Christian Nationalism is the Original Purity Culture
Brad does a preview from a key chapter in his new book. He argues that we should see purity culture - the movement for sexual purity in every way that swept through evangelical spaces in the 1990s - as an outworking of Christian nationalism. For Brad, Christian nationalism is the original purity culture because Christian nationalism is about creating and sustaining a pure nation - a nation that is ordered the right way with White Christians in power and everyone else knowing their place on the margins. Christian nationalism wants a pure national body. Purity culture is the attempt to create that nation by purifying teenage flesh from not only sexual licentiousness, but also all the elements that might make the national body impure - queerness, mixed races, and foreigners.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, our Social System Partnership at the Kapp Center, UCSB, and today I get to do a rare solo episode, and I want to talk about something I think is actually really important, and it comes right from my new book, Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and what comes next, so a little preview.
But before I go there, A couple of things to announce.
One is, and many of you know this already, we've got a Straight White American Jesus live event coming up in Denver, and you can watch that virtually.
You can also attend in person, and we would love it if you did both.
For those of you who can get anywhere near Denver, it's going to be super fun.
We're going to hang out before and after the show, and there'll be other folks there that you might recognize from various conversations, including Courtland Coffey and Megan from the Thereafter Pod and some others.
The lineup for the event is amazing.
It includes Robert Jones, who wrote Why Too Long, and Sam Perry and Phil Gorski, who wrote The Flag and the Cross, and Catherine Stewart, who wrote The Power Worshippers, and many others.
So, check it out.
You can see it in the show notes, or you can go to bradonishi.com slash nationalism to get all the information.
bradonishi.com slash nationalism.
The other announcement is something that I haven't talked about yet, and this is a kind of breaking news situation.
So, we have been working, I have been working with two great professors and scholars and creators who are just really dynamic and have a lot of great things to say about the contemporary public sphere, but also some other aspects of Christian nationalism and the religious right that you might have considered.
So, let me just say it.
Coming up here at the end of October, we'll be debuting a new series by Lucas Kuang, who some of you may know from his work on Christians against xenophobia and xenophobia, and who's also a scholar of Victorian literature.
Well, Lucas has created an incredible series called Monster in the Mirror.
That really looks at how those folks in 19th century Britain, who had a lot of power and a lot of anxiety about their empire crumbling, invented monsters, like say Dracula, in order to explain why they felt their empire crumbling around them.
And a lot of times those monsters were stand-ins for, I don't know, outsiders, immigrants, people from other places, people who didn't always fit into society as it was constructed, people who were queer and so on.
Well, what Lucas does in this series is something I think is absolutely ingenious, and he shows us that so many of the monsters that we are familiar with, whether it's Dracula or others, have been invented by and through the anxiety of white Christians worrying about a crumbling empire.
Well, if that sounds familiar, it should, because in our contemporary life in the United States, we have people inventing what they think are monsters or demons, And talking about combating them in order to save the country, whether that is Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as a literal demon, as Alex Jones talks about it, whether that's immigrants as supposed hordes, whether that is trans people and other folks in the LGBTQ community as monsters and pedophiles.
You can see the similarities here, and Lucas does such an incredible job bringing all of that out.
So, If you love sci-fi, if you love monsters, if you love Halloween, if you love learning about literature and its context, and you're like super, super interested in how all this applies to the United States today, Lucas Kwong's series, Monster in the Mirror, is something you're going to want to check out.
We're going to debut that on, you guessed it, Halloween.
So stay tuned.
The other is a series by Dr. Matthew Taylor, who is going to give us an in-depth look from his two years of research at the New Apostolic Reformation.
So if you've heard of the NAR, if you're aware of Pentecostalism as something that is a force in the world and you want to know more, this series is really where you're going to want to look.
We're going to have episodes on people that you may have heard of, Peter Wagner and Dutch Sheets and Cheon, and people that Pop up in the news as political candidates and others, people like Doug Mastriano and Sean Foy.
So that's coming later this year.
Be on the lookout for it, but we can't wait.
All right, let's jump into today.
Here's our topic.
Christian nationalism is the original purity culture.
Now, some of you listening, and I gander at almost all of you listening, know about purity culture in a basic sense.
Purity culture was a 90s phenomenon that really swept through evangelical spaces.
And I've talked about this a lot on my series, Mild at Heart, about masculinity and sex and love after purity culture.
My co-host, Dan Miller, has talked a lot about it because He was part of youth groups that sent in their purity pledges and cards in the very first rallies.
In essence, purity culture was a 90s phenomenon that said that waiting to have sex before marriage was really important.
And okay, that's not necessarily breaking news in terms of, you know, various Christian communities thinking that that's how you should live.
However, it went a step further, and what Purity Culture really did is encourage young teenagers to be pure in every sense of the word, lest they ruin their lives through sexual immorality.
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