Faithful Politics

What happens when moderation becomes a political liability inside your own party?

Filmmakers Meg Griffiths and Scott Faris join Faithful Politics to discuss The Life of the Party, their documentary following three Republican women in Texas whose careers reveal a party undergoing significant change.

Former State Rep. Sarah Davis was once the last pro-choice Republican in the Texas House and represents a tradition of moderate dissent. Former U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores, the first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress, represents a newer, faith-driven and MAGA-aligned Republican coalition. And longtime State Rep. Geanie Morrison reflects on an older political culture where bipartisan relationships and compromise were more common.

Together, the filmmakers describe them as an outlier, an outsider, and an old guard.

We talk about abortion, faith, MAGA, women as the Republican Party’s political organizers, partisan purity tests, political identity, and what disappears when disagreement becomes disloyalty. Meg and Scott also explain what they learned as liberal filmmakers spending a year listening to conservative women and why relationships across political differences still matter.

Watch the film: https://universecreative.org/the-life-of-the-party/
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Meg Griffiths and Scott Faris are documentary filmmakers, producers, and co-founders of Universe Creative. Their work focuses on stories that complicate political and cultural assumptions and elevate perspectives that are often overlooked. Before founding Universe Creative in 2017, they worked together at Teach For America and later in social-impact video strategy. Their documentaries include Impossible Town and The Life of the Party, which follows three Republican women navigating leadership, identity, and political change in Texas.

The Department of Homeland Security sent undercover agents into churches to monitor anti-ICE activists. In at least one case, an agent entered a Baptist church that was already protected by a federal court order restricting certain DHS activity on the property.

Brian Kaylor, president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way, joins us to walk through the court documents behind his reporting. We discuss DHS surveillance at at least five churches in Minnesota and Michigan, agents secretly recording meetings, collecting license plate information, and monitoring people who were not themselves targets of the investigation.

The conversation also gets into the difference between judicial and administrative warrants, First Amendment protections for houses of worship, government surveillance of religious communities after 9/11 and during the Reagan era, and what Kaylor calls the “imperial boomerang” - surveillance powers created for one purpose eventually being used elsewhere.

Subscribe: https://publicwitness.wordandway.org

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Brian Kaylor is president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way and leads its newsletter, A Public Witness, which covers religion, politics, and culture. He is a Baptist minister with a Ph.D. in political communication and the author or co-author of seven books on religion and politics. His recent reporting has examined Department of Homeland Security surveillance of churches and religious liberty questions surrounding immigration enforcement.

Robert P. Jones argues that the crisis facing American democracy is also a crisis inside white Christianity. In this conversation, Jones, president and founder of PRRI and author of Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, explains why he believes white Christian support for Donald Trump and Christian nationalism represents both democratic backsliding and theological apostasy.

We dig into one of the interview's most striking findings: among white evangelicals, higher church attendance is associated with stronger support for Trump, anti-immigrant attitudes, and Christian nationalism.

Jones also examines the growing Christian critique of empathy, the racial history embedded in American Christianity, how culture shapes biblical interpretation, and what Martin Niemöller's regret can teach Christians today.

The conversation ends with the question Jones says Christians and Americans have to confront now: what will we regret not doing while there was still time?

Book: Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy
https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781250431134

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Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, and a New York Times bestselling author whose work focuses on religion, race, politics, and democracy. His books include The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, White Too Long, The End of White Christian America, and his newest book, Backslide. Jones holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University and writes the Redeeming Democracy newsletter

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s fight over Muslim wudu stations at Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth airports opens into a much larger question: who gets protected by religious liberty in America?

Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein joins Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram to explain why facilities that existed for years suddenly became a political target, how legal experts view Abbott’s First Amendment argument, and how the dispute fits into a broader pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Texas. 

The conversation moves from Employment Division v. Smith and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to Kennedy v. Bremerton, the decline of the Lemon test, Ten Commandments laws, school vouchers, Christian nationalism, and the changing meaning of church-state separation.
Boorstein also explains why religious liberty becomes complicated in a pluralistic country and why some of the next major constitutional fights may center on the Establishment Clause.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott takes aim at Muslim washing stations in airports:https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/08/20/fight-over-airport-washing-stations-is-latest-anti-muslim-salvo-gop/
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Michelle Boorstein is a religion reporter for The Washington Post who has covered religion, spirituality, politics, and public life for more than two decades. Her reporting examines religious liberty, church-state disputes, changing religious identity, and the political influence of faith communities. She holds a journalism and history degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s in Near Eastern studies from New York University. Her recent reporting has focused heavily on religion, government, and the changing boundaries between them.

Why would a parent take their child on a dangerous journey to the United States? Gabrielle Oliveira argues that one of the most overlooked answers is care.

Oliveira, a Harvard professor who studies immigration, education, and family migration, spent years following 16 migrant families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. She explains how violence, insecurity, and a lack of opportunity push families to leave, while safety and education become central to what they hope to find in America.

We talk about border detention and family separation, what children remember about migration, why American schools can represent opportunity for immigrant families, and Oliveira’s idea of “constrained care” among teachers trying to support immigrant students.
She also challenges the way immigrant children are often portrayed only as victims or extraordinary success stories, leaving out the ordinary lives most children eventually build.
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Book: Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life
https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781503644540
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Gabrielle Oliveira is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. An anthropologist of education, her research examines immigration, mobility, family life, and children’s schooling across borders. She is the author of Motherhood Across Borders and Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life, which received the 2026 American Educational Research Association Outstanding Book Award.