To the average observer concerned with the future of American democracy, it might be easy to conclude that religion has been part of the problem — particularly over the last few years. Right-wing religious leaders, including the leading Southern Baptist televangelist Robert Jeffress, have endorsed “Christian nationalism”; other evangelical pastors and conservative Catholic intellectuals have been openly pondering if America should become more of a theocracy; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who once called for an “American crusade,” evoking bloody medieval religious campaigns, has referenced Christian theology in statements about the Iran war.

To critics, these examples show that American religion is becoming an active threat to pluralism and tolerance — the ideas that make American democracy work. 

But what if the solution to this anti-democratic slide is also religion — more religion than the US currently has?

A new book by two thinkers from opposing ends of the ideological spectrum argues that declining levels of religiosity across the board, but particularly among liberals, have deepened political polarization, which in turn has corroded democratic norms. Now, they argue, one of the most effective ways for liberals to stand up for democracy is to engage with religious communities and their scriptural traditions with more respect, openness, and curiosity. The authors also urge liberals who are believers themselves to embrace organized religion and return to it themselves.

Conservative evangelical Christian Matthew Kaemingk and liberal Muslim writer Shadi Hamid argue in Can Religion Save Democracy? that there’s a necessary and unique role that religious institutions and organized religion must play in American public life. Religion serves a fundamental regulating purpose, tempering emotions, fundamentalism, and nihilism. And when that fades away, those base instincts and emotions get channeled into our politics.

They write:

As Americans exit churches in droves, they’re not leaving behind their religious passions. Instead, they’re transferring those passions to the political battlefield. In this new post-religious context, Christian faith and Scripture function less as moral constraints within evangelical circles and more as political cudgels to use against one’s opponents.

“We’re not trying to convert [nonbelievers],” Hamid told me in an interview. “Believing is one thing, but believing that religion can play a positive role is another. And we want to encourage secular readers to embrace the second proposition, even if they don’t believe religion is true or don’t believe God exists.”

What happens when religion recedes from the public square

At the core of Kaemingk and Hamid’s argument is a simple case: There is an innate religion-shaped hole in people in the 21st century, which has been slowly replaced with politics, unbridled passions, and secular ideologies. The loss of religion hasn’t meant a loss of religious convictions, but instead has meant the rise of a new fanaticism, either secular or fundamentalist, while depriving everyone of the good things that organized and institutional religion can do.

It’s not a completely novel argument; it’s a combination of St. Augustine’s famous line that “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God]” and of the political scientist Robert Putnam’s modern case that churches and religious communities provided the third spaces that fostered civic partnership, trust, meaning, and belonging. 

But they also connect these lines of thinking to what the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper used to argue around the turn of the 19th century: that all people are religious, and that something very similar to religious fervor quietly powers all political movements. Religion is “pervasive, public, and pluriform” — an essential part of being human, whose absence leaves nihilism, fear, and distrust in isolated, but still fanatical, individuals.

“If Kuyper is correct that all human beings desire ultimate belief and belonging, then erasing or sequestering religion won’t extinguish our spiritual passions. They will simply shift elsewhere,” Kaemingk and Hamid write. And that shift has been toward politics, candidates, elections, and secular “creeds” that provide identity, belonging, moral certainty, and salvific promises without the accountability, guidance, and caution that religious traditions can provide.

It’s not hard to find examples of what Kaemingk and Hamid mean here. From 2016 to 2024, many observed elements of quasi-religious fervor in movements powering Trump and Woke 1.0. Trump’s strongman appeal generated a cult of personality around him, while anti-Trump resistance efforts and progressive social movements often took on qualities people also found quasi-religious: in-group markers, language, and customs, BlueAnon theories. What’s left is a stalemate, with more conservative religious believers bunched up on one end, and nonreligious but equally passionate citizens on the other end.

Kaemingk and Hamid argue that people on the left often respond by denigrating religion and religious people, dismissing those who try to defend or practice it in the public square, or forcing them to adopt secular language and thinking instead of letting religious people bring their full selves to the public space. But the way out of this current stalemate, Kaemingk and Hamid suggest, is for people on the left to be open, curious, and respectful with the devoutly faithful, whether they’re neighbors or candidates running for office. 

“For that audience, my desire is to say, ‘Hey, you don’t have to believe in religion, but you can recognize the positive aspects of religion,’” Hamid told me.

That involves practical, daily activities and more high-minded appeals. In regular life, the authors recommend prayer, or prayer-like practices for nonbelievers, to help better understand and forgive opponents. They suggest there can be benefits for both nonreligious and religious people to meditate on scriptural and theological teachings about forgiveness, debate, disagreement, salvation, and why earthly politics shouldn’t be taken so seriously. 

And they urge liberals in particular to reengage with religious communities and congregations. Religious liberals should avoid isolation or solitary, individualized faith, the authors recommend, and instead return to congregations and specific churches or places of worship to become part of a community and find purpose. For nonreligious liberals, Kaemingk and Hamid suggest they reexamine their own ideological priorities and be open to the possibility of being wrong on some of them, and potentially engage with organized religion to better understand a religious worldview.

Kaemingk and Hamid offer a specific challenge for liberals and secular Americans that might seem a bit unsavory: They have to realize that they are not blameless for the polarization and radical religious fervor that exists right now through their dismissal of organized religion. Their earlier denigration of organized religion around the turn of this century (think of the New Atheist movement), combined with many leaving institutional churches or failing to participate in religious life, has all contributed to the capture of these institutions by unsavory political opponents, or helped in the decline of more moderate congregations. And any attempt to stop this continued slide away from pluralistic democracy hinges on a collective effort between religious and nonreligious Americans to reverse these trends.

This argument has its limitations

Here’s an obvious question: If religion is so good at moderating people, why hasn’t it been able to temper emotions among the religious already? The most loyal Republican voters over the past few cycles have tended to be evangelical and nondenominational Christians, followed by white Catholics — both of which tend to report above-average levels of religious participation. They’ve stuck with Trump and the GOP over the last decade, which has been defined by polarization, authoritarian policies, and even moments of political violence, that both Kaemingk and Hamid say religion can fix. 

Here’s an obvious question: If religion is so good at moderating people, why hasn’t it been able to temper emotions among the religious already?

More generally, while there is evidence to suggest that evangelicals who leave their churches become more cynical and individualistic — a point in Kaemingk and Hamid’s favor — there’s not much evidence to suggest that the converse is true: that religious participation has actually tempered emotions, passions, and politics. Instead, there’s a case to be made, as the writer Robert P. Jones laid out recently, that the opposite seems to be true: The most religious folks tend to still be the most likely to support harsher Trump-era policies.

Hamid acknowledged that this is a challenge, but argued this isn’t about the religion itself — rather a Trump-specific phenomenon: “Many evangelicals have let partisan loyalties take precedence over religious commitments,” he told me. “This is the distorting effect that Trump has had on the evangelical movement.”

He emphasized that evangelicalism has suffered because many of the most fervent MAGA supporters who identify with that religious movement are not actually very religious. “Evangelicals aren’t going to church as much as they used to on average,” he said. “There has been a kind of process of de-institutionalization in the kind of Protestant domain. And the people who tend to be more fervent MAGA supporters tend to go to church less.” He compared the level of evangelical support that Ted Cruz and Trump got in 2016: Trump had an upper hand among unchurched evangelicals.

Beyond this, the practical reality is that, as things stand today, religiosity does not seem likely to bounce back to the levels it was at two decades ago — at least, not without the help of secular Americans.

What the authors prescribe for politics and elections

Still, it’s an attractive idea, and it’s not hard to see why people might be open to it. Even Democrats themselves seem to understand that writing off religious voters for years was a bad idea. Some of the most promising Democratic candidates in red states in upcoming midterm elections are religious, including Texas Senate nominee James Talarico and Kansas Senate nominee the Rev. Adam Hamilton. A dozen other pastors or believers are running in down-ballot races across the country, while potential 2028 presidential candidates like Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro talk openly about their personal faiths, the role of organized, institutional religion, and seem comfortable doing so.

“It’s promising,” Hamid told me about this trend. “Part of what we argue in the book is that Americans should be able to bring their full convictions into the public arena. If they’re editing themselves or suppressing their religiosity out of fear of alienating constituencies, that’s not good for democracy.”

And Kaemingk and Hamid also have a very influential intellectual ally in this mission: Pope Leo XIV just made a similar case in France for secular liberals to reexamine their understanding of religious liberty and how to balance it against the rise of right-wing religious politics.

