Brad speaks with journalist and pastor Angela Denker about the updated version of her book, Red State Christians.
Red State Christians: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506482507/Red-State-Christians
Denker spent a year traveling across the United States, interviewing the Evangelical Christian voters who supported the Trump presidency and exploring how their voting block continues to influence the landscape of modern conservative politics. From booming, wealthy Orange County megachurches to libertarian farmers in Missouri, to a church in Florida where the pastors carry guns, to an Evangelical Arab American church in Houston, to conservative Catholics on the East Coast--the picture Denker paints of them is enlightening, at times disturbing, but always empathetic.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And today I have an amazing guest who we have a lot to talk about and somebody who spent some time in my backyard in Orange County in ministry.
And so that is the Reverend Angela Danker.
So Angela, thanks for joining me.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Let me tell people about you.
Sometimes I get to interview people and I feel like Coming into the interview, I've had a pretty interesting life, but then I like get to see people's bios and I'm like, no, I think you win.
You've, you know, you've done, you've done pretty.
So you were at one time a sports writer, which is really cool and are now an ordained minister in the ELCA and a writer.
And we're here to talk about your book, which.
It came out a few years ago, but there's a new edition coming out this week as we speak.
And so that's incredibly exciting.
And I think it's one of those books, and I'm happy for you just to kind of jump in here and tell me if this is right or wrong, but it's one of those books I think you probably wrote at the very beginning of the kind of Trump era.
And now as the new edition comes out, you have like this, you know, we all do have this kind of like having lived through the Trump administration and, and things, some things look the same.
Some things look different.
Does that, does that kind of feel right to you just in terms of like how, how it goes in terms of updating this book and, and all the things that you reported on a couple of years ago?
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, I think it's really a privilege to get this opportunity to re-release the book and add some content.
And where you can really see my own personal evolution and, of course, everything we've gone through as a country in the last three years, particularly since the book came out in 2019, you can see it in the subtitles.
So the initial subtitle, which I kind of fought against, the initial subtitle was Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump.
And at that time, I really wanted it to be meet the voters who elected Donald Trump, because I think understanding gave this perception that I was going to give some sort of sociological historical justification for what had happened when really what I wanted to do was make introductions as a journalist and as a theologian.
You know, so those are my two main frames, which sort of differ from a lot of people writing on this topic, is that I approach it as a journalist and as a pastor and as a theologian.
But the new subtitle, is a journey into white Christian nationalism and the wreckage it leaves behind.
And that wreckage, for me, has been personal, as well as what I've experienced professionally and as a writer.
So it's rough, but it's good to get to do the work.
I want to talk about some of that here just quickly, and before we do that, I want to tell folks, so the book is about red state Christians, and as you just outlined so wonderfully, it's not only about meeting them, but also analyzing and dissecting the wreckage that is left behind when people delve into or find themselves entangled with white Christian nationalism.
I love what you said because it really resonates with me that you're a journalist and a theologian.
You're a journalist and a pastor.
You know, on this show, we're, I mean, I'm a former evangelical pastor and I'm also now a scholar of religion.
So we kind of do that dual lens thing.
And so I'm really excited to kind of talk to you about your dual or triple lens that you use whenever you're doing this kind of work.
So let's just start here with the kind of wreckage and the personal kind of things.
You know, you write in the new version about how In the week after January 6th, you had your heart broken and some of your naivete was shattered, and I feel some of that too.
Would you mind just changing, or excuse me, sharing a little bit of what changed for you in the weeks after the insurrection?
I think, and I will, I'll talk about that.
And then I want to talk about to this other personal level that became even more intense wreckage for me.
But after the insurrection, certainly what I noticed is, so I, when we're talking about dual existence, dual lenses, I live in Ilhan Omar's congressional district.
So I live in a very liberal corner of Minneapolis.
At the same time, I drive an hour West outside the Twin Cities to a very small town where I pastor a congregation.
I'm the solo pastor.
And so I live a very bifurcated existence, and I really sort of straddle that rural-urban divide.
And so, coming into the instruction, in Minneapolis and in Minnesota, we had lived through the murder of George Floyd, and we had lived through, as Minnesotans, Especially as white Christian Minnesotans having to confront our own racism.
And also for people in outstate Minnesota, there was this sense that you had to be afraid in Minneapolis.
And you remember all the headlines that still, I mean, I think Laura Ingraham was just in Minneapolis trying to say, you know, we have such a dangerous city.
You know, we don't, my kids go to the park all the time.
There are things happening, right?
But it's, Anyway, so I had that experience living in the city.
So that morning for church, I drive out to this church in this town that I love.
But that Sunday, when I had witnessed throughout the week, people marching, some of them armed, marching into the U.S.
Capitol with signs bearing their Christian faith in attachment to that being the motive for them to violently overthrow democracy and attached, of course, to all the threats against anyone who's not part of this white Christian dominant group.
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