Tom is a historian, translator, and podcaster. He hosts with Dominic Sandbrook the most downloaded history pod in the world, “The Rest Is History.” He’s the author of many books, including the two we discussed this week: Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, and Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Those two erudite, beautifully written books made a huge impact on me.
An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of our convo — on the paradoxical power of Christ’s crucifixion, and the Christian roots of “secular” — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: growing up in Oxford and near Stonehenge; dinosaurs his first passion; how the past is more interesting than the present; Pontius Pilate; Cato; Caesar in Gaul and conquering Rome; Hegseth reveling in death; the war prayer at the Resolute Desk; Trump’s pre-Christian values; Socrates; Paul the Apostle; turning the other cheek; agape; Christ’s silence and withdrawal; logos; the Gospels; the Gnostic Gospels; the Book of Revelation; Exodus and Israel; martyred Christians in the arena; Augustine; the emergence of Islam; the Koran as the literal word of Allah; the Crusades; Pope Gregory VII making the Church sovereign; Machiavelli and mastering the secular; the Reformation; toppling idols; Nietzsche and the death of God; Marx; the Sexual Revolution; #MeToo; Dawkins and the New Atheists; the religion of wokeness; racism as a collective sin; Michael Pollan and “All You Need Is Love”; Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion; the awe of cathedrals; and the new wave of cultural Christianity.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Jeffrey Toobin on the pardon power, Derek Thompson on abundance, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” Greg Lukianoff on free speech, and Tom Junod on his memoir and masculinity. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
From a fan of last week’s pod with Jonah Goldberg:
While this conversation takes a few shots at the left, it’s one of the best objective criticisms of Trumpism that I have heard or seen. Plus, if you listen carefully, the conversation leaves some subtle suggestions on how we might become a country built on consensus again rather than division.
Another listener writes:
As a longtime admirer of both you and Jonah, I greatly enjoyed your conversation on this week’s Dishcast. However, I also ruefully chuckled to myself when you asserted late in the podcast that Trump’s rotten character ought to be noted and condemned far more frequently than it currently is. Your results apparently may vary, but over the last decade I’ve been hearing about Trump’s moral deficits approximately once every 14 seconds by everyone from you to the NYT editorial board to my mother to the rabbi at every Shabbat service. With all respect, the notion that Trump’s singular cray-cray is an under-covered phenomenon is just about the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
All of which led me to wonder about the meaning of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which you and Jonah also briefly referenced in your chat. My own provisional definition of the term is as follows: The state of being so overcome with contempt for Donald Trump that you are mentally and emotionally unable to see him clearly.
For what it’s worth, I do not believe you qualify as a TDS sufferer under this definition, insomuch as you have proved time and again to understand and identify Trump’s obvious political strengths and the reasons why 50 percent of the country might be compelled to support him over the Democratic alternative. A true TDS basket case — up to and including several members of my immediate family — simply cannot process such thoughts and never will. To them, Trump is Literal Hitler, and his supporters — to a person — are Literal Hitler Mini-Me’s … and that’s all there is to it. You haven’t reached that point yet, and so I will continue subscribing to the Dish.
The thing is, though, that Trump’s depravity is truly off the charts. I don’t know of anyone quite as hideous in their character. I try to keep a balance between noting his degeneracy and viewing him politically. But I do not want to be lulled into acquiescence to the unacceptable.
Jonah and I also took a break from politics and talked dogs:
The chorus continues for Sam Harris to come back on the Dishcast:
I really hope to see you discuss/debate with Sam Harris soon regarding Israel and Gaza. Through the nudging of fans like myself and others, he seemed to be quite receptive to the idea in his last Substack Q&A.
Ok, ok. Here’s another Dishhead lobbying for a Sam pod on Israel:
On a recent “More from Sam” that was live-streamed, it seemed that most of the audience was pushing back on his support for Israel and, by extension, his belief that the war with Iran is somehow a good thing. He seems to be struggling on several fronts here, and it was proposed that you could be a good person to debate him on this topic.
For someone like Sam — who has spent the better part of the last 10 years telling us that Trump is an existential threat — to trust him to conduct this war, doesn’t feel like a defensible position. Also, Sam got years of pushback over the term “Islamophobia”, saying it’s not Islamophobia to discuss serious issues with the adherents of this faith who are the worst actors — but any serious disagreement with the State of Israel and their conduct? Now, according to Sam, we’ve got a dangerous and growing anti-semitism we simply cannot tolerate.
Can you make sense of this, because to my ears, Sam is no longer Making Sense. This is a Dishcast debate I’d love to hear.
Yes, I’m struggling to reconcile some of Sam’s views about theocracy with his support for a theocratic agenda of the Israeli far right, which controls the coalition government. It’s his view of Islam as uniquely evil that allows him, I guess, to ignore the reality that Israel has become. And speaking of that “Islamophobia” debate, here’s a famous exchange on Real Time where Ben Affleck goes ape-shit on Sam for being “gross and racist” against Muslims for “painting a broad brush” over fundamentalist beliefs:
I’m with Sam on this one. I am not with Sam in his reflexive defense of everything Israel does. A reader touches on the “Islamophobia” debate in the UK today:
The British government has just created a new advisory definition of what it calls anti-Muslim hostility. However well-intended, this seems to be an attempt to chill what looks to me like very legitimate questions about the role of Islam in the public square and in the West more broadly. I think when we talk about immigration, at least in Europe, we’re really talking about Islam.
The left seems to want to expand the definition of racism to include Islamophobia and sidestep the issue entirely by dismissing anyone with concerns as a bigot. And the right, I assume, is using the issue to scapegoat minorities. I don’t know who the sane, informed voices are. I know Douglas Murray has written about this. I sometimes listen to “The Rest Is Politics” with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart — two bright guys with a great deal of insight, but on this issue they just chalk it up to bigotry, full stop.
The left needs a better answer. It needs a better strategy than dismissing normies with credible worries as bigots — which is rhetorically lazy and politically unwise.
This issue also overlaps quite a bit with the issue of free speech in the UK. I didn’t realize until pretty recently that the UK doesn’t have the formal equivalent of the First Amendment, and this has meant that some 12,000 people a year have had a visit from the police for something they’ve written online. And some people, not sure how many, are doing real time in prison (FFS!) for writing something someone thought was inappropriate. Is this really happening in a modern Western democracy?
Yes it is. The difference between modern Islam and modern Christianity is that the latter is compatible with liberal society while the former has, in many of even its Western formulations, never made that adjustment.
Another reader dissents:
Your criticisms of Israel have detoured into some odd combination of paranoia and delusion, backed heavily by tortured logic that I don’t see you applying to any other topic. Your recent writings on the “Israel lobby” have been frequent, and I won’t try to cover all of them or respond to each point. But your criticisms can, I think, be fairly grouped into a few categories:
