The Dispatch Podcast - God and the Far Right | Interview: Mike Cosper

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Michael Warren speaks with Mike Cosper, host of the podcasts Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, to discuss ideological shifts in mass shootings, extremism among young conservative men, and the role of figures like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson in shaping narratives. The Agenda:—The Great Unbundling of Humanity—The rise of ideological mass shootings—Nick Fuentes and his influence—Christian Zionism and its implications—The future of the American church The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Dispatch Senior Editor Mike Warren. My guest today is Mike Cosper. He is a senior contributor at Christianity Today. He's the co-host of their podcast, The Bulletin, a roundtable podcast at Christianity Today. He was also the host of two other podcasts, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. I talked to Mike today about all sorts of things regarding young conservative Christianity, Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson. And we talked about Mike's Monday essay for The Dispatch,

The Great Unbundling of Humanity. Mike Kossper, thank you so much for joining me on The Dispatch podcast. I want to start by discussing your Monday essay for us. at the dispatch, the headline of which is the great unbundling of humanity. And it's a terrific essay, I think, for contextualizing and understanding where we are with the sense of kind of mass, politically motivated violence, maybe where it comes from. I'm just going to sort of very briefly paraphrase the idea that jumped out at me the most in reading this essays, this idea that the identities that we had as humans until sort of very

recently in human history were sort of unquestioned and maybe even sort of unremarked upon by us. We never thought about who we were in the world. You put this idea from the philosopher Charles Taylor. The questions like, am I a Christian or a Buddhist? What do I want to be when I grow up, where will I live? Those were questions that anybody was asking. Of course, those are questions that those of us in America and the Western world ask all the time. Our parents are asking us. What do you want to be when you grow up? Our peers are asking us those questions. We're asking ourselves those questions all the time. And your essay sort of acknowledges the very many positive elements of that, but there are a lot of negative elements as well. Things that we've

lost, trade it off because of that unbundling of identities. First of all, was that, was that a fair assessment of kind of that point? And can you explore it a little more? Yeah, I think it's exactly right. I mean, when you look at, you know, you look at a person born 500 years ago, they're sort of born into all of this. It's, it's given to them, in a sense. Whereas today, there's, you know, there's all these open questions. And, like, I try to say this in the essay as well. Like, there's a lot of good that, you know, as you mentioned, there's a lot of good that comes with that.

It's good that we can say, do I want to be a journalist or do I want to be an NFL quarterback or whatever? We can pursue these things, depending on our genetics in some cases, you know, not all of us can be NFL quarterbacks. But the, you know, the accompanying thing that comes with this is an enormous amount of anxiety because you're always faced with. I mean, the whole concept of like a midlife crisis is this moment in which a person sort of wakes up and goes, those decisions I made 20 years ago that got me from there to hear were

those the right decisions. And, you know, some people freak out and go buy a motorcycle and trade in, you know, spouses and that sort of thing, and other people have roots in, you know, institutions of meaning and communities of meaning and are more stabilized in all of that. But I think that's, I think that's a lot, it tells us a lot about the world that we're in, and it tells us a lot about, you know, particularly when you look at younger, younger people, the instability that's going on in those communities. Your essay is sort of pegged to a number of these,

these sort of shocking moments we've experienced, even many of them just in the last few months of politically motivated violence or seemingly politically motivated violence. There was obviously the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the murder of that Minnesota state lawmaker, Melissa Hortman and her husband. I mean, the list, the terrible list goes on and on.

Also, Brian Thompson, the CEO of United health care. These Israeli embassy workers as well. Exactly. It goes on and on. It goes on and on. One thing that's jumped out of me as well from your essay was the way in which you distinguish maybe some past mass shootings or sort of moments like those from the recent

past ones that I remember very far, you know, very, you know, very much far in my up in my head is, you know, things like Columbine, the sort of nihilism of those past shootings. And you contrast that with what we're seeing now a little bit. There's not a sense that these shootings are born out of a kind of lone wolf, you know, separation from community, but a kind of, they're done out of a seeking of a kind of perverted community, maybe that's not the right term, that people are finding online communities that encourage this kind of violence in reaction to all the issues in which your essay discusses. That does seem new, and it seems something that is born out of the internet age.