“A Christian engaged in public service and guided by the light of his or her conscience, illumined by faith, cannot be considered a proselytizer or a threat to the unity of the nation,” he said in Paris, appealing directly to France’s fiercely secularized civic leaders. “Indeed, authentic secularity does not exclude religion but is capable of valuing it as an educational resource.”

Aboard a plane back to Rome, Leo continued, arguing that religion must have a role in the public square and pointing to the decline of religion in Germany as something that may have facilitated the rise of a far-right movement that cloaks itself in religious language.

“It would be interesting to study, analyze if and how there may be a relationship, for example, between the growth of these groups on the far right,” Leo said mid-flight, “…with some expression of a combination of these far-right points of view with a certain kind of religion, which…is not an authentic expression of Christianity.”

This may be an unsavory ask for liberals and secularists most upset about creeping religious nationalism in the Trump administration and around the country. The recent creation of a new Office of Religious Affairs in the Pentagon, the invocation of God and Scripture to support military action and immigration enforcement, and the attacks on the wave of religious candidates running as Democrats this year all make it understandable why there may be hesitancy in accepting this challenge. But Kaemingk and Hamid are undeniably right about one thing: In a diverse and pluralistic nation, we have no choice but to live with each other.

DUBLIN — The U.K. government has reversed a decision to permit a parade by Protestant hard-liners through a Catholic district in Northern Ireland, a U-turn that overjoyed Irish republicans and infuriated the region’s British unionists.

After a nearly two-week standoff in the predominantly Protestant town of Portadown, Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant announced late Friday that the Orange Order would not be allowed to parade through the town’s main Catholic district for the first time in 28 years.

The Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal group reviled by many Catholics, had been barred from the route since 1998 following years of widespread violence triggered by the annual sectarian showdown.

“I call for all protests, rallies and demonstrations to be stood down. There is no excuse for a continued ratcheting up of tensions,” Bryant appealed in a statement explaining why he was reversing the original decision by the Parades Commission, Northern Ireland’s independent body for managing the region’s chronic conflicts over Orange Order demonstrations.

Street fighting over those traditional marches helped to trigger the onset of Northern Ireland’s three-decade conflict, known as “The Troubles,” which left nearly 3,700 dead before a 1998 peace accord.

Hundreds of Catholic locals backed by Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that leads Northern Ireland’s fraying cross-community government, gathered along the Garvaghy Road in Portadown to cheer the reversal.

First Minister Michelle O’Neill, who has been accused of breaking the law while helping locals block the Orangemen’s intended path since Sept. 27, went on Ireland’s flagship TV talk show, the Late Late Show, to express relief on behalf of the residents of Garvaghy Road.

“For the last 13 days they’ve been living with this constant fear and a cloud hanging over them that this unwanted sectarian march was going to be forced down that road,” she said.

But the main pro-British party in the coalition, the Democratic Unionists, denounced Bryant’s move as a capitulation to mob rule. Some DUP lawmakers called for Northern Ireland’s police chief, who had recommended the policy reversal, to be fired.

Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson said the U.K. government had sent a dangerous message that Northern Ireland “should be run on force of numbers and who shouts the loudest.”

Northern Ireland’s nearly three-decade system for managing conflict over parades “now lies in tatters,” he said, “and the rule of law has been fundamentally undermined.”

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Hi readers, happy Friday! It’s been a big week for the AI debate — not the one about whether it will cause the robot apocalypse, though there’s still plenty to worry about there, but instead about whether the technology is conscious. 

The folks at Anthropic, the AI company behind the large language model Claude, certainly seem to think it is — or at least, they’re extremely open to the possibility. 

As the New York Times reported earlier in the week, the company has spent the last year grappling with the question by speaking with religious thinkers from many faith traditions in an effort to chart a moral course for the LLM (that is, to keep it from killing us all, so maybe it is all one big debate). 

In the process, the Times reports, some of those thinkers observed that members of the Anthropic team were “relating to [Claude] like a conscious being” and even, according to it, a degree of “moral status.” 

On the flip side of this debate is Pope Leo XIV, who decidedly does not seem to buy into AI consciousness arguments. His “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical earlier this year argued that AI will never be able to replace humanity — and reportedly “alarmed” Anthropic’s co-founder, Christopher Olah.

Since then, Pope Leo has continued to emphasize the differences between humans and machines this week. “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others,” he posted on Friday. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”

Loneliness machines

Conscious or no (and that’s a no from me), it’s hard to argue that tech companies don’t want you to interact with their models like people. That includes OpenAI and Meta, both of whom introduced “cute” new AI agents — called Dots and Muse, respectively — last month. 

As my colleague Adam Clark Estes reported this week, though, the promise of a companionable, always-there AI might not be the best idea in the world — especially for children. A new study, still under review, suggests that AI use may be causing loneliness in middle schoolers. 

Adam spoke with the lead researcher on the study, UNC Chapel Hill professor Anne Maheux, who explained that “middle school students using AI for emotional intimacy and companionship developed greater loneliness over time.” 

According to Maheux, one big point where AI chatbots fail compared to human beings is “friction,” or the complicated push-and-pull dynamic of any connection with a real human being. By contrast, chatbots are “sycophantic, highly agreeable, anthropomorphized,” she says, which can lead to kids “developing expectations or understandings of interactive relationships that are actually fundamentally at odds with a normal human relationship.”

People, in other words, still matter, no matter how much the AI companies want us to build our lives around machines instead.

One link for later

➨ Why is horror so fun? It’s October, which means you might be planning a horror movie marathon or a trip to a haunted house/forest/corn maze/what have you in the near future. It’ll probably be a great time — but why? Terrifying yourself doesn’t intuitively sound like fun, but humans love to seek out frights, whether that means ghost stories or a rollercoaster. In 2024, Vox’s Unexplainable podcast spoke with some researchers trying to figure it out.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Disney’s “Magic Kingdom” in Florida is way, way better than most of the US at managing a complex network of underground cables and pipes? My colleague Sara Herschander dug into why, and whether other American cities can catch up.
• Today’s trivia: What musical note is equivalent to a G sharp? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you which constellation contains the North Star and the Little Dipper. That would be Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. 

Editor’s note, September 20, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published last September.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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The Jewish High Holidays are coming up, and that includes Yom Kippur. It’s a holiday that encourages people to reflect on their behavior and make amends. That’s all well and good, but I’m someone who struggles with scrupulosity — constantly worrying about my morality and if I’m doing The Most Possible Good™.

In practice this is far more paralyzing than motivating. Fixating on the ethical implications of all possible decisions makes it harder to take any action, and I’ve lost hours scouring my memories of my past behavior for immorality like a football player watching footage of their games to analyze what they could do differently. Guilt simply isn’t serving me, but I worry that saying to hell with all that means I’ll stop striving to be a better person and become morally complacent.

I’ve observed Yom Kippur for decades, and don’t want to simply avoid the day. But the holiday is a moral scrupulosity trigger. How do you think I should approach this? I want to stop feeling guilty for letting guilt get in my own way.

Dear Scrupulous, 

Have you ever heard the story about what happened when God decided to give the Bible to flesh-and-blood human beings? According to the ancient rabbis, the angels hated the idea. They argued that humans were deeply flawed mortals who didn’t deserve such a holy scripture; only angels could be worthy of it, so it should stay up in heaven. 

It fell to Moses to rebut the angels’ argument. He asked them: What do you angels need the Bible for? The Bible says not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal — do you have jealousy or other emotions that could lead you to do those things? The Bible says to honor your father and mother — but you don’t have parents, so how could you ever do that? And the Bible says to sanctify the Sabbath — but you never do any work, so how could you even honor the Sabbath by resting? 

The angels saw that Moses was right. Angels are really great at one thing: being perfect. But perfect creatures are static. They don’t experience painful challenges, they don’t grow, and they don’t make choices that add beauty to the world. We humans do those things. God gives the Bible to humans not to make them into angels — but to make them better at being the unique thing they are: human animals, with feelings, flaws, and all, that can learn to use their capabilities in more beautiful ways.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this story. And I want you to notice how far it is from demanding that humans do “The Most Possible Good™.” That language suggests a maximizing ethical theory like utilitarianism, which says that we have to do the action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words, we have to optimize. 

Moral optimization may be possible for angels, but not for humans. We each hold multiple values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other, forcing us to strike a balance as best we can. We’re not omniscient beings who can know with certainty how best to strike the balance. 

What’s more, sometimes different kinds of moral good straight-up conflict with each other. Think of a woman who faces a trade-off: She wants to become a nun but also wants to become a mother. She can’t balance between those options — she has to choose. And what’s the better choice? We can’t say because the options are incommensurable. There’s no single yardstick by which to measure them so we can’t compare them to find out which is greater.

