Episode
What If the American Revolution Had Failed? with Diana Butler Bass
- Podcast
- Homebrewed Christianity
- Published
- Aug 1, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5938
- Processing state
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- https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NAANT4924698759.mp3
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Summary
Diana Butler Bass just got back from Ireland, where she and Richard escaped the Fourth of July — and she came home with the most stunning historical counterfactual we have ever discussed on the podcast. Standing in the death-row hallway at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, the prison where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising were executed one by one, Diana asked herself the question that turned her whole trip: what if the American Revolution had failed, and this hallway held Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Adams instead? The Irish worked on decolonization for four hundred and fifty years. We got there in seven. American history might be a miracle; that is her real takeaway. Along the way: the London Fourth of July party where an American won best costume by going as the reflecting pool; listener questions our friends' Theology Summit lectures have generated on Jim Wallis's who must be defeated and who must be persuaded?; on what a congregation can faithfully do before the midterms; on the data centers now colonizing the neighborhoods that did not ask for them; on the day I got a text from David who turned out to be an AI chatbot trained to shift my views on Israel and Palestine; on Ulysses Mejias and Nick Couldry's Data Colonialism and why our interiority is the resource now being mined — and, at the end, the grief I have been carrying since I flew to Atlanta last week to bury my best friend from div school. Diana's answer to that grief lands the whole conversation. Come sit at the table. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featur…