Pulling together the lectures for my course "After Religion" is proving more difficult than I anticipated. Part of the reason is surely the discombobulation of zoom lecturing. Especially if you make use of slides, links to videos and other online materials such as google.docs, it's more than one compute desktop can accommodate ... and even if you use none of those, you can't see more than a handful of the students in the class, immobilized in their zoom boxes. Having to switch computers in midstream surely didn't help, and my printer's run out of ink so I've been reading my notes from a phone!
Starting this week things are worse, or perhaps better: I'm setting aside the class time to meet students for small discussions, and circulating a prerecorded lecture beforehand. Prerecording makes the technical transitions easier - you can just pause your recording as you switch from sharing one thing to another, adjusting settings as needed - but the pretense that this is some sort of live communication, a site for connection, is lost. How do you know if anything you've said has gotten across? The temptation is to let the slides take over, hiding in a little box, or even closing that box, and becoming a voice-over. Writing the whole thing out is next, I suppose.
But these lectures are hard also because it's material I haven't lectured about before, and because it involves questions I haven't found answers for. This sort of subject matter is perfect for a seminar, but a lecture - especially the disembodied zoom lecture - demands a performance of certainty. On "spirituality" (especially of the "spiritual but not religious" kind), the topic of the last two weeks, it wasn't so hard. But this week's topic is "(White)(Christian)(America)" - the parentheses forming the question if and how these are related or even interdefined - and its central question the mystery of the Trump-supporting White Evangelical. There's heaps of material here but synthesizing it proved daunting. For one thing, not all Evangelicals are white, and not all Evangelicals supported Trump - though the white ones overwhelmingly did. For another, the majority of white Christians of all sorts voted for Trump in both elections, though not by majorities quite so large, and smaller than in 2016. But there's also the fact that I, too, am a White American Christian. When I showed video of thugs loudly praying in the Senate Chamber during the attack on the U. S. Capitol (starting at 8:00 here) I felt I had to say "they look like me, I look like them."
But, I said, appalled though I am by them and by the legions of others who think White Christian America is God's plan, I also have to speak as a scholar of religion, and it's not my business to call these false Christians. I shared a clip from a radio interview the Rev. William Barber gave (4:57-10:00 here), in which he reclaims the words "Evangelical" for the evangel, for the good news preached to the poor (Jesus' first words in the oldest gospel), and denounces white Evangelicals who celebrate wealth and ignore the poor as "heretics" involved in "theological malpractice." As a Christian, I said, I completely agree with him, but as a scholar I have to take into account all who understand themselves to be Christian, William Barber - but also William Barr.