Given that this complexity is baked into the human condition, it’s impossible to be a perfect optimizing machine. And the more you try to force yourself to be that, the harder it’ll be for you to actually help others, because you’ll just be so burned out. As you’ve already discovered, the optimizing mindset is exhausting — you end up expending a lot of precious mental resources that you could be spending on something else. It can even lead to paralysis. And a lot of the time, there’s no knowably best decision.

So instead of trying to optimize everything, you can adopt a goal that’s humbler but more realistic: to live in line with your values as best you can. 

I know that can feel scary. Optimizing makes being human feel less risky. It provides a sense of control, and therefore a sense of safety. The unspoken premise is that if you optimize, you’ll never have to ask yourself: How could I screw up that badly? 

But there’s another way to feel safe. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re trying our hardest there will be some things that we do not do optimally.

Of course, we should still try to live in line with our values. But in those moments when we fall short, we shouldn’t berate ourselves, thinking, “I sinned!” In Hebrew, the word we typically translate as “to sin” (lachto) actually means “to miss the mark.” It’s the same word we’d use to describe someone with a bow and arrow who’s targeting the bullseye but misses it slightly. This is a useful image, because it reminds us just how normal it is to miss the mark. Just as the archer’s arrow is buffeted around by the wind, we’re buffeted around by all the physical and psychological conditions acting upon us — naturally we won’t always hit the bullseye! And when we do miss the mark, we deserve compassion.

I know what you’re thinking: What if adopting this mindset means you’ll become morally complacent and let yourself off the hook too easily? This is one of the most common objections to practicing self-compassion. But research shows it’s not well-founded. In fact, psychologists have found that more self-compassionate people are better able to acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake. They’re more likely to want to apologize and make amends to others when they mess up. And they try to do better the next time around. Why? Because, to them, mistakes don’t feel so psychologically damning. That allows them to take more — not less — responsibility for their actions.

Yom Kippur can feel terrifying when any mistake you’ve made over the past year seems damning. But according to the ancient rabbis, Yom Kippur is not meant to be a somber day — it’s one of the happiest days of the year! After all, it was on Yom Kippur that Moses descended from Mount Sinai carrying the second set of tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, ready to gift them to the people. 

You probably know what happened to the first set of tablets: Moses shattered them after seeing the Israelites engaged in idol worship. What’s less known is that, according to one rabbinic story, God’s response to the shattering of those tablets was to actually congratulate Moses. Why did God think breaking them was the right move? And what was different about the second set? 

While the first tablets had been fashioned by God and God alone, the second tablets were a human-divine collaboration: Moses carved the stone and God inscribed the words. And while the first tablets contained only the words of the Ten Commandments — a black-and-white, rule-based morality — the rabbis tell us that the second tablets contained within them all the stories and interpretations that Jewish sages would later develop.

In other words, God recognized that you can’t just give humans a list of moral rules and call it a day. Maybe that would work for angels, who live in a simplified, disembodied world, but our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles. Yet God chose people over angels anyway, inviting us into the collaboration and embracing our humanness rather than rejecting it.

So, to the rabbis, Yom Kippur was a happy day because they fully expected that God would accept and embrace messy humans. 

Please, don’t try to be more zealous than God.

When you’re taking action, by all means, aim your arrows as true as you can — try to hit the bullseye, the place that captures as much of what you value as possible. But once you’ve released the arrow from your bow, let it be. 

If it turns out that you missed the mark, that you acted suboptimally, I put it to you that that is okay. You are not an angel. You are not a perfect optimizing machine. You do not have access to a magical mathematical formula that can consider countless incommensurable variables and spit out the very best move with certainty. You are human and you do the best you can with what you’ve got. 

The wisdom of these millennia-old stories is that that’s good enough for God. Let it be good enough for you, too. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Writing this column reminded me of The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, written by the psychologists Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. It really helped me develop a self-compassion practice, which has in turn helped me get a grip on my own scrupulosity. I also strongly recommend the eight-week self-compassion course run out of Neff and Germer’s nonprofit, the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.

• I’ve always associated the philosopher Thomas Nagel with questions about consciousness, but I recently learned that he’s also super interested in questions about religion. In a great essay called “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament,” Nagel asks: What, if anything, does secular philosophy have to put in the place of religion? More specifically, can it answer the question: What is the underlying nature of the universe, and how can the human individual live in harmony with it? 

• In this Aeon essay, philosopher Elad Uzan argues that AI will not be able to solve ethics for us, despite what some people hope. Drawing on the mathematician Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems, Uzan writes, “just as mathematics will always contain truths that lie beyond formal proof, morality will always contain complexities that defy algorithmic resolution.” 

Why do I cry when I see a donkey? 

It’s completely involuntary. As if my heart’s defenses are swept aside by a giant wave of compassion and I’m left unnerved by the intensity of love that I feel: raw and a little foreign.

I wonder about this because I’m not a big animal guy. There’s no desire in me to own a pet; I’m allergic to cats and I will actively do what I can to avoid meeting your dog. (Sorry! It’s the nonconsensual licking! The crotch jumping! No thank you.) And yet, there I’ll be: leaning over a fence, arm outstretched to let the donkey nuzzle my open hand, feeling a sudden and desperate sadness. 

It’s happened so often that I wonder if these encounters point to something precious. The tears suggest that there’s a mismatch between the way I’ve been taught to understand animals as separate from myself and the connection that actually exists between us. Our paradigm of anthropocentrism distinguishes us from the natural world and puts us on a pedestal of worthiness, forcing us to look at the whole of nature as somehow less real than we are. Each animal and plant, the land and the water, the very air we breathe — all are resources for us to use rather than beings to be in relationship with. 

But the donkeys keep disrupting that notion.

Even if those sad Eeyore-like eyes don’t make you emotional, you have probably experienced some version of it. For many pet owners (and notice how that language of ownership emphasizes the idea of separation!), it may be a creeping uncertainty about the validity of the love that they feel for their pet. You might ask yourself, “Am I crazy to love an animal this much? Is this feeling of mutual friendship and understanding actually real?” 

This week, dear friends of mine had to put down their dog. Like most dog owners, they understood their pup to be a part of their family. And so the intensity of their grief — and the heavy burden of having to decide whether the time had come to say goodbye — opened up not just emotional questions, but spiritual ones, too. Is it wrong to euthanize a family member you love? What happens to a dog when it dies? Does your dog have a soul? 

Your deep connection to your animal companion might also make you question your relationship to and understanding of other animals: How is it that my beloved has a soul, but a pig or a cow or a bird does not? To kill one animal but to love another demands significant mental gymnastics. The modernist, mechanistic view of the world where humans are separate and death is the end doesn’t hold true to my experience. And so perhaps it is wise to look at spiritual traditions that affirm the ways the animate and inanimate are connected.

What religious tradition can teach us about the souls of animals

The idea that animals are not equal to humans is rooted in a dominant refrain in Christian theology — which David Clough, chair in theology and applied sciences at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, says has done great disservice to animals. Significant church figures like Thomas Aquinas and the philosopher René Descartes have argued that animals don’t have an immortal soul. Other doctrines like predestination (where some people are chosen for salvation and others are damned) have further broken the world into separate spheres. This stratification of significance, where humans sit above everything — from the stones and stars to the pets we share our homes with — has led to a paradigm where we’ve been able to desecrate the natural world and continue to practice cruel factory farming, killing hundreds of millions of animals every day.

But this particular Christian worldview isn’t the only way to think about a spirituality of animals. 

Indeed, says Clough, in the first centuries of Christian life, theologians like Irenaeus and Origen imagined a very different ordering of the world. Rather than envisioning a judgment that separates us, these early thinkers believed God would regather the whole of creation in what Clough calls “a comprehensive redemption.” Here, because God created the world, all of life will one day be regathered together, including the pets we love and the places we live. At the end of time, the thinking went, all of life will be embodied once again, but free from pain and suffering.

Maybe that’s what I long for when I see those donkeys: a union of all living things, free from pain and suffering. 

David Haberman, professor emeritus at Indiana University who studies South Asian religious traditions, tells me that a Hindu worldview sees humans and animals as inherently connected. He points to the concept of Ātman, which dates back thousands of years: “Some translate it as soul, some translate it as self, some translate it as the ultimate essence. I think all those work in various ways, but the notion is that it’s shared amongst all beings,” he says.

