Seven Ways To Fight Fascism Radical Soul podcast

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Seven ways to fight fascism

14d ago 42:49

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This is part three of a three part series on combating Christian Nationalism. The entire conversation was livestreamed on Wednesday, November 6, the day after the election. Part one covered what Christian nationalism is and who Christian nationalists are. Part two covered what doesn’t work in combatting Christian nationalism, or fascism in general. In this episode, we discuss strategies that do work.

My guests for the talk were Blake Chastain, host of the Exvangelical podcast and author of the new book Exvangelical and Beyond: How American Christianity Went Radical and the Movement That’s Fighting Back, lenny duncan, an ordained Lutheran priest and author of Dear Revolutionaries: A Field Guide for a World Beyond the Church, and Redeem Robinson, an ordained minister within the fellowship of the department ministries, and a longtime civil rights activist.

Books mentioned in this episode

Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity by Noel Ignatiev

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by Incite! Women of Color Against Incite!

Highlights from the entire livestream about strategies to lean into

1. Take practical training

“It's time to get basic street medic training. If there's a de-escalation training in your area, you need to find one. You need to learn how to make someone realize that they might be making a mistake that will put them in prison for the rest of their life.” Lenny

2. Invest in mutual aid

“You got to get involved in mutual aid because mutual aid is baseline community living. Get into rent and tenant unions; figure out what they're doing at the encampments that you keep seeing on your highways that you've been ignoring for months.” Lenny

3. Invest in other organizations that are BOTH led by and funded by the communities they support

“We have to break away from this whole non-profit industrial complex. We have to break away from it. It is killing us. And it's sucking up actual resources that can go to directly impacted people.” Redeem

4. Find your ride-or-die community, no matter what they believe or who they voted for.

“These will be the people who run towards the gas and the bullets and the pain, and they'll show up the next day cause they're going to want to see what really happened for themselves. And they're going to have lots of ideas. You don't have to convince them of anything. The state does a really good job of convincing people of its violence. You just have to make sure you hold them in that space while they witness it.” Lenny

5. Be prepared to welcome and un-condition people fleeing from toxic communities

“There will be people who are hurt and they will leave their faith communities and they will go to a place that focuses on a part of their identity or their experience, whether that's because they're a Black Indigenous person of color and they need to focus on that, or because they're queer or because whatever else. We need lots of communities and we need them to do their own thing and focus on their own values and, at the same time, find ways to build meaningful alliances that can combat this sort of stuff.” Blake

6. Get serious about supporting alternatives to the two-party system

”The Democratic Party is not here to protect us. They are another face for the empire. And the sooner we get that through our heads, the better we can actually fight like supremacy, Christian nationalism, KKK, whatever you want to call fascism.” Redeem

7. Resist through pleasure and joy

“If you don't got some joy, like listen. After you get done being all serious with us … I hope you're ready to find some joy. I hope you're ready to use your body. I hope you're ready to have some pleasure,” Lenny

In 2020, I wrote about why I regretted unfriending my family over the election and maintaining relationships with political differences for Rebellious Magazine.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radicalsoul.substack.com

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#Religion #Jera Brown