Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 700-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
In this episode, Dan continues decoding a card from a church bulletin that outlines the features of a particular church. This week focuses on the promise of encountering “good manners.” Why is this on the list? How do “manners” relate to Christian nationalism and the conservative Christianity at its heart? What is going below the surface of the desire for “good manners”? Listen in as Dan hits these issues in this week’s episode.
See the church bulletin photo HERE.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome, as always, to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Delighted, as always, to be here with you.
And, as always, want to thank those of you who support us in so many different ways, everything from listening to subscribing to the emails and the feedback and the comments and the attendance at events and on and on and on.
Say it and mean it that we could not do this without you, so thank you.
As always, I want to invite you specifically for this series, but for anything else related to the podcast, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Always value your insights, comments, feedback.
I've gotten some great feedback or sort of insights on some of the topics we've been talking about in recent weeks on It's in the Code, and I think that's going to sort of bring up some things when we're done with the episodes that we've been doing here the last few weeks.
So thank you for that. I want to dive in today.
We have been looking at a small card that somebody got, I think, from a church bulletin, took a photo, shared it.
And again, just to recap in case maybe you've missed the earlier episodes or you're just coming into this, it highlights eight things this little card does that one will presumably encounter if they visit this church.
It's a card. It's about the size of a business card.
It's got a list of eight things.
And we've just been making our way down the list and kind of decoding this card and figuring out what does this tell us about the church this came from.
What does this tell us about, I think, the broader conservative religious community of which this church is a part?
As I noted, I had listeners who identified what church this is, and I haven't named them, but it's a church in Arizona.
And we've looked at smiling wives, obedient children, loud singing, strong handshakes, and last episode, young marriages.
Those are the things on the list so far.
There are three more things on the list out of the eight.
We're coming up on the end here.
And today we're looking at number six, which is good manners.
And this one, at first glance, I think seems pretty weird.
You might feel like... I laughed when I first saw it.
I was like, good manners? Really? Okay.
I shared this card in class, a religion and pop culture class.
We were talking about the podcast and what we do here.
And I showed the card, and students were like, good manners?
What is that doing? That's what we're going to look at.
What is that doing? It seems weird, I think, until we decode it, and then I think it makes a lot of sense.
So let's get started here.
And the first thing that we might say when you see this is like, manners?
Really? Manners? Like, that's the thing?
What makes your church different or unique or faithful to what you understand real Christianity to be is manners.
Okay. And if that's your reaction, it's understandable.
But I think that the fact that that's there and that our first reaction would be like, manners?
Really? I think that clues us in to the fact that this isn't really about manners.
It's bigger than that.
It's deeper than that.
And I think the first and probably the most obvious dimension of this is the nostalgia that it expresses.
I feel like when I hear this, I can just hear somebody's grandparents, or if you're my age, maybe just parents, bemoaning the fact that kids don't learn cursive anymore, or that people don't say thank you with handwritten cards, or that people don't open the door for each other.
There's this kind of bemoaning how society isn't as polite as it used to be, and people just don't have the manners that they used to be.
And I think, you know, when that's what comes to mind, it elicits the kind of, you know, okay, boomer sort of response.
But we know, again, we know it's not really about cursive or handwritten cards or in-person social interactions.
It expresses nostalgia for something that they feel has been lost.
And I think that this is important because contemporary conservative Christianity in America is It's not about making America into a Christian nation in just a merely contemporary sense.
It's about returning to a time when America knew it was a Christian nation.
It's a nostalgia for an imagined Christian past.
Contemporary Christian nationalism and the conservative Christianity at its heart, it is a story of America's fall.
It is a story of a time when America was a good Christian nation filled with good Christian people, and we have fallen away from that.
We have lost that.
And I think that the language of manners or related terms like politeness or civility, I think in this context, those are code for Christian.
When we've lost polite society, it means we're not Christian enough anymore.
When we've lost civility, it means we're not Christian enough anymore.
Again, the nostalgia for a more polite society is nostalgia for an imagined past when Americans knew that America was a Christian nation.
And I think that the idea of manners here isn't sort of abstract.
It's not general.
To say people had good manners then, a time when people had good manners, it's a time when people were good Christians.
And that's what Christian morality demanded, is what we're calling manners here.
And we know that that's a largely imagined past.
And that's not the point. If you've ever had the conversation with somebody about this idyllic past in which America was a good Christian nation, you say, well, I don't know if that was ever actually the case.
