Liberalism Isn't Cruciform. Neither is Conservatism.

A Billy Graham Center survey of Gen Z reported that nearly half of respondents agreed that Christian support for Trump has made them less likely to attend church. The survey offers no follow-up on why — whether the objection is to a candidate, to partisanship generally, or to something deeper about how the church understands its own order. James Spencer and Ashish Varma take the finding as a starting point rather than a conclusion.

The conversation reaches back to Constantine and the first council called by an emperor, to Augustine's two cities and the early church's refusal of military service, and to the medieval contest between papacy and throne — arguing that the entanglement of theology and politics is old news, not a recent American invention.

From there: why neither conservatism nor liberalism has room for Christ at its center, why "care for the poor" collapses so quickly into a debate about welfare, what the three people at a Wednesday night prayer meeting say about arguments over prayer in schools, and a reading of Ahaz in Isaiah 7 — a king who had already decided, and dressed the decision in piety.

Chapters (part-two offsets assume the recordings join cleanly at 28:00 — verify against the export):

00:00 The survey, and what it doesn't tell us

03:25 "Politically motivated" — who gets the label

06:28 Constantine, Nicaea, and the entanglement begins

10:09 Sacred social order and the scope of government

12:33 When political procedure starts discipling us

14:54 Care for the poor, and why it becomes welfare

16:48 Augustine's two cities

18:56 The early church and military service

22:12 Bezalel: creativity constrained by a given pattern

25:32 Selective use of Scripture as a rejection of authority

26:30 Conservatism has no place for Christ

28:00 Two sides of the same coin

31:00 Where do our ideals actually come from?

36:00 Reparations, history, and what we're actually called to learn

36:30 Engel v. Vitale and the Wednesday night prayer meeting

39:40 The government has no interest in informing you

42:00 Housing, highways, and the history nobody teaches

46:40 When the platform changed and nobody blinked

48:50 Isaiah 7: Ahaz had already decided

53:20 McGilchrist, Deuteronomy 30, and knowing what we don't

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