Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits, problem solvers, saints, and heathens.

I'm your host, Andrew Heathen.

And today I'm feeling rather uncomfortable

because we're going to get into politics and religion,

the two topics that used to constitute the third rails of polite conversation

before we all decided to fight about politics all the time.

And we're not just going to talk about politics and religion.

We're going to explore the rather contentious idea that Christianity has failed democracy.

Hold on. Hold on. Calm down. Hold on. Listen, before we jump into that, I want to set the stage

for the two people that you're about to hear from. In my case, I used to be very, very religious,

as in I would visit monasteries for fun on vacation. I lost my virginity

pretty late in the game. And I rather thought that at some point, maybe in my 50s or 60s,

after a robust career as a full-time bestselling author and congressman, that in my third act,

I would join the priesthood.

Granted, I had pretty grandiose ambitions believing that I would fund my

congressional career writing science fiction.

Neither of these things happened, but I did kind of think maybe I'd become a priest at

some point.

It was on the radar.

But sometime in my 20s, religion kind of fell out from underneath me like a muffler on the highway.

You ever see a car dragging a muffler down the road and just kind of falls off on I-35?

Something like that happened to me.

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