Brad speak with Ryan Stollar, expert on child protection and a Christian homeschooling survivor. Ryan shares his research on the evangelical and ex-evangelical components of Britney's story--from her childhood in church, to her experiences in purity culture, to the powerful evangelical business manager who convinced her dad to put Britney under conservatorship.
It is a story of sexualizing young women, toxic sexual standards, overwhelming patriarchy, and a shocking loophole in our legal system. Stollar makes a compelling case that #FreeBritney is an exvangelical cause, and that Spears's conservatorship represents the culmination of many evangelical beliefs and practices concerning wayward, apostate children
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Venmo: @straightwhitejc
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AXIS Moondy AXIS Moondy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, our show host in a partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And I have today with me a return guest, someone who I really had the pleasure of getting to know over the last year, who actually lives in close enough proximity to me that we can get together in person sometimes and talk about all things related to religion and politics and everything else.
And that is Ryan Stoller.
So Ryan, thanks for coming back.
You're very welcome.
Thanks for having me.
I'm excited to talk about what we're going to talk about.
It is fun.
Fun and harrowing, I would say.
I just want to make sure everybody knows who you are.
You were here before and talked about your experience as somebody who was homeschooled from kindergarten all the way to high school graduation.
You're writing a book on homeschooling and the homeschooling movement.
You're also writing a book on child liberation theology, so you're an author, you're an activist, your work on homeschooling, the episode you did with us was one of our most popular episodes, and so, you know, folks were fascinated and very interested in what you had to say there.
But today we're doing something a little bit different, and you had this idea, and we talked it over at coffee, and I was like, we got to do this, and that was the fact that As many people know, Britney Spears is in a legal battle to end her conservatorship.
She's been in under, I should say, a conservatorship since 2008.
She had a kind of a very famous public breakdown.
You know, some of you will remember the images of her shaving her head in public and these kinds of things.
You know, at that point, her father was able to institute this conservatorship where he has basically control over her finances and lots of other things of her life.
All of that's been made very public, and there's a movement to free Britney, I'm sure many of you out there will be familiar with.
Some of the things, though, about this story are missing, and that is namely the religious element.
So, before we go there and we get into the very evangelical and ex-evangelical parts of this, is there anything I missed, Ryan, about just the sort of, like, Britney Spears conservatorship saga that people have really sort of latched onto over the last six months or so?
I think that's a good summary.
I think the only thing I would add is just what she has actually accomplished since the conservatorship.
Since she was placed under it, she's completed four world tours, recorded four albums, and she's performed 248 sold-out shows in Las Vegas.
And I just think that's a very interesting piece of information because the conservatorship, the idea there is that she's not capable of making her own decisions.
And here she is, you know, a world-class performer who's putting on shows that are selling out.
Yeah, so if you're under conservatorship, as you just said, the idea is, you know, you're not well enough in some way to make decisions about your life, about your job, about your money, about perhaps family.
I mean, part of this story is Brittany and her children and sort of limited contact with them, less contact than she would like.
And as you just said, she's clearly well enough to do all of those amazing professional feats that you've talked about.
So here's my first question.
A lot of people out there will know about the fact that there's a big conservatorship battle, but they may not know that Britney grew up as an evangelical in many ways, and there's some sense in which Britney Spears might be characterized as an ex-evangelical.
So would you mind taking us through those elements?
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, I think that there's a case to be made.
I mean, there's no debate over whether she was raised evangelical.
We have the facts about that.
And I think there's a very strong case that she is an ex-evangelical in some very real senses.
So yeah, I'll start with just talking about her evangelical background.
And I think I would like, yeah, I'd start off by saying that she's a lot like Katy Perry, you know, who was once a contemporary Christian music artist and she toured with the Newsboys.
And so a lot like Katy Perry, Britney Spears has like deep roots in white American evangelicalism.
And I would say in a very real sense, she's, you know, one of us in terms of people that were raised evangelical and then left the faith.
So I'll just go over some basic information.
Brittany was born and raised in the Bible Belt, and she was surrounded by conservative evangelical Protestants most of her life.
She's the second child of Jamie and Lynn, and her family was Southern Baptists, so she spent her childhood Doing gymnastics, but also performing in a lot of Baptist choirs.
I think this is a very cute factoid that her first stage performance when she was five years old was singing What Child Is This at her kindergarten graduation.
Wow.
That's a classic right there.
And even though she's getting popular, like in the late 1990s, she was known to attend church.
I found a lot of articles about that.
And, you know, not just any church, but a Southern Baptist one.
And because of that, there was a lot of things that a lot of your viewers were probably going to be familiar with.
You know, she was raised in purity culture.
From early on in her career, she vowed as a youth to, quote unquote, remain a virgin until marriage.
And that, you know, became its whole thing with Justin Timberlake when they were dating.
And also, she grew up in a pretty dysfunctional and abusive home.
Her dad, Jamie, was an alcoholic.
A year before she was born, her mom actually filed for divorce from him because of his antics.
When he was drunk, he would be abusive towards the family.
And I think that's, you know, a really important piece of information to keep in mind as we start talking about the conservatorship, which is that she does not have a good relationship with her father, and it is one that actually scares her, and that she considers abusive in some real senses.
One of the things you touched on there, I mean obviously the abuse part is harrowing and important to the story and obviously a very sad and unnerving part of the story.
You also mentioned purity culture and I think for me as I've as I watched some of the Uh, the content on, you know, Britney Spears going back to her, her early days on like Star Search with Ed McMahon.
And, um, you know, there's this clip of Ed McMahon basically saying, do you have a boyfriend?
And she's like, no.
And he says, can I be your boyfriend?
And it's supposed to be playful and it's supposed to be kind of, uh, you know, funny and light, but it's, it's honestly just creepy.
And when you, it's one of those moments you look back on.
You know, 30 years later and you think, that's just, that's just gross.
And Britney Spears, you know, Britney Spears seemed to just hold this unique place in like late 90s, early 2000s American cultural imagination.
She was the innocent girl who vowed to stay pure.
And yet, you know, the world watched her sort of grow into a young woman and, you know, break the bounds of that purity culture.
And that seemed to be part of the kind of Fascination and repulsion with Britney Spears and the way that she was just sort of treated as both this icon, but also as this kind of that Eve syndrome, you know, the way that American culture treats young women with an assertive sexuality as somehow dangerous and somehow, you know, something along those lines.
I mean, does that make sense to you in terms of the purity culture piece here?
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire Swadge archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
