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Amy D. McDowell, "Whispers in the Pews: Evangelical Uniformity in a Divided America" (NYU Press, 2026)
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- [00:00]
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- [01:12]
Roland Clark
hello and welcome. My name is Roland Clark and I'm here today on the New Books Network Talking to Amy McDowell about her latest book, Whispers in the Pews, Evangelical Uniformity in a Divided America. Amy specializes in the sociology of religion, race, gender, and sexuality, and she serves as the director of the Queer Mississippi Histories Project at the University of Mississippi. Welcome to the podcast, Amy.
- [01:37]
Amy McDowell
Oh, thank you for inviting me.
- [01:39]
Roland Clark
So, Amy, this book's about how small talk works in evangelical churches to create what you call biblical sameness. What is biblical sameness and why does it matter?
- [01:50]
Amy McDowell
Well, evangelicals have a history of attaching biblical to actions and beliefs that they believe are mandated by God or aligned with God's authority in scripture. So you may have heard of those terms like biblical manhood, biblical marriage, biblical worldview, or biblical truth. And my concept, biblical sameness, in some ways draws on that tradition but puts emphasis on how political and ideological uniformity is pursued in conservative Christian communities. One of the things that I think I went into this study thinking and had some assumptions about is that evangelical Christians are really all on the same page, theologically and politically. But I found out that that's really not the case. There are lots of shades of differences within the evangelical church, and what I found is that people really are putting on what I'm calling this front of biblical sameness, meaning that they're searching out, performing and uplifting the idea that evangelical Christians are and must be homogeneous in their everyday social interactions and in their larger causes. And I think that matters for us to consider as social scientists, as historians, because this pursuit of sameness normalizes the assumption that a staunchly conservative position on social and political matters is the only option or the right option. And that assumption, I found, makes it really hard for churchgoers to critically reflect on their own beliefs and actions, to have debate and discussion about that, because there's an investment in this front of being on the same page, and it
- [03:38]
Roland Clark
becomes an all or nothing thing for a lot of people.
- [03:42]
Amy McDowell
Yeah, I would say so. I think it becomes an all or nothing because if you don't, you know, put on that front, then in some ways you might get seen and you might not look like you're in line. And I think that there's a sense of either you're in or out. And that feeling can push people into being a little bit more quiet about some of their doubts and their skepticism.
- [04:09]
Roland Clark
So the points you make about the power of small talk, they apply to lots of different community groups and religious groups. But in this book, you base yourself on a very close study of one particular church, which you call welcome Church, although I'm guessing that's not a true name. Why does welcome Church make a good case study for understanding small talk and biblical sameness?
- [04:29]
Amy McDowell
So I would like to say first, to answer that question about what makes welcome Church a good case study for understanding small talk and biblical sameness is that I had no idea I was going to write a book about small talk and biblical sameness. So that's made me reflect a lot about why this church is particularly helpful or an ideal case study for that. And I think before I get into that answer, I want to tell listeners what how I'm defining small talk in the book. So the way that I'm conceptualizing small talk is this process of a mission that limits and prescribes what can and cannot be talked about. So, yes, it's a social glue. It's something that kind of helps us form social ties, and it can make us feel more comfortable in our social interactions. But it also is a way in these church settings, for people to limit where the conversation goes and manage conversations. And small talk is what builds biblical sameness. And that's something that I touch on throughout the book. And you're right, the phenomenon of small talk is not exclusive to welcome or to evangelicals, the act of ignoring and managing the elephants in the room is something that many people tap into, especially those who come from positions of racialized and gendered power. But small talk and its consequences are extreme, are extensive in communities like welcome, where the stakes of belonging are high. I started this ethnographic research in the late summer of 2016. Donald Trump had been named the presumptive Republican nominee, and Mississippi had somewhat recently passed a harmful religious liberty bill that targets the rights and well being of LGBTQ people. Survey research at the time had linked those political shifts to Christian nationalism, a political ideology and movement that seeks to make the US a conservative Christian nation. And survey studies that also been showing continue to show that white evangelicals living in the US south are more likely to support or accommodate Christian nationalism than our other groups. And that isn't to say that it's only attributed to white evangelicals, but again, they're more likely to do so. And yet we didn't have a good grasp on how ordinary people in this region of the country are forming their political outlooks at church. So at a really basic level, I started this ethnography with a question like, what do people talk about at church? Are they talking about these religious liberty bills? Are they talking about the kind of polarizing campaign of Trump and potentially their vote for him? Again, I'm starting this right before he was elected. And it turned out that welcome was an ideal case to explore those questions. I met Bird, who I call Bird, also pseudonym, like welcome Church. He's the pastor of the church. Around this time, he actually invited me to do the study on the church, and I was there for exploratory reasons. So I was kind of looking for a place to do this work. I'd found out about them from someone at a crisis pregnancy center, long story there. But she was telling me about how that this church was really different and they were doing something very different in town. And she was excited about it and she was telling me that I should go check it out. So when I met Bird, I told him about myself, about