04/02/2025 – Keeping It 101 podcast hosts interview!

Today we’re having a conversation with the Keeping It 101 podcast hosts. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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Keeping It 101 is a somewhat irreverent podcast on understanding religion. The hosts are Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst. And they recently wrote a book titled, Religion Is Not Done With You. Get a copy and read this book because it’s that good. We had a great talk and here’s our conversation.

Dr. B.: Hello everyone, we are here with Dr. Megan Goodwin and Dr. Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst. How are you ladies doing today?

Ilyse: Pretty well, can't complain. I mean we could complain, but we're not going to.

Megan: Like the dude, I abide.

Dr. B.: We are going to be talking with these Keeping It 101 podcast hosts here today. And our plan today is going to start with a quick question for each of them on their own research and then we're going to get into how they met and the podcast and all of that. So we're going to be getting into the whole idea of religion today. So I'm going to start with Megan and Megan wrote a book which I have here again called Abusing Religion a while ago. And in that she has a couple of case studies on Satanic Panic, Islamophobia and the FLDS church For those of you who don't know what that is. And so regarding all of these cultural issues, what is the main takeaway that we can learn about religion from these examples?

Megan: Damn, not a comps question before lunch, Mark, okay. Yeah, no, I mean the main argument of the book is that religion doesn't cause abuse and that we tend to pay more attention to abuse in these fringe communities because it lets us pretend that abuse is rare, that it is something that only monsters do, that it's perpetrated by religio-racial outsiders. And the truth is that abuse happens every single place that we let it happen, which is to say abuse happens everywhere. So the argument of the book isn't, okay, we shouldn't care about abuse when it happens in marginal communities. Obviously we should, we should always care about abuse. We should always intervene when we can to make sure that people are safe. But the way that we intervene, particularly in these marginal religious communities, is so out of proportion to the size of the community and also frankly to the proportion of abuse that's happening in those communities. So the larger zoom out point is looking at the way that we use kind of the specter of sexual abuse happening in these marginal religious communities to explain to Americans why they should be suspicious of religious outsiders, particularly racialized religious outsiders. And it kind of is a cautionary tale to see what happens when you let religion be too free, right?

Dr. B.: I mean it's interesting because I was, you know, I'm old, I was born in the 70s, I grew up in the 80s during the Satanic.

Megan: I was also born in the 70s too.

Dr. B.: The Satanic, I was barely born in the 70s. But you know, so I mean the whole Satanic panic thing, I lived through that. And then also I was living in Phoenix teaching part time at community colleges with the whole Warren Jeffs thing going on. And it was all over our local news, but they didn't really explain a lot of the religious aspects of that. And so there's sort of a little bit of a disconnect there. Do you think that's the case?

Megan: So in particular with Warren Jeffs, who is the once and future president of the fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the most frustrating things about that case, and there are many, and it was horrendous. And I am absolutely an abolitionist and whilst we have jails, Warren Jeffs should be under one just to get that straight from the jump. The way that the case got covered, and this was very much encouraged by people like John Krakauer and the former AG of Utah, was to focus on Warren Jeffs as the problem. And if you eliminate Warren Jeffs, then you eliminate the problem. That is not the problem in Yearning for Zion. That is not the problem in Short Creek. That's not the problem in any community. One person can't be the whole problem. The reason Warren Jeffs was able to do such horrendous things to his community for so long was because there were community members that were complicit, that let it happen. And you get this, oh, God, there's this really heartbreaking moment where his former chief of security talks about the fact that because Mormons and particularly Mormon fundamentalists have been so minoritized, so targeted, so reviled in broader American culture, it was really easy for people to write off any sort of rumblings about Warren Jeffs or what was going on in his inner circle as just Gentiles trying to discredit the prophet. They're just trying to break us and destroy our way of life. And that made it easier to cover up abuses for honestly decades. It's really horrifying.

Dr. B.: Wow. Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. So I do want to get to Ilyse because she's done a lot of interesting work.

Megan: Sure has.

Dr. B.: on Islam, and there was a book on the, for many Americans aren't aware of the 1857 rebellion. And then maybe I'll ask her to talk about that in a minute. But the first question is, is in teaching Islam or presenting Islam publicly, is the main challenge more of a political thing, more of a cultural thing or something else?

