The Bible, the Constitution, and the Confederacy: A Response to Josh Mandel and Matt Walsh
Brad begins by responding to Pennsylvania Senate candidate Josh Mandel who claimed last week that the Bible and the Constitution were "not supposed to be separate."
He then spends the bulk of this response episode dissecting the comments of conservative "theocratic fascist" Matt Walsh, who spent last week whining that the House voted to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol.
Brad uses the metaphor of family and representation to demonstrate how bogus it is to maintain that any Confederates should be represented in the legislative and symbolic epicenter of our nation.
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What's up y'all?
My name is Brad Onishi.
This is Straight White American Jesus, our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I want to provide a response today to some of the leaders and pundits who talked about the Constitution and the Bible going together over Fourth of July weekend, and I also want to talk about infamous conservative troll Matt Walsh's take on the removal of Confederate statues from the Capitol.
Before I get to that today, though, just a couple of things to share with you.
One is, many of you have listened to The Orange Wave in the past.
I released The Orange Wave, a docu-series, about a year ago, and it's a 10-part series that uses personal storytelling, interviews with leading scholars and journalists, including Kristin Kobes-Dumé, Ann Nelson, Sarah Posner, Gerardo Marti, and others, as well as historical research to trace the rise of the religious right from 1960.
And I actually do so with a focus on my home region of Orange County, California.
There are surprising resonances and just deep connections with the origins of the religious right to Southern California, which might be surprising to some of you.
I'm going to ask you to do two things.
One, if you haven't listened to it, go find it.
It is on Apple Podcasts and other places, and you can listen to that series right now.
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If you listened to the Orange Wave and you found it helpful, you found it illuminating, if you found it scary, whatever, let us know about it by giving us a review.
It would really, really be helpful for us.
On top of that, I just want to reiterate that we are kind of in a new chapter of our show.
I have decided to step away, at least for the year, and perhaps for a permanent basis from my job at Skidmore.
I will be teaching part-time at the University of San Francisco.
I'm finishing my book.
But I'm also looking to devote just much more time and intentional kind of space to this podcast and to continue to do it like I have over the last couple years, publishing new content two and three times a week, working on docuseries and other focused projects, as well as just doing interviews with scholars and journalists and sharing content that I think many of you find helpful.
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So we just finished with Fourth of July weekend.
And inevitably that brought out the Christian nationalism in so many of our fellow Americans.
The Fourth of July, as Sam Perry and others have noted recently, is kind of like a high holy day for Christian nationalism.
If you go to many churches across the country on Fourth of July weekend, you will hear just a unapologetic blending of American patriotism and Christian discourse and Christian ideas, and this came out through various politicians last week.
So Josh Mandel, who is running for Senate in Ohio, was previously a state rep in Ohio and the state treasurer there, said in a tweet that the Bible and the Constitution were never meant to be separate.
This garnered a lot of praise and criticism, as you can imagine.
That followed on the trails of Lauren Boebert, a congressperson from Colorado, who talked last week about how there are two nations that were set up with God in mind and set up to represent God, and that is the United States and Israel.
Christian nationalism was thick in the air last week, and I don't want to spend all day on this, but I do just want to provide one way to respond to this kind of line when you hear it from someone who is a Christian on your timeline or at a barbecue or whatever.
One of the things that I've always, and I thought this when I was a Christian, it's actually part of the reason I left evangelicalism, is there are clear directives in the New Testament that the Christian is meant to serve one Master, and that is the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
There's this idea of the Kingdom of God, and that if you are a Christian person, you serve one master, one king, and that is Christ, and all others are only given due according to what they're due.
You give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but there's a clear message here, right?
That if you try to serve two masters, that you will serve none, that you will fail.
My standard reaction to anybody who talks about the United States as this exceptional, God-chosen place that is meant to be revered above all nations—I mean, I haven't even mentioned Marco Rubio, who said in a tweet that even if there are issues with the United States, it is a place that is better than any other place ever, okay?
My standard reaction is, look, you can't serve two masters.
You are a citizen of the kingdom of God.
You're supposed to be, it says it on your car sticker, not of this world.
I don't understand why you are so invested in creating a situation where the kingdom of God and the United States of America are on equal playing field.
That's idolatry.
You are serving two masters.
You are not called, as a child of the kingdom of God, to be a sort of unabashedly, uncritically loyal servant of the American nation.
It doesn't mean you don't, you know, act like a good neighbor and everything else.
It just means that as a Christian, it really just doesn't register here that you would serve two masters.
I mean, do you really think that God wants you putting the United States on par with the Kingdom of God?
For me, that's always just a way to kind of respond to these kind of very blasé and crude formulations of Christian nationalism.
is to put the Christian on their heels, I mean, the evangelical, whoever it is, the Mormon, you know, could be anybody, and say, I'm just not sure why a child of the King and a citizen of the kingdom of God would spend so much time and effort invested in an earthly nation.
That seems to be idolatry to me, and it seems to be something that runs counter to your stated objective of serving God and loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and body.
How can you do that if you are loving your nation, your earthly nation, in this way?
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