what I that I teach sociology of religion, that I've done research on Christian hardcore punk music before. And he asked me if I'm a believer. I said no. And he said, hey, you should come study us. You know, we're doing something really different than most Southern Baptist churches in town. And he said, we want to be a multiracial, multi ethnic community. And he talked about Martin Luther King's jr's remark about their churches being really segregated on Sunday Mornings he did let me know that he had been him and his church had been really planted by the Southern Baptist Church where he had worked prior to starting welcome. And you know, as I got to know Welcome, I found out that they are part of this church plant movement, which is an evangelical enterprise to build more rather than bigger churches. And church plants are largely considered startup churches. They're churches that have the support of a parent church until they can generate enough income to become self efficient. Welcome Church that I study was also launched at a time when its beloved college town was on the edge of the country's mounting political divides. And I talk about Oxford in that context more extensively in the book, and I won't do that right now, but just to say that Welcome's part of this Southern Baptist church plant mission to build a society where everyone shares the same values, believes in the same gods, and carries out their lives in a way that aligned with Southern Baptist doctrine. But at the same time, it's really branding itself and promoting itself as being very different than their Southern Baptist peers. And for some, many of the churchgoers I interviewed, they didn't even fully recognize that it was a Southern Baptist church or Southern Baptist Convention affiliate. They just saw it as like this cool new church in town. And because of that emphasis on being a church for everybody, that being, as the pastor told me, we're a church for homeschool moms, for college students, for his, what he called his Hispanic brothers and sisters, racially mixed families, blue collar workers, white collar workers. It meant that the church was necessarily positioned to attract people with varying ideas about what they were coming into. It was a fairly new church. And I was curious. Yeah, how, how do, what do people talk about in a place like this? There are a lot of new church plants not only in Oxford, but across the country that are part of this evangelical enterprise. So, wow. Are churchgoers handling their internal differences? How do they navigate those conversations, especially in a social, political context, that feel very divisive. And I found out that they're doing that by pushing a lot of their differences out of sight and out of mind with small talk. So I think that's what really makes this church or this case study, an illuminating case study for a concept like small talk in the building of biblical sameness.
- [10:57]
Roland Clark
You point out that trying to build bridges with people by steering clear of topics that might alienate them, it's really important for welcome Church because welcome Church cares a lot about being welcoming. How do they do this in practice? Like, what does it look like on the ground.
- [11:14]
Amy McDowell
Yeah. I mean, how it looks like in practice is being friendly, being even friendly, very practically, when you show up, having many volunteers every Sunday, they have to set up. They had to set up the church and the activity center and the recreation center every Sunday. So that meant a group of people had to volunteer every Sunday to help hang the welcome banners and be at the doors or be at the parking lot and kind of wave people in. There would even be a person waving near the road, like, standing there, almost like a crossing guard. That would be a volunteer and a bright yellow vest to wave people into the church parking lot to be like, yes, this is. We're having church here. And that kind of welcoming and friendly vibe was there whenever you arrived. I would say that in terms of just the style or the dress of people. There was a mix of kind of class signifiers in the room. People would dress really like, kind of how anyone, you might think most people dress on a Sunday morning. You know, dress in their. Their heels and their dresses and their khaki pants and polo shirts. But there were also a lot of people showing up in blue jeans and hunting T shirts or Ole Miss garb. So I felt like when I entered the church, I remember being nervous, and then I felt very unseen and unnoticed and not in a way that was bad, in a way that felt like, you know, I could. Yeah, I can see how that people show up here. And it feels like no one's really paying attention to what you showed up in, in terms of what clothes you're wearing or if you're sitting by yourself or sitting with a group of people. And so that's kind of on the. On that just way that many churchgoers themselves see the church as being welcoming. They really appreciated that about the vibe. As one churchgoer said, we're not stuff. Stuffy and stuck up like a lot of churches in town. And I didn't hear that from just her. I heard many people that I interview talk about the church in that way. But one of the things that also really helps create this welcoming vibe, I think, for churchgoers is that they really emphasize keeping politics to yourself, and they emphasize that implicitly, but yet very powerfully. Something was deemed political political if it could spark disagreement, doubt, or permit a progressive point of view to emerge. For instance, churchgoers neglected discussions about Trump's campaign to build what he calls a big, beautiful wall along the US Mexico border at the time, where a big mantra of the church was, we built. We don't build walls, we build Longer tables. I actually have a chapter with that title that's really telling just how that it almost seemed like a metaphor for what was going on. The conversations that were happening in the news and in, in the university setting for sure, especially in a department of sociology and anthropology. And then to go to this church and those conversations to not be had while they're also saying we don't build walls, which is fascinating to me, they dodged important debates about the fight to preserve and tear down Confederate monuments in town, even when neo Confederate groups stormed through the town. So that kind of idea of you just keep politics to yourself and that's one of the primary ways that we create this welcoming community. Because we don't want to get into a fight, we don't want to stir tension, we don't want to stir disagreement was very powerful at that church.
