Here’s what we’ve been talking about on ‘Highest Power’

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on April 1, 2025.

It’s been one month since the launch of my new podcast with BNG, Highest Power: Church + State, which is currently ranking within the top 20% of all podcasts nationally.

“I’m thrilled with the podcast and what you’re doing here,” BNG Executive Director Mark Wingfield told me during his appearance on the show. To those who follow BNG, Wingfield promised: “We’ve got to have a record of what’s really happening. There’s got to be a historical record. And we’re going to do that every day, every week. We’re going to keep plugging away, telling you what the truth is, so that there is a baseline you can refer back to on this. We’re not going to be cowed by this.”

Rick Pidcock

“This” meant the Trump administration’s intimidation of the media for covering today’s stories in ways Trump doesn’t approve of. But members of the press who cover the stories of today aren’t the only ones facing Trump’s bullying these days. So are historians who share the stories of our past.

In the final episode of last month, I interviewed historian Beth Allison Barr about Trump’s recent executive order which the White House titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” According to that order, American history is being rewritten by woke liberals in a way that replaces “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” It criticizes telling negative stories about our history because such stories might deepen “social divides” and foster “a sense of national shame.”

To solve this “problem,” Trump is putting Vice President JD Vance in charge of “saving our Smithsonian” by removing what Trump and Vance consider to be “improper ideology.”

But as Barr notes, “That’s what history is, an act of rewriting. The more we can understand, the more we can tell, the more we can reevaluate” because “when you’re only taught a history where only a certain type of people are always in charge, then it is much easier to convince people that only a certain type of people should be in charge.”

Analyzing the news while questioning the assumption that only a certain type of people should be in charge is essentially what we’re doing with “Highest Power: Church + State.” Episodes release at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Mondays and Thursdays. This is one of three podcasts available from BNG, along with “Stuck in the Middle with You” and “Change-making Conversations.”

‘Writing out’ the oppressed from history

Trump’s concern about rewriting history is interesting because for history to be rewritten, it has to be written in the first place. So the logical question would be to ask who it’s been written by, or what perspective it’s been written from. And typically, history was written by the powerful.

As Barr explained, what people often label “objective history” is really a “historical narrative that was born in the 19th century, mostly among white European and North American intellectuals, who saw history primarily through the lens of white male imperialists. And so this was the history that was often being taught at universities, etc. And when people argue that they want objective history, this is often what they are wanting to go back to, this very narrow perspective on history that was produced by actually a very small group of white European and North American intellectuals, and all male, almost all male.”

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.