This is a turbulent time for American democracy. Years, perhaps decades, of social change is manifesting in the form of distrust, violence, chaos, fear, loneliness, and despair.

But Conversing, along with Comment magazine, is about hope, healing, and hospitality.

For this special 200th episode of Conversing, Mark Labberton invites Anne Snyder (Editor-in-Chief, Comment magazine) for a close reading and discussion of the 2025 Comment Manifesto, a hopeful new document offering a vision of Christian Humanism for this era.

Together they discuss:

The meaning and intent behind a new Comment magazine Manifesto for Christian humanism

The Incarnation of Christ for what it means to be human

Hospitality in an era of exclusion

Healthy institutions and the importance of communal agency

Individualism vs communitarianism

Learning to perceive the world in fresh, surprising ways

About the Comment Manifesto

To read the Manifesto in its entirety, visit comment.org/manifesto/, or scroll below.

To watch a reading of selections from the Comment Manifesto, click here.

About Anne Snyder

Anne Snyder is the Editor-in-Chief of Comment magazine, which is a core publication of Cardus, a think tank devoted to renewing North American social architecture, rooted in two thousand years of Christian social thought. Visit https://comment.org/ for more information.

For years, Anne has been engaged in concerns for the social architecture of the world. That is, the way that our practices of social engagement, life, conversation, discussion, debate, and difference can all be held in the right kind of ways for the sake of the thriving of people, individuals, communities, and our nation at large.

Anne also oversees our Comment’s partner project, Breaking Ground, and is the host of The Whole Person Revolution podcast and co-editor of Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year (2022).

Show Notes

• Giving thanks for 200 episodes of Conversing!
• 2000 years of Christian thought to the public square
• James K.A. Smith, the former editor of Comment Magazine
• Seeking a positive moral vision
• A turbulent moment for democracy
• MANIFESTO SECTION 1 “We are Christian humanists…”
• What it means to be human in our age—our infinite dignity, relationship to the earth, and woundedness
• The significance of Jesus Christ for what it means to be human
• What the Incarnation of Christ means for our world
• “So many people we know and love and respect feel ecclesially homeless, obviously politically homeless.”
• MANIFESTO SECTION 2 “We believe it’s time to build…”
• Agency
• Called to a co-creative project
• Productive and constructive
• “Contributing the true and good and beautiful in a messy world.”
• MANIFESTO SECTION 3 “We believe in institutions…”
• Collective, common, and communal
• Institutions, as part of the social architecture of our world, can be extraordinarily positive.
• “I always get asked, ‘Why do you believe in institutions? Why? You don’t need to! They’re gone! They’re dead!’”
• “Healthy institutions are channels within which you can actually realize your sense of agency in a way that might be more moving than you ever would have imagined just by yourself.”
• Yuval Levin’s take on community (paraphrased): “All the tumult we're experiencing, we're just having a big fight about what kinds of what community means.”
• Polarization
• MAGA as a kind of community
• “I consider myself a bit of a communitarian.”
• Christian humanism throughout history always has four projects connected to it: Theology, character formation, political economy, and aesthetic.
• MANIFESTO SECTION 4 “We believe in the transformative power of encounter—encountering reality, encountering those unlike us.”
• Addressing the fractured social fabric and isolation of this age
• Encounter and trust
• Hospitality— ”taking one another's being and doing in the world seriously enough”
• Enter the room listening
• MANIFESTO SECTION 5 “We believe Christianity is perpetually on the move. There is no sacred capital.”
• “This is our most aggressive claim.”
• Distinguishing Comment from peer publications such as First Things
• “All cultures are fallen, and we’re part of another kingdom.”
• Galatians 5 and the Fruit of the Spirit
• Civilizational Christianity
• The smallness of “faith, family, flag”
• “So much of my Christian identity has been rewritten by experiences of Christian faith that are completely outside the, the social reality that is my fundamental location.”
• ”When Christianity seems to be running the dangerous risk of being captured, captured by a certain kind of ideological political social frame that feels as though it's really making itself primary simply by its Napoleonic capacity for self-crowning, that is a very, very dangerous thing.”
• MANIFESTO SECTION 6 “We believe there are different ways of knowing—that the thinker and the practitioner have equally valuable wisdoms worth airing, that relationship and context matter for the ways in which we perceive reality, that the child with Down syndrome perceives truths that a Nobel Prize winner cannot, and that there is a need for those who inhabit these myriad ways to share space and learn how to pursue understanding—perhaps even revelation—together.”
• Perceiving the world differently
• Down syndrome and the expression of a different kind of knowing or wisdom
• Full circle with the first principle of the imago Dei
• Functioning out of either confidence, uncertainty, or anxiety
• Mark Labberton’s friend Dustin (R.I.P), who had cerebral palsy
• Fatigue, trying to get our bearings
• Looking for moral and eschatological coherence

