Brad talks about:
Christian nationalism and Bruce Springsteen's Meet in the Middle ad
Tom Brady's friendship with Donald Trump and White Privilege
Tom Brady and Colin Kapernick: The Center and the Margin
The Kansas City Football Team's name as the chef's kiss to all of this
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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, faculty in religion at Skidmore College, And today, in lieu of an interview, I wanted to just provide some reflections on the Super Bowl.
Did this last year, talked about purity culture and some of the criticisms that were leveled at Shakira and J-Lo.
This year, I want to talk about nothing, as you can expect, nothing more than Christian nationalism and How it was on display yesterday.
So let's start with Bruce Springsteen's ad about meeting in the middle.
If you haven't seen it yet, go YouTube it.
It's a long ad.
It's two minutes.
And in this, the boss talks about how it's been hard for Americans to meet in the middle lately, that we have been divided.
We have found ourselves not together.
And in order to sort of highlight how it might be possible for us to come back together as a nation.
Springsteen He finds himself at what he calls the middle, which is a chapel in the exact dead center of the 48 contiguous United States and Kansas.
And this chapel is, as the boss says in the ad, it never closes.
It's open to all.
And on the surface of it, you might think, oh, this is a nice symbol, right?
I mean, this is a nice thing.
This is a great way to make a point.
You know, we are in the exact middle of the United States.
We're at a chapel.
It never closes and everyone's welcome.
This is the kind of America we would want, right?
This is the kind of place that you would think would exemplify the national ethos that we're looking for.
And yet, as many of you saw as you watch the broadcast and anyone who's seen the commercial, what hangs in the chapel is not non-denominational symbols, right?
So, some of you might have visited Rothko Chapel in Houston, near the Rice Campus.
And that chapel is sort of known as a non-denominational center of spirituality, that it is supposed to be a sacred place, a place for reflection, a place for Meditation, a place for quiet, and yet it's not supposed to be sectarian.
It is supposed to welcome all by way of its universality, right?
And we can debate whether that's effective or not.
I'm sure some of you are drawn to spaces like Rothko Chapel.
I'm sure others of you are not, and that's fine.
My point here is this.
In a space like that, there is an intentionality behind trying to welcome all and to Recognize the incredible diversity of anyone who might enter the doors.
It was a much different story in the ad because what hangs in the chapel that Bruce Springsteen is visiting and talking about and that really stands at the center of this of this ad is a cross hung on the United States, right?
It's basically cross and flag together.
And if you've listened to the show, if you are somebody who reads, you know, folks that we talk about a lot, Sam Perry, Andrew Whitehead, Catherine Stewart, Sarah Posner, Ann Nelson, Kelly Baker, all these folks, if you listen to podcasts with those people, if you listen to Blake Chastain, if you
are reading Chrissy Stroop, you know, right, that the idea that the cross and the flag go together is not neutral, it's not universal, and it's not welcoming to all by any means.
A couple things that show up here for me when I think about this.
One, Bruce Springsteen wants us to meet in the middle, okay?
And yet what we've tried to do on this show is call for accountability as a prerequisite for unity.
And by having this sort of blithe symbol of the cross and the flag together in this ad as the means of unity, Springsteen and the creators overlooked the fact that Christianity is one of the reasons we are divided.
I'm not saying that as an anti-Christian person.
I'm not saying that as an anti-religion person.
I'm saying that as somebody who has done the research, interviewed people like Peter Manceau, who is curating, along with many other people online, artifacts from the capital siege that are related to religion.
As somebody who has tried to view Christian nationalism As a lens for understanding support for Trump, and religious support for Trump in particular, and looking at data, looking at artifacts, looking at what I take to be compelling analysis, this ad completely overlooks that Christianity is part of the reason we are not united.
That a certain brand of Christianity has been used to fuel White Christian nationalism, Maga Nation, so on and so forth, right?
So the blithe call for unity in the middle around the American flag and the cross, number one, overlooks the role of disunity that Christianity has played up to this point.
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