MLK Day, Postliberalism, and the Assault on Civil Rights One Year Into Trump's 2nd Term
MLK Day, Postliberalism, and the Assault on Civil Rights
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026, Brad Onishi reflects on the legacy of civil rights in a moment when those rights are under unprecedented threat, one year into Donald Trump’s second term. From Trump’s humiliating and dangerous letter asserting U.S. control over Greenland to the escalation of ICE abuses in Minnesota, this episode argues that the core idea of civil rights—inalienable human dignity promised to all—has entered a period of open attack. Drawing on King’s own words, Brad frames civil rights not as radical demands, but as a fight for what the United States has always claimed to promise: equality under the law, due process, and freedom regardless of race, religion, immigration status, or identity.
Brad then introduces the real engine behind this moment: postliberalism. Joined by theologian and political theorist Dr. David Congdon, the episode unpacks how postliberal movements—rooted in both Christian theology and Silicon Valley technocracy—reject liberal democracy, individual rights, and pluralism in favor of hierarchy, authoritarian power, and state-enforced moral order. From JD Vance to Catholic integralists to tech elites dreaming of CEO-rule, these movements converge in their hostility to democracy and civil rights. This conversation situates Trump’s second term as the first sustained experiment in federal postliberal rule, explaining how backlash to the Civil Rights Movement itself helped fuel today’s authoritarian turn—and why understanding postliberalism is essential to grasping what is happening to American democracy right now.
David Congdon, Who is a True Christian? https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/who-is-a-true-christian/2DA88468C8824BD55EBE9AE94CFCDF73
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, and great to be with you on this Monday.
It is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 19, 2026.
And I want to talk about something that pertains to, I think, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights in general.
It also pertains to the fact that we are now just about one year into Trump's second term, and things only seem to get worse hour by hour, minute by minute.
Some of you have probably seen already that Trump released a letter to Denmark explaining why the United States should have control of Greenland.
It's a tremendously embarrassing letter.
I mean, in a decade of embarrassing moments from Trump, as somebody who's been in office and running for president, this it could take the cake.
I'll read some of it to you.
Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars plus, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
The world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland.
That's just part of it.
It kind of continues like that.
So yeah, things are not getting better.
And it strikes me that today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, that the idea of civil rights is under complete threat.
If you think about what's happening in Minnesota, we have instance after instance after instance of ICE overrunning people's civil rights.
Whether that is people they are detaining, whether that is American citizens they are detaining, whether that is observers who are being hurt, who are being attacked, or who are being arrested simply for observing.
Our civil rights as Americans are in peril.
And I think we need to talk about why.
One of the things that civil rights are about is the idea that all of us as humans have basic inalienable rights.
This is something that goes back to the American founding, to the Declaration of Independence, to the Constitution.
And at the basis of the idea of civil rights is the idea of inalienable human rights, that we all have rights as humans that you cannot take away.
It doesn't matter what family you're from, what position you have, what talent you have, what money you have.
There's a baseline of what every person is promised.
And Martin Luther King Jr. was, of course, the person who became the figurehead of the civil rights movement that was laser focused on winning the civil rights promised to everyone in this country, but not given to black people in the United States.
He did that by leading sit-ins and marches and strikes.
He did that by giving some of the most famous speeches that we've ever had in the history of our country.
The fight for what was always about what was promised.
If you listen to his last speech, the mountaintop speech, he says, look, if I lived in somewhere like Soviet Russia where I was not promised these things, then I would not expect them.
But in the United States, that is the promise.
And so we fight for what is promised.
We fight for that which everyone is supposed to have, regardless of their skin color, their ethnicity, their immigration story, their sexuality.
It doesn't matter.
Now, that is under severe threat, and I don't think I need to explain that to most of you who are listening.
But I do want to explain the ideals and the ideology that challenges the basic idea of civil rights.
I want to talk about post-liberalism.
The idea that we're in an era that is after or beyond or against the liberal tradition.
And that doesn't mean voting Democrat or being somebody who has a certain political affiliation.
It means the liberal tradition in the sense of a government that recognizes individuals who are free and have basic inalienable rights.
I'm going to talk about that at length today with Dr. David Congdon, who's written extensively about this and has really shown that the post-liberal movement that we're seeing flower today, most notably in the Vice President JD Vance, but throughout the Trump administration, has theological antecedents in various forms of Christianity going back to the 1980s and 90s.
And he and I talked all about that to start.
But before that, before I get into my interview with David, I just, I want to outline some basic terms and sort of some basic premises.
And these are all in my book, American Caesar, how theocrats and tech lords are turning the United States into a monarchy.
That book will be out in a couple months.
The pre-orders will start soon.
But here's some premises that I outline in that book that I think are worth sharing here.
