Asha Dahya was a happy evangelical when she moved to LA from Australia. But the politics of the Religious Right led her out of the faith. Indian by ethnicity, British-born, Australian raised, and living in the USA since 2008, in a few short years she has become a reproductive rights activist, editor in chief of a feminist website, and author of a new book on women who are changing the world in extraordinary ways.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Welcome to Straight, White, American, Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I am joined today by a very special guest, Asha Daya, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Girl Talk HQ.
She is a broadcast journalist who's worked on three continents, in the UK, in Australia, and now in the United States, as a TEDx speaker, somebody who works for Reproductive Rights, and has now written a great new book called Today's Wonder Woman, Ordinary Superheroes Who Are Changing the World.
And I just want to say, first of all, thanks for being here, Asha.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
It's great to be chatting with you.
Folks, I just want to say from the bat, I'm having internet trouble today because I think the whole world is on Zoom and a lot of folks are working from home.
So we're going to do our best to get the best audio quality possible.
But anyway, Asha, thank you so much for being here.
And one of the reasons that, you know, we've interacted on Twitter and other places and one of the things that is so compelling for our audience about your story is just You grew up mainly in Australia.
You're Indian by ethnicity.
You spent time in your early life in the UK, but spent a lot of time in Australia as a young person.
And evangelicalism is nowhere near as sort of widespread and influential in Australia as it is in somewhere like the United States, but you did grow up with a kind of evangelical upbringing and then, as we'll get to, you really did have a kind of very stark and jarring deconstruction process later in life.
So I guess I just wanted to ask about, you know, Your early life and how it was living as an evangelical young person in Australia.
Like, how did your life look when you were young?
Yeah, that's a good question.
And I love talking about it because when I was growing up in Australia and whenever we would go back to the UK and visit family and obviously go to churches there, because as a, you know, growing up evangelical, even if you're on holiday, you still find a church and you go to that, you know, the greater family.
But it wasn't the same as what a lot of evangelicals grew up with in America.
However, that is changing today.
But when I was growing up, The best way I can put it is, it's all the same cultural trappings, except the politics.
So we listened to DC Talk, I went to a Billy Graham rally, what else?
We had the altar calls, Jars of Clay, you know, bands like that.
We read Joshua Harris's book.
His books, plural.
All of those things.
Chuck Swindoll was on the radio.
My dad would always listen to him.
All of those things were like an ingrained part of my everyday life.
Not just on a Sunday, throughout the week.
We would hear Sermons on Sunday, then we'll go to Wednesday Bible study.
My parents would actually host, and still do, at their house Bible studies.
Friday night was youth group.
There was this idea of, you know, you don't need to look beyond the church to find a partner to get married, for those of us who are kind of getting into late 20s, early late teens, early 20s.
But my church was very, very small, and so I remember one of the The mums saying that to the youth, like, you know, you can find just just basically just find anyone in church and just marry them and me and my sister looked at each other horrified because we didn't we didn't think any of those boys were cute, first of all, but those kind of things were You know, like that was our mantra, you know, the whole purity culture.
Forgot about that.
That was a major part of our culture as well.
In my family, and I'm Indian, so there's that conservative edge about, you know, your appearance anyway.
Probably more modest than anything, but you know, double so with evangelicalism.
Yeah, those are the similarities to what a lot of people experienced in America.
And then when I moved here in 2008 for my career, I wanted to further my career in TV and obviously there's more opportunities here in Los Angeles.
I quickly joined a church because that was, you know, that's the thing you do.
My parents were very much about, you know, yes, they were supporting me in my career choices and ambition, but they said, you know, quickly find a church, get involved, and that becomes your quote-unquote family, as we're all familiar with these terms.
And so I did, and I ended up meeting a guy there.
We fell in love and got married very quickly, and I was 24 at the time.
Six months away from turning 25.
And, you know, it was just the thing that you do.
And although we were in love, I didn't realize what a toxic environment that would be for me personally in that relationship, but also in that environment too.
So that's where I really learned, oh, this is where, this is like the headquarters of white evangelicalism in the world.
This is where it comes from and I'm in it.
And at that time in 2008, 2009 now, California was deliberating Prop 8, which was all about gay marriage, before, obviously, the Supreme Court decision in 2015.
So I was thrown into the fire, really confronted with all this stuff about how evangelicalism was inherently political in America, and I willingly went along with it, willingly became a pro-life crusader, and just saying all these things and identifying in all these ways.
Until it all kind of came to a crashing halt and I ended up going through a divorce at the age of 29.
And that thus started my deconstruction journey and me figuring out, not just the last four or five years being in the American church, but my whole life as an evangelical.
Like, who am I?
What do I really believe?
Why am I just saying all these things and rattling off these Bible verses as if they are You know, as if that's something I believe in.
Do I believe in that?
All that kind of stuff.
So in a nutshell, that's my story and how I kind of came out the other side and I'm still going on that deconstruction journey.
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