Truce - History of the Christian Church
Truce explores the history of the evangelical church in America, from fundamentalism to pyramid schemes to political campaigns. Host Chris Staron uses journalistic tools to investigate how the church got here and how it can do better. The current season follows the rise of the Religious Right, examining the link between evangelicals and the Republican Party. Featuring special guests like Rick Perlstein, Frances Fitzgerald, Jesse Eisinger, Daniel K. Williams, and more.
Episodes
April 8, 2025 • 28 mins
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Milton Friedman is one of the most important economists of the last hundred years. His ideas were quoted by many evangelical writers in the 1970s and 80s, despite his not being a Christian and few of his ideas being in the Bible. Figures like Jerry Falwell loved the guy. Ronald Reagan adopted many of his ideas, though they disagreed on things like the increasing national debt. Friedman play...
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March 25, 2025 • 38 mins
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Milton Friedman may be the most famous American economist. His research and theories have profoundly shaped the modern American economy. But few of us can clearly articulate what he taught and what it means for our times. Friedman's career was defined by the aftermath of the Great Depression. He worked in the government administering the New Deal, but never really agreed with it. He joined the faculty...
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March 11, 2025 • 17 mins
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William F. Buckley Jr. helped change the face of conservatism in the US because he gave it intellectual backing. But that doesn't mean that his ideas were accepted completely. He had several nemesis within his own movement that tried to derail him.
One opponent was the John Birch Society. Buckley's whole modus operandi was to make conservatism respectable. But Robert Welch and other members of the JBS ...
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March 4, 2025 • 44 mins
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Senator Robert Taft couldn't get the nomination. He tried to be the GOP's nominee for president three different times but could not get elected. Conservative Republicans' failure to get nominated by their own party was a source of much frustration. What could they do? Concerns of conspiracy spread through people like Phyllis Schlafly whose book A Choice Not an Echo claimed that "elites...
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February 18, 2025 • 43 mins
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In the first part of our series, Chris explored the beginning of Barry Goldwater's career, from his early days as a young man to his rise to the Senate. In the second episode, Goldwater still hasn't agreed to be the nominee, even though groups are raising money in his name.
One of his most valuable supporters was a woman named Phyllis Schlafly. In 1964 she published a small book, A Choice Not an Ec...
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February 4, 2025 • 39 mins
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Barry Goldwater may be one of the most interesting figures in Republican history. He grew up the son of a wealthy department store owner. He was a city council member and then a senator from Arizona. He was handsome and took pictures with guns and cacti. Goldwater was also a libertarian who wanted a small government and low taxes.
His platform was laid out in a ghostwritten book Conscience o...
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January 21, 2025 • 44 mins
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Robert Welch was a candy magnate who invented the Sugar Daddy and sold favorites like Junior Mints and Milk Duds. He was also very anti-communist. His dubious research led him to found the John Birch Society, a group whose mission was to spread conspiracy theories worldwide. They had major support from wealthy men like Fred Koch, father of the Koch brothers (who financed opposition to Obamacare and cl...
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January 7, 2025 • 63 mins
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Modern evangelicalism sometimes incorporates pieces of different ideas. Things that are in the air. Social messages. Political stances. But has evangelicalism been enchanted by libertarianism?
In this episode, we cover a brief history of libertarianism. What is it and who are some of the main thinkers? We discuss Murry Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Robert Nozick.
What is a libertarian? M...
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December 17, 2024 • 43 mins
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Well, we survived the 2024 US presidential election! But many people still feel anxiety as we head into the Christmas and New Year holidays. How can Christians prepare for a holiday season when politics will likely arise?
Chris Staron is joined by Karl Klemmer, Nick Staron, and Ray McDaniel at First Baptist Church in Jackson, WY to discuss these issues and more. Plus Chris talks about his own anger a...
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December 3, 2024 • 47 mins
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How do ultra-wealthy people avoid paying taxes? It seems like a strange subject to bring up when discussing why some evangelicals are drawn to the Republican Party. But many of the ties between evangelicals and the GOP have to do with money. So, let's take a little side trip and explore the tax loopholes of today. More importantly, let's try to understand why so many Americans are tax-averse. Could it ...
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November 19, 2024 • 29 mins
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It all started with a meeting over fancy donuts. Paige Patterson and a friend met together to plot the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Before that time, the SBC had been more theologically diverse (though, not necessarily racially diverse due to its founding as a group that desired slavery). But if this group of fundamentalists was going to get a whole denomination to t...
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November 4, 2024 • 41 mins
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What are the warning signs that a church leader will become a tyrant? How do we prevent church hurt from becoming our identity? What are ideologies and how do they become the overall focus of some ministries?
Mike Cosper is the co-host of Christianity Today's The Bulletin podcast, the producer and host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and now the author of The Church in Dark Times.
Discus...
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October 29, 2024 • 18 mins
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In the Kanawha County Textbook War episode, Chris shared that the people of that county fought against some textbooks and stories being read in classrooms and as homework. Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado is one of the texts that was contested.
So Chris decided to read it here as a bonus episode at the end of October. Enjoy!
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October 22, 2024 • 53 mins
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Frances Schaeffer is one of the most important theological thinkers of the 20th century. He urged fundamentalists and evangelicals to think outside of their separatism and consider how they could reach the world and expand their worldview. He began his career as a preacher in the United States, but a foreign missions board asked him to assess the state of fundamentalism in Europe after WWII. While the...
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October 8, 2024 • 51 mins
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Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique kicked off second-wave feminism in the United States. The book was published in 1963 and addressed what she called "the problem that has no name". As women's roles shifted with the invention of electricity and the number of workers needed to run farms decreased, women's roles shifted. The idea of a "traditional" woman went from a farm laborer or factory ...
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October 2, 2024 • 34 mins
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In the 1960s, Tom Tarrants was a young man on a mission - to save America from Communism, Marxism, and desegregation. He was prepared to do anything, including joining the Ku Klux Klan, drive-by shootings, or even dying for his cause. Yet God had a far greater plan for this would-be revolutionary.
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September 24, 2024 • 39 mins
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The National Women's Conference was set to take place. State meetings were overrun by conservative women causing disruptions to the meetings as they paid the entrance fee with pennies or made noises during the discussions. But liberal women were not angels either. Some went so far as to accuse the conservatives of sending in mental patients to do their voting.
It's easy in all of the noise t...
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September 10, 2024 • 50 mins
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In 1977, the Congress of the United States allotted $5 million for the National Women's Conference. The money was intended to bring together women from around the country so that they could put together recommendations for the Congress and President. It would highlight women of color, and those minorities who were sometimes overlooked like Native American women. But there was conflict from ...
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September 7, 2024 • 3 mins
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August 27, 2024 • 34 mins
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Phyllis Schalfly was a remarkable woman. Regardless of your politics, you have to admire the impact that one person, who was never elected to office, could have on national political conversations. Schlafly was already part of the in-crowd in Washington when she took a stance against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She was an exercise in nuance herself-- a woman who fought for tradit...
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