Today we have Protestant, Catholic, and technocratic movements that are reshaping American politics.
And they each have their differences.
They come from different trajectories, but their diagnoses of what they think of as civilizational decline and their proposed solutions now overlap in striking ways.
They all believe that liberalism is the poison pill of Western civilization.
And so what they want is something that is somehow against or beyond the idea of a country, a people, a nation of free individuals with inalienable rights.
They want something else.
They want a monarchy, a hierarchy, a dictatorship.
They want a tech CEO who has unilateral control.
Some of them argue that a tech CEO should own the people and the land.
Some of them argue that the church should be the overseer of the United States government.
Some of them argue that there is simply no room at all for non-white, non-Christian people in the United States.
And again, you might be thinking, well, yay, Brad, those are extremists, but they also are people who have the ear and are in many cases good friends or confidants of the Vice President of the United States.
There's some pillars of these movements where they overlap.
They're different, but they have like serious overlaps in a couple of areas.
One of them is they reject liberalism, which means they reject individual freedom as the organizing principle of society.
They want hierarchy, not free individuals.
They view democracy with disdain.
They think it's weak.
They think it's feminine.
And they think it's incapable of moral governance.
They think Western civilization is under threat because of all of the invaders who have weakened this country and others.
Multiculturalism, immigration, secularism, liberal elites.
These are the people to blame for the downfall of Western civilization in the U.S. and Germany and France.
They also are anti-libertarian.
They don't think that libertarianism has the teeth to save Western civilization, that you can't just have the invisible hand of the market.
You can't let the market decide.
Because if it does, and most of the people are not on your side, then you're going to get major corporations supporting gay rights or trans rights.
You're going to get folks who are celebrating multiculturalism and diversity because that's what people want, and that's what they want to buy, and that's what they want to support.
And so the people who are in these movements, these post-liberal movements, are not libertarian.
We are no longer in an era of conservatism in the U.S. that can be defined as or characterized as libertarian.
They don't want a small government.
They want a big government that controls you.
They want a government that gets in the way of what happens in your bedroom, who you love, what happens with your body, how you worship, how you sing in public.
Julian Waller is a political theorist whose work I've appreciated, and he says that post-liberalism is illiberal.
It is a reaction against perceived liberal domination, and its solutions involve rejecting individual autonomy, expanding state power, and distrusting democratic institutions.
I think we can see that throughout Trump's first term.
I think we can see how this is an attack on civil rights.
I think we can see how the civil rights movement and all the gains that were made therein were some of the impetus for the backlash against liberalism and against civil rights.
Charlie Kirk said Martin Luther King Jr. is a bad guy.
Charlie Kirk said Martin Luther King Jr. hurt the black community more than he helped it.
So the civil rights movement is part of what created the backlash to liberalism, to the idea of a people who are free individuals with inalienable rights.
So as I get into my interview with David, I guess the argument I'm trying to make today is that the first year of Trump's second term is the first year, I think, of federal post-liberal rule in the United States.
Now, as soon as I say that, I'm aware of the fact that the country has been in certain ways fascist before, that black writers and intellectuals looked at the Jim Crow South and said, this is a fascist government.
We don't have rights.
We are not treated the same.
We don't have recognition under the law.
We don't have a way to get recourse for mistreatment.
We see that throughout American history, whether that's Japanese incarceration, whether that's Jim Crow, whether that's all kinds of events surrounding the KKK, et cetera.
I think with all of that in mind, what's happened over the last year is a post-liberal movement that is threatening to take over the entire nation and invade it and to end constitutional rule as we know it.
All with no apology, no interest in abiding by the Constitution or the processes outlined in our various governmental agencies.
This is a full assault on the rule of law, the separation of powers, on checks and balances, on the idea that we are a liberal democracy where the will of the people has any kind of sway, any kind of influence, any kind of power.
And so we're in a post-liberal era.
We're in an era where the government is trying to basically say you don't have rights to do things like observe or protest, where if you're walking down the street, we may just ask you for your papers, where you might get shot in your car trying to drive away from a protest.
Post-Liberalism And Its Critics00:03:47
And the government will say, please pray for the officer involved.
Rather than do anything to investigate that murder, the government may even try to investigate your wife, who was sitting in the seat next to you.
That's where we are now.
It's a post-liberal moment.
And I don't have time today, but in my book, I outline all the ways that Christian supremacists, both Protestant and Catholic, as well as Silicon Valley tech lords, are the ones pushing the post-liberal moment and are doing so by way of direct influence on the Trump administration, on JD Vance, and so on and so forth.
I'll leave it there for now and just say, here's my discussion with David Congdon about all of this.
We get into the weeds a little bit.
There are some terms that need to be defined and some historical trajectories that need to be explored, but I hope you'll stay with it because I think if you can understand this, it will help click into place a lot of what is happening around us in the way that democracy is no longer seen as something sacred.
