America loves the word “freedom,” so why do so many of us feel spiritually starved, politically cornered, and weirdly isolated from our own bodies? We pull a thread from The Great Cosmic Mother and it turns into a whole tapestry: patriarchal religion doesn’t just shape private belief, it builds the rules of the modern world. When the sacred gets split from the lived, you end up with what the book calls the American split, a culture that can offer abundance and ideology but not wholeness, ecstasy, or a shared vision worth living for.
We walk through the historical tension that still haunts US politics: Puritan Christianity feeding fundamentalism and Protestant capitalism, while many founders leaned Deist and helped birth secular humanism. That gap helps explain why “Judeo-Christian nation” rhetoric keeps resurfacing, and why people who aren’t religious still live inside religious structures. We also dig into the book’s critique of the all-male divine family, the virgin birth story, and how women’s unpaid labor, sexuality, and guilt get converted into fuel for institutions that claim to speak for God.
Then we hit the hardest link: control female reproduction and you can control the workforce. We talk capitalism, labor rights, reproductive autonomy, and what it means to live inside a machine that tries to turn humans into mechanisms.
It's way more fun than it sounds, trust us. Press play and be sure to share the episode everywhere!
SHOW NOTES WILL BE UPDATED EVEN MORE SOON
Here's some stuff we talked about:
"One nation under god" - added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954:
https://www.history.com/articles/pledge-allegiance-under-god-schools
"In God We Trust" first appeared on U.S. coins in 1864 during the Civil War. It was added to paper currency much later, with the first bills entering circulation in 1957 following a 1955 law requiring it on all money. The phrase was added to reflect religious sentiment, with paper, and to distinguish the U.S. from "godless" communism during the Cold War:
https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1951-2000/The-legislation-placing-In-God-We-Trust-on-national-currency/
And here's Thomas Jefferson's Bible:
https://americanhistory.si.edu/jeffersonbible/#1
Paine’s Anti-Slavery Legacy:
https://thomaspaine.org/resources-essays/paines-anti-slavery-legacy/
Little background on the Comstock laws that affected women's access to reproductive information and birth control: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-anthony-comstocks-chastity-laws/
Credits
Season Two Recorded at Bob's Basement Studios, Michigan
Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson
Intro/Outro Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies
Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers
Season One Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI (now in Traverse City, MI!)
Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia
Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio
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