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Brad returns from vacation to discuss the Democratic ticket and the controversial candidacy of Tim Walz. Covering Walz's religious identity, military service, and public perception, we explore how accusations against Walz reflect broader political and cultural dynamics. Special guest Dr. David Congdon joins to analyze the politicization of Christianity and its implications within American politics.
Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture: https://www.dwcongdon.com/project/who-is-a-true-christian-contesting-religious-identity-in-american-culture/
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Axis Mundi This is the most radical anti-child ticket that we have ever seen.
He brags about Nancy Pelosi telling him to calm down on his pro-abortion rhetoric.
The policies here on abortion, the policies here on marriage, the policies here on pushing trans ideology through schools, that stuff, we've never seen a ticket like this.
So I don't want to give too much attention, but at the same time, this was the choice, and it matters, and it does reflect some things, I think.
- Amen. - Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, back after a couple weeks of vacation.
I have two kids under three, so no vacation is really a vacation.
But nonetheless, it was good to be away and rejuvenate, see some friends, see some family.
And I was itching to be on the mic last week.
I'm not going to lie.
Texted with Dan about doing Friday, even though I was away and with my family and ultimately decided, nope, need to honor the vacation and not do that.
Nonetheless, have been waiting to get back on here and talk about everything related to Tim Walz and the Good Vibes ticket that is now at the head of the Democratic Party.
Going into the convention, there's just an overwhelming amount of momentum, and we're seeing just the enthusiasm in the rallies across the country.
We're seeing those in polls.
Now, I don't think those things win elections outright.
I think that we've said for years that just because Trump has big numbers at rallies doesn't mean he's the most popular candidate and all that stuff.
But I think what is significant to me about the polls and the rallies is just the difference.
There is a difference.
And whether you measure that through the polls and the rallies or you measure it through what people are saying on X or whatever it is, there is a difference.
And so I want to get into that today.
The big focus for today, to me, is on Tim Walz and the ways that identity politics and a certain equation in the American right and the ways it attacks its opponents is at play with the Tim Walz pick, but is in many ways falling flat.
And it has to do with so many things we talk about on the show so often, things related to being a real American or a real man or a real Christian.
So later in the episode, you're going to hear from my colleague, David Congdon, Dr. David Congdon, who's just written a great new book about who is a true Christian.
Talking about this, I asked him about the ways Tim Walz is being attacked as not a real Christian.
And you're going to hear from David here at the end of the episode.
Before we get there, though, I want to talk about a few things related to Walz and his identity as a veteran and as a person of faith and the ways that they're being Attacked by the GOP in the ways that they're falling flat, or they don't make sense, or they just really reveal something really insidious inside that party.
So let me start with an equation.
All right.
If I was in class, if we were starting our class session off today, what I would do is write this on the board.
When you see a political opponent of the GOP, they roll out an equation.
You ready?
You're not a real X.
And therefore you are dangerous to Y. So that's our equation for today.
If we have a political opponent, we say, you're not a real X and therefore you are dangerous to Y or you're dangerous because of Y. Okay, I'll get to that in a second.
So, all right, imagine we're in class and I just wrote that on the board.
So let's go over some historical examples.
Well, we can start with John Kerry.
Dan talked about this on Friday.
I think so many others have talked about it.
But let's just talk about it for a minute.
Tim Walz comes out as the candidate.
Now, it's really hard to talk about Tim Walz as not a real American because the GOP can't use its racist and xenophobic attacks on Walz because he's an old white guy with white hair.
OK, so not going to not going to necessarily work, although there was somebody on X who infamously said that this is what happens when German people don't assimilate and you get a socialist like Walz or whatever.
So that was a basically saying that, you know, these white immigrants haven't assimilated and blah, blah, blah.
All right.
Not going to go there for too long.
So you can't do the ethnic or racial thing, but what can you do?
Well, you can talk about his military service.
If we go back in time, we see how this has worked.
