Weekly Roundup: The Problem with the Focus on the Family
Brad and Dan draw on Sophie Bjork-James' new book, the Divine Institution, to demonstrate how Evangelicals use the nuclear family in order to both attack members of the LGBTQ+ community and draw attention away from systemic issues related to race and other public health threats. In particular, they discuss a) the trans bill and healthcare for trans children in Arkansas b) Biden's executive order on gun control and the issue of gun violence as a public health threat c) the CDC's labeling of racism as a threat to public health.
In all three instances, the individualist, patriarchal, and heteronormative Evangelical view leads to either active or passive complicity in marginalization and/or violence against racial, sexual, and gender minorities.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion, Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and I'm here with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad.
You too, Dan.
It has been a hard week on many levels.
Personally, there's always a lot going on politically.
I feel like we've hit this period where, for those of us in higher ed, there's enough time left that we cannot yet sort of white knuckle it to the end.
But we're getting so close to that point, right?
There's going to be a point here soon where, like, you're going to say to yourself, 10 All bets are off.
If I need to eat Doritos at midnight till I get through this next hour, I'm going to do it.
If I need to drink four Red Bulls today, I will.
But we're just not there at that scorched earth like race to the finish yet.
And so it's a weird time where everyone's grumpy and so on and so forth.
So anyway.
All right, let's talk today, Dan, about issues related to individualism, systemic issues, and public health.
I want to read a little bit from a new book by Professor Sophie Bjork-James, who I have an interview with coming up soon.
And so in her new book, The Divine Institution, Dr. Sophie Bjork-James argues that the main theological emphasis in post-civil rights era white evangelicalism is on the supremacy of the heterosexual male-headed nuclear family.
This, she says, on page 5, Theology of the Family inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sex identities that ground the nuclear family.
One of the things I appreciate about Bjork-James' argument is that it is two-pronged.
One, it shows that evangelicals have used the nuclear family as the foundation for understanding the Christian faith.
And so any one or any family or any community that does not live up to this theology of the family is targeted as problematic in the public sphere.
The other side of the argument is that by focusing so much attention on individuals and on families living up to certain gender identities, certain moral ideals, certain religious ideals, That it takes attention away from structural oppression in economic form, in racial form, and so on and so forth.
So we have both an issue of addition.
If you don't live up to what we say and believe, we will target you.
We will go after you.
We also have an issue of subtraction.
We will spend so much time on the individual and on the nuclear family that there will be no bandwidth left for attending to any kind of structural or systemic issues.
Dan, I bring this up today because we're going to talk about three issues that I think are directly related to this.
One is the ongoing trans bills and their moving through state legislatures in our country, something we talked about at length last week.
Another is President Biden's recent executive order on guns and gun violence.
And the third is the CDC classifying racism as a public health threat.
I think what we want to do is connect all three of these things to what I just talked about, the evangelical focus on individualism, the divinization of the nuclear family, and the judging of all morality, ethics, and religiousness or religiosity ethics, and religiousness or religiosity on the earth.
on that basis.
So I will throw it to you to sort of help us pick up the thread from last week.
We talked about the dozens and dozens of bills, 80 or so bills, that are anti-trans and trans-oppressive in state legislatures at the moment.
One of those in Arkansas Uh, was passed by the legislature, but then vetoed by the governor.
Um, that was a surprise, but there's even more surprise to the story.
So Dan, what, uh, what happened in Arkansas and, and how does that lead into some other issues related to, uh, gender dysphoria, trans rights, and so on and so forth?
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