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

The 6 Primary Sections of the 2025 Comment Manifesto

To read the Manifesto in its entirety, visit comment.org/manifesto/.

1. We are Christian humanists, those who believe that Jesus Christ—God become man—is the ultimate measure of what it means to be human. We believe that every human being is created in the image of God, whole persons who are at once fallen yet gloriously endowed, finite and dependent, yet deserving of infinite dignity. We seek to stay true both to the wonder and to the woundedness of life this side of the veil, even as our eschatology floods us with hope: Jesus has walked with us, died, risen, and ascended, and he will come again to make all things new.

2. We believe it’s a time to build, that the creative imagination and the Christian imagination are mysteriously linked. We want to begin with the Yes in Christ, not our own noes. While there is an important role for criticism baptized in a study of what is true, good, and beautiful, it is a means to an end—the basis for wise repair and imagination, not the justification for destruction or erasure. We are committed to keeping orthodoxy and orthopraxy married, taking seriously our job to translate between them.

3. We believe in institutions: government, guilds, families, schools, universities, the church. We recognize that in our age of individualism, institutions are often painted as the enemy. We try to change that, seeking to shape the character of today’s most formative institutions while exploring what kind of reimagined social architecture might compel the next generation’s trust.

4. We believe in the transformative power of encounter—encountering reality, encountering those unlike us. Loving enemies is bedrock for Comment, hospitality core. We are champions of the difficult room. We believe in the deeper truths that can be discovered when different life experiences and distinct sources of wisdom are gathered around one table. We intentionally publish arguments with which we disagree, including those who don’t hail Christ as Lord, not for the sake of pluralism without conviction, but because Christians have always better understood the contours and depths of their faith when crystallized through exchanges with strangers turned friends.

5. We believe Christianity is perpetually on the move. There is no sacred capital. While the audience we serve is navigating a North American context, we serve this audience from an understanding that Christianity is an intercultural, polyglot religion. At a time of rising religious ethno-nationalism, we insist that no culture can claim to represent the true form of Christianity, and we actively seek for our authors and partners to reflect the global reality of the church.

6. We believe there are different ways of knowing—that the thinker and the practitioner have equally valuable wisdoms worth airing, that relationship and context matter for the ways in which we perceive reality, that the child with Down syndrome perceives truths that a Nobel Prize winner cannot, and that there is a need for those who inhabit these myriad ways to share space and learn how to pursue understanding—perhaps even revelation—together.

...

Our theory of change takes its cues from the garden, less the machine. We are personalists, not ideologues. We follow the logic of Jesus’s mustard seed, of yeast transforming a whole pile of dough, of the principle of contagiousness and change happening over generations. We believe in the value of slow thought. We are skeptical of the language of scale in growing spiritual goods. While we wish to be savvy in unmasking the either/or reactivity of our age and will always call out dehumanizing trendlines, we are fundamentally animated by the creative impulse, by a philosophy of natality expressed through hospitality. This feels especially important in this time between eras when no one knows what’s next, and we need one another to recalibrate, to reflect, and to shape a hopeful future.

”I grew up thinking that Christianity was basically cruel and hypocritical.”

“The core teachings of Jesus align very well with the core teachings of James Madison.”

“That's why we need Christianity. It's not because we don't have reason to fear. It's because we do.”

—Jonathan Rauch, from the episode

We’re at a crossroads, where Christianity and secularism in America are both operating at cross-purposes, and both need a critical reassessment of their role in democratic public life.

In his new book, Jonathan Rauch “reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity.” He “addresses secular Americans who think Christianity can be abandoned, and Christian Americans who blame secular culture for their grievances.”

