Weekly Roundup: How 9/11 Accelerated Christian Nationalism
Brad begins by tracing the extreme Christian nationalism of the 2020s to the years following 9/11. The thesis: the ways that Republican politicians and conservative pastors responded to 9/11 led to a new chapter of American Christian nationalism.
Dan then picks up the thread to discuss how Black churches and other groups are teaching Black history in Florida given the fact that it is being left out of school curricula in the state.
The episode finishes with an extended discussion of the lapsed child tax credit - and what it says about our country's morals and priorities.
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The government is not supposed to direct the church.
Most Christians are now confronted with questions concerning what we all believe and why.
We need to be the party of nationalism.
And I'm a Christian and I say it proudly.
We should be Christian nationalists.
When it comes down to democracy or power, white Christian nationalism will choose power every time.
After over a decade of studying Christian nationalism and three decades practicing the Christian faith, I'm convinced that Christian nationalism is a very real threat to American democracy.
It betrays the Christian gospel and threatens the American Christian Church.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
And soon, Dan, I'll be teaching a class at Santa Clara University, which I'm super excited about.
So I'm here with my co-host.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Good to be with you.
I hadn't heard about the Santa Clara thing, so that's cool, too.
Yeah.
Very excited about that.
And, um, I, uh, before we started recording, uh, was going to shave for the first time in about 10 days and, uh, I used the wrong thing and I shaved off my entire beard.
So now I feel like, um, a 16 year old who has no facial hair.
I, I, I always have a beard.
I've had a beard for like 15 years and now I have no beard.
So I'm feeling a little strange at the moment.
So I hope you'll bear with me.
You know, I'm going to try to make it.
You look young, you look fresh.
It's like, it's fine.
It's just the refresh, Bradley.
I do not feel young or fresh, so I can tell you that right now.
I promise everyone listening, I'm going to stop talking about this in 10 seconds, but I shaved and then I had a mustache and I was like, oh, I'm going to do a mustache because I'm soon going to be the dad of two little kids.
I'm in my 40s.
This is prime mustache season for me.
I shaved it because I knew my wife was going to make me shave it anyway.
There was no way she was going to let me sit down to dinner with a mustache.
So I shaved it.
Here I am, fresh faced and ready to talk about the weekly roundup.
I was disappointed you didn't go with the full trucker mustache.
That would be the new Brad Onishi look.
Do you want to tell everyone about your fun weekend real quick or no?
I mean you did some pretty cool middle-aged dad stuff too.
I went to see Rob Zombie and Ministry and like some other bands so that was cool.
The middle-aged dad part is that Rob Zombie was there with Alice Cooper so like the dude next to me was like 70 so like this concert had everything from like teenagers to like the 70 year olds who like he was telling me all about seeing Alice Cooper when he was in high school the first time in the 70s so I was like yep.
And Alice Cooper, unfortunately, I think, came out with some anti-trans comments.
He did.
That's the problem.
It's like you get these lineups and they have multiple people in them.
Ministry closed with an anti-nationalism song called GD White Trash is the name of the song.
So yeah, mixed bag in that regard, ideologically.
I was hoping Rob Zombie was like playing with NSYNC or something, just really mash it up.
But anyway, all right, we're done.
We're done, people.
We're talking politics now.
It's over.
Okay, here we go.
We're going to concentrate.
I want to talk about 9-11 and Christian nationalism.
I want to talk about Florida schools and Florida churches and black history.
And we're going to talk about the child tax credit.
Children in this country slipping into poverty because of one, in essence, decision made by Congress and certain Congress people, if you ask me.
All right, Dan, let's talk about 9-11 and Christian nationalism.
This week was, of course, 9-11, the anniversary of one of the most infamous days in American history.
And it really is a day, I think, that brings about a lot of Just obvious sadness and grief and mourning for so many Americans, if not all Americans.
I think we're to a point now where many of our students and young people are kind of like, we're not born then and they don't, they obviously don't remember it.
So we've reached a point of like a different kind of memory when it comes to 9-11.
But I was asked this week by Anna Boehm at Reckon South, who's just a great journalist, about 9-11 and Christian nationalism.
And it really sparked some thoughts that I wanted to share here on the pod.
And here's what I wanted to talk about, okay?
9-11 is a day of infamy, along with Pearl Harbor and a few other days in American history where the country's been attacked.
There is no denying, there is no ever denying that it is a day where Americans lost their lives, families were changed forever, the nation itself was altered in its history.
What I want to talk about is how 9-11 led to a resurgence of Christian nationalism.
And not 9-11 the event, but the reactions to 9-11.
Okay, so there's certainly going to be some trolls that are like, Onishi says this and that, and here's what I'm saying clearly if you actually want to listen.
9-11 garnered responses from then-president George W. Bush, but many in his administration, but also around the country in churches, in communities, that I think has maybe the beginning point of what we might call the current chapter of Christian nationalism.
So let me unpack that.
You're like, you know, what does that mean, Brad?
Come on, what are you talking about?
In order to unpack that, Dan, I want to go back to something that you and I both remember, and that is the 1990s and Promise Keepers.
Some of you listening know that Promise Keepers was a men's movement.
It was a movement for men, and it was a movement that was really problematic.
It included a lot of patriarchal language.
It included a lot of heteronormative language.
It was not affirming.
It was not so many things.
However, one of the aspects that I really want to recall about Promise Keepers is the fact that it happened in the 1990s during a time when the United States did not feel as if it was under threat from the outside.
Okay, so everybody hang with me for a minute.
If you're a 90s kid like me, you know the 90s as a time when the Cold War was over, the Berlin Wall had fallen, Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union, I should say, was over.
There was no clear mortal superpower enemy across from the United States, okay?
There was no sense that we had anyone in the world that could challenge the United States in terms of its wealth, its military might, its dominance, okay?