This worldview enables us to see “the self present in all beings and all beings in the self. … So whatever happens to a human happens to a dog, whatever happens to a dog happens to a human.” Haberman says that this ontology establishes a “deep connection between all things and a recognition that it’s the same essence.” So, whether canine or human, individual souls are described in the Bhagavad Gita as “eternal, immortal, and ageless. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.” 

Other spiritual practitioners are of the same mind. Susan Allen is a medium who specializes in communicating with pets that have died. It wasn’t a career she was planning on, but her intuitive and sensitive nature has meant many grieving dog owners seek her out when their pup passes away. Allen believes animals have a continuation of consciousness that transcends death.

“The body leaves and dies,” she says, “but the soul stays with us.” Allen says she senses messages and emotional states that pets want to share with their former owners — usually feelings of gratitude and love, a message that is especially consoling for those who had to make the decision to end the pet’s life amidst increased suffering. Though there is great sadness when a pet dies, it is, Allen says, “the consequences of living with so much love.”

Maybe that’s what holds me back from welcoming an animal into my home. Sure, there is the hair that gets everywhere and the picking up of poop and the need for walks at all hours of the day — but I suspect there’s a big part of me that recoils from the inevitability of grief that loving an animal so deeply will lead to. I became a vegetarian when I left home and started to cook my own meals and found it difficult to put a knife through the flesh of a chicken or a fish. That decision seemed to open a window into seeing the truth of our interconnectedness. 

Perhaps that’s what so many traditions try to help us realize: that we are part of one another. All living things are inherently bound together. Separation is an illusion that fuels harm. “At its best, a relationship with a companion animal is a sort of anticipation of a sort of redeemed future where humans and other animals will live peaceably together,” Clough says. “A companion animal relationship could be a small anticipation of that sort of restored mutuality of relationship.”

Haberman agrees. “It doesn’t have to stop with dogs,” he says. Though we may start by loving a pet, we must embrace an “ever expanding circle of love.” When we embrace our interconnectedness, we embrace something sacred. The love that exists between a human and their animal can be a bridge to a redemptive love for all living things; for every animal; for the very fullness of life itself.

Anti-Muslim messaging has been on the rise among Republican elected officials for a while, and last week it took center stage at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, where speakers warned that leftists and “Islamists” were joining forces.

“We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance. Communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution. And they hate America.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, attempted to link his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to the 9/11 attacks: “I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” he said. “Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain.”

The convention’s rampant Islamophobia isn’t a one-off: It fits a trend of Republican lawmakers attacking Islam and Muslims in the runup to the midterms. 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) said “we need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said, “No more Muslims.” Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said that “I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult.” 

The attacks have gotten specific: High-profile Muslim figures like El-Sayed, Piker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have all been targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the GOP is also pushing anti-Muslim legislation.

A new “Sharia Free America Caucus” in the US House now includes dozens of members, all Republicans. Texas Republicans made banning and investigating cases of sharia law an official plank in their party platform. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a federal probe of Muslim washing facilities at Texas airports.

To break down the disturbing uptick in Islamophobia this midterm season, what’s driving it, and where it could be headed, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with journalist Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Do you think that we are partly seeing a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric because this year we have high-profile Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker criticizing US foreign policy?

We have had really prominent Muslim politicians in the last several years. The same year that President Trump was elected, we also elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives. And then we had the [2018] election of Rashida Tlaib. These are remarkable because not only were they Muslim politicians, but they were also critical of US foreign policy and the government. 

What’s actually been a turning point has been the post-October 7 period because, one, we had a lot of politicians, especially from the Republican Party, starting to label this entire war as a religious war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) immediately said, “We’re in a religious war,” which is astonishing, quite frankly, because that’s not even the rhetoric the Bush administration used after 9/11. 

What also happened is that a lot of Muslims — Muslim experts, Muslim scholars, Muslim journalists, and Muslim politicians — started being very vocal about US foreign policy. And that wasn’t necessarily the case after 9/11. A lot of Muslims who did criticize US foreign policy back then were sidelined or monitored or seen as suspicious, but they are so vocal now. The younger generation that has come up — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and others — they’re so vocal. 

And it’s not just foreign policy. What they say is that the way we conduct US foreign policy actually has direct ties to what’s happening at home. They’re very critical of the inequality they’re seeing at home, the rising costs, inflation — there’s so much to criticize about what’s happening at home. And I think this is one of the reasons we see so much backlash against them — because they’re unapologetic in their criticism.

The US has always had these fights over who gets to criticize the United States of America. I wonder why you think, at this moment, they feel safer launching those criticisms. 

Do they feel more free because the wars were such disasters? What opened the door to allow younger Muslims running for office to run in part on, “The United States is a really imperfect country and we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve done overseas and at home”?

I think they’re able to do that because so many Americans do that. A lot of politicians and policymakers are openly critiquing what has happened abroad and what is happening here. One of the marked differences between the post-9/11 period and now is that there was widespread support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” from policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from media, from the public at large. The few scholars and Muslim community members who did critique what the Bush administration was doing were often shunned. 

In later years, it became very clear that we were not winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or even the war on terror. There was a lot to be critical of, not just with the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo, but also what was happening at home. There was mass surveillance, [and] then we had the rise of the NSA. 

I think, ultimately, we have reached a point in this country that we actually have a society that has deep, profound distrust of its institutions. That larger landscape allows politicians like Zohran Mamdani, like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but also any other politician to critique the government and feel comfortable doing so. 

I would say this is the Democrats’ side. I think what’s so interesting about the Republican Party now is that so much of their rhetoric and their vision is about who loves America. I was listening to clips of JD Vance at the convention and he kept talking about “America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.” And I think this is just a fascinating declaration to make when there is such a disconnect between what the public is feeling right now and what the Republican Party is saying.

I’m glad you brought up JD Vance, because one thing that is true of the vice president is that he too is a critic of America. It doesn’t always come out, but it has come out in the past. There are parts of America, including the wars overseas, that JD Vance has been fiercely critical of. 

Mamdani and El-Sayed are also Americans. It seems to me like some of the pushback they’re getting is rooted in the idea that “you don’t have the right to do this, you’re lucky to be in America.”

Do you think there is something going on here where you can criticize America if you look like JD Vance, but you cannot if you look like Zohran Mamdani?

Unfortunately, yes. And I will say, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not just the Republican Party who perpetuated that narrative. Some of the Democrats in earlier years did the same thing. I very clearly remember Bill Clinton on the DNC stage in 2016, saying, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.”

“I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.”

It placed a conditionality on the way that Muslims would be accepted in the United States. But that was an absurd statement to make because there was a lot to be critical of with the way that the US was fighting its war on terror. 

And that conditionality — we have continued to see it over and over again, except it has morphed and mutated to the extent that someone like JD Vance can say that “we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” He blames that squarely on immigrants or foreigners or what he considers un-American values. He can say that, but not anyone else who is, perhaps, brown or Muslim. 

I don’t think it’s just targeted towards Muslims. I actually think the problem and fascinating thing about what the Republican Party is doing is combining all of these labels into one. And there’s this narrative that they’re creating that anyone who is against us will be Muslims, will be leftists, will be immigrants, will be people who don’t look like us. 

It’s really creating this cultural, religious, racial divide, which is quite frightening. 

I wonder if you think this fearmongering is about winning the midterms and then it’ll die down in the same way that a lot of political rhetoric gets very heated in the run-up to contested elections and then dies down, or whether you worry that this talk keeps escalating?

I have been wondering about that because I think there are two things happening. 

One is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become a feature of American politics and seems to come out during election season. And I think what the GOP is doing is actually seeing if this anti-Muslim rhetoric is going to be effective in helping them win. This is what they were trying during the Mamdani campaign and it didn’t work. And I think they’re trying this in Michigan and, let’s see if it works. They’re trying this elsewhere too. 

But the other thing that’s happening, which is a bit more lasting, is the effort to change the very structures and laws regarding Muslim expression and the freedom to practice Islam in the United States. For example, in Texas, we are seeing efforts to frame the entire religion of Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion itself. 

There are efforts to, for example, ban sharia, which still makes very little sense because I don’t know if anyone can quite explain that. There is a very concerted effort to try to block signs of visible Islam at a local level. And if they’re successful, we’re going to see that at a national level.

I was in Michigan last month and I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are a lot of things that make him interesting, but one of them is how easy it is to look at a politician like that and call him “all-American,” right? He’s high-achieving, he’s married, he’s handsome, he’s a jock. He’s got two kids. He is all-American. 

