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Brad and Dan begin by discussing a terrifying law in Texas that would allow law enforcement to detain people based on any suspicion of them being undocumented. This is frightening in itself, but even more so that the presumptive GOP nominee for president recently said some migrants aren't "human."
In the second segment the hosts break down new research from Dr. Paul Djupe on how those who refute the Christian nationalist label identify Christian nationalism as the phenomenon that will save the country. In other words, they refuse to be labeled Christian nationalists while expressing the idea that Christian nationalism is the greatest hope for the country.
Read it here: https://religioninpublic.blog/2024/03/18/christian-nationalism-is-both-smear-and-savior-to-many-christians/
In the final segment, Brad responds to criticisms of his Politico article where he points out that the idea of human life beginning at conception is not a settled matter in the history of Christian doctrine.
Read it here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/21/life-conception-christian-theology-00147804
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad.
We're recording early West Coast time.
So, Brad, I think I can see in the background that you have a caffeine IV drip.
I could be seeing that, but that's what it looks like to me.
I'm going to give everybody a pro tip.
If you're going to do a podcast before the sun comes out, if you're going to get up at a very, very early time, you need to spend the first like 10 minutes of the call with your co-host, Dan Miller, telling him stuff that makes you angry.
And then when you get angry, your blood gets gone and you forget that you've been up since 3 a.m.
And you're moving, you're grooving, you're ready to go, you're ready to, like, to do it.
So I don't feel tired, Dan.
I feel like one of those folks who does the morning news.
Somehow they get up at 3 a.m.
and then they're just on the TV feeling good.
Well...
I'm ready.
So, today we're going to talk about Texas and the ongoing battle for power at the southern border between the Texas National Guard and Governor Abbott and the federal government and the Biden administration.
I'm going to then jump into some great new work by our friend Paul Joop, who talks about the ways that Christian nationalists both deride the idea of being a Christian nationalist as a smear, but then see Christian nationalism as the thing that will save the nation.
It's a very, very interesting study that he's done, and I'm really excited to talk about it.
And at the end, we're going to talk about, probably jump into some things related to abortion and life beginning and conception.
And there's a hack of a scholar who wrote an article in Politico, and that scholar tried to make the case historically that life beginning and conception is Not a majority Christian opinion.
Anyway, that scholar's name is me, and I just want to respond to, like, a lot of different emails I got about that piece, and Dan can give you his view on it as well.
So, Dan, I'm going to start in Texas, and I'm going to throw it to you.
What happened this week with a startling turn of events in terms of the Supreme Court and what's going to go on at the southern border?
Yeah, so, and nothing about the Texas stuff is anything that makes Brad angry, so this clearly is not, you know, not going to get the blood pumping here.
So, let me walk through this, and a big part of it is that it's all generally confusing and has created a lot of confusion, so I'm going to try to untangle pieces of it.
If I get some of it wrong, folks can let me know, because it's sort of just very convoluted, but as Brad, as you alluded to, Back in, I think it was December, Texas, under Abbott, signed a law.
Basically, you've got this kind of politicized thing where Republicans accuse Democrats, and specifically Biden, of not enforcing border policy and so forth.
And so Texas passed a state law to sort of Depending who you ask, there's no non-political way to describe it, right?
They will say to enforce border policy that the federal government's ignoring.
The federal government will say to usurp the role of the federal authority on immigration and so forth.
It's been in court.
It was blocked by a federal judge, I believe in Austin.
Texas appealed it to the Fifth Circuit.
I believe the Fifth Circuit panel allowed it to go into effect.
So it was in the appeals process, but they allowed it to go into effect.
Then the Biden administration appealed to SCOTUS, to the Supreme Court, to try to force a stay on the imposition of the law by the Fifth Circuit.
So that's all the stuff that's going on.
What happened was, earlier this week, SCOTUS allowed Texas's law to go into effect.
And so they basically removed the hold that had been placed on it.
So that's what happened earlier this week.
Hit pause.
Let's just talk for a minute about what the law does and why this was a big deal, why it was on hold.
Basically, it makes entering Texas illegally or without documentation a state crime, right?
So not just a federal immigration crime, but a state crime.
And it allows Texas judges to order migrants' deportations, all of which is normally the role of federal border enforcement.
There are other pieces of this that even if they're there in a way that could be legal under federal law, if they're breaking this Texas law, then they're still under that authority and so forth.
The Texas law also sets a really low bar for how determinations are made on checking individuals' residency status, and it's just primed for racial profiling.
This is one of the big concerns, right?
40% of Texas is Latinx.
As folks know, this is an issue.
It's not limited to immigration.
It happens in police stops.
It happens in lots of other places where, basically, if there's probable cause for somebody to think that you've committed a crime and to question you, They're not allowed to do it just because you look like you belong to a particular ethnicity or something.
So this is one of the big pieces is there's just really no, as I understand it, no safeguards or that, no strategy of like, what does somebody have to do to have piqued the interest of somebody who thinks that they're there illegally?
If somebody's speaking Spanish at Starbucks and The person behind him wants to call the local, not just the National Guard, Sheriff's Office or whomever and say, I think that there's somebody here illegally in front, you know, whatever.
All of this kind of stuff.
SCOTUS allows this to go into effect.
That makes big waves and obviously is viewed as, you know, a big victory for Texas.
Part of what makes it confusing though is this wasn't a ruling on the law.
And I think for those of us who aren't professional legal hacks and don't sort of pay attention maybe to how this works, it's really important to understand what a court like the Supreme Court or an appeals court is and isn't doing when they issue an order.
So in this case, they weren't making any determination about the law.
They were basically just saying, we are not going to intervene on the Fifth Circuit's decision to let the law go into effect.
And this is something that had happened.
Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, two of the court's conservatives, as we know, indicated that this was their reasoning.
Barrett said that the court had never intervened in an appeals court decision to enter or not enter an administrative stay.
And so there was that.