Now, because of that, I think that we entered a place where American Christianity did not have a big bad other that it was looking to as kind of the enemy that it was fighting.
And as a result, American Christian men, at least evangelical men, started to look inward.
Okay?
So, Promise Keepers is really, Dan, that looking inward.
Promise Keepers is not something I'm singing the praise of.
It was problematic.
It was patriarchal.
It was heteronormative, the whole thing.
But let me remind everybody some things about Promise Keepers.
Y'all hang with me for a minute, right?
Just because I'm me, I have all these notes in front of me from a documentary that celebrated the 25th anniversary of Promise Keepers.
And when I go through my notes, so many things jump out at me, okay?
One is that Promise Keepers showed up All these men in stadiums gathered to worship God, okay?
Promise Keepers was like in these stadiums full of 20, 30, 40, 50,000 men gathering, okay?
And there's these moments in these gatherings where the speakers are saying, we're not here for political power or influence.
We are here to display our spiritual poverty so that the Almighty God might influence us.
Think about what they're saying there.
We're not here for political might.
Because we want to surrender ourselves to the Almighty God and learn things like this.
Here's the things they wanted to learn.
Mercy, grace, submission, spiritual poverty.
Nobody was going to express political opinions on the stage, okay?
They say at some point in these promise keepers rallies, we did not come to exalt manhood, but God.
We're not here to be like, oh yeah, manhood's so important.
You know what we're here to do?
Exalt God.
Okay, let me give you some other things real quick about these promise keepers gatherings in the 90s, Dan.
Folks are talking about repentance, humility, and bowing down when it comes to racial reconciliation.
White men, black men, let's get together and reconcile.
We need to do this better.
Okay, hang with me now.
We need to recognize a history of racism in the country and what it's done to the American church.
And we need to fix that.
There was extended reflection at these gatherings.
50, 60,000 men in a stadium, many of them white, but some of them black, some of them people of color.
Extended reflection on who?
Martin Luther King Jr., the March on Washington, stuff like that.
If you watch this documentary and you look at some of the footage that I've looked at, You can see that manhood is not about killing bad guys.
You see that there's a celebration of manhood about dancing, crying, writing songs, and it's about the ultimate vulnerable man before God who is promising to go home and be a better dad and a better husband.
There's even somebody who says in the doc from the stage, your second job is to go home.
You have a job, nine to five.
Your second job is to be a good husband.
That includes washing dishes, right?
Why am I getting at this, Dan?
I'm getting at this because Christian manhood was a lot different, it turns out, 30 years ago.
Still problematic, a lot different.
9-11 happens.
Now, let me draw the threads together.
9-11 institutes a new chapter in American history where there now is a, quote, big bad other that America is fighting.
We all remember, at least old people like you and me remember, George W. Bush talking about the axis of evil.
Oh, here is an axis of evil we are going to fight.
And all of a sudden, the country And Christians especially are like, yeah, you know what's evil?
Those countries and Islam.
And we are the good.
We are Christian.
We are American.
We're democratic.
We're capitalist.
We're the good.
And all of a sudden, you see a different understanding of the country and the Christianity embedded therein.
And slowly but surely, you see a different form of Christian masculinity start to take root.
You start to see, Dan, A kind of militant masculinity.
You start to see a masculinity that says real men sign up for the armed forces and they fight Saddam Hussein or they go to Afghanistan.
And I'm not belittling anyone who did that.
What I'm saying though is all of a sudden that was tied into being a Christian man.
The Christian man who went home and prayed, who was vulnerable, who washed dishes, he's gone now.
The promise keepers of the 90s, racial reconciliation, that's gone.
You know what we have now?
We have godly warriors fighting the axis of evil.
I could talk about this for three hours.
I'm going to fast forward.
George W. Bush leaves office, Dan, and Mitt Romney runs, excuse me, John McCain runs against Barack Obama.
What is Barack Obama called?
A lot of things.
A lot of bad things.
But you know what the main focus is?
Obama was not born in this country.
Obama's a Muslim.
We do not get Obama is a Muslim as a slur.
Without 9-11 and the reaction to it.
9-11 gave the fodder, it gave the fuel, for George W. Bush and Christian nationalists all over the country to have an enemy that they were targeting, a big bad other that the United States had to squash, and guess what?
When it came to Barack Obama, he was labeled the internal enemy.
An enemy on our soil.
A Muslim, not born in the country.
Someone we can't trust.
Someone who hates America.
And I just want you to think about the through lines.
We get Islamophobia rampant after 9-11.
We get Christians who think Islam is the work of the devil.
We get Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.
and others making comments to this effect.
And then we get Obama's a Muslim, meaning Obama's bad.
We get Obama's not born in this country.
Now, who is the birther-in-chief?
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is the birther-in-chief.
Donald Trump is the one who thinks he is going to prove once and for all Obama's not born in this country.
And who is the man that once he is elected to office, Puts in effect a Muslim ban weeks into his administration.
It's Donald Trump.
He says, I want to stop all immigration from these countries until we figure out what the hell is going on.
That's what he said.
My point is this, Dan.
9-11 itself is a moment of deep tragedy and pain and trauma for this country.
What I'm talking about are the reactions to 9-11.
The reactions to 9-11 were really generative for a Christian nationalism that says, we are good, we're godly warriors, and we're going to go fight the axis of evil and destroy it.
In what comes to our politics, when it comes to who's the real Americans, Obama's not one of them because he's more like the axis of evil.
Then he is like the real American patriot.
And you know who we need eventually to get in there?
Donald Trump.
Right?
Because he is going to do the fighting that we need.
He's going to brutalize our enemies in the ways we want.
And now we're off and running.
Again, I could talk about this for the next three hours.
I have one or two more things I want to say.
But Dan, you lived through this.
You were in ministry during this time.
How does this sort of fit into your timeline and your understanding of, you know, Christian masculinity, Christian nationalism, and what happened in the years after 9-11?
