Flipping Tables

Dr. Dan McClellan, a public scholar of the Bible with a PhD in theology, joins to share his insights on biblical scholarship. He discusses the impact of misinformation on social media and how he aims to correct it. Topics include the plural nature of Elohim in Genesis, the concept of ancient Israelite polytheism, and the politicization of abortion rooted in biblical interpretation. Dan also delves into the Bible's views on LGBTQ issues and corporal punishment, promoting a nuanced understanding of scripture that embraces its complexities.

I am SO SORRY. In the wake of traveling and working in DC I completely forgot to post last weeks episode. I'm a human and I apologize sincerely. It means a lot to me to stay on top of this work and education the best I can. That said, YOU GET TWO EPISODES THIS WEEKThe first is the most comprehensive conversation I've had to date. Dr. Randall Balmer is a prize winning historian and Emmy Award nominee and holds the John Phillips Chair in religion at Dartmouth which is the oldest endowed professorship at the school. He is an expert in Religion in North America and Evangelicalism in America and his recent book "America's Best Idea: The Separation of Church & Hate" is the best top to bottom explanation on why 1. Separation is so important and 2. NO we are not a "Christian Nation" but one founded on religious liberty. For early and ad free releases please subscribe at patreon.com/montemader

September 11th was the day where I learned as a girl that America was not impervious. I'll never forget the people standing in the windows and the smoke. Little did I know I would grow up to live in New York City and it wasn't until then I understood the scale of the disaster. It's not until you realize just how big those buildings are, how close everything is, the people trapped in the subways, people walking home to NEW JERSEY because they didn't have cash for a cab and the ATMs were down. Meeting friends and clients who survived it...It's incomprehensible As a girl I remember fear, I remember everyone wanting to go to war, and to war we went. A war that wouldn't end until after I had graduated high school. The claims I remember were to defend democracy and to end Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program. Weapons that were never there Weapons that were searched for for months And in our wake we started an onslaught on a country we had no business being in, and our recklessness paved the way for the domination of ISIS and the re-insurgence of the Taliban.The first amendment is the single most important amendment we have. We HAVE to be able to question and condemn our government, we HAVE to be able to demand answers, we HAVE to be able to protest. 9/11 and the Iraqi War are a great example of real tragedy, real heroes, real courage, and the very real and all too common instance of the powerful using it to their advantage. I hope that we can use this conversation to honor the innocent and the brave and remember to ask questions to the powers behind the machine and demand accountability when they lie or cover things up. The story and article of NYC resident Christina Stanton shared at her request and with her full permission** See her article here: https://thedispatch.com/article/september-11-victims-memorial-health-trump-cuts/Sources: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006) – Pulitzer Prize winner, deeply researched account of al-Qaeda’s rise and the events leading to 9/11.The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) – Official bipartisan investigationAnthony Summers, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden (2011) – Investigative account with interviews and newly declassified documents.Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004).Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 (2019) Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019) – Oral history drawn from transcripts, survivors, responders.Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (2004) Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) – Military-focused critique of the war planning and execution.Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (2006) – On occupation mismanagement.Charles Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (Duelfer Report) (2004) – Definitive assessment that Iraq did not have stockpiles of WMDs.Michael R. Gordon & Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006).Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005) – Broader critique of U.S. war culture, with Iraq as case study.Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons (2003).Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006) – Explains ideological currents behind Iraq War push.Foreign Affairs and International Security articles on U.S. grand strategy post-9/11.Middle East Journal and Journal of Military History articles on insurgency and U.S. occupation.U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports on 9/11 and Iraq (2001–2010).RAND Corporation studies: e.g., Operation IRAQI FREEDOM: Decisive War, Elusive Peace (2004).

TRIGGER WARNING: CHILD ABUSE AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCEOn August 21, 2025, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family died. A behemoth and kingmaker in the evangelical world who supported vicious corporal punishment of children, the subjugation of women and the demonization of the LGBTQ community. Today we discuss the life and career of James Dobson. We will open up about his teachings, books, and his evangelical power machine: Focus on the Family. We will discuss how his teachings overlapped with Bill Gothard. The same teachings that allowed Bill Gothard to groom and abuse of teen girls and young women.Focus on the Family purported to be a wholesome counseling service but was the power arm of an evangelical force affecting policy around marriage, equality, and torture like conversion therapy. They even falsely claimed to be a church to evade taxes because... of course.We break down destructive teaching by pulling it out of the darkness and into the light. So as we shine a light on these harmful organizations and doctrines, lets destroy them for good.

