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Hello and welcome to Straight Wide American Jesus.

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, the University of California at Santa Barbara.

You are joining me for, it's a second installment in a new series that we began last week called You Don't Belong Here.

Looking at religion, identity, politics, identity, politics, and all the things related to that in our society and in the world around us really.

And last week, I briefly introduced the theme of identity politics, what we were talking about.

We will be working through this for, I don't know what you even know for how long, but for a lot of sessions because it's a really complicated topic.

One that matters to me a lot and one that I know matters to a lot of you.

And I want to thank those who took the time to contact me this week and I'll say this now, one person referred to me as old school.

And I guess I am old school, if you want to reach me, the way to do it is via email and you can reach me at Daniel Miller at landmark.edu.

I would love to hear from you, but I noted briefly the concept of identity politics, what that means.

And I noted that people on both the political right and the political left are critical of the concept of identity and the way it plays out in politics and the role that it has in political life.

And I noted there that a lot of listeners on this show on the podcast will be really familiar with the criticisms of identity politics from those on the right, from the Christian right, from Christian nationalists on the part of lots of white American evangelical Christians.

We talk about this all the time, but I noted that there are also liberal and progressive critics of identity politics, but I didn't take very far into it.

And some of the some of the people who contacted me this week pointed this out and asked questions, I said, you say that this is an issue for people on the left.

What do you mean? What are you talking about or people who had a really specific vision of that and knew what I was getting at, but said, I wish you would say more about that because I feel like people miss this.

So today what I want to do is is kind of address that and digging a little bit more deeply and a little more concretely on those criticisms of identity politics on both the right and the left.

The shape they take where they come from, what people in those different ideological and social spaces have to say about identity politics and what they really think about it.

And I'm going to spend some time on the right, but again, that's something we talk about a lot on the podcast. And so I'm going to spend a fair amount of time as well looking at liberal and progressive critiques of identity politics.

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