Shake the Dust

Today’s episode features Jonathan and Sy talking with Pastor Rasool Berry. They discuss:

-        The importance of acknowledging and understanding your own and your community’s power

-        The social and spiritual forces behind the opposition to CRT or DEI (or whatever they’re calling it today)

-        Pastor Berry’s incredible documentary about Juneteenth and Christian faith

-        When to leave communities that push back against racial justice

-        And after the interview, Sy and Jonathan reflect on the work it takes to pass on a tradition like Juneteenth well, and the truly, literally unbelievable levels of ignorance whiteness creates in people

-        Plus, they discuss the Daniel Perry pardon, and the threads that connect it to the Donald Trump convictions

Mentioned in the Episode

-        Our anthology - Keeping the Faith: Reflections on Politics and Christianity in the era of Trump and Beyond

-        An abridged version of Pastor Berry’s article from the anthology.

-        His subsequent article, “Uncritical Race Theory”

-        The documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom

-        Resources for screening Juneteenth and inviting speakers involved with the film

-        The soundtrack for Juneteenth

-        Pastor Berry’s podcast, Where Ya From?

-        The article on Daniel Perry Sy put in our newsletter

-        The Texas Monthly article about how legally unusual Perry’s pardon was

Credits

-        Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.

-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.

-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.

-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.

-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Rasool Berry: There was a lot of nicknames and still are for Juneteenth. One was Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, but Jubilee Day. And when I discovered that, that's when I said we got to get involved in this process. Because you mean to tell me that these formerly enslaved people at a time when it was illegal to read, that they understood enough of the story that they picked out this festival, that it was this reordering of society, the kingdom of heaven coming back to earth. And in the context of this, of their faith, they saw God doing a jubilee in their lives?

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Introduction

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Today, hear us talk to Pastor Rasool Berry about his thoughts on the movement against CRT, or DEI, or whatever the term for the moment is right now when you listen to this. We're also [laughs] going to talk about his incredible feature length documentary called Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom, which is available for free on YouTube right now. And then after the interview, hear our thoughts on the pardon of Daniel Perry and the conviction of Donald Trump in our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open?

Sy Hoekstra: The 34 convictions of Donald Trump.

Jonathan Walton: All of them.

Sy Hoekstra: All of them [laughs]. We're going to talk about each one individually…

Jonathan Walton: Exactly.

Sy Hoekstra: …the specific business record that he destroyed, whatever.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Don't be afraid, we're not going to do that. By the way, I said at the end of last week that the guest this week was going to be Brandi Miller, and then we realized that we had to do the episode that was about Juneteenth before Juneteenth. So Brandi Miller's going to be in two weeks from now. And this time [laughs], it's Pastor Rasool Berry.

Before we get to that, just a reminder, we need your subscriptions. Please go to ktfpress.com and become a paid subscriber on our Substack. Your support sustains what we do, and we need that support from you right now. We've been doing this as a side project for a long time, and like we've been saying, if we want this show to continue past this season, we need to get a lot more subscribers so that we can keep doing this work, but not for free as much as we've been doing it.

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Jonathan Walton: Pastor Rasool Berry serves as teaching pastor at The Bridge Church in Brooklyn, New York. He's also the director of partnerships and content development with Our Daily Bread Ministries. Pastor Berry graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in Africana Studies and Sociology. He's also the host of the Where Ya From? podcast sponsored by Christianity Today, and the writer, producer and host of Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. Let's get to it. Here's the interview.

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

Sy Hoekstra: Pastor, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.

Rasool Berry: Oh, well, I'm glad to be here with you all, back at it again, Keeping the Faith.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yes, exactly [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Amen. Amen.

The Importance of “Mapping” Power

Sy Hoekstra: So, you wrote this fantastic essay for… so, well, actually, it was originally for your blog, I think, and then we kind of took it and adapted it for the anthology. And it was about critical race theory, and you broke down a lot of the history and sort of the complex intellectual background of it and everything. But you talked specifically about something that you said, critical race theory and the Bible and the Black Christian tradition in the US all help us do something really important, and that thing is mapping power. Can you talk to us a little bit about what power mapping is and what the importance of it is?

Rasool Berry: Yeah. I first kind of got wind of that framework when we were launching a justice ministry at our church. And two friends Gabby, Dr. Gabby Cudjoe Wilkes and her husband, Dr. Andrew Wilkes, who do a lot of great work with justice, actually walked our church through thinking about mapping power in our church as a way of evaluating what types of justice initiatives did it make sense for us to engage in, in light of what we had in the room. And so for instance, when I was in my church in Indiana, a lot of the parishioners worked at Lilly who's headquarters is in Indiana. And so when they decided to do something for the community, they ended up opening up a clinic in the church building, which still exists and serves the local community, because they all had medical backgrounds.

So when they do mission work, they do mission work with a medical component, because that's a effective way of mapping power. Where our church in Brooklyn average age is about 28, 29 and they're more artsy. So we're not opening up clinics, you know what I mean? But what we can do is events that help inspire and help engage with people. And then eventually with our pastor's leadership started something called Pray March Act, which looks to be a place to mobilize churches around issues of justice in New York City. So what is oftentimes overlooked in Christian spaces, and I really am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, for really surfacing the need for us to have a theology of power.

That this is something that oftentimes especially evangelical churches, or more kind of Bible oriented or people kind of churches, there's a sense in which we don't know how to think about power. And I believe, I suspect this is one of the reasons why the church has been so susceptible to issues like sexual abuse, to egregious theft in money, is because we are not really conditioned to think about power, which is really ironic because the scriptures really do point to… I mean, we literally have two books, First and Second Kings, and those books are pointing to you have the king, this king was a good king, and it impacted the kingdom of Israel this way. This king was a bad king, and then this is what happened.

And so it's wired in the text, right? Amy Sherman in her book, Kingdom Calling, Dr. Amy Sherman points to this when she points to the proverb that says, “when the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.” And it's this idea, when she says righteous, she's not thinking about it in the kind of traditional pietistic aspect of righteousness, but she's talking about “tzedakah” in the Hebrew, which has this connotation of justice. Because when people who are put in positions of power and influence, when they do right by the people underneath them when they do right, that people celebrate. Versus when there's somebody who's a tyrant that's in office, the people groan because there's that sense of they recognize we've mapped power dynamics, and somebody who's going to do ill is going to have a disproportionate impact on all of us.

And so power mapping is bringing to surface the awareness of what is it that we have in the room. And it's also a very humbling way of being aware of our own power, right? Like how do I show up as a man in a space, in certain things? Like I know if I get up and I'm about to preach that there's some different dynamics depending on who I'm talking to in a room. Like if I'm in a predominantly Black context that's younger, then the locks might actually kind of give me some street cred. Like, oh, that's kind of cool. But if I'm in a older, traditional space, looking younger is going to be more of a uphill climb to say, okay, what's this guy coming at? And if I'm in a White space, versus but I also recognize that when our sisters come up, that there's a whole different type of power mapping situation.

And so all of these things are helpful in being aware of how we show up and how that matters. And Andy’s kind of thesis is that unlike the kind of post Nietzschean postmodern suspicion and critical view of power that only sees it as a negative, that God has actually given us and ordained us to exert influence and power in redemptive ways. But we can only do that if we map it, if we're aware of it, and if we use it in a way that's not just for our own self or comfort or glory, but for those who we're called to serve.

Sy Hoekstra: Can I ask, just for some like to get specific on one thing, because I'm not sure this would be intuitive to everyone. You said if we map power, then we might not end up in the same situations that we are with, like abuse scandals in the church?

Rasool Berry: Yeah. Yep.

Sy Hoekstra: And I think I… where my mind goes is I think we would react differently to the abuse scandal. I don't know if the abuse scandals themselves would… those happen unfortunately. But I think where the power mapping might come in, is where so many people are then just deferring to whatever the person in, the pastor's narrative is. Is that kind of what you're talking about, like the reaction?

Rasool Berry: I think it's on both sides.

Sy Hoekstra: You do? Okay.

Rasool Berry: Yeah, because for instance, if I am aware, very aware of power dynamics with children and adults, I would see the value in a practice of not leaving an adult in a space with a child by themselves.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see. You might put systems in place ahead of time. Yeah, yeah.

Rasool Berry: Right. So there's the sense in which we can put policies in place that recognize… it's the same thing why we put the labeling system on kids when they check into childcare, right? Like you put the little label so that some random person can't just come and pick them up because a kid can’t defend themselves. Or they may not have the capacity to understand what's going on if somebody just random comes up and says, “Hey, your mom and your dad told me to come get you,” and then they believe that. And so we have systems that we put in place to recognize those power dynamics. And I think unfortunately, that in a lot of our church context and culture there's an overly naive sense of, and really sometimes idolatrous view of pastors and leaders that essentially say, well, they're good and they're godly people, so there isn't a need for accountability, or there isn't a need for, you know…

And so no, it's like, well, in the same way that we have trustees in certain churches, or there's a elders board, depending on what your church polity is, that polity should reflect a sense of accountability and transparency so that there is an awareness on the front end as well as on the backend that when it does come to bring people into account, that there's also an awareness of a power dynamic at play there too.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense especially when [laughs] we throw those things out, all we have are the systems of hierarchy and social dominance that exist to define what power is, right?

Rasool Berry: Right.

Jonathan Walton: So the train just keeps going.

The Social and Spiritual Forces behind the Fight against CRT/DEI

Jonathan Walton: So leaning into that a little bit, you wrote an essay focusing on CRT power mapping and things like that. But it feels like nobody in the Trump camp really had an idea of what CRT was, and it didn't even really matter to them what it was.

Rasool Berry: Right.

Jonathan Walton: So what do you think is at the core of what's going on with White people when they reject CRT or DEI or whatever the—conscious—whatever the term would be?

Rasool Berry: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: What do you think the underlying concern is?

Rasool Berry: Well, you know, after… and it's so funny because when I wrote that first piece, I wrote it as a way… [laughs] I wrote it just to get it off my chest. And in my mind, almost nobody was going to read it because it was like a 20-something minute read, and I just didn't care because I was just like, “I'm getting this off my chest,” and this is the last I'm going to say about it. Like I thought that was going to be just this thing, just so I can point people to, if anybody asks. I did not intend, nor did I think that it was only going to kind of position me as this person that people were listening to and reading and resonating with about it. So that was funny. But then what ended up happening, and especially after I was on the unbelievable? podcast with Justin Brierley, kind of in this debate format with Neil Shenvi, who's kind of been one of the most outspoken evangelical Christian critics of critical race theory. Critics is probably too mild of a term, kind of a…

Jonathan Walton: Antagonist.

Rasool Berry: Antagonist, even stronger. Like this doomsday prophet who says that, who’s warning against the complete erosion of biblical norms because of the Trojan Horse, in his mind, of critical race theory. In the midst of that conversation, that kind of elevated, it was one of their top 10 episodes of the entire year, and it just kind of got me into these spaces where I was engaging more and more. And I kind of sat back and reflected, and I had a few more interactions with Neil on Twitter. And I ended up writing a separate piece called “Uncritical Race Theory.” And the reason why I did that, is I went back and I was curious about what kind of insights I could get from previous instances of the way that there were being controversies surrounding race in America in the church, and how the church talked about those debates.

So I went back and I read The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll, who looked at and examined the actual debates during the time of the antebellum period of pro-slavery Christians and anti-slavery Christians, and he analyzed that. Then I went back and I read The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby, who looked at the pro-integrationist and segregationist arguments in the church. And what I found was that there was incredible symmetry between what was argued in each of those instances, going all the way back to the 1800s, to the 1960s, to now, and there were two things that emerged. The first was that the primary response from those who were supportive of slavery in the 1800s, or those who were supportive of segregation in the 1960s was to claim first of all, that the opposing view were not biblically faithful, or were not even concerned about biblical fidelity.

So this is different than other types of discussions where we could say, even going back to the councils, right? Like when there's some type of, like during the Nicaean Council or something like that, they're debating about how they're understanding the text about certain things. Whereas is Jesus fully God, is he man, is he both? But there's a basic premise that they're both coming at it from different aspects of scriptures. What I noticed in the American context is that there was a denial that the side that was kind of having a more progressive view was even biblically faithful at all.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Christian.

Rasool Berry: The second part is related to the first, is that there was this allegation that there was outside philosophies that was actually shaping this impetus because it wasn't clearly the Bible. So in the 1800s that was the claim, “Oh, you're being influenced by these post-enlightenment ideas.” In the 1960s it was straight up Marxism, communism. You see the signs. “Integration is communism.” Like you see the people protesting with that, and of course the new version of that is kind of the remix of cultural Marxism, or these type of things. And so what I acknowledged in each of those scenarios is that part of the problem is that there is such an uncritical understanding of race that it causes, I think especially those in a dominant culture or those who've been susceptible to the ideologies of White supremacy, which can be White or Black or other, There's a tendency to see any claim that race is a problem as the problem itself because there's an underlying denial of the reality of racial stratification in our society, and the what Bryan Stevenson refers to as the narrative of racial difference or what is more commonly known as White supremacy. So when your default position is that you are introducing a foreign concept into the conversation when you talk about the relevance of race in a scenario, then it causes… that sense of uncritical nature of the reality of race causes you to then look upon with suspicion any claim that there's some type of racial based situation happening. And that is what I call, it is really ironically uncritical race theory. It's the exact opposite of what critical race theory is trying to do.

And so I think that that's my take on what's happening. And then I think that's more of the scientific sociological, but then there's also a spiritual. I am a pastor [laughter]. And I have to end with this. I have to end with this, because in some ways I was naively optimistic that there was, if you just reasoned and show people the right analogies or perspectives, then they would, they could be persuaded. But what I have since realized and discovered is that there is a idolatrous synchronization of what we now know of different aspects of White Christian nationalism that is a competing theological position and belief system that is forming these doctrinal positions of what we now kind of look at as American exceptionalism, what we look at as this sense of the status quo being… all the things that are moving toward an authoritarian regime and away from democracy, that that is all solidifying itself as an alternative gospel.

And I think that at the end of the day, I'm looking at and grieving about mass apostasy that I'm seeing happening in the church as a result of an unholy alliance of political ideology and Christian symbols, language, and values expressed in this kind of mixed way. And that's what is really being allowed to happen with this unmapped power dynamic, is that people don't even realize that they're now exerting their power to kind of be in this defensive posture to hold up a vision of society that is actually not Christian at all, but that is very much bathed in Christian terms.

Jonathan Walton: I want to say a lot back, but we got to keep going, but that was good.

Sy Hoekstra: We got to… [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, we could talk forever about what you just said, but we could also talk forever about your documentary. So let's transition to that.

Rasool Berry: [laughter] You all are like exercising restraint.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes.

Jonathan Walton: I am.

Rasool Berry: Like, “oh, I want to go there.” I just threw steak in front of the lions [laughter].

Why Pastor Berry Made a Documentary about Juneteenth

Sy Hoekstra: But it's because, I mean, the documentary's interesting in a way... It's sort of like, okay, you've seen this movement of mass apostasy and everything, and you've had all these people tell you you're not faithful. And with this documentary in some ways, you're just sprinting on down the road that you're on. You know what I mean? It's like sort of [laughs], you're just going straightforward like we need to remember our past. We need to learn about power dynamics in American history. So you wrote this—[realizing mistake] wrote— you were involved in, you're the kind of narrator, the interviewer of this documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. And you went to Galveston and you went to Houston, Texas to learn more about the history of Juneteenth and the communities and the people that shaped the celebration and everything.

And I guess I just want to know how this got started and why it was so important for you to engage in what was a very significant project…

Rasool Berry: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: …to teach people about this kind of history that I think the movement against CRT or DEI or whatever is quite actively trying to suppress.

Rasool Berry: And these two stories are very much intertwined…

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.

Rasool Berry: …in ways that I didn't even fully anticipate in some ways. In some ways I knew, in some ways I didn't. But I grew up in Philly, where there was not growing up a significant Juneteenth awareness or celebration or anything like that. So I had heard about it though when I was very young, the concept of it. I had a classmate whose middle name was Galveston, and I was like, “That's a weird name. Why is your middle name Galveston?” [laughter] He told me that it's because his mom had told him about this situation where there were Black people that didn't know they were free for two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. I was like eight years old when I first heard that, but filed that away.

It wasn't really until more recent years with the, just massive racial justice movement spurred on by the murders of Tamir Rice and George Floyd and others, Sandra Bland. And so, as that movement started to gin up, conversations about race that I was kind of plugged into, I heard about this 90-something year old woman that was appearing before Congress…

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Rasool Berry: …and challenging them to make Juneteenth a national holiday.

Sy Hoekstra: I can't believe you got to interview her. She was amazing.

Rasool Berry: Yeah. And I was like, why would a 90-something plus year old woman be like this committed to this? So I started looking into it and realizing, I think both spiritually and socially, that there was incredible potency and opportunity in the recognition, the widespread recognition of Juneteenth. I'll go socially first. Socially, the reality has been the United States has never had a moment where we collectively reflect on the legacy of slavery in our country. And if you do the math, from the first enslaved people that we have documented coming into the States in 1619 until if even if you go to the abolition of slavery in 1865 or 1866 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, that's about 244 years.

If you go from 1865 to now, it's like 159 or so years. So we still have way more time in our society that has been shaped by this most intense version of a caste system and brutal slavery that had global, it literally reshaped the globe. And sometimes we forget. I live in Brooklyn where most of the Black folk are Afro-Caribbean. When you think of Jamaica, you think of Usain Bolt or Bob Marley. Do you realize that all of those people are from Africa, like our African descent people. That like the native people of Jamaica would've been Native Americans. So the legacy of slavery and colonialism has literally reshaped population centers in our world. That's how significant it was.

And so to not have a moment to reflect on all of it, the implications of how the legacy still shapes us, but also the progress of what we've seen happen and how we are not in that same place is a missed opportunity. But on the contrary, to put that in place is an opportunity for reflection that I think could really help ground us toward being a more perfect union, toward us being a unified people. Because we're basing it on the same story and information, which increasingly in the age of misinformation and disinformation, that the erosion of us having a shared narrative is really upon us. So I think it's interesting and important from that standpoint. Spiritually, it was even more dynamic because one of the… so there was a lot of nicknames and still are for Juneteenth. One was Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, but Jubilee Day.

And when I discovered that, that's when I said, “Okay, Our Daily Bread, we got to get involved in this process.” Because you mean to tell me that these formerly enslaved people at a time when it was illegal to read, primarily because they didn't want people to read the Bible, that they understood enough of the story of the Old Testament, that they picked out this festival in Leviticus 25, this ordinance that God had put in place, that on the Jubilee year, the Sabbath of all Sabbaths, I call it the Super Bowl of Sabbaths [Sy laughs]. Seven years times seven, forty nine years plus one, fifty. That on that day that it was this reordering of society, the kingdom of heaven coming back to earth, which simultaneously anticipates the wickedness and the brokenness of human systems in power, but also projects and casts vision about the kingdom of heaven, which would allow for equity and equality to take place. So debts were forgiven, lands were returned, and people who were in bondage primarily because of debt, that was the main reason back then, they would be set free. And in the context of their faith, they saw God doing the jubilee in their lives. So what that gave was the opportunity for us to talk about and reintroduce in many faith traditions the relationship between spiritual and physical freedom, and see that in the Bible story those things were wedded.

What's the major account in the Old Testament is the Exodus account. Like it was both physical and spiritual freedom. And in the same way we see that is why Jesus, when he reveals himself and says, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” notice when John the Baptist starts to waver because he's expecting this conquering king. He's still in prison and he says, “Hey, are you the one or we should expect another?” Jesus points to physical and spiritual aspects of liberation in his response. “Tell John what you see. The blind receive sight. The sick are healed. The gospel is preached. Blessed is the one who is not ashamed of me.” So in the sense of that, what we see elements of the kind of seeds of in the gospel is this aspect of the physical and spiritual liberation being tied together.

And that is what Jubilee gives us opportunity to explore and investigate. And I think lastly, seeing the role of the Black church in bringing out that insight, I think is particularly valuable in a time where oftentimes those contributions are overlooked and ignored.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. I think being able to watch the documentary was transformative for me. Mainly because I'm 38 years old and it's being produced by people who look and sound and act like me. It's interviewing the people who came before us, trying to speak to the folks that are younger than us. And each generation I think has this, this go around where we have to own our little piece of what and how we're going to take the work forward. You know what I mean?

Discerning Whether to Leave Communities that Push back on Discussions about Race

You interviewed Lecrae in the documentary and he's taken that work forward, right? And you both say that you've had the experiences of believing you are loved and accepted in these White evangelical spaces until you started talking about racial justice issues.

And so I feel like there's these moments where we want to take the work forward, and then we're like, “All right, well, this is our moment.” Like Opal was like, “Hey, I'm going to do Juneteenth.” Where now you're like, “I'm going to do something.” [laughs] So I wonder, like for you, when you have to make decisions about how to stay, not to stay or just leave. What is the effect of constantly engaging in that calculus for you?

Rasool Berry: Oh, man! It's exhausting to do it. And I think it is valuable to count the cost and realize that sometimes you're best suited to reposition yourself and to find other ways to express that faithfulness. At other times, God is causing you to be a change agent where you are. And I think how to navigate through that is complicated, and I think it's complicated for all of us, for our allies who see the value of racial justice as well as for those of us who are marginalized and experience, not just conceptually or ideologically the need for justice, but experientially all of the things through macro and microaggressions that come up, that weigh and weather us and our psyche, our emotions, our bodies.

And I think that it’s important to be very spiritually attuned and to practice healthy emotional spirituality as well as, best practices, spiritual disciplines, all the things that have come alongside of what does it mean to follow Jesus. I was recently reflecting on the fact that in the height of Jesus’ ministry, when it was on and popping, he’s growing, the crowds are growing in number, it says that he went away regularly and left the crowds to be with God. And then the verse right after that, it's in Luke, I can't remember which chapters, I know the verse is 16 and 17. And then it talks about how he had power as a result of going away to do more. And there's this relationship between our needing to rest and to find recovery in the secret place in the quiet place with God in order to have the energy to do more of the work.

And that's a lot to hold together, but it's really important because otherwise you can end up being like Moses, who was trying to do justice, but in his own strength at first when he kills the Egyptian, and then he tried to go to his people being like, “Yo, I'm down!” And they're like, “You killed somebody. We don't want to hear from you.”

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Right.

Rasool Berry: And then he flees. Because he tried to do it in his own strength. And then when God reveals himself at the bush, now he's totally broken and not even confident at all in himself. And God has to say, “No, the difference is going to be I'm with you.” So I think in my own journey, I've been one of many people who've had to evaluate and calculate where I've been in order to kind of see where there are opportunities to move forward. For instance, I was on staff with Cru for 20 years and then as the opportunities to work with Our Daily Bread, and I remember specifically the podcast Where Ya From?, that we launched and then Christianity Today got connected to it.

They were eagerly looking, or at least supporting the idea of us having conversations about faith and culture and race and all these things. Whereas in my previous environment, I felt like that was not something… I didn’t even feel like it, I experienced the pullback of talking about those things. So it has actually, by repositioning myself to kind of be able to be in spaces where I can tell these stories and advocate in these ways, it has been a better use of my energy and my time. Now, even in that other space, everything isn’t perfect. It's still the same type of challenges that exist anywhere you go in the world where you're a minority in race and racial difference is prominent, but at least it's a opportunity to still do more than I could do maybe in a previous position. And all of us have to make those type of calculations.

And I think it's best to do those things in the context of community, not just by yourself, and also with a sense of sobriety of encountering and experiencing God himself. Because at the end of the day, sometimes, I'm going to just say this, sometimes the answer is leave immediately. Get out of there. At other times, God is calling you to stay at least in the short term time. And it's important to be discerning and not just reactive to when is the right situation presenting itself. And the only way I know to do that is by doing it in community, doing it with a sense of healthy rhythms and time to actually hear the still small voice of God.

Sy Hoekstra: Amen.

Jonathan Walton: Amen.

Sy Hoekstra: Because you really can err in either direction. Like some people, “I'm getting out of here right away,” without thinking. Meaning, when you're being reactive, when you're not being discerning…

Rasool Berry: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: …you can get out right away or you can have the instinct, “No, I'm going to stick it out forever,” even if it's bad for you, and it's not going to accomplish anything.

Rasool Berry: Yup, yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Which I think leans into jumping all the way back the critical versus uncritical.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. There you go.

Jonathan Walton: Like if we're not willing to lean into the radical interrogation of the systems and structures around us that inform our decisions each day, we will submit to them unconsciously, whether that be running when we should resist or whether that be resisting where we actually should flee. So yeah, thanks for all that.

Where you can Find Pastor Berry’s work

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. And so we will have links to both of the articles, to the documentary, which is entirely free on YouTube.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: So you're just wasting your life if you're not watching it, really [laughter]. And a couple other things you talked about, we'll have links. But is there anywhere that you want people to go to either follow you or your work online?

Rasool Berry: Yeah. So the other thing that what we did with the Juneteenth documentary, because the response was so strong and overwhelming, really, people wanted to host screenings locally. And so we did a few things to make that more possible. So you can actually go on our website experiencevoices.org/Juneteenth. And you can fill out like a form to actually host a screening locally. And we have designed social media so you can market it, posters that you could print out, even discussion questions that you can use to host discussions. And sometimes people invite some of us from the production on site. So I've gone and done, I’ve been at screenings all the way from California to Texas to Wisconsin and here in New York.

So you can reach out to us on that website as well if you're interested in hosting a screening with the director or one of the producers or myself, and we can kind of facilitate that. Also be looking at your local PBS stations. We partnered with PBS to air screenings so far over a hundred local channels.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, wow.

Rasool Berry: And have aired it. Now, the PBS version is slightly different because we had to edit it down to fit their hour long format. And so the biggest version is the PBS version doesn't have Lecrae in it [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Oh no [laughs].

Rasool Berry: We had to cut out the four-time Grammy winner. Sorry Lecrae [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Rasool Berry: You know what I mean? But it just so happened that way it, that it was the best way to edit it down.

Jonathan Walton: You had to keep Opal.

Rasool Berry: Had to keep Opal, had to keep Opal [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: I feel like Lecrae would understand that, honestly.

Rasool Berry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was so gracious. And actually, the other thing that Lecrae did, I had told him that we were working with Sho Baraka, a mutual friend of ours, to do the music. And he said, “Yeah, I heard something about that.” He's like, “I have a song I was going to put on Church Clothes 4, but I feel like it would be a better fit for this. If you're interested, let me know and I can send it to you.” I'm like, “If I'm interested? Yes, I'm interested.” [laughter] Yes. I'll accept this sight unseen. And so he sent us this incredible song that features, well actually is listed as Propaganda’s song, but it features Lecrae and Sho Baraka. And you can get the entire Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom soundtrack 13 tracks, poetry, hip hop, gospel, rnb, all on one thing. And wherever you listen to your music, Spotify, Apple Music, anywhere, you can, listen to it, stream it, buy it, and support this movement and this narrative. So yeah. And then personally, just @rasoolb on Instagram, @rasoolberry on, I still call it Twitter [Sy laughs]. So, and we're on Facebook as well. That's where folks can follow me, at rasoolberry.com, website. So thanks for having me.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, pastor, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.

Jonathan Walton: Thanks so much, man.

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

Reflecting on the Interview

Sy Hoekstra: Hey, Jonathan, you know what's really useful, is when in the middle of an interview with one of our guests, we say, “Oh no, we don't have time. We'd really like to get into this, so we have to move on to another subject.” It's really useful when we have these little times that we're doing now after the interview to talk more about the subjects than we did with the guests [laughter]. This works out well for us.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Why don't you tell everybody what you're thinking after the interview with Pastor Berry?

Passing on a Tradition Well Takes Significant Work

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think the biggest thing for me that I took away among a lot of the nuggets that he… nuggets and like big things that got dropped on me while we were listening, was like the amount of work that he went through to make this film. Like traveling to Galveston. There's a lot in the documentary that reminds me of how much it costs us personally to create things that are moving. To be able to have these conversations, sit down with these people, smell the smells of these folks' homes. That's just a big thing, particularly for me, like not having… I grew up with the Juneteenth story and needing to think through my own traditions and what I’m going to pass to my kids and stuff like that.

It's just I'm challenged to do that work so that I have something substantial to pass on to Maya and Everest. And to the folks who listen to the preaching that I give or the stories I write, or the books I'm going to write, just so I can communicate with the same amount of intimacy that he did. So, Sy how about you? What stood out for you?

The Literally Unbelievable Racial Ignorance of Whiteness

Sy Hoekstra: I think what stood out for me was actually right at that point where we said we really wanted to talk more about something, I really did have more thoughts [laughs]. When he was talking about the thing that underlies the fight against CRT and DEI and all that sort of thing. Being just a straight up denial of any sort of racial caste system or racial stratification in our country, I think that point is extremely important. That so much of our disagreements about racial injustice, at least on the intellectual level, not on the emotional and all that kind of thing, the intellectual level that come down to a difference in beliefs about the facts of reality in America. It is literally just do you think racism is happening or not? Because if you do think that it's happening, then everything has to change [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And there's not a lot of room… you'll have to do a lot more like kind of active denial. A lot more having a very active lack of integrity [laughs] to continue in the way that you're thinking when you believe that there is no racism in America if you find out that there is. Which kind of explains why there's so much resistance to it. But I think one story that sort of illustrates how this dynamic works a little bit that just, this is something that happened to me that this reminded me of. I was an intern right after college at International Justice Mission, and I read Gary Haugen's book, The Good News About Injustice, where the intro to this book is about his childhood growing up in kind of suburban, I think he's outside of Seattle, somewhere in Washington. A suburban Christian home, things were pretty nice and easy and he just did not know anything about injustice or anything in the world. Like oppression, racism, he did not know anything about it. And then the book takes you through how he discovered it and then his theology of what God wants to do about it and what the organization does and all that kind of thing. But just that intro, I remember talking to one of the other interns who was at IJM m when I was there, who was a Black woman who was ordained in the Black Baptist Church and had grown up relatively low income. And I was talking to her about this book because I read that intro and I was like, “yes, I totally resonate with this. This is how I grew up, check, check. That makes sense. I understand all of it.”

And it makes sense to a lot of the people who support IJM, which are a lot of suburban White evangelicals. She told me, she read the intro to the book and her immediate reaction was how, there is no way that anyone could possibly be this ignorant. It is not possible [laughs]. And I was like, [pretending to be hurt] “but I was” [laughter]. And there's this wrench in the gear of our conversations about justice where there's a large spectrum of White people who are, some engaging in actual innocent good faith about how much nonsense there is, like how much racism there is in America, and people who are engaging in complete bad faith and have ignored all the things that have been put right in front of them clearly.

And it is just very difficult for a lot of people who are not White to understand [laughs] that there are actually… the level of ignorance of a lot of White people is unbelievable, by which I mean it literally cannot be believed by a lot of people. And I don't know, that's just, it is a complication in our conversations about race that doesn't really change what you have to tell people or how seriously you should take your conversations or whatever. It's just a note about what you might need to do to bring people kind of into the fold, by which I mean the fold of the truth [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes. This is true of like a lot of White people. And the sad part is that it can also be true of a lot of people of color…

Sy Hoekstra: Well, yeah.

Jonathan Walton: …who say, “I'm just going to deny, because I haven't experienced.” Or, “We have opted into the system of ignorance and don't want to engage.” And so I'll tell a story. Priscilla was at the airport this week.

Sy Hoekstra: Your wife.

Jonathan Walton: My wife Priscilla, was at the airport, not a random woman [laughter], was at the airport this week. And someone said, “Yeah, everyone who came to this country, like we're all immigrants.” And Priscilla said, “Actually some people came here as slaves.” Then the person says, “No, that's not true.” And it's like, what do you say to that? When someone just says slavery doesn't exist? And that's literally why we celebrate Juneteenth. So I don't know what this person's going to do on Juneteenth, but when there's a collective narrative and acknowledgement that this happened, and then there's a large group, James Baldwin would say, ignorance plus power is very dangerous.

If there's a large group that's ignorant and or like intentionally not engaging, but also has power and privilege and all the things, the benefits of racial stratification without the acknowledgement of the reality of it, which is just a dangerous combination.

Sy Hoekstra: So when somebody says something like that, like that didn't happen, people didn't come over here as slaves, I think it is possible that they legitimately don't know that I suppose [laughs], or that they think it's a conspiracy theory or whatever. My guess is, tell me what you think about this. What I would imagine happened there was, “Oh, I never thought about the fact that Black people are not immigrants. And so I'm just going to say no.” Do you know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. Well, I agree. I think some people even, so let's say like, I write about this in 12 Lies. Ben Carson says that we all came here as immigrants, even if it was in the bottom of a ship. He says that. And I think that is a, to be kind, a gross misrepresentation of the middle passage [laughs], but I see what he's trying to do. He's trying to put Black folks in a narrative that fits in the American narrative so people can, so he's not othered. Because what happens when you acknowledge enslavement is that you have to acknowledge all that. They all come with each other. It's like being at a buffet and there is literally no other menu. Like once you say, once you go in, you can't order one plate. If you talk about slavery, you're opening up all the things and some people just don't want to do that. And that sucks.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Which Tab Is Still Open: Daniel Perry

Jonathan Walton: It's true. And [laughs], I think this feeds into a little bit of this segment [laughs] that we have aptly called Which Tab is Still Open. Because out of all the things in our newsletter and our podcast, there's stuff that comes up for us and it's just still hanging on our desktops, we still talk about it offline. So for Sy, like for you, which one, which tab is still open?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. We're going to talk about Daniel Perry and Donald Trump today.

Jonathan Walton: Fun times.

Sy Hoekstra: So I recently had an article in the newsletter that I highlighted as one of my resources, that is about the case of Daniel Perry, which I think kind of flew a little bit under the radar in the fervor of 2020. But he was a known racist, meaning we have now seen truckloads of social media posts and text messages and everything revealing his out and out racism, his fantasies about killing Black Lives Matter protesters, all these kinds of things. Who in the summer of 2020, during those protests, drove his car through a red light into a crowd of protesters. And he did not at that moment hurt anyone, but another, an Air Force vet, Daniel Perry's also a vet, but another Air Force vet named Garrett Foster, walked up to him carrying, openly carrying his, in Texas, legal assault rifle.

