Brad and Dan begin by discussing the abortion ruling in Texas, pointing to the ways that the vague wording in the law and the threats from state officials have made abortion effectively banned in the state. They discuss how the case represents a new chapter in the cruel approach to reproductive non-rights and what it means for the state and the nation.
They then pivot to Iowa, where a display by the Satanic Temple in the state's capitol has led to a new Satanic panic. Brad reviews the Christian nationalist responses to the display and analyzes what it means for freedom of speech, religious liberty, and Christian privilege.
In the final segment Dan summarizes Trump's dictator comments and Brad points to the spiritual warfare and revenge comments made by a pastor at Trump's recent rally.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad, as always.
It's fair warning to everybody that if you feel anger seething through in the episode, it's not even about Trump or Texas abortion rulings for Brad.
It's the DMV, and we've all been there.
We all know.
I feel like somehow like the California DMV probably like, I don't know, it feels like there's a stereotype there that's a stereotype for a reason.
So anyway, we expect good fireworks from you today, Brad, just given that you've been dealing with the DMV.
I'm not going to go into it.
What I am going to say is that very soon, friends, and we don't have all the details for you yet, but very soon Dan and I are going to start doing An extra episode per month that will be for folks that are subscribing to our thing here.
And on those episodes, I promise to go into great detail about personal stuff like the DMV.
I won't do that here because a lot of you listening are like, didn't come here for that, Brad.
Came here to hear about Christian nationalism and religious studies and, you know, everything else.
So if you are a fan of ours and you want more of Dan and Brad talking about Cargo shorts, minivans, the DMV, and all the other things related to that.
We're going to start an extra premium episode every month and we'll ask questions that you all send us and we'll do all kinds of fun stuff.
So I'll just tease it that way.
I'm not going to tell you what happened to the DMV.
I'm going to tell you that if you want to know about the DMV, And many other things.
You're going to want to subscribe and tune into that premium episode.
I will just plug though, if people have seen Zootopia with the sloth who works at the DMV, it is like the most genius thing ever when I saw that.
So, you know, if you've never seen it, Google it.
It's worth the few minutes on YouTube to see it.
All right.
Look, I'm not going to do it.
I am tempted to give you my opinion of the Zootopia film.
I'm not going to do it.
I'm going to save it for the premium episode, because the Zootopia film, not bad.
Now, is it the best one, I think, out there as a man who watches a lot of these films with his two-year-old daughter?
I have a list, and you might get that on the premium episode.
It's going to be crazy.
All right.
Enough, enough, enough.
Here we go.
Today, we're talking about Trump wants to be a dictator.
We're talking about Texas and just another cruel and draconian judgment regarding reproductive rights in that state.
And then we're going to talk about Satan in Iowa, the satanic panic at the Iowa Capitol and the Christian nationalism that is at play there.
So, Dan, I'm going to throw it to you.
Let's hear about Texas and the case that the Supreme Court of Texas heard this week and all the fallout.
I'll throw it to you.
Yeah, so a lot of people have heard at least parts of this.
It was a pretty fast-moving case, at least, number one, both in legal terms, but I think also by the time sort of national media had picked it up.
But a Texas woman named Kate Cox sued Texas, arguing that the Texas abortion ban, which folks probably know is among the strictest in the country, right, in terms of what it does and doesn't permit and so forth.
She sued Texas arguing that she should not be prevented from having an abortion because it put her at risk if she's forced to carry her pregnancy to term.
It's worth noting she's a mother of two, so this is not some, I don't know, stereotype that the people on the right have that people seeking abortion are all Fire-breathing, angry feminists who hate babies or, you know, something.
Whatever, whatever sort of images they have.
The reason she did this, she's 20 weeks pregnant.
She'd had three ER visits in a month due to various kinds of complications.
And she argued that she's at risk for severe complications if she has to carry the pregnancy further, including loss of life.
As this has all been reported, I'm not saying anything weird or private here.
Her first two births were by C-section, which means that she's also under increased risk of, like, uterine rupture and different kinds of things like this.
Those of you in the world who have been, you know, involved with having babies know that that's a real thing.
And her baby was diagnosed with something called trisomy 18.
I don't know a lot about what that is, but it's a severe medical condition.
The baby is not expected to survive more than a few days after being born.
Things that I've read said that most fetuses, about 95% diagnosed with this, don't survive to term, are not carried successfully to term.
So this, and this is also thought to be one of the first attempts by an individual to challenge these laws.
So lots of people watching it to see what goes on.
And the Texas law allows abortion in cases to prevent, quote, substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function other than a psychological condition, end quote.
In other words, they're trying to make sure that somebody can't just say, I don't know, that they're at risk of postpartum depression or something, and so that they should be able to have an abortion.
So this is what she was pushing on.
Because she goes to the ER, she'd sought this.
Doctors were unwilling to perform an abortion because they were not clear that they were covered under the Texas law, given the complications and the diagnosis of this baby.
So she sought an injunction blocking the state from preventing her from having an abortion, and a Texas judge ruled that she could, in fact, have the abortion, that it could go forward.
However, and this is where it gets even sort of more interesting, I think more telling, immediately after that ruling, the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did several things.
One, he warned her physician and the hospitals where her physician who would perform the procedure, were she to have an abortion, he warned her and the hospitals where she's allowed to practice that they were not protected legally.
So basically he said, yeah, so she's got this injunction and can do this, but if you do it, we will come after you.
We will enforce the law and punish you.
And he petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to intervene.
So he jumped straight to the Texas Supreme Court to intervene.
The Supreme Court initially blocked, issued a temporary block on the lower court's ruling.
And I say, initially, later that day, they actually made a ruling in the case.
The Texas Supreme Court, nine conservative Republican justices, they reversed the lower court's order.
And since then, or almost right along the same timeline, Cox's attorneys have shared that she did leave Texas to receive an abortion elsewhere.
Because of these medical conditions and concerns.
And citing fears that she would lose future fertility.
That if she was forced to carry this child to term, she could lose her fertility.
