Culture, Faith and Politics with Pat Kahnke

Jennifer Welch said white evangelical Christianity is a cancer on our democracy. Bonnie Kristian’s In Defense of Evangelicalism defends the movement, even while MAGA Christianity still baptizes Trump, harsh immigration policy, and Christian nationalism.

So the real question is not only whether Welch’s worst sentences failed the image-of-God test. They did. The question is why In Defense of Evangelicalism is the book this moment keeps demanding—while MAGA theology still runs so much of the witness.

In Part 3 of this conversation, cultural historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez joins Pat Kahnke and Renee Horsman to unpack how whiteness became the default for American Christianity. From Christian radio's "Becky" formula and K-Love's safe, suburban sound, to C. Peter Wagner's homogeneous unit principle and Rick Warren's Saddleback Sam, Du Mez shows how an entire industry marketed white evangelicalism as simply "biblical."

On Culture Faith and Politics Live, Pat and Adam connect today's disparate headlines through one question: who gets to belong? From Emmer's "assimilate or go the hell back" moment at the Faith & Freedom Coalition to vulnerable Republicans quietly distancing from Trump's Dallas midterm convention, from the Tarrant County polling place cuts (316 to 224) to a rare point of agreement with Franklin Graham on Samaritan's Purse refusing federal money — plus Adam's new Substack article on what assimilation really means and a look at the Nepal floods as a neighbor test.

The U.S. Postal Service's Federal Ballot Mail Portal was rushed through in a completely unmanageable manner — a system where a single scan error could reject thousands of vote-by-mail ballots. In this episode I break down why this federal takeover of state-run elections is not about election security, but about creating chaos and suppressing the vote, why states are suing to stop it, and what a federal judge just did to block the plan. You'll learn how the portal actually works, why software engineers say it will collapse under the weight of the 2026 election, and what you can do right now to protect your mail-in ballot.

In this second part of a friendly, wide-ranging conversation, Pat Kahnke and co-host Renee Horsman talk with historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez about her new book Live, Laugh, Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made — the companion to Jesus and John Wayne. Kristin shares the erased story of Elisabeth Elliot's deconstruction era, why evangelical women were not simply tricked but taught, mentored and formed, and why patriarchy in evangelicalism would not survive if women weren't its most effective enforcers, authors and publishers.