- [14:57]
Roland Clark
Earlier on, you alluded to Pastor Bird talking about Martin Luther King Jr. S comment that 10am on a Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America. And Welcome Churches desire to be multi ethnic. So being multi ethnic church, it matters a lot to members of welcome Church. But in the book you write about how different people had different ideas about how to do diversity. What does tearing down the walls of race look like for whites in that church as opposed to people of color?
- [15:28]
Amy McDowell
Yeah, that's a great question. Black and brown congregants disclosed to me in one on one interviews that being at welcome Church, which was a white majority church, did make them uncomfortable. I mean a couple, one married couple. The husband in that couple was saying that his wife kind of drug him to that church, that he wasn't going to really excited about it. But then he found the racial reconciliation group, the be the bridge group that he called jokingly the black group. And that once he went to that group he felt a little bit better about attending welcome Church. And he actually, he made friends there and he started to feel good about going there even to the Sunday services. But you know, with that said, he and others described the ways in which he was willing to sacrifice his own discomfort for a bigger cause of building a multiracial church community. Many of the people of color that I talk to in the church talked about them believing in that, in Wellcome's mission to be a multiracial, multi ethnic community and that they believed that their presence could change the hearts and minds of racist whites in the church and outside of the church. So showing up, participating in be the bridge, moving past that discomfort that they were personally experiencing was part of their spiritual practice for white Members of the church tearing down the walls of race was really a matter of welcome talk, which is a concept I use in the book to describe how churchgoers and leaders exaggerate their commitment to and success at achieving racial and ethnic diversity, while at the same time suppressing real talk about the privileges and powers of whiteness in the evangelical church. So welcome Church is, you know, welcome Talk is really kind of connected to this idea of being a welcoming church. You know, that. That hospitability, the hospitality that I described earlier of creating this friendly place. And, hey, this is what we got to do. You know, as long as we welcome people and say they can come, that's really. That's a big step for us. And we say that anyone can come to this church. It's for everybody. And that's about as far as it goes for the white members of the church.
- [17:51]
Roland Clark
You talk about an outreach called Spring is Here, which welcome Church does in a black neighborhood in the town every year, but you point out it very rarely results in people from that neighborhood actually coming along to welcome Church. Why doesn't it work?
- [18:06]
Amy McDowell
Well, Spring Is Here happened about once a year, and a neighborhood that I call Rolland Residential, which is a pseudonymous, you know, I. I think that it didn't even happen every year. Sometimes they put on Spring It's Here events in other neighborhoods. But at least two consecutive years while I was doing the study, they were at Roland Residential in the Spring, which means that it was fairly infrequent to visit. To visit the neighborhood. So that might be one of the reasons it doesn't work. Meaning that the church isn't putting that much time into forming relationships with people in the neighborhood if they're just showing up once a year. And the way that they show up is they bring. They set up their large, you know, white tents in the neighborhood, bring some bouncy houses for the children to enjoy in the neighborhood, and then serve hot dogs. And they talk about extensively how many hot dogs they give out. And a lot of kids come out and they're very excited about the hot dogs and the bouncy houses. But there's not a lot of talk about the adults and neighborhood and their conversations with them and whether or not they're having much of a turnout. I had a research assistant, Heather Costa Grego, actually attended Spring Is here with the church because she had been volunteering with. Been participant observation, doing participant observations of one of the groups that was involved in setting up Spring Is Here in Rowland Residential. So it made sense that she would go to that event with them. And, you know, in her field notes, she describes how that there weren't really any adults ever come by the tents. And so later, she follows up with people who volunteered the following Sunday about why they think people don't come out. And, you know, they're saying things like, well, they're just so shy. You know, I'm a little shy, too. Whenever someone would come up, I just would give them our card or I would tell them that they should come on Sunday morning. Just sounded like the conversation didn't go anywhere and there wasn't much there to be had. But the other thing is that churchgoers just didn't engage in reflective discussions about why they were going to rolland residential in the first place or wrestle really with why weren't the grownups coming out, you know, into the parking lot and getting a hot dog themselves and having a conversation. And perhaps why would it be the case that black members of this historically marginalized neighborhood would be apprehensive about approaching mainly white churchgoers in the parking lot of their own neighborhood that is promoting their church? Just that those conversations weren't being had. Now, to say that at the same time, I should give some welcome church goers some credit in that they did see it as part of their welcoming mission. They felt like, hey, there's not other churches that are mainly run by white leaders that are doing this kind of outreach work. We're saying that, yeah, we, we really want to be this multiracial church. Look at what we're doing. And they were very proud of that. And they felt like that outreach ministry was a way to practice that mission. But outside of those remarks, there wasn't much of a deep dive into what does it really mean to do that kind of outreach work and bring people into their church community.