Which, by the way, again, for the anti-abortion activists, this is somebody who's thinking that she might want to have more kids in the future.
And that is why.
She is seeking an abortion, right, for a pregnancy that is not very viable.
So here are my takeaways and issues, right?
That's the summary.
Here are the things that I think stand out, and then I'll throw it to you, Brad, for your thoughts on those or other thoughts that you might have.
The first thing is that the Texas Supreme Court issued what I think is a completely legally incoherent and highly partisan ruling here.
They called out the state's medical board.
Basically they said the state medical board needs to provide additional guidance on the medical emergency exception.
Except the state medical board's not the one that wrote the law and, you know, and whatever.
So the issue was that the law was too vague and doctors didn't know what to do.
So the Texas Supreme Court says, well, you know, it's for the doctors.
They even said that.
They said it's for doctors to decide, not judges, to make these decisions.
The law is too vague.
I think that's by design.
I think that was the issue.
I think the aim has always been in the drafting of this legislation, number one, drafting it really, really, really fast.
It's not as if this was a good faith effort to involve the medical community and say, like, what does risk mean?
What does threat to the life of a mother mean?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, how does this work?
Doctors don't have the latitude to decide.
I mean, that was exactly the issue.
Paxton, the Attorney General, intervened to make clear that they don't have that latitude, right?
When he said, we're going to come after you and the hospitals and everybody else if you do this.
And the Texas Supreme Court knew that.
So this is a big kind of circular way of not addressing the issue and making it impossible.
It reminds me of Neil Gorsuch in his Supreme Court hearing.
When he kept saying to ask him questions, he kept saying, well, this is a legislative issue.
This is for the legislature to decide.
As if the Supreme Court isn't the one that's going to be reviewing everything that Congress decides to see if it's allowed to stand.
It's the same kind of issue.
And so I think, for me, this shows a lot.
It shows the partisanship of this.
It shows that this is vague by design.
It's not just that a bunch of well-meaning people who aren't doctors came up with these rules and they don't know enough about medical terms or something.
I think this is very much by design.
I think it also again highlights this myth of women's health.
We've talked about this before, that for a long time now, anti-abortion activists have couched it in terms of women's health.
When they started, for example, making sure that abortion providers, this is a number of years ago, had to have access, privileges is the word I'm looking for, at hospitals and so forth, and most abortion providers did not.
And they said, oh, well, you're going to have to close down and we're doing this because we care so much about women.
I think this exposes that for the lie that it is.
I think the other big thing, once again, excuse me, this keeps the issue alive for Democrats.
We've seen this.
Everybody in the GOP running for office wants the abortion issue to just quiet down and go away.
And what happens here, a sort of pro-MAGA, you know, Texas Attorney General makes national news by very, very explicitly Basically intervening to make sure that the life of a pregnant woman is at risk for, again, a pregnancy that's tragic, a child that will not be able to survive.
It's not a viable pregnancy.
And I think the other one is that the abortion issue is tied in with this remains significant at every level.
Kentucky, there's a class action suit currently going through challenging their very draconian rules.
SCOTUS has agreed to take up the case about banning the abortion pill nationwide and whether or not that will happen.
So at every level, it remains a significant issue.
This is why, and I think we're not the only ones who called this, but we said you're going to start seeing people Sue these states on the grounds that this is a threat to their health.
I dread thinking about some time in the future when somebody actually dies because they're forced to carry a pregnancy, an unsafe pregnancy, forward and, you know, what that's going to do.
But short of that, I think a place like Texas makes it clear that the threat, quote unquote, to the mother is not taken seriously.
So I throw it to you for other thoughts, expansions on those, other things you thought about as you followed this story.
So I just want to start by saying I have two interviews on Texas coming over the next two weeks.
So on Monday I'll be airing, finally, we had some technical difficulties, my interview with Representative James Tallarico from Texas, and we talked about reproductive rights in that interview briefly, but I really talked about it at length with the Mendi and Chris Tackett, who are activists and organizers in Texas, and those who are fighting Christian nationalism in the state.
So, if you want more on this, tune in on Mondays, the next couple of weeks.
What I will say in the course of doing those interviews that I learned, Dan, is that the number of abortions in Texas, 2020, I'm going to put you on the spot.
You're going to have no idea.
I'm going to make you guess.
How many abortions in the state of Texas, 2020?
Just give me a wild guess.
Yeah.
1,500.
Yeah.
50,000 abortions in the state of Texas.
Yeah.
50,000 legally registered.
Like, hey, I'm a doctor.
I'm telling the state board or whatever I did this procedure.
How many in 2023?
I'm going to put you on the spot again.
How many in 2023?
in 2023?
200.
34.
Two, 200.
34.
Wow.
So, what you just said about the vagueness of the law and the exceptions is exactly what they wanted.
We have these quote-unquote exceptions.
You can get an abortion if there's these exceptions.
And Ms.
Cox seems to fit every exception.
The fetus is not viable.
Her life is in danger.
This is a person who should be allowed to get an abortion.
Guess what happens?
Her doctors get threatened by the state.
They're like, she doesn't fit the exception rule.
And it's like, well, if she doesn't fit, who does?
This is the exact goal, Dan, of the vague, ambiguous law is we want a situation where is abortion outlawed in Texas?
Not totally.
But guess what on the ground?
Guess what when you live there?
It is outlawed.
You know why?
Only 34 people in a state as big as Texas have been able to get an abortion this calendar year.
So it is, in essence, de facto, if not de jure, outlawed.
So that's takeaway number one for me, is when you write a vague law and you have the Ken Paxsons of the world in charge and a friendly Supreme Court who will like take up the case in like eight minutes after they get a text from Ken Paxson, somehow the Supreme Court's already ready to like rule on it.
You're going to get a situation where it is pretty much outlawed in the state of Texas, de facto.
Second, As you say, this is one more example of this specific issue being alive and really, really important to millions and 10 millions of Americans, and Republican Elected officials, at least, are starting to catch on.
