The Cheeky Scholar
Listen as smart – and cheeky – scholars share their knowledge about culture, art, and history... and bust a whole lot of myths along the way.
The Cheeky Scholar
How Evangelical Beliefs Are Influencing Modern Politics
Is the Bible really anti-abortion? Ever wondered what it’s like inside a fundamentalist evangelical gathering?
Strap in for a thought-provoking episode of The Cheeky Scholar as we sit down with Dr. Myev Rees, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, to uncover the complex layers behind evangelical movements in the U.S. We pull back the curtain on their origins and evolution into a system that impacts education, family dynamics, and reproductive choices. Myev shares her firsthand experiences from evangelical gatherings, including The Institute of Basic Life Principles conference, revealing the strict disciplinary practices and controversial teachings that permeate conservative Christian households.
Reality TV’s role in mainstreaming conservative values takes center stage as we dissect the portrayal of hyper-conservative families in shows like the Duggars in TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting.” Myev and I explore how these sanitized depictions influence societal norms and potentially propel fringe beliefs into the mainstream. We then navigate the contentious history of evangelical anti-abortion stances and the rise of the religious right, shedding light on the intersection of religion, politics, and media.
From evangelical activism to the strategic adoption of abortion as a political tool, this episode offers a rich, nuanced perspective on how deeply intertwined these elements are in shaping contemporary America.
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Hello everyone, welcome to the Cheeky Scholar. This is the podcast where smart and cheeky scholars share their knowledge about history, art and culture and bust a whole lot of myths along the way. I'm your host, Dr. Lara Ayyad. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before, welcome back, all right. So I'm very excited to have Maya F Reese on the show on the Cheeky Scholar. Maya received her PhD in religious studies at Northwestern University and she is now associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Cypress College. Maiev grew up in Southern California. She loves food, wine and rescuing dogs, and I can attest to this because whenever I go over, I play with the pups and you're a chef extraordinaire. But instead of asking you for the best recipe this time around, maya, I'm going to actually ask you if you could come up with the worst imaginable ice cream flavor. What would it be?
Myev Rees:Ooh, worst imaginable ice cream flavor, I think, maybe something like smoked salmon.
Lara Ayad:Ooh, oh, my God, yeah smoked salmon.
Myev Rees:Oh my God.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, smoked salmon would be really bad. I think anything in the fish or marine animal category would be a pretty bad one. I was thinking sardine and blueberries would be pretty, pretty horrendous, but yeah, yeah, well, anyway, we can start talking about much less important things now. So so, Myev, you you specialize in religious studies and I know you've studied fundamentalist groups in the United States specifically, and what I thought was so interesting when I was was talking with you ahead of time about your research is you looked a lot at the Institute of Basic Life Principles, like this is sort of an organization that you've focused on with your research. The name of the Institute, institute of Basic Life Principles, doesn't sound very interesting, but when I looked them up I was shocked to find out who they are. So would you mind telling me what exactly is the IBLP?
Myev Rees:What's their mission? Yeah, yeah, it is. It's one of the most banal names for an extremist organization, right? Um, the Institute of Basic Life Principles? Um, sounds like a bad sort of self-help kind of you know movement or something like that. But no, the, the, basically the institute. I'll just call them the IBLP. That is their current name. It started as the Institute in Basic, I believe, Youth Conflicts. This is earlier in the 20th century, founded by a man named Bill Gothard, and it's what we call a parachurch organization. So it's not an official nomination.
Myev Rees:It's an organization of conservative evangelicals that got started to address the I would call moral panic of the mid 20th century of juvenile delinquency.
Lara Ayad:Okay, and that was in the early sixties, right, right, yeah.
Myev Rees:And so this is like, you know, the rebel without a cause, you know the James Dean panic, right? What are the teenagers doing? And so the and this came along with the general moral panic around the decline of the traditional nuclear family was helped along by the women's movement, by, you know, all kinds of the civil rights movement and so on. So you see, so what happens is this man, um, bill Goddard, begins hosting these seminars, um, so they're basically just live events that people start coming to, and they start coming by the thousands. They're incredibly popular, um, and then eventually he kind of does this sort of like circuit tour where he's hosting all of these, these big seminars. Eventually he starts turning it into a curriculum that people are sort of taking home with them. There are these textbooks that he starts to self-publish.
Lara Ayad:So it's almost like a homeschooling type of situation or kind of like a self-education, you know type of setup here.
Myev Rees:yeah, it starts out aimed at parents helping um build strong christian families quote unquote and um and parents who are concerned about moral decay, moral decline, um, and all of these kinds of things. It doesn't really jump into homeschool curriculum until the 1980s and that's sort of that maps on with the history of American homeschooling generally. So that's, you start to see more and more families deciding in conservative Christianity to homeschool, far more now than in the eighties, as it's been a pretty steady increase.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, and you've been to. Yeah, you've been to. You've been to some recent conferences with the IBLP, I know when you were doing your field work and working on your doctorate. My understanding is you went to a couple of the what they're called conferences or meetings for members of the IBLP. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like and what you saw there?
Myev Rees:Yeah, so these homeschool conferences. So now the IBLP is a sort of a comprehensive homeschool curriculum, and I say comprehensive in the sense that it's comprehensive for them. It is severely lacking in sort of basic math, history, things that we would consider to be important parts of an education program. But so now it's a, it's a whole sort of system. But it doesn't just stop at homeschooling. It really is about how marriages should function, how many children people should have.
Myev Rees:So one of the hallmarks of the IBLP is that Bill Gothard taught that parents should, or husbands and wives should, welcome as many children as God will give them. So they don't practice any kind of birth control, including the rhythm method or natural family planning or anything like that. It's complete openness, regardless of what that means for the health of the mother and so on or the financial freedom of the family and so on. So it's not just homeschooling, it's how husbands and wives relate to each other. It's how parents are supposed to relate to children. It is a lot real stress on child discipline. There are advocates of corporal punishment for children as young as infancy. So it's a pretty all-encompassing world.
Myev Rees:So, the vast majority of folks who engage with the IBLP engage with it through the homeschooling curriculum, through the family structure curriculum. But they do have these live gatherings and that they call homeschool conferences.
Lara Ayad:Got it and they're very family oriented, right Like you go there and there's lots of big families.
Myev Rees:They are at the family and they happen at various places around the country. The biggest one is their annual one, which happens in Big Sandy Texas. They have a campus in Big Sandy Texas.
Lara Ayad:I couldn't make up a name like that. If I tried Big Sandy, texas, it's like sober.
Myev Rees:Very Texas name. Yeah, it's a very Texas name. Um, about three hours, uh, east of Dallas. Um, just to give you a sense, it's in a little teeny town. If you blink you'll drive past it. Um, so it's, uh, yeah, I think that, um, it's closest, if I, if memory serves to, to Tyler, texas. That's. That's where I remember going to get when I was there. But so the IBLP has a now because it has become this whole organization. It has lots of little parts and one of the parts is called the Alert Academy. The Alert Academy is a sort of paramilitary organization for young men, so think of it sort of like a Boy Scout program meets boot camp, right?
