Brad and Dan begin by discussing the polar opposite speeches given by Biden and Putin on the eve of the one year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Brad analyzes Putin's culture war rhetoric, showing how and why it mirrors the family values and queerphobic rhetoric of American Christian nationalists. Dan points out the symbolic significance of Biden giving his speech in Warsaw and what it mean moving forward.
In the second segment the hosts breakdown the SBC's expulsion of Saddleback Church from the denomination. For both of them this spotlights the toxicity of complementarian theology and the tragedy of the sex abuse scandals in the SBC.
In the final segment, Brad points to two examples of right-wing takeovers of local government by Christian nationalists - one in Michigan and another in Idaho. The takeaway is that Covid played a huge effect on religion, politics, and migration in the USA - mobilizing an army of local culture warriors who are now taking the reins in towns all over the country.
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Axis Mundy You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Here today with my esteemed co-host on a cold morning.
Morning where I'm not feeling good.
I don't think you are either, Dan, but how's it going?
It's good.
Glad to be here.
I am Dan Miller, associate.
No, I'm not even an associate.
I don't even know what my rank is.
I'm professor of religion and social thought.
That's where we're at.
Yeah, it's weird.
I'm on the East Coast, which is supposed to be cold.
You're on the West Coast where I'm like reading about blizzard warnings and stuff in Southern California, and you're not feeling good pushing through.
So glad to be here.
Glad that You can make it.
Hopefully you can rest when we're done.
It snowed on, so I live somewhat nearby to Santa Cruz, California, which is a beach town.
And I go surfing there when I can.
And it snowed on the beach yesterday, which if you're in Maine, I know makes sense.
But here in California, that is not something that usually happens.
So anyway.
Were you actually surfing in snow?
Because that would be awesome.
I was not.
I feel like 17 year old me would have been, that would have like, you know, when you're 17, it's like, guys, when are we ever going to get this chance again?
We have to, you know, 40 something year old me, uh, doesn't even think about such things.
Uh, you know, my, my students ask me like, what do you do for fun?
And I'm like, I don't even think about having fun, buddy.
Okay.
I am in my forties.
I have a, like a one and a half year old child, you know, We got jobs.
We got in-laws who need our help.
We got all kinds of stuff.
So that's, and I'm just kidding.
Please don't email me and say, Brad, have fun and enjoy.
I'm just being a little sarcastic here.
Fun are those days when like joints don't ache or something and you just, you just sit there and like, you know.
It's like, hey, I can't feel my lower back right now.
That's fantastic.
It's not that bad.
Oh, my God.
People are like, please stop.
Please stop.
All right.
Here we go.
We're going to talk about Putin and Biden and talk about Saddleback Church being cut out from the SBC.
Going to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene wanting a national divorce.
Going to talk about what happens when Christian nationalists and far right folks take over small town government and how that looks on the ground.
All right, Dan, let's start with Ukraine and Russia and two speeches.
Some of you all will be already cognizant of the fact that Joe Biden made a surprise appearance in Ukraine.
And, you know, it was something that I think was seen as really galvanizing for the Ukrainians, for President Zelensky, and for the war effort that Ukraine's allies have been supporting for a year now.
Last Friday was the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it was striking because Putin and Biden gave speeches that day, and they were very different.
They had a very different tone and tenor, and they also had a very different aesthetic, Dan.
So Biden was in Warsaw, and I think he chose Warsaw very strategically.
So Biden's in Warsaw.
It feels in some ways celebratory and upbeat.
He comes out to You know, some music that feels kind of cheery.
He's talking a lot about freedom.
He uses, you know, broad, universal, inclusive rhetoric, according to Ann Applebaum at the Atlantic.
He's talking about the hope of the brave, you know, and freedom for Ukrainians and for those who want democracy all over the world.
And Applebaum says, and I think she's right about this, that one of Biden's goals was to persuade people, to inspire people.
You know, it's kind of hard to remember back this far, but a year ago, I think there was a kind of general sense that this war would be over very soon, that Kiev would fall within a matter of weeks or days.
And there was also a sense beyond Ukraine that perhaps this was the end of NATO, that NATO would crumble, that we would see Putin Well, being able to chip away at territory and governments in this region, you know, places like Poland and places in the north of Europe.
I think a lot of people just thought, well, here we go again.
What's going to happen here, especially in the wake of the Trump presidency, when a lot of those allyships and alliances were tested, to say the least, and the post-war Coalition that developed after World War II was really in many ways in question.
Biden chose Warsaw because, as some of you may know, Warsaw was just totally leveled during World War II and it was rebuilt from the ground up.
If you go to Warsaw, that I've visited Poland several times, you know that Warsaw has been rebuilt.
So, you know, it's really hard to find old buildings in Warsaw or the historical district in the original sense because it was literally rebuilt.
And I think Biden wanted to give the sense that Kyiv and Ukraine in general will be rebuilt and democracy will prevail.
The speech by Putin, Dan, was much different.
It was two hours.
It was very, it was like in a, the aesthetic was just what you would imagine.
It was just a drab, uh, setting filled with Russian elites who Biden needed, excuse me, who Putin wanted to kind of deliver his message to.
And, uh, it was really based on fear, uh, fear and grievance.
So let me, let me make two points here before I throw it over to you.
Putin continued this line that we were, I mean, he literally said this in translation, we were doing everything possible to solve this problem peacefully, but Ukraine started the war.
It is them, the West, who are culpable for the war, and we are using force to stop it.
So Dan, you've talked about abuser language before and abuser tactics.
And this is, to me, the same thing.
We had to.
We had to invade.
You made us do it.
We didn't want to.
We wanted this to be peaceful.
But you know what?
We had to do it.
This coincided with Putin's announcement that Russia would not continue with the New START treaties, which are a program, which are nuclear treaties that kind of give the United States and Russia the ability to check each other's arsenals.
