Weekly Roundup: Haley-lujah - Revival for a New Generation
Brad and Dan begin by talking about Nikki Haley's announcement that she is running for president. While she mentioned being a candidate for a new generation, it seems she is ready to carry on the work of her former boss - Donald Trump.
Khyati Joshi on Haley: https://religionnews.com/2023/02/16/nikki-haley-says-shes-christian-but-its-complicated/
They then provide some context and commentary on the Asbury revival happening in Wilmore Kentucky.
Finally, both hosts offer insight from the PRRI/Brookings report on the ascendance of Christian nationalism in the USA .
John Hawthorne on the PRRI/Brookings report: https://johnhawthorne.substack.com/p/why-the-prribrookings-christian-nationalism?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad, back in your normal digs after your globetrotting and telling people about your book.
Yeah, back here in the storage closet.
Always good to be back.
But I want to give one announcement before we get going today, and that is next week, February 23, I'll be at Santa Clara University.
So Santa Clara is in the Bay Area.
It's in the South Bay.
And if you're around, if you're in Oakland or San Leandro or Santa Cruz, Or San Jose, come hang out February 23.
And it's at 6 p.m.
And I'll put all the links in the show notes.
But yeah, I would love to see you there.
I know some friends of the show will be there and folks that you might have heard on a show like Ryan Stoller.
So that'll be really fun and really looking forward to that.
So.
All right, Dan, we have a bunch of stuff to talk about.
We need to talk about Nikki Haley running for president, which is You know, Nikki Haley may not have a chance in Hades of winning, I'm not sure, but there's a lot of things about Haley's candidacy that I think are really worth talking about in terms of class, generations, race, gender.
Things like that.
So we'll get there and talk about Asbury.
As many of you know, there's a revival of sorts going on at Asbury University in Kentucky.
A lot of news about this.
A lot of people talking about it on Twitter, social media.
So we will definitely get there.
And then Dan and I are going to reflect on the PRRI Brookings research Uh, report that just came out.
It's actually been out more than a week.
We didn't really get to it last week, but, and we're not going to go over it comprehensively, but I think each of us will talk about something that caught our eye on the new survey that does, uh, reveal that, uh, at least three in 10 Americans support Christian nationalism.
So that's, uh, that's a thing.
That's a thing.
So, all right, Dan, here we go.
Uh, Nikki Haley is running for president.
Um, I.
I think some there's like maybe 10 people who woke up and were so excited to hear this, Dan, this week.
And I just want to imagine.
OK, just hang with me.
Just want to imagine there's a couple living in South Carolina and they loved Nikki Haley, her whole political career.
And they woke up and saw this and, you know, the man walked into the kitchen, uh, where his wife was, you know, making her coffee for the morning.
And he said, Hallelujah.
She's running.
Do you think that happened in America somewhere, Dan?
Cause I would like to think it did.
I'm sure it did.
It took a while to get to the Hallelujah, but it was good.
Your criticism of the joke is that the setup took too long.
No, as a purveyor, a fine purveyor of dad jokes, it was...
But, I mean, you hit it on the head.
There is some subset of people who's really, really excited about Nikki Haley running.
Obviously, presumably, some people in South Carolina, right, where she has been for a long time, are excited about this.
One thing worth noting, right, is the question of whether or not her campaign can cut through the noise, right, around the GOP, and that's a question we'll get to.
Haley announces that she's running significantly, as you say, for a number of reasons.
She's younger than, you know, say, Donald Trump or Joe Biden or folks like that.
She also touted this line.
I brought this up after Sarah Huckabee Sanders did the response to the State of the Union and talked about this need for a new generation or time for a new generation.
And that caught my ear.
And I was like, that sounds like not just a shot at Biden, but also a shot at Trump a little bit of like, you know, we need somebody besides Trump.
Nikki Haley said the same thing and brings out this this kind of weird thing about competency tests for politicians and stuff like that.
Clearly a shot at older politicians and I think specifically male politicians.
She is, as you say, she's a woman.
She has a more diverse background and lots of other people.
Once upon a time, and this is important, she was seen as one of those more, let's say, steady and rational people in the GOP boat.
And then she went to work for Trump, kind of kept her head down, didn't get wrapped up in Trump the way that somebody like, say, Rudy Giuliani did, but was still associated with Trump, kind of disappears for a while from public view, unless you were really tracking her or watching South Carolina or whatever, and announces that she's running for president.
Why?
I think all of that's relevant because she made this statement about Wanting a younger generation and so forth.
And the other thing is that lots of people noted her rally and announcement that it didn't look Trumpy.
She didn't breathe fire the way that Trump does.
She didn't go the route of DeSantis.
She didn't go the route of Pence this week, who was like, I'm going to try to go to the right of Trump, right?
She didn't tout a lot of those same things, anti-immigration stuff, anti-trans stuff.
anti quote unquote woke stuff, whatever, didn't have lots of MAGA stuff in the crowd, didn't have, you know, sort of all of that.
And there, I think there were some who said, oh, wow, she's, I read one analysis that said, if you were like a GOP voter and you'd like lived under a rock for the last 10 years and you came out, you would feel right at home.
Like this felt like that.
I was reminded a little bit of Once Upon a Time, George W. Bush running on a policy of compassionate conservatism, of trying to rebrand and be a kinder, gentler conservative.
