HeyJaredWeird, Wicked, and Wild
Welcome to Weird, Wicked, & Wild, a new hard-hitting podcast about the world we live in and how we got here. Part storytelling, part conversation, we're two old friends talking about what we've learned--or failed to learn--from our histories.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 19, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest episodes
ONUG: Promised Land (opens the original)
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Americans were sure that God was on their side. They sought to remake their world according to a new covenant. And in this new covenant, borders seemed wrong. There was land waiting for them in the West, and all they had to do was clear the way. Expansion would be a great national project, a realization of American manifest destiny. But manifest destiny resulted in a continental empire, increasingly divided over the national crime of slavery. God's chosen people entered a stolen promised land an
ONUG: Faith on Fire (opens the original)
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On the heels of the American Revolution came a Second Great Awakening. It did not transform the U.S. into a Christian nation either, but it did something perhaps more volatile. In a republic with no established church, faith became a matter of choice, and with that came power. Ordinary Americans claimed the authority to interpret Scripture, experience God directly, and remake the world around them. Camp meetings dotted the landscape into the 19th century, preaching that salvation was open to all
ONUG: Endowed by Their Creator (opens the original)
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The Founders did not create a Christian nation. They created something stranger. The American Revolution rejected the divine right of kings, but it did not reject sacred purpose. Instead, Americans transformed liberty, the nation, the Founders, and even the war itself into objects of near-religious reverence. Thomas Paine preached revolution like a revival sermon. Jefferson invoked “Nature’s God” and “divine Providence.” George Washington became a providential deliverer in the public imagination
ONUG: No King but God?? (opens the original)
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A religiously pluralistic colonial people could never unite against an empire with a state-mandated faith, could it? Thomas Paine thought it could, and while not advocating for a religious society, he deployed explicitly Christian reasoning when he called for independence in Common Sense , the wildly popular pamphlet Paine published in 1776. Nobody was likely to make Congregationalists, Baptists, Anglicans, Quakers, Catholics, and revivalists agree on religious doctrine, or clerical authority, o
ONUG: Born Again? (opens the original)
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The Salem Witch Trials frightened people, not about witches, but about the dangers of rigid orthodoxy. The following decades into the eighteenth century saw the old Puritan guard lose its grip on New England. Religion didn't disappear, but it cooled notably. Increased trade across the Atlantic and the arrival of Enlightenment thinking resulted in greater secularism in New England society, until George Whitefield arrived in the 1730s. Whitefield was a charismatic itinerant preacher who helped ush
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