So here is my interview with Dr. David Congdon.
David has a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary.
He is now the senior editor at the University Press of Kansas, where he oversees publishing in politics, law, U.S. history, Indigenous studies, and religion.
He's written a number of great works.
His most recent book, however, is Who is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture.
That was published by Cambridge University Press.
And so David has written a lot about post-liberalism and Christianity in this current moment.
And our interview centers on that.
I think he has just some great insight here.
And so I hope you learned a lot.
I appreciate you all for joining us today.
For subscribers, there's about 10 extra minutes at the end here where David and I keep the conversation going.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
Catch you on the flip.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, Brad O'Nishi and Brad Onishi here.
And as I just said, I welcome somebody who's been on the show before, but we did not have the full interview, the full like boat, and that is Dr. David Congdon.
So here to talk about post-liberalism and your great work on this whole phenomenon.
David, thanks for stopping by.
Yeah, thank you, Brad.
Thanks for having me on.
So I've been thinking about how to introduce today to folks, and I want to do it in a way that's accessible, but also like does justice to the incredible nuance of your work here.
So you've written a great article at the Journal of Religion about theological and political post-liberalism.
You've been writing about this in many places, giving papers, lectures.
There's a whole body of work from you on this.
I think there's a couple of words we hear a lot.
So I'm going to start with those words, see if we can define them, and then we'll get into the weeds about what they mean.
And I promise everybody, there is like incredible import for our public square today in what we're talking about.
And the takeaways are going to be very salient and very on the surface.
Don't worry.
Let's start with this.
You're laughing.
Like you're like, you don't believe in us.
Like we can't get there.
I think we can do this.
We can do it.
I agree.
I think we got it.
All right.
Let's start with post-liberalism.
I've written a book about post-liberals.
You've written a ton of stuff about post-liberals.
Is there a way for you to kind of encapsulate what post-liberalism is in a very general way that will be a good starting point?
Post-Liberals Rejection Of Liberal Democracy00:15:21
Sure.
I mean, I'll try my best at this.
This is tough because a lot of this movement depends on ambiguity about these terms.
So much of what makes this coalition work is that they are able to use words that we know in other contexts, twist them, generalize them, and apply them in other contexts.
So that being said as a caveat, I think what holds together the group that I'm calling, broadly speaking, post-liberals is it's just a rejection of liberal democracy or pluralism as a project.
That's the overarching opposition.
In various ways, every figure in this group views liberal democracy, and I'll get to that a little bit more and explain what I mean by that, but that idea as the source of our ills, the source of our social problems, collapse, crises, whatever it may be.
And their alternative is, it varies.
There's a lot of different versions here in terms of how they articulate their solution, but it is to replace liberal democracy with something not liberal, not democratic, authoritarian.
So let's drill down on that.
If the general idea of a post-liberal is that they're against liberalism, that they're not just not liberal, they're in many ways anti-liberal, that liberalism is the problem that has to be overcome.
That's the diagnosis.
Now, the solution is different and the solutions are wide and varied, and we'll get to those in a minute.
But if we start with liberalism as the problem, is it fair to say that the problem with liberalism is that the bedrock of the liberal project is that there are individuals who have free choices and certain rights, and that is the atomic basis of politics and governance, that you, David, are an individual.
You can choose.
You have certain rights.
You have certain liberties that are afforded to you.
And politically speaking, we start with the individual and their free choice.
And everything builds from there.
Human rights, civil rights, protection under the law, protection in the workplace.
Is the basic problem the individualism of liberalism?
Or how would you expand on that or just maybe not agree?
I think you've nailed it there.
I think individualism is the unifying thread or concept that you see across all these figures.
I'm including both the theological ones and the political ones.
What they see is that the individual, when you make the individual the starting point for a polity, for society, what you end up doing is you cannot, in their minds at least, you cannot create a cohesive, unified community.
That's, in their minds, that's the goal.
The goal is a unified, cohesive, coherent community or society.
And how do we get there?
So the theological post-liberals, who I talk a lot about, they're viewing this in terms of the church originally.
So their starting point is, how do we get a unified ecumenical church?
And then they diagnose the liberal individual as the source of that problem.
The political post-liberals simply apply that schema to the nation.
So the nation serves now as the community that needs to be unified, the church just being the vehicle to get there, but it's now the nation is now the subject matter of this problem.
And it's the same issue, though.
The liberal individual cannot be coherently turned into a community.
Now, before we go to the people who are post-liberals and all of their nuances, the theological versions, the political versions, let's stay on liberalism.
So broadly speaking, folks, if we think of liberal democracy, we think of a liberal, free individual subject who exists with choices and freedoms.
And when it comes to politics, we deal with that individual.
