The Sunday Interview: The Rise of the Hype Priest: Judah Smith, Celebrity Faith, and Modern Evangelicalism
Leah Payne and Sam Kestenbaum dissect Judah Smith's "hype priest" persona, analyzing how his Church Home ministry blends Southern Black Pentecostal cadence with a "white bro" aesthetic to attract Los Angeles creatives. They examine the shift from Obama-era progressive stances on racial equity and same-sex marriage toward atomized spirituality, contrasting Smith's therapeutic approach with politically active leaders like John Cheon. Ultimately, the interview reveals that this celebrity faith model prioritizes cultural relevance over traditional church structures, serving an already-churched demographic while navigating tensions between West Coast liberalism and conservative charismatic landscapes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus Sunday00:01:30
Axis Mundi.
Welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday interview.
I'm Leah Payne, author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You, A History of Contemporary Christian Music, and host of Spirit and Power, Charismatics and Politics in American Life.
Today, I am speaking with Sam Kestenbaum, a journalist who profiled Judah Smith, the prominent pastor to the stars for New York Magazine.
Sam is an award-winning reporter based in Los Angeles, and his work has been published by the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, many other outlets.
And I'm delighted that he's going to be speaking with us today.
Welcome, Sam Kestenbaum, to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday Interview Series.
Welcome, Sam Kestenbaum, to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday interview series.
So happy to have you, one of my favorite journalists writing about religion and American culture.
Oh, thank you.
Happy to be here.
Thanks.
Thanks for coming.
Right before we started recording, you and I were doing our little things where we get ready to be on a podcast.
Judah Smith and the Hype Priest Wave00:08:43
And you made a funny comment about how it's not as easy as it looks being a person.
In public, and you're here talking with me about an article that you wrote for Vulture, the hype priest who rode the Bieber wave.
And I want to high five you on your writing here and read the first couple of sentences of this article and then ask you a question about it.
So the first sentence is Judah Smith, the pastor of Churchom, is backstage at Trinity Broadcast Network regarding himself in the mirror.
We don't wear clothes, we wear outfits, he tells me.
I love that opening, those couple of opening sentences.
Tell me a little bit about how you decided to open this article.
Well, thank you for the reading and for highlighting that.
It was a dramatic read.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I knew when Judith gave me that quote that it would need a place in the piece, just because I like when someone, I mean, he's making a distinction there, and distinctions are always interesting, and he's Articulating something about himself, something he prides himself on.
Also, one that, if I'm being honest, I knew that something that I think certain readers might find not distasteful, but he's saying something about his interest in looking good and aesthetics.
And so I like sort of quotes or moments that can be read a couple different ways that are sort of honest to what I've seen, but also might create a reaction in the reader depending on their feeling about whatever I'm witnessing.
I want to ask you about that.
What kind of reaction, like, what's the range of reactions that you might be expecting?
From that intro.
Well, I mean, I think like if you don't think that a man of the cloth should regard himself in the mirror and care about his outfit, if you find that distasteful, then you're going to say, Oh, here's evidence I'm seeing right away that there's something insincere about Judah's self presentation.
But Judah comments often on his clothes and takes great pride in his clothes, and there's nothing dishonest about that.
That would be one reaction, I think.
That would be a more critical reaction to that opening scene.
I guess I'm aware that that might be in the room when I'm writing it, but I don't want that to be heavy ended.
And I also don't think there's something inherently distasteful about a public facing person who cares about what he puts on.
And before we recorded this interview, I had to message you and say, is this going to be on video or not?
If it was going to be on video, I would have made sure I had a different shirt on.
I would have cleaned up the bookshelf behind me.
I would have done certain things.
None of us are immune to wanting to dress up for the camera.
And Judah has big cameras he's dressing up for, and he has lots of eyeballs on him.
Yeah, that's one thing both you and I have studied and written about charismatics and Pentecostals.
And one of the things.
