Brad and Dan begin by discussing the State of the Union address given by Pres. Biden this past week. Brad touches on Biden's main theme: how he is working to provide support, relief, funding for Americans in the form of infrastructure, healthcare, and price protections. On the other hand, Dan notes, the GOP reacted to the speech with consistent jeering and boos with Marjorie Taylor Green leading the way. This represents for both of them the ways that democratic processes have been eroded in the face of the perpetual culture wars waged by the GOP and the result of seeing your political opponent as enemies.
In the second segment they breakdown a long article by Timothy Keller at the Atlantic in which the pastor argues that Christianity can be saved in America if evangelicals are willing to clean up its image and prioritize justice. For the hosts, this is a classic evangelical rebranding exercise done in a faux intellectual vein.
This links to the topic of the third segment - the $100 million campaign "He Get Us," which is a marketing enterprise meant to introduce Americans to the ways of Jesus. While it seems to be POC centric and a message about welcoming the vulnerable - refugees and immigrants - the hosts dig into the funders and tell a deeper story . . .
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Piece by Chrissy Stroop on He Gets Us: https://religiondispatches.org/behind-the-inclusive-sounding-ads-of-the-100-million-pr-blitz-for-jesus-its-the-same-old-white-conservative-fantasy/
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty, 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.
Glad to be here, Brad.
It is not sub-zero wind chill and high winds, so hopefully my internet and computer won't die today.
So it's nice to be back.
Yeah, it was a little sudden last week.
It did feel in some ways like a very exciting podcast because I was like telling people text messages I was getting from you live on air.
On the other hand, it also felt like a horror movie.
Like, you know, we're doing a podcast and then you're gone.
And then I felt like maybe at night you were going to come and talk to me through the radio.
And, you know, it was going to be this weird, like, horror situation where you were lost.
Did you worry at all that the rapture had happened?
And, like, maybe you missed it?
No, Dan.
No.
All right, Dan.
Okay.
All right.
You know what?
Brad Onishi left behind.
You know.
All right.
All right.
I had to go there.
You did.
All right, so let's do it.
We're going to talk about State of the Union and the responses and the, shall we say, lack of decorum.
We'll get into a piece, Dan, my favorite segment of the show.
I respond to an op-ed, and this time it's by Tim Keller, who once attacked our show and had some, you know, not so favorable things to say about us at one point.
And then we're going to get into this campaign that some of you might have seen.
It's called He Gets Us.
Dan, I think both of us actually went down some rabbit holes, like figuring out where the money's coming from for this.
But it's really a campaign to sort of basically say that Jesus gets you if you're an immigrant, if you're a refugee, if you're a person of color.
And it all on the surface seems like, wow, that seems OK.
But when you dig in, as usual, unfortunately, it's a little bit of a different story.
So let's start with the State of the Union, Dan.
You know, Biden delivered this a couple days ago.
A lot of the talk has not been on the content of the speech.
It's been on really the kind of culture surrounding it.
So let me just mention one or two things about the speech and then I'll hand it over to you to kind of run us through what happened in the chamber and the ways that people reacted and what that tells us about our country.
And we can talk about Sarah Huckabee Sanders' response.
to the State of the Union, blah, blah, blah.
So this was very much classic Biden.
Biden talked a lot about basically trying to help working people.
I mean, he talked about things like airline refunds that seem really mundane, but he also talked about infrastructure.
And he said, you know, I'm really excited about rebuilding our roads and our airports and our bridges.
And he had this great line, Dan, where he said, you know, and Republicans who voted against that, I look forward to being at the groundbreaking ceremonies with you and taking pictures.
And even though you didn't vote for it, we're still going to obviously spend money in your districts because we want to help the American people.
And I don't always buy all the dark Brandon memes and all the dark Brandon like, you know, theme, but This is a pretty good line.
Like, it's a pretty good line.
Yeah, you didn't vote for this.
And you're gonna take credit for it.
All right, I'll see you at the groundbreaking when we fix the bridge in upstate New York or when we redo all the roads in Kansas.
And he's right.
I mean, and we've talked about it ad nauseum.
I don't want to talk about it at length today, but the messaging is really important here.
Who voted for this?
Who's doing this?
Who's trying to help you?
Who sees governance as a way to, like, make your life better?
Who sees it as just a reality show?
Biden talked about basically trying to roll back big oil and the way that big oil made hundreds of billions in the midst of a global energy crisis.
And so this was sort of working class Biden, the Biden of the everyday man trying to pump up his record on helping the middle class and others in a time when it feels like they're getting left behind.
The parents of Tyree Nichols were there.
And just one more stark reminder of the tragedy that we just live in every day in this country, which is police brutality and the killing of people of color, predominantly black men.
And just it just seems like that's always there in this country.
So. - Lots of the headlines, Dan, were on the reactions in the chamber.
So I'm sure people have been hearing about this.
I'm sure if you're somebody who kind of picks up on news and picks up on bits, you've got this in the ether, you've got it by osmosis.
You may not have all the details or know exactly what happened.
So Dan, why don't you take us there?