And there was a bit of that.
And I think some people were like, look at this.
This is her seeing if this works.
We don't know if it'll work.
We don't know if there's bandwidth for this.
And then the GOP, don't know if it's going to be able to gain a foothold, but here it is.
So there's those, I think, who say, oh, this looks like a breath of fresh air.
This feels like something really different.
But is it right?
That's the other side of this.
And we've been following this and then throughout stuff in Rolling Stone wrote a good article about this as well.
Nikki Haley shows up in kind of all the usual places.
If you're a GOP candidate running for president, she's on Hannity.
She's on Fox and Friends.
And she's explicitly asked, like, basically, like, how are you different from Trump?
Why should somebody vote for you and not Trump?
And she wouldn't really answer the question.
She wouldn't What she wouldn't do is attack Trump.
And she had a line ready for this.
I think it's important for folks to recognize she wasn't caught flat-footed by this.
She knew, as anybody would, they're going to ask you why they should vote for you and not Trump.
And she had this weird line about how, I won't kick sideways.
I'm not here to kick sideways.
I'm going to kick forward.
And said that Trump was a friend and this and that, but didn't say, We need different policies.
She didn't say Trump was right where we needed to be in 2016, but we need a new direction now.
She certainly didn't say Trump was a mistake for us and we need to chart a new path.
So it opens up that question, number one, of if she gains any traction, how different really is it?
Is this another Trumpism without Trump?
More of it just quieter, keeping the quiet part quiet and maybe not saying it out loud.
Or if it isn't, if she is really trying to get to a different kind of conservative vision, which I suspect she is, just given who she was before Trump, her kind of tepid responses to him, even while he was president.
The question that comes up is, then why will anybody vote for her if she can't say, here's why you should vote for me, not Trump, because she's still afraid of offending him.
So all of those are takeaways.
The big one, I think, is that it shows that there is still no clear way for people in the GOP to steer away from Trump.
There's growing momentum and a kind of consensus that big backers like the Koch brothers don't want to support Trump, that a lot of political leaders don't want Trump to be the nominee.
But he's still enough of the center of gravity that they can't pull away from him, number one.
And number two, as we've been talking about, even if Trump isn't the nominee, it doesn't mean that Trumpism doesn't work.
And it's not at all clear that a GOP candidate who doesn't fully embrace the MAGA vision and the MAGA brand can gain traction in the GOP.
So a lot of interesting thing.
And I think she may be the proverbial canary in a coal mine in some ways to see if what emerges as sort of an alternative candidate Within the GOP can gain any traction or not.
Yeah, there's I don't think.
Yeah, my my initial reaction is I don't think I don't know who the Haleyites are right now.
So I don't know who is.
Are you ready?
I've been practicing one more.
Just one more, Dan.
OK, I'm ready.
I want it.
I don't know who's writing Haley's comment.
OK, but I don't know.
I just.
Yeah, maybe not.
Okay.
But I do think there's a bunch to talk about here.
So I want to start with questions I know we're going to get, and I'll put one of these in your ear.
Nikki Haley's born to Immigrants from India.
Haley is an Indian American.
Haley is Asian American.
OK, so let's put that out there and make sure that that's there.
So Haley presents this different face to what we're used to in GOP presidential politics.
This is a woman of color.
So let's just say that.
And it's, I think, really important to have women of color running for our highest offices or any offices in the country.
I don't agree virtually with anything that Haley stands for policy-wise.
I will say, and this is one way that she is, at least in the contemporary GOP, not in my mind, in the political spectrum in general, but the contemporary GOP, she is moderate.
Some proof of that would be that she supported taking down Confederate statues in the South, right?
And so that's, in the contemporary GOP, that makes her moderate in some sense, because many did not support that and many still do not support that.
So I think that's worth pointing out.
Haley is a convert to Christianity, and there's a good piece up at Religion News this week, and I can link it in the show notes that talks about the complications of Nikki's faith and her heritage and just her ideas, her expression of her Christianity and so on and so forth.
OK, so all of that's there, Dan, Asian, American woman, person of color, so on and so forth.
However, you I think hit it on the head and you you make a point that I just I really think is worth taking away from today is.
This is not somebody who came out and said, I'm Nikki Haley.
I'm obviously different than the old white guys you're used to looking at.
And I'm different too, in terms of my policy.
I'm not going to return us to the absurdity of Trumpism.
I'm going to move forward into a more common sense, moderate, Something, something, something Republicanism that will get the country back to a state of normalcy or a state of equilibrium.
And I'm ready to do that.
Like, this is not somebody who came out and just said, you know what?
We've had six years of chaos and madness, and I'm tired of it just like you are.
So let's move forward with a different GOP in 2024, right?
It's somebody that came out and was like, yeah, vote for me.
Why?
I don't know.
Am I different than Trump?
I don't know.
It's kind of maybe I'm not going to criticize.
I don't kick sideways.
And so I guess for me, that still signals if you want to run for office in this Republican Party, you basically have to either signal full throated support for Trumpism or not give a full throated criticism, at the very least, if you want in your own mind to stay viable.
And I just think that's worth pointing out.
Here's a question I know we're going to get asked, and I wonder if you can answer it is.
How can a woman run for GOP if the if the GOP is marked by such patriarchy and Christian nationalist ideas of gender?