I think you nailed the head on the Christian masculinity piece.
Like, exactly.
I think that's what it was.
It did transform What could have been a more reflective kind of vulnerable model of masculinity to something else?
I think touching on the racial component of Promise Keepers is key, because that's when they also lost a lot of their kind of white followers, and they're like, oh, nope, talking too much about, you know, pro-black stuff now, like, we're done.
So I agree with everything that you said in the masculinity piece and the way it also I think fixed in with that it tied in there were there were lots of really great cultural analyses of the time that would also talk about the kind of American myth of the reluctant hero right this kind of everybody knows the old western right the person who's the the good guy and they don't want to be violent and so forth but damn it if the authorities aren't going to do it we'll step in and do what needs to be done and the U.S.
kind of taking that role and that's wrapped up in I think a kind of American masculine mythos as well.
But I think like just on the, tied in with that on the political side, I think that 9-11 also made a certain kind of nationalism palatable again for people, right?
And people ask all the time, like, what's the difference between nationalism and patriotism?
And it's a thin line that can't always be easily defined.
And it made it okay to be sort of like rabidly pro-American.
I think, I think I mentioned in the last episode, right, that There was this working document already circulating among, you know, conservative thinkers in the GOP about that loss of an outside enemy and that America had kind of lost its global position and needed an outside enemy.
And like, all of a sudden, you know, the Green Crescent becomes the enemy, right?
The symbol of Islam.
And so that comes in, I think it makes it like sort of socially acceptable again to call the U.S.
a Christian nation in a way that it kind of hadn't been for a while because we're now standing against Islam.
Scholars of secularism will note that there's this weird hybrid thing that a lot of people in America have.
Call it Judeo-Christian secularism, where it's just this model that we're a secular nation, like we're really Christian, but we're a secular nation compared to like Islam or these other places or whatever.
It's like trying to kind of have your cake and eat it too and be like, we affirm others and we're tolerant and Muslims are bad, but as long as you're Christian, right?
It's wrapped up in the same time.
And I think you're right.
I think all of those seeds were sown, the cleavages between Democrats and Republicans.
Right.
At first, there was this great unity.
And then you started having people on the left who were like, whoa, hold on.
I'm not sure about the Patriot Act.
And all of a sudden, they're the enemies within.
Do they really love America?
They're soft on terrorism and just sort of on and on.
I think a lot of those rhetorical and ideological pieces, they weren't planted there.
They were there, right?
But they germinated, I guess, if we want to use that metaphor.
That's when they really sort of took root.
And we've talked years ago, right, when McCain passed away about, you know, McCain in that election tapping Sarah Palin as his running mate, and that this was another piece of sort of opening the floodgates To that populist element that fed in as well to his military background and a pretty hawkish stance.
I remember he's the one who said that, you know, if we need to be in Iraq for 100 years or whatever it was, then we can be there.
So, yeah, I think your analysis is right.
I think the masculinity piece is key.
I think the Christian nationalism and the Christian national identity becomes legitimized or sort of socially acceptable after 9-11 in a way that planted a lot of the roots that we're dealing with now.
So, let me just make two more comments.
One is about the masculinity, right?
So, Dan, we've talked on this show quite a few times about churches having men's conferences, men's retreats, and what are we seeing at those men's retreats?
We are seeing, and I'm, you know, go back and look this up in our archive, friends.
Go to straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and type this in.
But you can see this in churches that are saying, hey, men, let's all go away for four days into a campsite or a retreat center.
And you know what they're doing, Dan?
They're doing, like, war games.
They have, like, you know, these contests where men are, like, competing against each other in combat, and they have 14-year-olds with fake weapons that are training them.
There's, like, tanks on stage with, like, fake soldiers rappelling down with lasers and hardcore music, right?
Can you imagine, Dan, saying to that church, hey, why don't we do promise keepers?
Where, I don't know, we all get together, we talk about racial reconciliation.
If you mentioned racial reconciliation right now, they'd be like, woke, too woke, I can't believe you would even mention that, right?
And we're going to get into that basically in Florida here in a second, okay?
Let's talk about racial reconciliation.
Let's talk about being really good husbands and fathers who are what?
Vulnerable?
Who help out around the house by washing dishes and vacuuming.
Who, you know, take care of our kids in a way that is accepting and understanding.
That's the kind of stuff you heard at Promise Keepers 30 years later.
You know what you see?
Let's take the 14 year old boys out and teach them how to use AR-15s because that's what Jesus would want.
So that's changed a lot.
That's number one.
Number two, I think, you know, when we, well, let me stop.
Can you, can you explain what the Patriot Act is?
Because it's, it occurs to me that there's people listening and they're like, I don't remember what that is.
And it's literally called the Patriot Act.
Would you mind just giving us a minute on that?
Yeah.
So the first off topic, the Patriot, if you look it up, it's, you can Google it, you know, Wiki, you'll have a great thing on it.
It's, it's all capitals because every letter stands for something.
I can't remember what they all are, but it's like this, this uber American thing.
But the Patriot Act, it expanded basically surveillance.
It made it so it was easier for different federal agencies to get secret warrants to look at things.
It was a lot about listening in on phone conversations.
Really, now we would call it gathering metadata, like vast amounts of metadata that before the government couldn't have access to and then sifting through it and all these arguments about, you know, we're not going to do anything with it unless we see reasons to be alarmed.
And privacy advocates were like, I'm not so sure about that.
And a lot of things like that.
It was basically critics, including me, will say it was it was really about basically curtailing civil liberties to try to increase the ability to To track phone conversations, to try to keep an eye out for weird phone calls from foreign countries, to track people's movements and things like that.
But I think not technically probably part of the Patriot Act, but you also had all these other things like extraordinary rendition and other kinds of practices that really, really stretched the balance of what was legally permissible to do to non-citizens and things like that.
And again, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, a lot of people just sort of jumped on board with this.
