167: Straight White American Jesus (w/Bradley Onishi)
Dr. Bradley Onishi, is the author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism - And What Comes Next. He is the co-host of the excellent Straight White American Jesus podcast. His work has appeared in the New York Times, NBC News, Politico, Rolling Stone, Huffpost, and many other outlets.
Bradley got personally drawn into evangelical Christianity as a teenager—and from a secular family—and had the strange experience of burying his part-Japanese heritage in a white coded, Christian Nationalist identity. It took him years of scholarship to see how this political ideology had been baked into the religious indoctrination. Now he’s a religious studies scholar, doing work in the world from that perspective. And his struggles with all of this stuff have brought his empathy and his humility up to the surface in really profound ways.
Bradley has a lot of family history in Maui, and on his behalf and for people there who have just survived a catastrophic fire and now must bury their dead and rebuild, we would like to encourage you to consider donating to the Maui Mutual Aid Fund.
Show Notes
Straight White American Jesus
Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--and What Comes Next
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast where we investigate the intersection
of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence and we uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian
extremism.
I'm Matthew Remske.
We're on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
This is episode 167, Straight White American Jesus with Dr. Bradley Onishi.
So today, Julian and I are really happy to present this discussion with Bradley Onishi.
He's the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and What Comes Next.
He's the co-host of the excellent Straight White American Jesus podcast, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, NBC News, Politico, Rolling Stone, HuffPost, and many other outlets.
Now in his book, Preparing for War, Onishi analyzes how for decades the evangelical movement has seemingly been destined to play a substantial role in the January 6th insurrection.
He describes a holy war mentality and obsession with seeing the world as a battleground between the forces of Jesus and the forces of Satan, with abortion being a central front in that war.
We also find Onishi's bio really fascinating because he got personally drawn into evangelical Christianity as a teenager and from a secular family.
He says that he was seeking a sense of belonging that, I mean, he'll describe it in our interview, he found out eventually was also available at home.
So he talks about how he wound up burying his part-Japanese heritage into a white-coded Christian nationalist identity.
And it took him years of study and reflection to see how that political ideology had been baked into the religious indoctrination as if they were one and the same thing.
And now he's a religious studies scholar doing work in the world from that perspective.
And his struggles with all of that stuff have really brought his empathy and his humility up to the surface in really profound ways.
Now before we roll, Bradley has a lot of family history in Maui.
And on his behalf, and for people there who have just survived a catastrophic fire and now must bury their dead and rebuild, we would like to encourage you to consider donating to the Maui Mutual Aid Fund.
We'll put a link in our show notes.
Here's our discussion.
We've been so looking forward to this.
You are a scholar of religion and, of course, co-host of the acclaimed podcast called Straight White American Jesus.
You're also the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and What Comes Next.
I devoured the book in two days.
It was fantastic.
I'm not good at taking compliments, so I'll just say thank you for reading the book.
And that means a lot to me.
And I'm just really grateful to be here and have a really in-depth conversation with two really smart people.
So thanks for having me.
Bradley, Straight White American Jesus has got to be the best podcast title ever.
I'm wondering if we can just start with you breaking down those three descriptors that I think are deceptively simple,
but actually carry a lot of weight.
So we've got straight, we've got a white, we've got American, go.
Our title's a blessing and a curse, because it really, you know,
the amount of people who have said, oh, wow, what a title.
And they're really ebullient about it.
It's great.
It's really hard to put on a shirt without feeling like you're, you know, advertising.
Like, it's hard to make merch with that shirt, with that title.
So we've had to be creative.
And I do get emails.
I got one last week from my pillow guy asking if he could advertise.
So some people don't do their homework.
So they just, they see Straight White American Jesus and they're like, oh, finally a show for us.
Yes.
You're playing for our team.
Yeah.
We've been waiting for this thing.
God bless this patriot.
So, yeah.
So I think for us, we wanted to figure out why so many people envision Jesus as a straight white American who is carrying an AR-15, who is, Probably doing CrossFit, who is in a cishet patriarchal marriage, you know, the whole thing.
And so, it really, for us, those descriptors, we don't think Jesus was straight, white, or American, but we want to figure out why those descriptors are really a prism for understanding so much of American religion, so much of contemporary politics, the modern GOP.
The rise of Donald Trump and so on and so on.
And so that's what really allows us to do that.
And it's it's enabled us to look at things from just a wide variety of angles along those lines.
To that point, you have this fascinating analysis, both in the book and on the podcast of the intersection of religious fundamentalism With the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, as you were just mentioning, it strikes me that the Japanese part of your heritage may have been unusual at the Rose Drive Friends Church in Yorba Linda, which I'll take you back to now, which was the site of your religious conversion at 14.
So I'm curious, how did you and your congregation at that time relate to non-white racial identity?
Yeah, so my dad is a Japanese-American guy.
Our family's from Maui.
They went from Japan to Maui in like 1900.
So, my brothers and I are first generation not to be born on Maui in a while.
And then my mom's a white Southern woman from Tennessee.
So, mixed race.
And when I converted, I entered the church when I was 14.
And the church is about 90% white.
And so I learned a couple things.
One is they definitely wanted people of color there.
They just didn't want you to be a person of color.
And what that meant is like, you know, if you're, if you're Japanese, um, don't like bring weird food to the potluck, please.
Like, you know, like we have like turkey sandwiches and popcorn.
Kimchi smells bad.
Like, what is that?
Does anyone want that?
No?
Get it out of here, right?
So the songs, the food, the garb, the ways of, you know, constructing the narratives that form your identity, they were all really purified, right?
So, you know, you would never find the Quinceañera celebration at the church, even if there were a few, like, Mexican-American families there, and there were, right?
You would never see that kind of multicultural approach, to use a word that's, you know, problematic.
So for me, I also realized that if I backgrounded my Asian American identity, I would do better.
So if it became visible, I learned that if I made a joke about it, that would be a winning maneuver, right?
So I would make fun of, you know, the Asian-ness as something other, as a way to kind of whisk it away and not have everybody looking at it, thinking about it, noticing it.
And it took me years after I left the church to come to You know, realize the internalized racism and the self-hatred I had and the ways that I had really distanced myself from my family and my heritage.
And that took a lot of hard work and it still hurts and I'm still ashamed of it.
But it's something that, you know, I've confronted and I'm trying to help others confront too.
And I think that's why race and ethnicity are such a part of the work I do, because I want people to become aware of these things.
In hearing you give that answer, I really took it in more deeply than I have so far, that this was a conversion, not only in religious terms, but in cultural terms too, that you were to give up your cultural identity so as to find belongingness in Christ.
Let me give you an example.
I mean, you're exactly right.
And so Christmas Eve at the church, it was a big church.
So Christmas Eve, we would have like five services, you know, and as a pastor at the church, you know, I eventually became a minister at the church.
I had to beat all of them, right?
So it was like the first service at 3 p.m.
and then another one at 5.15 and another one at 7 and then another one at 9 and whatever.
And Christmas Eve was the time that my Japanese-American family gathered in LA, Los Angeles, and we really had our Christmas at that time.
It's not a Christian family.
It's not a family that has anything to do with Christianity, but we celebrated Christmas.
If you walked into that house, and I'm not kidding, You would find in a small three-bedroom house in a so-so neighborhood in LA, a spread of food that spanned Hawaii, Japan, and America, right?
So you would have ham and potatoes, you'd have rice, you'd have homemade sushi, you'd have sashimi, you would have Kalua pork, you would have fried rice, you would have tempura, meat, I can go on.
You know, we had a very particular way of telling our family's story through that food.
And then we would play games and we would do all these things.
And if you walked in, everybody would be dressed like they were on Maui because that's just who we are.
You know, Hawaiian shirts and no shoes and that kind of stuff.
That's my family.