- [21:31]
Roland Clark
You mentioned before that the two Trump presidencies have resulted in a lot of very public conversations about a whole range of sensitive issues in America over the last 10 years. How does a church that wants to be welcoming talk about Donald Trump?
- [21:46]
Amy McDowell
They don't.
- [21:49]
Roland Clark
What if you tried to talk to them about Donald Trump? How does that work?
- [21:53]
Amy McDowell
Okay, yeah, they avoid him like the plague. In the span of two and a half year ethnography, I heard only one person bring him up without my prompting, and that was in a private conversation with me at a women's potluck that I call recharge in the book. And this person, Darlene, was somewhat of an outlier in that she didn't really stick to small talks all that much. And I think sometimes what she figured out, that I wasn't really part of the church, or she asked me, are you. Are you an expert in theology? And I said, no. And then she. Then she brought up Trump and how that he is a very polarizing figure in her home, and. And how she just feels like she's stuck in the middle of. Of her family members. So, you know, I think her comment that day, really, that's really when the light bulb went off for me, was, oh, wait, you know, I haven't heard anyone bring him up on their own ever. I'd already kind of noticed that. But her remarking on him and the tension that he brings to her family was illuminating. And it was kind of through that experience and my own observations that I really learned that he was one of the biggest elephants in the room at that church. And that knowledge shaped when and how I brought him up in private interviews. So I didn't bring him up as the first question is certainly not the last, but I usually kind of eased into it about how the people felt about Christianity's place in the U.S. today. And I had already asked them about what they felt about LGBTQ membership in the church, about men's and women's roles in the church and in their families. And so when I brought up Trump, I usually talked about it in regards to, you know, there was a large outpouring of support for evangelical Trump in the 2016 election, because I should say that by the time I'm interviewing people, it's after he's been elected. And so I just remarked on the studies that show the white evangelical support for Trump. And I'd asked them what they thought about that. And then from there, I oftentimes could ask them, or they would let me know whether or not they voted for
- [24:03]
Roland Clark
him to shift away from Trump for a minute, because we can try to ignore him just regardless of what he wants. One of the other small groups that you talk about at welcome Church is the Be the Bridge group, and that was specifically set up to talk about race and racism. What happens at that group when black or Hispanic church members share their own personal experiences of racial discrimination?