So let's just start with Obama.
Obama's the candidate.
You're not a real American.
You weren't born here.
Well, do we have proof?
No, but you just don't look like a guy that was born here.
That was basically it.
Donald Trump, birther-in-chief.
Made a bunch of years of his career basically as star of The Apprentice and birther-in-chief.
You're not from here.
You don't look like a real American.
We don't think you were born here.
We don't have proof.
Yep, that's your birth certificate, but nonetheless, don't believe it, because people from here don't look like you.
Sorry, that's just how it goes.
That's the line of attack we're going to take.
We're going to take that whole strategy.
That's our approach.
Birtherism.
What about Kamala Harris?
Well, Kamala Harris, just a couple of weeks ago.
You're not really black.
I mean, you've been trying to be Indian and now you're trying to be black and which one is it?
You're not right.
So with Barack Obama, it was you're not a real American and therefore you're dangerous to America.
It was also, you're not actually a Christian, you're Muslim.
And because we're Islamophobic and we think Islamophobia will work with our voters, we're going to say that you're not a real Christian, you're actually a Muslim and therefore you're dangerous as a Muslim to America.
That's the idea.
So that's Obama with Kamala Harris, it was.
Well, you're not a real black person because you have been trying to be Indian.
So that's dangerous.
So we should think of you as a danger to black folks, as a danger to America.
It's really hard to know what you are.
You're mixed race.
You're like more than one thing.
So, yeah, that's scary.
People should be scared of that.
That's weird.
You want people.
You want your kids hanging out with folks like that and going to their houses and they have Indian food one night and, and, and other food another, and they have a Baptist, you know, tradition and they have a Hindu tradition and it's scary or dangerous.
You can see how this works.
Now, if we go back to Joe Biden in 2020, this was hard to roll out.
It didn't really work that well.
And it's kind of part of why I think why Biden ended up being the winner.
Sadly, in a way that's a kind of referendum on the country.
But Biden was an old white guy, a very old white guy then.
He's an even older white guy now.
Biden had been in the public view for a long time.
It's hard to say he wasn't a real American.
Hard to say he wasn't something.
So they said he wasn't, he was a woke Marxist globalist.
That was the attack.
You're not a real American because you're Marxist.
Okay.
Talked about it on the show.
That's been trotted out in this country for a long, long, long time.
There's a sense in which if you're a Marxist, you can't be an American.
And even though there's no evidence at all that Joe Biden is a Marxist and no one would ever do the history of Marxism, starting with Marx and then going to Trotsky and Lenin and then ending up with Joe Biden.
Nonetheless, that was the way to do it.
Now, did it help them?
In some corners, sure.
Most people just don't see Joe Biden that way.
So it didn't work.
This brings us to Tim Walz.
All right, Tim Walz, Minnesota governor.
Can we do the whole you're not a real man thing?
Well, hard to do that.
It's hard to do the you're not a real man thing when you are somebody who holds retrograde masculinity and you think real men play football.
Well, the guy coached football.
In fact, he took a winless football team to a state title.
That's kind of retrograde man Hall of Fame stuff, right?
To be a real man, you got to be big and tough and scream and play football.
Well, You really can't get him there, can you?
What makes Walls unique is that he was also, at the time of coaching football, the representative for the Gay-Straight Alliance, or the faculty sponsor, I should say.
Now, Dan talked about this Friday.
I don't want to go super into it, but I'll just say this.
My guess is that in 1999, across the country, the amount of football coaches on a high school campus who were also the Gay-Straight Alliance faculty sponsor, Had to be in the single digits.
Like, there's a chance he was the only one.
Now, I don't know.
Maybe somebody can dig this up.
Maybe there were five.
Maybe there were ten.
I'm not sure.
That's just not something you see every day, especially 25 years ago.
So it's hard to do the not a real man thing.
And yet, as somebody who is on the Democratic ticket, who is running as part of a Democratic duo that is at least in policy and in speech, pro LGBTQ rights and supports and affirms members of the LGBTQ community.
