Today's Conversation

In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson and Walter Kim discuss race and the Bible.

We talk about race a lot in the United States. Whether it's the growing population of Asian Americans, trends in Latino immigration, or racial unrest in metropolitan cities, race plays a major role in the American experience. As evangelicals, we want to start with the Bible.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from a respected pastor and theologian on:

What — if anything — the Bible says about race;

How the Tower of Babel and Pentecost relate to diversity;

The racial situation among first century Christians; and

How Christians today ought to respond to racism and racialization.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: Events of the last couple of years in Ferguson, Baltimore, South Carolina, and other places in our country have exposed long-standing injustices and misunderstandings between those in black and white communities and have brought the issue of race to the forefront of many discussions. As evangelicals we want to start with the Bible. What does the Bible have to say about race? That’s the focus of our conversation today, so thanks for joining us, Walter. First, let’s just get right to a basic question — making sure we’re on the same page. What are we talking about when we use the word “race”? What does that mean?

Walter: Well, it depends who you ask. If you ask a biologist or sociologist, they would give different answers, but I think functionally when most people consider the issue of race, they associate it with perceptions of physical or genetic characteristics. Characteristics like skin color or facial features, black or white skin tone, Latino or Asian facial features. And it’s this particular access and definition of race that is probably most present on the consciousness of people as they raise this issue to address.

Leith: And I’m assuming that most people notice. I’m sensing that in some cultures this is a bigger deal than it is in others. I had sort of an embarrassing moment recently. I was at a conference with an African American friend, and the topic was race. And a few months later, we were talking about one of the speakers there. And the race of the speaker came up, and I said the person was Caucasian. My friend said the speaker was African American. I looked it up, and I was wrong and he was right. So is our culture more or less addressing and sensitive to this than others in history and around the world?

Walter: I think this really gets at the issue of categorization. As humans we have a finite ability to organize all the information that comes through our senses, and so of course we’re going to try to come up with ways of categorizing the information. And when it comes to people, one of the ways we attempt to categorize is by the features that we see with our eyes and associate with a certain set of meanings — a person’s origin or value or so-forth. This really isn’t a problem just for North Americans; this is really a function of being human —the need to categorize. The real question is: Are the categories that we use appropriate, or can they be misused? And this is where we in America have gotten ourselves into a very complex and challenging situation.

Leith: Let’s tie that back to the Bible. Does the word “race” even appear in the Bible?

Walter: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. The Bible is completely comfortable with this notion of categorization. In fact if you go to the Old Testament in Genesis Chapter 10, categories are in fact used to divide humans. And so you have these table of nations. So you read about the sons of Japheth. “And from these the maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each within its own language.” The categories that exist — at least in this passage — are territories (geographical categories...

We talk about race a lot in the United States. Whether it’s the growing population of Asian Americans, trends in Latino immigration, or racial unrest in metropolitan cities, race plays a major role in the American experience. As evangelicals, we want to start with the Bible. In this podcast, you’ll hear from a respected pastor ...

Evangelicals are good news people who want to bless others. There are many ways to do this including politics and voting. But sometimes it’s hard to know what is actually going on inside elections.

Nathan Gonzales regularly appears on Meet the Press, NBC Nightly News, the Newshour on PBS, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, Fox News and others as an expert on political races. And his political analysis has been published in USA TODAY, Roll Call, The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, among others.

Congressional candidates come to Washington, D.C., to be interviewed by Nathan as his critique can make the difference in getting financial and political support when running for office.

In Today's Conversation, you'll hear Leith and Nathan discuss:

The impact of local and state elections in federal governing;

How analysts predict election outcomes;

The importance of the Iowa Caucus and other early turnouts for the presidential race;

How congressional districts are set; and

Tips for researching a candidate.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: So it’s probably an understatement, Nathan, to say that you are very busy these days as you engage in the next election.

Nathan: Yeah, it seems like there used to be an off year, but there’s no such thing as an off year anymore, so it keeps us — it keeps me — on my toes.

