Reckoning, with Anthea Butler
“We cannot get away from the fact that theology plays a role in racism.”
About the Guest
Anthea Butler is department chair of Religious Studies and professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of White Evangelical Racism. Her work as a public intellectual has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other media outlets.
Best Books
White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, by Anthea Butler.
Anthea recommended:
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith.
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, by Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Transcript
ANTHEA BUTLER: And so when we talk about this, we cannot get away from the fact that theology plays a role in racism.
BLAIR HODGES: Anthea Butler is a top expert on religion, politics, and race in the United States. In her latest book White Evangelical Racism she tells the history of the rise of the Religious Right in America—Christians who are politically conservative, predominantly white, and Republican.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Evangelicals pairing with Republicans is really important, because on state and local and national levels, they've been able to achieve a lot.
BLAIR HODGES: They've helped presidents get elected, they've impacted public policy on things like abortion and gay rights. But Butler says all their successes have come at significant cost. And and she says that cost is rising fast.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah, it's hurt them if we're looking at numbers. It's hurt them if we're looking at, you know, in terms of the moral status that they want to have.
BLAIR HODGES: As church attendance shrinks and public confidence and respect of religious people dwindles, Butler sees a moment of reckoning for American Christianity. And she's not a disinterested observer, either. Even though she left Evangelicalism herself, she's still got a few sermons to preach.
Welcome back to Fireside with Blair Hodges. Today we're talking about the book White Evangelical Racism by Dr. Anthea Butler. She's department chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a prominent public intellectual. You might have seen or heard her in the New York Times, Washington Post, and cable news networks, and I'm so glad she's here at Fireside, because her research offers a cautionary tale for all kinds of Christian traditions, including my own, who are grappling with racism.
ANTHEA BUTLER: I was an Evangelical once. I had these experiences, I understand the movement, I understand the people in it. And I wanted to make an appeal to people that they needed to see who they really have become, and why so many people have left Evangelicalism.
BLAIR HODGES: This is episode 7: Reckoning.
Haunted by a question - 1:58
BLAIR HODGES: Anthea Butler, welcome to Fireside.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Great to be here, Blair.
BLAIR HODGES: For the past twenty years you've taught and written about American Evangelicalism. And you say in this book that we're talking about today that all throughout that time, you've been haunted by some questions about that movement. What had been haunting you?
ANTHEA BUTLER: There's a question that I started asking myself, sort of towards the end of my graduate career. It was that, you know, was evangelicalism white? And I came up with the answer, yes. But it wasn't just that. It was the way in which race was inscribed in American Evangelicalism. And the ways in which even I, who was a former evangelical, had to be expected to behave and to pick up certain cultural kinds of things.
And so this is a question that haunted me. But then it went deeper than that to think, you know, how is it that we got here? How is it that evangelicalism got here, first of all, and secondarily, how are the experiences that I and other Evangelicals of color had—how were they historically prescribed or proscribed in a way? How did this happen?
And, you know, I'm not talking about good experiences I'm talking about, right? [laughter] So I think that's part of the genesis of the book, I think people always write from something that they're interested in. And I've always been interested in conservative groups and why they do what they do. But I’ve been especially interested in evangelicalism because Evangelicals have made a lot of claims about themselves in terms of their history, and how it's been written. And I think where we are right now, I think about myself and people like Kristin Kobes Du Mez. We've all sort of—are writing a history of evangelicalism that I wouldn't say is a “revisionist” history, but a history that challenges the history that people have told us and have believed in for different sorts of reasons.
BLAIR HODGES: So how's that different from revisionist history? That's a really interesting distinction that you make there, because it does seem corrective in a way so—
ANTHEA BUTLER: Well, revisionist, to me, is a term that says we're revising what the “canon” is. And I'm making the claim that this is not the canon of Evangelicalism. I think the ways in which Evangelical scholars have written about evangelicalism has been through a thoroughly white male lens, whether we're talking about George Marsden, Thomas Kidd, and others. And while they are great scholars, they have been myopic in their vision about what they think Evangelicalism is.
But it's not just them. And I want to make that really clear. It's not just about the historians. It's about Evangelical writers in the public. And at the beginning of my book, I talk about Michael Gerson, who has done a lot of hand wringing about where Evangelicals are. And so when you say “revisionist” that means that you're revising something that is already sort of the truth. And I'm saying we haven't had the whole truth. We haven't had the whole truth about evangelicalism. And so the kinds of books that we see right now that are dealing with nationalism, like Taking America Back for God, or Jesus and John Wayne, or my book, or Biblical Womanhood—all of these books are challenging things about Evangelicalism that are also historically correct but have never been written about. So it's not a revision.
Donald Trump and Evangelicals - 5:06
BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned Michael Gerson. He's a person who had written public essays about the election of Donald Trump—
ANTHEA BUTLER: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: —and the support that Donald Trump received from Evangelicals. And he was really upset by that, because as an Evangelical, he felt like Donald Trump was sort of disqualified, that he wasn't a morally acceptable candidate. So he's within the Evangelical tradition, and trying to figure out, “how did my people vote for this person?” Did you find his response satisfying or not?
ANTHEA BUTLER: No. [laughs] And honestly, really, he's part of the reason why this book started the way it did, why I put him in the introduction. Because you know, his famous Atlantic article about this, where he tries to sort of put together his Evangelical history, and how could we have ended up with this guy. I’m like, you ended up with this guy because this is the guy you've always ended up with.
You've made concessions to people like this, because they've given you things, first of all. And secondarily, this is you! This is who you are! And this is the part of yourself that you haven't wanted to see because you're doing performative kinds of religiosity that makes you think you're more moral than everybody else. But then you get this guy who's like, immoral—
And I mean, I know some people are going to bristle at me calling Trump immoral, but I'm gonna say hello, basically, you know, from a biblical standpoint? Yes, immoral, whatever religious book you want to count it on, he's kind of immoral. And basically, you took this guy because he was able to give you everything Evangelicals wanted.
