Weekly Roundup: State of Disunion - Contraceptive Nationalism and the Innocent White Christian Woman
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Brad and Dan begin by discussing the State of the Union speech by Pres. Joe Biden and the GOP response by Sen. Katie Britt (AL). They analyze the theatrics of the civic ritual - and how the chamber has turned into something more like the comments section on a YouTube video than a stately affair where all three of our branches of government gather. Brad draws on the work of Sara Moslener and Megan Goodwin to explain how Britt's response was a manifestation of the innocent White women myth and a form of contraceptive nationalism.
In the second segment, Dan breaks down new data from PRRI on Christian nationalism. The two hosts explain how and why White Christian nationalists differ from their Black and Hispanic counterparts.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the 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.
You too, Dan.
I feel like last week you were just at your wit's end in terms of fatigue.
I feel like it's my turn.
Yeah, March.
My motto about March is, at least it's not February.
That's how I feel about March.
It's not my favorite, but at least it's not February.
That's happening.
We had our big bonus episode come out this week.
That was fun.
People got to listen to stories about me being a young Evangelist on my high school campus and some others, but you I want to say that I think you are really leading the charge when it comes to Storytelling the last couple weeks here like I'm not gonna lie.
There's been moments I've been driving and I've thought about young Dan Miller on the roof Just as king of the schoolyard throwing down tennis balls dodgeballs Soccer balls and all the kids cheering, you know, and I just love that image because you're you're so not a like rah-rah Like, I'm very excitable.
If you catch me in the wrong context, you will find a very excitable ringleader type.
You're not that.
You're more of a silent, like, strong, stoic leader.
But I just love you up on the roof, like, hands raised, like, Are you not pleased?
And just throwing balls down to all the children.
It's amazing.
I love that.
I peaked early.
It was my gladiator moment.
It was my Christmas story when Ralphie imagines everybody carrying him around because he did so well on his essay.
If you could merge the two, there's me as the young wannabe academic hero.
I just shouldn't have gone up and tried to bottle the- Well, you overdid it.
You're a shooting star.
That's what happens.
You see some success and you overdo it, and there you end up in the teacher's office and the principal.
All right.
Here we go.
We're going to talk about State of the Union.
We're going to talk about Joe Biden and Katie Britt.
Many of you waiting for that.
We're going to talk about- Data from PRRI that came out last week, and we're kind of late to the party here.
Other folks have kind of analyzed this data, but it really is data about Christian nationalism in the country.
It shows that about 3 out of 10 Americans score as Christian nationalists.
It breaks it down by state.
Interesting things in there about age, and the ways that Christian nationalism is affiliated with support for Trump, and hardcore immigration policies, and belief there's a crisis at the border, and so on.
And then in the final segment, we'll get to a truly frightening gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina who is a Holocaust denier and wants, in his own words, to take America back to a time when women could not vote.
So we'll hopefully get to that.
We might even get to to Elon Musk meeting with Donald Trump.
If we have time, we will see how it goes.
State of the Union was last night, Dan.
It's...
I'm not sure how much the State of the Union moves any needles, but nonetheless, I do believe about 30 million people watch the State of the Union still.
It is still that kind of event.
I'll just stop and say, give me your thoughts and analysis on the theater of the speech, on some things Joe Biden might have said, reactions from the GOP, and then we'll get in a minute to the Katie Britt response that has garnered quite a bit of attention over the last Yeah, so as you say, it's theater, and that's really what, for me, stands out, right, is the political spectacle of it.
I think that's what the State of the Union largely is.
Whether it's Margie Taylor Greene wearing like a bunch of red stuff and heckling and, you know, even talking about heckling ahead of time.
Or, you know, Biden or whatever, we know that we're in an election year.
So, like, all of that's at play.
So, just sort of quick hits or things that sort of stood out to me.
One is first, like, Biden spoke like Biden, right?
I mean, Biden has never been a smooth reader of speeches.
He's always had trouble.
He's always had gaffes.
And I think that that has sort of fed into perceptions of him in recent years more.
There was some of that.
I think he took Marjorie Taylor Greene's bait when he referred to someone as an illegal.
Like, we're suddenly back in the 90s, moderate democratic language, when that was a kind of a standard thing.
And I think that that was a misstep there.
But there were a lot of other things that I think He did really effectively.
He was aggressive, but didn't, to me, didn't come off as, like, defensive.
Didn't come off like he was on his back foot the whole time.
Felt, like, sort of aggressive.
He was willing to directly engage, uh, the kinds of things, the kinds of criticisms that have been leveled.
Um, I think it also stood out, uh, just as a side thing, Mike Johnson, like, couldn't hold still in his seat behind him and stop making faces and stuff.
And usually, if you watch the State of the Union, And my hat's off to the VP and the Speaker of the House, because I would not be able to sit there and hear somebody saying things that, like, drive me crazy or that I vehemently disagree with and be as, well, to use your phrase, as stoic as they usually are.
