The Daily - The Pastors Being Driven Out by Trumpism

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Evangelicals make up about a quarter of the population in the United States and are part of the nation’s largest religious group. But lately the movement is in crisis.The biggest issue is church attendance. Many churches closed at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and struggled to reopen while congregations thinned.But a smaller audience isn’t the only problem: Pastors are quitting, or at least considering doing so. Guest: Ruth Graham is a national correspondent covering religion, faith and values for The New York Times.Background reading: Across the country, theologically conservative white evangelical churches that were once comfortably united are at odds over many of the same issues dividing the Republican Party and other institutions.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today, Kevin Thompson thought that he would lead his hometown congregation for the rest of his life. That's not what happened. That's not what happened. My colleague, Ruth Graham, on the story of how Trumpism is driving evangelical pastors out of their own pulpits. It's Friday, September 23rd. Ruth, what is the story of the evangelical movement right now in the United States?

Well, we're talking about the largest religious group in the country. Evangelicals make up about a quarter of the U.S., which is really a remarkable number. And when you think about white evangelicals specifically, you know, this is a socially and religiously conservative group. That's a core part of who they are. And in a lot of ways, this is a triumphant moment. They're thrilled that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. They've been working toward that for decades. So on paper, this is a really celebratory moment for them. It's a high point. But at the same time, when you kind of take a magnifying glass to it, in another way, it's really a movement in crisis. And why is that? Well, the biggest issue is that, you know, just because of the pandemic, church attendance is way down. Churches closed at the beginning of

the pandemic. They struggled to reopen. And a lot of people just didn't come back. Longer term, you have fewer and fewer people identifying as Christian, denominations are shrinking. So overall, you just have a real decline in Christianity in the United States. But for me as a reporter, the most interesting and surprising problem involved with all this is the fact that pastors themselves are quitting or at least considering quitting in really large numbers right now. And these are the people who have devoted their careers, their lives to church life and to spiritual leadership. They're the people you would think would be the most firmly committed to sort of staying in those church walls. And so that's a real shakeup that's happening right now. And how big an issue is this, pastors quitting?

Well, 42% of Protestant pastors said that they had seriously considered quitting full-time ministry within the last year. Wow. That's a newish survey by this evangelical pollster, Barna. It's a number that rose 13 points since the beginning of 2021. So it's really startling. Right. I mean, four out of 10 evangelical pastors saying that they're thinking of quitting definitely sounds like a crisis.

Yeah. of quitting definitely sounds like a crisis. Yeah. To see this looming kind of great resignation happening within the church is really, you know, it pretends big changes for churches themselves and for church life. And I wanted to go looking for a pastor who could really explain this to me, someone who maybe had left his position, someone who had gone through this, who had been in the trenches, been in the pews, and who could walk me through what exactly happened and what this looked like in his own life. And the pastor I ended up spending the most time with is a guy named Kevin Thompson. And what should we know about Pastor Thompson? I started talking with Kevin last year. Yeah, so maybe can you start by telling me, you know, about your family background in Fort Smith?

Like, how far does your family go back there? Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, I grew up there. Now, my mom was military, and so... He's a 44-year-old pastor, and he grew up in Fort Smith, this mostly white, middle-class, pretty conservative town in Arkansas. It was a great place to grow up, family-centric, church-centric. And Kevin is a pretty typical white evangelical guy. You know, I grew up, Reagan was president. I thought every president won every election, 49 states to one. So he's pro-life. He holds the full typical slate of evangelical beliefs. He's theologically conservative. He votes Republican. And from early on, church was a really big part

of his life. I mean, my earliest memories are sitting between my mamaw and papaw at a small missionary Baptist church and not understanding the preaching and not understanding whenever we sang a song why that guy was up there waving his arm around and trying to figure out what he was painting in the air. But just this extreme sense of comfort of that I was loved, that I was secure. And why did he feel that he belonged in church? His family life was a little bit tumultuous. His parents divorced, and church was this stable and really comforting, warm place for him during that time. When I was like 15, 16, started feeling kind of a call to full-time ministry. Preaching is really kind of the thing

for me. At an early age, he has started to feel this pull toward preaching, toward leadership. And then made that public in high school and started preaching at all the little small towns around there. And he's starting to take the skill of preaching more seriously. It's almost like a little old-fashioned, right? The youth preacher. Tell me how that sort of came about and what, you know, what you were like as a teen preacher. Yeah, you know, it's just one of those things. We're just trying to give you experience. Yeah.