And I think that's the tradeoff here. What Gerson does not understand is that Evangelicals slid away from the religious and went into a political movement inside of a political party. And that's what I'm really trying to get at with this book, and to understand how much the foundations of what Evangelicals believe and think and how they've constructed morality, over and against race, has been part and parcel of forming certain kinds of political platforms that they have fit into very well in America.
Colorblind Christianity - 7:11
BLAIR HODGES: You talked about the historiography, which is sort of the history of histories that have been written about Evangelicals, and how a lot of those, most have been written from white perspectives or by white historians. What would you say to people who say, that shouldn't matter? We shouldn't look at that as some sort of qualification or disqualification?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Well, it's also about who's able to be out there. So you know, you'll give my bona fides I'm sure at the beginning of this podcast, but I'm gonna remind everybody that, you know, Kristin Kobes du Mez, I'm a professor of religion, she's a professor of history at Calvin.
I'm talking about her a lot, because I find that what ends up happening is that this also gets gendered in a certain kind of way, as though women are not able to put down parts of history in certain sorts of ways. And I think even the fact that I am who I am, writing about Evangelicalism, is important because I think I don't get seen in Evangelicalism.
And that's a really important point. I make a statement in the book that, you know, lots of Evangelicals say, “I don't see color, I don't see race.” And I'm like, you do. You just see white. And that's the point.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you talk about this kind of “colorblind Christianity” that arose, you trace it to the 1970s. Let's talk about that a little bit. How this idea came to be, this idea of, you know, “we don't see race. So God loves everyone, and so do we. So we don't even have to focus on race. And if you do, maybe that's racist!”
ANTHEA BUTLER: Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, there's a way in which to think about this theologically. Like, we're all the people of God, you know? God created us in his image, and all of this. And once you move away from the nineteenth century and get into the twentieth century, the things that are racialized end up being put as sort of “political” or “social.”
And so when we get to this moment of the civil rights movement, when all of these kinds of norms like Jim Crow are challenged, Evangelicals have to make a move. Because they realize that with things that happen legally—you know, when we're talking about the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, all of these things—that brings African Americans into the mainstream. And once we come into the mainstream, you have to make a decision. Do you stay blatantly racist? Or do you move a little bit to the center culturally, and say, “Oh, we gotta include Black people, we got to start doing this.”
And so what you see at the end of the 60s is people like Billy Graham, putting people like Ethel Waters in front—
BLAIR HODGES: That's a Black woman, right, that he sort of would bring out on stage, right?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yes, she's a famous singer, and she's been in movies, and she's a Christian.
But there's also a way in which, you know, Black people get added on, right? So those people who've watched The 700 Club before, you know, Ben Kinchlow is this person, or Rosey Grier when he becomes a Christian. All of these different African Americans get added on to certain kinds of predominantly white and Evangelical ministries as a way to show that they are accepting and integrating and all of this.
Here's the “however.” The however is that, are you sidekicks or are you really there to be part of the leadership? And what you can see in this early history in the late 60s and 70s is that people end up being sidekicks, or they get to sing, or they get to perform, or they get to tell their testimony. And they're there for “color commentary,” but they're not there for real change. They're not there running things. They're there as support staff.
And I want to bring this up to the present and talk about this in terms of what Donald Trump did, because I think this is really important. Donald Trump did the same thing! He operated like an Evangelical evangelist. He put Darren Scott, he put Mark Burns around him, he got Paula White around him. He always had this coterie of what I used to call the “D List” of Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and others. And I call them D List because people didn't really know them. And he put them around him. And it looked like he was being racially friendly, when in fact, all the things he was saying wasn't.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you think those people would resent like that framing? I mean, I also think—not just religiously, but politically, right? You have Ben Carson—
ANTHEA BUTLER: Of course.
BLAIR HODGES: —you have Diamond and Silk, you have these Black people who Donald Trump sort of put into the mix there. And if they heard you describe it like that, you know—
ANTHEA BUTLER: They would be mad. They would be mad.
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah.
ANTHEA BUTLER: And see, the thing about Diamond and Silk is that they come from a Black Evangelical family. I think one of the parents is a pastor or something. And they were selling supplements and stuff like this.
I mean, when I'm talking about this in the book, I don't mean it to besmirch what people really want and do. It's just that they need to understand what is happening when you see this, and how it's happened over time. And I think that's the important part. And how that plays a role in buttressing Evangelicals’ ways of saying, well, we're not racist, “Look, we have this person in front.” But representation does not mean less racism.
Defining “Evangelical” - 12:14
BLAIR HODGES: That speaks to, I think, your definition of “Evangelical” itself. Let's talk about how you define Evangelical in the book. In fact you say, whenever you say “Evangelical in the book,” you mean “specifically white Evangelical unless otherwise noted.” Talk about that definition.
ANTHEA BUTLER: I'm gonna ask your indulgence, and I actually want to read from the book for a minute.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, please, please do!
ANTHEA BUTLER: You know, it’s a great way to sort of think about this, okay. I'm gonna read a piece.
“I want to be clear about what my working definition of Evangelicalism is in this book. The word ‘white’ in the title White Evangelical Racism is about the construction of Evangelicalism, from the theological to the political. If one takes the purest definition of Evangelical, that is spreading the gospel, then there are many Christians who believe they should spread the message of Jesus Christ to the world. That includes believers of all races. In the American context, Evangelical means different things in different centuries. In the nineteenth century, the term ‘Evangelical’ was about missionary work, spreading the gospel to the heathen—read: ethnic groups other than white—and was embraced by people who were both for and against slavery. In the twentieth century, ‘Evangelicalism’ became a term that was used internally as a boundary making enterprise to wall off Evangelicals who embraced an identity different from Fundamentalists, who believed the Bible was both inerrant and infallible. By the 1950s and the entrance of evangelist Billy Graham, Evangelicalism had mainstreamed itself, and in the words of George Marsden, an Evangelical is anyone that likes Billy Graham.”
And then I go on to talk about this and what it is in the seventies and whatever. But then we come down to the end. So let me talk about my definition.
