Erica Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator. She is currently an associate professor and the Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies in the departments

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This paper focuses on the Black Christian response to the 2020 uprisings against police brutality in the United States. Through a critical discourse analysis of three podcasts and interviews with podcasters, this paper argues that the Black, Christian podcast circuit is a counterpublic (Squires, 2002) that seeks to change Christian culture in America. I argue that it is the affordances of the medium of podcasting that make this counterpublic possible and that make it a potent force for changing the Christian conversation about race. These podcasters offer a portrait of a divided Christian church in need of repair and they make the case that repair is only possible through decolonizing the Christian faith, repenting and offering reparations for the racial trauma caused by white Christians, sparking Christians’ activist inclinations in favor of racial justice causes, and interrogating and correcting sexism within both the Black church and white evangelical culture.

Through evidence gathered from sixteen interviews with producers and businesspeople in the podcast industry, this paper argues that the professionals that populated the early phase of the formalizing podcasting scene made up an interpretive community defined, in part, by their appreciation for, and experiences with, public radio. I chart how this interpretive community cast themselves against dominant public radio paradigms when they moved into podcasting, while also retaining much of public radio’s ethos, and I discuss what the central preoccupations of this interpretive community were. I assert that audio broadcasting as understood and practiced within the interpretive community is a particularly millennial medium, influenced by the norms of digital communication. And I make claims about how this is foundational to understanding podcasting’s political and aesthetic predispositions. Ultimately, this argument advances and nuances one connection between public radio and podcasting using qualitative interview data.

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