Shake the Dust

We’re sad to announce that KTF Press is closing down, and this will be our last episode of Shake the Dust. But both of us will continue to do work in different places. In this conversation, we cover:

- Why KTF is closing

- What will happen to our newsletters, articles, podcasts, and books

- What we’re both doing next

- What the experience of running KTF has been like for us

- What we want to leave listeners with

- And a benediction

Where you can see some of our upcoming work:

- Jonathan’s new book that you can preorder now! Beauty and Resistance: Spiritual Rhythms for Formation and Repair

- Jonathan’s new Substack, The Crux

- Sy’s new website for his freelance work

Credits

- Follow Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.

- Follow 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 Sy.

- Production by Sy and our incredible subscribers

The transcript for this episode was autogenerated by Substack and may contain errors

On this month’s bonus episode, Jonathan and Sy talk about our political system from a practical and theological view:

- What we can accomplish using America’s political system

- The limits of what political action can do

- Given those powers and limits, how Christians should approach politics

- And, in Which Tab Is Still Open, boycotting as a spiritual practice

Mentioned on the Episode:

- Pastor Erina Kim-Eubanks on boycotting as a Lenten practice

- Malcolm Foley’s book The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money Is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way Forward

- Aja Barber’s book, Consumed: the Need for Collective Change

- The Vox podcast episode with Barber, and its transcript

Credits

- 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 Sy.

- Production by Sy and our incredible subscribers

The transcript for this episode was autogenerated by Substack and may contain errors

On this month’s bonus episode, Jonathan and Sy discuss:

- What exactly the Trump administration does to distract the media and the general population so it can achieve its goals

- How it uses the erasure of experiences from outside MAGA world to demean and suppress opposition

- What we can do to resist Trump’s agenda in light of these tactics

- And, in Which Tab Is Still Open, making sure immigrants know their rights when dealing with ICE, and preparing for those encounters ahead of time

Mentioned on the Episode:

- Ezra Klein’s op-ed, “Don’t Believe Him.”

- Professor Austin Kocher’s post about knowing your rights when encountering ICE

- “Know your rights” distributable cards for immigrants in English

- The same card in Spanish

- The feelings wheel skill sheet to help kids work through hard conversations

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 Sy.

- Production by Sy and our incredible subscribers

The transcript for this episode was autogenerated by Substack and may contain errors

On this month’s bonus episode, Jonathan and Sy are talking political education in this new era of traditional and social media bowing to Trump and the MAGA movement. We get into:

- The beliefs about free speech behind the changes at Meta that Mark Zuckerberg recently announced

- How our understanding of healthy discourse differs from those beliefs

- And tips for staying politically educated in this new environment

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.

- Editing by Sy.

- Production by Sy 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.”]

Sy Hoekstra: The moderation isn't really a problem, it's sort of the greed behind the companies. Like, the people who have realized, “Oh, I can make a ton of money by making people super angry [laughs]. And I don't care what that does to our public discourse, because it makes me money.” That's the real problem to me. It's not actually the fact that somebody has said, “I will not let people say anti-Semitic things on my platform. “

[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: Hello, hello, everybody. This is Sy. Jonathan and I are still recording these monthly bonus episodes on Substack live. Thank you if you were able to join us for the live recording this time around. I'm just here to tell you that the recording cut off the very, very beginning of what I said when we started. So if I just dropped you in, it wouldn't make any sense. What I'm gonna do is seamlessly transition us from this to the live recording. Now ready? Here we go. Welcome to this bonus episode of Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. [transition to live recording] I'm Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Welcome again to this bonus episode recorded live on Substack. Thank you to everyone who is joining and watching right now and watching later, and again, thanks for being a subscriber to this podcast. We appreciate you.

Sy Hoekstra: We are going to be talking today, as the headline says, about how to be politically educated, how to keep yourself politically educated in this new era of Trump. And not just Trump, but also both legacy and social media platforms, kind of bowing the knee to him and doing his bidding [laughs]. Political education has always been central to what we talk about at KTF Press, and our reasons for doing it and what we’re trying to accomplish haven't changed, but the way that you go about doing it is actually starting to change in significant ways. So we thought we would take some time to talk about kind of the reasons behind the changes that are happening in the media and how that means we need to be paying attention going forward in order to remain people who are informed and who can be helpful and who can serve the kingdom of God in our politics.

So we're kind of merging the whole show together. Normally, we have our conversation and then we do separately the Which Tab Is Still Open, which is where we have a segment where we talk about diving deeper into one of the things from our newsletter, one of the highlights that one of us brought out from the news in our newsletter. When we were talking about this conversation, I was like, “I wanna talk about the Meta stuff and Mark Zuckerberg and those announcements that he made.” And as we had the conversation, we sort of realized that's actually the whole episode [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, exactly.

Sy Hoekstra: We're doing a whole episode of Which Tab Is Still Open. I will explain those of you who don't know, give a brief summary of what it is that Mark Zuckerberg said exactly last week, and then we will get into the meat of the conversation. And then we'll be talking about how to find trustworthy sources and how to better understand the political and news climate that we are in in this new Trump era. So this is gonna be a really good conversation. I'm sure you’ll all enjoy it. Jonathan, though, before we get started, it's your turn to talk [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Well, if you're listening to this live, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting this work so we can do more of it. If you become a paid subscriber, you'll get access to this video, audio and all of our live and bonus episodes from like [laughs] the last four years. You also get access to archives of everything that we've done, our Zoom calls as well. So please, please, do become a paid subscriber. You'll also get the ability to comment and interact with us more, and you'll be supporting everything that we're doing as we push for just political discipleship and education and leave behind the idols of the American church. Welcome to all y'all who just signed on.

For everybody, if you do like Shake the Dust, definitely go to Apple, Spotify, give a great review. That helps people discover the show and lets us know that y'all appreciate what we're doing, and we are so excited to jump into this conversation today. Go for it, Sy.

Sy Hoekstra: All right, let me get us caught up. And for the people who are live, feel free to comment or question in the chat at any point, and Jonathan will be monitoring that. We will incorporate that into our discussion. And join us live, by the way, if you wanna have that opportunity, if you're listening later. So like I said, what I'm gonna do is explain just the brief bullet points of everything that Mark Zuckerberg said in his reel last week [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And all of the changes that are happening at Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram and Threads.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And then we will get into the conversation about it after I go into that. Like I said, Which Tab Is Still Open right at the top of the show. So here are the announcements that he made, and they're all about content moderation and filtering content and everything on Facebook and Instagram and Threads. So the first thing, he has six announcements. I'll go through them really quickly. One is they are ending their fact checking program [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: They are completely getting rid of all of their mostly third party fact checkers and replacing them with community notes like they have on Twitter, meaning users will be doing the fact checking and trying to post notes to correct disinformation on Facebook, instead of having professional fact checkers doing that. He will be limiting moderation on certain subjects. He specifically mentioned immigration and gender. People who have subsequently reported about the policy changes have said there are also things about race and some other subjects that will not be moderated. And this is like basically saying that censorship on those subjects is out of touch with mainstream discourse now.

All of this he made pretty clear, was revolving around Trump's election. They're gonna be focusing their content filters, like their automatic, not the actual people doing the fact checking or the humans doing the moderation, but the robo content filters [laughs] on illegal content and high severity violations, as he described them. So that's stuff like drugs and terrorism and child exploitation, that sort of thing. And then anything that is not on those subjects, in order for the filters to act in any way, people will have to affirmatively report them. The filters won't act preemptively. They're gonna bring back what they call civic content, which is like their political content.

They had been, as a lot of you probably know, sort of hiding it. You had to go into your settings and say that you specifically wanted to see it to get it in your feed. So they're taking away that filter, that'll be back in your feed. And then the [laughs], there's two more. One is the safety and content moderation teams. They are moving to Texas, where they're, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, “where there will be less concerns about their biases.” They are currently in California, so that tells you which biases [laughs] he cares about and which he doesn't. Also, by the way, other reporters have said a lot of their content, there's some of their content moderation teams are already in Texas, but…

Jonathan Walton: It's true.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It’s a hand wave, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Exactly. The rest of them will be moving to Texas.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And then finally, he said he'll be working with Trump and the US government to push back on governments, he specially named Europe, Latin America and China, who want Facebook to be doing more moderation and content filtering, which he always refers to as censorship, to push back against them, combined with the power of the American federal government. Specifically noting that over the last four years, it has been difficult, because the American government was asking for more censorship.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And all of this he justifies under kind of a heading of giving people a voice and allowing people to share their real experiences and free speech. He mentions the constitution and just our culture of free speech and discourse. Those are kind of the, I don't know, bigger ideological points that he gives behind it. I will just note before we start, this is very similar to the moves that Twitter has made and, important for us, this is similar to what Substack has been the whole time. Substack has been a non-moderation, almost entirely unmoderated platform for a very long time. They only moderate material that is either illegal in some way or pornographic. They have pretty much let everything else be, which has caused some controversy.

So we will get into it, Jonathan. As I said, anybody can comment or ask questions as we go. But Jonathan, before we jump into what we think good political education is in the midst of changes, like what's happening at Meta, I wanna talk a little bit about kind of the ideology, the world view behind this, what the politics and economics behind this way of thinking are, because that will inform how we think that you move forward. So tell us what you think about what the world view is, what the ideology is behind these sorts of changes, and how does yours differ from that worldview [laughter]? Because spoilers, it does differ.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I've got a significant amount of disagreement with all of this.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Lots of dissonance that I feel around it. And there's a meme that someone put out really, there's amazing art happening right now around the different things that are happening in culture, particularly around war, injustice, violence, et cetera. So if you're not following amazing artists on Instagram or, we’ll dive into how to use social media a little bit more later, but find some great art, find some great photos, find some things. And I found one that basically showed Trump sitting on a throne with a stream of visibly cartoonish but totally recognizable CEOs dropping million dollar coins at his feet to signify the reality that there are many, many CEOs right now, basically tithing a million dollars paying tribute to our new leader.

And I think that is what we need to hold as the reality, is that all of this is subservient to the reality that these CEOs are trying to make as much money as possible and to protect the empires that they're building, and there is no larger framework of engaging in a social good. The reality is wherever the wind blows that's going to be the most profitable for their company, that is where they're going. And I think this is signified by how Morning Brew Daily, one of the most popular podcasts on the planet, talks about how Elon Musk invested money in the election. That was how they framed it.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: He “invested” $227 million in Trump becoming president. We should not call election manipulation and subversion of democracy an investment. But I think that's exactly how the powers that be see and engage with our current political system downstream of Citizens United in 2010 and all that kind of stuff. So I think we have to remember that we sit on stolen land that’s set up in an exploitative, capitalistic system, and the moves that are being made are to protect the accumulation and the unbridled accumulation of that capital. And I think pretty explicitly now and enshrined into law, like with Citizens United, is this political and economic marrying which has ballooned into just all kinds of campaign finance violations that are no longer violations, and secret organizations and all those kinds of things that I wish were different, but am recognizing, praying and working against so that they actually will be.

Sy Hoekstra: It's interesting to me that you mentioned those things in particular, because as we have said with Donald Trump in so many other arenas, he is not particularly unique in… like everybody always donates to presidents’ inaugurations. Companies have always donated money to senatorial campaigns or to whatever.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: That's not new. The idea that your whole goal of your company is to maximize wealth for your shareholders is not new. It's just as usual with everything else. Trump magnifies things and puts them out in the open, not just him, but the whole culture around him, puts them out in the open in a way that they weren't before. And that's the chief thing that surprises people about him a lot is just how brazen he is.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: But, yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think the things, part of what we're maybe uncovering there is the things that change in how you politically educate yourself are not about radically new ideas that are coming down the pike. They're just about things crystallizing and elevating in a new way, and that's why we have to change. But, yeah, you're right. It's a cohesive thing. It makes sense with how we've had 40 years or so of sort of Republican orthodoxy being the purpose of a corporation is primarily to maximize shareholder value, maximize the value for people who own the company, and then that will in turn, be in the best interest of society, which is sort of an article of faith, that those interests will be aligned, that it is useful for people [laughs] who want to make a lot of money to propagate that faith.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, go ahead.

Jonathan Walton: No, I was gonna say, how about you? What are some of the things standing out for you as we engage?

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, there’s so much, Jonathan. There's too much.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: I have so many things written down [laughter]. So I will pause and allow you to talk as I go through this.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: So I think you're right in what you're talking about is the motivations behind what CEOs are doing, but more broadly, the reason that things like what Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or other people are saying about their social media platforms, there's ideologies that justify those things in the minds of people who aren't making money off of them [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And one of those values or one of those, I don't know, it's a phrase, it's an idea that a lot of people have, is the marketplace of ideas. So this is a big part of our, quote- unquote, First Amendment or free speech culture in America. It's the idea that if you just put all your ideas out there in the world and all the justifications for them, the best ones will win out. Like products. You have a bunch of companies competing selling similar products. People are gonna buy the products that are the best at the best price, and the other ones will not do as well as whoever manages to provide the best product at the best price. It's the same. It is the marketplace of ideas.

You provide the best ideas with the best justifications, you get them out there, they will beat all the other worse ideas, and the good ideas will dominate society. And so I say that that's important because that's kind of the reason that people say so there should be no moderation.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Nobody should be blocking anybody's content, because actually, the way to defeat ideas is by presenting better ideas, not by destroying them or censoring or moderating them. Now I'm not in favor of censorship [laughter]. I'm not in favor of shutting people down in oppressive, authoritarian regimes. I just think the notion that better ideas, if they're put out there, will just automatically be bad ones is absurd [laughter]. And that bad ideas can be propagated through things like money and advertising and political power and whatever. You can do things short of all out censorship and oppression that are bad for our civic discourse [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: That is a thing that I firmly believe. It is not that there's one bad guy of censorship, and as long as we defeat that, then everything will be, all the conditions will be perfect for beautiful, productive public discourse [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And I think part of the problem is that the idea, doesn't really account for either emotions or power dynamics

.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So It kind of stems from a belief, kind of like our beliefs that everybody in the free market just makes perfectly rationally, self interested decisions all the time. It just doesn't account for culture and for emotions [laughs] and decisions that people make that are based on unprocessed or suppressed or repressed emotions, whatever. People are just rational beings that only make good, calculated, computer-like decisions. And so that's just kind of like one fact that it has wrong about the world, but the reality of power dynamics is like, makes what Zuckerberg is doing baffling, if you take them seriously.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Because it's basically the idea is, I'm gonna get out there and be able to say what I want. Because effectively, what he's doing is allowing people to say bigoted things again. That is the primary change he's making to content moderation. He's letting people say transphobic things. He's letting people say discriminatory things about immigrants. He's letting people insult people because of their race again, all those things will not be moderated any longer.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And he says that that is giving people a voice and allowing people to share their experiences. That's one of the weirdest things to me. Like your experience is bigotry [laughter]? “I have to be able to share my experience, which is that I hate this group of people.” It’s wild.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: But it does not take into account the fact that people are going to walk away from the conversation, because this is present. If you just let everybody talk, there's gonna be a bunch of trolls. And if a bunch of those trolls gather in one place, then the people who they're trolling are going to leave that place and you're not gonna have a good discussion anymore. You're gonna have a bunch of trolls. So it’s like… I don't know. I feel like it's something that may be hard to believe when you haven't been on the receiving end of a lot of it, which Zuckerberg has, he faces a lot of anti-Semitism, but he's basically expecting everyone to just be like, their reaction to be, “Oh, Facebook has a bunch of horrifying racist trolls who can say whatever they want,” which on the internet is like truly vile stuff, “And I need to go in there and fight them,” [laughs]!

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: “I'm gonna take my time, my limited time and my limited energy, and I'm gonna go out there and beat them in the marketplace of ideas, and we'll get good information, good ideas out there on Facebook.” Facebook is gonna become like what Twitter has become. It's gonna become overrun by trolls and bots and whatever, and it's gonna be a much less pleasant place to be. It's gonna be a place that people don't want to be. And even when Twitter had a lot more benefit to it than it does now, a lot of people didn't wanna be on there either. People were constantly complaining about [laughs] how miserable it was, how angry and hateful and just like not helpful people were being there.

So anyways, all this part of the problem stems from the idea that there's just a big old marketplace of ideas that we can engage in perfectly rationally without any power dynamics [laughs]. Your thoughts before I move on to my many other thoughts [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Well, no, I mean, I think the reality is we live in a world that exists for… man, how do I say this?

Sy Hoekstra: The benefit of certain people?

Jonathan Walton: I didn't wanna say it so simply, but yes [laughter]. The world that we live in exists for the benefit of some. And again, I mean, I've talked about this many, many times. But if we think about the world that we live in as a large plantation, then things make sense.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: The goal is that a certain group of people gets to decide how things go, and then there's another group of people who gets to implement how those things go so they're not suffering. And then there's the folks that are just experiencing this. And the thing that I think is an exceptional level of hypocrisy, is that if the bottom, quote- unquote, decides to fight, they need to fight in the way that the people at the top have determined that that fight should take place, and so that fight right now is community notes. Whereas like when Elon Musk changed Twitter to X and then literally told ad companies to go F themselves, and with emphasis, that to me looks like someone who has embraced the reality of the power that they've been given and are now going to use it in a way explicitly to name what the person downstream of them cannot change or challenge.

Similar to Trump. Trump said when he was on the debate stage with Hillary Clinton years ago, he said, “I gave you money. Nobody wants to talk about that. I gave you money, I gave you money, I gave you money.” He's saying the quiet part out loud. And so he's using the tools of the game and redefining the game, but the people who don't have power cannot change the rules of the game, and when they play, the rules are changed around them. And so I think that height of hypocrisy that is not invisible is the problem, because we… I mean, the system itself is a problem, but the reality that on the one hand I can say, “Hey friend, I'm a CEO and I run a business, and we are struggling, so we can't give you your bonuses this year. We can't pay you a living wage. We can't do that.”

And then in the next article, on a different podcast, say, “Friends, we've got record profits.” So this is a problem [laughter]. And you can't say, oh, on the one hand, “We are struggling,” and on the other hand, “I just bought a $300 million yacht.” On the one hand, “We can't pay you living wages,” but on the other hand, “We're gonna do historic buybacks for our stocks and give dividends back to…” I think before, it was harder for us to see, but now in the media environment that we have, the hypocrisy is on display, and now you're saying, “Hey, don't look at the trees, even though these are all sequoias. Don't look at them, though.” And that I think is a is a exceptional struggle in the current moment that we're in.

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, do you really think there is a yacht out there that costs $300 million?

Jonathan Walton: I know that there are.

Sy Hoekstra: No, there can't possibly. That's not possible.

Jonathan Walton: No. I think Bezos’ yacht was a half a billion dollars. I'm not joking.

Sy Hoekstra: That's… what [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: So all of this, when I was a real estate agent, the difference between price and cost. And these are ways that people have chosen to hide their money. Like, “I'm gonna have this investment, I'm gonna have this thing,” and yachts are part of that milieu right now [laughter]. So, yeah. Somebody in the chat can Google it and drop in the chat.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I was gonna say I’m gonna look this up later. I’m open to the possibility that you're correct, but I currently don't believe you [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No worries. I remember clicking on those things, but anyway, go for it. We don't have to talk about yachts, it’s kind of…

Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no. This is definitely a rabbit trail. Okay, so another thing for me, it's kind of two things that go together that are behind the Zuckerberg announcement. He mentioned a couple times the Constitution and the First Amendment. A thing that I want to tell people as a former lawyer who has actually worked on some First Amendment cases and stuff like that. The actions of Meta and any private company in the world have nothing to do with the First Amendment whatsoever [laughter]. This is something that everybody needs to learn. It's like a basic civics thing that the First Amendment is about what the government does. It is not about what private not about what private companies do.

