Shake the Dust

Jonathan reads his poem that we just published. To read the ProPublica article that inspired the poem, click here.

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. Transcripts of every episode are available at KTFPress.com/s/transcripts.

Host

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

Production, editing, and transcript  by 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

[A 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.” There is a short pause, and then the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out]

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to this extra episode of Shake the Dust. I’m Jonathan Walton, here to read a poem of mine we just published at KTFPress.com called “Bodies.” This poem was originally commissioned by Poetic People Power. The links to the poem and the ProPublica article that inspired it are in the show notes. Alright, here we go.

“If the Negro is to be free, he must move down into the inner resources of his own soul and sign with a pen and ink of self-assertive manhood his own Emancipation Proclamation.”

— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This poem is about bodies. Not bodies of water or bodies of work, but bodies covered by water, mud, brush, or dirt.

Not unearthed by chance like when me and my little brother found bones looking for minnows by the creek, but on purpose as white men search for new ways to make money. 

Black bodies under barriers, brown bodies under borders, or out in bushes, backwoods or boondocks.

Out of sight and out of mind until they interrupt or could be politicized or commodified. 

Like the bodies buried in Boydton, Virginia in Mecklenburg County. 

Black bodies found in what was the Moseley Family cemetery moved by Microsoft to make way for their new data center.

Big tech deleted them like an unwanted search history,

They emptied the caskets to make cash for caching our crap in the cloud. 

Thank you ProPublica and Seth Freed Wessler for seeing Mike and David Moseley, for remembering Stephen and his toddler son Fred, for exposing Alexis Jones and EnviroUtilities and Wayne Carter who found the remains of 37 Black people, packed their bones and belongings in plastic crates, and buried them in four graves where they wouldn’t bother Nadella and Gates—as they demonstrate what it looks like when Black lives don’t matter and you  illustrate through your time and attention what it means when they actually do.

This piece is called:

"Bodies" 

People

Names

Habits 

Delights

Thoughts

Dreams

Hopes

Aspirations

Ambitions

Rituals 

Rhythms

Songs

Prayers 

Proverbs

Poems 

All the beautiful and broken, messy and amazing of it – embodied

life all bound up 

in dark, beautiful, collective skin 

Beheld, hated, taken, chained, labeled

Renamed and shipped away 

Beautiful bodies in 1619 the Virginia company deemed 

Black bodies, commodities, and moved us for money 

Now another company in Virginia is moving us for money

They crushed us for cotton and now our bones are in the way

Highlight skulls and femurs and dirt,

Control X and paste them in another place

Black bodies at the bottom of the American way 

While everyone lives on top of us

We’re supposed to know our place, stay and be grateful

just forget from whom and where we came

You know… 

We went in the water Ashanti and Igbo and came up

Jonathan, Jennifer, and Toby

Black people 

With White names 

and gray thoughts

no bodies now 

Just Somebody’s now

Like Jim’s hog or Massa’s cow 

We have

Black habits

Things Black people like

Black dreams

Black aspirations

Black ambitions 

Black music

Black magic

Black songs

Black Lives

Black hopes

We are Black folks

And the stuff we touch, we taint

And change its nature to Black 

Fascinating a whole neighborhood leaves because of one Black home

Trying to live in a place where they once debated if we had souls

A land that determined by vote we were Three-fifths not one whole

Black Power bound up in brown skin

Hemmed in by a false fence called race 

Black bodies forever bound to colonization 

our false history said to begin with slavery

Black bodies on the bottom rung of white supremacy

So now we carry this trauma wherever we go –

In our bodies

Oh how will we change this? What will we do?

How will we cope? Will we make it through?

They’ve moved our bodies and built the buildings

We’ve seen and they’ve proven

They will do whatever they want to.

Ban our books, fire our teachers, burn our churches

Lynch, maim, kill, shoot, doesn’t matter if there’s camera footage.

Evidence be damned, it’s relocation without hesitation and with impunity

Pluck us up and move us out

Black bodies don’t belong in this community.

So where do we go?

Accept King’s invitation to go inside.

My body might be chained but my mind has amnesty

My spirit is immune and this Black soul is gonna dance in my community.

First me with God; then me, myself, and I; and then me and mine

Because this dark skin is filled with light

And I refuse to hide.

I bear witness to the one who made me, and the one who was sent.

I am made in the image of God no matter what your book says. 

I am not who you say I am unless you agree with him. 

The God who made me, you,

And everything,

That is

He is the one who holds it all together

White people are just pretending.

So say what you will, his voice is louder.

I may be silent amidst your nonsense

I am yielding to a different power

And if you dare take me like you did Martin, Emmett, and Ahmaud

Please know you can kill this body and move it wherever you like.

But one day I’m gonna get up and answer the call from my master, Jesus Christ.

I’m signing my own papers like MLK said I must

I withdraw my deposit in this society

Because whiteness is bankrupt

I’m leaving this burning house, and I’ll be okay

Just like Jesus we are only borrowing these graves.

Today, we’re speaking with Rev. José Humphreys and Dr. Adam Gustine about their book, Ecosystems of Jubilee: Economic Ethics for the Neighborhood. We cover how God’s vision for the Hebrew people’s society gives us a framework for imagining neighborhood flourishing, how our scarcity mindset negates God’s abundant provision, how churches can decenter themselves in community life in order to spread good economic news, and a lot more! It’s a really good one that you don’t want to miss!

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. Transcripts of every episode are available at KTFPress.com/s/transcripts.

Hosts

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – 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.”]

José Humphreys: See, when we talk about liberation, like Dr. James Cone said, we're also talking about salvation. If liberation was just about the soul, God would've left the people of Israel in Egypt. Your souls are saved, continue to make bricks without straw. But he saves them and God saves them in body, mind, soul, and spirit, and they go and celebrate. So this idea of economic liberation, this goes down to the nuts and bolts, the daily fabric of our work days.

[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. We are very excited today to be talking about economic justice and the ways that Christians and churches can participate in neighborhood flourishing with two incredible guests who Jonathan will introduce in one second. Before we get started on that, just a quick reminder for everybody to go to KTFPress.com and consider becoming a subscriber to our Substack, that gets you the bonus episodes of this show. It supports everything we do on this show. It gets you our weekly newsletter where Jonathan and I curate media highlights to help you in discipleship and political education. It supports the work we do with books and articles and everything else, centering and elevating marginalized voices as we leave colonized faith.

And we would really appreciate it if you would go there and considering signing up as a paid subscriber. Jonathan, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, please tell the people who we have with us this afternoon… Well, I can't say this afternoon because I don't know when you're listening. But Jonathan, please tell the people who we have with us.

Jonathan: Our guests today are Reverend José Humphreys and Dr. Adam Gustine, the authors of the book, Ecosystems of Jubilee: Economic Ethics for the Neighborhood. Reverend Humphreys is a native New Yorker, ordained minister and co-founder of Metro Hope Church, a multi-ethnic and multicultural church in the amazing neighborhood, East Harlem in New York City. He's also a social worker, consultant, and author of the award-winning book, Seeing Jesus in East Harlem: What Happens When Churches Show Up and Stay Put. Reverend José participates in shalom making and trauma-informed healing work through facilitating conversations across social, economic, racial, and religious boundaries. Amen. Dr. Adam Gustine is an assistant director of the University of Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns, focused on justice education and research for the common good.

He has worked in a wide variety of church, nonprofit, denominational, and educational context, and has a doctor of ministry degree from Missio Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He's also the author of Becoming a Just Church: Cultivating Communities of God's Shalom. It's a 2019 IVP Readers’ Choice Award in Christian practice. They are qualified to have this conversation, that's what all that means [laughter]. Thank you all so, so much [laughs] for being here today. And so we'd love just to start off with a big picture question. This book is trying to teach us about biblical economic justice by looking at laws from the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures about gleaning, Sabbath and Jubilee. I think a lot of Christians have a hard time understanding the relevance of these things especially these laws that we no longer follow, and they come from portions of the Torah that often seem like the most difficult to understand. And so, can you tell us why these particular aspects of the law are a good starting point for us to jump into economic justice to apply today?

José: Sure. I'll jump right in there Jon. Thank you so much, and thanks for having me. Thanks for having us. Grateful to be here and have this conversation. So it's interesting, like I'm a career Christian, right? I grew up in the church [laughs]. And we did tend to avoid the Levitical laws and all these other just like, yeah, let's skip over Chronicles [laughter] and those other seminal books in the Bible. But what we found when we started talking about this idea of economics within the larger ecosystem we found out there was some wisdom in the Old Testament that we could actually glean from. I think our greater question wasn't so much how do we apply this and make it relevant? We wanted to kind of meet the Old Testament on its own terms and ask the question, what was God perhaps intending in having these laws, like a Sabbath, a gleaning and a jubilee, cyclical laws that would address matters of land, labor, ownership and slavery.

And it was almost, it almost popped out of the page for us when we're reading the text. It was just like, oh, God is creating these laws of justice that were cyclical in nature, of course going by the agrarian culture, right? But it really spoke to this larger thing about, hey, we need to revisit the life of society because left to its own devices, left alone, even when we do have policies, there are unintended consequences. And society is not neutral, meaning that all of the benefits, all of the goods can end up in the hands of a few. So in here, so when we're looking at the Old Testament, we were saying, “Oh, wow,” there was something very corrective, restorative if you want, about what God was creating in this society, this pattern of justice, this pattern of restoration and restitution. And then we thought, “Hey,” I think this is something that we could, as we had the conversation, Adam and I said, “Hey,” this is something that could actually meet our current moment when we see the disparities that we see in our society.

Adam Gustine: So I think the other piece of that is that if you look at the start of Jesus' ministry, particularly in Luke 4, where he enters the temple, and he reads from the prophet Isaiah, and he says that I've come to in a sense declare the year of the Lord's favor, is the quote that he reads from Isaiah is a direct reference to the year of Jubilee. And I think that's the thing that sort of animates our imagination as well. As José says, all of these Old Testament laws were descriptions of God's ideal society and a way of like recalibrating something that naturally gets off track. But if Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God, come in me, is an expression of the year of Jubilee, then it's not just a cycle anymore, it's the way that it ought to be. That the kingdom of God operates by this sort of ethos.

These ethics are now part of the tapestry of the way that we are meant to live all the time. Christians everywhere are trying to think through like, what does it mean to live out the ethics of the kingdom of God in real time and place? And Jesus is saying…our argument is Jesus is saying, well, economically speaking, it should look like that. And so you may not be able to apply it. Not everybody has a field to leave the edges of for people to glean from [Sy laughs], but what are the ways in which we can as José said, have a moral imagination to animate a way of life that's sort of undergirded by these ethical principles. And so I think that's really what it comes to for us, is to live in the kingdom of God means to embrace this.

Sy: I think I'm realizing we should probably just briefly say for the audience what these laws entail, right? So the gleaning you just mentioned is when people have crops in a field leaving the corners for people to harvest themselves who don't own land or who are poor, and then not going over the field a second time to get whatever you missed. That was a command for anyone who was working land to do that. And then obviously Sabbath is daily time to rest, and then every seven years is it forgiving debts every seven years? That's what happens. Am I correct?

Jonathan: Mmhmm, yes.

Sy: Right. And then jubilees every 50 years returning land to the people, to the families who originally owned it as set out by God when they reached the Promised Land. And then setting people free who were in debt bondage and a few other things. But those are kind of the basics of those laws. So taking those laws as a framework for how we ought to engage with economics today, I think is a helpful way to look at it, rather than just trying to figure out, inspire your imagination, not just figure out a bunch of do's and don'ts, I think is a helpful way to look at it.

And so you two talk about in the book the scarcity mindset as being antithetical to the biblical justice of God. And the scarcity mindset leads to what you call the three E’s of economic injustice, which are exclusion, extraction, and exploitation. Can you just describe for us what you mean by a scarcity mindset and why it's so harmful?

Adam: Sure. No, and I think that's well put in terms of the overall summary that I do think is the framework. And the framework is meant to help us resist those three E's. That really, as you say, is sort of rooted in that notion of scarcity. I think a real basic summary is the fear of not enough. Scarcity is the fear of not enough. And the scarcity mindset is a way of living in the world that's animated by that sense of fear. And I think anytime we think that there's not enough, then we are less likely to be open handed and much more likely to be closed fisted. And economically speaking, of course we're talking about our assets, and if I'm closed fisted with my assets in a world that I believe does not have enough for everyone including myself, then my neighbors are no longer people who share space with me, people who I’m meant to flourish with.

My neighbors become opponents, and my neighbors become enemies.  And if you take that, that to its logical end, then the fear of scarcity becomes a form of vulnerability. And by that I mean that when we are enmeshed in that fear, when we are animated by that fear, when we're locked up in the fear that there is not enough, then we are prone to be taken advantage of by those who would seek to capitalize on that fear in society. And so in the book, we talk about a lot of different historical examples of legislation that is passed that enacts economic injustice, that preys on the fear of scarcity that's rooted in like the dominant culture. So like the rich and wealthy are afraid there's not enough, and those fears are preyed upon to justify things like economic exclusion and economic extraction and economic exploitation of the poor and the vulnerable.

And so it's really kind of an insidious thing that of course, that's something that's interpersonal between me and my neighbor, but that's also something that comes out in like anti-immigration laws and those kinds of things, that really exploit people. So I don't know if José, if you want to chime in there, but those are the kinds of things that we're thinking about.

José: Sure. I couldn't help but think about this also from just the framework of discipleship. So we're swimming in the waters of capitalism, and that determines the patterns and practices of how we spend money, we use resources, and even our relationship to our stuff in a consumer different society. I heard someone recently say that money is our most unconscious agreement. In other words, capitalism in many ways, and consumerism creates the pathways for how we use it. And to think like if we have a scarcity mentality or if we just have, we critically engage, uncritically engage our consumerism, we're not thinking about new patterns and practices. In other words, a scarcity mentality will dullen the imagination for something different. How is it that I could use my money more creatively? How is it that I can own differently?

Alright, We're going to own, that's the world we live in. I have this second house… well, not me, literally. I wish [laughter]. But I have this, how is it that I can share that, put it back into God's ecosystem of shared economy, of open handedness that would allow this to maybe be a blessing for others. So I think part of economic discipleship, or the practice of economics of solidarity is to have folks really think about what they do have, even when they don't have much. And people in lower socioeconomic runs are more creative[laughs] are more generous.

Jonathan: Have to be.

José : The data proves it. I think what happens is the more you get, the more you amass, the more you're afraid to lose.

Jonathan: As you all are talking, like we talk about the abundant provision as the basis for a lot of your thinking about economic injustice. But we've heard about or been a part of churches that often weaponize the idea of abundance as a tool to extract wealth from their congregations via the prosperity gospel or just other similar theologies that hang out in that space. Did you think about the ways that churches misapply the idea of abundance or some of the ideas you're bringing up, and what are some of the guardrails against those misapplications in your way of thinking?

Adam: I mean, I think that's a great question, and I guess maybe to get at that, let me just give two quick examples that we use from the book that are both from scripture. But I think point at the way that I think about that question. I think ultimately, it's a question of what we do with God's abundance. And I think there's two moves that I see. One is Old Testament in the journey through the wilderness. The people are provided the manna and quail in the wilderness. In that sense, it’s abundant in the sense of it's God's enough, there's more than enough for everyone, and that's sort of our working definition of God's abundance is more than enough for everyone. But the question is, what do the people do in the face of God's abundance?

Their response is to hoard, and it’s a pretty individualistic way of thinking about it, but confronted with God's abundance, it triggers that sense of scarcity and I start to hoard for myself. And of course in that story, when people hoard God's abundance, it actually corrupts God's abundance. It's the very thing that turns it, the food actually goes bad because they hoard God's abundance. The flip side of that is in the New Testament, the classic story of the loaves and fishes. What looks like a scarce amount in the hands of Jesus becomes an abundance that actually flows out to all the people that are there. No one hoards, it's an overflowing to others. And I think that's really the difference and the examples that you're talking about of when confronted with God's abundance, we weaponize it, is that we use God's abundance to prey on people's fear that there's not enough for themselves.

And in most cases where churches or pastors enrich themselves along those lines, they're enriching themselves by preying on the fear, by saying, if you do this, there’ll be more for you on the backside of it. And I think a lot of the examples that we're trying to tease out in the book of the alternative of that is a recognition that because this is from God, because this is God's, it's not mine to hoard, it's meant to overflow out from my community to others. And I really think that's a big piece of the difference there.

Sy: One interesting thing I think about the example of the manna from heaven is the instinct to hoard there, actually with the loaves and the fishes too. The instinct to hoard there from the perspective of those people makes a very logical sense [laughs] from the perspective of not like, not from a kingdom-minded perspective, right? These are people who were just slaves for hundreds of years who have come out into the desert where there's not a lot of food and they're getting some food. So you might as well save it because you don't know when your next meal is coming, right? Or like the boy who just has this lunch, it's like, if I give up this lunch, what am I going to eat [laughs]?These things, I feel like from the perspective of the people actually in the story would be very logical.

And so, I think it also from that angle kind of helps us see how it's really easy not to trust it, how counterintuitive the idea of God's abundance is and how trying to live just your own life, let alone the whole economic life of a neighborhood from the idea of abundance is extremely challenging.

José: Yeah, one of the one of the interesting things that comes out of Leviticus is God making this statement, the land belongs to Yahweh. And in many ways that was kind of the framing reality. “Alright, I'm the landlord. What you have actually belongs to me.” So it even will influence a landowner's stewardship of the land. If they're actually walking in line with that divine logic that whatever it is that I have, the check that I get in the mail, yeah, it might have my boss's signature, but at the end, Yahweh is providing for this. And if it doesn't belong to me, then how is it that I resubmit this check that has come through a specific system? How do I now resubmit it into God's ecosystem of grace? So now what we're doing is we're creating an alternative system of exchange.

We're saying, oh, we're not exchanging tender here, we're actually giving gifts. And that's when we're talking about that larger economy of grace, the “greater economy,” as Wendell Berry defines it. So now I have, if I'm thinking about it like this, then perhaps I have a different relationship to my money. And so we bring up different examples in the book, like anything from what about the money in your pocket? You think about it as this gleaning concept. Maybe it's not just extra change. I have $5 in my pocket, a true story last Sunday. I'm on my way to church rushing to preach as someone standing in front of the restaurant saying, “Hey, could you buy me something to eat?” And I'm like, I got to preach a sermon. I got to go, and I don't even know if I have cash.

I take a few steps past him, something tells me, “You know what, go back and go buy him a meal.” And when I just listen to that kind of internal voice in my mind, in my heart I realized in that time it wasn't really just buying him a meal. The money facilitated an interaction where that man could be seen and acknowledged for who he is, a human being created an God's image, a child of God. Not just some random person asking for money. So I changed, for me, the nature of the agreement had changed in that moment. And I think that yeah, the purpose of the book is just that, helping people's moral imagination to be opened and challenged in a way that they can think about their resources and those everyday exchanges that we're making.

How much money do I want to spend in one month in my neighborhood versus going outside to the usual folks, the big box development where the flow of resources don't find their way back into my community. And to begin with that question, Jon, even that's what you were saying with the prosperity Gospel, the flow of dollars in those mega churches stays within that mega church for the most part, you know what I mean? To finance the operation. It's like, little shop of horrors, feed the beast. “Feed me, Seymour.”

[laughter]

And it's just to say, okay, but how much is actually like going out into the ecosystem we call our neighborhood in order so that our neighborhood could flourish?

Sy: So you just mentioned Feeding the Beast, and there's a point in the book where one of the practical tips that you give is the idea of a church benevolence fund for the neighborhood. So taking something that the church normally does for its own congregants and doing it for everybody around them. And that's kind of when it struck me, is that a lot of your book is actually suggesting that, is suggesting treating the neighborhood around the church the way that congregants of a church are often used to treating each other. And so I'm wondering why you think we end up thinking in that kind of insular way about our money and our close-knit group within the church, and how we can sort of expand our thinking outward more

José: The church in America, as we know it tends to move into neighborhoods, or sometimes I think just like fly in from neighborhoods and just land there.

[laughter]

Just like, where did that come from? It's like, “Where did that Whole Foods come from?” And it'll often follow the corporate model. And it's maybe this unconscious corporate model. We are going to become the flagship of this neighborhood, maybe even a one-stop shop. You can get it all here. Not realizing that in their very neighborhood, the very things that they're trying to do are actually the services, the care are actually located in different organizations in their ecology. So they become this one-stop shop and they become the flagship of the community instead of becoming a part of the fellowship of the community. And I think that that's where ecosystems thinking really can feed our imagination, or even what some people would call biomimicry. Realizing that look at the way trees cooperate in a forest.

Their roots are actually entangled underneath the surface and they're sending nutrients to the tree that's in distress right now because they're not getting enough sun, or for whatever reason, or the elder tree that has its last act, gasping its last breath, metaphorically, is now sending out its own nutrients for the benefit of those trees that are just beginning. And there's just this beautiful exchange that's happening under the ground. And I think we have so many different systems in our neighborhoods. Political systems, housing systems, economic systems, everything that we considered a part of the commons. And I think that that's where the discipleship comes in, where what happens if a church actually dissenters itself and then begins to realize like, “Oh, I’m not supposed to be at the center of something. I'm supposed to be a part of it.”

And it's in this beautiful collaborative exchange that actually Christian witness can happen in relationship. But it really is like a revolution in the church's own self-concept in place.

Adam: One of the really big imaginative challenges in this is that very question that you're talking about of getting all of us collectively to see ourselves as part of the neighborhoods and the communities that we're for. And I think that many of the challenges of work in the fields that we're talking about here get down to this barrier of the church seeing themselves as in a, like an us versus them sort of way as it relates to the community. And like for generations, Christians and churches in the United States have been fed a steady diet of “The culture is against us. The culture is out to get us. The culture is the enemy.” And at the end of the day, the imagination of the church in America at large, particularly like majority culture churches really tend to see the culture as the enemy and the church as a haven from that something that should be protected.

And if that's the case, it actually doesn't take too much of a leap to then go to the scriptures and find examples of the church or the people of God actually as sort of being oppressed by the larger culture around them. And so it's pretty easy to then read ourselves into that story. And so if you think about Old Testament, the church is an exile the people of God, sorry, are an exile in Babylon. Well, what are those people thinking? What are they feeling? I think it's not too hard for us to imagine what they're thinking and feeling when they're in exile in Babylon. And I think about a psalm like Psalm 137, which is one of those classic ones where they say like the Psalms are pretty violent because here's the psalmist saying we should dash the babies of Babylon's heads on rocks.

It's like, well, actually that's written when they're in exile in Babylon. And that's exactly what we would expect the people to be thinking when they're in exile in Babylon. And it's pretty easy to see ways that the church today sort of adopts that posture towards the wider world. But the interesting thing to me is that it's into that emotion that God interjects Jeremiah 29 where it says, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city that I've sent you and pray for it, because if the city prospers, you will prosper.” Meaning your fortunes are tied up together with the city. No, not dash their heads on the rocks. Instead, seek the peace in the flourishing of the community. And see, to me, I think that's the imaginative shift is that God is always inviting the people into that space.

And the temptation for us is always to try and cordon ourselves off from society. That's really the fundamental tension, the imaginative shift that I think we need to be making.

Jonathan: [slowly] Oh… Okay... Yes. Question then [laughter].

Sy: You just made Jonathan think 18 different things at once [laughs].

Jonathan: I did. So what you're saying is good news, right? Like what you're saying is good news, period, full stop. But when Jesus is arrested, Peter pulls out the sword, chops off the dude's ear because the coming of the kingdom, as Peter interprets it, is actually not good news, because he wants different news. When the angel shows up to, like in the Christmas story, like I bring you good tides with great joy, they weren't looking for that. It wasn't something that they were set up for. It's something they were aware of, a story they knew about, but like, that's not what liberation looks like for them or what they would've been looking for, but it's definitely good news in the liberation of Jesus. And so in the book, you're claiming that, and I believe that the idea of Jubilee and the modern economy is good news.

Like in our present day, that's good news, but it might not feel like good news to rich and poor people. Because if I grew up in material poverty, the answer to my material poverty sounds like material wealth. That's why I'm on this performance treadmill in the capitalistic society that we're in, right? But it is good news and it does produce positive outcomes for rich and poor people. So can you explain the differences there and how this is good news for the rich and the poor and maybe the unintuitive ways that economic justice liberates wealthy people? as we're moneyed up right now [laughter}.

