Brad and Dan begin by discussing the porn-accountability app that Speaker Mike Johnson uses with his son. They explain how apps like these are a feature in evangelical circles and how they are a part of the purity culture landscape. Dan then zooms out to explain why he doesn't buy the idea that contemporary Christian nationalism, as it embodied in Johnson, is not a divergence from American history. Neither host agrees that this is just a matter of normal patriotic Americans being corrupted, but is instead an outgrowth of a long history.
In the final half of the episode the hosts go through the good news in this week's elections on the issues of abortion, school boards, and the election of one of the nation's first trans state senators. The question: What does this mean for 2024 and beyond?
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Subscribe now to American Idols: https://www.axismundi.us/american-idols/
To Donate: venmo - @straightwhitejc
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
SWAJ Book Recommendations - September 2023: https://bookshop.org/lists/swaj-recommends-september-2023/edit
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
You too.
I know we have to record early because you're off to go see a big concert, and you explained to me what they are, but now I'm going to admit I have no idea what you were talking about.
So what kind of music are they?
Don't tell us the name of the band.
No, no, I won't.
It's a Scandinavian band.
They used to be a doom metal band.
So now everybody's like, oh my God, Miller listens to doom metal.
And I don't listen to doom metal often because I don't like the way that the vocal style is.
But the guy hurt his throat at some point, had to change his style.
They have a very unique sound.
They're playing down in Hartford, which is like an hour from me.
And it's like 45 bucks because they don't have a huge American audience.
Surprise, surprise.
So he hurt his throat and now they're like a jazz trio or a Moby cover band or something.
All right.
Very good.
I think they wear cargo shorts and drive minivans, I think, is what they do.
All right.
Well, have fun with that this afternoon.
Before that, we need to talk about a bunch of stuff.
So friends, I know a lot of you are wondering, are we going to talk about Mike Johnson and this whole creepy porn app thing?
And the answer is yes.
So we'll talk about that.
Going to use that to talk about larger trends when it comes to Christian nationalism in the country and just some recent comments and commentary from folks on that.
And then we're going to spend basically the last half of the episode talking about the elections that took place this week, the ways that Democrats really did have a good night and Democrats maybe is the wrong way to put it, Democrats won, but reproductive rights were on the ballot and those came through.
There's also just good news, you know, in places like Virginia and Pennsylvania when it comes to Moms for Liberty losing and other things like that.
So we'll get into some of those details.
But Dan, let us start with the now infamous app called Covenant Eyes.
So Johnson said, well, not said, there was some resurfaced, I think is the way people put it, resurfaced footage of Mike Johnson talking about this app, Covenant Eyes.
And he explains that he uses this app, which basically monitors everything you look at, not only on your computer, but on your phone.
And you choose an accountability partner and they get a report if you look at anything that is deemed sexually explicit.
So Dan, if you and I were accountability partners in this case, and we signed up for this app, if I looked at something sexually explicit, you would get a message or an email that said, you know, Onishi's over there looking at something sexually explicit.
Okay, great.
I regret even using that example because I'm now uncomfortable even thinking about that scenario.
This is all getting very weird.
I had a guest speaking thing this week talking about trauma and I talked about breaking out in a cold sweat and like the heart rate.
And so, yeah, I just want everybody to know that you've now traumatized me on the episode.
So, thanks.
Now, a lot of folks are shocked by this because not only does he use the app, he says that his accountability partner is his 17-year-old son.
So it seems to just get worse and worse and worse and worse, right?
Like, how can this be what's happening?
Now, I want to talk for a minute, as a former insider, because I know some of you are living in, have lived in, Church spaces, Christian spaces that are like the ones that Mike Johnson comes from, Southern Baptist, Evangelical, so on and so forth.
Others of you are not, and you're like, that can't be real.
That's not real.
Is that real?
So I want to tell you, friends, that it is very, very real.
And I'll just share some stories, Dan, from my past, and I'll let you jump in here.
But it is very much a part of a couple of things, evangelical culture and especially purity culture, to have a situation where you try to set up accountability For your sexual life, in essence.
So I will just say when I was in the youth group in the 90s, being a 16-year-old boy, a 17-year-old boy, I remember that during, I think it was my junior year of high school, every Monday I would go after school to an accountability group with about five other boys my age.
And it was a time where we were meant to kind of talk about what had happened for us that week in terms of our sexual sin.
Because in these spaces, to even think about sex is a sin if you are not married.
And then if you are married, if you think about sex in any way, that does not include your spouse.
And this could be as simple as I'm walking down the street, I see someone I'm attracted to, I have a sexual thought or impulse or something.
And this all goes back to Matthew 5.
If you look at a woman with lust, you've already committed adultery in your heart.
Or even just noting that they're attractive, right?
Depending on how much it is.
It doesn't even have to be explicitly sexual.
It can be any sense of like, wow, that person's really pretty, or that guy's really handsome, whatever.
It's a very movable target of what sort of qualifies as quote-unquote sexual.
Yeah, this does not have to be just graphic sexual imagination.
This can be like, you know, I'm at the gym noticing somebody's shoulders and it's up.
I mean, it can be something as a crush sort of thought rather than a epic, most intense internet pornography you can imagine kind of thought.
So this is a real thing.
I will say, Dan, that even back In the late 90s and early 2000s, there were programs and there were discussions in church about putting blockers in place so that you could not access certain websites.
So I do remember those discussions, and I do remember somehow trying to set that up on computer, talking with people in the youth group and youth pastors and saying, yeah, that would be good to set up, and those were good protections.
So this persists, and what has happened in the internet age, and this is what is happening with Covenant Eyes, the history of Covenant Eyes, if you go back, there's a really good piece in The New Republic about this by Melissa Ghira Grant.
There's a really good piece by a friend of the show, Kelsey Burke, who's a professor at the University of Nebraska at At Slate, so you can read both of those.
But Covenant Eyes goes back to this idea of a guy who had a teenage daughter who was using her phone to sext, in essence, with her boyfriend.
