There are two stories about Nazis in the news this week that caught my attention — because, in case you haven’t already noticed, there have been a lot of stories about Nazis in the news lately. I want to be clear here: I am not using the term “Nazi” euphemistically, or exaggeratedly, in the way of like, “that person said something racist, what a Nazi.” No, no, no. These are people openly espousing Nazi ideas and speaking in Nazi language.

The first story is truly bizarre. It happened in Orlando, on August 29th. A guy named Paul Miller, who goes by “Gypsy Crusader,” beat his opponent, Ben “King” Azoulay, by split decision at the Kia Center. At the mic after the fight, Miller called his opponent “a short little [effing] Jew prick,” then appeared to give the Nazi salute twice before leaving the ring — with a Nazi swastika flag visible in the crowd. The event was built around and paid for by a crypto casino called Duel, and a Duel staffer posted, as part of the event’s own promotion: “the world’s first anti-Jew versus Jew boxing match.” The anti-Jew came out victorious.

The second story is from just north of there, in Georgia, and it concerns a staffer for Representative Mike Collins — who is currently running against John Ossoff for a Senate seat. The staffer, Preston Parra, worked on Collins’s 2024 campaign and has continued on as a contractor, helping with fundraising and media promotion. Parra posted an image of himself in KKK robes and has used racial slurs for Black people repeatedly, along with posts about White power.

In a Washington Post story that exposed his Nazi connections, Parra said he is not a White supremacist because it goes against his religion, and because he has a Colombian father. “I do think that the White race contributes more to the world,” he said.

Two strategies, not two degrees of extremism

A couple of years ago, I was working with a researcher who specialized in tracking Nazi ideology in the United States, and he told me: just watch how much these folks are going to go mainstream after the 2024 election. I have to admit — even as someone who researches Christian nationalism and the far right — I thought that was hard to believe. Nazism, mainstream? This is America. We make movies about how fun it is to torture and kill Nazis — remember, Inglourious Basterds? We automatically cite Hitler as the epitome of human evil. How could Nazism become mainstream in America? Racism, maybe. Misogyny, sure. But Nazism?

My researcher friend explained it to me, drawing largely on the work of Leonard Zeskind, whose 2009 book Blood and Politics is a valuable resource if you want to dig deeper into American Nazism. Zeskind’s book is organized around two competing strategies within the White nationalist movement: mainstreaming and vanguardism.

The mainstreamers really believe they can change the culture — that a majority of White Christians will eventually come around to their perspective, evolving an ethno-state out of the current regime. The vanguardists don’t think that’s going to happen. They think you need to upend society, seize power outright, so they build smaller cadres — accelerationist movements, militias, the neo-Nazi groups people picture: shaved heads, swastikas, Charlottesville in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” They’re the ones carrying the swastikas at the marches. They want to upend the current system.

To be clear, this isn’t about degrees of extremism — the mainstreamers aren’t the “moderate” Nazis and the vanguardists the extreme ones. They’re trying to get to the same destination. They just think they can work through the system. The mainstreamers are more patient. They are not softer than the other kind.

And this is what we’ve seen happen since Trump’s second inauguration: the mainstreamers have surged into the mainstream of the MAGA movement, even as the vanguardists have grown bolder in their own hijinks. That’s what Gypsy Crusader is — a vanguard guy. Overt. The SS tattoo, the salutes, the antisemitism, completely undisguised. But don’t dismiss it: consider what had to happen for that event to come together. The Kia Center is owned and operated by the city of Orlando. They had to get a permit. It was built around and paid for by a corporate sponsor. And roughly 10,000 people — the arena holds about 20,000 — came out to watch a Nazi defeat a Jew at MMA and then throw up Hitler salutes. Vanguardism used to require moving to the margins of society — living on the outskirts, joining a militia. Now it’s a MAGA content style with a revenue model that can draw a big crowd.

Here’s the part of the strategy that matters most: the vanguardists lull us into a false sense of safety. Gypsy Crusader provokes an immune response — officials in Florida condemn the event as disgusting, Orlando puts out a statement saying they don’t condone the messaging and took the flag down as soon as they saw it. Everyone condemns it. But nobody’s career ends, because there was no career at stake. It’s a spectacle, and the spectacle happens and then moves on.

Where it actually lands

Now consider the mainstreamers. When Preston Parra integrates himself into Mike Collins’s campaign and becomes a Republican consultant, he states his ideology plainly — White people are superior, White people contribute more — and then denies the label in the same breath: “I’m not a Nazi, I’m not a White supremacist, don’t call me that.” That’s not a slip. That is the method of mainstreaming.

Nick Fuentes — whose followers are called Groypers, and who is probably the most prominent Nazi mainstreamer in the country — is a compelling spokesperson for exactly this version of the strategy. To his followers: “Bit by bit we start to break down these walls. And then one day we become the mainstream.” He also tells them: “Your job is to get into the Ivy League. Your job is to get into these offices and do what you need to do.” He wants them to hold their views close to the chest, to disguise the ideology so they can get into positions of power and influence.

And what have we seen in the second Trump administration? The mainstreaming of exactly these figures, insinuating themselves into the administration and into influential positions in Republican politics:

• Last October, Politico published leaked Telegram messages among young Republicans — up-and-coming figures in Republican politics — in which Black people were called “monkeys” and “the watermelon people,” there were jokes about gas chambers, and one candidate to chair a chapter replied to the group, “I love Hitler.” JD Vance’s response: “Kids do stupid things. I refuse to join the pearl clutching.” These are not kids — they’re full-grown adults in their 20s and 30s — but he wanted to brush it off.

• Around that same time, Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, withdrew his nomination after Politico published texts in which he said he has “a Nazi streak in me from time to time,” and called the Martin Luther King holiday something “to be tossed into the seventh circle of hell.” He couldn’t get the nomination — except he was then appointed Deputy General Counsel at the General Services Administration, and by December had become acting general counsel.

• Around the end of 2025, much of this happening right after the Charlie Kirk assassination, Tucker Carlson brought Nick Fuentes onto his podcast — one of the clearest moments of Nazism going mainstream. The Heritage Foundation imploded over it: its president, Kevin Roberts, a close friend of JD Vance’s, said Heritage would not disavow Carlson, accusing a “venomous coalition” and “globalist class” of coming after him. Staffers began resigning — and notably, it was the people objecting to the mainstreaming of Nazism who left. The mainstreamers, and the people who could tolerate them, stuck around.

• This summer, Politico reported an aide’s estimate that 50% of GOP congressional staff are Groypers or Groyper-adjacent. A Trump official told the New Yorker the figure was closer to 75%. Rod Dreher put it at 30–40% of Republican staffers under 30. This isn’t survey data — but it’s insiders, people watching this up close, pointing at their own colleagues.

• Mike Collins’s son-in-law was reported by CNN in July to be a White-nationalist-adjacent influencer with a history of sharing antisemitic material and Nazi imagery. Collins himself has posted things that are at least White-nationalist adjacent, and had to fire his chief of staff over a campaign social media post. Collins is the Republican Senate nominee running against John Ossoff — one of the most prominent Jewish politicians in the country. When you’re on the mainstreamer track and you get on the inside, that doesn’t end at a spectacle. It ends in a competitive Senate race.

Pay attention to the mainstreamers

The vanguardists give us these spectacles, and the spectacles make us feel more comfortable with ourselves — the system worked, people condemned it, everyone agreed Nazis are bad, and nothing needed to change because apparently nothing needed to. But the mainstreamers’ strategy creates personnel: people embedded within the government, embedded within Republican politics and the MAGA coalition, who keep getting into more and more positions even when they’re exposed. They don’t get shunned. They disavow it — “I’m not a White supremacist, I’m not a Nazi” — and that disavowal is part of the strategy, not a departure from it. Meanwhile the spectacle over here becomes a distraction, even as the ideology insinuates itself deeper and deeper in.

