What does it mean when cultural and religious conservatives proclaim that they affirm a “culture of life?” We know it means that they oppose abortion and abortion access. But what else does it mean? In this episode, Dan dives in to decode this message to look at the racial, gender, and social positions that are encoded in this seemingly familiar slogan.
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Hello and welcome to Stray White American Jesus in the series It's in the Code.
I'm your host, Dan Miller, a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Just coming back from a week off, getting back into the swing of things, a little bit behind the eight ball, as they say, but glad to be back and recording another episode here.
As always, Straight White American Jesus is offered in association with the Kapp Center at University of Santa Barbara, and we thank them for their support.
I thank all of you for your support, whether you're listening, whether you help support us financially.
We can't keep going without you and the revenue that that provides.
As always, I welcome your thoughts, your insights, your suggestions, your topics at danielmillerswaj.com.
As I say, I was just gone for a week.
I'm behind on emails, even further behind than I am.
But please keep them coming.
I do read them.
I read them all.
I respond to the ones that I can respond to.
I value all of them.
And thank you all so much for your engagement and for keeping this series going.
It's those of you who who write in with different ideas and topics that really give me a sense of what it is that people are wondering about or thinking about.
So thank you for that.
Please keep that coming.
As always, I'm Sorry that there's just me to try to keep up with all of them.
Before diving into this week's episode, I do want to say a word about an upcoming seminar with Straight White American Jesus.
If you go to the website, Straight White American Jesus, you can find the information on this.
This is a repeat of the seminar that ran a few months ago and was incredibly popular, filled up really fast.
It is on purity, culture, race, and embodiment, hosted by Sarah Mosliner.
Those of you who listen to the podcast will be familiar with Sarah and her work.
She has appeared on the podcast and helped co-host when either Brad or I are off or gone on the occasional Weekly Roundup or other times.
It's running August to September.
Starting on August 18th, it runs in the evenings, 5 o'clock Pacific if you're on the West Coast, 8 p.m.
Eastern if you're on the East Coast.
The information is all there.
I just really encourage people to check this out.
Sarah's work is amazing.
And in my view, still does not have the kind of awareness that it deserves.
So please do check that out and feel free to contact us if you've got questions about the seminar and what will be involved.
Really, really great stuff.
Can't emphasize it enough.
Now, as I try to get my head back in the game, so to speak, after taking this week-long break, I want to look at a phrase today that's going to be familiar to a lot of people, right?
And it's a phrase or a concept or a series of concepts, and we've spent some time on it in the regular podcast, the Straight White American Jesus podcast.
Especially if people go back and look at, really, some of the stuff from our first season has some stuff on this.
But it's also a phrase that a lot of you have reached out about and have expressed concern about and frustration and confusion and anger and all different kinds of things.
And especially in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, this has kind of come back, I think, into the consciousness of many of us.
And I think that's what I'm seeing in the email.
So I decided to tackle it.
And it's this.
It's basically the idea of a so-called culture of life.
As I've said, this is a very familiar phrase, and it is a very distinctive part of religiously and culturally conservative rhetoric.
If you have ever been a part of a conservative white Protestant church, you know, what we typically call evangelicals, you will have heard this phrase.
If you have heard politicians, particularly conservative politicians in the GOP, many of whom also court Christian nationalists and other conservative Protestants, You will have heard this phrase, and within a religious context, of course, we're talking about churches and other religious organizations or groups that proclaim that they want to foster a culture of life as part of their religious expression, that this is part of what they as Christians are about.
And the proximate cultural reference, right, the cultural issue that's like sort of right on the main stage here is familiar to everybody, and it's about abortion, right?
To claim that one supports a culture of life is to say that one wants to bar access to abortion, they want to criminalize it.
We know that, and I'm not going to spend tons of time on the background of that, because I think that's familiar to everybody.
But another point that's pretty obvious, but maybe overlooked by some, is also that this is an intentionally affirmative phrase.
It's articulated in terms of what individuals or communities affirm or support, rather than what they oppose.
So they won't say, I'm opposed to abortion.
They will say, I affirm a culture of life.
Or they will certainly not say, I oppose healthcare rights.
I oppose access to healthcare.
I suppose, excuse me, I oppose a woman's ability to make decisions about her own body or any other number of things that people might say.
They won't oppose that.
They will say, I support life.
I'm affirmative of life.
And that That sort of affirmative phrasing has been hugely effective over time, right?
It helped build a massive following, a massive religious and political movement, a movement that has been active for decades trying to achieve exactly what was just achieved in the Supreme Court with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
There's some basic stuff.
We get all of that.
That's all really important.
We could talk about that a lot, but it's familiar.
And so it's not really the direction I want to go in this episode.
I also don't want to get into the sort of ethics of it or the debates about, you know, sort of when does life begin and the relation of conception or the status of the unborn as persons and so forth.
Lots of resources on that.
Some episodes where we've talked about things like that.
Again, that's not really the focus here.
My interest is in wanting to decode this phrase a little bit more.
I want to go beyond the familiar surface level to look at some of, as we do in this series, the point of the series, the opacity, what's the sort of plain meaning or the surface meaning to looking at, you know, what does this language really do?
How does it really operate?
And as we get to the end of the episode, I think I also want to highlight just a couple of sort of ironies of this language and the way that it's used.
So let's get started with that, right?
And again, if you were to go through lots of episodes that we've run in the past, you could sort of cobble some of this together.
I want to draw it together in a fuller way and make some points here that I think I haven't always made in some of those other contexts.
And so let's begin with, you know, talking about this abortion focus, right?
And so if you ask anybody, With even a passing familiarity with this language.
If you were to stop somebody on the street, and I don't know, you're a reporter, maybe you're a social scientist, whatever, and you say, are you familiar with the phrase, culture of life?
Many would say yes.
Or if you were to say, when you hear the phrase, or you hear somebody say, I support a culture of life, what are they talking about?
They would know that the focus is abortion, immediately.
They don't have to necessarily know that it has a religious intonation to it.
They don't have to know all the debates about it.
They'll know that it's about abortion.
And this is the question I want to start with, is what does this focus, the kind of narrowness of it, and sort of the obviousness of it, that when somebody hears this phrase, immediately they know we are talking about abortion.
What does the obviousness of it tell us about how life is imagined by the people who affirm a culture of life?
Right?
In other words, let's say I affirm a culture of life, and you say, okay, but cool, what counts as a life?
And that's the question.
That's what I want us to look at.
When you hear the phrase, culture of life, you can be pretty assured of the narrowness of the scope of the quote-unquote life that's in view there.
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