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Aug. 5, 2024 - Straight White American Jesus
01:16:13
Purity, Race, and Homeland
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- Axis Mundy.
Axis Mundy.
You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.
And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas like the rule of law and religious liberty.
Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation.
But America is not just an idea.
It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.
It is, in short, a nation.
Now that's not just an idea, my friends.
That's not just a set of principles.
Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland.
That is our homeland. - Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, My name is Brad Onishi.
Today we have a kind of mashup episode with a bunch of elements.
I'm going to talk here for a few minutes about J.D.
Vance and Kamala Harris, about race and the idea of the United States.
I then want to share with you a webinar.
With several authors who write about white Christian nationalism, you know, that includes myself, but also Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians, Amanda Tyler, the leader of the Baptist Joint Committee and the Christians Against Christian Nationalism Initiative, and Greg Jarrell, the author of a new book about white Christians and taking over of neighborhoods across the country.
It's a fascinating look into under-discussed phenomenon regarding the United States and how our neighborhoods are constructed.
For bonus content, I have an interview with Rick Pitcock, who is a writer for the Baptist Union Times and somebody who I think had some really good insight on J.D.
Vance.
And so if you are a premium subscriber, make sure to check the premium feed today because you'll see an entire episode with me and Rick talking about it.
If you're not, you'll want to make sure and subscribe in order to get the entire thing.
This week, this past week, I should say, Donald Trump attacked Kamala Harris and said at the conference for black journalists that she used to be Indian and then now she's black and he doesn't understand.
And it's a whole big controversy.
This has been echoed on right wing media by people like Charlie Kirk who are trying to say that Kamala Harris used to be Indian and now she's black as if one has to choose either or as if as a mixed race person you can only be one thing and that's the only thing that's possible.
I think the strategy is clear.
Try to make it out that Kamala Harris is not really black and she's only claiming to be black or is now claiming her black identity so she can get votes but throughout her life she's really hidden that or not really claimed it or whatever may be.
I want to contrast this with J.D.
Vance, who has talked a lot in the past, the recent past, about the United States as not a principle, but a group of people.
I wrote this at Rolling Stone about a week and a half ago, but here's a quote from Vance in First Things.
We have to recognize that America is not just a principle.
It is a group of people.
It's a history.
It's a culture.
And yeah, part of the story is that people can come and assimilate.
But if your attitude is that the only thing you need to become an American is to believe that with a little bit of hormonal therapy, a man can become a woman, then you're making it so that massive numbers of your own country either need to be reeducated or need to be cast out of the political community.
So this quote is obviously rife with transphobia, and we've come to expect that from J.D.
Vance.
He says something at the beginning, though, that really echoes what he said when he accepted the nomination for vice president, and that is this idea that America is a group of people.
It's a history.
He talked in his acceptance speech about where his relatives are buried in Kentucky, and he hopes that seven generations of his family will be buried there and so on and so on and so forth.
And I want to just contrast this with Kamala Harris and tie some threads, I think, that really go together.
The attacks on Kamala Harris are basically like, we don't know what to do with her.
Is she black?
Is she Indian?
What is she?
There's this befuddlement because there's a presumption for many on the American right that you're one thing.
We've talked about it at length on this show, but purity is a virtue.
Purity is understood to be the goal.
That to be one thing is to be the right thing or the good thing and to be mixed, to be an entity, an organism, an ecosystem that contains diverse elements.
Is scary.
Is not something to be desired.
You know, Van says openly here, you might need to cast some people out of the political community.
I talk in my book about this in relationship to evangelical purity culture, and one of the arguments I make there is that Christian nationalism is the original purity culture.
And the argument I make really stems from work by my co-host Dan Miller, who says that for any nation, any country, any political community, there's an understanding of a national body.
There's an understanding of the nation as having a body that looks A certain way has certain attributes that if you were to sit down and draw ancient Greece or medieval China or fifth century Rome, that you could probably gather enough public sentiment and the imaginary of the entire community such that you could draw the prototypical body of that community.
Well, for the white Christian in the United States, the prototypical body is, of course, a white, Christian, English-speaking, male, patriarchal body.
It's a body that is cisgender.
It is a body that speaks English with no accent, no hint of English being a second language.
It's a person who dons the symbols or the comportments of Christianity.
You can see how you imagine the white Christian male body as the embodiment of the national body.
And if you deviate, if you take it further, you can imagine the national family.
You can imagine a family that is made up of a patriarchal husband and a submissive wife and two or three or four or five children.
And you can understand the kind of building block of the nation from there.
One of the things that's challenging about Kamala Harris that was not challenging about Joe Biden, at least for the Republicans that would like to attack her, is that Kamala Harris is many things.
Kamala Harris is a person who had a Jamaican father, who has an Indian mother.
She talks about the ways that her mom would cook certain dishes and her dad would cook others, and they both were derived from their various heritages, their own heritages and their own cultures and backgrounds.
She's a mixed race person, and she's mixed race in a way that is somewhat rare in the United States.
She is South Asian.
She is black.
She is both.
And so what do you do with that if you're a Republican?
How do you approach that?
In addition, she's married to a Jewish man.
So here's the thing, friends.
If you're J.D.
Vance and you think that America is not a principle but a group of people, then Kamala Harris is the antithesis of America to you.
Her people come from various places.
Her food and her customs and her traditions are diverse.
They include elements that are, in some ways, not like each other.
And they come together in this person who is Kamala Harris.
She is not a person who represents American purity.
Kamala Harris is somebody who represents and embodies American diversity.
Someone who is American through and through in the sense that she's born to folks who have come from other places, who have their own religious and cultural and historical markers, and yet nonetheless came together, at least for a certain time, to have a relationship, in addition to other things, led to the birth of Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris is the embodiment of the United States as a principle.
The United States is a creedal nation, a constitution based on a creed that says, we are all free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
We are all free to pursue our lives as we choose.
We are all free and equal under the law that we're bound in the United States, not by a certain ethnicity, not by a certain religion.
Not even by our definition of people in terms of tracing histories that go back to ancient times or to nine generations.
You know what we're defined by?
A grand experiment.
A power sharing agreement.
One that says there are no kings.
There is no royalty.
