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Let’s Talk About: Is Christianity Good?

What happens when you stop being able to balance Christianity’s ledger? When “But the church built hospitals” no longer cancels out the crime of residential schools, the crusades, or the doctrine of discovery? In this episode I sit down with my good friend Danielle Steenwyk-Rowaan, who leads Open Homes Hamilton, a multi-church network that welcomes refugee claimants into spare rooms in family homes. We talk honestly about deconstruction, the moment Danielle realized that domination isn’t an aberration in Christian history but a pattern, and why she stopped trying to decide whether Christianity is “net good or net bad.” We get into the ethos of domination, the thing that white Western Christians swim in without noticing, the crusader fantasy behind the “Deus Vult” tattoo, why Canadians don’t get to feel superior to Americans, and the question that won’t leave me alone: Christians have always emphasized Jesus’ identity – but what was his actual method for change? Danielle’s answer runs through radical hospitality: eating with the wrong people, bringing the margins to the centre, and welcoming the stranger into your own house. If you’re carrying the weight of church history and wondering what’s left to hold onto, this conversation is something of a life raft. 

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Why I'm done trying to balance the ledger of church history. No more finding a good deed to neutralize every atrocity
• Danielle's story: doing denominational justice work, and how everything hit a wall during Trump’s 2016 election
• Aberrations or a pattern? Residential schools, colonization, and the thread that runs all the way back
• The birth of Open Homes Hamilton: Haitian refugee claimants at the border and a coffee-shop idea that became a life raft for a meaningful faith
• The Christian penchant for "making the other like us": conversion, crusade, and the doctrine of discovery as one project
• And why are white people so lame? Cringe, aloofness, and what domination does to a culture
• Deus Vult: the crusader tattoo and white Christian masculinity's knight fantasy
• The Canadian “Angel Complex”: America might be in chaos, but Canadians don't get off easy
• Domination's fragility: why the powerful are so easily triggered
• Proximity as our teacher: what nine months in West Africa revealed to Danielle about the iceberg under every culture
• "The way of Jesus" vs. Christianity-the-system
• Jesus’s method for change
• Eating with the wrong people: Matthew 25 and hospitality as Jesus’s other way of flipping tables
• Glimpses of God as gift, not threat: a Sudanese Muslim friend's experience of the divine

Calls-to-action:

• Learn more about Open Homes Hamilton and get involved
• Follow Freestyle Theology on Instagram: @freestyletheology
• Got Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Click the link at the top of the description to send me a message directly!