I think, first of all, I think Dave Collins' book on Columbine is a really important, a really important document for us to understand the whole mass shooting phenomenon in the first place. a big part of what Colin does in that book is he debunked so many of the myths that permeated the culture right after, you know, right after that horrible shooting, this whole idea that this was like, this was cult like, this was the Trenchcoat Mafia, this was, you know, an anti-Christian thing, all the rest of it. He basically boils the thing down and he goes, no, no, no, like one of these shooters was a psychopath and the other one was kind of a disaffected kid who was caught into the sort of whirlwind that this guy's, destructive ideas. So many of the mass shootings that followed Columbine were, in a sense, they were copycat efforts or there were escalatory efforts to sort of who can be the biggest villain, who's going to go down in history with the biggest body count, and who's going to be the most

extreme in what they do. The thing we've seen that has changed of late, you know, and I think the, I think the, I think the shooting at Annunciation Catholic High School, I believe was in August, as an example of this, is that people are going into these mass shootings with a political ideology. They have a message they want to send. So they're carving the messages into their bullets. They're writing them on the magazines that they carry into these things. There's a sort of a political valence to all of this. what I think has happened here is what's come together is sort of online sort of meme culture and really like a mob mentality, you know, this sort of rising up of like a mass group of people

who are angry and want to lash out and want to, you know, want to bring a whole heck of a lot of destruction to the mass shooter phenomenon. What can we take them from the mass shooter phenomenon that's going to get lots of headlines and get lots of attentions and, you know, and then make this an expression of these online mobs. And yeah, I do think that's, I do think that's new, and I think it's utterly horrific. There's something that I've been pondering about, and I don't necessarily, it would be something I would love to read more about. This is, you know, what sort of psychology and social psychology comes out of. this, but, you know, the idea that you're, when your community is not made up of people

that you see face to face in person, where you're looking in the eyes of the people in your community, you're talking with them, you're having conversations, you're having this, this sort of these physical proximity as well as the sort of, you know, community, that that seems to me is so much of what's missing from these online communities that are, you know, for whom these shooters are engraving messages on the bullets and leaving the manifestos out there, that there's a, there's something about the mob mentality that the internet is just primed for because it really anonymizes though people in that community in a way we don't get from our meat space communities.

What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a very interesting contrast. I, you know, like most middle-aged men, I've got group chats with my friends. Yes. You know, one of them devoted to the Indianapolis cults, another one, a group of guys at our church from my church that get together and talk politics from time to time. You know, if someone in either of those group chats said something that was, you know, suggested violence or suggested, you know, profound racism in one form or another.

Like, because we have, like this, like, for instance, my football, you know, my football group chat, I've known most of these guys since I was in high school. And if someone said something crazy in there, those other, the rest of us would show up on their doorstep the next day and go, hey, is everything okay? Like, what's going on here? What, you know, what's happening? Accountability. Exactly. And also just care and concern, you know, like this doesn't seem normal. Whereas if like the nature of online meme culture in Reddit and 4chan in these different places is it's always escalatory. Who can push the boundary the furthest? Who can make the harshest joke? Who's willing to sort of violate norms the furthest? So we shouldn't be surprised. I mean, given the nature of that, and,

And look, I don't know how you fix that. I mean, I don't know how you police chat rooms or whatever to say, okay, that joke was too far, right? But because these people don't have any association with one another, you know, they're all going about their lives. And there's no social cost, because it's often anonymous online, there's no social cost to saying the, you know, the escalatory thing, the violating. thing, the violent thing, the violent suggestions, you know, in one sense, like you can even contrast this now, I mean, not to sidetrack us, but, you know, when Jay Jones made those comments in his group chat, this figure in this most, you know, this recent election that took place on Tuesday, when he made those jokes in his group chat, his friends were going,

hey, man, I'm not okay with this. You know, this is going to come out someday. Like, this isn't, this isn't good stuff. And so all that to say, I think it's the, it's as much the anonymity of online life as anything else that allows this stuff to fester and, and grow in the way that it does. Well, it does seem if, if Mike, if you and I are not going to come up with a solution for this, the more that people talk about the problem, you know, is sort of the first step in in trying to figure out that solution. And it does strike me that there are, there is a lot more thoughtfulness about this, maybe out of necessity, out of a feeling that something has to change, then there had been maybe in the beginning of the Internet and the Internet culture.

