Brad and Dan begin by discussing an excerpt from Joshua Butler's new book, which appeared at the Gospel Coalition this week. The excerpt lays out a theology of sex that imagines Christ as the male partner in a heterosexual erotic relationship with the Christian church. This metaphor is extended to the sexual relationships men and women in Christian marriage. Dan analyzes the patriarchal aspects of this approach, showing how it creates a context where submission is required from women and consent is almost by definition excised from the relationship.
In the second segment Brad breaks down an article from Rolling Stone on the National Association of Christian Lawmakers - a Christian nationalist policy engine that is writing and proposing potential laws across the country with help from legislators.
In the final segment the hosts discuss a new bill in Idaho that would prohibit "lewd" materials from being taught in schools. Dan points out the hypocrisy and reductiveness of the bill, while Brad points out that children under 18 are allowed to marry in the state and if they become pregnant are asked to carry the fetus to term - but apparently are not mature enough to deal with sexula materials in any way.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here on a chilly morning with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Always nice to be with you, Brad.
You too.
We're heading into what I take to be, Dan, the worst part of the school year.
I always tell my students, like, you know, fall semester, you get kind of tired at this point, but then it's just Halloween, which is like super fun.
And then you look forward to all these other holidays and you're like, all right, I can do this.
Spring semester, you're just like, it's March.
You know, I took a nap because I was tired and I feel worse.
That's how exhausted I am, right?
That's how I feel like, like how March works.
So I will not be here next week, Dan, and you'll be here hosting with our colleague and friend of the show, Annika Brockschmidt, because I hate to tell you this, but by Friday of next week, I will be at a family reunion.
On Maui.
So, there you go.
I'm pretty excited about that.
March sucks, alright.
It's a rough March.
So, anyway, we'll be on Maui.
And, yes, it is going to be great.
I haven't been there in a long time.
I have not been able to see some family there in a long time, and it's going to be really good.
In all seriousness, it's great that you get to do that, and for people who have Heard Annika on the show before, or people who watched the Denver event or participated, got to know her.
Really, really, really sharp and really excited to have her on the show again.
So we'll be holding down the fort next week.
No, an absolute pro.
And just really, at the moment, I know Annika is like dialed into CPAC because that's something she's writing about.
So anyway.
All right, Dan, this is one of those weeks where, you know, some weeks there's just a big national story that we have to talk about, you know, whether it's like Trump announces he's running or they find documents at every vice president and president's house who are living.
At one point I thought they were going to find classified documents in like Richard Nixon's grave or whatever, but This is one of those weeks where, like, you know, nationally there's a couple of things happened.
Wasn't a ton of, like, just naturally sort of obvious stories for us to cover.
CPAC's happening, but CPAC right now is is kind of a nothing burger.
A lot of people didn't go and aren't there.
I mean, maybe you and Anika will get into it next week.
Merrick Garland spoke in front of the Senate.
There was some back and forth, but, you know, so we have what I would take to be kind of three Particular stories, stories particular to Christian nationalism, to the religious right, and they're somewhat local in some sense.
And what I mean by that is one of them is actually local.
It's going to focus in on a law in Idaho.
But the others are kind of local to this show, meaning they're about kind of issues that really we care about when it comes to Christian nationalism and the religious right and evangelicalism.
So We're going to start with an article a lot of you have been hearing and talking about that appeared at the Gospel Coalition.
It's actually a chapter of an upcoming book.
It's all about, we'll just say, sex and gender.
So I'll just say that for now.
I'm sure there'll be more words later.
Going to get into a nice piece at Rolling Stone that outlines the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which is basically a Christian nationalist policy engine.
And then we'll finish by talking about a proposed law in Idaho on what is allowed to be read in schools and studied in schools and things like that.
So that's where we're going today.
All right Dan, there's been a lot of cringe and a lot of people in shock and awe at something that appeared at the Gospel Coalition's website this past week, so I'm going to turn it over to you to take us through it.
What is the sexy article that is rocking the world?
I did see, I'm going to give one shout out to deconstructiongirl on Instagram who Said you know I've I've heard about the holy of holies and this article seems to have a certain idea about where the holy of holies are but Deconstruction girl said you know after reading this article.
It seems like it's take me to the horny of hornies I don't know Dan too much.
It's like 5 in the morning.
I don't all right there.
It is all right Deconstruction girl that was a pretty good one there you go All right, Dan, go ahead after that.
I don't know how you won't succeed after that setup.
So there it is.
Yeah, it's true.
It's a low pitch over the plate.
So thanks.
Thanks for that.
So yeah, so there's this article popped up under the title.
It was something like sex won't save you, but points to the one who will.
And if you click on it now and you go to the Gospel Coalition, as you said, that has been removed.
And what they said is, we recognize that the adapted excerpt from Josh Butler's forthcoming book, Beautiful Union, lacked sufficient context to be helpful in this format.
So, it tells you it was a chapter excerpt from a book called Beautiful Union by Josh Butler, And it produced anxiety and backlash.
That's the first point.
I want to come back to that.
But what did it say?
So, here's kind of what it said.
I want to talk about what it said, the sort of theological and sexual parts that were there.
Sexual parts is probably the wrong word.
Aspects is the word that I'm looking for, right?
We're not going to get that detailed here on straight white American Jesus.
And what I think is significant about that, and I think we could riff on this forever, but I'll toss it your way for your thoughts.
