Oh, straight white American Jesus. My name is Brad Oñishi. I am a associate professor

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

My name is Dan Miller. I'm a associate professor of religion and social thought at Lamar College.

And today, our focus, we're calling the episode of dating Jesus. It's kind of a weird, 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, you know, dying 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, that's really 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 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, I mean,

that's just like, okay, you can't compete with that, and you've got to just say, well,

you know, you've 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, though, Dan, I think some people have heard a lot about purity culture.

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