Afleveringen
-
This is the recording of the conversation we had earlier today on Substack Live reacting to the election. We got into different kinds of grief people may be feeling and our responses to them, how to move forward in the church with uncompromising empathy, and what we thought of the somewhat surprising demographic shifts in this race. There is an AI transcript on the video version of this episode that is on our website, KtFPress.com, and a full transcript will be coming in the next few days.
Join us for our next live video in the Substack app.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.ktfpress.com
Listen to a recording of our monthly subscriber chat from this past Tuesday, where Jonathan, Sy, and our subscribers get into:
- How to practice hope and peacemaking in fearful times like this election season
- How peace is different than unity, and takes power dynamics into account
- How hope is shaped by God’s presence with us, the depths of evil and suffering we see around us, and perspectives outside our context
- And we discuss and contextualize the news about increased BIPOC support for Trump
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Editing and Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Intro and Announcements
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra, and this is a bonus episode where we are bringing you the subscriber conversation that we had just a couple of days ago. You might notice that I, both in the recording and right now sound a little bit sickly just because I have COVID. Don't worry, everything is fine. It's been pretty mild, but I sound stuffy.
We are bringing you a great conversation today about hope and about peacemaking in difficult times and times like this election, frankly. Why hope is so hard to have, both because it's risky, but also because it can seem privileged and naive, and why we think it's not and we do it anyways. Some stories of where that kind of hope comes from. And we talk about peacemaking and how it's not the same as just unity and kumbaya, but how we sometimes strive for unity in the name of peace. And sometimes we strive for a little bit of strife, maybe, to tell some truth in the name of peace. Not maybe, we definitely do that a lot [laughs]. And then we get into a little bit about some kind of changing, somewhat changing demographics about who is voting Republican and why that is. And that actually makes sense when you understand it from the perspective of whiteness and colonization.
Quick favor to ask, if you like this podcast, which I know you do because you're listening to the subscriber only feed, go give this show a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And if you're on Apple, give us a written review too. They are so encouraging, and the ratings and the reviews help other people find us and see that other people think that this show is good and worth their time.
Also, in case you missed it, we are going to be doing a Substack live conversation on November 6th at 1pm, that's the day after the election. If you're listening to this, you're already on our mailing list, so that means you will be notified via email. You will need the Substack app. There will be a link in that email, but you can also download the app at any time, iOS or Android, and then you'll be able to watch our live video conversation. We've already done the tech check and everything [laughs] to make sure that it all works. It's a new feature on Substack, and we're excited to talk to you, kind of in that new format. So do join us, Wednesday, November 6th, at 1pm to hear our reactions to what happened on Election Day and whatever is going on after it. There's a lot of possibilities. Trump will have declared that he won no matter what happened, that's my guess, and we will be moving on from there. So please do come join us. That'll be, I don't want to say, a fun conversation, but it'll be an interesting conversation for sure, and you will find some grace in it and some people who share your values. So join us then, and alright, without any further ado here is our monthly subscriber conversation for October.
[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Let's pray. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, deliver us from the evil one. For thine is kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.
Sy Hoekstra: Amen.
Jonathan Walton: And thanks again for all of you all for being here. Sy is gonna set up our time.
What does it mean to have hope or be a peacemaker in stressful times like the election?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, thanks for coming. We just figured we wanted to, I mean, obviously we do this every month, but we wanted to talk some about kind of what it means to be a thoughtful peacemaker in a time like the next week [laughs] or the next couple of months to come, depending on what exactly happens next week. And first of all, you'll hear I'm a little stuffed. I apologize. I have the COVID virus.
Mindy: Oh no.
Sy Hoekstra: I've been okay, don't worry. It's been a mild cold for me. Welcome Allison. And so I will sound nasally, but [laughs] that's all. And so I guess we wanna talk a little bit about that, and then we wanted to get into, assuming people don't have questions. At any point anybody can interrupt with questions that they have, you put in the chat, or you can just join the conversation and ask questions. So we wanna talk about what it means to be a peacemaker in this time. And then also, a little bit about interesting things that have been happening around, like where voting demographics and stuff with the with the Trump campaign. So Jonathan, I think you had some thoughts to get us started on what you think it means to follow Jesus' instructions to be a peacemaker in a time that is as unpeaceful as this. So [laughs] do you wanna get us going?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think we may have talked about this a little bit on the podcast last week, just about how the invitation from culture, particularly the people texting me to give to campaigns [laughter] and emailing me. I got a text, it literally said, “We have texted you six times. You have not made a donation.” And I was like, “That is true, I have not made a donation [laughs]. I did not know you had texted me six times.” But Walz wanted me to know that. But the feeling is that I should be afraid, and then as Sy mentioned on the podcast, is that his sense is that he should be cynical. And so this invitation to cynicism and to fear, and just no. Jesus says no to that [laughs].
So what does it look like to be hopeful and have our hope be set on the hope that does not disappoint in that way, and then that we can ask questions and be introspective, and do the radical interrogation that is necessary to follow Jesus in ways that are transformative and helpful in a world that is fractured and falling apart, and not be cynical. And so, I don't know if you all have thoughts about that or feelings about that, but how are you pushing towards hope when you're pressed to be afraid, and then how are you, or do you have questions about leaning into radical interrogation and asking good, hard, deep questions without slipping into cynicism? I have thoughts, but that was something I wanted to open up with, particularly in light of CNN, and a certain rally that happened in New York City two days ago. Does anybody not know what I'm talking about when I say the rally?
Sy Hoekstra: You might as well just say because people listen to it later, so [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Okay, great. So there was a… shoot, what's his name? Shoot. Donald Trump [laughter] had a rally.
Sy Hoekstra: What's his name. Old What's His Name?
Jonathan Walton: Well, because I was writing another… so I did not write this blurb. This will not show up in the newsletter, but I was trying to write, and it turned into too many links about the Nazi rally from the 1930s at Madison Square Garden, and that comparison to the rally that happened yesterday, and like they're strikingly similar. Also the similarities between Elon Musk and Henry Ford and their anti-Semitism racism, but that's an essay, friends. That's not a blurb in our newsletter, and takes more time and energy than I have right now. But all that to say, Donald Trump was at Madison Square Garden, and he did a rally there were however many thousands of people there. And it was littered with racist, xenophobic nationalists just… it was a lot. It was a lot of them in one speech with lots of people.
So I honestly can't tell you what other content was there, because there were so many groups that got kind of called out, which was similar to Trump's presidency. But I think the invitation from that is to be afraid and then to be cynical, because it's quite likely that he could win. And so that feels for me particularly pertinent to present to being hopeful and present to asking good, hard questions and loving the Lord with my mind in that way. So yeah, any thoughts, comments, puzzles that you'd like to share Allison sighed. I mean [laughs], Mindy sighed. And David looks very reflective [laughs]. So feel free to share about that, what you all are thinking and feeling. David, looks like you almost started. Did you have anything to share? No? Alright.
Making Peace Involves Taking Power Dynamics into Account
Sy Hoekstra: Okay. I could talk a little bit, Jonathan. The guy who spoke, the guy who most of the comments that the media is focusing on, was a comedian who opened for Trump who told a bunch of racist jokes. And I think when I think about what it means to be hopeful and peaceful in this moment, I do contrast it a little bit with what I think a lot of people who I think would probably be sort of politically in the middle. Oh, David says he can't unmute himself, Jonathan.
David: Now I can.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, there you go.
David: Sorry, go ahead.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay, well, I'll keep talking, and then you can go, I guess, since I started [laughs]. But I've just been contrasting in a little bit with what I think some people in kind of the middle would view as peace, which is…Typically the default in our conversation is, without recognizing this or making this explicit, the default is people who vote for Trump are real Americans, with the concerns that we should care about and we need to understand and empathize with. And lots of other people, especially people who are marginalized, are more marginal. Not to say that no Trump voters are marginalized, but more marginalized than the demographics that vote for Trump are like DEI concerns, you know what I mean?
Like some kind of special concern outside of the concerns of real Americans. And so I do think that, in part, what it means to be not cynical and not fearful and hopeful and peaceful is to reject that binary and to say, for me to be a peacemaker, I need to take into account power dynamics and say that the thing that has to happen is, yes, everybody needs to be understanding and kind and empathetic and everything toward each other, but because there are power dynamics, there actually are people who need to do that more than others [laughs]. And it is not that the elite liberal media on the coasts needs to understand the farmers in the middle [laughs]. That's not the power dynamic.
The power dynamic is everybody who has positions of privilege, whether they're on the coast or in the middle or whatever else, whatever part they’re part of needs to be making an attempt to understand people who have less of a voice and less of a say in the world than they do. So that's my initial thought. I don't know, David, if yours is related to that at all, but you're welcome to go ahead.
God’s Often Confusing Presence in Our Grief Is a Foundation for Hope
David: No. Thanks, Sy. And I agree. I think it's there's a combination of, what do you do? What should I do? And I don't have a lot of clarity on that. And I think you're right. I mean, I think some of us have more responsibility than others to do and to stand up for the people who are going to be feeling marginalized no matter what happens in our church.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I was just gonna say, what are you doing as a pastor? It’s an interesting question.
David: Yeah, this coming Sunday we have All Saints Sunday, and the gospel reading is the end of the raising of Lazarus. And I was talking to someone this morning who said, “This really should be the reading for the Sunday after the election, because we can say it's been four days and it stinks”
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
David: Which I guess is the cynicism temptation. But just sort of in reflecting on that, I think that's one of the things that I've been trying to wrestle with, is being in the space of Jesus both knows what he's going to do at the end, it's gonna be good, when he tells us what to do we're gonna say, “Oh no, no, no, that's not a good idea.” But we haven't gotten to that point in the story yet. And we're at the point of the story where we're weeping, and God is weeping with us and present with us. And I think for me at least, I think we have to be grounded in that first. That God will show up. No matter what happens, God will show up. God will show up in a way that we don't expect, don't understand, and probably will resist at first, but we don't know what that is yet.
And right now, emotions are raw, and they're gonna be raw, and just knowing that God is present in that, I think that has to be the starting point. Because if we don't start there we're gonna just do whatever comes to our mind first, and that's probably not gonna be the right thing, because we're reacting out of a place of fear.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
David: And there's a lot to be afraid of.
Jonathan Walton: Right. [laughs] Mindy nodded, yes, there's a lot to be afraid of.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
David: But there really is a lot to be afraid of.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: What you're saying is…
David: Regardless of who wins, to be honest.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely.
Insisting on Hope is Difficult and Emotionally Complicated
Sy Hoekstra: And what you're saying is not to delegitimize that reality.
David: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And it's a hard thing to do to insist on hope [laughs]. It's not just a hard thing to do because you're risking, like, what if I hope and I'm wrong and I get hurt? But there's also just, there are people who are going to see hope and think it's the wrong thing to do, and it might even be an insulting thing to do, depending on where they are, and we're still called to it, and that is just genuinely complex.
-
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
Today, Jonathan and Sy speak with author and housing advocate Kevin Nye about the Church and homelessness. We get into:
- The ineffective housing policies Christians often promote
- The bad theology behind those policies
- A run-in Kevin had with institutional resistance to his view that governments shouldn’t criminalize homelessness
- How churches can get things right in ministries to unhoused people
- Plus, hear our thoughts on the interview,
- A discussion of how we are resisting the negative ways the election is trying to shape us mentally and spiritually
- And our thoughts on all the discourse around Ta-Nehisi Coates’ controversial new book
Mentioned in the episode:
- Kevin’s article on Christians mistakenly rejecting housing-first policies
- Josiah Haken’s book, Neighbors with No Doors
- Kevin’s article on Christianity Today’s coverage of homelessness
- His article in RNS about a Supreme Court case on unhoused people’s constitutional rights
- His book, Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness
- His Substack, Who Is My Neighbor?
- Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, The Message
- Our newsletter with links to a couple of Coates’ interviews
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Kevin Nye: If you're an average middle class American Christian and you want to become wealthy, have a private jet, a mansion, here's your spiritual steps. Get closer to Jesus, you'll be rewarded with physical wealth. Well, if that's true, the opposite of that would be true, which is that if you are in deep dire poverty, it must mean that you're that much farther from Jesus.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Intro and Housekeeping
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra, today is gonna be a great one for you. We have a conversation that we're gonna have before we get into our interview, kind of about the election. A little bit of a catch up, since this is actually going to be our last show before the presidential election, which now that I say it into a microphone, is a little bit scary [laughter]. We're gonna be having a conversation today with author, theologian and housing activist Kevin Nye. I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. Basically, the church is extremely involved in housing policy in America, and we are often going about it the wrong way, and that's often because of a lot of bad theology and some falsehoods that we believe about unhoused people, and so Kevin will help us get deep into that.
He's a great resource and a great person to talk about it with, as well as some of the more systemic issues of why we have such an entrenched way of thinking about unhoused people. You'll be able to hear Jonathan and my thoughts about the interview afterwards, and we will get into our segment Which Tab Is Still Open, where we go a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. This week we're talking all about Ta-Nehisi Coates and his new book, The Message and some of the discussions that have been happening around it. Also, one quick note. My voice might sound a little groggy, because about 12 hours ago, I was at game one of the American League Championship Series [laughter] and I screamed my face off.
Is that a wise thing for a podcaster to do before recording? Maybe not, but I trust that you all will forgive me [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, and for the uninitiated, we’re talking about baseball [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yes, that's a good point. American League Championship Series, that's a baseball series [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: But before we get into all that, please friends, remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to support this show and everything we do here at KTF Press. We've been creating media that centers personal and informed discussions on faith, politics and culture, and that helps you seek Jesus and confront injustice. You've been listening for a while or the first time, you need to know we're resisting the idols of the American church by elevating marginalized voices and taking the entirety of Jesus' gospel more seriously than those who narrow it to sin and salvation. The two of us have [laughs] a lot of experience doing this, have been practicing this in community for a while, and as Maya Angelou would say, we're always practicing Christianity.
So if you wanna do that, you could do that with us. We'd love for you to become a paid subscriber. You get all the bonus episodes of this show, access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats, and you can comment on posts and more. So again, go to KTFPress.com to join us and become a paid subscriber.
Sy Hoekstra: A couple of quick announcements before we get into everything. In two weeks there will not be an episode. That's just a couple days after the election. We're gonna let things settle a little bit.
Jonathan Walton: Hopefully so.
Sy Hoekstra: I mean, hopefully settle a little bit before [laughter] we have our sort of clean, edited podcast discussion about the election. However, we are going to do something a little bit different the day after the election. So that'll be Wednesday, November 6th at 1 pm. We are going to be having a Substack live conversation. So that means basically, if you have the Substack app, you will be able to watch us just have a live conversation about the election, what happened the night before, what we're thinking, how we can move forward faithfully now that the voting is done, and all of the potential chaos that comes after that. If you don't have the app, you can download it on the App Store or the Google Play Store. Anybody who's on our email list will get an email notification or a push notification from the app when we start.
So if you're not on our email list, go to KTFPress.com and sign up. Even just the free email list, you'll get that notification. The email will have a link to download the app if you don't have it. So Substack live Wednesday, November 6th, at 1 pm to talk about the election. A little bit more raw, unfiltered, that sort of thing [laughter]. And then we'll have a finale episode, we'll announce the date later once we have that set. You'll be able to comment in the chat of the Substack live, so you can put your comments and your questions there. So come prepared to dialog a little bit. We're excited to try this new feature that Substack has rolled out. Also our next Zoom chat for subscribers will be this upcoming Tuesday, October 29th at 1 pm.
So if you want to join in on that, please become a paid subscriber. If you already are a paid subscriber, then the link to register for that is in your email already. Go back to your emails from us and check for it, submit your questions. We have had some really great conversations at the four or five of these that we've done so far, and we look forward to another one this Tuesday.
How Has the Election Been Shaping Us? And How Are We Resisting?
Sy Hoekstra: Alright Jonathan, before the interview, we're gonna start off with an election question that will kind of let us give some of our final thoughts going into actual voting day. This is a question that you came up with, and I like it a lot, actually. Jonathan, how has this election been trying to shape you and how have you been resisting it?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think just hanging out in this space of formation, like we're impacted by things around us, and it's literally making us into new people or different kinds of people. I have an injury in my hip, and it's like, I ran marathons and did lots of sports and work, and so my hip is shaped differently because of the pressure that I put on it.
Our Political Culture Tries to Instill Fear, but Jesus Doesn’t
Jonathan Walton: And so I think that culture is trying to shape me into an anxious, fearful person, because violent crime can be down in the United States, but my fears about my daughter getting older and going to the train, I'm terrified.
Sy Hoekstra: Really?
Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. It's terrible. It's terrible.
Sy Hoekstra: Interesting.
Jonathan Walton: People are like, “Oh yeah, my kid walked to the train,” I'm like, clutch my pearls.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Oh, you're one of those New York City parents.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And some of its familiarity, I never did that. That just wasn't my reality. I think it's more that than all of the fears that people have. It's just unfamiliar to me. And so I think that the Democrats would love for me to fear the apocalypse, and the Republicans would love for me to fear the apocalypse [laughter].
Sy Hoekstra: Different apocalypses.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, different apocalyptic visions for the state of this country and the world. And that is a very effective fundraising tactic. It's a very effective way to get people out to vote, because having people be motivated by fear rather than love is better for the prince of the power of the air. It's better for the wills within us that are not submitted to God and trusting him for our well being and the well being of those around us, and leaning into that. And so I think that I want to reject the gospel of self reliance. I want to reject the gospel that I have to control everything and hold it all close and accumulate more and protect that which I accumulate, like all that I got. I just have to say no to that, because I don't wanna be afraid all the time and then make all the people around me more afraid. I don't think Jesus made people afraid.
He made demons afraid, but off the top of my head, I cannot… like Judas wasn't even afraid of Jesus. The fear and reverence of the Lord and all of those kinds of things where the angels and the Father say, “Don't be afraid,” Jesus speaking to people did not instill fear in them. I don't think I need to be motivated or driven or attracted or tempted towards fear about anything.
Sy Hoekstra: I mean, there are people who seemed kind of afraid of him, but they were all powerful and largely oppressive people.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] That’s true.
Sy Hoekstra: Herod seemed pretty afraid of Jesus [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Herod was terrified. Yeah, that’s true. I don't think that Jesus' goal in conversation dialog was for someone to be afraid.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's correct.
Jonathan Walton: And then for them to be compelled to follow him because they were scared. Like that… it is literally the opposite of a fire and brimstone call to faith. It's not congruent with the Christ of scripture.
Resisting Cynicism by Choosing Where to Place Our Hope
Jonathan Walton: So what about you? How do you think our current political [laughs] realities, would love for you to be in the world?
Sy Hoekstra: It feels like they would love for me to be a cynic. I don't know, someone who's just a real downer. Because I would say, if you'd asked this eight years ago, I would have said they would want me to be depressed. Because at that time, Trump just felt so dark and foreboding in a way that was deeply sad to me. Not exactly scary, but just really, really depressing. I think now I'm actually thinking more about the Democrats when I say that, because as we are recording, the Biden administration has said some very tentative things about a maybe possible weapons embargo if some undefined humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not vetted in the next month. So we'll see how that works out over the next week and a half until this publishes.
But basically, up until now, it's kind of been you’ve got to toe the party line. You got to be effectively totally pro Israel to be in line with the Biden administration and also with the Harris campaign. That could lose them Michigan maybe or whatever, but ultimately coming out for a ceasefire or something else they must have done the calculus is gonna lose them more.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: The reason that that makes me cynical is just so much in politics, it's just about that. It's just about, are you gonna get elected or not? I think Jonathan, and I've been convinced for a long time, it is pretty impossible to be a politician and follow Jesus, because if you follow Jesus you're not gonna be a politician anymore [laughter]. Because the whole point is you got to get reelected, and you got to do whatever it takes to do that. You’ve got to change your mind on issues, you’ve got to spend money, you’ve got to be a hypocrite. Doesn't matter, you’ve just got to get reelected. There are probably certain scenarios, like certain places that you could be elected and have integrity for smaller offices than the President [laughs], that would lead me to some amount of cynicism about the whole system and despair if my faith was in the system. If I was looking to who the next president is to determine my hope for the world.
And it's kind of a cheesy Christian thing maybe to say, but my hope is in Jesus. But I think it's actually, even honestly, if your hope was not in Jesus, if it was just in something other than what's happening in our current politics, that's a very powerful thing. You know what I mean? It is a very powerful thing to genuinely have your emotional steadiness in something other than whatever's happening in politics. And for me, that's Jesus. But you know, so that's where I'm trying to sit, and that's why I'm trying to resist the way that the election is trying to make me a cynic.
Can Christians Be Politicians Faithfully?
Sy Hoekstra: You keep taking breaths like you have something that you wanna say immediately [laughs] [unclear 00:11:14].
Jonathan Walton: I'm thinking, if I heard you right you were like, you believe it may be impossible to follow Jesus and be a politician?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And I was thinking about that because I think it's like, we would have to define follower of Jesus and define politician.
Sy Hoekstra: Sure.
Jonathan Walton: But it's interesting to me that it is impossible to be a servant of empire and follow Jesus. Like it's possible, because Jesus calls them out to be a non-Christian religious person. It is possible for Cornelius to be in the military and be faithful to God.
Sy Hoekstra: I see what you're saying.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, but what you're getting at is the incoherence of that reality that we try to assert. So for example, I think it's possible to be a Christian politician. It is impossible to make politics Christian.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And if you want to be a Christian politician, you're gonna have to recognize that your job is going to be constantly, ceaselessly trying to pull you away from Jesus [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. It is impossible to follow Jesus and be a politician, if a politician is what you are trying to be.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I got you.
Jonathan Walton: It is possible to follow Jesus and hold elected office, you know what I mean? But there are some people whose complete identity, which is what you're talking about, “I'm only here to get reelected. I wanna accumulate power, I wanna do that,” like it is impossible to be a politician.
Sy Hoekstra: I think it's a little bit harder than that though, because it's not just about your identity if you're a politician, your job is to get reelected. That's what everyone is looking for you to do. That's what your party's looking for you to do, all people who work for you, obviously, that's what they're looking for you to do [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Literally, if you don't get reelected, you can't do the job anymore. So it's like it is an integral part of the job description itself. It’s not even just an issue of where your identity lies. You know what I mean?
Jonathan Walton: That's true. Listen, if you're listening to this, I would love to hear what you think.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Love to hear what you think. Unfortunately, the philosophical argument, the dominoes could start to fall around lots of professions. It's interesting. We're probably gonna talk about this as a subscriber chat now. So there we go [laughter].
Sy Hoekstra: There we go.
Jonathan Walton: Cool.
Sy Hoekstra: Cool. Thanks for that little brief discussion as we go into the voting booths, which is in like a week and a half from when you're listening to this, if it's the day it comes out. And as we continue to behave politically after the voting happens, which I hope everyone listening to this show is doing [laughs], let's try and be shrewd. Innocent and shrewd, right?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: That's what Jesus wants us to be.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: And let's continue to think hard about that. I appreciate that discussion. Let's try to find a way to continue it. We are gonna get into our interview now before we come back and talk about our thoughts on the interview and some stuff about Ta-Nehisi Coates [laughter] in Which Tab Is Still Open.
Interview with Kevin Nye
Our guest today, as I said, is Kevin Nye. He is a writer and advocate working to end homelessness through engaging best practices. He has written on the intersections of homelessness and faith for Religion News Service, Sojourners, Red Letter Christians and more. He has presented at national conferences on the topic of homelessness. His first book released in August of 2022 and it was called Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness. Kevin currently lives with his wife and son in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he works as the housing director for an organization addressing youth homelessness.
Jonathan Walton: Let's get into our interview.
[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Kevin Nye, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.
Kevin Nye: Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here.
The Effective ‘Housing-First’ Policies Evangelicals Often Reject
Sy Hoekstra: You and I met about a year ago at the Evolving Faith conference, just after you had published what I thought was a really great article for Sojourners about kind of the difference between treatment-first housing policy and housing-first housing policy, which can, they can sound a bit wonky to people. But you talked about how it's a really important distinction, and how a lot of times Christians are making the wrong choice in choosing the treatment-first policy and favoring those types of policies. And so because I think this distinction will actually help us get at a lot of underlying kind of spiritual and theological issues when it comes to housing policy, can you tell us what these two different approaches are and why you think a lot of conservative Christians are picking the wrong one?
Kevin Nye: Absolutely. So the treatment-first methodology, it's kind of the one that we've been using for almost 100 years in response to homelessness, but it also sort of infects a lot of our thinking about many different things. And it essentially says that if you are in poverty, if you are in homelessness, that you have to sort of prove your worthiness of getting out of that. So if you are experiencing homelessness, we know that ultimately the destination that you're hoping for is to be in housing of some kind, an apartment, a house, what have you. But that in order to get there under the treatment-first model, it suggests that you have to sort of check a bunch of boxes. And those boxes have looked different, according to the program, and according to the time that it's been implemented, but they usually include some level of sobriety.
So if drugs or alcohol are part of your life, they have to stop. If you struggle with your mental health or even your physical health, that you have to ascribe to a particular treatment plan, and demonstrate your willingness to do that and to stay on it to then achieve whatever objective is set for you by some institution, which often is a shelter or a government program or a Christian institution, like a Rescue Mission. And then depending on which avenue you're going or which institution is involved, that can include a lot of other more arbitrary types of rules, like that if you demonstrate your worthiness or your dedication by applying for a certain number of jobs per week, or attaining employment first, or attending Bible study every day at the Rescue Mission. There's sort of all of these expectations to demonstrate that you are sort of good enough, worthy enough to invest in with this long-term opportunity.
That is opposed to the housing-first idea, which we've known and understood for closer to like 30 years and have been studying and practicing ever since, which suggests that rather than do or accomplish all of these things to prove that you deserve housing, housing being sort of the end destination, we lead with the housing because we recognize that housing is the stabilizing force that makes so many of those other things possible. And then we don't just plop you in housing and say, “Good luck,” but we put you in housing and then ask you, “Okay, now, what do you wanna work on?” Now that you have this baseline of stability, of safety, a literal home base, what's next? Let's tackle it together. Now that you can get a good night's sleep. Now that you can charge your phone in an outlet overnight.
Now that your documents and your medications are safe. Now that you can buy food to store it in a fridge, rather than go to whatever dinner is available for free for you across the community, or save up enough to get fast food just to fill your belly. All these things that we sort of take for granted that a home with four walls, a roof and a door provide for us are those things that we actually need to be successful. One's ability to stabilize a physical or mental health condition is really difficult if you don't have a safe place to go every night, like where you can store your medication safely, where you can eat a healthy diet, where you can have a normal routine. And even something like drug use and alcohol use, we understand are things that are responsive to a chaotic situation.
That if you are living on the streets every day, you are more likely to seek out the soothing effects [laughs] of alcohol, the numbing effects of substances, or the energizing effects of other types of substances, in order to try to get things done that you need to get done. But that even folks who are deep in the throes of those kind of problematic relationships with drugs and alcohol do so much better with housing-first, rather than saying, “Hey, you need to fix all of these things before we even help you feel safe and stable.”
Sy Hoekstra: It also strikes me all three of our mutual friend, Josiah Haken, wrote a book where he talked about kind of myths about homelessness. And one of them was the myth that, basically, homeless people are dangerous.
Kevin Nye: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And he was like, the real reality of being homeless is that you're actually in more danger than everybody else constantly. You are the one who's the most likely to be the victim who's most likely gonna be robbed, have your stuff taken. And that stuff that's on you, like you said, is all your documents [laughs], it's all of your medicines that you need to remain in your sound mind or whatever. And just having a place to not be worried about that as much feels like an enormous burden lifted off people too, in addition to all the other enormous burdens lifted off people that you just mentioned.
Kevin Nye: Absolutely. Yeah, Josiah is great, and his book is really good, too. Neighbors with No Doors, for your listeners to go check that one out.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, yeah for sure.
Christianity Today, and Why the Church Doesn’t Address Homelessness Well
Jonathan Walton: This is something that I'm very passionate about. Like Sy said, I've known Josiah for years. I spent a good part of my formative young adult years on the streets with friends. And so a few months ago, you wrote a post on your Substack about an article of yours that Christianity Today was like, “Yep,” and then said, “No.”
Kevin Nye: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] So can you tell us about that story, why you decided to go public, and the difference between knowledge and opposition. Because I think some people that are listening to this might think, “Oh, well, if we just know better, then we'll do better.” And I don't think that's true. So could you tell us about your journey writing, then having it get rejected, and then that difference between knowledge about something and opposition. Could you break that down?
Kevin Nye: Sure. Yeah, the Christianity Today thing was interesting. When you're a writer on a particular topic and that topic sort of starts to get national attention, which is what was happening, at the time there was a Supreme Court case that was gonna be heard, since then has been heard, Johnson versus Grants Pass, Oregon.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Kevin Nye: We could talk forever about that, but essentially, whether or not municipalities have the right to criminalize homelessness was sort of being decided at the national level. And I wanted to write something about the faith perspective of that. And I have my own Substack and outlets where I can do that, but I thought that this being such a national issue, and my take on it wasn't particularly edgy or controversial. It was just, “Hey, maybe we shouldn't criminalize poor people for being poor.” [laughter]
Jonathan Walton: Maybe. Let’s try that.
Kevin Nye: I thought that that was something… and actually part of what I was writing was not, “Hey, this is what I think.” It was, “Hey, this is what a bunch of churches and faith groups are thinking.” And part of my article was actually about how churches were rallying to support unhoused people in this case and writing into the Supreme Court. So it was almost like, it's kind of pro-church [laughs]. And so I thought given all of that, this would be a pretty good pitch for Christianity Today who is a more conservative publication who I hadn't published with before. I'm more likely to publish with Sojourners, which is less obviously conservative or Religious News Service, which is a little bit more like they're reporting news about religion, not religious news.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Kevin Nye: But I thought this was the right pitch for CT. They had expressed interest in me writing for them before, and it was just about finding the right thing, and I thought this one was it. So I sent it in, and I got a really good response. They agreed. They said, “Hey, this seems like the one. We definitely wanna work with you on it.” And I was pretty upfront from the beginning about what my stance on it was. And they seemed willing along the way, and even a couple times in the process, I just said, “Hey, I just wanna be super clear, this is where I'm going with it. It may be a little different than what you guys are used to publishing on homelessness,” and I just kept getting thumbs up along the way until it was time, essentially to publish it.
I had sent it in, it had gotten the final edit, and they had said, “Hey, we're probably gonna publish this on Friday.” And then two hours later, I got an email that just said, “Hey, hold that thought. Just came from a meeting. We might be going in a different direction.” And then I didn't hear anything for 24 hours, and then it was, “Yeah, we are going in a different direction for our coverage.”
Jonathan Walton: But did they pay you for it?
Kevin Nye: They did. They paid me a kill fee, which…
Sy Hoekstra: Which is not the whole thing.
Kevin Nye: Yeah. And part of me was like, I wanna be like, “I don't want your money,” [laughter] but then I was like, “I'll take your money and I'll use it for something good.”
Jonathan Walton: I can deposit this. Yeah. Right [laughs].
Kevin Nye: Yeah. And so I ended up just then sending it to Religion News Service, and said, “Hey, sorry that this is coming late.” Because the deadline was that the Supreme Court was hearing it that week, and so it was sort of a timely piece. And I sent it over there, said, “Hey, I'm sorry this is such short notice, but do you guys want this because another publication didn't want it?” And they ran it. I sat on that for a while deciding whether or not I wanted to say anything about it, because I never want to, I don't wanna stir up trouble just for the sake of trouble. And I don't wanna trash this publication for no reason, even though they've given us some pretty good reasons over the years.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Kevin Nye: But I was like, I don't wanna pick a fight just to pick a fight. And part of that is a professional consideration. As a writer I have the potential to burn a bridge there. So I just sort of said, I'm gonna wait to see what they meant by our coverage is going in a different direction, because it does imply they're gonna publish something, right?
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Kevin Nye: And for all I know it could have meant, “Hey, we actually got someone really, super, more qualified than you to write this.” Or, “One of the lawyers who's on the case wanted to write something for us.” And I'd be like, “Well, yeah, of course.” I suspected that wasn't what it meant, [laughs] but I'm gonna withhold judgment, at least publicly for a bit [laughter]. And so I sat on it, and then a couple months later, the Supreme Court ruling came out. So it was supposed to publish when they heard it, and then they had a couple months to deliver a ruling. They delivered a ruling, and Christianity Today had still not published anything, not even about homelessness, period. And so then I thought, “Okay, the ruling just happened.” It also came out the same day that they ruled on presidential immunity.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Kevin Nye: So it was like, okay, there's a lot of competing things to talk about right now so I'm gonna give them a week, two weeks, to see if they put out anything. And then when they didn't, that's when I sort of decided that I wanted to write about not being published, and again, not personal, but write about the fact that nothing was being published about this when it is such a significant ruling about what I would argue is one of the top five most significant issues on everybody's mind, which is housing and homelessness. And sort of how that feeds an ignorance and a lack of Christian conversation about this topic. And again, it wasn't, “How dare they not publish me.” It was sort of like, “How could they not publish anything, especially when they had something to publish, and they chose not to?”
Jonathan Walton: Why do you think they killed it and didn't write about it?
Kevin Nye: My guess is that ultimately, there is a pretty powerful voice that is Christian and institutionalized in the form of the Gospel Rescue Mission. And those who have supported it have worked in it, worked around it, worked adjacent to it, that does genuinely believe that we should make homelessness harder so that A, either people stop choosing it, which is ludicrous, but more so B, will drive people into institutional settings, like shelters, like Christian shelters, where evangelism can happen, sort of Christian teaching can happen. And the reason I believe that is because there was only one faith perspective that wrote into the Supreme Court in favor of criminalizing, and it was the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission.
Criminalizing Homelessness to Force People into Religious Shelters
And they actually wrote in that publicly available letter that they felt that since it had been ruled at a lower court that they couldn't criminalize, the numbers at their shelter had been declining. Now they failed to mention that this happened at the same time as COVID, and might be another reason that people didn't wanna come into a public shared space type of shelter setting, but that because the city could not use criminalization to compel people into the Rescue Mission, that people were not getting services that they needed. But if you dig into the Gospel Rescue Mission over there, which I did extensively, you learn that they have some of the most egregious rules and expectations of people, and have a very poor reputation among the unhoused community there for how they treat people.
And so what then truly is at stake here is in a town like Grants Pass where the only shelter is a Gospel Rescue Mission, can the government criminalize homelessness and force people into a religious setting where they are being taught against their will Christianity in the form of chapel and required Bible studies on a daily basis? And now I don't think Christianity Today thinks that we should institutionalize all unhoused people and scream the Bible at them, but I think that Christianity Today is reluctant to anger the voices who are pretty large and hold a lot of power that defend that institution.
The theology behind Misguided Christian Housing Programs
Sy Hoekstra: Can we get a little bit at what some of the reasons are underneath all this stuff? I mean, aside from the [laughs] opportunity to evangelize, forcing people into your program to evangelize them, because that's just your whole end goal as a Christian or whatever, is to convert people, and so the means by which you convert them doesn't matter. Which is, I'm putting it that way because I'm just kind of processing that, because it's gross. It's in line with manipulating people into Christianity by scaring them about hell.
Kevin Nye: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Like why not just scare them about prison or anything else?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, right. I'll put you outside.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly [laughs]. But I wonder what other… you've dug into the theology of this, you've dug into people's reasoning for supporting this kind of programming and the powers that be supporting this kind of programming. What are the other motivations, theological reasons that you see behind treating vulnerable people this way?
Kevin Nye: Yeah. Well, I mean, the way I framed it obviously, is sort of the most insidious version of it, but I think that most folks who… I mean, especially your frontline workers in a place that, genuinely believe that Jesus is the solution to homelessness. That people who are experiencing homelessness are doing so because of a personal failure, a moral failure, and that if they commit their lives to Jesus, that that will allow them to leave behind the life that led them into the situation that they're in and propel them towards a new life. That's the nice way of understanding what's happening, which I genuinely believe a lot of folks in these settings are operating it from that more positive version.
Even what you described as scaring people with hell to get people to accept Jesus, I know people that are in my family who they genuinely believe that the people that they love and care about are gonna go to hell if they don't. And there is this motivation that, again, because they have this belief that is toxic, that the way… if you are committed to that belief, to then address this problem can be very problematic. My experience by and large, has not been that people who experience homelessness are not religious or are not even committed Christians.
Sy Hoekstra: Seriously.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Kevin Nye: And on top of that, an informed understanding of what causes homelessness is not moral personal failure, but very measurable and understandable social issues like the cost of housing, like our mental health systems, like the stagnation of wages, so that housing is more expensive and people aren't making any more money. So one plus one equals two, fewer people can access housing.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, there's so much to say there, but things I wanna highlight, you're basically saying that Jesus is the answer to homelessness, allows you to avoid asking systemic questions, allows you to avoid talking about systems that need to change. It also kind of turns Jesus into something that he never said that he was. He never said he was the answer to homelessness. He also never even said, “If you state a belief in me and read the Bible and pray and x, y and z, then you will automatically start making significantly better moral decisions.”
Kevin Nye: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: That's not even true about Jesus. He also didn't say, “If you believe in me, all of a sudden you won't be addicted to meth,” or whatever. You know what I mean?
Kevin Nye: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: None of this is true. There's a real powerful underlying fundamentalist current in that perspective. In a just don't worry about the politics, don't worry about basically any real earthly concerns, just Jesus, everything else will fall in line after that.
Kevin Nye: Yeah, and it’s, I think a lot about how it's just an extension of prosperity gospel. That it’s the same idea that says if you're an average middle-class American Christian, and you want to become wealthy, have a private jet, a mansion, here's your spiritual steps. Get closer to Jesus, you'll be rewarded with physical wealth. Well, if that's true, the opposite of that would be true, which is that if you are in deep, dire poverty, it must mean that you're that much farther from Jesus.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Kevin Nye: And I think even people who would reject the Joel Osteen prosperity rich end of that gospel, still believe a lot of that same stuff, but on the poverty end.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. That's so true.
Jonathan Walton: The connection for me happens, is yes, the prosperity gospel, but then also the plantation spirituality.
Kevin Nye: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: The people who are rich are obedient, the people who are poor are disobedient. And what disobedient people actually need is supervision and discipline.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Kevin Nye: Yes.
Jonathan Walton: And so the housing-first, the entire mentality that you are flipping over is saying you don't actually have to be good or better or on the right side of things to receive, which is the opposite of the plantation, which is the opposite of Capitalism, which is the opposite…
Sy Hoekstra: You might even call it grace, Jonathan [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: I mean, I was gonna get to the title of the book at the end, but like…[laughs].
Kevin Nye: And not even just to receive, but to receive in a way that allows freedom and choice. Because that is one of the biggest differences between these two models. And I think, a lot of why it's we need to hold housing back until we've programmed into a person what they should be acting like and being like then we give them housing, because once they have housing, they're free to make their own decisions, and we're afraid of what that looks like. Versus that housing-first model that, baked into housing-first is choice and options and autonomy. And even in the process of getting into housing, it's not just, “Hey, here's the apartment that you get,” although that is how a lot of systems end up working, just because of scarcity of housing.
But in a good housing-first model it's, “Here's all the types of housing that are accessible to you. These ones are subsidized this way, these ones are this way. This is in this part of town, this one is connected to these types of services. What works for you?” And then after that choice comes more choices like, “Hey, what's the thing that you wanna work on first?” Which is the treatment-first model says, you got to get sober before you do anything else. And that is just not true. I think that's a big piece of it too, is how much the treatment-first system allows us, whether we're government or religious, to exert social control over people.
Jonathan Walton: All that to say, there are people and systems and structures, institutions in place that keep this ideology enforced.
Kevin Nye: Yes.
Jonathan Walton: It is moving forward. Something, harking back, we had an interview with Lisa Sharon Harper, who I believe you know.
Kevin Nye: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And one of the things she said was, the hope is in the work. As we do the work, we will find hope, because we're close and we see progress, we build relationships, that's the fruit of being in the work. And so as people are, what we were just talking about, these institutions, these individuals are reluctant to this evidence-based policy actually being rolled out in the church, where do you see good work being done inside and outside of the church, where you can find that intersection of hope and work?
Kevin Nye: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: As people do start to say yes to Matthew 25.
Kevin Nye: I mean, I think that my… so my book came out two years ago now, and when I wrote it, I sort of hoped that it would be revelatory for people. That a lot of Christians would be like, “Oh, this is new information. This is a new way of looking at it.” And there was a good amount of that. But what really surprised me, and gave me a lot of hope, was how much response I got that said, “Yes, this is what we over here already believe, and we've been doing.”
Sy Hoekstra: Oh.
Kevin Nye: Sometimes like, “We didn't know it had a name. We didn't know there were other people thinking and talking about this.” And so in those two years, as I've gotten to travel around and do some speaking and stuff like that, I've gotten to see and hear about a bunch of programs, churches that are merging this sort of faith-based and evidence-based. And, yeah, it's just been, it's filled me with a ton of hope. And where they're, I think the next growth is for them to get organized together, because right now the Rescue Missions are organized. They have a centralized network, and so they can speak together with one voice in opposition to these best practices.
But there's not sort of a focal point or a voice box for all these other ones that are doing, like you said, the hope is in the work, they're doing it in their small, local ways, but don't have a collective together to speak to each other and on behalf of one another and on behalf of the things that they believe in. And so that's part of the project I'm working on right now. My next book project is to sort of give voice and awareness to a lot of these ideas that are being implemented in different places that people don't really know about outside of those local communities, and sort of name what is working and why, and hopefully inspire responses from faith communities and individuals that align with best practices and align with their faith.
Jonathan Walton: One, I wanna dive into your book, because I actually haven't read it yet, so I'm looking forward to grabbing it. And I'm glad to hear that you have another one. What would you say is the bridge from the one you wrote to this one?
Kevin Nye: A lot of different things, but to make it very black and white, it's the first book is about how to think differently about homelessness, and this book is about how you actually go and do that, and how those change beliefs get worked out in things as nitty gritty as program design.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Totally.
Kevin Nye: Without being boring, hopefully.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] That's great. Where can people find you or your work?
Kevin Nye: So I'm on most social media. I'm not too hard to find there, but my handle is a little different everywhere you go. The best sort of landing spot is my Substack. So that's Kevinmnye.substack.com. And so any new thing that I'm writing, whether it's there or I publish with Sojourners, or I'm speaking somewhere, I always put that out in my newsletter there. And hopefully as some more news comes out about this new book project, I'll be able to make announcements about that there.
Sy Hoekstra: That's awesome. We will definitely link to that. Kevin Nye, we so much appreciate having you on the show today. Thank you so much for being here.
Kevin Nye: Yeah, absolutely. It was a blast.
[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Our Thoughts after the Interview
Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, I loved that conversation. Tell me what you are thinking about coming out of it.
The Church Is Actively Contributing to the Problem of Homelessness
Jonathan Walton: There’s a lot. I think that the thing that frustrates me the most, and I think this is true about a lot of just injustices that I'm thinking about right now, is that the church is actively contributing to the continuing…
Sy Hoekstra: To the problem.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. When we're literally supposed to not do that. Like, the whole Grants Pass amicus brief, I'm just like, “Really guys?” That takes energy. That takes effort, that takes meetings, that takes emails, takes drafts. It takes time to do that. You can't just like, “Hey, I'm gonna write an amicus brief,” and just submit it. There's an effort that goes into sustaining injustice, and that to me I think is concerning and exhausting.
Societies with Colonial Roots Won’t Provide “Unearned” Benefits
Jonathan Walton: The other thing I think about is, I mean, I would say White American folk religion, talk about a plantation mentality, but it even stretches into addressing injustice. I was having a conversation with Maya yesterday.
Sy Hoekstra: Your seven-year-old.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. No, she's eight. She's eight.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh. I forgot.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. But we were talking about the difference between fairness and justice. And she said, “Baba, is it better to give someone what they need or give someone what they ask for?”
Sy Hoekstra: You have the deepest child [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: She literally asked me that. And I was like, “Ooh.”
Sy Hoekstra: Does Maya wanna be on this podcast [laughter]?
Jonathan Walton: No, but she was reading a book. I have a discussion or something at school, and this is what she asked me. So I started talking about the vineyard. I said, “Maya, who gets to decide what is needed? Who are the different people?” And she goes, “Well, someone outside is deciding.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, well, then let's go read the story about Jesus in the vineyard.” Like the kingdom of God is like a vineyard.
Sy Hoekstra: You're talking about the parable where he pays all the workers the same, no matter how long they worked, and the ones who worked the longest get angry [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Exactly. And then we went and read… she had only read the first half of the parable about the two sons. She hadn't read the second half. So then we talked about the similarities between the father who runs out to meet the prodigal son, and then how the person in charge gets to decide how grace or resources or whatever are distributed. And I was like, it would seem to me that that person gets to define what is just and what is fair, and what is equitable. And we didn't get to talk about power, but that was ultimately what I was thinking about.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And I don't know how to explain it to an eight year old. But she said everybody should get what they need. But she's like, “How can we do that?” And I said, “Maya, that right there is the fundamental question that we try to put together.” There are people who think and believe and will work tooth and nail for people not to get what they don't think they deserve. “I don't think that person deserves a home. I don't think that person deserves to live where I live. I think they should, quote- unquote, wait in line,” if we're talking about immigration. “I played by the rules. Don't pay off that debt. I worked at a job…” We're constantly doing that. There's a Hawaiian activist, her name escapes me right now, but she said, “You got to remember you live in a colony.”
Like the United States is a colony. That's what it is. Another Peruvian scholar is like, coloniality is a real thing. And so in a colony, you cannot have people get things that they quote- unquote, didn't work for. The kingdom of God should literally break the brains of imperialists, which it does [laughs], because it just, it blows up everything. So all that to say, I hope, and we'll pray and will work in the influence that I have to say, “Hey, can we do what Kevin was talking about, like housing-first, resources first, hugs first, communication first?” All that.
For Evangelicals, Grace Is Not Tangible
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, totally. I had kind of similar thoughts. I was gonna talk about how the moralism underlying all of the policy, like the treatment-first policy like, “You have to earn this, and we are suspicious of you, and we have all these stereotypes going in that we're just not going to question and we're gonna follow. And until you prove yourself worthy of our generosity, we're not gonna give it to you.” And so it's sort of like, we can talk about grace and generosity and all of that all day long, but we're not gonna put our money where our mouth is, especially not government money [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right, exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: That's kind of the other side of the coin of the coin of what you were talking about, which is so there's this lack of grace generosity, but I think yours is actually a step further, which is if you're denying grace and generosity, you're going to have to take active steps to reinforce the frankly, evil way of doing things [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And that's the amicus briefs and everything else. What I was just saying, that kind of moralism, it really is connected to the more fundamentalist side of evangelicalism about how, basically, grace is a spiritual thing. It's not a tangible thing. It's not a material thing. It's not something you practice outside of forgiving someone for wronging you. It's not something you do with your money and your resources. It just doesn't really have any business in the public square, or in public policy, which is not a distinction the Bible draws.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: The best you can argue is maybe it's a distinction that under your theology you think the Bible implies. It's definitely not explicit [laughter]. You can look at Leviticus, where there are so so many different provisions where God is requiring people to use the fruits of their own labor to provide for the poor in their neighborhood, and not in particularly efficient ways [laughter]. And Jesus is obviously, or John the Baptist is telling people, “If you have two coats, give one away.” There's the spirit, the direction where everything's going with the kingdom of God is so opposed to that way of thinking, in my view, that it's incredibly frustrating that we have to… Kevin, in particular. I'm frustrated for him, for advocates, and then for most of all, for the actual people who aren't getting housing, who are literally out on the streets. Some of them are freezing to death or starving to death because of our insistence on this moralism.
Jonathan Walton: Right. The fundamental thing is at the end of the day, moralism is an argument that you need to earn the stuff, like you were just saying. And then it's like, I'm gonna create an entire ecosystem that justifies your poverty and my comfort.
Christians Should Actively Invite Unhoused People into Our Neighborhoods
Sy Hoekstra: My other thought was around markets, and a lot of how some of the intractability of housing policy is that so many people just have decided that when you put out public housing or low income housing somewhere, that that lowers the value of the property around it.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is by economists, the way they speak, it's an inevitability. It's just the way things are, and it can't be changed. But that is ultimately because the potential buyers of that property are bigots toward poor people [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No, it’s true. Right.
Sy Hoekstra: It's such widespread, systemic bigotry that it changes the value of homes and buildings and land. And that's a choice. It is a choice that I will grant you most societies have made [laughs]. Like most societies, rich people want to cordon themselves off from everybody else and to use their money to try and escape the things about this world that are difficult and make us sad and uncomfortable and hurt. But that doesn't mean that it's not still a choice for which God absolutely holds us accountable. Go and read Amos, or whatever [laughter]. There's no question, it does not make God happy, and that we have a different way to go. But what we would need is something that seems kind of impossible at the moment, which is a… you’ve heard of a NIMBY?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: NIMBY people, like Not In My Back Yard. So that means, “Don't put that new methadone clinic, don't put that new housing project anywhere near me.” We would need a YIMBY movement.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: You actually have to have people who say, “Yes. I want poor people around. I want people who are trying to recover from drugs around. I want people who have mental health issues around. Because of my positive value for human life and communal flourishing.” And that truly feels impossible to me. I don't think it is, again, I think it's a choice. And one thing that I'm trying to do, I have narrow influence in the world. One person over whom I have a lot of influence is my two year old. I walk around New York City with her all the time. I take her to daycare, other places. And I'm trying to make a point that, we're not going to be afraid of the person who's having the mental health crisis, because the actual reality is, in that mental health crisis, they are in more danger than we are. They are the ones at risk, we are not.
Most of them are not violent. A lot of us want to be violent towards them. Aka Jordan Neely, who was killed on the subway because he was having a mental health crisis, and people were sufficiently afraid of him. And so if I'm on the subway platform with my daughter and someone's having a mental health crisis, and they're not that far away from us, and people will move away from that person because they're afraid, I will stay there. And that has never been a problem, not once. You can tell me that that's dangerous or risky, and I don't care, because I know you're wrong, and I'm going to teach the person that I have the ability to teach that you're wrong [laughs]. And we're gonna stay there, and we're gonna be completely fine. I've been here for 16 years now. I've lived in New York City, and I've been around people having, I've worked with even my clients as a lawyer.
These are not alien, weird people having scary freakouts to me. These are real people, who by the way, are fully conscious when they're having their mental health crises, and they can see everyone walking away from them, and they know how afraid everybody is of them, and that affects them deeply.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And I'm not gonna be part of it. I will be the yes in my backyard person, even if nobody else is. There are other people who are. I'm not saying it's me against the world, but that is something that we need to insist on it.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and honestly I think that ties literally perfectly into Which Tab Is Still Open.
Which Tab Is Still Open? — Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah. Let's get into it. So this is Which Tab Is Still Open. This is the segment where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter, which you can get by joining the free mailing list at KTFPress.com. You'll get resources articles, podcasts, books, everything, recommendations from Jonathan and I on ways to grow in your discipleship and in your political education. So go to KTFPress.com, sign up for that free mailing list. Jonathan, we're talking about Ta-Nehisi Coates today. Why don't you tell us what we're talking about exactly?
Jonathan Walton: Yes. So Ta-Nehisi Coates has a new book, it's called The Message. A very significant portion of it is about his trip to Israel and Palestine, occupied West Bank, Hebron, places like that. Some important points he makes are that when you see how Palestinians are treated up close, it's not really that hard to see it as apartheid or Jim Crow or any other exploitative, discriminatory system that has been set up. And he took a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, and found it profoundly moving as well, but just couldn't shake that the lesson Zionists took from the Holocaust was that, “We have to obtain our own power at all costs to prevent this from happening again.” He's had some really fascinating media appearances while promoting the book that we'll link to in the show notes.
One of them, you mentioned the newsletter, was a great interview with The Daily Show. The interview that instigated a lot of this fervor and dialog and will probably help him sell a lot of books, which he's also said [laughter], was with CBS because he was basically ambushed by Tony Dokoupil, and was called an extremist in asking him pretty nonsensical questions for people who are against genocide, totally normal for people who are for Zionism. And the question he asked that many people ask is, “Does Israel have the right to exist?” And it's a rhetorical question, which Ta-Nehisi Coates actually answered when he said that countries don't have the right to exist, they exist by power. Just that turn was really great.
But about the interview, there was controversy, because it came out that the interviewer went around CBS’s editorial process and just went off on his own without telling anybody what he was doing. So Sy, what are your thoughts?
The Power of Clarity and Focus in Prophetic Truth-Telling
Sy Hoekstra: I am so happy that Ta-Nehisi Coates is back writing nonfiction [laughter]. That's my main and primary thought. Everything he wrote in the 2010s is very formative for a lot of my thinking. I just love his approach to writing and journalism. He said many times he just, he writes to learn. He really appreciates the power of writing, and he has an incredible amount of moral clarity, a really impressive inability of everyone who's trying to distract him, to distract him. Like he's very focused. Like that question that you just brought up was a good example of it. Somebody says, “Does Israel have the right to exist?” He says, “Israel exists. States don't have the right to exist, they just do. They establish themselves with power. And now I'm gonna talk about, because Israel does exist, how does it exist, and why is that a problem?”
It's just, I'm going to acknowledge your question. I'm going to say very quickly why it doesn't make any sense, and then I'm gonna get back to the point that matters [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And that is something I want to emulate in the way that I go about my writing and my commentary and all that. I mean, those are kind of my… [laughs] I'm not sure I have a lot of substantive thoughts about what you just said, I'm just happy he's back. He took a long path down the fiction road and was writing comic books and all kinds of other stuff, which is also very cool. And he also did that because he was like, “That's the challenge for me as a writer right now. I've never done this. I'm a little bit scared of it. I think being nervous is good as a writer. And I'm gonna go do this thing that makes me sort of uncomfortable, instead of just continuing to churn out bestsellers about whatever.” You know what I mean?
Jonathan Walton: [laughter]. Right. Let me go and be challenged. Right right right.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, which I really respect that too, even though it means there were several years where I didn't get his commentary on stuff that I would have appreciated [laughter]. That's what I have been thinking as I've been watching him. But how about you, and you said you were gonna connect it back to what we were talking about before?
Jonathan Walton: Yes. So one, amen, I'm glad he's writing nonfiction as well.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: It's really powerful to me what truth telling does. He is stewarding a platform. He is leveraging his voice. He is doing what I would hope followers of Jesus would do in the ways that we can and the lives that we live every day. You're leveraging your platform with your daughter. You are her biggest influence. You and Gabrielle. The stewardship of his power and platform to elevate and center the most marginalized voice in the media landscape over the last 65 years, people from the Middle East. That we say the Middle East, because we're the center of the world.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: And so that reality comes from… I've listened to so many interviews. I listened to his one with The Daily Show, MSNBC, Zeteo with Mehdi Hassan. I listened to the one with Trevor Noah. I'm gonna listen to the one for Democracy Now!, I’m gonna listen to the one with The Gray Area, because I need to be reminded every day that there are people willing and able to say the hard things, not be distracted or dissuaded from what they're trying to say, and be willing to communicate that they would risk their own injury. He said, “It doesn't matter what someone else has done to me or how evil someone is, we should not kill them.” Over and over again. There is no world where it's, “Oh, it's complex. Oh, it's complicated.”
No, no, no, it's not. It's not complicated. It becomes complicated if you don't think about it. Everything's complicated if we don't think about it. But if you actually sit down and think about what it would mean to be Palestinian and what it would mean to be a Jewish person post Holocaust, post multiple pogroms, I would love for us to arrive at the point where we're like, “I don't want to perpetuate that against anyone else, because it was perpetrated against me,” which is love your neighbor as yourself.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Which he's not a follower of Jesus, but where we have instead landed is where he is willing to wrestle, he talked about this with Trevor Noah, he would hope that he would not become someone who would commit acts of violence to keep acts of violence from happening to him. That, I think is a rub. Like Nat Turner's rebellion and what happened on October the seventh when the quote- unquote, Hamas escaped. Even the words we use to describe the attack that happened, it literally is described like a breakout a lot of the times, in Zionist literature and communication. All of these things frame the Lebanese, or frame now the Iranians as not people. And what Ta-Nehisi Coates is trying to do is actually say they are people.
And that gets back to what you're talking about with, yes in my backyard. This is a person. Jordan Neely is a person. The person on the street having the mental health crisis, the person who's going through a messy divorce and doesn't have anywhere to go, the folks that are unemployed or bust up here from Texas, these are individuals made in the image of God, who do not deserve harm. That is the thing that draws me back to Coates' interviews, because he's not avoiding the hard questions, but what he is doing is communicating a truth that the people asking hard questions don't like. We are no better than the person that we're shooting or bombing or killing. We're just not. And so why are we doing that to someone who is literally just like us?
And so I will keep watching, I will keep listening, keep reading. I hope that there is a shift happening. I'm not optimistic. I'm grateful for him and driving the conversation, because it feels something has broken through that I hope continues, because that was a conversation on CBS Morning Show. That was a conversation on progressive, liberal, conservative. Like people are talking about the book, even if you're critiquing it, you got to talk about it. I'm glad that that's happening, and I hope that this is taking the trajectory of what happened in South Africa, that's the best case scenario.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: It's not the best case scenario, but politically in the limits that we have, it's the best case scenario.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And I think he thinks that way. Like when he talks about the power of writing, he's not talking about the power of my book to end the war, he's talking about the power of my book to influence some people who somewhere down the road have a lot of impact. That's what he means. He's not unrealistic about it, which I also appreciate.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Every single person made an image of God, man. Period.
Sy Hoekstra: Period, end of show [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Outro and Outtake
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you all so much for listening. Just quick reminders, no episode in two weeks, we are gonna have that Substack live on Wednesday, November 6, at 1 pm right after the election. So get the Substack app or join our mailing list so you'll get reminded about it. Our next subscriber call will be Tuesday at 1 pm so be sure to join that. Get registered for it, it's in your email if you're a paid subscriber. If you're not, join us. Become a paid subscriber and join us on these calls. They've been really interesting conversations. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale. Editing by Multitude Productions. And this show is produced by our incredible paid subscribers. Thank you all so much for listening, and we will see you the day after the election.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: “I play by the rules. Don't pay off that debt for I didn't…I worked out a job.” We're constantly doing that. Oh, I'm sorry. There's a couple outside at the front door that speak Chinese. Give me one second. I’ll be right back. Sorry, Sy.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay.
Jonathan Walton: Uh, they were Jehovah's Witnesses that spoke Mandarin. I thought it was a couple across the street, but they were just trying to get me to be in the kingdom. That's what they were doing.
Sy Hoekstra: Wait, Mandarin-speaking Jehovah’s Witnesses were…because they've seen Priscilla around?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of Chinese people that live in our neighborhood, so like…
Sy Hoekstra: So they’re just knocking on doors, and you open the door and they're like, “Oh, damn it” [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Well, no. Actually, Christine, who is White from Texas, opened the door and then said, “Oh, I'll just go get Jonathan,” because she didn't know what they wanted.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, right. And you speak enough Mandarin to figure out that what they want is your soul [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes, yes yes.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
On today’s episode, we discuss the ways our faith has changed as we’ve grown in discipleship and justice work. Our spiritual practices, as well as our relationships with church, God, and the non-Christian world have all transformed over time, sometimes in surprising ways that would have made us uncomfortable in our earlier years as followers of Jesus. It’s a personal and instructive conversation on how to grow up with Jesus that we know will be helpful for a lot of people. Plus, after that conversation we get into the war in Sudan and why it’s an important topic for us to learn about and engage with.
Mentioned in the episode:
- The episode of the Movement Memos podcast about the war in Sudan
- The link to donate to the Sudan Solidarity Collective via PayPal
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Jonathan Walton: I'm trying to live in the reality that God actually loves me and he actually loves other people, and that's just true. And to live in that quote- unquote, belovedness is really, really, really difficult in a extractivist, culturally colonized, post-plantation, capitalistic society.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: It's really, really hard when every single thing that I was raised to do goes against, just receiving anything.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: This week we have a great conversation. There's no guest this week, it's just Jonathan and I. And we are actually going to be talking about something that we originally were gonna talk to Lisa about in the last episode, but we ran out of time [laughter]. And we thought it would be, actually it was worth taking the time to talk about this in a full episode format. And the topic is basically this, as people grow not just normally in their faith, but also in the kind of work that we're doing, resisting the idols of America and confronting injustice and that sort of thing in their faith, your personal spiritual life tends to change [laughter], to put it mildly. And we wanted to talk about that.
It's something that we don't necessarily hear a lot of people talking about as much and I think it's something that people are kind of concerned about. Like it's in the back of people's heads when they start to dive into these justice issues. It's something that I think conservative Christianity has put in the back of your heads [laughs], like your personal walk with Jesus, or your something like that is going to falter if you stray down this road. And so we wanna talk about how things have changed with us, and be as open and honest about that as possible, with our spiritual practices, with our relationship with God, with our relationship with church and kind of the world outside.
And then we're gonna get into our segment Which Tab Is Still Open, where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. This week, we will be talking about a really fascinating and informative podcast on the war that is currently happening in Sudan that has been going on for about a year and a half. If you don't know a lot about that war, or if you just want some more insight into what's going on there, please stay tuned for that. It'll be an interesting conversation, for sure. So we're going to get into all of that in a minute. I think this is gonna be a really fruitful and helpful conversation for a lot of people. Before we jump in though, Jonathan,
Jonathan Walton: Hey friends, remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to support this show and everything we do at KTF Press. We're creating media that centers personal and informed discussions on faith, politics and culture and help you seek Jesus and confront injustice, that's so desperately needed today. We're resisting the idols of the American church by elevating marginalized voices and taking the entirety of Jesus' gospel more seriously than those who might narrow it to sin and salvation or some other small, little box. Jesus' gospel is bigger than that. The two of us have a lot of experience [laughs] doing this in community and individually.
We've been friends for a good long time, and so I hope that you can come to us and trust us for good conversation, dialogue and prayerful, deliberate action. So become a paid subscriber, and get all the bonus episodes to this show, access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats. You can comment on posts and a lot more. So again, go to KTFPress.com, join us and become a paid subscriber. And if you really wanna double down, become a founding member. Thanks, y'all.
Sy Hoekstra: You get a free book if you're a founding member. So that’s…
Jonathan Walton: You do get a free book.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Because we publish books too. I guess we didn't… we have to tell people that.
Jonathan Walton: That’s true.
Sy Hoekstra: If you're listening, if this is your first episode, you didn't know that. We’ve published a couple of books.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Alright Jonathan, let's dive in. Let's talk about, as you have grown over the past however many years since you've been doing this kind of work, which for you is what now, 15? No, almost 15.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: More than 15. It’s more than 15 years.
Jonathan Walton: It's more than 15. It'd probably be like… I was trying to reflect on this. I think I seriously stepped into this stuff in 2005 when I wrote that first poem about child soldiers and sex trafficking victims and was like, “I wanna do this, because Jesus loves me, and Jesus loves all people.” And so yeah, almost 20 years.
Sy Hoekstra: Was that “Decisions?” Is that the poem?
Jonathan Walton: I think it was actually “Invisible Children.” That poem.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay. Literally because of the documentary Invisible Children.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. That was the first advocacy poem that I wrote.
Sy Hoekstra: So since then, how have your individual spiritual practices changed your scripture reading, that sort of thing? The kind of thing that at one point we might have called our quiet time, or our daily whatever. Where are you at?
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Absolutely. So I do not have daily quiet times. How do I explain this? When the Psalms say, “write the words of God on your hearts that you might not sin against him,” I think with all of us, it's kind of like building a habit. So I read a lot of scripture when I was a kid. I read a lot of scripture when I was a college student. And I think it was because I literally needed flesh and bones on just the air of my faith. And I think literally sitting there and listening to sermons for hours as I go about my day in my room and not study in college, or me and my brother would do [laughs] these weird things because we lived in the South and had nothing to do on this 30-acre farm, is we memorized the entire Charlton Heston film, The Ten Commandments.
So me and my brother literally memorized the entire six hour epic that is The Ten Commandments. And so I just had this desire, and I think habit of just like memorizing and learning about God because the context that you're in. And so I think that there was a season in my life where sitting in the word of God was just a regular practice. And now I would say, just to overtake scripture, scripture is for me a process of recall and reflection. Like I have to give a talk next week on racism and racial reconciliation and justice. And if you had said to me, “Jonathan, what passage are you gonna speak from?” Like, because I've studied Genesis 1, because I've studied Isaiah 61, because I've studied Isaiah 58, because I've leaned into John 4, because I'm leaning in to Luke 4, I can grab from any of these places because it's almost like riding a bike in that way. I don't have to ride a bike every day to know how to ride a bike.
And so I think if you're sitting there thinking to yourself, “I don't do a daily quiet time,” I don't know that you are negatively impacted. I know that you may be shaped differently, but we don't lose God, just like we don't lose the knowledge of something in that way. So I think Scripture for me has become more of a remembering and reflective process, rather than an active like, “Oh man, I need to know more.” And I think if we do scripture prayer, so let's talk about prayer, liturgy has taken on a more significant part of my life.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Partially because I've stepped out of the, “let's prioritize this as better” box. So when I grew up in the South, I was like, oh, I go to a Black southern Baptist church, not a Southern Baptist Church. Let's be clear about that.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Spontaneous worship was quote- unquote, the best in my mind. Then I come to InterVarsity and more quote- unquote, evangelical spaces, and then it's like, well, popcorn prayer. Every single person goes individually and we all listen and try not to fall asleep.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: And then I go to another place and it's like the quote- unquote, warrior prayer. Like this lion’s war prayer. Everybody's praying at once. And that was amazing.
Sy Hoekstra: Charismatic.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And it was amazing, but overwhelming. And I would go to these places and say, oh, one is better than the other, when in reality, these are just expressions of God's faithfulness to different parts of his body. And so I think the season I'm in now, I've leaned into the prayer without ceasing, where it's like I am in conversation with God. I can be in prayer just going about my every day, similar to scripture with the riding the bike thing. These are things that I've marinated in, and so I'm riding the bike all day. I might get on the bike in the morning, I might not, but God is an active part of my day. And so I think the last thing just about church and preaching. This is hard [laughter].
And some people might get upset with this, but church has taken, the institution; going to, sitting in. That's probably the last thing that I'm still processing. My children don't want to go to church some days, and I have a high value for that. And I have to ask myself, why do I have that high of a value? And Maia asked me, because she was crying, she didn't wanna go to church. She said, “Why do you wanna go?” And I told her, I said, “Maia, sometimes I have a really hard week, and I go to hang out with other believers because they encourage me that God is faithful and I can make it through.” And I said, “Some weeks are good for me, and then I go to church, and someone may be having a poor week, and then I'm able to encourage them to make it through and center ourselves on Jesus.”
And I said, “In that way…” I didn't say this this way, but we bear one another's burdens with love. We are able to come alongside each other. And she didn't get it, and that's fine, she's eight.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: But I recognize that that's actually what I'm looking for when I go to church. And so if that's what I'm looking for, how can I have that in other spaces that my family also feels closer to God as well, so that we can grow together in that way? So I've stopped expecting the pastor to serve me a platter of spiritual goodies every week. [laughter] I've stop expecting this community in some way to be the buffet from which I gather my spiritual authority and intimacy with God. And that didn't used to be the case. It was like, “I got to go to church or I'm wrong. I got to be in the building, or something's messed up with my faith. I might be falling away.” And that's just not true, because I don't forget how to ride a bike. Like it's just not a thing.
So, yeah, I would say those big three things of prayer, scripture and going to church have changed. And later we could talk about justice stuff, but those things around just our relationship with God have changed for me.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's funny you said the thing that was a big deal to you, the second one was about like the spontaneous worship is the best, or this kind of prayer is the best or whatever. And that it's just so cultural and stuff because I never had any of those.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: I was like it's whatever. Nobody taught me that one… maybe somebody tried to, but it never got really inculcated in me that one kind of prayer or something was better than the other. But the daily scripture reading thing was so… Like you saying, “I don't read scripture every day,” there's still some little part of me that feels like, “Ooh, should he say that?” [laughter]
Jonathan Walton: Right. Right, right, right.
Sy Hoekstra: And it really just depends on where you grow up. Because a funny thing, like part of the scripture thing for me is, at some point I realized, I was like, “Hey, wait a minute [laughs], for the overwhelming majority of Christians who have ever lived, they A, could not read…”
Jonathan Walton: [laughter] Right.