How can a woman of color run for president in a GOP that is so full of xenophobia?
Now, I will say I'll just answer that second one real quick and culture this week.
Came out and said some things that I think a lot of Republicans, unfortunately, will agree with.
So this is at NBC News, February 16th.
It's by Sakshi Venkatraman.
And here's what Coulter had to say about Nikki Haley.
Why don't you go back to your own country?
So just for the record, Nikki Haley was born in this country in South Carolina.
But nonetheless, she says, go back to your own country.
She made some really so it actually just gets way worse.
And she starts talking about all kinds of stereotypes about India and and and other things.
She called Haley a bimbo.
And a preposterous creature criticizing her for having advocated removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse in the wake of the 2015 shooting at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.
Okay.
This is my country lady.
I'm not an American Indian and I don't like them taking down all the monuments.
So I will say that I think Ann Coulter is expressing out loud what a lot of folks are going to think internally about Nikki Haley.
And that's unfortunate, tragic, disgusting.
Awful, period.
However, I will say that Nikki Haley can run and has been a viable GOP politician because Nikki Haley plays by the GOP game.
She supports the policies, she goes by the program, and she looks and plays the part of a GOP woman.
She's traditionally feminine.
She sort of plays the role in a way that is much different on camera.
She appears as a much different, in the eyes of the GOP, different kind of woman than Ilhan Omar or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ayanna Pressley.
Or Elizabeth Warren.
And so her brand of femininity, I think, fits into the GOP vision in some sense.
I'm curious what you think, Dan, about that.
I also want to just point out that we're two men talking about this.
And so, you know, that's something we should bring up and just say that's a limitation to this conversation.
So off to you.
Yeah.
So, you know, as you were talking and I was Thank you.
If Nikki Haley is ever, ever going to get traction, I think she's going to have to have a broader appeal or like a different demographic than just Trump voters, because the Ann Coulters of the world and the people that really like Ann Coulter are never, ever, ever going to vote for Nikki Haley, right?
Like for all the reasons you just said.
So for them, all of those, let's call them identity dimensions are, they're negatives.
They're things that count against her.
So what does she need to do?
She needs to appeal to suburban women.
We've talked about this.
The GOP has talked about this, of needing to win that appeal.
Ideally, being able to appeal to voters of color who might be more willing to vote for her, depending how she presents her policies, than others and so forth.
I don't know.
And this is why I say it's like a test case, like the canary in the coal mine.
I don't know if she can, because here's why.
There's a sense in which, I think you hit it on the head this time, when you said she's the right kind of GOP woman.
She presents herself as a woman that is acceptable within the framework of the GOP.
We'll say this, I think it's always worth repeating, right?
You don't have to be a man to agree with, say, patriarchy or a lot of the assumptions in the GOP or heteronormativity or whatever, right?
And she has played that game for a long time and she's played it deftly enough To be able to sort of be allowed in the room, so to speak, right?
If she starts appealing to her identity, if she starts saying, hey, suburban women, I understand you.
I'm a woman, too.
OK.
But if she starts saying, hey, you know what, Indian Americans, Asian Americans, people of color, I get you.
She has just written off huge swaths of GOP support because now she's being quote-unquote woke just by invoking her identity.
She's talking about a hyphenated identity, right?
She shouldn't be doing that.
We're all just Americans, right?
And we all know that that language of not having a hyphenated identity, just being an American, it's really a way of making sure that what goes as unmarked in this society—white, Christian, patriarchal, and so forth—can continue to do that.
So my personal view is I don't think that she can leverage those things that make her different enough to really make headway in the GOP.
Precisely because the contemporary GOP, the vast sort of moral force of it, is about eradicating difference.
And so, I mean, that's my personal view.
We'll see where it goes.
And because I'm with you, I think it's good.
I think it's good that I don't, nothing about her politics, certainly nothing about like Sarah Huckabee Sanders politics or whatever, but am I glad to see that there's a female governor of Arkansas?
Sure.
Am I glad to see that there's a A female-identifying person of color running for president in the GOP, yeah, all things considered.
But my view is that I don't think that she can make use of those things that make her different enough to make any headway, which means that trying to run on this really soft-pedaled I'm different from another generation.
I mean, notice that that's what she appealed to, the generational component, the age component, not the gender component, not the race ethnicity component, not the cultural heritage component, not the, hey, I'm an immigrant too, I understand the immigrant world, right?
Because that's going to write off everybody for all the reasons we'll get into here in a few minutes when we talk about the PRRI findings about Christian nationalism.
So, I think it's an interesting thing and I think that there will be those both on the progressive side or on the left or some journalists who will say, see, this is good.
This is progress for the GOP.
Anybody can announce they're running for president.
We'll see where it goes when the stuff really starts.
I think Within those conservatives who still want to say, no, no, no, it's not really about Trump.
That wasn't really conservatism.
That's not really the GOP.
This will be the case that shows, can there be a different GOP right now or not?
And if I were putting money on it, I would say no, but I'm excited to, if I put my just analytic hat on it, try not to be so invested in watching it to see Where can it go?
Can a woman of color in the GOP run in some way that actually appeals to people because she's a woman of color?
Or is it just going to be kind of the standard?
No, no, people of color should support us.
Conservative policies are good for people of color and so forth.
Again, it's Bush's compassionate conservatism and I don't think that's going to sell.