He didn't point it at Daniel Perry, but he was carrying it. And he knocked on the window and motioned for Perry to roll his window down, and Perry shot him through the window five times and killed him. He was convicted of murder in 2023 by a jury. And the day after he was convicted, governor Greg Abbott republican governor of Texas said that he wanted his case to be reviewed for a full pardon, so that the pardons board could send him a recommendation to do it, which is the legal way that a governor can make a pardon in Texas. And that happened a couple weeks ago. Daniel Perry walked free with all of his civil rights restored, including his right to own firearms.

Texas Monthly did some really good reporting on how completely bizarre this pardon is under Texas law, meaning they very clear, they kind of laid out how these pardons typically go. And the law very clearly says that a pardon is not to be considered for anyone who is still in prison, like hasn't finished their sentence, except under very exceptional circumstances, which are usually that like some new evidence of innocence has come to light.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And the actual materials that the board reviewed were basically just his defense case where like him arguing that he was doing what he did out of self-defense. He was standing his ground, and that he was afraid of Foster and therefore allowed to use deadly force. In any other case, the remedy for that, if you think that's your defense and you were wrongly denied your defense by the jury is to appeal. Is to go through the appeals to which you have a right as a criminal defendant. And in this case, he became a bit of a conservative cult hero and the governor stepped in to get him out of jail. It was so bizarre. So the weird thing here is, for me at least, for these cases, for the cases surrounding like where someone has been killed either by the police or by an individual, it has always been pretty clear to me which way the case is going.

Like if you're someone who's actually taken a, like me, gone to law school, taken a criminal law class, you've studied murder and then like the right to stand your ground and the right to self-defense, and when you can use deadly force, most of these cases are pretty predictable. I knew that the killers of Ahmaud Arbery and Walter Scott and Jordan Davis were going down. I knew that people were going to get off when they got off. Like those were not confusing. And that isn't because the law isn't racist or whatever, it's just the law doesn't take race into account at all. It just completely ignores, it has nothing to do with the cases, according to the law. So it's like this one was stunning.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Because if it had gone to the appellate judges, the judges who actually are thinking about like the whole system and the precedents that they're setting would say, “Hey, in an open carry state like Texas, we do not want to set a precedent where if someone who is legally, openly carrying a gun walks up to you, you can kill them.” That is not a precedent that they want to set. But this is not an appellate case, so we're not setting that precedent, we're just letting this racist murderer go. That's it.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And that is like what effectively Greg Abbott and the Board of Pardons in Texas have conspired to do. And I didn't know this was coming actually. I hadn't heard the news that he was calling for the pardon when it happened, but it's wild. And I just kind of wanted to give that additional context and hear what you're thinking about it, Jonathan, and then we'll get into Donald Trump a little bit.

Normalizing Punishing Protestors and Lionizing Murderers

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean, I think first thing for me is like this is a PG podcast. I won't use all the expletives that I would like to use. The reality of like Kyle Rittenhouse lives in Texas now. George Zimmerman, after he killed Trayvon Martin, he was in other altercations with people with guns. So this is not a person or a scenario that is new, which is sad and disappointing. But the reality of an institution stepping into enforce its institutionalized racism, is something that feels new to me in the environment that we're in. And what I mean by that is like, I think we now live in a society that desires for protestors and folks who are resistant to the system that oppresses and marginalizes people, if you believe that is happening.

There are individuals and institutions that desire to punish that group of people. It is now normed that that group of people can be punished by anybody.

Sy Hoekstra: If you're in the right state.

Jonathan Walton: Well, I won't even say the right state, but I almost think if you can get caught in the zeitgeist of a certain media attention, then you will be lauded as someone who did the right thing.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh yeah. Even if you might still end up in jail.

Jonathan Walton: Even if you might still end up in jail, like you'll become a hero. And so the circumstances have been created where protesters can be punished by regular members of society, and then their quote- unquote punishment could be pardoned in the court of public opinion, and so much so you could end up being pardoned by the institution. There are going to be more protests on campus. There are going to be more protests in light of Trump's conviction and potential election. The chances of political violence and protests are very high, highly probable there're going to be thunderstorms. And what we're saying is like, let's give everybody lightning bolts [Sy laughs]. And we all know if this is a racially stratified society, which it is, if it's a class stratified society, which it is, then we will end up with things like Donald Trump getting convicted and becoming president.

Sy Hoekstra: And the racial stratification is important to remember because people have pointed out, if there had been a Trump rally and someone had been killed, that like, not a chance that Greg Abbott does any of this, right?

Jonathan Walton: The hallmark of White American folk religion is hypocrisy. If this were a person of color, there's no way that they would've got pardoned for shooting someone at a protest.

The Criminal Legal System was Exceptionally Kind to Donald Trump

Sy Hoekstra: And this is the connection to the Donald Trump case [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Because despite the fact that he was convicted, he has been treated throughout this process in a way that no poor or BIPOC would, like no poor person or any BIPOC would ever be treated by the New York State courts. I can tell you that from experience [laughter] as an actual attorney in New York state. Donald Trump had 10 separate violations of a gag order, like he was held in contempt by the court and required to pay some money, which is significant, but nobody does that and doesn't spend some time in jail unless they are rich and famous and White. It was shocking to watch the amount of dancing around him and his comfort that the system does. And this is, pastor Berry mentioned Bryan Stevenson, another Bryan Stevenson quote.

I've mentioned, we've mentioned Brian Stevenson so many times on this show [laughter]. But it's true. One of the things he says all the time is that the system treats you better if you're rich and White and guilty than if you're poor and BIPOC and innocent.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And, that's the demonstration. So the Trump indictments happened when we're recording this yesterday. Or the convictions, I mean. And in terms of what it'll do to the election, probably not much. In terms of what it'll like [laughs], like Jonathan was just saying, like this is the situation that we're in here. We don't have a lot of political analysis to bring you about this case because I don't think there's much political analysis to do except to continue to point out over and over again that this is not the way that people are treated by the criminal justice system. This is an exception to what is otherwise the rule.

Outro and Outtake

Okay. I think we're going to end there. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Our theme song, as always is “Citizens” by John Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robyn Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale. And thank you all so much for joining us. Jonathan, thanks for being here. We will see you all again in two weeks.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me was like the amount of work that he went through to make this film. I'm challenged to do that work so that I have something substantial to pass on to Maya and Everest, just so I can communicate with the same amount of intimacy that he did.

Sy Hoekstra: So now you're going to go make a documentary about Juneteenth, is what you're saying?

Jonathan Walton: [deep exhale, and Sy laughs] At least a reel [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: A reel… yeah, those are pretty much the same I'd say.

Welcome to the Season four kick-off! Today, we have our first interview with one of the authors from our anthology on Christianity and American politics, the incredible Dr. Randy Woodley. The episode includes:

-        How dualism defines White worldviews, and how it negatively affects White Christians

-        How love and vulnerability are central to a life with Jesus

-        Why our voting decisions matter to marginalized people

-        And after the interview in our new segment, hear Jonathan and Sy talk about the attack on teaching Black history in schools, and the greater responsibility White people need to take for their feelings about historical facts

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

-            Dr. Woodley’s essay in our anthology: “The Fullness Thereof.”

-            Dr. Woodley’s book he wrote with his wife, now available for pre-order: Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Led Us to Harmony and Well-Being

-            Dr. Woodley’s recent children’s books, the Harmony Tree Trilogy

-            Our highlight from Which Tab Is Still Open?: The podcast conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jelani Cobb

-            The book A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life

Credits

-        Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com.

-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.

-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.

-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

-        Production by Sy Hoekstra.

-        Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Randy Woodley: So the Europeans were so set in this dualistic mindset that they began to kill each other over what they consider to be correct doctrine. So we had the religious wars all throughout Europe, and then they brought them to the United States. And here we fought by denomination, so we’re just like, “Well I’m going to start another denomination. And I'm going to start another one from that, because I disagree with you about who gets baptized in what ways and at what time,” and all of those kinds of things. So doctrine then, what we think about, and theology, becomes completely disembodied to the point now where the church is just looked at mostly with disdain.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. My name is Jonathan Walton.

Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra, we are so excited to be starting our interviews with our writers from our Anthology in 2020 that we published when we [resigned voice] had the same election that we're having this year [Jonathan laughs]. So it's still relevant at least, and we're really excited to bring you Dr. Randy Woodley today. Jonathan, why don't you tell everyone a bit about Dr. Woodley?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So Dr. Woodley is a distinguished professor emeritus of faith and culture at George Fox Seminary in Portland, Oregon. His PhD is in intercultural studies. He's an activist, a farmer, a scholar, and active in ongoing conversations and concerns about racism, diversity, eco-justice, reconciliation ecumen… that's a good word.

Sy Hoekstra: Ecumenism [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Ecumenism, interfaith dialogue, mission, social justice and indigenous peoples. He's a Cherokee Indian descendant recognized by the Keetoowah Band. He is also a former pastor and a founding board member of the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies, or NAIITS, as we call it. Dr. Woodley and his wife Edith are co-founders and co-sustainers of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice situated on farmland in Oregon. Their Center focuses on developing, implementing and teaching sustainable and regenerative earth practices. Together, they have written a book called Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Led Us to Harmony and Well-Being, which will come out in October. It's available for preorder now, you should definitely check it out. Dr. Woodley also released children's books called Harmony Tree.

In our conversation, we talk about what he thinks is the key reason Western Christians have such a hard time following Jesus well, the centrality of love in everything we do as followers of Jesus, the importance of this year's elections to marginalize people, and Dr. Woodley’s new books, and just a lot more.

Sy Hoekstra: His essay in our book was originally published in Sojourners. It was one of the very few not original essays we had in the book, but it's called “The Fullness Thereof,” and that will be available in the show notes. I’ll link to that along with a link to all the books that Jonathan just said and everything else. We're also going to be doing a new segment that we introduced in our bonus episodes, if you were listening to those, called Which Tab Is Still Open?, where we do a little bit of a deeper dive into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. So this week, it will be on The Attack on Black History in schools, a conversation with Jelani Cobb and Nikole Hannah-Jones. It was a really great thing to listen to. That'll be in the show notes to hear our thoughts on it after the interview.

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely. And friends, we need your help. We're going into a new phase of KTF, and as you know, this is a listener supported show. So everything we do at KTF to help people leave the idols of America and seek Jesus and confront injustice is only possible because you are supporting us. And in this next phase, we need a lot more supporters. So we've been doing this show, and all of our work in KTF as kind of a side project for a few years, but we want to make it more sustainable. So if you've ever thought about subscribing and you can afford it, please go to

and sign up now. And if you can't afford it, all you got to do is email us and we'll give you a free discounted subscription. No questions asked, because we want everyone to have access to our content, bonus episode, and the subscriber community features.

So if you can afford it, please do go to www.ktfpress.com, subscribe and make sure these conversations can continue, and more conversations like it can be multiplied. Thanks in advance. Oh, also, because of your support, our newsletter is free right now. So if you can't be a paid subscriber, go and sign up for the free mailing list at www.ktfpress.com and get our media recommendations every week in your inbox, along with things that are helping us stay grounded and hopeful as we engage with such difficult topics at the intersection of church and politics, plus all the news and everything going on with us at KTF. So, thank you so, so much for the subscribers we already have. Thanks in advance for those five-star reviews, they really do help us out, and we hope to see you on www.ktfpress.com as subscribers. Thanks.

Sy Hoekstra: Let's get into the interview, I have to issue an apology. I made a rookie podcasting mistake and my audio sucks. Fortunately, I'm not talking that much in this interview [laughter]. Randy Woodley is talking most of the time, and his recording comes to you from his home recording studio. So that's nice. I'll sound bad, but most of the time he's talking and he sounds great [Jonathan laughs]. So let's get right into it. Here's the interview.

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

What Dualism Is, and How It’s Infected the White Church

Jonathan Walton: So, Dr. Woodley, welcome to Shake The Dust. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for contributing to our Anthology in the way that you contributed [laughs].

Randy Woodley: I’m glad to be here. Thank you.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Your essay, I mean, was really, really great. We're going to dive deep into it. But you wrote in the essay, the primary difference in the lens through which Western and indigenous Christians see the world is dualism. And so if you were able to just define what is dualism, and why is it a crucial thing for Western Christians to understand about our faith, that'd be great to kick us off.

Randy Woodley: Yeah, except for I think I want to draw the line differently than the question you just asked.

Jonathan Walton: Okay.

Randy Woodley: When we say indigenous Christians, by and large, Christians who are Native Americans have been assimilated into a Western worldview. It's a battle, and there's lots of gradient, there's a gradient scale, so there's lots of degrees of that. But by and large, because of the assimilation efforts of missionaries and churches and Christianity in general, our Native American Christians would probably veer more towards a Western worldview. But so I want to draw that line at traditional indigenous understandings as opposed to indigenous Christian understandings. Okay. So, yeah, Platonic Dualism is just a sort of… I guess to make it more personal, I started asking the question a long time ago, like what's wrong with White people [Sy laughs]? So that's a really valid question, a lot of people ask it, right? But then I kind of got a little more sophisticated, and I started saying, well, then what is whiteness? What does that mean? And then tracing down whiteness, and a number of deep studies and research, and trying to understand where does whiteness really come from, I really ended up about 3000 years ago with the Platonic Dualism, and Western civilization and the Western worldview. And so Plato of course was the great dualist, and he privileged the ethereal over the material world, and then he taught his student, Aristotle. So just to be clear for anybody who, I don't want to throw people off with language. So the thing itself is not the thing, is what Plato said, it's the idea of what the thing is. And so what he's doing is splitting reality. So we’ve got a holistic reality of everything physical, everything ethereal, et cetera. So Plato basically split that and said, we privilege and we are mostly about what we think about things, not what actually exists an our physical eyes see, or any senses understand. So that split reality… and then he taught Aristotle, and I'm going to make this the five-minute crash course, or two minutes maybe would be better for this [laughs]. Aristotle actually, once you create hierarchies in reality, then everything becomes hierarchical. So men become over women, White people become over Black people. Humans become over the rest of creation. So now we live in this hierarchical world that continues to be added to by these philosophers.

Aristotle is the instructor, the tutor to a young man named Alexander, whose last name was The Great. And Alexander basically spreads this Platonic Dualism, this Greek thinking around the whole world, at that time that he could figure out was the world. It goes as far as North Africa and just all over the known world at that time. Eventually, Rome becomes the inheritor of this, and then we get the Greco-Roman worldview. The Romans try to improve upon it, but basically, they continue to be dualist. It gets passed on, the next great kingdom is Britain, Great Britain. And then of course America is the inheritor of that. So Great Britain produces these movements.

In fact, between the 14th and 17th century, they have the Renaissance, which is a revival of all this Greek thinking, Roman, Greco-Roman worldview, architecture, art, poetry, et cetera. And so these become what we call now the classics, classic civilization. When we look at what's the highest form of civilization, we look back to, the Western worldview looks back to Greek and Greece and Rome and all of these, and still that's what's taught today to all the scholars. So, during this 14th to 17th century, there's a couple pretty big movements that happen in terms of the West. One, you have the enlightenment. The enlightenment doubles down on this dualism. You get people like René Descartes, who says, “I am a mind, but I just have a body.” You get Francis Bacon, who basically put human beings over nature. You get all of this sort of doubling down, and then you also have the birth of another, what I would call the second of the evil twins, and that is the Reformation. [exaggerated sarcastic gasp] I’ll give the audience time to respond [laughter]. The Reformation also doubles down on this dualism, and it becomes a thing of what we think about theology, instead of what we do about theology. So I think I've said before, Jesus didn't give a damn about doctrine. So it became not what we actually do, but what we think. And so the Europeans were so set in this dualistic mindset that they began to kill each other over what they consider to be correct doctrine. So we had the religious wars all throughout Europe, and then they brought them to the United States. And here we fought by denomination, so just like, “Well, I’m going to start another denomination. And I'm going to start another one from that, because I disagree with you about who gets baptized in what ways, and at what time,” and all of those kinds of things.

So doctrine then, what we think about, and theology becomes what we're thinking about. And it becomes completely disembodied, to the point now where the church is just looked at mostly with disdain, because it doesn't backup the premises that it projects. So it talks about Jesus and love and all of these things. And yet it's not a reflection of that, it's all about having the correct beliefs, and we think that's what following Jesus is. So when I'm talking about Platonic Dualism, I'm talking about something deeply embedded in our worldview. Not just a thought, not just a philosophy, but a whole worldview. It's what we see as reality. And so my goal is to convert everyone from a Western worldview, which is not sustainable, and it will not project us into the future in a good way, to a more indigenous worldview.

Dr. Woodley’s Influences, and How He’s Influenced Others

Sy Hoekstra: So let's talk about that effort then, because you have spent effectively decades trying to do just that.

Randy Woodley: Exactly.

Sy Hoekstra: Working with both indigenous and non-indigenous people. So tell us what some of the good fruit that you see as you disciple people out of this dualistic thinking?

Randy Woodley: I feel like that question is supposed to be answered by the people I effected at my memorial service, but…

Sy Hoekstra: [laughter] Well, you can answer for yourself.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean…

Randy Woodley: Yeah, I mean, it's a bit braggadocious if I start naming names and all those kinds of things [Sy laughs]. I would just say that I've had influence in people's lives along with other influences. And now, I mean, first of all when I look back, I look and the most important thing to me is my children know I love them with all my heart and I did the best I could with them. And then secondly, the people who I taught became my friends. And the people I've mentored became my friends and I'm still in relationship with so many of them. That's extremely important to me. That's as important as anything else. And then now I look and I see there's people and they've got podcasts and they've got organizations and they've got denominations and they’re... I guess overall, the best thing that I have done to help other people over the years is to help them to ask good questions in this decolonization effort and this indigenous effort. So yeah, I've done a little bit over the years.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] How about for yourself? Because I don't think, I think one of the reasons you started asking these questions was to figure things out for yourself. What fruit have you seen in your own “walk,” as evangelicals might put it?

Randy Woodley: Well, I think as you get older, you get clarity. And you also realize that people who have influenced you, and I think about a lot of people in my life. Some I've met, some I've never met. Some you've probably never heard of. People like Winkie Pratney, and John Mohawk and John Trudell, and public intellectuals like that. And then there's the sort of my some of my professors that helped me along the way like Ron Sider and Tony Campolo, and Samuel Escobar and Manfred Brauch. And just a whole lot of people I can look back, Jean [inaudible], who took the time to build a relationship and helped me sort of even in my ignorance, get out of that. And I think one of the first times this happened was when I was doing my MDiv, and someone said to me, one of my professors said to me, “You need to see this through your indigenous eyes.” And I was challenged. It was like, “Oh! Well then, what eyes am I seeing this through?” And then I began to think about that. The thing about decolonizing, is that once you start pulling on that thread the whole thing comes unraveled. So yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think like, just to speak a little bit to your impact, I think something you said to someone that was said to me, was like we're all indigenous to somewhere. And the importance of looking upstream to see how we're influenced to be able to walk into the identity that God has called us to. Including the people who led me to faith being like Ashley Byrd, Native Hawaiian, being able to call me out of a dualist way of thinking and into something more holistic, and now having multi-ethnic children myself being able to speak to them in an indigenous way that connects them to a land and a people has been really transformative for me.

Randy Woodley: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. See? Right there.

Love and Vulnerability are Central to Christian Life

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Yeah. And with that, you make a point of saying that you're somebody who works hard to speak difficult truths in a way that is loving and acceptable to everybody. I would say that's like Jesus, right? To be able to speak hard truths and yet people are curious and want to know more even though they're challenged. And so why, I could guess, and I'm sure people would fill in the blanks. But like if you had to say why that's important to you, what would you say?

Randy Woodley: Well, I mean, love’s the bottom line of everything. If I'm not loving the people I'm with, then I'm a hypocrite. I'm not living up to what I'm speaking about. So the bottom line to all of this shalom, understanding dualism, changing worldviews, is love. And so love means relationship. It means being vulnerable. I always say God is the most vulnerable being who exists. And if I'm going to be the human that the creator made me to be, then I have to be vulnerable. I have to risk and I have to trust and I have to have courage and love, and part of that is building relationships with people. So I think, yeah, if… in the old days, we sort of had a group of Native guys that hung around together, me and Richard Twiss, Terry LeBlanc, Ray Aldred, Adrian Jacobs. We all sort of had a role. Like, we called Richard our talking head. So he was the best communicator and funniest and he was out there doing speaking for all of us. And my role that was put on me was the angry Indian. So I was the one out there shouting it down and speaking truth to power and all that. And over the years, I realized that that's okay. I still do that. And I don't know that I made a conscious decision or if I just got older, but then people start coming up to me and saying things like, “Oh, you say some really hard things, but you say it with love.” And I'm like, “Oh, okay. Well, I'll take that.” So I just became this guy probably because of age, I don't know [laughs] and experience and seeing that people are worth taking the extra time to try and communicate in a way that doesn't necessarily ostracize them and make them feel rejected.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I think there's all these iterations of the last 50 years of people trying to say, “Hey, love across difference. Hey, love across difference.” And there's these iterations that come up. So I hope a lot of people get older faster to be able, you know [laughter].

Randy Woodley: I think we’re all getting older faster in this world we’re in right now.

Jonathan Walton: It’s true. Go ahead Sy.

The Importance of Voters’ Choices to marginalized People

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So we had another interview that we did, kind of about Middle East politics, as we're thinking about the election coming up. And one of the points we hit on that we've talked about before on this show is that to a lot of people in the Middle East or North Africa, whoever gets elected in the US, it doesn't necessarily make the biggest difference in the world. There's going to be drones firing missiles, there's going to be governments being manipulated by the US. America is going to do what America is going to do in the Middle East regardless. And I assume to a certain degree, tell me if I'm wrong, that that might be how a lot of indigenous people think about America. America is going to do what America is going to do regardless of who's in power, broadly speaking at least. What do you think about when you look at the choices in front of us this November? How do you feel about it? Like what is your perspective when you're actually thinking about voting?

Randy Woodley: Yeah, that's a really good question. And I understand I think, how people in other countries might feel, because Americans foreign policy is pretty well based on America first and American exceptionalism, and gaining and maintaining power in the world. And I think that makes little difference. But in domestic affairs, I think it makes a whole lot of difference. Native Americans, much like Black Americans are predominantly Democrats and there's a reason for that. And that is because we're much more likely to not have our funding to Indian Health Service cut off in other things that we need, housing grants and those kinds of things. And there's just such a difference right now, especially in the domestic politics. So I mean, the Republicans have basically decided to abandon all morals and follow a narcissistic, masochistic, womanizing… I mean, how many—criminal, et cetera, and they've lost their minds.

And not that they have ever had the best interest of the people at the bottom of the social ladder in mind. Because I mean, it was back in the turnaround when things changed a long time ago that there was any way of comparing the two. But ever since Reagan, which I watched, big business wins. And so right now, we live in a corporatocracy. And yes, there are Democrats and the Republicans involved in that corporatocracy, but you will find many more Democrats on the national scale who are for the poor and the disenfranchised. And that's exactly what Shalom is about. It's this Shalom-Sabbath-Jubilee construct that I call, that creates the safety nets. How do you know how sick a society is? How poor its safety nets are. So the better the safety nets, the more Shalom-oriented, Sabbath-Jubilee construct what I call it, which is exactly what Jesus came to teach.

And look up four, that's his mission. Luke chapter four. And so, when we think about people who want to call themselves Christians, and they aren't concerned about safety nets, they are not following the life and words of Jesus. So you just have to look and say, yes, they'll always, as long as there's a two-party system, it’s going to be the lesser of two evils. That's one of the things that's killing us, of course lobbyists are killing us and everything else. But this two-party system is really killing us. And as long as we have that, we're always going to have to choose the lesser of two evils. It's a very cynical view, I think, for people inside the United States to say, well, there's no difference. In fact, it's a ridiculous view. Because all you have to look at is policy and what's actually happened to understand that there's a large difference, especially if you're poor.

And it's also a very privileged position of whiteness, of power, of privilege to be able to say, “Oh, it doesn't matter who you vote for.” No, it matters to the most disenfranchised and the most marginalized people in our country. But I don't have a strong opinion about that. [laughter]

Jonathan Walton: I think there's going to be a lot of conversation about that very point. And I'm prayerful, I'm hopeful, like we tried to do with our Anthology like other groups are trying to do, is to make that point and make it as hard as possible that when we vote it matters, particularly for the most disenfranchised people. And so thank you for naming the “survival vote,” as black women in this country call it.

Dr. Woodley’s new books, and Where to Find His Work Online

Jonathan Walton: And so all of that, like we know you're doing work, we know things are still happening, especially with Eloheh and things like that. But I was doing a little Googling and I saw like you have a new book coming out [laughs]. So I would love to hear about the journey that… Oh, am I saying that right, Eloheh?

Randy Woodley: It’s Eloheh [pronounced like “ay-luh-hay”], yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Eloheh. So I would love to hear more about your new book journey to Eloheh, as well as where you want people to just keep up with your stuff, follow you, because I mean, yes, the people downstream of you are pretty amazing, but the spigot is still running [laughter]. So can you point us to where we can find your stuff, be able to hang out and learn? That would be a wonderful thing for me, and for others listening.

Randy Woodley: Well, first of all, I have good news for the children. I have three children's books that just today I posted on my Facebook and Insta, that are first time available. So this is The Harmony Tree Trilogy. So in these books are about not only relationships between host people and settler peoples, but each one is about sort of different aspects of dealing with climate change, clear cutting, wildfires, animal preservation, are the three that I deal with in this trilogy. And then each one has other separate things. Like the second one is more about empowering women. The third one is about children who we would call, autistic is a word that’s used. But in the native way we look at people who are different differently than the West does: as they're specially gifted. And this is about a young man who pre-contact and his struggle to find his place in native society. And so yeah, there's a lot to learn in these books. But yeah, so my wife and I…

Sy Hoekstra: What's the target age range for these books?

Randy Woodley: So that'd be five to 11.

Jonathan Walton: Okay, I will buy them, thank you [laughter]

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Randy Woodley: But adults seem to really love them too. So I mean, people have used them in church and sermons and all kinds of things. Then the book that Edith and I wrote is called Journey to Eloheh, how indigenous values bring harmony and well-being. And it's basically our story. The first two chapters really deal, the first chapter deals more in depth of this dualism construct. And the second one really deals with my views on climate change, which are unlike anybody else's I know. And then we get into our stories, but I wanted to set a stage of why it's so important. And then Edith’s story, and then my story and then our story together. And then how we have tried to teach these 10 values as we live in the world and teach and mentor and other things and raise our children.

So, yeah, the journey to Eloheh, that's all people have to remember. It's going to be out in October, eighth I think.

Jonathan Walton: Okay.

Randy Woodley: And we're really excited about it. I think it's the best thing I've written up to this date. And I know it's the best thing my wife's written because this is her first book [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Awesome.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s great.

Randy Woodley: Yeah, so we're proud of that. And then yeah, people can go to www.eloheh.org. That's E-L-O-H-E-H.org and sign up for our newsletter. You can follow me on Instagram, both @randywoodley7 and @eloheh/eagleswings. And the same with Facebook. We all have Facebook pages and those kinds of things. So yeah, and then Twitter. I guess I do something on Twitter every now and then [laughter]. And I have some other books, just so you know.

Sy Hoekstra: Just a couple.

Jonathan Walton: I mean a few. A few pretty great ones. [laughs] Well on behalf of me and Sy, and the folks that we influence. Like I've got students that I've pointed toward you over the years through the different programs that we run,

Randy Woodley: Thank you.

Jonathan Walton: and one of them is… two of them actually want to start farms and so you'll be hearing from them.

Randy Woodley: Oh, wow. That’s good.

Jonathan Walton: And so I'm just…

Randy Woodley: We need more small farms.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Places where stewardship is happening and it is taught. And so, super, super grateful for you. And thanks again for being on Shake the Dust. We are deeply grateful.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Randy Woodley: Yeah, thank you guys. Nice to be with you.

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

Sy’s and Jonathan’s Thoughts After the Interview

Jonathan Walton: So, wow. That was amazing. Coming out of that time, I feel like I'm caring a lot. So Sy, why don't you go first [laughs], what's coming up for you?

Sy Hoekstra: We sound a little starstruck when we were talking to him. It's kind of funny actually.

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.

Sy Hoekstra: I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if people know, in our world, he's sort of a big deal [laughter]. And we have, neither of us have met him before so that was a lot of fun.

Jonathan Walton: No, that’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: I think it was incredible how much like in the first five minutes, him summing up so much about Western theology and culture that I have taken like, I don't know, 15 years to learn [laughs]. And he just does it so casually and so naturally. There's just like a depth of wisdom and experience and thinking about this stuff there that I really, really appreciate. And it kind of reminded me of this thing that happened when Gabrielle and I were in law school. Gabrielle is my wife, you've heard her speak before if you listen to the show. She was going through law school, as she's talked about on the show from a Haitian-American, or Haitian-Canadian immigrant family, grew up relatively poor, undocumented.

And just the reasons that she's gotten into the law are so different. And she comes from such a different background than anybody who's teaching her, or any of the judges whose cases she's reading. And she's finding people from her background just being like, “What are we doing here? Like how is this relevant to us, how does this make a difference?” And we went to this event one time that had Bryan Stevenson, the Capitol defense attorney who we've talked about before, civil rights attorney. And Sherrilyn Ifill, who at the time was the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. And they were just, it was the complete opposite experience, like they were talking about all of her concerns. They were really like, I don't know, she was just resonating with everything that they were saying, and she came out of it, and she goes, “It's just so good to feel like we have leaders.” Like it's such a relief to feel like you actually have wiser people who have been doing this and thinking about this for a long time and actually have the same concerns that you do. And that is how I feel coming out of our conversation with Randy Woodley. Like in the church landscape that we face with all the crises and the scandals and the lack of faithfulness and the ridiculous politics and everything, it is just so good to sit down and talk to someone like him, where I feel like somebody went ahead of me. And he's talking about the people who went ahead of him, and it just it's relieving. It is relieving to feel like you're almost sort of part of a tradition [laughter], when you have been alienated from the tradition that you grew up in, which is not the same experience that you've had, but that's how I feel.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I think for me, coming out of the interview, one of the things I realized is similar. I don't have very many conversations with people who are older than me, that are more knowledgeable than me, and have been doing this work longer than me all at the same time. I know people who are more knowledgeable, but they're not actively involved in the work. I know people that are actively involved in the work, but they've been in the silos for so long, they haven't stepped out of their box in ten years. But so to be at that intersection of somebody who is more knowledgeable about just the knowledge, like the historical aspects, theological aspect, and then that goes along with the practical applications, like how you do it in your life and in the lives of other people. He's like the spiritual grandfather to people that I follow.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: [laughter] So it's like, so I think you said it, like we were a little starstruck. I do think I was very conscious of being respectful, which I think is not new for me, but it is a space that I don't often inhabit. And I think that's something that has been frustrating for me, just honestly like the last few years, is that the pastoral aspect of the work that we do, is severely lacking.

Sy Hoekstra: When you say the pastoral aspect of the work that we do, you mean like, in the kind of activist-y Christian space, there just aren't a ton of pastors [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: Yes. And, so for example, like I was in a cohort, and I was trying to be a participant. And so being a participant in the cohort, I expected a certain level of pastoring to happen for me. And that in hindsight was a disappointment. But I only realized that after sitting down with somebody like Randy, where it's like, I'm not translating anything. He knows all the words. He knows more words than me [Sy laughs]. I'm not contextualizing anything. So I think that was a reassuring conversation. I think I felt the same way similarly with Ron Sider, like when I met him. He's somebody who just knows, you know what and I mean? I feel that way talking with Lisa Sharon Harper. I feel that way talking with Brenda Salter McNeil. I feel that way talking with people who are just a little further down the road.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Lisa’s not that much older than us [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Well, is she?

Sy Hoekstra: You compared her to Ron Sider. I'm like, “That's a different age group, Jonathan” [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Well, I don't mean age. I do mean wisdom and experience.

Sy Hoekstra: Right. Yeah, totally.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, Ron Sider was very old [laughs]. And actually, Ron Sider is actually much older than Randy Woodley [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: That’s also true. That’s a good point.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, right. Ron Sider is, when the Anthology came out, he was legit 45 years older than us, I think.

Sy Hoekstra: And he very kindly, endorsed, and then passed away not that long afterwards.

Jonathan Walton: He did, he did.

Sy Hoekstra: He was such an interesting giant in a lot of ways to people all over the political spectrum [laughs]…

Jonathan Walton: Yes, right.

Sy Hoekstra: …who just saw something really compelling in his work.

Which Tab Is Still Open? Legislators Restricting Teaching about Race in Schools

Sy Hoekstra: So Jonathan, all right, from our recent newsletter recommendations. Here's the new segment, guys. Jonathan, which tab is still open?

Jonathan Walton: Yes. So the tab that’s still open is this article and podcast episode from The New Yorker, featuring a conversation with Columbia School of Journalism Dean, Jelani Cobb, and Nikole Hannah-Jones from Howard University and the 1619 project. They talked about the attack on Black history in schools. And so there's just two thoughts that I want to give. And one of them is that there are very few conversations where you can get a broad overview of what an organized, sustained resistance to accurate historical education looks like, and they do that. Like they go all the way back and they come all the way forward, and you're like “expletive, this is not okay.” [Sy laughs] Right? So, I really appreciated that. Like, yes, you could go and read Angela Crenshaw’s like Opus work. Yes, you could go…

Sy Hoekstra: You mean, Kimberlé Crenshaw [laughs]?

Jonathan: Oh, I mixed, Angela Davis and Kimber… Well, if they were one person, that would be a powerful person [Sy laughs]. But I do mean Kimberlé Crenshaw, no offense to Angela Davis. I do mean Kimberlé Crenshaw. You could go get that book. You could go listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates testimony in front of Congress on reparations. Like these long things, but like this conversation pulls a lot of threads together in a really, really helpful, compelling way. And so that's one thing that stood out to me. The second thing is I think I have to acknowledge how fearful and how grateful it made me. I am afraid of what's going to happen in 20 years, when children do not know their history in these states. And I'm grateful that my daughter will know hers because she goes to my wife's school in New York.

And so, I did not know that I would feel that sense of fear and anxiety around like, man, there's going to be generations of people. And this is how it continues. There's going to be another generation of people who are indoctrinated into the erasure of black people. And the erasure of native people in the erasure of just narratives that are contrary to race-based, class-based, gender-based environmental hierarchies. And that is something that I'm sad about. And with KTF and other things, just committed to making sure that doesn't happen as best as we possibly can, while also being exceptionally grateful that my children are not counted in that number of people that won't know. So I hold those two things together as I listened to just the wonderful wisdom and knowledge that they shared from. What about you Sy? What stood out for you?

