I speak with Professor Jesse Smith from Benedictine College about his article "Sociology in the Age of Trump," focusing on the sociological perspectives of Trump voters. We discuss the political polarization in America, the impact of religion, and the need for empathetic research that respects voters' lived experiences. Jesse critiques the politicization of sociological inquiry since the Trump era, advocating for a qualitative approach that fosters understanding over bias. He emphasizes the importance of curiosity and integrity in academic research, offering insights for sociologists navigating politically charged environments.
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[0:08] Music.
[0:34] Hello, and welcome to this episode of Church and Main, a podcast for people interested in seeing where faith, politics, and culture intersect. I am Dennis Sanders, your host. My guest today is Jesse Smith. Smith is a professor of sociology at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. His research is focused on topics such as the transmission of faith and families and the role of religion in American political polarization. And today we're going to talk about his recent article in Public Discourse that's called Sociology in the Age of Trump, The Clash of Deep Stories on the Left and Right. Now, I think that this is an important article and it's also an important conversation, especially in the aftermath of last month's election. I really enjoyed talking with Jesse about this topic, and I think that you will enjoy hearing it.
[1:30] So join me in this conversation with Professor Jesse Smith.
[1:36] Music.
[1:56] So i thank you for uh coming on this morning uh today to talk about uh your article and i think the first thing just to kind of um for people to get to know a little bit about you is is to talk about your background um where you're at and um kind of your religious background as well, yes absolutely thank you so much for having me on so my name is jesse smith and i'm a sociology professor at Benedictine College. I took kind of a circuitous route to get here, actually out of college. Then I worked in social work for several years, and I liked that pretty well, but I decided I was more interested in kind of scholarly pursuits. And so I went to Penn State in 2017 to go get my PhD in sociology and demography and just obtained that in 2023. and so now I teach sociology here at Benedictine College. My research interests, really I'm interested in a lot of different things, but one of them is religion and politics, and that's kind of the thing that brought me to write this article, that I was doing a lot of reading, doing a lot of research in the overlap between religion and politics, and so I kind of had a front row seat to this whole development of this Christian nationalism concept and had some concerns about it that led me to write the article.
[3:17] Okay. And yeah, I think that was actually going to be the second question was kind of what was the impetus to writing the article.
[3:26] Kind of an interesting thing to talk about sociology, especially in the last few years, and its changes, especially just before Trump came on the scene and then during and after. Um what kind of led you to think about writing about this and and some of the changes that were happening what really prompted me to start writing about this is i was just frustrated with a lot of what i was seeing in so my area is the sociology of religion that's the subfield that i'm in and so i go to the conferences and read the journals and see the things that come out and um christian nationalism starting in around 2018 or so just really took off just kind of like an explosion of research and writing on this topic. And I was somewhat frustrated with the tone of the research because some of it felt very politicized to me. Some of it seemed like it was very much playing into partisan narratives. And the theory of it, the social science behind it didn't look all that strong to me the things that people were saying about christian nationalism and what it is and what it's supposed to be doing didn't necessarily add up to me when i looked at the data and yet it was them really just blowing up and i felt like a lot of it was that it played into certain partisan narratives and you brought up trump so i think trump had a lot to do with that i think there's um.
[4:51] You know, after Trump was elected, understandably, this was a very shocking thing. And the fact that so many religious people seem to be supporting him, this was also kind of a very shocking thing. So there was a puzzle here for researchers to try and figure out. And it's an important question to ask. It's an important thing to study. I think what happened in social science and also in a lot of the academy is there was kind of a resistance mentality.
[5:18] You see it in other areas too. You see it in journalism, but I think it was also true in the academy. There was a sense that this thing that's happening in politics and this mega politics is blowing up. This is bad and we really need to oppose it and we need to use our influence or our power as social scientists or academics or researchers to really just morally oppose what we see going on in the political sphere. And I don't really think that's the job of social scientists. And I think when they try and do that, then they can end up somewhat compromising the quality of their science in order to make a political point. So this is what I was trying to unpack to some extent with the article.
