Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast

RINDWY: Choosing Case Studies

• Profs. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin • Season 7 • Episode 706

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In which we nerd out about how we chose which weirdass historical case studies to support our killjoy theories of religion.

As always, be sure to visit keepingit101.com for full show notes, homework, transcripts, & more.

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Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion is proud to be part of the Amplify Podcast Network.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

This is keeping it 101, a killjoys, Introduction to religion podcast, which is part of the amplify Podcast Network, we're grateful to live teach and record on the current ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki and Wabanaki peoples, as well as the lands of one federally recognized native nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and seven North Carolina state recognized tribal entities. Increasingly, though, native folks are pushing us to forgo land acknowledgements altogether and focus on action items. So let's start with Ladd and back. And as always, you can find material ways to support indigenous communities on our website.

Unknown:

What's up? Nerds? Hi, hello. I'm Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American religions, race and gender.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Hi, hello. I'm Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, an historian of religion, Islam, race and racialization and South Asia.

Unknown:

I'm sorry, did you just end historian us? I love that. I love that as a jumping off point. This is welcome to banter o'clock.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

I was giggling in our names, so maybe it's like, just mom o'clock and I'm done. But yeah, yeah, I sometimes an historian. I like that better. I love it better than "uh historians. Then my accent gets worse.

Unknown:

No, I like it because it sounds like the academic equivalent of Anne with an E. That's why I like it.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

That's so specific and deadly accurate.

Unknown:

It's my brand. Welcome to banter o'clock, Ilyse, and since time is normally my enemy, but banter is my favorite, I think this is a schedule I can get behind.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Should I just rename every single calendar invite that we send to each other? Banter? Not. No. Would that fix it? Yes, yes.

Megan Goodwin:

Let's I mean, we should try.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

What do you want to banter about today?

Unknown:

I can banter about any number of things. I have banters about love Island. I got bants about The Boyfriend and I have bants about several A24, movies. I have very strong feelings about what just happened with the ex Pearl, what anyway. But I figured we are probably here to talk about writing.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Yeah, I guess so. But, like, I have genuine opinions about why Tae Hyun gets nary a gander from the other house boys in Netflix the boyfriend. But I assume that this is not the place to talk about, like, Japanese racisms against Koreans and beauty standards and things like that. But I find that is a separate podcast that we should

Megan Goodwin:

he is so attractive, though, and he is competent, he's professional,

Unknown:

he's a he a grown up. Why weren't they all sweating him?

Megan Goodwin:

They should sweat him

Unknown:

anyway. Dress like this and say, Yo, they didn't. They didn't sweat the pretty one. I'm just, I'm feeling so Jersey sleaze. It's a great banter for us, and he is,

Megan Goodwin:

hey, hey, what are we doing today?

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Yeah, what is on our docket today? I feel like folks keep asking us how we write, either the books that we write individually or our podcast episodes, or more often now our forthcoming venture Religion Is Not Done With You, available from Beacon Press on any local bookstore as pre orders and live on november 5.

Unknown:

This is very exciting. That is now that I have checked our schedule. That is the scheduled banter for today.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Oh, well, then can I be like, kind of nudgy, then?

Megan Goodwin:

why should today be different?

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

That's that's fair. That is who I am as a person. But like, we've already talked about how we write the podcast and how we wrote our individual books and articles and chapters. We've talked about the content of those, we've talked about that process. So like, I appreciate that our dear nerds keep asking the question, but is this one of those moments where you just say, like, I say to my children asked and answered. Like, what else is there to say?

Unknown:

For more information, please see my published works. Now I thought we could answer the listener "How'd you do that" with a specific line of thinking, instead of like, "how we do research?"Because the answer to that is like grad school. That's we did. We did research in grad school, and then we just never stopped. It's a dirty, dirty habit

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

and not for nothing. Like I teach a semester long class on methods to undergrads, so I don't we can't do that in 15-20 minutes

Unknown:

No, absolutely not. But we can talk about how we chose our cases, why we thought particular historical and contemporary examples would best tell a story, because that's both a practical bit of advice for the listeners working on their own writing projects, and it's also it's fun. Well, I think it's fun. It's a fun way to talk about how the sausage gets made without being too boring or overwrought or like precious about it.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

All right. Well, that sounds reasonable. Goodwin, How did we pick our cases?