So I will say, if you look at Ted Cruz and what he is doing, people are asking about this.
Interviewers are walking up to him and being like, what do you think about the Cox case and abortion?
And he's like, I'll call my press office.
And the reporter's like, yeah, I called them for the last two days.
They won't tell me.
I'm asking you.
You're right here.
And he's like, OK, right.
Because you know what, Dan?
He doesn't want to get on the record because they're starting to realize just how bad this looks for them.
So in one sense, They're pushing forward with this truly hellish approach to reproductive rights or non-rights in Texas.
And on the other hand, there is a now conscious concern on the part of Republican lawmakers that if we keep going down and sort of centering on this, it's not going to go well at the ballot box.
Those are two takeaways from what you said, and those are the things I couldn't stop thinking.
Now, last thing, and I'll throw it to you, is Ms.
Cox is able to leave the state.
She's privileged, and I'm not judging.
When I say that, I don't mean that as a judgment.
I'm saying she had enough money, right?
She had enough time to go somewhere else where she'd get an abortion, and I'm glad.
Don't get me wrong.
When I say privileged, there's no snark or judgment or The reason I use that word, though, is because there are a lot of women in Texas, and all of you can imagine this, who don't have that time.
They cannot leave work.
They don't have anyone to watch their other children.
They don't have an ability to travel hundreds of miles by car or to buy a plane ticket.
So you can say, why doesn't everyone just do that?
And I'm thinking of that person who just worked a double shift.
you know, at Walmart and who has two kids at home and is like, I don't have money to fly to California to do this and come back.
Who's going to watch my kids?
Where do I get the airfare?
Blah, blah, blah.
Time off work.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, all right.
Those are some takeaways on my end.
Final thoughts on this one?
So, well, first, like clearly undershot the 2020 number, which I think just puts it in perspective, like, of like what a significant issue this is.
Another thing to throw out is that I think one of the ways that this works with the vague language, and by definition, is Pregnancy is risky.
I mean, being pregnant is risky.
Everybody who has been pregnant, has known people who are pregnant, know that there are risks inherent to being pregnant.
I think that also creates the wiggle room for this, or makes it so the doctors are like — because no doctor worth their salt is going to say, here is what will happen if you carry this two-term.
They can't.
They can't predict that.
And so those kinds of inherent unknowables turn into license for not allowing things to happen.
Another one, I'm not good at math, it's part of why I'm a humanities person, but that number is something like a 99 and 93 one hundredths of a percent drop in abortion.
As you say, it's a ban.
And all of these states that want to say that they're not banning abortion, That it's reasonable that, oh no, we've taken into account the health of the mother and so forth.
Absolutely have not.
This is moderate.
Yeah.
This is moderate.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it's the same thing you get the Republicans that are like, I'm going to put a moderate, like, 16-week ban.
That's my moderate move, right?
She's 20 weeks pregnant, folks, right?
So I think it just puts it into perspective.
And again, I'm just going to say this.
This is about targeting women and people who can have babies.
That's the aim.
And I know that I hear from people who still I don't know, maybe it's because their mom or their friend or their brother or their sister or somebody is still in that evangelical world and they want to give it all the benefit of the doubt that they mean well and they just don't know, and I'm telling you, I don't think that they do.
Or, if you can say, I mean well, And I'm going to make things like this happen.
You need to mean better than you do.
It's just an issue that's there.
I think we still have this idea that somehow these are our unforeseen consequences.
It was the aim.
And the last point tied in with that, you know, that really occurs to me as you were summing this up, it's the Texas Supreme Court like had this just waiting.
It's like they had this like position written or drafted or something.
To be able to just trot it out like sort of five minutes later or something and say, oh, here it goes.
Here's our well-reasoned, you know, legal argument.
They had this drafted and ready to go.
Same as all those states that had trigger laws on the books so that, you know, abortion became illegal the moment the SCOTUS decision came out.
All of this was planned.
This relates to something that's happening in Kentucky.
So I want to throw it to you here in just a second to talk about Kentucky in a kind of related case.
I'd just say that On that point of meaning well, I think cases like this one with Ms.
Cox really, they have the chance to kind of shatter the worldview for some evangelicals and others in those cultures.
And here's why I say that.
It's one thing to be presented with a situation where abortion is wrong.
You think abortion is murder, etc.
What this case does, and it's not going to be one that reaches all those ears and all those eyeballs, because, Dan, you've been in those spaces.
They're very protected.
You don't usually have access to the information in ways that are not full of propaganda when you're in those spaces.
They're largely filtered and heavily mediated.
But there are going to be a few people who sort of come to a realization that we're now in a situation where Even if a woman might die and her pregnancy is not viable, the state, fueled by Christian nationalism, is going to say, too bad, go through with it.
Even if it's a mother who's like, I'm doing this because I want to have more children, I have two, I want three or four or five, as risky and as much as that will mean for me, I'm doing this thing so I can do that thing.
There will be some people that wake up and are like, this is this is not what God wants.
This is and it won't be that many.
It's not going to be right, but it will happen.
So anyway, that's just a thought.
You know, take us through a related issue here in Kentucky.
So I think I want to tie it in with that.
And what I think is different, like one of the things that's different about Kentucky is that it's a class action suit, right?
There is kind of a lead plaintiff who's made some news.
News came out, maybe the news didn't break today.
I saw it today, but it was recent that She apparently, there's no detectable fetal heartbeat anymore, and so it's unclear how that will affect her standing with the suit, because were she to have this medically dealt with, it's not technically an abortion at this point.
But I think one of the things that you're hitting on is, on the one hand, I think a class action suit has more weight to it, it has more mass to it.
I think if you're a state There's more concern if you've got a whole class, right, of plaintiffs who are coming at you and so forth.
But I think that, as you're describing, a case like the one in Texas actually has more of a psychological impact on a lot of people because It's easy to lose the real people behind a class action suit.
I don't know if you've ever had this happen.
I've had this happen where I've actually been part of class action suits, and I kind of didn't know that I was.
