Use JESUS20 for 20% off at Swanson.com! Dan and Brad hosted a live meeting with SWAJ listeners. We had a great discussion of important questions. They are listed below: Questions for SWAJ Q+A, June 30, 2020: Randall Balmer’s three point definition of evangelical does not directly mention a belief in Hell or an afterlife. The evacuation plan seems to be such a focus in many churches and I believe this is foundational to many conversions, ie, the fear of spending eternity in a firey Hell or the promise of spending eternity in a heavenly mansion. Has there been any research as to how many people are converted out of fear, especially children? Would you consider the Great Commission a form of colonialism for Christian Nationalists? How did you choose your show music? 2. What does faith mean to you? 3. What kinds of research from other PhDs in your field do you hope to see coming out of the movement for Black lives? 4. The conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist convention - where did all those pastors, church members, and churches go that were either excommunicated or willingly left the SBC? Did they have any impact on evangelicalism, or did they just get out? Did they become a part of the religious left? 5. Has understanding about the origins of the religious right helped you to communicate with people still heavily involved in it? 6. Is it possible to be both libertarian and ethically concerned with social justice? Or do libertarian ideals always = alt right? 7. Does populism result in authoritarianism? I ask because of this op-Ed by Francisco Toro https://tinyurl.com/y8ql725r 8. Obviously American leadership contributes to our anti-science COVID tsunami. But rank and file citizens are the actual problem. Does Europe not have these people? Is the Brexit crowd an anti-mask crowd? Europe has an anti-vax movement. Why not this other garbage? 9. A question for your Q&A: how much did the interest in your podcast from outside the US surprise you? 10. I'm curious about your knowledge of the Falkirk Center at Liberty U? 11. What made the charismatic and neo-pentecostal churches embrace right wing politics?? 12. In the past you mentioned 'non church going, self identified Evangelicals'? Can you expand on that, it doesn't make sense to me.
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Well, it is 5.5.
I know we have more people coming, so as they show up, I'll admit them into the thing here, but I want to get started.
I know for those of you on the East Coast, it's, you know, the night is, we're losing, we're losing time here, and for those of us on the West Coast, dinner will be upon us, so I know that And I know some of you from real life, and I know some of you really love to eat, so you're not going to stay around.
Straight white American Jesus or not to miss dinner.
So this is our first live Q&A, anything we've done really with straight white American Jesus, so we're super excited about it.
And I'm just really, first of all, just so thankful for all of you and your support.
I'm not going to lie, the orange wave has really taken over my life.
My wife will attest.
Been in this office that I'm in right now until 2 30 a.m.
Like many times over the last couple weeks, so but just having the encouragement from all of you and the feedback has just really helped me and Helped us just sort of do this show every week.
So I'm gonna jump into questions I'm gonna start with a question from Laura, and Laura, you asked this, you asked, first of all, Randall Balmer's three-point definition of an evangelical does not directly mention a belief in hell or the afterlife, and this seems to be a big focus.
If any of you've been to an evangelical church, like I know many of you have, this is a big part of being an evangelical, is sort of knowing where your eternal destiny will be.
Has there been any research as to how many people are converted out of fear, especially children?
So, I have thoughts on this.
Dan, do you want to jump in or offer any initial thoughts here?
Just that last point about fear is interesting, right?
Like, I don't have hard numbers in front of me, but I do know that there is, there's a lot of data that shows that, especially it's kind of accelerating, that young people who start out in evangelicalism tend to leave pretty quickly at this point, like after, even by the time they get into high school, but certainly by the time they go to college, if they go to college, by the time they leave home and that kind of thing, which Kind of suggests that that fear thing may be a part of it, right?
That there's a lot of sort of wrapped up with you know parental protection and fear of the world and so forth and that as people get out on their own and figure out that like maybe the world isn't quite as scary as they thought it was or it is but the answers that used to work don't or something like that but I mean that that's I don't have firm numbers on that it's an interesting question people have studied like specifically that issue that would be really interesting to look at you know.
I would say, I would take your point, Laura, and I think it's a really good one that I actually think Dr. Ballmer's definition is missing.
You know, nobody tell him that or whatever.
I'll just cut this out of the recording later.
But, you know, I remember if you all some of you all remember this in the early 2000s, people like Rob Bell and Brian McLaren got very close to universalism, right?
They got close to this idea that everyone was going to go to heaven, including Hitler, including everybody.
And that promptly got them pretty exiled, right, from the evangelical fold.
And so, to me, it's hard to think, and I'm willing to entertain this, and if folks have counterexamples, we can talk about those, but I can't think of an evangelical setting where there is no belief in the afterlife, and even further, no belief in some sort of heaven or hell.
If there is, it's a rare exception.
And so, anyway.
Yeah, Dan, you want to follow up here?
We got a bunch of questions, so...
Yeah, the only thing I was going to say real quick, and we've talked about this on the show before, right, is that Bible passage about not having a spirit of fear that's almost a slogan within evangelicalism, but the identity of evangelicalism seems to be built on sort of fearing everything, right?
Like we fear gay people and black people and like all kinds of stuff, so I think that that notion of the afterlife just sort of elevates that a level, right?
It's not just earthly, worldly fears.
It's like this cosmic Super beings are out to get us kind of fear.
So I think I think it's a really good point.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a good point.
Lori made the point that Bennington doesn't mention the afterlife either, which Bennington is often used as the sort of standard definition of evangelicalism.
And honestly, Laura, it brings up a point as to why and and I'm I kind of makes me want to dig into this a little bit more.
So Great question.
You also asked, would you consider the Great Commission a form of colonialism for Christian nationalists?
And, you know, the Great Commission comes from Matthew 28.
It's when Jesus says, go into all the world and make disciples of all nations.
Do I think that that is inherently colonialist?
I don't think so.
However, historically, has it been used for colonial purposes?
Very much so.
And so I have a colleague, Lucia Holseter, who's written a book called Capitalist Humanitarianism.
And that book is going to come out in about a year, but there she shows how a lot of our corporations, Coca-Cola and others, used Christian missionary efforts to infiltrate markets all over the world.
Now, is that nationalism?
No, but it is capitalism.
And there's another book, Matthew Avery Sutton Double-Crossed, and that book touches on this.
It's really a book about spies and missionaries.
But it does touch on how missionary efforts from the United States to the world have been used as not only proselytizing projects, but nationalist ventures.
And so, I don't think it's inherently part of colonialism, but I do think it has been used as such throughout history, and it's a very nice cover, right?
Hey, we're going to convert, we're going to spread our gospel, we're going to Fill in the blank, and by the way, we're going to slip in there a kind of nice nationalist agenda, colonial agenda, so on and so forth.
So, Dan, any follow-up there?
Just to beat my drum that probably people are tired of hearing of, but again, that in the context in which it's produced, right, you still have this tradition that's like a minoritarian tradition from a marginalized, oppressed people, so this notion of going out and making disciples is not In that context, there is no sort of authority to be going out and colonizing anybody.
But yeah, as soon as it becomes a kind of tool of the Roman Empire, it works really, really well.
And it's been part of the civilizing mission of the West ever since, right?
To go and make disciples every time.
I always think of the British Empire and tell my students, when they sent anybody out, it was the capitalists, it was the East India Company, and it was the Anglican ministers, right?
So it was always sort of hand-in-hand.
So I think, again, it's a great point.
Well, and you're seeing in California, you're seeing a lot of the statues of Father Junipero Serra come down, right?
And he's the one who started many of the missions in California.
And those missions were often just harbingers of mutilation and attempted genocide on the indigenous populations.
And so that's another good historical example.
If people are wondering why Californians are tearing those statues down, That is the reason.
A couple of you have asked, what is that book?
That book is called Capitalist Humanitarianism, and it is by my Skidmore colleague, Lucia, L-U-C-I-A, Hulseter, H-U-L-S-E-T-E-R.
Lucia was on the What Do Religion Scholars Think of Trump's Photo Op?
episode.
She was the very last interview.
So anyway, that's where she's been on the show before.
All right, Laura, your last question was how do you choose your show music?
And so our theme song was developed, it's original, and was developed by Ben Wickman, who's a listener, and he very graciously did that for us.
In terms of the Orange Wave, we have no money for this show except for what people sort of throw in, and so I use the YouTube audio library, which is free, and I'm usually upstairs at 2 a.m.
Sort of, you know, high on Coke Zero and just trying to find the best soundtrack.
So that's probably a very disappointing answer.
But anyway, that's just, that's how it goes.
All right.
Dan, Emily is asking, what does faith mean to you?
So if you can just give us that in a concise paragraph, we can all move on.
So please, go ahead.
We'll solve that.
I saw that question earlier and I've been kind of chewing on it all day because I admit that as somebody who still participates in a church life but is also super, super aware of like Not being exclusivist in that and things like that.
But faith is honestly a word I tend to shy away from.
