Dr. Andrew Whitehead exposes Christian nationalism’s ableist core, tracing its rise under Trump—12 days before his 2017 inauguration, Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk dismissed disability accommodations, while Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation blueprint slashed $15B in disability funding, weakened ADA enforcement, and targeted Medicaid/SNAP. RFK Jr.’s HHS leadership, marked by autism misinformation, mirrors evangelical opposition to the ADA, framing disabled bodies as deviations from God’s "ideal" image. The movement’s free-market theology prioritizes productivity over dignity, leaving vulnerable Americans—like his sons with fragile X syndrome—excluded from both divine and civic belonging. [Automatically generated summary]
axis mundi welcome to straight white american jesus I'm Brad O'Nishi.
Great to be with you for this Sunday interview.
Today, we welcome back someone who has been on the show numerous times and is an amazing scholar and person.
And that is Dr. Andrew Whitehead.
So, Andrew, thanks for coming back.
Yeah, thanks for having me back.
Always fun to be here.
You are a world-renowned sociologist, professor of sociology at Ui Pui.
You are the author of Taking America Back for God with your friend and colleague Sam Perry, the author of American Idolatry, all about the threat of Christian nationalism to the church and to democracy, the creator of American Idols, the Axis Mundi podcast series that remains to this day pretty popular and outlines many of the themes in your book.
And so you've done so much great work in this area.
You are a pioneer and a seminal figure in the field for those of us who's been thinking about Christian nationalism.
And today we're here to talk about, I think, an undercovered aspect of that conversation, and that is the ableism that is rife in the second Trump admin and surprisingly from Christian nationalist sources.
So let me set this up.
12 days before Donald Trump took office, according to The Guardian's Saranovich, Charlie Kirk and people like Christopher Ruffo were online bemoaning the fact that there are sign language interpreters at news conferences, calling them wild human gesticulators and labeling it a farce.
Elon Musk was sulking around his pet project, Twitter, wishing he could use the R word and telling people it was time to bring it back.
This was all part of a kind of like something in the air as Trump got back in that Trump's in office now and now we can use the R word and we can get rid of all these things we don't need like sign language interpreters.
As soon as Trump took office, he moved quickly with executive orders to slash protections and funding and rights related to Americans with disabilities.
He dismantled diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, DEIA efforts that protect disabled people, removed the government's ability to enforce disability civil rights laws, undermined healthcare affordability and access for disabled people, destroyed public health infrastructure, stripped the ability of disabled children to receive free, appropriate public education, all that through the cuts of the Department of Ed, slash services, benefits,
and regulations that help keep disabled people in their communities, decrease disability protections in employment.
I could give all the details of this, all the agencies, all the dollars, but I'll go here as well.
He also appointed RFK to be the head of health and human services.
And Donald Earl Collins, faculty at American University, says that Kennedy's policies and worldview are shaped by ableism wrapped in racism and patriotism.
He says this because of RFK's approach to autism and his claims that autistic people will, quote, never pay taxes.
They'll never hold a job.
They'll never play baseball.
They'll never write a poem.
They'll never go out on a date.
Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted, which is wildly offensive and inaccurate, both at the same time.
Kennedy refused to believe the data that autism is not spreading like a disease, but instead we have better tools to detect folks who are on the spectrum, socially and neurologically.
And he's just gone on to spread disinfo time and time again about autism and other disabilities.
Looking Broadly At Categories00:15:06
Here's the thing, Andrew, is we might be listening to this and thinking, well, yeah, it's kind of what I expect.
It's Donald Trump.
It's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It is Chris Ruffo and other online trolls.
But you have a new peer-reviewed article out all about ableism and Christian nationalism.
And one of the main hurdles that you identify comes from Project 2025.
Would you mind just opening up here by telling us how Project 2025 is a kind of purveyor of the kinds of ableism that I just talked about coming from those other sources?
Yeah, no, I'd be happy to.
That's a really, really great overview and thorough, too, of just kind of the lay of the land where we're at.
And one that I'm not sure if you mentioned, but another thing, too, that plays into this is religious school vouchers and the push for those because that also connects to this idea of taking money from publicly funded schools, which are legally required to, as you said, give all kids a free and appropriate public education to now religious schools that in some ways and in some places can refuse to serve various students, even those with disabilities.
And so that's yet another angle to this.