Legally speaking, the Constitution does not enter into this at all. Facebook could decide tomorrow that it is going to ban all Democrats and only Republicans will be allowed on its platform, and nobody would have a First Amendment claim against them [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Because it doesn't matter, they're not the government. Of course, they have a massive effect on our discourse, and our political conversation in America, but the First Amendment is not concerned with any effect on our political discourse. It's only concerned with the government. That's one thing. Another thing is like the culture... So the more generous way to think about, maybe he said the Constitution as a slip. People sometimes talk about the First Amendment, and what they're actually talking about is our general culture of free speech, our general civic discussion. And the belief that Zuckerberg seems to have is that his censorship of whatever, people being angry about immigration harms that culture, like hurts the general culture of free speech in America.

And the sort of ironic thing is, one of the things that the First Amendment actually does also protect is a private company's right to discriminate, meaning their right to decide to only publish things of a certain point of view. The way that you get Fox News or the way that you get MSNBC, with their biases, they're only hiring people who have their same biases, is that they are allowed to specifically by First Amendment law [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: They're allowed to make those discriminatory choices as private entities that the government could not make, and that allows people to have news sources that come from their own perspectives. And we've always had those things, and I don't think that's bad. I think it's fine to have, like you have conversations with the people that you agree with, and you have conversations with the people that you don't and you need to balance those things out. The problem is actually things like Facebook's algorithm [laughs] that create echo chambers and create like heightened, there's always been echo chambers, heightened echo chambers, and make us angered and outraged all the time. So it's not actually the… the moderation isn't really a problem. It's sort of the greed behind the companies.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: The people who have realized, “Oh, I can make a ton of money by making people super angry.” [laughs] And I don't care what that does to our public discourse, because it makes me money.” That's the problem.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And I'm not suggesting we nationalize all of our news or whatever. This is just a problem that we have to constantly be pushing against. And obviously, money and business also creates opportunities for there to be great investigatory journalism and stuff that we need and whatever. I apologize for the sirens in my background, I'm in Manhattan. But I'm not saying, stop private companies forever owning whatever. I'm talking about the culture of greed that has sprung up in our economy, and has sprung up specifically in our news that leads people to purchase…Rupert Murdoch has been a big problem [laughs] over the decades. People that are trying to make financial empires off of making as much money as possible from media, from specifically our news media, from the media that affects this culture.

That's the real problem to me. It's not actually the fact that somebody has said, “I will not let people say anti-Semitic things on my platform.” You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Obviously, the way I'm putting it makes that seem obvious, makes any other opinions seem silly. But I'm just saying that's a thought process that I think is also behind Meta’s decisions. How about you, Jonathan? Do you have anything else to say on that?

Jonathan Walton: Well, I think I'll get more into that when we talk about how to actually engage in political education. Because the reality is, the amount of money made off of outrage and distraction in entertainment is enormous. And it gets all thrown into the bucket of content, and that is a new thing that I think we need to engage with, as I also confirm that Jeff Bezos’ maiden voyage of his yacht, Koru, that was $500 million set off in April of 2023.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: But, yeah. I agree with you that outrage called engagement is an exceptionally profitable business that did not exist 20 years ago. But it's now in fervent, an enormous fervor in our current reality. So, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I think it existed, but it was a lot harder to do.

Jonathan Walton: That’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: It was harder to make it as focused and effective as it is now without all the data that you get from being on the internet. Just from having a website or a social media company that allows you [laughs] to more precisely target your outrage [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: It's serious. That's the issue there. I'm gonna say, I think there's also some amount, not a ton, or not as much, but there's some amount of blame to the consumers.

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Those of us who opt into it, I don't wanna put all the blame on us, meaning I don't wanna put all the blame on just like the readers of the news or whatever for falling for the click bait or falling for the outrage machine or the echo chambers, because these massive companies that have a ton of money have studied in enormously fine detail how to manipulate your behavior [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Well, it's…

Sy Hoekstra: The thing that you're trying to resist is much bigger than you, but also, there's a culture around how we consume media, and that has also gotten more clickbait-y and angry and all that kind of thing.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I don't know where the line between… I don't know if you can blame oil for going into a funnel.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: I don't know if you can blame the oil, because I do think there's a level of impossibility that exists. And we could apply this to any number of injustices. But if I am an activist in the United States, and I have to buy a phone to communicate, I am participating in an injustice that I want to stop. And that I think is the quote- unquote, the tensions we're always trying to negotiate and quote- unquote consumers, right? That term coming out of post-World War Two, in the Neo Liberalist economics, that now we're all consumers, that I think does two things. One, it frames us as consumers, and literally turns most people, experiences, resources, things around us, into things to be consumed, not stewarded, taken care of, not extended a life of, then you get planned obsolescence and all of those kinds of things.

And so I do think there's a level of accountability for us. I just don't know where us being the folks that are literally trying to eat every day and buy things and communicate, I don't know where that line of complicity versus like, man, it's impossible to be a guy that begins and ends in our just saturated, dominated culture.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, it's hard.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, I think that was a good thought to end that part of the discussion. What do you think, should we move on? Okay.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, let's do it.

Sy Hoekstra: So let's talk about how we actually stay politically educated, which is more than just like informed.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And being informed is part of it, but we're actually talking about how you might kind of form yourself as someone who is trying to be a faithful person engaging in politics, even faithful Christian, faithful citizen, whatever.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Faithful neighbor. And to be a little bit broader than Meta, we're also talking about that in the context of the legacy media companies like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, who are increasingly doing whatever Trump wants. So Jonathan, tips for being well politically educated in this new but also, as we've discussed, connected to the old environment [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I would say there's a few things that I think are consistent, but look different in the context that we're in right now, in our current day. And so I think the first thing is, most of us consume media, and I say consume intentionally. We're not processing it, it's just coming at us. We do it individually. And so the first thing that I would say is please, have conversations with people about what you're watching and reading. Most of us don't recognize that we're in rabbit holes, that we're in echo chambers, that we're in cultural bubbles. We don't usually for the most part, willingly opt in, decide to stay, then amplify and then radicalize. It's not usually a road we're all trying to get on.

And so I think we should have conversations with folks about the content we're engaging with, and then up from there, I think we need to start to identify the content that's coming at us, because it's not all the same.

Sy Hoekstra: Hey, can I say one thing about the community thing before we move on to another thing?

Jonathan Walton: For sure. Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: So the community thing is both to get you out of your echo chamber, and you can have other people, I don't know, fact check you kind of, but it's also that will help you get… not just out of your echo chamber. That will educate you more generally about how people think about things. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Right, right.

Sy Hoekstra: You can read a bunch of things, some people are good at this. You can read a bunch of things from a different perspective of your own, and you can kind of get the general thoughts and patterns behind it. But it's so much easier to do when you're actually interacting with people.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So I just think that it'll round you out, and you will round other people out in a way that's beneficial for everyone.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely.

Sy Hoekstra: But, please continue. Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: No, and we talked about this offline, but me saying, “Hey, Priscilla,” my wife, “This and this, this happened,” and she goes, “Why do you believe that?” Just that little question is helpful for me to be like, “Well, crap. Why do I believe that?”

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: That actually might be a little ridiculous, that I made these 19 connections and now I'm running all around, even if it's just inside my own head, with an idea that could actualize itself into something really unhelpful.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: So up from that, I think we need to slow down and analyze the content that's coming at us, because in your Instagram feed, or in your whatever Meta platform, like I've seen my platform change already with what's on my Instagram feed.

Sy Hoekstra: How so?

Jonathan Walton: Oh, they're trying to make me angry and engage.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: I can see it. And they're either trying to get me angry or entice me. So there's more women in my feed. I don't wanna make comments on the looks of celebrities, but that's what's coming up. So I have to… I've been clicking not interested, not interested [laughs] trying to get out of that. But that was a discernible change. I love MMA and Muay Thai and things like that, and so I think they're trying to pull me somewhere I'm not interested in going. But all that to say…

Sy Hoekstra: You mean they're like, “Oh, this guy likes MMA, so he must also like hot celebrities?”

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, because they are in the same photos, like the fights and they're in the background, stuff like that. So I'm like, “Oh, I don't wanna see that.”

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, makes sense.

Jonathan Walton: But in that same feed I might see the latest update from a fight, or I might see a video about race that's very educational. Then I have an ad from Temu, then I have political commentary, and it's branded all as content. But the reality is, some of that is news, some of that is entertainment, some of that is analysis.

Sy Hoekstra: Some is advertisement.

Jonathan Walton: Some of its advertising. And I think we have to slow down and stop swiping so quickly to understand what is coming at us each day, what we're actually looking at. And so one of the things that I try to do is, even in click not interested, is that to turn my social media feed from a dumpster fire to a garden.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Like, how can I tend this in such a way that it helps me grow up into the person I wanna be, not just the person that they're trying to form me into. And so as we're taking media in, please, please, please stop. Please stop watching short form content. It's conditioning. I'm conditioned, my attention span is shorter, and stuff is hard. It's hard to understand capitalism. It's hard to understand political frameworks.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: These are difficult concepts that can’t be explained in a reel. They just can't. And so I think, for all of the things that we're consuming and taking in, I do think the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart is an amazing tool to go back to just recognize, “Oh, all of the things I'm consuming right now are coming at me are not being processed. So the stuff that I'm consuming, oh, it's actually all opinion. I haven't learned what happened. I've only learned what people think about what happens.” So I've seen fires burning in California, but I actually don't know why the fires are burning. I actually don't know the background of water usage and families meeting with representatives to get water to flow to their pistachio and pomegranate farm. I didn't know that. I didn't know water is being rerouted this way.

And even Frontline just released a documentary on the Maui fires and how that happened. There's like, Inside Climate News just released a report on climate change and trauma. So there's things that we can engage with that are much longer than a swipe up or down that will help us not to become radicalized, because radicalization in any direction is radically unhelpful. Because when we are radicalized we don't listen, we’re unwilling to grow. And then what happens is everything goes through the filter of our own hard thinking, which I think we just need to get out of.

Sy Hoekstra: Wait Jonathan, when you say radicalism or radicalizing, do you mean extremism?

Jonathan Walton: Oh, you know what, I do mean extremism.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I was gonna say, I think Jonathan is actually kind of in favor of certain types of radicalism [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, people would call me radical. I think we should love people no matter what, which is a radical thing. Every single person is made in the image of God and worthy of dignity, value and worth, all of that. That's a radical thought. I do believe that.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: So maybe let's replace that with extremism.

Sy Hoekstra: I have a couple thoughts on this too, if you don’t mind.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, go for it.

Sy Hoekstra: In favor of slowing down and, basically, you're kind of talking about checking your sources a little bit, or checking your facts, or whatever's behind the opinion.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: That's important. And as I've said before, if you take a not very long amount of time [laughter] to go and read some of the actual facts, and ask yourself, what is different between what I'm reading here and what the opinion columnist said or what the person said on social media, you can be very quickly, miles ahead of the average person [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: A lot of people just don't know the facts. You learn a few more things and you are going to be able to help a lot of people out of misinformed takes about things.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And the other thing about slowing down, and here's my plug for the fediverse, for Mastodon [laughs], is that you can dislike things on Instagram while you want, you still have your algorithm. You can make lists on Twitter, Bluesky or whatever, and that'll help, you can only look at the things that you wanna see and not the “for you” tab or whatever. On Mastodon all you ever see is the things that you've affirmatively followed. There's no algorithm, there's no company trying to manipulate you at all [laughs]. It's all nonprofit, it's wonderful. I've been only on Mastodon for a while, like it’s my personal social media, and the past couple weeks I felt very vindicated [laughter] in that decision.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: But go on, before we get to mine, you had a couple more tips here.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, the last thing was, become familiar with the other ways other people are educated.

Sy Hoekstra: Right.

Jonathan Walton: So just ask, “Hey, what are you reading?” in your friend group, in your family. Say, “Hey, who do you follow on Instagram, or Bluesky or Mastodon? Who do you read on LinkedIn? What documentaries are you watching?” I think just moving politics, money, race, class, gender, status, religion, out of this box of untouchable topics into just a normal communal conversation will help us. I was having a conversation a few days ago with someone about a racist incident I had in my neighborhood. And they looked at me and they said, “What? Like that still happens.” And I was like, “Ah, yeah, racism’s still a thing.” Or we had a conversation, and they were like, “Your daughter would experience that?”

I'm like, “Yeah.” He's like, “You believe your daughter will experience racism?” I'm like, “I do, and she does.” But we don't talk regularly, and maybe his friend group doesn't have these conversations or engage in this way. So just having normal conversations where we're bringing up all those topics in a curious way, not a judgmental, not a corrective, but saying like, “Hey, what do you watch? What are you reading?” With a posture of curiosity to connect with someone, not an explicit posture to just correct them so that they're looking at the same things you are. We actually, I think, just have to talk with people about what they're engaging with, what they're reading, and how they're living their lives, and whether it is genuine.

Sy Hoekstra: And for a whole lot more detail on that particular tip, you can go to our last podcast episode [laughter]. witch was more or less all about that.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. How do you talk to people?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly. How do you have difficult conversations across differences on important subjects?

Jonathan Walton: You have more tips, Sy? Go for it.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I do. I do have more. Here's my first one. My first one has to do with the thing that I hear all the time, which is people saying, “I cannot believe how somebody thinks X. I cannot believe how somebody does whatever.” And a lot of times people are saying that they mean something genuine. They're just shocked, or they're just surprised, or whatever. There are reasonable ways to say that. A lot of times, though, when people say that, what they mean is, “I am stunned at what a bad person this is. And I'm also kind of talking about how I'm better than them,” [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I’m guilty as charged.

Sy Hoekstra: Well, I think all of us are probably guilty of that to a certain degree.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: But here's the thing that I want people to cultivate. Which is when you have the thought, “I cannot understand how somebody believes that,” go understand it [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Go find out. Which is, obviously it's related to what Jonathan just said, but what I mean is, assume that the person who is saying those things, in order to be able to understand how other people are being educated, you have to assume that they're a human.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: You have to assume that they have reasons, good or bad, that are similar in, maybe not in content, but they are similar in kind to the reasons that you have for believing the stuff that you do.

Jonathan Walton: Right. Exactly.

Sy Hoekstra: And if you were in their position, you would probably believe similar things to them. And so that is just a big part of it is. I'm always amazed at how many arguments get dismissed, and then the dismissal itself, an implication of the dismissal is that the other person is basically not human. Is basically just not somebody who has any sort of valid belief, just constantly. And not just on social media, everywhere in our political discourse, in a way that makes me honestly pretty sad, even if I do actually think the thing that the other person was saying is objectively ridiculous [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So another thing that we talk about all the time is listening to marginalized people. But there's a thing that I wanna add on to that. So the thing that we usually say is, we wanna listen to, the thing that I have said a lot on the show is we wanna listen to marginalized people because they actually understand the systems that marginalize them better than the people who the systems are built for.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan was talking about the systems that we have. They're built for somebody. Part of that, part of making a system for someone is finding ways to hide the fact that the system is being made for that person.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: It's unbelievable to us now, or to a lot of people now, but the system of slavery had a whole bunch of reasons behind it that White people actually believed and thought it was a it was good, it was a good thing. And the good thing that they had all those reasons that function to keep them from ever thinking about the horrors. So I think you have to listen to marginalized people, but you actually, the thing that I wanna add on is you have to understand who those marginalized people are [laughs], which is a factual question. Meaning a lot of opinion polls have told us that more than half of White Republicans believe that, or it's Republicans period, believe that White people are the most oppressed racial group in America.

So if you believe that, then who are you going to listen to about issues of race? White people. And what are your going to be concerns? Your concerns are that White people are unfairly accused of racism and that White people are not being pushed out by these unfair affirmative action DEI, whatever, “Most things threaten me, and I'm the vulnerable one, and therefore I need to fight back against that.”

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So you need to be clear about who's... And I just gave an example that to us and our listeners is like a very clear and straightforward one. But there are gonna be, I don't know. There are times where that's harder, and you need to understand that your difference, the difference between you and someone who's against affirmative action, is probably a question of fact, not a question of ideology.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: You probably both believe that racism is bad [laughs], you just completely disagree on who's the victim of racism.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And that's a thing like, that thing that I just said about, “I can't understand how people think this,” or whatever, it is sometimes, or the thing that somebody said to you about, “Do you really believe your daughter's gonna face racism?” Like that person who I think you, I don't know if you said it or not, but I'm assuming is White.

Jonathan Walton: No. This is a person of color.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, fascinating.

Jonathan Walton: That's a wrench there, but go ahead [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: There's a wrench, but it actually doesn't matter.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I know.

Sy Hoekstra: I was just making an assumption that was wrong.

Jonathan Walton: No worries.

Sy Hoekstra: Those beliefs, when you encounter them, it is genuinely hard to believe that they are true, and again, part of assuming that someone is a human might be saying, “Okay, what are the facts that this person has wrong?” [laughs] and not assuming, “Okay, why is this person so ridiculous and absurd? Let me make myself better than them.” Just saying, “What's wrong here?” And how they're being educated is part of that question, too. All these things tie together.

The last thing I wanna say, buck the norm in America of being anti-elite and anti-education [laughter]. Don't swing the other way on that pendulum, and don't be an elitist or someone who looks down on people who are uneducated, but you need to basically just don't have the bias.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Elites and people who are well educated are again humans [laughter]. Like we're all just humans, and they've had different experiences than you've had. They've been educated in something that you haven't, or they've been educated in a lot of things that you haven't. There's lots of people who have tons of expertise that I do not have, and my job is to figure out… There might be some bad ideas floating around in their field, there might be some bad perspectives that they represent, but there's also a whole lot of things they know that I don't. And you need to figure out ways to sort the bad from the good. We just need to treat people like nuanced human beings [laughter] instead of being anti-elitist and anti-…

Here's one thing that I have noticed, Jonathan, and you can correct me or add nuance or whatever. I grew up with a lot of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism being… honestly, just being White in America, but also being White evangelical in particular. That was just the culture around me. That wasn't my parents or my immediate family, but that was the culture around me.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Since getting to know Black Christians [laughs] or just Black people in general, I have found a remarkable lack of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism, and much more of an attitude of like, “Oh, someone from our community went and got an education. Great, what can we learn from them?”

Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: And there's just much less, I don't know, there's so much less of that, “What, you think you're better than me?” [laughter] that I grew up with, and so much more of an assumption that, “Oh, good. You got some information, you got some education, you learned about stuff.” And then an assumption that you're gonna come back and use that to help the community.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And that is just a big… I don't think I've ever said that out loud before, and I appreciate that you're [laughter] just listening to me just talk about your culture.

Jonathan Walton: No, I think that… I mean, there are streams of Black folks that don't do that.

Sy Hoekstra: For sure… because everybody is a human [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It's true. But I will say that the fewer resources that you have or are available to you, the more reliant on the community you are by necessity.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so this idea that… and you actually said this in, I think two podcasts ago, the idea that at some point you are supposed to be able to just take care of yourself, independent of every single person around you, is unbelievable in a lot of ways. And so Randy Woodley, first episode of our last season, talked about if we look at a culture of a people like that, and you can analyze it by the folk tales that they tell. And he said, Native Americans and First Nations indigenous people would never write a story about how someone left their whole family and then succeeded and created a life for themselves.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: They wouldn't do that. It's not their dream to do that. And so the reality is, for me, it's like, and I think this is most prevalent in immigrant communities. It's like, “You are going to college for all of us. You are going to get this job for all of us.” And that is the antithesis of what we were all talking about with Meta’s, with capitulation. It's like, they're like, “I made a business for me and for mine, I did not make one for everybody.” And then you laid out like, the law exists for this thing to work this way, not for everybody to have X, Y and Z. Like one of the, I feel like a stream throughout this conversation has been, are we going to exist for the benefit of the community, or are we going to exist for the benefit of a few people, or an individual?