I'm like a stereotypical liberal Protestant in that.
We'll be Protestant but not really talk about faith very much.
But I think for me part of what it came to is There's a philosopher named Richard Rorty and he talks about what he calls final vocabularies or ultimate vocabularies and just it's just this notion that kind of what's your last resource that you work you know that you reach for conceptually if you're working with something and I've talked about this on the podcast ironically or strangely or whatever
The embrace of Trump by evangelicalism is part of what moved me back into church life, because I found myself just so enraged.
It was really the Affordable Care Act stuff.
It blew my mind that so many Christians, or people who consider themselves Christians, would talk about or would be okay with taking health care from people.
And I just, I kept reaching to that passage in the New Testament, where Jesus says, whatever you've done for the least of these, you've done for me.
And this kind of Divine identification with the marginalized and there's no reference there to a specific community or an ethnicity or a religious identity or anything else.
It's just this kind of identification.
And I think somewhere in there is what faith is for me is the fact that that's this resource that I still go to.
I kind of didn't expect to reach there.
I've got lots of other intellectual resources or ethical resources I could reach for but for me that's still where I found myself going.
It doesn't mean that other people have to go there.
And I'm much more concerned with like, I don't care where people reach for that resource if they share that same impulse.
But I think for me, it's something about that notion of kind of what we reach for at that kind of visceral level to make sense of the world or life or whatever.
And so I don't know if that's a great answer.
But I think that's where I'm at.
So it's a really good question.
Yeah.
I'll just say for me, Dan has explained on the show many times that he is a practicing Christian in what we would call a mainline denomination.
I identify as secular, but one of the drums I'm beating these days is that secular people can and should identify as people of faith.
Because the world we live in, just from a scientific perspective, a quantum perspective, whatever you want to add there, is a world beset by uncertainty, unknowability, and an unpredictability, right?
And so there's a great book by my mentor and friend Jeff Kosky, it's called Arts of Wonder, Enchanted Secularities, and I'll say it again, it's Jeff Kosky, K-O-S-K-Y, Arts of Wonder, And Jeff really makes the case in there better than I can, that even if you are a secular person, your world is full of uncertainty, unpredictability, and unknowability.
It is in essence full of wonder, and therefore to be a person in the world is always to exist without complete knowledge, without complete understanding, and therefore to be a person of faith.
Ironically, leaving evangelicalism to me has meant sort of becoming in ways that I would argue a person of more robust faith.
Because for me, evangelicalism was always about certainty.
You have the answer, you know the truth, and you're there to tell everyone who doesn't believe you or convince everyone who doesn't want to believe you.
And to me, that's not faith.
To me, that's certainty.
And it's a mask, right?
It's hiding behind theological and political commitments in order to sort of cover over the vulnerability and unpredictability of life.
And so for me to be a secular person is to be a person of faith.
And to be a person of faith does not mean that you have to participate in a religious tradition.
So, okay next question Tori asks what kinds of research from other PhDs in your field?
Do you hope to see coming out of the movement for black lives?
This is a fantastic question.
Dan?
I think as you've read that just now, I'm looking at books that I should have pulled down to take a look at.
I think that we are seeing, like we get these questions about colonialism and colonization.
I think that that's one.
I think more and more there's some really good stuff that I see showing the way that We tend to divide these identities up, right?
We have racial identity, and religious identity, and political identity, as if they're these different domains, but there's a lot of scholarship increasingly showing specifically that a certain kind of Christian identity is wrapped up in a really deep level with racial identity, and specifically one of the people that I've read recently puts it in the terms of anti-black affect, and I think
For me, I think part of what I want to see is people continuing to recognize that these analytical distinctions that we have that can be really useful can also be misleading, and I think beginning to see how those identities are wrapped up into each other.
There are relatively few theologically conservative Christians who don't also harbor pretty problematic views about people of color.
One of the things that they look at in that book is research that looks at how many people they can identify as Christian nationalists.
One of the research questions is, would you be comfortable with your daughter marrying a black man?
And like the numbers who say no, they wouldn't, is like disturbingly high, right?
So those kinds of connections, I think that that's one thing, is seeing how these different forms of identity wrap up.
And we as scholars, and then I think broader society also, having to recognize that those identities aren't all distinct, but are wrapped up.
And I think that's why you have so many people that say, well, I'm just a Christian.
I'm not.
It's not about race.
It's about my faith, right?
But when you dig down, it's about that.
So that's what I sort of see coming, and I think it's just becoming more pertinent and more visible, and so I think it'll keep gaining steam with what we've seen in the last few years.
Brad, what are your thoughts?
Well, I'm thinking of scholars like Shannon D. Williams, who is a scholar of Black Catholicism, and her work, you know, one of the theses I give in almost every class is this, that religion has been used in this world for exploitation, oppression, violence.
All of that is true, and we all know the examples.
Religion has also been a vehicle for liberation.
It has been a vehicle for freedom.
It's been a vehicle for expression.
And so someone like Shannon D. Williams is working in the Black Catholic tradition to show us that something like the Movement for Black Lives has, in its many various roots and its many various sort of antecedents, Folks working in traditions that we often don't think of, like Catholicism, right?
And that they are doing work that is incredibly important in order to lead up to this current moment.
So, Anthea Butler has a book coming out, and her book is on racism and white evangelicalism in the United States.
I think that's going to be great.
And then there's just a bunch of books that I think are also sort of surrounding this topic.
They're looking at the intersections of race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality.
I'm thinking of a scholar named Daisy Vargas, who's doing a lot of work on Latinx Christianities and migration.
And I just think that kind of work is just super, super important to religious studies as a discipline.
My former colleague at UCSB, Natalie Avalos, is doing work on Indigenous communities in the country and sort of looking at things like conservation, environmental concerns, land use, etc.
So We're seeing that become part of our discipline, and religion scholars are realizing that, and here's I guess the last point I'll make about this, Tori, is we're getting to a place where religious studies is recognizing that race is not an add-on to our discipline.
It's not a like, oh, you do religion plus race.
You can't do religious studies without thinking, reflecting on, and doing critical work on race and ethnicity.
It's just part of the job.
And I am excited to see that take root.
It's long overdue, and I think we're going to have some wonderful scholarship come through as a result.
Anyway, Eddie Glaude, who some of you may know from MSNBC, just came out with a book, it just dropped like yesterday, called Beginning Again, and it's on James Baldwin.
That's a great, that's something I'm really looking forward to reading.
So anyway, Not enough time to answer that question, but those are some thoughts.
Okay, Dan, I think this is going to be a question for you.
Laura is asking, there was a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention a couple of decades ago.
And a lot of people got thrown out.
People that we would have probably considered in some sense, and I hate to use this word, but some sense moderate.
So, these are pastors, church members, and even churches, and they were sort of thrown out of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Where did they go?
First question.
And, you know, what impact on evangelicalism did that have?
Dan, you're the resident Baptist, or you're a recovering Baptist.
I don't know what you are, but so thoughts on this question?
Yeah, so it's interesting because I started, I'll date myself here, I started my undergrad in 1994.
And so that was not too long after this.
So there was this event in the Southern Baptist Convention, and for people who don't know, Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.
It's also overwhelmingly conservative, politically in particular now.
But they had this series of events that culminated in what some people called the conservative resurgence, and other people called the fundamentalist takeover, depending on like which side of that battle you were on.
The long and short of it is that theological conservatives basically figured out that if they could get enough people on the different boards that ran things within the denomination, they could control the denomination.
Those boards appointed presidents to seminaries, or the boards of trustees for seminaries who appointed the presidents, who named the faculty, and so forth, and you have this kind of trickle-down effect.
They won that battle.
Prior to that, there were moderates and even liberals.
It sounds strange now to think of, but there were some, you know, liberal Protestant Southern Baptists running around the world in like the 1980s.
Where did they go?
A lot of those faculty members left and went to different kinds of institutions.
There were also some different institutions that were founded.
Truett Seminary at Baylor was one of the seminaries that did not require like a signing statement.
You didn't have to sign anything about biblical inerrancy and so forth and there were a lot of Southern Baptist professors who went there.
There were professors who left some Southern Baptist colleges and went to other sectarian institutions where they could still feel they had the freedom to do what they wanted to do.
The Baptist Seminary at Richmond was another seminary that was started sort of independently.
So there were some independent institutions that were started.
Back in Late 80s, maybe 90, there was a group called the Alliance of Baptists.
They still exist.
You can Google them.
And that's where the really progressive Southern Baptist people tended to go.
The Alliance of Baptists isn't huge, but a lot, and a lot of those churches and people, if they stayed within Christianity, they ended up going to places like the American Baptist Churches, which is the other, the second largest Baptist denomination and is more pluralistic.
United Church of Christ, places like that.
You also had something called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which was another kind of funding organization.