And so when we're looking at Project 2025, you know, a lot has been written on this.
And we know that the organizations that created it, a lot of the authors describe themselves as Christian nationalists.
And that's not something that I do as a sociologist.
But looking at, you know, the things they support, you know, these are hallmarks of Christian nationalism, this desire to privilege a particular expression of Christianity and have the government enforce that particular expression in all aspects of our civil lives.
And so as they wrote this huge document, there are multiple places, like you said, that outline and highlight where cuts should be made.
So dismantling aspects or all of the Department of Education, which is generally tasked with ensuring that about $15 billion a year is spent well in the public schools to help support programs for kids with disabilities, because a lot of states maybe don't or don't have those funds.
And so dismantling that, cuts to health and human services that would serve adults, children with disabilities, the Social Security Administration.
I mean, just firing everybody, you know, in the federal government almost, like 300,000 people now, you know, were out of jobs in the federal government.
And so just doing that, those cuts themselves weaken the ability of the government to ensure that the support that people are, at least now, legally required to receive from the federal government actually happens.
There's just backups.
People can't get the work done.
So there's that.
But then also, if there are lawsuits or people have been discriminated against, those get backed up.
And so we see that it isn't just trying to cut programs, but also weaken the levers of the federal government so that folks that are disabled can't live and work and exist in our society and culture like they used to.
And then we have cuts to SNAP, cuts to Medicaid, trying to change how those are funded.
So all of this is in Project 2025, this desire to do that and shrouded within this, you know, the boogeyman of DEI.
But accessibility is a part of that because, yeah, different abilities and disabilities are a part of diversity and inclusion.
And so, yeah, we have folks in the very highest positions.
Yeah, talking about and spreading this information broadly and widely and all sorts, as you pointed out.
But then, too, we just have the functioning of the federal government being weakened to ensure that it can't actually serve the American people broadly.
And I think this is the big thing too, is when we talk about ableism and disability, you know, an accessible America serves everybody no matter where we're at, because at some point or another, we are going to have family members, ourselves, or whoever needing to have access.
And so those are the things that, yeah, we're really looking at and we see in Project 2025.
So we have Project 2025, and we know that, you know, anyone who's studied that document can see the Christian nationalist overturns in there.
And I'll ask you in a minute, Ty, to define Christian nationalism just so we have a baseline here.
But, you know, I've spent many hours on this show.
Many other people have in writing, in podcasting, in video, wherever, dissecting how the Heritage Foundation really did create a 922-page document that is informed by the idea of a Christian nation.
If you read the preface by Kevin or the foreword by Kevin Roberts, it's clear.
Kevin Roberts, it just is all on the table from the start.
So it's one thing to say, okay, great.
Christian nationalism is in Project 2025 and Project 2025 has these ableist goals and wants to cut all of this stuff in the name of a Christian nationalist, ableist ideology or theology.
It's another thing, though, to look at data and say, do people who score as Christian nationalist score as people who are in favor of these cuts and these rollbacks of protections for disabled Americans?
And so let me ask you a first question.
What's Christian nationalism?
And then I'll ask you a question about what the data says.
Yeah, no, perfect.
So Christian nationalism, the empirically supported definition, you know, that is now over a decade and, you know, dozens of surveys.
I just, I want to make it very clear that this isn't something that's getting pulled out of thin air, but within social science across a lot of different scholars is this desire to see a very particular expression of Christianity and a particularly conservative strain of Christianity fused with American civic life and have government at all levels defend and preserve this fusion as being central to our national identity, who we are, and particularly which Americans truly belong.
So the benefits of citizenship, who does it go to?
And it's those that adhere to preferred social norms and social categories of this particular expression of Christianity.
So again, it's the people that deserve it.
And who deserves it?
Well, we decide, the we being those that embrace this particular expression of Christian nationalism.
And so that is what we're talking about when we're talking about Christian nationalism.
And Americans, you know, embrace this strongly.
Some are more sympathetic, but maybe don't embrace it as strongly.
And a lot of Americans resist it.
A lot of Americans reject it.
But we find that it is distributed across the U.S. population.
And we see it obviously too being lived out in the policies and, you know, these different things like Project 2025.
And so with this research, my goal then was to look at Christian nationalism across the U.S. population using a large national survey of the American public and then also asking questions that get at this idea of ableism, because it is something that we haven't really looked at at all in the research.