Well, if I'm a minister and I got to be at church all of New Year's Eve or Christmas Eve, you know, there were years there where I just didn't go.
And my dad and my aunts and my uncles and my grandmother are like, why are you not here?
And I basically, in a few words, said, this is my family now, right?
I'm at church.
I converted to Christ.
I converted to this church.
I converted to whiteness.
And that sounds like kind of extreme, but I saw I saw the hour drive to LA and the eating of all this food and the telling of all these stories and the ways that there was still like Buddhist remnants in the kind of practices and a Buddhist statue of the Buddha in the house, whatever, as like, that's other, that's idolatrous.
That's not, that's not okay.
And you know, again, there's a lot of shame there.
There's a lot of like regret and hurt and, and having to kind of confront that.
But that's how it worked.
If you were saying that the church formed your new family, Was there any way in which they fulfilled those rules as well in such a way as to further complicate things?
Like, was there any relief that you were getting from your church life that perhaps you didn't feel within the home family?
Because I think that can make things very difficult as well and complicated.
I think, well, I think there was a number of things happening.
I think, you know, I come, my, my parents got divorced when I was 10.
You know, and there was, you're a teenager and there's like your, your dad's getting remarried and your mom's getting remarried and you got, you have new step siblings and you got this and that.
Right.
And so I think there's that.
I think there's a sense of like the church was a way to sort of just go to a place where some of those complications We're not present.
And I could just kind of like be around the youth group and hang out and do things and in many ways avoid, right, the difficulties of being family.
Family's hard.
Family is complicated.
And it was a way to avoid that.
Yeah.
I think there's another way that it was easy because it was a way to shed or at least to try to or distance myself from a part of my identity that at times was hard to Forge in the neighborhood I grew up in, right?
Right.
Like when I look back at my high school yearbook, there are Asian people in my class, there are Asian Americans, there are, there are, you know, black and brown people.
But all of the beautiful people, all of the cool people, all of the popular people were white.
And so, you know, if you were white, you had a chance not to just be like one of the smart kids or one of the whatever kids, but you could be one of the beautiful kids, one of the cool kids, one of the, you know, the ones you wanted to be.
So I think being at church, Drew me closer to that.
And it made me less of the guy who, who most of his childhood got up with his dad on Saturday mornings and drove a little Tokyo to buy all the food we couldn't find in our like Orange County suburb or had his like, you know, when I was really little, my great grandma would come over.
And cook all weekend in our kitchen and it would just, you know, the smell of, of, you know, her home cooking, a woman who was born in Japan, you know, was, was, was like in our house all weekend.
And here I am thinking that's the thing to get away from because it's easier.
So if I adopt this family, I'm closer to whiteness and I'm closer to beauty.
I'm closer to popularity.
I'm closer to a lot of things.
And the turkey sandwiches are easier to make.
Let's be honest.
Yeah, a little bland, a little bland, a little bland.
But, you know, it's a little easier to make than some some of the dishes we had at home.
Yeah.
And I'll just say, too, as a as a as a fellow Angeleno, that's a drive.
Oh, yeah.
Orange County to rural Tokyo, like that's some commitment.
It's like four freeways, you know.
Yeah, it's a lot.
It's like four freeways and a lot of yelling at people in front of you in traffic.
But yeah, we used to do it most Saturdays.
I'm really happy that we have this personal background for a discussion of your scholarship coming up.
I mean, you ascend to a ministry position and then obviously something happened.
You went through a process.
Multiple dissonances, I imagine, intersected and began to disrupt your beliefs and probably some of these relationships.
So now you're a scholar of those dissonances, really.
What was the first brick to come out of that wall?
Yeah, there's a number of moments that really kind of led me to Unpack the faith that I had converted to.
Um, you know, I, I was a weird kid.
I, I'm like, I'm like the oldest brother and I, I do everything so hard and so extreme that I ruin it.
Like if you just give me a thing that I like, I'll just like it way too much and get obsessed with it.
And then like a hobby, like let's start, let's do a hobby.
And most people are like, yeah, I went on Saturday morning and had a bike ride and I'll just ruin it.
I'll do it so hard that like I get injured and I'm, you know, a year later I've like ridden a thousand miles and I'm like, My body's broken and I'm tired and you know whatever.
So that's what I did with Christianity is like I converted and I am an intellectual person so I just started reading.
I just you know I was that kid at age 16 I would ride my bike to the Christian bookstore and buy all these books on church history like Senior year of high school at summer camp, there was a big night game that was supposed to be the funnest thing ever for the week.
And I asked my youth pastor at the time, like, hey, can I sit out and just go to the rec room and read this book on Thomas Aquinas?
And he was like, uh, yes.
I, okay.
Yeah.
If you want.
And I was like, so stoked.
I didn't have to play capture the flag at night or whatever.
I could just like go read about Thomas Aquinas.
So, um, that continued.
And by the time you're like 21, you've read so much that you're like, wait a minute, The faith I inherited seems more like it's based on Republican political issues and a modern conservative political program and a myth of America than it does the gospel and the church history and all this stuff I've been reading.
9-11 was big.
I remember after 9-11 just the full-throated American nationalism in church.
So I, you know, that period of time was one where there was a lot of patriotism.
But it just in the church, American flags everywhere and all about American exceptionalism and, you know, good versus evil.
And I'll just give you one more that was really big for me.
You know, when George W. Bush ran against John Kerry, I was going to vote for John Kerry because I thought he had a quote unquote more Christian program, helping the poor, education, whatever it may be.
And I told my elders at the church that, the pastors that were like older than me, and they said, yeah, they were like, look, that sounds great.
Good for you.
Uh, really cute.
Nice job.
But, um, you know, he, if you vote for him, you're voting for like the murder of millions of babies cause he's pro-choice.
So, you know, if you want to do it, go for it.
If not, you know, I would make a better choice.
And I got into that voting booth and I was like shaking cause it was, I really had convinced myself, and I think I knew intuitively John Kerry was a better choice, marginally perhaps, but still.
And nonetheless, if I voted for him, was I going to be like voting for somebody that would, you know, continue to enable the murder of millions of babies?
When I left that voting booth, I was determined To find a way to think harder about these things, because I realized that some of the most important political issues and the most important aspects of the human condition were being reduced to this or that, one or the other, either or.
And I just thought, I've read enough theology, I've gone to seminary, I've read enough philosophy, I've read enough history to think, to know that these things have to be more complicated.
There has to be more to this than that.
Very soon after that I go away to grad school to England and it all unraveled very quickly once I got away from my hometown.
Yeah, so you write about how once you're at Oxford in 2005 that that sort of sheen of ancient religious authority starts to come off of the political ideology you've been indoctrinated into and that you're starting to question here.
You describe, this is so So beautiful, recreating yourself and the moral contours of the world and being liberated from the fear of like elders looking over your shoulder, judging you for reading or thinking in forbidden ways.
Can you talk more about that?
So you're, I'm picturing you at Oxford.
I'm imagining that there's sort of equal parts culture shock and intoxicating liberation sort of intellectually and spiritually, but then also this creeping guilt of like, am I, am I being corrupted here?
First of all, thankful for this question because this was a moment in my life that I think many listening to this show and given the work that y'all do will understand and really empathize with.
So this point in my life, I moved to Oxford, England when I'm 24.
I've never really I've never lived anywhere but my hometown.
I've been married now for four years to my high school sweetheart, and we are both knowing that we got to get away from this church because we need to figure our stuff out for ourselves.
I really expected when I got there that I was going to, like, enjoy this smorgasbord of Christian denominations.
Like, I'm free!
I'm going to go, like, hang out with the Anglicans, and then the Methodists, and then the...
You know, and I did some of that, but a couple of things happened.
I realized how tired I was of church and trying to be part of this, these communities.
