We are thrilled to announce Straight White American Jesus's first affiliate podcast: Out of the Closet and Into the Pews, a show by Rachael Borthwick that asks what it means for religion to be a vehicle for liberation and freedom for queer people. Rachael is a burgeoning scholar of religion at the University of Pennsylvania who has written on queer communities of faith in the USA and beyond, served as a research assistant to our show, and worked as a campus activist.
Out of the Closet and Into the Pews includes interviews with leading scholars in queer studies, religious studies, and gender studies, along with conversations with activists and practitioners.
Brad and Rachael discuss it all in this conversation.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
Our show is a partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
Today is a big day for us on this show.
We are announcing our first affiliate podcast, and that is Rachel Borthwick's Out of the Closet and Into the Pews.
The show asks what it means to do religion queerly, and it asks, in essence, what would it look like for queer people to talk about how religion and spirituality have been vehicles for freedom and for liberation.
We have, during the tenure of Straight White American Jesus, discussed the religious left.
We've discussed how certain court cases, certain policies, and certainly how white evangelicals and white Christian nationalists have affected queer communities and their lives in this country and beyond.
But there's just no way to do justice to all of those issues, events, themes, and histories in a show where we talk about religion and politics writ large.
Many of you have written to me and asked, you know, if we could not hover more often on queer communities of faith and queer issues and Like I said, we cover the gambit on our show, and that's why when I started to discuss with Rachel this project, we really were excited to have our shows be linked and to have her show be an affiliate of Straight White American Jesus.
In addition to the thematic resonances we have with Rachel's show, I think we have a kind of methodological resonance, and you're like, what are you talking about?
Stop being a professor.
And what I mean by that is, like us, Rachel has conducted interviews with leading scholars and experts in the fields of religious studies and queer studies and gender studies, And so her show brings a sense of public scholarship to these themes and motifs and histories, just like our show does.
She also has interviews with activists and practitioners.
And so what you'll find on her feed is just an incredible variety of discussions and interviews.
With people who are thinking about what it means to hold the identities of a person of faith and a queer person simultaneously, and how that looks across various traditions and across various times and places.
So, my interview with Rachel is next.
I hope you not only enjoy our conversation, but that you will go over wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to Out of the Closet and Into the Pews, our first affiliate podcast for straight white American Jesus.
And today's a very special day on Straight White American Jesus.
I love doing this show.
I love getting to talk to scholars and journalists and other folks, but today's really amazing because I'm joined by Rachel Borthwick.
Rachel is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rachel is a burgeoning scholar of religion who's written about queer religious movements in the United States and elsewhere.
Rachel is an activist, but Rachel is also the host of Out of the Closet Into the Pews, which is her new podcast and one we're going to talk about today.
But it is our first affiliate podcast with Straight White American Jesus.
And so our two shows are linked and are tied together in some way.
And I'm just really excited about it.
And I couldn't be more happy to be affiliated with a person or with a show.
So Rachel, thanks for being here.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me today, Brad.
Are you thrilled to have the show?
I mean, you've worked really hard.
Are you thrilled to have the show appear in the world now?
Yeah, I'm excited to have my peers listen to the people I was able to connect with in my podcast, but also at the beginning of Pride Month, I saw a lot of fellow white queer people posting about Stonewall as a site of myth-making and remembering in the queer community.
So I was really excited to share my work with that, with my peers and my friends and hear their opinions and also their thoughts.
So, yeah, I'm super excited to have my podcast released.
I can't wait to talk about your work on Stonewall because I think it's remarkable and I'm really excited to get into it today.
Just a couple minutes before everyone has the chance to listen to the episode itself, let me start by asking you this.
You know, I got to see you develop this idea as you finished up your time at Skidmore.
I got to see you go from the idea stage to the kind of production stage to the interview stage all the way into where you are now and that is ready to to launch the show.
The show's called Out of the Closet, Into the Pews.
Would you mind just telling us about the show?
What is it?
What is it you're trying to accomplish here?
Yeah, so the show actually came from my senior capstone, and you obviously know that as my advisor at Skidmore College, but I kind of, in my junior year, began to ask questions about what it would mean to study religion queerly, and what it would mean for queer communities to be liberated religiously or spiritually.
So my podcast kind of stemmed from that idea.
I wanted to focus queer activists, but also queer religious practitioners and queer scholars in my podcast and ask what it would mean for religious studies to center a world of queerness and sexuality and what it would mean for queer studies to center a world of but also queer religious practitioners and queer scholars in my podcast
So through my podcast, I kind of explore how during the last 10 years, the voices of queer religious people have really started to emerge, but what does that mean in terms of multiplicity and holding different identities, whether that be queer, religious and spiritual.
So I wanted to explore that in Out of the Closet and Into the Pews and understand what it would mean to be liberated at the intersections of queerness and religion.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swag episode.
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