White Feminine Innocence, the Body Politic, and Contraceptive Nationalism
Dr. Megan Goodwin is the author of Abusing Religion, which explores how White Christians and their influence in our "secular" institutions have constructed religious outsiders as sexual predators as a pretext for persecution and othering. The American body politic is envisioned as a White Christian woman in need of protection from religious (and racial) foreigners who seek to infiltrate and contaminate her.
According to Goodwin, this is mobilized through the "catholicization of public morality" as it comes to sex, contraception, and the body--what she calls a "contraceptive nationalism."
It also rests on latent White supremacy, which is manifest in both Protestant and Catholic institutions, communities, texts, and so on.
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All right, Dan, we're going to get to the week in a minute.
But before that, we have to tell some folks about some very exciting things coming up for Straight White American Jesus.
So in August, I'm going to be launching, and I know you'll be part of it too, our Masculinity After Purity Culture series, and that's going to be in our Patreon.
And so purity culture is something that both of us experienced and went through.
I know a lot of folks out there have as well.
It was harmful.
Am I right, Dan, that you had a pledge card at the very first True Love Waits?
I believe I did.
Yeah, people study true love weights and they went to the National Mall in D.C.
and put in all the cards.
I believe that one of my cards was there.
Yes.
And I think it's a good series.
As you say, we talk about purity culture.
It's talked about a lot.
But there has been, I think, a gap of what it means in relation to masculinity and for men and boys coming through purity culture.
And that's something I think we're really going to try to hit as we talk about that.
So that's launching in August.
It's very exciting.
It's going to be on our Patreon.
In September, we're going to be having our very first Straight White American Jesus Seminar.
So if you would love to take a class from Professor Dan Miller or Professor Brad Onishi, this is your chance.
We're going to be talking about a pure America, religion, race, and nation.
We're going to be looking at white Christian nationalism, And how white Christian nationalists try to create a social body in this country that is straight, white, patriarchal, native-born, and so on and so forth.
It'll incorporate so many themes we talk about on this show.
Purity culture is one of them.
Christian nationalism is another.
But we'll get into the weeds with some things that we don't always have time with on our shows.
The ways that white evangelicals were the foremost proponents of pro-slavery theologies, the way that conspiracy theories and other aspects of white Christian nationalist movements play into this attempt to create a kind of pure America.
So, Dan?
I'm excited about it.
I'm excited, too, because a lot of this will will touch on some some material from your new book, Queer Democracy.
You're going to be kind of leading the charge, even though I'll make an appearance at various times.
Are you excited about this as I am?
I'm really excited about it.
And I'm excited for an opportunity.
I know we hear from people, follow ups who they want more depth than we can do in the podcast or maybe more depth and is really going to sort of communicate that way.
This is an opportunity for anybody who's interested in that to get that, to get time.
This won't be the only one of these we do.
We plan on doing others, right, to get time getting to know each other, getting to know us, getting to interact.
It'll be virtual, but live, right, in a way that we can't do in the podcast and other things.
So I'm really excited about it.
I think the themes and the topics are really important and timely, but I also really look forward to having sort of a We'll have more information in the coming weeks.
We'll have a brochure and links for signing up and dates and all those things.
people who are coming to be with us in a way that we just can't do on a weekly basis in the podcast.
So I'm really excited about it.
We'll have more information in the coming weeks.
We'll have a brochure and links for signing up and dates and all those things.
Be on the lookout for that.
Two big announcements.
August, Masculinity and Purity Culture.
September, our very first Straight White American Jesus seminar on race, religion, and nation.
Look for those.
Now to the weekly roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I am joined today by Dr. Megan Goodwin, who teaches at Northeastern in the Philosophy and Religion Department.
The program director for Sacred Rites, which is amazing, we'll talk about in a second, and is the author of Abusing Religion, Narrative Persecution, Sex Candles, and American Minority Religions, which is out from Rutgers University Press, is also working on a new book that'll be out sometime in the future called Cults, Inc., and it's about the commodification of the idea of cults and all of the sort of surrounding ideas.
One more thing, there's just too many things to mention.
Also, the co-host of Keeping It 101, A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion, which is a podcast that I have recommended and I have assigned to my students.
And if you are an academic studying religion, teaching in religion, if you're somebody who's in this realm and you don't know about Keeping It 101, you need to turn this off, go look it up, check out the website, and then you can come back and listen to the interview.
But you have to do the homework first.
Okay, all of that to say, Megan, thank you for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm going to apologize in advance for how often I'm going to interrupt and or talk over you.
I promise I'm working on it.
That sounds great.
And feel free.
You're the guest.
You do whatever you want.
Sounds good.
And so a couple of things.
You are the program director of Sacred Rites.
Some folks know about it.
Some don't.
Just tell us real quick.
What is Sacred Rites?
Sacred Rites, W-R-I-T-E-S, because God forbid I do anything without there being a dumb joke involved, is a loose foundation funded program hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.
So we both provide training for scholars to Just communicate more clearly and effectively with the public.
And we, shall we say, incentivize relationships between established publications and scholars so that folks can not just share their expertise with the public, but also get paid for doing that labor.
It's an amazing program.
I mean, several of the folks who've been on our show have done training with y'all.
Annie Selick was just on.
I know she's a current Sacred Rights Fellow and we've had other folks.
So that's amazing.
We're here today to talk about your book, Abusing Religion, which came out just a few months ago.
I don't know.
I saw my friend's kids the other day and I was like, how old are your kids now?
Like 10?
And they were like, no, they're four.
It's been a pandemic.
Like, you don't, you don't know anything anyway.
Okay, so Abusing Religion, to me, was a book that hit me in ways I didn't expect.
I thought I knew what I was getting into, but I really didn't.
And I want to try to help folks understand your argument, because I think your argument is really important.
But the book is about minority religions.
It's about the idea of sex abuse scandals and the abuse of women and children, but it's also about how these narratives get framed by dominant cultural forces, namely white Christians in this country, and that includes Catholics.
Absolutely.
Surprisingly.
Yeah, the Catholic piece surprised the hell out of me.
No pun intended?
But I also want to zoom back because it's not just confessional Christians that are shaping these narratives, right?
What I really want to pay attention to are these spaces that profess to be secular or that we assume are secular, like the news media or the Supreme Court of the United States.
Presidents.
Judicial systems, all of these spaces where we're not supposed to prioritize or favor one kind of religion over another, and yet, just like coincidentally, we see that these systems just By accident, happen to be favoring a very specific kind of conservative, white, mainstream Christianity that, and this is the part that was really surprising to me, includes Catholicism, arguably for the first time in U.S.
history.
So, yeah, there's a lot going on.
I mean, you really draw on the work of folks like Tracy Fessenden and others who've helped really clarify how Many of the institutions and spaces that you just mentioned in our public square that are supposed to be secular and separate from religion are just infused with Christian values.
We usually talk about those as being Protestant, but as you're saying, there's this Catholicization of that, and I think we'll hopefully get to that in a minute.
One of the things you say early on, which really sort of sets the tone for the book, is that this is a country that consistently fails to acknowledge, much less address, the sexual abuse of women and children.
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