My advice to anyone still paying attention to this: pay attention to the mainstreamers. It’s not accidental what they’re doing — it’s intentional, thought out, an agenda they’re trying to enact through the party. And part of that agenda is that they deny the agenda even as they continue to enact it. That is why Nazism keeps showing up in the news.

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A Detour Back to 2008

I have to tell you all, I am kind of in the midst of a big life transition right now, and it’s something I’m a little apprehensive about — and it relates directly to today’s topic. So let’s go back to the ancient days of, let’s say, 2008.

At that time I was living in South Florida, working as a sports writer, covering a hockey team. I was also doing a lot of coverage of high school football, which, as many of you know, is a really big deal across America, particularly in places like Florida and Texas. So I was driving all over the state, often at odd hours, and with me in my car was a huge stack of papers — not only for high school football statistics, but a stack of papers with the initials MQ. MapQuest. My boyfriend at the time, now my husband, had a nickname for me: Magellan. Because every time he got in my car, he’d have to move aside this huge stack of printed-out MapQuest directions.

Why am I telling you all this story today? Because the transition I’m contemplating is that I may no longer be using Google Maps, which has been the backbone of my phone’s navigation system for many, many years now.

An Executive Order and a Renamed Lake

Why would I no longer use Google Maps? This past week, President Donald Trump signed yet another seemingly superfluous, spite-motivated executive order — the same kind of move he’s made before with Mexico. In the midst of a spat with Mexico over trade, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Pulling from that same bag of tricks, this past week, in the midst of a trade spat with Canada — arguably our most important trade partner — he renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America.

Google Maps, alongside some other famous tech companies, quickly renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America on their maps. MapQuest, I’m hearing, is holding out.

Why does this matter, and what does it have to do with what we cover here — the intersection of religion and politics, the encroachment of right-wing Christian nationalism into American policy and culture, and how that encroachment reflects an increasingly authoritarian view of identity, culture, and country? Renaming a lake, a body of water, may seem silly. But as a Lutheran pastor and theologian, I know that renaming carries a great deal of significance. We know this because naming, throughout Hebrew culture and the culture of the Bible, denotes identity. Renaming is a significant way to mark a changing identity — which is exactly what Donald Trump is trying to do in America: change the identity of what it means to be an American, from a shared set of ideals about freedom and openness to immigrants, to, instead, a homogeneous race and culture rooted in right-wing Christianity.

What the Bible Says About Names

So what examples do we have in the Bible? There’s Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel after he wrestled with God; he became one of the founding patriarchs of the Hebrew family. There’s Simon, one of the disciples — perhaps the most significant — whose name was changed to Peter, which in Greek was Cephas, meaning “the rock on which I will found my church,” as Jesus said. Peter became, in the Catholic faith, the first pope, the foundation of Christianity after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And in the New Testament there’s the renaming of Saul — who had been persecuting early Christians, going after them with violence — to Paul, who became, alongside Peter, one of the most important founders of the early church. Saul, cast down on the road, becomes blind for a number of weeks; when his blindness was taken away, he went from being Saul to Paul, from a persecutor of early Christians to the author of a majority of the New Testament.

In each of these cases, there’s a significant change. Jacob goes from being kind of a scoundrel, a trickster — which is what the name Jacob means in Hebrew — to Israel, a patriarch, the father of the twelve tribes. Simon goes from a rough-around-the-edges fisherman who would even deny Jesus, to Peter, the rock of the church. And Saul, perhaps the most significant transition, goes from persecutor to leader of the early church, even going to jail for his support of Jesus.

Great Lakes, Great Erasures

All of this got me thinking of the Ballad of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot’s song about the tragic shipwreck on Lake Superior. In its opening lines, the song traces its story back through the region’s Ojibwe heritage, sometimes called Anishinaabe, sometimes Chippewa, and names Lake Superior by its Indigenous name.

I bring this up because it reminds us of the significance of renaming, and the ways renaming has shaped the United States over the years. Growing up, like many American schoolchildren, I learned the names of the Great Lakes from the acronym HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Like many place names across America and across Minnesota — including the name Minnesota itself — these come from Indigenous languages, rooted in the tribes who were settled here long before explorers like Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer from whom “America” gets its name, ever arrived.

Indigenous tribes themselves have been renamed by Europeans, and have sometimes had to reclaim their own tribal names. Names are transitory, particularly names of natural bodies of water, mountains, land masses — they depend on which group of people has power and control.

Renaming as Repair, Renaming as Subversion

Over the past several years in American life, we’ve seen renaming used the way it’s used in the Bible — as a way to honor life and honor identity. Here in Minneapolis, we saw that with the renaming of one of our beloved chain of lakes: Lake Calhoun, named for South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun, a proponent of slavery and slaveholder. During a period when we were looking to make amends for that history of White supremacy, Lake Calhoun was changed to Bde Maka Ska — which wasn’t really a renaming at all, but a return to the lake’s original name from the Indigenous tribes who lived here. It takes a little time for White Minnesotans to figure out how to pronounce some of these Indigenous names, but we can do it, because we’re honoring the identity of the land and the lake itself.

As we’ve often seen with the rise of Trumpism and Christian nationalism, this movement subverts things that have been done recently in American history to bring honor, life, and repair to old wounds. It does that same thing — renaming — but for a different purpose. Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and of Lake Ontario isn’t really about honoring Amerigo Vespucci. His goal is to recast the identity of America by removing names that have honored the historic legacy of these places — whether it’s the Gulf of Mexico (Mexico once owned much of what is the American West today) or Ontario, another word, like many of the Great Lakes, that harkens back to Indigenous tribes. Replacing them with the singular word “America” speaks to a desire to recast our country from one of multiplicity and diversity into a singular entity rooted in a vision of America that is homogeneous, White, right-wing, and narrowly Christian — recasting Jesus from a peacemaker and giver into a violent warrior.

United States of America, Not Just “America”

Timothy Snyder wrote a good piece on this, which I’d encourage you to check out. One thing he noted: this rename-and-claim of Trumpism and its attendant Christian nationalism — repeating “America, America, America” — leaves out the first part: the United States. While “America” harkens back to an Italian explorer, “United States” speaks to our existence as a republic — many different parts forming one whole, unified not by culture or ethnicity or religion or race, but by a shared desire for democracy, for freedom, for welcoming immigrants.

Snyder suggests that in the face of renaming — even something as seemingly ridiculous as renaming a Great Lake or a gulf — we should focus on that first part, United States. What does that mean? To reclaim and continue to reiterate our identity as people of the United States of America, and not as people who are so easily manipulated, whose identity as a country can be so easily changed.

So, About MapQuest

Which brings me back to Google Maps. If you’re going to so quickly change, and seek to be a big part of the many puzzle pieces Trump is putting together to bring increasing authoritarianism to America — hey, maybe we can all just go back to using MapQuest. And you won’t even have to print it out and leave the pieces of paper all over your car.

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Adapted from a conversation on the Axis Daily Brief podcast with host Brad Onishi, writer and historian Karen E. Park, and religious scholar and museum worker Emma Cieslik.

While the Trump administration has spent months accusing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of ideological capture by the far left, even ordering signage to frame its exhibits as “alternative” or false history, a very different kind of institution just a few blocks away on the National Mall has been getting the opposite treatment. The Museum of the Bible, long understood as a hub of Christian nationalist organizing, is being embraced by the administration as a partner in celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary.

A Renovation Timed to the 250th

Emma Cieslik, who works at one of Washington, D.C.’s major research and museum institutions, laid out the timeline. This past Fourth of July marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the city became, in her words, a hub for revisiting the nation’s history — from a state fair on the National Mall to a Grand Prix race that had only just been dismantled.

