You’re Not Welcome Here: Religion, Politics, Identity Ep. 2
What do politicians like Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders have in common? They’re critical of “identity politics.” In this episode, we’ll take a closer look at how people on both the political left and the political right are critical of identity politics and the unexpected similarities of their perspectives. We’ll also talk about some of the obvious problems with these perspectives and suggest some of the issues we’ll tackle in future episodes.
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Episode produced by Daniel Miller and Brad Onishi.
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www.StraightWideAmericanJesus.com My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the CAP Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
You are joining me for, it's the second installment in a new series that we began last week called You Don't Belong Here, looking at religion, identity, politics, identity politics, and all the things related to that in our society and in the world around us, really.
And last week, I briefly introduced the theme of identity politics, what we were talking about.
We will be working through this for, I don't even know for how long, but for a lot of sessions, because it's a really complicated topic, one that matters to me a lot, and one that I know matters to a lot of you, and I want to thank those who took the time to contact me this week.
And I'll say this now, one person referred to me as old school, and I guess I am old school.
If you want to reach me, the way to do it is via email.
And you can reach me at danielmilleratlandmark.edu.
I would love to hear from you.
But I noted briefly the concept of identity politics, what that means, and I noted that people on both the political right and the political left are critical of the concept of identity and the way it plays out in politics and the role that it has in political life.
And I noted there that a lot of listeners on this show, on the podcast, will be really familiar with the criticisms of identity politics from those on the right, from the Christian right, from Christian nationalists on the part of lots of white American evangelical Christians.
We talk about this all the time.
But I noted that there are also liberal and progressive critics of identity politics.
But I didn't dig very far into it.
And some of the people who contacted me this week pointed this out and asked questions.
They said, you say that this is an issue for people on the left.
What do you mean?
What are you talking about?
Or people who had a really specific vision of that and knew what I was getting at, but said, I wish you would say more about that because I feel like people miss this.
So today what I want to do is kind of address that and dig in a little bit more deeply and a little more concretely on Those criticisms of identity politics on both the right and the left, the shape they take, where they come from, what people in those different ideological and social spaces have to say about identity politics and what they really think about it.
And I'm going to spend some time on the right.
But again, that's something we talk about a lot on the podcast.
And so I'm going to spend a fair amount of time as well looking at liberal and progressive critiques of identity politics.
And I'm going to say at the outset, I'll say this as we go along, and it's going to take a long time to give all the reasons for this as we go into future sessions.
I sound like I'm doing counseling, right?
Future sessions.
We'll counsel our way through identity politics.
But as we go into future sessions, what I'll try to highlight is that I really disagree with these criticisms of identity politics.
Now we'll have to get into definitions.
What do I mean by identity politics?
Do I necessarily mean the same thing that some critics mean?
Probably not.
But I think that identity is a fundamental political category.
I think politics is impossible without it.
And so in that sense, all politics is identity politics.
And so that's sort of where I'm starting from, but I think it's important to understand what are the criticisms of identity politics.
So this is what we're going to look at.
And so let's, let's start with those in the political right, political conservatives, Christian nationalists, and others.
And again, if you've listened to the podcast, you're going to be familiar with this, right?
This is familiar territory.
If you are somebody who watches the news or pays any attention to internet websites or any of that, The kinds of things I'm going to highlight are things that you will have heard and that will have come up just in regular discussion.
But it's worth pausing to take a look at those things and see what's going on.
So, people on the right have long been opposed to identity politics, sometimes by those terms, sometimes by other terms.
And this is not new.
This didn't start with Donald Trump.
This didn't start with contemporary Christian nationalism.
This didn't start with the 2016 election.
People on the political right in this country have had a long-standing opposition to emphases on, for example, multiculturalism or just general emphases on diversity, right?
They have tended to be opposed to programs like affirmative action and other kind of quota-based systems or systems that seek to make sure that the demographics of a public school system, for example, represent the demographics of the society around them.
They have tended to be opposed to things like African American History Month.
They have tended to be opposed to things like Pride Month.
And the reason is that these kinds of emphases single out particular groups of Americans for attention.
Critics will argue that they single out particular groups for privilege, for special treatment, for rights that not everybody has, and so forth, right?
That this appeal to identity That essentially means privileging particular social groups above others.
And that's been a long-standing position among people on the political right.
So fast forward to now, and everybody will be familiar with the more contemporary nature of these discussions, right?
Current opposition to so-called critical race theory.
And critical race theory is a real thing.
The reason I say so-called critical race theory is that opposition to it at present Basically as opposition to any kind of teaching about racism, American racial history, anything that can make particular groups, in particular white people or white students, quote-unquote, feel uncomfortable and so forth.
These are also criticized on the same logic as a form of identity politics that needs to be opposed.
Now the question is, why?
What's the argument?
What is the reason that people in the political right give for opposing identity politics and a focus on social identity?
Things like race and gender and sexuality and socioeconomic status and any number of other things.
What is the reason why they oppose doing this?
The biggest one is that they will say it is divisive.
What does that mean?
They will say, instead of focusing on Americans as Americans and recognizing that we are all Americans, that we have this common national belonging, you, that is the people who focus on identity and differences, you focus on what makes Americans different, you focus on things that divide us, and in doing so you are divisive.
You are carving up the American society into Gay, and straight, and black, and white, and sort of on and on and on.
And they will say that you are essentially favoring particular groups over others, that these groups, these identity groups, are nothing more than essentially special interest groups who demand privileges and rights that other people don't get, or they demand privileges and rights that can only come at the cost of the rights and privileges of other Americans.
So this is a long-standing criticism on the right, and again, people who listen to the podcast, you'll be familiar with this.
If you listen to the contemporary GOP in opposition to teaching about American racial history in public schools, if you follow podcasts that we've done about places like Texas where they're busy sifting through books to see which books can be in a library and arguing that you can't have divisive topics covered in class and things like that, you're familiar with this line of argument.
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