Bonus Content: Anthea Butler On Trump’s Lack of Empathy
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Alexis Mundy.
Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
If you listen to this show, you know that every week I'm thrilled because I get to have a conversation with a smart, insightful person, and I've usually read their book or something like that.
Today, I don't know about the words that one could have to express how I feel about our guest today.
Somebody who's been an inspiration for public scholarship in the humanities for a long time, particularly in religious studies, and someone who's fearless, insightful, intrepid, and so that is...
Dr. Anthea Butler.
So, Anthea, thank you for being here.
Oh, wow.
Thank you.
That kind of introduction, I mean, that's a high bar.
Well, you're going to fill it, because you're you, and that's how it works.
But let me tell folks about you.
Dr. Anthea Butler is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, sought-after commentator on the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, History Channel.
PBS, basically everywhere, is somebody who writes regularly on race, religion, politics, pop culture for NBC, Religion News Service, The Washington Post, CNN, and other places.
Her books include Women in the Church of God and Christ, Making a Sanctified World, which is out by UNC Press, and has a very exciting couple of new projects, one that is directly related to our show, and that is White Evangelical Racism, The Politics of Morality in America.
You can already pre-order that on Amazon.
It'll be out in March.
And that is also out with UNC Press.
And so you need to check that out and put that at the top of your list.
Anthea, let me just say this.
You are interim chair of your department.
A couple weeks ago, you organized an international scholar strike.
You're writing two books.
Every time I turn on the television or read the paper, you got a new op-ed.
A lot of folks are wondering, when was the last time that you slept?
Was that?
Last night.
Okay. All right.
Good. I didn't get in bed until like one o'clock in the morning.
I was up pretty early this morning.
I do sleep.
I enjoy sleep.
I do nap because I used to not take naps when I was a kid, and now I pay forward by taking naps.
Okay. But yeah, I got a lot going on.
I don't know if I finish it all right, but yeah, I get it.
I got a lot going on.
Well, we were originally going to talk about, and I think we still will, but you are one of the captains in the newly launched Catholics for Biden.
There's 36 captains.
You're one of them alongside Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, Donna Brazile, Samantha Power, who used to be the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. So we'll probably come back to that.
It's important.
But we need to talk about what's happening right now as we speak.
And that is the fact that over the weekend, we found out that Trump has COVID, that he came down with COVID last week.
The timeline is a little bit murky.
But I think we can probably start by talking about what some folks are calling the Red Wedding or the Rose Garden.
Whatever you call it, the gathering slash party slash whatever at the White House last week celebrating the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett seems to have been a super spreader event.
She herself had COVID.
She was not masking and seemingly did not It seems as if Trump knew he had COVID sometime early last week.
People are trying to figure this out.
So, Anthea, let me just ask you about your initial thoughts on what, I mean, this avalanche of news.
Trump sent out photos this weekend of him signing blank pieces of paper that were supposed to have been hours apart.
We now know they were 10 minutes apart.
He took a joyride in a Secret Service car yesterday.
That no doubt endangered some of his Secret Service bodyguards.
People universally slammed it on social media as a sad show of faux masculinity.
So let me just open with all of that.
What do you think?
What's on your mind?
We only have a couple minutes here.
I know, I only have a couple minutes, so there's a lot on my mind.
But let me just first say for you listeners, since this is straight white American Jesus, and some of them will respond to this, this is much more than any Thief in the Night or Left Behind movie that could have ever possibly predicted, okay?
Like, this thing has jumped the shark, like, so big.
I mean, how are we going to even, like, make a movie about this, like, another 15 or 20 years from now?
I don't know.
So let's start with the beginning.
Let's start with the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to be the next Supreme Court Justice.
I think that we had to tell the week before when Trump gave a whole list of what he thought would be potential third-party candidates, right?
Third people that he would put up for it to be...
You know the Supreme Court Justice and they probably already knew she was sick.
So of course he always tips his hand and this will become apparent later on.
So in the passing of RBG And then this, you know, outcry of mourning that everybody had, of course, right?
You know, she dies on, which all of this has a religious tint to it, which is why I'm going through this narrative of, you know, she passes away on Yom Kippur.
