In a rare guest interview, Dr. Jemar Tisby sits down with Dr. Matthew D. Taylor, author of the new book Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists.

They discuss Christian supremacy, Christendom, and imperialism. Going deeper, they explore how Jesus displayed and taught about power, and why the tyrants who claim his name avoid those teachings with surgical precision.

They also talk about the cost of this work. Dr. Taylor lost his job for writing this book.

You'll come away with a theological case for defying tyrants and a picture of what that looks like in the church, in politics, and in everyday life.

Get Defying Tyrants wherever you get your books.

Topics Addressed

• Pete Hegseth's speech and the new Office of Religious Affairs
• Constantine's conversion and the merging of church and empire
• Christian supremacy as the ideology beneath Christian nationalism
• Why "antichrists" in 1 and 2 John refers to Christians who harm others in Jesus' name
• The parable of the wheat and the tares
• The cost of speaking out against authoritarianism

Support conversations like this one by becoming a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com.

Resources Referenced

• Matthew D. Taylor, Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists (Broadleaf, 2026)
• Matthew D. Taylor, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy (2024)
• Matthew D. Taylor's Reckonings (Substack)
• Scripture: Mark 10:42-45; 1 John 2:18-19; Matthew 13:24-30

Get the course. Gain the confidence: How to Resist White Christian Nationalism

White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the church in the United States today.

Most people who follow this work already know that. So why don't we have more confidence to confront it?

In this back-to-basics episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Jemar Tisby names five obstacles to confidence:

1. leaving out the "white,"

2. calling every conservative Christian a Christian nationalist,

3. leading with facts alone,

4. stopping at 'it isn't really Christian,"

5. mistaking understanding for resistance.

Along the way, he brings the receipts, from PRRI's newest data showing that nearly two-thirds of Americans resist Christian nationalism to Gorski and Perry's "deep story" of a Christian America that was supposedly stolen and must be taken back.

The episode builds toward a revelation Dr. Tisby had live on the show: what people need most to resist white Christian nationalism is confidence. The truth is on our side.

To move from understanding to action, Dr. Tisby introduces his new self-paced course, How to Resist White Christian Nationalism.

Topics Addressed

• How the plantation's paternalistic hierarchy mirrors the white Christian nationalist vision
• Tokenism: why people of color in the movement are useful but never central, and why tokens get spent
• New PRRI data: nearly two-thirds of Americans resist Christian nationalism, with Arkansas and Mississippi the least resistant states
• The "deep story" of white Christian nationalism and why we must meet a bad story with a truer story
• The third commandment, the no true Scotsman fallacy, and the responsibility of Christians to resist
• The ARC of Racial Justice and the gap between understanding and action

Resources Referenced

1. How to Resist White Christian Nationalism (self-paced course), Dr. Jemar Tisby

2. PRRI, New Report Analyzes the Two-Thirds of Americans Who Resist Christian Nationalism (September 24, 2026)

3. Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022)

4. Dr. Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise (2019)

5. Dr. Jemar Tisby, How to Fight Racism (2021), source of the ARC of Racial Justice

6. Scripture: Exodus 20:7; Isaiah 6:8

Support the Show

Fewer than 5% of subscribers make this truth-telling at the intersection of faith, history, and justice possible. For $7 a month, or $5.83 a month on the annual plan (less than a gallon of gas in LA), you can help keep The Justice Briefing going. Become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com.

Stay informed. Stay faithful. Stay in the fight.

For decades, the religious right told Christians that abortion was the one issue that outweighed every other.

Yet ICE recorded at least 18 miscarriages in its custody from January through September 2025, then lost count, and the movement's loudest voices have barely said a word.

In this episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Tisby asks why an unborn child's life should matter less because their mother is an immigrant, and how race shaped the religious right from the start.

In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention backed laws allowing abortion in cases including rape, incest, and likely harm to a mother's emotional health, then reaffirmed that stance after Roe v. Wade.

Historian Randall Balmer argues in Bad Faith that what first mobilized conservative Christians politically was the IRS denying tax exemptions to racially discriminatory Christian schools like Bob Jones University.

So was it ever about life in the womb, or was it about power?

Support the podcast:

Is this kind of information worthwhile? That's the only question you need to answer. If yes, become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com

For $5.83 a month on an annual subscription, you fund the research behind every episode, along with Tisby Media's new course and films.

This episode of The Justice Briefing is different. Instead of starting with a current event and working backward to the history, Dr. Jemar Tisby does what he loves most: he tells stories.

Diving back into primary source research for his new Substack series, History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Rights Edition, left him feeling like a grad student again, brimming with material he could not wait to share. So he devoted a full episode to three of those stories.

The first is about the Congress that refused to seat more than sixty former Confederates in December 1865, overrode a president more than a dozen times, and wrote insurrection into the official record.

The second is about the 1868 Charleston constitutional convention, the only one in American history with a Black majority, where recently emancipated men wrote the most democratic document South Carolina had ever seen and included the children of the people who had enslaved them.

The third is about Amos T. Akerman, a former Confederate and enslaver who became attorney general and prosecuted the first Ku Klux Klan out of existence for forty years.

Taken together, the three stories make one argument: Congress has the power, it lacks the will, and history has the receipts.