So, there were some attempts to maintain what they saw as a more moderate, but still sort of historically Southern Baptist kind of identity.
I would say, by and large, number one for most outside observers, places like Truett Baptist Seminary at Richmond, They're not, certainly to people who are sort of fed up with evangelicalism, they're not going to look very progressive.
But within the Southern Baptist world, they were and in some ways are still much more moderate.
But a lot of those movements never caught on the way that they wanted to.
They're relatively small.
They never produced the kind of counterweight to the main SBC that I think a lot of them had wanted to.
So I think the answer for a lot of people down at the local level is a lot of them just Drifted to different things different churches different denominations Baptists don't have like a hierarchical church structure.
So basically if a church decides they're going to do something like Be open and affirming of LGBTQ people Their local church association can say basically we're not going to be your friends anymore.
Like we're not going to let you hang out with us, but they can't like remove the pastor or take away their credentials or anything like that.
So there are still increasingly a number of sort of independent Baptist churches that have been sort of shunned by their denominations.
So all that's a long way of saying that there were institutional efforts to create counter institutions and there were churches that became independent and there were sort of these quasi denominational bodies that formed I don't think any of them ever turned into much of a counterweight to the SBC.
I think a lot of that energy kind of got diffused and diffracted to other denominations and other institutions.
So I'm happy to follow up with other comments and things if people have that, but it can be a pretty dry topic unless you're a former Southern Baptist, in which case it's, you know, kind of interesting.
Kind of like a Baptist wedding.
Dry.
So that's the joke for the day.
Good.
Thank you, Bob.
I've been practicing that one.
So I'll just say, if you can, check out Shadow Network by Anne Nelson.
In the first chapter or two, she talks about people like Paige Patterson and Herman Pressler.
And they really got in bed with a lot of the C&P people that I outlined on the Orange Wave episode.
It's not democracy, it's war.
And so that book, if any of you want to read about this further, Shadow Network, I think might be a nice place to look if you're interested in following some of the money.
So anyway, okay, Emily, Different Emily has asked, has understanding about the origins of the religious right helped you to communicate with people still heavily involved in it?
So I'll just say, this might be a time when anyone who's here on the call might want to put in the chat function some of your thoughts on this.
I take this question basically to be, the more you learn about evangelicalism, the religious right, some of us are ex-evangelicals, etc.
Has that helped you talk to the people in your life who remain in the tradition, in the movement?
And I'll just answer for myself quickly, Dan.
I'll just say yes and no, right?
Because the more you know, the more frustrated you get with folks who don't want to learn and don't want to listen and don't want to take account of like where their beliefs and their politics comes from.
It's tough.
It's tough to be patient.
You know, when people from my old church and other places tell me, You know, it's really sad you don't go to church anymore.
I mean, I often respond like, it's really cute you go to church once an hour a week.
That's really quaint.
I think about God 12 hours a day, and I have thought about God 12 hours a day for 25 years.
However, does that help anyone, Emily?
Not really.
That kind of attitude, really, it's good for blowing up Thanksgiving.
It's not good for helping people.
And so, I think one of the things that I like to keep in mind is The most persuasive person in an evangelical's life is somebody they love.
And if you can find ways to remain in a relationship, find opportunities when they come about, you know, in moments where there are openings to have those discussions, that's the most effective you can be.
What will help you is being somebody who cannot be out evangelical, right?
So the more you learn, the more you learn the language, The more you can kind of speak in the lingo, and you can kind of use that in my experience to sort of try to reach people where they might be open and might be sort of willing to listen, right?
So for example, I had people in my family who for the first time expressed displeasure with President Trump when he did his photo op in Lafayette Square at St.
John's Church, right?
They were like, this is not okay.
And that was a real sort of moment for us to have a little bit of a dialogue.
Make a little bit of inroads and to sort of be on the same team, right?
In a very, you know, short way or, you know, short intersection.
Anyway, Dan, I have more thoughts, but Dan, go ahead.
Well, I think yes and no is the true and not super helpful or encouraging answer, right?
For those same reasons, one of the things I was reading something unrelated to this, but it was about conspiracism the other day.
And one of the people put it this way, and they said, conspiracism, it's a cognitive style.
It's not about information.
In other words, it's almost like a, not quite a willful decision, but it's like an orientation to the world and to information that's really difficult to dislodge, which is why if you're an analytic type person and you've got all your mountains of evidence, you're going to throw at somebody and you throw it all at them.
They're like, well, yeah, but still, and then they just like repeat whatever.
I think Brad hit it on the head that I wrote down, you know, to myself, relationships, right?
It really is about relationships.
I think that's what, in my personal experience, what I see in others, and what I think we see in like social science data, right?
Lo and behold, it turns out that when more people know gay people, they tend to be less homophobic, right?
Or when people know more people who aren't sort of card-carrying evangelicals and like they don't have like pointed tails and and like cloven hooves and they're not out to like kill all the babies or like whatever else and they find out that like oh they're regular people and
They sit on the school board with me and we are both really frustrated with the principal's policy even though they don't go to church or like whatever those kinds of points of commonality I think help open open people up to that more because I think often they're demonizing a kind of caricature and we're all prone to the same thing right?
It's easy to sit around having these kinds of conversations and like Start demonizing everybody who is evangelical or something and then you meet people you're like, oh, you're not like so terrible and you know, I think those relationship those relationships can be key.
The question is how do you how do you do that?
Right?
We live in this world where social media is supposed to in some ways bring us all closer and create communication and yet It makes it easier to like troll people or to like pick a fight at three in the morning because you just got to throw some stuff in comments and then if you start to feel bad you'll just close Facebook and go to bed and just like not look at the responses the next day or you know maybe I'm the only one who does that.
But yeah so I think relationships and I think the real key is like how do you bring those about?
How do you have the patience to do that?
How or can you seek those out?
The blowing up Thanksgiving like comment is great like How do you go and make that into a productive time and not just a, you know, four beers in, we're going to start yelling at each other until we can watch football and just not talk anymore.
Like, um, so I, I think it, it, it helps, but I think it has to help in the right context.
I think in a relational context, at some point you can say, Hey, did you know that this thing that you're like really, really stuck on didn't used to be this way, or the church didn't used to think this, or, You know, the church we grew up in said something different, or whatever, that's when people are receptive.
And I think the trick is to try to cultivate those moments and be prepared for them.
It's funny, I just now sound like I'm telling you about how to evangelize, right?
Like, prepare yourself and have all, like, you write verses and stuff, so when God presents an opportunity, so I guess it's a, it's like a secular evangelization model.
Man.
Thanks a lot, Dan.
Yeah.
One thing I would add here is, I want to add two things.
One, if Chrissy Stroop or Blake Chastain or other folks were here, they would say, you know, it's not your responsibility to stay in a toxic and abusive relationship with someone.
That just goes, generally speaking, but if an evangelical in your life is being, is creating a toxic environment, yes, it's great to want to help or to change their mindset, etc., but You also need to think about yourself and your well-being and your health, and so I think that's important to say.
Two, these things to me rarely go well on social media.
Some of you see me on social media, and if you come at me on Facebook, my mode is just gonna be battle.
Like, I'm not, like, you're not gonna win here.
And Kendra, my partner, will tell you this is why this Facebook's not a good place for you, Brad.
Like, this is just, You're up till 3 a.m.
Dan closes the thing, goes to bed apparently.
I'm storming around the house, walking around.
Or I just pop some popcorn and watch your comments.
So I would say...
There's just, it's just too easy to delve, to degenerate into battle when, to escalation, to use a tactic that we're talking a lot about these days when it comes to social media.
So my best instances for this have come in person.
Anyway, okay, let's move on.
Is it possible, this is from Monique, is it possible to be both libertarian and ethically concerned with social justice?
Or does libertarian always equal alt-right?
I think it's a great question.
It's a fantastic question.
So I've been thinking about this a lot today.
If you go back to my interview with Gerardo Marti for the Orange Wave, he said something I think is really insightful, that libertarianism is on the cover this ideology that says the government should just back off and let the market decide.
The government should just be the sort of like very mild support for the invisible hand of the market.
Just let the market do its thing and don't worry about it, okay?
What Marty argues in his new book, American Blindspot, is that libertarianism uses that cover and then pushes the government to protect and privilege a certain kind of citizen.
So you can tell me, oh, I'm just a libertarian, bro.
Like, just government, get out of my life and let the market do its thing, while usually somehow protecting the white American Christian who submits to a patriarchal social order, okay?
So that's a historical answer, it's not a theoretical answer, but I think that is true and I buy Marty's point on that topic.
We see this throughout our world today, that libertarian often equates to alt-right, because it is often that ideology, that economic ideology of, I don't want the government to make sort of decisions, moral decisions about people's lives and their rights, is a way to justify not caring about the well-being of other people, okay?
So I think we do see that.
Through and through.