We have these suspicions, and at least I did too, that this is connected.
Because again, Christian nationalism, as we've shown over and over, Brad, in your work, in your book, and lots of others, that it's connected to, again, these preferred social categories and identities of what race and ethnicity you are, whether you're a natural born citizen, your gender, your sexuality, your religion, all these things line up.
And so ableism and disability, this is another one of those markers that is likely connected.
And so in asking these questions, I measure ableism and draw on a lot of other work that has kind of created these scales.
And then I can look at both of them together, Christian nationalism and ableism, to see are these things intertwined?
What's going on here empirically?
And we'll get to the data in a minute, but you came away with a pretty straightforward conclusion that the data shows that being able-bodied is one of the preferred social categories of Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalists, and we'll get to how we know this in a minute, but Christian nationalists prefer, they want to, in some ways, privilege those who are able-bodied over those who are not.
Is that a fair summation of the kind of major conclusion of the paper?
Yeah, that's kind of the executive, you know, takeaway of this research is that Christian nationalism is strongly and significantly associated with ableism, even when, again, we control for all different types of demographic information, whether the person is disabled or not, or even knows somebody who's disabled, whether they're a type of Christian they are or their age, their gender, their political views, all of those, when we hold those constant,
Christian nationalism is still a significant predictor of how ableist they'll be.
And ableism, when we're talking about that, that refers to this tendency to discriminate or stereotype against people with disabilities.
And it's this idea of assigning value to intellectual and physical abilities, generally preferring able-bodied people that, again, these are the ideals.
So that's what we're talking about.
And the reason that ableism is so important to talk about and understand is because it tends to hide and obscure the social and cultural challenges that Americans with disabilities face and experience.
So a lot of the things that they're up against are structural in nature.
It's the funding.
It's the federal support.
All those things are structural outside the individual.
And so if ableism is a part of our social structure and the way that our society operates, it's going to hurt and crush and marginalize people with disabilities in ways that when you're not disabled, you just won't see.
And so understanding that is really important because we want to bring that out into the light.
And it's not just the individual's fault that they're struggling, but that we as a society have kind of absolved ourselves of the collective responsibility of ensuring that people with disabilities get the help they need, can survive, and that it's not just up to them or their families.
And so Christian nationalism across the U.S. population, yeah, is strongly associated with ableism.
All right, let's go to the data.
So you have a number of questions, survey questions, and ways that you ask people about things.
And so I'm going to start by describing for everyone the categories of folks.
So when it comes to Christian nationalism, people believe that as a social and cultural identity, Christianity should be privileged and preferred.
And that this is a Christian nation.
People who would, you know, if they're Christian nationalists would answer in the affirmative that we should teach the Bible in public schools and that the government should declare this a Christian nation and our policies should adhere closely to the Bible, whatever that might mean.
You have these categories, rejectors, resistors, accommodators, ambassadors.
So friends, if you're listening at home, you're driving your car, you're walking the dog, let me slow down.
You have people that outright reject this.
Okay, they're like, nope, not a Christian nation.
We should not do any of those things.
This is a country built for and by everybody.
It's pluralist and so on.
You have resistors, people that really do not adhere to Christian nationalism in any strong or robust sense.
And then the scale sort of tips and you get accommodators, people that are willing to accommodate Christian nationalism, even if they are not people that we would think of as hardcore or militant or zealots when it comes to this stuff.
You might have a person at your church or in your neighborhood who really likes the fact that this candidate's a Christian and she can't vote for someone who's not Christian.
And, you know, that person might, are they in a militia?
Did they go to January 6th?
No.
But are they an accommodator of Christian nationalism?
Yes.
And then we have the ambassadors.
These are the people out front wholeheartedly representing Christian nationalism in terms of their beliefs, their worldview, and so on.
So you asked people about the situation for people with disabilities and whether or not it is good as it is.
And you found that overwhelmingly ambassadors of Christian nationalism, people that whose worldview corresponds most strongly to Christian nationalism scored highest when it came to saying, yes, things are good as they are when it comes for people with disabilities.
In comparison to everyone else, they were way higher.
Would you mind unpacking that for us?
Yeah, definitely.
So yeah, with this question, again, part of this larger body of work, you know, drawing on psychologists and educational folks working on education, they've asked a bunch of different questions that kind of try to get at, well, how do people think about Americans with disabilities or what they face?