Unknown:

Rude? You're so rude. That's how you want to play. Okay? That's fine, fine, fine.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

I mean, not really. We don't have to play it that way. I can help but, like, either way, let's, let's get into it. You.

Unknown:

All right. So you asked, how we pick our cases?

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

You want me to start over? Goodwin, How did we pick our cases?

Unknown:

Well, from my perspective, we had to balance a bunch of stuff, including our really widely different areas of expertise. I know it's easy sometimes to default to the US. Our audience is largely North American, and when it's not, it's British, and British folks are familiar enough with American stuff that it basically works. It's translatable without dictionaries, and real talk as much as you. Rag on Americanists for knowing one thing, myopically, the fact is, ju suis an Americanist,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

my whole brain wants to do like a proud to be an Americanist, where at least I know I don't have to learn any languages.

Megan Goodwin:

See, I really thought we were gonna do a drop dead gorgeous there. But yes,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

no, I was going like full sleeze

Unknown:

I see you. I see you. Okay, first of all, first of all, I had to take French and German. Thank you very much. Did I learn? Arguably, no, arguably, no. I did not learn them, but I did take and pass those courses, in addition to Latin and biblical Hebrew for my first master's thesis. So there that she said that being said, Please never ask me to do any translation work whatsoever without the help of Google Translate.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Okay, an entire field of people's bottoms just fell out like they sphincters are failing, but you're like, Yeah, I use Google. No,

Unknown:

okay, yeah, no, I'm the worst. No one asked me to do non English stuff unless it's speak internet, in which case I am fluent. Yes. Also, the fact remains that it's a lot easier to get through hard and often counter intuitive theoretical concepts, if you don't also have to catch up your readers on millennia of unfamiliar history and also where Kashmir is or that it exists in the first place.

Megan Goodwin:

All right, fine. Americans might be the worst.

Anyway, as I was saying:

Our book is the book I was contributing to. So obviously we needed to include American case studies. That's my expertise. That's also our primary audience's assumed familiar national history. Plus, as we explain in our book, a lot, American influence is global, ignoring what's now the USA just doesn't make sense. America, sadly, is not done with any of us, either. But I also know that you bring South Asia, and frankly, a lot of the rest of the world at the table. So we also needed to talk about the rest of the world, I guess, both, becaus--whatever I can, I can afford it. I'm American. It hurts right? That's American altruism, right there, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are exceptional. So we had to talk about the rest of the world, I suppose, both because of how religion plays out globally, but also because this is a book that you are also writing, and a book that you write needs to be about a thing or some things that you are an expert on.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

yeah, totally. So like, in terms of the nitty gritty, I feel like we figured out the themes of each chapter, how they might progress and hang together, and then we almost verbatim said to each other, oh, yeah, this needs to go back and forth between American examples and non American examples.

Megan Goodwin:

Yeah, yeah. We're going to talk about the writing together process on a future episode. But once we figured it out, it was, we were, it was that brain sync moment of like, oh, okay, I got it, yeah, okay, America, not America. America, not America. And it just, it just worked, yeah? So why these particular case studies, though?

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

I think the easiest way to do this is just to go beat by beat. So for me, chapter what we do an introduction. It's cute, it's clever. You'll love it. It sounds like us. And then chapter one is where we kind of like dig in, right? And Chapter One is all about what religion is and isn't. And I made that about sports, especially Boston sports, because that is a weirdly shared thing for us. Neither of us are from Boston, but we both lived in Boston at formative parts of our lives, and because it's a sport, baseball that is, that has a global reach, both because of American imperialism and cultural imperialism, but it's also like baseball and sports and Boston in particular, are a fun, non religious way to think about culture, community, power, ritual and belonging. So this was like, we knew the key things we needed to talk about, and we wanted an easy, peasy way to ease in that felt recognizable and maybe somewhat familiar in that famous phrase where, like--If you make the strange familiar and the familiar strange that you have a lot to learn there.

Unknown:

Yes, and Boston is both very familiar to me and super strange, so

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

the strangest.

