Episode 515: Author Jon Ward - Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation

Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, songwriter, author, worship leader, an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene, and most recently, a hospital chaplain. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss things that are on my mind. The Voices in My Head. Music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more are all on the table as I discuss them here with friends and colleagues and sometimes just by myself, processing what I'm learning in the moment. Make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes, tweeting to me @RickLeeJames on Twitter, and by joining my mailing list at rickleejames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you are interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the loudest voices in my head, which is ironic because he was such a quiet person. Also, if you do want to be notified about all of my latest releases, not just this podcast, sign up for email notifications on my Substack page found at rickleejames.substack.com. Substack.com. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so let's get to the latest episode of Voices in My Head, the Rick Lee James podcast.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm so grateful to all of you who are listening. Thank you for being here for another conversation this week. My guest this week on Voices in My Head is John Ward. John is the chief national correspondent at Yahoo News. Ward's life is divided in half: two decades inside the evangelical Christian bubble and two decades outside of it. In his new book, Testimony, Ward tells the engaging story of his upbringing in and eventual break from an influential evangelical church. He sheds light on the evangelical movement's troubling political and cultural dimensions, tracing the ways in which the Jesus People movement was seduced by materialism and other factors to become politically captive rather than prophetic. A respected journalist, Ward asks uncomfortable but necessary questions, calling those inside and outside conservative Christian circles to embrace truth, complexity, and nuance. He recounts his growing alarm and grief over the last several years as evangelical conservatives attack truth, rejected personal character, and embraced authoritarianism and conspiracism. He shares his search for faith that embodies the values he was taught as a child. His experience and reflections will resonate with many readers, including myself, who grew up in the evangelical movement, as well as all those who have an interest in the health of the church and its impact on American life and politics. John Ward, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Well, as, as we said in the introduction already, your book has resonated with so many people, and I include myself in that number of people. As we hear your story, I think many of us hear our own stories and our own backgrounds and things that we've been grappling with over the last several years. I appreciated the honesty, just the transparency that you share, personal stories and things that you didn't necessarily have to share with us, but we are so much more enriched because of it. So I appreciate you sharing I appreciate even, I think, your family's willingness. You know, I'm sure you probably asked their permission as you share about some of the conversations you had and difficult moments. But I'm grateful that you make that relationship a big part of the conversation. So thank you for being here today to talk about your wonderful book, Testimony.

Thank you, Rick. I think, I think one of the reasons I wanted to share You know, transparently is because I do think there was some motivation to help others. I think the more a reader or a listener can see the reality of the situation in another person's story without gloss, without spin, without the best foot forward, I think the more that that helps you know, another person identify because we all have challenges, we all have struggles, and, and our stories are not, are not usually tied up with a bow.

Yeah. Well, that's, yeah, so true. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there.

Oh, no, that's fine.

Well, I think I want to start with actually a passage that you wrote in your book. You say in your book, I existed during my upbringing in a conservative church. I never felt entirely comfortable there. And it's interesting how you say you existed, but you didn't feel entirely comfortable. And in the book, you talk about uncomfortable but necessary questions that you began to raise that made you feel a bit like an outsider, or to use the phrase that you use, which comes from Beowulf, a border stalker. And I really appreciated sort of that metaphor and that language. Maybe talk a little bit about the meaning behind that, that phrase of being a border stalker, and maybe some of those questions that you began to grapple with that you, you really didn't feel free to either ask in the church or you weren't finding good answers.