I want to move on to something that I think is related, which is the extreme and stridentcy, the extremism and stridency, I should say, of the sort of conservative Christians, particularly young men that we're seeing. It's, again, I think that maybe an offshoot or sort of a less utre and an extreme version of maybe what we're seeing happen with these shootings, but no less concerning. If for nothing else, then there seems to be a sort of an acceptance and a broader acceptance of some things and ideas and statements that not long ago would have been thought completely out of the bounds of polite and respectable society. So let's talk about Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson. Just as a quick intro for people who are listening who are unfamiliar, people probably know who Tucker Carlson is, former Fox News host, who is now doing a regular podcast on X, formerly known as Twitter, and is really embraced over the last decade or so, a very extreme level of nationalistic politics. Nick Fuentes is a prominent neo-Nazi online.

He hosts, he's sort of a media figure, and he has created a kind of white nationalist neo-Nazi following, called the Groyper's. The size of these groups are, you know, of the Groyper's, for instance, I'm always a little unclear of how many there are, but they are influential and powerful. Talk to me a little bit about, well, let's just talk about Nick Fuentes first. How influential is Nick Fuentes among Christian, among conservatives, among young Christian conservative men is why do we need to even pay attention to him aside from this interview that he did with an obviously prominent person in Tucker Perlson? You know, it's an interesting question. I'm actually working on something.

So my day job, I work for Christianity today. I'm a contributor there, and I'm working on an article about this for them. If you had asked me how influential Nick Fuentes was 10 days ago, I would have said, oh, it's a fringe phenomenon. He's this online weirdo. You know, nobody's really paying attention to him, except for, you know, a cluster of white nationalists or whatever. What's been interesting in kind of looking into the phenomenon as a whole is this sense that actually, I think he has more influence than people realize.

I was talking to somebody who works on a Christian, very conservative Christian college campus yesterday. And, you know, she was saying it's surprising how much hold someone like Fuentes has for these young men. And she said, I think the reason that he has a lot of influence is because he, because he's wildly entertaining. When you watch him, he's funny, he's affable, he's engaging. He's saying horrific stuff. But, you know, it's that thing where it's one thing to be persuasive. It's another thing to just be good on camera. And I think Fuentes' gift is that he's good on camera.

And that lends itself to, you know, being the kind of person who ends up producing content that's easy to clip, easy to share, easy to promote and say, oh, well, at least this is interesting. And it draws you into his world. But as you said, you know, Fuentes is definitely, he's definitely a neo-Nazi. I mean, he's an unapologetic, you know, cheerleader of Hitler and has, has, yeah, I mean, he's plastered the airwaves with these incredibly, incredibly gross things. I'll say this, too. Back in, back in April of 24, I went to Columbia in the middle of the Columbia encampments. And this is one of the reasons why I take Fuentes a whole lot more serious. seriously than some people might.

When you ask a lot of conservative Christians about how influential Fuentes is, they're very quick to say, oh, he's fringe. He's not part of our movement. He's not us, right? It's very different, I think, when you talk to people who are actually college-aged and involved in this. The cinema go, like, I went to Columbia in 2024 in the spring in the middle of the encampment.

And a young conservative Christian guy, guy named Roy Wilson, who was a student at the campus. He showed me around. He showed me kind of what was happening with the encampment, where the conflicts had been, you know, what was going on. And it's interesting because Wilson is, Rory is the grandson of Doug Wilson, who's a fairly influential, you know, Christian nationalist pastor or whatever. And I made the comment to him, I'll never forget this. I made the comment to him. And I said, so it's got to be pretty tricky for you as the grandson of Doug Wilson to be at Columbia in a season like this. And he said this to me, he said, it is, but not for the reason that you think.

He said, you know, I am, you know, part of my family and our tradition and kind of where we stand. But when I go to the young conservative gatherings on this campus, it's full of, you know, hardcore monarchists, Catholic traditional, you know, Catholic integralists, these people who are essentially saying democracy was a mistake. I mean, he said, I literally went to a meeting one time where they were talking about how universal literacy was a problem and how most people, you know, most of the people around us should be out picking potatoes, right? So there's something going on, I think, among young, you know, and let's be real, like these rooms are probably full of young men, not young women. And it's the kind of people who are drawn into the influence of people like Fuentes. says, there's something happening there that I think is, it's cultural, I think it's spiritual, where they're gravitating towards these extreme ideas for a variety of reasons. Rod Dreher had a great piece on this, actually, this week on his substack.