And are they supportive?
Do they agree, disagree with these different things we're trying to do?
And the questions that I chose essentially are kind of more on this explicit ableism spectrum.
So the people that are agreeing with this, if you're saying, yeah, the situation for people with disabilities is good as it is, that's a really kind of out front.
You think we don't need to be doing anything else for these folks.
And again, it has this kind of structural viewpoint of the way things are are fine.
We don't really need to be doing anything else.
And so this question kind of gets at that idea.
And then too, there are other questions I'm sure we'll talk about.
And so in the research, you know, I combine these together and look at how it relates to Christian nationalism.
I pull them apart, look at how they relate.
And I find that these questions really operate in a very similar way, whether they're together or apart.
And Christian nationalism, again, is strongly associated with, as you said, ambassadors being the ones most likely to agree.
Now, it's around, it's a little over 30% of ambassadors say, yeah, the situation for people with disabilities is good as it is, which in some ways we can look at it and say, well, it's a third of them, which isn't, you know, over half or all of them, which is good.
But when we compare it to the others, it's twice as many as the accommodators.
It's about three times as many as resistors and rejectors.
And as we know, with how elections work, how state elections work, the way that our society operates is if you have 30% or more of a really motivated group, that is quite a bit.
And again, if they're kind of ableists and then those that maybe aren't, but they're still really strong Christian nationalists or, you know, embracing Christian nationalism, they're more likely to go along with those other ambassadors.
And so this creates the situation, which can be really difficult for folks in Americans with disabilities.
And so, yeah, over a third say that the situation for people with disabilities is as good as it is.
Three Times as Many00:14:30
So there's another question.
People with disabilities, do people with disabilities demand too much?
So essentially, do people with disabilities want too much?
This goes back to the sign language interpreters.
It goes back to accessible bathrooms.
It goes back to accessible car parks, but it also goes to our school systems, our federal dollars, our employment protections, et cetera.
And ambassadors, again, score at about 30%.
And rejectors, so people who are on the very opposite end of the Christian nationalism spectrum, people who reject Christian nationalism score at something like 8%.
So when you look at the bar graphs, it's really stark.
If you are an out-and-out Christian nationalist, you are the most likely by far to say that people with disabilities demand too much from our government, our society, our culture.
Is that fair?
Yeah, no, that's exactly what we're finding or what I'm finding in this research.
Again, it's not only that the situation is fine, but then two, these folks are demanding too much, like demanding us to change things as they are or raising a ruckus, causing a problem, all this stuff.
We're just tired of it.
As we'll see in a second, they shouldn't, this situation's fine.
They shouldn't demand anything.
And then, too, we've done enough.
So in all these ways, it's kind of absolving again.
And again, it gets at this idea of the preferred social category, the preferred, a true American is somebody.
And this will actually get at why these things are connected.
But it's a person that's able-bodied, can work, can function.
That's who we want.
Yeah.
So one last question that I'll go over here is, you know, has there been enough societal efforts in favor of people with disability?
So have we done enough, as you just referenced?
And again, ambassadors, those who are strongly correlated with a worldview to Christian nationalism are over 40%.
Yes, we've done enough.
We don't need to do more.
We don't need to think about how we can further help those who have disabilities to be included in our church services, in our schools, in our culture, in our anywhere.
And again, that is about three, three and a half times more than rejectors on that question.
So, you know, friends, if you read the paper, you read Andrew Substack Post, it is clear Christian nationalism, as he concludes, is one of the, quote, strongest predictors of discrimination towards Americans with disabilities.
I think the question then becomes for people, why is that?
And you give two main reasons in your work.
Would you mind unpacking both of those for us now?
Yeah, definitely.
Well, I think, you know, one of the aspects of why we see this strong connection is related to the fact that when we're talking about Christian nationalism, we're talking about Christianity, the world religion.
And so in my work and in your work, Brad, and others, we're all very careful to say that when we're talking about Christian nationalism, we're talking about Christianity.
However, it's a very particular expression of it.
There are many expressions in the U.S.
And there are expressions of Christianity that, for example, Reverend William Barber is motivating him and he himself is disabled and fighting for the poor, right?
It's motivating him to do these things.
But then it also is motivating, you know, folks like Russ Vaughan running the Congressional Budget Office and wanting to cut, cut, cut, cut.
