Weekly Roundup: White Panic is Destroying the Country
Brad asks Dan to explain how the Southern Baptist Convention is a barometer for White American Christianity and what it means moving forward. They then discuss how the White panic over CRT has led to dangerous legislation and lawsuits. In AZ, a new law stipulates that teachers will be fined 5k if they discuss divisive topics without giving time to "both sides." In PA, a family is suing a school district for teaching about White privilege and BLM because is supposedly infringes on their "majority White religion," of Christianity.
Their discussion finishes with a damning investigation of how MAGAites and QAnons are taking over election sites and polling places, leaving our democracy less stable and under threat.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad, in another busy week of busy weeks.
Yeah, it is.
And first off, just want to say thank you to all of the new patrons who have signed up over at Patreon.
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So, with that said, Dan, let's get to what's going on this week.
I have been talking this week about the SBC.
I think there's some folks out there Who are getting a little bit like, all right, that happened.
I know more about Southern Baptist than I ever wanted to.
But we are going to spend just a couple of minutes at the top talking about it.
And I want to just start by asking you, the former Southern Baptist, the guy who was trained at a Southern Baptist institution.
Why should we care about the SBC in general terms?
You know, beyond the SBC convention this week, beyond all the other debates, why is paying attention to this group actually quite important?
Yeah, so, I mean, the first thought that people might have is like, who cares about the SBC?
And I get it, right?
The Southern Baptist Convention, that's what we're talking about, and it's got the name Southern Baptist in it.
That brings up images, I think, of churches in the South and maybe the rural South and things like that, and it does involve that.
But the SPC is the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., right?
It has churches in all 50 states.
They've actually debated changing their name a number of times because there have always been those within the SPC who feel that the name is misleading.
And as the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., it's also an overwhelmingly white denomination.
That's changing somewhat demographically, but what it does mirror is the black-white segregation that marks most American Christianity, not just evangelicalism, right?
Most American Christians, if you're in a church and you're white, the vast majority of the people in the church with you are white.
And if you're in a church and you're black, the vast majority of people in the church with you are black.
Little more complicated with Latinx and Asian American congregants, but not much.
So it maps on to that and it's like a barometer, right?
So social scientists will do this or when people read polls you always want, you know, what we call a representative sample, right?
Some group of people that you can look at that tells you about more than just them.
That's what the SPC is.
It's like a barometer and It shows us when we talk about things like white evangelicalism in America, we talk about Christian nationalism, we talk about the debates within evangelicalism and that kind of increasingly vocal minority of people who within evangelicalism want to push for greater LGBTQ inclusion or roles for women or what have you.
The SBC gives us that kind of sample, right?
They're like a microcosm of that.
And so they've been front and center and visible in a special way this week because they have their annual meeting.
For people who don't understand how Baptists work, churches are individual and independent and autonomous.
It's not like the Catholic Church where there's like a sort of hierarchical structure.
But they band together into conventions and this kind of organizational structure and all together, all of these, these, uh, thousands and thousands of independent churches constitute the Southern Baptist Convention.
And typically in June of every year, they have this big annual meeting, uh, where each church sends representatives there.
And this is where they sort of do, do their work as the Southern Baptist Convention.
This one's really significant because there wasn't one, uh, in 2020, or at least not an in-person one.
It was very truncated and as everything was in 2020.
So all that's been going on this week, things we've been talking about and looking at in broader American culture and the intersections of religion and politics and MAGA world and stuff about critical race theory and sexual assault stuff and questions about the relation of religion and politics.
All these things were on full display and people who observe American culture and religion and politics, people like you, people like me, but journalists, which is why people have probably seen this in the news in a way that they normally wouldn't.
Well, I think there's a couple other things, too, that stand out.
at the SPC this week, said, what does this tell us about all the kinds of things you and I have been talking about for a long time on this show?
So that's why the SPC matters.
Even if you don't care about Southern Baptists, even if you're like me and you left the movement a long time ago, that's why it's still important to kind of track what's going on there.
Well, I think there's a couple other things, too, that stand out.
One is, you know, Southern Baptists have been front and center in the MAGA Nation kind of movement.
And so there's a lot of Southern Baptists who are aligned with Trumpism.
And when we think of white evangelicals and their support for the former president and the ongoing support for MAGA Nation, the Southern Baptists, many, not all of them, but many of them are right there within that group.
And they're in many ways fueling that group and helping to cultivate and foster it.
So that's one.
The other is, Dan, as you're saying, they're a barometer.
And I think a couple of things are actually worth pointing out here.
You have done this in the past, but the SBC is in a numerical decline.
They've had people leaving.
They are losing folks.
Ryan Burge has some great graphs of this on Twitter.
And so they're losing a lot of people.
I'll throw this to you in a second to kind of talk about how that's happening.
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