And, you know, I'm not often in, you know, rabbit agreement with Rod Dreher, but I am on this. And one of the things he says in the piece that I found surprising until I talked to some other people who are on college campuses, as he said, you know, this is like 30 to 40 percent of young Christian men are sort of in sympathies with people like Fuentes who have these more radical sort of fascist adjacent or fascist ideas. It's something that I'm struggling to understand as well. You know, I've not been on a college campus as a student in 15 plus years. I, you know, just, just for, for your benefit, you know, I come from a Catholic tradition.

My wife and I were both born and raised Catholic, basically Catholic millennials. We raise our kids in the church. We, we try our best to sort of raise them in what I would say is a post-JP2, you know, cradle Catholic kind of home. and we both grew up in an area where we, you know, an area of the country with a lot of evangelical Christians, and so that's not an unfamiliar world to me as well. And my experience as a millennial Christian is that there is a lot of sort of pushback against both kind of boomer, the sort of boomer Christian melding of politics and,

and faith, a sort of a desire to kind of separate those two, even among conservatives, even along millennial conservative Christians who see that as maybe a mistake of the sort of, you know, post-moral majority era and a sort of, you know, almost return to the faith. You know, what's really important is not just, you know, not just the social issues, regarding abortion and for a time marriage, but also, you know, caring for the poor, caring for our neighbor, that sort of thing. And so it's, what's happening among Gen Z Christians,

particularly Christian men is wholly alien to me. It's something that I don't understand. Is it a reaction to what sort of my generation of Christians, of sort of attempting to be serious Christians were doing? and is it is it pretextual from from politics are these people just looking for something to kind of hang a radical right wing politics on what what is going on with young Christians particularly young Christian man oh man what a great question uh you have two hours uh to explain it all i need at least that much for the preamble um look so i i was a pastor from uh from 2000 to 2015, I helped plan a church in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was part of this church planning boom that took place at the time, and the church grew, and it was a lot of interesting things happened around it. But what you just described is exactly the kind of the ethos of the church

that we planted. It's almost like the Cold War ends, and, you know, George W. Bush gets elected, and there's this sense like, there's almost this sense that, like, the culture war is over, you know? Democracy won on the world. stage. Capitalism went on the world stage. George W. Bush is in office. Of course, there's a whole other valence to this, you know, related to terrorism and 9-11 and everything else. But it's, there was a sense that the church itself could really focus on, you know, what, what, what, theologically, what they often talk about is this idea of, like, there's primary and there's secondary issues. Primary issues are the issues of orthodoxy. Like, what is the gospel? How are we

to be saved, who is God, what are the things that will, you know, what are the things that are essential to understand about what it means to be a Christian and to live the life of the church. There was a real sense that that stuff was centralized and that the cultural war stuff was put on the shelf during the odds, you know, there's a real backlash to this now. I mean, one of the things that I find, frankly, baffling in the moment we're in. is that it feels like every time there's a, you know, some culture war battle, a lot of these, a lot of these sort of millennial aged and Gen Z as well, Christian leaders are who are, they're often very close to MAGA or tied to MAGA or they're to the right of MAGA, right?

Like they're part of this like more aggressive Christian nationalist wing. Every cultural war issue ends up being an opportunity to take a, swipe at Tim Keller. And for listeners who don't know who Tim Keller is, Tim Keller was, Tim Keller was the pastor of a church in New York City. You know, he planted it in 1990. He pastored it, you know, through the 90s, when the early 90s, especially, when New York was a pretty rough place to be. And, you know, after 9-11, there was this, there really was, I mean, this has been documented, there really was kind of a spiritual revival in New York for the, for the years after 9-11. And Keller was kind of the vanguard of that. But a big part of