There is no way that one citizen is above the others, but that we are all here from Jamaica and India, from various places, England and Wales and France and Germany, Thailand, and not to mention all those folks of African descent brought here not of their own accord.
We are here.
And what ties us together are lofty principles.
In fact, the loftiest, the most audacious principles you could imagine to create what we can call a nation or a country.
The ideas of equality and liberty and freedom.
Have we ever lived up to them?
No.
Are we living up to them now?
Not at all.
Is there inequality in our systems?
Yes.
Is there injustice?
Of course.
But the United States, as a principle, is the American experiment.
It's hard.
It's just not easy.
There are very few straight lines.
There are very few images and stories that reduce to one thing.
And for some people, that's really scary.
Because purity is the only way they feel safe.
For all things to be the same is to make them good.
And that's why on this show we talk about purity, in most cases, as a negative thing.
Because purity is a reckoning with anything that is different and doing what J.D.
Vance says.
Excising people from the political community.
If you're not part of the people, Vance says, if you're not part of the history, maybe you shouldn't be here.
That's scary kind of talk.
Catherine Stewart has a new piece out at the New Republic where she talks about this on this very show a week ago.
Annika Braxamit spoke about what she heard at NatCon just about a month ago.
The ideas of homeland and Volk, the ideas of hearth and family, these are very popular on the American right at the moment.
And those ideas come from a sense that in order to be a community, you have to be a people.
And in order to be a people, you have to share a history.
And then it goes further, right?
In order to share history, you have to share an ethnicity and a way of life and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that means I'm just not sure about these people who have their kids in the school where my kids go, who don't have our holidays and they don't dress the same.
And the women dress this way and the men do this and the food they bring for lunch is in their holidays and blah.
It's just different.
It's not pure.
It's not all the same.
This is not the America I grew up in.
This is not the America I experienced.
It's not the America I want for my kids.
That's all code for I'm scared.
I'm scared to try to have a country that's based on a set of principles and ideas and experiment.
And I'd rather just resort to that easy, anxious impulse, that oh-so-reductive human impulse to say, well, no, no, no, it's really just about skin color and really just about the same way of life.
And if we don't have that, we don't have anything.
Well, That's the least American thing I've ever heard.
But that that's what we see here in J.D.
Vance's comments about home.
It's also why we see Kamala Harris as such a vexing figure for the American right.
As if for her to be somebody of mixed race, heritage is something bad or sinister.
As if it's something that means that we can't trust her or that she can't be trusted at all, because what is she after all?
Is she Indian or black?
Is she American?
What is she?
I don't know.
She's vexing because she represents everything that America is supposed to be, on principle, in the sense that her parents are diverse.
Her parents themselves, in their own family, did not share a history, did not come from the same place, and nonetheless loved each other, at least for a time, nonetheless cared for each other, nonetheless raised someone who would become a nominee for president.
That doesn't make sense when you think of the country based on a homeland, the country based on a history.
In fact, it's the very opposite.
And so with Kamala Harris now in the place of Joe Biden, we have a new dimension to this Election.
We have a dimension that that pits two visions of the United States against each other as if there weren't already a number of contrary visions of the of the country at stake in this election.
We have the idea of the country as a set of principles, as an audacious experiment.
Or we have what J.D.
Vance wants to tell us and what Donald Trump only echoes when he attacks Kamala Harris's heritage, a country based on homeland and history, a country based on a way of life, a country based on a threat that you better conform or you will be thrown out of the political community.
Those are two different ideas about what we are as a country.
And I'll tell you one is easier because it relies on fear.
It relies on reduction.
And the case that I think that we all have to make is that I want something more than that.
There's this quote from, from Star Trek, The Next Generation, and it's also part of the book Station Eleven by Emily St.
John Mandel.
And I know many of you've probably read that book, but it, it, it's, it goes like this, that survival is not enough.
That we need more than that as humans.
And don't get me wrong as I say that, I'm not overlooking at all those around the world, whether in Gaza or elsewhere, and those in this country who are facing a threat of not surviving, whether because of violence or because of hunger, because of health phenomena that could be rectified by different medical solutions and so on.
So please don't take any callousness in my voice here.
But I think what that quote gets to the heart of is that as humans, we endeavor to live lives that are ones in which we survive.
We eat.
We shelter.
We care.
And yet we also endeavor to create meaning and significance, to flourish.
To live lives that have stories and principles and values.
Those things are not things that many other animals or organisms do in this world.
They're things that as humans we struggle for and we can hold open at various times.
And it's not easy.
And just like any fragile and vulnerable ecosystem, they can go away.
But when I see Vance talking about history and family and land, and then I look at Kamala Harris, this person, Who is of mixed race and who has so many different religious aspects in her own marriage.
I think we can strive to create a community that honors all of the diverse stories, all of the diverse histories, all of the ways that we've created meaning and significance in this world through culture, through religion.
All the ways that Kamala Harris's Indian mother brought Brought to her home recipes and food and customs and symbols and imagery that gave that home and that dinner table meaning and the ways that her father did too.
I think of how that works in my family, and I'm sure you can as well.
All right, I want to share now with you the webinar that I took part in last week, and that's with the authors that I mentioned.
You'll hear an introduction from the host of the webinar and an explanation of what we're there to talk about.
And so without further ado, I'll turn it over to them. - I'll turn it over to them. -
Good evening and welcome to this two-part webinar series from Broadleaf Books and Fortress Press.
We will be discussing this topic of breaking point, tracing the roots of white Christian nationalism and how we can resist.
I'm Dr. Laura Gifford.
I'm a books editor with Fortress Press and a historian of American politics, so I'm delighted to be able to moderate this conversation.
Tonight we're discussing the rise of white Christian nationalism and its impact on society, including its propensity for violence like that which we saw on January 6th, 2021, and the ways it perpetuates racism and xenophobia.
By examining its history and facing these uncomfortable truths, we aim to foster a deeper understanding of white Christian nationalism and inspire you to take proactive steps to counter its harmful influence.
So let's meet tonight's panelists.
First joining us, we have the Reverend Angela Denker, who is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a veteran journalist.