That means she's a righteous person.
I'm not going to try to pronounce the Hebrew because everybody knows I'm from Texas and I'm going to botch it up anyway.
And then we have this immediate appointment of Amy Coney Barrett and this party in the Rose Garden.
You know, the administration has flaunted all of the COVID 19 protocols and regulations.
But there has been a theme throughout this and the theme has been basically this.
This is going to go away.
We shouldn't worry about it.
You don't really need to wear a mask.
A mask is about, you know, your freedom and you shouldn't be trammeled and you shouldn't have to wear a mask.
You should also believe everything that Trump has said about it's going away instead of believing what he told Bob Woodward that, you know, I really wanted to downplay it and everything.
And then they do the worst thing of all.
They have this big giant neat thing in the Rose Garden, which, by the way, was redesigned to look like a mausoleum slash funeral, you know, like graveside place, right?
And they put all these chairs in and they don't socially distance people.
You test them beforehand and you tell them they can take up a mask if they're negative.
But we all know that you can be negative at some points during this disease and then, you know, positive at other points, right?
But he puts everybody together.
And so you have a variety of luminaries there, from politicians and people who work in the administration to religious people.
And now we have an outbreak of COVID.
And I should have known on Tuesday, when Trump was at the debate, when he was yelling and screaming on stage, that his eyes looked very strange to me.
And I kept saying, why is his eyes so red?
Why is his eyes so red?
And we soon found out.
So what does all this mean?
It means a couple of things.
Number one, it means that prosperity gospel and the power of positive thinking does not stand up against a virus.
The virus is a science, okay?
Or we can cuss on this show, right?
I need to just quote somebody.
You do whatever you need to do.
Okay. So, you know, to quote Cardi B, shit is real.
Coronavirus, right?
Coronavirus said, guess what?
I'm going to show you who I am this week.
Throwing out all this stuff.
So, you know, it's just amazing to me that we could have this person who said two Corinthians buy into such magical thinking, prosperity gospel thinking, and have this kind of result with science, okay? So the first thing we know is that they've been trying for months and months and months to do this and trying to squelch what this happened.
So I have several takeaways from this so we can kind of...
The first takeaway is that, you know, the boy who cried wolf basically has to move over for Trump.
That there have been so many lies in this administration that it doesn't matter.
But what's interesting about this in terms of what we're talking about today is that the lies have been relieved.
Believed by religious people.
You know, there's that scripture in the New Testament that says, the lie became the truth.
And for a lot of people, the lies of Trump have become a truth.
And now that they're faced with the real truth about the president having the virus, numerous people in his administration having the virus.
Today, right before we came on, Kayleigh McInerney, the press secretary, has had it.
Numerous people in the press corps have had it, are testing positive.
What we're seeing is the complete and utter collapse of this administration because of the very thing that they tried to not talk about.
And so I think one of the things we have to talk about here is this bigger issue about how evangelical Christians especially, but the Trump administration in particular, has decided to take on this idea of if we don't see it and it's not happening to us, it's not happening, right?
So that's one.
I think the second thing is that there's an element...
A huge element of racism in this.
And, you know, there'll be a lot of people who will disagree with me, but I think that the whole attitude towards the virus was about the articles that we saw from the very beginning about essential workers who were black and brown and some Asian workers who were also, you know, affected by the virus.
It was the China virus, the Wuhan virus.
It was all of this other stuff.
So it's those people over there.
Us white people don't get this because we have better genes and we're clear.
And so that's the thing that we probably need.
The third part about this is this linkage of religion and capitalism, which I think is really important.
So, you know, we're not going to pay attention to this because we believe in prosperity and we need to open back up.
We need to get the economy back where it was.
We need to do this.
And, you know, honestly, the God of America is Mammon, all right?
If there's any God that we have, it's Mammon.
And, you know, I don't want us to speak of it in terms...
In purely Christian terms, but I think it's really important to realize that even Trump's drive-by yesterday, which he said was ostensibly for his, you know, the people who were standing outside and his followers, was also for the stock market, so that the markets would open up today a lot better.
So, you know, I think all of these things together are part and parcel of the problems that we see right now that are happening with the Trump administration and with religion writ large in America.
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