Every day for nearly three hours, Erick Erickson sits at a microphone and keeps people company. His talk radio show has no script — he takes calls from listeners and interviews the occasional guest, all in the hopes of helping listeners make sense of the political moment and reminding them, “It’s going to be okay.”

His format seems to be working. The show is carried on 83 radio stations nationally to an estimated 3 million listeners.

Erickson is open about his Christian faith, even though his show is mostly about politics and current events. He has developed a tradition on Good Friday of clearly explaining to listeners the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. Then he invites pastors to join him for a discussion on why Easter matters.

He also shares with listeners about his own family’s struggles, letting audience members know they are not alone in facing life’s challenges. And he reminds them that whether they are facing difficult personal circumstances or a bleak political landscape, “At the end of the day, God’s in control. I’ve read the end of the book, it’s going to be okay.”

A longtime member of First Presbyterian Church in Macon, Georgia, and occasional student at Reformed Theological Seminary, Erickson talked with byFaith about how his faith informs his work and worldview. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I know that you spent some time in politics on the Macon City Council, reported on politics for years, and worked in political consulting when you were a practicing attorney. What did you enjoy or find appealing about political reporting?

I grew up in the Middle East in the 1980s and was a news junkie and gravitated toward news and politics as a way to connect back to the United States. In high school, I moved back to the United States and volunteered for some campaigns. I went to college and started the College Republicans at my alma mater, and the political bug just kind of bit me. I never intended to run for office, but fell into a city council seat. I ran campaigns around the country from my law firm, and I enjoyed it far more than I enjoyed the regular practice of law.

What is it that you enjoyed about it? 


Finding good people and trying to get them elected. Everybody always says, “We need good people and to get them elected,” and so often you wind up with terrible people in office. I got a lot of pleasure in finding good people, building a good campaign, and being able to get people in office. 

How did you arrive in the PCA? 

I moved from rural Louisiana to Macon, Georgia, to attend Mercer University. I went to First Baptist Church in my little town in Louisiana, so I went to First Baptist Church in Macon, Georgia, and the woman in the pulpit that Sunday was talking about how we needed to be more spiritual and be in the hymnbook and less scriptural and get out of the Bible. And it kind of blew my mind. I went home and called my pastor at my Baptist church, and I believe his exact words were, “Find a church that has the letters ‘PCA’ next to it. 
I would be one but for the sprinkling.” And so I moved to First Presbyterian Church in Macon, Georgia, and never really left. 

You’ve worked as a lawyer, but then you are also taking classes at Reformed Theological Seminary. 

It’s actually been several years since I’ve been. I’m planning on starting back this fall. Eventually, I’ll get the degree, Master of Arts in Biblical Studies. 
But, I promised the president of the Marietta campus at the time that I wouldn’t actually work on my degree. He said if I did, I would start sounding like that on the radio, and it would probably hurt my career.

Do you think it would? 


You know, probably so. When I was in law school, everyone started talking in legalese. My job on radio is to be very relatable to people and, if you start talking about the hypostatic union on radio, you’re probably gonna lose some of your audience. 

What made you want to take theology and Bible classes at a graduate level? 

I talk a lot about faith and culture on the radio and started getting asked to preach on Sundays at small churches. 
And I thought it was very odd because I had never had a degree. In talking with my wife and some friends, several people said maybe you should go to seminary. So I decided maybe this is God’s way of telling me to go to seminary, and I have loved it, being able to tune out of the headlines for either a full morning or afternoon and just focus on theology. 

It has certainly helped me talk to the audience better about evil and why bad things happen, being able to relate better to my audience and answer their questions. And then the funniest thing was that once I felt comfortable, like, okay, I could preach on a Sunday, all the little churches that were calling me found out I was in a Reformed seminary and were like, “Maybe not.” They were the small, independent Baptist churches that are not exactly down with Reformed theology. 

Derek Thomas, who used to be the senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Columbia [South Carolina], was one of my seminary professors. He told me, “You know, you kind of have a pulpit and a congregation, and you should be real diligent in how you talk to them about these issues.” That was really a motivation for me to keep doing what I’ve been doing. 

There was a lot of robust theology in your explanation of sin and the Fall and the world’s brokenness in your Good Friday show. 