Leith: It keeps us on our toes with the continued political news. Well, evangelicals are good news people, so we want to bless others. There are lots of ways of doing this, including through politics and voting. But sometimes, with all the media going on it’s hard to know what’s actually going on. And it might be — I don’t know — the sociologist in me, but I’m always fascinated by how elections work and how do analysts predict election outcomes. So, you’re the expert on this, thanks for the opportunity to look inside of elections and politics. And I wanted to start out by asking, how did you get into this most unusual occupation that is yours?

Nathan: Well, I know that God has a plan, but I really kind of stumbled into it. I’d always been interested in writing. When I was a kid, my friend, we’d sell lemonade at the lemonade stand, and I would sell my star wars stories that I had written. And so I’d always been interested in writing, but my senior year when I was an undergrad at Vanguard University in California, I came to Washington D.C. through something called the American Studies Program and I really caught the political bug. I spent half my time that semester in classes and actually meeting, getting to know Heather, which was a very important part of my life, but also I interned in the White House Press office. Now this was a few presidents ago, but I think just being there and seeing the reporters, the White House Press Corps really struck a chord with me, and so I figured out that politics is what I want to write about. And it started giving me a focus. My first job out of college was at CNN. It was fantastic. I was working for the political section of the website. But then there was a merger between AOL and Time Warner, and things got messy. I got moved over to the television side, and I figured out that I wanted to get back to writing longer pieces. So my first boss at CNN used to work for a gentleman named Stuart Rothenberg. She knew that he was looking for someone new. She knew that I was looking for a new position. She said “the two of you should talk” and really the rest is history. That was over 14 – almost 15 – years ago. And I’m so grateful to find something that I enjoy, get paid to do something that I love to do, but also have the flexibility to carve out time for family as well. But the bottom line is I really didn’t grow up as a political junky. I didn’t come from a particularly political family,

Nathan Gonzales regularly appears on Meet the Press, NBC Nightly News, the Newshour on PBS, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, Fox News and others as an expert on political races. And his political analysis has been published in USA TODAY, Roll Call, The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, among others. Congressional candidates ...

Everyone wants to know what evangelicals think — particularly in the election season. But who are researchers talking about when they refer to evangelicals? In Today’s Conversation with Leith Anderson, Ed Stetzer talks about the challenges and opportunities in defining and researching evangelicals.

In this podcast, you’ll hear insight from a leading Christian researcher on:

The different ways researchers identify evangelicals;

How to define evangelicals by their beliefs;

The statistical realities of how evangelicals vote; and

What the future looks like for evangelicalism in the United States.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: You are a professional researcher and know this extremely well. Why is this important to clarify this definition of evangelicals?

Ed: Well, I think the reality is that you can look at this definition in multiple ways. You could come at this from, there’s a thing called the RELTRAD, which is a tool that sits on top of the General Social Survey that actually uses what you belong to. You fill out a form, you say that you’re PCA, or Assemblies of God, Presbyterian Church in America, you will be counted as evangelicals. So that’s by belonging. We think that’s helpful. And there’s another by self-identification, this is what Pew does. So Pew identifies you as evangelical if you say that you are an evangelical or you are born again, and so that’s how Pew uses that. What we’re trying to do here in this project – two years we’ve worked together with the NAE and with LifeWay Research – is to really look at it from a perspective of beliefs. Too often it get’s categorized – particularly in political season – by politics, or it gets categorized by some other factor. So by looking at beliefs we can let people and what they believe place them in the evangelical bucket for research. And it gives us another tool, another helpful tool – and I would say a better tool – than simply saying, “Well, they attend this church. They might not have evangelical beliefs. Or they might attend a church that has non-evangelical beliefs but they themselves are evangelical.” So this gives us that tool. And I think it will be widely received to help people to use this for researchers and analysts to say,“Alright, who are evangelicals?” – particularly because it’s the NAE LifeWay research definition of evangelical belief. And in doing so, it sort of helps define for researchers what the most well-known association of evangelicals thinks defines the belief of the movement statistically.

Leith: So evangelicals actually get to define who are evangelicals, instead of somebody externally doing it for us.