So he's talking to Sunday school classes. You start doing it more and now you're kind of rotating around on Sundays. He's, you know, taking over for small town pastors on nights when they want the night off. And he's really starting to practice and hone his skills as a preacher. For the non-church person, the best way I can explain it is when your kid goes to work at Chick-fil-A or In-N-Out

or wherever you are in the country, they learn some skills that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. Same thing with me in high school and college. He's figuring out if this is the right job for him. You know, it's not just a calling, but it's a profession. And like any profession, there was a learning curve.

And I'm just outside of Shawnee in a little town called Bethel. And I preached one night. The pastor was very kind. He let me do a series of Wednesday nights, which is kind of a training ground, right? Because pastors don't want to have to preach on Wednesday night. And so I preached this sermon about how one way God makes himself known is through nature. And it just did not go well at all. I'm literally walking out of there going, I don't think I'm meant to do this. Like, if it's going to go that bad, I've missed God's call here. And so I try to get

out of there as quickly as possible. And the people were so kind, you know, they say things like, hey, you're going to be great one day, is basically there was that you weren't today. But very encouraging. And literally, I walk out that Wednesday night, dark as can be. And as soon as I step out, there is a shooting star, whatever comet, whatever you want to call it. It literally is so bright. My face lights up. And it disappears. And I look around and there is nobody in this parking lot. And I've just preached on how God can reveal himself through nature. Literally, my faith is illuminated and nobody else sees it. You just kind of have these moments of good and bad.

It teaches you and trains you. So after college, he decides to seek out formal training, and he heads to seminary. And there, he's really encountering people from other denominations, you know, grappling with other theological traditions. And he's starting to formulate his own ideas and interrogating his own assumptions about how he preaches. So he had a really close connection with one mentor in particular. His name was Robert Smith Jr. To my knowledge, seminary was the first time I ever had a black professor. And here was this professor who probably had voted differently than my parents in every

election ever. And yet he loved Jesus. He's a giant in this world of preaching. And he teaches Kevin some really important lessons. And what are some of those lessons? So Kevin talks about this moment where in class... You preach for like 12 minutes and then they review it. So I preach on Ezekiel 37, the Valley of Dry Bones, pretty famous passage. I preach on Ezekiel 37, the Valley of Dry Bones, pretty famous passage. He's giving a sermon to his classmates about a prophet who has this sort of dreamlike vision of encountering God out in this deserted valley, and God breathes life into these bones lying

in the dust. So, God is walking with the prophet and brings these bones back to life. And his perspective as he's preaching is sort of embodying the perspective of the prophet Ezekiel, who's walking alongside God and pitying these poor, dry bones that need God's help. And I sit down and getting good reviews from my peers, but they're obligated to say good things because I'm going to critique them at some point. So they're just buttering me up. But his professor. Somebody else.

