It's In the Code Ep. 77: "Why Won't They Say Anything?"
Why don’t conservative Protestants who oppose Christian nationalism, but who choose to remain in MAGA-affirming churches, seem to say anything in opposition to Christian nationalism? Do the theological beliefs underlying their Christian identity prevent them from doing so? Is it an issue of how groups regulate individual identity? Dan explores these questions in this week’s episode.
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I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and this series is a part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
As always, delighted to be here with you.
Love hearing from you.
Please keep the ideas, thoughts, input, questions, critiques, on and on and on coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Love to hear those.
As I say, and as those of you who listen know, I've recently gotten over COVID for the second time.
Feeling better, a little more energetic this episode than I was last episode, but I am behind in everything.
From losing a week so as always this time of the year I kind of fall behind on the emails Trying to catch up on those some of you have heard from me one of my big projects once the semester ends is to sort of Plow in and and respond to so many of you with the great insights thoughts comments and so forth so I do appreciate those Sorry, I wish I could like clone myself.
I read a sci-fi book recently where people could have a Like like multiple bodies like so there could be like multiples of them and I've often thought That maybe I'd be more productive if I could do that, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet Do the best I can Thanks to all of you Want to dive in here?
The episode today responds to some emails that I've gotten recently in response to a recent episode that I did.
And this was the episode sort of responding to criticisms that say, Hey, Dan, love what you say, but I think you paint with too broad a brush.
You're critical of American evangelicalism.
But there are a lot of really good people in that movement, and you sort of make it sound like everybody's the same.
It's monolithic and so forth, okay?
A couple things.
One is, you know, I know we talk about evangelicalism a lot.
That's not narrowly my focus.
I think my focus, when I get real clunky and technical, would be something like, Popular American, you know, conservative Christianity.
You could map that onto high control religious contexts and what have you.
But you're right, I do.
And people say you paint with too broad a brush.
And I addressed this and basically said that I think what we need to do is look at the folks that are in those movements that don't hold to these things and so forth and question whether or not we can really describe them as quote-unquote good people if they remain in Those movements and complicit with the politics and practices of those movements.
And it evoked a lot of responses.
A couple defensive responses, which I knew would come.
It's come from defensive conversations I've had with folks.
But also some really affirmative responses and what I was saying clearly resonated with many people I heard many heard from many people who said, you know, I've tried having this conversation with my brother.
I've tried having this conversation with my family.
I've tried having this conversation with my friends.
You know that can they still tell me what great people they are if they're part of this movement or I said in the episode as well that I think for people for whom this really matters It should be a matter of faith conviction if their faith is what they say it is that they can't remain a part of a movement that would do these things if they're really serious about opposing these and heard from several people who said that that was in fact why they left the movements that they did was because of a sort of faith commitment to a different vision of spirituality and so forth.
So lots of great conversation.
Again, would love to hear more from people would love to talk about that more.
But it also provoked a couple other interesting questions, one in particular, and this is what I want to get to today, and it was basically, it could be summarized this way, and these were people, again, who were responding to that episode and kind of related content, and asked a question in, you know, I think, perfectly good faith, right, about people in those movements, and the question can be summarized this way.
If there are people within those kinds of high control conservative Christian American circles who don't buy into the whole Christian nationalism thing and there are folks like I'm not denying that I'm not saying there aren't people in those movements that don't buy into that so say if they're if they are there and they're choosing to remain there but their faith you know as they would understand it probably incompatible with this Why don't they say something?
Right?
Why do they seem to not take it on?
Why do we not hear very much from them?
We hear from lots and lots of former evangelicals or people who have left conservative religion, or people who have left high control religious environments, we hear from them.
There's a whole as a lot of you listeners know, right?
There's a whole sort of ecosystem of that group.
But they'll say, we don't hear very much about or from those within those communities who oppose these kinds of things.
And the question I got was that, you know, and people say, so is there like a, like a theological reason for this?
Is there some tenet of their faith that says that they can't take this on?
They can't critique other people in their church, whatever.
And people ask this, and I think it's a really good question.
If there's some kind of Christian emerita at work here, or if it's something else.
And in thinking about this question, the answer to it, I think it links back to stuff I've talked about in the podcast before, and probably in more detail, wow, a long time back.
But it's worth revisiting in this, this context.
And I hadn't really looked at it, you know, I think in this series.
And so, so that's what I want to dive into today.
Okay, so again, here's the question.
If there are individuals within these kinds of religious circles who oppose nationalism and you know, a sort of MAGA dominated conservative religion, right?
Why don't they more openly criticize or oppose those tendencies?
