The wall Baptists built — and are now dismantling.

The Baptist preacher (and Texas Lieutenant Governor) who stood before the White House Religious Liberty Commission had a message: There is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. That’s a shift…

For two centuries, Baptists didn’t just support the wall of separation between church and state — they built it. They famously asked Thomas Jefferson for it. And then as recently as 1960, Southern Baptist leaders argued that a Catholic president would surely subordinate the Constitution to the Pope. This devotion to a secular state was deep. But that was then, this is now…

Baylor University historian Elesha Coffman suggests Southern Baptists have become the very force they feared Catholics would be — a dominant religion using political power to shape society along theological ideals. According to Coffman, the receipts are right there in the historical record.

In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with Coffman about her recent article, “Southern Baptists have become what they once feared Catholics would be,” about the winding path from Jefferson’s reply to the Danbury Baptists, through the founding of a prominent anti church-state separation organization, through Ronald Reagan telling a room full of evangelical leaders, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you,” all the way to Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick declaring the wall never existed.

The question underneath it all: Is this hypocrisy, strategy, or evolution?

Separation of Church and State Was a Baptist Idea. What Happened?

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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From symbolic gestures to structural shifts, what carried on — and what looks different now.

A year after his death, the Catholic Church is moving forward — and revealing what Francis actually changed.

While he was alive, Francis’ papacy was interpreted in real time: praised, criticized and debated. It was difficult to separate what was truly changing from what simply felt different because of him.

Now, the Church moves forward, and this movement offers something new—a chance to see what was durable.

What still feels like Francis? What has been absorbed into the Church’s way of operating? And what, if anything, has already begun to fade?

In this episode, we step back from the moment-to-moment reactions and take a first real look at Pope Francis in hindsight. Not to revisit his papacy, but to understand it differently — through what we can now see.

What Stuck: Reading Pope Francis a Year Later

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🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Trump called the pope a loser. The pope is from Chicago and isn’t backing down.

The playbook for dismissing a pope just stopped working.

President Donald Trump called Pope Leo XIV weak. Catholics — including some of Trump’s own — aren’t buying it.

Vatican reporter Claire Giangravé joins Amanda Henderson to explain why Leo, a Chicago-born American pope, can’t be dismissed the way his predecessors were, what his quiet first year was actually building toward, and whether the unlikely Catholic coalition forming behind him can hold.

What If the Most Powerful American in the World Isn’t Who You Think?

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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What the law allows and what survivors describe don't match.

Tim Schrader Rodriguez spent eight years trying to “pray out the gay”. He modulated his voice. He stopped listening to music with female lead singers. He sat weekly with a therapist who watched him come apart — and said nothing.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that therapists have a First Amendment right to pursue conversion therapy with their patients, upending a Colorado ban on the practice.

This isn’t history, nor is it a Colorado-only case. Bans that advocates spent years winning in state after state will unravel.

The number of LGBTQ youth being engaged in conversion practices nearly doubled in the last year alone — from 10 to 20 percent.

What Tim’s story makes clear is how ordinary this harm looks from the outside. It’s not electroshock. It’s not boot camps. It’s a weekly therapy appointment. It’s a trusted relationship. It’s the promise that if you pray hard enough and want it badly enough, God will change you.

And when it doesn’t work, the program tells you that’s your fault too.

Amanda Henderson talks with Tim this week about what eight years inside that world actually felt like — and what it means that the one protected space survivors thought they still had is now gone.

He Survived Conversion Therapy. The Supreme Court Just Made It Legal Again

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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When Sarah Mullally was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury, it looked like a breakthrough. It was. But it didn't happen by accident.

In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with Catherine Pepinster, a journalist who reported on Mullally’s rise and the network that helped make it possible.

Before women could even become bishops in the Church of England, a small group of clergy saw a gap: being allowed to lead and actually getting there are two very different things.

So they built Leading Women, a mentoring organization designed to prepare female candidates for leadership inside one of the world’s oldest institutional churches — one still embedded in British parliamentary life and still navigating deep divisions over sexuality and abuse.

Pepinster traces Mullally’s path from chief nurse of Britain’s National Health Service to the most powerful seat in Anglican Christianity — a woman who has reached the top of two professions in one lifetime.

She also maps what Mullally is walking into: an institution in numerical decline that still sits at the center of British public life, now led by a woman who will serve only six years and inherit two unresolved crises her predecessor couldn’t survive.

