Brad dissects the evangelical scrutiny of the halftime show, demonstrating how Franklin Graham's (et al) criticism comes from the misogyny of purity culture, a history of othering people of color through a sexual lens, and willful ignorance on forms of exploitation.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi and I'm Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
Unfortunately we had an interview planned for today but our guest had to cancel last minute and so this might be a shorter than normal episode of our show.
But I did want to talk about something that is sort of swirling in our atmosphere at the moment and sort of make some connections to White evangelicalism and purity culture.
And what I'm talking about is the halftime show of the Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl was on Sunday, and as I'm sure many of you will know, J-Lo and Shakira performed.
And after their performance, there was what some might call scrutiny of their performance, their dancing, their outfits, all this stuff.
So let me read you a tweet from Franklin Graham.
I don't expect the world to act like the church, but our country has had a sense of moral decency on primetime TV in order to protect children.
We see that disappearing before our eyes.
It was demonstrated in tonight's Pepsi Super Bowl halftime show with millions of kids watching.
This exhibition was Pepsi showing young girls that sexual exploitation of women is okay.
With the exploitation of women on the rise worldwide, instead of lowering the standard we as a society should be raising it, I'm disappointed.
Here is Ryan Recker.
He says, I guess pole dancing is part of football now.
Yikes.
Here is Spencer Cox on Twitter.
Room full of kids so we paused the halftime show to strategically fast forward and I didn't wait long enough and we're suddenly watching pole dancing.
And Abby, I guess that's his partner, is giving me the stink eye like I'm the choreographer.
Another person said the NFL has an obligation to warn people with children what they are about to see may be upsetting to some viewers.
Okay, so I just want to make a couple comments on how this sort of relates to purity culture and white evangelical politics and practice more generally.
First of all, this goes back to something I spoke about with Dan on a weekly roundup about two weeks ago.
And that was that at Liberty University there's this new Falkirk Center.
The Falkirk Center is named after a battle in the Mel Gibson film Braveheart.
Now there is a sort of historical kind of episode that it's based off.
But the point that Dan and I made a couple weeks ago is that they literally named a whole center after a scene from the movie Braveheart.
And what I pointed out at that time is that Braveheart was a classic in 1990s sort of boys, youth group, evangelical culture.
And the point I made there is that there was this strange disconnect when we were growing up that said, You can watch movies like Braveheart that are rife with violence, killing gory depictions of human beings losing their lives at the hands of other human beings.
That is totally okay and there's a good chance we're going to hold up those films as like exemplars of evangelical morality.
That those will be things we'll learn from.
Those will be things that we will model our masculinity off of.
However, you need to carefully and resolutely guard your eyes and heart from any movie that includes any sort of sexual depictions, okay?
Those are clearly out of bounds and they're not allowed.
There's something really sort of analogous with Franklin Graham and other people taking aim at the Super Bowl halftime show.
Like, you're literally watching a sport that has documented links to brain damage and physical issues after people stop playing and while they are playing.
Like, you're literally watching a sport where there is immense scrutiny on the violence of the game, where the NFL and others are working really hard to regulate the types of hitting and impact that players endure because they realize that unless they do that, people are going to stop playing football and are going to stop sort of supporting the game of football because it's just too violent.
I mean, you know, I'm at an age where so many of my friends have young children and the amount of folks who tell me, like, "I'll never let my kid play football because of these sort of reasons," right?
What am I saying?
I'm saying, like, Franklin Graham and others are literally sitting there watching people play the most violent game we have in terms of major American sports.
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