He's he's not problematic on that front, at least from what we know right now.
So you can't do the whole not a man thing.
And yet he is a guy who supports queer rights.
And there you go.
So you can try the whole he's not a real soldier thing, and that's where they've gone.
And again, Dan talked about this.
A lot of folks have talked about it.
But you can try the whole, he didn't, he was in the military, but not really.
He was in the military, but he backed out, he chickened out, whatever.
The only note I want to make, and that I didn't get to say on Friday because I was gone and I would have brought up if I had been there, is the whole swift boating campaign of 2004, when John Kerry was made out to be this fake soldier, was backed by Harlan Crowe.
Crew had a great article and great reporting on this.
Harlan Crowe is, many of you know, the guy who has been giving Clarence Thomas lavish gifts for a long, long time.
But one of Harlan Crowe's very first forays into political donorship was giving a whole bunch of money to the swift voting campaign.
So I bring this up for a number of reasons.
One is that we have this ongoing crisis at SCOTUS in terms of ethics and oversight.
Clarence Thomas, every time we turn around, has new disclosures that people have found and it's not even making news really anymore.
There was a bunch actually about 10 days ago and nobody really batted an eye.
So we have this ongoing crisis at SCOTUS.
Biden has rolled out reforms he'd like to see before he's out of office and so on.
We can talk about that another time.
But here we have Harlan Crow, the guy who's given Thomas all of these vacations and rides on a yacht and rides on a plane and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The guy who, if you read the crew article I'm mentioning, Actually helped to give money to a 501c4 run by none other than Ginny Thomas, who earned a salary from that C4 and so on.
So here we have Arlen Crow, the billionaire who likes weird Nazi art and other fascist and autocratic figures from history, giving the Thomases all kinds of stuff, whether it's support for their nonprofit that Ginny's in charge of, or a big part of at least, and Clarence Thomas and the vacations and then everything else.
He's the one who bankrolls the Carrie Swift boat campaign.
There's a whole lot to say here.
But something we're going to talk more about on Friday and I'll just mention here is that there are reports that the Trump campaign and Trump and his his allies are basically working to plant people within the apparatus of voting and election certification across the country.
In short, the plan would be that election results would not be certified across various states in the country, and thus there would be chaos.
And for a lot of people, the plan is simple.
If you create that kind of chaos, you can kick this up to the Supreme Court in ways that bring back George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 election, the one right before John Kerry versus George W. Bush.
We'll talk more about this Friday.
It's scary.
It's alarming.
I'm sure some of you have already seen it and heard about it.
But I bring it up now because here we have a situation where they're trying to swift boat Tim Walz.
Say you're not a real soldier.
It doesn't hold water.
The guy who ran that, or at least funded it, I should say, is Harlan Crow, the guy who is just, every time we turn around, giving the Thomases money and vacations and so on.
And it could get kicked up to the Supreme Court that is filled with Trump nominees and the likes of Alito and Thomas, who are so partisan and so extreme, it's hard to put into words.
And they could decide an outcome of an election that has, in essence, been polluted by an ongoing effort, a years long effort, really, by the Trump campaign and Trump people to create a kind of false flag operation within the United States election system.
So that's just worth thinking about all of those connections and all of those kind of top to bottom links in this whole saga.
All right.
So, Tim Walz, not a real man, not a real soldier, and then not a real Christian.
We've seen stuff come out about Tim Walz and people in Minnesota saying, oh, he's so liberal and he's so this and he's so that.
So let's talk about Tim Walz and his religious background.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
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Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
I want to thank Tiffany Wicks for help with some of this research for today.
Walls is part of the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
Now, the evangelical in that acronym is a little bit misleading because the ELCA is largely considered a mainline denomination.
That's a denomination that is filled with people that I would sort of characterize as center-left.