Right. I’ve done that since 2011, and the first year I did it, my local radio station said, “Never, ever do this again.” And when everybody got in to work on Monday, their voicemails were all filled up begging for copies of the show. Now they make me do a Christmas show as well. And that show gets an extraordinary amount of listenership. Particularly at that time of year, when a lot of people are on spring break, and you can see it in the ratings that you can tell when I do my Good Friday show, across the nation, stations that don’t even carry my show normally will run that show.

Your website says you want to give people the truth. But, you don’t want to whip people into an emotional frenzy. So how do you provide truth without increasing indignation at the same time?


I used to do a bad impression of Rush Limbaugh, who was actually the guy who got me into radio. 

And, Rush Limbaugh and I were talking, and he asked about the future and said I should do syndicated radio. I kind of laughed and said I never wanted to do it as long as he was around because there’s no way to be No. 1. And he kind of laughed and said, “Even if I’m dead, you’ll never be as good as me. Stop trying to be me and just be yourself.”


And that was an eye-opening moment. And then I also realized I had been doing this conservative talk radio shtick, where you kind of make people think that it’s the end of the world if they don’t do this stuff, and I don’t want to do that. I actually want to tell people the truth, keep them company, and be their friend. Be somebody they know who says, “It’s all going to be okay.” It’s not going to be the end of the world if the election doesn’t go their way. God’s sovereign, and he’s got a plan, and I should start talking like that instead of doing the doom-and-gloom talk radio that so many other people do. 


When I was thinking about what you do for work, I thought about the verse in Proverbs that says, “Where words are many, transgression is unavoidable” (Proverbs 10:19). How do you think about your talk show and the impact you have on your audience? How do you conduct yourself so that your show is not a breeding ground for sin when your job is to talk and have conversation for multiple hours a day in a very public medium?

It’s very hard. I talk for three hours, and there is no script. It is a complete freeform conversation for three hours, talking to listeners and taking their questions. Rarely do I do interviews. It is a very hard thing to do, and I’m not perfect at it, and sometimes I have to correct myself and apologize, and occasionally I have probably taken it too far. But it helps being grounded in God’s sovereignty and knowing, reminding people, everything’s going to be okay. I am often the guy in radio who gets a lot of hate for telling people that it is going to be okay. And you can be angry, but do not sin. 

We’re actually at a point politically, from politics to talk radio, where the average person who listens and the average host and politician says, “They’ve done this bad thing to us. We should do this bad thing to them.” And I am now this lone voice out there saying, “You can’t repay sin with sin.” I say very frequently on my show, “Be angry, but do not sin.” And that resonates with a large portion of the audience. 

Some people get mad at me, saying, “This ‘turn the other cheek’ stuff — you’re just surrendering.” I just try to explain to people, you don’t have to fight the left or the secular people the same way they fight you. There are other ways to win these political fights, and at the end of the day, God’s in control. I’ve read the end of the book, it’s going to be okay.

What do you hope that your listeners will take away from the time they spend listening to your show?

My job’s not to save the world; it’s to keep people company. And we live in an extremely isolated age, even more so after COVID. And so being a relatable voice that they can trust to tell them what’s actually going on in the world is the No. 1 thing I want to accomplish. And then, making sure they understand it. It’s not that everything’s going to go the way we want, but everything’s going to be okay in the end. To reassure them. 

I try to be relational and transparent, sharing my family’s problems. I think my family thinks I do share too much. But they also understand it. The guy on the radio, his wife has Stage 4 cancer. He was given 24 hours to live. His kids are going through stuff.
So it’s not just you. You’re not alone. Other people have these problems. If I can be that relatable to people, also giving them the truth of what’s happening in the news instead of partisan spin and keeping them company, wherever they are, then I think at the end of the day, that’s a job well done. 

Is there anything that I have not asked you about that you’d like to bring up?

I should just tell you how my view of God’s providence comes from my career in radio. I fell into radio by accident. I was doing TV for CNN at the time, and the local radio show host here in Macon, Georgia, got arrested in a crack house, and they needed someone to fill in for him and asked if I would. I’d never done radio in my life. One day turned into three days, turned into 6 months. I got paid in an expired gift certificate to Outback Steakhouse. I only knew it was expired because I took my wife to dinner with it. 

And all in those months, Herman Cain decided to run for president and his boss was driving through Macon, Georgia. He heard the show. I had mentioned Rush Limbaugh, and they reached out to his team, and he said that I was a radio pro, even though I wasn’t. And now it’s the longest job I’ve ever had. So I’m a big believer in Providence.