Christian Nationalist Nostalgia, Violence, and Resistance to Change (Re-release)
In a re-release from 2019, Dan and Brad discuss how evangelicalism is a fundamentalist worldview. They draw on scholarship on global fundamentalisms in order to explain why evangelicals are so prone to nostalgia and so resistant to societal and political change. They also illuminate why fundamentalists are willing to use symbolic and physical violence to advance their cause. This episode is especially pertinent given the ongoing vitality of the Big Lie and Evangelical reluctance to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I am actually recording today from the studios of WLMC, Landmark College Radio.
And as always, I am joined by my co-host.
I am Bradley Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I'm actually out here in California today, so calling from a long way away.
So I'm in rainy Vermont, and Brad is in sunny California, and I'll try to mask my resentment about that during the episode.
So just reminding everybody where we were, we're still early in our second round of episodes, our second season here.
And we spent some time in our first episode this season talking about how to understand evangelicalism, American evangelicalism, we really need to understand it as a kind of culture.
Less about a belief system, more about a culture with customs and identity and the construction of identity.
And what we want to talk about today is a specific facet of that, that cultural aspect of Evangelicalism, and specifically that it's a kind of culture that we can refer to as a Fundamentalism.
And so Brad, I want to throw it over to you.
Tell us what that means.
What does it mean to say Evangelicalism is a kind of Fundamentalism?
Yeah, you know, one thing we talked about last week is that, you know, we wanted to get into Evangelicalism as a culture, right?
So we pointed out the fact that All of us participate in cultures, and by participating in a cultural community or cultural milieu, we often do things without sort of reflecting on the beliefs of that community, right?
We often participate in the rituals or the practices or the events without really sort of thinking about, you know, what the beliefs are about.
You know, I'm Japanese-American.
A couple weeks ago, I was at the Obon Festival, which is a yearly festival, Japanese festival, Related to sort of, like, ancestor veneration and the celebration of roots and heritage.
And, you know, there was a bunch of teenagers standing behind me during one of the big Obon dances at night.
And, you know, they were being loud and disrespectful, which is no big deal.
They're teenagers.
But it was very clear that, like, they had no idea what Obon was about.
They were just there because they're Japanese-American.
They go every year with their family.
And being there and doing this thing, Ritual, the dance, all this stuff that was happening wasn't about like belief and figuring out the history of the event.
It was just like, I participate in this culture, right?
Well, we all do that.
We all participate in those kinds of things, from how we sort of act in public at the grocery store, all the way to like our most intimate family and ethnic and religious communities.
Well, the difference with evangelicalism, and there is a difference, is that it is what we would call in the religious studies world, A fundamentalism, right?
So you might be thinking, okay, I'm part of communities, but my communities are nowhere near as militant and stringent as the kind of white evangelicals that are now sort of having this outside influence on our politics.
And you're right about that.
The reason that white evangelicals appear different is because they are what we would call a fundamentalism.
Okay.
And so let me give you just a couple of quick definitions, Dan, of fundamentalism.
I'm drawing, I just want to, Jay, I'm drawing on an article by Michael Emerson and his co-author Hartman from 2006, so we can post that later if people are interested in seeing that.
Sorry, we should also just point out to listeners that obviously we're not making any of this up like whole cloth, and if people are interested in this, there's a vast, vast literature on fundamentalisms and Christian fundamentalism in particular, and we'd be happy to direct people to that if this is something that they're interested in.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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