You're Not Welcome Here, Ep. 12: “Why Don’t They Ever Change?”
If individual identity and group identity are deeply intertwined, why does it seem that group identity shapes individual identity, but not the other way around? Why are group identities so hard to change, even when there are those within them working to change them? And what does this mean for understanding identity politics?
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy What are the connections between purity culture and race?
Why does purity culture work so hard to disembody people, make them feel as if they're not living in their own skin?
And what do these things have to do with each other?
Well, we're incredibly excited to announce our next Straight White American Jesus Seminar, Purity Culture, Race, and Disembodiment.
In this class, the instructor, Dr. Sarah Mosliner, who is a leading researcher on purity culture and the leader of the After Purity Project, We'll take participants through various histories and ideologies as they relate to the racist origins of purity culture and how disembodiment is a tactic used by white evangelical leaders and others in order to achieve cultural, political, and religious dominance.
Sarah Mosliner is the author of Virgin Nation, a leading scholar on purity culture, and someone who's been studying this topic for over 15 years.
Our seminar is going to run in May, every Thursday, and you can find all the information at StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com under the Seminars tab.
Sign up quick, there are limited spots, and we expect them to fill up fast.
We hope you're having a great day.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you soon.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College and also a Trauma Resolution Practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
And this is the series You're Not Welcome Here, which focuses on identity and identity politics.
As always, we are hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and thank them.
And I want to, as always, also thank all of those who listen, those who support, Financially and otherwise, we're just in spirit.
Straight white American Jesus.
All of you who've reached out to me, I can be reached at DanielMillerSwag, S-W-A-J, at gmail.com.
I always value hearing from everybody.
I do apologize I'm behind in responding to those emails because of just other things impinging on life, but I will be getting to those.
So thank you to everybody.
Thank you for taking time in whatever format and wherever you are, whatever you're doing to listen to this.
So I wanted to start today by pointing out simply that I am a part of Gen X, Generation X. We don't talk about Gen X anymore.
We're sort of a small group and have been supplanted by millennials and now later generations.
But the reason that's significant is when I was an undergrad in college, there were lots of books written and prognostications given about how Gen X, my generation, was going to change American evangelicalism.
And I should probably say white evangelicalism.
We didn't talk that way then, but we know that American evangelicalism is very, very split down lines of race.
But the idea was then, just as now, that there were concerns about things like religion and politics, different kinds of culture war issues and so forth.
And there was this line that a younger generation that was more sensitive to things like, say, global poverty or the AIDS crisis, or not as condemnatory of LGBTQ people or what have you, would come along and basically bring about a kind of kinder, gentler, American Evangelicalism.
That largely didn't happen.
20 some odd years on from those discourses, it didn't happen.
And in the run-up and the aftermath of the 2016 election, if we fast forward, you know, 20 or so years, there were a lot of similar predictions about Millennials and American Evangelicalism.
In the face of historically high white evangelical support for Donald Trump, remember in 2016, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
It was a historically high number.
It was higher than had voted for Mitt Romney or John McCain or even George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
Historically high numbers.
But that also meant that there were, you know, about 20% of white evangelical voters who did not vote for Donald Trump.
And there was a not maybe widespread, but not uncommon discourse, especially among that 20% or so of evangelicals who said, we're not going to stand for it.
You could call them the never Trumpers now, I suppose.
They wouldn't stand for it.
They would transform the movement from within.
It didn't happen.
And there's no sign that it is happening.
Support among white evangelicals in 2020 was even higher for Trump than it was in 2016.
I said in the regular podcast that we do, I in the run-up did not think that that was possible.
I thought the number had sort of maxed out.
It hadn't.
I was wrong about that.
In addition, more people identified with white evangelicalism because they supported Donald Trump.
Social scientists have found this fact out.
So it hasn't been that long since 2016, but it's been long enough that presumably if there was this big groundswell of opposition to Trump among white evangelicals, we would have seen it.
So, when I was an undergrad, Gen X was going to change white evangelicalism.
Didn't really happen.
2016, that minority, that anti-Trump minority, they were going to change white evangelicalism.
No sign that that's happening.
What are these examples of?
They're examples of group identities that have not substantively changed as a result of the individuals within those groups who differ from the majority of the group.
And so the question is, why don't individuals more easily change group identities?
Why do group identities seem so resistant to change?
So those are two examples of that or maybe one example of evangelicals in two historical periods.
Let's take it down a notch in case that's an uncomfortable topic and think about it in a little bit more fanciful way.
The topic that I introduced last time right imagine that again that I'm sitting around still discussing the Broncos with other Broncos fans.
I'm in a sports bar.
I'm maybe it's virtual.
Maybe I'm online.
Whatever it is.
I'm talking with them and I mentioned this before that I have argued that drew lock the mediocre QB that Denver just got rid of was was a great QB great quarterback and the Denver shouldn't have made their blockbuster trade for Russell Wilson.
Let's imagine that I even get a few people who agree with me and I'm sure they're out there.
Is it the case that Denver fans are going to look around and say, well, you know what?
I'm a hardcore Denver fan.
It's a no brainer for me that Russell Wilson is better and that Drew Locke wasn't a great quarterback, but there's just a few other Denver fans out there who make that counter argument.
And because they're Denver fans and I'm a Denver fan and we share an identity, I think, I think I should hear them out and maybe I'll be convinced.
Right?
That's not how it works.
It's unlikely that the few of us who might think that are going to in any fundamental way change what it means to be a Denver fan.
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