Keller's platform, again, you're in New York City. If you're going to be a right-wing culture warrior, you don't do that in Manhattan if you actually want to build relationships with your neighbors and do things successfully. I think it's, I think it's accurate to say, Keller was faithfully a pastor of the Presbyterian Church of America, his theological commitments were very orthodox, they were very conservative, they were very, whatever. But he was also very adamant in saying, look, politics is complicated. People draw lines in different places. You know, we're not going to, we're not going to make that a dividing line inside our community. That's not acceptable anymore in a lot of the evangelical right. There's a real

backlash to this. There's a real sense. I mean, I see, I see a lot of pastors that I knew when I was pastoring that were coming up at the same time that I was, I see a lot of them these days saying, you know, essentially like, no, no, no, no, you have to tell your congregations that Christianity isn't, in a sense, it's partisan, it's sectarian. Like, we have to press into a lot of this kind of stuff. And I think what's interesting about it is that in the midst of that, in the midst of this kind of a rejection of a kind of generous vision of Christianity that made room for people across the political spectrum. As that's being rejected, there's also this no enemies to the

right attitude, this popular front kind of, you know, attitude on the right that has basically, I mean, it's the reason why Megan Kelly won't aggressively confront Tucker Carlson. You know, there was an event, I guess it was two nights ago. She won't aggressively. confront Tucker Carlson for his interview with Nick Fuentes, because ultimately, you know, Flentes hates the right people. Carlson hates the right people. And it's this grievance-driven thing that I think is just utterly transformed the way we think about politics, but it's, it's infected the church as well. Well, it strikes me that grievance and hatreds, this is not, I don't think this is original to George Will, but I remember George Will saying,

years ago, that, you know, the parties are how we organize our hatreds or organize our grievances, it seems like a very, if not healthy, it's sort of a natural way that politics works. It doesn't seem like the way for faith and for religion and for the church, and church is to operate. It brings me back to that question of what is coming first here? Are people, are young people looking for a church to fit their politics? Or are young people coming to their adulthood, their position and relationship with the world and saying, we want more radical Christianity. or, I mean, I think, I personally think that Christianity properly understood is the most radical idea, but it's sort of more stringent, strident, and I would say a farther Christianity

away from the teachings of Christ. Where are people, where are these young people coming from? What do they really want, or do they not know what they? You know, I think a lot of where we are, when you think about the embrace of a person like Fuentes, it's similar to the, you know, the ways, because in a sense, I mean, Fuentes embodies this, similar to the reasons that you find people embracing conspiracy theories generally, right? Like, why does somebody, why does somebody take hold of a conspiracy theory that, you know, the Jews are secretly in charge of everything or that there's, you know, there's these lizard people and they're, you know, they're shapeshifters. and they're running all of the most important institutions in our modern world. The reason you grab a hold of that, or the reason that grabbed hold of you, perhaps, is a better way to say it, is because you're looking for something that makes sense of a complicated world. I think for a lot of young people, like, to frame this as sympathetically as possible,

number one, they've grown up in, like, if you're in college now, the right wing, has been MAGA since probably as far back as you can remember. Right. So this kind of combative, you know, the, when we talk about like the degradation of public rhetoric that Trump has instigated with his sort of insult comic routines and all the rest of that, that's well established at this point for these folks. This is the only right wing that they've known. Yeah. Then on top of that, you get the COVID shutdown, which creates that, you know, for everyone created six months of traumatic social isolation for young people. I mean, it was, it was awful. I mean, Louisville was a fairly,

Louisville opened fairly soon amongst, you know, other stuff. But I've seen it with my kids and my kids friends. Like, COVID really, really hit these kids hard. Yes. Then on, on the heels of that, particularly if you're from a more conservative background or a more sort of right of center, right wing background, um, then you have, all of, you know, the transgender controversies that follow that, you know, the Lea Thomas stuff, the bathroom debates, the trans surgeries, like all of these, all of this stuff that just feels invasive and oppressive. And so we shouldn't be surprised, especially among young people on the right, that there's kind of a reactionary spirit given what, what they've experienced

over the last number of years. The danger is that a person like Fuente, who's a profoundly pernicious, you know, actor on the world stage. Like, Fuentes is well positioned to take advantage of that. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear-off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do.

