Brad and Dan discuss how racism and patriarchy stem from a desire for power and control. They relate this to comments by Rick Santorum on Native American culture, American culture, and the history of the nation. They also apply it to statements from Lyndsey Graham, who said we can't be a racist nation because we elected Obama, and Tim Scott who gave the response to Pres. Biden's address a few days ago.
They discuss patriarchy in relation to the revival of Promise Keepers as a way hetero-patriarchal movement designed to combat the recognition of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities in this country. This leads to a discussion of Josh Duggar, who was arrested on child pornography charges this week and Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is alleged to have paid underage girls for sex.
This episode finishes with a round of Falwell's Follies.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in Religion, Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's good to see you, Brad.
I know that neither one of us are tired by now.
I know that the news is not exhausting us.
I know that there have not been, again, more police killings and more shootings And all the other stuff that weighs on us.
I'm of course being darkly facetious, but it is good to see you even if it's yet another podcast that we get to do with way too much going on and too much that hopefully we can help people sort through a little bit.
Yeah, there is a lot this week.
And this is one of those weeks, Dan, where I feel like there were a couple of folks who reached out and said, you know, hey, after Trump lost, is there going to be a need for your show?
And this is one of those weeks where it's like, yes, there is a need for our show.
There's there's a lot of need for our show because people like Rick Santorum and Lindsey Graham and Matt Gaetz and All kinds of folks continue to give us reason for that, as well as, Dan, things happening at the state legislature level, things happening on local levels.
We'll get into all that.
I want to say first, though, thank you to all of our listeners.
We had an abundance of reviews this week.
Five star reviews that not only really helped us in just the algorithm and the ratings and really saved us from the kind of Al Mohler, you know, Jim Daley fanboys, Dan, but they were just heartwarming to read.
I mean, it really does, you know, encourage us.
We are both tired.
We are both sort of worn out, but we do this every week for a lot of reasons.
One of them is just So many of you have expressed how it's helpful to you, so that makes us feel like it's worth doing, and we thank you for that.
So I appreciate it very much.
We also get emails, and I know some of y'all have reached out, and we're doing our best to keep up.
It's, at this point, a matter of getting through about 100 essays to grade, and then, you know, trying to catch up on all kinds of other aspects of life, Dan, and that's kind of how I feel at this point of the year every year.
That's where we're at.
All right, we're going to talk a lot today about the sort of interrelation of racism and patriarchy or misogyny.
We're going to talk about Christian nationalism, all of the sort of hallmark motifs of our show.
So, I want to start with a quote from Ann Anlin Chang, writing in The Atlantic in the wake of the Atlanta massacre.
Here is what Chang says.
Racism and sexism are partners that stoke each other with frightening ease.
Racism may be caused by many factors, demagoguery, religious intolerance, economic resentment, inherited bigotry, but its expression is almost always about the assertion of power.
And whenever vengeful male power is in play, it is never good news for women.
One of the things I really appreciate about this very pithy passage here, Dan, is that it shows us how racism and misogyny or sexism can really go together, that they can boost each other.
It also shows us that they're both about power, right?
That, you know, that you have a vengeful, misogynistic male who wants to control women.
You have racism as an expression of power.
I was telling my students yesterday that whiteness is a category that was invented in order to wage and maintain power, right?
That's what whiteness was invented for, okay?
That's what its original intent was, right?
And so I love this passage because it really sort of reveals how they have a common origin and a common source, the desire for power, control of women, control of people who are deemed of a certain race, and so on and so forth.
This leads us, Dan, to a segment I'm going to call today, This is Not a Racist Country.
And of course, Senator Tim Scott said that in response to Joe Biden's speech the other night.
But it kind of fits with a number of things that have happened this week.
So let's start off with some just incredibly blithe and amnesiac statements by Rick Santorum.
You want to take us through what the former statesman from Pennsylvania said?
Yeah, so if people don't remember or kind of vaguely remember, Rick Santorum was a U.S.
Senator with the GOP representing Pennsylvania, I think from 95 to 07, so a good chunk of time.
He was speaking at a conference called the Standing Up for Faith and Freedom Conference, which basically, you know, hits on every note that we talk about every week.
And he said this.
This is a quote.
He said, We came here and created a blank slate.
We birthed a nation from nothing.
I mean, there was nothing here.
I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.
And that's the end of the quote.
It picks up on a whole number of things, but as you say, we'll talk about some other things, some other lines on the America's not a racist country trope.
First of all, there's this, but it's the irony, and the irony is not even the right word for this, but to have Rick Santorum say this when you're like, that is the racism, and that statement illustrates the racism on which the country was actually founded.
And so, I'm going to do what I do now and become kind of the geeky, wonky guy.
And talk about a couple things here, but what it cuts into is this notion, and there's a fancy word for this, and it's called settler colonialism, right?
So, people have some sense of colonialism and what that is, and everybody who's taken a history class at some point knows something about the colonial period and powerful European states having colonies around the world and so forth.
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