Sy Hoekstra: “…and B, did not have access to the printed word.” The only time they were getting scripture was at mass on Sunday. And it's just one of those things where it's an enormous privilege, and we should, I'm not saying take it for granted, but it's something that has not only been not necessary for discipleship, but literally impossible for [laughter] most Christians who have ever lived. It's just an enormous privilege that we treat like a necessity or we treat like an imperative. And the distinction between those two things can be subtle, but it's real. They're not the same thing [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: True.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so for me, I've talked about this in one of the bonus episodes we did, but I'll make a slightly different point about it, which is, I used to, like you sort of alluded to, I used to come at daily scripture reading and prayer and everything from a place of deep anxiety. Constantly trying to stay up on whatever I had decided was the requirement for the day, and then falling behind and becoming anxious about it, and just getting on this treadmill of trying to catch up and then being anxious again. And a funny thing happened when I got into, as we were talking about on our recent subscriber call, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality [laughs] and learned about that anxiety and where it was coming from, and tried to change my relationship to it, and it decreased a lot, I realized when the anxiety went away I started to feel like my love for or even just my care for God, was going away.
Jonathan Walton: Huh.
Sy Hoekstra: Like if I wasn't anxious that I was reading scripture every day, it's kind of like what I just said, like there's still some part of me that feels like ugh [laughter]. If I wasn't anxious, then I didn't love God, which is kind of dark.
Jonathan Walton: It is. Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: You know what I mean? It’s like putting yourself in a sort of abusive relationship with God and saying, “If you don't keep up with me, then I'm gonna punish you in some way,” or something negative is gonna happen. It was never entirely clear what negative thing was gonna happen to me.
Jonathan Walton: Just a threat. Just a threat.
Sy Hoekstra: That something was bad. I was gonna backslide in some way. So, yeah, but the amount of time, like on a daily basis, that I spend praying or reading scripture has also decreased, and then anxiety went away. And then I had to get used to the anxiety not being there and being like, “Hey, that's okay. This is actually a reflection of the fact that I now on a much more embodied level, understand that God loves and accepts me.” [laughter] That's a good thing.
Jonathan Walton: That is a great thing. Yes, for sure.
Sy Hoekstra: Another big thing for me was, this is my change with regard to scripture, is letting the Bible be what the Bible says that it is, as opposed to what the spiritual authorities in my life told me that it was supposed to be. And so that's things like, I had a really interesting experience where I went through this thing called the Academy of Christian Thought. There was this three-year read-through-the-Bible program. It was run by this scholar named Ron Choong, a Malaysian guy who's really incredible. But one of the things he talked about was the idea that every word of the Bible is literally true. And he would go through it and he would say, “Okay, so there are these stories that Jesus tells, that when he tells them, like the parables.
Like say, The Good Samaritan or whatever. We understand that Jesus is telling a story here, and whether or not the story itself is true doesn't matter. He's making a point.” It's a sermon illustration, effectively. And Jesus never claims that the stories are true. We're all fine with that. We're not saying if the guy didn't actually get beat up on the road to Jericho, then the Bible's integrity is in question. And he was like, “Okay, so how about the book of Jonah?” He's like, Take the whole thing with the fish and the spending three days in the belly of a fish, which seems scientifically impossible, and then you get… like without dying, whatever. It could be a miracle. But does the Bible ever actually say, does the book of Jonah ever actually say, “The following is a true story?” The answer is, no, it doesn't [laughter].
And can you still learn all the same lessons about faith and everything from the book of Jonah if it's not true, like the parable of The Good Samaritan or any other parables Jesus tells? Yes, you can.
Jonathan Walton: Right. Right, right.
Sy Hoekstra: So does it really matter [laughs] whether the story in the book of Jonah is true? No, it does not. It affects nothing [laughter]. And by acknowledging that, you're just letting the Bible be what it is, which is, it's here's a story. It just told you a story, and whether or not it was true or not is not a point that the Bible makes, and therefore is not a point that matters.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] And so there were a lot of just simple things like that. He was like, The book of Revelation, you do not have to have a perfect understanding of what every twist and turn in that bizarre apocalyptic dream meant. You don't. You don't you don't have to have it. Because the Bible never tells you that you had to have it [laughter]. It just says, “Here's a dream from John,” and then it tells you a bunch of stuff that happened [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. It’s true.
Sy Hoekstra: And so it's like there was a lot of that that I thought was extremely helpful and allowed me to then use my mind. And then people would come back with the verse in 2 Timothy, “All scripture is God breathed,” and et cetera, et cetera. And [laughs] Ron would just be like, “That was literally written at a time when the New Testament was not canonized, and half of it was not even written yet.” [laughs] So it's like, what scripture is God breathed, you know what I mean? [laughter And also, does God breathed or trustworthy for instruction, does that mean the book of Jonah's literally true? No. [laughter] Like letting the Bible be what the Bible is was important to me, and understanding…
We talked in that episode with Mako Nagasawa about how sometimes translations of the Bible differ from each other in significant ways, and we picked which one we followed, and that's just a reality [laughs]. And you can still have a very high view of the authority of Scripture, it can still guide your life, it can still be an authority, it can be all those things, and you can acknowledge realities, and your faith doesn't fall apart. That was a big one for me [laughs]. A lot of that also has to do with letting go of the need to have everything under control in a perfect little box.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is a very… was just a real White way of thinking about it to be frank [laughs]. We must have our systematic theology, and everything must be clear and tied up neatly. So the last thing for me, I think, is just knowing that the way that God speaks to people changes over time. And so like I know there are ways that I could be going back and trying to find the things about my early faith that were really exciting and new and gave me these big spiritual highs, and a lot of those things just don't happen anymore. And I see that as I get older, there are so many people I know like that. And there are so many, there's such a range of reactions to that from people who are like, some people are totally comfortable with the fact that God changes how he talks to people over time.
And that even happens in the Bible. People hear from God in different ways, in new ways. And there are some people who are like, can lose their faith over that. They can panic, and it's like, “I'm not hearing God the way that I heard got at one point,” and I guess the possibility of change is not there [laughs]. And so it's like, if I'm not getting that same experience, then something has gone terribly wrong or whatever, and I need to get back there. I would just really encourage people to drop that way of thinking [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely.
Sy Hoekstra: It is okay if your relationship with God changes, the way that you communicate with God changes.
Jonathan Walton: There's nothing healthy about a plant that stays the same size over year's time.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly.
Jonathan Walton: Man.
Sy Hoekstra: Alright, Jonathan, you talked about this one a little bit already, but I wanted to talk about our relationships with churches and the institutions of churches. Did you have more to say on that, or was…?
Jonathan Walton: Well, yeah. I think something that is intriguing to me, and I dabble in thread and Facebook debates sometimes just to ask questions.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: And just as an example, and friends, I again, in the just modeling the growth and change and willingness to ponder in a way that doesn't shake my salvation, I'm gonna try to model that. And so a question that came up for me yesterday while I was on threads, there's a man named Eugene Kim, who I've just followed for a little while.
Sy Hoekstra: He's a pastor, right?
Jonathan Walton: He was a pastor, and he is a pastor now, but they just launched this thing called the Wild Fig organization. And so essentially, they're trying to decentralize the church and say, there are lots of people who follow Jesus and wanna organize in ways that are transformative and help for them in their walks with God. And we just need to figure out a different way of credentialing people than getting folks organized around this man who we believe is God named Jesus.” And there's another thing like this out in Seattle called Dinner Church, where a church sold their building, and they have 25 dinner churches where people come to church to have dinner, and they just eat and talk about God, almost like they did in Acts. Whoopitty.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: And so that's what they're doing, and they're actually putting pastors in these house churches just to be present at these dinner churches. And so there are people who would say, “No, we cannot do that.” Like, I remember sitting down with a pastor in New York City who was just like, “Jonathan, I don't think that you should do campus ministry, because it should be done in the church.” And I was like, “Oh, well, I think this meeting is over.”
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: “And I hope you pay for this food.” But all that to say it's like, that was one conversation. Another conversation was like, “If you do that, what about the traditions of the church?” All of these things. And I'm like, I hear you on the tradition, but why are we choosing to model some things from Acts and then saying other things we can't do anymore? Seems like the Great Commission commissioned all people to baptize. Seems like the Great Commission commissioned all people to… like 2 Corinthians and the model about how to take communion. I don't see where that says I can't do that at home, because they were done in homes. So all of this. Some people say that's great, some people say you can't do that.
But when I was specifically looking at the Wild Fig network yesterday in this threads conversation, someone said, “You're doing a heretical thing, you're breaking off. And if you wanna join anything, just go back to the Catholic Church, because that is where it all began.” And I thought to myself, and this is a genuine question, and I haven't seen his response yet, but I said, “Did Jesus come to build the Catholic Church?” There may be, very well be an argument for that that I'm not aware of because I'm not Catholic. Right?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, there definitely is [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: There definitely is [laughter]. And so I am wondering what that means, as someone downstream of colonization, abuse, violence and oppression, coupled with the Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, and every other Western faith, political faction that decided to join themselves on the colonialist project, I wonder if Jesus came to build the Catholic Church. And there's 1500 years of arguing about that and making that case to be true. At the same time, I'm like, 1 Corinthians one, when Paul is writing to the church at Corinth, he says, “Some might be for Paul, some might be for Cephas, which is Peter. Some might be for Apollos, but the reality is, we all need to be for Jesus.”
So if this person is making an argument against pastor Eugene Kim, I'm like, “Why are you saying he can't go do that? What's the goal?” Because if Eugene goes and baptizes a thousand people, and all these people come to faith and it's an amazing thing, what is the loss for the kingdom? You know what I mean?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Well, so here's the loss. I still don't think this is correct, but the loss from the Catholic perspective is you only can experience the fullness of the revelation of the Spirit of God within the Catholic Church. That is where it happens, and it happens nowhere else, and it cannot happen anywhere else.
Jonathan Walton: Now see, okay, this is where I would push back ridiculously hard.
Sy Hoekstra: I mean, me too, but yeah [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and using Peter, Peter in Acts chapter 10 has a very specific way that he thinks the Spirit of God is being revealed. And God blows that wide open first with a vision for him. The sheet comes down, look at this three times, three times, three times. Then the same thing for Cornelius. And so if we try to limit the spirit or movement of God, we will fail. So why do that [laughs]? There's so many points in scripture where God is breaking through in ways that we cannot fathom or recognize.
Sy Hoekstra: Amen to that.
Jonathan Walton: And so, I think the thing about the church, I'm like, it's evolving for me, not in the Darwin way, but just like a development. Because to be like, “Oh, evolution,” because we have these wrong conflations in our brain. But my faith is evolving, but I'm not moving farther away from Jesus, and that includes the church. Because similar to you, I would say I am closer to Jesus than I was when I was 17 years old… 16 when I got thrown across the parking lot on a motorcycle, or 19 years old when Ashley told me to follow… Ashley Byrd, me and Sy’s staff worker for InterVarsity, invited me to follow Jesus. I'm still close, I'm closer to Jesus than I was then, and I've been a part of very different churches and all those things.
So my relationship with God is predicated on my adoption into the capital “C” Church, not the specific church on my block in my neighborhood, or where I gather with folks. And so I'm grateful that the rapture catches all of us and not just insert your denomination here.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So for me, I am less engaged than I used to be, but that's because what I used to do was let Christian community and Christian programming activity take up the vast majority of my free time, because I thought we had something to prove as a community. You know what I mean? Like, I thought you had to be, it's a little bit vague what I thought I think, or a little bit blurry to me now. But it was something along the lines of, some interpretation of the idea that we're the hands and feet of Jesus, or we are here to testify to him and his goodness as a community. That meant that you had to be super involved in your community. You had to be something to prove the worthiness of God, basically.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is completely the opposite of what I now think, which is that no matter what your community is, the fact that God loves you is the proof of the worthiness of God [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: You don't have to prove nothing. Similar to my quiet times and everything, it took a lot of the pressure off of my need to be involved in religious activity, and therefore it decreased, but not in like a I'm leaving the church way, just in what I think is a healthy way [laughs]. I am now very suspicious if I go to a church and the consistent thing that they are telling people to do in terms of discipleship is just get more involved in that church's programming. As opposed to being something in their neighborhood, or trying to turn outwards in some significant way. That, to me, is a big ol’ red flag. I'm constantly now thinking about what is reasonable to expect of a church, versus what I would have want a church to ideally be.
I think this happens to everyone as they grow up a little bit, is you start to see the inner workings of a church and how just very ordinary and sometimes petty and gross, it can be.
Jonathan Walton: [laughter] Ordinary, petty and gross.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's just another fallen institution [laughs]. And people have all their own little individual problems, and some of those problems are big and some of them are small. And it's just not that different than any other organization. And that is disappointing if you think it's supposed to be this shining beacon on a hill, which is actually a metaphor for the kingdom of God, and not your individual neighborhood’s church [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, yes, yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Scripturally speaking. I think about that balance more, like what can I reasonably expect versus what would I ideally want this institution to be? And from what I've talked to, like Christians who are much older than me, that never changes. That's the mature way to go about [laughter] looking at a church. You just, you have to do it that way, and not just think of the church as this thing that needs to be something that is like this shining example to the entire world of how to do or be something. And this is especially true in a context where we have the idols of empire built in. I have to go to my church in New York City in 2024 and I have to recognize this is a culture that is filled with greed and self-interest.
And so odds are, this church is also going to be filled with greed and self-interest. So what can I reasonably expect from this church [laughter]? That's part of it. And again, it's just reality. It's sad. It's a thing that I had to work through emotionally. But it is also a reality that you have to come to terms with.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: I'm much more ready to walk out of a church when I hear nonsense than I used to be [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: I'm just willing to go. Thanks.
Sy Hoekstra: Which I don't necessarily… that doesn't even mean like leave the community and turn my back on everyone. I just mean if I hear some nonsense from the pastor, I can go home, and that's okay [laughter]. And I've done that a few times. I had this one pastor a while back who just got on a streak. I don't know what happened, man, but it was this one month where at maybe two or three of the sermons he just said some stuff that was super ableist. I don't know what happened. He never even talked about people with disabilities before, and all of a sudden it's like, got to bring disabled people up all the time. You got to say really nonsense, insensitive, ridiculous stuff.
And there was one time I just left. I was like, “I'm gonna go to the bathroom.” And then I came out of the bathroom and I was like, “Actually, I'm not going back in there.”
Jonathan Walton: [laughter] Right. Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: I just remember looking at the door back into the service and the door to leave the building, and the choice could not have been clearer [laughter]. It was like a hundred percent of me wants to go this way, zero percent of me wants to go that way.
Jonathan Walton: Brunch with Jesus. I’m gonna leave now. Yeah, that makes sense.
Sy Hoekstra: Alright, Jonathan. Last question. How have things changed between you and the rest of the world [laughs]? The people outside of the church? How are you thinking differently? I'm sure there's a lot to say here, but…
Jonathan Walton: Lord have mercy. Okay, so I can be friends with non-Christians…
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Not every woman in the world, their primary relationship to me is I shouldn't sleep with them.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see.
Jonathan Walton: So either this woman is my wife or a temptation. Like that…
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I got you.
Jonathan Walton: This is a human being made in the image of God that I am incomplete without on this side of heaven [laughs]. Like God desires shalom between me and her or them. It's a group. Also, it's very possible to be generous to people, and if it doesn't go against my taxes, it's still a great thing to give to. Friends, there's so much crap in that, and I wanted to say the other word.
Sy Hoekstra: Churches make a big deal out of that your gift here will be tax deductible or whatever [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And institutional giving or whatever, and you're just like, “No, actually, I can tithe to the guy on the corner who needs a sandwich.”
Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely. I also think that, along with the every, I can be friends with non-Christians, and this is still actually hard for me, is I can learn from people that don't believe in Jesus the same way I do.
Sy Hoekstra: Is it hard for you? Because I think sometimes, like we were talking about Valarie Kaur the other day, the seek prophet who says amazing things and you were…
Jonathan Walton: Yes, yes, yes. So here's what I mean by that. And I think my wife is the one who challenges me on this.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay.
Jonathan Walton: It's very different to learn from someone online and through their books, but she said, “Jonathan, when you have relationships with people, intimate relationships with them,” she said, “It doesn't register for me as you're talking with them, Jonathan, that you want to learn from them.” And I'll also be really honest, my pastor told me this. When I first met him, he invited one of his friends over, and we wanted to have this conversation. And I asked him, I said, “What was that like for you?” And he said, “Well, it seemed like you were not interested in getting to know us. You just wanted to know what we thought about these things.” And that to me, is something that I'm like, oh.
I believed, past tense, and I'm still working through that, I think my relationship with God is based upon my utility to people around me, and if I'm not useful, then I'm not valuable. And if I believe it about myself, I'm gonna reflect that outwards.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And so, something that bothers me that I'm still working through is, how can I be in relationships with people and learn from them, and not require them to change or grow in some way or become or believe like me, those things would probably be the biggest, but that last one is probably… I mean, all of those I'm still working through, but that last one is the most potent right now as I try to make friends and be in community with people. What about you?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, the friends with non-Christians thing is funny to me. The specific thing for me is that I'm not trying to, it's similar, I'm not trying to convert and change everybody. There was a while when I was young kind of late teens or early 20s, where I literally thought just every interaction I had with a non-Christian had to be toward the end of making them a Christian at some point.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And I now realize that ensuring the salvation of anyone, including myself, not my job [laughs]. No one ever said that was my job in the Bible, at least. And my job is to talk about the truth, like talk about what has happened in my life, but that's all I got to do. Just talk about it [laughs]. I got to testify to the truth, and that does not mean that I need any individual person ever changes as a result [laughter]. That is not part of my job. I want people to know Jesus, but that's different than thinking that everything I do must be toward some end of like, honestly kind of manipulating people into [laughs] that, which is the constant evangelical tendency, hell being the biggest manipulator. “Do this or you will be tortured forever,” and framing it that way.
We're constantly framing things in terms of manipulating people to just be one of us. I don't do that anymore. Thank goodness [laughs]. And stuff like that that makes me, I look back and I'm always like, I don't think that anything I was involved in actually meets the definition of a cult. But there was some cult-y aspects of it, for sure [laughs]. There was some stuff in there that was [laughs]9 weird in terms of how you related to other people. I'm much less suspicious to the rest of the world. I don't think the rest of the world, kind of like you said about women, just anybody in general, isn't trying to tempt me out of something or send me down a wrong road, which then allows me to enjoy, not just learning from people like you said, but also just beauty and joy in places that I couldn't, I wasn't allowed to find it before.
A result of all that is people are no longer projects to me. This is all very similar to what you said, actually. So I think those are my main ones. And I said the last thing was the last question, but I actually did have one more question written down here. Do you wanna [laughter] go through that one too, or no?
Jonathan Walton: I mean, I think we've talked about this a lot where it's like, your last question being, how has my relationship and view of God changed?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And what I would say is… and you said this way back in the podcast already. I'm trying to live in the reality that God actually loves me and he actually loves other people, and that's just true. And that can be my posture bent orientation to the world at all times. And to live in that quote- unquote, belovedness is really, really, really difficult in a extractivist, culturally colonized, post-plantation, capitalistic society.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: It's really, really hard when every single thing that I was raised to do goes against just receiving anything.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] I mean, that's why the grace of God is confounding. But all that to say, I think I'm trying to live in that. And I think teaching my children that has taught me that more than anything.
Sy Hoekstra: Early on in my faith, one of the seeds that I think God planted really early on was, and I've talked about this before. I had a lot of trouble with the idea of hell when I was considering following Jesus. And the way that that got resolved for me was to stop, I stopped asking questions about the unfairness of the idea of hell, because I came to trust Jesus as a person and say, “Whatever thing is going on there with these problems, with the unfairness of hell that I have, Jesus did something to himself. God did something to himself in the form of the cross that was also extremely unfair [laughs], actively harmed himself in order to get us to trust him.” You know what I mean?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Actively harmed himself, is maybe a weird way to put it. Like, lived in such solidarity with us as humans, and especially as oppressed and vulnerable humans, that he died and had some terrible spiritual fate that people characterize in different ways, depending on what denomination you're from or whatever, happened to him [laughs]. And that then makes me trust him and ask questions about, why would God do this to God's self?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Why would God do this to himself, as opposed to, why would God do this to us? And I decided to follow and trust Jesus before I really had answers, or had passed through all the different theologies of hell or any of that stuff. And so the seed there is talking about truth and talking about faith as trust in a person, and not as belief in specific doctrines or trust in specific doctrines. And I've leaned way into that. That's the thing that has grown over time and has replaced a lot of the anxiety and trust that I was putting in other things that were either of my own effort, or what other people told me I had to believe or whatever, is trust in God the being, like the spiritual entity with which I have actually interacted and I know and I love.
And that part of my faith has just grown, I think, exponentially, and has allowed me to be okay with things I don't understand. And I have long term things that I don't understand, that I do not have answers to that make me uncomfortable. And still be okay with that [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, because it's about a relationship, not perfect understanding at all times.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And if you trust God, you don't have to understand all things, just like we trust people, even though we don't understand every single thing about them.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, which is different than trusting God as a replacement for understanding [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So let's get into our segment Which Tab Is Still Open, where we dive a little deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletters. And remember, you can get our newsletter for free just by going to KTFPress.com, and signing up for our mailing list. You'll get recommendations on articles, podcasts and other media from both of us on things that will help you in your political education and discipleship. Plus you'll get reflections to keep you grounded and hopeful as we engage in this challenging work together, news about what's going on with KTF and a lot more. So go get that free subscription, and if you want to, you should become a paid subscriber at KTFPress.com.
So this week, Sy, we're gonna be talking about the war in Sudan. Can you summarize the main points for us?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, sure. And I know there are some people who know nothing about this war, so I will give kind of all the basics here. Basically, Sudan has been at war for about a year and a half, since April of 2023. And it's between two state-armed factions, one is the regular military, and the other is kind of a paramilitary force that was set up at one point that were supposed to kind of integrate into each other, and instead they were fighting over power. But what they had done previously together was to suppress the popular uprising that began in 2018 and it was to oust the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir, and it had started as these organizations called neighborhood resistance committees all over the country.
It's a little bit tough to document how many of them there are, but they're these highly localized, very fluid groups that don't have a single leader who are doing all kinds of political organizing at a local level all around the country, coordinating with each other incredibly well, and also providing mutual aid and humanitarian aid as this war goes on. They basically organized these sit ins where they had, I mean, I don’t remember the numbers, a ton of people in Khartoum trying to get rid of, Khartoum is the capital, trying to get rid of al-Bashir, and they successfully did it. And then they had a whole plan to transition to an actually civilian-led democratic government, but they were sort of beaten back by military and this other paramilitary group in a coup in 2021.
So there was an attempt for a couple of years to really transition Sudan to a democracy government accountable to the people, and it did not work because of this counter revolutionary coup. And so the resource that I had was this podcast from Truthout that's called Movement Memos, and they were talking to two members of the Sudanese diaspora in Canada who, one of the main points they were trying to make was that this is a counter revolutionary war. A lot of the media will portray it as a civil war, and really it is forces fighting over who gets power after basically pushing people down. Racism is a big part of the context of this too, because a lot of the elites, the military and the paramilitary elites, and everybody who’s in charge of the country are Arabic. Like ethnically or racially Arabic. And a lot of the people from the South and from the resistance committees who are part of the revolutionary groups are Black.
So I think a lot of the reason that we haven't talked about this is the US is not directly involved. There are things that the US does that create some problems, like the sanctions that we still have on Sudan. But the reason everyone needs to care about this is, first of all, about fifteen or sixteen thousand people have died, which is not on the same scale of death as Palestine exactly or whatever, not to minimize those deaths or anything, but they have created the largest displacement crisis anywhere in the world. There are more than eight million people who have been displaced by this war. There's famine and starvation happening. Surrounding countries are refusing refugees. In some cases, Egypt has been doing this for some time.
The guests of the podcast are really saying that these neighborhood committees are the people who need outside support the most, because there's, a lot of the NGOs and everybody have fled. So amidst this humanitarian crisis, these people on the ground doing this mutual aid are the only people keeping people alive. And they actually gave a link, which I will provide, to an organization called the Sudan Solidarity Committee I believe. I can’t remember the last word. Sudan Solidarity something, where you can just donate money directly to these resistance committees. They're getting it to them via PayPal, and people are just dispersing it as needed. And it's direct giving. It's nothing paternalistic.
You're just giving them money, and they're doing with it what they need. And apparently a lot of the Sudanese diaspora is trying to support this group, but they can't do it on their own, and a lot of them are struggling with their own, all the financial issues that come around immigrating to other parts of the world. So yeah, we'll have the link for that in the show notes. Jonathan, that’s a lot of information I just gave. I just kind of wanna know what it is that you think about this whole situation, your reaction to it, anything about the podcast that you thought was interesting.
Jonathan Walton: So one thing that's really important to me is history. And fortunately, whether we're talking about Gaza, whether we're talking about Haiti, whether we're talking about Hawaii, whether we're talking about any of these places, really anywhere that colonization has touched, there's a history.
Sy Hoekstra: Yes. They get into that in the podcast too.
Jonathan Walton: They do. They get into it in the podcast, because history, we need to understand how we got here to be able to make something different. And what I thought was normal and revolutionary is what the scholars who are participating and being interviewed and things like that, have done with their education. So the folks they're interviewing got their education here in the West with a mind for liberation of their own people, but not their own people, understanding how this racially assigned group downstream of colonialism called Black is basically undergirding the entire economy in the world for the last 350 years. We have to engage with that as a reality, that Africa as a continent can hold the United States, China, Russia and Europe in it with room to spare. The second largest rainforest in the world is in the Congo.
We've got these huge, massive amounts of resources in Africa, not just but also including its people who have been enslaved in various ways by various groups for the last 400 years. So it's helpful just that background that was provided, and then how that trickles down into then conflict in Sudan.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Can I just note one interesting fact that they've mentioned?
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.
Sy Hoekstra: That I don't think we think about a lot, is when the colonial government left Sudan, they just vacated 800 government administrative positions or something. I can't remember what the exact number was. It was hundreds. They just vacated them. They did nothing to transition them. They didn't find people to fill them. They just left them empty [laughs]. And what do you think is gonna happen when you just create a massive power vacuum like that, with no transitional plan? You get a dictator, shocking. You know what I mean [laughs]? You get a dictator doing the exact same thing that the colonialist government that came before it did, which was effectively be a dictator.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely. Because whoever had access to power post the colony is the people that colonizers empowered the majority of the time. Those educated folks, those are the people with power and resources. And so what do they do? We do what's been taught to us because we're hundreds of years removed from our own ways of leadership, our own matrilineal, patrilineal, or communal ways of governing and dividing ourselves and working together. And so all we have is the master's tools, as Audre Lorde would say. And so I think that connection to history, the connection to globalized blackness, and then just the ridiculous amount of coordination that I think, in the United States and in more resource places gets minimized, but in order, and this is where I might, “Oh, Jonathan, you’re a Marxist,” and da da da.
But let's lean on the reality that something Ta-Nehisi Coates said, and something will come up in the newsletter is, the way that we organize ourselves and the way that we exist together in the world is not inherent. We need to have nations that do X, Y and Z. That's a young system. Sharing is as old as we are, and so could we as followers of Jesus, as people who want to see beauty, love, justice and all these things flow in the world, just connect with our neighbors in ways that are transformative and helpful to say, “You are going through something, let me leverage my creative capacity and imagination to create ways that you can get what you need?” And I shared a video on Instagram today of a young woman named Taylor was sharing from North Carolina.
She said, “If we can precision bomb people in a building a world away, we can precision guide food to people who need it.” We can do that. And so what I am empowered by, Munther Isaac said this similarly with what's happening in Gaza, when you are forced to be creative, that is where Jesus is, and that's where we can learn. And I think followers of Jesus like me in Bayside, I'm like, “Oh it's so hard for me to buy nothing and figure out this free thing and do this and do that.” And it's because I could just go to Target. I could just order on Amazon, but we don't have to do that. And I was emboldened and encouraged and empowered by the creativity, because I wonder what would happen if we learned from these people.
Instead of creating a new way to do things when there's a crisis, we could actually create new ways to do things before the world is just destitute. And so I'm praying for the folks of Sudan. I wanna share [laughs] the ways to give. I'll probably sign up to give myself and then just would God move in us the way he has moved in them to mutually help and care for one another amid such destitution.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. One of the things that the guests said about the neighborhood resistance committees, that I thought was really interesting was, they were like, these committees are running services. Like they're providing food. In a couple cases, they actually took over abandoned hospitals and reopened them, found doctors and staffed them and get supplies there, whatever. They are running the country in a way that these paramilitary organizations are not. And they are out there actively proving we don't need these people [laughs]. We don't need these people, we can run the garment ourselves[laughs]. We can run the country ourselves. We have the energy to do it. We need the resources to do it. We could do so much more if there wasn't so much violence and displacement and poverty and famine.
But yeah, that kind of imagination, that kind of, you're right. That kind of necessity has created in them just an incredible capacity to share and to love each other, frankly. And I also hope that we learn from that. But at the same time, that's why they've seen so much violence and repression, is because they are threatening the power structure. And not only that, but when they were doing the sit ins a few years ago, and they ousted Al-Bashir, there were other countries starting to look to them for similar resistance. There are people in, like they mentioned specifically in the podcast, there’re people in Lebanon looking at Hezbollah and going, “Could we do something about this?” [laughs]
People in other countries are actually looking to these Sudanese organizations. And so the ruling power structures have to shut that down. And it means that there are other countries involved in helping them shut it down. So it's like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and other countries that are not interested in seeing revolutions like this [laughs] are involved, are providing weapons, are doing all kinds of things and just interfering in a regional way, in the way that we as the US are used to doing globally all the time.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: This particular conflict, the US doesn't see as being as closely aligned with its interests as say, defending Israel, or now empowering Israel to go invade other countries.
Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Which is what has just started as we are recording this. I'm sure we'll have more to say about that.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: So go listen to this podcast. Go read more about this conflict in the media. The reason we wanted to bring it up is, I didn't wanna become the thing I'm critiquing and not talk about Sudan just because it doesn't affect the US. But man, the media is not talking about Sudan when we should be. So please go listen to this podcast. The link will be in the show notes, please just go learn more. Give if you can. They're asking for 10 Canadian dollars a month, which is like 7.50 US [laughs]. So please, if you have some money to spare, there are people in desperate need of it who are doing very good things with it. Alright, I'm gonna wrap us up there. Thank you so much for listening today. Jonathan, thank you for a great conversation, as always.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.
Sy Hoekstra: Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale. Editing by Multitude Productions. And the producers of this show are the lovely paid subscribers. Again, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at KTFPress.com, get all the bonus episodes of this show, join our monthly Zoom calls, comment on our blog, on our Substack, and more. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you in a couple of weeks for what I think will be the… yeah, will be the last show that we do before the election. So we'll be talking more about some current affairs then, and doing a great interview. So we will see you in two weeks.
Jonathan Walton: Stay blessed y’all.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: That was the first advo—like [sound of something repeatedly hitting the mic hard]whoa, hit the mic [laughter]. My first quote- unquote, advocacy poem that I wrote, for sure.
Sy Hoekstra: But can you say that again, just without laughing or hitting the mic [laughs]?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and slapping the mic? Yeah.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
Today, we’re talking with veteran activist and theologian, the one and only, Lisa Sharon Harper! The conversation covers:
- Lisa’s journey finding Jesus outside of Whiteness and White evangelicalism
- The centrality of advocating for political and institutional policy change to our faith in Jesus
- How respecting the image of God in all people is the starting point for following Jesus to shalom
- The unavoidable job we have to speak truth, even when it is costly
- Where Lisa finds her hope and motivation to keep going
- And after that, we reflect on the interview and then talk all things Springfield, Ohio and Haitian immigrants.
Mentioned on the episode:
- Lisa’s website, lisasharonharper.com/
- Lisa’s Instagram and Facebook
- The Freedom Road Podcast
- Lisa’s books, Fortune and The Very Good Gospel
- Make a donation to The Haitian Community Support and Help Center in Springfield, Ohio via PayPal at [email protected].
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Lisa Sharon Harper: I would lose my integrity if I was silent in the face of the breaking of shalom, which I learned in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, is built on earth through structures. It doesn't just come because people know Jesus. Two thirds of the people in the Bosnian war knew Jesus. The Croats were Christian and the Serbs were Orthodox Christian, and yet they killed each other. Massacred each other. Unfortunately, knowing Jesus is not enough if you have shaped your understanding of Jesus according to the rules and norms of empire.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. We have a great one for you today. We are talking to veteran organizer and theologian Lisa Sharon Harper, someone who a lot of you probably know and who was pretty big in both of our individual kind of stories and development as people who care about faith and justice when we were younger people, which you will hear about as we talk to her. We are going to be talking to her about the centrality of our voting and policy choices to our witness as Christians, the importance of integrity and respecting the image of God in all people when making difficult decisions about where to spend your resources as an activist, where Lisa gets her hope and motivation and a whole lot more.
And then after the interview, hear our reactions to it. And we're also going to be getting into our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our weekly newsletter that we send out to our subscribers. This week it will be all about Haitian immigrants to America in Springfield, Ohio. You will want to hear that conversation. But before we get started, Jonathan.
Jonathan Walton: Please friends, remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to support this show and get access to everything that we do. We're creating media that centers personal and informed discussions on politics, faith and culture that helps you seek Jesus and confront injustice. We are resisting the idols of the American church by centering and elevating marginalized voices and taking the entirety of Jesus' gospel more seriously than those who narrow it to sin and salvation. The two of us have a lot of experience doing this individually and in community, and we've been friends [laughs] for a good long time. So you can trust it will be honest, sincere, and have some good things to say along the way.
If you become a paid subscriber, you'll get access to all of our bonus content, access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats with me and Sy, and the ability to comment on posts and chat with us. So again, please go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber today.
Sy Hoekstra: Our guest today, again, Lisa Sharon Harper, the president and founder of Freedom Road, a groundbreaking consulting group that crafts experiences to bring common understanding and common commitments that lead to common action toward a more just world. Lisa is a public theologian whose writing, speaking, activism and training has sparked and fed the fires of reformation in the church from Ferguson and Charlottesville to South Africa, Brazil, Australia and Ireland. Lisa's book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World, and How to Repair It All was named one of the best books of 2022 and the book before that, The Very Good Gospel, was named 2016 Book of the Year by The Englewood Review of Books. Lisa is the host of the Freedom Road Podcast, and she also writes for her Substack, The Truth Is…
Jonathan Walton: Alright, let's jump into the interview.
[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Lisa Sharon Harper, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yay, I'm so excited to be here, and I'm here with a little bit of a Demi Moore rasp to my voice. So I'm hoping it'll be pleasant to the ears for folks who are coming, because I got a little sick, but I'm not like really sick, because I'm on my way, I'm on the rebound.
Sy Hoekstra: So you told us you got this at the DNC, is that right?
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yes, I literally, literally, that's like what, almost three weeks ago now?
Sy Hoekstra: Oh my gosh.
Jonathan Walton: You’ve got a DNC infection. That's what that is.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Lisa Sharon Harper: I have a DNC cough. I have a DNC cough, that's funny.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: So before we jump into our questions, I wanted to take a momentary trip down memory lane, because I have no idea if you remember this or not.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.
Sy Hoekstra: But in January of 2008, you led a weekend retreat for a college Christian fellowship that Jonathan and I were both in.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, I do remember.
Sy Hoekstra: You do remember this? Okay.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Absolutely.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Lisa Sharon Harper: I remember almost every time I've ever spoken anywhere.
Sy Hoekstra: Wow, okay.
Lisa Sharon Harper: I really do. And I remember that one, and I do remember you guys being there. Oh my gosh, that's so cool.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: You remember that. That's amazing.
Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no.
Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Hang on. Wait a minute [laughter]. We don’t just remember it. Because, so you gave this series of talks that ended up being a big part of your book, The Very Good Gospel.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And you talked specifically about the difference between genuine and pseudo-community and the need to really address each other's problems that we face, bear each other's burdens, that sort of thing. And you did a session, which I'm sure you've done with other groups, where you split us up into racial groups. So we sat there with White, Black, and Latine, and Asian, and biracial groups, and we had a real discussion about race in a way that the community had absolutely never had before [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: And it actually, it is the opening scene of Jonathan's book. I don't know if you knew that.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my God, I didn't know that.
Jonathan Walton: It is.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Which one?
Jonathan Walton: Twelve Lies.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow, I didn't know that. Oh my gosh, I missed that. Okay.
Sy Hoekstra: So it was a… Jonathan put it before, it was a formative moment for everybody and a transformative moment for some of us [laughter] …
Lisa Sharon Harper: Oooooo, Oh my goodness.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: …in that we learned a lot about ourselves and what we thought about race, what other people thought about race. I will tell you that in the five minutes after the session broke up, like ended, it was the first time that my now wife ever said to me, “Hey, you said something racist to me that I didn't like.” [laughs] And then, because of all the conversation we just had, I responded miraculously with the words, “I'm sorry.” [laughter].
Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my God!
Sy Hoekstra: And then we went from there.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Miraculously [laughs]. That’s funny.
Sy Hoekstra: So I have lots of friends that we can talk about this session with to this day, and they still remember it as transformative.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my Gosh. Wow.
Sy Hoekstra: All of that, just to lead into my first question which is this, a lot of people in 2016 started seeing kind of the things about White evangelicalism that indicated to them that they needed to get out. They needed to escape in some way, because of the bad fruit, the bad political fruit that was manifesting. You saw that bad fruit a long time ago.
Lisa Sharon Harper: A whole long time ago.
Sy Hoekstra: You were deep in the Republican, pro-life political movement for a little bit, for like, a minute as a young woman.
Lisa Sharon Harper: I wouldn't… here's the thing. I wouldn't say I was deep in. What I would say is I was in.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay.
Lisa Sharon Harper: As in I was in because I was Evangelical, and I identified with itbecause I was Evangelical and because my friends identified with it. So I kind of went along, but I always had this sense I was like standing on the margins looking at it going, “I don't know.”
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: You know what I mean? But I would say literally for like a minute, I was a believer. Maybe for like, a year.
Sy Hoekstra: But my question then is, what were the warning signs? And then, separately from what were the warning signs that you needed to get out, who or what were the guiding lights that showed you a better way?
Lisa Sharon Harper: My goodness. Wow. Well, I mean, I would say that honestly… Okay, so I had a couple of conversations, and we're talking about 2004 now. So 2004 also, this is right after 2000 where we had the hanging chads in Florida.
Sy Hoekstra: Yep.
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And we know how important voting is, because literally, I mean, I actually believe to this day that Gore actually won. And it's not just a belief, they actually counted after the fact, and found that he had won hundreds more ballots that were not counted in the actual election, in Florida. And so every single vote counts. Every single vote counts. So then in 2004 and by 2004, I'm the Director of Racial Reconciliation for greater LA in InterVarsity, I had done a summer mission project that wasn't really mission. It was actually more of a, it was a pilgrimage, actually. It was called the pilgrimage for reconciliation. The summer before, I had done the stateside pilgrimage. And then that summer, I led students on a pilgrimage through Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia asking the question, “How is shalom broken? And how is shalom built? How is it made?”
And through both of those successive summer experiences, it became so clear to me, policy matters, and it matters with regard to Christian ethics. We can't say we are Christian and be, in other words, Christ-like if we are not concerned with how our neighbor is faring under the policies coming down from our government. We just can't. And as Christians in a democracy, specifically in America, in the US where we have a democracy, we actually have the expectation that as citizens, we will help shape the way that we live together. And our vote is what does that our vote when we vote for particular people, we're not just voting for who we like. We're voting for the policies they will pass or block. We're voting for the way we want to live together in the world.
So in 2004 when I come back from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, I'm talking with some of my fellow staff workers, and I'm saying to them, “We have to have a conversation with our folks about voting. I mean, this election really matters. It's important. ”Because we had just come through the first few years of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like Iraq had just erupted a couple years before that, Afghanistan the year before that. And we were seeing young men coming back in body bags and this war, which had no plan to end, was sending especially young Black men to die because they were the ones…and I know, because I was in those schools when I was younger, and I alsohad been reading up on this.
They're the ones who are recruited by the Marines and the Army and the Navy and the Air Force, especially the army, which is the cannon fodder. They're the ones who are on the front lines. They are recruited by them more than anybody else, at a higher degree than anybody else, a higher percentage ratio. So I was saying we have to have a conversation. And their response to me in 2004 was, “Oh, well, we can't do that, because we can't be political.” I said, “Well, wait, we are political beings. We live in a democracy.” To be a citizen is to help shape the way we live together in the world, and that's all politics is. It's the conversations we have and the decisions that we make about how we are going to live together.
And so if we as Christians who have an ethic passed down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and we have the 10 Commandments, which is like the grand ethic of humanity, at least of the Abrahamic tradition. Then, if we don't have something to say about how we should be living together and the decisions we make about that every four years, every two years, even in off year elections, then what are we doing here?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Who are we? Like, what is this faith? What is this Christian faith? So that was my first real rub, because I had experienced the pilgrimage to reconciliation. I had seen, I had rolled through. I had walked on the land where the decisions that the polis, the people had made, had killed people. It had led to the death of millions of people. Thousands of people in some case. Hundreds of people in other cases. But when coming back from Bosnia, it was millions. And so I was just very much aware of the reality that for Christians, politics matters because politics is simply the public exercise of our ethics, of our Christian ethic. And if we don't have one, then we're… honest, I just, I think that we are actually turning our backs on Jesus who spent his life telling us how to live.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And so that was, for me, literally that conversation with that staff worker was kind of my first, “Aha! I'm in the wrong place.” I needed to learn more about how this public work works. How do systems and structures and policies and laws work? So that's what actually brought me, ended up bringing me a year later, to Columbia University and getting my master's in human rights. And I knew, having had the background in the two pilgrimages and the work that we did on the biblical concept of shalom at the time, which was nascent. I mean, it was for me, it was, I barely, really barely, understood it. I just knew it wasn't what I had been taught. So I started digging into shalom at that time, and then learning about international law and human rights and how that works within the international systems.
I came out of that with a much clearer view, and then continued to work for the next 13 years to really get at how our Christian ethics intersect with and can help, and have helped shape public policy. And that has led me to understand very clearly that we are complicit in the evil, and we also, as Christians, other streams of our faith are responsible for the redemption, particularly in America and South Africa and other places in the world.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So I think I'm placing myself in your story. So I think we intersected in that 2005, 2008 moment. So I've traveled with you.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, we had a good time. It was so much fun.
Jonathan Walton: We did. It was very good. So getting to follow, watch, learn, just for me, has been a huge blessing. First with the book, with New York Faith and Justice, reading stuff with Sojourners, grabbing your books, gleaning different wisdom things for… it's something that I've wondered as I'm a little bit younger in the journey, like as you've operated in this world, in the White Evangelical world, and then still White Evangelical adjacent, operating in these faith spaces. And now with the platform that you have, you've had to exercise a lot of wisdom, a lot of patience and deciding to manage where you show up and when, how you use your time, how you manage these relationships and keep relationships along the way. Because you didn't drop people.
Lisa Sharon Harper: I have. I have dropped a few [laughter]. I want to make that really clear, there is an appropriate space to literally shake the dust.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: I think what I have not seen you do is dehumanize the people in the places that you left.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, thank you. Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And that's hard to do, because most people, particularly my generation, we see the bridge we just walked across, and we throw Molotov cocktails at that thing [laughter].
Lisa Sharon Harper: Y'all do. Your generation is like, “I’m out! And you're never gonna breathe again!” Like, “You're going down!” I'm like, “Oh my God…” [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: It's quite strong with us [laughs]. And so could you give any pieces of wisdom or things you've learned from God about navigating in that way. Things that we can and folks that are listening can hold on to as things shift, because they will shift and are shifting.
Lisa Sharon Harper: They always shift, yeah, because we are not living on a book page. We're living in a world that moves and is fluid, and people change, and all the things. So I think that the best advice that I got, I actually got from Miroslav Volf. Dr. Miroslav Volf, who is a professor at Yale University, and he wrote the book that really kind of got me into, it was my first book that I ever read that was a book of theology, Exclusion&Embrace. And when we went to Croatia, we met with him. We met with him in the city of Zadar on the beach [laughs], literally over lunch. It was just an incredible privilege to sit down with him. And I've had many opportunities to connect with him since, which has been a privilege again, and just a joy.
But he said to our group, our little InterVarsity group. And that's not at all to minimize InterVarsity, but we had a real inflated sense of who we were in the world. We thought we were everything, and we thought we were right about everything. And so here we are going through Croatia, which had just experienced a decade and a little bit before, this civil war. And it wasn't really a civil war, it was actually a war of aggression from Serbia into Croatia, and it was horrible. And it turned neighbor against neighbor in the same way that our civil war turned neighbor against neighbor. So literally, these towns, you literally had neighbors killing each other, you just were not safe.
So basically, think Rwanda. The same thing that happened in Rwanda, around the same time had happened in Croatia. And so Miroslav is Croatian, and the lines by which things were drawn in Croatia was not race, because everybody was White. So the lines that they drew their hierarchy on was along the lines of religion. It was the Croats, which were mostly Catholic, mostly Christian. Some not Catholic, they might have been Evangelical, but they were Christian. And then you had the Bosniaks, which were Muslim, and the Serbs, which were Orthodox. So that was the hierarchy. And when you had Milošević, who was the president of Yugoslavia, who was trying to keep that Federation together, Yugoslavia was like an amalgamation of what we now understand to be Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.
So he was trying to keep all of that together, and when he then crossed the lines, the boundary between Serbia and Croatia and invaded and just began to kill everybody, and the Serbs then went to his side, and the Croats went over here, and the Bosniaks were caught in the middle, and people just died. And they chose sides and they killed each other. And so we sat down to do lunch with Miroslav Volf, and in that context, interfaith conversation was critical. It was and is, it continues to be. One of the main markers of where you find healing, it's where you find interfaith conversation in Croatia and also Bosnia and Serbia. And so we, in our little Evangelical selves, we're not used to this interfaith thing.
We think of that as compromising. We think of that as, “How can you talk to people and gain relationship with and actually sit down and…?” And he was challenging us to study this scripture with other people of other faiths, and study their scriptures. He was like, “Do that.” And so our people were like, “How can you do that and not compromise your faith?” And here's what he said. He said, “It's easy. Respect. It's respect, respecting the image of God in the other, the one who is not like me. That I, when I sit down and I read their scriptures with them, allowing them to tell me what their scriptures mean.” Not sitting in a classroom in my Evangelical church to learn what the Muslim scriptures say, but sitting down with Imams to understand what the Muslim scriptures say and how it's understood within the context of that culture.
That's called respect for the image of God. And there's no way, no way for us to knit ourselves together in a society, to live together in the world without respect. That's baseline. That's baseline.
Jonathan Walton: As I'm listening, I'm thinking, “Okay, Lisa made choices.” She was like, “We are gonna not just do a trip. We're gonna do a trip in Croatia.” And so as you're going on these trips, as you were having these conversations, you're making choices. There's decisions being made around you, and then you get to the decision making seat. And how that discernment around where to place your energy happens. So something that's at the top of mind for me and many people listening is Palestine.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: So how did you decide at this moment that, “Hey,this is where my energy and time is coming. I'm going to Christ at the Checkpoint. I'm going to talk with Munther. I'm going to be there.”How did that rise to the surface for you?
Lisa Sharon Harper: It's funny, because I have, really have been advised, and in the very first days of the conflict, I was advised by some African American leaders, “Don't touch this. Don't do it. You're going to be blacklisted.”
Jonathan Walton: I heard the same thing, yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: “Don't do it. You're gonna find you're not invited to speak anywhere.” Da da da da. Sometimes these decisions are just made to say, “I am going to act in the world as if I don't know what the repercussions are, and I'm just going to do the thing, because my focus is not focused on the repercussions.” I mean, in some ways, in that way, I do think that my constitution is the constitution of a warrior. Warriors go to battle knowing that bullets are flying all around them, and they just choose to go forward anyway. Somebody who cared, and not just cared, but I think there's a moment where you begin to understand it's that moment of no turning back. It's the moment when you stand at the freshly buried graves of 5000 Muslim boys and men who were killed all in one day by bullet fire in Srebrenica.
It's the moment that you drive through Bosnia and you see all of the graves everywhere. Everywhere, especially in Sarajevo, which experienced a siege, a multiyear siege by Serbia. And they turned the soccer field, which at one point was the focal point of the Sarajevo Olympic Games, they turned that into a graveyard because they ran out of space for the graves. When you roll through Georgia, and you go to Dahlonega, Georgia, and you go to the Mining Museum, which marks the very first gold rush in America, which was not in California, but was in Dahlonega, Georgia, on Cherokee land, and you hear the repercussions of people's silence and also complicity.
When they came and they settled, they made a decision about how we should live together, and it did not include, it included the erasure of Cherokee people and Choctaw people and Chickasaw people, Seminole people, Creek people. And you walk that land, and the land tells you. It's so traumatic that the land still tells the story. The land itself tells the story. The land bears witness. When you stand on that land and the land tells you the story, there's a moment that just happens where there's no turning back and you have to bear witness to the truth, even with bullets flying around you. So with regard to Palestine, having done what now goodness, 20 years of research on this biblical concept called shalom, and written the book, The Very Good Gospel, which really lays it out in a systematic way.
I would lose my integrity if I was silent in the face of the breaking of shalom, which I learned in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, is built on earth through structures. It doesn't just come because people know Jesus. Two thirds of the people in the Bosnian war knew Jesus. Two thirds. The Croats were Christian and the Serbs were Orthodox Christian, and yet they killed each other. I mean, massacred each other. Unfortunately, knowing Jesus is not enough if you have shaped your understanding of Jesus according to the rules and norms of empire. So we actually need international law. We need the instruments of international law. That's what stopped the war there. And they failed there too, but they also have been an intrinsic part of keeping the peace and also prosecuting Milošević. Solike making sure that some measure of justice on this earth happens, some shadow of it.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And what are we told in scripture in Micah 6:8, walk humbly with God. Do justice. Embrace the truth. So I think that when I saw on October 7, the breach of the wall, the breach of the gate and then the massacre at the festival, I grieved. I really grieved. And I was scared, really scared for the nation of Israel, for the people who were there. And I began to ask questions, because I've learned the discipline of not dehumanizing. Because to dehumanize is to break shalom. It's one of the first things that happens in the breaking of shalom and the eradication of it. And so part of what I had to do if I was going to consider Palestinian people human was to ask what has happened to them that would cause them to take such violent and radical action. How did we get here? Is the question.
And the narrative that I heard from Israel, from the state of Israel, from the leaders of the state of Israel, which had been marched against by their own people just the week before that, and weeks for like a month or two before that, they were trying to depose the leadership of Israel because they were trying to turn their state into a fascist state. I was watching that as well. Trying to take the power of the judiciary away so that they could increase the power of the Prime Minister. So what does it mean then? What does it mean that this happened? And I was listening to the way that the narrative that Netanyahu was giving and his generals and the narrative they were giving is, “These are monsters. They are terrorists. They are evil. They are intrinsically, they are not human.”
And I knew when I saw that, when I heard that, I thought Bosnia. I thought Rwanda, where they called the other cockroaches. I thought South Africa, where they called Black people not human, monsters, who need to be controlled. I thought Native Americans, who were called savages in order to be controlled, in order to have the justification of genocide. I thought of people of African descent who were brought in death ships across the Atlantic to South America and Central America and Mexico and North America in order to be used to build European wealth and they were called non-human. And even according to our own laws, our constitution declared three fifths of a human being.
So when I heard Netanyahu and his generals dehumanizing the Palestinians, I knew, that for me was like the first signal, and it happened on the first day. It was the first signal that we are about to witness a genocide. They are preparing us. They are grooming us to participate in genocide. And I, as a theologian, as an ethicist, as a Christian, would lose my credibility if I remained silent and became complicit in that genocide through my silence. Because having studied the genocides that I mentioned earlier and the oppressions that I mentioned earlier, I know that most of those spaces were Christian spaces.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And they happened, those genocides and those oppressions were able to happen because Christians were silent.
Jonathan Walton: Gathering all that up, I think… I mean, we've had Munther on this podcast, we've talked with him throughout the years. When he said, “The role of Christians is to be prophetic, to speak prophetic truth to power,” something clicked for me in that as you're talking about our witness being compromised, as you are saying, “Hey, let's ask this question, who does this benefit? What is happening?”
Lisa Sharon Harper: That's right.
Jonathan Walton: The reality that he said, “All of us are Nathan when it comes to empire. We are supposed to be the ones who say this is wrong.” And that resonates with what you said, like how can I have integrity and be silent? Genocide necessitates silence and complicity in that way from people.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. And here's the thing. How are you gonna go to church and sing worship songs to Jesus on Sunday and be silent Monday through Saturday witnessing the slaying of the image of God on earth. You hear what I'm saying?
Sy Hoekstra: Yes.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Like my understanding of shalom now is not just we do these things in order to be nice and so we live together. It is that shalom is intricately connected with the flourishing of the kingdom of God.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Lisa Sharon Harper: It is the flourishing of the kingdom of God.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And the kingdom of God flourishes wherever the image of God flourishes. And the image of God is born by every single human being. And part of what it means to be made in the image of God is that humans who are made in the image of God exercise agency, stewardship of the world. And the most drastic example or practice of warfare against the image of God is war.
Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs]. Absolutely.
Lisa Sharon Harper: War annihilates the image of God on earth. It is a declaration of war, not only on Palestinians or Gazans or even Israel or the empire anywhere. It is a declaration of war against God. It is a declaration of war against God.
Sy Hoekstra: A phrase that has stuck in my head about you was from one of the endorsements to your last book Fortune. Jemar Tisby described you as a long-distance runner for justice.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] That’s awesome.
Sy Hoekstra: That always struck me as accurate.
Jonathan Walton: That is great.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Not a sprinter.
Jonathan Walton: No.
Sy Hoekstra: Not a sprinter.
Lisa Sharon Harper: That was really pretty cool. I was like, “Oh Jemar, thank you.” [laughter]
Jonathan Walton: I need that. We just in here. That's great [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: So here's the question then, where does your hope and sustenance, how do you get that? Where does it come from?
Lisa Sharon Harper: Honestly, it comes from focusing on the kingdom. Focusing on Jesus. Focusing on doing the kingdom of God. And when you do it you witness it. And when you witness it, you get hope. I mean, I've learned, even in the last year, an actual life lesson for me was hope comes in the doing. Hope comes in the doing. So as we do the kingdom, we gain hope. As we show up for the protests so that we confront the powers that are slaying the image of God on earth, we gain hope. As we speak out against it and form our words in ways that do battle with the thinking that lays the groundwork for ethics of erasure, we gain hope because we're doing it. We see the power.
The kingdom of God exists wherever there are people who actually bow to the ethic of God. Who do it. Who do the ethic of God. You can't say you believe in Jesus and not actually do his ethic. You don't believe in him. What do you believe? He never said, “Believe stuff about me.” He said, “Follow me.” He literally never said, “Believe stuff about me.”
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Lisa Sharon Harper: He said, “Follow me. Do what I do. ”And that's ethics. That's the question of, how do we live together in the world?? So we do and we gain hope.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: I like that. That reminds me of Romans 5: There’ll be glory in our suffering. Suffering produces perseverance, character, and character hope. It's like, it's not an intuitive thing necessarily, if you haven't done it before. But that's great, and that's a really, I like that a lot as a place for us to end [laughs]. To get out there and do it, and you will find the hope as you go.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: Can you tell us where people can find you or work that you would want people to see of yours?
Lisa Sharon Harper: Absolutely. Well, hey, first of all, thank you guys so much for having me on, and it's been really a joy to start my day in conversation with you. Y'all can follow what I'm up to at Lisasharonharper.com. I live on Instagram, and so you can [laughter], you can definitely follow on Instagram and Facebook. And Freedom Road Podcast is a place where a lot of people have found the conversation and are tracking with it. And I'm always trying to have guests on that are pushing me and causing me to ask deeper questions. And so I really, I welcome you to join us on Freedom Road.
Sy Hoekstra: Yes. I wholeheartedly second that.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And of course, the books [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And of course, the books.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Fortune, Very Good Gospel, all the rest.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: Lisa Sharon Harper, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a delight.
Jonathan Walton: Thank you so much.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Thank you Sy. Thank you, Jonathan.
[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, that was a fantastic discussion. Tell me what you are thinking about coming out of it?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think one, is just it's just really helpful to talk with someone who's been around for a while. I think most of us… I'm 38 years old, but let's just say millennials and younger, we don't consume or receive a lot of long form content.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: And we don't also engage with people who are willing and able to mentor us through difficult situations. We're getting sound bites from TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and we don't get the whole of knowledge or experiences. So listening to Lisa talk about, “I grabbed this bit from L.A., I grabbed this bit from Palestine, I grabbed this bit from Croatia, I grabbed this bit.” We cannot microwave transformation. We cannot have instant growth. There is no, let me go through the side door of growing to maturity in my faithfulness and walk with Jesus.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: There is just doing it. And so when she said, “I find the hope in the doing,” you don't learn that unless you have done stuff. That's a big takeaway. I also appreciated just her take on the genocide in Palestine. And because she was mentored and has talked with Miroslav Volf, she knows what it smells like, because she's done the work in her own history of her own background. If you have not read Fortune, go read the book. The reason Black folks cannot find who we [laughs] come from is because they were enslaved and killed. The reason we cannot find the indigenous and native folks we were related to is because there was genocide. So there's these things.
And she goes through that in her book, and to talk about how to wield our stories when we don't have one, or how to wield a story of tragedy to turn it into something transformative, is something I admire, appreciate and hope that I can embody if and when the time comes for myself, when I have collected and grown and have asked similar questions. I'm appreciative of what she had to say. And you know, I know I asked her the question about not burning things down, and so I appreciated that [laughs] answer as well. Like, there's just a lot of wisdom, and I hope that folks listening were able to glean as well.
Sy Hoekstra: I totally agree with all that. I think all that was very powerful. And there isn't it… kind of reminds me of when her book we've mentioned a few times, The Very Good Gospel, came out. It came out in 2016, but like I said, when we were talking to her, the stuff that was in that book she had been thinking about for more than a decade at that point. And it was very clear. When I was reading it, I was like, “Oh, this is Lisa's bag—this is what she was talking to us about when we were in college in 2008.”
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: At that camp, but she'd been thinking about it for even longer than that. It was just like, you can tell when something isn't like, “Oh, I had to research this because I was gonna write a book about it, so I had to learn about it.” You know what I mean? You can tell when someone does that versus when someone's been soaking in a subject. It's like marinating in it for 12, 15, years, or whatever it was. She just has a lot of that stuff [laughs]. You know what? I just used the image of marinating and marinating and microwaving are very different things [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, that is true.
Sy Hoekstra: One takes a lot longer.
Jonathan Walton: Put a steak in a microwave, see if you enjoy it [laughter].
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so I totally agree with all that. I came out of it thinking a lot about how the things that she said thematically kind of connected to some thoughts that I've had, but also just in terms of historical events. Because I told her this after the interview, when I moved to Switzerland in 2001 I was 13, my family moved over there. It was just at the end of the Yugoslavian Civil War, which was what she was talking about Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia. And Switzerland took in a ton of refugees from that war.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So my neighborhood, there was a big apartment complex. I mean, big for Swiss standards, kind of small honestly for American standards. But there's an apartment complex around the corner from my house that they had put a bunch of Bosnian refugees in. And their school was right down the road, the public school. And so my neighborhood in high school was like the kids playing around in the streets and in the playground or whatever were Bosnian refugees. And the combination of the three countries, Serbian, Croatia and Bosnia, used to be one big thing called Yugoslavia, right.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And the first two syllables of the word Yugoslavia were in Switzerland, a slur for anyone who was from that country. And there was just a ton of bigotry toward them, basically because they displayed poverty [laughter]. Like they were one of the most visible groups of poor people in Zurich. And again, like Lisa said, this wasn't about racism. Everybody's White. But you're talking about like there were ethnic differences and there was class differences. And people dismissed them for their criminality, or for how the young men would get in fights in bars and on the streets or whatever, and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know how a lot of refugees from the Somalian war ended up in Minneapolis and St Paul, just like where a lot of them were placed in the US, and then a lot of them moved into North Dakota.
It's like, a lot of… which is where my family's from. I've been there a lot. I hear a lot of people talking about the politics in that region. And you would hear similar stuff about them, except that it was about race. That it was, “Oh, we have crime now because we have Black people and we haven't before.” I mean, obviously Minneapolis, they did, but not really in the parts of North Dakota that my family's from. And so it was this lesson for me about the thing that Lisa was talking about, respect for the image of God in all people and how when you bring people who are somehow differentiable [laughter] from you, somebody who's from another grid, you can call them a different class, a different race, whatever, we will find any excuse to just say, “Oh, these are just bad people,” instead of taking responsibility for them, loving our neighbor, doing any of the stuff that we were commanded to do by Jesus, to the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant in our midst.
We will find whatever dividing lines we can to write people off. It can be race, it can be poverty, it can be, it doesn't matter. It's not what we should actually be saying about poverty or violence, or the fact that people are getting mugged or whatever. What we should be saying is we have a bunch of people who just got here from a war torn society. They were cut off from education and job skills and opportunities and all kinds of other things. And this is, when you just stick them in a society that treats them like garbage, this is what happens every single time, without fail. And so what we need to do is [laughter] be good neighbors.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Treat people well and forgive when people wrong us and that sort of thing. And we just will find any excuse in the world not to do that. And it's because we are not starting from that place that Miroslav Volf, who I love by the way, said to Lisa, is the place where you have to start everything when it comes to these kinds of conflicts, which is respect for the image of God in other people. The fact that they didn't do that in Yugoslavia led to slaughter en masse, but it still happens when you leave and you put yourself in a different context. There's still that lack of respect, and it's still harming people, even when there's quote- unquote, peace.
Jonathan Walton: This opens up another can of worms. But I thought to myself…
Sy Hoekstra: Go for it.
Jonathan Walton: …it's much easier to say, “I just don't want to help,” than it is to say, “This person's evil,” or, “These people are bad.” Because I think at the core of it, someone says, “Is this your neighbor?” Jesus says, “Is this your neighbor?” And the Jewish leader of the day does not want to help the Samaritan, whatever the reasoning is. Right?
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Jonathan Walton: We're trying to justify our innate desire to not help our neighbor. As opposed to just dealing with the reality that many of us, when we see people who are broken and messed up, quote- unquote broken, quote- unquote messed up, quote- unquote on the opposite side of whatever power dynamic or oppressive structure that is set up or has just made, quote- unquote poor choices, some of us, our gut reaction is, I don't want to help them. And if we would just, I think just stop there, be like, “My first inclination is, I'm not interested in helping them.” And paused it there and reflected on why we don't want to do that internally, as opposed to turning towards them and making them the reason. Because they were just sitting there.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: The person on the street who's experiencing homelessness was just sitting there. The one in 10 students in New York City that is homeless is just sitting there. They're just there. And so if we were able to slow down for a second and say, “Why don't I want this person to live in my neighborhood, in my own stuff? Well, I don't like change. I'm afraid of this being different. I'm uncomfortable with different foods. I'm afraid of my favorite coffee shop or restaurant being taken away. I'm uncomfortable around people of different faiths. I feel weird when I don't hear my language being spoken.” If we were able to turn those reflections inward before we had uncomfortable feelings, turned them into actions, and then justified those actions with theology that has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus, then I wonder what would be different. But that that slowing down is really hard, because it's easier to feel the feeling, react, and then justify my reaction with a divine mandate.
Sy Hoekstra: Or just plug those feelings into stereotypes and all of the existing ways of thinking about people that we provide for each other so that we can avoid doing that very reflection.
Jonathan Walton: That's all that I thought about there [laughs]. I’m going to be thinking about that for a while actually. So Sy, which tab is still open for you? We're going to talk about a segment where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. And remember, you can get this newsletter for free just by signing up for our mailing list at KTFPress.com. You'll get recommendations on articles, podcasts and other media that both of us have found that will help you in your political education and discipleship. Plus you'll get reflections to keep us grounded, from me and Sy that help keep us grounded every week as we engage in just this challenging work and together in the news about what's happening and all that.
You can get everything I'm just talking about at KTFPress.com and more. So go get that free subscription at KTFPress.com. So Sy, want to summarize that main story point for us?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I mean, this is interesting, because when I wrote about this, which is the story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, it was two days after the debate, and the story has only exploded since then, and I think a lot of people kind of probably have the gist of it already. But some completely unfounded rumors based on fourth hand nonsense and some blurry pictures of people that have nothing whatsoever to do with Haitian immigrants started spreading online among right wing conspiracy theorists saying, for some reason, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Stealing, kidnapping and eating the resident’s pets.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And the absurdity of this story was immediately apparent to me being someone who married into a Haitian immigrant family, Haitians do not eat cats and dogs [laughs]. It's a ridiculous thing to have to say, but I say it because I understand, maybe you have no, maybe you know nothing whatsoever about Haiti and you think, “Well, I don't know. There are some cultures around the world where they eat animals that we think of as pets or that we don't think of as food or whatever.” And like, okay, fine, that's true. It's not Haiti, though.
Jonathan Walton: Right [laughter].
Sy Hoekstra: The idea of eating a cat or a dog to a Haitian is as weird to them as it is to us. I promise you, I've had so much Haitian food [laughter]. So basically this rumor spread, Donald Trump mentions that the debates and now there are Proud Boys in Springfield, Ohio, marching around with cat posters and memes. There are people calling in bomb threats to schools and to government buildings, to all other institutions in Springfield. The Haitian population is very afraid of Donald Trump. At this point, we're recording this on Friday, September 20, he has said that he will travel to Springfield, and basically everyone there has said, “Please do not do that. You're only going to stoke more problems.”
And every last piece of evidence that has been offered as evidence, which was always pretty weak in the first place, has been debunked at this point. There was one, the Vance campaign just recent, the past couple days, gave a police report to the Washington Post and said, “See, we found it. Here's a woman who actually filed a police report that says that my Haitian neighbors took my cat and ate my cat.” And the Washington Post did what, for some reason Republicans never expect journalists to do, and actually did their job and called up the woman who said, “Oh, yeah, I filed that report, and then I found my cat in my basement, and they were fine.” [laughs]
Jonathan Walton: Yes. In her house.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And so I don't know, there have been a couple of blips like that where somebody is like, “See, I found evidence,” and then someone was immediately like, “That's not actually evidence.” There have been rumors of other rallies or whatever. It's basically just becoming a focal point and a meme for all of Trump and his supporters, immigration resentment.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: There was a story today about people in Alabama being concerned about, some small town in Alabama being concerned about becoming the next Springfield because they had 60 Haitian immigrants in their town of 12,000 people [laughs]. I don't know. It's all just bizarre. The main actual point though, around the actual immigration policy stuff, Gabrielle and a few other people, my wife's name is Gabrielle, and a few other Haitians that I've seen comment on this, keep bringing up the Toni Morrison quote about how racism is a distraction from actual issues.
Jonathan Walton: That is literally what I was gonna read.
Sy Hoekstra: There you go. Okay [laughs]. So the actual issue here is that there's this community of about 60,000 people in Ohio that has had an influx of about 15,000 Haitian immigrants, and so it's a lot of strain on the schools and housing and stuff like that, which those are real questions. But also, the Haitian immigrants are there because the local economy revitalization efforts led to a bunch of manufacturers coming into Springfield and having more jobs than laborers, and explicitly saying, “We need you to bring in more laborers.” And so they were Haitian immigrants who are legally in the country [laughs], who have social security numbers and temporary protected status at the very least if not green cards or whatever, have been filling these jobs, and not remotely even a majority of these jobs.
They're just filling in the extra 10, 15 percent or whatever the workforce that these manufacturers thought they needed. And the story has become, “Haitians are taking our jobs,” which is absolute nonsense.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So those are the main points of the story. Sorry, I talked a while. I have a lot of feelings about this one [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: No, I mean…
Sy Hoekstra: But Jonathan, what are your thoughts?
Jonathan Walton: For a good reason. Let me just say this quote by Toni Morrison, “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, and you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” So along with that Toni Morrison quote, I want to put that side by side with this quote from Robert Jones Jr.'s National Book of the Year, The Prophets.
“To survive this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by the Toubab.” Toubab is a Western and Central African word for colonizer, European. “They push people into the mud and then call them filthy. They forbade people from accessing knowledge of the world, and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted and bleeding and can do no more, than they called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs, and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts and called the pieces savages. They stepped on people's throats with all of their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe.”