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I usually drown it out with the radio. How's this? Oh, yeah, way better. Save on insurance by switching to Bell Air Direct and use the money to fix your car. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. This is where sort of a bugaboo of mine comes in, which is the Tucker Carlson element of it. And it's, it's, I would say I don't mean to pick on Tucker Carlson, but I do mean to pick on Tucker Carlson.

But, but he does, he's not the only one, I would say. And it turns to question back around on, on people like you and me and others, people who know better, people who have, you know, longer, life experience, have a wider view of all of these issues. And our role collectively, and specifically with Tucker Carlson, in kind of helping shape and guide the minds and hearts of young people. And so what I see Tucker Carlson doing in this interview with Nick Fuentes and sort of chasing after that audience, and I think that's the real word here, is sort of a dereliction of duty, is a irresponsible on a scale that's not just the things he's saying are atrocious, but that he's leading and affirming young people that this is

okay and this is how to operate or how you may operate in the wider world. Where does our responsibility as much as we might hate to think of it as elders to this younger generation and helping guide them right. What can we do? Or where have we failed? Well, on the where have we failed, I don't know because I don't know how many people were listening to us before this, right?

Fair enough. And I don't know how many people are listening to us after this. I mean, that's the other challenge in all of this, is how do you break through? Look, I think what's really important, and this is something that I've been focused on, and I've seen a number of others focus on this as well, is that we have to point to the ways that if Tucker Carlson is going to be a journalist

who, you know, as he said to Megan Kelly the other night, like, I wanted to platform these ideas so that they could be confronted, right? Then confront the idea, you know? You can't just have a neo-Nazi on your show. And when he talks about how he got blowback for saying things that were, you know, vile and grotesque, your response is not supposed to be, really, they did that to you? That was awful, you know? He, it was a, it was a flattering. I heard a number, I think I probably heard three different people refer to it as like,

it felt like flirtatious, like, not sexually, but just like, in the sense that, like, he was, he was trying to draw a nick in. He was trying to sort of bring him into the, you and I are the same, I think, would, was kind of the underlying message. And, well, and then the explicit message at one point being like, hey, I'm sorry, I called you gay, you know. Right, right, right. There was a lot happening in that interview.

But I think, again, like, I think, I think the key to all of this is if the conservative movement actually has a pretty good track record of at important moments and important inflection inflection points in the 20th century. country, when anti-Semitism erupts, they push the anti-Semites out, they push the birchers out, they pushed Pat Buchanan out at a certain point. This is a moment where the movement as a whole, and I imagine we'll get to this, but the movement as a whole needs to react to this and say, like, we can't normalize, you know, a person like Fuentes, but not only can we not normalize a person like Fuentes, we also can't normalize the people

that are trying to normalize him. And the problem with Tucker is, like, Tucker is a fixture. I mean, one of the things that it has driven me absolutely nuts since this thing erupted as a controversy is people who are going online and saying, well, Tucker Carlson's fringe, I'm sorry, you can't call a guy who spoke from the platform at the, you know, at the GOP convention last year, who spoke from the platform at Charlie Kirk's funeral, the biggest, you know, right-wing event of the year. You can't call that guy French.

Tucker is not French. And Tucker is pulling, he's not only pulling Nick Fuentes in. He's pulling Daryl Cooper in. He's pulling Muntler Isaac in. He's pulling a bunch of people who have pushed profoundly anti-Semitic ideas into the mainstream. And, you know, and then lots of people, again, I've mentioned Megan Kelly. Imagine we'll talk about Kevin Roberts here at some point. You know, heritage, like people are trying to basically.

say, hey, we, we stand with Tucker. That's, that's not going to yield anything good for the right. Yeah. And, uh, I've written about this. You're writing about this. The, the whole blow up what heritage, um, on the one hand seems like a, a sort of, uh, a concern of elites or a small group of people. And I've seen that criticism even, um, the things that I've written about this. So this is, this is small. This is, this is limited. Um, it doesn't, have larger implications. I strenuously disagree and I would defend that this is a big deal because of not only sort of it is a reflection of other fights that are happening between more traditional conservatives and the folks who would allow for the nationalists and the

white nationalists and the Christian nationalists to sort of take over. But also, you know, you described who Tucker is bringing in, but it's also who is he connected with within the mainstream. And, you know, you can say Vice President J.D. Vance is one of those people. You know, it is, it is no coincidence that J.D. Vance's, one of J.D. Vance's staffers at the White House is Tucker Carlson's son. There is a lot of crossover and connection here. whose name is Buckley, right? That's correct. Buckley calls him. I mean, he's renounced William F. Buckley in the last few years, but his son's name is Buckley. I find that really interesting.