But Basically what it starts with is an account of the author's view of of a biblical sexual ethic and it's basically the notion that it's so first of all it's completely cis hetero normative right there's no question here of queer folk there's no question of trans folk there's no question of of people having sex with people with the same body parts as them or the same sexual or uh the same gender identity or whatever right so it's a cis hetero
Sex only happens in a monogamous marriage kind of model.
It's the purity model of sex and sexuality, but it's pretty explicit and clear that The gender roles in this are set.
Men are the active members in sex.
They are the penetrative members in sex.
They implant the seed in the female partner.
The female partner is passive and receptive.
The term submissive rolls around in here, right, is to be submissive to this, and this is the sort of natural sexual expression within what is taken to be a natural order of the genders as divinely appointed and so forth, okay?
Problematic enough for lots of reasons.
We'll get to that.
Theologically, then, this is taken and said, well, you know, this is the model of spirituality, right?
The Bible says that the church is the bride of Christ, and just as the woman is the passive recipient with the male partner who initiates sexual activity and penetrates them and so forth, so God is the initiator, we are the one who received God's Word, I think it specifically says that God implants the seed of His Word, which takes life in the church, and so on and so forth.
Okay?
Created in uproar, that's why we're talking about it, that's why we're hearing about it, and so forth.
Lots of reasons why people don't like this, obviously.
People get upset that clearly, even within a cis hetero union, this is a problematic conception of sex and these notions of submission and a lack of awareness or discussion of sort of mutuality or female activity or whatever.
And then carrying to that, lots of people were upset and said this gives like a basically a really rapey view of God and the church, right?
God forcing God's self on the church and so forth.
All of this should be criticized.
For me, ground up, it should all be criticized and thrown out.
But here's what's interesting to me, if we look at it as kind of a religion and culture, religion and pop culture sort of thing, is it's not just people who reject all the ideas of purity culture who are upset by this.
It isn't just anti-Christians.
I don't think it's just ex-evangelical, deconstructed people who are out to convince everybody it shouldn't be evangelical.
I think there were lots of religious conservatives and evangelicals who were really, really uncomfortable and or offended by this.
Why do I say that?
I've bumped into a few things online.
But I also say because the Gospel Coalition had to take down the excerpt and basically pass it off to the book.
It means enough to me of their readers were like, whoa, what is this?
This is problematic and so forth.
And that's why they say it lacked sufficient context to be helpful.
They're basically saying, no, no, no, read the whole chapter.
It all makes sense.
Folks, it doesn't change if you read the whole chapter, right?
It didn't lack the context.
Here's why I think that's significant, is because I think it's significant that there are some evangelicals who don't like this, but I don't think that they understand how much this is an expression of evangelical faith.
Why do I say that?
First of all, these views of male and female roles in sex and sexuality, that's like evangelical sexuality teaching 101.
The view that this applies to the church, number one, there's a model of the church as the bride of Christ.
There's a long tradition.
You know this.
People who study church history know this.
People are familiar with their Bibles.
There's a book in the Hebrew Bible called the Song of Songs.
It's a very erotic poem about sex between a male and female partner.
Early on, as in centuries and centuries and centuries ago, the church was really uncomfortable with this and started interpreting it as a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
A metaphor for the relation between God and the church.
So when this person comes along and advances this, he's not saying something that should shock or appall evangelicals.
All the pieces are there.
If you hold That there is this biblical model of the bride of Christ and so forth, and it's an important and, if you hold things like gender essentialism and gender complementarianism and views of male headship and submission and so forth, and you bring those things together, this is a completely logical expression of both human sexuality and the relation of Christ and the church, right?
So what I find interesting is you get these people who are upset about this, and again, I'm really interested in the evangelical people who are upset about this, because they'll talk about, no, no, no, that's not, it should be more mutual, it should be more loving, it should be more this, this isn't the model of like the church is the bride of Christ and so forth.
And my response is, if you don't like this, You need to pay attention because you can't fix this by just trying to be a kinder, gentler, slightly more inclusive evangelicalism.
You cannot say there are only two genders, and they're male and female, and they have these naturally appointed, God-given roles in the bedroom and in society and so forth, and not have it go in this direction.
This book, for me, is the logical conclusion Of that theology and that what we would call a theological anthropology, right?
An account of what the human person is in sex and sexuality and so forth.
And part of why this strikes me, I guess what we're talking about is I've had this conversation with evangelicals.
I've had this conversation.
I know you have too.
I've had it with coaching clients when people say, what I don't like about purity culture is all of this.
This is where it goes, let alone the fact that there is no space for anybody who's not straight, who's not cis, whatever.
Well, I mean, you haven't just, no, no, no, that's, that's not, that's not where it goes.
And you're like, no, it really is.
It's all there.
The pieces are all there.
And if you put them together, so what strikes me about this?
Is that I think it highlights that even for evangelicals, the challenge I would place them as or religious conservatives, if you're not comfortable with that vision of sex and sexuality, your problem goes deeper than just we need to learn to be nicer to each other or talk about mutuality or temper the commands of women to be submissive to their husbands by talking about mutual submission and things like that.
Again, to plug my little tagline, it's in the code.
It's written in, and if you have problems with that, once you start tugging at that thread, it unravels a lot.
Once you start saying, well, you know what?
I know the Bible maybe says these things, but we need to think about sex a different way.
Well, that's going to make you rethink LGBTQ issues.