- [24:26]
Amy McDowell
So, unlike the other small groups at welcome, race and racism were topics of discussion at Be the Bridge, which is a name that the group borrowed from Latasha Morrison's racial reconciliation book and study guide by the same name. So this is a study guide and book that's picked up in many evangelical churches. Black members were candid about personal experiences of racial bias and exclusion in that group. But they and the white members of Be the Bridge cautiously avoided topics that could be perceived as political or divisive. So again, not to keep talking about Trump, but Trump, but they did evade the subject of Trump and his racist campaign and platform. No one brought him up in that group. And I was with that group for three semesters. So that's. To me, that seems like a lot of work, conversation management, not even to make a joke about him or anything over that span of time in a group that is built to talk about the difficult subject of race and racism. And they kept quiet about other polarizing issues like movements to take down the Confederate statue off the University of Mississippi's campus at the time. And they refrained from phrases that called attention to racialized power and structural inequality. So hearing people say the word white or white privilege or white supremacy was very rare. I do know that there was a time where that white privilege was brought up at the meeting. And some members of the group did talk about their, their advantages from being white. There were a couple people that didn't return to the group, white members after that discussion. It's not clear to me whether or not that felt that that discussion became too tense or too political, as they might put it. But I did note that, that there were some people that left after that conversation transpired. Also, follow up questions and comments were really rare in that group. I did find that participants of color, oftentimes they would speak into the void when they would talk about their experiences of racial bias and exclusion or discrimination. At one meeting, a few Be the Bridge members took turns sharing their observations of explicit acts of racism. And at welcome Church. And some of these observations I was not aware of, I actually learned about at this group. So for instance, one black member of the group raised concerns about a white family that she had seen post photos of themselves in blackface on social media. And my understanding is that this family were active members of the church or if not regularly attending the church. There was also a young white college student who was participating on a Be the Bridge group study group on campus. So she was also part of the one at welcome Church. And she shared after this member showed this about the family posting that image on social media, she shared that she heard an overheard a churchgoer laughing about how he went, quote, unquote, packing, meaning packing a firearm when he attended Spring is here at Roland Residential. You know, this idea that he had to protect himself with a weapon because he was going to be in a majority black neighborhood.
- [27:46]
Roland Clark
Wow.
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Amy McDowell
And I also recall a Latina woman at that same group once. These two had shared those observations. She told us about how she had heard church members saying insensitive things about children in Mexico when they were on the plane to Oaxaca for a mission trip. And she felt that people needed some sensitivity training, what she called cultural sensitivity training. And really she didn't say it like this, but I understood it as anti racist training because of the remarks that they were saying before they are going on a global mission trip and spending time in another country. And after they shared these things, you know, I'm, I'm writing, jotting down notes going, whoa, where is this conversation going to go? White members of Be the Bridge and others let out moans of annoyance. You know, kind of oo, that's, you know, that's hard to hear. But then after that there was no more talk about it. And there were a couple people who, very close to members of the leadership team and they didn't engage in a conversation or a frank talk about racism in their community. The conversation just went nowhere. It, it vanished. It was like the remarks were made and then that was it. And that's what I mean by speaking into the void.
- [29:12]
Roland Clark
Yeah, that's, that really is speaking into the void. So let's not talk about race again. Let's talk about women. What about when women in the church talk about gender issues and toxic, toxic masculinity? How does that go down?
- [29:27]
Amy McDowell
Well, the church was candid about men's divine authority over women. So I think that's helpful for understanding what happens with women when they talk about gender issues, because I'm going to get to that. But first I want to get a, give listeners a sense of, you know, what is the church preaching about gender? What is it saying? So it preached the, that women are to submit to men. That might not be surprise for anyone who's familiar with evangelical Christianity, but I think it was going a little step further. And this is what we're seeing with the Southern Baptist Convention largely. And where we're seeing evangelicalism and the conservative movement going is this just, you know, it's pushing us along into more severe strands of patriarchy. They also really emphasize that men who fail to take control of women are failing at masculinity. And I think one of the most striking observations that I also had a research assistant, Pace Ward, who's now a PhD student at Notre Dame. He participated in some of the men's studies group on my behalf and collected field notes as a research assistant at the time. So he was able to hear kind of what men in the church were saying in their conversations in these small group meetings. And one of the things that they would emphasize is that men need to take responsibility. They need to take responsibility for women's choices. At one point, Byrd and others in church leadership called Adam from Adam from the book of Genesis a punk because he didn't have enough courage to tell Eve, don't eat the apple. So in some ways they were saying that Adam is actually to blame, not Eve. And I found that really remarkable. So that stance on gender was really reflecting where the Southern Baptist Convention's going and especially its ban on women in leadership positions. And this idea that women must submit to men and that women have no right to complain about that, even though it might feel unfair. But there were women, of course, in the church who weren't happy with these church teachings, some who were very active. One interviewee did talked about how that she loved Bird. She loved the church, it was her church home. But she didn't expect to hear them draw such a hard line around gender and that she felt that it was belittling to women, that it made her feel silly, and she didn't like to feel that way. There were others in the church that I interviewed who said that they were tired of being asked to do take on more responsibilities in their family and in their church. And they felt like these demands to be a women of a woman of God were getting kind of out of control and out of hand. But these women didn't have space to air their grievances. They were gently and firmly nudged into silence by men through these messages that they've heard over and over and over again in the church, but also by other women. So I describe a book club that I've participated in. It didn't happen very regularly, but every few months or so we would read a book usually authored by an evangelical superstar, usually women who authored those books. And then we would meet in someone's home from the church to talk about the book. And oftentimes these book would end up being about someone's marriage. Even if the maybe, let's say the main storyline of the book wasn't about someone's marriage. It's still like the marriage or husband or the heterosexual union was always present in some form or fashion. And so it kind of opened up this space for women to talk about their own marriages and their relationships with their husbands. But I found that every time someone would bring up their husband in any negative light, like, oh, my gosh, you know, if we don't make him happy and no one else is happy. Or if someone complained about their husband being overbearing, there would be ways that others in the group would kind of shut down that conversation. They would change the subject, or they would bring up some other aspect of the book or text, or, hey, let's go to chapter three to, you know, really put a stop to women airing their grievances about the potentially toxic relationships that they were in. And I, you know, was really struck by that because I kept thinking that, oh, this could be a place where that they just kind of have a little bit of a chit chat about their crappy husbands and. And then that's it. I didn't think it would be that dangerous, but it seemed that even that alone felt somewhat dangerous and something that had to be contained.