Now, I am very aware that there are folks who are with us who come from Quaker traditions, Mennonite traditions, right?
And in those traditions, one could, and this is just, I wanted to be kind of comprehensive in my answer here, those traditions often Are resistant to interaction with or entanglement with the state, right?
Like you can kind of see them on a continuum leading towards something like the Amish, right?
In some theological sense or social sense.
They're not the same.
I'm not collapsing all of those into one.
So don't don't accuse me of that.
My point, however, is one might be able to argue that the Quaker or the Mennonite is somehow libertarian in the sense that their concern for social justice, their concern for the Kingdom of God, is not meant to take place within the context of state sort of run programs, initiatives, so on and so forth, right?
Does that mean they're libertarian?
I'm not sure, but I did want to mention that because it struck me as a very sort of vehement tradition of social justice is at the core of who we are.
It's at the core of what we do, but we do it without the government or the state.
We do it as a church community and as a church sort of group.
So I'm not sure if that's helping, but anyway, Dan, you want to jump in at all?
Yeah, it was a great question, and I was kind of wrestling with it, too.
And I say this not to just be the annoying academic, but part of it, of course, depends on how you define justice, right?
As I understand libertarianism, and maybe I'm thinking more classical liberalism, and I don't know exactly where you draw the line between those two things, but in the classical liberal mindset, what is just Is to be able to do your own thing like that.
That is kind of what justice is.
And the role of the state is just to let people do that.
That's a classical liberal model.
People have as much right to do what they want and to exercise their freedom only up to the extent that they prohibit somebody else from doing the same thing.
And if you read people like Hobbes or Locke or people like that, the only purpose of the state is to keep other people from basically inhibiting my rights.
So that's what justice is.
Then I guess, sure, right?
But I think when most of us talk about social justice, we're thinking about a much more substantive conception of what society is, of what our relationship to other people in society is.
We're probably thinking more in terms of responsibilities and obligations that we owe to other people than just claims of rights that have to be protected.
And so you can have a very different understanding of, I think, what the state is and what justice is that I think is probably incompatible with Libertarianism.
I would also say that that classical liberal model smuggles some stuff in philosophically.
It tends to have this notion that if you leave people alone and let them exercise their freedom, I think it assumes, and I think it assumes this because it was still pretty Christian even though it kind of didn't realize that it was, it assumes that people are fundamentally good, that they're basically benevolent, that they're going to help each other, And I don't think that that's always a warranted belief, unfortunately, in the world.
And so I think when you call into question that presumption that, you know, we're all just, we'll do the right thing when it really comes down to it, we'll do the right thing.
We'll all put on our masks and clearly help protect other people if we're left, right, we see right now that that doesn't happen.
And if you don't accept that vision of what society is, that we're just a bunch of individuals seeking our own sort of gratification and exercise of freedom and everything else is secondary, if you don't accept those, then I think you're probably not a libertarian.
Um, or as Brad's saying, you're a sneaky libertarian who's actually, you know, again, sneaking in a whole bunch of conceptions of, well, what kind of people should be able to exercise their rights and that sort of thing.
So that's my long, meandering way to say that I, I don't think so.
Not in the sense that I don't think somebody be a libertarian and affirm social justice in the sense that I think most of us have a sense of what that is that we see in the streets right now with Black Lives Matter and things like that.
I think those are probably incompatible, uh, I also just think it's really telling that the folks who claim to be libertarian most often are folks who are at the top of the social hierarchy, right?
They have a very privileged position.
There's a disproportionate amount of men.
They're usually white men.
Douglas on Twitter one day the other day said, you know, for those of you who are my white male followers, you know, when did you become libertarian and how long did it last?
And her implication there was, you know, in her experience when she meets white dudes, they had some sort of libertarian phase, right?
I'm not trying to stereotype and I'm not trying to say that that's always true.
What I am trying to say is The idea that the government should back off and not have an active role in sort of creating a just and equal society is usually espoused by those folks who don't feel like they need it because they're already at the top.
So I think that's one way to look at it.
Okay, this is definitely a Dan Miller question.
It comes from Jason.
Does populism rest, I'm sorry, does populism result in authoritarianism?
And he points us to an op-ed that appeared in the Washington Post and it is about Venezuela and the breaking point in Venezuela that led to authoritarianism and wondering if that's going to happen in the United States.
So Dan, populism, does it always lead to authoritarianism?
I think the short answer is probably.
So populism, you got to think of like sort of broadly two contexts.
If you already have an authoritarian regime, right, or a totalitarian regime, and that's where lots of populist movements take shape, it can be a democratizing force, right?
If you already have an authoritarian structure where like one party or one individual or one ethnicity sort of holds all the reins of power, And all the other people, right?
That's the popular, the people rise up and demand their place.
It can be a democratizing force, right?
And that's what you see historically in some places in South America and places like that.
If you're talking about an established democratic system, if you're talking about a place like the U.S.
or Western Europe or places like that that already have established institutions and structures that have increasingly pluralistic Societies and multicultural societies, then I would say populism tends to be a kind of majoritarian movement.
In other words, that tends to to localize power and concentrate it.
And then it becomes authoritarian really fast because one of the models of authoritarianism is that the leader is not just the representative of the people, the leader is kind of the embodiment of the people, the voice of the people.
It's almost like the people concentrated into a single form.
And so it becomes authoritarian very quickly.
You get a model where you don't vote for your leader, you don't select your leader, you acclaim your leader.
And Trump is a great, almost like a textbook caricature of this, right?
This notion that everybody should be proclaiming him and telling him how great he is and recognizing that, and that there's no sense that he has to do anything to earn that.
So you go to something like South America and you say, well, it still spins off into this authoritarian dimension.
It happens really, really fast.
You see this in lots of different movements where there were populist uprisings, they demanded their place, but as soon as they gain power, as soon as they gain authority, you immediately turn around and start exercising the same kind of authoritarian impulses that you rose up against.
And so I think it's very difficult to have populism That doesn't bleed into authoritarianism.
Is it possible?
Yes.
Are there non-authoritarian forms of populism?
Yes.
I would say the overwhelming, overwhelming tendency is toward authoritarianism.
And I think populism, certainly in like Western European context, the U.S.
context, democratic context, I mean, populism, if not authoritarian, is certainly anti-democratic.
And you can draw the line between those two things.
It's going to be a shifting line, right?
How anti-democratic do you become?
Before you're an authoritarian, but I think it's definitely I think that the two merge and I think we see in somebody like Trump strong authoritarian tendencies and desires, right?
It's why he likes North Korea and China and Turkey and places like that.
It's why he he can't maintain a relationship with Democratic leaders like in Germany or Australia or even the UK.
Yeah, so I think that the two are pretty closely linked.
Yeah, you know, I'll just say we were in, Kendra was, my partner was living in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we were there on voting day in Egypt.
You know, folks, there was like 38 political parties because folks were really trying to sort of, you know, get their legs under them in terms of democracy.
And by the time she left there, there was all this sort of like foreshadowing of an anti-democratic sort of form of government, right?
So it is hard.
And again, Dan, I take your point.
I don't think it's an automatic sort of transition, but it is.
Historically, we do have many examples of populism leading to authoritarianism, unfortunately.
And so anyway, there's probably discussion here to be had about the French Revolution, and that's very complex and complicated, and it's not an either-or situation.
I digress.
Okay, next is from Tom.
Obviously, American leadership contributes to our anti-science COVID tsunami, but rank-and-file citizens are the actual problem.
Does Europe not have these people?
Is the Brexit crowd an anti-mass crowd?
Europe has an anti-vax movement, but it does not have this other garbage.
What is happening there?
You know, one of my thoughts on this is that My experience, and Dan, I'll ask you this in a minute, but my experience living in places like the UK and in France was that there were people who were very conservative.
There were people who were, you know, Brexit was not happening then, but if it was, they would have been all for it, right?
But there was no Fox News there.
There was no sort of like just ubiquitous misinformation propaganda coming from Fox News.
And we have a country where Folks see Fox News as their only source of information a lot of times.
I spoke with Ann Nelson in my interview with her about wraparound media, and she really, in Shadow Network, she does a great job of showing you how there's folks who really do live in echo chambers, right?
And so, are there right-wing people in France?
Yes.
Are there people who voted for Brexit?
Totally.
But I think the combination of having a leader, the only sort of leader of a developed nation, maybe other than, I don't, well...
We can talk about Boris who got COVID, but the only leader of a developed nation who's just openly flouting the mask idea, having rallies indoors, and then you couple that with a large segment of your population that relies on what is essentially a disinformation campaign from top to bottom, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, etc.
You're gonna get a different result than you might in the UK or Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand.
Not the same.
Dan, do you have thoughts on that?
Do you agree, or do you see other things at play in this puzzle?
I don't disagree with anything you said.
I think there are other things.
It's a good question from my brother, the pediatrician, interested in all that stuff.