Okay, these are people who don't leave, but they insist that they don't support these policies or these practices or these teachings.
So why not be more vocal or visibly oppose them?
And this is a question, as I say, I'm responding to some emails about this, but this is a question I've gotten from other places as well, just in casual conversation and informal context.
So the first question, as I said, is, you know, is there some sort of theological command here?
Is this about theology?
And my answer is not really or not directly.
We could say a lot more about that.
I'm just going to say a couple things.
You know by now that I think that theology is often kind of overrated as an explanation for what happens in a lot of these contexts.
There can be theological components.
If we're talking about a Catholic context, for example, there might be a certain deference to clergy who espouse, you know, MAGA positions.
The Catholic tradition assigns a greater authority to clergy Then, generally speaking, does the Protestant tradition.
So, you know, maybe there's some elements there.
Maybe there's a little bit of a kind of theological demand to fall in line.
But for me, that would be balanced by the fact that American Catholics, like Americans in general, tend to be a rather individualistic bunch.
And they don't tend to simply give in to religious authority just because somebody tells them they should.
And I would just say, you know, look, for example, on, like, Catholic laypeople's views on the use of birth control or other things that are officially against church teachings, but in practice are kind of flaunted by a lot of American Catholics.
In other words, I don't think American Catholics necessarily do it, you know, well, the priest said so, so we have to follow the priest and that's how it works.
We know that even the American Catholic leadership doesn't do that.
They're not fond of Pope Francis, and you don't hear the American bishops often coming out and saying, well, you know, I wouldn't have liked this, but Pope Francis said it, so we should do it, right?
This kind of theological submission.
So I don't know that that's there.
Within Protestant circles, there really isn't, I don't think, A formal theological demand at play here.
Now, the things I'm going to discuss later can can wed with theology, that can be theologically inflected.
And I would love to hear, you know, after the episode, if folks have things to add about this, I'd love to hear it.
But as I say, in Protestant circles, clergy don't theologically have the same kind of authority.
And there are also biblical demands.
And again, when we're talking about conservative Protestants, we're talking about groups that want to use the Bible, that want to show that the things that they say and do are quote-unquote biblically based, and so forth.
And there are things in the Bible about confronting fellow believers, not confronting them in love, but confronting them If you think that they've done something wrong or raising issues of concern or correction or rebuke, and we've even talked about this in this series, some of the language that comes in, having a word from the heart or something.
So one could imagine somebody who opposes MAGA stuff saying, hey, I just want to share a word from the heart.
I'm afraid that you've been misled by nationalism.
I'm afraid that you've fallen for the idolatry of the state over your authentic Christian faith or something like that.
I think one could even make an argument that there's a theological demand to Contest that if one's really opposed to it, so I don't think there's a specifically theological issue here to explain this this this Lack of willingness to sort of take this on I think it has more to do with sociology and you know, maybe a little bit parts of psychology and I often say
Not on this series, maybe, but when I'm in geekier academic circles, I often say I believe sociology trumps theology.
That is, sociological factors, factors related to group behavior and group identity and things like that supersede theology.
I think theology tends to be a very malleable sort of medium.
And people will modify their theology.
They'll bend it to fit things that have much more to do, I think, with social dynamics and social groups and social identity.
And so that's what I want to talk about here, because I think that this issue has to do primarily with the dynamics of social identity, right?
And many of you have heard me talk about this before.
I talk about it a lot in our weekly roundups.
Haven't talked about it in detail in a while, and this is something I think about all the time.
And so a couple things are important here to understand.
We talk about identity.
First is that I think for many individuals within conservative, high control religious environments, a lot of those environments are also we might call them high investment environments.
They demand a lot from the people who are members of them.
And so often people who are members of those groups, people who persist in identification with those groups, That identity is very, the way I would say it, is very salient to them.
In other words, it is a crucial or even core component of who they feel themselves to be.
So if we're talking about a certain kind of American conservative Protestant, for them, the fact that they are a conservative Protestant, they would just say a Christian, but Christian understood in that way, it's a really core part of their identity.
It really, really matters to them.
It may be so significant for them that they believe it should be their primary identity.
And this is even a part of teaching of a certain kind of popular Christianity, is that your identity as a Christian should be the defining identity that you have.
Now, we could set that aside and have discussions about whether that's ever really the case and how things like masculinity and femininity or race play into that.
I'm not here to say that when they say, you know, I'm a Christian first and a, you know, I don't know, a man or an American or this or that second, that that's how it really operates.
I'm saying that in their sense, their perspective of who they are, that's how it's supposed to be and that's what they are.
They're Christians first and everything else second.
