Paul Elie On Crypto-Religion In Pop Culture

Paul is a writer, an editor, and an old friend. He’s a regular contributor to The New Yorker and a senior fellow in Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He’s the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach, and his new book is The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s.

For two clips of our convo — on Martin Scorsese’s extraordinary religious films, and the strikingly resilient Catholicism of Andy Warhol — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Paul raised in upstate NY as a child of Vatican II; his great-uncle was the bishop of Burlington who attended the 2nd Council; Thomas Merton and Flannery O’Connor as formative influences; working in publishing with McPhee and Wolfe; Cullen Murphy on the historical Christ; Jesus as tetchy; Czesław Miłosz; Leonard Cohen making it cool to be religious; the row over The Last Temptation of Christ and Scorsese’s response with Silence; Bill Donahue the South Park caricature; Bono and U2; The Smiths; The Velvet Underground; Madonna and her Catholic upbringing; “Like A Prayer” and “Papa Don’t Preach”; her campaign for condom use; when I accidentally met her at a party; Camille Paglia; Warhol the iconographer; his near-death experience that led to churchgoing; Robert Mapplethorpe; S&M culture in NYC; Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ”; Jesse Helms’ crusade against the NEA; Sinead O'Connor’s refusal to get an abortion; tearing up the JP II photo on SNL; the sex-abuse crisis; Cardinal O’Connor; the AIDS crisis; ACT-UP’s antics at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; the AIDS quilt as a cathedral; and Paul’s gobsmacking omission of the Pet Shop Boys.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Edward Luce on the war with Iran, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Thomas Mallon on the AIDS crisis, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. (NS Lyons indefinitely postponed a pod appearance — and his own substack — because he just accepted an appointment at the State Department; and the Arthur Brooks pod is postponed because of calendar conflicts.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

We got a deluge of emails over the contentious pod with Batya Ungar-Sargon. Here’s a dissent from a devoted listener:

I listen to the Dishcast every Saturday morning, and I have come to treat that time like a sacrament. A signature Andrew interview is just the best — incisive, soulful, fearless, funny, and enriching. And so, I feel honor-bound to say that the last half-hour of your interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon was none of those things. In fact, it was brimming with their opposites. Forget the politics; it was simply beneath you.

I am not here to scold. I too have a temper, and in recent months I have failed to exhibit proper decorum when discussing the same issues that so animate you. The difference is that I have done so in group chats with a handful of close friends who know me, while you have done so in public. Don’t get me wrong — your authenticity is what makes the Dish great. And my 90 minutes per week with the Dishcast is more than I spend with all but my closest friends. So this is my electronic version of tough love over a beer.

Another is more blunt:

I have been a long-time Dishhead and loyal subscriber since the beginning, and that was the worst interview I have ever heard you conduct. Next time show some respect by allowing your guests to complete a sentence.

Another writes, “One can be correct about content but very ineffective in style, and I think that’s what happened here”:

You seemed hell-bent on just issuing polemics and not engaging in genuine dialog on issues with which you passionately disagreed. It was not just unproductive; it was a bad product. You sounded like an angry Sean Hannity (I know, I know, that’s below the belt, but you did). You would ask a question, let Batya get in 5-10 words, and then just steamroll her. That prevents any hope of her better understanding your arguments. Clearly she is open-minded in that regard, because she took your critique of her anti-trans comment with humility and grace, seeing where she was wrong, and admitting it.

And to be clear, I do not mind your aggressive posture one bit. It’s your show; it’s an opinion show; and I love hearing your passion. It’s just that I also want to hear your guests fully formulate their positions. I want to hear the best arguments they have so that I can better understand. That’s you when you’re at your best. With Batya, I fear your anger and frustration got the better of you.

And another:

What’s the saying? “If you can argue the law, argue the law. If you can argue the facts, argue the facts. If you have neither, pound the table.” I think you have the law and the facts, but you chose to pound the table instead.

Some advice:

You could have moved the conversation along by saying things along the lines of “we’ll fact-check those claims” and “we disagree about the nature of ____,” and so on. The debate also seemed to oscillate between disagreements over what the law is vs. what the law should be — which felt a bit muddled.

From a listener who heard the episode after reading my written apology:

Before I listened to your interview with Batya, I was afraid you might have been too argumentative and unfair. However, after listening to it, I think you showed remarkable restraint. It’s beyond frustrating when members of Dear Leader’s cult refuse to answer direct questions. You gave her multiple opportunities to say, for example, whether she agreed with Rubio’s attempts to deport people based on criticism of Israel. Yet she refused. All she did was cite the law that arguably gave him that authority. She never answered the question you asked, until you pressed her repeatedly.