Yeah, so if anybody looks, I mean, probably the abiding picture will be Marjorie Taylor Greene in that cool white outfit that she had.
Can't help reading something into like Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing all white and not taking her coat off inside like whatever that just bugged me standing up right and sort of yelling and so there was there was lots of booing there was lots of jeering there was lots of sort of catcalling of liar and this and that and whatever even minor things like I've always thought that it would be awful to be the Speaker of the House and the Vice President who have to sit right behind the President on camera right and like If it's somebody you completely disagree with, they always sit there very stoic, very stone-faced.
Even McCarthy couldn't do it, like he was shaking his head a lot and things like this.
And so you used the word decorum, but there wasn't a lot of decorum.
And I think that that's important to note, but for me, it's more about what all of that symbolizes.
Because yeah, it was loud, it was boisterous and all of this, but for me it's more like an emblem of what the GOP is now.
I don't think it would have mattered what Biden stood up and said.
I think Biden could have stood up and said, you know what, we're gonna build a wall.
It could have just been Trump.
He could have said, we're gonna build a wall and we're gonna like ban vaccines and we're gonna make, you know, all the trans people register with the state or something.
He could have said all of that and they would have booed at him because it was Biden saying it.
And that's the GOP now.
The GOP is just, this started with Obama very explicitly with the whole notion of what people then would call the party of no.
It's no matter what is coming forward or going to oppose it.
And that's kind of what they were.
And for me, it was like this kind of microcosm image of, oh, if we think about US politics, that's what it is.
The culture war stuff, the anger, the working upper age all the time.
That is what drives the GOP.
It's what drives their legislation.
It's what drives their policy.
It's not about, in my view, even helping The people they view as their constituency, it's about sticking it to the people they don't like.
It's about owning the libs, but it's also about wanton cruelty to everybody that we talk about all the time.
The people for them who just don't belong here, who aren't real Americans, whether it's people of color, whether it's trans and gender non-conforming people and the rest of the LGBTQ community and sort of On and on and on.
So I feel like that was all on sort of full display.
I also think that it ties in with your content point of Biden did have some good quips and that line about, I'll be there, you know, I had forgotten the exact language, but like, hey, you know, I'll be there as you're taking credit for what we did and whatever.
But he walked The GOP into a couple like PR traps in that, right?
He talked about them wanting to defund Social Security and Medicare.
It is no secret that the GOP wants to do this, right?
He gets boos, he gets everybody yelling, no, you've got McCarthy vigorously shaking his head behind him.
And then he turns around, he says, oh, great, good.
Then I look forward to talking to everybody since we all agree that we shouldn't cut Medicare and Social Security, right?
It was, I read one strategist who referred to it as a rope-a-dope move.
Like he lured them in And sort of used it against them.
And the other thing it helped is it helped Biden.
It helped because, you know, Biden was Biden.
Biden is not smooth.
He's not a great public speaker for lots of different reasons.
He always has, you know, some kind of word salads and different kinds of things like that.
Nobody's talking about that.
They're talking about the GOP yelling and hollering and so forth.
I think they're also talking about the kind of things that you're highlighting of Biden being able to say, oh good, I'm glad we're all on the same page or, you know, this kind of thing.
But it shows to me, if somebody says, why are they acting like this?
Well, that's what they do now.
It doesn't matter what we're talking about.
That's what their policies are about.
They're about taking that anger and that vitriol and that kind of puerile Name-calling, and if they had rotten vegetables to throw, they would have been throwing them, but they aim that at everybody in society they don't like.
It's that sort of logic.
The next piece, just real quickly, and then I'll throw it over to you because I'm talking a lot, is Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her rejoinder, right?
And of course, these things are written before the speech is ever getting and stuff, given Two things I thought were really worth note in there.
One was her, I think, a subtle dig at Trump, where she talks about time for a new generation and this and that, and like, I think that could be a signal to some that, you know, Trump is almost as old as Biden and the sort of shifting winds, whatever.
The bigger thing was this positively, again, kind of Orwellian doublespeak thing about how all the Democrats want to do is fight culture war.
We don't want a culture war.
If that's what you want to force us to do, we'll do it, right?
When that sort of All that they do.
It is the standard bully and abuser rhetoric.
And why do I say that?
I say it because it's the domestic abuser who's like, look what you made me do.
I just, I care about you so much that I just, I didn't have a choice but to react this way because I'm jealous or I'm angry or this or that.
It is angry white conservatives who are pissed off about everything And as I say, in just wanton acts of cruelty, target every group that they can, and then want to blame it on those groups for somehow engaging culture war by, I don't know, existing or demanding their rights as Americans and sort of on and on.
So, I saw it all as this big sort of interlinking thing that's really emblematic of what the GOP is, of what Christian nationalism in this country is.
And I think what we can just expect to see more of.
But I'm interested in your thoughts as you sat through the joy of watching Huckabee Sanders and the rest of it.
Well, I mean, some similar themes to you.
So what I want to do is I want to take Some history lessons and connect some dots.
So, you know, when Obama becomes president, he gives his speech in 2009, and somebody famously yells, a representative, and I don't have this in front of me, I believe from South Carolina, yells, you lie when he gives a line.