That, that term border stalker grabbed me by the lapel, and I, I think it, it functions that way for a lot of people. It's an odd term, it's an interesting mix of words, um, The Old English version from Beowulf is even stranger. Myrkstapa. Yeah, there's something about like just that term that I think intrigues people. It intrigues me. And, you know, so I oftentimes that's my instinct is if it intrigues me, it's going to intrigue somebody else. Andrew Yang, you know, who ran for president and ran for mayor of New York City, he read the book recently and Rick Lee James, um, sent me a copy of his book and, and he, you know, he signed it from a fellow border stalker, which I thought was kind of cool. Yeah, but the term, um, it just gets at, I think, a feeling that anybody will have if they're in an in-group that is generally closed off, um, keeps to itself and tries to hold to a pretty precise set of doctrines or beliefs. And that does not have to be Christian. It does not have to even be religious. It could be political. It could be social. It could be really anything, any kind of group that kind of keeps to itself and tries to enforce a pretty strict sense of orthodoxy or dogma or, you know, adherence to a set of teachings or whatever. So I think anybody who questions that is going to end up being, um, alienated from that group. And I, I don't really know why some of us tend to push more against that sort of thing than others. I think it generally probably just comes down to personality types. Um, and I still, I think, am working to get less and less judgmental of those who are not like me, because I think the natural instinct is to think, well, everybody should be a border stalker, everybody should question, you know, rigid orthodoxies. I'm not sure that's true. You know, I think in any group there's a need for for people who do walk the border and push against the boundaries. There's also a need probably for people who patrol the boundaries and the borders. Um, and there's all kinds of roles inside the group. What we're kind of really talking about is an ecosystem, because we do all live within ecosystems, um, community groups, or just our communities, our neighborhoods. You know, our religious communities, our school communities, work, all of these, you know, these are all ecosystems. And I do think though that a lot of religious communities often fail to appreciate and prioritize the role of the border stalker, um, because like, again, like many other in-groups, um, it's easier in the short term to move forward without troublesome questions. Yeah, questions slow us down. They call— they, they make it harder to make decisions because then you have to stop and think about the question and answer the question and deliberate. Um, and you know, I'm not advocating for paralysis, but I do think over the long term valuing this role within religious communities is one of the most wise, pragmatic, strategic, health and life-giving things that a religious community can do for itself.

Yeah, no, I agree. I thank you so much for sharing about that more. And I think a lot of us probably feel that way from time to time. And I remember a church history professor that I had one time reminding us that sometimes it feels frustrating, but change in the church Church is very slow, he said, but at the same time it needs to be very slow because you don't want to be tossed about and by every wind of doctrine that comes along. But at the same time, it's good for us to be able to be in that place where we can have difficult questions and, and conversations that need to be had that help us to, to make sure that we're still on the right path. And I, I feel like, um, the way that you talk about in your, your book, as you grew, and I, I think You know, James Fowler talked about different stages of faith that people have as we go through. And I feel like you began to grow into a new stage of faith, and you started asking questions. And I, if you don't mind, I just want to read another short excerpt from your book where you say, but the main reason my parents should have been concerned about me in high school was because my— sorry, my religious upbringing had given me lots of training on how to feel and what to believe, but very little on how to think. Jesus instructed his followers to love the Lord your God with all your your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind in Matthew 22:37. And we were quite good at the heart and soul part, but the mind had somehow been neglected. And I, I find that kind of a very fascinating place for maybe us to, to just discuss a little bit about sometimes the reality of what it feels like. We're often taught what to believe and, and not what to think. And again, the same professor I mentioned a moment ago had a poster hanging on his door in his office that said, Jesus came to take away your sins, not your brains. And I always love that phrase as we come to it. But I'd love to know just— and I think our listeners would love to hear if they haven't read the book already, just a little bit of sort of your background. And I know that part that I just read comes in when your parents were very concerned about as you were growing up as a teenager and all the things that parents, especially conservative Christian parents, worry about, like drugs and sex and rock and roll and all those things. But I love how you express that what you really uh, that they should have been concerned about was, was your ability to think. So I wonder if you could just kind of take us a little bit on your background, tell us about maybe that church that you were raised in, in the Maryland suburbs outside of Washington, DC, and your dad working as a minister, and just some of the situation there, because I think it helps us to have a little more depth into your story and your insights.

Sure. Um, I will just say, you know, the whole issue of whether change should be slow or fast, going back to our previous point.

Oh, sure.

