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Hello and welcome to Straight Wide American Jesus.

And our series You're Not Welcome here, which focuses on identity, identity,

politics, understanding how those things fit together.

My name is Dan Miller.

I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.

Straight Wide American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the Cap Center University, California, Santa Barbara.

And I am pleased to say hello to all of those who are listening as we continue to think about identity, identity, politics,

what those terms are, how they come together.

And I'm issued today to pick up a theme that I introduced at the end of last session.

I want to take a couple of minutes though to remind us sort of where we are, what we're talking about, how we've gotten here.

I have argued that identity, right? We use this term identity, this concept of identity, politics, it can be pretty mystifying.

But I've argued that this term identity is fundamentally about the recognition of similarity and difference, right?

It's really, really pretty simple. You look around and you recognize other people as being like you or different from you or like or different from others.

And I've argued that identity, this process of recognizing and recognizing similarity and difference is a really basic mechanism for social categorization and organization.

That is, it's how we make sense of the social world, right?

We walk around and we identify different people as fitting into different groups.

And again, just to illustrate that this isn't as strange as it sounds like we think of identity as having to do with like big things like racial identity or ethnic or gender identity and it does have to do with those things.

But we look around and we identify children as being different from adults and we identify people by age, we identify them by dress.

Maybe we identify them, I'm just imagining walking through a mall or something like this, we identify and categorize them maybe by what store they're in, what stores do they go to?

We categorize them for all different kinds of reasons in all different kinds of ways and every time we do this and most of the time it's not conscious, it's not something we're aware of doing, we're using identity, right?

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