I was looking at this today, and apparently, I was looking at some stuff, and apparently the UK right now has one of the lowest mask-wearing populations in the world, like lower than the US.
But when they interviewed people and found out why, they said things like, this is so British, that it made them look silly or foolish, right?
Like that was the reason that they gave.
It's not as politicized.
It's just like, it's not this ideological stance that It's like this expansion of a visceral kind of conservatism that, well, yeah, we oppose abortion and we oppose gay rights, but now we also oppose vaccines and wearing masks and, like, anything that the CDC says.
At least if Democrats like it.
It's not as politicized in other places, I think.
I also do think that another piece of this is that religious, religious conservatism does not and has not, in the modern period, Played the kind of political role in, like, Europe and the UK as it does in the U.S.
There's just no parallel to it.
Are there conservative Christians?
Of course.
Are there evangelicals?
Yes.
Are there anti-vaxxers?
Yes.
But you don't—and, you know, the series that Brad's running through now is like a prime example.
You just don't have a parallel to that, that I'm aware of.
Certainly not on the scale in Europe and the UK.
And so I think that's part of it.
Another piece of it that shouldn't be overlooked is how long our election cycles are.
Like, you know, a lot of countries have like a six week election cycle, or they call an election and they're like, yeah, eight weeks we're gonna vote.
And you know, in a blink it's over.
We get halfway through a presidential term and it's all election stuff all the time again, right?
And so this stuff that you get this politicizing, you get all the media amplification of it that Brad is talking about, but then you have it used as a constant wedge for like, you know, two out of every four years in a presidential cycle.
If you're talking about congresspeople or state legislators or governors that are on even shorter election cycles, it just becomes continual, right?
You have to keep drumming it up.
You have to keep Feeding this sense of opposition and cultural division, especially if your political strategy is one of building a base and doing that through the exclusion of others.
I think all of that stuff flows together to create this kind of very uniquely American mix, so it has a kind of political potency here that it just doesn't have.
I think most British people I ever knew, if It would just be not that controversial that if masks, if it turns out that preventing the spread of COVID, for example, is deceptively simple, we now know that if you wear masks and you stay six feet away and you wash your hands, it basically won't spread if you just do those things and the stuff that comes with it.
I think a lot of other places, regardless of your political persuasion, that's just not that controversial.
I think all that mixes together to make it just a really, really different thing in the U.S.
Two more comments.
One is, in the countries we're talking about here, those sort of comparison countries, those peer countries, evangelicalism does not have near the hold it does here, right?
So the very first episode we did in this podcast was, what is an evangelical and why are they running my life?
And what we meant by that was, every time you turn around in this country, if you want to do anything politically, you have to deal with white evangelicals, right?
They just seem to have this, and it's not seem, they do have a disproportionate representation in Congress, all the way down to mayors, right?
And so their political hold on our public sphere is way different than in, like, the UK, or way different than in France, right?
It's just not comparable in that sense.
So, that's one comment.
Two, we have to realize that the Republican Party in this country is an extremist right party in world perspective, right?
If you don't support socialized medicine, if you think that, you know, climate change is a conspiracy or a hoax, right?
Anywhere in these countries we're talking about, UK, France, Germany, you know, Northern Europe, wherever, Australia, New Zealand, Anglophone world, whatever, that's an extremist position.
You're an extremist if you say, right, standing in London, I don't believe that we should have the NHS.
You're just, you're not, you're not in anywhere near the center of the political discussion.
In this country, you're like 44% of the population, right?
So, when it comes to masks, to me, that's all related.
It's like, we have, what we call Democrats in this country, are like, in most of the world, conservatives, and what we call Republicans in this country, in most of the world, are far-right extremists.
And so, that, I think, plays into this, in addition to the media, and in addition to the cultural hold of evangelicalism.
Anyway, all right, a couple more questions here.
I don't want to keep everyone too long.
Miriam asks, this is kind of a fun question.
This is from someone living in Finland who is a German, so a German living in Finland.
How much did the interest in your podcast from the outside the US surprise you?
I'll just say We're so stoked that people from outside the U.S.
would listen.
I always check who's listening and see the statistics and people from Finland, people from Sweden, people from Norway, people from Australia, people from everywhere.
I take it to be kind of a bad problem.
I'm sorry, like a It's a good and a bad thing.
It's bad because you're interested because our political scene is such a dumpster fire that you're like, we need to figure out what's going on there because you're affecting all of us, USA, and the fact that you are doing what you're doing is making our lives different.
So we need help understanding that.
So am I grateful that people think we can help them understand that?
For sure.
Am I sad that we need that?
Yeah, I am.
I'm very sad about that and I wish it wasn't true.
So anyway, Dan, any quick thoughts on this one?
Yeah, it was just funny.
Internationally, Americans often have a stereotype, and I think it's probably well-deserved, that we're just not very globally aware.
And we're not.
And, like, if you go to, like, I don't know, CNN.com or something, and, like, you got to kind of trawl around before you find, like, much international news, right?
We're really focused on the U.S.
But it wasn't until I spent some time outside the U.S.
that I realized just how much attention other people pay to the U.S. and just like how significant that was.
Years ago, I went to the U.K. when the Tea Party movement was first starting.
I was waiting in line for a train.
I was with a group of American students and like we're painfully, obviously American.
And all my students are making a bunch of noise.
And I'm sitting there thinking, you don't do that when you're in Q's in Britain or they're like not like you.
And people figured out as Mary started asking me about the Tea Party and what that was and trying to understand it.
Yeah, so we are this kind of, have been historically, you know, since World War II at least, this kind of huge center of gravity and Brad hits it right on that we're this kind of, I think people are watching with shock and awe for all the wrong reasons about sort of everything that's going on.
Um, but I've found in conversations with people from other places they are really fascinated and I think just dumbfounded and confused about like religion and politics in the U.S.
and like why in the world anybody cares what the pastor of First Baptist Dallas thinks about a presidential candidate.
It's literally inconceivable to lots of Europeans.
So I think not really surprised necessarily, but really gratified and happy that maybe we're helping explain that to an audience that is broader than I think what we anticipated.
So just to echo what Brad said, we've been really thrilled with the international interest in what we're doing.
I was going to save this to the end, but somebody who listens every week I know and I've interacted with, And I'm going to say the name wrong, so excuse me.
Hakenfoda is from Norway.
And if you listened to last week's Weekly Roundup, Dan and I talked about the Nordic-looking Jesus and Hans Christ and all that.
And he told me on Facebook that everyone knows that Jesus is from Norway.
He grew up down the street from me.
There's a reason my area is part of the Norwegian Bible Belt.
Duh!
So anyway, we appreciate that comment.
I just wanted to clarify, if you listened to the Weekly Roundup last week, we love you Sweden, we love you Norway, we were not disparaging you in any way, we were just disparaging the idea that Jesus came from the Nordic countries, that's all, okay?
Hopefully you will see the reasonability of that position.
Okay, this is a question from Ryan about the Falkirk Center at Liberty U. There's a new center at Liberty University called the Falkirk Center.
And I have the website up here and I'm going to read everyone just a little bit from that.
America is great because America is good.
If America ever ceases to be good, it will cease to be great.
That is Alexis de Tocqueville.
Why the Falkirk Center?
Because in the 1995 movie Braveheart, the Battle of Falkirk is remembered as the heartbreaking defeat of William Wallace and his freedom fighters against the treachery of the Scottish establishment.
It was indeed a loss for Scotland, but it was also the beginning of the end of King Edward and his ambitions for the nation.
Wallace lost the battle with many casualties, but he ignited the spark of freedom.
That ultimately won the war.
So Liberty University has launched the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and mobilizing Christians in the battle to preserve American liberty.
It's a Turning Point founder, so if anyone knows Turning Point, their founder is Charlie Kirk.
And Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr.
established this cultural influence alliance to rally citizens in an effort to shape government policies, national institutions, and American society through a biblical worldview.
If you listen to the Orange Wave that will drop a week from today, it is about masculinity, and my interview with Kristen Dume, who just wrote a great book called Jesus and John Wayne, And on that interview, we talked about how evangelicals have shaped their conception of masculinity, not through the Bible, but through Hollywood.
So it starts with John Wayne, it goes to people like Clint Eastwood, and then in the 90s, anything Mel Gibson made, from Patriot to Braveheart, was like top of the list for evangelical subculture.
So the Falkirk Center is, to me, it's so sad that it's named this, and yet it's not surprising.
I say in my interview with Kristen Dumake that's dropping on Tuesday.
When I was in the 90s in the youth group, we were not allowed to watch movies with any hint of sexuality.
There was no watching the like, it's high school and we're gonna get drunk and go to the prom and like lose our virginity.
Not allowed.
But we watched so many violent movies full of killing and gory violence and murder and I watched Braveheart.
I'm not, I'm not exaggerating here.
