Pod Only Knows

As a nice break from all the doom and gloom in the world (and the depressing stuff we often cover), we decided to ask the wonderful Dr. Judith Weisenfeld to come talk to us about her life and work.

Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, Associated Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Effron Center for the Study of America.

Her research focuses on early twentieth-century African American religious history, and she has explored a range of topics, including in the relation of religion to constructions of race, the impact on black religious life of migration, immigration, and urbanization in African American women’s religious history, and religion in film and popular culture.

She is currently the Director of The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities and Cultures, a four-year project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation aimed at producing deeper understandings of the history and diversity of Black religious life in the U.S.

Here she talks to Kelly and John about how she got into religious studies, the joys of accidentally discovering new things during research, and her books Hollywood Be Thy Name and New World A-Coming.

She is on Twitter @JLWeisenfeld

Is Peloton a cult?

Well, Kelly owns one, so she is uniquely qualified to answer.

In all seriousness, a Google search for terms like "peloton cult" or "fitness cult" yields a lot of results.

Fairly or not, the fitness equipment company Peloton has been accused of fostering cult-like behavior in its customers. And the same can be said for branded workout companies like CrossFit and SoulCycle.

But why? And is there anything to this?

In this episode, Kelly and John ask those very questions, and explore what thinking about fitness culture in the framing of religion and cult behavior can tell us about all three of those things.

And they also look at the emerging "cults" that appear to defy our traditional understanding of what they are and what leads people to them, like Twin Flames.

34 years ago, in December of 1989, Fox aired Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, a Simpsons Christmas special, the de facto pilot to the subsequent primetime sitcom, and a cultural phenomenon was born.

To people of a certain age, The Simpsons is part of the cultural DNA. And as an animated sitcom, it had unique license to explore elements of American culture that no other series could. And one of those elements was religion.

The Simpson family went to church. They lived in a multicultural, multiethnic (but still predominantly white and Christian) community. They exposed aspects of American religious life that were hiding in plain sight.

Dr. David Feltmate wrote about all this (in addition to how religion is portrayed in Family Guy and South Park) in his book Drawn to the Gods, and this week, he joined Kelly and John to talk about his life in religious studies, why he loves The Simpsons, and how religion exists in a post-Simpsons America.

But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.

So Charles Dickens described Ebenezer Scrooge's encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in his beloved 1843 classic A Christmas Carol.

And while A Christmas Carol is best known as the endlessly-adapted and reimagined cornerstone of modern Christmas storytelling, it's also a freaky ghost story, and it turns out that, in Dickens' England, telling ghost stories at Christmas was a whole thing! There were, as it turns out, a lot of ghosts in Christmas past.

Why did Victorians like themselves a spooky Christmas? And when did spookiness get replaced with mall Santas, Bing Crosby, and family church services? Is it too late to make Christmas spooky again?

This week, Kelly and John talk to folklorists Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, co-founders of the Carterhaugh School about lost Christmas traditions, winter hauntings, and what else you should read if you prefer ghastly specters to eggnog and Rudolph.

It's December, which means it's time for everybody's racist uncle's favorite holiday tradition, the War on Christmas.

Every year, sure as silver bells chime and lit wreathes line the streets of America's most aggressively white suburbs, Fox News delights eager viewers by trotting out this year's new battlefront narrative: Gay nutcrackers at Target! Insufficiently Christmassy Starbucks cup! Liberals cancelling Rudolph!

If you ask Fox News and your least-favorite relatives, there is a War on Christmas...and there always will be.

So Kelly and John are here to lay down so facts, starting with the fact that Christmas in the year 2023 is a much, much more religious affair than at any time in the past, and that Christmas is only growing more ubiquitous as a holiday globally.

And that there was a War on Christmas - a war that Christmas won in a rout - waged by Christians for centuries.

LINKS!

The Right-Wing’s Forever War: A Short History Of The War On Christmas - Bill Berkowitz

Who Waged the Very First ‘War on Christmas’? - Jade McClain

Target is “Sexualizing Christmas for Children” Screeches Fox News - John Riley

A Puritan Christmas under Cromwell - Jessica Brain

The Plum Pudding Riots: What happened when Christmas was cancelled in Kent - Phil Hayes

What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than to have Kelly and John ruin it for you?