It's in essence a continuation of the nuclear detente that has been in place for decades.
So by pulling out of this, he's basically sending a nuclear warning signal to the United States and the rest of the world, and it's very much a scare tactic, okay?
I want to zero in on just one more thing, and I think it's for us in this show, it's probably the most important, and that is that Putin continues to couch his language about Ukraine and the West in terms that really sound right out of the playbook of the religious right, out of American Christian nationalism, out of what you might hear on Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham.
He talks about the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion, the abuse of children.
This is Dan, I mean, that that sounds like the rhetoric we hear from Matt Walsh or someone.
OK, he also just talks about I mean, he's really upset that the Church of England and then you talk about this all the time, the Church of England might actually go to a gender neutral appellation for God.
So instead of calling God, he they might change that.
He's Putin is pretty upset about that.
Didn't like that idea.
This all recalls and I think some of you will remember this, that Let me just say one more thing.
Putin is very upset about same-sex marriage.
So let me just back up.
Somehow same-sex marriage and the Church of England's theological approach to God's gender is somehow baked into Why Russia needed to invade Ukraine?
I mean, there's this weird logic here of like, well, you made us do it.
We didn't want to.
But you keep allowing gay people to get married and women to be autonomous and independent.
And, you know, some of you might be calling God by they.
So we had to invade Ukraine.
We just had to do it.
OK, some of you might remember Putin's Holy War speech.
And this is from last fall.
And and this is the one where he really caught the eye of a lot of folks who study these things, because He was using rhetoric that just sounded so much out of the playbook of the religious right and Christian nationalism in this country.
In that speech, he began by saying, I promise that we will win this holy war.
He talked about how in the West, people who say their God is Satan, Satanists are at war with us, people who insist we attend LGBT parades.
So once again, you know, who are we at war with?
Satanists.
Why are they Satanists?
Because they they want rights and representation for LGBT people.
OK, so, you know, let me give you one more quote from this.
They're not fighting Christians in Ukraine.
Victoria Smokin comments, and Dr. Smokin's a scholar at Wesleyan, a very good scholar.
They're fighting Satanists.
They're fighting the West.
And what Smokin says in her work and in other places is basically like, Putin has conjured a sense where the war is not against Ukraine.
It's against the West and it's like Satanist grooming cabal of elites who want everyone to abandon God and the family and to kind of, you know, jump into this satanic cult, right?
Putin is always talking about Russia's spiritual values, its Christian heritage, and defending the family.
All this to say, Dan, the two kind of speeches by Biden and Putin are totally striking in their tone and tenor.
I think what people are going to miss with Biden, and I and I will admit that it's easy to do this with him because he's Biden and he's he's just he's Biden, is that this is this is a president standing in a very strategic and symbolic place in Warsaw, Poland, talking about the victory of democracy and freedom after secretly and covertly visiting Ukraine during a war.
This is the kind of stuff you would have seen in the middle 20th century from American presidents.
And I'm not here to celebrate the United States carte blanche and say, oh, those were the good old days.
What I'm trying to say, though, is when you think about the days of fighting Nazis, of fighting what were taken to be the bad guys in global conflicts, this is the kind of move you would have seen on a global scale, whether it was World War II, Or that was during the cold war.
If John Kennedy had done this or, or Harry Truman, I think it would have sort of clicked into place for us.
Like, Oh yeah, that's what those guys did, but it's Joe Biden.
And we don't think that way.
On the other hand, you have Putin who's really using, and I just cannot get away from this.
He's using basically American culture war language.
To justify why he's taking his country into this disastrous attempted invasion of Ukraine.
There's so much there.
There's so much to talk about.
There's so much to discuss.
I'll give one book recommendation, and that is The Moralist International by Stokl and Uslaner, and I'll put that in the show notes.
But all right, Dan, that was a long monologue.
I apologize, but a lot there.
What do you think?
There is, excuse me, there is a lot there.
And one of the things, I don't know if this was part of the symbolism of Warsaw or not, but something that occurred to me is that you had the formation of NATO after World War II, but you also had what was called the Warsaw Pact, right?
That was the kind of Eastern Europe, Soviet bloc sort of counter to NATO.
So that's like a whole nother piece of it, right?
That symbolically you have the name of Warsaw was this area headed by whom?
By the Soviet Union.
And the Ukraine, rather Ukraine, sorry, was part of that.
So to be in Warsaw talking about democracy and we stand with Ukraine and so forth ties in all those other things that you're talking about, that NATO didn't crumble.
There's been more support for Ukraine in terms of weapons and other sort of material resources than I expected.
I think that a lot of other people expected.
Especially looking back a year ago when I was one of the people who thought that this would be over quickly and it would be bad for Ukraine.
And so all of that and everything that you're talking about as well with the language and the rhetoric, I think it's important.
I've raised this point before, but I think it's worth noting that way back, you know, Around 9-11 and all of that, we talked about how the US started talking about the war on terror and terrorism, this and that, and security, and that language filtered out to everywhere.
You had authoritarian regimes all over the world who started couching everything they were doing in terms of fighting terrorism and so forth.
Well, here we are again, right?
Once again, the US is leading.
rhetorically so much that we hear Putin coming out with, as you're saying, all of the holy war language, the culture war leading to real war language.
That's a piece for me.
All the people who are like, it's just rhetoric.
There's nothing real to it.
I'm like, well, there is for Russia.
And we've seen J6, and I don't want to keep talking about January 6th all the time, but we've talked, I remember it was last episode or a couple episodes ago about PRRI and the number of Americans who Christian nationalists who support the use of violence.
So just on and on and on.
I think that's, Something that is there and worth noting.
I think another piece of this, this is like a bigger macro level thing, is the weird position, and this is worth watching as things continue to develop, this all puts the GOP in.
Because you had the Christian Nationalists, Trump supporters, and others who valorized Putin.