Ilyse: Yeah, it's a great question. And I would trouble the question, right? Like separating culture from politics and politics from culture just doesn't work, especially when we're talking about a racialized religion like Islam. Because as we talk about in Religion is Not Done With You, one of my favorite gags about Islam in the last 25 years has been Egyptian American comedian Ahmed Ahmed. Ahmed Ahmed looks like an Egyptian American, if you can imagine that. And I'm asking you to play along with my racialization. Okay. Sounds like a Muslim, right? Ahmed is a Muslim, a stereotypically Muslim name because it is one of the names of Muhammad. But Ahmed Ahmed doesn't identify as Muslim. Ahmed Ahmed was born to Muslim parents, but doesn't identify as Muslim. But when Ahmed Ahmed goes to the airport, you better believe that he is treated like a Muslim. So I think that when we talk about Islam in public, people really want me to talk about like, well, what does the religion say? And then I'll say stuff like, well, you know, you know, Islam, unless it's the name of some dude and some dudes are named Islam, but unless it's the name of some dude, Islam doesn't have arms or legs or mouths. And so it can't do anything. But I think people want to know like, what does the religion say versus what does culture say? And in these kinds of really imbricated cultures, it's just not possible to separate that. It's not possible in any culture, but it's especially not possible in cultures where you have a global religion that takes root locally and then starts to look local. So Muslims practicing in Turkey looks slightly different than Muslims practicing in India, and they look different than Muslims practicing in Malaysia. So for me, the issue is actually communicating with my audiences that just because the Quran says "X," how that plays out amongst Muslims in their real life is contingent upon all sorts of things, including where they live, when they live, what languages they speak, and who their interlocutors are, right? So like I work in South Asia, quite a lot of Muslims in South Asia have elements of their practice that look and sound South Asian. Like it looks maybe what we might consider a little bit Hindu or a little bit Indian or a little bit different than what we would see in a black American Muslim community. And that makes sense because people grow where they are planted.

Dr. B.: Yeah. In fact, that reminds me in the early 2000s when those five guys were taken off the plane, the Delta flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix, they were coming. I was working in Phoenix at the time and they had, they covered the story on CNN. We were, I was in the break room with these other couple of other coworkers and they're like, when they showed their faces on CNN, they're like, I know that guy. He teaches Arabic here at our college. And so it was like, and they just take these guys off of this plane and they interviewed them and they said, we don't know why they canceled our tickets or whatever, our return tickets. And they asked them, and then the reporter asked them, why are you here? We're here for a conference on religious tolerance. It was just like, wait, what?

Ilyse: Yeah, that's my experience. So, so teaching Islam is tricky. It's been politicized really since 1979 in this country and in a big way. But before that, if you think about the nation of Islam and the rise of black Muslim practice, before that, if you think about, uh, like black, black movements in the 1910s and 1920s. And then even before that, we've got the politicization of literacy in enslaved Muslim communities and why those folks were, were like simultaneously seen by slave owners as slightly better, right? Like they're educated compared to these other black people, gross, or slightly worse because well, you can't control them as well because they're writing in a secret squiggle language. So we might as well criminalize Arabic. So in a, in the United States, we've never talked about Islam as a neutral entity. And so when I teach as an American, two American students, we're, we're fighting against really 400 years of politicized religion. And so asking, asking scholars of Islam or asking practitioners of Islam, Muslims themselves to like depoliticize their religion. It's not possible in this continent at this moment in this, uh, place that we've like grown such vitriolic hatred for it.

Dr. B.: It's, it's sad because I, you know, when it was teaching for a while, full-time in Atlanta at a community college, I had, it was a very, um, multi-ethnic area. And I had students, um, over the course of those seven years from like a hundred different countries. I mean, all over the place. And whenever we got students from Iran, um, they would never identify, they would identify as Persian or, or something else or middle Eastern or whatever. And then I always loved talking to students and ask them what language they spoke. And then all the students got along with each other. It's just other people that ended up being the issue, not necessarily at the college, but other people in society in general. And then when they realized that it was a safe place, I mean, we had a great time in class, you know, celebrating our cultures and our languages and learning about religion from all these different places. And then, then they were free to open up and share their experiences. It was great. But then, then they left my classroom and it, it, you know, they left my bubble. And so then it wasn't safe anymore. And it felt so sad, you know, it was, yeah, it's really tough.