There were a lot of bad things and bad people and bad stuff happened and whatever.
That's not the point. We know that because you know that that argument falls on deaf ears.
The point is that it energizes and mobilizes action aimed at recreating that society.
The fact that it was never fully in order isn't what matters.
So I think that there's a nostalgia here.
This language of manners, I think, is hearkening back and expressing this nostalgic desire, again, to regain something that people feel has been lost.
And, you know, if that's all the nostalgia was, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
I can get nostalgic. I am old enough now.
I can officially get nostalgic about stuff, and I can remember things.
I get all those things that come up in, like, my phone feed about, you know, I don't know, growing up Gen X and drinking from the garden hose in the summertime and running wild and just being told to come home when the streetlights turn on or whatever.
And I remember those are all real things from my childhood.
I can get nostalgic.
Okay, right? If that's all it was, it wouldn't be so bad.
If it was just people who really like, you know, I miss cursive writing, or my son just had a birthday, gets a card from the grandparents, and I've got to read it to him because it's in cursive.
He can't read cursive. Maybe, yeah, that can be a cause for nostalgia.
Okay. It wouldn't be so bad.
And I think if the nostalgia for an earlier imagined Christian America, if it was just about that kind of stuff, it'd be no big deal.
If it was just a concern for these little lost things and things that we remember fondly, yeah, no problem.
Who cares? But this idea of manners or politeness or civility, it goes to darker places.
It's not just about people not knowing to say please or thank you.
There are other more problematic expressions of what manners or politeness require.
And so it's the person who says, and you've heard people who say things like what I'm about to say.
I have had real people say these things to me, right?
So it's the person who says, well, you know, I don't have any problem with gay people.
I just don't think they need to flaunt it all the time.
Or somebody who says, you know, well, you know, of course I believe in equal rights.
I'm no racist, but boy, they protest everything and make it about race.
Or the person who says, well, yeah, of course we should respect women, but, you know, the least they could do is dress a little more appropriately in public.
You know what I mean? It's all of that.
That's the language of manners, too.
It's bad manners.
When queer folk flaunt their sexuality, it's bad manners when people protest racial inequality.
It's bad manners when women show their bodies in public.
The language of manners here, it's the language of propriety.
It is the language of what is proper.
And I think this brings us to the real issue at play.
The nostalgia for A Lost America, it's not just a nostalgia for a time when, I don't know, where kids were more polite or, I don't know, everybody would sit around and watch TV at night, not all be staring at their phones.
That seems like bad manners.
Or, you knew your neighbors and the person across the street instead of now when we all sort of live on these streets and we don't know our neighbors.
All of that sort of stuff. It's a nostalgia for A Lost America, but it's more about A Lost America...
I know this is a theme I talk about a lot.
This is one of my emphases, this notion of society that is put together in the proper way of a properly ordered social body.
I wrote a book about this, but I wrote it because I think that this is a real thing, and I think that this emphasis on manners is a nostalgia for that.
It's a vision for America of a time when everyone knew their proper place, And society was ordered by proper social relationships, understood within these Christian terms.
And I think that the appeal to manners, it's code for a return to that America.
It's code for an America where people knew their place and they stayed in it.
It was an America where if queer people were acknowledged to exist at all, they had the good manners to remain closeted.
Or even better, they had the good sense and the good manners of living a straight life anyway.
It was an America where people of color accepted what the white majority gave them, and they were grateful for it.
It was an America where women knew that their role was to stay home and raise their kids and serve their husbands as their quote-unquote helper.
See here, J.D. Vance.
See here, the contemporary GOP. Everything that they say about this and women who don't have kids and all of that.
It's that nostalgia for an America with a proper social role for women.
It was an America where little boys grew up to be cis-hetero men and little girls grew up to be cis-hetero women.
It was an America where there was none of this questions about gender or the impropriety of that, nothing that was so threatening to Christians today.
It was an America where the conservative Christian vision of the family and domestic life reigns supreme.
It was an America where the challenges to that could be kept safely marginalized and kept out of view from polite white Christian society.
Out of sight, out of mind.
It was a vision of American society that we can see, if we look back at the rest of this card, we can see it reflected in this.
It was a society of smiling wives with obedient children and families served by strong, properly masculine men.
I think all of that is what's captured in this language of manners and propriety, of doing what is proper.
That's what manners are about, doing what's proper.
It's about propriety.