José: Man, that's a complex question and Sy was right. You had about 18 different things just floating through your mind all at once [Sy laughs]. Everything everywhere, all at once.

Jonathan: I'm so sorry. I’m so sorry.

José: So the interesting thing, let's continue your thread on the offensiveness of this all [laughs]. So Luke chapter four, Jesus goes into his hood, opens up the scroll as his custom, reads Isaiah 61, everybody's impressed. But then, and then it was also like the whole Shane Claiborne thing, it was almost like, I'm announcing my candidacy. I'm going to liberate the oppressed, set the captive free, declare the year of jubilee. Everybody was impressed until he described how this jubilee plan would also be for the Romans and also for the Gentiles. Then he almost got thrown off a cliff, right? That's what the scripture recalled, right? And so we see that here is Jesus being of offense to the exiles and the diaspora. People that were waiting for that liberating Messiah. People that were waiting for Roman rule to be overthrown.

And that kind of messed with me too even as a man of color, afro-Latino in our society, just like, okay, what does progress look like for me? People of Israel were like, “What does progress look like for us?” What does liberation actually look like for us? And I think that that's the part we need to wrestle with. It is those complexities. So me as a person of color who didn't grow up with means have had to wrestle with, in Jesus's jubilee plan, what does upward mobility look like for me, and how do I engage that in a way that doesn't necessarily give all of the honor due to Caesar that Caesar wants? Meaning just like Jesus tells the sons of Zebedee, “I know you want to be on my left, I know you want to be on my right politically, but really the Gentiles are about that stuff.”

But here in God's economy, the resources that you're given, the education that you're given, all of that, those things that give you opportunity for ownership in the world are going to be used for different means and you're going to have a different relationship to it. And that's the hard part, you know what I mean? Dr. King said, “I can't be everything you can be until you are everything that you can be.” That was “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” So this is recognition that this idea of abundance, God's abundance in my own life or in anybody's life, cannot be understood within the construct of individualism. It's not mine, it's not siloed. I don't hoard it. It's my house, my car. But I am now living in the ecology of God's grace, so I'm holding onto these things differently.

I am being, so instead of being shaped by capitalism, per se, and career paths and tracks, there's something going on there that's leaving me in a constant tension as a person of color. I'm not talking about rich people, maybe that's something else. Maybe Adam can cover that side of the spectrum. But I'm talking about folks who are on the come up, so to speak. What does that mean? I think in minority communities, exile communities, diaspora communities, we have to ask ourselves what does it mean to get on a just path where you are not repeating the patterns and the practices of the empire. But you are coming at this from a consistent place of tension. And I think that's the key word there, Jon, that I am in. Even when I do get something, I'm in tension with it. I'm not just settled in it.

 And I think that that's the Christian call to be in tension with your resources, to be intention with culture. Have a peace about it, yeah. There's a blessing to it, but I always got to be asking myself, “Who's not eating? Who's not represented at this table?” And I won't be totally settled in my own quote unquote “success” until I see Jonathan succeed as well. And I think that's a real, a qualitatively different approach to economics in an ecosystem as a Christian.

Adam: One of the things that José and I started thinking about a little bit in the book, and have certainly been talking about a lot, is this idea of a solidarity economy, which is not new to us. But an economy of solidarity takes into account people's starting points where you start in the world frames the way you enter this new space where we're saying we are in an economy that's marked by solidarity. And I think that one of the things that that necessitates is that we recognize that the upwardly mobile or the rich or the wealthy in our society, they are not the exemplar. We're not trying to get everybody to that place, that indeed the rich are enslaved to wealth, enslaved by wealth as well. And I think the real tragedy is the way that wealth confuses us into confuses into thinking that our enslavement is actually pride of place. That it's actually a privilege.

And, when Jesus came and he said, “If I've set you free, you'll be free indeed,” the people that he said that to got mad. Like, “What are you talking about? We're not enslaved to anything. Why are you going to set us free?” And I think that's the same thing that's going on. It's like Jesus came to liberate us from our oppression to economics, from our own enslavement to wealth. And rich people the world over are like, “What are you talking about? I'm living the dream.” And I think for us to really lean into the kinds of ecosystems that we're talking about, the neighborhoods and the communities where we are authentically all in it together, that there's a real work of I guess I would call it repentance on the part of the wealthy to say, “No, I need to be set free.”

And that that's going to be accompanied by tangible acts of divestment, of restitution, of reparation. Those kinds of things. And I think that those kinds of actions begin to say, what I had was an enslavement. What we can create together is much more reflective of God's abundance and freedom than what I had before on my own.

Sy: And then what so many people perceive as, “Oh you're just trying to punish me because I'm rich by getting me to give my money to other people,” is actually reframed as liberation.

Adam: Right, I think as long as we frame divestment as an act of charity whether forced or philanthropic, we won't get very far. I think if we see it as a surrender to the need to be liberated by God and a response of faithfulness to God, then we might be able to get somewhere.

Jonathan: Jesus desires to liberate us from the supremacy. He is supreme, we are not. And there is something, I think there's a false empowerment that comes from charity. And then there's a false repentance that comes from like, going back and looking, like John D. Rockefeller, and these other people that invented the modern philanthropic movement, it's like this is a false confession, a false repentance. It is nowhere near enough, nor is it true to the living king, but, this type of inadequate absolution basically for what they were trying to do and have done. And we live in the downstream legacy of that. And so I'm very much looking forward to people who read the book, taking the path of Liberation, not Liberty.

People who prayerfully will have prosperity redefined and generosity sparked as their imaginations begin to engage with the idea that maybe the story that we're living in is not the one we should be in. Even sitting in our congregations and looking at our budgets and looking at our endowments and how the church is going to be sustainable and all those kinds of things. And so, may it be so as people dive into what it looks like to reflect the beloved community that King talks about and the economy that Jesus called us to.

José: Amen.

Sy: [laughs]. Jonathan, you want to ask about hope?

Jonathan: Oh! Yes, I do. Sorry. I was thinking. I was like, “Can. We. Do. this [laughter]? And so…

Sy: Jonathan wants to get like a planning committee together. He doesn't want to ask any more questions [laughs].

Jonathan: Man, I've got, because I mean, the chapters in my book like five, six, and seven are about democracy, generosity, prosperity, and then we have to redefine what it means to be rich because Jesus does. He just does that.

Sy: Yeah.

Adam: Yeah.

Jonathan: We have to redefine what it means to be generous because Jesus does. And we see those questions of people pop up all the time to question God's generosity. So the parable of being in the vineyard, Jesus decides, or the purveyor of the vineyard decides, I'm going to give the same wage to everybody. And we see that pop up today when people are like, “Well, what do you mean they're going to get paid more money?” Because we have this tender that goes back and forth and there are some people more invested in the flourishing of the folks downstream of their stewardship as opposed to the radical exploitation that's before them. So anyway, Jesus come.

José: Yeah, [laughs]. But what you're talking about is just it rails against this idea of meritocracy. I gained, I earned, I got, and here God's math and God's economy is turning our current system upside down. And I think, I just think about just the average Christian in America. If this is offensive, then this idea that you're bringing, that we need to look at what generosity means. We got to look at what enough means. If these things bring tension to you, then I say good, because chances are we, I'll put myself in there. We have been discipled by the ideology of capitalism, and just by the fact that we're not having this conversation. I think one of the disservices that's happening in justice circles—mainly in the church, because sometimes I feel like other folks get more expansive in their engagement to justice—how race and class are tied. And something Adam mentioned earlier, inextricably tied. You can't talk about one without talking about the other. And I think that, so even in our justice initiatives, if we're not looking at, yeah, how is it that people have benefited economically from impoverished schools? Well, yeah. There's a lack of opportunity now for a whole community that doesn't, resources are not going somewhere else, right? Or school to prison pipeline, who's benefiting off of that? What companies are benefiting off of creating these prisons? So if we don't see the economics behind these things and actually look at that in serious ways, then we're not maybe going to be able topple the machine, but we could sure frustrate the machine and throw some dust in its gears. That's the way I look at it, know what I'm saying? Like Ewok resistance.

[laughter]

Jonathan: So in all that, it can be hard to think about enacting this. We're having this conversation, and I think all of us want to see strong neighborhoods and are actively working towards that with the influence and stuff that we have. So, but it can feel like nebulous at best and impossible at worst. To achieve, given how huge, complex and greedy, like you said, the waters that we're swimming in are. And so what gives you all hope as you're consistently involved in this work? And we're still on this side of heaven.

Adam: Well, I think the first thing that I would say is, I’m with you. I hear you. And that frustration is real. I think staving off despair is a consistent part of the discipleship work of anybody that cares about justice and the kingdom of God. You have to see the cultivation of hope as something that's primarily an eschatological reality that animates my day today. I got a good friend David, who says, “Yeah, I'm hopeful, but I'm not optimistic.” I think that that little play is kind of like a way of walking through life. I think that's true. And then I would say this, that everything that we're writing about in the stories and the people that we're talking about in this book are folks that are trying, we're trying our level best to take the kingdom of God seriously.

To take the way of Jesus seriously, and allow that to animate our imagination. And so to that end, Jesus said things like the kingdom of God is a little bit more like yeast, in that it slowly works its way through. There is a sense in which the parables that Jesus told are like whispers of the kingdom of God. And so if we're doing this work, the stories we tell I think are like parables. They're not, the global economy is not changing because of Pastor Semmeal in Detroit. But is Brightmoor changing because of Pastor Semmeal in Detroit, that neighborhood? Absolutely. That is true, and I think that that is ultimately a primary characteristic of the kingdom of God is that it is often unassuming. And yet there's some sort of power that I don't fully get because I'm so trained to think that power happens top down and there's something kind of organic and grassroots about the way the kingdom of God works. And so I try to allow that to sort of fuel my sense of hope, if not optimism along the way.

Jonathan: Amen.

José: Yeah. Just to jump off of Adam, and the use of startup metaphors, that Jesus did. The mustard seed, starter bread, right, Starter dough, the things that are unassuming but then can take root and form a movement and… or even Jesus' commissioning, go into the world, start here in Jerusalem, then Samaria folks you got to reconcile with, and beyond. So when I look at place-based initiatives, hyper localized initiatives, it gives me great hope. Adrienne Maree Brown, who’s a strategist, writer. She says, “Small is all.” What are the small mustard seed fractal movements that can create ripples and patterns that can reverberate out to our larger world? And I've seen that for example in the book we mentioned the Land Back movement. People returning land to native indigenous folks.

And now we're seeing that more churches, United Methodist Church in particular giving back like 10 acres of land to the Wyandot nation under some agreement. And that's maybe on this kind of macro level. On this middle tier, what we call meso, churches canceling debt. And then as we mentioned in the book, Jubilee is also celebration. The church gets together with the folks and they burn the debt and then they just celebrate. Because just imagine what it feels to be free now and to be able to use that money as discretionary money in a different area? And I think when we talk about liberation, like Dr. James Cone said, we're also talking about salvation. This is like literal salvation. You are saving me from the economic misery that I was facing. My back, as Dr. Howard Thurman says, was on the wall, but your gospel had something to say about that.

And I think that in this, what we're finding is that hope is like, yeah, if liberation was just about the soul, and I had said this last Sunday, God would've left the people of Israel in Egypt. Your souls are saved, and continue to make bricks without straw. But he saves them and God saves them in body, mind, soul, and spirit and they go and celebrate. And so there's this, so this idea of economic liberation, this idea of revisiting labor, seriously, this goes down to the nuts and bolts, the daily fabric of our workdays. How are bosses, business owners really thinking about the labor force? Is there a Sabbath? Is there a time for rest? Is there a time to let things grow fallow because we believe that God is going to take care of the work that we do?

So I think micro, macro, meso, what excites me about the book is that we give some conversation starters around how this stuff can permeate every system and every level of society. And I would just say, go buy the book, y’all. Go buy the book.

[laughter]

Sy: Other than obviously going and buying the book, Ecosystems of Jubilee, is there anywhere else that you want people to follow you or any other work of yours that you want people to go check out?

Adam: José and I were just talking about this beforehand. I mean, I think that we've been trying to say that the sort of individualist approach to life doesn't work economically speaking. And so we would love to find ways to read this book in community and imagine things differently. And so one of the things we're trying to do is like, hey, if there's a group that wants to read the book, we'll jump on Zoom and join you for it. And so if anybody's interested in that, you can find us on our socials, but we would love to do that work in community and not just say, “Hey, read it and you're on your own.” We would love to be able to make that available to folks if they're thinking about like, “Oh, there's a group that would benefit from this conversation.”

Sy: Oh, cool! So can people just get on Twitter and DM you if they want to have you come do that?

Adam: Absolutely. Yep.

Sy: Great.

Jonathan: Amen.

Sy: We really appreciate the two of you being here. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Adam: Our pleasure. It was great. Great conversation. Thanks so much.

José: Thanks for having us, man.

Sy: Yeah, of course. So before we leave, just a reminder in addition to going and checking out the book and DMing these two, check out KTFPress.com. Consider becoming a subscriber and get the bonus episodes of this show in our newsletter every week. Support everything that we do at KTF Press. Our theme song, as always is “Citizens” by John Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see everyone in two weeks.

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

Jonathan: Well, our guests today, are Reverend José Humphreys and Dr. Adam Gustine… I said that right, didn't I? Jesus… now I'm conscious about it. My bad. This is a blooper. We got it out of the way.

[laughter]

Welcome to season 3! We’re here with CNN reporter John Blake, discussing his book, More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered about the White Mother He Never Knew. It’s a memoir all about faith, race, mental health, family, and “radical integration.” We’re so excited to be back recording episodes, and this is a great one to start the new season!

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. Transcripts of every episode are available at KTFPress.com/s/transcripts.

Hosts

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – 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.”]

John Blake: Just think about it. When my mom got together with my father in 1963, interracial marriage was illegal. The idea of interracial marriage and biracial children being open, that was like unheard of. They didn't wait for a politician to decide or a judge to decide. They said, “This is right. I'm willing to take a risk. People are people.” But because of people like her, they created that conditions where it became a norm. I think ordinary people have tremendous power, and we shouldn't forget that.

[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'm Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to season three. We are so happy to have you here. We have an incredible guest today, CNN reporter John Blake. He's here to tell us all about his new memoir about his life, wrestling with faith, racism, mental health, and so much more.

Sy Hoekstra: But before we get to that, a couple of things. First of all, as we mentioned in our announcement of season three which is the last thing that's in this podcast feed before this episode, Suzie Lahoud will no longer be joining us sadly, as the co-host of this show. It will just be Jonathan and I for now, though we will likely look for another permanent co-host at some point in the future, but I just wanted to flag that for people who may not have listened to the announcement.

Second, if you want to support the work we do here at KTF Press, please go to KTFPress.com and consider becoming a paid subscriber. That gets you the bonus episodes of this show, it gets you our newsletter. That's where Jonathan and I curate media to help you in your discipleship and your political education. It supports this show and everything else we do at KTF Press, the books, the articles, all of it. And until June 19th, we're having a season three launch sale. Get a full year of that subscription for 50 percent off. That's just $35 for the whole year. Go to KTFPress.com/season3. That’s KTFPress.com/season and the number three.

Jonathan Walton: Our guest today is John Blake. He is an award-winning CNN journalist who has been honored by the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Academy of Religion, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Religion Communicators Council. A recipient of the GLAAD Media Award, he has spoken at high schools, colleges, and symposiums, and in documentaries on race, religion, and politics. Blake is a native of Baltimore, Maryland. He's here to talk with us today about his new book, More Than I Imagine: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.

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

Jonathan Walton: So, John, thank you so, so much for being with us on Shake the Dust today. I am deeply appreciative of it. I know Sy is too, and we look forward to jumping in.

John Blake: Thank you.

Jonathan Walton: And so this book is largely, I think, a memoir about race and family and how they come in and out of each other and merge together, and particularly your relationship with your Black father's family, who you grew up with, and your white mom who vanished when you were very young. And then this explicit thing about nobody telling you why. And the story of how you reconcile those things, and just this beautiful picture of Baltimore and how, just all these different places. So can you orient us and the people listening to this podcast a little bit. Where did you grow up? What was that like, and what world are we stepping into when we grab your book?

John Blake: I grew up in a very infamous neighborhood in West Baltimore. Most people know it through a television show in a particular event. Most people know it through the HBO series, The Wire. That was my backyard. So when I look at The Wire, I'm looking at the place where I caught the bus to go to school, where I stood on the corner with my friends. So I grew up in that world, but also that place is also, people know it from the 2015 violent protests that erupted when Freddie Gray was arrested by police officers and died in police custody. It was one of the biggest racial protests in the country's history. So that's where I grew up. And so my neighborhood is this kind of symbol of how intractable racism is. A lot of conservatives point to it and say, racism persists; they talk about things like the culture of pathology. It's a very poor and violent place, and it's all Black.

And so I grew up there having a white mother, and not only just having a white mother, but having a white family and a white mother that I knew nothing about because they vanished from my life not long after I was born. All I was told when I grew up was that your mother's name is Shirley, she's white, and her family hates Black people. That's all I knew. I didn't know what my mother looked like, the color of her eyes or hair. It was like I said in the book, it was like half of my identity was amputated at birth. So I grew up in this all Black neighborhood where there was tremendous hostility to white people, a lot of poverty, a lot of violence. And knowing that I had this white mother and I had this white family that didn't want anything to do with me, that I thought hated me.

Sy Hoekstra: You eventually figured out, you had kind of a revelation that it wasn't exactly racism that separated your parents. It was sort of a combination of mental illness, your mother's schizophrenia, and I would say poverty and kind of the complete, at the time, complete lack of supports for disabled people that were in place. What was that realization like for you?

John Blake: How did I make that realization?

Sy Hoekstra: How did it happen and what was it like for you? Yeah.

John Blake: That's a good… It taught me that, let me just put it this way. The first place I met my mom was a mental institution. I was 17 years old on my way to college. I thought my mom was dead. And my father just came to me one day [laughs] and just said, “Do you want to meet your mom?” Like, “Do you want to go to the store?”  [laughter].

John Blake: And the next thing I know, I'm driven out with my brother to this notorious mental institution in rural Maryland called Crownsville that has since been closed down. And to give you an idea of how awful a place Crownsville was, they used to abuse patients, chain them to the bed, put them through electro shock therapy. And in fact, when it was closed down, it was used as a set for a horror movie. It was a horrible place.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, wow.

John Blake: So I was just driven out there with my brother one day. No one said, “You're going to a mental institution. You're going to see your mom. She's sick.” They just drove us out there, we walked in this building, and she comes out and dad says, and that's our mom. And I pretty much figured out within 15, 20 minutes of meeting her that she had a severe mental illness. And to answer your question, what that realization did to me in that moment is kind of two things that I can think of at the top of my head. One is that just that sight suddenly widened my empathy. I had grown up in a world where white people were the enemy, where they could not relate to what it meant to be Black, I thought, to be poor, to be looked down upon, to be treated with contempt.

But when I saw my mother in that awful place come out, and I figured out that she had been in this place most of her life, I thought to myself, “God, I've never even seen a Black person suffer like that.” So it's kind of enlarged my world within like 15 minutes of meeting her that wow, other people suffer like us, and in some cases more than some of us. So it did that. And I think secondly, that it just started me on this journey where I had to, how can I say? I had to somehow jettison a lot of these assumptions and hostility I had toward all white people because of how I grew up. So I guess the main thing is it's just widened my empathy. That's one of the reasons I try to, well, that's one of the things I try to show in the book, is that there are a lot of different attitudes about how do people change their racial attitudes?

And I used to believe, as a journalist, if you give them great arguments, you write great articles. You talk about reparations, you talk about slavery, you cite your Kendi, you cite your DiAngelo [Sy laughs], you show them the George Floyd video, people will change. I don't believe that as much anymore. I think people change primarily through relationships and community. And one of the things I say in the book is, facts don't change people, relationships do. And I say that because it started with meeting my mom. I started to change through meeting my mom and other members of my family. That had more effect on me than all those brilliant people like Jonathan I interviewed [laughter]. Not to say those things aren't important, but it's those relationships that really changed me.

Jonathan Walton: So me and Sy, we're writers, you're a writer. How we do things is intentional. And you, the way you wrote this book, it seems like there are very conscious decisions never to indicate exactly where you were going and where you were going to land. Like we were immersed in every situation, what you were thinking at each moment. And I mean, I was just like, “John knows how to write, so what's he doing?” And like, being the… I'm immersed in southwest Baltimore, I'm immersed in your dad's house. I'm immersed in eating the mashed tomatoes.

John Blake: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: I'm in there. I mean stewed tomatoes. I'm in it. And it's like, “Oh, this is a book about racial justice and reconciliation.” Could you talk a little bit about what prompted you to tell your story, and then how you decided to tell it?

John Blake: I think the genesis for my story really began with the racial protests in 2015 with Freddie Gray. I was assigned by CNN to cover it. So I go back to my neighborhood and I see my childhood home, my school, my neighborhood, literally going up in flames and everything coming apart because of race. But at the same time in my private life, the white and Black members of my family are coming together despite race. And I was like, how did this happen? Why…? So it's like a mystery. Like what, what really changes people? As a journalist, I've been writing about race for like say 25 years. And I've always looked for these inspirational stories that give me hope. And when I went back to Baltimore, I realized, wow, I might be living that story in my own life. So that was the beginning of it. I wanted to figure out, how did I go from having this white family who wanted nothing to do with me, I had all this hostility, to us actually becoming a family? So that was the genesis of it.

And as far as how I wrote it—and I tell you the truth, Jonathan, I was so daggone tired when I wrote it. [laughter] It was like, I didn't… I don’t know, you might be giving me more credit than I deserve for it. But I wanted to tell a story. And one of the things I say is that in the beginning, the only thing that can replace one story is another. And I think people are driven primarily by stories. And I think there are people who are very threatened by diverse America in some ways, who are better storytellers than those who are not threatened by it.

To me, Make America Great Again is a story. Like, we used to be great, these people came in and they change… we have to tell a story. So I figured as I started writing it, I wanted to tell a story. And then when you tell a story, you're not so much making an argument. You're trying to evoke feelings. You're trying to put people there. And I wanted to show people how people changed, how I changed. How my mother changed me, how my mother's family changed me. And I figured the way you do that, that you don't come out with an argument. You just evoke feelings and you just put people in your shoes and you just take them on a journey. And that's why I decided to write it that way.

Jonathan Walton: In our emotionally healthy activist work, we just talk about moving from pity to incarnation.

John Blake: Oh, I like that.

Jonathan Walton: Right, so transitioning down, not just feeling bad for someone and their sympathy, but like, or even compassion, like the Greek to suffer with, but to really like you said, get into somebody's world. And I think there's a gift in that, but also, like you said, there's a tiredness that comes when you're entering into it over and over and over again. And so for you to go from Baltimore to South Central. Right?

John Blake: Yeah. Yeah. That really affected me.

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Right. And I mean, you've been in the thick of a lot of this stuff in some really pivotal moments. So again, just thank you for staying in it to be able to create a world that we can genuinely step into.

John Blake: Well, thank you. And just to add really quickly to that, as I was writing this, I was still experiencing a lot of this, so I didn't know where the story was going. A lot of things were happening. I mean, really, and I'm a big fan of jazz music. And part of jazz is improvisation, and just follow… they talk about following the music. You don't know where it's going. And just like there are people who preach sermons where they improv. They don't know where it's going. And sometimes I think that's the best form of communication because it's authentic, it's real. It's not contrived, it's not planned. Like King’s I Have a Dream speech as a lot of us know. He ad-libbed that ending and that made it all the more powerful.

That wasn't part of the speech. So I try to keep that attitude as I was writing too, to just be comfortable with not knowing where it's going. Just be honest at every place where you are.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Because you don't say it right up front, here's my thesis statement. Here's what I think is going to fix America's racial problem. You're not writing that way. And so there was a lot of the book where I was, you really are just along for the journey, but where you do land, and I think what does kind of set a lot of the book apart is this idea of radical integration. And you talk about, there's this these old reports on integration from Nikole Hannah Jones that I remembered very well, that you quoted, that are about how there's kind of this propaganda, there's this myth around the fact that integration, school integration failed. It was actually a remarkably successful experiment that was fought tooth and nail.

