Good-day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you.

The institution that is best equipped to defeating Trumpism, to shoring up traditional anti-Trumpist American traditions of pluralism and tolerance,

civility, reason, forgiveness, and of rescuing Western civilization from splitting apart into

squabbling echo chambers of irrationalism, the institution best placed to do such things, to pull off the impossible, to save us all,

is the evangelical church that helped turbocharge Trump in the first place.

And furthermore, the claim is that the people whom secular liberals like myself should form alliances with

to save us all are white conservative American evangelicals. Well, that's a claim that

pricked my ears up, to say the least, as someone who generally thinks of institutionalized

religion as being part of the problem, not the solution to most of what ails us in the West.

But when the man making the case is a man as wise as Jonathan Roush, I listen. He has a new book,

Jonathan. It is entitled Cross Purposes, Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy.

And I first invited Jonathan on the show

many months ago, actually, when I was thinking about the people who I wanted to speak to

around inauguration time, because I thought he would be fascinating to hear a pine about

Trump 2.0 and what we might expect the impact of a second Trump term to be on America's

institutions, on the institutions

of liberalism, on American tolerance and pluralism and diversity.

Jonathan is an expert, if you don't know him, he's a journalist, but basically an expert

thinker in how we can all get along and how the institutions of American democracy help either buttress or

undermine our ability to get along and our ability to progress. His book before this one was also

a terrific book. It's called The Constitution of Knowledge, a Defense of Truth. And when that was

released, Sam Harris and I both interviewed Jonathan on Sam Harris's podcast,

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