Trump's COVID Diagnosis, the ACB "Celebration of Life," and White Evangelical Racism with Prof. Anthea Butler
Brad speaks to Professor Anthea Butler, a captain in the Biden campaign's "Catholics for Biden" initiative, and chair of the Religious Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. They discuss the details of Trump's COVID diagnosis and how his recklessness is fueled by four things:
Prosperity Gospel positive thinking,
racism,
capitalism,
hypermasculinity.
These themes ground a conversation that ranges from Trump's lack of empathy for Americans, especially BIPOC, who have contracted the virus, his supporters' call for empathy after telling the nation that it was okay if "grandma dies" to save the economy, the conservative Evangelicals and Catholics who held a superspreader prayer rally at the Lincoln Memorial, and the belief that whiteness is a shield against the iniquities that plague other people.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
And I am, if you listen to this show, you know that every week I'm thrilled because I get to have a conversation with a smart, insightful person.
And I've usually read their book or something like that.
Today, I don't know about the words that one could have to express how I feel about our guest today.
Somebody who's been an inspiration for public scholarship in the humanities for a long time, particularly in religious studies.
And someone who's fearless, insightful, and intrepid, and so that is Dr. Anthea Butler.
So, Anthea, thank you for being here.
Oh wow, thank you.
That kind of introduction, I mean, that's a high bar!
Well, you're gonna fill it, because you're you, and that's how it works.
But let me tell folks about you.
Dr. Anthea Butler is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Sought-after commentator on the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, History Channel, PBS, basically everywhere.
Is somebody who writes regularly on race, religion, politics, pop culture for NBC, Religion News Service, The Washington Post, CNN, and other places.
Her books include Women in the Church of God and Christ, Making a Sanctified World, which is out by UNC Press.
And has a very exciting couple of new projects, one that is directly related to our show, and that is White Evangelical Racism, the Politics of Morality in America.
You can already pre-order that on Amazon.
It'll be out in March, and that is also out with UNC Press, and so you need to check that out and put that at the top of your list.
Anthea, let me just say this.
You are interim chair of your department.
A couple weeks ago, you organized an international scholar strike.
You're writing two books.
Every time I turn on the television or read the paper, you got a new op-ed.
A lot of folks are wondering, when was the last time that you slept?
Was that?
Last night.
Okay, alright, good.
I didn't get in bed until like one o'clock in the morning.
I was up pretty early this morning.
I do sleep.
I enjoy sleep.
I do nap because I used to not take naps when I was a kid and now I pay forward by taking naps.
Okay.
But yeah, I got a lot going on.
I don't know if I finish it all right, but yeah, I get it.
I got a lot going on.
Well, we were originally going to talk about, and I think we still will, but you are one of the captains in the newly launched Catholics for Biden initiative.
There's 36 captains.
You're one of them alongside Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, Donna Brazile, Samantha Power, who used to be the U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N.
So, we'll probably come back to that.
It's important, but we need to talk about what's happening right now as we speak, and that is the fact that over the weekend we found out that Trump has COVID, that he came down with COVID last week.
The timeline is a little bit murky, but I think we can probably start by talking about what some folks are calling the Red Wedding.
or the Rose Garden, whatever you call it, the gathering slash party slash whatever at the White House last week celebrating the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett seems to have been a super spreader event.
She herself had COVID.
She was not masking and seemingly did not understand herself to be, you know, contagious.
It seems as if Trump knew he had COVID sometime early last week.
People are trying to figure this out.
So, Anthea, let me just ask you about your initial thoughts on what, I mean, this avalanche of news.
Trump sent out photos this weekend of him signing blank pieces of paper that were supposed to have been hours apart.
We now know they were 10 minutes apart.
He took a joyride in a Secret Service car yesterday that no doubt endangered some of his Secret Service bodyguards.
People universally slammed it on social media as a sad show of faux masculinity.
So let me just open with all of that.
What do you think?
What's on your mind?
We only have a couple minutes here, so... I know, I only have a couple minutes, so there's a lot on my mind, but let me just first say for your listeners, since this is straight white American Jesus, and some of them will respond to this, this is much more than any Thief in the Night or Left Behind movie that could have ever possibly predicted, okay?
Like, this thing has jumped the shark, like, so big, that I don't even... I mean, how are we gonna even, like, make a movie about this, like, another 15 or 20 years from now?
I don't know.
So let's start with the beginning.
Let's start with the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to be the next Supreme Court Justice.
I think that we had to tell the week before when Trump gave a whole list of what he thought would be potential third party candidates, third people that he would put up for it to be the Supreme Court justice.
And they probably already knew she was sick.
So of course, he always tips his hand.
And this will become apparent later on.
So in the passing of RBG, and then this outcry of mourning that everybody had, of course, You know, she dies on, which all of this has a religious tint to it, which is why I'm going through this narrative of, you know, she passes away on Yom Kippur.
That means she's a righteous person.
I'm not going to try to pronounce the Hebrew because everybody knows I'm from Texas and I'm going to botch it up anyway.
And then we have this immediate appointment of Amy Coney Barrett and this party in the Rose Garden.
Now, you know, the administration has flaunted all of the COVID-19 protocols and regulations, but there has been a theme throughout this, and the theme has been basically this.
This is going to go away.
We shouldn't worry about it.
You don't really need to wear a mask.
A mask is about, you know, your freedom, and you shouldn't be trammeled, and you shouldn't have to wear a mask.
You should also believe everything that Trump has said about it's going away, instead of believing what he told Bob Woodward, that, you know, I really wanted to downplay it and everything else.
And then they do the worst thing of all.
They have this big, giant, neat thing in the Rose Garden, which, by the way, was redesigned to look like a mausoleum slash funeral, you know, like graveside place, right?
And they put all these chairs in, And they don't socially distance people.
You test them beforehand and you tell them they can take off a mask if they're negative.
But we all know that you can be negative at some points during this disease and then, you know, positive at other points, right?
But he puts everybody together.
And so you have a variety of luminaries there from politicians and people who work in the administration to religious people.
And now we have an outbreak of COVID.
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