“And then when people made an attempt to break the foot or cut it off one they screamed, “Chaos,” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order. They praised every daisy and then called every blackberry a stain. They bled the color from God's face, gave it a dangle between its legs, and called it holy. Then when they were done breaking things, they pointed to the sky and called the color of the universe itself a sin, [black]. And then the whole world believed them, even some of Samuel's [or Black] people. Especially some of Samuel's people. This was untoward and made it hard to open your heart to feel a sense of loyalty that wasn't a strategy. It was easier to just seal yourself up and rock yourself to sleep.”
That to me, like those two quotes together. So the Son of Baldwin, Robert Jones Jr, great follow on Substack and that quote from Toni Morrison, an iconic Black female writer, wrote Beloved, The Bluest Eye, those two things together, like what racism does to a person. The giving up, the I just, “What can I do?” and the distraction for the people who do have effort, are just two roads that I wish we just didn't have to go down. But most people will spend our energy either resigned because we've spent too much or pushing against the lie as the powers that be continue to carry out genocide, continue to extract limestone from Haiti, continues to extract resources from Haiti, continue to destroy African economies through extraction in the Congo and Benin and all the places.
And so my prayer and longing is that the resilience of the Haitian people and the legacy of Toussaint and all of that would be present in the people that are there and the diaspora. And I believe that is true. And I pray for safety for all of the people that still have to live in this, what is fastly becoming a sundown town.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Jonathan Walton: It's a very real thing. And I talked to someone else. Oh, actually [laughs], it was a DM on Instagram that I sent to Brandy, and she agreed that there's a lot of PTSD from when Trump was president, because things like this got said every day.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: All the time. And downstream of rhetoric are real actions, like lawyers and taxi drivers being mobilized to go to the airport to try and get the, quote- unquote, Muslim banned people now representation and get them to their destinations. You had very real terrible child separation that happened, that children are still separated from their families right now. And so downstream of all this stuff, are real, real concrete actions. And I am praying that… my daughter asked me this morning, Maya, she said, “Do I want Trump to win, or do I want Harris to win?” And I said, “Maya, I hope that Trump does not win.” She goes “Well, if Harris wins, will it be better?”
I said, “It depends on who you ask, but I think there will be a better chance for us to move towards something more helpful if Trump does not win.” And then she said she knew some people who are supportive of Trump, and I told her things that her eight year old brain cannot handle.
Sy Hoekstra: But wait, what does that mean? [laughs]
Jonathan Walton: I just started breaking down why that is because I couldn't help myself.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, why people support him.
Jonathan Walton: Why people would support him.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, okay.
Jonathan Walton: And then she quickly pivoted back to Story Pirates, which is a wonderful podcast about professional improvisational actors telling kid stories like Cecily Strong and things like that. It's hilarious. But all that to say, I think this is a prime example of the type of chaos and environment that is created when someone like Trump is president and the cameras are on him at all times. And I hope that is not the reality, because he absolutely does not have any meaningful policy positions besides Project 2025. I don't know if you saw… I'm talking a lot. He was in a town hall in Michigan, and someone asked him what his child care policies were. Like what actionable policy does he have? And he said a word salad and a buffet of dictionaries that you don't know what he was talking about.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: It was nonsense that somehow ended up with immigration being a problem.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And so I think that the worst factions of our country will have a vehicle to live out their worst fantasies about deportations and violence and racism, White supremacy and patriarchy and all those things, if he becomes president. And that's really sad to me, and I think it's a preview of that is what's happening in Springfield right now.
Sy Hoekstra: Here’s another angle on this. And it fits into everything you just said, but it's just from a different angle, bringing a little bit of Haitian history here. The Haitian Revolution is probably, I can't say that I've read everything to guarantee this, is probably the greatest act of defiance against White supremacy that the world has ever seen. For those who don't know, it happened right after the American Revolution, it was just the enslaved people of the island of Saint-Domingue, which is now Haiti in the Dominican Republic, rising up and overthrowing the French and taking the island for themselves and establishing, like writing the world's second written constitution and establishing basically the world's second democracy.
Really the world's first actual democracy [laughs] if you think about how American democracy was restricted to a very small group of people. If you read things that people in colonial governments or slave owners throughout the Western Hemisphere wrote and like when they spoke to each other about their fears over the next decades before slavery is abolished, Haiti is constantly on their minds.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: They never stop talking about it. It's actually mentioned in some of the declarations of secession before the Civil War. When the states wrote why they were seceding, it was like, “Because the Union wants Haiti to happen to us.” For the plantation owners to be killed. It was an obsession, and so the colonial powers in Europe, you may have read some of the work that the New York Times did in the New York Times Magazine last year, maybe it was two years ago, about this. But the amount of energy from European powers that went into making sure that Haiti as a country never had access to global markets or the global economy, that they were constantly impoverished.
They were still finding ways to extract money from Haiti, even though it was an independent country. The fact that the US colonized Haiti for almost 20 years in the early 20th century, like the ways that we have controlled who is in power in their government from afar. We've propped up some of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world, honestly. We have been punishing and making sure that everybody knows that the defiance of white supremacy that Haiti showed will never be tolerated.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And so it is so easy for Haitians at every stage to become a scapegoat for whatever anxiety we have about the world becoming less White, the world becoming less of like under our control. Haitian immigrants were the reason that we started using Guantanamo Bay as a prison. They were the first people that we ever imprisoned there. We changed our policies, we like… Do you know for a long time, they wouldn't let Haitian people donate blood in America?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Because we said they'd had HIV. They had dirty blood, is what we said about them for years. Haiti is not at the bottom because of its choice. That's what we're constantly telling ourselves. Pat Robertson went on his show after the earthquake in 2010, and said the reason that these things still happen to Haiti is because they did Voodoo before their revolution, because they're pagans or whatever. We will make up any reason to not just take responsibility. Again, like with the Bosnians, the Somalis, we make up any reason to not just take responsibility for our actions.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And this is just a continuation of that. And I don't know that I have a further point beyond that, other than to say, everything that Trump and Vance and the Proud Boys and all of them are doing in Springfield right now is just a continuation of that. “You're immigrants that we will call illegal, even though you're not right and you are Black. Your whole pride in your culture and your history is about the way that you defied White supremacy, and you're foreign to us, and you are strange. And we will say that you do things like eat cats that you don't do, and we will just believe it, because we don't actually want to know anything about you other than that you are a monster who defies the way that the world should be ordered.”
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: I'm trying to stop myself from tearing up right now, and I don't know that I have points beyond this. Do you know what I mean? I'm just angry because this is like people, this is my wife and my daughter. I'm probably just taking time now to do what I should have done earlier in this process, which is just feel all the sadness and the anger. But that is what I feel. The Trump and Vance and the people that are a part of his movement are just horrifying. The fruit of their way of seeing the world is just evil, and I think that's where I'm leaving it for now [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities and spiritual wickedness in high places. And the very thing that Haitian people are called, evil, voodoo all those things, is what White supremacy is.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: That is evil, and that is wicked, and it has been at work for centuries. And in Jesus name, as Connie Anderson would pray in the work she does with White people around White supremacy and leaving that behind, and she says she just prays that it would be overthrown. That demonic power would be overthrown, and people would be disobedient to that leaning.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And I pray the same would be true for many, many people before and after the polls close on November the 5th.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So in the newsletter, I put an email address where you could send a PayPal donation to the local Haitian community center. We'll have a link to that in the show notes too. The Haitians on the ground, especially some of the pastors and the churches there, are doing some incredible work to try and keep the peace. I think people have been overlooking that. There was a decent Christianity Today article on kind of what's going on the ground in Ohio, but it really focused on what the local White churches are doing to help [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And I really need people to focus on the Haitians, like what is actually happening there, and the fact that there are White supremacists marching around the town. And how terrifying that has to be for them, and how the people who are doing the work to keep the peace there are heroic, and they should not have to be. And they deserve all of our support and all our prayers. So I appreciate anything that you can, any intercession that you can do, any money that you can give. Any support that you can be. Any help that you can be just spreading the truth to people who may not be wanting to hear it or who might not be hearing it from their news sources right now,
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: We're gonna end there, then. Thank you so much for listening. Please remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber and support everything we're doing, the media that we're making here. Get the bonus episodes to this show, come to our monthly Zoom calls to have a chat with me and Jonathan about everything that's going on in the election. Bring us your questions, get access to comments on our posts and more please, KTFPress.com, become a paid subscriber.
Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robin Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale. Editing by Multitude Productions. The show is produced by our paid subscribers. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we will see you in two weeks.
Jonathan Walton: Bye y’all.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Alright, Lisa, let's jump into it. How are you? That’s not it.
Sy Hoekstra: What?
Jonathan Walton: [laughter] Hold on. I thought that would be funny.
Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, she's not here.
Jonathan Walton: I know, right?
Sy Hoekstra: She was here last week.
Jonathan Walton: It's true.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.ktfpress.com
Today’s bonus episode is the recording of our most recent monthly subscriber Zoom conversations. This is the second of these we’ve released (the first was here). Give them a listen and join us for the next one! In this episode, the group discusses:
- Books and other resources that have been particularly helpful in spiritual formation
- Emoti…
-
Today, we’re talking all about the recently-released Confession of Evangelical Conviction:
- What the confession is and what it says
- Why we signed it and got involved promoting it
- How the American church got to the point where a confession of very basic political theology like this is necessary
- And after that conversation, we talk the many layers of Christian nationalism involved in the debacle at Trump’s recent trip to Arlington National Cemetery
Mentioned on the episode:
- The Confession of Evangelical Conviction, and the associated resources
- The video we produced to promote the confession
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
Introduction
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Sy Hoekstra: When we first started doing this work and we published our anthology, we went on a couple of podcasts about it. A common thing that people asked of us at the time was, where do you think the White American church, where do you think the like 81 percent of the church, the White evangelical church that voted for Trump is going? And the first time I said it, I sort of surprised myself and I was like, look, it's being cut off the vine for not bearing good fruit and thrown in the fire. There's been a long time coming of a divorce, like a complete split between White evangelicals in America and followers of Jesus.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: We have a great show for you today. We're doing something a little bit different. We are talking about a bit of a movement, a little, a confession that we have signed onto that we're a part of that we're producing some media around that you may have seen by the time this episode comes out. And it's a confession of sort of evangelical faithfulness to Jesus in a political context. And it is probably a little bit off the beaten path of kind of some of the political commentary that we normally engage in. And we wanted to talk to you about why we think it is a good and strategic thing for us to do during this season, give you some of our thinking behind how we kind of strategize politically and think about ourselves as part of a larger theological and political movement.
So I think this will be a really good conversation. We're also gonna get into our Which Tab Is Still Open and talk to you about Christian nationalism and whiteness through the lens of Donald Trump doing absurd things at Arlington National Cemetery [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: But we will get into all of that in a moment. Before we do, Jonathan Walton.
Jonathan Walton: Hey, remember, if you like what you hear and read from us at KTF Press and would like for it to continue beyond the election season, I need you to do two things. Go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber. Now, you could also tell other people to do that as well if you've already done that. We've got a ways to go if we're going to have enough people to sustain the work, but we think it's valuable, and I hope you do too. So go to KTFPress.com, sign up, and that gets you all of the bonus episodes of this show, access to our monthly Zoom calls with the two of us and more. So again, KTFPress.com. Become a paid subscriber.
What is the Evangelical Confession of Conviction, and Why Is KTF Involved?
Sy Hoekstra: All right, Jonathan, let's get started in our conversation. We've signed onto this document called The Confession of Evangelical Conviction. We've produced some media around it. First of all, what is it and what does it say?
Some Basic Political Theology That We Need to Restate at This Cultural Moment with Unity
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Well, I think the question of what it is, it's words [Sy laughs]. Like there's these things that we put together, it's words. And I think the reason that it's powerful is because of when and how it's said. And so these are basic confessions that every Christian should believe, but it seems like the reason that we're doing it right now and that I've signed onto is because there are seasons when the discipleship and formation of the church needs to be plain and centered. And so being able to say, “I give allegiance to Christ alone,” and then have that be reverberated across denominations, across movements of quote- unquote, Christians around the country that are usually so disparate, they usually don't communicate, they usually disagree with each other in very public ways, to say, “Hey, hey, hey.”
We need people to understand who don't follow Jesus, that when Gandhi said, “I like Christ, I don't like Christians,” that's part of the problem. We are part of that problem. Where we don't articulate what we know, what we believe, what we know to be true. I think this is an articulation of that, speaking particularly to a cultural and political and social moment that needs the clarity that Jesus can bring.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So this is just to get into the weeds of it. It's a confession signed by I would say, the sort of extreme ends, at least to the people that we know about right now, I don't know who's gonna sign it in future, but center-right to more progressive left. And the basic confessions, like the seven statements of the confession are, “We give our allegiance to Jesus Christ alone. We will lead with love, not fear. We submit to the truth of Scripture. We believe the Gospel heals every worldly division. We are committed to the prophetic mission of the Church. We value every person as created in God's image.” And “We recognize godly leaders by their character.” So this is very basic theology [laughs] like you said. And you got a little bit at why it matters to put this out there, why we are involved. I agree with you. I think it's more about the context and it's also about who is saying it more than it is about the content.
Because, and by the way, we should say we are giving you our reasons for signing this and why we think it's important. This is not… like there's a group of people that were involved in writing it, so there's lots of people involved who we don't know precisely why they signed [laughs] or precisely why the people who wrote it decided it was necessary. We're talking to you about our opinions. So to me, if you have something that says we pledge our allegiance to Christ alone, that's a rebuke of Christian nationalism to me.
We judge godly leaders by their character, that's a rebuke of people who argue that Trump is a godly leader or a leader who has been appointed by God in some way or another. So those are important things to say. And it's with people across a pretty big spectrum of, as I said, the political range. Would Jonathan and I go a lot further than this if we said what we thought is important for political discipleship? Yes, we would, and you know that, because you've heard our other episodes. Or if you haven't, go listen to our other episodes [laughs]. We would go a lot further than that, yes. But we think, I think it's good to work with a broad range of people during a political campaign.
Reaching a Broad Audience and Pushing the American Church to Change
Sy Hoekstra: Like I think when you're talking about discipleship at a moment when tensions are extremely high around theology and politics, it is good to do these kinds of things where you are trying to scale your efforts.
Where you're trying to reach as many people as possible in the hopes that you will change some minds, both so that they will more faithfully follow Jesus, and in this specific context, so they won't vote for Donald Trump. That's one of my personal reasons for being involved in this [laughs]. And that's how you do campaigns in general. That's how campaigns operate. You try and call as many people as you can. You try and put commercials out there as widely as you can toward your targeted audience, whatever. Not in the hopes that the vast majority of the people who see it are going to suddenly be like, “Oh my goodness, I agree with everything you say,” but in the hopes that you'll reach enough of the people whose minds you can change to make a difference in their decision when it comes to November.
You will reach them and you will start to be one of the people who affects their choices, is what I'm trying to say. So I don't know, that's kind of the strategy of it from my point of view. It is a similar way of thinking to me from the anthology. When we published the anthology four years ago, it was different because we were letting people say their own beliefs. And it was people from all over the spectrum kind of saying why they weren't voting for Trump in whatever way they saw fit [laughs], on whatever topic they saw fit. That was our approach. But this is the way some other people are going to do it, and we're gonna be happy to work with them in that way.
Jonathan Walton: I think for me, I see the political strategy of it. I see the strategery that's happening, to use a word from SNL. My hope is that…
Sy Hoekstra: From SNL 25 years ago [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. My hope… [laughs]. It was such a great sketch. “Strategery,” it was so good. “I'm the decider” [Sy laughs]. So I think one of the things that stands out to me, particularly in reviewing it more and assign it and then come on board, is, I hope that this is a Belhar Confession type moment for the United States and followers of Jesus. Particularly, because when we look at the Dutch Reformed Church, the Dutch Reformed Church was the theological backbone and framework for apartheid in South Africa. They gave the covering for those things to happen. It gave theological and moral legitimacy to a movement that was oppressive, violent, exploitative, and un-Christian at every level. Because there are Christian leaders who are willing to say, “You know what? This is really good. This is actually right. This is good and just, and God intended this.” And we have the exact same type of nonsense happening in the United States.
There are quote- unquote, prophets and apostles and preachers and teachers and publishing houses and Amazon independent book publishers rolling out materials that say, “America first.” America is the kingdom of God. America is the kingdom of heaven. America is this baptized land on the earth, as opposed to being a land that is rooted in land theft, genocide, violence, patriarchy, greed and exploitation. Which it is that. It's actually not the kingdom of God at all. And so I hope that this creates a groundswell that goes beyond November 5th and beyond January 20th. And could this be a pivot point of orientation for people who followed Jesus to say, “You know what? Actually Jesus didn't say any of that.” If all of these people, right, left, middle, above, otherwise are saying this, maybe I should consider. “Oh, Randall Balmer said that, and Mercy Aiken” [Sy laughs]? “Shane was there too? Alright. Shane is on the same page as Curtis Chang and Sandra Van Opstal? Alright, let me jump in and get on this.” That's what I hope happens, is that it becomes impossible to avoid the question of allegiance to Jesus, or allegiance to the United States. Just like in South Africa the question was, are you pledging allegiance to apartheid or are you gonna follow Jesus?
Sy Hoekstra: I totally agree with that. And I would say that it is 100 percent in line with the sort of premise of this podcast, which is helping people shake the dust and walk away [laughs] from the places where the word of God is not accepted as Jesus put it. And you let your peace return to you and you move along on your way.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
How Did We Get to the Point Where This Confession Is Necessary?
Sy Hoekstra: So let's actually talk about that thing that you were just saying. The thing where all these people from these different walks of life are coming together to make this specific statement at this time. How did we get here, aside from the obvious thing that Donald Trump is very good at uniting people who oppose him [laughter]. How did we get to this point in the church in America?
Jonathan Walton: I think we need to narrow the scope a little bit.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay.
Jonathan Walton: Of how we got to this point, I think I would start at Acts 2 [laughter]. But, and then the church and then the alliance with the empire to escape persecution. Constantinople like Nicea, I mean…
Sy Hoekstra: Let’s focus on America.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, let's focus on the United States.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Zoom in a little bit.
The Moral Majority Took Us Very Far down a Path Away from Jesus
Jonathan Walton: I think that one of the pivot points in the United States is 2008 in the ascendance of Barack Obama. With Barack Obama, you have what was roiling and starting with Al Gore, but like can Christians vote for Democrats and still be Christians? Because with the ascendance of the moral majority, with what Randall Balmer talks about this coalescing around abortion as a position, and then the policies laid out by Jerry Falwell. And there was a conference in 1979 in Houston. Lots of organizations came out of that gathering. And so when those types of things occur, I think we are living in the wake of that wave, but that wave wasn't really challenged until 2008 when many, many, many, many people said, “Oh, I wanna vote for Barack Obama.”
And so with the ascendance of Obama, then the question particularly among the Black community from evangelical Christians is like, can you be a Christian and vote for Obama? And that was talked about extensively in Tamice's book, Faith Unleavened, which is amazing. And that scene that she describes of the dissonance between the White evangelical church that she was sitting in, and the conversation she was having with her grandma on the phone, who she called Momma.
Sy Hoekstra: Where her family was having a party because Obama had been elected and her White church was having a mournful prayer service.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think a lament session basically, for the United States being now overtaken by a demonic force. And so I think if we start there and move forward, like if this was a ray coming from a point, then the line actually starts to diverge from there, from the center point. And now we are actually so far apart that it's very, very difficult to justify what's happening. So if we're at our end points right now, we have followers of Jesus legitimizing sexual violence by saying Trump is fine. You have followers of Jesus legitimizing fraud, saying that that’s fine. You have followers of Jesus legitimizing insurrection, saying that's fine. We are way, way down the road and very far apart from these basic confessions.
And so I think people that are co-opted and indoctrinated by Fox News and the conservative White evangelical and conservative Catholic and conservative… because there's a smattering of Christian movements that have so aligned themselves with political power that it is very apparent even to non-Christians, that this is not Christ-like. And so I think for us, similar to the church in South Africa, to say, “Hey, we need to just make very plain every person is made in the image of God, and you shouldn't enslave, violate and steal from people.”
If we could articulate that and do that, and have a movement around that, then I think that is how we got here, is that basic tenets of following Jesus have stayed the same, but forces, institutional, the powers, the principalities, and also people who chose to align themselves with that have taken the ball and run so far down the road that even people who don't follow Jesus and folks who just have basic biblical engagement are seeing that this is just not the way. And so I think followers of Jesus across the spectrum are starting to say, “You know what? This is a moment that we can actually speak into.”
The White Evangelical Church
A Divorce between White Evangelicals and Followers of Jesus
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I agree with all that. I think, I mean, look, when we first started doing this work and we published our anthology, we went on a couple of podcasts about it. A common thing that people asked of us at the time was, where do you think the American church, where do you think the like 81 percent of the church, the White evangelical church that voted for Trump is going?” And the first time I said it, I sort of surprised myself, but I was like, “Look, it's being cut off the vine for not bearing good fruit and thrown in the fire.” That's it. There's been a long time coming of a divorce, like a complete split, I think, between White evangelicals in America and followers of Jesus.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: White evangelicals have had a whole long history of being involved in, as you said, in the exact same way that the Dutch Reformed Church was involved in apartheid, just being involved in everything. Every [laughs] terrible thing America's ever done, we've been there cheering it on and supporting it in all kinds of ways. And I think a lot of what Trump in particular, and it's sometimes a little bit hard to put my finger on why it was him, but Trump in particular, I think highlighted to a lot of Christians who viewed themselves as kind of like just nice, gentle, center right Christians who were a part of a larger movement where maybe there were some people who were a little bit off the deep end, but overall, these institutions and these people are trying to accomplish good things in the world and follow Jesus faithfully, realized that that wasn't the case.
I think there are a lot of people who realized that they actually had opinions about what it meant to follow Jesus that were dramatically different than the average person in their institutions, or the average evangelical Republican.
Policy Debates for White Evangelicals Have Been a Cover for Power Hunger
Sy Hoekstra: Peter Wehner, I think would be one of these people, who writes for the New York Times. He was a George W. Bush speech writer. He recently wrote an article saying, “Look, Donald Trump has explicitly said that if you took one of these super restrictive state abortion bans and you passed it in Congress and you put it on my desk, I would veto it. I would not pass a national abortion ban.”
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Which for the pro-life movement, that's the end goal. That would be [laughs], that would be the thing they've been fighting for for decades [Jonathan laughs]. And he has said, “I will not sign this.” And do you hear anything about that from Franklin Graham [laughs]?
Jonathan Walton: So Al Mohler was on the Run-Up of the New York Times this week, when you listen to this probably like two weeks ago, talking about how, “Hey, Donald Trump just said he's not gonna sign a national abortion ban. What's your position on that?” And his position hasn't changed, because again, it is framed as you all are the radical people, not us. We are the victims, not you. There's a constant revision of reality that they are gonna continue to turn out and communicate that is rooted in fear and a lust for power and control and dominance. And that is toxic as all get-out, and obviously un-Christian.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that was the end of my point, was that a thing that people have been arguing for a long time, which is that, this focus on abortion, this focus on prayer in school, or this focus on whatever the evangelical issue of the day is, has in fact been about power from the perspective of the leaders.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Maybe not the rank -in-file people like marching and the March for Life or whatever.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: But the leaders are after power, and they always have been. That’s what, if you go back a couple years to our episode with Mako Nagasawa, the first episode of season two where we talked about abortion. That's what his whole book is about, is the history of abortion policy and how it's almost never been about abortion. It's almost always been about something else like anti-immigrant sentiment or professionalizing the medical profession or whatever. It's always been about some other issue of people trying to establish themselves and gain power over somebody else. That's what I think a lot of people are realizing, and so a lot of people who are, I think more to the right in the group of people who have signed this document that we have are on that journey, like are in the middle of it.
Or not in the middle of it, but they've been going on it for a few years and they've been rejected by who they thought were their people for saying things like, “Hey, should we maybe adhere a little more closely to the teachings of Jesus?” [laughs] And now they're saying, okay, they've gotten to a point where they're like, “I need to draw a line in the sand. I need to make something clear here.” And that I think is different. That is genuinely different than eight years ago when everybody was, a lot of people in the middle were just kind of waffling.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Yeah, right.
Sy Hoekstra: Were not really sure what to do yet. And they still viewed the people on the far right who were all in for Trump as possibly a minority on their side, or possibly just something like a phase people were going through. Something that would flare up and then die, and it just didn't turn out that way. I think that's kind of how I view a lot of how we got to the place that we are now.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Again, zoomed in on America and not looking at the entirety of church history, which is where you wanted to go [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I mean, and I'll name some of the people that are key to that. So, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, like her book Jesus and John Wayne, Jemar Tisby’s book, The Color of Compromise. And we could also throw in some Christianity adjacent, but loved by them books as well. So like all of the quote- unquote, anti-racist books, where people who are trying to leave the race-based, class-based, gender-based environmental hierarchy that White evangelicalism enforces, like I wrote about that in Twelve Lies as an explicit book. But you could say that Ibram X. Kendi’s book is trying to get away from that. That White Fragility is trying to get away from that. That all of these books pushing back against [laughs], what now is called like Trad Wife and all these different things, it's trying to push back against these things. They're trying to call people to another reality because the one that some people have found themselves in is deeply unhelpful and not Christian.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I feel like that's been like you're refrain of this podcast. “And also, not Christian” [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Not Christian. Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And not Jesus.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Do we have any other thoughts on this subject, or do we want to jump into our segment?
Jonathan Walton: I just think people should go sign it.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And there's a fun bible study there that [laughs] we talked about two weeks ago on the podcast and spread the word about it. I think it's gonna be a good thing.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, the link to the website, the people who organized it, Jonathan said, “Hey, you can put the Bible study that we talked about in our last episode up, if you want a place for people to go to scripture on these subjects.” And they did.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: So that's cool. We will have the link to the confession in the show notes, as well as the link to the video that we created, which has a bunch of the signers of the confession reading parts of it, which we would love it if you would all share as widely as possible on your social media, and share the confession as well. We hope that this, as I said, changes somebody's hearts and minds, has some good effect on some people both in their discipleship and in their politics, which is what we're all about.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Amen. There's actually a worship album that came out too. So along with Phil Vischer’s cartoons for kids that can be shown in churches, there's a Return to Love album by a bunch of folks that you all may know like Will Matthews, Crystal Lewis, Ryan Edgar. These are folks that have led worship in great places that the evangelical world has followed for a long time. And so having worship leaders willing to call us out as well is pretty great. Along with Phil Vischer, because these videos will definitely be great for kids.
Sy Hoekstra: Is that worship album already out?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, it's out right now [laughs]. You could click on it.
Sy Hoekstra: I don't know how they did that that fast. That's incredible [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Hey man, listen. There's a thing called the Holy Spirit.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: And I think we all know that when Jesus moves, Jesus can do some things.
Which Tab Is Still Open?: Trump at Arlington
Jonathan Walton: And so let's get into our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open?, where we dive a little deeper into one of our recommendations from the newsletter. And remember, you can get our newsletter for free by signing up for the mailing list at KTFPress.com. You'll get recommendations on articles, podcasts, and other media from both of us on things that will help you in your political education and discipleship. Plus, you'll get reflections to keep you grounded and hopeful as we engage in this challenging work together. News about KTF and what's going on, and a lot more. So go get that free subscription and a paid one too. Alright. So this is your recommendation, so let's jump into it.
Sy Hoekstra: This actually has a lot to do with what we were just talking about.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, it does.
Sy Hoekstra: This is all about Christian Nationalism [laughter]. And Trump kind of stepping in it when it comes to dealing with his Christian Nationalist followers. So here's the story, and the article that I recommended in the newsletter was actually, it both gave the details of the story, but it was actually for me, an example of kind of the thing that I was critiquing [laughs]. It was an Atlantic article, and basically the facts of what happened are as follows. Trump went to Arlington National Cemetery, which if you don't know, is I just learned the second, not actually the largest, the second largest national cemetery in the country.
Jonathan Walton: Oh. Huh.
Sy Hoekstra: The largest one's on Long Island, Jonathan, I had no idea.
Jonathan Walton: What!
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] I did not know that.
Sy Hoekstra: So the people who are buried in Arlington are soldiers who served in active duty. Some of them died, some of them were retired and passed away later. And then like very high ranking government officials, like Supreme Court justices or presidents or whatever. So Trump went and visited a specific spot that had I think 13 soldiers who died during the evacuation of Afghanistan when there was a suicide bomb attack from the Taliban.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And he did this basically to highlight Biden administration screw ups. You didn't handle this evacuation well. And so because Harris is part of the administration, he's criticizing his opponent. And he went and took some pictures, which is fine, but he then was like specifically taking pictures in this area and like narrating a video talking about Biden screw ups and everything. And an employee of the cemetery pointed out correctly that campaign activities are illegal under federal law [laughs] at Arlington National Cemetery. And they kept going anyways. And they got in a little bit of an argument with her, and then later to the press said that she is mentally ill and was having a mental health crisis in that moment, and that she needed to be fired.
And, fortunately the cemeteries said, “No, that's all a lie, and she was correctly telling you that you shouldn't have been doing what you were doing and et cetera.”
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: But there were a number of people, and I don't know if this is a majority or anything like that, but there were actually some Trump supporters who viewed this as a violation, like something that Trump really shouldn't have done. He was being disrespectful to the dead, the troops who were there, by doing partisan stuff at the National cemetery. It was not necessarily about the things that he was saying, but just by conducting yourself in a way that you're not supposed to conduct yourself at a national cemetery.
Sy’s Experience with Arlington and it’s Strong Christian Nationalism
So here's my in for this. I have a very long history of military [laughs] service in my family. Somebody in my family went on Ancestry.com one time, and I have a direct ancestor who was a drummer boy in the Continental Army with George Washington [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Oh, wow.
Sy Hoekstra: And somebody who enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War. And my great-grandfather was in World War II in Korea, grandfather was in Vietnam. And my grandfather who was in Vietnam, he died when I was about 10. My grandmother remarried a very highly decorated army colonel also from Vietnam, who he passed away and we had a funeral for him at Arlington. And Arlington does like 20, 30 funerals a day. So if you're a rank-in-file soldier, it's like a very, it's an in and out thing [laughs]. But because of either his rank or his awards or both [laughs], it was an event, Jonathan. It was like, we had the bigger, more beautiful chapel, and then we had a procession, because I can't see, I can't tell you how many it was, but at the very least, dozens of soldiers with a commanding officer taking his casket from the church to the burial site, there was a 21-gun salute. There was the presentation of the flag with the shell cases from the 21-gun salute to my grandmother. It was a big thing.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And if you've been to Arlington, you know that one of the key messages there is that the people who served America and the army served the kingdom of God, served Jesus. That is what they did. They served, and they may have died serving heaven [laughs] effectively. And so what that means is this is one of the holiest sites for Christian nationalism. This is one of the places where you go to be reassured with some of the highest level, like some of the world's greatest pomp and circumstance. The world's most convincing showing of pageantry and religious activity that the United States Army and the people who died serving it are also serving God, which is, you can't get more Christian nationalist than that.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is also why we have talked about Christian nationalism, actually far more common than people think it is [laughs]. It is absolutely normal in how we talk about the military. So what I think happened here with Trump is that because what I believe about Trump is that he's a conman to the core. He is pure... he's like self-interest incarnate [laughs]. He is out to promote Donald Trump and nothing more, and nobody more than that.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: I think he forgot that his self-interest can actually diverge from Christian nationalism [laughs]. I think that he forgot that he can step on his people's toes in a way that he doesn't want to. And he's basically going to look out for where those things diverge in future in order to not have this happen again. Because he's just there doing what he does, which is promoting himself anytime, anywhere at all costs. And he forgot that one of the things that he harnesses, which is Christian nationalism, is not actually something that he believes in, and so he can misfire [laughs]. The irony to me is that I want to gain enough power to do anything and not be held accountable for it to better myself in my own position, is a pretty good summary of how kind of the operating principle of the US military in our foreign policy has been for so long.
So it's actually, it's like [laughs], it's two entities, a former president and the US military kind of clashing in their basically excuse making for their own unaccountability and their own sin. Which is how I view the Christian nationalism of a place like Arlington. What I just said Jonathan, is [laughs] blasphemy to a [laughs] lot of the people that I probably, to some people that I know personally. So I will just acknowledge that. But that is what I believe, and I think is true to the Bible. So hopefully you can at least give me that credit [Jonathan laughs]. Jonathan, boy, did I just talk for a long time. I'm sorry. I actually had in the outline that I wanted to ask you first what your thoughts were before I went on my rant, and I just couldn't help myself. So, [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Well, Sy, I mean…
Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, what are your thoughts?
Jonathan Walton: I think one, I just appreciated the explanation of the closeness, why it's still open for you. Because I think when I was writing Twelve Lies, I wrote about the military, and I wanted to say, “Oh, they're only going to these types of communities to get people.” That would've been my hypothesis or was my hypothesis, but the research proved different.
Sy Hoekstra: And when you say that, you specifically mean exploiting like poor Black and Brown neighborhoods?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: You're saying like, “We'll get you into college, we'll give you benefits, et cetera, if you come fight and die for us.”
Jonathan Walton: Exactly. And so…
Sy Hoekstra: Potentially die for us.
Jonathan Walton: Right, there's this exchange that's gonna happen for your body. Whether alive or dead, there will be benefits and resources for you or your loved ones. And so I went in with that lens, but what my research showed me was that the majority of people who serve in the military are family. Their parents were in it, their grandparents were in it, their cousin was in it. It's actually like only about two percent of the United States population is affiliated with the military. We're recruiting from the same groups of people. And this would also be true for law enforcement. People who were in it essentially raise their children and bless and send them into it as well as most often. It's not actually about income.
The income, if I remember correctly, was between 50 to 70 thousand dollars a year in a household, which in a rural area is at the time, 10 years ago, felt like a living wage. And so that reality was also something that's interesting for me. So when Trump came out against Mark Milley, when Mark Milley challenged him to say, “Hey, you will not use me, quote- unquote, the military, as a prop in your racism, standing in front of St. John's church holding that Bible up,” which was literally the distorted cover of our book, our anthology, because these things were happening. When he insulted John McCain, that was a moment where the military and I think those who are beholden to Christian nationalism tried to speak up. Tried to say, “Hey, we won't do this.” But then the ball continued down the road.
I don't know what the fallout of the Arlington stuff will be, but I do know based on Up First the NPR podcast this morning in the morning that we're recording September the seventh, they said the military and the employees actually let this go. But the reason they brought it back up was because Trump got on Truth Social , used platform and stature to say, “This did not happen. There was no altercation. This person had a mental health episode.” And when you go into that, that's where I think the, “We will not be disrespected” thing kind of came up. Like what do you mean? No, we're gonna talk about this and we're gonna name that. You will not desecrate this holy site. Holy in holy site of Christian nationalism, as you were saying.
So I hope that there are more people that are offended, because I think that if we allow ourselves to be offended, to be bothered, to be uncomfortable, then maybe there will be some movement. Because I think you're absolutely right. He is, you said self-interest incarnate. I think that is a great quote [laughs].
Trump Cheapened the Spiritual Cost People Pay to Be in the Military
Jonathan Walton: What's painful to me, so I too have, my father was in Vietnam. My brother was in the Navy, my uncle was in the Army. My other uncles were in Vietnam. And Brodnax, the town where I'm from, has many gravestones from Vietnam and Korea. And so what is fascinating to me is the level of belief that you have to have to commit acts of atrocity or commit acts of violence. Like Shane Claiborne would say, we were not made to kill people, you have to be taught to do that.
And I am in no way condemning a soldier or a person who's in military service, who's listening. That's not what I'm saying. I'm observing, it costs us something to do these things. And I think the thing that Trump did was cheapen the cost that many, many, many thousands of people have paid for something that they thought was a collective interest blessed by God when Trump said, “No, you are a pawn in my game. And I will use you for my benefit.” Now you again, you will have people that say that's what's happening anyway. Trump is just doing in like what everybody else does behind closed doors. But I think that tension that he articulates or brings up for us, I hope it's allowed to rise to the surface, and then we can have a conversation about the cost.
Like the silent war in the military right now is that even soldiers who have not seen active duty are committing suicide. I hope it brings to the surface the, like my dad, Agent Orange ruined some of his life. They're still figuring out what the effects of that were. You have people who are saying they support troops in one hand, but then voting against resources and benefits for them in the other hand, when the legislation comes up. Lauren Boebert did that yesterday. I hope that the perceived belovedness of our veterans and military versus the reality of how they're exploited and taken advantage of and dismissed and cast aside, we would actually acknowledge that and then do real work to ensure that they don't end up on the street.
They don't end up stuck on painkillers. They do get the medical resources they need. They do get the mental health support that they need. Their families do get the resources that they need on and off-base and not just a discount at the PX. If that could be the conversation because of this, then I'd be very glad.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Just one more thing you said there. You said lots of people use the military as pawns and it's true. Or like props for their campaigns. It is just another one of those things about Trump where he will just do what everybody else did, but he'll turn it up to 11 [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, no, yeah. It's true.
Sy Hoekstra: Everybody else, every politician, if they have a military background, if their family does, if they can visit a military site or whatever, they do it all the time. And even if their love for the military or for America is real, it is also true that they use them for their campaigns [laughs]. Use them to prop up. That has been… since we elected George Washington, the general of the Continental Army, has been true [laughter]. Right?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So Trump is just the one who says, “Whatever your rules of decorum are, I'm going to break them.” And in most cases, that is actually his appeal. “Yes. I break rules of decorum and there's no consequences. And that's because these elitist can't tell me what to do and we need to take back power.
Jonathan Walton: Oh Lord have mercy, Jesus [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: You need someone like me who can just break through all this nonsense.” You know what I mean?
Jonathan Walton: Right. Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: That's usually his appeal. And in this case, it just happened to be that he crossed the wrong line for some people. I'm sure there's a lot of people who probably don't care [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right. It may not wrangle a lot of people, but I hope it wrangles the right people.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And him stretching out this poop that he stepped on and not wiping it off his foot and continue his campaign, I hope that roils people. He is a disrespectful person.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And for Christians, literally James chapter four, it's that God opposes the proud. We are called to be humble people, and so I pray for Trump. I pray for his family. Not that he would win an election and all those things, but literally that they would come to know Jesus. Literally that they would know the freedom in him. Literally, that they would be able to experience the freedom that money cannot purchase and privilege cannot provide for you. And so I say all these things in hopes that everyone who is watching what happens is disquieted because we should not be comfortable with what's happening. Especially as followers of Jesus [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Amen to that Jonathan. Amen.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: I think we'll wrap it up there. Just as a reminder, as we finish, please again, go to KTFPress.com, get that newsletter and sign up as a paid subscriber to support everything that we do. We're centering and elevating marginalized voices. We're helping people seek Jesus in their discipleship and in their politics. We really do need some more support than we have right now if we're gonna make this sustainable kind of past this election season. So please do come and sign up as a paid subscriber at KTFPress.com. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robyn Burgess, transcripts by Joyce Ambale, editing by Multitude Productions. I am the producer along with our lovely paid subscribers. Thank you so much for joining us, and we will see you in two weeks.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Give me one second. One moment. I'm gonna get the name right so that you don't have to go edit this later [Sy laughs]. … So yes, we… Robert Mohler. The—Richard Mohler. Al Mohler. That's his name [Sy laughs]. Al Mohler [laughs]. It says R dot Albert Mohler.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
Today, our episode’s all about discipleship around political engagement, based on a series of Bible studies Jonathan and his team at his real job recently created for this election season and beyond. Some points we hit:
- Why it is essential for our political action to understand we were not created for this world
- Why followers of Jesus won’t overemphasize the importance of political victories and losses
- The reality that we are all connected to each other and God desires everyone’s political liberation
- And, after that discussion, we dive into a recommendation from one of our recent newsletters on the fallout from Israel’s torture of Hamas operatives
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript Introduction
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Jonathan Walton: If we are clear-eyed about the brokenness of the world, I would love for us to be as clear-eyed about the bigness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I don't think our concept of sin and our concept of redemption is actually mature enough to deal with the problems of the world.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: And I'm Sy Hoekstra. I'm so excited about what we're gonna be talking about today. We have concluded our series of interviews with authors from the anthology that we published in 2020 about Christianity and politics in the era of Trump. For the next several five or six episodes until the election, you will be hearing more from the two of us. We'll probably have a couple more interviews, but it will not be from those authors. But today, we are jumping into something that I think is very core to what we do at KTF Press. We're talking about political discipleship and how the ways that some stuff that we maybe in some churches relegate to the realm of personal salvation, like the incarnation and the death and resurrection of Jesus, actually have a whole lot to say about how we engage politically. But before we get to all of that, Jonathan.
Jonathan Walton: Remember, if you like what you hear and what you read from KTF Press, and would like for it to continue beyond this election season, please go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber and encourage your friends to subscribe as well. We've got a ways to go if we're gonna have enough people to sustain this work, but we believe this work is valuable for us and for you, and so we hope that you do too. Go to KTFPress.com, that'll get you the bonus episodes of this show, access to monthly Zoom chats with the two of us and more, but only if you are subscribed. So again, go to KTFPress.com, subscribe today.
The Bible Studies Jonathan’s Team Created about Christian Political Engagement
Sy Hoekstra: All right. So Jonathan, this conversation is actually coming from some work that you are doing in your regular job with InterVarsity. First of all, remind people what you do with InterVarsity [laughter], and then tell people about these resources that you've produced and kind of what the goal of them is.
Jonathan Walton: So I'm a Senior Resource Specialist with InterVarsity. And what that looks like is when there are some significant problems, then those things get sent up to the discipleship and leadership team to think about, and one of the things in our sandbox is political discipleship. And so for the last six months, we've been working on a curriculum that folks will be able to use to not just see and seek Jesus during this election season, but actually be formed into people who can see Jesus on the seat in our image as a seat of a stool with three legs, and on the seat. The Lord over our feelings, over our thoughts, over our actions, is Jesus. And so this five part Bible study really leans into that and prayerfully will push people to make that decision, to say, “Oh yes, if I'm a follower of Jesus, then my orthopathy, my orthodoxy and my orthopraxy will be under the Lordship of Jesus.”
Sy Hoekstra: You just said three big words. I think a lot of people know that orthodoxy kind of means right belief, and orthopraxy kind of means right practice
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: Orthopathy, what does that mean?
Jonathan Walton: Orthopathy, which most of us function on is our feelings and passions. So what does it look like for us to actually say, “I feel uncomfortable, I feel afraid, I feel sad.” And instead of acting out of that feeling and then forming a theology that justifies our actions that were based on our feelings of fear or anxiety or discomfort or loss of control, we actually said, “Oh, I feel afraid of this,” or “I feel uncomfortable about this, but I can actually put that fear, that discomfort, that anger, under the seat of Jesus,” and be able to have our thoughts and actions be in line with the kingdom of God, and not just in line with our deepest wounds or whims.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay, so that is some helpful context. You have created these Bible studies as part of your job as a resource developer, and we will have links to those Bible studies that are available for free online. So if you wanna do a five session Bible study with a small group or whatever, you can go get Jonathan's stuff and talk about politics with your small group, which I think everybody should be doing right now [laughter], at least if you live in the United States. Not everybody that listens to the show is in the United States, but for all the Americans, go do that, please. Oh, and actually, sorry you didn't write these. You were part of the team that developed these.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: The actual writing was done by other people, but you were very involved in the process.
We Were Not Created for This World, and That Affects Our Politics
Sy Hoekstra: So let's get into one of the main ideas here, which I think is, let's talk about some of the implications of the idea that we were not created for the world that we live in. This is kind of a big deal I think, in your thinking, and I would like you to tell us what, first of all, what kind of world were we created for, and then what does that imply for our politics?
We Were Created for a World Where Everything Existed in Harmony
Jonathan Walton: One of the things that gets lost in most of our theology about the quote- unquote, fall is that we don't engage as much with what the world could have looked like if we had not, quote- unquote, fallen. And so I like to think about every possible thing in the world that is broken and not working well, what if it had been working just fine? So let's imagine for a moment that work, like Adam and Eve in the Garden doing the stuff, was good. Like work was good. Let's imagine for a moment that a man never blamed the problem on a woman, and a woman never blamed the problem on the man. Let's imagine a world free of shame, jealousy, deceit and blaming. Let's lean into that slim window in Scripture and that slim window and stories that were passed down for generations, and generations where there was no deceit.
We could know one another and be known. We could forgive, because I don't imagine that no one got hurt, but I imagine though, is people were quick to forgive and quick to ask for forgiveness. To be able to live in harmony with the world, that includes that big Shalom theology, where there's peace in me, there's peace between me and others, there's peace between me and creation, there's peace between me and God. There's reconciliation, there's Shalom there. And so since we do not have that world, the world that we currently live in is one that we will have constant dissonance with.
We Must Be People Who Rejoice When Empires Fall
Jonathan Walton: So fast forward all the way to Revelation 18,19, and 20, when quote unquote, Babylon, or the Empire is destroyed.
And there are people that are weeping over Babylon, and there are people that are rejoicing that Babylon has been destroyed. Followers of Jesus need to be in the camp that says we are rejoicing that Babylon is destroyed. Hallelujah, salvation and glory be unto our God. If we are those people that say, “Ah, you know what? We're so sad that all the spices and all the products and all the slaves are no longer being brought to our shores to serve us,” then you suffer under the judgment of God. The judgment of God says these systems are unjust. A lot of followers of Jesus and other folks don't like to talk about the judgment of God, but I will be honest, I am totally fine talking about the judgment of God when talking about destroying unjust systems and structures in the world [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Like Jesus, let that come as quickly as possible. So in Amos via Martin Luther King, how most people recognize it, let justice roll down like a mighty stream. That's what we are talking about. When these systems of injustice and violence are washed away. We were not made to be exploited or to exploit other people. We were not made to dominate, destroy, rule and violate. That's not what it is. And so that's what I mean when we say we should have dissonance with this world that we are in because we were not made for this nonsense that we experience regularly.
Sy Hoekstra: And then our politics should reflect that dissonance.
We Should Not Be Seduced by Colonialism
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Our politics should reflect that dissonance, and what we should not do is be seduced by coloniality. And here's what I mean by that. Aníbal Quijano, who was a Peruvian sociologist and scholar on coloniality, talked about the seduction of European colonialism, such as that, even though you take colonialism away, we cannot imagine ourselves independent of that colonized structure being in place. And so if we look around the world, the sun never set on the British Empire in that way, there are entire people groups including Black people in the United States, who it's very difficult to imagine life outside of the stratified, segregated society that we find ourselves in.
And so for me, I think when we think about our political systems, and we talked about this before on the podcast, one of the things we need a radical revolution of is imagination. Like to be able to imagine a different way of share, like mutual aid, reciprocity. Being able to say, “You know, what? What if I'm not a wage earner in a society, I am still valuable.” Sy, you've talked about this in your essays about disability. Like, what would it look like for us not to see the CEO and the kid with down syndrome as equally valuable for God, even though one of them contributes more to the GDP, like we need to lean into that. And so when we make decisions in politics, we actually need to wrestle with that dissonance as opposed to trying to impose a perfect will in an imperfect world, because it will not exist or come to pass.
We Should Always Be Unsatisfied with Political Outcomes, and Be Aware We Don’t Control Them
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So I think one of the things that you and I have talked about that is basically how we will almost always be unsatisfied with the decisions and the activity that we engage in in politics.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, and that is okay [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly. Right. That's part of it. You should be that way, is what we're saying.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: You shouldn't be someone who votes wholeheartedly like, what I'm rejecting right now is people who are just like, “Yes, Trump is God's man. We're with him 100 percent. He's gonna do all the stuff we need him to do.” There isn't really a Christian equivalent to that on the left, or I would reject that as well, if anyone was saying that same thing with that same level of fervor about Kamala Harris [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: But well, we'll talk about how there is still some idolatry on the left, but we'll get into that nuance in a second. I just want to emphasize this point, that it's the lack of satisfaction with our votes and the lack of satisfaction with outcomes of activism isn't just what you should expect, it's reflecting a reality in a good way [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: That you are not… you know what I mean? You're always going to feel that tension because you were made to be loved and treated with justice and kindness and generosity and to do the same for others, and that is fundamentally not how our system ever works.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: We will know that we don't have control over the systems that we have. We should know that [laughs]. We should go into our political engagement with that in the front of our minds, that we don't control the outcomes, and we shouldn't be surprised when they don't come out exactly the way we want them to. But again, when we were talking about this, another thing you pointed out was we also don't have control over God and how God affects the outcomes that God wants to affect [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: We don't know how that's going to happen. So a political loss for us does not necessarily mean anything about God or God's plans, right?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: So that is kind of the hopeful other side of that coin that I was just talking about. And that doesn't mean by the way, that we don't make clear decisions in certain contexts and be like, “No, this person is absolutely better than this person.” I have no problem saying that. You know what I mean? I feel like sometimes when you talk about being a citizen of the kingdom, there's a lot of like, especially White Christians, who will say that kind of means that we should never really judge anybody's choices at all [laughter], and I fully disagree with that [laughs], because in a given context, someone can be much better than somebody else. They're just not perfect.
We Should Want to Make Things Better in Small Ways and Do as Little Harm as Possible
Jonathan Walton: Well, the only other thing I'll say, and this actually may apply to later questions in the conversation as well. But I had a conversation, I was one of the keynote speakers for the Community Boost nonprofit leaders conference this week. And one of the speakers, she was on the panel I was moderating, her name is Jennifer Jones Austin. She's the Executive Director of the Federation of Protestant Welfare organizations in New York City.
Sy Hoekstra: Gotcha.
Jonathan Walton: She used to have a position in corrections in New York City as an advocate [laughs]. She said, “It is my job in this space,” holding her faith in all these things she possibly can, she said “This system is toxic, it's broken, it is terrible, and in so much as I can, I will prevent all harm that I can. And if I also could do incrementally better, then I will do that, knowing full well that this is not the kingdom of God, and I will be wholly dissatisfied with all the things, even the progress, quote- unquote, progress that I'm able to make.” And I think that is a sobering embrace of the realities of where we stand as followers of Jesus who are able to and in so far as we are willing to actually participate in the change of the systems and structures that we are in.
So that's Priscilla with education. She is going to [laughs], in Jesus name, do as little harm as she possibly can and make as much progress, quote- unquote, progress as she possibly can.
Sy Hoekstra: This is your wife, who's the principal of a school for people who don't know.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, and I've recognized also that this is me within InterVarsity, an evangelical organization in the United States that fully participates in the system of this country. Like philanthropy is broken, giving is broken. We all know these systems will not usher in the kingdom of God. At the same time, we are called to participate and reflect the kingdom of God as best as we can. And so I think as we vote, as we enter in, as you were saying, we do not have control over the system, we do not have control over God, but we do control if we are obedient to him and faithfully wrestle with what it looks like to follow him in context. Because, as Munther Isaac, Palestinian theologian, prophet, amazing person said, a theology without context is irrelevant, and we are doing our best to live out of theology in our context.
Sy Hoekstra: Both of us saw him speak last week, or I guess when you're hearing this, it'll be two weeks ago at Riverside Church, and it was incredible. And one or two of the things Jonathan has said so far, are certainly inspired by Reverend Isaac. If you look at our newsletter from the 23rd you can watch the entire talk on YouTube. It's incredible. I really suggest everyone does it. When Jonathan says he's a prophet, that's not…
Jonathan Walton: Oh, I'm not joking. Yeah [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: It's not an exaggeration. It's like the word prophet is something that gets thrown around a lot, and it can be grandiose when you apply to certain people. This man fits the bill [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Why Christians Shouldn’t Overemphasize Political Wins and Losses
Sy Hoekstra: Okay, so let's get into another point that we were talking about that I think is important when it comes to political discipleship, especially in this moment of heightened tension in the election. Which is there are so many ways that understanding yourself as a citizen of the kingdom of God makes you less likely to overemphasize political victories and losses. And you can err to one side in the way that Trump does, which is what I was talking about before, or the way that Trump supporters do, where they can say, “Trump being elected will basically be our political salvation [laughs]. We will be fine. Our power will be given back to us the way that we deserve, our enemies shall be defeated,” etcetera, etcetera.
But like I also said, there are ways that the left does this and there are ways that the right does this when it's not Trump and we're not in a sort of cult of personality situation. So can you talk to us about what overemphasizing political victories and losses looks like, and why understanding the kingdom helps you avoid doing that, making that mistake?
Our Hope Is Not in Political Victories or Material Prosperity
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the way the right predominantly does this is using salvific language like, “We are going to save you.” And so there's this identification alliance with right wing rapture theology that says, we just need to be redeemed from the world or going back to something that is more holy, just, beautiful, righteous and good. Usually for White evangelicals, that's around 1958. 1958 was the peak of White evangelical and White American leadership and ownership of all these different things in the United States. And so that reality that many people in the current day White evangelical movement are trying to get back to. 1958 also signals what the left tries to do.
1958 was the advent of the civil rights movement coming into the mainstream of the United States when Martin Luther King wrote, when White evangelicals in the United States had to contend with Martin Luther King. So Jerry Falwell writing, segregation or not, like which is it, and then doubling down on segregation. But from 1958 you can begin to see this surging of the rights of women being talked about, the rights of people of color being talked about. Then you get into quote- unquote, the sexual revolution, feminist revolution of the 70s and 80s, like music changing into a way that there's television, things to be broadcast. Folks being shocked that the people they listen to on the radio are people of color, like you start to get this change [laughs].
And so what the right says is salvation, the left says is progress. And so pastors and people who push towards more progressivism and politicians who don't read in context like to pull out that piece when Martin Luther King says, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We take that out, and basically what that does is a soft baptism of generational superiority. Meaning that I'm better than the last generation, and the generation after me will be better, when scripture does not say that. Ecclesiastes says there's nothing new under the sun. There have always been people fighting against slavery, oppression, abuse and violence, and there have always been people who are trying to impose those systems, whether they be the Roman government or the American government or the Spartans or the Cretans, it doesn't matter who it is.
This has always been the same argument and fight. The Nazis before, the Americans today, Israelis one day, slaveholders another day, Palestinians one day, enslaved Africans another day. The reality is this has always been going back and forth. The invitation has always been the same, to follow Jesus. That's the invitation. There isn't a like, “Man, you know what? In 1950, it was really bad.” That's what progressives would say, “But we've come a long way, and we're continuing forward, onward and upward.” And then conservatives would say, “Oh, man, you know it used to be this way. Let me go back to my little town and…” but both of those are salvation narratives that actually don't leave us saved. They don't. Jesus is the only way.
They don't leave us saved, because the salvation of Jesus is ultimate and all encompassing at once. The quote- unquote, safety that moral progressivism or conservatism offers us is for a few, for moments in time. The only thing in my estimation, as an individual that has read a little bit and prayed a lot is the only thing that has been as pervasive and adopted by so many people is colonialism. The idea of White supremacy, the idea that we need to exploit and violate, the idea that we need to extract as much as possible and we deserve to accumulate at an unfettered pace, that is pervasive across cultures, backgrounds and narratives. That has been carried everywhere even more so than the gospel.
And so I would hope that the salvation of all things through Christ would be as comprehensive and fierce as the salvation through works. So it's life, liberty and pursuit of property slash our own comfort equals happiness, or take up your cross, deny yourself and follow me, they are fundamentally opposed to each other.
Sy Hoekstra: That was good and deep, and I love it. Let me drill down for a second on the progressivism, because I think some people would hear you say, and you've explained this a little bit, but I mean, some people hear you say, things haven't gotten better, or things took off in some fundamental and helpful way in the 60s, that that's not something that we should think of as salvation. And they might kind of go, “What does he mean by that? I don't know. That's a little…” Because I know you are saying things have gotten better.
Jonathan Walton: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Sy Hoekstra: Like, obviously, there are people who materially did a whole lot better [laughs] after the Civil Rights Movement.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Absolutely. Right.
Sy Hoekstra: But what you are saying is, when you are clear-eyed about the amount of harm that the hierarchies and systems of oppression do in this country globally, there are so many things to be concerned about and so many things to deeply lament that the true and good and incredible thing that Black people can vote now [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, me and you can have this conversation [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, all those kinds of things. Those things are incredible and should be celebrated, and there are just so many other things that are so wrong and terrible.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: You're just being clear-eyed about the world as it is.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Because you can do that, because you're not looking toward a narrative of progressivism to assure you that you are okay.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes. The fundamental container that you and I find ourselves in has improved. That's true.
Sy Hoekstra: You and I, like meaning literally you and I.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, me and you. Literally, Sy Hoekstra and Jonathan Walton, the container that we find ourselves in has improved since the lives of our parents. My momma was not born with all of her rights, I was born with all of mine, to an extent in this country. That container has gotten better. The container is still on this side of heaven, which means it's incomplete.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: So can I celebrate, and I do celebrate, the reality that I could go to a bank and get a mortgage and it would be illegal if they discriminated against me and my wife for being people of color, that is awesome. I can celebrate the fact that my wife can get a credit card in her own name, and my daughters will be able to as well. That was something that was illegal. go look it up. I appreciate that. At the same time, let me not be seduced to think that this is the container I was made for because I wasn't. I was made for Genesis 1.
Sy Hoekstra: Or seduced into a kind of softer, subtler idolatry of America.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Or the West, or the societies that we live in, or wealth, or whatever it is that you think has made things more comfortable for you.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Good Political Fruit that Comes with Putting Hope in Jesus
Sy Hoekstra: The reason I spent so much time on that is it's a complicated idea, but I think it's important for people to understand, because it really does free you from the problems that inevitably come when you sort of think, let's say Harris gets elected. We're just like, “Oh, good. We staved off Trump, we beat back fascism. We defeated it, hooray.” [laughs] It stops you from looking at the long history of America and saying no, fascism, authoritarianism, like real oppression of people is a normal part of the DNA of this country, and will continue to come back, and we need to continue to be ready to fight it all the time.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: It does not ever go away, and if you want to sit in comfort and say, “Good, we finally did it,” or “I can rest now,” you can't. You're being seduced into something that is not true [laughter]. And also, being clear-eyed in this way also stops you from doing something that people complain about progressives doing all the time, which is show up to your door every four years or every two years, and ask for your vote, and then not do anything to actually fight the oppression that you're under on a daily basis once they're elected [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: If you're clear-eyed in this way, you can fight for people's flourishing 365 days a year…
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: …and every year. What I'm just doing now is talking about some of the good fruit that comes from letting go of these sort of soft political idols that sometimes people have. Because, I think… And the reason I say soft political idols, they're just political idols, but I think people look at the obviousness and the brazenness of the way that people idolize Trump and Christian power in America, and they think, “I'm not doing that in any similar way,” and a lot of us actually are.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So that's why I'm harping on this.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And two sentences that I hope will help people as well, is that the reason we're saying this too is because what will drive you is actually hope in the right stuff, as opposed to ending up with putting, literally, for me, like my hope in Obama. I remember the posters, like I was excited.
Sy Hoekstra: Do you remember that music video?
Jonathan Walton: Which one? There were many.
Sy Hoekstra: The “Yes We Can” music video.
Jonathan Walton: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I do remember that.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. I remember that in particular, I remember you being so excited and emotional about that video, and then later coming back to me and being like, “I should not have cared about that video that much,” [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right. But man, it is attractive. Like Lil Jon at the DNC right now is there to seduce a certain group of people [Sy laughs]. And Kid Rock is just, let's swap out Kid Rock. Kid Rock was at the RNC. We have to engage, like you said, clear-eyed, so we know what to put our hope in. Because the gospel is a hope that does not disappoint.
What Is God’s Good News about Politics, and How Can We Apply It to Our Lives?
Sy Hoekstra: Amen to that, Jonathan [Jonathan laughs]. But let's talk about the hope that does not disappoint, because I think the stuff that we've been talking about, if you just stopped there would be a little bit, I don't know, it can be a little bit depressing. If you don't already have this perspective [laughs] it's like, it can be hard.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: It can be hard to deal with being clear-eyed about the brokenness of the world, it's not an easy thing to do [Jonathan laughs]. So let's talk about what actually is the good news about politics that you are trying to get people to see through, through these Bible studies and through this kind of work that you're doing.
Question Your Assumptions, and Understand the Connectedness of All People
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean to what you just said, if we are clear-eyed about the brokenness of the world, I would love for us to be as clear-eyed about the bigness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I don't think our concept of sin and our concept of redemption is actually mature enough to deal with the problems of the world. And so I think that one, the first session is just what are our starting points? Most of us have been cultured into political discipleship, we've never actually consciously thought about it. And so that's the first part, just where are our starting points? Then we get into the reality that the theology of the kingdom of God, and the theology that we are all made in God's image is a political reality.
If I believe that I am made in the image of God, and every single person around me is made in the image of God, then that has political implications, because my flourishing and their suffering, or my suffering and their flourishing, they are actually intertwined. If I actually live out that theology, when they bleed, I bleed, when I bleed, they bleed. That's why the command to mourn with those who mourn is not, it shouldn't be far off, because I'm mourning my own human family, or I'm rejoicing with my own human family. And so that first study gets into that, and then we have, each study has a real-life story, and each study has a testimony about how these things have been applied or wrestled with in the current day.
Making Informed Decisions about Whether We Want to Seek God’s Liberation
And so when we get into the choices that the Israelites made in Samuel, they wanted a king. Wrestling with that, oh snap, the Israelites literally said to the Prophet Samuel, we want to be like everybody else.
Sy Hoekstra: And sorry, just really quickly for people who are unfamiliar, there's a moment in the book of 2 Samuel, I think, where Israel goes from saying, “We don't want to just be this people of God who kind of live in this promised land and follow these instructions that God gave us, we want to have a king,” which was not part of like God's plan for their society, “The way that all the societies around us have a king, so that we can have kind of similar power and influence the way that they do.”
Jonathan Walton: Exactly. And so when Samuel responds, he says, “Your king will be exploitative. Your king will violate. Your king will take your kids. Your king will do all these things.” And they say, “Yes, sign us up.” And so we need to have conversations about what will actually happen when we say, “Yes, we do want this,” instead of what God intends. And then make concrete decisions about, do we actually want that, and what are the implications? And then if we do decide to follow Jesus, then what does he do and what is his response. When Jesus shows up and says, “I am the Messiah,” out of Isaiah, chapter 61 pulled into Luke chapter 4, the initial sermon is, “I have come to set the oppressed free, proclaim sight to the blind, proclaim freedom for the captives.”
He did not say, “I have come to convert you to a certain political ideology, a certain political party or platform.” He didn't say that because he literally says, the kingdom of God is not of this world. And so how do we see that as good news as followers of Jesus? And do we see that as good news in the context we're in today? And then finally, if we do see that as good news, how do we partner with God to actually participate as followers of Jesus in seeking the shalom of all the people around us? Because we do live as followers of Jesus in exile. Now, we are different from the Israelites because, friends, we are not disempowered as Americans.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: I have an American passport, which puts me in a fundamentally different political bracket than my brothers and sisters who are undocumented, than my human family that suffers under drone strikes. It's different. But at the same time, I can hold fast to the reality that how can I steward my power, my influence, my resources, towards the flourishing of all people, not just myself, which is resisting the gospel of Babylon. And so we have, one of my favorite people in the world is Connie Anderson, and she talks about how she was one of those White women in a midwestern state who had no idea who she was voting for and why. But then she goes to a board meeting at the invitation of someone to really get involved in local politics, and she realized the person that she was voting for had dementia, and he was on the city council voting for things, arguing for it in one minute, and then some time would pass, arguing against it in another minute.
And then when someone said, “Hey, didn't you just say the opposite?” Then shout at them, “Don't try to tell me what I think.” And she said, “The only reason I voted for this person was because I recognized their name.” And she began to get involved, and now she leads workshops on anti-racism, trying to help White people do the work of deconstruction, not deconstruction of their faith, but a deconstruction of the White supremacy in their lives and how they can partner with God towards more redemptive things. And she is doing the good hard work of politics, and not politics from a lens of this world would be better if we get the right person in power, but this world will be better and transformative when Jesus is in power.
And so how do I partner with him to reflect his kingdom in the system and structures that I have influence and power over? And besides a lot of the work that we do with KTF, this is probably the thing with InterVarsity that I am most proud of. So I sincerely hope that folks will grab it.
We Need to Revolutionize Our Imagination
Sy Hoekstra: Absolutely. Go check it out. Thank you for sharing the wisdom from it. And I especially want to emphasize what you said about, what did you say about our imagination? You said change or, the verb I can't remember [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Oh, bring a revolution in our imagination [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, there you go. That's what you said. I knew it was good [Jonathan laughs]. That is something that I am particularly passionate about, and kind of dovetails into why I spend so much time reading speculative fiction, like sci-fi and fantasy and everything [laughs], because… and thinking about how the people who write those books affect the worlds that we imagine too. That may seem like a weird, random turn into another subject to some people, but it is the way that I exercise my imagination, and I find a lot of the way that God talks to me in that work [laughs]. Like in the ways that I think about how we can imagine really different worlds and other stories that we don't see here now.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: That to me, is extremely important, and I know that there have to be at least some of you who feel that way too.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: So [laughs] I know there are some avid fiction readers out there. Jonathan, we have a segment to get into.
Which Tab Is Still Open? Israel’s Horrifying Treatment of Palestinian Detainees
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes, we've talked a lot, and we are still talking as we're going to get into our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, because this is something we're still talking about 10 months later, 76 years later, where we dive a little deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. So Sy, this one is yours, so tell us a little bit about it.
Sy Hoekstra: It is mine, although I think I maybe originally got it from you. This is something that we have both been thinking and talking about a lot, so I will just summarize the story very quickly, and then we'll both talk about it for a while. So we're gonna be back on Israel and Palestine. Now, listen everything we just talked about is gonna affect this conversation that we're having now [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: But there have been some horrible whistleblower stories, and I will not get into the details. So hopefully we're avoiding the need for a content warning here. But some horrible whistleblower stories about some things going on, I believe you pronounce it, the Sde Teiman detention center in Israel, which is where basically they're keeping a lot of known or suspected Hamas operatives who attacked on October 7. The allegations are about basically physical and sexual torture, and that's all the detail that I will get into, being regularized and just a part of the culture at this particular detention center. So recently, after a lot of these reports, there were 10 IDF soldiers who were charged by military courts, or nine soldiers and one reservist who were charged by military courts with perpetrating one of these acts of violence.
And what followed is something that's a little bit unimaginable to me, until I think about January 6th, which was a series of riots at this detention center of people literally trying to just charge into the detention center and take the IDF soldiers who have been charged and put in detention themselves, and just kidnap them out of the place, just like free them. And these rioters, there were a couple hundred of them. A lot of them were just regular people living in the area. But some of them were actual government administrative workers and some of them, a couple of them were actual members of the Israeli parliament who participated in this riot, and they did not succeed. Like the soldiers are still there.
Two of them were let go eventually, meaning, the charges were dropped. Eight of them, the military is actually pursuing the charges against them. There has not been any punishment for any of these rioters [laughs]. Nothing's happened to them. There's been no legal consequences. There was another riot and another base, same thing, no real consequences. I was trying to see if maybe just like the American media wasn't reporting on it, but I used multiple large language models [laughter] to look into whether there were any stories about these rioters and what consequences they face, and it's really been nothing. The members of parliament are still just sitting in parliament.
Some people who are not in the government, who are in the opposition parties have called for investigations, but nothing has happened. There were many statements made by different far-right government members of parliament that were in support of the rioters. One person in Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, basically stood up in Parliament and said, “I do not care what these soldiers did to Hamas operatives, because anything done to Hamas operatives is legitimate, in my view.” Like there's just no limits. When we say that there's an apartheid in Israel, this highlights kind of what we're talking about, because there is sort of within Israel proper, there is, you can still make some arguments about this, but there is a lot of democratic representation and rights for people who live there.
And then in the West Bank, since 1967 there's basically been martial law where a general is in charge and makes all the decisions on behalf of people who live there, with the exception of the Jewish settlers who live there, who still have all the rights, as though they lived in Israel proper. And so there's this kind of weird thing going on where even though this base is in Israel, it is under the jurisdiction of the military. So it's this kind of martial law, I don't know, running into Israel's law in a sort of way that's highlighting some divisions in Israel. Because obviously, there are a lot of people within Israel who are very concerned that this has happened, and that people are going completely unaccountable for it.