The Museum of the Bible used the moment to unveil a significant renovation. The day before the July 4th celebration, it debuted a new exhibit called Sacred Liberty, spotlighting founding fathers whose lives it says were shaped by the Bible. The museum also relaunched its flagship exhibit, previously The Impact of the Bible, now retitled The Bible in America, and introduced an entirely new exhibit, The Bible in Times of War. Taken together, Cieslik argued, the three exhibits form a kind of pseudo-historical worldview popular on the far right, one that recasts the role of Christianity in the founding and development of the country.

Why a Private Museum’s Framing Matters

Karen Park, who co-wrote the original piece with Cieslik, explained why this goes beyond a single exhibit. The attacks on Smithsonian institutions get most of the attention, she said, but the more important story is that an alternative is already being offered a short walk away. Families wandering the National Mall are likely to treat the Museum of the Bible as just another stop on the tour, without registering that it’s a private institution promoting a specific historical narrative, one presenting American history as inherently Christian in its origins.

Park compared the museum’s approach to the Creation Museum in Kentucky: it borrows all the visual language of a legitimate museum — displays, interactive exhibits, signage, artifacts — but inverts the basic premise of what a museum is supposed to do. Rather than inviting visitors to question and explore, she said the Museum of the Bible starts from a predetermined answer, treating the Bible as essential to understanding American history and steering every visitor toward that conclusion. Because most families can’t easily distinguish it from a Smithsonian museum, she argued, the framing slips past visitors largely unquestioned.

Borrowing the Trust Museums Have Earned

Cieslik pointed out that the museum’s location compounds the effect. It sits just steps from two major downtown Metro stations, and during the week of July 4th, it ran an advertising campaign at one of them — pushing its message well beyond the museum’s walls. As a scholar of museum studies, Cieslik was careful to note that museums have never been neutral spaces; they carry complicated histories of their own, including complicity in religious ordering and moral policing of minority traditions. What makes the Museum of the Bible notable, in her view, is that it deliberately trades on the baseline public trust and credibility that institutions like the Smithsonian have built over decades, repurposing that trust to serve a Christian nationalist narrative that aligns with the current administration’s political goals.

Park picked up the same thread, noting that families often travel to Washington specifically so their children can learn history — the field trips, the rites of passage tied to a capital visit. Into that expectation steps a private museum that, in her assessment, masquerades as a neutral cultural institution while pursuing a very different agenda: rather than opening visitors up to inquiry the way she believes the Smithsonian aims to, it funnels them toward a single, predetermined set of conclusions.

The Administration’s Embrace

Asked how directly the Trump administration has aligned itself with the museum, Cieslik traced the relationship back to before the second inauguration. The Museum of the Bible hosted a gathering of the administration’s religious liberty commission, and Trump himself has repeatedly held it up as a must-see Washington destination — remarks Cieslik described as not especially coherent but clearly aimed at elevating the museum’s status. She noted that the museum is already considered controversial within the museum field, particularly over its history of contested acquisitions. Still, the administration has pointed to it as a kind of validation, treating it as more than a political ideology and instead framing Christian nationalism as something closer to historical inevitability.

Cieslik also flagged a practical detail: Sacred Liberty, the new exhibit on the founding fathers, sits on the museum’s ground floor and is free to enter, unlike the roughly $35 general admission. The Bible in America, by contrast, is the exhibit that most directly argues the United States could only have come into being because of the Bible.

The Cherry Tree of Christian Nationalism

Park offered a concrete example of how invented history gets baked into the museum’s presentation: a prominently displayed painting by Arnold Friberg depicting George Washington kneeling in prayer in the snow at Valley Forge. The image, painted in 1975 for the American bicentennial, has no historical basis. There’s no record the scene ever happened, yet it functions as a visual centerpiece for the museum and was reproduced on the “Freedom Trucks” that toured the country as part of 250th anniversary programming. Cieslik summed up the dynamic bluntly, calling the image the movement’s version of the George Washington cherry tree myth — a fabricated story treated as settled fact.

What to Watch

Host Brad Onishi closed the conversation by noting what’s ultimately at stake: an administration lending legitimacy to a version of history built on invented episodes and a specific ideological reading of the founding, even as it attacks other institutions for supposedly distorting the past.

This piece draws on reporting by Karen E. Park and Emma Cieslik, whose original article, “The Museum of the Bible is Offering a Christian Nationalist Vision of America’s Past,“ appears in Religion News Service. You can find more of Park’s writing at Ex Voto on Substack and Cieslik’s at the Queer and Catholic Oral History Project on Substack. This conversation originally aired on the Axis Daily Brief podcast.

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• Read: The Interview

• Podshots: This Week on SWAJ

• Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week

• Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media

• Reasons for Hope

• The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About

• SWAJerati: What We Are Reading

• SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week

• Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members

• Read: The Interview (cont.)

Read: The Interview

“Damned If She Does”: Sarah Stankorb on Why Women Are Leaving the Church

A conversation between Brad Onishi and Sarah Stankorb, ahead of the release of Stankorb’s new book, Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion (out September 15).

Brad Onishi: Welcome to the Sunday interview. I’m Brad Onishi. This is Straight White American Jesus. And today I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming my friend and colleague and a return guest, Sarah Stankorb, to the program. Sarah, thanks for being here.

Sarah Stankorb: Thanks. I’m so excited to be here.

Brad: Here to talk about your brand new book, Damned If She Does. Let me get the subtitle right: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion. Our books are coming out the same day — they share a birthday, which is super fun and exciting. This is a book about women leaving the church, and I think there are a lot of great books out there about people leaving the church — memoirs, ways that people explain what pushed them over the edge. This book is that and more. It provides an in-depth examination of why women, who have traditionally been the glue and backbone of American churches, are finally saying, “I’ve had enough, and I’m done.” That in itself is amazing. But there’s also this whole set of investigations into what happens when they do leave. Where do they go? Where do they land? What kind of spirituality or religion — or lack thereof — do they engage in? I think that really sets this book apart. Congratulations on it.

Sarah: Thank you. I mentioned in the intro that I wanted to write a version of this book maybe a decade ago. Thankfully no one wanted it then, because the world is unrecognizable now, and there’s a lot more to reflect upon.

Brad: Your main thesis, I think, is on page three — and I’m sure we could find other iterations of it in the book — but you say: right now we’re witnessing a mass movement away from the church, led by young women in particular, with echoes up through their grandmothers. Why is it significant that so many women are leaving the church, whether they’re 23, 53, or 73?

Sarah: There are a couple of ways to look at this. Women typically are the glue that binds religious communities — the world over, women are almost in every case more religious than men. So once you get to a point in a country or culture of secularization, when women start to leave in numbers similar to men, you’re usually already at a tipping point where you’ve moved into a secular society. The interesting thing happening here in the U.S. is Gen Z women are now out — non-religious — in larger numbers than Gen Z men, and the gender gap is completely gone among millennials. When I first started paying attention to this, I was just predicting, “Wow, wouldn’t it be something if this really took off?” And now here we are, and the country’s different, religion is different, and because of these changes, women’s lives are very different.

The Interview continues at the end of the Report…

Podshots: What’s Happening on SWAJ

The Sunday Interview: Damned If She Does: Why Women Are Leaving the Church

Tuesday: Axis Live - with Brad Onishi and Matthew Taylor

Wednesday: It’s In the Code

Friday: The Weekly Roundup - Live!

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Book Launch Party!

• Annie Bloom’s Bookstore in Portland, OR

• September 16th!

• If you can’t make it to the party, order a copy from Annie Bloom’s and it will be signed by Brad!

More book tour stops:

Full details here

Reasons for Hope:

• Polls in Arkansas show that Democratic Candidate Hallie Shoffner has a lead over over Republican incumbent Tom Cotton for the US senate seat.