She is the author of Red State Christians, A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind, and the forthcoming Disciples of White Jesus, The Radicalization of American Boyhood.
Angela lives in Minneapolis, where she is a sought after speaker on Christian nationalism and its theological and cultural roots.
So welcome, Angela.
Next joining us, we have Greg Gerald.
Greg is a cultural organizer with QC Family Tree in the Enderly Park neighborhood of Charlotte, North Carolina.
He works with words and music to impact housing and neighborhood justice issues.
Gerald writes about theology and history and is the author of Our Trespasses, White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods.
Hello, Greg.
Hey, Laura.
Thank you for having me on.
Hello, Angela.
Our third panelist is Dr. Bradley Anishi.
Brad is a scholar of religion and co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, and is graciously going to be using the audio from this particular webinar on that podcast, so thank you to Brad for that.
He is the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next.
A TEDx speaker and the author, editor or translator of four previous books, Onishi teaches at the University of San Francisco.
So thanks for joining us, Brad.
Yeah, good to be here.
And finally, we have Amanda Tyler.
Amanda is an attorney, executive director of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and lead organizer of Christians Against Christian Nationalism.
She also co-hosts the Respecting Religion podcast.
Tyler is the author of How to End Christian Nationalism.
She lives in Texas.
Welcome this evening, Amanda.
Oh, thank you.
So great to be with you all.
So thank you all for being here.
We have a lot to cover tonight.
I was joking, I know, before the conversation that with one of you, we could easily fill an hour and we've got a lot of wonderful material to discuss in this hour we have together tonight.
To get the conversation started, we have a general question that I'd love to posit to each of you about what precipitated your work of writing about and working against white Christian nationalism.
And also, kind of a two-part question, what most concerns you about the rise of white Christian nationalism right now?
So the reason why you're doing this, what especially concerns you as we gather together here on August 1st?
So, Angela, how about if we start with you?
Sure.
Well, always hard to be the first one to go.
I like to hear everyone else first.
But I guess I am sort of the grizzled veteran here in Christian nationalism in some ways.
When I first began working on Red State Christians, I was not real familiar with Christian nationalism and the threat it poses.
And it was with the reporting for that book undertaken mostly in the year of 2018 after my service in a conservative evangelical style Lutheran in name megachurch in Southern California in Orange County, where I witnessed the racism within evangelical churches down there back in Brad's old stomping grounds.
So it was doing that research when I just became convinced that, wow, not only is Christian nationalism going to be the first chapter of this book, but it is permeating every single section of the book.
And again, ancient history, you know, almost five years ago, Red Saint Christians first came out.
And since that time, I've continued to watch the growth, the perniciousness of Christian nationalism.
The resistance, which I'm so grateful that has been spawned, but I've become increasingly more and more concerned.
And every single day, there's another story, another place in our politics where this threat continues to rise.
So I've been grateful to continue to do this work and to see it from small town, Minnesota, where I pastored to the White House.
So it's really in every corner of so many of our lives and in our families and our communities as well.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And with that Orange County sort of connection, I wonder, Brad, if you'd like to step in next.
We've kind of got a geographic affinity here in some ways in terms of the roots of potential interest.
Sure, I basically grew up in the neighborhood.
I mean, my brothers went to preschool at the church where Angela was pastoring, so it's not a 45-minute sort of, you know, separation.
It's like a literal connection there.
So I think for me, there's a couple things.
I think with all of us, the last 10 years have been shocking, have been surprising, have been disturbing.
And I wanted to help folks see that from my view, which is bifocal.
Somebody who lived it, somebody who was an evangelical minister in a megachurch that I would call Christian Nationalist.
Somebody who's now a scholar of religion, who studies these things from the outside and perhaps could provide a historical And in addition, a story about a part of the country that's often viewed as liberal, as progressive, as not prone to the impulses and temptations of Christian nationalism and other fundamentalisms and nationalistic movements, but nonetheless has been an epicenter for those things, and that's Southern California and Orange County.
All of those things together really precipitated me writing.
In addition to January 6th, which as I watched, as a scholar of religion, I noticed all the religious symbols and imagery.
As a former Christian nationalist, evangelical, I thought perhaps I would have been there.
If I was 19 and there had been a man in my church who said, we need to go to the Capitol this week and And make sure God's will is done.
Here's a plane ticket.
19 year old me might have might have been on that plane.
So all of that led to writing the book.
And I think what concerns me now is things have only gotten more extreme and more violent.
I think we've reached a place where Christian nationalists are done trying to persuade and are ready to simply take.
And I think that's that's pretty alarming.
And it's hard to think we've come to a place that's different and worse than January 6, 2021.
However, I think we have, which is pretty alarming.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic and that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country and meet some really interesting people and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.
And your your mention of geography just leads me to to wonder, Greg, if you would like to step in next, because it feels as though certainly that the focus of your book is a little bit different, Greg, but the the ways that.
Geography that place all of these factors in turn factor into experiences that we're having as Americans across the country feels really relevant.
Yeah, for sure.
I think the influences we see, the stuff that we see on television that really kind of captures our imaginations, is underwritten geographically in the ways that our cities and our landscapes have been built.
And that's kind of been my attention.
My work sort of came about trying to understand the takeover of my own neighborhood, having lived in a One of the poorest neighborhoods in Charlotte, mostly black and sort of a Catholic worker environment and sort of watching white evangelicals kind of seize the space around us.
And tracing, tracing that back to urban renewal and to some other like there are a lot of through lines that move through this work.
And as somebody who grew up in the Southern Baptist Convention, but now is a progressive Baptist, I've sort of seen through my work the ways that all of the white progressives are innocent within, kind of laying the groundwork for all of this as well.
So that's been some of the stuff that I've noted and has really interested me.
And as the father of 16 and 14 year old boys watching the ways that young men in particular have been kind of captured, young white men, by this, then my senses are heightened around this as well.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I wouldn't be surprised if there's an opportunity to follow that up as given Angela's recent writing and so on.
Again, though, the Baptist connection and also then hearing from somebody in Amanda who's working with All of this right in the locus of power in Washington, D.C.
and beyond.
I'm curious to hear what precipitated your work and also what concerns you in particular, given the connections and avenues in which you're operating at the moment.
