Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Since you’ve gamely indulged my inquiries all year, it’s only fair that I give you a chance to ask me anything––pose a question about any issue under the sun, any article I’ve written or argument I’ve made, or any subject at all that you’d like to see me think through. When I answer, space will be limited, so keep your questions short enough for me to reprint them as prompts.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

In a bygone newsletter, I asked, “How much time did you spend with peers in adolescence, and what effect did that have on the rest of your life?” I ran responses from some older readers here. To close out the year, here’s one more batch of responses (edited for length and clarity), featuring a younger cohort of readers.

Andrew in Montreal reminisces about the mid-1980s.

Middle school was surprisingly the happiest period of my life. I had a few friends who would come over every weekend. We’d stay up late playing board games or filming ourselves lip-synching on my parents’ VHS recorder. As we got older we used to sneak out and visit girls on our bikes. We had to plan everything during recess––there were no cellphones and we didn’t want our parents to get wind of our plans on the one family phone.

I’ll never forget the freedom and camaraderie I felt during those years.

Joe graduated high school in 1984, in St. Louis.

I’d be out with friends every weekend and almost every night during the summer and holidays. Video games were starting to be a big part of how we spent our time. But mostly, we just hung out. There were a lot of parties and a lot of drinking but not other drugs—pot occasionally. There were also a lot of couples. So a typical quiet night would be four or five couples watching rented movies at someone’s house, while a wild night would be driving around with a gallon of Brass Monkey (the amount of drunk driving we did is appalling to look back on) and ending up at a house party where police would show up, though no arrests would be made. They’d just send us on our way.

I have a son who’s a freshman in college. He had a couple of steady high-school girlfriends but spent a fraction of the time out of the house with friends compared to me. Online gaming is underestimated for its sociability. He has a lot of friends, or at least acquaintances, through his gaming circle, which ripple out from just his school friends. Also, as far as I can tell, he and his friends drink much, much less than we did. (Yes, I may be fooling myself, but I don’t think so.) I’m grateful because one of the lasting effects from those years was a drinking problem that I struggled with for a long time. I’ll take my kid playing Playstation all night over getting drunk and driving around, that’s for sure.

Ariela is a Millennial in her mid-30s who started homeschooling by seventh grade.

I met up with my friends after they got out of school and worked in retail and hospitality from age 14, where I made lots of friends five to 10 years my senior. I experienced aspects of a classic adolescence––embarrassingly awkward debauchery, crushes, and insecurities. What teenagers face today, however, is significantly scarier than what I faced. LiveJournal was merely an outlet for my writing and Myspace was a way to publicly curate my interests. I didn't grow up on apps that changed my physical appearance, and bullying was something that we could escape after the school bell rang. It didn't follow us into our own homes on an addictive and compact device. I would rather the teens of Gen Z get out of the house, smoke a little pot, get drunk, and know what it's like to be arrested at a pharmacy for stealing condoms than live in a virtual world.

Matt grew up in rural North Carolina in the 1990s, joined the Boy Scouts, and became an Eagle Scout at 16.

There were some cooler kids in our troop who would win the elections to see who would be the senior patrol leader. I was shy, effeminate, and not the sporting type. But I was good at learning things, and Boy Scouts gave me something to be good at: knot tying, camping, hiking, and good citizenship. I had friends there like me. I advanced in rank. There were times that I felt bullied by the cool kids, but I always had my patrol of friends who were laid-back and enjoyed spending time outdoors. I was given freedom to explore my own character. I was taught responsibility and the tenants of the Boy Scout oath and law. I could learn to be me. Maybe it’s too early to know if kids with helicopter parents will come out as responsible adults. Without independence, a kid won’t know who they are until later in the game.

Errol grew up in a small town in a dry county.

My friends and I frequented the local coffee shop College Hill Coffee on nights and weekends. I formed some strong friendships and bonds with them sitting in front of the fireplace with my mandarin-orange-and-cherry Italian soda while we all debated various political points as if we actually knew anything at all. We’d get heated over Bush versus Kerry.

Experiences with them and the random college kids and strangers who would sometimes stroll in prepared me for a life of spirited debates. The feeling of being in a public place with a group of your peers and feeling free enough to announce your disagreement with them is still unmatched in the way of experiences that I’ve had in life. This is why, in my mid-ish 30s, I advocate for being a regular at a bar. Being around your friends and being comfortable enough to say what you believe is vital. It’s also fleeting, as we see with Gen Z and younger. Most important, it never gets old. Talking about stuff with the people around you is one of the greatest pleasures and frustrations in life.

Matt was born in 1984, and recalls spending 75 percent of his unstructured time with friends and classmates during his adolescence.

We spent entire summer vacations outside, riding bikes, getting lost in the woods, swimming, playing sandlot baseball, getting in fistfights and chasing enough spare change for an ice-cream sandwich. I am shocked at the amount of independence and trust our parents gave us, and I’m grateful for it. With age, our interests shifted, but the time we spent was still “quality hang.” Poker, pickup basketball, sneaking out of the house and driving around. Even just sitting around watching TV or playing video games was as a group. I don’t even want to guess at the number of hours we spent playing GoldenEye. If you had to stay home, or you got left out of something, you felt like dying. I am not one of those people who walks around saying “What’s wrong with kids these days?,” but it seems obvious that a certain amount of anomie and self-centeredness follows when kids spend too much time “imperially alone,” as David Foster Wallace once put it, “lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.”

Tex started ninth grade in 1999.

We all knew car = freedom, and were killing time till we turned 16. We didn’t have iPhones or social media, but we had AIM, which wasn’t all that different from modern instant-messaging apps, except you were sitting at a big desktop computer. People were gossiping, spreading rumors, adding friends, but mostly just having a good time learning how to type. During school we would talk about what happened online last night.

Once you added a username to your list, you could see if they were online or not. I remember staring at the username of the girl I liked. I never got the nerve up to send her a message.

Davis is 21, and graduated from high school in 2020.

I’m reflexively skeptical of the idea that the kids these days just don’t hang out in person. I saw my friends outside of school most days, and we almost never “hung out” through texting or other digital methods—we mostly just used it to coordinate physical meetups. And I was a pretty reclusive, depressed kid—I spent more time alone than most.

If technology affected anything, it was the way we hung out—our default was watching (often admittedly terrible) movies and reality shows on Netflix and then talking over them. If we didn’t have that, I guess we might have had those aimless conversations at a mall or a park. But I think they would have been fundamentally the same conversations.

I was part of the no-dating statistic, but is that a bad thing? I see hand-wringing about this, but do healthy, long-term adult relationships even remotely resemble high-school dating?

I have no regrets there.

Robin was born in 1999.

As a teenager in the 2010s, I was lucky enough to spend almost every afternoon in activities with friends. We would spend every Saturday together under the guise of working in our school’s robotics lab (we did plenty of robotics, but also plenty of sitting in someone’s car in the parking lot). Some nights, we would make it home for 10 p.m. curfew, then talk for several more hours on Skype. That’s where we talked about “deep things” like what we wanted from the world, and when we started admitting, even to friends of the opposite gender, that we thought about sex and had questions about each other’s bodies. I am forever grateful for those friends, and I still talk to several of them regularly.

Despite these close friendships, I didn’t date at all in high school. I then spent most of college feeling paralyzed. It seemed like everyone else knew what they were doing and I didn’t. I spent several years thinking I might be asexual, when really I’m just not interested in hookups. I didn’t have my first real relationship (or lose my virginity) until I was 22.

Luckily, I was never very interested in social media. I had Snapchat for about a year when I was 16, but I deleted it because I could feel myself focusing on documenting my life to show others how much fun I was having instead of actually having fun. In college, I finally got Instagram, years after most of my peers. I developed an eating disorder. I deleted Instagram.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

This newsletter will be off next week. We wish you all happy holidays, and we’ll be back the week of January 1.

However troubling its political implications might be, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday that Donald Trump is disqualified from the state’s primary ballot for having “engaged in insurrection” demonstrates that the judicial system is still functioning in the United States. The reason is straightforward: The court applied the plain language of the Constitution, doing its job with clarity and fidelity to the rule of law.

But perhaps what is most striking about Colorado’s decision was the conservative reasoning the justices employed to reach their conclusion. The four justices who voted in the majority adhered to three stalwart principles of judicial conservatism: textualism (by which judges endeavor to strictly apply the plain text of the Constitution), originalism (by which they refer to historical sources for a contemporaneous understanding of that text), and federalism (by which judges take pains to respect the dual sovereignty of the states alongside the federal government as well as the state courts’ concomitant prerogative to construe their own laws).

This third element is perhaps the most interesting. The Colorado Supreme Court was tasked with interpreting Colorado’s Uniform Election Code of 1992, which contains that state’s criteria for getting on its presidential ballot. It determined that disqualification under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is also disqualifying under Colorado law. And it upheld the lower court’s conclusion, after a multiday evidentiary hearing, that Donald Trump in fact engaged in insurrection. Because he is thus disqualified as a matter of Colorado law, the Colorado Supreme Court determined, “it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Secretary [of State] to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”

[George T. Conway III: The Colorado ruling changed my mind]

The U.S. Supreme Court has ignored this sort of reasoning before—and to ill effect. In Bush v. Gore, it ruled in 2000 that manual recounts under Florida’s law regarding contested election results would violate the Constitution’s equal-protection clause, and thus effectively handed the election to George W. Bush by a margin of 537 votes. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens emphasized that “when questions arise about the meaning of state laws, including election laws, it is our settled practice to accept the opinions of the highest courts of the States as providing the final answers.” The conservative justices of today’s Court should bear this example in mind—and the stakes for the Court’s legitimacy—when considering whether the Colorado court got this aspect of its interpretation right.

Next, consider the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which belies a handful of textual ambiguities: What is “insurrection” (and did January 6 qualify)? What does “engaged” mean (and did Trump do it)? And is the president of the United States an “officer” of the United States covered by Section 3? As for the first two questions, President Joe Biden summed things up yesterday, calling it “self-evident” that Trump “supported” an insurrection. Nobody seriously contends otherwise. The rebuttal instead is that Section 3 kicks in only if a jury makes these findings beyond a reasonable doubt pursuant to a federal statute that criminalizes insurrections (and which Special Counsel Jack Smith declined to invoke in indicting Trump)—an argument that one of the dissenting justices made as well.

The Colorado Supreme Court elegantly dispensed with that concern. Again, it applied a plain reading of the law, concluding that Congress’s decision to criminalize “the same conduct that is disqualifying under Section Three … cannot be read to mean that only those charged and convicted of violating the law are constitutionally disqualified from holding office without assuming a great deal of meaning not present in the text or the law.” Neither the Constitution nor the statute say anything of the sort. The court thus refused to go where it needn’t by theorizing about inferences buried beneath the plain text, which is precisely how conservative judging, at least in theory, is supposed to work.

On the officer question, the Colorado Supreme Court focused on the Constitution as written, noting that it “refers to the Presidency as an ‘Office’ twenty-five times,” including in connection with the natural-born-citizen eligibility requirement for the presidency (Article II, Section 5), the four-year cap on presidential terms in office (also in Article II, Section 5), and the impeachment clause (Article I, Section 3). It then turned to tools of originalism, observing, for example, that “dictionaries from the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification define ‘office’ as a ‘particular duty, charge or trust conferred by public authority, and for a public purpose,’ that is ‘undertaken by … authority from government or those who administer it.’” The court then reasonably concluded that “the Presidency falls comfortably within these definitions.” Judges make these kinds of interpretative decisions all the time.