That's part of why I'm not an evangelical, because I started tugging at threads like that.
If you don't like this language, this application of the notion of the church as the bride of Christ, But theology matters to you.
You're going to have to rethink what bride means and what that is and how that relates and so forth.
I taught this once, that passage, The Church is the Bride of Christ, in a class, and I presented it as a sexual image of the divine.
And it was amazing, Brad, because my students, who were not Christians, they were very clear to tell me they weren't Christians, did not see it as a sexual image.
I was like, that's really weird to me.
They're like, why is that weird?
I'm like, well, it's weird because usually when you think of brides and grooms getting married, and then what do they do after the wedding feast?
They go off and they have sex.
That's kind of built into the idea, right?
It's in the metaphor.
They didn't see it.
It made them uncomfortable, and it makes lots of conservative Christians uncomfortable to see this.
What I would say is, okay, let's sit with that discomfort then, and let's see what that really says about Your broader theology and your image of human sexuality and who people are and so forth.
So anyway, just so much there.
But for me, what struck me was the way it really upset a lot of people.
Again, opponents of evangelicalism, that's clear.
But even some conservative folks, Which I think caught the Gospel Coalition by surprise because guess what?
In my view, this is completely like Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 101 Evangelical Purity Culture and Spirituality.
So I will throw it over to you and just interested in sort of your thoughts about this.
And again, we've just heard from so many people and it's raised such a stir about this post.
It is, I think, one of the reasons that it created a stir within evangelical circles.
Obviously, those from the outside looking in, lots of ex-evangelicals, those who are deconstructing, those who are not religious, etc., have reacted strongly.
It's just the language that's used.
So, I'm going to read a passage, and I just want to give everyone a warning.
If you want to skip 15 seconds ahead here, that's totally fine.
But I think this really highlights this passage, Dan, highlights a lot of what you're talking about.
And it leads to just the two points I want to make about this.
So here's what Butler writes.
Inversely, back in the wedding suite.
And so this is sort of talking about that wedding night sexual encounter that you were kind of just referencing there, Dan.
The bride embraces her most intimate guest on the threshold of her dwelling place and welcomes him into the sanctuary of her very self.
She gladly receives the warmth of his presence and accepts the sacrificial offering he bestows upon the... upon the...
I was doing good, Dan, and now you're laughing.
And it's like, God, we're like at a slumber party.
I'm sorry.
No, I am laughing.
But I'm also laughing because this, like, I, honest to God, was in a class at an evangelical college talking about human sexuality.
And I swear, this is exactly what we heard.
And I laughed then and I laugh now.
So I'm sorry.
I don't mean to.
No, no, no, no.
Here we go.
She gladly receives the warmth of his presence and accepts the sacrificial offering he bestows upon the altar within her most holy place.
OK, got that out.
That's a whole sentence there.
So a couple of things that this does.
So that kind of language, I think there's just a lot of evangelicals who are like, even though this is an outworking of our theology, that kind of sexual imagery, Scares me, and it unnerves me.
And it also does something that evangelicals, even though theologically it makes sense, as you just outlined, Dan, I think in practice doesn't make sense to them, which is it makes God and sexuality something that go together.
And I think for so many evangelicals, even if they talk about, oh, we're married now, sex is allowed, sex is a God-given gift, everyone can kind of give lip service to that.
But there's still, I think, If you're going to survive in evangelical purity culture and evangelicalism in general, you just have to do this thing where in your mind, in your body, you're like, God good, body and sex bad, and just keep them separate.
You know what I mean?
And this does not.
This really brings it all to the fore.
I have two points, though, that I want to make.
One is that, and many folks have made this online.
I'm not the first.
And so a lot of folks have already been talking about this.
But this reduces, I mean, the most holy place that is talked about here about a woman, right, is ostensibly in the passage, her sexual organs and so on, rather than her, as Ryan Stoller pointed out, just to think of one person, rather than her brain or her heart or, you know, there's so many other places that might be the most holy place, the most important holy aspect of a human being.
But here, It is the sexual organs, and those might be the most private place, but are they the most holy place?
There's a lot to be said there.
Following on what you said, this is problematic in so many ways when it comes to the power dynamics, the consent dynamics, the submission dynamics, but it does something that I have made the case for in the past, which is that purity culture and evangelical theology in general
It does so much work to convince you that it wants to resist the objectification and sexualization of people by the world, by the big scary bad world that thinks sex is just fine, you know, people having sex all over, you know, on the bus and on a street corner and what's next?
Are we going to allow people to have sex with rocks and trees and, you know, okay?
This is all the stuff you hear in church.
But let me just say something clearly and I have a whole episode on this from my series that was ran like a year and a half ago, Mild at Heart, on masculinity and sex after periodic culture.
Periodic culture reduces people to sex because what it says about you is What's your purpose in life?
As a man, your purpose is to be the sort of masculine partner who helps to bring forth God's bountiful creation by impregnating his wife.
And if you're a woman, Your role, as we just read in this passage that we both giggled at, is to allow your bridegroom as the most intimate guest on the threshold of your dwelling place so that you can fulfill your role.
As his sexual partner and, again, become pregnant and reproduce.
The point for me, and I'll be brief on this, is just for all the talk of, oh, we don't, the world wants to turn you into a sexual object and it turns everything into, the world's obsessed with sex.
Have you turned, you know, when we were kids, Dan, I was like, have you turned on the MTV Awards?