• A federal judge declared SB 12 (the law commonly known as the Texas “Drag Ban”) unconstitutional for the second time.

• An arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire Karen Attiah, the opinion columnist fired because of comments she made on social media following Charlie Kirk’s death. Attiah says the decision “sends a message to journalists and media institutions everywhere that freedom of expression is always worth fighting for.”

The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About

From the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement, and The Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), Mixed is a podcast about forming strong mixed race and mixed faith families and relationships. Mixed people—especially mixed kids with multiple ethnic, racial and religious identities—experience marginalization and acceptance in ways that are different from monoracial and religious minorities. But, there are simple and straightforward things people can do to make sure mixed kids and adults have a sense of belonging and pride in their backgrounds.

Dr. Khyati Y. Joshi is a scholar-storyteller who bridges research, lived experience, and practical wisdom. She is a tenured, Full Professor in the School of Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the author of White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America (NYU Press, 2020) and several other books on race and religion in America.

Dr. Joshi is also part of a mixed marriage. Along with her husband John, they have raised their son to be Hindu and Christian; and to recognize, cherish, and embody his Indian and European heritages.

In this series, she blends scholarly expertise with her unique story, relaying the mistakes she’s made, the wisdom she’s gained, and the practical tips she can offer for cultivating mixed relationships and raising kids and adults to embrace their whole selves.

You can read more about Mixed here.

SWAJERATI: What We Are Reading

Damned If She Does by Sarah Stankorb

https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889837091/Damned-If-She-Does

SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week

Clover: I made up a song in honor of this Lake America nonsense.

It is the dumb that never ends.

It just goes on and on, my friends.

Some people voted yes to this not knowing what it was,

And now we're f**ing stuck with it forever just because

It is the dumb that never ends.

Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members

Thank you to Dan L, Aly F., Cindy L., and the 5,000+ others who made the switch to Substack with us!

Read: The Interview (cont.)

The Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Brad: One of the things you point out is that women haven’t just been the glue to religious communities — doing the work that makes those communities go, while men have often been out front preaching and leading — women are the caretakers, the food preparers, the ones who look after the elderly, the ones who make sure the operation runs down to the most minuscule things, whether it’s the pamphlets handed out at church or the coffee service everyone looks forward to. Women have been the glue, but they’ve also been a predictor of whether their kids stay religious. You write that studies suggest the active faith of mothers is a strong predictor of the later religious affiliation of her kids. So is women leaving the church a predictor of secularization — a canary in the coal mine, where if the mom is leaving, there’s a good chance her kids aren’t going to continue either?

Sarah: Yes. And if you look at conversion rates — once those kids grow up, it’s far more likely for someone raised in a faith to leave and become non-religious than it is for non-religious people to swap and become religious. So not only are we going to have fewer and fewer families where the mom is making sure everyone’s reading the Bible, showing up for Sunday school, doing the things that form that theological narrative that couches you in a faith — without that happening, those kids are far less likely to wake up one day and become religious than their religious parents. And their religious peers may also leave, and then their kids are more likely, farther down the line, to be disaffiliated from faith too.

Brad: This is a book about women, and I don’t want to make it about men — but the thing I thought about on this page is that this, to me, is one of the reasons we see the rise of accelerationist militant patriarchy in Christian spaces — repeal the Nineteenth Amendment and so on, the Doug Wilsons of the world you’ve covered for so long. They know. They’re desperately trying to hold on to whatever’s left of their flocks and double down on control of anyone they can control, because I think they know. Anyway — we can get into more of that later. Part two of the book — and there’s no way for us to cover the entire book, but one of the things I love about your writing is that you’re a journalist who puts us in the shoes of the people you cover. We see the world through their eyes, feel it through their bodies. You lay out these reasons people are leaving, and the first one you talk about, in chapter five, is secrets — you really dig into the Catholic sex abuse crisis and related issues that pushed people out the door. What did you learn digging into those narratives?

Sarah: I’ve covered quite a bit of church-related sex abuse, usually in the evangelical context. This was my first time really working with sources who were Catholic, and I assumed the spiritual trust and betrayal would be fairly similar. But in the Catholic context, because there’s such a strict hierarchy — and because the secrets were known and the cover-up traveled up and down that hierarchy — when you’re in a denomination where that trust goes straight up the hierarchy, and the higher you go, the closer you believe that person is to God, seeing that line of trust parallel with a line of betrayal really shakes the foundation of how you’re willing to approach any institution. It rattled people raised Catholic with that mindset of trust — from the Pope down to your parish priest — even if they weren’t directly affected. For those who were affected: it’s easy to stereotype and think mostly of young boys molested by priests, but there were plenty of female victims. They tended to be older — tweens and teens — and as happens in other churches, including evangelical ones, those girls get blamed for being a temptress. In the popular mind, those crimes get treated as different, when for the person experiencing them, they’re definitely not. There was a time when Catholic sex abuse was the only church sex abuse people talked about — Southern Baptists could say, “that’s a Catholic problem.” Now they say it was a hoax. Neither is true.

Brad: The next one you talk about is Black Lives — and this chapter really hit me. Someone from my hometown, still a friend of mine, is part of the family that was the core family at my church when I was an evangelical — her grandfather was the pastor, her uncles were on the ministerial staff. About eight years ago she adopted a child who is Black; she is white. In 2020, that child and her older siblings said they wanted to go to some of the protests after the George Floyd murder. She took them, and it was a transformative moment for her — being around people vying for racial justice, hurting, coming together through pain but also through resolve to change things. It set her on a path where she thought, “I’m not sure I can stay at this church.” Then, back in those church spaces, she’d hear the little comments made about her Black children — the looks they got, the things said to them — and it was like, “My God, I’ve got to get out of here.” Is that a story you heard? How did this play out in your reporting?

Sarah: Yes. There’s a difference in the experience of our nation’s lengthy confrontation with the violence done to unarmed Black Americans, versus white people noticing — and it played out differently in churches. Among Black believers, especially those who joined evangelical churches that claimed to want a diverse church — intentionally diverse spaces aiming for a fractional diversity that’s still majority white and comfortable for the white people in the church — as Black Americans saw children killed, children who looked like them and their children, and then heard resounding silence on the topic at church, there was a quiet pulling away. Among the white women I interviewed, racism and violence were among the reasons they started to question things — usually that happened around 2020. There were certainly white people who noticed the protests in the years leading up to George Floyd, but 2020’s protests were the big ones — many in higher-income white cities, where people protested for the first time. If you were in a mixed-race family, in an environment where you or your friends were having an awakening and it was suddenly undeniable, that confrontation made you look down the pew in a whole new light and ask: Who’s down there? What are you saying? And why is our minister not saying a word?

Brad: There’s so much there. I’ve heard this story several times — from the person I mentioned and from other friends and colleagues who’ve said almost the same thing: you start to look at your church differently, and realize where it’s silent, where it’s not willing to speak up, where people just don’t seem to care about something that feels like life and death for a whole group of Americans.

Sarah: It is life and death.

Brad: What about the “gay scare” — chapter seven? That’s been happening for a long time; we could go all the way back to Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell, and Anita Bryant in the 1970s. But what about the contemporary contours of gender and sexual politics driving women out of church?

Sarah: This is across the board — homophobia and transphobia, among people to whom it matters, has been extremely repellent, especially starting with millennials. I could speculate — we grew up during the HIV/AIDS crisis, we were around for marriage equality — there are plenty of reasons this becomes relevant for our generation. But even among people raised very conservative, in the broader cultural reality where acceptance of gay people kept building, the contrast within the church became extremely stark. This is a leading reason people cite for disaffiliating. It also cuts across a lot of other dividing lines — you can be gay and grow up in Texas, conservative or liberal, any race. There’s a “my best friend is” or “my child is” element, where the kinship and love you have for a person matters so much, and when you’re in an environment that taught you to love your neighbor unconditionally but you don’t see that love reflected back, the tension builds until it’s much easier to stick up for your kid than to belong to an institution that calls your kid down.