So I think all of that is what's going on in the appeal to good manners.
And I think that the language, like putting it under the rubric of good manners, is like the ultimate passive-aggressive move.
This isn't the adversarial, confrontational sort of Donald Trump model of make America great.
What? Make it great again.
Let's go back to the past.
This isn't somebody saying, People without kids don't have a stake in America's future.
It's not that adversarial kind.
It's the ultimate passive-aggressive move.
It's the application of, if you've looked around, you've seen this, the kind of boomer parenting style known as false harmony.
The idea that it's bad manners, it's improper to...
Talk about, you know, complex emotions or to bring up our dissatisfaction with relationships and so forth.
You can Google the term.
It's been a lot of writing about this.
It's kind of making its way into more and more popular culture.
I think it's the ultimate model of that, the ultimate model of false harmony, the ultimate passive aggressive move.
It's impolite to force your views on others.
Translation, it's impolite, it's improper to agitate for one's rights and demand that they be equal to mine.
Somebody might say, well, you know, it's impolite to draw attention to yourself.
Translation, it's improper to assert or publicly or visibly express your identity if it isn't straight and white and Christian.
You're playing identity politics.
It's impolite to discuss sex in public.
Translation, we need to remain silent on issues like sexual assault and harassment and slut-shaming and the debilitating effects of purity culture.
We need to remain silent on that because it's just improper not to.
It's impolite to make others uncomfortable.
Translation there, majority white society will shut down any discussions that can cause them discomfort.
And we can just think of all the places where they actually passed into law.
They legislated.
That you can't teach about, say, race or slavery or sexuality if it might make some people feel uncomfortable.
So, in my mind, when I see this, when I see good manners on this card appeals to manners and civility, it's just Christian nationalism in the guise of your kind-hearted, well-meaning grandmother who's just old-fashioned or who grew up in a different time.
We all know those euphemisms.
That make up for or are supposed to mask or excuse sexism or misogyny or racism or xenophobia.
Because who could be opposed to civility or good manners?
I mean, who's going to be opposed to that?
Who wants to pick on grandma or their aging parents or the guy at the office who's just a quote unquote old soul?
That's what I mean when I say it's the ultimate passive aggressive move.
It lets all of that kind of stuff pass under the guise of just being old-fashioned, just
good manners.
You know, I'm not trying to be contentious.
I just remember a time when people were more civil.
That's what I think is going on with this appeal to good manners.
So it might just seem weird or irrelevant at first.
I think we first read it, and my student's response was like, what is that doing on this
car?
That's a weird thing to have on there.
But I think when we put on our decoder rings, it turns out that the appeal to good manners
encodes a lot about the conservative Christian vision of America.
And once again, on this card, this card, what it is telling us, hey, you visit our church?
You come into our church? You're going to visit a space where you can step back into time and you can experience a kind of microcosm of what America once was, what a Christian society was, and what it can be again if we just follow through on our Christian nationalist principles and our vision of the faith.
That's what it's doing on this card, and I think that that's what it expresses.
I think that that's how it will resonate with a certain kind of person who reads that, and they see good manners, and it doesn't seem weird.
It doesn't seem irrelevant.
Feels good.
It feels positive.
They find comfort in it.
I think it's because that nostalgia is what feeds this.
Got to wind this up.
As I say, this is number, what, I think six on the list.
We've got two more coming and we'll wind down this series of reflections.
As I say, please keep the comments coming.
Create comments and feedback, some emails about, you know, things we just don't have time to get through, insights that I didn't have, things I've overlooked.
I really value all of that.
Keep them coming. DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
It's a cliche by now with me, but I'm way behind on the emails.
As I say, some of the issues with loss in my family earlier last month have sort of slowed that down.
But I am reading those emails and I value those and love the insights that you bring.
Again, thank you for supporting us.
If you are not a subscriber and that is something that you would consider doing, I would just ask you to do so.
We try to do a lot on this show and we want to do more.
We want to keep doing that. That's what lets us do that.
But as I also always say, I recognize not everybody's in a position to do that.
And so if you're not and you're here and you're listening, that is support enough.
And I thank you for that.
Join me again next week.
We're going to continue on through this.
We're going to continue to the next point on this card, which is biblical preaching.
And I've talked a lot about what it means to be biblical, what the concept of the Bible is within this kind of conservative Christian context.
I won't rehash all of that in the next episode, but I will talk about some of what that means and how it fits with this card.