That they are very willing to do is to use a commonly used phrase in the social media sphere.
They're willing to say the quiet part out loud when it comes to presentation because everyone is concerned about that.
But very few people are willing to admit it.
Right after that, he credits his sister and his mother for doing that, which establishes kind of a matriarchy in his mind.
And yeah, it does that.
And it also.
Like it also maybe allows his interest in aesthetics.
Like it's actually still the sort of women who care about that more.
He cares about it, but he learned it from the women.
He learned it from the women.
Yeah.
And then you, okay, I got it.
I'm going to get off of this here in a second.
But because then you refer to him changing tops.
The reason he's doing that has to do with the show that I was watching there.
So they're at TBN, they're filming content that will be streamed out over the course of a month as part of their monthly.
Administrations to church home app viewers.
So everything was filmed within three hours, but he needed to make it look like he was coming to you weekly.
So he had to have four fits.
So that's why he's changing tops, which I do think is relevant, but it's also interesting that they cared enough.
You could just film all four in the same shirt.
Right.
But why would you do that?
I have brought different shirts because I do weekly videos for my class, not as high production value as that.
Right.
But I have been known to bring two or three shirts because I'm like, well, I'm doing two or three weeks.
Right.
So, yeah.
And I spoke to them about it, and they were like, Yeah, well, it also has to do with the thumbnails.
If you're looking at the thumbnail clip, so they've thought it through quite a bit.
And I think they're correct.
So that's why he was changing tops out of a sweater into a vintage plaid shirt.
I think Judah's attention to Judah's clothing, which I do throughout the piece, also has to do with this the kind of millennial nature of who the high priests were and when they came onto the scene.
I might be sort of jumping ahead of your transition here.
I would love for you to talk about this because one of the major themes as I read it in this piece.
Is his location in time as a millennial mass media figure in charismatic Christianity that is distinctly millennial?
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you came to Judah Smith and how you came to identify him in time in this way.
Like many others, I have consumed other media I'd read about this category of good-lucking, at the time, younger youth pastors.
Chad Veach, Carl Lenz sort of really got the spotlight on him for reasons which we can get into in a moment.
And they all had an association with Justin Bieber.
I'd read these pieces when they came out and I lived in New York at the time and I visited Hillsong to see Carl Lenz sort of at the height of his plunging v neck motorcycle jacket.
I wasn't in a position at that time to get at him and write about him in that story.
And also, it might have, at the height of their powers, also was a little maybe even less interesting to me in a certain way or like harder to name without hyping it up to borrow a phrase.
So they were called lots of things, right?
Cool pastors, the preachers and sneakers and hype priestesses.
I can't take credit for that.
That was, I think, GQ that coined that phrase.
Excellent.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I was already interested in this category.
And Juden is a West Coast person.
I live in Los Angeles now.
He's from Seattle.
And he has their monthly ministry at Church Home, which is in Beverly Hills.
And I have a habit of going, basically just visiting churches all the time or visiting different places of worship, things that are happening in Los Angeles.
It is my kind of weekly pastime.
And so I visited Church Home a couple of times before I wrote about this and saw Haley Bieber in the front seat, the front row.
And I approached them that way, I guess, like by going a couple times and.
Also, this was post pandemic, and I'd written a lot about churches that had defied COVID lockdowns and stayed open.
I remember your Washington Post story on God Speak Calvary Chapel, which was led by a pastor and former mayor, Rob McCoy, and how it became this flashpoint in culture wars over COVID 19 restrictions.
And you wrote about how, while initially complying with shutdowns, McCoy reopened his church in defiance of state health orders and framed Those restrictions as an attack on religious liberty, and a lot of other churches like God Speak that defied COVID 19 restrictions.
It began to be very publicly aligned with conservative organizations that wed defying COVID 19 restrictions with religious liberty and really honed the political identities of conservative, predominantly white, charismatic churches.
Church home seemed like doing something a little different.