And so they were sending back messages that were sexual in nature, right?
17-year-old people dating, they're using their phones to sort of do this.
All right, you all know the story.
So he's like, hey, it's not enough to protect the computers.
We have to protect the phones as well.
So it's even kind of more creepy because now we have this dad and he's sort of trying to be in on the most intimate communications of his like 17 year old daughter.
And that's a whole other thing.
I just want to introduce this by saying this is a very real thing.
If you've lived in this culture, you might have been grossed out by the news, but none of it surprised you, because this is how this operates.
So, I'll make one comment, Dan, and then I'll throw it to you.
There's a really weird but-her-emails history to our republic.
But-her-emails.
Hillary Clinton, but-her-emails.
And here we have the new Speaker of the House saying that he's installed on his phone this monitoring app, and it knows every website he's gone to.
Above and beyond all of the weird, cringy, conservative Christian purity culture dynamics of knowing what your son is looking at and having an email sent to your son if you go to the wrong website.
You know, that's also a national security issue, it would seem.
So I have a bunch of thoughts, but I just wanted to open today by saying, yes, we're scholars.
Yes, we study this stuff, but we've also lived it.
I have very lucid memories of these kinds of apparatus and techniques being used to govern people's sex lives.
I have memories of sitting in meetings with other 16 and 17 year olds saying, yeah, this week, you know that girl in English who sits in front of me?
I, you know, I just, she's really cute.
And I think maybe I thought about her being cute for too long.
So I messed up and I sinned.
I remember, I'll tell you some, and I've shared these before.
I'll share one more before I throw it to you, Dan.
I remember I'm a surfer.
I, back in those days, the internet was just sort of coming into vogue.
So we still got magazines and I subscribed to like two surfing magazines.
You come home from school when you're 15, 16.
It's a great day.
The new surfing magazines here.
Yeah.
I can't wait to look at it.
But I had trained myself to go through the magazine and rip out any of the like ads or pictures that included like people in bikinis because I didn't want to quote unquote be tempted into lust and adult.
Right.
So one of the exercises I would do is like I would open the magazine and just sort of brace myself with every bit of willpower I had, go through it, any sort of sexual image or not even sexual image, but just an image with people not wearing much clothes.
I had to rip out and then it was safe for me to like look at the magazines.
So it's that kind of stuff that happens in these cultures that this Covenant Eyes app is only an extension of, right?
It's so cringy that Mike Johnson says he uses it.
It's another layer that, you know, his son is his accountability partner.
But I'll leave it to you for some other thoughts.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I'm like you, like so many.
And I grew up in that culture as well, so again, none of this is weird or surprising.
One thing that I just thought was humorous once upon a time is when I was in seminary, the computers at the seminary had those filters, right?
So there were certain terms you couldn't like.
Google search, or whatever search we were using then.
I don't remember if it was fully Google yet, but whatever.
And it would block certain words.
And one of the things about these accountability groups, because this is all a completely cis, heteronormative sort of context, right?
So another emphasis on this always was, in my circles, that your accountability partner needed to be somebody of the same gender.
And so, ironically, people were trying to do a project in seminary and they couldn't look up anything with same gender or same sex in the filter, so they couldn't look up stuff about how to form Christian accountability groups because the filter wouldn't let them.
Taking any funny stories out, though, There's so much to me that this says about what I think is a feature of evangelical subculture.
We're going to talk about this a little bit.
I know there are the people who want to point at the positive things of evangelical subculture.
I got somebody who listens to what I say, I guess a lot because he really doesn't like any of it, posted in my Facebook message this week.
I get messages from him occasionally.
It was just about how much hate I have in my heart toward evangelicals.
Fine, whatever.
But there are parts of this that are real.
It could be well-intentioned, but it has always felt to me when I was in these contexts, there's such a sort of prurient interest And here's all this stuff we're not allowed to talk about or do or whatever, so let's create these spaces where we're going to be a bunch of guys talking about our sexual fantasies.
Or we live in a culture that objectifies women and we shouldn't support that, whatever, but we're going to profess the ways that we have been thinking things about people that maybe we all know and we're going to talk about that.
That's weird and problematic.
The gender dynamics of fathers and kids in general, but daughters when fathers have to play this role of policing their daughter's sexuality and so forth.
A whole nother thing we could talk about purity culture, the phenomenon of like purity balls and things like this.
There's a docket.
Yeah.
Let me just stop.
Okay.
Let me stop.
Some people just skidded their car.
They like, you know, uh, as some people dropped a dish they were washing.
Okay, so friends, Dan was neither being funny nor erroneous.
There are things called purity balls.
They're not sex toys or any other novelty item you might get at a funny birthday party.
They are actually balls where a dad will take his teenage daughter and basically be- As his date.
As his date.
He will be the stand-in for her future husband and for Christ.
She will dedicate herself to purity as a kind of Christian princess and debutante.
And it's a whole kind of ritual, very cringey coming-of-age rite of passage kind of Perfect situation.
So if you are interested in that, you can look that up.
Purity balls are a real thing.
Be careful where you Google it and just be ready.
Okay, Dan, back to you after that.
It's like the old days of the internet where you put in anything and terrible websites would come up.
It's like living that again.
But there's a documentary about these that I've used in religion and pop culture and other classes where I teach about the purity movement and they talk There's a person who, without any irony, is somebody who participates in these.
Her husband and her daughter are part of this, and she says something like this.
I'm not getting it word for word, but I'm not making it sound weirder than it is.
She says, a lot of people say this seems incestuous, but it's not.
If you have to start your sentence about helping your kids learn about sex and sexuality with, a lot of people say it's creepy or incestuous, but it's not, you maybe need to rethink what you're doing.
There's that.
I have a teenage kid.
I want her to have happy, healthy, fulfilling sexual experiences, and I think that's different at 13 or 14 than it is at 17 or 19.