Sonia Sotomayor and Katonji Brown-Jackson, obviously two of the liberal justices, they dissented and said basically that the order invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement.
So that's where we were early in the week.
There was all this going on, some typical partisan lines within the Supreme Court on different sides of this issue.
Nobody was clear what it meant.
Then it gets even more confusing because later that night, A three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit put the law back on hold.
And in doing that, they voted 2-1 to override the previous ruling from another panel on the Fifth Circuit to let the law go into effect.
So as of now, for the next five minutes at least, we think The law is again on hold.
And then that was the day before oral arguments were being held about the law.
So again, the law is being appealed.
It was blocked by a federal judge.
It's on appeal by Texas to the Fifth Circuit.
And they've had oral arguments now about whether or not the law is constitutional and so forth.
The justices seem pretty skeptical of the Texas arguments, which bodes well.
But the result has been just sort of mass confusion at the border.
There are sheriffs and police and immigration officials that are all waiting for direction.
The Texas law, as I say, creates conflict with federal law enforcement.
For example, the Department of Homeland Security has said, If the Texas law is in effect and the local sheriff's department or National Guard or somebody brings somebody before a judge and judge says they have to be deported, the Department of Homeland Security has said, we don't have the authority to do that under a state law, that it's not decided in a federal court, federal judge, et cetera.
So you get that issue You also get contradictory statements by Texas officials and others, and I think this is worth paying attention to, right?
Because if you listen to the Abbots of the world, if you listen to the Trumps of the world, if you listen to the politicians on the right, the rhetoric about this is all about securing the border and the federal government's failing and they're letting everybody in.
All the typical stuff that you see from everything from, you know, SCOTUS responses to everywhere else, that's the rhetoric.
But the Texas Solicitor General, arguing before the appeals court, he had to argue that Texas is not trying to supplant federal authority, but wants to cooperate with the federal government.
So this is a piece that I think is interesting.
We've seen this happen in other court cases where sometimes courts will look and be like, well, you've said this and this and this over here, but now you're arguing this.
So which is it?
So that's a piece of it.
There are also other complications.
He had to admit in cross-examination, opening arguments, that I think he was posed the question of how would this affect an individual, an undocumented migrant or immigrant, Who enters the U.S.
in, say, some other state and then comes to Texas and is identified.
Like, how does this law affect them?
And he had to admit that they don't know.
So it's a very half-baked, kind of knee-jerk political reaction.
And so it's not clear how they would enforce that.
Mexico has said that it will not take back anyone deported by the state of Texas.
So this has become like an international issue.
That they don't recognize basically the sovereignty of Texas to enforce federal border policy.
Last point I'll make, and then I'll throw it to you, is that other GOP states are looking to kind of follow the lead, not surprisingly.
But for me, something that indicates the politicized nature of this is like one of the big figures in this is Iowa.
Okay.
I'm geographically challenged, and I realize that there are lots of, there are undocumented people in Iowa, I get that.
But last I checked, Iowa does not have a border with Mexico or someplace like that, and yet this is a state where lawmakers have approved a bill that would give state law enforcement the ability to arrest individuals, Who are undocumented in the U.S.
and have previously been denied entry.
It just stands out to me because what it says is this is the political dimension, right?
That you have a state that doesn't have a border crisis, does not share a border with a foreign country and having people that are fleeing different kinds of things and coming across and so forth.
So again, as with so many things, you've got one set of arguments I feel like are being advocated in court and a very different set of arguments that are advocated in the rhetoric.
All these other issues.
So it's a mess and it's confusing and it's contradictory.
So I'll throw it to you for your thoughts and or corrections or untangling of anything that I have gotten wrong in this mess of a legal issue.
Well, no, I think you did a great job and I'm sure there's, you know, I know that folks like at Lawfare and other places will really zone in on a lot more of those legal details and processes.
So, expectedly, my focus is on what this means on the ground in terms of culture, in terms of identity, in terms of what people really want.
So, here's where my thoughts went as I write about this case this week.
You already highlighted this.
The law is about if somebody is suspected of being an undocumented person, they can be stopped, they can be detained, and the process of deportation can start.
That scares me a lot for, like, so many reasons.
One is, as you already pointed out, what does it mean for someone to be suspected of being an undocumented immigrant?
Like, what does that mean?
Because on the ground, you're going to have law enforcement folks, sheriff, deputy, police officers, and others making this call.
So what is it not... Dan, this goes right to things you and I talk about all the time.
Who's a real American?
Who is not suspected of being from somewhere else?
And sorry, just to jump in with that, that's that gut level response of, you don't have to do anything to be suspected, right?
I talk about that notion of feeling all the time, or just social perception, that it's not about belief.
It's just a fundamental sense that when that person walks in the room, they don't fit.
There's something wrong about them.
They literally don't belong here.
Sorry to jump in but like that's it's that that really visceral gut level it's not about deliberation it's not about I saw them shoplifting or I don't know something else and then it turns out when we called the police that they don't have documentation it's nothing like that it's everything you're talking about of just not fitting into a perceived or felt sense of what America should be like.
This person who's brown and probably speaks Spanish Doesn't belong here.
That's how this law in particular is going to work.
And that's what I'm driving at is, okay, so let's go to your example.
Somebody's in Starbucks.
Somebody's in Denny's.
Somebody's at Waffle House.
Somebody's, wherever they are, they're speaking Spanish.
And here comes Karen saying, this is America, speak English.
They're in Walmart.
I don't know.
There's a small Frustration in the parking lot at Walmart.
I took your parking spot.
You took my parking spot.
You're speaking Spanish.
All right.
I'm going to weaponize the police and my privilege as a white woman, as a white man, as whoever, by calling the cops.
And I kind of think you're undocumented.
You speak Spanish.
You have a dark complexion.
Yeah, I heard the music that was on in your car.
Didn't sound like American music to me.
I didn't hear country music or Taylor Swift or, you know, I heard something else.
So as soon as we open that can of worms, we open a can of worms that we cannot dive into today in any depth.