It's Britney Spears is up there kissing Madonna.
Did you watch the Super Bowl halftime?
Oh my God.
This is just a really good example of how this culture turns everything into sex.
It reduces people to their sexual identities.
Are you straight?
Are you not?
Right?
That's the first question.
There is no room for any diversity because the very first preoccupation of this culture is your sexual identity and your gender identity.
Okay?
So, for all the talk of resisting sexual obsession or preoccupation or reduction, that's exactly what this culture does.
The second really piggybacks on what you said about the Song of Songs, and if you listen to the show, you know this is a thing for me.
I used to teach a whole class called God, Sex, Love, and what we would do is we would read the Song of Songs, and we would talk about it, and one of the things I would introduce to the students is, yes, Jewish and Christian sources have made this into a metaphor for a long time.
So, if we have the metaphor of God is the groom, the man, God is the man in this heterosexual relationship, and everyone else is the woman, okay?
What I love every time, like, so I feel like Dan, you're really good at bringing out the paradoxes of evangelical culture.
Like the way you just described everything, you were like, you know, Hey, why, why is everyone upset?
This is what, this is what evangelical culture says.
Like, I feel like, you know, young Dan that we talked about last week, who's like, Subverting his theological elders is really good at that game.
My game has always been, if you know me, you know this is true, I just take everything so far that I ruin it.
That's basically, if you know me, that's kind of what I do, right?
I'm the oldest brother and I just do everything so extremely that it's ruined and then I have to find a new thing to do.
So, you know, we'll see what happens with this podcast.
But anyway, Here's what I always tell the butlers of the world when they want to tell me about the Bride of Christ and the Bridegroom is, this is cool.
I really love this.
I actually am enjoying this.
And what this means to me, Mr. Butler, writing about submitting the Most Holy Place, Is that when it comes to my relationship with my wife, you're telling me that yes, I am the image of Christ.
I'm the bridegroom who is doing all of this visiting of the dwelling place and blah blah blah that you talked about.
But when it comes to my relationship with God, it seems like I'm the bride.
Is that right?
Yeah, it is?
Okay, I got it right.
Okay, so I'm the bride.
All right, great.
So, when am I most truly myself?
When I'm in my relationship with other humans or with God?
Oh, with God?
Okay.
So, when I'm with God, that's when I'm most me?
Great.
So, you're telling me, just by deduction here, that I am most me when I'm with God, and when I'm with God, I'm the woman?
Okay.
So, I just want to get it straight here, Mr. Butler.
I am spiritually female, and that is actually the essence of who I am and how I should see myself in my most true and most holy image of who I am, because that's how God sees me.
Is that that's what you're getting uncomfortable now, Mr. Butler?
OK, so you don't you want to leave this coffee shop?
OK, right.
Here's the point.
You're telling me I'm the bride of Christ.
Awesome.
So you know what happened in throughout history?
And I know people listen to this show, know this.
Is male readers of the Song of Songs, they skipped the whole marriage part.
They're like, I'm not going to marry a woman.
I'm going to marry Christ.
I'm going to go be a monk.
I'm going to go be ascetic, meaning I'm going to resist the worldly temptations of a marriage.
I'm going to live in a monastery or in a cave somewhere, and I'm going to see myself As the female partner of Christ, who is anticipating his wedding day, or her wedding day, or their wedding day, when he dies, she dies, they die, and they meet Christ, and that wedding feast, you know, sexual union actually happens.
So, what Butler doesn't realize is that the outworking of this theology is what Howard Albert Schwartz calls the homoerotic dilemma.
It creates a situation where if I am a cis man embodying this theology, I, when I'm with other people, when I'm with my wife, a mister, you know, groom, assertive male, dominant masculine dude, but when I'm with God, I'm the bride.
I'm the woman.
I have to see myself in my most pure essence as female.
And this, of course, piggybacks along with St.
Paul saying there is no longer male or female.
There's a whole sort of way that gender is rendered spiritual and fluid.
And there's also this piggyback with Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 where he says, don't marry if you can be strong enough not to.
So the point I guess Dan, and I'll stop here, is just I don't think Butler realizes that the outworking of this theology is one that says spiritually you are feminine and female.
That's what I hear.
So I'm going to go embrace that.
If I want to be the best Christian possible, screw marriage.
I'm just going to go dedicate myself to my sexual union with Jesus, where He is the penetrative male and I am the female.
Is that right, Mr. Butler?
Did I get the Sunday School lesson right?
And when you go there, here's what happens.
All the evangelical men with the trucks and the flannels and the And, and the, the, you know, John MacArthur tapes in their car, they get really uncomfortable.
Because all of a sudden, it's like, you're actually, you actually just subverted everything you what you wanted was male control and male assertion.
And you got to go consider something else.
So all right, I'll leave it there.
What do you think?
Final thoughts on this one before we jump?
So I make all those same points and love it, right?
And you have this super homoerotic kind of tendency in this tied with a homophobic church, transphobic church, whatever.
I intentionally...
Again, in another class, it was religion and pop culture.
So we're talking about pop culture, and we're showing bumper stickers.
We talk a lot on here.
We talk about people who talk a lot about a hyper-masculine, muscular Christianity, hyper-masculine notions.
Real men love Jesus and so forth.
And I propose this.
These passages, it should be, I guess, real men get topped by Jesus.