Myev Rees:So it's kids who are as young as you know, six or seven years old, but goes all the way up to high school and all the way up into the early twenties, and at that level it's very much a sort of paramilitary organization. They have uniforms, they drill, they, you know, they do all of the things, they have ranks and you know unlike the Boy Scouts, right, and all of that. So the Alert Academy campus is in Big Sandy, texas, and so it's sort of the place where the IBLP is now headquartered. It used to be actually headquartered in Illinois, but now they've moved it entirely to the Alert Academy campus in Big Sandy.
Lara Ayad:Got it Okay. So the men are there, they're doing these paramilitary things, and boys as well. They've got these rankings. Are women there doing anything at all? Do they have?
Myev Rees:activities, Not on the regular, but for this once a year event. They host these what they call the family conferences, and that's when IBLP families from all around the country descend into Big Sandy, Texas, and they camp. Essentially, they come in giant RVs, they come in multiple minivans, because we're talking about families of 10, 12, 13, 14 children, right? So I mean they're not all that big but a lot of them are that big but they're pretty massive.
Lara Ayad:These are massive families. Yeah, these are big families.
Myev Rees:I mean. I mean I think that it was very unusual to, unless it was a very young family. It was unusual to see a family of two kids right, usually you had multiple siblings and so they, you know it's a vacation and it's it's the sort of primary vacation for a lot of these folks. You know, they, they pack up their stuff and all the things that 13 kids could possibly need. They've got little bikes and they've got the diapers and they've got the stuff and they all caravan to big Sandy, Texas, where everybody sort of gathers together and they, you know, line it all up and it's, I mean it's, it's sort of like it's like kid chaos. You know, there's like little, there's a gaggle of little kids running around everywhere and and all kinds of things.
Lara Ayad:And what they have. I mean my gosh. Even parents of one or two small children will tell you that they're almost like chaos machines. It's a lot like that, as as lovable and wonderful as they are, they're also like these kind of chaos machines. Yeah, so, so, so you, so you went to one of these conferences and you went. I'm guessing just as a single woman or you went by yourself.
Myev Rees:Yeah, they are technically open to the public. They're not. You know you don't have to. You know you have to buy a ticket and there were no. You know you give them your name and you register just like anything else. So I can't imagine why anybody who's not associated with the IVLP would want to go, unless they were a researcher or a reporter maybe, but it's a bit of an insular group and so they really flew under the radar of the popular press until very, very recently, and even then we're still very much an under studied group particularly their political influence, which I can get into in a minute.
Lara Ayad:But the big yeah, yeah, but let's talk about what you saw there.
Myev Rees:What did?
Lara Ayad:you. Was there any particular experiences that you had there that really just kind of struck you or have kind of stayed with you?
Myev Rees:There. You know, there are a couple of experiences that were hard, so they. So the the gathering is organized. There's like a giant sort of auditorium where everybody can gather for like opening ceremonies and keynote speakers and things like that. There's a book sale area just like any other conference, right. There's like an area where you're selling these but nothing that would be available in mainstream shelves, very niche things in fundamentalist evangelical materials.
Myev Rees:And then there are all these sort of breakout schedule groups groups for young married couples, you know little, seminars for mothers, seminars for men and so on. So I tried to go to as much as I could go to without having to be in two places at once, and I was obviously not welcome in the men's groups, so I didn't try to attend those. But but I did attend some of the, some of the, the married couples one I did, I did ask permission to sit in on that even though I was single and and some other ones for mothers, and I think that I mean there's a couple of things that really strike you. If you're familiar at all, probably what listeners might be most familiar with the IBLP is through the Duggar family, which is the TLC's 19 Kids and Counting reality show.
Lara Ayad:Right, I remember hearing that name. I remember hearing that name when I was younger.
Myev Rees:Right. So, yeah, they start out as this, like reality show family. Then they eventually sort of become this, this huge sort of thing, and then there's a very public fall from grace where their son is is convicted of having child pornography. He is, he molested his sisters and a family friend and is now now incarcerated and you know and all and so that caused TLC to drop the show. But of course the Duggars are a huge money-making thing, so they they sort of create, quickly created a new show for just the daughters and so anyway. So I think that what what people would notice right away if they were to go, um, is that it's it's like being in a community of people, but there's thousands of people who are just like the Duggars. So they dress very modestly in long dresses. All of the women have very long hair. It's a teaching of Bill Goddard for women to have long hair as their crowning glory. It's predominantly white, which makes sense when you start to look at the homeschooling curriculum, which is a very white supremacist bend.
Lara Ayad:Right, and we'll get to that in a little bit too, because I know that's been an important part of your work and like even that book that you've been working on in the early stages, so we'll get to that in a bit, yeah.
Myev Rees:Yeah, and so what you notice I mean what you notice on the surface is, you know, thousands of really seemingly very happy families, right, sort of all going about doing this like fun, camping vacation kind of thing, right, and. But when you start to hear some of the stories, it starts to feel you start to see some of the cracks. So one of the things that the IBLP teaches, and Bill Goddard really has emphasized throughout his career, is what he calls the umbrellas of authority, so that women fall under the umbrella of authority of their husbands when they are married, when they are unmarried to their fathers, and then the husbands fall under the umbrella of authority of church organizations, church leaders, government leaders and so on, right, and so it's a very structured, hierarchical thing, and so the women in these communities are expected to accept their husband's leadership and to not argue. And sometimes these husbands make questionable financial decisions, right, and it's also very difficult to have 14 children in any economy.
Lara Ayad:Right, I can imagine that puts so much strain on just the parents' resources.
Myev Rees:Yeah, exactly, and another complicating teaching of Goddard's is that they do not allow for any kind of debt, which includes credit card debt, but also mortgages and car loans and things that we would sometimes use to build wealth in our economy. Now, not everybody in the IBLP hones exactly to all of these laws all of the time, but the vast majority of them do, and so you have a lot of these families who are really financially struggling. But there is this almost unsettling veneer of cheerfulness which many viewers caught on when they were watching 19 Kids and Counting Right.
Lara Ayad:Many people were family right yes exactly.
Myev Rees:Many people remarked at how this woman with 19 children never seemed to raise her voice and she always spoke in this infantilized, sweet high pitch sort of way.
Lara Ayad:Right and it's.
Myev Rees:That is, that kind of behavior for women is something that we, that that we say is caught and it's taught. So it's something that is expressly taught to be submissive, to be sweet, to not be challenging, to be a help meet, which is one of their favorite words to your husband. But it's also caught because it's the way that the culture speaks, right, it's the expectation that people have for women, and so the children that are raised in this movement grow up hearing their mothers speak like that and so on. So a lot of these women are living in situations that are really challenging.