Over time, as things sort of settled a bit, you started getting liberals and progressives and others who were really concerned about this and started wanting to sort of pull back on this.
But the genie was sort of out of the bottle.
So, yeah, it was this raft of legislation.
One was called the Patriot Act.
There were other ones, sort of like what it centered around, that really was about expanding surveillance abilities in the U.S., and there are lots of questions about the constitutionality of that.
Privacy rights, worries about profiling, other concerns about FBI infiltrating mosques and things like that.
So that whole raft of things is what we're talking about.
Well, and if you listen to scholars of Islam, scholars who study Islam in the United States, they will tell you that many Muslim American countries, or excuse me, communities in the United States, they're very aware that they're being listened to by the FBI because of the Patriot Act.
Like, you could be anybody who is part of a Muslim community, and most folks are pretty aware, like, we're probably being listened to just because we're Muslim, and we are in Los Angeles, or we're in Chicago, or wherever it may be, and that was at the hands of the Patriot Act.
Let me just say two more things and then we'll go to break.
One is, Dan, I think one of the things I would love for people to take away from this conversation is that 9-11, the response to it by the presidential administration and by larger forces at play, re-instantiated the Christian myth of the nation, as you said.
Therefore, right, you came to a place in the 2005s and the 2006s and the 2007s where people who were not necessarily Christian or churchgoers would be like, of course I'm a good American and I'm, yes, I'm a Christian because I'm against all of those terrorists and all of the, you know, those, those folks trying to destroy democracy and civilization.
Like the civilization myth, the good guy myth, was tied to a Christian myth.
If you're going to be the good country, it's not enough just to be a democracy, to be the United States, to be, right, a place with a constitution and freedoms or whatever.
It had to be a Christian country to be the really good country.
So you get a lot of people that are like, yeah, of course I'm a Christian.
Do they go to church?
Not really.
Do they read the Bible?
But being a Christian means not being Muslim.
And not being Muslim means not being a terrorist in these years.
And so it really reinstantiates the Christian country myth.
I'll say too, right, I can think of a place like France.
France has had terrorist attacks on its soil from various places, and in France you would never get, right, hey we were attacked and therefore we're going to refabricate our identity and regalvanize our national understanding of ourselves by saying we're a Christian country.
Like, there might be other insidious reactions, don't get me wrong, but it's never the way for us to be Americans is to be Christian.
But that's what happened in this country.
Last point is this.
After 9-11, you get rampant Islamophobia.
You get violence against Muslim people.
You get the Patriot Act, which is really used by the FBI and others to spy on Muslim communities.
You know what the overwhelming concern is?
Islam is bad.
Islam, Islam, Islam is going to get us.
That was the fear.
Sharia law?
Some of you are old enough to remember all the, no, Sharia law is creeping up in Mississippi or in Tennessee.
Really?
Okay, great.
All of that surveillance, all of that fear, and guess what happens 20 years later?
White Christian nationalists are the one that attack the effing GD capital.
20 years later, not to the day, but like a few months off, right?
It is White Christian nationalists overrunning the Capitol, stopping the peaceful transfer of power, trying to delegitimate a free and fair election.
All that fear, all that phobia, all that surveillance, all that hate, and guess who ends up Running over the Capitol, defecating in the halls, and really damaging our democracy, the white Christians, the white Christian nationalists.
Now, not all white Christians, and y'all can aggregate this and go all over the internet and say, Brad thinks that all the white Christians, that's not what I'm saying.
But I am saying white Christian nationalism was the driving force behind January 6th.
And it's really sadly poetic that it was 20 years after 9-11 and all the Islamophobia and hate that we're talking about today.
All right, Dan, final thought on this before we jump to a break.
Just my final thought, I looked it up because it was driving me crazy.
So it is, the whole name is the USA PATRIOT Act.
And what it stands for is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.
That is what USA PATRIOT stands for.
And it's ridiculous on a number of levels and so were the outcomes of it.
Appropriate tools.
All right.
I'm going to be, yeah, I got, there's a lot of things in my brain.
I'm going to leave in my brain.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
We'll talk about Florida.
Okay.
Dan Miller, Florida man.
You are the Florida desk chief of this show.
And we're not going to really, I mean, we will talk about DeSantis, but it's actually about something else here.
Indirectly DeSantis, but more black churches and black history.
So what do you got for us?
Florida has been marked, as everybody knows, by structured opposition to critical race theory, critical race theory in quotes there, limiting access and exposure to books and materials about race, as well as gender and sexuality and so forth.
Everybody knows and remembers the Fighting the College Board on the American History AP exam, adopting K-12 history standards, the whitewash American history.
We've talked about all of that.
All of that background is significant because There was some really interesting and I think really encouraging news this week about black churches in Florida sort of stepping up to fill what they see as a gap and to teach African American history that the GOP in Florida is trying to erase.
There's an organization, if people are interested in this, I invite you to just Google it, look them up online.
I spent a lot of time on their website this afternoon.
It's an organization called Faith in Florida.
And they describe their aims as quote building a powerful multicultural nonpartisan network of congregation community organizations in Florida that will address systemic racial and economic issues that cause poverty for our families.
So it's this kind of A faith network spearheaded in large part by African-American majority churches.
And what they did is they created an online toolkit to equip pastors, ministry leaders, teachers, and others to teach about African-American history.
And they describe it as responding to efforts to, quote, eradicate and water down African-American history in Florida, And I went to their website, as I said, and if you go there and you look at it, the section on black history provides resources on topics such as from Africa to America, racial terrorism and civil unrest, race, racism, and whiteness, black faith as resistance.
Brad, this is something we talk about a lot, is that when people talk about the African-American civil rights movement in this country, they often don't describe it as a religious movement, right?
And when people talk about things like religion and politics, they often Don't talk about the way that faith communities fight for rights of minorities and so forth.
They have another section on Black History is American History.