[6:00] Yeah, I think it's interesting. I was just recently, I'm writing something for my Substack, and I was looking at a lot of religious publishers. And I think one particular publisher, I think I counted maybe about four or five books that were all on Christian nationalism. And that's not to say that's not an issue that you don't want to talk about, but it was just interesting just the amount of books that are out there. And that was just one publisher. I know that there are a lot of other publishers, you'll probably find the same amount of titles just within that one publisher. So it just seems like it's the kind of thing that everyone's writing about. But you do have to wonder how deep is the research that they're really looking at, and if it's more opinion than it is actual kind of really digging into what's going on.
[6:55] Absolutely. And that's been also in like the academic journals, and there have been dozens and dozens of publications on this topic. And if you know much about academic publishing, you know, it's a very slow process. It can often take up months or even years to get an article published. So to have a topic blow up that quickly in the normally very slow moving academic literature really speaks to something kind of unusual happening and something where I think maybe the claims we're making, we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit in terms of what is happening. Really grounded in the evidence. Now, one of the things that, kind of contrasting that is that, and you begin your article talking about the book Strangers in a Strange Land, or not Strangers in a Strange, Strangers in Their Own Land, and by a sociologist, Arlie Hochschild. And could you kind of talk about that person's approach? Because it's very different to a lot of what you've just been talking about, how people have taken on Christian nationalism.
[8:01] This book was a little bit different. I remember, actually, I have not read the book, but I've heard a lot about it. This was maybe just shortly after Trump was first elected, hearing about it. And this was around time people were trying to find out a little bit more about why he won. And this person was interviewed, and it was just a very unique approach. But could you kind of contrast how that story was very different from kind of more recent takes?
[8:34] Yes, absolutely. So I can get into the article itself a little bit more. And that's where I start out. I mentioned Arlie Hothschild. She wrote this book, Strangers in Their Own Land, as you mentioned. It came out in 2016, but it was based on several years of research she had done before this. And really the impetus for her to write the book was, it was in the Tea Party era. So this is what she was thinking about. And she's this Berkeley sociologist. She does qualitative work, very high profile scholar in our field. She's very attentive to people's experiences, people's emotions. She takes a very much on the ground approach to her research. And so she wanted to understand the specific question she asked is, why do Louisiana Republicans, you know, it's deep red states, rural people, why do they vote against more environmental regulations, even though they live in communities where, you know.
[9:30] Oil drilling have devastated a lot of their environments? And this is a source of great grief and great distress to a lot of people in these communities. So why are they voting against the regulations that should be making their communities better? And, um, kind of the, this was the specific question she looked at, but the bigger question was just a, what's going on with these red state Republicans? Why do they vote the way they vote? Why do their politics look the way they do? And she knew she's a Berkeley sociologist. I'm extremely different from these people. I have very little in common, very little overlapping experience. And so it's going to be difficult for me to get in their heads a little bit. And so she took, uh, you could say somewhat extreme measures methodologically. She went to live in the Louisiana Bayou part time, she used some of her very indirect personal connections to make friends with some people, did interviews, did kind of ride alongs, just spent time with them, went to tea party meetings at local town events and some of these places.
[10:30] Watch Fox News day in and day out, recognizing this is something very influential for people in these communities. So if I want to understand what's going on with them, I really need to familiarize myself with both the social and the media environment. And you could almost say went kind of deep cover, if you want to put it like that. Now, she was upfront about what she was doing there. She didn't pretend to be doing anything she wasn't doing, but really took drastic measures to try and understand people's experiences on the ground through their own eyes. That's really what she was trying to do. And I think this is important because it's very easy for social scientists or scholars to try and elaborate theories of what's going on from the ivory tower from, you know, 10 feet up and try and force some kind of theory on people to say, this is why they do what they do. And she was taking a very opposite approach and trying to get on the ground and try and understand the world from her research subjects perspectives, which is difficult to do. It takes a lot of work, but I think it's really important. You get a much richer sense of what people are going through when you try and take that on-the-ground approach. And one of the things that she talks about in that approach is a deep story.
