S1.Ep.1 (Re-Release): Why Straight White American Jesus?
After many requests, we begin the re-release of Season 1! On this first episode Brad and Dan introduce themselves and tell their stories of being evangelical youth group kids, ministers, and seminarians, and then leaving the movement. They also explain why it was necessary to start Straight White American Jesus. This is our origin story. Take a listen!
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I am officially running for President of the United States.
The American dream is dead.
Please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
We're going to win more.
Hello!
Welcome to the very first episode of Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am the Associate Professor of Religion at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.
And I am here with Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought and Chair in the Department of Liberal Studies at Landmark College in Southern Vermont.
So, you might be wondering, what is Straight White American Jesus?
What are we doing here?
What is this podcast about?
Dan and I have been talking about this for quite some time.
We're professors of religion.
When you're a professor of religion and you sit next to anyone on a plane or go to a barbecue, people want to ask you questions, right, about the meaning of life and all kinds of things.
Well, over the last two years, since Donald Trump has been elected, A lot of the questions from friends and family and colleagues have been, how did Donald Trump get elected?
And more specifically, how did he get the support of white conservative Christians who basically helped usher him into the White House?
And as we've been talking about this, we've kind of become convinced that even if you are just sort of casually interested in these things, you really can't get your head around politics, culture, even economics, without running into terms like the religious right, evangelicals, conservative Christians, and more colloquially, born-again types or Jesus freaks, whatever words you might hear.
Certainly in the age of Trump, you can't begin to answer the question of how this man became president without running into the fact that 81% of white evangelicals voted for him.
Now that's a higher percentage than voted for George W. Bush.
It's a higher percentage than voted for John McCain or Mitt Romney.
So how did that happen?
How did these conservative religious voters help usher a thrice-married, documented adulterer, soft-core pornographer, foul-mouthed, makes fun of disabled reporters, and says he's never asked God for forgiveness bully into the White House?
How did that happen?
And why did they vote for him in numbers higher than a well-documented and seemingly very sincere evangelical like George W. Bush?
We, myself and Dan, are both ex-evangelicals and we are both ex-evangelical ministers.
We're now professors of religion.
We have lived this stuff.
We now read about it, discuss it, teach about it, and write on it.
We are here to talk about who evangelicals are and how they relate to politics, culture, economics, etc.
We want to cast an informed but critical perspective on evangelical subculture and most importantly its relationship to the political sphere.
Our bet is that you can't understand any hot-button issue in politics and culture.
We're talking about race, sex, gender, gender identity, immigration, refugees, war, international relations, guns, family dynamics, nationalism, populism, the list goes on, without a basic grasp of the evangelical position.
White evangelicals are Trump's most loyal and ardent religious supporters.
As of today, they're the only religious group of which a majority still support Trump's presidency.
In short, if you want to understand this troubling period in the American experiment, you have to understand white evangelicals.
So here's what we want to do.
We want to answer questions that real people ask.
About this subculture and about this voting bloc.
We've both lived this life.
We both now teach on these issues.
We are sort of outsider and insider at the same time.
Now that doesn't mean we ourselves don't have different perspectives or that we can possibly represent all evangelical people or scholarly perspectives on these things.
Our goal is to provide both a personal and critical view.
As you'll learn, neither of us are anti-religion.
Maybe like Richard Dawkins or the New Atheist.
Nor are we here to defend evangelicalism.
We don't want to make fun of anyone.
We simply want to examine the issues in order to help others understand them more clearly.
You might be a secular person in New York City who doesn't understand how this religious group plays such a big role in American politics.
You might be a Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox person who doesn't understand how your fellow Christians arrived at their political views.
You might be somebody who identifies as a person of color and an evangelical who can't understand why people who approach the Bible and faith in similar ways to you can come to such different conclusions.
You might be listening from Canada Or the UK would be wondering how a group of ardent and vehement religious people helped put Trump in the White House.
You might just be someone interested in politics who wants a better view of its contemporary religious dynamics.
Whoever you are, we are here to help explain why a straight, white, American Jesus may be the most important political figure of our time.
So later on in the podcast, on this very first episode, we want to sort of define evangelicalism.
And you might be wondering, well, how are evangelicals different than other Protestants?
And what does evangelical even mean?
What's the history of that term?
We're going to get into that.
Before we do that, though, we want to just provide a kind of brief intros about who we are and how we kind of arrived where we are today.
And so I'm going to ask my co-host, Dan, some personal questions.
First, how did you become an evangelical, Dan?
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