Ilyse: It is. It's, uh, these are hard times to work on anything that is perceived of as difference. But I think Islam has been in that category for a while now, minimally since 2001, expansively since 1979 in the contemporary period. But frankly, in American history, we don't really have a moment where Muslims are seen as equals.

Dr. B.: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's crazy. I, I don't know if you're probably familiar with the film Good Will Hunting, where Will is in the bar and he's arguing with somebody about history and he refers to Howard Zinn, this, this story who wrote this book A People's History of the United States. I recently got that book from the library and read it and realized how great of a history book that is that was so different from the history that I got in school growing up. And I'm like, now I just got the point in the movie after I read that book.

Megan: And so it was just, you know, I use that one in class. It's great.

Dr. B.: Oh, you do? That's great.

Megan: Yeah. It's also got a really robust collection of primary sources available online for free if folks might do some research.

Dr. B.: Nice. So, so how did the two of you meet?

Ilyse: I mean, we answered this question many times, but let's just picture it. It's 2007. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There is a beautiful floor. And I, a graduate student admitted and having to do interviews at UNC Chapel Hill and welcomed to this beautiful floor by first year graduate student, Megan P. Goodwin. And I slept on that floor and would have been besties ever since. Really. It was kind of like an instant click and it took a while, you know, we took a year to get to know each other, but like it was an instant. I'm coming to this school because if these are the thinkers that I will get to play with, then I get, then I want to be here. So Megan had started the year before me at UNC Chapel Hill. I was a visiting student. I really did sleep on her floor. That's not just a gag. And then, and then I matriculated at UNC the next year.

Megan: So you were a year ahead of me.

Ilyse: I was the year coming in, entering the year behind you.

Megan: The only time I was a year ahead of you. Ilyse left us all. She was like, great. I know what I need to do. I get all the things done. I'm done. Bam. Job.

Ilyse: I am our order muppet. And so I, yeah, I, but that's how we met. We met really like through chance and random assignment and also one of those great moments where I felt like, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be. Like the folks I'm talking with, the projects I want to do, all of that felt like, yep, this is where I'm supposed to be all because of a floor. A really beautiful floor.

Megan: So gorgeous. In the apartment I was sharing with three pharmacy students at the time.

Ilyse: It's strangers. You're like, I don't really know them. And I was like, I'm just in their common room on the floor.

Megan: In retrospect, I'm not 100% sure if I even asked them if that was cool. I think I just, I made it, just made that happen. Anyway, sorry to those pharmacists. And yeah, good. It's.

Ilyse: Whose names we never knew.

Megan: One was named Megan. I remember her. Yeah, no. And we have been, basically family ever since. So we've been thinking together for almost 20 years, which is wild, but awesome.

Dr. B.: So how did the Keeping It 101 podcast come about?

Megan: Well, the idea, the original idea was we had been flirting with the notion of starting a podcast largely because Ilyse is a rabid podcast listener. She's got noise in her ears all day, every day. And I had become low key obsessed with this podcast called Witch Please, which was two lady scholars in Canada providing like a really smart, really funny, really irreverent gloss on Harry Potter back when I still wanted to know anything about that universe. So Hannah McGregor in particular was really emphatic about the need for more women in podcasting. And I got excited and in a feminism way, Ilyse was, was this right after you got tenure or right before? 2000.

Ilyse: Just after I got, I got 10, cause like I got tenure in July of 2019 and then we literally started planning the podcast right after.

So Ilyse had this whole moment of I have more responsibilities, but also I'm thinking about what my career should look like and how do we bring more joy and more collaboration into that trajectory. And frankly, my ADHD brain got excited about the excuse to learn some new technologies and play around with stuff that I wouldn't have an excuse to play around with either other wise and call it work. Oh, we thought we were, we knew we wanted to do a podcast. The original pitch was helping white folks think through the challenge of white supremacy. We, I really wanted to call it tea and crackers because you're telling white people the truth about themselves, but Ilyse very, very correctly pointed out that that is hard to fundraise for. So…

Ilyse: That is not an award-winning grant funded podcast title that is not disqualifying at the jumps. So a good joke, not always a good plan.

