Brad interviews Phil Gorski, Professor of Sociology at Yale, and the author of the new co-authored book with Sam Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to Democracy. Gorski breaks down how the rioters thought about the Insurrection–it was not about right or wrong. It was about us vs them. This explains how the various spiritualities on display at J6 worked to form a coalition of forces even if they don’t all have the same worldview. It also explains the function of religious symbols, rituals, and dress on display that day. They all worked to tell a story of one team trying to overtake another.
The discussion finishes with Gorski explaining how the Reformation and the wars that followed it are a good comparison point for our current situation. The breakdown of authority, the transmission of information, and the individualism of our time resonate with the Reformation period and portend difficult days ahead.
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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 at UCSB, and today I have an amazing guest for our ongoing series, J6 One Year Later, and that is Dr. Phil Gorski.
I'm going to introduce Phil in a minute, but let me just first say, Phil, thanks for taking the time to be here.
I'm always happy to talk with you, Brad.
So, Dr. Gorski, Phil is a professor of sociology at Yale University, has been writing about a lot of the things we're going to discuss today for quite some time, is a distinguished sociologist in the field.
Sometimes, friends, I get to email folks who, before I started this show, I uh, looked up to as sort of, um, you know, idols in the field.
And, and for me, it's always just an amazing thrill to now get to have conversations with them and like this.
And so, um, Phil Gorski is one of those people.
He's the author of many works.
One is, uh, American covenant.
Uh, another from just a little bit ago, 2020 is American Babylon.
Uh, Both of those touch on what we're going to discuss today, which is Christian nationalism and the history of the United States, civil religion, and so on.
He also has a new book co-authored with Sam Perry, who I know that many of you know, and that'll be coming out in March in just a couple of months.
Last time Phil was here, I talked about how having Sam Perry and Phil Gorski together is like having Dwayne Wade and LeBron James on the same team, which I'm going to stand by that reference and say that remains true.
So, we're here to talk about January 6th.
And, you know, the last two weeks I've talked to Sarah Posner and Teddy Wilson, and I started with a big question, you know, what was J6?
And as I started to think about today, Phil, I wanted to, instead of having that sort of zoom out view to start with, I want to zoom in, right?
I'd rather zoom into something specific and then we can then zoom out to the bigger picture from there.
You recently contributed to Uncivil Religion, which is a great new project done in partnership between the University of Alabama Religious Studies Department and the Smithsonian.
And folks, if you haven't checked it out yet, go do that now.
Or actually, listen to the rest of the interview and then go do that.
But in your piece that you wrote here, you talked about the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Apotheosis of Washington.
This is the title.
And you focus on this young man who's at January 6th, Roundface, Rotunda Roundface, as he's called, because people don't know his name at the moment.
And Rotunda Roundface sort of becomes famous with J6 Luce because he's in the Capitol Rotunda, and one of the things he does is he stops and prays with other people.
Now, he appears to be white, as you point out in the piece, Obviously not sure how he identifies, but he appears to be a white man and he stops and he prays and he gives a prayer that seems to exemplify in many ways white Christian nationalism and other facets of the spirituality of President J6.
So, would you mind if we just zoom in quickly, Phil, and say What does Rotunda Roundface pray, you know, how does the prayer fit the bill of somebody who's kind of embodying Christian nationalism as he is participating in an insurrection at the nation's capital?
Let me just kind of contextualize the piece a tiny little bit more.
So one component of it is a series of video clips and then accompanied by interpretive essays by
People have been thinking about these sorts of questions about religion politics in the US for a while and so you have to imagine maybe half a dozen guys and they've clearly set their cell phone camera down on the floor and they kind of huddle around it and then one of them starts praying and it's
Kind of a spontaneous, unscripted prayer.
So in that sense, very much fits into a certain Protestant and especially evangelical tradition.
I mean, they're not reciting Hail Marys here.
But when you listen to the text, it's just.
You know, it's not at all clear that it's really a Christian prayer.
I mean, they address a God or some God.
Give some thanks.
They talk about freedom a bit.
And then, as it were, they kind of break out of their huddle.
And that's the other thing that's sort of odd about it is that if you just dress these guys up in, you know, football or basketball uniforms and, you know, put this on ESPN, it would you would imagine they were talking about something totally different.
You know, it was kind of a Pep talk before they went out and and ran a ran a play and So what's kind of interesting about this?
Is one that it is sort of vaguely Protestant Christian and you have the sense like, you know, probably some of these guys Went to Sunday school or attended church every now and then when they were younger But they're certainly not particularly Orthodox and then What they pray about and for is not justice or mercy, it's freedom and power.
And then the strange way that it kind of overlaps with or kind of takes from just secular culture.
And so that it really is, you know, as you said, Brad, in some ways, just a little tableau that encapsulates so much about
Christian nationalism, you know, this sort of vague Protestant or evangelical identification, this extremely watered down theology that seems to have more to do with politics and identity than it does with theology and community and the way in which it's sort of like being that identification is part of being on a team that's competing with another team and you want to sort of overpower
and beat the other team, and that to me really is Christian nationalism in a nutshell.
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