And you talk about how radical integration you think was what helped you to heal, to reconcile with your aunt who had a lot of racist views. And you think is kind of a way forward for a lot of our strife in the US right now. Can you talk to us about that idea and why you think it's so important?

John Blake: Yeah. I'm going to tell you how discredited the term integration has become. I felt more nervous about writing about integration and revealing that I believe that white, Black and brown people can live together. I felt more nervous revealing that about myself than talking about the ghost. I mean, that's just…

Sy Hoekstra: We'll get to the ghost, but yeah [laughter].

John Blake: I’m serious [laughs]. I mean to me, integration is the uncoolest word you could even say now. It's almost as worse as post-racial. It's been thoroughly discredited, but I don't see, and I base this on my personal experience. I don't see how we survive as a multiracial, multi-religious democracy when different groups are living apart and separate. And I base that on what changed me, as I said before, the reason to try to answer your question, I went back to it, is because when I looked at all the events that really changed me in my life, none of it had anything to do with the brilliant people and the brilliant books I read. It all came back to me being in situations around people who were different, who were different races, who saw the world differently. But that enlarged me and that took away these stereotypes that I had.

And I just don't think we can get forward as a country to do that. And so I didn't… as I was writing about it, I came across this term, Radical Integration. It was a paper written by Michelle Adams, and it just kind of illuminated a lot of things I believed. And one of the things she says, and also I think Nikole talks about that, is that people have a distorted vision of what integration was meant to be. They think it's just sharing spaces. It's not just sharing spaces, it's sharing power. And that in integration, you don't become less Black so white people are more comfortable. And so those are some of the things I experienced that really changed me, and in the way, the place that I really experienced radical integration was at church.

I was really fortunate to go to this tremendous integrated church in Atlanta. And I'm an integrated church veteran. I don't know about you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Walton: Yep.

John Blake: I've been in a lot of racially mixed churches, but they weren't integrated, meaning you had Black, white, and brown people together, but all the leaders were white. All theology was Eurocentric. All the music and everything. And I've been in those churches, but I went to this church, what I call radically integrated, because we just didn't share pews, we shared power. There were arguments, there were tremendous debates, but that was community. That's relationship. And that's where I experienced that. And so that's, as I look at what's happening, I don't see how we go forward. I'll give you a prime example, and it's the last thing I'll say.

Look at what happened with George Floyd. Three years ago, we had the largest social protest in this country's history. And now it's like it never happened. And this one guy, this professor who was writing about that experience said, it wasn't enough for people to go to those protests. If white people go to those protests, but they go back to their all white worlds and they send their children to their all white schools, you're not going to really have lasting change. So I just think that people really, you need to have that tool. You have to have interracial communities. You have to have interracial relationships along with policy changes and power. I think it's a real dangerous thing. I don't want to ever imply that if we just hug white people, racism will disappear. I'm a big believer in what Frederick Douglass says, power concedes nothing without demand, never has, never will.

But what I am saying is that I think integration in creating these communities is also an indispensable part of fighting racism. And I think we've forgotten that over the past couple years.

Sy Hoekstra: There’s a scene in your book from the church in 2016 where you describe a big church meeting where I don't remember if it was when Trump was elected or nominated or whatever. But one of the white people in the group gets up and says, “We just need, we need more understanding. We need to better understand the people who voted for Donald Trump.” And a lot of people reacted that way. And then a Black woman gets up and says, “Why do we always have to be the ones to understand?”

John Blake: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: “Why can't you ever reach out? Why can't you ever understand us?” And I just end up thinking they're both right [laughs]. It is so profoundly unfair, and it is also so difficult for me to imagine kind of like you're saying, any significant amount of change among white people that doesn't involve somebody moving toward us.

And I say that because that's how I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen when people, like you said, radical integration, they're in close proximity to each other. But that almost never involves, at least practically speaking, I don't think, it almost never involves white people voluntarily going, “I'm going to leave my comfort zone and just skip on over here to this unfamiliar neighborhood…

John Blake: Correct.

Sy Hoekstra: …and then learn a bunch of things that are difficult for me to learn that I don't really want to learn. I could leave at any time, but I won't.” I'm just… how does it actually happen, John, is what I'm saying? How does it actually happen in a way that isn't… because you write in the book after that conversation, you walked away having heard that Black woman get up and speak in your church.

You were tired and you agreed with her and you didn't want to talk to white people anymore. That to me is 100 percent understandable. And I just don't know any other way to do it. I just keep coming up against this seemingly intractable problem in my mind. Do you have any thoughts [laughs]?

John Blake: Yeah, and there is another way to do it. There's a very important person I mentioned in a book, a guy named Gordon Allport, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century. He wrote a book called The Nature of Prejudice, which is a classic. And I just happened to stumble on it while I was writing the book. And he writes about, in one chapter, he writes about something he calls contact theory. And the whole chapter is about how do we change racial attitudes to get at what you're talking about? And he said, the way you change racial attitudes is that you get different groups together, and you get them together where they have a larger common purpose that goes beyond race. When you have those kind of situations, racial attitudes will change among white and Black people. Meaning a lot of times we think if we get different groups together to talk about race, that creates racial change.

What Allport is saying is that when you get different groups together to not talk about race, but to serve a larger common purpose, that's when you have tremendous racial change. For example, think about all the sports movies we've seen, like Remember the Titans, Denzel Washington, when you have all these different racial groups get together but they want to win a championship. And I think to try and answer your question, I have found, well, you have different groups, different people coming together for a purpose other than race. Whether it's a 12-step program, whether it's a military, whether it's a championship team, it could be a national service program where people are trying to beautify the country and they come together from different races.

When you have that going on, then you can avoid that little dynamic you're talking about where Black people are always reaching out, and white people don't want to, you have this dynamic where real serious change comes about. And I think that's part of what happened too when I went to church. When I went to Oakhurst, yes, we talked about race, but we had a larger mission. We were all Christians. We all had this common faith that went beyond race, and I think that created those conditions. So it's kind of a weird thing. You want to have people to get together in a group for racial change, have them get together, but don't have them talk about race all the time, have a larger purpose.

Sy Hoekstra: Having people who have similar missions allows people to see others for who they are beyond a stereotype.

John Blake: Yeah, you see the humanity of people. It has to be a larger common purpose. For example, in my family, I gave a TEDx Talk when I talked about my relationship with Aunt Mary, who was the aunt who resisted admitting that she was driven by racism. And I was trying to figure out, how did she change so dramatically, because I never lectured her, but I think part of the reason she changed is what Allport talked about. Is that we had a larger common purpose. We had to come together to work together as a team to take care of my mom. We couldn't talk about race all the time. We had this other stuff to talk about, other stuff we had to deal with. But in doing so, I saw her humanity, she saw my humanity in a way that I think was easier to do if we weren't always talking about race.

Sy Hoekstra: John, so there's a point in this book where you talk about, as you mentioned, a ghost. You talk about being haunted, not metaphorically, literally haunted by a ghost. And it is actually the ghost of your dead grandfather who was quite racist. And it becomes like a key kind of moment for you in the book, in terms of how you dealt with that, actually ends up being a key part of how you reconcile with your aunt and your white family. But you also say in the book that you were kind of afraid to tell your wife about being haunted like this because you thought she might think, “Oh, he's showing early signs of hallucination, of schizophrenia like his mother.”And so you go from that now to, you're writing a book about it. You're telling the whole world about this ghost.

And it was just interesting to me that you had that obviously very large change in how you thought about it. And also that you're a journalist, you trade in credibility, and there's a lot of people who are going to hear a ghost story and wonder what to think about it. And I just want to hear kind of how that transformation happened and how you got to where you are now in terms of telling a story like that.

John Blake: Well, thanks for asking those questions because I was very leery about putting that part in the book because I had these visions of me sending off the proposal and agents responding with, “You don't need an agent, you need a therapist.”

[laughter]

John Blake: So, and you mentioned my wife, and how would she react to it? But she had no choice but to react to it because she saw what I saw. She saw it twice. And if it was just me, I would've never told anyone this story. But the thing is, this involved my wife twice and involved my brother. So I felt like I had to do something he wanted. And to try to answer your question, I felt like I had to include it because it was a pivotal part of my story. And it was pivotal in this way, it taught me in a kind of a weird way not to define a white person by their worst act. Because I had defined my grandfather as this man who called my father the N-word, who assaulted him, had him arrested, who hated Black people. But when I saw him, these reappearances, whatever you want to call them, I saw that he was, I felt, tormented by guilt by what he did, and that he had other good sides to him.

And that for me to kind of in a sense, come to terms with him, I had to understand that about him. I had to see him as more than just this boogeyman, but as a complex human being who was raised a certain way. And that's how he acted. But he was more than that. So it taught me to have compassion for him. And like I said in the book, I said in some ways I haunted him. He didn't just haunt me. He didn't have any relationship with us. And I think he felt regretted about that. And to finally ask, to the other part of your question about credibility, I think for me, when I'm writing a memoir, the most important thing to write, to think about is the honesty, is the truth. And I can't think about how people will react or the credibility. I just got to tell the truth. And that was a real pivotal moment in my life to really understand him.

So I said, I can't worry about credibility. And finally, I will say this, I think there are a lot of people, more people than we believe, than we realize who've had experiences like this.

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.

John Blake: I mean, you think about it, the Bible is full of apparitions, ghosts, and people have all sorts of experiences, synchronistic events, appearances. I think these things happen to a lot of people, but we are afraid to talk about it. So I kept that in mind as well. And I said, “Well, maybe I won't feel alone.” Maybe there are other people saying, “You know what, something like that happened to me, let me tell you.”

Sy Hoekstra: And you actually talked to a chaplain, a hospital chaplain at one point who said he has people who when they're about to pass away, have all kinds of apparitions of family members who are ushering them to the afterlife. And you found other people, my point is, who had had experiences helping people walk through stuff like this who are actually religious leaders, including your father-in-law who's a pastor.

John Blake: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: So, I don't know. I just thought that was a really fascinating part of the book, and I appreciate you telling it, I appreciate very much the commitment to honesty and truth and the kind of empathy you're saying. There are people who are going to relate to this and I'm going to, they're going to be kind of the thumb on the scale, and not the people who are going to roll their eyes at me or whatever.

John Blake: Well, let me ask y'all a question. How do y'all think people will react to coming apart those kinds of stories in a book about race? How do you think people react to that?

Sy Hoekstra: I think there are a lot of people, actually, I agree with you. I think there are a ton of people who have stories like that who are totally open to that kind of thing [laughs].  Who are, obviously tons of people who are just kind of in more charismatic or Pentecostal parts of the church are just going to be like, “Yeah, stuff like that happens. Whatever.”

[laughter]

Jonathan Walton: I mean, for me, it's one of those things where like, oh man, somebody named it [laughs]. That’s what I think will happen. They'll be like, “Man, he wrote it down.” Or they'll just skip over it because it's not part of their milieu. You know what I mean? But I do think more people will feel validated than people will be vindictive.

John Blake: I don't really worry as much about people believe me or not, because I'm telling you, I envy people who say, “That's not real, couldn't happen.” Because it is an incredibly terrifying experience. I've had guns pulled on me. I've been in situations I thought I was going to die, but I have never been as terrified as I was in that situation. I try my best to describe the fear, how my body reacted, but it's something that has no frame of reference. Something totally alien. You think you're safe in your bedroom and you wake up and this, you see this and you’re, I didn't know how to deal with it.

Jonathan Walton: So in that same vein, your description of being in church, reading. You're sitting in a congregation, everyone's praising God, something in you wants to join them, but you leave instead of getting caught up in that. And I'm wondering to myself, what caused you not to run away this time? What has caused you and kept you walking with God, seeking out faith, trying to follow Jesus? What has kept you on that path towards doing really, really, really hard things?

John Blake: Wow. That's a deep question. Thank you. As I think about it in the book, there’s clearly a pattern to me running away from things. Like when I went to Howard, the last thing I wanted to be was become a Christian. And all these people kept on coming up to me, but I felt like I had to make a choice. So, to answer your question, I felt like there were all these moments in my life when it became clear to me that God was presenting a choice. And if I didn't make a choice, I was already making a choice. And that I had to decide, that I couldn't run away. Even if it was uncomfortable, even if it was scary, that if I was going to grow, I just had to stay in there and ride it out. I mean, that's just the way I felt. I've always, like, God has not felt distant to me.

I just feel like God is moving in people's lives. I've seen Him moving in people's lives. He's steered in my life and I just felt like I had to make those choices. But it's funny you said, you mentioned that I was thinking maybe that's why I attend a Presbyterian church now, because everything is so…

[laughter]

John Blake: There’s still part of me where these strong emotions, feelings scare me and I'm very restrained and measured, and that's a lot to do with the way I grew up. When you spend your time in a foster home, you don't know where your mother is, you don't know where your father is, you can't express your emotions. You can't be sad, you just have to keep everything in. And that habit has unfortunately stayed with me.

Jonathan Walton: Thanks for diving into that, because I was just like, I do believe that stories transform people, and it is a false binary to put stories versus statistics and things like that. But to hear how and why people stay, I think is the song, like, “the power of our testimony.”

John Blake: Yeah.

Jonathan Walton: If we can articulate that as honestly as we can then I think something happens when people say, “Okay, maybe I can stay too,” or “Maybe it's not…” You know what I mean? Like it's not always this pretty cookie cutter kind of deal, but to be able to enter in and be in true relationship with other people, with God and with yourself. To be in relationship and seek out the shalom that he intended in the first place is just, yeah. I think it's a great… I hope there are more conversations like that because of this book.

John Blake: I appreciate it. You talk about entering in those difficult moments and staying. Like a pivotal moment came from me in the book when I talked about going to that bible study in suburban Chicago, and I looked in there.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.

John Blake: Before I rang the doorbell and I hesitated and I was like, “Oh God, nothing but white people [laughter]. I don't want to go in here and be the only Black person.” But I was like, “No, go in there.” And I rang that doorbell and I joined that bible study. For the first time in my life I became close friends with white people. And there were two young men who were my age, Paul and Andy. We became really tight friends that summer and that really changed me. So I always knew that fear isn't a reason to hold you back. That often when you're afraid of something, you are on the verge of something really beautiful and just stick with it and some good things will happen. And that's what happened to me.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. In the book that we just put out, in Tamice's book, she makes a big point of that, that fear is kind of the first thing that has to go when you want to see transformation happen. The things that pen you in, the things that keep you where you are and in your comfort zone are often the things holding you back a lot. It's interesting because your story is one where you experienced a lot of transformation by running into kind of standard issue white evangelicals [laughter].

John Blake: Yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: And Tamice had completely the opposite story where she was, that's what screwed her up was being entirely immersed in that world. But you're saying basically the combination of losing that fear and that contact that you were talking about, having positive contacts with people who are kind of with you on that mission. Like you said, they're trying to accomplish something else with you.

You actually had some people in that group who said a couple of things to you that I thought were, not necessarily profound, but like a higher level of insightful than I often [laughs] now expect. Like looking back at myself when I was just in a suburban white evangelical environment. Having somebody say to you, you should definitely go be a journalist because you are going to have perspectives that so many people don't have…

John Blake: Oh yeah, yeah.

Sy Hoekstra: …just from having grown up in West Baltimore, like you're going to be able to write things and have insights that are actually an advantage to you in understanding the world. That's what we talk about now, Jonathan.

Jonathan Walton: Mmhmm.

Sy Hoekstra: That's centering and elevating marginalized voices, right? That's what that is.

And I think it's interesting you can… I think it’s another example of how you can find so many different kinds of truth in unexpected places that you might be afraid of.

John Blake: That's a great point. And I was thinking about something how with all the hostility that I grew up grew up with toward white people, that some of the people that played key roles in helping me were white people. And be more specific, that some of the white people who helped me the most were white Christians who struggled a lot with racism. Like my Aunt Mary, I mean, she struggled with racism. But there's a scene where I talk about when I finally read all these letters she wrote, and I saw that she had changed, and she gives me hope that people can change. Like we look at what's happening right now with white evangelicals in the church, it's clear they have a huge problem with racism, and the way they've lined up behind Trump. And that's really shocking to a lot of people.

And you wonder, some people write them off saying, “Well, they just, they can't change. Don't even try to have dialogue with them.” I can't say that because I've seen my family change in ways I never imagined. Imagine that my Aunt Mary, the one who voted for Trump, who denied racism had anything to do with her decision to have nothing to do with me, who's now calling me, talking about John Lewis, Black Lives Matter. I see this change, man. It just gives me tremendous hope. And even the pastor at the integrated church I went to in Atlanta, Nibs, this is a guy that grew up in Jim Crow South, thought that Black people were subhuman. What happened? He moved to New York, he joined this anti-poverty program where he worked with Black people on something larger than race, and that changed him. And I talked to him yesterday. So I still have a lot of hope.

I don't think particularly as Christians, we can write people off, when we see somebody like a Saul becomes a Paul. We shouldn't write people off.

Sy Hoekstra: Mmhmm.

John Blake: Hey, I want to compliment you both. You guys really read the book [laughter]. I'm so… I know how it's when I have to interview people and I got to read a book fast, but you can really tell people who read the book. And I'm so honored that it didn't bore you and that you read the whole thing and you ask such good questions. I really appreciate it.

Sy Hoekstra: Oh it did not even come close to boring me [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Not at all.

Sy Hoekstra:  Are you kidding me? Once a ghost shows up, I'm like, where is this going?

[laughter]

Jonathan Walton: Because it takes so much to write a book. And for me and Sy and the camp that we hang out with, we're not going to at least, we push each other. If we're going to write about something, we got to read the whole thing. We don't need retractions and all that. And if we're going to promote something we want to promote what we want to promote and send out. And so that's what I hope our subscribers and the folks downstream of our influence get.

John Blake: No, I appreciate it. Yeah. Because it was a difficult story to tell and I don't know… you know my mother died when I was writing this, and that was hard. It just like, how do I put this in the story and how do I grieve? And one of my favorite parts of the book is the end when I had to say, I don't know if we reveal this, but when I had to say goodbye to her. That was when the first time in my life I said like, I was ashamed of her when I was young because she was white. Then I was ashamed of her because she had schizophrenia. But at the very end of her life, when I really began to think about the courage it took for a 19, 20 year old white woman to do what she did, that was the first time I’m like, I am proud to be her son.

It just took me so long to see that in her and to say goodbye to her that way was really tough, but they have that little beautiful little fortuitous accident, whatever you want to call it. This frigid winter landscape we're saying goodbye and then you just look in the sky and see the sun breakthrough. It just really helped me a lot. Maybe it’s kind of corny and all, but I really began to see she was an incredible woman. I always thought my father was the real badass because he was just, he was a Merchant Marine, he was tough, he did what he wanted. But she was just as courageous, if not more than he was.

Sy Hoekstra: I thought that part was beautiful.

John Blake:  Thank you.

Sy Hoekstra: There are people close to me in my life that have mental illness too, and to get to that point where you just see people as you put it, for the hand they've been dealt, what do they do with the hand they were dealt? Not like, what are they on some other… how can they hold down a job or how can they be productive or whatever? And for you, I think to get to the point where you see your mom was dealt a really tough hand, not just with her own mental illness, with her mother's mental illness, with her father's alcoholism, with everything else, and to see what a vibrant person she was when she was young, and how she made incredibly risky attempts...

John Blake: Yes.

Sy Hoekstra: …to cross bounds of racism and could not have seemingly cared less about the risk that that was to her. And your dad was the same way. He was also extremely brave. But to be able to see her through that lens. Just what was the hand that she was dealt and what did she do with it. And from there you're able to say, I was proud to be her son and I am in fact proof that the world can change.

John Blake: Man, y'all read the book! Golly.

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] But that was, I don't know, that touches me personally on just with relationships that I have, and that is potent stuff, man. If more people thought that way, that would be an incredible result of you writing this really beautiful thing.

John Blake: Thank you.

Sy Hoekstra: So other than going to buy the book, more than I imagined [laughs], is there anything else you want people to do? Do you want people to follow you anywhere or any other work you want to plug?

John Blake: No, no. I mean, I appreciate the opportunity. I think to pick up on what you said about my mom, if anybody could take something away from this is, I talk about at the end, as you mentioned, the kind of courage it took for her to do what she did. And I gave a little TED Talk recently where I said, I really don't know. I still don't understand why she took those risks. And I said, I don't think I ever will. But what I said is that, just think about it. When my mom got together with my father in 1963, interracial marriage was illegal. A Black man could easily get killed for walking with the white woman down the street. That was the world. The idea of interracial marriage and biracial children being open, that was like unheard of.

And look at today. Oh man, I see interracial couples, biracial children everywhere and no one thinks about it. And I'm like, how did that happen? And the message I wanted people to take away from the book, if anything, is I talk about that thing what I call good contagion. That when people like my mom and that generation, there were others like her, her and my mother and father. They didn't wait for a politician to decide or a judge to decide. They said, “This is right. I'm willing to take a risk. People are people.” And she went out and she took these risks, she paid the price for it. But because of people like her, they created that conditions where it became a norm, and nobody thinks twice about it. So I think ordinary people have tremendous power, and we shouldn't forget that because I see so many people who feel hopeless, things can't change, and I'm like, “Look at my mom.”

Look at what she did. She had no power in the world, but through the power of what she did with my father and others like her at that time, they created this new world where nobody thinks twice about interracial marriage or biracial children. Nobody's peddling that sick stuff that it’s bad for the children or it's sinful. You couldn't even say that stuff now and get away with it. So I just hope people remember the power of her example and how—what ordinary people can do.

Sy Hoekstra: That's a brilliant place to end [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.

Sy Hoekstra: John Blake, thank you so much for being on Shake the Dust with us. We really, really appreciate it.

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

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please remember to go to KTFPress.com and consider becoming a paid subscriber. And remember until June 19th, we have that sale going: 50 percent off an entire year's subscription. That's just $35 for the whole year. You can get that by going to KTFPress.com/season3. That’s KTFPress.com/season, and the number three.

Thanks again for listening. Our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all back here in two weeks.

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

Sy Hoekstra: You said the “Glad” Media Award, but it's G-L-A-A-D. Do they say glad? Is that how they pronounce it?

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that's how they say it.

Sy Hoekstra: Because there's two a's my screen reader pronounces it glaad [with a long A sound and dramatic emphasis].

[laughter]

Jonathan Walton: That's funny.

We’re back! Jonathan and Sy make some announcements about what’s coming in season 3, and a sale we’re having on our paid subscription at http://www.ktfpress.com/season3!

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. Transcripts of every episode are available at KTFPress.com/s/transcripts.

Hosts

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – 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

[A 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.” There is a brief pause, and then the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out]

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome, everyone, to this announcement little feed drop that we have about season three of Shake the Dust. I’m Sy Hoekstra.

Jonathan Walton: And I’m Jonathan Walton.

Sy Hoekstra: And we are here today to give you some news about season three. We are gonna give you some good news, and then we’re gonna give you some sad news, And then we’re gonna give you some good news again. It’ll be a little bit of a sad news sandwich. But Jonathan, why don’t you be the bearer of good news?

Jonathan Walton: The good news is that season three Starts Friday with an interview featuring CNN reporter John Blake. We’re interviewing him about his incredible new memoir about racism, mental health, a fractured family, and his faith. You don’t want to miss it.

We’ll be staying on our every other week schedule from season two, and we have a lot of good stuff coming your way. We’re talking about money, economic justice, white people in racial justice movements, Black maternal health, and a whole lot more.

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, so now the sad news. You’ve probably noticed there’s only two of us here, and that is because Suzie Lahoud is no longer going to be joining us as a co-host on this show. She’s working on her PhD at a little school you’ve probably never heard of called Oxford University, and she needs to take time to focus on that, which we find incredibly understandable, but we are also very sad and we will miss terribly her and her contributions to this show and everything we do at KTF Press. But we wish her all the best in her work on what we are sure will be a brilliant theology thesis.

For now, it will just be Jonathan and I holding down the fort. We are probably gonna have a third permanent co-host come on at some point. We’re definitely having at least one guest host this season. And as Jonathan said, we have a lot of really great things planned for this season already.