So I think just to wrap this up before we take a break, I think this is a really good test case of the Oh, yeah.
Not all Republicans.
And it's like, OK, so how many?
Because Nikki Haley, you know, is the daughter of immigrants, is is a person of color, is a woman, is all that stuff.
But Nikki Haley's also like been just in terms of performance.
A really good politician, like doesn't lose races, wins, was governor of South Carolina as a woman, as a person of color.
That takes like an immense amount of political acumen and strategy.
Like Nikki Haley's, by all accounts, an effective politician, if by effective you mean like winning races and being victorious and so on.
This isn't McMullin, Evan McMullin from 2016, who, you know, was this sort of Longshot Canada.
But here's the thing about McMullin, Dan, is like, I don't think McMullin thought he was going to win.
He was running on principle.
Now, if Nikki Haley was running on this, like, who cares if I win?
I'm going to come out and say, hey, there's a different way to be a conservative in America.
And I represent that.
Who's with me?
I'm going to take the 20% or the 18% or the however many percent don't want Trumpism anymore.
And I'm going to make a point.
Then I think maybe I'd be a little more like, oh, this is kind of something here.
But as you say, when asked about her candidacy, it wasn't like, hey, look, I'm I'm I'm a different.
GOP and I think there's a lot of person who want a different GOP.
So let's go.
It was yeah, I'm not gonna say anything bad about Trump.
I'm younger.
Y'all want younger?
That'd be you know, I'm 40.
She's in her late 40s.
I'm I'm like, not even 50 yet.
That's, that's a thing.
That's it.
And I'm not even talking like she had to come out and talk all about Indian American heritage.
I'm saying she didn't talk about policy.
She didn't talk about tone.
She didn't talk about I don't want chaos anymore.
I don't want conspiracies.
No more QAnon.
It was just, well, I'm younger.
So anyway, blah, blah, blah.
All right.
Let's take a break.
Come back and we'll we'll go to we'll go from South Carolina over to Kentucky.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
So this week, a lot of folks have been emailing me wanting us to talk about this.
A lot of folks are noticing this on Christian Twitter, on ex-evangelical Twitter, on nerdy religious studies Twitter, all kinds of.
You know, places.
So Asbury University is in Wilmore, Kentucky.
Asbury University was started in the Wesleyan holiness tradition.
So kind of part of my background, a little bit as somebody who went to Zoos Pacific.
It's been around for quite some time, going back to the 19th century.
And this week after chapel, what has been dubbed a revival broke out, meaning that people never left chapel.
They've had a revival going for almost a week now.
People have been coming in from all over the country, driving from several states away.
There has been media coverage.
There are all kinds of generational gaps being filled in.
So if you go to the chapel today, you will see not just college kids, you'll see older folks and boomers and middle-aged people.
They're all there and they're all Worshiping God.
So if you've never been to a revival and you're like, what does that look like?
It's a lot of prayer, a lot of singing, a lot of sometimes someone will get up and preach to the group, things like that.
Now, I will say, Dan, what we should say at the outset is to date, it's really been a nameless revival.
So this has not been a situation where a celebrity A preacher or Christian has stepped in and really taken the spotlight.
It's not a time when even one of the students or faculty at Asbury has sort of emerged as this new star that has led the.
This is really been a revival that has been organic.
It is not one that has been kind of co-opted, at least yet, by big names or big kind of figures in, you know, Protestant Christianity, Evangelical Christianity, etc.
Um, so I think that's interesting.
Um, it has in many ways been a intergenerational, um, uh, kind of revival.
So it's much, it's, it's now much beyond just the 19 year olds, um, praying in the chapel.
Um, so all of that I think is there.
All right.
I think people want to know, like, you know, the questions that I've seen bouncing around are like, is this a real revival?
Is this actually genuine?
What should we make of it?
So on and so forth.
OK, so let me put on my religious studies hat first, Dan.
Okay.
My religious studies had as a scholar is number one is I'm not going to make fun of people's religious rituals and sort of, you know, judge them in scholarly terms.
My religious studies training says, okay, what's happening and what's going on here?
And what's happening is a revival that, you know, I'm always the one who kind of points to history.
So this is a revival that is in line with Methodist holiness traditions, revival traditions.
I mean, there's a lot of kind of holiness traditions out there that really see these events These spontaneous, excessive events, and excessive in the meaning of like they go beyond the hour you're supposed to have for chapel on a weekday, that they really signal that God is doing something different.
They signal that God has blessed the nation and is pouring out His Holy Spirit into the people and things are going to change.
They're going to be different.
The generation will be transformed.
The community will never be the same.
That's the idea behind a revival historically.
Uh, these happened at Asbury quite often.
So according to the Asbury website, there's one and we can go back to 1905, 1908, 1921, 1950, 1958.
There was one in 1970.
That's actually quite notable, um, that there were just thousands of people there.
50, 1958, there was one in 1970 that's actually quite notable, that there were just thousands of people there gathered in chapel, and some 2,000 witness teams went out from Wilmore to churches and at least 130 college campuses around the nation witness teams went out from Wilmore to churches and at least 130 college So there's one in 1992, a student confession during the closing chapel of the annual holiness conference turned into 127 consecutive hours of prayer and praise.
There's one going back to 2006, and now the one that is happening today.
