Danté Stewart on Leaving the White Church to Follow Jesus
Brad speaks with the Danté Stewart about his journey into, and then out of, the White Church. Stewart grew up a Black Pentecostal until he reached university. There he began attending a White megachurch. He spent years in White churches convinced that the Jesus worshipped there--one coded as a White American, as superior to the one found in the Black church, as the true and right way to be a Christian and an American--was saving him from his own blackness. The murder of Trayvon Martin, the election of Donald Trump, the massacre of the Charleston 9--these events and more slowly opened his eyes to the way White Jesus had made him anti-black.
Danté Stewart's Shoutin' in the Fire: An American Epistle: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672938/shoutin-in-the-fire-by-dante-stewart/
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
Produced by Brad Onishi
Edited by Shannon Sassone
Music by Documentary
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Hello friends!
Before we jump in today, I wanted to say thank you to all of you for your support.
All of our patrons and people who reach out to us, we are immensely grateful and you definitely make this show go.
In the new year, we're looking forward to continuing the show and doing it three times a week, but we're basically in a place where we need to continue to raise revenue and raise money in order to do that.
For Dan and I, this is a passion project.
It's something that takes up a lot of time, especially for me.
I'm the writer, the producer, The interviewer, the editor, and all of those things.
And so, with a newborn, and with job responsibilities, and all kinds of other things, both Dan and I are basically staring down a scenario where we need to kind of figure out how we can balance all of those obligations with the time it takes to do this show.
Not just once, not just twice, but three times a week.
If you have not thought about becoming a patron yet, please think about that today.
Or, if you would like just an ad-free experience without having to sign up for Patreon and all that stuff, you can find that in our show notes as well.
It would really help us and allow me to focus on content, and to interviewing great scholars and journalists, and to formulating further series and documentaries.
And if none of that's possible, we totally understand.
We would hope that you would perhaps stop by Apple Podcasts and give us a review.
It helps us out immensely, and share all of our stuff on social media.
That helps too.
Thanks for being here, and we'll turn now to today's interview.
When I was 14, I converted to evangelicalism at an overwhelmingly white church in Southern California.
Over the next 10 years, I went from someone who was a golden child in the youth group to one of the ministers at the 2,000-person church.
After I deconstructed, there was a long journey of understanding and dissecting and analyzing, trying to figure out all the elements of what I'd experienced.
One of those was the way that being at the church, the white church, made me more white.
Let me explain what I mean.
I'm a biracial person.
My father is a Japanese-American guy from Hawaii.
My mother is a white woman from the American South.
My life has been one toggling back and forth between cultures and identities.
But when I was at church, there were little signs, little signals, little utterances from my elders and my peers.
That shaped me into somebody who identified as a white person and who worshiped a white Jesus.
None of this was explicit or overwhelming and it wasn't until years later that I understood the ways that coming up in a white church that envisioned a white Jesus shaped my understanding of myself and shaped my attitudes towards my own Asian American identity and towards other people of color.
That journey has been painful, and it's required the ability to face up to my own failings, my own misgivings about who I am and who I've been, and to do work to gain a broader understanding of the world and all of its complexities.
My guest today has been on that journey in ways that feel in some ways similar to mine, but in other ways are worlds apart.
Dante Stewart grew up in a black Pentecostal church in South Carolina.
While he was at Clemson attending university, he began attending a white megachurch.
And eventually found himself as one of the leaders in white churches across the country.
However, certain events in his life, certain discussions with family members, certain events in our political and cultural sphere made him rethink how his participation in the white church and his worshiping of what in essence was a white Jesus made him anti-black.
And it caused him to turn away from the stories, the rituals, the traditions, and the people who had taught him to follow Jesus in the first place.
His book, "Shouting in the Fire: An American Epistle," is out now, and we had the opportunity to discuss his story and so many others in this interview.
Welcome to "Straight Wide 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 I have an amazing guest today, someone I'm sure that many of you are already familiar with, and that is Dante Stewart.
So Dante, thanks for joining me.
Yo, what's up, bro?
I didn't even know you was at San Francisco.
What you do over there, bro?
So I teach philosophy and religious studies.
Really?
Yeah.
Dang, that's lit, bro!
That's legit.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I have to say though, I'm feeling, you know, I feel good about it.
I feel good about my life, but I'm feeling a little old because today is your birthday and it's your 30th birthday.
So, you know, welcome to the club.
When you got out of bed today, did you feel the aches and pains?
You know, did you see some gray hair?
No, no, I'm healthy.
I'm good.
And even if I had aches and pains, bro, You know, I still would be good because, you know, I'm getting older for me, bro.
It ain't no, I don't see, I don't dread getting older.
Like, I look forward to getting older and seeing kind of what the third is going to look like.
The only thing that messed me up this morning is I'm in the mountains.
And so my Airbnb don't got no workout equipment.
And then, being in the mountains, I can't run, so I can't run, I can't work out.
So that's the only thing, bro.
That's the only ache and pain this morning is my broken heart that I can't work out.
Okay, so you got a lot of energy, and you may have to expend it in this conversation, is what I'm hearing, right?
There's a lot of, you know, yeah.
Let's do it.
All right.
Well, you know, folks, as I said in my intro, Dante is the author of Shouting in the Fire, an American Epistle, has written for so many outlets all over the place, New York Times, ESPN, and just today, on his 30th birthday, has a new essay out at CNN, so everybody should go read that.
Thank you, Dan.
And so, just want to jump in.
You write in your book, and I know you've talked about this all over the place, but I'll ask you myself, You get to Clemson, you come from the Black Pentecostal tradition, you've grown up in the church, you're committed to your faith in ways people call you preacher and so on, and yet you start to attend the white megachurch.
You start to find yourself in white spaces at Clemson and then afterward.
You talk there about scripts.
You say, when I entered those spaces, they were following scripts, and I was following a script.
What were those?
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swag 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 Swag 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.