- [34:17]
Roland Clark
So if I'm understanding this correctly, this is a church that actively goes out of its way to avoid conflict and to avoid sensitive issues when it comes to politics and race. Like, they won't talk about Trump, they won't talk about racism, but it's practically enthusiastic when it comes to talking about male supremacy. Why do you think patriarchy is non negotiable when other things are? Or why is it okay to teach patriarchy when members are discouraged from talking about politics and race?
- [34:44]
Amy McDowell
Yeah, this is a great question and one that I continue to contemplate. My chapter Back to Basics, which is about this. The church's message about the place of men and women in society and in their marriage has more references to scripture than any other chapter. And I didn't set out writing the book thinking that that's what was going to happen. I hadn't really fully realized it until I had finished the chapters to notice that, oh, scripture keeps coming up in this chapter. And this is because the pastor, guest speakers and small group leaders frequently referenced a handful of scriptures to support their aggressive stance on gender. So that said, I've had friends and colleagues over time point out that the church might be more explicit about gender because their beliefs about it are more firmly rooted in theology. Like they have some reference point to say. See, it says this here, this is what you're supposed to do. But I don't think that that explanation satisfies the question of why gender we know from the black church that calls for racial justice are rooted in the Bible as well. That is, there are many churches that draw on scripture to justify their stance on a wide range of issues such as capitalist greed, inequality, the death penalty, and the common good. Welcome. Didn't do that so much, but they did for gender. So I think gender is a dog whistle in the church. The theology of male headship and a heterosexual marriage signals where the church should be in its orientations and allegiances to the religious and political right. So that means that it's signaling where it should be in regards to issues regarding race and inequality. Gender is also a way for the church to suppress the voices and perspectives of its most active members, which are women and predominantly white women. If the church seeks to protect the authority and power of white men, it has to routinely suppress the voices and perspectives of women in the church. It can't really let that go. And if women in the church start acting up and becoming, as one of my interviewees called it, almost feminist, the entire system might shut down. So I think there's a real investment in being explicit about the gender order in the church.
- [37:04]
Roland Clark
Let's talk about the church's attitude towards the LGBTQ community for a minute, then. This is something else that's not talked about much over coffee after church, but from what I got out of the book, a lot of church members see it as a religious freedom issue. Is that right? Whose freedoms are they talking about here?