And if you really, really want to freak out that audience and show exactly those tensions there, It's to bring this out.
It has always fascinated me that it's right on the surface.
It's not a big leap to say, it says the church is the bride of Christ.
You say the only men can be pastors and so forth, and the church is a fundamentally masculine institution and so forth.
I guess the last point I'll make, this is one of those reasons, one among many, why when those same groups that are so uncomfortable with this are also the ones that claim to be biblical literalists, they want to be biblical and so forth.
And when I tell people, we just cannot take that language at face value.
Because on something like this, they absolutely do not want to be literal.
They turn it into a metaphor, which doesn't really work.
You're like, okay, but why that metaphor?
Right, the metaphor is still there.
And they're just pressed further and further and further from that.
So yeah, it can be a really provocative point.
And I think that unknowingly, I guess this book like just kind of wades right into this and raises all of those, those discomforts.
We need to take a break.
I want to give one book recommendation, however, and that is a book called God's Phallus, which is like the best title or the worst title.
I can't decide.
I don't know.
But it does talk about this whole set of issues in ancient Israel.
It's not a totally quick read, but it's by Howard Alberg Schwartz.
I did read this book, Dan, as a grad student, and I would have it on the bus when I would ride to school and be reading it.
And it was not a good way to make friends, it turns out.
But you live and learn, OK?
We'll be right back.
Let's take a break.
All right.
So want to move on here, Dan, to a story that appeared in Rolling Stone this week by Tim Dickinson.
It's a really good piece, but it covers something I'm not sure I've heard others talk about too much and I think is really important.
So one of the things you and I get asked a lot is, Is Christian nationalism going to go away in the wake of the Biden election in 2020?
One of the questions we got was like, oh, who needs your show anymore?
This is over now.
Trump's out of office.
And I think every time I go somewhere and speak or we get questions from audiences, it's like, all right, is this going to be done soon?
Because it'd be nice if it was.
And I think this piece at Rolling Stone really is a good reminder that it's not.
So the piece is really focused on a man named Jason Rappert or Jason Rapert, who is the leader of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers.
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers, or the NACL, is basically a Christian nationalist policy machine.
So some of you may be familiar with ALEC, the kind of mock policy think tank or policy factory That really allows like big donor libertarian and elite Republicans to basically write the policies they want to see as law and then play them out and propose them to state and federal lawmakers at conferences and in various venues.
Alec is an overwhelmingly powerful part of the Republican ecosystem.
There's a lot of history with ALEC and the religious right and others we won't go into today, but it's a fascinating history.
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers, according to Dickinson, is the first of its kind organization.
It aims to advance biblical, quote unquote, legislation in America's state houses.
These bills are not mere stunts or messaging.
They're dark, freedom-limiting bills that in some cases have become law.
So what Dickinson points out is that the NACL played a significant role in the legal fight that eventually helped to overturn Roe v. Wade, okay?
And so NACL member Brian Hughes Who's part of the Texas legislature, was one of the leading voices and helped pass SB8, the bounty hunter bill that outlawed abortion in Texas by allowing private citizens to sue women who terminate pregnancy.
So we talked all about that bill.
Many of you listening will be familiar with it.
This is the like, if someone's having an abortion, if someone's helping with an abortion, you can all become bounty hunters and and turn them into the state and blah, blah, blah.
Well, that was an NACL person.
Okay, that was somebody who's part of this National Association of Christian Lawmakers, all right?
The NACL logo is, as you would guess, Dan, I think if I made you guess, you'd probably get this on like the first, second, or third try, but the logo is a crusader's shield, so red emblazoned with a white cross.
And one of the things that Dickinson argues, and I think this is actually the most important part, is that the NACL represents Christian nationalism Uh on the legal offensive that we want to basically take control of the country's laws and policies in the name of a certain Christianity.
So Rayford is quoted in the piece as saying that the NACL is at the forefront of the battles to end abortion in individual states.
And also seeks to drive queer Americans back into the closet.
That's Dickinson, not Rayburn in that last part.
For far too long, Rayburn insists, we have allowed one political party in our nation to hold up Sodom and Gomorrah as a goal to be achieved rather than a sin to be shunned.
So right now the NACL has members in 31 states.
It has like a dozen or so model laws that its members can introduce in legislative bodies around the country.
So if you're a member of the NACL, you can basically take this to your state legislature and you can introduce the laws that have already been modeled and mocked up and written for you by the NACL.
That's how these think tanks work, right?
if you wonder how state lawmakers and federal lawmakers often have the time to sort of write and do this, well, a lot of time it's being written for them.
And in this case, it's being written by the National Association of Christian Lawmakers.
Now, there are people involved in this.
You're like, well, who's there?
Well, we have Mike Huckabee.
We have Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
We have people like Dan Patrick, who is the lieutenant governor of Texas, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Matt Staver, President of the Liberty Council, which is a kind of big.
The Liberty Council is often in front of the Supreme Court and arguing things on the part of conservative Christians and Christian nationalists.
So all the people I just talked about are what?
They're on the group's advisory board.
Okay, so you can see here Christian nationalism In the very DNA, or in the very code, to use Dan's language, of U.S.
law and U.S.
policy, at least in the attempts to get these things passed.
As you would imagine, Raper believes this is a Judeo-Christian nation founded on Judeo-Christian values, but he then goes into something that should be familiar to people who have been paying attention.
He says that the United States is embroiled in, quote, a spiritual struggle.
