Ken Kemp is not the person you'd expect to be leading small groups and table talks helping White folks understand the histories of racism and strategies to combat it. He's a White male Boomer. Someone born into evangelical culture. A guy who went through seminary and was almost ordained twice. But late in life he had an awakening through visits to India, South Africa, and via friendships and events that woke him up to the racialized dimensions of White Evangelicalism. He shares his story with Brad and talks about how other White people can do the work to become anti-racist.
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Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
And it's been a couple of weeks.
We had last week off just due to grading and AAR and some other things that were going on.
And I'm back this week with an interview with my friend Ken Kemp.
Ken is the host of the Beached White Male podcast and has a great story to share with us.
Before we get to that, I just want to make an announcement about what's coming up for our podcast.
We are going to go on hiatus for new interview episodes until February.
In place of those new episodes, I'm going to be re-releasing our Season 1 slate of shows.
Many of you have reached out about these shows and wondering where you could find them.
Well, in response, I wanted to re-release them.
We have a bunch of great content, including some of our most popular episodes.
An episode titled 81% WTF, which It helps to explain why 81% of evangelicals voted for Trump.
It's really where we started with the show.
We also have an interview with Randall Balmer on the history of the religious right, interviews with people like Catherine Stewart on Christian nationalism, and so on and so forth.
So starting next week on Tuesdays, please look out for those episodes to drop.
And if you're new to our show and you're wondering, hey, I love your content, I'm not sure where to start, this would be a great place to get going.
If you joined us in the last couple of months and you want to know where our show originated, you want to hear more about Dan and I's story, and you just want to sort of get to the core of why we started this show, well, these episodes are really for you.
We'll be back in February with our interview schedule and with some updates about some new series and new docuseries that we are going to be developing.
And we will be continuing, however, on Fridays with our weekly roundup.
So you won't be hearing anything new midweek, but on Fridays Dan and I will be here with the weekly roundup.
With that said, I want to turn to my conversation with Ken Kemp.
Ken, like me, is from Orange County, California.
At least for most of his life.
Ken has been a pastor, a business person, an author, a speaker, a blogger.
He's an amateur philosopher, all those things.
The reason I wanted to have Ken on our show is this.
Ken is a boomer.
If you go to his website or listen to his show, he's a white male boomer.
He's a person who was part of the evangelical subculture, the white evangelical subculture, for most of his life.
He was born in Chicago.
He was raised in and around the Moody Church and the Moody Bible Institute.
He came to California as part of the Orange Wave, if you're familiar with my series.
He was definitely part of the Orange Wave and eventually found his way to Bible college and pastoral training.
Well, late in life, in retirement, Ken had kind of an awakening, what I call his second great awakening.
And he became very aware of the sort of racialized dynamics of white evangelical culture.
He'd become very aware of its restrictive politics.
And it led him on a journey where he is now doing what I call white people's work.
He is Training other white folks through curricula based on history and racial justice.
And he's doing the kinds of work that I think many of us should consider.
Going through events, lineages, covered over and hidden histories, and dissecting events that most folks don't hear when they're going up in school.
And are able to ignore as adults.
So Ken in his retirement is now dedicated himself to this work and I think it's really important.
I really love his story and I really love how he arrived at this place in his life.
And so now I want to turn to our conversation.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
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