“Evangelicals, however, are concerned with the political alliance with the Republican Party, and with maintaining the cultural and racial whiteness that they have transmitted to the public. This is the working definition of American Evangelicalism. American print and television media have embraced and promoted this definition, and the American public has accepted it. So for the purposes of this book, the word ‘Evangelical’ unless otherwise noted, should be read as white Evangelical.”
I know that's caused a lot of furor for people. But I think this is that this is part of the cultural definition. And there'll be people who say “well, you know, Evangelicalism can be defined by theology.” But I'm explicitly saying that the theological is not the point anymore. It may be for a group of people who believe in that theology, who might be at Calvin College or someplace else, but it's not.
It is cultural. It is about what do you believe? Where do you shop? Do you shop at Hobby Lobby? What do you read? Who do you follow? Do you contribute to things like American Family Association or Focus on the Family and Family Research Council? Do you vote completely Republican all of the time? Does your pastor talk about voting Republican or voting for you know, “pro-life” as opposed to pro-choice or something else? Those are the kinds of things I think define Evangelicalism, and have defined Evangelicalism, since the late 1970s.
But this idea that this has all been a theological definition just belies the whole history of Evangelicalism in the first place.
BLAIR HODGES: You come to this topic, not just as a religious studies scholar, but also as someone who has direct experience in the Evangelical tradition yourself. Talk a little bit about your religious background.
ANTHEA BUTLER: I grew up Catholic, moved out to California, started going to a Foursquare church, and went to Fuller Seminary and got a master’s from Fuller Seminary. So I've been at the seat of American Evangelicalism, which was Fuller.
And so what was interesting to me while I was a student at Fuller, I never had a course in American Evangelicalism. And the reason why was because nobody taught it, because everybody thought we all knew what it was. I get to graduate school at Vanderbilt and I get a course on American Evangelicalism from an African American man, Louis Baldwin, who would become my advisor. And so that was a moment for me to think about what this history was. And I didn't get it from a white Evangelical historian. I got it from an African American who writes primarily about Martin Luther King, but had to think about Evangelicalism a lot because of writing about King.
So I think what's interesting about this is that there'll be people who say—I've seen the comments from people who say, “Oh, you know, she doesn't know what she's talking about, or whatever.” I'm like, Oh, I do, because I lived it. And I understand Evangelicalism, not just historically, but culturally. And I think that's important when we think about Evangelicals because it's not just about history. It's always going to be about the cultural appropriation. Because Evangelicals are great about thinking about culture. And they know how to manipulate culture.
Theology plays a role in racism - 16:44
BLAIR HODGES: And you mentioned the theological way of defining Evangelicals. So some people will want to say, “Well, what are the religious beliefs they have? Let's define Evangelicals just according to what that is.” In the book though, here's a quote from you: “The set of Evangelicals who believed in, and continue today to believe in the inferiority of people of color, are complicit in supporting structures of oppression that are antithetical to the gospel.”
So you actually see, even in the theology in some instances, some racism baked in there as well.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah. I do. And this book does not go back as far as I would have liked it to have gone back if I could have done it. But I’d go back to the Reformation. And I would talk about Calvinism and think what people don't understand is that this idea of predestination has a lot to do with who gets saved and who gets left. You might think about it just like that. But the reality is, that that was used to uphold systems of slavery and apartheid.
You could say the same thing about the Catholic Church. I mean, the Catholic Church said on the front of it that they didn't believe in slavery, but anybody who didn't convert could be enslaved, right? So these are the ways in which theologies play a role in this. And for Evangelicals to discount the creation, let's say, of a Southern Baptist Convention. Because you have people who believe that Black people are not human. That it is right and just to hold slaves, because the Bible says that you can, right? That’s their reading of it, you know, and this is why the Presbyterians split, the Baptists split, all these churches, the Methodists split, over the issue of slavery. And part of that has to do with how they read Scripture.
And so when we talk about this, we cannot get away from the fact that theology plays a role in racism. And I think, I'll suggest it to your readers, because I think it's one of the best chapters I've ever read about this and I still use it even though it's old, is from Cornel West's Prophesy Deliverance! that was published, I think, back in 1982, or 83. And he has a chapter in there where he talks about the genealogy of race. And he talks about the rise of how race is constructed in the Enlightenment. And a lot of the people who are also writing theologies are also looking at Enlightenment thinkers and appropriating a lot of that into their theology.
So I think what we have to do is be really sober minded about bandying about the word “theology,” because I know that's the word that a lot of Evangelical theologians like to use against people like me who write this history. But I understand it, you know? And not only do I understand it, I understand that you don't want to look at that construction, because it really does show what the truth is underneath.
BLAIR HODGES: How would they use it against you? What pushback would they offer?
ANTHEA BUTLER: I think the pushback people offer is that well, you know, “She writing about this from a cultural perspective.” You know, there was a review that I won't get into from somebody who's atheist—get this—who said basically, you know, I was just angry. And I'm like, I don't think you do a closing of a book like I do if you're angry. I think what you do is you don't even write the book. If you're just angry, you don't care about people, right? But I actually do care about Evangelicals. And I've thought about this a lot. And I have lost a lot of my Evangelical friends, because I don't vote the same way that they do, or I don't think about these things the same. And I've called people out on their racism. And that's really—that's a tough thing, you know?
And I think that the criticism is always going to be about theology, but they won't move from the theological to explore the other pieces of Evangelicalism that are there, that really point to how people take this theology of privilege—and I will call it that, the theological privilege to say it's only theology and not realize that in saying that they are also saying, “Well it doesn't really matter, because the theology is there. And so since the theology was written by all these nice white guys here in America, and Germany, and some other places—but mostly Germans, you know, some of the Dutch and some Americans—then we shouldn't consider anything else.”