I mean, some people are literally talking about, I don't think this is a mainstream idea, but there's some people talking about, what if a civil war breaks out in Israel, because there are people who are so against what has happened, but the ruling government coalition is just so in favor of continuing the war at all costs, they're now starting to fight with Lebanon. They may start to fight with Iran. So anyways, those are the basics of the story. Jonathan, what are your thoughts [laughs]?
Privilege Marginalized Voices in Your Media So You Don’t End UP Believing Falsehoods
Jonathan Walton: If you are listening, you've made it this far in the podcast and all those things, I hope you would privilege Palestinian voices and the voices of Jewish activists in your media diet, so that you are not persuaded towards believing what is not true. The reality is Israel, not the people, but the state, is a settler colonial project, and much of this I'm gonna repeat from Munther and other people that I have learned from because I am now trying to privilege their voices. I remember, and I've said this on podcast before, my RA when I was 18 years old, who lived in the West Bank, arguing with a Zionist Jewish young man who lives in Brooklyn and had never been to the West Bank about what it looks like.
So you're watching someone from a lived reality argue with someone downstream of propaganda. And so the exact same thing could be true of someone who lives in a segregated Black neighborhood trying to explain how law enforcement works to someone who has never actually dealt with law enforcement in the United States, or a man who is having a conversation with a woman about what it's like to have her rape kit submitted and then it never be tested or run or anything. So just trying to bring things home a little bit in that we have to prioritize the voices of marginalized people in these conversations.
Now, that is true all the time, particularly when there is no media or video. And in this particular case, there is video of all of this, similar to George Floyd, similar to Sonya Massey in the United States, there's video of this terrible perpetration of sexual violence, and there's video of the soldiers guarding this action so that people don't see it from the cameras and that it continues to happen, which is why these soldiers were quote unquote, arrested in the first place.
What Would It Take for Americans to Wake Up to the Reality of This Suffering?
Jonathan Walton: Now, my final thought around this is, which really a question, is like I wonder how desensitized we have become to the suffering of others and made it normal for these types of things to happen. And I wonder what it would take, in Jesus name I pray it is not violence.
But I wonder what it would take for us to be awakened to actually do something about it as American citizens, because it is our tax dollars, our money, it's all of us that are funding that. And so those are my thoughts as I consider this, because there's a population of people that is further desensitized running into a population of people as being further radicalized because they are seeing more and more images and media come across their feeds. And my longing and hope is that there would be an awareness of the people who have been so desensitized and propagandized of the pain and suffering of the people who are experiencing deep harm, so that there can be some sort of reconciliation and just peace and a ceasefire and all those things before, not because of a war. That's my prayer.
And so, yeah, as I am, [laughs] I'm gonna in Jesus name, be at Hunter College, be at Brown, be at MIT, be in Florida this fall, I'm gonna be talking about that. Having conversations, encouraging people to advocate so that there is a lesser chance of violence. Sy, that was a lot for me [laughs]. What are you thinking and feeling?
Dehumanization Always Leads to Horrifying Violence, and Turns Oppressors into Monsters
Sy Hoekstra: That was very good. The thing that is so frustrating to me is how incredibly predictable this was.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right.
Sy Hoekstra: From the moment October 7th happened, they said, “This is our 911” Okay, This is your Abu Ghraib. This is your Guantanamo. Like we cannot expect to react the exact same way to an attack and not have this happen again. You can't expect to have the same dehumanization and racism against Arabs and not have this happening again. I don't know. It's just so frustrating to me, having grown up with the War on Terror, and just feeling like I'm watching it all over again. And just like it was in America, there's a lot of people in Israeli society who think this is all fine and totally support it.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And we may have done it in a little bit more of a buttoned up way. We might have done it with some lawyers making questionable interpretations of international humanitarian norms or whatever. We might have put the stamp of approval on it of some more powerful forces than they have available to them in Israel, but they're doing the same thing that we were doing. The thing that we need to come away from this is knowing that your dehumanization of other people has real life consequences, and the consequences are both for the victims who experienced horrific things and for the victimizers. Because one of the whistleblowers, when they were talking to CNN, the CNN reporter who doesn't believe this himself, and he put to the soldier, “A lot of people in Israel would say, well, Hamas does way worse than this to our captives. So what's the problem?” And he said, “Hamas is not your bar.” It’s like, fine, if you want to be a terrorist organization, go ahead, be a terrorist organization. But you have to recognize that that's the moral decision you're making. You are not better than them, if this is what you are willing to do to them. And your dehumanization of other people at some point will turn you into a monster, is what I'm saying.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And I just, I don't know [laughs]. I'm mad about it because of the horrifying consequences that it has on individual people, so it's a little bit visceral for me, but it is just so frustrating to watch all these things happen all over again and with our same stamp of approval.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And if you want an example of why electing Kamala Harris will not be a victory for all things good and moral, it is because this sort of thing will continue.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
The Church Is Complicit in This Terror
Sy Hoekstra: Another thing from Reverend Isaac last week was he really did a good job of emphasizing how complicit in all this the church is. Emphasizing points like, Christian Zionism actually predates Jewish Zionism, and there are actually way more Christian Zionists in the world than there are Jewish Zionists, just the raw numbers.
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: And our support of that theology, our creation of that theology, our failure to fight it at every turn, that is what makes us just wholly complicit in what is happening over there. And Jonathan literally, here's the last note that I wrote in our outline: “Hopefully Jonathan has something uplifting to say before we end” [laughter], because I'll be real, I'm not thinking of it right now.
Followers of Jesus need to Focus on Doing Small Advocacy out of Deep Love for Others
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So God's good news about politics is what we're talking about. We are talking about the allocation, distribution of resources, and how people have decided to govern ourselves, and what has happened in the United States, if we're just gonna hang out in the container that we're in, that in the United States we have decided with billions of dollars of our tax dollars, that we are going to build, then send, then advise the genocide of another group of people. I do not want the voting and advocacy and time and work that I do to be perpetrating that or be complicit in that. I might be involved because I have no choice not being overruled, but I will not be unopposed or complacent.
And so as followers of Jesus, I think we have two options, and Peter did this really, really well. Peter was suffering under the oppression of the Jewish people, just like Jesus was, and Jesus' family and Jesus' friends and all the disciples as they were being occupied by Romans. And Peter thought he was doing the absolute just right, good thing in carrying a knife all the time, so that when Jesus got arrested, he pulled out his sword and chopped off the dude's ear. And this is John 18, the scene when Jesus was arrested. Jesus then picks up dude's ear, puts it back on his head, tells Peter to fall back. And Peter had two options. Peter could have said, “You know what, this sucks. I'm just not gonna do this anymore. Jesus, you're wrong.”
He could have done that. He could have said, “You're presenting me with this gospel of hope in the world that is to come, not the world that is right now.” And he could have said, “I'm just going to give up, or I'm going to… look Simon the Zealot, we listen to this dude talk. It's time to start this.” He could have done that, but instead, eventually he got to, “I'm actually going to be the rock of this Church that Jesus said I was going to be,” which is why you and me and so many people listening to this podcast, have decided to follow this man who happens to be God named Jesus, who 12 ordinary men and a bunch of women that we did not name because they too are from a patriarchal society, we know a few of them, like Mary and Mary Magdalene and Dorcas and Phoebe, who decided to say yes, and thousands of years later, we're still talking about them.
And so my hope would be that we as followers of Jesus, would say, “Hey, you know what? What small group of people can we do a little bit of revolutionary actions out of a deep, deep love for so that many, many, many years from now, people are still choosing love over fear and violence.”
Sy Hoekstra: There we go, Jonathan. I knew you had it. I knew you had it in you [Jonathan laughs]. But I appreciate that, because when I say uplifting, that feels like something I can resonate with even while I'm looking at the horrifying nature of what I'm looking at. That feels like something where you're not sugarcoating it.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, right.
Sy Hoekstra: And that's what I appreciate, and that's what I meant by uplifting. I don't want us just to end on a happy note, because you're Christian and you have to or whatever [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Amen, amen.
Sy Hoekstra: So thank you so much for all this work that you're doing trying to create those small communities where people love and do good things. We did a lot of work and tried very hard to do it when we were in college, and I appreciate that you're still trying to get people to do the same thing as they go through that time in their lives.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Prayers and Support for Protesting Students Returning to Campus
Sy Hoekstra: And you and I will be absolutely praying for and supporting in any way that we can the students as they come back to campus and continue to, again as Munther Isaac said, lead the way in ways that the church has been so afraid to do and so unwilling to do.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: If you're listening to this, and you're about to go on to a campus [laughs], or you're already on a campus, we are praying for you, and we absolutely cannot imagine, I don't know, just the uncertainty and the strangeness of what you're doing, but we so appreciate it that you are doing it. And if you're not, and you're just choosing to support people in other ways, because there are many reasons to make that decision, then more power to you as well.
Outro and Outtake
Sy Hoekstra: Okay. We are going to end there. Jonathan, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. I'm really glad that we got to do it. We'll have those Bible studies that Jonathan created in the show notes.
Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Editing by multitude productions. Transcriptions by Joyce Ambale. Production of the show, by me and all of our lovely paid subscribers. Please remember, go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber. Get the bonus episodes of this show, as well as access to the monthly Zoom conversations. When you're listening to this we will just have had one, so be sure to sign up for the next one coming in September. Thank you all so much for listening, and we will see you all in two weeks.
Jonathan Walton: Bye.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: We are close to the camera. We are ready to go.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah. By the way my camera, I tried so many different things to make it work here in Canada, and there's just nothing to be done.
Jonathan Walton: I understand.
Sy Hoekstra: So highlight reels from this episode will come from Jonathan Walton [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: No worries, yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Just make sure everything you say, you look really cool saying it.
Jonathan Walton: I do look really great [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Hey, I'm glad you know that about yourself, Jonathan, I cannot confirm [Jonathan laughs].
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
Today, we talk with theologian and activist Jesse Wheeler about the rotten fruit of the West’s theology in Palestine and the broader region. We get into:
- How everyday Christians can tell the difference between good and bad theology
- Examples of the fruit of bad Western theology in Palestine and the region of the Middle East/North Africa
- How we must acknowledge the horrible effects of the Zionism on both sides of the political aisle, even while rejecting Trump
- What the political witness of Christians should be with respect to how we handle power
- And after the interview, Sy and Jonathan discuss the Christian nationalism and bigotry in faith leaders’ response to controversies at the Olympics
Mentioned in the Episode
- Our anthology, Keeping the Faith
- Jesse’s essay from the anthology, “Bad Theology Kills”
- Jesse’s book, Serving a Crucified King
- Jesse’s organization, Friends of Sabeel North America
- The new Institute for the Study of Christian Zionism
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
Introduction
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Jesse Wheeler: The Kingdom of God, or Christians, or those who would seek to be citizens of the kingdom, cannot live in such a way that emulates the kingdoms of this world. What that entails is, I call it the proper use of power. It's not like physical versus spiritual as sometimes we try to kind of get. It's like, no, it's actually how we understand power and why Jesus through going to the cross, he was basically saying, “Okay, empire, the forces of violence and hatred and exploitation, give me your all.” And he took it to the cross and took it on the cross, and he rejected the violent option.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting Injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. We have a great show for you today, including an interview with another one of our authors from our anthology on Christianity and politics in the era of Trump. This one's on how regular Christians can discern between good and bad theology, and how we can see bad theology playing out in the Middle East. Plus afterwards, hear our thoughts on the interview, and we'll be doing our segment, Which Tab is Still Open, diving deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. This week it's all about the Olympic opening ceremony controversy, trans athletes at the games and the White Christian persecution complex.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs]. We should probably say non-trans athletes at the Olympic Games.
Jonathan Walton: I was literally about to be like, “and not?” [laughs] but…
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's part of the persecution complex. But we will get to that folks, don't worry. You will hear the whole story on how ridiculous it is. Before we get there, a quick reminder, please, everybody consider going to KTFPress.com and becoming a paid subscriber. We will not be able to continue doing this work beyond this election season if we do not get a lot more paid subscribers. So if you want to see this work continue, please go there and sign up. That gets you all the bonus episodes of this show. It gets you access to our monthly Zoom subscriber chats and more community features. So please KTFPress.com, become a paid subscriber.
If you already are a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to a founding member level and please share widely with your friends and family to anyone who you think might be interested in joining our community here. Thank you so much all. All right Jonathan, tell everybody about our guest this week.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, we have the amazing Jesse Wheeler. For almost three years, Jesse has served as executive administrator and development director for Friends of Sabeel North America, an interdenominational Christian organization seeking justice and peace in the holy land through education, advocacy, and nonviolent action. Prior to that, he served just shy of seven years in Beirut, Lebanon as a project’s manager for the Institute of Middle East Studies at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary. He also ran the Master of Religion in the Middle East and North African studies program, working also as support instructor for MENA history, politics and economics.
He has served in Nazarene, evangelical free and Presbyterian churches, and he holds a PG certificate in baptistic histories and theologies from the University of Manchester, a master of divinity with an emphasis in Islamic studies from Fuller Theological Seminary and a BA in diplomatic in Middle Eastern history with a minor in political economics from the University of California Berkeley. Jesse's wife Heidi is Palestinian-American, and they have three amazing boys. Now, Jesse's essay in our anthology was called Bad Theology Kills: How We Justify Killing Arabs. We actually published that at one point on KTFPress.com, so we'll have the link in our show notes to that. And you can get the entire anthology with all 36 essays at Keepingthefaithbook.com. That link will also be in the show notes.
Sy Hoekstra: So we did this interview like we did a lot of our interviews a few months ago, at this point [laughs]. We've been releasing these slowly. This one we did in April, which is relevant. I only say that now because we talk about Biden a decent amount, and when it comes to Palestine, which is what we're talking about when we mention Biden, there's not a lot of distance between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Jonathan Walton: Nope.
Sy Hoekstra: So [laughs], I just wanted to note that up top so that you know that effectively all the content, all the things that we actually say on the subject don't really change given the candidate switch. But that disclaimer behind us, here we go with the interview with Jesse Wheeler.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Jesse Wheeler, thank you so much for being with us today on Shake the Dust. We really, really appreciate it.
Jesse Wheeler: Yeah, no, thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be with you guys.
How Everyday Christians Can Tell Good Theology from Bad Theology
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. We were privileged to publish your essay in our anthology, and you gave us a relatively simple and accessible test for judging the value of the theology that we hear from leaders. Could you talk a little bit about the fruit test?
Jesse Wheeler: Yeah. The fruit test, basically, it's taken straight from the Sermon on the Mount. It's no secret that there are different theological systems that exist in the world, different schools of thought, different ways of thinking, and it can be overwhelming, actually. And I'm even thinking of either my own context back when I was in seminary and sort of some of the destabilizing aspects of it, or when I was working at a seminary and working with students who are introduced to new ideas. And it can be overwhelming even epistemologically overwhelming when they're getting ideas that sort of might butt up against core ideas that maybe they were grown up with that are core parts of their identity. It can be very destabilizing.
And this question of is there a way to distinguish good theology quote, from bad theology quote- unquote, if, I mean, those are very reductionist [laughs] the terminology itself, of course. But I think it comes straight from the Sermon on the Mount actually. And Jesus in the concluding sections of Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7, Jesus gives this, “By your fruit you will recognize them.” How to tell true prophets from false prophets on the basis of their fruit. He doesn't necessarily say, go get a doctorate in systematic, [laughs] in dogmatics to determine whether they are… He’s like, look at the fruit of what is happening.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Jesse Wheeler: And it's for normal people too. This is like normal people without massive theology to say, “Hey, look at this. I see that the fruit of this is leading to hurt and harm and destruction, or the fruit of this is leading to healing and health and flourishing.” It's not to denigrate or dismiss theology. I mean, the title of my chapter is Bad Theology Kills. I think Theology is important.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly
Jesse Wheeler: [laughs] It's a litmus test for assessing theology. And right there, Jesus chapters five, six, and the first part of seven, he gives a whole list of instructions of teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, and then concludes with, “Therefore do to others what you would want others to do for you. This summarizes the law and the prophets,” which is of course, the scriptures. Basically saying, if you wanna know what the scriptures teach, what God is expecting of you, do for others. And even in other parts of the gospels, when people ask, “Oh, what's the greatest commandment?” And he comes back to, “Love the Lord your God,” it's the Shema.
And then right on adds it, and your neighbor as yourself taking that from the Leviticus. And he’s like, there you go. Basically says that and then immediately goes into this section on two roads, easy road and narrow road. And then right after that talks about the false prophets who will come, who might speak eloquently, lovely, and yet the fruit is rotten.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jesse Wheeler: The fruit is rotten.
Sy Hoekstra: Absolutely.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Out of the three of us, I feel like I am the one in the position to most appreciate your point, that you don't need a big theological education to apply this test [laughs]. Because for me and for a lot of the people listening, if you don't have a master's in divinity like Jesse, you haven't been doing ministry and Bible studies and everything for years and years like Jonathan, the more you learn about how little as kind of lay people we know about the whole wide world of theological academics and whatever, the more you realize, I don't feel equipped [laughs]. And so this is, I think, like Jonathan said, it's accessible. It's something that the average person can apply and have some success [laughs] according to Jesus, trying to figure out what's good and bad.
Theologies that Have Born Rotten Fruit in the Middle East and North Africa
Sy Hoekstra: And then I would like to hear from you, in your work doing work with advocacy in churches in the MENA, in the Middle East and North Africa, sometimes abbreviated MENA region, what have you seen bearing bad fruit? What kinds of theologies have you seen bearing bad fruit?
Jesse Wheeler: So, I mean, I could start with the three I listed in my chapter, but I think I kind of want to say like, there is so, so much misunderstanding and prejudice and straight up bigotry that's filtered through a theological system that attempts to justify it.
Colonialist Paternalism
Jesse Wheeler: But I'm going to start with the three I listed in my chapter, and the first one, colonialist paternalism.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Jesse Wheeler: It's a theology of colonial supremacy. Why one person gets to make the decisions for another person, gets to invade another country, gets to conquer, but it's couched in a paternalistic language, often. In a this is for your own good language.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Jesse Wheeler: It's the, I'm not going to attempt to do the French, but the civilizing mission [laughs], hand in hand with the White man's burden from back in the 19th century of bringing our civilization, our Christianity, on one hand… I mean, sometimes it was the church and sometimes it was full on those modern secularists springing [laughs] their enlightened, was just, it was hand in hand with the colonial project too. And that's actually what muddies up the water sometimes in our discourses, especially on more left side of the aisle discourses [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely.
Jesse Wheeler: Because you go from there and you go into speaking right in the Middle East, right after World War I, when you had the three competing promises, you had deals, you had The Balfour Declaration on the one hand, you had Hussein McMahon promising the Arabs of the Hajj, the like the Hussein family, a state, an Arab state, if they would help fight against the Ottoman Turks. And then you had the Sykes-Picot which was basically France and Britain getting together and saying, “Okay, here's how we're going to divide up the spoils.” [laughs]
Sy Hoekstra: And the Balfour Declaration was Britain's intent to make a Zionist state.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Jesse Wheeler: Yeah. Basically a Zionist state in historic Palestine. And so, but you get into afterwards and you had the 14 points, and Wilson came in with, “Oh, we're gonna create a whole new world of peace and…”
Sy Hoekstra: The League of Nations.
Jesse Wheeler: The League of Nations, yeah. And the mandate system, like the fruit of 2that, where basically it's like Sykes-Picot. It's like Britain takes control, France takes control of Lebanon, Syria, Britain, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, and they had Egypt too. So it's just, but it's couched in this language of, it's for your own benefit. We are here to provide guidance to these native populations who need to be trained in the ways of democracy.
Jonathan Walton: It's framed as benevolence. Like this is a good thing.
Jesse Wheeler: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a good thing. It's like we are colonizing you for your good thing. Of course, land extraction, resource extraction [laughs], all of these marks of colonialism are part of this, right, but this is how it's justified, how it's sold, how it's…
Sy Hoekstra: But the theology, like basically you're saying there were always churches and people propping up those colonialist ideas in the Middle East with basically the stamp of approval of the Bible or the church.
Jesse Wheeler: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And it's not a total. I do need to make the point that sometimes the missionaries were very much… actually in the Middle East and in, or very much part of the colonial project, sometimes they actually would actually fight and counter the colonial project in certain ways, even though they were also facilitated by it. But yeah, these theologies, the colonialist paternalism. But to continue on, you have a theology of the Cold War developed almost of democracy and we’ll bomb your entire country, but we will protect you from communism [laughs], you know.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Jesse Wheeler: To very much part of my life, the war on terror. We're bringing democracy to the Middle East.
Sy Hoekstra: Right. I was going to say that just sounds like George W. Bush, like everything that they were saying post World War I. It hasn't changed a lot.
Jesse Wheeler: It has not. It has not. And so that's the first one.
Henotheism: My Good God Will Defeat Your Bad God
Jesse Wheeler: The second one in my book I describe as, I take this term from a scholar Joseph Cumming, he’s a comparative theologian of Christianity and Islam, but he calls, he speaks of Henotheism.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jesse Wheeler: Which is sort of your tribal deity. I don't want… people push back on using tribal as a negative, but sort of the sense of like God is our God and we are the holy ones, and their God is a demon, and we will defeat them and destroy them. And so I even take this quote again from this, the war and terror era where a general speaking about fighting this warlord, whatever, in North Africa, talking about, “We have God on our side, and their god's a demon, and that's why we're gonna win and be victorious.” And this is so much in situations of conflict and situations, you very much have this sense of, “we are the good, our God is the good, they're the evil. And so because they're so evil, any violence is justified against them.”
Sy Hoekstra: And that dates like straight back to the crusades.
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Jesse Wheeler: Oh, yeah. This is crusades [laughs]. Exactly. Exactly. It's a crusader theology, but it's also when you really dig into it and you ask, well, these are supposed monotheists. And isn't the whole point of monotheism that there's actually one God for everybody, and thus it's to turn the God of the cosmos, the monotheistic God into a territorial idol.
Settler Colonialism/Zionism
Jesse Wheeler: I'll move on to the third one, which I think is very relevant in that what I listed as manifest destiny. But it's the settler colonial theology, where it's different from the colonialist paternalism, because this is really, it's a theology that justifies why I deserve to go into a land, remove the indigenous people and take it for my own, basically.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is the difference between settler colonialism and like metropolis, distant ruler colonialism.
Jesse Wheeler: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And Jim Wallace, once he wrote, the most controversial statement I ever wrote talking about something he previously wrote was how America was founded on the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. There was a time in my life where hearing words like that would be so deeply, deeply disorienting for me. My identity, my understanding of who I am. I think part of that discomfort, which is very real, because that's part of my background, and is I think what drives people to someone like Trump. Less the logic behind it, but the emotional, the emotions of feeling safe to have this champion on my side. But that's the simple truth. I mean [laughs], there's this belief that we are god's, we have this divine mandate to come into this new territory. And so I'm talking here about America, but of course this happened all over the world, actually. France and Algeria.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Jesse Wheeler: That was so utterly destructive of traditional Algerian society. And France would even talk about, “Algeria is fully France. We are one.” And so I don't understand why these people are rebelling because we've given them democracy and freedom, when it's like, no, you've completely disrupted their entire civilization and ruled, but how it affects the news, you have the whole Charlie Hebdo incidents and these attacks in France. And this was violent murderous acts, yes. And morally they should be condemned, but you have to see them in their historical context [laughs] of this, the Algerian conflict. But South Africa, this was a deeply theological Dutch Calvinist movement. Even Argentina was a settler colonial context as well.
Sy Hoekstra: I mean, most things in the Western hemisphere are [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Jesse Wheeler: Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. But in a way of the natives were cleared out more.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yes. I see what you're saying. Right. In Argentina, yes.
Jesse Wheeler: Compared to like Brazil, just to the north. And then of course, Zionism is right in there with that. I think it's a theology that justifies why one group gets to come in and displace another group. And those three are three big ones.
The Rotten Fruit of Colonialism and Zionism is on Both Sides of the Political Aisle
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think those three, if we could hold them together as we press into the conversation, all of them are relevant. As we kind of move from the anthology into the present day. So in 2020 you wrote, “If our task is to examine the fruit and avoid falling prey to seductive rhetoric, it is crucial to note that from the vantage point of the Middle East, Republican drones don't look or act much differently than Democrat drones. Biden's record on the Iraq War or Israel-Palestine, while not as appalling or destructive as that of the Republicans is nevertheless quite bad. He's the only viable choice put before us on election day, yet we must remain vigilant in holding a potential Biden administration to account in the weeks, months, years that follow.”
Now, I don't think any of us knew when you wrote that [laughs], how relevant, prophetic and important that last sentence would be. Especially when we talk about the settler colonial ideas that you just talked about, and the deep enmeshment and entanglement with Christian Zionism and the colonial state that is Israel. So, can you… I don’t know how to say this just in a simple way. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been up to with the Friends of Sabeel over the past several months, since October 7th? And what are your thoughts about the two candidates? Because they're the same [laughter], as we look towards the election in the Middle East now. And I will also say our thoughts and prayers are with your friends and family in Palestine.
Jesse Wheeler: Thank you.
Jonathan Walton: And we've been praying that they would be safe in Jesus' name.
Jesse Wheeler: Yeah. No, thank you. I'm trying to think of where do I start digging in? First, my wife is Palestinian. Her family, still a lot of family in Bethlehem. My kids therefore are Palestinian. So I have a deep personal connection. And so to your listeners, knowing that [laughs] who is this guy? I definitely have a deep and emotional pull and connection to what's happening right now. But to go back to what you were first saying is, as you were reading that quote, that passage, and you had wrote, Biden is the only viable [laughs] candidate, my heart sank [laughs]. I'm like, “Ugh.” I understand why I said it at the time, but the listeners need to understand the depth of feeling of the pain, the sense of betrayal, especially amongst the Arab and Palestinian-American community and even wider Muslim community. The utter hurt that they felt in these last six months by everything that has happened.
And so, it's so hard because Trump, just to get into the politics of, it's like I don't even need to say it. From my perspective, from where I stand, Trump is bad [laughs]. I mean, it's like he's out there saying, re-implement the Muslim ban and all completely bigoted and horrible. His son-in-law's talking about, “Oh, yeah, and there will be prime real estate in Gaza,” and [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yes. Right.
Jesse Wheeler: You know, back to settler colonialism. And yeah, it's terrifying. But the thing about Biden, and here's where I just have to say, he will in one breath talk about the importance of combating anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia, and in the next breath give billion more dollars of armed shipments to a country that the International Criminal Court is saying in their legal language, is very plausibly in the midst of an active genocide [laughs]. I'm not a lawyer. Sy, you're the lawyer [Sy laughs]. And it's just the duplicity is what hurts. So KTF shaped, you talk of Christian nationalism a lot and the dangers of Trump, and that largely the anthology was digging into that. And I remember writing the idolatrous fruit is rotten. I mean, that is like, the man thinks he's Jesus, I mean, or… [laughs] It's just horrifying.
Sy Hoekstra: But it’s still there with Biden.
Jesse Wheeler: It's still there.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Jesse Wheeler: It's like when you are connected to the Middle East, either via family or study, or I lived in Lebanon for seven years, when you're paying attention, it's very hard to cheerlead one political party versus another when it comes to the American presence in the Middle East, which has been incredibly destructive.
Sy Hoekstra: And we have come back to that point that you made in your essay. If you listen to a lot of episodes of this show, you will have heard Jesse's name and this point brought up before [laughs].
What Should the Political Witness of Christians Be?
Jonathan Walton: Mm-hmm. You explained in the essay and just now, drones do not own political parties. The bombs that are dropping are the same. The impact they have is the same, devastation is the same. So the idea of the cross to so many people around the world, particularly in the Middle East, North Africa, the MENA region is a symbol of hatred and violence when it's supposed to be like the ultimate expression of God's holy love. We are recording this just after Easter, contemplating the death and resurrection of Jesus. To you, what should the political witness be of people who carry the cross of Jesus?
Self-Sacrifice and a Rejection of Imperial Violence
Jesse Wheeler: Self-Sacrificial love. Quite simply what the cross represents. But at the same time, to dig into it a little more, the cross is what? It's a instrument of imperial violence, that's what it is. There's a reason Jesus died on the cross. It is ultimately a rejection of the Imperial way. Theologically, we need to talk a lot of the kingdom of God and how the kingdom of God exists as a direct challenge to the kingdoms of Pharaoh, of Babylon, of Caesar. And one of the brilliant things of the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament is the fact that it's also the kings of Israel and Judah [laughs], who become the Babylonian leaders. So you have the prophets who rail against the injustices of the Assyrians, but also look back at their own kings.
And when Jesus comes proclaiming the kingdom of God, and when he comes before Pilate and he's brought before Pilate, what does this show right now? And I'm just pulling straight from N. T. Wright, so don't [laughs] pretend I'm like some great Bible scholar here. No. But you have Jesus, who is the representative of the kingdom of God standing before Pilate, who is the full legal representative of Caesar, son of God as they were known and called. And it's just a straight back and forth. And what does Jesus say? He says, my kingdom, there's the quote that always gets misinterpreted. So if you're talking politics and faith, my people say, my kingdom is not of this world. Well, people tend to say, oh, well, Jesus is, it's a spiritual kingdom.
So all we do is sit and pray, and then you just let the world live as what empire, as injustice, like do we have nothing to say? No, he says it's more like, my kingdom is not from this world. It's not in kind to those kingdoms of this world, but it's very much in and for this world. Why?
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Jesse Wheeler: Otherwise, Jesus says, going back to the garden, we just came through holy week, otherwise what? My disciples would've fought. They would've picked up arms, they would've become revolutionaries, they would've fought my arrest. They would've holed up in the mountains. They would have… So you have the kingdom, but going full back to the cross, kingdom by way of cross. So the kingdom of God cannot, or Christians, or those who would seek to be citizens of the kingdom, cannot live in such a way that emulates the kingdoms of this world. What that entails is, I call it the proper use of power. It's not like physical versus spiritual as sometimes we try to kind of get… It's like, no, it's actually how we understand power and why Jesus, through non-violence, through going to the cross, he was basically saying, okay, empire, the forces of violence and hatred and exploitation, give me your all.
And he took it to the cross and took it on the cross, and he rejected the violent option. He did not take up the swords and the arms. He just said, just previously, those who live by the sword will die by the sword. And so that is the witness of the cross. It's self-sacrificial love. It's not this assertion of like, “Hey, this is mine. This is my space, this is my territory.” This is why, back to America, this is why the Christian nationalism is so idolatrous.
Sy Hoekstra: We just had a, our March bonus episode, you're like hitting a bunch of our points, actually [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Keep going.
Jesse Wheeler: Oh, no. Yeah. Thanks [laughs]. It's why it's so idolatrous, is because it's complete rejection of the way of Jesus. It's a complete rejection of what the cross is and what it's supposed to represent. I mean, scrolling through social media, I came across what this is like giant muscle Jesus breaking free from the cross. I'm like, no, that's the complete… no, the cross is the… Like Jesus says, you don't think… back in the garden, he says, you don't think I could call down angels? Call down [laughs] fire from heaven, and just like in an instant, make this all go away? He's like, “No, I'm going to the cross.” It's an example for us to follow.
It Takes Faith in the Resurrection to Use Power Like Jesus
Jesse Wheeler: And it's an article of faith. This is where people will come back and say, this is why it is hard for people, because it is a belief in the resurrection.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Jesse Wheeler: All the forces of death and all the things we do to avoid death. All the killing we do of others, the things we… all the hoarding of resources. All the things we do that we try to preserve ourselves and in the process hurt other people. And we build walls and we break them down. He's like, let it go. Let it go. Let it go. Go to the cross because the resurrection is happening. And it's hard for people because if you don't believe in resurrection, in a sense it's very difficult. But it is very much a faith stance and a faith position.
The Roots of Sabeel in the Political Witness of Palestinian Liberation Theology
And going back to, you asked about Sabeel, you asked about where I work. So Sabeel is an organization founded by Palestinian-Christians out of the time of the first Intifada, the Palestinians uprising. Very much a movement, a spontaneous movement that didn't involve the PLO, which was largely external at the time, or the Palestine political leaders, and was a complete shock to many of the global leaders.
And largely involved a lot of nonviolent direct-action, sort of creative actions, creative resistance and great violence actually was to try to throw it down in response. And yet, Naim Ateek, he was the founder of Sabeel, he wrote a book, published it 1989. It's called Justice and Only Justice, A Palestinian Theology of Liberation, basically started asking the question, how does our faith, our Christian faith, does it have anything to say to the situation, to us being under this violent, brutal occupation? And sort of the traditional, across the board, Orthodox Catholic, Protestant theologies weren't really saying much.
So they started just, would preach there in St. George's Episcopal Church right in Jerusalem. And after the service, they'd kind of get together and start discussing. Like let's read a passage and let's think and just look. It's very much like you, if you think of the classic liberation theology in Latin America. The base communities just getting together. It's basically kind of got together and started thinking, but it grew from there to, so Naim Ateek sort of was the founder, but then it was really this core group that formed and they started inviting… because even back then, they're like, “We know the narrative imbalance that people are not hearing the Palestinian side of the story. Let's bring people and show them.”
And they bring people, they show them, and immediately people are converted once they see the reality. People go on tours with the holy land all the time, they're highly curated and they don't go to those scary Palestinian areas. But the moment you enter Palestinian areas and are greeted with wonderful Arab hospitality and like [laughs]… But then here's what the reality of being under their military occupation is. And it is like, oh, I see it now. So people would go back and they founded, I work for Friends of Sabeel North America, but there's groups all over and it's been still going on. And then there's subsequent groups that have formed and other great partners too that we work with.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for being here. I mean, you didn't just write for the book. You were an enormous help in actually getting it published. You did a ton of work for us, source checking and all kinds of other things. You were… and were not running around looking for credit for any of that. So you definitely had your head down and you were doing [laughs] what you needed to do to get the word out. And thank you so much for being here today to talk to us.
Jesse Wheeler: Thank you for doing it. I mean, I was really proud to be.
Jonathan Walton: Thank you so much, man.
Jesse Wheeler: Thank you for having me. And thank you for your witness. I mean, Palestine is a wheat and chaff issue, and I feel like those who've really stood for the truth and stood for justice and stood for what's right in the face of so much that's wrong. And it's just been amazing to see the witness of you guys, and I just want to thank you for that. It's very, it means so much.
Sy Hoekstra: No, thank you for everything you do as well. We so appreciate it, man.
Jonathan Walton: Amen. Blessings on you and Friends of Sabeel. Amen.
Jesse Wheeler: Thank you so much. Blessings to you guys.
Jonathan Walton: Amen. Thanks.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Jesse’s Social Media and Recommendations
Sy Hoekstra: You can find Jesse @intothenoisejsw on Instagram and Twitter. His organization, the Friends of Sabeel North America is at FOSNA.org, and those will both be in the show notes. And also, Jesse wanted us to mention another organization that just kind of had its grand opening over the summer after we recorded this interview. It's called the Institute for the Study of Christian Zionism. It's a really cool new organization with a lot of people involved who you may recognize if you're familiar with kind of the field of that particular branch of theology [laughs]. And basically, they want to be a one-stop shop, a hub, a go-to resource for everything related to fighting the heresy, as they call it, of Christian Zionism.
And so, that you can find that organization at Studychristianzionism.org. We'll also put that in the show notes, obviously.
Jonathan’s and Sy’s Reactions to the Interview
Sy Hoekstra: Okay, Jonathan. After that interview, what are your thoughts?
Jonathan Walton: Bad theology kills people.
Sy Hoekstra: Yes. Uh-huh. It's not a joke.
How We Resist Institutions Built to Protect and Reinforce Lies
Jonathan Walton: [Laughs] I think we need to lean into that and say it over and over and over again. We cannot divorce what we believe from what we do. Can't. They are intertwined with each other. And it's baffling to me that particularly American Christians, and this like runs a gamut like Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, native, all the things, how strongly we cling to, I believe this, I believe this, I believe this, how deeply committed we are, how there are institutions, there are studies and conversations, there are all these different things that are built up around things that are just not true. Like just the level of intricacy of every apparatus to hold together a lie is mind-boggling to me.
And it is so effective that we can get caught up in all the details and never think about the impact, which is what I feel has happened. Like, oh, all I do is read these books. All I do is write these articles. All I do is do these podcasts. All I do is give money to this organization. All I do is pray. All I do is watch these documentaries. All I do is host these little dinners at my house. Not knowing at all that it is undergirding the bombing of Palestinians and the rampant Islamophobia and the destruction of Palestinian Christian life. Don't even know it because it's just an encased system. So I think for me, I'm reminded of the power of the gospel transformation because the gospel and liberation is also a complete process, just like colonization is and settler colonialism is.
So I'm challenged because the next time I think to myself, I'm going to change the world. I'll remember this conversation and realize only Jesus can [laughs] do that. And I need to have just as robust of a theology and apparatus built around me and participating as a follower of Jesus as the forces that are hell bent on destroying people's lives. That was just a thing I've been holding onto, particularly as we were talking about Easter, as we are reflecting on the reality of the resurrection, we need a theology of life, abundance and liberation that is just as robust, just as supported, just as active and engaged as the theology of destruction that we have now.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. The theology, specifically what he was talking about kind of toward the end about the use of power.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: I had that same thought basically that you just said. Like the way that we use power via sacrifice as opposed to using power via dominance. Like that needs to be as emphasized as anything else in our Christian discipleship.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Because it is just, it's so absent. You cannot insist to so many Western Christians that that aspect of our faith is as important as the stuff that we'll get into a minute about arguing about like sexuality or whatever [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: We have just so deprioritized these things that were so central to Jesus when he said things like, my kingdom was not of this world. So there's that.
We Emphasize the Importance of Theology for the Wrong Reasons
Sy Hoekstra: The other thing that I was thinking about was also related to what you just said, which is, you say bad theology kills, and we need to understand how important our theology is in that sense. But we also need to understand the way that our theology is important because we actually do think theology is really important just in the wrong way.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right.
We think theology is really important for defining who is in and out of Christianity or just for having proper orthodoxy and that sort of thing, just to tick all the boxes to make sure that your beliefs are correct.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Which absolutely pales in comparison to the real reason that theology is important, which is it shapes our behavior, or it can shape our behavior [laughs]. Or it interacts with our behavior and they reinforce and shape each other in ways that create policies and government actions and whole social transformations and systems across the world [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So yeah. That's what I am coming out of this thinking. We need to stay focused on. And I'm just so happy that there are people like Sabeel and others fighting in that way. And by the way, back on the point of how we exercise power and how important it is to exercise power in the way that Jesus did. Jesse actually wrote to us after the interview and said kind of, “Oh, shoot, there's a point that I forgot to make,” [laughs] that I wanted to bring up here, which is something that, so the founder of Sabeel, his name is Naim Ateek often raises, which is that, like Jesse said, Sabeel was founded after the first Intifada in 1987. But he says, there are two organizations that were founded out of that Intifada.
One of them was Sabeel and the other was Hamas. And he said, basically just look at the two approaches [laughs]. There's armed insurrection and then there's non-violent direct action and education and advocacy and whatever. Like it is small what Sabeel is doing. It is certainly smaller than what Hamas is doing. And it is one of those things that probably to the rest of the world looks like it's less powerful, it's less effective. And like Jesse said, it is an article of faith to believe that that is actually the stronger way to go. You know what I mean? That is the more powerful road to take, even though it is the much more difficult one to take. And I just really wish that we could all have a faith like that.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes, and amen.
Sy Hoekstra: Shall we get into Which Tab Is Still Open, Jonathan?
Jonathan Walton: [laughs], all the tabs Sy. Let’s go.
Which Tab Is Still Open?: Christian Reactions to the Olympics
Sy Hoekstra: All the tabs are still open. We're gonna talk about two stories that have to do with the Olympics, that also have to do with Western Christians [laughter], and how persecuted we feel.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: I'm just, let me quickly summarize what happened here. The details are very silly on the first one. You probably heard about this one, this is probably the more popular story. During the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, well, here's some background. The opening ceremonies to the Olympics are weird. They're always weird. They've always been weird [laughs]. I always come away from them thinking, “Wow, that was weird,” [laughter]. They usually include some kind of tribute to ancient Greece where the Olympics came from. And in this case, one of the things they did was a little tribute to the Festival of the Goddess Dionysus. Wait, goddess? Was Dionysus supposed to be a man or a woman?
Jonathan Walton: A man. Dionysus is a man.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Okay.
Jonathan Walton: No. Diana is a woman, but yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: All right, fine [laughs]. So anyways, they had this staging of a feast, and the way it was staged with all of the people sitting at the table facing the audience and the cameras reminded a lot of Christians of the way that Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper is staged with Jesus and all the disciples facing the painter [laughs]. But all of the, or not all, but the most of the people sitting at the table were drag queens. And so Christians took this as a massive insult, that people must be mocking the Last Supper and our religion and our beliefs about conservative traditional sexuality and et cetera. The Olympic organizers came out and said, “This had nothing to do with Christianity, we apologize for the offense. This was about Dionysus, and that was kind of it. We weren't talking about Christianity, but we're sorry if we offended you.”
And that was the end of it. But basically Christians said, “We're being mocked, we're being persecuted, they hate us,” et cetera. Second story, a female boxer by the name of Imane Khelif was in a fight with an Italian female boxer and hit her pretty hard a couple of times. And then the Italian boxer quit and said that Khelif is a man who is a trans woman fighting in the women's competition in the Olympics. The only reason that this was a viable thing for the Italian woman to say was because in the year before that, at the 2023 World Championships, the International Boxing Association disqualified Khelif from the competition saying that she had elevated testosterone levels and that she had XY chromosomes and was in fact a man. So she failed the gender eligibility test.
The reason this is a ridiculous thing for them to have said [laughs], is that Khelif was born assigned female at birth. Her birth certificate says she's a woman. She has lived her entire life as a woman, she has never claimed to be trans in any way. And they never published the results of the test. And they only came out and said that she had failed these gender eligibility tests after she defeated a previously undefeated Russian boxer. Why does that matter? Well, the president of the International Boxing Association is Russian, has moved most of the IBA’s operations to Russia, has made the state-run oil company the main sponsor of these boxing events, has close ties to Putin, et cetera [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: It has become a Russian propaganda machine. The International Boxing Association, the International Olympic Committee has actually cut ties with them, is no longer letting them run the World Championships or the Olympic games boxing tournaments. They have suffered from corruption, from match fixing by referees, lack of transparency in finances, et cetera. It is a big old mess, and they never published the results of these gender eligibility tests. And it is pretty clear that they were made up in order to preserve the undefeated title of a Russian favorite boxer [laughter]. So it's absolute nonsense is what I'm saying.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: But that has not stopped anyone, including people like Elon Musk and JK Rowling from saying, “what we clearly saw here in the Olympics was a man punching a woman. And this is where you get when you follow the transgender agenda,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Obviously I just named, well, Rowling is a Christian, but lots of Christian leaders jumping on this same train. Jonathan, these were yours.
Jonathan Walton: [exasperated exhale] These are mine.
Sy Hoekstra: Why did you include these? You have been, I'll say you have been very focused on these, the Christian reaction to things going on in the Olympics has been on the brain for you. Why [laughs]?
Fusing Faith with American Power
Jonathan Walton: Because I think there's a couple things because bad theology kills people. Sy, we talked about this and like…
Sy Hoekstra: Well, no, wait. How is this, explain the relation there, please.
Jonathan Walton: Gladly. Gladly. So I think [laughs], I'm gonna read this quote by Andy Stanley who posted this after the Dionysus thing and then took it down because I think he realized the err of his ways. But I am grateful for the interwebs because somebody screenshot it. Here we go [Sy laughs]. “Dear France, the Normandy American Cemetery is the resting place of 9,238 Americans whose graves are marked by 9,238 crosses. American soldiers, who in most cases volunteered to come to your shores in your time of need. Their final prayers were to the God whose son you mocked in front of the entire world. It was during the very meal you went to such creative pains to denigrate, that Jesus instructed his followers to love one another and then define what he meant. Quote, greater love has no one than this, that one laid down his life for his friends, end quote. While you host the Olympic Games, remember your nation hosts 172.5 acre reminder of what love looks like. You don't just owe Christians an apology. You owe the West an apology.” End quote.
Sy Hoekstra: It's so much Jonathan [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: It is. That's a book. That is a book. It's called 12 Lies.
Sy Hoekstra: That's your book, yeah [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: And then it's an anthology that like [laughs] called Keeping the Faith, right? So that to me, and what's happened in this season of the Olympics has crystallized something for me that I think about. But these are such concrete, clear, succinct, edited examples of like, here is what happens when geopolitical power of the American apparatus is just completely inseparable, completely fused, completely joined together with the Jesus of empire.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: So much so that minutes after this ceremony was completed and broadcast, you have people with the language, you have people with the vocabulary, you have people with statistics. He's like, this is the number of crosses. That means he Googled something, he don't just know that.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: We are primed as… not me, because I'm not. But the White American church and folks affiliated and committed to White American folk religion, like this race-based, class-based, gender-based environmental hierarchy that dominates this false gospel of the merchant, the military and the missionary all coming together. Like that is just so frustrating to me. And it's not going to stop because the apparatus is in like, I feel like a full maturation right now because it is under threat and constantly being exposed. So what tab is still open for me is the reality that the people who are armed with a false gospel are finally being met online and in real life by people who are willing to challenge them.
And so what was amazing to me was watching a Fox News segment where someone came on and said, “Hey, Imane Khelif was born a woman, is a woman. This is not a trans issue.” There are people willing to go on and say the things. There's an online presence of people willing to go online and say the things. And I think we have an articulation of faithful followers of Jesus who are willing not just to say this is wrong, but name the connection that when we have conversations about Christians being persecuted, boom, here's a picture of Christians actually being persecuted, Palestine. Right?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: When we have conversations, oh, we are being persecuted and violence is being committed against us. No, no, no. Violence is actually happening to trans people at a staggering level. And it correlates with when we have these nonsensical conversations that actually create environments that are more dangerous for them in the bathroom, in schools and wherever they go. And so, I can have a conversation with someone and say—this was a real conversation—we have the luxury of having this conversation as people who are not involved directly, but we do not have the luxury of as followers of Jesus is not then following up and saying, “I was wrong.”
So I had conversations about Imane Khelif with Christians who said, “You know what? Oh, I didn't know that. Let me go back and post something different. Let me post an apology. You know what, I see what you're saying. I clicked on the links. Yeah, we shouldn't be doing that. I'm gonna go and have a conversation with these people.” That to me is hopeful, and at the same time, I know that this will not stop because my mama would say, “When the lights come on, the roaches run everywhere.” I fully suspect that there will be more examples like this leading up to and beyond the election.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, for sure.
Jonathan Walton: …as there is more light on the sheer nonsense that Andy Stanley and these other people are propagating on a regular basis.
Christians Demonstrated How Christian Nationalism is Common and Acceptable in White Churches
Sy Hoekstra: And people who jumped on this by the way, were like, Ed Stetzer and people who are kind of like in the middle politically in America and in American politics at least. They're not Trumpers. These are regular Christians [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right. And that's the thing that we talked about a few episodes ago. This is the soft Christian nationalism, socially acceptable American exceptionalism. All these things are totally normal, totally fine in quote- unquote. that normal Christianity.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And actually, so one of the things I want to emphasize about that thing you, that someone screenshotted from Andy Stanley, was that his idea of love in that post is like, I'm gonna sacrifice myself for you and then in exchange I get control over your culture so that you will not insult me.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is not the love of Jesus. The love of Jesus is laying down your life for your friends, period, end of story. Jesus laid down his life for people who have nothing to do with him. You know what I mean? Who can't stand him, who don't like him, whatever.
Jonathan Walton: Who desired to kill him [laughs]. Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly. And did not demand then that they conform to his way. He let them go on their way.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: The quote unquote love that says, all these soldiers at Normandy sacrificed, therefore you cannot insult us, is not Christian. Has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus. And it does have everything to do with tying your faith to an empire that uses military might to demand conformity. That is colonizing faith, period.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Why White Christians Invent Enemies Where None Exist
Sy Hoekstra: That aspect of it then kind of plays into some of the stuff that I was thinking about it, which is that like if you are someone who has so fused your faith with dominance like that, then you are constantly looking for enemies who don't exist to come and defeat you because that's your way of living. You live by the sword. So it's almost like a subconscious, like you live by the sword, you expect to die by the sword. You live by cultural dominance, you expect people to culturally dominate you. So you're going to find insults against one European artist’s rendering of a scene from the Bible where none exist. Just because they had drag queens you don't like.
You are going to find trans women who don't exist [laughs] and argue that they are a sign of the things that are destroying the culture that you built in the West. And I just think that is so much more revealing of the people who say it than it is of anything that they were trying to reveal through what they said.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely. I wonder if there were followers of Jesus who when da Vinci painted what he painted, said, “This is not my savior.”
Sy Hoekstra: I can think of one reason, but why would they have said that Jonathan?
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Because the Last Supper is a parody of an event in the scriptures. The reality is Jesus is not a Eurocentric figure sitting with flowing robes with people surrounding him. That's not how it happened. That's not how Passover looks[laughs]. So I mean, the reality of them being these American insurrectionist pastors who say, “You know what, we are going to get angry about a parody that isn't a parody, about a parody that we believe is actually sacred.”
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs]. Well, okay. Calling the Last Supper parody I think is a little bit confusing.
Jonathan Walton: No, the…
Sy Hoekstra: Because I think da Vinci meant it the way that he… [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: No, I'm sure da Vinci reflected his cultural reality on the scripture, which is something we all do.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Jonathan Walton: But to then baptize that image to be something that can be defiled and then demand capitulation because of our quote- unquote military might, those lines are bonkers to me. So I can be frustrated that I feel mocked, because that's a feeling, I feel mocked. But what should happen is we say, I feel mocked because I don't actually have cultural understanding and acuity to be able to differentiate my own emotional realities from the theology of the Bible when we don't have those skills. And actually we don't have that desire because we desire for them to be one and the same, like you said. I desire to feel affirmed and good and empowered all the time.
And if that comes under any threat, then it's either the merchant, let's take money from you. Let's sanction you, let's get you out of the economic system so you cannot flourish in the way that we've defined flourishing to look. We will bring missionaries and people and set up institutions to devalue and debunk your own cultural narratives and spiritual things that you hold dear. And if that doesn't work, we'll just shoot you and make sure it does. Anyway, that's was more forceful than I expected it to be.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] It wasn't for me because you keep putting these Olympics things in the newsletter and you keep telling me how frustrated you are about them, but it goes to stuff that is extremely important and I appreciate you bringing up and bringing us into this conversation.
Outro and Outtake
Sy Hoekstra: We have to go. You specifically have to leave in a couple minutes, so we're going to wrap things up here. Even though you and I could talk about this subject forever [Jonathan laughs]. Maybe Jonathan, maybe we'll talk about it more at the next monthly Zoom conversation.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: …on August 27th that people can register for if they become paid subscribers at Ktfpress.com, which you all should please go do if you want to see this work continue beyond this election season, get access to all the bonus episodes of this show, the ability to comment, other community features like that. The anthology, again, is at Keepingthefaithbook.com, that's what Jesse wrote for and what 35 other authors wrote for trying to give us a faithful path forward as so much of the church idolizes Donald Trump and the power that he brings them in this particular political era. Our theme song is Citizens by Jon Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robyn Burgess, transcripts by Joyce Ambale, editing by Multitude Productions. Thank you all so much for listening and we will see you in two weeks.
Jonathan Walton: Bye.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: The White Christian persecution complex. [Jonathan lets out a deep, croaky “Maaaaaaaah”].
Sy Hoekstra: I really should have… what was that noise [laughter]?
Jonathan Walton: I think it's appropriate [Sy laughs]. It was the exasperation of my soul.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
On today’s episode, Jonathan and Sy have a catch-up conversation on the assassination attempt, the Vance VP pick, Biden stepping down, and Harris stepping up. Then they talk with UCLA professor Robert Chao Romero about:
- What everyday life was like for immigrants during Trump’s administration
- How MAGA Christians’ treatment of immigrants reveals a lack of spiritual discernment
- What Professor Romero would say to immigrants who think voting won’t make a difference
- And the complicated, diverse politics of Latine voters in America
Mentioned in the Episode
- Our anthology, Keeping the Faith
- Tamice Spencer-Helms reading an excerpt of Faith Unleavened
- Professor Romero’s Instagram
- And his book, Brown Church
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
Introduction
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Robert Romero: In the context of the life of worship, we are to reflect upon scripture, upon the 2000-year-old tradition of the church, and to add Latino theology, en conjunto, or in community, with the local church, with the global church, with the church that's there with Jesus right now, even. And there has to be a continuity, a harmony between new scriptural interpretations and our ancestors that have gone before us. And so if you just run that test [laughs], that criteria, the MAGA movement through that doesn't make any sense.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. This is gonna be an interesting episode. Today we're breaking our format a little bit because just so many things have happened since the last time that we recorded. I don't know if you've noticed, Jonathan, a couple of things happened in the news [laughs] since the last time we recorded this show.
Jonathan Walton: A few historical events.
Sy Hoekstra: Just a few historical events. So we're still gonna have an interview with one of the authors from the anthology that we published on Theology and Politics. This week it will be Robert Chao Romero, who is a lawyer, history PhD, professor, pastor, activist. No big deal, the usual combination of the regular career path that everyone takes. But before we do that, we are going to spend some time talking about the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, the JD Vance pick for Vice President, Joe Biden stepping down, the almost certain nomination of Kamala Harris. And while we will probably talk about a couple of the resources that we've highlighted in our newsletter on those subjects, we're not gonna formally do our Which Tab Is Still Open this time around. There's just too much…
Jonathan Walton: There’s a lot. There’s a lot.
Sy Hoekstra: …to talk about, and we wanted to get all that in. Plus the really, really great interview with Professor Romero. But before we get into all of that, Jonathan.
Jonathan Walton: Hey, if you like what you hear and read from KTF Press and would like for it to continue beyond the election season, please go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber, and encourage others to do the same. We've got a ways to go before we're going to have enough people to sustain the work we're doing after the election. So if that's you, go to KTFPress.com, sign up, become a paid subscriber, and then tell a friend to do the same thing. That gets you all the bonus episodes of this show, access to our monthly Zoom chats with the two of us and some other great subscribers. And so go to KTFPress.com and subscribe.
The Assassination Attempt on Donald Trump
Sy Hoekstra: Alright Jonathan. Let's start with the big one. Well, no, they're all big ones.
Jonathan Walton: No, they're all big for different people, for different reasons [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: For very different reasons.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: The assassination attempt in Pennsylvania at the rally, just before the RNC. The media reaction to this, Jonathan, has struck me as a little bit odd. I don't know what you've been thinking, but let’s hear what you're thinking, what your reaction to the assassination attempt was and to the conversation around it.
Not Taking Part in the News Spectacle of the Assassination
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So my immediate reaction was, okay, if this had happened in 2016, I think I would've pulled my phone up and writing things, processing, trying to figure things out, all those kinds of things. When I heard this news, I was on the beach in California with my family, and I honestly was not troubled. And that was weird to me. I was not worried, I was not concerned. I thought to myself, “Man, if I was orienting my life around the decisions of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, I would probably be losing my insert word [laughs], but I'm not.” And I also thought about, oh, if I am someone on the quote- unquote left, my brain would be spinning. How is this gonna be politically, what's the impact? Blah, blah, blah. And I just wasn't. And so in that immediate moment, I felt empathy for folks that were feeling that type of dissonance.
And the way that I felt towards Donald Trump actually came from a conversation I had with Priscilla, because she was sharing and just the reality that we don't want to participate in the spectacle of it. Reality in TV is an oxymoron that shouldn't exist. Our lives are not entertainment. The intimacies of life should not be broadcast and monetized and commented on as though all of us are all of a sudden now in a glass, I mean [laughs], to reference not the book, but just the image. But that all of us are now like a glass menagerie that we can just observe one another and comment as if we're not people. Those are the initial feelings that I had.
Why Wasn’t the Shooter Considered Suspicious?
Jonathan Walton: The last feeling that I had was actually highlighted by someone from our emotionality activist cohort. He said that he felt angry because the shooter was labeled as suspicious, but not dangerous. And he said, if this had been a BIPOC person, Black, indigenous person of color, there would've absolutely been a response.
Sy Hoekstra: Especially at a Trump rally.
Jonathan Walton: At a Trump rally, there would've been a response to a suspicious person of color. That would've been fundamentally different place as evidenced by the very real reality, I think a few days later at an event where there was a Black person that was killed by the police [laughs] near a political rally. So I think there, no, there was an altercation, there was a very real threat of violence between these two people, but the responses to Black people and people of color and the impoverished and all these different things that it, it’s just a fundamentally different thing because they saw this 20-year-old kid who isn't old enough to buy alcohol, but old enough to get his hands on an AR-15 to scope out a place and shoot someone wasn't seen as a threat. And I think that is a unique frustration and anger, because I hadn't thought about that, but I hold that too.
Sy Hoekstra: Just to emphasize that he was, the local police officers actually did try and flag this person as someone who was suspicious. They didn't do anything about it, but they noted it. You know what I mean?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is even more… Like his behavior was suspicious enough for him to be noticed by law enforcement, but they didn't actually do anything, and then they reported it to whoever was running campaign security, and they didn't do anything about it either.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And I don't know. Yes, that is a good and sad point, and I appreciate you bringing it up.
We Have to Insist on the Value of Trump’s Life
Jonathan Walton: Well, what about for you?
Sy Hoekstra: I mean, I guess my response to, two different angles of response to it. One is to anybody, I know there are people out there who are like, “Trump is a fascist, Trump is a threat to democracy, I just wish he'd been hit in the head.” And I don't think anyone in, I haven't heard anybody in the mainstream media or politicians or anyone saying that, because that would be too far for them in their [laughs] policies and their politeness and all that. But there are people thinking it, and I just, I don't know. I just have to say that we can't do that.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely not.
Sy Hoekstra: We can't be the people who dehumanize somebody to that degree. I agree that he's a fascist and that he wants to, and that he is a huge threat to our democracy and all of that. But to then say, “I wish he was dead,” that puts you on his level. That makes you like him, the person who mocks when other people have had assassination attempts on them, like Nancy Pelosi or Gretchen Whitmer. Or who encourages and stands behind all the people who were in the January 6th riot that did actually kill people, right?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: You don't become him, is what I'm saying to anybody who's thought or been tempted to have those thoughts. We still have to stick to the image of God and everybody as a principal. Even when it's genuinely tempting not to, because there are serious considerations on the other side of that argument [laughs] if that makes sense.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, yes.
Sy Hoekstra: It's a terrible thing to talk about, but it's, I think it's worth addressing.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.
We Do Not Need to Tone Down Our Rhetoric about Trump’s Threat to Democracy
Sy Hoekstra: But I also have to say the opposite side of like, we must call for unity. We must call to lower the political rhetoric and the political temperature. When it comes to Donald Trump, that is ridiculous.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: That is a, you can't do that [laughter]. And the reason is, first of all, he's the one mocking other people's attempts that have happened on their lives, or riots that actually led to people dying, right?
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: So for him or the people who support him to say, “Oh, now we need to call for unity or rhetoric to come down,” it's hypocritical on their part. Now, that doesn't matter. I'm not trying to just be like whatabouting the Republicans. But the issue is like, there's different kinds of heated political rhetoric. When you obviously accuse somebody of being a threat to democracy, that's a charged statement for sure that you shouldn't say lightly. However, the people who are arguing it now are arguing it on the basis of Donald Trump's words and actions [laughs]. They're making a real good faith argument based on actual evidence. It's heated nonsense political rhetoric when Donald Trump says that there's an invasion at the southern border…
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: …and you're just painting poor people who are fleeing violence, trying to find safety in an opportunity in America as invaders who are here to, well, like he said, killers and rapists and drug dealers and whatever.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: When you're just painting with a broad brush, when you're creating stereotypes, when you're just trying to slide people into a category, that's dehumanization and that's what can lead to violence. When you're actually making an argument against something that people have actually done, like words that people have said and actions that they have taken, that's a different story. And it is true that in a country of 320 million people, even if you make a good faith argument based on facts, that somebody's a threat to democracy, somebody might take that as a reason to shoot at them. But that's not anything over which we have any control.
Jonathan Walton: No.
Sy Hoekstra: That doesn't mean you stop saying things that are true because they're… you know what I mean? That then I wouldn't say anything about anybody. I would just keep my mouth shut all the time. I can't make any arguments about anything because what if somebody just happens to at the wrong moment take that as license to go attack somebody?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So all of that stuff seemed like nonsense to me. And then people were like, “Oh, don't talk about how it's gonna help his campaign.” Of course, it's gonna help his campaign. And of course the Republicans are going to use it to help his campaign. We need to be realistic about what we're talking about here [laughs] in the context of our conversation. So I think those were my reactions to all of this. I think because as soon as he was shot at, I, because he wasn't hit, I knew he was fine. So I wasn't particularly scared about it. I didn't have like a lot of emotions around the thing itself, because the guy missed him [laughs].
Americans Condemning Political Violence is Hypocrisy
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think I'll also say too, it's the idea that all of a sudden, we are gonna step out and condemn political violence, let's be clear. There's an exceptional level of political violence enacted by the United States every single day against its own people, against people around the world. There are 900 bases where political violence is happening. We tried to assassinate a leader a few months ago in the Congo. Let's be clear that the reality of that statement too is just ridiculously hypocritical and ignorant.
Sy Hoekstra: Yep.
Jonathan Walton: Right. Like just Biden did rattle off some political violence that I think we, the quote- unquote dominant cultural narrative is okay with calling out, but we also have to just name the reality that we are actively participating in things that are politically violent.
Sy Hoekstra: All the time.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs] all the time. For example [laughs], Biden said, oh, yeah, we're not gonna ship bombs to Israel anymore, and the reality is we shipped thousands of bombs.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: That level of comfort with ignorance and hypocrisy and the dissemination, or just sharing that widely, is also something not about the event itself, but our dominant narrative response and the legacy media's response was just, that was disheartening to say the least.
Sy Hoekstra: It's a very good point. And I would point out that Trump himself had a general in Iran assassinated [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right. Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: It's just like, it's complete nonsense.
Jonathan Walton: He did. Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: For us to be like, “Where does political violence come from in America? I don't know.”
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: The many presidential assassinations and lynchings and pogroms and everything else. Like what? I don't know.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: We should note, by the way, as I'm listening to you talk, Jonathan's at home and children are not in school, they’re home from daycare [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Oh, yes. Yes. Our house is very full. Thank you for being gracious.
Sy Hoekstra: You’ll hear some adorable little voices in the background. I'm sure everyone will enjoy it all.
The VP Pick of J. D. Vance
Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, let's talk JD Vance. What are you thinking about this pick [laughs]?
Vance Is Everything Trump Wishes He Was, and Could Lead for a Long Time
Jonathan Walton: Oh, Lord! I think the thing that bothers me about JD Vance, as my daughter screams [laughs], is Donald Trump picked someone who reflects all of the values that he has and wants to espouse.
Sy Hoekstra: Yep.
Jonathan Walton: So Donald Trump would love to say that he grew up poor and is a working class man, all those things. He's not, but JD Vance, quote- unquote, is. He desperately wants to say he made it and served his country and all the… No, he didn't.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: But JD Vance is a Marine and quote- unquote actually built a business. Now, JD Vance is also exceptionally misogynistic, exceptionally patriarchal, exceptionally individualistic in the way that Bootstrap Republicanism tries to embody itself. And so he chose someone at the same time that did not have the apprentice. That did not go on reality television. That did not spend his life entertaining people, so I think he is going to be taken seriously, which is why he's dragging Donald Trump in the polls. I think what happened is the wholesale remaking of a section of the Republican party that has now taken it over, and he chose a leader that could be the voice of that for the next 25 years. And that I think is sad [laughs] because I do believe in a pluralistic society where people can share ideas and wrestle and make good faith arguments and argue for change and all those things.
So I don't want some one party event that happens. At the same time, I think it is exceptionally unnerving and unsettling and destabilizing for someone who holds such views against women that we will absolutely see, obviously when we talk about Kamala Harris. But what he, what Donald Trump blessed and sent out, JD Vance will now bless and send out for the next few decades at least. And that if you wanted to give a new, like a reiteration of Strom Thurmond, here we go. He's 38, he could be talking and on TV and doing things for the next 50 years, and that is deeply unsettling for me.
Vance Is a Sellout, but That Probably Won’t Matter Much
Sy Hoekstra: It's also interesting that he's someone who's doing it as a sellout.
Jonathan Walton: Oh, yeah. A thousand percent.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Meaning he was not… he was a never Trumper for a while. He called Trump possibly America's Hitler at one point. And now he totally turned around once he ran for Senate because he saw where the wind was blowing.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: If nothing else, his Silicon Valley background lets him understand disruption and how to capitalize on uncertainty and when things are changing [laughs]. So yeah, that's an interesting one to me. I kind of wondered if that would make Trumpers not trust him or even not trust Trump, because he isn't… So much of the Trump worldview that he tries to inculcate in people is us versus them, and we need to demand loyalty because there's so much danger out there coming at us. And so a guy who flip flops to become a pro-Trump person, like a lot of… I don't know, there have been a lot of politicians like that who have been distrusted, but maybe he's just famous enough that it doesn't matter. I'm not sure. We'll see as it goes on. There's a possibility that he weakens the enthusiasm of Trump voters, but I don't actually know.
Jonathan Walton: They chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” So I don't put that beyond them, beyond anybody.
Sy Hoekstra: I see. They can always separate Trump from anybody else, basically.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: He's the exception no matter what [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right, right, right.
Vance Helps with the Tech World, but He’s Unexperienced and Hasn’t Accomplished Much
Sy Hoekstra: Another thing about him is, well, there's a couple of things. One is he is, he was a pick, at least in part to court tech billionaires. He's a Peter Thiel protege. He's basically promising to deregulate all kinds of tech related things. He is helping Trump secure the support of Musk and Zuckerberg and everybody else.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So, I don't know. He was a strategic pick in that sense, I guess. He's also one that was a strategic pick when they were facing Joe Biden.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Which they're not anymore, and it's an interesting, I don't know, it'll be a different kind of calculation. Now, I've heard some rumblings that some Republicans kind of regret the choice at this point because [laughs] it's gonna be such a different race.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: It's also incredible to me that the entire Republican ticket now has a total of six years of government experience [laughter]. It's just like, so Trump has done it for four years. Vance has done it for two, that's all we got. Six years.
Jonathan Walton: Right, right.
Sy Hoekstra: Kamala's got that beat like by multiples, by herself with no running mates [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right, right, right.
Sy Hoekstra: So anyways, that's just kind of a remarkable thing. Vance is also totally, he hasn't done much in the Senate in terms of bills that he's introduced, but he has introduced things that haven't gone anywhere that are just like a bunch of transphobic and anti-DEI and all that kind of legislation. So he's been not doing much, but ideologically on doing the kinds of things that Trump wants a senator to do. So that's another part of the pick, which is also depressing. But let's move on from that sad one.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Biden Stepping Down, Harris Taking Over
Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, what are we thinking about Biden stepping down and the almost certain, possibly the only legal available nomination of [laughter] Kamala Harris to be the President of the United States?
The Dynamics of White Boomers Passing Power to Younger BIPOC
Jonathan Walton: So, yeah, the first thing that I thought of when Biden said he was stepping down was that I knew he was gonna step down when he got COVID.
Sy Hoekstra: Huh.
Jonathan Walton: I think that's a very interesting thing because when we were in California traveling this past few weeks, we knew four families that got COVID. And then I checked the numbers and I realized, oh, like the numbers in cities are going up because they're still testing water, right? And obviously the most susceptible people are older people and people with chronic health problems. And he is an older person [laughs]. Like, it was another thing…
Sy Hoekstra: I don’t know if you noticed.
Jonathan Walton: …that says you're old, right? Like, and that, that Steve Bannon was right. He started the old train a long time ago, and it has run its course and run him out of the election. So I was not surprised that he was dropping out. The second thing about it though is, and I don't know if there's more writing about this. If you're listening to this and you have read some analysis or commentary, I'd love to read it. But I wonder how boomers are transitioning from positions of power, and if they are or not [laughs]. Because Joe Biden, I think, signifies a generation of people that don't know how to let go of power. And he said that in his speech. He said like, “I have to give up ambition.”
