Episode
Progressives Need Better Stories
- Podcast
- Heretic Hereafter Podcast
- Published
- Apr 8, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 251
- Processing state
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Summary
How do you feel about these “secular saints” candles? Are they a funny joke? A cringe Millennial trend? The desperate grasping of a culture that has lost its way? I’ll admit, I’ve owned a few of these (Harriet Tubman, RBG.) My husband received a Jeff Bezos one as a gag gift that I keep threatening to smash. This is one of the problems with living heroes—they keep revealing problematic behavior. It’s why every Tesla bumper in Seattle now looks like this: Maybe this is why Roman Catholics require at least 5 years pass before canonization can begin, time for all the skeletons to emerge from a potential saint’s closet. And yet, the recent revelations about labor organizer Cesar Chavez have shown that it can take a long time (33 years in this case) for the dark truth about a “hero” to come out. For years we’ve been having a conversation about how to deal with heroes who have done monstrous things. Is it still okay to listen to Michael Jackson? Watch Roman Polanski movies? Ought we still have statues of great American statesmen who also enslaved African Americans or slaughtered Indigenous Peoples? Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Many conservatives seem intent to put their fingers in their ears and stress that it was a different time, that Thomas Jefferson, for instance, couldn’t possibly have known that it was wrong to father children with his teenaged slave, Sally Hemings, then enslave those children until their early adulthood. (To be sure, many white American men at that time had no problems with this arrangement, which was common enough to have the moniker “shadow family.” Nevertheless, abolition has always been part of American political thought. The truth is alwa…