He said, that's the most famous passage from the Old Testament in African-American thought. He said, you know, Kevin, in the black church, in the history of the black church— And never would an African-American ever preach that they were the prophet walking through the valley being corrected by the Spirit. You know, a pastor would never put himself in the role of the prophet in this story. Instead, they would always be the dry bones that God is rescuing in spite of the prophet. The role of the pastor and the people in the pews, their perspective would be the dry bones who are being brought to life by God. And finally, Dr. Smith says, Kevin, do you notice that every time you preach a passage, you're the person in power? He said, have you ever considered that you need to be rescued by Jesus? And it was just a really powerful moment to show how I view everything in Scripture as I'm the

powerful one that's doing wrong. I never see myself as the one in desperate need on the side of the road in the Samaritan story or the thief on the cross who needs saving. I never see myself in those positions. And that was a real light bulb moment for Kevin. He had never thought about it that way. He'd never seen himself as the person needing God's breath in the bones, the one needing the help. Yes, exactly. in the bones, the one needing the help. Yes, exactly. What do you think that means just to start to be able to see yourself in those more vulnerable roles? What did that do for you to have that aha moment? It's a blind spot I didn't recognize. And there's no way for me to recognize it unless a person with a different background experience and understanding could point it out

to me that I had been reading scripture through a lens that was incomplete and was totally biased by my culture. And yet I didn't realize it was biased by my culture. He had thought about, you know, what's my responsibility as a leader, as an empowered person. And he's preaching to people who are kind of similarly situated and then never put himself in those other perspectives. So now he starts to see this in a different way. And he kind of has his purpose to use his sermons, use the Bible to not just affirm the position that his congregants are already in, but to really challenge people's perspectives, to make them confront parts of their own belief systems and their own blind spots in a way that they might not have otherwise been able to see. You know, in the same way that he had just had his blind spots confronted.

Right. So to the degree that he is going to go before groups of people and tell them about Christianity, he's going to do it in a way that makes them put themselves in somebody else's shoes. Right, exactly. So instead of just comforting people, he might be telling them things that are going to make them uncomfortable and that that's a part of spiritual growth. So he graduates from seminary in 2002. By this point, he's married.

And he and his wife decide to go back to his hometown, Fort Smith. They end up at this church called Community Bible. So, yeah, we made the decision to come home, and with the understanding that I would be a teaching pastor, and that at some point, I would become the lead pastor. And it was a very loving place, and, you know, years later, somebody would say, hey, aren't you all the church for addicts? Because we have such a reputation of helping people. And I remember hearing that and going, yeah, that's exactly who we are. And so just kind of have that aura about it that no matter where you've been or what you've done,

this is a place where you can try God again or, you know, work out whatever you're dealing with and figure it out. And so... And so what's Kevin like as pastor at Community Bible? Well, Kevin decides that instead of assuming the role he had grown up with, where the pastor is a kind of authority figure, you know, delivering wisdom from on high,

he wants to be more approachable and to speak to people in a less lofty way. And so the approach that I landed on much more was, hey, I'm just a fellow guide. Right, a pastor of the people. Exactly. And Kevin really subscribes to that approach. This idea of you are just as messed up as I am.

And I have found Jesus, and I hope that you do as well. And it turns out to be a great fit with how he's been thinking about preaching throughout his seminary training. We've all had those nights in which the sorrow was unimaginable, in which the grief was overwhelming, in which the questions rose up in our minds of why, God? How did this happen? What have I done? He's been thinking about empathy, nudging people to new perspectives. They say that everything happens for a reason,

but they are wrong. Everything doesn't happen for a reason. Everything happens for a thousand reasons. Literally, God and his overwhelming love for us can allow something to take place and bring from it a thousand goods. And it turned out that this was really a recipe for success. You know, I came on staff to probably a church of 300 in 2002. And, you know, by 2005, we're up around 1,000 people. And by the time I became the lead pastor, we're probably running 1,100. Community Bible was booming.