Jonathan Walton: Please remember you can support this show by going to KTFPress.com and becoming a paid subscriber. And for the next two weeks, we’re having a season three launch sale! Get a whole year of the subscription for 50% off at KTFPress.com/season3. That’s KTFPress.com/season, and then the number three.

That gets you the bonus episodes of this show and our weekly newsletter where we curate media to help you in your discipleship and political education. And it supports this show and everything else we do at KTF Press. So you get a full year for just $35 by going to KTFpress.com/season3. Again, that’s KTFPress.com/season, and then the number three.

Sy Hoekstra: We are so excited to be back behind the mic and recording this show again for you all. We are going to do bonus episodes again for subscribers when this season is over. We couldn’t during this last season break because we were working on our new book (which is still available at faithunleavened.com), but now that that’s out, we will get back in our more regular recording rhythm.

So, we will see you all on Friday with CNN reporter John Blake.

Jonathan Walton: See you then!

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

Jonathan Walton: The good news is that season 3 Starts Friday with an episode featuring CNN reporter John Blake. We’re [tries to say the next word and coughs]. Oh, that sounded [coughs again]. Sorry… [Sy chuckles].

The good news is that season 3 Starts [Jonathan laughs at himself]. Dang it! [laughs again]

The good news is that season three starts Friday with an episyooode [oddly lengthening word] featuring CNN reporter John Blake.

Sy Hoekstra: No dude do it again [laughs]

Jonathan Walton: [makes a croaky frustrated noise] Mah!

The team interviews Tamice Spencer-Helms about her new book, Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, published by us, KTF Press! We talk about the meaning behind the book’s title, Tamice’s introduction to and discipleship under White Jesus, burnout in ministry, what writing such a raw and honest memoir was like, and a lot more! Get your copy at http://www.faithunleavened.com.

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com.

Hosts

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – 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.

Tamice Spencer-Helms reads us an excerpt from her new book, Faith Unleavened, published by KTF Press! Order the book today at www.faithunleavened.com.

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com.

Host

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

Production, editing, and transcript by 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

[A 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.”]

[Instrumental piano from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out]

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to this special, though brief, extra episode of Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. It’s book day, everybody! Our book, our newest book, Faith Unleavened is out. The full title: Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd by Tamice Spencer-Helms is out today for purchase as an e-book or a paperback. You can find it at faithunleavened.com, and it is incredible. We are so excited about it. You’re gonna hear an excerpt of it today, read by Tamice, the author, and then you’ll get more from us. We’ll have a full interview with her coming pretty soon. You will be able to read all about the book at the website, faithunleavened.com. She will be on other podcasts and in other places as the weeks go on. But today the book is out. Again, please go to faithunleavened.com to check it out.

I am here today to just do two things. One of them was tell you that. I’m not here by the way to tell you about season 3 of Shake the Dust. That – information on that will come, but it’s gonna come a little while from now because we have been hard at work on this book.

The second thing, though, that I’m here to do with you today [laughs] is just to introduce Tamice, who’s going to read, like I said, an excerpt of this book for us. It’s a really good one. We also published this excerpt at KTFPress.com today, so this is the audio version. The title of it is “White Jesus, Black Stories,” and here to read it for you is Tamice.

Tamice Spencer-Helms: I arrived as a new intern at the mission's base of a large, Midwestern, mostly white ministry in 2007. I had full confidence in the organization I was joining. People in charismatic circles knew it as a place where God was moving. It had an atmosphere where Heaven was “open” and the “fire on the altar” never went out. People who joined saw themselves as “special friends” of Jesus, like the disciples in his inner circle.

Of course, I was the lonely only in many meetings, but I was used to that by this point in my journey with White Jesus and his followers. Being Black in a white ministry in a red state hit different during the Obama years, though. Barack Obama’s campaign was an exciting time for my family and for many people with skin like mine. My brother and sister-in-law stood in line outside for hours early in the morning so they could vote before classes started at their HBCU. My mom and dad texted me pictures with grins and stickers saying “Yes, We Can” and “I Voted.” They even sent me a picture of my nephew holding hands with Obama at the Democratic National Convention.

The Obamas made me feel proud, but I was too ashamed of that pride to tell anyone at the ministry. It would have made them question my devotion to Jesus. The relatively few Black staff were all at war within ourselves in one way or another. The white people kept reminding us that we were different by laying their hands on us unprompted and praying for "your community.” The Black ministry leaders, who didn’t seem to be at war within themselves at all, constantly exhorted us to show allegiance to Jesus above all else.

Many of my Black siblings walked out during this time. I should have, but I didn’t think I could. I was so afraid of being wrong about God. I was going to be faithful to Jesus even if it cost me all my friends and family.

When MSNBC announced that Obama had won the election, the leaders of the ministry called everyone into a Solemn Assembly. I sat down and was pulling out my Bible when my phone rang. It was my grandmother. A wave of remorse and regret came over me.

Her name was Dr. Leah Naomi Omega Goldsborough Hasty. I called her Mom-Mom. She grew up in a segregated town on the eastern shore of Maryland. She was the second youngest of twelve siblings. They hunted their own food, and they all shared one outhouse. Mom-Mom had seen so much, done so much, and this election victory must have felt like her experiences had not been in vain. But here I was in a quiet room of devastated white people. I was grateful for the opportunity to step outside.

“Hello?” I answered the phone. I could hear people in the background cheering and crying.

“Hi ... Meecie?”

“Yes! Hi, Mom-Mom!”

“Are you watching the news?”

“No, Ma’am. I’m at a prayer meeting.”

“A prayer meeting?”

“Yes.”

It took a moment for her to reply.

“Oh, well, it’s a momentous night, and I was just calling to celebrate and say I love you.”

“I love you too, Mom-Mom. Thanks for calling. Tell everybody hi for me.”

“I will. Take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

Click.

I headed back into the assembly. The juxtaposition between my life before and after I met White Jesus was never more jarring than the moment I opened that door. The room was an echo chamber where white intransigence obstructed Black jubilation. My family was celebrating. My church was crying.

As I sat back down, I pushed away the rumbling of roiling memories of stories my grandmother had told me that were threatening to erupt inside me and disrupt the noiseless gathering. I remembered her telling me that my great grandmother, Ida Jane, worked for a wealthy plantation owner as a laundress and maid. One day while ironing, she laid a white sheet out on the board and saw two holes. It was a Ku Klux Klan hood. She folded the uniform up, put it in a drawer, and gave the missus her notice.

Then there was the time Mom-Mom took the train to hear Mary McLeod Bethune speak at a convention. She had complained that she looked ugly because of a scar that developed on her face after she fell onto a metal can. Ida Jane dragged Mom-Mom to the convention to show her that worth comes from the heart and mind, not outer beauty.

Mom-Mom marched for voting rights and participated in the sit-in that desegregated the ice cream shop in her neighborhood. She always said she did the latter because Ida Jane loved French vanilla.

White Jesus needed me to forget these stories in order to follow him. Myths like him can only function in the absence of reality. Story is too powerful. Notions, fabrications, and falsehoods cannot withstand the test of a testimony. White Jesus cannot endure the presence of people who need real-life liberation because his architect was the imaginations of the privileged. He needed me to downplay my inheritance because he could not stand up to it.

It was the last year of Obama’s first term when Trayvon Martin died. After his reelection, he went on national TV and said Trayvon could have been his son. I wondered if the president wasn’t getting any sleep either. He may have been the only person who spoke to what I was feeling at that time. The pastor sure as hell didn’t. That was the moment I finally let the dissonance in my soul take the reins. The heat from my tears washed the scales out of my eyes. Someone—and certainly not just anyone—in a position of power had actually named my experience and validated the pain I was in.

There is hardly anything I regret more than missing out on the joy of Obama’s election—such a crucial moment in the story Blackness is telling—because I was bowing to White Jesus. I can't help but feel a little like Ida Jane when I think about how Trayvon woke me up to the white supremacy in my theology. I’d stretched white evangelicalism all the way out over the years, and I, too, found holes.

I think my grandmother always knew that day would come. Mom-Mom died while I was in the middle of writing this very essay. I find comfort and redemption in the fact that I drove her to the polls to elect the first Black, female Vice President of the United States. I held her storied hands while Kamala Harris was sworn in. A cancerous tumor had grown in on the jaw where the scar was. She was having trouble talking, but she managed a “go girl!” when Amanda Gorman let her literary light shine. She squeezed my hand when Michelle gave Kamala a fist bump on her way out of the arena, and I squeezed back. I’d finally come home.

When I told her I wanted to write about my journey one day, Mom-Mom winked at me. I’m winking back at her now.

This is our season 2 finale! The team answers questions from listeners, diving into several different topics, reflecting on the season as a whole, and talking about where we’re going next. We get into spiritual direction of white people, when to leave your church, what media outlets should get your money, and a whole bunch of questions about our episode on queer Christianity. It’s a great episode to cap off a great season. We’re so proud of what we’ve done this year with the show, and thank you all so much for listening! 

Mentioned in the episode: 

* Jonathan’s review of Andy Stanley’s most recent book 

* Our episode, “Debunking the Dangerous Doctrine of the Political Middle” 

* Our episode, “Clarity and Queer Christianity” 

* Sy’s article on sexual orientation discrimination in foster care licensing 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – 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.”] 

Suzie Lahoud: Why is it more important to us to be able to tell someone that we think they're living in sin, than it is for us to be able to look someone in the eye and say, “You are seen and you are known and you are loved, come fellowship with us.” Because I think the latter is what we see lived out with Christ. 

[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.] 

Suzie Lahoud: Welcome to Shake the Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. I'm Suzie Lahoud.  

Sy Hoekstra: I'm Sy Hoekstra. 

Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Welcome to our season finale episode! Today, we will be answering some really great questions submitted by listeners just like you, and talking a bit about what's ahead for Shake the Dust and KTF Press. 

Sy Hoekstra: Speaking of KTF Press, please remember to go to ktfpress.com and consider subscribing. We have a monthly and an annual subscription, it gets you the bonus episodes of this show. It gets you our weekly newsletter, where all three of us give you highlights from media, things to listen to and read and watch, that will help you in your discipleship and your political education as you leave colonized faith. It also supports everything that we do at KTF Press. That is how we exist, because of the people who support us through that subscription, and we really appreciate it. So please go to ktfpress.com, consider subscribing. And you can always start off your subscription with a free month by going to ktfpress.com/freemonth.  

Okay, let's get started. Suzie, give us our first question.  

Suzie Lahoud: Our first question comes from a listener named Adam, in response to Jonathan's piece about Andy Stanley's book and the episode we did on political moderation in white churches. It sort of has two parts. The first part is, “As a spiritual director and someone interested in attempting to address white people with racial issues, I'm never sure how to prioritize/address how people are traumatized by coming to terms with the reality of the history of the country or their own family or their church.”  

The second part of the question I'm just going to summarize, but basically Adam, in addition to that first part expresses feeling sort of betrayed by his church. And even though he felt like the church community came at issues like COVID and LGBTQ Christians from a healthy place, he feels like they're just going nowhere on issues of race. So he hasn't really been able to go back on Sunday mornings and is concerned about how this is affecting the spiritual life of his kids.  

So, I'm interested to hear from you two, Jonathan and Sy. How would you address, I guess, both parts of this question? The first sort of more general and the second more kind of personal.  

Jonathan Walton: So, all right, I'm going to go to the second one first, because that's actually I think easy. Is that me and Priscilla, whenever we had… and I actually did an Instagram video series about this. If you go to my Instagram @ehactivist, I talk about this. It's like, when is the time to leave your church? And I would say to Adam, it's beyond time for you to leave your church. At our church, one of the things that they asked when we first got there was, is this a place that you can grow, connect and serve? And I never heard those three things put together before, but I would love to be at a place where I can grow in my love of God, other people, his word, and all of creation, like with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit indwelling in me. And I would love to be able to connect with other people as I do that, and I'd love to serve. And those things actually acting in concert with each other. And if I'm only doing one of those things for a sustained amount of time, then I'm actually not participating in, I think, like a healthy body. If I'm at a place where I can do those things. And so that was the first thing.  

The second thing is, if I wouldn't want my child to grow up and be like the people that I'm around, why am I at that church?  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. 

Suzie Lahoud: Oo, yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: Why am I there? If I hesitate with inviting people there, I think it's okay for us to leave. And there are hard conversations that come with that, issues that come with that, but all of those things are emotional.  

We need to do the work to interrogate, to figure out what those things are, but it sounds like that it's beyond time for Adam to leave, because he's not able to grow, connect and serve, and it's been that way for a while. If that's the case, what actually needs to happen is, I would recommend having the hard conversations to figure out what's at stake for you if you go, and then addressing those things. Because none of the things that I assume are going to come up are worth your relationship with God and your children's relationships with God over time. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think part of what you're saying, Jonathan, what I'm hearing from you, is that the simplest answer is often right and simultaneously the hardest thing to do. 

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely. Absolutely.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. I think that's a great point Sy. I also think it's good… To your point, Jonathan, I think it's good if and when you feel like it's time to go, to have an exit strategy and a re-entry strategy. So an exit strategy for, and I would recommend to folks going back and listening to one of the first episodes we did with Pastor Sandra Maria Van Opstal and hearing her advice on this. That even when there are times when you feel like you want to burn it all down, resisting that urge and trying to extricate yourself in a way that you can try to prevent as much as you can burning bridges while also speaking truth in love. 

So not silencing your truth telling, but also doing it in a way that is loving to the community of Christ, and is looking out for folks who will come after you. But then also I think a reentry strategy for how and where are you going to seek out that community that Jonathan was describing, where you can grow and connect and serve. So I think that's important too, because otherwise, especially when you have a family that's going to be leaving with you, otherwise it's possible that you could just end up in limbo and that's not a healthy place to be either.  

So I think rather than just doing the easy thing in a way, put “easy” in quotation marks, of just sort of launching yourself and your family out into oblivion, out to outer space [laughter]. I think it's smart to go to mission control and talk through how you're going to exit the atmosphere [Sy laughs] and then land wherever it is you feel like you're called to land, having in mind the kind of place that you want to land, and why and how you're going to go about that. 

Sy Hoekstra: So leaving your church in this metaphor is like launching yourself into the sort of cold, indifferent expanse of space.  

Suzie Lahoud: I mean, I feel like it can feel that way when you're in the wilderness for a little bit.  

Jonathan Walton: Yes, it can feel that way. I have had so many conversations with racially assigned white people in the United States about this very question. I have not had any conversations with Black folks about feeling homeless in a church and like a political outsider and “Where is my tribe?” Like none of those conversations with marginalized people. But I have consistently had those conversations with mostly white men, about “I don't know where I belong politically. I don't know where I belong in church. I don’t know where I belong socially.” And I think that's because we're used to… not we, because I'm not white, but you're used to belonging and used to having it all make sense.  

And Jerry Falwell, when he designed the first church around these like, he created this behemoth where everything you quote-unquote “need” comes from this place, and we've bought into that. Where it's hard for us to have non-Christians and call them friends. It's hard for us to build relationships outside of our small group, outside of our family group, outside of the Saturday luncheon. So when you leave, quote-unquote “leave” or think about leaving…  

Sy Hoekstra: You lose everything. 

Jonathan Walton: you lose quote-unquote “everything”. Not to text jack a verse, but if you lose your life, you'll gain it. And if we give up some of these things that we think are our entire lives, we might just gain the kingdom.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: And so to go straight into the first part of that… 

Sy Hoekstra: The first part of his question?  

Jonathan Walton: The first part of his question about how do you address these things as a spiritual director? I think that is a great, honest pastoral question. And I think that some of the difficulty in answering that question might come from the fact that you haven't left yet. And so if you actually go first, you'll have to think through, what am I leaving? Why am I leaving? What am I giving up? Is it worth it? Yes. Why? How am I going to do this? Because I don't know if the person sitting in front of you, how to love that person other than saying I X, Y, and Z, if that's what they're asking for in this spiritual direction experience, if that's what they're looking for in this formation relationship.  

Because most of the spiritual directors that I've had and the people I have, and I listen to and hold in the highest regard is, they tell me, “I did this. I felt this.” And I think there's something significant about Jesus, because Jesus, when he says, I know what it's like to be betrayed, or I know what it's like to have people turn their back on me, and I know what it's like, he's a man of sorrows. So we can go back and see stories of how he entered into those things and overcame, and I think as a spiritual director, if you have, that's the prior agreement and expectation in these spiritual direction relationships, we're able to do that. When those things come up and you pull from your own wealth of experience and not a secondhand spirituality, I think there'll be power that comes and discernment that come. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with all that. I would add, God meets people where they are. He's not going to… like if you left and you could articulate all those things with all the authority that Jonathan just kind of cast a vision for, there's still going to be some people who aren't ready to hear it, and you need to be conscious of those things. Like you can't just throw people into trauma and let them sink, if they're going to sink or reject it or whatever. But we also, like every white spiritual director needs to understand that getting white people to the place where they understand that that trauma that they're going through is so much less than the trauma that is inflicted on everybody else by the same issues… 

Suzie Lahoud: Yes, yes. 

Sy Hoekstra: … and that they are unable to handle emotionally and to even understand the extent of the trauma because of the fact that they are white and the things don't affect them directly. If spiritual directors can't get people there, can't get people to a place where they understand that, we can't go anywhere on race. We can never go anywhere on race, because that's the starting point. Like you can't get anywhere as a white person until you understand… you can't get anywhere significant anyways. 

Jonathan Walton: Sy — I'm sorry. 

Sy Hoekstra: Go ahead.  

Jonathan Walton: Sorry, I was exploding because I want to write an essay about this [Sy laughs]. But it's the gospel. If we cannot bring our sin to Jesus, individual and collective, …  

Suzie Lahoud: Yes. 

Jonathan Walton: ...if we're not able to do that, then I don't think we get the gospel.  

Sy Hoekstra: Right. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yes, preach. 

Jonathan Walton: We don't understand the good news of Jesus. So if I'm sitting here in a spiritual direction conversation, and God has revealed to me that I am directly connected to institutionalized violence against a marginalized group of people that I have benefited from, and I can't deal with that, what I'm effectively saying is the work of Christ is incomplete and too small.  

Sy Hoekstra: Uh huh. 

Jonathan Walton: Jesus must not, must not have risen from the grave for this. I'm just, this is just too much. So in that liminal space, I think there's unlimited access to the, all of the scriptures become true. How high, how low, how wide, how deep is the love of God for us. There's no shame or condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. All these things just burst forth, and if you are white or you are a man, or you are able-bodied, or you are any of these spaces that society has actually set up for us to flourish and then set up for other people to be crushed and we recognize that, and then Jesus loves us anyway and died for us anyway, then all of a sudden we might understand why Judas wasn't cast out, why Pontius Pilate wasn't put in his place. Why all of these people along the way that crapped on Jesus, like Peter still got to be the rock of the church. And he literally abandoned his best friend and his teacher. So, anyway, I just think it's a great space for people to meet Jesus and come to the King. That’s all. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] I completely agree with all that. You're also partially just talking about decentering yourself as a white person, because you won't… if all of your concerns are wrapped up in how do I get anybody in my white church to move an inch on race when you could be running miles with Jesus. You're just, you're going to lose out on so much, like Jonathan just said. And so a big part of the solution to that in a lot of cases is leave, which is back to the second question that Adam asked, I think, because leave and put yourself in a place where you are actually under the authority of somebody who's not white, if it's a racial question that you're asking about your church or whatever. Put yourself below the group that society subordinates. And you will be probably disoriented, but you're also going to not face as much of the trauma that you face in a white church, and you're going to see real life examples all around you, of the people who have not only dealt with the level of trauma you faced, but with levels of trauma far beyond what you faced, and you're going to be able to learn from them.  

And there's nothing, absolutely nothing, that Jesus ever says that is stay in an institution that is refusing to change, when the spirit does not seem to be working in this area and try and do anything you can. Jesus says follow him, so go follow him wherever he is, which doesn't sound like he's necessarily in the church where you are [laughs], as harsh as that may sound.  

Suzie, do you have anything to add? 

Suzie Lahoud: I’ll just launch off, I love that picture that you paint, Sy, where it's once you're able to exit that space where the biggest question is, how do I help white people deal with their feelings, to put it in just really stark terms. And once you can launch yourself into that space where like you were saying, you are under the spiritual authority of those who have been oppressed by white people, and who are struggling with real life things. And the question shifts, having that paradigm shift, all of a sudden you can now be dealing with, as you were describing Sy, real life issues of like, okay, how do we help these people feed their families? How do we address this housing crisis? How do we deal with this police brutality that are robbing people of their lives? 

All of a sudden, I mean, really, I think back to your point, Jonathan, it's being launched out into the kingdom of, can we get away from these piddling little questions and start to look at the big picture of how do we allow God to use us as a conduit for his grace in real, tangible, concrete ways? But then also, Jonathan, I love how it gets to the piece of, as white people, white evangelicals, we love to talk about the wages of sin. And we love to talk about original sin and all of those things, all of those theologies. But then we are just babies when it comes to actually dealing with sin. And I say babies, because the verse I'm thinking about is we are not mature enough to eat the solid food… 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. 

Suzie Lahoud: … that needs to be fed to us in spiritual formation. If you're going to talk about spiritual formation, we need to move beyond the milk of like, oh, you poor white person, you can't handle knowing that you are actually a sinner and that your sin actually has real life consequences in the world that are still occurring. That still have repercussions, reverberations generationally, that you are still actively a part of. We can't move beyond that. We are still being bottle fed… 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. 

Suzie Lahoud: … and we need to move past it. Like not only is it a sin for us to not be able to repent of those things and acknowledge them, but we, how are we ever going to be able to eat the solid food that Jesus wants to feed us? And it is good food, friends. It is a banquet. And I want to be there, and I want to see all of us at the table. But if you're in the business of spiritual formation, I'm sorry. I don't mean business. Like it's to monetize, let's get capitalism out of the church. But I'm just saying, if that's what you feel called to, … 

Jonathan Walton: [laughing] There you go. 

Suzie Lahoud: … you bringing people to the table, I don't want to be spoon fed at the table of the Lord. I want that real food. 

Jonathan Walton: Amen. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Amen. All three of us had a lot of feelings about the first question [laughter]. So Let's keep moving to the next one because we could talk about that all day. Thank you so much, Adam. I'm glad we have a, not as intense, but I think super practical and great question next from our occasional proofreader at ktfpress.com, the proofreader of our anthology, and my aunt, Margie. Hit it, Suzie.  

Margie: Hi friends. Every time you ask for questions to be sent in by voice or email, I think of this question, so I don’t know why I never send it. Anyway, here's my question. If a person were going to pay actual cash money for a newspaper subscription, not the paper, but digital, what newspaper or papers would you guys recommend someone put their money in? Maybe give a top five or 10 in order of preference. I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions and referrals on this.  

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you, Margie. Guys, you go first. I'll just tell you up front, I'm going to cheat a little bit on this question and not precisely follow Margie’s instructions in the, I think the classic tradition of the podcast host, but I'm going to get at the heart of her question [Suzie laughs]. But you guys feel free to answer as you choose. 

Suzie Lahoud: The spirit, not the letter of the question [Sy laughs].  

Jonathan Walton: Ah, man, as someone who pays for very few news sources. 

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs]. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, I think that's the honest first part of the question. 

Sy Hoekstra: Margie, you're asking millennials this question.  

Jonathan Walton: So if I pay for news. 

Sy Hoekstra: No, it's a hypothetical. If you have money for news. 

Jonathan Walton: Hypothetical, okay. So one, I would pay for the New York Times. Let's be clear, New York Times is some of the best reporting that there is, I think just in the world. And so I think if I was going to pay money, and I do pay money for the New York Times, I would pay for the New York Times [Sy laughs]. The second thing that I would pay attention to, the Miami Herald has really great reporters. 

Sy Hoekstra: Hey, Jacqueline Charles, if you want to learn about Haiti in a way that nobody else in America is going to let you learn, go read the Miami Herald. 

Jonathan Walton: If you love her, you should definitely read Leonard Pitts. Really, really great commentary and a 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner. The other things that I would say is, I would find voices on Substack.  

Sy Hoekstra: You’re stealing mine. Okay, go ahead [Suzie laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: Peter Beinart is amazing. Peter Beinart is great. I would also lean into… now this is where I think we can get into who you're going to support with your ad dollars and your eyes. I think Fareed Zakaria is really helpful.  

Sy Hoekstra: Oo, I agree with that one.  