The Myth of Sudden Change: How the First Woman Archbishop Got There

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Inside a growing spiritual movement built around awakening, ascension, and the search for something bigger

At a packed conference in Los Angeles, thousands of people gathered to explore a different way of understanding reality—through crystals, energy healing, and the belief that some humans didn’t originate on Earth.

They’re called starseeds: people who believe they were sent here from other planets to help humanity “ascend” to a higher dimension.

According to our guest, RNS reporter Kathryn Post, it might sound fringe. But the deeper you go, the more familiar the underlying search begins to feel.

Because the people drawn to this world aren’t so different from anyone else. They’re looking for meaning, for purpose, for a way to make sense of suffering. And increasingly, they’re finding those answers online—through influencers, shared language, and communities that have no central authority.

But as these beliefs spread, they’re also evolving. In some cases, blending with conspiracy theories about hidden elites, cosmic battles, and the end of the world as we know it.

So what happens when belief becomes entirely personal—but still somehow shared?

And how do you tell the difference between a spiritual search… and something more dangerous?

RELATED: Starseeds, government plots, and an alien mantis: Inside New Age spirituality’s new age

Are You a Starseed? The Search for Meaning, Rewritten

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Muslim families in Texas are asking: Does school choice include us?

A Houston father went to enroll his kids in Texas’s new school voucher program and discovered his school wasn’t on the list — along with every other Islamic school in the state.

Texas launched one of the country’s largest school choice programs, promising families public funds for religious private schools, but roughly a hundred Muslim schools were excluded without official explanation.

State officials have publicly posted about not funding schools tied to terrorist organizations, pointing to Governor Abbott’s designation of CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization — a designation the federal government has not made.

Now families are suing with a March 17th deadline bearing down. Amanda Henderson talks with RNS reporter Fiona André and editor-in-chief Paul O’Donnell about the lawsuits, the communities affected, and what this moment reveals about who “school choice” was really built for.

Texas Created a Program to Fund Religious Schools. So Why Are Muslim Schools Missing?

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Growing up in the 1990s meant purity rings and Josh Harris books — now the loudest Christian women are countering 'toxic empathy' and shooting dogs.

When empathy became toxic, and cruelty became strength for Christian women.

Christian womanhood has changed—and not in the ways we could have expected. In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with the co-hosts of the “Saved By The City” podcast Katelyn Beaty and Roxanne Stone about the shift from 1990s purity culture to today’s trad wives, MAGA moms, and warnings against “toxic empathy.”

They unpack how pandemic burnout, influencer culture, and widening political gender gaps reshaped the ideal Christian woman — and why empathy itself has become a flashpoint.

From Purity Rings to Shooting Your Dog: How Christian Womanhood Went MAGA

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Are six decades of solidarity giving way to generational strain?

For much of the last half-century, support for Israel was a defining pillar of American Jewish life. It shaped institutions, philanthropy, politics, and identity. The consensus wasn’t always quiet — but it was broad.

Today, that consensus is under strain.

Younger American Jews — many raised in synagogues, camps, and on Birthright trips — are expressing a different relationship to Israel than their parents and grandparents. Some are building alternative communities. Some are challenging legacy organizations. Some are questioning whether Israel should remain the organizing center of American Jewish life at all.

Meanwhile, established institutions are responding with urgency — and anxiety – warning of rising antisemitism, political danger, and fractures that could reshape the community for decades.

This tension didn’t begin on October 7. But October 7 — and the war that followed — has intensified it.

Religion reporter Yonat Shimron joins us to trace the full arc: from postwar American Jewish flourishing, to decades of near-consensus, to the generational and institutional rupture unfolding now.

What changed? Who gets to define Jewish responsibility? And what happens next?

What's Next for American Jews and Israel? A Half-Century of Consensus Weakens.

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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“We’re the people everyone hates.” That’s what Rabbi Steven Burg hears when he asks young Jews who they are.

October 7 accelerated this. In the aftermath of the attacks, lines were drawn between support for an occupied Gaza and the security of the Jewish state and its people. Progressive coalitions found themselves fracturing. Interfaith partnerships are strained to stay together. Students found themselves abandoned by people they thought were allies.

But Burg says the problem runs deeper than politics.

In this episode, host Amanda Henderson talks with Rabbi Steven Burg about what happens to religious identity when an entire generation can only define themselves by who hates them—and what it takes to move from trauma to something they’re actually for.