And it was this stunning sort of break in decorum in the sense that, right, the protocol had been, you know, during the speech, people clap, people give standing ovations, but both parties recognize that it's a really important speech.
It's a really important ceremony.
It's a really important ritual for the country, for the chambers of Congress, you know, to have the president visit and give a speech and so on and so forth.
So that happens, and you can see it, you can see there, right, the building up of all the things we've talked about, Dan, at length, like the Obama presidency, the sense of the Tea Party and the Tea Party's just seething anger, its sense that the country's been stolen, we have this, you know, and I've talked about this endlessly in regard to my book, that you have this mixed-race man whose father came to the country from somewhere else, black wife, black children, Somebody who grew up in Hawaii.
All on and on and on and on.
Okay, what's the point?
If you fast forward till now, we have a situation where it felt, Dan, and I know I don't always want to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene, but you know there were so many boos and so many jeers from the Republicans, and so it was not just Marjorie Taylor Greene.
You have a situation where the entire chamber is filled with noise now.
Like they can't hold back.
They're like jeering.
And it's like they feel as if if they don't jeer, if they don't say something, they're going to lose like street cred with their constituents.
That if you just sit and listen and you don't yell at Biden, Like you're on a reality show, then you don't care.
Or you're not a real one who really is there to fight for us or something.
I guess that's the mindset?
Okay.
And then the pictures of Marjorie Taylor Greene, I think just really emblematize this.
Like she's got, she's just, you know, standing and it looks like someone at a sports game, right?
A basketball game or a football game, who's just standing up yelling the whole time at the referee or the other team, telling them all kinds of things about how they stink and they're, they're the worst and you know, blah, blah, blah.
And here's what I want to highlight, Dan, with all that, is that I was on a panel with Stephen Gardner from Public Research Associates a while back, and he said something that others have said before, but he said it really well.
He said, you know, there's a difference between having political opponents and political enemies.
And when someone's your political opponent, you disagree with them, but you both respect the processes of democracy.
You both recognize that the other is a human being, and you both recognize That what matters, ultimately, is that the whole set of institutions in regard to democracy are abided by and that, you know, the other person is not a demon, the other person is not from Satan, the other person is not less than human.
And, you know, yeah, it hurts to lose.
You may not like the other person.
You may actually not like them one bit, but they're your political opponent.
If someone is your enemy, you see them in a way that you're like, you're not just my opponent.
It's not that I just need to beat you in this, you know, basketball game or in this, you know, match.
It's that you're my enemy.
Like, it doesn't matter where you exist or live.
I'm against you, right?
I see you as something that needs to be overcome.
When Marjorie Taylor Greendan just cannot sit still one minute in the State of the Union and has to just yell and scream and jeer, And I don't think, Dan, that that's an act.
I don't think that she, like, made a decision with her staffers, like, this would be good for us.
I think this would help us in the polls and get us attention.
I truly think that's who she is.
I just think that's who Marjorie Taylor Greene, she, when she goes to State of the Union, she's thinking, oh, great, good.
I get to stand up and yell and wear a very noticeable outfit and sort of just get, get my, you know, jeers out.
You realize that this is what the Republican Party has become.
They see the other side as enemies, not opponents.
They see democratic ceremonies and rituals that are important, right, for the tenor and tone of the country.
That are important for the workings and functionings and mechanics of the capital and everything that happens there in terms of its business, in terms of its carrying out the will of the people.
It's just become a place to yell and scream at people you think are your enemies, less than human, serpent, DNA, demon, whatever Alex Jones talks about.
It just speaks to everything we say on the show so often, which is that it's really hard to have democracy.
When a large part of one of two parties sees everything as a culture war, sees everything as persecution and takes these really important moments and is like willing to break every protocol to just carry out their culture war mentality.
And it's just clear by, I mean, and then I'll just, I'll shut up here, but it just could not be more clear to me.
Biden's talking about like, Hey, Here's what we did to like help folks when it came to, you know, whether it's, uh, uh, an airline ticket refund or building bridges or, uh, infrastructure or capping insulin.
Okay.
And look, you may not love Biden.
You might whatever we can get into, you know, that at some, some point, but he's talking about substantive things.
You agree, you disagree.
He should have gone farther.
He didn't go far enough, whatever.
And what he says, the GOP's response is just to yell, just to scream, liar, this, that, you know, you're an idiot, you know, go build a wall, right?
And it's just like, this is what it's become.
This is really what it's become.
One person trying to talk about policy to help people, others just like, well, governance is just about yelling and screaming.
And that's about it.
Other thoughts on this?
Just, number one, that you would talk about the jeers.
Again, that's what the GOP has.
That's all they have.
And that's what, to me, the legislation is.
They're jeers at people.
Like, just look at what they're really about.
They're about targeting people, which I think goes to that point, that point about enemies.
And the last point about that is the person, if I put my dorky academic hat on, who sort of put this on the map in the 20th century, was a political theorist named Carl Schmitt.
Problematic figure and anti-democrat.
He was not a fan of democracy, especially parliamentary democracy in Europe.