Brad: To finish this thread — what makes this moment different? If someone’s listening and thinking, “Haven’t we always had moments in American religiosity where people got fed up — in the sixties they left for the women’s liberation movement, the summer of love” — whatever caricature people have of past reasons for leaving Christianity — what’s different about this movement?

Sarah: I have a couple of theories, but at the root of it — and this might sound more cerebral than it needs to be — coming through the eighties and the rise of the Christian right, the popular version of Christianity beamed into our homes, the version most people think of when they think of “the church,” probably isn’t the Methodist church on the corner — it’s the version of evangelical Christianity that’s so in our faces. As that comes to power, there’s a very binary view of the world: you’re right, you’re wrong, you’re Christian, you’re not, you’re male, you’re female, you’re white, you’re Black. And that binary view is now couched in an authoritarian administration. We’re living the reality of what it’s like to have these extremes. Because of all these other cultural realities — women having respect in many places in their everyday lives, having careers, expecting not to deal with sexism and racism, ills that are still comfortably residing in many churches — and because on a broad scale you see this tension, and the people telling you “this is true, this is false” are also people who regularly lie and abuse people and don’t love their neighbors — it’s so damned hypocritical. Maybe there will be healing, but I don’t know how it happens within at least a generation.

Brad: Are the numbers stark enough that this is a kind of extinction moment for at least certain parts of the Christian sector in this country? It’s almost like climate change — you can go outside on a nice 74-degree day with a nice breeze and tell yourself we’re probably fine. As someone who’s dug into the numbers and talked to the women who’ve had enough, are you seeing, ten years out, a much different religious landscape because of the women who are leaving?

Sarah: I think it’s different, but I never want to pretend to be a prophet — I think it’s messier. Right now we’re experiencing a kind of bifurcation as we polarize politically. There are still people in the church, and many of the people who remain — who want to be a Christian in a sense that aligns with what’s happening politically — will veer toward more conservative evangelical churches, or traditionalist Catholic, or charismatic, more extreme, patriarchal, nationalistic versions of the faith. The rest — which used to be the mainline — that’s where a lot of this disappearing is going, which is also unfair, because a lot of the damage happens over there, not here. What we’re seeing is a line that was decline, decline, decline, and then we reached a leveling off — 2025 Pew Research Center numbers for their 2023–2024 study years showed a petering-off of the decline of Christianity. However, one group still disaffiliating, if you look at PRRI, is young Gen Z women. So among women who are growing up and about to have kids they’re not taking to church, you’re pulling more away. But then there’s the line of people who are still members of the church — and we don’t talk about this much, but many of them are very, very old. There’s going to be a natural, sad funnel — the graying of the mainline churches is going to be a drop. So we’re going to see a numeric plummet in response to both of those things. That doesn’t mean church is disappearing — it means the face of church could look a lot like Doug Wilson, traditionalist Catholics, and JD Vance. Which I think is an argument for those who want a more progressive Christianity to fight tooth and nail to say, “this is actually what a Christian is” — because otherwise that version of things could win.

Brad: There’s so much to say there. Even if you take the Doug Wilson version of Christianity — the New Apostolic Reformation plus Doug Wilson plus the traditionalist Catholics, Doug Wilson as a figurehead of the reformed Theobro reconstructionist paradigm — you’re not going to get anywhere near a majority of Americans. You’ll get a small percentage. But nonetheless, they have a lot of money, power, megaphones, and friends in high places — Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, and so on. The other thing I can’t get away from: if you’ve ever been in a church, you’re used to seeing a mom come with her three kids in tow while Dad stays home watching football. Mom is determined — we’re going to Sunday school, you’re going to youth group, you’re going to the kids’ program. If that’s not happening — if young Gen Z women are never those church ladies — it’s a cascade effect, because the domineering, authoritarian men who are always yelling about gender and sex and “don’t tread on me” aren’t going to do the work of dragging three kids to church by themselves. Tell me I’m wrong here, but I can’t get that out of my head.

Sarah: No — and there’s a reason I wrote about Promise Keepers. There’s this magical thinking that recurs: if we could just make Jesus manly, these guys will come, and a portion will be attracted to that.

Brad: If we just give men guns in church and let them lift weights while they listen to the sermon — and if the wafer was made of creatine — I think we’d get more men. That’s what we need.

One of the parts of the book that enthralled me is what happens when women do leave. Do they stay religious? Stay spiritual? There’s a passage on page 178: “As more people have left organized religion, there’s a narrative that has emerged — a plethora of disaffiliated people have simply found more authentic spiritualities outside of church. That may be true for some, but it’s probably more correct to assume that the majority of people opting out of religion lose their taste for spirituality generally.” So it sounds like you’re saying most people who leave don’t end up spiritual in any robust way — maybe a tarot reading here, a horoscope check, an Enneagram result there — but not a kind of immersive spiritual worldview. Fill me in — what does this passage mean?

Sarah: I threw that idea out there because it’s true that many of these people don’t find some new community. The majority aren’t joining the local coven — not that there’s anything wrong with a coven. It would be nice if there were stair-steps — here’s your new membership. It’s more piecemeal. When I first looked into it, I knew for a fact I’d interviewed many people who join astrology apps, do tarot cards, have crystals — dabbling. I reached out to Ryan Burge, the numbers guy for religion, and asked him about spirituality. He pointed to statistics showing that people who say they’re spiritual but not religious — the vast majority had done zero spiritual things in the last month despite saying they’re spiritual. I asked about the gender breakdown, and that was interesting: the majority of men who claimed to be spiritual had done zero spiritual things, but the majority of women who said they were spiritual had done something spiritual in the last thirty days. So it’s a mix. A lot of women told me they joined a women’s-only gym — they go Sunday morning, the music is better, no one asks them to volunteer for anything, they get their endorphins and they’re done. Wonderful. But there are also people who really try to patchwork something together for themselves and slowly build a new worldview. For those folks, it’s a lengthy process — not only deconstruction, which is already long, but also a kind of decolonization, where they’re trying to peel back the influence of Christianity on older forms of spirituality, or ancestral veneration, or other belief systems, to get rid of every hint of the Christian worldview they’re rejecting.

Brad: I’m glad you brought up decolonization, because I think one of the reasons people find it so hard to go back to church is that once they start deconstructing what they found hypocritical and incoherent about the religious worldview they held, they realize that worldview was imbued with white supremacism, xenophobia, misogyny, queerphobia, and on down the line. That process is so hard that many of them never find their way back, and I think the numbers bear that out. There’s a passage —

Sarah: I was going to say — and it can be very, very lonely. That was something we talked about with one of the experts, whose name I wish I remembered. I asked what happens when you leave a community — especially a high-control community, where everyone you were friends with rejects you for leaving. It can be painful and lonely. He pointed out that for many of these people, it was lonelier to be in the church — to feel utterly alone with their questions and their pain, surrounded by people who didn’t notice or didn’t care.

Brad: I feel all of that. I left twenty years ago, and I remember feeling so alone, like the community I’d had just disappeared in an instant. But I also felt so much freer and hopeful that I’d find genuine, authentic human connection and friendship. It’s such a double-edged sword. This takes me to page 185, where you write: “No one factor can begin to explain spiritual and religious shifts on a national scale. But whatever the combination of reasons people leave the church, loss of faith in the institution appears to correspond with a rediscovered trust in one’s own ability to decipher and adopt meaningful beliefs and enact them.” I took that to mean that when people leave, their trust in institutions goes way down, and there’s a reinvigorated sense that they need to trust themselves — their instincts, their bodies, who they want to be in the world. But that also seems to be a barrier to joining alternative institutions in the future, because they’ve lost trust that any institution can be healthy or helpful.