That helps anybody.
Big purveyor of Project 2025.
Russ Vote is closely associated with Project 2025, just to bring it home.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so we see both these.
So just making that clear.
But within Christianity, there are theological strains within that world religion and certain interpretations of the Bible that aren't just embraced by very conservative Christians, but really exists kind of across different expressions that can lead to people to discriminate and prejudice against those with disabilities.
And so there are a couple examples.
So some interpret various Christian scriptures to say or interpret disability as, in some cases, divine punishment for sin, that something was wrong in the past, whether it's their parents or grandparents or this person or something, or that, you know, God wills disability on some people to kind of demonstrate that they can, you know, bear up underneath it and kind of bring glory to God because they're able to deal with this suffering.
Or disability is allowed and God kind of allows it to give God's people or others, but mostly God's people, the opportunity then to care for those that need help and to show charity.
And this is one that some folks are like, wait a second, charity is good.
Like, what's wrong with that?
And the reason that these theological strains and interpretations can be linked to ableism and can be dangerous for those that are disabled or their families. is because they all interpret disability as an individual theological problem, whether it's willed by God or allowed by God.
And, you know, some are to say God wills disability is different than God allows it, but both are difficult and dangerous because then it kind of places people in this position where they may overlook the actual needs of people with disabilities and especially how to change the situation that these people are in, the structural nature of this situation.
So if, for instance, viewing disability as an opportunity to show charity, if that's all we see it as, it really absolves our collective responsibility to do anything about creating this situation that these disabled people are in or the struggles that they have.
We don't look for these society-wide issues because we're thinking, well, we need to allow people to give charity.
But what that also does is it places people with disabilities in a really precarious situation because what if I'm not feeling charitable today or tomorrow?
Then their ongoing needs that never go away are subject to the whims of Christians of whether they feel charitable, whether they're very progressive or very conservative.
When we just leave it up to charity, that is really, really difficult and places them in difficult situations.
And if you're not in a network that connects you to people that view charity as their God-given and God-desired way to serve people with disabilities, then what about them?
And so all these things are part of the Christian tradition that can lead to more ableist narratives and ideas that place people with disabilities at a disadvantage in our society.
Yeah, go ahead.
No, no, no, keep going.
I got.
Yeah.
Keep going.
Yeah.
So there's the theological aspect in some of those.
Another aspect too that's intertwined with Christian nationalism is the prosperity gospel.
And this is something too that I know that you've talked and worked a lot about and in the podcast that you all support and in your podcast.
But again, this idea of health and wealth, that if you are truly following God, then you will be healthy and you will be wealthy.
And if you're not, then maybe you don't have enough faith.
And those are really, really dangerous aspects of Christian theology that we have to be very careful of, you know, wherever somebody might be in the Christian tradition.
But then we have, too, the historical realities of Christian nationalism in the U.S.
And this is something that your writing has helped me with.
Kevin Cruz and his book, One Nation Under God, really highlights too, that as the Christian nationalism ideology kind of was created in this country, especially in the 20th century, was really aligned with and was happening alongside the spread and the creation of kind of this more capitalist and neoliberal response to politics and especially government funding.
And so this idea of privatization, deregulation, reduced public spending, kind of this opposition to the New Deal.
But then when we get into the 1950s and the Red Scare, just all these things kind of working together, we have really rich capitalists essentially that are like, we need to support preachers who are going to say that, you know, the best way for our country to be Christian is to be capitalist.
And so Frank or Billy Graham was lifted up by really rich folks and said, you know, spread this message.
And he did that faithfully for many years, that God hates communism, God hates socialism.
And anything that was even a hint or a whiff of federal government providing support for every citizen, no matter who they were, got marked as communism, socialism is evil.
And so we see this as taking place.
And so with the spread of the ideology of free market capitalism, and this is developing alongside ableism generally in the U.S., economic productivity got elevated as a real true sign that you are a true American citizen and that you're doing what God desires in a good Christian nation.
So good people are economically productive people.
And so you see this type of talk then taking place.
So we not only see these strands within the Christian tradition, but then we also see it lived out historically as Christian nationalism came to the fore, especially in this current iteration through the 20th century, where it's really linked to how we view what people do and why they do it and whether they're being a good citizen is being economically productive.
That is the sign.