It's inside the church. I do think sometimes people can say, you know, hey, change has always got to be slow, and I instinctively agree with that to a certain degree. I, I do think there's something wise and conservative in having a view of change that it should— that you shouldn't make reforms, especially big ones, in ways that are overhasty. But as in almost everything, there is a matter of balance here, because if there is clear or egregious abuse or, you know, injustice happening, I'm just sensitive to the fact that the line that change should be slow can be used as a club to beat down those who want to bring or advocate for justice.

Yes, 100%. Yeah.

So my upbringing was situated in the '70s, and when we talk about wanting to teach children the right things to believe and the right things to do, or more often the right things not to do. I do think so much of that is situated, um, or shaped by a unique set of factors. Um, in the religious space, I think a lot— a big, a big input was this dispensationalist theology, actually. Just this view of, you know, the end times being imminent and the job of the Christian to be, to kind of keep oneself pure from the world and to hold on till Christ's return. That was very, very popular then. The Late Great Planet Earth came out, I think, in '72 or '73. Um, Hal Lindsey's book, and that was very popular. There were some films that came out around that time, so this was very much in the air. And I think it often gets overlooked, um, by, by certain people who were not necessarily overly focused on this, because I think a lot of times they, they may not be fully appreciative of how I do think that that shaped people, the Evangelical Church, or large, large sections of it, even if they weren't, you know, obsessives about, you know, the rapture. My parents were both mainline Christians. My dad was Catholic, my mom was Episcopalian. And then they, they, they left that behind, probably in high school, and then were looking for something more and, and looking for a meaningful faith in the early '70s. And that's when the Jesus Movement was in full effect, uh, this revival that started in California and spread across the country. And a lot of their friends became, uh, born-again Christians at the same time as them. So there was definitely a feeling that something was happening that was organic and real and authentic and exciting. Um, and they all started going to a Bible study outside— or just inside the DC, uh, city line, um, at a, I think a, I think a Baptist church in Northwest DC. Um, started in somebody's basement, and the, the main speakers were, were, uh, talented, um, and dynamic. And so they started attracting a lot of people who were coming to this, and, uh, they had to move into a bigger space. And they did this for several years. It was called Take and Give. Uh, it went the acronym TAG. And then at a certain point after a few years, they started their own church. And, you know, I mentioned the dispensationalist theology, the rapture mindset, um, and, and I think that was more in the background. I think in the fore— and I think it was more formative, but in the forefront was, um, just, you know, a very charismatic quasi-Pentecostal, uh, way of faith. Um, at times there was there were hints of almost like socialism in terms of the philosophy of materialism, which was, who are resources? Let's live as the church in the Book of Acts. Yeah, they shared their, their shared their possessions and very egalitarian, although not probably so much when it came to gender roles, but egalitarian at least in, um, a sense of everybody being equal and belonging, but still vestiges of sort of those gender, uh, you know, traditional roles. Um, so, you know, the church services were, uh, rock band and everybody dressed casual. Um, and, uh, this was the beginnings in some ways of, uh, of megachurches. You know, those didn't really exist at the time. And so a lot of these megachurches came out of the energy that came from these more organic house churches and startups.

Yeah, well, thank you for that. I appreciate you sharing some of your background there. And, you know, one thing that, that you write about in your book, and, and I, I think you, you say this in a really powerful way, and one way that it really speaks to me right now in my work as a hospital chaplain, um, a lot of what I do is I listen to people and I hear their stories. And it's amazing sometimes, uh, the inner resources that God has given people to, to ways of being healed from resources within them when someone listens to them. And then when they are able to sometimes find this release of things they've been holding on to for so long. It's fascinating. That often comes from, from being able to look into another person's life to kind of make that bow to a person where you're willing to hear their story, to see them. And you talk about in the book, you say that In the evangelical subculture where you were raised, you were in a place of not looking at the world that much. And I, I understand what you mean by that because, uh, we're almost— in many ways, many of us were taught to, to fear those outside of our sort of subculture. And you talk about a way that even though you, you lived in a certain part of the country, you might as well been in Appalachia or somewhere because you were so kind of closed off. And yet the, the way that you talk about that place of, of being taught not to look at or look into, you know, the world in such a way, I'd love for you to talk more about that a little bit, if you don't mind, of the way that Christian subcultures can sometimes be places that are not looking at the world that much, and thus they are not advocating for the common good, because they, they don't tend to look outside themselves. Would you mind just talking a little bit about that? Because you write so well about it in the book.