Sarah: Yes. There are historic and sociological theories about a pendulum — people move toward an institutional mode, the institution corrupts, people question it, they go off on their own, it’s lonely and harder, it helps to organize, and they move back. I’m usually uncomfortable with any grand theory of history that says “here’s the model,” but you do see patterns across countries, cultures, and religions: first, people pull away and stop showing up — they’re not engaging in public expressions of faith. Over time, fewer people say the majority religion where they live is important, because it’s no longer a crucial part of their day-to-day. Then, often, they’ll say — there’s a movement from “I was raised Catholic” to “I was Catholic” to “I used to be Catholic,” or “I don’t want to talk to anyone who is Catholic.” There’s a slide. As you pull away, your identity changes, your habits change how you see yourself day to day, and the person you become is no longer wrapped up in those old practices. You become something else — you need some new term for who you are and what you’ve become. I think that’s where people, if they experiment with other spiritualities or convert to a new religion, that’s often where it happens — when they need something else to grab onto, something they can try to believe in. But it’s sourced from within, not handed to them by the institution as dogma or rules.

Brad: I want to come back to that — I want to put a pin in it. But first, one more page, because I think it ties in. Page 196: you cite Pew’s most recent Religious Landscape Study, published in 2025, showing that almost half of atheists have a household income of $100,000 or more, are college grads, or hold postgraduate degrees; over half of agnostics hold a college degree or higher; those who call themselves “nothing in particular” tend to be less educated than any other portion of the “nones,” with 40% holding a high school diploma or less; and the majority of atheists and agnostics are politically liberal, while the largest portion of people who say they believe “nothing in particular” tend to be political moderates. What does that mean? I’ve spent time at atheist conferences, humanist spaces, secular organizations — they tend to be predominantly white, older, and there’s a sense of people being middle class or upper-middle class. How do you parse this data — is every atheist a kind of upper-middle-class white guy? How does it change across the spectrum?

Sarah: Part of it is that the category of religious “nones” is so heterogeneous. There are three main columns. “Nothing in particular” — they’ve just disaffiliated, and they’re the most complicated group to study or understand. They skew more moderate politically; they just don’t want to belong to anything. They’re different from atheists, who skew higher-income and — especially in the past — white and male. Agnostics are a little more educated, in between. Atheism is a fascinating test case; I wrote a whole chapter on it because I didn’t want readers to think there was an easy answer — “women should leave and become atheists, we have a club, they can join.” The old Richard Dawkins model of atheism — old white intellectual men getting together arguing the same side of evolution — was the early organized-atheism version. As atheism becomes more diverse, with more women, more women of color, and trans atheists, organized atheism is going through a tough moment: the old guard says some really hateful stuff, honestly. This more diverse group — especially people who left churches because they were so patriarchal — shows up and reports abuse, and says, “we’re not going to tolerate that.” Transphobia, and other things that align with why people leave churches, follow them into these spaces too. So there’s a struggle, and within some atheist organizations, a real effort to embrace this newly diverse group of atheists. It takes a while for humans to work things out.

Brad: I love that you don’t reduce the story to “people leave and become one thing.” People have varied journeys, varied reactions, and they land in different places. It’s fascinating to read and think about through your work. So thank you. I want to ask one or two more questions — but first, tell people where they can find you, your schedule, where to hang out with Sarah.

Sarah: Someone asked me this earlier and I got the date wrong, then I got the time wrong — so please go to my Instagram, I’ll pin where I’ll be. I’ll be at the Wild Goose Festival — my first time. I’ll be in Minneapolis for a pre-launch event on September 10th, in conversation with Angela Denker. Then I’ll be in Takoma Park, Maryland — on the border of Washington, D.C. — with Sarah McCammon, author of The Exvangelicals; back in Cincinnati; then Boston, Grand Rapids, Chicago. A whole tour of the Midwest and East. Find it on Instagram — but don’t go by any time or date I tell you. Sarah Stankorb on the internet.

Brad: Go to Sarah Stankorb’s Instagram, S-T-A-N-K-O-R-B. The book is Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, out September 15. Buy Sarah’s book and mine together — let them be book twins, grow up together, go to preschool, play in the front yard. Really, that’s what you want to do.

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For seventy-five years, the religious right has insisted that being a Democrat and being a Christian are mutually exclusive. Gender, sex, and family have been elevated to the level of orthodox doctrine, so that crossing those boundaries disqualifies a person from the faith no matter what they believe about the incarnation, the virgin birth, or the resurrection. James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate from Texas running against Ken Paxton, is the latest target of that old playbook. He is a seminarian. He talks openly about his faith. His family has been Presbyterian for generations. None of that has stopped a prominent New Apostolic Reformation leader from branding him a fake Christian — a caricature of what the left imagines a person of faith to look like.

That leader is Lance Wallnau, and this time the attack didn’t stop at questioning Talarico’s Christianity. Wallnau went further, suggesting Talarico is connected to Al-Qaeda and working through the Democrats’ “global Muslim channels.” The pretext was Wallnau’s objection to Talarico’s use of the word “non-binary” to describe God — a well-established idea within the Christian theological tradition, but heresy in Wallnau’s eyes, and therefore proof of apostasy.

What Talarico Actually Said

The real trigger for Wallnau’s attack was Talarico’s criticism of Christian nationalists in Texas who, in his words, are trying to build a theocracy by imposing a certain form of Christianity on every Texan. Talarico drew a comparison that has become common on the left: that Christian nationalists seeking to impose theocratic rule on their fellow citizens resemble Al-Qaeda or other Islamist movements pursuing the same goal elsewhere in the world.

Wallnau didn’t just reject that comparison. He inverted it — recasting the seminarian who made it as the one secretly aligned with Islamist terrorism.

Who Is Lance Wallnau?

Wallnau has been called the father of modern Christian Dominionism by the Baptist Joint Committee. He is the figure who popularized the Seven Mountains Mandate, the theological program urging Christians to take dominion over every sphere of society — education, family, economics, entertainment — not as missionaries converting their neighbors, but as colonizers claiming authority as emissaries of King Jesus.

As Matthew D. Taylor documents in Charismatic Revival Fury, the Axis Mundi podcast series, and his book The Violent Take It by Force, Wallnau was among the New Apostolic Reformation prophets and apostles who pushed Christians toward January 6th and toward spiritual warfare in defense of Donald Trump’s rule.

Why Al-Qaeda?

The obvious move for Wallnau would have been to simply declare Talarico a fake Christian. Linking him to Al-Qaeda is a different and more calculated maneuver — one that fits a broader strategy on the American right to stoke Sharia law panic, manufacture a renewed Islamophobia, and blunt the gains made by DSA-adjacent candidates on the left.

The underlying narrative is a new red-green scare: to be a Democrat is to be in league with communists abroad, and to be part of that coalition is to be aligned with Islamists abroad too — two worldviews the right now treats as fundamentally coherent, and fundamentally un-American. In this framing, being a Democrat leads to socialism, socialism leads to Marxism, and Marxism traces back to threats from China and Cuba. That last thread was reinforced by a hundred-page State Department report released a month ago, which outlined not just Cuba’s standing as a communist power in the Western Hemisphere but its supposed role in bolstering anti-MAGA Democratic figures like Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass.

By this logic, any Democrat, any DSA-adjacent figure, anyone outside the current regime becomes suspect of sympathizing with Islamist regimes abroad as well. That fusion was spelled out explicitly in Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s companion document to Project 2025, and later formalized in NSPM-7, the memorandum branding those deemed anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Christian as domestic terrorists.