This is not the Episcopal Church of America or the UCC, but In large part, the ELC is a mainline denomination that is center-left.
Most ELCA people are going to affirm queer people.
There are definitely progressives in the ELCA I've interviewed and am a colleague of.
Angela Denker, who you heard last week on the webinar.
And Angela is a minister in the ELCA denomination.
It's one of the whitest denominations in the country.
It's a mainline denomination and it's center left.
There are folks in ELCA denominations that if you met them in person, you would think that's a political conservative.
There are political progressives.
So the ELCA adheres to multiple texts for its theological and ideological foundations.
You have, of course, the Bible and the apostles and Nicene creeds and so on and so forth.
But there are other things, the Book of Concord, the small catechism from Martin Luther and so on.
This is a Lutheran denomination.
And I think the thing to point out about the ELCA is it is a classic kind of Midwest denomination.
This is a denomination you're going to find in Minnesota, in Chicagoland, in all parts of the Midwest.
It's really a denomination that is classically based or traditionally or historically based in the kind of upper Midwest.
And, you know, Angela Denker has said it and many others have said it.
If you go to those parts of the country, you're going to meet guys like Tim Walz there.
You're going to meet guys who are white and gray haired, into hunting and football, and yet not into a kind of machismo masculinity, control women's bodies masculinity, a control people's uterus masculinity, and so on.
People who are nice, compassionate, empathetic.
And Tim Walz kind of fits into that pretty Perfectly.
The ELCA is U.I.
plus affirming.
They are doing their best to decenter whiteness despite the overwhelming whiteness of the denomination.
There are women who are pastors like Angela Denker, so there are chances for women to be in leadership.
This is not a kind of what you would think of as the religious right and women not being allowed to be leaders and to be in front of the congregation or at the pulpit.
There's just really an intention by the ELCA to be gender inclusive, to be ability accessible, to acknowledge what's happened with indigenous lands in the country, and so on and so forth.
It has an egalitarian outlook on things.
And this is where Tim Walls comes in.
There's a way that denominations like the ELCA end up manifesting, and this is going to sound strange, a kind of invisible Christianity at times.
And what I mean by that is many folks who are part of denominations like the ELCA are not the kinds who yell and scream about religion at every turn.
They're not the kinds that use religion to Kind of batter people, whether it's J.D.
Vance or Ted Cruz.
You hear people like this all the time saying, well, we've gotten away from this and we really need to go back to that.
And if people would just do this, we'd have a better country and God would stop judging us and the plagues and the earthquakes would stop and this and that.
It's not a it's not a denomination like big into Jeremiads.
It's not a denomination big into forcing people to be Christian.
And in fact, the reason I say that it can kind of become an invisible form of Christianity is that the expression of this kind of Christianity is often understood to be service to others.
It's often understood to be compassion and welcome and hospitality.
Things that can be done without a kind of super surface level Christian legibility, right?
The idea that everything I'm doing is Christian and Christianity and Jesus and right?
You know, 10 Bible verses on the car bumper sticker and, you know, all the verses in my Twitter handle and blah, blah, blah, right?
It's not that mode or brand of Christianity.
And so, is Tim Walz a real Christian?
Is Tim Walz not a Christian?
Well, here's what we know.
Tim Walz is part of the ELCA.
Tim Walz talks about his faith, but it's not something he's talking about all the time.
He's not using it as a component of his campaigns.
This is not somebody who is at every turn talking about, like George W. Bush used to do, speaking of him, or Donald Trump, who was selling Bibles a couple of months ago, using religion to gain votes.
And what I mean by that is saying, you should vote for me because I'm a Christian.
There's a long tried and true Equation of that within the GOP.
Now, it's possible to take the attack line of Tim Walz is not a real Christian, and therefore he's dangerous because there's people that would say because he supports reproductive rights, he cannot be a Christian.
There's evangelicals on the attack on social media saying that all the time.
I think one of the hard parts with Tim Walz, again, is that he comes off as a genuine and authentic person.