They'd shut down, but I wanted to write about it because I visited and it seemed like something interesting was happening still there.
And Judas seemed maybe more approachable now than he would have been at another time in his life.
And it still took a lot of back and forth with his media team and meeting with them and them vetting me and deciding whether, whether I was the person they would let in to hang out with him at the golf course and backstage and the kind of access that I require if I'm going to write about somebody.
Church Home: A Divergent Path Forward00:13:51
And listeners, you should also check out Sam's reporting on figures like Catherine Crick and Greg Locke and Clay Clark.
We'll put links to his article in the show notes.
But you really like to have a lot of hang time with people.
And that's part of how you develop these nuanced portraits of these figures, attending to a lot of those details.
That's really important to me to be able to have hang time that's like off mic.
I mean, these guys are never really off mic, but.
As close to a backstage as I can get.
And so once that was established, we were good to go.
I'm hoping that listeners will read your article if they haven't already after they listen to this interview.
But for those who haven't read it, can you explain to listeners what it's like to attend one of these worship services?
Yeah.
Church Home, like a number of LA ministries, doesn't have a brick and mortar place they worship, they rent out a theater.
Hillsong did this for a time.
They actually have a brick and mortar now, but Hillsong did this.
They actually did it in Times Square too.
Hillsong does this.
Catherine Crick, a person of shared interest, also does this.
A number of other ministries as well.
They'll rent out these old, beautiful theaters that dot Los Angeles, and they'll rent them for a night or for a morning and hold their service there.
So at this place, the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, which is where Church Home Visit holds their monthly church experiences is what they call it.
You will arrive and generally there'll be like a line outside.
The doors will be closed.
There'll be a pretty long line outside that might go around the block and you'll line up and people will be taking selfies and taking pictures under the awning.
There's a back entrance that to call it the VIP entrance makes it sound more velvet rope than it really is, but there's a staff entrance that people will come up in their cars and that's where the Beavers will often enter if they come or other people of more high profile so they can go right to the back to be with Judah.
and his team.
But the hoi polloi, the general parishioners will be up lined around the block.
And you enter into this beautiful theater, take your seat.
What follows is like, it's pretty familiar to anyone who's been to a sort of Pentecostal flavored evangelical service.
There's lots of worship music to begin, people standing and sitting, like kind of low energy in a way.
That is, people are not necessarily standing up.
They might be singing along.
The idea is that you can come and not really be familiar with church and not know the words.
And they talk a lot about that.
And then after some time, Judah will, after some announcements, come on stage and give his sermon.
And he's a really, really compelling performer, I think.
He has this kind of a meandering style.
I tried to spend quite a bit of time in the piece, like giving space to what it is like to see him perform.
And I give him credit for having this kind of vocal range where he can do a lot with sounding very quiet, sounding very loud, acting out personas.
He's rarely on stage when the worship music is happening.
That is, he's kind of just giving the message.
He comes out, he gives this message.
It's quite funny, often at his own expense, can veer into kind of vulgar territory, like a little transgressive.
He might talk about Weed strains or feet picks, or he's demonstrating his knowledge of the world that which he imagines everyone in the audience to be a part of.
And after he's given his message, he'll go back and there'll be some worship and then people will be off on their way.
What he'll do is he'll go back to the backstage where often there's like a smaller audience.
And I had a chance to be back there with a woman from Fifth Harmony, Ally, and her husband who was a part of Justin Bieber's inner circle.
That's where the Beavers might hang out.
So he'll go back and do his sort of chaplaincy work, which is often how I came to think about what Judah really does is ministering kind of one on one with more high profile people, I guess, who, who might not want to be out on the floor with all the other people.
And the church home parishioners will go off and they might go to a bar.
I went to a bar afterwards with some of the church home people and they'll have beers and talk about going to church or they might meet up at a taco place.
There's like, Extracurricular things that church home folks do, which listeners probably will recognize a lot of this from maybe ministries they've been to, or not all of this is unique to church home, but that's the church home experience.
