Andrew Seidel on How SCOTUS is Weaponizing Religious Liberty
Brad speaks with constitutional lawyer Andrew Seidel about the crusade to weaponize religious freedom for the minority - and against the majority.
The Bible speaks of people beating swords into plowshares, but some conservative American Christians are proving that a false prophecy. They’re beating plowshares into swords. A group of committed and well-funded activists—“Crusaders”—are attempting to redefine and weaponize religious liberty, to change a hallowed legal protection into a tool to impose religion on others.
The Crusaders are deliberately working to pervert this hallowed constitutional protection. Their vision of religious liberty codifies privilege and status for conservative, white Christians, a dwindling demographic. It’s a weapon to maintain their dominant, privileged caste status that can be used against nearly every law, rule, or regulation.
https://andrewlseidel.com/american-crusade/
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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.
And today I have a return guest who is an amazing guest, who is a fan favorite, and I think somebody that most of you listening will be familiar with, and that is Andrew Seidel, Esquire.
So Andrew, I'm going to tell everyone about you in a minute, but thanks for coming back.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
It's such a pleasure.
So Andrew is the author of a couple books, one of which we're going to talk about today.
The first one is The Founding Myth, Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American.
And I think if you have not read that, you should stop what you're doing and go order it and then come back to this to this podcast episode.
He's also the author of a brand new book on the Crusade, How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom.
And we're going to get into that today.
And it is about to drop here any any moment now.
He is also somebody who's done just a ton of other stuff.
He's a senior correspondent over at Religion Dispatches and writes there regularly.
Graduated from Tulane.
And I have to say, Andrew, before we get going talking about your book, I think you're the first person on this podcast who was a Grand Canyon tour guide.
So you're now the father of three.
You're like overwhelmingly busy.
You have, like, so much to do every day.
Are there moments during the day where you just dream about the Grand Canyon and wonder, like, oh, you know, like, what would it be like just to be taking a nice, like, long walk and not be dealing with a Christian supremacist all the time?
Yes, yes.
I do.
I dream of floating down the Colorado River Gazing up.
Yes, one of the coolest jobs I have ever had.
I often think like when I retire, I'll probably just go back to doing that.
It was so fun.
Loved it.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
I'm not jealous at all.
All right, let's talk about your new book, American Crusade, How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom.
And I want to just do something that we often do in religious studies and the humanities, which is I want to start with the kind of theory that you propose and then get into the data.
And one of the most insightful, convincing, compelling parts of the book to me is How you frame what is called the crusade, which is a very long effort to stack the court in a way that essentially Christian supremacists would have their thumb on the levers of power and the levers of policy and the levers of basically everything in the country.
So you talk at length about the crusade in the book.
People are going to need to read about it in order to get the full picture.
But in essence, what is what you call the crusade as it comes to the Supreme Court?
So, religious freedom in our history has long been a shield, right?
It is this hallowed protection, something that guards all of us equally against government overreach, that protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
It's something that we consider a measure of equality, right?
It embodies those words that are etched into the Supreme Court building, into the edifice, equal justice under law.
And it's strongly supported by the separation of church and state, but not anymore.
There is a well-funded, powerful network of Christian nationalist organizations and judges that are working to weaponize the First Amendment, to turn that protection of religious freedom that's enjoyed by all of us into a weapon of Christian privilege for the select few.
And they are literally changing the meaning of our Constitution, and that is what the crusade is.
They are weaponizing this protection and imposing conservative Christianity on all of us.
So if we think about a shield protecting everyone and then we realize that it's been turned into a weapon, it's been turned into a spear or something else and it's now being used in essence by one small and what truly is a minority group in the country to kind of change the country's laws and policies for their benefit.
You say crusade.
Well, I mean, I think I know the answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway, just because I want our audience to kind of get clued in here.
Why would you call this a crusade and not something else?
Well, I mean, I really do think it's a crusade.
This is a religious war.
And it's also it's a war of conquest.
Now, they're not looking to conquer land, acreage, but they are looking to conquer our country and specifically our constitution.
They are trying to create the Christian nation that they claim, broadly, that we were founded as.
And, you know, I mean, the crusade itself has been remorselessly waged for like a decade, but they laid the groundwork for several decades prior to that.
And what we are seeing right now, what is happening with the Supreme Court, with the last term, with the Dobbs case, with the case of the praying coach, or the coach imposing prayer on other people's children, really.
The case out of Maine where taxpayers are now being forced to fund religious indoctrination.
If you want to understand what's happening with religion and the law with our Supreme Court, you gotta read American Crusade.
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