When you see him on the campaign trail, when you start to read about his biography, when you watch old speeches and things, What you see is something that I think has not been in American politics for a long, long time for many people.
And that is somebody who seems to have a life that maybe they could have had.
A life that is sort of accidentally in the spotlight.
Like somebody who at 17 joined the military.
Somebody who then throughout his life was, or his adult life at least, a teacher, a football coach.
Somebody who was, as he put it, watching the lunchroom.
And then somebody who decided he was going to run for Congress in a way that never felt calculated or pre-planned or predestined.
If you look at old videos of Ted Cruz, he's talking about like conquering the world and becoming a Supreme Court justice and weird stuff like that.
Tim Walz doesn't seem to have a life pre-programmed for fame and political power.
He seems to have a life pre-programmed for service and care.
One of the biggest donor bases of the last couple days here for the Walz Harris, excuse me, the Harris-Walz ticket has been teachers because they see in him one of themselves.
And so when you see Walls, and he talks about providing school lunches for kids who need them and making sure it's free for everybody, when he talks about changing his stance on guns because of what happened, you know, going back to mass shootings and thinking of his own kids, when you think about him and IVF as a Christian, in light of what's happened with the SBC and the Catholic Church and the Alabama Supreme Court, he comes off as a guy
Whose Christianity seems to be based on loving his neighbor, caring for the stranger, and just simply looking out for his fellow human beings in a way that you might expect from somebody who thinks about someone like Jesus and the kingdom of God and so on.
So you can do the whole he's not a real Christian thing.
But there's just a lot of folks in the country who I think are going to say, it's hard not to like this guy.
It's hard not to see in him somebody who's organically grown as a leader, right?
And I think that's something the country's been missing so much.
And I just want to comment on this.
And then I want to go to David Congdon, who's just written a great book about who is a real Christian.
I want to go back to Obama and then to Hillary Clinton.
Obama inspired the kind of enthusiasm and hope we're seeing from the Harris Walz ticket.
And he did so in a way that I think was unique in American political history.
We have this situation where, you know, Obama arrives on the scene as a community organizer and then a senator.
And he's new.
He's novel.
And his life story is so just incredible in terms of the way he grew up and his parents and Kansas and Hawaii and how he meets Michelle and so on and so forth.
Obama takes something that I think had not been present in American politics for a long, long time and bottles it up and he becomes president for eight years.
All right.
That's great.
After him, on the other side, you have Trump, who at the time felt so new and so different.
And I think Dan talked a lot about this on Friday, who seemed like a change agent and now seems kind of stale, if we're honest.
Hillary Clinton was not somebody who people saw as having a life they could have.
Now, I'm not bashing Hillary Clinton.
I'm not here to litigate Hillary Clinton as a political candidate.
Some of you appreciate Hillary Clinton.
Some of you don't.
I'm not doing that today.
Here's what I'm doing.
When people saw Hillary Clinton, they saw somebody who, despite having such an interesting and remarkable life as somebody who was at Wellesley and gave incredible speeches about women's rights, somebody who, as a first lady, was more active and influential and involved than most of the first ladies in our history.
They saw somebody who had been married to a president, somebody who had been a U.S.
Senator in a way that felt like vaulted her to the front of the line after the Clinton presidency.
They did not see somebody who felt organically grown, whether that was fair or not.
There was not a sense of enthusiasm in something new.
A person they could identify with in the sense of the school teacher, the military person, the person who was born in Nebraska, who went to a state college, who seemingly Came into political life as a result of caring too much and accidentally finding themselves at the top.
And then came Joe Biden.
And Joe Biden was the non-Trump in 2020.
He was a familiar face.
He was stable.
He was somebody that people had affection for going back to the Obama years.
But Joe Biden was never the novel, the new.
The unexpected.
That's not who that was.
This was anyone but Trump.
We cannot do this anymore.
It's been four years of misery.