They have a section for children's resources.
They have a section linking to other online sources and invite people.
We get emails all the time from people who are like, the stuff you talk about is really cool, or I didn't learn about this in college, or I didn't learn about this in high school, or I didn't like, where do I go?
And they've got just great lists of books and resources and things like that.
But I think that this is really powerful and significant.
I want to watch and see what happens, how this plays out, when we talk about, people talk about, Christian support for the GOP, but what they often mean is white Christian support.
And Brad, I know you hear it, I hear it all the time.
Why do you talk about white Christians all the time, or just Christians?
Why do you always make it about race?
I don't make it about race, it is about race, and this is what shows that it's about race.
That these are majority black churches, and clearly there are white churches that support this, there are white Christians who support this, but it pushes against the narrative that the GOP and conservatives have that they are somehow the Christian party, right?
That they're the party that quote-unquote American Christians want to follow.
So, tied in with that, I also want to relate this interesting timing on this.
This news kind of comes out at the same time that a group of faith leaders in Florida has also organized to combat what they call the hateful political climate that has been created there.
And this is a group, again, a group called the Take Back the Mic Campaign.
It's a multicultural, multi-generational group of Christians.
This week, they had a group of college students delivering a letter calling on DeSantis and others to, quote, cease and desist from culture war rhetoric that they think is destructive and not productive.
They're marching to Jacksonville City Hall this weekend in a call to state leaders to end divisive language and legislation.
And the route will pass through the site where similar rhetoric spawned violence in 1960 in what in Florida is known as the Axe Handle Saturday.
It was sort of a violent attack on people of color.
The student organization March for Our Lives is a participating group.
They formed in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida back in 2018.
So, what we see in all of this, I see these things as related, they're not directly part of each other, but we see a sort of counter-movement of that dominant Christian nationalism in a place like Florida, and Florida's not going to be the end of it, right?
Seeking to tell African American stories to make sure that, as they say, African American history is American history.
We see faith communities beginning to push back.
One of the things we've talked about for years is the way that those Christian communities that are not part, especially white Christian communities that are not part of the kind of Christian nationalist movement, tend to not be very culturally visible.
There's a real space here, I think, for a lot of those different movements in the Black church to bring together a very different sort of perspective.
So all of this is going on this week.
Again, talk about Florida, not because it's Florida, but because I think it's sort of a bellwether in a lot of ways of where the GOP wants to go.
And I think of what, in this case, a faith-based resistance to that might look like and what shape that might take.
So I know you've been following this as well and toss it over to you for your thoughts on this.
Well, I just want to link it to the first segment about 9-11, right?
So I want to go back to Promise Keepers.
So here we are, it's 1997-1998, Promise Keepers.
And you have white men and black men, others.
My dad, I remember my dad went to Promise Keepers.
My dad's obviously Japanese-American.
And they're getting together in stadiums and talking about race.
Like, one of the reasons to go to Promise Keepers was to talk about race.
Like, that was one of the stated objectives.
The guy who started Promise Keepers, Coach McCartney, was like somebody who, in his family, there was adopted children or grandchildren who were black, and so this spurred him on.
It might have been Pacific Islander as well, I can't remember.
But he had this whole sort of personal story where he said, white Christians need to do racial reconciliation.
Okay.
So, If I ask myself, what happened between 1997-98 where all these white Christian men are going to gather with men of color, black men, and talk about race?
Now we're in a place where if you even mention race in Florida or so many places across the country, people are like, what are you doing?
Why you got to bring all that up?
There's no need for that.
We don't need wokeness around here.
I don't need your critical race theory.
Get off my, what are you doing?
Stop.
Stop being divisive.
Okay.
What happened?
And there's so many things to talk about.
We could spend 80 hours and a whole college seminar trying to figure out this question, but you know what one of them is?
One of them is a black president.
And a black president who was president for eight years.
And you know what?
For a lot of folks, it was one thing to say, yeah, there was racism in the past.
It's 1997.
Let's get together and hug and be better.
But you know, we just got attacked at 9-11.
And then they elected this guy Obama, who I think might be a Muslim.
So you know what?
No.
And if you just watch the progression, right, of American rhetoric, American Christian rhetoric, American Christian masculine rhetoric, it goes from racial reconciliation to, I kind of think the tides and the tables and the scales have been upset too much.
It's too much.
You want a black president with a black wife and black kids?
A guy named Hussein?
A guy named Obama?
What?
Are you serious?
No.
We're gonna get to a place now, and I recognize I'm skipping over 10 years of details, but we're gonna get to a place where if you even try to teach black history in our schools, we're gonna call you woke, we're gonna call you a radical leftist, and we're gonna tell you to get out.
So now, We need faith-based initiatives.
We need private civic groups to pick up the slack because the public sphere has been so poisoned that these things can't even be discussed, much less taught.
That is what goes through my brain as I hear about all these efforts.
Yeah, I think the one thing to, because I was reading about this this week, right?
And so people reached out to the Department of Education in Florida.
And of course, they didn't get back.
They had no comment, whatever.
One of the things I want to watch, because I am really, I don't know, intrigued, frustrated, infuriated.
Lots of feelings come with the fact that this notion that whenever the black church community is involved in these things, it's not coded culturally as religious.
It's coded as something else so it can be dismissed by, I think, a majority white Christian culture.
And I'm interested to see how that plays out over time.
It's not Christian, it's activist.
It's not religious, it's activist.
Exactly, right?
It's politics, that's not religion.
They're just about politics.
They're being divisive and so forth.
I'm interested to see how and if those attacks move forward when this is coming out of churches.
Right?
Not college classrooms, not historically black colleges, not a seminar room that you or I might teach in, but out of congregations and out of churches.
And I'm curious to see how, like what rhetorical moves are made to try to insulate broader society from that and to define this out of Christian identity.
Because I think that's what will happen.