Ed: Which would be I think a helpful thing. Considering that sometimes when you read things – you know, in the media or elsewhere – people don’t know the difference between an evangelical or five other things. So I think getting a key read from a key organization with a statistically validated process will really help answer some of these questions.

Leith: I’d like you to talk about what the method has been for the NAE LifeWay process. And I’ve got to put this in here, you know all the technical language, so you need to say this in terms that I and others will understand. Explain how you do this. What’s the process through which you go?

Ed: What you try to ask is: Are there certain questions that you can ask that people who hold evangelical beliefs will answer, and people who don’t hold evangelical beliefs will answer differently. And so that’s what we sought to determine. Even before we did that, we went through and we started with some theologians. And we asked the theologians to help us come up with some questions. And so these theologians worked with Ron Sellers and Grey Matter Research and came up with a series of questions. When we kind of started the conversation,

In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson and Marshall Shelley talk about hiring and firing pastors, and the relationships between pastors and their congregations and church board.

In this podcast, you’ll hear thoughts and advice on:

How to handle pastoral transitions well;

What the Bible says about letting pastors go;

The legitimate reasons for pastoral terminations; and

How and what to communicate publicly regarding personnel decisions.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: So Marshall, delighted that you are on Today’s Conversation. And let me just start out by asking, why are we talking about this subject? Why is this important?

Marshall: Well as you alluded in your introduction, Leith, I think we’re talking about this, because it’s sometimes an inevitability that leaders are going to separate and that a church does need to make a change. But it’s so often done so poorly that it damages the church. It damages the church’s reputation and ministry in the community, and it can certainly damage the pastor and the pastor’s family. And if there’s a pastor who’s there one Sunday and gone the next with little or no explanation, it can also lead to civil war within the church. So it’s just a very delicate time. It’s a vulnerable time — both for the pastor as well as the congregation. And done well it can lead to renewed strength in the church, but done poorly it can do undue damage.

Leith: So there’s really two issues here. One is whether or not to terminate a pastor, and then how it’s done. And I think we’re focusing primarily on how it’s done. How widespread is this? Are there a lot of pastoral terminations?

Marshall: Well there are. The most recent research that I was able to come across is 20 years old now, but when Christianity Today did some polling of the pastors in our sphere, it indicated that 23 percent of them said that they’d been let go at a previous position. So that’s almost a quarter of the pastors had been either fired or pressured to resign in a previous position. So that’s a significant number. It’s not a majority by any means, but it’s certainly a significant minority of churches that have actively had to ask a pastor to leave.

Leith: Each month the NAE has what we call the Evangelical Leaders Survey and in July of 2015 we asked our survey recipients — and these are top leaders, heads of denominations and organizations — if they had ever been terminated from a paid ministry position, and it was 18 percent. So that’s almost 1 in 5, and these are people who went on to significant leadership. I just got to tuck in here a bit of my own experience. After graduating from seminary, I was a youth pastor at a church in the Rocky Mountain West, and the church voted me out. It was really — at the time — an awfully painful experience. It wasn’t because I’d done anything bad, but it was because they didn’t have money to pay me. And of all the ironies, the senior pastor the church had to go away shortly after that, and they didn’t have anybody to preach the next Sunday. And the chairman of the board called me up and said would I preach because they couldn’t find anybody else, and then he said “and we knew you’d be free.” Of course they knew I would be free, because they had just fired me a few days earlier.

Marshall: They had made sure you were free.

Leith: And the irony of it was, a couple of months later the senior pastor resigned, they called me as a senior pastor and I ended up being there 10 years. So it doesn’t always mean that the person has done some awful thing, and it doesn’t mean that there’s going to be a bad outcome, but it means it’s just got to be done right.

Marshall: I think that’s a great story, because it also illustrates that firings can be painful. They are humiliating, and you can feel used even if there’s good reason ...