And when he won, people were in the streets, young people especially.
Is that because Joe Biden had inspired them like Obama before?
No.
Was he Teddy Roosevelt?
Was he FDR?
Was he John Kennedy?
No.
But there was relief of no more Trump.
In 2024, there's something else.
There's this deep desire for a politician that people can believe in and hope in.
And I think both Harris and Walz provide that in really different ways, but in ways that balance each other and are really striking a chord with the American people.
Kamala Harris is somebody whose life is remarkable, but it's remarkable in a way that she feels like an underdog in some ways, because her parents came from different places.
They met having come from different countries of origin.
Kamala Harris's life is not one you expect to find, and yet there are many people across the country, whether they're black people, Whether they're South Asian people, whether they're women, whether they're folks who grew up in Oakland or who just did not have a life that is legible to the American public, is not legible to American institutions, is not the kind of life that fits into well-tread paths of how you kind of make it in this country.
And here she is running on just a reservoir of joy and energy, a reservoir of can't wait to show the American people who I am.
Now we'll get a better sense of the policies and the platform when we get to the convention here in a few weeks.
But for now, you're seeing a connection with her.
And then Tim Walz right behind her.
And you're seeing a connection with him in similar but resonant ways.
A guy that people feel like they can believe in.
And I'm going to give you one word about Walz and then I'll leave it there as problematic.
When, when young people talk about someone and there's aspects of them that are just not okay, they often say, yeah, that person is problematic.
Whether it's their views on LGBTQ rights, whether it's their views on reproductive rights, whether it's the subtle racism, whether it's the subtle misogyny, whether it's the subtle, whatever.
Right.
You know, I had students all the time talk about, oh, so-and-so is problematic.
Right now, at least, and this could change.
There's not a lot problematic for Democrats, for everyone from AOC to Joe Manchin, from Gen Z to the white haired white guys who look like Tim Walz.
Like, it's hard for people right now to find anything about him to say, well, I don't like that.
In terms of His views on anything from reproductive rights to guns to to school lunches.
There's just there's just no major red flag.
There's no there's nothing that stands out that says I'm not sure about him.
I think you would have had some of that with Josh Shapiro.
I think Shapiro's ambition his age means Josh Shapiro would have probably still does wanted to be president.
I don't think Tim Walz has that on his agenda.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, he'll be 68 when this is over, if they win two terms.
He's probably looking at like, you know, retiring.
Maybe not.
Joe Biden's 81.
What do I know?
My point is, Walz is somebody you can look and say, I kind of see a life there that looks ordinary.
And yet I see a guy who's on stage.
That's not something we've had for a long time.
And it feels really good.
He is a Christian, but not a problematic one.
He is a man.
Great.
But seemingly not a problematic one.
He is a white guy, but his lieutenant governor is an indigenous woman who will now be governor of the state of Minnesota.
Like on and on and on.
Every time you go down the line, the boxes get checked.
Now I want to stick for a little bit longer on this idea of Walls as a fake Christian, because that's what you're going to hear from Uncle Ron and other people.
So I asked David Congan about this, and he wrote a book called Who is a True Christian?
Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture.
The book came out just a couple of months ago, and I'll put a link in the show notes to it if you'd like to check it out.
David comments here about this whole attack line on walls and the ways that conservative Christians use it to delegitimize other Christians, people who are not real Christians, people who are not genuine Christians, people who are not really saved, or so on and so forth.
People who would say you can't be a Christian and support gay marriage.
People who would say you can't be a Christian and support reproductive rights.
Or you can't be a Christian coming from the other side and vote for Donald Trump.
So here's David talking about how this is playing out in relationship to Tim Walz and his candidacy.
It's become commonplace in recent years to hear Christians of one type or another lob accusations that so-and-so is not a true Christian because of some cultural or political difference, whether that is over abortion, marriage.
sexuality, gender, racial justice, or the like.