White People Should Take Responsibility for Their Feelings Instead of Banning Uncomfortable Truths

Sy Hoekstra: Narrowly, I think one really interesting point that Jelani Cobb made was how some of these book bans and curriculum reshaping and everything that's happening are based on the opposite reasoning of the Supreme Court in Brown versus Board of Education [laughs]. So what he meant by that was, basically, we have to ban these books and we have to change this curriculum, because White kids are going to feel bad about being White kids. And what Brown versus Board of Education did was say we're going to end this idea of separate but equal in the segregated schools because there were they actually, Thurgood Marshall and the people who litigated the case brought in all this science or all the psychological research, about how Black children in segregated schools knew at a very young age that they were of lower status, and had already associated a bunch of negative ideas with the idea of blackness.

And so this idea that there can be separate but equal doesn't hold any water, right? So he was just saying we're doing what he called the opposite, like the opposite of the thinking from Brown versus Board of Education at this point. But what I was thinking is like the odd similarity is that both these feelings of inferiority come from whiteness, it's just that like, one was imposed by the dominant group on to the minoritized group. Basically, one was imposed by White people on to Black people, and the other is White people kind of imposing something on themselves [laughs]. Like you are told that your country is good and great and the land of the free and the home of the brave. And so when you learn about history that might present a different narrative to you, then you become extremely uncomfortable.

And you start to not just become extremely uncomfortable, but also feel bad about yourself as an individual. And White people, there are so many White people who believe that being told that the race to which you belong has done evil things, that means that you as an individual are a bad person, which is actually just a personal emotional reaction that not all white people are going to have. It's not like, it isn't a sure thing. And I know that because I'm a White person who does not have that reaction [laughter]. I know that with 100 percent certainty. So it's just interesting to me, because it really raised this point that Scott Hall talks about a lot. That people need to be responsible for our own feelings. We don't need to legislate a new reality of history for everybody else in order to keep ourselves comfortable.

We need to say, “Why did I had that emotional reaction, and how can I reorient my sense of identity to being white?” And that is what I came out of this conversation with, is just White people need to take responsibility for our identity, our psychological identity with our own race. And it comes, it's sort of ironic, I think, that conservative people who do a lot of complaining about identity politics, or identitarianism, or whatever they call it, that's what's happening here. This is a complete inability to separate yourself psychologically from your White identity. That's what makes you feel so uncomfortable in these conversations. And so take responsibility for who you are White people [laughs].Just who you are as an individual, who you are as your feelings, take responsibility for yourself.

There's a great book that my dad introduced me to a while back called A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being White or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life [laughter]. And it's written by this black, female psychologist named Janet Helms. It's H-E-L-M-S. But it's pronounced “Helmiss.” And she just has dedicated her career to understanding how White people shape their identities. And she has so, like such a wealth of knowledge about different stages of white identity formation, and has all these honestly kind of funny little quizzes in the book that she updates every few, there's like a bunch of editions of this book, that it's like asking you, “What do you think is best for America?” The campaign and ideas of this politician or this one or this one. And she asks you a bunch of questions and from there tells you where you are in your White identity formation [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Wow. That’s amazing.

Sy Hoekstra: It's really, “how would you feel if somebody said this about White people?” whatever. Tons of different questions, it's kind of like taking a personality test, but it's about you and your race [laughs]. That's just a resource that I would offer to people as a way to do what this conversation reminded me my people all very much need to do.

Jonathan Walton: Amen.

Sy Hoekstra: I just talked for a long time, Jonathan, we need to end. But do you have any thoughts [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: No. I was just going to say this podcast is a great 101 and a great 301.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Like it spans the spectrum. So please do if you haven't, go listen to the podcast. Yeah, just check it out. It's very, very good.

Outro and Outtake

Sy Hoekstra: We will have that in the show notes along with all the other links of everything that we had today. Okay, that's our first full episode of season four. We're so glad that you could join us. This was a great one full of a lot of great stuff. Our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. The show is produced by all of you, our lovely subscribers, and our transcripts are by Joyce Ambale. Thank you all so much for listening, we will see you in two weeks with the great Brandi Miller.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ and you call us citizens/ and you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Randy Woodley: You know, I think I've said before Jesus didn't give a damn about doctrine. Excuse me. Jesus didn't give a darn about doctrine. I don't know if that'll go through or not.

[laughter].

Season four starts next week! Hear Jonathan and Sy talk about:

-            What to expect this year from the show during this election cycle

-            A reintroduction to everything KTF does, and why we do it

-            How we really, genuinely need your support right now, and ways you can help

Credits

-        Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com.

-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.

-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.

-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

-        Production, editing, and transcript by Sy Hoekstra.

Transcript

What’s Coming in Season Four

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.” After a brief pause, the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice! I’m Sy Hoekstra

Jonathan Walton: And I’m Jonathan Walton. Welcome to season 4!

Sy Hoekstra: We are so excited to have you here. We’re going to be doing something very special for this season during this presidential election cycle

Jonathan Walton: Yes, we’re going back to our roots. The first thing we did with the company that makes this podcast, KTF Press, was publish an anthology in 2020 called Keeping the Faith. It had 36 authors writing political theology and personal stories to explain their opposition to Christian support for Donald Trump.

Sy Hoekstra: We called it an anthology of dissent, a record of resistance toward the church’s political witness in America. And our guests this season are going to be authors from that book, talking about what they wrote and how they’re thinking about their faith and the political landscape now.

Jonathan Walton: You’ve heard some of the writers from the book on this show before, like Dani Espiritu, Scott Hall, and Wissam Al-Saliby. And we’re excited to bring you Dr. Randy Woodley, Brandi Miller, Mark Scandrette, Rasool Berry, and many more this season. The first episode is dropping this upcoming Friday, May 24, with Dr. Woodley.

Sy Hoekstra: We’ve recorded some of these already, and we’re really excited to get them to you in the coming months.

What We Do at KTF, and Why

Sy Hoekstra: But before we jump into this season, we want to give you all a bit of a refresher on what exactly it is we do at KTF Press and why we do it. And the reason that we want to tell you all that is because we really need your support right now.

Jonathan Walton: That’s right. We do everything that we do to help people seek Jesus, confront injustice, and resist the idols of the American church that got us to the religious and political mess we’re in right now. This show is all about hearing personal stories and informed discussions to help you do just that.

Sy Hoekstra: And our weekly newsletter is where we curate media to help you in your discipleship and learning about politics and policy. You get commentary from us on issues important to our national discourse, and we also give you something each week to help you stay grounded and hopeful. Plus, you get news about what’s going on with us at KTF, previews of this show, and a whole lot more.

Jonathan Walton: We also write articles on similar subjects for our website, we have the anthology, and Tamice Spencer-Helms’ incredible memoir we published last year, Faith Unleavened, about how White Jesus nearly destroyed her faith, and how she left him behind to find her way to liberation and the real Jesus.

Sy Hoekstra: And we do all this with a couple things in mind. First, we always pay the most attention to marginalized voices, the people who our society oppresses and pushes to the side. We had a whole discussion on this in our very first episode, so if you want to learn more, you can always listen to that. But simply put, The opinions of people who a society favors get the most airtime, but people who a society harms and ignores actually have the clearest insight about the character of that society. And so if you want to understand the world around you better, you have to talk to marginalized people. Plus, God’s ministry throughout the Bible is primarily directed toward the poor and oppressed, and his disciples primarily come from them. So you just have to train yourself to learn from people whose perspectives come from that angle on the world if you want to follow Jesus.

Jonathan Walton: Another value of ours is trying to be both kind and humane toward people we disagree with, while remaining uncompromising about our own views. We believe, despite all the evidence on the internet to the contrary, that this is in fact possible [Sy chuckles]. But it requires a lot of intentional growth in the area of emotional health, so we talk a lot about that too.

Sy Hoekstra: The good thing is, we’ve been practicing all this for a long time. We have been friends for 18 years now, talking and learning about these subjects together, and having our own sometimes very strong disagreements. We have had to learn how to talk across lines of difference with each other in real time as friends and followers of Jesus. Fortunately, we have been able to do that in communities with friends and mentors who are doing the same thing. On top of that, Jonathan has been doing justice ministry for well over a decade, and my career before this was in law and advocacy, and we want to just share all of this experience with you.

We Need Your Support to Keep KTF Running

Jonathan Walton: So, if all that sounds like something you can get behind, here is our ask of you. We need you to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to our Substack. We have to get more subscribers if we’re going to keep this going. So, if you can afford it, please subscribe. If you can’t, just write to us at [email protected] and we’ll give you a free or discounted subscription, whatever you want, no questions asked. Because we want as many people as possible to have access. But if you can, please go to KTFPress.com and sign up. On top of supporting what we do, you get access to all our many bonus episodes, and coming soon, monthly subscriber chats with me and Sy. Also, if you’re already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to our founding member tier, which will immediately get you a free book.

Sy Hoekstra: We’ve been doing all this podcasting and writing and book publishing as a side project for a while now, and we have some incredible subscribers supporting what we do. And they are covering the costs of what it takes to produce this show, to keep the websites running, and pay a bunch of our regular business expenses. We actually would not be here without them. But we’ve kept those expenses very low. I don’t know if you know, but we’re not recording this from KTF Press Studios, right next door to NPR. This company is two people with some basic sound equipment that our subscribers paid for, and our laptops. We occasionally get help from other people with laptops. We work in whatever room is available in our homes that are full of other people. At least once, that room was my closet.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs]The point is this might sometimes sound like an established operation, but it’s a little scrappier than you think. And I think you would agree work like this should not be a side project.

Sy Hoekstra: To be fully transparent, I cannot afford to keep doing this as a side project. Jonathan does this work around his full-time job, but if I’m going to keep putting as much time into this as I do, which is a lot, I’m going to have to stop working for free.

Jonathan Walton: So here’s what we’re doing. We’re leveling up our branding and designs. You may have seen that on our website and in our emails. We’ll also be doing some advertising, and of course continuing to put our best work here. But we need you to do your part!

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, how many paid subscribers do we have right now?

Jonathan about 120.

Sy Hoekstra: And how many do we want to have by the end of this year?

Jonathan Walton: One thousand! [laughs]

Sy Hoekstra: So we have just a few more to go. Please, please go to KTFPress.com and sign up. Don’t wait.

Jonathan Walton: And there are a few free things you can do apart from subscribing. That newsletter we mentioned is free, so sign up for our free mailing list if you can’t become a paid subscriber, and forward that thing so many times. That’s also at KTFPress.com

Sy Hoekstra: You can also give this show a five-star review on Apple or Spotify, and say something nice about us in a review if you’re on Apple Podcasts. You can also like our Facebook page and follow us on Instagram and Threads. But to reiterate, the most important thing we need you to do is go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber. By the way, cool new trick. If you’re listening to this on Spotify, just go back to the bonus episode right before this one in the feed, click the button to unlock that episode, and it will take you right where you need to go to Subscribe.

Outro and Outtake

Jonathan Walton: Alright everyone, thank you so much for listening. Once again, we’re starting season 4 this upcoming Friday, May 24, with Dr. Randy Woodley. We will see you then!

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, [singing a made-up tune] let me hit the button to stop this recording.

Jonathan Walton: [commanding, in an English accent] Cease recording. Immediately.

Sy Hoekstra: [with fake dramatic anger] Cease it now!

On today’s episode, Jonathan and Sy talk Christian Nationalism. They cover:

-        What Christian Nationalism is exactly

-        Why they personally reject it

-        Why it’s so hard for White Christians to let go of the idea that the US is a Christian nation

-        Why White Christians need to confess, repent of, and oppose Christian nationalism, rather than merely stating that it’s wrong or minimizing its importance

Mentioned in the Episode

-        Jonathan’s book, Twelve Lies That Hold America Captive

-        Dr. Anthea Butler’s article on why White evangelicals need to own Christian nationalism

-        The Belhar Confession from South Africa

Credits

-        Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com

-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads

-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon

-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify

-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram

-        Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra

-        Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra

Introduction

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B, F#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pod playing the note B in the background… both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Sy Hoekstra: White Christians in our democracy today have power and we want to know what to do with that power. And the answer has to be, “Oh, we have to use it to enact what Jesus would enact.” It is trying to apply teachings from a person who was occupied, who was in no position of power, and who was not interested in establishing a government on Earth…

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs]. Yes, that’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: …to the question of how you establish a government on Earth [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. I'm Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Today, we're going to be talking about Christian nationalism. What it is exactly, why it's much closer to what the average White American Christian believes than you might think, and some others might think, and why rejecting it is mostly an excuse not to engage in some deeper and very necessary self-reflection about the church's political witness in America.

Sy Hoekstra: Just some small things like that, that's what we're talking about. Before we get to that, I just wanted to encourage everyone, as we've been doing all these bonus episodes, to go to Apple or Spotify and give this show a five-star rating. It really helps us as we try and spread the word about the show when people look at it and see that other people find it valuable, and we would really, really appreciate it. We've gotten some, a few more of these ratings as we've been asking you all to do it, and we would just please encourage anyone who hasn't done it to keep going. It's a really easy and free way to support what we do at KTF Press helping people leave the idols of the White American church to follow Jesus, and we very much appreciate it.

If you're on Apple, if you could give us a written review as well, those are so encouraging to us and they give other people a great kind of flavor of what the show is about from the perspective of readers. So Apple or Spotify, give us a five-star rating, and leave a written review if you're on Apple, please, it helps us so much. And we very much appreciate it.

Jonathan, what are we up to? Let's get into it.

What Is Christian Nationalism?

Jonathan Walton: Sy, I mean, this is going to be a light-hearted, very simple, straightforward conversation. Alright [laughs], So can we start out with just a simple question to get everybody on the same page because there are lots of different definitions out there. So what is Christian nationalism?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I'm going to talk about what it is technically, meaning there are lots of people operating with many definitions of it out there. There are also lots of people using the word without having a particular definition of it [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: This is also true [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Which just happens a lot in political discussions, it's sort of unavoidable. But there is a technical definition of nationalism and Christian nationalism. So I'm going to start with nationalism broadly. This is where kind of my background and history in law and politics comes into some usefulness on this show. I'm going to give you a definition of nationalism and you're going to think, “That doesn't sound that weird or important or interesting.” So let me just tell you, I promise you, it is [laughter]. I'm going to give you the definition first then we're going to talk about it more.

So effectively, nationalism is the belief that people should identify with their nation state over other nations. It's like creating a sense of political identity in the people who constitute a nation. And the thing that they're identifying with is the whole nation of people over whom the government operates as a state. So not that odd or controversial, particularly in America, lots of people think that way. To understand it a little bit better, you have to kind of understand the historical context that it comes up in. Obviously, like when nation states were first arising in Europe, there were lots of other competing loyalties. You could be loyal to your church or your kingdom or whatever else, so it was important to construct an identity around this new thing called a nation. Or at least it was important to the people who were trying to build the nations.

So when you're constructing an identity around a nation, you have to find something for people to sort of hold on to as they’re building a common identity. So what that means is nationalism gets combined with a lot of other stuff. And again, this is important. This is not just like random historical information. This will come into play when we talk about the details of our current debate today. Nationalism gets combined with a lot of other things, it gets combined… Like I'll give you an example. I'll give a couple examples, because there are examples that we might find sympathetic and examples that we will find horrible [laughs]. So for instance, there were lots of anti-colonial movements, where they relied on nationalism to create a sense of solidarity among all of the people in a given colony that we're trying to fight, say like Britain.

Like what Gandhi did was nationalism. Gandhi fought very intentionally for a unified Indian state that was not about religion or any other divisive thing. It was about all of the people who are native to this place called India fighting against… having self-determination, governing themselves apart from the British Empire. That's what he was fighting for. That happened in anti-colonial movements in a lot of different places. He's just one of the more famous figureheads of it.

Nationalism can also be combined with, it's not about like fighting a distant empire or trying to counter an identity as being part of a British, being a British subject or whatever. It could be part of creating an ethnocentric community, meaning like… the most famous example of ethno-nationalism is the Nazis. Nazi being a word that is short for the German word “nazional,” meaning national, because they were the National Socialists. So basically, that's creating a national identity around being Aryan. Around being anti-Semitic. So anyways, there are a million different ways that nationalism gets combined with other stuff. And there are lots of different versions of religious nationalism around the world. In America, we have Christian nationalism, which is basically a belief that America is or at least it should be a Christian nation, and that you should have your identity as an American, specifically in the fact that America is a Christian nation. And that that's part of your primary identity, “I am an American, which is to say that I am part of this Christian nation, and that's a primary identity of mine.”

So again, not everybody is thinking that way. Like a lot of people are just saying, I'm a Christian nationalist, because that basically just means I support Trump and his movement [laughs]. Or there's lots of other ways that people talk about it, but that is the kind of technical definition. Jonathan, do you have anything to add, or should we just move on from my history and poli-Sy lecture [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: No, I think the only thing that I would add is that nationalism is… Or I guess, could you tell me the difference between nationalism and patriotism?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I mean, patriotism could apply to any sort of political organization, I guess. But patriotism is more usually a question of love of country, meaning they go together a lot. But basically, it's more just about your identity with a nation state in particular. So you can love your nation state, you could also love your kingdom [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: You know what I mean? You could love your tribe, you could love your whatever. Like there's lots of different ways to… I don't know. Love the political organization that you're under. So it's more they're just sort of separate questions is the real answer.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No, no, that makes sense. The only thing I would add to it I think, is patriotism slash… because sometimes I feel like they get conflated, especially when we get into Christian nationalism, is that this is a normal way of thinking for most people, but is most likely heavily subconscious.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes.

Jonathan Walton: So as you're listening to Sy’s definition, even as I'm thinking about it, I'm like, yeah, these are all quote unquote, “normal” ways to think and be in the world. And without interrogation, it becomes the basis for a lot of actions or inaction that we take each day.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, totally agreed with that.

Why Should We Reject Christian Nationalism?

Sy Hoekstra: So before we get into the kind of meatier part of the discussion of why rejecting it isn't enough and why it's actually very common, Jonathan, there's a book that was written called Twelve Lies That Hold America Captive: And the Truth That Sets Us Free.

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs] Yes. I’ve heard of it.

Sy Hoekstra: And it was written by Jonathan Walton. Yeah. And one of the titular lies of this book [laughter], one of the twelve lies was that America is a Christian nation. Effectively, you have a chapter in a book rejecting the ideology of Christian nationalism [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes. It's chapter one actually [laughs]. It’s the most important chapter of the book.

Sy Hoekstra: Is it really chapter one?

Jonathan Walton: It’s chapter one, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I’d forgotten that actually.

Jonathan Walton: No worries, no worries.

Sy Hoekstra: Can you give us the bullet points, Jonathan, why is it something Christians should reject?

Jesus Did Not Want Us to Establish a Kingdom on Earth

Jonathan Walton: We should reject Christian nationalism because it's antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think it's very clear in Scripture that if Jesus was trying to start a political revolution and baptize a nation state, he could have done that. There's a prime moment in Scripture when Jesus is arrested and Peter pulls out a sword and chops off the ear of Malchus, the people who were there to arrest Jesus. In that moment, if there was going to be a revolution that would have been the moment. There's a detachment of soldiers there, Jesus' disciples were there. There could have been a start to a fight. This was the height of Jesus' ministry, and instead of overthrowing the Empire, which is what Peter, Simon the Zealot, and thousands of Jews at the time were waiting for, he didn't do that.

He picked up Malchus’ ear and put it back on his head. Jesus was not there to bring his kingdom of the world, because he told Pontius Pilate after he got arrested, “My kingdom is not of this world.” So when we as followers of Jesus say the United States is a shining city on a hill as Barack Obama did in his speech in 2008, echoing John F. Kennedy from the 1960s, we are doing the work of Christian nationalism. We are baptizing, we are sanctifying a land theft, genocide, patriarchal, racist, hyper capitalist, militarized project, to create a quote-unquote, “new people in a new place,” which God did not ordain or endorse in any way as the way of his kingdom coming into the world.

Sy Hoekstra: Can I ask you one step further? I agree with all that.

Jonathan Walton: Sure.

Sy Hoekstra: Wouldn't it be best for a nation to operate according to Christian principles, wouldn’t that be the best way to make people flourish?

Jonathan Walton: I would argue that the answer is no.

Sy Hoekstra: Why?

Jonathan Walton: If that was the best way for us to flourish in the world, then that would have been Jesus' mandate, but he did not say that.

Sy Hoekstra: So that's interesting. The reason it's interesting is like, I feel like it's baffling to White Christians to say…

Jonathan Walton: Oh! Listen, man…

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I’m just saying I don't necessarily disagree with you, but man, in the context of the church that I grew up in, what you're saying is ridiculous.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, because of where we live and how things have operated the last however many years. Let's take for example the idea of Manifest Destiny, and the glorification of capitalism and a Protestant ethic. And we look at a forest and we say this forest should be timber. This forest should be grazing lands for cattle. This forest should be cut down and replaced with pines that we can select cut for every five years and clear cut every 20 years to maximize and boost profits. Like we need to make this island, which apparently is vast, make it as efficient and productive as possible. That reality is externalized Christian nationalism, and the ethic of the story that you just said.

Like it makes no sense that we shouldn't have every single person believe this one way so we can be the best people to do the most things to be the most accomplished all the time. People are not trees to be harvested, to be bred and then harvested so that we can reap the most benefits as defined by a certain group of people. That is why we should have a theocratic racialized state.

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, did you grow up on a pine tree farm?

Jonathan Walton: I did.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughter]. I think you just made that obvious through some of the stuff you said.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I was like, “to clear cut and what now?” I don't know what any of those words mean.”

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

 Sy Hoekstra: That's fine. You don't have to explain [laughter]. Okay, so I just want to be real clear about this Jonathan. You're saying that laws and policies and procedures and whatever, that reflect Jesus' teaching are not the best way to go for our country?

Jonathan Walton: I am saying… that… precisely.

Sy Hoekstra: Why [laughter]?

Jonathan Walton: And the reason I'm saying that is because the Kingdom of God as reflected by Jesus did not function that way. And if it did, then the actions that Jesus took would make no sense.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. So you've made that point I think. And I think I want to drill down on the way—the kingdom doesn't work that way. Meaning, I think what you're saying is the nature of God's Kingdom is fundamentally not about earthly power.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. So I think that underneath the Christian nationalist impulse, is a desire for control of other people. That's the impulse. Like other people... and I will say that some of this is a twisted form of evangelism, because we’ve framed hell and we’ve framed, like it is the worst possible thing for someone to go to hell. Now, I am not saying it’s not a bad thing for people to not choose Jesus and be separated from God for eternity. That is not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is, it's been framed in such a way that it creates an unnecessary level of anxiety when someone has not decided to follow Jesus.

Sy Hoekstra: Specifically, because we think it's our responsibility to make them do that.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, because it's framed as my, like if I do not bear witness then it's my fault this person didn't say yes. If I had just shared the right thing, or gave the right track or played the right song or prayed the right prayer. Like it is not your strategy that leads people to repentance, it is the kindness of God. It is a work of the Spirit. It does not say if we lift up this denomination, all people will be drawn to him. It says, “If the Son of Man be lifted up, he will draw all people unto him.” So I think there's an unconscious and unnecessary binding anxiety around whether or not we are Christian enough, and loved enough, and all those things. So I think that the desire to share our faith is literally the Great Commission. Go out, baptize people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Like go and do that. Make disciples.

I'm a fan of the Great Commission. I'm an evangelist, I preach the gospel. We do that. What I am not saying, is that that then gives us the reason and justification for indoctrination and compulsive religious identity. Like it's just not there. If it was there, Jesus would have done it. Because I am a Christian. I am not a Pauline, I am not all these other things. I have decided to follow Jesus. If I look at the life of Jesus, he did not come to create a theocratic, multiracial society. He didn't do that.

Sy Hoekstra: I think this is where the rubber hits the road, which is that we in our… that White Christians in our democracy today have power and we want to know what to do with that power. And the answer has to be, oh, we have to use it to enact what Jesus would enact.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Or something like that. And it is trying to apply teachings from a person who was occupied, who was in no position of power, and who was not interested in establishing a government on Earth…

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs]. Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: …to the question of how you establish a government on Earth [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: I think I want to be clear because what I'm a little bit trying to get at here is I know what you're not saying is, like if there's a choice between a law that reflects something that Jesus taught that will help people that is good, and a law that does the opposite of that. You're not saying, “Who cares what the law is?”

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So for example, Donald Trump in his 2025 document says he wants to round up undocumented people and put them into camps.

Sy Hoekstra: You're referring to the plan that he has for basically day one.

Jonathan Walton: Well, the plan that was written for him by a group of conservative activists.

Sy Hoekstra: by kind of a super PAC, yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. If that happened, I personally would lead a movement against that. I would do that. Now, I am not saying that if people vote for him, therefore we should overflow the government. That's not what I'm saying. Because if the majority of people vote for Donald Trump, then Donald Trump becomes the President of the United States. I don't think the United States is more or less Christian because he becomes the president. The United States as a nation will never be and has never been Christian. The seeds have been planted. They're just bearing fruit every day. And so, but I am resistant to patterns and practices that don't reflect the kingdom of God as best as that possibly can be in the world.

But what I am not going to do is to force or compel people to live and be in the way that I would have them to be and then baptize that as doctrine. I can't do that.

Sy Hoekstra: Again, I know there are White people listening to this, who are going to be like, “These two are just ridiculous.”

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: “How can you not believe that we should use our power for good for the kingdom?” Whatever. And I think what you're hearing from Jonathan is the perspective of someone who comes from a church tradition that was not in power, and is therefore [laughter] in my view, more easily able to understand what Jesus was getting at. And it's very hard when, you know what I mean? It's a hard thing for White people like us and I just wanted to highlight that. Because we have such a long, long tradition in the White Church of people trying to figure out how do you govern a nation state in a Christian way? Like how do you create the most possible Christian nation?

That is such a preoccupation of some of the reformers [laughs], right? Of so many theologians, of so many people. Like that is… And I think the kingdom is not a nation state. Like that's what it comes down to. And you hear those sentiments too. Like I heard, it was honestly very confusing growing up [laughter]. I would hear these sentiments about how the kingdom of God doesn't come through politics and the nation state, and also, “We need to make sure that our nation is as Christian as we possibly can in its laws and institutions and everything else.” And those two messages are hard to reconcile.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, and which is why it's hard for us to explain colonized faith, but that's what we're talking about.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].

The Constitution Sets up a System Opposed to Christian Nationalism

Sy Hoekstra: It's not only like… one of the reasons that I would reject Christian nationalism [laughs] is due to the reality that the system that we set up in America is not a Christian nationalist system. Meaning we have set up a majority rule system in America. We've always had lots of Christianity influencing the culture of our government, influencing the culture of, our culture in general. Like we've been a predominantly Christian society, but at the base of the country we set up in the Constitution, like there's nothing about that in there. We have a majority rule country [laughs]. If the majority of people in your country are not Christians, you're not going to end up with laws that are in line with those Christians’ interpretations of the Bible.

So we're literally not a Christian nationalist state, that's what I'm trying to say [laughs]. We are a representative democracy. Representative republic technically, but whatever. We're a democracy.

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs]. That's lie number five, but go ahead.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughter]. But you know what I’m saying.

Jonathan Walton: I do. I do know what you mean.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s a system that, yeah. We have not extended that democracy to all of the actual citizens of America, nor have we extended citizenship to all the people that we should at all times. But we have a majority rule system. Yes, there are ways that that gets distorted by all kinds of things like racism and money and whatever.

Jonathan Walton: Right. But everybody who's listening to that knows that, where we mean [laughs]. So we’re good.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, probably. Man, I have so many thoughts on this subject too, I'm wondering if we should just move on or if I should touch on one of these two things. I mean, actually, one important thing to say is we are a pluralist secular democracy. I just touched on this a little bit. But basically, if you don't have the majority of the people who are voting, whoever they are, you lose. That's how it works. So Christian nationalism is intentioned with that idea, with that system. Like with the actual system that we set up. Because if you as Christians don't have the votes to get whatever it is that you want, the Constitution says you should lose. So I don't know. It's just, it’s complicated in that way, but you were about to say something.

Jonathan Walton: Oh no, I was just going to add on to that. That one of the things that happens is that we make the leaders who planted our nation Christian as well, and that's just not true.

Sy Hoekstra: Right. Like some of them were [laughter], but certainly not all of them.

Jonathan Walton: Right. So for example, someone like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, these were people who were not religious people. These were people who actually talked about not being religious. I think the most famous thing is Thomas Jefferson having a Bible that he cut out all of the Jesus and miracles out of. The Thomas Jefferson Bible is a real thing. I think the thing that, for him, I think he described himself as a deist, basically. So believing in a higher power, but there was no difference between Jesus and Muhammad and all the other things that were downstream in his reality at the time, including philosophers that justified slavery. So I think we can't deify the land that we're on, or the colonial project that we're on, and we also can't deify the people and individuals who made it possible, or baptize texts, like the Constitution and Bill of Rights to the point that they become sacred.

Nationalism Makes Us Ask “Who Is My Neighbor?”

Sy Hoekstra: So one more quick point for me is actually regardless of whether the nationalism is Christian or not, it is something that is actively competing for your identity as a Christian. It is making your identity competitive compared to other nations. You are supposed to root for and think that your nation should succeed, or it is the primary thing that you identify with over other nations. And I don't really think there's any basis for that in Christian belief [laughs]. I don't think there's any particular reason for me to say… I think having a strong nationalist identity while it may seem like an obvious thing to a lot of White Christians, I think it is a subtle way of asking, “Who is my neighbor?”

I think it's a way of demarking here are people that I need to care about more than others, and there's just not really any basis for that in Scripture. And Jesus is constantly challenging us to see beyond those divisions that we create, as we know, because his answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” is the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is actually a parable about someone from one nation helping out somebody from another nation, even when the people in their own nation didn't [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Exactly [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: So, alright, let us move on, unless you have anything else to say about why we should reject Christian nationalism [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: No, I’m good [laughs].

Why Is Rejecting the Idea That the US is a Christian Nation So Hard for White Americans?

Believing America is Christian Is Easier Than Facing America’s Sins

Sy Hoekstra: Alright. Jonathan, why is rejecting the idea of the US as a Christian nation so hard for so many White Christians to do?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs]. The reason that I made this the first lie of the book is because it is the lie that holds all the other ones together. So if I as a… and I would say this as a Black person. If I as a Black person say that the United States is not a Christian nation, then what happens is all of the things that I justified with my faith, so let's throw out things that are not in the Bible, but people in a quote-unquote, “Christian” nation believe. God meets us halfway. God rewards hard work. That everything happens for a reason. None of those things were in the Bible, but those are absolutely tenets of White American folk religion, a race, class, gender, environmental-based hierarchy that segregates the stratified society that we live in. So if I take the divination out of that, like all of a sudden these are not sacred things and I have to deal with the reality of them.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, so you mean divination in this, you mean making something divine.

Jonathan Walton: Is divination the right word? Is it the right word?

Sy Hoekstra: I'm not sure, but it's the word you said so we're going to go with it [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It is. Alright, cool. Hey friends. Word of the day, divination. Is it a real word? Who knows.

Sy Hoekstra: [Laughs].

Jonathan Walton: But let's say when we make things divine, when we make things sacred, when we make them all of a sudden consecrated, then when we take that away, all of the other things beneath that unravel. The idea that we are all immigrants. The idea that something beautiful and wonderful is being created and therefore, we don't have to think about boarding schools, or residential schools for Native Americans. We don't have to think about the enslavement of Africans. We don't have to think about subjugation because what we're doing was holy. What we were working on was objectively morally pure. So the baggage, the things that happened, that was all for a wonderful, amazing, beautiful, just, loving, kind cause.

Sy Hoekstra: Or it was like a deviation from those things that we then corrected and now everything’s fine.

Jonathan Walton: Right. That we then corrected, and you know, we're making progress. This is Nikki Haley's problem. Like she said, “I just can't have people walking around believing that.”

Sy Hoekstra: Believing, in her case, “that” is that America is a racist country.

Jonathan Walton: Is a racist country. Right. Because what she's actually saying is, everything that we're doing must have been worth it. Must have been good. There must have been this greater ideal that's at work. And the reality is, no it wasn't. There was no greater ideal at work. God was not blessing and sending colonists to go out and do this work. They were going out in the name of greed and plunder. That is why they were going. We can dress it up really prettily, but if we actually begin to deny that Christ sent us on this mission, then we actually have to deal with our sin. We actually have to deal with it. And for White Christians, because of the segregated, stratified society that we live in, I think that White people can't do it because they actually don't believe that the God they serve is big enough to forgive them for the atrocities that they've committed, participated in and benefited from.

That I think is an affront to the work of Jesus, but I think we don't have a theology that's big enough in the White American church and then every church that's downstream of that, to actually have a grace that's large enough to cover, or a love that is sufficient, or a strength that's made perfect in our weakness. We don't have a theology that can hold water against that.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, strength being made perfect in weakness, or the meek inheriting the earth.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Those sorts of things. And then your ability to be vulnerable and to be sinful, and be forgiven. All that kind of falls by the wayside when what you were actually after was power and money and dominance.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Right.

Believing America Is Christian Lets Christians Justify Clinging to Power

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. All that is very good. I think I would add a couple of things. Another reason that it's really hard for people to reject, just on a practical level, is the instinct behind the question that I asked you before, which is, wouldn't it actually be better if Christian rules and Christian laws just ruled the land? If Christian people and Christian laws ruled the land. We have a really hard time, ‘we’ being White Christians, have a really hard time letting go of that idea. By the way, we're talking about White Christians right now, because that is where Christian nationalism is overwhelmingly most prevalent [laughs]. It exists in other places, it exists in other like demographics in the US, and there's also Christian nationalism in other countries. But that's what we're talking about within our context of the US. You will find Christian nationalism in like Brazil, for example.

Jonathan Walton: Or Poland, yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Or Poland, or Russia, or yeah. So when it comes to a law that Christians want passed that we think is really important, if we don't have the numbers for it, and I think a lot of where this happens now is around LGBTQ+ issues. Because there are so many Christians trying to pass anti-queer legislation of various kinds. And there's so much anxiety around schools teaching your kids that there's not a gender binary or whatever. That is where Christians cannot accept losing. White Christians had the dominant beliefs on pretty much all issues of sexuality up until like 15 years ago, then public opinion just changed so quickly [laughs].