Serious constitutional scholars have nonetheless pushed back on the notion that Section 3 applies to presidents, underscoring that prior drafts of Section 3 included references to “the office of the President” but that the language was ultimately abandoned. According to this argument, the framers of Section 3 intended only to prevent insurrectionists from serving in the Electoral College, but left qualified electors free to choose insurrectionists for the presidency. But those distinctions are missing from the actual text. As the conservative scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen argued in an exhaustive article, “The substantive terms of Section Three’s prohibition are not themselves difficult or inscrutable.” Even more to the point: Jurists differ over what tools of constitutional interpretation are paramount in construing arcane constitutional terms. The political right, for example, has long assailed progressive judges for emphasizing the purposes behind a law when a plain-text reading would arguably suffice. For conservative justices to abandon that hierarchy now, on a case this consequential, would destroy whatever guise of impartiality the Court has left.

[David Frum: The Colorado Supreme Court just gave Republicans a chance to save themselves]

If the U.S. Supreme Court winds up leaving the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision undisturbed, it will inevitably get GOP voters and politicians very upset with the justices in the majority. It could also encourage states to play fast and loose with Section 3 to keep legitimate candidates off future ballots. But the threat of political retribution is just the sort of possibility that motivated the Framers of the original Constitution to give federal judges lifetime appointments under Article III—they needn’t think about the popularity of their decisions. Moreover, the ostensible point of the so-called conservative judicial philosophies of textualism, originalism, and federalism is to confine judges to the business of judging. That means resolving, on the narrowest possible grounds, discrete disputes affecting the immediate parties, at least one of whom is concretely injured by the other—rather than wading into political or normative policy conundrums in ways that aggrandize their own power relative to that of the other branches of government. If the purportedly conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court are intellectually honest about their jurisprudential approach to the law, this case should not be hard.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the agency responsible, one would imagine, for housing and urban development. Over the past two decades, America has done far too little urban development—and far too little suburban and rural development as well. The ensuing housing shortage has led to rising rents, a surge in homelessness, a decline in people’s ability to move for a relationship or a job, and much general misery. Yet the response from the federal government has been to do pretty much nothing.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the federal government granted $87 billion to the CDC and other health agencies, and paid pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars to create a vaccine. When the property bubble burst, the Bush and Obama administrations earmarked as much as $100 billion to stem the foreclosure crisis (albeit with horrid results). During the financial crisis, Congress created a $700 billion backstop for failing banks. And to jolt the country out of the COVID recession, Washington disbursed nearly $2 trillion to households and businesses—including putting a temporary moratorium on evictions and providing $46 billion to cash-strapped renters.

What is happening with housing might not seem as dramatic. But that is only because the crisis has been brewing more slowly. Despite the unemployment rate sitting at record lows and household wealth sitting at record highs this year, an also-record number of Americans were experiencing homelessness: 653,104 in just one night this January. And by some measures housing is less affordable now than it has been in half a century. Shaun Donovan, who served as HUD secretary from 2009 to 2014, told me he had “never seen availability problems this bad … Housing has always been a top-three issue in New York and San Francisco. What is changing now is that it is a crisis in red parts of the country, rural parts of the country—in places where it’s never been an issue.”

Yet legislators have not passed a significant bill to get people off the streets and out of shelters. Joe Biden has not signed a law to increase the supply of rental apartments in high-cost regions or to protect families from predatory landlords. Congress has not made more families eligible for housing vouchers, or passed a statute protecting kids from the trauma of eviction, or set a goal for the production of new housing.

For its part, HUD says it is doing what it can. “Housing sets the foundation for everything else in a person’s life,” Marcia Fudge, the HUD secretary, told me in an email. “HUD is doing all in our power to invest in those who have often been left out and left behind.” But the department can only work with the authority and money Congress allots it. As housing costs have risen, as more people have been forced to crowd in with neighbors or camp in their minivans or skip going to the doctor to make rent, neither HUD nor its budget has expanded to meet Americans’ needs. Right now, it subsidizes housing costs for 2 million households, though more than 10 million families spend more than half of their income on shelter.

The country’s lack of a national housing policy is part of the reason we are in a housing crisis, and Washington needs to take a real role in ending it.

In the past few weeks, I asked a number of housing experts why Congress, HUD, and the administration weren’t doing more.

The problem is structural: Washington just isn’t set up to address the housing crisis. The federal government plays a large, but largely indirect, role in the housing market. It operates through incentives, credits, guarantees, and subsidies. Rather than building housing, it makes mortgages cheaper and covers part of market rents. Rather than setting up retirement communities, it provides tax breaks for developers. You could say the country’s real department of housing and urban development is the Treasury Department, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Senate committee responsible for housing is the Banking Committee.

“The biggest footprint is in mortgage markets,” Jenny Schuetz, a housing economist at the Brookings Institution, told me. The Federal Housing Finance Agency—which oversees Fannie and Freddie—“has more practical authority over housing markets than HUD does. And it’s this obscure agency that most people don’t even know exists.” But the Treasury Department, she added, “doesn’t view itself as a housing agency. I don’t think that many people are sitting inside Treasury actively working on housing-access issues.”

It wasn’t always that way. Indeed, Washington played an aggressive role in expanding the country’s housing stock from the 1930s to the 1970s. As part of the New Deal, the government financed the construction of homes for tens of thousands of families. HUD was founded during Lyndon Johnson’s administration and, as part of his Great Society, set out to build or rehabilitate millions of housing units.

But concentrated poverty and social unrest in public housing—and the anti-Black racism it triggered in voters and politicians—led Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, to put a moratorium on new government-financed projects. HUD would instead provide eligible applicants with vouchers to help pay for their housing. This would “in the long run be the most equitable, least expensive approach to achieving our goal of a decent home for all Americans,” he told Congress. A decade later, Ronald Reagan gutted the voucher program, slashing HUD’s budget by 60 percent.

As a result, today’s HUD is not much of a housing agency. And it is definitely not much of an urban-development agency. (“I used to joke that I’d like to put the UD back in HUD,” Donovan told me, pointing to the department’s limited community-development efforts.) It lives in the shadow of Reagan: small, narrowly focused, and somewhat disrespected. Its current secretary, Fudge, not only publicly lobbied for a different Cabinet gig after Joe Biden’s election but did so by arguing she did not want to end up at HUD. “It’s always ‘We want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD,’” she told Politico while seeking the USDA post that ended up going to Tom Vilsack. (“These out-of-date comments do not reflect the Secretary’s strong pride in the HUD workforce and the work that HUD has accomplished during her tenure,” a spokesperson responded.) Preceding her in the job was Ben Carson, who had no housing experience and repeatedly asked for his own budget to be decimated.

Nearly all of HUD’s budget goes to its voucher programs. And unlike SNAP benefits or Medicaid coverage, vouchers are not an entitlement; the majority of qualifying families do not get help. (Ninety-three million Americans are on Medicaid; 41 million use SNAP; just 5 million live in a household receiving a voucher.) Applicants languish on waiting lists for years, even decades. Many eligible people don’t bother signing up, and as many as one in three people offered a voucher does not end up using it. Take-up rates are low because the process is so arduous and because landlords discriminate (illegally, but commonly) against voucher recipients.

“Think of lining up families who qualify for food stamps and only one in four families gets to eat,” Matthew Desmond, a Princeton sociologist and the author of the book Evicted, told me. “That’s exactly how we treat housing policy today. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because, without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

Something else is stopping Washington from addressing the housing crisis: the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. Land-use policy is not the purview of the federal government. It’s the purview of the states. Congress cannot rewrite Los Angeles’s building code. The White House can’t decide to upzone West Hartford, Connecticut. “I used to spend time with my counterparts in other countries and they’d say, Well, we just updated our national building code and national zoning code. We just wrote a national housing strategy,” Donovan told me. “I’d say, Wait, you have a national building code?”

As my colleague Jerusalem Demsas has written, we have delegated our housing policy not just to state and local governments but to every neighborhood’s homeowners association. Residents of a given place have ample opportunities—zoning-board meetings, candidate forums, historical architectural reviews, city-council open mics—to stop development. So they do. And thus mostly wealthy, mostly older people shape policy to their preferences: keeping new families out, maintaining single-family zoning, stopping development, and prioritizing the aesthetics of buyers over the needs of renters.

Local control is going to make it hard to get out of this crisis. “We’ve got 3,000 counties and 40,000 cities and towns,” Schuetz, of the Brookings Institution, told me. “There’s huge variation in not just their political motivations but in their capacity to carry policy out. And there’s no way to implement local reforms in a widespread way, at any kind of scale.”

But Washington can do something—much more than it is doing now. Expand the low-income housing tax credit. Direct even more money to states with high housing costs. Get rid of the law preventing the government from increasing the number of public-housing units. Fix up the units we already have. Make housing vouchers an entitlement, so that every poor family that needs help with rent gets it. Doing all of this would help not just help millions of poor Americans get and stay housed. It would also help boost the supply of affordable apartments and make HUD a strong advocate for all low-income renters. “Maybe I am getting out over my skis here, but I feel like if HUD were an agency funded at the level of need, an agency administering a universal benefit, it would be a different agency,” Desmond told me.

Then it could develop novel policies to address some of the big drivers of today’s housing shortage: building costs and land-use restrictions. The federal government cannot change land-use policies unilaterally. But that doesn’t mean that it is out of policy levers, housing experts told me. It just means that it needs to work somewhat indirectly: providing cash incentives to places that harmonize their building codes, green-lighting dense development near transit hubs, and allowing prefab homes, for instance. The Biden administration is starting to enact these kinds of policies, and pressing Congress to let it do more. In terms of building costs, the federal government can’t do much to lower the price of lumber. But it can allow more skilled immigration for construction workers and tax land to encourage development.

More modest, cheaper policies are at hand as well. For instance, HUD could start advising state and local governments on how to increase their housing supply. “There is a lot of experimentation going on at the local level,” Schuetz told me. “HUD could at the very least be monitoring this stuff, performing research, evaluating what works and what doesn’t.” It could help Tucson learn from Oakland, Iowa from Massachusetts. “This is squarely in HUD’s comfort zone,” Schuetz added, noting that no agency or political entity is doing this work at the moment.

Many of these policies cost money. But the federal government needs to spend more on housing, particularly on multifamily rental housing. The first thing politicians and civil servants in Washington need to do is simply see the housing crisis as the federal government’s responsibility. Universal homeownership was once the explicit goal of the U.S. government; affordable housing for everyone, everywhere, and the end of homelessness should be the policy priority now.

Illustrations by Adams Carvalho

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and The Trace.

One Saturday night in April 2017, Jenn Jacques and Bob Owens stayed up late drinking at an outdoor bar in Atlanta. They had worked together for more than two years, and Owens had become like an older brother to Jacques. On this Saturday, Owens seemed relaxed and was looking forward to the future; he talked about an upcoming family vacation. “That was such a special night,” Jacques told me. “I can say that there was no warning.”

They were both in their 40s, and had spouses and kids back home. Jacques lived in Wisconsin, and Owens in North Carolina. They were in town for the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. Together, they edited a popular gun-rights news and opinion website called Bearing Arms.

As a blogger, Owens was often combative and blunt. He had a tendency to mock those who disagreed with him; he believed that gun-control advocates were performative and that they ignored inconvenient facts. A few days earlier, he’d written that protesters who were planning a “die-in” near the NRA convention were staging “a dramatic hissy fit.”

But the man Jacques knew was different. “His personality was as calm as his southern drawl,” she said. “The man was so levelheaded and thoughtful and kind, deliberate and generous.” Owens had coached his older daughter’s soccer team, and he went to equine therapy with his younger one, who had been diagnosed with autism. He had a sarcastic sense of humor, but he also sang karaoke and watched Disney movies with the kids and his wife, Christine.

