Complexified

Who gets to tell America's story?

Hillsdale College is small by most reckoning, but punching above its weight in influence, with its ethos and teaching saturating all levels of education far beyond its campus in Michigan.

It is showing up in charter schools. In civics curriculum. In state-level fights over history education. In Trump-aligned patriotic education projects. And recently, in Rededicate 250, a faith-filled gathering on the National Mall where conservative Christian leaders, political figures, and Trump allies are preparing to rededicate America as “one nation under God.”

This week on Complexified, Amanda Henderson talks with RNS reporter Kathryn Post about how one small, academically serious, deeply conservative liberal arts college became a key intellectual partner in MAGA’s Christian America story.

Listen to the new episode of Complexified wherever you get podcasts.
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The Baptist preacher (and Texas Lieutenant Governor) who stood before the White House Religious Liberty Commission had a message: there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. That's a shift...

For two centuries, Baptists didn't just support the wall of separation between church and state — they built it. They famously asked Thomas Jefferson for it. And then as recently as 1960, Southern Baptist leaders argued that a Catholic president would surely subordinate the Constitution to the Pope. This devotion to a secular state was deep. But that was then, this is now...

Baylor University historian Elesha Coffman suggests Southern Baptists have become the very force they feared Catholics would be — a dominant religion using political power to shape society along theological ideals. According to Coffman, the receipts are right there in the historical record. 

In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with Coffman about her recent article, Southern Baptists have become what they once feared Catholics would be, about the winding path from Jefferson's reply to the Danbury Baptists, through the founding of a prominent anti church-state separation organization, through Ronald Reagan telling a room full of evangelical leaders, "I know you can't endorse me, but I endorse you," all the way to Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick declaring the wall never existed.

The question underneath it all: is this hypocrisy, strategy, or evolution?
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A year after his death, the Catholic Church is moving forward—and revealing what Francis actually changed.

While he was alive, Francis' papacy was interpreted in real time: praised, criticized and debated. It was difficult to separate what was truly changing from what simply felt different because of him.

Now, the Church moves forward, and this movement offers something new. A chance to see what was durable.

What still feels like Francis? What has been absorbed into the Church’s way of operating? And what, if anything, has already begun to fade?

In this episode, we step back from the moment-to-moment reactions and take a first real look at Pope Francis in hindsight. Not to revisit his papacy, but to understand it differently—through what we can now see.

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The playbook for dismissing a pope just stopped working.

Trump called Pope Leo weak. Catholics — including some of Trump's own — aren't buying it. Vatican reporter Claire Giangravé joins Amanda Henderson to explain why Leo, a Chicago-born American pope, can't be dismissed the way his predecessors were, what his quiet first year was actually building toward, and whether the unlikely Catholic coalition forming behind him can hold.

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Tim Schrader Rodriguez spent eight years trying to "pray out the gay". He modulated his voice. He stopped listening to music with female lead singers. He sat weekly with a therapist who watched him come apart — and said nothing.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that therapists have a First Amendment right to pursue conversion therapy with their patients, upending a Colorado ban on the practice.

This isn't history, nor is it a Colorado-only case. Bans that advocates spent years winning in state after state will unravel.

The number of LGBTQ youth being engaged in conversion practices nearly doubled in the last year alone — from 10 to 20 percent.

What Tim's story makes clear is how ordinary this harm looks from the outside. It's not electroshock. It's not boot camps. It's a weekly therapy appointment. It's a trusted relationship. It's the promise that if you pray hard enough and want it badly enough, God will change you.

And when it doesn't work, the program tells you that's your fault too.

Amanda Henderson talks with Tim this week about what eight years inside that world actually felt like — and what it means that the one protected space survivors thought they still had is now gone.

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