One thing that I want to ask you about is about his like regional location.
So you mentioned he's from Seattle and now he has a sort of up and down the West Coast type of ministry, but you also talked about his performance style and you mentioned a black scent where he has a kind of like Southern Black Pentecostal type preaching style, which is weirdly common in this hype priest network of preachers.
I'm thinking of somebody who is Southern himself, somebody like Stephen Furtick at Elevation Church, which is another powerhouse kind of charismatic ministry.
And it's an odd thing to have.
I understand how a Southern white preacher who's been mentored by Black.
Preachers might kind of have a certain style of cadence that would be.
That you would easily attach to black church style preaching.
But Judah Smith is a little surprising if you know anything about Seattle.
Did you have a chance to ask him about that?
You observe it in the piece, but there's a weird kind of southern cadence that these folks have.
Where does that come from?
I mean, I can't put words in Judah's mouth about this, but I do know that he told me about who he studies, who he studied as a public speaker.
T.D. Jakes is someone who he.
Adores and someone who's been a mentor figure to him.
Mentored Paula White.
Yeah.
Lots of, yeah.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Just a lot of, a lot of sort of people with maybe like divergent paths now who picked up various things from him, stylistically or otherwise.
So that's somebody that he, like one of the greats that he mentioned studying.
I mean, I think they're right.
There's like a TD Jakes quality to it or a like a Southern preacher quality to it.
And there's also just like kind of generic like white bro black scent that is also going on.
I don't mean to disparage it, but like, It's functioning a couple different ways, I think, are how I observed it on stage functioning.
It's both the kind of revivalist Southern preacher, but then it is also acting out a kind of like a masculine persona or like a sort of street smart guy, like a persona he might be offering who's like down.
I think it is like the youth pastor wanting to appear.
I mean, you know, that was a cool one.
He's going to bring a chair out on the stage.
He's going to turn that chair backwards.
Just like, yeah, he'll be Michelle Pfeiffer in.
Right, right.
Dangerous Minds.
I'm really just trying to analyze how it's working, not to take shots at it.
That's how I observed it functioning in a couple different ways.
And I knew that I had to get that in the piece somehow.
And I had to figure out what phrases I could represent without it being like egregious, like how I could represent him doing a kind of a black scent, which he does, among others.
And you also had to do it.
I just want to like hats off to you because you had to do that for vulture readers as well, which is a whole other audience.
Yes.
So that's a complex task.
High five for that.
Thank you.
One of the questions that I wanted to ask you.
About that, is his audience.
You told us a little bit about the people who were waiting in line, and but that is just a fraction of the audience that Church Home has.
Who I'd like to ask who you think Judah Smith is talking to, and then who Judah Smith thinks he's talking to.
Maybe it's the same audience, maybe it's not, but who are the people who are engaged in this?
Right.
I can really only speak to Los Angeles and that's where I can speak with the most specificity because Seattle has been their home, still is their home in many ways historically.
And they had multiple campuses there, which have now shut down as a sort of restructuring.
But when they were called City Church, which is what his father, the church that was founded by Wendell Smith was called City Church, they have historic City Church Pacific Northwest Seattle people who I think have been there since it was when the rains were passed to Judah.
I imagine that's a slightly different audience, but.
The mandate of Judah among all of these, with all these high priests, right, is they imagine themselves speaking to a wider audience than their parents' generation.
But we can view that with some suspicion because all of these big Christian media companies that are supporting them along the way, TBN, CBN, whatever places they came up in, that are more Christian viewers than I think the high priests would like to think they're reaching.
The Church Home audience themselves here in Los Angeles.
From the people that I spoke to there, it's largely people who are involved in the culture industry writ large.
These are makers and creators and creatives and would-be artists who many, if not most of whom, have some experience with with Christianity.
They were raised in it or they've maybe drifted away, but it is not a wholly new enterprise to them.
