In an interview from 2018, Brad and Dan talk to Dr. Glenn Bracey of Villanova University about his experiences in White churches as a Black man. Dr. Bracey unpacks racialized dimensions of the Evangelical culture that shed light on what's happened during the the last four years--and even the last few weeks. His firsthand account and researcher's sensibilities make for a compelling interview on the troubling dynamics of race and White supremacy in contemporary American Evangelicalism.
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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 gonna win more!
Okay, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, Associate Professor at Skidmore College.
And I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thoughts at Landmark College.
And we're recording today, as usual, up here in Saratoga Springs, New York, at Skidmore.
And today we're talking about the issues of race, racism, and religion.
And we're going to talk to Dr. Glenn Bracey a little later on.
Dr. Bracey's from Villanova University, and we'll have our interview with him in just a minute.
Before I go there, you know, Dan, we're going to talk about a lot of sort of highly charged categories and things that are maybe not as familiar to many people.
So when we talk about race, when we talk about whiteness or these kind of categories, what's going on?
Yeah, so we're going to let Glenn sort of carry the big workload here, because he does a fantastic job on this.
But we do want to just sort of set the ground a little bit.
And one of the themes that's going to come up, and people often bring this, is they'll say, well, race isn't real, right?
And in a certain sense, that's true.
There is no objective basis for racial identity.
Scientific theories of race have been widely discredited.
Notions of sort of cultural notions of race as if cultures are these kind of closed off entities that don't influence each other.
So there's a sense in which when people talk about race, there's nothing objective sort of out there in the world that's simply being named.
But that doesn't make race unreal, right?
It has a social reality.
And the way that race takes shape is precisely in the way in which It impacts, in some cases, our sense of self, our own personal identity, but I think even more significantly, the way that identity is ascribed to us, right?
And those kinds of categories impact the distribution of social power and social goods, the sort of real-life possibilities that are open to us.
And so that's part of what is going to be sort of cutting through this, is the way that race is a socially constructed category, but that doesn't make it in some sense.
It's not ephemeral or false.
And one of the things, you know, I often talk about in my classes is, you know, students will say, well, race is one thing, but when people are religious, shouldn't their religious identity, and especially their Christian identity that says, you know, that all people are loved by God and created equal in his eyes, etc.
I mean, shouldn't those things really supersede any racial issues, racial politics that might be going on in their communities or in the United States?
And, And, you know, again, we're going to get into that a little later, but I think Dan and I have both had experiences in our respective churches and our respective ministries that kind of bring home the fact that it's a lot more complicated than that.
I mean, Dan, you were telling me earlier about an ex-pastor of yours who was saying something to the congregation that, you know... Yeah, and this is the kind of thing that was Back in the 90s, and this is a church in rural Arkansas, and he made a comment about how, you know, people in that congregation might be surprised to know that there would be black people in heaven.
And the thing about that is that that was this kind of edgy, almost progressive thing for him to say, that heaven, I guess, wouldn't be segregated.
Or there was one mixed-race African-American, Caucasian-American couple in our church, And that was this really big deal, and that's the telling point, right?
More than the comment itself is that it was so shocking to people in that congregation.
So, religion doesn't just erase these kinds of issues.
These issues color what we mean by these terms.
Well, especially because there's some recent data from PRRI, and the data shows some, I think, telling things.
One, This is data from just a couple years ago, fully 8 out of 10.
So 8 out of 10 white evangelicals have fully segregated social networks, meaning their social networks are filled with only other white folks.
Two, in response to questions about recent killings of African Americans by police, White evangelicals were the group least likely to say that those killings reflected a larger pattern of police brutality and racism in this country.
And so clearly something's going on.
Clearly, you know, there's a sort of theme running throughout here.
And this all follows up on our last episode and our interview with Randall Ballmer, where we examined the real origins of the religious right.
And if you haven't listened to that yet, I would say stop right now and go back because that is a real historical perspective on the sort of issues of segregation, desegregation, race, and racism that were really the impetus for the formation of what we now know as the religious right.
So I think we'll stop there and turn to our conversation with Glenn Bracey.
We are very pleased to be speaking right now with Dr. Glenn Bracey, who is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Villanova University, and we're going to be talking with him about some issues related to American evangelicalism and race and racial identity.
And so I want to begin, Professor Bracey, by just welcoming you.
And you are a sociologist by training.
You specialize in issues related to race, religion, and politics.
Can you tell us a little more about that?
What brought you to those issues?
What are the interests that you have in your scholarship and your teaching?
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