It's like David is a voter.
David is an individual.
We don't recognize the house of David or the House of Congon or whatever it is.
The individual is the basis for our understanding of law and voting and politics.
But there's different versions of liberalism.
And I think in your work, you do a really great job of teasing those out.
And I think it would be helpful for people to kind of understand that because it would be helpful to dig into what the post-liberals think they are getting us away from.
There's a sense of liberalism as based on civil rights.
There's a sense of liberalism based on free choice in the market.
I'm sure that you're like, well, that's too reductive.
And it is, but maybe that's a good tee up for you to kind of explain further.
Yeah.
I mean, this is where it gets really tricky because the post-liberals don't all have the same kind of diagnosis at this point.
But broadly speaking, I would say there are three stages of liberalism that we can identify.
There is what is often called classical liberalism.
And this is the liberalism of the Enlightenment, the idea of the autonomous individual who has now rationality, choice, capable of objecting to traditional narratives and choosing their own path in life.
So this is the liberalism of, say, like a Thomas Paine and John Locke and other figures who were crucial to the formation of democracy and democratic societies.
Then if you move a lot further forward, you have the 20th century and you have kind of what I would call New Deal liberalism.
So New Deal liberalism of FDR and the civil rights movement is a liberalism that is focused on equality, not just the individual as a choosing rational subject, but now equality as a society.
How do we level out the inequalities that characterize society, racial, class, gender, all the rest?
And so that is what leads to what the post-liberals would call wokeness and all the rest.
And then there is neoliberalism, which is a reaction to New Deal liberalism and in trying to reassert a kind of classical liberalism, but in a highly financial economic sense in which the economic liberty of the free market percolates and is infused throughout all society to kind of deregulate society in every level.
So often we have, you know, so what's interesting here is that the post-liberals are, generally speaking, unanimous in objecting to neoliberalism.
They don't like that kind of hardcore free market liberalism, but they want to object to both New Deal liberalism and classical liberalism as frameworks that are destructive to society.
All right.
I'm going to try to spit it back at you and you tell me as the student, you know, where I'm off.
So when I think of neoliberal logic, neoliberalism, I think of an idea of like, hey, you're free to choose in the marketplace of capitalist goods and services, consumer goods and services, what you want.
And if that happens to be that you want to go to Target, as in the summer of 2021, and buy clothing that is made for a queer body, well, you're choosing that and that's great.
You're going to buy goods and services and you want to, you know, buy things that enforce your identity and support your identity and accord with your identity as a queer person, a trans person, et cetera.
To me, the neoliberal is like, go ahead if you want to, as long as the market is going to offer you the consumer what it wants.
We're not here to make sure that everybody has the same civil rights, the same equal protections.
We're here just to make sure that the market responds to the desires and whims and expressions of the consumer.
The civil rights version is much more focused on the idea that we have certain inalienable rights.
And those not only include what Some figures like the founders would say, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, but also something like Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 address, where he's like, here's a second Bill of Rights.
You have the right to a job that will pay you enough to live.
You have a right to food.
You have a right to health care.
The neoliberal is like, well, I don't know if we can afford health care for everybody.
And I don't know if we can afford food for everybody, but we can't afford to let you buy the products you want if those products are about, you know, any aspect of your identity.
And the classic liberal is much more focused on rationality and not relying on what they might think of as external, external crutches to their worldview.
So I'm thinking of Immanuel Kant saying, Enlightenment is thinking for yourself, not relying on what scripture says or something else says.
You have a rational mind as an individual and you should use it.
And I, for so, first of all, tell me, does that all work?
And then, second of all, the post-liberals are rejecting a lot of times the neoliberal version, the consumerist version, but they're really rejecting all of it.
Is that a fair summation?
I think that's a fair, yeah, that is fair.
They are rejecting all of it.
They view the classical liberal Enlightenment liberalism as the source of everything else.
And so they want to go back to the origins and say, this is genealogically for them all rooted in this original liberalism.
And therefore, we have to get rid of it at the root in order to solve the later problems.
But I do think a crucial issue here throughout is the role of the government in securing those liberties or maybe putting a check on those liberties.
The role of the government here is a really important factor.
The neoliberals want to remove the government's role in having that sort of say at all.
I think actually what's interesting about the post-liberals is that they're quite happy to have a strong government, clearly, playing a role in this issue.
But they want the opposite role that the New Deal had, whereas the New Deal is about using the government's power to put a check on inequalities in society.
The post-liberals say the government's role now is to ensure to protect the hierarchies in society.
That's now its role.
And then to do so, we got to chop off the individualism at its base.
So if the post-liberals see the entire liberal project going all the way back to the Enlightenment figures, whether it's Kant, whether it's Locke, whether it's Hobbes, et cetera, everybody sort of moving forward from 17th, 18th, 19th century.