I think that Judah in his in Church Home Would rather they be reaching the unchurched, the world.
And I think imagine themselves doing that.
But my impression in conversations I have with people there is that largely they're people who have some experience with it.
And here is a way they can do Christianity in Los Angeles that feels like cooler than it did somewhere else.
And they can show up in their designer wear and they can hang out with people who look like that and they can be among like minded people.
That's interesting to me because LA has such a long tradition.
Of doing that type of legacy revivalism.
You and I have talked about this in a number of contexts.
Amy Semple McPherson comes to Los Angeles and does a form of revivalism that a lot of people who've migrated from the American South to Los Angeles recognize and appreciate.
And that's in the 1920s.
And here we are in the 2020s.
And there's a whole new generation of people doing that.
One thing that I want to ask you is related to how Judah Smith's Articulation of Christianity resists the kind of political polarization that I would say is pretty dominant right now in the kind of major social media forms of revivalist engagement.
Judah Smith seems to resist political engagement.
Did you ask him about his political orientations?
I mean, for white charismatics and Pentecostals, right now the trend is to go far right.
Why do you think he doesn't do that?
I thought about the hype priests and when and how they entered into wider culture.
And this would have been in the 2010s, the kind of tail end of the last moments of the Obama, our Obama era, and Black Lives Matter comes out.
And some of these interviews, the early interviews with Carl Lentz, with Judah, with Chad Beach, and others, the line of questioning from journalists like myself in those settings would then question them on positions on racial equity, on same-sex marriage.
And I think to their credit, in probably the eyes of many readers, they actually adopted or they had relatively progressive positions on some of those issues.
And I mentioned in the piece, Judah Smith during the 20, in 2020, closing the church down, putting out messages about Black Lives Matter.
There were times that he and Carl Lentz as well were taking relatively progressive positions within their community.
The second Trump moment for them has been different.
And I think that they, widely, what I've seen has been like generally it's like a less engagement, a retreat from political language.
For Judah, he would articulate it as getting back to the real message of what we're doing, which is this singular, like atomized, he wouldn't put it in these words, but about the scripture.
I would probably put it in a kind of a therapeutic lens.
He's gone into this far more therapeutic language.
He just put out a book.
With his therapist.
So he's gone further into the kind of one salvation to a pod, a very atomized form of American religion, which is, if not dominant, then like a widely held approach to how religion is done.
He's done that, which has allowed him to not have to weigh in on what his people with whom he has had a history, say Liberty University or places that he associated with coming up, he can retreat into their own church home brand.
Therapeutic Language in Atomized Religion00:12:14
That's really interesting because you can see how it would allow him to exist regionally.
Because a far right form, well, it might work in Orange County, but it's probably not going to work in LA generally.
But he is, in many ways, and maybe there are others of his generation that are outliers in this regard.
Can you tell me a little bit about folks who are associated with Judah Smith who have?
Chosen to engage in a more partisan way?
Yeah.
I mentioned in the piece a couple of the younger generation, several ministers or media makers who Judah has been a mentor to and who attend church home and who are also in the Los Angeles orbit of Christian content creators, for lack of a better category.
Girls Gone Bible is one.
For the few people who may not know what the Girls Gone Bible is, Title is referencing here Girls Gone Wild was a series of late 90s and early 2000s videos marketed through late night TV that featured young women, often college age women, being encouraged to expose themselves or perform for the camera in party settings.
It became a flashpoint for debates about exploitation, consent, and the commercialization of early internet era media.
So, Girls Gone Bible invokes a let it all out, girl type of enthusiasm.
But in this case, for the Bible, not for sharing their bodies with people who are purchasing VHS Girls Gone Wild videos.
Yeah, totally.
I haven't spent time with them, but it's run by two women here in Los Angeles, both blonde women, telegenic podcast characters who have a podcast.
Judah's been on that podcast.