Under no circumstances am I going to be like, Trolling, you know, going through her phone and looking at every image or things like that.
I'm going to try to, as best I can, shape her into the person that, you know, can make those decisions.
And that's what evangelicals say that they do, but they put up all of these, this culture within evangelicalism, puts up all these kind of external barrier people coming out of this who have no idea how to deal with sexuality or sexual desire.
Or mental health people will talk about hypervigilance.
That's when you are so worried all the time about thinking or doing things that it becomes intrusive and disrupts your life.
This form of spiritual practice builds this in.
There's a Bible verse, bringing every thought into captivity for Christ.
That's you as a teenager tearing out all the photos in your magazine and trying not to look at them as you tear them out so they can't take root.
Or somebody who I had this inner monologue where I would think something immediately.
I would pray for forgiveness.
I would confess it.
It was this literally obsessive kind of practice.
So, I feel like it's damaging on so many levels.
I think it's problematic the ways that abuse gender, the way that it thinks about sexuality.
I guess the last thing I would say is that one of the things about these accountability practices Within evangelicalism for me, they always felt so unforgiving and so non-redemptive.
You would have these people who were in this position.
They were supposed to be mentors, not your 17-year-old son.
Typically, I was a teen or college student most times.
People who are your peers, maybe they're a little bit older, a little bit further along in life, they're supposed to be mentors.
Often, there was just so much guilt and judgment and shame that came as a result of this kind of confessing and sharing and so forth.
I find it damaging and creepy in so many ways, but not weird within that context.
This is the same evangelical context where people spend hours and hours and hours watching movies so they can compile how many swear words they have or how many sex scenes they have and tell you why you shouldn't watch them.
All while they sit or watch them.
Or I think you were alluding to this when I was a pastor.
I had an experience once as a pretty young naive pastor.
A guy kind of comes on board to this college group and we're going around in a prayer circle just sharing things we're struggling with in life.
And it turned into this super creepy thing where he goes into great detail about his pornography viewing habits.
And it turns out he was a pretty questionable quasi-predatory person who is using this way of doing things to feed that.
It's just so many problems with it.
I think this is all part of it.
And unfortunately, it's pretty typical in a lot of that evangelical subculture.
So I just want to say that this is a good chance for us to talk about why evangelicals are so obsessed with sex and what this mindset I think does, because we're speaking as people who Friends, I'll stop you right now, and if you're interested in this as it relates to men and masculinity, I did a whole series called Mild at Heart.
You can go to straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and just search Mild at Heart, okay?
But Dan, I want to say that, and I wrote about this for The Revealer when the Atlanta massacre happened.
If you all remember, about two years ago, a man killed nine people in Atlanta, seven of whom were women of Asian descent.
He came out of evangelical purity culture.
What that example did for me and what that whole episode did, as tragic and as unimaginable as it was, is that it highlighted how You're really taught that the people you're attracted to are always sexual in nature, right?
Like, it's very impossible in this culture to be somebody who says, yeah, I'm 16, I'm 26, I'm 36, I'm 46, and I have a friend, right, who is, I'm a man, I'm a heterosexual man, I have a friend who is a woman.
It is impossible for me not to think of that person as a potential sexual stumbling block, sexual tempter, sexual entity that will lead to my, you know, committing these kinds of sins.
This is why Mike Pence doesn't have dinner with and is never alone with women other than his wife, because it's the Billy Graham rule and it's this whole culture of that.
This is why Mike Johnson has this app.
What it does, Dan, is it really inhibits your ability to have healthy human relationships with anyone in the world without seeing them as inherently sexual.
So it's this whole thing where this culture is trying its best to get people to avoid sex.
By talking and obsessing about sex all the time, to the point that if you're a youth group kid in the 90s or the 2000s, you know that every other lesson in the teenage youth group was about sexual purity, keeping your thoughts pure, how to resist temptation when you go on a date with your boyfriend or girlfriend, why holding hands is probably as far as you should go before marriage, all that stuff.
Because it is this weird situation Where it's like, you know, humans are only happy and healthy if they have sex in marriage.
Humans are not sex objects.
That's the sheen.
But you know what this does?
It reduces you to a sexual being and little else.
Because it basically says your entire life revolves around you.
Trying to be not the thing that you are, which is an uninhibited sexual animal that is prone to all kinds of sin and going astray.
And so there's this very odd paradox at the heart of this culture.
That leads to an obsession with sex in an attempt to eradicate sex and so on and so on and so on.
So any any final thoughts on that, Dan, before we we move on?
I mean, there's a long history here, again, of Mike Pence.
You know, we can talk about Billy Graham.
We can talk about, you know, all kinds of different politicians and the ways that these things are inhibited.
I'll just say one more thing.
This is in my head.
Sorry.
Is it this is part of why an American culture at large, but especially this religious culture that we're talking about.
We don't have any conception that nudity and nakedness is anything but sexual.
Right.
Here's and here's what I mean by that.
There are many cultures in the world where there are situations where people are unclothed and nude, and that is not me.
It is a sexual situation.
And, you know, sometimes you have Americans who get very shocked by this when they go hang out in northern Europe.
You ever hung out in northern Europe?
You know that everyone in the sauna, men and women, right, might be nude or you might go to the swimming pool or the beach and there's just various levels of clothing going on.
And to the American sort of mind, it's like, what's happening?
And what's happening there is this recognition that sometimes people are not clothed in certain ways and it's not sexual, right?
That nudity and sex don't go together.
And we don't have that distinction in this country, largely because of this overwhelmingly Puritan sexual ethic.
That is all related to the Mike Johnson stuff.
So.
All right.
Last thoughts.
And then I don't want to talk about this at all for a long, long, long, long time.
I wish we could say we'll never speak of this again, but of course we'll have to at some point.
But yeah, I guess the other piece I'll throw out, because it's always, I've talked about this with students all the time too, right?
That it is so taken for granted within the context of these, it's hardly ever discussed, but those heteronormative concepts, right?