Really, even before that, some will say Martin Luther, actually.
They'll go all the way.
So this explains something that I've said on this show a bunch and people may or may not still understand, which is for me, there's a lot of Christian nationalists 10 years ago that wanted to go back to the 1950s.
And now if you pay attention to the post-liberals, they're like, yeah, 1950s?
What about the 1650s?
Because that sounds pretty good to me.
Or maybe the 1550s or maybe the 1450s before the Protestant Reformation.
But you start to understand why.
If the free individual human being is the problem, then you've got to go back before not only the Enlightenment and not only all of these iterations of civil rights liberalism and neoliberalism, but you've got to go back before democracy became the dominant governing structure.
I mean, doesn't it lead from if you're going to critique liberalism, you're going to critique liberal democracy?
I mean, that's a pretty natural flow.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing among the post-liberals.
And I think actually what we've seen over the last eight years is them pushing each other to get more and more radical about this issue.
You know, because when Patrick Denin released Why Liberalism Fails back in 2016, I believe, when it came out, he was critiqued by some of the others, like Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law integralist, for not being radical enough in his critique of liberalism.
And so you see then Denim come back around with regime change in a much more hardcore position, far-right position that is in agreement now with Vermuel and others.
So you see this kind of ratcheting up effect of how far they're willing to push things back in time.
Why liberalism failed is almost cute at this point.
It's like, oh, that's cute.
Yeah, that's a cute.
That's a good.
I mean, Obama endorsed it.
I mean, he.
Well, and he did.
So.
Okay, so, all right.
So we've set the stage.
We know what liberalism is.
We know that post-liberals, in essence, are critiquing the free individual who is making choices, has rights, has liberties.
And that includes in the consumer mode, that includes in other registers.
So that leads us to the different kinds of post-liberals.
Okay.
And your claim is that there are political post-liberals today that many people listening might have caught wind of.
I did an interview with Laura Kay Field.
They might have heard Laura talk about Patrick Denin, who you just mentioned, Adrian Vermuel, who you just mentioned, R. Arino, Vamari.
These are all Catholic figures who are self-styled post-liberals.
They call themselves post-liberals.
Well, I mean, you never know.
Yeah, that's right.
Who's blog and who's not, doesn't like that term anymore.
But nonetheless.
Can you tell us how post-liberals are taking a kind of Christian, what many people think of Christian nationalism, and in many ways making it more radical and I think even more extreme.
I'm not sure if you would put it that way, but that's kind of how I read your work.
So, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, part of my argument is that in order to fully understand post-liberalism today, we need to look back at its theological roots back in the 70s and 80s and really even before that.
And it's not just that the Yale school, so to speak, in the 70s and 80s used the term post-liberal.
So there is a semantic connection.
I do think there's an ideological connection here that I want to tease out.
But so just to put it simply, there was a group in the mid to late 20th century theologians who came out of liberal mainline churches and had a sort of moment of revelation where they realized, you know what, our entire way of being trained theologically is rubbish.
We need to start over.
We need to rethink everything about the church, about theology.
And liberalism, broadly speaking, in really both its political and theological connotations is the problem.
We have to uproot liberalism.
And now how they went about that, we can get into, but that movement, that school of thought was very powerful for 20, 30 years.
And it trained a lot of people who then went on to become political post-liberals.
Rusty Reno, at first things, is probably the most prominent of those figures.
And he was trained under Limbeck and others at Yale, went on now to head up arguably the main Catholic voice in that movement.
Post-Liberal Retreats00:15:29
So there are institutional connections.
Heritage Foundation is another institutional connection.
You had a lot of people like Richard John Newhouse, who spoke and frequently as an activist within heritage circles.
Newhouse was an early theological post-liberal who then kind of laid the foundation for later political post-liberalism.
So these figures are all there.
It's an uncomfortable thing, I think, for the theologians to acknowledge because a lot of the theologians in major seminaries and divinity schools today were trained by post-liberals.
That was a generation that trained many, many people.
And they don't want to acknowledge that that training, that theological project has been deeply destructive of the polity that they otherwise are supportive of, many of them being Democratic voters and all the rest.
So that's part of what makes my argument somewhat uncomfortable.
Well, let's break it down.
So let's start.
Let's go back to what you call the theological post-liberals.
I'm going to interject my own personal story in here just because as I told you before we started recording, this is all part of like my journey as somebody who was trying to figure out his theology back in like the early 2000s.
So I'm an evangelical minister, David, in like 2001.
I'm part of a church.
It's like 2,000 people, Southern California.
And Thursdays are my day off.
Okay.
And my wife at the time was a school teacher.
So she was teaching school.
So here I am on my Thursdays.
And my Thursday routine was to go to the coffee shop with like 16 books from my seminary and like read theology.
