Know Your Enemy - Reasons To Believe [Teaser]

Matt and Sam have a personal, wide-ranging conversation about religious faith in our troubled times.

Duration: 4m
Broadcast on: 04 May 2026
Audio Format: other

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Given the string of recent episodes that, in various ways, grappled with religion we wanted to take a step back and offer a rather personal conversation about believing in God, or not, and what difference it might makes. The discussion begins by revisiting when we first met over a decade ago and talked a lot about faith, then ranges widely, including: atheism vs agnosticism, W.H. Auden, why we're not experiencing a religious revival in the United States (but could be soon), and more.

Sources:

Christopher Beha, Why I Am Not an Atheist (2026)

Edward Mendelson, "The Secret Auden," New York Review of Books, March 20, 2014

David Martin, w/ a reply from Edward Mendelson, "Why Auden Married," New York Review of Books, April 24, 2014

Matthew Sitman, "Saving Calvin from Clichés: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson," Commonweal, Oct 5, 2017

Ryan Burge, "Religion Has Become A Luxury Good For The Middle Class, Married College Graduate With Children," Religion Unplugged, July 12, 2023

Daniel Cox, "The Illusion of America's Religious Revival," American Storylines, Nov 13, 2025

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

— The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (1975)

The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, edited & with an introduction by W.H. Auden (1999)

W.H. Auden, "In Praise of Limestone," in Nones (1951)

"Jill Lepore on Nationalism, Populism, and the State of America," EconTalk, April 15, 2019

I think the thing that I feel troubled by and despair about is, look, now I'm going to sound like the beginning of an Atlantic article, but like when you're on the subway and you look around, maybe your phone's in your pocket and you're reading a book or a magazine or something and you look around and you see like every single person is just flipping from video to video to video to video on their phones, it does feel kind of like dystopian to me. And that's because of course basically the most powerful and profitable companies in this country, what they are doing in order to make all that money is capturing people's attention and distracting them from like whatever might be like real and complicated and true about life. And so I think it's possible that like what is attracting certain people to a spiritual searching is a sense that is a hundred percent true, which is that like the world that is being born right now is one which wants people to be stupid, wants them to be distracted, wants them to be like entirely absorbed by absolute bullshit at all times. It is a cause of suffering, but it also assuages suffering in the sense that like as long as you have something to watch, as long as you have something to flip through in every moment of boredom, then like life can just be filled up with those moments of mild, half focused entertainment. And that seems to be like the whole project of like the culture industry right now is to to lubricate the passing of time, to give people an alternative to living inside their own heads, just to assuage the natural kind of questioning that takes place when you're left alone with yourself. You know, I am sleepwalking through my own life and I'm incapable perhaps. I mean, this is the thing that our peers complain about is like I'm incapable of experiences of the sublime. I'm incapable of experiencing really serious, complicated feelings and the pains of life because I'm distracting myself from it. And one of the solutions that people look for or one of the life rafts people reach for is church. Well, you know, Sam, I do kind of wonder when it comes down to it, when push comes to shove, well, what we need to fight back against the radically dehumanizing and esthetizing technologies and apps and the array of forces against our humanity, soul, attention and so on, if at the end of the day, you kind of have to end up in a religious position of saying something like, well, why? You're like, why am I opposed to these? What is wrong with it? Maybe eventually you just have to make a almost religious, you know, kind of assertion that no, the human person is holy. This is sacred. We have souls. These are not just bags of meat and bones, not just matter in motion, not just kind of cogs in a machine, not just optimizing machines. Yeah, utility maximizing machines, no, you have to draw a circle around the human person and say the person in that circle is sacred, has infinite dignity. And religion is the way we do that, that that human beings are sacred. We're created in God's image. We have souls that, you know, will persist forever. You are not just tinkering with some animal. You are dealing with, and if you're someone like Peter Thiel, you're getting vastly enriched, both of these technologies, off of the things that make us less than human. Like maybe the answer really is, you just have to say, no, that's the only final defense

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam have a personal, wide-ranging conversation about religious faith in our troubled times.