Can you conceive of a world where Abdul El-Sayed being Muslim is not the first line of attack when he makes a point about what the US has done wrong? In short, can you see him occupying, at some point in the future, a place like JD Vance occupies: You get to criticize the country because you are American enough?

There was a time when being Catholic was considered a really big deal. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president and it just kept coming up over and over again. Now, no one even remembers. I bet you half the country doesn’t realize he was Catholic. 

I think that could happen to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the near future. I think it’s going to take a generational change for that and it’s not going to come organically. I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.

But you think we might?

I think we might, in decades’ time.

Are we on the precipice of a white Christian nationalist takeover? 

The author and religion scholar Robert P. Jones sure feels like we’re close. “This is our 1933,” he writes in his new book, referencing the year that Weimar Germany fell to a Nazi takeover.

Panicked allusions to Nazi Germany have been a common occurrence in the Trump years. But Jones, who has studied religion for decades and grew up Southern Baptist, has a very specific perspective on why those references are warranted now, particularly because of the role Christians played then — and it all worries him.

It was in 1933, Jones writes, that the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller began resisting Nazi rule. He was arrested four years later and imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp until 1945. Revisiting Dachau after World War II, Niemöller remembered 1933 as not just the year the camp opened, nor a reminder of a time when he was still a free man, but also a marker of how much time he had wasted in the preceding years supporting the Nazis. From their rise in the 1920s until that moment, he’d been supportive of much of the Nazis’ movement, voting for them in three different elections. After his release, every day of that time felt like a missed opportunity to do something to avert a tragedy.

Jones doesn’t make this historical parallel lightly. In his new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, he spends a significant amount of time building the case that the actions of the second Trump administration, combined with rock-solid support from white Christian evangelicals, are resulting in escalating religious authoritarianism, pointing to evangelical support for mass deportations earlier this year and Christian nationalist rhetoric by members of the administration, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “We are now living in a democratically back-slidden nation, abetted by an apostate white Christianity,” he writes.

But his book isn’t just a panicked observation; it’s a call to action. Like Niemöller, he argues, religious people who’ve sat out or passively supported MAGA can still effect change. And churches are just as important to stopping a slide into religiously backed authoritarianism as many were in abetting its rise.

So what should Christians who don’t buy into this vision of their faith do to resist it? 

Jones is the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, the leading research and polling think tank on politics and religion, and a scholar of religion — spending his career analyzing and writing books on the relationship between race, white supremacy, and faith in America. I decided to chat with him to figure out what the road map for Christian resistance to Christian nationalism might look like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are you taking on this project now?

If you look back at the three previous books I’ve written in the last decade, they have been responding in various ways to the rise of Christian nationalism that we’ve seen in the country and the threat that that poses. This book is motivated by a sense of urgency.

I’m also trying to turn the corner in this book by saying, For those of us who care about the integrity of Christianity and the future of democracy, the real question is what are we going to do in this moment?

Throughout the book, you argue that there is very little daylight between what the administration is doing and what white Christian evangelicals will support. I think immigration policy comes to mind: that it’s hard to propose draconian enforcement policies that these Christians won’t tolerate. Do you really expect people to change?

So the line you’re thinking about — because I remember writing this line — it was, “In the Trump era, white evangelical attitudes about undocumented immigrants are so extreme that it seems virtually impossible to construct a policy that is too brutal for them to support.”

I go through the options [offered in PRRI polling]: Do you support putting things like razor wire and barricades in a river that might make people drown? Yep, we’re good with that. Do you put people in internment camps? Yep, we’re good with that. And so I do think it should be shocking to hear those kinds of responses, again, from people who say they follow a Bible that talks more about caring for the widow or the orphan and has a lot to say about immigrants and the stranger who resides among you and being kind to them, not oppressing them.

I even say at the beginning of the book, I’m not writing for the people who have completely given themselves over to this MAGA worldview. And the evidence shows that it is the vast majority of white evangelicals that have done that. But among white Catholics, among white mainline Protestants, it’s less of a complete acquiescence to that seductive political worldview. That’s who I’m writing to. 

“The biggest challenge has been apathy among many white Christians who have watched this extremism take hold, have watched it grow, and have really been uncomfortable speaking out.”

I’m a pragmatist on this point. At the end of the book, I talk about the need for division, and that we have to realize that there are going to be some people who are so wedded to this kind of power and violence that they’re beyond persuasion. The only solution is to out-organize and resist that movement and to stand up something else in its wake. 

We’re starting to see some of that as well. White evangelicals only make up 13 percent of the country. And even though almost 85 percent of them are all in on the MAGA movement, that’s nowhere near a majority of the country.

And even if you take everyone who supports a Christian nationalist worldview, it’s only about three in 10 Americans. Now that’s a lot, and it’s a majority of Republicans and it’s two-thirds of white evangelicals in that camp. But it does mean that the country as a whole rejects that worldview by a margin of 2-to-1. 

The biggest challenge has been apathy among many white Christians who have watched this extremism take hold, have watched it grow, and have really been uncomfortable speaking out and saying, Wait, wait, wait, that’s not how I understand Christianity. That’s not how I understand the Bible or the teachings of Jesus. And so I think this book is in some ways aimed at that group and saying, Yeah, it’s kind of now or never. If you want a different version of Christianity to exist in this country, it’s time to stand one up and make it a very publicly visible thing.

So where does that leave us in terms of resisting and out-organizing? What is the playbook for beating back this takeover?

I’m pretty convinced that if we’re talking about persuading the folks that have been all in for Trump for a decade now, for three consecutive elections, that’s a fool’s errand.

But I do think there’s a bunch of folks in the middle that aren’t that group. The white mainline Protestant world is much more divided. The white Catholic world is much more divided. The Latino evangelical world is much more divided than the white evangelical world. And so there are other groups of Christians that I think are still debating this out. And I think those are the places where I think there’s fertile ground for a conversation to be had. And I also think there is a great mass of Christians that have been very deeply but quietly disturbed at the way that Christianity has been portrayed and hijacked, but haven’t really found their voice or their feet in putting out a different version.

One thing to say here too is that we have long had Christian voices and, to talk Democratic politics for a minute, in the Democratic Party, they’ve just mostly not been white: the late Rep. John Lewis, Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn from South Carolina, Sen. Raphael Warnock, who have been very eloquent about talking about their own faith. Warnock is himself a pastor at Martin Luther King’s old church, so very prominent. 

But I think what we’ve had less of is people who come out of the white Christian denominations who have been willing to speak from their faith perspective in that way. And I think it’s why Texas Senate candidate James Talarico’s gotten so much attention because he doesn’t fit the mold in many ways. But we are seeing half a dozen other folks running up and down and from a lot of Midwestern states, which is interesting.

And partially that’s because in those Midwestern states, the white evangelical group is typically smaller than the white mainline — in Iowa, in Michigan, and those kinds of upper Midwest states. And so I think we’re seeing more people coming out of that mainline Protestant, Presbyterian, Lutheran world that are representing that. And in Minneapolis, we saw that as well [the active organizing of Lutheran and other mainline Protestant communities to protest ICE, aid immigrant communities, and monitor ICE agent movements].

I’m also thinking in Texas, there was just a story about a Catholic bishop and parishes in a community outside of El Paso that looks like they’ve successfully stopped ICE from building a very large detention center. And Pope Leo has been speaking out about this as well. So I think there are these signs that this other voice of Christianity is emerging, particularly out of alternative white Christian spaces. And I think that’s super, super important. 

What does that mean for the average person reading this? What should they be doing?

In the last three years, I’ve probably been invited to well over a hundred mostly predominantly white Christian churches who are asking the question: What can we do? And how do we resist this in our communities? How do we stand up and be a witness to a different kind of Christianity that centers love rather than fear and inclusion rather than exclusion?

And there’s now either five or six major denominations that have either already adopted or are in the process of adopting official statements against Christian nationalism, in their denominations, which are ways of signaling to all the local pastors and all the local churches in their denomination that we see this as a danger and trying to help them draw some bright lines that are helpful at the local level. 

So there is movement. And I do think that many of the people that have left Christianity are realizing that there are some alternatives out there.

One thing we political journalists wrestle with is making sure we’re not talking down to voters or readers, or asserting feelings or attitudes about people to them. Did you wrestle with that, in making the case that a segment of white evangelical Americans are racist or bigoted?

Of course, and this is where I have standing as an author. I bring an insider and outsider perspective to this topic, having been raised inside the Southern Baptist world in the Deep South. I have my undergraduate degrees from a Baptist college. I have a master’s degree from a Baptist seminary. So these are waters that I have drunk fairly deeply from the inside. And since I have the sociological data, I have an external perspective on it as well. What the book does is work as a back-and-forth between these two lenses.

