I Thought I Was a Doctor: Trump, the Pope & the Most Chaotic Week in Religion News with Diana Butler Bass

About this episode

Diana Butler Bass joins Dr. Tripp Fuller to discuss the chaotic week in religion news, touching on topics from Trump to the Pope and the implications for American Christianity.

It's Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass on Tax day! Also, apparently, the day the Vice President told the Pope to stop doing theology. Diana Butler Bass joined me for what was supposed to be a casual religion news roundup and turned into something I didn't entirely expect — a full-on church history seminar about what happens when empire tries to silence the gospel and why it never actually works. We started where everyone started this week: JD Vance, a newly minted Catholic who received what sounds like the Peter Thiel E-Z Pass lane through RCIA, publicly suggesting that the Pope — the Pope — should think more carefully before opining about theology. The same Pope who then responded to a Pentagon threat referencing the Avignon papacy by giving an even stronger anti-war speech. We talked about Trump's Easter posts, the Jesus meme, the "I thought I was a doctor" explanation, and the remarkable spectacle of evangelicals — evangelicals — saying the president might be demon-possessed. But Diana being Diana, she kept pulling the historical threads, and we ended up somewhere genuinely useful: the long story of how American Christianity split the sacred from the secular, why that…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Tripp Fuller

Guest: Diana Butler Bass

Topics covered

• religion news
• church history
• American Christianity
• theology
• politics and religion
• Easter
• empire and gospel

Keywords

• Trump
• Pope
• Diana Butler Bass
• JD Vance
• Easter
• theology
• American Christianity
• empire
• gospel

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Pentagon, American Christianity

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