And now White Conservative Christians find themselves on the losing side of those issues and they're just like, “No, we cannot accept this. We have to find ways to stop it.” Even though, again, the majority rule, like if you're in the minority, your policies lose. That's crucial to a functioning pluralist democracy. But that's not really what people want [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: No.

Sy Hoekstra: That's not really what White Christians want, speaking very broadly. It's also why authoritarianism is so attractive [laughs]. It's why it doesn't matter that Donald Trump loses the popular vote, but wins the presidency. That's actually good. Having a strong man who's willing to beat up on your opponents, that's what you need when you're losing.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So it makes that instinct, I don't know, more natural, I guess. That instinct towards authoritarianism. You were about to say something Jonathan.

Jonathan Walton: Just very quickly, I think just for people of color listening to this episode, this is attractive to be aligned with the people who are winning and to get away from suffering and marginalization.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: When we talk about what Sy was just naming, discrimination against the alphabet community, like the, sorry, alphabet community being LGBTQIA+ people. So when we talk about discrimination against them, it's easier to just say, “You know what, let me go with the strong people and not stand up for the vulnerable people because then they won't pick on me.” It's moving from being someone who's in the fields on a plantation to being an overseer. And overseers can be worse than the folks that actually are the people owning and holding the plantation. So I think that's something for us to name as well, as that it is attractive to think that we should be the master.

It's attractive to think that we should be the ones in control and be dominant. And that is never the role that a follower of Jesus was supposed to play. But it's how we ended up with me in high school getting a t shirt that says “The Lord's Gym” on it, and Jesus is jacked.

Sy Hoekstra: [Laughs].

Jonathan Walton: And doing pushups with a cross on his back. That’s a real t-shirt. So [laughs] that’s how we end up with these visions of a strong man and then it gets marketed because we want to believe in a God like that. But we actually serve a God who died, who laid down his life, who was described as a lamb. So I think there's inherent tension there. I just want to name that. Things that Sy is saying are attractive because it's great to feel like we win. But that's not what God has called us to.

Sy Hoekstra: And I think coming off of that, is part of the reason that it's again, so hard for White people to reject is, we do not want to be in the position that we have put so many other people in. We don't want to be the people who are working in the fields. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Which is why we never have the instinct, this has always been so interesting to me, like so revealing. We never have, like when I say we, again… if you're a conservative White Christian, who now finds yourself in the minority on issues of sexuality, which I'm not one of those. But if you are one, then it is just never, it's interesting to me that it is never the instinct to go to the Black church and say, “Hey, how have you dealt with schools teaching your kids stuff that's not true?” Because Black people have dealt with that, for sure.

Jonathan Walton: This is true.

Sy Hoekstra: Why is it never our instinct to go ask them, “Hey, when you find yourself in this position, when the government is saying something that you disagree with that is violating something that you hold to be sacred or whatever.” That's never the instinct. You’re never going to find White Christians going to the Black church to ask a question like that, or you're going to find it very, very rarely. Because the thing that we want to do is make sure that that is never us. So what we're going to do instead is get a mob and take over a school board meeting.

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs] Yes, hashtag Moms for Liberty.

Sy Hoekstra: Options that have never been available to Black people [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Right. This is true.

Sy Hoekstra: So yeah, that is a revealing impulse that we don't have [laughs]. It is a revealing lack of an impulse.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Michael Wear talked about this. And he was right. He said, “For all the people, for my White conservative Christians out there,” and Michael Wear is White. He said, “If you're sitting there asking yourself, ‘I feel politically homeless,’” He said, “That's okay.” Go and ask Black people what it's like to be politically homeless. Go and do that.” And I've never heard a White person say anything like what Sy was just saying until 10 years ago, and I was like, “It would be great to be asked that question [laughter]. I’d feel so affirmed. Yeah. Come. Come sit with me in the desert” [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Which you would also have to know though, like you would even have to understand that Black people are politically homeless.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Because most White people are just like, “What do you mean? Black people are Democrats. they vote Democrat. Aren't they one of the most loyal voting blocks for the Democrats?” Well, yes, but [laughter] with a lot of significant caveats. They're not particularly happy to be there. It's the better of two very bad options.

Jonathan Walton: This is a survival vote.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan Walton: Because prior to that, we were all Republicans [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Right. Because they were the party that eliminated slavery.

Jonathan Walton: Exactly, right.

Sy Hoekstra: And then things shifted over time. I mean, it's been like 60-ish years now…

Jonathan Walton: 60 years, yeah almost.

Sy Hoekstra: …basically, since the Republicans ran a candidate who actively opposed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which was kind of the last straw for the Black people who were left in the Republican Party, for a lot of them anyways.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Ever since then Black people have voted for like, just barely in the double digits for Republican presidential candidates. It used to be much higher than that. And barely in the double digits percentage wise. But again, that was because the other guy was actively saying “civil rights are bad.”

Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: It's not because LBJ was going to have Black people's interests at heart. In fact, LBJ was really hard on the Civil Rights movement.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. He was not a fan [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: He was one of the primary obstacles they had to get out of their way in order to get what they wanted. Anything else to say on that subject or should we...

Jonathan Walton: No. No, we can go on.

Why Do White Christians Need to Own Christian Nationalism, Not Just Repent of It?

Sy Hoekstra: Let's get into this because I think this is actually super important for people to understand this next question. Which is, Jonathan, why is rejecting Christian nationalism not enough? Why is that like a wholly insufficient response to the political landscape when it comes to what White Christians need to do to achieve anything that's kind of like what Jesus would probably have us do in this moment?

We Have to Oppose Sin, Not Just Identify It

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think Brandi talks about this in her podcast that she did on the idols of White evangelicalism.

Sy Hoekstra: Brandi Miller.

Jonathan Walton: Brandi Miller, in our Anthology. She's amazing, wonderful, chief storyteller of Quest Church. I think the reason it's not enough is the exact same reason why it's not enough just to believe that punching people in the face on the street is not enough.

Sy Hoekstra: What [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: So I'm trying to think of something that's ridiculous. That it's not enough just to believe that it's not okay. You actually have to resist it.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: You can't just say, “Oh, yeah, we shouldn't abuse children.” And then children are being abused, and you do nothing. It requires an active interruption of the nonsense. So if we're sitting in a room at Thanksgiving and someone is actively saying, “Hey, we should exterminate these people,” that requires an active resistance. It doesn't require a passive knowledge of the issue. It's not something that requires, it's like being on a bike and not pedaling.

Sy Hoekstra: [Laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It's like you’re sitting on the bike. Like, ride the bike! So all that to say, the reason that it's insufficient is because faith without works is dead. Like it's dead. We actually have to do something about the faith that we have. And the kingdom of God is an active moving force in the world. The Gospel requires an action. So for us to say, “Oh, yeah, Christian nationalism is not right, is heretical, is anti-kingdom-of-God,” requires us to move our feet against that. As opposed to just thinking on your own that this isn't okay and then allowing it to literally plant churches, sell books, build conferences, that our families and friends attend and support.

White Christians Use Rejecting Christian Nationalism To Absolve Themselves of Guilt and Avoid Self-Reflection

Sy Hoekstra: I listened to interestingly, after we decided to make this month's bonus episode on this subject, The Gospel Coalition came out with a podcast about Christian nationalism, with four of their leaders kind of discussing it. And the Gospel Coalition if you don't know, is a ministry that puts out a lot of media and discipleship tools and runs conferences and things for people. It started in the US 20 years ago-ish. It's now kind of all over the world. And it was kind of centrist with the right leaning instincts at the beginning and it's drifting further and further to the right as America becomes more polarized. That's how I would describe it. That's not how they would describe themselves, that last part about politics.

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: They would describe themselves as Orthodox, theologically conservative Christians. It's also, again, not the way they would describe themselves, is very White dominated and very culturally White. But so it was an interesting little test case for me to listen to. And the way that they kind of get around not having to actively push against it in this podcast or in this discussion, was by minimizing its impact and basically saying that nobody really believes this stuff. And like, there's one guy who's actually asking on the podcast, “What politician would even advocate for this? Why is it…?”

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs] Sorry, I didn’t listen to the podcast, but there’s so many politicians that actively do that.

Sy Hoekstra: Well, yeah. Because I was like, “the Speaker of the House of Representatives [laughs]. Third in line for the presidency, that’s who would advocate for it.”

Jonathan Walton: He has a Christian nationalist flag in his office.

Sy Hoekstra: Right. So anyways, there's a lot of politics. It's not like a majority of Republican politicians. It's a ton though, of pretty high up and important people. And it's certainly Donald Trump who was the president. But it's interesting because it was, so then went on to say it's totally insignificant. So why does everybody talk about it? Well, it's just punishing us for voting meaning... He specifically said, he didn't say White evangelicals, he just said the 81 percent. But the 81 percent number is White evangelicals [laughs]. It's 81 percent of White evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And he said, basically, calling us Christian nationalists and bashing Christian nationalism is punishment for the 81 percent, for voting for Donald Trump.

So that's why rejecting, the way that it gets rejected is why I kind of disagree with rejecting it, or like why I say rejecting it isn’t enough. Because the way that it gets rejected is to basically scrub the image of conservative Christian Republicans in the United States. Kind of the same way that somebody who is implicitly very racist or holds very racist views, but doesn't explicitly state that “I believe in White supremacy,” would use like the Klan as a way to scrub their own image. “I'm not them.” That that little minority of really, actually bad people over there. I'm not them. Therefore I'm not a racist, I'm not a bad person, like you have to have the, assume the best of me.”

It is a way to cleanse your image and make kind of conversations about the harms that Donald Trump or that the right wing of the party is causing, not about you and say, “I don't have to own this.” A long time ago, kind of when the Christian nationalist conversation was bubbling up in Christian circles before it got to the mainstream, professor Anthea Butler, who we've mentioned before, wrote this great little article that has really stuck with me about what White evangelicals need to do is own Christian nationalism. If you want to get to a place where you will have a political witness that is reflective of Jesus, you have to own and repent of it. Actually, I'm not even sure if she's, I think she just said “White evangelical”. I'm not sure she said “Conservatives”.

But regardless, I would say every White Christian [laughs] needs to a certain degree really think about what Christian nationalism, like what its beliefs are and how it's reflected in what we believe, and then repent of those things. Because again, continuing on with this [Gospel Coalition] conversation, they did say a lot of things about rejecting Christian nationalism as idolatry and having your identity in the kingdom be greater than your identity as an American, and not recognizing borders on basically who you should love as an image bearer of God. A lot of great things like that. But then they kept coming back to these issues of DEI and especially to issues of queer, basically queer people. Queer people's rights, and trans rights in particular, and people teaching children about people who are transgender or people teaching against the gender binary in schools.

And they just kept asking all these questions about like, “Okay, but what do we do about this? We have to do something about this. This can't stand.” [laughter]

Jonathan Walton: Right. “It could not be.”

Sy Hoekstra: It was like, if I am to love my neighbor, it's all fine to say that we are here for the good of the people to promote the common good, whatever. But when I disagree with my neighbor about what constitutes justice, what do I do? And there was just this constant underlying anxiety about that question. And I think that is reflective of the ways in which even fairly moderate White evangelicals have that instinct of Christian nationalism. Like I have to do something, this can't be left to stand because people are going to be hurt if the Christian, what I view as my interpretation of the Christian policy in this area is not dominant. So we have to do something. And the answer was they were still advocating for, yeah, you have to get your people on to school boards, you have to get your people on to library boards and local politics…

Jonathan Walton: Seven Mountain Strategy.

Sy Hoekstra: But it wasn't that, right? The Seven Mountain Strategy is something much more explicit and much more like… That is a smaller section of White, like charismatic, Pentecostal evangelicalism, sort of.

Jonathan Walton: Right right right.

Sy Hoekstra: So anyways that's what we need to do, it is constantly White people who have any amount of power, it’s constantly our instinct to separate ourselves from the ones who are the real bad people. Instead of saying, actually how does our culture reflect the things that we see as bad? How do we kind of take in those ideas or how do we implement those ideas in subtler ways? And we just need to do the latter. We need to figure out the ways that Jesus is not ruling over any aspect of our life [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And get him in charge of that part of our life. So that's kind of my plug for my fellow White people.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I agree. I think that looking at South Africa and how the equivalent of their Orthodox church made part of the Catechism a renunciation of apartheid. Because I think they recognized if you are South African and you decide to come to faith in South Africa, you need to renounce all other allegiances. So when you're baptized in the United States or I guess in my tradition, Black church and then a downstream-of-evangelicalism, non-denominational church, before you're baptized you say, “Do you affirm that Jesus is your Lord and Savior?” You say yes. And they say, “Do you renounce the devil and all his works?” You say yes. And I think that repentance and contextualized renunciation would make a lot of sense for people who are in this country, particularly if we're not just calling people to faith in Christ, but calling people into the kingdom of God.

I think there needs to be systemic contextualized renunciation in word and deed with power. Like I need to, in the United States, renounce patriarchy as a man. I need to renounce meritocracy as a man. I need to renounce ableism as an able-bodied person. I need to renounce and reject these things in word and deed in power, and not just say that they're bad, and then live my life in benefit of those systems. I think at minimum, there's deliverance by the power of the Spirit. And then in Jesus name, there is discipleship out of these things into the creation of a new world and reflection of the kingdom, and which I would just love to see happen.

Sy Hoekstra: [Laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: I think kind of what you're saying is to just say that something is bad, and to reject it very often leads to a limiting of self-reflection.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: So I then think, there's not just the idea of Christian nationalism, but there's lots of other things that Christian nationalists and lots of other people share in common that you're just not thinking about, because you're so focused on them. So like a lot of White Christians share in common with Christian nationalism or with Christian nationalists, deep dislike of immigrants [laughs]. Or maybe it's a lesser dislike of immigrants than an explicit Christian nationalist, but like deep suspicion about it, colorblindness would be something [laughs] that pretty much any conservative White Christian shares with Christian nationalists, that is actually doing a lot of harm to people.

America's colonialism or outsized power on the world stage, all those things are totally fine with a lot of White Christians. It's just there are so many things that you're not thinking about when you are, you're not reflecting on when you are saying I've rejected Christian nationalism, and therefore I can sort of go back to thinking that my position is totally fine.

White Christians Overemphasize Statements and Beliefs, And Underemphasize Acting Justly

Jonathan Walton: Yep. I've said it's bad. I've done enough.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I mean, and in general, White Christians have kind of a problem with believing that beliefs and stated beliefs are enough. Not just when it comes to politics. That's what we believe about being a true Christian. You just state the right things, you just believe the right doctrine. That's the most important thing when it comes to following Jesus, is just believing stuff. That is a bias or a bent or a problem that we encounter in many areas of our lives. We tend toward the dualistic intellectual way of approaching problems in the way that we think and that is very much an inheritance that we get from the Enlightenment in Europe.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Oh, and last thing is it does harm for both of those things. So for example, when we do that, statements become the biggest thing and nothing outside of that. So for an evangelical church in the United States right now to make a statement, to put something on a website about George Floyd or Nex Benedict or anything like that, it becomes a huge deal to write a statement, which does effectively nothing.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And it becomes a huge deal when a statement isn't made, which still doesn't do anything for people who are marginalized and oppressed. So there is this prioritization of the written word and just saying things that does not have material change, it does not spark or cause material change for people that are actually in oppression. Like it, we must literally do more. That's why “the Word became flesh” is an amazing doctrine. That Jesus would literally become like us, move into our neighborhoods, and be close. So I pray that we're able to do that.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. If you're a White person with an intellectual inheritance from Europe, if you want something that the more you think about it the more it will utterly baffle you, is the idea when Jesus says, “I am the truth.” When a person, when an entity says, I am the truth, and not, “Here is the truth,” and then following a series of statements [laughs]. That will… I can tell you from personal experience, that'll mess up the way you think about the world [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Outro and Outtake

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, Jonathan, I think we're going to leave it there. We're going to skip our segment this month of Which Tab Is Still Open. It's funny, I didn't even have us in the outline at the beginning bring up that we were doing the segment. I kind of forgot that, but I think I subconsciously knew that we would just have way too much to say about this subject [laughs]. Because the reality is the tab that is still open for us always is this whole subject ever since 2020 when we put out the anthology that started this company, like this is kind of fundamental stuff that we talk about all the time. So we're not going to do that segment. We are soon for subscribers going to be launching monthly conversations that you can have with us.

Meaning we will put out basically kind of like a zoom link. It won't be on Zoom, it'll be on Google Meet probably, that you can come to, to just talk with us about anything. We would love to talk about this subject more and hear what more people have to say about it. And you'll get more details on those from us soon. That'll be something that you as paid subscribers have access to and we would love to see you there. Just as a quick reminder, please go to Apple or Spotify, give us five stars. That helps us so much. Give us a written review if you're on Apple podcasts because they let you do that there. But please continue, we've seen it you know a handful more on each platform as we've been asking for this and we would love for there to be more because it really does help us and helps people discover us, it gives us sort of credibility that you value what we're doing.

So if you do value what we're doing go to Apple or Spotify, give us a five star review. Thank you so much for listening. Our theme song as always as “Citizens” by John Guerra. Our transcripts are by Joyce Ambale. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess and we will see you all for our next bonus episode in April.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. Are we good?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Am I in camera okay?

Jonathan Walton: Yes, you look as wonderful as you could possibly look.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, that… is that a compliment [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: It is. Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: “You have reached the ceiling of how good you can look. Where you are now, don't get excited, you're not going beyond this.”

Jonathan Walton: Oh, that is not what I meant [laughter]. That’s not what I meant. You look as great as you could today. Like that's, you look wonderful. It’s great.

Sy Hoekstra: [sounding unconvinced] Thanks… Thanks, Jonathan.

Listen to Jonathan read the essay of his we just published, and which is reprinted below. It's a personal story and reflection on overcoming the barrier to rest that is racism. For more stories like this, as well as our weekly newsletter, podcasts, and more, subscribe at KTFPress.com.

Last summer during a vacation, my family and I went on a zip-line course with a group of other tourists on Catalina Island off the coast of southern California. The landscape is epic and streaking through the sky over it was exhilarating. But a familiar feeling interrupted my joy–the anxiety of exclusion. I was the only Black person in the group. I committed myself to trying to enjoy the moment for the sake of my wife (plus, the tickets were not cheap). Then our White tour guide started asking questions.

On the platform at the top of each new line she threw out an icebreaker to the group. Her first question to me was, “What’s your greatest fear?” My internal response was, “One of my neighbors calling the police because there is a Black man at my house, and my daughters losing their Dad in the driveway.” But of course, I could not say that in front of all these White people. My momma raised me to prioritize White comfort because that meant I would always survive the day. So what came out of my mouth was, “This. I am jumping off a perfectly safe platform even though I have children to live for.” Everyone laughed. Deflection successful.

At the next platform, the guide asked, “What would be your last meal?” My internal answer: “Fried chicken, biscuits, mashed potatoes, watermelon, and every other stereotypically Black and objectively delicious dish that my people so generously prepare for one another and had to prepare for y’all by force.” My external answer: “Whatever the wonderful ladies at the church I grew up at are willing to serve me”. Everyone laughed again. Another deflection successful. That pattern continued. And as I skimmed the tops of trees on the last leg, I was glad the tour was ending. I had gotten used to jumping off the platforms. But I’ll never get used to jumping out of my skin. Afterward, the tour group went our segregated and stratified separate ways.

Later that week in a suburb of Los Angeles, I was cleaning my mother-in-law’s car, and a White woman crossed the street directly toward me. She was focused and intent. But at the last moment, within feet of the car, she turned onto the sidewalk and walked in a different direction, headphones in, not paying attention to me at all. So why did I experience her like a Russian fighter jet buzzing a US F-15? Why did my watch pick up an increased heart rate? Because I’m in a town where White supremacists rallied not too long ago, and no one seems aware that the blue-striped flags on the surrounding houses make me feel unwelcome. The woman walked out of sight. But my adrenalin kept me wondering if I was doing anything White people might find suspicious. I looked down at my glass bottle of ginger beer. Could a neighbor suspect I was drunk?

Anti-Blackness and White supremacy are real and still reign, and they left me weary after those ten days. On our way back home to Queens, I was glad to be going to a place where there are safe friends and a bed where I can sleep in peace, knowing my skin isn’t an anomaly and I have a community where I don’t have to deflect so much.

But on a morning not long after we got home, I was doing yard work in a hoodie. A White woman neighbor stopped her car and rolled her window down to tell me, “You better not have that hood on. People are gonna start asking questions.” I looked at her, smiled as unthreateningly as I could, and said, “You’re exactly right about that.” She laughed and drove away.

I spent the next minute removing her from the list of white people that are safe for me and my kids. I spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out how to tell my wife that this happened. I spent the next hour trying to remind myself why we moved to this more culturally suburban neighborhood. And I spent the day trying to plan how I’m going to act when I see that neighbor next. All this mental load just to deal with the intractable reality that Whiteness doesn’t take a vacation when I do, and it’s there waiting for me when I get home.

As I look toward our summer vacation this year, I wonder what a slower pace, beautiful views, and great food will cost us. I’ll budget for the ticket prices, meals, or an RV. But I don’t have pockets deep enough to buy the privilege of existing as the default traveler, the desirable guest, or the patron a tour guide can easily relate to. Yet I still have to rest. So when I leave my home every morning with my daughters, we recite a prayer together to remind us that where we are is where we belong. “I am accepted. God is not ashamed of me. I am His and He is mine. I am a child of the Most High God.” My fear is real, but so is that faith. And that faith rests not just in God’s promises, but my experience.

God got my mother and father through Jim Crow to bring me into this world. He will keep me and my wife as we raise two girls of color to be lights for the next generation. When I, at 18, left my region of the South for the first time alone on a train to New York City for college, God provided a stranger on the Petersburg station platform to assure my Momma I would get where I was going. The stranger got me all the way to Penn Station and onto the subway toward campus. God will also be with my two little girls when it’s time for them to travel far away. The world is not safe, but God has always been good. That gives me the peace, perseverance, and hope I need to board another plane or do yardwork in front of my house. He will carry us through.

Note: The transcript for this episode is below, rather than in the usual separate post. We’re experimenting with ways to make our podcast posts more convenient and easier to find. Feedback is welcome as always at [email protected]!

This month, our bonus episode features a discussion about our big-picture thoughts on the 2024 presidential election and the possibility of a second Trump term. Jonathan and Sy get into:

-        How a Trump Reelection would harm marginalized people, democracy, and creation

-        How God’s sovereignty and familiarity with suffering would get us through another Trump administration

-        How both the oppression Biden’s administration causes and US history give us helpful context for thinking about Trump

-        How we can minimize the suffering of others by overreacting to Trump

-        And a discussion about a recent highlight from our newsletter on prison slave labor in America’s food industry

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

-        Our YouTube video of Dr. Mika Edmondson on MLK’s theology of suffering and sovereignty

-        The essay from our anthology, “Bad Theology Kills” by Jesse Wheeler

-        The AP’s investigation into prison labor and the Food Industry

Credits

-        Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com

-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads

-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon

-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify

-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram

-        Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra

-        Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra

Introduction

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Jonathan Walton: I think there's a, there’s just healthy, healthy gifts in Scripture when we remember that Jesus lived in an occupied territory by an empire that was ruthless, just like the United States. It’s not a new thing to Jesus, it’s not a new thing to God, which I'm really, really grateful for. Like our Savior understands. That's the reason he can say in scripture, “There will be wars and rumors of wars, let not your heart be troubled.”

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. I am Jonathan Walton.

Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. We today, are going to be talking about the election coming at the end of 2024.

Jonathan Walton: Lord Jesus…

Sy Hoekstra: Of course, I'm talking about the election for New York City comptroller. No, I'm talking about the presidential election [laughter] in the United States of America. When it comes to season four of this show when we get started in a couple of months, we are going to be talking mostly, if not all, about the election. Kind of bringing on some guests that we think have a really good perspective, just really diving deep into this crucial subject for this time. And we thought it would be a good idea to give you, our lovely paid subscribers some perspective before we dive into that. Some of like where we are coming from when we think about the election.

How important is it? What are the truly bad things that will happen if Trump gets reelected? And without minimizing any of the harm that will come if he is reelected, how can we sort of contextualize these issues within history and theology from the perspectives of marginalized voices, to give us just kind of a broader understanding of kind of the real consequences and really what's going on this year? So what happens if Trump gets reelected and how earth shaking is it [laughter]? That's effectively what we're talking about today. We will also be doing our new segment, which tab is still open, diving a little bit deeper into one of the recent highlights from our newsletter, in this case, is going to be my highlight, a massive AP investigation into prison labor, and how it supplies the food that is absolutely in your kitchen. If you didn't take a look at it, it will be in the show notes. It is a shocking one, and we're going to talk about that one a little bit more. But before we jump into the main discussion, Jonathan.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, before we jump into anything, we just have one quick favor to ask of you. And that is, go to Apple or Spotify and give this show a five-star rating. It's a quick, easy, free way to support us and makes us look good, and other people look us up. So please go to Apple or Spotify, give us a five-star rating, and if you can, leave a review. It's just a super, super helpful way to support the show, and many of you have done it. And so there's an unlimited invitation to this party [Sy laughs]. So please do give us a five-star rating, write a review. We really, really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much in advance.

A Trump Reelection would Multiply the Harm We Do to Marginalized People

Sy Hoekstra: Alright, let's jump into it. I know that both of us think this election is really important. But I also know that we both have some historical and theological perspective that might somewhat ironically, maybe make us think that it's a less earth-shaking election than other people might. But I just wanted to start by talking about what will happen. Why is this election important? If Trump gets reelected, Jonathan, what will happen and why does it matter?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, actually, as I've been thinking about this question, I think that the reason that it's important, are the reasons that have always been important. It's just a problem at a fire when someone has kerosene, and it's just walking around, throwing it everywhere. Right?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And so it's like, it is not untrue that the United States has, it has been and has baked in racist, bigoted, misogynistic frameworks into our entire systems and structures. It was intentional, and it is still working very strong and well today. That has always been true. What changes, I think, is how these systems and structures impact a lot of the vulnerable people. And if you vote for Donald Trump, or lean into the things that he normalizes as everyday practices, that is a profound problem for the most vulnerable people in our country. We are living in the wake of significant cultural, political, theological and demographic change in the United States, and to have a president that explicitly endorses exploitation and militarism and hyper-capitalism, then we have a serious problem.

The things that I am hopeful do not happen is the expressed situational, like contextualized things in our time and culture, which again, I'm not saying they haven't happened before. I'm not saying that they're more unique than other things that have happened before. What I am saying, is we're living in this moment, and we have an opportunity as best as we possibly can to push back against systems that oppress, abuse and violate. And one of the ways to do that is to not vote for someone who's going to do and say things that cause oppression and violence and abuse to be multiplied the world over, because he sits in the most quote- unquote, “powerful” seat in the country. So Sy, that was a lot from me. What do you think about this election, and why is it important to you?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so I think this question for me, is the one that I kind of want to answer a little bit talking more to marginalized people than not. And then the kind of like get some broader, bigger perspective questions that we're going to ask in a minute, are kind of the things that I think need to be directed towards people who come from the dominant side of a hierarchy, right? Like, right now I'm talking to people who are not white, instead of me talking to white people. Right now I'm talking to people I think, mostly who are disabled, and I'll be talking to able bodied people in a minute. And the reason I say that is like, I think this question of why is this important, primarily for me is like acknowledging all the things that have happened to marginalized people in his first term, and that will happen again, if he's reelected.

So, for instance, because I'm married to an attorney who was working in immigration during the first Trump term, and because I have a good friend who applied for asylum just before Trump was elected, I saw kind of firsthand, like a lot of the very kind of small administrative things that Trump did in the immigration system that had a huge effect on the lives of just like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people that kind of went under the radar, just because they weren't flashy. I don’t know how much you remember—how much you've put your memories of the Trump administration out of your mind for your own sort of mental peace. But there was so much stuff going on every day. Like he would say something new that was absurd, that topped the absurd thing he said yesterday, and proposed some new ridiculous policy and whatever.

So a lot of things just like went under the radar that were small. And I'll give you an example. One was this woman I know who applied for asylum just toward the end of Obama's presidency. Had like an absolutely open and shut case for asylum. There's no question ever that she was going to be granted it. She was a woman from Iran who converted to Christianity and basically became a women's rights advocate. She's not going back to Iran. So she—without being persecuted, it's open and shut asylum. So she comes here and applies, and then just as, like she's kind of work… you know, it takes a while to get your asylum application granted, but it doesn't take as long as it took her.

Because what happened was, Trump, in his efforts to deter as many people from coming here as possible, did this thing where he said we're going to process all of the applications that have been filed most recently first, and then we're going to make our way back towards the applications that were filed, sort of in the past. So she was making her way through the line through the processing thing, and then all of a sudden, the line flipped, and she was at the end again. So it took eight years to process her asylum application, which was unheard of previous to the Trump administration. And that just like left her in a state of limbo and uncertainty, it makes it, there's all kinds of things that are just harder when you haven't been granted that when you can't be moving on your path towards citizenship. There's all kinds of bureaucratic things that are complicated, and it just put her forever wondering whether she was going to be able to stay in this new place that she had made her home. And that's like one example of so many different things that happened.

The worst things that we've been seeing at the state level are going to be amplified if Trump gets reelected. Meaning, think about like the DeSantis takeover of public schools in Florida. Like just anything to do with talking about race in history, or gender or sexuality, those things are going to be stamped out as vigorously as possible by the federal government. The violence towards immigrants on the Texas border that we've written about in the newsletter a couple of times, like the ways that Greg Abbott is just like actively killing people who try and cross the river into Texas.

The way that he and Ron DeSantis are trafficking immigrants to Blue cities for like a political stunt. All that kind of stuff would be approved of and encouraged by the head executive of the country. Everything we're seeing about don't talk about…the attempts to completely erase queer people from our public education system, attempts to ban even like life-saving abortions. All that kind of stuff, the President would be behind all of it, and that is quite scary.

Trump Will Undermine Democracy, Damage Creation, and Embolden People with the Worst Ideas

There will be I think increased attempts to undermine democratic norms and processes. Obviously, he did that in his first term. He will be maybe better at it. I mean, it's hard to tell, right [Jonathan laughs]? He's still, he's the same blustering guy that he was before. And there are some things that he's proposing doing that he would absolutely never be able to do, that the President doesn't have the power to do.

But you know that he's going to undermine as many norms as possible to get whatever he wants. You know that if he loses this time, there will be election violence. I mean, I would be willing to bet that at some point, he goes, “Hey, about those term limits [laughs], what do we think of those still?” And his supporters are going to say, “Get rid of them,” and he will try. Again, not something he has the power to do, but that doesn't mean that there won't be violence if he can't do it. I mean, these are all totally realistic possibilities. And then foreign policy is just going to go off the rails. Can you imagine what would be happening right now in Gaza, if Israel had the full-throated support of the American President to do whatever they want to fight terrorism, which is absolutely what he would do. Right? I mean, it would be… like not that it's not terrible now, it's horrifying now, it would be on a whole different scale if Trump was president. Because ultimately, as we've discussed in the newsletter, like what the American president says are the guardrails of Israel's military operations, are in fact the guardrails of Israel's military operations. We sort of define how far they can go or Western powers defined how far they can go. That's always been the case.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: The environmental situation will get way worse, he's promised a ton more drilling. He's said he's going to pull out of the Paris Accord, which is the big multinational treaty about climate change that exists right now. It needs strengthening, but it's the one that exists. So basically, everything I'm saying is, the reason that it's important. The reason that it's going to be bad if he gets reelected, is because it will negatively affect actual people. Actual, marginalized people will be hurt. And the creation, like God's creation will be damaged. And the line that I do want to draw there a little bit for the clarity of our thinking is, that's the problem.

The problem isn't that he will degrade America's greatness or whatever. He will harm like, he may hasten the decline of America, but America to me is not like theologically or morally significant, except insofar as it contains people. It contains people…

Jonathan Walton: Exactly, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: …who bear the image of God, and the creation that God made and wants us to steward. So I think that's worth keeping in mind as well. Do you have any other thoughts? There's a lot from… Now, you did a lot from you, and I did a lot from me. Do you have any thoughts?

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Well, I think what you said put hands and feet to what I was thinking. Like naming specific policies that will violate and destroy the image of God and people downstream of the American empire. And the American empire looks like what's happening in Palestine. Looks like what's happening in the Congo. Looks like what's happening in neighborhoods in New York City, and around the country where kids won't be able to get books because they will pull the funding from the library. They will have made sure that these school boards would be completely flipped because the bully pulpit as they say, the presidency, as you said, full-throatedly endorses a race-based, class-based, gender-based environmental hierarchy that makes sure things run a certain way.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, the importance of him just emboldening people can't really be understated. I mean, it's like a little bit hard to remember now, but 8, 10 years ago, we were not regularly talking about the Klan, or the Proud Boys or like the QAnon or whatever. Any of these alt right things that have cropped up since he basically made it okay to have their views and be at least around mainstream politics, right?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: I mean, you just, I don't know. There are so many people now who on their TV shows will have, who never would have done this before. Now, I feel like they have to have somebody who just has the absolute worst views you can imagine about whoever, to come in and comment like a really serious commenter because that's the environment that Trump has created. That's the people have been emboldened by him.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely.

Trump’s Reelection Is not the End of the World

Trump Isn’t God, and Jesus Knows the Suffering of Oppression

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. So let's pivot to some caveats or some ways that we think about another Trump presidency, from a broader perspective. Not at all trying to minimize any of the harm that we just detailed, but Trump isn't the only thing in the world that causes harm to marginalized people or to people in general. So maybe put it this way, Jonathan: would a second Trump term be the apocalypse?

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] No.

Sy Hoekstra: Why not Jonathan?

Jonathan Walton: I think that for all of the strong feelings and emotions and all the things you just heard, I think it is helpful to remember that Trump is not omnipresent [Sy chuckles], neither is the United States empire. Trump is not omniscient, neither is any apparatus of the United States. And nothing about the United States government, any of its representatives or agents is sovereign. None of that. And so, I think there's just healthy, healthy gifts in Scripture when we remember that Jesus lived as an occupied person in an occupied territory by an empire that was ruthless, just like the United States, that felt overbearing, just like the United States. There was a culture, and a very clear invitation to demonize your enemies and make into divine counsel all the people who are in power.