In Today’s Conversation with Leith Anderson, Nicole Baker Fulgham talks about her work helping faith communities close the academic achievement gap in public schools.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from an education policy expert on:

What the term "education inequality" means and looks like;

The achievement trend lines in American classrooms;

Her personal background growing up in Detroit; and

How churches are uniquely positioned to respond to education inequality.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: I have a whole list of questions that I want to ask you, but I’m going to dive into the deep end, and that is “education inequality” and “academic achievement gap.” So these are big concepts, so help us who are not official educators to understand, what do these phrases mean? What does it look like?

Nicole: Sure. What it looks like is that we essentially in our country still have — despite, you know, decades now past school desegregation, we still have — two separate and pretty unequal school systems in our public schools. And so that looks like kids in a wealthier community — a suburban community often — are going to fantastic schools. The buildings are bright and shiny. They’re well resourced. The teachers have graduate degrees. And they have advanced placement classes for the students. And not surprisingly many of those kids are going on to college and becoming very successful. And you contrast that with schools in low income communities where families are struggling financially and the schools are very different. They physically generally look different. But beyond that, the expectations are often lower for kids in those communities and in those schools. And they may not have the resources, and the advanced classes, and supplies, and everything that we know is necessary to make sure that kids achieve. And not surprisingly in low income communities, about half the kids don’t graduate from high school, and only about 10 percent will graduate from college. And we see this in city and city across the United States where you can literally look at an income background for a particular zip code — the average family income — and there is a pretty direct correlation to the number of kids that are graduating and going on to college. And that is a massive inequality in our school system, and that’s what many of us refer to as “inequality” and the “achievement gap.”

Leith: And we’re talking big numbers here. I think there’s something like 16 million children who are growing up in poverty. Is that right?

Nicole: There are 16 million as last count. And the poverty line, as I think we all know, is very low in this country, right? So we’re talking families that are very much struggling economically, and half of those kids won’t graduate from high school. And so it affects those 16 million kids who are living in poverty, but also millions more who are living sometimes just above the poverty line and are the working poor in our country, and their schools are often struggling as well.

Leith: And is there a trend line here? Is it stable? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse?

Nicole: You know it’s actually been pretty stable since we started collecting this data a few decades ago, and in some cases the gaps have gotten wider, actually, between either racial groups or income groups. And there are a few pockets of places where we see things starting to improve in certain districts around the country. And in schools we certainly see improvement where schools in low income communities are exceeding all of those expectations. So we know we have examples all around the nation of things that are working, which really proves the potential, right, that kids in every community have. But the challenge is getting those examples of success to scale and having more people that are invested in en...

In Today’s Conversation with Leith Anderson, Ian Hutchinson shares about his experience as a distinguished scientist and a committed Christian.

In this podcast, you’ll hear Leith and Ian discuss:

Ian's personal faith journey;

The relationship between science and faith;

How pastors can support scientists in their midst; and

The important distinction between science and scientism.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: Let me start out and go right to a question that I’m sure you have been asked many times. What exactly is fusion plasma physics?

Ian: Fusion is a form of a nuclear energy that arises from reactions between the nuclei of our atoms in the regular world. And nuclear power, as we currently experience it, is based on fission that is breaking up heavy elements like uranium and that releases energy. But it turns out that if you take very light elements, like hydrogen and its isotopes, and fuse those together — we add them together, making heavy elements — that also releases energy, and that energy source (fusion energy) is the energy source of the sun and stars. And the question we’ve been researching for 60 years or so is: Can we bring that energy source of the sun and stars down to earth on the terrestrial human scale? And can we make it into a practical energy source, by which we can generate electricity and supply our energy needs? That’s been the aim of fusion research, and basically that’s the research — or the motivation at any rate for the research — I’ve been doing through most of my career. Plasmas — to address the other part of the title — plasmas are incredibly hot, ionized gases. They are gasses that are so hot that the electrons are stripped away from the nuclei. And the reason why we deal in those plasmas in fusion research is that in order to make fusion reactions take place you need extremely energetic collisions between the nuclei, and that requires extremely high temperatures — temperatures in the vicinity of 100 million degrees Celsius. That’s hotter than the center of the sun. And when you have some matter that is at such a high temperature, it becomes what’s called a plasma. So what I do — I and my colleagues here at MIT — is we study the behavior of these incredibly hot gasses called plasmas, combined using magnetic fields. If you have something that’s 100 million degrees centigrade you don’t just put it in a regular bottle because it would either vaporize the bottle or it would immediately cool the plasma down, so we confine it using magnetic fields — immaterial fields — and heat these plasmas. And we’re basically studying the behavior of plasmas combined by magnetic fields with a view to making fusion energy a human reality.