Two, my wife of four years and the only person I'd ever been with since I was 15, We decided to get divorced because we were different people than, say, when we were 15, and it was just, like, time for us to part ways.
It was amicable, it was all good, but she left.
So within six months of moving to England, I now go from, like, a youth pastor who's in charge of, like, hundreds of kids and who, you know, shakes hands at the grocery store every time he goes out and kisses babies and does all this stuff around the community to, like, I live in a dorm room, I'm divorced, Not sure I believe in God.
And I have no idea how to exist at Oxford, this elite university that I am not prepared for.
So I was completely exhilarated.
Like you're telling me I get to wake up and just read books all day.
This is the best thing ever.
I was also so lost because I had no understanding of how to forge my way in the world away from the church.
I had like, I, somebody offered me a cigarette and I was like, yes, I'm, I, I would like to smoke a cigarette because I'm an adult and I like totally put the wrong end of the cigarette in my mouth and tried to light it you know and like I walked up to get a beer at a pub because it was England and that's what you do and I was like shaking like you know like yes I'll have two of your finest lagers please you know I'm just like trying to like act cool like yeah and I mean and it was and so I look back on that time at Oxford and I
It will always be a time in my life where I have just the warmest memories and the greatest affection and the like also accompanied by the greatest terror and anxiety and uncertainty that I've ever faced and just trying to figure out like how do I go on a first date?
What do I believe?
How am I going to be a quote-unquote good person in the world?
What does it mean to form community away from this church that I've been a part of for 11 years?
How do I make friends?
What are the things that are important to me?
All of those issues that a lot of folks are starting to figure out at 15, 16, 18, I'm asking for the first time.
And so, yeah, there's so many embarrassing stories from that time.
There's also so much love and affection for the people I met and who helped me figure things out and who I
I did I did life with then because I needed it then more than than ever
You know, my next question was gonna be about like, you know when you grow up with a rigid dogma
there's a lot of psychological defense work that it performs and
And I was going to ask, you know, so when you go through this major change in your life, do you feel more or less safe?
And I think you've just answered it by saying, yes, I felt more and less safe.
But I guess it makes me curious as to whether there was any particular relationship you had intellectually, socially, any kind of, I don't know,
I would describe it as a post-cultic relationship in which you actually don't know
what the other person believes and part of becoming friends or part of falling in love
with a person is realizing that you may not share the same beliefs or you might not think the
same thing about God or whatever and that's going to have to be okay because you're both
human anyway doing the same thing.
Was there something like that socially, interpersonally that helped?
There was, and there's two parts to this answer and I think it may not be completely
The one everyone listening wants, I'll be honest with you.
But so Oxford is broken up into like 40 something different colleges.
So everyone is in part of this big university, but you all have a college that like is your, it's like Gryffindor, you know, Harry Potter, right?
Slytherin, Gryffindor, et cetera.
Okay.
So I go to Regents Park College, which is the only Baptist college at Oxford.
It's, it's not Anglican.
It's right.
So, and I'm studying theology, even though I'm sort of not sure I believe in God.
Right.
And Regent's Park College was a small place full of a lot of non-religious people, but a lot of religious people.
And a lot of the religious people did things I didn't know religious people could do.
They drank beer.
They affirmed gay people.
Some of them were gay, right?
And they were the ones I had lunch with every day and sat and talked to about transcendence, about the meaning of life, about, you know, values and things.
And I started to think, oh, like coming from that rigid community, There's different ways to be a quote-unquote human being that seems really positive and thoughtful.
It's not the big, bad, scary world that I was told, if you go out these gates, get ready, because it's all just baby eating and Marxism and everyone, you know, having an orgy all the time.
Cocaine for lunch, get ready.
You know, like we, like it was like, Oh, these are really thoughtful people who really want to do good in the world.
And they're amazing.
And they're, I think they're my friends.
And it just changed everything.
And then, and there's another, this goes to the falling in love part.
Um, the, after I got divorced, you know, there, there was a moment, there was just these very cringy period of going on first dates for the first time in my life.
That is a whole book I'll write someday and everyone can laugh at me.
But, um, I eventually fell in love with somebody who was exactly as you're saying, somebody who had this sort of mysterious set of values and spiritual beliefs and religious background, but they didn't all align with mine and they came from a completely different world that I had come from.
And it was so exhilarating to, like, talk to them and just meet them.
I mean, I learned something new every time we got together.
But I also realized that, like, I would never fully understand them, and that that was okay.
Because everything I'd been taught was, like, unless you have certainty, you have nothing.
And that relationship was, like, this is all going to be uncertain all the time.
And That's okay.
That actually might be better.
And it really was a release valve for me kind of growing up, I think, into, you know, who I am now.
It's wild, Bradley.
Even after listening to a lot of your stuff and reading your book, what Matthew was just saying about a kind of post-cultic experience is really underlined for me and everything you've been saying so far.
And it just It hammers home the sense that within the United States, all forms of Christianity, but especially Evangelical Christianity, are so normalized that it almost feels
It feels like, is it really legitimate to say that this is cultish?
But everything you're describing, the level of inward pressure, the level of pressure to stay within that very narrow sort of identification is incredible.
You write that since leaving evangelicalism you no longer identify as a Christian.
But, you know, it's clear that your life has been consumed, as you say, for the last 15 years with considering questions of faith, the divine, the way humans make meaning.
Obviously, I know this is something that you could probably write another dissertation on.
But at this point, is there like a thumbnail sketch of how you identify in relation to these kinds of questions?
I'm a secular person of faith.
And what I mean by that is, you know, the way that you all talk about high demand religion, the experiences I had, certainty is Is the, is the baseline.
And what I learned after leaving that community was that there's no faith there, despite them talking about being people of faith and I'm a person of faith who believes in God and country and I'm a person of faith who just wants to protect their kids.
Faith is not actually what you want in those communities, because faith means, as I just said, uncertainty.
It means there's things that are gray, things that are nebulous, things that are changing, things that are adaptable.
And so now, 15 years later, I've stayed in the religion game, so to speak.
Like, I'm a religion professor.
I still, you know, have so many colleagues and friends who somehow participate in various religious communities, but I don't.
And I guess one of the things that You know, first experience in Oxford away from Christianity was realizing that there was a way to be a person in the world who invests deeply in the most fundamental questions about the human condition.
Does so with good faith and welcomes dialogue partners from various perspectives and comes to a conclusion that there are certain things that are uncertain, unpredictable, maybe even unknowable.
And that's okay.
And that actually might be one of the most enchanting aspects of being this terrible being that we are, which is human.
And so I'm a secular person of faith.
I love having to, I mean, I spoke at the American Atheist Convention this year, going to speak at the Freedom from Religion Foundation Convention, but also, you know, Might catch me having lunch with a rabbi or talking to, you know, a friend who comes out of the Sikh tradition or is a Christian, you know, a gay Christian minister, etc.
So that's how I identify.
Those are the conversations I want to have every time I get off track in my life.
I'm like in my 40s and I'm like, you know, maybe I should switch careers and do something, you know?
And I'm like, the question I always come back to is like, why are you alive?
And I think the answer has always just been to probe this condition as best we can in the most wondrous way we can, and then go from there.
So, Bradley, I have not heard the moniker secular person of faith before, and maybe I'm wondering if you can help me disambiguate the word faith in that phrase.
I think it is typically associated with belief structures, but what I'm hearing from you is that it's actually an attitude of resilience towards uncertainty and a kind of a tolerance for ambivalence.
Yes.
And a willingness to maintain maybe Well, I should have asked you the question.
Let me hear your answer.
No, no, no.
You were right.
You were answering for me.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I think everything you said was right.
Like, I know faith is a hard word for some, and I totally understand if some people are like, I'll never use that to describe myself because of my experiences.
So I'm also aware it's a deeply Protestant word.
