Culture, Faith and Politics with Pat Kahnke

Tim Whitaker (The New Evangelicals) and Pat Kahnke are go live together to take your questions, discuss the big news topics of the week, and more on this special episode from Culture, Faith, and Politics and Tim Whitaker Speaks

Graham Platner is out. JD Vance just published a book. And somewhere in between, white evangelicals became the least likely Christians to welcome a stranger. This week, Pat Kahnke and Adam Swenson take apart three stories that share one spine: the gap between what MAGA Christians say they believe and what they actually do. We examine Vance's Communion — his four stated values, the ordo amoris debate, the papal rebuke, and why the immigrants he fears are already filling his own Communion rail. We look at the Platner reckoning as a live Fruit Test: one party moves against its own, one doesn't. And we run the immigration numbers that expose how Christian nationalism has quietly replaced the Great Commission with blood and soil.

This is Trump's world... and we're all trying to move past it. The Patriot Front marched unimpeded on July 4th, and Trump and FIFA are corrupt. There is a lot of bad out there, but we've found some Christians Behaving... Good! Pat Kahnke discusses all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!

A new Johns Hopkins ethnographic study followed 21 Trump voters to answer one question: what does MAGA actually want from democracy? Pat Kahnke and Adam Swenson break down the tension between Jonathan V. Last's read and the study authors' own interpretation — moral disgust or wounded faith? We cover why so many conservatives recoil at the word "democracy," the "Faith, Family, Freedom, Place" moral foundation driving it all, and why "save democracy" messaging keeps failing with MAGA Christians. A theological look at Christian Nationalism, the illiberal core underneath it, and what it means for your MAGA family and friends.

Amy Hawk talks with Pat Kahnke about what's happening to children inside the Dilley detention center — and what she shares dismantles the "Godly" framing MAGA Christians have wrapped around family detention. In this conversation, we walk through the evidence: the "Letters from Dilley" written by detained children, the near-total rate of PTSD among kids held there, the moldy food, the denied medical care, and the case of a father whose criminal record was fabricated to justify taking his son. We also examine the revocation of Temporary Protected Status that could make 1.3 million people "illegal" overnight, and the financial machinery that keeps private detention profitable. But this isn't only a story about policy. It's a story about theology. When a movement calls the caging of children "Godly," when Romans 13 becomes a shield for cruelty, and when "pro-life" politics stops at the border — the question every Christian has to answer is whether their conscience still belongs to Christ or to a political project.