So, you know, I'll give you an even better example. It's the ways in which, after the Jeremiah Wright thing happened in 2008, with Obama, that Black theology was attacked on Fox News for like a year, almost two years, by somebody who considered themselves to be Mormon, because they were afraid of this theology of liberation that called out racism. And it wasn't that it was any less than any other theology. It was just the fact that it challenged some of these cherished beliefs that were subsumed in racial ideas. And I think that's where, you know, if a Jim Cone—who is the founder of Black theology—cannot be considered in the same breath as a Jürgen Moltmann or somebody else, then I think we have a real problem.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, so you're basically seeing more emphasis put on theologies that are constructed by white people, and that sort of counts as Evangelical, compared to people like Jeremiah Wright or James Cone who are Black theologians or Black preachers, and they're discounted as angry or—
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: —or basically not preaching the gospel of American exceptionalism.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Exactly. And I think that when you challenge that gospel of American exceptionalism, and you say that America is not exceptional, then people think that means you hate America, and therefore you should be vilified. And that's not it at all.
In some ways—you know, I've had conversations with friends about this—it's like, do we think what Jeremiah Wright said about America is a jeremiad not. But I mean, there's always been jeremiads, there's always been people who've lamented about where America hasn't been. And one big place that America hasn't been is in the area of race. I mean, if we're still having to have Black Lives Matter and everything else, then clearly we have not done what the framers said, who by the way, themselves, wrote documents and still had slaves.
So there's all these contradictions in our history. But as I said to someone, I think one of the things that's most important about this time and about my book is that I want people to understand that in writing this I am challenging Evangelicals to think about what democracy means. And the fact that Black people have to continue to keep asking for it because of racism. And they're helping to perpetuate that.
The rise of Americanism in Christianity - 23:07
BLAIR HODGES: I think you focus on that a lot in chapter two, which is called "Saving the Nation." And this is where you talk about the rise of Americanism in Christianity. A really heavy emphasis on nationalist ideas. And this is also the time when communism is being used as sort of a Boogeyman, or it's feared, especially here in the West, and we start to see communism and civil rights get lumped together. And Evangelicals are playing a part in this.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah, I think one of the most important things to say about communism is that the fear of communism was not the same kind of fear that we think about communism. It's about how people thought communism was actually like an atheistic religion, they considered it to be religion. And so it's even before the 1950s and Billy Graham, it actually shows up in the early—you know, before the FBI, they're looking at people in the Tulsa race riots and all these other riots that happen between 1919 and 1921, and saying “Oh, those people who are agitators are the reds,” right? The word “Socialism” always makes people go crazy. But it was like just a pejorative thing. Just like communism, we might not say communism very much anymore, but you hear socialism all the time.
BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm.
ANTHEA BUTLER: And so what people felt like is that these people are asking for equality, and they shouldn't be asking for this because basically “they're trying to turn us into a Socialist country where they just get things for nothing.” And so there was a way in which all of this got lumped in with the economic and social things, where people actually thought that Martin Luther King was communist, anybody who looked at wanting to have civil rights or equality was communist. And so communism was equated with a way in which people who were already not part of the social fabric of leadership were trying to get in and expected to get something without working for it, and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and everything else.
I think it's also important here to say something really—that'll be tough for some people to hear. This is a time where there's different immigrant groups who have come in and were treated as badly or worse than Black people. Irish in the nineteenth century were vilified. But at this moment in the fifties, they are beginning to move into this place where they can be—they became white. There's a book that says “when Irish became white,” right? These different ethnic groups move up the ladder.
But Black people never move up this sort of Americanized ladder, because we can always be seen through our phenotype, through our skin. And so when you get somebody who is as famous as a Billy Graham, talking about communism, and the threat, and all these other things, and then you have those words used against Martin Luther King, then it obviously makes a distinction between what is Christian and what is not. And, you know, even though King can quote Jesus 'till the cows come home, and quote Old Testament scriptures, nobody believed he was a Christian, because of the way that he presented the gospel, in that kind of liberatory, “we must have equality” kind of way. And Billy Graham just basically said, “it's an individual kind of thing.” And I think that's the important part.
BLAIR HODGES: Talk about that individualization a little bit. You know, Evangelicalism became about a personal relationship with Jesus, about getting saved, about, you know, people are fallen and they need to be saved, and this sort of thing. Compared to someone like a Dr. King, who is also coming out of a Protestant tradition, but is focused a lot more on community and on justice today, not some sort of future heavenly kingdom, but making a kingdom present today and that both of those strains exist there within Evangelicalism.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah. And that's really important. I think that Evangelical impetus to individualism, individual salvation, if we want to talk about this like a class, you can think about Charles Finney and The Anxious Bench, and people having to come up and confess their sins in the nineteenth century, which becomes a very big deal, right? And so it's focused on the individual.
So when you get somebody like Billy Graham in the twentieth century who has these big giant crusades, it's all about “come up front,” you know, “confess your sins, do all of the stuff,” right? And it's about the individual.
But here's the important part. For Evangelicals, racism is an individual sin, not a corporate sin. It's not structural sin. And that's the difference. Because Evangelicals think of racism as an individual sin, “God needs to cleanse my heart, and that's that. I don't have to work for the structure.”
King is saying something different. And all these other Black theologians and leaders say, this is structural sin, slavery is a structural sin. This whole thing that's happened—Jim Crow is structural sin. The nation must be changed. People must change the structure of this nation.
And that's the difference. That is the reason why you have this big giant clash. So then when Billy Graham says, “well, it's not going to be until heaven when little Black boys and little white girls walk hand in hand.” And King is saying, “well, I'd like them to be hand in hand in here on earth. And then not have to worry about the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”
Which is why it drives me crazy when politicians want to quote King, and they don't understand that this is not about individualism. This is about corporate stuff.
And so I think this drive of individualism and Evangelicalism, coupled with this nationalism and Americanism, is the way in which there's a mythology that grows about what America is, especially in the fifties, with the space race, and all of this kind of stuff, this mythology that holds very strongly. And when people challenged that mythology to say, “well, you're not that great, because look at how people are living in this country,” people get angry.
And it's the same thing today. I mean, it's about, you know, “make America great again,” right? And how that plays out versus, “America has to change.”
Mixing politics and religion - 29:13
BLAIR HODGES: That's Anthea Butler. She's a professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book White Evangelical Racism, which we're talking about today.