And so I think these are some of the reasons why even across the U.S. population, we see Americans who really embrace Christian nationalism.
A part of that is this desire to elevate a particular economic system like capitalism.
And that means you need to be able-bodied, need to be able to work.
And if you're not being productive, well, then what good are you?
And so the things you said at the outset of this podcast, I mean, people should just rewind it and listen to it again, but that's so important as we hear what they're saying.
They're saying you need to be able to work.
And if you can't do that, then what good are you?
What good are you to this country?
And that is truly, truly dangerous.
Dr. Oz has been on this a lot.
Dr. Oz has been a grifter for a long time, but he's now part of the Trump administration.
And he's said things like, you know, if you can work more or the best way to be a good American is to be more productive and to work harder.
And built into those statements is an ableist ideology ideology that says the most valuable American is the one who is economically productive, who saves the country money on Social Security because they work a year longer or they don't go to college and start working sooner or, you know, whatever it may be.
And there's just this sense of the more productive you are economically, the more valuable you are.
Your value is not based on the sense that as a human, regardless of ability, ethnicity, creed, race, religion, you are universally valuable, both under the law and in the eyes of God, which is what we might expect coming from a Christian standpoint.
One of the things that struck me, just to stay in schools for a minute, is this idea of the church being the place where we would be taught to be charitable and to care for those of all bodies and all abilities.
It's really the private schools and the private school Christian movement in going back to the 1990s, fighting against the ADA saying, oh, you can't include us in the American with Disabilities Act passed in the early 90s because we don't want the government entangled in our business.
But what that did was give private schools an out from providing the services, the needs, the accommodations, et cetera, for disabled students.
And so disabled students, by and large, are not able to attend, depending on their disability, private schools, Catholic, Protestant, and so on, because those schools rarely, rarely provide those services.
So there's this sense of like, hey, the church, you know, I guess what I'm getting at here, Andrew, is like, for a long time, I've heard Christian nationalists in this country say, get the government out of my life.
The church and the individuals can provide what we need.
And then when it comes to certain folks, they're like, oh, no, no, we actually will not and cannot provide what those folks need.
Is that a fair assessment?
I'm wondering how that hits you.
No, it really is.
You know, I was working on a column with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and I think it'll come out in the next month or so in their next issue, but it's right on this exact topic of religious school vouchers, Christian nationalism, and ableism.
And the way that you described it is exactly the state of affairs.
So the ADA passing and becoming law in 1990, some of the folks that were arguing against it were evangelical organizations, evangelical Christian organizations, essentially saying, like you said, you can't require us to have to do these things, whether it's build a ramp into our church, which is why religious buildings are exempt from any sort of ADA come ADA accommodation, or yeah, in their private schools.
And so there's a story that I tell in this column that'll appear, but right out of college, I taught for a year at a small Christian school in Indianapolis or just south of Indianapolis.
And there was a teacher there that was, you know, a really popular teacher.
And I saw pictures of his kids.
And, you know, the daughter, I was like, oh, these are your kids.
And he's like, yeah.
And he's like, yeah, daughter attends here at this Christian school, small Christian school.
And my son, he's like, well, he goes to public school.
And, you know, I could tell that his son had Down syndrome.
And I was like, oh, he doesn't go here.
And he's like, no, he gets more of the support he needs at public schools that are better set up to serve him.
And so I've carried that with me because this is a guy who's devoted his life to teaching at this school, but he needed the public schools and the support that his son could get there.
And, you know, glad, like, I'm so grateful that that was there.
But if we weaken that and take that away, even our Christian teachers who are serving these schools, their kids may not get the help that is necessary for them if we weaken schools because again, diverting funding from our public school system for religious schools that mostly serve people that could probably afford it anyway.
And so that's the really dangerous part.
And that really is how it plays out, how you described it.
It's one of those moments, too, where for me at least, what it breaks down is like he's saying, hey, I love this school and I love teaching here because of the Christian mission.
Christianity And Nationalism00:10:20
I mean, I assume he's like, there's a Christian mission.
We're teaching kids a God-centered curriculum, but my son can't go here because the support's not here.
So what he's really saying is we need gesturing towards all of us, society, we need all of you who pay taxes.
And I don't say that begrudgingly.
I say that like, yes, I want to live in a society where like we pay taxes and we bond together such that everyone in our society can have a home and education and health care and a house and a living wage.
