Hello. Hello and

welcome to Straight White American Jesus.

My name is Brad O'Nishi and I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies

at Skidmore College.

And I'm going to have, like I did last week, a shorter episode today,

just because we are working hard to curate our new series,

a history of the Religious Right since 1960 and that will debut on May 26.

I will be here Friday with Dan for the weekly roundup, but for the moment I wanted to talk about

evangelicalism and individualism and I wanted to talk about that in the context of COVID-19.

I am for the moment living in my home state of California and I know many people across the country

envision California as a kind of bastion of liberal politics and culture and in many

ways it is but there are significant pockets of this state which have very long and wide

conservative histories. And that brings up something that happened yesterday.

Yesterday there were protests in Orange,

which is in Orange County, about 30 miles from LA,

to reopen the state.

They were protests against Governor Newsom

State Home Directives and protest against Gavner Newsom's stay-at-home directives and

protest against the need to keep the economy closed.

Now, something we're going to go into in our new series

is just how Orange County, California was in fact an epicenter for the conservative

political and religious revolutions in the 60s and 70s that really have shaped the contemporary evangelical scene.

...