Just kidding! We're not here to cancel Thanksgiving and we hope you have a lovely one.

But holidays are weird things - we often celebrate them without really examining why, or how we arrived at the myths and rituals that emanate from their core.

And Thanksgiving is, in many ways, our strangest holiday - a secular celebration that is at once also an aggressively religious one, built around a series of supposedly historical events that seem to have a lot of missing pieces when you start connecting the dots.

It can also be a day that evokes painful memories for the indigenous population.

To help us unpack what Thanksgiving is and what it is not, and to shed some light on how we came to celebrate this holiday as well as how important it is that we not let that celebration obscure our understanding of early American history and the genocide of the indigenous population, we asked historian David J. Silverman - author of This Land is Their Land - to join us.

You can buy Dr. Silverman's book here: This Land is Their Land @ Amazon

Read also Dr. Silverman's 2019 piece in The New York Times: The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth

Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House or Representatives.

And what the media seems to think you should know about him is that he's very nice, he's smart. he's well-respected by his colleagues, he's personally liked by Democrats, and he's conservative Christian. Oh, and did we mention he's nice? Mike Johnson - real nice guy!

What we think you should know about him, however, is that he is now the most powerful Christian Nationalist in the country - possibly in the history of the country. And Mike's niceness masks some truly dark intentions. Because while nobody seems to have heard of this guy before last month, he has been at the center of the far-right Christian project to remake America as a patriarchal theocracy, and he has very close ties to the likes of the Falwells, James Dobson, and Tony Perkins.

So today, Kelly and John take some time to vent about the failure of our media and to try to correct their missteps ever so slightly, including highlighting some folks who have been covering Johnson the right way, as they provide a quick rundown of who Mike Johnson and why the ascension of this very nice man marks a very dangerous moment for the future of the country.

The New York Times: The Embodiment of White Christian Nationalism in a Tailored Suit

Mother Jones: Mike Johnson’s Long Flirtation With Christian Nationalism

Mother Jones: Mike Johnson Conducted Seminars Promoting the US as a “Christian Nation”

The Nation: The Folksy Fanaticism of Mike Johnson

Jenn Tisdale joins John and Kelly to talk about Edgar Allan Poe and the new Netflix series from Mike Flanagan The Fall of the House of Usher

Like he did for Shirley Jackson with The Haunting of Hill House, Flanagan's series remixes and reimagines much of Poe's work and life story to create something haunting, timely, and revelatory, exposing themes in Poe's work and digging into the author's sense of morality and justice.

For this Halloween special, they discuss the role that fears of pain and death play in narrative, what Carla Cugino's Raven character suggests about justice and free will, and just how damn great this cast is.

Jason Bivins is a specialist in religion and American culture an is the author of 2008's Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism.

He has also published multiple articles, review essays, and occasional pieces on religion, politics, and culture in the United States.

His most recent book is Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America’s Obsession with Religion (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, April 2022).

A child of the era of the Satanic Panic - the unfounded moral hysteria around devil worship that gripped much of the US and Canada in the 1980s and 90s - Jason's interest and study of religion has been driven in large part by the experiences of his metal-loving, comic book-reading youth.

Here he talks to Kelly and John about how conservative evangelicals manipulate and embrace horror tropes for their own ends in books like Left Behind, the story of Hell Houses, and how are cultural fractured and broke all our brains sometime in the mid 1990s.

If you want to connect with Jason, you can email him at [email protected].

Mike Flanagan's "Midnight Mass" revisits a lot of the themes of much of his previous work: grief, death, trauma, loss (and you can listen to our discussion of his "Haunting Of" Netflix series here).

But it also covers some a lot of new ground, including the complicated relationship between human beings and the religions they build. It is a show grounded as much in humanity as it is in horror, and it asks more questions than it answers - and, in this way, it demonstrates an understanding of what religion is and how it works that is rare not only for the genre but for popular fiction in general.

John has been unable to stop thinking about the series since it debuted three weeks ago, and so, desperate to talk about it, he invited the two most qualified voices on the subjects of horror and religion he knows - Kelly J. Baker and Dan Colón, co-host and co-creator of Cage Club's The Monsters that Made Us.

Dan on Twitter

Show page: The Monsters That Made Us