Myev Rees:One woman shared in a mother's group about how, um, uh, based on some decisions that her husband had made, they were struggling to, um, to pay the heating bill and um, and it was winter time, and she was telling the story that if you had seen it written down and read it, you would have thought that this was a deeply tragic story about how her children were cold and they had to all sleep together.
Myev Rees:All 10 of them sleep together in the living room and, as she put it, piled up like puppies and she's to keep warm, and she was describing this as if it was a blessing, as if this was a moment that God had provided to strengthen her faith right. And that's the sort of the loop that runs through the way that women speak in these communities, so that everything that is challenging becomes an opportunity to test your faith right. Everything that's challenging becomes an opportunity to test your faith right. Everything that's difficult becomes an opportunity for you to witness for Christ. And so what that does is that it nips in the bud any kind of disagreement, any kind of dissent, any kind of demand, perhaps of the, the, the wife, that maybe she doesn't want to have kid number 11, since they can't keep the 10 they have warm in the winter.
Lara Ayad:Um, you know. And how old do you think that mother was? How old do you think that mother was, that you saw, she was probably in her early forties. Yeah, she was probably early Right, so she had time at that point to have quite a few children and this was the situation they were in. I mean, they were basically living in poverty and they couldn't keep the kids warm. But she did not see that as you're explaining. It's like she didn't see that as a problem, or at least on the surface.
Myev Rees:It's like the way she's relating the story was like we are so blessed to be living in this situation the story was like we are so blessed to, and that's the sort of striking thing that you get is that I don't think that these stories would be told if there wasn't some part of her that was hurt, upset, afraid. In that moment she was sharing that, but it's very quickly turned around into this socially acceptable way that you can make sense of it, which is to then continue to be a witness for this lifestyle. You know, another thing that's sometimes hard in as a, you know, as an educated woman who makes her living now as a college professor the education, the value of education, education is undervalued deeply in this community. There is a real contempt for higher education in particular, and especially for girls.
Myev Rees:So it was challenging to sit in a room and listen to women in their 30s and 40s instruct young women who were, you know, 15, 16, that their primary objective should be wifehood and motherhood and that anything that would distract them from that was of what they call the enemy, which is the devil or Satan. And so the goal is to, you know, to, to support your husband and to to, even if you don't have one yet, that one of the major teachings that they say over and over again is that every young girl should start praying for her husband as young as possible. You know, 11, 12 years old, start praying for your future husband. Like not praying that he'll show up praying for him, you know, as if I hope he's doing well out there in the world right.
Lara Ayad:That's incredible. So it's also like a very kind of there's a lot of aspiration in all of this right. It sounds like young girls are taught to really aspire to something that maybe doesn't exist yet or something like that, and I know, like you know, it's interesting you're talking about women and talking about mothers, because my understanding is like your focus on mothers, and also like even reproductive rights, was a big reason that you went to these conferences. Is that right? Like why did you go to this conference in the first place?
Myev Rees:Well, I went to the conferences because the vast majority of my research I was interested in the way that this community was presenting on television through the Duggars and the way that that television show worked to mainstream some of these values.
Myev Rees:Because the way that the show really presents the Duggar family it's as if they're not part of a larger movement, as if they're sort of a one-off, you know, and it's a very apologetic show, right, it's a show that really casts them in a very positive light and highlights some of the very extreme parts of Goddard's institutions, like the courtship rituals, right, where there's no hand-holding until you're engaged, there's no kissing until you are married. It's a very hyper-supervised by the father courtship process. The way that the show presented that it was almost like a fairy tale, right, they presented these weddings and millions of people tuned in to watch these Duggar girls get married. In these very sort of performative of purity culture we call purity culture in evangelical circles, the IBLPs takes purity culture to a whole new place. So even those who espouse purity culture sometimes, you know, don't wait till their wedding day to have their first kiss.
Lara Ayad:But that's, you know, there's a spectrum and we could get into this in a minute. But it's just kind of interesting that you mentioned this reality show about the Duggars was sort of like a bit apologetic and is like making it look like this is a one-off, but it's actually it seems like it's kind of playing into like I don't know it's I don't know if it's like an increasing amount of Americans are really pushing for much more conservative values, because it wasn't there even like some recent reality shows about like arranged marriages, like these Indian weddings or like these like kind of women who are specifically employed by like Indian families to like arrange a marriage and find a match for their daughter, for their son, and this was getting like really popular. And even you could argue like bachelor the bachelorette. There's like kind of a formalized sort of ceremony. In that I don't want to stretch it too far, but it's just interesting to me that like there's kind of this trend, even in just reality TV, where you see like are American audiences kind of like attracted?
Myev Rees:to these ideas on some level or another you know, well, it's, it's funny because, you know, reality television and this kind of reality television, reality television is a big genre, so I'm I'm excluding anything that's like a competition show, you know.
Myev Rees:Sure, yeah, but reality television really gets a lot of its start through this kind of like extreme family.
Myev Rees:I'm thinking of, you know, tlc's earliest shows, like A Baby Story and A Marriage Story, right, that really emphasize this very heteronormative, very procreative, you know, type of relationship that reinforces the idea that a woman's highest calling is in wifehood and in motherhood, right, I mean, and this is, I think that I think you're right to point out that there has been a mainstreaming of that idea that, there, that that didn't necessarily, it's not that that didn't exist, it's that that has always existed, but that the folks on the fringe have sort of been brought into the mainstream in a way. That's very powerful, right? And you now have, you know that gosh I'm forgetting his name now, but that was he a football player who gave that graduation speech, who said you know, when his wife's life really began, when she got married and had a child, you know, and he's saying this at a college graduation to a room at least 50% of female graduates, right. So this is, you know, and that's that is the message, right, that's the message of those reality shows, that's the message, certainly, of the IBLP, that that is when you, that is when your life really begins, that that is when you, um that is when your life really begins, um, and that's when fulfill your calling, right, right, and is this so?
Lara Ayad:do you think then? I mean, we were talking about kind of reality TV. We're talking about the messages of these different types of shows and these narratives. Do you think that what, what the IBLP was doing on a larger level, is reflective of Christianity on the larger level in the US? Because, like it's funny, like here I am podcasting from Los Angeles, of course, and I'm looking around and I'm like I don't think I don't see my neighbors being directly impacted by these views. As far as I can tell, I don't think that the state of California is gonna, like you know, ban abortion at any at any point, even though, federally, we've already seen the overturning of Roe v Wade. But, like, is there something that I'm missing? Like is there some kind of like a secret Bible belt or something like that that is operating in LA or in Southern California that I'm not seeing? Like what's going on here?
Myev Rees:Yes, except it's not secret.
Lara Ayad:There's nothing secret about it. Lara's just in a cave and it is not a secret.
Myev Rees:You're not in a cave, but I do think that perhaps Sometimes I do feel like I'm in a cave girl.