Megan Goodwin:

So I think it worked pretty well for us. So chapter two is all about you'll never guess. It's a book that Ilyse wrote. It's imperialism. It's imperialism, which is obviously fully or jam. I think we did a decent job of showing that conversations about imperialism don't start or end with the US, duh, but also that they can't exclude the US because we are an Imperial Force and a colonized space ourselves. So we chose to talk about the Doctrine of Discovery, because, honestly, we had to how you're going to talk about imperialism without acknowledging that Western European Christianity called dibs on the whole rest of the world. But also that case is easily accessible. You can Google it for now and get really decent information before you hit a ton of misinformation. The Doctrine of Discovery has a much broader impact than just what's now the US. It's all of the Americas, the entire continent of Africa, giant chunks of Asia, and then the other half is just straight up your work in South Asia about borders and nationalism and religion,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

yeah, yeah, that's where the maps are after that, with beautiful maps that we had redrawn so they would print beautifully some 150 years After they were originally printed. Anyway, in chapter three, we moved from all that imperialism and race stuff going on in chapter two right to the USA because, well, of you, Goodwin,

Megan Goodwin:

this is my fault,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

but also because we needed to talk about race. It makes sense to go from imperialism and race to race, as it plays out with religion, and that's what you do here in the US. And so there's no reason not to have made that our case study. But not just laziness. But the reality is, is that American understandings of race so clearly play with European understandings of both race and Western European Christian imperialism, plus a heady mix of scientific racism, which flourishes in the United States, really, alongside our particular heady cocktail of Christianity. So in this chapter, our case study needed to hit all of those things, and which meant it was a great place for us to talk about Sojourner Truth, Native American activism, and how often, quote, religious freedom fails, minoritized religio racial communities, among lots of other things. There's a lot going on. Actually, there's a lot going on all these chapters. But in this chapter where we're cherry picking, not cherry picking, where we're highlighting cases that fit the theme. There's no shortage of American race and religion to talk about true story.

Unknown:

And so from race and racialization, we went to sexuality and nationalism in chapter four, religion is politics, because conversations about reproductive justice and bodily autonomy are some of the clearest places to see white Christian nationalist thinking at work in supposedly secular places. That's really the entirety of my first book. So you best believe law, and especially us, law has a firm place there.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Yeah, no, the legal history is super fascinating, and it helps us tell a story that isn't about like, how much can a society learn, which is an interesting but ultimately deeply unfulfilling question when we're thinking about like, what does progress look like? We see poll after poll that shows us how popular support for things like abortion are at their highest across religions, even in conservative America. Or we see polls that like how minorities or attitudes toward minorities is actually pretty good, but then you have to look at the system and say, like, hold up, hold up. Our policies, our institutions, are racist as fuck. So how that work? Yeah, right, and law is one of those places. Law is absolutely one of those places. So like, why if we live in a country that supposedly separates church and state, a country whose population overwhelmingly supports access to abortion. Why are policies so aggressive, so dare we say, white Christian nationalist? Why do policies made by a white Christian nation such as our own get to shape policies all over the world? Looking at legal codes and restrictions about sexuality on a global scale helped us show the ways white Christian sexual morality is still hard at work, even absent formal imperial control of those regions. And then we wrap it up. Man, we just were like, done. That's a lot of stuff to read. So all the way at the end, we're talking about airports, which, if you've met me, you know that I think airports are really important and deeply frustrating places, because they are national and international, unique and distinctive, they show us American global power, particularly after 911 while also demonstrating how local governments do their own TSA and TSA adjacent stuff all the time, thinking about enacting reinscribing and policing, religion, race. Nation and sexuality.

Megan Goodwin:

Yeah, yeah. So yeah. Basically, we chose case studies that felt relevant to major global issues, that would be interesting, if not necessarily familiar to regular folks living in the world, but also case studies that let us be ourselves, theorists of race, religion, gender, nation and politics, whose expertise lives in specific regions and time periods.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Yeah, as we were choosing what to do in this book, not just like, oh, we have to write a book. Well, like, now, how do you fill the pages? We wanted y'all to learn some new things, but not be so bogged down in some micro history of like, the Indian state of Maharashtra, so that you miss the forest for the trees. So we chose cases both in our wheelhouse that could or should be adjacent to your own issues and certainly that fit the themes of the given chapter. Yeah,