Yeah, well, I very much came to this work because of both my personal and my professional You know, personally, growing up as a Baptist in Texas and being an active lay leader and watching my family be active lay leaders and just having that strong connection to church polity.
But then also, professionally, after a career in law and politics and government, in 2017, I came to lead the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
This 88-year-old education and advocacy group that is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
And so it was early on, I came to lead the organization two weeks before Donald Trump was inaugurated to the presidency, and seeing all of these attacks on religious freedoms.
And how we protect religious freedom in this country by being sure that we ensure the separation of church and state.
But seeing that it wasn't just the legal principles that were under attack, but that people were actually under attack in houses of worship.
And the violence that was being brought and fueled by Christian nationalism, and then aided by guns, so that people were no longer safe.
In their house of worship, and so it was really that impetus that led me Baptist Joint Committee working with my colleagues there and interfaith colleagues and ecumenical colleagues to form the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign, really identifying Christian nationalism as the single biggest threat to religious freedom in this country right now.
Back in 2019.
And so, you know, much like Brad said, we were positioned then, by the time January 6th happened, to really recognize those symbols as not just the symbols of Christianity at the insurrection, but actually the symbols of Christian nationalism.
And since then, watching this campaign evolve into something that really provided a way for people to take action in their local communities.
So that led me to write this book that's really a handbook for anyone, but particularly for Christians who are looking to know what to do when they are looking to dismantle Christian nationalism from themselves, their theologies, their congregations, and their broader communities.
And in the midst of that, and in fact in the midst of writing this book, My family moved from Washington, D.C.
back to Texas, and that experience has given me a new appreciation for how Christian nationalism is really thriving in certain areas of this country and by certain legislatures and other leaders that are really exploiting this ideology in order to further exclusionary policies.
So what concerns me the most at really watching how this ideology has evolved over the last seven years now that I've been really working intently on it, is just how we risk the normalization of Christian nationalism.
When we started out, this was something that most everyone would at least distance themselves from the term or the knowledge of it.
And now over time, we've had more and more people, including leaders at the top of government, embracing the term and embracing the concept of something that the country should be.
And that is such an urgent threat to both American democracy, but also to an authentic Christian witness.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you all for sharing that motivation and a little bit of where you're finding your particular points of concern as we're moving into the current election season and all its ever-changing glory.
I think it's a I anticipate, you know, five new developments by the end of the hour, the rate that we're going now in society.
But the books that each of you have written also delve more deeply and personally and specifically into how How Christian nationalism functions, how both problems and possibilities can emerge from having the sort of deeper knowledge that comes from really studying this phenomenon.
I wondered, and throughout feel very welcome to large questions of each other.
This is something that we can have as a flowing conversation.
But perhaps to get us started into that more specific realm, Angela, you alluded to the fact that, and this is quoting from Red State Christians, the unlikely love affair between Red State Christians and Trump comes down to a shared language, which I felt was very poignant and maybe gets us into this question of how to engage, how to think about the ways that we are active in society engaging this concern.
I was wondering if you could speak more to that and to how opponents of white Christian nationalism might address this issue of language.
Yeah, well, language is really important to me as a writer, as a journalist, as a preacher.
And so I was really struck by the ways in which when I would interview people for writing Red Saint Christians, I spent 2018 traveling across the country from Appalachia to many places in Texas, U.S.-Mexico border, down to Florida to meet with Trump's pastor, Apollo White.
But I was really struck by The appeals that Trump would make to these different constituencies through language.
And at the time, many of these appeals that I was really struck by had to do with class.
And while Donald Trump comes from a wealthy family in Manhattan, he went to an Ivy League college, he had sort of this gut level ability to transcend What people would consider as elite political language, and to speak in some sense to the folks who I would interview in small town rural America, folks in Appalachia, and you know things like he would talk about going to get a Big Mac, he'd talk about McDonald's, he'd talk about
And all of these ways, these were very early days, were ways of making connection.
My thinking on this, as these years have passed by, has shifted a bit.
And it's no longer, you know, these were very early ways to form sort of a heart connection and trust with his voters.
And one of the things that I always talk about when I meet with groups of people who are wanting to push back against Christian nationalism is I talk about rebuilding trust.
Because what Trump did on a very gut level and what many Christian nationalist leaders seek to do is they build trust with people over creating seeming commonalities.
But what I would say today that I got to address a bit in the new version of Red State Christians in 2022, but what I'll write about much more sensibly in Disciples of White Jesus, is that so many of these shared appeals are about commonalities over who we hate.
So you're certainly seeing this with the language that Republicans, that Christian nationalists are using when they talk about Vice President Kamala Harris.
And so I was thinking about this example from Trump's interview yesterday at the NABG, National Association of Black Journalists, their convention.
He said he's asked if Kamala Harris is a DEI candidate.
And his answer here, you can see again the slippery way that he uses language.
And I won't do this today because we have a whole lot of other people to talk to.
But I want to flag for people that there's an object lesson on this in the Bible.
It's in John 18, 31 through 38.
And this is a lesson in the ways in which Pontius Pilate, with Jesus in dialogue, Pontius Pilate does the same thing that I see many Christian nationalists and I see Trump doing.
Which is slipping around conversation to deny the existence of truth, to avoid directly answering a question, but to create a shared affinity over who we hate, who we dislike, who is not us.
And so I saw Trump doing that in a hate-filled, racist way when he was asked about Kamala Harris being a DEI candidate.
First, he says, well, you need to define it.
And so the interviewer, Rachel Scott, says, well, diversity, equity and inclusion.
And then he keeps, but what define it?
What does that mean?
It's it's this attempt to skirt around an idea that there is a truth that you can hold on to.
And then he kind of ends up landing on this thing that he has done in many cases where he says, well, she could be.
I don't know.
Some people might think she is.
What he's doing in those answers is giving permission for people to indulge in sort of that devil on your shoulder of, well, I really want to have somebody to blame for the things I'm maybe legitimately upset about, and I want to be able to Indulge in thinking about the differences that I have with other people.
I want to engage in white supremacy.
And so I think that that language really comes down to, in many cases, a language that is a dog whistle to racism, to sexism, to classism.
