Show Notes
When the media talks about the evangelical vote today, what or to whom are they referring? Who are the people who self-identify in this way? Should we understand them as a group defined by their faith, their style of worship, by distinctive theological positions – or has the term evangelical itself become so politicised that in practice it is now most meaningfully understood as shorthand for a group of mainly white voters characterised by their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights?
Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American Institute Guests: EJ Dionne, is a distinguished journalist and author, political commentator, and longtime op-ed columnist for the Washington Post. He is also a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University, and co-author of the recent New York Times bestseller One Nation Under Trump, author of Souled Out, and Why the Right Went Wrong, among others. His most recent book, released last year, is Code Red: How Progressives And Moderates Can Unite To Save Our Country. David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative. His research focuses on civic and political engagement, with particular attention to religion and young people. Campbell’s most recent book is Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (with Geoff Layman and John Green), which received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Among his other books is American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (with Robert Putnam), winner of the award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.uk Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Last Best Hope?
Since the Civil War the president's party has lost ground in Congress in every single midterm election bar four. What's going on? Are voters punishing the administration they put into office just two short years earlier? Is it an attempt to balance power in Washington? Or is it just that the president's party's supporters don't turn out? To explore this issue, Adam is joined by Ursula Hackett, the Churchill Associate Professor of US Politics at the RAI. Adam and Ursula discuss some of the most dramatic midterm elections of the past -- from the 1874 repudiation of President Grant to Obama's 2010 "shellacking" to try to work out what explains a remarkably consistent phenomenon-- the President's party losing.
What is an American political party? Unlike in parliamentary systems, they're not private organisations but quasi-public bodies, with no membership dues and with their candidate selection regulated by public law. And how do we explain the paradox that in an era of intense 'partisan' division, the parties themselves -- as organisations -- are by some measures weaker than ever before? Adam is joined by Sam Rosenfeld Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, the author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, and, with Daniel Schlozman, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.
As the United States gears up to mid-term elections, which may once again shift the political trajectory of the country, the Last Best Hope? returns for a brand-new season on the 8th of October.
In the bicentennial summer of 1976, the United States staged what was, by some measures, the largest single celebration in the country’s history. Tall ships in New York harbor. Fireworks over the Mall. Specially-minted bicentennial quarters. A made-for-TV reconciliation after Vietnam and Watergate, after the assassinations and the riots and the burnings of the long sixties. The country told itself, for a few weeks at least, that it was still the country it remembered being.
Is there anything more distinctively American than its sports culture? In a previous episode of this podcast, we discussed the tragic decline and partial revival of American cricket. As the 2026 World Cup kicks off in the US Adam asks why a sport that took over the world has been so marginal for so long in America – and wonders if that’s finally changing. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a form of football that had begun in English public schools became a global phenomenon, played almost everywhere except in the United States. There, a strange alternative form of football was played instead, one in which men in helmets stand around for long periods, interrupted by occasional violent bursts of energy. This is a story about culture, gender politics, race, class and migration – and, as with the story of cricket’s demise -- about nationhood. Guests on this episode: Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History at Columbia. His most recent book is The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) which tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice over the last 150 years. And by Uta Balbier, Professor of US History at Oxford, a transnational historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in sport history.