Weekly Roundup: Rad Trad Catholics, SBC Investigations, and the Party of Trump
Brad and. Dan begin by discussing the week's GOP primary results, nothing that the GOP remains the Party of Trump. They juxtapose these results with the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Org tax case in NY, and the other ongoing investigations. The takeaway: facts and morality don't matter in MAGA land. Just fealty to the leader.
They then transition to two stories about American Christianity. First, the DOJ's investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention and what that means for the SBC's governance, theology, and future. The takeaway: we should stop giving American Christians the benefit of the doubt. Christian does not automatically mean good, civil, or trustworthy.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/13/1117362904/southern-baptists-doj-investigation-sexual-abuse
Houston Chronicle's Robert Downen on SWAJ: https://www.irreverent.fm/show/straight-white-american-jesus-1/special-episode-the-southern-baptist-conventions-apocalypse-with-robert-downen/
The last segment is on the new article from the Atlantic on how Rad-Trad Catholics are using the rosary to as a militant symbol for spiritual and political warfare. This leads to analysis of how the Rad Trad movement represents a significant Christian nationalist faction within American Catholicism. Brad argues that there are correspondent elements of nostalgia, apocalypticism, and literalism with White Evangelical Christian nationalism.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/radical-traditionalist-catholic-christian-rosary-weapon/671122/?utm_source=apple_news
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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 UCSB.
Here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
It's always nice to see you, Brad.
Other people get to hear you.
I get the pleasure of seeing you before you were like in a basement or a storage closet.
Now it looks like you might be sitting on the edge of a bathtub in a bathroom or something.
I'm not sure where you're recording from, but I'm glad that you're going that extra mile to be with us.
I'm in a place that we're staying for a family reunion and coming to you from the one part of the house that is quiet and where I'm able to do some semblance of thinking simultaneously.
So, you know, sometimes people email us down and they're like, Hey, Straight White American Jesus guys, can you have your team like send us over things?
And if you're listening and you think we have a team.
Just know that it's me and Dan Miller over here, and I sometimes record from a closet, and sometimes I record from a bathtub, and we just make it all work.
So that's a good plug, Dan, to say, hey, if you want to become a patron and help us out.
Dan's laughing.
It really does help us because this is us doing this.
There's not 10 people over here behind the scenes.
There's not a production studio.
We are affiliated with the CAP Center.
But that really is just something that where we support each other, but the CAP Center, love you CAP Center, but they don't they don't send us anything.
They don't send us any equipment or we have no space or no, you know, we don't use any of their resources in essence.
Neither of our institutions give us any of that stuff, so it's not like they're sending us any sweet, sweet microphones or interns or anything like that.
So anyway, if you want to think about becoming a patron, there's my plug from the bathtub.
There you go.
It reminds me, near where I live, there's a company called Four Guys in a Truck.
It's a moving company, and that's basically us.
It's like two guys and some microphones.
And when we say two guys, we really mean Brad Onishi, who is a contributor, but is really the producer and the do-everything or We do.
So, our seminar is underway.
So, yeah.
So, thanks, Brad.
All kidding aside, I think we've got a couple things going on this week.
Is that right?
That we should talk about on the edge of the tub?
We do.
So, our seminar is underway.
So, I just want to say thank you to a couple of people who donated scholarships for participants in that seminar.
It's incredibly generous.
And just, it honestly...
Honestly, I think, Dan, when we started the show, we never thought we would have something like Swag Seminars.
And so to have people, you know, donating their their hard earned money to help others go to those seminars is just something it's kind of overwhelming to think about that.
So if you're one of those people and you're listening, just want to say thank you to you and just want to say how grateful we are.
Dance series that's in the code continues to march on.
That's great.
I want to just say one more time my book is available for pre-order so if you haven't heard me talk about that it's called Preparing for War and it'll be out in January but it is a history of the religious right since 1960 along with a lot of my own story and it really does kind of hone in on how we got to something like January 6th.
It also explains what's next.
And we go from Orange County to Washington, D.C.
to Idaho and back.
So it's a pretty fun ride.
Pre-orders really do help authors because they show publishers and news outlets and others that the book is really something people are interested in.
So if you are interested, order today and don't wait.
And we'll be super grateful for that.
Okay, Dan, let's jump in.
Last week was basically the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago week.
It was an hour on that.
And since then, there have been some more developments.
So we're today going to get into, I think, some stories that A lot of folks listening probably aren't going to hear very often on NPR or on their kind of local news station.
We're going to get into the SVC, the Southern Baptist Convention, being investigated by the DOJ.
And we're also going to get into the Rad Trad movement within the Catholic Church.
But before that, I think we do need to just kind of like wrap up some of the developments from last week in terms of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and some of the primary results from this past week and what that means for Trumpism in the GOP.
So I'll throw it to you.
What are some of the new developments here with the FBI and Mar-a-Lago?
Yes, I feel like, like, you know, before the days of streaming when they would have like old school shows, it would end on the cliffhanger and it's like last week, but last week, right?
When we recorded, you had just had the Department of Justice moving to make the warrant known and nobody still knew really exactly what was going on here.
There were rumors of classified documents.
So since last week the warrant has been made public and it's clear now that this was not just about stuff that was supposed to be in the archives that wasn't in the archives.
They removed apparently at least 11 files or cases or whatever of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago including some that had the highest level of classification.
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