“Spiritual Warfare 1.0”
What is “spiritual warfare”? Why do some Christians understand their faith and practice in terms of spiritual warfare? And what are some of the concrete effects of understanding Christianity in terms of spiritual warfare? In this episode, Dan outlines where this language of spiritual warfare comes from, how different Christian groups understand and practice spiritual warfare, and considers the significance of spiritual warfare language for Christian groups that deny the reality of mental illness and the legitimacy of LGBTQ+ identities.
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Hello and welcome to the series It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I, I am your host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I want to thank everybody who's listening to this for joining me.
I want to thank, as always, those who support Straight White American Jesus, whether it is financially, whether it is simply through the feedback you give, whether it's through listening, whether it's through telling others.
We can't do what we do without you.
I also want to thank the CAP Center at University of California, Santa Barbara, with whom we are offered in partnership for their support and help.
And for this series in particular, I want to thank all of those, all of you who continue to reach out.
My email is danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj, at gmail.com.
And those who continue to reach out with ideas and topics and themes for this series.
I've had some people ask, like, how long this series is going to go, and the simple answer is, I don't know.
Because folks keep, you know, digging up and bringing up just really great ideas and concepts and questions, and I want to thank everybody for that.
I want to thank people as well for the feedback that you give, questions, follow-up sort of conversations that you have.
I always say, and I'm sorry that I don't get a chance to respond to everybody, but I try to respond when I can, and I just want to thank everybody for this.
I said way back when we started this series that I wanted it to be driven by topics that matter to people, topics, questions that they might have, and that's really how it's been going, and I want to thank everybody for that.
I just can't say that enough.
So let me dive into this and really what we'll be doing is I started putting stuff together for this episode and realized that I had enough for two episodes.
Otherwise, it was going to go like 45 minutes or something like that.
So this will be the first sort of a two part episode.
But the theme is one that a lot of people have contacted me about, and I've been kind of thinking about it for a while, deciding, you know, sort of the best way to approach it.
But the theme is spiritual warfare, right?
Now, I've had conversations with folks who are sort of uninitiated to American Christianity, and they hear this phrase or this language of spiritual warfare, and it's really weird.
They want to know, like, what is that?
It sounds archaic.
It sounds potentially violent.
It sounds maybe scary, but certainly confusing, right?
What is quote-unquote spiritual warfare?
Why do Christians in their life talk this way?
What can that possibly mean?
And on the flip side, for those of us who grew up within particular kinds of Christian communities, this language would be very familiar.
It might be so familiar that its distinctive features can be easy to miss.
And really, as we move forward through this episode and the next, those are sort of the two groups I have in mind.
One, wanting to sort of set the stage.
For those for whom this language is really strange and really foreign and try to give some context for it.
But I also want for those of us who maybe grew up with this language to be able to almost as it were take a step back and see some of the nuances and the work that this language does.
That it might have been easy to miss.
And I should also say, both in the coaching work that I do and in the emails, a lot of folks coming out of these traditions, I think, are going to really hear a lot of what I talk about.
And it's really going to make sense.
People will say and have said, yes, that is my experience.
So those are the sort of the two dimensions that we're going to take a look at.
We're also going to look at, and I think this will come out probably a little bit more in the next episode, but it'll be present in this episode as well, that this language is used by different kinds of Christians.
Not all Christians speak primarily in terms of quote-unquote spiritual warfare.
I would say in general, and please, again, I don't necessarily say this every time, but I want to be clear about it.
I am speaking When I do the decoding and talk about these patterns, we're talking about patterns to which there are exceptions, right?
So there are exceptions to everything I say.
I know that.
But in general, I think Catholics tend not to speak in terms of spiritual warfare so much.
And probably liberal and progressive Protestants tend not to speak in terms of spiritual warfare so much.
It tends to be other groups of Christians that speak this way.
And even among those that do, the language doesn't always work the same way.
And that's going to come through a little bit today.
It's going to come through, I think, again, even more in the next episode.
But those are some things that we're going to look at.
And so the broad focus, I'm going to provide some context and background for where this language comes from.
And then I want to look in this episode that really, I think when we say, OK, so we understand the context, we understand the background, but let's let's sort of crack the code.
Let's go a little bit deeper into what this language does or how it works.
One issue of, I think, extreme importance is the significance of mental health, LGBTQ plus orientation and related things.
to this concept of spiritual warfare.
We're going to talk about that a little bit this episode.
And the next issue that can be really complex and complicated is the relation of the quote-unquote spiritual world or spiritual warfare with flesh and blood conflict, with the conflicts and the realities of this world.
And that's what we're going to tackle in the next episode.
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