Oh, straight White American Jesus. My name is Brad O'Nishi. I am Associate Professor of Religion,

Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host.

My name is Dan Miller. I'm an associate professor of religion and

social thought at Landmark College. And today our focus, we're calling the episode

Dating Jesus. It's kind of a weird title and I'm going to start with a story a little embarrassing story about once upon a time as an undergrad and as a reminder as an undergrad I was

Died in the Wool hardcore evangelical Christian I was a died in the wool hardcore evangelical Christian.

I was an evangelical undergraduate institution.

And I was crushing pretty hard on this girl there.

And I asked her out one time.

And she said, she shot me down and the reason

she shot me down is that right now she said I'm dating Jesus now that's going to

sound weird and you'll have stories like this too but within the evangelical context at

certainly at the time that was not a weird notion and it was it was a euphemism

for an evangelical parlance focusing on their relationship with God as opposed to

dating but it was also a broader euphemism focusing on their relationship with God as opposed to dating.

But it was also a broader euphemism for the purity movement

and culture within evangelicalism.

And what we want to talk about today is a little bit about that movement,

but more importantly, what that movement has to tell us

about evangelicals and politics and broader culture. I mean first of all it's hard to be

mad if someone's dating Jesus okay look, look, I mean, that's just like, okay, you can't compete with that and you got to just say, well, you know, that's, you got to leave it there. I mean, anyone who's God and human simultaneously literally walks on water.

I mean yeah that's just sorry just go just walk away. More seriously

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