I mean, that all sounds good.
And now you've got me talking like a crazy socialist or something.
I don't know.
I'll resist that.
But I guess I'll just say on the example of like, he's saying, hey, we need all of you, taxpayers, secular people, godless humanists, people who don't believe in Jesus to do the work that this school can and won't do.
And, you know, maybe that's a little too harsh, but it just, it strikes me that that's what's built into that statement.
So that's, that's there.
I want to talk about, I want to talk about theology for a minute, if you don't mind.
And you gestured at some of this earlier with the kind of idea of healing, the idea of health and wealth, the idea that God favors the able-bodied.
I think that idea is something that I want to break down.
In the evangelical spaces I grew up in, I think in many churches across the country, there's an implicit assumption that God, let me put it this way, when the body of Christ is restored to glory,
that body will be imagined as a beautiful, able, symmetrical, thin body that is close to like in the Shekinah glory of the body of Christ.
The restoration will include a restoration to being pretty, to being handsome, to being able-bodied, to being muscular, not being obese or disabled, being young, not being old, not being wrinkled as I look at myself on the camera right now, not having, you know, aches and pains because you're middle-aged.
Speaking for no one in particular.
And so, like, I guess what I'm getting at here is there's a theological assumption of the able-bodied is the closest to the restored body of Christ.
And if I look around at evangelical spaces, there is a love for able-bodied, handsome, beautiful people who look good on stage and look good on camera.
And those implicit assumptions lead to a flip side of this, which is the disabled are furthest from God.
They have the most to be healed.
They have the most to be restored because their bodies are clearly the least or the farthest from what the restored body of Christ will look like.
I'm wondering if those theological assumptions are striking you at all or if those are ones you think are built into this.
No, it really is.
And there's some really great work.
So if any of your listener, I mean, anybody who's interested, but even those that maybe are identified as Christians, still there's a lot of really good theological writers now from the disabled perspective as disabled writers themselves really doing important work here.
So one of the like, you know, like for me, original workset is so, so wonderful is Nancy Easlin.
She has since died, but in the 1990s, she was writing on this and she has a book, The Disabled God.
I think it was like her master's thesis.
She's a sociologist, but it's, it's brilliant, but it's theological and really strongly theological.
But she was disabled and she imagined God as disabled, like in a puffer chair.
And because she said that my disability does not draw me away from the image of God, and what you're describing is this idea of Christians kind of imagining any sort of disabled, a disability is they are, you know, less reflective of the image of God.
And so her work is super important.
There's other books, Amy Kenney, My Body is Not a Prayer Request.
It's just really important work.
So some of that, I think, helps unpack really the implications of what people have said.
But too, if I can bring in like my own personal experience with this, Brad, a little bit is so I have two boys with fragile X syndrome.
So pretty severe intellectual disabilities.
And so as we've navigated educational systems, as we've navigated different like religious institutions and organizations, coming up against this over and over.
So not only ableism organizationally and structurally and socially, but also like in my own view of the ways that I'm ableist and the ways that I limit what they can and can't do or should be or shouldn't be a part of is a part of that as well.
And we've run up against that to where it is this idea that, well, one day they'll be healed, they'll be changed or whatever, you know, for those that are Christians talking to us.
But then too, this idea of what are they worth?
And is that worth contingent on what they provide to all of us?
Or if they need things, then that is somehow a drain.
And so the way that you're describing it, I think is so important because, you know, I still identify as a Christian.
And, you know, in talking to Christians, they care about people with disabilities.
They care about my sons.
I get that.
But a lot of times then they vote for policies and people that make our life so difficult because it's cutting funding for their education.
It's cutting funding for Medicaid.
Like, you know, our Medicaid forms aren't getting processed because there's enough people working there.
And so when they're like, we'll pray for you.
I'm like, great.
But next time there's an election, can you vote for people that see my boys as worth existing and that will support the things that serve all of us?
That I don't just want it for my boys, but for the single mom who has a kid with autism or whatever else that maybe, you know, can't provide or needs more help.
Like I want those things there for her and for her kid and anybody, no matter who, what.
And so those are the things that, yeah, as you're talking about those theological aspects, but then how that connects to what we do socially in the world.
I think getting, you know, those that embrace Christian nationalism or even progressive Christians to see like what are the blind spots within this tradition that we need to be aware of and how we can ensure that we're serving everyone and not just the few or just elevating these very particular kind of images of the good and the worthwhile.