But he was, you know, squirming and shaking his head, and so I think it sort of provoked that kind of response, which was part of the aim.
I think a lot of things—this is what people wanted to see, and so in terms of the theater, that's what a lot of it was.
He came off as engaged, aggressive, and so forth, and it seems to have rung true with people.
There were something like—CNN polling showed after this—something like six in ten viewers I think he was using the so-called bully pulpit in a way that he usually doesn't do.
And for a president and presidential candidate that, you know, recent polling is showing some huge percentage of people think that he's too old to be president.
I think all of that was sort of there.
That was like the subtext of it.
I think that was there.
I think he was using the so-called bully pulpit in a way that he usually doesn't do.
I feel like maybe it's just my perception.
Maybe it's maybe it's that he's following Trump.
I don't know.
But I feel like Biden has been one of the most sort of invisible presidents of like, at least as long as I've been paying attention to presidents.
And so let's say going back to George HW Bush probably is, you know, when I first started kind of paying attention to that.
So I think that he was He was just visible and present in a way that he hadn't been.
And I think he also sought to capitalize on popular topics like abortion access, and we'll say more about that in a minute, raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, lowering prescription drug prices.
In terms of the theater, I have to say, people who have listened to the podcast for a long time have heard me say this before, it drives me crazy.
CNN, in their write-up, though, in talking about that, said that this is why Biden chose to focus heavily on populist themes, like raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations and so forth.
Folks, those are not populist themes.
That was one of the pieces, I think, of the media and its both side-isms that it still plays on.
Appealing to things that actually help people and that would help a majority of people doesn't make you a populist.
Populists want to narrow the scope of who counts as the people.
So when you want to take benefits away from people, when you want to take rights away from people, when you want to be stricter about who can be an American and who can't, that's populism.
So that was sort of a thing that just sort of struck me about the media coverage of it.
I think one of the big issues that really stands out, of course, was abortion being front and center, this topic that we keep talking about, that everybody keeps talking about because it It stays front and center.
Kate Cox was invited as the guest.
She, of course, is the woman that has become known nationally.
We've discussed her, the Texas woman who was denied abortion access, despite wanting a child, despite being at risk.
And I think it demonstrated very publicly the hollowness of those so-called medical exceptions.
And I think all of that was sort of front and center there, really trying to capitalize on that.
So that was the topic that stood out the most.
The GOP response had its things, including the immigration focus, which we'll get to in a minute.
But those were a lot of my quick hits.
If somebody like me is kind of afraid that, I don't know, Biden might just fall on his face, like come out and face plant on stage, he didn't.
And so I think it was really strong in that regard.
But yeah, your thoughts on it.
Yeah, a couple things here.
Just want to break down.
I know most people listening will understand this, but I think this is one of those moments it's helpful to do a little bit, like 30 seconds of explaining.
Why do you not say an illegal?
Why would we not do that?
Well, because no human being is illegal.
Now, you might be in a country without documentation.
So you might be in a country where you don't have the documents to be there as a citizen or a resident or a visitor or anything else.
So you might be undocumented, but no human being by dint of being a human being is illegal.
So, to call somebody an illegal is just not something that, you know, I do and I take the lead of many who have argued over the last 25 years that that's just not appropriate and not helpful.
I'll also just add to that and say, when people do things that are illegal, I don't know of any other category where we label, make this kind of existential statement about somebody being an illegal.
Somebody cheats on their taxes, we don't call them an illegal.
Somebody steals a car, we don't call them an illegal.
Somebody murders somebody, we don't call them an illegal.
For me, to the point I think you're making, it's this kind of statement about the status of the person as a human being, and that's why we're not doing it.
And the Democrats, of course, have moved away from that.
Biden, I think, did show the kind of Democratic generation he comes out of when he lapsed into that language.
Yeah, for sure.
I want to just make two comments on the theater of it and the decorum.
And so one is about Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was wearing what looked like Paraphernalia one buys outside of a Trump rally.
Now, this is not me, and I want to be very clear and careful here, commenting on a public woman's outfit.
This is not me being like, oh, the dress wasn't flattering or, you know, I don't care anything about that.
I have no interest in those kinds of comments.
I have no interest in making any sort of judgment on whether the outfit looked good, stylish.
I don't know.
I don't care.
What I'm commenting on is that Marjorie Taylor Greene or anyone else, it could have been Josh Hawley or Jim Jordan, it doesn't matter, but you show up to the State of the Union.
Wearing like a MAGA hat, a like shiny MAGA shirt.
And I just have to say, Dan, that when people around the world look at the United States, they already know that we're much more casual, I'll say, as a country.
Okay?
Like, you know, if you visit other countries, whether they're European or Asian or other places, Americans are just known for like wearing white tennis shoes and jeans.
That's kind of, you know, a standard.