And everybody made fun of me.
Everyone at the church said, if you need to find Brad, he's at the coffee shop with all these books from European theologians and stuff we don't care about or understand.
And one of the people I discovered was a man named George Lindbeck who said, I'm doing post-liberal theology.
And as an evangelical, there were two reasons I was interested in it.
One was I felt like I was allowed to read post-liberals because they were still very particularly Christian.
Like they were talking about being the church in a particular way, in a unique way.
This was not the Christianity that I was warned about that said, well, Christianity is great, but all religions lead to the same truth.
In an evangelical setting, that was like pretty core teaching of the Antichrist, right?
Like not allowed.
So these guys were like, look, the church is particular.
The church has its own language.
It has its own logic.
Scripture has its own world.
We're in.
And number two, I was interested in them because they wanted to create community.
As somebody who was used to a church that was based on the individual and who grew up in a community full of strip malls and there was no old buildings and no monuments and no old churches, this idea of community sounded great.
And so I discovered these guys and I discovered what you say in your article is that A, they gave up on apologetics.
They did not want to defend Christianity.
Gone were the days of like proving historically that Jesus rose from the dead or that the Bible was archaeologically accurate.
We're not doing that.
We're just going to live out the Christian story and just tell you that it's true because it is, period.
We're not going to like demonstrate it.
Sorry.
Number two, and I'm going to quote you, they turned away from pluralism, universalism, and globalism and toward the insular internal confines of the sectarian culture of the Christian church.
They basically were like, the world has gone mad, so we should create house churches or communes or rural communities out in the middle of nowhere and just like create the church Jesus wanted.
And as a 22-year-old, I was like, this is awesome.
Let's do it.
This is so much better than the seeker-sensitive, wishy-washy evangelical church I'm part of, where you get a latte before worship and the kids behind you are on the climbing wall while you eat your banana nut muffin and try to worship Jesus.
That's not what Jesus wanted.
He wanted a community where we shared everything and we lived together and we don't apologize to the world.
We're just radical disciples.
That seemed really like attractive, as you've outlined, but there was like unintended downfalls to that.
And I think you outlined those so well.
Like there was an unattended turning away from engagement with anyone else that actually had deep political consequences.
Am I on to something?
Does the story sound right so far?
Like jump in here.
Yeah, you've nailed that.
I mean, I have a very similar story background.
I mean, I grew up in Oregon where I was surrounded by friends who were very influenced by Harawas.
And so a lot of my friends were in house churches in the Portland area.
Many of them still are.
When they read Resident Aliens by Harawas and Willemon, their minds were blown and they were like, this is the solution.
This is the answer to our problems.
This is how we're going to be rebels for Christ, is we're going to rebel against consumerist American Christianity, and we're going to be hardcore Christians in these little insular, little intentional communities, as they would call them.
And that was very attractive.
I was also raised in a very apologetic environment.
So the apologetics angle was really important.
I mean, Josh McDowell, people like that were, it was, you know, the case for Christ.
These books were so prominent.
I mean, people today can't understand how prominent those books were in the 80s and 90s.
You know, you could not go into an evangelical's home without seeing one of those apologetics books.
They were just everywhere.
And so as a elder millennial growing up in these kinds of homes, seeing these apologetics texts and being given the license to reject apologetics as the, as a problem of modernity, that was a modern liberal enterprise was apologetics.
It was so, it was, it kind of tickled that rebellious bone in you to say, oh, yeah, I can just like, you know, get my middle finger to apologetics and to my parents' generation by rejecting all that attempt to communicate with other people, all that engagement, and just being like living in these like really serious discipleship communities.
So it just fed a lot of, a lot of that desire to live an, you know, a countercultural lifestyle in a world in which the counterculture was no longer around.
You know, we grew up in the Jesus Freak generation too.
Jesus Freak came out, the album of DC Talk came out in 95, 96.
That was a massive moment for the mid-90s evangelical kids.
And we had our Jesus Freak Bibles and our Jesus Freak journals and all the rest.
And I went to Jesus Freak concert.
It was such a, all of that stuff was in the air at the time.
And we had the kiss dating goodbye also in 94, 95.
And so we're trying to rebel against dating culture.
All these little things that were saying, okay, here's how you can be a rebellious radical for Christ now.
And post-liberal theology just satisfied that urge.
It really scratched that edge for us.
So one of the arguments I've made is that what you just outlined so beautifully, I was caught up into.
And the idea in the mid-90s was you're going to be a missional church.
You're going to swim upstream in an increasingly godless Western culture.
And instead of looking at yourselves as Christians in a Christian country, you're going to look at yourself as Christian missionaries to a non-Christian country.
And I don't know if that slaps for you.
That's very important to my framework.
Yes, absolutely.