It is To sound more academic, a salient, a highly salient part of their identity.
And there's a sense that, literally for them, were they to set aside that identity, I don't know, renounce their faith or something, they would cease to be the people they are.
They would become someone else.
Okay.
And I think that that is a really, really key point.
Okay.
So the first thing is that for many of those people in those kinds of contexts, that identity is really central and core to their self perception to who they are.
And here's the second point.
And this is a general point again about identity, right?
No matter how personal, Or central and aspect of our identity may be whether we're talking about our race or our ethnicity or our gender identity or religious affiliation, whatever it is, right?
No matter how intensely personal it may be, it is never just individual or private.
Identity is never just about how we identify or recognize ourselves.
We're all familiar with that language of, you know, I identify as X, Y, or Z. You can fill that in in lots of ways.
It's never just about how we identify.
It's also about how others identify us.
It is about recognition.
It's about, yes, recognizing ourselves as a certain way, feeling ourselves to be something, but it is also about being recognized as that by others.
Which means that identity always has a kind of communal dimension to it.
And the more central that identity is to us, that's that first point, that that identity can be really central.
The second point is that it's always communal, it's always involves a community or a group.
The more central that identity is, The more that that communal dimension is explicit, as it will be with a religious community or a church, is right there on the surface, that this is part of being a church community, a church family.
I think we've talked about the language of the church as family in this series.
The more pronounced this aspect of identity is going to be, okay?
And you can think of things like being on a football team, right?
It makes no sense to claim that you're a football player if you're like not on a football team and never have been or something like this.
That just makes really a case where it's very explicit that recognition by and membership within a particular group is a part of the identity, right?
But I think the same thing goes on for groups like churches, okay?
So why does that matter?
Why do these two just very general points about identity and as they might relate to, you know, popular conservative Protestantism in America, why do they matter?
It means that it matters because what it means is the high control religious groups like the ones that I talk about on this series all the time, high control religious groups exert an enormous pressure toward conformity.
If someone questions their church's teachings or messages or practices on, say, all of the MAGA stuff, or it could be other things, you know, more narrowly focused that are related but not specifically like Christian Nationalists, like LGBTQ issues or something like that.
If someone questions or challenges their church's teachings or messages or practices, it is unlikely that that questioning will be received positively.
That is, what's not going to happen, almost certainly, and the higher control, the context, the more this is going to be the case, the more central that communal identity, and the more explicit that is, I think the greater this is going to be the case.
Nobody's going to look and say, well, hey, you know what?
Dan poses some real questions here about queer inclusion, and he's a member in good standing here, been a part of the church for a number of years.
I think we should really listen to him.
We need to really rethink this.
He's got some stuff to say.
That's not what's going to happen.
Instead, what happens is the identity of the person making the challenge becomes suspect to the group.
Instead of responding, they say, whoa, whoa, Dan, hey.
I mean, you've been around for a while.
I thought I knew you better than this, but you're really suggesting that we need to be, like, queer affirming?
Buddy, I, you know, I thought I knew you, but I guess maybe I don't.
That's what's going to happen.
If we question those groups from within, right, if members of those groups question those teachings or practices or whatever, there's a high risk that they will no longer be recognized as having a place within the group.
In other words, if I claim my identity as a Christian and make my stance and make my stand and press on my church, I'm threatened with the loss of recognition by that community.
So while non-MAGA evangelicals, for example, right, they might still view themselves as evangelicals.
They might say that they oppose this because they're evangelicals.
It's a tenet of their faith.
A majority of the evangelicals around them in their immediate circle in their church community will not recognize them as such.
So rather than being a voice of change from within the community, they will no longer be recognized as a part of it.
They will no longer be constituted as insiders or members of that community.
They will have forfeited the recognition of the community of being a part of that group, regardless of how they conceive of themselves.
And I say that these communities can exert tremendous pressure in this direction.
This can be formal or informal.
It can be formal.
It can be churches that remove somebody from fellowship.
It can be churches that explicitly instruct members of the church not to communicate with this member of the congregation anymore because they're a danger to the faith or, you know, or whatever else.
Uh, that would be sort of like, I guess, the, you know, really high control side of that equation.
But there can also be more informal things, mechanisms that can be deployed to push people either to fall into line, Or to leave, right?
To be forced out.
Things like people can show up in their church prayer tree by name.
It's a way of sort of using the supposed care of praying for people going through different things as a form of like ritualized and legitimized gossip.
So now everybody in the church knows that we're praying.
We're praying for Dan because he thinks that queer affirming people should be a part of the church.
You've now been stigmatized.
As having strayed from the path in some way.
