Brad and Dan discuss the startling ways that the Religious Right has aligned itself with Far Right leaders across the world, including Vladimir Putin. They discuss why evangelicalism has transformed from envisioning Russia as enemy number one to a friendly ally in the fight for "family values."
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AXIS MUNDY Okay, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and today we're talking about the sort of religious right and the far right, and I'm going to throw it over to my co-host, My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
We're recording—I am recording—from the studios of WLMC at Landmark College, and I should say that Brad, my colleague, is on sabbatical in California, so we're doing this from distance, as we have been this season.
As Brad said, we're talking about authoritarianism, why there's this evangelical embrace of authoritarianism.
And a good place to start with that is Russia, right, the kind of evangelical love affair with Russia.
And Brad, you know, and you've been looking into this and doing some really interesting stuff with this, evangelicals for decades have had a lot to say about Russia.
But for those who have lived within evangelicalism or have enough kind of institutional memory or have studied it enough, They'll know and you're going to tell us that what evangelicals have said about Russia has really, really changed in recent years.
And I wonder if you'll tell us more about that.
Yeah, let me give you a quote.
I want my candidate to look eyeball to eyeball with the Kremlin and draw a line.
We need a president who will tell the communists this far and no farther.
I had rather be dead than red and believe most Americans would.
We've got to stop these monsters somewhere.
So that's Jerry Falwell and that's Jerry Falwell speaking in the late 1970s.
And you hear there, right?
I mean, a really, really, really strong disdain for what was then called the Soviet Union.
And, you know, Dan, if you look back at the history, and this is something that we've done over the course of our two seasons here, in the 1970s, the religious right was forming.
It was forming on The basis of issues like the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, and as we've talked about, it really formed in its first impulse based on the fact that the government was going to no longer give segregation academies tax-exempt status, right?
That basically race and not abortion was the original impetus for the religious right.
Okay, all that to say, we get to 1976, we went over this in Episode 2 of Season 1, and we have In the White House, Jimmy Carter, who's an evangelical.
He's a Southern Baptist.
He's from Georgia.
He carries around the Bible all the time.
I mean, you know, Jimmy Carter's an evangelical through and through.
Well, when he's up for re-election, he's going up against Ronald Reagan, right?
We've been over this.
He is from Hollywood.
He's been divorced.
He was actually sort of wishy-washy in evangelical eyes on abortion when he was governor of California.
Well, one of the central issues, and I've tried to make this clear on this podcast for evangelicals, was not only, you know, sort of Christian ideals, not only family, not only this very racist approach to segregation, but it was sort of American nationalism.
And the big bad other for America during the Cold War, during this period, is, of course, the Soviet Union, right?
So there is a disdain for Russia on the part of Jerry Falwell and his cohort during the 70s and the 80s.
Falwell says this, we have lost every war since the second war.
We've lost in Korea, Vietnam, and lately in Angola.
God only knows where we will fail next.
I want my candidate to begin immediate and drastic moves towards balancing our budget and at the same time increase our defense budget to whatever it takes to exceed that of the Soviet Union.
Falwell's basically saying, Jimmy Carter, I don't care if you're an evangelical.
If you're not going to do everything you can To bolster our military to the point that we are superior to the Soviet Union, then we're not going to vote for you.
We don't care that you identify as a Christian.
If you're not on board with our foreign policy against Russia, then we're out, right?
And this is one of the big stories about why evangelicals sort of put their weight behind Ronald Reagan rather than Jimmy Carter in that election.
Yes, he positions himself as the cold warrior, right?
The one who's going to bring the Soviets to their knees and so forth.
One point I just want to jump in here with, as you're sort of talking about this, you rightly highlight that notion of nationalism, and we'll revisit this, and it's sort of one of my broken record topics.
But you're exactly right, but to really make clear for people that the nationalism of that time period in the Cold War, it's the other against which the Christians are identifying themselves are the communists, right?
The Soviets.
All of that context is part of why we have One Nation Under God and our Pledge of Allegiance that was added to kind of differentiate us from the godless communists and so forth.
And so it was very much a part of that nationalism that whatever we viewed us having that the Soviets didn't, that was central, right?
So we're Christians, they're atheists, we're capitalists, they're communists, we're a democracy, and they're an authoritarian regime.
So at that time, authoritarianism is part of that other against which evangelicals begin to define their own sense of national identity.
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