This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Bradley Onishi [Twitter]. Brad is ‘a social commentator, scholar, writer, teacher, coach, and co-host of the Straight White American Jesus (SWAJ) podcast’. We spoke to Brad about his new book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books, 2023):
The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture’s preparation for war. Religion scholar and former insider Bradley Onishi maps the origins of White Christian nationalism and traces its offshoots in Preparing for War.
Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country–communities of which Onishi was once a part–to ignite a cold civil war?
See also : Is America Already in a Civil War? (An expert in militant Christian nationalism weighs in: “There are little fires all around us”), Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, June 15, 2023 | Tracing the evangelical roots of white nationalism, David Conrads, Christian Science Monitor, March 2023.
4.30pm, Thursday, August 10, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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- Last week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! Cam spoke to Valerie Morse about Julian Batchelor’s crackpot ‘Stop Co-Governance’ tour over the pond in Aotearoa/New Zealand. You can listen to that here. On Sunday, in a choice display of anti-racist community solidarity, a Batchelor meeting in Whangārei was stopped from starting by peaceful protesters blocking the entrance to the venue (Stop Co-Governance Tour in Whangārei met by peaceful protest, Karina Cooper and Mike Dinsdale, Northern Advocate, August 6, 2023).