Jonathan Rauch is senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books, including The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth and his latest book (under discussion in this episode),  Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. Follow him on X @jon_rauch.

He is also a celebrated essayist, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and a recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

In this episode Mark Labberton and Jonathan Rauch discuss:

• Republican virtue
• What Jesus and James Madison have in common
• The political idolatry of secularism
• The differences between the thin church, sharp church, and thick church
• The political orientation of the church in exile
• Tyrannical fear
• The Morman church’s example of civic theology “of patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation”
• The promise of power in exchange for loyalty

About Jonathan Rauch

Jonathan Rauch is senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books, including The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth and his latest book (under discussion in this episode),  Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. Follow him on X @jon_rauch.

Show Notes

• Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy
• The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
• Reasonable, civic mindedness
• “Graciousness toward a faith you don’t share.”
• “Of course I knew I was Jewish. I also knew that the idea of God seemed silly to me. I just never, never could believe it.”
• The Rev. Dr. Mark McIntosh
• 2003 Atlantic article: “The dumbest thing I ever wrote” celebrating secularism in America (”Let It Be,” The Atlantic, May 2003)
• “ It turned out that when Christianity started to fail, people started looking for substitutes, because they were looking for a source of identity and values and transcendent meaning.”
• Political idolatry of secularism
• “A major reason the country is becoming ungovernable is because of Christianity’s crisis. We can no longer separate the two, and that’s why I, a very secular person, am writing a book about Christianity.”
• “Moving away from the teachings of Jesus…”
• “The core teachings of Jesus align very well with the core teachings of James Madison.”
• Mark’s description of his father: “ My dad used to save certain neck veins for the discussion of religion because he felt like it was something that should be avoided, at that time, at all costs, particularly its most zealous kind. And his primary critique was that what religious people do is that they take great things and make them small. …   What shocked me when I became a Christian was this discovery that Jesus and my dad had this same theme in common, that Jesus often objected to the small making of various religious authorities of his day.”
• “God’s capacious grace, creativity, purpose, and love”
• Will the church live in its identity as followers of Jesus?
• “Christianity is a load-bearing wall in our liberal democracy.”
• “Republican virtues” (not the party): lawful, truthful, civic education, tolerant, pluralistic
• Christianity’s role in upholding the unprecedented religious freedom
• “When Christians begin demanding things that are inconsistent with those core values, that makes everything else in the country harder.”
• “The thin church is a church that blends into the surrounding culture and it becomes diluted.”
• “The sharp church is …  where the church takes on the political colorations of the surrounding environment, aligns itself with a political party.”
• Divisive and polarizing
• “The third is the thick church. And there, the challenge is that you want a church to be counter cultural. You want it to have a strong sense of its own values. Otherwise, it's just not doing the work. So it needs to ask a lot of its followers. It needs to give a lot back in exchange. That's what sociologists mean by, by thick communities and groups. At the same time, it needs to be reasonably well aligned with our constitution and our liberal democratic values.”
• Church of fear
• Fear of demographic decline
• Cultural fear and losing the country to the woke Left
• Fear of emasculation
• Plain old political fear: “Our side needs to win.”
• Fear as a major theme of the Bible
• Fear of God as “the beginning of wisdom”
• “A communion of unlike people. … A workshop in which the character of God … is meant to be learned.”
• Immaturity and lack of wisdom in the church
• “The chief defense of the faith in the world that Jesus died and rose is that unlike people find communion with one another in a union that only Jesus Christ's death and resurrection could actually accomplish.”
• “Tyrannical fear”—a drive for dominance
• “Fear is part of the human condition. Yet what's so countercultural about Christianity, is its teaching that you can't be governed by that fear. You can't let it run your life and go around in a state of panic. And that Jesus Christ himself had lots to be fearful of, as we know from the end that he came to, and yet comported himself in this calm and dignified way, did not let fear triumph over him. That's why we need Christianity. It's not because we don't have reason to fear. It's because we do.”
• “Fear casts out love.”
• Trump administration[’s] … demonstration of a capacity to have literally no compassion, no empathy.”
• The paradigm of Exodus versus the paradigm of exile
• Isaiah 58: “ Now as strangers in a strange land in Babylon, I'm going to ask you: Who are you now? Who do you trust now? Who are you going to put the full weight of your life on now?”
• “Exilic Church”
• “ Christianity is not about owning the country or winning in politics.”
• “It can’t be a coincidence that at a moment when (at least) white Protestantism in the United States is obsessed with political influence and has mortgaged itself to the least Christlike figure possibly in American political history (in any case, right up there) that its numbers are shrinking catastrophically.”
• “The irony of the cross always is this self emptying power.”
• [Trump] is saying, “I will give you power, and in exchange, you will give me unquestioning loyalty.”
• Comparing Trump’s transaction (at Dordt University in Iowa) “If you vote for me, you will have power” with the temptation of Christ in the desert: “All of this will be yours if you bow down to me.”
• Transactional relationship with power
• The Mormon church’s “ civic theology … of patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation”
• Jesus: “Don’t be afraid, imitate Jesus, and forgive each other.”
• Madisonian liberalism: “Don’t panic if you lose an election, protect minorities and the dignity of every individual, and don’t seek retribution if you win, share the country.”
• “When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, ‘It would be a good idea.’”
• Black church and MLK Jr.—”emphasis on Reverend”
• “You accept the stripes and the crown of thorns. You turn the other cheek.”
• Profoundly counterintuitive countercultural example