But specifically to white supremacist ideology that we see not just in Trump, but we're seeing in somebody like J.D.
Vance as well.
So much more to unpack there.
But I continue to see it over and over again.
And it's a very slippery way at undermining trust, building up anger and rage and violence, which, again, is a big thing to talk about with the role of young men in this movement and the role of radicalization.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I wonder, given that segue, whether, Brad, you'd have comments on this notion of language from your lived experience as well as scholarly background.
And also the reality that you discuss quite eloquently how white Christian nationalist followers are everyday people in communities like Orange County, just as you'd articulated earlier, and that you could have been there in D.C.
on January 6th, but it's not really that far of a stretch.
And sometimes I do think we tend to put these things in categories, which, as Angela was alluding to, is Far from that easy, in reality.
But I'm curious to hear more from you about this idea of really everyday people caught up in these communities, in this language and shared affinity for the language and the ideology, and how that might, of course, be a cause for concern, also perhaps potentially a cause for hope.
How you'd recommend that listeners be thinking about all of this.
Yeah, you know, I think Got a noisy air conditioner is what I think.
I think that Angela touched on language.
Hold on.
All right, there we go.
Angela touched on language, and I want to touch on a related, but I think distinct aspect to that, which is narrative and story.
So I think that whether it's the person in Appalachia, whether it's the person in in Baton Rouge or whether it's the person in Orange County.
I think what Christian nationalism does, including Donald Trump, is to give people a story to live out.
It gives it invites them into a narrative and it gives them a character to play in that story.
And I think within that story, you're able to do exactly what Angela just talked about, which is to unite with good guys and fight the bad guys.
You create enemies that are not just your political opponent who doesn't agree with you about how the mayor should run the town or what we should do with our school dollars as a PTA, but they're actual demons.
They are Satan-fueled actors who want to destroy America, who hate children, who want to eat children, who want to be groomers, who want to be perverts.
Whatever rhetoric we hear, And so I think the invitation into a story is a way that we can understand how these common enemies, these common foes, start to appear.
And so we can see someone like J.D.
Vance, who is from Appalachia, he says, and a recent convert to a very reactionary strain of Catholicism, uniting with the likes of megachurch pastors.
From Robert Jeffress to Tony Perkins.
For 50, 60 years, we've had reactionary Catholics and white evangelicals as co-belligerents in the ways that Francis Schaeffer and Jerry Falwell would say against these common enemies that Angelus talked about.
One of the hard parts about running against someone who tells a story that way, that they will make America great again, is that they are promising something they can't deliver, but it doesn't matter.
It's inviting, it's tantalizing, and it's a promise to fix you, a promise to fix your community, a promise to fix your life, a promise to get the people you think have ruined it.
And so it's really hard to run against that kind of person because you're never going to be able to promise as much as they are.
And the story they're telling is way more epic than the one you're going to tell, about living a quotidian life as citizens of a democracy, trudging along, trying to be neighbors, trying to figure it out together in a way that's peaceful, in ways that we can flourish and learn and grow.
That's much more difficult to get the hairs to stand on end when you deliver a message to people.
Where is there hope there?
There's hope there because eventually the fascist narrative evaporates and you see it for what it is.
It's a reality star television 78 year old man with more makeup and hair gel on than one can imagine promising that he'll fix you and the world and you realize he's lying.
And he looks like a buffoon.
And so to me, the hope is you continue to tell the real story, the story of it's possible for us to live together as in a multiracial, multireligious, pluralistic democracy, to struggle together, to try to live in a way that is full of sharing power and that that is not totalizing, that is not exclusionary, that is not violent.
And you continue to have hope in that story.
And you realize that history tells us someday that fascist demagogue will will appear to the masses what he really is, which is a lying buffoon and the gig will be up.
But it's really a lot of work and a lot of belief to get to that point.
And I think that's where we are right in the middle of that.
Hey Laura, can I jump in?
So for one, I appreciate you just naming it fascism, Brad.
I think that's clearer language sometimes than sort of some of the new speak that comes along.
That's what we're facing and fascism, obviously, in my work.
has spatial orientations you know this this question over birthright citizenship that all of a sudden has got some salience within this this community is a one x one evidence of that i also think that in terms of telling a different story and sort of taking the power out it's been very interesting over the past 10 days to see that The narrative has shifted a bit, just through ridicule.
Just through calling these folks weirdos, which seems so anodyne.
Not to say that they're not dangerous, but also, these are genuinely weird people.
With really obtuse and unbelievable kind of beliefs that have started to be poked through in some ways.
It's really kind of changed the dominant narrative.
They don't feel so inevitable.
It's like we're not handing them all the power just by fulfilling their narrative about talking about how dangerous they are.
So that has been a really interesting development to me over the last few days.
And I appreciate, Brad, your naming narrative as well.
And what comes to mind for me is a narrative of America as a Christian nation that does create belonging for some people, but it also creates a sense of insider outsider status.
And it seems like we've all kind of gone to the current moment that we're in.
And I was reminded of The acceptance speech that JD Vance gave at the Republican National Convention, in which he disagreed with the whole nation that what defines America is an ideal.
Some of these foundational ideals.
That I think many people do cling to ideals that have never been realized, but provide a framework, I believe, for that kind of radical inclusion that everyone belongs, no matter how they identify, how they identify religiously, whether or not they are a Christian or from another faith or are not religious at all.
That's the promise of America, and that's the ideal of religious freedom.
But in his speech, he explicitly said that that's not what America is about, but rather that America is about a land, and a land that his people have lived on for generations.
You know, ignoring altogether the doctrine of discovery that was, of course, infused with Christian nationalism that justified the taking of the land to begin with, but defining America based on who lives here and has lived here for generations.
Which again is this implicit reminder of white Christian nationalism and who really belongs here.
And so I think when we think about countering Christian nationalism, we have to counter with a narrative that provides true belonging for everyone, regardless of any of their identities, including their religious identity.
Yeah, I think that's really powerful and I want to take off my clergy collar and put on my journalist hat for a moment as we're talking about narrative because media companies are right at the center of all of this and journalists are right at the center of all of this and social media companies are right at the center of all of it and Much of the way that we see the world now, as Americans and as citizens of the world, is mediated through algorithms.