The notion that when, that men are by nature straight, they're attracted to women, women are by nature attracted to men, there are two genders and so forth.
There are other ironies and paradoxes that abound with all this emphasis on same-sex accountability, and then if you have any awareness that there are queer people in the world, you're not going to be able to put up external guards and make sure that you're never quote-unquote tempted by meeting with people the same gender, because guess what?
You might wind up liking them, or they might like you.
That's just a thing you're going to have to deal with.
It's something you're going to have to grow up and learn how to deal with.
Or an anecdote that I came across recently that was funny and tragic at the same time.
It was a kid who grew up evangelical, was gay, and so they were sent to this camp to try to make them not gay.
But they were talking about the ironies of going to this camp full of sweaty teenage boys To try to convince them that they're not gay.
They're like, nothing confirmed my gay identity like being sent to these anti-gay camps.
It's that kind of world.
If you are a gay evangelical, your only chance of meeting a gay boyfriend is at gay camp.
I mean, they literally sent you to the place with 20 other gay boys who are like, you know, supposed to be praying the gay way like you.
Guess where you're going to find your gay boyfriend at that camp.
All right.
Yeah, and doing quote-unquote boy stuff.
So, lots of shirtlessness, lots of sweating, lots of swimming.
Yeah, it's that world.
And yeah, it's absurd and it's comic in a way, but it's tragic in a lot of other ways, and it's very mainstream.
All right, let's take a break, come back, and briefly we'll get into some Christian nationalism sort of stuff that relates to MAGA and Mike Johnson, and then We'll spend the last half of the episode with good news.
I promise, friends, good news is coming.
Some cheery, hopeful things are coming here in a couple minutes.
So just hang with us and we'll be right back.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
All right, Dan, before we get to the cheery news and some of the things that are actually pretty hopeful in the country, let's just sort of relate everything we talked about with Mike Johnson and him being the Speaker of the House to some trends in the MAGA world and some sort of recent commentary on Christian nationalism.
Yeah, so one of the things we talked about, I think the last episode, it feels like a really long time ago, just a week ago, but was this growing awareness of, you know, of people that, oh, gee, look, the religious right and MAGA have come together.
And Mike Johnson is this perfect example of this because he has this long history of evangelical identity.
And he was also an election denier and a Trump, you know, strong Trump defender and so on and so forth.
And what it highlights for me is that we continue to have these analyses trying to explain or understand the relationship between white American evangelicalism and the MAGA movement.
And this week, something that caught my eyes, a CNN article by John Blake, and he was interviewing John Ward, somebody that listeners here will be familiar with, wrote a memoir about evangelicalism.
And one of the things we've highlighted is a lot of people, we have different takes.
We have different understandings of what the evangelical world is.
You and I both come as former insiders of that world.
We both left that world.
I think we both think that there were reasons sort of baked into evangelicalism that have moved us to where we now are.
But what it What struck me was is the interview articulates a position that I still hear.
I still hear people sort of saying, and people come to me and they say, how do we respond to this, right?
And basically, it's sort of the idea that says, yes, there are lots of white evangelicals who espouse Christian nationalism.
They jump on board with MAGA.
But it's not everybody.
It's not all of them, and we need to see that, and we need to know that.
And you and I hear this from folks, I hear it from people, from scholars down to popular, you know, just regular people who say, I think you're painting with too broad a brush here.
You're too hard on evangelicalism, you speak too generally.
So, I sort of want to talk about that, because I think it helps us understand why there is a natural movement from, say, you know, Mike Johnson 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and Mike Johnson, you know, MAGA supernationalist now.
And this is what Ward said in the interview that I want to quote.
He said this, he said, quote, I think most evangelicals probably have a mix of views, and one of them is that America is a Christian nation, and they don't have a lot of implications that flow out from that.
When you categorize everybody as an extremist just because they hold those views, I think it pushes more evangelicals toward the bad actors who are trying to bring people into an anti-democratic movement." So this is what he said in this interview.
And this is what I want to talk about, because the argument is basically this.
It's that argument that, you know, most of these evangelicals, they are just, quote, normal patriotic Americans.
What has happened, this line of reasoning goes, is that their critics have weaponized the term Christian nationalism.
They've said, all white evangelicals are Christian nationalists.
I've never said that, but this is the logic.
All evangelicals are white Christian nationalists.
And then when that happens, Those evangelicals who wouldn't be Christian nationalists are sort of pushed into that movement because they've been demonized by a broader non-evangelical culture.
And I think that the argument is basically that if non-evangelicals would be nicer and more understanding of, you know, white evangelical Americans, they wouldn't support Christian nationalists.
So I think the logic of this argument — I don't know that this is where Ward's trying to go.
I don't think he's trying to push it this far.
But the logic of the argument for me is that it's not really evangelicals' fault That they in overwhelming numbers support the MAGA movement, and they do.
I think we've got to keep that in front of us.
You're talking about at least four-fifths of identified white evangelicals in America who support Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
You're talking about a vast majority.
I think it's actually exactly backwards, and I think that we have to understand that.
So here's my thesis, and I'm going to run through this, and then I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, right?
But my thesis is that what he calls, quote-unquote, the normal patriotism of white evangelicals, if I remember the white evangelicalism of my youth, right, so years ago, here's my thesis.
It was always Christian Nationalist.
It was always Christian nationalism.
I didn't have the words then.
I don't think most of us probably had the words then, but I think the term fits.
The view that America is a Christian nation, that's a Christian nationalist view.
I'm sorry, it just is in my view.
And so for me, the argument is, it's not that Christian nationalism is new or that it changed in some way.
It's that the country moved away from being substantively Christian nationalist And this produced a backlash among a lot of people, including a majority of white evangelical Christians.
And that is what we see now is this sort of flashing of Christian nationalism.
The visibility of it is this sort of pushback.
For most of American history, our demographics, religious teaching, law, culture, all of them were structured in such a way to ensure that people that Christian nationalists now would say are the real Americans Straight people.
