Weekly Roundup: American Insurrection and Beth Moore's Anti-Christian Nationalism
On the last Weekly Roundup of the year, Brad and Dan discuss: 1) the myth of the stolen election and how it has gained legitimacy through support from GOP leaders 2) comparing it to the lasting nature of the Birther controversy 3) examining the consequences of the myth, including the radicalization of a generation of White Americans, calls for implementing the Insurrection Act, and the development of a new Lost Cause (what Brad calls the Lost Pause).
We finish the episode by examining Beth Moore's call for Evangelicals to back away from Trumpism and Christian nationalism.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at University of California, Santa Barbara.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I'm here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Brad, it's good to see you over there in Balmy, California, where you probably didn't just get a foot of snow.
I was gonna say, my friends and colleagues in Saratoga Springs got about 34 inches of snow the other night.
What did you get?
We got about a foot here, so it wasn't so bad.
Although, for everybody out there, I'm a dork who likes the snow.
My old stomping grounds around interior New York State Some of those areas got up to four feet.
Yeah.
No, I'll be thinking of those folks and you, Dan, when I go surfing later today.
But I also remember when you moved to Saratoga Springs, you're quite an excellent winter snow driver, as I remember you talking.
You took a duck to molasses in driving in the winter snow.
All right, moving on to our first topic.
So good, good one, Dan.
Well, this is probably going to be, barring any emergency sort of events and, you know, need to jump on real quick, probably going to be our last show of the year, a week from today's Christmas Day and then New Year's Eve.
And so we're going to call this our last one of 2020.
We did not have a show last week, Dan, so it all feels like there's a lot going on today in terms of things we want to cover and things we want to make sure and talk about.
So, first off, let me just make a couple announcements.
We are going to be posting.
So you're thinking, hey, no more weekly roundups for two weeks.
What's going to happen?
I have a straight white American Jesus shaped hole in my heart.
What am I going to do?
I'm going to be re-releasing season one starting on Tuesday.
So if you're new to our show, if you joined in the last six months, started listening, and you're like, hey, where did this thing start?
I'd love to know like what Brad and Dan's stories are.
I'd love to know what kind of kicked off this whole thing.
I want to know the origin story.
Tune in.
We're gonna have our first seven episodes.
We have great interviews in those episodes with people like Randall Ballmer and Catherine Stewart.
So be on the lookout for that.
We'll be back in early January with weekly roundups and then we'll be back in February with new content midweek in terms of interviews and docuseries and stuff like that.
All right?
So Dan, Last show of the year, and it's going to be no more cheery than the rest of 2020, I would say, unfortunately, but important things to talk about.
I was just going to say, our last show of the year, barring a coup on January 6th, which is unfortunately a real theme we'll get to here in a few minutes, in MAGA Land.
Or, I mean, if you remember a year ago, we had the whole Christianity Today editorial that was a sort of emergency pod situation.
So if things like this happen, we will definitely jump back on the mics.
But for now, I think this is our last broadcast until early January.
So let's start with this, Dan.
We continue to have The myth in our ether that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
And we're going to get into some of the details of this.
I know that some of you listening are like, I'm tired of that.
I'm tired of hearing about it.
But I do think from a scholar of religion perspective, there's some things we really need to kind of flesh out and understand the kind of ripple effects of what's happening here.
It's easy to imagine people just being sore losers.
Trump lost, they voted for him.
They don't want to accept that, so now they're out here pretending that there's this sort of stolen election situation.
Dan, I'm here to say, and I think you would agree with me, that's not the case.
This is not a case where people are pretending.
This is not a parade.
This is a genuine, held set of beliefs.
I think we need to use this to understand the future of this sort of Biden presidency and what's next for our country.
And here's my pitch, okay?
and who you listen to, all right?
Dan, I think we need to use this to understand the future of the sort of Biden presidency and what's next for our country.
And here's my pitch, okay?
My pitch is this, is like Obama won in 2008.
And I think a lot of folks, and again, we can relitigate the Obama presidency another But I think an effect that the Obama presidency had on a lot of people was relief, hope, and complacency.
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