And helpful to go back to Tim Keller if we wanna talk about trying not to be anti-elite, and trying not to be anti-education, one of the things that I appreciated about Tim Keller, which is why he was vilified by people on the right in conservative Christianity, is because he was unwilling to dehumanize people who made lots of money, and lived in New York City in that way. And when he wrote Generous Justice, like he said, when you go back to the Hebrew Scriptures, the definition of injustice is disadvantaging the community for the advantage of an individual. And the definition of justice is disadvantaging yourself for the advantage of the community. And he said, if you look back and forth, wickedness and justice stand on those two poles.

And so everything that you're saying, I think, is about how to… the last points you're making is, can we refuse to dehumanize people and refuse to participate in wickedness so that we might humanize people and humanize ourselves to be able to participate in an ecosystem and not a plantation?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so I hope that we're able to do that in a little bit in this...

Sy Hoekstra: Absolutely, that's part of why what we said is community is a big part of this. Community is inherently anti-authoritarian.

Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs]. It sounds so simple, but it’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Who knew that loving your neighbor as yourself might be an important commandment [laughter]? Who could have predicted such a thing? I think that's a great note to end on, Jonathan. Look at how well our outline matched our time that we had on Substack live [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: That's awesome.

Sy Hoekstra: We did it.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: We’ve gotten good at podcasting [laughter]. Alright, listen, there's two ways you can follow up with this conversation, is our last bonus episode, and then also the episode from earlier in this season with Matt Lumpkin which had a lot to do with getting…

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Matt Lumpkin’s great.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, it had a lot to do with getting curious and empathizing with people who believe wildly… It was specifically about people with who believe in conspiracy theories, and how people get in and out of them, Christians in particular.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: So that's a very helpful exercise in a lot of the stuff that we're talking about today.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and if you wanna check out our Anthology, like his essay is in there, along with a guy named Bart Tocci. It's just great essays to engage more deeply in long form reading, friends, not just videos.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Absolutely. Alright, so I think that's it then. I'll wrap us up. Reminder, if you're watching us here, please become a paid subscriber and get access to our bonus episodes, our monthly Zoom calls, commenting on our posts and more. Everybody give us a rate and review on Apple Podcasts. Give us a rating on Spotify.

Jonathan Walton: Thanks so much.

Sy Hoekstra: Anywhere else you can do a rating, we'd really appreciate it. Our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Joyce Ambale has done the transcripts, and our paid subscribers are the producers of this show. Thank you all so much for watching and for listening, and we will see you next month.

[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.]

In this month’s bonus episode, we talk all about why and how to have difficult conversations about important political subjects with people who disagree with you. We get into:

- What are goals are in these kinds of conversations

- Strategies for regulating our emotions and achieving those goals

- The power dynamics to keep in mind when having these conversations

- And afterward, our segment Which Tab Is Still Open?, diving into a fascinating conversation with Rev. William Barber about what Democrats could gain if they paid attention to poor voters

You can find the video of the portion of this episode that we recorded live at ktfpress.com.

Mentioned in the episode

- Disarming Leviathan by Caleb Campbell

- The Deeply Formed Life by Rich Villodas

- Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero

- When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert

- Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Shila Heen

- Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, and Ron McMillan

- John Blake’s interview with Rev. William Barber

Credits

- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

- 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 Sy Hoekstra

- 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.”]

Sy Hoekstra: Hey everyone, it's Sy. Quick note before we start. Stay tuned after this recording of our conversation, which we did on Substack Live because we recorded our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, separately due to some time constraints we had. Thanks so much for listening, and the episode officially starts now.

Jonathan Walton: If your relationship is broken by what you think about trans rights, then I think we need to examine what kind of relationship you had in the first place, because I think our relationships have to be much more than our opinions about the latest political topic of the day.

[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… [long pause] Jesus, confronting injustice. I am Jonathan Walton [laughter], and we’re live on Substack.

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan starts the live by forgetting our tagline [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: It’s true. It’s true. So welcome to Shake the Dust. My name is Jonathan. We are seeking justice, confronting injustice. See, this is live. Live is hard. Go for it, Sy.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Thank you for being here, Sy.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, sure. I'm Sy Hoekstra, that's Jonathan Walton.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: We're doing this live, if you couldn't tell. This is a live recording of our podcast. We are gonna ease into it, and then we'll be good. Don't worry.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: We're doing this live as a recording, and then we will be releasing the audio and the video later to our paid subscribers. So if you're listening, welcome. Alright, we are gonna be talking today about a subject that comes to us from a listener that came in as a question on our finale episode, but it came in a couple hours too late, and I missed it before we started recording. But it was such an interesting question that we decided to make a whole episode out of it. So thank you to Ashley, our listener, who sent this in. We will be talking about basically, how to regulate yourself and actually strategies you can employ when having difficult conversations with people you disagree with on important subjects, the power dynamics and everything all around it, and literally just how to do it, which is actually kind of something that a lot of people have been asking us.

Ashley comes at it from a really good angle that we'll be talking about too. So we'll get to all that in a moment. We will also be talking, as we usually do in our episodes, doing our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, diving a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. And this week, we will be talking about a really great interview with William Barber, the Reverend William Barber, and basically how poor people can but often don't affect elections because of the ways that the Republican and Democratic parties approach poor people. So we will get into all that in a second. I will apologize for my voice still sounding like I have a cold. It sounds like I have a cold because I have a cold, and [laughter] I have the eternal fall-winter, father of a two year old in daycare cold [laughs]. So bear with me, and I appreciate your patience. Before we get into all this, Jonathan Walton, go ahead.

Jonathan Walton: Well, if you are listening live, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for tuning in, and I just wanna encourage you to become a paid subscriber of our Substack. If you do that, you get access to video and audio of this conversation afterwards, you also get bonus episodes and our entire archive of bonus episodes as well. Plus, when you become a monthly paid subscriber, you also get access to our monthly Zoom chats, and you'll be able to comment on our posts, communicate with us on a regular basis. And so that would be great. Plus, you'll be supporting everything that we can do to help Christians confront injustice and follow Jesus. And so that's particularly in the areas of political discipleship and education, as we try to leave behind the idols of the American church. And for everybody, if you do listen to this, please go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you might listen, and give us a five-star rating. If you wanna give less than that, you can also but you can keep that to yourself.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Thank you so much for your support and encouragement. We really appreciate it.

Sy Hoekstra: Four stars and below, give us those ratings inside your head [laughter]. Also, if you have any questions and you are listening live, feel free to put them in the chat. We can answer those as we go. And alright, Jonathan, let's jump right into it.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: We got this question from Ashley. She comes at it from an interesting angle. I wanted to talk about the things that she doesn't wanna do, and then get into her questions. So she said, when she's talking about people that she disagrees with on important political or religious subjects, there's a couple of things that she did growing up. One of which was the only reason that you're engaging in these conversations as a conservative Evangelical, is to change people into you [laughs]. Is to win people over to your point of view and make them the same as you. That's your goal. Then she said she kind of grew up a little bit, went to college, became what she called it, an ungrounded liberal arts major [laughs] and started getting into what she described as the sort of millennial slash Gen Z cusp age that she is.

Just it being cool to shut people down and just defeat them, destroy them in an argument. So she’s just like, “I don't wanna be there just to make people into me. I don't wanna be there just to destroy people.” But she said now she finds herself in a position where most of the people around her largely agree with her on important subjects, and she just doesn't spend a lot of time around people who don't. So just kind of wants to know how to get into that, because she thinks it is important. She was saying some political organizers really convinced her that it is important to be doing that. And she just wants to know how you regulate yourself, how you go about it, and all that.

What’s the Goal When You’re Having Difficult Disagreements on Important Subjects?

Sy Hoekstra: And although that question was really interesting, and we're gonna jump into the actual strategies, I think Jonathan, the place to start is when you're having these conversations with someone, if you're not trying to cut them off, if you're not trying to turn them into you, and you're not trying to shut them down, what are you trying to do? What's the actual goal of what these conversations are? And for those of you who might be listening live or listening to us for the first time, this is Jonathan's wheelhouse [laughter]. This is right in what Jonathan does all the time. So Jonathan, go ahead, tell us what is the actual goal of these conversations?

Jonathan Walton: Yes. So I wanna start off by saying that none of this is easy.

Sy Hoekstra: For sure.

Jonathan Walton: I'm giving you a cookie cutter, boxed up wonderful version of a cake that you don't… Like all the ingredients are in there, all you need to do is add water. And life is not like that.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes.

The Goal Should Be Connection, not Cutting off or Colonizing

Jonathan Walton: But if you're not trying to colonize someone or make them into you, and you're not trying to cut someone off just because they disagree with you, or you're not trying to cancel them, shut them down, hold them accountable in a way that leaves them feeling like a puddle of ignorance in front of you, then what you're actually trying to do is connect with them. And so I think that God made us to be in relationship with other people, and being in relationship with other people means that we're able to sit before them, to see and be seen, without trying to consume or control the other person. It's impossible to connect with someone that you're trying to control. It's impossible to connect with someone, to love someone that you're trying to consume, like to be enmeshed with and turn into yourself.

And so I think one of the ways that we, what we're actually trying to do, instead of colonizing someone, instead of consuming someone, instead of controlling someone, is to connect with them. And so the foundational question that we need to ask ourselves when we're in conversations with someone who we disagree with is, “What do we want from the relationship?” So, yeah, we want to connect. And then we ask ourselves the deeper questions, hey, Ashley, [laughter] a deeper question of, “What kind of connection do I want with this person?” So for example, I know a couple. They voted differently in the election.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Than each other, or than you?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Than each other.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay.

Jonathan Walton: I don't know if how I voted will even come up, because that wasn't the premise of the conversation.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: But this couple, their actual argument is not about like you voted for Trump and you wanted him not to vote for him. The actual thing is, how do we love each other amidst a disagreement? Because they don't know how to hold the reality that I believe something different from you and we can still remain connected. The only option they have is to consume the other person or calling them out, “You need to think like me.” Or be consumed, “I need to think like you.” Or, “Do we need to get a divorce?” Like, no. It is possible to remain connected to someone while being in disagreement, even vehement disagreement. I think what we actually need to agree on is, how do we wanna be connected? I think that's the foundational question.

Connection Versus Conversion

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I like that a lot. It's funny, when we were talking about this, this did not… I don't do emotional health and relationship discipleship and all that kind of thing that Jonathan does all the time. And your answer did not immediately occur to me [laughs]. I was thinking about Ashley's question, and I was like, “Wait a minute, what is the goal? I don't even know.” Anyways, I think the framework of connection is super, super helpful, and I appreciate you laying it out for us. And it's helpful for a couple of reasons. One is, it roots us in actual relationships, meaning your real life circumstances are what's guiding you. Your goals in your relationships is what is guiding you in how you approach the question of how you have these conversations.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And then it's something that is sort of an antidote to that evangelical tendency to try to convert everyone, like you were talking about.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Meaning, it's like, if you have a separate goal, then you can leave those other goals behind. But those other goals, if you don't have a new goal, those goals always stick. How you were raised is not going to change or move or be as prominent in your mind if you're not replacing it with something else.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: It's something that you can focus on, that you can actually do. Meaning you can make as much of an effort as you can to connect with someone, and they might not work, but you know that you did everything that you could, as opposed to trying to change someone. If your goal is changing people or defeating people, that never works. It very rarely works. And this is a weird thing that a lot of, I've realized growing up in evangelical churches, you couldn't face this directly, the fact that the overwhelming attempts that you made to evangelize someone didn't work [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right.

Sy Hoekstra: That was just a reality that you had to ignore. The vast majority of the people that you tried, they ignored you and walked on their way. And you couldn't just stop and go like, “Maybe the thing that I'm offering them is actually not all that attractive [laughs]. Maybe the church or the community or whatever, is getting in the way of…” That stuff you couldn't face. You had to believe that you had the best way, and you had to change people, or you had to shut them down. You had to shut down your opponents if you were talking about, atheists or whatever. And that stuff, it leads to constant anxiety, because you don't control the outcome, but you want to.

You feel like you have to control the outcome, but you do not control the outcome. And when it comes to connection, again, you don't control the outcome, but the goal is that you attempt, you do everything that's in your power to attempt to reach your goal of connection with this person.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And then it also filters out the people that you don't need to have a connection with [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: You don't have to respond to trolls. You know what I'm saying? You don't have to convert everyone. Because you're not trying to do all those things, it takes a lot of pressure off you. But I'm sorry, you were trying to say something. Go ahead.

Jonathan Walton: Well, no, I think just to give some other resources, I'm pulling from Disarming Leviathan by Caleb Campbell. I'm pulling from Deeply Formed Life by Rich Villodas. I'm pulling from Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero. I'm pulling from Difficult Conversations. There's like, Crucial Conversations and Difficult Conversations and I get them mixed up.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: And also I'm pulling from When Helping Hurts. Because, oftentimes too, When Helping Hurts, I think it's really good, because we can start out with really good intentions, with trying to do something, quote- unquote, good for someone, when I think in reality what Sy was saying is true. We can only control what we desire, how we communicate that desire, and then pursuit of that desire.

There is Vulnerability in Pursuing Connection as a Goal

Jonathan Walton: And then the other person actually gets to respond to that. And what's difficult about being vulnerable in connecting is that if you're trying to convert someone or control someone or colonize someone, they are rejecting a message or an idea. Or is it whereas if you are trying to connect with someone, you could feel rejected.

And I think it's easier to try and persuade someone, or convince someone of an idea, rather than it is to connect with you as a person. I've been rejected by people, not just romantically [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: That too, though.

Jonathan Walton: And it hurts. That as well. It's true. Tears.

Sy Hoekstra: Sorry [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: But one of the things is… No, it's cool. It’s alright. Things worked out, praise God. But I think there's a vulnerability in, let's say I'm having a conversation with someone and they say, “Hey, Jonathan, I don't actually believe that police reform should happen. I think it's a few bad apples.” I have a few ways to go in that conversation. I could say, “Hey. Have you seen these statistics from this magazine and these FBI reports?” And go down deep into why Memphis is rejecting federal oversight. I could do that. Or I could say, “Oh, I feel afraid when you say that, because the results of that are, I'm afraid to walk outside my house because there aren't people actively pushing for reforms in the police department that occupies my neighborhood.”

And that is vulnerability, because they could then invalidate my fears with their response, or whatever the thing is, but I think that that's the costly work of following Jesus in those moments.

You Don’t Need to Have Conversations with People Whose Goals Are Not Connection

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And just one more note on the goal, because we're starting to get into how these conversations actually work. But I did just wanna say one more thing about the overall goal of connection first before we move into that, just because I think this one is important. Especially for people who do ministry work of some kind, or talk about the kind of things that we talk about publicly, is if your goal is connection and the other person's goal is not connection, that's another reason that you don't have to talk to them [laughs]. Meaning, here's what I'm talking about here. I've seen you, Jonathan, in situations with people who do the kind of classic Christian thing when they disagree with something you're saying in public. They come to you and they say, “Hey, I've heard you talking about, let's say, police brutality. And I have some thoughts, I was wondering if we could just talk about it. Could we set up some time to have a Zoom?”

And I've seen you go like, say to this person in not so many words basically, “I don't actually think that your goal is to have a conversation right now. I think you're upset with what I'm saying and you want to try and change me. Is that correct?”

Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: You just said that to them, and not rudely. You put it in kind words, but you're just like, “Am I right in thinking that that's really what you want here?” And if they can't say no, then you will say, “Okay, I'm sorry. I don't really think I have time for this,” [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And move on. Which is something that I don't think a lot of ministers feel the need to do. But if someone is cutting off the possibility of connection from the jump, and all they're saying is, “I want to change you,” or they're refusing to not say that all they want is to change you, [laughs] you don't have to talk to them. You have no responsibility to talk to that person because you don't have a responsibility to get into an argument with anyone. Even as a pastor. Your responsibility is to shepherd people and to lead people, and if our conversation is just going to be an argument, you don't have to talk to them. You may still want to, everything I say is subject to your personal relationships with people and your individual circumstances, but that's an option, and I want more people to know that [laughs], because I think a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to just win arguments when they don't need to be having them.

Winning Arguments Is Not What Leads to Repentance

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And also too, I think we've misidentified what the fruit of a won argument is.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: So for example, if I preach a sermon, or I have a conversation with a small group of people and I give a call to faith, and someone decides to follow Jesus, I did not win an argument. They're not saying I have the best ideas, or I presented things in a really compelling way, none of that is happening. What's happening is the Holy Spirit is working within them for them to respond in some way. It's the kindness of God that leads to repentance. The Gospel is the power and transformation. I can't say, “You know what? What I drew on that napkin, or what I put in that card, when the PowerPoint slide opened and everybody went, ooh,” like, no. That was not the power. It is the power of God that draws people nigh into himself.

Sy Hoekstra: Nigh unto himself [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes. KJV baby. KJV [laughter].

How Do We Achieve Connection in Difficult Conversations?

Sy Hoekstra: So let's get into then the actual strategies and kind of the meat of the question.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: That's it. Let's get into, how do you regulate yourself and what do you actually do to achieve the goal of connection?

We Have to Know Ourselves to Connect with Others

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, so I think the first thing is that we can't know other people unless we know ourselves. So for example, if… let's say I was having a conversation over the weekend with someone, and they said to me, “Well, I can't believe they would think that way.” And then I said, “Well, if I were in your situation, I would be pretty angry at that response. Are you upset? Do you feel angry?” I have to know, and be willing to name that I would be angry. I have to know, and be willing to imagine, like how to empathize. Like I'm listening to them, then I wanna empathize with how they're feeling, and then ask them, “Does that resonate with you?” To build some sort of emotional connection so that we stay grounded in them as an individual and not stepping up to the argument. Like “Oh, yeah. Absolutely, what they did was wrong.”

I don't wanna participate in condemning other people either. I wanna connect with this person. We could commiserate around what happened, but I think we should prioritize what is happening for the person right in front of me, not just rehashing what happened to them. You know what I mean? Like figure out what's going on. So I think we have to know ourselves to be able to know other people, which includes that emotional awareness and intelligence. And then I think after that, we should affirm what's true about that person. And then, if we've done that, then be able to ask some questions or share our own perspective.

Sy Hoekstra: Or what's true about what they're saying.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, what's true about what they're saying, yeah. And then be able to lean in there. And if there is an opportunity and the person desires to hear what you think about it, then that's great, but I guarantee you, they will not wanna hear about what you're saying if you don't connect with them first. And so creating or building a foundation of trust that you're not trying to just convert them or consume them or colonize them, but you are trying to connect requires that first part. So slowing down, then knowing how we feel, and then being able to connect around that level is a great place to start.

Connect with Whatever Is True in What the Other Person Is Saying

Sy Hoekstra: Can you tell us what finding what's true and what someone is saying and then affirming that value, what does that actually sound like?

Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely. So let's go to a different script. There was a woman that had a conversation with me and was very upset that Black people could vote for Trump. This was a racially assigned White woman saying these things. And she was, I mean, raising her voice very loud, and so I said my goal… I did actually speak over her. I said, “So my goal in this conversation is for us as a group to remain connected and aware of each other and ourselves. What is your goal in what you're saying?” And I think that kind of threw cold water in her face because she didn't know what to do with that. And so she slowed down, then she said, “Well, I don't know. I haven't processed anything,” that was kind of what she blurted out.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I knew that, actually [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I said, “It's great that like you need… this is a space to process.” I said, “What I would love for you to do is to slow down and tell us what you want, because I don't think you want me to be angry, and that's actually how I'm feeling right now. Was that your goal, was for me to feel angry and disconnected from you?” And she goes, “Well, you shouldn't be mad at me.” I said, “I can own my feelings. I didn't say you made me angry. I said my feeling in what you're saying is anger. Is that your intention? Is that what you're trying to foster? Because I would actually like to have my emotional response match your intent.” And it was not an easy conversation, but she did say after about 15 minutes of this kind of back and forth, she said, “I wanted to just close my computer,” is what she said, “But I didn't.” And then I said, “I'm so glad you chose to stay.”

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: “I’m so glad you chose to remain in our group. And to affirm again, you are valuable here, we desire your contribution and things like that.”

Sy Hoekstra: And you were specifically in like a cohort that you were leading.

Jonathan Walton: And I think it is hard to move towards someone who… Yeah, I was leading. I was leading. And everybody else was silent. They were not saying anything, but I had follow up conversations with one person after that, who said they were very grateful that I did that, because they were like, “I didn't know that you could be patient like that with someone so animated.” They were like, “I don't understand how you were calm in that situation.” I said, “Well, I was calm because I knew who I was. I was facilitating the conversation. I was leading the dialogue.” And I said, “When I’m with my mom,” not my mom, my mom passed away. “But if I was with my dad or my brothers in that conversation, I would have to do the same thing, but it will require more work because of the emotional history that's there. This history of my family and stuff under the bridge.”

So each relationship is gonna bring with it its own porcupine quills, if you will, but that doesn't mean our steps change. I think our goal is to love our neighbor as ourselves. And if we don't know ourselves, we can’t love our neighbors. So in the way that we would want patience and want grace and want respect, I think we need to extend that as best as we possibly can by trying to build a connection.

Sy Hoekstra: And if you're talking about, I think that's really good for a discipleship situation. Anybody who disciples people, I hope you just learned something from that story [laughs]. But if you're having, by the way, Jonathan, I've noticed as we're talking, there's a very long delay. So I apologize.

Jonathan Walton: No worries.

Sy Hoekstra: I just interrupted you with something that was related to something you said like three sentences later, I'm sorry [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: You’re all good [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: So I think when it comes to a political issue, if you're talking to someone who's saying something that you find very hurtful or very upsetting or whatever, which is where I think a lot of these questions come up for people. For a lot of people it's, “How do I talk to a Trump supporter?” That's kind of the question.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And then, like Jonathan said, it's going to be very hard. It's going to depend on your relationship with that person. And this work can be hard. It's very hard to get people to talk about their emotions, but that's what we need to do when somebody's talking… if they're being very anti-immigrant. You need to find a way into how they're communicating and what they're saying as angry as they are, whatever. An underlying thing might be, “I feel insecure about the economy of our country, I feel insecure about my job. I feel like I'm not gonna be able to provide because somebody's gonna undercut me in wages or whatever.” All that stuff. And the way to connect with that person is to say, “That makes sense, that feeling. And if I felt that that was happening to me, I would also be insecure.”

Maybe it is also happening to you, you know what I mean? You have to just find a way into that feeling, and then say, “But the way that I feel secure is X, Y and Z, about…” If you want to talk about solidarity and lifting everyone up actually makes all of us more secure. You can get into the nitty gritty of immigration and economics, if you know that stuff, and say [laughs], “Actually, in general, immigrants really help us economically. And so I actually feel more secure. I know that immigrants commit crime at lower rates than citizens. And I trust the numbers that say that, and that comes from police departments. We can go look at your police department stats. So immigrants coming in actually lowers crime. I know that's a shock, but. So I feel more secure.” All that kind of like, you try and find a way to connect on the emotion and speak in a… What I'm doing right now is summarizing and being slightly glib, but [laughs] I think that's the best you can do.

People You Connect with May Not Change, or Take a Long Time to Change

Sy Hoekstra: And I know to some people, if you have a really obstinate person that feels hopeless and impossible, and I think what we're saying is you give it your best shot, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And there's nothing you can do about it not working. And it might also be something, by the way, where you talk to them now and that's the beginning of a 10-year process of them changing.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: You don't know. This is why I said that stuff's out of your hands, is what I mean. So that's where we need to find our own internal piece about it. And then, I don't know, there's a number of other thoughts I have about what you have to do to prepare for all that, like the prep work that goes into it. But do you have other thoughts about that, Jonathan?

Jonathan Walton: Well, I mean, I think just all of what you said is true, and I just wanna lean into what you said about, you cannot rush the process of that relationship. Because if your relationship is broken by what you think about trans rights, then I think we need to examine what kind of relationship you had in the first place. Because I think our relationships have to be much more than our opinions about the latest political topic of the day. We've got to be able to have conversations with people that are deeper and contain the multitudes that a person holds, as opposed to the latest tweet or share that they had.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: We're talking with people, we're not talking with a minimally viable product that's before us like, “Do I want this or not in my life?” And so I think even in the, let's take the example, like Caleb Campbell did a great example of this immigration. If someone actually believed that they were going to be invaded, I'm making quotes with my fingers, but invaded and they're gonna lose their job and they’re gonna lose their emotional and spiritual and social security, not Social Security like the actual entitlement program, but social security like their feeling of social safety, that is objectively terrifying. If that is the narrative, then we can actually connect with people around why they're afraid.

And if we connect with them why they're afraid, not convince them why they shouldn't be scared, then you actually have the opportunity to share with them why they may not need to be afraid. Because, as Sy said, immigrants crime actually goes down. Immigrants actually pay billions of dollars in taxes. Immigrants actually start businesses at a higher rate than our native population. All those things, but we can't get there unless we're connected. We cannot correct people without connecting with them. So, yeah.

Getting Good at Connection Takes Practice

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think this takes a ton of practice.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: You will be bad at it at first, and that's [laughter]… So I think another part of it is you have to know why it's important to you. That's another thing, and that's a personal thing. But you have to understand why connection with someone whose political beliefs or whatever you find kind of abhorrent [laughs] is something that is important to you, that work has to be done on your own and ahead of time.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: You also have to take into account… sorry. You'll just get better at it over time. So meaning it, I'd say it's only like in the last few years that I've really been able to participate in extremely difficult conversations about politics or whatever, and just be okay [laughter], no matter what the consequence of it is. And sometimes that's still not true, depending on the relationship I have with the person, but I don't know. You’ve got to remember that people… actually, at the beginning I remember I told you she talked about, as a young person or as millennials and Gen Z wanting to shut people down. And I actually don't think that's a generational thing. I think that's just a young people thing.

I think when I was 22 I thought it was awesome to shut people down [laughs]. And I think all the most recent, this is something I know from justice advocacy work, but all the recent neurology science basically tells us you don't have an adult brain until you're like 25 [laughter]. You don't have your impulse control, you know what I mean? It's just hard.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And it just takes time to retrain yourself to do something, It can take years. So fear not, is what I'm saying, if you think you're bad at this.

Being Aware of How Much You Know about a Subject

Sy Hoekstra: And then I think something that's kind of deceptively emotional is the things that don't seem emotional, like knowing your facts and being able to bow out of conversations when you don't know your facts [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Like if you have a feeling that something's wrong, but somebody's saying something wrong, or bigoted, or whatever, but you don't have the information, A, it's gonna make you much more comfortable if you do have the information, if you've read up on it, if you know the subjects. Because you find as you dig deeper into different political issues and hot button topics, there really are only so many opinions that people have, and they’re usually based on relatively shallow understandings of information. So you can know a lot of the arguments ahead of time. You can know a lot of the important facts ahead of time. You’ve just kind of got to pay attention and that's something that happens over time.

And then if you don't know that stuff, and you try and engage anyway just based on instinct, you're gonna have a lot of times where you say stuff that you regret later [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: You're gonna have a lot of times where you maybe even make up something just because you wanna be right and you wanna win.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, you wanna win.

Sy Hoekstra: And then bowing out and letting someone believe their terrible thing without you fighting against it, sometimes that can be really hard, but that's an emotional issue, that's something about you being…

Jonathan Walton: Right. That's a feeling. Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's always gonna be feelings, and that's why you got to have your goals clear, and whenever you can, know your stuff.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Adam just said something, really quick. He said, “I've literally had notification of high heart rate from my Apple watch during such conversations.”

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Yes.

Jonathan Walton: And being able to have conversations without a high heart rate notification is becoming more normal.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes. Good.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, that has happened to me so many times. And it's true. It's fewer, it's less than what it was before that.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s so funny. I don't have a smart watch, so that's never happened to me, but that's so funny. And I'm glad that it's improving for both of you [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And it's a way to track if your spiritual formation’s actually forming you [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: True.

Engaging in Hard Conversations with Connection as a Goal is Exhausting

Sy Hoekstra: So one more thing though is, this is exhausting.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: One of the reasons it's exhausting is not just because the whole thing is hard, but the issue is no one's ever gonna come to you, again, I guess, unless you're a pastor, and say, “Hey, next Wednesday at 4:00 pm I wanna talk to you about immigration.”

Jonathan Walton: Right [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: They're going to come to you, you're gonna be having a dinner, and there's gonna be a completely random out of nowhere comment that you do not expect coming and your instinct may be in that moment to get angry or to just let it pass because you don't wanna deal with right now or whatever. And all that you have to take that into account. Again, over time it'll get easier to respond to random acts of racist bigotry, whatever. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: But it is something that's hard to do for anyone, and so you need to take the exhaustion of constantly being on alert into account when you think about, how do I wanna connect with this person? Because if it's someone where you have to be on alert the whole time and ready to go at any moment [laughs], that's difficult. And that's somebody that you might need to hang out with less or whatever.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: You have to make those decisions for yourself. And so I'm just saying, be willing to take that into account. Be alert to that way that you can become exhausted. Because, again, if you're really tired and you just have a snap reaction, you can say stuff you regret later.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Alright, Jonathan. Do you have… Yeah, you have thoughts. Go ahead and then we’ll get to...

Jonathan Walton: No, I was gonna say, off all of that, I think is mitigated by asking myself, “What kind of connection do I want with this person?”

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And all of us have relationships that are not as healthy as we'd like them to be. And if my goal is not to convert someone or I don't feel this like abnormal, huge weight of this person's salvation, because that's not my responsibility, then I can say, “You know what? I just can't be with that person right now. I just can't do that.” And be able to enter into that in a healthier way, and it'll be a more loving thing.

The Power Dynamics of Difficult Conversations

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely. Let's just get into, I think that's a lot of the meat of it, but let's talk about just some of the power dynamics and other things that are going on during these conversations. Jonathan, I'm happy to start if you want, but you can go ahead if you have some things you wanna flag for people.

Jonathan Walton: Well, I think if we're not thinking about power dynamics then we're missing what's actually happening. So when men to women, able-bodied to disable-bodied, rich to poor, educated to uneducated. All of these things are playing all the time. So somebody's like, “Oh, you're playing the race card, or you're being ageist,” that's just the table. It's not a card. That's just the society we live in. We live in a segregated, stratified society. And so to be able to be aware of that, I think respects whether you are in the ecosystem or whether you've been lifted up by the ecosystem because of the hierarchies that we live in. I think that's just something we have to take into account of where we are and where the person that we are engaging with is or is perceived to be, then that can be a gift, just in the conversation. Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: So that’s sort of like keeping in mind whether you're talking to someone who's basically [laughs] above or below you on different hierarchies, which is gonna be important. Like, if you're talking, if I as a White person am talking to a Black person about race, I have to understand the dynamics. For me, at least, what I'm thinking about is I have to be personally familiar with the stuff that Black people hear all the time [laughs], and how it is often heard, and that sort of thing. Not because I need to apply a monolithic understanding of race conversations to any individual, but just to know that that individual is probably going to hear something I say this way, or feel this way about something.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: I'm sorry about the sirens in my background. I live in Manhattan [laughter]. So I think that's one thing. But then the other way is I as a disabled person, if I'm trying to talk to an able-bodied person about disability stuff, I just need to take into account how much more tiring that's going to be, and the work that I may have to do after the conversation to process whatever terribly insulting thing was said to me [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And I do that all the time. That's something I have to do when I get home from dropping my daughter off at daycare. It just depends on what happened on the way there, or whatever. Another thing is that the, a person you're talking to can always walk away [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Nobody needs to be in this conversation, and that you need to be able to accept that. You need to be able to let people go the way that Jesus did when they rejected his teachings. Because if you don't do that and [laughs] you try and force them into conversations with you, again, that's what we're trying to avoid doing, is panicking about the results and trying to make somebody like you because you think the world needs to be the way that you are. That's the colonialist mindset [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: And then I think one other thing for me is how the person… this is back on the hierarchy thing. How what somebody else is saying is affecting other people around you, or the other person that that person has to interact with. Meaning the person that you're trying to connect with might be someone, like not the person you're talking to. It might be somebody who’s sitting next to you, it might be somebody who's not there.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: So that's just the other thing to keep in mind, because you might be trying to show somebody else that they have support, that's a huge thing. That's the person who you have a conversation with after your cohort call that you were talking about earlier. And it might be just like, if I'm talking to another White person and I know, actually doesn't matter if I know them or not, but if I'm talking about connection, if I know people of color who have to talk to this person and they're saying something that I think I can head off or correct in some way, then I should do that. And I should keep in mind my connection with that White person, but I've also top of mind it's gonna be the connection that I have with people of color who interact with that person too.

Okay, those are my thoughts on that big question. Jonathan, do we have anything else to say about these conversations before we move to Which Tab Is Still Open?

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Well, I don't have anything more to say about that conversation. I do have two problems that our live audience will get to engage with.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: One is that I need to get… it's one o'clock.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so I have a time stop.

Sy Hoekstra: Right now?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And my phone is also telling me, yeah, because I was thinking, I didn't know we're gonna talk past one o'clock, but…

Sy Hoekstra: [laughter] Well, we started like 12:15 so.

Jonathan Walton: We did. We did, we did. And then my phone as we entered into this conversation is on the red.

Sy Hoekstra: Is about to die. Alright, cool. So then I think what we'll do, Jonathan, is we'll record the Which Tab Is Still Open separately, and just add that to the bonus episode.

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.

Sy Hoekstra: So again, everybody, if you wanna hear the recordings of this afterwards, and now I guess the extended version of this episode, become a paid subscriber at KTFPress.com, or just on, you're on Substack right now if you're listening to us. Become a paid subscriber, that would be amazing. If you wanna get our newsletter that's actually free, you can follow us on the free list and get us that way. Thank you so much for joining us today, we really appreciate it. Give us a five-star review on Apple or Spotify and we will see you next month. We do these once a month now that we're in the off season. And our theme song is “Citizens”, by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Joyce Ambale does the transcripts. I'm doing the editing right now and the production of this show, along with our paid subscribers. Thank you all so much for joining us, and we will hopefully see you next month or on the paid list.

Jonathan Walton: Yep, bye.

Sy: Bye.

[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]

Which Tab Is Still Open?: Rev. William Barber and Poor Voters

Sy Hoekstra: And now this is the separate recording of Which Tab Is Still Open. We're gonna dive a little bit deeper into one of the articles from the newsletter that Jonathan brought up recently. Jonathan, why don't you tell us about the article, and we'll get into a little discussion about it.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. So our good friend, John Blake, award winning journalists and former guest on this podcast interviewed Reverend Dr William Barber on his thoughts after the election. It was one of the most interesting things I read post-election, because Dr Barber has a perspective most politicians and pundits just don't. He takes a perspective of poor people seriously, like Jesus [laughter]. And so one of the things he argues was that about 30 million poor people who are eligible voters usually don't vote because neither party is addressing the issues that are important to them, like minimum wage, affordable health care, strengthening unions, etc.

There was talk about strengthening unions, but not in the ways that communicate about the needs and priorities of low wage and poor workers. Republicans mostly blame poor people for their poverty, that is a consistent thing over the last 60 years. And Democrats ignore them altogether because they see them not as a viable voting block to mobilize, we should get middle class voters, which is not the same as the working poor. Barber has a history of successfully organizing multiracial coalitions of poor working class people in North Carolina to make real difference in elections. So it's not just a theoretical thing, like you can actually win elections by doing what MLK did, which Barber is in the tradition of you can have a multicultural coalition of impoverished or economically impoverished, marginalized people in the United States and actually have and hold power in the country.

So even as Kamala Harris lost in November in North Carolina, voters elected a Democratic Governor and Attorney General and got rid of the veto-proof majority in the state legislature, even with all of the nonsensical gerrymandering that exist there. So Sy, what are your thoughts on all this?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I'm very happy that somebody in the mainstream news is actually talking about this [laughs]. That's one thing. I just haven't heard... This is one of those things where if somebody, if the Democrats got this right, they could win a lot more. I don't know how much more, Reverend Barber is very optimistic about it. I haven't dug into the numbers the way that he has as a political organizer, but he basically says if you swing like 10 percent of the poor vote in any direction in many states, and you could change a whole lot of stuff.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I mean, you can read the article for his exact arguments. But it is definitely true that we don't address poor voters any real way, like we get stuck on, I've talked about this before, the bias toward, quote- unquote, real America, which sort of amounts to working and middle class White people and really does not address actually impoverished people. And the average, Reverend Barber is very sensitive to this, which I think is why he's effective, is the average welfare recipient in the United States today is still White. That hasn't changed. Welfare recipients are disproportionately Black and Brown. But the demographics of this country are such that you can be disproportionately high as a racial minority, but White people are still gonna be the majority of the welfare recipients.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And the potential interest alignment between those groups has always been intentionally broken up by elites in this country. And the thing that this raises for me is our constant, throughout our whole history, our belief that basically, poor people's opinions don't matter, that poor people's interests don't matter, and maybe poor people shouldn't even be voting in the first place. We had to have a movement in this country for universal White male suffrage [laughs] in the first few decades of this country, that was a fight. And the reason was they did not want you voting originally, if you didn't own property. And the belief behind that was, if you don't have property, then you don't have a stake in society. You don't have a sufficient stake in society to, I don't know, uphold the responsibility of voting.

And in a lot of different ways that bias or that bigotry, frankly, has shot through a lot of different ways that we think about economics and politics. And just the idea like, it does not make sense to start with. If anything, the people with the most stake in how the government treats them are the people with the least power, with the with the way that society is run, are going to be the people who suffer the most when society is run poorly [laughs]. And the people who have the most independent wealth and power, meaning they can, regardless of what the government is doing, they're going to be generally alright, because they are wealthy landowners, if we're talking about the beginning of this country. They're actually kind of the least interested in how society runs, and maybe the most interested in maintaining the status quo and not having things change, which I think is what we're actually talking about.

I think we're actually talking about not having significant change [laughs] in our economics, when we talk about the people who have the most quote- unquote, responsibility or the most sense of responsibility for how the society goes. And I think all of that bleeds into how both parties think today, because both parties are made up of elites. And I think there was this huge and terrible reaction to the CEO of United Healthcare being assassinated. And I was reading some stuff about it that basically said, if you're talking about healthcare, which is one of the issues that William Barber brought up, I think the reason that a lot of people don't understand the anger and the glee over the fact that this guy was killed online, which there was a ton of, which I don't support.

But if you're trying to understand it there's so many elites who are the healthcare CEOs themselves, the politicians who write healthcare policy for whom, the biggest problem that health insurance is ever going to be is maybe a significant amount of paperwork. Maybe you get something declined or not covered, and you have to fight a little bit and then you get it covered again. It's not something that's going to bankrupt you or kill you. But that's a reality for many, many people around the country.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And if it's not bankrupt or kill, it's long, grinding trauma over a long period of time.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And it's just so easy for us to lose sight of stuff like that and then not understand as a political party, why addressing those problems directly wouldn't matter. And when I say us in that case, I mean people who are economically comfortable and who have educated and are doing okay in this society. And so all this is what Barber's comments bring up for me is, he is trying to pay attention to real needs that real people have, and alert his party, the Democrats, to the fact that if they understood and paid attention to and took those needs seriously, they would have a ton of voters who nobody's counting on right now. Like there's no strategy around them.