If only Trump supporters had a little intellectual honesty, what a refreshing change that would be. So don’t be so hard on yourself. They are the problem, not you.

From another critic of Batya:

I applaud you for even trying to have a conversation with her. She is so intelligent, but ever since her conversion to the Trump sect, she is (mis)using her intellect to push the most absurd ideas and to justify his crazy. I watched her on Bill Maher and had to skip after 10 minutes because she was so infuriating. So kudos to you for trying.

On the part of the pod on the First Amendment:

I was really impressed with how you handled that conversation — engaging in real time with a guest who was taking some very ridiculous positions. Free speech for citizens only? Seriously? The very point of having a right enshrined in the Constitution is to constrain the government from bad behavior, not as a reward for special people!

Anyway, I thought you were respectful and tough — which are both virtues, in my view. Whatever indignation she tried to feign about how you handled the conversation seemed like another layer of bullshit to me, and I’m glad you didn’t let it deter you.

Another writes:

Batya repeated falsehoods when she said that Khalil being a UNRWA worker makes him a Hamas member and therefore he lied on his application. While Israel claims UNRWA are Hamas supporters and banned them, Biden did not. I could find no evidence that Biden determined they were terrorist organization or directed by Hamas. All I found was a pause in funding them, late in Biden’s term.

Also, her tariff argument was ridiculous:

Batya: Well, right now we have a 10% global tariff, which the CBO — the Congressional Budget Office — projects will raise three trillion dollars over the next 10 years. That’s a nonpartisan office that is not a fan of the president or of anything else he’s doing. So it’s raising billions of dollars a month.

Andrew: Well, it will have to, right? You were charging people, taxing people.

Batya: I mean, that’s good. I like money. We like money. We want money.

Andrew: But it also means that the consumer pays that, because —

Batya: No, it doesn’t.

Here is what the CBO really said:

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan would cut deficits by $2.8 trillion over a 10-year period while shrinking the economy, raising the inflation rate and reducing the purchasing power of households overall, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office. [Italics mine]

Other specific parts of the pod:

I felt compelled to finally reply, having made it through that interview. (I’d listened to Batya on a different podcast interview before and couldn’t make it all the way through.) There are multiple things that are weird to me about people’s conversion to Trumpism. One seems to be the retconning of their views on his character: “I used to think he was bad until I agreed with his policies, and now I think he’s a good person, actually.”

Another thing I find so weird is the lefty rationale for supporting Trump. “The tariffs are class warfare!” What?! But what do they accomplish? Just making “the elites” angry is the accomplishment?

I could probably go on a rant but shouldn’t, so I’ll cut myself off there. I think you did a very reasonable job at trying to press her. It went a little off the rails for a bit, but I don’t think there was a way to avoid that.

On immigration:

Batya claimed the Washington Post had reported that “a million people have self-deported out of the workforce.” For someone who repeatedly asked you if he had read her writings, I would have assumed she had read the article from which she was quoting. The New York Post had this article, where the headline (“Nearly 1 million illegal immigrants have ‘self-deported’ under Trump, which has led to higher wages”) claims this, but the article doesn’t state it.

In that article, they offer as evidence a link to a Washington Post article, which I assume is what Batya is referring to. It does state, “More than a million foreign-born workers have exited the workforce since March” — but it does not state how they arrived at this figure. It also does not indicate that anybody self-deported. It does not even indicate that these were illegal immigrants, only that they were foreign-born workers. Given all that, I have a difficult time finding Batya credible.

On E-Verify:

Batya pointed to a high-profile raid on a Nebraska meatpacking plant — roughly 70 illegal workers were identified as identity thieves — as an example of how E-Verify “doesn’t work.” That’s not quite right. First, E-Verify primarily works by discouraging illegal hiring/work in the first place. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimates that E-Verify laws have reduced illegal presence in Alabama (57%), Arizona (33%), Mississippi (83%), and Utah (34%) ... all of that without raids or roundups (which I support but recognize as disruptive, unsettling, and difficult to scale).

E-Verify is, though, susceptible to identity theft, as Batya pointed out. What she missed is that the bills in Congress to mandate E-Verify (H.R. 251; S. 1151) include provisions to narrow if not close the ID-Theft loophole. These provisions include notifying people when their Social Security Number is being used at multiple worksites simultaneously. If unauthorized by the holder, the SSN gets locked, the employers are notified that they may have an issue, and the workers using those numbers are re-verified.

Thus, you were absolutely right to suggest that the least disruptive and most effective tool to encourage people in the country illegally to return home is E-Verify. I greatly admire both your work and Batya’s on immigration, but on this particular question, you were the clear winner.