[11:46] How would you define that deep story, and what does that mean? Right, so at the end of her research project, she was writing the book. She's like, how do I communicate everything that I've seen to an audience? You know, what have I actually found here that I want people to understand? And she came up with this idea of a deep story, which is something it's like a narrative that people live inside. It's kind of the stories that we tell ourselves and that we tell each other in our communities to make sense of the world and what's going on in it. And where do we fit in it? What's going on in society and our country, et cetera. And she argues, and I think she's right about this, that everybody has some kind of deep story. It's not like something that's just her research subjects. Go to any community, any group of people, see how they talk and what makes sense to them. You'll kind of pick up on a story of how they understand the world.
[12:39] And I think we often do kind of think in terms of stories and in terms of narratives. And so I like this concept she came up with for that reason. It matches well with just human experience. The particular deep story she found from her research subjects is there were people that felt like they were being left behind by society. They wanted to celebrate America. They wanted to celebrate the country and America. Achieve the American dream to be able to have their white picket fence, to have a middle-class lifestyle, a satisfying job, being able to take care of your family, save for retirement. It's those very normal American kinds of things, but they felt like they couldn't get there, whether for economic or cultural reasons. And this was kind of frustrating, but they were waiting in line, waiting their turn to eventually achieve this dream.
[13:29] But she argues they were looking at what was going on in society, what was going on in politics. She talks about Obama a lot and some of the changes happening during the Obama era. The people living in this community, they feel like they're seeing, say, racial minorities or single mothers or poor people or immigrants, people who they see as not really being part of their community, but they're getting special privileges or special treatment from the government and from the culture there. They were thinking of these people as line cutters. These people are jumping ahead of us in line for the American dream. And not only are we getting cut in line but now they're kind of turning around and laughing at us you know they make fun of us and their news shows and journalism and media you watch a lot of tv shows these days and it's like oh people like us are rural conservative southerners we're the villains in a lot of these tv shows and so this um kind of led them to gravitate toward this angry populist politics toward a figure like Donald Trump or toward, you know, we need to cut the government back because the government is helping other people get ahead of us in line. So she argued this deep story is what is fueling people's reactionary politics in certain ways.
[14:46] And I think one of the things that was interesting about that was that you talked about, and maybe she was even asked whether it was.
[14:56] True or not, but that the reality was that this was kind of more how they were feeling, and it wasn't as much trying to say whether this was a right or wrong feeling as much as it was this is what they're feeling right now and trying to kind of understand where they're coming from. So it was kind of like a withholding of judgment as much as it was, well, to be honest, to act as a sociologist, to really say this is how these people are living their lives right now.
[15:34] Absolutely and there's a famous uh phrase in sociology where we say what people believe is real is real and its consequences so she wasn't so much focused in the book on whether the deep story that people are telling themselves whether it's right or not whether it's true or not um she didn't say it wasn't true that just wasn't really the question she was asking she's just more concerned with them what is the story and then what are the consequences of that story and And you said it very well, that is a very standard sociological approach to take, you know, it's someone else's job, it's an economist job to figure out whether people are getting cut out of the labor market or not, or some of these other questions would be the focus for other disciplines, but a sociologist is just going to be more interested in how do groups and how do communities understand the situation that they're in, and then how are they responding to that understanding?
[16:31] And when it came to the, then there was another, a few years later, probably I think it was around 2018 or so, was when we kind of in some ways started to talk more about Christian nationalism.