White people.
Men.
Cisgender people.
Protestants.
People of Northern European descent.
You run down the list to make sure that those kinds of people had political and cultural power.
And to be a normal patriotic American, to affirm America as a Christian nation, was to affirm that vision of America.
That's what America was.
And I think that what happened is what we now call Christian nationalism, or the ideal that Christian nationalism has of what America should look like, that was sort of the default setting.
That was the baseline.
That's what it was for lots and lots of people.
And a story that you tell, I think, better than most people.
You've written about it, we talk about it, but it's a central focus of your work, is telling the story how from the 60s forward, and these movements predate the 60s, but the 60s are like the sort of tipping point or the flashpoint I think that changed.
America started to change.
The demographics changed.
The religious identity has been changing.
The sexual identities have been changing.
People began moving away from that vision, and it produced this backlash.
But this backlash is to reassert what I think America functionally was for many.
And I don't want people to mishear me.
Obviously, I know that there were Americans who didn't share in that vision of America, right, from its founding and before.
But the point is that the U.S.
was structured in such a way that it could kind of contain that dissent.
It could contain those counter views.
That brings me to somebody like Johnson, right?
So you have somebody like Johnson who's been a long-time, you know, warrior on the religious right, committed white evangelical Christian.
He's part of that backlash.
It's a natural movement if somebody is, in my view, if somebody is coming out of that subculture where they're, quote, just patriotic Americans, they just think America is a good Christian nation.
When it starts feeling like America is not their Christian nation anymore, They put that into action.
And I think that to go back to Ward's statement when he said that, you know, one of their views is that America is a Christian nation, and they don't have a lot of implications that flow out from that.
There was a time when, yeah, white evangelicals opposed same-sex marriage, but guess what?
So did 60-something percent of Americans.
There was a time, you've talked about this a lot, where lots of states banned interracial marriage.
So we didn't have to worry about that if we're white Christians.
Didn't even talk about gender identity.
That wasn't even on the radar of mainstream white Americans.
It's when those things change that I think those implications come out.
So all of that is to say, once again, and this is the difference.
We've got folks like Ward who are going to say, Evangelicalism is a fairly benign or even beneficial cultural movement, and it has been damaged by MAGA and weaponized, and those of us who don't identify as evangelical are a part of that.
My argument as a former evangelical, and part of the reason I am a former evangelical, is that no, I think that this is in the DNA of white evangelicalism.
And that's what we see.
If somebody says to me, and people have asked, Brad, they've said, "Do you really think Christian nationalism is a logical outflow of American evangelicalism?" I have to look at the history in the last, I don't know, say two, three decades and say, given the historical changes and the response to them, yeah, I do.
Right?
And I know that that's controversial.
Respect a lot of people who have different views, but that's where we're at.
So for me, that's why when we talk about, you know, creepy apps and things like that, and this comes out, it's like, yep, that would have been part of the evangelical world that Johnson is coming out of.
So would believing that if people really stop making this a Christian nation, we're going to put somebody in office who will empower the Christians, or we're going to do anything we can to keep them there.
We're going to start reading the Bible verses that show that God doesn't support democracy, God's an authoritarian ruler, and on and on and on.
I see these things as unified, and I think we just have to keep talking about this, because it's something that keeps coming up.
All the time in these analyses.
So, I will take some deep breaths, ground myself, interested in your thoughts on this, on the interview, on any of these thoughts, on anything else.
I'm going to be brief on this because I do want to get to elections and all that stuff.
So, I'm going to point us to two people who I think are People who have spent their lives studying the history of evangelicalism in the United States.
I'm going to point to Anthea Butler.
Anthea Butler wrote a book called White Evangelical Racism.
And I don't want to speak for Anthea Butler, but when I read that book, I read a scholar who is doing everything that, and this is my view, I'm reading a scholar who's doing everything possible to say, please do not tell a historical kind of narrative that makes this a new phenomenon.
That it was benign, now it's been damaged by this demagogue Trump, and it's just so sad to watch.
I get that feeling, and I understand why some people are like, I can't believe my family now believes this.
I understand that.
I'm not saying that that isn't happening, that you have family members that seem to be, whatever word you want to use, moderate, rational, et cetera, and now they've been co-opted by MAGA and by Trump, and they're so deep down that well.
If you read Anthea Butler's book, and I encourage you to do it, it's a short book, she'll show you that going back to America's founding, all the way to the present day, there has been a thoroughgoing white evangelical racism.
Now, Randall Balmer's another, and Randall has a somewhat different take than Anthea.
I don't think Balmer's going to argue that since the founding, I think Balmer might be somebody that's like, hey, if you go back to the 19th century, you had evangelicals who were doing things that were working towards abolition or towards women getting the right to vote, right?
What Balmer's going to say is a little different, and I think they, if I'm honest, I think they disagree a little bit as scholars, is There used to be really helpful, as you're saying, Dan, healthy evangelical white cultures in the country.
But over the course of the 20th century, not during Trump, but during the 30s, 40s, 50s, and especially 60s and 70s, things took a hard right turn.
I try to show that in detail in my book, okay?
I don't disagree with Anthea Butler.
I try to make clear in my book, this has been present since there's been an America and before.
I'm not going to focus on 400 years.
I'm going to focus on 1960 to the present.
All of that to say, I respect John Ward's book.
I've interviewed John and had him on the program, but I do disagree with him on this point, and I disagree with him quite heartily.
And Randall and Anthea and many others will tell you, and I disagree with them, if we keep viewing these cultures as benign, as healthy, and yet just sort of infected.
with a cold or infected with a virus that can be eradicated, then we're going to miss a lot that is telling about American history.
One last analogy I'll use and then we'll go to break is that if you think of the Trump presidency, if you think of white supremacy, if you think of those things as in America's history, you get a cold and then you get over it, right?
We're We're entering that part of the year, everybody, where you get sick and then you get sick again and you're just hoping you don't get a cold and flu and all that for the entire winter, right?
