This week’s episode focuses on the intersections of cultural and political debates about race, history, sexual violence, and abortion. Dan and guest co-host Professor Sara Moslener discuss a Fox new claim that "wokism" has taken over Thomas Jefferson's legacy because tour guides at Monticello now highlight his sexual relationships with the people he enslaved. Sara recounts her recent visit to Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello, VA and the lessons for understanding current debates a race, history, and cultural memory.
They also discuss ongoing efforts to minimize and trivialize the findings about sex abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention, and some of the ongoing lessons that are being learned in the wake of SCOTUS’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am one of your hosts, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Our other beloved host, Brad Onishi, is not with us today.
He is having a rare week off from our end-of-the-week podcast, so good for him.
But I'm the lucky one because Brad is gone, but I am joined by a friend of the show, somebody that I hope a lot of you are familiar with.
She's been on the podcast before, has run a seminar with the podcast and is going to run it again here in a few weeks.
We'll be talking about that in a few minutes.
But Professor Sarah Mosliner.
So, Sarah, welcome to back, I guess, to the podcast.
And thank you so much for joining me today.
Thanks so much, Dan.
I am delighted to be here, as always.
Yeah, and I mentioned it a minute ago, so for those of you who've heard Brad and I talk about Sarah's work before, you'll be like, get past it, we know what she does.
But she does a lot of great stuff on, saying it's on purity culture sounds a little bit too simplistic at this point, really playing out evangelical purity culture, but it's relations to race and class and cultural politics and so many other things.
I've mentioned before that I've used your work, Sarah, in a really religion and pop culture class that I do for years and love it, and want to, as I say, emphasize that if you go to the podcast website, Straight White American Jesus, and you click on Seminars, Sarah is offering her seminar, Purity, Culture, Race, and Embodiment.
It's going to be running in August and September.
Is that, I think, Monday nights?
It has the dates on there, but folks can take a look at that.
Sarah, if you want to just give us, you know, the 30, 45 minute, one minute pitch.
Tell us a little bit about the seminar for folks who may not be familiar, or maybe who missed out the first time, who are interested in signing up this time.
Yeah, absolutely.
So Thursday nights, starting in the middle of August, so we thought end of August into early September.
Yeah, this is a seminar I put together really around my current thinking on the topic and the questions I've been asking specifically about purity culture.
Not as a gender project, not as a project primarily around sexuality, but as a race project.
And so so we dig into the history of the concept of sexual purity, which goes back far, much farther than the 1990s and true love waits.
And and think about the ways that The history of sexual purity continues to inform how we, and by we, I think those of us who have been or are a part of various forms of Christianity in the United States, how we think about sex.
You know, I have sort of these, these theories that I sit with.
I think a lot of academics do, like we kind of have theories, we're not quite sure.
But my theory is that sexual purity is rooted in a great deal of anxiety about race mixing.
And so I just I have lots of questions to sort of poke into that and I'm always very excited to have people come join me.
In thinking about those questions, when we ran this in May, we had an incredible group of people.
I'm kind of mad at Brad because he, when he described it, he said, Oh, so plan on something, designing something for an undergraduate, you know, a first year undergraduate audience, which I have a very specific sense of what that is.
Okay.
We're defining things.
We're doing this.
And I ended up getting people.
With doctorates in doctoral programs, so it's and some actually pretty incredible undergraduate students as well, but it was just a whole bunch of intellectual heavy hitters.
Who also wanted to talk about their own physical embodiment and experiences in their body, whether that be race, gender or sexuality.
So this has always been my goal and my dream is to create a learning environment that that isn't just about bringing our brains, but we're actually bringing our whole bodies and thinking about how do we encounter these questions through our bodies?
through our racialized bodies, through our sexed bodies.
And this has just been a pedagogical experiment for me, which I think went very well.
And I think people really appreciated it.
So if that's something you are up for, and you have lots of questions beyond the questions that we, that people ask all the time in places like Twitter, this is the place to come.
So I look forward to meeting you there.
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