And those algorithms are prioritized according to, most popularly, what makes us rage, what makes us angry.
And so when you're trying to push forward an alternative narrative, you're up against not only You're up against the violence and the ideology and the powerful history of fascism of authoritarianism, but you're also up against a profit motive.
And we see that profit motive with the selection of JD Vance, you know, who was promoted by Silicon Valley.
Again, these these odd marriages between old school Southern Baptist, God and country type, you know, folks marrying with somebody like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, people who People have really no interest in the Bible, in social teachings, but they're very interested in profit and in money.
And so that profit motive is right at the center of this narrative, which I think makes it altogether so much more remarkable and hopeful that there has been a bit of a shift in the type of narrative that people are willing to believe in.
And I do think some of that is this generational change.
And this movement of Joe Biden to do something which Christian nationalists could never conceive of, which is somebody who has power voluntarily giving up that power, not for their own personal good, but for the good of the country.
And for the good of someone else.
It was a move that I thought really had potential to change and to shake up this narrative.
And I really think that we've seen that it has.
Because of that movement of sacrifice, it opens up a whole world of possibilities that for people who have grown up, you know, in the 80s, in the 90s, we've seen 9-11.
We've seen You know, Bill Clinton scandal.
We've seen our politicians not live up to what you would hope for of honor, of grace, of honesty.
And there's so much cynicism and cynicism goes far on social media, too.
So this move of Joe Biden to do something to voluntarily give up power, I just think was a real move in an antithesis of a Christian nationalist narrative that has had the power to change the conversation in America, particularly for younger Americans.
Yeah.
You know, I'm struck and I appreciate you bringing media into this because I think the ways we tell our stories make such an important difference and have evolved so significantly.
I'm also thinking back to Amanda's comments about land and place and some of what J.D.
Vance had to say about land and place in contrast to the, yeah, the ideals of American democracy that I think would be the thing that we would assume would be the foundation that he ignored.
This feels like an opening, Greg, for a little bit of conversation about how urban renewal and cities and towns links into all of this, how understanding the history of our place can impact, can influence our capacity to tell our stories, to perhaps tell better stories, to challenge and assert a different narrative that subverts some of what we're seeing as problems and adds to this well of maybe the cracks of possibility.
Sure.
So, I mean, I think the unfortunate kind of reality about, you know, speaking of Vance and some of the ways that these fascist beliefs kind of come through is that they do have a lot of historical continuity with the way that, in actual practice, this country's politics has worked.
So, I've studied, in particular, urban renewal, which was a giant land grab.
And it was a land grab that was done for the last half of that program at the same time that the Civil Rights Movement was actively going on.
So I think it's very easy to read it as a, at least a portion of it, as a backlash against the organizing that was going on during the Southern Freedom Movement.
And so I think at least seeing those roots and the continuity
uh with those roots and sort of for me it was important to examine like who was participating how were christians participating and conceiving and it was it was liberal christians liberal white christians along with conservative white christians that were all actively involved in this and in acting out what a friend of mine says about racism that it is it's a way of taking people from land and land from people
And that really salient point, I think, comes through in a lot of the discourse that we hear now with the subject that we're talking about tonight.
But it pervades the history of white settlement on this continent.
And it moves across the usual conservative and liberal divides, like all of us who have inherited these traditions.
That point is still in there.
It's still the water that we swim in, so we still have work to do around it.
I'll just jump in and say, I don't, you know, I don't think Vance's comments were by any means an accident.
They were really in step with so many of the common good conservatism Catholics that he is influenced by, who don't believe, and along with white nationalists, along with, you know, so many of the kind of reformed Christian nationalist types from Doug Wilson to Stephen Wolf, who Who really believe that a creedal nation based on ideals is not possible.
And thus, the only way to have a country is to have a Volk, right?
As Stephen Wolf puts it, a people based on land, based on a sense of nationhood, based on a sense of ethnicity.
And so there's a there's a really, you know, we hear so often from politicians these these tired lines and we have a choice to go forward or to go back.
But what Vance does is present us with this idea of is the United States A place based on some sense of who belongs, based on land, based on who controls the land, based on who's been here, though his partner and her family has a very recent immigration story, and he has biracial, multiracial children.
Nonetheless, he talks like this.
Or are we, right, a country that is doing something harder?
And more beautiful and rarely attempted in the history of the human species.
And that is a type of community based on a set of ideals that are lofty and difficult to live out.
And nonetheless, provide us with people who are multiracial, who have multiple religions in their homes, different symbols, different heritage that have, you know, who knows what they're eating for dinner because they've come from different grandmas from across the world.
And there's a texture and a mosaic and just an absolute beauty to the entanglement of all of these stories together in a way that can make the United States appear to be something of an audacious experiment.
But, you know, we can live that one.
Or we can live like scared little humans who resort to skin and what's familiar And who lives here and who doesn't?
And say, we'll just build our nation based on that.
Because we don't have the guts to live out the beauty and the wonder that was proposed in an American founding that has never been lived out yet, but a more perfect union might be possible.
So for me, that's the narrative that says, of course, going forward is something we want to talk about, but that's what going forward means.
It means going forward to something that's a lot scarier, but a lot more beautiful.
And that's, isn't that what being human is?
Rather than resorting to something that reduces us to scared little organisms huddled together in ways that are violent and really small.
I think we want to be bigger than that.
And I think that's what it means to go forward.
So when I think about stories and the stories I want to tell the potential voters, to young people, to those young men who are 23 and think that you can't be a man unless you vote for Donald Trump.
Or those young folks who are like, I don't know what the story of this country is.
It seems to be just the doctrine of discovery and chattel slavery and Chinese exclusion.
Why the hell should I be proud of it?
We have to, we have to find a way to say, well, yeah, all that's there.
It's all there and it's gross, but it doesn't mean there's not something else possible.
And to that possibility, Brad, I think we talked about what's the opportunity here.
There is an awakening to the danger of Christian nationalism in our current moment.
And it does require bravery.
It requires really being honest about our history.
And Greg, I loved how you brought in the fact that this is a problem across Christian It is not just a white evangelical problem as we sometimes hear about it, but it is something that is pervasive in Christian life.