That is predicated and prophesied in the 66 books of the Bible.
Raybord does not want the separation of church and state.
He thinks that's a myth.
He thinks America's issues are because we have departed from God.
Dickinson points out that Raybord is a dominionist.
So he wants Christians to have dominion over the earth.
And I think many of you listening will be familiar with dominionism.
Already.
There's a lot more here, Dan.
I could go on.
We're going to run out of time.
So I'll just say, for me, what this signifies is that a lot of people ask me at events, like, what can I do?
What's going on?
And I'm like, look, The people that I write about in my book, the people that Dan and I talk about on our show on a weekly basis, they have been organizing for 60 years more and more.
They have machines.
They have engines.
They have networks.
So the 2022 midterms were kind of disappointing.
Oh, we didn't win as many House seats as we thought.
The Democrats still control the Senate.
Biden's still in office.
They were never going to give up.
They were never going to be like, oh, I guess we'll just do something else now.
What I always say to people is, at every node in the American body, every tendon, every ligament, every muscle, Christian nationalists are trying to take dominion of it.
And I think the National Association of Christian Lawmakers is a great example.
Hey, we're going to mock up the laws and policies we want to see passed.
Pass them along to state and federal reps who will try to get them passed, and we are going to just chip away at the American legal system as best as we can with this clear and explicit language that Christians should have dominion of the country.
So, friends, if you're listening, my encouragement would be, please understand that this is what is happening at every level.
of government and electoral politics in the country.
And it should tell you where we're at and perhaps what the task ahead of us is if this is not what we want to see happen here.
So thoughts on this, Dan?
Yeah.
So, I mean, some that are clear, again, for the people who say that the stuff about Christian nationalism is too alarmist and it's not significant, whatever.
Again, it's just another example.
Like, here it is.
But it also highlights, as you noted, I like to highlight the contradictions, right, in evangelicalism and conservative American Christianity and so forth.
But to remind folks of all the times that we're told when there's a mass shooting that you can't legislate morality, Or that it's about broken, sinful, fallen people and you can't fix that with laws.
Or the individualistic spirituality.
We've talked about the vision of Christianity, what it is to be a Christian, what it is just to be a person within this kind of Christian thinking that says you can't transform society through social change, Or institutions or structures.
It's just about converting individuals.
As individuals become Christians, you get a Christian society.
We hear people say that all the time, right?
We hear them say it in front of microphones, as I say, when there's a mass shooting.
If you have individuals in your life, the Uncle Rons that you, you know, talk to at holidays and things, and you say, well, you know, I just think maybe like, you know, maybe having healthcare for everybody would be a good thing.
And they will say something about, you know, you can't fix a broken sinful world with laws.
You need to just, you know, if everybody was Christian, I don't know, they would donate their health insurance or something like that.
This gives the lie to that, to me, right?
This flip side of saying, well, if all that's true, then why are you spending so much time trying to legislate, trying to enact laws, trying to take over state houses, trying to do away with, you know, And not just like protesting when there are drag queens reading at a library, but prohibiting drag queens from reading at libraries, right?
And I think that's the deep thing between what a lot of evangelicals will say, and I think what a lot of them Think they think right on like a surface level or an everyday level or something like that.
But then the actually the things that are actually in place and that's what I would invite like next time you're in conversation with somebody and they say you know there's another mass shooting and because we live in America they're like it will take no time at all for that to happen and for people to start talking about how well you can't legislate more I would be like well okay but like Over in this state, they want to do this, and this organization that you support, Uncle Ron, says that we should, you know, do exactly that.
So why can't we do that with guns?
And really sort of pressing that point, because this is, I think, a deep contradiction and an intentional one within evangelical discourse and Christian nationalism.
When it suits the needs, It's all about converting individuals, small state, so on and so forth.
But when it suits their needs, it's all about forcing and coercing people to be the right kind of people, to worship the God that they say is omnipotent and all powerful and so forth, but who apparently needs them to pass laws to make sure that people are still doing what God wants.
I mean, just this week, Jordan Peterson, of all people, posted that social justice has nothing to do with the gospel.
The gospel is about individual conversion and being born again.
It goes to your exact point, Dan, right?
So, the whole idea that I hear from everyone from, you know, Charlie Kirk to Uncle Ron is, well, social justice and collective change is not part of the gospel.
It's about your individual relationship with God.
And then, as you just said, Dan, Okay, then why do you have the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and you're trying to basically change the justice system or the legislative system or the policies and laws of this country in a way that suits your vision for society?
It's completely paradoxical and hypocritical.
This guy, Raypert Dennis, was a member of the Arkansas State Senate.
And at the beginning of his career there, he was caught on tape saying that President Obama, quote, didn't represent the country that I grew up with.
And he vowed to his constituents, quote, we're not going to let minorities run rough roughshod over what you people believe in.
So gives you a little bit more insight into this guy is governor gubernatorial candidate in Louisiana, Hunter Lundy.
Is a member of the advisory board for the NACL.
So just another example that this is not a fringe group that's just sort of paying for some kind of place in Republican politics.
It is already there and already working.
All right, let's take a break, be back and talk about one of the laws that kind of examinatizes this whole vision.
We'll be right back.
Okay, Dan, law up for debate in the Idaho legislature this week on reading, and so I'll turn it over to you.
What's going on with the Idaho reading bill?
