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Hello and welcome to Straight Wide American Jesus.

I am your host Dan Miller, associate professor of religion and social thought at Lamar College.

We are hosted in partnership with the CapCenter UCSB and you are listening to my series on your not welcome here, focusing on identity, identity politics.

We've been introducing those concepts. We'll be looking at things like how concrete social identities form and how that informs American religion and politics.

So thank you for joining me. I want to invite any who have not to consider supporting Straight Wide American Jesus on our Patreon account.

We value the work that we're doing and we hear from a lot of other people who do as well and your support allows us to keep doing it.

And for all of those who already support us financially in so many other ways, I want to thank you all.

I also want to thank those who reach out to me.

I can be reached at Daniel Miller at landmark.edu.

All of you who've reached out to me with great comments, questions, thoughts, insights, follow-ups about the different episodes and the topics raised in this series.

Keep those questions and comments coming. They really do inform what I do and I try to incorporate them into what we're doing.

I try to respond everything that I hear from folks and all the inquiries I get and I know that I miss some. So if I've missed you, I apologize.

Very often the ideas and thoughts of people are bringing up are things that we will be getting to in the series.

I just want to thank everybody for their continued support and your listening.

So let's dive right in here.

I want to recap a little bit from the discussion in the last episode and lead into the discussion in this episode.

And last week I looked at Mark Lilla, a historian from Columbia University and a little bit from Tucker Carlson as well.

But I want to focus on the mark a little bit here because he's critical of identity and identity politics because he says it represents what he calls a Facebook view of identity.

And we talked about this.

And it's this notion that those who appeal to identity as a political force are simply appealing to something that's a matter of personal preference is purely subjective.

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