And if we have the bravery to really face history with eyes wide open, then we can realize where we have been departing, you know, speaking from a Christian perspective, where Christians have been departing from the teachings of Jesus in service to the power of Christian nationalism for centuries.
So not only could we achieve the ideals of the American project, but we could also grow more close to Jesus in the process as we reject Christian nationalism in favor of Christianity.
And I was also just struck by how many times you said scared or fear.
And we have to know that that's what's driving this push towards authoritarianism or fascism, as we talked about, with the chaos that is going on around the country and around the world.
And we look at what's happening with the climate, we're looking at what's happening with violence and war.
That's when we're all most susceptible to the allure of authoritarianism, the easy answers of a strong person who would say, we can just do this by making Christianity the law of the land, that that will solve all of our problems.
When in fact, it will draw us, of course, further away from the kind of multi-racial democracy that we say we want to have.
You know, one of the questions that we received from subscribers who signed on to these webinars was one that really juxtaposes well with I think where our conversation sits at the moment, and that is the question of how
How and what, particularly for those of us who identify as Christians or have a contextual background that includes Christianity, what responsibilities we might have or how we might operate with the reality that this is a pluralistic society and there are people who are religious minorities, of varying stripes, who are coping with these messages.
What would we say to those people?
What are the responsibilities, perhaps, that we who are engaging this question bear toward society in terms of the really distinctive sorts of fears and concerns of people who are Jewish, who are Muslim, who are Hindu, who are identifying with any number of other religious faiths?
Well, I often approach, so I'll take it first, I guess.
I often approach that question thinking about impact and responsibility.
That the impact of white Christian nationalism is most felt by people who aren't Christian or people who are people of color or both, right?
But white Christians, therefore, might feel the least impact day-to-day on white Christian nationals.
And not that they don't feel some, because White Christian nationalism draws the circle of belonging so tight that it excludes many white Christians as well.
But as a generality that we feel it the least, but yet we bear the greatest responsibility both in examining how it's impacted our own theologies and our own ways of being, But also in advocating on behalf of equality and on behalf of all of our neighbors.
And what I write about in the book is acknowledging that that will lead to a loss of power and privilege.
And being able to reckon with that, but be realizing that this is not a zero sum game.
That to give up supremacy in our society does not mean a loss for us, but rather is a gain for everyone.
And so that is why I wrote my book, particularly to Christians and even more specifically to white Christians, to encourage them to take on that responsibility.
Yeah, I would really resonate with a lot of what Amanda's saying, and as a female clergy member, you know, I'm often like, I'm not in on the Christian Nationalists for many of them.
I'm one of the people that they want to draw the dividing line on, you know, you can't be part of our group.
And at the same time as a white Christian and my experience in pastoring, I have experienced many of the privileges of white Christianity in this country.
And I think where I see some of the hope is, you know, not only in the many times that I'm called into churches and not only to liberal churches, often to churches that would see themselves as more politically conservative or in conservative environments.
People want to talk about these things.
All you guys who are here listening to this tonight and watching it later, that's a huge source of hope that people want to engage and want to have conversations.
And I would again, echo Amanda's comments that those conversations really start with your own communities, your churches, your families.
And many, many times it's, it's not a debate.
It's not a rational argument, but it's, it's a sense of rebuilding trust.
It's setting your own boundaries over.
These are things that I'm not okay with being said in my presence and having the confidence to draw those lines, but to find ways not to sever the relationship and many times it's like working with through the process of 12 step recovery, you know, and through that process of When somebody is ready to step away from this ideology, that they know you're there to be there, to catch them, to have these conversations.
But finally, you know, kids, the next generation, gives me a lot of hope.
My kids are in the Minneapolis public schools and we have to You know, as white Christians, we have to realize, hey, they made a choice that we're going to take off not just the Christian holidays.
So we have a lot of days throughout the school year when like, oh, it's a it's a Wednesday and I wasn't expecting that the kids are going to be out, but it's a Jewish High Holy Day or it's Eid for Muslim students.
And so I think that's been a growing pain on the part of, you know, many white Christian and white Christian parents in the school district.
But I also get to see my son, you know, with one of his friends who's Jewish, and they're having a conversation as eight year olds about, well, what does it mean when you wear the Star of David?
What does it mean when somebody wears a cross necklace?
And those kind of conversations are the same, you know, cross-religious conversations that Jesus was having in his religiously pluralistic context as a Jewish man.
So I think for Christians to hearken back to that story and to realize the context of Jesus is really powerful.
Yeah, you know, that's an interesting example of sort of how this can operate at the local level, too.
And I'm curious, one thing that I've been thinking of asking Amanda, and I'll go ahead and log this as we're coming into our last several minutes, is how you write that this is something that affects us most at a local level, even as white Christian nationalism is a national problem, and we've spent a lot of time clearly talking about the national context.
Could you say more about why that's so and what both dangers and opportunities that might bring?
And others might have thoughts on this too, this question of Christian nationalism at the local level.
Well, from a policy perspective, it's just the way that our system is built.
With a limited federal government, limited powers, much of the power is reserved to the states and the localities.
And with changes at the U.S.
Supreme Court, that has become even more so.
So we see, for example, The taking away of abortion rights and then that being pushed down to the states.
And so more and more, the decisions that most impact people's lives are made not by the president or by the Congress or even by the Supreme Court, but by their local authorities and their state legislatures.
And so because of that, we are seeing also a divide between how people's rights are protected in this country from state to state.
And so even though Christian nationalism as an ideology is in every community in this country, we're seeing certain areas that are more impacted than others.
And so we really, if we're going to succeed in this movement to dismantle Christian nationalism, we have to learn to recognize how it's impacting people at the local level.
Whether it be at their city council or their school board or their state legislature.
And give people tools to help advocate against it.
And also, as Angela was saying, to build those relationships with people in our communities.
To have greater understanding of religious diversity.
And of how people exist in this country even bring their morality even without a religious perspective at all.
And have greater appreciation for the beautiful diversity of people in this country, and that is what will help, I think, more than anything to dismantle it.
