Dan and Brad revisit the issue of abortion in evangelical politics and culture. They examine evangelical support for heartbeat bills, what's behind the phrase "culture of life," and what opposition to abortion does for evangelicals. They also discuss how support for heartbeat bills can lead to heartlessness on other issues.
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- Axis Mundi. - Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, My name is Dan Miller, and we're recording in the studio of WLMC at Landmark College, where I am Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought and the Chair of the Department of Liberal Studies.
And I am joined by my colleague... I'm Brad Onishi.
I'm Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
Good.
And we are excited to start in this first episode of what will be our second season of the podcast.
Brad, just to remind people where we've been, why don't you offer sort of a recap and remind us where we've been and give an idea of where we're headed this season.
Yeah.
So, you know, last season we dug into a lot of issues, gender, race, sexuality.
All those things.
And we did a lot of historical tracing.
You know, how did evangelicals get to a point where they vehemently argued against Bill Clinton because he wasn't a godly leader and yet were willing to support Donald Trump?
You know, how did the themes of race, of gender, of things like war and other political forces, cultural forces, sort of shape us into a place where 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump?
Well, those issues remain, and we want to continue to sort of investigate those and others.
However, we're going to take a little bit more of a kind of psychological and social approach to this and ask, you know, not only how did we get here, but we want to ask, why do evangelicals believe what they believe?
And even further, you know, what are the social implications of those beliefs, right?
So when somebody says, you know, I believe that the Bible is literally true, What does that mean?
I mean, because there's so many ways we can poke holes in the fact that they actually probably don't believe the Bible is literally true in terms of, you know, some obscure verse from Leviticus or some other place where, you know, someone could say, well, it doesn't seem like you're actually following the Bible literally.
So why would someone say that?
And what does that mean socially?
What does it mean for group identity?
And more importantly, what does it mean for our political sphere and how evangelicals sort of participate in that?
And so in this season of Swag or Straight White American Jesus, we're going to look at some of the things evangelicals believe and try to answer this question.
Why do they believe slash do that?
Yeah, and some of the things we're going to look at, we've both gotten some really great feedback and people send these questions.
And there are some things that people sort of get, right?
They may not agree with it, but if an evangelical says, I'm opposed to abortion, they at least sort of get it.
Say they oppose LGBTQ rights.
Again, people may not agree with it, but they can at least maybe understand cognitively or conceptually why the evangelical says they oppose that.
But I've had people who say, why opposition to gun control legislation?
What does that have to do with quote-unquote believing the Bible is literally true?
Or why are evangelicals increasingly opposed to vaccination, mandatory vaccinations?
That's a relatively new thing.
And so those are some of the things we want to look at this season, is getting into kind of the social mechanisms of evangelical belief and practice and how it relates to these issues, just like you're saying.
Yeah, and I guess that leads, you know, to kind of a basic question, which is, you know, why do evangelicals believe what they believe, and what does that do for them?
And I guess I just want to throw it to you, Dan.
You know, you've done a lot of teaching and writing and researching about this.
Um, you know, so why don't you start us off?
Like, you know, when we talk about belief, what does that mean?
So you and I, as scholars of religion, probably know this.
People that happen to be in religious studies will know this, but it's going to sound pretty counterintuitive to a lot of people.
And that is the notion that this part will make sense to people.
Most Westerners, generally, I think most Americans in particular, we understand religion in terms of belief, right?
I teach an Intro to World Religions class.
The first assignment for students on the first day is to try to come up with their own, like, half-page definition of what religion is.
And I would say close to 100% of the time, it's couched in terms of belief.
Religion is belief in X, Y, and Z. And from that, everything else that we call religion sort of flows from that.
That's how we understand it.
We believe certain things, so we have certain rituals and certain practices and certain institutions, and people invested with authority and so forth.
And one of the points we're going to make, you and I are going to make, is that that's actually not probably the best way to understand religion, and it's actually not the best way to understand the role of belief in religion, right?
And not just among American evangelicals.
I would say in most social and political movements, but white American evangelicalism in the same way.
And so that's part of what we're going to be looking at today.
And like you say, as you said in the intro, I've been thinking about this some, and what I want to look at is the way that these claims to belief work, both in the terms of individual identity, right, people who identify as evangelicals, call themselves evangelicals, but the way that that relates to their group identity as being evangelicals.
Or for them, just Christians, right?
That's how they conceive of Christianity is as evangelicalism.
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