So it's not new for Asbury.
It's not new for the Wesleyan holiness tradition.
Now, I think the questions that people are asking and then I'll throw it to you, Dan, are, well, will this have any effect?
Is this and I think there's a lot of ex-evangelicals out there wondering this and others who have been part of you know, high demand religions are like, well, this is, is this anything else more than an emotional outburst, singing together, praying together, and yet then you go home and things are kind of the same, right?
Does anything change?
There have been people saying, well, this won't change anything structurally.
This is not going to change, you know, inequality when it comes to income inequality, when it comes to gender norms, when it comes to all kinds of stuff.
And I think my religion scholar hat tells me we don't know.
We don't know.
And believe me, I have a lot of suspicions in my gut that I'll get to in a minute.
But the religion scholar hat inside of me says, Historically, this could just stop and really be in two weeks, something that's over.
And just really, there could be just, we could really kind of in five years be like, Oh yeah, I think there was that thing happened.
And yeah, did we talk about it?
Yeah, I guess we did.
Yeah, that was the thing.
There's also though, there are also, you know, historical reasons, Dan.
and precedents that say that people go from these revivals and they do actually, you know, make decisions that change.
So like there are revivals in history that led folks, white folks to join the abolitionist movement, right?
Against slavery in this country.
There are revivals that have led people to join in various movements, whether they be for social justice or to go out and be missionaries or proselytizers and give up their dreams of being a businessman and to join the church, whatever it may be.
So I don't think that we should just say that this will have no effect.
The question is, what effect will it have?
And I think what many of you are wondering are, will this have any effect on the fact, and I'll mention one last thing and throw it to you, is that Asbury is, according to the website today that I spent time on, is not a school that sees same-sex relationships as biblical.
It is not an affirming place.
It's a place where that if you enter into Sexual intimacy before marriage, you might have to be suspended from school.
It's a place that really does seem to uphold traditional gender norms and non-affirming sexual ethos on campus.
There's a long and wide discussion about race and race relations in Kentucky, in Wilmore, in the South in general.
Will this change that?
So people are wondering those things.
I have more to say, but I'll throw it to you.
Any thoughts on the Asbury revival?
Yeah, so putting on my same religious studies hat, but also the philosophy and social theory hat, a few things.
So number one, it's interesting people contrast it.
Will it bring quote unquote change or just a kind of religious and emotional intensity?
And the first thing to understand is that within this kind of Christian spirituality, that relational and emotional intensity is the religious.
It's like the major, major of your religiosity.
So I think that's a false A false distinction for the people within this system, within this kind of religion, within this tradition.
So I think that people on the outside, or maybe former insiders or whatever, have to understand that.
If you left this kind of tradition, or you've never been a part of a tradition where emotional intensity is a measure of the sincerity of your faith, That can seem quote-unquote false or something, but if you're there where like my intensity, my willingness to be here praying for like days or to be quote-unquote on fire for God or whatever, that is the measure of my depth, of my devotion.
Then there's no, it's just quote-unquote emotion.
The emotion is part and parcel of what it is for this to be a real revival.
A revival of what?
A revival of my commitment to God and so forth.
I think tied in with that is the other piece.
That I think goes to these other issues and you're right, we can't fully prognosticate and there have been historical precedents in different directions of sort of what happens with these, but I think that As a part of just, you know, American Protestantism and American Conservative Protestantism and American Revivalism, this kind of tradition tends to the individualistic.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that the Christian faith for them is about me and God.
It's about my relationship to God.
It's about my experience of God.
Visions of social transformation within this kind of tradition are aggregated.
In other words, if we want to change society, we don't do it by passing laws.
We don't do it by We don't do it by getting rid of quote unquote structural racism or institutional racism.
We don't even recognize those as things because we see society as a bunch of individuals.
And if you want to change society, you do it by doing what?
Changing individuals.
So I tend to think that from the perspective of those participating in this, if they leave this, whatever leaving this means, if it's, you know, the end of the week, it kind of goes away.
If it lasts for a while, whatever, if they leave feeling more individually committed, more individually engaged in things, more like their relationship with God is better than it was, then that is a successful revival.
And for them, going out and quote-unquote changing society is, I'm going to convert other people, I'm going to proselytize, I'm going to share my faith, I'm going to win others to Christ, and as we do that and more people become Christians like me, as individuals, society changes because we view society as nothing but a collection of individuals, right?
So I think that that's why structural institutional changes are not likely to come from something like this.
And I'm not saying that, same as you, to mock anything.
I'm trying to be something of a sociologist here and say this is how I think this kind of religion works, the worldview that it inhabits, the kind of person it creates.
I don't see that.
Which comes to the next thing that you're talking about, the kinds of changes that I think we would like to see if we put our sort of opinions in this and so forth.
I think the other part to understand about this is that that intensification, that revival of one's faith is going to be an intensification of things you already believe and value for.
For the people who are here, for the majority of them, to be a good Christian is to oppose same-sex marriage.
It is to remain abstinent until you're married.
It is to be opposed to trans and gender non-conforming people.
This is part of what it is to be a quote good Christian And I think that that has even hardened as those views have become more socially acceptable.
That's why we have the backlash.
So I see it as incredibly unlikely, possible, but unlikely, that coming out of that kind of social framework, because we talk about the emotions and stuff, but they don't happen in a vacuum.