The pews were filled. It was growing year over year. He felt really beloved by his church members. And this was the case for about 15 years. By 2016, we're up to 1600, and things are going great and having tremendous fun. We'll be right back. So Ruth, when did things start to change for Kevin at Community Bible? It started in the run-up to the 2016 election. So Kevin had this blog that he would write in occasionally. And it was just, it was another way to connect, another way to feel approachable. It was a way for him to noodle around with politics and cultural

topics that he might not be preaching on directly from the pulpit. So in the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump is getting more and more popular. And like a lot of mainstream Republicans, Kevin was really caught off guard by his ascendancy. He had grown up in Arkansas. So remember, you know, he had a very clear memory of being a teenager during the Clinton years. Right, because Clinton was governor of Arkansas. Exactly. So an Arkansas guy. I mean, the basic thing we were taught was you can't vote for him because of his character defects. And the character is a prerequisite for healthy leadership and biblical leadership. And he didn't meet it. And he remembered how the Christians in his church that he had grown up with, that he loved and knew very deeply,

had condemned President Clinton very forthrightly for his scandals throughout the 90s. That was something he felt like he learned from Christians, was how to think about a president who didn't have good Christian character. And then here we have Trump on the scene, who's this reality star, casino magnate, accusations of sexual misconduct flying. Everyone knows it. I began to realize that for many people, it was about winning. And here he is getting all this support from evangelicals. Because what we were seeing from so many at the time was, well, we're not trying to hire a pastor. We're trying

to hire a president. And so character doesn't matter. And that's just foreign to the gospel, foreign to the Bible, foreign to my own experience. So he decides to write this blog post about all of this. I was on vacation in Florida. And so I just wrote this blog very quickly. I mean, probably 800 to 1,000 words edited by my wife. She had some hesitation. Do you really want to post this on vacation?

And I'm like, yeah, it's pretty middle of the road. Saying, hey, we're in a contentious election. I understand people are divided. And if you vote for either major candidate, I get it. Don't be ashamed of it. It's fine. But for me personally, I can't vote for either one. It's not meant to be a divisive post. And I'm going to pick a third party candidate. I know they're not going to win and it's not going to be a big deal. He doesn't think he's throwing a bomb. And as generally happens in life, Jenny was right and I was wrong. It started a firestorm. And what happens? Well, you know, of course the whole congregation sees it. I remember sitting on the beach and I wanted to throw my phone into the ocean. I remember sitting on the beach and I wanted to throw my phone into the ocean.

And the responses are fast and they are nasty. It was the messages of how dare you? And where's your heart gone? And you're just in this for yourself. And you're leading this country in the moral decay. And it wasn't you're wrong, it's your evil. You know, he knew that most of the people in his congregation supported Trump, but he didn't quite understand before that moment just how much people's politics had blended into their faith and how they felt betrayed by their pastor saying that

he wasn't going to vote for Trump. That felt like a rebuke, no matter how mildly it was phrased. And by not voting for him, you're actually voting for her. And by not voting for her, you're actually voting for him. And this had become really emotional for a lot of people in his congregation. I think the most shocking aspect of that was the level of critique, and that's a very kind way of saying it, that I got from my former Sunday school teachers. And it really was a questioning of my own heart and integrity that I just never saw coming. I mean, it was really shocking to me. And for someone who thought he knew this community

and really thought he knew his church and the people in his church, he just felt blindsided. This is a bewildering moment for him. He was confused and he was hurt. I mean, 2016 was just crazy around the board. And so I remember around that time thinking, man, somebody should write a book about this. No, but it takes two years for a book to come out. We're through it.

It's over. Never realizing that it had only just begun. So Ruth, by the end of 2016, some kind of a rift has formed between Kevin and his congregants over the election. So what happens next? Well, for a long time, nothing happens. Life kind of went back to normal for Kevin, a community Bible. Trump is elected. And then in the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd protests, which are prompting a lot of discussion at Community Bible and in Fort Smith,

just like they are all over the country, some members of the church started wanting a stronger statement from Kevin and from the church about racial injustice. This is early 2020. It's a moment when a lot of white evangelical pastors have seen the George Floyd video, are appalled by it. And it does seem like there's this little window where there's some real momentum around the white evangelical church doing some reckoning over racial injustice. We have a congregation that has a much larger African American population than some of the other congregations of ours have. And literally, I'm asking some of my friends, how can we support?

