Weekly Roundup: Why Are They Trying Write Trans People Out of Existence?
Brad and Dan are happy to announce that SWAJ is joining the Irreverent Media Group--a collective of podcasts that offers content on deconstruction, rediscovery, and everything in between. We outline the details at the top of the episode. Check out irreverent.fm for more details!
We spend the major segment discussing the 82 anti-trans bills up for vote across the country. Dan shares analysis about how and why the trans body is so disruptive to the Christian nationalist vision of the USA. By using the metaphor of the social domain as a body, it's clear that Christian nationalists see trans people as an aberration from nature--and thus they are trying write laws that make it almost impossible to acknowledge trans existence, much less trans rights.
On the second segment, they discuss the Evangelical leaders trying to defend purity culture and how sexual ethics in the Bible is a complex--and often disdainful-thing.
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Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
I'm here with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Brad, it's good to see you.
We're not on camera for other people, but I'm wearing flannel with snow flurries and you are now officially in your California, like your nine month of the year California attire, I think.
I am.
I'm in the tank top and I'm feeling good.
I'm also feeling good, Dan Miller, because For two reasons.
One, I got to see you twice this week.
You came and did a guest appearance in my class, which was awesome.
And my students got an incredible dose of dad jokes between the two of us and light-hearted making fun of each other.
So, always a great thing.
Even more amazing is this set of announcements I'm about to share with everyone about the future of Straight White American Jesus.
So, are you all ready for this?
I know you're waiting with bated breath.
So, happy to announce Straight White American Jesus is joining the Irreverent Media Group, a new podcast collective.
And basically, folks, this is a bunch of us who do somewhat similar things on our shows, who are working through issues related to deconstruction, ex-evangelicalism, rediscovering spirituality and faith.
And like we do, analyzing politics and current events and everything from theology to culture.
So here are the shows that are going to be part of this collective.
It's an incredible lineup.
So we have Straight White American Jesus.
We have Making Spaces with Reverend Sarah Heath and Josephine Jael Jimenez.
We have Ask Your Aunts, also with Sarah Heath and Kevin Garcia, who I know many of you know.
We have the Dirty Rotten Church Kids, who are an amazing duo, Josh and Adrian, and we just had Adrian on our show.
We have Blake Chastain's Exvangelical, one of the original shows in this genre.
We have Blake Chastain's Powers and Principalities, which is much like our show, one that analyzes Christian nationalism and other things.
We have Tori Douglas' White Homework.
I know many of you know Tori's work, and she is doing amazing anti-racist education.
We have Tori Douglas and Justin Gentry doing Go Home Bible You're Drunk, two ex-evangelicals, looking back at the Bible and seeing what they might learn from it.
We have Mason Monega's A People's Theology, which is great, and Kevin Garcia's A Tiny Revolution.
Some amazing people here, people who are doing different things but who all share a commitment to helping others work through deconstruction and also rediscovery and figuring out kind of what's happening from an individual level all the way To a political and cultural one.
We're super excited about it, and we have a kickoff event to announce, and that is on April 18 at 9 p.m.
Eastern.
We're gonna have a kind of webinar event where we introduce everybody, talk about our hopes for the collective, and just kind of let y'all know what we're up to.
So mark that down, April 18, for the kind of get-to-know-you of the irreverent media group.
A couple other things that are happening.
Dan and I have been talking and we do not have concrete details yet, but we are trying to figure them out as we speak.
Starting this summer, our hope is to start offering Straight White American Jesus seminars where people could sign up and take a class essentially with Dan and I. And so we are both professors and we both love to teach and we want to do that in a way that reaches beyond the ivory tower.
And so we're going to try to Host month-long seminars where Dan or I will provide videos for you to watch before class, provide readings for our class, and then have a once-a-week seminar where us and a small group of 10 or 12 people will join together and have a couple hour discussion.
So, we're not sure what to call it yet.
You know, we're thinking about it as the Straight White American Jesus Academy.
I told my wife that we were thinking about calling it the Swag Academy, Dan, and she forbade me from calling it that.
So I don't think we will be calling it that.
So we will come up with a better name.
I can see Dan laughing.
So anyway, one final announcement.
I am writing a book about white Christian nationalism, and that's going to be with Broadleaf Books.
And I'm hard at work on it, and hopefully we'll have it to the publisher as soon as possible, and we'll get it out to everyone.
It's kind of a takeoff on the Orange Wave series, in addition to some memoir and some other elements.
So I'm really excited about it.
At the moment it's called Preparing for War, How White Christian Nationalism Dan's new book, Queer Democracy, is going to be out this summer from Rutledge and we're actually going to talk about a little bit of the kind of key argument of Dan's book today as we get into some other issues.
So, Dan, those are our announcements.
I hope you're excited.
I hope that you are feeling great.
I can see from your You're dancing around the room.
You just dabbed.
This is getting a little weird.
No, you're not doing any of that.
It's OK.
I'm just standing up flossing, so to speak.
No, no, it's really exciting.
It's sort of exhausting to think about, but in a good way.
I think we both spend a lot of our time, as I know a lot of people listening do, Spending your life doing exhausting things that suck, so it's nice to think about doing some exhausting things that hopefully won't.
Yeah, really looking forward to it.
Shout out to you for all the work that you've been putting into that, as this is really something you've been pouring yourself into for quite a while now, to sort of lay the groundwork for these things.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire SWADGE archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
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.