It's not you would be stealing voters from the Republicans, you would be bringing in a whole bunch of new voters and doing something that no one is expecting, and you'd be able to [laughs] actually make a big difference that way. Jonathan, if you have any thoughts or just your own responses to me, or your own thoughts.

Jonathan Walton: Well, I think there's a there's a few things like, yeah, I'm grateful for John Blake and for media personalities that take the time to center the most marginalized people, because that was not the conversation. All the post mortem of the Democratic Party and the celebration of what Trump did, neither one of those things included real solutions for materially impoverished people in the United States. They were not a group of people that were, when you said, counted, it's literally they're not counted. They do not count in that way. There isn't analysis, there isn't engagement. And so that I think is deeply saddening. So I'm grateful for John Blake for highlighting it. I'm grateful for Barber for the work that he does.

I think one of the things that highlights for me is the… because you use the word elite, and I think there was an essay a while ago that I read about the word elite and what it means and how we use it. Like Tucker Carlson says the elites, when in reality he is elite. Elite is Hell.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: The money that he makes, the universities that he went to, the position that he holds. Me and you are elite. We both have Ivy League educations, we both have graduate degrees. We are both financially secure, we are both educated and well connected. And the majority of, some of that, that I realize is that if I have those things I am insulated from the suffering that millions of people experience around health insurance. And because our classes in the United States are segregated and our churches are also often segregated, we are not going to have relationships with people that are struggling with these things. It's very difficult, at least for me, to live in Queens, to have conversations and relationships that are cross class.

My children participate in activities that cost money. That's a proxy for a class decision. I drive, I do not take the train. That is a class communication. I live in a home and I own it, I do not rent. That's a class. I drive to a supermarket like Costco. You have to pay for a membership to be in Costco. These are all economic decisions, and there are going to be certain groups of people that I do not interact with every single day, because I have more money. And so I think if we stretch that out across the Democratic, Republican independent leadership in our country, the majority of us do not interact with people that are from a different class, higher or lower. And so we have these caricatures of what life looks like, which is why an executive can say it doesn't matter if we deny or defend or depose or delay or all the things that were written on these bullets that came from the person that killed the United Healthcare CEO.

The reality is, I think we do not… I don't think, I know this, we do not prioritize the poor in this country. And to what you were saying, it's not that we don't prioritize poor and marginalized people, it's a strategic, intentional exclusion of them. So [laughs] like you said, the reality is, if you were not a wealthy land-owning White person, you were not allowed to vote or hold elected office. And so that's a reality. So each time a tier of people wanted to be included, there was an argument, there was a fight, there was war, there was violence. And so I believe that there is an opportunity that Barber is talking about too. It does not have to be violent to include people who are poor and marginalized.

It's really just a decision to and the time and intentionality to do it. And I wish that the church did that. I wish that politicians did that. I wish that we did that as a society. And I recognize in my own life it is even still difficult to do because of how our society has set up invisible and very real fences between economic communities.

Sy Hoekstra: And it's remarkable for you to say that in some ways. I mean, it makes sense that you would be the person to notice it, but it is remarkable in some ways for you to say it because you grew up as you've talked about many times, quite poor in the rural south.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And you are actually directly connected to people who don't have a lot of money, right?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And that’s still your reality that your day to day life does not involve that many poor people.

Jonathan Walton: Right. And that is, to be totally transparent, that is one of the hardest things about getting older and having children. When we go home, when I say home I'm thinking Brodnax.

Sy Hoekstra: The small farming town in Virginia that you're from.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Where I’m from. It's exceptionally clear to me that the access that I have to resources, the decisions that I'm making each day are infused with the wealth and resources that surround me, just by virtue of the location that I live in. So we have to do really, really, really hard work to include people who are across classes in our lives, so that when we consider what we're going to do with our power, they are included in that decision. And I think Barber did a great job of explaining why that is strategically important as well.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so two points. One is, thank you for talking about that. For those of you who don't know, Jonathan and I are good friends. That's why I can say, “Hey Jonathan, let's talk about [laughs] your background as a poor person.”

Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: We've talked about this a ton on the show before, Jonathan is very open about it in public. And that, I actually think, hearing you talk about the tension and how your hometown is versus your new adopted home, a lot of that is actually part of the answer. Just people being willing to be totally open about their own financial circumstances, and the differences they see between places, because that is something that we hush up and we talk about, we make it shameful to talk about your money. We make it shameful for everyone to talk about their money. You're not supposed to talk about it if you're rich, you're not supposed to talk about it if you're poor [laughs]. You're basically only supposed to talk about it if you're right where the Republicans think real Americans are [laughter]. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And yeah, just being willing to talk about it openly and in a not ashamed way actually goes a long ways to breaking some of the taboos that hold the silence on these issues. That's one thing. The other thing is, you said at the end just now, that William Barber would argue that it is strategic to basically address the needs of the poor voters who are not voting. But earlier you said it is a strategic exclusion, or like a strategic that they’re evading talking about these issues.

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. So in the Constitution, there is a strategic exclusion of poor, marginalized, non-White-land-owning-educated-well-healed people. There's the intentional strategic exclusion of those people for the maintenance of power and dominance, right?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And I think there needs to be a strategic, intentional inclusion of those people, and the intentional redistribution, and I know people hate that word, redistribution [laughs] of resources, so that people can be included in our society in a meaningful way.

Sy Hoekstra: Well, Jonathan's a communist. You heard it here first.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] It’s not the first time I've been accused of loving the Marx.

Sy Hoekstra: Loving the… [laughs]. But I think the other aspect of it is just, the reality is that the donors that support both parties, these are not priorities of theirs. In fact, a lot of times they're opposed to the priorities of theirs. They are the healthcare CEOs. They are the people who have to negotiate against the unions. They are the people who would have to pay up the higher minimum wages. So that's part of the thing that makes it challenging. But Barber’s been able to do the work [laughs] in North Carolina and make a difference there. And it’s not… and he was one of the people, organizing like his is what made North Carolina a swing state in the first place from a traditionally deep red state. So it's worth trying, guys [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It is.

Sy Hoekstra: Take a look, Democrats.

Jonathan Walton: Worth trying.

Sy Hoekstra: It's worth trying [laughs]. It's not just worth trying for political victories either. It's also worth actually addressing poor people's needs [laughs], to be clear about what I'm saying.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I think I was convicted. Like, Shane Claiborne said this and others like Merton has said this, and Howard Thurman said this, and MLK said it, and Jesus said it. The center of the church should be marginalized people. That should actually be the thing. “The poor will always be with us,” is not an endorsement of poverty. That's not what that is. You know what I mean? [laughter] Some people were like, “Well, people are supposed to be poor, and I'm supposed to…”

Sy Hoekstra: I know. I know. Or, the poor will always be with us, and that means that we should not try to end poverty, because Jesus said you can't end it.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, right. That, no. But the reality that that is a broken, tragic theology that aligns with White American folk religion and requires no sacrifice from people who are on the upper end of a dominant hierarchy. That's what that is. Yeah. I hope that even if the political parties of the United States do not pay attention to what to what Barber is saying, that the Church will. That would be great.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Amen to that. Alright. I think we're just gonna end it there. I already did the outro and everything, the credits and all that stuff in the Live episode, so I think Jonathan and I at this point are just going to say thank you all so much for listening. We will see you in January for the next episode. Goodbye.

Jonathan Walton: Thank you. Bye [laughter].

[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: How what somebody else is saying is affecting other people around you, or the other person that that person has to interact with, meaning the person who you

Jonathan Walton: [burps].

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs], remember, I can't mute you if you just burp into your microphone.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, sir. My apologies. [laughter] Welcome to live everyone.

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to live Substack.

Jonathan Walton: I drank a ton of water. They saw me just do that [laughter].

It’s our season finale! We’re answering listener questions and talking:

-        Staying grounded and emotionally healthy post-election

-        Some mistakes people are making in their election analysis

-        Why the politics of identity will never go away in America

-        How the Church can and can’t fight anti-Blackness and other forms of injustice

-        Where you can hear us in between seasons

-        And a lot more!

Mentioned in the Episode:

-        Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor by Rev. Caleb Campbell

-        Our newsletter from last week with a worship playlist and sermon Jonathan recommended

-        The Webinar Intervarsity is doing with Campbell on Tuesday – Register here.

-        The article on patriarchy by Frederick Joseph: “For Palestinian Fathers, Sons, and Brothers”

-        Our free guide to processing and acting on the injustices you encounter

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: The beauty of the church is not in how good it is. The church is beautiful in the light of Christ, not in the light of its own good work and goodness. The church is beautiful when it is people collectively trying to put their faith in the grace that governs the universe, and not put their faith in their own ability to bring the kingdom of God into this 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.]

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. It's our season four finale. We're answering listener questions and continuing our discussion from our Substack live conversation two weeks ago, about where to go from the Trump election as followers of Jesus.

Sy Hoekstra: And because this is the finale, let me just take a quick second to tell you where we are going from here. We are gonna be doing our monthly bonus episodes for our paid subscribers, like we usually do when we are not on a season of this show. We are going to be doing them though slightly differently. You will have the opportunity to hear them at one point if you're not a paid subscriber, because we're gonna record them like we did two weeks ago on Substack Live. So if you want to see those when they are being recorded, download the Substack app. If you get on our free emailing list, you'll be notified when we start. You just need to go ahead and get that app, it's both on iOS and Android.

And if you wanna make sure that you're getting our emails in your Gmail inbox, because we've heard some people tell us they're going to the promotions folder or whatever Gmail is trying to do to filter out your spam, but actually filtering out the stuff that you wanna see, you just have to either add us to your contacts, or if it's in the promotions folder, just click the “Not promotion” button that you can see when you open your email. Or you can actually just drag and drop emails that show up in your folders to your inbox, and then it'll ask you, “Hey, do you wanna always put emails from the sender in your inbox?” And you can just click, yes. So do one of those things, add us to your contact, drag and drop, click that “Not promotions” button that'll help you see those notifications from us.

Jonathan Walton: If you'd like access to the recordings of those bonus episodes, plus access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats, become a paid subscriber at KTFPress.com. We would so appreciate it and you would be supporting our work that centers personal and informed discussions on faith, politics, and culture to help you seek Jesus and confront injustice. We are two friends resisting the idols of the American church in order to follow Jesus faithfully, and would love for you to join us. So become a paid subscriber at KTFPpress.com.

Sy Hoekstra: And we've said this before, but we should probably say it again. If you want a discounted subscription or if money's a barrier to you joining us as a paid subscriber, just email us, [email protected]. We'll give you a free subscription or a discounted subscription, no questions asked. You will not be the first person to do it if you do. Other people have done it, we've given it to them. We won't make it weird because we want everyone to have access to everything that we're doing. But if you can afford to support us, please as Jonathan said, go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber. Let's jump into it, Jonathan.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, man.

Sy Hoekstra: We, a couple weeks ago on our Substack Live, we were talking about processing through grief and like what we have been hearing from people. We've had lots of questions and lots of conversations since then. So we're sort of combining, amalgamating [laughs] lots of subscriber questions into one, or even just questions from friends and family. I just wanna know how you are continuing to process the election and what you're thinking about grief and how we move forward, or how we look back and see what exactly happened.

Staying Grounded and Emotionally Healthy Post-Election

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So I think that one of the things I just have to acknowledge is that I'm tired of talking about it, and not okay talking about it. Like just the level of energy it takes to have regulated, like emotionally regulated healthy conversations is exhausting.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so, just naming that. So last week I think I was in a better place than this week recording. And so I'm recognizing I need to be able to take steps back and set boundaries so that I can be in a healthier place. And I just encourage everybody to do that. We all need rhythms and disciplines that keep us grounded. That is not like, oh, when I'm in this season, I need spiritual discipline. No. We actually are supposed to have them all the time. But I think in moments like these and seasons like this, we actually need them just in a more pointed way. It reminds us that we do. So those are things that I'm doubling down on, like starting to listen to worship music.

If you check out last week's newsletter, I actually had a worship set from a worship leader in Columbus, Ohio, who basically said, if you can't sit across someone who has a different political perspective than you, then you probably can't worship with them. So let's start off with worship. And so they made a, I don't know, a six hour playlist of songs from different traditions and said like, play it without skipping it. Without skipping a song. Don't be like, “I don't like this song, I don't like this. I don't like…” This reminds me of them. Like, just listen to the whole album because somebody who is different from you meets Jesus through the words of the song. And he said, “You would never know that I don't like some of the songs that we sing [laughter], but I sing them. And I thought that was just a really honest thing.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. You said it was six hours long?

Jonathan Walton: It's a lot. I haven't made it through a third of it.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It's long. And the sermon is also linked in the newsletter as well. It's just a great message from Pastor Joshua.

Sy Hoekstra: This is a pastor in Ohio that you're familiar with?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: How did you get connected to this?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So someone on the political discipleship team for InterVarsity, shout out to Connie Anderson, who's written…

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, great.

Jonathan Walton: …a lot of our stuff. Our InterVarsity stuff.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes. Not KTF stuff.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. She just, she said, “Hey, I really appreciated the sermon and I was able to listen to it, and I'm working my way through the songs. And if I skip a song, I'm gonna go back, because I'm not the only person on my Spotify. Shout out to all the Moana and Frozen tracks that get stuck in there.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: So all that to say, that's like the first big thing, is setting boundaries, trying to have healthier rhythms so that I can be fully present to my family and myself.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Having Difficult Conversations by Meeting People Where They Are

Jonathan Walton: Also, I think it's really important to remember, particularly when I'm frustrated, I have to remember to meet people where they're at the way that Jesus met me. I have not always known that Christian Nationalism was bad. I didn't always have another term for it that captures the racialized, patriarchal environmental hierarchy of it called White American folk religion. I didn't always know about police brutality and the rural urban divide. I didn't know about those things. And what I desperately needed and unfortunately had, was patient people who were willing to teach me. And so as we're having these conversations, there's a book called Disarming Leviathan, ministering to your Christian Nationalist neighbor. It's really, really good. We're doing an event that you will hear about in our newsletter as well with the author of that booked Caleb Campbell.

Sy Hoekstra: And when you say we, in that case again, you mean InterVarsity?

Jonathan Walton: Oh, shoot.

Sy Hoekstra: It doesn't matter [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: I do mean InterVarsity. There's a little bit of overlap here because the season is so fraught.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Like [laughs], and so you're gonna hear about that in a newsletter as well. InterVarsity Press is promoting it, InterVarsity's promoting it. Pastors and teachers are promoting it because the reality is, we all need to figure out how to tackle difficult conversations.

Sy Hoekstra: Yep.

Jonathan Walton: And we use that verb specifically, like it's elusive. We have to go after it [laughs] to be able to…

Sy Hoekstra: You have to go wrangle it.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, because it's hard. It's really, really hard. We would rather run away. We would rather run away from difficult conversations. So meeting people where they're at, we do that because Jesus meets us where we are. Our compassion, our gentleness is in outpouring of the compassion and gentleness that we've meditated on and experienced for ourselves and are willing to embody with other people. So those would be my biggest things from the last week or last two weeks since we last talked about this stuff. What about you?

Healthy Reactions to the Election Are Different for Different People

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's good. We actually had, speaking of people who have a, like a different rhythm or need to adjust something now to be emotionally healthy, we actually had a subscriber, I won't give any details, but write in who's overseas, who basically said, “I've got too much going on in the country that I live in. I can't deal with American stuff right now. I need to unsubscribe from you.” They’re on the free list. And I was like, “Man, I understand [laughs].”

Jonathan Walton: Yes, right. I would like to unsubscribe from this [laughter]. No, I'm just joking, just joking.

Sy Hoekstra: I appreciate that he wrote in to explain why he was unsubscribing. That doesn't necessarily happen a lot…

Jonathan Walton: Right. Right, right.

Sy Hoekstra: But it's very understandable and it's really sad, but I totally get it. And I want people to take care of themselves in that way. And I think, I mean, the flip side of that is we had a ton of people in the last week or week and a half sign up for the free list because I think a lot of people are just looking for ways to process, right [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: They are looking for people who are having these conversations, which happens. We got started, this company got started during the 2020 election, putting together the anthology that we put together, and we had a lot of response at that point too, and people who are just like, “Yes, I need to hear more of this processing.” And the difference now is there are fortunately, like a lot of people doing this work from all kinds of different angles all around the country, which is a very good thing, I think. We could be tempted to think of it as competition or whatever, but the church [laughs] has to come at this from as many angles as possible. There need to be as many voices doing the work of trying to figure out how to follow Jesus and seek justice as there are people promoting Christian Nationalism, and we're… those numbers are nowhere close to parody [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: No.

Sy Hoekstra: Not remotely close.

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely. No, they are not [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Unfortunately, that's a reality of the American church. So, anyways, I appreciate all those thoughts very much, Jonathan.

Mistakes People Are Making in Election Analysis

Sy Hoekstra: I think when I'm thinking about the conversations that I've had, I have a couple thoughts that come to mind. I think a lot of the things that I think about in the conversations in the last week and a half are people trying to figure out what happened, like looking back and like playing the blame game [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And the excuses that people are making, or the blame is shifting for why Trump matters now, because you can't say he lost the popular vote anymore. Obviously he won the electoral college the first time, but he lost popular vote, and then he lost the popular vote to Biden plus the electoral college. Now he's won it, and so people are not as able to, to the extent that people were still trying to paint him as an aberration from the norm.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: …that's getting harder. It's getting harder to say, “Oh, this is just a blip on the radar and we'll come back to our normal situation at some point, some undetermined point in the future. But so they're shifting blame to other people. It's like, oh, various non-White groups increased their votes for Trump. Or young people increased their votes for Trump or something.

Which Party Wins Tells Us A Lot Less about America Than Who Is an Acceptable Candidate in the First Place

Sy Hoekstra: To me, a lot of that stuff, if you're trying to say that Donald Trump represents a problem with the whole country that you're trying to diagnose how it happened, all those conversations are a little bit silly, because the problem is that he's like a viable candidate who people voted for in the first place. But the people to blame for electing Donald Trump are the people who voted for Donald Trump, which is more than half of the voters in America. Not much more, but more.

And the reason it's like a little bit silly to talk about what's different than the prior elections is, the prior elections were like Trump's gonna win this election, the popular vote. Trump's gonna win the popular vote by like two or three percent probably. It could be a little bit different than that, but basically Trump's gonna get slightly more than 50 percent, Kamala Harris is gonna get slightly less than 50 percent. And that's usually how it goes. That is the reality of this, how this country works. We have a winner take all system, and so typically speaking, it's a little over 50 and a little under 50. The swings between who gets elected in any given year, president, we're playing with marginal things. Democratic strategists, Republican strategists are trying to figure out how to fiddle with the margins to get what they want.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: It was only seven states in this country that actually mattered [laughs]. Like 86 percent of the states in this country were decided and then we're just playing with seven states. We're just playing with little numbers. And so all of these, like all Black people went slightly more for Trump. Young people went slightly more for Trump, whatever. It'll go back later. I don't know if you saw this, Jonathan, on Monday this week. So last week, if you're listening to this, John Stewart brought out the map of the 1984 election. Did you see this?

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. It was so interesting [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: It's like it was completely one color.