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Subscribe for 40% off their Vantage plan ($5 a month) Death is the one experience we all share, yet it remains the conversation we avoid most. In this episode, I sit down with death doula Britna Savarese to explore what it truly means to accompany someone at the end of life. We talk about why our culture struggles to face grief, how silence around death isolates the dying and their loved ones, and how reclaiming these conversations can bring healing, connection, and even beauty.Britna I was raised Southern Baptist in a small town best known for its rodeo. As a skateboarding punk, she pushed against the system and questioned the rigid religion I was handed. That same spirit of questioning and reimagining guides her work as a death doula today. Just as Flipping Tables dismantles harmful narratives, she dismantles fear and silence around death—offering space for authentic reflection and intentional closure.Britna shares powerful stories of walking alongside families in their most vulnerable moments and offers insight into how death work isn’t just about endings—it’s about presence, love, and honoring the whole of a life. Together, we explore the hesitancy many of us feel when confronting mortality, the lessons death has to teach us about living, and the hope that can be found in embracing this natural transition. And these conversations can help us prepare for ourselves and our loved ones for our next great adventure. This is a tender, vulnerable, and deeply human conversation. If you’ve ever felt uncertain about how to grieve, how to support a loved one, or how to face your own mortality with more grace and peace, this episode is for you.In this episode, we discuss:The role of a death doula and what it means to provide compassionate presence at the end of lifeWhy our culture avoids talking about grief and how that avoidance impacts usThe sacredness and beauty found in the transition from life to deathHow opening ourselves to conversations about death can actually deepen our appreciation for livingThis episode is not about fear—it’s about finding courage, tenderness, and even hope in the face of the universal journey we all share.Please consider supporting my work at patreon.com/montemader

“What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil?” — Heinrich Kramer (Malleus Maleficarum, 1487)Part I, Question VIToday we travel to Europe's witch trials, the church and government leaders claimed it was to rid the world of women who had made pacts with Satan. It was really just to remove women from positions of medical and religious power. and to it was to take their wealth and force their obedience. Priestesses, healers, midwives were targeted and the traditional role of women in medicine stripped and given to male doctors. Women who inherited land were targeted so their wealth could be given to powerful men. Women who refused marriage norms, appearance norms... also died in the flame.The language and history that demonized the sexuality and prowess of women is the same language we hear today in purity and incel culture, with the same motive. The motive of stripping women of power, autonomy, wealth, equality and position,The woman who refused to give up her power and knowledge, or chose to keep her own wealth, the woman that chose solitude... chose deathSourcesBoyer, Paul & Nissenbaum, Stephen. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Harvard University Press, 1974.Mather, Cotton. Wonders of the Invisible World. 1693.Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Vintage, 2003.Reis, Elizabeth. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. Cornell University Press, 1997.Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge University Press, 1992.Augustine. City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics, 2003.Canon Episcopi (c. 906), in Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology.Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, 13th century.Levack, Brian. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Longman, 1987.Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Feminist Press, 1973.Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. Yale University Press, 2004.Karlsen, Carol. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. W.W. Norton, 1987.Kramer, Heinrich and Sprenger, Jacob. Malleus Maleficarum. 1487. Trans. Montague Summers, 1928.Tertullian. On the Apparel of Women, 2nd century CE.Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1989.Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.Kassell, Lauren. Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London. Clarendon Press, 2005.Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons. Oxford University Press, 1999.Rowlands, Alison. Witchcraft Narratives in Germany. Manchester University Press, 2003.Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas. Vintage, 1996.Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities. Oxford University Press, 2003.MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianizing the Roman Empire. Yale University Press, 1984.Rogers, Nicholas. Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. Oxford University Press, 2002.McDougall, Heather. “The Pagan Roots of Easter.” The Guardian, 2010.Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford, 1997.Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. Penguin, 1964.Harpur, Tom. The Pagan Christ. Walker & Company, 2004.MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Viking, 2010.Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne. Liveright, 2020.Beard, Mary. Women & Power: A Manifesto. Liveright, 2017.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies. Zero Books, 2017.Rogers, Nicholas. Witchcraft and the Western Imagination. Routledge, 2020.Donovan, Joan. “How QAnon Uses Digital Witch Hunts.” Harvard Kennedy School, 2021.Spring, Alexandra. “Inside the Tradwife Movement.” The Guardian, 2020.

Video for this episode available on patreon. Thank you to all my supporters www.patreon.com/montemaderThe book "The Color of Compromise" is an heartbreaking historical journey through the history of America specifically around faith and the racial divide. In this episode we sit with the author of "The Color of Compromise" and "The Spirit of Justice" Jemar Tisby. He is an author, historian, speaker and Christian who calls on his readers to faith history honestly, to step out of the bounds of complacency into real activism and real change. Today we talk about head-shaking history, the development of "white is right" and the ideal that began to associate Christianity with European descent. We discuss "hereditary heathenism" and the key role the white church has played in injustice, both by her actions, and by her silence. We get to choose in this moment how the story of our lives will be written. When it comes to our response to injustice, "What will it say?"

