Special Episode: Andrew Whitehead on American Idols and Christian Nationalism
Ahead of the premier of American Idols next week, Brad talks with Dr. Andrew Whitehead about the podcast series, his new book, and why Christian nationalism is such a threat to our democracy. He shares insight from his own life as a kid who grew up in church, only to see many of his fellow Christians succumb to the temptations of Christian nationalism's idols: fear, power, and violence.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, joined today by the one and only Dr. Andrew Whitehead.
Andrew, thanks for joining me.
Hey, good to be with you.
So we're a week away from publishing American Idols, a four-part podcast series on your work.
Now that, of course, everybody, is coming right out of your new book, American Idolatry, which is right over my shoulder here.
And so your book is out, your podcast is happening, you're a busy man.
But here's the thing, this book and this podcast are very personal.
You're a sociologist?
I have so many sociologist friends who I love and admire, and they do so much work that I can't do with math and charts and stuff.
But my sociologist friends are usually not the ones who are like, let me tell you my story.
Hey, there's me.
That's exactly what you're doing here.
Why did it feel like this was the time to insert your story into your work?
Yeah, no, it's a good question.
And, you know, I think some of it kind of came from working on this for the last, you know, academically, like the last decade, right?
Starting to write peer-reviewed articles around Christian nationalism.
And then the first book was Sam Perry, Taking America Back for God.
And as we were sharing that work and trying to help bring some sort of framework to understand what we all were seeing, right, in the lead up to 2016 and then soon after, It was really resonating with folks and now they were like, oh, now I've seen this all around and I've wondered what it is and now I can kind of place this framework on it and it makes sense.
And that was really fulfilling.
But then the question we would always get and that I would always get is, but what do we do?
What do we do now?
What do we do about this?
And so as social scientists, we literally usually are like, well, that's not my job, right?
It's to gather quality data, organize it, you know, and go to peer review and then provide, you know, really rigorous examinations of kind of what is.
We don't really talk about what should be, but too, I'm like a human being living in a world and in a democracy right now.
And as I was looking at all this evidence that social science was handing me, whether it's through our work or others, a lot of other people working in this area, as an American citizen, I'm like, okay, these are really negative things, right?
Christian nationalism is really connected to Embracing racism and anti-democratic ideals and authoritarianism and all these different things.
And I'm like, that's harmful to a functioning civil sphere.
And then too, I am a person of faith still, a Christian.
And as I'm looking at different expressions of Christianity and working through this whole journey, I'm thinking too, this doesn't seem like what we were taught growing up in these communities of loving Jesus or loving God or loving people around us.
When we are like refusing refugees and immigrants who are also Christians, perhaps, like we don't want them here.
And so, how does this work and how Christian nationalism is related to that too?
So, as a person that's a citizen and identifying as religious, I was looking at all this.
And so, this book really is kind of the culmination of those two journeys where It's this journey of studying this academically, but then also being an American citizen and being a religious person who wants to see, you know, this religion that I identify with engage in the public sphere in a way that isn't trying to marginalize and oppress other people.
That would be my goal.
And so this book really is kind of flowing out of those two journeys.
One of the things I love when I watch a new TV show or listen to a new podcast is getting to go places I don't usually go, or places I've never been.
So yes, I love it when I watch a movie and it's in New York City.
That's fun.
I love, okay, we're in London now.
Great.
But one of the awesome parts about your book and about the podcast series that we're going to publish here very soon is, We get to go at least briefly to your hometown.
And so not only are you a person of faith, not only did you grow up as somebody embedded in certain kinds of churches, but you do so not from a place that many people may visit very often, whether physically or virtually.
So where do you come from and how does that play into the story?
Yeah.
So, I grew up in a small rural farming manufacturing community in Northern Indiana.
So, literally over the last 80 years, the population has hovered between 1,500 and 2,000 people.
It just has not grown that much, hasn't shrunk that much.
It's just there.
And in this community, it is pretty homogenous, you know, demographically and then religiously as well.
There's just not a lot of variation.
Like if we're talking about diversity, it's like, well, are you Baptist or the Missionary Church or Lutheran?
Some brand of conservative Protestant Christianity, that's about it.
And so, in this community, and I don't want to say, oh, we all need to get back to how rural communities work because I think that is not true.
But in this community, my experiences growing up, it was a caring place, right?