And it actually gives me some empathy because, if for no other reason, these are my people. These are my friends, these are my relatives, these are my family. So I’m not looking down my nose or a foreigner wagging their finger in disgust. That’s not who I am.

I’m not afraid to make some moral judgments in the book. I mean, that’s a deeply distorted and destructive story that we’ve inherited in the country that the US was intended to be of, by, and for Christians of European descent. So I’m partially trying to show how it’s destructive and how, for example, these kinds of beliefs connect to things like racism against African Americans and anti-immigrant attitudes, antisemitic attitudes, a whole denial of systemic racism and history in the country. I think if we’re going to have a healthy country and frankly a healthy faith, we really are going to have to reckon with these things.

So should we be promoting a return to these churches and denominations as an effort to revive Christianity and fight back against the encroachment of Christian nationalism?

I should be clear that this book is really not defending Christianity. I fully understand why people have left the church in such large numbers over the last two decades. All I can do is nod my head when people narrate the reasons why they’ve left. I think what I can say for myself is that I’ve found that sometimes, even despite myself, I still care very deeply about the faith of Christianity in this country. 

This book is speaking into that. It’s not a proselytizing book. I’m not arguing that anybody who’s left should come back. 

But the point is to say that we have this threat of the faith being hijacked for this Christian nationalist purpose. And for those of us who do still feel connected to this faith, it is really a critical time to reclaim it and to put forward a version of it that I would say is more consistent with a religion that emphasizes love and care for the vulnerable, and that is fully compatible with a pluralistic democracy. It’s a really critical time in our country’s history for that faith to emerge as it can.

That faith is actually quite compatible and would find a common cause even with the people who have left for all those reasons. So I think that’s the thing. It’s not a faith that sets itself against those who’ve left, or, if anything, is fairly sympathetic to the reasons those people have left.

When the Donald Trump era is over — however that ends — I feel comfortable saying that at least one thing will be certain: He’ll still have the overwhelming support of evangelical Christians in the United States.

Even today, with the president’s popularity at near-record lows, you’d be hard-pressed to find a religious denomination or ethnic group more supportive of Trump and his MAGA movement than American evangelicals, something that’s been true in polling and election results over the last decade. And that’s all lent itself to the perception in popular media, elite spaces, and the greater non-evangelical world of Christians that this movement is full of bigoted, Trump-worshipping hypocrites.

Yet Bonnie Kristian, a deputy editor at Christianity Today and a fellow at the foreign policy think tank Defense Priorities, says that perspective gets it all wrong. It’s a caricature those outside the evangelical movement have made the mistake of accepting as truth, and in the process, they conflate the loud, Trump-supporting, white evangelical voting bloc with the entire evangelical faith tradition. 

The result is a “monstering” of normal people who hold deep and earnest beliefs about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the importance of the Bible, and spreading the gospel. They may vote for Trump, and they typically favor Republicans, but Kristian argues the reason they vote that way is often more complex than supporting every policy, or even most policies, associated with those candidates. She also points to fascinating research that shows that when Southern evangelicals leave the church, they become more cynical and individualistic, not less — which itself poses concerns for democracy’s future. 

“This is a movement of tens of millions of people. You can’t have any collection of people that size and not have some unsavory stuff in there,” Kristian told me recently. “But I do really want to emphasize that [what gets caricatured in media coverage] is not typical evangelicalism.”

She expands on all this in a new book out this week — In Defense of Evangelicalism — in which she rebuts five popular attacks levied against the evangelical movement in the US: that it is insincere, advances evil, is hypocritical, imposes itself on others, and seeks political control. It’s an impressive intellectual undertaking, and an informative education for those of us who grew up outside of the evangelical tradition. (As a Catholic from Los Angeles, I hadn’t had much exposure to the theological roots and spiritual convictions of the prototypical evangelical.) Kristian helped me better understand all this, and evangelicalism’s place in 2026.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m sure our Vox audience thinks of the guys with “big beards and big podcasts,” or Trump-supporting white voters when they think about “evangelicals.” Who were you thinking about when writing this defense? Who are the evangelicals you are trying to defend?

The best way to put it is I’m thinking about a normal, typical evangelical church.

One of the interesting things that I found as I was researching the book is you’ll see the same characters recur in coverage of evangelicals doing crazy stuff. There’s one pastor in Tennessee, Greg Locke, who shows up in story after story and book after book. I listed something like two dozen media outlets in which he’s been featured. He does sound pretty extreme, but there’s a reason reporters go back to a guy like that, and it’s because most evangelicals are not like that.

If you just walked into a normal evangelical church on any given Sunday, you won’t find anything of that nature. This isn’t just my impression — though certainly being at Christianity Today, I do have a bird’s-eye view of this movement, and I did do in-person reporting and talk to ordinary evangelicals for this book.

But this is also something that you can see in survey data. Pew especially has done good research on this, asking both pastors and congregants: “Do you want politics in your churches?” Overwhelmingly, people are saying, “No, that’s not what we’re here for.” 

People might also have misguided ideas about themselves when they speak to pollsters. And so the other fascinating thing is many churches put sermons online now, and we’re able to do large-scale assessments of what is actually being said in these sermons. And there you find the same thing: Overwhelmingly, evangelical pastors are not preaching political sermons in the way that folks who have absorbed that caricature of evangelicalism, or who have focused on those crazy outlying figures, suspect is the case.

It is hard to argue that these more extreme voices aren’t influential, or that they aren’t taking up an exorbitant amount of attention online thanks to our algorithms.

I mean, obviously those people exist and I don’t like it, but I have to say they are part of evangelicalism. But this is a movement of tens of millions of people. You can’t have any collection of people that size and not have some unsavory stuff in there. But I do really want to emphasize that that is not typical evangelicalism.

Even among evangelicals who are squarely on the political right, evangelicals who do support Donald Trump, even evangelicals who want — maybe not the Trump-level aggression and brutality of immigration enforcement — but who want a stricter immigration enforcement than we saw with Joe Biden…even among those people, it is not uncommon to find really tangible care for immigrants in their own communities. 

For instance, I interviewed a retired pastor who is local to me here in Pittsburgh. He voted for Donald Trump. He also works for an immigration advocacy center. They help people through the legal process at free and really reduced rates to get them access to lawyers. 

Or one of my writers at Christianity Today did a story on a pastor down in West Texas who liked Trump’s first-term border policies, and he provides tangible care for illegal migrants. He gets them jobs, he helps them find housing, he helps them with food and clothes. 

Even in those cases where the political differences are real between the average evangelical and perhaps the average Vox reader, that doesn’t mean that that average evangelical is one of these big beards and big podcast guys, just spewing hate. Very often they’re tangibly helping in their communities.

Taking a step back, what is the state of evangelicalism in 2026? What’s your diagnosis of this movement? Has anything changed since you wrote the book? Is it still a robust movement, or has anything changed?

That’s a broad question, so in broad strokes, things are not terribly different between when I was writing in late 2025 and now. It’s only been a year.

In terms of [longer-term] changes, I would also point to a few things. When many people think about evangelicals, thinking back to the ’90s, they might think about the evolution and creation debates. But these days, actually for most evangelicals, they’re not young-Earth creationists anymore. 

Or many times conversations around evangelicals are framed around, well, will they let women be pastors? Today, the majority of evangelicals say that’s fine. So there are changes and there’s continuity. 

There’s also intense growth zones of this movement in the Global South. They’re in Latin America, they’re in Asia, they’re especially strong in Africa.

Why take on this defense of evangelicalism now? Evangelical identification seems to be on the decline, like religiosity in general. Is this an attempt to intervene in that?

I first started talking about this with my editor early last year and I had some trepidation. I work in journalism. I follow politics. I know how people talk about evangelicals in the discourse. And so I went into this with eyes open. Frankly, what would people think of me if I wrote this book?

I read this book by an evangelical theologian named J.I. Packer, and as he was writing, he would casually drop in “because I’m an evangelical.” He did this over and over throughout the book, and I was noticing in myself this strange reaction where I asked myself, why is he so happy about it? Isn’t it a little bit distasteful that Packer is out here just perfectly content to be an evangelical and talking about it? And then I really had to ask myself, “Why am I reacting that way?” I am part of an evangelical church. I work at an evangelical magazine.

Why is this my response? Why do I think he should be ashamed?