Megan: Which is something I'm still working on internalizing. But so we, we played around with a bunch of different concepts, but ultimately we wanted to put something together that would be useful in our own work that we could do without a whole lot of prep and that seemed fun to talk about together. So we thought, all right, we have some really basic topics we talk about every single class we teach. What if we record a couple podcasts that we'll just cover, you know, what is religion? What does it mean to be religious? Why is it important to think about practice as opposed to belief? Why there are no such things as a-political religions and why you need to care about religion, even if you're not religious yourself. So the plan had been five episodes. We'd use them in our classes. Maybe we would have some friends who would also use them in their classes. We launched in January of 2020 and you probably remember this. There was almost immediately a need for like a lot of material that could be taught at a distance. So the podcast took off in ways that we had not anticipated. I think we also brought in a lot of listeners that we might not have otherwise gotten because folks were at home and looking for distractions. And yeah, we had a really vast and diverse audience find us almost right away. And now we're five years and what seven seasons in over a hundred episodes.

Ilyse: Five and a half years, seven seasons and a book.

Megan: And a book grant funded award winning.

Dr. B.: Yeah. I'll let you know that in a minute. I remember listening to it in your first season and then that was when I was designing and starting my TenOnReligion channel as well. And I'm like, these ladies are great. But the irreverence that you exude and so on and so forth is that by design, is that part of your natural personalities?

Megan: Oh, it's involuntary. I mean, Ilyse makes deliberate choices about things. I'm just like this. Okay.

Ilyse: We're comedic people. I think when I was in college, I wanted to, I needed a job, right? Like I didn't come from money. I needed a job. And my top three jobs were to be a professor, to be a comedy writer, or I guess to be another Jewish lawyer from New Jersey because like that path is available to me. Right? Like I know people on that path. But I think, I think for me as, and Megan, I, you know, you're being, you're being you, which is like a little bit self-deprecating, but I want to name actually that both of us teach and research things that are absolutely heartbreaking and devastating, right? Like I locate a lot of my work in hate studies. Like that's not light. We're not doing, we're not like watching comedy and then writing about it. And Megan works on like sexual abuse. So between the two of us, we work on really stone cold, bummer things. And both of us have developed pedagogical styles so that students stay with us, stay in our class and don't, you know, develop tremendous eating disorders as a stress response. So our comedy chops are really, they are what we've developed over 20 years of teaching in college classrooms so that we can talk about things that actually should make you cry.

Megan: Yeah.

Ilyse: And, and I say in my class, like I start class with like, I come from a long line of, of Jews who believe that you laugh because you shouldn't cry all the time. And I think I'm vaguely funny. So like my classroom is a captive audience. Like they have to laugh. Their grade depends on it a little bit. But you develop that, right? Like all type fives are just practice. And so what we, what we developed was, and from the jump, it was this has to be funny because ultimately we are white identifying women who talk about white supremacy and we are religious people who talk about Christian domination. And that does not go down if your tone is you're wrong, I'm right. You don't know, I know that tone goes down a treat. If you can, or that information goes down a treat if you can say, look, this is bananas and we're going to make some silly jokes about it. Cause we also were not taught the Zinn version of American history. We also were not taught X, Y, and Z. And we do not expect our audience to have been taught that either. That is our job here, but it's gotta be enjoyable. It's gotta be entertaining and enjoyable, not enter joinable, which is really, it was really elegant right now.

Megan: It was really eloquent. Well, and I think the approach to the book was very much born out of that. Teaching voice works in a way that scolding voice does not, which is a thing that I'm still again, working to internalize. Cause I love to yell about things on the internet, but the cults episode we did first, first season I have seen make more of an impure, like an empirical impact on the way that my colleagues discuss cults and new religious movements than 10 years of like all capsing on Twitter. So, or even like 10 years of a robust publication. I think, I think, I think what we are seeing in this is that when we use our teaching voices, which we are both award-winning college level teachers, when we use that voice, boy, do people want to listen. They do. Well, and that's the thing is there's a real hunger for religious literacy in this country and beyond. But one of the things that the book is challenging folks to think about is why don't you know this? Who benefits from you not knowing about this? Because it's not, it's not individual people's fault that they don't get taught that history. That is happening by design. You don't teach people, you try to subjugate about how you subjugate people. So challenging folks, again, even those who are not religious themselves to think about where is religion work in the world? How does us ignoring religion or pretending it's private or pretending it's no big deal allow folks whose religion is winning to keep winning?

Dr. B.: So the, I've, for my viewers, Megan's talking about a book Religion Is Not Done With You. I have my little sticker that I got that I can't take off because I got it from another library. But so tell us a little bit about this book, how you decided to do it, how, how you planned and came about writing it.

