J6 ONE YEAR LATER, Ep. 1: Christian Supremacy and Holy War - with Sarah Posner
In the first installment of J6 One Year Later, Brad speaks with the journalist Sarah Posner. Sarah discusses the various aspects of Christian supremacy and myth that provided a basis for the religious dimensions of the Insurrection. She and Brad touch on the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and the Jericho March in order to uncover how and why the Insurrection was saturated with Christian imagery and symbols.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and I'm joined today by our return guest, and that is Sarah Posner, who is a type investigations fellow and the author of Unholy.
Unholy is a book I've recommended I don't know how many times, people.
I don't know how many times that I've told you to read it.
I don't know how many times I've assigned it in my courses the last year.
And so, Sarah, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me again.
I kind of have a feeling that there's a lot of academics out there.
And by a lot of academics, I mean me, who kind of wish they were journalists.
I also think there's some journalists who think that they were, we like wish, think that they should be professors.
But when I think of the kind of journalist I would want to be, like it's Sarah, it's Sarah Posner.
Like when I think of like, who would I want to be when I grow up?
It's you and Ann Nelson and a couple other folks, because you're, the way that you investigate and the way that you sort of look at things is to me, in my mind, with the kind of intellectual acumen of academic and yet with the intellectual Incisive view of a journalist.
And so that leads me to our brand new series that we're doing and that is January 6th, a year later.
And I'm basically going to spend the next couple of weeks asking folks, hey, it's been a year since, I don't know, an insurrection at our Capitol, a coup attempt.
And a lot's going on, and it's hard to keep track of every tentacle and every movement and every development.
And so I want to get the perspective of very smart and very connected people who are tracking all of this.
So I'm going to ask you a very open-ended question that maybe will lead us into some more specifics.
But a year later, what do you see after January 6th?
Well, first, thank you so much for all of those kind words.
It just means a lot to me that a professor would say those things about my work.
Now, a year later, I think we're in a place where we're starting to see accountability for the lower-level participants.
In the insurrection and some hints of some higher level accountability, um, hopefully coming down the road.
And I think that in terms of religion's role in the insurrection, it's really important to delineate between say people who were armed militia members who helped plan, organize, strategize, et cetera.
And people who were swept up in what was going on.
And that in both camps, you saw people invoke religion, invoke Jesus, invoke Christianity, invoke an intertwining of Trump and Christianity or Trump and divinity.
Um, and I think that that just shows us how much Trumpism is intertwined with white evangelicalism, and I think in particular its charismatic strands.
And, I think it's a risky proposition to just say, oh, well, just because, you know, there were some people on January 6th who happened to be carrying these Jesus is my king, Trump is my president kinds of signs or invoking Jesus's name while praying in the Senate chamber.
It's it would be easy to dismiss those people as having warped Christianity in the service of the insurrection.
But I think it's that would be a mistake that as we saw throughout Trump's presidency and after.
That the intertwining of Trumpism with evangelicalism is so central to what Trumpism is that you can't dismiss those people as outliers in terms of their expression of Christianity tied with Trumpism.
One of the things that happened pretty soon there after the insurrection was the development of capital, hashtag capital C's religion, you know, Peter Manso from the Smithsonian really sort of kicked it off.
But many of us, including you, have kind of been.
Tracking it, adding to it, trying to build an archive of images, and it is striking, and I've been looking at these images for a writing project I'm doing, but it is striking to go back to that day and to see, and it really backs up everything you're saying, that when you go back to the images of that day and say, hey, was religion really a part of this?
Was religion a weird add-on to the militias and the Proud Boys and the guys in camo?
And it really feels like it's not.
And I'm just wondering, you know, I know that you've been talking about this, lecturing about it.
We have images of people carrying the Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.
We have people walking in the mob, you know, with a Jesus saves sign.
We have folks with a cross bowing before it, genuflecting in some sense.
I'm just wondering, as you return to those images a year later, Given some distance, given some time, what sticks out to you now?
How do those resonate?
How do those ring in your mind?
Those images ring to me of people who came to believe that not only was Trump a salvific figure for the country, but to them personally as well, and that they were on a shared journey of fighting against
Satanic forces or the deep state or You know the George Soros or whatever the particular bogeyman was and even if the the country's top mega church pastors were not involved in Blessing the insurrection or even being there the fact that
This kind, this form of Christianity or this politicization of Christianity so permeates evangelicalism so that, you know, anybody in the pews or even not necessarily in the pews, but listening to the radio or watching TV or watching social media got swept up in this idea of Trump as a messianic figure against the forces of evil, which included the Democratic Party and the supposed deep state.
And that they had an almost religious duty to save the country on his behalf.
And you could talk forever about, you know, well, there's only a handful of pastors across the country who were at the insurrection or overtly told their followers to go to the insurrection.
And that's true.
But many, many more perpetuated conspiracy theories about any number of things, including all of the conspiracy theories that sort of surround Trump, the deep state, the QAnon conspiracy theories, um, and the big lie, most importantly.
And so even, even religious figures who, said afterwards that the insurrection was terrible and they denounced the violence and so on and so forth, nonetheless would say things like, well, I think that Joe Biden is the legitimate president, but Trump is entitled to his opinion about this.
This is something that Robert Jeffress, who you're probably familiar with, First Baptist pastor and very close to Trump, said in late January of 2021.
Um, so they kind of try to cut it both ways.
I believe that Joe Biden is a legitimate president.
But, you know, Trump, Trump really believes that the election was stolen.
He's entitled to believe that if he wants to.
And, you know, Jeffress had Trump come speak at his Christmas service in late December.
And so, you know, these These events and these disagreements haven't severed those kinds of relationships, and that's a very important thing to keep in mind, even as somebody like Jeffress condemned the violence at the Capitol.
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