Here’s one more listener, on Trump’s character:

I was struck by Batya’s view of what you called Trump’s cruelty. The dichotomy between her glossing over of the disabled reporter he mocked, and focusing on his tariffs as a kind act of defiance toward the elites, I think the Trump phenomenon was laid bare: if a person, country, or organization is in his in-group, he is indeed capable of kindness, loyalty, and even what might come off as selflessness; but if they’re in the out-group, he is capable of truly wanton, dismissive, abject cruelty. Mockery. Hatred. Vengeance.

I’ve heard the UFC’s Dana White talk about how in the early days of the UFC, Trump would just call to check in on him, offer him help with venues, and so on. And of course, Bill Maher just famously commented on his charm and sense of humor. I can imagine that for those like White, Batya, or those at his rallies, they see these qualities often. But as you remarked, a good president is one that is at least trying to serve the entire country, not just those on the inside.

So was Trump interested in tariffs because they helped the working class, as she suggests? Maybe. Or was he interested in them because he has that crude, transactional sense of economics where there are in-groups and out-groups, winners and losers, plunderers and the plundered? Most of his other actions — from the mockery of the reporter to his zigzagging foreign policy, from his forthcoming Medicaid cuts and lower taxes on the rich to his manic relationships with colleagues — suggest the latter.

And Batya’s claim that his particular personality is somehow necessary to take on both parties and disrupt the establish seems obviously false. Bernie Sanders seems like a genuinely good person and nearly pulled off a similar presidential upset twice. Andrew Yang, Chip Roy, Justin Amash, Rand Paul, AOC, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, and Ritchie Torres — among many others — all have zero love for establishment politics and establishment media. For better or worse, they have spoken similar truth to party power. I don’t agree with many of them on many things, but none of them strike me as a possible sociopath the way Trump does.

One other big moment stuck out to me in the conversation: Harvard. Like you, I understand that our universities have been struggling to live up to their billing as places of truly free speech and open inquiry. But mechanisms like lawsuits, market forces, Congressional inquiries, and plenty of others exist to apply pressure when there is genuine wrongdoing. But for a single executive to deploy such sweeping power? That should be terrifying.

And indeed, it’s easy to imagine that Batya would be apoplectic if the situation were reversed. Let’s say in ten years, there’s a major national backlash against Muslim students, and suddenly a Democratic president is accusing leftist Jewish professors of racism in the classroom. Would the chief executive be fine to judge that evidence and begin yanking science funding as he or she saw fit? I doubt it.

Lastly, as someone who spent so much time in academia, when Batya argued that Harvard has a big enough endowment and can simply transfer funds to scientific research cut by the federal government, she has to know that she’s full of shit. Most endowments come from donations, and those are quite often subject to rules by the donors who gave the gifts for a particular intent. A dean generally cannot strip money from the Endowed Chair in Anti-Racist Beat Poetry even to fund urgent cancer research.

Here’s a guest rec:

Have you been following Carl DeMaio — the GOP state assemblyman from the San Diego area and the first openly gay Republican elected to the state legislature? He is trying his hardest to bring sanity to the CA government and gets harassed every step of the way by the power-drunk Dems. Here’s a video of him explaining why he was voting against the Pride Month Resolution — in particular over its inflammatory language. He gets interrupted four times. Pure harassment:

Maybe he can be a guest on the Dishcast.

Another:

Here’s a guest suggestion: Scott Thompson. He’s a true original, famous for playing Buddy Cole and all his other characters in Kids in the Hall. But he is also fiercely opinionated about the state of gayness today (see: “Scott Thompson Rips Into GLAAD in Blistering New Show”); and his outrage about how the left and Amazon treated him over his last show is worth exploring on the Dishcast.

Next up, a debate between two historians over President McKinley. The first email is from a Rutgers professor, Kate Epstein (who agreed to break anonymity as a Dish reader); and the second is a reply from Robert Merry. Epstein writes:

In your episode with Robert Merry on McKinley, I found his arguments exasperatingly imprecise in the ways that I often find the arguments of personality-driven popular histories exasperatingly imprecise. This may seem like the snobbery of an academic historian towards a popular historian, but it isn’t. On the one hand, I’m exasperated by what I see as the collapse of scholarly standards for precision among academic historians; and on the other hand, I’ve deeply admired the scholarship of history books written by non-academics. It’s also nothing against Merry, whose willingness to say that he didn’t know something rather than trying to BS his way through an answer formed a refreshing contrast to the epistemological arrogance of so many professional historians.

That said, here are some points in the interview that leapt out at me: