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On this two-hour bonus episode, Brad and Dan are joined by Brad's former ministry partner and friend of 25 years Jason Thompson. They recount an absurd, whimsical, and somehow instructive story of flinging fresh fish at a wall with teenagers in order to build the Kingdom of God.
From there they answer a bunch of AMA questions, and then finish with Dan taking the group through the idea that if you label anyone a Christian nationalist, then you label every person of Christian faith a Christian nationalist. It's Dan ranting at his best, with commentary from Brad and Jason.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty at the 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, for our special sort of long-ish episode full of ranting and raving and whatever else we do today.
Bonus episode today, so if you're a subscriber, buckle up.
You got, we got about two hours of the Brad and Dan show here.
If you're not a subscriber, make sure to subscribe now so you can get the full episode and listen to everything we're talking about.
We're going to answer all the AMAs.
We're going to get into something that's really under Dan's skin, which is this idea that if you say Christian nationalism, you're calling all Christians Christian nationalists.
But we're going to start today with a story from me, Dan.
So we've done, this is special episode number three.
First one, you told a story about Arkansas and getting arrested in the parking lot while wearing a Bible chain.
Still like, there's still people in the Discord that are like, we need that merch.
I will buy a Dan Millard Bible chain merch item.
So.
Donald Trump was peddling Bibles this week.
So like why we should get in on that.
Yeah.
More on that at the weekly roundup.
Last time I told a story, I talked about Oxford and some of that business.
Today, I want to go back to my ministry days, and we're going to be joined in a second by one of my former colleagues in youth ministry.
This is crazy, Dan.
A blast from the past, my friend Jason.
So, he'll be here hopefully soon, barring any issues.
But I started in ministry when I was 18, so many of you out there know I converted to Christianity when I was 14.
By the time I was 18, and Dan I think you can probably relate to this, I think a lot of you out there can relate to this, I was a real, I was a weird guy.
I told you all about proselytizing at high school and telling everyone about Jesus at the movie theater.
So there were definitely settings in high school where I was just Cringy.
But I was a superstar in youth group.
Do you know what I mean when I say that?
Like, when I went to youth group, the leaders loved me because I was so, so into Jesus.
I was willing to help out.
I was willing to, like, greet new people, welcome them in.
Like, when you're a youth leader, you want certain kind of kids in the group because they just, they're like the ones that not only are easy to deal with, but they're super into Jesus and they're super into helping other people, like, feel comfortable in the group.
And like, I was that guy.
So, I go through all of high school, and by the time I graduated high school, the youth pastor said, hey, why don't we hire you part-time, a couple hundred bucks a month, and you can be like an intern for the junior high side of the ministry.
And I was like, that's my dream.
It's my dream job.
But job I quit, Dan, to do that job?
I don't think I know this.
Blockbuster Video.
So my, my two jobs in high school, when I was 16, like literally on the, like almost on the day I turned 16, I started working at McDonald's.
And then when I was 17, 18, I can't remember, I got, I stepped up to Blockbuster Video.
That's that's where I was working.
I would work the like 3 to 11 shift after school and somehow do homework in between there.
I don't know how and yeah I mean you know let's just do it folks.
Memory Lane.
Y'all remember Blockbuster Video?
Y'all remember like Getting to the store and hoping they had the video game you wanted and it wasn't rented, or like, you know, you really wanted to see Drew Barrymore in Ever After, and you're like, oh, they don't have it.
What am I going to do?
Here's a memory, right?
So the end of Blockbuster, and they were trying to compete with Netflix, which back then mostly made its money by sending DVDs, so you could get Blockbuster videos We're having fun story time.
You could get Blockbuster videos like also in the mail and then they had this thing where you could go to Blockbuster and then turn them back in and like get a DVD.
So the summer that I was reading for my comp exam, so like you just got like this list of books that's forever long and you got to read them all and get ready for your PhD, comps, like whatever.
All I did that summer is I read for that.
For reasons I still don't fully know, I listened like the full genre of like 90s grunge metal, past the 90s.
And then I would get the videos from the X-Files and then I would go trade them into the Blockbuster, get the other video, and I re-watched the entire X-Files series.
So that was my, like, I don't know, sort of infantilizing back in the 90s phase or something.
But Blockbuster looms large until it, you know, obviously lost the battle to streaming.
So, yeah.
This is the perfect moment to bring in Jason.
So Jason, I was just telling everyone... Hey guys!
Hello Jason!
I graduated high school and I quit my job at Blockbuster Video to be an intern in the junior high department at Rose Drive Friends and I worked under none other than you as my boss.
You were the brand new, newly minted Youth pastor at that time.
This is 1999.
This is like, right?
Y2K mania.
These two data points also seem like they're just the first in a string of terrible career choices you've made.
Well, what I think is that Brad should leave for a while.
And, uh, I think Jason and I should just talk like, just, uh, I think it's gonna, a lot of things are going to come into focus and yeah.
Jason, let's welcome you in.
We've known each other 25 years now and we're pals and text a lot, talk a lot.
Friendship goes back to those ministry days.
I was a groomsman in your first wedding.
You were a groomsman.
Yeah, and to be fair... With their Hawaiian shirt at your behest like a freaking idiot.
I didn't though.
And I would do it again.
I want to say a couple things about that.
A, a white guy has never looked worse in a Hawaiian shirt than that day.
I agree.
But B, I haven't seen Dan Miller in a Hawaiian shirt.
I've got competition.
B, it wasn't that big of an honor because I think there was like 38 to 40 groomsmen in that wedding.
A lot of people were asked.
My barista, I asked a lot of people.
These were ultimately at the time and given how young everyone was, these were rituals that we all understood.
We're just desperate maneuvers so that we can have sex with somebody.
All right.
Just stand by my side.
Everybody will know it's fine.
It's sanctioned now.
I can go.
And that's going to sustain a relationship in the long term.
Well, I mean, there's a lot more to it.
But yes, I mean, that's evangelical culture in a nutshell.
All right.
Real quick, before we get to what I think was both somehow The nadir and the crescendo of our youth ministry experience.
Tell us a little bit about you.
So you have, like, some serious evangelical bona fides.
Well, for anyone who's read your book, I mean, I grew up in the belly of the belly of the beast.
Given that I was born in Garden Grove, right there in Orange County, while my parents attended the church you and I would eventually go on to work for and be ousted from in various ways.
My parents worked with Campus Crusade for Christ their entire adult working lives.
And you know, I grew up in Colorado Springs.
I worked for one summer during college at Focus on the Family as a tour guide there during college, and most of the rules I've seen That came into being at Focus on the Family regarding tour guides do seem mostly to be in response to things that I did.
Probably very much like the church we both worked at.
I think everything you are and aren't allowed to do at this point is mostly uh because of what shit you and I pulled.
Come on.
So you I mean you're bona fides I mean it's it's interesting because I think I think we all three of us have some similar like background but You know, Dan was in Arkansas.
He was in Colorado for also a bunch of his life.
I was a convert, but you really grew up, like, birth to young adulthood, like, ensconced in evangelical culture.
You're one of those kids whose life, whose parents, whose siblings, everything about, you know, your experience from age zero to age 25 was evangelical saturated.
I was ensconced AF, Brad.
It's true.
It's not just, I was drinking all of the Kool-Aid.
I was born like swimming in it and having no concept that there could be anything other than Kool-Aid.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I think, you know, there is a key to a lot of like what you guys have talked about on your show for so long.
A lot of right wing projects and high control religious systems are no exception to this.
But the idea of preventing self-awareness and teaching what's really a very punitive kind of carceral state of being, teaching people who you want to keep there in that place, not just how to be a good inmate and think of yourself as deserving, not just how to be a good inmate and think of yourself as deserving, as deserving everything you're getting, but also how to be How to keep yourself in there and put self-police.
That's really key to a lot of this because you can't have people thinking too freely.
I know you have questions, but I've come to think of a lot of what you and I did in our So, Dan, here's what we're going to do.
in Orange County a couple of decades ago as really a microcosm of the larger systems that what we were doing fit into and was a reflection of, so yeah. - So Dan, here's what we're gonna do.
I'm just gonna tell you the basic facts of this story.
And I'm gonna let you ask a couple questions to set up how we got there.
And then Jason and I will just give you an oral history of what happened this evening.
Because I want to preface this by saying, in ex-evangelical circles, youth pastors are the easiest people to dunk on for good reason.
No.
I don't think Jason's running away from that.
I'm not.
Youth pastors are often too enthusiastic for their own good.
They're often cringely trying to relate to youth culture.
They are often, and this is a very serious point, like overstepping bounds with like, you know, the 21-year-old youth pastor somehow starts dating the girl that just turned 18 in his youth group.
That kind of business.
So neither Jason nor I had any of that kind of stuff.
that kind of thing happening.
I did, when I was the one in the youth group and having youth pastors I was under, that was very much part of the thing.
Yeah, so you experienced that.
Yeah, we avoided recreating that, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know, that's a pretty low bar it seems like.
Oh no, I'm not trying to be a hero here.
I just want everyone listening to know that my time as a youth pastor was surely cringeworthy, was surely full of a lot of things, but it was not full of any sort of creepy grooming situation.
You know what I mean?
Because that's just, I think that's what people think of when they think youth pastors.
So I just want to put that out there.
All right, Dan.
Jason started at the church in summer of 1999.
Yep.
I started at the church summer of 1999.
I had been part of the youth group.
I had been kind of this convert, golden boy, part of the youth group.
Jason was more of like a legacy, like, you know, he would, in terms of mafia, he was like, his parents were made, you know, they were, they were in, right?
The evangelical mafia.
I like it.
Yeah, they were OGs.
There was part of me that knew this was the case and probably informed how I...
Went about going to get the job and interviewing and all that stuff.
I had a lot of, you know, pressure points I could hit.
But I had no idea what I was doing.
The first thing I did, Onishi, was turn 22.
Yeah.
And all of the talk of, like, training me and helping me know what I was doing and setting me up for success, none of that came to me.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, no.
I was winging it.
Winging it, man.
No.
You, I mean, I was fresh out of high school and here you just graduated college.
You show up, you're supposed to take over this youth group that is about 200 kids, and you're working with me and another guy, and you've never met us, and we're supposed to be in charge of the spiritual lives of teenagers and help them grow as human beings, and that means dealing with everything from, hey, are there dinosaurs in the Bible, to getting phone calls like, hey, my 13-year-old ran away from home, or my 14-year-old is pregnant.
I mean, that's the kind of stuff we would see in this kind of role, right?
All of it, of our pay grade.
Training, maturity, you know, we just didn't have anything.
Might as well ask somebody marriage counsel.
Well, that's why I got married at such a young age, Jason.
Sure, whatever counsel I gave you was indispensable.
All right, so Dan, it's a Wednesday.
We spent most Wednesday nights with the youth group playing a game outside.
I'm just going to give you the bare facts.
I'm not going to tell any story right now, and I'm going to let you ask the question.
On the night that we are going to discuss just now, one of our fellow youth minister types showed up.
His name was Rick, and he had a cooler full of fresh fish, about six inches in length, each of them.
We then held one side of a water balloon launcher.
I believe Jason and another guy did it because they're discriminatory and they're both tall and they said I would be uneven if I held it, which I'm not bitter about or anything.
So I think I was watching.
These are the three-person water balloon launchers where two people are holding the other ones.
The frat boy water balloon launchers, basically.
Oh yeah, that's the one.
So we are then telling all of the children in the youth group, okay, everyone who wants a turn, get up here and you can put one of the fish in this water balloon launcher and fire it straight toward a handball wall where it will explode.
Uh, but missing detail, I had myself personally designed and executed a mural that was then draped over the handball wall, providing a target.
And it was meaningless.
It was just something to hit.
But look, man, these fish, whole entire raw fish, I just wish high speed cameras were as accessible then as they are now.
This would have been epic.
Slow motion guys would have had field babies.
Right?
Just imagine a whole audience leaving the hands of a 12 year old standing between two adults Who are facilitating the obliteration, the inevitable just defamation of a fish corpse.
And it weaving its way through the air to the target as though it were still in water and still ready to make some kind of spiritual point.
Exploding.
And then, okay, the name, also the name of the youth group, which I had changed when I came and was hired, is Fish Hook, as in an homage to Fishers of Men.
Really, really profound.
Okay, deep stuff.
So, how does this help?
Drive home whatever point we're trying to make, whatever culture we're trying to create here for these kids, I don't know.
But was it provocative?
Yes.
Was it violent?
Uh-huh.
Are we still talking about it five years later?
You freaking bet!
You're a sweet bit of PR.
So, Dan, before Jason and I get going on this, just go ahead.
Ask your questions.
You want to know what happened in the hours leading up to this, to make this decision.
How did the children react?
Were there repercussions?
Ask your questions, Dan.
Go ahead.
Well, I was never a youth pastor, and I went—we'll circle back around to this—I went from being the super youth group kid, like you're talking about, sort of idolizing the youth pastor or whatever, to I graduated, go to this Baptist college, I called a ministry or whatever, and now I like look down on youth pastors, like within the Baptist world, because I'm training to be a pastor.
I'm not going to do the JV youth pastor thing.
I'm going to go like—so there was that, right?
But So my recollection about being in youth group and I did, I wasn't a youth pastor, but I was involved in lots of like, you know, weekend things, helping friends at their churches or volunteering or all that kind of stuff, was what was the purported spiritual point?
Because I feel like that was always the youth group thing, right?
It's like, let's come up with crazy shit to do.
That'll get kids to show up on a Wednesday instead of doing something else, or like, that'll get them to come to a fifth quarter after the football game instead of going out and drinking, or get them to show up the night after graduation, or like, whatever.
And then we'll kind of manufacture some spiritual lesson out of it.
And so like, before you told me that the name of the youth group was Fish Hook, I wrote down, I was like, Loaves and fishes?
Are we talking about loaves and fishes?
Are we talking about fishers of men?
Are we?
So like, that was the first thing is, is what, what was the purported tortured sort of spiritual message that was like developed out of the obliterated fish?
Every bit on the nose.
Every bit is on the nose as you are saying.
Just ham-fisted, just right out there in the open.
No nuance whatsoever.
It's like, if there was a CTRL-F function back then, you're like, where does the Bible talk about fish?
And like, that becomes the Bible message, right?
For that night, tied in with blowing fish up against the wall.
Yeah, it's very much in the evangelical tradition of figuring out what it is you want to do anyway, and then finding a way to sort of, after the fact, back into it and justify it or make it meaningful or whatever.
Just, I want to see fish explode, okay?
Y'all love it!
As both of you know, right, you do all things to the glory of Christ, right?
So that was always that kind of like, we can take anything and sort of baptize it and turn it into a spiritual lesson.
So yeah, that's the first thing I think of is like, Yeah, and I was surprised—I am gonna say, from my pastor days, in my head, number one, this doesn't surprise me that this was a thing that happened, right?
Number two, the church that I worked at, I can totally picture the wall we would have used for that, and I don't know what that means, that I, like, still have this part of me that's like, oh yeah, that wall in the back parking lot, that's where we would have done this, that would have worked.
Um oh yeah so yeah so how does like I guess that is the other question is is how planned premeditated is this just a dude who shows up is like hey you know I got a cooler full of fish that we're not going to use for deep sea bait or something or was this like a no I had calendared four months out kind of thing Yeah, I planned and this was my brainchild.