I get some letter being like, I can get $3.50 from some drug company or something.
I didn't know.
Like, it's very impersonal.
It's very amorphous.
It's very...
It feels distant precisely because it's like staring into a crowd at a stadium.
You don't pick out individual faces.
So I think you're right that an incident like the one in Texas has the power in many ways to personalize it because this is about people.
It's about real concrete people and what they're going through that personalizes it in a way that they don't.
A class action suit doesn't.
But I think sort of, I don't know, paradoxically or something, a class action suit probably has more of a chance to like sort of swing the legal scale.
So we'll see where that goes.
Lots of concerns that the Texas funding will, of course, have a chilling effect on individuals trying to challenge these laws, especially in states where you've got a Supreme Court just lined up behind the Attorney General to, you know, make sure that what the state of Texas wants to do, it gets to do.
Those are the things that stand out to me as being some of the most relevant parts about the Kentucky case.
We get into slight differences between Kentucky and Texas and so forth, but I think that point that you make about how it personalizes it is what really stands out to me as the difference between the two.
All right, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about Satanic Panic in Iowa.
It sounds like such a good... Doesn't that sound, Dan, like just like a really good horror film you want to watch?
I was going to say, that's like total awesome like B-movie.
We're sitting with popcorn and like, yeah, watching.
Watch that.
So it's good.
You're good on the titles.
You know that week after Christmas, before New Year's, where, like, no one's working and you don't know what day it is?
I mean, I have young children, so, you know, I have no fun.
So you never know what day it is, is what you're saying.
Yeah, it doesn't matter what happens.
I have no time off.
But, you know, there used to be this moment where it's like, December 28th, I'm going to sit on the couch and watch Satanic Panic in Iowa and, like, eat leftovers from Christmas, whatever.
All right, we'll be right back.
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 Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
OK, so this week, Dan, there's been just an incredible amount of, I dare say, hubbub at the Iowa Capitol because the Satanic Temple of Iowa unveiled its beautiful holiday display, complete with goat heads and candles and a statue in the Capitol.
And this was, of course, in Conjunction with, in response to, alongside the installation of a nativity scene at the Iowa Capitol.
So, basically the Satanic Temple is like, look, if you're allowed to put a nativity scene, we're allowed to put up our display from the Satanic Temple.
And if you're familiar with the Satanic Temple, you will know that the Satanic Temple is really an organization focused on Freeing our public square from religious bias, such that you should not be allowed to put up a nativity scene in the Iowa Capitol if you're not allowed to put up other religious symbols.
There should be equality or nothing.
So, the Satanic Temple is much less about worshiping Satan.
It is not really about the idea that you want to worship The Dark Lord or anything, and much more about freedom from religion, the freedom of religion, separation of church and state, human rights, and so on.
And they've always sort of been this really clever, subversive group that works in this way.
I've met people from many chapters of the Satanic Temple.
Religious studies professors love to teach about the Satanic Temple because of the ways that they are really good at provoking reactions such as this and playing on the laws and so on.
All right.
So we're in Iowa State Capitol.
You walk in.
Here it is.
Nativity.
Little baby Jesus.
Mary.
And then over there, it's like, oh, Lord, look at that.
There is a big statue with all kinds of candles and a goat head and other things.
Now, there has been a ton of backlash on this, Dan, and the backlash is worth paying attention to.
So Kim Reynolds, the governor, said, this offends me, but it's part of freedom of religion.
So Kim Reynolds, right, for all the ways that I disagree with Kim Reynolds on so many things, yeah, this offends me as a Christian, but this is how it works.
You get to have freedom of religion and equality for all religious kind of groups.
OK.
There have been other reactions, I shall say, and I want to go through some of those.
All right.
Ron DeSantis weighed in.
All the way from Florida, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.
They recognized it as a religion, saying, hey, they recognized that the satanic temple is a religion.
I don't think that was the right decision.
I want to stop here and say, when Christian nationalists and people in the Christian majority Want to try to make a legal or legally coherent argument about other religions and why they shouldn't be allowed?
Like, here's why you're not allowed to build your mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Here's why you can't build that Sikh Gurdwara.
Or here's why the Satanic Temple can't have its, uh, its, uh, its, uh, It's statute.
One of the ways they do that is it's not really a religion.
You used to hear this all the time after 9-11.
Islam is not a religion.
It's a political ideology, right?
So that's one of the ways because there's a recognition that in this country, religion is privileged legally.
If you're right, if you're a religious inmate, you get to get released and go to like service or chapel, right?
Well, you don't get to do that if you're an atheist.
So there's, you know, religions are tax free.
A lot of like religious professionals don't pay taxes, blah, blah, blah, blah.
All right.
My view would be that that's not a religion that the Founding Fathers were trying to create.
Dan, I try not to cuss on this show.
Like, I just try not to do it.
But what does that even effing mean?
That is not a religion that the Founding Fathers were trying to create.
Were the Founding Fathers trying to create religion?
What is?
I don't even know.
This is like it's just like word salad at this point.
OK.
All right.
We're going to get more from Ron DeSantis in a second.
We're going to come back to you, Ron.
OK.
All right.
Let's read.
Let's read another one here.
I'm going to go into.
A couple more.
So this one is from William Wolfe.
And if you're on Twitter, you know William Wolfe as a Christian nationalist provocateur who writes for the American conservative.
OK?
I'm going to read one quote, Dan, and then I'm going to give you the two major tenets of his article he wrote for the American conservative.
And the title of that is, There's No Constitutional Right to Satan Worship.
OK?
So here's what he says.
Here we've gone wrong.
Once the traditional understanding of religion at the time of the Constitution was ratified is discarded, we have no clear way to define the contours of what constitutes a religion at all.
So we resort to allowing courts to make up tests and rules.
The Supreme Court suggested that when determining whether a non-traditional religion has First Amendment protection, we should ask whether the claimed belief occupies the same place in the life of the objector as an orthodox belief in God holds in the life of one clearly qualified for exemption.