But so many communities of color listening to that kind of law are like, yep, that's familiar.
Yep, that's scary.
Yep, that's terrifying.
I mean, and so what I'm imagining are just people on the ground who are terrified.
Now, I want to apply this to one thing you mentioned that I think everybody should be thinking about in these cases, and that's sheriffs.
If you think about the sheriff, the sheriff is elected.
The sheriff in most cases can really only be fired or reprimanded by like the governor in a state.
And so the sheriff is really a kind of running his own fiefdom in most cases across the country.
There's no sense that the sheriff is beholden to any kind of accountability, at least in large majority of cases.
So, if you're in a county where the sheriff has free reign, and that sheriff doesn't like you, that sheriff doesn't want to hear people speaking Spanish, that sheriff doesn't like something about your family, I mean, you live in fear that for just For arbitrary reasons, at the caprice of this sheriff, you might be detained.
You might be put into the legal system.
So, I think that's one more.
There's a final one here, and then I'll throw it to you, and that's this.
When people are so worked up about immigration and undocumented people, Let's take our eyes off the mechanics of the law.
Let's not be lawyers.
I want to be scholars who are thinking about what do people really want when they are just online all day every day talking about how illegal immigrants quote-unquote are ruining the country.
About Donald Trump saying that some migrants aren't human.
I mean he said that in the last couple days.
They're ruining the blood of the country.
My question is What do they want?
And what they want, Dan, is a fix.
They think that if they can seal off this vulnerability, they will be fixed.
Their country will be fixed.
They will have a country that is great again.
If I can just do that thing, I will be happy.
We've all thought that, right, Dan?
Like, we've all thought in our lives.
If I could just have that, if I could just get that job, if I could just get that house, if I could just date that person, if I could just lose that weight, if I could just get that money, I would be happy.
We all know that impulse.
The impulse here is if we just stopped the undocumented immigrants, the country would be great.
So what scares me about this is that you're going to find people On the ground.
Like, their issue, Dan, with undocumented immigrants is not that they're taking their jobs.
It's not.
I mean, on the whole, right?
Statistically, undocumented immigrants are taking jobs most people don't want.
They're taking jobs that make the economy go in terms of agriculture, in terms of service industries.
They're taking, they're not taking the jobs of the person who's driving the $90,000 pickup truck.
You know what they really want?
They want to walk in to Target and Starbucks and Whataburger and they want it to be ordered in a way that doesn't irritate them, that doesn't make them feel uncomfortable, doesn't make them feel like there's difference around them.
They want to walk in and not have people speaking Spanish.
They want to go in the parking lot and not hear music coming from Sinaloa or Mazatlan or any other part of Mexico.
They want to walk into their school and not see kids who have a different culture than their... You see what I'm saying?
Like, Dan, I have two young children.
I have a very old dog.
The amount of times I'm in a house that's quiet and orderly and like not full of chaos and noise is very rare at this point in my life.
And there's this desire for me and my wife too, to like actually have a house that's like clean and tidy and everything's put away and the dishes are done and the shopping is done and the bills are paid.
And I want it so bad and it is not available to me right now because I have a six month old and a two and a half year old.
What's the point?
The way that these folks look at the country, they want it to be ordered in a way that they are not uncomfortable, they don't encounter difference.
That's what they really want to me.
That's my take when they're so vehemently against the undocumented.
So when this law does to me is it gives a permission structure to walk into those public places I'm talking about and just start in on it.
Right?
The parking lot at Walmart, the checkout line at Target, the family who's sitting in the corner at the burger joint eating their lunch, speaking Spanish.
It gives a permission structure for people to attack them.
To tell them, you're not a real American, go back where you came from, you don't belong here.
Asian Americans know this so well.
You go to a party and someone asks you, where are you from?
And you're like, Buffalo?
Where are you from, dude?
No, like, where are you really from?
Yeah, like, I'm really from Buffalo, bro.
Where are you from, from?
Yeah, where are you from?
Like, what county in Ireland did your great-granddaddy come from?
Am I asking you that?
Then why are you asking me that?
You know?
So that's what scares me is like permission structure to attack on the ground in ways that people feel emboldened, like I'm the real American, you're not.
One last thing, you said 40% of Texas is Latinx.
I want to challenge everybody out there who is not Latinx.
When Dan said Texas, who did you imagine lives in Texas?
Was it a white guy with a pickup truck?
Or was it the fact that almost half of Texas Is Latinx.
I mean, did a Latinx person come into your mind?
Right?
You know?
And I'll throw it back to you on that note.
Yeah, so a couple points that you hit on, I was also, as you're talking, I'm thinking of things, and one was that notion of, when we talk about what arouses suspicion, and the point that I want to tie in with what you're getting at is, it's not just who arouses, it's where they are.
It's about that proper order, because a lot of those same people that are upset, as you say, about having to encounter somebody, who speak Spanish, or having to hear it, or feeling like they are invading white spaces.
That's the feeling.
This is a white space.
What are you doing here?
If they're mowing their lawn and they maybe don't care so much, right?
The stereotype of the migrant worker who works for the landscape company.
And why is that a stereotype?
Why is it so common?
Because those same white people aren't so worried if they pull up in a truck and they pull their vehicle off the trailer and they mow the lawn, they never come in the house.
You never engage with them.
You pay your bill online every month for the landscape service.
Like, whatever.
That's it.
Or the person who's working in the back of the restaurant, right?
The one who's flipping the burgers or making the food or whatever.
That's fine.
As long as it's not the hostess who has to seat me.
As long as it's not the register person at McDonald's.
Like, I think that's another piece of this.
About a proper, as you say, a properly ordered society.
Or running for mayor.
Yeah, exactly.
Or running for political office, or attaining political office, or social activism, or whatever.
Yeah.
Speaking up at the PTA, like, hey, we're at a PTA meeting, why is the Mexican woman talking?
Hey, we're at the PTA meeting.
Why is the Chinese man talking?
You know what I mean?
This is not the place where you get to be doing things.