Like, the reason we say person of faith is because America has been so Protestantized.
But I think for me, what it does is It really allows me to say that I'm a secular person, but I'm one who recognizes that the universe and my relationship with it will be, at times, marked by uncertainty, unknowability, unpredictability.
And I'm not going to try to solve that.
And I think that there's sometimes a temptation to think that now that I'm away from religion,
I will approach things ultra rationally in a way that I can solve all of the mysteries
that are there.
And following the work of Jeff Kosky and Mary Jane Rubinstein and other scholars of secularity,
following just basic quantum physics and the uncertainty principle,
and just realizing that, yes, I'm gonna be a person who uses data, evidence, logic.
I want to be rational.
I want to look at the sources.
I want to make decisions based on all the information.
I don't want to do it based on superstition or on whatever.
But I also want to admit That there's a humility built into who I am and I'm not going to try to solve the universe.
Being a secular person of faith also allows me to really throw that back at people that don't like it.
So, you know, it's a way to poke the bear because I get a lot of trolls and they're like, you know, what are you?
Who are you even?
And I'm like, person of faith, pal, you know?
And they're like, what do you mean?
I'm like, well, secular person of faith.
And they're like, well, that's that doesn't work.
And I say, well, I think it does.
And I explain everything I've just explained, you know, and there they get really upset.
And I'm like, I actually don't think you're a person of faith because you operate on biblical inerrancy.
There's no faith in that.
Come on, let's get real.
There's no uncertainty in your life.
You're not a person of faith, are you?
You sure?
Seems like you're a person of, like, foolproof, unquestioned authority, you know?
And here's what I'm going to do, my guy.
I'm going to pray for you because it seems like you're having a hard time.
And, you know, maybe you'll see the error of your ways, but I'm going to go talk to the universe and, you know, maybe you're going to figure it out, you know?
This is a superpower.
This is a superpower.
The anti-theists have nothing on you, brother.
Well, also, I think you are getting at the fact that faithful behavior is actually a behavior.
And that there's an attitude of maybe forbearance, of generosity, of, you know, sort of inclusivity.
No, that's just beautifully said.
That's exactly it.
You know, generosity, forbearance, and always an attitude of learning.
You know, what can I learn here?
that allows supportive conversations to happen.
Is that part of it too?
This is what I'm gleaning, not just from what you've said, but also from your podcast content.
No, that's just beautifully said.
That's exactly it.
Generosity, forbearance, and always an attitude of learning.
Can I learn, what can I learn here?
What do I not know?
And what can I take away from this?
This interaction, this encounter that will help me, you know, be a better person.
So you're exactly right.
Okay, so we've unlocked your childhood in psychology.
We understand you perfectly well now.
Let's turn now to your work and your thoughts about how you can help us figure out what the fuck we're doing, because on our beat, we study the origins of conspiracy theories, and specifically how they intersect with spiritual needs and spiritual anxieties.
What would you say, as a scholar of religion, is the perennial conspiracy theory of conservative Christianity in America, and where does it begin?
This is like, first of all, one of the best questions anyone's ever asked me.
So I've been thinking about it.
I was like, taking a walk this morning, thinking about this question, and I'm going to cheat.
And I think there's two.
So I think one is very basic, and that is that America is a Christian nation.
So, you know, what I always tell people is like, What fundamentalists and evangelical Christians want to do is they want to just reduce the history of the country to America as a Christian nation.
America was founded as a Christian nation.
There is so much wrong with that leveling, okay?
But the myth is really helpful for them because they can couple it with that looking backward, they can couple with a looking forward.
And what they couple the looking forward with, what they frame the looking forward as is apocalypse.
So the Christian idea of apocalypse, the evangelical idea of the end of the world.
So if you say this used to be a Christian nation and, right, we expect apocalypse anytime, and then you put them together, you say this used to be a Christian nation In line with God's will, but we expect America, the country, to experience a apocalypse because we have departed from God's will, right?
So instead of that rapture, like we're all going to go to meet Jesus in the rapture.
To me, it is an American apocalyptic narrative.
Now, if you have this used to be a Christian country, that's a myth that can motivate the present.
All right, that that myth can make you say, well, what should we do?
Well, we should make it a Christian nation again.
Well, sounds good.
And we better act urgently.
Because the apocalypse is coming.
Therefore, extreme measures are justified.
We have to be extreme.
We have to be radical.
We have to do things that people are going to say are violent or not politically correct or anti-democratic.
If you want to save the nation, like I, you know, I have a two year old daughter.
I live in California.
If there's an earth, like usually when her and I leave the house, it takes like 48 minutes, right?
Like we need diapers and we need like a water bottle and we got to find her bunny and we got to like get extra clothes.
And then it doesn't get any faster.
My friend, let me just tell you.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, I'm not wearing a shirt apparently.
So, all right.
Can't go like this to Target.
Here we go.
Go put a shirt on.
But like, if there's an earthquake like we have in California, I just pick her up and what do I do?
I just run out of the house because Right?
Crisis.
The crisis myth, the apocalypse myth, justifies doing things that are not built for the long term, that do not consider other people, that are going to be extremist and radical and even violent because you are convinced you have to save the country now.
Right now.
Otherwise it will no longer be here.
You know, there's there's so much about this.
I got really fascinated with Sam Perry and Phil Gorski's book,
The Flag on the Cross.
And I know you've talked to them as well.
And there's a lot of overlap there in terms of the historical view that I know you take.
But you had this other fascinating piece I was not at all aware of, which is
about libertarian evangelicalism originating in Southern California, where I also happen to live.
And I found myself curious, if you had thoughts about this, there's this strange symmetry between the West side of LA,
new age movement that I'm very familiar with, and the Orange County evangelicalism,
both becoming vectors for the idea of material wealth as evidence of spiritual progress.
And then more recently, QAnon conspiracism, COVID denialism, it's an infringement on our religious freedom to be sovereign spiritual beings and all of that stuff.
Do you have thoughts about how such different cultural and even sort of metaphysical worldviews could lead to such similar political conspiracism?
I do have views, yes.
And you set it up so beautifully.
I think that both are imbricated in an authority vacuum.
Right?
So, L.A.
is famously a place of experiment, a place, you know, of avant-garde fashion and lifestyle and, you know, breaking the mold.
It is not like living in Omaha, Nebraska, or like living in, you know, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
There is really no authority in L.A.
You do it how you want to do it, and if it catches on, it catches on, right?
So, the west side of L.A., in my mind, is a place where that That authority vacuum and that anti-authority ethos leads to, I'm going to do my own research.
I'm going to form my own way of life.
I'm going to find my own experts.
We are going to forge ahead with our own values, right?
And so people sort of start gathering.
And one of the ways they do that is they, you know, these COVID measures and these vaccines, these are the authority figures trying to impose themselves on us.
I don't think so.
We have a more, We have a more wise way, we have a more spiritual way, we have a more holistic way, a way that will promote wellness rather than, you know, pharmaceutical submission or, you know, being just mere sheep in a corporate plan.
You know, the libertarian Christians of Orange County, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, they're in a similar place where a lot of them are Southerners and Midwesterners who came from like Pittsburgh or from, you know, the Boothill of Missouri.
And they left the main streets and the hometowns that kind of kept them in a certain way of life.
Now, I'm not saying that way of life was always good.
But, like, my brother lived in Pittsburgh for quite a while.
Whenever I'd go there, I would meet generations-long ethnic communities of white people.
And you're like, what are you talking about?
I'm like, I'm talking about Italian neighborhoods.
I'm talking about Polish neighborhoods.
I'm talking about places where, like, for four generations, people are like, here's how we've done life here.
And it kind of holds you in a certain structure, right?
And a certain set of values in who you are.
So you get to Orange County in 1965, and none of that exists.
