Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Bo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin's lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking existed from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. World War II made us construct ourselves as anti-Nazi. The Great Depression flattened the top of the economy so everyone briefly supported the welfare of the person next to them because they were also broke. The Cold War closed borders. Television consolidated. Dishwashers freed the PTA. Then the iPhone came out and the birth rate fell off a cliff a full year before the 2008 crash because everyone stopped having sex to look at their phones. None of it was moral virtue. It was a perfect storm of accidents. What now, then? Kevin's frame: the responsible self, and Christianity's confidence that our imperfection is taken up by God's perfection. Bo's frame: the Methodists went from getting kicked out of Anglicanism for enthusiasm to being respectable Anglicans-with-different-money in two generations. Mine: we have no economic model left to nationalize, and Augustine was right that we are held together by what we hate. Sit with Kevin's lecture over a Sunday-school hour at theologysummit.com.
Bo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin's lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking existed from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. World War II made us construct ourselves as anti-Nazi. The Great Depression flattened the top of the economy so everyone briefly supported the welfare of the person next to them because they were also broke. The Cold War closed borders. Television consolidated. Dishwashers freed the PTA. Then the iPhone came out and the birth rate fell off a cliff a full year before the 2008 crash because everyone stopped having sex to look at their phones. None of it was moral virtue. It was a perfect storm of accidents. What now, then? Kevin's frame: the responsible self, and Christianity's confidence that our imperfection is taken up by God's perfection. Bo's frame: the Methodists went from getting kicked out of Anglicanism for enthusiasm to being respectable Anglicans-with-different-money in two generations. Mine: we have no economic model left to nationalize, and Augustine was right that we are held together by what we hate. Sit with Kevin's lecture over a Sunday-school hour at theologysummit.com.