You don't get to be in charge.
You don't get a voice.
You don't get authority.
You don't get all the other stuff that comes along with what we get.
No, that's exactly right.
It's that notion that, quote unquote, if everybody's not watching, they, they in quotes, that if they are going to be here, They have to know their place, like literally know their place.
And when they are out of place, that's when we are in a disordered, misshapen society, and they need to be sent back to wherever, again, they came from.
So I think that's a key piece that you're picking up on.
And I think it also ties in with, again, this notion of, you know, this is a whole other piece we could spend a lot more time on, but people ask about racism a lot.
I talk about racism a lot in classes and here.
And sometimes you get this sense, like we talk about, it's just a perception.
It's a deep-seated feeling that people have that somebody doesn't fit.
And I've had people say that, well, that's not really racism, though.
Like, they don't really believe that this person is less than them or different than them or whatever.
And on one hand, they're right.
Most of these people, I think, when they experience that profound discomfort at having that person in their proximity, they're not believing something about them.
They're just feeling something about them.
It's still racist, and that's why it's hard to eradicate, because to fix racism, you have to fix the way people actually perceive and feel in the world.
It's not just about belief.
That's a really abstract thing that could go a lot of directions, but I think that's one of the things that you've got to push the Uncle Rons and the world on and say, well, maybe if you feel that way when somebody walks into the room, Maybe that's an issue.
Maybe you need to go see somebody and spend some time and figure out why you feel threatened in some way by somebody ordering a Starbucks drink in Spanish.
Or that you feel even more threatened if they order it in Spanish and the barista can respond in Spanish.
Then we just know that we're losing our country.
Why does that bug you so much?
So yeah, now I'm getting all worked up.
We could go on on this forever, but I think all of this is real.
The last point that I'll just maybe make about why I think Texas is a big sort of focal point.
It's not just that Texas is really big.
It's not just that Texas has a southern border with Mexico.
It's that as a state that is 40% Latinx, it's on the cutting edge of becoming a majority-minority state.
We talk about this stuff by mid-century that in the US, the US as a whole will be a majority-minority But there are places where that is, they're skewing that average.
New Hampshire is, I could not tell you when or if ever New Hampshire is going to be a majority minority state.
It's like one of the widest states in the country.
Texas, California, Arizona, a lot of these places, that's where that's a real thing.
And so in Texas, where you have firm control of the GOP, I think that's also why we see this at like a fever pitch there.
And I think it tells us a lot about, as you say, those conceptions of What it means to be a Texan, what it means to be an American, and who belongs and who doesn't.
New Hampshire.
Minority-majority by 3,100.
That's it.
That's a slogan I saw rolled out.
They were testing it, and my feedback was maybe work on it, but... It'll go on the bottom of the license plates, right?
New Hampshire.
Live free or minority-majority by 3,100.
Yeah, that one doesn't work either.
Okay.
All right.
Been up since 3 a.m.
I just want to say, real quick, I live in a place that is my city, my part of the country is minority-majority.
About a third of my city is Mexican-American.
There's other folks from Central America.
There's many people with Vietnamese heritage.
There's many people with East Asian heritage.
And this is just my two cents, but my...
My outlook on that is like, man, my neighbors are amazing.
And I have so much, like I am rich.
I get a chance.
I sound like a brochure or something, but I don't know.
This is just how I feel that when I take my kids to the park or we go out to eat, I just feel like, God, I'm lucky.
I get to learn so much about people who have such different stories, experiences, uh, cultures than mine.
I get to teach my kids about the ways that people make meaning through their food and through their rituals, explain what a quinceanera is, explain what like mariachi music is or reggaeton music is.
Like doing that with a two and a half year old is like complicated, but fun.
And you know, I don't know.
I, it's really hard for me to get in a space where I think of my neighbors Who Jesus has instructed us to love as like a threat to me and not see them as folks who just make my life and my American story as rich as I could ever imagine because of what they've bring to it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, just tied in with that.
And I know we need to move on from this, but you keep throwing out some really great points.
We've been taught a lot about natural law and appeals to nature and what's natural lately in discussions about abortion and stuff, but you'll hear that with this too.
You'll hear people say, well, it's natural for people to feel most comfortable around people like them.
It's natural for, you know, again, it's a way of trying to explain away racism and things like that.
Here's the thing, human nature, if there is one, it's mutable.
We can change it.
There's nothing natural about having to feel threatened by people who are different from you.
That does not have to be a threat.
It doesn't have to be something that's terrifying.
And so the next time somebody says, well, that's just natural, especially if you're one of those people, like Brad, or you love going there.
I live in an area, I've got a child who goes to a Chinese immersion school and speaks Chinese all day.
Partly because of all the universities around where I am, we have a really, really high number of foreign Asian people living in the community, right?
They work at the universities and lots of kids and like, it's really cool.
There's a lot of really cool stuff about it.
I think it's cool when my little white kid is like talking to Just some Chinese person on the street.
He's speaking Chinese.
I have no idea what they're saying.
I don't speak Chinese, but I think it's cool.
I think it's awesome.
I think it's enriching.
I think it's a lot of different things.
If you're like that, next time Uncle Ron or somebody says, well, it's just natural to feel weird about people who are different or something, just be like, is it?
Am I unnatural?
Because I don't.
I don't feel that way.
I know it's natural.
I'm going to tell you right now.
I'm a man in his forties, going to tell you what's natural.
You ready?
Driving on the right side of the road.
That's what I thought when I arrived in the UK and driving on the left made me uncomfortable.
But then guess what happened?
I don't know, Dan, two months later, I just figured it out.
You know why?
Because that's what happens.
I just want to know how many mirrors were taken off other cars while you were figuring it out.
But like, that's just, you know, a few mirrors, but that's a small price to pay.
Yeah.
New Hampshire.
Shattering mirrors until 3100.
Let's take a break because we're going to lose it.
We'll be right back.
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All right, y'all.
Here we go.
Let's talk about Christian nationalism.