I was cared for, a rough kind of childhood, junior high, senior high years for me in my home.
So, church was a place where I felt safe.
And I appreciated that and was, you know, taught the Bible and taught to love Jesus and these different values.
But then what I started to realize was these folks really cared for me.
But when we took that those values and looked at folks outside of kind of our particular group, it seems like then they got put in the backseat.
And that's what I didn't understand.
And I think for a lot of folks who grew up in a conservative Christian area and Or churches, this is what we've been wrestling with over the last couple of decades is like, why don't these values now apply to these other groups, whether it's religious, racial, gender, sexual minorities?
And so, that's a part of my personal faith journey.
But yeah, in this small town, You worship beside the people that teach you and do your electric, you know, electrician work and all these other things.
And so it's very kind of embedded.
And so, yeah, as I started to move beyond those and start to see the cracks in the worldview that I was handed, then it was starting to try to make sense of, well, what does this mean in this larger, you know, Larger group that I'm a part of, right, in this nation or even globally, and trying to make sense of my faith, citizenship, all of those things with that.
So, I want to ask you one more question about growing up there, but I want to ask you a serious question before I ask you a non-serious question.
So, last serious question is, is it fair to say that for you to remain a Christian, you had to leave Christian nationalism behind?
Yeah, I think that really is the crux of it, is that for me and others, so as I was reading folks and hearing their stories, especially of those that have been marginalized by white evangelical Christianity.
So, as a white Protestant man, You know, this country has been built for folks like me, right?
Doors opened and I didn't even know doors were there.
They were just open.
And so starting to be able to recognize that was helpful.
And in many ways, listening to the voices and reading the books and hearing these stories of folks where they had different experiences, that's where it really started to show me that this gospel that I was handed, this form of Christianity I was handed, wasn't good news for them.
And so, there's a problem.
That is a problem that has to be remedied if I want to continue to put my faith in this story and be willing to be wrong about it.
It's a big deal.
And so, that was where I had to really start wrestling with that and listening to and following the guidance of these groups who have maintained This faith in the midst of oppression, in the midst of being marginalized.
And that's not something I've ever really experienced.
And so that was really part of that journey.
And Christian nationalism is wrapped up with power and self-interested power to benefit the in-group.
and fear and threat from these out groups and then moving towards violence towards those groups.
And so all that I had to set aside if I wanted to follow, what I found was a beautiful representation of the Christian faith where it is used to love and serve and overturn systems of oppression, things like that.
And real quick, the last thing too is, I have three kids and my oldest and youngest have severe intellectual disabilities.
And it was my experience of just being near them and recognizing their marginalization that again, I'd never experienced personally.
That was a part of that journey too, where I was like, this faith that was handed, this kind of victorious, always winning, type of faith where, yeah, you have dark moments, but then you, you know, you're going to conquer.
I was like, that doesn't resonate with my experience right now.
And I need to look elsewhere.
And so all of that was kind of wrapped up in this journey.
Well, and you, you really outlined in the book and in the podcast series, the idols that you think Christian nationalism worships, you know, fear, power, violence.
And so, you know, to hear you talk about it makes a lot of sense.
You also just asked a question, I think would be a great question for everyone who identifies as a Christian to answer or ask themselves, which is Christian.
Who hears the good news and receives it not as good news?
For whom is the good news not good?
And if I ask that question, it helps me understand how my faith and my Christianity may be having at least blind spots and at worst idols that you discuss at length in the book.
So, all right.
So you grew up in a really small town and then you went to Purdue.
A lot of people listening and watching know Andrew Whitehead, world-renowned sociologist, author of Taking America Back for God.
You and Sam Perry are like out here doing this work that is essential for understanding Christian nationalism.
You're a really big deal.
But you went from like a town with two and a half stoplights to Purdue.
I went from my hometown to Oxford.
When I got to Oxford, like on one of the first days of the dining hall, they served moussaka, which I was like, I don't even know what that is.
I don't know what this is, but I'm hungry.
So let's eat it.
And I'm going to pretend like I've had this before because everyone else seems to know what this is.
So when you got to Purdue, what's one thing that happened where you're like, well, I'm not home anymore.
I'm at Purdue and this is this is a new thing.
I'll have to learn how you do this.
Yeah.