[16:45] And there were two other sociologists. And one is I'm familiar with, Samuel Perry, and then the other one I believe is Philip Gorski. And they came up with the flag and the cross. and they had a kind of differing approach it wasn't as uh the same um as strangers in their own land how would you kind of explain that one a little bit yeah so they wrote a book about well what they call white christian nationalism and this is in 2022 when this book came out and they claim to use this deep story concept you know they directly reference it and they said, we want to understand basically why are people voting for Trump? Why are people engaging in this mega politics? And I said, well, we think that we can explain this through a deep story. But they didn't, there wasn't nearly as much, you didn't have like a years long project of interviewing people and embedding yourself in their communities to try and figure out what's going on. To me, reading their work, it feels much more impressionistic. It feels much closer to the level of kind of a hot take rather than like a really
[17:57] deep and rigorous scholarly endeavor. And let me actually look up the article because I can read exactly what they said the deep story is.
[18:15] Because I believe in the article that I quote them directly what the deep story of white Christian nationalism is they claim. So they say America was founded as a Christian nation by white men who were quote-unquote traditional Christians who based the nation's founding documents on quote-unquote Christian principles. The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful, and the nation has a special role to play in God's plan for humanity.
[18:45] But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from, quote unquote, un-American influences, both inside and outside our borders. So this is what they say is the white Christian nationalist deep story. And they trace some not only support for Trump, but support for pretty much any kind of conservative policy or any kind of conservative political movement in recent years. But really, they go back through history and say across a very long time, any kind of support for anything conservative is rooted in these white Christians wanting to maintain their own cultural dominance by excluding other people as much as possible. And that that's fundamentally what's motivating a lot of the politics that we are seeing. So this is their claim. And I suppose I just don't really see as much of the grounding in it. So Arlie Hothschild with her, Strangers in their own land. When she came up with this deep story, she actually read it to her research subjects. And she said, okay, I've been spending all this time with you. I've interviewed you. I've watched you. This is kind of what I'm seeing. Is this right? Does this reflect how you understand the world? And they were very enthusiastic about it. They were like, yes, this is exactly what we think. Thank you for articulating it so well. So we could take this as some validation that, you know, she was actually onto something. She was articulating people's experiences in a helpful way.
[20:09] This story from Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry in The Flag and the Cross, they don't do anything like that to validate their story. So it doesn't give me as much confidence that this is really the thing that's guiding people. And if you look at the way they write it, they have, say, America was founded as a Christian nation by white men with white in parentheses. So there's something subtle going on there. They're trying to insert racism effectively or racial exclusion into people's deep stories and say, well, we think this is really what's going on. And I don't think that's true for most people. This isn't the way that most white Christians or really most Americans are looking at the world. Now, a lot of sociologists will argue even if people say they're not motivated by race or racism, if you really dig in and read between the lines, really there's a racial element there. I think that's probably true sometimes. Sometimes it's not true or it might be somewhat exaggerated. You know, that's a conversation you can have. But what's important about this here is that the whole point of this deep story concept is we're telling people's stories on their own terms. We're trying to tell you what the world looks like through their eyes arlie hot shield was saying i'm not trying to impose some kind of explanation on these people from my ivory tower i want to tell you what the world looks like to them.
[21:33] And Gorski and Perry, they claim to be doing the same thing here, but I don't think if you went out and interviewed a lot of the kinds of people that they're thinking about, if you read them this deep story, including the parentheses and scare quotes and everything like that, and you said, okay, is this how you see the world? I don't think people would tend to affirm this. And in fact, I don't think they would be very happy that somebody was trying to attribute this motivation or this worldview to them. So this is where I see it as kind of problematic. They're taking a concept where empathy was extremely important to making the concept work, but they're applying it in a very unempathetic way to me, which I see as being a problem both in terms of social science, because it's not really the right methodology for the concept they're trying to use. But as I get into later in the article, I also think it's kind of harmful because it makes the kinds of people they would be talking about feel even more embattled or feeling even more like these academics in their ivory tower. They don't really care about us. They don't like us. It's not actually that important to them to try and understand us, except in the way that's most conducive to their own kinds of political commitments. And so this is where I see this as being somewhat of a serious problem, both for not only scholarship, but also the public profile of the academy in American life more generally.