I arranged for the fish to be brought from a volunteer's workplace.
I knew how easy it would be to access these things.
This is also not unrelated to a similar stunt where we also had massive softball fields here on the campus of this megachurch, because of course we did.
And we'd have one kid who volunteered to wear football shoulder pads and a football helmet and then go out into the field and then their teammates would use the same water balloon launcher but this time to launch a raw egg up into the air.
The goal being To try to hit the guy with the football equipment and the football person's goal being to get underneath the egg.
Like, you want to be hit.
That's the point.
I have no plausible theory about what lesson could have come from that or how we could have tortured any of that.
I don't know.
But it was epic.
And most of these things, look, they're designed to just get kids to have a good time and tell their parents they want to come back so that they and their parents And therefore their money, uh, return and keep coming back, right?
That was, we, in a weird way, the youth groups as much as we deserve to be looked down on and I join you in that, uh, effort.
We are kind of, we were like the PR.
We were publicity.
We were very much about, like as much as the teaching pastors, we're the ones putting butts in seats, alright?
Like we're getting people to show up.
Because youth group, I mean, junior high and high school are hard enough as it is, right?
So for the first time in that kid's life, they are in a family dynamic where they're maybe struggling to fit in.
Junior high sucks.
High school sucks.
You're like, oh, I actually want to go to this place where my friends are going and it's fun and nobody takes it too seriously.
Now mom and dad are like, well, we actually better pay attention and go and we'll give it a chance too.
So it was like a full on, like on ramp.
This was a way of getting families in the area, like, Into the church and plugged in, right?
So I now understand that was my dramatic function.
I didn't.
No, I think that's exactly right.
And so it is easy to look down on youth ministry, but you know, if you get the 13 year old who is part of a family and that family is sort of lukewarm about church, they show up once a month, but now that 13 year old is all about youth group.
They want to go every Sunday.
They want to go to the beach trip.
They want to go to summer camp.
That family's gonna, they're gonna be in church.
And that's what your function is as a youth minister.
And, you know, not in total, right?
I mean, I love, to this day, when I think about youth ministry, I love those kids to death.
And some of them are listening.
I love them so much.
And I think about that time as a time of, like, great privilege to, like, be part of, like, young people's lives and help them when they're vulnerable, help them when they're trying to figure life out.
But here's the thing, Dan, and this is serious and not serious at the same time, is, like, Like, we're sitting there on a Wednesday at, like, you know, 2 p.m.
And for 10 Wednesdays in a row, we have played dodgeball.
We have played capture the flag.
And we're feeling this immense pressure that we're talking about to be, like, a really cool youth group that attracts kids from our community.
Like, we need to be this, like, PR firm and entry point for people to come to this church.
So we're feeling pressure.
We want the kids who are there to think we're super cool and fun, not just boring old Christians with three-piece suits and Ned Flanders and all that.
And so you get to this point, and I remember this clearly, Jason, of like, I don't know what to do.
What are we going to do tonight?
We don't have a game to play.
We need a cool game.
And then it's just spiraling where Jason's like, what if we got fish?
You know and like it's like you're sitting in a room at like 2 p.m and you really just should just take a walk and not do this but you don't and it's like what if we got fish and we took the the water balloon launcher we have downstairs and we like launched it into the wall and then like Jason what if yeah like Jason's in there like what if I like drew a mural you know of like something and it was like Satan or something and we were like you know we're the fishers of men that are like gonna obliterate Satan you know and we'll do this has to be so much like that these are the
The precursors to conversations that execs were having at social media companies decades later, where they're like, how do we drive user engagement?
How do we keep them in, you know, like, we want to retain these users.
We want to get them addicted.
We want to keep them coming back.
Get clicks!
That's what we were, we were talking about getting clicks pre, you know, social media age.
This is also how Kevin Costner got Waterworld made, I think.
You know what I mean?
I think it's, that's a powerful metaphor and honestly, I feel like I could teach a four-week series of it.
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