Ilyse: Well, some of it was that like we gave up, we'd give a lot of talks like this. So we talked to people all the time we had given one and a publisher from Beacon was like, we should talk this, this is a book project. And so we were like, cool, we write books. Yeah, we think in books. This is a great way for us to translate this project. Yeah. Also, I'll be completely honest, like I'm a person in a tenure track position. So writing books was a way to both validate the work I was doing, but also a way to make sure that for me, podcasts are ephemeral, right? So like, eventually this will have to stop. Eventually we will, we will shut the doors on Keeping It 101. Not our working relationship or our like, try to get rid of me, please. Our brain mind melds. But, but unless we're hosting that website, unless a university is willing to put that in their archives, it can go away, right? Like the beauty of digital media as we all can participate. The problem of digital media is it goes away. And so a book was a way for us to, I think put like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence of look at all this work we have done. Look at how much labor it is doing in the academy and beyond. And it also gives us a way to speak to a different audience. I love podcasts. Megan doesn't really, right? And so folks that don't love podcasts are not listening to this podcast, which we think is doing really important social justice and academic work. So we wanted to do it and, and we had the opportunity to do it. And then I'll let Megan take it from there.

Megan: Yeah, that's fair. One of the things that was really great about working with Beacon was that they really let us set our own tone as long as we were backing it up with the scholarship. So there are nonsense jokes in there that I still can't believe that we got in print that I'm delighted to have there. Both because I feel like I got away with something and I'm petty enough to enjoy that. But also as Ily says, the work that we're doing both in the pod and the book is really depressing and really hard and really challenging in a lot of places. And sure, there are folks that will sit down and just consume atrocities, but you reach a lot more people when you can surprise them, when you can invite them into the conversation. And that's exactly what the comedy does in terms of how it came together. This was, this was really interesting. When we started the book, we had been working together, thinking together, making ridiculous jokes together for a decade and a half. And we thought, all right, well, we know what we want to do with the book and we know how we work together. We're going to sit down and like, they gave us a year, but we're only like three months. This is going to be fine. And instead, we realized that writing together is a very different experience than podcasting together. And I think one of the ways that Ilyse puts this, that always makes the most sense to me is she does, has done the, I'm going to say a solid 92% of the writing for our scripts. I have done a couple here and there, but usually she does a fairly beefy outline or scripts the entire thing. I go through, maybe add my two cents. I'll tweak things in real time, but we always maintain our own voices. And there are ways that I say things that Ilyse would not say. And there are ways that Ilyse puts things that just don't feel natural to me. That doesn't matter when both of our voices are clearly both of our voices. When we have a voice, it very much matters that it sounds like both of us. And that is an entirely different undertaking and way more challenging than we anticipated. So when we set out to kind of collaborate on chapter one, the "What is Religion?" chapter, which I cannot stress enough how very many times both of us have taught that class.

Dr. B.: Sure, sure.

Megan: I want to say we went through nine drafts, like easily. We had to put it down for nine months because we could not get together on how we wanted to present the absolute basic building blocks of this thing that we have been working on our entire adult lives.

Ilyse: We actually agree on how it functions like it's not like

Megan: We're on the same team.

Ilyse: There's not creative differences, irreconcilable differences. This was not an intellectual divorce moment. This was a moment where in my discipline, we write very formally. We have quite a lot of like stodgy, like our, our, our style is a little bit stodgy and Megan both doesn't care about that and doesn't come from a discipline that that rewards that. And so it sounded like I was like, oh, oh, oh, I don't. It's one thing if we talk like this, it's another for us to write like this because I don't know. And really that piece of it took like Megan said, nine months for us to figure out. And then we wrote the book in three months.

Megan: We really did. It came together. Oh, I'm sorry. I cut you off.

Ilyse: No, but, but like what we had thought was true, but we didn't anticipate having to negotiate what is our writing style. But once we figured that out, and again, that took the majority of the time that it took to write the book. Figuring out our voice was the hardest piece. The data wasn't hard. The expertise wasn't hard. Knowing who would say what and when wasn't hard, but figuring out how to say it, that was rough.