And especially out here on the west coast, it's not a place where you see the guy in the suit, the three-piece suit and tie.
I'll give you a quick story.
When I lived in France, this is a story that will be told one day on a bonus episode at length, but I lived in a monastery for a year.
Some of you don't know that.
Very first day there, I go downstairs to eat breakfast.
And Dan, to this day, it's the best setup I've ever had.
It's France.
Homemade croissants every day.
There's a dude who's been up since 4 a.m.
making croissants and bread every day.
And then there's like Nutella and jam and butter.
And then there's just coffee and orange juice.
And it was awesome.
But I was wearing sweats and like a sweatshirt.
And everyone there at 7 a.m.
The monks, the seminarians, the priests are wearing slacks and ties, and they just shook their head at me like, American.
Here's my point, Dan, is this is a moment when the world is watching, and one of the most visible and camera-hungry representatives we had is dressed like, in a tchotchke sort of manner, a Trump kind of All American t-shirt and hat sort of situation.
And it just shows you where we're at as a country, that not even in one of our country's most important civic rituals, the gathering of the judicial, all three branches, right?
Do we have any kind of decorum?
In addition to that, A lot of folks have noticed the back and forth that Biden had.
You know, Biden was doing almost a call and response at times.
There seemed to be a planned moment with the Democrats, but there was also just jeers several times, especially when he talked about immigration.
And I think you and I are old enough, Dan, to remember when Obama was giving his speech and he received the infamous you lie comment from GOP Rep Joe.
I did not look up his name.
I can picture him.
I cannot remember his last name to save my life.
It doesn't matter.
I didn't look it up.
But Dan, that was a big deal.
It's a big deal that this man interrupted the president that he would he would break decorum and like shout out you lie to the president the first black president and so on we're now in a situation where like it's like a daily debate in the house of commons there's so much yelling and jeering that it feels like a comment section on youtube rather than right all three branches of our government gathering To hear the president deliver what he takes to be the state of our union.
And I just think that's indicative of something.
It's indicative of something.
Well, and Mike Johnson, again, just the ineffectiveness of whoever the GOP gets in there to be Speaker of the House.
He tried to tamp this down ahead of time.
He called for decorum.
He called for not having the disrupted behavior and so forth.
And it didn't do anything.
That's another piece of it, right?
Because as you say, it's a joint session of Congress with the Supreme Court there being addressed by the president.
Just dress like it's a business thing.
Just do it.
It's kind of like the first time a kid is going to go to an interview and his parents are like, dude, just put on a tie.
Just put on the tie.
Watch the YouTube video, learn how to tie it, and just go.
Just do this.
And the GOP can't and won't.
And I think another telling feature is that just, again, that Mike Johnson, who couldn't hold still himself, but he just has no sway in the House.
And I think that that's another piece that was on display last night.
And I'm sure this is out there, and I don't know about it, and if it is, I hope someone will alert me to it.
But I'm sure there's a scholar of religion and performance and garb out there who has analyzed something like what's happened in these cases in the United States from the Tea Party till now.
Because I think you could do an interesting analysis, and surely someone has, and I don't know about it, about the way that the Tea Party sent radicals to Congress Okay.
And those radicals are now just mainstays.
That's what we expect from House GOP members.
And there's no longer a sense of having to be a grown-up, having to act a certain way, having to respect certain rules, having to speak with a certain sense of respect for your fellow congresspeople and so on.
And I just think you see that, and it's indicative of the way that the fabric of our civic square Has changed over the last 15 years, that that kind of decorum, that kind of respect, and I'm not both-sizing this.
I'm not trying to say, all we need to sit down and have a good talk, bring America together, apple pie, get some whipped cream, where's the corn on the cob?
I don't know what this voice is.
I don't know, but I'm loving it.
I think it's probably- That voice has to stay.
Has to stay.
I think it's a voice from one of my daughters' cartoon she watches or something.
But I'm not doing it.
I'm not saying that's the antidote to America's problem.
I'm just saying when the world's watching, do you do you really think wearing a MAGA hat shows us how much you love Donald?
Like, is that?
Is that the way to do it anyway?
So I think that's that.
All right.
You want to say anything more about Biden or the theatrics of the speech, or do you want to?
I'm happy to move on to Katie Britt and her response to the State of the Union.
Let's move on to Katie Britt.
I mean, because you talk about theatrics, like there it is.
It's on a number of levels.
All right.
So Katie Britt is the junior senator from Alabama.
And Alabama, we love you.
We see you.
If you're in Alabama and listening, just shout out to you and thank you for being here.
And thank you for you have two senators.
Katie Britt did this last night and then Tommy Tuberville.
If you're listening to this show in Alabama, I assume you did not vote for either of those people, and it's really hard for you on a day-to-day basis to know those are your senators.
I'm saying with all sincerity, thank you for your resilience and persistence, because that's a lot.