You know, people change, Mike. People change. I guess he can't change your name, or maybe you can. But this all, it all comes back to, to me, you know, this lack of responsibility, this idea that the adults in the room who ought to be sort of standing up as, say, Robert Rector did, I think I and others are reported on what happened in this private meeting at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, a 40-plus-year veteran of the Heritage Foundation standing up and saying what you just said, look, conservatives have put up guardrails against cranks and anti-Semites for as long as we've been a movement, we can still do it. Instead of doing that, a lot of the leaders are almost chasing after these young people. But that brings me to something I want to ask, and maybe we can close on this, or I would love to hear your thoughts on Heritage, but something that struck me listening to some of the defenses of Tucker Carlson and of Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, who defended Tucker Carlson, were that, you know, the defense of Israel writ large.

that Christian Zionism, which again is a term I don't think I've ever heard quite defined of what it means and who is one and who isn't, that that's a heresy, this is a modern heresy. A young woman actually stood up in the Heritage Meeting and said that in defense of Kevin Roberts. It's something that Tucker has said as well. It sounds to me like TikTok speak, and I don't mean to sound like an old man going, what are they kids doing on TikTok? but it does seem like there's a lot of influence and that young people are getting a lot of their sort of buzzwords

not from reading, not from reading The Dispatch, for instance, over Christianity Today, but from what they hear on TikTok, wherever you want to take that, I'd just love to hear your thoughts and kind of where these ideas are coming from. So I think this is a huge question, actually. So let me wind up here a minute, because I really care about this issue. So I think, first of all, what is Christian Zionism? Christian Zionism, Christian Zionism is first and foremost not a doctrine. It's not a dogmatic issue. It's not a,

it's not a theological question. It's a political question. Do the Jewish people have a right to return to their homeland? Right. If you say yes to that question, you're a Christian Zionist, period. The reasons you might, you know, argue for that might be theological. They might be political. I come from a more reformed tradition, but I grew up in a dispensational tradition. And in Christian dispensational theology, and I won't get, you know, I won't bore listeners with the details of this except to say dispensational theology was very prominent in the late 20th century. and it was it was very influential in kind of a broad general sentiment among evangelicals towards Christian Zionism. Probably the foremost expression of that theology was a series of books that came out, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s called The Left Behind series, which led to a series of movies. You know, Kurt Cameron started the first version of it, and then Nicholas Cage actually started in the Rebels.

make, you know, the second iteration of the left behind cinematic universe. And I think it's important to mention because I think there was, you have this cultural phenomenon around left behind, and then I think you have this backlash to it, almost an embarrassment about, you know, well, that's not the Christianity that I want to represent. So there's a, there's a distancing from it. At the same time that that's happening, you have the Iraq war, right, which I think most millennials look at the Iraq war as a profound mistake, and, you know, it was problematic, and it was a bad expression of American power and all the rest. So, meanwhile, under the surface, especially among sort of elite evangelicalism,

the Evangelical Academy, places like Wheaton College and Calvin College in the 2000s, you have the influence of a kind of anti-Israel Palestinian liberation theology that has had a profound effect, again, on evangelical elites. So the church as a whole is in a very different place today than it was 25 years ago when it comes to its thinking about Israel. Now, you know, for Tucker to call Christian Zionism a heresy, I'm not exactly sure. where that's coming from. I imagine we could probably source that. Frankly, I imagine we could probably source that in some of these Palestinian liberation theologians. He's had one on, Mitri Rehab, who's a very prominent writer on this. I'm not positive that that's where he got

that from, but I would imagine it's probably in the vicinity of Mitri and, or sorry, not Mitri. Muntur Isaac is a theologian that he's had on that I imagine is where he has sourced some of that. But the point being that I think what you have now is you have this cultural background of a sort of a general ambivalence about, you know, the church's relationship to Israel, America's relationship to Israel from these cultural factors. And then you have the fact that everybody under the age of 25 lives on TikTok. And there's been really solid reporting, including reporting at the dispatch, that has, you know, looked at the, you know, looked at the, these algorithms and the fact that there's a profound anti-Israel bent to all of this, that's going to affect young Christians as much as it's going to affect anybody else. Look, I think Tucker has, in a sense, sort of preyed upon this,