And so when Putin invaded Ukraine, You had so many people in the GOP, you could see them like not quite sure where to stand on it because we like Putin now and Putin's strong and whatever, but we're supposed to not support things like this.
Now you have China.
Sort of trying to weigh in and their neutrality is being questioned and they're sort of maybe supplying Putin with some things and so forth.
And the GOP being the anti-China hawk is a really hot sort of position to hold right now.
So that's just another piece of this to look at.
Nobody in the GOP wanted to come out and decry Biden or Colin Week for going to a war zone and appearing and giving a speech, right?
So it's a lot of layers to this in terms of U.S.
domestic politics as well that I think are worth Noting, as you have, as you say, Putin speaking the language of American Christian nationalists, but some of these other geopolitical things that are sort of counterweights to the GOP.
So it's been interesting to me to watch them not really feel like they're clear to themselves how to respond to any of this.
Well, and there was just, I want to say one more thing about Putin and Christian nationalism, but if we come, if we bring this back home, as you're saying to the GOP, there was a lot of talk of like, why is Putin, why is Biden in Ukraine?
He's just fueling the global war machine.
Look, where's Donald Trump?
He's in Ohio at the train derailment.
He's at McDonald's.
I mean, Tucker Carlson did a whole segment on how Donald Trump was at McDonald's and how this showed that he was like a real American president.
It felt ridiculous.
I'm not I mean, I don't know.
I don't know why.
You know, I mean, candidates, politicians do this.
They go buy ice cream or they go buy hot dogs and they try to show that they're real people and all.
I don't know.
Anyway, so that was one attempt.
Dan was basically like, oh, look at Biden.
He's halfway across the world.
And Donald Trump's in at the train derailment as if Biden didn't care about that.
And it was a whole thing.
So let me just say one more thing about about Putin, and that is that if you all have read, and I know many of you have, and if you haven't, you should, Gorski and Perry, The Flag and the Cross, there's a kind of great theoretical framework in there that says that Christian nationalism works on this triumvirate of order, violence, and freedom, meaning that white Christians can only be free if the social order is in place, and if it's not, then the white Christian has the exclusive right to commit violence.
And Putin's rhetoric, Dan, fits perfectly into that theory.
He basically says, you made me do this by upsetting the social order.
I mean, people in the West, what he calls the West, are same-sex marriages happening.
And there's LGBT parades and there's, you know, there's gay clergy and there's, you know, adopted families and mixed race couples.
And these are Satanists, right?
So he's basically saying, I, Putin, have the right to be violent when you get out of line.
And I have the right because I'm God's chosen servant.
Who's protecting values and vision and order for society.
And you know, when, when you talk, when he talks about destroying the institution of the family, he's pulling, this is Gorski and Perry, like 101 in terms of just Christian nationalism and how it works.
And so I don't, I just don't want people to miss that.
Just real quick, tied in with that.
Another piece of this is I'm not trying to open up completely other cans of worms here, but.
It's interesting to me to parallel sometimes that legitimation of violence and the broken order with the way that radical Islamist extremism will highlight.
It's the same thing.
It's the same laundry list of things that they don't like and so forth.
And you'll get terrorist groups who appeal to this, all of which is to say when it suits the right to point out that, you know, look how evil this religion is and this group of people is and decrying the American way of life and our freedoms and so forth.
It works.
The Christian nationalists have the same list of grievances, and yet this is what the GOP now is and embraces, and that's a parallel that I think would be worth people just sort of thinking about and exploring further the next time they're just sort of taking this at face value.
Yeah, that's a great point.
Anyway, so much to talk about here.
Okay, let's take a break, come back, and we'll come back stateside to talk about Saddleback back in a minute.
Okay Dan, Saddleback Church right down the road from where I grew up.
One of the biggest churches in the country.
Rick Warren, celebrity pastor.
Got some big news this week.
What's going on?
Yeah, so those of us of a certain age that watch American religion and politics will remember Saddleback Community Church, founded, as you say, by Rick Warren.
People want to Google a book.
There was a book called The Purpose-Driven Church and then The Purpose-Driven Life.
It turned into this kind of whole, like, self-help spirituality thing.
This is what we're talking about.
It's a church of, I think, around 25,000 members.
It's a Southern Baptist church.
For a long time, that was sort of one of those things you kept on the down low if you were a Saddleback.
People who listen to It's In The Code, if you go back and look, there was an episode on Cool Kid Church, I called it.
Saddleback was like the paradigm Cool Kid Church for a long time, the church that was seeker-sensitive, that sought to bring people in who might not otherwise go to church and Over time, though, I think as it sort of solidified and aged and became its own institution and so forth, identified more kind of openly with the Southern Baptist Convention.
It's the largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention, and it was just removed from fellowship within the convention.
Why?
Because they ordained a woman in the position of what they call teaching pastor.
And for people who don't know, you just hear the word pastor, it means like the pastor of a church, but like really, really big churches have lots of pastors.
And so you've got like these different titles, executive pastor, lead pastor, teaching pastor, pastor of this and that.
And so all of that is to say that in like 2021, 2019, somewhere in there, the church came under fire for ordaining three women And there's this whole study committee that was put together to look at it, and they kind of weren't sure what to do because they had all these different titles and they wanted to make sure that, you know, see if this really was violating their standards and so forth.
But they have now decided to remove the church.
They also removed, I think it was four other churches, different places in the country for ordaining women as pastors.
Why?
Because what's called a Baptist faith and message, which is the kind of doctrinal statement to which churches affiliated with the SPC are supposed to hold, says The office of pastor can only be held by men.
A couple of things about this.
It's significant.
It's the largest Southern Baptist church.
I think it's also significant.
The SBC kind of tried to drag their feet.
It took a couple of years to get around to finally being like, fine, we're going to like lower the, you know, drop the hammer and fire you or not fire you, sorry, expel you.
A couple things for people to remember.