And so I think that was an interesting, that's just an interesting thing to think about as there is a very significant, I think in the trillions of dollars’ worth of transfers of wealth from that generation to their children and grandchildren. The billionaires that have been minted in the United States are just people inheriting money. So it's just a fundamentally different thing around wealth and power that's happening, I think, as it is power quote- unquote, is given from one older White man to a middle aged Black woman. Right? Black and South Asian. And so the other thing I thought about with Joe Biden is that he also was on the ticket that coordinated Obama.
And so he's the meat in the middle of this sandwich that I think is also very interesting [laughs], that he leveraged his power to effectively potentially elect the first two Black presidents of the United States.
Sy Hoekstra: Now, to be fair, he did run against the first one in the primary [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: He did, and he lost, and then he joined a ticket, right?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
What We Can and Can’t be Grateful to Biden For
Jonathan Walton: And so, I think it's interesting that that's a thing. I will also say, for all the people, left, right, center, wherever you place yourself, thanking him and praising him and all these different things, I'm just not on that train.
Sy Hoekstra: Huh? Why?
Jonathan Walton: I've thought a little bit about this, and I'm continuing to think about this, but there's a tension that I feel generally for the processes and the participation and the hard decisions that we have to make every day that require necessary compromise and then violence as a result. And so when we talk about being grateful for things, like, “Oh, Jonathan, aren't you grateful for like soldiers, or grateful for America?” And it's like, the first thought that I have is, thankful to who for what? Who am I thanking, what am I thanking them for? And I think it's because I just have this resistance, and I desire this purity that only is found in Jesus. This purity, this wonder, this beauty, this justice, this love that is blemishless, right? So I find myself, it's very difficult for me to be like, “Thank you Joe for this work that you did 10 years ago, this work you did five years ago.” It's hard. I'm just like, you know, thanks.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see.
Jonathan Walton: Blessings on you on the rest of your life. I hope that you are able to flourish and receive all the things that God has. It's very general, very cursory. I don't carry this deep respect, appreciation or anything like that. And I think that just comes from like, I attach people to institutional violence and he represents a lot, a staggering amount of institutional violence. Even though he fought for lots of good things, it's like, yeah, it's hard for me to get on that appreciation bandwagon of the last 50 years of service.
Sy Hoekstra: I totally understand that. I thought you were talking about, because a thing that I think you can acknowledge is difficult to do is to step down.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: In the situation that he's in, there are so many people telling him not to. It's so easy, especially if you have that ambition that he's obviously had his whole life.
Jonathan Walton: For his whole life, yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Decades, he has wanted to be president, right?
Jonathan Walton: [laughs]. Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And he just wants to hang onto it and…
Jonathan Walton: Let me into the sandbox! Let me in [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: And it's hard to just admit, “I'm tapped out guys. I can't do this anymore.”
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: That is not an easy thing to do. And I do, in spite of all the criticisms that I a hundred percent agree with you with about the time that he spent in the presidency and in Congress and everything else, that's hard. And I can acknowledge when somebody did something hard that is helpful for the country [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: And because it is hard, I did not expect it. It's interesting that you did, but I didn’t know that was coming.
Harris and Why Representation is Important
Sy Hoekstra: I also, when it comes to Harris, who by the way, I said Kamala earlier. I'm trying not to do that, because it can't be that the two, Hillary and Kamala, we use their first names. Everybody else we use their last names [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: The soft misogyny. I hear you, you're right.
Sy Hoekstra: Everybody calls her Kamala though. It's like hard not to.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So I'm not the guy to explain why her running is so historically important in any detail, and there's gonna be a lot of very shallow attempts at talking about representation in the mainstream media. Which is why in the newsletter, I pointed people back to Tamice's book, because in the book that we published, Faith Unleavened, Tamice Spencer-Helms, the author, has a really great excerpt that we published and actually put as a episode of this podcast feed. I'll have the link in the show notes where she talks about, like Kamala Harris just comes at the end of the excerpt, but it's in the context of her talking about the stories of generations of women in her family and how they've served as a barrier or a bulwark against White religion and Whiteness destroying their lives.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And the story ends in a scene that has never once failed to make me tear up [laughs] even though I edited it like 15 times [laughter] when we were making the book. It ends with her and her grandmother, and her grandmother's basically on her deathbed watching Kamala Harris get sworn in as vice president. And she does an incredible job of emphasizing the power and meaning of something like that happening without really talking about it. You know what I mean? It just is because it's part of her story as she puts it, like the story that Blackness is telling in America. So it's very, very good. If you haven't read it, I would go back and just grab a couple of tissues.
And for me, I won’t just let that story sit there, and the fact that it is important to sit there, because look, I have a lot of criticisms of Kamala Harris’ policies [laughs] as a former prosecutor, as her foreign policy, as all those kinds of things, and I am willing to let all of that sit in tension together. And I will move on with my life, but I don't know if you have more thoughts about that, Jonathan.
Resisting the Bigotry that Is Coming for Harris
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. The only thing that I would say, and actually it's already happening. But the level of anti-Black, anti-woman, racist, misogynistic, patriarchal flood that is about to happen, will be unprecedented.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Online right now, even on Fox News, like on Fox News this morning, one of their commentators said, “Kamala Harris is the original ‘hawk tuah girl,’ that's how she got to where she is.” Now, if you don't know what that is, I'm gonna explain it very quickly in ways that I hope are not dehumanizing to the person that actually did this and the people that it was said about. But there was a young woman who was taped on TikTok, who was asked about how to get a man more aroused. And she said, you gotta do that Hawk Tua, and that really gets them going. There's a slice of the internet, which we are all becoming more familiar with if you're online, that still desires the Girls Gone Wild videos of the 1990s, the centering of men constantly in sexual pleasure and relationships, and the picture of women only being able to succeed or excel if they are in service to men, and absolutely never achieving anything or earning anything on their own merit.
And so I think Ketanji Brown Jackson, when she was certified and confirmed as a Supreme Court nominee, I think will give a slice of the anti DEI, anti CRT, anti-Black female, anti-female narrative, but that will pale in comparison to what we are about to see. And I think followers of Jesus need to resist that at every single level. At every single level if we can. Individual, in our own hearts, like us saying “Vice President Harris” is a way not to participate. Right? Like in an interpersonal level, like not… we have to check other people with this nonsense. And then in an institutional and ideological level, we actually need to communicate as followers of Jesus, that there is no place in the kingdom of God… and I would want to it to be nowhere in the world, for misogyny and misogynoir. Like this mix of anti-Blackness and anti-feminism and patriarchy. So that's the only other thing that I would say, is I just strongly desire in the most emphatic terms I can without using profanity that [Sy laughs] we need to stand against them. We need to stand against that as followers of Jesus and people invested in the flourishing of other people and ourselves.
Sy Hoekstra: It's going to happen. Like you said, it will be a ton. And just thinking back on all the absolute nonsense that was said about Obama over the eight years that he was president. I don't know how much we've progressed from there.
Jonathan Walton: No.
Sy Hoekstra: And so I just, it will be even worse…
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: As we've already seen, like you've said.
Jonathan Walton: With all of that, there's a lot of things to process. There's frustration, anger, numbness, curiosity. Maybe some people are feeling peace. I don't know anybody who's feeling joyful about our political process right now. And so, as we are processing and trying to find hope in times of crisis and things that are difficult, I really want to commend to our listeners the resource that we created called Pace Yourself. So to pray, assess, collaborate, and establish, like to actually engage as a follower of Jesus in community for the long term.
Sy Hoekstra: Yep.
Jonathan Walton: If you are someone who's sitting here listening and thinking to yourself, “I need a resource like this, I want community like this, I want to engage in this way,” if you're a subscriber already, it's in your inbox. Just search [laughs] in your KTF Press and look through your newsletters that you've received every Thursday. Also, if you are not a subscriber, you could get it for free. Just go to KTFPress.com and become a free subscriber. And it'd be better if you became a paid subscriber, but [laughs] I understand if you don't wanna do that right now. But go to KTFPress.com, become a free subscriber and get that resource. And I also want to comment to you like, we do not have to do these things alone. And so if you are a paid subscriber, you could also join our monthly chats and conversations so that there's a space. It may not be at your church, it may not be at your job, it may not be at your kitchen table. You'll at least have a one-hour Zoom call to talk with some people who want to be redemptive forces in the world. So we'll lay that out there as well.
Sy Hoekstra: Absolutely. We've had two of them and they've been really great.
Jonathan Walton: Amazing.
Sy Hoekstra: And we hope we see you all at the next one.
Introducing the Interview Guest, Robert Chao Romero
Jonathan Walton: Now we're gonna get into our great interview with Robert Chao Romero. Professor Romero is an associate professor in the UCLA departments of Chicano and Chicana studies. Also, the Central American Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Department. He received his PhD from UCLA and Latin American History. He's also a lawyer with a JD from UC Berkeley. Romero is the author of several books, including Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful, Constructive Conversation, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity, and The Chinese in Mexico: 1882-1940. The Chinese in Mexico received the best book award in Latino/ Latina studies from the Latin American Studies Association, and Brown Church received InterVarsity Press' Reader's’ Choice Award for the best academic title.
Romero is also an ordained minister and a faith rooted community organizer. Now, we talked to him about the everyday reality of the lives of immigrants under the Trump administration, what those lives tell us about the spiritual state of the MAGA movement, and the diverse and complicated politics of Latine voters in America. And guys, a lot more. Alright, let's get into the interview.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Robert, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.
Robert Romero: It’s great to reconnect after a while.
The Everyday Suffering of Immigrants under Trump
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, thank you. Just to get started, let's take a… I don't know, a kind of sad walk down memory lane [laughs]. Thinking back to the Trump administration, obviously you have a lot of experience both in immigration, the immigration law world, and in just the world of immigrant churches. And I'm wondering if you could give people a reminder or a picture of what the immigration world was like during the Trump administration.
Robert Romero: Sure, I can share a story of one of my students. So in the beginning of the Trump administration, I was teaching a big lecture class, like 400 students. And there was a young woman who came up to me after class one day and said, “Professor Romero, can I get the lecture slides from the last few classes?” And I'm like, “Yeah, sure. What's happening?” And she said, “My mom has papers, she has legal documentation, but she was swept up by an immigration raid in her workplace, and I had to go home and watch my kids, and it took six days before we could find her.”
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, wow.
Robert Romero: And that's when I knew, oh my gosh, this is gonna be really bad. And so one of the things that launched things off in the Trump world with regards to immigration was an executive order that he passed, which took away any type of prioritization with regards to deportation. Now, the Obama administration was no friend to immigrants, and that's another conversation. But in theory, at least the Obama administration had a prioritization as to kind of who immigration would target as priorities for deportation. And on top of that list before was people with serious criminal convictions, who were undocumented with serious criminal convictions, and then families were at the very bottom. And there was kind of this internal policy. What the Trump administration did through that executive order is take away any type of prioritization, as imperfect as that prioritization was.
So my student's mother and the people at her workplace, families, people who had worked in the US for 30 years, they were put on the same level and prioritization as someone who had many serious criminal offenses, for example. And I can tell you that also happened with Pastor Noe Carias that we worked with. He was an Assemblies of God pastor who came to the US in the eighties fleeing civil war. He had his own business, US citizen wife and two US citizen kids, and he was threatened to be deported. So many stories like that, it just created chaos and pain throughout the lives of millions of people.
Sy Hoekstra: I'm glad that you brought up that one executive order deprioritizing things, because that's not something that made the headlines. And I know because my wife who listeners to the show would be familiar with, was an immigration attorney at the time, and she was dealing with all these tiny little things that did not make the headlines or whatever, that the Trump administration would just adjust, that would just make things that much harsher and that much more cruel on immigrants. And the result was like the human cost that you were just explaining. And then on the service providers on top of that, it was like if you have to drop everything you're doing and spend a bunch of time making new arguments or appealing cases, or in some cases dropping everything to bring a big class action lawsuit to try and stop some rule change or whatever, that is a decrease in your capacity, that then means you can't work with more people.
Like my wife spent a lot of time where she was just taking no new cases on, she was just appealing all the cases that had been denied because of ridiculous rule changes that eventually got overturned. But in the meantime, a whole bunch of clients that would've been eligible for green cards lost the opportunity or whatever. And so I very much appreciate you bringing that perspective.
Robert Romero: I remember another example. I remember at the time, the Diocese of San Antonio, Texas, that's one of the largest Catholic diocese in the whole country. They were trying to sponsor a special religious worker and [laughs] their application got denied because ICE wanted proof that they were a legitimate 501 C3 corporation [laughs] the Diocese of San Antonio.
Sy Hoekstra: The Catholic church?
Robert Romero: The Catholic church, yeah [laughs]. And it's like those kinds of shenanigans.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh my gosh.
MAGA’s treatment of Immigrants Reveals a Lack of Spiritual Discernment
Jonathan Walton: Wow. Oh man. I'm gonna attempt to ask this question without going down too many rabbit trails because that just sounds ridiculous [laughs]. But in your essay, you said, “Jesus warns us soberly in Matthew 25, that our response to immigrants and the poor is a barometer of the sincerity of our relationship with God,” end quote. To you, what does all that stuff we just talked about reveal spiritually about the MAGA movement?
Robert Romero: So that interpretation of Matthew 25, that our response to the poor and immigrants reflects our heart with God, that's an ancient tradition. Ancient Christian interpretation, thousands of years. And I think that what that reveals about the MAGA movement, it shows how much the culture of US nationalism that's embedded within MAGA has become so conflated with Christianity in the US that people have lost discernment. They've lost discernment. In other words, this is one of my reflections over the last couple of months. When you really get down to it, these issues that we're talking about, it’s a discernment process, spiritual discernment process between what is culture, what is the gospel, what happens when the gospel becomes invited into a culture, and how do you distinguish between the gospel and culture?
And now here's the tricky part [laughs]. The gospel has only expressed itself and always only expresses itself through culture. First the gospel came through the Jewish people, enculturated in that context, then became enculturated in the Greco-Roman Hellenistic context among Turkish people, among North Africans [laughs] among Persian people, among all these people. Then it became enculturated later on in more Western Europe, and then in about a thousand AD, like the Vikings, and Christianity becomes enculturated. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's just the reality. And theologians talk about a process though of discernment with regards to enculturation. What is a biblical contextualization of the gospel in a local culture and what's not.
And what they say is that the way that you discern, is that in the context of the life of worship, we are to reflect upon scripture, upon the 2000-year-old tradition of the church. And to add Latino theology, en conjunto, or in community, with the local church, with the global church, with the church that's there with Jesus right now, even. And there has to be a continuity, a harmony between new scriptural interpretations and our ancestors that have gone before us. And so if you just run that test [laughs], that criteria, the MAGA movement through that doesn't make any sense. And we can talk more about that, but that's what I've been… thank you for giving me the chance to just throw that out on you, because that's what I've been thinking about. I've been dying to share it and to process it with people.
Sy Hoekstra: The immediate response from people in the MAGA movement is, well, from Christians in the MAGA movement at least, would be, we're the orthodox ones and the people who oppose us are the ones with the new interpretations of scripture that are going off the rails and trying to destroy American culture and et cetera, et cetera.
Robert Romero: Sure.
Sy Hoekstra: So why are you coming to such a radically different conclusion?
Robert Romero: So first of all, orthodoxy means right praise, correct praise. That's what it means. So, as we said, this criteria, the context of the life of worship. So as people are worshiping Jesus, we're bearing one another's burdens, we're taking communion, we're praying to God. That's the context first of all that this discernment takes place. And you look at scripture, 2000 verses of scripture that talk about God's heart for the poor, and the marginalized and immigrants, Matthew 25, among about a hundred other verses. So first of all, MAGA would've to contend with that. Tradition, the tradition of the church for 2000 years from the earliest church records where they said it in the Greco-Roman world. “These Christians are so strange. They worship this…” I'll just paraphrase, “They worship this Jesus, but they belong to every culture.
You cannot distinguish them by their dress or their language or their clothing, but by the way, they love one another, and they care for those that are poor and marginalized.” And there is a historical record of 2000 years of the church. And what MAGA is doing, it is not in continuity with that 2000 years of church tradition en conjunto, in community, because as Americans, we're so individualistic. People think, I'm gonna go into my prayer chamber, I'm gonna pray for two days and whatever I come out thinking about immigrants, God spoke to me. Doesn't work that way. It's like in community, all these things, the context of the life of worship, scripture, tradition of 2000 years in community with the local church, the global church, and also what theologians talk about is like another principle of continuity again.
Whatever MAGA is saying has to… MAGA Christians, at least, there has to be continuity with 2000 years. And if you look at the history, I challenge anybody, there's no continuity there. Anti-immigrant sentiment, there's no continuity. And so that's what I would say first and just to kind of throw out a big concept there, the major concept that we're talking about, it's called inculturation. Inculturation. And how does the gospel enter a culture and transform it? How does a gospel enter a culture and heal it? But sometimes what happens is that a culture can become so culturally Christian that people confuse just the culture with the gospel. And if you run through this criteria, this ancient criteria of discernment, you'll find that's why prophets arise. And that's what's happened with MAGA.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. That's a helpful distinction, I think. Because you could also say, well, there's another tradition starting with the eastern half, the Roman Empire becoming Christian and creating Christian empires for a couple thousand years, right? But I think you're saying that just the phrase, “that's why prophets arise” [laughs], I think is the helpful distinction for me. Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: You write about this a little bit in Brown Church, your other great book. There's this unhealthy syncretism, this marriage that has happened. And when you said the word “Orthodoxy” I immediately thought of a conversation I had with a wonderful person on Instagram. I am being facetious. But she said Israel is a nation ordained by God to exist in all these different things around 1948. And then and she said that's the orthodox view, is what she said. What would be your response to someone who divorces their belief in Jesus from the scriptural basis of Jesus and the tradition of, that missión integral, the conjunto that you're talking about, when they make that divorce, what do you do besides go to your prayer closet and pray for them [laughter]?
Robert Romero: Yeah. I think that you go to the roots. If those of us who call ourselves Christians, we follow Jesus, and Jesus lived in history in a very specific moment in time, and he had 12 disciples and apostles, and he shared a message with them that he was the Messiah expected by the Jewish community. And that through this Messiah, the whole world would be transformed and saved and redeemed, there's a core message that was passed on from Jesus to the 12, to the leaders, the bishops that they appointed, to established churches. And there was, for the first 300 years of the church, lots of writings, lots [laughs] that established orthodoxy.
So there was a core orthodoxy that Jesus established to use that term. I mean, it's anachronistic. Core message. That core Christian message was passed on to the 12. The 12 passed it on a majority consensus as to what that core was, to leaders that they appointed in Egypt, in Turkey [laughs], in Persia, in North Africa. And they had people that they appointed, and there were writings that developed. So, in other words, what I'm saying is you can trace what this major consensus of orthodoxy was pretty clearly through the historical record. And this is what I'm saying about history [laughs]. If you put MAGA through that, it's not in harmony with it.
I'll say this though, if you use this criteria, this healthy criteria that have been established by theologians over the millennia, Christianity is not the same as the left either. I wanna make that clear as possible [laughs]. There are lots of Christians who make the same mistake and conflate Christianity with the cultural left, and it's not the same either. So there's room for abundant nuance and complication, but at the same time, there is a complicated, thoughtful process. And one of the things that disturbs me so much is that for the last five or 10 years, with all of the social disruptions in every arena of society, you have this positive desire to try to figure it out. Like what's right, what's wrong? And you have some people who are just holding on to this cultural Christianity, this cultural nationalism as indistinguishable from Christianity.
You have some folks who are at the same time going the other extreme and throwing away 2000 years of very imperfect, but still the Christian movement. And things are just so disruptive, this process, I would hope this criteria again, and this is a work in progress for me, of we discern the difference between Christ and culture. We discern what aspects of culture are positive reflections of the gospel or not, or what's represents cultural impurity and what represents the unique reflection of the image of God through culture. We discern that. And I wanna share a quote that I think expresses the mess of the last 500 years. This is from an article by a Filipino theologian, José De Mesa. He's one of my favorite theologians.
He is citing missionaries who were going to go to China in 1659. The quote again from 1659, “Can anyone think of anything more absurd than to transport France, Italy, or Spain or some other European country to China? Bring them your faith, not your country.”
Jonathan Walton: There you go.
Robert Romero: That's it [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Bring them your faith, not your country.
Robert Romero: Bring them your faith, not your MAGA movement.
Reacting to People Who Think Voting Won’t Make a Difference for Immigrants
Sy Hoekstra: I wanna transition a little bit because everything we've talked about so far is a little bit aimed at the MAGA movement, or at White Christians in America. But again, talking about my wife, her family is from Haiti, and during the 2020 election, she made some calls for the Biden campaign down to Miami and to, there's a lot of Haitian voters there, it's a swing state, they needed people calling. So she called potential Haitian American voters and was talking to them about the election. And she had some fascinating conversations [laughs]. But she had a couple people in particular who I think represent a certain segment of immigrants or the one or two generations after immigrants to the US who are not White.
And they basically said, what on earth is the point of voting for Biden versus Trump? You were talking before about the Obama administration, and they were just like, Trump, Obama, Bush, we get treated the same. We get deported, we get forgotten, we get left behind. We get approached every four years to put somebody in power who then doesn't really do anything for us. What do you say to that kind of hopelessness?
Robert Romero: Yeah. First of all, I totally get it and understand it, because it feels that way so much, so often. So I would first approach it on that level of like, okay, let's process. What are we feeling here? I get it. And then I would say, well, I guess I have a response just as a human being, and then a response as a Christian. So those are kind of related, but different things. I mean, just as a human being, as a US citizen, there was a substantial difference in the treatment of immigrants under the Trump administration. It was just like, it made people suffer. Millions of more people suffered in very specific ways when the policies changed under Trump. Again, under Obama, again, I don't think that he is perfect either, and he caused a lot of harm, but things were way worse. They got way worse.
We didn't think they could be, but they got in very practical, specific ways under Trump. So depending upon who we vote for with respect to this topic of immigration, it makes a difference. It makes a huge difference. And that's because every president has the constitutional authority to set immigration policy on their own. They can't pass immigration laws, that's Congress's job, but they can pass hundreds of policies carte blanche, which is what Trump did, at their own discretion and mess people's lives up. That's what I would say. Like just as a human being, and in terms of Trump's potential to come back into office. Just as a human being, oh my gosh, I want our democracy to just survive.
And he's signaled so many times that he's willing to just overturn the rule of law, and we can talk about that too. So that's just as a human being. Now, as a Christian [laughs], it's like, I know that there's no perfect candidate, and Jesus is not a Republican or a Democrat. And I know people go off the rails on both sides. At the same time, Christians, I think in good faith, can hold some different political perspectives. If we do that, run through that discernment process that I mentioned, we can come to good faith differences of opinion. We really can. That's just a hundred percent true.
Jonathan Walton: I like how you said good faith differences.
Robert Romero: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: That feels very [laughs] very important.
Robert Romero: [laughs] Yes.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Because I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, I would love to see an experience like good faith differences, where the other person isn't just dehumanized to the point of like, it's okay to do violence. That the reality that the first step towards violence against someone is dehumanization.
Robert Romero: Yeah.
The Diversity of Latine Voting and Politics in the US
Jonathan Walton: And so can we have good faith disagreement. And going along with that, I listen to a lot of podcasts, read a lot of news, sometimes healthily, sometimes to just cope, I think the information [laughs]. But a lot of media outlets like The Run-Up on the New York Times, or Politico, or NPR, they make a big deal out of polling, saying Latine voters, particularly men, are somewhat more pro-Trump than they have been in recent years. And like, what are your thoughts on that talking point? And the diversity of Latin experiences and political thought in America?
The Effect of Latin America’s Racist History, and its Leftist Dictatorships
Robert Romero: Yeah. I mean, I don't doubt that those stats are somewhat true. I mean, I don't know. I haven't studied them. But I think that within, again we talk about this inculturation process, and how the gospel gets interwoven with bad aspects of culture, sinful even. And, but how the gospel also at the same time, when it engages a culture, it transforms the culture and heals the culture too. And our diverse Latin American Latino peoples, we've got both [laughs]. We have the sin [laughs] and our own colonial history of 500 years that is just as racist as the US history. Just as racist. And so I think that when it comes to more people supporting Trump, and I want to distinguish the support of Trump from a pre-Trump Republican party.
Again, not that it was perfect or anything, but I wanna make that distinction [laughs], because there are some Latinos who just feel more aligned with again, the Republican party 15 years ago or something, for some reasons that are not entirely bad. Now, the folks that support Trump and Trump's racism, again, we're super, the Latino people are so diverse in every way imaginable. Politically, socially, economically, racially, ethnically, culturally, religiously. So I wanna make that disclaimer. But at the same time, we have our own 500 years of racism and colonial racist values that are within us. And so if a Latino male voter says, I like Trump because he's just, because I wanted to kick out all the immigrants or something like that, [laughs] then that's where that comes from.
And it also comes from holding racist values in Latin America, bringing it here and wanting to fit into the racial system here. I'll say one last example. So in Latin America, for 500 years to this present day, there's a legacy of everybody wants to be called Spanish, quote- unquote.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Robert Romero: Because you had a racial hierarchy and caste system officially for about… let's see, 1492 to 1820 officially, this caste system. And just like in the US, you had a certain legal caste system, these terms of White, which was a legal category, Black, Indian and so forth. In Latin America you had the same thing, but the different terms. They were like Spanish and Black and Indian and Mestizo and Mulatto. And at one point they had dozens of terms. But that created the society in which people who were social climbers wanted to be considered Spanish. And to this day, some people will say that I'm Spanish. And doesn't mean… it's fine if someone's like, if someone immigrated from Spain to Mexico that's great. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about like, no one in their family has been to Spain like in 400 years.
So Spanish is sort of, saying I'm Spanish is like a MAGA person saying, “Well, I'm White,” or something. It's like this, it can be. Not always so extreme, but now imagine someone that comes from that context in say Mexico, I can speak for my own context. They come to the US, they find a different racial hierarchy, and they wanna fit in with power. So you become Ted Cruz.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs]. This is true.
Robert Romero: You become Marco Rubio. Where you're willing to sort of just like… Actually, this is the term, this is another use of the term enculturation. You enculturate yourself fully to the dominant White racist narrative so that you can gain acceptance. And that's what happens. And so I think that some of those Latino Trump voters, again, if they're doing it, I mean, there's other reasons too. But if they're doing it because as an explicit endorsement of anti-immigrant policies, then I would say this is a lot of what's going on. Now, to be fair, some Latinos, and not without reason, are kind of scared off by, like they come from socialist countries that have really in a lot of pain and hurt. And they hear someone on the extreme left of the Democratic party reminding them too much of what it was like in Nicaragua [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Or Cuba or whatever.
Robert Romero: Or Cuba. Yeah, I mean, I remember I was talking to a Cuban taxi driver who had just come to the US five years ago, and he said, “I’d rather someone shoot me than send me back to Cuba.” That's what he said. So it's like, I think there's that going on too. Again, not that that's a hundred percent right or whatever, but it's understandable and I get it too.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, right.
Robert Romero: So yeah. Some people just vote Republican no matter what, because of those reasons, and those are not just for no reason.
Jonathan Walton: Right. Right, right. There's a history and a context there too that all, all that makes sense. All that makes sense.
Outro and Outtake
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for that question and all the other insight you've given us. If people want to follow you online or see some of your work, where would you point them?
Robert Romero: Sure. So my full name is Robert Chao Romero, C-H-A-O. And if you use that name, you can find me in all the usual places.
Jonathan Walton: There aren't a lot of Chao Romeros out there, you sure? [laughs].
Robert Romero: Yeah [laughs]. There was one. One person wrote me actually [laughs], but other than him, I think I'm the only one. [laughter].
Sy Hoekstra: A guy wrote you just to say we have the same name, I can't believe it [laughter]?
Robert Romero: Yeah He was in Brazil or something and he is like, “Is this a coincidence?” But anyways, it's neither here nor there, but, so if you look up my name, you can find me in the usual places, social media.
Sy Hoekstra: Great.
Jonathan Walton: Nice. Nice.
Sy Hoekstra: They'll find all your books [laughs]. And we've put some of them in our newsletter and some of the other stuff, and we highly recommend all of it.
Robert Romero: Thank you.
Sy Hoekstra: So thank you so much for being with us on the show today. We really appreciate it.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, thank you so much.
Robert Romero: It's my pleasure.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you all so much for listening. Please remember to support what we do and keep this work going beyond this election season. Go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber. Get all the bonus episodes of this show, access to those monthly subscriber chats we were talking about earlier and a lot more. You can also get the anthology and read Professor Romero's essay and everybody else's essays at keepingthefaithbook.com. Alright. Our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robyn Burgess, transcripts by Joyce Ambale, editing by Multitude Productions. We thank you all so much for being here, and we will see you in two weeks.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, sheaking Jesus... What? Sheaking?
Sy Hoekstra: Sheaking Jeshush.
Jonathan Walton: I don't even know what that means. Okay, [Sy laughs].
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
On today’s episode, Jonathan and Sy are talking all about conspiracy theories with Matt Lumpkin, a former minister and software developer. They discuss:
- Asking what it is that conspiracy theories accomplish for the people who believe them
- Why White Evangelicals are so susceptible to conspiracy theories right now
- The importance of churches helping people develop critical thinking, rather than outsourcing belief systems to authority figures
- How we can help people let go of conspiracy theories
- And after the interview, a fascinating conversation about despair in the face of violence like that in Palestine, prioritizing the vulnerable, and Albert Camus
Mentioned in the Episode
- Our anthology, Keeping the Faith
- Matt’s website, Mattlumpkin.com
- Matt’s Instagram
- The podcast episode on Palestine and Camus
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
Introduction
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Matt Lumpkin: You notice almost all of these conspiracy theories provide a way to stay in the old way of thinking and being. They want to make America great again. They want to go back to a time when things made sense, when White people were powerful, and no one questioned their gender. They want to go back, right? [laughs] And if you look at the prophets, the biblical prophets, yes, they're interested in what happened before, but they're more interested in saying, how do we move forward from this? As I try to sift through and make sense of who are the voices that are worth listening to, one of the litmus tests I use is, does it ask anything from me? If the story only makes me feel good, if it only affirms my existing Identity, then that's a red flag for me.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Get ready for an incredible interview from our series where we're bringing on authors from the anthology we published in 2020, Keeping the Faith: Reflection on Politics & Christianity in the Era of Trump & Beyond. Today, we're talking all about the world of right-wing conspiracy theories with Matt Lumpkin [laughs]. But don't worry, it's nowhere near as depressing as it sounds [Sy laughs]. Matt is really interested in figuring out how people make meaning out of their lives and circumstances, so we focus on what the benefits of believing in conspiracy theories are for the people who subscribe to them, why Conservative White Christians are so susceptible to conspiracy theories in this historical moment, and what we are learning from comparing conspiracy theories with biblical prophets and a whole lot more.
Sy Hoekstra: It's a really good conversation. Matt actually does a pretty good job of taking us through his bio in the conversation, so I won't do that now, except to say he's a Fuller Seminary grad who worked as a hospital chaplain for a while and then actually made his way into the world of software development. So that is what he does now. His essay in our anthology was called “What Job Is a Conspiracy Theory Doing?” And you can find the anthology at www.keepingthefaithbook.com. After the interview with Matt, hear our thoughts on the interview, plus our segment Which Tab Is Still Open, diving a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our free weekly newsletter. Today, we're talking about a really interesting podcast episode comparing the French Algerian War to the violence in Palestine right now, all through the lens of the Algerian philosopher Albert Camus. You don't want to miss that one, it'll be a fascinating conversation.
Before we dive in, like we've been saying, we need your support, and we need it now. If you like what you hear and read from KTF Press and you want it to continue beyond this election season, please become a paid subscriber at KTFPress.com that's our Substack, and share our work with anyone you think might be interested. If you're already a paying subscriber, consider upgrading to our founding member tier.
And if the price to subscribe is too high and you want a discount, just write to us at [email protected]. We'll give you whatever discount you want, no questions asked. Every little bit helps. Subscribers get all the bonus episodes of this show, monthly Zoom discussions with the two of us and a lot more. So please go sign up at KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber and join us in seeking Jesus and confronting injustice. Thank you so much.
Jonathan Walton: All right, let's get into our interview with Matt Lumpkin.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Matt Lumpkin, thank you so much for being with us on Shake the Dust today.
Matt Lumpkin: I'm so glad to be here. It's great to meet both of you. I've been a fan of y'all's work since I learned about you and started following the publishing, but also some of Jonathan’s work on Instagram. I learn things from almost every post, so really appreciate that.
Jonathan Walton: I appreciate that. Thanks so much.
Sy Hoekstra: It’s very nice to talk to you not in emails and document comments on your essays or whatever [laughter].
Matt Lumpkin: Yeah. Well, it was a lovely process working with you all on the book chapter, and I love asynchronous first working patterns, so that makes me very happy. But it's great to actually be chatting and get to learn a little bit more about you guys and talk a little bit more about some of the stuff that you want to get into.
How Matt Started Thinking about the Ways People Make Meaning in Their Lives
Matt Lumpkin: Just a bit about me up front. So raised very Evangelical, very fundamentalist, frankly Baptist, with a [laughs] very Pentecostal grandmother. So right out the gate, you have two frameworks [laughs] who don't agree on what's true, but are both family [laughter]. So that's my religious upbringing. And then I spent early years in my career working as a hospital chaplain. I also spent some time living outside the country, taught English in Indonesia and traveled around Southeast Asia and all of those things. When I actually did end up in grad school at Fuller Theological Seminary, I had a lot of questions [laughs]. I had a lot of big questions around, how does a religion work? How do people make meaning? How do people put their meaning-making frameworks together and this language of what job is this doing? These are questions I've been asking for a long time in the course of my time at Fuller. I was there for about a decade studying part time and then working, doing a lot of online course design, and a lot of building and experimenting with online spaces, building mobile apps to test out different psychological principles, and all the way into building products.
There's a product now called Fuller Equip that's still alive and kicking that I designed and built with several colleagues. So in my early career, I brought all those questions to Fuller, which is a very Evangelical space, but also a pretty… Fuller is like a bridge.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: It's a bridge from where you start to, usually somewhere different. And then a lot of people walk across that bridge, and they look back and they're like, “Man, why is this place so like still connected to that place I came from?” And it's like, because it's a bridge [laughter] and it needs to still be there so that other people can walk across. But so much goodness came from my time there, and just in terms of really expanding my understanding. I had a very narrow idea of what calling meant, a very narrow idea of what I meant to be faithful to God. And that in my mind [laughs], by the time I was 14 years old, that meant I need to be a pastor, preacher in a small church like the kind I grew up in.
And it was at Fuller where I really… and my work in, all different kinds of work in early life, especially as a chaplain, was about finding a space to be faithful to that calling and that identity, while also being the person that I am who's endlessly curious about people, endlessly curious about how do things work, and what's really going on versus what people say is going on, and just how do people think about things in their own way. So in the course of doing that work, I found my way into designing software. All kinds of software, from websites and mobile apps to now in the last five or six years, I've been working on diabetes software and supporting people who live with type 1 as well as type 2 diabetes.
And all those same skills I bring to bear of getting into the mindset of other people, really deeply trying to enter their world and understand what does it look like. What are the problems, what are the pain points, and then what might actually move the needle to change it? But this background in studying religion formally, studying psychology, studying cultural anthropology, these lenses are all things that I use in my work as a designer, but also [laughs] in my attempts to make meaning of this rapidly evolving landscape we live in.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Asking What Job a Conspiracy Theory Does for its Believers
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Speaking of how things operate in people's minds versus how they say things are operating [laughter], let's jump right into your essay, which is all about conspiracy theories. And your kind of framework for understanding conspiracy theories is right there in the title, it's what job is a conspiracy theory doing? So I just want to start with, when you hear Trump talking about having the election stolen, or you hear someone talking about QAnon or whatever, why is the question, “What job is this theory doing?” the basis for how you understand what's going on with that person?
Moving to Empathy and Curiosity Instead of Anger
Matt Lumpkin: Yeah. So there's a few reasons. One is to move me to a space of empathy, because I don't know about you all, but I get real mad [laughs] at times about some of the just really hurtful and harmful ideas that get spread around that have no basis in fact very often, and actively harm people. It's one thing to make up a story that makes you feel good if that doesn't hurt anybody else, but a lot of these stories really create a lot of harm. So this is a step for, it's a pragmatic step for me to step out of anger, frustration, let me just push you away to get curious of what is going on here? Because so many of the stories, I think I talk about the lizard people [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Matt Lumpkin: That one takes me back to V. Did you guys watch V in the 80s? There was this lizard people, body snatchers, terrible, I don't recommend it. These people unzipping like masks and there are lizards underneath.
Jonathan Walton: Yes! I do remember that. Yes [laughter].
Matt Lumpkin: It terrified me as a kid. I walked in the living room one time and saw it. That's always where my mind goes when I hear those stories and I think, “Wow, how could you believe this?” So the question of, “What job is this doing?” is a way to get me out of my judgmental reactive and into getting curious about this person and what is it doing. It also connects to my work as a designer. There's a framework that we use in design called “jobs to be done” and thinking about digital products. And basically, you ask yourself, “If this piece of software were going to get hired to do this job, what would it need to do? What are the jobs to be done? And what would it get fired over?” Like if you don't do this thing, are you going to lose the job?
So kind of a way of moving out of the emotional space and into the curiosity space. But also when I say the way that they say something is different from the way that they think it, we all do this. We all have cognitive biases we're unaware of, and it's not like anybody's a particular failure for having a bias that they don't see. So when I talk to people about the software that I've designed, I'm not just going to ask them, “Do you like it?” People will always tell you, “Yeah, yeah, I like it.” I have lots of strategies that I use to get behind that and understand on a more deeper level like, is this doing the job for you?
What Do Conspiracy Theories Accomplish for People Who Believe Them?
Matt Lumpkin: So when I came to these conspiracy theories and was just hearing these things I just couldn't fathom why or how someone come to that conclusion, what was the context? It was the pandemic. We were in the midst of the pandemic and a lot of this was happening. All the rules and the maps that people had to make sense of their world were not working anymore. And as a person who's lived outside the US and experienced culture shock directly, when your maps don't work, it is profoundly disorienting.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: You feel like a child again.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: You feel really vulnerable because you don't know how to act in a way that makes sense. I believe that that sense of disorientation, cultural disorientation, social disorientation, religious disorientation, that is the driver. That's what makes people reach out and grab onto these ideas. And frankly, I think it's what makes con men and people who are aware of this dynamic pop up. These periods of time are ripe for cons because people are looking for a way to get their feet under them again, so to speak, in a world that feels confusing and uncertain. So that's a number of different things. It's empathy, it's about moving to curiosity and away from anger, and it's also just pragmatically, what's going on here?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].
Matt Lumpkin: What's the real value? What's the real driver here? Because it's doing something for you, whether you're conscious of it or not. People don't change their minds easily until the pain of changing your mind is more than the pain of holding on to the original ideas. So I think a lot of these conspiracy theories or strategies are ways of hanging on to old ideas that are unraveling, and they're ways of saying, we can discount this proof for this evidence here because the conspiracy supplies this idea of, “Well, the conspiracy is designed to hide things from here. It's designed not have evidence so it's okay if we don’t have evidence.” Has all these logic loopholes that get people out of the normal social contract that we have when we talk in public [laughter] saying things that are true.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: Or saying things that can be checked or are credible. And I think the broader challenge that we're in is… You know, I got into working in technology after studying church history and understanding that the printing press is really a catalyst of the complete social and political upheaval of Europe.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Matt Lumpkin: It's that moment that breaks the way people put meaning together, because it suddenly increases literacy and increases the speed in transmission of ideas. And I woke up and realized we are in the middle of a Gutenberg moment here. We are 25, 30 years into the internet, and we're just beginning to see the epistemic crisis, the crisis of how we know what we know really come to fruition.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: So I think that's the broader context of wanting to get curious about this, because that's the broad context. The narrow context is pandemic, the narrow context is like… there's lots of other things that push people to this feeling of disorientation.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Just Providing Correct Facts Won’t Change Minds
Matt Lumpkin: And so I'm looking for, how is the thing that you believe that is obviously wrong or factually disprovable to me, what does it do for you? Because just pounding on people with facts has been scientifically shown to not change people's minds.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense.
Matt Lumpkin: It will not work.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. What you just said makes sense, yet we love to do it.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Right? [laughs] We love to just pelt people with answers.
Matt Lumpkin: Some of us do, some of us have minds that are more… and I’m guilty. I have this deep internal need that's probably related to ways in which my brain may not be 100 percent standard equipment[Sy laughs]. This internal need to make things consistent. Like if I encounter a new piece of information that doesn't match my map of the world, I've got to figure out how the information is wrong, or I’ve got to change my map. And I can't really rest until I've done it. But that's not most people. And there are parts of my life and thinking where I don't do that as rigorously, but there's a lot public space safety questions, questions of [laughs] science and medicine, those are ones in which I do need my model to be accurate, because those models have literally saved the lives of people that I love. Like the practice of science, the scientific methods saved my daughter's life when she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
We knew before the doctors did, because we gathered data, we gathered evidence, and then we were able to show that evidence. So it satisfied our way of knowing, like we measured it. It's not just family worries. It's not just parents being nervous. It's grounded in real observation that we can then hand you. But there's a lot of domains where people aren't used to doing that kind of rigor.
Why Are White Evangelicals So Susceptible to Conspiracy Theories Right Now?
Mat Lumpkin: As we think about the Evangelical context, one of the things I explore in the essay is why are Evangelicals particularly, do they seem to be particularly vulnerable to these kinds of erroneous claims or conspiratorial claims? I feel that that's true, and I started to pay more attention to it when I noticed other non-Christian journalists were noticing.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: Like, “Hmm, the Evangelicals are really buying this QAnon to our surprise. Outside it doesn't seem it would match,” same with a lot of Trumpism.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: A lot of Trump's ideology and way of being in the world seems very antithetical to what popular conceptualization of Jesus followers would be, and yet, it's working. So why? What job is it doing?
Jonathan Walton: I'd love for you to dive deeply into that. Why do you think White Evangelicals are particularly susceptible right now?
Matt Lumpkin: Thank you for that correction as well. Because I do think that it is a specific challenge to White Evangelicals, and I don't see it spreading and being shared in the same way among Evangelicals that I know that are not White.
Discouraging Critical Thinking about What Authority Figures Say
Matt Lumpkin: So a couple of things. One, just a general lack of rigor in how you know what you know. And why would Evangelicals have a lack of rigor and how they know it? Why would they? It's a tradition that literally emerged from people, the deep Protestant move to want to read the Bible for yourself and, but what does that do? That centers the self and the individual in the private prayer time, in the quiet time, as the source of authority.
If you want to go deeper into that space, and I say this as somebody who has many Pentecostal folks in my family who was raised in no small part by my Pentecostal grandmother, and my mom, her faith is deeply shaped by Pentecostalism. But that tradition really centers the individual experience of the deity and of their experience of God as a source of truth and authority. Well, you hang around with more than one Pentecostal and you're going to find you get differing accounts of what God might be saying in any given time.
Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs].
Matt Lumpkin: So that kind of flexibility and fuzziness, and in folks that move in these spaces, they're really clever at saying, “Well, that didn't mean this, it meant this now, now that I know this other thing”
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].
Matt Lumpkin: So it's very changeable in a way that's very coherent with the way that you see a lot of QAnon folks or a lot of other conspiracy theorists say, “Well, we got this piece of evidence, and so now what we said last week doesn't work anymore, but don't worry, I've got a new way to read Revelation that actually accounts for it” [Jonathan laughs]. And so that practice and that move being modeled by leaders and authority figures in these churches creates this receptivity to a kind of very, I want to use the word lazy, but that's maybe a bit harsh, but it's a lack of rigor in questioning, “What did you tell me last week [laughs], and what did you tell me this week, and why is it not the same?”
Authoritarian Methods of Learning Truth
Matt Lumpkin: And all of that stems from what I would say in many churches is an authoritarian epistemology.
Sy Hoekstra: I was going to say it's kind of a lack of accountability, which goes along with authoritarianism.
Matt Lumpkin: Yeah. I think I touched on this briefly in the essay that, when your foundation of what you know is because an authority told you, who that authority is claiming that it comes straight from God or it comes straight from the source who's deeply embedded in the deep state, those are both parallel claims. Like, “I've got a direct line, so you can trust me.” But that is a very brittle way of building a model of reality, because you're not doing it yourself. You've outsourced it to the authority, in spite of any claims you might be making to doing your own research. It's a way of saying, “Well, I can't read the text in its original Greek or Hebrew, so I'm just going to outsource that to somebody who can.” “Well, I can't understand necessarily these theological concepts, so I'm just going to trust my pastor to do that.”
Well, once you get in the habit of outsourcing all these things that are at the root of your most deeply held beliefs about reality and truth, then that's a move that you're accustomed to making. And it's a dangerous move, because without a practice of critical thinking and of questioning for yourself, critical thinking is the immune system for your mind. If you don't have it, you won't notice that it's getting colonized or infected with bad ideas.
Jonathan Walton: A thousand percent [laughter].
Matt Lumpkin: And you won't be able to spot those infections as they make you sick and as they make your communities sick. I think what we're seeing right now is a time in which a lot of these ideas and these ways of… it's not just ideas, it's ways of thinking and ways of knowing that are very, very changeable and very flexible and fluid. They lack a certain rigor. That's happening because, why? Because people are reaching out for a way to hang on to the old map. You notice almost all of these conspiracy theories provide a way to stay in the old way of thinking and being. They want to make America great again. They want to go back to a time when things made sense, when White people were powerful and no one questioned their gender.
They want to go back [laughs]. And if you look at the prophets, which is in the chapter that we're discussing here, the biblical prophets, yes, they're interested in what happened before, but they're more interested in saying, “How do we move forward from this?” As I try to sift through and make sense of who are the voices that are worth listening to, the people that are interested in trying to understand how we got where we are today, so that we can understand how we can get out of this mess, what actions we can take. Those are the voices that I think are more… One of the litmus tests I use is, does it ask anything from me? If the story only makes me feel good, if it only affirms my existing identity, then that's a red flag for me, because it's only flattering me.
Now, on the flip side, if you read the book of Revelation, that book is written to a community that it’s trying to encourage that community that's being marginalized, it's suffering. And it does ask some things of that community, but it's also trying to celebrate. So there aren't really easy and clean [laughs] answers on which voices you can trust, you have to do the work of doing your own critical thinking. But I think Evangelicals in general have been discouraged in many churches from doing any critical thinking at all, because it undermines the authority of the lead pastor or the leadership team or whomever…
Sy Hoekstra: The denomination or whoever.
Jonathan Walton: …that they've outsourced all of this work to.
Matt Lumpkin: Yeah. And that might seem… I've been to seminary, I have a Master's of Divinity degree. I get frustrated when people don't listen to my authority [laughter]. You work in any number of church settings and you realize you don't want them to. What you really want is you want to teach people how to build their own faith and their own meaning using these tools, and do it in community, so that we can check each other's work.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: In my early work as a hospital chaplain, I spent a year doing spirituality support groups with the folks that were in the lockdown unit in the psych ward.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh wow.
Matt Lumpkin: So we're talking about doing spirituality groups with people that have schizophrenia, that have bipolar disorder, that sometimes in their mind hear the voice of God telling them to do things. Now, how do you help a person like that connect with their faith, now that their very way of knowing or having that connection is now called into question? It's a hard problem, but that's really where I started to wake up to this reality of the problematic nature of, “God talks to me, and then I go do a thing.” There are lots of stories in the Bible where that happens, and some of them are terrifying, but it is always an interpretive choice that we make to say that, “I had an experience, and I believe it was God speaking to me,” best done in community with people that you trust.
I kind of wish Abraham had talked to some of his community of faith before taking Isaac up on the hill. That's a terrifying story of somebody not raising questions about what they thought they heard from God.
Conspiracy Theorists vs. Biblical Prophets; Blaming “Them” vs. Inviting Introspection
Sy Hoekstra: The community point is very well taken, and also you've said it, but I want to just highlight it for the audience, because I think that the point about profits versus conspiracy theorists being the people who require something of you versus the people who require nothing of you is so important. And you are right, it is so within the culture of Evangelicalism, definitely within the culture that I grew up in, to say that everything that is wrong with the world is because of those people out there, and has nothing to do with us, and we do not need to reflect, we do not need to change, they need to become like us. And that is that colonial type of faith that you were just talking about. Everyone else needs to become like me, and then the world would be fine.
Matt Lumpkin: That's a litmus test.
Sy Hoekstra: It's a litmus test, but I also want to highlight the prophets being the people who against what everybody else, not what everybody else, but what in many cases everybody else in their society wanted them to do, we're suggesting the problem here might actually be us [laughter], and we need to take some time and think about how it might be us, and have some real reflection as a community. And that is actually what God wants us to do. So having a faith that is oriented around that versus a faith that is oriented around blaming the world for everything, those are faiths that go in polar opposite directions. And I want that to be everyone's red flag [laughs] is what I'm saying, and I really appreciated when you made that point your essay.
Matt Lumpkin: As a designer, we use “how might we” questions when we don't know the answer [laughs]. How might we encourage faith communities to develop a healthy critical thinking and awareness of religious abuse and manipulation? I mean, religion is powerful. It's how many, many of us, most humans, make sense of their reality and situate themselves in the cosmic story and understand who they are and what their life is about. And yet it is so often used to manipulate people, to sway people, to create specific emotional experiences for people, so that whoever's doing the manipulation can get something that they want. And how might we create communities of faith that are resilient against manipulation, resilient against co-option by, I like y’all's term “colonial power” or “colonized faith?”
I think it's a great lens to think about the ways in which the Evangelical tradition, which when I teach my kids about where Evangelicals came from, because I've studied this church history, abolition, that was Evangelicals. So many of the really positive expressions, I think, of Christian faith have also been a part of this tradition. So how did we get co-opted by fear and a desire to go back in time to some imagined past? How did so many churches and church people get co-opted in that way? I talk a little bit about the first time I encountered it. I'm 42, dispensationalism was around, but it wasn't a part of my church community.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is just, briefly, for people who don't know.
Matt Lumpkin: Yeah. Dispensationalism is the idea that… oh boy. So it's pretty young as a theological movement, I think, around 100 years. And in fact, it's a really great propaganda strategy if you want to have your religious idea emerge from the grassroots, you just print up a Bible, a study Bible. Scofield Study Bible has a lot of these connections drawn for pastors. They gave them away, they printed them up and shipped them out to pastors all across the country. Twenty years later, lots of people came up with dispensationalism, simultaneously invented. It's a really great propaganda strategy, worthy of Dune [laughter]. It laid those foundations early. But it only took 20 years in America for this idea, and this idea being that Jesus is going to come back and take away the faithful, but then real bad stuff's going to happen on earth, trials and tribulations are going to happen.
And then in some versions there's a showdown with Jesus and Satan, in other versions there's not. Then it gets pretty divergent, and you can find really cool maps of this in old bookstores where people try to map it out because it's impossible to explain.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs].
Matt Lumpkin: And then the churches that I was around in my early theological study were obsessed with arguing over whose version of dispensationalism was right. And then you dig into it and you're like, this is a novel idea [laughs], it doesn't even go back very far in church history. So it's a great example of a way a theological concept takes hold and then gives people a lot of busy work to do, to go home and read Scripture and try to mix and match and come up with a way that makes sense of it. So The Late Great Planet Earth was the antecedent to the Left Behind books, which were big time when I was in college. And all of that is based on this idea of dispensationalism, that there's going to be an antichrist arise and then all these switcheroos and people get taken away [laughs].
Like the rapture, it literally comes from the same word that we get raptor, the birds of prey, because some people are snatched away, not a good image. I don't want to be taken like that actually. That doesn't seem a positive [laughter]. So all this to say, those ideas, when did they emerge? They emerged during the Cold War. They emerged when kids were having to duck and cover under the [laughs] idea that's going to save you from an atomic blast. Like real terrifying existential stuff going on that causes people to look around and say, “This is causing me anxiety. I am terrified all the time. How can I not be terrified?” And a lot of these moves, they go back, or they look for a scapegoat to blame.
And that's really, I think, one of the most harmful and most important litmus tests to hang on to. I don't like the word litmus test. I would call these heuristics. They're strategies you can use to understand something, questions you can ask yourself, like who's paying for this? Who benefits from this? What does this demand of me? Who's at fault? Who's to blame here? If the persons to blame are somebody you already feel disgust or separation from, that should be a red flag. Because we know that the human mind feels emotions before it knows why it feels them, and then this narrative kicks in to try to make sense of why do I feel these emotions? And I think a lot of how the conspiracy theories work, particularly the really deeply dark ones around pedophilia, around…
Sy Hoekstra: Cannibalism.
Matt Lumpkin: …cannibalism.
Jonathan Walton: Cabal.
Matt Lumpkin: Yeah, and a lot of those, they draw on really, really deeply held old, long, deep human history social taboos. We don't eat other people. Children are off limits as sexual partners. These are deeply held boundaries on civilization, on humanity, on even having any kind of community at all. So once you say, my opponent, the enemies, once you make them into something so horrible…
Jonathan Walton: Lizard drinking blood people [laughs].
Matt Lumpkin: …then it justifies the disgust you already felt towards somebody that you didn't like. So that's another way of thinking about this, of not falling for this trap of somebody coming along and saying, “You know what, your life is messed up. You are disempowered. You don't have the same cultural power and influence you had before. You can't enjoy just talking to your grandkids without worrying about offending them, and it's because of those people and their secret agenda that you can't actually know about, but I'm going to tell you about because I know,” and then what job does that do? It makes you feel justified in the things you already felt and thought. It makes you feel angry, and it makes you feel you were right all along.
Feeling like you were right all along almost never [laughs] results in good actions. [laughter] When it turns out, everything I already thought was right, that's not a great place from which to get closer to truth.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and there’s a lot of gold in what you're saying, but something standing out for me is I can feel strongly about something without thinking deeply about it.
Matt Lumpkin: Oh, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: So Hillary Clinton can be a lizard person who drinks the blood of children to stay alive. That's much easier than saying she's actually just somebody who benefits from systems of powers and structures that have put her in place her the majority of her life, and she's responsible for the deaths of a lot of people. But not drinking the blood of children, but like drone attacks. You know what I mean? But one requires thoughtfulness and doesn't engender those same feelings, because we don't have compassion for folks in the Middle East. I have compassion for folks in South America, but I can feel strongly about this 500 year old cabal that she's a part of and that Obama and Oprah and all them are.
Matt Lumpkin: You’ve been reading more of that than I have. I don't know all that [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Hey man, hey man, you know, some of us got to do it so other people don't [laughter].
Matt Lumpkin: Yeah.
How Can We Help People Let Go of Conspiracy Theories?
Jonathan Walton: But as we're engaging with these things, and I'm sure you're going to get to it, but what are some ways that you've actually seen people let go of this stuff, and how can we move towards those people in love instead of judgment, the way that you've been sharing about being empathetic?
Maintaining Relationships with Conspiracy Theorists Is Key
Matt Lumpkin: I have to tell you guys, I don't think I'm particularly good at this. I have learned from some other people that I think are better at it than me. One is the thing we've talked about, about getting curious. This is just a good, this is Matt's unsolicited advice for all humans, whenever you're getting mad, pause and get curious. That's a good move to make. Getting out of the deep emotion space and into the curiosity space of what's going on here? What's really happening? Why am I feeling this?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Matt Lumpkin: Why are you feeling this? What's really motivating this? But the second one is, it may feel good to want to dunk on people with facts, because it's so easy [laughs] with so many of these things, but it doesn't actually result, dunking on people rarely results in closer relationships. There are times where I think it's important to push back against direct untruths that if spread can actively harm people. But the way you want to think about it is how can I say this and keep our relationship? Because what has been shown to work to get people to move out of some of these terrible ideas is relationships with people who don't share them. Because once all of your relationships are comprised of people who share this shared reality, that's an intersubjective reality that is mutually reinforcing.
All those people are thinking the same things and talking the same things and thinking under the same reality, and it will make that reality more real. So just being in someone's life and existing and being the sort of person that isn't dismissible. For your listeners that are good Bible readers, go read the Gospels again. Watch how Jesus stays uncondemnable by the rules of phariseeism, so that he can transgress the rules of phariseeism in a way that upends them, in a way that challenges them. If he was just like, “Well, this is all terrible. None of this is true,” and just lived a way that, they would say, “Well, we can't take this man seriously. This person's not a person of faith. He's not even following the law.”
But no, he carefully stays comprehensible to them as a participant in their community, so that when he does transgress on purpose with intention, a thing that needs to be challenged, he can't be dismissed. So staying in the lives of these people, and this is hard work, because some of the rules and the ways in which they put their world together are nonsensical. They don't match, they don't fit together.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Matt Lumpkin: So you can't do it perfectly, but staying a person that has not rejected them, and staying in relationship with them while holding on to your reality and talking about it. It's not enough that the reality just lives in your mind. You have to bring it out into the world and make it real for them, so that you become a problem [laughs] for them that they have to resolve.
Sy Hoekstra: Well, I had two quick things to say about that. One is the point about throwing facts at people. If you have asked the question of what job is this conspiracy theory doing, and you have answered that question, then you will realize that throwing facts at people is not going to address that problem.
Matt Lumpkin: You've just taken away the thing that was fixing something for them, and now they're not going to let go of it easily because you've not offered anything better.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, and the problem is still there. Their problem wasn't insufficient facts.
Matt Lumpkin: [laughs] Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So that's one thing. And the other thing is talking about having close relationship with people and being credible and all that, I think that just emphasizes a point that we made before in this show, which is that if you are in a dominant group on a hierarchy, it's easier for you to do that. It is easier for White people to talk to other White people about racism and to remain credible and to maintain your close relationships, and to be able to talk about things that maybe your racist cousin would never talk about with Jonathan. You know what I mean? And that goes for anything. Able-bodied people talking about disabled people or whatever, checking people who use ableist language. So I just wanted to draw those two points for our listeners out of what you were saying.
Matt Lumpkin: I think that's really important. And I think that any advice that I'm offering here is offered from the perspective of somebody who enjoys a lot of power and privilege. As a White, cis het man in America, in my middle age, I am at the height of my power and privilege. So the question that I ask myself is, I learned early on in life, I can't give the power that these corrupt cultural institutions have given me away. I can try, but they just give it back [Sy laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Matt Lumpkin: So how might I use that power to amplify the voices of people that don't have it, that don't enjoy it? Those are questions that I come back to and need to come back to more and more. And frankly, the less risk I take, I take less risk for me to challenge those ideas. But I think again, the challenging… and I get it. I get mad and I want to shatter these false realities. When I get in a space of anger, I want to burn it down. I want to reveal the falsity of it. But burning down a shelter someone has made for their psyche is rarely a gateway to a continued relationship [laughter]. So instead, the metaphor that I like to use, and I use this even when I was working in churches and doing adult Bible study, it's a metaphor of renovation.
We all have rotten boards in our faith house and in our own psychological house, the shelter that we use to face the challenges of reality. We all have things that could be improved, and it's easier to take somebody walks through and says, “Oh, I think you've got little bit of dry rot over here. I got some time this week, you want me to help you work on that? I think we could fix it.” There’s a really, really great passage over in Jeremiah that could really help us shore this up. That's a better way than saying, “You know what, I came over and you're living in a house full of rotten garbage, and I just burned it down for you.” That's less helpful.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Asking What Evidence Would Prove the Conspiracy Theory Is False?
Matt Lumpkin: Finally, I think the thing that, and I looked for the source on this, I couldn't find it. And if I find it, I'll let you know.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Matt Lumpkin: But I heard a guy being interviewed, and he had done a lot of work scientifically in this area. If you can't tell I care a lot about science. I care a lot about how you know what you know. Scientific method is important to me. But he had said that basically, there aren't a lot of good strategies for getting people to let go of these ideas, but one that has been shown to be successful is to ask more questions. And to ask questions about, “Okay, well, why do you think that? How did you come to this conclusion?” To get curious with the person of how they came to these conclusions. And then when you hear things that are factually untrue, ask like, “Okay, well, what evidence would you accept?”
So the move is this, you get curious, you ask questions, you get more data on why they think what they think. You offer some counter evidence that challenges some of the false foundations. When they don't accept it and they won't, then the move is, if you don't accept that evidence, what evidence would you accept that would actually change your mind? And that question can become the seed of doubt in the conspiracy theory thinking. Why? Because conspiracy theories are self-authenticating. There is no evidence that can show them to be false. And so telling somebody that isn't the same as them coming to that conclusion on their own and then feeling a little bit conned.
At least for what I understood from this gentleman, the most successful paths are not making the leap for them, but leading them up to the leap to understand that they're locked in.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Matt Lumpkin: And a lot of folks that really these theories appeal to, they appeal to them because they feel empowering. “I'm choosing this, I'm believing against the mainstream.” So once they start to realize that they're locked in a system that they can't actually ever get out of, because no evidence would convert them out of it, that's a bad feeling.
Where to Find Matt’s Work
Sy Hoekstra: Interesting. Matt, before we let you go, can you tell people where they can find you on the internet, or what work of yours you would want them to check out?
Matt Lumpkin: I do a lot of stuff at www.mattlumpkin.com, that's where most of some of the stuff that I write goes. If you want to see pictures of the paintings that I'm working on or the furniture that I'm designing [laughs], which is unrelated to our conversation, that's on, mostly on Instagram. But I don't have any way for people to subscribe, I don't have a Substack or anything like that. So I do post on Instagram when I have a new piece up, so that's one way you can sort of keep up.
Sy Hoekstra: Awesome.
Jonathan Walton: Nice.
Sy Hoekstra: Matt is a jack of all trades [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Nice.
Matt Lumpkin: Life's too short to do one thing.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Matt, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. We really appreciate you coming on and for being a part of the anthology.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, man.
Matt Lumpkin: Thank you so much. And I just want to say again, thank you for the work that you're doing in decentering us White guys and centering the voices of people of color, of women. I saw your recent episode you were highlighting the challenges around birth and women of color. I'm so inspired by the way that you guys are bringing together these real deep awareness and understanding of the hard problems that we face, and also keeping that connected to communities of faith and people who are striving to be faithful to the life and teachings of Jesus.
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much, Matt. We really appreciate that.
Jonathan Walton: I appreciate that, man. Thanks so much.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: att's handle on Instagram is @mattlumpkin, and we'll have that link plus his website in the show notes.
Sy’s and Jonathan’s Thoughts on the Interview
Jonathan Walton: All right Sy, what are you thinking about that interview?
Sy Hoekstra: Too much [Jonathan laughs].
Conspiracies vs. Prophecies Is a Crucial Distinction
Sy Hoekstra: Well, okay, I have two main thoughts that I would like to highlight. One of them, I just once again, I would like everybody in the world to be making the distinction between prophets and conspiracy theorists [laughter] in terms of what people are asking you to do with the stories they're telling you. If they're asking you to do nothing except oppose all of the evil that is out there in the world, versus asking you to examine yourself and see how you can change and make the world a better place. If everybody in the world was on the lookout for that, man, we would be in a better place [laughs] in our society.
Addressing How Conservatives Would Process This Conversation
But second, I just wanted to address some tension that I sometimes feel when we're having conversations like this that I'm sure other people feel as well.
In conversations like these and a lot, we're talking about conservatives or White Evangelicals or people who believe in conspiracy theories or whatever. It's conversations about these people. These people over here, who we are not a part of. And we're trying to be humane by understanding what it is that, what makes them tick, what it is that puts them into the places where they are. But it's always from our perspective, how did they get into the position where they are so wrong. That's really what we're asking. And we're not just asking that about people who are involved in QAnon, we're asking that about just kind of everyday conservative White Evangelicals or White Christians of any kind, or lots [laughs] of people who just subscribe to whiteness, who may or may not actually be White.
But the people who actually hold those positions would not really see this conversation as humane. They would mostly see it as condescending. They would mostly see it as, “You trying to understand how I got to the place where I'm so wrong, is not you being generous or kind, it's you being kind of a jerk.” [laughs]
How to Think about the Narratives We Have about People We Disagree with
Sy Hoekstra: And the thing that I always have to remember, and I just wanted to kind of flag this for our listeners, is that really that is kind of just the nature of disagreeing. Anybody who disagrees about anything has some story, conscious or not about why the other person is wrong. That's just the nature of the diversity of thought, just having people who disagree about stuff. That's going to be what happens in a society, you're going to be making up stories about the other people and why they disagree with you.
But what you get the choice of doing is trying to understand people the best you can, or dehumanizing them and attributing bad faith to them. Or saying, “Oh, the reason you think that is because of, I don't know, you're just those people.” I’m not trying to come up with any coherent psychological framework that makes sense of where you are. I'm just saying, “Ah, you're just a bunch of racists.” Or it could be, “Oh, you're just Black people. You're just inferior.” Anything like that. Anything that's dehumanizing, whatever, you can choose to do that, or you can choose to understand people as best you can, given the reality that you disagree with them and think that they're wildly wrong and that their views are harmful. So I just want everyone to remember that. Everyone's doing this, it's just about how you go about it. I don't know. I hope other people also sometimes feel that tension and I'm not just addressing no one, but that was a thought that I thought it might be worth sharing. What do you think, Jonathan?
Jonathan Walton: Well, I mean, it is very possible to disagree with someone without disrespecting or dehumanizing them.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: That is possible, but the amount of work that that takes, most of us are unwilling to do at this point in time. And what's sad about that is, and I think a couple of things that stood out to me, is that the main point of what he said in the essay he wrote for the anthology, and this is like, what am I going to gain if I hang out with this conspiracy theory? What am I going to keep, what am I going to get? What am I going to maintain if I believe this, and then if I not just think it, but believe it, and then act like it's true, and then enforce that reality on other people, what do I gain? And that to me, I think stands out to me because humanity, particularly though anyone upstream of a power dynamic has shown just an incredible capacity to enforce things that are not true to maintain power, authority, privilege and resources.
Our Ability to Lie to Ourselves to Maintain Oppression
Our capacity to innovate, to maintain lies, is fascinating. So when he talked about the Pentecostal who says Jesus is coming back in 1988 on January 13, and then Jesus doesn't show up, they got another revelation, and they don't lose any followers.
Sy Hoekstra: This is in the essay, not in the interview.
Jonathan Walton: Oh, so sorry.
Sy Hoekstra: No, it's fine.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, but just that constant innovation and the individualization of your relationship with God, to the point that there’s this entire reality that's constructed, and to deconstruct that reality would be so disorienting that we would rather just function as though it is true. So that confirmation bias where we then go seek out information then it sounds true, and so we add it to our toolkit to maintain our reality, that to me feels, and I need to think about this more, but feels at the root of a lot of injustices.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: So it's like, I won't change this, because it would change everything about my life, and I'd rather just not change. So I'm going to keep it this way. So whether it's men and patriarchy, able-bodied folks and disabled folks, Black folks and everybody else, wealthy people and poor people, we’d just rather not change. So I'm just, I'm not going to do that. And then Newt Gingrich said, “Well, it doesn't feel true, so the facts don't matter.”
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And that to me stood out. And then Kellyanne Conway, an iteration of him just coming back and saying, that just saying “alternative facts.” Like what are we talking about? [laughs] In some world that feels plausible, and because it feels plausible, it must be true. And then their entire apparatuses, religious, political, social, familial, built around protecting these realities. And if we could just shake ourselves away from that, that would be wonderful. But it is... [laughs] I mean, when Jesus says, “You shall learn the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” there is just freedom in living in the truth, like what is actually there. So the last thing I'll say is I appreciated his emphasis on the reality that truth and knowing happens in community.
It does not happen like me going to the mountain, getting it, then coming down and living unaccountable to anyone. This is not how it works. I say this in every single prayer workshop I do, the Lord's Prayer starts off “Our Father,” not “My daddy” [Sy laughs]. It just doesn't start like that [laughs]. So how can we have a more collective, communal relationship with God and one another?
Sy Hoekstra: The thing you just said about the skill of being able to maintain falsehood, it feels particularly important to me in maintaining systems of oppression after they've been built. Because they're usually built on a lie, and then at some point that lie can get exposed and that can threaten the whole system, but the system can survive by evolving. We've talked about this before. You can get rid of slavery, but the essential lie behind slavery stays and justifies every Jim Crow and segregation and the Black Codes and sharecropping and all that. So there's a refining almost of how good you can get at lying to people until you have a not insignificant number of people talking about lizard people [laughs].
