Fascism is Our New Normal III is coming tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the first episode of the new Axis Mundi Media series On God's Campus.
Chloe, Paul, and Erin set the stage for On God’s Campus by giving in-depth background information from their personal lives, upbringings, and the ways that they are directly connected to LGBTQIA+ discrimination on religious college campuses.
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Produced by Crystal Cheatham of Our Bible App: https://www.ourbibleapp.com
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy Hi, I'm Chloe Gio, and you're listening to On God's Campus, Voices from the Queer Underground, a podcast about white Christian supremacy and being queer on the most conservative campuses in the country.
Think of me as your guide and translator as we explore the carefully constructed subculture of religious education.
Joining me are co-host Paul Carlo Southwick, a resident legal expert and historian, and Erin Green, our biblical scholar.
What you will find here is a roadmap to change from the underbelly of the church's best kept secrets.
Let's try an experiment.
Go outside and ask some random strangers why being gay is wrong.
If you're in a red state, like the one I grew up in, odds are that most of those people would say because it's a sin or it goes against the Bible.
Even if they aren't religious, they suddenly reach for this argument.
The U.S.
was built on this idea of a separation of church and state, but in many ways, the Puritan Christian values of the people who colonized this land have shaped this country into a Christian nation whether we agree with it or not.
After all, as the mighty dollar reads, in God we trust.
As we unpack some of the most fascinating Supreme Court cases at the center of this clash between human rights and religious liberty, it will become crystal clear that among the greatest threats to human rights and democracy in the United States are the thousands of taxpayer-funded Christian schools, colleges, and seminaries that are being positioned as pawns in a larger political fight against so-called woke ideologies and liberalism.
So much for the separation of church and state, am I right?
At age 11, my mother gifted me a life application Bible.
It has a red, leather-bound cover.
The spine is now broken, but I keep it held together by red duct tape.
The pages are worn.
Some texts are highlighted and underlined, especially the texts about homosexuality and abortion.
As a little kid, I had no idea that this version of the Bible had been hijacked by a political movement.
And I had no idea how the leaders of this movement and the teachers at my religious schools would over the next 15 years of my life weaponize scripture to draft my brain and body in service to whiteness and Christian supremacy.
When I was 12 years old, I had a teen New Testament study Bible entitled, The King and the Beast.
But before you actually read any of the New Testament's words, this Bible had special articles driven and geared toward teens on topics like gender roles, homosexuality, the end times, drugs, and alcohol.
When I got to the end of this, I signed a document asking Jesus into my heart, with a promise that I would be obedient.
And I adhered to that biblical document until I was 19, when I had my first relationship with a woman, who also happened to be my best friend.
On God's Campus, Voices from the Queer Underground is a podcast about white Christian supremacy, specifically about the educational pipeline of white Christian supremacy at schools, colleges, law schools, and seminaries.
In this three-part series, Paul, an attorney, and Aaron, a biblical scholar, give us a glimpse behind the curtain at America's most conservative educational institutions.
These educational institutions enroll tens of millions of students from pre-K through PhD.
They include your local Catholic and Lutheran schools and colleges like Liberty University, Bob Jones University, Hillsdale College, Baylor, Yeshiva, and BYU.
We come from these communities.
I went through this educational pipeline.
I became a child soldier.
If you don't know, the Family Research Council is an anti-LGBTQ hate group that grew out of focus on the family.
And if you grew up in an evangelical family like I did, think Adventures in Odyssey.
But if you don't know who they are, you will soon.
Okay, back to Paul.
At the age of 23, 12 years after I first picked up that Life Application Bible, I entered what would be my final training camp as a Blackstone Legal Fellow at Alliance Defending Freedom, the most powerful legal advocacy organization for white Christian supremacy in the world.
And it almost killed me.
Paul is now an attorney and activist who, for the past 12 years, has been trying to make sense of how he went from being a little homeschooled kid living on a farm to a dangerous weapon of the religious right.
What I have learned is this.
Among the greatest threats to human rights and democracy in the United States are the thousands of predominantly white religious schools, colleges, and seminaries that provide an unregulated ecosystem in which white Christian supremacy thrives, And marginalized people are abused.
