Straight White American Jesus - Why REvangelical is Not Deconstruction Aired: 2021-02-24 Duration: 05:50 === Special Episode: Deconstruction Thoughts (05:07) === [00:00:00] AXIS MUNDY Hello! [00:00:28] Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. [00:00:30] My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion, Skidmore College, and today I want to do a special episode to talk about deconstruction and this idea of re-evangelical that continues to pop up in various corners of the evangelical universe. [00:00:45] Some of you might have seen me on social media recently. [00:00:47] I was pretty fired up about this stuff the other day. [00:00:51] I promised I'd share some thoughts, so I'm going to do that. [00:00:54] I'm not going to lie. [00:00:55] It is a crazy busy week. [00:00:57] And there's just so much going on. [00:00:59] So I would have loved to have spent a whole day just organizing my thoughts, outlining things and being able to kind of present my case here with an airtight, cogent approach. [00:01:12] But that's not possible, honestly, just because there's a million things going on. [00:01:19] But this is too important to talk about. [00:01:21] So I'm going to do my best and lay out some of my thoughts. [00:01:24] So I want to first start talking about deconstruction. [00:01:27] As many of you know, deconstruction is a very open-ended word, and it refers to the process of one deconstructing their worldview, specifically in the context of a fundamentalist religion, and sort of reconsidering every aspect of their faith, their spirituality, their social commitments, their political commitments, their culture, and so on and so forth. [00:01:49] There are so many great folks who talk about what deconstruction is and how the process works. [00:01:54] And that includes so many people that I've come into contact with who have helped me understand these things. [00:02:00] And those people are Blake Chastain and Chrissy Stroop. [00:02:03] They're Tori Douglas. [00:02:04] They're Mason Meninga. [00:02:05] They're Justin Gentry. [00:02:07] They are Joe Luman. [00:02:09] They are Linda K. Kline. [00:02:12] Laura and the folks working at the Religious Trauma Institute and so on and so forth. [00:02:17] There's just a lot of great voices out there. [00:02:20] Nothing I'm going to say today do I want to indicate that I have some sort of monopoly on what deconstruction is or that I have a definition and that everyone else sort of needs to listen to what I'm saying on the issue. [00:02:31] This is one contribution to an ongoing conversation, one that should never have a kind of definitive end. [00:02:38] Or a zip tied kind of definition. [00:02:41] So I want to put that out there to start. [00:02:44] I do want to say though that I'm going to venture force a thesis about what deconstruction is not. [00:02:49] And I'm open to folks weighing in on this and people maybe expanding or helping me understand some blind spots in this. [00:02:56] But I do I do think this is important. [00:02:58] So let me give you a thesis. [00:02:59] OK. [00:03:00] Deconstruction is not realignment. [00:03:03] Deconstruction is not a Equivalent of renovating your bathroom and kitchen and coming back a week or two weeks later to your home and thinking, oh, look, it's different. [00:03:14] When you renovate your bathroom or your kitchen, you don't think of yourself as having a new home or a new house. [00:03:21] You think of yourself as having updated or realigned your living space. [00:03:26] You might've knocked out a wall and now you have an open concept, right? [00:03:31] You realigned your abode. [00:03:33] You didn't transform it. [00:03:35] You didn't move it. [00:03:36] You didn't break it down in a way that would signify something new in a total or holistic sense. [00:03:45] To me, deconstruction is when you break down the structure to its foundation. [00:03:51] You break it down to the studs and you start over. [00:03:55] And when you rebuild, you reconstruct, you rediscover, You may end up with some of the same elements as you had before, but you arrive at those same elements as a result of a total breakdown or deconstruction of the structure. [00:04:15] And so even when you rebuild and you arrive at some of the same components, the same features, you've done so as a result of a different process. [00:04:23] Okay? [00:04:25] And so, to me, that's a good place to start, and it's a good place to sort of understand what, to me, is at stake with deconstruction. [00:04:32] Now, this leads me to some of the folks who are talking about this idea of revangelical as deconstruction, okay? [00:04:39] And I want to try to explain why I have a problem with that approach. [00:04:43] I came across this the other day on a thread by the Confessing Millennial at ConfessInMill on Twitter. [00:04:50] Confessing Millennial was talking about how they are a re-evangelical who has rediscovered even our Christian orthodoxy and in essence renovated their evangelicalism and that this was the result of their deconstruction. === Free Preview Access (00:42) === [00:05:08] Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode. [00:05:11] In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes. [00:05:20] It'll take you like two clicks, I promise. [00:05:23] In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire SWADGE archive, over 550 episodes. [00:05:30] You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more. [00:05:37] All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism. 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