Like this is not a new thing to Jesus, not a new thing to God, which I'm really, really grateful for. Like our Savior, sovereign king of the world, Jesus Christ, son of the living God, flesh incarnate, raised from the dead, seated at the right hand of the Father, understands what we’re talking about. And I think that's the reason he can say in scripture, “There will be wars and rumors of wars, let not your heart be troubled. Take heart, I have overcome the world.” And then when we actually lean into that, we can say yes, what Trump says he's going to do is terrible, and not new. What Trump desires to perpetuate in the United States, what his administration desires to make happen is terrible, and it is not all encompassing.

Only thing, the only being, the only power that can declare that is the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit. And I think we hold all of our fear and frustration and anger before the God who holds all things together. And that is to me, an exceptionally grounding place. So if you were… [laughs] I feel like this should be the cold open so we make it through all that nonsense of like 20 minutes that we talked about [laughter]. But just to remember that God is God and Trump is not. The kingdom of God is not America, and God is faithful to all people who call on his name, near to the brokenhearted and close to those who are suffering.

God’s Sovereignty is Motivation to Act, not an Excuse to Accept the Status Quo

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I would like to highlight for people, I think there are a lot of people out there right now who hear theological ideas like that, from I don't know, basically any professional Christian talking into a microphone, and kind of think, “You're making excuses for people not to do anything.” I mean, that's just what people hear, because those ideas that you just put forward that I totally agree with, are so often used to silence people. Right?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Or to justify inactivity.

Sy Hoekstra: To justify inactivity or passivity, or going along with the status quo. Or even actively pulling you back on progress. God's got it, we don't need to do anything.

Jonathan Walton: Right, right. Right.

Sy Hoekstra: I just, I hope you know, if you’ve listen to us for any amount of time, that is not us at all [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: No.

Sy Hoekstra: Like Jonathan is trying to provide comfort to the people who are out there working hard, right? And the people who are like not going to stop because they understand the implications of the gospel. Not the people who have never really worked out the gospel in their life, so they're just sitting there happy with the status quo.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And you know what, actually, I'm going to put in the show notes for this episode, the YouTube video that we did, that we put out just before Martin Luther King Day this year, which was Pastor Mika Edmondson talking about this very thing. Like MLK’s notion of redemptive suffering, and how it doesn't mean that suffering is good, or we just need to accept it or be passive, but a God who is sovereign, and truly cares about the brokenhearted and the marginalized, should be to us at least an encouragement and a source of power to act.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: That's something, everything I just said shouldn't be necessary to say [laughs], but in context, it is.

Thinking Scripture Doesn’t Require Action against Oppression Is Just Bad Interpretation

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. What you're saying is that it's similar to Acts chapter three, and when Peter preaches, right? And Acts chapter two, right after Pentecost. You can have an amazing moment happen, and then how it's interpreted can change everything.

Sy Hoekstra: What happened there, for people who don't know.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. At Pentecost, we celebrate that after Easter slash Resurrection Sunday, like the Holy Spirit of falling, after Jesus ascended to heaven, Acts chapter two. And so right after that happens, people start speaking in tongues, then there are folks gathered from lots of different backgrounds and ethnic identities, and they say, “I hear the gospel being proclaimed in my language.” That's where quote- unquote, “tongues” comes from. In that moment someone said, “These people are drunk.” [laughter] Now, let's just say that that dude won the day, and instead of having an interpretation that says, “No, no,” which Peter stood up and said, “These people are not drunk, they're full of the Spirit,” and then began to preach the gospel to those people in their language, as recorded by the apostles in Acts.

Like, what if the other dude’s narrative had just one? And it was interpreted that these people were drunk or high or under the influence [Sy laughs], and then we just move on. And you don't get Acts three, where Peter does it again for another crowd. You don't get Acts six where Stephen is stoned because he's willing to stand up for marginalized people. You don't get the rest of the book of Acts, if you have incorrect interpretation. The message can be the same. So you could have a pastor, I guarantee this is the case. Because this was like a Baptist orthodoxy for 100 years before segregation was going to be taken away in the 1950s. The reality is, that was the line: Like, “God's got it, he is sovereign, he's amazing, he's wonderful. He cares about you, and therefore the political process does not need us.”

Mika Edmondson, me, Sy, and a billion other people would say, no, because God is sovereign, because he in Luke chapter four, pulled from Isaiah sixty one, and said, “The spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, set the oppressed free proclaimed sight to the blind, freedom to the captives, therefore we will do the same thing. Not, “Oh, God is going to take care of that, and I'm going to keep driving my Jetta and move out.” That's just not… it's in the interpretation in the application. It's not in, the tension is not in the Scripture. And so yes, thank you for naming that.

Voting for Biden is Just Minimizing Damage

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Let me let me talk about why. So that was a really good sort of theological set of reasons why a second Trump presidency is not the end of the world. There are some things that are a little bit more just kind of policy and historically based things. One of those things for me is this idea that we've come back to many times in our discussions about politics from our Anthology, and we've brought this essay up so many times. But Jesse Wheelers essay about “Bad Theology Kills,” which we have republished on our blog, and I'll put in the show notes.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Basically talking about how… I'll be a little bit broader than Jesse was. Jesse was specifically talking about like drones and bombs in the Middle East and how they don't really change from Democrat to Republican or whoever. Just to so much of the world, America is America regardless of who's in charge, and we are doing the thing that empires do in their lives, doesn't matter if it's a Democrat, doesn't matter if it's a Republican. And that's true for people in the country as well, it's not just a foreign policy thing. So like there are so many things that Biden is doing right now that are actively horrific, right? I just said how much worse it would be if Trump was around for Israel and Palestine, but Biden is still letting the genocide happen.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Not challenging in any way. He's still not reversing some of the terrible Trump immigration related policies that he actually promised to reverse and never did. So my point there is basically just like, we're talking about minimizing harm. Whereas I think this is kind of what you and I are always talking about when we're talking about voting. We are not talking about trying to put the kingdom of God in place. I mean, I want someone who represents my views as much as possible, I want someone who's going to do positive things, but the reality of the two choices that we have in front of us right now is, like I'm going to vote for Biden to minimize damage. That's what I'm doing.

A Second Trump Term Would Be Very Far from the Worst Time in American History

Sy Hoekstra: The other thing to me is to keep in mind the perspective of American history.

And this is again, like I said before, this is kind of where I'm talking to, like white people, or able-bodied people, or people who are at the top of hierarchies. A second Trump presidency is absolutely not going to be the worst point in American history. It's not even going to be close, right? I mean, just look at the historical perspective of basically any marginalized group. The historical like reality and experiences of any marginalized group in America. Jonathan, just look at like your grandparents…

Jonathan Walton: This is true.

Sy Hoekstra: …growing up under Jim Crow in Virginia. Nobody is going to, I highly doubt that anyone is going to experience anything like that under a Trump presidency. Look at people, disabled people like me 100 years ago, were just being sterilized, just for being disabled, as so many people in power in America actively worked with the people in Germany, who would become the Nazis to implement the ideology of eugenics.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: I'm not going to be sterilized if Trump gets elected [laughs]. Which is not, again, not trying to minimize anything that will happen if he is elected, but that is the perspective that we need to keep in mind.

We Can Minimize the Suffering of Marginalized People by Overreacting to Trump

Sy Hoekstra: and this is where our normalization, and our trivialization of our horrific history really leaves us unable to analyze the present clearly, right?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: It is really hard, if you haven't had an education system that has actually taught you the daily horrors of slavery for hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people. Millions of black people in American history, then yeah, you might think that what's going to happen next is the most terrible thing that's ever happened, or it's the most important election we've ever seen in the world. It's not. So I want, especially white people to just to be careful when we're talking about how bad it could be in general in America, or how bad it could be for us. If you're worried about yourself specifically, you're still like living on the land that we stole from people who we mostly killed. And I mean, the horrifying things that our people have done. We are minimizing them when we overemphasize how terrible Trump is going to be.

And I just want us to keep that in mind. Again, that shouldn't change your analysis or anything, right? It doesn't mean don't fight. But yeah, I just I want us to be careful, us being white people.

Jonathan Walton: So what's interesting or compelling about what you're saying, and I hope is compelling about this conversation. And for subscribers comments are open, and I'm like, we're open to have these conversations. We're going to roll out some monthly conversations where we're talking about these things with you. But I think one of the, the compelling thing about what you're saying is that if we are, and I say we as like a collective people living in America, documented, undocumented, citizen, non-citizen, Green Card holder, resident, all those things. People in our context. If that is you, I'm talking about us, right? We have to be willing and able to grieve the things that have happened to ourselves and one another, and be grateful for the things that are around us.

And I think it's very difficult to do that when we try to live ahistorically, right? We're not grieving the right stuff, we're not being grateful for the right stuff. We don't even know what and how things came to be. And it's difficult to do that when we're not in community.

Sy Hoekstra: That's so true.

Jonathan Walton: And so, there's a there's an activist that I was listening to. And he goes, a lot of people quote- unquote, on the left who are who are more progressive, are talking about how things are terrible and horrible. And he said, “Listen, 100 percent of Black people before were slaves.” So that amount has gone down, which I praise God for. So he's like, “Let's not say there's been no progress.” And at the same time, so we can be grateful that like Jonathan Walton, like I own a home in New York City. I have a mortgage when my people were the basises of mortgages before. So like there is progress. At the same time, there are real things to grieve, and there are real things to be grateful for.

And that I think, can be a helpful lens for how to then begin to put voting in perspective and engaging with political process in general. Because literally, what Sy just said about voting to do less harm, I had to make that choice. George Santos was unseeded in my district, and I had to choose between Mazi Pilip and Tom Suozzi. Mazi Pilip is a former IDF soldier and dual citizen of Israel. And Tom Suozzi said we do not need more pro-Israel Republicans, we need more pro-Israel Democrats. And so both of them are full-throated supporters of the genocide that is happening in Palestine right now. And so, Maia said to me, “Who are you going to vote for?” And I said, “Maia, I have no idea.”

And I talked to Jesus, and I had to remember, I am not voting for a prophet. I'm not voting for someone who's going to reflect the kingdom of God in all the ways that the Beatitudes talk about. I got in the car after shoveling the snow, and voted for Tom Suozzi, and it bothers me. And that doesn't mean I'm going to like stop advocating, because I'm grateful for the protesters at his event that stood up before he opened his mouth and said, “You are supporting a genocide,” and he looked awkward and didn't know what to say. Because it's true, he is supporting a genocide. And at the same time, I'm glad that I could vote, one, I'm glad I could go to a polling place that was not violent. I walked in and I walked out in 15 minutes.

Two, I'm grateful that my vote actually counted. There were people who were volunteers and a process for that to happen. Three, I'm grateful that there was media that communicated to me who won and who didn't. And I'm grateful that we can continue to protest the policies that hopefully he will change when he leaves this district and goes to D.C. So there's things I can grieve and things I can be grateful for, and I remember that God is sovereign over that. And that I think, is a really difficult place to live in, because there is no winner, there is no loser. I'm not on the good team or the bad team, and I don't get to like run around with my flag and say I’m overtop of all these other people. I sit in the tension with everybody else before Jesus, in Romans 3:23, “That all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” we're all equal before the cross. So all that to say, I'm glad we got to have this conversation.

Sy Hoekstra: Amen. I very much appreciate all that. And also, I always forget that George Santos was your representative [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yes, he was! Yes, he was. Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Speaking of minimizing damage, glad he's gone.

Jonathan Walton: Special… [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: Like legendarily special.

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah, I mean...

Sy Hoekstra: special on a level that we don't often get the true lack of privilege of seeing.

Which Tab Is Still Open: Prison Labor in the Food Industry

Sy Hoekstra: Shall we move on to our segment?

Jonathan Walton: Let's do it. Alright, so we're going to get into our segment, Which tab is still open? And that's diving a little deeper into one of our recent newsletter recommendations that we can't stop thinking about. So Sy, why don't you tell us about this AP investigation that had me all in my feelings?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, me too. I'll give you the details of the investigation and kind of what they discovered about the prison labor in the food industry, and then we'll kind of give you our reflections and feelings on it. So here's some of the basics. Effectively, the story starts in 1865 [laughter]. The story starts when we pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States, and we made an exception, which was you can still enslave people as punishment for a crime. It says it explicitly right there in the text. And so we've always, that's how we were able to lease convicts back to the plantations where they had been slaves. We had kangaroo courts that convicted black people en masse of crimes they didn't commit, or crimes that were made up specifically so that we could convict them of something, and then lease them for money back to the plantations where they had worked before.

That's why we have chain gangs picking up trash on the highways. You can do all that because we are still allowed to enslave prisoners. There was a massive two-year AP investigatory effort that basically unearthed that there are hundreds of millions of dollars of food products, going to just every quick service like fast food chain, grocery store, eatery of any kind that you can think of. And the products that these prisoners create are definitely in your pantry. Like the extent makes it unavoidable. The companies often don't know that they are buying food that was produced by prison labor, because they, these AP reporters were literally just in their cars following a truck of cattle that had been raised on a prison farm to see where it ends up. Because people don't keep track of it and there's a ton of corruption and kickbacks and schemes in the system.

And basically, it's just like one of the suppliers for this guy who sells tons and tons of cattle to whoever. Like to farms, then slaughter it and sell it to McDonald's. And there's just like no way for McDonald's or whoever to have known that that's where it was coming from. And they, a lot of these companies actually have policies stating specifically, “We will not buy food produced by prison labor,” and they're just doing it without even knowing it. There's one point in the article where they quote a communications rep from Whole Foods who’s just like, “No, absolutely not. There is no food made by prison labor on the shelves at Whole Foods.” And then they just name very specific products that are absolutely made by prisoners that are definitely on the shelves at Whole Foods.

The labor is like, the labor in prison is sometimes just forced. It's sometimes for like pennies an hour, because there's no minimum wage requirements for prisoners. And then sometimes it's like these programs that are sort of allegedly about job training for prisoners. So, give them skills for when they get out or whatever. But if they don't participate, things can happen. Like they can end up in solitary confinement, or their sentences can be longer. Or other retribution from guards including like really, honestly, overseer levels of beatings. Like just horrific stuff being described by the people that they interviewed. In this article, the conditions for the workers are often really bad and unsafe. Again, labor standards don't apply because we can enslave them.

And of course, the laborers are disproportionately Black and Brown. The majority of this work is happening in the South, and it's often at prisons that are literally buildings on land that used to be plantations. So Bryan Stevenson [laughter] always says that slavery in this country did not end, it just evolved. And this is one of the more concrete ways that that is the case. Jonathan, I've put a little bit of what I thought in the newsletter, and I've just talked for a long time, so I want to hear what you think.

We Don’t Fight Exploitation Because We Will Win, But Because We Are Doing Jesus’ Work

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So I don't know if you saw this Sy, but I posted a video from Angelina Jolie a couple of weeks ago. And listening to her talk about the naivety that she had when she went into activism. And she said about 20 years ago, she thought there were good guys and bad guys. There'd be like progress, things would get better, things like that. And for me, and I think we talked about this in another bonus episode. About 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I was doing a lot to fight homelessness. At that time we call homeless people now that language has changed, unhoused. It was one of those things where like, here I am 10, 12 years later, after being immersed in that work, and the population of unhoused people is bigger than it has ever been.

And I think so for me, I thought subconsciously, that the work that I was doing would make things better. Things would be different because of what I had done. And similarly, when the work that I was heavily involved in, fighting labor exploitation, and I think that feeds into environmental exploitation as well. When we talk about the impact of these massive farms on land, and the people around on that land, not just the prisoners forced to work the land. I think I thought 10 years ago, things would get better. And so when I read this article, I was reminded, one, that it's not a… we don't do this work to make sure things get better. Me being engaged in this work is not contingent upon the success of the work. It is contingent upon the reality that one day Jesus will make all things new, and I am joining him in that work until that work is done in completion.

The Tension between Divesting from Exploitative Systems and Fulfilling Adult Responsibilities

And so as I read the article, after thinking through that, I was just challenged. Because I do have kids, I do have a house, I do have a job, I do have these responsibilities that did not exist when I was in college. And I do not want to be 50, 60, 70 years old saying, “What happened to that person that stewarded my time and energy to learn about where stuff is coming from. To be able to vote in local elections, to be able to advocate in ways that actually impact my life. I do not want, as much as the systems and structures would like to intentionally obscure it from me. I want to be somebody who is trying to figure out what is upstream of me and what is downstream of me so I can steward what I have access to, and what I possess in ways that do not perpetuate or perpetrate systems that abuse or violate.

I do not want to be complicit. And so I was really challenged by that. And so one of the things so for Lent, I'm actually giving up meat and being vegan as a result of this article [laughs]. So to go back to that, and try to be more intentional about that. And just thinking through just how I'm connected to the exploitation of my own people. Because I think that was the big challenging thing for me. And just committing to pray through like what does it look like to reincorporate a lot of the things that I did around food and around what we buy, that I was so passionate about and so engaged with years ago, before I had kids. And so I'm just going to lean into that over lent, and then we'll see what Jesus does with that.

Sy Hoekstra: How do you process emotionally, just the loss of that time and the loss of the capacity to not engage—because you were, just for the audience, very focused on buying fair trade.

Jonathan Walton: Oh, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Like really, supply chains, like “I don't want to take part in exploitative purchasing.” Right?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And it just gets harder, the more obligations you have, because it takes so much time. Because like you said, the system makes it so hard to like just… I don't know, be as ethical as you can. Right?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, if I just go back to what our conversation we were saying earlier, was it's like, when I first started investigating all these things in 2011, there were no apps. You couldn't just google these different things to figure out who made this product and the labor, the US Labor Report, exploited goods wasn't something that was like widely read and distributed by people. That has changed, right? People are more aware now than they've ever been of where things are coming from. And so I think I can celebrate that, knowing that there are hundreds of companies… we bought luggage for our kids, because they're bigger, and it was like, “Hey, we're going to go on these trips, and we want to get you some nice suitcases.” Everybody pitched in, they get stickers and things like that. And those were ethically-made suitcases. ten, twelve years ago, I don't I don't know that ethical was even a category for luggage. But now people are starting to think about those things. And so I think that emotionally, I am grieving the lack of capacity that I have now. And I'm grateful that it does not take as much capacity as it did before. And then I'm going to do my best to make choices aligned with those values and do that same process of grief and gratefulness. Being able to be sad, and being able to be grateful. The fancy way I'm saying it in this new book is like doing the dance between beauty and resistance, is like…

Sy Hoekstra: This new book, Jonathan?

Jonathan Walton: Oh [laughs]. Hopefully, there will be a new book.

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan is pitching a book around to some publishers. That's what Jonathan just told you without really thinking about it [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I did. It's explicitly about things like this. That's all I'll say.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Pray. Pray for success for Jonathan's pitching.

Jonathan Walton: Please do.

We Can Fight Prison Slave Labor with Legislation, and Praying to Burn the System Down

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think for me, this is one of those things where the… going back to the AP article, the ubiquitousness of it, is such that I don't… Like basically what they're saying in this article is, you can't avoid buying food that was produced by prison slave labor. And because we just, you don't know. There's no way for you to tell if a thing you're picking up off the shelf came from that or not. Unless you're like eating something you grew in your backyard, basically [laughs]. So it's like, I think the answer here to me has to be policy based. And actually, the article does mention, there are I think 12 states this year who have on their ballot, basically provisions to get rid of the prison labor exception to the ban on slavery in their state constitutions. So regardless of what the federal constitution says, the state constitution can ban prison slave labor, and then in that state, it will be banned. So it can, regardless whether the federal constitution ever changes, it can still be fought in other ways. It could just be fought through legislation. Any State Assembly, or even Congress, could just pass laws. So that's I think the level at which we need to operate here, at least for the time being, because there isn't currently, like at this very moment, there is not a way for me to tell whether what I'm buying came from a prison. So I don't know. That's kind of where my head is at when I think about this problem. Also pray. Pray for the… I'm like thinking about how much do I actually get into my own feelings here? Because what I want to pray for is the just immediate and violent destruction of systems [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Hey, listen. You can pray a Psalm 10 [Sy laughs]! There's no problem with that, God can answer it. That's the… It's on him! It's on him to answer the prayer. You just pray.

Sy Hoekstra: You could just open all the doors at Rikers, and then maybe on the way out, they could set a little fire right? That'd be fine, Jesus [laughs]? That's kind of how I feel. Yeah, so that's sort of where I end up. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Should we wrap up?

Jonathan Walton: Well, I mean, we are going to release a resource about how to process these hard things. So you can look out for that.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes, we are. We're going to have a little PDF soon that's available for anyone who signs up for the email list, will be able to get a little resource that Jonathan is putting together based on his vast experience of trying to emotionally and spiritually process difficult topics like this, just to give you some pointers. I just read the draft of it. I'm excited to dig into editing it soon.

Jonathan Walton: Amen.

Outro, Credits, and Outtake

Sy Hoekstra: Alright everybody. Thank you so much for listening. We will have more information on season four coming to you relatively soon. So hang tight. If you're not on the email list, go get on the email list. No way, you have to be… No, that's not true.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, subscribers.

Sy Hoekstra: No, hang on. Somebody could be listening to this episode, they're just like with one of our subscribers.

Jonathan Walton: Oh, that’s true [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: You specifically, if you're not on the email list [laughs], go to KTFPress.com and sign up. Thank you so much to the rest of you who are obviously already our incredible paid subscribers who we so appreciate, and without whom we simply would not exist. We just thank you so much for your support.

Speaking of your support, if you wouldn't mind going to Apple or Spotify and giving us a five-star review. We really need them, they help us so much. When people go to look us up, it just makes us look good. Leave a written review if you're on Apple as well. We just got another one. By the way, it takes like two months. Apple only updates those every like two months or so I think.

Jonathan Walton: Oh really?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So I just saw one from November, that I won't say his last name, but that are lovely and wonderful, and always so supportive. Subscriber Adam wrote on there, and we just, we appreciate it, Adam. Thank you.

Jonathan Walton: We appreciate you.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's very encouraging when we get those. So thank you, all of you, please. Five- star review on Apple or Spotify. Just open up your phone right now. Go ahead, do it. Go ahead. Right now [laughs]. Reach to your pocket. Come on. \

Alright. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our transcripts are by Joyce Ambale. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess, and we will see you all in a month. Thank you so much.

\[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: You can't avoid purchasing… Hang on one second [some shuffling noises and the clunk of a phone on a desk]. I just had to turn off my Bluetooth because the phone started ringing and then my computer started ringing [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes, that's exactly what happens.

Sy Hoekstra: Because I have it hooked up to Phone Link…

On today’s episode, Jonathan and Sy talk about what keeps them going in the work that KTF does. Hear their thoughts on:

- The spiritual and emotional practices that keep Jonathan grounded

-        Why Sy only prays when he feels like it, and consumes a lot of fiction

-        The importance of the image of God and living in shalom with your surroundings to Jonathan

-        How Privilege and anxiety interact with each other

-        Why Sy wants to show people another way of living is possible

-        And Jonathan’s recent newsletter recommendation about a massive, nearly untouched national park and the important environmental and cultural questions surrounding it

Mentioned in the episode

-        The Prayer of St. Francis

-        A Franciscan Benediction

-        Our previous episode on family court and foster care

-        “Thou, Oh Lord” by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir

-        The episode of the Field Trip podcast about Gates of the Arctic

-        The book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Credits

-        Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com

-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads

-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon

-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify

-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram

-        Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra

-        Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra

Introduction

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Jonathan Walton: If I hung out, and I could do this, hang out in the systemic all the time, I would not want to get out of bed. I wouldn't. Like if I just read the news and just knew the statistics and just laid my life down every day at the altar of my social media feed and my algorithm to feed the outrage machine, that would be a very, just not a fun way to live.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. I'm Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Our topic today is what keeps us going in the work that we do here at KTF when we're constantly confronted with difficult subjects. Like what are the practices and experiences and the ideas that sustain us. We'll also be introducing our new segment, Diving Deeper into one of our recommendations from the newsletter, which we have recently decided is going to be called “Which Tab is Still Open?”

Sy Hoekstra: It's not introducing it. We've done it before, we're just doing it again, but now we've named it. That's the difference.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: We’ve named it Which Tab Is Still Open?

Jonathan Walton: That’s exactly right.

Sy Hoekstra: Before we get into everything quickly, as always… No, not as always, but as we're doing in these bonus episodes, I'm asking you, please everyone, if you support what we do—and I know that you do support what we do because you're listening to this bonus episode that is only for subscribers—please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give us a five-star rating. And if you're on Apple Podcasts, give us a written review. The ones that we have there are great, we so appreciate everyone who has already done this, it really does help us. That's the only reason I'm taking time to ask you to do it now. It helps people find us, it helps us in the ranking and helps us look good when people look us up if we have more ratings.

So if you support what we do and want to spread our work around a little bit, that is a very quick and easy way to do it. Just pull out your phone, open Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or really any podcast app you have that allows ratings, give us a five star review. Give us that written review on Apple, even just like a sentence or two, we would so appreciate it. Thank you very much.

The Emotional and Spiritual Practices that keep Jonathan grounded

Sy Hoekstra: Without further ado, Jonathan Walton, you’re obviously a black belt of spiritual disciplines and emotional health, just a sort of, a sensei, if you will.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Oh my.

Sy Hoekstra: Should I do that? I don't know if I should say that or not.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] It's all good. You can be facetious. It’s all good.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us some of the things that you do to stay grounded. Some of the spiritual disciplines, some of the emotional health practices that you do to keep yourself from losing yourself in the anxiety and everything as you go through stressful news events and deal with difficult subjects in theology and politics and oppression that we talk about all the time.

Jonathan Walton: I fortunately, I have thought about this a lot, mostly because I burned out

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. That’ll do it.

Jonathan Walton: And I have anxiety, and because of traumas, little “t” and big “T” Trauma from when I was a child. I have a high propensity for control [laughs]. So I think I've had to think about it a lot so that I could not just get by in life, but actually have thriving relationships where I'm engaged with people and can show up as myself and not as a performer trying to get approval and things like that. So I think one of the things we want to think about a lot of the times is like what is our motivation in these conversations? Why are we getting this information? Why don't we want to engage, things like that. Being able to name our feelings, where they come from and the stories we tell ourselves about them, it's just like an exceptionally helpful thing when we engage with this stuff. So I ask myself those questions regularly, like what am I feeling, why am I feeling it, and then what is the story I tell myself about that feeling? So that's one simple emotional awareness thing. And I do that on a pretty regular basis in conversations. So if this is going to be like a sensei thing, like Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid…

Sy Hoekstra: Oh no…

Jonathan Walton: …like you’re doing these things… you're doing these things and they are hard in the beginning, but then they become natural. It's like, “oh, I'm not going to put my feelings on other people, I’m going to own my feelings.” And often, the reason I'm able to do that is because of the three prayers I pray each day, The Lord's Prayer, the Prayer of St. Francis and the Franciscan Benediction. Because the Lord's Prayer helps me see myself and see God. The prayer of St. Francis helps me out of that, how do I want to see other people, I want to see them in the same way. And then with the Franciscan Benediction, then the anger, the fear, the discomfort, all of those things are good. Those are things you ask for in the Franciscan Benediction: God to bless you with discomfort, tears, and sadness, anger, and then foolishness. So I think after that there's this thing called the Rule of Life that's very old, that I update pretty intentionally, instead of it being like a self actualization tool where I'm like, “I just want to be my best self.” It's like how can I use this so that there's actually fruitful fruit in my community, not just me? Where the fruit is interdependence, the fruit is not independence and my own personal awesomeness. And so being able to practice things daily, weekly, monthly, annually, quarterly, things like that to help me and my family and those around me flourish in ways that are transformative and helpful, as opposed to strictly by utility or productivity or self aggrandizement and things like that.

Sy Hoekstra: And the Rule of Life itself is, what exactly, actually, what is it in your life?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, so the Rule of Life is like [mockingly serious voice] an ancient spiritual practice [laughter]. But the image is a trellis, that whenever I've heard it talked about with monks and things like that, there's a trellis like if you're growing a plant, like a tomato plant or a cucumber plant, or something like that, and you want it to grow up, or grape vine, you set up a trellis to help it grow so that it’s more fruitful. So for us, it's like these patterns and practices and thoughts and habits help us to create a structure for us to grow. I'd like to think of it more as the scaffolding of our lives. Because when you take the scaffolding away, the building is supposed to stand. So when you take away these systems or structures that you've set up, they become second nature, those things fall apart, and then you continue to do them and you are a whole person.

Like nobody is walking down the streets of Manhattan today looking at buildings full of scaffolding. When you take the scaffolding away we're supposed to be whole.

Sy Hoekstra: Well…

Jonathan Walton: Well, that's true. There’s lots of scaffolding around.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: And it lasts longer than it's supposed to. And for all those people in Jackson Heights, I know your plight and I'm sorry, that it’s dark on your block 10 months out of the year [laughs]. But all that to say, a Rule of Life is just an exceptionally helpful tool to be able to do that.

Sy Hoekstra: So then for you, the scaffolding—that's a good New York City updating of agricultural metaphor of a trellis [laughter]. But what do you what do you actually do? Like what do you and your family actually do on a regular basis?

Jonathan Walton: So one of the big monthly ones is I looked at every month of the year, and basically put something in there that all of us can look forward to together and or individually. So Priscilla knows that in our schedule, she's going to have at least three snowboarding or skiing trips in the winter. She knows that in the fall, she's going to have at least three or four hiking trips. She knows every October, we're going camping with our family and every September we try to go camping by ourselves. She knows there's two weeks every July where we are out of New York City. Now, I know that every Labor Day there's a chance for me to go away and her to take care of the kids, for me to just like be away from my children and my wife for a little while. I love them dearly, and I’m an introvert [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Exactly.

Jonathan Walton: So things like that. So yeah, that's something that happens every month. And every day I am… this year for my New Year's resolution, shout out to 2024, for every post and thing that I have that is dealing with something difficult, I want to try and post and think about something that brings the light. So can I actually hang out in the beauty and the resistance, the delight and the struggle at the same time, and kind of show up fully in both spaces? That's what I'm committed to doing on social media.

Sy Hoekstra: So that one I think is more directly related to the stuff that we do at KTF Press, and you're saying that all those other things are like the scaffolding that lets the building stand. You know it's built into the rhythm of your life, that there’s things that are replenishing and peaceful coming in the not too distant future, which makes the daily stressors easier or seem like they're more, something you can overcome more easily. Is that right?

Jonathan Walton: Yes. I've got equal parts depletion and equal parts filling.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's great. You mentioned one of your goals for this year. What are some of the other goal setting practices? I guess you talked about how you review some of your emotions. So what are some of the other goal practices that you put in place?

Jonathan Walton: Every week I write out a to do list, like every Sunday night or Monday morning, because it's usually after midnight, I sit down, I look at the to do list from the week before, I mark out everything that was done, I rewrite everything that wasn't done and I fill in the stuff for the week. I did that last year almost every week, and that's been something that's really helped me, because I can tell myself I didn't do anything and I'm worthless. That's how I feel a lot of the times, like I just haven't done enough. But if I consciously sit down and say, “Oh, these are things I accomplished this week, this is what I'm looking forward to and what I have to do next week,” and I can kind of close the chapter on one week and move forward to the next one.

That's probably the most crucial thing that's helped me in being able to engage with things that are difficult, and things that are good, because I put those things in the same to do list. So I have to spend a good 10 minutes with Maia and Everest, while also “Hey, Jonathan, you need to read this article for the newsletter.” So they're beside each other, like I go back and forth between that beauty and that resistance.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s good. I should do the look back at my previous… When something's off my to do list, it's just gone. Like I just hit complete on my app on my phone.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And I should… That's a good idea actually.

Jonathan Walton: That's a shout out to Flora Beck. I don't know if… oh, actually, Flora Tan now. I don't know if she's listening to this, but her reflections always challenged me. So yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Let’s just assume Flora’s listening. She's great.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Why Sy Only Prays When He Feels Like It, and Consumes a Lot of Fiction

Sy Hoekstra: I come at this from such a different angle than you, man. So I will say me as a listener, if I just heard everything you said, I would get kind of stressed out and think that I was in trouble if that's what you need to be peaceful in life [laughter]. And the reason is this, it's not because anything you just said is bad, it's just because I come from such a different place, which is, I used to be very hyper-disciplined when it came to my spiritual practices. So I had prayer lists every day, like—meaning, a different list of people to pray for every day of the week. I had quiet times and just all kinds of regularized practices like that, none of which is bad.

But it was bad for me because the reason I was doing it was basically out of anxiety that I wanted to be a good Christian and do things well and be a good person, and check all this stuff off my list. And basically remain caught up with Jesus [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: So I would get behind on my prayer list, I would get behind on my Bible reading, I would try and catch up, it would get longer and longer. Because sometimes you're just tired and you sit down to pray at night and you fall asleep [laughs]. It just so stressed me out and I was using, we've talked about this before, I was using prayer as kind of a bad substitute for mindfulness and therapy [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yup.

Sy Hoekstra: I had no sense of emotional health or insight into my own emotions at all, I just knew I was really stressed out. And then if I sat and prayed for a long time, I would get less stressed out, which I used to refer to as like “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding,” And I now refer to as mindfulness [laughter]. Because I realized I could actually do, I can accomplish that same sort of ridding myself of anxiety without prayer, which doesn't mean that prayer is useless, or that God shouldn't bring you peace when you pray. What it means is I was using God to achieve an end for myself. It was not a relational, I wasn't there to commune with God, I was there to use God as a stress reliever.

So the way that I stay grounded, and the way that I live in my own emotions and put myself in a place where I am more able to handle the stress of life because I'm not so stressed out by my spiritual practices all the time, is I read the Bible and I pray, and I talk to God when I actually want to. Which if you grew up like me, that idea sets off alarm bells in your head.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Because you think that that means that you are giving into your flesh, that you are just not being disciplined, you're going to lose out, you're going to backslide and drift into the way of the world, and all these other phrases that basically mean you're going to lose out because you're not doing something in a rote way. And I really had to lean into all the scriptures where God talks about spiritual practices and worship and everything that are empty of love for him and says, “I don't care about any of that. It disgusts me. Stop doing it.” Which he says over and over again. So I did take hold of that and get kind of into the real, get into a realistic relationship with Jesus where I'm actually talking to a being who I want to be talking to, as opposed to just doing things out of rote obligation.

Jonathan Walton: And the fruit of that is a closer relationship with God.