prayed upon this cultural shift in a way that has frankly gone to his benefit in the sense that people who are tapped into young people on campus, they at least are probably more hesitant today to be pro-Zionist than they were, you know, 15, 10 years ago, maybe five years ago because of how effective all of these shifts have been in changing that sentiment. Well, Mike, I feel like we could talk about this again for another two hours, But I want to sort of end our conversation today by asking about where you think this is leading the American church and the institutions that make up the American church. Is there a parallel to what we saw sort of the starting at the end of the 20th century with you could argue on sort of the political left side of things where the embrace of the mainline Protestant churches of a sort of more liberal. approach, you saw that precipitous and steady decline in church membership. Are we going to

see something like that in the evangelical Christian, conservative Christian space? Or is this generation really the next generation and we'll be shaping what the church looks like in the next decades to come? How do you see it? Yeah, I think it's hard to say, you know, these reactionary movements, you don't know how far they're going to go, you don't know where they're going to burn out. There's solid evidence to suggest that reactionary movements inside the church are often short-lived, you know?

And the church does have, you know, because it is, it can't get away from the Bible, it can't get away from the doctrines of its denominations regardless of who they are. It can't get away from certain course-correcting values, I think. That said, I mean, it can sometimes take a long time for these things to burn out. I mean, what's happening inside the church is happening inside the culture as a whole

in a, you know, in a much broader, in a much broader way. The church has a, the church has a challenge with young men who are being drawn to these kinds of ideas. So is the rest of the culture. They have a problem with young men. um the church has a problem with polarization the the church has a problem with sort of you know politics consuming all of life i i think we're we're a decade into sort of this this trump area this this trump era and what's like one of the things you can't deny about trump love him or hate him like trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of the culture and the culture is about trump he's he's master in this. And so, you know, the, the extent to which I think a lot of this stuff has sort

of leaned in his direction is, well, the extent to which a lot of this stuff has leaned in a political direction is a reflection, you know, a very direct reflection of the influence that he has had. The fact is that I'm not persuaded by Steve Bannon. I think Donald Trump has term limited. I think he is going to withdraw from the public scene in 28. I mean, there might be a gesture or two. He's, you know, performative gesture or two on his part between now and then that, you know, we'll lean in a different direction. But ultimately, I think he will withdraw by then. And I don't think there's a figure on the national political stage that can command detention the way that Trump has. I think this is a very unique figure. This is somebody we won't see the like of in our lifetime. Not in the sense of him being a great man of history necessarily, but more in the sense of like, this is a P.T. Barnum, like that he's a master of capturing our attention. And I think his withdrawal from the public scene will be good for the church because it will, it'll free the church from having to, you know, steer itself in the direction

of these kinds of politics. I say all that to say this. I think when it comes to young people, the most important thing for those who are concerned about them is, number one, patience. We all had dumb ideas when we were in our early 20s, you know. We all said things in our early 20s that we look back on and go, yeah, I wish I'd tempered that. And, you know, there's, Hannah Arendt has this great line where she says, basically, like, if you don't have, if you don't have a principle of forgiveness, you don't have a culture. And I think that's true for us as well. There are people who are grasping onto this kind of stuff right now where a few years from now, they're going to have to offer their mea culpa's. And we need to accept them when they do.

In the meantime, I think the urgent thing for us is just to continue to the best, you know, the best of our ability to tell the truth as we see it. I agree. My quota to all that is we've talked a lot about young men. And my sort of hopeful note on this is that it's a sort of a gesture and an ideology that does not attract a lot of young women relative to the young. young men. And if there's anything I know about young men, it's that a lot of times they will follow where the young women go out of biological necessity of it for nothing else. Yes. Amen to that. Well, on that, I think, hopeful note on what is, I think we would agree, a dark and distressing subject. Mike Cosper, thank you so much for joining me today on the Dispatch

Podcast. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. I'm going to be able to be.