[23:00] Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that was fascinating in this article.
[23:04] And again, remembering what Ari Hoshout had done was she actually took the time to get to know these people.
[23:18] I'm going to assume she probably didn't necessarily agree with their viewpoints, But she actually spent the time with them, lived with them, got to know them. And even when she wrote out things, she actually communicated with them. Is this how you really see the world? I want to make sure I'm getting it right.
[23:39] Whereas it seems like with Gorski and Perry, they didn't talk to anyone. This was, as you said earlier, a hot take. It seems much more geared towards more activism than it is actual sociology and trying to understand people. It was interesting that one of the people who wrote, I guess it was the foreword, was Jamar Tisby, who I'm aware of and can be rather much of an activist, which is not good or bad. It just is. But that's a very different understanding, and how he wrote about it was more that it was supposed to make people feel a certain way.
[24:26] I feel like one book was more here's trying to understand people, and another one was trying to, I guess, stir an emotion, but not necessarily an emotion in the people that they were talking about. It was someone else that was supposed to be activated. So it was just a really interesting understanding in how these two books were written, that one was written kind of with the people in mind and one was written at the people in mind.
[25:00] I absolutely agree with that. And that speaks to what we were talking about earlier of just how quickly this concept of Christian nationalism and the scholarship has really blown up. And I think with the election of Trump and then with this kind of resistance mindset that accompanied that for a lot of people, there's really a sense of urgency, like democracy is under threat. So we have to act now. And that's ideally, that's not how scholarship would be done that scholarship. It should be a slow, careful process. So you can really think through your theories and collect your data and test things the right way. But I think there was, as you said, there's a kind of a mix up of scholarship and activism that you get when you have this more resistance mindset that we need to do something. We see this bad thing happening and we need to try and stop it how we can. And if you're in academic, it's like, okay, well, if I want to try and affect what's going on in politics, or if I want to try and stop something or intervene or derail something, well, what are my tools to do that? Well, I can write books. I know how to do that. I can write academic articles. I know how to do that.
[26:10] I can go and speak at conferences or different kinds of speaking engagements. These are the kinds of things that academics do. And so what happened is they took those activities and they directed them more toward activism, I think, than scholarship.
[26:25] Still, though, using the language of scholarship. And that's where I'm very troubled by it, because I do see a lot of this work as being more activistic in its nature and its tone and what it's trying to do. But it gets a certain legitimacy from the fact that it's being done by people who are scholars, who are social
[26:43] scientists, who bring that kind of credibility to what they're saying. And I worry that in the long term, then that might undermine that credibility. It's kind of like the one metaphor you might look at is like the currency of scholarship gets debased or it gets devalued when you're using it not to make careful claims or careful studies based in data, but instead you're using it to try and score political points and show how evil
[27:13] your political opponents are. In the short term maybe that does what you want it to do it gets people riled up or helps them vote how you want them to vote it may or may not but maybe it does i think in the long term though then it makes people lose some respect for the kind of authority that scholarship is supposed to be able to provide so how do you think that all of this especially the more more recent social.
[27:42] On Trump and his voters, how do you think that that's had an effect on, or how do you think it affected the recent election? How do you think that that mindset kind of affected how people thought about each other, especially as we headed towards the voting booth? That's a very good question. And I will say I can respond to that question, but it will be maybe somewhat more at the level of a hot take because the election just happened and it'll take years for all the data to come in for us to really sort through these things. But I think increasingly our politics very much reflects people having an us versus them mindset in various ways. Like, okay, and in some ways the versus them is maybe the more important part. It's like, okay, those people over there, they don't like people like me. And if they take control, then they're going to pass laws or policies that are really bad for me. Or they're going to run the country into the ground. Or they're going to change the system.