And the churches that are also part of those places, those like, you know, those Italian Catholic churches and those mainline, like Presbyterian, they're not in Orange County.
So all of a sudden, who steps into the vacuum?
The megachurch preacher.
And he's like, follow me.
You don't need to wear a suit and tie.
You don't need to get, you know, go through the whole catechism of the Catholic Church.
Show up in your car for all I care about.
Wear a Hawaiian shirt.
I don't care.
I don't care what you do.
You want to be rich?
So does God.
God wants that too.
I'm not going to get out here and tell you not to be rich.
He wants that for you.
He wants you to be you in the best way.
I'm not here to be the authoritarian structure in your life.
I'm here to be the one that lets you become the best you.
And that sounds a lot like, I think, some of the West Side LA stuff that I'm familiar with.
And it's very much in line with a lot of the prosperity gospel and the Orange County versions of evangelicalism and megachurch evangelicalism that we now see all over the country, whether it's Hillsong, right?
Whether it's other places.
So first of all, Julian, I think we missed a chapter in our book, which is a vacuum of authority, right?
Like this is a very important concept, but I think what you're saying is that in a vacuum of cultural or And to say, you know, you're totally deracinated now.
Let's just go with it.
charismatic actually finds the hole in the culture that allows him to speak for
neoliberal values basically and to say and to and to consecrate what
Capitalism is already doing and to say, you know, you don't you're totally deracinated now. Let's just go with it
Let's actually make the best you can out of this obliterated landscape of
Disappeared values and feel good as you're doing it and that's and I suppose that goes along with a megachurch
vibe feeling kind of like an amplification of top 40 radio and
football game, right It is, and I think, so like if I bring it down to the ground, here's what I think it looks like on the ground.
Here's what I saw in my church community in the 90s.
You live in utter suburbia, like Orange County is suburbia par excellence.
It doesn't get more suburban, suburbia, suburban, suburbanist than Orange County.
So you're like a 31 year old couple, you know, heterosexual couple.
You got two, three, five year olds.
You don't have that many friends, right?
And, as I just said, you don't live in a place where you're like, hey, I'm Italian-American, let's go hang out in this neighborhood my family's been part of, or where I will find people who tell the story of themselves in ways I do, right?
Like, for me, being Asian-American, you know, where are folks gathering that have a story that's like mine, where they might accept me and I can, like, become part of a community?
Whatever it may be.
So that 31-year-old family or couple is like, let's take our kids over to this church.
They seem nice.
I like to play basketball, so I'm going to join the Men's Basketball League.
And they have like a little group for moms.
And there's like a cool vacation Bible school.
And what are we going to do with the kids in the summer?
We got to work, right?
And a lot of those folks, I don't think start out actually believing most, they might say, I'm a Christian.
Yeah, sure.
Bible.
Great.
And then a year later, like in, in this environment, they're like anti-vaxxers.
They might be homeschooling their kid, right?
They're like, they're out there fighting CRT at the school board, you know?
And I think that vacuum of authority and that vacuum of identity, Feeds into, right, the, as you're saying, the charismatic leader, the megachurch, it becomes a place where it fills a void and the sense that the lack of authority and the lack of structure actually plays into that.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I don't think all structures and all authorities are good.
I'm not like, oh, the good old days when everybody just had to, you know, I, so I don't want that to be an email that, that any of us get.
I, but I do, I do think that that's a way you get fed into these communities and these movements is How do I forge a story of myself?
If I have no resources for that, I'm going to look for people that are actually capitalizing on what you're saying, neoliberal values and capitalistic approaches, but they're doing it in a way that makes me feel like I'm part of something organic, something new, something fresh, something different, something against the grain.
And once they do that, you know, there's a good chance they have you.
Yeah, something virtuous as well.
Going back to what you said about the sort of driving impulse of Christian American conspiracism being urgency, or this notion that an apocalyptic moment is always upon us.
Um, what I think we see very clearly played out over the last couple of years through the urgency of QAnon and Q Adjacent ideology is something that echoes through the culture from the same feelings that were very prevalent during the Satanic Panic.
Yeah.
And I know that that would be part of your religious heritage, whether it was alive for you during that time or not.
But I want to ask about your understanding of that and its aftermath and the extent to which you believe evangelicals and the Catholics, who are actually more prominent in the sort of formulation of the satanic panic, Were they able to hide their own institutional abuses behind this fiction?
Were they able to, you know, generate more recruitment?
Did they fill out their ranks?
How did it work out for them?
This is such a great question.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think there's There's a couple of answers.
One is that the satanic panic really takes hold in the wake of a movement that sees women entering the workforce in mass.
Yeah.
And Megan Goodwin's really good on this in her book, Abusing Religion.
But, you know, I think what Megan and others have shown is that women are now going, like, I was born in 1980 and my mom was a working mom at that time.
So, like, I remember I have these memories of being in daycare, like, you know, before kindergarten.
And there's a way that what's happening there is women are entering the workforce.
Okay.
Authority, strike one.
The church no longer has control over women in terms of their kind of like professional and familial roles.
Two, the children are now with whom?
Are they with the mothers who we have done a really good job like cultivating and contouring morally and so on and politically?
Nope.
They're with daycares.
Okay.
This is a giving away of our authority to a way of family, a way of life, and a way of rearing children that we will not have any influence over.
So I think there's a panic that can be invented that says there's a spiritual demonic force at play.
Right?
We need to be very wary of these.
In fact, moms, should you really be going to work?
It might be better to stay home.
Otherwise, not only will your kid get a cold because they're around a bunch of two-year-olds, they might be demon-possessed.
So think about it really hard.
Okay?
So I think that's one.
I also, do I think that the purveyors of the satanic panic sat in a room and were like, all right, if we create a conspiracy theory about there being a satanic movement in youth culture and in various corners of the United States, that that will hide our own abuses?
Like, do I think it was that tit for tat?
No.
What I do think, though, is that projection is always 100 times easier than introspection.
So you will always find yourself projecting, right, your failures and your fears onto others before you introspect and think about how they apply to you.
And I think those of us who study these things, we know the abuses rife in the Catholic Church, the abuse, I mean, In 2023, the abuse is rife in churches, Protestant churches, Evangelical churches, all of those places.
Do I think it was a quid pro quo, like, hey, let's invent a satanic panic over here so that I can hide my own, like, rife?
No, I don't think it was like that.
But I think I do think that that kind of projection, right, is so much easier than introspection.
And if there's an other you can demonize, so many more people will get behind you rather than somebody who stands up in the community that says, it's time for us to look in the mirror and do some really fucking hard work about who we are.
That person is not popular.
They lose followers.
A lot of folks leave, they don't like it, they might lose their job.
The person who says, you know what's wrong with this place, is all those folks out there who are, right, introducing your kids to satanic spirits, forces, and demons, and it's happening through music, and it's happening at daycare, and it's happening in pop culture.
Are you ready for that?
Let's get going.
That message gets you more money for your church, More people in the pews, more popularity, and on down the line.
And that's not changed.
That's, you know, we could look at The Sound of Freedom and everything that's going on with that movie right now and just, you know, something I'd love to ask y'all about too, but yeah.
To your point, um, about urgency, obviously, The Sound of Freedom builds into its narrative that, you know, Tim Ballard has to absolutely leave Homeland Security in order to do this DIY, you know, drop into, you know, foreign territory and figure out how to rescue specific particular children, uh, who he has somehow bonded with.
But on a larger scale, There's this other conclusion that we came to as we reviewed the Satanic Panic and its echoes was that it seemed to also hit at the moment that devoted believers and their leaders needed to resurrect the literal presence of Satan in the world.
to stem, you know, what's happening to Brian over there as he secularizes.
So do you think it worked?
This is true now and it's true, you know, 45 years ago with the satanic panic coming in.