We've been talking a lot about politics, let's get a little bit more specific about this. Because if we could hop in a time machine and go back in time back to the fifties and sixties and talk to Billy Graham, and talk about the rise of the Religious Right, he might be shocked at this. A lot of Evangelical leaders might be shocked at this, that Evangelicals would be so heavily politically involved. There was a time when they would say, like Jerry Falwell said, “preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners.”
ANTHEA BUTLER: Mmhmm.
BLAIR HODGES: That's a little bit different than where we're at today.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Well, you know, I'm not sure Billy Graham would be surprised, because Billy Graham made it a point to try to court everybody since, you know, basically Truman. And it started working with Eisenhower. And even when he was bedridden, people went up to Montreat to go and see him. So I'm not sure he would be surprised. You know, and, and I think...
BLAIR HODGES: Do you think be surprised by the success, though?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Well I think he would be surprised by the success and the failure. Let's put it like that. Because there's failure. And I think we got—really, we've got to deal with “there’s failure.” And I think Evangelicals don't want to deal with that. But yes, there is failure, there is failure of the message, because guess what, the numbers are dwindling and dropping. And we can see that in the polling from Pew and other places, right?
Maybe they're not surprised. I think what they would believe is that right now, especially at this sort of interesting point, is that the thing that they went into with this in the fifties worked, and this is going to sound like she's digressing from the question, but I'm really not.
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs]
ANTHEA BUTLER: It's about states rights. And where you might not have a national law, where you repeal Roe v. Wade, it's been able to happen on state levels. And in my home state of Texas, they basically just made it a law, if you even help somebody, if you drive somebody to an abortion clinic, you can be arrested, you can be fined.
There’s all these kinds of things that have been instantiated on a statewide level that have really worked for Evangelicals. I have to say that Evangelical pairing with Republicanism and Republicans is really important, because on state and local and national levels, they've been able to achieve a lot. And now you have conservative courts, we have over two hundred judges that happened in the last five years because of Donald Trump. So in that sense, they've won.
But what have they lost? I think that's now what the bigger question is. They've lost stature, I think that especially after 1/6, you know, there are a lot of questions about growing Christian nationalism, and is Evangelicalism a part of this kind of violence in this country against the government? I think they've lost status with younger people who don't want to be Evangelical, and don't want to be called an Evangelical. And they might not have gone away from the church, but they've definitely gone away from the faith of their fathers and mothers, so to speak. I think Evangelical, instead of a helpful word, might be an epithet now. And that's really bad.
BLAIR HODGES: How did we get there, though, because we did start out with Jerry Falwell kind of condemning political involvement, or really discouraging it in 1965?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: But then we had a complete 180 on that.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Well, you got there, in part, because of several things that happened in the seventies, which I outlined in the book, and I'll just say these quickly. One is about Bob Jones, and the ways in which Bob Jones lost their tax-exempt status—
BLAIR HODGES: This a university, right, it's sort of a Christian University?
ANTHEA BUTLER: A fundamentalist university that loses a tax-exempt status because of not wanting to allow Black people in or have interracial relationships. That's one.
The second thing is, obviously, people think about this as the abortion—but really, the abortion, pro-life, Roe versus Wade is a lot less than what happened with Bob Jones and the tax-exempt status, because people wanted to maintain things like segregation, schools, and all of these things that allow for them to have predominantly white educational systems.
We also can think about the rise of, you know, the election of Ronald Reagan and the repudiation of then-Evangelical, in a way, Jimmy Carter, right? Or we can point to the rise of the Religious Right, which I think is a really crucial moment, actually. Pat Robertson may have lost the 1988 primary for Republicans, but he won the war because he created the Christian Coalition. And that really set up all of these particular kinds of organizations that got Evangelicalism motivated politically to vote.
And so if you pair that with Focus on the Family that I mentioned before, the Family Research Council, American Family Association, and all these lobbying groups, the power of Evangelicals as a voting bloc became huge, it became massive. And that was something the Republican Party was able to court.
And by the time you get to George W. Bush, who doesn't win an election, but gets put in by the Supreme Court, that is seen as a victory, and he wins again in 2004. And in some ways, he's like the perfect Evangelical president—but it's still not enough. It doesn't get Evangelicals where they really wanted to go.
And so what really gets them where you want to go, is the hatred of Obama. And this brings out all of the stuff so that they are galvanized throughout those eight years, to the point that they get to Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump becomes a guy—whether or not he's good—I mean, you know, we think about the ways that Evangelicals used to judge leadership. Well, they didn't want somebody who had been—you know, they took Reagan because he was divorced, but he'd only been divorced once. And Trump has been divorced like twice, had to pay off a porn star, all this?
I mean, it's kind of amazing to look at what Evangelicals went for in the eighties versus what they went for in 2016. And that, to me shows you everything about where Evangelicals went politically, and why I refer to them as a political religious movement, rather than a religious group.
BLAIR HODGES: And you're suggesting that's hurt Evangelicalism, if we're looking at numbers?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah, it's hurt them if we're looking at numbers. It's hurt them if we're looking at, you know, in terms of the moral status that they want to have, right?
There's one important phrase I say in the book that I think people forget a lot when they're reading the book, because the history is overwhelming to them. And I say that Evangelicals use morality as a shield. Basically, they've been able to say, “Oh, we're the moral people.” But you chose this immoral guy. Like you voted for him like seventy and eighty percent. Twice. In 2016 and 2020. You don't care about morality, you care about power.
And I think this is the hard thing for people to hear about that. And I think that's true for every group. And you know, this will hurt some feelings. But I think this is true for every group that voted for Donald Trump. You want power. You want the power to be able to dictate what you think you want morally for the rest of the nation. And that thing where in the nineteenth century, you know, whether we're talking about temperance or anti-slavery and everything, that turned out to be kind of a moral suasion movement for moral, very moral reasons—let's get rid of slavery, let's, you know, stop people from drinking too much—those things got flipped on their head. And now here we are in the twenty-first century, and Evangelicals are for locking up kids at the border, attacking the Capitol, making sure people can't vote, making sure that people who have a different sexual orientation don't get to do anything in society, and don't want women to be in leadership.