I said that there's not a theological reason for deference to pastors within these primarily, you know, Protestant contexts.
And that's true, but the force of personality of a lot of pastors plays into this, right?
And certainly, as they preach and teach, they can appeal to things like their calling by God to be where they are and so forth.
They can appeal to their authority and use a kind of authoritative personality And a kind of, you know, charismatic presence to be deployed to try to people bring people in line.
Okay, we can talk about this forever.
Again, I would love to hear from folks if you've got experiences with this or stories about this, these informal and informal mechanisms of bringing people into line.
The point is that all of this creates a tremendous pressure not to critique the movement.
Those who do risk having their Christian identity denied or questioned.
And this kind of gaslighting can be really effective.
I have talked to people and encountered people who begin to question their own sense of faith identity because they are told so much from others that they aren't in fact really Christians.
They begin to doubt their own faith and conviction and so forth.
This kind of gaslighting can be really effective.
But I think the other piece of this is that they also risk losing a huge part of their social network.
And we can think about this for just a minute.
Think of the friendships you have, the people that you hang out with, the acquaintances you talk to, the people you'll catch a game with on a Sunday afternoon or go have a beer or go for a walk or whatever.
A huge number of those, think about my life, they come from work contexts.
I've got some certainly from like past times in my life, people around the country and so forth.
But they also come from things like, I don't know, parents of other kids in your grade, your kid's grade and like sports and stuff like that.
But there aren't that many places from which we draw that network of people in our lives.
A huge part of that, sometimes the biggest part of that for many Christians is their church.
And for those in high investment religious communities, In the communities that require a lot of time and resources from them?
This could be most of their friends.
It could be most of their acquaintances.
It could even be family members.
And so sometimes, if they're going to raise these questions, they are at risk of losing all of that.
And sometimes that's unintentional.
Let's say that, you know, I raise this issue.
I become basically persona non grata enough in the church.
I'm like, fine, forget it.
I leave.
I'm done.
I'm out.
It means I don't see those people anymore on Sunday, but it also means that I'm less likely to see them in other times and that can be unintentional on their part.
We all know the sense of like if we have a friend who was in our circle a lot and we hung out and then, I don't know, they change jobs or that maybe their kid goes to a different school or quits playing the sport.
We don't see them as much.
It's hard to keep in touch.
All of us have limited opportunities and time.
to invest in other people.
And so as people like encounter us less, they sort of drift apart, that can happen.
But again, sometimes it's intentional.
I've talked to clients, for example, who are in, you know, their church was instructed by the pastor not to talk to them.
No, that's voluntary.
But all the people that the pastor said that to are now at risk of having their identity questioned if they do, and so forth.
You get the idea.
In other words, gotta wrap all this up, why don't they say anything?
Because the cost for doing so is really, really high.
It's not the only reason in every case.
We could talk about other reasons.
There are always going to be individual reasons and context-specific reasons.
But I think that these elements of social identity and the dynamics of how it's formed and maintained, I think they're the real key driving force.
I think they're more important than the theology.
I think they're often given a kind of theological veneer, but I think if you sort of sand down past the veneer a little bit, you get to the real issue.
And I want folks to know, so I examine this, does that mean that I think people shouldn't be challenging their traditions?
Nope, I absolutely think that they should, right?
But I'm also aware of, and I'm noting the very real costs that come with that kind of challenge.
The clients I work with at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, most of whom have left evangelical contexts, virtually all of whom, some exceptions I suppose, as I'm thinking about it, but most of whom Also, really deal with the loss of relationships that it costs them a very real cost of choosing to leave that tradition.
Oftentimes, after the churches they were part of refused to countenance the kinds of changes or reconsiderations that they thought were really important.
Okay.
Last point I'll just make is this is also generally speaking, I think it's why social groups are slow to change in general.
They exert tremendous pressure to conformity among their members.
It's not limited to churches.
It's not limited to high control religious environments.
It is a I think a fact of the dynamics of social identity, but it's one that I think is really, really present in the kind of phenomenon that we're talking about.
All right.
As I say, gotta wrap this up, so I will say goodbye.
Thank you all for listening.
Thank you for the support to our patrons.
As we announce the weekly roundup, we've got some new announcements that'll be coming out, I think, in the near future.
So keep an ear out for those.
As always, love to hear from you.
Daniel Miller Swedge, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Got some announcements, some things in the works for some, I don't know, some new developments with this series as well.
I'm sort of thinking through those, but we'll be ready to announce those soon.
So some things to look forward to.
As always, again, thank you.
You could be doing other things.
We value you so much, and please be well until we have a chance to talk again.