Well, it's so funny you ask that because, you know, as I was thinking of it as a high school senior going to Purdue, I was like, I am going away to college because it was like two hours away rather than 30 minutes away in South Bend or wherever else.
And so that was really funny to look back because it's still in Indiana.
It's still pretty agriculturally bound.
And like, you know, it's not a totally diverse, but it's more diverse at Purdue than Indiana generally.
So it is funny.
You know, I think a lot of it there at Purdue were, you know, courses where I was able to, both in sociology, but then history courses that I would take, where it's just engaging with, you know, learning about the kind of ancient history of Christianity, right?
The first 150, 200, 300 years and wrestling with that or learning U.S.
history from colonial period up through reconstruction and then seeing kind of these threads throughout just understanding like where we are now and the context that surrounds us.
How history has played a role in that.
And I think in my work as a sociologist, really being able to gather data and understand where we are now, historians and good history have been so important, right?
To set the context and understanding of why do we see what we see right now?
And I think it pairs so well then where sociology can then say, hey, this history that we're, you know, documenting, here's what it means for us today, right?
We can make it kind of come alive.
This is still with us, right?
The famous quote of I'm going to get it wrong.
Maybe you know it, but like, you know, history isn't even past, right?
It's like, it's all around us.
We're living in it.
And so I think those were the moments where, you know, two in particular, where I'm in a history class with a renowned, you know, scholar of the founding period and religion.
And he's like, Hey, the founding fathers were mostly deists.
They certainly weren't evangelical Christians.
Um, and I was like, Oh, okay.
That helps things click in this place.
Right.
Or, um, another one was, you know, learning about, um, Constantine and the vision he saw and sitting there as like a good evangelical and being like, okay, so.
He saw this light and this shield and God was speaking to him.
And then they went to war and they were just... We grew up hearing about Christians being killed by Romans and all these things.
So, now God would want to support... So, it's kind of silly maybe to look back, but I don't.
You know, look too down on my past self because I didn't know any better, right?
What I was handed is where I was, but it seems naive to think about now.
But those were real moments where it was like, okay, I have to think about this.
And I never had to before.
So, those were the times that really come to mind once I went away to college.
Well, you have much more dignity than me because I asked you a non-serious question.
You gave a really thoughtful answer full of insight into how you've arrived where you are today.
I thought you were going to tell me that you tried hummus for the first time at the dining hall or whatever.
Clove cigarettes, there it is.
Okay, now we're getting the real, now we've got it.
We're getting the sorted past of Andrew Whitehead.
Alright, now I've accomplished my goal.
Now I can sign off the interview.
Okay.
Well, friends, here's the thing.
In a couple days, you're going to have a chance to listen to the first episode of American Idols.
We're going to play the trailer here for you, so you can listen if you haven't already.
It's an amazing series.
It includes cameos from Andrew's co-author, Sam Perry, Anthea Butler, Jim Artisby, Robert Jones, Andrew Seidel, so many others, so many other folks that you probably are familiar with.
And if you haven't already, you should go buy American Idolatry, which is right over my shoulder.
It's out now from Braslow's Press and will really give you some amazing insight into how Andrew, someone who's been studying these things for a long time, but has been practicing Christianity for much longer, understands his own faith journey and the threats that Christian nationalism poses to not only the American democracy, but also the American church.
Right.
What are the best places for people to link up with you as they listen and read?
And I want to connect with your ongoing work and other stuff you're up to.
Yeah, so I am still on the platform, Twitter, whatever it's called, for now.
I'm planning an ESIX strategy.
It's just getting really gross there.
And so, basically due to Elon.
But, you know, I just started a substack, and so it's American Idolatry.
So people could hopefully find me there.
I hope to transition more to that and just go a little bit deeper, have more conversation.
Those types of things.
I'm also on Instagram and Facebook, so the social media sites.
But yeah, that's the best place to kind of keep track and yeah, really looking forward to the podcast.
I mean, obviously I have a vested interest in the podcast, but I listened to the first episode that Brad and Scott put together and it's really wonderful.
So, I'm so excited to share that.
Yeah, no, we are too.
And anyway, all right, guys, I want to thank everyone for listening and for watching.
We'll be back later with what's in the code with the weekly roundup and everything we're doing, but look out for American Idols.
And if you haven't heard already, go to accessmoondy.us for information on the brand new network we've just launched.