When you see the rise of spiritual warfare language among Christians, to me what that signals is there's a realization that the cultural, political, economic tides are against them and that they have to turn to a weapon that is both explanatory and unique.
Spiritual warfare is explanatory.
Well, why is this happening, Satan?
Like, why do we have gay marriage legalized?
Why in the 1980s is Murphy Brown like a single mom on TV?
And, or I guess that's the 90s, but still, you know, why, why can we explain in the 1980s that the country's somehow, you know, quote unquote, moving away from God?
How can we explain that more women don't want to be just homemakers and wives, that they, right, want to be independent and in the world?
Why, how can we explain a show that has my two dads or whatever may be?
Spiritual warfare to me is a last-ditch tactic that is popularized when on-the-ground realities are stacked against fundamentalist Christian communities.
The rise of spiritual warfare language today is, it is rampant.
I mean, it is everywhere in conservative Christianity.
The idea that Satan has a stronghold on the I think it's explanatory, and then I think it's unique.
that Satan has a stronghold on the voting machines, on the Joe Biden, this famous Marxist.
When I think of Marxism, it goes from Marx to Lenin to Joe Biden.
And he is certainly this man who goes to mass three times a week possessed by the devil
and so on and so on.
So I think it's explanatory and then I think it's unique.
I think it's, right, they turn to something they feel like is unique to their community.
It's a cosmic battle, a cosmic war that they're participating in
and really excited to be part of.
It gives people something to fight.
It gives you an other and it turns that other, not just into a political opponent that you're like, want to kind of beat in a democratic election, turns them into an enemy.
It turns them into less-than-human.
Like, they are Satan-possessed, cabal-participating, sulfur-smelling, serpent DNA-having, right?
Less-than-human entities that want to destroy your kids.
Are you going to stand for that?
Now that 31-year-old mom and dad in church are like, let's do it.
Let's go Brandon and save the children and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What kind of coalitions are Christians able to form over these concerns?
Because one of the things that we try to figure out is how the satanic panic, for instance, intersects with new age influencers that really push it forward, like Teal Swan.
Like, is there a principle of the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing sometimes?
Completely.
And you see that within the Christian universe.
So, like, the satanic panic's really good at making more Catholics friends with more evangelicals, right?
Right.
That's there.
Give you another example.
Just a couple of weeks ago in Glendale, so down the road there, you know, there's this big protest over school board decisions and school curricula.
And on one side you have people saying, like, you know, Let the teachers teach and let the, you know, we need inclusive curricula.
And on the other side, you have a lot of, right, the people you'd expect, a lot of conservative Christian, but also sort of, you know, Q adjacent and others on the other side saying, like, you know, save our children, get the pedophiles out of here.
Well, who was there with them?
There were, there was a large contingent of Muslim parents on that side.
And so you saw this coalition, and I wanna be very clear,
not all Muslims are anti-LGBTQ, not even close.
The disclaimer is, right, the presence of Muslims in this particular protest
does not represent all Muslims in America or around the world by any means,
but it answers your question by saying, in 2004, would you have ever seen
an evangelical Christian standing on the side of a Muslim somewhere, fighting for the same thing,
And then in 2023, they've somehow around the panic of children and pedophiles in schools, they've all standing out there together, yelling at the parents on the other side.
I think that's a great example of the coalition building that's possible in these cases.
So Brad, I feel like we're kind of circling around an interesting question that we have a lot of conversation about, you know, culturally and behind the scenes in the podcast too.
I'm thinking about your chapter titled Real Delusions.
And in that chapter, you compare the claims of end times, evangelism and conspiracy theories.
You write, and this is a quote from you, understanding is granted by an initiation that gives the believer knowledge the unbeliever does not have.
And I know this is a very difficult question and we've kind of touched on it a little bit so far.
Do you think there's something uniquely politically motivating about apocalyptic religion?
And to what extent do you feel like that might be ameliorated by extremist religious beliefs actually being downstream from the will to political power?
This is such a fantastic question.
I think that there is political motivation there and I think that what apocalyptic religion does is say that not only is there a crisis upon us and the end may be near and the end may look like the end of the world or it may look like the end of the United States as we know it at the hands of a Marxist regime or something.
But it also says, often, as you just quoted, it means that oftentimes you're initiated into a regime of knowledge that is unavailable to those who are not initiated.
And as such, you then have a responsibility to go create the world as it should be, because you have the secret knowledge, you know how things should be, and you know how far from the ideal state they have gone.
So you as a community are going to band together and get out there and turn the social order into what it should look like.
You're going to put things back in place and no one's going to understand you.
They're going to think you're crazy.
They're going to think that you're not.
You know in your right mind or you're operating in such an irrational way But you know you and your compatriots know you have the real knowledge you have the real insight and you will not be deterred by those charges of irrationality or You know actions that are not in line with data or evidence or anything else because it is your responsibility So I think there is a keen political motivation there for sure.
This really touches on something I think is is A dynamic of white conservative Christianity in the United States that we have to point out, which is everything I just said about the apocalyptic view and the initiation into the secret knowledge is a revenge fantasy to me.
Because these folks believe they are the founders of the country.
They are the legitimate heirs of the founders.
And they have been, in their mind, since the 1960s, told, you're no longer the ones who determine what is real, or true, or actual.
It's actually scientists.
And now there's women talking.
Oh, look at that, there's black people talking.
And look at that, there's Asian Americans, and gay people, and trans people, and folks who've immigrated to this country, and so on and so forth.
And all of a sudden, you don't get to shape the public square.
You don't decide what is true, and actual, and real.
And so the secret knowledge piece is actually a great way to get into the revenge fantasy piece, because then I can show up in the public square and say, I don't care what you tell me about Ivermectin.
I don't care what you tell me about Donald Trump.
I don't care what you tell me about anything.
Shove out your facts and your scientific findings.
Go ahead.
Not only do I know I have the secret wisdom, but I am confident I'm the legitimate heir of the people who founded this place.
So it's our time and we're not going to be dissuaded by any kinds of bookish antics or, you know, data that you want to give us.
Turning to another thing that you speak about quite regularly and that intersects with our beat is the tango between pollution and purification.
We took a long, hard look at the nature cures and organic fetishes of early European physical culture.
And how they meld into a kind of body fascism and various eugenics programs.
And there's a strong dose of muscular Christianity in all of that mix with its attendant racism and exceptionalism.
How do you see these very material anxieties overlap with the sexual relational purity culture that you grew up with and now speak about so eloquently?
I'm going to answer your question, but I feel like the two of you know more, a lot more about this than I do.
So I'm going to ask you this in a week, but, um, I, I think purity when people call for purity in any context, now I hear them calling for a mythological past. It's a nostalgia. It's a nostalgia
call. Like, you know, this will make you pure. These things will purify your body. These things
will purify your soul. You can purify yourself from all the pollutants of, you know, corporate
pharmaceuticals or the, you know, the modern world or whatever. When it comes to my own
context, my own work, purity culture is this thing that takes place in the 90s. And it really tells
teenagers, Christian teenagers, hey, if you purify yourself of sexual sin, you will have
the ideal life God wants.
So, what that means is, before you get married, no sex.
Okay, well, yeah, you hear that from religious people a lot.
But, if you even think about sex before marriage, adultery.
So here I am like 16 and I'm thinking, okay, if I think about sex in any way, including like, there's a really cute person over there in my English class.
And I kind of looked at them twice and thought they're really cute.
Adultery!
I just cheated on my future wife.
Let's just back up.
I'm not clear.
I'm not, I'm not clear on this.
They changed the definition of adultery.
To be preemptive and about thought alone?
100%.
Okay, I'm somewhat familiar with, you know, I've sinned against my partner in my mind or in my heart or something like that, but you're saying that this is also predictive.
I've committed a sin against God and my future partner.