The emotions are shaped by these institutions and structures and practices and their histories of who they are as Christians and so forth.
To be a good Christian is to hold more firmly to Those accepted views.
I think the issue of race relations is the one where maybe there's the most potential for movement, given those histories that you talk about in Kentucky and places around that.
But I would be amazed and would be happy to be amazed if a revival in a conservative religious context like this led to greater LGBTQ plus inclusion or rethinking of You know, opposition to Black Lives Matter or the kinds of things that are going on in Florida with African American Studies or whatever.
Because I think that to revive one's faith in this is to hold more closely to the received truths that you have grown up with, that your church has told you as part of what it is to be a Christian.
So those are sort of my thoughts, and I'm trying to be really clear here.
Those aren't like theological arguments about it.
Those are what I see, if I'm looking at this as somebody who looks a lot at what shapes identity, what makes us the kind of people we are, how do our identities affect Our own emotions, our own sense of value judgments, and so forth.
Those are what I would see.
How long it will last?
I have no idea.
I think the lasting impact is likely to be more measurable to the individuals in it than it might be observable to anybody on the outside.
Well, and I think the question you're asking and you're pointing us to is, well, what what does revival signify in this context?
So what are we reviving?
And if you're reviving your commitment or you're reviving your fervor or you're reviving your desire to serve God, that none of that happens in a vacuum.
So you're reviving something that already existed.
What already existed was shaped by church cultures, political cultures, ethnic cultures and so on.
And so that's I think that's what I'm taking away from what you're saying is like, Well, if you're going to revive something, you're going to bring it back to life.
Well, you're going to bring it back to life to what it was in that life and what it was before it needed revival.
And so it's hard to think about this as being qualitatively different in terms of transformation when it comes to gender, sexuality, thinking about structural racism, thinking about structural inequalities related to economics.
I will say, just because I want to say this just for the holiness, Wesleyans out there Scholars of 19th century America, there is a long and deep history of Methodism as a kind of movement that understands itself as committed to societal change.
And especially, and this is just for all you out there who, if you know, you know, right?
The post-millennialist Methodists of the 19th century, before World War I, even before the Civil War, did see what they were doing as tied to societal change and societal revival, but that has also changed in the last 150 years to 100 years.
Lots to talk about there, but if you'd like to email me about that, feel free and happy to entertain that.
We can't get any more into the weeds than that for now.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about PRRI and Brookings on Christian nationalism.
Be right back.
Okay, Dan, I was entertaining calling this episode for today.
Don't hate Asbury, you know, because I like I work in the University of San Francisco right near hate Asbury.
You know what I mean?
Do you think that would land?
All right.
I'm trying them out today.
You know, they're getting shot down.
We can all be looking for the T-shirts next week, right?
Yeah.
You know, yeah.
Don't hate Asbury.
Okay, that's fine.
All right.
A couple weeks ago, well, not a couple weeks ago, like nine days ago, PRRI in Brookings put out a big new survey about Christian nationalism in the United States.
And we haven't talked about it yet.
Lots of folks have broken it down and analyzed it.
So PRRI Brookings surveyed more than 6,000 Americans, and it took a close look at the underpinnings of Christian nationalism.
And they asked five questions, Dan, to measure Christian nationalism.
So just so people know, like, what are they asking and how are they building their scale?
Here's the questions.
The U.S.
government should declare America a Christian nation.
U.S.
laws should be based on Christian values.
If the U.S.
moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.
Okay.
They then broke this down, Dan, into a scale that really follows on the work of Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry in taking America back for God.
The scale is adherence Sympathizers skeptics and rejecters, right?
So you can have four rungs.
You might be a full-on adherent.
You could be a sympathizer and kind of like kind of on board you could be a skeptic or you could be an outright rejecter like I'm just I'm not doing that.
Okay.
All right, so The Here's some breakdowns, okay?
About 10% of Americans are adherents.
They are like, yeah, you asked me if this should be a Christian nation.
You asked me if God is called Christians exercise dominion.
One out of 10 Americans is like, I'm all in.
I completely agree.
Another 19% agree mostly with a little bit of hesitation.
So you ask them these questions about the U.S.
being a Christian nation, should adopt Christian values, blah, blah, blah.
And they're kind of like, yeah, that sounds good.
I mean, I have a little, I have some reservations, but for the most part, I'm in.
So what that tells us, Dan, is we're kind of at about Thirty percent, three out of ten Americans are either 100 percent on board with these questions or mostly agree with a little bit of kind of hesitancy.
All right.
So I have thoughts.
I think we're going to try to talk about sort of like one thought each, but I'll throw to you to start.
There's a lot more to this survey.
We'll link it in the show notes.
If you want to dig into this, just have a wild Friday night tonight.
You know, just get crazy, pour yourself some green tea and really just dig into this.
You know, you should do that.
But we have a couple of minutes here.
Dan, what do you think about, what's one takeaway for you from the survey?
So unlike you, there were a lot of takeaways and it was, you know, I started writing them down and after a while I gave up because I was like, it's basically line by line.
But one is for me, Christian nationalism is not limited to any one Christian group.
It's not limited to any one demographic, and this shows this.
But it is, in general terms, an overwhelmingly Protestant phenomenon.
And this comes up a lot.
