Brad and Dan discuss the COVID culture wars: the armed "protest" at the Michigan capitol, the masculinity of face masks, in-person church meetings, the stunning decline in Trump's approval ratings, the Bill Gates conspiracy, and Justin Amash's third-party presidential bid.
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My name is Brad Onishi and I am joined, as always on Fridays, by my co-host My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And Brad, it's nice to see you, as always.
You too.
We are recording, as always, on our Friday.
I have not thought of a great story to tell you this week, Dan.
I feel like I've let some of, you know, some of America down on that front.
But I will say that, folks, if you tune into our new series, a history of the religious rights since 1960, that there will be plenty of stories there.
So if you're missing the sort of funny or embarrassing story from today, you need to tune in on the 26th 'cause there will be plenty to feast upon when we get there.
So I wanna jump right in, Dan.
We both have kind of a busy day, and there's a lot to talk about, so I'm going to jump into this.
I saw a new piece this week from our friend Ryan Burge, former guest of the program, who wrote at Christianity Today that almost two-thirds of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus has been, quote, about right.
They are more confident in the president's response than in any other groups, including public health officials like those with the CDC.
Just 3 in 10 respondents who are not white evangelicals think that the president's response was about right.
So let me just summarize that, Dan, real quick.
We've got about 67% of white evangelicals who believe that Donald Trump's response to coronavirus has been about right.
Anybody else, if you are not in that group, if you are not a white evangelical, only about three in ten people think he has got it about right.
Let me continue with what Burge said.
He says, in comparison, the group that the general public thinks has gotten it about right is public health officials.
So nearly two-thirds of the general public approve of public health officials' sort of messaging and response to the pandemic.
Non-evangelicals were twice as likely to say that the media had covered the outbreak properly.
So, just one more time, non-white evangelicals, about two-thirds, believe public health officials have got their messaging right and their response right.
They have also said, about 42% have said, that the media has covered the outbreak properly.
Only 23 or 24% of evangelicals believe that the media has covered the pandemic properly.
So what we get here, Dan, is a picture of white evangelicals once again as an outlier in terms of their perception of the pandemic, and the president's response to the pandemic, the media's response to the pandemic, and the CDC and other public health officials' response to the pandemic.
We're gonna sort of unpack this as we go today, but I'll throw it to you for some initial thoughts.
Just a general point was, and we'll talk about some, I think, some of the mechanisms of this in a little while, but it's just like everybody recognizes at this point in time, right, just how partisan sort of claims of information and data and truth and whatever have become.
And when it relates to science, It has shifted.
For years and years and years, you know that if you're a conservative Christian, you don't buy into evolutionary theory.
We talked about it when we first started this podcast, and the Scopes Trial and so forth, and we'll see it with the modern religious right, and textbook controversies in places like Texas, and things like that.
That's been in the news for years.
Global warming and climate change worked their way in there, but it's like it's become sort of more and more and more pervasive to where now it's not just big giant issues where this it's almost as if if anybody says anything with a scientific basis whether it's about vaccines or COVID or you know wearing a mask to keep from infecting others or whatever it is if you know that somebody is a white evangelical Christian You almost certainly know that they're Republican.
You know with good certainty that they probably support Trump.
They certainly don't support Biden.
And following from that, you can say, yeah, not only are they not going to accept evolutionary theory and maybe arguments about abortion, they're going to deny that COVID is a real problem.
They're going to oppose wearing masks and so forth.
And this just highlights it, right?
So, like, what you're saying is gonna sound shocking, like, two-thirds, but to anybody who kind of follows this or looks at this or listens to the stuff we've been talking about for, you know, a couple years now, you're just forced to kind of nod your head and be like, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I would expect at this point, is this kind of hyper-partisan and religious divide about what counts as truth or what kind of data counts as evidence.
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