Weekly Roundup: Funding Anti-LGBT Schools with Tax $, the Radical MLK, and the March for "Life"
On the Weekly Roundup Brad and Dan discuss Espinoza vs. Montana, a supreme court case that will determine if states must fund private schools. They discuss how currently millions of dollars in tax money is being sent to anti-LGBT institutions. They also discuss the whitewashed radicalism of MLK JR., and evangelical quietism on abortion.
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I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and this is our weekly roundup for January 24th, 2020.
Dan, we've got a lot to talk about today, so I'll throw it over to you.
I'm here with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Brad, thanks for taking the time.
I'm going to throw it back to you.
You have kind of a giveaway to let people know about, correct?
Yeah, so before we jump into our first segment, I want to just reiterate, as I did the other day on Twitter and Facebook and my interview with Derrida Sugiuchi, We have a couple of copies of Empty the Pews to give away.
Empty the Pews is edited by Chrissy Stroop, who's been on our show twice, and Lauren O'Neill.
It includes essays from Deirdre, who was on our show just a couple days ago, from Carmen Maria Machado, who's a very well-known author, and many others.
And these essays are all about leaving the church.
And a lot of them are from fundamentalists and or abusive situations.
They're evangelical.
Stories, there are stories from Mormon communities, Catholic and others, and so if you'd like a chance to win Empty the Pews, you can go over to our Twitter or to our Facebook and fill out a short survey and that will enter your name into the giveaway and we'll be announcing that next week.
So, that's exciting.
We're going to have actually two more weeks of giveaways after this one, so you can look forward to that.
We have two more books to give away, and I'll be talking all about that next week.
But for now, Dan, I just want to get into our first segment.
Our first segment, as always, is Did You See That?
And we are speaking on the Friday of Martin Luther King Jr.
Week.
I mean, Martin Luther King Jr.
Day was Monday, and I think you have a kind of Did You See That?
story on that topic.
Yeah, so, and this caught both of our attention, and we're going to talk about this for a few minutes because I think we both agree that MLK and what this week represents deserve that.
But on a rally this past weekend, sorry, at a political rally, I think it was formally an election rally that Trump was holding in New York State.
He introduced, he formally introduces Pence as his running mate and Pence among other things said that Martin Luther King was one of his two heroes growing up.
I think he said JFK was the other.
People can make of that what they will.
But this really caught my attention for a number of reasons.
One, and you might get into this, is there are lots of reasons to question how much of MLK's legacy is really influential in these.
But I really started to, you know, this week, that caught my attention.
And, you know, of course, Pence is a white evangelical.
But some other things sort of hit me and what it kind of got me to thinking, I guess, about the ways that I think well-meaning white people often appeal to Martin Luther King Jr.
In the midst of this thing with Pence, I'm also writing a chapter where I'm looking at a certain kind of white, liberal critique of contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter, and I also, on my personal Facebook feed, Um, there were some, some laudatory posts, pro-MLK posts from white evangelicals who are not white nationalists.
They're not Christian nationalists.
Uh, that kind of got me to thinking about this because, and what I think we can talk about for a few minutes, right, is the way that a lot of well-meaning white people have this, they appeal to MLK, but it's just like this really, really sanitized safe version of what he is.
Jean Thea Harris, I'm not positive I'm pronouncing her last name right, she has a fantastic book called A More Beautiful and Terrible History, The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.
And she sums it up this way, she says that figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., she says that they've quote, been turned into Thanksgiving parade balloons, floating above us larger than life, unthreatening happy patriots.
And that's sort of what always comes to me when we have ML Keating Day and this week is the way that he's sort of sanitized and made safe.
And so, for example, on the side of liberal progressives or people who call themselves liberal progressives on whites, I'm thinking of a guy named Mark Lilla.
Other people might know Lilla.
He's at Columbia University.
Big name, writes lots of books that have like sort of a lot of popular kind of crossover appeal.
But he writes a book called The Once and Future Liberal, and he appeals to the spirit of Martin Luther King to critique Black Lives Matter, right?
And this is a standard trope, right?
So he says the problem with Black Lives Matter is they're too divisive.
They're busy telling everybody they're racist.
They're not trying to build coalitions.
But he specifically contrasts this, and he says, you know, in the civil rights movement, people operated within the system.
They weren't as disruptive.
They didn't criticize American values and so forth and it's this appeal to Martin Luther King Jr.
to critique these kind of contemporary movements and it always strikes me as this way of like White people appealing to a sort of what they consider to be a safe black person to then tell other black people how they can and can't criticize white people, and it drives me crazy.
And again, these are well-meaning white people.
So it looks like you're ready to jump in.
What do you got on that?
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