To me, this is the difference between being a stakeholder versus an antagonist or an opponent. And I think we were very much— I was very much— I think a lot of people have been raised this way, where you're taught to think of non-Christians or the secular world as the opponents. And there is some grounding in biblical, you know, scripture and theology for this notion of, you know, the world as a force. And, you know, even, you know, the forces of evil, you know, there is language like that in the Bible. So I understand where it comes from. But, you know, I've written in my journalism about how when you overemphasize passages of scripture about spiritual warfare or over-apply these kinds of ideas onto political disagreement. It's very easy to— even if, you know, there are a lot of people who even today will say, you know, they talk mostly about angels and demons in the spiritual realm, And then they kind of qualify it and they say, we're not talking about real-world violence and we're not saying that these people are demons, but that, that's not really an effective way to prevent dehumanization and demonization. I think I said those distinctly, right? Dehumanization.

Yeah.

Right. And, um, because if all of your rhetoric day after day is talking about people who think differently from you, you know, in this schema of good versus evil and light versus dark and angels versus demons. You can qualify it all you want, but that's building the mental categories in your head about how you think about those people. And I think that's a large part, along with the dispensationalism, uh, which teaches us to sort of just regard the created world as kindling for a fire that will come when, when, when Christ returns. All of that kind of works together to, to build an oppositional mindset about those who think differently, those who share, have different values, those who have different beliefs, rather than a stakeholder mindset, which is, sure, we disagree, we have different beliefs, but we share this neighborhood, we share this country, we share this world. And, you know, our call as ambassadors of Christ the King is to work, to love our neighbor, and to work for the good of all. And I think, you know, if that had been more of a banner, I think it would have changed some things. And yeah, I just, I was speaking to a New York Times reporter recently. The piece hasn't run yet. And I felt like throughout the conversation, I felt like I wasn't saying the right thing. And, you know, I was just not— I didn't feel great about it. But at the very end, I felt like I said something that I hadn't said before, which really captured, I think, something kind of deep in my soul, which is that she asked me something about regrets.

Hmm.

And I, and I don't like to talk about regrets. I don't like to think about life in that way. But I did come to a place where I said, you know, I do feel sad that it has taken me so long to love the world. And by the world, I don't mean the structure in scripture that is talked about as systems that produce unjust outcomes, right? I just mean the created world. I mean, the trees outside my window.

Yeah.

And my neighbor across the street. And the music on the radio, you know, just the everyday blessings of life. The ups and downs, the ins and outs. You know, it's taken me a long time to really love those things and to love this world, to love this day in this moment. Because a lot of faith taught a certain way does teach us to think more about the day that's coming.

Yeah.

Then the day that we're living. And even in life before death, that can be an unhealthy way of thinking. Yeah, if you're always thinking about, if I just get to this point, then it'll all be okay. And maybe there might be, you know, elements of Eastern religion that feed into a more present-minded focus. But there's just a lot to unpack there, you know, when it comes to being embodied. Loving, you know, the earth, the dirt, the cycles of nature. All of these things are things that I'm— that are kind of, you know, new over the last decade for me, which I found to be very life-giving. But I wish I had been raised more in line with that sort of way.