The rise of Donald Trump in 2016 saw a new version of that rhetoric coming from Christians on the left, trying to score points against white Christian nationalists by claiming Jesus to be on their side.
In response to these exchanges over social media, I wrote the book, Who is a True Christian?
Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, published earlier this year by Cambridge.
And in that book, I argued that these debates were merely the latest manifestation of a dispute that has been going on in some form since the Protestant Reformation in 1517, though I trace the origins especially to the rise of modern liberalism and the effort to make religion compatible with a diverse democratic society.
But in addition to this, I argue that the debate over true Christianity has taken different forms.
For most of recent Christian history, true Christianity was understood in doctrinal terms.
If you believed the right doctrines, then you were a true follower of Christ.
In the 20th century, however, that consensus about the importance of doctrine fell apart, replaced instead by culture and politics.
The reasons for that are complex, and you can check out my book for more of my explanation.
But the point is that when we see someone claim that so-and-so is not a true Christian because they believe in critical race theory, we have to realize that is today's version of so-and-so is not a true Christian because they reject the doctrine of irresistible grace.
And that seemed to largely explain our situation.
That is, until Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her nominee for vice president.
So Tim Walz, as we have now heard repeatedly, is a Lutheran, and his selection has thrust Lutheranism into the political spotlight for the first time in American history.
There has never been a Lutheran president of the U.S., and at best, only one Lutheran vice president, if we count Hubert Humphrey in the late 1960s.
What makes Walls particularly notable is that he belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, or ELCA, one of the so-called Seven Sisters of American Mainline Protestantism.
For years now, Mainline Protestants have been in the media solely to highlight their decline in numbers relative to the rise of non-denominational evangelicalism.
If we don't count the Methodist affiliations of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, given that their administration was the one that saw evangelicals cement themselves as a key voting bloc.
Then, before Kamala Harris, we haven't had a mainline Protestant president or vice president since the George H.W.
Bush administration, where Bush was Episcopalian and Dan Quayle was Presbyterian.
And I provide that context to help explain some of the bewildering reactions to Walls, which in many ways are a throwback to an earlier time, back when doctrine was what mattered.
For example, a post on the site formerly known as Twitter said Walls isn't actually Lutheran because his church does not confess the unaltered Augsburg confession to be true.
Likewise, the website Protestia, which seeks to continue the Reformation, as it says, and only allows those who subscribe to the classic Protestant confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries to write for them, they had an article denouncing Walz's church as, quote, a train wreck of heresy and blasphemy, unquote.
What was most offensive to the staff writer for Protestia was a sermon preached at Pilgrim Lutheran Church, where Governor Walz has attended, in which the preacher talked about how God wants to share God's divine life with people in the church, drawing them into a holy community.
Now, most people, including very conservative Christians, are going to scratch their heads at this and wonder why that was so heretical.
And the answer is that confessional Lutherans believe strongly in the idea that God's justifying grace is alien to us and cannot be shared or imparted to human beings.
That was the error of Rome with its view of grace as a substance that could be received in the sacraments and infused into one's soul.
In other words, what this person was saying is that Governor Walz's church is teaching Catholic ideas.
God forbid.
Of course, the controversy around Tim Walz is not simply about doctrine, because, as my analysis confirms, doctrine today has very little purchase for most people.
Outside of a handful of seminary nerds, doctrine is really a proxy for one's cultural and political beliefs.
This was most apparent in Christianity Today's article by Harvest Prude, which claimed that Walz's brand is more left than Lutheran.
The article goes on to quote Greg Seltz, who is a lobbyist for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which is the largest conservative alternative to the ELCA mainline denomination.
And Seltz is quoted as saying, Walz is really not representing our worldview.
Before going on to say that Walz's position on abortion is disqualifying.
The language here of worldview is telling.
One of the things that I trace in my book is the rise of worldview language as a replacement for older confessional language about doctrine.