But his whole argument was that, you know, you have political enemies and that you can't do that in a democracy.
A democracy won't work if you view your opponents as enemies, as you say, which is exactly, to make your point, that's why he didn't like democracy.
He felt like your opponents were enemies and that that's how politics worked and should work.
It just highlights again that fundamental incompatibility, which is why you can't have a democratic system in any meaningful sense when you have one party that is just aiming to harm and lash out at others.
And that's all the GOP is.
One comment on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and then we'll take a break.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders gives the response from the GOP, and in one sense, you're saying, Dan, that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is young for a politician, especially young for a governor, is a mother, is someone who talks about the various identities that she holds together, and in one sense, seemed to be saying it's time to move on.
And especially in a party that increasingly seems to be signaling it wants to move on.
And yet like Sarah Huckabee Sanders is Trumpian.
Like where, why is she governor?
She was governor because she was the, you know, the spokesperson for the Trump administration.
She's the one who stood up in front of the American people all the time and lied.
I mean, the New York Times, Frank Bruni writes, Trump was her cause and then Trump was her springboard.
Okay.
She's supposed to carry Republicans beyond Trump when she so carefully carries Trump inside her.
It's ludicrous.
It's perfect.
It's what makes her such a fitting mascot for a party that won't come clean about compromises it has made, the values it has trashed, and the madness it has abetted.
So like Sarah Huckabee Sanders giving the response, it fits perfectly in everything we're saying here.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders cut her teeth Basically going out to mouth all of the compromises and lies of the Trump administration.
And so who did they choose?
Her to kind of respond to Biden.
So one thing that she said, Dan, is the choices between normal and crazy.
And it's exactly what you said.
It's like, Well, you forced our hand.
They're crazy, so we're going to have to do this, right?
Anyway, we talk about this all the time.
We need to stop.
We need to take a break, but all right.
There's a lot there, and I can feel my blood pressure rising.
All right.
We're going to take a break.
I'm going to take some deep breaths, and we'll come back and talk about Tim Keller, which no way will get my blood pressure going at all.
Not at all.
Okay.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
So we want to talk about the He Gets Us campaign, which I think is going to surprise a lot of you.
Some of you may already know about it and kind of know where this is going.
But before we do that, we're going to talk about Tim Keller, who is pastor and founder of the Redeemer Church in New York City, is a really huge figure in kind of reformed circles and gospel coalition circles, is just a highly influential person, is battling cancer.
So I hope that You know, that battle and that fight is one that he wins, so just gonna put that out there and say that.
But when it comes to politics and theology, could not disagree more with Tim Keller, perhaps?
I mean, maybe I could, but you know, who knows?
Tim Keller famously, at least in my mind, Dan, attacked this show because he didn't like some things I had to say about his approach to marriage and to gay marriage, same-sex marriage, and the LGBT community.
Tim Keller talked on Twitter about, you know, protecting the institution of marriage and the institution, one man, one woman, and this and that.
And it was biblical and this.
And so I didn't like that.
I had some things to say.
He had some things to say to me.
He probably doesn't remember, but I do.
So.
Um, Tim Keller Dan is the kind of person who always wants to, uh, seem like he is talking to wider culture.
Like he's that pastor at the pastor's retreat who like feels like he can go up and talk to actual like secular folks and speak their language.
And you know, he knows he's not just in a Christian bubble.
So he wrote this piece at the Atlantic this week talking about how Christianity, American Christianity can be saved.
And Dan I think this is it's it's amazing how it's a really glossy long essay in the Atlantic in 2023 and it might as well have been written in 2003 or 1993 and we're going to talk about why in a second.
So here's what he says.
Why should anyone besides Christians like me care whether the church revives?
Many Americans would say the fate of the church is inconsequential to them.
Others want very much to see the church to continue to shrink.
I believe both attitudes are mistaken.
Many secular social theorists.
Dan, I love what's happening next.
Okay, I just want to tell you what's going to happen next.
I'm in love with many secular social theorists, including Emile Durkheim and Jonathan Haidt to name two.
Okay, so...
The look Dan just gave is like the kombucha girl meme, you know?
There are lots of descriptions of Durkheim.
Secularist is typically not one of them.
But it's like, dude, Emile Durkheim lived a hundred years ago.
Jonathan Haidt is alive today and still has a best-selling book, works at the University of Virginia.
He's also an evolutionary psychologist.
Like he tries to do social theory.
He doesn't do it well, but he's an evolutionary psychologist.
Just throw that out there.
But I feel like this is one of those moments where like my students are trying to quote their papers and they're like, you know, theologians, uh, such as St.
Augustine of Hippo and... Such as what came up when I typed in Google, who is a theologian and like the first four things on Wikipedia that come up are the names you throw in, right?
Oh my God.
Emile Durkheim.
Oh my God.
Okay.
Whatever.
I mean, yeah, whatever.
Okay.
I'm going to try to move on, but my brain is like, please make 12 more jokes about that.
Not going to do it.
Here we go.
They show how religion makes contributions to society that cannot be readily supplied by other sources, such as cultural unity.
Okay.