This is not like the Catholic Church where there's a hierarchy that can tell churches what to do or something like that.
Southern Baptist churches are independent bodies.
So what this really means is the SBC basically says you can't be part of our group anymore, right?
They don't, they can't level disciplinary action against the church.
They can't They can't take away the credentials of their pastors.
They don't own their property, right?
So mechanisms that other denominations can use, they can't.
It's also worth noting.
Yeah, sorry.
So Dan, if this was a Catholic church, they would just get rid of the priest, put in a new priest and then do right.
So you're saying they can't do that in this case, basically.
Yeah, they can't do that.
Or even I think this is coming through with like the United Methodist Church, which is having its own kind of denominational split going on.
Sometimes the denomination owns the properties.
And so if a church or a pastor does something they're not supposed to do, they could basically say like, find a new pastor or we're going to like close your property.
They've got leverage that they can use.
They can't do that here.
They've ousted them, uh, and some other churches, um, and so forth.
It's also interesting and for me, not coincidental, uh, that Rick Warren announced he was going to retire a couple of years ago.
For people who follow the kind of social dynamics and sociology of the big mega churches, they are often founded by very charismatic figures.
And some of them have a hard time sort of persisting after that.
And people who, you know, think about how organizations work with, you know, Big charismatic figures at the head.
Often those organizations struggle to carry on when that person leaves.
Rick Warren, originally they ordained these women kind of at the same time he was announcing his retiring.
It was almost like a parting shot.
There's actually a different head pastor now at Saddleback, but they continue doing this and so forth.
Here's what I think is really interesting and significant about this, and I'll throw it over to you for your thoughts in just a minute.
But there was also a church that was banned from fellowship with the SBC because they were not cooperating with the SBC in investigating credible sexual abuse allegations.
These are two big things that have been going on in the SBC at the same time.
We've talked about this in the past, the sort of response or lack of a response to sexual abuse allegations and so forth.
I find it significant that in the same raft of decisions, we're going to kick out some churches for ordaining women, for not insisting that women can't have authority in the church, that they need to be subordinate to men, that they can't exercise spiritual authority, that the man is the spiritual head, all the Bible language that they'll appeal to, and they're having to ban yet another church for not taking seriously credible sexual abuse allegations.
People may disagree.
We'll look forward to the emails, right?
I see these things as related.
For me, and we've talked about this before, I just see no way that you can have a theology or a system that very explicitly says women cannot have authority.
They are by definition subordinate to men.
Men hold authority in the family.
They hold authority in the relationship of husband and wife.
Because of course, this is all within the relationship of straight marriage and so forth, right?
That's what they envision.
And they hold all the spiritual authority.
I see these things as linked.
And so I see it as kind of the hamster in the wheel, just going around and around and around.
of enforcing patriarchy and then somehow wanting to be surprised when that patriarchy is abused and exercised the way that it has been.
So, I see these kind of things.
I know people reach out to you.
They reach out to me sometimes.
They say, are some of these large evangelical denominations changing?
How will the so-called Church 2 movement and the awareness of sexual assault and so forth change them?
How will millennials and Gen Z, coming of age in the church, change them?
This is an example of very much not change, especially in a large denomination that is losing membership and size, making the decision to expel their largest church.
So I could go all different kinds of directions, but I'm interested in your thought.
As you say, this is right down the road from sort of your backyard, so to speak.
Yeah, no, when I was in ministry, Saddleback was kind of the cool kid that everyone wanted to be.
So many of the people that were on staff at my church, my church was a church of 2,000, but paltry compared to the 25,000 of Saddleback.
So many of the pastors wanted to be Saddleback.
We read The Purpose Driven Church.
We talked about how we could turn our church into something like that, blah, blah, blah.
I want to pick up on what you said about the sexual abuse scandal in the Southern Baptist Convention.
We've covered that.
We talked about it in three or four different episodes.
But if you're not familiar with it, over the last half decade, there's been a sex abuse scandal in the Southern Baptist Convention.
And what came out last year was the fact that Officials at the Southern Baptist Convention had lists of people who work at churches or who were associated with churches, who were known sexual abusers, known harassers, and basically people that under any other rubric, if you were an employer, if you were somebody who was sort of considering someone to be in a place, you would take seriously the fact that there had been numerous threats against
There are numerous accusations against them in the workplace about how they had sexually harassed or abused people in that space.
Well, here's my point.
The SBC has been dealing with sexual abuse for a long, long time and it is widespread.
We're talking about hundreds, if not thousands of perpetrators in the denomination.
Dan, one of the claims has been, and Emily Joy Allison, the author and activist and just great voice, said this perfectly on Twitter the other day, but one of the claims that the SBC has made is like, we have so many churches in the United States, largest Protestant denomination, and we're this kind of confederate setup where we're really, confederate's the wrong word, I'm sorry.
It's so early in the morning, Dan, and I'm so tired.
It is.
It's a federation or a confederation of churches, right, is what you're after.
Yeah, it is.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Brain fog is real.
Basically, their claim is like, look, we're not the Catholic Church.
We're not, you know, the Presbyterians.
We don't just have a kind of like hold on every church.
We're independent.
It's basically the state's rights model, right?
Like, oh, yeah, everyone's off doing their thing.
We get together once a year.
We have a loose connection.
We can't police all the sexual abusers and harassers.
The church has got to do that themselves.
There's no way.
And right.
And all the while, there's a list.
At the central office where they know who these harassers and abusers are.
What's the point?
Emily Joy Allison says it perfectly on Twitter.
So you're telling me you can't do anything about the sexual abusers in most cases that when that happens, you're like, well, we can try.
I mean, you know, Dan, you brought up one church, but it's just not a problem.
We can totally root out.
But these guys ordain some women and we can take care of that.
We are no problem on this one.
Yeah, we might drag our feet a little bit, but Saddleback and a few other churches, you all want to keep ordaining women?
