Andy Root is back, and this time he’s got a fertility god on the cover of his book — which, if you’ve been paying any attention to his work, is not actually a detour. Baal and the Gods of More is what happens when Andy takes the background hum of economic critique that’s been running through all his previous books and turns it all the way up, then runs it through First and Second Kings, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of dynamic stabilization, Robert Gordon’s economic history of the American special century, and Luther’s commentary on the Magnificat, and comes out the other side with something genuinely uncomfortable and genuinely useful. The argument in brief: the church’s anxiety about decline is not primarily a spiritual problem or a missional problem. It is a fertility cult problem. We have, like the Israelites under the Omride dynasty, decided that Yahweh needs a little help from the gods of growth — and we’ve done it so thoroughly that we can barely tell the difference anymore between faithful ministry and escalatory capital accumulation. Andy doesn’t spare himself, or Tripp, or the emerging church movement, or the academic publishing world, or anyone who has ever refreshed their social media numbers and felt something. The conversation got real fast and stayed there. And yes, there is a Counting Crows footnote.

Also: Tripp and Andy are going back to Bonhoeffer’s house in Berlin in summer 2027 — two different tracks, one for personal and vocational formation, one for the theology nerds who want to read Bonhoeffer intensely and argue about it in his actual house. Go to BonhoefferTrip.com to get on the list to get info and early access to tickets.

In the conversatsion we discuss…

The origin of the book: a throwaway line about fertility gods on a podcast that wouldn’t let Andy go
Robert Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth and the special century — why 1870 to 1970 was a historical anomaly, why Protestantism rose with it, and why both started declining at exactly the same moment in the mid-1970s
Hartmut Rosa’s dynamic stabilization: what makes a society modern is not its epistemology — it’s that it can only stabilize itself by growing
The logic of escalation: grow or die, with no telos, no grounding, and no end — just more
Baal vs. Yahweh, Artemis vs. the Madonna, instrumentality vs. relationality — and the meme that started it all at the Vatican Museum
The emerging church movement as a case study: how a genuine epistemological critique of modernity got eaten alive by the escalatory logic of Web 2.0 personality capital
The techno-optimist and the identitarian as two responses to the end of the special century — and why they’re both operating inside the same machine
Solomon’s sin: the golden age that was built on the “except” — and why the prophets saw what the historians didn’t name
Mary as the completion of Elijah: Luther’s Magnificat commentary and a different kind of growth, a growth into someone rather than of something
Why we can’t unhook from the engine of escalation without a practical theology of money — and why Andy thinks that requires recovering a vision of eternity
Augustine, Peter Brown, alms, and the poor: why losing a theological conception of heaven means losing the mechanism that kept the poor inside the exchange of money
Tripp’s Judas Energy, Andy’s Solomon Energy, and the mutual confession of two people who wrote and podcasted their way into the very system they’re critiquing
What the church looks like in 50 years if the post-war liberal order keeps dissolving — and whether the theology of the cross has anything to say to a world of competing civilizations that no longer bother to feign morality

Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, USA. He writes and researches in areas of theology, ministry, culture, and younger generations. Some of his most recent books are The Congregation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2021), The End of Youth Ministry? (Baker, 2020), The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need God (Baker, 2019), Faith Formation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2017), and Exploding Stars, Dead Dinosaurs, and Zombies: Youth Ministry in the Age of Science (Fortress Press, 2018). Andy has worked in congregations, parachurch ministries, and social service programs. He lives in St. Paul with his wife Kara, two children, Owen and Maisy, and their dog. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Andy spends far too much time watching TV and movies.

Previous Visits with Andy Root

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION