What does it mean when someone asks you if you’re “saved”? If you’re active in the life of a Christian church or tradition (of whatever kind), and someone says, “that’s fine, but are you saved,” what’s going on? In this first of paired episodes, Dan explores this question, decoding the different ideas of “salvation” and Christian identity that define and structure so much of the terrain of contemporary American religion.
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Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus and the series It's in the Code.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm the host and I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
As always, what we do on Straight White American Jesus, including this series, is supported in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, so we thank them.
And, as always, I also want to thank all of the listeners who support us, whether that's just by listening, whether that is by doing things like emailing me with ideas for this series or other questions or comments, whether that is supporting us financially.
You're the reason we do this.
You're the ones who give us the energy and the means to do this, and so we thank you for it.
As I just referenced, this is a series called It's in the Code, where we sort of decode some of the language and practices of American religion, particularly American Christianity.
And as I noted there, I really want this to be a kind of grassroots, from the ground up sort of series, and so I invite folks to keep contacting me.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj.com with ideas, comments, thoughts about the issues that arise here.
I again apologize, as I always do, that I just can't get back to everybody who contacts me, but I do read those emails.
I do sort of compile those and take note of them.
And hopefully if you send in ideas you'll hear as we discuss some of these that you know if I don't mention people by name but I'm often bringing you know a whole cluster of emails or themes that people have raised together into an episode and so hopefully you hear that.
The last thing I want to say is that I know that from some experience at this point that talking about some of these issues can be Difficult for folks.
Folks have been impacted, sometimes positively, very often negatively, by the kind of coded religious language and practices that we talk about.
And I'm also a trauma resolution practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
And if you find yourself sort of dealing with that, feeling triggered or traumatized as we talk about these things, I just encourage you to check out the Center and the resources there.
Because I know that's a real thing and I want to take that seriously and I want folks to know that they should take that seriously as well.
So all that by sort of way of introduction, I want to dive right in here and I want to spend a couple of sessions.
So this session and probably the next episode.
Looking at a couple of really fundamental elements of American Christian language that a lot of you have written me about.
One is the question of whether or not you are quote-unquote saved, or the affirmation that you need to be saved, or something like that.
The language of being saved.
And the second one, this is the one that we'll turn to more in the next episode, is the slogan or the insistence or the affirmation, whatever word you want to put on that, that will say that, quote, it's not about religion, it's about relationship.
Or that Christianity is, quote, not a religion, it's a relationship.
And a lot of you have emailed me with questions about this and just basically asking, like, what the hell do people mean when they say things like this?
Like, what does this mean?
So today I want to spend a little bit of time in that language of being saved.
Next episode get into this relationship versus religion kind of notion.
And the reason I bring this up is here is a kind of typical email that I've received about this and I've heard a lot.
All right.
And these are emails that I've received typically not all the time but typically from people who identify as Christian who participate in Christian life Largely within Catholicism or what we would call mainline Protestantism.
I'm going to talk about that in a minute.
So I've gotten emails from like Presbyterians and Anglicans and Catholics and what they'll basically say is somebody coming up and asking them, are you a Christian?
And sometimes they're taken aback by this because this might be a family member.
You know, say over a holiday or something, this might be a friend, it might be a co-worker, it might be a neighbor, but the reason they're sort of taken aback by this, it's often asked by people who know that they attend church or that they go to mass or that maybe they went on a, you know, their church had a big fundraising thing to raise, you know, support for Ukraine or
For some some part of the world that was devastated by a tsunami or an earthquake or maybe they even Gave of their own time and their church like had it let a volunteer group who went and helped rebuild like You know a school in one of these places or something like this.
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