I probably watched Braveheart 50 times in high school.
It was like our, it was like Where we learned how to be men, and how to be masculine, and how to be warriors for Jesus.
Anyway, that's my thoughts on the Falkirk Center.
They have been slamming, if you look at what they're doing, they're slamming liberation theology as not really Christian, etc.
And to me, that's just a function of Christian nationalism and everything we've talked about on our show for months.
Anyway, Dan, what do you got?
I'm sitting here laughing because, you know, I see the comments.
Yeah, when I found out about the Falkirk Center and looked at it, I'm like, you've got to be effing kidding me that it's named after Braveheart.
What?
But there's another book.
Kristen's work is really, really great on masculinity.
There's another book called Does God Make the Man that looks at masculinity, especially among evangelical, white evangelical men.
And it is amazing.
They talk about like how much Braveheart came up in their research.
And it's just like, Just sort of, you're like, wait, what?
Like, what?
But Brad's right.
I remember watching it, you know, when I worked in the church.
And, you know, you'd have viewing parties of Bravehearts and, you know, things like that.
So yeah, this is really screwed up conception of masculinity, but I think, I don't know the two are directly related, but as an academic, as a professor, or whatever, it's also telling to me that the Falkirk Center, with this aim of promoting a kind of Christian nationalist, masculinist conception of Christian identity, also coincides with the same institution getting rid of their philosophy department.
I don't think that the two are unrelated, or at least they're really telling about sort of what counts as knowledge.
What is reason?
How do we deploy our reason?
You know, what are our sources of knowledge?
All of that sort of stuff that it's Hollywood and really like, you know, kind of toxic conceptions of masculine, you know, manly men and so forth and not You know, sort of more rigorous or intellectual things in an institution that likes to position itself as a kind of world leading evangelical institution of higher education.
So I think those points are not unrelated.
They're not directly related.
They didn't defund the program because of that center.
But I think it's interesting if you look at sort of the flow of resources, it says a lot about where their real focus is and their real conception of what their sort of institutional mission is.
Well, and just think about that, right?
So, you know, Braveheart is about Scotland fighting against the colonial power of England, right?
And they're sort of fighting for their independence.
And something we've talked about on the show since it began is evangelicals are the best in the world at holding power while claiming to be the victim.
Right?
And so the Falkirk Center is just right on message.
You know, we were in power.
We have the president we want.
We have a Senate we want.
We have a lot of control over state legislatures, local politics.
And yet, who are we?
We are the persecuted Scotsman of Braveheart.
We are the ones who need to fight to rescue our country from the overlords who are trying to take it from us.
And so I think that that's something to remember.
Okay.
This is a great question from Bob.
Bob asks, what made the Charismatic and Neo-Pentecostal churches embrace right-wing politics?
I have some thoughts here.
Dan, you want to jump in or you want me to take this one?
Well, I don't know.
I think your thoughts are probably gonna be better than mine, which isn't that new.
I think that One of the things I immediately jumped to those questions about libertarianism, right?
Sort of theologically, Pentecostals and Charismatics have been the theological libertarians for a long time in the sense that They don't have as big of an institutional apparatus.
They have tended not to be as grounded in like historical forms of theology.
It's much more grounded in a kind of immediate sense of divine presence and communion with the divine and the emphasis on the Holy Spirit moving as it wants to and empowering people in different ways and sort of who are we to limit God and what God will do and therefore who are we to limit Individual Christians or what they say their experience is and I mean, I I don't know much about that connection but it's just occurring to me that that I think is sort of a piece of it.
It's almost like a At least formally, a kind of political parallel to their understanding of spirituality, right?
Just leave me alone and let me do my thing.
God will do what God wants to do.
And so when politicians come along and say, oh, hey, we're libertarians.
We believe that you should just be able to do what you want to do and the state shouldn't intervene, right?
None of which is what they actually believe, but that's what they say.
I think it's really appealing and enticing.
I think that could be a reason why you had kind of fertile ground for that.
Yeah, you know what, so I actually have a slightly different thought on this, Dan, is my experience has been Christian nationalism is rampant within those churches.
So I went with Catherine Stewart.
If any of you look up my interview with Catherine Stewart from a couple months ago, it's titled Inside the World of Christian Nationalism.
I went with Catherine to the Trump Hotel in D.C.
to a neo-apostolic reformation revival meeting, right?
So it was one of the most, if you've listened to that episode, it was one of the most bizarre nights of my life.
We're walking into this, like, gaudy, gold-plated Trump Hotel, which felt like being in the eye of Zoran, okay?
And then we go into this, like, room, and there's, like, people eating chili and, like, breadsticks, and everyone's, you know, Pentecostal or New Apostolic Reformation.
And we go in and we have this huge revival for three hours.
People are blowing horns.
It's the fifth night of Hanukkah.
There's menorahs everywhere.
And the Christian nationalism coming from that room was pungent.
I mean, it was just all about reclaiming God's land, linking that to Israel and Jerusalem.
And bringing it through.
If you remember when Trump launched his Evangelicals for Trump thing, it was at a new Apostolic Reformation church with a Latinx pastor, right?
So if you read Catherine Stewart's book, The Power Worshipper, she has this great chapter on a Southern California pastor named Jim Doman.
And Jim is somebody I used to work with.
And Jim is part of a group that is recruiting Latinx churches, Spanish-speaking churches, to essentially a Christian nationalist cause.
They're doing it through gender and sexuality and family issues.
So, do you want your children to go to school with gay people?
Do you want your children to be trans?
Are you afraid of that?
Okay, you should be with us.
Forget the fact that your Latinx church and our views on immigration and other things are more extreme to the right than any other group in the nation.
Just pay attention right now to the sex and the family and the gender stuff.
And my experience bringing all this together has been that the Christian nationalism Even extending to what we might consider like populations that would not be our most likely candidates to be Christian nationalists is emanating from those denominations.
If anyone wants to pursue this question further, read the work of André Gagné.
Who is at Concordia University in Quebec.
He's got a new book coming out, and he lives and breathes this stuff.
He is a former Pentecostal minister, and I trust no one more on those issues in the world than him.
We also just lost a man named Don Dayton, who was a renowned theologian in this tradition, and he wrote a book, he wrote several books on these issues that may be of interest to people.
So his name is Donald W. Dayton, and he was a one-of-a-kind guy.
He just died.
All right, two more questions.
Here we go.
Actually, one more question.
So this is from Daniel.
In the past, you mentioned non-churchgoing, self-identified evangelicals.
Can you expand on that?
It doesn't make sense to me.
All right, so Dan, how can somebody be a white evangelical but not go to church and not really even do anything Christian, like read the Bible or pray or whatever?
How is that possible?
It's a good question, and it's one that Isn't just one that, like, you know, the people sitting here ask and wonder about.
You actually see it, you know, I think in scholarship, where when we define religion, again, it goes, I think it goes about definitions and identity, right?
We tend to, or when social scientists study religion, for example, and they want to see how religious somebody is, they usually measure what we would call personal religiosity, right?
So they say, how often do they go to church?
Are they a member of a religious community?
How often do they pray?
How often do they read the Bible?
And so forth, and if the numbers, their scores on those things are low, they tend to say they have low levels of religiosity, right?
So if that's how you think about religion, then the idea of somebody being a Christian or self, you know, a really out and proud and loud, you know, evangelical Christian who doesn't do any of the stuff you tend to think Christians ought to do, you're like, well, that doesn't make sense.
My answer to that is that that definition of what religion is presumes that religion is essentially individual and private.
It's something that we do as individuals.
And it's essentially separate from other kinds of social activities, and that's a way of understanding religion that actually goes all the way back to the Enlightenment.
My answer to that would be, and this is a thing, a sort of drum we've been beating for a while now, is that if we think of religion not in those terms, but in terms of an identity as a social phenomenon, Then what matters, or the sense of someone's identity as Christian, has less to do with what they do personally.
And you ask them in person, they probably say, well, yeah, I should go to church more than I do, and I'm so tired on weekends.
It's the only day I'm off, you know, so I tend not to.
But being Christian is about more than that.
And that's where all these other things we talk about come in.
Being Christian is about being the right kind of American.
Being Christian is about having the right conservative political views.
Being Christian is about being anti-abortion.
Being Christian is about being anti-gay marriage, right?
And so if all of that, that kind of public-facing corporate sense that we have is also part of religious identity, then you can have somebody who has a very strong sense of religious identity, and I would say is religious in that sense, even if their levels of personal religiosity or personal piety even if their levels of personal religiosity or personal piety or whatever are low.
And so I think that's part of it, is that we have to kind of rethink how we tend to think of what religion and religious identity is, what makes somebody or qualifies somebody as being religious.
So I would just add that if you go back to Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead's book, Taking America Back for God, they talk about Christian nationalism.