Katie Britt is the youngest Republican woman ever sent to the Senate.
Katie Britt gave this speech, if you've not watched it, gave this speech from her kitchen.
And again, and I think people have noticed this, right?
Usually when you give this kind of speech, Your setup is like the American response to the president from the other party who you feel is making bad decisions all the way to leading the country to And you need to have what?
You need to have authority.
You need to have gravitas.
You need to have symbolic things around you that express your elevated status as the person who should give this speech.
Okay?
Well, the decision was, we're going to put Katie Britt in her kitchen.
I didn't see any American flags.
Didn't see any books.
Didn't see any stately Dynamics in the scene.
No mahogany furniture.
None of that stuff.
Yep.
No mahogany.
No marble.
Nope.
And maybe the countertops.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Beyond that.
Yeah.
So, and Dan, I'll jump in here at any moment and fill in things that I forget, but I think you and I agree, along with many other commentators out there, that there was a clear strategy here.
This is one of the youngest members of the GOP caucus in either house.
And she's a star contrast to the 81-year-old Joe Biden.
Early 40s and a mom and a parent.
She's a kind of old millennial or maybe pushing to Gen X, but my guess is she's kind of one of the oldest millennials out there.
That's much different than Joe Biden.
All right, that's one.
She's a woman.
And her setup in the frame was clearly a like sort of well-organized, well-maintained suburban kitchen.
I mean, I don't know how else to put that.
It looked like a sort of crate and barrel catalog kind of setup.
Upscale, neat, tidy.
And so here we have a young mother.
Who is in her kitchen giving the response to the State of the Union, okay?
Now, many people have commented also on the delivery.
Now, I don't want to do as much of that.
I'm going to let you just watch it.
The delivery, I will say, was different than what you're normally used to from a political speech.
If you go back and listen to anyone from Sarah Huckabee Sanders to Bobby Jindal to Barack Obama to anyone giving a political speech, you sort of expect a certain cadence and a certain tone.
This was much more wide ranging in terms of its emotional Scope.
Everybody who hasn't listened to it is like, what are you talking about?
There's a lot of breathy voice catching on the edge of tears.
I think very melodramatic.
I think very calculated.
In my view, miscalculated.
But that was very definitely.
So yeah, folks, just go watch a few clips of it or sit through the whole thing and you can see exactly what we're getting at here.
All right, so that's the setup.
No stately mahogany desk with a person surrounded by American flags wearing a suit or some kind of outfit that says, listen to me, I'm a senator.
It was very much a, I'm a suburban mom.
Sitting in my kitchen.
And here's my message.
Fill in some stuff.
What did I miss?
We'll get to what she said, but I don't know.
What else is there?
As you say, the strategies, right?
In the tick boxes.
A woman, right?
A party that struggles with suburban women in particular, so they choose a woman to deliver the speech.
Makes sense.
Somebody who's young, as you say, and she clearly was trying to emphasize that, right?
Kept referring to Biden as out of touch and not in control to me, like thinly veiled shots about, you know, mental acuity or this or that, as well as policies.
But so here's my thing.
We get it.
The GOP struggles with suburban women, and they have for a long time.
We know this.
We know this from the last two elections.
You have the Dobbs decision and the doing away with Roe v. Wade, everything that's going on in Alabama.
We know that the GOP is like, we have to try to reach suburban women.
But to me, I look at them like, so what's your view of suburban women?
You put a woman in the kitchen.
I'm a suburban woman, and I care about America, so I ran for the Senate, and I became the youngest GOP senator, and I'm doing something about it.
That would be a That would be an empowering message.
Nope, nope.
It's a suburban woman in the kitchen who sounds like she's on the verge of tears and scared of what?
Of people at the southern border.
The issue just hammered on over and over and over was how afraid we are, you know, terrifying it is, the southern border, the border's not secure.
So to me, what they did is they created or projected this caricature Of the white suburban woman huddled in her kitchen, afraid of brown people coming across the southern border.
And it was just, that's the piece of it to me that more than the strategy behind it, it's like, what do they think American women are when they choose that this is how they're going to put this forward?
And that to me is what stood out.
And that was the theater of it that for me stood out and I think will backfire against I think, will backfire against the Republicans.
Much like, you know, the parallel was John McCain tapping Sarah Palin once upon a time, and like in some ways it was strategic, it was smart, let's get a woman, a female running mate, etc., etc., etc.
But there was also this sense that, oh hey, we've got a woman on board now, so the women will be okay.
They'll follow right along just because we did that.
He chose somebody who, you know, couldn't communicate and all of that.
I feel like this to me felt like the same kind of thing.
What it projected was a really problematic view of who and what American women, suburban women, are.
Yeah.
I want to stay on this.
So let's take a break.
We'll come back and just keep breaking down some of this symbology and historical contours of that speech.
Be right back.