Just to set this up, we want you to know that we put together this podcast to uncover the very real political threat posed by the educational pipeline of white Christian supremacy.
These educational ecosystems play a major role in the culture wars we see erupting today around things like Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, don't say gay, and anti-trans legislation.
We aren't born with racist or transphobic beliefs.
They are taught to us by our families, our churches, and our schools.
The pastors and priests who preach against homosexuality, abortion, and Black Lives Matter are taught these messages at predominantly white religious schools.
These schools are often controlled by a religious hierarchy, or board of directors, composed of older white Christian men.
Or those they have taught to think like them.
Such that voluntary changes in racist or homophobic policies and beliefs are extremely difficult and rare.
Under these circumstances, I have witnessed generation after generation of students, faculty, and staff quietly and gently, and sometimes not so quietly and gently, try to make their schools and colleges safer and more inclusive.
These efforts have generated underground networks of students, staff, and faculty.
Some underground networks focus on providing community and safety.
Others organized to push their schools in the direction of human rights.
I happen to lead one of these underground movements at Biola University.
We called ourselves the Biola Queer Underground.
But the conservative religious leaders at these schools are pushing back.
They are drawing lines and purging progressive faculty and staff.
They are shoving students back in the closet.
They are disrupting our underground networks.
This backlash creates real hardships for the people involved.
On God's Campus is about more than just the ideologies being taught in these schools.
It's about the people and their stories.
It's about what life is like when you go to one of these schools, but you don't fit the mold because you are black, or queer, or trans, or need an abortion, or aren't a certain kind of Christian.
It's about what life is like when you are the one your school teaches you to hate.
I trusted my teachers, pastors, and other leaders to explain the Bible to me and its relevance to my life.
As a queer person receiving and internalizing their messages, they will never truly know how deeply they taught me to hate myself.
And Paul is not alone.
There are many of us.
Rejected, abused, harassed, and silenced.
Some of you are students or faculty at these schools now.
Some of you are alumni, or you may know people associated with schools like these.
The degrees of separation aren't that large.
That's something you'll discover through Paul's story.
Despite their differences, all of these schools have one thing in common.
To varying degrees, and based on sincerely held religious beliefs, they erase and punish queer, trans, and non-binary identities, and people who have abortions or become pregnant while unmarried.
Sometimes, they give such students 24 hours to pack their bags and leave.
Most schools are not so cruel, but some are.
Sometimes they send us to conversion therapy, I say "us" because this is my story too.
Okay, so something I've been wondering as I'm hearing all of this is: What is a religious school?
Or a religious college?
Is it a church?
Is it an educational institution?
Does it indoctrinate or educate?
Does it do both?
And then, should a religious school or college be completely autonomous and immune from government regulation?
Like, who gets to decide what it teaches, who it teaches, and who it allows to teach?
For me, I was taught that religious colleges are more like churches than schools.
Chapel is often mandatory, we sometimes pray before class, and while we learn secular subjects, they're taught from a Christian worldview.
I was also taught that for pretty much any religious institution, religious freedom is paramount.
That religious institutions are above the law.
And for those of us who are outsiders on the inside, we have been taught that we do not deserve legal protections, because we are the ones to blame.
But let me ask you this.
Should our perspective change if the religious school has let a predatory priest go from school to school molesting children?
What if a religious school tells a survivor of sexual assault to just forgive her assailant and that she will be expelled if she is pregnant and has an abortion?
These are not hypotheticals.
These are our stories.
There should be a point at which we are all allowed to stop blaming ourselves for our abuse.
There should be a point at which our government protects us from our abusers.
We live in a secular democracy.
Do we not?
I want to give a content warning here for the next few minutes as we discuss sexual abuse and suicide.
It's important to acknowledge that sexual abuse within religious institutions is common.
Power disparities, abuse of trust, and autonomy from government oversight allows abusers to harm youth on a massive scale.
As an example, earlier this year, it was reported that in the state of Illinois alone, nearly 2,000 children were sexually abused by more than 450 Catholic leaders.
In another example, it was reported in 2022 that the founder of a Christian college in Indiana sexually assaulted up to 200 young men.
Is this the price we pay for religious liberty? - Should our answer to the question of religious liberty change if the religious school doesn't allow black students to enroll, Or black teachers to teach?