Here the question is not about the content of the beliefs, but only whether they are held and lived with similar vigor as that of the believing Christian.
So William Woof's doing a bunch of things here, most of them not surprising if you know about him.
He's saying that Christianity and his version of Christianity and the way he sees it are the standard for religion in the United States.
Such that if your religion doesn't look like mine, if it doesn't feel like mine, if it isn't practiced like mine, then it's probably not a real religion.
He even says non-traditional religions.
What does that mean?
Again, as a religious studies professor, I just want to go outside and yell into a burlap sack until my lungs hurt, and then go inside and watch Satanic Temple at Iowa and not talk to anyone.
Because what is a Mormon?
Is the Latter-day Saints in there?
What counts as a non-traditional religion?
All right, so that's there.
And if you're listening and you're a religious studies scholar, you know in and out that this is how this has worked in this country forever.
Religion has to be shaped and contoured to Christianity, otherwise it doesn't count as a real religion.
And people, Asian-Americans, South Asian-Americans, African-Americans, so many people from Latin America and other places have had to go before the courts for so long, people who are Sikh, people who are Buddhist, people who practice what is known colloquially as Santeria, and basically say, yes, I'm religious.
I'm sorry I don't look.
Like the white Protestant William Wolfe.
I'm sorry that my worship isn't the same.
As a Hindu, I'm sorry I don't go to temple on every Sunday, or that I don't pray like you, or that I have more than one God, but I'm still religious and you should still afford me that right.
Okay.
So, Dan, if I read the article in the American Conservative by William Wolfe that says there is no constitutional right to Satanism, It says, his argument comes down to this.
The satanic temple is not a religion because of originalism.
So basically, when the founding fathers envisioned religion, William Wolfe was like, they did not envision the satanic temple.
Therefore, there's no way it could be a religion.
Dan, I'm, I've been like ranting as a religious scholar.
I'm not a legal scholar.
But we cannot operate this way.
This is so specious as an argument.
That whatever the Founding Fathers had in their mind as religion is what counts as religion.
Were they thinking of Hindus?
Of Buddhists?
Were they thinking of Sikhs?
And the Sikh religious practice?
I mean, I don't even want to justify this by going through religious traditions they didn't think of.
So, originalism is one idea, and the other idea is basically that it's blasphemy.
So, he goes through this whole thing where he says that blasphemy laws have existed in the United States, and that if you look at the Satanic Temple's teachings and website and all this kind of stuff, that it clearly blasphemes the name of Jesus Christ.
That there is a sense in which the Satanic Temple is just based on blasphemy, meaning of his Christian God.
So therefore, it should not be allowed.
I don't.
I'm sorry.
I'm like exasperated by this.
This case.
Is exactly why we talk about Christian nationalism all the time.
And let me explain why.
I think William Wolfe's argumentation here is so embarrassing.
I think it's embarrassing.
To say in public, you're blaspheming, you're offending my God, therefore you're not a real religion.
Are you serious?
Is your God that weak?
Are you that weak?
Is your God that tiny and small?
Listen, dude, like when my two-year-old gets pushed on the playground, God, everything inside me is like, I want to protect her, right?
But you're talking about the creator of the effing universe, you puny, puny, puny little Christian.
So you're telling me that if I say something nice or not nice about your God, I'm not really religious?
Damn, dude.
Wow.
That's weak.
But number two, Dan, is this.
People are like, you talk about Christian nationalism too much.
Those people in Iowa are just good, God-fearing people that want conservative values.
Leave it alone, man.
Come on, what's the big deal?
Well, here's the big deal.
When the satanic temple puts up their display, the reaction is not, you know, that kind of gets under my skin.
I don't agree.
That's not my religion.
And that's actually a religion that kind of makes me uncomfortable.
But I'm an American.
I love the Constitution.
I love the freedom of religion.
I love the freedom of speech.
So you know what?
Johnny, Dougie, we gotta just live with it.
Because that's what it means to be an American.
That's what we fought for in World War II.
That's why we stood up to Hitler.
That's why we stormed the beaches of Normandy.
It's for freedom of speech and the Constitution.
You know what they do?
Here's what they do.
Today, somebody destroyed the display.
A guy who ran for Congress in Mississippi, a former military veteran, decided he needed to take things into his own hands and he beheaded the statue.
said he could not abide by that.
It was not something that he could allow to take place in America's public square, and he had to take matters into his own hands.
He was encouraged to do so by leaders at various outlets on the American right, including Jack Posterbeach and others, who said this is the Boniface option, meaning you should show up and take the public square by force.
So what happens in these cases is not, Dan, and I'll throw it to you and I'll stop and I'll get a hold of myself, I promise.
What happens in these cases is not, all right, yeah, they got their display at the Capitol.
We got ours.
Yeah, just ignore it.
Don't look at it.
Let's just be grateful we got, you know, a little baby Jesus over here in the Capitol.
That's all good.
Okay?
The response is, this is spiritual warfare.
That if Satan is allowed in the Capitol, the nation will be punished and suffer.
That we're allowing demonic forces to take over.
And Dan, I'm going to dare say you've heard this kind of talk when you were an evangelical.
That if you had idols near you, that if you were willing to abide by the forces of other gods in your midst, you would be infiltrated by their demonic forces.
I dare say you heard this, and I'm happy to hear in a minute if you did.
And so what that means to me is, Democracy be damned.
Constitution be damned.
Freedom of religion be damned.
Freedom of speech be damned.
You know what needs to take precedent?
Our spiritual authority.
So we're going to call Kim Reynolds and say, I can't believe you allow this.
We're going to complain and whine.
I mean, there were state reps after state rep in Iowa, Dan, saying this has to come down.
You cannot allow it.
Ron DeSantis is weighing in.
You know what Ron DeSantis said?
I'm gonna give the guy who destroyed the statue 10 grand for his legal fund.
That's what he said.
That's Christian nationalism.
You don't have to be at J6 or riding in the Capitol or whatever to be a Christian nationalist.