It'll be defined as somehow not Christian or anti-Christian or not biblical or something, some way to say that these Christians aren't really Christians.
And that's part of the nationalist and populist game, right?
To say who the real Americans are, who the real Christians are.
But this, this takes us back to the like very beginnings of this show and some of the things we've talked about for five years now, but I wrote about it in my book.
I feel like you and I in the first years of the show talked about this almost every week, but I'm going to say it again.
One of the things that happened in this country mid-20th century was a really successful campaign to code Christianity as individual.
You and God, you and God, me and Jesus, personal salvation, personal relationship.
And if you code it that way, what you can then do is say to the black church that is organizing everything from a march, right?
You know, anywhere in the country to a teaching African American history, you can code that as activist.
You can code that as, well, that's not Christian.
They're just doing things related to identity politics, right?
And here's the way to think about it.
Anything collectivist is not religious.
And then you can whisk it away, right?
Real Christianity is about Ted Cruz or DeSantis or anyone else standing on stage saying, I believe the Bible and God bless America.
It's not actually about enhancing the public square as a group, as a collective.
And so I just think what they're going to, my guess, Dan, about what they're going to do, Is there going to say, well, this isn't real Christianity.
Those churches are woke.
They're leftist.
They're doing things that have nothing to do with the gospel or building the nation.
And they're just being divisive.
Right.
And that's why they're, you know, they're they're a problem and we shouldn't take them seriously.
And what happens and I'll just say I'll say this for the millionth time on this show.
When white Christians do things, they do them as Christians.
Oh, Mike Huckabee, the Christian candidate.
Ted Cruz, the Christian candidate.
Okay.
Nikki Haley, the Christian candidate, right?
When black Christians do things, they do them as black people.
Oh, that's black people working for the advancement of black people.
That's how it's sold in the media.
Oh, that's black people.
That's not Christian people.
Okay?
That's black people.
That's Asian people.
Right?
Those are, oh, Korean Christians are doing things?
No, no, no, no.
Those are just Asian people doing Asian things.
Whereas, when it is white Christians, it's Christian Americans doing Christian American things.
And that's the difference.
And I think that's what's at play here.
So, any final thoughts on this whole phenomenon in Florida before we move on to the child tax credit?
I will note that I think I was reading something from USA Today, and it was interesting because they did have this little thing when they're like, Black churches being on the forefront of the 1960s civil rights movement and the Quaker tradition, going all the way back to the Civil War and abolition movements and whatever.
I had two thoughts.
One was, I was like, that's good.
I'm glad that they are seeing this because that's often not talked about.
Exactly the point that you're making.
The other thought, though, was, like, it's really frustrating that it's notable that—oh, wow, look what they actually said.
They actually pointed out that this is not something new, that this is something that faith traditions in the United States, on this continent, have been doing for a long time, fighting for social justice, inequality, and so forth.
So, yeah, really just fascinating.
If I can get my emotion out of it, put on the Religious Studies Scholar hat, it's really, really interesting to watch, and we'll see where it goes.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about the child tax credit and some things surrounding that.
We'll be right back.
Okay, Dan, got a new report out this week that showed some statistics about American children who have reentered poverty.
And so I'll throw it to you to take us through it.
And I know both of us have thoughts on this.
So what happened with these stats?
Yeah, so we don't normally talk about tax policy that much on the podcast, but people will remember, especially if you're somebody who has kids, or maybe if you're somebody who's still a dependent of somebody who can claim you on their taxes and stuff.
During COVID-19, Congress enhanced what's called the Child Tax Credit, right, that basically gives you a tax bump.
Because you have dependents, you have kids that you have to care for.
It also enhanced the eligibility for low-income parents.
It made it easier for lower-income families to claim this, because the reality is if you make $150,000 a year, you don't need the child tax credit in the same way that you do if you make $35,000 a year, right?
So it did all of this, and we and others, we weren't unique in this, but lots of people said this is going to do huge things to combat child poverty in America, and it's As far as things go, a pretty easy thing to do, and it did.
In 2021, a record low, 5.2% of U.S.
children were in poverty.
a record low 5.2% of children were in poverty.
So it reached a record low, but the enhancements lapsed.
Congress chose not to renew them.
I'm going to throw it to you in a minute to take us through some of the figures who are there, but in 2021, as I say, you had a record low 5.2% of children.
Last year, the number jumped to 12.4%, right?
That is a 230% increase in child poverty, and it didn't just affect children.
The overall poverty rate was affected by this, but I think We're more concerned about child poverty here.
And that was a number that was higher than before the pandemic.
It was the highest number since 2010.
We've talked about before that if you want to win elections and do things like that, you know, show that you actually care about people, do things that will actually benefit people.
And this expansion of the child tax credit did that.
I'm just going to throw this out there.
It's no secret which party opposes extending this, right?
Democrats have been trying to get it, we're trying to make it permanent, have been trying to extend it ever since.
They don't have the votes to do it.
But I'll just point out that one of the reasons why you get, or one of the effects of so much culture war rhetoric on the right, is because one of the things that it does is it takes a lot of working class white Americans who benefit from something like an expanded child tax credit, right?
It obviously does not raise their taxes.
That's the point, right?
They get a child tax credit.
What it does is it makes them angry, and it makes them defensive, and it makes them sure that they're being attacked in a bunch of other ways.
And so all that energy goes to that, and it distracts nicely from the fact that the same party you're supporting Is not enhancing this policy that would benefit you, that would benefit your children, that would benefit people all over the country.
And that's just one of the effects.
And I think one of the stratagems behind the kind of endless culture war rhetoric on the right is to keep feeding a kind of economic beast that disadvantages lots of working class white Americans, among others.
Lots of poor white Americans, among others, who will gladly vote for a billionaire because he says that he opposes queer people and he opposes Black Lives Matter, all the while he and his party are taking money out of their pocket.
So that's me on my soapbox.