Or black students to date white students?
or black history to be taught accurately.
Thousands of whites-only religious schools and colleges operated throughout the United States, even through the 1970s.
And at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian college at the heart of a legal dispute that sparked the rise of the religious right, A ban on interracial dating persisted until the year 2000.
And in 2023, at least two Christian colleges fired white professors because their teachings on racial justice went too far for these white Christian spaces.
Should our answer to the religious liberty question change if gay and trans students in these schools are harming themselves, even killing themselves, at an alarming rate?
Would your answer change if I told you that one of those students was me?
Reports of suicide and suicide attempts by queer, trans, and non-binary students at religious schools and colleges are common.
In fact, research shows that on Christian college campuses, queer students are three times more likely to seriously consider suicide than straight students, and trans students are five times more likely to seriously consider suicide than their cisgender peers.
In November 2022, a trans student at Redeemer University died by suicide in the student counseling office.
They left a note begging the Christian College to support its LGBTQ plus students.
The note said, it didn't have to come to suicide, but it did.
Don't let it happen again.
We should think of the mental and physical traumas inflicted by religious educational institutions as a public health crisis.
As an epidemic within this community.
I'm asking you to think of it that way.
If we don't start thinking of this as an emergency situation, kids will keep feeling tormented and alone.
Some will abuse alcohol or other drugs to escape.
Others will die by their own hands.
Some people might say that while these stories and statistics are tragic, we're talking about private religious institutions and they should be allowed to make their own rules, even if those rules have severe consequences for some people.
But what if the religious school or college is primarily supported by your taxpayer money?
What many people in this country don't know is that all of us financially support these religious schools and colleges.
Tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money flows from the federal government and state governments to these schools.
Liberty University alone, which enrolls 100,000 students, receives about a billion dollars in government money every year.
So what do you think?
Should the government regulate the schools and colleges that it funds?
Should taxpayer money go to schools and colleges that expel gay and trans students?
Is there a danger to human rights and our democracy if government money flows to these kinds of unregulated educational institutions?
Listen in and answer these questions for yourself, as On God's Campus examines the lessons history has to teach us about where predominantly white Christian educational institutions and the political machine that's backing them are taking the country now.
In the first episode of this series, we're going to examine why religious schools and colleges fought for exemptions from civil rights laws in the first place.
and we'll find out that the goal was to preserve anti-black racism.
We'll talk about the racist policies at Bob Jones University, a Christian college in the South, and the federal government's response to those policies.
And we'll introduce you to Elizabeth, a gay Bob Jones University student whose story links the past with the present.
In episode two, we're going to look at how religious schools and colleges are claiming exemptions from civil rights laws now in the context of sexual orientation and gender identity.
We will learn about the landmark and ongoing case of Hunter v. The U.S.
Department of Education, which challenges the constitutionality of the religious exemption to Title IX.
We will look at Lincoln Christian University, located in Illinois.
And introduce you to Kaylee, one of the student plaintiffs in the Hunter case, who was recently expelled from there for being trans.
In episode three, we're going to highlight the stories of the students, staff, and professors who are fighting back against religious exemptions.
We're going to call on you to join them in this struggle, to demand safety, inclusion, and bodily autonomy from the administrators at these schools and colleges.
We'll introduce you to student-led movements at Baylor University, BYU, and Seattle Pacific University.
Hey, that's where I went!
And we'll give you the resources and personal connections so that you can join the movement now.
Legal and political battles over the conflict between religious liberty and civil rights are heating up everywhere.
In Congress.
At the Supreme Court.
In your state legislature.
At your local school board.
This is also happening inside of our churches, denominations, and in our seminaries.
Despite all the progress for LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedoms, and racial justice in our country, the Supreme Court is now poised to erode those rights on a massive scale.
The reversal of Roe v. Wade last year was only the beginning.
We will continue to see a rollback of our civil rights because of a political and religious movement led by people committed to whiteness and Christian supremacy.
Unless we can stop them. - Thanks for tuning in to On God's Campus, voices from the queer underground.
I'm your narrator, Chloe, alongside co-hosts Paul Carlos Southwick and Aaron Green.
This podcast is a product of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project and is produced by Crystal Cheatham from Our Bible Lab.