The concept of worldview became prominent in the 20th century because it allowed people to expand their religious identity to include new social, cultural, and political topics that are technically not matters of orthodoxy since they do not rise to the level of official church doctrine.
But because these topics are the real dividing line for Christians today, worldviews have replaced confessions as the true mark of orthodoxy.
Paradoxically, Christians who used to see themselves as doctrinally opposed to each other might now see themselves as allies within a shared worldview or a shared culture.
That brings me to a final point regarding ecumenism, a fancy term for the goal of establishing unity among Christian churches.
The mainline Protestant denominations were the leaders of the ecumenical movement that reached its pinnacle in the post-war years in the mid-20th century.
They sought to build bridges across doctrinal divisions in the goal of spreading Christianity and making the 20th century the Christian century.
There's a deep irony in this movement because two things resulted from these efforts.
First, this shift was seen as nothing less than heresy by the ultra-conservative denominations, such as the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.
In 1998, they passed a resolution expressing deep regret and profound disagreement with the ELCA's decision to establish full communion with the Presbyterian Church USA, the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ.
This was a classic case of defining Christianity in terms of doctrine.
The mainliners were moving away from that.
They were uniting with the very enemies that they had back in the 1500s and 1600s.
And the traditionalists were outraged by that.
On the other hand, as I discuss in my book, These mainline liberal Protestants helped shift the focus away from doctrine to culture as the essential mark of true Christianity.
This was one of the crucial consequences of the ecumenical movement.
And in doing so, these mainline Protestants paved the way for a new kind of ecumenism, what Andrei Shishkov calls conservative ecumenism.
Over the last decade, conservative Catholics and Protestants across denominational lines have partnered together to wage cultural war, usually under the banner of religious liberty.
Some have waged war against certain social policies, seen as heretical and immoral, while others have gone further and waged war against liberal democracy itself.
Many in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod are part of this conservative ecumenical movement.
And for that, ironically, they have Tim Walz's denomination, the ELCA, in part to thank.
I appreciate David's thoughts there and insight and just fascinating to think about Walz and the ways that religion does and does not play into his candidacy and how we're going to hear about that probably in the next couple of months, along with questions about his.
military service and so on Tomorrow, I'm going to have a bonus episode on J.D.
Vance, Kevin Roberts, and really what I take to be intellectual foundations.
What I want to get into tomorrow are the connections between Kevin Roberts, the leader of the Heritage Foundation, and the author of a book which has now been pulled because it is too toxic for the Trump campaign, it seems.
Kevin Roberts has been in the news a lot lately, more than a heritage president I can think of in the recent memory.
And of course, J.D.
Vance wrote the foreword to that book.
So here we have Vance writing the foreword to Roberts' book and Vance really trying his best to kind of give the right answers about Project 2025 and so on.
And yet, Roberts in the book is totally, totally uncensored.
I think you can see Roberts as kind of what Vance would say if he were not on the vice presidential ticket, or if he was not a nominee for vice president.
Behind that are radical Catholic intellectuals, and I want to tie together What Robert says in his book about family and abundance and the ways that he thinks that having children should be seen as an expectation in American life, the ways that he sees teachers as having gone insane, wanting to start a second revolution.
And this is the kicker, wanting to use government to enforce all of that.
Roberts is very clear that small government is out and what's needed is big government directed towards the good life that he envisions and that he thinks many other people envision.
Well, that common good conservatism is backed by a set of Catholic intellectuals who are really giving voice and articulation to it intellectually.
And then downstream, people like Roberts and Vance are picking up on it.
So I'm going to do that tomorrow.
Usually I do bonus content on Mondays as well, but I just haven't been able to finish the episode and I want to make sure to get it right.
So if you're a premium subscriber, look for it tomorrow in your feed on Supercast.
If you are not, I would encourage you to think about subscribing now so you can get access to that, to our 600-episode archive, ad-free listening, our bonus episodes every month, our bonus content with people like Matt Taylor and others, and on down the line.