That was a way for me, and it sounds like for you, to be like, as you just said, a 16-year-old who's like, I'm a rebel for Jesus.
I'm swimming upstream.
And a lot of the post-liberal theology that you talk about here was right in line with that.
But it was what I would call a kind of defensive crouch or a reclusive crouch where you're like, hey, we're going to go off to a house church.
We're going to become Mennonite.
We're going to go to rural Canada.
We're going to become like folks who have a new community and we're going to start that over here.
And the world is going to lose its mind.
The world is going to continue to be chaotic and godless, not us.
And we're not worried about converting them by convincing them.
We're just, if they want to know who we are and what we do, they can come see our story and they'll be converted by our witness in our lives.
That's a sort of, that's a crouch where you're like, well, I'm not scared.
Like, and I got to the point, David, where I was like, I don't want to go.
I actually kind of got close and I was like, I don't want to be Mennonite and I don't want to move to rural Alberta.
I don't want to do it.
I'm not doing it.
I'm sorry.
I just don't want to.
I just, it doesn't sound that great.
Now I just want to say I might now.
I have Mennonite friends.
This is not me.
I'm not like making fun of you Mennonite folks.
What I'm saying is like, I got close to the like, hey, I'm going to retreat into a really rural, secluded community.
I don't think it's for me.
But I don't think that that scared me as a like, that is going to destroy the world.
It just seemed to me like Christians retreating into enclaves in ways that were just sort of in many ways monastic or neo-monastic, et cetera.
What you trace, though, is that there's a flip from the defensive to the offensive.
And that is where we get political post-liberalism that actually is very frightening.
Is that a fair assessment?
Is that a way to sort of tease out the further development?
Yeah, to put some like theoretical bones here on this.
I mean, one of the part of what my argument is is that what post-liberal theology did was to say Christianity is its own culture.
It's a static culture that has its own very clear cultural boundaries so that any engagement with the other is inherently cross-cultural or, you know, engagement with a cultural other.
Now, once you have that framework in mind, there are really just two ways to engage others.
You can either just not engage with them.
That's a separatist route that you're talking about, these kind of house churches that sort of withdraw from society, or you can colonize them.
You can take them over.
You can, you know, take the imperialist route and say, well, the cultural other who is the other thing, the other factor here is that the cultural other is wrong.
It's not just that they're different.
They're wrong because they don't have the correct culture, our culture.
So by being wrong, the only way to make them right is either to colonize them or to leave them for God's judgment down in the future.
So those two paths are built into the post-liberal picture.
And yes, so I think early on, a lot of them were, let's be resident aliens.
Let's just withdraw from engaging the wider liberal society.
The world is sinful and evil and violent.
We'll just stop engaging with it.
We'll stop voting.
We'll stop participating in their ways of life.
But at some point, I think that route becomes impossible and defeatist for a lot of folks.
And I think for those of us who are trained to be saviors of the world, to engage the world, to be missionaries to society, to be told that we can be change agents for America, for the world.
You can't inhabit a kind of defeatist posture of withdrawal forever.
At some point, you're like, you know what?
These people shouldn't be in power anymore.
Maybe I should be in power.
Maybe I should call the shots.
And that's where everything just starts going off the rails.
I think that really, I think that happens initially in the early 2000s.
I mean, but the Obergefell decision in 2015 is really what then that switches everything for everybody because you have a lot of people before that who are like, we are aliens in this society.
And after that, we're like, you know what?
No, this society is evil.
We have to completely take it over and control the future.
I'm really glad you brought up that timeline because I want to go to that timeline as a way to like slide into the current iteration of post-liberals that you talk about that I've worked on that are really having a moment in our politics, people that are in the ear of the vice president, people who are really influential at high levels of American government.
It felt easy.
I'm going to, again, be personal here.
2005, I left my evangelical church and I went to England to go to graduate school.
And that was my chance to be free from that and to figure out what kind of theology I wanted to have.
But in those George W. Bush years, I think playing the resident alien was easier because there was this sort of wishy-washy evangelical president who represented the sort of lineage of mainstream religious right evangelicalism, the Franklin Graham, Billy Graham lineage, the Falwell family, the Family Research Council values, voters, right?
So you could play it being a resident alien while your like counterculture you're reacting to was the evangelical mainstream.
George W. Bush's president.
No, dude, we're way more hardcore than that.
Are you serious?
That's lame.
We're over here at the house church.
We're over here at the commune.
We're over here being resident aliens.
And then you elect a black president whose dad's from Africa, who's who's like multiracial, who grew up like half his life in Hawaii where my family's from.
And most people, you know, in the United States are like, is Hawaii a real part of the country or not?
We're not sure.
His name is Barack.
His name is Hussein.
And everybody said he was Muslim, even though he's not.