Yeah, well, I think you're touching on something, and you've mentioned it a couple of times, the dispensational theology that kind of pervaded so many churches in such a short amount of time. Because really, I think if I'm right, something like maybe that theology is roughly 200 years old, if that, which would not have been something the early church would have seen or even understood. They would look at it and go, what are you talking about? Because our, you know, we talk about in scripture of a God who is continually making all things new and redeeming and making new things. And we are heading towards a recreation of, you know, like a return to Eden almost. We, you almost started in the Bible in the same place, you know, with this, this creation of a new Eden and a new heavens and a new earth. And dispensationalism, as you had talked about before, it looks at it very suspiciously. Everything's just going to be blown apart. And instead of looking at it as, no, God is taking what has become corrupt, and God is redeeming and renewing and making beautiful. And, you know, taking the, you know, turning, as Jesus says, you know, swords into plowshares. And we're taking these things that were meant for destruction and harm and actually making something beautiful and powerful from it. So, so that, that whole theology, it really does make a difference in our focus and what we're heading for. And so if we learn, I think what you're talking about is essentially learning to love our neighbor, you know, and to look outside and see the beauty of the things that God created. I was joking with somebody the other day, I'm, I'm at the age now where I'm starting to notice birds, you know, when you're younger, you don't think so much, but You know, during the pandemic, we had a nest just above our garage, and we got to see some birds take their very first flight out of that nest. And I remember us, like, we're videoing it, and there was a new wonder to it, you know, that we had not experienced before. And it almost— maybe it takes a little time in your life to grow and develop into that. But I love hearing the way that you talk about these new ways, the way that you've learned to love the world. Just, you know, the world that was created and the beauty that God makes. And I think that's beautiful.

But I also—

oh, I'm sorry, you were—

well, the other thing I would say is that I do think that the way that we're taught to read the Bible plays into this as well. There's an element of, you know, biblical supremacy or biblical literalism that discounts the fact that that, you know, you can be a person who believes in the divine inspiration of the Bible. You can even be probably an errantist and still believe that God has revealed himself through the created world as well. But I think sometimes biblical supremacy gets taken to such an extreme that people kind of place the Bible over the created revelation, or the book of created reality, and begin to— I think the other elements we've already talked about play into it, you know, the dispensationalism and the other factors. But I think the biblical supremacy mindset can also play into that where we look at the created world, and if there are elements of sort of evangelical culture that have been extrapolated out of the text by somebody's interpretation that are saying what you see with your own eyes is not actually happening, I think that further leads to a devaluing of the created reality.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And thank you for the way that you write about— I think there's a professor that you had for a time, Throckmorton, I believe. It's a unique name for sure. And he says something, not exactly how you phrased it there. And I wish I would have written the quote down so I could say it better. But it was about this idea of, you know, not ignoring the truths in front of you just because the Bible might say something different, because they're writing it different perspectives and different times. So I appreciate the way that you help us to, to see that. And I think you talk about in your book too, I, if, if I remember, you talk about the way that journalism actually was a way that kind of, kind of saved you from that kind of thinking because it helps you to look at the world in a way, maybe not an unbiased way because we all have, we all have our biases, but in a way that is, that is true, you know, and in a way it is, uh, helpful to just look at it with nuance and not so much only always black and white, but in the way that the world is complicated. And it's a place that, um, I think as a journalist, you would, you would probably say— these are my words, not yours— um, but you're looking at the world for what it is and not for what we want it to be necessarily. And you're trying to tell a truthful story about that. And am I kind of accurate in how I'm assessing Yeah, 100%.

And, you know, we were just talking when it comes to the way that the Bible interplays with the world as we experience it. Oftentimes, if people take the Bible supremacy too far, they can often slip into the world as I want it to be rather than the way it is. But I think that journalism did a few things for me. It did teach me that life is much more complicated than I had been taught in terms of, you know, everything is not so black and white in terms, you know, as we try to assess what's good and bad and right and wrong, or, or in between. There's a lot more in between, I think, is probably the point there.

Yeah.

It also taught me that the world and life are not as evil and scary as I had been taught, even though there is great evil and true horror in this world. You know, I think there were elements of that that had been overblown or overextrapolated, and there were also elements of it that were misplaced.

Yeah.

You know, the evil was, was not— was, was in other places, you know, greed and, and You know, the abuse of the power of the powerless, I think, was not something that we were taught about. But, you know, the complexity really gets to something else, which is journalism taught me about complexity, but it also embeds in the practitioner a habit of starting with a statement when you approach a topic. Or, um, or an issue or a situation, uh, it embeds in you this habit of starting with a statement of, I very well could be wrong here in my assumptions. I could be wrong. And I think that statement, I could be wrong, has been one of the most powerful, life-giving, faith-building statements in my life. And I do think a lot of it started with journalism. And here's an example of what I mean. I started my journalism career in late 2001. 2003, the US invades Iraq. And early on in that invasion, I was a very young reporter and I was assigned to write about the deaths of US soldiers who were in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. I attended a few funerals at Arlington Cemetery and at churches around the D.C. region. If you're assigned to write that story, and part of the job of writing that story is to write about how to spell the name of that soldier. Let's say his name is Darryl. You assume his name is spelled a certain way. But I could be wrong about that.