I know people ask about Catholics and Christian nationalism.
Yes, there are Christian nationalists.
Catholics talk about the radical traditionalists and others, right?
People ask about different groups.
Jewish groups and others in the U.S., but this showed, I think it was, it was about, you know, like you say, about a third of people overall that did this, but it was 64% of white evangelicals, 38% of black Protestants, 43% of Hispanic Protestants who identified as this, so strong numbers.
By contrast, Three quarters of Hispanic Catholics, non-Christian religious people, Jewish people, unaffiliated people rejected this.
It was like 75%.
If in general, if you are talking about Christian nationalists, you are probably talking about Protestants.
And given raw numbers and everything else, you're probably talking about white Protestants.
And that's a thing that comes up because people ask all the time, like, why do we say white Christian nationalism?
Why does the whiteness come in?
And this survey has lots of great stuff about the whiteness that show this.
The Christian nationalists are also the ones who are most likely to have to experience anti-Black racism, to have anti-immigrant views and sort of on and on.
But I think that was one is the That it is, by and large, a very, very Protestant kind of phenomenon.
And others will get way down in the weeds about why that is.
But I think that that's something to bring up because it comes up with people you talk to, I talk to, we talk about other things.
But people sometimes are like, why do you spend so much time talking about Protestants?
Because we spend a lot of time talking about Christian nationalism.
And if you're talking about Christian nationalism, typically, demographically, you're talking about Protestants.
So a couple things.
One is, so if we look at black Protestants, and I know some of you are going to be wondering this, so you got 38% of black Protestants are somehow signing on to these questions and that might seem surprising.
And so in one sense, I think it's just, yeah, there's a lot.
Let's just be honest.
There's almost 40% of black Protestants are going to answer affirmatively in some way that this is a Christian country and it should have Christian values and that kind of stuff.
What I will say, and I think if you have not read Taking America Back for God by Whitehead and Perry, you should, I touch on this in my own book as well, that white and black Christian nationalisms show up very differently when you start asking further questions.
So when you ask further questions to the white evangelical, They see the country has gone downhill.
They have a nostalgia for the past.
They have an idea that it used to be great, but not now.
They have an idea that it's going to go bad soon.
Apocalypse is coming and we have to save the country.
And if we don't act in extreme measures, it'll all go bad.
When you talk to black Protestants, black Protestant Christian nationalists, I should say, you know, and again, Perry and Whitehead, Whitehead and Perry are great on this.
They have a different story of the United States.
They have one that says, yeah, it is a Christian nation, but it's never been a Christian nation that lived up to its ideals.
And it could if we all committed to a covenant with each other that meant we were living up to the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, equality, and independence for all people.
So, You know, this may not help some of you.
Some of you are still going to be like, I can't believe 40% of black Protestants would answer affirmatively to those questions.
I would just add the context that the story they're telling about the nation in their Christian nationalism is way different.
And this is why their politics end up being so much less exclusionary than many others.
If you look at Raphael Warnock, he talks about a covenant among all humanity.
He talks about living up to our ideals for the first time.
So, That's a different story than we used to be a city on a hill.
But now we're not because all these invaders and immigrants got in and now we need to put a wall around the city on a hill so we can protect it.
Right.
So I think that's one thing I want people to see when it comes to Catholics.
I just want to talk about white Catholics, because you do have about 30 percent.
So three out of 10 white Catholics are in.
And let's just point out, there's a lot of Catholics.
So 30 percent of white Catholics is a lot of people.
It's it's it's a lot more than, say, 30 percent of Latter-day Saints.
OK, so I'll just and I'd have to run those numbers and somebody is probably going to email me and say, well, here's the actual numbers.
So feel free to do so.
But there's a lot of Catholics in this country.
There's a lot of white Catholics in this country.
So that is a lot of people, even if overall the percentages are lower.
Uh, then in say white evangelicals.
Um, I'll give you one more and it comes from our friend John Hawthorne.
So John Hawthorne has, um, a great newsletter.
Uh, every week he's a sociologist of religion.
Um, but he says, look, only 10% of Americans are like full on adherence.
100% in on this.
Who cares?
One out of 10, right?
But another 19% are sympathetic.
And you know, when you look at the numbers in terms of like white evangelicals or white Catholics, you kind of see that breakdown.
And John's point is like, we need to recognize that people who are all in on this, the 100% adherence are often sitting in the pews next to the sympathizers.
And they are able to sway those people when it comes to on the ground issues, whether that is the CRT panic, the school board issues, the curricula, the libraries and LGBT books, the, uh, the groomer rhetoric, right?
If you're going to the same church, you're going to the same PTA meetings, you're going to the same soccer practices with your kids.
There's a very good chance that the 10% are the most vocal section, and they're the ones doing everything they can to get everybody to believe like they do, including that other 20 or 25% of people in the country or in their community.
And they are having an outsized effect.
So I appreciated John's point there that just because it's a one out of 10 who are really 100% into this, we shouldn't be worried.
It's no big deal.
And I just think history tells us that's not true.
Our contemporary situation tells us not true and so on.
So any, any others, Dan, any other takeaways from the survey?
So one other that I think is really good that they put in here is they actually gauged views on violence and experience on violence.
And it was really telling to me that Christian nationalists, people who scored highly, so these, as we say, the adherents and sympathizers, right?