Another time when he and Jacques were out drinking, Owens decided he didn’t like the way a man was talking to her. “Sir, I would never hope to get in a fight with anyone,” Owens said to him, “but I will take you down if you go near this woman again.” Jacques laughed and told him to stop. “He was so serious in protecting others,” she said.

That night in Atlanta, Owens and Jacques were in a reflective mood. They discussed their families and aging.

“My grandma is going to be 86,” Jacques said.

“I hope I make it that long,” Owens said.

At one point, the conversation drifted to suicide.

“The most selfish thing you can do is take yourself away from your kids,” Jacques said.

“I could never do it,” Owens replied.

From time to time, Owens wrote fiery posts about public figures he saw as antagonistic toward gun rights. One subject was a doctor named Arthur Kellermann, whose research had indicated a troubling link between guns and suicide.

In 1984, Kellermann, then 29, was earning a master’s degree in public health at the University of Washington in Seattle. One day, he was sitting in the student center between classes when he heard on the news that the singer Marvin Gaye had been fatally shot with a .38-caliber revolver by his own father.

Kellermann had grown up in a conservative household in Tennessee. His father owned guns, and had taught Kellermann to shoot at the age of 10. But Gaye’s shooting, which had happened at home, got Kellerman thinking about his recent experience working in an emergency room. He had seen a number of gunshot victims, but he couldn’t remember treating a single patient who had been shot while breaking into someone’s home.

[Daniel Levitin: The ineluctable logic of gun ownership]

This prompted Kellermann to seek out research measuring the risks and benefits of keeping a firearm in the home. But he couldn’t find much, so he decided to embark on a simple study of his own.

With the help of the local medical examiner, Kellermann reviewed every gunshot death that had occurred in King County, where the university was located, from 1978 through 1983. During that period, there had been 398 fatalities in homes that contained a firearm. Fifty had been homicides—and of those, only nine involved self-defense. Twelve shootings had been accidents, and three deaths couldn’t be categorized. The remaining 333 incidents—almost 85 percent of the deaths—were suicides.

Kellerman’s study, titled “Protection or Peril?”, was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986. Because the data set was limited, he avoided drawing firm conclusions, but the numbers immediately attracted attention. A New York Times article summarizing the analysis began, “Keeping firearms in the home may endanger, not protect, the individuals who live there.” At the time, research suggested that half of all American households contained at least one gun.

Kellermann wanted to perform a case-control study, a methodology that would be more definitive. With CDC funding, he set out to investigate whether homes where guns are kept are more likely to be scenes of suicide than similar households without firearms. He and his team focused on the period from 1987 to 1990, in King County, Washington, and Shelby County, Tennessee, where Kellermann had moved. The researchers identified 565 suicides that occurred in or near a residence, almost 60 percent of which involved a gun. In 1992, the results were also published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and again the finding was clear: “The ready availability of firearms appears to be associated with an increased risk of suicide in the home.”

The danger was not unique to those who were known to have mental illness, or to those who had newly acquired a gun—most of the victims had owned their weapons for months or years. The article ended with a warning: People who keep a firearm in the home “should carefully weigh their reasons” against the “possibility that it may someday be used in a suicide.”

Kellermann’s results aligned with a long-running trend. From 1953 to 1978, the rate of gun suicide increased by 45 percent, while the rate of suicide by other methods remained steady. Gun suicide outpaced gun homicide, as it still does. Since 2017, firearm suicide has been the cause of roughly 25,000 deaths each year. Nearly 80 percent are white males ages 15 and older.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you’re in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.

Social scientists and other researchers have looked extensively for explanations behind America’s swelling suicide rates: deindustrialization, addiction, a lack of new opportunities for working-class men, the breakdown of once-tight-knit communities. But the most crucial—and controversial—ingredient is the gun itself. Suicide is typically an impulsive act; the difference between life and death can thus turn on whether a person has access to a lethal weapon. In one study, survivors were asked at the hospital how much time had passed between ideation and attempt. About half said 10 minutes or less. And when a firearm is involved, according to a 2019 analysis in Annals of Internal Medicine, there is a 90 percent chance a suicide attempt will be fatal. One statistic is particularly clarifying: Only 5 percent of suicide attempts involve a firearm—but a gun is used in more than 50 percent of suicide deaths.

After Kellermann published his findings, the National Rifle Association told Americans that he could not be trusted. In an interview with The Morning Call, an NRA representative denounced Kellermann’s study as “dishonest,” adding, “Worldwide, nationwide, regionally there is no relationship between gun availability and suicide rates.” But in the three decades since, other studies have consistently echoed Kellermann’s conclusions.

The core of the gun-rights movement—and the firearms market—is made up of white men who live in suburbs or rural areas. These buyers are among the least likely to encounter gun violence, but the most likely to die by their own hand using a firearm. And yet the gun industry has so far avoided any real public reckoning over whether the strategy that keeps these customers buying could also be placing them in danger.

Bob Owens was the oldest of three boys, raised in a Christian household in Greenville, North Carolina. He grew up hunting deer, fishing, and playing soccer. His father liked to remind Owens and his brothers that they alone were responsible for their actions. “You made that bed,” he would say. “Now lie in it.”

As an undergraduate at East Carolina University, Owens majored in English, covered sports for the school paper, and aspired to be a novelist. An old classmate, who also worked on the newspaper, told me that she never heard him express strong political opinions or take a position on guns. He was mild-mannered, an introvert with a small circle of close friends.

One night, at a downtown pool hall, one of those friends introduced him to a nutrition major from New York named Christine. He’d seen her at parties; she had bright blue eyes, blond hair, and a warmth that made people feel comfortable and accepted. She loved music and played the violin. Christine worked at a restaurant, and when they started dating, Owens would hang out there during her shifts, just wanting to be nearby.

When the two had been together a year, Christine’s parents came to town for a birthday dinner at Owens’s childhood home. In front of both families, Owens revealed an engagement ring. “Will you?” he asked Christine. “He could barely get the words out,” she told me. “He was so nervous.”

In 1997, after they’d both graduated, the couple moved to Charlotte. Christine managed a restaurant; Owens went into IT. They liked spending time outdoors together, hiking in the North Carolina mountains. Owens kept a shotgun in the house for hunting, which was new for Christine, who hadn’t grown up with firearms and was uncomfortable around them. Mostly, the gun remained out of sight. Being a gun owner wasn’t yet a key part of Owens’s identity. “It was more of a history thing,” Christine said. “He knew the background and history of these old guns from wars … It was kind of a hobby.”

They got married in 1998 and had their first child, Maya, two years later. “Bob was over the moon,” Christine said. In 2001, she and Owens moved to Newburgh, New York, to live with her family, then rented a home of their own. The house had a lovely view of the Hudson River, but Newburgh, sitting at the intersection of two interstate highways, was a hub for crack-cocaine trafficking, and a frequent site of violent crime. The place next door to the Owens’s home was abandoned, and drug dealers and prostitutes hung out in the area. Owens and Maya tended to make their fun inside. They invented a game they called Table Ball; he would kneel in front of a table, acting as the goalie, and Maya would try to kick a ball underneath it.

When strangers loitered near their house for too long, Owens and Christine often called the cops, and sometimes Owens would go outside and confront people himself. He’d knock on a car window and ask whoever was inside to leave. At the time, he didn’t carry a gun.

Though Owens had been conservative his whole life, he wasn’t particularly outspoken about his political views until after 9/11. In the early 2000s, he was still working in IT, but he missed writing and was eager for an outlet. Then, in 2004, he started a blog called Confederate Yankee. Its slogan: “Because liberalism is a persistent vegetative state.”

In his early entries, Owens offered a vigorous defense of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War. His online writing had a brashness and a commanding authority, as if he were test-driving a new persona. In one post, Owens declared, “There is something inherent in the character of Americans that makes us want to fight for and nurture the freedom of others.” And yet the Democratic Party, he wrote, has “fought against this fine trait.”

Owens could be irreverent and contemptuous. His opponents were “idiots,” “morons,” or “dumb as a stump.” But he also strove for moral consistency, even when it was inconvenient. He was adamantly opposed to abortion while chastising “small-minded people who find a bit of satisfaction in the thought of an abortion doctor burning in Hell.” He called the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy “antiquated” and declared, “We’ve seen this kind of discrimination before from our military, but it is past time for it to stop.”  

Owens posted multiple times a week, and his following grew. On Christmas Day 2004, he was feeling joyful and gracious. He commanded his readers to “go spend time with those you love,” and assured them, “I’ll be back posting tomorrow as my regular obnoxious self.”

Bob Owens. Courtesy: Maya Owens

A year later, Owens discovered an essay titled “Tribes,” by the conservative author Bill Whittle. “Tribes” argues that people belong to one of two groups, “Pink, the color of bunny ears, and Grey, the color of a mechanical pencil.” The Pink tribe, Whittle writes, is concerned with “feeling good about yourself!” For the Grey tribe, “emotion is repressed because Emotion Clouds Judgment.” Whittle’s Grey tribe knows “that sometimes bad things happen, and that these instances are opportunities to show ourselves what we are made of.” He elaborates: “My people go into burning buildings. My Tribe consists of organizers and self-starters, proud and self-reliant people who do not need to be told what to do in a crisis. My Tribe is not fearless; they are something better. They are courageous.”

The piece ignited something in Owens. He called it “the single best essay I have ever read,” and wrote that it prompted him to do “a lot of soul-searching about what it means to be Grey.” Whittle incorporated ideas from an author and a former Army Ranger named Dave Grossman, who had become a prominent right-wing thinker on the psychology of violence. Reading “Tribes” led Owens to “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” Grossman’s most influential essay, which divides society into three categories. Sheep are “kind” and “gentle,” and “can only hurt one another by accident.” They are prey to wolves, who “feed on the sheep without mercy.” And then there are sheepdogs—the animals that “live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.” Sheepdogs, Grossman says, have both “a capacity for violence” and “a deep love” for “fellow citizens.”

Owens republished Grossman’s essay on his blog in 2006. “I’ve been thinking a lot about sheepdogs lately,” he wrote. “Most of us can define where we fall in Grossman’s essay if we are honest with ourselves. Most won’t be honest of course, including many of you reading this. Dishonesty to one’s self is, after all, the defining characteristic of Sheep, even perfectly nice Sheep.”

By this time, Owens and his family had moved back to North Carolina and were living in a newly built home in Fuquay-Varina, a quiet suburb 30 minutes outside of Raleigh. The school system was good. Their middle-class neighborhood had fields and a brook, and there was a park near their house.

For a while, Owens had a part-time job working the gun counter at a sporting-goods store. He could talk at length about “00-buckshot” and its ability to “penetrate 22 inches of ballistic gelatin,” or a .410 pump shotgun, which, he once blogged, was ideal for home protection because the weapon’s “low-recoil, low-report” made “follow-up shots considerably easier than would a larger-bore shotgun.” One time, Owens wrote about customers who’d come into his store asking for a whistle to scare away potential muggers. He suggested a concealed handgun as a better option, but the customers were wary. When recounting the incident, Owens wrote, “Whistlers, however you cut it, are sheep.”  

Adams Carvalho for The Atlantic

In 2008, Owens got a permit to carry a concealed firearm, which he described as a transformative experience. “There’s a certain kind of freedom that comes with the responsibility of carrying arms that is hard to properly express to those who don’t,” he wrote. “Yes, guns can take lives. But far more often, experience truly bearing arms helps hone and reveal character.”