Hmm.

Well, I better damn well check. Yeah, yeah. Because if I get that person's name wrong, that's an insult to their memory. And that family will be— I will be adding to their grief. And And, you know, that applies not just to the name, but to the manner of death and the date of the death and on and on and on. The details are, are quite voluminous in any 800-word story about, you know, a soldier's death in combat or in theater. And so at a very basic granular level, you're taught to second-guess your assumptions. Hmm. And I think as a way of life, that's, that's been a very healthy thing for me. And I've applied it broadly, just as sort of a way of approaching knowledge in general. And we can talk more about it. But I don't think it's the norm for people, I think, especially now, even as now, you know, information has accelerated, and there's more and more bad information out there, I think people are still operating on the old assumptions of, well, I can just sort of pass on information or, or, uh, assume information into my frame framework, um, without really doing some due diligence on this.

Yeah, yeah, I, oh, I agree. And, and thank you for giving us that good insight into what you— the importance of good journalism too, you know, and, and the real-world consequences of when it actually, you know, is— gets wrong. Um, and, and, and also the integrity that I think most journalists have. Uh, the journalism has gotten a bad rap over the last few years for sure, but I think there are so many people with integrity that just as you're talking about, I mean, the things like even how to spell a name, those are so important. Important, um, which, which makes it all the more difficult, um, when, when we're in the time that we're in. And as you write about in your book, where, um, you know, journalism begins to be under attack, the church begins to put its support behind a man like Donald Trump, which is, you know, he's, he's probably a symptom of a deeper problem than he is just the problem himself. But still, it's a, it's a head-scratcher at times. And the way that you write about it in the book, um, is, is very interesting because I have been I don't know, probably spending the better part of, what, 6 years now asking all these questions of how do so many of the good and loving people that I know, that I worship with, that I was raised by, that I grew up with, how have they gotten behind someone so hypocritical, so corrupt, someone that tells nothing but lies constantly? I mean, I mean, I'm sure there's truth peppered in. There's enough truth to make it sound true. So I don't want to say nothing but lies, but it's, it's a— if you fact-check, it's a pretty constant, steady stream of lies, you know, that's going on. And then to have the church so embedded with that, and I think it creates a great crisis of faith for many of us who feel like we're the crazy ones and we're looking in and saying, saying, what's going on? Like, how did the same church that, you know, instilled in me about there was a problem with Bill Clinton Clinton back in the day because of his morality. And, uh, you have a man that makes Bill Clinton look like a choir boy almost in some ways. And yet, well, nope, the church is fine with it now. Um, so there are these really complicated issues that come up. And you talk about in the book about like your warnings about Trump's scorn for the Constitution and the rule of law, they were just dismissed as mere liberal bias. You write about, um, the 2016, uh, result you say it caused you to reflect deeply on how your politics— how our politics had come to this point, as well as how in the world Christians had thrown in their lot with such a man. Um, I think that's a question many of us have asked again and again. I like how your book and your reflections actually give us some insight into that, about how maybe because of your own background and some of the churches and, and the people that you grew up around, there was actually a fair amount of, of hypocrisy and immoral things happening in churches too. And there was a sense which some of these things found each other, you know, in the midst of all of it. And as a person who loves the church, I'm not trying to badmouth churches or even politicians for that matter. But there is a way that you write about in the book that kind of tells us the way that these two things kind of got married together. And I wonder if you could tell us, and I know we're going a little bit over in time, if you're okay with just a few more minutes. I'd love if you could maybe tell listeners about this very interesting part of your book. It was a couple of years before Trump put his name in for running for president. There was a prayer breakfast that— well, no, I'm sorry, it was a birthday party, I believe, for Billy Graham that was happening at that time. And it's a very interesting story, and I think it's a very enlightening look into maybe some of the ways that— how we got where we are today. Would you mind just kind of setting up that story for us and telling us a bit more about it?