Leith: I looked up on the internet and found a picture of the equipment that you use, and it looks like a scene out of a science fiction movie. And it was an amazing piece of equipment. And shows your staff there, with you center in the staff picture, with this — what do we call the machine that you’re working with?

Ian: The type of confinement device I’m using is called a tokamak. And that basically refers to a toroidal — that is donut shaped plasma — held with a magnetic field in a chamber. But there are lots of very complicated pieces of equipment that generate the magnetic fields in the first place, that cool the magnets, that make the vacuum in which we generate the plasma, and so forth. But you referred to science fiction. Fusion made it into the movies in Spiderman and his interactions with Doctor Octopus. The type of fusion that’s often portrayed in these kinds of movie situations is kind of different from reality, but nevertheless it gives you something of the impression of the sort of complexity of the equipment that we’re studying. And so we have a major facility here at MIT that enables people to study these incredibly hot gasses.

In Today's Conversation with Leith Anderson, Robert Putnam shares his research and stories showing the growing class gap among kids in the United States and offers ideas for how we can address the disparity.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from a renowned social science researcher on:

The experiences of young people growing up in different economic classes;

Statistics and trends explaining a growing economic gap among Americans; and

How churches can be involved in caring for all of our kids.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: Professor, America is abuzz over your new book, “Our Kids.” And I’ve got to tell you, I’m amazed at how many people I talk to who have already read it. In it, you claim that there is a large and growing class divide in our nation that’s more than money and more than race. So, what are these classes? And what’s happening here?

Robert: Well, what’s happening, is in the bigger picture is that there is of course — this is widely known — a growing inequality and income distribution. People who are less affluent and less well educated have not really had a raise for almost 30 years. So there is a growing income gap, and as I say that’s been widely discussed. Our society has become more segregated by social class, by education and income. People are more likely to live near people of a different race or a different religion, are more likely to have friends or to even marry people from a different race or a different religion. But in social class terms, in terms of education and income, we’re less likely to live near people who have a different income or educational level than we used to. Our kids are less likely to go to school with kids from a different social background. And we’re even less likely to marry someone from a different class or background. So in that sense our society has become more and more polarized into really two different societies: an affluent society of college educated Americans who are doing pretty well — I’m not talking just about the ultra rich, I’m talking about people basically in the upper third of American society, which amounts to people who have a college education — and a growing gap I should say between them and the lower third of American society — people who have not gotten past high school, they may have a high school degree but they have not gotten past high school. And that gap, that divide, that really serious divide between those two Americas is I think causing grave problems especially for kids. That — as you know ­­— is what the book is focused on, which is what difference does all this make for our kids.

Leith: Do these classes know about each other? I know generally they know about each other, but are they aware of how different their lives are?

Robert: No. I think that’s one reason I wrote the book actually, Leith. Because I think, you know when I was growing up in the 50s — or even more recently than that — lots of people knew people from the other side of the tracks. I mean, I grew up in a small town, and I describe this a little in “Bowling Alone,” my hometown was a small town. And there were, of course, some people in town better off than others, but we all played on the same teams. And we all went to the same school. And we dated, and many of us went to church together. So there wasn’t such a big class divide, and we knew about the lives that other people led. That’s less true now — much less true. And therefore, lots of people of goodwill who are on the upper side of what I call the opportunity gap — that is people from college educated backgrounds — simply are unaware of how bad things have gotten down in the lower third of American society. That’s why there are so many stories in my book of kids from what I call rich kids and poor kids. I have lots of stories, because I want to say to readers of the book who are likely to be themselves pretty well ed...