His timing coincided with a landmark Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, which declared that the Second Amendment guaranteed the individual right to own a firearm. One article about the decision, in Reuters, quoted Kellermann discussing the risks of keeping a loaded firearm in the home. The story infuriated Owens, who referred to Kellermann on his blog as a “radically anti-gun doctor.”

[Timothy Zick and Diana Palmer: The next fight over guns in America]

The next year, Barack Obama took office. For men like Owens, Bush represented the Grey tribe, and the new president represented the Pink. According to a former NRA staffer, who at the time was involved with membership communication and requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, “It was easy for [the] NRA to take an aggressive approach, and fearmonger.” The organization’s pitch, the former staffer said, was succinct and urgent: “Obama was coming for our guns.” Owens seemed to agree. He wrote that the president—who supported policies such as an assault-weapons ban while clarifying that he respected legal gun ownership—“continues to lie to the public about his intentions towards our Second Amendment rights.”

During the summer of 2009, a 29-year-old named Jennifer Perian was working for the NRA. She loved horses and baseball, and aspired to visit every Major League stadium in the country. Perian, who was from Colorado, hadn’t grown up around guns, but she attended George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where the NRA is located. She took the job after graduating, and soon purchased a handgun.

Perian began dating someone new, but the relationship quickly grew tumultuous. Then one day Perian’s dad, Jim, was at work when the police called. Jen had fatally shot herself. “They said it was impulsive,” Jim told me. “They called it an ‘emotional suicide.’”

The NRA paid for the funeral and flew Jim out to Virginia. “They were very nice to me,” he said. “I can tell you that.”

Three years after Perian’s death, an NRA field representative named John quietly attended a Sandy Hook memorial ceremony near the small town in Indiana where he and his family lived. John, at 45, was tall and sturdy. He had two daughters in high school, and he had worked for the NRA for 10 years, running fundraising banquets in his region. Before that, John had been a field artillery officer in the Army. Now he was in the Reserves.

The NRA had hired him with the understanding that he could still be deployed overseas. In 2011, he was sent to Iraq for most of the year. He earned a Bronze Star, one of the highest honors bestowed by the armed services. According to his certificate, he was “engaged in stability operations under constant threat and frequent attack.”

But after he returned, John was clearly suffering. His wife, who asked that her name and her family’s surname be withheld, told me that the NRA made him feel like his job was in constant jeopardy. “The expectation was to jump right back in and have all of the other stressors on top of it,” she said. When Sandy Hook happened on December 14, 2012, John had been back at work for a year, and had earned his second Field Representative of the Year award. His wife said that her husband believed in the NRA with his “whole heart.” He would tell people: “This is not a traditional job, because this is a lifestyle. This is about our Second Amendment.”

[Read: 10 years after Sandy Hook, here we are again]

John’s wife was a teacher at a local high school and had helped organize the Sandy Hook memorial event; John attended to support his wife. “He wanted me to be very clear that, if anybody asked, he was there as himself, not as a representative of the NRA,” she said.

After the new year, John started drinking heavily. On April 5, he got arrested for a DUI while driving an NRA vehicle. “That just sent him over the edge,” John’s wife said. “He feared he was going to lose his job.” On April 7, he spent the day in his home office, working on NRA business. The next day, around lunchtime, he took one of his handguns, got on a bicycle, and rode half a mile into the woods near his home, where he shot and killed himself. “I’m not anti-gun,” John’s wife said, “but having a gun right there and accessible definitely made it easier.”

When she discovered that her husband had spent the last day of his life working for the NRA instead of with his family, she was livid. She remembers calling John’s boss and telling him, “You need to come and get this NRA stuff out of my house.” Twenty-four hours later, the boss and a colleague came and took the materials away. No one from NRA headquarters reached out to the family to express condolences, she told me.

A federal bill proposing expanded background checks for gun buyers was defeated in the Senate the following week. The NRA released a celebratory statement underscoring that the legislation would have undermined a “fundamental right,” but noted that the organization would continue to work on “fixing our broken mental health system.”

At least two more NRA employees would die by gun suicide after John. On a Monday in November 2019, Ryan Phipps, who worked in the NRA’s affinity-and-licensing department, did not show up for work. Phipps, 27, had been with the organization for half a decade. He enjoyed hunting and fishing. He played the drums and had built his own bicycle.

But privately, Phipps had a history of depression, according to a source who knew him well. Over the years, Phipps had sought treatment, and he’d seemed to be doing well until the day he used one of his own handguns to attempt suicide. He initially survived the shot, but died in the hospital two weeks later.

That same year, the NRA fired a program coordinator named Mark Richardson. HuffPost had published emails that showed him, in conversation with a prominent conspiracy theorist, raising questions about the 2018 Parkland high-school shooting. Richardson was almost 60, and he had worked at the NRA for a decade. His friend and former NRA colleague Stephen Czarnik invited him to live on his farm in West Virginia, where they raised chickens.

Richardson’s mental health was deteriorating, according to Czarnik. He was drinking alone. In October 2020, Czarnik recalled to me, another friend from the NRA was visiting the farm. He and Czarnik were hanging out in an upstairs room when Richardson walked in. Richardson embraced them and said, “God is good,” and that he loved them. “Then he ran downstairs,” Czarnik said, “and we knew something was wrong.” Czarnik and his friend followed Richardson, who dashed to the front porch. Before anyone could reach him, he shot himself with a handgun.

When Richardson died, it had been almost 30 years since the NRA had publicly disputed Kellermann’s research. Billy McLaughlin, an NRA spokesperson, said in an email that the organization “observes that according to many criminologists and researchers” Kellermann’s work is “interpreted as junk science.” He added that the NRA does not comment on its employees, and that there is “nothing more important to us” than the staff’s “safety and security.”

In 2013, Owens was out of work in IT, but his profile as a writer had risen. He was done with Confederate Yankee, and was now a regular contributor to the long-standing conservative site PJ Media, where he focused almost singularly on firearms. He was especially fixated on the trial of George Zimmerman, who, a year earlier, had fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager who was unarmed. Owens seemed to identify with Zimmerman. Martin, he wrote, “was a very troubled young man who believed very strongly in impulsively trying to get whatever he wanted, and did not care if others were hurt if it made him feel better”; he found Zimmerman, meanwhile, to be a “generally honorable man with idealistic goals about the role good men should play in protecting their communities.”

Owens and Christine now had two children. Maya was in her early teens; their second, Kate, was 6. Owens took the family on trips to North Carolina’s western mountains, and cooked them pork butt on the grill. They attended church every Sunday. Owens always had a handgun on him, though the only real hazard in their neighborhood was the occasional car accident on a busy road called Judd Parkway. When that happened, Christine said, Owens was the first to rush outside and offer help.

On the night of the Zimmerman verdict, he tweeted to his thousands of followers, “Trayvon Martin tried to kill George Zimmerman. He just failed at that as he did everything else in his life.” Stephen Gutowski, a journalist who reports on firearms and was close with Owens, told me, “When he felt like a media narrative was developing that was unfair to gun owners, he would go and push back as hard as he could.”

[Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trayvon Martin and the irony of American justice]

Christine recalled that Owens half-jokingly turned to Twitter for help finding full-time work, suggesting that there must be an organization out there that could use his skills. Katie Pavlich, a conservative commentator and friend, saw his tweet. She worked for a conservative media company called Townhall, which had recently launched BearingArms.com. It needed someone to run the site, and Pavlich thought Owens would be a good fit. He was soon hired at a salary of $80,000 a year. “This was like a dream job to him,” Christine told me.

The self-defense gun market is defined by contradiction. In a 2015 study conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF)—the trade group for the firearms industry—white respondents had the highest level of gun ownership, and were the ones most likely to claim that they carried weapons out of a “duty to protect” family and worries over “random acts of violence.” But at the same time, they were also less likely than Black and Hispanic respondents to report that they actually live in dangerous neighborhoods.

These results aligned with other research. In his book Dying of Whiteness, Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and sociologist, looks closely at gun owners in a Missouri county that is 85 percent white. He told me that many of his subjects “imagined a threat around every corner.” He added, “One guy was talking about ‘gangbangers’ who would come through his window and steal his television.” Another man “imagined that he could be carjacked at any moment.” Angela Stroud, a sociologist whose book, Good Guys With Guns, explores similar themes, writes that the men she interviewed were fixated on imagined violence. “Though they may never be in a position to carry out heroic fantasies of masculine bravery,” she wrote in her book, they were “positioning themselves as brave leaders of their families.”

At the NRA’s 2015 annual meeting, in Nashville, Tennessee, Dave Grossman held a seminar called “Sheepdogs! The Bulletproof Mind for the Armed Citizen.” “Of all the violence we could engage in, violence to protect our families, to protect our children, is what we’re wired to do,” he told attendees. “You are the Special Forces. We are at war.”

Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 40,000 annual gun deaths that were occurring at the time were suicides. The statistics were bleak enough that even the NSSF felt compelled to publicly address them. In August of 2016, the group launched a high-profile campaign aimed at combatting gun suicide, in partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), the largest private suicide-prevention organization in the country.

On its face, the partnership seemed promising. Robert Gebbia, the CEO of AFSP, said in a press release that his organization saw “this relationship as critical to reaching the firearms community.” That same press release quoted Stephen Sanetti, then the NSSF president, as saying that the effort placed the “firearms industry” at the “forefront of helping to prevent these deaths.”

But the written agreement between the two groups, which has never been reported on before, has a “conflicts of interest” provision that might have caused some concern had it been viewed by the public. The opening sentence promises that “the parties shall act in the best interests of the other” and “shall disclose any real or potential conflicts that are adverse to the interests of the other as they arise.” Such conflicts included “positions advanced by one party [that] do not align with the positions advanced by the other and the issuance of any public statement by a party that harms or could harm the other.” Given that one of the NSSF’s primary goals is to maximize profit for the firearms industry, such a policy would seemingly present a major limitation for the partnership. Stephanie Rogers, the chief communications officer at AFSP, told me in an email that the language merely calls for transparency, and “does not inhibit the action of either party.”

By 2018, the NSSF had a landing page for its partnership with the AFSP. Most suicide deaths involved a firearm, the program’s materials emphasized, because the presence of a gun almost guarantees that the attempt will be successful. In an introductory video, Sanetti described the deadly urge as often “spur-of-the-moment.” He ended his monologue with a simple statement of fact: “Temporarily preventing a person in crisis from accessing a firearm can help save lives.”

Sanetti was nodding toward a concept known as “means restriction.” If people are jumping off bridges, for instance, then the government builds barriers to prevent those deaths. Such solutions tend to work when they are externally imposed. But the NSSF and AFSP would not jointly recommend anything that could be construed as “gun control.” Instead, an AFSP spokesperson explained in an email, the two groups were “providing practical and accessible suicide prevention education.” The website suggested separately storing ammunition and firearms, which should be kept in safes or lockboxes. If more drastic measures were deemed necessary, the organizations said that “temporary off-site storage” was an option to “consider.” They were advocating for a do-it-yourself approach to a deeply complicated societal problem.

For the NSSF, it was still bold to acknowledge that separating someone from their firearm might be the key to survival. But a 2018 study funded by the group illustrates why it might have been—and likely remains—difficult for the industry to push for more forceful solutions. The NSSF surveyed gun owners who often carried concealed firearms, 81 percent of whom disclosed that they always kept a loaded one close by. “The more frequently a person carries a firearm,” the study found, “the more they spend on handguns, ammunition and carry equipment and accessories.” On average, respondents owned more than 10 guns. Roughly 80 percent of the participants were white men.