I'll step back.
What were your thoughts on this?
And I know that you have some choice insights on some of those congresspeople who are involved in not extending this policy.
Well, let's just, I'm always a fan of just trying to put things really plainly.
So if we put it plainly, we're the wealthiest country in the world, and we are choosing for this to happen.
This is not a scarcity situation.
This is not a, we just can't do it situation.
And you're like, well, prove it.
Well, here's the proof.
Since 2022, the proposed budget for the military in this country has gone up $100 billion.
So, and this comes from the black church tradition and its legacy.
Budgets are moral issues.
The way you budget your money shows what you care about.
And the way you budget your money, right, shows what values you have.
So the United States, under not only the Trump administration, but now the Biden administration, so it's all fair and game.
Sorry, on this show, we criticize everybody.
The Biden administration has proposed a military budget that is $100 billion more than it was in 2022.
Okay?
And yet we're letting a child tax credit expire.
That means American children are sliding into poverty.
So we don't have to live this way.
It is a choice.
OK?
And I just I feel like we need to point that out.
Now, as you say, Dan, one of the things I have said for a long time in the show is if you are a party that actually helps people, you might get past the rhetoric.
So if you're a party that says we're going to do things to help children have food on the table, Pre-K for everyone so that little kids can get educated and parents can go to work and not have to worry about paying for childcare, right?
Medi-Cal, Medicare, making sure people have health and they can survive.
If you do things like that, all of a sudden people might say, yeah, I heard on Fox News all this stuff, but who's helping me?
How did all that happen?
I just want this to continue.
So who's doing that, right?
And the child tax credit was one of those things we talked about way back in 2020 and 2021, right?
So one of the people that I've always just sort of looked to is like, you're one of the linchpins and we could blame all of the GOP senators.
We could talk about every one of them, okay?
But there's a Democratic senator named Joe Manchin who said that he worried that if you put money like this in the pockets of poor parents, they will use it for drugs.
And again, did he have any evidence for that, Dan?
Did he have any studies?
Did he have any books of data that showed when you give these communities money for their kids to eat, they use them on drugs?
He did not.
That was just an excuse, right?
It was a way to castigate lesser privileged people and provide him a justification for not extending the child tax credit.
It would have taken very little in the Senate for the Democrats to tip into the majority and make this a reality.
Joe Manchin was one of them that said, I don't care.
I'm an oil tycoon.
I'm an oil millionaire.
I have a yacht and I don't care if millions of children fall into poverty.
It doesn't matter to me.
Okay.
But this is a choice.
It's a choice.
We don't have to live this way.
And I will just say, when we look back in the history books, we will all be ashamed.
Okay.
That we lived in a country that was willing to spend the kinds of money that we spend on national defense and not feeding children.
That leads to a final point, and I'll throw it to you.
I always have all these points, and they all just come firing to my brain.
We have said it a million times.
Let's say it again.
You want to be pro-life?
You want to care about kids?
You want to be family values people?
Then help children.
Help children.
Help families.
Help families.
Dan, we don't have to get into it, but you and I have kids.
I have a little two-year-old.
I'm about to have another baby.
I pay a lot of money for my two-year-old to go to daycare every month because we both work, my wife and I, and there's just no other way to balance it.
And it's a ton of money, right?
Do you know how many people across the country would benefit if there was pre-K, if there was a child tax credit?
Let me just add some other things in there.
Universal school lunch.
Universal school breakfast.
Why do we look at that as like we're doing something that is criminal or bad when we give children food?
Why is it that you would say, yeah, there's some kids in my, in my, uh, in my school who, um, it's really better for them just in terms of their situation.
If they can show up to school and get breakfast, why would I not want that?
Why would I want to say, well, who's paying for it?
Who's paying for the a hundred billion dollars of military increased spend?
Who's paying for that?
Who's paying all those defense contractors, 10 miles outside of DC where I used to live, to build missiles and tanks and skim off the top, 40, 50, 100% higher than they need to?
Who's paying for that?
We are.
So don't talk to me about who's paying for universal school lunch, who's paying for Pre-K.
The same effing people, the same effing country, that's paying for tanks, missiles, bombs, and everything else.
Okay?
We're always paying for it.
It's just a matter of what we want to pay for.
And if you want to be about family values and life, why won't you support families and life?
Well, we all know the reason, but anyway, all right.
I've just about blown up.
My face is about to explode.
Your turn.
Go ahead.
Save me.
I don't think I'm going to be saving anything.
So, like, if you hit on something really key there, I think, with that whole notion of, you know, mansion, you know, it could be money used for drugs.
Talking to Uncle Ron, and this comes up, and Uncle Ron says, oh, what if the family's using it for drugs?
And just ask this, Uncle Ron, like, you know, I guess Uncle Ron's got a kid now, let's call him Jimmy, right?
You got Uncle Ron, probably, the child tax credit.
Did you buy drugs with it?
Did it even cross your mind to buy drugs with it, or did you do stuff for your kids, among other things?
Like, all the money you have to spend in a household to take care of your kids.
Like, oh, of course I took care of my kids.
Cool.
I think most parents, the vast majority of parents, want what's best for their kids, and they're doing the best they can with their kids, right?
And it's just that fundamental lack of empathy is just really, really striking, and I think it's carefully cultivated, right?
You talked about the moral dimensions of all of this, of positioning ourselves, if we're the, you know, the people who oppose this, as somehow good and moral and everybody else has to be demonized.
This is part of what it does.
It makes it so that it's not just Muslims who are bad, it's not just other countries, it's parents who have less money than us, I guess, you know, and so now they might use that money for bad things and we can feel better about not giving it to them.
Or you mentioned, you know, the universal school lunches and breakfast and things like that.
I live in a state, or at least a town, where everybody has access to school lunch.
I've had this conversation with people where she was like, oh yeah, well, what about the kid who already ate breakfast at home and then they go to school and get a second breakfast?
