Culture, Faith and Politics with Pat Kahnke

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer biographer turned evangelical Trump defender, reveals the bizarre reason he flipped from Never Trump to MAGA in his debate with Ross Douthat — exposing the shallow theology behind Christian nationalism and evangelical support for Donald Trump. Pat and Adam argue this is an embarrassingly shallow and vapid foundation for a Christian intellectual — reducing character to "mean tweets" while diminishing the absolute wickedness of policies grounded in a self-absorbed and vengeful character. It's the Fruit Test (Matthew 7:16) in real time: stated Christian values vs. documented behavior, and the classic MAGA seduction of trading moral substance for owning the libs.

Trump's trade war with Canada gets even dumber as Trump pushes renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America and reignites the Great Lakes fight, while Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty says on Morning Joe she has enough evidence to make a charging decision in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Jenn Pennington joins to discuss her guest essay "What Assimilation Cost Us And the benefits of recovering intergenerational narratives" — how America's push for "One Country, One Flag, One People, and One Speech" led to a catastrophic loss of culture and language, why that history fuels today's loneliness epidemic, and how recovering intergenerational storytelling and genealogy can rebuild belonging, identity and resilience.

In Part 3 of my interview for his new book, No Prophets, Huffman explains how a fringe end-times theology became the carpet of the MAGA movement: the belief that the modern state of Israel must expand and trigger the end times — with Jews as a means to an end who must ultimately convert. We get into what most Christians never tell Jewish allies (the fine print), why Speaker Mike Johnson says "there is no West Bank," how Ambassador Mike Huckabee can claim Israel can take "the entire Middle East," and why Sen. Ted Cruz says Genesis settles foreign policy.

In Part 2 of my conversation with Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA), author of No Prophets, we expose the "shadow theocracy" operating inside the U.S. government: the Capitol-based ministries shaping policy, Speaker Mike Johnson's theology of power, and Russell Vought's plan to turn the federal government into an instrument of Christian dominion — the blueprint behind Project 2025. Is the separation of church and state quietly being dismantled from the inside? Huffman maps the machinery — who's funding it, who's staffing it, and what it means for American democracy when theocracy stops being a metaphor.

In this clip from Tuesday's live stream, Pat and Ken discuss the passing of Dolly Parton and how the legacy she leaves behind was defined by her actions, not what she claimed to be.