Sy Hoekstra: Yes. Right, it is.

Jonathan Walton: You didn't backslide, you didn't fall into the sea of forgetfulness. You've actually cultivated a wonderful relationship with God rooted in your desire to be with him and his desire to be with you, and that is a beautiful thing.

Sy Hoekstra: And my desire to be with God has increased since I have stopped. Because when I wasn't doing things this way, I fundamentally related to God in obligatory ways. Like the same way you don't want to do any obligation, I didn't want to hang out with God [laughter]. That's where I was. So anyways, it's interesting that because we start in different places, and because God knows both of us, we do two very different approaches to things and we come out the other end more peaceful and happier and closer to God, because, I don't know. Because of the stuff that we did that actually correlated to how we feel. I'm just making another in our million plugs for emotional health and awareness. Everybody, we got to do it [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: It's true. It's true.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, one other important thing for me is fiction, which is… I spend a lot of time reading, listening to, thinking about all different kinds of fictional stories. I mean, I've said before I listen to like lots of sci-fi and fantasy and all that stuff like any other 35 year old, White millennial.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: White male millennial [laughs]. But I actually think it's extremely important for us, people who are specifically called to be ambassadors of the kingdom, to be able to consistently exercise our imagination. Because we are supposed to be thinking about how to change the world on a very fundamental level, kind of all the time. We're supposed to be bringing in new realities or praying for them or trying to. I'm not saying you, man, again, me as a younger Christian, I would have felt a whole lot of pressure around that idea of, “You have to bring in a new reality.” [laughter] But you know what I mean.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: That's what we represent and that's what our God does and is after, is a fundamental change and things. This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to abolitionist politics, because they are the ones imagining the most radical changes for us, and for our society and for the most marginalized.

The Importance of the Image of God and Living in Shalom with Your Surroundings

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, so those are practices that we go through Jonathan. How about experiences you've had or ideas that you hold on to, that keep you grounded in the work that we do?

Jonathan Walton: So yeah, I think the answer for me is pretty straightforward and is simple, but is revolutionary, that every single person is made in the image of God. Like every single person. And every single person that has ever been, is now and will be, is deeply loved by God, to flourish, work, rule, and create in the ways that he has ordered and called them, and like, I am in relationship to that person and my delight is bound up in their delight, and my freedom is bound up in their freedom and their bondage is bound up in my bondage. And meditating on that reality, like our actual connectedness and interdependence, and whether it be a person or the planet or creation, we were made to be in shalom with one another.

I was made to be in shalom with myself, I was made to be in shalom with God. And I think holding fast to that as not just a cool thing to think about, but like the experience that we’re like, when I'm sitting on the subway, or today at jury duty, or tomorrow when I'm back at jury duty, the people that I see are made in his image. So just a quick story because we tell stories. I had to drop Everest off today and I booked a SpotHero so that I wasn't late for jury duty. I had never been to jury duty and didn't want to get fined or anything because I am scared of rules.

Sy Hoekstra: SpotHero is an app you can use to book a parking spot in New York City.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. It’s quite great. So I go to pull into the spot, or to pull into the garage, and it's a garage in Jamaica, Queens, which is a different neighborhood pretty far away from Jackson Heights. And the same attendant that I remember four years ago in Jackson Heights was at this place this morning. So I talked to him, I said, “Hey, you used to be at 88th Street.” And we talked for a little bit, and he looked like the last few years have been really, really hard. So I said that, I said, “Hey, are you alright? The last few years have been really hard.” He said, “Yeah, it's been really hard. But like good to see you.” We fist bumped and like those kinds of things.

And Priscilla would tell me, she would say, “Jonathan, to us, it's not an abnormal thing to notice and see everybody.” She said that, because when we used to live in Jackson Heights, the same in this neighborhood, she was walking home with someone from the train and she said, “Hey,” to the folks who worked at Chipotle, she said, “Hey,” to the folks who worked at Children of America, she said, “Hey,” to Pizza Sam, she said, “Hey,” to the parking person. And the guy was like, “You know people in your neighborhood, that's weird.” And she's like, “No, it's not weird actually. It's weird not to know the people who make your life possible.” [laughs] So I think just practicing that and experiencing that, and promoting that, to see everybody and notice everyone and acknowledge everyone, is something that, that's a regular experience that I'm grateful for.

Sy Hoekstra: That's really good, and I can see how that would help you understand the importance of what we do. Like meaning, I guess I can understand how it would motivate you…

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: …to tell people the stories that we talk about in the newsletter on this show, and highlight the perspectives. How does it ground you? How does it help you get through it? You know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, it helps me get through it because if I hung out, and I could do this, hang out in the systemic all the time, I would not want to get out of bed. I wouldn't. Like if I just read the news and just knew the statistics and just laid my life down every day at the altar of my social media feed, my algorithm, to feed the outrage machine, that would be a very, just not a fun way to live. But if I make eye contact with Everest, who doesn't know where the chocolate in her hot chocolate came from, she's just really excited about the froth and slurping it. [laughter] There's like, “Oh right, this is a real thing.” I can eat this poppy seed bagel with lox and I don't… Like yes, I know the flour is not the greatest. I know. I can lay out all the ingredients, I remember the Department of Labor and Statistics, how we're all, everything’s sourced, like that stuff comes to my head at every meal.

And I can look down and be like, “Maia and Everest and us are really enjoying this meal,” and we're grateful. And like holding those two things, so noticing that people at our table and the folks that make our table possible, who may not have a table of their own, holding that is a grounding thing, so that I can go into the work that we're doing with real people in mind, not just bylines and links in a newsletter.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s good. I appreciate that clarification a lot.

Jonathan Walton: No, I'm glad you clarified because sometimes it just comes out all this like fluffy things.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

How Privilege and Anxiety Interact

Jonathan Walton: What about for you?

Sy Hoekstra: I think, so a couple of things. One, we've talked before about the metaphor of weightlifting.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Oh, yes. Yes, we did. That was a good metaphor.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, this is… Jonathan, you're complimenting yourself right now, because this was your metaphor, but that's fine.

Jonathan Walton: What? [laughs]

Sy Hoekstra: It's okay. You're the poet. This is your realm. We basically were talking about the idea of kind of anxiety and privilege. So meaning, there is real, honest, felt anxiety when it comes to doom scrolling on social media, or when it comes to reading all these horrible things in the newspaper, that I do not want to diminish in any way. I just want to acknowledge the fact that kind of the more real-life stuff you've been through, the easier that kind of more distant anxiety feels. So when I say more distant anxiety, here's what I mean. I spent two-and-a-half years as a public defender in Family Court. And I would have, I was the defense attorney for the parents. I've talked about this on an episode before.

It's something I'm really passionate about, go back and listen to it, please. So I was defending parents who were accused of neglecting or abusing their children or somebody's children. And that makes me the bad guy, that makes my client the bad guy in court at all times, despite the fact very often they were not bad guys who had done nothing wrong. Again, go listen. If you don't understand the system, believe me, it's true. Go listen to this past episode. But I was being just berated constantly by everybody, by judges, by opposing counsel, by the council that represented the children, because I was the bad guy. And for note, when I was doing my job, all I was doing was my job that I was hired to do that the system actually needed me to do in order for them to even accomplish their goals.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: And I would get yelled at by a judge for just raising objections that you're supposed to raise as a defense attorney, to defend your client. That it would be bad if you didn't intervene, all that kind of thing. And I'm having to defend myself for doing my job or for raising good points about the evidence that there’re like big gaps in the case or whatever. And what the other people who were yelling at me are trying to do is destroy yet another poor Black or Brown family or really traumatize them. And when you go through something like that for a couple of years, and it's very personal and it's about people that you know being harmed, it's like the real trauma and the real anxiety of reading a whole bunch of news articles about other people who are farther away from you, or at least abstract people you don't know being harmed, it's just not as hard.

And I also burned out at that last job, and a lot of people who are from the directly impacted families who end up doing defense work or whatever, they don't burn out as easily, because it's the reality that they're used to. Meaning I'm not the heavyweight lifter here. [laughs] I'm not the bodybuilder, I'm just someone who goes to the gym for a while. So that's all I wanted to say, I've had those experiences, and those helped ground me. And it's always going to be that way. Also, when I was in that job, I would not have been doing this.

I would not have been spending tons of time digesting and digging through really difficult news and difficult subjects and thinking about abuse and all kinds of other things, because I was doing that all day at work and I was utterly exhausted from that. So I also understand when people have that reaction because it’s just whatever they do all day or something. So that's one thing for me. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, I can move on. I have one other thing.

Jonathan Walton: No, I think just the reality of what you're talking about, like a lot of us, I think feel that way when we encounter things and we can fall into to the into the comparison trap, particularly as Christians, like what I'm experiencing isn't as bad as that person. And the reality is, God looks at us and sees all of our crosses, he doesn't say, “Oh man, that's a worse cross than the other person.” God actually cares that you don't know what to pick out at the grocery store. And he also cares about the kid that doesn't have any food around the corner from you. He cares for both of them. And when you grow up with food full in your fridge, and someone else has grown up with food not in their fridge and now you both have full fridges, there's an anxiety that one person won't experience because they know what it's like to live with nothing in the fridge, and anxiety you might feel because your fridge is constantly full, and you don't know what it's like to not have anything.

And that's only because you've been lifting five pounds most of your life and the other person's been having to lift 50. So it's all weight, though, and so being able to walk through life with empathy for the person that has five pounds or the person that has 50, because we're all carrying something, regardless of how we might appear. And I think Jesus invites us to have empathy regardless of how much our burdens are, whether they be light or heavy, he desires that they would be light.

Sy Hoekstra: And to help people get there. The two fridge people that you're talking about are you and me [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that's true.

Sy Hoekstra: I don't think you meant to do that, but…

Jonathan Walton: I actually didn't mean to do that. I was thinking about me and Maia, but yes. But you're right. That could also be both of us as well [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: I was like, “two people, one of whom grew up with food [laughter] one who didn’t, I think this is me and Jonathan.”

Why Sy Wants to Show People Another Way is Possible

Sy Hoekstra: So another thing for me and this is again, where you talked about ideas and I'm talking about experiences, that's fine. They're both in the question. It's cool. Also, your idea like the Imago Dei and all the things that you talked about are also things that hold me down. I just don't feel the need to repeat them after you said them already. When I say hold me down, I mean ground me. You know what? You know what I just ran into, Jonathan?

Jonathan Walton: What’s that?

Sy Hoekstra: To hold something down is a phrase that White and Black people use differently [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Really?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, think about it.

Jonathan Walton: Okay.

Sy Hoekstra: When Black people say like “Hold it down,” that's a positive thing.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah yeah, it is.

Sy Hoekstra: When White people say, “Something's holding me down,” that's bad [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Oh, that's so true [laughter]!

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I just like was slipping between the two of them and going, “Wait, what do I mean?”

Jonathan Walton: There you go. It's like, the White person listening to this is like, “What, was that a good thing that Sy just said?”

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I’m saying. Our audience might be confused.

So one other thing that happened to me recently, a couple months ago that's been kind of grounding me for a few months actually, was at the Evolving Faith Conference that we went to that KTF sponsored. We had this really great talk from Sarah Bessey, who kind of runs the show at Evolving Faith, about kind of what I was talking about before, the power and importance of imagination in our faith. And obviously based on what I said earlier, that kind of jives with me already [laughs]. But she kind of gave some time for people or prompted us. I don’t remember exactly what she did, but she gave, there was some point which I was prompted to sit and imagine, just see what comes to mind, which is actually a way that God has spoken to me in a lot of ways over the years.

I'm not someone, like my wife comes from a Pentecostal background where God just says things very directly to them. No, not me [laughs]. I get indiscernible images that I have to figure out later, and not very frequently. So anyways, I'm sitting there, and I start thinking about basically a barren wasteland where people are just barely surviving, trying to find food and water that is almost non-existent, fighting over resources. Just living like there are no buildings in sight, people camping, fighting each other. And then because I'm a fantasy sci-fi person, there're like monsters around [laughter] coming after people. And the sky is super dark. The sun is out, but it's just dark storm clouds everywhere, you cannot see anything.

Then as far away as you can see on the horizon, there's light, like a bit of actual blue sky and sunlight. And the next person who came up and talked was Alicia Crosby Mack, who kind of talked about, one of the themes of her talk was, what you can do, what you have the power to do right now with what you have, like what can you actually move forward on in your faith and location and everything. The thing that kept coming to my mind as I was thinking about this image of this scene, this wasteland, was “point people to the horizon.” And that idea for me is just something that's been keeping me going. There's a lot of things that I've done in my life that I think revolve around sort of that passion.

And I think what we do here to a certain degree too, trying to show people that there is something else out there. It might be far away and might look like it's hard to get to, but it is possible for us to do something different, to live differently. That for me is a grounding idea that pushes me through reading about something difficult, because I want to tell people how we can digest this, to how we can think about it and how we can push forward in a way that actually changes how we think about the world, and somewhere down the line might actually change the world, if enough people started changing what they're thinking and doing. Again, I'm not putting a lot of pressure on myself to change the world.

I'm feeling the obligation that I feel, the real desire that I feel, to do everything that I can in my power, which is a very different place to be. So yeah, look at the horizon. I don't know if that sparks anything for you, we could move on to our segment if it doesn't.

Jonathan Walton: No, I mean, I just think about the Psalms where it says like, “He's the lifter of our heads.” We're able to look up and see out, like I look to the hills from where help comes from. Yeah. The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir has a beautiful song called “Lifter of My Head.” That's what he does, and that makes sense to me.

Sy Hoekstra: If I can find that on the internet, I'll put it in the show notes.

Jonathan Walton: Nice. Yeah, I'll find it.

Which Tab Is Still Open?: Gates of the Arctic

Sy Hoekstra: Cool. Okay, Jonathan, let's get to our segment, which we now have a title for. So I'm going to ask you, we're going to talk about something that we, a highlight that we both found a lot of inspiration from because of just frankly the creation, God's creation that we talked about in a really powerful way, and then also made us kind of dive deeper into difficult policy questions when it comes to environmentalism. So to get us into that, Jonathan, here's the question. The new name of the segment. Of all the stuff that we've been reading and listening to and telling people to read and listen to in the newsletter, which tab is still open?

Jonathan Walton: Ah! Sybren. Sy.

Sy Hoekstra: [Imitating Jonathan’s tone] Ah! [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: The tab that is still open on my phone, on the third desktop with like rabbit trail links connected to it is Field Notes. No, that's wrong.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's the name of the podcast.

Jonathan Walton: No, it's called Field Trip. Field Notes is actually…

Sy Hoekstra: It’s Sarah Bessey’s Substack.

Jonathan Walton: Which is another tab that’s open on my desktop [laughs]. That's funny. So I'm sorry. The tab that we are talking about today on this podcast is called Field Trip. Great episode for The Washington Post about the largest national park in the US. And the rabbit trail that just leads me down is like, the Green Revolution is tied to exploitation of people and the planet at the exact same time that we are trying to stop exploitation of the planet through fossil fuels.

Sy Hoekstra: Can I give people some summary points about what happened in this episode?

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely, I'm firmly in the rabbit hole, bring them to the light.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So it's a podcast about national parks, but this episode in particular is about a park that neither of us had ever heard of before, called Gates of the Arctic National Park, which is 8.5 million acres of land, which is like you can fit Death Valley and the Grand Canyon and the Glacier National Park and the Everglades and Yellowstone, and like three other parks inside of this park and still have room. It is enormous.

Jonathan Walton: It's hard to fathom.

Sy Hoekstra: It's north of the Arctic Circle. The whole thing is north of the Arctic Circle. The only way to get there is by sea plane because there's nowhere to land. Like you have to fly in on something that can land on water. And it's just millions and millions of acres of mountains and forests and pine forests, obviously, and lakes and rivers, and then like shifting wetlands. There are bears and caribou and all kinds of wildlife, and there are indigenous people who have lived there for a long time. Obviously, the longest time of anyone who's living there. Then there are some people who’ve lived there for a bit longer, but basically the park on any given day has 27 visitors, because it is so difficult to get to, and because you have to basically be an expert survivalist to..

Jonathan Walton: Right right right.

Sy Hoekstra: …not die while you're there. So this podcast is kind of about a proposed road that they want to build through the park, that they might be able to build through the park. It's going to be 26 miles long to get to a copper mine, or a mine that has a bunch of minerals, but the most important one is copper.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And the reason Jonathan was just talking about the Green Revolution is that copper is essential for a bunch of green technology, like solar panels and electric vehicles. So the mining companies are playing up the Green Revolution is the reason they want to create this mine, this huge open pit mine which is…

Jonathan Walton: Open pit mine. Yep, the worst kind.

Sy Hoekstra: …bad [laughter] for the environment, and then have this road that obviously a bunch of other development will be around. So the whole episode was just about people who are resisting it for all different reasons and how much damage you would do to this otherwise pristine national park for what the company estimates would be two billion pounds of copper, which is nothing. Which is just nothing in terms of the scale of what America actually is going to need on an annual basis. It does not remotely cover what America would need just for one year in the not too distant future to produce the amount of green technology that we think we need. So all right, Jonathan, give us your thoughts.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, man. All right. Two quick things about this podcast, which is why the tab is still open, is one, they follow this man who is the son of a guide that lived in the park before Jimmy Carter made the land…

Sy Hoekstra: A park.

Jonathan Walton: ...government land. Made it a park. And one of the things that he says, his father used to take like wealthy Europeans out to hunt and fish and things like that. So the son is like, he doesn't do that, but instead he just takes people out into the wild. So the son says he has this recurring dream, really, which really is a nightmare, that he wakes up one day and there's just a city around him and he's like, “How come I didn't see this coming?”

Sy Hoekstra: How did it sneak up on me? Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. How did it sneak up on me? So there's that and you juxtapose his nightmare with the sounds that just start the podcast. Like you hear the water, you hear the plane engine start, you hear the silence that is, that I think the podcast so she says her, her ears shifted away from processing sound to seeking out sound because it was so quiet. So the amount, just the production value for this entire thing is just elevated to another level.

Sy Hoekstra: Listen, The Washington Post is good at making podcasts [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Post reports, all that. it's a great podcast. And so for me, I just kept thinking to myself, again, it's like my Tesla, the car that we have outside, the solar panels we have on top of our house, those minerals don't come from nowhere. I am connected, the power in my house is connected to this place that we want to exploit. We want to build this, you might blow the top off the ground…

Sy Hoekstra: Of a mountain.

Jonathan Walton: …pull out minerals for 12 years, and then just leave it there, which is what's going to happen. So it's the reality that we live in this tension. And so the resource that, the other resource that made me think about was Palo Alto, the history of California and capitalism, that we cited as another resource some months ago.

Like the reality that deindustrialization has, we actually can't live the way that we're living, for things to thrive. So it challenges me to think to myself like how can I live in such a way that this man's world, the indigenous people who are there, their world are not compromised for my comfort? Their desires and ways of life are not stripped away because I want to continue my way of life.” There has to be a way for both of us to be able to thrive in ways that are transformative and helpful for the generations of kids that we’re raising and look forward to.

Sy Hoekstra: That was some of the most difficult stuff was listening to the native people that she interviewed processing through whether to fight or whether to go along with the development in order to preserve whatever aspect of their culture they can preserve. Because the development is inevitable, and they need the money. And like I just, I don't know, you can't blame anyone for going either way, I don’t think. It's people making the best of a hard situation.

Jonathan Walton: Right. And the reality that this is a, what year, this is 2024. So let's say this is an 800 year old conversation…

Sy Hoekstra: Oh yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Walton: …where people show up, they're going to take it, and the arguments start to happen. It happened in Hawaii, it happened with indigenous people here, like all of the, in the Americas, like “Hey, do we want to help? Hey, do we want to trade? Hey, do we want to…” and then this reality of like, “No, I trust them. No, I don't. Yes, we should. No, we shouldn't.” And like these are old conversations, which now we get to listen to, and struggle with and wrestle. And what does it mean to be present to the struggles of indigenous people?

Sy Hoekstra: So this made me think, like I live in Manhattan, where you cannot see the actual nature that used to exist, it's all covered up. Even the central park or whatever, that was all put there. That's not the actual ground of this island. We put that on top of a bunch of other stuff. And it actually made me… so Jonathan, this is some, maybe some background. Jonathan and I are both people who like nature a lot and very easily slip into worship [laughter] and awe of God's design when thinking about nature and animals and everything. And I actually teared up thinking about the fact that that this untouched wilderness that they're walking us through that you have to go to like the farthest reaches of Alaska to get to now in America, to get actual untouched land, that used to be Manhattan.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: This island used to be forests and hills and surrounded by a couple of big rivers and a bay, and a couple other smaller islands. And the Lenape lived here in that environment for since forever. And I love New York City and still the stuff that we lose to create a place like this is so sad. But at the same time just hearing, I don't know. It's haunting. It's hauntingly beautiful is what it is. That listening to a podcast like them capture the audio of a place like this. And especially so for me, for someone whose world because I'm blind is mostly audio.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And to what you're saying about how it all used to be that way, Maia was saying to me one time, I think it was this past summer when we were going to an RV trip, because we have the resources and that's part of our rule of life is to go out and be reminded that mountains are bigger than buildings [laughs]. And the things that we build and construct are small in comparison to things that God has made. And when we came back, we were in Cold Spring, and there's a view, like a vista or a viewpoint like in Cold Spring. It's a beautiful place if you live, or if you're in New York, and you want to just get an hour away. So we're standing there and Maia looks out and she goes, “Did everything used to be like this?” And I say, yes. And she said, “Even the city?” And I said, yes. And she said, “Man I wish the Europeans never came.” I said, “Oh snap” [laughter]

Sy Hoekstra: The bluntness of children.

Jonathan Walton: Right. It gets at something right?

Sy Hoekstra: It sure does [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Like, what would the world be like if? And this isn't, you don't have to throw out all Europeans, but like, what would the world be like if we did not see it as something to be wrestled into submission, and solely productive in a way that our dominant culture perceives productivity? Like, what if that just had never been? And I think to go back to the other point, we talked about imagining things, Sy. Like we have to be able to imagine a different way of being in the world. And being in nature and listening to this podcast and wrestling with that haunting beauty and attention, I think that's one way for us to do that. And I think doing the newsletter, doing the podcast, continuing to wrestle helps us to shape not just a fantasy world, but an actual redemptive world where God redeems the stuff that we've made to be something beautiful.

Outro

Sy Hoekstra: Amen. Let's wrap it up there.

Jonathan Walton: Cool.

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you all so much for listening and supporting what we do. We hope this gave you a window into, I don't know, how we do what we do, and how we think about the resources that we think about in the newsletter at a little bit of a deeper level too. Please again, if you support this, if you enjoyed listening to this show, go give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Give us a written review if you're on Apple Podcasts. We so appreciate it, it really actually helps, which is why we keep asking you to do it.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, it does.

Sy Hoekstra: So please go do that. Well, I'll just go back, I'll just go into the credits. We're going to have some more announcements coming up about stuff that we're doing this year. We have big plans folks, but we're not quite ready to give you a ton of information yet, but you will be hearing more from us in the coming weeks about cool things that are going to be coming to KTF Press.

Jonathan Walton: Very cool things.

Sy Hoekstra: Cool things! Our theme song is “Citizens” by John Guerra. Our transcripts are by Joyce Ambale. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess, and for the next bonus, you'll probably be hearing from us before this, but the next bonus episode will be in February and we will see you then.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

[Tapping sounds from Jonathan’s mic]

Sy Hoekstra: Your thing is bumping up against the mic, and by the way a lot.

Jonathan Walton: Oh sorry, I was typing.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, you're just typing. You’re on mic, Jon. I mean, you're on camera. If you're just typing while I’m talking, people are just seeing you just typing [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: No. No, they actually can't see me typing [laughter].

Sy Hoekstra: You're just yawning. You're like reading a book.

Jonathan Walton: No, no [laughter].

This month’s bonus episode features Jonathan and Sy talking about the power of the incarnation during hard times over the holiday season. They discuss:

* Why exactly the holidays can be so hard

* How our values about justice and systems of oppression interact with the vulnerability of this time of year

* What the hope of the incarnation has to say about all of it

* And, during our new segment, a recent newsletter highlight about the audacity and courage of abolitionist work throughout history

Resources mentioned in the episode:

* Jonathan’s essay about Poverty and Shame

* Mastodon thread about the Civil War military operation led by Harriet Tubman

Correction: in the episode Sy discusses the Abolition Riot of 1836, but mistakenly identified the year of the riot as 1831.

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow KTF on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. Transcripts of every episode are available at KTFPress.com/s/transcripts. And you can find the transcript for this episode here.

Hosts

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Mastodon.

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra.

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode.

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Sy Hoekstra: The narratives that we tell ourselves that allow us to dismiss other people and absolve ourselves of moral responsibility, the incarnation is the complete opposite of that. Who better to relieve themselves of responsibility for your actions and behavior than God?

[laughter]

And what does God do? The opposite. Says, “I'm going to shoulder the responsibility of everything all of you have done, and I'm going to come down. I'm going to empty myself of the privilege, I'm not walking away. I'm going to be as in it as I can, I'm not kicking you out the house. I'm not leaving. I'm not cutting you off.” That example, the ability that we have to follow and commune with that person just gives me a ton of hope.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. I'm Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Today, we are talking about the vulnerability, loneliness and intimacy of the holiday season. We'll discuss why the emotional stakes seem so high this time of year, how those feelings are often at odds with our own values around justice and resisting oppression, and how the incarnation gives us a path forward to wholeness and flourishing. We're also going to be doing our new segment where we talk about one of our recent newsletter recommendations with a little more depth, but we'll do it at the end of the show this time, so we can jump right into our main topic.

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for joining us on this bonus episode, we really appreciate you, our subscribers and everything that you do to keep us afloat and growing at KTF Press. And we just have one quick request of you, one quick favor to ask, which is go to Apple or Spotify and give us a five star rating. And if you're on Apple leave us a written review. These really help people find us, like they help us actually get up the search and the charts and all that sort of thing. They also help us just when people look us up, they see that other people have listened and like us. You give us credibility. And so insofar as you want to support what we're doing here at KTF press which we know you do because you are subscribing, then please do open up Apple podcasts or Spotify on your phone, give us that five-star rating.

As Jonathan said last month, if it's four stars, keep it to yourself, give us a five-star rating. We really appreciate it. And that's all we're going to ask of you because we don't have to give you the pitch because you're a subscriber, and again, we so appreciate it. Jonathan, let's get into it.

Jonathan Walton: Let’s get started. It's not a new idea to say this, this time of the year is vulnerable and hard for a lot of people, either because they're facing complicated family relationships or facing loneliness or isolation because they don't have the family relationships they want to lean on. Why are we talking about this on the show about leaving colonized faith? What does this have to do with following Jesus, resisting oppression, centering marginalized voices, any of the stuff we normally talk about? We will definitely get there soon. But first, let's lay some groundwork. Can we talk from an emotional health standpoint about what is going on exactly this time of year? Why do people feel so vulnerable and anxious around the holidays?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I'll start, but I should say in general, this topic, the whole topic of this episode is more your bag. I imagine you will do the majority of the talking this time around, because we are in the realm of how you kind of integrate your beliefs about the world and systemic oppression into the interpersonal. And that is Jonathan Walton [laughs]. That’s is literally what you do on a lot of your actual job. But yeah, I guess I'll give some of the, you'll do the deep stuff. I'll give the more obvious ones now just to…

Jonathan Walton: No worries. And then you'll be deceptively deep and then be like, well, but go ahead [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: I wasn't planning on that, but if that happens I will sound cool. So, I mean, part of it is when you're among family, and when we're talking about family we mean, I think both biological or chosen or whoever you're around, whoever you happen to be around this time of year. There's often a lot of unresolved trauma. There's stuff that you've buried. It can be something traumatic that happened that was hurtful that you've kind of buried and stopped talking about just for the purposes of being able to move on. It could be trauma that you're not even aware of that just comes from years and years of patterns of behavior amongst you and your family.

And those things, I don't know, just kind of heighten the stakes of a lot of conversations and behaviors and everything. There's political, this probably happens more with your biological family than your chosen family, but there's political polarization. There's just, there’s a ton of anxiety and fear around a lot of really important subjects. And when people get out of their tribes and their bubbles and get back into these groups of people that they are clinging on to, because they're a part of… The fact that we don't have a choice, but to be a part of, it breaks the bubbles, and that makes things very uncomfortable for everybody a lot of times.

I just think when you're not talking about chosen family, when you’re talking about biological family, obviously, you're talking about people that you didn't choose. And you're stuck with them, and they are like, deeply a part of your identity and your upbringing, whether you want them to be or not. For a lot of people, that just makes you feel stuck, when there's unresolved trauma, when there's tension when there's whatever. And that kind of stuck, being stuck in things that are difficult, and having no way really of ever fully escaping them, like, that's really complicated. And then even when you're among chosen family, there is some amount of increased pressure there, even though those are often like more, if you're there, they're often more copacetic relationships than you had with your family.

But there is some pressure there too, because if that's the family that you're with, but you can choose not to be and then if you're not, or if somebody else chooses not to be part of your chosen family anymore, then you're back to either being isolated and lonely, and we'll talk about loneliness too. Or with the people that you were stuck with, who you don't have a good relationship with. So there's, I don't know, just a lot of that going on. But Jonathan, you're the one who knows about all the terms and the family systems theory and the [unclear 00:06:42]

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: So why don't you take us a level deeper here?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean, I don't know all the things. I am not a therapist, let's preface that right now. I am in therapy.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s enough.

Jonathan Walton: But I like to think about the things that impact me the most. And I do believe that I have a responsibility to share the resources that I've been given, and I fortunately have a robust, chosen family. And I think two things that stand out to me, as we're having this conversation, and the fancy words are like enmeshment versus differentiation. And then the other term, which we should acquaint ourselves with is grief.

Sy Hoekstra: Can you just define, we've talked about enmeshment and differentiation before, but can you just define that real quick?

Jonathan Walton: Sure. So enmeshment simply is when our identities are so affixed with other people that we are unable to distinguish ourselves from them. So that can look like an inability or unwillingness to let people have their own thoughts, actions and feelings independent of someone else. For example, you may have a parent that is deeply uncomfortable or angry with you and you think, act or feel differently from them. You may feel blamed, you may be blamed. You may be critiqued and made to feel guilty when you have changed your political beliefs, or you are eating differently, or you have decided to bring a person home that they are not happy with, right?

There's a lot of things that can come up, when we have times with family based on with our biological family expectations that come from that, when we are enmeshed with them, and they are enmeshed with us. Differentiation is when we are able to be ourselves and have our own thoughts, actions and feelings while remaining connected to people. It is possible to differentiate ourselves from someone without destroying them in our minds [laughs], or completely engulfing ourselves and their identity. And so my invitation to you, as I talked about in our one of our cohorts this week is, can you go home to your family and not turn back into your childhood self and play the role that is expected of you?

And I think when we're able to do that, and not to individualize in a way that cuts your family off, but individualize in a way that allows you to be more present to the community, that's the goal. So I think that the flip side of differentiation is actually grief. A lot of us, as Sy was talking about, are carrying around this unprocessed trauma. Big T- Trauma or little t- trauma. And so I think…

Sy Hoekstra: Wait, sorry, what's the difference between big and little T trauma?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So big T- Trauma would be something that happened to you, and little t- trauma would be something you didn't receive that you should have.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, okay.

Jonathan Walton: So yeah, so let's say big T- Trauma, these things that happen to us that are traumatic, that cause us to have these earthquake events in our lives. Little t- trauma would be something like neglect. I did not, like I can count on one hand how many times I initiated and my mom reciprocated a hug. That's little t- trauma. I should have received that when I was younger. Little t- trauma would be going into my house, and I talk about this in the poverty and shame essay like, there should have been stability in my house around furniture and things like that. Do you know to come home and our furniture is gone [laughs] or to come home and cars are gone? There was a constant sense of instability in my life. So these things should have been there, but they weren’t.

Sy Hoekstra: Having been repossessed, you mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yes, having been repossessed [laughs]. Yeah, man. Some of you all have experienced that before. It's not fun when literally the furniture you were sitting on is now not there anymore.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And these are things from our childhood, but like I said, there are things to grieve each year with our families around the holidays. People get married, they don't come back for holidays anymore, people pass away, they don't cook that dish anymore. People are estranged, and they just aren't present anymore. So there's things that we have to grieve and let go of and reengage with and all of that takes time. But it's exceptionally important to be differentiated, to be able to do that in a mature, conscious and intentional way.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And just to expand our examples a little bit, grief can also just be the fact that you're lonely, because you don't have anyone to be around this time of year, and there's so much pressure to be with your family. Or it can be the grief of having, even if you are with people who love you, it can still be the grief of having been cut off from your family or whatever. That's something that a lot of people experience. I'll say I in particular, well probably both of us, when we're thinking about like chosen family or people being isolated and cut off, I just really don't want to leave out like that's a ton of our queer siblings, right?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: That's just so many, there's like such a disproportionately high number of people who have been cut off from their family, because their family are bigots. And that gets in the way of, it's just a way that kind of, I'll start to bring in the systemic stuff that gets in between families and people and I just, I don't know. I feel a, burden is the wrong word. But just feel a desire to make sure we're bringing that into the conversation. Any more thoughts on that or should we get into this systemic stuff? Did I do a segue or not?

[laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think if you're listening to this and this is you, I wouldn't rush through this process of processing. And my prayer for you, if you have questions or want to process more, you can obviously email us or reach out for resources or more conversation. But I would not sit alone in these things and think to yourself, nobody else is going through this, but I would reach out because we could actually be a community for one another amidst the hard stuff that's happening.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, even if you are at home happily with a family who loves you and is healthy and great, it also just helps you too. I think this whole conversation I think will just help you too to be a better friend to people who are in this situation. Be a better example of how Jesus comes towards us and tries to be with us, Emmanuel.

Jonathan Walton: Amen.

Sy Hoekstra: So yeah, I think this conversation is for everyone, not just people who are feeling grief, that's just a note that I wanted to make. But Jonathan, let's bring this kind of into the realm of what we talk about in general, now that we've laid the groundwork. So we and I think a lot of people have a lot of values about when it comes to how we engage with systemic oppression or systems and structures in our society, how we want society to engage with vulnerable people, all kinds of things that we think that when we bring them into really intimate vulnerable settings like our families, some stuff happens [laughs]. Some stuff happens that makes things, that raises the stakes and makes things complicated. Can you tell us what happens a lot of times when we're combining those values in that setting?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I'll tell a quick story, and I may have told the story before, just to ground our example. I had a young racially assigned white 18/19 year old student who learned about the oppression of BIPOC folks at the hands of police and went home and told her dad Black Lives Matter. And he kicked her out of the house and said, “Don't come back until you learn how to think correctly.”

