Pod Only Knows

The 1972 film Marjoe won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. And then it spent a long time having largely been forgotten until it was restored and rereleased in 2005.

Marjoe is an intimate look at the life of Marjoe Gortner, who rose to fame in the charismatic evangelical revival world as the world's youngest preacher until he was ultimately unmasked as a fraud, trained (often through torture) to deliver sermons with fake piety while fleecing untold crowds of true believers.

The film starts with Marjoe in his twenties having made a comeback, fully aware he was still a conman and showing at least some signs of remorse and discomfort with the grift.

It's a film told from a questionable perspective, dripping with iffy journalistic ethics, but it poses (even if inadvertently) some tantalizing, unanswerable questions about, among other things, the role sincerity plays in the preacher-believer relationship and the unfortunate ease with which religion can be leveraged to stay cons.

Our friend Megan Goodwin joins us to talk through all of it.

Well it's been a heck of a week of bad news, and even before the Supreme Court decided the the president was king, Kelly and John decided to look at two news stories likely to play into next year's Supreme Court decisions: Louisiana's new Ten Commandment school mandate and Oklahoma's new requirement to include the Bible in its public school curriculum.

On the surface, both of these measures are clearly, explicitly unconstitutional, and both have plenty of precedent to back up their unconstitutionality.

But in this episode we argue that that may not matter, and that lawsuit-hungry ideas like these are designed to fine-tune a decades-long attempt to bring Christian indoctrination into the public education system.

And, given the makeup of the current court, one of them may actually work.

Some resources used in this episode:

We're back for season two, and we're kicking it off by talking to Dr. Matthew D. Taylor about that weird An Appeal to Heaven flag that got Justice Samuel Alito in so much trouble!

Taylor holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and Muslim-Christian Relations from Georgetown University and an M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. His book, Scripture People: Salafi Muslims in Evangelical Christians’ America (Cambridge University Press), offers an introduction to the oft-misunderstood Salafi movement in the U.S. by way of comparison with American Evangelicalism.

He is also the creator of the acclaimed audio-documentary series  “Charismatic Revival Fury: The New Apostolic Reformation,” which details how networks of extremist Christian leaders helped instigate the January 6th Insurrection. His next book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian movement that is threatening our democracy (Broadleaf Books), will be published in Fall 2024.

He joined Kelly and John to talk about the threat to democracy the flag represents, and offered his thoughts about what we can still do to break the spell of Christian Nationalism in America.

Last month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill authorizing Florida school districts and charter schools to adopt a policy for chaplains “to provide support, services, and programs to students"...provided those chaplains aren't Satanists.

"We're not playing those games in Florida. That is not a religion," DeSantis said of Satanism. "That is not qualifying to be able to participate in this."

The thing is, though, Satanism most definitely is a religion, and in the case of The Satanic Temple it is a religion in the eyes of United States tax law.

DeSantis may well have said this knowing his bill likely violates the 1st amendment and thus inviting an inevitable legal fight with The Satanic Temple's founder, social justice and 1st Amendment activist Lucien Greaves.

In our final episode of the season - marking the podcasts' one year anniversary - Kelly and John talk about the bill as part of creeping Christian Nationalism, why it's so hard to define a religion (and why governments shouldn't be in the business of doing so), and what Lucien Greaves and The Satanic Temple actually stand for.

Dr. Richard Newton is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director in the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama

From the University's website:

Dr. Newton's areas of interest include theory and method in the study of religion, African American history, the New Testament in Western imagination, American cultural politics, and pedagogy in religious studies. His research explores how people create “scriptures” and how those productions operate in the formation of identities and cultural boundaries.

In addition to an array of book chapters and online essays, Dr. Newton has published in the Journal of Biblical Literature and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion among other venues. His book, Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox, 2020), casts Alex Haley’s Roots as a case study in the dynamics of scriptures and identity politics with critical implication for the study of race, religion, and media. And you can learn more about his use of digital media and pedagogy at his site, Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations in Religion, Culture, and Teaching.

