You Don't Belong Here: Religion, Politics, Identity Ep. 1
On the first episode in this series, Dan Miller explains why identity politics gets a bad rap and why that's a mistake. He introduces basic concepts in identity formation, group dynamics, and cultural identity in order to explain how identity is at the core of everything we do--including politics. It's not a matter of doing away with identity politics. It's a matter of understanding how they work and why in order to create a society in which everyone can flourish.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the CAP Center at University of California, Santa Barbara.
I want to thank everybody for joining me today.
This is the first of what will be an ongoing series.
Typically we post these on Wednesdays.
And I'm thinking of them as kind of a weekly explainer.
Those of you who listen to the podcast and have kept up with things that I do, or maybe you've been part of our seminar series that we've done, or maybe you know us from other places, you know that I am, among other things, a very colossal geek.
And one of my geeky interests In issues related to social theory, society, politics, these are all topics that we talk about on the podcast.
And one of the things that happens is, as you all know, and as people tell us all the time, there's a lot of really bad discussion about things like religion and politics in America.
Uh, that goes on and we talk about, you know, your hypothetical Uncle Ron, uh, quite a bit.
The people that you might have in your life, uh, that you meet at a cookout, or maybe you just had Thanksgiving dinner with them, or some other holiday get-together, or maybe you'll see them on New Year's, uh, and New Year's Eve, and they bring up discussions of things and they just don't sound right, they don't make sense to you, but it's not always easy to understand exactly what's going wrong or how to counter that.
And I, living as I do in the academic world, know that there are a lot of really, really, really smart people who say and think really, really smart things about religion and society and politics, but they spend most of their time talking to other academics, and they write most of those things in journals and in different places like that, and books.
That are not accessible to most people and if most regular people can get their hands on those things and read them They don't always make a lot of sense And so what I want to do is start kind of a weekly series where I take some of these topics that I think are really really important and really central to understanding who we are as a country where we're going as a country where we might be going where we could go and And try to take those really, really good ideas and put them in terms that regular everyday people can understand.
And so that's what we're going to try to do over at least the next weeks and months.
And so I'm going to start our first series here on a topic called identity politics, or what I would actually like to call the politics of identity.
And maybe that's a term that you've heard, maybe it's a term that you haven't, but I want you to think for a minute and think about if you have ever heard the term identity politics, maybe in a newscast or maybe on Fox News or maybe on MSNBC or maybe on our podcast or wherever.
It's almost always a negative term.
Identity politics is something that's considered bad, it's considered negative.
And this is significant for a number of reasons, because this is what I'm going to argue, this is what I'm going to say about identity, or the concept of identity as it relates to politics, is that number one, it is everywhere.
Politics is absolutely central to identity, it's central to culture, it's central to religion.
If you've listened to the podcast at all, you know that it is one of my core concepts, a concept I think is absolutely central.
And it is also a category that everybody denies.
Everybody will point their fingers at somebody else and say they're playing identity politics, or they're claiming identity, or they're leaning on their identity, or they think their identity is privileged, but we never want to point that finger at ourselves.
We always think of ourselves as not subject to identity, as not expressing a particular identity, as not quote-unquote playing identity politics.
And we all are all the time.
And that's not a bad thing.
That's just the way things are.
That's just the nature of social reality is that identity is absolutely central.
We can't operate as social beings.
We can't operate as political actors.
We cannot operate as humans without identity.
And so that's what we're going to talk about.
As we move forward and so that's what I'm gonna start with today It's just a little bit of a reflection about the way that people talk about identity as something negative Before we start getting into untangling this concept for the next few weeks So here's the first thing to understand about identity politics.
I use words a lot like everybody does this and that, or we all this, that, or the other.
And when it comes to identity, I mean it.
And here's why.
Identity politics is not something that applies to just the political right or the political left.
Here on the podcast, we spend most of our time talking about Christian nationalists, conservatives, the American religious right, people who fit pretty far to the right on the political spectrum.
But identity politics cuts across that spectrum and critiques of it cut across that spectrum.
People on both the political right and the political left decry quote-unquote identity politics.
So what does that look like?
Here's what it looks like on the right.
On the right it looks like those who oppose what they call hyphenated identities.
If you've listened to commentators on the right they'll talk about this.
These are the folks who don't like discussions of multiculturalism.
These are the things who don't like what they call those hyphenated identities like African American or Indian American or Asian American.
They do not like language of somebody who identifies as something else.
Maybe they identify as queer.
Maybe they identify as biracial.
Maybe they identify as trans.
They don't like that language of identification.
They don't like that language That that specifies a country of origin or a culture from which one's family comes.
And the reason they don't like that is they say that what it does is it dilutes a kind of shared sense of Americanness.
It takes away from a more shared, authentic American identity.
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