Sy Hoekstra: Kicked her out of the house?

Jonathan Walton: Yes, kicked her out of the house.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay…

Jonathan Walton: I've also had students that make decisions around LGBTQIA+ issues and had their money drained from their account by their parents. So these are interpersonal realities that happen because of changes about how a student or a person thinks about oppressive systems. So one of the things that I've noticed in these conversations is that some people in our families literally cannot handle the reality or thought that we would think differently from them. And that we might actually have our own thoughts, our own feelings, and still love and want to be in relationship with them.

Sy Hoekstra: You're talking about basically someone who feels really enmeshed, not knowing how to comprehend someone who feels differentiated.

Jonathan Walton: Exactly. Right. And so, I think one of the things that I've tried to do in these situations is, how can I be a son, be a father, be a cousin, be a brother, be a friend, in relationship to my family, primarily, rather than being a pastor, a teacher, a leader, a writer, a speaker? That to me feels like the more vulnerable thing, to be able to share myself with my family before I share my ideas with my family. I think that is a lot of work, usually because the way that our quote- unquote, minds are changed when we go to college, when we go to a protest, when we watch a documentary, or when we have conversations with someone, is like we're getting new information introduced to us independent of the home environment that we grew up in.

And when we get that information, we often cannot take the people with us who actually helped us make those changes. So this young woman's father did not bring, I mean, this young woman did not bring Jonathan Walton and an entire week's worth of experiences to her dad to have this conversation.

Sy Hoekstra: She just brought the new idea.

Jonathan Walton: She just brought the new idea. And similarly, like with the person who decided to say, “Hey, I want to make space for my queer family.” They didn't bring the queer people there. They just brought this new idea and this new decision that was not consulted with the leaders in the family.

Sy Hoekstra: By the family.

Jonathan Walton: And so I think it's helpful to remember that sometimes loving the people that we come from equals acknowledging where they're at and being there with them, as our whole selves, us quote- unquote, changed and them being unchanged, and pursuing the relationship before we try to correct people. In parenting speak it's, we build a connection before we bring the correction. I think something beautiful about Jesus is that he is remaining connected to his disciples primarily before and during their correction. He never left them. He always pursued them. And I wonder, would it be possible for us to pursue our family members? And I'm not talking about big T- Trauma family members that do unhelpful, abusive things. That's not what we're talking about.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s an important distinction to make.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that is a fundamentally different conversation. How do we handle inter-relational familial tension with Jesus at the center as people who are maturing and changing and desire to be in authentic relationship with the families that we come from? That's what we're talking about. And so when the stakes are that high, I think pursuing the relationship and prioritizing connection over correction is a paramount thing to do. Because we want to win the relationship, not just win the argument.

Sy Hoekstra: Which is not to say don't have integrity with what you believe.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: You're actually saying, have full integrity, but just do whatever you can to make it clear that you still love the person or want to be in relationship with them. So you might face a situation where you just want to say black lives matter, and if you say it your dad is going to kick you out of the house. And that's like, you can't do anything about that, right [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So we're not saying hedge your bets and maybe say all lives matter just for the sake of the relationship.

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: We're not saying like change the message [laughs], but we are saying be careful. What I'm saying is be careful and thoughtful about who you're trying to correct and when and where they're at. That's all. It's I just want to make sure that people understand the limit, you know what I mean?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Just so we're not suggesting stay silent, do nothing, let people go on and on about horrible things in your presence or whatever [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, exactly. It is possible to lovingly confront the people and nonsense in our lives.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: It's possible. I think of [laughs] I have, some interesting people in my life. And sometimes they say things that are really, really unhelpful and demeaning to people that I love and care about and I think Jesus loves and cares about deeply. And usually, the way that presents itself is me asking a question, when they say said unhelpful thing. So, for example, someone said to me, “Well Jonathan, like what about men's rights?” And my response is, “You know what? Yeah, you're absolutely right. There is a crisis among men.” Because that's true, I'm not violating a value when I say that. There are real problems with men in this country. I can say that without disparaging women or delegitimizing feminism.

But when I also follow up with that and say, it's true, there are real problems with men, but I wonder if the quote- unquote, men's rights movement is just a reactionary movement compared to the rise of women's rights?”

Sy Hoekstra: And then you have a conversation about that.

Jonathan Walton: And then we have a conversation. Because I'm asked, I'm genuinely having a conversation. I didn't pull out my like one, two, or first, second, third wave feminist philosophers. I didn't start like [laughs], “Let me go get my notes.” I didn't take my phone out. I was just like, this is something I'm thinking about, because they are my peer. This is my, in this case, one of my cousins. They're not a person in my section A discussion class that I'm trying to debate. This is my cousin who I grew up playing sports with, and really care for his mom, my aunt, and like [laughs] we're going to eat biscuits and gravy after this conversation.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: That I think is, we just have to prioritize loving the people who are in front of us, while not dismissing the people who are not there. So if I'm having a conversation with this person in front of me who I think is flattening out women's rights and dehumanizing women, it doesn't justify my dehumanizing him or reducing him to an argument to just be beaten down, just so I can justify the humanity of somebody else. I actually need to hold both of them in tension and love my neighbor, in this case my cousin, by having a conversation about women's rights, which honors him and his humanity, while also honoring the humanity of the women that are in the room in that conversation.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Which is always like, it's just always tough to do, but that is the line you have to walk, in my opinion.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: You have to walk the, “Everybody's a human,” line

[laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Right, which sounds so basic.

Sy Hoekstra: It feels basic, I say it that way to make it sound basic, because it's easy to lose it. It's easy to lose track, it's easy to just say either, depending on what your personality is, or kind of what your politics are, it's easier to say I'm not gonna rock the boat, and I'm gonna let this person dehumanize women. Or I'm going to beat this person down in an intellectual argument and care nothing for them as a human, which is also dehumanizing. And you can feel pressure to do either one of those things from both sides, and I just think neither of them in the end are our Jesus, frankly [laughs]. And we will be we… I don't want to put too many caveats in everything I say, but you have to exercise wisdom, right? There are going to be situations where you need to walk away from a conversation, or you need to just flat out tell someone, “Shut up.”

[Laughter]

Those situations will arise and people need to figure out where those are, but we’re talking about like what your guiding principle is, right?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And just everybody's human [laughs]. That's a pretty good guiding principle.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I will be… listen, like something that I think was a learning I had to do is that just because I don't speak up in every situation does not make me a bad friend. Or I lose my integrity in some way, all these things because my temper when I was younger was really bad. So I actually didn't have the skills to lovingly confront the people around me. I would just argue and try to destroy them. With all of the anger and frustration communicated clearly, the talking over them, the shouting them down the statistics. I was like, you cannot debate me. But that was not loving at all to the person sitting in front of me, and ultimately did not make it better, quote- unquote, downstream for the people that I was actually trying to defend. Because this person in front of me may leave thinking Jonathan is right, but they don't leave thinking I should do things differently on behalf of these people.

Sy Hoekstra: Why not? Let's say you just utterly destroy them in the argument, why don't they leave thinking I should do something differently on behalf of these people?

Jonathan Walton: [Laughs] Sadly, I think it's because it was disrespectful. I don't think that presentation matters, but I do think presentation matters. And how we share things with people is not ultimately how they will change, but how we share things with people will dictate if and how they stay connected to us and engaged in the conversation. So I think it was a transformative thing, the way that Jesus chose to talk to the Pharisees in different situations. So when he managed the crowd, when the woman quote- unquote was caught in adultery, and started to write down, write on the ground, he took the attention away from the woman that was presumably standing there naked in front of a crowd about to stone her, everyone started to look down at the ground and stop looking at her.

And then he said, “If any of you are without sin, let them cast the first stone.” That to me is a loving confrontation. It's not violent, he doesn't pick up stones and throw them back at them. He doesn't call down angels to have the stones fall on the people who are holding them, he doesn’t do any of those things. He just asked them a question, a rhetorical question in that way. And then they dropped the stones and then walked away. And then he looked at the woman who he did not condemn, and condemnation in the Torah would have been death. He did not condemn her. He said, “Go and sin no more.” So there's an invitation to stay in relationship with him while also taking an action, and I think if we're able to do that, then something transformative can happen.

Sy Hoekstra: And that's really hard to do, I think. Because just throwing rocks at the other people who are judging her or depending on what your orientation is maybe joining the rock throwers.

[laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Like it's hard to… I was thinking of what my temptation would be, which would be to punch the people in the face who had the rocks [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: But for some people, they have different temptations. I just think it's hard to resist those things because those are, as Jesus would put it, kind of the patterns of the world. Or maybe that’s how Paul would put it. And doing the stuff that Jesus does just requires such a different way of thinking.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Because so, when I was thinking about this question I was actually thinking about this question of what happens when your values about systems and structures sort of collide with your intimate family relationships?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: I was imagining a scenario where it's like, let's say you have someone in your family who uses drugs. And you maybe zoom out like not somebody who's your family, how do you think we should be approaching the issue of drug use in our society? Maybe you think it's a public health issue, we shouldn't be criminalizing it. It's something where people need support, not judgment and shame. It's a psychological issue. It's a disease. It's not just like an immoral choice. All those things. Okay, so you have all those beliefs, then bring a drug user into your home, and what changes? Now all of a sudden, it's not like an arm's length policy question, it's is this person going to steal from me to feed a habit? Is this person going to bring, I don't know, a bag of heroin into a home where my kid is or something?

Jonathan Walton: My kid, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: You know what I mean? There's all these questions, that just, it raises so many issues of stuff that you have to deal with, and it's so much easier to go back to the way that the world thinks and just erase the traumatic things, cut them off, get rid of them.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: If there's someone who is sick and in need of support, you can't kick them out of your house. But if there's someone who's just making bad decisions and is just selfish, not thinking about other people, and they’re a criminal, and they deserve to be locked up, you can kick them out of your house, no problem. And then all the problems go away, then you don't have to worry about your kid. Then you don't have to worry about all the time and energy you're going to have to put into being creatively supportive to this person. So I just think, I'm using this as an example, but this could be people with mental health symptoms, this could be people with, it could even be like you, Jonathan, all the stuff that you just said about how to approach someone who's racist, when you're actually faced with a racist person.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: That's a lot harder to do, you know what I mean? Like, now they're insulting… you know what I mean? It just becomes so easy for us to follow the patterns of the world because they help us reduce trauma. That's why they're there. That's why those narratives about personal responsibility… It's like we were talking about Maxine Davis, actually how the criminal justice system, a lot of it is to put yourself in a hierarchy where you're a good person and the people who commit crimes are bad, and we can get rid of them.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely.

Sy Hoekstra: Those kinds of narratives make the lives of the people who tell them easier. They absolve the people who propagate the narratives of moral responsibility for other people.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: And for being in a society and they allow us to make things simple and cut and dry. And we do that most of the time by demeaning and dehumanizing other people, and by ignoring their actual circumstances, ignoring psychological and circumstantial situation that they're facing that you've never faced before. You have no idea how you would react if you're in their situation. Forget all that, it doesn't matter. They're bad. We can lock them up, we can kick them out, we can get rid of them, you know?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I just appreciate you saying you want to do what Jesus did in the situation with people trying to stone the woman because that's the hardest thing to do. And there's so much soft narrative power that is so subtle and so pervasive against us doing that exact thing what Jesus did.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and in to push back, or actually not to push back against you, but to push back against the narratives of the world. Let's say you pick up stones and fight on behalf of the woman. The pattern of the world would say, when you realize that you shouldn't have picked up stones to stone the crowd, even though you beat all of them, justify why you did it by this person's, like by protecting this person, as opposed to saying, “Hey, I'm so sorry I resorted to the tactics that you were trying to employ against this person. I used those against you, and that was wrong. I wish that I had done this differently, and I hope that we can all protect the vulnerable people, not using the same tactics of dehumanization and violence.”

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. Jonathan, any other thoughts there or should we move on to Christmas?

Jonathan Walton: No, we can move on. I think we’re good.

Sy: All right. So tell me what happens then with the incarnation, Jonathan. We're here talking about Christmas in theory. Now we're actually gonna start talking about Christmas. How does the example of Jesus and the incarnation change kind of how we think about these things or help us move in the direction that we want to move?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think there's a beautifully difficult photo of the Nativity scene right now at the church in Bethlehem. And it's baby Jesus on a pile of broken concrete from a building that was destroyed by a missile there.

Sy Hoekstra: Right, and for people who don't know, Bethlehem is in what is now Palestine. Right?

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Currently being bombed, the place where the Christmas story happened.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, and Christmas services there have been canceled because of said bombardment. So I think one of the things the incarnation teaches me in this moment, we had a Bible study on Sunday, and leaning into the reality that Jesus is vulnerable as a baby under an oppressive regime. Mary is vulnerable as a teenager who is pregnant about to be quietly divorced or dismissed by her husband that she was committed to. Elizabeth is vulnerable as in a married woman who has been childless for years and when Angel Gabriel shows up and says, “You're gonna have a son,” she says, “My disgrace has been removed.” The entire story of humanity, of the divine encounter with humanity in Luke 1, is about vulnerability. Mary is vulnerable, Joseph is vulnerable. Zacharia is invited to be vulnerable, he doesn't want to opt in, the angel shuts him up [laughs].

Elizabeth is invited to be… and Jesus comes into the midst of an oppressed, vulnerable group of people and does not announce himself for a decade. 12 years old, like where do you think I was gonna be? So there's all these stories about what did Jesus do, blah, blah, in all those years, but all that to say is he was silent about the, at least the narrative is silent to us about all the problems in the world. It's fascinating to me that Jesus paid taxes to the Romans and those resources oppressed other people. When I think about, oh, like 54 cents of my tax dollars goes into the military industrial complex of the US, like, Jesus paid taxes. That is, I don't know what to do with that. Jesus was a vulnerable person in the midst of an oppressive system his entire life.

So how do we be vulnerable in the midst of the oppressive systems and structures we are aware of and not aware of, and pursue intimacy with God and respond to him in ways that bear witness to this new kingdom and this new family? That's what I'm getting from the incarnation right now.

Sy Hoekstra: And what answers if any, have you come up to with that question?

Jonathan Walton: It's not so much an answer, but I think one of the things that stands out to me is that the most vulnerable thing I can be, not just with my family, but in any situation is just Jonathan. Like not hiding behind accolades or whatever story I can tell myself, but that reality of… like I was praying with one of our cohorts, one of the people from our cohorts yesterday, when I tell Maia I am accepted, God is not ashamed of me, I'm a son of the most high God, then she says “daughter’ and we do that thing, she doesn't have the same generational trauma that I have. But I'm realizing I'm telling her this because I'm debunking narratives within myself and trying to give her the gift as opposed to giving her the liability.

And it's fascinating to me that Jesus would subject himself to that, to just be himself. To be 100 percent, human 100 percent divine, but lean into, at least when he's a baby, like his humanity. So how can I lean into my humanity and see it as a good thing?

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. That's really good. I think I want to also emphasize on top of that, that the gift of God's presence especially in the vulnerable circumstances that you were just talking about in the Roman Empire and all that. In poverty, in being a refugee and everything that he was, is supposed to signal the idea of Emmanuel, the idea of God with us, which is such a direct contradiction to our vulnerability. Meaning, this is not a complicated point I'm making, but if you really believe in the idea of Emmanuel that's going to help you with your loneliness, that's going to help you with your fear [laughs]. That's going to help you with your insecurities when you're around your family, that's gonna help you with your insecurities when you're alone, if you're feeling like… how much more of an answer can you have for loneliness and isolation than God is with you?

And that doesn't mean that me saying that immediately cures everybody's loneliness and isolation, or heals their wounds with their family. But it is just a gift for us to meditate and reflect on and to live into, and to find, I don't know. To find a greater sense of ways that we are not alone. So there's that component of it. There's the somewhat of an antidote to loneliness and fear [laughs]. And then I think there's also just the example of the incarnation meaning in. like how Paul describes the incarnation as God emptying himself of privilege, emptying himself of riches and status and coming to be one of us. The problems that I was talking about before, like when I was talking about having the family member who's a drug user or whatever, that was just my example.

The narratives that we tell ourselves that allow us to dismiss other people and absolve ourselves of moral responsibility. The Incarnation is the complete opposite of that [laughs]. Who better to relieve themselves of responsibility for your actions and behavior than God? [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: Amen.

Sy Hoekstra: And what does God do? The opposite. Says, “I'm going to shoulder the responsibility of everything all of you have done, and I'm going to come down. I'm going to empty myself of the privilege, I'm not walking away. I'm going to be as in it as I can. I'm not kicking you out of the house, I'm not leaving, I'm not cutting you off. And at the same time, I'm not one of you. I'm going to be…” It's like perfect differentiation [laughs]. “I'm gonna be here, but I'm gonna be entirely myself and separate from who you all are.”

Jonathan Walton: Yup.

Sy Hoekstra: And I just think that example, the ability that we have to follow and commune with that person just gives me a ton of hope. Like that's the person that we're following, that we're trying to become more like, is the person who does not cut people off. The person who finds the way to be in the suffering. I don't know. I guess it took me probably a while to get to that point because it's hard what Jesus did [laughter] and following him is hard as the Bible warned several times. But it's just if we were following that example, all of us, man, what a different world we would have,

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: What different policies we would have, what a different government we would have.

Jonathan Walton: And I mean, a different church.

Sy Hoekstra: Very different church.

Jonathan Walton: Like imagine if the Catholic Church had done that instead of the papal bull that was manifest destiny.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh that was enshrining White supremacy and theology in beginning the colonial project. Yeah. Right.

Jonathan Walton: Let it be so.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, amen. Let's wrap up that discussion there, but then we have our segment to do Jonathan.

Jonathan Walton: Cool.

Sy Hoekstra: All right. So we still, by the way, we still need a name for this segment. We need to figure out what we’re gonna call this. Maybe I need like a sound effect or something. We'll figure it out.

Jonathan Walton: Behind the blurb, sound drop [makes the air horn noise].

Sy Hoekstra: Behind the blurb [laughs]. Yeah, I'll get an air horn. So what I wanted to talk about today was one from our newsletter last week, if you're listening to this when it comes out. And it was ever since Twitter went from the dumpster fire that it always was to sort of like blazing dumpster inferno that it became in the last year. So I've left and looked for other places to find things.

And I spent some time on Mastodon and have discovered the incredible work of D. Elizabeth Glassco who's a Rutgers history professor on Mastodon, who just leaves these incredibly long threads of really cool stories from Black history.

It's like a ministry that she's doing over there on Mastodon. And okay, so I'm reading this thread that's about the Civil War, and basically, the Union Army has captured this area in South Carolina. Abraham Lincoln has issued the Emancipation Proclamation and they are noticing of this one kind of area that they've taken over in South Carolina, that they have this one person who's volunteering with them, who is incredibly good at speaking to the slaves that they have freed and creating networks of communication among the slaves, and getting information, getting reconnaissance and espionage, recruiting people to her cause. And she's really good at speaking with the Gullah-speaking populations, even though they're not they don't speak the same language, she's finding ways to communicate.

She has camaraderie with them, and the person is Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman is down in this encampment of the Union Army, basically creating networks of currently and formerly enslaved spies effectively. And she's just doing this kind of out of her own accord because she's used to doing it because it's how she operates the Underground Railroad. So they recruit her to lead this one stealth mission. She's the first woman in US history to lead an armed mission for the US Army. They recruit her, she leads about 250 Black soldiers and 50 White soldiers into these basically really backwoods parts of South Carolina, where they're getting into plantations that are just really far away from town centers or anything, going up this river in these boats with a bunch of soldiers.

And she has so effectively scouted with all of her spies the area, that they know where all of their anti-troop explosives and traps and gun stations are and everything. And they're basically sneaking up these creeks and rivers at night. They literally in the course of one night, they pull 700 enslaved people off of plantations. And the people who live there have no idea that it's happening, and they basically just gut the economy of this whole area of South Carolina, and free 700 people in like one night, and with one death in the middle of an army. So it's like a huge blow for the Union Army, and all led by Harriet Tubman. So this is more people than she ever freed on the Underground Railroad. She did it in one night with these people.

And it's just wild to me, the reason I bring this up and the reason I put it in the newsletter is because of how much I think hope it brings me that people like her exist [laughs] or existed. That like just the sheer amount of bravery and the sheer amount of skill that she had and that she actually deployed on behalf of her cause, as a Black woman in US history, as a disabled woman, she had epilepsy… we don't know if it was epilepsy or not. She had a…

Jonathan Walton: Injury.

Sy Hoekstra: …seizure disorder caused by head trauma. It gives me hope, and I don't want to say that in a flippant way, because I know a lot of like, you can have White people talking about slaves who did stuff like that. And just like, “Look at this, isn't this great [laughs]? Golly, gee, this is fantastic.”

I'm not trying to diminish the ridiculous circumstances that she was in or how hard she had to work, but the story gives me a lot of hope. And I just want to hear what your immediate reactions are to it, because you were raising your eyebrows [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I'm reading this in real time, but one of the things that it reminds me of is that there's a reason why people in power want to ban books and change stories and not tell all these things. I remember I wrote a poem called Just Black. It was the first time I ever did poetry about race in front of crowds in New York City, and I was so nervous that I did it. And one of the lines, it says they don't want us to remember the Martins or the Malcolm's and I just went through all the revolutionary people that had impacted me. Because if we don't know them, we can't change things. And if you don't have the imagination, or the history, then we'll just keep the status quo going.

So yeah, this reminds me to get creative this Christmas season around the Congo. Get creative about what to do about Gaza, get creative about the people who are still on the proverbial plantation that we're trying to get off of. So I'm grateful for this story. And I need to reactivate my Mastodon account.

[laughter]

Sy Hoekstra: The abolitionists that yeah, so much of abolition, I studied a lot of abolition history. I was a history major in college. And so much abolition is like that, like the imagination that it takes to do the stuff that they did.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: To be that audacious and that bold and to just like, you're going to just pull a new world into this one.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Right.

Sy Hoekstra: Because nobody could have possibly have imagined this kind of raid being pulled off, because you needed someone as uniquely gifted and dedicated as Harriet Tubman to be able to pull something like this off. And I just, I don't know, there's so many other… Can I do one more before we go, just one more story?

Jonathan Walton: Sure. Yeah, go on.

Sy Hoekstra: Here’s another example of this just imaginative, absolute bold stuff. So there was this, they call it an abolition riot, which is a slanted way of thinking about it, but it's 1831 in Boston. And there are these two women on trial as runaway slaves. They show up on the day that they're having the legal proceedings, and the courtroom is just full of abolitionist Black women, like just packed from wall to wall, the whole gallery, they're out in the hall they're everywhere.

Jonathan Walton: Oh wow.

Sy Hoekstra: And they let the proceeding happen and then when it becomes clear that things are not going to be fair and these women are going to be shackled, a woman sitting in the crowd just says, “Go,” and they flood the court, like the area where the judge and the attorneys are [laughs]. They all just run in and then they all just leave. And when they leave, the two women are gone. And they have a chariot, like a horse drawn chariot waiting outside of the court. They put the two women in the chariot, it takes off through the streets of Boston, and there's no historical record of those two women anywhere else ever again.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] That’s amazing.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And that's what I mean. Like, that's the kind of stuff, I don't know, to have just the sheer gall to do it. You know what I mean [laughs]? Gall is maybe is the wrong word. Just the audacity.

Jonathan Walton: Wow. Like, “Go.”

[laughter]

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. They were all ready. They were all just sitting there totally ready.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, they knew the deal. They knew the assignment and that’s what we doing.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] But coming up with the assignment is the incredible thing to me. Just the imaginative power of this. That's again, like you said, this is why stories like this get banned and put away and diminished in importance and whatever.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So let's end on that note of hope, shall we [laughs]?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Get imaginative, get creative and bold this Christmas season everybody with the power that comes with the knowledge that God is with you.

Jonathan Walton: Right. Amen.

Sy Hoekstra: Before we go, just again, a quick reminder, please rate us, give us a five star rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Give us a review too, just write a sentence or two or five paragraphs, whatever you feel like writing on Apple, if you're there on Apple, they let you do that. It really helps us. We're not kidding, please. We were going to have some news early next year, I think about kind of how we're trying to really grow and we have some big plans and big goals. And you doing little easy free things like this actually really helps us. So stay tuned. In the meantime, five-stars on Apple and Spotify, please.

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. The transcripts for this show are available at ktfpress.com, click podcast transcripts, those are by Joyce Ambale. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. We will see you all in January for our next episode. And everybody Merry Christmas.

Jonathan Walton: Merry Christmas.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: I like that when I have to do something on the outline I never write it out for myself. I just wrote, “Sy, colon, welcome, comma et cetera [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I’m like I don't... Yeah, I need more than that in all of my notes.

Sy Hoekstra: Well, you’re not the… Yeah, but I also want to make sure that you have what you need, but I apparently don't care if I have what I need [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: I also think you think you will be much more succinct than me, so therefore a script for Jonathan.

Sy Hoekstra: I'm the… whatever.

[laughter]

Jonathan Walton: I also appreciate it a lot. I'm like, “Yep, staying on task. This is wonderful. Sy knows me, I feel seen.”

[laughter]

So I see it as exceptionally helpful.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh good, I'm glad.

In November’s bonus episode, Jonathan and Sy talked about the conflict in Israel and Palestine. They discussed:

-         how they both approach thinking about the occupation as people leaving colonized faith

-        The difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism

-        How to engage media and advocacy on this subject in an emotionally healthy way,

And a lot more! This is a transcript of a preview of the episode. You can hear the preview here.

Content warning for brief descriptions of wartime violence, including against children.

Transcript

Introduction

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Sy Hoekstra: Hey everybody, this is Sy. I’m just here to introduce this preview to our bonus episode, the one that we released in November about Israel and Palestine and everything that’s happening there. You’re gonna get kind of a snippet of it, probably about 10 or 12 minutes or so of a much longer episode. We release these bonus episodes every month. This was our November episode. Our December episode on Christmas is dropping on Friday.

If you want to become a paid subscriber and get these episodes in your podcast player or your inbox every month, go to KTFPress.com, sign up as a paid subscriber. You can always get a free month at the beginning of your subscription by going to KTFPress.com/freemonth. I think you can remember that: KTFPress.com/freemonth for a free month.

If you become a paid subscriber, you get the bonus episodes as they come out. You get the whole archive. You can get them all in a nice little feed that goes in your podcast player. And you get our newsletter that comes out every week with highlights from Jonathan and I—highlights from media on things that we think will be helpful in your discipleship and political education, and why we think that. All of it, of course, aimed at helping us leave colonized faith for the kingdom of God. So if you want to get access to all of that, and support everything that we do at KTF Press, please, again, KTFPress.com, become a paid subscriber.

Thank you so much! Without further ado, here is the clip from the episode on Israel and Palestine.

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

Understanding Israel’s origin and today’s violence

Sy Hoekstra: Let's just start with where we're coming from when we talk about this with Israel and Palestine. Where we start from, what's our starting point and how do we think about the issues? Jonathan, do you want to…? You've already like intimated a little bit about what you think, but why don't you give us a little more?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I think the starting point for me, I immediately go to the historical context of how and why Israel came to be, and then how and—the State of Israel came to be in 1948—and the United States’ and the West’s role in that. I dive there immediately just so that I can step out of trying to throw on Old Covenant language, try to graft myself onto some larger cosmic story from God, and just say, “No, that actually wasn't it.” Let me resist that temptation. Because it is so easy to want to be right when we're angry, upset, frustrated, sad, grieving, and an attack like what Hamas did on October 7th can lead to that. I think the big picture is where I start and where I end is just mothers holding their dying children. Those two images for me are really, really, really, really difficult to hold on to.

Sy Hoekstra: And even by the way, you mentioned the ICU before, I think.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Just in case people don't know, like a day or two ago, the hospital that was bombed toward the beginning of the fighting was bombed again and the power went out.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So the incubators in the ICU were not working and a few dozen children, babies died as a result [correction: the hospital could not provide incubators for about 36 premature babies after the bombing. Five died as a direct consequence. A third of all babies at the hospital were critically ill when the hospital was finally evacuated, and all had serious infections. We at KTF do not know Their ultimate fate at the moment].

Jonathan Walton: Right. And I mean, yeah, that just doesn't have to, it just doesn't have to happen. It just doesn't have to happen. And if you follow me on Instagram, I've tried to post… [choking up]

Sy Hoekstra: Take your time.

Jonathan Walton: …the same photo every day. There's a short video of a woman just holding her kid, and they put… like all of the remains are just in bags. White bags. And that I think… I don't post other videos because I think they're too… Just, I mean, I don't want people to be… Like, even some things are too unsettling for me, and I don't think Instagram is helpful and how they just bombard people with images to keep them on algorithm. But this this particular video, I do share because I think it speaks to the lack of humanity and the humanity… the lack of humanity of what's happening to them and the humanity of what is happening when you lose a child. And it doesn't have to be that way. It just doesn't.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Thanks.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I think I start at a similar place. The beginning point for me is 1948. The context for everything that is happening is the fact that 750,000 Palestinians were forced off of their land. And since then, in order to maintain, they were forced off their land in order to create space for settlers to come in and create this state, and then have decades of basically violence to maintain that situation. And I think like Jonathan said, if there's a settler situation like that, at no point in history have you ever had hundreds of thousands of people kicked off their land and forced into another place and forced to live as second class citizens under a regime that is fundamentally not built for them and not had violence as a response.

Which is not the same as me saying I don't hold Hamas responsible for what they've done. It just means if you're going to have a state like Israel, there's going to be a violent response every single time. And you're going to have to have continuous escalations of violence in order to maintain a situation like that, because you kicked hundreds of thousands of people off their land. And if you don't start from that point and say, how do we go back and do something about that fundamental problem that founding the State of Israel created, you're never going to solve anything, right? There's going to be no… if the only discussion is, “We're here, all the international community says we deserve to be here, the Bible says we deserve to be here, this is our land, nobody else matters,” then you're never going to stop having violence.

And by the way, Palestinians live in a lot of different places, they don't just live in Palestine. You're never going to stop having Palestinians, you’re never going to stop having the idea of Palestine. A huge percentage of Jordan’s population is Palestinians. There are Palestinians in Egypt. There are Palestinians all over the world, it's not going away. And any other framing is just not going to get you to any sort of solution that deals with anything real. For me, like the one state, two state—I don't know the details. I'm just saying you're going to have to address the fact that all these people's land was taken, and they were forced off of it, and there's been an enormous amount of violence and discrimination in order to maintain that situation, and if you don't, this attack from Hamas will not be the last.

It's the same thing, 9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum either, right? That happened… again, I hold the people who did it responsible for their actions, but it's also not surprising. That it happened at all is not surprising.

America is the colonizer in Israel

The other point I wanted to make is that just like, people call it a colonizing project in Israel, and people are confused a lot of times by that framing of it. But it's not as confusing when you understand how invested the West is in it. Like effectively we are the colonizing country.

Jonathan Walton: Yep.

Sy Hoekstra: Like the United States and Britain and France to a certain degree, we have all had a hand in this because we want an ally in the region. It is about our foreign policy interests. That's why Israel was created in the first place.

That's the only reason they had the political will to do it in the first place, and that's the only reason it continues to exist. Because another reality of the situation is Israel is surrounded by people who would destroy it if it wasn't being protected by bigger countries like us. And they're there because we want them to be there and because they serve our interests in a lot of ways, our foreign policy interests.

American Hypocrisy about indigenous people replicated in Israel

And I think part of the reason that we don't see it this way, or that Americans especially are primed not to see it this way, is because of the kind of racist colonialist way that we see our own country.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Right? Like we do not… So many Americans, so many Christians in particular—talk about a concrete example of colonized faith, of theology that supports colonization—we talk about American exceptionalism and how we've been blessed by God and how we've accomplished all these great things, and nothing about all the people that were displaced and killed and enslaved and exploited to get to where we are. Like we are so used to that, just celebrating America and not thinking about any of the things that happened as a result. I was just watching something with Rashid Khalidi [discussion with Professor Kahlidi begins at about 26”40 in the linked video] who's a Palestinian-American historian, and he was just like “A Native American reservation, Palestine, the places where Black people were forced to live in South Africa in apartheid; It's all the same thing.”

You're just forcing people to live somewhere so that your colonialist project can stand. And the point is that we're used to talking about self-determination and self-governance. Like us in the United States, we say, “We fought against Britain because we had the inalienable right to govern ourselves,” with no thought to the fact that we were denying the right to govern themselves to a bunch of other people.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Absolutely.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] That is a fundamental part of how America thinks of itself, that kind of doublespeak [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Self-determination for us, but not for the people that we don't want to give it to. So it's not really a surprise that we have no issue saying, “Oh yeah, this state Israel, has self-determination, and we're going to make sure that they continue to have that” with no regard for all the self-determination that they are denying to the people within their borders.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. I mean, embedded in our political reality in the United States and all of the economic and social tentacles downstream of that is radical hypocrisy.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And are socially accepted. Morally, I'm using my big, huge finger quotes, morally justifiable hypocrisy.

American foreign policy interests are not Jesus’ priorities

Oh, and something that I wish Christians understood, which is why I think I enter back in where like where I come into it because I try to stay in a lane to stay grounded, is that like the economic and political and militaristic interests of the United States are not how Jesus runs foreign policy. The idea that the, let's say, the Roman government fits so beautifully with Jesus' desire for the beloved community makes absolutely, positively no sense. And so if you are a follower of Jesus listening to this podcast and you're thinking to yourself, “We should wholeheartedly put just a platform where the kingdom of God is the same as a platform of a political party,” then we are radically out of step with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the apostles and anything before or after that we are sitting in with in Scripture, which is missing it completely.

Because Jesus says, “We will be known by the fruit that we bear,” and the fruit of the United States, just like Sy was saying, when Joe Biden stood up in Congress in 1986 and said, as he was fighting for $3 billion worth of funding to go to Israel, he said, “This is the best $3 billion investment we can make, because if Israel didn't exist, we would have to make it exist to secure our interests in the region.”

Sy Hoekstra: That is a clip available on YouTube if you want to go watch it.