Sy Hoekstra: It’s red, yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And you're like, “What? Whoa, this looks like a candy cane without the White” [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Right, exactly.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: If you've never seen the Reagan-Mondale electoral map, literally the entire country, except for Minnesota is red. The whole country went for Ronald Reagan. So that's like, it’s one of the biggest landslides in history, and the popular vote for Ronald Reagan, I decided to look that up, was less than 59 percent.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Right?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: You get the whole country. You have to get 270 electoral votes to win, he got like 520 something.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: He crushed Mondale. But eight years later, bill Clinton is in office and we're kind of back to normal. We're back to America's normal, right?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: It's so small, these little things, and we just have to stay focused on, the problem here is that both of our parties in different ways, to different degrees are just infused with White supremacy and White American folk religion and patriarchy and everything else. And Donald Trump can be a viable candidate in the United States.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: That's the problem [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right, that is the problem.

Sy Hoekstra: We have to stop talking about, I don't care what Gen Z did. Gen Z will change just like everybody else has changed. Election to election, things will be different. Anybody who thought that, “Oh, just a new generation of people in the United States of America growing up is gonna fundamentally change the United States of America.” How? Why did you think that [laughter]? Why? Why? Why would the children of the people, who were the children of the people, who were the children of the people who have been in the same country for years and years, generation after generation, why would that just be something fundamentally different? It's the same people, they're just a bit younger. I don't know. I never get those kinds of arguments.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Facing the Reality of America’s Brokenness

Sy Hoekstra: What I'm saying is, I think underlying a lot of those arguments though, is a desire to have some control over something. To have something that we can say is certain that we're changing, that we can be the good people that we thought Americans fundamentally were again, or something like that. It's about control and trying to wrap your mind around something. I think instead of just facing the reality that we live in a deeply flawed country.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Which is, should be biblically speaking, unsurprising.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: But it is also difficult. It's unsurprising and it's difficult to deal with. Facing the reality of the brokenness of the world, not a fun thing to do. We've talked about this before.

The People to Blame for the Election are the Mostly White and Male People Who Voted for Trump

Jonathan Walton: Well, I think it would be helpful for people to remember, in all the things you're talking about, Trump did not win the popular vote last time, he won it this time. Trump won the electoral college, right? Let's actually just for a moment identify the voting population of the United States of America. So there are 336 million people in the United States per the population tracker today, right?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: There are 169 million people who voted in the election in 2020. The numbers are not final for 2024.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's gonna be less, it'll be less than that though.

Jonathan Walton: It’s less. So let's say 165 million people voted in the election this time. And that's generous. Right?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: So that's less than 50 percent of the country that actually voted. Then we take into the account that 70 percent of this country of the voting population is still White. Okay friends?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Roughly, I would say. Yeah, that's true.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: People give different estimates of that, but it doesn't get much lower than like 65 [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right. So let's even go with 65 percent.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yeah. Right. [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: So let's say 65 percent of that voting population is White, and then half of that population is male. And Trump did an exceptional job at mobilizing White slash men in the United States to go and vote. An exceptional job. Looking at that population and saying, “We are gonna make sure that you feel invited, welcomed and empowered.” Joe Rogan's show [laughs], these other influencers, how he advertised. If you look at who was on stage in these different venues when he was campaigning, all men. And the women, I think it's very important to notice this. I think when he gave his acceptance speech, his now chief of staff that they called the Iron Lady or something like that. The Ice Lady, Iron Lady, something like that.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: That's what they called her. And then she declined the invitation to speak. And so I think that when we are sitting here saying, “Oh man, how could people vote this way?” We are not talking about the entire population of the United States.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes.

Jonathan Walton: We are talking about a little less than half of the voters in the United States, and then we are talking about 50 percent of that group. We're not talking about people under 18, generation alpha. We're not talking about the vast majority of Gen Z. We're talking about the same voters we've been talking about for the last 30 years [laughs]. The voting population of White adults in the United States. That's who we're talking about. We could blame, oh, this group or that group, but I agree with what you're saying. We have to face the reality that at some point we have to talk about race and we have to talk about gender. When we talk about identity politics, we don't name White and male as an identity.

Sy Hoekstra: Right. Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: We don't. We call it something else. We say, oh, like the working class or all these other things. But we need to just say, if we look at how White people are voting and we look at how men are voting, then we have the answer to I think, how Trump was elected. But those two things are third rails. Or like in New York City, you don't touch the third rail, it's electric because of the subway.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: So we don't talk about that. And I think, I don't say that because I wanna blame people, I'm just naming statistics. These are just numbers. The numbers of people who are voting, the demographics they represent, this is the group. So when Sy says, who is responsible for Trump's election, it is the majority of White Americans who vote, and men in this country of all races who lean towards hey, opting into patriarchy in ways that are unhelpful.

Sy Hoekstra: It's not of all races [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Well, I will say that the increases of Black men, the increases of Latino men, Trump did grow his share of the Black male vote by double digits. Right?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, but it's still a minority of the Black male vote.

Jonathan Walton: It is. I'm just saying, I do not want to discount the reality that patriarchy is attractive to all races.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah.

Jonathan Walton: That's what I wanna name. And so when Fred Joseph, amazing author, talks about the attractiveness of patriarchy, I think that is something that all men need to say no to.

Sy Hoekstra: This is an essay that we highlighted in our newsletter like a month or two ago.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I'll put the link in the show notes.

Jonathan Walton: We have to say no to patriarchy.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so anyway, that's my rant in response to this [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, no. That's good, and that actually gets into it, the other thing I wanted to talk about was, which even though I think some of these blame game conversations are such like nonsense, we are still able within those nonsense conversations to say a lot of things that are just demonstrably false [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right.

The Politics of Identity Will Never Die in America

Sy Hoekstra: And what you just said is one of them. Like I've seen some people talking about, “Oh, the democrats lost because they ran on identity politics,” or, “Identity politics is over.” And I'm like, “What are you talking about [laughter]?” Donald Trump is all identity politics.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: It was all about White men and how they were gonna be comfortable and empowered how Christians are gonna be in powered again.

Jonathan Walton: How women are gonna be taken care of, whether they like it or not.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah right. Men are gonna be back in power. How citizens are gonna have what they deserve, and then we're gonna stop giving it to the illegal immigrants, right?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Like everything Donald Trump does is about identity. And the bigger thing to say is identity politics in America is not a current or temporary trend. Identity politics is baked into the foundation of the country, and it was not Black people who did it [laughs]. It was the founding fathers who created a system where only White men could be naturalized and only rich White men could vote, and we enshrined racial slavery, all that stuff. Identity politics has been here from day one. It's not like a liberal thing. It was a thing that we baked in on purpose, and it's a thing that came from European culture and it's still fundamental to European culture to this day.

Sy Hoekstra: And I, what I think what people mean when they talk about identity politics is, it's another one of the endless string of words that we use since racial slurs became impolite. We can't say the N word anymore. It's another way of saying it's Black people talking about Black people stuff. Right? When people talk about identity politics, they're saying the wrong identity politics, because everybody is talking about identity politics all the time. They're just, like you said, not calling it identity politics. They're talking about “real America” [laughs], right?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: They're talking about, we know what they mean by real America. They're talking about White men and they're just saying this is the default culture. We're all just assuming this is the default culture, everything else is identity politics. Nonsense.

Jonathan Walton: Right, right.

Sy Hoekstra: So that's one of the nonsense things that shows up in the conversation as a result of a nonsense thing that we say that we think all the time on some subconscious level that we're not always talking about identity politics, even though we absolutely are. And it's because it's been forced upon us. It's not because somebody's trying to create divisions.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

The Democrats Are the Party the Non-White Working Class Voted For

Sy Hoekstra: A similar thing is, I heard people talking about the Democrats are not the party of the working class anymore. The working class is not voting for the Democrats because, and then, obviously the White working class is voting for Trump, and then start to talk about the gains that Trump made among the non-White working class. Again, the majority of everybody in the non-White working class is not voting for Donald Trump. And assuming that voters have some idea of what's good for them and who better represents them, maybe not who best represents them, but who better represents them, the Democrats are still the party of the non-White work—we're talking about the White working class again, you know what I mean? We're trying to make it about economics and it's actually about race. That's a thing that we're doing all the time, constantly [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Well [laughs], the reality is that economics is about race.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: It's like, if we could just like get some daylight between them, then maybe we could make a separation. And so then it just becomes about keeping that separation in place, because if we bring them back together, the system falls apart. It literally crumbles if you call it out. And something that I'll just name, because I think in all these conversations, even as me and Sy are saying, oh, this Democrat about that Democrat, like this is the Republican or that race, when we call out differences, when we name things, our goal is not to dehumanize anybody, dismiss people's needs or grievances, or minimize the reality and perspectives that people have.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan Walton: The goal and hope is that we would actually grasp reality, name the idol and follow Jesus.

Sy Hoekstra: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan Walton: That is our goal and our hope and our aim, because if we can't say it as is, we will never be able to address and communicate with the most marginalized people. And we'll never be able to communicate a vision that draws people in power towards something even more loving and beautiful, unless we name the thing as it is. And so hopefully that is breaking through to folks who might come across this conversation.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I agree. I can get very passionate about these facts and stats and whatever. And I'm not trying to say that anyone who doesn't…

Jonathan Walton: No [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: …agree with me is somehow a bad person. I'm just, this is, it's important, like you said. It's an important goal that I'm trying to move us toward.

Jonathan, we got a great question from a listener that I wanted to talk about. You cool moving on, or do you have more thoughts?

Jonathan Walton: No, no. Let's do it.

What Can the Church Do about Continuing Anti-Blackness?

Sy Hoekstra: Alright. So what can the church, practically speaking, do about ongoing anti-Blackness in the country? And not just correct disinformation or post on social media, what can the church practically speaking do? That was the question. Jonathan, solve anti-Blackness. Go.

Support Black Spaces, No Strings Attached

Jonathan Walton: There's a reason that enrollment at HBCUs is surging right now.

Sy Hoekstra: Ah, okay.

Jonathan Walton: And that is because when the world is unsafe or feels unsafe, or the reality that, “Oh, trying to get to the master's table and eat is actually not that great,” we're gonna recede back into our communities. And so I think one thing that the church can do is support Black spaces. So financially support Black spaces, empower Black spaces. I did not say create Black spaces moderated by you, that you will then curate for, and

Sy Hoekstra: Control.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, control would be the right word, for an experience that other people can observe. Like, “Oh, this is what Black people really think.” Like no, just support Black spaces. Black, sacred, safe spaces that help and care for us in this moment. The number of Black women that are being harassed online, like showing up to their jobs, walking down the streets in different cities, is radically disturbing to me.

And if we wanna get into the intersectionality of it, like when we talk about like Black, queer people, the numbers that the Trevor Project is recording, it's like the Trevor Project is a alphabet community support organization, particularly to prevent suicide. And so their phone calls are up in the last two weeks. So I think we as a church, as followers of Jesus need to create and then sustain spaces for Black folks to hang out in and feel a part of that we control. Kathy Khang, the author of Raise Your Voice said in a workshop that I was in one time, “Spaces that marginalized communities are in, we feel like renters, we don't feel like owners.” So we can't move the furniture. We're not really responsible for anything, but we're just, we could exist there and do what we need to do.

Sy Hoekstra: But it’s not a home.

Jonathan Walton: It's not a home. And so I would want to encourage churches, small groups, bible studies, community groups, parachurch organizations to create spaces for Black folks by Black folks to be able to thrive in and feel a sense of community in. The other thing that I would say is that the church could educate itself around the complexities of Blackness. And so there's the Black, racially assigned Black Americans in the United States that are the descendants of enslaved people. Then there's Caribbean folks that are the descendants of enslaved Africans and the colonizers there. And then there's Central and South American and Mexican. There's a lot of beauty and complexity in Blackness.

And so obviously, Ta-Nehisi Coates's book The Message, talks about that in ways that are exceptionally helpful and complex. So that would be a great book to dive into. And again, create educational, engaging spaces around. This education, quote- unquote, educating yourself, not asking Black folks to spend their time educating you. Doing that work, creating those spaces, supporting those spaces financially, time, resources, et cetera, and creating spaces for Black folks to feel and be safe, I think would be just exceptionally helpful in this season. Yes, share on social media. Yes, send messages to your friends. Yes, do all those things on your own time and on your own dime. But I think these are two things that could be helpful because it's not gonna go away the next four years. It's probably gonna be more intense. And so I think creating and sustaining of those places would be helpful.

Sy Hoekstra: At least sustaining, you don't have to create.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that's true. There are some that are already there. That's true. Find a place, donate, support, host. Hey, provide the space. Buy food, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And the reason I say that is you could end up with people who just go to Black people and are like, “Hey, we'll give you money and you get to do a bunch of work to create a space or,” you know what I mean? And there's also the instinct to say, if we're gonna support something, we have to create it.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: We don't. We can support things that other people are already doing. There might be people in your congregation who are already doing that as their job. Just give them money. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: The more you're not in charge, the fewer strings are attached. Jonathan already talked about that. Even if those strings are implicit or not even there, but they're just perceived to be there, and that could be a problem too. So it's good to just give money to stuff that already exists or give support. Give volunteer work, whatever. Good, I appreciate that. Thank you for having practical answers.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No worries. I'm glad you sent it to me earlier so I could think about it.

Educating Ourselves on Fighting Racism Works (Sometimes)

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yeah [laughs]. Continuing to educate ourselves is a good thing too. And I think I've actually seen some of the difference in that. I know this is, there is so far to go and there's so much to do in terms of educating ourselves, but I can personally tell you from having watched a lot of Christians go through the Trayvon Martin case and Ferguson and everything. And I'm saying Christians who want to be supportive of Black people, who want to be helpful, who want to be anti-racist, all that stuff. I saw a lot of people who in 2012, ‘13, ‘14 were just like babies. Just starting out, didn't know what to say. Didn't know whether they could go protest, didn't know why All Lives Matter wasn't appropriate. Like, “Don't all lives matter though?” All that kind of stuff.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Even when you're trying to be helpful, you know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Right, right, right.

Sy Hoekstra: And then 2020 comes around and I saw a bunch of those exact same people being like, “I'm gonna go march! Black Lives Matter, let's go.” You know what I mean? So people really can learn and they really can change. And the problem is that you just have to keep doing it to every new generation of people that comes up, and it takes years to do. It's not something that you can do in a couple of sermons or one course that you take or whatever. And again, I know they're so far to go, I'm not trying to say… I understand that you can work for years. A White person can work for years, and the differences can be trivial and frustrating and like enraging. But it's also true that people can learn [laughs]. And talking about meeting people where they are, that's kind of what I'm saying to White people as we're trying to educate ourselves and others.

Educating Each Other about Race Is a Long, Continuous Process

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and to build off of something that you said before too, it's like Donald Trump was elected eight years ago, and some people were not alive eight years ago. And some people were 10 years old, eight years ago. So they didn't even…

Sy Hoekstra: And now they're voting.

Jonathan Walton: And now they're voting. So like Trayvon Martin was killed 12 years ago. They may not have the same knowledge as you, the same awareness as you. So yes, the education and the engagement is ongoing because there's always people that are coming up that had no idea. And I think just going back to what we said in the first part, like you were just saying again, meeting people where they're at because maybe they were too young and they just don't know. Like I was having a conversation this past week and someone said, “Yeah, my mom and dad have been sick. I've made 10 trips to another city the last two years to try and take care of them.” Maybe their world is just small because they've been engaged in loving the people closest to them through illness.

We must meet people as best as we possibly can where they're at. And I confess, I have not always done that. And so being able to not be prideful and not be dismissive, and not look down on someone from being ignorant to simply not knowing. And even loving someone who's exceptionally misinformed. As we're doing this recording, one of my friends is meeting with a Christian nationalist right now. Like they're going there. They said, “Alright, can you pray for me, I'm going to have this conversation.” Because it is one conversation at a time that these things change.

Sy Hoekstra: I appreciate that. You just reminded me of another story I had, and I won't give details about the individual, but there's someone in my life who is a White person who's from the south, who lives in New York City, who's just one of those people that makes Black people uncomfortable, Jonathan. Just like the moment you meet him, you're like, “something… hmm, I don't know.” And I've heard other Black people talk about him this way. I've heard stuff that's made me uncomfortable. And he was just an easy person to kind of like shun or avoid.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, for sure.

Sy Hoekstra: Until I ran into another extremely kind Black person who told me… we ended up not because of me, because of someone else, in a conversation about this guy, and how he sort of makes people uncomfortable. And he was like, yeah, but he just said in not so many words, I kind of tolerate him because he lost his entire family in Hurricane Katrina, and he lives in New York City and basically has nobody and just works this kind of dead-end job and is not a very happy person. Actually, he is kind of a happy person. He's sort of trying to make the best of it, and he doesn't know what he is doing. You know what I mean? It's just like, you have one of those moments with someone where you're like, “Boy, that changes my view of this person.”

Jonathan Walton: Right [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: I still don't think any of the things that you're saying to make people uncomfortable are okay, and I'll try and interfere in whatever limited way I can or whatever. But you hear something like that, your heart changes a little bit. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Your attitude changes and like, you just, we gotta get to know each other better. We gotta listen better.

We Need Endurance and Truly Practical Wisdom

Sy Hoekstra: I think this question about what can the church do about anti-Blackness, for people who are like kind of our age or older, or people who have been through the 2010s and everything that happened up till now. It's just, it's a question of resilience. And whenever you're engaged in anti-Blackness work or any sort of activist work, you're gonna have these questions of resilience of like, what can we do, because this problem is just still going. And then there's another question of the practicality of it when you're asking that question in the church. I'm gonna define the question a little bit or reframe the question a little bit and then give answers.

When you ask the question of something like, what can we practically do about a problem in a Christian context, the question is a little bit strange sometimes, and I think you just gave some good practical answers, but we have both noticed, we talked about this recently. In the Christian world, the word “Practical” often means something different than it does to the rest of the world [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: That’s true. That's true. Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: The phrase practical application just seems to have a different meaning to pastors than it does to everybody else [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And what it tends to mean to professional Christians is, when you're talking about practical application, you're talking about a new way of thinking or a new goal for how you should feel about something.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Or like a new “heart posture” or something like that.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: It's a new attitude, but it's not practical. You actually said recently, you came out of a sermon going, “Okay, I kind of know how to think, I don't know what to do with my body. Now, after listening to this sermon.” You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right, right [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: I know what to do with my heart and my head. I don't know what to do with my hands and my feet. And we're supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, not the heart and the brain.

Jonathan Walton: Right [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: And I think, actually, I don't wanna sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but I think that problem, it at least promotes racism [laughter]. It promotes institutions remaining as they are. You know what I mean? It promotes, like when we talk about practicality and we're just talking about how we kind of think about things, like the world of ideas and emotions and not what we do politically or whatever, that is a subtle way to reinforce status quo institutions.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, it is.

Sy Hoekstra: And it's not anything to do with the person who asked the question. I'm just acknowledging the reality of how that question lands to Christian ears.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes. Especially institutionalized Christians. Yes, absolutely.

The Church Isn’t Necessarily the Best Place to Go to Fight Racism

Sy Hoekstra: And another thing is, I will say, we're talking about the church, the whole wide capital C church. The Black church, is gonna keep doing what it's always done. Black church is gonna do anti-racist work. Obviously, there are problems and questions and whatever that Black people have in their conversations among themselves within the Black church about how to do that best, or what things may be getting in the way of that or whatever. But if you're talking about big picture here, Black church is always fighting racism. I think we're kind of asking questions about the rest of the church. The White church in particular, and then some other churches as well. If we're just talking about the American church in general and what it can do to fight anti-Blackness, if you look at the history of just big picture American church, there are Christians in the United States on both sides of this past election.