And I'm like, who cares?
If that means the kid who can't eat breakfast at home gets breakfast, I'm all for it.
I've got no problem.
No problem with that, right?
It's that kind of rhetoric that I think is just...
Sort of, I don't know, beyond the pale.
And like the last piece of it for me is this is the rhetoric people will hear, not just about this, lots of things where people say, well, you know, it's a moral issue because poverty is often a moral issue.
In America, there's often a deep, deep-seated sense that if people are poor or can't feed their kids, it's because they did something wrong, they don't work hard, they're lazy, they're bad people, whatever.
But you'll hear the, well, you know, you've got to fix, you can't just fix a problem by throwing money at it.
You know how many times in my life, in different contexts, I'm like, well, have we tried that, actually?
Have we tried throwing some money at it?
Have we tried hiring some more people?
Or have we tried feeding some more kids?
Like, let's give that a try.
All right, so now I'm going to blow a gasket, too.
So, yeah, it's infuriating.
Okay, real quick before we go, because now we're both on a roll.
I think we're all, we're ready to go now.
We worked up a sweat.
We could go for another two hours.
Let's just talk about 2023, okay?
We have, and this is from CBS News, y'all can find these articles, it is not hard.
The Department of Defense is being overcharged by contractors in the area of 40 to 50%, costing us taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
And do you know how many people at these barbecues, Dan, are like, yeah, what about these contractors?
I mean, you know, that missile was supposed to cost $5 million, but they charged us $10.
Can you believe these guys?
You know what that dad you're talking about at the barbecue is saying?
Yeah, can you believe it?
John over there eats breakfast at home, and then he goes to school, and it costs taxpayers $1.80 for him to have another breakfast.
Can you believe that?
Why do we worry about one thing and not the other?
There's a lot of reasons, but it's just so easy to punch down and feel morally superior than it is to look up and think, we're getting hosed by defense contractors and an $842 billion defense budget, and we don't even care because we just think more... You know what people always say?
You can't just throw money at it.
You know what they do say in this country?
More security, we'll be more safe.
More guns, more missiles, more tanks, we'll be safe.
That's what we always say.
And Patriot Act?
That'll make us more safe.
One more thing that we haven't talked about is you take away the child tax credit in one instance and then you know what you tell all those folks back home in your district if you're a congressperson or if you're in your state if you're a senator?
Man, that damn Biden, huh?
Look at these gas prices.
Wow, what a jerk he is, huh?
Do you know how many times I've gone to the gas station and there's like a sticker that's like, thanks a lot, Biden, because the gas prices are high?
I don't like high gas prices either.
But you can see here, right?
The game of playing on emotion.
Where is my anger directed?
Where's my irritation directed?
Where's my blame directed?
If I can just put it in the right spot, then nobody notices that I'm not feeding kids lunch or I don't care if they go into poverty because gas prices are high and blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
Last thought and or what is your reason for hope?
Because we got to cool down the jets.
We got to ice it down.
We're old.
We got to like make sure that when we finish at the gym, we stretch.
And so we got to just ice it down, Dan.
We got to calm down.
Otherwise, we're not going to make it.
So final thoughts and reason for hope.
Yeah, I'll just go to the reason for hope.
I'm sitting on an ice pack to cool myself down right now.
So it's, you know, it's already gone into effect.
No, mine, this week, approval for a new COVID booster, and I took hope from that.
And I think what is hopeful about this for me is, number one, like, they approved it on, I think, Tuesday, and I looked online, and I could start booking appointments on Saturday, which I think is really, really remarkable.
I also think, I think COVID is with us, but I think we're in a place where if people are responsible, we can manage it, just like the flu, getting flu shots and so forth.
I take great hope in that.
This week, you and me in Florida, I have to talk about Florida.
The Florida Surgeon General warned people in Florida not to take the vaccine, not to get the booster.
That's still with us as well, but I take great hope in the fact that it's here and it's regularized and my kids can have that vaccine as part of their standard fall regimen and it doesn't have to be the terrifying thing that it was, you know, three years ago when we were sort of in the midst of all of this.
So my reason for hope is very personal and very, in some ways, centered on what we do here at the show.
But this week, just yesterday, in fact, we helped to launch Inform Your Resistance, which is a new podcast from Political Research Associates.
And if you don't know about PRA, What they do is they study the far right and the American right in this country, and they really dig deep.
So there's a lot of voices out there, a lot of people out there that are going to tell you things that they think they know about what's happening in the far right or the alt-right or whatever.
PRA is the real deal.
They employ researchers who spend their working hours digging into abortion abolitionists and Christian homeschooling and neo-Nazis and fascists and all kinds of things.
So we just released an episode on Inform Your Resistance about abortion abolitionism.
So, if you are interested in the extreme abortion movement, you should check out Inform Your Resistance.
We'll be releasing episodes every two weeks.
There's one on surveillance and racialized capitalism coming up.
There's another on Christian homeschooling, another on NatCon conventions, and so on.
So, it's a really good show.
I know there's a lot of podcasts out there, but I'm going to say I think it's good news that Inform Your Resistance exists.
And guess what, Dan?
On Monday, Andrew Whitehead's show, American Idols, premieres.
So, you all should get ready for that.
Okay, if you'd like to support us, here's a bunch of ways.
Check out our Venmo, PayPal, Patreon in the link tree.
Axis Moondi Media is up and running.
If you'd like to support us there, go to Axis Moondi Media on Substack and become a paid member.
That's like a really direct way.
We will keep you updated on all we're doing and that's something that would help us right now.
Other than that, you can follow us at Straight White JC, me at Brad the Onishi, and we'll be back next week with the weekly roundup and an interview, and it's in the code, I have to say, right here at the end, Dan.
My wife is due soon, so I'm hoping to be here next week, but if the baby comes early, I will not be, and I'll see you all on the flip side.