What do we need? And hearing, we need to hear it vocalized that we matter. And then I just felt the need to say we need a more formal statement. So Kevin, once again, you know, he writes a blog post. And so the article basically said, you can't say the all unless you say the each. You can't say all lives matter unless you can say Black Lives Matter. In this post, he titles it, Why Our Church Says Black Lives Matter. Titles it, Why Our Church Says Black Lives Matter.

And I talked about how Genesis 1 and 2, we can clearly say Black Lives Matter. And he kind of walks through the phrase Black Lives Matter from a theological perspective. And he points out that no one pushes back when he says things like prisoners' lives matter or police lives matter or people with disabilities' lives matter. I have a child with Down syndrome, and nobody pushes back whenever I say that people with special needs, their lives matter. And nobody then complains, well, all lives matter. Well, no, no, no. Everybody knows that. But he writes, when he uses the phrase Black Lives Matter, suddenly that is this third rail and why. And he knows that in this part of the country, in his community, that the phrase is controversial.

And the Post is addressing that directly, that the fact that people would prefer him to say all lives matter. But it's a part of what he considers his mission and his approach to challenge the assumptions in his congregation. Right. In fact, saying Black Lives Matter feels like it very much harkens back to that conversation he had with his Black mentor, who said, see yourself as the bones that God is breathing new life into. He's having a conversation with his largely white congregation about seeing things a little bit differently when it comes to race.

Exactly. He's asking them to look at this really contentious moment in the culture and think, what would it be like to view this moment as a Black church member, as a Black American, and what does that require of us as white Christians in thinking through all this? And what's the reaction from his congregants to this post?

So... My fellow pastors are sharing the article, and I felt like it went fine. Once again... And then it kind of went crazy after that. It blows up. Again, now I've become a Marxist. Did I tell you the story about kind of a person I grew up in town who called me a Marxist? And there's a serious backlash in the community.

Somebody I went to school with, you know, we're in conversation and they bring up the Marxist idea. And I said, look, buddy, we've known each other for a long time. And you and I both know that we did not pay enough attention in high school to know what Marxism meant. But we told you I was a Marxist because you didn't come up with that on your own because I had to look up what it meant. And my guess is so do you. It turns out his congregants did not want to be challenged in this particular way.

And people were saying, you know, you wrote this post that says, our church says Black Lives Matter. You're putting that phrase in my mouth. And I don't use that phrase. I don't want it attached to my church and my name. At the same time, the phrase is being associated with Democrats. It's election season, which is 2020.

And all of this is really thorny and it's increasingly ugly on the national stage. You know, I go to a home group and I'm sitting there and, you know, one of the guys just looks at me and says, I am not racist. And it's just interesting to me that you can stand up on a Sunday morning and say, everybody in the room is a sexual center and there'll be tons of amens. Everybody in the room struggles to breathe. Amen.

Everybody in the room struggles with pride. Amen. Everybody in the room struggles with gluttony. Amen. Everybody in the room has some, some kind of bias in their lives. How dare you call me racist? So people in Fort Smith feel like Kevin is taking sides and he's taking sides

against them. And I had all these people saying, how dare you call me a racist? You called me a racist. No, I said, you're just as biased as I am. And you can't have grown up in this town like me and not have some biases. Now listen's listen, learn, and grow, and move forward. And yet that just wasn't something people could do. So for the second time in four years, Kevin is running up against the limits of what his congregation can accept about his approach to religion. I think that's right.