And it’s just I'm almost sometimes impressed by how skilled evil is at understanding humanity. Does that make sense? [laughter]
Jonathan Walton: Well, I mean, not to quote myself. In Twelve Lies I talked about how whiteness, White American folk religion, race-based, class-based, gender-based hierarchy is forever innovating. And the current container is in the United States of America, and it's being perfected.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, it's forever innovating, and it's good at it. That's what I'm saying. Which is why we spend so much time emphasizing how much you have to keep learning and being alert and praying. I'm going to say everything except “stay woke” [laughter]. Any other thoughts or should we get to our segment?
Jonathan Walton: The only other thing I would say, and I almost started a whole thing about this, was just the importance of critical thinking. Just basic being willing to ask, why? Like, hey, Hillary Clinton is actually part of a race of lizard people that drink children's blood to get this chemical that's going to make them eternal. Why do you believe that [Sy laughs]? Like a person, a real human person went to a pizza place with a gun. That is a real thing that happened. Folks show up and ask questions. Like we cited this resource in a newsletter probably three years ago where the New York Times did this amazing podcast called Rabbit Hole. And this young man who worked an overnight job stocking shelves in one of the Midwestern states listened to podcasts every single night. Podcast and YouTube videos that drove him to become an extremist. And then he changed his podcast diet, he changed his YouTube diet, and then he realized, you know what, maybe I don't have to be afraid of everybody. He just started asking, why.
There are people around him that said, “Hey, why do you believe the things that you do? Why are you becoming more afraid? Why do you feel the need to arm yourself? What do you think is going to happen?” Just people asking him questions, and he was willing to engage. So friends, just to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. We can think. And that would be just a wonderful thing to push back against the anti academy thing that exists within modern Evangelicalism and most patterns of dominant religious thought.
Sy Hoekstra: We can think, and that would be a wonderful thing. That's the pull quote.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Right.
Sy Hoekstra: That's the t-shirt [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: That’s true.
Which Tab Is Still Open?
Sy Hoekstra: All right. Jonathan, let's get into our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, where we dive a little bit deeper. We're really shifting gears here from conspiracy theories [laughs] to Albert Camus, where we dive a little bit deeper into one of our recommendations from our newsletter. That newsletter is free at KTFPress.com. Get recommendations from us on discipleship and political education each week, along with resources to help you stay grounded and hopeful, news about KTF Press, all kinds of other great stuff at www.ktfpress.com. Jonathan, for you, out of all the stuff we've been writing about in the newsletter, Which Tab is Still Open, can you tell us about it?
Jonathan Walton: Okay, friends, we are going from not thinking at all to thinking very deeply. Okay?
Sy Hoekstra: Yes [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: So this episode of a podcast called The Gray Area, where the host Sean Illing talks with a historian and philosopher, Robert Zaretsky about the politics and the ethics of Algerian philosopher Albert Camus. Again, we're going to think really hard, so go with me. Camus lived through the colonial occupation and the French annexation of Algeria. And he also lived through the violent struggle between Algerian rebel forces and the French army. He opposed France's policies of discrimination and oppression of the Algerian people, but never fully endorsed Algerian independence. So leftists thought of him as a moderate. Keep going with me, okay?
He also believed that killing was wrong no matter who was doing it, and that neither the rebels nor the French had a monopoly on truth. But he was not abstract. He thought that violence was inevitable. He just couldn't justify it being used against innocent people, even in the name of freedom. He was not at all abstract or a systemic thinker. Like a lot of European philosophers, he was grounded in reality of day to day suffering that he had lived, and his conviction was that it was simply wrong.
Prioritizing Vulnerable People in the Halls of Power
So as I listened to this episode, the thing that just fascinated me about Camus is that it is possible to hang out in the biggest halls of academic power, to win awards, as he did for his literature and novels and essays, but to stay grounded in the village, to stay grounded in the community, to stay grounded in reality.
Because I think something that struck me, my daughter does gymnastics and she got the chance to go to a state competition, and I was walking with her through a college campus, it was her first time on a college university campus. And I thought to myself, the distance between where my daughter is right now and the quote- unquote, grandeur of this university is all false. The reality is, these are just kids. This is the same kid that was in the neighborhood an hour ago that drove to this place to do flips and tricks in this new gym. The walls might be shinier, the mats might be cleaner, it may be a bigger stage, but the reality is we are just people doing the same things together in a different venue.
So Camus, even though he was at a university, held the village with him, even though he was at a newspaper, held the village with him. Even though people were pushing back against him, held the village with him. So how can I Jonathan Walton, Ivy League educated person, or you listening with whatever background you have, hold fast to the reality that the things we say and do impact vulnerable people? I can't just say that there's an invasion at the southern border and not think that there are implications to that. I can't just say, grab women by their genitals. I can't just say that and not think that something's going to happen. The reality of the things that I say and the things that I do impacts people downstream of me is something I have to hold fast to.
And just what Camus said, violence is inevitable and totally unjustifiable. I think that felt to me as one of the truest things I've heard in a very long time, is that, do I think that all of a sudden, on this side of heaven, violence is going to stop? No. At the same time, could I ever justify in the name of Jesus, violating the image of God in someone else for whatever cause? No, I cannot, because Jesus didn't do it. If violence was justifiable, then Jesus absolutely would have joined Peter and started the revolution, or did it beforehand, which I wrote about. If I was Jesus, I would have slapped Zacchaeus so hard in the moment.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Wait, Zacchaeus?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I wrote a piece called “Jesus Didn't Slap Zacchaeus” [Sy laughs]. Just that reality of even before Pilate, because, you know, there's other things happening with Pilate. But it's like if I was Jesus and Zacchaeus is standing right there. He stole money from my family for years and years and years and years. He betrayed our people. He did all that. And he's short, he's standing there, I'm stronger than him, the crowd is behind me. Pow! I would have done it and felt totally justified. But Jesus doesn't do that, just like he doesn't throw himself off the cross and start the revolution. Just like he doesn't call angels to intercede and do things on his behalf. He stays in line with his vision and mission and calling because he knows the cup that he has to drink. And so Camus messed me up.
Sy Hoekstra: The thing that I wanted to highlight from the podcast was a story that I think the guests, I think Zaretsky told about Camus being confronted by a student from Algeria saying, “Why aren't you supporting the rebel forces who are fighting the French? Why haven't you, in an outspoken way, said that what they're doing is good?” And he says, “Look, at this very moment they are placing bombs under tram cars in Algiers, and my mother could be on one of those tram cars. And if what they are doing is justice, then I prefer my mother.”
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And I think that's kind of what you're talking about. Just this, he just had this wall in his mind where he's like, “You cannot, you can't kill my people and call it justice, and call it goodness. I will not let you do that.” And that's, I'll talk about this in a minute, the place that he leaves you in politically and morally and whatever, is very difficult, but you got to respect the integrity [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely. A thousand percent. The other thing that I really appreciate about this podcast is that Sean Illing, when he opens the podcast, addresses a reader or a listener who sent him a handwritten letter asking him why he had not addressed Israel, Palestine. And I respect him, and I respect his answer. And I suspect that other journalists and politicians are being confronted, whether on Instagram or not like, “Why aren't you doing x, y and z?” So I just appreciated Sean's, I'm talking about him like I know him, Sean Illing’s candor and honesty to open the podcast. I think it just set the tone, really, really well.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I totally agree with that.
Jonathan Walton: So Sean, I mean, Sean, what do you think? So Sy, what do you think about the podcast? [laughs]
Sy Hoekstra: I, Sean Illing, believe… [Jonathan laughs] Yeah, no, this podcast had me deep in my feelings is what I'm saying.
Despair about Violence and Hope without Answers are Both Biblical
Sy Hoekstra: First of all, I don't say this a lot, but I think French existentialism might actually be a decent way to respond to Palestine and Israel [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Okay.
Sy Hoekstra: The reason I don't say this a lot, is I have grown up in so many ways with people who just do not like the French or anything that they have produced culturally, whether that's America during the war on terror, or the German literature that I studied in college. The canon of German literature, not a fan of the French in general. And then I married a woman whose family's from Haiti. So just like no matter where I go in my life, nobody likes French people [laughter]. They’re the kind of school of thought that Camus was a part of, the existentialists, who were big in the mid 20th century, kind of despairing about all of the kind of broken promises of modernism and the enlightenment and all these things that said we would so quickly advance to these just amazing, humane, technologically advanced, wondrous societies that did not come to fruition.
And they just lived in that grief in a way that a lot of intellectuals don't. And when I think about Israel and Palestine, and I'm talking about the big picture of Israel and Palestine as a whole, since 1948. I'm not talking about the current war. I think the current war can end, and I think it will end probably when the US decides that it's time for it to end.
Jonathan Walton: A thousand percent.
Sy Hoekstra: But like I said, Camus had this kind of principled despair. He just had these moral lines that he wasn't willing to cross. And if not crossing those lines just put him in a place of grief and despair and emotional confusion, then he was just going to sit there. Even if that left him in a place where he couldn't really offer viable solutions to decolonizing Algeria, or how it was actually going to work. How it was going to go down to make people free. But I think we actually see this a lot in the Bible. If you read Psalms, you read Lamentations, especially if you read Ecclesiastes, you have a lot of people just despairing and not offering solutions, just sitting there with the fact that the situations that they're in are so incredibly difficult and impossible, seemingly impossible to solve.
That doesn't mean that Camus or the Bible, the authors of the Bible, aren't doing things, aren't trying to fight for freedom, aren't trying to oppose discrimination and oppose oppression, but it does mean that they are grieving alongside that justice work. And I guess what I'm saying is an outlook on the world that doesn't see a way out is not too hopeless for a Christian. We don't always have to have the answers, is what I'm saying.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: What it means is we hope for things we cannot see. We have faith. It's literally, if you don't know what I'm referring to, that's Hebrews 11. It's literally the definition of faith from the author of Hebrews.
Jonathan Walton: [laughter] Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: It’s hope for things you cannot see. Literally meaning, I don't know how to get out of this, but I'm still hopeful. Even though I'm grieving, even though this seems impossible and violent and terrible, I still have hope in something that I have never seen and do not know what it's going to look like. And it's kind of how Ecclesiastes ends, actually. Ecclesiastes just sort of ends with this author who's been going on for pages and pages and chapters and chapters about how meaningless and despairing and pointless life is, just like all of life. All religious activity, all governmental activity, everything. It kind of ends by just saying, but I will follow the Lord and his precepts and commandments.
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: That's it, that's the end of the book. No solutions are offered to any of the problems [laughs]. And there's just no resolution to the things that the author is seeing in front of him. What I want to get specific though, about the thing that I'm sort of despairing about, like when I think about really, really big picture Israel and Palestine stuff. I've been thinking this for a while, I just haven't found an appropriate place to put it in the podcast yet [laughs]. Let's say Jonathan that you and I and people who think us, got everything we wanted. Let's say there was land back for the people of Palestine, there was justice, there was some new state set up that was democratic and enforced people's rights, and kept everybody's interest in mind, and whatever you want. If we just waved a magic wand over Israel and Palestine, whatever you would get.
Any Zionist, once we did that, could just turn to us and say, “Okay, now, do America. Why don't you address what you did to your native people? Why don't you address any of the ways that your country was set up in a systemic fashion?” And they would have a point.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And I don't think anyone would be able to say they don't have a point. And I think, there's so many people talking about how, antizionism is antisemitism. There's so many people misattributing antisemitism to so many things that people think about Israel, just criticism of the of the Israeli government. The one way that I think antisemitism… not the one way. One of the ways that I think antisemitism may actually be playing out in this situation, from the left, from people who are criticizing Israel is, I think it might be one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that Israel has any chance of actually facing accountability for using the tools of colonialism. We have a whole movement against their colonialist state.
There's no similar movement against America in America. We're not arguing with France, even though they're still holding colonial, we're not arguing the Netherlands or whatever. All these other places in Europe are still doing colonialist things, holding territories they got during colonialism, oppressing people in all kinds of ways that are undemocratic and inhumane and terrible, and we're not fighting them. And look, activists have moments where they need to take advantage of what's going on in the world, and then there's political will to do certain things at certain times, and that's fine, I don't have to criticize that. But that's just kind of where my despair comes from, and that there's no real way to resolve things without perpetuating further injustice.
But that doesn't mean that I can't continue fighting for what is right and following Jesus, and that's not a hollow way to live. You know what I mean? It just means I have to continue to put my hope in things I haven't seen, and we have to continue to fight oppression and colonialism wherever it springs up, and we can end the war maybe in Gaza, but then we just have to keep going on all fronts [laughs]. And this means exercising emotional health and knowing what your capacity is, and all that sort of thing. But this is what Camus had me thinking about, and but actually finding some amount of… I don't know, peace is the wrong word, but a rock to stand on [laughs] and where to put your feet down. So those are my thoughts, Jonathan. That was a lot. You got anything?
Jonathan Walton: It was a lot. I think I have to think about what you said [Sy laughs]. Okay, so everything that you said, particularly the reality that, if we could wave our magic wands and do it in Israel and Palestine and all that, the just wonderful things that we would imagine. The critique is then to say, “Well, why can't you do that here?” And then I think what unfortunately happens is people then say, “Well then, I will just keep going.” So, because what you're saying, that critique makes sense. And then people will say, “Well, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing in Israel, because you're not fixing your place.” Russia says that to the US, the US says that to France. France says that to China, China says that to… that whole rigmarole just keeps going.
Sy Hoekstra: Yep.
Jonathan Walton: And I wrote this thing yesterday sitting in church where followers of Jesus, and I'm just repeating what you said, basically, but turning it into a sermon. Followers of Jesus have to consistently and continuously say the same thing. The answer is every person's made in the image of God. The answer is Jesus. The answer is the light of the world. The answer is following him. That's the answer. So it doesn't matter who is saying, “Give me the right to kill these people.” We have to say, no. It doesn't matter who the culprit is. And I think that is difficult, because followers of Jesus need to say, “Hey, just because we are the ones extracting the gold and silver and tungsten and tin and tantalum and copper and all those things, doesn't make it right.”
Just because we win the battle in the Congo doesn't mean the Congolese still need to be exploited. I think what's unfortunate is we are fighting to be the people on top, we're not fighting to be the people who follow Jesus. That I think, layer that over all the arguments, whether or not you wanna put the 10 Commandments in a classroom or not. The argument I think that we're trying to win is the wrong one. And the right argument would be is for the Christian, the follower of Jesus, is the argument, the fight, the battle, to unfortunately use militarized language because we're literally talking about violence, is the Great Commission. There's nothing violent about the Great Commission. There's nothing violent about the Great Commandment.
To love our neighbors as ourselves, and to seek the Lord our God with all our heart, souls, mind and strength, and to go and make disciples, baptizing people in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and doing things as Jesus did them. There's no violence in that.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I don't know the way out of this conversation.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think it's just Ecclesiastes, where you said there’s nothing new under the sun, and that [laughter] everything is a chasing after the wind. But maybe the word for wind in Ecclesiastes is the Holy Spirit, and we will chase after the wind, and it'll be great [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: All right [laughs]. Maybe. Maybe the word means that.
Jonathan Walton: I don't know.
Sy Hoekstra: Nobody look it up. That's the important thing. No one look it up, we found a way to wrap up the conversation [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: All that to say, when you listen to the Camus conversation, you will be just as confused, befuddled and prayerfully grounded, just like we were.
Outro and Outtake
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Listen, between Matt Lumpkin and Albert Camus, we had a lot to talk about today. This one went a little long, that's okay. All right, we're going to end there. Thank you all so much for listening. This was a great one. Thanks so much to Matt for being on. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess, editing by multitude productions, transcripts by Joyce Ambale. Thank you all so much for listening, and we will see you in two weeks.
Jonathan Walton: See you in two weeks.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Get ready for another incredible interview from our series where we're bringing on authors from the anthology we published in 2020, Keeping the Faith…
Sy Hoekstra: Wait, sorry. All right, okay. I don't normally do this to you, but you said that, “Get ready for an incredible interview,” you still sound a little bit sleepy [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Oooh.
Sy Hoekstra: “Get ready for an incredible interview,” came off a little bit sleepy.
Jonathan Walton: [exaggerated sleepy voice] Get ready for an incredible interview. You’re the first person I’ve talked to in four hours, so… [Sy laughs]
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.ktfpress.com
This is your free preview of our bonus episode, a recording of the first monthly chat with paid subscribers Jonathan and Sy had a couple weeks ago. Become a paying subscriber to hear the rest of this episode, attend next month's chat on July 23rd, and get access to all our bonus episodes!
Here's the transcript of the preview of the conversation:
Jonathan Walton: So there's two things I just want to let you all know. One is that you're welcome to show up as you are. And the questions, proclivities, personality traits that you have, they're welcome here. Some of those things we not be able to perceive, but you know about that are welcome. So if you're like, “Hey, you know what I am…” I've been in calls where some people have ADHD, and if you're comfortable naming that, then we know or you give us tips for how to engage in ways that may be helpful. Like Sy cannot see very well, and so like naming for that. It's like if you put something in the chat, I'm going to be the one that's looking at the chat. But if I'm talking and you put something to chat, you may just want to say that out loud, because Sy’s not going to notice.
Sy Hoekstra: I do, I have access to the chat actually.
Jonathan Walton: Oh, you do.
Sy Hoekstra: I do.
Jonathan Walton: Okay, cool, cool. All of you is welcome. The messiness and the good stuff that you already know about. The second thing that I would say is I would hope that spaces like this, you don't just feel welcome, but you cultivate welcome for other people. So like I'm hoping that the hospitality that we receive, we're able to offer, and that this would become a sought after kind of fruitful space for people.
Sy Hoekstra: Amen.
Jonathan Walton: We may have a cool liturgy or something another time, but this is pretty casual. So I’d love to talk about and hear your thoughts on one of the things that that's going around in my mind right now is some of you follow me on Instagram, and I had just a lament around women and girls. So like I saw Butker, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, his comments when he was doing a commencement speech at a conservative Catholic university. I was thinking about the “man versus bear” meme, and just add that the Reddit thread is long of just really hard stories from women. I was thinking about the SBC and the vote that they, quote- unquote, decided to take, but we all know that they believe the things, even though they voted against it.
And I was at gymnastics with my daughter. Like I was watching her turn into a little girl, and hopefully one day be a strong woman, and I just cried. Once you open the door for grief, all the grief comes out [laughs]. So thinking about the, it's Pride Month and how so many churches don't know how to talk about that in ways that are honoring and helpful to our queer brothers and sisters and family made in the image of God. And also the unrelenting, I mean, the algorithm has got me just like, there's just so much violence on my Instagram feed. So like Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Palestine, I'm somebody who is engaged and I'm overwhelmed, and I have tools and frameworks and all the things, but that's something I just want to name, is that if you are quote- unquote, engaged with the news and then engaged with our own families, we are not even talking about sickness in our own family, or death in our own families, or stuff that's just at our kitchen tables.
So I admit I feel overwhelmed and just wondering how you all are feeling processing the various global events and local events that are happening with you. So anyone want to speak to that, that how you're feeling processing things? Oh, and feel free to introduce yourself, because I realized we did not do that. So you could say your name and where you're at, and then feel free to answer that question.
Rana: I will respond to that. I'm in Southern California, and I am a contributor to Jonathan and Sy’s anthology, but unnamed, anonymous. And it’s been, I see you on LinkedIn Jonathan, and I see that you are really engaged. Anyhow, I know that it's very difficult for me to, you know, like just with… I'm Palestinian, and I have family in Gaza as well. Both my parents grew up in Gaza, and they were, my dad was a Nakba survivor and essentially my mom was, they left the year before, but they weren't able to return. So I still consider both parents and both families as refugees, because they still lived with the limitations of not being able to return. So anyways, but I can’t continue to consume all the news and it's just a struggle. I don't even know what to say.
I always tell my dad, my dad, he's in his mid-80s and he watches a lot of the news. And I tell him, “Dad, you were not created to take in this much suffering and sorrow and watch this all day long.” And I guess that's something I would say to you and anybody else, but I'm not an expert. I've been watching Palestinians since the 80s on TV growing up, but I don't claim to have the answers, but I would say that it would be important to protect your own mental health and well being. It doesn't mean that you disconnect from yourself. And I know for me it's also trying to show up, like I'm learning to show up with who I am, because I realize that there's a lot of pieces of who I am that have been silenced. So I feel like I'm trying to find my voice.
And if you remember, when I wrote the piece in the book, I struggled a lot with that, and that's something I've emailed you about or messaged you, but that's another conversation I just don't… I can't get to all of it, but there are things, there's conversations I want to have, there's things, but realistically, there's just, we're limited. Thank God. So, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: As you were sharing, one, thank you for sharing and saying things about who you are and how you show up. I really appreciate that. You all are gonna see this thing called a lead generation magnet soon [laughter], but it was literally written in response to that overwhelmed question [laughs] and the cover of it is a young woman holding a newspaper that's on fire. Like that's the image [laughs]. So just introducing this thing called pace yourself with the news, and pace yourself as you engage with injustice. So, yeah, it is easier preached than practiced.
Sy Hoekstra: This is an acronym Jonathan invented.
Jonathan Walton: Oh, it is an acronym. Pray, assess, collaborate and establish. Pray and lean into God, assess who you are, what he's given you, what's around you. Bring those things to then collaborate with other people, and then where you can establish rhythms and patterns for flourishing. And so it is much easier preached than it is practiced.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And so definitely try to do that. Oh, David, Will, Allison, did you all want to say anything about that? Or we can go to the next topic.
Allison: My name is Allison, I live in Wisconsin, and I do have a little bit of adversity in my life as far as I'm blind, so I've had some challenges with that. But I also recognize that I'm White and I'm very well-off. I always had wonderful support networks and I'm really blessed. I probably watched too much news. I admitted I kind of watched, kind of been watching news all the time, taking in stuff all the time, and probably isn't good for my mental health. But then I also have this feeling of like paralysis as a person who is, you know, White, well off, I have this sense that I should be doing something, I should be doing something. But what? What? So it sounds like almost like by watching the news, it's like I feel better because I think I'm doing something, even though I know I'm not really.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].
Allison: But it’s like I struggle with this idea of when I see my friends just laying on the beach or going to a silly movie or something, like how can you engage in that frivolous [unclear] and stuff when this world is suffering, you know? It’s like I struggle with that [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Man, does anybody want to add on to that at all? Have similar feelings?
Sy Hoekstra: I was just going to say, this is a thing… [laughs] I feel like, Alison, you and I and Jonathan would have been friends in college, because this was like a thing we [laughs] constantly... People were like, ‘Why don't you just like chill out a little bit?” And we were like, “No!” [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: It’s true. I was not mellow at all [laughter]. David, were you going to say something?
David: Yeah, no, I'm just going to say I appreciate that and feel that myself. And I also recognize that sort of feeling like the world is my responsibility is part of the White supremacy that's all around us.
Sy Hoekstra: Amen, David [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: There we go.
David: That's [unclear] like why is the world my responsibility? So sort of like how to gage, what is mine to do and what is not mine to do is, I just find it's really a hard thing that I struggle with trying to figure out how that works.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, David just went there, so let's hang out in that water.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, let's do it [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: I do think it’s… I was just teaching a workshop yesterday to about 60 college students. And I run cohorts around these things, and it is a very interesting question when someone says, “I want to do something about X,” and we just stop and ask, why. Like why do you wanna do that? Oftentimes, what I've noticed is that there's a role that we think we're supposed to play. And then we have to ask, “Well, why do I think I have to play that role?” And then you keep asking why, and usually it ends up at some systemic ideology that has been trickled in. So for me, I'm not White, but the way I participate in White supremacy is, there's this book, there's an essay in, it came out in like, I think like 1909, and it's about the White man's imaginations of the negro.
So there's like the brute, the thug, the vagrant, the deviant. And essentially, when Black people participate in these tropes, we participate in White supremacy. And one of the things that I noticed about myself is that my desire to save and to be responsible is to be seen as one of the good ones and not to be seen as lazy. Which is downstream of the same system. I'm still not free. It's just an acceptable, socially acceptable way of showing up when the vice is kindness, but it's not coming from a place of freedom in that way. And the gospel liberates us from trying to be masters. So both of us, for different ways, are trying to be masters. To control.
-
Today, Jonathan and Sy talk with author and international speaker Mark Scandrette about:
- How Mark went from fundamentalism to loving his neighbor through political protest
- The cost of leaving a fundamentalist world and speaking out against injustice
- Why the beatitudes should guide our discipleship and voting
- How discipleship is practicing the way of Jesus, not learning doctrine
- And after the interview, a discussion on a really thoughtful article about how patriarchy harms Palestinian men
Mentioned in the Episode
- Our anthology, Keeping the Faith
- Mark’s website, MarkScandrette.com
- His organization’s website, Reimagine.org
- Frederick Joseph’s article on Patriarchy and Palestinian men
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Editing by Multitude Productions
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
Introduction
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Mark Scandrette: We all struggle with a sense of not enoughness, and what do we do with our lack. And we can either be closed handed, anxious, worried, and greedy, or open-handed and trusting. And that's blessed are the poor in spirit. It's hard to face the realities of a complex world, and so we wanna hide and escape, but Jesus says, blessed are those who mourn. And so that opens up opportunities for lament and confession and things like that. So in a way, I call it like the Beatitudes I think, and the Sermon on the Mount are like the psychology of how to live in the kingdom of God.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: And I'm Sy Hoekstra. We have a fantastic show for you today. First, we are continuing our series of interviews with authors from our anthology that we published in 2020 about Christianity and the election, which is still relevant because it's the same election we had, are having now. Time is a flat circle. This episode we have Mark Scandrette talking about his journey from a fundamentalist devout Republican upbringing in the eighties and early nineties until today, the cost that leaving that world had on his personal life, and his thoughts on living out the beatitudes practically in everyday life and in voting, and a whole lot more with him. That's a great conversation.
And after that, hear Jonathan and my thoughts on the conversation, as well as our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, diving deeper into one of the recent recommendations from our newsletter. This week, a powerful essay by the author Frederick Joseph about patriarchy and its effects on men in Palestine. You do not wanna miss that.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Such a great essay. And if you like what you hear and read from KTF Press and would like for it to continue beyond the election season, please become a paid subscriber, like and share our work and encourage others to subscribe as well. Our goal over the next six months is 1000 paid subscribers, and right now there are 167. So we’ve got a ways to go, but we believe this work is valuable and we hope you do too. So like, share, subscribe, and tell a friend. We'd really appreciate it and look forward to reaching that goal.
Sy Hoekstra: Mark Scandrette is an internationally recognized specialist in practical Christian spirituality. He is the founding director of the ReIMAGINE Center for Living Wisdom, where he leads an annual series of retreats, workshops, and projects designed to help participants apply spiritual wisdom to everyday life. His multidisciplinary studies in psychology, family health, and theology, have shaped his approach to learning and transformation. Mark teaches as contingent faculty in the doctoral program at Fuller Theological Seminary.
His most recent books include FREE: Practicing The Way of Jesus, Belonging and Becoming: Creating a Healthy Family Culture, and The Ninefold Path of Jesus. That's the book from which a lot of what you will hear today come from. It's his most recent book. Mark is passionately engaged in sustainability practices and efforts to create safety in neighborhoods for all people. His essay in our anthology was called “Vote Like the Beatitudes Matter.”
Jonathan Walton: Awesome. Let's get to the conversation. Here is the interview.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Mark Scandrette, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.
Mark Scandrette: Great to be with both of you. Appreciate you guys so much.
Sy Hoekstra: Same to you. Absolutely.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.
How Mark went from Fundamentalism to Loving His Neighbor
Sy Hoekstra: So let's just dive right in. In your essay in your anthology, you write about kind of your upbringing in sort of fundamentalist Christian nationalist kind of spaces. I remember you particularly saying that Billy Graham and Chuck Colson were considered too liberal for the places… or were suspiciously liberal.
Mark Scandrette: Yeah. Yeah [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Which is, that is a niche community right there [laughter]. And so we have a lot of listeners who probably… you said that your view started to change basically after the 1992 election. You were very active in the Republican party, and then things started to change after that. And we have a lot of listeners who are either people who had their whole political outlook change from conservative kind of Christian politics recently, like in the past several years because of Trump in 2016. Or we have a lot of listeners who are kind of helping… who know a lot of people who are in that situation.
And so as somebody who is at this point more than like 30 years out from your own political shakeup in your worldview, what would you say to people who are kind of experiencing the shock and confusion of that change, or who are trying to help people through the shock and confusion of that kind of change?
Meeting People Who Didn’t Fit Stereotypes
Mark Scandrette: Yeah. When I… you tried to put a point on it of being like 1992. I think that was maybe towards the beginning of a very long process. It's not really a binary. So I think that there were some gradual steps. Like I was repeating the things that my community was saying and believing about the world and about politics. And maybe my first step was not… like pausing to not say those things anymore, or not feeling like I could say them. And the sense I got was that there was some very clear borders of what would be considered in and out ideas or perspectives in the Christian communities that I was part of, and in my family. And so I just, I was just quiet for a lot of years sifting through what do I really think about things?
One of the key things for me was having experiences beyond the boundaries of the community that I was raised in. For me, being around… I'm a White male, so being around people of color and people in poverty and struggle. And actually meeting people that my community would've labeled as liberals and finding out that they weren't the, those people weren't the caricature that I had been given. And that there wasn't this clear, there wasn't this binary. Not all of them were atheists and not all of them… Like they still had values and ethics. And so these were like layers of kind of surprise to me and a little befuddlement that I'd been given a narrative that just real… like my experiences in the world did not confirm.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Mark Scandrette: And another thing that may be good to know about me, is I moved to San Francisco in 1998. And so you have this little house on the prairie, White, Midwestern pastor family moving to the mission district of San Francisco that was mostly immigrant in a very progressive city. And I could, like I would trot out some of those ideas about the world that I'd inherited and grown up with. And to see the reaction and the kind of check on those things was really powerful for me.
Accepting Complexity, and Loving Your Neighbor Politically
And I think a lot of us who have spent time in evangelicalism, we like a simple world. We like it, we wish the world was really simple and that there's a couple of things that would fix everything [laughs]. And so I've entered into, in my neighborhood, into complexity.
And that was a big part of my shift in perspective. I would say it all came to a head in 2015 when a young man on our block was shot and killed by the police. And I had enough information to know police broke their protocols. He was shot six times in the back. They didn't address him in his native language and they misread a situation. And that was a series of about 15 police killings over just a couple year period in San Francisco. And I think that prior to that, my sense was as a follower of Jesus… and I think, I don't think I'm alone in this. I'm just gonna be apolitical and try and live out the teachings of Jesus in my everyday life, love my neighbor as myself. And I'm not gonna participate in the political world because It's dirty. It's a dirty thing. It's full of crooks and [laughs]…
Sy Hoekstra: Which isn't wrong. That's not a wrong thing to say about the political world [laughter].
Mark Scandrette: But with the killing of my neighbor, I realized there was all kinds of complexities to this about police hiring practices, their own protocols, the police commission and the union and all these things. And then when I would go to these organizing meetings, I would find out that most of my Latin and Black neighbors had had similar experiences. Everyone had somebody in their family that had been mistreated or killed. And I would say, “When they broke into your house and woke you up with guns [laughs] to your faces, did you make a complaint?” And they said, “No. We were just glad that they eventually left and that we're still alive.”
And so I was like there's an… if I wanna love my neighbor as myself, it's more than just my direct action to love that person. I also need to advocate for them, and that gets me into politics and public policy. And so that was kind of a huge learning curve for me, to go from being apolitical to actually feeling like I needed to have a voice and participate at a different level.
Sy Hoekstra: That's a useful story for people to hear because I mean, a number of things that you've highlighted is like, I mean, the story highlights is proximity to marginalized people is the willingness to enter into complexity and not shut it down by making things simple. And the how loving your neighbor actually takes shape when you get involved with real people in the real world as opposed to what you've been told about them. I mean, all those points, there's probably more in there that Jonathan could point out, but at least those three points come out of that story [laughs].
The Importance of Firsthand Experiences in a World of Secondhand Media
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the biggest thing that stands out to me for folks who are on the like, “I want to help this person,” is that we can't help people who are unwilling to put themselves in close proximity with folks who are different.
Mark Scandrette: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: The information is not gonna be the transformation. I'm sure you saw documentaries about what happened when your neighbors are hanging with you. But when you’re breathing the same air in the same room, you shop at the same grocery stores, you get on the same public transit, you ride on the same bike lanes, it creates a different narrative, right? And that I think, particularly for folks who are like, “Oh man, I don't know how this person would change.” I think there's a powerful invitation that Jesus says when he says, “Come and see.” And you came and you saw. And the interpretation of that was what then you're able to respond to, which is great.
Mark Scandrette: So one of the things I try and emphasize is that I want to have firsthand experiences rather than relying on second or thirdhand reports about things.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Mark Scandrette: And I think that a lot of our media-fueled political discourse operates at that level of secondhand, thirdhand information. And I could see it in action. We spent a year doing weekly prayer vigils and walking from the site of his, the killing site to our local police station.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh wow.
Mark Scandrette: And on anniversaries there would be a particular attention from the media. And it would be mostly, it'd be a couple hundred grandpas and grandmas, observant Catholic folks from the neighborhood who were actually praying. And then a few radical communists would show up at the end with masks and hammers about six of them. And [laughs] that's the image that would go on Fox News.
Sy Hoekstra: Right, of course. Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Mmhmm, yep, right.
Mark Scandrette: Not these devout people praying and not saying mean things about the police, but saying our liberation is bound up with one another and calling on God's grace to help us learn to live together in love. And so yeah, firsthand experiences I think are really powerful. And I'll tell you, maybe a hard thing for me was when I shared my firsthand experience, how people would tend to go to rhetoric with me very quickly. And I would go around to churches and tell the story of my experience with my neighbor, and people would assume I was saying bad things about their uncle who was a police officer, or whatever.
Sy Hoekstra: Right.
Mark Scandrette: And I said, “I didn't say anything about your uncle. I'm a writer and a storyteller. I try to be very careful about what I say. And so you're really making assumptions and backfilling what I didn't say.” And it's hard to get to that. In conversations with family and friends, it's really hard to get to that person to person level if one of us is talking from rhetoric.
Why Should the Beatitudes Guide Our Voting?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I feel like if the willingness and ability to resist relationship and go to rhetoric for simplicity's sake, which really means my own safety and my, I don't have to change, right? You, as a storyteller, as a writer, as someone who's shepherding folks in the way of Jesus, you landed on what you wrote in your essay for us, which was like voting in line with what you find in the Beatitudes. So there's these things happening in the neighborhood. You resist oversimplification, you make these things personal, and then you're like, all right, “I'm gonna step into the policy ring and vote from the Beatitudes.” So how did you land there, and why is that the passage of scripture as opposed to Isaiah 1:17 or Micah 6:8, or Matthew 25. For the folks who don't know the Bible, those are all the justice passages [laughter].
The Beatitudes Are Some of Jesus’ Most Important Teachings, and They Show Us How to Think and Live Like We Will in God’s Kingdom
Mark Scandrette: Sure. There's two layers to the question. One is I was mentored by somebody, by a philosopher named Dallas Willard, who would often say that the Sermon on the Mount is the curriculum for Christlikeness, the best collection we have of the teachings of Jesus. It was sort of like, if you have a favorite comedian, they do the same set hundreds of times, and you just, when they record the special you're getting the best hits. And I think the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ best hits. So the Beatitudes fall at the beginning of that passage, and I think the Beatitudes can be seen as a way of Jesus naming areas of the human condition and human struggle that his teachings address.
So we often, we all struggle with a sense of not enoughness, and what do we do with our lack. And we can either be closed handed, anxious, worried and greedy, or open-handed and trusting. It's hard to face the realities, and that's blessed are the poor in spirit. It's hard to face the realities of a complex world, and so we wanna hide and escape, but Jesus says, blessed are those who mourn. And so that opens up opportunities for lament and confession and things like that. So it's like a, in a way, I call it like the Beatitudes I think, and the Sermon on the Mount are like the psychology of how to live in the kingdom of God.
What's the inner work, a new way of seeing that allows me to show up in new ways in the world. And so I think there's just incredible richness there. The other part of the answer is I did get invited into a project in 2015 called Nine Beats, where a group in the UK invited me to spend particular time on the Beatitudes and I developed a curriculum around it that we've introduced to groups around the world. And my main, my biggest passion is how do I invite other people to follow the teachings of Christ in the messy details of everyday life? Like, how does that work? Where do we start? What's the self-awareness we need to have? What are the practices that might help us learn to see and be like Jesus in the world?
And so we created some labs around the… I call it a learning lab, a lab around the Beatitudes that would look at those principles from the Sermon on the Mount, and then we'd invite people to do experiments and practices around them. And actually it's, I'd say there's a political component to that because some of those teachings really confront our habits around how we show up in civic life. Like when we were looking at “blessed are the merciful,” we asked people to make a commitment to practice positive speech for one week. For one week, I won't say anything critical or disparaging about myself or another human being, including politicians.
And we just asked people to do it for a week, and then notice how that changed the nature of their conversation and their attitudes. And most people, when we invite them to do this practice, they're like, “Oh, I don't know if I could do that.” Or there's a little bit of a chuckle knowing how much contempt is part of how we talk with each other.
Sy Hoekstra: I literally just called politicians crooks. So yeah, I got you on that one [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: And that piece, you said like “how much contempt marks our speech about each other and ourselves.”
Mark Scandrette: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: It's good.
Mark Scandrette: Yeah. We did another… when we looked at “blessed are those who mourn” or “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or justice”, we just asked people to think about, consider who tends to be excluded or on the margins in their context, and get curious and meet someone from that group. Or with “blessed are the peacemakers,” who do you put on the other side of us and them? Go have a conversation with that person, be curious and listen. And it's exciting to see. We had like, some of my work is in Australia and a lot of older White Christians in Australia carry some pretty judgmental I would say racist attitudes towards the original peoples of that continent.
And it doesn't seem to cause much conflict within them as followers of Jesus. But with this lab, we just say, who do you put on the other side? Look at how Jesus did this, hanging out with the Centurion and the Samaritans and the occupiers, would you be willing to meet someone who is from that original people group and get curious about them and to see the kind of changes in attitude and learning, “Oh, that's why they wanted to see the referendum go through.” And it’s been really powerful. And I’d just say, what I've noticed is by inviting people into the Jesus practices, you can get a lot further in the conversation around politics than you can by pushing your agenda forward.
Jonathan Walton: Right. Almost like if you lift him up, he'll draw all people unto himself [laughter].
The Beatitudes Are sometimes Unintuitive, and They Challenge Privileged People to Think Differently
Sy Hoekstra: Almost like that. I think thinking of the Beatitudes as the psychology of what it means to be a Christian, that you just made something click in my brain. And that was because there… and the reason I think it clicked is there are so many things in the Beatitudes that I find helpful, but it's not necessarily immediately clear why [laughs]. Like even just “mourn with those who mourn,” it's like—"Blessed are those who mourn.”
Mark Scandrette: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: It's like that was never a command. Like that's not a, here's what you do to be righteous, or here's what you do to live well or whatever. I don't know. Like why you need to mourn is not immediately clear versus why you shouldn't steal or kill or commit adultery [laughs].
Mark Scandrette: Yeah. And it's right there. It's the second thing Jesus says in this great sermon, is blessed are those who mourn. So that's probably out of all the beatitudes, the one that's hit people the hardest from dominant culture, is the scriptural invitation to lament and complain. And that it gives us an opportunity to both mourn how we've been hurt by personal or systemic forces, and to also sit with how we maybe have been complicit in systems and structures of oppression. And that it's okay and good to do that. And our healing's gonna come by realistically facing mistakes in our past and collective mistakes that we've made.
What Was the Cost of Leaving Fundamentalism And Speaking Out Against Injustice?
Sy Hoekstra: So in your turning to this way of thinking, you made it clear in the essay you've had some strain in some of your personal relationships. And I don't, without obviously you getting into the details of your personal life [laughs], I'm just kind of wondering in general how your relationships with people who disagree with you have changed and how you try to continue to approach people who are close to your part of your community who disagree with you in truth, but also in love at the same time.
Mark Was Misunderstood When He Left Conservatism, but Being Misunderstood Is Part of Following Jesus
Mark Scandrette: Yeah. I find it to be challenging, and it's been with my immediate family and extended family and with people who've even been donors to our work and organization over a very long period of time. And some of it really surprised me because… and I think that it has to do with that acceleration of divides that happened over the last four to six years. It surprised me who would be so adamant around and defensive around issues of racism and racial justice and things like that. I'm a sensitive person. Like I will say and do what I believe, but I don't go out of my way to offend. And so I like to, I'm a nice guy [laughs], but so it surprised me when I’m met with such anger from people I love. And I spent a lot of time trying to talk through things.
I had one friend who was very offended because we organized a group of people just after George Floyd's death to do a lab on anti-racism. And he was really offended by some of the Black voices that we had as part of that and what they said. And I just spent hours trying to compose a response to him that was gentle and helpful and non-reactionary. And one thing that brings me great comfort is that part of Jesus' spiritual formation was to be misunderstood by the people closest to him. And so his mother and brothers thought he'd become mentally unwell and should have been committed to a mental health ward during his ministry [laughs]. People in his hometown rejected him.
And not that any, like, we could go the wrong way with this to be like, oh, just because I offend people that means I'm following the Jesus way. But I do think there might be something archetypal in that if you keep trying to follow the Jesus way, you will be misunderstood and you will be misrepresented, and that that is part of your formation. So instead of taking it personally, just go, “This might be necessary because I've liked being liked. I've liked people agreeing with me thinking that I had wise things to say, and now people are not giving me that affirmation. Can I still be at rest and centered as a person who's trying to listen to God's voice and God's spirit when I'm not getting rewarded for it [laughs] by my community?” And that's a, it's a hard, but I think a necessary spiritual development step.
Practicing the Way of Jesus Is Discipleship, Not Learning Doctrine
Jonathan Walton: Amen. Amen. So, as we've had this conversation, you put a lot of emphasis on practicing the way of Jesus, right? Like following Jesus looks like this. The Jesus way looks like this, the kingdom of God is like [laughs]... And so your training and discipleship focuses on trying to exercise that muscle. That you, how you wanna behave in the world. You just talked a little bit about that, rather than just saying the doctrines about Jesus and what we believe is true. Okay? if you were to make it succinct for people, why do you do that? Who helped you get to that point?
Mark Scandrette: You know, I came up in a faith tradition that emphasized having the right beliefs and doctrine. And I was a good student of my tradition, as a young person I was reading the Bible one to three hours a day, memorized
Sy Hoekstra: Okay.
Mark Scandrette: …chapters and books of the scriptures, sang worship songs for an hour or two a day. Went to church every time it was open, handed out tracks to my friends at school. I don't know if that is a thing anymore, but it was in the eighties [laughs]. But carried a bible with me wherever I went. And having a head full of scripture did not magically make me into a well-formed person. And so I came to a point of frustration where I was like, there's just a tremendous gap between how I know I'm being called to live and how I actually live, there's been a missing element here. And I think it's the missing element is a commitment to practice and to really considering how do I, not just what is the right thing for a Christian to do, but how do I learn to do that right thing?
What are the belief structures that need to change? What do I need to be honest about where the gaps are? What practices? And so we created something that back in the early two thousands, a program to try and approximate learning to have that student apprentice to rabbi relationship with Jesus. And the earliest disciples took him that his social place was as rabbi, and he was teaching them how to live his way of life. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Learn from me. And so we called it the Jesus Dojo. I know that's a little bit of cultural appropriation. I don't use that term anymore, but it got to the point that to be a Christian in the way of Jesus looks more like being in a karate studio than in a college lecture hall.
And I'd spent so many years in the college lecture hall of my faith getting a head full of information, but had not been in a gym or studio where I could work it out. And so I just found that when I'd gather groups of people and we'd say, how do we learn to not judge? Who are the Matthew 25 hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and lonely in our neighborhood? How would we care for the least of these? Let's meet them, let's share food. As we got active in trying to practice the Jesus way, that's when my heart and life really came alive, and it was so deeply transforming to me.
Western Culture, All along the Political Spectrum, Privileges Words and Thoughts Over Actions
And I'll just also make this point that I think that this is not just symptomatic of people who identify as Christians, but I would say it's all Western culture, is our inheritance is that Greek Hellenistic way, trying to be objective and thinking that in our minds we can get the right picture together of life, and that words and thought is the whole game.
And so I would say across the whole continuum, from conservative to progressive, there's a lot of rhetoric around words, and Jesus invites us into embodied practice. So some people, when they make the, if they've grown up conservative and Christian, and they're making a shift to let's say a more progressive way of being Christian, it's still just words. They just have different [laughs] slogans now.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark Scandrette: But you haven't changed the game. You haven't gotten up into the real thing yet. And the real thing is embodied love in practice. So there's a curious phenomenon where some people live better than their ideas. I would say I have family members like this. I don't like what comes out of their mouth about certain groups of people. I don't like the literature I see in their house. I have concerns about it, and I'm afraid of how they vote. But man, they live and love well. They live better than their ideas. And then I think some of us, maybe I'd include myself in this, I don't live as good as my ideas [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I agree with you.
Mark Scandrette: And so, I think to people both on the… if you, I don't like these binaries, but across the continuum of right to left, we're all being invited by Jesus to live our values, to live love rather than just spouting rhetoric.
Sy Hoekstra: Amen.
Jonathan Walton: And who is one person that you're like, if you all hear someone talk about this, who's your person? Who are the folks that have helped you imbibe that reality?
Mark Scandrette: Oh well, I think Dallas Willard to some extent was an early influence in that way, I think. I think Richard Rohr saying the best critique of what is, is to live a better story, has inspired me in that way. And to not…
Maturity Is Moving Past Deconstruction to Synthesizing What Is Good from All Your Experiences
I think the tendency when you feel like you're moving out of one community is to disconnect from it. You might feel rejection, but I think the mature posture of a Jesus follower would be to say, “I want to transcend and include.” Like I come from this community, I came up with these ideas, I'm moving beyond them. And maybe the first, let's say in a process of rethinking or deconstruction, it's very easy to disregard everything from your past, and to embrace the new.
The more healthy approach would be to value whatever was good. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Value what was good, and then add to it more nuances in your understanding of reality, and not do this in a binary sort of way. It's hard to do that, it takes time. And maybe there's early stages where you have, it's like maybe even psychologically necessary to reject and renounce and disassociate, but eventually a Christlike maturity would be, I try to stay engaged. I don't create walls and boundaries.
Jonathan Walton: Amen. Amen to all that.
Interview Outro, and Where You Can Find Mark Online
Sy Hoekstra: Amen to all that. Mark Scandrette, this has been wonderful. We probably should’ve had you on the show earlier, but thank you so much for coming on [laughter]. We really, really appreciate you taking the time.
Mark Scandrette: Yes. Yeah. I love what you guys do. I appreciate the way you show up in the world.
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: You can find Mark's work at Markscandrette.com and his organization at Reimagine.org. Lots of the content he talked about in this interview come from his most recent book, The Ninefold Path of Jesus. We'll have links to all of that in the show notes.
Jonathan and Sy’s Thoughts After the Interview
We Can’t Control When White People Respond Well to New Information, but the Spirit Is Always Working
Sy Hoekstra: All right Jonathan. After that interview, what are you thinking about?
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Well, I think the thing that both encourages me and frustrates me is that I can't control how and when, and exactly what happens when folks encounter deep suffering and then are transformed or not. Like his sharing of like, okay, I'm a White guy, middle upper class, living in the suburbs in San Francisco, and all of a sudden, boom, police brutality is at his doorstep. Fifteen people are killed by the police, and all of a sudden the statistics he may have heard, or in the 1990s with Rodney King, prior to that, growing up in the sixties and seventies and eighties, like, there's these things coming up over and over again, but they didn't impact him.
But now, boom, it's in his neighborhood and now he's impacted. And then he makes radical, quote- unquote, radical choices in response to that. And it changed his life, it changed his ministry, it changed his leadership, changes his family. Like generations of his family are different because of how he chose to respond to the incidents in his neighborhood. I just wish I could control that for every White person that I know [laughter]. You know? But I can't. I can't. So I take deep joy and I love Mark. He's one of my favorite people, and I just wish that more people went on that journey. I just wish it was as simple as, oh, just put people in proximity to one another and their lives would change and they'll become empathetic and transformative leaders. But that isn't the case, you know? And so I think taking that to Jesus is what I'll do because I know that he is the power and the gospel is the power of transformation. I just wish it was my persuasion or oratory skills from lots of leaders, but it's not. And talking with him reminds me of the work that I must do, because who knows what God will do when these seeds are planted? At the same time, man, I just wish it was easier to control the bearing of good fruit for the seeds that are planted.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay, but so question, you said at the beginning, the first thing you said at the beginning of all that was that everything you just said is both frustrating and encouraging to you. I understand why it's frustrating. Why did you say encouraging?
Jonathan Walton: It's encouraging because if it was just me or just leaders then we're confined to space and time, but it's the Holy Spirit, so he can literally do it whenever he wants.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see.
Jonathan Walton: He can have people all the time. Like God is sovereign, omnipresent, omniscient, can just be dropping stuff all over the world, and people are being ignited and lit up all the time. It's not just one organization or all those different things. And so as Tisch Warren would say, there's this mystery between what God is doing, what we are doing. And somehow that marriage of obedience and faithfulness creates an amazing transformation that we get to be a part of. And so I'm encouraged because God is at work. I'm discouraged because I wish what he did worked all the time. So, yeah. What about you? That was a lot. So tell us what you’re thinking.
How Listening Skills, Curiosity, and Proximity to Diversity Helps Us See Through False Media Narratives
Sy Hoekstra: I'm thinking along kind of similar lines, or at least the same story of him kind of moving to the mission and having his perspective changed. But it's kind of how it affects the, how we engage with media in a certain way. But before I get to that, actually real quick, you mentioned that he's just a nice guy and one of your favorite people, I don't think I ever told you this. When we finished recording with Mark, you had to go. You had some scheduled thing, you had to leave. And then Mark and I just sat there and talked for like 45 minutes.
Jonathan Walton: [laughter] That’s awesome.
Sy Hoekstra: Because he has this incredible… and he did not say, “I have time, let's hang out, Sy, let’s catch up,” whatever. He's just one of those people who starts asking questions, and he does it in a way where he's like, “I'm fully engaged, I want to hear your answer. It's important to me, and I’ve got all the time in the world.” You can just tell that from his tone, and that's a really cool thing that not a lot of people are good at, and he's very good at it [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes, absolutely. He's genuinely interested in what you are saying.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, for real. And has been ever since I met him when I was like 19 and probably didn't really have anything interesting to say [laughter].
Okay, but getting back to him going to the mission, right? So he goes into the mission, he gets proximate to people who are very different than him. He exercises listening, he exercises curiosity. And that's how he finds his way past the media narrative about the marches in his neighborhood, right? Because he's got these, I can't remember if he said weekly or monthly. Oh, no. It was annual on the anniversary of the kid from their neighborhood who the police killed. They were doing these marches.
And he said it was mostly like older folks from the community, largely Catholic praying as they marched. And at the very end, there's these Antifa or whoever they are, guys show up and start breaking stuff, and there's like a handful of them and they're just being difficult. And that's always on Fox News, is the anarchists. Right?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And it's so easy to get the completely wrong picture of people who are different and far away from you, that we need to get good at exercising the skills that he was sort of demonstrating, or at least that he demonstrated through the stories that he was telling about how his transformation happened.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.
Sy Hoekstra: And that's really hard. There are so many people… I have a similar story to him where it was like I was just displaced from a lot of super White spaces that I was in and happened to randomly end up close to people who are really different than me in college and beyond. So there's a lot of people like that for where it just, you have some point of contact that's, you don't necessarily seek out, it just happens to you. And then like you said, people's responses are just so different. But if you wanna get to know people well, you have to be able to discern through those media narratives in a way that is really hard if you're not there.
And I think a good example of that is all of the crime narratives that have been going on recently, not just because of the election, but have been going on for years now, that Trump is made into such a big deal for his whole political career. Is this idea that just basically if you live in the city, you're just, I don't know, you're just dodging bullets wherever you go [laughter]. You're just like, crime is up all the time, it's never gone down, whatever. And all the statistics are actually showing in general, crime going down, way down in 2023 actually, like murder and some other crimes have gone way down. If you looked at a graph of the crime in New York City from like 1990 until today, it would be comical to say that crime is up in New York City. It is so, so far down than it was when I was a kid coming into the city for Yankee games or whatever [laughs].
And people just, I don't know, you and I had both had the experience of people who used to live in New York City years ago coming back to visit us and being like, “Is it safe to walk through your neighborhood? Are we gonna be okay?” And we're just like, “Yes. It has not changed. Nothing has changed. I'm walking down the street with my toddler on my back in a carrier every day and we are fine.” But you wouldn't know that if you just watched the media. And so I think take some lessons in discernment from Mark, I think is what I'm saying [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.
Which Tab Is Still Open?: Patriarchy and Palestinian Men
Sy Hoekstra: So we're going into Which Tab Is Still open?, our segment where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations that we posted recently in our newsletter that you can get totally for free at ktfpress.com if you wanna go there and do that. Jonathan, this one was your resource. So why don't you tell the people about it?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. The essay that I put in a newsletter a couple weeks ago is called “For Palestinian Fathers, Sons, and Brothers.” And I read it on Father's Day. It's by the bestselling author Frederick Joseph. It's about patriarchy and Palestinian men. That is the overarching container, but it goes so deep. And so Joseph argues that patriarchal power men receive from society is a devil's bargain because it robs men of humanity by making us people whose value comes from fitting a certain mold of being physically threatening, socially and sexually dominant, and emotionally unavailable. Like just a stoic figure. If you aren't those things, you don't get power and you aren't fully human.
And then he talks about the various disparities in the ways that the media discusses Palestinian men. And we always talk about, we see this on Instagram. We see this particularly on the major, quote- unquote, major news outlets already, where it's the number of women and children are killed by Israel are propped up as though the number of men are less consequential or inconsequential. Because men who are victims are always put under the guise of terrorists, or they must be doing something evil, they're different, they are subhuman. And I think that is exacerbated even more when we talk about the level of sexual violence that's perpetuated against Palestinian men, while the many stories about Israeli soldiers or prison guards violating them just gets less airtime.
When I encourage you, it is difficult, but to please go and read the New York Times' interviews of Palestinian male detainees. There's a long CNN article that also exposes just the terrible things that are happening to these men that are detained. And so this he argues, and I absolutely agree, that this is a pattern of dehumanization of what was largely like Muslim and Arab men coming out of 9/11, but especially true of just a campaign perpetuated by the West and Israel to dehumanize Palestinian men, specifically around the idea of occupation and giving Israel and the superpower allies just an excuse for their atrocities.
One civil rights leader said the first step towards committing violence against someone is their dehumanization. And we've seen that pattern start from the beginning of occupation before the Nakba started up through till now. And so, understanding these men as fathers, and sons and brothers, and humans who value their lives and relationships and have deep grief and suffering due to war, can move us towards liberation.
Mourning with Those Who Mourn Helps Us See the Humanity of Other People
I think Jesus's invitation command for us to mourn with those who mourn is a door for rehumanizing Palestinian men. It's a door for rehumanizing ourselves because we were actually made to be in relationships with one another, and our liberation is bound up in the liberation of all people.
So when I'm celebrating Father's Day, I can hold the beauty that comes with that, but I can also resist the reality that I do not have to dehumanize other dads to make myself more of a Father. I don't. I don't need to do that. And so the pictures of men from all different backgrounds holding their kids in deep, deep, deep, deep suffering is something that I had to engage with. And this essay was a door to that, because the reality is they are men just like me. They're human just like me. I am no more or no less human than them. And God has made all of us in his image. And pushing back against narratives of dehumanization is a way to reflect that theology and make it more than just a thought, but turn it into a feeling and a practice. So yeah. Sy, what'd you think?
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] You just did a lot of really deep stuff and then you just ended it with, “So, yeah. [laughter]. This is how Jonathan and I talk, we get way too casual about very important things [laughter]. All that is so true and so good.
Men Need to Understand How Patriarchy Hurts Them to Sustain the Fight Against It
Sy Hoekstra: And I think another layer of why this essay is important to me is he's doing some really important psychological work that can feel awkward for men to do when it comes to talking about the patriarchy, because here's the background. I've been listening, I mentioned last episode I've been listening to Scott Hall, who's one of our previous guests from season three, and Erna Kim Hackett. I've been in a cohort with them from, with Erna's organization, Liberated Together, fantastic organization if you wanna go check it out.
And one of the main points that they've made about Whiteness and White people doing racial justice work, and I'll connect this to patriarchy in a second, is that if you want to sustain motivation over the long term to do racial justice work as a White person, you can't be in it for altruistic purposes. Like you just can't. Because people, if you are there to help other people and not yourself, then at some point you are going to burn out, or you're going to demand that you be respected or rewarded or lauded in some way that makes you a bad ally. Right? You're going to burnout or be unhelpful, is what it comes down to because you're not doing what you just said, Jonathan, understanding that everyone's liberation is tied up together.
So you have to say that White supremacy actually harms me as a White person and figure out how that happens, and then figure out how you as a White person need to heal yourself and participate in racial justice work for that reason. To heal yourself and other White people because basically that motivation will sustain you.
It's kind of selfish, or it's kind of self-centered, but that's the reality of how humans work [laughs]. You need a personal motivation a lot of times to, or most of the time to do anything over a long stretch of time. The same thing is true of patriarchy. It's men need to understand how patriarchy harms us. And the reason it's awkward to talk about that is for two reasons at least. One is you can go too far with that and you can end up being like a men's rights activist, right? [laughter] Or like somebody who's just complaining about how men are victims and how women get unfairly treated, get stuff they don't deserve ahead of me or whatever. Go on that dangerous road. But the other reason it's awkward is when you think about patriarchy, obviously the first thing you go to is the way that it harms women.
And you don't want to, you might not want to be caught complaining about how it harms you, because the harm on other people is so much worse. And the answer to that is, yes, it's worse. Fine, that's true. But the fact that somebody else got hurt worse than you doesn't mean that you didn't get hurt. Right?
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Absolutely.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. If I break an arm and you, Jonathan, break two arms and a leg, that doesn't mean I don't have to go to the doctor [laughs], right?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: I gotta go to the doctor. And so what Joseph is doing is just some really good thinking, deep thinking, about how patriarchy hurts himself. He talks about himself as a Black man and how it hurts him, just like you did. And he talks about the Palestinian men and really digging into this so that you can feel the grief and then subsequently process those emotions and then be able to do the work afterwards that you need to do to fight patriarchy to help everyone. Help everyone get out of the snare that it is. That was a lot of talking. Jonathan, any thoughts?
Jonathan Walton: Well, yeah. I mean, I'll just lean into, try not to go even more down a rabbit hole, but I agree with everything that you said. And it's like you've talked about this before with like just hierarchies of dominance and power. It's a very different thing if a woman or someone from the a non-binary person says I'm gonna resist patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn't necessarily end because the folks downstream of it decide to stop. Patriarchy ends when men refuse to participate in the system. When the master walks off the plantation, that's when the plantation stops. And so we actually need men to say, “I'm going to opt out of this system of oppression because I can see that the first person it dehumanizes is me.” Because I am not a person anymore as soon as I decide to put myself on top of somebody else. That's not how God made us.
We were made for relationships with one another. We weren't made to dominate and rule over each other. And so, something that I wanna push back against too is like a soft acceptable misogyny, where it's like we just walk around with assumptions about women and assumptions about non-binary people. I think what Frederick Joseph is doing is like when he pushes back against these narratives, I think our response should be just like Mark had when he was first encountering these things, is radical interrogation. To say, “Where am I being complicit? And let me stop that.” And repentance is part of that. We say, I'm doing this thing, I'm gonna turn from that and do these set of things instead.
We need to make that as practical and as clear as possible as we can so that we can move towards freedom, not just by ourselves, but as we already talked about, like our liberation is bound up together. So the men and the folks downstream of me don't have to participate either. So, yeah, great job Frederick Joseph. Amazing essay. Thank you so much.
Sy Hoekstra: Great job [laughs]. He needs our validation, not multiple New York Times bestseller awards or anything, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Awards and thousands of followers and all that. I hope my encouragement means something to you [laughter].
Outro and Outtake
Sy Hoekstra: All right, cool. Well, we will end it there. This was a great episode. Thank you so much Jonathan, for being here as always. Thank you all for listening, we will see you in two weeks. Our theme song as Always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Our editing is by Multitude Productions who just started doing the editing for us. We are so grateful to them. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale, and we will see you all in two weeks. Thank you so much for listening, goodbye.
Jonathan Walton: Bye-Bye.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. We have a fantastic show for you today. First, we are going to be continuing our—I... didn't turn off my air conditioner. Be right back [laughs].
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
This episode, Jonathan and Sy talk with the incredible Brandi Miller about:
- How faith and churches change when we engage with the political idolatry of the American church
- The spiritual and political fruit of the MAGA movement
- The good things people still want and can find in Jesus and Christian community amidst all the nonsense
- Developing inner lives that can sustain political engagement and community building
- Plus, Jonathan and Sy discuss some fascinating numbers about the political views and voting patterns of the average Black Christian versus the average overall Democrat
Mentioned in the Episode
- Our anthology, Keeping the Faith
- Brandi’s podcast, Reclaiming My Theology
- Her other show, The Quest Church Podcast
- The article on Black, Christian political beliefs and voting
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Brandi Miller: God made people in God's own image, and people's job is not to conform into your pastor's version of following Jesus. It's to conform more into the likeness of Jesus as you become more yourself. And so instead of going to a pastor who is essentially saying, “Follow me as I follow Jesus,” you say, “We're following Jesus, and you're gonna discover who you are along the way.”
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. We have a fantastic show for you today. We are talking all about church and politics with the great Brandi Miller, who many of you know. And we're doing our new segment, Which Tab Is Still Open?, diving deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. This week, a closer look at the political beliefs of the average Black Christian versus the average Democrat. If you think those are pretty much the same, you've got stuff to learn [laughter]. So stay tuned.
Sy Hoekstra: Brandi Miller is the host of the podcast, Reclaiming My Theology. As she calls it, a space to take our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress. She's also now newly the host of the Quest Church Podcast, which is unsurprisingly for Quest Church in Seattle [laughs], where Brandi has the staff position of Chief Storyteller. Before that she was a justice program director with a college ministry working at the intersection of faith, justice, and politics. If you know Brandi, I don't have to convince you that this is a good conversation. If you don't, just, you need to get to know her, so [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes, yes, yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Get ready for this one.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, we talked to her about her perspective on evangelical politics, how she sees people's faith changing as they engage with the American church's idolatry, and what Jesus has to offer as a vision for us in this political landscape. There is a lot in the episode, I hope you're ready. Her article in our anthology was called, “Left Behind: What American Evangelicalism Has Lost and Needs to Find.” And of course, you can get the anthology at keepingthefaithbook.com.
Sy Hoekstra: And before we get started, just a reminder that we have been telling everyone we need your subscriptions [laughter], please. The best way, if you are into what we do, helping people try and leave the idols of White America and seek Jesus through this media and you want to help us build something that can do that in an effective and far reaching way to people, we need your support. We have been doing this as a side gig for a lot of time. For a long time it's been me and Jonathan in our rooms with laptops trying to make things work, and they have worked [laughs]. But if you wanna see that stuff grow and you wanna see this stuff continue for a long time into the future, we really do need your support.
So go to KTFPress.com, please become a paid subscriber. Get access to all the bonus episodes of this show. Get access to our monthly subscriber chats that we're starting, get access to comments on our posts and support everything we do centering and elevating marginalized voices. If you cannot afford a subscription, like if money's the only barrier, please just write to us, [email protected], and we will give you a free or discounted subscription. Whatever you ask for, no questions asked. We want everyone to have access to all the stuff that we're putting out, but if you can afford it, we really, really want the support.
Actually, one of the things that you'll be supporting now is that our newsletter is free. So anybody can go to KTFPress.com, sign up for the free mailing list. You get news about KTF press, you get all kinds of stuff like that, but you also get recommendations from us every week that are things that we think will be helpful in your political education and discipleship. And you will also get things from us that we think are helpful in staying grounded and hopeful in the midst of all of the difficult issues that we are all seeing in our news feeds and in our politics and everywhere else and in our churches. So please, KTFPress.com, become a paid subscriber. Thank you so much in advance.
Jonathan Walton: Yep. Thanks in advance, and here is the interview with Brandi.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Brandi, thank you so, so much for joining us on Shake the Dust. We really appreciate it.
Brandi Miller: Of course. Glad to be here. Always glad to get to spend time with you all, so.
How Does Faith Change When We Engage with The Idolatry of the American Church?
Making Our Political Theology Accessible to Everyone
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean, now you wrote this bomb essay. Okay. And so something that you said, which [laughs] is still true in 2024: " The result of the syncretism of American religion, propaganda-based iconography and political power is cultish religiosity centered on Donald Trump as God’s Messiah sent to buttress patriotism, political power, and global dominance. Regardless of his lack of demonstrable Christ-likeness in his politics, it is clear that pandering to his constituents’ desire for Christianized power in the United States has framed him as the president who will ‘bring America back to God.’ This is a trade-off: Christian practice and the way of Jesus for American Christian power and utopianism.” End quote.
Monstrous, amazing text, right? [laughter] Now, after you wrote this, you became a staff member at a church, right?
Brandi Miller: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Walton: And you have a large community of people following and engaging with you online. And as you try to teach and disciple people out of this syncretism slash nonsense, how have you seen their faith change?
Brandi Miller: Well, one thing I'll say is something that's changed about myself first, because even as I hear back my own words, I can hear how inaccessible they are to a common regular person. Like how many four to six-syllable words can I use to say Donald Trump does not look like Jesus, and that does not matter to most Christians who follow White American religion. That is what I was trying to say, that there is a propaganda based way of doing religion that has indoctrinated a ton of us into a traumatic type of spirituality that we cannot hold. And so I think even a critique of myself in a way that I've changed is trying to ask, how do I take what is a political reality rooted in a current religious moment and strip it down in a way that a regular person can understand?
Because if I am theologizing people out of their own experiences or trying to pull them out of a demonstrably terrible politic and they can't understand where we're going, then that's on me. And so I think that part of my trying to engage with a lot of this stuff has been my own change around how I engage with it so that people who are trying to follow Jesus outside of this kind of syncretism with American nationalism can actually come along.
When People See the Idolatry, Staying in Church Community Is Hard
Brandi Miller: That being said, I think that, I mean, it's been kind of bleak honestly. Like I think that the church that I work at is a church that is people's last stop on their way out of Christianity specifically for these issues. Because they can see the ways that American politics have more say in the lives of people who identify as Christian than Jesus does.
And when that is the case, it is really hard to be a part of a Jesus community. And so what I'm seeing a lot is people trying to figure out, can I actually trust community as I follow Jesus? And a lot of people can't. And it makes sense to me, and they leave. But what ends up happening is that people are like, “Well, I can follow Jesus outside of the church,” and I actually believe that some people can do that. But I think because community is at the core of following Jesus, when you leave in those contexts without any kind of community to buttress your faith at all, it's really, really hard to, with integrity, continue to live out those values, and it's really easy to become increasingly cynical in the media ecosystem that we have.
And so I don't really know what to tell people pastorally, right? Because there are many ways that I could say, “No, no, no, just come back to the church,” but the church isn't trustworthy. And I can say, “No, go on your own,” but with a lack of community, a lot of the faith stuff falls apart because it's meant to be done together in a non-westernized religious context. And so I'm finding that to be a pretty sad and frustrating space to occupy. So I think that'd be my first bid.
What People Can Still Get from Church Community Even after Seeing the Idolatry
Jonathan Walton: I have so many thoughts, but I’m going to let Sy ask his question.
Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no, go for it, Jonathan. We have time.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] So in the midst of that, this new like re-imagining of what community would look like, independent of the colonized faith, what we call it at KTF, White American folk religion, what I call it in Twelve Lies, are there any fireworks of imagination that have happened that you're like, “Oh, that looks nice. That might be something that is hopeful,” for a group of people who are on this subway stop at the end of the line?
Brandi Miller: Well, I mean, I think that people still want all the good stuff, right? I think people want connection and community and gentleness and kindness and meekness and self-control and the fruit of the spirit, and the beatitudes. I think people still want the Jesus stuff. People want to live in an accessible and just world where people can be fully themselves, where the image of God in me meets the image of God in you, and somehow in that magic we're transformed. I think people still want that, and I think when people come and get a taste of that, it's really, really beautiful. Because what it results in really is friendship and friendship results in systems change and system change results in world change and political change.