I mean, I just gotta say, when you line it up like that, what else do you have?
How Evangelicals embraced Trump - 37:05
BLAIR HODGES: With all those things in mind, what happened? Because Evangelicalism went from, in the seventies, we talked about that color blindness, you know, they would want to say, “we don't see color, and God loves everybody,” and you suggest that the veil was pulled away around the year 2000, that that whole thing fell apart. What happened there?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Well, in 2000, you know, one of the things that—it's 2001 if we're going to talk about it, is Islam and 9/11 and Islamophobia. It's not just about Black people here. I want to make that really clear. Although when I talk about racism, this book is predominantly about racism against African Americans. It against all other people too. It's about Muslims, and you know, Muslims are going to take over, and they're—all these horrible things.
I talk about a case where a Sikh man is killed because somebody thinks he's a Muslim, and doesn't even understand that this is a traditional headdress, and that's not what Muslims wear. And that's just from the nineteenth century Orientalism that carries forward into the twentieth and twenty-first century of Evangelicalism.
So you've got hatred of Muslims, you have the vilification of LGBT people. This is what happens with Obama in 2008, because it's the intersection of his life, his name, Barack Hussein Obama, his history of his father and his mother, where he studied, you know, the madrassas and all this other stuff.
So that Islamophobia, in a way, got re-instantiated racially with Obama, and became part and parcel of this whole thing, so that when Donald Trump comes down the escalator—and I want to bring something up about that that's really an important point—Donald Trump comes down the escalator the day before the [Charleston] massacre, that thing that happens to Charleston with Emanuel AME, I think that's really important to say is like we got this—
BLAIR HODGES: Where a gunman killed people in church.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah, exactly. A white gunman.
BLAIR HODGES: A white gunman, yeah.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Who attends the Bible study and kills everybody in the church after the Bible study.
BLAIR HODGES: That's just the day after Trump announces his candidacy.
ANTHEA BUTLER: After he announces his candidacy. Donald Trump hires—you know, we know now that he hired all these people—you know, comes down the escalator, says he's gonna get all the Mexican rapists and everything else. It's just a cornucopia of racism that he espoused. And this is a moment where people who hear these things, it trades on fear. And Evangelicals respond to fear. It is one of the biggest things they respond to. And so if you can scare them and say, “somebody is coming for your guns, your God, and your children, or your wives,” then it's like, “we're just going to glom on to you because you're going to protect us.” And Donald Trump had all of that.
BLAIR HODGES: How would they justify? How would they say, look, Donald Trump has personal immoralities and all these problems, but we're still gonna go for it?
ANTHEA BUTLER: There were so many people who did, and this is why I didn't even put him in the book, because I just thought, you know what? I don't even need to talk about Trump. Because if you read the whole book, you'll understand why they could do that.
It was a moment of expediency for them. If you move from a religious movement to a religio-political movement, then what you're saying is, “we don't have to have people who are moral, we just have to have people who will bring our idea of morality into focus and in power.” And so you don't care about Donald Trump.
I was stupid. I thought at the moment, October before this, you know, October 2016, when the grab them by the you know what came out?
BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm.
ANTHEA BUTLER: I thought surely, we're gonna get Evangelical leaders to come on board. But now I realize, you know, after looking at this, like no, of course not. These guys are patriarchal. They'll just say it's a locker room talk, which is exactly what happened, and move forward and go and vote for him.
Now, there's other things that were happening, but this did not move anybody. And there were already things that were baked into Evangelical behavior, like wives not questioning who their husbands told them to vote for, because submission to your husband, right? You know, men who were thinking “he's manly,” and you know, “he doesn't look like a wuss,” and I don't want to vote for this woman who everybody's been talking about for the last 25 or 30 years as a harpy, Hillary Clinton? I mean, it was easy.
Dr. Butler’s Evangelical history - 41:19
BLAIR HODGES: I want to talk about your own stance in this book. It's published by a university press, but it's not a dispassionate book. In fact, there's a lot of passion here. And so talk about the difference there between this idea of objective scholarship versus scholarship that's really engaged and even personal.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah, there was a lot of questions about how I wanted to do this book. And there's only bits and pieces of me, there's not a lot of me. If you think you're going to read this book and know who I am, you don't. But you will see a couple of glimpses of my past and how I was trained.
I think one of the things that's really important is that there's no one who's 100% objective, the whole study of religion isn't objective to begin with. I have a lot of times, students will ask me, “well, you know, my rabbi,” or “my Sunday school teacher,” like this, or that, and I have to remind them, “this is not what this is. We're gonna learn about history in here.”
And I say that because a lot of times what has happened with this book is that people read it, and they want to argue scripture with me. And I'm like, “I'm not a biblical scholar, I'm a historian.” So you know, I know biblical scripture, but this is not the argument here. This argument is about history, and culture, and politics. And that's what we're doing here, and how a religious movement moves in that.
But I also think it was important for me to say something about my past in this book, because you needed to know that I was an Evangelical once. That I had these experiences, that I understand the movement, that I understand the people in it. And that's why I wrote the conclusion like I did, because I wanted to make an appeal to people, that they needed to see who they really have become, and why so many people have left Evangelicalism. The “Exvangelical” movement is an important one, because people have said how Evangelicalism has hurt them. And so I want people to understand that this movement has really hurt people, this movement has stymied the growth and the prosperity in America, and the things that they possibly could have done that would have been better from some lofty beginnings that they thought they had.
And I think it's also important as a scholar to say this is a university press, so I want to just let everybody know out here, it got vetted, just like a regular book, you know. So I've seen people sort of whining, “why there's no footnotes!” There's apparatus in the back. And there's plenty of people who are cited throughout the book.
And I think that what we do by writing some of these books that are really heavy academic tomes is that we miss the point about the message that really needs to get out. And I think that people want this history at this crucial moment, where we are in the country right now. We're at a real difficult, difficult phase with everything that's happened, from the last five years of Donald Trump, to this pandemic, to the insurrection, to the ways in which police violence and protests have happened in the street. What has happened to African Americans in this country, what's happened to Native Americans or Latinos. I mean, I could just say this in so many ways.
