You’re Not Welcome Here, Ep. 14: “It Doesn’t Just Happen”
One of the fallacies that often arises when we think about diverse identities, marginalization, and exclusion, is that all those groups who have experience marginalization or exclusion will naturally or organically come together in solidarity. But the social and political landscape is full of examples illustrating that this doesn’t happen. This episode explores this fallacy and looks at how it operates with an eye to thinking about how we can cultivate real solidarity and shared social identities.
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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.
You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
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Hello, 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.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj, that's danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
As always, I really appreciate hearing from everybody and the time that people take to speak to me, to reach out, and I apologize that I continue to be behind on responding to those.
This is the series, You're Not Welcome Here, which focuses on identity and identity politics, one of a number of different series and programs we have with Straight White American Jesus.
And as people are listening, I want to just plug another thing that we have coming up with the podcast.
Sarah Mosliner, a scholar who has appeared on the show, whose work has been very influential for me.
She works in the area of purity culture, one of the leading experts on purity culture.
is running another one of our Straight White American Jesus seminars called Purity, Culture, Race, and Embodiment.
It will run every Thursday in May, so just over a month from the time that I'm recording this.
If you're interested, please check out straightwideamericanjesus.com.
The information is there.
There are still some spots available.
I would love for people to just have an opportunity to work with Sarah and to learn what she has to offer.
I will say that for me, her work on the connections between race and purity culture have been absolutely central for my own understanding of purity culture and so much of my own developing understanding of race in American religion and politics.
So please do check that out.
So let's shift from that to today's topic.
I will say that I've probably only got a couple episodes left in this series.
I'm not quite sure, but I think we're getting ready to wind it down, and we'll soon be talking about where we go next.
But last episode, I talked about how complex, large-scale social identities develop and take shape.
It was really around the issue of Christian nationalism and this idea that, no, it's really about politics, not really about religion, or it's really about religion, not really about politics, and just understanding that the two are deeply entwined into one complex social identity that we now call Christian nationalism.
I want to revisit a little bit of the ideas that we talked about last session, partly because they're important to revisit, but partly because they're going to carry us forward to kind of a related idea.
Because they give us an insight into the nature of complex social identities and how we have to understand what's going on with them.
But they also provide an insight into how to undertake social and political action, given the realities of contemporary identity politics.
How do we actually do or take advantage or mobilize what we know about identity and identity politics to try to do concrete things in the world?
And those are some of the things that we're going to talk about, and in particular, what is necessary in the construction or cultivation of shared identities.
How do we get to that?
And so this episode is, as I say, probably the first of two parts on this.
And I want to begin today with really looking at sort of a fallacy, a fallacy that I think is active often among people on the left, the political left, liberals, progressives, lefties with a capital L. And I want to sort of talk about a mistaken understanding of identity that I think works against us as we seek to politically mobilize.
And then in the next and probably final session, spend just a little bit of time and say, okay, what are some really basic ways that we can start doing that?
So let's begin by thinking back to the emergence of the religious right.
As I say, I talked about this a little bit last time.
I'm not going to go in great detail.
We've spent a lot of time on the podcast and in the series, and Brad has done series, looking at the dynamics of how the modern religious right took shape.
I don't want to rehash all of that.
I just want to hit some high points.
Because here's why thinking about it can be so useful.
The religious right is so well-established and obvious by now that there is something called the religious right, that we can identify what that is, that we can identify who's part of it, that we can identify what it does.
For many of us, our entire adult lives have been lived in a context in which it is simply taken for granted.
It is simply a social fact that, for example, most conservative Christians are Republicans.
We live in a context where it is simply a given social fact that political and religious conservatives oppose, for example, abortion and abortion rights.
We have existed in a context where it is just a social fact that the GOP is disproportionately composed of religious conservatives as compared to, say, the larger American population.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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