You're out of here.
Oh, sexual abusers?
No, no, no, that's tough.
I mean, we got to, that's a lot of work and a lot of, it's very delicate, you know, who can really keep a handle on all that.
So I think that's worth just throwing into this context.
Josh Scott, who's a pastor and author, And a colleague of mine, a friend of mine says on Twitter, you know, the Southern Baptist Convention began as a way to defend slavery.
Maybe looking to the Southern Baptist Convention on who or who shouldn't be ordained may not be the best place to look.
So anyway, back to you.
Final thoughts?
I guess one other final thought on this, on just the whole thing, because this is all very, I don't know, sort of interesting and quasi-personal to me.
People know, when I graduated from college, I was a Southern Baptist.
I was an ordained Southern Baptist minister, and I favored the ordination of women.
So I was this kind of outlier within the SPC circles and the broader evangelical community, because I I felt the women should be ordained.
Interestingly for me, I made it on gender complementarian lines, that notion that men and women have distinctive roles and so forth.
And so part of my argument was that churches ideally would have a male and a female pastor.
Like they would have like this kind of balance.
I no longer hold a gender complementarianism and so forth, but that was that.
But what it highlights too is the squishiness of this doctrine that evangelicals often want to hold to firmly because For example, when Saddleback ordained the three women a few years ago, my understanding is they were long-tenured members of the staff.
They had been doing what they were already doing, they just didn't have the title.
And when they got the title, all of a sudden it was a big problem, right?
Or, and this is a broader thing within evangelicalism, people who watch this will know, you get some of these sort of celebrity Bible teachers, women, who have mass followings Who on most readings ought to run afoul of the evangelical notion that women ought not to exercise spiritual authority over men and so forth, but they let that happen.
Or the one that always struck me is the way that it works in evangelical churches is, well, woman who wants to serve God, feels called by God, maybe is theologically trained, whatever.
We're not going to let you teach adults and be a pastor, so you're going to work in the children's ministry.
We're going to let you teach the most impressionable, most untrained, Most vulnerable people in our congregation, but we won't let you teach men who are supposed to know better.
Like, that's the whole logic.
So on just a sort of theological level, aside from the inconsistencies with the arguments about sex abuse and whatever, it's just, it's always been this very kind of squishy, ill-defined thing that for me, for a long time, and this was one of many reasons I left evangelicalism and that denomination, I love this.
the lie to this, I think the simplistic notion that, you know, we follow the Bible and the Bible says this, and it's very clear.
And so we have very clear practices when in practice they didn't.
I love this.
I love young Dan Miller subverting his theological elders and pastoral elders by saying, of course, gender complementarianism, but we should have on staff of every church, a man and a woman so that we have both sets of gifts represented at all.
I mean, you know, we both these days for a long time have viewed complementarianism as patriarchal and
Problematic to say the least, but you know, I like, I, I'm now envisioning that we should make a TV show about young Dan Miller in Seattle as the, the young plucky associate minister at a Southern Baptist church in the Pacific Northwest and always interjecting these irreverent and, you know, clever, uh, subversive theological takes to, to his elders and just confounding them at every turn.
I don't know.
Should we start writing that TV series?
Do you think, or?
Yeah, I think it'll be really gripping, and we could put in there the passive-aggressive threats from young Dan Miller's head pastor to be fired about every six months or so, and we'd have some conversation.
So yeah, that's what would happen when you would confound the elders, is they would threaten to fire you if you kept talking about it.
Yeah, I think we got something here.
I mean, if we throw in some aliens or superheroes, I think the studios will go for it.
And then we're really probably off and running.
So.
All right.
I know what I'm doing this weekend.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll talk about two things.
National divorce and right wing Christian nationalist takeover of local government.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
So this week, at a time when Biden was in Poland and appearing covertly in Ukraine, Marjorie Taylor Greene once again makes the headlines by calling for a national divorce and says that we need that because conservative Americans have these woke policies rammed down their throats all the time.
So we should just all get divorced.
It's just striking, Dan, because this is someone who is now on high ranking is now on is now on important committees within Congress, is one of Kevin McCarthy's sort of right hand people in the in the House GOP and seemingly cannot not be in front of the camera or the microphone all the time.
As we continue to make the case, this is not a fringe member of the GOP.
This is the GOP in 2023.
So What's some of the context?
What are some of the details on the call for a national divorce coming from our most vociferous and controversial congressperson?
Yeah, so as you say, she tweeted out, I think it was on President's Day, that there should be a, quote, national divorce between red states and blue states.
That's what she's talking about.
Has been given multiple chances to walk this back, and of course hasn't.
She's just intensified it and sort of doubled and tripled down on this.
She said at one point, and this, I'm just going to say this sounds like, you know, sort of the Trumpian language, is everyone I talk to says this, right?
Which is almost certainly not true.
Anytime anybody tells you everyone says whatever, like it means not everybody says that, but that's a piece of this.
The standard new sort of the crazy left invocations, right?
We heard the same thing from Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
We've seen this coming from others that the left is crazy and they're punishing us and they're forcing these policies down our throat and so forth.
The same, in my view, sort of passive-aggressive, abuser-logic language of Putin and everybody else.
On Hannity, she says, you know, we're not calling for a civil war.
Nobody wants that.
We hope that doesn't happen.
But that's kind of where it's headed, like that kind of like, you know, we're not saying to do anything about it, but, you know, he pushing us woke left and who knows what would happen with that.
Um, she proposed that, you know, she was pressed on, like, how would this actually work?
She proposed that, like, people from blue states who moved to red states shouldn't be allowed to vote for five years, uh, to make sure that they're not importing, like, blue state policies to red states.
Um, it struck me as ironic that that would mean Donald Trump couldn't vote in Florida, uh, right now if that, if that passed, but, um, Yeah, and so this is it.
