In the previous episode, Dan decoded the affirmation that Christians are called not to “live in a spirit of fear,” showing that this affirmation actually masks a pervasive culture of fear. In that episode, he looked at the dynamics and effects of this affirmation within the spiritual and religious experience of individuals and particular congregations. In this episode, he continues that work, looking at how this culture of fear spills out from individuals and congregations, taking form the Christian nationalism and culture wars that currently engulf our society. As with individuals and congregations, and despite all the movement’s protestations to the contrary, we can see that this Christian nationalism is a social embodiment of pervasive fear.
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Hello and welcome to the series It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I am professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, Straight White American Jesus and this series are offered in partnership with the CAP Center at UCSB.
We thank them.
And as always, I want to thank all of you who listen to us, who support us.
When you listen and you suffer through all the annoying ads, and none of us like those online, you are supporting us.
Those of you who are patrons and give to us financially support us.
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We can't do it without you, and so I thank you for that.
And in particular for this series, which continues to run off of the insights that all of you provide, the comments, the thoughts, the ideas, the topics.
Couldn't do it without you, and you can reach me at Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
So just want to, a final time, thank everybody for that and for taking the time to listen and to support us in all the ways that you do.
Final thing before diving into today's episode, just a reminder, we've been talking about this for a while, I won't go into too much detail, but we do have our first Straight White American Jesus live event coming up in Denver, November 18th at 7 p.m.
Mountain Time, which is 9 p.m.
Eastern Time, 6 p.m.
Pacific Time.
A whole host, a slate of great contributors, a couple roundtables we'll be discussing, among other things.
The midterms, which will have happened then and will be sort of recent history and what those things might mean.
If you want to join us live, we would love to have you in person.
If you can't join us in person, the event will be live streamed.
It will also be in a format that can be accessed outside of those times.
You don't have to watch it live.
If you're interested in this, I encourage you, feel free to reach out to us or just go online and check it out.
Brad Onishi, my co-host, his website has all the information, www.bradonishi.com slash nationalism.
And the theme is Christian nationalism and the future of democracy.
So we want to try this.
We're going to see how this goes.
We're excited about it.
And obviously, the more people who are involved, the more people who are a part of this discussion and part of the Q&A and the online discussions and so on, the better.
So let's let's dive into today's episode.
As I said in the prior episode, this is the second of a pair.
And the theme is the kind of Christian affirmation that we do not live, quote, in a spirit of fear or something like that, that we're not defined by a spirit of fear, that we're not, you might hear the language, we're not called to live in fear.
And the flip side of that is that we are called, according to this, to be bold, to sort of live, as it were, loud and proud in the world as Christians and so forth.
And last episode, I highlighted the kind of scriptural text that this refers to.
This is a theme and a slogan, as it were.
Again, it's not limited to conservative Christians.
It's not limited to religiously, theologically, and culturally conservative Christians, but I think it plays a more prominent role in those circles.
And there are lots of Bible passages that they might point to if you were to say to them, why do you talk this way, or why this focus on not living in a spirit of fear, and so forth.
But the big one is in the book of 2 Timothy, verse 1-7, that says, For God did not give us a spirit of fear, or some translations might say a spirit of cowardice or timidity, but of power, love, and self-control.
And this is what we're talking about, is the way that this idea of not living in a spirit of fear plays out within these kinds of Christian contexts and sort of decoding that.
We discussed how in the last episode that within a particular kind of Christian context, again, this verse captures a certain claim of assurance that we as Christians, that we have eternal life, that we are saved, that the world that rejects us is in the wrong and we're in the right and so forth.
As well as a kind of identity claim, a claim that real Christians don't live lives defined by fear.
On the surface, we said this is a kind of bold affirmation.
It's an affirmation of confidence and assurance.
And yet we discussed that what we find lurking beneath the surface, and this is not very far beneath the surface, but if you scratch just a little bit beneath the surface, And begin decoding this language.
What we suggested in the prior episode is that we find that it masks basically the opposite of what it says.
It masks a kind of pervasive spirit of fear.
And we considered in that last episode the dynamics of this slogan and this phrase and this affirmation that we don't live in a spirit of fear and so forth.
We looked at how it operates at the level of individual Christians and individual congregations, maybe church bodies, or the role that it plays in pastors' sermons and so forth, and we talked about the effects, the concrete negative effects that it has on millions of Christians, the way that it impacts their mental health, their spiritual well-being, the way that it carries itself forward as a traumatic experience in their bodies.
And so I invite folks, if you're interested in that or you want to hear more about that, maybe you missed it, go back, check out that episode.
It's just called Not in the Spirit of Fear, and it's part one.
This will be part two of that.
But I also said there that we could talk about how this dynamic plays out culturally and politically, how it plays out at the societal level, and that I see these things as related.
I promise to get to that, and that's what we're going to take a look at today.
So I'm going to start by thinking about, you know, something that's familiar to all of us, and it's basically the experience of really two things, the bully or the braggart.
All of us, at some point in our lives, have been picked on by other people.
Maybe that was the case of really extreme bullying, or maybe it was much more sort of minor than that.
But we were probably all told at some point by our parents or our guardians or our friends or whomever that the reason bullies pick on other people is because of their own fears and their own securities and so forth.
They exercise power and authority and force over others because at the base level, at a really deep level, they feel insecure.
They live in fear.
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