Faith After Evangelicalism

Straight White American Jesus

Axis Mundi Media: Bradley Onishi + Daniel Miller

News, Politics

4.7 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brad explains how evangelicalism destroys faith, because it destroys any sense of uncertainty and unpredictability. By working in a register of moral, political, and theological certainty, evangelicalism becomes the anti-thesis of faith. Brad calls this disenchanted theology. By contrast, he argues that as a secular person he has become a person of faith in ways he never experienced as an evangelicals. For him, even as a non-religious person, the world is enchanted--full of unknowability and unpredictability--in ways that mean the human condition is always marked by vulnerability and wonder. He goes so far as to say that inter-faith dialogue is possible among secular people and religious. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://swaj.supportingcast.fm

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus, host and partnership with the Cap Center
0:16.2	at UCSB.
0:17.2	I'm Brad O'Nishi, faculty and religion, Skidmore College.
0:22.3	Want to talk today about faith and some of you saw me on Twitter the other day and
0:28.3	I was reacting to a tweet by Greg Locke who's a sort of infamous provocateur pastor, somebody
0:36.1	who burned Andrew Cidell's, the founding myth book on Twitter, on video, and here's
0:43.1	what he had to say.
0:44.1	He said, if you're preaching about faith in an empty auditorium because of COVID fear,
0:48.4	you've missed the entire point of what faith is, fear and faith do not mix.
0:55.4	I had a sort of strong reaction to that and one of the things that I said on Twitter was
1:00.1	that I became a person of faith after leaving evangelicalism and you may say, well, Brad,
1:06.3	you identify a secular, you don't identify as a Christian or another religious tradition,
1:10.9	so how is it that you became a person of faith after you left?
1:15.1	And my response is that evangelicalism is about certainty in every sense, moral, theological
1:23.6	and political.
1:25.5	It eradicates mystery and so in my view, it eradicates faith.
1:30.1	What does that mean in reality or in practice?
1:33.5	I remember and I've shared this many times on the podcast that in 2004, I was thinking
1:38.5	about voting for John Kerry and so many elders and so many people in my life told me that
1:44.5	abortion was wrong, that there was just no mystery, no gray area, no fuzziness about
1:51.1	the issue.
1:52.1	It's absolutely one or the other, murder or not.
	...

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