If you view it that way, you're really letting us off the hook as an American culture, in terms of the religious cultures that John Ward's talking about.
Because instead of saying, we have had the disease of racism, xenophobia, Misogyny.
Going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Going back to Plymouth.
Going back to Reconstruction and the KKK.
Going back to Father Coughlin.
Going back to the Christian Front.
Going back to Barry Goldwater.
The John Birch Society.
You see what I'm saying here, friends?
It's a disease rather than a cold.
It's not a bacterial infection that we've gotten over and then it comes back once in a while.
It's something that's been with us and it's something we've never ever really dealt with in substance.
That's the difference I think I see.
So real quick, Dan, what do you think?
And then let's go to break.
I just want to pick up on that metaphor and say it's like, you know, treating the symptoms of something like, you know, you've got fever, you've got this, you've got that, you keep treating it.
Eventually what happens, you go to the doctor, they do blood work and they find out it's something serious.
Like maybe you've got cancer, right?
And that needs to be treated and it's more invasive and it's harder.
It's not going to do anything to keep like taking Tylenol to reduce the fever or something like that if you're being eaten from the inside.
That's what these are.
They're deep-seated maladies And I think it's a really good metaphor because we keep trying to address symptoms of it and not wanting to face up to the real issue.
All right, let's take a break and we'll get to that cheery news we promised y'all.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
So let's talk about what happened.
Let's talk about what happened this week.
We had a bunch of elections across the country.
This is one of those kind of off-cycle election years in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Virginia and other places.
So, I'm going to talk about a couple things, and I'll throw it to you to talk about abortion and reproductive rights.
So, I want to talk about Virginia as a whole.
Virginia is a state I lived in, and I have lived in both, Dan.
Southwest Virginia, which is really a very conservative part of the country, and I've also lived in the D.C.
suburbs in Northern Virginia, which are really the kind of very progressive, is the wrong word, but they're liberal-leaning.
They voted for Hillary Clinton.
They voted for Joe Biden.
So on and so forth.
Virginia's a really interesting case, because in Virginia, we had a couple things happen.
Danica Rome made political history after winning a seat in the state Senate, and Danica is a transgender person.
The first to be elected to the upper house in Virginia, and only the second in the country following Delaware's Sarah McBride.
We talked about Sarah McBride on the program before.
So we have a transgender state senator in Virginia.
OK.
We also have Moms for Liberty, and Moms for Liberty had a stunning loss in Loudoun County.
Loudoun County, for those of you don't know where that is, it's about an hour from D.C.
So it's far enough from D.C.
that Loudoun County is full of a lot of folks who are part of what you might think of that old Virginia.
Southern, largely white, and not interested in being co-opted.
They're not the people commuting to DC in the morning.
They don't work for some DC firm.
They're not a transplant from Boston or California.
They've been in Virginia for four generations.
They're culturally conservative, whatever.
Loudoun County, though, is also the place that people who cannot afford to live in D.C., people who cannot afford to live in those really upper class suburbs right next to D.C., they now live as commuters because they're like, I can't afford to live there, so I'm going to move there.
And when I wake up in the morning, I will drive the hour to D.C.
because this is where my family can afford to live.
So Loudoun County is this really interesting place at the moment.
And we had a couple of things happen.
We had Skyler.
These names are amazing.
Just I love the South.
My mom is from Tennessee.
I've lived in the South during my life many times.
I just love talking about the South because we get names like this.
You ready?
Skyler Van Valkenburg ousted Republican state Senator Siobhan Donovan.
That's amazing.
Now, this is not in Loudoun County.
This is near Richmond.
But the ouster happens because, in large part, they were arguing about parents' rights, right?
Are you going to sign on to the Moms for Liberty way of approaching school?
Well, Skylar Van Valkenburg wins because Van Valkenburg wants to Basically say that what we need is to protect our teachers, trust our teachers, and give students, and I really love this sort of approach, we need to give students an education where inquiry and exploration is prioritized.
I love that, Dan, because what it does is say to people who are in that PTA meeting, the run-of-the-mill suburban mom, suburban dad, suburban parent who's not paying attention to the news 24 hours a day like you and I do, and basically saying to them at the baseball game or the ballet recital, Hey, you know what I want?
I just want a place where my kid can explore the world in every corner.
Hey, I'll protect them.
I know my kid needs, and when my kid gets scared or isn't sure how to handle something in the world, I'm gonna be there to step in.
But I want an education system that prioritizes inquiry and discovery, don't you?
Doesn't that sound good?
Yeah, if there's things that are, like, above their age level maturity, we'll step in and help out, of course.
And I just love that line.
As a response to the Moms for Liberty, like, you're grooming my kid by giving them literature that includes a gay character, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Okay, now let's get back to Loudoun County.
Loudoun County ends up in a situation where conservatives falsely claimed, and I'm reading here from a piece at the HuffPost, Conservatives falsely claim that the alleged perpetrator was transgender right-wing rhetoric began permeating the school district, leading to contentious school board meetings.
Okay?
And what this all surrounds is a student who allegedly committed sexual assault.
So we have a student who commits sexual assault, allegedly?
Conservatives are like they're transgender.
And it leads into this whole Moms4Liberty absolute morass of anger and outrage at the school board meetings.
Well, on Tuesday's school board election, all nine seats were up for grabs.
Moms4Liberty endorsed four candidates.
Only one prevailed, and liberals won a 6-3 majority on the county school board.
This is a trend, Dan, that happened all over the country.
You had people who all over the country voted to get rid of the Moms for Liberty presence on their school boards, and that is in places like Pennsylvania and Virginia and elsewhere.
So that is really good news, and I think it really shows a couple of things.
Then I'll throw it to you.
I think it shows us that in places you may not expect, in a place like Virginia that has Glenn Youngkin as its governor, Glenn Youngkin, who's been all about this parents' rights and Moms for Liberty tract, Glenn Youngkin, who basically put all of his political capital into getting the Virginia State Senate and the Virginia State Legislature Republican.