So they are testifying to, like, broadly, like having been in the world and come out of it.
They, you know, they have their.
Testimonies and they are people who have been in the worldly industry before coming into the Christian industry, but are very good on camera and on mic.
And so they may have gone wild in their previous lives, but they've gone Bible now.
There it is.
In their evangelism.
I mean, they probably have the capsule version better than we could have ever seen.
Probably.
I'm sure they've done.
Joining the Girls Gone Wild, the Girls Gone Bible.
But they have a very, very confessional style.
They'll really talk about the things they've been through and they'll cry on mic and their catchphrases, high besties.
They use a very zillennial or Gen Z language.
And yeah, Judith's been on their podcast.
I don't know if the markers we've given will do enough to say that there's a quality of it that's quite trad in their presentation.
And the one time I saw them in person was at the Make Heaven Crowded tour, which is the Erica Kirk tour that's semi-active going across the country.
And so they were speaking there at Greg Laurie's church in Riverside, another iconic figure in conservative charismatic Christianity in Orange County.
Greg Laurie is a prominent pastor and founder of Harvest Christian Fellowship, whose large-scale revival events and media platform have often aligned him with conservative political causes.
He's a well-known public supporter of Donald Trump, and he also served as a key figure behind the film Jesus Revolution, which dramatizes his conversion during the 1970s Jesus movement.
Yeah, totally.
So there are people with whom Judah might pal around or be on their podcast.
Here they are willing or enthusiastically joining up with whatever we can think of as this turning point USA post-Chelly Kirk's murder revival.
In this case, I mean a revival tour that's happening without wading into whether there is a revival or not afoot.
We'll leave that to the data scientists.
That's right.
Neither you nor I do that.
Right.
But there is a tour and it is a market as a revival tour and it is making heaven crowded.
The Girls Gone Bible girls, I think I can just call them that, were a part of that.
Another person who was also on stage at that event, another Los Angeles live streamer type named Bryce Crawford is part of the church home extended family who he's a live streamer, also podcaster.
He's probably best known for his man on the street evangelism.
So he'll minister to.
Scientologists, black Hebrew Israelites, pagans in Venice Beach.
He'll be like the young guy going on the streets.
It's a mixture of kind of internet genres, street interview, man on the street type of interview, and evangelism.
He's not necessarily like debating people.
There are versions of it where you will debate.
He's not necessarily a Christian apologetics guy, but he is a young, blonde, white man with very gen kind of feathery blonde hair and very white teeth.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
He's probably too young for them to be veneers.
We'll give him credit for.
For the deed, they're probably natural.
I wouldn't say call him a hype priest because he's of another generation, but he would look to someone like Judah as a mentor.
And there's even a famous sermon that he gave that he basically cribbed entirely from a Judah sermon to the point that it was like a thing that he was accused of plagiarizing.
He had to clarify when he had Judah on his podcast that he was just so influenced by him that he thought this was the best way to communicate the word of God.
And that's why he lifted those words.
Judah, of course, was.
Completely gracious about it all.
So, Bryce is someone else who also is kind of more comfortable, at least playing in that side of the pool with the more Trumpian trad side of kind of American charismatic Christendom.
And so, those are two interesting counterpoints to me in thinking about where the hype priests stand now in that landscape.
What's interesting to me is the role that Southern California is playing.
In all of this, there are these very prominent mass media voices that are going a long way towards shaping conservatism in the United States.
I'd like to take it back another generation and ask you a little bit about another figure in California who is actually making a bid for the California, the highest office in California.
I'm thinking a little bit about the multi generational qualities of these charismatic figures.
Charismatic on both senses of the term.
They're very intelligent and they're able to attract a lot of followers, and also they associate with charismatic Christianity.
They share the same set of practices, and they are, to greater or lesser degrees, interested in American public life and having an influence in American politics.
Cheon is a figure who will be very familiar to listeners of this podcast, who's currently running for governor in California.