Jonathan Walton: And then the most helpful conservative place that I lean into in the red, is The Bulwark. It's pretty new. It was created by some Never Trump people, but some, I think a helpful perspective I don't normally agree with, but the analysis is helpful. Oh, and if you have money also, you should definitely support The Guardian. They're great.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yes, agreed. 

Sy Hoekstra: Suzanne.  

Suzie Lahoud: I guess I would, yeah, I would also affirm what Jonathan was saying about the New York Times. I also, I am a Bostonian, so I also subscribe to the Boston Globe. But would I say it's as good as the New York Times? Not going to answer that because I'm a Bostonian [Jonathan laughs]. But I think it's also really good reporting, and especially, I think it's good just in general to subscribe to your local papers. I think that's really important. I know the Boston Globe has done some incredible reporting on racial justice in the Boston area and social justice issues, and I think that's really important for me as a Bostonian when I go to the polls, to be well informed through those sources, and I am blessed to be in a city that has a resource like that. 

So definitely look into your local papers. I would agree with The Atlantic, they also have a certain number of free articles you can read every month, so that's great. I am also one of those people, and I kind of feel like an old lady in this, but I have like a stack of New Yorkers that just piles up in my apartment. 

Sy Hoekstra: [laughing] That's right, you do.  

Jonathan Walton: They are really good. 

Suzie Lahoud: But look, I actually get like the actual physical copy of The New Yorker and you will get incredible long-form journalism pieces that will come out, and those are worth the subscription, I would say. But if you're not sure you want to go all in on the subscription, I think a really smart thing to do is through social media, just following those journalists. Some of them are freelancing for The New Yorker, but following those journalists whose reporting you like and who report on topics that you want to stay up to date on. So like Ian Urbina is someone who I just think he does such a phenomenal job going in depth on his stories, and really covers important things that are important critiques, I think, of empire and capitalism and not so great stuff going on in our world.  

So I think that's great. I was also surprised, I have to say as a side note, I took one course at the Harvard Kennedy School. I was really surprised that a lot of the curriculum for this one course I took, a lot of what we were assigned reading was actually just pieces from The New Yorker. And that was surprising to me because I realized that's what's informing a lot of the policymaking in DC, and so that’s another reason why… 

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Articles, yes. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. And so that's another reason why I like to keep up to date with that particular publication, is because even if I don't agree with everything coming out of it, which honestly, most of the time I do agree with the angles that are being taken, but at the end of the day, that's what folks are having eyes on in Washington. And so I want to be aware of how they're being informed on certain issues and to be able to respond and critique those things. Also I'm going to steal one from Sy, but Al Jazeera has for a long time been something that I check daily. They put out great journalism, great reporting on the Middle East. Tends to avoid a lot of the sort of problematic reporting that you might get on things in the Middle East from other publications in the United States, and so I definitely recommend Al Jazeera.  

Sy Hoekstra: My answer to this is a little bit different. I don't know, this is a personal decision. I'm not judging Jonathan or Suzie [laughs], but I typically don't give money to the big ones largely because there's enough problematic stuff that happens there, there's enough decisions that the New York Times makes that are real weird and questionable about the things that it decides to cover or the people it platforms, and I don't love the way The New Yorker’s treating it's workers right now, and that kind of thing. There's enough of that kind of thing that goes on that I'm happy to just give those people my ad revenue money. 

Jonathan Walton: Advertising dollars. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly, and kind of skip out on the actual cash. I a hundred percent agree — the Miami Herald has national reach, and a lot of the local papers do in various ways — but I would totally agree with that. Like your local paper that is especially doing the work of addressing the issues that your actual local communities are dealing with, holding your local government institutions accountable to whatever degree that's possible, a hundred percent agree with that. I would look at nonprofit journalism outfits too that are either from a perspective that you agree with or that you don't hear as often, or that you, they're on a specific subject that you're interested in. So I look at The Marshall Project and The Appeal all the time. Both great nonprofit journalism rooms talking about the criminal legal system and all of the incredible ways that it fails and how to change it. The Marshall Project also covers immigration. Mother Jones is an interesting one, they come from an obviously left perspective, but they write on just some stuff that's so interesting, that you're not going to find anywhere else. There's this one article about the child welfare system that I cite all the time, because nobody writes about it to the extent that they have. So things like that I think are interesting to look into.  

And then specifically for the Substack voices, like Jonathan mentioned, we have a recommendations page of other Substacks that we recommend. Just one of the smaller ways that we try and center and elevate marginalized voices. But you can just go to ktfpress.com/recommendations, and you will see all of the other people on the Substack platform that we recommend. I would highly encourage people to give those people some money. Most of them are not… actually, I think all the ones that we recommend are not companies even. Like I mean, we're a very small company obviously, but those are individual people that you're giving money directly to for their work, which I think is a cool model and something that’s pretty much only allowed because of the internet.  

Suzie Lahoud: One thing that I've been learning, is follow people, not publications. Social media is just a great way. Again, following journalists that you respect and just following people that you respect and seeing what they're reading, what they're putting out. And I think that that can be a helpful way to glean information and knowledge from a variety of sources, which I think is a smart thing to be doing.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Jonathan, can you give us the next question?  

Jonathan Walton: Yes, I can do that. This question comes from our episode about queerness and clarity. And if you haven't listened to that, please do go back to Spotify or wherever — your podcast listener — and check it out. But it goes, what about non-affirming LGBTQ+ voices? Why were they left out of our conversations about queerness and Christianity? Sy, what do you think about that?  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I think we got a couple of questions to that effect. I think there might have been some times where we worded some things, where we maybe made it sound like queer people are all on one side of the question of, does the Bible affirm LGBTQ relationships or not? So I'll own that, there are probably sometimes where I was a little bit careless with my words, I won't speak for the others. I will say that the question, coming from straight people, I think is a little bit like white people asking why when you talk about race, you're not taking into account the perspectives of like Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell or Candace Owens, or any of the Black people who very publicly take the side that is most often associated with white people when it comes to debates about race. The content of the argument doesn't really change. It's just you typically want someone who is from the marginalized identity group agreeing with you because that's more palatable and it feels better.  

But the thing about that dynamic in the LGBTQ conversation that I would highlight, is that the tokenizing is done by people in the majority culture. Like when you're talking about — what I just described is tokenizing. When you're just picking someone out who agrees with you because of their identity, whatever that identity is. That's done by people who are in the dominant group. So in this case, that's done by straight people. The non-affirming LGBTQ people themselves are not doing anything wrong. They just believe what they believe and they often believe it at enormous personal cost, because there are so many people on either side of the spectrum of belief who don't want them to be saying what they're saying. So I wanted to acknowledge that, but then also say, as far as who we're going to center and elevate, we're going to center and elevate the marginalized perspective, not the perspective that the majority already holds, just coming from a different voice, if that makes sense. I think that was just something I wanted to kind of make clear in response to that question. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think that that's a really important thing to call out. Suzie, did you want to add something to that? 

Suzie Lahoud: I'm trying to figure out how to address this without, because I don't want to come across as just being defensive. But going back to that episode, so I know, personally I did try to acknowledge the fact that, I mean, I have folks who come at this issue, LGBTQ Christians who are both affirming and non-affirming, and I certainly don't want to silence those who are non-affirming. And I even mentioned, I think, when I was speaking about wanting to support my queer Christian friends wherever they land on this issue, and wanting to support their wrestling, wherever they land on this issue. So, just to clarify that up front. 

And I think that's important because I also don't, I think Sy’s point is so valid and so significant, and I just want to bring that home. That we feel called to center and elevate marginalized voices, and the marginalized perspective is to be affirming. And so that's why we gave it so much air time. Again, we feel like that other side of the story is out there is being told. But then having said that, I also don't want to make it sound like I think it's okay to silence or belittle non-affirming queer Christians.  

I think one of the main… I was thinking about this recently, I think one of the major issues that I have with evangelicalism, particularly white American evangelicalism, is this idea of not only holding views, but using your personal views to kind of beat people over the head. And I just think that if you believe that what you believe is genuine and true and real, it should be so winsome to folks that you don't have to beat them over the head with it. And so I think if you land on the affirming or the non-affirming side, I don't think you should have to use that to belittle or persecute folks who don't hold those same views. I think you should be able to articulate that in a compelling way, that again is, that draws people in. That makes them want to hear more, that makes them want to know more and see more in your life and how you live that out. And so on both sides of this, that's how I think it would be helpful for the conversation to go, and how I hope I can enter into the conversation, but again, as a straight woman, so this isn't really my space I think to be offering my views either way as if they're so significant. But I think when that conversation is going on in the queer community, I don't want to see either side bashing the other. I want to see us be able to have that open and honest conversation. But again, to Sy’s point, I'm going to hammer this home again because I think it's so important, making sure that we are giving enough air time to the marginalized perspective. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And the only thing I want to add to what you all are saying, is that we had a lot of conversations about this conversation.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah we did. 

Jonathan Walton: And one of the things about centering and elevating marginalized voices when we are three straight people, is like answering the questions that we are being asked. I was not asked to give a side A clear argument and a side B clear argument, and then make sure there was equal time so that everyone feels that they are equally represented when they listened to this podcast. That was not what I was asked to do. What I was told that the most loving thing I can do, is explain where I land what that looks like practically for this marginalized group of people.  

And I think the person and the people that I am thinking about are my friends that are queer, when I think about that. And I'm thinking about how can I continue to be in loving, Christ-centered, pursuing relationship with these people who I love deeply and the center of our lives and conversations is not our sexuality. The center of our lives and conversations is Jesus. And so when I share about sexuality and where I quote-unquote “land” and where they land and there's conflict, what I appreciate about my friends that are queer and what they've said they appreciate about me, is that they are the center of my relationship with them. I am the center of their relationship with them.  

We are not our ideas, our ideologies, our opinions. They are trumped by the number of times we've eaten dinner and how we've prayed for each other and had conversations and wrestled with things. And those are the things that we— we actually have friendships and relationships, not arguments to win and lose. And I think in that episode, my hope was that the people that are in my life, I honor them by being clear about where I stand. That's where the episode came from for me. 

Suzie Lahoud: The next question, so a listener named Laura responded to Sy's point about idolatry in the fight against same sex marriage. To say that non-Christian marriages wouldn't be marriages without the Bible's way of seeing things. So Sy, you in particular, I think it'd be good to give you an opportunity to respond and maybe clarify, and then Jonathan, obviously, if you want to jump in, always love to hear your thoughts as well. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So this is a point… and Laura and I have gone back and forth a little bit, and I think we're actually kind of in the same place on this. But the fact that she didn't understand what I was saying and when I went back and looked at the transcript [laughs], made me think that this was worth clarifying because I said this kind of quickly. What I was talking about was the specific fight against government issued marriage licenses for same sex couples or for queer couples. The reason that's important is that like, I wasn't talking about like church marriages as it were. Like if an atheist got married, if two atheists get married, that's not a Christian marriage. But that's kind of like the point there. We don't have a problem with non-Christians getting married within the legal definition of marriage. 

And so if we are in the public sphere arguing that we should not be giving marriage licenses to LGBTQ couples because they are sinful or unbiblical or un-Christian, then you're saying all the other marriages that happen are Christian. That's the implication, right? You don't need to come in and selectively argue for Christianity to be imposed, Christian moral standards to be imposed on the issuing of government marriage licenses. Unless you're doing it selectively because you idolize something in particular, in this case, straightness and your view of sexuality. I think that that's just the clarifying point that I wanted to make. I hope that makes sense.  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and I'll just lean into very quickly, I think this is a function of a soft Christian nationalism, that we conflate religious institutions and state institutions consistently, and I think that needs to be resisted at every turn. And just because the United States says that you're married, it doesn't mean that God is for or against it. And I think we need to lean into the reality that some men and women that get married in the eyes of a church and in the state — God ain’t part of that either, you know what I'm saying? So I think there's a pridefulness that comes with that. Like inherently, if a man and woman are together, therefore God blesses it and we've moved on.  

And we all know that's not true for the obvious reasons that many of us have encountered in our relational lives, talking with people about how and when and what conditions they became married. So I think that there's a resistance to pride that we need to press into. There's a resistance to Christian nationalism that we need to press into. And then there's the honesty about history that marriage in the United States has not ever been a Christian institution and that the church can own that and we can wrestle with that in the church and separate that from what happens in the state of New York or wherever you find yourself today.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I think that's a good point about conflating church institutions and government institutions being soft Christian nationalism.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Sy Hoekstra: This is a point that I touched on in an article I wrote last year about the Catholic foster care agency in Philadelphia that was refusing to license same-sex foster couples. They were saying, “We can't condone this.” A big part of the point of my article was to say that's not what foster care agencies do. They don't morally condone couples. They evaluate whether or not their smoke detectors or their carbon monoxide detectors work [laughs] and whether or not they have food in the fridge to take care of a child. But that conflation that you were talking about, Jonathan, was happening there. There should be no difference between what we do in the church when we decide whether or not someone should, a couple is, their marriage is blessed by God, there's no difference between that and when I'm issuing them a foster care license. There's a melding of those two different scenarios.  

Suzie, I don't know if you had any thoughts on that one. It was directed at me, but go ahead if you do. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, well, I mean, I just want to agree. I think that's such an important point that you're making, Jonathan, and actually that was similar to what sort of you put it in better words than what came to mind for me when I originally was thinking about this question. And thank you, Laura, for bringing it up and for further discussion, because I appreciate Sy, you having the opportunity to clarify and to talk about this, because I feel like it can feed into, perceptions like that, can feed into a broader narrative of sort of quote- unquote, “Christian civilization,” which as you said, Jonathan, feeds into, I loved how you put it, sort of soft Christian nationalism.  

And there is kind of a homophobic narrative that talks about how the demise of civilization is when you start to see same sex couples who are then getting married and then they're not procreating, and then all of civilization falls apart. There's stories like that, that we've been told. There's this whole historiography around it. 

Sy Hoekstra: It's also extremely common with the alt-right and conspiracy theorists and the QAnon forums, those kinds of places.  

Suzie Lahoud: Exactly. And I just want to call it what it is, which is homophobia. It's a homophobic historical narrative. And so I'm not surprised that that… and by the way, I'm not saying that the person who posed the question is homophobic. I'm just saying we need to be aware of where these ideas come from. That sometimes we are repeating things that we've heard somewhere, and we need to go back to the source. And I think the source here is, as you were saying Sy, just now pointing out, it can feed into this alt-right extreme narrative that I think we don't want to be a part of.  

Sy Hoekstra: You think? 

Suzie Lahoud: I guess speaking for myself, I certainly don't want to be a part of [laughter]. And so there's that piece of it.  

And just to show on the surface how ridiculous it actually is, to show that the emperor has no clothes. So the idea, and this goes to this idea of conflating something. Christian marriage as a sacrament is different from the idea of marriage in general. Civilizations have been getting married for, since the beginning of time. That idea of folks getting married is not just from the Bible. We as Christians believe what we believe about it, starting with Adam and Eve and then moving forward. But I was just at a museum this past weekend looking at different forms of art from ancient Egypt, and they have a man and a wife there.  

Again, obviously there are different ways culturally, that the idea of marriage can manifest, but you can have marriage without having this idea of quote-unquote “Christian civilization.” And so it's just kind of a little bit, if you follow the argument, not only go back to the root of it, but follow it to its conclusion, it's actually a little bit ridiculous I think. 

Sy Hoekstra: Laura also asked us, and again, I've been back and forth with her on this, and I think we're sort of in the same place on it. But again, it was a point of clarification. About the times, I think it was just Suzie and I that said this, but when we asked about why does somebody getting married to someone of their same sex or gender bother you so much, like what harm is it doing to you? And Laura said from the perspective of someone who's not affirming, it may not affect your personal life or doesn't affect your personal life. What it affects is the church at large, like people calling something not sin that is sin, or confusing God's standards for what we should and shouldn't be doing. Do you all have thoughts about that point?  

Jonathan Walton: I'll process a little bit of this out loud. I think that we need to press in and ask ourselves, before I want to tell this person that they are sinful, we need to interrogate where that impulse is coming from. Is it coming from the Holy Spirit and relationship you have with them and they're asking you to engage with them on this deep, intimate, personal question that they have? Or have we imbibed a narrative that says, “If my child watches Buzz Lightyear, and two women come up on the screen and they are obviously in a romantic relationship, my child is going to be gay, I am scared of that.” If I introduce these concepts to my kid too young, it's just going to be this slippery slope of lesbianism that's just going to come up. 

I think we need to wrestle with, these are real conversations that I've had with people, where they're like, but if they see that, that’s going to make my child gay. If they see two moms… I think going back to Suzie's thing about meat versus milk, we actually need to grow up to be able to have mature conversations about sexuality, and mature conversations about the choices that people make and how to live our lives. And then I think we can have a conversation about sin and the love of God.  

I think we are missing an essential relational connective piece, where the person before me is not an abomination before they're made in the image of God, worthy of dignity, grace, love and respect. Before we say label this person as whatever we have decided that they are because of the theology that we have taken in and now desire to… I think we need to slow down, resist pride, resist narcissism, and resist hurry. Resist the idea that I am better than the person that's in front of me. Resist the idea that my ideas matter more than their perspective, and resist the idea that because I am better and because my ideas matter more, I can judge them before I know what their middle name is, or where they grew up, or I have never had a meal with them. I think we need to slow down.  

God sent his son Jesus to get to know us. God was not judging Adam from far away. There's an intimate relationship that happens, and I think that's what qualifies him to judge, because he knows us and we are actually not the ones to judge other people. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I should say or I should add, this was a long discussion where we went into our personal views on affirming versus non-affirming. We went into a lot of nuance on how these discussions should happen. So if you haven't listened to that episode and you're listening to us talk now, you might be missing some context, just in case somebody turned to this one before they turned to that last one. 

Jonathan Walton: This is true 

Suzie Lahoud: That’s a great point, Sy. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, we spent a long time thinking out how we would go about having that conversation, and this one is a little bit more free form. So, if you're thinking, if anything we're saying is raising some red flag for you wherever you are on the question or on these issues, I would go take a look at that past episode.  

Suzie Lahoud: I think one thing I'll add as well to what you just shared, Jonathan, which is super, super helpful, thank you for that, was, I think it's good to try to clarify, are we talking about affirmation or are we talking about visibility? And trying to disentangle the two. Because I think that, and you brought this up so clearly, Jonathan, with your example of the Buzz Lightyear film. Because one of themes in that episode that this question is referring to, was just that a lot of times all the church is really doing is keeping people in hiding and in fear, and in a position of being persecuted by the community of faith. 

And so is the fear just that those folks would be more visible to us, that they would be out in society? That they would be, we would know who they are when we're sitting next to them in church? And if that's the issue, then I think we need to ask ourselves why, because I think one of the beautiful things that Christ did is make invisible things visible and make invisible people visible to the community, and then bringing them deeper into community rather than casting them further out and casting them aside. And so I think that's where I just would love to reframe the question and the perspective that we're coming from with questions like this, of why is it more important to us to be able to tell someone that we think they're living in sin, than it is for us to be able to look someone in the eye and say, you are seen and you are known and you are loved, come fellowship with us. Because I think the latter is what we see lived out with Christ.  

And that's not to say that Christ didn’t do his fair share of calling people to account and speaking truth. And I think that's where, one of the things we were welcoming in that episode was more honest conversation and candid conversation, but let's have the conversation. Let's stop shutting people out and keeping them in closets and behind closed doors and shushing, and let's really come together and have these conversations from a place of love, informed love.  

Sy Hoekstra: And I think that point you made, Suzie, about how Jesus did sometimes call people out and sometimes didn't according to kind of different scenarios that he was in. One of the things we talked about in the episode was Jonathan said a lot of the issues that were determining how Jesus responded to any given person who he thought was sinning, and by the way, we’re all hypothetically right now coming from a non-affirming stance. That's not where we all are. But if you, like we were talking about that hypothetical because that's what the question called for. Jesus made decisions about how he responded to people based on power dynamics, power imbalances. Who has power and who doesn't. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. 

Sy Hoekstra: He responded differently to people in power versus people who are marginalized. That was the point that Jonathan made, I think it's a very important one. Because I think Laura's right. That there's like, if you're telling somebody that something isn't a sin when it is, you can be causing damage. You can also be causing damage when you tell somebody that something is a sin when it's not. And those two things, those two facts are true about any time we are having any discussion about whether or not any individual action is biblical or wise or sinful or whatever.  

In this particular case though, the question that we asked, how does it hurt you if queer couples, if people are affirming, how does that harm you as an individual? Turn that question around. Try and ask a queer person, how does it harm you if people believe that the fact that you're queer is a sin? The answer isn't something, is what I said. Yeah, you're putting some burdens on me that don't need to be on me. But the answer to that question is also going to be so incredibly grounded and personal about their individual lives because of the power imbalances. Because the answer to that question is going to be, “My whole community hates me, hates who I am. Everybody I grew up with won't talk to me anymore. My parents don't talk to me anymore. There are people all over the internet and television calling for the death of me and everyone like me, saying that I am a pervert, that I'm a demonic force that's destroying America. That I'm grooming children for sexual abuse.”  

Asking the question, “How does this harm you?” to a queer person who's affirming is just absurd because it's so obvious how it harms them, because of that power imbalance. So that's I think like a reality that we were dealing with when we were trying to talk about this. Is like, we know that when you're asking is something a sin or not, there are potential pitfalls if you get it wrong on either side. That's not like a point on which we're confused [laughs]. But I think what Suzie and I were trying to get at is, how does it harm you as an individual if somebody down the street is a man married to another man? The answer is it doesn't, but how does your antipathy, or how does the antipathy of the people in the pews of your church toward that couple affect their lives, is like a very obvious enormous problem for that couple. 

Suzie Lahoud: And I think with the empathetic point that you made right before that Sy, which I think was so well made, I feel like we've almost brought the conversation in some ways, not to draw false equivalencies, but we've almost brought the conversation full circle back to Adam's original question, talking about the feelings of the people who are doing the marginalizing, rather than those who are marginalized, and us worrying more about, as you pointed out, how it impacts them as opposed to looking to the people to whom the thing does the most harm. And I think you're right to point out that the piece there is power dynamics. And again, I just want to repeat that concept of looking to those to whom this does the most harm, and making them the center of the conversation. And I think that again, you brought out that empathetic piece so well just now in doing that, Sy. 

Sy Hoekstra: Thanks [laughs].  

This has been a really great conversation. I really appreciate this one. I just wanted to end on, does anybody have any thoughts about this season before we talk about where we're going next?  

Jonathan Walton: The only thing that I want to say is, I think that having conversations like this has probably been the most formative for me in my faith the last, I don't know how many months we've been doing this season. But getting to have these conversations, the things that sparks, the stuff that gets tossed around and engage with, I think is probably the most formative discipleship-wise, the most formative thing in my life. So I'm grateful for the listeners. I'm grateful for the people who write to us. I'm grateful for the little community that we have. And so I just feel challenged and I feel grateful to be able to be a part of what we're doing. So thanks to everybody, to subscribers. Thanks for readers and listeners, I'm really grateful. 

Suzie Lahoud: Y’all can't see me right now, but I have a big old smile on my face because it means a lot [laughter] to me to hear the great Jonathan Walton say that, and I have to just agree that it's meant so much being able to have these conversations. I also want to thank specifically those who sent in questions, because I feel like we come down hard on you all [laughs]. We do not hold back. I can already think of some things that I'm like, “Should I put it that way?” But I just want to say thank you so much for engaging with the content, because it really, it's a gift to us and you are causing us to press in deeper, and hopefully we can all grow together as Jonathan put it, as a small community, that's come together around these things. And so it's a privilege. It's been a privilege and we look forward to having more conversations and discussions like this one. 

Sy Hoekstra: I wouldn't say come down hard, Suzie. I would say we have very strong feelings about the subject. 

[laughter] 

Suzie Lahoud: There you go. Okay. We're passionate people.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I'm not angry at anyone who asked a question. I'm not like trying to lay the smack down on them. 

Suzie Lahoud: I'm just one of those people that has to say two things and apologize three times [laughter]. I generally hold back the apologies when I'm on mic, but yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] I genuinely want to thank the two of you for being people in my life who are incredibly morally grounded and who love Jesus so much. It honestly keeps me hopeful and reassured in a way that is a little bit hard to articulate sometimes. There are other people like that in my life too like Gabrielle, who's been on this show and some others. But that's why I love these conversations. They just, they give me a lot of direction. They've been extremely formative as Jonathan said, and I really appreciate that. I also like that I think we have upped our game a little bit this season [laughs].  

