Episode
Season 6, Episode 27: Danielle, Rebecca and Jenny McGrath - Pope Leo and the President
- Podcast
- The Arise Podcast
- Published
- Apr 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3311
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-arise-podcast-1194909/episodes/season-6-episode-27-danielle-rebecca-and-jenny-mcgrath-pope-leo-and-the-president/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-arise-podcast-1194909/season-6-episode-27-danielle-rebecca-and-jenny-mcgrath-pope-leo-and-the-president.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
This episode is a sharp, passionate, and often humorous conversation about religion, power, and political corruption in the current American moment. Using recent controversies involving Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and Pope Leo as a starting point, the three of us explore how Christianity is being manipulated for political gain and how sacred language is used to justify cruelty, nationalism, and violence. A central thread of the episode is grief and disbelief: How did so many faith communities get here? Rebecca especially wrestles with the collapse of theological integrity inside modern evangelicalism, while Jenny situates these distortions within a much longer historical pattern—empire repeatedly co-opting religion for domination. Danielle brings in race, imagery, and whiteness, asking how white depictions of Jesus shape public consciousness and who gets recognized as holy in the first place.