So basically, it's a bill, as you say, it's not a law yet, right?
It's been introduced and being debated and so forth, that prohibits giving children under 18, quote, harmful materials that feature, quote, nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse when it's lewd or patently offensive to prevailing standards among adults, right?
There's already a law in Idaho that prohibits distributing this kind of material to people under 18.
Okay.
What this bill does now is say, we're going to extend this to libraries, right?
So libraries that make this kind of material, as we understand it, make it available to people under 18 can now be sued for, I believe, up to $10,000, right?
It makes it a civil penalty, not a criminal penalty and so forth.
Now, some people may hear that and be like, well, of course, I don't want my minor like, you know, reading pornography or something like that.
But as we know here, the real issue is what's targeted by this.
It's targeted at LGBTQ materials.
Lots of the promotional things for this and so forth feature like, oh, here's an image from a library of the Pride Month display and the books that are on sale there.
Lots of works by people of color, feminist works of different kinds, right?
This is kind of more of the same pattern we've seen in lots and lots and lots of red states of essentially trying to impose and police a kind of conservative, white, evangelical vision of society and culture By making it impossible for anybody to present anything else.
And of course, what counts as quote-unquote lewd is going to be very much in the eye of the beholder.
It's going to be very much in the eye of, you know, whoever brings these suits against places.
And to give an example, this is from an article in the Idaho Statesman.
You know, obviously, a newspaper in Idaho.
Talking about a Nampa school board last year banned nearly two dozen books, including, and these are the examples, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Looking for Alaska by John Green, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, right?
I mean, this is just kind of a, oh yeah, of course, those are the books They've been pushed back, of course.
The Idaho Family Policy Center, which, again, family is always code for Christian in these things, right, which is a Christian lobbying group that is co-sponsoring the bill, said, quote, No one is talking about banning books.
We're simply asking that schools and libraries take reasonable steps to prevent children from accessing pornographic material.
What is this?
I've talked about this.
You've talked about this.
One of the It's in the Code episodes was, you know, on the sort of Christian health and safety, the appeals to protecting children, to protecting the vulnerable, to protecting women, right?
That we're doing this not because we're targeting anybody.
No, no, no, no.
We're not being anti-LGBTQ.
We just got to protect the kids.
We just got to protect the women.
No, we're not being anti-trans.
We just got to protect us.
No, we're not worried about black people and other people of color writing books that challenge white norms.
No, no, no.
We just want to protect the kids, right?
This constant rhetoric of protection that is used to target anybody who isn't White, Christian, straight, hetero, and suggests that maybe the whole world isn't that way.
So, I think to the point we were just talking about, this is yet another example that we're seeing on a more sort of, this is a statewide level, but we've seen it at the municipal level, we've seen it at the level of school boards, we see it at the level of state legislation here.
Over and over and over, these attempts to Well, as we said, to do exactly what they tell us they can't do, to legislate morality, to make sure that only the right kinds of Americans have so-called freedom of speech and freedom of expression and everything else, to define basically anything we don't like as pornographic.
It's very simple to do.
It's the same way that, you know, they'll call a drag queen show lewd or pornographic, even if there's no nudity, no sexual content, nothing.
So it's just an example of this in concrete practice.
So, I think this really ties together the two previous things we've talked about today.
So, obviously, this is an example of what it looks like when Christian nationalists start to put into practice and try to implement, I should say, laws and policies that follow their vision of society.
It also ties back to the discussion of Butler's work and chapter on Sexuality and the metaphor of the bride and bridegroom.
And here's what sticks out to me is that, speaking from personal experience, what evangelical theology and purity culture did to me was convince me that anything to do with bodies and desire and flesh at all, okay, is sexual.
And sexual is bad, okay?
So like when I'm 16, when I'm 18, and I'm trying to follow the guidelines of purity culture, Dan, and I know that we've talked to many people about this.
We've both talked about this in our various series.
We've talked to Sarah Mosliner, who's just like this world's expert on purity culture, and other folks we've talked to.
Purity culture teaches you that anything to do with the body, with sex, with desire, outside of that one particular place, which is the heterosexual marriage context, is bad.
Therefore, Dan, it's an easy jump to go from anything to do with desire, with embodiment, with carnality, is pornographic.
It's sinful.
It's lewd.
It's disgusting, right?
And you can start to apply those terms because there's basically a binary, right?
On one side, there's a very limited and specific context where sexual desire is allowed to flourish and be expressed and whatever.
And everywhere else, it should be kept under wraps.
It should be kept prohibited and it should be seen as gross and disgusting and we can't allow children to be exposed to that kind of thing.
And I just see that in this bill here and this vision so clearly, right?
That there's no understanding of like a human body, a human person, human desire as somehow good.
There's just, if you are those things, They are bad, and if you encounter them in history or in literature, if you encounter them in pop culture or anywhere else, then they should be seen as dangerous, a dangerous threat, right?
A dangerous threat to our kids' lives and basically the Christian social order that we want to put in place.
I'll say what I said at the top, like this theology reduces people to sex.
It objectifies people so much and it basically says you're nothing but this identity and that's why we have to police it so hard because as you said this Wednesday on your show, on your series I should say, we're so insecure about keeping this in place that we have to like try to police it and regulate it to the nth degree.
I just want to point out one more thing, and then I'll throw it back to you before we go to Reasons for Hope, is back in about a year ago in 2022, there was the chance that the Idaho Supreme Court was going to weigh in on a case, Dan, on what?