- [37:23]
Amy McDowell
Yes, I think they definitely see it as a religious freedom issue. And as you said there, not talking about LGBTQ plus people or community over coffee at the church. And in many ways, it was hard to find out where people stood on that, even in private interviews. I think it was almost like watching a tennis match, like, about, do you think that a gay person can come to this church and be a member? Or do you know if the church is what the stance are? And sometimes they didn't know what they felt the right answer should be for themselves, and they might not know what the church's official stance was, and that's something that I write about in the book. But to answer your question about religious freedom, I asked them about the religious freedom legislation that had been passed in Mississippi. And just to say a little bit more about that, in Mississippi, it's. There is a law that makes it legal for conservative Christians to refuse services such as health care, wedding cakes, and rental cars to an LGBTQ person on the basis of their religious conviction that a marriage should be preserved for the monogamous union of a man and woman. And that male, female refer to an individual's what they describe as biological sex as determined by anatomy and genetics at the time of birth. So it's very explicit. Right. About what it's protecting. So when I asked churchgoers what they thought about this law in Mississippi. They almost always shifted their response to the Supreme Court case about the evangelical baker in Lakewood, Colorado, who refused to create a cake for a gay couple. So they didn't really wrestle with the extensiveness of the religious liberty law in Mississippi. And some said that they didn't even know that it existed, which was striking to me, but they felt that they had a right. So they again went back to this larger national case that made a lot of national news headlines about the cake baker in Colorado. And they would say that they felt that he had a right to refuse the service. But they. Many of my interviewees would say that if it was them personally with the cake bake, with the cake bakery shop, that they would probably make the cake, but they just wouldn't put two dudes kissing on top of it. That was actually an expression that a couple people used, which I found remarkable, that it was something that not just one person said, but a few people said. I learned through those interviews that some of the more progressive members of the church who said that they had gay friends or queer family members weren't comfortable with the idea of a Christian being told what to do if it conflicted with their religious beliefs or made them uncomfortable. So they would say, you know, if I might make the cake again, I wouldn't put the topper on it. But I don't even know if it's right for someone to ask for the cake for a wedding or let someone know that it is their wedding because they're putting a Christian in this really difficult situation of not knowing how to live out their religious convictions. So from their perspective, lgb, LGBTQ visibility in public spaces, particularly in Christian contexts, was considered a violation of their religious liberty. So the chapter is called Don't Ask, Don't Tell for a Reason. In the book, their compromise that they propose, they said, would keep everyone out of the courtroom would be for queer people to order a plain white cake, not a wedding cake. So in many ways, when we're talking about whose freedoms are they talking about here? To answer your your question, it's clearly the freedoms are about their freedoms to practice their Christian convictions in public spaces, which in many ways really means that other people need to keep theirselves and their relationships and their love lives in the closet.
- [41:28]
Roland Clark
Another religious issue, religious freedom issue, is the role of religion in schools. So how do members of welcome Church feel about secular education?
- [41:38]
Amy McDowell
Yeah, one of the things I noticed and actually has sparked my interest in education and in schools since doing this study is that Schools and school teachers were an adversary that the churchgoers held in common. It was really a big subject of small talk. You know, when we talk about, well, what were people talking about to kind of fill the space of more uncomfortable things. Complaining about schools was one of the go tos a lot of times, especially in the small groups that I studied. And I studied eight different small groups at that church. So I spent a lot of time with people in groups of 20 people, all the way to as small as five people. They'd complain about standardized tests, they complained about teachers, about homework, and about the state limiting Christian expression in the classroom. And this is Mississippi, so the limits of Christian expression in classroom is debatable here. There's many ways in which Christianity finds its way in the public schools classrooms here. But still, for them, it wasn't enough. They wanted their kids to be able to pray at school, learn about Jesus at school, and have scripture displayed in the halls and walls of classrooms.
- [42:48]
Roland Clark
Yeah, that's a lot from, from a British or Australian perspective. What about universities? Does Wellcome Church see universities as places they feel comfortable? And if not, how do they deal with that sort of discomfort?
- [43:02]
Amy McDowell
Well, members and leaders of Wellcome certainly cherish the University of Mississippi, or what they and others call Ole Miss, and they are proud to call this town, Oxford, Mississippi, home. Many at the church, however, had strong feelings about the changes that they were seeing unfold in their beloved college town. The University of Mississippi, and by extension Oxford is, was and is continues to grow. There's an uptick in students from abroad, from countries all around the world, coming with different languages. Their undergraduate student enrollment from out of state was and continues to soar. And there are faculty from diverse religious and political orientations moving to Oxford for jobs here. And some of them are coming from what they would call blue cities and blue states, or what we might all call that. Right? So vote Democratic in elections. Welcome tried to make the most out of those changes. And Byrd really talked about it as a way like the mission of welcome is to intervene and bring those newcomers into the fold of Christianity. He preached it, he helped plant the church because he believes that the church has to, quote, unquote, run after the lost. And he would oftentimes just say run after people from every nation at the University of Mississippi. And he felt that this place, Oxford, was the best place to do that running. The problem, however, for him and others in the church was that newcomers, you know, some of those faculty from those blue cities were erecting roadblocks that made it tricky for