Adams Carvalho for The Atlantic

Jenn Jacques began working with Bob Owens in 2015. When she contacted him to ask if there might be a job for her at Bearing Arms, she was running a website for female gun owners. She’d been reading Owens’s writing for years; she admired his boldness and intelligence. Owens was working seven days a week, starting at six in the morning and often ending at 10 at night. Bearing Arms brought Jacques on as a volunteer at first, but after a year made her a full-time, salaried employee.

Owens and Jacques were each required to write seven posts a day if they wanted weekends off. Owens usually sat on a recliner in the living room, facing a window with a view of the woods. “We used to call him Barcalounger Bob,” Jacques told me.

By 2016, Owens had become a central voice in the gun-rights movement, regularly giving interviews on NRATV, which was then one of the gun group’s media platforms. “Bob was under so much pressure,” Christine told me. “The company always wanted more out of him. Always more, more, more.” She took care of the children while Owens was consumed by work. “When I think about it now,” Christine said, “I think Bob liked to look out the window because nature soothed him, calmed his nerves.”

Toward the end of 2016, the parent company of Bearing Arms asked Owens if he would like to write a book—something akin to a gun guide—that the company would publish through Regnery, its publishing house. He wasn’t offered a large sum, but the family needed extra money. Owens also held out hope that the book might lead to an opportunity to write a novel, so he agreed.

In January, Jacques and Owens attended the 2017 SHOT Show, the NSSF’s annual trade event in Las Vegas. Christine Moutier, the AFSP’s chief medical officer, was there to discuss her group’s partnership with the NSSF. She sat for an interview with Jacques, which Owens filmed. It was an intimate, polite chat. Jacques, in a neat striped shirt, sat close to Moutier. “What are a few of the signs of suicide?” Jacques asked. “Even those people who are presenting the strong happy face will show signs without intending to,” Moutier said. They might self-isolate, or become “more short-fused.” In the brief conversation, Moutier did not cover means restriction or the potential danger of keeping guns in the house.

Back home, as Owens worked on his manuscript, Christine noticed that he seemed newly moody. He started smoking, a habit he had dropped years earlier. He would get worked up about tiny things in a way he never had, snapping at Christine if she forgot something at the store. When he was frustrated, he’d say, “I have to go for a walk.” “He was always walking because everything was just irritating him,” Christine said.

Christine tried to reassure her husband that life would get easier when his book was finished. “I just kept saying, ‘You’re almost done. When this is done, you can relax.’” He was experiencing symptoms of depression. Christine asked him to see a therapist, and he did. He tried medication for about a week, but stopped taking it because he thought it made him feel worse.

To his readers, though, Owens was the same man he’d always been. That spring, he ran stories with headlines such as “Another Good Guy With a Gun: Detroit Man Shoots Sister’s Violent Stalker,” and “Armed Good Samaritan Runs Off Terrified Robber.” The NRA’s annual meeting—the one both Jacques and Owens attended in Atlanta—was in late April. Owens tweeted a photo of a revolver and ammo. “This is the Ruger LCR I’m carrying at #NRAAM2017,” he wrote.

On Friday, May 5, after Owens had returned from the event, Christine and Kate left for a Girl Scouts camping trip. Owens was “acting funny,” Christine said. “He was constantly texting to see how we were doing, and would get worried if I didn’t respond right away. I kept telling him, ‘We’re fine, we’re fine, but we’re out doing things.’” She noted that Owens was effusive, almost manic. “He was saying that I was the best wife, the best woman, and that when we got home, he would be the husband I deserve and things would change. He promised to cook us a steak dinner.”

On Sunday, Owens tweeted a meme featuring a heavily tattooed man and a little boy. Each had a speech bubble coming from his mouth. “Dad,” the boy says, “when I become a man, I want to be a Liberal.” The father responds, “Well, you have to choose one son. You can’t be both.” Owens added: “I admit it. I laughed.” That evening, after Christine and Kate returned, Owens grilled steak for the family. Everybody ate, and then he and Christine stayed up late into the night, discussing a possible winter trip to Las Vegas. His book was due in three days.

The following morning, Owens placed his cigarettes, Altoids, pepper spray, knife, phone, and wallet in his pockets. The holster clipped to his belt held the same revolver he’d carried a week earlier at the NRA’s annual meeting. He walked Kate to the school-bus stop and watched her board.

Owens had a few hours before he had to drive to Wake Tech Community College to pick up his older daughter, Maya, who was taking a final. So he kept walking. As he made his way down Sequoia Ridge Drive, he caught the attention of a neighbor, a woman who didn’t know him but was struck by the way he was hanging his head. That man, she thought, seems remarkably sad.

Eventually, Owens arrived at the intersection of Sequoia and South Judd Parkway, not far from his house. Cars whipped by rows of well-kept shrubs. Owens pulled out his phone to post a message on Facebook. “In the end, it turns out that I’m not strong,” he wrote. “I’m a coward, and a selfish son of a bitch. I’m sorry.”

When her father didn’t show up to get her, Maya tried calling. She couldn’t reach him, so she contacted her mom and explained that she was stranded. It was unlike Owens not to show.   

A 39-year-old Iraq War veteran drove by the corner of Sequoia and Judd. He noticed Owens lying in the grass, bleeding from a gunshot wound in the head. The vet parked and ran over. He felt for a pulse that was not there, then dialed 911.

Police told Christine what had happened. She was too distraught to drive home, so two detectives, along with Christine’s father, went to meet her. News of Owens’s death began to trickle out that evening. Jacques wrote on Facebook, “Life as I knew it ended this morning. It was a privilege and an honor to call Bob Owens my friend, co-editor and work hubby, so please know that I will do everything in my power to protect him in death as I did in life.” The next day, Jacques published a short post about Owens on Bearing Arms, but she did not disclose how he died. She wrote, “In the end, all that matters is [he] will be sorely missed, and the truth is that we will never know what truly happened.”

Owens’s employers at Townhall Media, which owns Bearing Arms and did not respond to a request for comment, sent Christine a condolence email and flowers. They also set up a GoFundMe page announcing that they’d “lost a friend,” soliciting donations from the public to help support Owens’s family. “We’d like to show our love and appreciation for Bob,” the page said. “Groceries, bills and college dreams will be a struggle—but we can help.” The campaign raised more than $36,000 from 608 donors. No Townhall executives attended her husband’s funeral. (On behalf of Owens’s mother and siblings, his father declined to comment for this article, citing his support for the Second Amendment.)

Jacques does not think the gun industry holds any responsibility for Bob’s death, or for gun suicide in general. “It really is a shame people may not be as comfortable reaching out for help because we’re attacked by the gun-control movement,” Jacques told me. Gutowski, the journalist who was friends with Owens, said that many gun owners are afraid to tell doctors about their mental-health struggles, because they worry someone will take their weapons away.

It’s been seven years since the AFSP and the NSSF announced their partnership, and more Americans are dying of gun suicide than ever before. The coronavirus pandemic and the summer 2020 protests after the murder of George Floyd spurred people to buy firearms in record-breaking numbers. In 2022, according to CDC data, there were 27,000 gun suicides, the highest number ever recorded in the United States. According to an analysis by Cassandra Crifasi, an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University, white men still make up nearly 80 percent of these deaths. “The risk typically starts to peak when they reach their mid-40s,” she said. Owens was 46 when he died.

In 2021, the NSSF, which declined to provide a comment for this story, hosted a webinar on suicide prevention for gun-range operators and firearms dealers. Two gregarious consultants—John “JB” Bocker and John “JC” Clark—ran the presentation. They ticked through the signs of depression, and gave some guidance on how to predict when a customer might be suicidal.

“How does your most common customer come into the store?” Clark asked. “They’re excited, right? They’re going to buy their first firearm, or they’re going to buy a new firearm, or something new to the market. Or they want to receive training. They’re excited about it. They have a certain amount of energy. So when you compare the atypical customer to these different scenarios, then you may have a situation where somebody is in crisis, where somebody needs help.” He continued, “Moving, speaking slowly, restlessness—all of these things could be signs you need to be aware of.”

“And, JC, we can’t forget understanding basic body language,” Bocker chimed in. “It may not always be verbal. It may not always be their direct approach about buying or not buying a gun. It just might be their quietness; it might be the way they’re looking or not looking.” He added, “Everything about their body language can be a telltale hint to them wanting to do something they shouldn’t do with a firearm.”

Bocker and Clark declined to be interviewed for this story. At my request, Amanda Spray, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, reviewed a recording of their presentation. “Untrained individuals would find it very difficult to predict who is experiencing suicidal ideation,” she told me. She called the approach, with its inherent conflicts between sales and public health, “extremely unrealistic.”

Not long ago, I visited Christine in North Carolina and spent a day in the Owenses’ old neighborhood in Fuquay-Varina. The homes and lawns were meticulously maintained. Driveways had basketball hoops, and rocking chairs sat on porches. There were decorative signs with welcoming messages. One said Home on the Range. Another said Sit Relax Gossip.

Other than his Facebook post, Bob had not left a note. At the time of his death, Christine felt as though she were in a kind of limbo. She was desperate for clues and answers. She could not get into his phone, and Bob’s therapist could not divulge any details about her husband’s treatment. “Why didn’t he come to me?” Christine wondered. “We always worked it out, always worked through things. We worked on them together, always.”

One day, soon after Bob died, Christine opened his work bag and found a notebook. In it was a list: “Things That Are Stressing Me Out.” It stretched on for seven or eight pages, mentioning death threats, which were news to Christine, as were Bob’s concerns about his aging parents. A lot of it was familiar, just laid out at length. “So much about his job,” Christine described to me, “the book, things that were going on with the kids, being the provider.” She realized she hadn’t known the extent of his stress. “Bob really felt like he was stuck and didn’t know where to go,” she said.

Christine doesn’t view Bob’s suicide as a cautionary tale about gun ownership, and she does not think anyone else should view it that way, either. She herself carries a firearm when she goes out of town, in case her car breaks down. One day, while we were eating lunch at a Japanese restaurant, I asked if she was aware that gun suicide, according to the data, seemed to pose a unique threat to men like her husband. She set down her fork and folded her arms. “I know,” Christine said, but she believes the real problem is that so many boys are raised to equate vulnerability with weakness. “I don’t think it’s about guns. I think it’s about men and their feelings—they’re still bad at dealing with them.”

Bob, she said, wanted to take care of the people around him. Like many men, she went on, “he had to be tough.” She thinks her husband would have found a way to kill himself no matter what. “Besides,” she said, “how would I have kept Bob away from guns?”

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and The Trace. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Brilliant, witty, and ambitious, Henry Kissinger made diplomacy the stuff of unrivaled celebrity. He thrived on attention, and would have been thrilled by  the flood of coverage that marked his death last week. Whether the obituaries and commentaries put his record in a positive or negative light, almost all of them treated Kissinger as the master of events.

This may be how he wanted to be remembered, but it’s not what really happened. No matter how often Kissinger is described as the Cold War’s most powerful secretary of state and a peerless elder statesman, the truth is that his tenure was often rocky, as full of setbacks as acclaim. By the time he left government, he was viewed by many of his colleagues as a burden, not an asset. Once out of office, the advice he gave his successors was sometimes spectacularly wrong, and frequently ignored.