Myev Rees:Also, I think that it is indicative of the fact that, you know, given social media and I am by no means an expert on how algorithms work but the way that those kinds of systems can create echo chambers where we are surrounded by people like us, who agree with us, we suddenly don't see a lot of. You know, the stuff that's going on are all around us, right, that our neighbors are deeply engaged in some of these ideas. Now, of course, you know, regional differences do matter. California does tend to be a little bit more left-leaning. That said, you know a great deal of research I'm thinking of Darren Docek's book in particular from Bible Belt to Sun Belt.
Myev Rees:You know Southern California has been a hotbed of evangelical culture for a very long time, since, you know, the early part of the 20th century, and part of an intellectual evangelical culture too, with the rise of organizations like Fuller Theological Seminary, pepperdine, the Seventh Day Adventist communities are located here.
Myev Rees:There's a great deal of conservative Protestantism, and not to mention, you know, los Angeles is a huge Latino population, and so you know that is a huge Catholic population as well. So the idea that Southern California is somehow secular is that that is just not the case. But I do think, though, that sometimes and something that I'm always telling my students is that sometimes there's a line from Marshall McLuhan that sometimes gets mistakenly attributed to David Foster Wallace, which is that the only thing that the fish don't see is the water, that the only thing that the fish don't see is the water. The idea is that when we are swimming in ideas that are so powerful and so prevalent, they cease to be legible to us right that we actually can't see them anymore, because they are the water in which we swim, they are the air that breathing, and I think that, with Protestantism as a concept writ large, it suffuses American culture in a way that sometimes becomes difficult for us to locate and pinpoint, but it is certainly there.
Lara Ayad:What's an example of that that really, like sticks out to you is like that sort of these heavily Protestant, perhaps even evangelical, ideas that are kind of part of this water that we swim in, like what. What's a great example of that?
Myev Rees:Well, I think that, well, one of the one of the biggest examples might be something like when my students ask, when I ask them like what's the most important question if you want to know something about somebody religiously, the first question they say oh well, you ask them if they believe in God, right, and I'm like well, sure, that's a reasonable question to ask. But the idea that religion is something that happens in belief, that religion is an individual intellectual activity, right, that's? Or what William James said what a man does in his solitude, right? That that idea of religion is is something that I intellectually assent to. I choose to believe this, and so, therefore, I am part of this religious community.
Lara Ayad:It almost sounds like Rene Descartes, that you know Enlightenment era philosopher like I think, therefore I am, and it's almost like I believe in God and therefore I'm a Christian.
Myev Rees:That's incredible, and that's great because it works for Protestantism, right For Protestantism. Whether or not you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior is the central question. That is the biggest thing. You can't walk into a church and say, gosh, I really like the music and I really like the sermon, but I can't get behind this divinity of Christ thing. Is that a problem? Right, I mean, you'd be left out of the room, right, like no, you have to believe that.
Lara Ayad:I'm sure a couple of folks have tried. You never know, yeah.
Myev Rees:Oh yeah.
Lara Ayad:Well, sure.
Myev Rees:But the primacy of belief right is a Protestant idea. Right, because nobody asks that of Buddhists, nobody asks that of Hindu practitioners, nobody is. I mean, I have a joke that my rabbi used to say what do you call the atheist who shows up at Yom Kippur services? You call them a Jew. And because you know, because it doesn't matter. Oh, like you know, or the sort of the joke in Judaism. It's like we're fine with one.
Lara Ayad:God or fewer right. I used to have one student who used to joke around that we're the only because she was Jewish and she's like the only group of people, we're the only group of people who, by religion, are literally called Jewish, like it's literally something-ish. And that was the joke and I was like. I'm not Jewish myself, but it's just like kind of hilarious to hear people talk about their beliefs that way.
Myev Rees:Yeah, so many religious traditions are much more about practice. They're much more about, or they're about, community, right? Nobody knocks on your door and says you know hello. Have you considered becoming a Navajo today? Right, because being part of Navajo tradition and there are many Navajos who are Christians, of very many or Dine people who who are part of you know Christian traditions as well. But the idea that religion is who you are as a community, or religion is what you do, this idea that religion is inherently something that happens between your ears, that happens in belief, and belief only, that's a sign of Protestant hegemony, right? That's a sign that Protestantism has gotten to define the terms of what counts as religion and what doesn't count as religion.
Lara Ayad:That's fascinating, and I you know it's kind of interesting because now that you're saying that out loud, I'm like oh, so there's a lot of, like different beliefs that, let's say, not just Protestants but specifically evangelicals really adhere to, and one of those key beliefs that we've been hearing about very much recently is the belief that abortion is anti-life, like that you need to be pro-life in order to be, even like, a good Christian, right, Like there's that attachment to beliefs. So I'm kind of curious, like was was something like this belief about abortion being anti-life or, you know, about the importance of being pro-life? Has that always been an issue for Christians more widely? Has it always been an issue for evangelicals? Like, where did all of this begin?
Myev Rees:Yeah, I mean the answer is no. It hasn't always been an issue for Christianity writ large, sorry, excuse me, it hasn't always been an issue for Christianity writ large, sorry, it has not always been an issue for Christianity. Jesus said almost nothing about. Actually Jesus said nothing about abortion.
Myev Rees:He did say a lot about a lot of other things that conservative Christians don't like to talk about. He said a lot about divorce. He said a lot about money. He said a lot about poverty. He said a lot about a lot of things. He didn't mention abortion, and no, abortion has not been part of, has not been a central tenet of Christianity for the beginning of its history. It has become a central tenet of conservative Christianity, conservative evangelicalism in America, and that has happened really in the last 55 years. So the idea that you know that in order to be a good Christian, you have to oppose legal and safe access to abortion, or in order to be a good Christian, you have to hold to the idea of fetal personhood, for example, that is a completely modern invention. And not only is it a modern invention, in some ways it's a very I mean, the Catholic Church does put that forward but it is also a very American idea, and so, yeah, so I mean, basically, I can go into the history of how this happened if you're interested.
Lara Ayad:I mean, could you tell us briefly, because you said it specifically tends to be very American, like and very, very briefly like, how did this all begin Like, and why is it such an American preoccupation?
Myev Rees:Well, okay, so in the beginning of the 20th century, evangelical Christians had a kind of crisis. They were being faced with a couple of challenges to their certain types of biblical interpretation. One of those challenges came from the intellectual, from sort of the top down, from the ivory tower, new ways of reading the Bible that we call biblical criticism. Another challenge came from Darwinian theory, right so, from Darwinian evolution, which challenged a literal reading of Genesis. And so what happened in the United States is that now, of course, there have been evangelicals who you know were very politically progressive. Some of our most effective urban renewal programs of the 19th century were championed by evangelicals.
Lara Ayad:The women's suffrage, the temperance movement were all championed by evangelicals, and they were almost like a yeah, it's almost like another, another face altogether of an evangelical, of evangelical movements that most people do not know about. Like I didn't know they were involved in the suffragette movements. That's, that's insane.
