Robbie Jones wrote a book called ?Backslide?, and I went in expecting a chronicle of every way a Southern Baptist kid from Jackson, Mississippi cursed or lusted in middle school. That is not what this book is. Robbie takes a word that in our shared upbringing was entirely personal and entirely theological, and puts it next to the way political scientists now use the same word to describe what is happening to American democracy. The two stories are not separate. He can prove it with the word white Christians used to name their victory over Reconstruction: redemption. This is the fourth book in ten years — The End of White Christian America, White Too Long, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, and now this one, which pops back to the present and asks: okay, now what? We got into the Bright Line Watch numbers, why Martin Niemöller is a more useful guide for American Christians than Bonhoeffer, the finding that made Robbie go home at 2:30 in the afternoon, the estate settlement he added to his family Bible before passing it to his kids, the war on empathy, and then the back half of the book — where Robbie argues polarization is the wrong diagnosis and writes a chapter called “Embracing Division.” I pushed back. He was gracious about it.
Highlights from the conversation
- Two meanings of one word. Backsliding has a theological etymology and, today, a political science literature that mostly doesn’t know it. The measurable version: Bright Line Watch surveys leading political scientists and rates countries from 0 (dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). In 2024 the US rated 67 — already below European and Canadian counterparts in the 80s. By September of 2025 it had fallen to 54, with experts projecting 47 by 2027. That puts us below Mexico and Poland, roughly with Brazil and the Philippines. V-Dem independently concludes that in two years we have wiped out gains in individual rights and free speech going all the way back to 1965. What took Orbán a decade in Hungary took less than two years here. Tripp’s aside: Brazil handled its January 6th more effectively. Robbie: people went to jail, and stayed there.
- They called it redemption. How intertwined the two backslidings are, historically. After the Civil War there were more than 150 African Americans elected to office in Mississippi. Within a decade it was completely undone — legally, culturally, and through vigilante violence and lynching — and the Mississippi Plan became the template that spread across the South. The undoing was led in many cases by white Christian leaders, and the word they used for their victory came straight out of Christian theology. Robbie’s other test: if you see a school with “Christian Academy” in the name in the South, check its founding date. Early 1970s, as public schools desegregated.
- Why he finally used the word apostasy. He thought long and hard about it, and there’s a whole chapter. His reasoning: in 2016 you could give people the benefit of the doubt — maybe the rhetoric was performance, maybe he’d move to the center. By 2024, after nearly a decade, you know exactly what you’re voting for, and at minimum you’re saying the xenophobia isn’t a deal breaker. The image that kept coming to him is Paul’s language about people giving themselves over. Not occasional sin, not temptation — giving yourself over to something you know is evil, and stopping any serious interrogation with your own faith. His asterisk, and it matters: at its best, apostasy is always a call to repentance. I think you’re lost. I’m hoping you won’t stay there.
- Niemöller, not Bonhoeffer. Robbie opens and closes the book with Germany in the 1930s, and he’s careful about the analogy. But he reaches for Niemöller rather than Bonhoeffer precisely because Niemöller struggled — four years of wanting to stay in fellowship, not wanting to alienate people, and by his own reckoning seeing it too late. Bonhoeffer is the rare person who saw it early. Niemöller is the realistic fit for where most white American Christians actually are. Tripp adds the week he taught in Bonhoeffer’s house, and the day at the Niemöller house when the clergy in the room started audibly exhaling — because Niemöller lost sleep over exactly what they’re losing sleep over. And Robbie’s honest limit on both men: without the state reaching into church doctrine, it isn’t clear either would have stood up for Jewish people who weren’t Christians. The historical record just isn’t there. Which is Robbie’s harder question for us, since Project 2025 gives American churches no single crucible moment. But he holds up Niemöller’s counterfactual anyway: what would have happened if in 1933 all of us had stood up instead of waiting to be picked off one by one?
- The finding that ended his workday. From White Too Long. Take the average white person in America and add Christian identity, and they move up the racism scale, not down. Controlling for party, region, gender, education — everything. His concrete version: a white supremacist recruiting on a Sunday morning would do better handing out flyers in the evangelical church parking lot than approaching white people sitting out services in the coffee shop. His first reaction was that can’t be right, run it again. They ran it again. Same result. He sat with it, then went home and took a walk.
- The estate settlement in the family Bible. Printed in 1815, inscribed to his sixth great-grandfather Pleasant Moon, passed mother to daughter down to him when he went to seminary. Four generations of births, deaths, and marriages recorded between the Testaments. Then he did the genealogy: the family came from Virginia to Georgia for free land in a lottery made possible by the forced removal of Indigenous people. Pleasant Moon served in the Confederate Army. And the estate settlement lists four enslaved people, making up roughly 70% of the family’s earthly wealth. So when Robbie passed the Bible on to his own children, he printed the estate settlement and put it inside. A more complicated object. A more truthful one.
- The war on empathy. The chapter opens with the Nuremberg psychologist’s assessment of what held the defendants together: a complete lack of empathy. Then two books — The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy — get traction and get platformed and mainstreamed into Southern Baptist life. Robbie’s question is what work that’s doing right now, and his answer is that it prepares people for violence. Love and empathy get coded as soft and feminine virtues that manly Christians shouldn’t worry about, and from there it’s a very short step to distancing yourself from human suffering. His sharpest line: this is a theology that doesn’t halt the dagger before it plunges into Isaac. And the image Toxic Empathy actually ends with isn’t Jesus — it’s Christ the King with his foot on the skulls of the vanquished. What it’s designed to do is immunize Christians from appeals by other Christians. It tells them they have to choose truth over love.
- Embracing division — and Tripp’s pushback. Robbie’s counterintuitive turn in the back half. He’s for social cohesion; he just thinks depolarization is the wrong goal right now, because the data doesn’t show a country split down the middle. On same-sex marriage, abortion, a path to citizenship, religious pluralism versus a Christian nation — it’s more like two-thirds to one-third. And when that third has landed on a fundamentally anti-democratic position, the big tent is the wrong frame. We can’t sacrifice justice or democracy on the altar of unity; Douglass and King weren’t trying to bring segregationists into the tent. His practical hope is voting and the local level: in 2024, more people did not vote than voted for either candidate. Tripp’s extended pushback — on the Democratic Party, the uniparty, the military-industrial complex, and why economic democracy keeps getting deferred — is one of the more honest exchanges we’ve had on this show. Robbie’s response is that we have two lazy parties, one now fully co-opted, and that the MAGA meta-narrative has no counter-story. “They’re going to run a campaign on affordability.” Against a story about being God’s chosen people on this continent. Tripp’s counter-proposal: run on accountability.
Dr. Robert P. Jones is the founder and president of ?PRRI? (Public Religion Research Institute) and the author of the ?White Too Long? Substack newsletter. He grew up Southern Baptist in Jackson, Mississippi, trained as a mathematician at Mississippi College, attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary during the fundamentalist takeover, and earned his PhD in Ethics and Society at Emory University. He co-hosts The Convocation Unscripted with Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Jemar Tisby.
His new book is ?Backslide?— on the interlocking crises of democratic backsliding and Christian apostasy in America. His previous books: The End of White Christian America, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, and The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.
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