Religion was in full view this week as it relates to COVID-19. Brad and Dan discuss evangelical leaders and politicians resisting shelter in place directives, the Trump Bible study leader blaming LGBT+ people for the pandemic, Hobby Lobby and visions from God, Liberty University going back to school, Pompeo railroading G7 talks by demanding it be called the Wuhan Virus, the faux-Trump Bump, strongman masculinity and disease, and reasons for hope (yes, there are reasons to hope).
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Monishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host, I'm Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad, even in troubled times, I guess.
Well, you know, we were just talking and it seems like this is a week where we had a lot of politics and obviously pandemic news related stories.
And this is one of those weeks where it seemed religion was like raising its hand like, oh, I need to come back in the conversation, please don't forget me.
So we got a lot to talk about.
Yeah, and so I think this week, right, we're planning on, you know, we've had this kind of format we've been following.
It's like pandemics, suddenly it's like all the really sort of crazy religious stuff is like, we're going to come back out and make sure you listen to us.
So I think we're just going to bounce back and forth.
There's like literally a laundry list of like, Of just crazy religion and politics stuff to talk about this week.
So why don't you start us off?
What was one of the first things you would like or that got your attention that you'd like us to talk about?
So there's a lot and we're not going in any specific order.
You know, Dan, we usually have these segments we do and we just decided this week, let's just do a laundry list.
So I'm not necessarily prioritizing any of these as most important, but I'm gonna throw some just tidbits out.
So my first one is that Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi signed an executive order a couple days ago that supersedes basically a bunch of like local bans in Mississippi.
So essentially in Mississippi you had some mayors who had put in shelter-in-place orders, right?
Well, the governor of Mississippi comes out and says, nah, we're good.
I'm going to sign this executive order that essentially says if you're in a city where the mayor has put a shelter-in-place order in, I'm overriding that.
And a lot of this seems due to I'm kind of concerned not to tick off some of the ministers and churches in Mississippi.
There's a lot of folks in Mississippi trying to keep church meetings going despite the pandemic and so we have here the kind of intersection of religion and politics and what seems to be perhaps the worst directive in the country from a governor in terms of a response to the pandemic that I've seen at least.
So I don't know if you saw this one, Dan, but I thought it was worth bringing up.
I don't know if I'd seen a specific thing about Tate Reeves, but I mean, it does fit into this pattern.
It's one of the things we're going to talk about, right?
Of like, churches that refuse not to meet.
I think it's kind of part and parcel of weird stories about like, you know, 20-somethings having coronavirus parties and it turns out that they get coronavirus.
But one of the things that strikes me about this, because if people go and they look at some of these news stories about churches that refuse to close their doors or live stream their services, or whatever, there's a passage in the New Testament from the book of 2 Timothy, chapter 1, verse 7, And it sort of starts with, and this is the part people will know, that we have not been given a spirit of fear, or that we've been called not to live in a spirit of fear.
And so you get this almost defiant sort of notion, a kind of quasi-theological argument, that if we shelter in place, if we listen to these things, it ties in with anti-intellectualism and a bunch of other stuff that we'll talk about here.
But that if you do that, you're somehow living in fear.
You're violating this command to not live in a spirit of fear.
So a number of things about it, but one of the things that strikes me and and I think we'll see this other things these we've talked right about how you miss the boat with these religious articulations if you focus narrowly on belief and like what does it mean to believe something and like what's actually going on what's the social work of these claims
What strikes me is that this is a movement that now is pushing back against things like shelter in place, overriding local municipalities or maybe counties or things like that.
But it's a movement that has built itself on creating a culture of fear, right?
Fear of cultural change, fear of gay people, fear of women having the wrong kind of social role, fear of refugees, fear of foreigners, fear of almost everything, right?
It's built itself on this kind of enclave mentality and fear.
And now their response to this is, well, we need to not live in a spirit of fear.
So we're going to sort of actively allow people to endanger others for the sake of, in my view, a guided sense of spirituality.
So that's the first thing that strikes me is this kind of hypocrisy or this doublespeak of, well, now we're not going to live in a spirit of fear.
Be afraid of the atheists and the Muslims and the gay people, but not the virus that is obviously killing, you know, thousands of people as now the U.S.
becomes the number one hotspot in the world.
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