Now to me, it's on, where it's like, oh, we can't be in defense now.
We got to go offense.
And then as you say, you get to Oberfell and it's like, gay marriage is legal, same-sex marriage is legal.
There's marriage equality.
And now it's like, nope, no more.
We're not sitting on our hands.
We're not going to be monastic.
We're going all out offense.
We're going to colonize.
We're not going to be colonized.
It's kill or be killed.
It's win or lose.
There's nothing in between.
Could you talk about that timeline and how that births a kind of post-liberal politics that is really part of the Trumpian decade we've now been living in?
We have to go back to the 90s, I think, because so post-liberal theology, the kind of separatist attitude really takes root in the 90s under Clinton.
Clinton, that's the important thing here.
Clinton's election is the initial, the pre-apocalypse for Republicans and the religious right.
If you go back and read magazine articles, newspaper articles from the early mid-90s, they are very despairing about the future of the religious right.
There's no moral majority.
No moral majority.
Bush lost.
He said, read my lips and he failed.
He screwed us over.
And now we have Clinton as president.
So the religious right leaders in that period are not sure what the future is.
And I don't think it's an accident that Limbeck goes to Wheaton College in 96 and gives his talk there and said, hey, you evangelicals, you're the future of our movement.
Taste Of Political Power00:05:01
You are the ones to carry us on because us mainliners, we don't know, there's no future for us because they're getting too liberal.
They're starting to dabble in gay ordination and all the rest.
And so it's in that period, in that late 90 period, where this mentality gets rooted.
And then when Bush gets elected, I think what happens for Bush is, yes, there is a sense in which it's easy to be a radical in that period.
But what's I think is important is Bush gave evangelicals a taste of what it means to be in political power.
He gave those evangelicals a little bit, a little snack, appetizer, say, hey, if you get into positions of power, you can do a lot of stuff.
You can have a lot of influence, more so than if you're just in these churches preaching to people in the pews.
You can actually exact actual change.
And so I think that whets their appetite.
And then when Obama comes, they're like, okay, now it's game on, okay?
Because now we're seeing Clinton all over again.
We know what it tastes like to have some power.
We've got to find that power again.
So Tea Party happens and all the rest happens from there.
So I think that's, it's important to see how that kind of cyclical nature of American politics is that spiral that ends up feeding itself.
The snake kind of eats its own tail and kind of reinforces its own positions and becomes more and more radical, more violent, more prone to extremist positions.
So if we just fast forward to where we are now, which is obviously a truly terrifying time in this country, I go on Twitter every day not to post and not to participate, but just to see what post-liberals, Christian extremists, Christian fascists, others are posting.
And the things that I see there are people saying, look, you have nothing in common with the woke liberal.
You have nothing in common with the godless heathen.
You have nothing in common with the immigrant Hindu person of South Asian heritage.
You cannot talk to them.
Nothing you do is going to make them American.
Nothing you do is going to make them part of our country.
The only answer is for us to be the colony of heritage Americans and for them to leave and go.
And there's really no choice.
And I guess, you know, this is going to sound too reductive of your work, but if you go and read those Twitter posts every day, and then you go back to these theological post-liberals who were saying the church has nothing in common with the world, you cannot talk to the other.
And there is no way for us to have a common language.
You start to really see what you're arguing, which is this very scary worldview where instead of us being resident aliens, everyone else is an alien in our country and we have to get them out.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, I think that's right.
I do think that there is that connection there that has been kind of cultivated in churches and seminaries and other places where we thought we were just talking about Christian doctrine.
And actually what we were doing, we were inculcating a whole political worldview, a whole political mindset about otherness, about difference, about pluralism, about democracy as such.
And so the chickens came home to roost, and that's where we are.
Can I ask you one more question before we go?
Sure.
All right.
So stick around, folks.
I'm going to ask David one more question here.
All right, y'all.
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Going to talk to David about monarchism and the way that monarchism is having a strange, trendy moment right now.
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And here are ways you can connect with David Congdon.
You can find me on my website, dwcongdon.com.
I have a book that came out with Cambridge in 2024 called Who is a True Christian?
Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture.
That book is where I develop my ideas on post-liberalism originally and more at full length.
And that's a much broader story there than what I've been able to share today.
My article that you mentioned from the Journal of Religion is available on my website as well, or people can contact me.
Hearing from Brockschmidt00:00:48
My book coming out next year is going to be on polyamory and sexual ethics in Christianity.
So looking at challenging ideas of monogamy and the norms of sexuality.
So, but yeah, hopefully I'll have, I have a future project on post-liberalism that I'm working on.
So that'll be down the road.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
We'll catch you Wednesday at It's in the Code and Friday for the weekly roundup.
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And you're going to be hearing every month from Leah Payne and Annika Brockschmidt.
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