RELATED: Rabbi Steven Burg: “We cannot allow ourselves to be reduced to victims.”

When Trauma Becomes Identity: What Young Jews Are Learning After October 7

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Bishop Barber says you can't undermine authoritarianism from DC down—it has to come from state-based movements doing micro-organizing at the county level.

Complexified welcomes the Rev. William Barber II, architect of the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, as he sets out to reclaim voters who ran to the right in the last presidential election.

Who are these voters? Low-income voters earning less than $50,000 who favored Donald Trump by roughly 1% in 2024. That margin, according to Rev. Barber, is reversible by campaigning for something instead of against.

Join host Amanda Henderson as she and Rev. Barber discuss presumptions about low-income voters, movement strategy, modes of resistance, and respond to a challenge issued by the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to debate immigration theology.

The Rev. William Barber II: Fighting Autocrats Starts at the Grassroots

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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The Movement Got What It Wanted. Abortions Increased Anyway.

The applause was muted when Trump appeared on video. One year ago, the March for Life felt like a rock concert. This year, JD Vance had to contend with detractors from the stage.

The pro-life movement got what it wanted—Dobbs overturned Roe. But abortions in America have actually risen since the decision. Nearly two-thirds now happen through medication abortion, mifepristone prescribed via telehealth, accessible even in states with bans. The Trump administration won’t restrict it.

Vance called that choice “prudential”—politically wise. The crowd wasn’t buying it. One man said he trusted Trump’s negotiating skills, then started crying.

Reporter Aleja Hertzler-McCain takes us inside a movement with profound conviction confronting political calculation, where only one person among thousands holds a sign about immigration.

Abortions Rose After Dobbs—And the March for Life Knows It

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Most people can’t tell you why they left church—they just drifted away, one Sunday at a time.

(RNS) Ryan Burge, a sociologist and pastor, calls it 'trying to put smoke in a box' — mapping religious decline when people can't explain their own choices and churches won't die on schedule.

Burge lives this trend professionally and personally. He’s a sociologist who maps religious decline in real time, tracking how the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans climbed from 5% in 1991 to 30% in 2020, then plateaued. He’s also a pastor who spent 18 years shepherding a mainline church he knew would close. In 2017, he did the math: three years of money left. But the church lasted until 2024. Organizations scratch and claw when resources run low, surviving long past their projected expiration dates in ways no model can predict.

But here’s what keeps him up at night: The data can’t explain why people actually leave. Most don’t have some big blow-up over politics or theology. They drift. Three times a month becomes twice, then once every few months, then never. Burge calls it “trying to put smoke in a box” — attempting to categorize something structureless, something people themselves can’t articulate. The era of New Atheism appears spent. Baby boomers are aging out of power. Both political parties appear to be facing an existential crisis because of shifting religious landscapes.

What do you do with numbers that reveal broad trends but can’t capture individual meaning? How do you find your place in the sweep of history when the mental scaffolding keeps shifting?

Quiet Quitting Church: When the Numbers Reveal Everything and Explain Nothing

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Faith leaders thought their collars would protect them. They were wrong.

The Presbyterian minister was wearing his collar. Department of Homeland Security agents shot him in the head with pepper balls anyway. The Unitarian pastor arrived at the scene of a killing in clerical dress. Federal officers fired rounds near her head within the hour. Across American cities, clergy are learning what happens when the federal government no longer appears to respect the moral authority they’ve wielded on for generations.

Faith-based resistance to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda started on Day 1 — Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral. But as Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations intensified through Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago and now Minneapolis, the organizing evolved. Rapid response networks. ICE observer trainings. Whistle brigades. Tactics shared between cities.

But clergy collars aren’t always de-escalating anymore. DHS mocks its religious critics on social media, calls them “imbecilic morons” and keeps advancing. Reporter Jack Jenkins has been on the ground watching one of the largest faith-based organizing movements in modern American history collide with federal power appears unmoved by their prayerful protests.

They Shot the Pastor Anyway: When Religious Authority Met Federal Force

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Religious leaders stayed mostly silent when the U.S. seized a foreign dictator — except for the pope.

Religious leaders stayed mostly silent when the U.S. grabbed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York. The loudest response didn’t come from Washington or American pulpits, but from Rome, where Pope Leo warned about sovereignty, dignity, and the rule of law.

