Andrew Whitehead: Conversations on Religion and Politics on the Eve of the 2024 Election Season
Friends,
First, it’s less than two weeks before my Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies. It’s been an exciting time to see this work come to light, especially as we will soon find ourselves in another presidential election season. I hope you’ll find it insightful.
As mentioned, I’m embarking on just a few Zoom meet ups with exciting authors who have something significant to contribute to this conversation. I hope you enjoyed last week’s video with Robert P. Jones of PRRI talking about his new book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy.
Andrew Whitehead
This week I wanted to call your attention to the second conversation with Andrew Whitehead, Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and a Project Director at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI, and a co-Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com), the world's largest online religion data archive.
I warmly recommend that you get a copy of his American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church, where he shows how Christians harm their neighbors when they embrace the idols of power, fear, and violence.
In our video below, we talk about:
Why Andrew transitions his work with data as a sociologist of religion to writing a book about the damage Christian nationalism is doing to religion.
What I call “authoritarian reactionary Christianity,” where democracy becomes problematic for a population that doesn’t want to lose control.
The data about Americans who embrace Christian nationalism who are much more likely to agree that voting is a privilege, not a right, which gets problematic as the idea of voting as a privilege inevitably targets certain groups.
Thanks for being on this journey with me,
DPG
Excellent. Thank you to David Gushee and Andrew Whitehead. You are both doing critical work and leading the way for the sake of truth, multiracial democracy, and the Church in America.