the church to share the gospel when and whenever they wanted. One churchgoer in her 50s was especially annoyed. And I always. She always comes to mind because she had been working in the public school sector for several decades, and from her perspective, the church and the wider community, not the church. The school where she worked at had become what she called a very, very secular place. She complained that all kinds of kids go to that school, including the professor's kids, who, to use her words, don't believe in sin. She felt like she couldn't share her faith with others, with her students anymore without some atheist or some professor's kids making a big stink about it. Pam joined. Her name was Pam. She joined an event evangelical apologetics group at welcome that was started by a person named Bob who had moved here from. Moved to Oxford from California. And he started that group, what I call Reason Defense in the book, because he believed that members of the welcome community needed to be equipped with tools for defending their faith and interactions with what he and others call skeptics. And skeptics are scientists, secularists, feminists, Christians who don't share their version of the Bible, secular institutions, all of those things are kind of within the skeptic umbrella for them. And they felt that they needed practice on how to not only defend their Christian convictions in conversations with such individuals or in interactions with those institutions, but also they needed to win the argument. And a lot of their conversations in that small group was about, you know, the public school system, the K through 12 school system, needing to change that. They needed to be able to express their Christian convictions out and open. And it was also about universities, you know, their diversity and inclusion initiatives being not inclusive of their conservative Christian values, and how that they felt pushed to the margins in the university system. And they didn't like that. And so this Reason Defense group that Pam joined at welcome Church, which was a small group of about seven people, they really felt at odds with the university and with what it. The changes that it had brought to their community. And in that way, we're going to that group to get trained on how to combat those changes. So there was a lot of talk that was, to say the least, disparaging about university classes, about professors. They followed a book called Tactics, and that book has this concept of the professor's ploy. And so they practice how to defeat what they call the professor's ploy, which is like, you have to get into a logic where that you are peppering the skeptic with lots of questions to make them feel like that they have to defend what they think and what they believe so that you yourself don't have to defend what you think or believe as a Christian. And so they spend a lot of time doing that. Um, that Reason Defense group, that evangelical apologetics group, is part of a nationwide evangelical movement called Ratio Christi. And that Ratio Christi has chapters and universities across the U.S. the goal of that movement is to make a conservative version of God an integral part of the public school experience. And of course, that movement has gained a lot of traction in the years since I left welcome. There's been legislation introduced in Mississippi and in other states that really is about limiting what people can say in their classrooms. And I find that that parallels very well with the dynamics I saw unfold at the Reason Defense group.
- [48:41]
Roland Clark
Last question. How does all this matter? Like White v. Evangelicals in the U.S. they're famous for their support of the Republican party and other right wing movements. What does small talk have to do with that?
- [48:54]
Amy McDowell
Well, there are a lot of great books about Christian nationalism, the rise of the religious right, and the relationship between American evangelicalism and the Republican Party. These texts mostly highlight the leaders of the religious and political right. Our focus on the characteristics of Christian nationalism. But what transpires in everyday church spaces often gets overlooked. And because of that, small talk and its power to shape the political trajectory of American evangelicalism has really gone unnoticed. Small talk, the avoidances and unspoken assumptions that transpire in everyday conversations and church teachings normalize and amplifies the big talk on the right. Those loud voices, those leadership voices. Over and over again, churchgoers at welcome and I bet in other churches hear from each other and from church leadership and from the larger evangelical movement that they must put Christianity first in their lives. Don't spend too much time with non believers. Do life with other Christians. Small talk is working in tandem with that Christian's first message. It shaped what people felt was possible to speak about question and discussion at church. It really shuts down reflective dialogue and critical contemplation in the church. It erases the possibility for those kinds of conversations to transpire and surface. And I do think that if there was space for people to talk out their ideas and their opinions, that maybe we might not be in the situation we are right now. That small talk created a lot of silence. And that silence eases the growth of white Christian nationalism both within American evangelicalism and in the wider society. It convinces seemingly silent minorities to conform to a vocal majority position. Small talk discourages critical reflection and thinking in the church. It weakens empathetic human connections in the church. You know, people don't find out about one another and their experiences. People didn't ask me many questions about who I am. They didn't ask one another a lot of questions, especially if they, you know, kind of suspected that maybe the answer wouldn't fall in line with some sort of uniform idea about who they're supposed to be. It fuels the idea. The small talk fuels the idea that differences are dangerous, unchristian, and therefore un American. So small talk is really politically powerful, and it's something that we might not notice at first. And I didn't know I would be writing a book about, but I found that it's something we should all be paying more attention to.
- [51:41]
Roland Clark
So what you're saying is this is a really important book?
- [51:44]
Amy McDowell
Yes, of course. As all other all. I'm sure authors never say that on the New Books Network podcast. Right?
- [51:54]
Roland Clark
Some people are better at explaining why their books are good than others. Um, but that's all we have time for today, but thank you so much for talking through these really interesting and difficult questions.
- [52:04]
Amy McDowell
Well, thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.
- [52:07]
New Books Network Host
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