Jonathan Walton: Right, right, right.
Brandi Miller: And so, I think that what I've seen happen is a lot of progressive spaces have done one of two things. One, said like, well, the individual transformation doesn't matter. And I'm like, that's actually not true. The health of the individual and the health of the system are always a cycle that are moving over and over and over again. And so we're like, “Well, F individual transformation and let's just like go do the system change.” And I'm like, yeah, but if like people don't change, then they're not gonna be alongside you as you change the systems and not understand why the systems change would be good for them. And I think churches do that too.
Jonathan Walton: Right?
Brandi Miller: So I think a lot of progressive media culture does that on one side, and then the other side uses all of this abstraction to describe what the world looks like when it changes, which is, I don't know, right now sounds like the end of postmodern empire. Like we're in empire collapse right now. And I'm like, “No one knows what that means.” Most normal average people do not know what it means. So they're like, “Let's find creative ways to engage post empire collapse.” And I'm like, can you just say that the United States is participating in all kinds of evil, and when our comeuppance happens, it's going to result in a completely different societal structure that we are not ready for.
And so, what I'm always looking for are glimpses of what could life look like after that? Which I think is what you're asking. And a lot of that looks like people choosing to care for each other well to build more simple lives rather than more complicated ones, to choose work that isn't their entire identity and allowing themselves to explore who they are outside of the kind of enculturation that happens when we don't have a life outside of that. And that is what I've seen change people's politics. It's not like having a fancy activist job. It's seeing how your neighbors are suffering and doing something about that together, or getting a measure on a ballot that changes things for folks.
And so I think that I'm seeing glimpses of people entering into more embodied, simple space that is actually transformative and actually grounding and does a lot to downshift some of our very present anxiety. And I think that's been really good. And so I think there's some structural and systemic things I've seen too, but a lot of the stuff that I'm seeing is people trying to make sense of this abstracted language and say, what does this actually mean for my life in real time, and how can that be good?
The Fruit of the MAGA Movement
Sy Hoekstra: One thread there that kind of leads into my next question is, you said that the idea that your church is the last stop on a lot of people's road out of Christianity, when I was a kid, I would, in evangelical churches, I would hear the sentiment a lot that—I would hear that sentiment a lot actually. I would hear like, “Oh, when you go to a progressive church, that's just, you're just on your way out [laughs], so don't ever go there.” That was the kind of, that was the warning, right?
Brandi Miller: Yeah [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: But basically, what I hear you saying is the reason that it's their last stop or the reason that they're on their way out is not because of they've lost their way or a lack of integrity, they don't really care about Jesus, whatever. They actually care about Jesus maybe more than the places that they left, and got so hurt as a result that that's why they're on their way out. And that's, I think that's a reality that Jonathan and I see a lot too, and I just wanted to point that out to people. But also this kind of gets a little bit into what my next question was, which I also had a big long quote here, but I'll just summarize [laughs] because Jonathan already read a big long quote [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: I did.
Sy Hoekstra: You basically talked about how there are a lot of masks that evangelicals wear to cover their support for Donald Trump's racism. So it's like the sanctity of life or pro-gun politics or pro-Israel politics. And that it basically that the result of that is you're not talking about the racism of Donald Trump, you're talking to people about those masks and saying, “If you're not willing to wear this mask, then basically you're an enemy to be negated because you're a baby killer, or you're an anti-Semite” or whatever it is. But I wonder if four years on having seen so much more of the fruit of the MAGA movement, if there's anything that you would kind of add on to this description of how it operates.
Shifting Acceptable Political Discourse Far to the Right
Brandi Miller: Yeah. So one of the main things I think about right now is the Overton window. So for folks who aren't familiar with the Overton window, it's essentially the range of acceptable political thought from left to right. And so there is an acceptable range of political thought, I'm doing some writing and thinking about this right now, but that what is considered far on the left and far on the right changes as that window shifts farther left or right. And what we've seen in the last four years is the Overton window shift so far to the right, that stuff that would've been considered so extreme, so outlandish, so problematic as to not be acceptable is now mainstream.
So when George Santos can have an entire political campaign and multiple years of being in the public spotlight, and everyone be like, “Ah, this is just kind of like normal run-of-the-mill American politics,” that's wild.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah [laughs].
Brandi Miller: When Donald Trump can have dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of criminal, like of criminal… or like he has so many, so many things that are happening right now at felony levels, and we're like, “Oh, I mean, he's just like working through it.” That is so wild to me, that the Overton window has shifted so far to the right that Marjorie Taylor Greene can do every bit of chaos that she's doing. That Mike Johnson is considered a normal speaker of the house.
Jonathan Walton: That is, ugh… [laughs].
Brandi Miller: We’ve moved so far right, that now what used to be considered moderate is considered hyper progressive. That being like, hey, like… maybe we should give people… that we've actually reversed, like with Roe v. Wade, we've reversed rights for people and we consider that normal. Like the Overton window has shifted so aggressively to the right that it is so, so damaging. And that has just continued over the last four years.
Shifting Acceptable Religious Thought Far to the Right
Brandi Miller: The thing I am observing and doing a lot of work around right now is what does it mean when the Christian range of political or range of acceptable religious thought also shifts to the right? And so I've been asking the question, what is that?
What we're talking about really is orthodoxy. We're saying there is this range of historically acceptable Christian thought, but when that gets chain linked to the Overton window and shifted to the right, the way of Jesus that gets to be considered left or moderate or something becomes completely unidentifiable to most Christians. And when that happens, the only response that we have in those super conservative spaces or that have moved to the right that much is to parrot political actors and call it holiness. And that is what I'm most concerned with and what I'm seeing most right now, is that people can't even have conversations because of those things like, yeah, you're an anti-Semite or you're a baby killer, or whatever.
You can't even have the conversations about why that ideology became important to someone, because even questioning the ideology itself or that indoctrination feels like it's a deviation from holiness because your religion is so connected to nationalism that to separate those feels like sin.
Sy Hoekstra: It's almost, it's like the way that you might get a question shut down in church because if of something you're asking about some orthodox doctrine or whatever, like expressing a doubt of some kind.
Brandi Miller: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: You're saying that's not just religious anymore basically. That is political. Or the politic—because the religious and the political are so closely linked that your political doubt is religious doubt almost.
Brandi Miller: Yes. Yes, most certainly. Connected to God's connection to a nation.
What Is the Good That All the Idolatry Is Overshadowing?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I got in this conversation with a… Sometimes I opt into the online debates to get fodder for more posts [Sy laughs]. And I asked someone what they meant by Orthodox. They were saying “Israel is God's nation. The United States should support Israel because we are also God's nation, we're mirror countries of each other. This is an orthodox view.”
Sy Hoekstra: Whoa.
Jonathan Walton: They had obviously no, like no image or thought about the non-evangelical 200-year-old, 50-year-old, 25-year, 2-year-old church that they were in [laughter], you know? But all that to say, as you talk about Jesus on your show, talk about Jesus in your writing, talk about Jesus in your church, talk about Jesus with us. We're constantly trying to get people to look at the Jesus of Nazareth and not the Jesus of nationalism. Right? What would you say in this era, like with the church and politics, what value do you think Jesus's teaching, Jesus's witness, his life, death, resurrection has to offer us this election season? And what is the good that all the syncretism that we're talking about is just completely overshadowing?
Following Jesus Helps us Find Ourselves and Resist Structures That Demand Conformity
Brandi Miller: Well, right. The Jesus story is a continuation of the Hebrew story, and that story is centered on a God who cares about righteousness. And righteousness is not adherence to political doctrine, it's right living in harmony and wellbeing with other folks. Dr. Randy Woodley talks about shalom in the community of creation and that you know that the world is well when the marginalized say so. And the Hebrew scriptures follow that journey really, really closely. Even if the people fail in it, God's calls stay consistent to make sure that the orphan and the widow and the foreigner are cared for. And that we know that a whole community is healthy and well and living rightly when that's the case. And Jesus lives out that same story.
And part of that story requires that people are given the chance to be themselves. That if we believe in this kind of, there's a lot that I do not believe about how we extrapolate Genesis one and two, but I think one of the core things is that like God made people in God's own image, and people's job is not to conform into your pastor's version of following Jesus. It's to conform more into the likeness of Jesus as you become more yourself. And so instead of going to a pastor and essentially saying, ‘Follow me as I follow Jesus,” we say, “We're following Jesus and you're gonna discover who you are along the way.” And that is what Jesus does with his disciples. Right? Jesus invites a diverse group of wackadoodle dudes to come and be themselves [Jonathan laughs]. And they change a lot. They change a lot, but they don't change away from themselves, which I think we see in the story of Peter, right? Peter's a fisherman at the beginning and he's a fisherman at the end. And the way in which he's a fisherman is really different, but he is still at his core in some ways who he is. And I know there's some conflation with vocational and whatever, but there are ways that people are, that people who were zealous in the beginning are zealous, but in a more refined way at the end. People who were engaging with the people in a particular way are doing so less judgmentally at the end.
So I think there's a way that there is an invitation to become fully ourselves that we do not get in church spaces because we're told that sanctification or that honoring the death and resurrection of Jesus is to become less like yourself. It's to do this… I think we just take the John the Baptizer quote, “more of him, less of me” out of context when you're like… y’all, the reason he's saying that is because they think he's the Messiah and he needs to make some stuff really clear. He's not saying, I need to become less of myself. John needs to become more and more of himself in order to do what Jesus has invited him to do.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Brandi Miller: And so, because in the church we often say, let's collapse our identities into one social, political and religious identity, people lose themselves. And so I think part of the invitation and the good that we offer to people is that you get to be yourself. And that justice work, this other side of the coin in the Hebrews text around justice and righteousness is making things right when righteousness, when people's ability to live fully as themselves to live original blessing is not in place. And so I think that there's an invitation in the way of Jesus to live fully as ourselves and to make right the spaces where people are not offered space to live the life that is abundant.
Jonathan Walton: May it be so in churches and spaces this fall [laughs] where that could be extrapolated. And as you were talking, I was just like, yeah, “God loves you,” should not be a controversial statement.
Brandi Miller: Right…. Woof…
Jonathan Walton: Right? Like it shouldn’t [laughs].
How Has Brandi’s Calling Changed around Political Engagement?
Sy Hoekstra: Alright. So, on your show, you're often talking about theology and culture. You obviously have a ton to say about politics though, and I've heard you say on the show you'd be kind of more interested in getting into that somehow at some point in your life. And you took a break from the show recently. Basically, you're in the middle of a season on purity culture, and you kind of took a break from the show because you felt some tension between talking about theology and church culture and purity culture with everything that's going on in Gaza. And I'm just wondering how the last four years have affected your sense of calling or your desire to engage politically from someone who has largely played a pastoral role.
Helping People Develop Inner Lives that Can Sustain Political Engagement
Brandi Miller: Yeah. Some of what I'm learning is that regardless of whether there's an urgent political moment that people are still entering into these spaces in a lot of different ways. And so me stopping the podcast because of everything happening in Gaza and trying to figure out how to respond wasn't actually as helpful as I had hoped it would've been. It didn't make more space for people, it just disengaged people from one of the only spaces that they're engaging with religion at all. And so pastorally, I think what I ended up doing was leaving people behind. And I didn't, I think I was so at that point unsure of how to respond to what was happening in Gaza and didn't know what my role would be, and felt like as a person who's, it's a little bit like one of my Jewish friends was talking about the parable of the virgins and the oil.
Some of us just showed up really late to this party, and we know so little, we've showed up so late, that it feels pretty impossible to show up effectively. And so I was trying to be responsible with what I did and did not know about Israel, Palestine, Gaza, all of that. Instead of just saying what I could unequivocally say, which is that violence in all forms, particularly genocide, is an egregious violence against God, against people and needs to be dealt with aggressively. Like, I can say that without any… we can say, “Free Palestine,” because that is an easy thing to, it's pretty easy for me to say, to agree with that idea. What I did though in being like, oh, purity culture isn't connected, was to say that people have on-ramps to these kinds of justice expressions that are far away.
And maybe it's like [laughs], I hate to use this metaphor, but like, or parallelism rather. Yeah, I hate to use this parallelism, but when I think about how QAnon feeds into conspiracy theories, I think there's a lot of ways that progressive Christianity can feed people toward better, more just politics. And so when I take away the on-ramps, I take away people's opportunity to enter into a more just spirituality. And so me choosing to not talk about sex for four weeks or whatever, for me it felt like it was a solidarity practice, but it really was just cutting off people from a community that they cared about. So I think I would say that that was like one thing that I'm learning.
And that is, and I think that what I'm trying to figure out is, as a person who primarily plays a pastoral function, what does it mean to invite people into a discipleship that can hold the politics that they're engaging with? Because one of the things I learned from 2016 was that many of us had a ton of passion, a ton of anxiety, a lack of knowledge, and we weren't able to hold onto the activism at the level that we held it during Black Lives Matter. We just weren't able to do it. And so, I think I'm trying to ask how do you build people's inner lives and community orientations in such a way that we can actually hold the political movements that we want to see happen?
So how do we become community organizers locally and nationally when our inner lives aren't able to hold even the basics of our day-to-day lives? And that's not a knock on anyone, it's just a, we don't know how to cope. We don't know how to be in therapy. We don't know how to ask good questions about our lives. And so I think that I'm still asking the question, what is the role of the pastoral in the political, when most of my examples of the pastoral and the political is just telling people how to vote once every four years indirectly so you don't lose your funding, and nothing else otherwise.
Helping People Learn and Grow through Curiosity and Questioning Assumptions
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I care a little bit about that, the inner life, peace [laughter]. I write, you know, I have a whole thing about that. So as you're talking, something I feel like I've run into is, I had a conversation with someone and they said to me, “The church discriminates against queer people? What do you mean?” And I looked at them and I was like, they were not being facetious, they were not joking. And like, and so I watched this train wreck happen in her brain, right? Where it's like, so then I just said, “You know, let's just talk about conversion therapy.” I said, “Let's just start there…” UN resolutions that say this is to—like all she, you could see it on her face she's like, like she did not know.
And so I watched it happen and couldn't stop it. So Brandi, when someone is sitting across from you and you see this lack of knowledge and the capacity to harm. Right? So there's this lack of knowledge, but they're gonna say the homophobic terrible thing whenever somebody asks them, and you are the pastoral person in residence with them. What habits, practices, tactics do you employ not to destroy them, like intellectually? How do you not reduce them to their ideas? How do you love them and meet them where they're at so that they will be at church next week? They will be, like all those kinds of things, to stay on the journey with you.
Brandi Miller: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And stop hurting people.
Jonathan Walton: And yeah, and stop hurting people.
Brandi Miller: Yes. Yeah, I mean, you become a master of caveats, and that's the easy thing. The hard thing is to believe that people are trying their best. I think that most people, and I'm really learning this and trying to learn this in the best ways I can right now, is that if you're not just like on the internet where I know people are not trying to do their best, they're just being mean, like in real life with people who are sitting, who you don't have to question whether they're a bot or not, people are trying to do the best they can and the best they can might be terrible. And that's okay, because when people are trying to do the best that they can, and when people are given the benefit of a doubt, they are more open to engaging with things that are embarrassing or challenging or confusing.
And so a lot of what I do is ask questions in the context of my own experience. I'll say, “Hey, when you say that, that hits me in a really strange way, and it's kind of hurtful and I can see where this would be hurtful for somebody else. Can you help me understand where that idea came from for you and how that became so important to you?” Or like, “I can hear that this is really important to you, can you help me understand why?” Because if I can understand that why, I can create a human connection that allows me to walk someone through, like, “Yo, when you say to me as like a partnered queer person, that my future marriage is not God's best, when did that become so important to you? When did thinking about like queerness in this way become so important to you?
And how big, like on a scale of one to 10, how big does that feel for you? And what would that feel like for you if I said something back to you like, ‘You’re heteronormative marriage where it looks like your wife doesn't really like you that much, you're kind of a jerk, isn't God’s best for you,’ what would you say back to me?” Like what a strange thing for you to say to me. And so I think I do a lot of assuming that people are doing their best and asking a lot of origins questions. Because I think that most of evangelicalism is more concerned with indoctrination than it is with development and discipleship. And when you can expose the indoctrination, it opens up a lot of space for questions. Because I know a lot of people that have said to me things like, “I have never thought about that before,” or, “I have never considered that before.”
Or, “It came from this book.” And I'm like, “Well, have you read these other books?” Or they're like, “It came from this verse.” And I'm like, “Well, have you read the equivalent verse in the gospels that exists?” And the answer usually is no. The people have not done their due diligence to come to their own ideas. They have parroted because parroting in the church gives you survival, and I understand that. I understand that being able to parrot ideas gives you belonging. And so to fall outside of that, to ask questions outside of that risks your belonging. And so I try to create spaces where people's stories can belong, even if their ideologies need to be questioned and engaged with differently. So I think that's the main way that I engage with that pastorally at least.
Jonathan Walton: That is amazing. So being able to sit down with someone, see someone across difference in a way, and turn to wonder, awe and curiosity as opposed to prejudice, judgment, and condemnation. That’s great. Amen.
Where Listeners Can Find Brandi
Sy Hoekstra: Can you tell our listeners where they can find you or your work on the internets.
Jonathan Walton: Or in real life. Or in real life [laughs].
Brandi Miller: Yes. Yeah, you can… if you're not being a weirdo, you can find my church, Quest Church out in Seattle [laughter]. We're doing the best we can out there. I work there, I'm a regular person out there, so don't be a weirdo [laughter].
Brandi Miller: But I'm online in several spaces. Primarily, I have a podcast called Reclaiming My Theology, that takes a topic.
Jonathan Walton: Five stars, five stars, five stars.
Brandi Miller: [laughs, then says very quickly] If you'd give it, it takes 30 seconds to do [laughter]. Yeah, that is exploring different types of problematic or oppressive ideologies and how they wiggle their way into our interpretation of the Bible and Christian culture and how they create Christian culture. We're working through a series on purity culture now that feels like it's never ending, but it’s like a perfect intersection of a lot of the other forms of oppression that we've talked about. So we'll be in that for a little bit. And then I just launched a podcast with Quest Church, talking to people about formation practices that make them feel at home with God. And so if you're looking for more of a formational storytelling bend, I'm interviewing folks around those practices right now, as well as the stuff that I'm already doing on the podcast that takes a little bit more of an academic theological bend.
Sy Hoekstra: What's the name of that one?
Brandi Miller: The Quest Church Podcast.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, okay, got it [laughter]. Okay, cool.
Jonathan Walton: Cool, cool. Nice.
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for that. If you go and listen to Reclaiming my Theology, you'll hear some familiar voices like Jonathan Walton and Tamice Spencer-Helms and other people that you know. Brandi Miller, this has been fantastic. I'm so happy you joined us [the sound of clapping]. Jonathan's actually applauding, I don't think that’s ever happened before [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: She's great. She's great. Lovely.
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for being with us.
Brandi Miller: Yeah, delighted to be with you all. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy and Jonathan’s Thoughts about Christian Community and Communicating Theology Well after the Interview
Sy Hoekstra: Okay, Jonathan, that was fantastic [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: It really, really was.
Sy Hoekstra: What are you thinking coming out of that? Where are your thoughts at?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, so I'm actually stuck on the first thing that she said.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, okay. After that you blacked out and then you don't remember the rest of the interview.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Well, I remember it. But one of the… I thought to myself, you know, I've changed a lot in the last four years since we wrote the essays that we did and since KTF started and all those things. And so it really pushed me to reflect. And when I was in journalism school with Peter Beinart, who is an amazing writer and commentator, especially right now.
Sy Hoekstra: Who you’ve mentioned before, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yeah, I mean, his work is just amazing. But something that he said in class was, you need to write for the language of the bleachers, like between a fifth and eighth grade level. And that is not a knock on people who are not educated or didn't go to university. It's more like we don't talk like this on a regular basis.
Sy Hoekstra: You mean you don't talk the way that highfalutin people write [laughs]?
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: Gotcha.
Jonathan Walton: Right. And it was one of those things where I was like, huh, I wonder, would I say things the same way now? Or how can I say them so that people leave saying, “Oh, I know what he meant and I understood what he said,” versus, “I don't know what half those words meant, but it sounded really good [Sy laughs]. Thinking of reflecting on how Jesus spoke to people and who he called and how he called them was something that I just, just struck me about that response. And then obviously we also threw out some big words, some large terms and all those things. And one of the things that stood out to me that I didn't know about was the Overton window that she said. I'd never heard of that before.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, okay.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, but what has become normal. Having a term for that's just helpful. For me, like [laughs] I think I've mentioned this before, is that when I feel anxious, when I feel worried, when I feel concerned, one of the places that I go is information. I need to put it in a box. I need to have words to just feel grounded to engage. And now I can just say, “Oh, the Overton window has shifted [laughs], and that helps me have a place to stand [laughs] in a lot of our discourse and gives me more space to do what she talked about at the end, which is like, can I love people across difference? And when I have cohesive frameworks and information especially like in context, and I can do that more effectively. So I learned a lot. I was challenged and I'm really grateful.
Sy Hoekstra: I think actually the thing that stuck out to me, kind of, I end up in a similar place, even though I'm coming from a totally different angle. Which is that the thing that she articulated about the how political doubt becomes religious doubt in like our current, kind of nationalist Christian nationalist landscape was really interesting to me. Because you hear it, so it's such a common thing if you think about it, right?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: At least I've heard so many times people just be like, how can a Christian possibly vote for the Democrats? Right? Or asking like doubting Republican orthodoxy is actually grounds to doubt the foundations of your faith or the seriousness of your faith, when Jesus had absolutely no issue having people who he called disciples who were wildly politically different from each other.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So when she talks about wanting to talk across difference like that, or wanting to how Jesus helps people become a better version of themselves, he was doing that with people who were like the Roman empire is fine and I work for them and I get rich off of them and that's great, like Matthew [laughs]. Versus the Roman Empire is the enemy and we need to throw them off via murder and other forms of violence, AKA Simon the Zealot. And like they're just sitting together with Jesus. They're both followers of Jesus, no question.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly, right.
Sy Hoekstra: And they have opposite political views. And one of them is like really earnestly advocating and killing a bunch of people [laughs]. Right?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And that is like, it's just a, I don't know, in the context of some of the church context where I grew up or some of the… like it's just a lot of the conservative Christian context now that is unthinkable, but it is also the absolute norm for Jesus [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: So that gives you a sense of when you're a place where your church culture is off, when something that is unthinkable is the norm for Jesus [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Exactly. Exactly. That is what I hope we would say when someone says, what is syncretism?
Sy Hoekstra: So syncretism is another one of those big words. I'm not sure we defined it right. Syncretism is a word that a lot of White westerners use for basically poor Black and Brown people, and sometimes Asian people.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: When it's like, oh, you are a Christian, sure, but you're also practicing this native thing. Like my wife's family's from Haiti, right? You are Catholic, but you're also doing this voodoo stuff. And so that's not real pure Christianity, that's syncretism. And now…
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: You were saying Jonathan, sorry, that was… go ahead.
Jonathan Walton: No, but like, so Brandi's just turn of phrase when she said, oh, when someone's political foundations are shaken, their religious foundations are shaken. That is syncretism.
Sy Hoekstra: Right, yes. Exactly.
Jonathan Walton: And so putting it in that language just makes it more effective, more practical, more illuminating for people as opposed to saying, “Well, you're political and social and religious ideologies are enmeshed with one another, but creating an agenda…” It's like, we don't need to talk like that [laughs]. You know what I mean? We can just say it plainly and things God can meet us in that.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Which Tab Is Still Open?: Average Black, Christian Voting Patterns and Political Beliefs vs. the Average Democrat
Jonathan Walton: Alright Sy. Let's jump into our latest segment that we introduced during the bonus episodes, and now we're bringing to you on our wider feed, is Which Tab Is Still Open. Out of all the highlights we've sent around lately in our newsletter, what's still standing out to us? And so, Sy, this one's yours. So go for it.
Sy Hoekstra: This one, yeah, this one is mine. It was an article that I had in the newsletter recently by a professor named Ryan Burge, who is a political science professor and a statistician. He's basically one of the go-to experts in America for a lot of media and other sources for data about religion and politics, like surveys, pollsters, et cetera. So he's a professor at Eastern Illinois University, but he's also an American Baptist Convention pastor [laughs]. So this article is about the average Black church attending Protestant. In a lot of these polls and surveys they ask people how often do you go to church, as a measure of your religiosity. Just like an estimate basically, of your religiosity.
So he says for the average Black regular church attending Christian, what is the kind of differences in their political beliefs between just the average overall Democrat? And we talked about this in one of our, in the March bonus episode, that for like a lot of people don't realize the distance between… a lot of White people don't realize the distance between [laughs] average Black voter and average Democrat voter, because Black people always vote Democrat, right?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So if you're not kind of familiar with the culture or the politics, then those, the Black people and Democrats can be synonymous. So basically what he said was the average Black church goer is like a self-identified moderate. Is like almost in the middle of the political spectrum. Is more moderate than the average Democrat on abortion, immigration, policing, all kinds of stuff. Not conservative, but more moderate than the average Democrat. And they've become more moderate in recent years. And so there's an actual kind of statistically significant shift toward the right, but voting hasn't changed at all. Or there's been very little change in actual votes.
And then the other interesting thing that he pointed out was the average… they do these polls where they have people rank themselves on a political spectrum from one to seven. So one is as liberal as it gets, and seven is as conservative as it gets. And then they also have people rank the Democrat and Republican parties for where they are, like the party overall. And in the last 10 years, the average Black church going Protestant assessment of where the Republican party is, has not changed at all, like in any significant way.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: So meaning when Donald Trump is the standard bearer, no significant difference in how radical or how right the Republican party is than when Mitt Romney was the standard bearer [laughs], right?
Jonathan Walton: Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: So you're saying that, “Yep. I get it, totally.” I think to a lot of people, that is some pretty stunning news [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Sy Hoekstra: So, I don't know, the interesting points to me are just how our assumptions are like about voters in general are based on how White people vote, because White people vote very ideologically and Black people just don't. Like I've seen other polling data where it's like, basically Black people self-identify as liberals, moderates, or conservatives at roughly the same rate as White people. They just don't, Black people just don't vote ideologically. That's the difference, right? And then yeah, that thing where there's no difference between Trump and Mitt Romney is so interesting [laughter].
Not no difference between those two men, but no difference between the parties under those two men. And by the way, the rest of the Democrat, the average Democrat thinks the Republican party is far more to the right than it was 10 years ago.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: So, basically what I'm saying is Black people knew the whole time [laughs], Black people knew what was up with the Republicans, and the assessment hasn't changed. I don't know, that to me is just a thing that people need to know. I don't know. When people say like, you hear sometimes from progressive people, “Listen to Black people, listen to Black women.” It just gets thrown out there, is like a, what I think to some White people probably sounds like just this weird ideological platitude that people are saying. But this is the reason [laughs]. The reason is marginalized folks in a system understand the system better than people in the dominant positions of the system, and have a, I don't know, have a kind of a clearer sense of where things are, have a more practical view of how to handle themselves in that system, which I think is the non-ideological voting. And yeah, all that stuff is really interesting to me. And I'm wondering what your thoughts were since this was my recommendation.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I've… there are so many things that come to mind as we're talking about this. One thing is that the Overton window, as Brandi mentioned [laughs], it has shifted for some people, right? When we talk, when Randy Woodley talks about how people in the United States do not have the luxury of saying, “Oh, it doesn't matter who's president.” Marginalized people know it matters who is sitting in a political position. If it doesn't matter to you, then that creates a different set of problems. And I think another thing I think we have to remember is that [roughly] 70 percent of the voting population in the United States is White. The people who are registered, the people who turn out.
And so there's, I think just there's a lot of context to layer over top of this that can obscure just the basic reality of the emancipation and the passing and Civil Rights Act. And the reality is, Black people voted for Lincoln because he wanted to stop slavery. Lincoln was a White supremacist. Lincoln literally argued in his presidential debate in Illinois that he did not believe that Black people were equal and could never be cultured to be with White people.
Sy Hoekstra: And therefore we should send them back to Africa.
Jonathan Walton: And therefore we should send them back to Africa. That is Lincoln. But why did we vote for him when we finally got the chance to vote, kind of with… [laughs]? It's because he said he did not want to have slavery exist anymore. Now, fast forward to the Civil Rights Act. Why did we all turn into Democrats? Because they said, “Hey, you should actually have civil rights.” Not equal rights, not full rights, not decriminalization. Not all, just some basic civil rights. Bam, now we're in that camp. This has always, always, always been about survival. The statistics are great. You could do the analysis, there's wonderful data that comes out. But at the end of the day, I'm gonna listen to my mama [Sy laughs] and say, “Oh yeah.”
It would be preposterous of her to vote for anyone who is for the active destruction of her community. And the reality is, most of the time that is Republicans. Now, there are destructive policies against Black people that come from the Democrats. The difference is, just like we see here, the difference is this thing called White supremacy. One party says White supremacy exists. The other party says it doesn't. One party says White supremacy exists and desires in rhetoric to make it stop, even though they pass policies that continue to perpetuate it. The reality is though, there are more Black people, more people of color, more women in the party that has a donkey and not an elephant. And therefore, we will ride donkeys [laughs].
And so that does not mean that we are for… we, when I say Black Christians, are for anything that the Overton window to use Brandi’s saying again, has expanded. So Black folks' views on abortion, Black folks' views on war, Black folks' views on policing. Again, we like to be safe too. And unfortunately, a lot of times in communities of color that equals calling the police. That equals saying, “Hey, can someone help me?” Right? In Baltimore, in Chicago, in over policed parts of New York City, Black folks still have to call the police. Like it's not some utopia where we're just gonna let everything go. That doesn't exist in our communities.
We still actually desire for the systems to work for us. We do not desire the system to destroy us. And so we use the systems and desire to make them better. And so these numbers I think are exceptionally informative at illuminating the, or illuminating the reality that many people in marginalized communities already know. But hopefully there'll be a common place for us to talk about it. Now there is a resistance to academia and research in progressive and conservative circles [laughs]. And so someone may say, “Well, that's just not true because it's not true for me.” But hopefully it will create some common ground to be able to have a cohesive conversation about Black folks, the Democratic party and progressive and conservative politics.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's what we're trying to do. Political education, man [laughs].
Outro and Outtake
Jonathan Walton: Lord have mercy.
Sy Hoekstra: Lord have mercy. This has been a great conversation. We were so happy that Brandi came on. And thanks for talking as always, Jonathan.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: We will see you all in a couple of weeks. Our theme song is Citizens by Jon Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robin Burgess, transcripts by Joyce Ambale. And as I'm gonna start saying a lot, I'm stealing this from Seth at Can I Say This at Church? This show is produced by our subscribers [laughs]. Thank you all and we will see you all in two weeks.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: And he loves wackadoodles, I'm gonna use that one. Loves wackadoodles [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: That I have never heard. Is that because I'm not from the south that I've never heard that? Was that… [laughter]?
Jonathan Walton: Well, no. Brandi's not from the south either.
Brandi Miller: Also, you know I'm big up north here. I'm a Pacific Northwest girly full on. There's no doubt there [Jonathan laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Is that a Brandi quote? Is that from you?
Brandi Miller: No, I'm certain that come from somewhere.
Sy Hoekstra: I'm just lost. It's fine.
Brandi Miller: Maybe it's Black. Maybe that's what it is.
Sy Hoekstra: Well, obviously if I am the confused one and you're not, that's my first thought as well. So [laughter], there's always, there's just like, I'm so used to that point in conversations at this point in my life where I'm like, “Oooooh it's because I'm White” [laughter].
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
Today’s episode features Jonathan and Sy talking with Pastor Rasool Berry. They discuss:
- The importance of acknowledging and understanding your own and your community’s power
- The social and spiritual forces behind the opposition to CRT or DEI (or whatever they’re calling it today)
- Pastor Berry’s incredible documentary about Juneteenth and Christian faith
- When to leave communities that push back against racial justice
- And after the interview, Sy and Jonathan reflect on the work it takes to pass on a tradition like Juneteenth well, and the truly, literally unbelievable levels of ignorance whiteness creates in people
- Plus, they discuss the Daniel Perry pardon, and the threads that connect it to the Donald Trump convictions
Mentioned in the Episode
- Our anthology - Keeping the Faith: Reflections on Politics and Christianity in the era of Trump and Beyond
- An abridged version of Pastor Berry’s article from the anthology.
- His subsequent article, “Uncritical Race Theory”
- The documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom
- Resources for screening Juneteenth and inviting speakers involved with the film
- The soundtrack for Juneteenth
- Pastor Berry’s podcast, Where Ya From?
- The article on Daniel Perry Sy put in our newsletter
- The Texas Monthly article about how legally unusual Perry’s pardon was
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers
Transcript
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Rasool Berry: There was a lot of nicknames and still are for Juneteenth. One was Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, but Jubilee Day. And when I discovered that, that's when I said we got to get involved in this process. Because you mean to tell me that these formerly enslaved people at a time when it was illegal to read, that they understood enough of the story that they picked out this festival, that it was this reordering of society, the kingdom of heaven coming back to earth. And in the context of this, of their faith, they saw God doing a jubilee in their lives?
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Introduction
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Today, hear us talk to Pastor Rasool Berry about his thoughts on the movement against CRT, or DEI, or whatever the term for the moment is right now when you listen to this. We're also [laughs] going to talk about his incredible feature length documentary called Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom, which is available for free on YouTube right now. And then after the interview, hear our thoughts on the pardon of Daniel Perry and the conviction of Donald Trump in our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open?
Sy Hoekstra: The 34 convictions of Donald Trump.
Jonathan Walton: All of them.
Sy Hoekstra: All of them [laughs]. We're going to talk about each one individually…
Jonathan Walton: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: …the specific business record that he destroyed, whatever.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Don't be afraid, we're not going to do that. By the way, I said at the end of last week that the guest this week was going to be Brandi Miller, and then we realized that we had to do the episode that was about Juneteenth before Juneteenth. So Brandi Miller's going to be in two weeks from now. And this time [laughs], it's Pastor Rasool Berry.
Before we get to that, just a reminder, we need your subscriptions. Please go to ktfpress.com and become a paid subscriber on our Substack. Your support sustains what we do, and we need that support from you right now. We've been doing this as a side project for a long time, and like we've been saying, if we want this show to continue past this season, we need to get a lot more subscribers so that we can keep doing this work, but not for free as much as we've been doing it.
So go and subscribe. That gets you all the bonus episodes of this show, which there are many, many of at this point. And then it also gets you access to our new monthly subscriber conversations that we're doing. Jonathan and I will be having video chats with you to talk about all the different kinds of things that we talk about on this show, answer some questions, just have a good time. And if you cannot afford a subscription, if money's the only obstacle, just write to us at [email protected]. We will give you a free or discounted subscription, no questions asked. But if you can afford it, please, ktfpress.com. Become a paid subscriber. We need your support now.
Jonathan Walton: Pastor Rasool Berry serves as teaching pastor at The Bridge Church in Brooklyn, New York. He's also the director of partnerships and content development with Our Daily Bread Ministries. Pastor Berry graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in Africana Studies and Sociology. He's also the host of the Where Ya From? podcast sponsored by Christianity Today, and the writer, producer and host of Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. Let's get to it. Here's the interview.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Pastor, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.
Rasool Berry: Oh, well, I'm glad to be here with you all, back at it again, Keeping the Faith.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yes, exactly [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Amen. Amen.
The Importance of “Mapping” Power
Sy Hoekstra: So, you wrote this fantastic essay for… so, well, actually, it was originally for your blog, I think, and then we kind of took it and adapted it for the anthology. And it was about critical race theory, and you broke down a lot of the history and sort of the complex intellectual background of it and everything. But you talked specifically about something that you said, critical race theory and the Bible and the Black Christian tradition in the US all help us do something really important, and that thing is mapping power. Can you talk to us a little bit about what power mapping is and what the importance of it is?
Rasool Berry: Yeah. I first kind of got wind of that framework when we were launching a justice ministry at our church. And two friends Gabby, Dr. Gabby Cudjoe Wilkes and her husband, Dr. Andrew Wilkes, who do a lot of great work with justice, actually walked our church through thinking about mapping power in our church as a way of evaluating what types of justice initiatives did it make sense for us to engage in, in light of what we had in the room. And so for instance, when I was in my church in Indiana, a lot of the parishioners worked at Lilly who's headquarters is in Indiana. And so when they decided to do something for the community, they ended up opening up a clinic in the church building, which still exists and serves the local community, because they all had medical backgrounds.
So when they do mission work, they do mission work with a medical component, because that's a effective way of mapping power. Where our church in Brooklyn average age is about 28, 29 and they're more artsy. So we're not opening up clinics, you know what I mean? But what we can do is events that help inspire and help engage with people. And then eventually with our pastor's leadership started something called Pray March Act, which looks to be a place to mobilize churches around issues of justice in New York City. So what is oftentimes overlooked in Christian spaces, and I really am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, for really surfacing the need for us to have a theology of power.
That this is something that oftentimes especially evangelical churches, or more kind of Bible oriented or people kind of churches, there's a sense in which we don't know how to think about power. And I believe, I suspect this is one of the reasons why the church has been so susceptible to issues like sexual abuse, to egregious theft in money, is because we are not really conditioned to think about power, which is really ironic because the scriptures really do point to… I mean, we literally have two books, First and Second Kings, and those books are pointing to you have the king, this king was a good king, and it impacted the kingdom of Israel this way. This king was a bad king, and then this is what happened.
And so it's wired in the text, right? Amy Sherman in her book, Kingdom Calling, Dr. Amy Sherman points to this when she points to the proverb that says, “when the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.” And it's this idea, when she says righteous, she's not thinking about it in the kind of traditional pietistic aspect of righteousness, but she's talking about “tzedakah” in the Hebrew, which has this connotation of justice. Because when people who are put in positions of power and influence, when they do right by the people underneath them when they do right, that people celebrate. Versus when there's somebody who's a tyrant that's in office, the people groan because there's that sense of they recognize we've mapped power dynamics, and somebody who's going to do ill is going to have a disproportionate impact on all of us.
And so power mapping is bringing to surface the awareness of what is it that we have in the room. And it's also a very humbling way of being aware of our own power, right? Like how do I show up as a man in a space, in certain things? Like I know if I get up and I'm about to preach that there's some different dynamics depending on who I'm talking to in a room. Like if I'm in a predominantly Black context that's younger, then the locks might actually kind of give me some street cred. Like, oh, that's kind of cool. But if I'm in a older, traditional space, looking younger is going to be more of a uphill climb to say, okay, what's this guy coming at? And if I'm in a White space, versus but I also recognize that when our sisters come up, that there's a whole different type of power mapping situation.
And so all of these things are helpful in being aware of how we show up and how that matters. And Andy’s kind of thesis is that unlike the kind of post Nietzschean postmodern suspicion and critical view of power that only sees it as a negative, that God has actually given us and ordained us to exert influence and power in redemptive ways. But we can only do that if we map it, if we're aware of it, and if we use it in a way that's not just for our own self or comfort or glory, but for those who we're called to serve.
Sy Hoekstra: Can I ask, just for some like to get specific on one thing, because I'm not sure this would be intuitive to everyone. You said if we map power, then we might not end up in the same situations that we are with, like abuse scandals in the church?
Rasool Berry: Yeah. Yep.
Sy Hoekstra: And I think I… where my mind goes is I think we would react differently to the abuse scandal. I don't know if the abuse scandals themselves would… those happen unfortunately. But I think where the power mapping might come in, is where so many people are then just deferring to whatever the person in, the pastor's narrative is. Is that kind of what you're talking about, like the reaction?
Rasool Berry: I think it's on both sides.
Sy Hoekstra: You do? Okay.
Rasool Berry: Yeah, because for instance, if I am aware, very aware of power dynamics with children and adults, I would see the value in a practice of not leaving an adult in a space with a child by themselves.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see. You might put systems in place ahead of time. Yeah, yeah.
Rasool Berry: Right. So there's the sense in which we can put policies in place that recognize… it's the same thing why we put the labeling system on kids when they check into childcare, right? Like you put the little label so that some random person can't just come and pick them up because a kid can’t defend themselves. Or they may not have the capacity to understand what's going on if somebody just random comes up and says, “Hey, your mom and your dad told me to come get you,” and then they believe that. And so we have systems that we put in place to recognize those power dynamics. And I think unfortunately, that in a lot of our church context and culture there's an overly naive sense of, and really sometimes idolatrous view of pastors and leaders that essentially say, well, they're good and they're godly people, so there isn't a need for accountability, or there isn't a need for, you know…
And so no, it's like, well, in the same way that we have trustees in certain churches, or there's a elders board, depending on what your church polity is, that polity should reflect a sense of accountability and transparency so that there is an awareness on the front end as well as on the backend that when it does come to bring people into account, that there's also an awareness of a power dynamic at play there too.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense especially when [laughs] we throw those things out, all we have are the systems of hierarchy and social dominance that exist to define what power is, right?
Rasool Berry: Right.
Jonathan Walton: So the train just keeps going.
The Social and Spiritual Forces behind the Fight against CRT/DEI
Jonathan Walton: So leaning into that a little bit, you wrote an essay focusing on CRT power mapping and things like that. But it feels like nobody in the Trump camp really had an idea of what CRT was, and it didn't even really matter to them what it was.
Rasool Berry: Right.
Jonathan Walton: So what do you think is at the core of what's going on with White people when they reject CRT or DEI or whatever the—conscious—whatever the term would be?
Rasool Berry: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: What do you think the underlying concern is?
Rasool Berry: Well, you know, after… and it's so funny because when I wrote that first piece, I wrote it as a way… [laughs] I wrote it just to get it off my chest. And in my mind, almost nobody was going to read it because it was like a 20-something minute read, and I just didn't care because I was just like, “I'm getting this off my chest,” and this is the last I'm going to say about it. Like I thought that was going to be just this thing, just so I can point people to, if anybody asks. I did not intend, nor did I think that it was only going to kind of position me as this person that people were listening to and reading and resonating with about it. So that was funny. But then what ended up happening, and especially after I was on the unbelievable? podcast with Justin Brierley, kind of in this debate format with Neil Shenvi, who's kind of been one of the most outspoken evangelical Christian critics of critical race theory. Critics is probably too mild of a term, kind of a…
Jonathan Walton: Antagonist.
Rasool Berry: Antagonist, even stronger. Like this doomsday prophet who says that, who’s warning against the complete erosion of biblical norms because of the Trojan Horse, in his mind, of critical race theory. In the midst of that conversation, that kind of elevated, it was one of their top 10 episodes of the entire year, and it just kind of got me into these spaces where I was engaging more and more. And I kind of sat back and reflected, and I had a few more interactions with Neil on Twitter. And I ended up writing a separate piece called “Uncritical Race Theory.” And the reason why I did that, is I went back and I was curious about what kind of insights I could get from previous instances of the way that there were being controversies surrounding race in America in the church, and how the church talked about those debates.
So I went back and I read The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll, who looked at and examined the actual debates during the time of the antebellum period of pro-slavery Christians and anti-slavery Christians, and he analyzed that. Then I went back and I read The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby, who looked at the pro-integrationist and segregationist arguments in the church. And what I found was that there was incredible symmetry between what was argued in each of those instances, going all the way back to the 1800s, to the 1960s, to now, and there were two things that emerged. The first was that the primary response from those who were supportive of slavery in the 1800s, or those who were supportive of segregation in the 1960s was to claim first of all, that the opposing view were not biblically faithful, or were not even concerned about biblical fidelity.
So this is different than other types of discussions where we could say, even going back to the councils, right? Like when there's some type of, like during the Nicaean Council or something like that, they're debating about how they're understanding the text about certain things. Whereas is Jesus fully God, is he man, is he both? But there's a basic premise that they're both coming at it from different aspects of scriptures. What I noticed in the American context is that there was a denial that the side that was kind of having a more progressive view was even biblically faithful at all.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Christian.
Rasool Berry: The second part is related to the first, is that there was this allegation that there was outside philosophies that was actually shaping this impetus because it wasn't clearly the Bible. So in the 1800s that was the claim, “Oh, you're being influenced by these post-enlightenment ideas.” In the 1960s it was straight up Marxism, communism. You see the signs. “Integration is communism.” Like you see the people protesting with that, and of course the new version of that is kind of the remix of cultural Marxism, or these type of things. And so what I acknowledged in each of those scenarios is that part of the problem is that there is such an uncritical understanding of race that it causes, I think especially those in a dominant culture or those who've been susceptible to the ideologies of White supremacy, which can be White or Black or other, There's a tendency to see any claim that race is a problem as the problem itself because there's an underlying denial of the reality of racial stratification in our society, and the what Bryan Stevenson refers to as the narrative of racial difference or what is more commonly known as White supremacy. So when your default position is that you are introducing a foreign concept into the conversation when you talk about the relevance of race in a scenario, then it causes… that sense of uncritical nature of the reality of race causes you to then look upon with suspicion any claim that there's some type of racial based situation happening. And that is what I call, it is really ironically uncritical race theory. It's the exact opposite of what critical race theory is trying to do.
And so I think that that's my take on what's happening. And then I think that's more of the scientific sociological, but then there's also a spiritual. I am a pastor [laughter]. And I have to end with this. I have to end with this, because in some ways I was naively optimistic that there was, if you just reasoned and show people the right analogies or perspectives, then they would, they could be persuaded. But what I have since realized and discovered is that there is a idolatrous synchronization of what we now know of different aspects of White Christian nationalism that is a competing theological position and belief system that is forming these doctrinal positions of what we now kind of look at as American exceptionalism, what we look at as this sense of the status quo being… all the things that are moving toward an authoritarian regime and away from democracy, that that is all solidifying itself as an alternative gospel.
And I think that at the end of the day, I'm looking at and grieving about mass apostasy that I'm seeing happening in the church as a result of an unholy alliance of political ideology and Christian symbols, language, and values expressed in this kind of mixed way. And that's what is really being allowed to happen with this unmapped power dynamic, is that people don't even realize that they're now exerting their power to kind of be in this defensive posture to hold up a vision of society that is actually not Christian at all, but that is very much bathed in Christian terms.
Jonathan Walton: I want to say a lot back, but we got to keep going, but that was good.
Sy Hoekstra: We got to… [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, we could talk forever about what you just said, but we could also talk forever about your documentary. So let's transition to that.
Rasool Berry: [laughter] You all are like exercising restraint.
Sy Hoekstra: Yes.
Jonathan Walton: I am.
Rasool Berry: Like, “oh, I want to go there.” I just threw steak in front of the lions [laughter].
Why Pastor Berry Made a Documentary about Juneteenth
Sy Hoekstra: But it's because, I mean, the documentary's interesting in a way... It's sort of like, okay, you've seen this movement of mass apostasy and everything, and you've had all these people tell you you're not faithful. And with this documentary in some ways, you're just sprinting on down the road that you're on. You know what I mean? It's like sort of [laughs], you're just going straightforward like we need to remember our past. We need to learn about power dynamics in American history. So you wrote this—[realizing mistake] wrote— you were involved in, you're the kind of narrator, the interviewer of this documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. And you went to Galveston and you went to Houston, Texas to learn more about the history of Juneteenth and the communities and the people that shaped the celebration and everything.
And I guess I just want to know how this got started and why it was so important for you to engage in what was a very significant project…
Rasool Berry: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: …to teach people about this kind of history that I think the movement against CRT or DEI or whatever is quite actively trying to suppress.
Rasool Berry: And these two stories are very much intertwined…
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.
Rasool Berry: …in ways that I didn't even fully anticipate in some ways. In some ways I knew, in some ways I didn't. But I grew up in Philly, where there was not growing up a significant Juneteenth awareness or celebration or anything like that. So I had heard about it though when I was very young, the concept of it. I had a classmate whose middle name was Galveston, and I was like, “That's a weird name. Why is your middle name Galveston?” [laughter] He told me that it's because his mom had told him about this situation where there were Black people that didn't know they were free for two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. I was like eight years old when I first heard that, but filed that away.
It wasn't really until more recent years with the, just massive racial justice movement spurred on by the murders of Tamir Rice and George Floyd and others, Sandra Bland. And so, as that movement started to gin up, conversations about race that I was kind of plugged into, I heard about this 90-something year old woman that was appearing before Congress…
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Rasool Berry: …and challenging them to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
Sy Hoekstra: I can't believe you got to interview her. She was amazing.
Rasool Berry: Yeah. And I was like, why would a 90-something plus year old woman be like this committed to this? So I started looking into it and realizing, I think both spiritually and socially, that there was incredible potency and opportunity in the recognition, the widespread recognition of Juneteenth. I'll go socially first. Socially, the reality has been the United States has never had a moment where we collectively reflect on the legacy of slavery in our country. And if you do the math, from the first enslaved people that we have documented coming into the States in 1619 until if even if you go to the abolition of slavery in 1865 or 1866 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, that's about 244 years.
If you go from 1865 to now, it's like 159 or so years. So we still have way more time in our society that has been shaped by this most intense version of a caste system and brutal slavery that had global, it literally reshaped the globe. And sometimes we forget. I live in Brooklyn where most of the Black folk are Afro-Caribbean. When you think of Jamaica, you think of Usain Bolt or Bob Marley. Do you realize that all of those people are from Africa, like our African descent people. That like the native people of Jamaica would've been Native Americans. So the legacy of slavery and colonialism has literally reshaped population centers in our world. That's how significant it was.
And so to not have a moment to reflect on all of it, the implications of how the legacy still shapes us, but also the progress of what we've seen happen and how we are not in that same place is a missed opportunity. But on the contrary, to put that in place is an opportunity for reflection that I think could really help ground us toward being a more perfect union, toward us being a unified people. Because we're basing it on the same story and information, which increasingly in the age of misinformation and disinformation, that the erosion of us having a shared narrative is really upon us. So I think it's interesting and important from that standpoint. Spiritually, it was even more dynamic because one of the… so there was a lot of nicknames and still are for Juneteenth. One was Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, but Jubilee Day.
And when I discovered that, that's when I said, “Okay, Our Daily Bread, we got to get involved in this process.” Because you mean to tell me that these formerly enslaved people at a time when it was illegal to read, primarily because they didn't want people to read the Bible, that they understood enough of the story of the Old Testament, that they picked out this festival in Leviticus 25, this ordinance that God had put in place, that on the Jubilee year, the Sabbath of all Sabbaths, I call it the Super Bowl of Sabbaths [Sy laughs]. Seven years times seven, forty nine years plus one, fifty. That on that day that it was this reordering of society, the kingdom of heaven coming back to earth, which simultaneously anticipates the wickedness and the brokenness of human systems in power, but also projects and casts vision about the kingdom of heaven, which would allow for equity and equality to take place. So debts were forgiven, lands were returned, and people who were in bondage primarily because of debt, that was the main reason back then, they would be set free. And in the context of their faith, they saw God doing the jubilee in their lives. So what that gave was the opportunity for us to talk about and reintroduce in many faith traditions the relationship between spiritual and physical freedom, and see that in the Bible story those things were wedded.
What's the major account in the Old Testament is the Exodus account. Like it was both physical and spiritual freedom. And in the same way we see that is why Jesus, when he reveals himself and says, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” notice when John the Baptist starts to waver because he's expecting this conquering king. He's still in prison and he says, “Hey, are you the one or we should expect another?” Jesus points to physical and spiritual aspects of liberation in his response. “Tell John what you see. The blind receive sight. The sick are healed. The gospel is preached. Blessed is the one who is not ashamed of me.” So in the sense of that, what we see elements of the kind of seeds of in the gospel is this aspect of the physical and spiritual liberation being tied together.
And that is what Jubilee gives us opportunity to explore and investigate. And I think lastly, seeing the role of the Black church in bringing out that insight, I think is particularly valuable in a time where oftentimes those contributions are overlooked and ignored.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. I think being able to watch the documentary was transformative for me. Mainly because I'm 38 years old and it's being produced by people who look and sound and act like me. It's interviewing the people who came before us, trying to speak to the folks that are younger than us. And each generation I think has this, this go around where we have to own our little piece of what and how we're going to take the work forward. You know what I mean?
Discerning Whether to Leave Communities that Push back on Discussions about Race
You interviewed Lecrae in the documentary and he's taken that work forward, right? And you both say that you've had the experiences of believing you are loved and accepted in these White evangelical spaces until you started talking about racial justice issues.
And so I feel like there's these moments where we want to take the work forward, and then we're like, “All right, well, this is our moment.” Like Opal was like, “Hey, I'm going to do Juneteenth.” Where now you're like, “I'm going to do something.” [laughs] So I wonder, like for you, when you have to make decisions about how to stay, not to stay or just leave. What is the effect of constantly engaging in that calculus for you?
Rasool Berry: Oh, man! It's exhausting to do it. And I think it is valuable to count the cost and realize that sometimes you're best suited to reposition yourself and to find other ways to express that faithfulness. At other times, God is causing you to be a change agent where you are. And I think how to navigate through that is complicated, and I think it's complicated for all of us, for our allies who see the value of racial justice as well as for those of us who are marginalized and experience, not just conceptually or ideologically the need for justice, but experientially all of the things through macro and microaggressions that come up, that weigh and weather us and our psyche, our emotions, our bodies.
And I think that it’s important to be very spiritually attuned and to practice healthy emotional spirituality as well as, best practices, spiritual disciplines, all the things that have come alongside of what does it mean to follow Jesus. I was recently reflecting on the fact that in the height of Jesus’ ministry, when it was on and popping, he’s growing, the crowds are growing in number, it says that he went away regularly and left the crowds to be with God. And then the verse right after that, it's in Luke, I can't remember which chapters, I know the verse is 16 and 17. And then it talks about how he had power as a result of going away to do more. And there's this relationship between our needing to rest and to find recovery in the secret place in the quiet place with God in order to have the energy to do more of the work.
And that's a lot to hold together, but it's really important because otherwise you can end up being like Moses, who was trying to do justice, but in his own strength at first when he kills the Egyptian, and then he tried to go to his people being like, “Yo, I'm down!” And they're like, “You killed somebody. We don't want to hear from you.”
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Right.
Rasool Berry: And then he flees. Because he tried to do it in his own strength. And then when God reveals himself at the bush, now he's totally broken and not even confident at all in himself. And God has to say, “No, the difference is going to be I'm with you.” So I think in my own journey, I've been one of many people who've had to evaluate and calculate where I've been in order to kind of see where there are opportunities to move forward. For instance, I was on staff with Cru for 20 years and then as the opportunities to work with Our Daily Bread, and I remember specifically the podcast Where Ya From?, that we launched and then Christianity Today got connected to it.
They were eagerly looking, or at least supporting the idea of us having conversations about faith and culture and race and all these things. Whereas in my previous environment, I felt like that was not something… I didn’t even feel like it, I experienced the pullback of talking about those things. So it has actually, by repositioning myself to kind of be able to be in spaces where I can tell these stories and advocate in these ways, it has been a better use of my energy and my time. Now, even in that other space, everything isn’t perfect. It's still the same type of challenges that exist anywhere you go in the world where you're a minority in race and racial difference is prominent, but at least it's a opportunity to still do more than I could do maybe in a previous position. And all of us have to make those type of calculations.
And I think it's best to do those things in the context of community, not just by yourself, and also with a sense of sobriety of encountering and experiencing God himself. Because at the end of the day, sometimes, I'm going to just say this, sometimes the answer is leave immediately. Get out of there. At other times, God is calling you to stay at least in the short term time. And it's important to be discerning and not just reactive to when is the right situation presenting itself. And the only way I know to do that is by doing it in community, doing it with a sense of healthy rhythms and time to actually hear the still small voice of God.
Sy Hoekstra: Amen.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: Because you really can err in either direction. Like some people, “I'm getting out of here right away,” without thinking. Meaning, when you're being reactive, when you're not being discerning…
Rasool Berry: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: …you can get out right away or you can have the instinct, “No, I'm going to stick it out forever,” even if it's bad for you, and it's not going to accomplish anything.
Rasool Berry: Yup, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Which I think leans into jumping all the way back the critical versus uncritical.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. There you go.
Jonathan Walton: Like if we're not willing to lean into the radical interrogation of the systems and structures around us that inform our decisions each day, we will submit to them unconsciously, whether that be running when we should resist or whether that be resisting where we actually should flee. So yeah, thanks for all that.
Where you can Find Pastor Berry’s work
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. And so we will have links to both of the articles, to the documentary, which is entirely free on YouTube.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: So you're just wasting your life if you're not watching it, really [laughter]. And a couple other things you talked about, we'll have links. But is there anywhere that you want people to go to either follow you or your work online?
Rasool Berry: Yeah. So the other thing that what we did with the Juneteenth documentary, because the response was so strong and overwhelming, really, people wanted to host screenings locally. And so we did a few things to make that more possible. So you can actually go on our website experiencevoices.org/Juneteenth. And you can fill out like a form to actually host a screening locally. And we have designed social media so you can market it, posters that you could print out, even discussion questions that you can use to host discussions. And sometimes people invite some of us from the production on site. So I've gone and done, I’ve been at screenings all the way from California to Texas to Wisconsin and here in New York.
So you can reach out to us on that website as well if you're interested in hosting a screening with the director or one of the producers or myself, and we can kind of facilitate that. Also be looking at your local PBS stations. We partnered with PBS to air screenings so far over a hundred local channels.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, wow.
Rasool Berry: And have aired it. Now, the PBS version is slightly different because we had to edit it down to fit their hour long format. And so the biggest version is the PBS version doesn't have Lecrae in it [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Oh no [laughs].
Rasool Berry: We had to cut out the four-time Grammy winner. Sorry Lecrae [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Rasool Berry: You know what I mean? But it just so happened that way it, that it was the best way to edit it down.
Jonathan Walton: You had to keep Opal.
Rasool Berry: Had to keep Opal, had to keep Opal [laughter].
Sy Hoekstra: I feel like Lecrae would understand that, honestly.
Rasool Berry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was so gracious. And actually, the other thing that Lecrae did, I had told him that we were working with Sho Baraka, a mutual friend of ours, to do the music. And he said, “Yeah, I heard something about that.” He's like, “I have a song I was going to put on Church Clothes 4, but I feel like it would be a better fit for this. If you're interested, let me know and I can send it to you.” I'm like, “If I'm interested? Yes, I'm interested.” [laughter] Yes. I'll accept this sight unseen. And so he sent us this incredible song that features, well actually is listed as Propaganda’s song, but it features Lecrae and Sho Baraka. And you can get the entire Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom soundtrack 13 tracks, poetry, hip hop, gospel, rnb, all on one thing. And wherever you listen to your music, Spotify, Apple Music, anywhere, you can, listen to it, stream it, buy it, and support this movement and this narrative. So yeah. And then personally, just @rasoolb on Instagram, @rasoolberry on, I still call it Twitter [Sy laughs]. So, and we're on Facebook as well. That's where folks can follow me, at rasoolberry.com, website. So thanks for having me.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, pastor, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.
Jonathan Walton: Thanks so much, man.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Reflecting on the Interview
Sy Hoekstra: Hey, Jonathan, you know what's really useful, is when in the middle of an interview with one of our guests, we say, “Oh no, we don't have time. We'd really like to get into this, so we have to move on to another subject.” It's really useful when we have these little times that we're doing now after the interview to talk more about the subjects than we did with the guests [laughter]. This works out well for us.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Why don't you tell everybody what you're thinking after the interview with Pastor Berry?
Passing on a Tradition Well Takes Significant Work
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think the biggest thing for me that I took away among a lot of the nuggets that he… nuggets and like big things that got dropped on me while we were listening, was like the amount of work that he went through to make this film. Like traveling to Galveston. There's a lot in the documentary that reminds me of how much it costs us personally to create things that are moving. To be able to have these conversations, sit down with these people, smell the smells of these folks' homes. That's just a big thing, particularly for me, like not having… I grew up with the Juneteenth story and needing to think through my own traditions and what I’m going to pass to my kids and stuff like that.
It's just I'm challenged to do that work so that I have something substantial to pass on to Maya and Everest. And to the folks who listen to the preaching that I give or the stories I write, or the books I'm going to write, just so I can communicate with the same amount of intimacy that he did. So, Sy how about you? What stood out for you?
The Literally Unbelievable Racial Ignorance of Whiteness
Sy Hoekstra: I think what stood out for me was actually right at that point where we said we really wanted to talk more about something, I really did have more thoughts [laughs]. When he was talking about the thing that underlies the fight against CRT and DEI and all that sort of thing. Being just a straight up denial of any sort of racial caste system or racial stratification in our country, I think that point is extremely important. That so much of our disagreements about racial injustice, at least on the intellectual level, not on the emotional and all that kind of thing, the intellectual level that come down to a difference in beliefs about the facts of reality in America. It is literally just do you think racism is happening or not? Because if you do think that it's happening, then everything has to change [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And there's not a lot of room… you'll have to do a lot more like kind of active denial. A lot more having a very active lack of integrity [laughs] to continue in the way that you're thinking when you believe that there is no racism in America if you find out that there is. Which kind of explains why there's so much resistance to it. But I think one story that sort of illustrates how this dynamic works a little bit that just, this is something that happened to me that this reminded me of. I was an intern right after college at International Justice Mission, and I read Gary Haugen's book, The Good News About Injustice, where the intro to this book is about his childhood growing up in kind of suburban, I think he's outside of Seattle, somewhere in Washington. A suburban Christian home, things were pretty nice and easy and he just did not know anything about injustice or anything in the world. Like oppression, racism, he did not know anything about it. And then the book takes you through how he discovered it and then his theology of what God wants to do about it and what the organization does and all that kind of thing. But just that intro, I remember talking to one of the other interns who was at IJM m when I was there, who was a Black woman who was ordained in the Black Baptist Church and had grown up relatively low income. And I was talking to her about this book because I read that intro and I was like, “yes, I totally resonate with this. This is how I grew up, check, check. That makes sense. I understand all of it.”
And it makes sense to a lot of the people who support IJM, which are a lot of suburban White evangelicals. She told me, she read the intro to the book and her immediate reaction was how, there is no way that anyone could possibly be this ignorant. It is not possible [laughs]. And I was like, [pretending to be hurt] “but I was” [laughter]. And there's this wrench in the gear of our conversations about justice where there's a large spectrum of White people who are, some engaging in actual innocent good faith about how much nonsense there is, like how much racism there is in America, and people who are engaging in complete bad faith and have ignored all the things that have been put right in front of them clearly.
And it is just very difficult for a lot of people who are not White to understand [laughs] that there are actually… the level of ignorance of a lot of White people is unbelievable, by which I mean it literally cannot be believed by a lot of people. And I don't know, that's just, it is a complication in our conversations about race that doesn't really change what you have to tell people or how seriously you should take your conversations or whatever. It's just a note about what you might need to do to bring people kind of into the fold, by which I mean the fold of the truth [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes. This is true of like a lot of White people. And the sad part is that it can also be true of a lot of people of color…
Sy Hoekstra: Well, yeah.
Jonathan Walton: …who say, “I'm just going to deny, because I haven't experienced.” Or, “We have opted into the system of ignorance and don't want to engage.” And so I'll tell a story. Priscilla was at the airport this week.
Sy Hoekstra: Your wife.
Jonathan Walton: My wife Priscilla, was at the airport, not a random woman [laughter], was at the airport this week. And someone said, “Yeah, everyone who came to this country, like we're all immigrants.” And Priscilla said, “Actually some people came here as slaves.” Then the person says, “No, that's not true.” And it's like, what do you say to that? When someone just says slavery doesn't exist? And that's literally why we celebrate Juneteenth. So I don't know what this person's going to do on Juneteenth, but when there's a collective narrative and acknowledgement that this happened, and then there's a large group, James Baldwin would say, ignorance plus power is very dangerous.
If there's a large group that's ignorant and or like intentionally not engaging, but also has power and privilege and all the things, the benefits of racial stratification without the acknowledgement of the reality of it, which is just a dangerous combination.
Sy Hoekstra: So when somebody says something like that, like that didn't happen, people didn't come over here as slaves, I think it is possible that they legitimately don't know that I suppose [laughs], or that they think it's a conspiracy theory or whatever. My guess is, tell me what you think about this. What I would imagine happened there was, “Oh, I never thought about the fact that Black people are not immigrants. And so I'm just going to say no.” Do you know what I mean?
Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. Well, I agree. I think some people even, so let's say like, I write about this in 12 Lies. Ben Carson says that we all came here as immigrants, even if it was in the bottom of a ship. He says that. And I think that is a, to be kind, a gross misrepresentation of the middle passage [laughs], but I see what he's trying to do. He's trying to put Black folks in a narrative that fits in the American narrative so people can, so he's not othered. Because what happens when you acknowledge enslavement is that you have to acknowledge all that. They all come with each other. It's like being at a buffet and there is literally no other menu. Like once you say, once you go in, you can't order one plate. If you talk about slavery, you're opening up all the things and some people just don't want to do that. And that sucks.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Which Tab Is Still Open: Daniel Perry
Jonathan Walton: It's true. And [laughs], I think this feeds into a little bit of this segment [laughs] that we have aptly called Which Tab is Still Open. Because out of all the things in our newsletter and our podcast, there's stuff that comes up for us and it's just still hanging on our desktops, we still talk about it offline. So for Sy, like for you, which one, which tab is still open?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. We're going to talk about Daniel Perry and Donald Trump today.
Jonathan Walton: Fun times.
Sy Hoekstra: So I recently had an article in the newsletter that I highlighted as one of my resources, that is about the case of Daniel Perry, which I think kind of flew a little bit under the radar in the fervor of 2020. But he was a known racist, meaning we have now seen truckloads of social media posts and text messages and everything revealing his out and out racism, his fantasies about killing Black Lives Matter protesters, all these kinds of things. Who in the summer of 2020, during those protests, drove his car through a red light into a crowd of protesters. And he did not at that moment hurt anyone, but another, an Air Force vet, Daniel Perry's also a vet, but another Air Force vet named Garrett Foster, walked up to him carrying, openly carrying his, in Texas, legal assault rifle.
He didn't point it at Daniel Perry, but he was carrying it. And he knocked on the window and motioned for Perry to roll his window down, and Perry shot him through the window five times and killed him. He was convicted of murder in 2023 by a jury. And the day after he was convicted, governor Greg Abbott republican governor of Texas said that he wanted his case to be reviewed for a full pardon, so that the pardons board could send him a recommendation to do it, which is the legal way that a governor can make a pardon in Texas. And that happened a couple weeks ago. Daniel Perry walked free with all of his civil rights restored, including his right to own firearms.
Texas Monthly did some really good reporting on how completely bizarre this pardon is under Texas law, meaning they very clear, they kind of laid out how these pardons typically go. And the law very clearly says that a pardon is not to be considered for anyone who is still in prison, like hasn't finished their sentence, except under very exceptional circumstances, which are usually that like some new evidence of innocence has come to light.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: And the actual materials that the board reviewed were basically just his defense case where like him arguing that he was doing what he did out of self-defense. He was standing his ground, and that he was afraid of Foster and therefore allowed to use deadly force. In any other case, the remedy for that, if you think that's your defense and you were wrongly denied your defense by the jury is to appeal. Is to go through the appeals to which you have a right as a criminal defendant. And in this case, he became a bit of a conservative cult hero and the governor stepped in to get him out of jail. It was so bizarre. So the weird thing here is, for me at least, for these cases, for the cases surrounding like where someone has been killed either by the police or by an individual, it has always been pretty clear to me which way the case is going.
Like if you're someone who's actually taken a, like me, gone to law school, taken a criminal law class, you've studied murder and then like the right to stand your ground and the right to self-defense, and when you can use deadly force, most of these cases are pretty predictable. I knew that the killers of Ahmaud Arbery and Walter Scott and Jordan Davis were going down. I knew that people were going to get off when they got off. Like those were not confusing. And that isn't because the law isn't racist or whatever, it's just the law doesn't take race into account at all. It just completely ignores, it has nothing to do with the cases, according to the law. So it's like this one was stunning.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Because if it had gone to the appellate judges, the judges who actually are thinking about like the whole system and the precedents that they're setting would say, “Hey, in an open carry state like Texas, we do not want to set a precedent where if someone who is legally, openly carrying a gun walks up to you, you can kill them.” That is not a precedent that they want to set. But this is not an appellate case, so we're not setting that precedent, we're just letting this racist murderer go. That's it.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And that is like what effectively Greg Abbott and the Board of Pardons in Texas have conspired to do. And I didn't know this was coming actually. I hadn't heard the news that he was calling for the pardon when it happened, but it's wild. And I just kind of wanted to give that additional context and hear what you're thinking about it, Jonathan, and then we'll get into Donald Trump a little bit.