In President Richard Nixon’s first term, Kissinger presided over three big diplomatic transformations—withdrawal from Vietnam, the opening to China, and détente with the Soviet Union. When he became secretary of state, his policy dominance was virtually unchallenged.  He was the first (and, to this day, only) person ever to run the State Department while serving simultaneously as the president’s national security adviser. Outside of government, he enjoyed unprecedented global renown. Less than a month after his Senate confirmation, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Shan Wang: Henry Kissinger’s real legacy]

Yet when Kissinger left office barely three years later, most of his ambitious schemes were unrealized. Others had simply been rejected. On the left, many revile Kissinger for the human costs of the policies he pursued; on the right, some still admire his unsentimental use of military force. In fact, the real story of Kissinger’s tenure as secretary of state is a tale in which, again and again, he encountered the limits of his power, and found himself unable to impose his will.

The policies Kissinger developed largely in secret to help wind down the Vietnam War enjoyed far less support once the war was over and they were subjected to more normal, open debate. His influence ebbed steadily. In 1975, Gerald Ford, who had succeeded Nixon a year earlier, forced Kissinger to give up the national-security job. Ford created further checks on Kissinger’s power by picking two former congressional colleagues, Donald Rumsfeld and George H. W. Bush, as secretary of defense and CIA director, respectively. Congress itself voted into law a series of challenges to Kissinger’s policies, something it had consistently failed to do under Nixon. Perhaps worst of all, the secretary of state bore some of the blame for Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election. The president’s campaign managers told reporters they saw him as a vulnerability. So did Ronald Reagan, whose bid for the Republican nomination centered in part on a promise to fire Kissinger.

Kissinger’s lost dominance was especially pronounced in what was arguably the central arena of his policy: the stable relationship—known as “détente”—that he sought to establish with the Soviet Union. His problems began with arms control. In November 1974, soon after Ford became president, Kissinger arranged a quick summit with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, hoping for a breakthrough in negotiating a long-term treaty to limit each side’s strategic nuclear forces. But he was never able to turn the framework they agreed on into a real treaty. One obstacle was a congressional requirement that U.S. and Soviet forces be equal—at a time when Soviet missiles were getting steadily bigger and more numerous. Outside experts claimed that Kissinger’s framework couldn’t meet that test. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Paul Nitze—a senior national-security official under Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson—insisted it would give Soviet forces a three-to-one advantage. (Privately, Nitze was far angrier, calling the secretary of state a “traitor to his country.”)

Even harder for Kissinger to handle was opposition within Ford’s inner circle. Rumsfeld, once he became defense secretary, was ready to take disagreements with Kissinger right into the Oval Office, telling the president that the United States had been losing its nuclear edge for a decade. At the CIA, Bush approved an assessment largely endorsing Nitze’s critique. Outside the administration, Reagan echoed the same charges. No surprise, then, that Ford eventually put the talks aside.

Kissinger found the ideological dimension of Soviet-American relations still more vexing. He had promised Soviet leaders to expand trade ties by granting Moscow “Most Favored Nation” tariff status, but he could not manage congressional demands for freer emigration from the Soviet Union. The initiative collapsed, but not before senior figures in both Congress and the Kremlin concluded that Kissinger had been deceiving them. On human rights more generally, the secretary of state was isolated within his own administration. He did persuade the president not to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most famous and outspoken Soviet dissident, but three other members of the Ford Cabinet defied him and conspicuously attended an AFL-CIO dinner in Solzhenitsyn’s honor. Even the young Dick Cheney, then the deputy White House chief of staff, dissented: Détente, he argued, didn’t have to be all “sweetness and light.”

[Gary J. Bass: The people who didn’t matter to Henry Kissinger]

Learning little from this opposition, Kissinger continued to hurt himself with scarcely concealed disdain for opponents of the Soviet regime. (“You know,” he once joked, “what would have happened to them under Stalin.”) The impact reached well beyond Washington. When Reagan delegates to the 1976 Republican convention wanted to repudiate Kissinger, they drafted a platform plank titled “Morality in Foreign Policy.” Ford and his advisers—who had already banned official use of the word détente—felt they had to allow it to pass.

Apart from arms control and human rights, Kissinger also had trouble imposing his views on Soviet-American competition in the Third World. When he wanted to launch a covert program to arm rebels against Moscow’s client regime in Angola, news quickly leaked to The New York Times. Congressional Democrats, predictably, voted to block the weapons transfer altogether. Less predictably, many Republican senators—liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike—also joined in, giving the measure a two-to-one majority. The president’s own party was deserting its celebrity diplomat.

Kissinger was furious, just as he had been earlier in 1975 when, with the fall of Saigon approaching, he proposed a big increase in arms supplies for South Vietnam. To make it happen, however, congressional approval was necessary—and again wanting. Ford ultimately chose not to fight the issue. Instead, in a speech at Tulane University, he declared the war “finished as far as America is concerned.” The White House did not even let Kissinger know that the game-over announcement was coming.

Much of the commentary on Kissinger’s career has presented him as the embodiment of unchecked presidential power over foreign policy. But the pushback against his policies grew steadily stronger as their downsides became better known. In the 1970s, Congress became far more assertive on foreign policy, legislating issues including arms control, human rights, foreign military sales, and covert action. Kissinger frequently railed against the decade-long decline in national-security budgets, but this too was part of his legacy. So were other institutional reforms, such as the Carter administration’s creation of a human-rights bureau in the State Department and the annual publication of global-human-rights reports. Other forms of pushback were less foreseeable: The “most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era” surely never imagined what Jimmy Carter’s high-profile envoy to China—Leonard Woodcock, the former head of the United Auto Workers—would tell his Beijing staff at their first meeting: “Never again shall we embarrass ourselves before a foreign nation the way Henry Kissinger did with the Chinese.”

After he left office, Kissinger kept much of the advice he gave his successors confidential, probably thinking that a little mystery about the extent of his influence would only help his new consulting business. But enough is known about some of his Oval Office meetings to challenge the common picture of presidents and advisers listening reverently while Henry Kissinger shared his wisdom. Kissinger’s sustained effort to reorient Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union provides a striking example. Together with Nixon, he argued that Mikhail Gorbachev was cynically exploiting the president’s naive antinuclear sentiments so as to tear apart the Western alliance. Under perestroika, they argued, the Soviet threat was actually increasing, not diminishing. Reagan ignored them—and over time harvested a global Soviet foreign-policy retreat.

Kissinger’s shortfalls in office and after are not the whole story, of course. In his first weeks as secretary of state, he was plunged into a crisis—Egypt’s surprise Yom Kippur attack on Israel, followed by the OPEC oil embargo. The cease-fire and disengagement agreements he negotiated bolstered American influence in the Middle East, a region to which he had paid little previous attention. He seemed, to quote the title of my colleague Martin Indyk’s recent book, the “master of the game.”

Yet here, too, the master’s record seems ripe for reassessment—and not just for his early, forgivable missteps. At the start of the Yom Kippur war, Kissinger thought it might be best to keep a low profile and meet Israel’s needs indirectly, by contracting with private companies to deliver arms. Nixon ordered his celebrity policy maker to stop dithering and organize a U.S. airlift. “Do it now!” he barked. More serious is the charge that, even at the height of his power, Kissinger had, of all things, a too-limited conception of what diplomacy could achieve. The most it should try to accomplish, he felt, was to stabilize the world, not to alter—much less transform—it. Hence, the secretary of state was reluctant to take on the hardest parts of the Middle East puzzle—above all, the clash between Israelis and Palestinians, still atop the headlines half a century later.

[From the December 2016 issue: The lessons of Henry Kissinger]

Indyk traces Kissinger’s hesitation to the same sources others have cited: his conservative view of history, his immersion as a scholar in the diplomacy of 19th-century Europe, and his personal experience of 20th-century totalitarianism. All of these drove home the value of stability. But, in looking to explain this conception of diplomacy, we should not leave out what Kissinger surely learned from his own bumpy record as secretary of state. No matter what the tributes and obituaries say, every day on the job confirmed the limits of his power, the difficulty of overcoming them, and his ability to make mistakes when he tried to do so.

Donald Trump and American evangelicals have never been natural allies. Trump has owned casinos, flaunted mistresses in the tabloids, and often talked in a way that would get him kicked out of church. In 2016 many people doubted whether Trump could win over evangelicals, whose support he needed. Eight years later, a few weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, evangelical support for the former president and current Republican frontrunner is no longer in question. In fact, there are now prominent evangelical leaders who have come to believe that Trump is “God’s instrument on Earth,” says Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

How did evangelicals shift from being reluctant supporters of Trump to among his most passionate defenders? How did some evangelicals, historically suspicious of politicians, develop a “fanatical, cult-like attachment” to Donald Trump? And what happened to the evangelical movement as some bought into Trump’s vision of America and others recoiled?

Alberta is a political reporter and also a Christian himself. After a dramatic and unexpected conversion, Tim’s father became a pastor at a prominent church in Michigan, which means Alberta grew up playing at the church, inviting dates to Bible study. He remains a believer. But he has watched with concern over the last few years as a lot of worship services have started to sound like “low-rent Fox News segments,” as he puts it—and as his own father, before his death, began justifying some of Trump’s behavior. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk to Alberta about the alliance between Trump and evangelicals, and what it means for the church he loves.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: The Iowa caucuses are coming up in just over a month, and despite the primary challengers, it’s very likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

Now, a lot has changed since 2016, when Trump first ran. Back then, one of the biggest questions he faced was whether he could win over evangelical Christians.

After all, he was a casino owner, used to hang out at the Playboy Mansion, and he was on his third wife. If he preached anything, it was the gospel of wealth.

Trump needed evangelicals back then and, eventually, they held their noses and voted for him.

Now the dynamic is very different. In this election, evangelical support is no longer a question. In fact, so popular is Trump that some evangelical leaders have come to think of him as a kind of messiah, the leader they have always been waiting for.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. And today: how Trump has transformed the evangelical movement.

[Music]

In the early 2000s I was a beat reporter for The Washington Post, and my beat was evangelicals. George W. Bush was president, and he was a self-declared born-again Christian. And I watched his relationship with evangelicals up close, but that’s nothing like what we have today.

Many evangelical leaders now have an intense devotion to Trump that I find mystifying.

So today on the show, we have Tim Alberta to help explain it. Tim is a staff writer at The Atlantic who just wrote a book called The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Also, Tim’s dad was a pastor, which meant Tim grew up in the Church.

Tim Alberta: So when I say that I grew up in the Church, I mean literally physically grew up inside the church. My mother was on the staff there. I spent my childhood playing hide-and-seek in the storage spaces, doing my homework in my dad’s office.

Tim Alberta watched the movement change during the Trump years. He watched his own dad change. It unsettled him. But it also gave him a unique insider’s perspective. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: So first basic question: Why write a book about evangelicals right now? It’s not like they’re a new force in American politics. They’ve, you know, been around for a while. They’ve had influence for a while. So why now?

Alberta: Well, I guess I would have to give you both the macro and the micro answer. So the macro answer is that I really do sense that something new and something urgent and something dangerous, frankly, is happening in the evangelical world—specific to not just its alliance with Donald Trump, its alliance with the Republican Party, but its processing of everyday, run-of-the-mill, partisan political disputes through this prism that’s no longer red versus blue, no longer even, you know, conservatives versus progressives, you know, God-fearing Christians versus godless leftists. It’s good versus evil.

There is really a sense within American evangelicalism today that the end is near, that the sky is falling, that the barbarians are at the gates, and that if we don’t do something about it now, then this country, this ordained covenant country that God has so uniquely blessed, that we’re going to lose it—and that if we lose it, we’re not just losing America. It’s not just a defeat for America; it’s a defeat for God himself. So that is the macro.

The micro as to why I wrote the book now is because, I suppose for lack of a better way of putting it, I finally found the courage to do so. I finally found my voice in addressing this thing that I have known for a very long time to be a problem but just wasn’t brave enough until now to really speak out about it.