There are Christians in the United States in history on both sides of the Civil War. There are Christians in the United States on both sides of segregation versus civil rights. There are Christians in the abolition movement, there are obviously Christians in the pro-slavery movement. Christians set up the system of racism and slavery. European Christians did.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: The American church, if you just look at history, is a weird place, is a weird institution to look to, to end anti-Blackness. We have been consistently ambivalent about it for centuries. Do you know what I mean? I understand…

Jonathan Walton: No, listen. It's true, and that's sad.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes, yes.

Jonathan Walton: That reality is depressing, right.

Good Things Come from God, Not the Church

Sy Hoekstra: Horribly depressing. And so I understand, one, you just don't want that to be real. So you say, “Hey, what can we do?” Or, you want, and when I say you, again, I don't mean the question asker because I haven't had a conversation or back-and-forth. I'm just saying this is what people could be asking when they ask this question. It could also be the instinct of a lot of White evangelicals, which I can tell you this question asker is not, have the instinct when we say, what can the church do, of kind of thinking that if there's anything good is going to happen in the world, it has to come from the church, and that is so wrong. It is not biblically accurate. You can't look at scripture and go, “Yeah, everything good has to come from the church.” Goodness comes from God. God is the source of goodness, and God sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous, and we are very much among the unrighteous. God is the source of goodness, and so we need to acknowledge that we can find goodness outside of the church.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that's a point worth repeating.

Sy Hoekstra: Right [laughs]. We can find goodness outside of the church. I will repeat it [laughter]. We can in our congregations have fights that can go on for years and years about how we can just try and move anyone toward anti-Blackness work, and you can work for forever and you can see no fruit. And you could have spent all that time taking the few Christians, because there's always a handful, even in a [laughs], in any church, there's a few people who are sympathetic to whatever you're trying to do.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: You can just take them and you are the church, you and your Christians, and go do work with somebody else. You can go to your local mutual aid organization. You can go to your local Black Lives Matter chapter. You can go to whoever. You can go find the people who are doing the work and work with them, and that's fine, because it's still good and it therefore still comes from God. And we don't have to subtly participate or subconsciously participate in the idea that everything good has to come from the church, which is ultimately a colonial and colonizing idea. That is what a church that is going into a country trying to colonize it wants you to think, “Everything good comes from us, so you gotta come here [laughs] for the good stuff. And all those people out there, those are the bad people.”

Jonathan Walton: [inhales deeply and sighs] Right. No, I mean, yeah, everything you're saying is true. That was my big sigh there [laughter].

All Justice Work Requires Real, Local Community

Sy Hoekstra: So I read a thing this week from Camille Hernandez who wrote a really great book called The Hero and the W***e, which is a look through a womanist theological lens at what we can learn from what the Bible says about basically sexual violence. Fascinating book. Anyways, she was talking about her reading of Mariame Kaba, who I've cited before in this show, who is a famous abolitionist organizer, who basically said a lot of people who have a lot of influence, activists who have a lot of influence, can be sort of confused and unmoored at times like this because they have a lot of influence. They have a lot of people that they can call to go do a march or whatever. But what they don't have is a local community. So like what I was just talking about, taking the few people in your church, if you have a few people in your church and going and doing the work somewhere else, that's your small community.

You need people who are on the same page as you, who you love, and they love you and you're there to support each other, and they will ground you in times like this, doing that work together. We'll ground you in times like this and it will give you a way to move forward. It will give you a sense of purpose, it will give you accountability. That's also a fraught word if you grew up in the church [laughter]. But it will give you the good kind of accountability to be able to do the work of anti-Blackness or fight any other kind of injustice, frankly. So that's one important thing.

KTF’s PACE Guide Will Help You Engage Practically with Injustice

Sy Hoekstra: I also think if you want a good framework for how to do things practically when you are fighting anti-Blackness or other forms of injustice, go get our PACE guide [laughs]. We have a guide that we produced a few months ago.

If you have signed up recently on our newsletter, or if you want to sign up for our free mailing list, you get it in the welcome email. If you were on our list before a few months ago, you have it in one of your old emails. It's basically a guide for when you encounter issues of injustice in the news or in your everyday life or wherever, how to process it and do something about it in a way that is, actually takes into account your limitations and your strengths, and helps you think through those things and help you kind of grow as you run through this cycle of steps and questions and prayers that we have for you to go through as you are thinking through these things. So PACE is the acronym. You can find out what it stands for and how to go through it if you go get that guide, sign up for our free emailing list if you don't have it. And that will give you a good sense of how to think through you personally in your context, how you can fight anti-Blackness.

Jonathan Walton: Exactly.

Sy Hoekstra: But yeah, on a bigger scale, the reason I'm talking about small things like community and how you personally can work, is I'm not thinking on as grand a scale as what can the church do to end anti-Blackness. Because we're not God, we are not saviors. We are not here to fix everything. God is here to do all those things. So I'm more asking, how do I join in with stuff that's already happening? And again, that's not like a correction to the question asker. It's just where I'm at [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Well no, it's a reorientation.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: I think something that, and I don't know if this is a generational thing, and I think that me being 38 years old, I have been shaped in a certain way to believe and want institutions to answer big questions as opposed to gathering a group of people and having a community instead of an institution. There's still work that God is doing in me around that, in that communities are vehicles for transformation in the kingdom and institutions it seems are vehicles for power in the world. That's something I'm wrestling with myself because I do think that one of the answers to anti-Blackness is beloved community, not as a concept, but like a practical thing. Like we are checking in on each other, we are going out to dinner, we are sharing recipes.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes.

Jonathan Walton: We are sending memes and funny videos like that. That is actually some aid that can lift our spirits each day amidst an empire that desires to destroy us.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think a lot of my journey trying to figure out how to do more justice work and follow Jesus, has been asking those smaller questions about what can I do in my own community? Just because I have, you and I, we have limited influence, and we have a church institution that has supported anti-Blackness in a lot of ways and those are just realities. And they're really sad, and the idea that a lot of the church is kind of useless and sort of opposed to the things of God, a lot of people don't wanna accept that. But I think if you don't accept that, you're gonna be running into these frustrations a lot. Like why is the church not doing this? And then trying to find probably solace in just really small things. Like okay, is my church's theology better than yours, or is my… You know, like in things that are not making a difference in the world [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right. Right.

The Church Has to Trust in Grace, Not Save the World

Sy Hoekstra: So, I don't know, man. Look, the beauty of the church is not in how good it is. The church is beautiful in the light of Christ, not in the light of its own good work in goodness. The church is beautiful because… the church is beautiful when, not because, when [laughs] it is people collectively trying to put their faith in the grace that governs the universe, and not put their faith in their own ability to bring the kingdom of God into this world. And that's such a hard thing to do. We so wanna make an institution that is good, that is fundamentally good and that we're a part of it [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Well, it's a hard thing to do and accept.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes.

Jonathan Walton: Because in how we have been cultured downstream of colonization, if there is no effort, then I don't get a gold star, then I'm not included. Like, what do you mean? What do you mean that I'm supposed to play a small part? No, no. I'm supposed to be a star.

Sy Hoekstra: I'm supposed to change the world.

Jonathan Walton: I'm supposed to change the world, and I'm supposed to build something. I'm supposed to make something. Like we're an entrepreneurial event, we're supposed to do that. And Jesus hung out for 30 years, and then went and got 12 seemingly disqualified people [laughs] to go and do this thing, and then drafted Paul who was woefully unhelpful, the majority of Jesus' journey to then go and take his stuff to the rest of the world. Come on man. This is [laughs]… it’s really hard to say yes to that.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: But when you experience it like you were saying, to live in the grace that governs the universe changes your life.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. People who are free of the need to prove themselves by defeating evil, right [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: Lord have mercy [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: That—look, to me that is a beautiful thing. That is one of the things that animates me, that motivates me. That makes me want to get out there and do more. Which is, I don't know, it's counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive to me, but it also works on me. So [laughs] I'm gonna keep focusing on it.

Jonathan Walton: Amen.

Season Wrap-Up Thoughts, Outro, and Outtake

Sy Hoekstra: Do you have more thought—I think that's a good place to end it, Jonathan. I don't know if you have more thoughts.

Jonathan Walton: No, I don't have more thoughts.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, great.

Jonathan Walton: I appreciate that you as a White person, or racially assigned White person who's aware of their heritage and trying to engage as best you possibly can across this difference, have so many thoughts. I think that is helpful actually.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, good. Thanks. I appreciate that [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I say that because there's a pastor that I follow, Ben Cremer, he's in Idaho, and experiences that I've had with different leaders, it is exceptionally empowering and feels like a burden is lifted off of my shoulders when people who don't have to carry the burden of Blackness are trying to be thoughtful around how to stop anti-Blackness.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I mean, ditto ableism man.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: If this is your first episode, I'm blind and Jonathan does the same thing to me on those grounds. And I think that's a lot of why our thoughts in relationship works. I'm not good at taking compliments, so I'm just throwing it back on you [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No worries. It's all good. If you haven't seen it, somebody should google “Christian Affirmation Rap Battle” where they just try to compliment battle each other. It is amazing. [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: I'm absolutely gonna do that because that sounds like brilliant and pointed satire.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Alright. Thank you all so much for listening. This has been an incredible season, man. I've had a lot of fun. Fun is a relative word [laughter] when we're talking about the things that we're doing. I've had, I don't know, a very motivating and helpful and stimulating time talking to a lot of the people that we talked to four years ago when we started this, who wrote for us.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: If you haven't listened to those interviews, go back in the season, they're really, really helpful. I feel like they're probably even more helpful in light of how the election turned out. And I don't know, I just appreciate this. I feel like it's been fun. We didn't do it this time, but when we're doing Which Tab Is Still Open and adding, talking about some of our newsletter highlights, I've really appreciated that. I feel like it makes the episode very meaty when we have an interview and some other conversation in there too, and I've just liked what we've put out this season. So thank you, Jonathan for participating in that. Thank you everybody so much for listening.

Jonathan Walton: Yep. Yep. And I'm deeply appreciative. I think a brief Which Tab is Still Open that I thought was gonna close was our anthology.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, alright.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] I will say we started this four years ago with the anthology and as we're ending this season, the anthology is probably one of the most relevant things.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: The leaders that wrote in it, the contributors to it, that work and those essays, I hate and love that they are still relevant.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, right. Same.

Jonathan Walton: …and helpful. If you don't have a copy, you should go get one.

Sy Hoekstra: Keepingthefaithbook.com, that's where you can find it.

Jonathan Walton: Yep.

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you all so much for listening. Remember, get the Substack app to listen to our monthly recordings of the, the live recordings of our bonus episodes. And if you want to get the recordings of those bonus episodes after the fact, or join our monthly subscriber Zoom calls, become a paid subscriber @ktfpress.com. Or get a discounted or free subscription by just writing into us if money is an obstacle. Make sure you add us to your contacts or drag and drop our emails to your inbox if they're in your promotions folder, just so that you can get everything from us that you need. That's how you're gonna get notified if you don't have the app. That's how you'll get notified when our Substack Lives start.

Our theme song is Citizens by Jon Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robin Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale, and our editing for a lot of this season was done by Multitude Productions. We are so incredibly grateful for them, they have been friendly and fantastic. Thank you, Brandon, our editor.

Jonathan Walton: Appreciate you.

Sy Hoekstra: I produced this show along with our incredible paid subscribers. Thank you so much. If you are one of those paid subscribers, we will see you next month. Otherwise, we will see you for season five.

Jonathan Walton: See y’all.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: A multi disc Encyclopedia Britannica.

Jonathan Walton: Basically.

Sy Hoekstra: Do you remember those? Did you have that when you were a kid?

Jonathan Walton: I, we definitely bought, my mama definitely bought them. You are absolutely right.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: She did. That man showed up with that suitcase and he left empty handed. That was his goal, he made it.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh no [laughs]. Oh no.

Jonathan Walton: And you best believe we read all them books.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

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.

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.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, Mindy, did you wanna add something to that before I dive into Jason's question in the chat, because I think it pulls David's question like in a tighter vein?

Mindy: Well, I guess I'll say it's hard to have hope in this… I believe that you're right, and I believe that God is present in this, and will find a way. But I just feel like there's going to be so much pain before that happens. And I mean, there already has been.

The Depths of the Racism Is a Barrier to Hope

Mindy: I read something yesterday, I think that, so this was the thing that people chose to speak out about [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Mindy: And we totally were fine with the Haitians being under the bus, but… and I don't want to pit people.

Jonathan Walton: No, no, I understand.

Mindy: It’s all awful, but I thought that was really interesting, that politicians weren't threatened by that, but were threatened now and so had to disavow it now.

Sy Hoekstra: Sorry, what are they threatened by now? The Madison Square Garden rally?

Mindy: The Puerto Ricans because they're…

Sy Hoekstra: The Puerto Ricans. Yeah.

Mindy: And…

Sy Hoekstra: Well, the Puerto Ricans are citizens, aren't they [laughs]? They can vote.

Mindy: Yes. And that just really hit me when I read it, because just the whole thing about the impact on Haitians in this country just has broken my heart. And again, it's like you can say something as a joke, and real people suffer. People are suffering. And even here's another thing that hit me. And we don't have to go up on this tangent, but I just wanna say it.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Mindy: Is that part of that joke was about Puerto Ricans having so many children.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes.

Mindy: And it's like, I thought that's what everybody [laughs] wanted.

Sy Hoekstra: No, it's the wrong people having the children, though. That's the thing.

Mindy: I mean, obviously the underlying thing is they don't want Puerto Rican children.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Right.

Jonathan Walton: Having children. Right.

Mindy: But, I mean, just all… I'm sorry, I’ll stop, but it just all makes me sick [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: There was a famous clip. It got a guy fired. He was an anchor or a pundit? I think he was a pundit for Fox News who when those numbers first came out like 15 years ago, or whatever that said, “By 2040 or whatever, we’ll be a minority nation. There'll be no majority race. There'll be a plurality of White people, but it'll be less than 50 percent. There was a Fox News anchor who said, basically, entreating his White audience, he explicitly said, “Do your duty. Have more children.”

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And he got fired over it. But also he just, like they might say on the Twitters, he said the quiet part out loud [laughter]. That’s what you're identifying that quiet part.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Jason said that the perception being the Haitians don’t vote as much as Puerto Ricans do. And, of course, the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, a lot of them are actually not citizens. That's the point there, but yeah, there are a whole lot of Haitian citizens [laughter] in some important places like Florida.

Jonathan Walton: And Pennsylvania [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Right. Which is why Rick Scott disavowed it, because he's trying to win an election in Florida.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly. Every politician in Brooklyn disavowed it. Of course, they did [laughs]. Boston, or whatever.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Do you wanna go with Jason's question?

There Is Hope in Worship and in Remembering How Small Our Particular Context Is

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, because I feel like David's question of, “What do I do?” and then it's like, if you pull that down one level, down a lot of abstraction, it's like, “What do I do today, what I do tomorrow, what I do?” Because there's like, real different things there. And then I think there's the engagement and communication across difference or perceived sameness that Jason is talking about, where it's like, “Alright, well, I'm doing this with Christians, but in this environment. Like how do I do it in this place?” And so something I've been thinking about a lot is the… I don't think that Christians, like followers of Jesus, are aligned with Trump as much as we believe or think that he is, because I think about the world.

So I have to right size, capital C Church, to remind myself that there is a remnant that exists outside of this context that has nothing to do with… You know, like I was having a conversation with an Indonesian kid in Tampa this past weekend, and him deciding to follow Jesus and seeing a vision, and all of these different things of God moving, his context has never been intersected with the Trump or Christian nationalist reality, and Jesus is meeting him. So I think there's some of that. So I can right size this to be like, Revelation like 3 to 22 is still at work in all these different places. Like, how does it work in this context? So I think being as present as we can with real people, and as present as we can in the promises of the Lord, and kind of seeing how those things work together, there can be a little more hope, because the pain and the suffering and the brokenness perpetuated by people gets overshadowed by the light of Jesus, to still be doing things in these places.

And so I think one way, as close as we are to the stories of people encountering Jesus and participating in that story is just a really helpful thing as best as we can. And I mean, I am I think a little privileged, and a little, it's a little problematic. It's like, this is my job. I get to think about these things. Oh, I get to, in air quotes, Allison. I get to think about these things [laughs]. But I think there was something that happened for me in writing. I just put it in the chat, we have these three prayer meetings next week, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Like the first one is, even if my greatest fears come true. The second one is, even if my greatest hopes come true, and the third one is, praying for our political enemies.

When we saturate ourselves with scripture, when we sit before God, when we have conversations with people, things just… It's like the song says, the things of this world begin to pass away, and we can actually see Jesus. And then we look back at the world, the world looks different. And so spiritual disciplines of prayer in community and individually, spiritual disciplines of fasting, spiritual disciplines of generosity, those things change us. And so I actually got, I told somebody a story of Gabrielle, Sy actually, when she was trapped in Haiti during the earthquake. And I don't know if you all remember the earthquake in 2010. And she's sitting there in the rubble and there's no power, and there's worship.

And there's something that happens when people of Jesus, people of faith, decide to praise God. And so I think worship, prayer, meditation and scripture, individually and in community, and in these moments of, what do I do now? I do feel like is, we need to pray, fast and intercede. That's what the people of God, we worship. So I think there is an urgency around that for orientation. And then the long-term stuff is the things that we were able to, I've said it in different ways and different contexts. In the KTF context is to pace yourself, being like to pray, to assess, to collaborate, establish. Like we can discern what God is doing, because if we're sitting on a Zoom call in the middle of the day, we have food, we have resources, we have… we have the capacity to plan, which people in Gaza don't.

So it's, how can we see that adequately, because we will in Jesus name, be alive post November the sixth. Like we can actually plan longer term because of how empire has treated us in 2024. Yeah, so I think that the dwelling in scripture and dwelling with people in scripture, and dwelling in worship alone and with people can kind of create the fire behind and the cloud above to be able to know that we're kind of it with God in that way, to use a, not we are not Israel, but to use an Exodus analogy, because now… Go ahead, Sy.

Sy Hoekstra: I was gonna say, if I can add to the hope point there, the hope in difficult times when Gabrielle was in Haiti, you just reminded me. So basically, Gabrielle was basically trapped in Haiti for a couple days and… this is my wife we're talking about. And she was not hurt, and neither was her team that she was there with. She was with a bunch of students from her grad school program, and a couple of professors, one professor. And they basically found themselves at a makeshift medical tent that someone, I think, a PA or a doctor, there was one actual medical professional there, and then just a bunch of people acting as disaster area nurses [laughs]. So that's what Gabrielle did for a couple days.

And was sleeping on the hood of a car whenever she got too exhausted to keep working, because people just kept coming in and coming in with horrible injuries. And we'd come to learn more than 100,000 people had just died in a matter of seconds, and way more were injured. And she was exhausted from all this after a while. And there was this young woman, I don't know, early teenage years, who at one point, she was injured. She was in a bed, or in whatever, a makeshift spot that Gabrielle was treating people around her, and she stopped Gabrielle, and she asked her if Gabrielle would pray with her. And Gabrielle comes over thinking, “Oh, yes, I'm gonna pray for this injured young woman who's whatever,” and the young woman starts praying for her, and basically asking God to give her the strength and hope as she keeps going. And I mean, I think maybe that was the moment you're referring to, Jonathan [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: But that's kind of where she… Our daughter is actually named after this young woman. I've told Gabrielle, I won't put our daughter's full name out there, so [laughs] I won't say it. But it was just an incredible moment of Gabrielle… Gabrielle questioned the whole time while she's there, where on earth is God in all of this? And that was the answer she got. And I think there's a lot of… it was like you and the work that you're doing and in the prayers of this young woman, and that's where God is operating in the middle of this disaster. And I think to a lot of people, this is why I'm saying hope is hard. Like that's not a satisfying answer to a lot of people, for reasons that I can understand. I can really understand. But it's one of those times… it's like one of those things that's deep enough for me, that gets me to think about the cross [laughs], to be to be my own… Once an evangelical, always an evangelical [laughs].