Megan: Yeah, it was. The thing that kind of really unlocked it for me was once we decided, all right, we're going to stick a pin in chapter one, because this is a big old mess. And then we knew broad strokes, what we wanted the rest of the book to do. So rather than trying to just generate out of nowhere a collective voice, what if Ilyse takes the lead on the stuff that she's the strongest on and I take the lead on the stuff I'm strongest on. And then truly we went through line by line in real time and said, all right, how does this read? Does this feel both weighty enough to be taken seriously and engaging enough to make people want to keep reading? So that's the thing. I'm not in the academy anymore. I actually don't care in ways that are probably both healthy and problematic what the academy thinks of this. But I do want to make sure that it is correct and that it's engaging. So blending the rigorousness of Ilyse's background with my schwa divif. Really it was rough going there for a minute. But one of the reasons I think it was possible is because we have known each other and loved each other and trusted each other for so long, we could have the hard conversations of like, oh, girl, you know, I respect you. And also I don't want to do it like that. And have that really be about the work and not about our relationship to one another or how much we cared about one another. And I honestly was so delighted once we got through that stuff of how natural it felt and how really joyful it was to pull it together. And we finished the book in Edinburgh actually because Ilyse was on a Fulbright. So we got to spend a couple days running around the city and just being really happy that we had done this thing that I think we both felt really good about.

Dr. B.: I mean, the presentation is excellent. And I think that people who listen to your podcast and then read the book, they can completely see how your personalities come out in both forms of media. But then again, like you say, some people may have never listened to a single episode of the podcast and then read the book and they're like, wow, who are these ladies? And maybe they go to the podcast after. I don't know. But if any, it's a, but of course your writing style is very engaging. It's very similar to your podcast style. So I think it would be a really good starting point for a lot of people who are trying to understand religion.

Megan: Yeah, that was really our hope was that given how many folks we have encountered out there that want to know more, but don't really have the resources to do it or think that to learn about religion, you have to be involved in a synagogue or a church or what have you. This is meant to reach for folks that are genuinely intellectually curious about this and maybe don't know enough yet to see themselves in the conversation. But hopefully by the end of the book, they will.

Dr. B.: What's your...I sometimes ask religious scholars this because I'm curious how they answer this question. What's your elevator speech on why religion is important? You know, what do you tell people if you have two minutes or something like that?

Megan: Oh, I can go. This is easier with an American audience because they're all freaking the fuck out right now. I should have asked if we can curse on the show, but now it's too late. So the two minute elevator speech is even if you're not religious yourself, you need to care about religion because it's shaping the world around us, it shapes our laws, it shapes our schools, it shapes our access to health care, at which point they're like, health care, what does that have to do with religion? And then I start yelling about Catholic hospitals being your only option in most poor and/or rural areas. Other people's beliefs, the beliefs of allegedly celibate Catholic white men are setting up what kind of health care you can receive regardless of what your body needs. And by that point, they're all fired up and I don't actually have to do a whole lot more pitching after that. But if if you need it, I always have more repro facts. I am happy to talk about what happens when you try to do religion too differently. But the underlining thing is if we are going to invest in this idea that is America, we said we were invested in religious freedom. We said we were invested in individual liberty. Why doesn't that line up with how we live in our country and in our world?

Dr. B.: Okay.

Ilyse: Yeah. And for me, it's it's all of those things. But it's also we're really good at saying religion starts wars. We're really good at that. We're less good at understanding why. And we're way less good at understanding that religion also is part of almost every single social global justice advocacy movement. Period. There is nothing that is always true in all places at all times. But one of the real truisms is that religion is always part of social justice advocacy period. And so for me, when folks feel animosity towards having to deal with religion, my sense is like, cool, then do you want to delete those civil rights movements or the labor movement or the movement for kids' rights or the movement for women's rights? Like, because you can't subtract religion from those movements, even if we don't like how that makes us feel. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that all religion or religious actors are good, because obviously not I mean, we are living here now under what is essentially Christian fascism. And so but but like not understanding that what's going on is Christian right now and making it about like the politics is for me another one of these like two minute hooks where I'm like, cool, if you read the news, you actually should know more about religion than you think. And to Megan's point, one of the questions I often ask people is who wins when you don't know? What does that allow? What abuses does that cover? You know, like my kids are off for today because it's Eid and that's great. I am thrilled that our local communities have finally the first year we've gotten off for Eid, which is the first time the districts have ever recognized a non-Christian holiday because even Jewish holidays were new to the calendar this year. Okay. And when people complain and I've heard moms and the mom lists complaining that this is another day that doesn't benefit everybody, that has to be another day you find childcare. And I hear that I hear the ways that we do not respect people with children in a work environment. But they don't know that the thing they're doing is racism. Because the idea that it's an imposition to be off on Eid but not on Christmas is a white supremacy, period.