Normalizing Punishing Protestors and Lionizing Murderers
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean, I think first thing for me is like this is a PG podcast. I won't use all the expletives that I would like to use. The reality of like Kyle Rittenhouse lives in Texas now. George Zimmerman, after he killed Trayvon Martin, he was in other altercations with people with guns. So this is not a person or a scenario that is new, which is sad and disappointing. But the reality of an institution stepping into enforce its institutionalized racism, is something that feels new to me in the environment that we're in. And what I mean by that is like, I think we now live in a society that desires for protestors and folks who are resistant to the system that oppresses and marginalizes people, if you believe that is happening.
There are individuals and institutions that desire to punish that group of people. It is now normed that that group of people can be punished by anybody.
Sy Hoekstra: If you're in the right state.
Jonathan Walton: Well, I won't even say the right state, but I almost think if you can get caught in the zeitgeist of a certain media attention, then you will be lauded as someone who did the right thing.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh yeah. Even if you might still end up in jail.
Jonathan Walton: Even if you might still end up in jail, like you'll become a hero. And so the circumstances have been created where protesters can be punished by regular members of society, and then their quote- unquote punishment could be pardoned in the court of public opinion, and so much so you could end up being pardoned by the institution. There are going to be more protests on campus. There are going to be more protests in light of Trump's conviction and potential election. The chances of political violence and protests are very high, highly probable there're going to be thunderstorms. And what we're saying is like, let's give everybody lightning bolts [Sy laughs]. And we all know if this is a racially stratified society, which it is, if it's a class stratified society, which it is, then we will end up with things like Donald Trump getting convicted and becoming president.
Sy Hoekstra: And the racial stratification is important to remember because people have pointed out, if there had been a Trump rally and someone had been killed, that like, not a chance that Greg Abbott does any of this, right?
Jonathan Walton: The hallmark of White American folk religion is hypocrisy. If this were a person of color, there's no way that they would've got pardoned for shooting someone at a protest.
The Criminal Legal System was Exceptionally Kind to Donald Trump
Sy Hoekstra: And this is the connection to the Donald Trump case [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Because despite the fact that he was convicted, he has been treated throughout this process in a way that no poor or BIPOC would, like no poor person or any BIPOC would ever be treated by the New York State courts. I can tell you that from experience [laughter] as an actual attorney in New York state. Donald Trump had 10 separate violations of a gag order, like he was held in contempt by the court and required to pay some money, which is significant, but nobody does that and doesn't spend some time in jail unless they are rich and famous and White. It was shocking to watch the amount of dancing around him and his comfort that the system does. And this is, pastor Berry mentioned Bryan Stevenson, another Bryan Stevenson quote.
I've mentioned, we've mentioned Brian Stevenson so many times on this show [laughter]. But it's true. One of the things he says all the time is that the system treats you better if you're rich and White and guilty than if you're poor and BIPOC and innocent.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And, that's the demonstration. So the Trump indictments happened when we're recording this yesterday. Or the convictions, I mean. And in terms of what it'll do to the election, probably not much. In terms of what it'll like [laughs], like Jonathan was just saying, like this is the situation that we're in here. We don't have a lot of political analysis to bring you about this case because I don't think there's much political analysis to do except to continue to point out over and over again that this is not the way that people are treated by the criminal justice system. This is an exception to what is otherwise the rule.
Outro and Outtake
Okay. I think we're going to end there. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Our theme song, as always is “Citizens” by John Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robyn Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale. And thank you all so much for joining us. Jonathan, thanks for being here. We will see you all again in two weeks.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me was like the amount of work that he went through to make this film. I'm challenged to do that work so that I have something substantial to pass on to Maya and Everest, just so I can communicate with the same amount of intimacy that he did.
Sy Hoekstra: So now you're going to go make a documentary about Juneteenth, is what you're saying?
Jonathan Walton: [deep exhale, and Sy laughs] At least a reel [laughter].
Sy Hoekstra: A reel… yeah, those are pretty much the same I'd say.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
Welcome to the Season four kick-off! Today, we have our first interview with one of the authors from our anthology on Christianity and American politics, the incredible Dr. Randy Woodley. The episode includes:
- How dualism defines White worldviews, and how it negatively affects White Christians
- How love and vulnerability are central to a life with Jesus
- Why our voting decisions matter to marginalized people
- And after the interview in our new segment, hear Jonathan and Sy talk about the attack on teaching Black history in schools, and the greater responsibility White people need to take for their feelings about historical facts
Resources Mentioned in the Episode
- Dr. Woodley’s essay in our anthology: “The Fullness Thereof.”
- Dr. Woodley’s book he wrote with his wife, now available for pre-order: Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Led Us to Harmony and Well-Being
- Dr. Woodley’s recent children’s books, the Harmony Tree Trilogy
- Our highlight from Which Tab Is Still Open?: The podcast conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jelani Cobb
- The book A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Production by Sy Hoekstra.
- Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra
Transcript
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Randy Woodley: So the Europeans were so set in this dualistic mindset that they began to kill each other over what they consider to be correct doctrine. So we had the religious wars all throughout Europe, and then they brought them to the United States. And here we fought by denomination, so we’re just like, “Well I’m going to start another denomination. And I'm going to start another one from that, because I disagree with you about who gets baptized in what ways and at what time,” and all of those kinds of things. So doctrine then, what we think about, and theology, becomes completely disembodied to the point now where the church is just looked at mostly with disdain.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. My name is Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra, we are so excited to be starting our interviews with our writers from our Anthology in 2020 that we published when we [resigned voice] had the same election that we're having this year [Jonathan laughs]. So it's still relevant at least, and we're really excited to bring you Dr. Randy Woodley today. Jonathan, why don't you tell everyone a bit about Dr. Woodley?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So Dr. Woodley is a distinguished professor emeritus of faith and culture at George Fox Seminary in Portland, Oregon. His PhD is in intercultural studies. He's an activist, a farmer, a scholar, and active in ongoing conversations and concerns about racism, diversity, eco-justice, reconciliation ecumen… that's a good word.
Sy Hoekstra: Ecumenism [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Ecumenism, interfaith dialogue, mission, social justice and indigenous peoples. He's a Cherokee Indian descendant recognized by the Keetoowah Band. He is also a former pastor and a founding board member of the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies, or NAIITS, as we call it. Dr. Woodley and his wife Edith are co-founders and co-sustainers of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice situated on farmland in Oregon. Their Center focuses on developing, implementing and teaching sustainable and regenerative earth practices. Together, they have written a book called Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Led Us to Harmony and Well-Being, which will come out in October. It's available for preorder now, you should definitely check it out. Dr. Woodley also released children's books called Harmony Tree.
In our conversation, we talk about what he thinks is the key reason Western Christians have such a hard time following Jesus well, the centrality of love in everything we do as followers of Jesus, the importance of this year's elections to marginalize people, and Dr. Woodley’s new books, and just a lot more.
Sy Hoekstra: His essay in our book was originally published in Sojourners. It was one of the very few not original essays we had in the book, but it's called “The Fullness Thereof,” and that will be available in the show notes. I’ll link to that along with a link to all the books that Jonathan just said and everything else. We're also going to be doing a new segment that we introduced in our bonus episodes, if you were listening to those, called Which Tab Is Still Open?, where we do a little bit of a deeper dive into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. So this week, it will be on The Attack on Black History in schools, a conversation with Jelani Cobb and Nikole Hannah-Jones. It was a really great thing to listen to. That'll be in the show notes to hear our thoughts on it after the interview.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely. And friends, we need your help. We're going into a new phase of KTF, and as you know, this is a listener supported show. So everything we do at KTF to help people leave the idols of America and seek Jesus and confront injustice is only possible because you are supporting us. And in this next phase, we need a lot more supporters. So we've been doing this show, and all of our work in KTF as kind of a side project for a few years, but we want to make it more sustainable. So if you've ever thought about subscribing and you can afford it, please go to
and sign up now. And if you can't afford it, all you got to do is email us and we'll give you a free discounted subscription. No questions asked, because we want everyone to have access to our content, bonus episode, and the subscriber community features.
So if you can afford it, please do go to www.ktfpress.com, subscribe and make sure these conversations can continue, and more conversations like it can be multiplied. Thanks in advance. Oh, also, because of your support, our newsletter is free right now. So if you can't be a paid subscriber, go and sign up for the free mailing list at www.ktfpress.com and get our media recommendations every week in your inbox, along with things that are helping us stay grounded and hopeful as we engage with such difficult topics at the intersection of church and politics, plus all the news and everything going on with us at KTF. So, thank you so, so much for the subscribers we already have. Thanks in advance for those five-star reviews, they really do help us out, and we hope to see you on www.ktfpress.com as subscribers. Thanks.
Sy Hoekstra: Let's get into the interview, I have to issue an apology. I made a rookie podcasting mistake and my audio sucks. Fortunately, I'm not talking that much in this interview [laughter]. Randy Woodley is talking most of the time, and his recording comes to you from his home recording studio. So that's nice. I'll sound bad, but most of the time he's talking and he sounds great [Jonathan laughs]. So let's get right into it. Here's the interview.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
What Dualism Is, and How It’s Infected the White Church
Jonathan Walton: So, Dr. Woodley, welcome to Shake The Dust. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for contributing to our Anthology in the way that you contributed [laughs].
Randy Woodley: I’m glad to be here. Thank you.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Your essay, I mean, was really, really great. We're going to dive deep into it. But you wrote in the essay, the primary difference in the lens through which Western and indigenous Christians see the world is dualism. And so if you were able to just define what is dualism, and why is it a crucial thing for Western Christians to understand about our faith, that'd be great to kick us off.
Randy Woodley: Yeah, except for I think I want to draw the line differently than the question you just asked.
Jonathan Walton: Okay.
Randy Woodley: When we say indigenous Christians, by and large, Christians who are Native Americans have been assimilated into a Western worldview. It's a battle, and there's lots of gradient, there's a gradient scale, so there's lots of degrees of that. But by and large, because of the assimilation efforts of missionaries and churches and Christianity in general, our Native American Christians would probably veer more towards a Western worldview. But so I want to draw that line at traditional indigenous understandings as opposed to indigenous Christian understandings. Okay. So, yeah, Platonic Dualism is just a sort of… I guess to make it more personal, I started asking the question a long time ago, like what's wrong with White people [Sy laughs]? So that's a really valid question, a lot of people ask it, right? But then I kind of got a little more sophisticated, and I started saying, well, then what is whiteness? What does that mean? And then tracing down whiteness, and a number of deep studies and research, and trying to understand where does whiteness really come from, I really ended up about 3000 years ago with the Platonic Dualism, and Western civilization and the Western worldview. And so Plato of course was the great dualist, and he privileged the ethereal over the material world, and then he taught his student, Aristotle. So just to be clear for anybody who, I don't want to throw people off with language. So the thing itself is not the thing, is what Plato said, it's the idea of what the thing is. And so what he's doing is splitting reality. So we’ve got a holistic reality of everything physical, everything ethereal, et cetera. So Plato basically split that and said, we privilege and we are mostly about what we think about things, not what actually exists an our physical eyes see, or any senses understand. So that split reality… and then he taught Aristotle, and I'm going to make this the five-minute crash course, or two minutes maybe would be better for this [laughs]. Aristotle actually, once you create hierarchies in reality, then everything becomes hierarchical. So men become over women, White people become over Black people. Humans become over the rest of creation. So now we live in this hierarchical world that continues to be added to by these philosophers.
Aristotle is the instructor, the tutor to a young man named Alexander, whose last name was The Great. And Alexander basically spreads this Platonic Dualism, this Greek thinking around the whole world, at that time that he could figure out was the world. It goes as far as North Africa and just all over the known world at that time. Eventually, Rome becomes the inheritor of this, and then we get the Greco-Roman worldview. The Romans try to improve upon it, but basically, they continue to be dualist. It gets passed on, the next great kingdom is Britain, Great Britain. And then of course America is the inheritor of that. So Great Britain produces these movements.
In fact, between the 14th and 17th century, they have the Renaissance, which is a revival of all this Greek thinking, Roman, Greco-Roman worldview, architecture, art, poetry, et cetera. And so these become what we call now the classics, classic civilization. When we look at what's the highest form of civilization, we look back to, the Western worldview looks back to Greek and Greece and Rome and all of these, and still that's what's taught today to all the scholars. So, during this 14th to 17th century, there's a couple pretty big movements that happen in terms of the West. One, you have the enlightenment. The enlightenment doubles down on this dualism. You get people like René Descartes, who says, “I am a mind, but I just have a body.” You get Francis Bacon, who basically put human beings over nature. You get all of this sort of doubling down, and then you also have the birth of another, what I would call the second of the evil twins, and that is the Reformation. [exaggerated sarcastic gasp] I’ll give the audience time to respond [laughter]. The Reformation also doubles down on this dualism, and it becomes a thing of what we think about theology, instead of what we do about theology. So I think I've said before, Jesus didn't give a damn about doctrine. So it became not what we actually do, but what we think. And so the Europeans were so set in this dualistic mindset that they began to kill each other over what they consider to be correct doctrine. So we had the religious wars all throughout Europe, and then they brought them to the United States. And here we fought by denomination, so just like, “Well, I’m going to start another denomination. And I'm going to start another one from that, because I disagree with you about who gets baptized in what ways, and at what time,” and all of those kinds of things.
So doctrine then, what we think about, and theology becomes what we're thinking about. And it becomes completely disembodied, to the point now where the church is just looked at mostly with disdain, because it doesn't backup the premises that it projects. So it talks about Jesus and love and all of these things. And yet it's not a reflection of that, it's all about having the correct beliefs, and we think that's what following Jesus is. So when I'm talking about Platonic Dualism, I'm talking about something deeply embedded in our worldview. Not just a thought, not just a philosophy, but a whole worldview. It's what we see as reality. And so my goal is to convert everyone from a Western worldview, which is not sustainable, and it will not project us into the future in a good way, to a more indigenous worldview.
Dr. Woodley’s Influences, and How He’s Influenced Others
Sy Hoekstra: So let's talk about that effort then, because you have spent effectively decades trying to do just that.
Randy Woodley: Exactly.
Sy Hoekstra: Working with both indigenous and non-indigenous people. So tell us what some of the good fruit that you see as you disciple people out of this dualistic thinking?
Randy Woodley: I feel like that question is supposed to be answered by the people I effected at my memorial service, but…
Sy Hoekstra: [laughter] Well, you can answer for yourself.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean…
Randy Woodley: Yeah, I mean, it's a bit braggadocious if I start naming names and all those kinds of things [Sy laughs]. I would just say that I've had influence in people's lives along with other influences. And now, I mean, first of all when I look back, I look and the most important thing to me is my children know I love them with all my heart and I did the best I could with them. And then secondly, the people who I taught became my friends. And the people I've mentored became my friends and I'm still in relationship with so many of them. That's extremely important to me. That's as important as anything else. And then now I look and I see there's people and they've got podcasts and they've got organizations and they've got denominations and they’re... I guess overall, the best thing that I have done to help other people over the years is to help them to ask good questions in this decolonization effort and this indigenous effort. So yeah, I've done a little bit over the years.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] How about for yourself? Because I don't think, I think one of the reasons you started asking these questions was to figure things out for yourself. What fruit have you seen in your own “walk,” as evangelicals might put it?
Randy Woodley: Well, I think as you get older, you get clarity. And you also realize that people who have influenced you, and I think about a lot of people in my life. Some I've met, some I've never met. Some you've probably never heard of. People like Winkie Pratney, and John Mohawk and John Trudell, and public intellectuals like that. And then there's the sort of my some of my professors that helped me along the way like Ron Sider and Tony Campolo, and Samuel Escobar and Manfred Brauch. And just a whole lot of people I can look back, Jean [inaudible], who took the time to build a relationship and helped me sort of even in my ignorance, get out of that. And I think one of the first times this happened was when I was doing my MDiv, and someone said to me, one of my professors said to me, “You need to see this through your indigenous eyes.” And I was challenged. It was like, “Oh! Well then, what eyes am I seeing this through?” And then I began to think about that. The thing about decolonizing, is that once you start pulling on that thread the whole thing comes unraveled. So yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think like, just to speak a little bit to your impact, I think something you said to someone that was said to me, was like we're all indigenous to somewhere. And the importance of looking upstream to see how we're influenced to be able to walk into the identity that God has called us to. Including the people who led me to faith being like Ashley Byrd, Native Hawaiian, being able to call me out of a dualist way of thinking and into something more holistic, and now having multi-ethnic children myself being able to speak to them in an indigenous way that connects them to a land and a people has been really transformative for me.
Randy Woodley: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. See? Right there.
Love and Vulnerability are Central to Christian Life
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Yeah. And with that, you make a point of saying that you're somebody who works hard to speak difficult truths in a way that is loving and acceptable to everybody. I would say that's like Jesus, right? To be able to speak hard truths and yet people are curious and want to know more even though they're challenged. And so why, I could guess, and I'm sure people would fill in the blanks. But like if you had to say why that's important to you, what would you say?
Randy Woodley: Well, I mean, love’s the bottom line of everything. If I'm not loving the people I'm with, then I'm a hypocrite. I'm not living up to what I'm speaking about. So the bottom line to all of this shalom, understanding dualism, changing worldviews, is love. And so love means relationship. It means being vulnerable. I always say God is the most vulnerable being who exists. And if I'm going to be the human that the creator made me to be, then I have to be vulnerable. I have to risk and I have to trust and I have to have courage and love, and part of that is building relationships with people. So I think, yeah, if… in the old days, we sort of had a group of Native guys that hung around together, me and Richard Twiss, Terry LeBlanc, Ray Aldred, Adrian Jacobs. We all sort of had a role. Like, we called Richard our talking head. So he was the best communicator and funniest and he was out there doing speaking for all of us. And my role that was put on me was the angry Indian. So I was the one out there shouting it down and speaking truth to power and all that. And over the years, I realized that that's okay. I still do that. And I don't know that I made a conscious decision or if I just got older, but then people start coming up to me and saying things like, “Oh, you say some really hard things, but you say it with love.” And I'm like, “Oh, okay. Well, I'll take that.” So I just became this guy probably because of age, I don't know [laughs] and experience and seeing that people are worth taking the extra time to try and communicate in a way that doesn't necessarily ostracize them and make them feel rejected.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I think there's all these iterations of the last 50 years of people trying to say, “Hey, love across difference. Hey, love across difference.” And there's these iterations that come up. So I hope a lot of people get older faster to be able, you know [laughter].
Randy Woodley: I think we’re all getting older faster in this world we’re in right now.
Jonathan Walton: It’s true. Go ahead Sy.
The Importance of Voters’ Choices to marginalized People
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So we had another interview that we did, kind of about Middle East politics, as we're thinking about the election coming up. And one of the points we hit on that we've talked about before on this show is that to a lot of people in the Middle East or North Africa, whoever gets elected in the US, it doesn't necessarily make the biggest difference in the world. There's going to be drones firing missiles, there's going to be governments being manipulated by the US. America is going to do what America is going to do in the Middle East regardless. And I assume to a certain degree, tell me if I'm wrong, that that might be how a lot of indigenous people think about America. America is going to do what America is going to do regardless of who's in power, broadly speaking at least. What do you think about when you look at the choices in front of us this November? How do you feel about it? Like what is your perspective when you're actually thinking about voting?
Randy Woodley: Yeah, that's a really good question. And I understand I think, how people in other countries might feel, because Americans foreign policy is pretty well based on America first and American exceptionalism, and gaining and maintaining power in the world. And I think that makes little difference. But in domestic affairs, I think it makes a whole lot of difference. Native Americans, much like Black Americans are predominantly Democrats and there's a reason for that. And that is because we're much more likely to not have our funding to Indian Health Service cut off in other things that we need, housing grants and those kinds of things. And there's just such a difference right now, especially in the domestic politics. So I mean, the Republicans have basically decided to abandon all morals and follow a narcissistic, masochistic, womanizing… I mean, how many—criminal, et cetera, and they've lost their minds.
And not that they have ever had the best interest of the people at the bottom of the social ladder in mind. Because I mean, it was back in the turnaround when things changed a long time ago that there was any way of comparing the two. But ever since Reagan, which I watched, big business wins. And so right now, we live in a corporatocracy. And yes, there are Democrats and the Republicans involved in that corporatocracy, but you will find many more Democrats on the national scale who are for the poor and the disenfranchised. And that's exactly what Shalom is about. It's this Shalom-Sabbath-Jubilee construct that I call, that creates the safety nets. How do you know how sick a society is? How poor its safety nets are. So the better the safety nets, the more Shalom-oriented, Sabbath-Jubilee construct what I call it, which is exactly what Jesus came to teach.
And look up four, that's his mission. Luke chapter four. And so, when we think about people who want to call themselves Christians, and they aren't concerned about safety nets, they are not following the life and words of Jesus. So you just have to look and say, yes, they'll always, as long as there's a two-party system, it’s going to be the lesser of two evils. That's one of the things that's killing us, of course lobbyists are killing us and everything else. But this two-party system is really killing us. And as long as we have that, we're always going to have to choose the lesser of two evils. It's a very cynical view, I think, for people inside the United States to say, well, there's no difference. In fact, it's a ridiculous view. Because all you have to look at is policy and what's actually happened to understand that there's a large difference, especially if you're poor.
And it's also a very privileged position of whiteness, of power, of privilege to be able to say, “Oh, it doesn't matter who you vote for.” No, it matters to the most disenfranchised and the most marginalized people in our country. But I don't have a strong opinion about that. [laughter]
Jonathan Walton: I think there's going to be a lot of conversation about that very point. And I'm prayerful, I'm hopeful, like we tried to do with our Anthology like other groups are trying to do, is to make that point and make it as hard as possible that when we vote it matters, particularly for the most disenfranchised people. And so thank you for naming the “survival vote,” as black women in this country call it.
Dr. Woodley’s new books, and Where to Find His Work Online
Jonathan Walton: And so all of that, like we know you're doing work, we know things are still happening, especially with Eloheh and things like that. But I was doing a little Googling and I saw like you have a new book coming out [laughs]. So I would love to hear about the journey that… Oh, am I saying that right, Eloheh?
Randy Woodley: It’s Eloheh [pronounced like “ay-luh-hay”], yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Eloheh. So I would love to hear more about your new book journey to Eloheh, as well as where you want people to just keep up with your stuff, follow you, because I mean, yes, the people downstream of you are pretty amazing, but the spigot is still running [laughter]. So can you point us to where we can find your stuff, be able to hang out and learn? That would be a wonderful thing for me, and for others listening.
Randy Woodley: Well, first of all, I have good news for the children. I have three children's books that just today I posted on my Facebook and Insta, that are first time available. So this is The Harmony Tree Trilogy. So in these books are about not only relationships between host people and settler peoples, but each one is about sort of different aspects of dealing with climate change, clear cutting, wildfires, animal preservation, are the three that I deal with in this trilogy. And then each one has other separate things. Like the second one is more about empowering women. The third one is about children who we would call, autistic is a word that’s used. But in the native way we look at people who are different differently than the West does: as they're specially gifted. And this is about a young man who pre-contact and his struggle to find his place in native society. And so yeah, there's a lot to learn in these books. But yeah, so my wife and I…
Sy Hoekstra: What's the target age range for these books?
Randy Woodley: So that'd be five to 11.
Jonathan Walton: Okay, I will buy them, thank you [laughter]
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Randy Woodley: But adults seem to really love them too. So I mean, people have used them in church and sermons and all kinds of things. Then the book that Edith and I wrote is called Journey to Eloheh, how indigenous values bring harmony and well-being. And it's basically our story. The first two chapters really deal, the first chapter deals more in depth of this dualism construct. And the second one really deals with my views on climate change, which are unlike anybody else's I know. And then we get into our stories, but I wanted to set a stage of why it's so important. And then Edith’s story, and then my story and then our story together. And then how we have tried to teach these 10 values as we live in the world and teach and mentor and other things and raise our children.
So, yeah, the journey to Eloheh, that's all people have to remember. It's going to be out in October, eighth I think.
Jonathan Walton: Okay.
Randy Woodley: And we're really excited about it. I think it's the best thing I've written up to this date. And I know it's the best thing my wife's written because this is her first book [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Awesome.
Sy Hoekstra: That’s great.
Randy Woodley: Yeah, so we're proud of that. And then yeah, people can go to www.eloheh.org. That's E-L-O-H-E-H.org and sign up for our newsletter. You can follow me on Instagram, both @randywoodley7 and @eloheh/eagleswings. And the same with Facebook. We all have Facebook pages and those kinds of things. So yeah, and then Twitter. I guess I do something on Twitter every now and then [laughter]. And I have some other books, just so you know.
Sy Hoekstra: Just a couple.
Jonathan Walton: I mean a few. A few pretty great ones. [laughs] Well on behalf of me and Sy, and the folks that we influence. Like I've got students that I've pointed toward you over the years through the different programs that we run,
Randy Woodley: Thank you.
Jonathan Walton: and one of them is… two of them actually want to start farms and so you'll be hearing from them.
Randy Woodley: Oh, wow. That’s good.
Jonathan Walton: And so I'm just…
Randy Woodley: We need more small farms.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Places where stewardship is happening and it is taught. And so, super, super grateful for you. And thanks again for being on Shake the Dust. We are deeply grateful.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Randy Woodley: Yeah, thank you guys. Nice to be with you.
[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy’s and Jonathan’s Thoughts After the Interview
Jonathan Walton: So, wow. That was amazing. Coming out of that time, I feel like I'm caring a lot. So Sy, why don't you go first [laughs], what's coming up for you?
Sy Hoekstra: We sound a little starstruck when we were talking to him. It's kind of funny actually.
Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.
Sy Hoekstra: I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if people know, in our world, he's sort of a big deal [laughter]. And we have, neither of us have met him before so that was a lot of fun.
Jonathan Walton: No, that’s true.
Sy Hoekstra: I think it was incredible how much like in the first five minutes, him summing up so much about Western theology and culture that I have taken like, I don't know, 15 years to learn [laughs]. And he just does it so casually and so naturally. There's just like a depth of wisdom and experience and thinking about this stuff there that I really, really appreciate. And it kind of reminded me of this thing that happened when Gabrielle and I were in law school. Gabrielle is my wife, you've heard her speak before if you listen to the show. She was going through law school, as she's talked about on the show from a Haitian-American, or Haitian-Canadian immigrant family, grew up relatively poor, undocumented.
And just the reasons that she's gotten into the law are so different. And she comes from such a different background than anybody who's teaching her, or any of the judges whose cases she's reading. And she's finding people from her background just being like, “What are we doing here? Like how is this relevant to us, how does this make a difference?” And we went to this event one time that had Bryan Stevenson, the Capitol defense attorney who we've talked about before, civil rights attorney. And Sherrilyn Ifill, who at the time was the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. And they were just, it was the complete opposite experience, like they were talking about all of her concerns. They were really like, I don't know, she was just resonating with everything that they were saying, and she came out of it, and she goes, “It's just so good to feel like we have leaders.” Like it's such a relief to feel like you actually have wiser people who have been doing this and thinking about this for a long time and actually have the same concerns that you do. And that is how I feel coming out of our conversation with Randy Woodley. Like in the church landscape that we face with all the crises and the scandals and the lack of faithfulness and the ridiculous politics and everything, it is just so good to sit down and talk to someone like him, where I feel like somebody went ahead of me. And he's talking about the people who went ahead of him, and it just it's relieving. It is relieving to feel like you're almost sort of part of a tradition [laughter], when you have been alienated from the tradition that you grew up in, which is not the same experience that you've had, but that's how I feel.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I think for me, coming out of the interview, one of the things I realized is similar. I don't have very many conversations with people who are older than me, that are more knowledgeable than me, and have been doing this work longer than me all at the same time. I know people who are more knowledgeable, but they're not actively involved in the work. I know people that are actively involved in the work, but they've been in the silos for so long, they haven't stepped out of their box in ten years. But so to be at that intersection of somebody who is more knowledgeable about just the knowledge, like the historical aspects, theological aspect, and then that goes along with the practical applications, like how you do it in your life and in the lives of other people. He's like the spiritual grandfather to people that I follow.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: [laughter] So it's like, so I think you said it, like we were a little starstruck. I do think I was very conscious of being respectful, which I think is not new for me, but it is a space that I don't often inhabit. And I think that's something that has been frustrating for me, just honestly like the last few years, is that the pastoral aspect of the work that we do, is severely lacking.
Sy Hoekstra: When you say the pastoral aspect of the work that we do, you mean like, in the kind of activist-y Christian space, there just aren't a ton of pastors [laughs]?
Jonathan Walton: Yes. And, so for example, like I was in a cohort, and I was trying to be a participant. And so being a participant in the cohort, I expected a certain level of pastoring to happen for me. And that in hindsight was a disappointment. But I only realized that after sitting down with somebody like Randy, where it's like, I'm not translating anything. He knows all the words. He knows more words than me [Sy laughs]. I'm not contextualizing anything. So I think that was a reassuring conversation. I think I felt the same way similarly with Ron Sider, like when I met him. He's somebody who just knows, you know what and I mean? I feel that way talking with Lisa Sharon Harper. I feel that way talking with Brenda Salter McNeil. I feel that way talking with people who are just a little further down the road.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Lisa’s not that much older than us [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Well, is she?
Sy Hoekstra: You compared her to Ron Sider. I'm like, “That's a different age group, Jonathan” [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Well, I don't mean age. I do mean wisdom and experience.
Sy Hoekstra: Right. Yeah, totally.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, Ron Sider was very old [laughs]. And actually, Ron Sider is actually much older than Randy Woodley [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: That’s also true. That’s a good point.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, right. Ron Sider is, when the Anthology came out, he was legit 45 years older than us, I think.
Sy Hoekstra: And he very kindly, endorsed, and then passed away not that long afterwards.
Jonathan Walton: He did, he did.
Sy Hoekstra: He was such an interesting giant in a lot of ways to people all over the political spectrum [laughs]…
Jonathan Walton: Yes, right.
Sy Hoekstra: …who just saw something really compelling in his work.
Which Tab Is Still Open? Legislators Restricting Teaching about Race in Schools
Sy Hoekstra: So Jonathan, all right, from our recent newsletter recommendations. Here's the new segment, guys. Jonathan, which tab is still open?
Jonathan Walton: Yes. So the tab that’s still open is this article and podcast episode from The New Yorker, featuring a conversation with Columbia School of Journalism Dean, Jelani Cobb, and Nikole Hannah-Jones from Howard University and the 1619 project. They talked about the attack on Black history in schools. And so there's just two thoughts that I want to give. And one of them is that there are very few conversations where you can get a broad overview of what an organized, sustained resistance to accurate historical education looks like, and they do that. Like they go all the way back and they come all the way forward, and you're like “expletive, this is not okay.” [Sy laughs] Right? So, I really appreciated that. Like, yes, you could go and read Angela Crenshaw’s like Opus work. Yes, you could go…
Sy Hoekstra: You mean, Kimberlé Crenshaw [laughs]?
Jonathan: Oh, I mixed, Angela Davis and Kimber… Well, if they were one person, that would be a powerful person [Sy laughs]. But I do mean Kimberlé Crenshaw, no offense to Angela Davis. I do mean Kimberlé Crenshaw. You could go get that book. You could go listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates testimony in front of Congress on reparations. Like these long things, but like this conversation pulls a lot of threads together in a really, really helpful, compelling way. And so that's one thing that stood out to me. The second thing is I think I have to acknowledge how fearful and how grateful it made me. I am afraid of what's going to happen in 20 years, when children do not know their history in these states. And I'm grateful that my daughter will know hers because she goes to my wife's school in New York.
And so, I did not know that I would feel that sense of fear and anxiety around like, man, there's going to be generations of people. And this is how it continues. There's going to be another generation of people who are indoctrinated into the erasure of black people. And the erasure of native people in the erasure of just narratives that are contrary to race-based, class-based, gender-based environmental hierarchies. And that is something that I'm sad about. And with KTF and other things, just committed to making sure that doesn't happen as best as we possibly can, while also being exceptionally grateful that my children are not counted in that number of people that won't know. So I hold those two things together as I listened to just the wonderful wisdom and knowledge that they shared from. What about you Sy? What stood out for you?
White People Should Take Responsibility for Their Feelings Instead of Banning Uncomfortable Truths
Sy Hoekstra: Narrowly, I think one really interesting point that Jelani Cobb made was how some of these book bans and curriculum reshaping and everything that's happening are based on the opposite reasoning of the Supreme Court in Brown versus Board of Education [laughs]. So what he meant by that was, basically, we have to ban these books and we have to change this curriculum, because White kids are going to feel bad about being White kids. And what Brown versus Board of Education did was say we're going to end this idea of separate but equal in the segregated schools because there were they actually, Thurgood Marshall and the people who litigated the case brought in all this science or all the psychological research, about how Black children in segregated schools knew at a very young age that they were of lower status, and had already associated a bunch of negative ideas with the idea of blackness.
And so this idea that there can be separate but equal doesn't hold any water, right? So he was just saying we're doing what he called the opposite, like the opposite of the thinking from Brown versus Board of Education at this point. But what I was thinking is like the odd similarity is that both these feelings of inferiority come from whiteness, it's just that like, one was imposed by the dominant group on to the minoritized group. Basically, one was imposed by White people on to Black people, and the other is White people kind of imposing something on themselves [laughs]. Like you are told that your country is good and great and the land of the free and the home of the brave. And so when you learn about history that might present a different narrative to you, then you become extremely uncomfortable.
And you start to not just become extremely uncomfortable, but also feel bad about yourself as an individual. And White people, there are so many White people who believe that being told that the race to which you belong has done evil things, that means that you as an individual are a bad person, which is actually just a personal emotional reaction that not all white people are going to have. It's not like, it isn't a sure thing. And I know that because I'm a White person who does not have that reaction [laughter]. I know that with 100 percent certainty. So it's just interesting to me, because it really raised this point that Scott Hall talks about a lot. That people need to be responsible for our own feelings. We don't need to legislate a new reality of history for everybody else in order to keep ourselves comfortable.
We need to say, “Why did I had that emotional reaction, and how can I reorient my sense of identity to being white?” And that is what I came out of this conversation with, is just White people need to take responsibility for our identity, our psychological identity with our own race. And it comes, it's sort of ironic, I think, that conservative people who do a lot of complaining about identity politics, or identitarianism, or whatever they call it, that's what's happening here. This is a complete inability to separate yourself psychologically from your White identity. That's what makes you feel so uncomfortable in these conversations. And so take responsibility for who you are White people [laughs].Just who you are as an individual, who you are as your feelings, take responsibility for yourself.
There's a great book that my dad introduced me to a while back called A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being White or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life [laughter]. And it's written by this black, female psychologist named Janet Helms. It's H-E-L-M-S. But it's pronounced “Helmiss.” And she just has dedicated her career to understanding how White people shape their identities. And she has so, like such a wealth of knowledge about different stages of white identity formation, and has all these honestly kind of funny little quizzes in the book that she updates every few, there's like a bunch of editions of this book, that it's like asking you, “What do you think is best for America?” The campaign and ideas of this politician or this one or this one. And she asks you a bunch of questions and from there tells you where you are in your White identity formation [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Wow. That’s amazing.
Sy Hoekstra: It's really, “how would you feel if somebody said this about White people?” whatever. Tons of different questions, it's kind of like taking a personality test, but it's about you and your race [laughs]. That's just a resource that I would offer to people as a way to do what this conversation reminded me my people all very much need to do.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: I just talked for a long time, Jonathan, we need to end. But do you have any thoughts [laughs]?
Jonathan Walton: No. I was just going to say this podcast is a great 101 and a great 301.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: Like it spans the spectrum. So please do if you haven't, go listen to the podcast. Yeah, just check it out. It's very, very good.
Outro and Outtake
Sy Hoekstra: We will have that in the show notes along with all the other links of everything that we had today. Okay, that's our first full episode of season four. We're so glad that you could join us. This was a great one full of a lot of great stuff. Our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. The show is produced by all of you, our lovely subscribers, and our transcripts are by Joyce Ambale. Thank you all so much for listening, we will see you in two weeks with the great Brandi Miller.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ and you call us citizens/ and you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Randy Woodley: You know, I think I've said before Jesus didn't give a damn about doctrine. Excuse me. Jesus didn't give a darn about doctrine. I don't know if that'll go through or not.
[laughter].
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
Season four starts next week! Hear Jonathan and Sy talk about:
- What to expect this year from the show during this election cycle
- A reintroduction to everything KTF does, and why we do it
- How we really, genuinely need your support right now, and ways you can help
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com.
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
- Production, editing, and transcript by Sy Hoekstra.
Transcript
What’s Coming in Season Four
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.” After a brief pause, the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice! I’m Sy Hoekstra
Jonathan Walton: And I’m Jonathan Walton. Welcome to season 4!
Sy Hoekstra: We are so excited to have you here. We’re going to be doing something very special for this season during this presidential election cycle
Jonathan Walton: Yes, we’re going back to our roots. The first thing we did with the company that makes this podcast, KTF Press, was publish an anthology in 2020 called Keeping the Faith. It had 36 authors writing political theology and personal stories to explain their opposition to Christian support for Donald Trump.
Sy Hoekstra: We called it an anthology of dissent, a record of resistance toward the church’s political witness in America. And our guests this season are going to be authors from that book, talking about what they wrote and how they’re thinking about their faith and the political landscape now.
Jonathan Walton: You’ve heard some of the writers from the book on this show before, like Dani Espiritu, Scott Hall, and Wissam Al-Saliby. And we’re excited to bring you Dr. Randy Woodley, Brandi Miller, Mark Scandrette, Rasool Berry, and many more this season. The first episode is dropping this upcoming Friday, May 24, with Dr. Woodley.
Sy Hoekstra: We’ve recorded some of these already, and we’re really excited to get them to you in the coming months.
What We Do at KTF, and Why
Sy Hoekstra: But before we jump into this season, we want to give you all a bit of a refresher on what exactly it is we do at KTF Press and why we do it. And the reason that we want to tell you all that is because we really need your support right now.
Jonathan Walton: That’s right. We do everything that we do to help people seek Jesus, confront injustice, and resist the idols of the American church that got us to the religious and political mess we’re in right now. This show is all about hearing personal stories and informed discussions to help you do just that.
Sy Hoekstra: And our weekly newsletter is where we curate media to help you in your discipleship and learning about politics and policy. You get commentary from us on issues important to our national discourse, and we also give you something each week to help you stay grounded and hopeful. Plus, you get news about what’s going on with us at KTF, previews of this show, and a whole lot more.
Jonathan Walton: We also write articles on similar subjects for our website, we have the anthology, and Tamice Spencer-Helms’ incredible memoir we published last year, Faith Unleavened, about how White Jesus nearly destroyed her faith, and how she left him behind to find her way to liberation and the real Jesus.
Sy Hoekstra: And we do all this with a couple things in mind. First, we always pay the most attention to marginalized voices, the people who our society oppresses and pushes to the side. We had a whole discussion on this in our very first episode, so if you want to learn more, you can always listen to that. But simply put, The opinions of people who a society favors get the most airtime, but people who a society harms and ignores actually have the clearest insight about the character of that society. And so if you want to understand the world around you better, you have to talk to marginalized people. Plus, God’s ministry throughout the Bible is primarily directed toward the poor and oppressed, and his disciples primarily come from them. So you just have to train yourself to learn from people whose perspectives come from that angle on the world if you want to follow Jesus.
Jonathan Walton: Another value of ours is trying to be both kind and humane toward people we disagree with, while remaining uncompromising about our own views. We believe, despite all the evidence on the internet to the contrary, that this is in fact possible [Sy chuckles]. But it requires a lot of intentional growth in the area of emotional health, so we talk a lot about that too.
Sy Hoekstra: The good thing is, we’ve been practicing all this for a long time. We have been friends for 18 years now, talking and learning about these subjects together, and having our own sometimes very strong disagreements. We have had to learn how to talk across lines of difference with each other in real time as friends and followers of Jesus. Fortunately, we have been able to do that in communities with friends and mentors who are doing the same thing. On top of that, Jonathan has been doing justice ministry for well over a decade, and my career before this was in law and advocacy, and we want to just share all of this experience with you.
We Need Your Support to Keep KTF Running
Jonathan Walton: So, if all that sounds like something you can get behind, here is our ask of you. We need you to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to our Substack. We have to get more subscribers if we’re going to keep this going. So, if you can afford it, please subscribe. If you can’t, just write to us at [email protected] and we’ll give you a free or discounted subscription, whatever you want, no questions asked. Because we want as many people as possible to have access. But if you can, please go to KTFPress.com and sign up. On top of supporting what we do, you get access to all our many bonus episodes, and coming soon, monthly subscriber chats with me and Sy. Also, if you’re already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to our founding member tier, which will immediately get you a free book.
Sy Hoekstra: We’ve been doing all this podcasting and writing and book publishing as a side project for a while now, and we have some incredible subscribers supporting what we do. And they are covering the costs of what it takes to produce this show, to keep the websites running, and pay a bunch of our regular business expenses. We actually would not be here without them. But we’ve kept those expenses very low. I don’t know if you know, but we’re not recording this from KTF Press Studios, right next door to NPR. This company is two people with some basic sound equipment that our subscribers paid for, and our laptops. We occasionally get help from other people with laptops. We work in whatever room is available in our homes that are full of other people. At least once, that room was my closet.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs]The point is this might sometimes sound like an established operation, but it’s a little scrappier than you think. And I think you would agree work like this should not be a side project.
Sy Hoekstra: To be fully transparent, I cannot afford to keep doing this as a side project. Jonathan does this work around his full-time job, but if I’m going to keep putting as much time into this as I do, which is a lot, I’m going to have to stop working for free.
Jonathan Walton: So here’s what we’re doing. We’re leveling up our branding and designs. You may have seen that on our website and in our emails. We’ll also be doing some advertising, and of course continuing to put our best work here. But we need you to do your part!
Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, how many paid subscribers do we have right now?
Jonathan about 120.
Sy Hoekstra: And how many do we want to have by the end of this year?
Jonathan Walton: One thousand! [laughs]
Sy Hoekstra: So we have just a few more to go. Please, please go to KTFPress.com and sign up. Don’t wait.
Jonathan Walton: And there are a few free things you can do apart from subscribing. That newsletter we mentioned is free, so sign up for our free mailing list if you can’t become a paid subscriber, and forward that thing so many times. That’s also at KTFPress.com
Sy Hoekstra: You can also give this show a five-star review on Apple or Spotify, and say something nice about us in a review if you’re on Apple Podcasts. You can also like our Facebook page and follow us on Instagram and Threads. But to reiterate, the most important thing we need you to do is go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber. By the way, cool new trick. If you’re listening to this on Spotify, just go back to the bonus episode right before this one in the feed, click the button to unlock that episode, and it will take you right where you need to go to Subscribe.
Outro and Outtake
Jonathan Walton: Alright everyone, thank you so much for listening. Once again, we’re starting season 4 this upcoming Friday, May 24, with Dr. Randy Woodley. We will see you then!
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Okay, [singing a made-up tune] let me hit the button to stop this recording.
Jonathan Walton: [commanding, in an English accent] Cease recording. Immediately.
Sy Hoekstra: [with fake dramatic anger] Cease it now!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.ktfpress.com
On today’s episode, Jonathan and Sy talk Christian Nationalism. They cover:
- What Christian Nationalism is exactly
- Why they personally reject it
- Why it’s so hard for White Christians to let go of the idea that the US is a Christian nation
- Why White Christians need to confess, repent of, and oppose Christian nationalism, rather than merely stating that it’s wrong or minimizing its importance
Mentioned in the Episode
- Jonathan’s book, Twelve Lies That Hold America Captive
- Dr. Anthea Butler’s article on why White evangelicals need to own Christian nationalism
- The Belhar Confession from South Africa
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram
- Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra
- Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra
Introduction
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B, F#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pod playing the note B in the background… both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Sy Hoekstra: White Christians in our democracy today have power and we want to know what to do with that power. And the answer has to be, “Oh, we have to use it to enact what Jesus would enact.” It is trying to apply teachings from a person who was occupied, who was in no position of power, and who was not interested in establishing a government on Earth…
Jonathan Walton: [Laughs]. Yes, that’s true.
Sy Hoekstra: …to the question of how you establish a government on Earth [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Today, we're going to be talking about Christian nationalism. What it is exactly, why it's much closer to what the average White American Christian believes than you might think, and some others might think, and why rejecting it is mostly an excuse not to engage in some deeper and very necessary self-reflection about the church's political witness in America.
Sy Hoekstra: Just some small things like that, that's what we're talking about. Before we get to that, I just wanted to encourage everyone, as we've been doing all these bonus episodes, to go to Apple or Spotify and give this show a five-star rating. It really helps us as we try and spread the word about the show when people look at it and see that other people find it valuable, and we would really, really appreciate it. We've gotten some, a few more of these ratings as we've been asking you all to do it, and we would just please encourage anyone who hasn't done it to keep going. It's a really easy and free way to support what we do at KTF Press helping people leave the idols of the White American church to follow Jesus, and we very much appreciate it.
If you're on Apple, if you could give us a written review as well, those are so encouraging to us and they give other people a great kind of flavor of what the show is about from the perspective of readers. So Apple or Spotify, give us a five-star rating, and leave a written review if you're on Apple, please, it helps us so much. And we very much appreciate it.
Jonathan, what are we up to? Let's get into it.
What Is Christian Nationalism?
Jonathan Walton: Sy, I mean, this is going to be a light-hearted, very simple, straightforward conversation. Alright [laughs], So can we start out with just a simple question to get everybody on the same page because there are lots of different definitions out there. So what is Christian nationalism?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I'm going to talk about what it is technically, meaning there are lots of people operating with many definitions of it out there. There are also lots of people using the word without having a particular definition of it [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: This is also true [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: Which just happens a lot in political discussions, it's sort of unavoidable. But there is a technical definition of nationalism and Christian nationalism. So I'm going to start with nationalism broadly. This is where kind of my background and history in law and politics comes into some usefulness on this show. I'm going to give you a definition of nationalism and you're going to think, “That doesn't sound that weird or important or interesting.” So let me just tell you, I promise you, it is [laughter]. I'm going to give you the definition first then we're going to talk about it more.
So effectively, nationalism is the belief that people should identify with their nation state over other nations. It's like creating a sense of political identity in the people who constitute a nation. And the thing that they're identifying with is the whole nation of people over whom the government operates as a state. So not that odd or controversial, particularly in America, lots of people think that way. To understand it a little bit better, you have to kind of understand the historical context that it comes up in. Obviously, like when nation states were first arising in Europe, there were lots of other competing loyalties. You could be loyal to your church or your kingdom or whatever else, so it was important to construct an identity around this new thing called a nation. Or at least it was important to the people who were trying to build the nations.
So when you're constructing an identity around a nation, you have to find something for people to sort of hold on to as they’re building a common identity. So what that means is nationalism gets combined with a lot of other stuff. And again, this is important. This is not just like random historical information. This will come into play when we talk about the details of our current debate today. Nationalism gets combined with a lot of other things, it gets combined… Like I'll give you an example. I'll give a couple examples, because there are examples that we might find sympathetic and examples that we will find horrible [laughs]. So for instance, there were lots of anti-colonial movements, where they relied on nationalism to create a sense of solidarity among all of the people in a given colony that we're trying to fight, say like Britain.
Like what Gandhi did was nationalism. Gandhi fought very intentionally for a unified Indian state that was not about religion or any other divisive thing. It was about all of the people who are native to this place called India fighting against… having self-determination, governing themselves apart from the British Empire. That's what he was fighting for. That happened in anti-colonial movements in a lot of different places. He's just one of the more famous figureheads of it.
Nationalism can also be combined with, it's not about like fighting a distant empire or trying to counter an identity as being part of a British, being a British subject or whatever. It could be part of creating an ethnocentric community, meaning like… the most famous example of ethno-nationalism is the Nazis. Nazi being a word that is short for the German word “nazional,” meaning national, because they were the National Socialists. So basically, that's creating a national identity around being Aryan. Around being anti-Semitic. So anyways, there are a million different ways that nationalism gets combined with other stuff. And there are lots of different versions of religious nationalism around the world. In America, we have Christian nationalism, which is basically a belief that America is or at least it should be a Christian nation, and that you should have your identity as an American, specifically in the fact that America is a Christian nation. And that that's part of your primary identity, “I am an American, which is to say that I am part of this Christian nation, and that's a primary identity of mine.”
So again, not everybody is thinking that way. Like a lot of people are just saying, I'm a Christian nationalist, because that basically just means I support Trump and his movement [laughs]. Or there's lots of other ways that people talk about it, but that is the kind of technical definition. Jonathan, do you have anything to add, or should we just move on from my history and poli-Sy lecture [laughs]?
Jonathan Walton: No, I think the only thing that I would add is that nationalism is… Or I guess, could you tell me the difference between nationalism and patriotism?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I mean, patriotism could apply to any sort of political organization, I guess. But patriotism is more usually a question of love of country, meaning they go together a lot. But basically, it's more just about your identity with a nation state in particular. So you can love your nation state, you could also love your kingdom [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: You know what I mean? You could love your tribe, you could love your whatever. Like there's lots of different ways to… I don't know. Love the political organization that you're under. So it's more they're just sort of separate questions is the real answer.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No, no, that makes sense. The only thing I would add to it I think, is patriotism slash… because sometimes I feel like they get conflated, especially when we get into Christian nationalism, is that this is a normal way of thinking for most people, but is most likely heavily subconscious.
Sy Hoekstra: Yes.
Jonathan Walton: So as you're listening to Sy’s definition, even as I'm thinking about it, I'm like, yeah, these are all quote unquote, “normal” ways to think and be in the world. And without interrogation, it becomes the basis for a lot of actions or inaction that we take each day.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, totally agreed with that.
Why Should We Reject Christian Nationalism?
Sy Hoekstra: So before we get into the kind of meatier part of the discussion of why rejecting it isn't enough and why it's actually very common, Jonathan, there's a book that was written called Twelve Lies That Hold America Captive: And the Truth That Sets Us Free.
Jonathan Walton: [Laughs] Yes. I’ve heard of it.
Sy Hoekstra: And it was written by Jonathan Walton. Yeah. And one of the titular lies of this book [laughter], one of the twelve lies was that America is a Christian nation. Effectively, you have a chapter in a book rejecting the ideology of Christian nationalism [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yes. It's chapter one actually [laughs]. It’s the most important chapter of the book.
Sy Hoekstra: Is it really chapter one?
Jonathan Walton: It’s chapter one, yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: I’d forgotten that actually.
Jonathan Walton: No worries, no worries.
Sy Hoekstra: Can you give us the bullet points, Jonathan, why is it something Christians should reject?
Jesus Did Not Want Us to Establish a Kingdom on Earth
Jonathan Walton: We should reject Christian nationalism because it's antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think it's very clear in Scripture that if Jesus was trying to start a political revolution and baptize a nation state, he could have done that. There's a prime moment in Scripture when Jesus is arrested and Peter pulls out a sword and chops off the ear of Malchus, the people who were there to arrest Jesus. In that moment, if there was going to be a revolution that would have been the moment. There's a detachment of soldiers there, Jesus' disciples were there. There could have been a start to a fight. This was the height of Jesus' ministry, and instead of overthrowing the Empire, which is what Peter, Simon the Zealot, and thousands of Jews at the time were waiting for, he didn't do that.
He picked up Malchus’ ear and put it back on his head. Jesus was not there to bring his kingdom of the world, because he told Pontius Pilate after he got arrested, “My kingdom is not of this world.” So when we as followers of Jesus say the United States is a shining city on a hill as Barack Obama did in his speech in 2008, echoing John F. Kennedy from the 1960s, we are doing the work of Christian nationalism. We are baptizing, we are sanctifying a land theft, genocide, patriarchal, racist, hyper capitalist, militarized project, to create a quote-unquote, “new people in a new place,” which God did not ordain or endorse in any way as the way of his kingdom coming into the world.
Sy Hoekstra: Can I ask you one step further? I agree with all that.
Jonathan Walton: Sure.
Sy Hoekstra: Wouldn't it be best for a nation to operate according to Christian principles, wouldn’t that be the best way to make people flourish?
Jonathan Walton: I would argue that the answer is no.
Sy Hoekstra: Why?
-
Listen to Jonathan read the essay of his we just published, and which is reprinted below. It's a personal story and reflection on overcoming the barrier to rest that is racism. For more stories like this, as well as our weekly newsletter, podcasts, and more, subscribe at KTFPress.com.
Last summer during a vacation, my family and I went on a zip-line course with a group of other tourists on Catalina Island off the coast of southern California. The landscape is epic and streaking through the sky over it was exhilarating. But a familiar feeling interrupted my joy–the anxiety of exclusion. I was the only Black person in the group. I committed myself to trying to enjoy the moment for the sake of my wife (plus, the tickets were not cheap). Then our White tour guide started asking questions.
On the platform at the top of each new line she threw out an icebreaker to the group. Her first question to me was, “What’s your greatest fear?” My internal response was, “One of my neighbors calling the police because there is a Black man at my house, and my daughters losing their Dad in the driveway.” But of course, I could not say that in front of all these White people. My momma raised me to prioritize White comfort because that meant I would always survive the day. So what came out of my mouth was, “This. I am jumping off a perfectly safe platform even though I have children to live for.” Everyone laughed. Deflection successful.
At the next platform, the guide asked, “What would be your last meal?” My internal answer: “Fried chicken, biscuits, mashed potatoes, watermelon, and every other stereotypically Black and objectively delicious dish that my people so generously prepare for one another and had to prepare for y’all by force.” My external answer: “Whatever the wonderful ladies at the church I grew up at are willing to serve me”. Everyone laughed again. Another deflection successful. That pattern continued. And as I skimmed the tops of trees on the last leg, I was glad the tour was ending. I had gotten used to jumping off the platforms. But I’ll never get used to jumping out of my skin. Afterward, the tour group went our segregated and stratified separate ways.
Later that week in a suburb of Los Angeles, I was cleaning my mother-in-law’s car, and a White woman crossed the street directly toward me. She was focused and intent. But at the last moment, within feet of the car, she turned onto the sidewalk and walked in a different direction, headphones in, not paying attention to me at all. So why did I experience her like a Russian fighter jet buzzing a US F-15? Why did my watch pick up an increased heart rate? Because I’m in a town where White supremacists rallied not too long ago, and no one seems aware that the blue-striped flags on the surrounding houses make me feel unwelcome. The woman walked out of sight. But my adrenalin kept me wondering if I was doing anything White people might find suspicious. I looked down at my glass bottle of ginger beer. Could a neighbor suspect I was drunk?
Anti-Blackness and White supremacy are real and still reign, and they left me weary after those ten days. On our way back home to Queens, I was glad to be going to a place where there are safe friends and a bed where I can sleep in peace, knowing my skin isn’t an anomaly and I have a community where I don’t have to deflect so much.
But on a morning not long after we got home, I was doing yard work in a hoodie. A White woman neighbor stopped her car and rolled her window down to tell me, “You better not have that hood on. People are gonna start asking questions.” I looked at her, smiled as unthreateningly as I could, and said, “You’re exactly right about that.” She laughed and drove away.
I spent the next minute removing her from the list of white people that are safe for me and my kids. I spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out how to tell my wife that this happened. I spent the next hour trying to remind myself why we moved to this more culturally suburban neighborhood. And I spent the day trying to plan how I’m going to act when I see that neighbor next. All this mental load just to deal with the intractable reality that Whiteness doesn’t take a vacation when I do, and it’s there waiting for me when I get home.
As I look toward our summer vacation this year, I wonder what a slower pace, beautiful views, and great food will cost us. I’ll budget for the ticket prices, meals, or an RV. But I don’t have pockets deep enough to buy the privilege of existing as the default traveler, the desirable guest, or the patron a tour guide can easily relate to. Yet I still have to rest. So when I leave my home every morning with my daughters, we recite a prayer together to remind us that where we are is where we belong. “I am accepted. God is not ashamed of me. I am His and He is mine. I am a child of the Most High God.” My fear is real, but so is that faith. And that faith rests not just in God’s promises, but my experience.
God got my mother and father through Jim Crow to bring me into this world. He will keep me and my wife as we raise two girls of color to be lights for the next generation. When I, at 18, left my region of the South for the first time alone on a train to New York City for college, God provided a stranger on the Petersburg station platform to assure my Momma I would get where I was going. The stranger got me all the way to Penn Station and onto the subway toward campus. God will also be with my two little girls when it’s time for them to travel far away. The world is not safe, but God has always been good. That gives me the peace, perseverance, and hope I need to board another plane or do yardwork in front of my house. He will carry us through.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.ktfpress.com
Note: The transcript for this episode is below, rather than in the usual separate post. We’re experimenting with ways to make our podcast posts more convenient and easier to find. Feedback is welcome as always at [email protected]!
This month, our bonus episode features a discussion about our big-picture thoughts on the 2024 presidential election and the possibility of a second Trump term. Jonathan and Sy get into:
- How a Trump Reelection would harm marginalized people, democracy, and creation
- How God’s sovereignty and familiarity with suffering would get us through another Trump administration
- How both the oppression Biden’s administration causes and US history give us helpful context for thinking about Trump
- How we can minimize the suffering of others by overreacting to Trump
- And a discussion about a recent highlight from our newsletter on prison slave labor in America’s food industry
Resources Mentioned in the Episode
- Our YouTube video of Dr. Mika Edmondson on MLK’s theology of suffering and sovereignty
- The essay from our anthology, “Bad Theology Kills” by Jesse Wheeler
- The AP’s investigation into prison labor and the Food Industry
Credits
- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com
- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads
- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon
- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify
- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram
- Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra
- Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra
Introduction
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Jonathan Walton: I think there's a, there’s just healthy, healthy gifts in Scripture when we remember that Jesus lived in an occupied territory by an empire that was ruthless, just like the United States. It’s not a new thing to Jesus, it’s not a new thing to God, which I'm really, really grateful for. Like our Savior understands. That's the reason he can say in scripture, “There will be wars and rumors of wars, let not your heart be troubled.”
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. I am Jonathan Walton.
Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. We today, are going to be talking about the election coming at the end of 2024.
Jonathan Walton: Lord Jesus…
Sy Hoekstra: Of course, I'm talking about the election for New York City comptroller. No, I'm talking about the presidential election [laughter] in the United States of America. When it comes to season four of this show when we get started in a couple of months, we are going to be talking mostly, if not all, about the election. Kind of bringing on some guests that we think have a really good perspective, just really diving deep into this crucial subject for this time. And we thought it would be a good idea to give you, our lovely paid subscribers some perspective before we dive into that. Some of like where we are coming from when we think about the election.
How important is it? What are the truly bad things that will happen if Trump gets reelected? And without minimizing any of the harm that will come if he is reelected, how can we sort of contextualize these issues within history and theology from the perspectives of marginalized voices, to give us just kind of a broader understanding of kind of the real consequences and really what's going on this year? So what happens if Trump gets reelected and how earth shaking is it [laughter]? That's effectively what we're talking about today. We will also be doing our new segment, which tab is still open, diving a little bit deeper into one of the recent highlights from our newsletter, in this case, is going to be my highlight, a massive AP investigation into prison labor, and how it supplies the food that is absolutely in your kitchen. If you didn't take a look at it, it will be in the show notes. It is a shocking one, and we're going to talk about that one a little bit more. But before we jump into the main discussion, Jonathan.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, before we jump into anything, we just have one quick favor to ask of you. And that is, go to Apple or Spotify and give this show a five-star rating. It's a quick, easy, free way to support us and makes us look good, and other people look us up. So please go to Apple or Spotify, give us a five-star rating, and if you can, leave a review. It's just a super, super helpful way to support the show, and many of you have done it. And so there's an unlimited invitation to this party [Sy laughs]. So please do give us a five-star rating, write a review. We really, really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much in advance.
A Trump Reelection would Multiply the Harm We Do to Marginalized People
Sy Hoekstra: Alright, let's jump into it. I know that both of us think this election is really important. But I also know that we both have some historical and theological perspective that might somewhat ironically, maybe make us think that it's a less earth-shaking election than other people might. But I just wanted to start by talking about what will happen. Why is this election important? If Trump gets reelected, Jonathan, what will happen and why does it matter?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, actually, as I've been thinking about this question, I think that the reason that it's important, are the reasons that have always been important. It's just a problem at a fire when someone has kerosene, and it's just walking around, throwing it everywhere. Right?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And so it's like, it is not untrue that the United States has, it has been and has baked in racist, bigoted, misogynistic frameworks into our entire systems and structures. It was intentional, and it is still working very strong and well today. That has always been true. What changes, I think, is how these systems and structures impact a lot of the vulnerable people. And if you vote for Donald Trump, or lean into the things that he normalizes as everyday practices, that is a profound problem for the most vulnerable people in our country. We are living in the wake of significant cultural, political, theological and demographic change in the United States, and to have a president that explicitly endorses exploitation and militarism and hyper-capitalism, then we have a serious problem.
The things that I am hopeful do not happen is the expressed situational, like contextualized things in our time and culture, which again, I'm not saying they haven't happened before. I'm not saying that they're more unique than other things that have happened before. What I am saying, is we're living in this moment, and we have an opportunity as best as we possibly can to push back against systems that oppress, abuse and violate. And one of the ways to do that is to not vote for someone who's going to do and say things that cause oppression and violence and abuse to be multiplied the world over, because he sits in the most quote- unquote, “powerful” seat in the country. So Sy, that was a lot from me. What do you think about this election, and why is it important to you?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so I think this question for me, is the one that I kind of want to answer a little bit talking more to marginalized people than not. And then the kind of like get some broader, bigger perspective questions that we're going to ask in a minute, are kind of the things that I think need to be directed towards people who come from the dominant side of a hierarchy, right? Like, right now I'm talking to people who are not white, instead of me talking to white people. Right now I'm talking to people I think, mostly who are disabled, and I'll be talking to able bodied people in a minute. And the reason I say that is like, I think this question of why is this important, primarily for me is like acknowledging all the things that have happened to marginalized people in his first term, and that will happen again, if he's reelected.
So, for instance, because I'm married to an attorney who was working in immigration during the first Trump term, and because I have a good friend who applied for asylum just before Trump was elected, I saw kind of firsthand, like a lot of the very kind of small administrative things that Trump did in the immigration system that had a huge effect on the lives of just like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people that kind of went under the radar, just because they weren't flashy. I don’t know how much you remember—how much you've put your memories of the Trump administration out of your mind for your own sort of mental peace. But there was so much stuff going on every day. Like he would say something new that was absurd, that topped the absurd thing he said yesterday, and proposed some new ridiculous policy and whatever.
So a lot of things just like went under the radar that were small. And I'll give you an example. One was this woman I know who applied for asylum just toward the end of Obama's presidency. Had like an absolutely open and shut case for asylum. There's no question ever that she was going to be granted it. She was a woman from Iran who converted to Christianity and basically became a women's rights advocate. She's not going back to Iran. So she—without being persecuted, it's open and shut asylum. So she comes here and applies, and then just as, like she's kind of work… you know, it takes a while to get your asylum application granted, but it doesn't take as long as it took her.
Because what happened was, Trump, in his efforts to deter as many people from coming here as possible, did this thing where he said we're going to process all of the applications that have been filed most recently first, and then we're going to make our way back towards the applications that were filed, sort of in the past. So she was making her way through the line through the processing thing, and then all of a sudden, the line flipped, and she was at the end again. So it took eight years to process her asylum application, which was unheard of previous to the Trump administration. And that just like left her in a state of limbo and uncertainty, it makes it, there's all kinds of things that are just harder when you haven't been granted that when you can't be moving on your path towards citizenship. There's all kinds of bureaucratic things that are complicated, and it just put her forever wondering whether she was going to be able to stay in this new place that she had made her home. And that's like one example of so many different things that happened.
The worst things that we've been seeing at the state level are going to be amplified if Trump gets reelected. Meaning, think about like the DeSantis takeover of public schools in Florida. Like just anything to do with talking about race in history, or gender or sexuality, those things are going to be stamped out as vigorously as possible by the federal government. The violence towards immigrants on the Texas border that we've written about in the newsletter a couple of times, like the ways that Greg Abbott is just like actively killing people who try and cross the river into Texas.
The way that he and Ron DeSantis are trafficking immigrants to Blue cities for like a political stunt. All that kind of stuff would be approved of and encouraged by the head executive of the country. Everything we're seeing about don't talk about…the attempts to completely erase queer people from our public education system, attempts to ban even like life-saving abortions. All that kind of stuff, the President would be behind all of it, and that is quite scary.
Trump Will Undermine Democracy, Damage Creation, and Embolden People with the Worst Ideas
There will be I think increased attempts to undermine democratic norms and processes. Obviously, he did that in his first term. He will be maybe better at it. I mean, it's hard to tell, right [Jonathan laughs]? He's still, he's the same blustering guy that he was before. And there are some things that he's proposing doing that he would absolutely never be able to do, that the President doesn't have the power to do.
But you know that he's going to undermine as many norms as possible to get whatever he wants. You know that if he loses this time, there will be election violence. I mean, I would be willing to bet that at some point, he goes, “Hey, about those term limits [laughs], what do we think of those still?” And his supporters are going to say, “Get rid of them,” and he will try. Again, not something he has the power to do, but that doesn't mean that there won't be violence if he can't do it. I mean, these are all totally realistic possibilities. And then foreign policy is just going to go off the rails. Can you imagine what would be happening right now in Gaza, if Israel had the full-throated support of the American President to do whatever they want to fight terrorism, which is absolutely what he would do. Right? I mean, it would be… like not that it's not terrible now, it's horrifying now, it would be on a whole different scale if Trump was president. Because ultimately, as we've discussed in the newsletter, like what the American president says are the guardrails of Israel's military operations, are in fact the guardrails of Israel's military operations. We sort of define how far they can go or Western powers defined how far they can go. That's always been the case.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: The environmental situation will get way worse, he's promised a ton more drilling. He's said he's going to pull out of the Paris Accord, which is the big multinational treaty about climate change that exists right now. It needs strengthening, but it's the one that exists. So basically, everything I'm saying is, the reason that it's important. The reason that it's going to be bad if he gets reelected, is because it will negatively affect actual people. Actual, marginalized people will be hurt. And the creation, like God's creation will be damaged. And the line that I do want to draw there a little bit for the clarity of our thinking is, that's the problem.
The problem isn't that he will degrade America's greatness or whatever. He will harm like, he may hasten the decline of America, but America to me is not like theologically or morally significant, except insofar as it contains people. It contains people…
Jonathan Walton: Exactly, yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: …who bear the image of God, and the creation that God made and wants us to steward. So I think that's worth keeping in mind as well. Do you have any other thoughts? There's a lot from… Now, you did a lot from you, and I did a lot from me. Do you have any thoughts?
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Well, I think what you said put hands and feet to what I was thinking. Like naming specific policies that will violate and destroy the image of God and people downstream of the American empire. And the American empire looks like what's happening in Palestine. Looks like what's happening in the Congo. Looks like what's happening in neighborhoods in New York City, and around the country where kids won't be able to get books because they will pull the funding from the library. They will have made sure that these school boards would be completely flipped because the bully pulpit as they say, the presidency, as you said, full-throatedly endorses a race-based, class-based, gender-based environmental hierarchy that makes sure things run a certain way.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, the importance of him just emboldening people can't really be understated. I mean, it's like a little bit hard to remember now, but 8, 10 years ago, we were not regularly talking about the Klan, or the Proud Boys or like the QAnon or whatever. Any of these alt right things that have cropped up since he basically made it okay to have their views and be at least around mainstream politics, right?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: I mean, you just, I don't know. There are so many people now who on their TV shows will have, who never would have done this before. Now, I feel like they have to have somebody who just has the absolute worst views you can imagine about whoever, to come in and comment like a really serious commenter because that's the environment that Trump has created. That's the people have been emboldened by him.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely.
Trump’s Reelection Is not the End of the World
Trump Isn’t God, and Jesus Knows the Suffering of Oppression
Sy Hoekstra: Okay. So let's pivot to some caveats or some ways that we think about another Trump presidency, from a broader perspective. Not at all trying to minimize any of the harm that we just detailed, but Trump isn't the only thing in the world that causes harm to marginalized people or to people in general. So maybe put it this way, Jonathan: would a second Trump term be the apocalypse?
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] No.
Sy Hoekstra: Why not Jonathan?
- Laat meer zien
