Brad speaks with Dr. Lucas Kwong, creator of the SWAJ spinoff podcast series Monster in the Mirror - first episode drops Halloween 2022.
They discuss how Christian nationalism is a story - a story about empire, fear of replacement, and anxiety about the other. In this story, White Christian invent monsters that they then blame for "destroying" the nation and the culture they want to protect. So, political enemies become demons. Elections become apocalyptic events. And the stakes are reduced to a battle between the Good Guys and the monsters they have invented. This explains how 19th century Gothic literature such as Dracula and War of the Worlds provides a map for understanding the monsters that contemporary American Christian nationalists have invented.
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Join me, Lucas Kuang, and straight white American Jesus for Monster in the Mirror, a limited podcast series on the gothic genesis of Christian nationalism in late Victorian fantastic fiction.
If you're into monsters and Victorian literature, or if you're worried about the anti-democratic forces wielding violence in the name of propping up a crumbling Christian empire, this podcast is for you.
First episode drops Halloween 2022.
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 I have today a friend, a colleague, somebody who we are just super excited not only to have here today, but to be making a series that will be dropping one week from now.
And that is Dr. Lucas Kwong.
So Lucas, thank you for joining me.
Great to be here.
Yeah.
So I think both of us are pumped.
I think you're probably a little tired because you're like putting some finishing touches on episodes.
Yeah.
But hey, let's talk about what you're doing and the series you're gonna make, you have made for Straight White American Jesus.
And then it's called Monster in the Mirror.
And it's really kind of like brings your expertise as an academic together with your activism and all that.
So we're gonna talk about that today.
But first, let's just say, hey, 60 Seconds, what's this podcast series about?
Well, in a nutshell, the podcast is based on the contention that Christian nationalism is not just a policy or set of policies.
It's not just a network of material actors.
It's a story.
And as a story, it belongs to a genre.
Now, you could parse that several ways, but as a Victorianist, I see that genre as a Gothic Fantasy, and the reason I say that, particularly of Victorian Gothic fantasy, is its preoccupation with monsters.
Monsters who specifically threaten White Christendom.
A particular version of White Christendom that is modern, that has sort of declined.
The Victorians were obsessed with decline, even though decline didn't actually kick in.
Now that decline has set in, to some extent, for White Christendom, Uh, what I call the Victorian nightmare machine has been revived, uh, amongst the right.
And it's not, it's not necessarily a matter of, you know, Donald Trump reading Dracula for ideas on how to mislead the masses or anything like that, but it's simply that these tropes The vampire, the alien, you know, the androgynous shapeshifter are so deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness that in times of decline and particularly identity crisis for white Christians, especially in the United States, those tropes have come roaring back to life.
It's amazing stuff.
And one of the things that I love about this is I think, you know, we've talked on our show about white Christian nationalism as a cultural identity.
And that really follows kind of Perry and Whitehead and their work.
We've talked about how it is a way to view our country as undergoing a kind of decline.
And there's this sense of nostalgia for the past and a sense of apocalyptic future.
But I've never heard anyone talk about it like you just said, which is as a story, That's part of a genre.
And I think that's really compelling because it places the kinds of things that I talk about in the show all the time that, you know, all the people that we have on the show and whose books we read.
It places all of this in a larger context that goes back even further, I think, than many people would expect.
So we want to, you know, kind of, I want to ask about all the pieces that went into this.
And the first place I want to Start is really with your activism, and this is kind of starting at the present, because you've been working on an open letter that tries to combat Christian xenophobia, xenophobia, and so on.
And so, would you mind telling those listening about your open letter and the work you've done to combat Asian hate during the pandemic?
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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