Sorry this came out late, for some reason it did not publish."History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes"- Mark TwainIt seems to be a common ideology that anyone who identifies as "left" or "liberal" or "progressive" or audible gasp "democratic socialist" is "a f*cking commie"!!!! And that of course is bad.... but why? Why is that rhetoric so ingrained in American vernacular?In the wake of World War II, the tenuous "alliance" between the USSR and the USA disintegrated. With the entrance of nuclear arms, the ideological enemies and political superpowers fell immediately into the decades long Cold War. Fear of nuclear fallout, another devastating world war, was perfect political fodder for those who wanted to use fear to generate power, privilege and wealth for themselves. Senator Joseph R McCarthy was a super power in his own right. From his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, viciously clasping a piece of paper he claimed had over 200 names of employees in the state department who were communist spies. He levied unfounded accusations, ruined careers and lied his way into infamy. He, and his right hand man and future mafia and Trump lawyer Roy Cohn, made it a point to paint all their opposition as communist enemies of state. And it worked.. until it didn't. We explore not just the life and movements of Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare and the thread of manipulation that leads us all the way to now.Sources:Richard H. Rovere – Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt Brace, 1959)Ellen Schrecker – Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton University Press, 1998)David M. Oshinsky – A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (Oxford University Press, 1983)Richard M. Fried – Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1990)Howard Zinn – A People's History of the United StatesJohn Lewis Gaddis – The Cold War: A New History (Penguin Press, 2005)Arthur Herman – Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated SenatorGovernment & Legal DocumentsArmy–McCarthy Hearings Transcript (1954)Available through the U.S. Senate Historical Office and National Archives.Excerpts are commonly found in collections like:📁 National Archives – Army-McCarthy HearingsU.S. Senate Resolution 301 (1954) – Censure of Senator McCarthy.Congressional RecordFBI Vault – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg FilesFBI Records: The Vault – Rosenberg CaseVenona Project Decrypts (NSA) – Declassified Soviet espionage cables.NSA.gov Venona FilesJournalism & Documentary ArchivesEdward R. Murrow – “See It Now” Broadcast on McCarthy (March 9, 1954)CBS News Archives & YouTubeNew York Times Archive – Coverage of McCarthy, the Rosenbergs, and the Army hearings.Vanity Fair – “The Power and Poison of Roy Cohn” (2019)Vanity Fair – Roy CohnThe New Yorker – “Roy Cohn and the Making of a Winner-Take-All America”New Yorker – Roy CohnThe Guardian – “Trump's Roy Cohn Obsession” and Cohn’s legacy in GOP tactics.The Guardian – Roy CohnVideo & Archival FootageArmy–McCarthy Hearings (C-SPAN Archive)C-SPAN: Army–McCarthy Hearings“Have You No Sense of Decency?” – Joseph Welch Confronts McCarthy (June 9, 1954)YouTube ClipPBS American Experience: “McCarthy”PBS – American Experience“Where’s My Roy Cohn?” (2019 Documentary) – Directed by Matt TyrnauerAvailable on various streaming platforms (Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube).

This show is brought to you by ground news. For 40% off their vantage plan ($5 a month) subscribe at groundnews.com/tables What would happen if representatives from every religion sat in a room and talked? How long would a conversation take before the atheist and the christian realized, they love the same hobbies, care about their kids having the best chance of success and LOVE Marvel movies? How long before the Muslim mother and the gay couple share their favorite recipes because cooking for their families brings them so much joy?Today is just a conversation, with one of the orphans from Stuart Little, the winner of TV show wipeout, recovered addict, fiance to his gorgeous partner Jennaca and satanic atheist. Kyle and I couldn't have grown up further apart in life and what we were taught to believe. And Kyle and I talk about.....How did we get here???Talking about what its like to be a creator who feels like you HAVE to start using our voice to help??How do we heal together and make something better for the future for EVERYONE, how do we create healing and hope and belonging for everyone??How do we help pull young men back from the jaws of the manosphere??This and more and I hope it intrigues and challenges you as much as it did me. Thank you for your continued patience, I have limited wifi access where we are and I'm having to produce the entire shows and content solo for another week. But update: Lucy is doing better and almost ready for her second surgery

If you grew up in Church in the 90s and early 2000s you remember the CRAZE that was the book "I kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. Purity culture was rampant in the church, preaching to young girls their worth was their virginity and that their bodies belonged to their fathers until they were given to their future husbands. YIKES. Do you know that Joshua Harris has now denounced both the book and his stance? Today Jubilee Dawns joins me on a deep dive about purity culture in the church, the damage it wreaked on ours and other women's lives and share our first "Youth Pastors Gone Wild" segment. Purity culture emerged in American evangelical Christianity in the 1990s and early 2000s, emphasizing abstinence from sex before marriage as a moral and spiritual ideal, particularly for girls and women. It promoted the idea that a woman's worth was intrinsically tied to her sexual behavior, often using metaphors like "chewed gum" or "used tape" to describe those who had engaged in premarital sex. Movements like True Love Waits and purity balls encouraged young girls to make vows of chastity, often symbolized by rings and ceremonies involving their fathers.This culture disproportionately harmed young women by instilling shame, fear, and a deep sense of guilt around their bodies and natural sexual development. Many were taught to suppress their desires, avoid close relationships with boys, and take responsibility for male lust by dressing modestly and remaining “pure.” As a result, countless women have reported long-term effects including sexual dysfunction, body shame, difficulty forming healthy relationships, and trauma from victim-blaming in cases of sexual abuse or assault. Rather than empowering young women, purity culture often silenced and controlled them, framing obedience and modesty as the only path to spiritual value.