On the one hand, it's easy to dismiss it as nonsense, except, as you say, this is not just a sitting member of Congress, but an increasingly high-ranking, prominent member of Congress, because she's one of McCarthy's go-to people now, right?
She's the one of that hard right wing who stood by him and supported him for the speakership and so forth.
She's gotten denunciation on this from people like Mitt Romney and others.
Everybody in the Democratic Party, of course.
But McCarthy's been silent on this.
And I just want to point this out.
People might say, well, why?
Just rhetoric.
Why?
Here's why.
That whole divorce from the United States, it's called secession, right?
And we tried that as a country once.
It happened.
And this is maybe so obvious that it doesn't occur to us to look into, but turns out the Supreme Court has actually ruled that seceding from the United States is unconstitutional, right?
That you're violating the Constitution if you secede from the United States.
And as lots of people pointed out when she did this on Twitter and other places, they said, you took an oath to defend the Constitution, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and you're calling for this.
And you're not saying it's tongue in cheek.
You're not saying it's rhetorical.
You're not saying it feels like this is what's going on.
You're doubling and tripling down on it.
You're talking about actual policies you would like to see in place about disenfranchising Americans and not allowing them to vote because of their political ideology, right?
It's like the most basic thing written into voting is done based on political ideology, right?
By definition, how you vote shows your political ideology.
You can't limit that in any way, say that you're giving people a right to vote.
So there's all of this.
And then like one other big takeaway from this, I guess I'm always in the zoom out takeaways with these things, is it strikes me as she proposes this thing with no reference to the Constitution, right?
A few years ago, not that long ago, Or go a little bit further back to, say, when the Tea Party started.
If people remember, all these things that have merged into contemporary Christian nationalism, they always argue that they were defending the Constitution, right?
We're defending the Constitution, liberals are violating it, and so forth.
As we've talked about, I think that rhetoric is shifting and you're getting more and more just openly authoritarian proposals from people in the GOP, whether it's Trump talking about suspending the Constitution or different kinds of things like this, or Marjorie Taylor Greene saying we should just split the country into two different countries and so forth.
That rhetoric, that we're doing this because of the Constitution, that we're the ones who really believe the Constitution, I think is fading and it's becoming more openly and nakedly authoritarian.
I think as they run into more and more trouble in court and other places with courts and real legitimate authorities saying, you know what?
It's not constitutional.
You're not defending the Constitution.
That's a takeaway for me.
And that's why it matters.
Yes, it's Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Yes, she wants the attention.
Yes, she would tweet anything she can to get the attention.
Yes, she's probably doing this when she does it because Biden is getting all kinds of international attention, so she wants to move the spotlight.
But I think it's still real and significant.
I think it's very significant that the Speaker of the GOP House, the GOP-controlled House, says nothing about it.
So, lots of thoughts.
Big soapbox I could climb on.
I will sit down and hear your thoughts on it.
Well, I think one thing that everyone should take away from this and from this week is that please, please, please, please never think of Kevin McCarthy as somehow moderate or he's not in the in cahoots with, you know, the MAGA wing or the Christian Nationalist wing of the Republican Party or the House, the GOP House Caucus, whatever.
Just stop.
This is who he is.
And you're like, well, why?
Well, A, he's silent on this.
He has nothing to say.
And this week, Dan, he gave 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from the January 6th Capitol attack to Tucker Carlson.
And when asked about it, he was like, well, I promised I would give these out.
I'd be transparent.
And so I gave them to Tucker Carlson.
And right.
This is a three hour monologue, but this is one of those moments where if you take there to be two sides, there's Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson and they're the same.
They're the most popular kind of hosts on the left and the right.
Then it makes sense.
He gave all this stuff to the most popular, you know, talking head on the right.
And it's like Tucker Carlson is a conspiracy theorist.
Tucker Carlson has downplayed and called into question the seriousness of January 6th.
Tucker Carlson released a documentary saying that men should suntan their testicles in order to increase testosterone.
Okay.
He went to Hungary just so he could sort of show everyone how great Victor Orban is.
Kevin McCarthy is absolutely beholden to Taylor Greene and the rest of that group because he is such a weak speaker.
He has such a short leash.
He is one person away from calling into question his leadership that he has no choice but to make these decisions.
And so this man gave 40,000 hours of surveillance footage.
To the United States' most popular, influential and dangerous conspiracy theorist.
Chuck Schumer says that this poses grave security risks and needlessly exposes the capital complex to one of the worst risks since 9-11.
So, anyway Dan, national divorce, giving the tapes of the worst attack, the worst coup attempt in the country's history, at least in modern memory, to Tucker Carlson, all of that is there.
Yeah, could go on and on and on.
All right, let's take one more beat here to talk about one other thing, and that is when right-wing Christian nationalists take over local government.
What does it look like on the ground?
If we zoom in from the Federal National Congress and Tucker Carlson, this big national figure, to a local kind of situation.
I'm going to go two places.
The first is Uh, is Michigan and the Ottawa County Governing Board.
Okay.
And this is, uh, uh, at Politico by Ron Ciders.
It's a long article, but, uh, it's a good one and you should read it.
I'll put it in the show notes.
In their first meeting, the new board members adopted a series of measures that changed things in Ottawa County.
They fired the county administrator and replaced him with John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official, Christian missionary, failed congressional candidate and election denier who once suggested women should not have the right to vote.
They ran out their corporate counsel.
They closed the county's Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
They picked for their new public health officer, a safety manager at an HVAC service company, who suggested during the pandemic that Ivermectin and neti pots instead of social distancing and masks would be effective.
And I mean, they did a whole bunch of things, rewrote the county motto and so on and so on and so on.
Dan, we don't have time today to kind of do just a point-by-point exegesis of this article, and there is some really good stuff here, and Ron Siders did a great job on this.
You should go read it.
The thing I want to take away, and I think that the thing that will be studied for a long time, and I actually don't know this, and I should.