Rosin: So, okay, let’s get down on the ground and paint a picture for people. And possibly this is starting at the extremes, but there’s a church you wrote about called Floodgate.

Alberta: Floodgate is a church in Brighton, Michigan, which is my hometown. They had about 100 people, 125 people on an average Sunday for their worship services. So it’s a pretty small church—roadside congregation—in my hometown.

And I grew up, like, a few miles from there. I had never heard of it. Fast-forward to COVID-19: Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, had issued shutdown orders that implicated houses of worship. And most of the churches in the area, including very conservative churches—theologically, culturally, politically conservative—they decided to shut down for some period of time.

And that included my home church, where my dad had been the pastor—the church that I grew up in, you know, spent my whole life in. They closed down, and basically at that moment, this massive schism was opened in the community, not only in the community I grew up in, but in the faith community that I grew up in, sort of universally speaking when we talk about evangelicalism in America.

Because this same thing that happened in Brighton, Michigan, was happening all over the country, which was to say that churches that closed down had some number of their congregants who were up in arms, who were furious, who basically believed that the pastors there were cowards and that they were succumbing to the forces of secularism that had the Church in the crosshairs.

And meanwhile, churches like Floodgate that took a bold stance against the government and stayed open, those churches were doing the Lord’s work. And so what you saw at Floodgate was a congregation that had about 100, suddenly within about a year had gone to 1,500. And now they’re even much bigger today than they were at that time.

And so when you go into Floodgate on a Sunday morning, as I did many times, instead of some of the traditional Sunday-morning worship rituals—you know, the church creeds and the doctrines being read aloud, the doxology sung, you know, some of the standard stuff that you would become accustomed to in an evangelical space—really what you would see was the pulpit being turned into a soapbox and the worship service turning into a low-rent Fox News segment, with the pastor just inveighing against Anthony Fauci, against Joe Biden, against the Democratic Party, against the elites who are trying to control the population—very dark, very angry, very conspiratorial. And that’s what you would see inside of a church like Floodgate.

Rosin: It’s not exactly an evolution. It’s more like an intensification. And I’m curious how the dots got drawn between a theological argument and COVID-19 masking, and then went all the way to Fox News.

Alberta: Well, you’re right that it’s intensification. It is also evolution. I’ll explain, I think, what is the arc that led us to this place. To understand this moment is to understand the sweep of the last 50 or 60 years in the evangelical world. So, during the mid-to-late ’70s, and certainly into the ’80s through the Reagan years, the Moral Majority is ascendant.

You’ve got tens of millions of evangelicals who are suddenly energized, galvanized, mobilized politically. And then you begin to see, after the Iron Curtain falls and the Cold War ends and we move into this period of a kind of peace and prosperity, that some of that panic starts to fall away a little bit.

A lot of churches sort of ratchet it back, and things return to normal for a period. And you see that, you know, really into the early 2000s, with a notable exception, I would add, of the Bill Clinton impeachment, which I think was a major moment for a lot of evangelicals—certainly my own father, my own church, where a lot of evangelicals wanted to take that moment to emphasize that character matters, morality matters, and that our political system depends on having moral leaders.

And then you kind of fast-forward, and things are still at kind of a low simmer for a while there.

Rosin: I think at the same time during the period that you’re describing, we do come to think, in our cultural imagination, of evangelical as equivalent to conservative, eventually as equivalent to Republican conservative, and then eventually as equivalent to white Republican conservative. Those definitions are also getting hardened during the period that you describe as quiet.

Alberta: I think that’s right, and I think that some of that owes to just a self-identification phenomenon. So, you know, during George W. Bush’s presidency, he’s talking about his relationship with Billy Graham. He’s talking about evangelicalism. And so that is becoming a part of the political lexicon all over again.

I think really what starts to trip the alarms inside of evangelicalism is the end of the Bush presidency and the election of Barack Obama, for some reasons that are obvious (i.e., we’re talking about a white evangelical movement, portions of which, perhaps significant portions of which, are deeply uncomfortable with a Black president).

I also think that during Obama’s presidency, you see a significant move in the culture. I mean, even just on the issue of same-sex marriage, for example, Obama runs for president in 2008 opposed to same-sex marriage, and by the time he leaves office, he is in favor of it and the Supreme Court rules to legalize same-sex marriage nationally. All of that is happening in the space of, like, less than a decade, and you’re seeing major cultural movement toward the left. And a lot of evangelical Christians during this period of time are really beginning to sound the alarm.

They’re really hand-wringing, saying, Okay, this is it. This is the apocalypse we’ve been warning about for 50 years. Even if that apocalypse was once sort of an abstract thing, something that they gave voice to but maybe didn’t really believe it, suddenly this convergence of factors is causing a lot of churches to become not just more conservative, not just more Republican, but really more militant in a lot of ways—in the rhetoric you hear from the pulpit, with the tactics that they will choose to engage in some of the culture-war issues with. And so that leads us to Trump coming down in the golden escalator.

And Donald Trump is not exactly a paragon of Christian virtue. The thrice-married, casino-owning Manhattan playboy who parades his mistresses through the tabloids and uses terrible, vulgar rhetoric—I mean, this is not someone who the rank-and-file evangelical would point to as an ally, much less as a role model.

Rosin: Right.

Alberta: And I reported extensively in 2016 on a really well-organized, well-financed effort to rally evangelical leaders around Ted Cruz, because they at least viewed him as one of their own. But he also had all of that same pugilism, all of that same attitude, that We’ve been pushed around too long, and now it’s time we fought back and we did something about this.

Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination, and then he realizes that he can’t get elected president without the support of these white evangelical voters and, frankly, without overwhelming support of those voters. And so, methodically, he starts his courtship of them.

He chooses Mike Pence as his running mate. He releases this list of Supreme Court justices. He promises explicitly that they will be pro-life Supreme Court justices, something that had never been done by a presidential nominee. He’s doing all of this signaling to evangelical voters. Perhaps most importantly, he goes to New York in the summer of 2016, and he meets with hundreds and hundreds of these prominent evangelical pastors from around the country, and he basically promises them, he says: Look, I will give you power. If you elect me, I will give you power, and I will defend Christianity in this country.

And so there’s sort of this transactional relationship where Trump gets the votes from these people, and they get not just the policies in return, but they get the protection in return. It’s almost as though Trump becomes, like, this mercenary who, on their behalf, is willing to fight the enemies out in the culture, in the government.

Anyone who is hostile to the Christian way of life as they view it, Donald Trump is going to fight on their behalf.

Rosin: Now, you use the word transactional. Did everybody understand it was transactional? I mean, from how you described it, Trump certainly understood it was transactional: I’m going to come out there and get your vote. How did evangelical leaders understand what was happening?

Alberta: The incredible part, Hanna, is that they really did. I mean, I have all of the reporting on the record from the time to back this up. I wrote about it in my first book, American Carnage. They understood exactly the relationship that they were entering into with Donald Trump. They were under no illusions that God’s hands were on him. They didn’t believe any of that.

They didn’t even bother trying to sell that to their flocks. Really, what they said was: Look, this is a crummy situation. We’ve got a binary choice. There are multiple Supreme Court justices hanging in the balance here. And if you care about abortion—which is the number-one issue for a lot of these folks—then you have an obligation to vote for this person, no matter how gross and wretched we find his personal conduct to be.

Rosin: This is the beginning of the first election. This is their attitude. Now we’re just at the beginning of the Trump administration.

Alberta: That’s right. And so what starts as this transactional relationship, it morphs into something else entirely. What we see today is this fanatical, cult-like attachment to Donald Trump in some quarters of the evangelical universe. Now, I say some quarters because I really need to stress this point. When we talk about white evangelicals in this country, we’re talking about tens of millions of people, right?

They are not a monolith. We have to understand that these are points plotted across this vast spectrum. So on the one hand—on the one end of that spectrum, I should say—of course you have some of these folks who are just all in on Trump. They have almost sold their souls for Trumpism, and they view him as a messianic figure. They really do. And they’ll tell you that.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have some of these white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016, held their nose, begged for forgiveness after doing so, but they still cared so much about the abortion issue that they felt compelled to do so.

And then pretty quickly thereafter, they walked away from it all and washed their hands and said, I cannot be a part of this. Right?

And then in the middle, you’ve got the great majority of these folks who are floating somewhere in the middle of this, trying to figure out, you know, I find this guy abhorrent, but I’m also terrified of what I see from the left. I can’t possibly vote for Trump again, but I can’t vote for somebody who’s pro-choice either. What do I do?

There’s this identity crisis now deep inside the evangelical movement, where a lot of these folks feel completely lost and completely homeless. And their relationship with Trump is not something that can be sort of caricatured, because for a lot of these folks, even folks who voted for him a second time, in 2020, they find the man to be completely immoral and reprehensible.

And yet they still voted for him twice.

Rosin: Yeah, I understand the second group, the bargain they’re making. I understand the third group that regrets the bargain that they made. It’s the first group that is a mystery to me, how people came to be all in. So can you try and describe that first group to me?

Like, how did they morph from holding their nose and choosing a flawed leader to deciding that he was the messiah? How did that evolution happen?

Alberta: There are many, many, many Christians in this country who are deeply invested in the idea of sort of supernatural intervention and transformation and the idea that God speaks to us through the unlikeliest of sources.

And so for some chunk of that first group that you’re asking about, there’s no question. And I’ve talked with plenty of these folks. They believe Donald Trump is God’s instrument on Earth. And not only that, they believe that Donald Trump has become a Christian, that Donald Trump underwent a transformation while he was president, And why else would he be fighting for us the way that he’s fighting for us?

And it’s difficult to overstate just how meaningful that language of transformation is to people whose entire lives revolve around notions of transformation and of holy intercession.

Rosin: Can I ask, is there any part of you who’s familiar and knows that language that can believe that maybe he did have some kind of transformation?

Alberta: No.

Rosin: No.

Alberta: The short answer is no. And I don’t want—listen, I don’t want to be disrespectful. I don’t want to be cute in my answer here. But, you know, scripture says that by their fruit you will know them. You know, a good and healthy tree bears good and healthy fruit. If one were to just spend a day studying the language Donald Trump uses, the behavior he exhibits, the way that he treats others—you know, Jesus tells us to love our enemy and pray for those who persecute you, to turn the other cheek, to love your neighbor as yourself.

I have studied Donald Trump as closely as anyone in the last decade, and I have yet to see him exhibit any of those qualities or follow any of those biblical commands. So, I’m sorry, but no. It strikes me as entirely improbable that he has had a real encounter with the risen Christ and has committed his life to Jesus.

Rosin: One thing that is mystifying me is that now that evangelicals are so deeply in that us versus them—sort of, It’s us in a war against the evil Americans. The rest of you are not even Americans. You’re our enemies, basically—what is evangelizing?

I mean, I recall that when I spent a lot of time around evangelicals (and I am Jewish), there was nothing I could say or do or confess about myself that would prevent them from wanting to evangelize me. Like, I was always a reachable soul. Everybody was always a reachable soul. And now it seems like, What is evangelizing?

There’s a whole swath of America that just isn’t—they’re beyond contempt. You know, they’re the enemy. And so that seems very different to me than what it used to be.

Alberta: Hanna, first and foremost, people will ask, understandably, Well, what does it mean, evangelical? What does that even mean? Right? There’s always been some disagreement over the terminology itself.

And what I like to say is, Listen, at its core, there’s a verb in there, which is “to evangelize.” It is to take the gospel of Jesus Christ out to all the nations and to reach the unbelievers and to share with them this story—of not only of God’s perfect love, but of humanity’s brokenness and how God ultimately had to take on flesh and be fully God and fully man in the form of Jesus, and that Jesus was the mediator between a broken humanity and a perfect God—and to share that message with an unbelieving world so that they might see him and they might believe in him.