So the idea here, Dan, would be for Keller that You know, religion, which is a stand-in here for Christianity, right?
I want everyone to notice this happens all the time, that in the United States, religion, when it's talked about in a good way, is a stand-in for Christianity, and Christianity is a stand-in for religion.
This is part of Christian privilege, right?
Oh, religion, and by religion I mean Christianity, It creates cultural unity.
It creates a conscious collective.
Okay, so that is his argument.
He's like, even if you're not Christian, I'm writing in the Atlantic, you should want there to be Christianity because it helps America.
It helps create cultural unity.
It helps people.
That's why you should want it.
Okay, he then goes on to cite Robert Bellah, And this is this part, Dan.
Oh man, it's juicy, Dan.
It's juicy.
Okay, here we go.
At least for me.
He says that American culture elevates the interests of the individual over those of family, community, and nation.
Yet for two centuries, Americans' religious devotion counterbalanced this individualism with denunciations of self-centeredness and calls to love your neighbor.
Okay.
So, he's now citing Robert Bella, this, for those of you who don't know, very famous person in religious studies, okay?
And Bella's thesis that, you know, religion and Christianity in particular might have been something that was a communal force in the United States.
Alright, we can debate it, Dan.
We can talk about it.
Do we agree with Bella or not?
Fine.
Here's what I know, though, is that Tim Keller comes from individualistic evangelicalism.
When you talk about the United States being individualistic, buddy, it's...
It's not like an accident.
You know what helped this country develop its overwhelmingly individualist ethos?
One that in the 20th century rejected things like unions and collective action.
One that looked with very suspicious eyes and oftentimes aggressive hands against questioning things like capitalism and its inequalities.
Movements and communities that always are very quick to criticize any group, including the movement for black lives or the civil rights movement that calls for and systemic change.
It comes from inside.
The calls are coming from inside the house, Tim.
They're coming from inside the house.
Okay.
I just interviewed David Clary about this last week and we talked about how big business and evangelicalism have been individualizing forces and they're married and they've been married for over a century.
They've been married for almost two centuries in this country.
So when you're telling me that your church and your Christianity is good for unity because it counterbalances individualism.
I'm saying you either need to do your history or stop lying.
Okay?
All right.
That's number one.
Let's continue.
While the revival of the church would benefit society, that will never happen if the church thinks of itself as just another social service agency.
Christians seek spiritual renewal of the church, not because they see religion as having social utility, nor because they want to shore up their own institutions.
Christianity helps society because its metaphysical claims are true.
Okay, Tim, Tim, you just, okay, all right, Tim, look, you just quoted Durkheim and Jonathan Haidt, two people I always think of together, you know, let me say, and you told me, as a secular person reading the Atlantic, That I was supposed to be really invested in Christianity because it is a helpful thing for the social square.
Now you're saying it's not about social utility and it's about metaphysics.
It's about this being true, okay?
And he says, when Christians lose sight of this, the metaphysical truth, the church's power and durability are lost.
So we see you behind the curtain there, the Wizard of Oz, okay?
We see what you're saying.
You started by saying, it's a good thing when religion is in the public square, but actually, Christianity, you know why it's actually good, guys?
Let me tell you a little secret.
You want to share this candy bar?
Here, sit down by the campfire.
Let me tell you something.
It's good because it's true.
The only true thing in the world is Christianity, okay?
Now, the conclusion of this, Dan, and I'll be quiet because I know we got to talk about other things, okay, is that he points, of all places, to the black church.
And he's like, you know who really does this right?
It's the black church.
You know why?
Because the black church combines Justice and righteousness.
He's like, you know what the black church gets?
Righteousness.
They know, okay, and this is Tim Keller, not me, okay, that Christianity is biblical and it has to be followed with righteousness.
And what, you know what righteousness means?
Traditional values, okay.
Evangelicalism stresses righteousness and traditional values.
That's a direct quote, okay.
So, righteousness here means traditional values.
And Dan, I know that you're in the code decoder, so I'm just going to leave that out there, Dan, just if you might want to comment on it in a minute.
You might want to tell me, somebody reading the Atlantic, you know, I'm sitting over here in Newark, New Jersey, okay?
I'm a secular humanist.
It says I have a tattoo on my chest that says secular humanist.
When I go to work, that's what I tell everyone.
Hello, my name is Jeff, secular humanist.
What does it mean When Tim Keller says righteousness is equivalent to traditional values.
So he says that, you know what would really help revive the evangelical church?
So you realize, Dan, we've gone from a situation, I'm just decoding here, where religion in the public square actually means Christianity in public square, and Christianity in public square actually means evangelicalism in the public square, but you know what would help revive that?
That would be realizing that justice is a good thing.
That justice is not bad.
And you can't shy away of that if you're going to be an evangelical church that exists in 2023.
All right, enough sass from me.
What do you got here, Dan?
So the first thing I want to just give like, I had my physical this week and my blood pressure is fine, apparently, which is a little surprising to me, given that we spend so much time talking about things like this.
First, the history lesson you gave is right on.
I'll go even further back and just point out that any scholars of social history, political history, will point out that the very ideas of radical individualism, capitalism, the whole system built around that, modern liberalism, all that sort of stuff, also originates or has deep roots within Christianity itself.