I don't know if some of our colleagues in religious studies, I know that there must be sociologists of religion covering this and looking into this.
But to me, Dan, one of the stories of these right-wing takeovers of county election seats, like here in Ottawa County, and school boards, okay, which is happening all over.
We've talked about it.
It's happening in my hometown.
It's happening all over the country, is the pandemic.
Dan, I think we're going to look at the pandemic as a sea change in American religion in the way that it supercharged Christian nationalism and a sea change in local government for the way that it supercharged these candidates to run and take over school boards I think we're going to look at the pandemic as a sea change in American religion in the way that it So,
Cider says this in the article, public health mandates related to the pandemic infuriated a group of parents who complained and litigated unsuccessfully about quote government overreach in schools.
They formed Ottawa Impact, recruiting a slate of candidates to run against the commission's Republican incumbents.
So the place was already Republican, and they were like, not Republican enough, because you know what a Republican means in this case?
Running against vaccine mandates.
Okay.
So, you know, like, Sylvia Rodea, who's co-founder of this Ottawa Impact and, you know, someone who's now vice chair of the County Commission, said that the election is one that will, quote, decide whether we're going to save America and that starts local.
Okay.
America, she said, is a place of opportunity built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.
Triple C. Okay.
Now, throughout the article, there's folks who are like, this isn't Christian nationalism.
We just, you know, we just love God and our country.
That's it.
We value our faith, our family, and our freedom.
No big deal.
Okay.
But you can see here that if you're saying, and this is, friends, if you just want to know what Christian nationalism is, if you think privileging Christianity in the public square is okay, like Sylvia Rodea does, that the country's built on capitalism, Christianity, and the Constitution, you're a Christian nationalist.
Okay.
That's period.
If you think Christianity should be privileged in any way, you're a Christian nationalist, and this is Christian nationalism.
Now, if we go to another story that appeared this week at Religion News Service by Jack Jenkins about Idaho, and if you listen to the show, if you know me at all, if you've been to a dinner party with me lately, or if you are my poor spouse who has to listen to me on a daily basis, you will know that I talk about Idaho all the time.
There's a whole chapter in my book about Idaho, and it's something that I am intensely interested in.
I talked to Jack about this story at length.
We had several phone calls and so on, and One of the things that Jack discovered as he went up to Idaho and reported on this story is that COVID was a big deal for many people moving to Idaho and getting involved in local government over the last couple of years.
So here's a quote from the story.
The COVID thing really drove a lot of people to get out of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, any place where the government was acting very tyrant-like in terms of lockdowns.
Up here, we locked down for about three and a half weeks.
So You can see, right, what the claim is, is that many people are leaving Seattle or San Francisco to move to Idaho because they didn't like the COVID lockdowns, the mandates and so on.
Jenkins writes, a year ago, the Coeur d'Alene City Council was faced with whether to take the American Rescue Plan Act funds to support pandemic health measures.
Citizens approached the microphone at the council's public session to rail against COVID-19 restrictions and government interference in general, often describing both as tyranny.
Over and over, speakers admitted they had only just moved to Idaho.
I moved from Southern California to be free, and I don't want to be under the change of the federal government.
So, Dan, we got to wrap up.
We don't have a ton of time today.
Here's my takeaway from these two stories.
For decades, we're going to be coming to terms with what COVID did to Christian nationalism and local government in this country.
We're going to be sorting that out in terms of migration, in terms of local politics, in terms of church growth, church decline for a long, long time.
And I think the sociologists of religions, the ethnographers of religion, they're going to have their hands full trying to sort this out for decades because this is a major story.
We're going to really see this, I think, for years as COVID changed The United States when it came to religion and politics.
All right, off to you.
I think everything you say is really insightful about that.
I think it's right.
One thing I want to jump in on is, is if I'm looking at the story on Politico, right?
Uh, the Michigan story read the same thing this week.
One of the things that they did is they changed the motto of the County, uh, from Ottawa County, where you belong.
That was the motto to Ottawa County where freedom rings.
Right.
And there is no bigger buzzword.
There's probably no bigger, like American buzzword than freedom, right?
It's, it's, it's hard to find, I think.
Anybody who feels that they're American in some way, right, left, otherwise, who doesn't value the notion of freedom, right?
It's just like, it's this word that everybody's going to appeal to, but it's an incredibly loaded, kind of free-floating word.
And it's interesting, because we hear this all the time.
And yes, as you're pointing out, we hear it in the context of lockdowns and COVID mask mandates and so forth.
You're constraining my freedom.
How dare you tell me I can't go into a store without wearing a mask or How dare you tell me that I have to get a shot or whatever.
I suppose one can make the freedom argument there.
What strikes me and what I'm always about, and people know this, they hear this, we talk about it all the time, they're probably tired of hearing it, but that so often freedom is actually code for denying the freedom of others.
And this strikes me when they change it from Ottawa County where you belong, because Christian nationalism, everybody is all about making clear who does not belong.
You who don't belong here.
People of color.
Queer folk.
Women who are too uppity and too proud of being women.
And just sort of on and on and on and on.
Drag performers in libraries.
You just name it, you don't belong here.
And so in the name of our freedom, we will deny yours.
That somehow, even if it's okay that I'm a straight person and I can still get married, it's somehow a violation of my freedom if you're a queer person who can get married.
I think you were talking about Putin, but we'll hear the same logic with the Christian nationalists being forced to go to pride parades.
I've never been anywhere in my life where you're under some compulsion to go to a pride parade.
I've never experienced that.
Nobody's making you do that.
But when you want to tell people that they can't do that, You're denying their freedom.
And so this is that empty, floating word.
I talk about it with students.
I talk about it with others that probe down when people talk about freedom, about what exactly it is that they're affirming and what they're not affirming when they use this word.
Because Ottawa County, you know, where freedom rings, And I invite people, same as you did, to go read the article.
There are a lot of things that closed down.