And they ask people, right, they ask hundreds of people questions like, should we teach the Bible in public schools?
Yes.
Should there be prayer in public schools?
Yes.
Should there be a more intimate relationship between Christianity and the government?
Yes.
Was this country founded for and by Christians?
Yes.
Okay.
If you answer yes to those questions, you're a Christian Nationalist.
Just like Dan said, those questions have nothing to do with, did you go to church this weekend?
When's the last time you read the Bible?
When's the last time you prayed?
Who cares?
You're answering questions about Christian Nationalism, right?
You're identifying as a Christian Nationalist.
You're showing yourself to be a Christian Nationalist, okay?
Christian nationalism, if you read that book by Perry and Whitewood, they do such a great job of showing us that it's totally acceptable to say, well, I'm a Christian American, right?
And again, and Dan and I do this so often on this show, you say one thing as an umbrella so you can smuggle in all this other stuff, right?
So if I say, yeah, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian American, you got a problem with that, bro?
Right?
What you're probably saying is, I think that religious and racial minorities should know their place and stop trying to make it out like this nation was built for and by them.
I think people who have different understandings of the social order than I do should stop because this is supposed to be a country where straight people, white people, and Christian people, and native born people are sort of in power, They decide who sits at the table, and everybody else just needs to accept that.
You're allowed to be here.
We're not saying you have to leave.
You can be Buddhist or Muslim.
You can be, you know, from Honduras or from Thailand, whatever, okay?
Just, you need to know that you're here, and we'll tell you when you're allowed to speak, and you're allowed to get on stage, and allowed to talk, and all that, right?
So if you identify as a white evangelical or you answer questions in a way that Perry and Whitehead would call you a Christian nationalist, you're saying socially acceptable things.
I'm a Christian.
What's wrong with that?
Okay?
What you're smuggling in rhetorically and socially is xenophobia, racism, Homophobia, transphobia, so on and so forth, right?
And so, I think it's very possible for someone to say, I'm an evangelical, or I'm a Christian, and not have gone to church in six months, not have read the Bible in a year, and really have no idea what the Bible says.
You ask them about the Trinity, and they're like, I don't know what that is.
You know, you ask them about their soteriology, and it's like, whatever, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Because it's not about the theology, it's about the politics.
If you go back to the episode I did with Gerardo Marti, in the Orange Wave, from the Gold Rush to the Tea Party, he says at the end of our interview, Evangelicalism is a political movement, not a theological identity.
If you think about it that way, You can be a white evangelical and not have any theological commitments or church commitments while getting on board with this sort of movement that is unified through opposition to abortion, opposition to trans rights, opposition to gay marriage, opposition to immigration, hardcore stances on refugees, Claims to religious liberty in various ways, right?
And where did we get all those issues?
Where did we get all those?
Did those just come out of nowhere?
Are those just from the Bible?
No.
Go back to the episode of Dan Nelson.
That all came from the politicos and the big financiers who sort of, like, engineered all that.
They engineered all that.
They approached Jerry Falwell and all these other folks and said, You know, do you want to partner with us?
And all of a sudden we got something that looks like white evangelicalism that is more of a political movement rather than a sort of theological identity or a religious sort of identity.
I hope that makes sense.
I hope that makes sense a little bit.
I skipped a question if anyone wants to stick around.
There was a question up here that I forgot, and that question is, sorry, yes.
So on the Orange Wave, the question was, we've talked a lot about Southern California.
Laura wanted to know how did the sort of religious right grow in the South?
How did the South sort of become an epicenter for what we think about as the modern religious right?
So my answer is this.
If you look at Orange County and Southern California as I've traced it in the Orange Wave, Um, what was happening there was not unique or brand new in the world.
However, right, what came together in Orange County and Southern California was a confluence of politics.
So, in the very first episodes, I talk about, like, the John Birch Society and Goldwater.
So, you have this libertarian politics.
You have this patriotism and nationalism that comes in Orange County because of the defense industry, right?
So, everyone was, like, making their money building bombs.
They're, like, pretty into America.
They're pretty against communism.
Right?
So we have nationalism, and we have a sort of libertarian politics that takes hold in these places, right?
We have there a stunning white majority, like 90% of the people in Orange County in the 60s, 70s, and 80s are white, okay?
And so you put all that together, and then you add it with media empires, you add it to politicians who have national significance, like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, right?
You add all that together, okay, and all of a sudden what you get is something like the religious right created in a kind of test tube, and it provides the buttressing, it provides the sort of framework, the network, for the takeover of modern American Christianity by evangelicals.
Did those evangelicals exist in the South before that?
Yes.
Did those evangelicals exist in Georgia and Louisiana and Virginia?
Totally, okay?
But they didn't have the organization, they didn't have the money, they didn't necessarily have the media to pull it all together, right?
So what I'm doing in the Orange Wave is not saying that what happened in Orange County caused millions of people in the South to suddenly convert to evangelicalism.
What I'm saying is what happened in Orange County is a prism for understanding what happened nationally, and it includes money, media, politicians that sort of helped that take over, right?
That sort of fed the beast that we now know is the modern religious right.
I mean, if you think about the Republican Party in the mid-20th century, it's really easy to forget That the nominees for president from that party in the mid-20th century almost exclusively came from the Sunbelt or California, right?
So Barry Goldwater, 1964.
They nominated Nixon three times, right?
And then you get the Gipper and you get Ronald Reagan twice, okay?
So we have a very West Coast-centric kind of modern religious right plus Republican Party thing that happens.
And it ignites and it organizes already existing communities in the South that then feed into the beast that we now know today.
Anyway, Dan, do you want to add anything there?
Yeah, the biggest word is specifically to the South, I'm going to just add is race.
It's not that they're, you talked about being 90% white, you know, in places like California in the Sunbelt.
It's not that race wasn't a factor other places, but in the American South you had You know, the end of slavery and then the imposition of Jim Crow segregation and of course we all remember that at the time that was the Democrats, the Republicans were something different and so forth, but then you get a real fracturing among other things with like the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Movement and you have the first Southern Baptist pastor is Jimmy Carter who comes out in favor of all of those kinds of things.
You get this this really strong disaffection built into Southern conservative Christianity about segregation and racism and different things like that, then the Republican Party explicitly targets and exploits.
That's part of the Southern strategy of Nixon.
I forget the book, but his, I can't remember if it was his campaign manager or just Sort of political strategist figure has said in interviews, he says, you know, we knew that you couldn't criminalize being black anymore.
Of course, that's what Jim Crow segregation did, right?
It criminalized being black.
He said, so we talked about law and order.
We talked about a war on crime.
And we talked about those things.
Like, that's what we were doing.
And everybody who supported us knew that that's what we were doing.
That's what we were communicating.
It's what we were saying.
And so you've had that going on for a long time.
We've talked in the show about the thing that really spurred the religious right in a lot of ways, especially in the South, was not abortion.
It was the threat of the Carter administration to take away the tax-exempt status of segregated Christian colleges.
So it was just another layer.
And again, it's not that race hasn't played a role other places, but I think racism in the American South is just Somewhat of a different game than it has been in other regions.
So that's the other piece of it that I think is even sort of amplified even more if you're talking about the religious right in the South.
Because again, without the Southern strategy of Nixon, I don't think you get the religious right.
Without Paul Weyrich sort of targeting Christians, disaffected evangelicals, after Carter who feel like he failed to sort of protect white rights the way that they wanted him to and so forth, I don't think you get the religious right without those specific Yeah, I mean, if you go to my episode with Ed Nelson, right, we have Paul Weyrich, who's the architect of the religious right, and then we have Richard Vigery.
Richard Vigery comes directly from the tutelage of Billy James Hargis.
So, if you look up Billy James Hargis, he was a preacher and an evangelist.
He had a radio show.
He was an out-and-out segregationist, right?
He wrote a book that extolled segregation as God's plan for the world.
Those are the folks that are considered the architects of the religious right, and so it's been baked into the algorithm from the beginning.
What I've tried to make the case about in Orange County is that people think of California is this leftist collectivist place, right?
They think of the Bay Area in the 60s and the coalitions among the Black Panthers and different Latinx groups and Asian American groups, etc.
What they don't think of is Orange County as a petri dish, right?
For a conservative, racist, libertarian, xenophobic takeover of the Republican Party that we are now seeing play out before us every day.
It's 621 West Coast time.
I know some of you need to go.
We're so thankful for you being here.
I'm going to be, I'm going to stick around for nine more minutes, so if anyone wants to ask questions over chat or anything or just pipe in about anything we've discussed, please do.
If you need to dip out, that's no problem and we're just, we're really thankful for all of your support and for being here and for your interest in the show.
Please be in touch.
Please write to us, Facebook, email, Twitter.
I know for me that the orange wave is eating me alive at the moment and so if I if I take a week or so to get back to you, it's just because I'm probably up here in this office trying to find the right music at 2 30 a.m.
and Feeling inept at that task.