It doesn't mean Christianity has to be that, but like in the modern West, you can't tell the story of how we become radical, capitalistic, individualist without Christianity.
I wrote a whole book.
Like the first three chapters of my book are just like, here's how individualism, capitalism, big business, and Christianity got married in, you know, the 20th century.
All right.
Sorry.
And before that, you could talk about Locke and you could talk about Kant and you could talk about Mills.
You could talk just on and on and on.
So it's a silly, ridiculous thesis from a guy that maybe had to read some Durkheim in a class once when he was in seminary.
I don't know.
Yeah, everything else you're talking about, I love the way you highlight those rhetorical shifts, right?
From religion, Christianity, evangelicalism, whatever.
Yeah, that notion of traditional values, that's what righteousness is.
And then of all things, to the point of the black church, I'll be like, so here's the test.
This is what I would always have people do, right?
It's like, somebody says something and you want to know whether or not to call bullshit.
Like, give the test.
What do they think about Black Lives Matter?
That's it.
Ask most black churches.
Black churches are like every other church.
They have individual views.
They have different perspectives and so forth.
But as a kind of cultural block, When they define justice, they're going to define justice as things like criminal justice reform, police reform.
They're going to be concerned about imprisonment of African American men.
They're going to be concerned about things like police brutality and so forth, right?
That's what they're going to be concerned about.
Redeemer Church, New York City.
Not so much, right?
Most white evangelical churches, not so much.
When they talk about traditional values being righteousness, their vision of righteousness is, number one, historically has been and still is, opposition to equal rights for people of color.
You talk about this all the time.
We talk about this all the time.
I steer people to the book all the time.
Take a look at Robert Jones' White Too Long.
The book White Too Long, we'll spell it out.
Historically and in contemporary practice.
What else does justice mean for quote-unquote traditional family values?
It means not letting people who aren't cis and hetero get married.
It means targeting people who are trans or gender non-conforming and making sure that they don't have safe public spaces to go to the bathroom, to change their clothes at a club, whatever.
Make sure that children who might be suicidal, depressed, at risk of sexual and physical assault because of their gender identity, make sure that they can't live in a way that makes them safer and gives them the affirmation they need.
That's justice.
That's the vision of justice of the quote-unquote traditional family values.
And so it just it galls me more than I could possibly say to cite the Black church as the model, when everything about traditional family values is also built on the notion of this kind of Victorian ideal of the white European nuclear family.
And our friend Sarah Mosliner does great stuff on this.
And that's the model and other people.
Excuse me, like Sophie Bjork-James and others, right?
People that we've talked to, people we talk about, just on and on and on and on.
It's a bunch of nonsense claptrap from, as you say, a pastor who I think wants to—I love the image of the one who likes—I've had this conversation with so many evangelicals, like, I have all kinds of people in my life.
You don't know anything about it.
I'm friends with all kinds of queer folk and other homosexuals.
And you're like, no, you're not.
You're just not.
He's playing that game, and he's that person who's not that.
He's also trying to be an intellectual, and he's just not.
He's not a good theologian.
He's not a good social theorist.
He doesn't know what he thinks he knows.
But he's got this platform in the Atlantic for reasons that I'll never fully understand.
Well, yeah.
Alright, I'm going to reframe.
You go to a party, and you're like 27, and there's the one friend there who thinks he's an intellectual and has a ponytail, and he's been reading Dostoevsky, and he's holding this glass of bourbon, and he's trying to tell everyone from high school how smart he is and how refined.
He's really used to that audience being impressed.
And then when he actually goes, you know, somewhere where there are people who've studied Dostoevsky or really done their work in modern literature or something, it's like a kind of big surprise.
He's like, oh, they're not nearly as impressed as everyone back home.
And actually, they think that I don't know anything.
I just feel like every time Tim Keller walks into these things, there's so many of us that are like, OK, all right.
I know that.
All right.
I know there are people back home who really are impressed when he said Durkheim.
But we're not.
All right.
We're going to take a break because I'm going to stop.
We got to stop.
Here we go.
Taking a break.
All right, Dan.
So this leads perfectly.
I mean, it could not be more perfect as a segue into something that some of you might have heard of.
So there's a campaign called He Gets Us, and it is a hundred million dollar campaign.
It's an advertising kind of marketing campaign.
And you might have seen the ads.
Jesus, he gets us.
And some of them have Jesus, he gets us, the words overlaid on a refugee family who seems to be walking from a place that is dangerous toward, you assume, a more safe place where they can find, you know, asylum.
He gets us.
Jesus was an immigrant or actually says Jesus was a refugee, but there's others that paint him as like very friendly to immigrants.
So, and oftentimes the people in the ads, Dan, are like people of color, right?
So when you see these, at first you're like, okay, well, Jesus, yeah, welcomes immigrants, welcomes refugees.
There's people of color here.
This is all right.
This, what is this now?
Okay.
So, um, they were bringing it up today because they have bought really expensive advertising for the Super Bowl and the Super Bowl is happening out here, Dan, this Sunday as somebody who doesn't, Watch too much football.