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All right, Dan, I want to turn to some journalists and scholars who I think can really help us understand the Katie Britt speech in context.
So here's Sarah Jones writing at the Intelligencer from New York Magazine.
Moms, she said, wonder how they're going to be three places at once and still get dinner on the table.
Do America's moms have a choice in this scenario?
Where exactly are the dads and what injury prevents them from cooking?
For women, the kitchen can be a place of exile to a location they inhabit out of necessity rather than choice.
So I think what Sarah Jones is saying here is like, yeah, you're in your kitchen.
You're trying to project this, this hearth of domesticity that you're inhabiting.
And Jones is like, well, why can't the men operate in the kitchen?
Or for some women, they have to be in the kitchen and they don't like that because no one else will cook in the house.
And if they don't, then.
They have to worry about what everyone's going to eat and so on and so on.
Should Brit and her party get their way, women may find themselves exiled again.
If she believes women can be anything but the wives of men, that unmarried women or queer women might lay claim to equality, it's not obvious.
So I think Jones points out something else here, is that that Hearth of domesticity that she's in was steeped in a kind of classic family values, heterosexual nuclear family deal.
Hey, me and my husband, Reece, I think is his name.
We were here at the kitchen table about all kinds of stuff.
If you're an unmarried woman, do you still have the same status?
And I want to just, we're going to come back to that because we're going to call in our friend Sarah Malzahn here in a minute to talk about that.
So if I'm an unmarried woman, do I get to still be The respectable suburban mom that you are?
If I'm a queer woman?
If I'm a bisexual woman?
If I'm a trans woman?
Yes?
No?
Okay.
Now, she also said something, Dan, that I think you hinted at that many people took note of.
We are steeped in the blood of patriots.
My God.
Why are we always talking about blood and homeland all the time now, Dan?
I'm about, I'm going to stop myself because I've had a kombucha and I'm feeling fine.
But if I hadn't had the kombucha and a sip of water, I might just lose it right now.
Why are we always talking about patriots and blood and homeland?
It's yeah.
All right.
Here's what Joan says.
It's violent imagery suitable for the party of insurrection.
When she said it, her kitchen became even less inviting.
It became briefly contested territory, a place secured through brutality.
And this is true because when she talks about the patriots, if you look at the speech or you listen to the speech, she talks about things like American conquering.
It's almost a manifest destiny trope of like, yes, I'm the white woman in the kitchen.
We are steeped in the blood of patriots who have overcome those others in history, right?
Whether they be indigenous folks, whether they be those who needed to be overcome for us to be who we are.
Like, excuse me, America's ideal woman serves her family atop a heap of bodies.
All right, I'm going to read that again because we're going to go to Sarah Malzahner here in like 10 seconds.
America's ideal woman serves her family atop a heap of bodies.
The hearth of domesticity, the home of bliss and family conversation, is possible because it stands on a heap of bodies.
Like Brit, she, America's ideal woman, knows her place and is willing to fight for it.
So it's not that Brit's not willing to fight for her place, it's just that she knows also where her place is, and that's in the kitchen, in the home, and so on.
She'll never know equality, but she may win power.
I'm going to stop there.
She may never know equality, but she may win power.
That's Sarah Jones writing at The Intelligencer.
If you now connect this to our very good friend of the show, Sarah Mosner, who just produced a podcast that is eight episodes, and I feel like it is basically an eight-episode response to Katie Britt's speech.
It is called Pure White.
It is at axismoondy.us.
It is free.
You can listen to it.
If you're a subscriber, you can listen to it ad-free, and it's all about this.
But look what Sarah Mosler said in a recent interview about her podcast.
She says, the white woman in the 19th century is the personification of the United States.
Just as Brit gave us the ideal woman, the woman who knows her place and will fight for it, The woman who leads her family and cooks in her kitchen atop a heap of bodies.
Sarah Mosliner says, the woman of the 19th century is the personification of the United States.
The white woman.
Lady Temperance.
Lady Liberty.
The very famous John Gast painting, American Progress.
Some of you can picture this in your mind.
American Progress.
Google it if you don't know it.
Which features Columbia, this white woman drifting from the East Coast to the West.
Behind her the sun is rising and there are ships and commerce and men cultivating the land with domesticated animals.
While before her, in front of her, in the dark portion of the painting are indigenous people who are being driven off like wild animals.
The landscape is dark and forbidding and foreboding.
What Sarah Mosner does in her work, and I think connects directly to Katie Britt's response, is say the myth of white Christian female innocence is the way that conservatives and Christian nationalists imagine the country and defend their violent actions and their exclusionary views of the nation.
Let me give you another bit from Sarah.
The myths around white womanhood exist and function in any context, religious or not.
So you don't have to be a Baptist.
You don't have to be a Catholic.
Because it's also a national myth.
It's also a national myth.
So Sarah Jones says, this woman that Katie Britt represents may never know equality, but she may win power.