And just to think of the pain that God, I just talked about this on a recent episode, the pain that God puts God's self through in order to get us to trust him through those little things. Like through those prayers and through that work that we do when hope is so low and in short supply. So I don't know, that's what you got me thinking about Jonathan. And because it's the origin of my daughter's name, I got all up in my feelings [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: It’s all good.

Sy Hoekstra: But that's, yeah, that's real.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think we could talk a long time about the cross and the gospel and how relevant it is when we are trying to feel hopeful.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And at the same time, it's like, for me, it's like, not the go to thing. I will go to lots of other things before I remember, “Oh, right. This was not what he promised.” We were doing a Bible study on Sunday at our house with our small group. It’s not a very small group. It’s like 10 families, which is not a small group anymore [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: That’s a small church, a house church.

Jonathan Walton: I was like, “There are a lot of people here.” But Ephesians 3, where it's like… I'm sorry, Ephesians 1, where it's like this deposit that Jesus, that God has made in us because of his promise. And I'm like, crap, his promise is just his presence, and the Holy Spirit is that deposit until we see him on the other side of eternity. I’m like, that's what was promised. All these other things I want were not promised, which is I like what Mindy, I would like to think that's really good, but in the daily I'm content, but not satisfied, which is really hard when people are suffering. So yeah. Any other thoughts or musings on that before, I know Sy has other things on the list, but you all may have had questions and stuff that came up between them.

Sy Hoekstra: Now, I made my other things feel insignificant [laughter]. I was like, we'll just start with a general thing, peacemaking, hope, whatever [laughter]. Oh, sorry, what was…? Jason had a question though, Jonathan, that was a little bit back about, I think White identity which I wanna hit since we have time.

Calls for Peace Versus Calls for Unity

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm curious about how you're made hopeful in peace building as Christians, when there is such strong alignment between White Christian identity and Trump campaign. I think I said stuff about that. Just been making, kind of decentering our current reality towards one that is much larger.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see. Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: But I did not do the second paragraph. It seems to be that 1, a perhaps well-intentioned call for Christian unity could center White Christianity, 2, reinforce, mirror false peace. Yep, all three of those things. Yes, it would do that [laughs]. And I think that I personally don't… I mean, there may have been a season where I did, but I don't know that I've ever called for unity, like been like, we need to really... I don't know I've ever done that.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I'm trying to think real hard. Have I ever…

Sy Hoekstra: Because the thing is, I think everybody would agree in the extreme… and Jason's right, calls for peace can be experienced as calls for unity. That's a good point.

Jonathan Walton: That's true. Okay, cool.

Sy Hoekstra: So that's not what we're saying [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Because I think what anyone would probably concede if you just made it abstract and took it to an extreme, there are always times when you should call for unity among people who are disagreeing over things that don't matter. And there are things where you need to call for, excuse me, disassociation, when there are disagreements over things that really do matter.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Like for any individual person, you could come up with something that doesn't matter and something that really, really is crucial, and I don't think anyone would say, “Yeah, we really should have been calling for unity in the churches of Germany in the 1930s,” or whatever. Like all those churches should have just gotten together and made peace with the Nazis and been fine because a lot of churches were basically Nazi churches. Or segregationist churches in America, or whatever. So I think the trick is just, you got to know when you're calling for unity and when you're calling to shake the dust. And obviously our orientation at this particular moment in the American church [laughs] would be the call to do the name of our podcast is. But I think that peacemaking and unity are different things.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And when we say peacemaking, I'm not talking about an absence of conflict. I'm not talking about just being nice to people no matter what. I'm not talking about very fine people on both sides [laughs]. I am talking about reconciling people to the truth, as many people as you can, and the people who will not do that. As Jesus said when he sent people out, before you shake the dust off your feet you let the peace that you gave to them return to you, and then you leave.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Philippians 2, where it talks about, so the unity that we are talking about is when Jesus says, “I want you to be of one mind. Be of one spirit in Christ Jesus.” And so if we, like we on this call are talking about that, then the other thing that my mind goes to is calls for peace and unity. I'm trying to think of when they have come not from people in power. And then I think there's a sliver of that in the quote- unquote, like parts of the Democratic Party, particularly Black folks right now. Like well, we need to vote for Kamala Harris, because if we do that, then we have a better chance of fighting for peace in Palestine. Or there's talks about what's strategic versus righteous in that way.

And I think that the calling for unity, I can't think of a time where that was, if we're not talking about Philippians 1 and 2 kind of unity, the calls for unity are usually by people in power, or to get some sort of power, which I don't know that Jesus is ever about getting power. So they feel irreconcilable to me. If I'm calling for unity in the spirit and in the church, I don't think it's possible for me to call for unity for the sake of political power. That seems antithetical to the entirety of acts to me, and the early church and the witnesses and how the redemption project that we can see, the arc of Jesus’ coming as a complete story. Nothing of that to me sounds like the strategy to obtain political power and influence.

So it's almost like in the church, when we call for unity, there has to be a radical explanation of what we mean by that before we say it, or people will just define it for themselves, or feel totally, not obfuscated. What's an easier word? Papered over. Like let's just paper over this difference for the sake of this. For the sake of the voting on this measure at our board meeting, or making sure this bylaw passes. Or this person gets into office, or this good thing happens. Literally, a lot of Black activists arguing vote for Kamala, because then we won't have to shoot all of the fires out if Trump's elected, then we can act… You know, like just time. I mean, you all probably remember this, activists’ energy got totally sucked up by everything that Trump did every day.

There was no focus and availability for long term things like climate change, just like second level problems that people engage with and experience. It was like we were afraid. I’ll speak in the I. I was afraid every day to go on social media to see what needed to be mobilized next and who would be hurt.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. Right.

Jonathan Walton: That was exhausting. So I can see the strategy, but it feels irreconcilable with Jesus' prayer, and the apostles prayer in John 18, the high priestly prayer in John 18, the call for unity in Christ in Philippians 2, it doesn't go together with political power.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think it sounds like you’re asking what the unity is, what is the goal? And then is the thing that I'm doing in the name of the goal? Can I have integrity with that, right?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Does that sound right to you?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, because I can't... Man, I was talking with a young woman… Well, she's not young, just a woman. She's an activist. I was doing a workshop. And she’s probably a nurse. She has two kids, she's Haitian. She's probably like 45/46. And she just said, “This isn't abstract for me. This is very real.” And what we're saying is, the Scripture says vengeance is not mine, vengeance is God's. But you're saying is that like, if this is true, then my people are going to suffer. Like that's not an uncostly thing to say, believe, preach, call people to. And so, yeah, the frustration with that is real.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And I would not have integrity on the flip side, if I told her it didn't matter, this is just the right thing to do for the sake of being united. Because we're united in Christ, which means I have to mourn with her, I have to suffer alongside her if we're united.

Sy Hoekstra: Any other thoughts on that? Thank you very much for the questions and the thoughts. Jonathan, you can still hear me, right?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, you're good.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, cool. I just made sure I didn't do something there.

The Somewhat Elevated Black and Latine Support for Trump

Sy Hoekstra: The kind of like the more newsy item that I wanted to talk about, the thing that I've just been seeing a lot about recently is there's been a lot of stories about, I mean, we're hearing this a lot in New York too, because Trump had his rally in the Bronx a little while ago, and it's just about why there appears to be a shift upward in Black and Brown support for Donald Trump. And it's been such an interesting story, because a lot of it is like obscuring the fact that Kamala Harris is gonna still overwhelmingly win all Black and Brown voters [laughs]. That's like not a question. But they keep saying there's X amount of percentage increase or whatever.

And then Jonathan reminded me earlier today, we had Barack Obama coming out recently and basically going after Black men for increasing voting in Trump, as though Trump getting elected could be their fault and not the fault of the overwhelming majority of… not overwhelming, but the majority of White voters who are voting for him. And people are just, I feel like people are missing the point in a lot of ways, in that we're kind of over emphasizing the upswing as opposed to right sizing it and looking at the whole picture. But I also think there's this interesting thing going on in the Republican Party, where they are I think realizing that with the demographic shifts of this country, they have to find a way to include more people somewhere under the umbrella of whiteness if they wanna survive.

Like if they don't wanna really change a lot of their outlook in the ways that they approach voting and still get elected, there's gonna be some inroads that have to be made among some people, other than hardline White conservatives. And that's harder the more Trumpy you get. But it's kind of like we have to find ways to make whiteness and the propping up of whiteness seem beneficial to some marginal increase of Black and Brown people. And the way that it's working the most is among men. And again, it's not really working overall at all, but the way [laughs] that there's small gains is among men. And I was listening to this interview with this journalist named Paola Ramos, who is really a great journalist in her own right, but she's also the daughter of the famous Univision anchor Jorge Ramos.

And she has written a book that she was talking about called Defectors, which is all about basically the increase in right wing and religious right wing Latinos in America. And she talks about, she has a nice, little alliterative three-word thing that she's talking about. She says we talk about tribalism, traditionalism and trauma, are her three big factors in her investigative reporting. And the trauma thing was the thing that kind of stuck out to me, and this real sense that Republicans can take advantage of massive amounts of people who have come to this country because they were fleeing… Jonathan just gave you the link to the book. Because they're fleeing communist dictatorships, or their grandparents fled communist dictatorships or whatever.

And the actual, genuine fear that Democrats are not taking into account, which is if you actually grew up afraid of the secret police or whatever from a communist regime, and you came to America for freedom, and one of the two people getting voted for is being labeled a communist, how that's scary in a way that a lot of people are not thinking about. That's like scary in a, and it's like a bone deep fear [laughs] of something that actually happened to me or to my family, and that still haunts me. I might have PTSD or whatever. And how easy it is for that kind of, again, like Jonathan inviting us to be afraid. There are fears that are more and less understandable [laughs] I think in the world, that would make somebody vote for a strong man, and that's one of the ones that's more understandable, even if it comes out, when it's in your face, it's really mean and ugly sometimes, but it's real.

And Gabrielle recently went to a protest. I wrote about this in the newsletter, there's all this ethnic cleansing going on in the Dominican Republic right now, where they're deporting just like tens of thousands of Haitians in a matter of weeks. And there was a protest at a Dominican consulate in the Bronx. There were a bunch of Dominican counter protesters, like serious Trump supporting, angry counter protesters. She said she was there and a couple people, there were cops and they formed a line in between the protesters and the counter protesters. So more than once, she heard a counter protester shout, “He's got a gun!” in an attempt to get the cops to spin around and pull their guns on the protesters and maybe shoot somebody.

And she was like, “This is serious. I'm afraid to be here.” And I don't know, that kind of fear coming from… and it's a little bit different in the Dominican case, because we propped up fascists in the DR to fight communism, but again, fighting this specter of this terrible thing that happened in Cuba and other places [laughs]. There's just so much wrapped up in that that isn't just what we're used to talking about with like rural White Trump supporters or whatever. It is heart wrenching, Jason. And I just think that difference and that nuance is like, we have to get that, but also I know that Donald Trump, the Donald Trump campaign, do not understand Latino voters [laughs]. You know what I mean? I know that they do not have the cultural context.

They know they have found through polling or whatever, that there is some anti-immigrant sentiment that they can take a hold of. There's some anti-communist sentiment that they can take a hold of. And also, I know for a fact that they don't actually understand the people that they're trying to preach to. And so there has to be a movement of people who actually do understand those cultures, to find the thing, find the hooks in those cultures that get people toward a movement of solidarity as the answer to trauma. Because that's the, you know what I mean? It's like empathy and understanding that other people have gone through the same thing, that the person you're voting for is putting other people through similar stuff to what you or your family went through, that kind of stuff has to happen and it has to happen from the from the inside, like from the people who actually get the culture and who know the stuff about the culture that Donald Trump doesn't know. And that I don't know, by the way [laughs]. Right?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: That kind of organizing has to happen. And that's the kind of stuff that you see happening with, I always think the Black Voters Matter movement in Georgia with LaTosha Brown and everybody else was that kind of movement, was somebody who understood, and Stacey Abrams, all those people understood something about Black voters in Georgia that outsiders, even in the Democratic Party, really didn't get, and they took advantage of it [laughs]. So that kind of thing needs to happen. I've been talking for so long now. I'm sorry [laughs]. I just had a lot of thoughts to get out, and I thought this might be a good place to do it. Jonathan, your thoughts, or anybody else's?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I want everybody else to talk, but I wanna say like…

Sy Hoekstra: Sorry.

Jonathan Walton: No, no, you're fine. Three quick things before too long. One, there's a book. Don't read the first one, definitely read the second one. The first one is Jerry Falwell's, Listen, America! Don't read it. It's a terrible book. It's not well researched or any of those things, but it dictates the United States’ entire Republican platform right now. And it's been that way since 1979. And one of the things that he says…

Sy Hoekstra: Well, except for the pro life stuff, They’ve kind of gotten rid of that. But go on.

Jonathan Walton: That's true. He did get mad about that later in life. What he says about evil communist and the evil Marxist and the godless, I think he said the godless socialist. That mechanism, and then if you can google his arguments with, he debated Jesse Jackson and he debated some other leader on Nightline in nineteen seventy something. And you could watch them argue about it.

Sy Hoekstra: All recounted in Jonathan's book, by the way. You can just go read Jonathan’s book.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. It is in Twelve Lies. I write it all down.

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan is trying to remember research he did a few years ago [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It's true. It's true. That's what's happening right now. But what's interesting about it is that the playbook’s really old.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so the way that I kind of pull it into today is like, and it is Twelve Lies, it is White American folk religion. It's like after race, there is gender, and that includes orientation, sexuality, identity and practice. So let me figure out a way to make… there's a Peruvian scholar whose name escapes me, but he says, “I can make coloniality tempting. Let me just get a few people.” And so The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. you should definitely read. It's not an easy book, but one of the things you see, and that he highlights, is a dialog between slaves and why they're doing certain things, why they're not doing certain things. Who's willing to fight, who's not willing to fight.

One of the slaves becomes a pastor of other slaves, and this idea that he could be elevated is enticing to him. And so it's just a fascinating, so similarly, I think the same thing is at play. Because I may not be White, and I do not mean this in a pejorative way, but I'm gonna just use the language. It's like, I may not be White, but at least I'm not Black. I may not be White, but at least I'm not gay. I may not be White, but at least I'm not a woman. I may not be White, but… And so there's a there's a temptation there to get it with Paola Ramos’ thing, and her stuff is amazing, like if I cannot be traumatized, I would choose that.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And it's a human choice.

Sy Hoekstra: It’s also, by the way, it's an intentional thing that we've done for a long time. And you can go back and especially among pro slavery advocates in the south before the war or after the war, at any point [laughs]. People who are supporting either slavery or supporting Jim Crow and the Black Codes later, there was an intentional, explicit, “We need to make sure that poor White people and Black people don't band together against us. So we're gonna give poor White people something over the Black people that they can hold on to that is of real value in our society.” And they would say these things in letters to each other just openly. Like as clearly as I just said it. And that's our history. You know what I mean?

And by the way, another thing you reminded me of, we have plenty of Cold War trauma about communism in this country too [laughs]. We had children hiding under desks and people saying that you could be exploded by a nuclear missile from the Kremlin at any point. So this is here too [laughs] is what I’m saying.

Mindy: But then what I don't get about that then is, how can trump being sidling up to Putin, and that's acceptable.

Sy Hoekstra: He’s a strong man.

Allison: I grew up with, you know, I'm a total Cold War kid. And so, how in the world, the Republican Party, I mean…

Sy Hoekstra: I hear what you're saying, but he's…

Allison: It’s making my head explode.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Allison: This stuff is like, this Russian interference, it's all over the place, and now somehow Kamala Harris is the communist. I don't get it [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: It's because they're like, we did this during the Cold War too, though. We cozied up with all kinds of dictators and strong men, as long as they weren't communists. And Putin's not a communist. He hates communists [laughs]. He's a right wing authoritarian. And we were fine doing that all over the world during the Cold War. Yeah, I don't know. It's an ideological thing. Anti-communism and anti-authoritarianism are not the same thing, is what I'm saying [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: I think that… All right, so it's 1:59. We are in like a lot of contextual soup.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so to go back a little bit, Haiti and the DR, and then their distinct histories with the developed world. I hate using that phrase, but you all know what I mean.

Sy Hoekstra: Rich world.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah. So if we are just looking at them, it's like Haiti liberates itself from France, then kicks out Spain. But when they came together, because there was a Republic of Haiti, the Dominicans were a part of that. But then the Haiti wanted the DR to help pay reparations to France, so that France wouldn't invade again. And so then the DR was like, “They're trying to tax us.” And so then Spain was like, “Well, we're gonna come back.” So then you have the wars between quote- unquote, Haitians and Dominicans. But then if you go across the ocean a little bit to Venezuela, on their flags, they have portion of the Haitian flag because Haitians sent resources to South America to liberate them from Spain. And so in the DR though, you might meet a lot of Dominicans with Greek names and Latinized names, because their relationship to whiteness is very different than other countries in the Caribbean. So that's like Campbell Soup, which has its own mix of things. So when we start having these conversations, they go one way. But then you go over here and we get into Cuba and the revolutions and then it's like okay, well, Pinochet did this, and he was propped up. And then, I don't remember the dictator before… Fidel Castro. But then you get this, so then Russia's like, “Hey, we're gonna come in.”

And then you get the whole Cold War narratives that didn't happen with other countries in South America, like Brazil. Because the Portuguese… So I feel like there's an invitation from God to slow down and try and see each group of people… Thanks Jason. To see each group of people, and as best as we possibly can engage with the person right in front of us, as opposed to trying to hold all the… You know the movie Up where the balloons take the house away?

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: I feel like we're the house and everything's trying to take us away [laughter]. And it's just like, how do we…? There you go. Because as we're having this conversation, I'm like, but this history is different, and their relationship is different. And depending how old you are, it's also different. But whiteness has a carrot for each one of these audiences, and that I think is the thing that is uniquely scary and hard, but we can definitely push against all that. Thanks David [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you.

Jonathan Walton: I appreciate you, man.

Prayer and Outro

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, we should wrap up [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you all for coming. Just a reminder, we'll be doing our Substack live next week, on Wednesday at 1pm after the election. So get the Substack app and watch us there. And Jonathan, do you wanna pray to close?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Allison and Mindy, if you have time, I’m gonna pray one more prayer. It's gonna be the prayer of Saint Francis. Lord, would you make us instruments of your peace. Where there's hatred, may we sow love. Where there's injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light, and where there is sadness, joy. Oh, Divine Master, grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood, as to understand, to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born into eternal life. In Jesus name, amen.

Sy Hoekstra: Amen.

Jonathan Walton: Amen.

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much.

Jonathan Walton: Blessings on y'all.

[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for listening. Please remember, rate and review this show on iTunes or Spotify, give us a review. It is so incredibly helpful to us. It helps people find the show and believe, from the power of other people's testimonies, that it's a good show that's worth their time. Also remember, join us on November 6th at 1pm after the election for the Substack live to hear Jonathan and my reactions. Get the Substack app on iOS or Android, and you'll get an email or a notification when we start that. So we hope to see you there. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale. I did the editing on this one and the production, and the production is also done by you, our incredible paid subscribers. Thank you so much, and we will see you next Wednesday.

[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.]

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.

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.