I want to extract this out to the imagined American body and the way that, as my co-host Dan Miller argues, every community, every nation, every people imagines its national or collective body in a certain way.
And what Dan Miller would argue is that for a Christian nationalist, the American body is envisioned as a straight, white, Christian, native-born, English-speaking, and I would add here, able-bodied body.
And I think, you know, just coming off the Super Bowl, we can think of like Kid Rock was held up as the symbol of the family-friendly Christian alternative to Bad Bunny.
And, you know, I could give you the titles of some of Kid Rock's songs.
It's wild growing up in the like 90s and late 90s.
Andrew, we were in, I mean, you're a little younger than me, but we were in youth group at the same moment in the 90s and the 2000s when Kid Rock was anathema.
We would have gotten in so much trouble for listening to Kid Rock.
That was not approved by any means.
And yet, you know, he was held up, but he's, you know, he's a straight white, native-born Christian, at least in perfunctory sense.
He talked about church at the halftime show.
He is more an image of the ideal American body than Bad Bunny, who is speaking Spanish, who is brown, who's coming from Puerto Rico, a place that is at the very margins of the American body and so on and so forth.
And so I think to me, if we think about the body of Christ, that's one arena.
The American body is another.
And I guess what I see going back to Trump and RFK and Dr. Oz is people basically saying explicitly, the valuable Americans, the real Americans, they're the ones who produce economically.
They're the ones who can work.
They're the ones who can lead companies.
They're the ones that will fight on the front lines.
They are, in Pete Hex asked the words, the lethal ones, the soldiers, the warriors.
And everyone else is on varying scales and according to various degrees, just less valuable.
And so the way that the national body is envisioned now is explicitly to me that straight white, native-born, able-body with a beautiful face and a beautiful physique and so on.
And that is to me where the Christian and the nationalism get married in this ableism.
What do you think of that formulation?
No, I think that's exactly what this data is showing when we think of the ideal American and the ideal America.
So who has the easiest access to the civil benefits, all of those things of being an American?
It's, you know, you kind of just go down this list of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion.
You got to have the certain types, but able-bodied, I think, has to be added to that.
So it's straight, white, able-bodied American Jesus.
And he's got to look Nordic.
And, you know, that's key.
And that really is the vision of the true American and the true America.
And it really is really this desire.
And you can kind of see these two different Americas and visions of America of, you know, and I forget, maybe you know this off the top of your head, but I forget who originally said this, but essentially this idea of you know the morality of a nation by how they treat their most vulnerable.
And, you know, I just think of my sons who are nonverbal.
They need all sorts of support, showering.
pottying, like all that stuff.
And so how our nation sees and views them, that's the measure of the type of nation rather than, oh, it's made up of these strong, able-bodied warriors and fighters and all of those things.
Morality Of A Nation00:01:53
So which, which is it?
And Christian nationalism and the nationalism part, as you said, really does have this vision that excludes anybody who might have any sort of vulnerability, whether it's able-bodiedness or, you know, disability or their race or ethnicity or where they happen to be born.
Yeah.
So if you don't mind, I want to ask you one more question.
But before we do that, you know, I want to encourage everyone to sign up for our newsletter.
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But you also need to sign up for Andrew's substack.
So Andrew, tell us where we can find your work, your sub stack, and everything else you're doing.
Yeah.
So my sub stack is a great place to keep track of the different places I'm writing.
It's my name, Andrew Whitehead, kind of squished together, a substack, and I titled it American Idolatry.
So you can find it there.
But yeah, I post in there about once a month, just ongoing research, whether it's mine or others on Christian nationalism or kind of meeting this moment of, yeah, defending democracy and how religion in America plays into that.
So that's where you can find me.
I'm also, yeah, in Blue Sky now and trying to find community there with folks, but those are the two best places to follow along.
And you should listen to American Idols, the four-part series that is really good and includes cameos from all kinds of people, Robert Jones and Jamar Tisby and Mandy and Chris Tackett and many others.
So check that out.
Check out American Idolatry, Andrew's book on the threat of Christian nationalism to the church and to our country.
All right.
Subscribers, stick around.
I'm going to ask Andrew one more question, and that's going to be on things he probably doesn't want to talk about.