So, Paul Jupe, one of my favorite folks who just does amazing work, has a new post at his site, Religion in Public, called, Christian nationalism is both smear and savior to many Christians.
And what Paul does in this piece is talk about how there are a lot of folks out there who, when you say the word Christian nationalists, they're like, The mainstream media, the secular government, those who hate God, they just call us Christian nationalists.
It's a smear.
It's a slur.
They're calling us a name, okay?
And Paul kind of documents some of this.
He goes to former Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
They like calling us Christian Nationalists.
I don't want to embrace that term.
That's their way to call you a Nazi, when actually they're the Nazis.
None of us wants to take any of these rights away.
We believe these rights are from God.
They do not.
There's a lot there, Doug.
I mean, I don't know why when somebody says one word, you start talking about Nazis.
There seems to be a lot going on in your head there, but he's basically saying, don't call me a Christian nationalist.
That's not what I want.
However, what Paul found through survey data is that those folks who see the label Christian nationalists as a smear, as something that is being thrown at them and it's not fair and they don't like it.
And that's what, you know, that's what the mainstream media and all these other people who hate God are doing.
In their ideology, in their beliefs, they actually think that Christian nationalism is what will save the nation.
Okay?
So, check this out.
This is Paul talking at his post.
More revealing is how views about Christian nationalism as a smear are linked to views on a second statement.
Christian nationalism is the only idea that will save this fallen nation.
Of those who strongly agreed that it is a smear, 68% also agreed or strongly agreed that Christian nationalism is America's savior.
So let me just break that down.
68% of people who said that Christian nationalism is a smear, who said, hey, that's just them calling us names or whatever.
They are the ones who agreed that Christian nationalism is what will save the nation.
So like, on one side of their mouth, they're like, I can't believe you're calling us Christian nationalists.
That's you trying to label us and make fun of us.
And then when it comes to the survey, they're like, yeah, what's going to save America?
Christian nationalism.
So it's this complete disconnect in terms of what's happening with the labels they want to use, but also the thing that they actually think will save the country.
Let me read to you Paul's last paragraph.
It seems clear that many Christian nationalists do not like being labeled as such, even as they see Christian nationalism as a substantive idea that they agree with for restoring Christians to societal dominance.
The elite ploy, of course, has been to try to delegitimize opponents who are accurately labeling them.
And they use accusations that opponents are trying to take away their rights by calling them Christian nationalists to feed the Christian persecution complex that has been so successful at mobilizing supporters.
The fact that those feigning outrage are actually supporting is unlikely to stop them.
So I just wanted to bring this up today, Dan, because I think it's really, it's really fantastic work by Paul.
And it shows us something that's really interesting.
People don't... there's a lot of folks out there that we would characterize as Christian Nationalists that are like, that's a made-up term.
Christian Nationalists don't exist.
I mean, do you know how many... Dan, I don't know how many comments we've gotten on our Instagram feed, on our Facebook feed, on my Twitter feed over the years.
I mean, we're talking Triple, quadruple digits of Christian nationalism isn't real.
It's a made-up term.
Christian nationalists don't exist.
I mean, there's even posts out there that are like, by people that are supposed to be scholars, that are like, well, can't find a lot of people who call themselves Christian nationalists, so a lot of them just must not exist.
Must not exist.
And yet, when you ask folks who, by way of their beliefs about the country, seem to be Christian nationalists, And you're like, hey, what would save America?
They're like, yeah, I got an answer for that, buddy.
We should institute Christian prayer in school.
The federal government should declare this a Christian nation.
We should make sure that every student reads the Bible in their schools, and we should see it as God having complete control over every aspect of human society.
And you're like, okay, so you don't want me to call you a Christian nationalist, but you think that all these Christian nationalist ideas are what's going to save us.
Yes.
Okay.
So, I think Paul points to something that is at play here, which is by refuting the Christian nationalist label, they're playing the victim.
Like, I can't believe you're persecuting us.
I can't believe you would denigrate us.
I can't believe you would try to label us.
It's a way of playing the attacked, and they're really good at this, and we've talked about this on the show a million times.
But then, in turn, it's very clear that they actually do believe the things that you're trying to attribute them.
I have a big thing I want to encourage people to say to Uncle Ron next time they go down this route with him, but I'll throw it to you first.
What were your reactions to Paul's analysis here?
First of all, I think it's really good.
To me, there was nothing surprising in it.
I'm like, yep, no surprise.
But I think it was really good and really set up, and what it does is it takes something that's not surprising because you think it makes a lot of sense.
It's what you would think is going on.
And as somebody doing the work to be like, yep, that's what's really going on.
Like, let's make sure we're not just being our own ideologues and whatever.
We're going to go out and take a look.
And so, like, seriously, huge, huge props for doing that.
I think what it also does is highlight a lot of things that are of interest to me.
Like, one is the nature of identity and how identity works, right?
So, yes, the term Christian nationalism or Christian nationalist By far and large, by many people all over the political spectrum, it is perceived as a negative attribution, right?
It's something you don't want to be.
It's just like, nobody willingly walks around being like, I'm a bigot, I'm a racist, I'm a misogynist, right?
These are all like negative attributions.
It has, I think, taken that, we could call it semantic force.
So they don't want to have that.
But I think what they're doing, and people do this all the time, if they hold a set of views, To them, the views don't feel radical.
They don't feel crazy.
And I think people do this all the time when they sort of project whatever they are as the norm.
And they assume that other people probably think what they think or that they speak for the majority.
I think there are lots of psychological and identity reasons why they do that.
But I think that's one piece where they're like, of course I'm not a Christian nationalist.
That's so offensive that you would say that, right?
It illustrates that.
It also illustrates that human beings are not consistent.
This is one of the things that drives me nuts when People miss that, as if we're like all math equations or something.
So like, if we're this, on this side of the equal side, what's on the other side should fit.
I'm like, nope.
People can do and inhabit completely contradictory spaces.