Suzie Lahoud: Ooh. 

Sy Hoekstra: We've just… yeah, I just think we've gotten, I was talking to a listener recently who who'd said he thought we'd really gotten into a groove this season and I went back and listened to some of the stuff. And I agree. We've also gotten some better sound equipment [Suzie laughs] and other stuff like that and it's just been a lot of fun to put these together.  

Jonathan Walton: I would agree, season two is better. And not to say that season one wasn't good, but I think the thoughtfulness, the quality of what is coming out of these things, I think is more refined. 

Sy Hoekstra: I think we're getting better as we go. 

Suzie Lahoud: Could we even say we knocked it out of the park? [Suzie plays a sound effect of a baseball organ playing the call for the audience to shout “charge!”] 

[laughter] 

Suzie Lahoud: Somebody decided to put me on sound for this final episode, so that's on that person who shall not be named. 

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] I’m never giving you this power again. 

Jonathan Walton: That was awesome.  

Sy Hoekstra: I did, yeah, that was entirely unexpected and I really appreciate it.  

Jonathan Walton: I'm waiting for you to go like [makes the DJ airhorn sound] 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: That is not one of the options on the sound board that I have given her control of. 

Jonathan Walton: Aw, man. Gotta pay for that one. 

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Thank you all so much. Like I said, we really, really appreciate everyone who supports what we do at KTF Press by subscribing. We could not be here without you. Please do go to ktfpress.com to become a subscriber if you appreciate what we do. If you want a free month, ktfpress.com/freemonth. The free month to start your subscription. We are in the off season, going to be getting hard to work on Tamice Spencer's book, which will be coming out next year from us. We have the manuscript already, the first one, we're about to get a second draft. It's amazing. We are so excited to share this book with you come next year.  

We want to be able to put out more books like that. We want to do more shows like this, more bonus episodes. We want to be able to do more writing. We talked about Jonathan's piece about Andy Stanley. He just put out another piece recently about the passing of Queen Elizabeth and how to mourn a colonizer. Suzie wrote a story this year about her experience giving birth to her second child and talking about white privilege and Black motherhood. And I wrote about an experience of being blind and how that kind of relates to solidarity and the incarnation, how people reacting to me in interesting ways when I'm just being blind in public relates to those issues. 

If you want to read more things like that, we want more subscribers. We really do want more people on board supporting this so that we can do more of what we want to do. We want to be able to also pay other people to write for the blog and get just more incredible content to you. We do things to a very, I think exacting standard when we work [laughs]. I think Jonathan and Suzie would agree and they would point their fingers at me for being perhaps over-exacting sometimes. But I think we put out really, really good stuff, I'm so proud of what we've been able to do, and I want to do more of it. So please go to ktfpress.com and subscribe. 

We will continue in the off season. You will get our newsletter. You will hear about everything that's coming up before anybody else does. You will have access to the whole archive of all of our newsletters, all of our articles, and all of our bonus episodes of which there are several hours at this point. So please go subscribe. It also supports everything we do, keeping the work accessible for disabled readers and listeners, and supporting new projects like the one that we did with Tamice, and the ones that we will be doing going forward.  

As always, our theme song for which we are so thankful, is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our incredible podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam. Guys, I said this on a thing that we didn't end up publishing. She teaches at Pratt now. 

Suzie Lahoud: What!  

Jonathan Walton: Nice 

Sy Hoekstra: You can go and take a class on how to learn Adobe InDesign from the woman who made our podcast art. That's really cool. I just found that out recently when I was hanging out with her.  

Okay, that is it from us. Thank you so much. Please go take a look at ktfpress.com and consider subscribing, and we will see you all for season three. 

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

Sy Hoekstra: I don't understand why you would do this, because now you have to wash that blanket.  

Jonathan Walton: Literally everything I have right now is going in the washer. I have been cleaning up dirt and grime and things since 8:30 this morning.  

Suzie Lahoud: I now understand why you reached for that baby blanket to blow your nose.  

Jonathan Walton: Everest uses all the tissues, because she uses the tissues to blow her nose, she also uses the tissues for blankets for all of her stuffed animals.  

[laughter] 

Suzie Lahoud: Oh really? I love that.  

Jonathan Walton: I'll look around and I'm like, everybody's been put to bed. The white bear’s been put to bed. Dog number one's been put to bed. Cat number two's been put to bed. Maya literally has behind me cats set up with fake meals of paper in bowls.  

Sy Hoekstra: Can I suggest something though, Jonathan?  

Jonathan Walton: What’s up? 

Sy Hoekstra: Is that once Everest has gone to bed, you can take all those stuffed animals’ blankets and use them. 

Jonathan Walton: You don't understand, Sy.  

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. 

Jonathan Walton: you don't get it. They going to wake up tomorrow, come in to figure out how come they cats didn’t eat. [Sy laughs]. 

Suzie Lahoud: The irony is that Jonathan can't use the real tissues to blow his nose because they’re baby blankets for the dolls. So he has to use an actual baby blanket to blow his nose. That's the irony here, friends.  

[laughter] 

Jonathan Walton: I didn't make that connection. That's funny though. 

[laughter] 

Content warning for mentions of sexual assault and stories about sexual harassment. 

Today, Suzie and Sy are talking about women in the church, Suzie’s experiences with both discrimination and empowerment in Christian spaces, systemic and personal aspects of church patriarchy, how sexism manifests in institutions that both forbid and affirm women leaders, and a lot more.  

Mentioned in the episode: Diana Butler Bass’s explanation of Elizabeth Schrader’s work.  

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – 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.”] 

Suzie Lahoud: I remember growing up, walking on the street and just having this feeling of eyes being on me and getting catcalled and just wanting to disappear. And having that same feeling kind of triggered in the context of the church, was just so horrifying to me. I just so wish that as a young woman growing up in church, that they would have done a better job of supporting and empowering women to protect ourselves. I feel like instead, all that we were taught was to cover up and to not be too enticing.  

[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.] 

Suzie Lahoud: Welcome to Shake The Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. I'm Suzie Lahoud. 

Sy Hoekstra: And I’m Sy Hoekstra. Today we're going to be talking about women in the church, giving Suzie an opportunity to talk about some of the times that she's felt discriminated against or empowered being in church spaces, and we're going to talk about some of the systemic and interpersonal factors that are at play when it comes to patriarchy in the church. Just because of some scheduling issues, Jonathan Walton is not with us this week. We are going to have some content warnings for this conversation in the show notes. I'm not going to say them now because we haven't had the conversation yet. So I don't know what all is going to be content warning worthy, but they will be in the show notes if you want to check. 

[The show notes include content warnings for mentions of sexual assault and discussion of sexual harassment.] 

Suzie Lahoud: Please remember to take a look at ktfpress.com and consider subscribing to our publication. You'll get our weekly newsletter where the three of us send media suggestions for your discipleship and political education as we leave colonized faith. You'll get access to all the bonus episodes of this show and support all our work on writing, podcasting, book publishing, and keeping our material accessible for our disabled readers and listeners. Also, please write in to [email protected] with any questions you have about this episode or any other episode you've heard. Our next episode is going to be a season finale question and answer session. We've already gotten some great questions and we're excited to hear more. Write in or send us a voicemail as an attachment. 

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. So let's start with this Suzie, if you don't mind. I'm falsely asking your permission, like we haven't talked about it, if it's okay to start with this ahead of time. 

[laughter] 

Suzie Lahoud:  Permission granted.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, thank you so much. We have talked a couple times on this show. You have said a couple times on this show that you growing up sometimes felt like you were a second-class citizen in the kingdom of God because you are a woman. Can you just expand a little bit on why you felt that way? 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, I mean, so it's something that I feel like is just kind of in the air that you breathe growing up in white evangelical spaces as a young woman. That just the subtle messages that you pick up are that you're created to be in sort of a servile position. And the way that I justified that for myself theologically as I got older, because this was something I very much bought into— on top of this, I was very much into complementarian theology— and the way I justified it again, was Christ came in a servant role, so as a woman, it should be okay that that's what I'm created for, that's what I'm supposed to do. Which is a really beautiful concept, except that I was actually using that to justify a lower view of myself that I had imbibed and that was presented to me continuously in subtle and not so subtle ways. 

And so the difference there is that Christ coming as a servant is not that Christ is worth less [laughs]. If anything, Christ is the God that we worship, and so the way that that was then lived out by myself, was that I really believed that I was worth less than the people that I was serving. And that I was never meant to have a role that would in any way put me at the center or in the spotlight, and it was because I didn't deserve to be there and I didn't have the gifting that that required. And because it would've been wrong for me to do something like that. And so it’s subtle ways that you're kind of, you get your hand slapped if you're — any hint of you having authority over a man or, heaven forbid, trying to teach a man in any way. 

And specific ways that I saw this growing up, so my parents as missionaries, they would travel around to a lot of different churches and they would be speakers at conferences and things like that. They were sort of on that circuit, and I was always really proud as a little girl, seeing my mom get up on stage and share. It was usually my dad would be invited to share and give a sermon and he would preach, and then he would invite my mom up, and she would essentially give another sermon [laughs]. My mom to this day is an incredibly gifted speaker and communicator and storyteller and just a real force of nature. And again, it always made me feel so proud to see her doing that.  

But I remember one conference that we attended, it was a college ministry conference. And at one of the sessions, they were getting feedback from the students. And this like 19, 20-year-old kid stood up and chastised my mom in front of everyone for thinking that she had the right to stand up on stage and teach any man anything. And my mom to her credit was wise and mature enough to not take the bait and to bounce back from it pretty quickly and actually finish the conference in the way that she had been requested to lead. But for me, I cried myself to sleep that night and I'll never forget the shame that I felt by association, because he used the Bible to justify this really inappropriate take down of my mom as a woman who — how dare she think that she could do that? And so it's just really, it's things like that.  

And then I remember in college, I was a student leader in my campus ministry and was actually chosen to be one of the two. Every year they would have a guy and a girl share the final parting words to the graduating class at our weekly meeting, and I was selected by my peers to be the one to give the final message. And I remember a woman that I deeply respected hinting to me that she felt like maybe it wasn't quite appropriate for me to be doing that. Even as a college student speaking to a room of other college students, she was hinting to me that she felt like maybe that wasn't my place to be standing up there. 

Sy Hoekstra: Just solely because you’re getting up and talking at all. You're not giving a sermon, you're not filling the role of a pastor, you're just talking to your friends basically.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, because it was a mixed room, it was men and women. And up until that point, my role as a student leader was mostly leading other girls in Bible studies and stuff like that. But yeah, the implication was that that would've been inappropriate.   

Sy Hoekstra: So look, a couple things I would want to point out there. One is, A, in that case in college, no man said anything to you, right? It's another woman enforcing like a patriarchal structure against you, which happens all the time in church spaces. 

Suzie Lahoud: Absolutely. 

Sy Hoekstra: This is something that Kristin Du Mez has said a few times, she was on our podcast. She’s just someone I've heard say this. But it is something that requires the participation of women in order to work in church spaces… 

Suzie Lahoud: Absolutely. 

Sy Hoekstra: ...which is why it's so threatening I think to a lot of people who hold complementarian and other views to have women who rejected openly in church. Complementarian, by the way, for those of you who aren't familiar, is just a phrase from the late 20th Century created by some white evangelical Christian men who wanted a new kind of way of framing their stance about why it was that women shouldn't teach in the church, and we'll talk about this more, like shouldn't teach or hold certain positions of authority.  

And the argument that we'll get into a little bit more later is always that men and women, it's not supposed to be a hierarchical structure. It's just men and women have different giftings and are called to different roles in the church. And preaching and teaching and being in roles of authority is not what women are called to. There's obvious problems with that, but we'll talk about it later.  

But the other thing was, you mentioned that your dad was the one who was mostly invited to speak in a lot of these church places, and then he would have to invite your mom up after giving the sermon. I think you've told me before that he would have to frame it in terms of like, she just wants to get up and “share some thoughts,” or, you know what I mean? Something like that that isn't, she wants to get up and preach or teach you anything. Is that right?  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: So I think that's just another, that's one of the subtler ways that sure, a woman got up and spoke in these churches, but a man had to speak first, give the official sermon and then invite the woman up on stage, and a lot of times that's how it plays out.  

You have also, you’ve talked to me about how oftentimes for a lot of women, church is actually the least empowering place in their lives. Can you explain what that means a little bit? 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. So this is another thing that just, it can be so confusing living in a world where you'll have women who are professionals, doctors and lawyers and academics, and really qualified women who are out in the world doing really important things and leaders in the workplace. But then you come to church, and again the implication is, make sure you're not taking on any inappropriate leadership role, make sure you're not stepping on anyone's toes, stepping in the spotlight too much. And it just, it makes it feel like the place, at least I have certainly felt that the place that I'm often least empowered is in the church and in Christian settings. 

It also makes it so difficult to just find your voice, which I think is so scary for the church, because imagine the amount of prophetic power that we are silencing by not allowing women to speak out in those ways. I mean, there have been times where I felt like there's almost like a stranglehold for me in terms of trying to figure out how much I can speak, and if I even have the courage or know how to speak in those spaces. There's like this code of topics that you have to stick to, and it's just, it's really strange to have to exist in those two different worlds, and then it makes me so sad too, because imagine… I talked about the loss of prophetic power and leadership potential that the church is losing, but also the church is going to hemorrhage people, period, if that's what folks are seeing and experiencing. You're just going to lose women if that's not the place where they can thrive and live to the fullness of who God's created them to be. 

Sy Hoekstra: And they can do that everywhere else. 

Suzie Lahoud: Right. Absolutely.  

Sy Hoekstra: The prophetic voice part, I think is something that's important for me, because I was also, I grew up where there was always some amount of theology being taught that women shouldn't be in leadership for various reasons. But I was also around people who thought the complete opposite and had lots of women teaching and leading me in various capacities in church and at work. And where I ended up was like, when I was weighing the theologies, I was like, there's kind of a risk either way. You could be silencing women's prophetic voices if you're not letting them lead or speak, or just squashing gifts in general, whether it's prophecy or preaching or whatever. Leadership roles of any kind or leadership gifts of any kind. 

But so then on the other side, theoretically, if there really was this God-ordained role that women were supposed to serve, something would happen [laughs] if they were, women were breaking out of that role and violating God's order of things. There would be some negative result, and I just never saw that, you know what I mean? It just came down to like my real life. I was like, let's look at the actual fruit of what's going on in these spaces where women are teaching, and I was like, I really tried [laughter]. As a young man, I was like, I really, I'm going to hunt for something problematic that's actually happening here. Not something theoretical, not something abstract. Not like this is a slippery slope or this is whatever. And at some point, I just thought to myself, “This is silly. I can't find anything wrong with this really [laughs].”  

This is kind of like what I said in our episode about queer Christianity, is like, the real theological textual arguments that go on, a lot of them have to do with Greek words and Bible history and stuff that I don't really, I don't have a PhD in and I'm not actually equipped to determine who's right and who's wrong. What I have to look at is what Jesus looks at most of the time, which is the actual fruit of the theology, like what's really going on in the world and are people flourishing and growing closer to God.  

So we're going to get deeper into some of the other stuff you said, but I do want to talk about some more experiences that you've had, because you have also had some experiences with what is popularly known as the Billy Graham Rule. So famous evangelist Billy Graham famously had this rule that he would not spend any time alone with any women who are not his wife. And any individual or person who does that I suppose could have good intentions for that rule, like for following that rule. But there are a lot of implications of men in leadership thinking that way and following that rule at scale, and I guess in individual churches and even some people would follow it in workplaces. So can you talk about that Suzie? How has that hesitance for men to be alone with you, what's behind that and how has that affected your life in the church? 

Suzie Lahoud: The clearest example that comes to mind for me with this in terms of my own personal experience is, so right around the time I was graduating from university and I felt called to go overseas and serve, and I couldn't get a meeting with any pastors… 

Sy Hoekstra: For fundraising.  

Suzie Lahoud: For fundraising. It finally dawned on me that it was because I was a woman because all of my guy friends were meeting with pastors left and right, and married couples weren't having the same issue. And they were always kind of really cagey about it. Like once one pastor would meet with me kind of for a few minutes, but like only in the lobby right after the church sermon, and it was really kind of crowded and cacophonous. And as a single woman, you're ultimately just sort of viewed as this potential temptation to particularly pastors, men in spiritual authority. And it just made me so deeply uncomfortable because you just feel at that point so hypersexualized.  

Sy Hoekstra: Literally, I mean, that's precisely what's happening, is you're being sexualized by your own pastor. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, no, literally. And in a way, again, it’s hard to experience just how uncomfortable and just sort of icky that is. And it was also in a way that was actually quite familiar to me unfortunately, having grown up in a country with extremely high instances of rape and sexual assault against women. I grew up overseas, outside the United States, but the same can be true of the United States. But I remember growing up, walking on the street and just having this feeling of eyes being on me and getting cat called and just wanting to disappear and wishing I could just wear a paper bag every day. And having that same feeling triggered in the context of the church was just so horrifying to me, and is something that it's taken me a long time to really shake.  

And again, it increases as you come of age in the church as a young woman if you're in spaces where these patriarchal forces are really at play, you start to feel that, that sense of eyes being on you, of being objectified, hypersexualized. This is something, Sy, you and I started to talk about in prep for this conversation, but I just wish looking back, and this is where patriarchy and purity culture and all of that sort of begin to intersect, you know all of these conversations are so interconnected, but I just so wish that as a young woman growing up in church, in youth group, in campus meetings and all these other spaces, that they would've done a better job of supporting and empowering women to protect ourselves, to not feel like we are being belittled as beings that are viewed as only there for sexual pleasure. And to work through the shame and the guilt and the fear that comes with that. I feel like instead, all that we were taught was to cover up and to not be too enticing and to not attract too much attention to ourselves. In cases where for myself, I grew up praying that if I was going to be raped, that they would kill me first because I was just so terrified.  

And so there are really dark places that this feeds into, and ways that it just, it's so dehumanizing of women, and so marring of the ways that women are created in the image of God. Because I think that sometimes it becomes almost this sort of Orwellian Animal Farm narrative in the church, where it's like, oh, all people are created in the image of God, but some are more in the image of God than others. Like all people are created in the image of God, but men are more in the image of God, than women. And obviously you can add to this the intersectionality of race and all these other aspects too, but it just, yeah. The things that that does to a person's soul, that kind of belittling and dehumanizing is really dark and ugly, and I wish that the church would play more of a role in restoring hope and healing in those spaces rather than amplifying those areas of hurt and brokenness.  

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. So a couple things. First of all, I'll just pause here for a second and say, I and the audience, everybody really appreciate you being willing to talk about things that are personal on this level because it's not easy, despite the fact that you're doing it very confidently and in a straightforward way. The stuff about not teaching women to respect and protect themselves is so frustrating in the context of, like you were saying, rampant sexual assault, which was very high in the country that you grew up in, but is also not as high, but still very high everywhere. 

So the church is teaching women to quote-unquote “protect themselves” by not dressing in too revealing of a way or whatever, and effectively accepting the behavior of men. Like the behavior of men is a given, it's boys will be boys and it sort of infantilizes men in a way. Like men are just going to behave that way. You don't need to expect anything more from them, stand up for yourself, like push back at all. It's basically up to you. So it is unsurprising that you go to that dark place when you are basically told by the church you're alone. This is you protect yourself as much as possible by not dressing in a provocative manner. And it's just, I don't know. It's like gross in a very profound way, and people just don't think about the damage that they're doing by acting that way. And like you said, like your experience demonstrated, it is men and women who reinforce this constantly in church leadership roles, in youth group roles, in women's ministry and children's ministry roles talking to little girls that yeah, it's awful.  

Okay, so let's talk about specifically how this looks in a couple of different contexts. Like how these patriarchal dynamics operate in the church, in churches that affirm women in leadership, like that have women as pastors, women as leaders, women able to preach from the spaces, are allegedly egalitarian versus churches that don't, because there are differences in dynamics. And I should note here, you already kind of touched on this, but we're two white people talking about this, right?  

Suzie Lahoud: Oh yeah, no, for sure. 

Sy Hoekstra: This is extremely different in contexts that are not the ones that we grew up in. And so that's, we will acknowledge that here, dynamics are different in other churches, but because white evangelical churches have exported so much of their theology to the rest of the world and to the church and to non-white churches in general, we are talking from our context. And that value is whatever that value is to you as a listener [laughs].  

Okay, now, I'm sorry, now answer my question.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, so it’s interesting and I guess unfortunate because having an egalitarian theology where you view that men and women can take on the same kinds of roles and women don't just have to be in servile roles or traditionally what in traditional gender models would be assigned to women, embracing a theology that eschews those kinds of ideas doesn't necessarily solve all of your patriarchal problems. And the ways that I see that oftentimes are, even if you're in a church or a Christian space that has women in leadership, that doesn't always mean that women are actually allowed to be changemakers in the sense of having the power to make decisions that will actually affect change. 

So they can still be sort of there symbolically in some ways, or oftentimes women are in leadership, but they still really only can affect change as it pertains to other women or children. They still may not, or probably won't have authority over men. So probably the lead pastor oftentimes is still a man, and so it just, I see a lot of folks and male pastors who I think want to be there and want to treat men and women equally, but and yet I still see them falling into this pitfall of not being willing to relinquish enough power that it's actually going to be an equal space. And that again intersectionality, like obviously you see the same dynamic when you're talking about diversity within your congregation and empowering people of color. And obviously this is going to be compounded when you're talking about women of color being in positions of authority and leadership in the church. So that dynamic being at play.  

And this is something I experienced at a certain point. Another woman and I in one of my churches, we had sort of started this ministry together. There was something on our hearts that we felt was really important to address, and we had gotten together a group and it started to grow. And my husband got on board and started joining in. And then this older gentleman joined and he was someone who had been in ministry for years, and all of a sudden it became very difficult for me to facilitate meetings about this ministry, because he would only look at my husband and referred to my husband. Like literally sitting in meetings, he wouldn't even make eye contact with me. And if I made a point, he would address it to my husband, as if my husband had made the point. And it was just exhausting week in and week out having to deal with this dynamic to the point that after about a year of this going on, I finally stepped down and asked my husband to take over, because it was more important to me that this ministry continue than that I have to go through this experience of trying to facilitate when I wasn't being allowed to do that. So you can have those dynamics.  

And the sad thing is, I don't even think this individual was aware that he was doing that, and so that also shows space for discipleship, that men need to be discipled out of patriarchy. Because there can be microaggressions that I think men aren't even aware that they're making, and so that those things need to be brought to light for them, but I don't think that a lot of men are even used to having those things brought to their attention. And I just, again, patriarchy is something that you have to be discipled out of, for men and for women, because just knowing that patriarchy exists in the church and that it's such a powerful force doesn't mean that you're aware of all the ways that it manifests day in and day out, and all of the ways that you are a part of that.  

And Sy, you're so right to continuously point out that women are just as much a part of upholding patriarchy as men are. And again, we're not the first people to say that, but it's so true. I've been one of those women who have enforced those boundaries and tried to put and keep other women in their place, because I thought that's what you're supposed to do. That's how to be a godly woman. So it just, there's so much work that we have to do around this and so much that we're not aware of. And there's so many granular conversations that need to be had, not just up at the high level of like, okay, when we look at our church, are there women in leadership positions, but down to the everyday interactions, how do those women feel who are in leadership positions? Do they feel empowered? Can they make actual impactful changes? Do they have that power and authority? Are there times when they feel like they're being pushed back on and put in their place and being belittled and put down? All of those things need to be addressed and we need to be on our guard for those things. 

Sy Hoekstra: I think when it comes to egalitarian spaces, what you're talking about, or the analogy for what you're talking about is gender blindness, kind of like colorblindness. Meaning like obviously race and gender are not the same thing. They don't have the same effects. They don't, they don't function the same way in society. But there's a logic to discrimination that is kind of consistent, which is like, you can have a church where, or you can have a business or a neighborhood or whatever, where legally, technically, Black people are welcome. There aren't any Black people there though. And it's the same thing in the church. You could say, yeah, women are allowed to be in leadership. There aren't any in leadership, but they're allowed to be.  