[28:48] In ways, they're going to make life harder for me and people like me in an enduring way. And so I think to a large extent, people are more voting based on what they're against or what they're scared of. And maybe more, I can say who they're against and who they're scared of than what they're for. And I think this kind of scholarship really promotes that. And I think so. But one of the narratives you've heard since the election, and I think there's at least some early data to back it up, is people weren't happy about the extreme positions that they were seeing among, say, highly educated progressives, whether it be on issues like transgenderism. Certainly, that's a big one that's popped up, or what is going to be the role of religion in public life moving forward? Is religion going to be marginalized? Yeah.
[29:39] Some of these kinds of things that people were worried about. And I think that's probably why at least a lot of people voted for Trump. I'm not going to claim that that's the main reason necessarily. I don't think we know yet, but at least one reason people voted is they didn't like the extreme progressive cultural positions they were seeing on the democratic side. And I think this kind of scholarship speaks to that because, uh, I mean, frankly, a lot of people doing this kind of scholarship, they explicitly align themselves with one part of the political spectrum. They tend to be on the left side. A lot of what they write about is how evil and scary and dangerous people on the right are. And I don't think this is lost on people on the political right. They see the kinds of things that are being written, the kinds of messages that are being promoted in public, and they think, okay, whatever else I believe, we definitely need to vote against these people because these people are making it pretty clear that they have it out for us and that they would be hostile to us if they were to gain more power or more influence. And so in that sense, I think this kind of scholarship, it's really feeding a lot of the troubling trends or some of the troubling dynamics of political polarization today. Instead of resisting those trends or trying to understand them, it's really playing into them and kind of throwing more fuel on the fire.
[31:01] And where do you think, you know, the role of curiosity plays into all of this? Because I think early on, you know, trying to actually spend time getting to know people, trying to understand why you think the way that you do, really lends itself to curiosity. You're trying to learn about people, to think about people. Um... And I mean, I've heard this myself in the rhetoric leading up to and after the election in dealing with, you know, why did one side lose is there doesn't seem to be any curiosity about who the people are who voted. They, in fact, sometimes have already tried to fill in the blanks, it feels like. And sometimes people do vote for those ways. I'm surely not saying that they don't. But it feels like there was a lot of assumptions made instead of really a curiosity of who these people were and really trying to find that out. If not for just the sake of curiosity, if you're someone on the other side, how do you reach out so that you can win the next time?
[32:23] I absolutely agree with that. And I think when you have this mentality of politics happening kind of at the edge of a cliff and you have this mentality that, oh, if our side loses the next election, then the country is over, that really pushes against curiosity because curiosity takes some openness and to take some time. So you have to be, you have to care enough to want to sit down with people who are really different from you and understand them.
[32:51] And you have to maybe be willing to suspend some of your preconceptions in order to do that. And you need to be ready to be surprised and ready to just, as I mentioned.
[33:02] Take time to get to know what's going on with other people and how they see the world. And that's difficult to do when you feel you have this mentality of if we don't act now, then everything is lost. It's hard to develop the right kind of mentality toward curiosity and I'm a big believer in the kind of thing that Arlie Hochschild was trying to do to take the time and sit down and try to understand not just in research but just in normal life in politics or some in society I think that dialogue and that encounter of other people is very important it doesn't mean that we're going to agree very likely we're not going to agree even if we sit down with each other but it does force us to humanize each other, I think, and it makes it more difficult to demonize each other if you do take the time to understand a person. Like, well, I still maybe disagree with their entire worldview, but I can see how it makes sense to them. They don't seem to be a monster. This doesn't seem to be rooted in something really pathological or some kind of drive to just exclude other people, which is often the explanations that we reach for from a 30 foot view. And so, yes, I do think encounter and curiosity is extremely important, both in scholarship and just in American life. And I think that's something that's really undermined in the kind of scholarship that we've seen blowing up over the past few years of the Trump era.