In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with Religion News Service editor-in-chief Paul O’Donnell about why so many religious voices paused, why the pope didn’t, and what that contrast reveals about power, politics, and faith in real time. It’s a conversation about silence, authority, and what happens when moral instincts lag behind geopolitical force.

A Dictator Was Seized. The Pope Spoke. Everyone Else Paused.

🎧 Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Faith, Fame, and the Feed: How Influencers Shape What We Believe

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In a world where attention is authority, who gets to shape faith, values, and public life?

What does it actually mean to be an influencer in 2025 — and why does it matter so much for religion and politics? In this episode of Complexified, Amanda Henderson is joined by Religion News Service reporters Fiona Murphy and Richa Karmarkar to unpack the people shaping belief, identity, and public conversation online right now.

From conservative power brokers and Christian nationalist figures to Jewish comedians, hijabi fitness creators, former monks, and viral TikTok storytellers, the conversation explores how influence works in the attention economy — and why people increasingly look to social media personalities, not institutions, for meaning, guidance, and moral frameworks. It’s a wide-ranging look at parasocial power, digital authority, and the blurred line between faith, culture, and influence.

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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How One Abuse Story Changed a Reporter

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🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website

Sometimes a story breaks you open.
While reporting on abuse and accountability inside the Southern Baptist Convention, RNS journalist Bob Smietana reached out to someone he’d interviewed many times before — publisher and whistleblower Jen Lyell. What followed was not another update for a news story, but a devastating turn that forced Bob to confront the human weight behind the reporting.

In this episode, Bob joins Amanda Henderson for an unusually intimate conversation about Jen’s life, her courage, the institutional failures that shaped her final years, and what it means for a journalist when a story becomes personal.

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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The Conservative Christian Momfluencer Machine

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What if your favorite wholesome mom account was also your quietest political radicalizer?

Earlier this year, RNS Editor Roxanne Stone was in Austin, Texas, talking about tradwife influencers—women whose soft, nostalgic aesthetic is reshaping conversations about gender, faith, and politics.

Just up the road in Dallas, her colleague Kathryn Post had been surrounded by 6,700 women at “Share the Arrows,” a high-energy conference hosted by conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey.

Different rooms, same ecosystem: conservative women influencers blending wellness, homeschooling, motherhood, faith—and a very clear political worldview.

In this episode, Roxanne and Kathryn trace how pandemic isolation, sourdough starters, and “crunchy mom” content became a surprisingly powerful on-ramp into right-wing politics for thousands of women.

They follow the journey of one former Bernie supporter turned MAGA homeschooler, unpack how these influencers use Christian language and gender ideals, and explore what happens when lifestyle content becomes a pipeline toward anti-trans activism, conspiracy thinking, and real-world policy changes.

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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From Pink to Waterproof: The Weird Economics of U.S. Bible Sales

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A paradox: declining churchgoing, rising Bible sales.

Americans are attending church less—and buying more Bibles than ever. In this Complexified conversation, Amanda Henderson and RNS reporter Bob Smietana unpack the paradox: a two-decade boom in Bible sales alongside sinking religiosity.

They trace how hyper-personalized editions (pink gift Bibles, “adventure” and environmental Bibles, even waterproof ones) meet life stages and rituals; why translation choices and shifting English keep spawning new versions; and how politics keeps creeping in—from school-gate Gideons and translation fights to specialty “commemorative” editions.

We get inside baseball on supply chains (thin paper, specialized presses, China printing), the print-vs-app tug-of-war, and the curious spikes tied to public events. It’s a tour of the market where scripture is both sacred text and consumer good—and what that says about American Christianity right now.

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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Beyond Identity Politics: The Mamdani Method in New York

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What happens when a Muslim mayor-elect treats identity as a bridge, not a brand?

In this episode of Complexified, Amanda Henderson explores the story of Zoran Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim mayor-elect—a politician who turned identity into empathy and faith into fluency.

RNS reporters Fiona André and Ulaa Kuziez join to unpack how Mamdani built a multifaith, multiethnic coalition that stretched from mosques to churches to fried chicken shops across Queens. They trace how his campaign refused to hide his Muslim identity but refused to be defined by it, focusing instead on rent, childcare, and transit—the everyday issues that knit a city together.

Along the way, they examine how Mamdani faced Islamophobia head-on, speaking plainly about belonging, and why his victory feels like a new chapter in American politics—one grounded less in performance and more in trust.

Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.

Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.

Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.

What are your thoughts on this week’s episode? 💭 Drop a comment below! 👇

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