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“Is Trump interested in being Constitutionally faithful?” (Mark Labberton, from this episode)

“What we're watching here is the operation of the will of an individual on the system, and the system is really meant to answer to the negotiated will of a plural body.” (Yuval Levin, from this episode)

“ I think character is destiny, especially in the American presidency, because the presidency really is one person.” (Yuval Levin, from this episode)

The transition of power from one presidential administration to another always has the potential for turbulence—often a surreal, perplexing, or disorienting process. But is there anything peculiar or problematic about the opening days of Donald Trump’s second term in office? Is there anything unconstitutional?

In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes back Yuval Levin for a conversation about the political and social impact of Donald Trump’s first month in office in light of Constitutional law and the Separation of Powers.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Currie Chair in Public Policy. His latest book is American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. He’s founder of National Affairs, senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor of National Review, and contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

Together they discuss:

• The authority of the Constitution over the presidency
• The importance of character in the office of the president
• The separation of powers and the threat of presidential overreach
• What American citizens should be genuinely worried about right now
• The importance of cross-partisan policymaking and a variety of political voices
• Why we should worry, but not panic

About Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

At AEI, Levin and scholars in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies research division study the foundations of self-government and the future of law, regulation, and constitutionalism. They also explore the state of American social, political, and civic life, focusing on the preconditions necessary for family, community, and country to flourish.

Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He was also executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.

In addition to being interviewed frequently on radio and television, Levin has published essays and articles in numerous publications, including Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Commentary. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation – and Could Again (Basic Books, 2024).

He holds an MA and PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Show Notes