We're taping this and just two days ago, the young man who was an Evangelical and a Baptist, a Southern Baptist, who killed the people in Atlanta, including five or six Asian women, is going to go to jail for life. He's going to prison for life. And he did that because he wanted to get rid of his sin, and he wanted to cleanse his sin, but he went and killed people. How do you measure cleansing your sin with killing people? That means that your idea of the gospel of Jesus Christ has been distorted. And that's a problem.
BLAIR HODGES: And you mentioned your own Evangelical history. And you talked about it in this book, what was your story? What brought you away from Evangelicalism?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Honestly, this is a real simple story. What started bringing me away was my early Christianity course. And realizing that I've been saying the Nicene Creed and not realizing all that history that was built into that, and why they said the things about Jesus. So it wasn't like a bad racial experience. You know, it wasn't that at all. It was actually built into theology and history, believe it or not.
And then the kicker was, when I was supposed to represent the particular church I was going to, Foursquare, for the World Council of Churches, at the General Assembly meeting in 1998 while I was a graduate student, and they denied me going because they said they didn't want me to represent them—I was a graduate student at the time. And I had been involved in an international dialogue, but they picked a white pastor. And I was like, you know what? This is not working. And I, you know, I had been in discernment during that time period about going back to the Catholic Church. And so I just went back. That was it.
BLAIR HODGES: Did you feel like that choice was made because you were Black? That they want to avoid—
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yes, I do. [laughs] Yeah, I do. I think it was because I would—you know, honestly, it's a toss-up between whether because I was Black or a woman. Honestly, you know, I think if I had been a white woman, that might have been the same choice.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you sort of tick both boxes. It's hard to—
ANTHEA BUTLER: I do.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, in writing this book, you're talking to Evangelicals as one who used to affiliate there. Do you think that that makes people more skeptical to approach your work, especially Evangelicals in particular that would say, “oh, this is a person who's disgruntled” or whatever?
ANTHEA BUTLER: It could be. What's interesting now is that I'm seeing people starting to do it in book clubs. So I think that'll be interesting. I think the people who are supposed to get it will get it.
But you know, here's the problem. The problem if Evangelicals don't want to deal with it, it's fine. This book is gonna have legs because other people are going to read it, because other people want to understand Evangelicals, and other people want to understand why you could have a guillotine and a cross at the nation’s Capital. Why is it that you could be flying flags that says “Jesus saves” while you're smearing feces on the American Capitol. They want to understand why people won't get a vaccine. Right? And why pastors keep preaching against that and saying, “that's their religious freedom,” when in fact, they're squelching the freedom of a whole bunch of other people.
And now that we're into this next phase of Delta, that, you know, children are very much at risk. I think those are the people who want to read this book, because they want to understand what this is. And I hope that what I've done by opening up this history, is to give them an understanding of why this happened. I'm not prescribing something for everybody, because I don't think that's my job. My job is to give you a historical viewpoint and a history and the research that I've done over the last twenty years. And then it's up to people to decide—then what?
Standing at a precipice - 48:03
BLAIR HODGES: You say that Evangelicals are at a precipice right now. What's that precipice?
ANTHEA BUTLER: I mean, the precipice of becoming a cultish movement that has no real—I want to say this gently but I also want to say it forcefully—a movement that can only be considered to be antithetical to democratic ideals of this nation. And I want to make that really clear, that you don't have to believe in democracy to have religion, right? But if you live in a democratic country, and you don't want democracy, then you want something else. You want fascism or you want monarchy, or you want something else. And I think that Evangelicals are so afraid of losing their power and their position as the moral arbiters for everyone else in this country, that they are willing to side with the devil right now to get it.
BLAIR HODGES: Some people seem to like that, like there are Evangelicals that would kind of embrace that and think opposition to them signifies how right they are, right?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Of course, because they have lived in this space of thinking that opposition is good, and that they are vilified and special because people oppose them. And it causes you not to look at yourself as you truly are. I think about that title of the old Christian Smith book, Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving, right? Now I would call that book Evangelicalism, embattled and dying.
BLAIR HODGES: What are they supposed to do?
ANTHEA BUTLER: I don't know.
And that, you know, like I said, I'm not trying to make prescriptions for this. But I really want to say one thing, I think it's important. People will think of this as an altar call to the individuals. It is an altar call to movement. And I think some of the leaders that they've listened to are not good leaders.
BLAIR HODGES: That altar call comes in your conclusion.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Sure does.
BLAIR HODGES: In fact, I don't know that you use the words right there. But I wrote in the margins: “altar call!”
ANTHEA BUTLER: Absolutely! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you say “My analysis and prognostications may be dire. But it's never too late to make amends.”
What kind of amends can be made?
ANTHEA BUTLER: Oh, God, just for—you know, the biggest amend now they could do: go get a damn shot. I mean, if you're listening to this podcast but you have not gotten vaccinated, you do not care about your fellow man. What does the scripture say? “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Evangelicals love themselves so much right now that they're being selfish, and we're in a major pandemic because they are selfish. And now I know, this is not the thing you expected me to say. Get a damn shot. Get a shot. I mean, give a shot because we're gonna be here forever. If you don't get a shot. That's number one.
The second thing you can do is begin to think about the ways in which your stances and your voting and your particular way of being safe in the world is causing other people to be unsafe. Whether they're unsafe at the border, whether they're unsafe at the traffic stop, whether they're unsafe because some Evangelical decided to change the Title IX laws, and young men and women get raped on college campuses.
What does your voting do that makes somebody not be able to get an education? What does your voting do—because we can't get anything done in the Senate or the Congress right now because we have people who won't govern. You are voting for death. You are not voting for life. You are not doing things that are bringing life. You are bringing death.
BLAIR HODGES: As you lay out this history that brings us up to this present moment, you write in the Acknowledgments that you wrote this book “in conversations, in camaraderie, and sometimes, in despair.”