Totally.
It's adultery.
Yeah.
So you, Matthew 5, 27, if you think about, you know, a woman with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart.
So the way that we learned it is, you know, like I grew up in Southern California.
I was like a surfer, right?
So I had all these surfing magazines.
Okay.
Here's what we did.
And I, you know, this is super cringy, right?
But like, you know, it's back in the nineties, no internet.
You come home from school and there's a surfing magazine in the mail and you're so excited.
Like, Oh, new surfing magazine.
Yay.
And what I would do is I would stop and be like, okay, You're going to flip through this and every time there's like a, an ad with like, you know, bikinis or something, you're going to rip it out.
Okay.
And you're going to tear it up and you're not going to look at it, you know?
And, and so that was, those were the kinds of tactics we used to sort of try to be quote unquote sexually pure.
Right?
So if you think about sex in any way, You are committing adultery.
Now this extends to like gender roles.
Men are assertive and aggressive and dominant.
They're the leaders of church, society, and culture.
Women are submissive and passive.
Women do not actually enjoy sex.
They just want sex to be closer to their partner.
Men actually want sex all the time and if you let them want to have sex 10 times a day, right?
These are the kinds of gender roles and sexual roles we were taught, right?
And what I learned over time, and especially as I reflected on this later in life, is that the goal of that program was really one in line with the eugenics that you just mentioned.
The largest and most influential purveyor of purity culture in my mind was somebody named James Dobson, a child psychologist turned kind of Christian influencer.
He was trained by Paul Popenoe, the eugenicist.
And they both adopted this idea that what was really needed to save society were nuclear families of a patriarchal man
and a submissive woman that produced as many babies as possible and reared them
in line with very rigid principles about discipline and values and morals.
Dobson put this into a theological frame.
So purity culture was really about forming teenage flesh into certain kind of man, certain kind of woman, certain kind of family, certain kind of sex, certain kind of desire.
And if you can do that, here's the bet, you can save American society.
Because from the ground up, you will build families that will form American society, Based on these pure lines of relationality and family, no more mixed marriages, no more two dads, no more two moms, no more single moms, no more, you know, intergenerational families, no more, I mean, and at their worst, no more interracial marriages, right?
To me, Christian nationalism is the original purity culture.
My show is called Straight White American Jesus.
Christian nationalism imagines the United States, the American body, as straight, white, hetero, Christian, patriarchal, native born, English speaking as a first language, no accent, no I learned English later in life, What Christian nationalists have always wanted, whether it's the 1600s, the 1800s, the 2023s, is an American body that is straight, white, Christian, and patriarchal.
That is exactly what the sexual regime I learned as a teenager was trying to form me into.
Right?
So purity in this sense is always a return to a mythological past where everything was as it should be.
Everything was the same.
Purity means sameness.
No difference.
Nothing introduced that is not the same as everything else.
And this is what Christian nationalism has always wanted.
And this is why purity culture took root in my mind in the 80s and 90s.
Do you know, the horrors of the repression are clear enough, but I just also want to note the comical naivety of trying to enforce a regime like this.
Like it's actually incredible to think, given how just freaky people are, that this would work in any way.
And I suppose the fallout from failing at it is as horrible as trying to keep up with it.
I used to go to, every week when I was in high school, I'd go to an accountability group
with other high school boys and like a leader.
Accountability for what, your thoughts?
So we would get in there and like everybody, you know, it's after school and it's like,
all right, let's have some popcorn or a snack or something.
And then we just go around the room and it's like, all right, Brad, how did you do this week?
And it's like, well, yeah, pretty good.
I might have, you know, kissed my girlfriend goodnight the other night
and we maybe kissed too long.
And so I, I am sorry for that.
I might have masturbated on Thursday.
So that was obviously terrible.
And I'm like the worst person ever.
I'm sorry.
Um, I might have looked like there's a really cute girl in my English class.
And like, we're partners when we do like class exercises and, uh, might've had like a thought, like we would just go around the room and totally say that stuff.
What's wild about this, what's wild about this is it strikes me as a particularly performative group 2.0 version of Catholic confession.
Yeah.
We're going to do it in public.
We're going to do it with one another.
Yep.
Wow.
Can I just tell you two, one more thing that comes up, like the flip side of this is like a lot of us got married young so that we could like, you know, deal with all of this repression.
But there was fallout there too, because what happens when you get married is you've been told your whole teenage life that women don't actually want sex.
So if you're like actually a woman who enjoys sex, You're like, something's wrong with me.
I'm a deviant.
And, and if you're a man who doesn't want to have sex eight times a day, both you and your wife are like, what's wrong with you?
You're not a real man.
Like, don't you only want to have sex once a day or once every other day or once a week?
You're, you got to get it together, buddy.
Cause you're failing God and you're, you're not really living up to your masculinity here.
Incredible.
Bradley, I'm so glad you are who you are right now and that that's all behind you.
Holy Jesus.
So bad.
Yeah, and you're damned either way, right?
You get married young so that you can finally have sex in a sanctioned way, and then it's like, yeah, but don't enjoy it!
There are very specific rules about how you're supposed to behave.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, from that painful topic to another that has more sort of political implications, you write as a scholar of white Christian nationalism.
Which you've been giving a really good account of in the last few minutes, I must say.
You say, I realized the insurrection was the logical outcome of a half-century of patriotic Christians preparing for combat, and hence the title of your book, Preparing for War.
So I wanted to ask you, having been part of that movement for the time that you were, very deeply, what was it like Watching January 6th from the outside and wondering, as you say you did, if an earlier version of you might have either stormed the Capitol yourself or been praying on that day for the insurrectionists who were willing to do God's will even though it was difficult.
You know, I think like all of us that day, I was, I turned on the screen and was terrified.
You know, you're, you can't believe what's happening in front of you.
And, and yet soon into that kind of process, I started to wonder like, huh, There's a lot of religious symbols here.
And a lot of the, on Twitter, religion scholars were gathering these things under hashtags.
And so you start to see the Christian flags and the Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president flags and the icons of Mary and, you know, the gallows that were raised for Mike Pence had prayers written on them and stuff like that.
And then it hits you like, wait a minute.
Are there people from my church here?
Oh gosh.
And then it hits you again, you know, and you're like, maybe I would have been there.
And here's the thing is I know some people are like, well, that's, that's a nice way to open a book and you know, good for you.
It's a nice little story, but it can that actually be true?
And here's the thing.
I convert at 14.
When I'm 15, my mom asks me, what do you want for Christmas?
And I pull out pamphlets from my backpack and I'm like, Mom, I don't want anything for Christmas.
I want you to use any of the money for Christmas presents on buying Bibles for these people in Nepal because they've never heard of Jesus.
And she looks at me like, why can't you just be normal and like sneaking out of the house and smoking pot?
You know, like I was captain of the basketball team and everyone had a Letterman's jacket.
And when it came to get one, my mom was like, do you want one?
I was like, mom, that costs $200.
Let's send Bibles to Nepal, right?
Friday night, you know, when you're a teenager, Friday night, let's, I don't know, go do whatever teenagers do on Friday nights.
I would go with my then girlfriend, soon to be wife, and we would stand outside the movie theater.
And when kids our age came out, we'd ask them if they knew Jesus.
That was our Friday night fun.
So when I tell you that if this all happened when I was 18 or 19 and a man from my church came up to me and was like, Hey, I bought you a plane ticket.
We're going, we got to save this country.
We got to stand up for God.
We got to stand up for what's right.
You think that I would have been like the kind of guy that was like, well, I don't know.
You know, that seems like I was the kind of, I led a Bible study at my public high school at lunch.
Right.
I, on Fridays, my senior year of high school, I stood out in front of the school and prayed at the flagpole alone every Friday because I wanted God to restore my school and my country to His glory.