Sure. I believe it was Billy Graham's 95th birthday party. I refer all listeners to the text for the actual birthday. I believe it was '95, and I'm going off of memory on that. But this was 2013, 2014. I came across it because I was writing about Lecrae, the rapper. And he was at that— he was at that dinner, and they, they featured him in a video there. But when I went back and looked at the dinner, I realized— there's a couple years later— I realized that, uh, at the table where Billy Graham was, um, Sarah Palin was sitting right next to him with her husband, um, and right next to them, like, literally in the picture where Graham is pictured was Trump and Melania. So this was a couple of years before he ever ran for president. Now, he had been thinking about running for president for decades. I mean, I, I literally just filed a story today about Roger Stone and how he is really kind of doing an updated version of what we're talking about here right now, where he is going into all these web streams of kind of really far-out Pentecostal charismatic Christians. He's, he's good friends with a guy named Robin D. Bullock, who, who goes on this thing called Elijah Streams all the time. Robin Bullock has 200,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. And he's somebody who claims that he's been to heaven several times, has seen God God has watched God create the Earth. Um, you know, said that the, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, um, unleashed, uh, a day of vengeance. And, you know, reads from Isaiah 63 about, you know, the blood of, uh, of people staining God's clothing. Wow. Um, really, really far out there, people. These are people who have completely detached from like any responsible epistemology in terms of like, how do we know what's true? How do we establish reliable information? But they're just out there like prophesying whatever they want. And Stone is out there becoming friends with them, gaining influence with them, and, you know, with clearly with the intent of using them politically and mobilizing them. Yeah, that's what Trump was doing back a decade ago or so. And Stone, the point of— I mentioned Stone is because Stone has been trying to get Trump to run for president. Since the 1980s.

Wow.

Um, and so all of this was in the background, and I think Stone, having been a dirty tricks person, knows a mark when he sees one.

Yeah.

And so does Trump. And, and Trump, I think, sensed that evangelicals were two things. They were suspicious of mainstream institutions and the mainstream media. And I think he sensed that he could manipulate them fairly easily. And I think that's largely because there's a lack of engagement, a lack of stakeholder mentality, leading to a lack of discernment. And I think that sense of being out of the loop when it comes to how things really work and makes people vulnerable to manipulation, because it is easier to spin their fears into greater and greater threats. Yeah, the, the, the, the— it's a truism of human experience that our, the, our fears are greater and greater to the degree we actually don't know or have, uh, real knowledge of the object of our fear. Once we actually, come face to face with the person or the thing that it is that we fear, we often see the ways in which our fears have been exaggerated. Maybe there was a seed of reality that led to the fear, but our, you know, our fears are often exaggerated by our imaginations. And so I think Trump sensed that and, and long ago was realizing that he could mobilize this group and, and use it for political political purposes.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's a, it's a sad thing as I think about it, because so many people that I've talked to who I think are inside sort of that, you know, one-sided echo chamber of things, um, many of them don't realize that, that he was just found liable and, uh, you know, $5 million for sexual harassment. Um, doesn't—