The problem today is that we, in the modern American context, have taken the New Testament model of what a church should be, and we have completely flipped it on its head. What I mean by that is if you study the New Testament model of what the early Church looked like and how it operated, there was boundless, abundant grace and forgiveness and kindness shown to those outside of the Church, because the thinking was: They don’t know God. They don’t know any better, so we can’t possibly hold their behavior against them. We need to show them the love of God.

But inside the Church, for fellow believers there was strict accountability. There was a very high standard. In fact, they basically said, You are held to the highest of standards for your behavior, for your language, for your conduct inside of the Church, because you do know God. You do know better.

What we see today in the American context is the complete opposite. We see, inside of the Church—despite all of the scandal, the abuse, the misconduct, the terrible behavior, the damaging rhetoric—we see forgiveness. We turn a blind eye to it. We enable it. We justify it.

But when we see those outside of the Church who disagree with us, it is nothing but condemnation. It is nothing but fire and brimstone. There is no grace. There is no forgiveness. And I just—it breaks my heart because, in so many ways, the entire identity of the Church is rooted in that mission, in that purpose of evangelizing. But we today cannot reach the outside world with that gospel of Jesus Christ, because the outside world looks at us and says, We want nothing to do with you guys. We want nothing to do with evangelicals. And it’s just, it’s tragic.

Rosin: And also vice versa, I have to say. I mean, that’s so interesting what you just said. But I was thinking, as much as I resented the millions of times that as a reporter and, you know, a Jewish person I’d have to sort of sit through people trying to evangelize me as I was trying to do my work, at least they were talking to me.

Like, at least that was like a—that was a bridge, you know? That was like, they were interested. And now I look back at that and think, like, If I were out there now, that wouldn’t happen. You know, a lot of people just wouldn’t be interested. I might be the enemy.

Alberta: Yeah, they would view you with hostility. Right?

Rosin: Yes, exactly.

Alberta: And suspicion.

Rosin: Yeah, exactly.

Alberta: Right. Which is, you know, listen, I plead guilty at times to probably—although I was just talking with a dear friend of mine, a journalist friend who’s Jewish, who told me, You know, I’m only about halfway through the book, but I have to say, you’re kind of, you’re intriguing me with your case for Jesus here.

And I said, Listen, you know, I figured that I might be annoying some of my non-Christian friends with parts of the book that are unapologetically trying to evangelize. But, ultimately, that is what we are called to do, and if we annoy people in the process, so be it. But boy, I’d rather annoy people with the gospel than denigrate them and antagonize them and dehumanize them with a twisted version of the gospel.

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so we’ve talked about the evangelical movement as a whole. Let’s talk about your own story. Your father was a pastor.

Alberta: Yes, he was. The Dr. Reverend Richard J. Alberta. My dad was an amazing guy who would have been the unlikeliest candidate to ever become a pastor. He was an atheist, actually, and he was working in finance in New York and making a lot of money and had a beautiful house and a Cadillac and a beautiful wife, my mother, and they had it all. They were flying high, living the dream.

And my dad, he just felt this rumbling emptiness. Something was missing in his life. And what could it possibly be? I mean, you look from the outside in: What could you possibly be missing? And so, he set out looking. And that search led him to a little church in the Hudson Valley called Goodwill. And it was there that he heard the gospel for the first time, and he gave his life to Jesus that day.

And it was a pretty radical transformation in his life. Suddenly he was waking up at 4 in the morning to read the Bible for hours, silently meditating, praying. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. She was not a Christian at the time. And then things got even weirder, because not long after that, he felt the Lord calling him to enter the ministry. And my mom had just become a Christian at this point, but she and his brothers and parents and their friends—everybody who knew him—thought that he’d lost his mind. And he just said, Listen, I don’t know what to tell you, but I feel an anointing from God to do this with my life. And so he did.

They left everything behind. They sold all their possessions. They spent the next couple of decades living on food stamps, working in little churches around the country. And eventually they put down roots at a church called Cornerstone, in Brighton, Michigan, which is where I grew up.

Rosin: Wow, you know, no matter how many times I’ve heard conversion stories like that, it’s very hard for me to, like, know or understand what that spark is.

Alberta: It’s hard to describe just how radical of a change that was for him and for his life and how much he sacrificed for it.

And my dad’s always been my hero because of that, because I think there are very few people in this life with the courage to follow a conviction in the way that he did.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so let’s take those feelings that you have about your dad, and it seems like belief has lived on in you, and overlay them on the political transformation that you’re describing. Because it sounds like from what you write in the book, your father went through that whole political transformation.

He started out suspicious of politics. He started out thinking Trump was a narcissist and a liar. And then over time, you watched him go through the same changes that you watched the rest of the evangelical community go through, right? Like, it started to feel to you, as you write in the book, like he was justifying some of the things that Trump has done. Did I get that right?

Alberta: Yeah, that’s right. And I would be clear—not just, like, to defend my dad’s honor or whatever, because I’ve been very open in discussing all of this, and I try to just be completely transparent in the book—but my dad was never, like, a Trumper, but he did become sort of defensive around Trump.

And I think the explanation I ultimately reached there was that my dad felt guilty, frankly, about voting for Trump. I think he felt vulnerable almost, because, again, here was someone who had lived his life in such an incredibly upright manner, who taught his kids to know right from wrong, who wouldn’t cheat anybody out of a penny.

It just, like, you know, he set a standard for us. And then he votes for this guy who was, in so many ways, just, like, a walking rebuke to everything that he’d ever taught us about how to be a man, how to be a husband, how to be a neighbor. And I think he felt guilty about it.

And he and I would sort of go back and forth on this and, ultimately, I would say that to him, which I think was, like, the deepest cut of all.

I’d say, Pop, like, you’re the one who taught me right from wrong. Like, Don’t be mad at me for acting on it. Like, This guy, what he’s doing, what he’s saying, it’s wrong.”

And I think that when we would have those conversations, I could sense in him this feeling that, you know, attacks on Trump’s character became an attack on his character, that he processed criticisms of Trump as criticisms of him personally.

And I think a lot of evangelicals felt that way. And in some strange sense, that almost drove them deeper into the Trump bunker, where if they were to concede any criticism, any attack on Trump as being legitimate, then it was sort of ipso facto a legitimate attack on them. And that was the sort of weird dynamic that took hold in my relationship with my dad.

Rosin: So, okay, here we are coming on another election. What do you think the future of evangelicals is in the near future, the next election?

Alberta: So Trump is obviously the runaway favorite to win the Republican nomination, and that is due, in no small part, to his continued stranglehold on the evangelical vote. What’s interesting, I would add as a quick aside, is that we really saw, for the first time, Trump’s support with those voters beginning to dip after the 2022 midterms, when Republicans underperformed so badly.

And then Trump responded to the results of the midterms by throwing the pro-life movement under the bus, basically saying it was their fault that Republicans had lost all these races. And Trump saw his numbers decline pretty noticeably with those voters.

But then something happened. Alvin Bragg delivered that first indictment of Donald Trump, which was, of course, then followed by all these subsequent indictments. And you saw Trump’s numbers with those same evangelical voters who had started to bail on him, they went right back up, and they have continued apace.

And I mention all that just to say that this idea of a persecution complex is so deeply embedded in the evangelical psyche. When Donald Trump goes to these rallies and says, you know, We are under siege. They’re coming for us. They’re coming for me first so that they can get to you, these people, they believe that deep in their bones. That is their entire political consciousness at this point.

So Donald Trump is almost surely going to win the Republican nomination, but transitioning to the general election next November, I don’t necessarily foresee any great defection of these white evangelical voters away from Donald Trump. He’s won roughly 80 percent of them in the last two elections. And if he is the Republican nominee in 2024, as we expect, he’ll probably win about that same rough percentage.

However, the thing that I have observed, and the thing that I would point out to our listeners to keep a very close eye on in the coming year, is that this is the first post-Roe v. Wade presidential election held in this country. And for so long, for 50 years, single-issue evangelical voters have been mobilized to turn out in presidential elections because of the abortion issue, because of the federal stakes, because of Supreme Court vacancies hanging in the balance. This is the first election where that will no longer be the case.

We now have abortion as a decentralized, defederalized issue. So you see all of the mobilization at the grassroots level in the states over abortion, but not in a federal framing.

Now with Roe v. Wade having fallen, there’s real consideration being given by a lot of these folks to either vote for a third party or even just perhaps to stay home and not vote at all, because they no longer feel obligated, they no longer feel compelled to choose the lesser of two evils in a presidential context because the abortion issue is pretty much off the table.

So you could see some significant drop off in terms of the raw votes cast by evangelicals in this upcoming election, and that would be unprecedented.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so what happens if Trump wins? What happens if Trump loses? What do those two scenarios look like?

Alberta: Well, if Trump wins, the folks around him who are advising him, they have made no secret of the fact that there will be elements of an explicitly Christian nationalist agenda pursued in a second Trump term. In fact, the West Wing will be populated by some individuals who would openly identify as Christian nationalists.

Some of them would probably even openly identify as theocrats, or at least if you stuck the needle of truth serum into their veins. So when Donald Trump, for instance, recently on the campaign trail, floated this idea of no longer allowing non-Christian migrants to enter the country, Trump said that a few weeks ago, and I mean, we just barely even batted an eye, right?

But that is the sort of idea now circulating inside Trump’s orbit, and there are a lot of people around him who really, truly, deeply believe in this idea now of partisan politics as a proxy for good versus evil.

And these are the folks who will be helping to shape the legislative agenda inside of the Trump White House. I think we need to buckle up if, in fact, Trump is elected, because some of this talk of a holy war, of a spiritual battle, good versus evil—we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of what we could see if Trump were to be elected again.

Rosin: Oh, that sounds very undemocratic and un-American to me. Okay, and what if he loses?

Alberta: Well, if he loses, boy, I mean, I think the question becomes, for a lot of these folks, you know, Donald Trump was able to sell himself as a martyr once, right—in 2020 with the “Stop the Steal” and “the election was rigged” and all of this—and if he loses again, does the label of “consistent loser,” does that somehow break the spell?

Is there some opportunity here for some of these evangelicals to sort of step back and reevaluate their relationship with Trump and wonder? Okay, maybe we’ve been investing too much in the political arena. If, in fact, we believe that there are these great moral problems in America, then maybe the solutions aren’t political. Maybe we need to reevaluate.

That could happen. I pray that it does. Or the exact opposite could happen. There could be a doubling down or a tripling down. And there could be an attempt to—I mean, I hate to even voice this, but I mean, January 6 was not an outlier. It was not something that we should have been surprised by.

And if you study some of the behavior, some of the calls to arms—figurative and literal—that we see coming out of some of these far-right evangelical spaces, this could turn into something really dangerous.

And I think that is why, even if you are not an evangelical Christian yourself, even if you are not a believer, even if you are not an adherent to any sort of religious tradition, you should be paying very close attention to this. And I wrote this book for you as much as for anyone else, because we have to understand that in the interest of holding together a pluralistic society, these schisms inside the Church, they have to be addressed, and they have to be addressed soon.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. I think we’re going to hang on to the phrase, or it sounds like you’re going to hang on to the phrase, break the spell. I mean, that’s what you’re hoping for.

Alberta: That is what I’m hoping for. I think we should all be hoping for it, but I’m not holding my breath at the same time.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, you’ve explained a lot to me. Thank you for coming on the show.

Alberta: Thank you for having me, Hanna. This has been great.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.