Myev Rees:They weren't just involved, they were instrumental. Without them, we, you know, it would have been delayed decades. Um so, absolutely so. So what happens basically in the 20th century is that in the early part of the 20th century is that evangelicals, particularly Southern white evangelicals, um begin to feel attacked by elites. This happens largely um in response to a very famous uh uh court case, the Scopes. The Scopes trial, sometimes called the Scopes monkey trial. It was made famous by the play inherit the wind the Arthur.
Lara Ayad:Miller. It was named after my podcast, obviously because I've got like a big monkey on the-.
Myev Rees:Right, there you go. Yeah, that's how important?
Lara Ayad:it is no, and so this is is this in the? You said this is in the 1950s, no, in the 1920s, 1920s, so this is a little earlier on.
Myev Rees:Yeah, so after the Scopes trial, basically what happens is the Scopes trial was a putting on. It wasn't just a matter of whether or not John T Scopes taught evolution in in his public school classroom, which he did, and he did it intentionally and that broke the law in Tennessee. Tennessee had made that illegal you could not teach evolution in a public school classroom and so he broke that law intentionally. And two of the most celebrated celebrity lawyers descended on this little town in Dayton, tennessee, clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, and they duked out like the trial of the century. And in some ways, when I teach it to my students, I'm like, imagine, like the OJ trial, that's sort of what we're talking about here.
Myev Rees:It's just like the OJ trial wasn't really just about whether or not this man killed his wife, right. It was also about race in America. It was also about the role of celebrity in the justice system. It was about all those other things and there were cameras and there was the court of public opinion, right. All of that is happening in the spokes trial as well, the end result of which is the question is really whether or not evangelical fundamentalism, which was sort of a new idea, that the Bible was absolutely, literally, true in every single word, and that it could be understood plainly by any anybody on the street, right. So this is what we call a fundamentalist principle, and the fundamentalism gets its name from a series of pamphlets that were put out by um, by, by two sort of robber baron brothers, who had a lot of money, and they put out these pamphlets that listed the fundamentals of the Christian faith as they understood it.
Lara Ayad:And that was also around that time in the 1920s.
Myev Rees:Okay, and so and so what fundamentalism does is it's a response to this new definition of modernity that's sort of dawning in America, right. This, this modernity of you know progress and science and you know Northern elite institutions and all of these kinds of things, right, and fundamentalism sort of emerges as a reaction to that, as a sort of like digging in of the heels and a hardening of ideas that are opposed to all of that.
Lara Ayad:So that's fascinating because and this is just like me, kind of coming from my own background too, because you focus on the US I used to focus on modern Egypt and my own field work and actually the Muslim Brotherhood was one of like the oldest fundamentalist Islamic groups to ever emerge in Egypt, and they arose in the 1920s as well, and it was in response to this idea of like what it means to be modern and what is modernity and what is a modern culture. And you kind of mentioned things like, you know, science and progress, the idea of the individual and having like individual aspirations and goals and your own like kind of existence in the world that's not just attached to god or a higher being. So this is really interesting. This is almost like a global phenomenon, right like the fundamentalist response to modernity yeah, that's right and the?
Myev Rees:um. You know, sometimes in our, in our contemporary news movement, we, when we hear the word fundamentalist, we do tend to think of extremist, uh, violent, uh, terrorist islam, right, um, that's what people associate with that word now. But actually it's an American word. We created it and it's a word that originated in evangelical Protestantism with the fundamentals, these pamphlets. So what happens is is that there's this little subgroup of American evangelicals, located mostly in the American South, that are defining themselves as fundamentalists. But the Scopes trial was an incredibly humiliating experience for them.
Myev Rees:And because you have the radio waves that are broadcasting this trial, william Jennings Bryan, who is the champion for the fundamentalist message, is made to look like a buffoon. Is the champion for the fundamentalist message is made to look like a buffoon, and then he unfortunately dies, like right after the trial ends. So it's almost like it killed him, right? Wow? Hl Mencken, who's one of the great satirists of American history, just goes to town on these people in a very cruel and in many ways unfair way, really paint them as these buffoonish backwards, southern, you know, hicks, essentially yeah, and that stereotype of like yeah, and that stereotype of the southern hick, or even the quote-unquote the redneck, is still something very alive and well.
Lara Ayad:I noticed it when, like when I'm like, when I was like living in boston, I would see people just like make totally blatant statements about, like all soutoutherners as being like this. So it's something that very much still lives with us today. We're dealing with the legacy of that.
Myev Rees:Yeah, and what that does is that it continues to feed a kind of populism right that defines itself against Northern elitist, you know, education institutions and so on, southern elitist, you know, education institutions and so on. So what happens after the Scopes trial is that this is a very oversimplified version. But many evangelicals essentially sort of throw their hands up and say you know what we're out, we're going to form our own subculture, we're going to form our own schools, we're going to form our own communities and to hell with the rest of the country. And in many ways that's what they do and they, in many ways they drop out of the political system.
Lara Ayad:Because they lost this. They lost this trial to try to say the Bible should be interpreted literally. It doesn't go through, it doesn't work out. They're like we're out of here and so then they go on to do their own thing, right.
Myev Rees:Yes, and one of the tenets of the fundamentals is the imminent return of Christ. So this adds to the idea of like why would you bother getting involved in a society that is bound for hell when Jesus could come back any minute? Like, why are you going to campaign for a presidential candidate? Why are you going to try to build a university or an institution? Jesus could come back tomorrow and the world's going to hell in a handbasket. So we might as well just hunker down and, you know, create our strength in our sub-community right. And that's sort of what evangelicals do for the better part of the middle 20th century. And it's not really until the Goldwater campaign where they start to come out, and not really until the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Lara Ayad:Which coincides with that big start of the culture wars. Right, we hear that a lot of the time culture war, culture war. It actually started in the 1970s, if I understood correct.
Myev Rees:Yeah, it starts in the 1970s and it is a creation of the evangelical right. So what essentially happens is that this community sort of stays very insular. And since we are talking about a lot of people who are also deeply invested in a kind of white supremacist idea, they also are setting up what they call segregation academies, these schools that are exclusively white, that do not admit Black students, or that if they do admit Black students, they do it in a very limited way and they ban interracial dating and so on and so forth. So with the rise of the civil rights movement in the late 50s and 60s, and then you get the Civil Rights Act in 1964. That suddenly clues into some of these white evangelical Southerners that society is changing and it's changing in this really dramatic way. And their quote unquote Southern way of life is under threat and one of the ways in which the Civil Rights Act gets enforced is actually through the internal revenue system.
Myev Rees:So I'm sort of taking a long story here to basically tell you how did abortion become the issue for you? Right? Issue? Because the Bible doesn't say very much about it and Jesus says absolutely nothing about it, right? And so why are we always talking about abortion.
Myev Rees:And we start talking about abortion largely in response, not to Roe v Wade, but in response to the racial politics of the late 20th century.