that—

what? Didn't know about that? Haven't heard about it? You know, because it's not on the radar, or the indictments or things like that. Uh, many of them I found didn't know about, like, his you know, just multiple affairs over the years and just different, um, ways that he— Trump University, things that, you know, the fraud that was involved there, just bankruptcy after bankruptcy, one thing after another. All I ever knew was the, um, the, the man that was shown on The Apprentice, you know, or, or whatever it was that— whatever, uh, spin was put on the news channel they were watching at the time. And so it's— your book points out so well the way that we can be living inside of our own bubble and the danger of that. And we see that danger culminating on January 6th, where people who I believe they really believe there was, you know, something that happened that we've, we've got to get in there and, and take this back. And it was all predicated on falsehoods, you know, everything that was going on. And so it can be frustrating, it can be heartbreaking, it can be very difficult through all of it. And as we are, you know, unfortunately going to have to start closing down this conversation a little bit. I know you've had a lot of time to reflect, and I encourage everybody to read your book, and we're going to have links to it on our website. And hopefully, if the technology works right, we'll be able to, from the podcast, wherever you're listening, go to the notes. You can just click a button and go and get John's book that we're talking about today. But as you have had time to reflect on, on so many things that we've talked about, I've heard you say before about the importance of slowing down, and you talked about it some on this podcast, and not so much getting your news from cable, but actually taking time to read. Could you talk about it in closing today in this conversation, why it's so important to be readers?

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's— you're really sort of going to my sweet spot there. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Neil Postman, who wrote a book gosh, next year it'll be 40 years ago, right? Amusing Ourselves to Death, which talks about the difference between a word-based culture in terms of communication and an image-based culture. And if anybody wants to really, I think, at a fundamental level, understand the word, the difference between words and images and how it shapes the way we think and communicate, read that book. But the basic point is that but typographic culture teaches us to think more in terms of reason, and the image-based culture reaches us and trains us in our emotions more than reason. And so I think that's reason number 1 to, to read rather than watch TV news. I think TV news is useful for a handful of things, you know, if there's something that's happened just now, like the 9/11 attacks. Um, you know, TV news is pretty indispensable for, for helping us see what's happening in real time, um, on a big story like that. But day to day, I think it's a terrible, uh, you know, um, companion in helping us be, you know, knowledgeable and discerning about what's going on in the world. And that's not just because TV can be ideologically, you know, biased. MSNBC one way, Fox News another way. A lot of people think CNN is biased one way. Chris Licht, the new president, is trying to bring it back more towards the center. But it's not just the ideology, it's just the medium itself tends toward reductionism and, and tends toward sensationalism. And that's not true of everybody on TV. I, I have wonderful friends in television at some of the highest levels, and I think the world of them. And like, for example, John Dickerson at CBS is doing a nightly newscast, which if you really do want to watch TV news, go watch his show every night. Like, that's— he's doing good work. And I can recommend that without without hesitation. I also think Jake Tapper happens to be an outstanding TV journalist. By and large, I just think we're better off reading because it teaches us to think more critically. It gives us time to kind of assess what we're encountering rather than just sort of TV. It just flies by us. We can kind of look at something we don't understand or which we think, you know, that might be I don't know if I agree with that, or maybe I agree with it too much, and we can go kind of double-check it. And, you know, print-based news has all kinds of liabilities and weaknesses as well. But just as a medium, like a way of receiving and giving information, I think it helps us be more deliberative and contemplative in the way that we think.

Yeah.

Excellent. Well, these are great insights. And while we're talking about reading, the book that we've been talking about today, The book is called Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation. It's from Brazos Press, and it was released this year in 2023. John Ward, who has been my guest today, is the author of the book, and I'm so glad that you stopped by and we were able to talk. I feel like the time just flew and we lost track of it, so maybe we can do this again one of these days. But I just want to take the moment again to thank you for your good work. The book is excellent. I really enjoyed it. I had trouble putting it down, and even even on my shifts at the hospital when I was overnight, I was— when I wasn't receiving pages, I was reading the book and just finding like, wow, this feels like my story in so many ways. So thank you for your good work. And as I say to my guests each week on this show, thank you for being one of the voices in my head this week.

Well, Rick, thank you for those kind words and for reading the book, and, um, love to come back, uh, in the future. And thank you for, for doing the work you're doing at that hospital. That is truly blessed and graced work that you're doing. And I know that it means a lot to the people that you're serving. So thank you very much for doing that.

Thank you so much. All right. Well, you take care.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head.

Music on the intro and outro of this show is from my single "As I Walk These Halls," which can be streamed on any streaming platform, including Spotify. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, schedule me for a concert, a speaking engagement, a podcast, or even a book signing in your neighborhood. It. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast will be. And now the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound In hope.