• A time of “presidential gigantism”
• “Is Trump interested in being Constitutionally faithful?”
• Pluralism and vigorous debate
• Swamping a weak, divided Congress
• Separation of Powers
• Legislature vs Executive Branch
• “ Nobody really ever expected the president to be representative. Presidents are elected to be accountable. Congress is elected to be representative.”
• “What we're watching here is the operation of the will of an individual on the system, and the system is really meant to answer to the negotiated will of a plural body.”
• Performative nature of political roles
• “Random grab-bag of power plays.”
• Fear of a “lawless president”
• “The beginning of  a new administration is unavoidably a little surreal.”
• “ It's important not to over-read the strength that's evident at the outset here because we don't really know how much of this will play out.”
• Elon Musk as Pseudo-President
• “ The president does command the executive branch. On the other hand, the president does not command the federal government.”
• “ When the question is, does the president have to follow the law, the answer to that is going to be yes.”
• Is the Supreme Court going to keep Trump in check?
• Overturning Chevron deference
• “Character is destiny.”
• “ I think character is destiny, especially in the American presidency, because the presidency really is one person.”
• “ The fact that character's destiny in the presidency is not good news for Donald Trump and is not good news for the country while he is president because the biggest problem with Trump is his character, is the lack of a sense of personal responsibility and self restraint, the lack of a respect for the need for stability and coherence in leadership, And to have an administration that has that character is going to challenge our system and I think just create problems for the country in some important ways.”
• ”In moments of decision and crisis, it's the president's character that determines how things go.”
• “ My biggest worry about Trump is not one policy or another. There's some I like and some I don't. But it's that ultimately the presidency is one person, and this one person is just not a good fit for that office.”
• Presidential overreach
• Loyalty tests and punishment
• “ What the president really does is make hard decisions.”
• Having room for opposition
• “Administration is impossible when people on the ground are afraid to tell you what's going on.”
• Alarm Bells
• First: “The possibility of the administration just willfully ignoring a court order.”
• Second: “Ignoring signals of trouble, ignoring dissent, ignoring opposing voices, a sense that they're ignoring reality and pretending things are happening that aren't. That's very dangerous in the presidency.”
• Third: “It's also worth worrying about the tendency for vengeance and for personal vendettas for using the power of prosecution and of law enforcement for political purposes, even for personal purposes.”
• Character and mindset
• Congress has 535 people. The presidency comes down to one person.
• Dangers on the horizon
• Checks and balances
• Laying the groundwork for a third Trump term?
• “On the whole  our institutions have proven fairly strong.”
• “It is better to worry than to panic. Worry lets you make distinctions …”
• Yuval Levin’s American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again
• What is the voice of citizenship right now?
• Appropriations
• “Governors are some of the sanest people in our politics in this moment.”
• “I don't think that the lesson of Trump's first term should be that people who oppose him should just sit it out and wait. I think the lesson on the contrary is that the Trump administration does respond to pressure.”
• “Policy change should happen through cross partisan negotiation in Congress.”
• “President Trump has said, for example, that in his first month in office, he wants to have met every house Republican.”
• A variety of voices
• “In a way, the mindset of what's the thing we would do if we could magically do anything is the problem, not the solution. And it's how Donald Trump is thinking, what would I do if I were the emperor? I think the most important thing in this moment is for him to realize that he is not the emperor, and that our system never lets us do that thing we would want to do. That's the beauty of the system.”
• “The other great political question. What can I get done that I also want to achieve?”
• “God Bless America.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“The gift of listening is the laying down of presumption. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you would say about this or that or the other thing. I don’t understand how you have experienced life. I don’t share in that emotional moment. I don’t have that same vocabulary. I don’t have that same life experience.” (Mark Labberton, from this episode)

In this Conversing Short, Mark Labberton reflects on the reality and meaning of the fact that “I am not you.”

He considers the importance of differentiation between speaker and listener, and the best posture of the listener not only to gain information, but to contribute back to the speaker and the conversation itself, opening up a deeper and more imaginative exchange.

Learning to appreciate and pursue knowledge of “differentiated others,” listening in this context becomes an antidote to presumption. The less presumptuous we are about others, the more knowledge and perspective we’re likely to gain.

Listening is also more than immediate reflection. Better than restatement would be to probe the speaker’s interest and awaken their imagination, thereby creating new possibilities for everyone involved.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate, inspire, and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection—a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

• The gift of listening is not just similarities, but differentiation
• The adventure of knowing another person
• Mature listening
• Expanding the heart and mind through true differentiation
• Letting differentiation be a gift, and not a threat—leading to compassion, mercy, justice, and enlivened exchange
• “A chance to be more than our mere selves.”
• We’re each coming from different bodies, contexts, backgrounds, etc.
• Understanding the volley or back-and-forth
• “Sometimes listening is just an excuse for being quiet while we develop our own lines that we’re preparing to say to the other person. That is not listening. That’s something else. That’s about plotting and planning, or it’s about fear, or it’s about anxiety …”
• Earnest, genuine listening means becoming a genuine learner, without presumptions.
• “The gift of listening is the laying down of presumption. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you would say about this or that or the other thing. I don’t understand how you have experienced life. I don’t share in that emotional moment. I don’t have that same vocabulary. I don’t have that same life experience.”
• What happens when you are wrongly presumptuous about other people
• Listening is an unmasking of presumption.
• Exposing our presumptions
• Reflecting the words of the other is not enough; genuine listening unearths and awakens the imagination of the other
• Reaching genuine depth of conversational volley
• “These things are critical in leadership, because communication is a miracle—and not a frequent one.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.