Megan Goodwin:

we also left a lot on the cutting room floor, to be honest. Boy hamplo Erm finnishly proposed soccer as the framework for our sports chapter. She said it would work better. She is probably right, but unless it is about bend, it Like Beckham or Ted lasso or pod inappropriate feelings about Megan Rapinoe, I had nothing to contribute to that conversation, whereas I arguably had too much ephemera to contribute to a conversation about the early aughts Red Sox, at least made me take out a lot of complaining about Johnny Damon, for starters. Also, most of our American readers would maybe vaguely get it, but like, soccer isn't our thing as a country. It's everyone else's, everyone else's, but it's not ours. And the point wasn't the sport, but rather how sport works as a metaphor for thinking about religion as a system so red, Sox Nation, it became. And

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

I wouldn't say Goodwin. I wouldn't say that we struggled over how to talk about race and religion at all that is literally how you and I make a living. But there are so many juicy, absurd, infuriating, fucked up cases that finding the perfect one, I wouldn't say it was a debate. I'm not sure you would say it was a debate, but it was definitely a discussion. We knew we'd done Sojourner Truth's speeches in an episode in Season Two, way back when. But the reality is, it remained the best example. It was demonstrative and clear and in writing, the imposition of what can only be described as blackface translation of truth's ain't I a woman? Speech is just so shocking. And to see it in writing, I actually think it's more effective than what we did on the audio medium that is a podcast. So it's not that we're repeating cases, it's really that the medium changes the message,

Unknown:

yeah, and

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

I think some of this was also trusting each other's sense of which case studies would work best, coming from our own expertise. So like, as you might say, I didn't know nothing about Imperial gazetteers. Listeners, if you like me, did not know what a Gazetteer is, it is not a newspaper. And I got a very dirty look for asking that. Yeah, you kept telling me, with that incredulous look on your face that I should know. Yeah, that one. That's nothing.

Megan Goodwin:

I don't see. No gazetteers. But it turns out, even though we had to work on how to teach our readers enough about gazetteers to understand the South Asian case study, they supported. You were right. It was a great example about imperialism and borders and the lasting effect of how British researchers and officials and policies still impact us today.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Well, I appreciate that trust, even though I acknowledge that I continually will make faces about Americanists, because in a universe in which y'all get to have a PhD, arguably the same degree as me, but say things like, I'm a Boston expert, I couldn't possibly know about Atlanta. It's different, some fucking hot nonsense. And I will never not make fun of the study of America. It is less than 300 years of state history, which is not even one dynasty in my neck of the woods.

Megan Goodwin:

So just just to clarify, Dr Ilyse, Ryan Morgenstein, first two Americanists, you're tacky, and I hate you, but you digress.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Listen, I will never forgive the person who shall remain, nameless, who told me that thinking the I 95 corridor was one contiguous whole was a mistake, and I really wanted to be like every every state in India has a different has a different language, and we treat it as one place. So kindly, shut the fuck up. You sound as obnoxious as someone being like, uh, this hot dog is technically from Coney Island, and that's specific. And you're like, okay, cool. That's a cool fact. Cool fact, bro,

Megan Goodwin:

remember how mad I got anytime I have to talk about anything that happened before 1979

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

Yeah, I remember how I make the same face at you that I'm making right now, because you should shut the up. You should, you should, you should have to know things before you were born that seems basic. Mm. Anyway, I digress. You did, and you did, in short. Megan, aside from my digression into why American history makes me grumpy, we chose cases, yes, in the United States and elsewhere, that we think are accessible but not boring, impactful, but not routine, and that honored both of our expertise, even if it's on the i 95 corridor, so that we could both have our names on the front of the book and not have folks ask questions like, Did one of you not write anything at all

Megan Goodwin:

correct? And that, beloved nerds, is how we chose the case studies for religion is not done with you. Forthcoming from Beacon Press in November 2024 you can find us across social media, still on Twitter, reluctantly, and instead Tiktok and Facebook and none of those wiggles your toes. We have a newsletter you can join via our website, which is keeping it one on one.com, drop us a rating or review and your podcaster of choice, and if

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst:

you want to invite us to campus or your local bookstore, which is happening with more regular frequency, please, please, please reach out to us. We would love that. Or specifically reach out to Caitlin Meyer, who's our incredible marketing and publicity Maven over at Beacon Press. All of that contact information is on the website, but just so you heard it, we would love to come visit, get in touch early and often, and with that, peace Out. Nerds.

Megan Goodwin:

Do your homework. It's on the syllabus. You

Unknown:

Me is the right when you take a look.

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Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst

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Megan Goodwin

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