Pod Only Knows - #005 - Is July 4th a Religious Holiday?

#005 - Is July 4th a Religious Holiday?

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07/04/23 • 60 min

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Pod Only Knows

This week, Kelly and John take on July 4th and ask if it's possible to wrestle it away from the darker side of American history as well as its increasingly Christian Nationalist connotations.

Even though (or maybe because) America is not, in fact, a Christian nation and has no official religious identity, is July 4th a religious holiday? Has the project of state that (purportedly) guarantees freedom of religion and keeps the government (purportedly) independent of any religious affiliation actually made American history and its icons objects of religious devotion?

Also this week: The good news is dogs and Bears. And we spend too much time on Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA".

Plus, we talk about how where you are in America often reflects what you're actually celebrating on Independence Day, we bring up Robert Bellah's 1967 article "American Civil Religion", that time Thomas Jefferson tried to take all the miracles out the New Testament, and the fact that most of the founders were deists.

And we somehow make no references to the 1996 movie, while Kelly attempts to accurately employ the phrase "go to bat for".

This week, Kelly and John take on July 4th and ask if it's possible to wrestle it away from the darker side of American history as well as its increasingly Christian Nationalist connotations.

Also this week: The good news is dogs and Bears. And we spend too much time on Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA".

And we somehow make no references to the 1996 movie, while Kelly attempts to accurately employ the phrase "go to bat for".

Previous Episode

#004 - UFOs as Religion - with Toby Ball

Toby Ball is the host and creator of the series Strange Arrivals, a production of iHeart Radio an Aaron Mahnke's Grim and Mild.

The recently-concluded third season of his show looks at UFO researchers who developed theories to explain the phenomenon and the consequences those theories had for people who believed they had experienced the paranormal.

In the finale, Toby explores the ways in which belief in aliens via the UFO phenomenon functions as a modern religious movement, including the ways in which it pierce the boundaries of an obsession to become something more like a faith, and how UFO culture often bears the traits of a hopeful apocalyptic cult not unlike early Christianity.

Kelly and John talked to Toby about how his own religious perspective (or lake thereof) informs the series, how UFO culture is distinct from fully-formed religious identities, and if we have any reason to believe the latest guy with the "real story" of the US government and UFOs any more than the endless parade of similar guys who came before him.

You can find Strange Arrivals on the Grim and Mild website here: https://www.grimandmild.com/strangearrivals

You can learn more about Toby and his work here: http://www.tobyball.com/

Next Episode

#006 - Dr. Shreena Gandhi - Yoga, White Supremacy, and Caste

Shreena Gandhi is a part of the Religious Studies Department at Michigan State University, where is primarily teaches classes on religion and race in the Americas.

She is currently finishing up edits on a manuscript, A Cultural History of Yoga in the United States, which looks at the impacts of race, gender and class on how yoga is practiced and commodified in religious and secular spaces.

And she is working on two other projects: one on religious seeking in the colonial and post-colonial global south, which uses her grandfather’s writings and books as primary evidence, as well as the writings of other colonial and post-colonial religious seekers.

And the other is a collaborative project on how to transform U.S. religious history into an anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-sexist discipline which helps move forward the goals of decolonization.

She joined Kelly and John to talk about the history of yoga in the United States, how the story of colonialism and white supremacy cannot be separated from the popularity of yoga in the west, and what can and should be done about it. She also shared her thoughts on the past and future of the caste system.