You can be someone in Iowa who's like, I will not stand by This thing being in our capital, and I'm going to do everything I can to get rid of it.
That is Christian nationalism, period.
All right.
Time to take a breath, drink some water.
Off to you, Dan.
Here you go.
So many thoughts, right?
It's hard to, like, I've just sort of sit here as you're talking about, like, new things sort of coming to mind and trying to give some shape to it.
A few things here.
One is that notion of, and I've heard this before too, it doesn't occupy the same space in their life as religion does in mine.
You know, basically it's the claim that religion is really, really important to me and it's somehow superficial to these folks or whatever.
But I just want to highlight how selective that argument is, because when all the black people are out marching with their pastors in the front of the line as a part of a spiritual practice, we're told they need to keep that in the church, or that that's not really religion, or, you know, it's basically that their religion is occupying too prevalent a place in their life.
Or stuff this week I was reading about the American Council of Bishops and, you know, not liking Pope Francis and, like, whatever, like, huh.
What place does religion hold in the lives of these Catholics who are, you know, rejecting the authority of the Pope?
Like, does that work, right?
Or all the sociological data that shows that a lot of these hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool Christian nationalists have low measures of religiosity.
In other words, all the stuff that they, as Christians, say that Christians should be doing, they don't actually do very much of that.
They don't Dan, you and I, did you learn Greek?
Yes.
Did you learn Greek?
Did you learn Hebrew?
or go to church or anything else.
So that's one piece of it is it doesn't hold the same place in their life.
Dan, you and I, did you learn Greek?
Yes.
Did you learn Greek?
Did you learn Hebrew?
Yes.
Yeah.
I did do Greek.
I did French.
I did German.
All so I could read the New Testament in its original language.
All so I could read all the theologians that were writing in French and German.
And then I spent 10 years in grad school just doing nothing but reading about Christianity, including the Bible.
I am way more religious than anyone you just talked about, according to their rubric.
All right, just going to put it out there.
Yep.
Yeah.
So, I mean, you've got all of that kind of stuff.
Here's another one about the founders and the originalism.
The founders, I mean, it's kind of like the Thomas Jeffersons of the world, the George Washingtons of the world.
You know what they would have rejected?
They would have rejected Contemporary Pentecostalism.
They would have rejected mainstream white American evangelicalism.
And if you want to try me on this, feel free to try me on this.
Because they would have said that it was quote-unquote enthusiasm.
They would have thought it was this kind of scary religion of the masses, that it was irrational, that it was too disorderly.
They never would have accepted a vision of like a sort of church service of people talking about hearing directly from God and bypassing clergy and on and on and on and on.
So if you want to play that originalist game with some of the founders, that's fine, but they would never have accepted that kind of mainstream American religion as something legitimate as well.
They couldn't even deal with the Quakers, just getting in there, being quiet.
That offended them, much less everything you're talking about.
Yeah, you have a friend service where nobody's feeling the spirit move, so everybody just kind of sits around for a while and calls it a day.
And let me be clear, I disagree.
I'm not a legal expert either, but I disagree with the notion that that means that they would have said we can't have evangelicals or something.
There were motions in the Constitutional Convention to declare Christianity the official American religion, and they didn't do it.
They chose not to.
Another thing, now that I'm ranting, people have heard me say before that when it comes to church safe, I'm a super traditionalist, like, 18th century Baptist.
One of the groups, we've talked about this before, that championed the First Amendment, that championed freedom of religion, were the Baptists.
In my neck of the woods here, Danbury, Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson's famous wall of separation language was in a letter that he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association.
They were explicit that this included Jewish people, that it included Muslims, that it included Hindus, right?
So yeah, not the full panoply of religious traditions that we might think of now, but it was a lot broader than this American myth that we have.
Well, they just meant different kinds of Christian denominations, right?
That's what they really meant was Christianity.
And then just another thing about, you know, I was going to say the same thing about how weak Is the God that has to have your arguments about blasphemy defended, right?
I am so tired of having conversations with people who believe that, like, I don't know, God, part of the Red Sea, literally, and God did all of these powerful things and can cure diseases and whatever, but, like, is somehow threatened by, like, a weird statue in the Iowa State Capitol, right?
And I did.
I grew up hearing that.
It's like, you know, you open the door a little to demonic influence, it'll come flooding in and, you know, all of this, this kind of political theology that if it's in the leadership, it'll trickle down to everybody else, unless it's Trump, right?
And then his immorality doesn't matter.
It's like this super scary, threatening thing, but I mean, if you knocked the head off the statue, you fixed it?
Like, really?
Wow, that didn't seem so scary.
Or there's the option of just saying, you know what, we're not going to have any religious displays in our state capitol.
Everybody can do what they want to do, you worship as you want to worship, and we're just not going to have it.
We'll just all take our toys and go home and play our own games and like that's fine.
Or there's the logic of, you know, I'm sure you've heard of the film The Last Temptation of Christ.
Lots of people have heard of the film The Last Temptation of Christ.
You know why anybody in like 2023 talks about The Last Temptation of Christ?
Because Christians protested it so much that they like sort of gave it oxygen that a film that otherwise would kind of be lost to time knows about.
Nobody in national media would be talking about this display in Iowa if it wasn't for the Christian Nationalists.
Making sure that everybody sees this challenge to Christian nationalism.
A last point, if I wanted to have Bible and theology arguments with these people, and I don't, I would point out that you've got somebody like the Apostle Paul in the Bible who's like, we who are Christians know that idols are nothing.
They're nothing.
So put your scary goat head statue up if you want, but we real Christians know that they're not real.
If that's really what you believe, and it's what you say you believe, Who cares?
So, brings us back to that point of, I think, let's call it the weakness of strong religion.
This is a thesis I wanted to kind of explore more, and I never really have, but it feels like there's a correlation that the stronger somebody claims their divinity is, the more insecure they seem to be about needing to defend it, or take up arms for it, or whatever.
And I think that there's a deep Deep kind of contradiction in that.