Topics Addressed

• Why the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan disbanded in the mid-1870s and did not reconstitute until 1915
• The 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention: 76 Black delegates out of 124, and the only Black-majority state legislature in U.S. history
• What Black delegates actually wrote into the state constitution, including free public schools, protected suffrage, women's property rights, and a permanent ban on secession
• The three Enforcement Acts, and why the Ku Klux Klan Act finally worked by naming the state itself as the defendant

Resources Referenced

• Here's What Congress Did When Members Had a Spine
• When Black People Wrote the Constitution
• When the Department of Justice Prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan Out of Existence
• The Spirit of Justice by Jemar Tisby: bit.ly/spiritofjustice
• A Way Forward: Hope in Uncertain Times, Nashville, August 28-30, with Rep. Justin Pearson, Shane Claiborne, and others. Free, but registration is required: Register here

Support This Work

History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Rights Edition runs weekly through the 2026 midterms, roughly twelve installments in all. The episodes are free. The articles are free. The research is not.

If this is the kind of work you want more of, become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com. It is $5.83 a month on the annual plan. Less than six dollars for history from a PhD historian who spent years learning the tools of the discipline to bring it to you.

Stay informed. Stay faithful. Stay in the fight.

On the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Dr. Jemar Tisby closes a full history of the law by turning to the fight over it right now.

What took blood and marches to win in 1965 has been taken apart in the thirteen years since 2013, from Shelby County to Louisiana v. Callais, and almost nobody marched.

Dr. Tisby refuses to end there. He points to the faith leaders already mobilizing to protect the ballot before the November midterms, from William Barber's 100 days of action to the poll chaplains and peacekeepers being trained in local churches, and he names the moment for what it is: the civil rights movement of our generation.

The episode also launches History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Edition, Dr. Tisby's three-month series tracing the struggle over the vote from Reconstruction to today.

• Why 2026 is the civil rights movement of our generation, and how the April march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge echoed 1965
• How the Voting Rights Act was taken apart in thirteen years, from Shelby County to Louisiana v. Callais
• Faith leaders mobilizing before the midterms, including William Barber's 100 days of action
• Poll chaplains and peacekeepers: protecting voters, protecting ballots, and protecting the system itself
• The launch of History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Edition on Footnotes
• The closing charge: register, check your registration, and take somebody with you

• The Washington Informer, "Faith leaders start 100-day countdown to Nov. 3 election," featuring Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Tony Lee of Community of Hope AME Church: https://www.washingtoninformer.com/faith-leaders-midterm-vote/
• Black Church PAC and its Freedom Summer events: https://www.blackchurchpac.org/
• All Roads Lead South Coalition, organizers of the 2026 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
• History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Edition, Dr. Tisby's new Footnotes series: https://JemarTisby.Substack.com

The Justice Briefing runs on readers and listeners, not advertisers. If it helps you make sense of this moment, the best way to support it is to subscribe to Footnotes at JemarTisby.Substack.com. The annual plan comes to $5.83 a month, it keeps this work independent, and it puts every installment of History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Edition in your inbox from now through the midterms.

The DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee just voted to have South Carolina lead off the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, and Dr. Jemar Tisby explains why that decision matters more than the news cycle will let on.

He walks through what a primary actually does, why the order of states determines momentum, money, and makes the case that this is a win for the party.

In this episode:

• What a primary actually is, and why it is not a direct vote for the nominee
• Why the order of states determines momentum, media coverage, donor confidence, and who drops out
• The South Carolina versus Nevada split and the case Latino leaders made for Nevada
• The progressive objection to a Southern first primary and what it assumes about Black Southern voters
• Six things candidates should do over the next 18 months to earn Black votes

Resources referenced:

• Previous episode: "What Every Social Movement Must Do"
• Dr. Tisby's YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@JTisby

Support the show:

There are no ads on The Justice Briefing and no sponsors. Paid subscribers are the ones who make this work possible. If the breakdown of the 2028 primary calendar was useful to you weeks before it becomes a headline, become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com.

On the Fourth of July, the White House released a 160-page report accusing the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History of "ideological capture."

In this episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Jemar Tisby reads the report's own words, walks through the two congressional hearings it triggered, and makes the historian's case that the charge is a confession.

His argument is simple: there is no such thing as objective history. Facts are objective, but facts do not interpret themselves, and interpretation is the work of the craft. When the right demands "straightforward" scholarship, what they really want is a story that agrees with them.

This is not about erasing the founders. It is about expanding the narrative to tell the whole truth. History does not repeat itself, Dr. Tisby reminds us, but it rhymes.

In This Episode

• Why "objective" history is a myth, and why interpretation is the historian's job
• The fundamentalist "plain reading of Scripture," and what it shares with the demand for "straightforward" history
• Narratives of declension and their link to "Make America Great Again"
• Inside the two congressional hearings, and which committee actually holds jurisdiction over the Smithsonian
• The witnesses behind the report: the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, and Hillsdale College
• PragerU, the 1776 curriculum, and this White House's record on history
• The Lost Cause, the UDC textbook committee, and the Dunning School
• Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson on expanding the narrative, plus the ARC of Racial Justice as practical next steps

Resources Referenced

• Saving America's Story, the White House report on the National Museum of American History
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and its chapter "The Propaganda of History"
• Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)
• Dr. Tisby's article on the Dunning School, at JemarTisby.Substack.com
• Jesus Was a Migrant, the first film from Tisby Studios, at jesuswasamigrant.com

Support the Show

The Justice Briefing is independent and listener-supported. Dr. Tisby is not attached to any institution on a full-time basis, which means this history reaches you because readers and listeners make it possible. If this episode gave you the background the headlines skip, support the work at JemarTisby.Substack.com. An annual membership comes out to just $5.83 a month, and it keeps the weekly articles and podcast coming.