People run, people show up, people say no to Moms for Liberty, and they lose.
It is possible, friends.
I have spoken all over the country this year, talking about my book.
Do you know how many times, Dan, I have heard people say that someone won a school board seat because no one ran against them?
I think this is an example of if you run somebody who wants kids to have a place of exploration, discovery, and inquiry for their education, you can win and you can get rid of this whole insidious movement that is trying to ban books and basically erase queer people.
I should add that in Virginia, Democrats kept control of the state legislature and turn the of the senate and turn the assembly.
What does all that mean?
It means the legislative branch in Virginia is democratic and Glenn Younkin's efforts completely failed.
So Virginia is a really interesting case for the rest of the country.
We've got a transgender lawmaker, we have an ouster of Moms for Liberty folks, we have the ouster of a representative who was really into the Moms for Liberty thing, and we have Glenn Younkin, somebody who thought actually might be a post-Trump presidential candidate in the GOP looking like he's really not winning much as it stands.
So that's there.
What else do you wanna talk about in terms of abortion rights, Ohio, or anything else? - Yeah, so I mean, one thing just about Virginia was just the yunkin belly flop, right?
Like, just sort of generally, I think, is like the sort of collective takeaway.
But yeah, so let's go to Ohio, right?
And reproductive rights and abortion.
Background for people, people will remember that there was a special election in Ohio a few months back, because there was an effort to raise the number of votes needed to change the, sorry, not the U.S.
Constitution, the Ohio Constitution from a simple majority to 60%.
That was not technically about abortion, but everybody knew, every commentator everywhere on the political spectrum knew that that was an issue because the GOP in Ohio, that controls both houses and the Republican, or the governor's mansion there, New that there were efforts on the way to try to protect abortion rights in the Constitution, so they wanted to raise that threshold.
That was rejected by voters.
In other words, voters chose not to make it harder to change the Ohio Constitution.
And then this week, showing once again that abortion remains a live issue, a motivating issue, an issue that draws people to the polls, which means that it draws primarily Democrats and independents to the polls, right?
Because Republicans oppose abortion.
They voted to protect abortion rights in the Ohio state constitution by a sizable percentage.
I think it was a 61% or something like that.
I may have that number wrong, but it was a sizable majority.
What are some takeaways from this?
A number of things.
First of all, in Ohio, it was significant because it joins California, Vermont, Michigan as the three other states that have done this, that have actually modified the Constitution.
But it's the only state under full GOP political control to do this.
So that, I think, really speaks to how significant this issue can be, even in so-called red states, right?
I think related to that, it was worth noting that there were some good state maps that showed how different counties voted on this earlier special election and then the election this week.
And it's the same counties that voted for both of those things.
The percentages of the population that voted for these were almost identical.
We see a lot of the same urban versus rural dynamics that we see nationally.
I would assume that a lot of the same issues related to Cultural, racial diversity that we see in other places, right?
That those more populated, more urban centers tend to be more diverse in different ways.
All of those things were there.
What do I think are like the big important takeaways sort of looking past this?
Abortion continues to drive voters, right?
It's been a while now since Roe v. Wade was overturned and there doesn't seem to be a diminishing effect from this.
Everywhere that abortion has been put on the ballot in this way, it has drawn a lot of voters and it has helped.
Democrats, we've seen that.
And we know that in battleground states for 2024, there are efforts to get these things on the ballot and to try to make that draw Democrats during a presidential election.
I think it's also worth noting the GOP candidates just don't have an effective answer to this.
And I don't think that they can have, right?
What we hear a lot of is people who say, oh, we need to change our messaging.
I don't think it's the message, I think it's the actual position, right?
I think it was Youngkin, and Brad, you can correct me if I'm wrong, who came out with what he said was sort of a moderate position of a 15-week abortion ban.
That's not a moderate position.
Most Americans don't consider that a moderate position.
They don't have something to stand on with this, they can't moderate their position without alienating their base, and they can't Stay with their base without alienating other voters.
I think it's also worth noting that I hear some candidates who say things like, well, we need to broaden it out and do things like expanding access to birth control and to contraception for women.
Fine, but the GOP has been an active partner in prohibiting that for years, right?
People will, I'll just remind people of the There was a Hobby Lobby case that went before the Supreme Court where it was ruled that the, quote unquote, closely held corporations could deny contraceptive care, contraception as part of their healthcare.
This was a cause championed by Republicans.
I think people remember this.
So, all of this to say, to sum it up, as you did, I think this is good news.
I think it's good news that shows... I think it's good news for people with, you know, Who want reproductive rights.
I think it's good news for people who need abortion to access abortion care and all the things that can come with this.
I think that that's good news.
I think it's also good news because it shows that this is an effort that continues to motivate voters, continues to draw people out.
The further that Roe v. Wade recedes in the rearview mirror, this just isn't going away.
I'm with you.
I think all of this was good news with the elections this week.
I do think it's good news.
Here's where I want to parse it, Dan.
I want to parse it this way.
I think what we have seen consistently over the last period since Roe was overturned by way of Dobbs is that people are willing to come out and vote On the issue of abortion.
And one of the things that Greg Sargent, I believe talked about this week and some other commentators was that some of the numbers reveal that the Ohio voters who voted to protect reproductive rights, many of them were Republican.
Right.
So I think there's a question.
Here's the open question.
In light of the good news you just talked about, in light of like abortion rights being protected, in light of what happened in Ohio, what happened in Kansas before that, what happened in other places before around the country, is are those voters who are voting about and for reproductive rights going to be willing to vote for Dem candidates when it comes down to it?
Right.
So if you are in a place where you don't you don't usually vote Democratic, But, you know, you're in a situation where your governor or state senator or president is basically giving you a choice about some really extreme anti-abortion view or Joe Biden or someone else who's like, yeah, I'm not.
Are you willing to vote for that person, that Democrat that you normally don't vote for?