The Institutional Momentum Behind the Scare

Marco Rubio gave this narrative a major push when he convened representatives from 66 countries for a ministerial summit on left-wing terrorism. There, alongside Stephen Miller, Rubio advanced the idea that communist influence from Cuba and beyond is entangled with Islamist infiltration from Iran and elsewhere, all aimed at undermining the United States government.

The result has been a fresh wave of Islamophobia and Sharia law panic on the American right. Ted Cruz has held Senate hearings on the subject and made the rounds on news programs and podcasts warning that Sharia law is coming to Texas if Talarico wins his race.

Not Just About Talarico

This pattern extends well beyond one Senate race. Anyone who opposes the Trump administration risks being cast as anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-capitalist — tied to communist and Islamist movements abroad, and ultimately framed as someone who hates the country and has no place in it.

It would be one thing if this rhetoric were aimed only at Muslim candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, or Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City. It is no less dangerous or offensive when it isn’t. But the fact that it’s now being deployed against James Talarico — a white Christian Texan who looks like Jimmy Carter, speaks like Mr. Rogers, and carries his Bible everywhere he goes — shows just how far this movement is willing to go to paint its political opponents as domestic terrorists.

What to Watch

Expect this rhetoric to intensify as the midterms approach. The pattern is now established: question the faith, question the loyalty, question the citizenship, and tie it all back to a foreign enemy — whether or not the facts support any of it.

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Americans sustained a real cultural loss this week with the passing of Dolly Parton. Amid the wave of tributes, one BBC headline stuck with me: “Dolly Parton was one thing all Americans could agree on.” It’s a nice sentiment, and it’s the kind of thing you hear a lot when a beloved public figure dies — that sense of unifying grief. But I think it’s also, unfortunately, another case of legacy media missing something important. I want to spend a few minutes unpacking that.

Dolly Parton was, among many other things, a legacy-defining country music star, and a huge part of her fan base skewed conservative. That’s been reflected clearly in how prominent conservative figures have memorialized her this week. Donald Trump called her an American cultural icon and described her death as a loss for millions of Americans. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called her a global ambassador for American music and entertainment. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee — Parton’s home state — praised her as “an iconic leader who loved our great state and nation,” describing her life as forever woven into Tennessee’s music, culture, and history. House Republicans, in a collective statement, labeled her a national treasure, highlighting her love of country and her joyful presence. Conservatives have also, for a long time now, leaned into her Christian identity, framing her Pentecostal roots and Dollywood as a model of wholesome, family-oriented entertainment.

Taken together, these statements sketch a familiar image: a Christian country star from the American South, evoking a golden age of country music and a simpler, faith-and-family-centered America. It reads like something out of central casting for the Christian nationalist or MAGA vision of the country. And to be clear, I don’t disagree that she was an American cultural icon, or that her death was a loss for millions. I don’t doubt she was, in Tennessee especially, an iconic leader woven into the state’s culture and history. What I question is what gets left out of these accounts — because all of them are only part of the story.

The Parts of the Story That Get Left Out

Parton was a vocal ally of the LGBTQ community for decades. In 2009, she broke from conservative orthodoxy to support marriage equality, joking that gay couples should be allowed to be “as miserable as the rest of us.” In 2016, she publicly criticized North Carolina’s House Bill 2 — the so-called bathroom bill targeting transgender people — along with similar legislation in her own home state of Tennessee. She drew criticism from conservatives for her large gay fan base and for hosting “gay days” at Dollywood, the very theme park the right likes to hold up as a symbol of wholesome family values. She defended that fan base directly in a 2014 Billboard interview, saying, “They’re not hurting anybody. They are who they are, they are who they are meant to be.” Her song “Travelin’ Thru,” written for the 2005 film Transamerica to highlight the struggles of transgender people, earned an Academy Award nomination.

She was also involved in exactly the kind of social justice and racial equity work that many of the same conservatives now memorializing her routinely dismiss as “woke” or “Marxist.” In 2018, she rebranded her Dixie Stampede dinner attraction — first to Dolly Parton’s Stampede, dropping “Dixie” — explaining that she’d come to understand the term carried historical connotations tied to slavery that could be hurtful. During the 2020 racial justice protests, she explicitly aligned herself with the message of Black Lives Matter, saying in a widely circulated interview: “Of course Black Lives Matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No.” She also put her own money behind initiatives aimed at building a more equitable society for low-income and minority communities, particularly in education and healthcare — alongside literacy programs, funding for COVID vaccine development, and generous education benefits for her own employees. The list goes on.

Why This Selective Memory Matters

There are a couple of reasons this stands out to me as I watch this week’s conservative memorials, including from political leaders in her own state. The first is that the right isn’t merely staying silent on these parts of her legacy — the same people memorializing her are actively mischaracterizing what she stood for. Every one of those issues — LGBTQ rights, racial equity, aid to marginalized communities, vaccine development — is unmistakably partisan in the contemporary United States. It’s true, and often noted, that Parton avoided baldly partisan behavior: she didn’t endorse candidates or campaign, partly out of clear awareness that doing so could alienate her conservative fan base. But that’s different from calling her apolitical. Representative Diana Harshbarger, a Republican who represents Parton’s home region of Tennessee, said Parton “was so apolitical, she did not want to be on one side or the other, and that made people love her.” Trump described her as “not a very political person.” Neither is accurate. She took sides. She was political, because everything on that list is political — and it’s worth imagining how these same political figures would describe an ordinary American who held those same views, if that person weren’t a revered country music star.

There’s a second reason this matters. These conservative commentators aren’t content simply to mischaracterize the political nature of her positions — they also work to attack and silence anyone telling the fuller story. Other commentators have highlighted these same facts since her passing, and conservative media has responded by accusing them of politicizing her death, of lying, of trying to “steal her” from traditional Americans. It’s not enough to deny the politics. They go further and try to discredit anyone who points them out.

What the Erasure Reveals

So here’s the real question worth sitting with as we continue to mourn Dolly Parton: what does this selective remembering tell us? What does it reveal that the American right is working this hard to forget who she actually was, and to demonize and silence anyone who insists on the fuller picture?

What it reveals is more than just a desire to cultivate the “right kind” of American icon — though it is certainly that. It’s also a reaction to a perceived threat. The real, complicated Dolly Parton threatens a very specific vision of what an American icon is supposed to be. A white, Southern, Christian country star who also — as a genuine expression of that same identity — supported the LGBTQ community, pushed for racial justice and social equity, and worked to help the poor and marginalized: that version of a Southern Christian icon is a direct challenge to the Christian nationalist, MAGA-shaped idea of what a “real” Christian or a “real” American looks like. Taking her actual life seriously would force a rethinking of who counts as American and what it means to be a Christian cultural icon in this country. Acknowledging her complexity threatens the narrowness of their own definitions — but condemning her outright risks alienating far too many people who loved her. They can’t be honest about who she was, and they can’t condemn her either. So what’s left is a sustained effort to curate an icon in their own image.

Which brings me back to that headline. It might turn out that the real Dolly Parton isn’t actually the one thing all Americans can agree on. What’s being sold as unifying is a carefully sanitized version of her — one scrubbed of anything the right would label left-leaning, progressive, or “woke.” That’s the Dolly Parton they want to sell. There was more to her than that, and it’s worth watching whether that fuller conversation continues.

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The story of Noah’s Ark is probably one of the biblical stories that most people have at least heard of. But for those who need a refresher, here’s the 30-second-to-one-minute recap: It’s a story from the first book of the Bible, Genesis, which is also the first of the five Hebrew Bible books known collectively as the Pentateuch. God sees that human beings have become “exceedingly wicked,” to the point that he wishes he hadn’t created them, so he decides to flood the world and essentially start over. But he identifies one man, Noah, who is righteous, and decides to preserve him and his family. He directs Noah to build a giant boat, the ark, collect all the different kinds of animals, and use this to rebuild creation after the flood. Then it rains for 40 days and nights, the world floods, eventually the waters recede, God makes a covenant with Noah and promises never to do this again, and so on. There’s a lot more detail we could add, but that gives us the broad contours.