I have heard that it is on Sunday.
My tradition has always been on Super Bowl Sunday to do something, uh, that is usually crowded.
Like, I'd often go surfing on Super Bowl Sunday because no one would be surfing or like, you know, go to the aquarium or Disneyland.
These are all good things to do.
Just a little tip for everyone out there.
All right.
Costco?
I don't know.
Am I a man in my forties?
Maybe.
Target?
Let's do it.
Okay.
So he gets us, they've bought these really expensive ads and they're going to advertise.
So I just want to say that, uh, This caught the eye of our friend Chrissy Stroop about a year ago.
Chrissy wrote an amazing piece on this.
Ryan Stoller is quoted in that piece.
So I'm going to post that in the show notes.
If you want a deep dive from about a year ago, check out that piece.
But Dan, I'll leave it to you for now to just give us a quick kind of summary about what is the He Gets Us campaign and should we be, I don't know, a little skeptical of this whole like really shiny, cool marketing set that is popping up everywhere?
Yeah, so I do watch NFL football, and that's where I saw it, was in the commercials for that.
It caught my eye because of that.
And I'll get to this in a minute, but being the wannabe decoder ring-wearing person that I am, what I was interested in is They had all these things of like who Jesus is into, what Jesus is about, but there was a group that to me was notably absent, and I'll get to that in a minute.
But if people just dig around, this is not deep internet sleuthing, and I know I think you did some more looking into sort of the money side of it, and that's something we'll get to, but If you go to the, you know, He Gets Us campaign and you read it, it talks about wanting to proclaim the Jesus of, quote, radical forgiveness, compassion, and love.
I'm all about radical forgiveness, compassion, love.
Sounds great.
It talks about they are a, quote, diverse group of people passionate about the authentic Jesus of the Bible, and so on and so forth.
They say they're not politically left or right.
You're like, all right, that's interesting, but like most Christian groups say that.
So if you go down to the bottom, it says, you know, it has their legal stuff, and it says they are an initiative of the Servant Foundation, which is a 501c3 organization.
So I'm like, oh okay, so like what's the Servant Foundation?
Look up the Servant Foundation Incorporated is an endowment fund controlled by someplace called the Church of the Servant, right, which is a church, and their foundation board, which is managed by the Oklahoma United Methodist Foundation, From there being the dork that I am, I'm like, what's the, you know, the Church of the Servant, which is a Methodist church in Oklahoma City, big Methodist church.
So that's sort of the group behind this.
I was interested in this because, as you know, as a lot of our listeners probably know, we're talking about the United Methodist Church, which is the denomination that they're part of, is in the middle of this kind of nasty divorce that's going on because the main denomination is becoming more opening to LGBTQ folk.
Lots within the denomination don't like that.
Lots within the global Methodist communion don't like that.
And so there's now this way for churches to disaffiliate.
Why do I say all that?
I say that because, and I think this is true, and you can correct me if you think it's wrong, but for me, if people want to know where a church really stands on issues like justice very broadly, how they respond to queer folk is like a key indicator.
It's kind of a litmus test about where they stand on a whole bunch of other stuff.
The group that I didn't see in a He Gets Us ad was queer people.
I didn't see two guys standing at an altar or something like that, right?
That stood out to me.
And it turns out that this church is really divided, this individual church.
They narrowly voted to stay in the United Methodist Church.
You have to have a 66.7% vote to leave, two-thirds.
They had a 66.4% vote.
So by three-tenths of a percent, they're sort of stuck in the United Methodist Church.
Their theology does the kind of thing, you go around their website, it sounds great.
I've talked about this in the, it's in the code in a couple episodes, but one is what I call cool, cool kid church.
It's the church where everybody's kind of cool and they're inclusive and it's the kinder, gentler Jesus.
And why do I bring up the queer stuff all the time?
Because I'm always like, if you want to know where somebody really stands, like how deep that goes, this radical forgiveness, radical love, radical acceptance, whatever, figure out where they stand in relation to the queer community.
Because that's often where they'll stop short.
And if they give you all the things about, oh, well, we think all sin is sin and we shouldn't single out one, or we're not opposed to queer people, they can just like never marry or have sex or anything like that.
They have to be celibate or whatever.
Then you know where they're really at.
You know what the limits of that radical love, forgiveness and so forth are.
So for me, that was the path I went down and I saw, and I guess I didn't mean to plug my own series, but people can go and listen to the episode on Cool kid church, or the no matter where you are on your spiritual journey, you're welcome here, right?
These kind of codes that these churches use to make it sound like they're the really tolerant ones.
You know, society tells you that they're tolerant and Christians aren't, but here we are, we drink lattes and we have a coffee house in our church.
They do, they have a coffee house in their church.
I looked at their website.
And look how cool we are and God loves you and so forth, but there's always that caveat that comes along of, unless you love other men, unless you love other women, unless you don't feel like the gender you were assigned at birth is where you really belong in the world, whatever it is, Which brings us right back to those discussions about justice, right?
About what justice is, what family values are, what is valued by that church.