Myev Rees:So what happens is is that schools like Bob Jones University, which was an all white, exclusively white organization, started in Florida, moved to South Carolina, and Bob Jones University only admits white students for most of its history. And then it twists its arm to admit a few African American students, but only married ones, because they don't want interracial dating. And then, even when they allowed for non-married African-Americans, the interracial dating policy was so strict that you would be expelled if there was any interracial dating, and so on. So, as part of enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Internal Revenue Service decides to say look, if you are an institution that segregates based on race, if you are discriminating based on race, we're no longer going to consider you a charitable organization, and so you're never. We're not going to give you tax exempt status and any donations that are made to you are no longer claimable, right? So if I write a check to you, know the American Nazi Party or something?
Lara Ayad:like that.
Myev Rees:I can't claim that as a charitable deduction on my taxes, right, thank goodness. So this is part of you know. So this is part of that movement, and when that happens, that's when evangelicals come out of their self-imposed subculture and they start to say, okay, look, now the federal government is starting to come after our all white Christian schools, and we can't have that. And so that's when they start to actually become involved in politics. What does all of this have to do with abortion? Absolutely nothing.
Myev Rees:That's the funny thing is that that is the issue that galvanizes the religious right, and this is not a secret. You know people like Tim LaHaye and Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell will have told people publicly, out loud, that the religious right starts with the Green v Colony case, which is the case that makes it so that you can't have these segregation academies anymore, that it has nothing to do with abortion. But what they realize fairly quickly is that abortion has the power to galvanize a certain subset of the evangelical demographic and to galvanize a Catholic demographic as well, and if they can bring those groups together, they can exert some political power that they previously didn't have.
Lara Ayad:So they attach themselves to a larger kind of Catholic demographic, or maybe a more now at this point in the middle of the 20th century more socially accepted or 1970s more socially accepted group of Catholics. If they attach to that boom, there we've got some power in numbers. We have a one common denominator, one common issue that we can you know, we can really like mobilize people on, and that is abortion Right.
Myev Rees:So like in 1960, sorry, 1973, when Roe passes, right Roe passes in 1973. Right Roe v Wade, yeah, right, no, no evangelical organization comes out and condemns. It Doesn't happen. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest denomination of conservative evangelicals in America. They reaffirm before Roe in 1971, but also again in 1974, a year after Roe, and again in 1976, that they call upon their members to work for legislation that would keep abortion legal and safe in the cases of rape, incest, the welfare of the mother. They do not want this being a federally adjudicated issue.
Lara Ayad:That's so interesting. So these Southern Baptists were actually, in a certain way, like fighting to keep women's reproductive rights in certain situations legal.
Myev Rees:Absolutely yeah, huh, yeah, yeah. In 1971, 1974, 1976, the SBC reaffirms that that abortion should be something that is legal, that the federal government should not get in, get involved in, and that, um, and that it should be accessible to women if they need it for financial, emotional or medical needs. And this is just you know. And when you contrast that right with the most recent, the Southern Baptist Convention met again this last June, right.
Myev Rees:June of 2024, wherein they affirmed that IVF. What would be against their teachings? Because they are now affirming fetal personhood. So they're saying that fetus like IVF. So not even fetuses, zygotes, I suppose right. Forgive me, I'm not up on the medical terminology.
Lara Ayad:I believe zygote is the best way to put it. Yeah.
Myev Rees:Yeah, so the result of IVF? Right? The fertilized, the embryo that is in a test tube in cold storage, right, the result of an IVF procedure. That is a person now, according to the SBC. The SBC's official theological statement is that that is a person In 1971, that was not the case. The same organization said women should have access to abortion if they wanted.
Lara Ayad:Right, right. And so you said women should have access to abortion if they want it, right, right. And so you said massive shift, right? So are these so like the Southern Baptist Church and these other types of fundamentalist Christian groups? Are they putting pressure? Because they did pair up with, like a set, a subset of Catholics who also posed abortion in the 1970s and moving forward into the 80s? So are they now? Are these evangelicals now like putting pressure on Christians to adopt a certain stance towards abortion and women's reproductive rights, like what is going on in terms of like what their relationship is with other types of Christian groups and denominations in the United States?
Myev Rees:So what happens with the segregation academies is that they lose, right, they lose the cases that they're trying to keep these universities and colleges all white, right, they lose that and they realize that they're sort of, politically, they don't have a platform. And so there's this very famous sort of conference call that happens in Lynchburg, Virginia, with Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell, where they're trying to figure out well, okay, if we can't campaign on segregation, if we've lost this battle, what is an issue that we could galvanize the country over and on. In this famous call, someone says what about abortion? And what they realize is that abortion has the ability to crack what used to be called the Catholic block. So it used to be that the Democratic Party could count on Catholics for their support unanimously right Like right, you think of John.
Lara Ayad:F Kennedy. As, like the most famous example, Catholic Democrat, like that was the traditional association.
Myev Rees:And they were deeply invested in labor unions, they were deeply invested in all of these movements that the Democratic Party really represented and counted on at the ballot box. And so what these evangelical pastors realized was that if they could make abortion the central issue, they could crack the Catholic vote, because that was the only thing that Catholics and conservative Christians could get together on.
Lara Ayad:So in in other words, they could, they could stop the Catholics from supporting the Democratic Party wholeheartedly at this point.
Myev Rees:Exactly right. They could pull, they could siphon off Catholic voters from the Democrats to the Republican side, and this was in part because they didn't like Jimmy Carter. And this is kind of getting into a different kind of conversation about why they didn't like Jimmy Carter. Carter um, but he was supposed to be their guy. He was this southern baptist sunday school teacher from georgia, like supposed to be their guy. He came to power on their coattails and then wasn't he a peanut farmer too?
Myev Rees:yes, exactly, and you know. It turned out, though, that, um, you know that jimmy carter didn't actually represent the values of, you know, white supremacist, fundamentalist evangelicals and didn't certainly want them legislated, and so this was a problem. And so now, all of a sudden, evangelical leaders are looking for a new standard bearer, and they find that standard bearer in Ronald Reagan, and so Ronald Reagan becomes their guy, right, despite the fact that ronald reagan has a very pro-choice reputation at this point. Right, and he's from california and he's divorced and he's an actor, right, like he's not.
Myev Rees:Not why reagan is kind of a trumpy kind of character, because you're just like wait, this guy like this is your guy, um, who stands and seems to not stand for any of the values that you seem to want to hold on to, but he was. He could open the doors of power, and so that's what? Yeah, so abortion becomes a very powerful galvanizing issue that they realize very quickly can get people to the polls, that can get people to write checks, that can get people, and it works out so nicely, right, because, when you think about this, who does this serve? Right, the?
Lara Ayad:the ultimate. I was gonna ask about that, who that it's, who it serves, because you were kind of like it's interesting, because we were talking before about like kind of keeping a white supremacist structure in place. How exactly is abortion related to that issue? That seems to be actually like the driving factor for these fundamentalist groups is actually maintaining white supremacy. How do those things connect?