Sarah Mosner says that this myth, this national myth of white female innocence is about white women being in a position just by default of who they are, the mom in the kitchen.
Being in a position of moral correctness, of virtue, and of innocence.
They are pure.
They are what we should defend and fight for.
They are the vulnerable.
And who's coming for them, Dan?
Well, in the 19th century, the early 20th century, it was newly freed black men.
Might have been Chinese workers on the West Coast.
And now, if you listen to Katie Britt's speech, who was it?
Those dangerous brown people coming across the border.
To me, this myth of white Christian female innocence was embodied last night by Katie Britt sitting in the kitchen.
And there's this idea, whether it's in the 1860s or the 1960s, of family values, of domesticity, of monogamous hetero marriages at the core of American social order.
And if we celebrate that and protect it, we'll have a good nation.
If we don't, If we don't, we're going to be in trouble.
Let me get your reaction to that.
I'm going to give you one more piece of scholarship to add to this discussion and then we can move on to PRRI.
I think all of that's right on, and again, as you say, I would invite people to go check out Sarah's work, because she really draws these things together.
The other piece I would think of that ties into this, when somebody like Sarah or others talk about the woman as the figure of the land, is how is that described traditionally, right?
Virgin territory, virgin land, pure land, in need of what?
In need of the protection of strong white Christian men?
And that's what Brit was, sitting in that kitchen.
It was a projection of strength, all the blood language and the bodies and all of that.
But you get the impression, not her, right?
And this is where, for me, the tone and the style of presentation was so significant that it just exuded fear.
And the need of a strong protector.
And so it was this, the empowerment of the pure white woman through her willing disempowerment before strong white men.
And I think that that's the other piece that gets projected onto the myth of the nation as virgin land.
But I think that that's also that ideal of domestic white Christian femininity that was very much on display in her response.
I'm so glad you brought up this idea of the sexually pure land or the sexually pure woman in need of protection.
I guess sexually pure land doesn't make total sense, but the pure land, the undisturbed land, we could talk about sexually pure land another time.
I don't know.
That's a whole other thing.
I want to refer us to Megan Goodwin's book, Abusing Religion, and her term, Contraceptive Nationalism, which we've talked about on the show.
There's a whole episode titled Contraceptive Nationalism in our archives.
If you're a subscriber, you have access to that.
Go check it out.
But Megan Goodwin writes in her book, Abusing Religion, contraceptive nationalism is a form of gendered white supremacist Christian Christianity that minoritizes certain American religious traditions, compromising their legal protections, political influence, cultural cachet, and or social credibility.
These kinds of stories are prophylactic, protecting the American body politic.
And the American body politic is allegorized as a white woman, such as Katie Britt, sitting in her kitchen.
Against insemination by religio-sexual predators.
They titillate audiences with gruesome depictions about, this is me now, about, I don't know, say the border?
Of sexual violation.
They reinforce anxieties about religious and sexual difference.
Go listen to the speech, Dan.
Anxiety was a key theme.
And commodify violence against women and children while failing to meaningfully disrupt or prevent sex abuse.
The only thing I would add here is that for Goodwin, it's minority religions that are turned into that which needs protecting from.
Muslims, you know, those who participate in Wiccan communities and so on.
I would add now we're at a place In 2024 where it's also the religion of Marxism, the religion of globalism and the religion of grooming, that if you're queer in any way, that if you're not a conservative, then it's the goal and the duty to protect The American body, allegorized as a white woman or a child, against insemination by those sexual religious predators.
And to me, when I think of the Katie Britt State of the Union response, I think of Sarah Mosner and the myth of white Christian female innocence.
And I think of Megan Goodwin, contraceptive nationalism.
Any final thoughts on this before we move on?
Just again, just to plug her work, I think it's outstanding, and people should check it out if they haven't had a chance to do that.
All right.
Oh my!
Need more kombucha.
It's about as wild as I get these days, Dan.
That's a kombucha in the afternoon.
Keeps me going.
Any kombucha brands out there need a sponsor?
Email me.
All right.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about PRRI's survey on Christian nationalism released last week.
Be right back.
All right, y'all.
Unfortunately, we had a little bit of technical difficulty on Dan's side.
So what you're going to hear is some material from Dan, and then you'll probably only hear me, Brad, for the last 10 minutes of the episode.
So if it sounds like Dan disappeared or I just am not letting him talk, he had a technical difficulty and we just couldn't get it fixed.
So anyway, here's the last couple of minutes of our episode.
Thanks for hanging in.
All right, Dan, take us through it.
This was a state by state.
Examination, there's a lot of data.
You texted me last night, I think gloating, that Massachusetts scores second to lowest on the Christian nationalism register, only to Oregon.
I think you wanted me to text you back and say, surely your state ranks so low on the Christian nationalism scale because of the work of one man named Dan Miller, who just tirelessly crusades against Christian nationalism.