They closed down their local municipal diversity, equity, inclusion office, right?
So there is now no oversight in any way, as I understand it, in their county to make sure that racial or gender or other kinds of discrimination are not taking place.
That's threatening the freedom of others.
So that's the piece that struck me, the rhetorical piece that I'm always latched into are the way that words like Freedom come out because who's opposed to freedom, right?
I think it triggers something in all Americans.
Yeah, of course, of course, of course, I value freedom, right?
But look at how it's used.
And it's very, very clear on this kind of sort of micro level in this county how that's working.
And they're right.
It can start locally.
What happens when one of these people decides that they're going to be the next state senator or Republican or gubernatorial candidate or whatever?
Well, let's just stay on freedom for a minute.
Freedom, I think what I took away from what you just said, Dan, which I think is really helpful, is that in this context, freedom means I feel free when I can deny your existence so effectively that I don't have to encounter you in the public freedom means I feel free when I can deny your existence so effectively
Meaning, for me, as a Christian nationalist in West Olive, Michigan, I feel free when I can walk down the street and I have successfully excluded, as you're saying, queer folk and others to the point that I don't have to think about them, that I have denied their existence so well that I am free from thinking about them or encountering that I have denied their existence so well that I am free from thinking That's freedom.
So freedom rests, as you're saying, on exclusion.
My freedom rests on excluding others and denying their humanity.
And I think for others, it's just freedom just means being allowed to be a human without being under threat.
Like if I'm a trans person, I'm allowed to just be a human, just to be me without being under threat.
If I am a queer person, if I am an immigrant, if I'm a refugee, if I am mixed race, if I am a woman, if I, we can go on and on and on and on.
I just want to be a human being.
I just want to walk down the street and be a human being.
And not have myself be threatened because of anything about my identity.
That would be freedom.
And you can just see in the example you gave the stark contrast between those two renderings and what it looks like.
And so, all right, let's go to reasons for hope.
I went first last time, so off to you to go first here.
What's your reason for hope?
Well, it's interesting, we brought up Tucker Carlson earlier.
I'm going back to Fox News again, talked last time about how all this stuff had come out, that they knew that the election stuff was fraudulent and so forth.
More information this week, Dominion Voting Systems, right?
They're the ones that ran the machines that Fox was always like hammering on and so forth.
Lots of legal analysts say this is basically a smoking gun for them, right?
They have this lawsuit against Fox.
Fox has been defending itself on First Amendment rights saying we're just, you know, just saying what we believe or whatever.
But now it's known that it was knowingly misinforming people and so forth.
Goes to the same Tucker Carlson stuff of, you know, I promised I was going to give him this footage.
And, you know, Tucker Carlson knows the J6 was an insurrection.
These are the conversations they have in private.
So I took hope from this that, again, I think this thing is snowballing against Fox in a potentially really significant way.
And I think that that's significant because I think Fox is one of the more pernicious Social forces that exist in our country at present.
So, I just continue to take hope from some of the developments on that front.
It really does look like the $1.6 billion lawsuit might have some teeth here.
And, you know, basically all those text messages you mentioned last week between Carlson and other, you know, Hannity, Ingram, all saying they know that, you know, this is BS what they're saying, but they're going to say it otherwise, is having a real effect.
I cannot wait for that Uh, that's a season of Succession, Dan.
It's going to be a good one.
I mean, that series of Succession is going to be incredible.
I hope, do you think maybe they'll call us to consult on that?
Or like, we could be, um, like, do you feel like, you know, with some makeup and a new haircut, I could play Tucker Carlson in that, in that series, that season of Succession at all?
I think you could.
And when we managed to bring that together with the young Dan Miller, like, you know, series, I think, I think it'll be gold.
You've heard?
Yeah.
You've heard of young Sheldon.
Oh, yeah.
Just wait till you get young Dan Miller.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
People are like, please, so many jokes this week.
Just shut it.
Please.
We just want the good news.
Here's my good news.
Special election in Virginia's 4th congressional district.
And it really looks like Virginia State Senator Jennifer McClellan will become Uh, the congressperson for the fourth congressional district.
This is significant because she will be the first black woman to represent that district.
Nope.
She'll be the first black woman to represent the Commonwealth of Virginia in Congress in, uh, in its history.
So that's huge.
She defeats Republican Leon Benjamin, who is a pastor and a Navy veteran, um, and will succeed the late Democratic representative Donald McEachin.
So, uh, who died in November.
Uh, but this is great.
It's also, uh, the fourth, you know, a lot of you out there don't know where the fourth congressional district is in Virginia.
It is, uh, in Richmond, the city of Richmond.
And if, if, if y'all know and remember, city of Richmond has been kind of a one of, uh, among several, uh, epicenters of debates and fights over Confederate monuments and taking those down.
And so to have a black woman being one of the representatives from that region is is pretty amazing.
So just throw that out there.
All right.
I want to say thank you to all of you who've come out to book events.
I got just to see a great group of folks in Santa Barbara, in Solvang, and last night it was over at Santa Clara University.
I was at Stanford the other day talking to some graduate students and it's just it's really cool getting to meet you all.
So thank you for coming out.
I want to say that if you're a patron of the show, we appreciate you.
Once again, we're not the kind of show that does a lot of like Paywalt stuff or stuff only for patrons because we want things to be free.
But what that means is that if you are a patron, it might feel like it's easy for you to get lost in the shuffle.
But we just we just appreciate you.
Couldn't do this without you and are very, very thankful for you.
We have a couple of really exciting things coming up, and we'll talk more about these in the future.
But one of them is a series on Buff Jesus and Muscular Christianity.
So we're going to have that coming out here in a little while.
And we have a couple of other things in the works as well.
So as always, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
You can always use your help on PayPal, Patreon, or Venmo.
And other than that, we'll be back next week with a great interview.
With Dan's It's In The Code series and the weekly roundup.