[34:31] Which actually kind of leads me to something that you wrote in the article, which was fascinating, going back to the whole concept of deep story.
[34:40] Because we talk about R.A. Hoshield's—she tries to find that deep story. And basically, Gorski and Perry said they are trying to find a deep story. But as you write, the deep story that they're encountering really is not a deep story from Christian conservatives, it's actually their own deep story. And how would you explain that or suss that out?
[35:14] Yes. So an intriguing thing about the deep story, and I mentioned this earlier, it's something that everyone has. It's not just something we go and try and dig out from other people, but it's something that we have ourselves and something we have in our own communities. And so I think an important thing to do that maybe social scientists aren't always very good at doing is turning the lens back on ourselves. And, you know, we're going out trying to understand other people, but what happens when we apply these same tools or these same theories to ourselves? How do we come out looking? And so in this sense I think the deep story concept it is kind of helpful I think we are we do often kind of live inside stories and narratives and this includes sociologists and social scientists and those communities also have their own story and I think you can kind of see a certain story a certain general narrative popping out of not only this particular book the flag and the cross, but a lot of the writing and a lot of the scholarship that happens.
[36:16] And the story, and this is especially true, I think, for any kind of scholarship on the political right, and this is going back decades. I think it might have really popped out in the Trump era, but you could see signs of this going back much further too. There's a general story that the people over there, the people on the political right who are different from us and don't agree with us. Those people are really a threat to our entire society. They don't really hold American values. They don't really value democracy, for instance.
[36:51] What they really want is some kind of, racial hierarchy something um that maybe has at least some similarities to uh nazi germany or has some uh similarities to the social system of the kkk back in the uh late 19th or early 20th century and that may sound a little bit extreme but if you read a lot of these pieces and a lot of the literature they will often make those connections explicitly or you take um another example something like the handmaid's tale from uh margaret outwood it's kind of this dystopian vision of women being oppressed. It's both a popular book series and a show that I think it really resonates with a lot of people, partly because it sort of reflects how they think about the people who are really different from them. Like, oh, this is what they really want to do, and this is what they would do if they were able to take power. And that's kind of a story that you're telling yourself about the people who disagree with you politically.
[37:49] So I have a summary of what i think that story is the one that's popping out in the article that um the forces of capital in reaction or ever in league uh bent on rolling back progress imposing this oppressive racist social vision even when it seems like people are talking more reasonably or um giving reasons for their policies well really there's more going on under the surface there's dark money and there's dog whistles and there's ways that, you know, our political opponents are really trying to do something much more sinister than it looks like they're doing if we just kind of read their rhetoric at face value. And democracy is under threat from these people. And so, as I mentioned earlier, we as public intellectuals really need to rally and we need to step up and write books and articles and speaking engagements in order to call out and expose this threat and rally people against it. This is kind of the deep story that I see happening in a lot of academia right now. And it animates a lot of, as I said, the scholarship and some of the other activities.
[38:59] And I don't think it's really a true story. I don't think it's actually, I don't think the data really support it that much. I don't think it's actually a good approximation of what is going on on the political right or what's going on out there with red state Americans I do think there are problems but I don't necessarily think those are the problems.
[39:21] So, moving forward, especially now that we're entering kind of the second Trump era, and what advice would you give to fellow sociologists as they are wanting to try to understand kind of the aftermath of the election? Maybe there are probably going to be questions about who are the people who voted for Trump. What advice would you give to people before they you know put pen to paper or or start typing something on the sub stack or what what have you, that's a very good question i'm somewhat hopeful that things will be different this time around i'm not necessarily confident they will be but i'm hopeful because it does feel like maybe some lessons have been learned from the uh earlier phase of the resistance scholarship if we want to call it that, that it didn't necessarily produce the effects that people were hoping it would produce. And some of my advice would just be stop trying to do activism. If you want to do activism, do it on your own personal time. I do think our scholarship and activism, they should be fundamentally different activities and they water each other down if you try and mix them together.
