Know Your Enemy: Strange Gods and Strong Gods, with Tara Isabella Burton
Know Your Enemy: Strange Gods and Strong Gods, with Tara Isabella Burton
Matt and Sam talk to Tara Isabella Burton about the spiritual longing behind today’s politics.
Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe, rate, and review to the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.
There’s been no shortage of commentary on the rise of the “nones,” those Americans who claim no religious affiliation, a trend especially notable among younger people. But that doesn’t mean we live in a secular age. Matt and Sam talk to Tara Isabella Burton about her new book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, and the way our search for meaning and the need for ritual has met our neoliberal economic order. What does this spiritual churn mean for our politics? Why do reactionary ideas find a ready audience among those disillusioned with modern life? We take up these questions and more in a wide-ranging conversation about the way we live now.
Further Reading:
- Tara Isabella Burton, “Christianity Gets Weird” (New York Times)
- Daniel José Camacho, “The Racial Aesthetic of Burton’s ‘Weird Christians’” (Sojourners)
- Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t)right?” (Claremont Review of Books)