But anyway, take us through what you've got here with this data.
I think it's clear that the state follows my lead.
I mean, that just, you know, goes without question, especially since I've lived here a whole almost 10 years.
Yeah, so I'm teaching a class next semester on, you know, religion and politics coming to the election.
So I've been digging through this.
Folks know we like PRRI and the work of Robert Jones a lot.
We're not going to have time to go into everything, and if somebody just Googles or just go to pri.org, it'll pop right up and you can take a deeper look at this.
But a few sort of high points or things that I thought were worth note.
Again, what he highlights is that about a third of Americans are what he calls Christian Nationalists, either adherents or sympathizers.
And this is a pretty standard way of thinking about Christian Nationalism, where you've got this kind of continuum.
On one end, you've got the hardcore believers.
On the far end, you have like the skeptics, the people who absolutely reject Christian Nationalism.
And then a couple positions in between.
And it more or less breaks into a pair.
So it was about a third, 30%, a little less than a third of Americans that on that metric would qualify as Christian Nationalists, with two-thirds as skeptics or rejecters.
I want to just answer something that I get asked all the time, which are, okay, you guys talk about white Christian nationalists.
What about Christian nationalists of color?
So this survey actually has some really good and very clear data on this.
There are black Christian nationalists.
There are what the survey calls Hispanic Americans who are Christian nationalists, okay?
However, one thing that Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead do a great job of explaining in Taking Back America for God is that if Christian nationalism is a cultural identity, if it's a way you think about yourself and the country, it's a story you tell.
That there might be black people in the country who are Christians who answer these survey questions in ways that are correspondent with some of their white counterparts.
And we can debate whether that's good or bad.
I'm not going to lie.
I wish no Americans answered affirmative to Should this be declared a Christian nation or God should have dominion?
I don't care white, black, Latino, Asian, you know, indigenous, whatever the way you identify.
I want to live in a country where no one does that, but that's not the case.
But there is something that's worth pointing out, which is black Christian nationalists are only slightly more likely than black Americans overall to hold favorable views of Trump.
So, it's a small, it's a 7% jump between if you're a black Christian nationalist and if you're not, in terms of whether or not you think Trump is favorable.
What that tells me is that black Christian nationalists tell a story about the country that's different than the Trumpian story.
It's not a story of nostalgia, and we've got to go back to being great.
It's a story, and you can find this in Whitehead and Perry, a story of hope, a story of saying, maybe one day we'll live up to the values of a Christian nation, even though we never have.
That's a different story than we used to be great and now no longer because of all those terrible people that got into the city on a hill.
I'll give you one more, Dan, and I'll throw it back to you.
White Christian nationalists are far more likely than Hispanic or Black Christian nationalists to say they most trust Fox News or far-right television news sources to give them accurate info about current events and politics.
So once again, You might have black Christian nationalists, or Hispanic Christian nationalists, or Asian for that matter, to envision them as sitting at home wearing a MAGA hat and watching Fox News.
The data says on the whole that's probably not accurate.
They're probably telling you a different story about America and how it's a Christian nation than the Fox News MAGA version that comes from Trump and the white Christian nationalists.
So, if you're wondering why white Christian nationalism is different than other Christian nationalists in the country, I think this survey gives us a pretty clear picture.
So, this is just a moment to say it's really easy for people to envision white Christian nationalists as white evangelicals.
And that makes sense.
66, a full two-thirds of white evangelicals score as Christian nationalists, either as adherents, 30%.
So 30% of white evangelicals are like in the top tier of Christian nationalism.
Another 36% are sympathizers.
Okay.
So, hey, if you think of Christian nationalists as evangelicals, I understand why.
But I think there's a couple of groups that I, you know, we're going to run out of time today that just we need to have in our minds.
One are Hispanic Protestants.
People are always talking about places like Florida and Texas and Arizona as places that the Democrats are going.
And there has been a systematic and concerted effort to make sure that there are ways that Latinx churches are especially Protestant Latinx churches, some of them Pentecostal, some of them affiliated with New Apostolic Reformation, are brought into a myth of the Christian nation that fits this idea of the Christian nationalist nostalgia Trumpian model.
Catherine Stewart has a great chapter on this in The Power Worshippers about California pastors who have really worked on this front for decades, so I'll just put that out there.
I just want to make one more comment on this, Dan, is Mainline Protestants, if you're a white Mainline Protestant, I'm sorry to say you're not out of the woods here, friends.
A third of you score as Christian Nationalists.
There are people in your churches, and Brian Kaler and Bo Underwood have a great new book about this coming out that talks about how mainland Protestants, just by dint of being mainline, you're not free here from the trappings in your communities of Christian nationalism, and white Catholics too.
I feel like we talk a lot more about white Catholics on this show, or at least we try to, because of their influence and participation in Maga World and so on and the representation on something like the Supreme Court and etc.
