Diana Butler Bass

Welcome to The Sacred Slope, friends, where the slippery slope becomes sacred ground.

I'm Alexis Rice, and I'm so excited because today we have Diana Butler Bass.

A lot of you are gonna be familiar with her, and for those who have not had the gift of hearing her speak or reading her writings from The Cottage on Substack or from one of her many books, she has a new book that's called A Beautiful Year.

It's so gorgeous.

The book takes us through the year following the Christian calendar, which we're gonna talk about because I now go to an Episcopal church.

I regularly have no idea where we are in the Christian calendar still.

Anne Lamott, Brian McLaren, and one of my absolute favorite people in the world, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who also has been on The Sacred Slope a couple times, writes on the back of her book, "To journey with Diana Butler Bass through the seasons of the year is to see familiar scenes with fresh eyes and gather amazing insights along the way.

At once a teacher and fellow pilgrim, she is a wondrous guide." In a time where I am talking a lot about just a lot of the rough and painful things and how to find beautiful ways through them, one of my goals is to always make sure that I am showing you beautiful expressions of our Christian faith that might be outside of fundamentalism, that you either grew up with or that you're curious about and you're like, "I grew up in Christianity, and my friend is a Baptist," or they're an evangelical, and they seem to just have a whole different framework for Christianity than I do.

What happens when people leave a religious institution, but not necessarily all the things they went there looking for? And that's where my guest has spent much of her career exploring.

Dr. Diana Butler Bass is a historian of American religion and one of the most trusted voices helping make sense of politics, religion, and history, and you might know her through her bestselling books, her wonderful Substack, or her podcast.

Because she has lived this history as well as studied it, from being a teenage evangelical in the 1970s, to a Duke graduate student, to becoming what the late Rachel Held Evans once jokingly called the original ex-evangelical woman.

So today what we're gonna talk about is how did American Christianity change, and why did so many people decide that they could no longer find a spiritual home there? And what are they still hungry for? So if you like religious history, which is to say you like understanding spirituality where we're at right now, you're gonna love my conversation.

Yeah.

What is it? The End of Religion? Is that the one I'm thinking of? Diana Butler Bass.

Diana Butler Bass.

It's so good.

Maybe.

This is where religion, culture, and politics intersect in real time.

I'm one of your hosts for this episode, Jamar Tisby, joined as always by Diana Butler Bass.

Oh, I'm glad to be here.

I'm glad all

He went on and he accused members of the press of treason, and he praised the ill-fated war in Iran as a courageous operation that, quote, every red-blooded American is proud of.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here.

We will start with Diana because you just wrote an article on this.

So you've actually put your thoughts into words and published them.