And you find it in religious nationalisms everywhere, be they Hindu, be them Muslim, be they Christian, you find those notions of, you know, the stronger your God claims to be, or you claim your God is, the more that God rules by authority with an iron fist, the more it seems like that God needs, like, angry people, and in this country, mostly angry white people, to, like, stand up and defend God.
So, yeah, lots more thoughts than I can possibly share.
My dad can beat up your dad.
The Weakness of Strong Religion by Dan Miller.
We'll talk offline about how much it will cost you to get that title copyrighted from me.
I'll give you a good deal.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything you're saying.
And I will say, I do want to highlight that there is a state rep in Iowa named John Dunwell, who is a very committed Christian and is a Christian in a way that I think John Dunwell and I probably agree on very little.
But he has basically come out and said it is absolutely the right of these folks to have this.
And guess what?
As a Christian, I'm not going to do anything to Try to get rid of it, because what we should be doing as Christians is trying to build the kingdom of God through love and grace and inclusion.
So, John Dunwall, theologically and politically, I don't think I have much to agree with on, but he has come out and said that, and then the likes of Jack Postabeach and others on the right have just lambasted him, said that he's uninformed and he's weak and he doesn't get it and he's not a real Christian and he worships, you know, two masters and all this kind of stuff.
So, there are people kind of, you know, Arguing along these lines, but they are getting completely scathed by the American right.
In line with somebody like him.
In line with that traditional Baptist vision.
If your religion is better, if it's truer, if there really is this God that is working to convert people and so forth, then go do that.
Go do it.
You don't need to threaten anybody.
You don't need to essentially try to force conversions or prohibit things.
If your God is so much better, if your gospel message is better and provides greater hope and whatever, then go do it.
And if it's not happening, maybe you need to rethink it.
Yeah.
Pro tip, The Last Temptation of Chris is not the same movie as The Last Temptation of Christ.
So if you are scrolling your TV choices late at night, like I might have been, it's just don't click on it because it's not what you might think.
I kept waiting for the religious component to come.
Well, just some of it did feel religious.
It just didn't feel necessarily sacred.
We're going to go to break.
We'll be right back.
Ah, Dan, when we record late in the day, the wheels always threaten to come off.
So we're going to go to one more thing today, and that is something deadly serious.
So we're going to have to get it together.
Donald Trump saying he wants to be a dictator.
Maybe.
Joking?
Kinda?
Who knows?
Tell us all about it.
Yeah, so, again, people have probably heard something about this, but I think it started in a recent interview with none other than Sean Hannity, because, you know, you gotta have Sean Hannity in there somewhere.
Trump, you know, was sort of talking about what it would be like if we had a second Trump term, and he said, this is quote, Day one, I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.
We're closing the border and we're drilling, drilling, drilling.
After that, I'm not a dictator.
End quote.
Right?
People like you and me and everybody who doesn't like Trump, you know, hear this and it's terrifying because we've talked for a long time about the logic of a kind of a dictatorial fascist logic to Trump and the MAGA movement and so forth.
Trump, of course, being Trump, doubles down on this.
A few days later in a Republican group, he said, quote, I said I want to be a dictator for one day.
You know why I wanted to be a dictator?
Because I want a wall and I want to drill, drill, drill.
He really wants to drill, I guess.
MAGA crowds loved it.
This is no surprise, right?
But people among GOP leadership and politicians tried to play it down.
And what caught my eye are the ones who basically said, ah, it's just a joke.
Just a joke.
Just lighten up.
So Representative Mike McCann of Texas said, you know, we've been around him long enough.
It's entertaining.
Just a joke.
Lindsey Graham, one of our favorites, said, I think it was a joke.
We've talked about this before.
We've talked a lot about coded language and the dog whistles and so forth.
And one of the defenses that comes out, and everybody's familiar with this, is when somebody says something offensive or insensitive or unkind or whatever, And then people call him out and be like, oh, hey, it was a joke.
Just lighten up.
Everybody in the world who's experienced like workplace sexual harassment has heard this about the joke about their physical appearance or their clothing or like whatever and how you're not supposed to take it seriously.
So we know we know how that operates.
But what's interesting to me about this is we've talked about this for years, literally.
But when we talked about it, it was the rhetoric that somebody like Trump would use And we said that's like when people tell an offensive joke and then say it's a joke and they'd be like, oh, it's just a figure of speech, whatever.
There's been a shift here where Trump is now just saying it.
Oh yeah, I want to be a dictator.
Day one.
But now it's treated as the joke.
And I see this as a kind of rendering more explicit of what we've talked about.
And for those who might say, I'm sure it was a joke, lighten up.
Here's what I would say.
That's the logic of the unified executive theory that we talk about all the time, right?
Is that essentially the president is a dictator.
They're immune from any kind of prosecution.
Basically, they're above the law.
They can't be challenged, not even by Congress, not by judicial review, you know, sort of on and on and on and on.
We have talked So we're blue in the face about the sort of fascist tendencies and the MAGA movement and parallels and so forth.
So when Trump says dictator on day one, I, for one, don't find it humorous because I think that's exactly what he wants.
And I think that he has said that out loud for a long time.
I think that's the logic of those positions.
But that was the statement.
And what caught my eye was the GOP defenders who were like, oh, you need to just lighten up.
It's just a joke.
I'd love to ask Lindsey Graham, you know, sit him down and be like, so what will happen on day one when Trump's president?
Will he do that or not?
You tell me.
So your thoughts on Trump's latest, you know, really funny sort of joke.
So I'll just reference, I did four episodes on fascism in America.
I'll just say, go back and check those out.
If this interests you and you're like, you know, you really want to dig into this, I There's four episodes, four Mondays in a row on this, and it really goes to this issue in detail.
I will say, this has to be said, all of you listening know this, but let's just be reminded, the man who said this incited a riot to stop the certification of the election he lost.
He's never admitted he lost, and he continues to tell a lie that he won.
This is not somebody who's just saying, this is not Vivek Ramaswamy.