Myev Rees:Well, they connect because, because they are losing the white supremacy argument in the 1970s, right right they glob on to abortion in order to make that their new issue, so that they can sort of skyrocket themselves in power instead leapfrogging over that first hurdle of using aborted abortion as a way to rocket themselves over yeah, and those first, those religious right abortion opponents, actually start calling themselves the new abolitionists.
Myev Rees:So it's really interesting, right, that here they are trying to maintain segregation, to maintain white supremacy in institutions that get federal tax exemption, and then claiming the mantle of the abolitionist in the process, right.
Myev Rees:I mean that's really really ironic and brazen in that way. But when I say who does it serve, it's that when you're opposing abortion, you have the ultimate sort of martyr story. You have this presumed completely innocent white fetus, right, that is so vulnerable, that is so that doesn't actually need anything, right? This is not an, this is not a poor person who needs a job. This is not a poor person who needs healthcare. This is not this. This is a sort of a perfect, disembodied victim martyr that you can then glob onto and say this is what we're fighting for, right, and that can then propel you into power. And then the people who are opposed to those kinds of things get sort of cast as people who want to kill babies, right, and that's, I mean, what a great political message that is. Right. Now You're, now you've created the concept of pro-life, right, and nobody wants to be anti-life.
Lara Ayad:Right, so you have like a couple of myths operating here that you're pointing out, maya. It's like. First of all, there's the myth that the Bible's pro-life, which you've shown, is not true at all.
Myev Rees:And then also this myth of like a the Bible is not anti-abortion Right.
Lara Ayad:It's not anti-abortion right, I guess that's a good way of putting it. So the Bible is an anti-abortion. And then the other myth is, like the myth of the fetus as a martyr, right, and that this is the kind of cause we fight for. I mean, you even see that in like sorts of narratives that say we, you know, the government wants to go into war, certain groups of people want to go into war. What do they do? They make the myth of the good war and the idea that, like, people going in are the martyrs and they're the martyrs for some other kind of much bigger cause, right, so that it's like those myths really mobilize people into like holding fast to certain sets of beliefs yeah, and it's particularly the white fetus right.
Myev Rees:And this plays into racist ideas of replacement theory that immigrants are going to come in and outbreed white people and then white people will be a minority and you know, god forbid. And then the United States, western civilization collapses and da da, da, da, right.
Lara Ayad:And if we can just change the definitions for who gets defined as white down the line, and it wasn't even like over 100 years ago, I think. Irish people weren't even considered white at a certain point. So it's fascinating too.
Myev Rees:Yeah, there's a lot of good scholarship on that, but no. So basically that you get this new story of if white women would just have more babies, right, and if white women would embrace this kind of patriarchal social structure where their job was to just raise white children and raise white families. We would then have a kind of you know perfect white supremacist utopia right, where you know this particular brand of evangelicalism and I do want to make it clear that, like evangelical is a big term that we really haven't spent a lot of time here defining.
Lara Ayad:Right yeah, what is it like? A brief way of defining that term?
Myev Rees:I think the most concise way is it's a subset of Protestantism that puts forward the idea that the Bible is inerrant and that there is a need to evangelize right, that's the verb from evangelical, to evangelize, to spread that message. And so you have. And culturally, evangelicals tend to be what we call low church, so meaning that their clergy tends not to be. You know, they don't have to have PhDs, they can have. I mean, all the many evangelical clergy do have, you know, advanced degrees, but they do tend to be anti-liturgical. Right, they don't have.
Myev Rees:You know, I always kind of the quick way I say to my students is if you walk into a church and there's a pastor in like vestments and a collar, and there's incense and there's smells and bells, as you say, right, you are not in an evangelical church. If you walk into a church and there is a pastor in a pair of jeans and there are two giant jumbotron screens and there are cup holders in the cat, in the, in the pews, then you are in an evangelical church. Right, it is a different world, right, and so there's a, there's a. There are cultural definitions, there are racialized definitions, there are theological definitions, and so we have to be sort of careful about who we're talking about here.
Myev Rees:I'm talking about these particular groups of people. I'm talking about dominantly white evangelical Christians who are biblical literalists and who who we would once call fundamentalists, although sometimes they don't like that word anymore fundamentalists although sometimes they don't like that word anymore, right, right.
Lara Ayad:So okay, this, this kind of. I want to like switch gears a little bit too, because I'm so curious. You know, you know so much about this topic and you've done all of this research and all of this field work and all of this thinking and writing about the history of these evangelical movements in the US. The history of these evangelical movements in the US. I often hear I myself have said it I hear other scholars joke around that research is me search, it's you know, and it's. It's sort of like a running joke, but I think there might be some truth to it, for me at least. Do you think it was true for you? Like, how did you get so interested in studying these groups and studying these topics? Like, do you have a background as an evangelical Like.
Lara Ayad:Is that something that you grew up with?
Myev Rees:Yeah, I mean I don't. There are a lot of scholars that do. My previous advisor, randall Balmer, started his life as an evangelical, even up to you know, scholars. Now many of them are ex-evangelicals that are scholars.
Myev Rees:I am not an ex evangelical, I was never raised as an evangelical, but I grew up in Southern California and I grew up with a lot of evangelicals around me and in, you know, in my extended family. I grew up with friends that went to evangelical megachurches, that took me along with them and I was interested in that. That, um, you know, my own family was very religiously eclectic, um, sort of, you know, ex ex-catholics and some new agey stuff here and there and you know things like that. So, um, it's not me search in that regard, um, but my interest really is in the intersection of religion and politics and power. I think that I was always really interested in, you know, as a child of the 1980s and I was paying attention to the, you know, to the Bush years right, that my whole life was really shaped, as was yours, because we're the same, roughly the same age that you know. It was really shaped by the rise of the religious right, like my life coincided with the rise of the religious right.
Lara Ayad:Absolutely, absolutely. I remember protesting Jerry Falwell when I was in college, like that was like a household name. Yeah, I was growing up, you know so I don't think that you know.
Myev Rees:I think that growing up in in that kind of a political milieu and then just having an interest in these kinds of questions really made that happen for me.
Lara Ayad:Wow, and I've heard some monkey with very funny wire rimmed glasses and a medieval looking hat told me that you're working on a book and the book deals with some of the myths of evangelical movements. Can you, can you, share with me what those myths are and what your book is about?
Myev Rees:very briefly, yeah, I mean the book comes out of the fact that I, you know, I think that there are so many really incredibly well-researched and dense scholarly examinations of the religious right that are out there right now and I don't think I need to give the world another one.
Lara Ayad:But you don't need to give the world another dense, dry book. Well, some of them aren't dry, some of them are great.
Myev Rees:When I'm sitting there thinking about, you know what are the questions that I'm seeing all the time in my classroom, right, when my students are getting their minds blown, when they're the ones coming saying, wait what you know in my classroom, what are the issues that are making them go whoa? I never thought about that before, and so the book really came out of teaching at that really introductory undergrad level. So what I really wanted to do is to write a book that anybody could pick up, that you did not need a PhD to pick up. That would really concisely indicate these untruths that many people are told about the religious right, about Christian nationalism, about conservative Protestantism in America more generally, and upend those untruths. Right, you know so many of my students, you know, think and are deeply traumatized by the idea that if they are not in favor of making abortion illegal in all cases that they're, that they have no place in Christianity.