And so in my book, I really give people tools and examples of how to advocate, including this very urgent issue of Christian nationalism being pushed through public schools, but also encourage people to join local organizing projects.
to really discern and work together in their communities about fashioning interventions away from Christian nationalism and towards that inclusive democracy that we're all fighting for.
Yeah.
And I think as you look back in history, you would see that all of the successful multiracial democratic resistance movements have always started locally at municipal levels or at state levels.
I think specifically of the fusion movement in North Carolina in the late 1890s.
There were some parallel movements in Virginia and other southern states that were really, really deeply important, energetic, multiracial organizing that started at the local level.
And, you know, that's ultimately that's that's where our our hope is going to begin with as we try to push against this.
Definitely, definitely.
Well, perhaps to wrap us up, I'll lodge the question that I gave you all in advance as sort of the final thought experiment for our hour.
And this is predicated upon the reality that so many of us are living in pluralistic environments, but many more of us are living in environments that are fairly strongly tilted ideologically one way and another.
And for those who are Swimming in very much white Christian nationalist or anti-white Christian nationalist waters.
Perhaps folks who aren't uber activists or even really would be knowledgeable to speak to this, but are moving and living in circles that are infused with these ideologies.
So a really conservative place, a really liberal place.
I'm coming to you all from Portland, Oregon.
So that would be the anti-white Christian nationalism, but can have its own problems, right?
As we seek to be a country together and talk about these things knowledgeably.
What's one thing that you wish you could share with someone either in super white Christian nationalist or super anti-white Christian nationalist waters based upon all that you've researched and learned about this and the continuing thinking you do about this issue?
And I'll just throw it out there that anyone who'd like to respond can.
Well, the first, I would just want them to know that they're not alone.
You know, when we look at Christian nationalism as an ideology, the latest research is that those who are most embracing Christian nationalism are a minority of the people.
And even those who are just, you know, kind of accommodating it, when it's really less than 30% of the American population.
So the majority of people are rejecting in some way this ideology.
And so there are more of us than you might think.
And there are ways to find people who you might find community and belonging and support in what is this brave act of pushing back against Christian nationalism, particularly if you're in a place that is more saturated by it.
And so I would reach out and look for tools.
There are many, including the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign.
We've recently launched a community group on Facebook that is really growing very fast where people are being able to kind of talk to each other and share information about Christian nationalism no matter where they are.
So my message is just, you're not alone and find other people who are looking to do this work with you.
Yeah.
I would just echo that and say, it feels really good to, to do things, which is not any sort of ingenious idea, but it's true.
It's easy to sit behind a screen.
It's easy to scroll under the bed and Eat French fries and be sad about the world.
I'm not speaking from personal experience at all.
And so I think when we gather with folks who are working towards something that seems to be important, to be just, to be a project that leads to a better world, it feels good.
And I always just say, I challenge you to do one thing you're not doing yet.
What's a thing that you haven't taken the leap to do, whether that's writing postcards, whether that's joining a group every Tuesday that is You know, organizing around something related to your school board, whatever may be, not only will that make an impact, as Amanda talked about earlier, but it will, it will, it will feel better than being at home worried about the ways that the world and the country seem to be in danger.
Yeah, I think it's important that this, again, like this is not inevitable.
It's not.
And it can be resisted.
It can be resisted with both like serious organizing and with joy and sort of alternative kind of ways of living and organizing our lives together.
So to me, I think that's the most important thing, just not to give it more power than it has.
And for those of us, especially who've been racialized as white, the rest of the country has lived under fascist or proto-fascist rules at many times in the past, and found ways of resistance, and even when they lost, of creating some sense of thriving, despite their political weakness.
And so, there are plenty of resources out there.
There are other people who have fought against our folks in the past, and there's plenty for us to learn from them as well.
Yeah, I echo the work of Christians Against Christian Nationalism.
I have a bumper sticker on my car, so you can, I believe, get them from the website, and it's an easy, non-confrontational way, I guess, unless somebody's tailgating you, but to spread the message.
I want to speak to, you know, my fellow Progressive leaning white Christians and say, you know, this is not a them problem.
It's easy to point out and sort of I see a lot of media making a spectacle out of white Christian nationalism and saying, wow, isn't this so nuts?
But the truth is, it's a highly organized, in many cases, well-educated and very well-funded movement that is, you know, Home in many Supreme Court justices as well.
So this is not, you know, I saw a post on Twitter that suggested that, you know, Trump supporters were toothless.
That kind of language and rhetoric of othering this movement only allows it to continue to gain power.
And so what I would say is if you think that Christian nationalism is not in your midst, it absolutely is.
I speak to and have spoken to so many parents of white teenage boys and young men who, you know, would consider themselves very liberal and all of a sudden they check out their child's YouTube history and they can't believe the kind of things that they're imbibing and taking in and are influencing them.
So I would say that that admonition from Jesus to remove the log from our own eye before taking the speck out of someone else's is really the best way to fight this kind of movement.
It starts local, it starts in our midst, and it starts with our own self-examination and repentance.
And that ancient Christian tradition of repentance and forgiveness for people of many different faiths, you know, is an important starting place.
Maybe that's my Lutheran pastor thing here, but I'll end on that note.
Fellow rostered Lutheran, totally down with that.
Greg, I saw you on... Are you good?
Well, thank you all.
That's, I think, a really useful collection of concrete steps and recognitions that this is a problem that is an all-of-us problem, and we need to be thinking creatively and constructively about these things.
So, that's all the time we have for today, but what a rich and generative conversation.
Thank you to all four of you for For sharing your time and your expertise.
And thank you to the audience as well for joining us.
A recording of tonight's episode will be available soon.
Make sure as well that you're following Broadleaf Books and Fortress Press for links and other resources to continue this important work in your own communities.
And I know that in the comments we've posted links to the books by all four of our authors, very much worth picking up.
And appreciating, as you are called.
And don't forget to join us as well next week.
Same time, same ethereal place.
We're continuing this conversation with four more authors and experts.
Pamela Cooper-White, Jon Fannistill, Aaron Scott, and Matthew D. Taylor.
It should be another wonderful conversation.
So thank you again to those watching, and very much to the four of you for participating.
And I hope you all have a wonderful evening.
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