The legality of child marriage.
Okay, let me just read this.
Rebecca Boone writing for AP.
A legal loophole in Idaho that allows parents of teens to nullify child custody agreements by arranging child marriages will remain in effect under a ruling.
In a split decision, the high court declined to decide whether Idaho's child marriage law, which allows 16 and 17 year olds to marry if one parent agrees to the union, is unconstitutional.
So the Supreme Court of Idaho If I skip down, the article outlines the fact that all but seven states allow minors below the age of 18 to marry.
This law is unconstitutional.
Instead, the justice said that once a child is emancipated by marriage, the family court loses jurisdiction over custody matters.
If I skip down, the article outlines the fact that all but seven states allow minors below the age of 18 to marry.
Nevada, Idaho, Arkansas, Kentucky have the highest rates of child marriage.
We all know also that people under the age of 18 become pregnant and often seek reproductive health care, including abortion.
And in a place like Idaho, and of course, many other places around the country, they're told, no, you need to have the baby because that's what God wants.
Here's the point.
Dan, this law is like, no one under 18 should see sexual materials.
They're lewd.
However, people under 18 can get married.
So there's that.
And yeah, if they become pregnant, they need to have the baby because they're clearly old enough and mature enough to be parents.
So not old enough or mature enough to actually be introduced to, I don't know, A sexual relationship in a Toni Morrison novel, but definitely mature enough to take care of another child if they become pregnant and to get married.
So there it is.
I know a lot of people know that hypocrisy, but I think sometimes it's just worth bringing to the front.
So any final thoughts?
And what's your reason for hope?
So just a final thought related to that, because you're right when you talk about this reduction to sex, right?
And again, I've had this conversation with evangelicals, and I kind of get it intellectually, but it still blows my mind that they don't see this.
When you say evangelical culture is absolutely fixated with sex, and they're like, what do you mean?
Just think about this.
Look what's not being banned.
It's not books with violent depictions, depictions of violence.
It's not books with depictions of racism.
It's not books with depictions of misogyny.
And I'm not saying that these people are all in favor of racism or violence or misogyny.
But the point is, the issue that always like floats to the top and is like the one that just absolutely occupies all the cognitive space, sucks all the air out of the room, is always sex and sexuality and bodies, as you said.
Like this weird, it's like an inverse focus on the body, right?
There's so much avoidance of bodies that it's like it's all about bodies, but it's this like empty space that we sort of can't see through or something.
So I think that's the telling point.
It actually sort of brings me kind of sideways to my reason for hope, which goes back to the discussion of sex and sexuality we were having earlier, which is That it did shock some evangelicals, that there are some evangelical people who, people I've heard from, people I've read and whatever, who are like, I think sort of at least coming up against a reality being like, wait a minute, like, is this really what we think?
Is this really what we view sex and bodies and sexuality to be and the possibility of that?
I'm thinking a lot about purity culture right now.
I'm teaching about it for one of my classes, and one of the things that you and others and Sarah and people who view evangelical culture have seen is there has been a Maybe not momentous, but a pushback against elements of that, and this is something that I think adds to that, and I do see it as a hopeful sign.
I find it interesting that the Gospel Coalition had to remove that excerpt.
There aren't a lot of non-conservative religious readers of the Gospel Coalition website.
I take some hope in that.
I'm under no illusion that purity culture is going to go away tomorrow or anything, but I found that hopeful.
My reason for hope is weird, but it is related to CPAC.
CPAC, I think, you know, we've been basically talking about what's going to happen in 2024.
There's a brewing civil war between, inter-GOP war, conflict between Trump and DeSantis.
We're seeing that play out.
They're starting to fight.
They're starting to really go for each other.
And Matt Schlapp, who is kind of the head figure at CPAC, has been accused of things related to sexual assault and harassment.
So that's in the ether.
But it means that CPAC is kind of really empty of certain folks.
So like Mike Pence, and DeSantis, and Tim Scott, and Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan are not there.
You know, is this good news, bad news?
I don't know.
What it does show, though, is that CPAC really looks like the MAGA wing right now, like Carrie Lake is there, for example.
People like that.
So it starts to look like CPAC is being siphoned off from some of the Republican Party.
Now, is that good or bad?
I don't know.
We'll see.
But we are starting to see the infighting.
That I think that we have anticipated and it really is going to be fascinating to see what comes of that.
I still think there's a chance that if like DeSantis is the GOP nominee, Trump runs third party and in a sort of Theodore Roosevelt weird, you know, return of history thing with a twist.
So anyway, that's all for the future, but I'm keeping my eye on that.
All right.
I want to thank you all for being here.
Thank all our patrons, all the people that support us, all the people that make the show happen.
I want to thank Emma Holbert for some research assistance this week.
I want to thank everyone who is here with us.
For In The Code and for our interviews.
I have a fantastic interview coming Monday that I hope none of you will miss.
It is on the gospel of J Edgar Hoover and how the FBI was a Christian nationalist organization for decades and decades and decades.
As always, find us at Bradley Onishi, Straight White JC.
Help, could use your help on PayPal, Patreon, Venmo, that's all there.
If you appreciate what we do, please think about supporting us so we can keep doing the show three times a week.
Other than that, we'll be back next week with that interview I talked about with It's In The Code, and Dan and Anika will be here to do the weekly roundup because I will be at a family reunion.