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's despairing. I mean, that hadn't even happened. I mean, when I wrote that 1/6 hadn't even happened, you know? The insurrection hadn't happened. But I watched how people lied about the virus, how people have been lying about the elections, how people have embraced conspiracies, and Evangelicals are particularly susceptible to them because of the ways in which they read scripture and other things, right?
And I despaired because I lost some really good friends who just became hateful and vitriolic. And they were dear friends. I mean, I had Christmases with them, I—you know, I traveled with them, I love their parents. And I couldn't be friends with them anymore because they turned into these people that I didn't recognize. They were full of hate. They were not full of love. They did not care for their fellow man, unless their fellow man or woman was a Republican. And I was just like, I can't, I don't even know what I do with you. I'm sick of listening to you trash people that you don't even know.
Light on the horizon - 52:50
BLAIR HODGES: With all that despair, do you see reasons for hope? Do you see any light on the horizon?
ANTHEA BUTLER: I think the light on horizon is that there's a lot of people who are seeing this vitriol and have decided to turn away from it, which I think is great. I think that there's a way in which we can hope that this decline in the numbers of Evangelicals might translate into something else.
But I don't know that I'm completely out of despair because of the virus, and the ways in which people are responding to that. And you know, quite frankly, the ways in which a lot of Evangelicals are interpreting religious freedom,—and some Catholics too—as to be whether they could wear a mask or not. This is the stupidest thing ever. It's not about this, it's about science. But the same kind of things that have bedeviled Evangelicalism before—you know, not wanting to pay attention to science, all of that—are things that will affect them in ways that they may not be able to come back from.
BLAIR HODGES: And your book tells that cautionary tale. I mean, toward the end, you say that “there's a reckoning on the near horizon.” And what does the reckoning look like in your eyes?
ANTHEA BUTLER: The reckoning looks like empty churches, empty coffers, people who are estranged from their children. Loss of sense of self loss of community, having to see themselves fade into not obscurity, but into ignominy, right? And I think embracing Donald Trump had a lot to do with that.
But it's not just about Trump. It is the embrace of this history that led them up to Trump. And so the ways in which we can look at them now is as a movement that has injected poison into our nation.
BLAIR HODGES: People can read more about how we got to that point in your book. It's Anthea Butler's book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. We're gonna take a break for just a second and come back with a book recommendation from Anthea Butler. We'll be right back.
Best Books - 57:24
BLAIR HODGES: We're back with Anthea Butler. She's a professor of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania and department chair of Religious Studies there. She's also the author of several books, including White Evangelical Racism. She's also done a lot of work as a public intellectual, you may have seen or read her work in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other publications on MSNBC and CNN. You get around, Anthea, you've been a lot of places!
ANTHEA BUTLER: [laughs] I get around, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: All right. Well, we're talking about best books in this segment, this is your opportunity to make a recommendation, some people have made a couple of recommendations. I'm just going to turn the microphone over to you to talk about a best book.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Okay. Well, I think right now, I would suggest for people—because I think history is always a contested thing—I want to recommend How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. And the reason I recommend this book, in part, is because when I'm teaching, I never get students who really have had a good idea, or good clasp about the history of slavery in this country. And I think understanding that helps you to understand a lot of what has happened, first of all. And secondarily, it also helps to, you know, discount some of these arguments that we're having about Critical Race Theory and everything else, because that's a buzz word, right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
ANTHEA BUTLER: This next book that I'm going to recommend is not a book that's out yet. And this may just make all your readers go crazy right now. But I'm gonna do it anyway. And I'm going to plug in a different way than you think. I'm going to recommend that you read the new 1619 project book, A New Origin Story. And here's why.
Yes, there were problems with parts of the project before, the history, you know, all of this stuff. But I have a chapter in that book that's simply called “Church,” and it's about Black church. And it's about the history of the Black church, and how democracy has been held up by African Americans since slavery. And that particular kind of way in which this whole history about African Americans in America has not just been a history about construction in the Black church and all of this, but about the ways in which we have always had to challenge, to fight for the democratic process and the ideas of democracy that had been placed down in this country by the framers. And I think that's a really important argument to make. And I think that's a different understanding about what this history is.
And I know for some people, you just say “1619” and they'll lose their minds. But I think that if you're going to criticize something, you should read it first of all, and understand what it is. Secondarily, I will say to you right now, that I have never been fact checked so hard in my life!
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs]
ANTHEA BUTLER: There were over three hundred fact checks in the piece that I wrote that started off at 5,000 words and ended up at 8,500 words. There were two fact checkers, four editors. I—like, never in my life, even with this particular book, have I been so vetted as I was with this chapter in the 1619 book.
So I promise two things. Number one, that everyone will have been looked up under sideways and all the ways about this book, and every chapter that's in that book, number one. And number two, I think that, given all the things that are happening right now and how 1619 has become this flashpoint, that means that it is challenging something. It is challenging something about the notions of who we think and what we think America is. And I think if you learn the history of America, and you learn it from people who actually have studied it, who actually have worked, people like Kevin Kruse at Princeton and others, then you will get a better idea about what it is that's truly worth fighting for here in America. And what it is that we're trying to do with this American project, as opposed to what people have told us we're trying to do with it.
BLAIR HODGES: When is A New Origin Story coming out?
ANTHEA BUTLER: It will be out in November; I believe November 16 is the drop day.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, great. That might be, I don't know, that that might be around the time this episode comes out.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Oh, wow!
BLAIR HODGES: So great timing!
ANTHEA BUTLER: Yeah!
BLAIR HODGES: So for people again, it's A New Origin Story. That's one of the recommendations. The other is How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith. We'll have links to both of those books and also to Anthea Butler's book White Evangelical Racism, links to that at firesidepod.org. You can check those out.
Anthea, thank you so much for joining us today is really great talking to you.
ANTHEA BUTLER: Great to talk to you, too!
Outro - 61:46
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.
Alright, so another episode is in the books, the fire is dimming, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. If you don’t know where to review the show you can always just click on an episode and scroll down past the transcript, and you’ll see the comment section there. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions to blair@firesidepod.org.
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Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistant, Kate Davis. She created the transcript. And also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, Caroline Kline, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.
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NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.