Like, it makes me feel really, really bad when you call me a Christian nationalist.
And like, on the next survey question, I'm going to say that Christian nationalism is a good thing.
And for those who don't know, right, because it also opens up, I think, really interesting things about the social sciences and what they can tell us about religion and debates within them.
That's what I love about the social sciences, and people ever like, you know, you run across the article that summarizes some survey, click on the survey, go look at it, and sometimes you're really, really bored, go look at the method part, the part that only the scholars look at, look at the questions that are actually asked, because it's a common thing that social scientists will do, is put questions in there
That if you answer one way on one of them, if you're going to be consistent, you're going to have to answer a particular way on another one, and people don't do it.
It shows that we are not these logic things.
So that's why I say I don't think it's surprising because it says things about who we are, how we work as people.
Another piece, and I'm going to maybe put my, you know, geeky scholar hat on for a minute.
This is a debate, like that notion of, well, they don't self-identify as, or they don't use that language, and so you get scholars who say that as well.
This is like a pretty deep-seated issue within social analysis, and I think politics, and scholarship of Do we just always defer to somebody else's self-understanding, or are there times when we need to name things what they are, right?
Again, if you leave it to people's self-definition, there are no racists.
They don't exist.
There are no misogynists.
There are no pedophiles.
There are no homophobes.
Those people don't exist, because nobody's like, yep, I'm homophobic.
I'm misogynistic.
I'm a predator.
Whatever.
And that's an issue that goes all the way, as you say, all the way up in sort of academic circles sometimes.
And it's a really deep-seated debate in these kinds of things among some social scientists.
Because some social scientists, I think, only really feel like we need to always enter into the self-understanding of others.
And so if they don't see what they're doing as bad or negative or whatever, we need to withhold judgment That's not my view of the social sciences or scholarship or the role of scholars like us or people doing these kind of studies, but it's an issue that comes up.
So I think it was just really illustrative for me of on-the-ground identity issues and how they work and why somebody like Uncle Ron will say, I don't know why you're always calling me a Christian nationalist.
I just think that and then lists a whole bunch of Christian nationalist stuff.
Also sort of methodological things.
Last point I'll throw out is we're getting ready to do our supplemental episode for subscribers.
Something similar to this is something I'm going to be sort of diving into.
One of the arguments of somebody sort of saying like, there's no such thing as Christian nationalism.
You just want to keep Christians from having a political voice, you know, whatever.
And so we're going to dive into this more in the supplemental episode, just as a teaser for folks who are subscribing or thinking about subscribing.
So one of the questions that is often asked to figure out if somebody's a Christian nationalist is, is being a Christian important to being a real American?
And so let's go back to what we talked about in the very first 25, 30 minutes of this episode, this immigration law, the battle between Texas and the federal government, and the long histories of people feeling as if they're not real Americans because they're neither white nor Christian.
They might be one or the other.
And so if you need to be Christian to be a real American, and that's what a Christian nationalist tells you, We're now in a place where they're not just somebody who's Christian and patriotic.
It's not just, well, I love Jesus and I love America.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
You're trying to tell us what a real American is.
You see, everybody stop for a minute.
And if you're just confused, you've been hearing Christian nationalism in the news every day and it's all over and everyone else has a blog about it now and it's a big deal and you can't keep it straight and it's everything Christian nationalism and nothing Christian nationalism.
If I'm a Christian and I'm an American and I love both those things, okay.
If I'm a Christian who thinks that to be an American, you need to be Christian?
Come on, now we're in a different spot.
If you think that the person who's not a Christian, whether by dint of being atheist or by dint of being not someone who fits the prototypical image in your mind of a Christian, somebody from a part of the world you don't identify as being a Christian part of the world, okay, somebody from wherever may be, you're not just somebody who's like, I'm a Christian, I love God, I love America, what's the big deal?
No, no, no.
Because I love God, I'm a real American.
Y'all see the difference?
There's one thing that says, I'm a Christian, I love America.
There's another that says, because I love God, I'm a real American and I get to decide who else is too.
That's one.
Number two, here's your, here's a little game you can play with Uncle Ron, y'all.
I was thinking about this the other day.
When Uncle Ron tells you on Facebook, there's no such thing as a Christian nationalist.
Nobody calls themselves that.
You can say, you know what?
That's fine.
But if we're going to do that, I just want to stop and ask you a question, Ron.
Do you believe in the Trinity?
Last week, we talked about Secker.
This men's society.
And you know what they wanted, Dan?
If you all listened last week, they wanted Trinitarian Christians.
Trinitarian Christians is what they wanted.
So I'm going to go up to Uncle Ron at the barbecue and he's going to tell me, I heard your podcast.
There's no such thing as a Christian nationalist.
You guys are idiots.
That's fine.
Do you believe in the Trinity, Uncle Ron?
The Nicene Creed talks about it.
It's basically a kind of bedrock of Orthodox Christianity for a long time.
You believe in the Trinity or not?
Yes.
Great.
Here's the New Testament.
I just read it cover to cover.
The word Trinity never appears.
I don't know what you're talking about, bro.
That thing doesn't exist.
I mean, I heard Jesus in John 14 talking about, you know, the way the truth in life and Jesus is out there before he gets crucified in the book of John.
He's talking to God and calling himself the Son and there's a whole relationship there and, you know, Acts chapter 2, the Holy Spirit comes, and John chapter 1, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's all great.
You know how you get the Trinity?
Do you know why you know that word, Ron?
It's because of second-order discourse.
Theology is second-order discourse.
You take concepts you find in the primary documents, And then you extrapolate a concept in order to capture what you find there.
The Trinity does not exist if Christian Nationalists exist.
So you tell me, Ron, what do you want?
You want the Trinity and Christian Nationalism or you want none?
You only get one choice there.
Because if you tell me you're into the Trinity, I'm going to tell you the Trinity's not real.
You're not biblical, Ron.
You don't read the Bible, Ron.
You don't follow the Bible, because it's not in there.