And I think it's safe to say he is a father figure to many of the people that we've talked about so far on the podcast.
What do you make of this multi generational, his place in the charismatic lineage?
Does he have a lot of political power?
Is that where his power resides?
I'd love for you to reflect a little bit on Cheon and his place in all of this.
So Cheyenne is also somebody who I can't say that I have interviewed or spent up close time with backstage watching him pick out his outfits or considering the angles at which he wants to be shot on camera.
He thinks about it though.
He and his son, he might now sort of give some of that power over to some of the younger folks in his circle, but he has a pretty gentle stage presence there at Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, which I have been to a number of times.
I visited there during the pandemic when they were staying open and really, I don't want to say brawling sounds violent, but they were staying open and fighting lockdown orders.
And I think that gave them, among several churches, some of which I have written about in this area, were staying open.
And they formed a kind of a collective or a network then of Newsom defying churches.
So it makes his bid against, I mean, Newsom was not running, but it sort of feels like a spiritual bid against Newsom.
Newsom's out of office and now Cheon is stepping up to it.
I visited.
Harvest Rock, when it was, it was, it ended up being more of a fundraiser than I knew it was when I went, but it was just billed as a, a, some sort of service about, about his running for governor.
And there in, in support were Bill Johnson of Bethel, Gene Bailey of Flashpoint, the TV host, and all these people would, will be familiar to, to listeners of this podcast.
So the real sort of the NAR. Royalty, of which he is a member, mentored by C. Peter Wagner, who is also was also not far from where Harvest Rock Church is.
So it's all happening right there in that same Pasadena area.
And The audience, it was pretty slack the day I went, even with all those big dogs there.
They are, if Judas Smith is the aging millennial, and I don't want to be ageist here, but if Judas Smith is the aging millennial who is looking to the youngs as they out-trad him or they surpass him in kind of influence in some ways, as all of us must watch, I guess, as we age.
So if he's watching that, then these guys are really of another generation who I remain skeptical of what Cheon's bid for governor will look like with that in mind.
But he's taken the COVID position, it was obviously a very political position, and he has wielded his political power in lots of other ways too over the last 10 years that I've been sort of tracking such things, if not before in the Trump years.
But how he might wield that.
Within the state of California, it remains to be seen.
And we've seen other folks in this NAR orbit kind of make bids for state power, meaning Sean Foyt, also without success.
One thing I want to ask you about is to go back to an earlier question, which is who the audience actually is.
You've written a lot about one of my favorite articles that you've written is about Greg Locke, who is a Southern firebrand conservative figure.
You've written about Clay Clark in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
So, Greg is in Tennessee, Clay is in Oklahoma.
I wonder do you, is there a chance that Cheon is, while I think we both agree it's unlikely that he will be the next governor of California, is there a chance that he's communicating with a different kind of constituency?
And if so, who do you imagine that would be?
Different than.
I don't know that he's going to energize California voters in a way that would.
Even get him through the primary process.
Although, wouldn't it be interesting if I'm wrong about that?
Sam Kestenbaum's Reporting and Future Wonders00:01:04
You and I would have a lot to write about.
The world holds all sorts of wonders, and anything could happen.
The past some years, if nothing else, have been full of many surprises and failed prophecies of all sorts.
So, certainly.
So, anything's possible.
Well, if anything comes up, I'll see if we can talk again.
Thanks so much, Sam Kestenbaum.
Be sure to check out Sam's work on his website, samkestenbaum.com, and we will include links to his reporting in the show notes too.
All right, I'm going to ask Sam one more question about the reach of hype priests past and present.
Subscribers, stick around.
And if you are not a subscriber, today is the best time to sign up.
See the show notes to get access.
Thank you for listening to the Sunday interview at Straight White American Jesus.
I am Leah Payne, author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You, A History of Contemporary Christian Music.
Find me on most social media platforms at Dr. Leah Payne.
Check out our website for the content schedule and make sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date.