White Supremacists, Border Vigilantes, and Survivalists with Dr. Susannah Crockford
Brad is joined by Dr. Susannah Crockford, author of "Thank God for the greatest country on earth: white supremacy, vigilantes, and survivalists in the struggle to define the American nation," an article in which she shares her ethnographic field work from the Arizona desert, near the US-Mexico border. Her work illuminates how Christian nationalism works in the minds of those who see defending the border as the most pressing issue in maintaining the greatness of the USA. She also explores how certain people separate the "People" and the "Land" from the government, thus creating a populism of We The People apart from allegiance to the workings of US democracy.
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Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion 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. Susanna Crockford, who holds a PhD from the Lennon School of Economics and is the author of the forthcoming book, Ripples of the Universe, Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona, which I'm really looking forward to, and is also the author of numerous other articles.
But the one we're going to talk about today is titled, So, before I go any further, Dr. Crockford, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for taking the time to be here.
Thanks for having me.
and survivalists in the struggle to define the American nation.
And this was published in Religion, State, and Society 46.3.
So before I go any further, Dr. Crockford, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for taking the time to be here.
Thanks for having me.
So I wanted to discuss your great article.
It sort of hits on the main themes of our show, talking about Christian nationalism, talking about American religion and talking about ways that narratives about this country are formed via myth and racial identity.
And so I guess I'll just start by asking, like with much of your research, this article takes place in the Arizona desert.
You describe a project of analyzing aspects of American populist nationalism.
So I just wondered if you would clue us in, where were you in terms of setting?
What was it like?
What were the living conditions like in terms of where you were doing your field work in Arizona? - Yeah, so I've done quite a lot of field work in Arizona starting in 2012.
And I started off in the town of Sedona, which my book is about.
But this article is about a place called Valley, which is spelt V-A-L-L-E, which is a census-designated place, which is essentially its unincorporated county in Arizona.
And it just exists as a place for the purpose of counting the people there for the census.
So it's not a town, as you might imagine, a town is what I'm trying to say.
It's an intersection where there's a gas station, a rock shop.
Some storage units.
There was a general store for a bit but that shut down.
You know a few other like local businesses like a hardware store.
Most of the business though is tourism based because Valley is 30 miles south of the Grand Canyon.
It's roughly 40 47 miles north of Flagstaff, which is the third largest city in Arizona.
So this is the north of Arizona.
It's high desert.
It's not low desert.
You're up in the mountains.
The Grand Canyon is right there.
So your population density is incredibly low.
And in a place like Valley, most of the people who live in that area live in Kind of undeveloped acres where they've just kind of rolled up and parked their RV or trailer.
If they've built something, it's a fairly kind of primitive shack.
This is the kind of unincorporated county land where there's not a lot of building codes enforced if they exist at all.
So most of the housing is what you would call an informal settlement.
There's very few actual kind of architecturally planned and structurally sound buildings out there.
There are a few, there's a couple of people out there who like, you know, They really put their $200,000 house out there.
But it's mostly like, do you know what a single-wide is or a double-wide?
Of course, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so there's like the kind of house you can put on the back of a truck and take out and plonk out there.
That's like the houses, quote-unquote, that are out in Valley.
But most of the dwellings are not houses.
They're trailers.
Some people are even just living in tents.
I saw one guy who converted a range of green silos.
There's definitely some creativity out there.
So your settlements are pretty self-built, they're pretty basic.
A lot of the people there do not have a huge access to income or basic services.
There's no connection to the water grid, there's no connection to the power grid, there's no trash collection, there's no mail service.
Wow.
So you're on your own basically for getting your water in and hauling your trash and especially your sewage This is away from the main intersection.
At the actual intersection of Valley, where you've got the businesses that I mentioned, there is a connection to the power grid.
You still have to get your water trucked in or go to the There's like a big kind of water filling station by the gas station where you can kind of drive your truck up and fill up your tank and then you take that tank back to your home and you've got your tank of water.
But you know if you want that to be like running water as you would have in a regular house you'd have to like set up an elaborate pump system by yourself.
So most people they just have potted water like so water they haul and they just keep in a big tank.
Yeah so for power a lot of people use like very small cheap solar panels.
A couple of people have larger setups but mostly it's more likely to be generators actually than solar panel out there for people's power which are paying for the gas for that to run.
So where I was staying was kind of in one of these kind of Dwellings where like different bits had been built at different times.
So there was like a converted barn, there was a trailer that had kind of had all its guts ripped out because it was pretty rat-infested and moldy, so it was kind of an empty metal shell.
And then there was like a couple of other buildings that the people who lived there had built themselves.
Yeah.
And I mostly stayed in the barn.
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