[40:42] So it's fine to write things or protest, but do that on your own time. When it comes to your scholarship, do more of what Arlie HaShield did. And so we shouldn't necessarily expect to be able to offer hot takes, to be able to offer some immediate in-the-moment analysis to explain what's going on right now, because it does take time. It does take years and a lot of effort to do good scholarship. So don't even necessarily be in the business of trying to explain what's going on in real time, because that, I think, can lead us astray. I think a lot of it just goes down to what we were talking about is openness and curiosity. And so be more curious about what's going on with people who are socially very different from social scientists and who live in different worlds or hold very different political views. Be more curious about those people and be more willing to suspend your preconceptions when you're trying to understand and what is going on with them.
[41:42] And this is maybe a more practical suggestion or just something I'd like to see more. I think we would benefit from more qualitative research. So more people going out and doing interviews and embedding themselves in the communities where these things are happening, rather than just analyzing quantitative data, which is what a lot of this scholarship has done. I think there's a place for different kinds of research, and there's definitely a place for quantitative survey based data analysis.
[42:12] But I think the problem with that is if you're just treating people like they're rows in a spreadsheet and you're trying to understand them that way, it makes it very easy to impose your own views on what you think is going on with those people because you're a thousand miles away from them. You're not seeing what's going on with them and what their concerns are. And so you can kind of use your imagination in some ways or use your preconceptions to make a lot of assumptions about why people believe what they do and why they vote the way they do. and that sort of thing. So I think even though it's, I am a quantitative researcher myself, but I think an over-reliance on quantitative research has made it a little bit too easy for some of these narratives to take hold. And I think we should have more people going out and doing interviews and embedding themselves in communities the way that Arlie Hachiel did. I think that would be a good path to get some better insights on some of these issues.
[43:09] Well, people want to know a little bit more or communicate with you how can they do that well they can uh follow me on twitter i guess it's x i still call it twitter and my uh handle for that is jessie smith so just all one word so they can do that i do have a website which is also uh jessiesmithsoc.com and that um that has my cv on there and so if they want to look at what else i've written you know i've written various things I've written a couple other things for the public discourse, which is where this article is. I've written some things for Current, for Law and Liberty, and some other publications. So if you're interested in my work, in addition to my academic work, then you would find it all on there. Or if you're just interested in reaching out to me about my work in general, I'm at Benedictine College. You should be able to find me on the website there and And send me a message if you're interested in my work. Hey, Jesse Smith, thank you for taking the time to talk. This was really a good conversation to learn more about how we kind of deal with one another. And especially, hopefully, especially how the Academy can understand people and really get to understand people that are different from them. So thank you for your time. Al, thank you for having me on. All right. .
[44:35] Music.
[45:06] So I will make sure to put the link in the show notes to Jesse's article. I really do hope that you will give it a read. It's a good, it's one of those good long read articles that I think you'll enjoy. And I think we'll be enlightened. So I'd also like to know what you thought about the conversation. Were there things that you agreed with or didn't agree with? I'd love to hear that. Drop a line. You can send it to by email to churchandmain at substack.com.
[45:37] And also, if you want to know more about the podcast, if you want to listen to past episodes, and if you want to donate, please check us out at churchinmain.org. And if you want to read articles that are kind of related articles that I've written, check out churchinmain.substack.com. Then you will find articles there to read. I'd also love if you would subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Um, if you listen to podcast apps that allow for reviews or, um, or ratings, uh, such as Apple podcasts, I hope, I do hope that you will either leave a review or rating when you do that, that actually helps others find this podcast. And, um, I I'd love to, um, have more people get to hear it. So if you can, please do that. So that is it for this episode of Church and Main. My name is Dennis Sanders, your host. Thank you again for listening. Take care. Godspeed. And I will see you very soon.
[46:42] Music.
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