So that was this sort of the pool I was swimming in and trying to figure out like where does this originate?
Who are they about?
The sort of ideas behind it.
It's sort of confirmed in my view if we look into like who actually supports this, right?
Who's giving to this foundation and funding this thing and so forth.
So A couple thoughts here, I would just point, there's so many thoughts.
But, okay, so Tim Keller talks about individualism, okay?
And Tim Keller is like, you know, that's Christianity, by which he means evangelicalism, has been holding back even the individualism of our society.
And we've spent some time today saying, you know, you need to actually learn the history there.
But part of individualism, right, and part of what has made evangelicalism and big business such good partners is the marketing acumen, right?
We want to brand and rebrand and then rebrand again.
And this is all this is.
I mean, you've said that, Dan.
I don't really need to go over it again.
But the reason I say this could have been made in 1993 is because I, Dan, I sat in like church staff meetings with other pastors in like 1999 when people were like, how can we, and talking literally about the Super Bowl, how can we use the Super Bowl to reach people?
How can we like, Make it so that young people in our neighborhood think that we're like, you know, not just a lame place, but like a really, you know, cool, cool community where they can hang out.
How do we get the young?
We're the cool kid church, right?
We're the church where they can be cool.
They can come and be them.
How can we get the young families, you know, the 32-year-old moms and the 34-year-old dads and their like three-year-old kids, you know, how do we get that right?
And the question is never, How do we fundamentally, you know, re-conceptualize who we are in terms of our theology, our systems, our institutions?
It's always just, let's rebrand.
And rebranding, Dan, you know, come on, whether it's Taco Bell or Domino's, it's just, we're going to make it look a certain way now, so you'll come in the door and we're going to serve you the same stuff we've been serving over and over and over again.
And that's all this is.
That's number one.
Number two, I wanna go back to Chrissy Stroop, who made this point over a year, actually, I think it was about eight months ago, in her piece, and I'll post it in the show notes, that if you think about Justice Dan, $100 million, that's what this is.
And some of this money's coming from the Green family, the Hobby Lobby folks, who have done everything they can to oppose reproductive rights and reproductive healthcare options for their employees, okay?
So let's just make sure we know that.
Chrissy's point is, why not spend a hundred million, I don't know, on justice?
Not marketing.
How about spend it on justice?
Why don't you spend a hundred million, right, on things related to income inequality, homelessness, lack of food for young people in the country, right?
I mean, there are children in the country who go underfed, right?
We could, I mean, we could name so many issues that we could talk about, you know, a hundred million dollars, right, to fight and reform and change and, reform is the wrong word, I'll be honest, completely overhaul Policing in the country, you know, whatever we want to talk about.
$100 million, okay?
But nope, you're going to spend $100 million to advertise, to market, okay?
So I think that's an issue as well that's going on here.
Here's what Chrissy writes because I just want to make sure that we recognize the work that's been done on this and from somebody who's just an incredible voice.
At the end of the day, he gets us amounts to both an egregious misuse of $100 million An amount that could do so much, for example, to alleviate the pervasive problems of homelessness or unaffordable medical care in the United States, and a predatory type of manipulation.
Thankfully, the manipulation at least is obvious so we can take some comfort in how easy it is to see through.
It's amazing how the Tim Keller piece in the Atlantic just works so in tandem with the He Gets Us campaign at the Super Bowl.
Anyway, we'll leave it there for now.
We'll see what happens at the Super Bowl.
Usually, Dan, the Super Bowl provides us something related to Christian nationalism to talk about.
Of any, I think, sporting event in the United States, a Super Bowl is tied to nationalism and symbols of American patriotism.
So we'll see what happens with the Halftime Show and with the responses.
I'm sure that even now, before the Halftime Show has taken place, That Charlie Kirk and Franklin Graham have already recorded and written down their tweets decrying the hypersexualization and you know pornographic nature of whatever they're watching and last time I believe it was like Adam Levine and anyone anyway doesn't matter or no no no last year last year was like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre and everyone was like
You know, really confused that Charlie Kirk thought that Dr. Dre standing in a pair of pants, rapping a 25 year old song was somehow.
Pornographic, but anyway, blah, blah, blah.
All right.
Dan, can I just, I felt like last week was really heavy and there was no levity.
So, I was thinking of a joke that I wanted to just give.
Right now, if you're listening and you need to fast forward, that's okay.
But I just, Dan, I want to provide a joke because last week we talked about literal Nazis and all kinds of depressing stuff and it was really heavy.
So, I was thinking that if I could choose a different profession than the one I have chosen, it would be to be a chiropractor.
Do you know why?
Because if I were... Why would you choose to be a chiropractor?
Sorry, I missed my cue there.
Well, we practiced it.
We practiced it.
Okay.
Well, all right.
Okay.
It's because if I was a chiropractor, every day when a client walked in, I could say, welcome to Thoracic Park.
You know, just like in the, you know, just, no, all right.
You know, my wife had the same reaction, Dan.
She asked me not to say the joke, but you know, I do what I want.
I go to Target on Super Bowl Sunday.
I tell jokes like this.
It's a pretty crazy life.
All right, y'all.
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