And then I think a view that puts women in specific roles in the church is making the same logical mistake of the notion of separate but equal, which is that you're trying to split people up into categories and assign those categories certain roles in society. And you have just like this abiding faith or hope that that will not result in a hierarchy. But it is not a coincidence that when it comes to those kinds of churches, what roles do men play? What roles do women play? The roles that men play are the ones that have all the power and all the influence, and the roles that women play are the ones like childcare and being a good housewife who cooks and cleans, that men don't want to do anyways, and that wealthy white woman push off on women of color.  

And I… so the fact that it all shakes out that way isn't surprising to people who have spent some time thinking about how discrimination and segregation work, which is kind of, it's just another reason that I reject those ways of thinking, is like, it is so, it maps on so perfectly to the patterns of the world around us. It just, it is so reflecting of the same idols of power and manliness and masculinity that we see all around us. It looks too much like our culture for me to believe that this comes from God. 

Suzie Lahoud: And it makes sense that you can make that comparison, even though as you said, gender and race, those are distinct spaces and distinct forms of discrimination though overlapping, but it makes sense that you can make that comparison because power dynamics. Those who are in power will always be to some extent oblivious to the ways that they wield power, to the detriment of those who don't have the power.  

Sy Hoekstra: And if you split up people into categories along those lines of power, you're going to end up recreating hierarchies.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: All right. So let's talk about something more positive Suzie [laughter]. Where have you found in Christian spaces real empowerment as a woman? 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, so I guess this is the really kind of beautiful part of my story, is that the folks that in many cases I’ve been most empowered by have been other men in my life, other brothers in Christ. And a lot of times, to be quite honest, it’s men of color who have been most empowering to me. And I think one specific example, my husband, when he and I were dating, as I mentioned before in the show, my husband's Lebanese. He and I met when we were in Lebanon… when I was in Lebanon; he grew up there. And then I moved there and we met at a Bible study, actually.  

And when we were dating and I think already engaged at this point, we were sitting down together at one point and he turned to me and was like, “So what do you want to do with the rest of your life?” My response was basically, “I thought I would get married and serve my husband in whatever he felt called to do.” And so to have my future husband and now husband really challenging me to seek out my own sense of calling and passion and purpose and vocation, was really at first, honestly kind of scary because in some ways it’s easier to think you're just going to hitch your wagon to somebody else's. But then also really incredibly empowering. I mean, he's the reason that I decided to go to grad school and get another master's degree and then two, and pursue other things in my life, and he's always been empowering of me in our relationship in terms of us being decision-makers together, and that's something that I've had to learn into because that wasn't the theology of marriage that was originally taught to me.  

Because as a single woman, you're always taking a lot of notes on how to be a good married woman [laughs]. I feel like I was prepping myself for so many years on how to be a good complementarian and then to have this this man in my life who really wanted me to step into leadership alongside of him was so incredible. And then I went to an Arab seminary where everyone from the president of the seminary, to my advisors, to professors, really challenging me to continue in my studies and to speak out and to preach if I felt called to preach. I'm not someone who's actually ever felt called to be a pastor, but it's been really empowering the times when I felt like there were folks who felt like I had a message that I had to share and provided me with that platform to do so. It's because of men in my life that I'm pursuing my PhD today, and so that's been really incredible and remarkable. 

Sy Hoekstra: Can we pause for one second? I don't think we’ve ever actually said on this show that you're doing a PhD at Oxford right now [laughs]. 

Suzie Lahoud: Oh yeah. So should I not mention that? 

Sy Hoekstra: No, I'm saying, so my point is that's the extent. You were thinking I'm going to spend my life supporting what somebody else does, and your husband’s like, “What do you want to do,” and now you're getting a PhD at Oxford. That's quite a turnaround and it's very cool.  

Suzie Lahoud: [laughs] Thanks. No, it's been an incredible journey. Again, I remember having one, even having completed my last master’s. I did my last master’s at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, and I was so afraid to tell my advisor in Lebanon that I was applying to Harvard because I was afraid he would just laugh at me. And I had to tell him because he was writing my recommendation. And to tell him and have him look me straight in the eye and say, “Yes, you should do that,” was just incredible.  

So just all that to say, don't assume that the women in your life don't need to be affirmed in the roles that they're in, because we do need people around us to bolster us up because it can be hard out here sometimes. And you will have enough people who are trying to dissuade you and discourage you, but sometimes it's just those few kind of bulwarks that you need in your life that can encourage you to move on and press forward and that's incredible. That's such a gift.  

Sy Hoekstra: And it's also like you're… this is something I can relate to a little bit as a disabled person, is like you feel all those things that hurt your confidence or hurt your, I don't know, just sense of self-worth, and you're still taught to project confidence and happiness and cheerfulness and whatever. So it's like, it's, it can be deceiving. Like people may need encouragement who you would not expect based on their immediate outward behavior. 

Suzie Lahoud: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it's not to say too, I know I've emphasized the role that these incredible men have played in my life. And it has been women too, but I just think men also have an important role to play in terms of empowering and lifting up other women, and I love to see that. 

Sy Hoekstra: And some of it is just role modeling like your mom. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, totally.  

Sy Hoekstra: You also told me that you found some empowerment just in like changes in your beliefs, like in theological changes that you went through in your life. Can you talk a little bit about how you found that kind of uplifting of yourself in scripture? 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, so I should say a real turning point for me was at the small seminary that I attended in Lebanon, the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary. I was also working with the parent organization of the seminary at the time and we were doing a training in partnership with World Vision. It's called Channels of Hope for Gender, but basically it's how they work with partner churches to address sexual and gender-based violence, which is something that was a part of my caseload of things that I was doing at my job at the time. And sorry, there are a lot of different threads I tried to tie together there. But it's a small community, so a lot of things happen with a lot of different hats.  

But the trainer was this incredible... I don't know if he was a pastor, but just this incredible trainer from, a Black man from Zimbabwe. They brought him in to do this training with church leaders that we brought together. And he started in the book of Genesis and worked all the way forward I think through Revelation, just looking at how gender is presented in the Bible, and essentially the ways that women and those who are perceived as different, who don't fit into our gender boxes, how scripture has been used to oppress them and the ways that actually we should be understanding scripture and disentangling these ugly patriarchal messages from the biblical text.  

And it was such an incredible moment for me because I was one of the people who had brought together these church leaders to learn from this trainer, and then sitting in the first session, I realized that I was the one who needed to hear these things, because I still read Genesis as, this is such a simple, silly thing, but “Oh, God created Adam first and Eve was out of Adam. So Adam must be therefore somewhat more important than Eve, like men are somehow more important than women.” He used that example, he said, “Well, if you believe that, technically God created the animals first. So how is that a theological hermeneutical tool for understanding that?”  

And just bringing it for—all these other little silly things that I had bought into, even talking about Eve's role, again this is just starting in Genesis. But when the Bible talks about her as a helper or a helpmate, that term, ezer, the only other place you see that in the Bible is referring to God himself, that God is our helper. It’s not a disempowering term. It's actually this beautiful, full term. It actually implies, I think, power. It's a really robust term that does not mean that I think women are second-class citizens and are only there to serve in a secondary role as supporting characters. So, all of these things that he brought us through, and I'm still actively learning how to, obviously, decolonize my faith and depatriarchize my faith. 

Sy Hoekstra: Depatriarchize.  

Suzie Lahoud: I was going to say, I don't think that's a word, that's my neologism for the day. But, and I've certainly learned from incredible academics and scholars that we have today, like Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr. And we recently shared in our newsletter a piece talking about the work of Elizabeth or “Libbie” Schrader, who is a young academic scholar who's doing amazing work on Mary Magdalene and looking at Papyrus 66, the oldest extant copy that we have of the gospel of John, and changes that were actually made to the Papyrus, to sort of scrub out and blur the role of Mary Magdalene in the early church. Like really incredible stuff that is changing the way that I read the Bible. 

And then that lens is changing the way that I view myself and is helping to heal really deep scars that I have, because I have viewed myself as a second-class citizen in the kingdom of God for so long. So my hope and prayer is that moving forward, we will be able to raise a generation of young women who don't ever view themselves as less than, who see the power of God that is placed in them. Who know that they are fully, fully 100 percent created in the image of God and bearing of his dignity and the value and worth that comes with that.  

Sy Hoekstra: Amen to that, as someone who just had a baby girl.  

Do you know the stereotypical thing that Republican politicians do when somebody, like there's been some sexual misconduct and they come out and they go, “As a father of daughters …  

Suzie Lahoud: [simultaneously] I have a daughter. 

Sy Hoekstra: … I object to this.” 

Suzie Lahoud: Yep, yep. 

Sy Hoekstra: I just did that basically [laughter].  

Actually, I want to pause on this Libbie Schrader thing for a minute, because it's really interesting. If you're a subscriber, go back to the newsletter we had recently that has “The Missing Mary Magdalene” in the title. But anyways, it's this woman's work who basically discovered that the Mary and Martha in John 11 is not actually supposed to be Mary and Martha in the original [laughs]. In the story of Lazarus, that's supposed to be one person, Mary Magdalene, who then pronounces that Jesus is the Messiah. So it's just Peter and Mary Magdalene are the only people that do that in the gospels.  

And this is not like some revisionist thing, this is like the people who were the keepers of Bible translation are now really wondering what to do about this. Do we put a footnote, do we change the text? It's a kind of a, it's not been questioned really. So we'll put a link to a historian who we've also referenced before in the newsletter, Diana Butler Bass, kind of explaining Libbie Schrader's work, and what implications it has and you'll see why it's so inspiring to Suzie.  

Alright. So we are going to pause there for now. Suzie, thank you so much for opening up and talking about all that stuff today. This was a great conversation and I really appreciate it, and I'm sure the audience does too.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. No, thank you for having the conversation as always. 

Sy Hoekstra: Before we go, reminder, please go to ktfpress.com, check out the subscription there. Get the newsletter, the bonus episodes of this show, support everything we do at KTF Press. We could not exist without our subscribers. We really appreciate everyone who chooses to support us that way. So please really do consider that.  

Also, our next episode is going to be our season finale. It's going to be a mail bag; we're going to answer some questions. We've already gotten some great ones like Suzie said, and we would love to get some more from you all. So please do send your written or voice recorded questions to [email protected]. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam. And we will see you all in two weeks! 

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

Suzie Lahoud: You know, it can even be sort of like microaggressions that they don't aware that they're doing. Oh, wow, that wasn’t English. I'm so sorry [laughter]. Let me say that again. Oh, COVID brain… 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, you're recovering from COVID. It's fine.

On this episode, Sy and Jonathan have a discussion related to Jonathan’s article that we published this week. They talk about the danger of Christians idealizing the political center, the difference between political conflict and the biblical idea of disunity, the trauma created by surrounding the need to evangelize with urgency and panic, and a whole lot more. 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – 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: The idea of holding onto cultural influence and to being Christians who really want to influence the culture for Jesus, always to me contained an inherent contradiction, which is that the message of Jesus is specifically about giving up influence and power and your personal amassing of wealth and platforming and whatever. And there are so many people that want to gain relevance to spread that message of giving up a platform. It is a contradiction in terms. 

[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, here with Sy Hoekstra. Suzie’s off this week because she's on an amazing vacation while we're recording. 

Sy Hoekstra: Today we're going to be talking about why we at KTF Press want people to stay so engaged in political discipleship and the kinds of things that we talk about here, despite the fact that they are sometimes incredibly exhausting [laughter] and difficult to deal with. This is a bit of a foundational conversation for us about why we do what we do, and sparked by the article that Jonathan just wrote about Andy Stanley's new book. Andy Stanley is a pretty popular white evangelical mega church pastor. I was going to say mega pastor, which sounds like a superhero [laughter]. But we don't want to pick on Andy Stanley necessarily in particular, but it's a well-known book that he just wrote that has pretty much the opposite perspective of us on how Christians should be engaged in politics [laughs]. 

So we're going to talk about it. Before we do that though, as always a reminder, please do go to ktfpress.com and look into becoming a subscriber there on our website. You can sign up as a monthly or an annual subscriber. That gets you our weekly newsletter, which we'll probably talk about a little bit today, because that is where Jonathan and Suzie and I give you weekly recommendations on things to read, to watch, to listen to, that will help you to try and grow in your discipleship and your political education as we try and leave colonized faith for the kingdom of God, as we always say on this show. That also gets you the bonus episodes of this show, of which there are several hours at this point. It also supports everything that we do at KTF Press.  

Our subscribers are why we exist. We would not exist without them, and we really appreciate everybody who has decided to support us in that way. Also, there are only probably a few episodes left in this season of our show. So please send in any questions that you have about anything that you have heard on this show. You could ask us about stuff from last season, you could just ask us about anything that is in the realm of the topics that we cover. You can send in your questions in email or voicemail form to [email protected], and we would just love to hear from you. The questions we got for the last time we did this were fantastic. 

They sparked some really great conversation and we would love to hear those again. I hear podcast hosts say this sometimes, and rare has been the time that I personally have actually written in, but a lot of times I end up regretting it, because there are questions I have that I would love to hear other people discuss. So any question you have that's on the tip of your tongue right now, go write it down and send it to us, [email protected]. Okay, Jonathan's article that he wrote that we were talking about will be linked to in the show notes here. It is also the last recording in this podcast feed. If you just go to the previous podcast episode, it is Jonathan reading the essay. So you can just go and listen to that.  

Now that we've gotten through all that, let's start our discussion today. I just wanted to start off with you explaining to us what exactly it is that Andy Stanley and sort of white, moderate evangelical Christians advocate as how to posture yourself politically, and this would be coming from his new book which is called Not in It to Win It. What's he arguing for?  

Jonathan Walton: I think what he's arguing for is caught in the title. Not in It to Win It, then continues Why Choosing Sides Sidelines the Church. What he and a lot of white evangelical, conservative people, along with generally conflict avoidant people, assume that the middle is the best and the superior option for engaging in conflict. So being too passionate, being too engaged, too conservative, too liberal, too anything is just somehow very unchristian, very … 

Sy Hoekstra: Divisive is the word. 

Jonathan Walton: Divisive, right. Unnecessarily so. So when that happens, we must be missing the real point of what Jesus is trying to communicate to us. I think our episode about tone policing actually gets into that a little bit, where —  

Sy Hoekstra: That’s a bonus episode for subscribers. 

Jonathan Walton: That is a bonus episode, sorry.  

Sy Hoekstra: No, it's fine to tell them about it. Listen, go become a subscriber and listen to what Jonathan is talking about.  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, go listen, then come back. But that episode really gets into this, because the reality is no one who is suffering or broken or on the opposite side of power desires us to be neutral or moderate when it's happening. And when it's down — like if it's happening to us, we don't want folks to be neutral. I think when we are neutral or claim the superior middle ground, there is no middle ground when it comes to injustice. Jesus does not take the middle. But if you are trying to maintain cultural influence, which is his biggest claim in this book, is that we should try to remain relevant to all people.  

And then he text jacks Paul in a lot of other places to say that “becoming all people that you might win some,” that does not mean embracing the political middle so that you can have the largest platform and reach the most people. That's not what that means.  

Sy Hoekstra: He specifically, this is all under the banner of winning people for Jesus, right? 

Jonathan Walton: Yes. 

Sy Hoekstra: You want to maintain your cultural relevance by not being too divisive so that you can evangelize, and maintain your unity in the church so that we can focus on what really matters, which is getting people to heaven. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. I think what we're advocating or what we are trying to unpack is, actually, in a very succinct portion of the 10th chapter, the last chapter. This is what he says. “We have continued to allow …” We, the “we” being specifically white evangelical Christians in the United States.  

Sy Hoekstra: He doesn't say that, does he?  

Jonathan Walton: He doesn't say that, I'm sorry. I say that as I read this book [laughter], because I am not included in the “we” that he is writing to. That's very clear. He says, “We have continued to allow ourselves to be divided by secondary concerns, while what our biggest concern should be, continues to go unaddressed, namely, division. Division is the threat, division is the enemy. Because of its size, a united church in the United States with all its beautiful cultural diversity would have the influence necessary to move the nation back toward the middle, the place where problems actually get solved. The middle, where defenses come down, experiences are shared, and people are inclined to listen to one another.  

Pause to consider the non-great commission critical issues we've allowed to divide us. Everything from climate change, to critical race theory, to COVID masks and vaccines. Two doses, three doses, no doses, who knows-es. Why, why, why would we, the light of the world, the salt of the earth, the hands and feet of Jesus allow ourselves to be baited into debates and divided over questions about which we all have opinions informed by partial and skewed information? See, this is the most palatable, polite case for Christian nationalism I have ever read. 

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. Let's talk about that because some people would think that this is sort of opposed to Christian nationalism. A lot of people would hear that and think this is something that is fundamentally different from what the evangelicals who are super pro-Trump want. Andy Stanley himself, not super pro-Trump. So why do you think that this is the most palatable case for Christian nationalism?  

Jonathan Walton: I think we need to remember a man named Jerry Falwell. What I want to press into when I get into the essay, is that White American Folk Religion, this conglomerate of Christian nationalism, white supremacy and unchecked exploitative capitalism, is like, there are two ways that we can enforce what we're doing. We can do it explicitly with the power that we have, or we can do it implicitly with the power that we have. And what Jerry Falwell called for with the moral majority is explicitly pushing for it. So the moral majority, organizations, conferences, there are entire network stemming down from 1980 of political organizations, religious organizations, churches, and now super PACs that drive this explicit agenda to push our nation towards quote-unquote “living out the city on the hill,” manifest destiny, doctrine of discovery.  

But then there's this flip side where, this genteel, polite invitation to say, well, you know, we are the greatest country in the world. Look at all the stuff that we have. God has obviously blessed us. Let's be generous to those that God puts in our path. And the reality is the people that are in our paths are going to be segregated. The people that are going to be in our path are going to be those people who are like us because of the society that we live in. The people that are going to be sitting beside us are going to be people who are just like us because our churches are segregated. We are downstream of a plantation-based colonial society, so the people that we encounter are going to be just like us. So if we're driving that narrative over and over again, what we're actually arguing for implicitly, is the status quo, if you follow Andy Stanley's logic. 

Sy Hoekstra: And if the status quo is racism… 

Jonathan Walton: Right [laughs] 

Sy Hoekstra: … then when you're implicitly arguing for the status quo, you are implicitly arguing to maintain a racial structure. I think, this is the point, like you just said in the passage you just read, division is the chief problem in the church. If you look at a problem like, let's just stay on race. Racism is the thing that divides people. Literally divides people into categories and sorts them by their value accordingly. In other words, if you are saying, stop dividing us by talking about race, you're missing what the problem is, and you are actually causing or exacerbating existing divisions by arguing against divisiveness. Here's what I take from that. Satan is real. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: The layers there. If you think that the country is divided by race in any significant way and you want to talk about it and do something about it, Andy Stanley is going to tell you to be quiet, because it's too divisive. You talking about division is too divisive. It's just, it’s kind of wild. So effectively, what you're saying is, the title of the book is Not in It to Win It. He's like, we're not going to get into the fight to win the country for God, because that's not our role. But the reality is that Stanley and the people that he pastors and white evangelicals in America are winning, regardless of whether they're “in it” or not. Like if you want to let the Robert Jeffresses of the world, or the Franklin Grahams of the world do your dirty work for you, that's fine, but you're still winning. 

You have the luxury to be able to sit back and say, “I'm just going to talk to people about how they get to heaven.” This goes back to our very first episode that we … actually no, sorry. Our very first interview that we did with Rich Villodas and like what is the nature of the gospel? Because Andy Stanley's gospel is just about teaching people about forgiveness and getting them to heaven. And the gospel that we believe you actually find in scripture is about the announcement that the kingdom of God has come near, which includes the fact that the ambassadors of that kingdom are going to be people who fight for justice. Even when, as you say in our piece, in the piece you wrote, Andy Stanley and his ilk are there telling you not to do so because it's too divisive. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. I think this is a great point to lean into, where they're arguing against division and for unity, but it's actually unity masquerading as uniformity. Usually, that gets thrown around in a tweet or like a sermon line and everybody claps. Like, oh, unity, not uniformity. But the reality is when we say unity, we are not talking about a uniform understanding of how politics should be done. We're not talking about a uniform way of serving and loving people in the world. We are actually supposed to work those things out as followers of Jesus. We're actually supposed to pray through those things, wrestle with those things. It's not going to be the same for every single person. There isn’t a formula for how you feed the homeless or how you fight sex trafficking and labor slavery, or how you fight educational inequality, there's contextualized stuff that happens. So wrestling with those things is part of loving Jesus and loving our neighbors. We actually are united in Christ. We're not united around a set of values handed down to us by the dominant culture. That then all of a sudden, we create this ministry industrial complex, where we just mass produce Christians. That's not how this works.  

Sy Hoekstra: So you're drawing a distinction between what Jesus prays for, which is love for one another. Like prays for the church to be unified in love, and just having a lack of conflict. Like loving and lack of conflict are two different things. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. I wonder what would've happened if Jesus had been conflict avoidant, when he was literally carrying the cross and knew that Peter was lying about knowing him. Jesus does not back away from conflict with Peter. He says, “You were going to deny me three times.” Jesus does not back away from conflict when he walks through Samaria. Jesus does not back away from conflict when he gets between the crowd and the woman caught in adultery. Jesus does not, he's not backing away from conflict, but he's actually uniting people around Jesus, around God. Around what God's new covenant is actually trying to do. 

And the new covenant that Jesus calls us to, versus how Stanley is trying to cast a new covenant are two different things. God is not trying to unite us in a way that models a whitewashed, very neat, nice, branded, wonderful campaign for people to sign up and follow. We are organized around a suffering savior who laid down his life, rose from the grave and is now seated at the right hand of the father, left and sent his spirit to dwell within us. That's a messy process.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And what do we celebrate every year at Christmas? Incarnation, right? 

Jonathan Walton:  Right.  

Sy Hoekstra: It is the … look around at the world religions. One thing you can say for sure about Christianity, is that staying above the fray, not a characteristic of Jesus [laughs]. That is not something, regardless of what you think of Christianity, staying above the fray is not what Jesus is known for. The thing is coming to earth as a baby, getting involved in the mess, giving up your privilege, giving up your position of power, giving up your influence to enter into the things that are very difficult in order to love people and save people specifically. Which brings me to another point, which I think is that … you didn't get into this in your piece because it was on a slightly different subject, but the idea of holding onto cultural influence and to being Christians who really want to influence the culture for Jesus, always to me contained an inherent contradiction. Which is that the message of Jesus is specifically about giving up influence and power and your personal amassing of wealth and platforming and whatever. And there are so many people that want to gain relevance, as Stanley puts it, or gain influence or a platform or whatever, to spread that message of giving up a platform, like it is a contradiction in terms to a certain degree. I realize we could nuance what I just said all day long, but that is always going to be a complication. That's going to be a difficulty when you're trying to argue evangelism based on platforming, if that makes sense.  

Jonathan Walton: Right. I think that if we are going to build institutions, then that requires a neatness that is not seen in the gospel. It's not seen in scripture. We are actively in the United States trying to build institutions that outlast us. We're constantly concerned about our images. We're constantly concerned about managing and controlling narratives and all of those things. And Jesus was just not at all concerned about what people had to say about him. He literally told demons to be quiet when they knew who he was, because it wasn't time for folks to know. Then he repeatedly, unless the people, the people at the bottom rungs of society, the people that he was actually coming for, asked him who he was, and he would tell them.  

But the reality is there's something fundamentally different about what Jesus is doing around influence, around power, around privilege. Privilege being things that you've received that you ain’t do nothing to get. That you are now called to use on behalf of the poor and the marginalized and those on the outside. He leverages all of that for the least of these, not so that he can have more cultural relevance and increase his platform, but because he loves them and loves us. 

Sy Hoekstra: Let me talk about a pastor who I think did something along these lines pretty well. Or at least this was a moment for me where I realized that a pastor was doing something along these lines pretty well. In 2015, when Black Lives Matter had really blown up on the scene and there were protests all over New York City, especially related to the Eric Garner case, but to all of the cases that were going on at that time, the church that I was in at the time, which was a predominantly white church, tried to respond and tried to say some cautious things about how Black lives matter, and immediately lost people. Like people just walked out the door and said we were getting too political, all that kind of stuff.  