When I'm watching January 6th, I'm like, oh, I would have been there.
Yeah.
I could have been there.
There's a there's a good chance somebody would have convinced me that that's what we needed to do.
Very much so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you do this incredible description of all of that religious iconography, how these people are explicitly linking this political moment of whatever you want to call it, rioting, insurrection to their religious faith.
That they're stopping to pray and sing worship songs as they breach each new boundary and get closer and closer to the flag, right?
You had a podcast guest, Peter Manso, who spoke of this as creating what he called a permission structure that sanctified their violence.
And you do such a great job of this, I wanted to just hear how you might frame it right now, the connection between January 6th and Jericho 6 in the Bible.
Jericho marches happened from basically the time of the 2020 election to January 6th.
And the Jericho marches were meant to be at state capitals and swing states and at the nation's capital.
And they were both supposed to be these like prayer rallies and prayer vigils for the country so that God would restore it to what it was supposed to be, i.e.
Donald Trump as president and so on.
The story of Jericho, if folks are not familiar, is in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Testament, and it's a story where God says to the Israelites, if you march around the city of Jericho a number of times, on the last time, the walls will fall down, and I will allow you to enter, because that is the land I've promised you.
And the Israelites do that, and they're faithful.
And this is a really popular story with Christians, because it's like, what a great lesson.
Hey, do what God asks, even if the world doesn't understand, and miracles happen, good things will happen.
All right, thanks for coming to church today.
Y'all get a donut, go have some coffee, see you soon.
All right, good job.
What happens after they go into the city in that story?
Y'all can read this later, it's a fun bedtime reading.
They kill every man, woman, animal, and child in Jericho.
It's attempted genocide, right?
So when you have a Jericho march...
January 5th in Washington, D.C., and it lasts four or five hours, and Mike Flynn and Alex Jones and Ali Alexander and all these other MAGA superstars show up, you're saying we're praying for God to let the walls fall down around Washington, D.C., so we can go in as God's army and make things how they should be.
And January 6th, the next day, many of those people do.
Now, my claim would be January 6th to them is not a time when they're being treasonous or criminal.
So many people say, how could you be a Christian and think that storming the Capitol is a righteous thing to do?
And to me, that is why those prayers you mentioned, Julian, and those songs are so important because they are them, these quote unquote, godly patriots overrunning the nation's Capitol, stopping To tell the story of why they're there.
God put us here.
God wants us here.
We are his vessels on earth.
We are his warriors.
We are not criminals.
We are not treasonous.
We are not interlopers.
We are not doing things that are the enemy of the United States.
We are the saviors of the United States in the name of God.
So we're going to just keep telling that story to ourselves.
So we have the gall to get in here and break windows and defecate in the halls and, you know, do all that business.
This brings us right back to your discussion of what real faith is versus the perpetual, you know, sort of expression of doubt, because the permission structure is necessary for the person who really doesn't isn't sure about what they're doing or is probably very, very aware that they're breaking all kinds of laws and that maybe Jesus actually isn't on their side.
No, I think that's exactly right.
And I think that's why those, you know, I think a lot of people wonder why so many rituals at J6.
If you look closely, there's people like standing around singing with guitars.
You know, the QAnon shaman prayed in the Senate chamber.
You know, Cooey Griffin, head of Cowboys for Trump, prayed when he got to the mezzanine level, right?
Why?
Keep reiterating the story.
Keep telling yourself, this is what we should be doing.
This is not crazy.
This is not ridiculous.
This is not something that is going to be remembered infamously forever.
This is what God wants.
And so we have permission to do it, and we're very certain that this is exactly where we should be right now.
Right.
How do you imagine evangelicals right now are perceiving grappling with telling the story around the tension between the multiple legal cases against Trump that just keep keep coming this year and the gamble that I think they took on him regarding stacking the Supreme Court, which has now finally delivered the overturning of Roe.
And you write about what a big theme that was in your in your adolescence, as well as affirmative action, which intersects with all of that.
I think we have to distinguish here between evangelical elites and evangelical rank-and-file everyday people.
I think the elites, you know, the folks who are Really, the ones pulling a lot of the levers, they know that Trump is long-term poison for them, and not who they want.
If you asked them and got them to tell the truth, they would love it to be Mike Pence, or Glenn Younkin, or maybe Ron DeSantis, maybe not, right?
So those folks know they opened up a total Pandora's box with Trump in 2016, but it delivered, and it got them what they wanted, and it helped.
I think the rank and file have no problem squaring the lawsuits with Trump's role in American history.
For them, the lawsuits are just, they're actually a good thing.
That's signs of the deep state coming after the God-appointed warrior who's going to make America great again.
That is signs of persecution of a godly, righteous man who speaks truth to power and won't allow the Marxist cabal of elites and illuminati to take over the world and the country.
Lawsuits are like really good news for a lot of them because it shows they're on the right path.
Persecution and victimization are signs you're doing the right thing.
On that note, we've got a last question for you about another persecuted savior as we head towards another election.
Jim Caviezel.
Well, him too, but do you think that from the other side of the aisle, nominatively anyway, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
has a pathway towards broad Christian support?
I'm imagining that there are a lot of evangelical Christians Who might find, I don't know, his devotion to St.
Francis or the environment a little too queer or woke, but at the same time he's a potent sermonizer and a contrarian and he appeals to his higher power constantly.
Do you think he has some kind of magic formula that will play amongst the demographic that you study?
No, not at all.
I think he'll peel off votes from some of the communities we spoke about earlier, some of the wellness communities that are looking for a contrarian, some of those that would call themselves politically without a home, some of those who are and were Jill Stein or Marianne Williamson supporters.
They will find their, in Kennedy someone that they think that they can support. To
me, the white Christian nationalists, the evangelicals, many of the
Catholics, the Pentecostals, they're gonna be with Trump and if they're
not with Trump they're gonna be with DeSantis and if for some reason those two don't
pan out, they will probably find a home somewhere other than Kennedy.
Kennedy really to me is just, you know, can he pull enough votes, Jill Stein style, Marianne Williamson style, et cetera, from Joe Biden or whoever in order to like peel away from, you know, from that margin to get Trump over the finish line?
I mean, You know, it's like Robert F. Kennedy watched Succession and was like, well, Conor Roy.
Right.
All right.
Yeah, absolutely.
I like that guy.
That guy.
You know what?
I'm going to give that a shot because that character arc is the one I want to live.
So it's really like he watched it and thought, all right, one percent.
Let's get it.
But that one percent could be costly.
Right.
In certain places when it comes to, you know, the next election.
So, yeah, the short answer is I don't think you're going to see any movement to Kennedy from Yeah, the folks I study.
I think that's the best news that we've heard on this podcast for, what, months?
Julian, what do you think?
I think so.
I think it also has explanatory power in terms of why those House Republicans chose to make such a spectacle of Kennedy yesterday, to bring a Democratic, someone seeking Democratic nomination into that hearing as a positive witness on their behalf.
I think that's the biggest poison pill of Kennedy, is that he's not saying, I'm Green Party, I'm independent.
He's like, I'm a Democrat.
And so the Republicans are super pumped to bring him in and be like, look at this Democrat, right?
Talking about the conspiracies we want to talk about and the misinformation that we want to spread.
This is great.
I mean, they love that.
Bradley, thank you so much.
This has been so fantastic.
We've kept you for a really long time, but I know that our listeners are going to really adore this discussion and super enlightening.
We really love your work.
Thank you for all of your integrity and close attention to all of this stuff.
No, thank you both for just fantastic discussion and questions and for all that you do.
And I look forward to returning the favor and getting to ask you about your work and those things very soon.
So thanks for having me.
It seems almost unfair that we should get to do this all over again in reverse.
I'm excited.
Thank you so much.
This was fantastic.
Pleasure's all mine.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