[laughter]

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

We’re not using Revelation as a lens to interpret today’s events

Sy Hoekstra: I should also say or we should also note, this is implicitly obvious, but we do not come at this from a position of like interpreting the dream in the book of Revelation to figure out who needs to own Israel and when in order to bring about the apocalypse [laughs], or anything like that.

Jonathan Walton: Oh Lord… [laughs]

Sy Hoekstra: I’m laughing as I say it because it is funny, but you have to note it because that is a dominant view in American Christianity.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: It's not a dominant view in the church in any way, like the global church, but it's the dominant view here. And again, it's not surprising to me that it is a dominant view here, because it is a view that fits very nicely with American foreign policy.

There is no conspiracy of Jewish people, just American colonialism

Jonathan Walton: Yes. I will also say, and this is not in our notes, but we don't come at this also coming at it thinking that this is some… when we are noting the interests of the United States and Western interests in foreign policy to set this up, we are not then endorsing some grand conspiracy theory about Jewish people.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah, that's a good point to make. We're actually doing the opposite of that.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: We're saying, unfortunately, like sadly, what I'm saying is, I think the Jewish state and the global Jewish people have been,

Jonathan Walton: Apro—

Sy Hoekstra: like their really genuine cause has been used, has been appropriated as you were about to say.

Jonathan Walton: right.

Sy Hoekstra: They’re pawns in the schemes of America's foreign policy interests. I think that's what it comes down to. By the way, a lot of other... this is not just Israel. Like a lot of times Hamas is a pawn of Iran or Russia. Like a lot of times this is… the Middle East and all these fights, we’ll talk about this more, a lot of people are being used for other people's interests.

That is generally what is happening in so many conflicts in the Middle East, like they are proxy wars for other people and other people's interests.

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

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for listening. Again, KTFPress.com to become a paid subscriber. Get access to this whole episode and all the bonus episodes. Get our newsletter, and get a free month at the beginning of your subscription if you go to KTFPress.com/freemonth.

Thank you again so much for listening. Hopefully we’ll see you on Friday for the December bonus episode. If not, we hope you all have a very merry Christmas.

[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: We’re going, yeah?

Jonathan Walton: [singing] We are recording now. We are recording now. Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay

Jonathan Walton: Okay [clears throat].

Sy Hoekstra: [inhales for a long time, brrrrs loudly sounding like he’s shaking his head, coughs, clears his throat, kind of growls, and speaks in a loud, hoarse voice]. Ready to go.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Everyone, I’m normal [laughter]. I make normal noises and there's no need for concern.

(Content warning for discussion of violence in a war zone, including against children). For this month’s bonus episode, Jonathan and Sy are talking about the conflict in Israel and Palestine. They discuss how they both approach thinking about the occupation as people leaving colonized faith, the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, how to engage media and advocacy on this subject in an emotionally healthy way, and a lot more. Please write in to [email protected] to let us know what you think about the episode, or to ask us any questions you have!

Mentioned in the episode:

* Adam Serwer’s piece on not equating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism

* Peter Beinart’s Substack, The Beinart Notebook

* The YouTube clip of President Biden speaking about Israel as a senator

* The New York Times’ reporting from its interviews with leaders of Hamas.

* The event about Palestine featuring a discussion with Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nihisi Coates, and Dr. Rashid Khalidi [the discussion begins at 26:40 in the linked video]

Correction: in the episode, Sy said that dozens of babies died at a hospital in Gaza when the NICU lost power. In fact, the hospital could not provide incubators for about 36 premature babies after the bombing. Five died as a direct consequence. A third of all babies at the hospital were critically ill when the hospital was finally evacuated, and all had serious infections. We at KTF do not know Their ultimate fate at the moment. We apologize for the inaccuracy.

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Transcripts of every episode are available at KTFPress.com/s/transcripts.

Hosts

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Mastodon.

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra.

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode.

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Sy Hoekstra: Why is Israel such an appealing idea? It's because Jewish people have faced so many thousands of years of oppression, everywhere they've gone. The dream of having a place where your oppressed people can be free and flourish, it's not hard to sympathize with that at all, right? It's one of the most natural human instincts. The problem is like Jonathan said before, the way this world is ordered, the easiest way to accomplish that is to trample other people.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. I'm Jonathan Walton.

Sy Hoekstra: And I'm Sy Hoekstra, welcome to this bonus episode. We haven't done one of these in a long time, Jonathan. But we are going to be talking today about Israel and Palestine and everything that's been going on over there. And we're going to introduce a new segment a little bit. Not a little bit—we're introducing a new segment today. We're going to be trying something out that we might then try on the regular show in the future, where we're going to be talking about one of our recommendations from our newsletter, just like in a little bit more detail before we jump into the topic of the show. Sometimes they will have to do with the topic of the show, sometimes they won't, the recommendations we talk about. Today it does.

We're going to talk about the great piece that Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic that Jonathan highlighted last week. If you're listening to this the day it comes out, last week. But before we get into all that, one quick thing, Jonathan.

Jonathan Walton: Yep, we have one favor to ask of you and that is to go to Apple or Spotify and give this show a five-star rating. If it's four, you can keep it to yourself [Sy laughs], but five stars, that'll be great. It's a quick and easy way, and a free way to support us. And it makes us look really, really great when other people look us up. So please go to Apple or Spotify and give us that five star rating. And if you're on Apple, please do leave us a quick review. We'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Sy Hoekstra: We would. Jonathan, don't make jokes just after I've taken a sip of tea, I almost spat that on my microphone.

[laughter]

One quick note up top, we know how hard this conversation is for people in so many different ways, and there are a lot of different angles. If you just listen to the first couple minutes, you'll only hear our thoughts on a couple different angles of this. So we would ask you to listen with us all the way through to hear whole perspectives, because there's a lot to talk about and a lot to take in. And also just take care of yourself, any specific trigger warnings will be in the show notes.

Alright, let's get started. We'll get into this. So Adam Serwer wrote this piece in The Atlantic about not conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. And Jonathan, why don't you tell us what he wrote?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So Serwer defines Zionism as, quote, the belief that the Jews should have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland.” And that argument then goes on that if you're against that idea, you're denying Jews a right that everyone else has in the world which is inherently discriminatory. So Serwer writes, “There's nothing anti-Semitic about anti-Zionists who believe that the existence of a religious or ethnically defined state is inherently racist, and that the only real solution to the conflict is, as Palestinian-American advocate, Yousef Munayyer writes, ‘equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians is a single shared state, end quote, with a constitution that would ‘that the country would be home to both peoples and that despite national narratives and voices on either side that claim otherwise, both people have historical ties to the land,’ end quote. Perhaps you think this idea is naive or unrealistic; that is not an expression of prejudice towards Jews.”

Now, he also points out that there have been Jewish voices throughout history and today who make the case for this one-state anti-Zionist solution.

Sy Hoekstra: Including one of your former professors, Peter Beinart [pronounced bean-art] Beinart [pronounced Bine-art]?.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Beinart [Bine-art].

Sy Hoekstra: Beinart. Okay.

Jonathan Walton: Yes, if you don't read Peter Beinart stuff, please go subscribe to his Substack, and then read all of the wonderful, wonderful analyses he does on Israel and Palestine. And he's been doing this for decades.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. Thank you for that summary Jonathan. So, now tell us why did you pick this and what are your thoughts on it? Why did you pick this article?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think I picked this article for two reasons. One is that he makes an argument that everybody makes, and then he makes one that very few people know about. So the first one is that we need to be able to say with distinct clarity and conciseness, that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Now, if we conflate the two, it's helpful for people who have certain agendas. But if we're actually trying to love people well, and see them for who they are, and not just politicize them into entities that we can deny or dismiss or destroy, then we have to be able to say that Palestinians are not Hamas. That the political ideologies that govern us are not held by every single person, especially if you are a child in an incubator, right?

We have to be able to see people apart from the ideas that oppress and marginalize them, or the ideas that we have about them. And so that argument for me, particularly in somewhere like The Atlantic, which has made unhelpful articles, by the way, since the conflict started, but Adam just writes a great, concise, clear argument around the nuances necessary. The second thing is that if we are about creating theocratic states that are tied to ethnicity, we are creating states that are racist and exclusatory. Exclusionary?

Sy Hoekstra: Exclusionary [laughs]. You just made up a new word, exclusatory.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Exclusatory. They are inherently racist and exclusionary, and we need to lean into that a little bit more, I think. Because if we are desiring to set up religious ethno-states, we are creating spaces that will be inherently oppressive to people who are outside of that social hierarchy. That is what will happen. So if we are going to create political realities that then create social realities, because politics, like the Greek is like how people, social people deal with power, then we are going to create structures that oppress and marginalize. That's what's going to happen. And so there needs to actually be not a two-state solution, in my opinion, but a one-state solution where people can actually pursue nuance and prosperity and flourishing together.

It's not a popular opinion, or popularly talked about opinion, but I do think that is the one that's actually going to lead to prosperity and peace in the region. That's my hope and my prayer when I engage with these things, and I'm grateful that Adam Serwer wrote the piece and it was published.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s interesting cause Serwer actually doesn't, he's like, “I don't really care one state, two state, whatever works for peace and harmony, that's fine with me. I'm just pointing out what I think should be a point of engagement for people talking about the issue.”

Jonathan Walton: Yes, that’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's good. I like this one. This wasn’t my, this is your pick in the newsletter, but I love Adam Serwer [laughs], just in general. We've recommended him, I've recommended him before in the newsletter too. Part of the reason I think it’s important is because like you said in the newsletter, that just the noise of the conflict, the intensity of the emotions around it makes it really hard for a point like this that is relatively simple to land. And there are just, there are a lot of people... I mean, I was reading yesterday about how the Anti-Defamation League, which is a well known Jewish organization that kind of monitors extremism of all kinds, not just anti-Semitism, but they focus on that a lot, is now labeling any protests calling for a ceasefire as anti-Semitic—or as anti-Israel. Just calling for a ceasefire.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: That’s like the lack of nuance isn’t even… there are like grown adults…

[laughter]

…grown, well-educated adults, saying things that are absolutely wild, because people's emotions and ideologies and all kinds of ideas around this topic are just, they swirl and make a bunch of noise, like you said. And I just appreciate it when somebody says something that everyone needs to understand in an exceptionally clear way.

Jonathan Walton: Right. To add to that though, I think what is problematic is that there are major news outlets that interview people that say things like that. Like to be pro-Palestine is to be inherently anti-Semitic. And then they go unchallenged. They go one question and they move on to the next discussion. It's not just that the stuff is out there, it's that it's not challenged and then it's not questioned at all. So the conflation moves forward as fact for millions of people every day. And I hope that there are more leaders that will say, actually, let's slow down and separate the two.

Sy Hoekstra: Yep. And we will talk about how to slow down and separate things in a minute. Let's jump into the broader discussion then. Let's just start with where we're coming from when we talk about this with Israel and Palestine. Where we start from, what's our starting point and how do we think about the issues? Jonathan, do you want to…? You've already like intimated a little bit about what you think, but why don't you give us a little more?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I think the starting point for me, I immediately go to the historical context of how and why Israel came to be, and then how and—the State of Israel came to be in 1948—and the United States’ and the West’s role in that. I dive there immediately just so that I can step out of trying to throw on Old Covenant language, try to graft myself onto some larger cosmic story from God, and just say, “No, that actually wasn't it.” Let me resist that temptation. Because it is so easy to want to be right when we're angry, upset, frustrated, sad, grieving, and an attack like what Hamas did on October 7th can lead to that. I think the big picture is where I start and where I end is just mothers holding their dying children. Those two images for me are really, really, really, really difficult to hold on to.

Sy Hoekstra: And even by the way, you mentioned the ICU before, I think.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: Just in case people don't know, like a day or two ago, the hospital that was bombed toward the beginning of the fighting was bombed again and the power went out.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So the incubators in the ICU were not working and a few dozen children, babies died as a result.

Jonathan Walton: Right. And I mean, yeah, that just doesn't have to, it just doesn't have to happen. It just doesn't have to happen. And if you follow me on Instagram, I've tried to post… [choking up]

Sy Hoekstra: Take your time.

Jonathan Walton: …the same photo every day. There's a short video of a woman just holding her kid, and they put… like all of the remains are just in bags. White bags. And that I think… I don't post other videos because I think they're too… Just, I mean, I don't want people to be… Like, even some things are too unsettling for me, and I don't think Instagram is helpful and how they just bombard people with images to keep them on algorithm. But this this particular video, I do share because I think it speaks to the lack of humanity and the humanity… the lack of humanity of what's happening to them and the humanity of what is happening when you lose a child. And it doesn't have to be that way. It just doesn't.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Thanks.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I think I start at a similar place. The beginning point for me is 1948. The context for everything that is happening is the fact that 750,000 Palestinians were forced off of their land. And since then, in order to maintain, they were forced off their land in order to create space for settlers to come in and create this state, and then have decades of basically violence to maintain that situation. And I think like Jonathan said, if there's a settler situation like that, at no point in history have you ever had hundreds of thousands of people kicked off their land and forced into another place and forced to live as second class citizens under a regime that is fundamentally not built for them and not had violence as a response.

Which is not the same as me saying I don't hold Hamas responsible for what they've done. It just means if you're going to have a state like Israel, there's going to be a violent response every single time. And you're going to have to have continuous escalations of violence in order to maintain a situation like that, because you kicked hundreds of thousands of people off their land. And if you don't start from that point and say, how do we go back and do something about that fundamental problem that founding the State of Israel created, you're never going to solve anything, right? There's going to be no… if the only discussion is, “We're here, all the international community says we deserve to be here, the Bible says we deserve to be here, this is our land, nobody else matters,” then you're never going to stop having violence.

And by the way, Palestinians live in a lot of different places, they don't just live in Palestine. You're never going to stop having Palestinians, you’re never going to stop having the idea of Palestine. A huge percentage of Jordan’s population is Palestinians. There are Palestinians in Egypt. There are Palestinians all over the world, it's not going away. And any other framing is just not going to get you to any sort of solution that deals with anything real. For me, like the one state, two state—I don't know the details. I'm just saying you're going to have to address the fact that all these people's land was taken, and they were forced off of it, and there's been an enormous amount of violence and discrimination in order to maintain that situation, and if you don't, this attack from Hamas will not be the last.

It's the same thing, 9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum either, right? That happened… again, I hold the people who did it responsible for their actions, but it's also not surprising. That it happened at all is not surprising.

The other point I wanted to make is that just like, people call it a colonizing project in Israel, and people are confused a lot of times by that framing of it. But it's not as confusing when you understand how invested the West is in it. Like effectively we are the colonizing country.

Jonathan Walton: Yep.

Sy Hoekstra: Like the United States and Britain and France to a certain degree, we have all had a hand in this because we want an ally in the region. It is about our foreign policy interests. That's why Israel was created in the first place.

That's the only reason they had the political will to do it in the first place, and that's the only reason it continues to exist. Because another reality of the situation is Israel is surrounded by people who would destroy it if it wasn't being protected by bigger countries like us. And they're there because we want them to be there and because they serve our interests in a lot of ways, our foreign policy interests. And I think part of the reason that we don't see it this way, or that Americans especially are primed not to see it this way, is because of the kind of racist colonialist way that we see our own country.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Right? Like we do not… So many Americans, so many Christians in particular—talk about a concrete example of colonized faith, of theology that supports colonization—we talk about American exceptionalism and how we've been blessed by God and how we've accomplished all these great things, and nothing about all the people that were displaced and killed and enslaved and exploited to get to where we are. Like we are so used to that, just celebrating America and not thinking about any of the things that happened as a result. I was just watching something with Rashid Khalidi who's a Palestinian-American historian, and he was just like “A Native American reservation, Palestine, the places where Black people were forced to live in South Africa in apartheid; It's all the same thing.”

You're just forcing people to live somewhere so that your colonialist project can stand. And the point is that we're used to talking about self-determination and self-governance. Like us in the United States, we say, “We fought against Britain because we had the inalienable right to govern ourselves,” with no thought to the fact that we were denying the right to govern themselves to a bunch of other people.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Absolutely.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] That is a fundamental part of how America thinks of itself, that kind of doublespeak [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Self-determination for us, but not for the people that we don't want to give it to. So it's not really a surprise that we have no issue saying, “Oh yeah, this state Israel, has self-determination, and we're going to make sure that they continue to have that” with no regard for all the self-determination that they are denying to the people within their borders.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. I mean, embedded in our political reality in the United States and all of the economic and social tentacles downstream of that is radical hypocrisy.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: And are socially accepted. Morally, I'm using my big, huge finger quotes, morally justifiable hypocrisy.

Oh, and something that I wish Christians understood, which is why I think I enter back in where like where I come into it because I try to stay in a lane to stay grounded, is that like the economic and political and militaristic interests of the United States are not how Jesus runs foreign policy. The idea that the, let's say, the Roman government fits so beautifully with Jesus' desire for the beloved community makes absolutely, positively no sense. And so if you are a follower of Jesus listening to this podcast and you're thinking to yourself, “We should wholeheartedly put just a platform where the kingdom of God is the same as a platform of a political party,” then we are radically out of step with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the apostles and anything before or after that we are sitting in with in Scripture, which is missing it completely.

Because Jesus says, “We will be known by the fruit that we bear,” and the fruit of the United States, just like Sy was saying, when Joe Biden stood up in Congress in 1986 and said, as he was fighting for $3 billion worth of funding to go to Israel, he said, “This is the best $3 billion investment we can make, because if Israel didn't exist, we would have to make it exist to secure our interests in the region.”

Sy Hoekstra: That is a clip available on YouTube if you want to go watch it.

[laughter]

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: I should also say or we should also note, this is implicitly obvious, but we do not come at this from a position of like interpreting the dream in the book of Revelation to figure out who needs to own Israel and when in order to bring about the apocalypse [laughs], or anything like that.

Jonathan Walton: Oh Lord… [laughs]

Sy Hoekstra: I’m laughing as I say it because it is funny, but you have to note it because that is a dominant view in American Christianity.

Jonathan Walton: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: It's not a dominant view in the church in any way, like the global church, but it's the dominant view here. And again, it's not surprising to me that it is a dominant view here, because it is a view that fits very nicely with American foreign policy.

Jonathan Walton: Yes. I will also say, and this is not in our notes, but we don't come at this also coming at it thinking that this is some… when we are noting the interests of the United States and Western interests in foreign policy to set this up, we are not then endorsing some grand conspiracy theory about Jewish people.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah, that's a good point to make. We're actually doing the opposite of that.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: We're saying, unfortunately, like sadly, what I'm saying is, I think the Jewish state and the global Jewish people have been,

Jonathan Walton: Apro—

Sy Hoekstra: like their really genuine cause has been used, has been appropriated as you were about to say.

Jonathan Walton: right.

Sy Hoekstra: They’re pawns in the schemes of America's foreign policy interests. I think that's what it comes down to. By the way, a lot of other... this is not just Israel. Like a lot of times Hamas is a pawn of Iran or Russia. Like a lot of times this is… the Middle East and all these fights, we’ll talk about this more, a lot of people are being used for other people's interests.

That is generally what is happening in so many conflicts in the Middle East, like they are proxy wars for other people and other people's interests. Okay, so Jonathan, you mentioned the importance, and this actually goes nicely into what we were about to talk about, that which is the importance of separating the people of these two countries or of these two places, I guess. Of Israel and Palestine from their governments. Why is that such an important point to you?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think it's an important point because people are not always in control or responsible for what those who govern and control them do in the world. It's often that they don't agree. It's often that they don't endorse. It's often if they had power, they would actually stop it. But unfortunately because of how our world is ordered, children can't stop what their parents do. Employees can't stop what their bosses and supervisors do. Like if I held a child responsible for the abuse of their parents, then we have a serious problem, because in all of these interactions there's power and resources at play. So to say that a child or their mother is responsible for rockets firing from wherever, and then therefore you can take a missile and destroy that hospital or destroy that ambulance, or destroy that convoy that you just told to go into this corridor, there's serious, serious problems with that.

Similarly, if you are sitting on the other side of the wall downstream of oppression, it is radically unhelpful, radically wrong, to maim and kill and shoot and kidnap people who may not, and particularly an activist that I'm thinking of, she was actually someone who was helping the Palestinians get into hospitals in Israel and get the health care that they need, and she was kidnapped. So I think we have to understand that people are not necessarily endorsers or enforcers of the policies of the governments that govern them.

Sy Hoekstra: Right. And you can't talk about them as monoliths. I mean, like you were just mentioning, there's actually a number of people who were killed or kidnapped by Hamas who were peace advocates, who were actually people who are very much on the side of Palestine. That doesn't matter to Hamas. There’s no difference to them. And it's the same thing. I mean, actually, the Hamas leadership, just a couple days ago The New York Times published an interview with a bunch of the members of Hamas leadership, and the stuff they cop to is unbelievable. I mean, it's like stuff that people kind of already knew about them, but the fact they just come out and say it, like that they absolutely knew what the response of Israel would be to their attack. And they knew that a ton of people would die as a result. And they were just like, “That's just the price that we're paying to get this issue back on the map, basically.” Right?

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And the specific reason they're doing it was because Israel was attempting to normalize diplomatic relationships with Saudi Arabia and some other Middle Eastern countries, and they didn't want that to happen. They don't want Israel to become normalized in the Arab world, and they want more people talking about Palestine. So they killed a bunch of Israelis and then they knew that as a result, a bunch of their people would die. And that's just like, to them it's just totally is what it is. It's wild. It’s not wild, I guess, it's how a lot of terrorists operate. But on the other side, there are plenty of Israelis and there are plenty of Jews around the world who are completely against what the government of Israel does.

And the government of Israel right now is one of the most far-right, Jewish supremacist governments they've ever had. And so it's… I wholeheartedly agree with the point that you cannot talk about the conflict in a helpful or nuanced way without I think, realizing that.

Jonathan Walton: Right. I also lean into the fact, and this I think, is something we also have to hold tightly, even though it's really, really slippery. Is that even soldiers don't believe in the policies and the actions sometimes that they are forced to carry out. There are a number of IDF soldiers, and reserves and people who have left saying, “I don't want to be a part of this.” And just like you had soldiers coming back from Iraq, coming back from Afghanistan saying, “I thought that I was going for this one thing, and I went for something else. And I ended up fighting for my comrades, like fighting for my battalion. I'm not fighting for this country, I'm caught up in a conflict and I feel like a pawn.”

Because I think we have to lean into the complexities of the power that people have, not just that the power we think they have, the power that we perceive. Because behind every gun, and before every gun is a person. They’re people. The person who's sending the bullet, the person being hit by the bullet, the person that's dropping the bomb, the person that the bomb is dropped on. They’re people, and if we're able to see the image of God and one another, then maybe we could slow down before we dehumanize people and think that violence is justified.

Sy Hoekstra: I think that's a good transition for us into Jonathan, how do we in engage with the issues at hand here without burning out or just trying to avoid the anxiety or trying to ignore it? How do we come at this in an emotionally healthy way? And by the way, I'll note before you answer that, we've mentioned a number of articles and other resources along the way in this conversation, and we will have links to those in the show notes if you want to read anything further. But go ahead, Jonathan.

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think that, you know, I gave a talk some years ago, was it two years? It was a year after the march by White supremacists in Charlottesville. So what I said to them was that for some of you, this is your first time engaging with anything about White supremacy and racism and the experiences of Black people and White people in the United States. It's your first time. This is all new to you, all the feels are there. For some of you, you were here when Rodney King was beaten, or you were here when Trayvon Martin was killed, or your first step into this may have happened today, yesterday, or 10, 15 years ago. But regardless of that, we need to be formed into people that are able to respond from our deepest values, not our deepest wounds.

So if you're sitting there, and you're like, “Man, all these images are coming into my feed on social media.” I think, again, we need to treat social media like a garden, not a dumpster fire, because the algorithm is feeding off your outrage and desires your constant engagement. But literally, your heart and mind cannot handle that amount of dissonance and pain and struggle. So we actually have to build in patterns of what it looks like to engage, pray, take a break and engage again. And so if you were sitting there and you're thinking to yourself, “I don't want to be someone who just jumps in and jumps out on my own whims and giggles. I decide to get in when I feel guilty and then I get out when I feel overwhelmed.” That's a doom scrolling cycle that's radically unhelpful.

And we can take this offline and put it in real life, when we disengage from the suffering of people around us and say it's for self-care, or say it’s to take care of ourselves, what we're actually doing is bypassing the suffering of people around us, because we don't have the rhythms necessary to rigorously engage with the world as it is. And so, if we are not going to be people who run to comfort, we have to be people who have done the spiritual, emotional, physical, mental work necessary to have the fortitude to stand in solidarity with ourselves, with the poor and the marginalized, with the family around us, and even our enemies, to be able to see from their perspective so that we are able to love well.

And so I think a couple of ways to do that on social media, is to turn off notifications, and to have people you follow and that you don't follow so that you're able to stay engaged without being overwhelmed. Because if you don't curate your social media, the algorithm will do it for you. So that's just the online stuff. In real life, similarly, who are you going to listen to and talk to, and who are you not going to listen to and talk to, so that you are able to be built up into the person that you want to be for the sake of those who are marginalized and suffering, not just for your own sake to feel comfortable and okay? So I need you to lean into the complexity because I'm not saying avoid all the people who are difficult in your life. That's not what I'm saying.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: I'm not saying, “Get away from the folks who challenge you.” That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, seek out the people that challenge you in ways that make you better, so that you can love one another well. I have to listen to hard conversations and engage with people who call me out. Because I'm not trying to live a life that where I and my comfort and my self-preservation is the most important priority, because the Gospel says I need to take up a cross. It doesn't tell me to go buy a croissant.

[laughter]

Jonathan Walton: I love bread, and that's my comfort food.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: And so that is why I said the cross with a croissant. It wasn't just for the alliteration. [laughs] But God is calling us to make sacrifices, and I think that when we have communities of people who are willing to do that sacrificial work with us, then when the next attack happens, when the next mass shooting happens, we actually have the inner fortitude and the external community to engage with these things for the long term, which is what God is calling us to.

Sy Hoekstra: That is all some very good advice. I don't know that I have things to add on to that, but I have other stuff [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Sure.

Sy Hoekstra: This has just been important for me when it comes to this particular issue. Actually, it's important for me in a lot of issues, but developing a real understanding and sense of sympathy for the people who disagree with you, to me is really important. So in this particular case, what that means is trying to… it's not even that hard when it comes to Israel honestly, right? Because why is Israel such an appealing idea? It's because Jewish people have faced so many thousands of years of oppression everywhere they've gone. And Israel today has created for the Jews who live there, peace and flourishing that they haven't seen probably since King David, honestly.

And it is just the dream of having a place where your oppressed people can be free and flourish. It's not hard to sympathize with that at all. It's one of the most natural human instincts. The problem is, like Jonathan said before, the way this world is ordered, the easiest way to accomplish that is to trample other people, and is to find somebody like the US whose interests are aligned with you, you know what I mean? Like to go that route. But understanding kind of where people are coming from and how real the fear is, even for people who have been a little bit secure for a few decades. You know, what I mean? How real that fear still remains in people.

So my great grandmother who was alive until I was 24, was half Jewish, and her dad came over as a young kid from Romania. They went through Russia first, but they came over from Eastern Europe fleeing pogroms and anglicized their names, married Christians, went to church, and they erased Judaism from their lives effectively. And my grandma has told me that my great grandmother told her when she was young, to never tell anyone, for any reason that they were Jewish. But the reason they did that was fear. It’s like the fear is so incredibly real, even for people who are living kind of middle class lives in the United States.

And, I don't know, being able to understand that makes the problem to me feel a little bit more comprehensible and it makes it feel like, because it's comprehensible, like something that could theoretically be if not solved, at least you could change people's minds. There are ways around that fear, and like expanding people's sense of solidarity and love for other people who are going through the same thing. That's it, you have to be able to see that what Palestinians are going through at the hands of Israel is the same struggle, is the same thing that Jews have gone through forever. So then when I hear like bad faith arguments, or bad faith readings of history, I have an idea of what's behind it, maybe not for the individual speaker that I'm talking to, but for a lot of people, and that helps.

Another thing that helps is get out there and do something [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: It’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: It really helps to call your representatives to petition, if you can go to a march or protest or something, I did that this weekend. Being with a ton of people who feel the same way as you, or like participating in some kind of movement like that just makes you feel a little bit less isolated and lost and like you're losing your mind because people around you are saying such wild stuff. Any other thoughts Jonathan, before we wrap up?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, for people who are listening to Sy and it’s like, “Okay, how can I capture that?” I think what Sy is saying is something we've talked about in the past where it's like, we have to move from pity and sympathy towards incarnation. So the ability to feel sorry and sad for other people, that’s just pity and sympathy. To look at someone's experience and say, “You know what, that is sorrowful,” right? And sympathy to feel that sorrow for yourself and then empathy to actually be able to imagine like, “Oh man, okay, I can identify with that.” And you watch Sy just do that when he's like, “Okay, I'm not just far away from this, but how can I get a little bit closer? Oh, my great grandma.”

He's moving, he's identifying those feelings. And then he moves to this thing called compassion, where he actually says, “You know what, I'm going to think about, how can I suffer with them, like alongside them, even from the position that I have in Harlem? You know what, I'm going to go and protest. I'm going to put my shoes on and get my family together, and I'm going to walk, and I'm going to actually go be out there.” And if I can get in proximity in some ways to imagine what that compassion will look like and eventually, I'm going to incarnate with the people who are around me that are suffering as well, because I'm sure in that crowd, there are people who are more closely connected than Sy is.

And so the fruit of that is the communal connection that he was just talking about. There's this collective grief that can be released. And when you experience the grief and connection, you're less likely to be violent, because the grief and the pain and the struggle and the push for better has somewhere to go and you have people to do it with.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Because we have to seek out community. We have to have these rhythms, like Sy just walked through. We have to create those things to move from dismissal and dehumanization, and whatever all of might be happening inside of us towards pity and sympathy, towards empathy, towards compassion. And then if we can, in Jesus name incarnation, putting ourselves as close as we possibly can, to those who are suffering the most.

Sy Hoekstra: And then when you go at that, like, the emotional health part is part of the incarnation as well, meaning like, because you can go into the grief, and you can get lost in it.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: And you can find an outlet for that grief in calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Jonathan Walton: Right.

Sy Hoekstra: So I was listening, there's a… I will definitely put this in the show notes. There was a talk, what do you call it? an event [starting at 26:40 in the linked video], that featured a conversation between Michelle Alexander who wrote The New Jim Crow, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the professor I mentioned before, Rashid Khalidi. And Coates, I guess, for those who don't know, is a famous Black American writer who writes about racial relations in the US mostly, went to Israel a few years ago, and went to the Holocaust Museum that they have in Jerusalem.

And he went in and felt everything that he felt and then he walked outside and was immediately met with a line of like 10 IDF guards with enormous guns, right? And this is really interesting actually. He talks about how people talk about the situation in Israel like it's so complex, like you need a Middle East Studies degree to really understand what's going on. He's like, “I went there and I understood it in one day.” He's like, “I saw Palestinians not being able to go down certain roads, and they had other roads that they could go down that were not as well kept and whatever.” And he's like, “I know what that is. My parents grew up in Jim Crow, this is not confusing to me.”

But he was like, he kind of said, “Imagine if Black people had gone through the hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation and everything and come out on the other side, and the lesson that they pulled from it was, we just need to get power, it doesn't matter what we do with it as long as we're safe.”

Jonathan Walton: [long inhale] Mmmm, right.

Sy Hoekstra: And he said that’s Israel. Like that's what has happened. And it's just tragic in so many ways. So I think all the things that Jonathan was saying are so important, because this conversation just gets people going in so many different directions because of the trauma that is on both sides. Like the really heavy trauma that is on both sides of the wall in Israel.

Jonathan Walton: I agree. I think there's, when I say and when we say, pursuing community, we are saying that we are trying to pursue a community that is seeking peace.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: That is [laughs] not… Because unfortunately, there is a solid… we may cut this out, but there is a solidarity that exists in exacting violence. And I think the resistance to that is necessary and difficult. And if we're not careful… No, it's exactly what you said.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: If we are not careful we will mistake our safety for the really, really, really good fruit as opposed to the collective fruitfulness of everyone being the thing that we long for and seeing it. That's the same thing, that's the exchange that Black slaves made when they became overseers. I will be safe. Those people won't be, but I will be safe. And like Tim Keller would say when he wrote Generous Justice, is that the definition of wickedness is to disadvantage the community for the advantage of yourself. And the definition of justice is to disadvantage yourself for the advantage of the community. And I think my hope would be that continue to push and disadvantage ourselves so that everybody can be free.

Sy Hoekstra: Amen.

Jonathan Walton: Amen.

Sy Hoekstra: That is a hard thing to ask, but nevertheless, I say amen [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Amen [laughs]. It’s true.

Sy Hoekstra: Before we finish up, well, a couple of things. One, I'm just going to remind you, like Jonathan did at the top. If you appreciate what we're doing here, which you do because you're listening to this, which means you're a subscriber, and we thank you so much for that support, please go and give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you're on Apple, leave us a little written review if you can. It helps, it's a very quick thing that you can do that really does genuinely help us. The reviews that we have on our podcast by the way, are so heartwarming and lovely [laughs], and they make me feel so great inside. So if you want to support us and also genuinely just make me feel real nice in my little heart, that'd be great

[laughter]

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, you know what Jonathan, I'm going to start doing what I realized I haven't been doing because… So we have not been crediting Joyce who does our transcripts [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Oh man.

Sy Hoekstra: I'm going to add Joyce to the list of transcripts. The reason we haven't been crediting her is because when we started the show, we were just doing the transcripts ourselves, and we just got into a rhythm of not crediting ourselves.

[laughter]

Sy Hoekstra: Joyce Ambale. Ambale? Hmm, Joyce is going to have to tell me how to pronounce her last name because I've only ever seen it in writing. Joyce Ambale does our transcripts. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra, our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess, and we will see you all in December. Thank you so much for listening.

[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: We’re going, yeah?

Jonathan Walton: [singing] We are recording now. We are recording now. Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay

Jonathan Walton: Okay [clears throat].

Sy Hoekstra: [inhales for a long time, brrrrs loudly sounding like he’s shaking his head, coughs, clears his throat, kind of growls, and speaks in a loud, hoarse voice]. Ready to go.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Everyone, I’m normal [laughter]. I make normal noises and there's no need for concern.