In this special episode, I’m sharing the prologue to my forthcoming book, American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, which will be published on September 15, 2026. The story begins with my own experience as a teenager in evangelical Christianity—and with the way my understanding of Jesus, America, and the role of Christians in public life has changed over the past three decades. From the “missional” church movement of the 1990s to the rise of Christian nat

How much love is enough? In this episode of It’s In the Code, part of the series “Questions I Wasn’t Supposed to Ask in Church,” we examine one of the most influential teachings in conservative Christianity: that Christians must love God or Jesus more than anyone and anything else. What happens when this teaching becomes an impossible demand? Drawing on a listener’s powerful experience, we explore the connection between the love of God, religious trauma, Christian deconstruction, and the damagin

Thinking out loud. It's what I do now. lagatascratch@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trump’s war with Iran is exposing a growing fracture inside the MAGA coalition. As the conflict continues, young America First voices—including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes—are increasingly at odds with the Christian nationalist and Christian Zionist establishment that continues to support Israel and the war. Brad Onishi, Matthew D. Taylor, and Holly Berkley Fletcher discuss the expanding Iran conflict, the Strait of Hormuz, the threat of a wider regional war, and why the con

This week on the Straight White American Jesus Sunday Interview, host Annika Brockschmidt sits down with extremism researcher Ivana Leidig, author of The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization, for an in-depth conversation about the women reshaping today's far-right movement. Together they explore how female influencers have become some of the movement's most effective communicators, using lifestyle content, tradwife aesthetics, motherhood, religion, and socia

In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, Brad Onishi sits down with renowned scholar, author, and television producer Reza Aslan for a wide-ranging conversation about America's religious past—and why that history matters more than ever. Drawing on Aslan's new podcast series, Our Seven Neighbors, they unpack the myths surrounding "one nation under God," the long struggle for genuine religious freedom, and the forgotten stories of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Catholics, Indigenous peoples, a