Weekly Roundup: 9/11, COVID, and the Promises and Perils of Civil Religion
Brad and Dan begin by discussing how 9/11 is an event marked by acts of civil religion--ceremonies, rituals, and symbols that enable the nation to remember and mourn. Brad asks why we haven't had such things implemented to help grieve the loss of the 200,000 Americans who have died of COVID. Dan breaks down the explosive recordings/material in the new book from Bob Woodward--including Trump's recognition of its deadly airborne transmission in February. They finish with a detailed discussion of how Trump has slipped with White Evangelicals and Catholics, how Biden has gained ground with those groups, and if there will be some real payoff there for the Democrats. Biden has crafted his message to these groups through his national director for faith outreach--who is an ex-evangelical. It's a complicated debate that includes issues like abortion, Christian nationalism, and religious liberty.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host, I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
How are you, Brad, staying unburned?
Trying, honestly, Dan.
It's been a hard week, and I'll talk more about that in a minute.
How are you?
You are one of several friends in my life who has told me this week That you have a PhD, you've learned several languages, you've had to write a dissertation, and you're a grown-up who's faced a lot of things.
And in all seriousness, no jokes here, helping your kids with online school has maybe been one of the most stressful things you've had in however many years.
I mean, you're not the only friend telling me that, and it seems like that's pretty true for a lot of folks right now.
It has been.
It's been really hard.
It's fair warning if like there are any glitches in this.
You know, we got like four people at the house all doing video calls at the same time, which is just a lot of a lot of bandwidth, but psychologically a lot of bandwidth dealing with this.
And you know, I'm very acutely aware that I'm still fortunate enough that I'm able to work primarily remotely right now.
My partner works from, she has a home office, she's a real estate agent.
So, we have an easier time right now than a lot of working parents do.
So, yeah, so just shouts out to everybody who's wrestling with that and trying to figure out multiple platforms.
You and I do this on Zoom.
The kids are using Google.
My institution uses Microsoft.
So, you know, I feel like we're all, none of us got into this to have to figure out what to do when like somebody's invitation link to something doesn't work or Those sites that for whatever reason I don't understand still insist on generating new links like for every time, or people who don't set up recurring meetings so everyone is a different link, all of that stuff.
Anyway, it's trivial but you get enough trivialities and it just it just eats up a lot of your attention and it Yeah, we all know this.
Yeah, no, it's genuinely a crisis.
I mean, as you said, a lot of working parents right now just struggling.
I mean, a shout out to Kelly J. Baker, who's been on our show in the past, who's the editor at Women in Higher Ed and has a great piece about how Women are really suffering because they are looked to to be the primary caregivers and kids are at home trying to do school and it's just impossible for them to do, for many moms, mothers to do work and so all of that to say we recognize that.
Dan, you asked about the fires.
I just wanted to take a minute and talk about that.
We left our house That we're staying in it here in the Bay Area for 12 days because of the fires.
We came back and immediately there was a heat wave and that heat wave led to more fires.
And we're now in a situation, so I was definitely part of the group of folks who experienced the orange sky the other day.
I mean it really did feel like we were living in Mars.
So I just wanted to give some numbers.
We have 471,000 acres with the August Complex Fire.
That's just about two and a half hours north of the Bay Area.
It's now the biggest fire in California's history.
If it were a city, it would be the third biggest in the U.S.
So if you can imagine the entire city limits of Chicago on fire, that's just one of the fires.
And the four biggest fires in California history have happened in the last two years.
Three of them are burning right now, and two of them are why we left when we did.
Three million acres have burned this year, and this has all been compiled nicely by Susie Nielsen on Twitter.
is also in big-time threat.
The Salem area is really problematic and there's a bunch of fires that are merging.
There's a chance that Portland may be evacuated, friends, so think about that.
Portland is not as big as New York City, but Portland is a major U.S.
metro area, period.
One of the frustrating things for me last night, Dan, I'm not gonna lie, I had a hard time sleeping last night, was Trump couldn't shut up about Portland two weeks ago, about how it was burning.
Well, it's literally burning now.
And he has not called the governor back.
He has not showed up to help.
He has no interest, seemingly, in helping Portland now.
That there's a possibility it will have to evacuate in the near future.
Seems to have no interest in the West Coast at all.
Folks, if you can imagine fires from Virginia to Vermont, that's kind of what we have right now.
So anyway, Dan, just wanted to say that.
It is a big deal.
It really does feel It just feels constricting on every level.
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