Myev Rees:And I'm not a Christian apologist, I'm not a Christian at all, um, but I see the pain that that causes in their lives um and I see that them, I see them feeling unwelcome in their communities and un and and sort of more or less in their faith tradition. And so part of what I want to do is sort of say like, okay, firstly, let's just do some basic history right. The history of Christianity is 2000 years old and the abortion debate is 50 years old. So can you be a Christian and be pro-choice? Absolutely, you're in good company. So just starting with something like that, starting with the idea that the opposition to abortion came out of this noble desire to save babies, when it didn't, it came out of a desire for political power in response to a threat against white supremacy, and that this was the issue that could launch them into political power I'm not saying that evangelicals today don't believe in fetal personhood.
Myev Rees:I think that many of them do, but they've been taught to believe in it.
Myev Rees:It was not ever part of the original tradition in any way, right. And so really, what my book is trying to do is to delineate some very clear lies, untruths, myths about, and some of the claims that come directly from these conservative Christian groups and sort of say, no, that doesn't match up with the historical record. No, that doesn't match up with you know what the scriptures actually say. And no, that doesn't right, because sometimes I think that, as we've all been paying attention to in the last 10 years, we seem to have lost the plot on some like basic facts. Right, we now live in a world of like alternative facts and alternative reality and now we can't seem to agree on some really basic like one plus one is two kind of situations, and I think that what I really want to do with this book is to just delineate this is what the historical record says, this is what the scripture actually says, right, this is what the tradition has said, and then do with that information what you will.
Lara Ayad:Right, so just the regular person can kind of like almost not armor, but sort of like equip themselves with that information so that they're not kind of being fed this sort of it almost sounds like it almost sounds like some of these fundamentalist groups are almost gaslighting other people and other Christians into being like well, in order for me to be Christian, I have to believe that the Bible is anti-abortion and I have to believe, and if I don't hold that belief myself, I'm like I'm not a real Christian. I mean, there's just something about that that sounds. You know, these untruths are really kind of misleading people.
Myev Rees:it sounds like, yes, yeah, and it is misleading, right, and it's a denial of so much rich history, right, the Christian bedrock of the civil rights movement, right, that so much of this, the rise of the religious right, was responding to. I mean, part of the reason why white Southern evangelicals stayed out of politics was because they saw politics getting involved in causes like equality that they were not in support of. And so I mean, when Jerry Falwell, you know, stands up in 1965 and says, I mean it's, it's crazy to think now we think Jerry Falwell as the political pastor, right, but in 1965, on the day that Martin Luther King and others marched from Selma to Montgomery, that very day Jerry Falwell stood up and gave a speech about how evangelical pastors should not be involved in politics. Ever, period, the end.
Lara Ayad:Wow. What a contrast, what a contrast.
Myev Rees:And what we see is that what he really meant was evangelical pastors should not be involved in those politics, in the politics of African-American empowerment, in the politics of African American empowerment, in the politics of civil rights. We shouldn't be involved in those politics, because then, when it became the politics that he agreed with, well, then they came out, then he was all about it.
Myev Rees:Right, right, right. So I think that that's. This is sort of. It is really interesting as somebody who studies this history, is that it's remarkable to me how short our memories are, that this is that long ago, right? This is our parents' generation, right? We're not talking about some long patinaed past right.
Lara Ayad:No, no, this is like living people who remember, like being almost adults in that era, and they're remembering that, which kind of gets me to like. This is like one last question that I wanted to ask you as we wrap up, which is, you know, oftentimes when I hear experts brought on, say the news or some a podcast or whatever to talk about religion, sometimes you get a historian, but more often than not I've heard people like political scientists, legal experts, sometimes they're lawyers. Why is like? What is it about your background and your knowledge in religious history that you think gives you an edge to understand what is going on here and to kind of like address what you were saying? Like our memories have gotten so short, like what? How does that kind of background, in that humanities type discipline, give you an edge?
Myev Rees:Yeah, I mean, I don't think if it, I don't know if it gives me an edge, but it gives me a different voice and I think that we need all the voices we can get right. I love you know reading, you know the texts that come out of, you know sociologists who are dealing with data and who are dealing with statistics and things like that. That's not my world, that's not the world I live in, but that's a really, that's really valuable work. And taking this view from a political scientist perspective is also really valuable work. And taking this view from a, you know, a historian's perspective is really valuable work. What, what I like about what religious studies can give you is a very multidisciplinary approach all at once. Right, so that it's not just we in religious studies. We don't tend to reduce what we are seeing to the political or the economic or the sociological. We tend to try to see that in concert with each other, right.
Myev Rees:Right, and you have a knowledge of the scripture itself too right, which is really interesting, yeah there's that as well, Because that is sometimes and a history of the tradition, right, Because I mean, you can be an expert in American political life and you can spend your entire career being well-steeped in American political life, but you may not know that. You know what the church is, what the official stance of Luther was on this right, Like they may not know the whole history of this within the religious tradition, right, and that's valuable information because it does actually, whether or not people are aware of it, informing their view. It does inform their view.
Lara Ayad:Wow. So do you have a sense then, because I can't wait to read this book that you're writing. Do you have a rough sense of? Is it in the nascent stages? Do you
Lara Ayad:how can people kind of follow up on how you're doing. Are you? Are you on social media?
Myev Rees:I am on social media. I'm at my um, but I haven't really started the social media campaign for this kind of work yet, so we'll see how public I want to be.
Lara Ayad:It's still incubating. It's still an incubator. It's still incubating.
Myev Rees:It's still an incubator.
Myev Rees:And I'm also aware of. I'm still trying to figure out how much of a public scholar I would ever want to be. People are very comfortable in that place and other people are not.
Lara Ayad:So yeah yeah yeah, well, time will tell and you'll know what's the best decision for yourself, right? So?
Myev Rees:yeah.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, yeah.
Myev Rees:Myev, I mean in the
Lara Ayad:sake of sharing this incredibly, not just valuable information, but great stories with listeners who you know. Maybe they're going to college, maybe they're not, maybe they have a full-time job or they're taking care of their kids. Anybody who's interested in this, I think, is going to be thrilled to hear this conversation. I know I really enjoyed it. Um, so I want to thank you again for being on the cheeky scholar. I thought this was fantastic and I just feel like I learned so much and I had a lot of fun. So good.
Myev Rees:Good good good. Yeah, well, thank you.
Myev Rees:Thank you, this was fun.
Lara Ayad:Wanna laugh and grow your brain at the same time? Put that monkey paw to work and hit the subscribe button. You'll get the newest episodes delivered right to your favorite podcast app. Thanks for joining us on the Cheeky Scholar and until next time, keep it real and keep it cheeky.