The Questions We Aren’t Supposed to Ask

There are a lot of uncomfortable questions that this story raises for conservative Christians. Conservative Christians have often read this story as a historically reliable source: there was a global flood; Noah really did rescue every kind of animal; 40 days of rain really covered the whole planet; and so on. We have to remember that the reason it is read this way is that this is how they read the Bible: it is a document inspired by God that is without error of any kind, so it has to be historically accurate.

Listener John highlights a number of reasonable logistical questions. How could anyone, including Noah—who is said to be hundreds of years old—and his family possibly care for that many animals? How could they store enough food for them all? It rained for 40 days and nights, but the Bible says there were 150 days of prevailing waters, and then months of waiting for the waters to recede. How would predator/prey relationships be managed? What about all the animal waste? Even with the size of the ark—about 34,000 square feet of deck and 1.5 million cubic feet—how could you possibly have a breeding pair of every animal? And what about species such as dinosaurs?

The list can go on and on, but the obvious takeaway is that it strains any kind of credibility, especially when we consider that the same people who believe this is historical fact deny the theory of evolution. If evolution is rejected, then all the biodiversity that exists had to be represented on the ark.

I’m not going to run through all the responses that conservative Christians have for these questions—many of you will know most of them—because there are a lot of other questions that come up. But the dinosaur question really illustrates the ad hoc nature of these responses. Some Christians argue that, for whatever reason, the dinosaurs didn’t make it onto the ark, which is why they’re extinct. But some conservatives say that there never were dinosaurs, and that the fossil record was created either by Satan to mislead people or by God to test their faith. As a little cultural aside, Alice in Chains even has a song called “The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here,” critiquing conservative Christians.

But we can move on, because the questions get even bigger.

The Lack of Geological Evidence

Here’s another question that comes up from the story: Does modern geology square with this story?

Another obvious point of contention is that there is just no geological evidence of a flood covering the entire globe for long periods of time. This was an issue that really came to a head in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the findings of modern science were beginning to acutely call into question assumptions about the historical accuracy of the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible.

Again, Christian apologists have tried to offer responses to this issue for well over a century. It was one of the main themes of the pamphlets produced in the early 20th century, The Fundamentals, which aimed to defend what the authors understood as the “fundamentals” of the faith, and from which the term “fundamentalism” originates.

Needless to say, these apologetic explanations have not been widely accepted, and no mainstream geologists or other scientists have found them convincing.

So there’s that.

The Babylonian Question

But there’s more. Here’s a set of questions that’s a little more academic and esoteric, but dropped like a bombshell on conservative Christians in the 19th century: What about the Babylonian influence?

For those who are unfamiliar, here’s what we’re talking about. In the 19th century, scholars discovered the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. And it turns out, among other things, that the Gilgamesh Epic includes a story of a god initiating a global flood to wipe out human beings. There are striking literary parallels between the two stories, along with some important differences.

But here’s the issue: the Epic of Gilgamesh significantly predates the Genesis story. The dating is difficult because both texts likely existed in oral form before being committed to writing, but the Babylonian epic predates Genesis by anywhere from a few hundred to more than a thousand years. So how do we explain these parallels?

The contemporary scholarly consensus is that the present Genesis account comes out of the period of time when the Hebrew people were in captivity in Babylon. This period is the time during which they would have been introduced to, and modified, this literary story.

Why is this a problem for conservatives? There are a few reasons. First, it means that the story was not written by Moses, as tradition holds, but was written down hundreds of years after his death. It means that the story is not simply “God’s truth,” revealed in the Bible, but a tradition built from an older, non-Christian and non-Jewish source.

This issue has, like the geology question, been a huge problem for conservative Christians for 150 years. And the conservative Christian response is often simply to deny it. If you ask about this issue, you’ll just be accused of not being a good Christian because you don’t believe the Bible.

“What about the Babylonian influence?”

That is a very uncomfortable question for conservatives.

How Many Animals?

There’s another, very basic, textual issue that comes up for those who read the biblical text carefully: How many of each animal were taken onto the ark?

The obvious answer comes from Genesis 6:20, where Noah is told to take “two of every kind” of animal onto the ark. Everyone knows this. It’s what you’ll see in every artistic rendering of the story.

But careful readers will also notice that just a few verses later, in Genesis 7:2, God directs Noah to take “seven pairs” of every “clean”—that is, ritually clean—animal, and a pair of the ritually unclean animals.

So that means fourteen of every clean animal and only two of every unclean animal, which just makes all the logistical questions harder.

How do we explain this obvious difference in a text that’s supposed to be “without error” or contradiction?

Here’s the reason that mainstream scholars have given: The Pentateuch, those first five books of the Hebrew Bible, was not written by Moses. It was produced over a long period of time, and this production included the use of preexisting sources, with their own differing—and often competing—theological emphases and complex histories of production.

The portion that says to bring on a pair of every animal comes from a source that doesn’t presuppose the distinction between clean and unclean animals, a later development. Another source does presuppose this distinction and has to allow for extra animals, owing to things like ritual sacrifice. And that matters because in Genesis 8:20, when Noah and his family leave the ark, Noah builds an altar and offers a sacrifice, which poses a problem for rebuilding the world if you’ve killed one half of a pair of animals.

The upshot is that the differences within the text unravel the claims that conservative Christians make about the text.

The Theology of the Flood

Here’s a final cluster of questions: What about the theological motifs of the story?

In Genesis, God’s creation of everything is presented as an act bringing order out of chaos. In releasing the rains and waters on the earth in the flood, God engages in an act of un-creation, undoing order by releasing chaos.

One of the differences between the Genesis account and that of the Babylonian epic is that the Babylonian god unleashed the flood because humans are too noisy and keep him from sleeping. Christians—and Jewish theologians—have often highlighted the moral superiority of the Genesis account because God unleashes the flood because of human wickedness. So it’s presented as an act of righteousness.

But for many modern people, that feels like a hugely disproportionate, morally problematic response.

In fact, the text suggests that God himself experienced remorse over having wiped out the world, and God even admits that the flood did not do away with human wickedness in Genesis 8:21.

And the reason why this is an issue is that, in the end, this is a horrifically violent story. God is committing the largest genocide in the history of the world—and yet this is the motif you’ll find in every church playroom and nursery.

Theological conservatives will, of course, argue that God, as God, is justified in anything he does. But this is just not a response that most will find compelling, when even God seems to declare that it was a bad idea.

Why the Questions Matter

So…the story of Noah and the Ark opens up a lot of questions that conservative, high-control Christians would prefer that you don’t ask.

And for me, going all the way back to my time as a student at a Christian college, training for ministry, the cumulative effect of all of these questions renders the story, as written, simply unbelievable as any sort of historical account.

Which is why conservative Christians will respond so forcefully to any one of these questions. And they will certainly work to keep one question from leading to others.

But that’s exactly what happens when you start asking.

The questions multiply, from the logistical questions John led with, to historical and scientific questions, to theological questions. Once you begin pulling on one thread, you discover that the issue isn’t simply whether Noah could have fit all those animals on the ark. The deeper issue is what we mean when we say that the Bible is historically accurate, who wrote these texts, how they were produced, what relationship they have to older traditions, and what happens when the theological claims of a text come into conflict with our moral intuitions.

And, in my view, conservative Christians don’t have compelling answers to offer. That was part of what moved me away from conservative evangelicalism. The problem wasn’t that I had one question that couldn’t be answered. It was that the questions kept multiplying—and the insistence that I stop asking them became, in itself, part of the answer.

-Dan Miller