They were the most likely to report having been violent in the past and that this rated this range from like shoving somebody to like actually using weapons.
Now, these are not huge numbers, right?
It's not nobody go and look.
None of us are saying like all Christian nationalists are attacking people with guns.
But it was telling that that that rated the highest of people who had actual like what we had reported resorting to violence to deal with anger, frustration, feeling wronged, whatever.
They were also no surprise to me.
And I know no surprise to you.
Report the most likely to appeal or to approve of the use of political violence to bring about their political aims and ends.
And I think that this was really important because, as I say, it didn't surprise me.
We talk about J6 all the time and what it means, and I think that's not going to surprise anybody who listens to us.
But I was really glad that PRRI and Brookings put this in here because it gives some quantifiable evidence to that, that this is not just Fear-mongering.
This is not just targeting them because we don't like Christian nationalists, or we're not real Christians, or we're a couple grumpy academics, or whatever.
That there's real data to this, that there are seeds of violence in this movement and this ideology, that it's part and parcel.
As I would say, right, it's in the code.
It's written in as part of Christian nationalism, that there is a place for violence within it, which is completely consistent with populism and nationalism of different kinds all over the world.
Well, and just to go off of Gorski and Perry in The Flag and the Cross, they say that white Christian nationalists see violence on their behalf as necessary to put the social order back in its proper place.
Violence from others could be an uprising, could be a protest, could be something as seen as illegitimate and a threat.
It's not surprising, right, everything you're saying, Dan.
I think all your work on populism and nationalism tells us that the real people think they have a right to be violent in order to make the nation what it should be, and white Christian nationalists think of themselves as the real Americans, right?
All right.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope.
I think we've skipped Reasons for Hope, Dan, twice, because two weeks ago, you were in a storm and the power cut out.
And then a week ago, we forgot because I was making too many dad jokes or something.
I don't know what happened.
So it's really been, you know, no hope here for two weeks.
So I'll start.
Washington Post this week, election deniers face a nationwide wave of pushback.
The growing effort by election officials and others is intended to counter mistrust arising from Donald Trump's claims of a rigged 2020 vote.
And there is just a kind of a real concerted effort to push back on election deniers and shame them in the public square and to make this something that is not tenable to believe in public Um, and so on.
We want to protect the people who protect democracy, said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who is working with state lawmakers in Lansing to toughen penalties for threatening election officials.
I know people who work elections.
I know people who oversee elections, and they're scared.
They are worried about their safety.
They're worried about being attacked when they're just trying to process people's votes or allow people to attend their polling place.
So this is really good news.
And I will say, Dan, I was on a call a while back with Jenna Griswold from Colorado, who's the secretary of state there.
And she talked all about this effort and protecting the vote and protecting those who help the vote and and countering election deniers.
And it was really inspiring.
So this is mine for for this week.
And actually, I think this is really good news.
Mine is related.
What I was looking at was a sort of similar thing, but I think it goes on the more the side of like the rhetorical side and the grassroots.
As you know, the elements of the grand jury stuff from Georgia was released and made public.
And one of the things it showed was a bunch of Fox communications that were going on right around this, showing that all the higher-ups at Fox knew that Everything Trump was saying was ridiculous.
They thought it was crazy.
And these are big people.
These are like Tucker Carlson and Hannity and other people who were talking about this.
And it became very clear that they went along with it because they considered it their brand.
They didn't want to lose listeners and whatever.
But I think it shows a couple things.
One is lifting the lid off of Again, the fact that, as you say, devaluing it, but it's going to the heart of Fox because I think there will be Fox listeners who will see this and be angry at Fox.
How could you say that this isn't real?
How could, right?
To show that just at every level, even among those who are peddling this, this was fake news in the true sense.
And I took hope in that because to me, To see the look behind the screen at what was actually going on at Fox is something that can communicate to a certain kind of viewer and segment who are never going to listen to you, Brad Onishi.
They're never going to listen to this podcast and be like, oh, hey, yeah, you're right.
But when they hear Tucker Carlson was saying this and Hannity or others were saying this, I think it can show it.
And it can also be the kind of thing in conversations with people to be like, look, I know you say you trust Fox News and stuff.
Like, how do you feel about this, that they were lying to you?
Like, you know, spinning it that way of I don't know.
I just took hope from the fact that so much of this is coming into full view.
And I guess to your point about the pushback, that it's not just legal, it's not just institutional, it's at the level of media, it's at the level of rhetoric, it's at the level of a kind of public shaming of some of these conservative spokespeople and so forth.
So I took hope in that for, I think, some of the same reasons you did.
All right, friends, we will be back next week.
But for now, I want to say join me at Santa Clara University, February 23.
Come hang out.
We'll we'll be there.
Plenty of time to ask questions.
It's not just a lecture or anything like that.
So, you know, every time we do these events, I get to, like, meet people and, you know, shake hands and talk for a while.
So if you've been listening to the show, I know it's it's hard.
It's a Thursday night, but six o'clock.
Come see us.
It's going to be really fun.
Other than that, we'll be back next week.
But I want to say thank you for all of your support to our patrons.
Once again, we just love you and are so thankful for you.
We do this show three times a week.
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Next week, we have a great interview.
We have Dan's It's In The Code series, and we'll be here for the weekly roundup.
But for now, we'll just say, thanks for listening.