Nobody in the Bible self-identifies as a Trinitarian.
That's the language, right?
Nobody self-identifies as a Trinitarian, so it's not a thing.
You know what's also not a thing?
At least according to the Bible.
Christianity.
I mean, I don't know, Dan.
You ever find Christianity in the Bible?
I have not.
I have only found the way.
I know that the folks in Acts talk about the way.
I know that Paul addresses the epistles to the Galatians and the Romans and others to the churches there or the believers there.
I've never heard, read, seen in all my years of reading the New Testament, anyone be addressed as Christians.
Never heard of a thing called Christianity.
Now, some people might say, Oh, well, I'm a Christian and I'm going to say, that's great.
But you're a Christian because you've extrapolated the idea of being a Christ follower as a Christian, okay?
My original point though is this, Ron...
If you believe in the Trinity, you believe in something, you are identifying in a text that it's a concept you think captures reality.
When I say Christian Nationalists, I'm saying I think Christian Nationalists, it captures a category of people who think to be a real American, you have to be Christian, that this country should be declared a Christian nation, that the federal government should align itself with biblical values and so on and so forth.
That's all I'm doing.
So you can tell me that doesn't exist, and I'm going to just tell you, well, there's a lot of things that you believe in that don't exist either, and you have to choose.
So that's my little game and my little strategy for Uncle Ron this week.
Any last comments, Dan, on this whole smear or save your idea by Paul?
Just again, for folks to go take a look at, I think it really does capture an important dynamic about the same people that decry the label also are appealing to it and feeling the truth of it.
All right.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about life beginning at conception and some issues there.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
Last night you were perusing the news and you were like, oh, this looks- We're getting ready for this.
We look around, we find articles and things, we share them.
People who get the sub stack see a lot of those links and whatever.
Just this, you know, I'm just kind of scanning around things, just thinking on Politico about, you know, life begins conception.
Like, oh, I wonder if this will be any good or not.
I don't know.
Maybe I should pass it on.
And then I see it's written by this guy who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about.
Some Brad Onishi guy who clearly is not aware of what he's talking about.
And he is apparently Brad Onishi, based on some comments and things from others.
This guy is a demon.
He's evil.
He doesn't like kids.
Doesn't know what he's talking about.
He says that this is not quote-unquote biblical truth and that this has not always been the position of the church and so forth.
And yeah, so in all seriousness, you wrote this piece on Politico.
People who've listened to the show, it's a deeper dive in some ways and maybe a little more laid out, but like things that you say all the time.
Things that you've educated people on for a long time.
But as I understand it, created some reactions from folks.
So I'd love to hear from you how this was received.
And I think it does open a window into, you know, the kind of engagement that can happen with this or the perception that people have that we're sort of pushing against all the time.
Yeah, I mean, the amount of hate mail I got yesterday is like in the hundreds in terms of people not happy with this.
Most of them didn't read it.
It's very clear.
They just, you know, but anyway, that doesn't matter that much.
So as you said, Dan, I think if you've listened to the show over the last month, we've basically been over everything I go into in the article.
The basic premise is that this idea that at conception you have what is called life or you have a human life or a human being is not a unanimous belief in Christian history, that you can look at people like Augustine and Aquinas, you can look at people Like Cotton Mather or John Wesley, and you're not going to find there a unanimous belief that life in terms of a human being begins at conception.
Most of them would have believed that it began with a quickening, as you've mentioned, 18 weeks or so.
Someone like Aquinas or Augustine are going to think about insolvent, as you've met, right?
Going back to some Aristotelian sources and other Other philosophical inspiration.
So the idea that at some point God implants the soul in the fetus.
So that was the basic premise of the argument.
But I did want to touch on a couple things I wasn't able to put into the article.
And that's two things.
One, Life Begins at Conception is really saying that, and people on Twitter were yelling about this yesterday, including like very prominent right-wing pro-anti-abortion activist types, Well, life begins at conception because there starts there kind of cell development, right?
There's a zygote and it's in some ways what we would call alive.
And so to be more precise, when you say life begins at conception, you might have an organism that comes into being and quote-unquote is alive.
The question is, is that a human life?
Is that a human being?
And you might think, well, of course, but Dan, this came into stark relief when we talked about Alabama and the frozen embryos and Ellie Mistel was like, are you, you're telling me these frozen icicle babies are actual, those are humans?
Right?
So that's when you start to realize, yeah, that seems a little absurd.
You're telling me right when that zygote, the egg and the sperm, meet and form, that's when there's a human being there?
So there might be an organism that is alive, but the argument would be, we probably need to think about something like personhood, which is something you've brought up several times on the show, a little more deeply.
When does the person come into being?
When does a human person come into being?
So that's one.
Number two, something struck me yesterday as I got a barrage of hate mail and mean tweets and other things from people.
The hate mail, a lot of it always begins with, hello, let me introduce myself.
Don't you love those?
It's like three pages of stuff.
It is.
I love those.
It's always like, hello, I'm Dave Pozniacki.
From, right, Walnut, Maine.
And I'd like to tell you this, you know, and you're just like, why did you tell me?
Okay.
Thank you, Dave Pozniacki.
Good to meet you.
Thanks for telling me that I should die a slow death.
Uh, blah, blah, blah.
Great.
Glad to hear that.
All right.
There's another little fun game that I'm going to play with Uncle Ron next time I hear about abortion and life at conception and all that stuff, is I'm trained in theology.
I'm kind of in a theological mood today, Dan.
I don't know why, but I don't know about you, but here's what I learned as a theologian.
I learned that Adam and Eve were the first human beings and they were paradigmatic of humans because they were the first, they were sinless, and then we had the fall.
We had the original sin and it ruined everything.
Okay, great.
Jesus, according to Romans chapter 5, is the second Adam, if I'm not mistaken, and I'm happy for you, the biblical scholar, to correct me here.
Jesus is the second Adam who restores humanity to its proper state.
He is the one who redeems humanity By way of His sacrifice.
I'm paraphrasing.