He joined Kelly and John to talk about a cul-de-sac in Houston led him to religious studies, the value of scripture, and Pearl Jam.

Find him on Twitter @seedpods

It's Eclipse Day, so we're releasing a day early!

The solar eclipse that will be visible for much of the United States today had evoked all kinds of reactions, from overbooked hotels in wholly unprepared corners of the country to end times zealots declaring it a warning from God.

Eclipses have always been a source of wonder and religious interpretation, and if Marjorie Taylor Greene's Twitter feed is any indication, there is no sign of that slowing down anytime soon.

But do eclipses also have a place among the more level-headed, mainline religious communities in America?

We asked journalist Emily McFarlan Miller, who wrote about religion and eclipses for the 2017 solar eclipse, to share her thoughts on the matter.

You can find Emily on most of the socials with the handle @emmillerwrites. Her piece on the last eclipse, from Religion News Services, can be found here: Signs and wonder: How people of different faiths view the total solar eclipse

In 2003, Oxford University philosophy professor Nick Bostrom published a paper titled Are You Living in a Computer Simulation, thus giving rise to the modern incarnation of Simulation Theory, which posits that our experienced reality is actually the product of an advanced (possibly future-self) civilization running a simulation experiment.

But the paper on might have been written off as a useful thought experiment had it not been for the popularity of the 1999 film The Matrix, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, and its two sequels, which came out the same year as Bostrom's paper.

In the years since, Simulation Theory has become a lot of things to a lot of people - from a fun metaphor to explain Cartesian philosophy to college freshmen to an all-out article of faith for an increasingly doctrinaire sub-culture of futurists. How useful (or even likely) is Simulation Theory?

In honor of The Matrix's birthday, John and Kelly decided to take up that question.

Sources

https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf

https://builtin.com/hardware/simulation-theory

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/

https://www.wired.com/story/living-in-a-simulation/

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

Sarah Posner has been covering the Christian right and Christian Nationalism for more than a decade. A regular contributor to MSNBC, her works has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Salon, The Nation, The American Prospect, Al Jazeera America, and many other publications.

Posner is the author of 2008's God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters and 2020's Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind.

She joined Kelly and John last week, on the eve of the State of the Union Address and just as Donald Trump had secured the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential race, about how she came to cover religion, how Christian Nationalism has evolved over the past few decades, and what she thinks is ahead, whether Trump returns to power or not.

Her website is http://sarahposner.com.

For the last couple years, Amanda Moore has spent her time covering the far right on her Substack The Turtle Diaries

Amanda infiltrated the far right during the final year of the Trump administration and has written about her experiences in publications like The Nation.

She recently went to the Texas border to cover the arrival of "God's Army" - a group of truckers (possibly) who took it upon themselves to defend the border from an "invasion" and maybe possibly kick of the 2nd Civil War (they didn't).

Amanda joined Kelly and John to talk about her experience at the border (which led to her acquiring a new far-right, J6-alumnus stalker), growing up with fundamentalism, how she sees QAnon as a perfectly predictable offshoot of evangelicalism, and whether she thinks the right is poised to bubble over in violence once again.

You can find her on Twitter (and other social media) @noturtlesoup17

This week, Kelly and John talk to Dr. Nicole Symmonds, who works as an Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics and, it happens, used to work a few cubicles down from John at Beliefnet a decade and a half or so ago.

Dr. Symmonds' work sits at the intersection of Christian ethics and women, gender, and sexuality studies. She explores Black women’s embodiment, particularly the practices of liberative embodiment they craft as a method of resistance to domination and as a simulation of freedom.

Dr. Symmonds identifies as Black Catholic, a religious tradition that follows the rite of the Roman Catholic Church but is driven by the spirit of Blackness in all its forms according to Black people’s diasporic origins and heritage. She is a parishioner at Our Lady of Lourdes, the Mother Church of African-American Catholics in the Archdiocese of Atlanta.

In this episode, she discusses her work studying evangelicals and anti-sex-trafficking work, becoming a Black Catholic, TikTok, and why she emphasizes the term "womanism" in her studies.`

She is on Twitter @nicole_symmonds