So anyway More thoughts before we go.
I'll just check the chat here and see what folks said So Daniel just made a great point I'll just I want to put this on the record for the audio If California's Trump voters were their own state, they would be the ninth largest voting state in the nation, right?
So that's just a great testament to that point.
And Daniel, thank you for that.
That's really insightful and helpful.
I mean, it is true.
California is many nations within one state.
That's how I like to think about it.
And you can go from where I live in San Jose, which is one of the most diverse places in the country.
And you can go to Orange County, which is not.
You can go to Ventura County, which is not.
And then you can go up to A place like Oakland, right?
Which will look completely different than other places.
So, anyway.
Other questions or comments before we go?
So, Tori's asking if we are following the Rene Bach story, and I will admit that I am not.
So, Dan, if you want to jump in, or Tori, if you want to tell us about that, please.
Totally, totally open to hearing more.
Yeah, I don't know much about it.
She was the missionary where she claimed, yeah, you probably know more about it than I do.
I saw a couple headlines but I don't know much about it.
It's absolutely tragic.
She's like a missionary who opened a clinic for children in Africa and basically 150 of them ended up dying and it's like, yeah, I'm just wondering if you guys are like following that at all or if there would be an episode about just missionaries in general coming up or anything like that.
We really, what we really need is, and we do not have, and what we need is an episode on the deleterious effects, to put it mildly, of short-term evangelical missions.
We really have not talked about that enough, but the classic picture of the evangelical teenager, white American evangelical teenager, with a group of You know, black children in an African village, the deleterious, toxic, as you just mentioned there, Tori, fatal effects of missionaries doing things that lead to harm for themselves and for many other people.
So that's a trope that we definitely need to get to and hopefully in the fall, after the orange wave, we can kind of incorporate more of that.
But that's a great point, yeah.
I think, just to add to that, I think the The kind of at-home vision of that is the mental health, like the pastor is a mental health provider.
I think it's all sort of a constellation of different kinds of things.
It often takes the form, I think, overseas of You know, I don't know, building structures that you're not qualified to build or providing medical care you're not qualified to give.
But I think immediately, too, of all the pastors who tell their, you know, depressed congregants that they need to pray more or have more faith or that they need to stop taking their meds or, you know, whatever.
I think it's all part of the same kind of complex phenomenon.
And I think Brad's right.
It's something we should we should take a look at.
Yeah.
Bob just made the point that it's Worth bringing up to everybody that Orange County's changed, so Orange County is quite diverse these days, and I've mentioned that on the Orange Wave, if you've been listening several times, that there's a wave of congressional races that just went Democrat in Orange County.
In 2018, when I go back to where I grew up, I'm always disoriented because it is a way more diverse place than it was when I was growing up there.
I said on the other day in an episode that there's a Japanese market like six minutes from where the house I grew up in, which is it's like Astounding.
I mean, every time I go in there, I'm like, we used to get up at 8 a.m.
to drive with Dad to, like, Little Tokyo so we could buy, you know, all kinds of, like, Japanese foodstuffs, and here it is six minutes from home.
Like, man, do you know how happy nine-year-old Brad would have been not to get up and have to drive to, like, Little Tokyo or Gardena to pick up, you know, Seaweed seasoning, you know, that would have been when you're nine.
That's just not a priority But anyway, so it is definitely way more diverse than it used to be in a different place.
So Alright a couple other thoughts here Assuming Trump loses in 2020.
Where do you see evangelicals in America's political societal societal life going forward?
So this is a great question.
It comes from Daniel Daniel.
I Was talking about this with a law professor today and I think we are going to see people try to forge an evangelicalism that looks more like the 19th century evangelicalism.
There's going to be a push for more emphasis on social justice, a hard look at racism, and a hard look at what evangelicals became in the Republican Party and in Trump's Republican Party.
What we're also going to see is what we saw with Bush.
A lot of folks being like, yeah, never supported him anyway.
I knew this was a bad idea.
Yeah.
Glad we're done with that.
Everyone else too, right?
Good.
I mean, there's going to be a lot of like, Men in black waving the thing like, okay, forget that I was the one who put this dude in the office.
Forget that my community and my people were the ones that were like tooth and nail behind him.
So we're going to get that.
I do think we're going to try to see some poke their head to a new evangelical reality of social justice.
Reckoning with racism, reckoning with perhaps some of the issues surrounding sexuality and gender that so far evangelicals have been resistant to.
Now, will that work?
Will that flower?
Will that grow?
I don't know.
People have tried it before, and it has not.
The money and the influence goes elsewhere.
Every time there's an emerging church, every time there's a new, young, hip evangelical leader who's like, we're gonna do it different now.
We're the generation that's gonna like, not be that evangelicalism that your parents, you know, grew up with.
The money, the influence, it all gets sucked away from them, and they're exiled, and then they exist in these no-man's lands, and we all know the story.
So, anyway, Dan, I don't know if you have thoughts on this, but...
Yeah, I do.
I think there will be evangelicals who attempt that reckoning, but I don't think it'll work.
So I basically think that the percentage of the U.S.
population that sort of fits under that category of evangelical will continue to shrink.
These are like, I guess, bold predictions that could be wrong, but for decades that number was going up and it's now shrinking.
I think that To put it in crass terms, the support for Trump has just, like, fatally damaged the evangelical brand, I think, for anybody else.
I think there will be people who try to bring those movements about, but I think that there'll be such—I use the example, the illustration, or the metaphor of the supernova all the time, this kind of, like, before the star dies, this big kind of explosive force.
I think those who do identify as evangelical will become even more politically conservative and more nationalistic as their social influence
Decreases and I think that'll force any of those moderating voices out So far beyond 2020 to 2030 2040, you know, I think that I think white American evangelicalism is in the death spiral I think it'll take a long time till it may never completely go away But I think it is just going to kind of continue to diminish and I I personally think it's beyond reforming I don't think that I think as Brad says there will be people who ask those questions and want to have that reckoning and
And they'll just be pushed out of the movement and I think we already see that with you know Millennials leaving the church and different things like that.
So that's that's my sort of prediction.
I think Robert Jones has said too that he thinks that like in 2020, sorry 2024, is probably the first election where you're really going to see the demographic damages to the Republican Party perhaps become insurmountable, right?
That the demographic shifts will be enough that this kind of minoritarian authoritarian model that the Republicans have adopted won't be effective anymore.
So I think we see that.
I think evangelicalism become a smaller percentage of the U.S.
population, but I actually think it will kind of retrench and become sort of even scarier in a lot of ways.
Well, and Julie brought up in the chat that, you know, those who try that reform are just usually defined out of the movement.
And that's, you know, that's true.
And we've seen it, you know, we've seen it happen.
We've also mentioned here, and this will happen again, right?
If Trump is voted out, there will be that entrenchment of evangelicals who will play the martyr card and the victim card.
I mean, they are experts at this, right?
They are trained for centuries in this art of, you know, being the victim.
I mean, the Falkirk Center is named after William Wallace, the freedom fighter from Scotland, fighting the big bad king from England.
I mean, you know, there's tried and true tactics for them.
However, some of you are more pessimistic about this.
I'll just say, The demographic numbers do not look good, right?
Evangelicals are very old as a group.
They're very old.
They're graying and their kids are not necessarily buying into the program.
People are leaving.
And so, you know, if you talk to people like Ryan Burge or Robert Jones, they'll tell you the amount of white evangelicals in this country is probably something like 15%.
It's not 25.
It's not 30.
It's not 35, even though it feels like it.
And so what does that mean?
It means who knows.
I don't think any of us knows what's going to happen in this election.
We're living through an incredibly extraordinary time.
And anyway, those are just some thoughts.
All right.
Last thing here.
Let's see.
No new questions in the chat.
So I know some of you need to go to bed.
Some of you need to help kids get ready for bed.
Some of you need to eat dinner and all that.
So I want to say for the record, I put on this shirt that has a collar and buttons.
And I have not really.
Thank you, Dan.
I did, yeah.
I don't know if I've done that since the pandemic started, so that is how much I just am so flattered by your support.
The real question is whether or not you're wearing pants right now.
I am wearing cut-off shorts that no one is going to see, but I did shave.
So anyway, it was a big rehearsal today before the live chat.
Anyway, I hope it went okay.
Thank you so much for being here.
We're so grateful for y'all.
We started this podcast November 2018, and we didn't know if anyone would listen.
We weren't sure what we were doing, and we just got to this place where we're just I'm flattered that people listen.
We regularly compete, if you look at the charts, with the New York Times and the Federalist and Fox News and those people.
And they have, I'm sure, met many more competent people picking their music and doing their editing than me.
So we're just really thankful for y'all.
So please be in touch.
Please reach out.
You know, Tori and others have given us great topics here that we need to cover in terms of future episodes.
