You don’t mention politicians a lot in the show. Is the omission intentional?
I tend to have stayed away from party politics, politics with a capital P. When I find an odd story of somebody just living a personal life and they get caught up in big politics — decisions being made upon high filter down and impact them, and maybe in ways they don’t know — I just find those stories very engaging. With politicians, I think there are so many better political journalists than me with experience, they’ve been doing it for decades, and I just haven’t, it’s probably hard to break through all of the politicians’ P.R.-ing.
I was especially struck by your episode about Tammy Faye Bakker, the televangelist who, in a 1985 interview, showed compassion for Rev. Steve Pieters, a pastor living with AIDS at a time when prominent evangelicals were hostile toward the gay community. Is there a moral message you want to leave listeners with?
Everybody says that they want a solution. If you look to the past, human connection and people listening to each other tends to work better than people retreating to their corners and screaming at each other.
With the Tammy Faye episode, people have been emailing and messaging me to say that they were sobbing listening to the show. And I think that means it’s touching something that really matters to us, that we haven’t been able to access quite as much as we should have these last six or seven years, which is human connection, empathy, shared humanity.
Do you see yourself continuing to produce work about the culture wars?
I can’t lie, it does occupy a lot of my thoughts. It does feel like the most important thing that’s happening at the moment, especially since the Republicans are gearing up to make the midterm elections about the culture wars, all about cancel culture, quote unquote, so it is a very important part of our world.
I think I’ve done enough critiquing of it now. What I want to do instead is try and tell positive stories that might make people have different emotional responses.

Source: New York Times

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