And he's also discovering, you know, that ideas like, don't criticize Trump, even from your perspective as a Christian, don't use the phrase Black Lives Matter, that those things have almost become as important and as true and as core to people's identities as the scriptural truths that Kevin has devoted his life and work to. But I don't think he even realized how far apart he'd grown from a lot of his congregation until a few months later when he was preaching. This time, he wasn't even trying to challenge his congregation. In fact, he said something he didn't consider at all controversial or political. Which is what? So, he's giving this sermon about the gentleness of God, and he has to throw out just a couple of examples of big celebrities as representatives of people who are

you know maybe admired but who are aloof and distant and you know the opposite of our kind and loving and accessible god so he's kind of riffing and he mentions oprah he mentions jay-z and he mentions tom hanks we just used him as an example as an everyman that everybody likes. But this too, to his amazement, ends up tripping some kind of hidden wire. And just got a couple messages

of one of them being very sincere of, hey, help me understand. Use this reference and here's all this that's going on, which I love, right? Versus another email, which is how dare you use this. And so, you know, with that one, it kind of gave me insight that there were some among that group who really had bought into it. of gave me insight that there were some among that group who really had bought into it. He's confused at first, but he pieces together that a few church members believe this QAnon conspiracy theory that Tom Hanks is the head of a Hollywood pedophile ring.

Wow. It sounds absurd to say. I should say for the record that it is not true, but he's getting a couple of messages really questioning, you know, what did you mean by mentioning Tom Hanks in this sermon? And I think what scared me was, you understand you're going to have a couple of French church members, you know, on occasion. I just wasn't really prepared for the number of people that had bought into it and would honestly believe it. issues like Trump and Black Lives Matter, now he's encountering some of these conservative beliefs that are basically the product of misinformation, kind of an alternate reality. Exactly. I mean, these are people that I love and that I'm at the hospital as their mom is dying

and I'm with them as the baby is born. And I'm just looking at that moment going, I don't have a clue how to pastor you in this moment. And it's even harder to counter because it's, you know, beyond a political disagreement, but it's really about the nature of truth itself. Where the moment we let go of truth, I mean, this is a characterization of God itself, truth. And the moment we let go of that, our faith is lost.

And Kevin is starting to wonder, how can I continue on as a spiritual leader in this moment how do I do my job when my job is to speak truth when you know I'm in this community and we don't even agree on what reality is did you feel in some way that you had failed if they're looking elsewhere for answers that you know did that feel like you had somehow let them down or failed to disciple in the way that you would have wanted to? Absolutely. I had 19 years or 18 years as a pastor of that congregation leading up to COVID and the racial tensions in the election of 2020. I had 14 years leading up to the election of 2016 to disciple people into an awareness of how to handle these issues, not agree with me, but how to handle disagreement, how to love one another well, how to decipher and discern truth and search it out for yourself. So no doubt it felt like a great personal failure at that moment.

moment. They wanted me to preach against those who are outside the room in order to rally those who are inside the room. And everybody inside the room ends up feeling better about themselves, but there's been no change or transformation. That to me is not Christianity. That to me is not preaching. So what does Kevin decide to do? So all of this has made for a really sad and confusing time for Kevin and his family. And he's wondering, you know, do I really have a role here anymore? And as that's happening, Kevin gets this job interview at a larger church out in Sacramento, California. It's not to be the lead pastor.

It's a different role. He'll be an associate pastor focusing on marriage and family issues, which is a real passion of his. And he thinks it over. He prays about it. He has a lot of conversations with his wife. And I told Jenny, if we leave here, this will forever be the sweetest ministry experience of our lives. If we stay here, there is a chance that it can become very contentious and bitter. And I just don't want that. And I literally think that we could do the hard work of leaving. And I just finally came to the conclusion that, you know what, this church would be better served to have somebody else saying exactly what I'm saying than me. And at the end, he decides to take it. And they've been in California ever since.

the end, he decides to take it. And they've been in California ever since. Ruth, at the beginning of our conversation, you said that the decision Kevin has made is a decision that many evangelical pastors are making right now, quitting their churches after basically finding out that their congregants have quit them. And when that happens, what kinds of pastors are replacing people like Kevin in a church like Community Bible? Who takes their place? So, I spent a lot of time trying to answer this question, and we're starting to see that a lot of the pastors who are thriving and the ones who are replacing people like Kevin are preaching in a way that really runs counter to Kevin's approach. They're picking up on these political themes and rather than trying to challenge their congregations or to add nuance, they're reinforcing their beliefs.