Dr. B.: Yeah, yeah.

Megan: And a white Christian supremacy.

Ilyse: A white Christian supremacy.

Dr. B.: Right, right. Like you want to give them Khyati Joshi's book on white Christian America.

Megan: We definitely do. We definitely do.

Ilyse: Yeah, she's great.

Dr. B.: Right, that's a great book. So, I mean, like after the election I did a short TikTok starting with Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 and then explaining briefly that that transition to, segregation transitioned into the abortion thing in the 1970s. And then I got all these comments from people like, "We never knew that." I'm just like, "Okay, just Google the Heritage Foundation and then you'll learn a lot more about American history than you ever want to know." Right, you know, so I mean it's just like, it's pretty crazy. So how do you assess the effectiveness of all these public efforts in understanding religion? You know, like a lot of people don't know the academic field of religion is even a thing. You know, how do you assess how well all these efforts are working?

Ilyse: That's a really great question. I am not, I am of two minds. The first is, you know, I'm an academic, I run a center, I trade in metrics all the time. And so I believe in them and they are completely made up. So I don't put that much stock in them. One of the ways that we think about whether our work is impactful is downloads. Like we have a ton of downloads, we have a bunch of book sales. So like that's out there. I think the other thing for me is that I am a drop in the bucket activist. I'm also a drop in a bucket academic. And what I mean by that is every little thing we contribute might be one drop in a bucket of water, but if it's not there, the bucket is less full. And so I am less interested in whether or not there are measurable outcomes that this work exists than that the work exists, because if it's not there to point to, we don't know what that, we don't know what possibility it seeds that we teach in the way that we teach or we broadcast the way that we broadcast, we publish in the way that we publish. Right? So as we're watching the administration that we're currently living under remove funding and move educational stances and try to rewrite museums and try to rewrite history, frankly, that's one of the ways I know that those of us who are working on these issues are making an impact because you wouldn't have to fight us if we were irrelevant. You wouldn't have to fight us or silence us or frankly deport and kill us if there is a space in which what we are teaching wasn't undermining the very white Christian supremacist systems that we are looking to undermine. It's a threat. And so, you know, I'll say the other way that I gauge impact is like I have been on neo-Nazi hate websites. Like my name has been published. My addresses were docked in previous locations since 2008, 2009. So again, like my experience in this universe is slightly different than most, but I know I'm doing well if the people that are loathsome want to burn me in effigy.

Dr. B.: Yeah. If you're on their radar.

Ilyse: That's exactly right. I'm doing just fine.

Megan: I think on a positive note, one of the other ways that we're seeing an impact happen is we hear from friends and colleagues that they're using our work, that they're recommending our work. One of my absolute favorite things is hearing, oh, you know, my library book group is doing this or my reading group is doing this or we got a really lovely tag on Blue Sky this morning. Our friend and colleague, Sohini, who is at Queens University, just showed, she did like a shelfie of all of the books that she's using in one of her classes. And we're on a list with some really illustrious folks. The way that we're showing up in theories of religion classes and getting to participate in shaping that conversation is really, I mean, frankly, I'm gobsmacked. It is a funky thing to be like, I'm not in the academy anymore. And also I am regularly showing up on syllabi. And that's not even an ego moment. That's just math. Like we have stats on how many folks are using our work. And that's just, it's incredibly humbling, but it also does get to feel like, oh, this is making a small change, but it is making a change in the conversation. And that's really exciting.

Dr. B.: It's nice. I mean, I, my channel is really small, but if I did, I do interreligious hermeneutics and philosophy of religion. And I've done some things. I've done a number of videos on Paul Tillich, Paul Ricoeur, all these sorts of figures. And some people have told me like, you have the best videos on Paul Tillich that we've ever seen anywhere. And then, and somebody said, they read, they saw my video on Paul Tillich. And they said, I learned so much more from your video than I did the Wikipedia article on Paul Tillich. And I, and I, and I thought I, I'm like, well, if I can't do better than the Wikipedia article on Paul Tillich, then I'm going to shut my channel down. You know, I should be able to do better than that. But, but it, but it is, it is validating when you hear people are using your things, you know.