And I hadn’t left evangelicalism, so what’s going on here? I worked through that question and realized that as much as evangelicalism has many wrongs in its history and in its present — I don’t want to paper over that — there are also real goods here, and I’m not ashamed of the tradition and the people in it. I value those goods, and these are my people. 

There are a lot of evangelicals who feel that same dissonance, and I wanted to help them think through that same thing and say, “No, there’s goodness here,” and we can say so and not be embarrassed of it. 

As far as the idea of evangelicalism trending down here, it’s seeing, if anything, less of a decline than other religious traditions in America. The last I looked at the numbers, evangelicalism and Catholicism are the two big ones and holding steadier than, certainly, mainline Protestantism.

But overall, the story of the century, frankly, is the rapid decline in religiosity and connection to religious institutions in general, and evangelicalism’s not immune to that.

Turning to the political realm, and how the term has become associated with a negative light, has it been healthy for the movement to be associated so strongly with Trump and the GOP?

Squarely the answer is no. It’s not been healthy. It’s not been advantageous.

I say that in particular about Trump, but I would also say that about any political alignment. It is not our purpose as Christians, as evangelicals, to advance any political party or politician. That’s not what we’re doing here. So, not healthy. 

That said, I have spent — and I haven’t changed my mind on this, I don’t think Donald Trump should be president, I think he’s a terrible president — but I’ve spent many years now writing about evangelicals and Trump, and often very critically, and I stand by all of that. However, I also think that in the discourse there can be some conflation of what very famous evangelicals who should — and I think do — know better say and do about Donald Trump, and what the ordinary voter is doing. These are different levels of moral and political responsibility and flattening them is not helpful to interacting with our neighbors. 

Early on in the Trump era, people talked about the reluctant Trump voter, and there was a theory that the evangelical voter was that kind of voter. That’s not what I’m positing. That might have existed, but we’re over a decade into this now, and that’s not really a viable explanation at this stage. But there is what I would describe as an “obligation voter” who is found among evangelicals.

It works like this: Like many other Americans, many evangelicals think you have a duty to vote. That’s point one. 

Point two is that, also like many other Americans, many evangelicals are only interested in voting for a viable major-party candidate, because they know how this works.

Point three, they’re pro-life. We know where the Democratic Party is on this issue. When you add those three things together, you end up with a Republican vote for president, whether it is Donald Trump, or any Republican.

We see, basically, statistically identical rates of white evangelicals voting for Republican nominees throughout this century — every single one. It’s right around 8 in 10. 

Now, that is not how I decide to vote. I reject the idea that I have a duty to participate in a system where the only viable options are ethically intolerable to me, but that is intelligible and it’s, I think, morally defensible and it’s not outlandish and it’s not a statement of extremism.

But evangelicals have to vote. We are sensible about who can win and we have this bedrock conviction and that’s where people end up. 

Sure, there are people who have much wilder ideas. There are people who are voting for Trump because they love Trump — that exists. But I think obligation voter theory is a more accurate and understandable description of the position many ordinary evangelicals are in.

What aspects of the movement still need change or reform? What problems remain, particularly on race, or on, as you say, “matching words to deeds”? And how do you communicate that to such a vast movement?

It’s complicated. On the one hand, there has been meaningful change on issues of race within evangelicalism in America in my lifetime that I have witnessed that is measurable, a real thing. 

It’s also fair to say that in the last few years, there’s been some stagnation or even some backwards movement on that. The overall trajectory is we are still going in the right direction there, but it can be a messy trajectory. There’s more to be done there. 

But there’s also not a one-size-fits-all solution, especially for a movement of this size. Just think in terms of local demographics: there are churches who in 2020 wanted to dive right into a curriculum of racial reconciliation and now seem to have lost interest; that backsliding might have happened for really indefensible and gross reasons, but it also might be that they live in a state like South Dakota, which is like 2.5 percent Black, and realistically they don’t have a way to meaningfully diversify their congregation because it’s just white people who live there.

That’s the reality of some of our states and especially rural areas. 

I tried, and hopefully was careful, to distinguish between cases where a critique is fairly applied specifically to evangelicals and in many cases where progress has already been made and should be recognized alongside the critique.

Like which ones?

A good one here might be conversations around Christian nationalism. And this is one where I can’t give away all the details because so much of what I’m looking at there has to do with what I think is really bad data that has suggested that Christian nationalism, in the really horrifying way that we understand it, is far more common than it actually is.

But to make this distinction, yes, actual Christian nationalism does exist. There are people who will even claim that title. And some of them are Catholics, and some of them, though, are evangelicals. But it’s also the case that sometimes the label Christian nationalism gets applied any time a pretty conservative evangelical is trying to engage in politics, trying to vote for what she thinks is right.

That’s just how democracy works! The idea that evangelicals are trying to impose our beliefs on our neighbors when we’re voting for what we believe to be moral — that’s literally what we’re invited to do. We’re supposed to vote for what we think would be best. It’s not Christian nationalism. 

Maybe we’re wrong, maybe our ideas are bad, but it doesn’t deserve that very exciting label. 

How did you wrestle with developments in 2025 and 2026, particularly when it comes to mass deportations and stronger immigration enforcement? I’m thinking in particular of the Public Religion Research Institute’s analysis of how white evangelical Protestants seem to have the most restrictive views on immigration, and are more likely than other religious groups to endorse tougher or more dangerous enforcement policies, like razor wire or camps.

Those numbers are real in many cases. I might have some quibbles with how the questions are asked, but I think obviously there are patterns here. Those are very much not my politics, and I am very comfortable saying I think evangelicals who are in favor of that kind of brutal immigration enforcement are wrong. 

I understand why many people outside of evangelicalism may think, well, evangelicalism itself is the problem. But a point of fact: we have research that makes very clear that when, in particular white Southern evangelicals, the kind of folks who are going to be showing up in that PRRI research you named, when they leave the church, they do not become more caring for immigrants. They do not become more gentle in their politics. On the contrary, they go in the other direction. 

Evangelicalism very measurably is making evangelicals better. It is making them care more for their neighbors. It is making them more invested in their communities. And so just monstering this movement is not even a solution.

How do you think evangelical leaders and institutions should be engaging with electoral politics and political activism in the future, and in a post-Trump era? Is there room for collaboration or dialogue between Democrats and evangelicals?

It’s so hard to say what the post-Trump era is going to be like.

I am very skeptical of church involvement in politics where people are lobbying for things in their formal capacity or their organizational capacity. At the same time, I look back at the history of the civil rights movement and obviously it was enormously important that Martin Luther King, for instance, was Reverend Martin Luther King.

That does give me pause in my inclinations to just say we should stay out of it. We should be thinking about things on an issue-by-issue basis and not aligning ourselves with parties or politicians.

Obviously there are always going to be policy differences among Christians generally on those alignments — among evangelicals particularly. We have the same doctrine and we read the same scripture and people in good faith can come to different conclusions about what that means for policy. But generally speaking, if we are sincerely trying to bring our faith to bear in our politics, if we were to operate on that issue-by-issue basis, we’re going to tend to see a diversity of coalitions and partners.

Abdul El-Sayed is trying to win over undecided Jewish voters in Michigan — without compromising his substantive positions on Israel or disavowing his most radical allies.  

During both his primary and general election campaigns, El-Sayed’s opponents have portrayed him as insensitive to Jewish concerns, if not outright antisemitic. These charges have often rested on falsely equating El-Sayed’s opposition to Zionism (he is not committed to Israel’s existence as a majority Jewish state) with a hostility for Jewish people.

But in recent weeks, two other concerns came to the forefront. One was El-Sayed’s response to an antisemitic attack on a Michigan synagogue. In March, a 41-year-old named Ayman Mohamed Ghazali drove a truck into Temple Israel’s Jewish preschool. Days later, El-Sayed condemned the attack, while also noting that Ghazali had recently lost family members to an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. El-Sayed suggested that these events illustrated how “hurt people hurt people” and that “violence is a cycle,” one that had led Ghazali to perpetrate “an evil act of displaced rage.”

Separately, El-Sayed had campaigned with the far-left streamer Hasan Piker during his primary campaign. This had always sat poorly with many Jewish and centrist Democrats in Michigan. But Piker made his association with the Democratic Senate candidate more conspicuous in late August. During a broadcast, Piker lambasted Jeremy Moss, a pro-Israel Jewish Democrat running for Congress in Michigan who had not endorsed El-Sayed but was in active conversations with the candidate about how to bridge lingering divides with Jewish voters. More explosively, Piker said, among other things, that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually somebody is going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” He subsequently insisted he was merely spotlighting the hazards of portraying all Jews as ardent Israel supporters, not making some kind of veiled threat, as his detractors alleged.