So here's an example. The pastor who took over for Kevin at Community Bible is actually pretty apolitical in his sermons, but he's from a family of pastors, and his brother directly challenges Kevin's philosophy in his sermons. Now, I personally believe that the church is primarily at fault for what has happened in our culture. All through my lifetime, the church has been busy trying to compromise itself, trying to make friends with the world, trying to be liked by the godless. Is it the way of the cross, this hyper-tolerance that you're now seeing in churches. And I don't mean the mainstream denominations that went off the track, went off the rails years ago. I'm talking about the so-called

evangelical denominations. And now you see the compromise in those churches. And he's part of a wave of pastors, including some in and around Fort Smith, who are encouraging their church members to sort of do battle against political enemies. Y'all, today we live in a time when we Christians, it is now time for us to quit being passive and start being aggressive, to quit reacting and start acting, it is time for us to fight fire with fire. It is time for us to fight the gods of this world, this secularism and this philosophy of humanism that those things that are destroying our nation today,

we can no longer be passive. Now has come the time for us to be confrontational. Now has come the time for us to be confrontational. Now has come the time for us to take a stand. They're reinforcing their own worldview on things like January 6th, on Trump, on election fraud. Our fake president who did not win, we know that. 2,000 mules proved it. By the way, why isn't the FBI on that? They got the J6, guys.

That tells me the end is near. So what does it ultimately mean to replace what Kevin represents with what these new, more strident pastors represent? I mean, what I keep thinking about is five years ago, someone like Kevin and what he represented was completely mainstream in American evangelicalism. You know, he might not have been as famous as someone like Jerry Falwell or, you know, these politically active TV pastors, but there were so many more Kevins, you know, at thousands of churches across the whole country. And for people in those communities, and again, that's millions of people, the core experience of what it meant to be an evangelical, it wasn't about voting.

I mean, they might have all voted similarly. We know this. That part of it is not new. But it's something much closer to Kevin's experience, closer to Kevin's belief that this is really about a personal encounter with God. It's about trying to be more like Jesus. And it meant that in those places, every Sunday for an hour, people were hearing messages about loving your neighbor, helping the poor, turning the other cheek. And we can certainly talk about how effective all that was and what it actually looked like, but you had millions of people in the room for one hour a week hearing

messages along those lines. There's something, this line I hear a lot from evangelical pastors these days, I get them for one hour a week and Fox gets them for 10 hours. And they're kind of joking, but they're kind of not. And what they mean is that for one hour at least, you know, I get to take them out of their comfort zones. Right. Now people might be getting an extra hour of exactly what they're hearing the rest of the week, and now it's from their pastor. So the person who was at the center of their religious life now is feeding them more of the politics and reinforcing their political beliefs. and reinforcing their political beliefs. You know, I think if you ask someone like Kevin why this matters,

it's that it's turning the church, this institution that for so many people is a place of growth, of community, of love, of beauty. It's turning that space into a place of growth, of community, of love, of beauty. It's turning that space into a place not where your views are expanded and challenged and where you're asked to become the best version of yourself, but instead a place where those views are really hardened. Well, Ruth, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you so much. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin began to make good on his vow to require hundreds of thousands more Russians to join the fight against Ukraine. Overnight, thousands of Russian men received draft papers, were summoned to town squares, and put on buses bound for training grounds. grounds. Putin has said that only Russians with combat experience would be conscripted, but at least one Russian journalist said that her husband, a father of five, had been called up despite having never served in the military. On social media, videos captured men across the country delivering tearful goodbyes to their wives and children as they boarded the buses. Today's episode was produced by

Aastha Chaturvedi and Stella Tan, with help from Lindsay Garrison and Rochelle Bonja. It was edited by Michael Benoit, with help from Patricia Willans. Contains sound design by Marion Lozano, original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, and Alicia Baetube, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it

for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.