Because I think we are seeing a lot of folks, A, who don't normally vote and B, who don't normally vote for Democrats pushing these measures over the line.
I think it's worth noting that this was a referendum, so this was not about a political candidate or party.
This was about people and an issue, right?
Can you just get an issue on the ballot?
And they did with abortion, and it didn't go the anti-abortion way.
I will just say real quick, and I'll throw it to you after this before we wrap up and see what you think, is the GOP has been really good.
Getting one-issue voters out to the polls for a long time.
I was one of them at one point when I was a Christian nationalist.
My church was the kind of place where no matter what you said about education or income inequality or something else, if you wanted to vote for somebody who was pro-choice, it was like, you can't do that.
It doesn't matter what George W. Bush or someone else says, you need to vote for them because they're the pro-life candidate.
My question is, will the Dems be able to continue to capture the single-issue voter or create single-issue voters out of people who aren't sure, don't usually vote, or usually vote for Republicans?
The looming issue here for the Democrats is that Joe Biden's poll numbers are in the toilet.
And there's a there's a lot to say about that.
We don't have time today to go into it.
I think we might get to it next week.
But Joe Biden is just not performing at a level that makes it look good for 2024.
What does that mean?
You know, how do we parse out Moms for Liberty getting ousted, Danica Rome, transgender, you know, state senator, and Ohio enshrining, you know, or protecting abortion rights with the fact that Donald Trump is leading in the polls in many swing states?
I think that's something that's an open question at this moment.
So final thoughts before we move on.
I think the final thoughts are a couple of things, is that I think if you'd asked me this a couple of years ago or a year and a half, whatever it was, I did.
I said no, right?
We talked about, is the Dobbs decision going to have a significant political effect?
And I was wrong.
I've never been happier to be wrong about something, I think, in a long... maybe ever.
I would have said no, I don't think so.
I don't think it's going to have the motivational force.
We've seen this happen over and over and over and over again.
And it has happened at times where it is tied to a candidate and it is tied to a party and it has a very significant positive effect for them.
So I think that there's some evidence that maybe they can.
I think it also depends on the willingness of Democrats to tie themselves to those issues.
Don't take that for granted and start talking about weird stuff.
I'm a wonk.
I can follow whatever a politician is going to say.
People aren't buying into, I don't know, Bidenomics or whatever.
Just don't, right?
Capitalize on these issues that will bring people out and make sure that they know that part of the reason you are running, Democrat, whatever, is because you support these kinds of policies and this kind of access, right?
That it's not enough to simply vote for it to be in the Constitution or something when, you know, you're going to have a legislature that will probably try to find ways to mitigate the force of that or Change how constitutions are changed or not fund it at some point in time or whatever, whatever it is.
So I think there's, I'm more hopeful about this now than I would have been a year and a half ago.
I think the Democrats have had an uncanny ability in recent decades to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, you know, or sorry, to pull defeat from the jaws of victory, right?
To get it exactly backwards, to be cruising and then find a way to lose.
I think that they've gotten better since 2016 and I don't know.
So, I have some qualified hope in this regard that they can be, that they can capitalize on this.
All right, we'll see.
And I think there's more to talk about next week or soon about Biden and honestly, what's happening in Israel-Gaza and what that means for... Yeah, there's just...
There's so much.
All right, we can't do it today.
We're out of time.
My reason for hope, Dan, Yusuf Salaam was elected to the New York City Council in the Ninth District, representing Harlem.
Yusuf Salaam is one of the members of the Central Park Five and served time in jail and was exonerated.
I'm not sure that I'm on board with all of Yusuf Salaam's policies.
If you dig in, he's pretty moderate, actually, so I'm actually not sure we're on the same page there.
I think it's good news for a number of reasons.
One is just, Salam is now out of jail, exonerated, and a city council person in New York.
The man who took out a full-page ad calling for the Central Park Five to receive the death penalty has been indicted on 91 counts and is in court seemingly every other day.
It's hard to believe in justice these days.
It's hard to believe in accountability.
This is some nice way to think about what's happened in Salam's life, in Trump's life, and in the United States at a place where sometimes you might be able to get it right.
So I'll leave it there.
I saw that.
That was one that was on my list.
So what I'll go to is back to this, and it has to do with the polls, right?
Number one is the election is a year away, which is like, I feel like elections happen in dog years, like a million things can happen.
But one is that I think another pattern that has emerged in 2016 is that pollsters just can't They can't get it right, right?
They missed one way in 2016.
They missed in different ways in 2020 than 2022.
I think the results this week threw a lot of them off.
It did not play out the way that a lot of them thought that they would.
And as weird as it may sound, I actually take some hope in that.
Because I think sometimes we voters, people, people who care about things, people who need to vote, people who need to be active, I think we pay too much attention to the predictions of what's going to happen and that can make people complacent.
It can also make people defeatist.
I think knowing that we don't know ahead of time what's going to happen and that we need to be motivated and active and act as if it matters what we do and how we vote and who we put in office is significant.
So I actually took hope from that, but from sort of another number of swings and misses by pollsters in this election as they're still trying to figure out kind of how to do their job now, 'cause it seems like it's really hard to do.
Just want to say thank you to all our new patrons.
We've had several of you this week, and I just can't express how thankful we are to you, all of you who support us.
Thanks so much.
We are an indie show.
Access Moody Media is an indie network.
We do this show three times a week.
We produce all of our stuff the best we can, and your support makes it happen.
We're making a research-based podcast designed to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism.
Extremism and rising authoritarianism.
We have a new show coming out next week, excuse me, next month from Sarah Mosner, friend of the show on purity culture and white supremacy, and you're not going to miss that.
On God's Campus is playing now from...
And you can still subscribe to American Idols by Andrew Whitehead.
Check out the show notes for our recommended book lists, for our Venmo, our Patreon, and all the other things we're up to.
We'll be back next week with some great content that's in the code with the weekly roundup.