At some point we had a meeting with the pastor of a, not entirely, but majority black church in the city, who said what they did in response to those cases, which was just mourn. They just had prayer that was like mourning prayer. They were praying with people, they were trying to shepherd people through that time. I actually asked the pastor, so what do you do with the people who are against mourning because they think it's too political or because they don't really think that racism is happening to the degree that people think it is, and it's not worth mourning over and all that stuff? What happened to those people when you did all that? And he just goes, “Oh, they don't come to my church.”  

So he was just testifying to the truth. He was just doing what Jesus tells us to do. He was mourning with those who mourn. He was speaking the truth about injustice that happens, and the chips fell where they may. Which is what Jesus did over and over again. He let people go. He let people walk away. When he said things that upset people and made them walk away, he wasn't chasing after them. He wasn't trying to make them more palatable. Again, you could nuance that and there's no reason to completely, unnecessarily offend someone, but he was letting people leave. Another way of saying that, is he was being divisive. Really divisive [laughter], to the point where the majority of his followers completely walked away from his ministry. How we get from that to we need to be really soft in what we say to maintain our relevance to make sure people get to heaven, is fairly stunning.  

Jonathan Walton: I think the passage that I read, the image that he sets up right before that, is of his kid going to the emergency room. He's like, when there's an emergency, things that are important rise to the surface. Right now, the American church is in a crisis, and so what should rise to the surface is spreading the gospel. That needs to be the priority. I literally had a conversation with someone where they said, “Jonathan, I'm not able to come to your church anymore because you focus too much on the marginalized, and we just really need to focus on what matters.” What they've embraced is this reality that actually Brandi Miller talks about in her podcast on urgency, like the urgency of evangelicals, and how that urgency gets framed in a way to basically where we live in a constant state of trauma. Where we're always thinking, someone is going to hell. Someone is going to miss the boat. Someone is going to be cast in a lake of fire. There's always this … and that is just not peace. 

Sy Hoekstra: And it's our job to save all those people immediately. 

Jonathan Walton: Yes, it's our job to save them. It's not just that we bear witness to God. It's that is the signpost that we're supposed to carry at all times, no matter what, in this urgent, tract-throwing way. And that burden is not easy, and that burden is not light. It doesn't actually allow us to live the joyful, delight-filled, even lament and mournful ways that he calls us to. What's actually happening is all of the cards about our faith and about Jesus and about what is not that are basically coming out and being in full view. Like nobody's bluffing about what we believe. Nobody is … it's becoming very, very clear about the fruit of the theology and the orthodoxy and the sermons and the message that we've been preaching over the last 35 years.  

Some uphold white supremacy and prioritize it as okay. Some don’t. Some are pushing for explicitly moderate things or explicitly middle things or explicitly Christian nationalist things, but the cards are being played. But what's dangerous about this book, is that the call is for your cards to come off the table. To placate the person in front of you to keep them in your church. Or keep them in your fold, or keep them in your pocket or keep them in a relationship, so that one day you might be able to pray Romans Road with them, or walk them down Romans Road. 

Sy Hoekstra: I know, Jonathan, this is all very good points you're making. What's Romans Road? I don't know what that is [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: Oh man, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. When I was a student, someone said to me, “You got to walk them down Romans Road.” Romans Road is like Romans 1:16. I'm not ashamed of the gospel, and so I'm going to share it with you. And then Romans 3, it's like, we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  

Sy Hoekstra: It's like a method of walking people through Romans and sharing the gospel with them? 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, you walk people through it and you get to Romans 8 and Romans 9, you’re loved by God. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, of course. Yes. Okay. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they stop before they get to Romans 12. We don’t need to get systemic … 

Sy Hoekstra: This is a white people thing, right?  

Jonathan Walton: Oh, for sure.  

Sy Hoekstra: I was going to say, if anything that ends at Romans 8, if Romans 8 is the culmination, it's a white people thing. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Romans 8 is amazing and I love it and it is apparently more important scripture than lots of other parts of scripture to a whole lot of conservative white people [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: This is true. Yo man. It’s good in context!  

Sy Hoekstra: It's amazing in context. 

Jonathan Walton: Devoid of context, it's radically limiting,  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: But yeah. All that to say, I think if your gospel ends at Romans Road and not at the open tomb of Jesus and his ascension into heaven and all that stuff, then we have a problem. 

Sy Hoekstra: Right. This urgency thing, for people who are unfamiliar, or even if you are familiar and you just want something to point at that you might be familiar with, D. L. Moody who's a famous theological, conservative American evangelist, if you’ve ever heard of Moody Bible Institute, that's him. 

Jonathan Walton: I didn't even make that connection. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Nice. He had this kind of famous image that basically the world that we're living in right now is a burning house, and as Christians, all we're trying to do is pull as many people out of it as possible. That's the goal of Christians, pull people out of the burning house. That's the urgency. That's the emergency that you're talking about, that Stanley is talking about. We need to stop talking about all these other issues because there's an emergency happening. You said that that's not an easy burden, that's not a light burden. What it is, is trauma. It is never ending trauma. You're comparing your life, your whole existence on earth to… what is really a horrifying scenario? Like a burning house with people who are inside of it that you need to rescue?  

That's terrifying. If you go through that, you're going to have a whole lot of stuff to deal with. And if your whole life is that, then you're going to have a whole stuff, a whole lot of psychological stuff to deal with that you're never going to have time or space to deal with because you're trying to focus on what matters, which is just saving people. Like we've talked about before, we're not saying that the gospel doesn't save people, it's the opposite. Of course the gospel saves people. Jesus came to save the world. But Jesus came to save the world, Jonathan and I didn't come to save the world. Jonathan and I came to testify, and all we are supposed to do is testify. There's nothing that says anything hangs on how effectively we testify. In fact, the opposite is true. 

There is something that says if we don't testify, the rocks will cry out. God's going to get his work done with or without us. So honestly, when I read that passage for the first time Jonathan, or when you read it to me for the first time, I come away from that feeling bad for Andy Stanley. Like genuinely just kind of sad about the mental state in which he at least professes to exist. And I don't want to be condescending to him either. I'm not saying I feel bad for this little man or whatever. Which is, I want to emphasize again, that we are not … I said at the beginning, that we're not trying to knock Andy Stanley specifically, and now we've just talked for a very long time about why we think he's super wrong on a whole lot of things [laughs].  

But the point that we're making, is that loving someone and saying that they're really wrong about something very important are not mutually exclusive. I don't hate Andy Stanley, I feel a little bit bad for him. I wouldn't be condescending to him if I met him and say, “I feel bad for you.” You know what I mean? These are the kinds of conversations that we need to be able to have. We need to be able to say this book is dangerous for America and American Christians, particularly at this point in our history when there are so many things that we do need to address clearly, as a matter of our gospel witness that are what Stanley would categorize as divisive distractions. 

Jonathan Walton: I actually feel similar to Sy, which is why I do what I do. I don't do what I do because I'm angry all the time. I do what I do because Jesus has called me to love my neighbor and pray for my enemies and love those who persecute me and things like that. And he will actually do that if you ask him to transform your heart, which he has done for me. So the lady who said to me “your church focuses too much on the marginalized, so I can't go here,” or the person who is in my … anyway, I have a lot of conversations where people just feel like they can say whatever they want [laughter]. But the reality is like, if my response to the racism that people share with me, or I engage with, or hurts me, and I am indifferent, I'm missing out on the kingdom of God.   

I'm missing out on genuine love for neighbor and genuine relationship and receiving genuine love from other people for me. When I withhold the conflict and carry them myself, or if I try to remain apolitical or avoid having conversation with racist family members, or I don't challenge racist jokes, or I think politics doesn't affect me, what's actually happening is I'm acquiescing to the cultures and patterns of the world. And that is — we lose out. We lose out on just beautiful depth of relationship on this side of heaven that Jesus modeled with his disciples. Doing conflict with them happened on a regular basis. They wrote down some of the things that Peter said, imagine what they didn't write down with the stuff that he said. As they wrestled with Jesus saying, “Get behind me, Satan.” I imagine him and Peter debrief that later [laughs]. I just wish we could do the same thing.  

Sy Hoekstra: There's also even potential conflict in just other people who Peter knew writing down the stories about when he got rebuked real hard by Jesus [laughs]. But that was just a story that people passed around. And I completely agree that that is something that has been modeled for us. And I don't know, throwing that model away is just a little bit tragic because we've talked about this before, but there are so many good things that come from conflict. There are so many things about you learning about what is important to people. Or when you work through conflict, figuring out how to be emotionally healthy, figuring out how to exist as a real community that is able to weather storms as opposed to one that just sweeps things under the rug.  

And we get actual clear guidance on scripture about when we are supposed to create conflict [laughs]. There are issues that are important to Jesus that we're supposed to speak out about, and we can find what those are in scripture and they are not solely the fact that Jesus saved you from your sin and you can therefore go to heaven. 

Jonathan Walton: I think if you made it all the way to this part of the podcast, it must be abundantly clear that being politically moderate does not make us more Christian. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. You hear a lot of people in the evangelical world talk about finding a political, like a different political way of being that will show people that you are not coming from an earthly perspective, that you're coming from a godly perspective. And that the marker of that, the way that people will know you have different priorities than the culture that you're in, is that you are too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals, because you're not following one of the two ways laid out before you. But all that really means is that you're a moderate [laughs]. If you're right of the left and left of the right, you're just in the middle. That's all that means.  

That doesn't really indicate anything about your spirituality, it just makes you a moderate. And there are plenty of people who read the Bible and land on very different points in the political spectrum, all trying to be quite faithful with what they've read. I don't think that just because you consistently vote for one party or the other, you are less spiritual or less heavenly or less discipled than if you vote for people who are in the middle.  

Jonathan Walton: And If I can lean into one other thing that my pastor said to me after this conversation, is he said, Jonathan, you know I would love for everyone to feel welcome at our church, but I don't want everyone to necessarily feel safe at our church. White supremacy is not safe at our church. Racism is not safe at our church. Christian nationalism is not safe at our church. And I thought about that, because I've been told that I'm a safe person. “I feel safe to say these things to you.” And I thought to myself, that's a label that was given to me that wasn't something that I actually desired. I actually desire to be someone that you could ask anything or share anything with, but there's this trait about Jesus, that I'm still unpacking, where he knew everything about someone and said the truth in radical love and all these things, but he didn't agree with everybody, he didn't think everybody was fine. 

He didn't say these placating things, but people were drawn to him, and I would love, particularly around political stuff, to be someone that does what Jesus did, where he is obviously with Pilate. Pilate is drawn to Jesus. I mean, it's fascinating. Jesus does not want the power that Pilate has. He's not interested, and that is baffling to Pilate, who's probably spent his entire life trying to protect, maintain and attain power. And Jesus is just not concerned with the Roman empire in the ways that Peter would want him to be concerned with the Roman empire, or in the ways Pilate would want him to be concerned with the Roman empire. 

The Roman empire is literally under his feet. That's how Jesus knows and sees himself. So that's the end of my diatribe about that. But I think there's something transformative about naming why we are not too liberal for conservatives, and too conservative for liberals, and dismissing centrism as the narrow and straight path to the kingdom of God.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Amen to all that. I just completely agree. The combination of being someone who is uncompromising, but also loving, that's a hard line to walk, but it is a thing that I see in Jesus and want to emulate always. There are so many things and so many people in so many different ways who will tell you that that is not possible. That there's a choice between being uncompromising and telling truth, and being somebody who people want to hang out with [laughter], regardless of whether or not they agree with you.  

Jonathan Walton: Right Right right right. Oh man … 

Sy Hoekstra: I'm sure there are people who think the way that Andy Stanley does and we hope that you hear from us, that we just disagree. We don't hate you [laughs].  

Jonathan Walton: Right. Again, the problem is white supremacy, the problem is not you. The problem is racism, the problem is not you. The problem is we deeply desire for people to know and follow Jesus of Nazareth, not the Jesus of nationalism, in whatever form that comes. Jesus is about doing something different than the constitution. Than what shows up in the majority of our churches and contexts. Jesus is amazing, if we would just read what he said and try to do it. 

Sy Hoekstra: I completely agree with that. That is actually one of the reasons we do the newsletter. We want to be able to have a space where we talk about all of those things in one place where discipleship, political education, learning about the world around us, speaking truth about injustices, that is what we're trying to do. Really, we're trying to lift up other people who did it. As always, trying to center and elevate marginalized voices and their stories and everything. That is why we send those things to people every week, and we hope that some amount of those people read those things that we send [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton:  Yeah. I think the work that we do is important. That's why I do it. But I also think it's not just important just in our church context, but Andy Stanley's right in that we should be working towards the renewal and redemption of people and our country, and the world. That's true. I'm sorry, and as we move into an election cycle, as we move towards increased tensions, and we move towards these things, if we move away from conflict, we are doing a dangerous disservice to the people who are suffering and the people who are inadvertently or intentionally inflicting suffering on people. We actually have to enter into the darkness and believe that the darkness will not overcome in the same way that the darkness did not overcome Christ.  

The same power that raised him from the grave lives in us, so let's go into the darkness with that marvelous light so that Jesus might be seen and known. 

Sy Hoekstra: Amen, Jonathan. See, Jonathan's a preacher and sometimes on our podcast, he gets in that mode and it's great. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Before we go, please remember to check out ktfpress.com, consider becoming a subscriber. Get that newsletter that we were just talking about and get the bonus episodes of this podcast and support everything we do here at KTF Press. Also, please remember any questions you have, comments, anything at all, write to [email protected]. We may answer your question on a future episode in a few episodes, we will be doing a season wrap up where we have a little mail bag session. So please write in, record something on a voicemail and send it to us, we would really appreciate it. Okay, as always, our theme song is Citizens by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all in a couple of weeks. 

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

Sy Hoekstra: All right, my friend. Get up, get up on your mic.  

Jonathan Walton: Mhmm. My foot is elevated. I'm leaned into the pop filter.  

Sy Hoekstra: Your foot is elevated for podcasting purposes. Not because you injured your ankle.  

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Both. I'm in extra chill mode right now. 

Sy Hoekstra: No, we don't want that. Energy. Get up. We got stuff to talk about.  

Jonathan Walton: Oh no, I'm good.  

Sy Hoekstra: We want to engage the audience! 

Jonathan Walton: As soon as I start talking about this, all the energy is going to be there.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's true, actually [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton reads us his new piece that we just published at KTFPress.com. Enjoy!

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com.

Host

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

Production, editing, and transcript by 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.”]

Jonathan Walton: Hey everybody, this is Jonathan Walton and I’m here to read y’all the piece I wrote that we just published at KTFPress.com. The link to the article is in the show notes. So please, if you like it, go to KTFPress.com, look around, and become a subscriber. All of your support goes towards elevating and centering marginalized voices to help us leave colonized faith. Thanks in advance!

The article is titled, “Book Review: Andy Stanley Is Winning, Whether He’s ‘in It’ or Not.”

The 1980 book Listen, America! by Jerry Falwell, Sr. thrust white fundamentalist Christians into the explicit fight for the United States to be a Christian Nation and gave the Moral Majority the political manual to build what we now know as the religious right. Megachurch pastor and author Andy Stanley’s new book, Not in It to Win It, is a polished, persuasive push for White American Christians to recede back into the shadows away from nasty, polarizing politics in order to prioritize evangelism. At first glance, Stanley’s advice may seem like the opposite of Falwell’s, but both approaches accomplish the same end of maintaining a race, gender, and class hierarchy masquerading as Christianity.  This is what I call White American Folk Religion, or WAFR.

The first nine chapters of this book are luxurious stone veneer covering the rotted, moldy walls that hold up WAFR.  Stanley contends that Christian values undergird Western civilization, and the only way to change institutionalized injustices— like racism, sexism, or economic inequality — is to transform individuals’ hearts through Christ. He condemns the joining of Christ’s mission to historical travesties like the Crusades or Constantine’s reign. Their sin? They were too political. Stanley’s message is polite, moderate, and sincere. It’s not a brash “America is the greatest country in the world.” It’s a more casual, “hey, our democracy isn’t the best, but it’s better than a lot of what’s out there.” It’s not the Puritan John Winthrop’s strident assertion that America is the biblical “city on a hill.” It is instead a warm offer to look at how good God has been to us here in this special place in time. Shouldn’t we be content to just appreciate and enjoy his gift?

The last chapter reveals the blueprint for White moderate Christians to follow that leaves systemic injustice in place, protected from critique, ridicule, or substantive change. Get Christ out of politics by positioning Christians above the political fray to maintain and grow the Church’s cultural relevance. Then that cultural relevance can help us win souls for Jesus.

Stanley gives us examples of what he believes to be model Christian engagement with injustice, highlighting those who bore up under suffering and forgave. One example he mentions is Rachael Denhollander, an American gymnast who was the first to publicly accuse Larry Nasser, Team USA’s physician, of sexual abuse.  During Denhollander’s testimony at Nasser’s sentencing, she forgave him and Stanley is right that the words she spoke were a powerful witness to the transforming work of Christ. Stanley also mentions Reverend Anthony Thompson, husband to the late Myra Thompson whom the racist Dylann Roof murdered along with eight others at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Reverend Thompson spoke with truth, grace, and clarity when he forgave Roof and publicly longed for his salvation.

But Stanley cherry-picked these stories. He proof-texted and excised them from the context of their subjects’ lives and communities. Denhollander became a lawyer who tirelessly fights against the scourge of sexual abuse and cover-ups in major churches, denominations, and other ministries. As a result, she has many enemies among her siblings in Christ who find her advocacy divisive. And Reverend Thompson also responded to Roof’s crimes by supporting Hilary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election specifically because she was the candidate who he believed was the most likely to strengthen gun control. Stanley also omits Mother Emmanuel’s centuries-long commitment to ending systemic racial hatred, including when its congregation attempted to orchestrate a slave revolt. But what Denhollander, Reverend Thompson, and Mother Emanuel are doing is not causing division. They are trying to heal division caused by the evils of sexual abuse and racism. Stanley consistently dismisses this distinction and doesn’t want his readers to see it. To him, pointing out divisions in order to fight against them is itself divisive.  Rocking the boat is unbiblical.

Throughout the book, Stanley uses the pronoun “we” which he never defines. Presumably, he wants readers to assume he means all Christians. But let’s be clear: Stanley’s audience, like his congregation, is mostly White. It’s not much different from Falwell’s audience in 1980.  At that time, the civil and women’s rights movements had made enormous changes in the United States, and resistance to imperialism, war, patriarchy, and exploitation had risen sharply.  Yet, Falwell helped get his man in the White House and defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. His congregants and readers held enormous power, but they felt under siege. Many in Stanley’s flock feel the same way, but, like Stanley himself, take for granted the power they have. They are Falwell’s generation, plus their children and grandchildren. Now, Black Lives Matter is the new Civil Rights Movement, Marriage Equality is the continuation of the “sexual revolution” and, even though he might make Stanley’s people uncomfortable, Trump, like Reagan, appointed Supreme Court justices to strike down precedents in order to restrict voting and civil rights on their behalf.

I grew up in southern Virginia, Falwell’s backyard, and I have worked in the White evangelical church world for almost 15 years.  Historically, when there is an opportunity to expose and exorcise White American Folk Religion, its disciples pivot their message to keep it in place. Just when they might cast out the false faith of racism, greed, patriarchy, and militarism that holds dominant church culture together, it rebrands and redistributes itself.  This book is a glossy, beautifully-designed roadmap for adherents of WAFR to leave institutional injustice in place and justify their position with scripture.

The gospel in this book is only good news for moderate White people who prioritize civility and the status quo. They might be uncomfortable with the political and religious “homelessness” they feel in the wake of the insurrection, the presidency of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, and the COVID-19 pandemic. They are against police brutality, but think there’s a lot less of it than those BLM troublemakers do. They want everyone treated fairly, but shun specifics about fair wages, healthcare, voting rights, or raising taxes. They might be interested in helping individual refugees, but don’t want to talk about how our country’s foreign policy caused mass displacement. They want things back to their normal. This is not the case for most of their non-White, non-male, or materially poor siblings in Christ. Stanley’s version of WAFR is therefore dangerous for marginalized communities, but attractive for much of his and Falwell’s target demographic.

Stanley correctly notes that racism, political upheaval, and the pandemic pulled all the skeletons out of America’s culturally Christian closet for everyone to see. But Stanley’s primary objective is to get those skeletons back in there and board that closet up. His interpretation of Paul’s advice to “become all things to all people to win some” (1 Cor 9:22) is to become lukewarm and baptize the political middle when controversy arises. I believe his advice is nothing short of an abdication of our responsibility to spread the gospel that the just and righteous Kingdom has come near. That true good news should make us fight for justice, even when Stanley and his ilk oppose us by insisting on unity with those who perpetrate injustice — unity for the sake of a gospel we do not recognize.

Further, I believe Not in It to Win It makes a renewed case for large-scale spiritual bypassing — that is, claiming to be against injustice generally but using spiritual practices or theological ideas to sidestep naming or fighting any specific injustice. John Blake, a journalist at CNN, got a dose of spiritual bypassing when he pressed Stanley in an interview, asking if refusing to stand up for one political side or the other could, in dire situations, amount to moral cowardice. Stanley evaded the question by appealing to the unity of the body of Christ. He said that if he were to take a stance in favor of something like gun control, which he was quick to say “I wouldn’t” because it’s a “very complicated issue,” Republican Christians might respond by assuming he is with Democrats on all subjects.  That, he said, is the real problem he wants to discuss.

But, of course, he still made sure during the interview to let his in-crowd know that he is politically “right-leaning.” So he let his audience know he is conservative like them, he would never touch their guns, and their social, economic, political, and religious status quo can remain intact. And he accomplished all of this while preaching about not taking sides.

Stanley does not need to worry. He is a wealthy, famous megachurch pastor and the son of a wealthy, famous megachurch pastor. He will undoubtedly maintain his much-desired cultural influence under the auspices of the evangelistic opportunities it affords him. He will appear careful and nuanced to White people who are tired of wokeness, CRT, and the “gay agenda.” They will find reassurance in his words that they don’t need to worry too much about the insurrection, gerrymandering that disenfranchises BIPOC communities, a partisan Supreme Court, daily mass shootings, COVID deaths, skyrocketing housing costs, expanding inequality, unchecked police brutality, #MeToo, #ChurchToo — and the list continues. He will convince them that it is more biblically important to not appear overly partisan.

MLK wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that the White moderate was more dangerous than the white supremacist willing to wear a hood and burn a cross. My grandfather taught me the same thing.  They were both right. A few staunch segregationists are preferable to the millions of parents paying lip service to racial equality but leaving for “better” school districts and “safer” neighborhoods. The Proud Boy in camo is more genuine than the millions of concerned citizens ready to call the police “just to make sure things are okay” when a person of color is loitering.  Mike Pence and the Christian nationalist ecosystem that put Trump in place are more dangerous than 45 himself because they dismiss and resist prophetic critique while laying a broadly accepted claim to Jesus. Those everyday injustices are so insidious precisely because of how common and systemic they are in American churches. But Stanley wants to shut down serious conversations about them because it would be divisive.

Therefore, for the midterm election cycle, Christian nationalists have options. They can heed the call for an explicitly Christian resistance to the liberal agenda by the likes of Franklin Graham or Robert Jeffress, or respond to Stanley’s softer invitation to stay focused on “what really matters to God.” In any case, followers of White American Folk Religion can feel faithful without changing themselves or anything around them, and the realities for women, BIPOC, the poor, and the marginalized will remain the same. In other words, Stanley doesn’t need to be in it to win it because White people win either way.

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

Jonathan Walton: This is what I call White American Folk Religion, or WAFR [Jonathan pronounces this like “wafer.”] The first nine chap —

Sy Hoekstra: [interrupting] Wait a minute. Wait. You call it, you say “wafer?”

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah, W-A-F-R, I say “wafer.”

Sy Hoekstra: I did not know that. I’ve always said “W-A-F-R” in my head [laughs]

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah yeah yeah. Somebody said it’s like a nice way of saying “cracker.” I thought that was funny. [laughter]. I did not put that together, but they were like, “Yeah Jonathan, see what you did there.” [laughter] And I was like “Ooooh…” I said “I did not do that on purpose.”