The Nostalgic Myths that Drive MAGA Nation with Dr. Ruth Braunstein
Brad talk to Dr. Ruth Braunstein, Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, about the nostalgic myths that drive MAGA Nation. Their conversation centers on how recognizing the structure of these myths enables us to better see how Christian nationalism pervades right-wing movements that don't have any explicit religious identity markers or symbols. Think: the Proud Boys and the NRA. These groups structure their identities around a certain Christian nationalist interpretation of American history, even when they don't claim an explicitly Christian mantle.
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My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
And I am joined today by Dr. Ruth Brownstein, who is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, and an Affiliate Fellow at Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.
We had Dr. Brownstein on to talk earlier on our show about her book, Prophets and Patriots, Faith and Democracy Across the Political Divide.
And we're excited to invite her back today for a discussion of her new article, In the Right History, Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America.
So, Dr. Brownstein, thanks for being here.
Thanks so much for having me.
I saw the article as soon as you posted on Twitter, read it, was enthralled, and I'm really happy that you have the time to come back and talk to us about it.
My first question is this, your goal here seems to be to help us understand how religions play An important role in right-wing movements that are not explicitly religious.
So you're talking about, you know, in your work you of course explore Christian nationalism, you explore the religious right.
These are areas in which you are an expert and you've written extensively about.
In this article, though, you're really trying to help us see how religion is sort of pervasive even in places where it's not explicitly part of the identity or the symbol-making or the myth-making.
And that's something Dan and I talk about all the time, that if we look at what happened on January 6th, Religion was everywhere.
If we look at other groups that are on the political right in this country, religion is everywhere, even if you can't see it at first glance, or even if your metrics you're using are showing you that, oh, this isn't about religion, this is about race or class or economics.
And so I guess my first question is just, why do you see this as important?
Why do we need to be able to sort of understand the complexities of religious presence in places that they may not be so obvious to the naked eye?
Yeah, thanks, because it's a really important question to me.
And in part, this comes out of the research that I previously did for my book, Prophets and Patriots, on the Tea Party movement.
And it also comes out of the current research that I'm doing on tax resistance that has led me to be thinking and paying a lot of attention to the right-wing tax protest movement and its history.
And as part of that research, I have gotten sort of more into the literature on Right-wing movements beyond the religious right.
So far-right groups that would include more racist right groups, nativist groups, anti-government groups.
And most of those groups are not explicitly religious in the ways that we would describe the religious right.
They're not organized through religious institutions like churches.
They're not led by clergy.
They're not focused on religious issues per se and kind of organized around that.
And yet, There's stuff going on, to your point, right, that involves the religious in a way that the literature on those movements don't always pick up.
And so part of what I talk about in the article is that religion is sometimes used in a descriptive way to talk about the idea that these groups are for speaking for white Protestants or to describe some of the groups they describe as their enemies.
In particular, many of these groups are anti-Semitic, and so the idea that Jews occupy this sort of place in their imaginations, but it's not really analyzed through the lens of religion.
And so I thought that this was worth kind of speaking to, in part just to help me map these groups in relation to a movement like the Religious Right, and understand some of the continuities between them, as well as some of the differences.
You use in the article what you call a complex religion approach, and I know you're drawing on other scholars to develop that approach, but would you mind just giving us the sort of mechanics of how that works?
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