Nonetheless, this triggered a new round of calls for El-Sayed to both disavow Piker, and to take other measures to reassure Michigan Jews that he cares about their safety. 

These disagreements between El-Sayed and moderate Jewish voters reflect broader tensions within the Democratic Party nationally.

El-Sayed declined to disown the streamer. But he did defend the right of all Americans “to advocate for what they believe without fear of violence,” saying this was “particularly true for communities that have been intimidated for their beliefs in the past.”

Some Jewish Democrats found this insufficient. In an open letter Wednesday, 400 Democratic Jewish Michiganders — including donor Rob Orley — announced that they would be supporting Republican Mike Rogers in their state’s Senate race.

Days earlier, El-Sayed had sought to mend fences with such voters at a summit held by the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus. During his appearance there, he apologized for his remarks following the Temple Israel attack, saying “I should have issued a statement, of course condemning it, and it just should have been the full stop.”

Among those in attendance was Charles Gaba, a healthcare analyst and major Democratic fundraiser; Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow has called him “the biggest powerhouse democratic donor wrangler that nobody has ever heard of.”

Gaba was a strong supporter of Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. And he has expressed serious reservations about El-Sayed, even while committing to voting for him and raising money for his candidacy.

These disagreements between El-Sayed and moderate Jewish voters reflect broader tensions within the Democratic Party nationally: over how far Democrats can and should go in criticizing Israel, whether the left takes antisemitism seriously, and if centrists are using allegations of anti-Jewish bigotry to stigmatize legitimate dissent. 

To explore these debates — and clarify the concerns of “Sayed-skeptical” Jews in Michigan — I spoke with Gaba this week. 

 Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision. 

From your vantage point, what are undecided Jewish Michiganders’ biggest reservations about El-Sayed — and how many are actually addressable by his campaign? 

I’d say that there’s probably four main ones. Two are connected to his comments about the Temple Israel attack. And he definitely addressed one of those complaints with his statement: that it was awfully timed. In other words, that days after the attack was not a good moment to raise other issues instead of simply condemning the violence full stop.

But the larger issue to me — and to a lot of other folks I’ve spoken with — is he seemed to be under the impression that timing was the only problem. That it was just too soon and if he’d waited a month and then made the exact same comments about “context,” that would have been fine. He doesn’t seem to get that trying to put it in context at all is the larger problem. Because a bunch of preschoolers at a synagogue in Michigan have absolutely nothing to do with a military conflict overseas, just nothing. If a family member of someone who died in the September 11th attacks had gone and attempted to kill Muslim children, their loss wouldn’t be relevant context. You couldn’t say, “Oh well, but he was upset about that attack.” 

I think an El-Sayed supporter might say: There’s a difference between explaining an abominable act and excusing it. In his original statement, El-Sayed did say explicitly that “there is never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship” and described the violence as “heinous” and “evil.” Taken literally, he was arguing that the strike that had killed Ghazali’s family members led to his act of antisemitic terrorism, even as nothing could possibly justify it. 

There was just no reason to try to put it in context at all. Pretty much everyone understands that the Israel-Hamas war has brought emotions to a fever pitch for a lot of people.

I don’t think we needed someone to say, “Hey, that whole mess in the Mideast might have inspired this!” Yeah, no shit. Who was the audience for this? Who was he trying to give context to? Certainly the Jewish community understands the situation. I think the Muslim community understands the situation. And so does everyone else. I don’t think it served any purpose other than to upset and offend a bunch of people. So he was lecturing to no one essentially, in my view. Which I get; I have a tendency to do that myself sometimes in other ways. But it isn’t helpful. And shifting the timing wouldn’t have made it helpful.

So, what are the other two big sticking points for Jewish Democrats not sold on El-Sayed?

The third is this Hasan Piker guy. The media certainly seems to be pretty focused on that. If memory serves, El-Sayed seemed to be trailing Mallory McMorrow and Haley Stevens in the primaries up until around March. And then it was announced that he was going to be rallying with Piker at Michigan State and the University of Michigan.

A combination of that and the reaction to it — namely the McMorrow campaign heavily criticizing him for the rally — generated a bunch of attention and certainly raised Abdul’s profile tremendously. I don’t know how much credit to give Piker, but it made some difference. And next thing you know, he’s kind of running in the lead. 

So, it’s pretty clear that Piker was brought in specifically to help him win the primary with a very young, progressive crowd. To that effect, it worked. But that doesn’t mean he’s helpful for winning a general election.

So, why do you think El-Sayed refuses to distance himself more explicitly from Piker, if the influencer’s support is not helpful in the general election?

I don’t know. Maybe he thinks that he’s being noble or something by not throwing him under the bus. But the guy just seems to be kind of an asshole, and I would not want to be associated with him in either the primary or the general. And so associating himself with Hasan Piker makes me think less of Abdul. 

And I have a lot of respect for Abdul. I’ve met him about a half-dozen times or so, back when he ran for governor and then several times during this campaign. And we’ve also been in contact a few times in between to discuss healthcare policy. And I know he’s a very intelligent guy, very thoughtful guy, and very passionate about universal healthcare. I respect him for all of that. But I think less of him for associating with Piker. And I think a lot of Jewish Michiganders feel that way.

So, what’s the fourth issue?

Well, this is not so much about Abdul specifically as it is about the left. A lot of progressives get that you should condemn antisemitism, or bigotry against the Jewish religion. But many don’t seem to grasp that Judaism is not just a religion; it is also a people. And we do have a several thousand-year connection with the land of Israel — not the leadership, not the current government — but with the land itself. And so that makes the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism complicated. You know, to try to say, “Well, as long as you give up Israel, then Judaism is fine” — many of us can’t do that because it’s an intrinsic part of who we are. 

Is there not a distinction between recognizing Jews’ historical and religious connection to Israel — and being committed to the maintenance of a majority Jewish state in the Middle East?

In other words, there are anti-Zionists who deny Jews’ roots in Israel — or the right of Jewish Israelis to live in the region. But I think most progressive anti-Zionists would dispute neither of those things. Rather, they’d argue that Israeli Jews have a right to live in their land — but that maintaining a majority Jewish Israel should not take precedence over allowing Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their ancestral territories.

It’s definitely true that there’s more than one type of anti-Zionism. I think there’s several groupings and different shades between them. And that also holds true on the Zionist side. There are right-wing extremists like [Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben-Gvir who say, “We should annex both the West Bank and Gaza.” And then there’s others that go even more extreme and say that Israel should dominate the entire region, including Lebanon and Egypt.

And then, at the other end, there’s Hamas and other extremists who literally want to either kick out or slaughter every Jew in the region.

And those extremes have led people to think that Zionism means “Jews get to take over the region” and that anti-Zionism means “Jews have to be kicked out.”

I think for most people, it’s somewhere in between. I’ve started calling myself a “small-z Zionist,” which is basically a more mainstream, two-state solution type. I don’t know how feasible that solution is. There’s only a slim chance these days. But the odds of a two-state solution are still better than those of creating a single “kumbaya, let’s all live together in peace” nation, in my view.  

How were El-Sayed’s remarks to Michigan’s Jewish Caucus received, from your vantage point?

They were better received than I expected, to be honest. Although, I suspect that those most opposed to him probably didn’t show up at the event at all, since they’ve made up their minds. 

Having said that, I did have discussions with several people afterwards, and there was definitely still concern about the whole “context” thing. People were polite and it was a reasonably warm reception. And to his credit, he did stick around afterwards and had one-on-one personal conversations. He was there for quite a while, so I give him credit for that.

From a purely electoral perspective, how much does El-Sayed actually have to lose, if he fails to consolidate the Jewish vote? In demographic terms, the bloc of Jewish voters who are open to voting for El-Sayed — but still need to be persuaded — would seem to be tiny. After all, we’re talking about a small minority of small minority; Jews account for only about 1.4 percent of Michigan’s electorate. So, what’s at stake here politically?

In terms of activism, organizing, and donations, the Jewish community punches far above our weight. 

But yeah, we’re a fraction of a fraction. I think the biggest thing is just reassuring moderate Democratic voters in general. Basically, if the headlines start to read, “Jewish leaders seem reassured by Abdul apology,” then some non-Jewish folks — who aren’t sure about El-Sayed — might say, “Oh, well, if the Jews signed off on this guy, I guess he’s okay.”

Update, September 3, 3:30 pm ET: This piece was originally published on September 3 and has been updated with new developments and later clarified Charles Gaba’s title.