I don't have the verses in front of me, but if sin came through one man and Adam, redemption comes through one man in Christ Jesus, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Now, Adam and Jesus, Adam and Eve and Jesus, are used as paragons of humanity.
So, a lot of times when we talk about Gay marriage, when we talk about queer Christians, people are like, well, I mean, everyone has heard this.
Well, it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.
And what they're saying there is like, Adam and Eve are the original examples of what humans should be.
So if it's Adam and Eve, it must mean God, only men, men and women.
And you can't have anything outside of heterosexual relationships, desire, blah, blah, blah.
That's what they're saying.
Right.
Okay.
And then when they talk about Jesus, they're like, well, I mean, somebody actually said this to me yesterday.
God had Jesus show up here as a human.
Don't you think that that's actually something?
And there's even a man, Father Kirkpatrick, who used to be Cardinal Kirkpatrick in Texas, who spoke at CPAC and tried to get the crowd going in their very anti-abortion fervor by saying, well, Jesus was, we need to humble ourselves because Jesus humbled himself and was once a little embryo.
Just like those little embryos frozen in Alabama, okay?
Where am I going with this, Dan?
I'll make my point and I'll shut up and I'll throw it to you and then we can go to Reasons for Hope.
Go read Genesis today, y'all.
Does anybody see where the sperm and the egg meant to make Adam?
Because I don't.
The guy you think is the paragon of humanity came into being without a fertilized egg, a zygote, or anything.
And you're like, well, yeah, okay, good point.
What about Eve?
She was pulled from his rib, depending on which creation account you read.
That's not what I read in biology class or what people were tweeting at me yesterday.
And then I'm going to Jesus and I'm like, well, I know God caused Mary to be pregnant.
There's nothing in there about a fertilized egg, an embryo, a zygote.
There's just God making Mary pregnant.
I don't think God the Father, if you guys want to get really theological, does God the Father have sperm?
Because this is getting weird, Ron.
We're at a barbecue.
I'm trying to eat a hot dog.
Does God the Father have sperm?
Yeah, five-year-olds, go play.
Does God the Father have sperm?
Answer me, Ron, right now.
Because I don't think he does, and I think that's weird.
So I don't think Jesus was conceived by way of sperm and egg.
I think it was some weird supernatural thing that is extraordinary.
Great.
Wonderful.
Happy for that.
The people you're trying to tell me represent humanity did not come into being by way of the thing you think is human life and that is, right, like a very small cluster of cells that emerges after a sperm and an egg are become formed.
That's my point.
Sorry.
I'm just thinking of myself at the barbecue getting yelled at by people being like, hey, can you not talk like that around the children?
So anyway, I'm having a hard time keeping it together.
I'm just saying, Dan, I think that's weird.
And I think that everybody should think about the theological incoherency of basing their conception of human personhood off of a model that neither Adam nor Jesus endured as the paragons of human society or human nature.
All right, there you go.
Go for it.
Just a couple others to make it weirder is like, let's not even get started on their chromosomes, right?
People want to talk about gender and stuff, so I don't know what that means about Jesus chromosomes or Adam and Eve.
Let's just go into the fact that Adam and Eve are genetically identical creatures because she's a clone.
Yeah, whatever.
Anyway, on a more serious point, I brought this up before, but I mean, it is complicated, but to acknowledge it's complicated is part of the issue.
If we imagine a continuum between what we're talking about with IVF, a few cells on one end and a newborn infant that you're holding in the hospital on the other, there's a lot of stuff that happens in that space from when you get to one of those, and there are real questions to be asked.
Like, you know, as you say, what makes Human life.
What makes personhood?
And those are hard to answer.
Is it viability?
Is it a nervous system?
Is it the ability to perceive things?
Is it something about physiognomy?
Like when a human starts looking like a human and not every other kind of embryonic mammal or every other vertebrate?
And everybody's seen the little images of the development and, you know, whatever.
The point is, those are real questions and they're real questions to have.
They're real questions to ask.
But this notion that it's that simple, a handful of cells is literally the same as that child that you're holding in the hospital or something like that.
I think for a lot of people, if we pause on that, that's just silly.
It just doesn't make sense.
So, you know, let's have those discussions.
Does God the Father have sperm?
Visit New Hampshire.
All right.
That's the T-shirt.
I couldn't resist.
I couldn't resist.
Just right there.
It was just right there.
All right, Dan, give us your reason for hope, because so many people are so disappointed in us right now, they have completely just given up.
So go ahead.
My reason for hope is that the Georgia DA, who sort of narrowly squeaked by being booted off the Trump election subversion case.
Is still pushing to try to hold Trump's election in, or sorry, his trial in Georgia before the election in November.
We'll see how that works.
We'll see what happens with that.
But I think people were afraid that it would just kind of essentially be put on hold for a while.
Trump people are appealing that ruling and so forth.
Lots of things still going on.
But I took hope with the fact that they are still moving forward with that case and with that trial.
Mine is that Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York have reintroduced their Green New Deal for affordable housing, and that is to try to take on the housing crisis and obviously the threat of climate change.
looking for a public housing act that would invest over 200 billion in public housing, moving to zero carbon, highly efficient homes, and helping to improve the lives of millions and millions of people, as well as creating well-paying jobs.
So I think the Green New Deal is something that people have unfortunately taken to be a negative thing, going back to the Christian nationalism label.
People have taken the Green New Deal as like something to laugh at or that conservatives especially are happy to make fun of.
But I think it's a good thing that they're putting this forward.
I think it's a good thing that we have people in both houses of Congress who are Willing to put these things through and put themselves out there and not give up.
And so Senator Markey has also joined in on this, Ed Markey from your state, Dan, Massachusetts.
So anyway, we'll see what happens, but I think that's good news all around.
As always, friends, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
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We answer questions, we tell personal stories, and we also dive into big issues, and I think we're going to dive even further into some things we talked about today.
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We're trying to update our publishing flow and make sure that everything gets in the right spot.
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