Ilyse: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. B.: Yeah. Yeah. So I tell us what you're working on right now or things that are going on either now or, or the near future.

Ilyse: Well, allegedly I am writing two separate books, but in reality I'm taking a break. But in, but I'm, I'm working on two books. One is a project that I had a Fulbright for, which is on, it's called Imperial Pandemics. And it is about the viral nature of spreading specifically hatred located in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim rhetoric. So when Semite meant both communities and how that that early history spread like wildfire through imperial regimes that we still live with. So that's one book. The second book I'm working on is more in line with the series we did this year on Keeping It 101 on adoption and that we have a piece out with the revealer about on religion, white supremacy and adoption, particularly in the United States, uh, as an adoptee. It's something I think about all the time, but also as we're seeing the threats to birthright citizenship, um, that is threatening to many more communities for many more reasons, but it is actually deeply threatening to adoptees because none of us have original birth certificates. And so if the SAFE Act for voting passes, I know it's meant to disenfranchise women in a real way, but like it also specifically disenfranchises me twice because I don't have acts. I'm not allowed to have my original documentation because of the way the state intervenes in adoptees lives. So I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about those two projects, Imperial pandemics and religion and adoption with a title yet to be determined.

Dr. B.: Yeah. And like you say, no, no heavy topics at all that you deal with, right?

Ilyse: You know, again, I am a stone cold bummer. My work is a stone cold bummer with a dash of humor. That's the best you can get for me. I'm not everyone's cup of tea.

Dr. B.: You have to do something to keep your sanity. So, you know, Megan, what are you working on?

Megan: I just, I also want to point out that Ilyse is also running the humanity center at UVM. So when she says she's taking a break, uh, be skeptical. I am, let's see, doing a bunch of public comms work for humanities and religion projects. So half of my stuff is building websites and doing Brandon comms consulting for public humanities projects. So I work with Crossroads Project at Princeton, which is amazing. I did some very cool stuff with the shared sacred sites project. And yeah, I'm just about to bump back into Crossroads again. I'm also a senior editor at Religion Dispatches. So I am commissioning articles, particularly from writers of color, queer writers and/or disabled writers. Religion Dispatches for folks who don't know has been around since 2008. So we're a digital elder. And the coverage is on religion, but is not confessionally religious, right? So you're not getting a religious perspective. You're getting a secular analytical perspective on current events, breaking news and larger cultural trends, that kind of thing. I like them because they're snarky, which feels like a good fit for me. And then writing wise, I have been spinning my wheels for ages on this cults incorporated book. So the project is called cults incorporated business of bad religion. And we're thinking about who benefits from treating specific groups like cults. What does that get us? So I'm looking at the move bombing and the aftermath, particularly on the theft of Africa children's remains by Ivy League professors. I'm sorry, I should say theft and commodification. I'm looking at the way that we misremember people's temple in Jonestown. I am looking at the cultification of America slum. And the chapter was called cult 45. It was supposed to look at the contained period of the 45th president's term and the way that QAnon informed that. But now it's still again happening. So I don't fully know how I'm going to get a handle on that. I still need to figure out where the Hindu nationalism piece fits in and the ways that Hindu nationalism is affecting the American religio-political landscape. I still think the conclusion of the book is going to be Disney and why isn't that a cult?

Dr. B.: Oh, wow. The Hindu national piece, I mean, I would love to learn more about how that relates to the United States today because I don't know nearly enough about that.

Megan: Most Americans don't, which is exactly why it's concerning. But Hindus for Human Rights is doing some really great public campaign stuff around that. So I would point folks there first and then hopefully someday I will have a chapter about it.

Dr. B.: Wow, that's great. So hopefully this has helped people better understand the Keeping It 101 and these two lovely scholars and where they came from and how they met and how this whole thing came together because it's a really fascinating story. And because I know your own podcast, you don't really usually tell your own story that often. And so it takes somebody on the outside to come in and say, OK, what's this all about? Right. And so it's always hoping to step in and make that happen. But I will try to get some video editing done and get this out later this week. I'll certainly let you know about that.

Megan: Great.

Dr. B.: Thanks so much for taking some time. We appreciate it.

Megan: Yeah, great to see you. Thanks for having us.

Ilyse: Take good care.

Megan: Bye.

So, what did you think about our convo? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below. Give me a Super Thanks. Also, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.