This is not some other blowhard who really has no chance of being in power.
This is the guy who started a riot to stop him from losing an election.
This is a guy who held up a Bible after having peaceful protesters sprayed.
So there's all that.
This is the guy who, seven weeks into his last term, put into place a Muslim ban.
So that's that.
Project 2025, we've talked about at length.
That is the executive branch expansion that he and his allies want to do.
As we close tonight, I'm going to put my focus somewhere else.
At his Trump rally a couple of days ago, here's a pastor who spoke there.
This election is part of a spiritual battle.
There are demonic forces at play, but judgment is coming.
When Trump becomes 47th president, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.
That doesn't sound like a joke.
That sounds like somebody who wants a dictator who will take revenge on the people he thinks are evil.
I'm going to tie this right back to Iowa, Dan, and right back to Texas.
Texas feels like punishing women who want autonomy and independence.
Iowa feels like you're allowed to have religion as long as it's Christianity.
Otherwise, we're going to chop your head off of your statue.
And here at a Trump rally, this is not somebody on the radio in obscure Christian radio station in Appalachia, right?
Or in rural Nevada.
This is at the Trump rally.
A guy who's speaking from the same stage.
A guy who has Trump make America great again 2024 at the lectern from which he is saying these things.
I'm going to say it again.
This election is part of a spiritual battle.
That sounds like Iowa.
That sounds like what people say about abortion.
There are demonic forces at play, but judgment is coming.
Now, when he says judgment is coming, he doesn't say God is going to intervene.
He's going to change hearts and minds.
He's going to bring people to the truth.
He's going to show them that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.
John 14, 6, just in case you didn't believe that Dan and I studied the Bible, okay?
He doesn't say that for God so loved the world, he sent his one and only son, John 3, 16.
He doesn't quote the ancient ecclesiastical hymn of Colossians 2.
You see how much we know about the Bible, y'all?
OK, we actually studied it, OK?
He says, judgment's coming.
So when Trump is president, there will be retribution.
Is there any love, grace?
No.
OK, so we've been over that.
We all know that Maga Nation is not about love or grace or any business there.
But friends, if you think that Iowa and Texas are not connected to Trump, if you think that those local or state-level things are not about the national, that there are a lot of people in Iowa who are using the Satanic Temple statue to say to little old ladies in church and other people, hey, you know, if they're gonna let them have that, you know, statue, they're gonna, what else are they gonna get going in here?
We need Trump back, don't you think?
Okay?
It's all connected, and it's all overwhelmingly frightening.
And so, I'll just say that, to me, when you, Dan, talk about the dictator comment and it's a joke and all that, when I see this minister saying this stuff, there's no joking in his voice or his face.
He is like, why do I want Trump back?
Revenge.
Who are the ones doing evil?
I don't know.
The women who want independence over their body.
People who aren't Christians.
The people who dare to blaspheme God and call him names.
Oh my God.
Clutching my pearls.
All those folks will be punished.
That's what I see here.
All right, final thoughts on this one, and then give us your reason for hope.
Just on that last joke point, it's that sort of double code that goes on.
So you can get somebody who says it, who knows it's not a joke, and can feed that line.
But you can also have the more respectable leaders who need to appear, you know, to not endorse that, who can say, oh, I think he was joking.
Notice that they don't say, he needs to be joking, or I hope that that was a joke.
It's, oh, I think he was joking.
It's a double code that operates that way.
I just want to throw this out there, you know, for the Bible thing, but I once upon a time won an American Bible Society Award for That's my reason for hope, jerk.
All right.
Well, thanks a lot.
The hope that I'll come back.
I should say my Greek and Hebrew is pretty rusty at this point.
But anyway, my reason for hope is tied into some of this other stuff.
Jack Smith this week, the prosecutor looking into Trump federally and so forth, he asked the Supreme Court to determine if Trump is immune from prosecution as he claims and to do so on an expedited basis.
This was a really interesting move and this was one of those things I think got a lot of people's attention because basically Trump's been making this claim for a long time.
It's wending its way through the court process and whatever.
A lot of speculation about exactly why Jack Smith did this.
Things that I think he's thinking and that I think are really smart.
One is he's trying to circumvent the delay tactics of Team Trump.
He's like, fine, let's go straight to the Supreme Court.
I think it implies that he's probably confident that That's not gonna stand up to scrutiny nor nor should it it sort of defies logic that the president Could literally do anything that he wants as president and like not be a subject to this I'm interested to see It's not clear.
The Supreme Court's gonna do this It's not clear that it'll be expedited, but they did say that they wanted the Trump team's response by the 20th of December Which is like lightspeed in like Supreme Court time.
So the reason I took hope in that is that I think Number one, there's a part of me that's scared and there's a lot of other people like, what if they say that the president is immune?
Then I guess let's get that out now instead of going through, you know, years of the process of doing it to know it.
But I'm hopeful because I think it's calling Trump's bluff in a lot of ways and I'm going to be really curious to see what Team Trump actually argues.
I'm going to be, I think it's going to be really telling if they argue that this should somehow not
Go before the Supreme Court on an expedited basis because I think all of us recognize that all Trump's trying to do is stretch things out into the summer and fall when he can then say this is not fair because there's an election and then if he wins the election he can back it off for more years etc etc etc so complicated issue but I actually saw it as really hopeful and I think um I don't know just just seemed like to me a very shrewd maneuver on the part of of Smith.
My reason for hope is there's a number of this we could have chose this week, but Biden staffers staged a demonstration outside the White House calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Last week, we talked about the UN.
We talked about the fact that there's going to be a meeting.
I can't remember the number right now.
I have it in front of me.
I think it's 150 countries called for a ceasefire.
I think 153.
It's 150 some odd countries that called for the ceasefire, yeah.
The United States vetoed it at the UN Security Council.
So it's there's just at this point, there's really no reason that Biden shouldn't have the courage to do that.
But to date has not happened.
The staffers who did this are, I'm just really hopeful because of their courage and their show of faith here.
All right.
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