But the white mainline folks, just because you're mainline doesn't mean, okay, you're good.
This isn't a trap you all fall into.
So I think that's something that has, I mean, Dan, think about white mainline Protestants, 32%.
Religiously unaffiliated, 7%.
Jewish, 8%.
Right now, some of this is like, well, they're clearly not Christian.
Yeah, that's, that's great.
But they're clearly also not buying into a certain story of the United States.
Certain story that says, It once was great and is no longer, that the country was chosen by God, blah, blah, blah.
And shout out to everyone at PRI who worked on this and the Brookings Institution and all of you.
It's Robbie, but it's a whole team, so shout out to all of you.
And to Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry who helped sort of construct the spectrum that is now kind of used to understand these things.
Real quick, Dan, I just want to point this out.
I feel like on this show, we talk a lot about certain states.
Texas.
Dan, you talk a lot about Florida.
Idaho.
We've mentioned Oklahoma recently.
I feel like we've been in Virginia.
We sometimes talk about South Dakota because of Kristi Noem, but we rarely talk about the Carolinas.
And I just want to mention that the GOP candidate for governor is now officially Mark Robinson.
Mark Robinson is a black man who's a Republican, and for a long time he's been at the very edges Of right-wing extremism.
I mean, I'm not talking like, oh, this is just, you know, march out another MAGA candidate.
This is a man who made hateful remarks about Michelle Obama to the survivors of the Parkland school shooting.
Has called members of the LGBT community filth.
Threatened to use his AR-15 against the government.
Wants to outlaw all abortions.
And has said he wants to return to a time when women could not vote.
He is a Holocaust denier.
Has made anti-Semitic remarks.
Thinks 9-11 was an inside job.
Thinks the music industry is run by Satan.
And that George Soros orchestrated the Boko Haram kidnappings of 2014 and so on.
This is all coming from Vox and it's written by Nicole Neria.
So, I'll just say we could spend an hour on Mark Robinson, but this is bad, Dan.
This is bad even for the GOP in 2024.
It's bad.
Now, You read about North Carolina, and if you're North Carolina, I'm happy for you to correct me on this.
North Carolina is a place that is usually a tight race, three points, two points.
It's a place Barack Obama won historically.
It's a place that is now gone for Trump.
It's a place where you have a lot of educated, Advanced degree types living in certain cities, right?
Whether that is Raleigh or Durham or other places.
You also have a lot of rural parts of North Carolina.
I've been to those places.
Very rural parts of North Carolina.
Here's my point.
There's a line of analysis that says, well, the man this extreme cannot win the general election in North Carolina because there's too many North Carolinians in the middle who will just not vote for this guy.
This is not a place where he's going to be able to capture enough votes in that extremist lane in order to win.
And that might be true.
I don't know.
We will see.
I'm no longer surprised about American politics.
Dan, it's just not healthy to have a society where we're elevating someone with these views to the gubernatorial candidacy of any state, much less North Carolina, which is a fairly mid-sized, large state, and to think that there's no effect on our civic government.
We started this talking about how Marjorie Taylor Greene wore Trump rally tchotchkes To our State of the Union.
There's an effect when you send these people to represent.
Even if he doesn't win the general election for governor, it's not good.
This is not good.
Reason for hope.
I'm going to go to Arizona for mine.
Kirsten Sinema dropped out of the race, which is, there's a kind of weird good news, bad news thing here.
But Kirsten Sinema is somebody we talked about a lot going back about two years ago.
Kirsten Sinema, one of the more befuddling and peculiar figures in American politics at the moment.
Somebody who I think Thought of herself perhaps as smarter than everyone else and had a path to some sort of independent position.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
She's dropped out.
Ruben Gallego is now going to face off versus Carrie Lake.
I think it's good that Sinema won't split that vote and perhaps siphon off some of the Gallego vote.
I also think Carrie Lake is everything I just talked about with Mark Robinson in North Carolina.
It's just not good.
Damn, she ran for governor, and she's still here, and she's running for Senate.
Like, she was not excised from polite conversations, from political viability.
She's still here.
So, Ruben Gallego is now the one that will hopefully not allow her to become a United States Senator.
I also, out of Arizona, want to say that Katie Hobbs, the governor, the governor who won and beat Carrie Lake by like the slimmest of margins.
is using money in Arizona to buy up medical debt and forgive just a ton of medical debt for Arizonans.
So there are a bunch of Arizonans who are going to wake up and have no more medical debt because the governor is making that decision.
And elections matter.
Elections have consequences.
One of them is a governor who's like, hey, we have funds, we can direct them here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
How about we help, you know, X number of ten thousands of Arizonans wake up and not have to pay back the debt for that ambulance ride, or for when their kid got sick, so they can pay their mortgage, or buy a home, or afford their car payment, or whatever may be.
Okay?
So, I think that's good news.
All right.
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