Aug 31, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 10 segments
Pre-order BACKSLIDE to grab your copy! https://prri.org/backslide/ On Episode 986 of I Doubt It Podcast, Brittany Page and Jesse Dollemore welcome returning guest, New York Times bestselling author…
Robert P. JonesGuest
Jesse DollimoreHostBrittany PageHost
Thank you for joining us this very special episode with a very special guest.
But before I- we talk about that, I wanna introduce my very special co-host, the lovely, talented, scholarly Brittany Page, everybody.
I, we, we teased it and had [laughs] people throw out some guesses of who our guest was going to be for this interview, and I think only one person got it right.
Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, which if you have listened to this show for any amount of time at all, you have inevitably heard us talk about, because they are always doing amazing polling that helps illuminate the differences between, you know, Republicans and Democrats, but also lately following patterns of Christian nationalism, which we get into very heavily in this interview.
Look, when you, when you do something as goofy as what we do for a living, and for as long as we have done it, I mean, going on 1,000 episodes now, you, you have occasion to, we have had occasion to bump brains with some luminaries.
And among all the people, we've had Congress members on this show, we've had, we've, you know, some notables.
I mean, just, if you just look at the titles of the books that he's written, it tells you what his focus in life is, and it's a measure of character-
I mean, l- some of these titles here, The End of White Christian America, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, and then, uh, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, and then now Backslide.
Yeah, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.
And what's remarkable, there's several remarkable things about Robbie, but he grew up in a religious tradition that you would not expect has him writing books now about Christian nationalism and the threat to democracy.
And so he has gone through this evolution, and he has made changes in his personal views over time, and I think that's one reason that he's one of the most frequent guests that we've had on the show.
Like, with, with most of these books, he's come on the show to talk about it, because we can relate to those experiences of being people who when you get more information, when you are confronted with the realities of the world, changing your views, um, from those that you were indoctrinated with in childhood or that you were taught during childhood, and then learning and changing and growing.
And Robbie not only personally has grown and changed in his views, but he's now using that to help go into these communities and talk to people who are from the religious tradition that he is.
And I just wanna say that that's a remarkable thing, right? And, and people who are watching this, you may not be religious.
But what's remarkable about this is that he is doing the work to try to communicate to the people that may be listening and may be able to be moved and changed on their positions.
This is a guy who still practices the faith, is still a believer, uh, in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and, and i- is a member of a Christian community and church and congregation.
He's not, like, an activist against religion or specifically against Christianity.
And the other thing about it is when he writes these books, these aren't just flowery opinion pieces.
He runs the, the Public Religion Research Institute, and they are filled to the brim, chock-full with not just anecdotes but history and data and polling and receipts.
And i- it's, it's a remarkable thing in our world today, in this climate, to have someone writing books that are just backed up with history and stories and, uh, and tha- He's also a beautiful writer.
We could have s- this could have been a Joe Rogan three-hour marathon conversation, but you know, you only have so much time-
So without further ado, here is our very important and I hope very entertaining conversation with Robert P. Jones, author of Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.
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