Episodes
The first season of The Unfinished Church explores humility, implicit bias, building right relationships, compassionate listening and more as the bishops talk with activists, authors, preachers and teachers about what it means to do the work of antiracism. Our guests are well-known thought leaders putting their faith into action for a better world. Listen in.
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EPISODE 1
Respecting Differences with Nadia Bolz-Weber Our guest for the episode “Respecting Differences” is Lutheran pastor, public theologian and author of New York Times’ best-selling books Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People and Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. The bishops speak with Bolz-Weber about honoring differences and calling the Church back to the work of transformation. This episode invites listeners to embrace humility, let go of fear and have the hard conversations necessary to build the beloved community God calls us to build. Bolz-Weber’s unique and uncensored approach to living out the Gospel and building community is rooted in respecting difference with humility, grace and forgiveness. The bishops engage this mold-breaking author and theologian in a brave and authentic conversation about responding to cultural differences with humility, grace and fearlessness. |
Full transcript
Bishop LaTrelle…: Welcome to the Unfinished Church.
Bishop Gregory …: I’m Gregory Palmer.
Bishop Mike McK…: I’m Mike McKee.
Bishop LaTrelle…: And I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations, to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
Beloved, I am excited about the vulnerability, the authenticity, and the clarity that Nadia brought to this conversation around anti-racism and about calling the Church back to who she is supposed to be for the real work of transformation.
Bishop Gregory …: I think because it models laying bare our imperfection around race, among many other places where, as persons and as the institution of the Church, where clearly we have not always hit the mark and maybe missed it more than we’ve ever hit it. And until we allow that to be laid bare, the wound can’t even approach healing.
Bishop Mike McK…: This conversation is helpful because I think we begin to understand the importance of authenticity. A word that is often misused or used too often, but we have authenticity embodied in this conversation with Nadia Bolz-Weber. And I so appreciate about her honesty, not only about herself, but about the church that we all dearly love.
Bishop LaTrelle…: And I think that Nadia invites us to let go of the fear, that to engage in this conversation, to recognize where all of us hold some bias, some preconceived notion, all of us fall short of the glory of God that, that doesn’t mean that we need to hate ourselves. That doesn’t mean we need to be afraid to enter into the conversation.
From vocabulary, to clothing, to hairstyles, to the nature and content of what is being protested. God’s creation is diverse. Today’s conversation is about respecting these beautiful human differences even if we don’t prefer them or understand them. Respecting different forms of expression requires an understanding that we may not really know what is going on. As the theologian Aretha Franklin reminds us, R-E-S-P-E-C-T find out what it means to me. Our baptismal vows and communal practices of baptism bathes this practice in grace, mystery and connection across time, all ages, nations, and races.
We are thrilled to be joined today by author, speaker, activist and public theologian, Reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber. She writes and speaks about personal failings, recovery, grace, faith and whatever else she wants to. Nadia’s unique and uncensored approach to living out the Gospel and building community is rooted in respecting difference with humility, grace, and forgiveness. It is great to be with you again, Nadia; welcome to the Unfinished Church.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Thank you so much, Bishop. I’m delighted to be joining you guys.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Excellent. Let us embark upon this rich conversation. The gospel of Matthew includes the scripture “don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged. You’ll receive the same judgment you give.” Yet Christians seem to be judging others quite a bit. I mean, the society that we’re living in is becoming more of a vituperative by the day. And a lot of that vitriol seems to be centered in race. Where have we failed in our spiritual formation?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Oh, where have we failed in our spiritual formation? I think that in terms of Christianity, I feel like there really has so seldom been a deep commitment to humility. And sometimes people teach humility, but it’s as a way of being able to abuse people easier. So that’s not what I’m saying, but it feels like in all sectors of the church, there isn’t this sort of spiritual humility, intellectual humility, religious humility, to say every single one of us is not really going to get any of this completely right. Like the scripture says, maybe we shouldn’t judge how far everyone else is off the mark continually when we ourselves are probably off the mark and don’t even realize it.
So I feel like both in the liberal and the conservative church, there’s an enormous amount of hubris. So often our psyches have a hard time withstanding any kind of criticism, any kind of inclination that we might not be getting something right. Because when somebody actually has a lot of maturity, when they have a sort of solid, healthy ego, criticism isn’t threatening. So I think that we haven’t done a lot in the church to sort of become these really integrated people that can actually withstand a little bit of pressure, a little bit of criticism. It’s interesting that judge not lest ye be judged.
I have a friend who is one of these people who their online presence was really one of calling other people out a lot, like piling on. Somebody made an error of some kind, and she was the first to call them out and to get other people on their side and to pile on. And she’s in this moment of repentance from that. I’m like, man, you live by the call out, you die by the call out. If that is your brand, if that’s going to be your brand, God bless you, but it’s a matter of time.
My friend Jacob Smith is an Episcopal priest in New York and he goes, “Look, we’re all three bad days away from being in an internet scandal, and most of us are already on day two. Everyone needs to relax.” So one of the things I see in our conversations with race and where people get very defensive and they don’t want to take in any kind of new information, is that most people are so wrecked with insecurity and have such a lack of spiritual maturity, that they put all their energy into preserving this idea that they have of themselves that they’re right. This is what we do. I think that we are in so much more danger of harming ourselves and other people when we’re certain we’re good, when we’re certain we’re bright, that when we think we’re being virtuous, than we ever do when we’re certainly acting out of our vices.
So I think sometimes this need to like, I have to maintain a self-understanding that I am good. Now, if somebody’s going to be giving me information that says, “Actually you know what, as an overeducated privileged white lady, there’s a bunch of stuff you don’t understand yet.” Well, if my self-understanding is I already know stuff, I’m going to get really defensive. If my self-understanding is solid enough and my psyche and my maturity is solid enough, I’m not threatened by that. I want to know, oh, I wonder, I could have curiosity. What is it? This was hard for me as well. It’s hard for a lot of us. I thought I know stuff about race and then when I was confronted more and more with things I didn’t know, I had to fight through a little resistance to go, what do I want more? Do I want the truth more or do I want to be right more.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Because so seldom are these going to be the same thing.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Exactly. Well, it sounds like you’re describing the difference between convicted humility and a facade of humility, or even humility as a weapon. And God knows we weaponize scripture and the like enough.
I’d also like to ask you about the violent that pervades our society. It seems particularly predicated on othering and a righteous indignation, that some believe gives them license to actually act out violently. How do we then reframe our discipleship to recognize that Christ comes as the Prince of Peace, and to bring reconciliation and healing?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: I do a lot of speaking in other countries, and if you’re in other, what are called Western developed countries, the ones that we have the most in common with, and you’re an American, you will eventually get the questions. I mean, I swear to God, every time I’m over there, after a while people would be like, “Look, we got an American. We got to ask her these questions.” And the questions they always want to ask me about, they’re like, “Look, there’s so many similarities between our cultures. Can you help us with some things that are very difficult to understand in America?” They want to know about, you can probably guess it, gun laws, mass incarceration, the percentage of our citizens that are incarcerated, and relatedly, the death penalty. These three things, as they’re lived out in the United States of America, are madness to other Western developed.
They cannot understand them. So they’re like, “Nadia, can you help us?” And my answer, and this has been for the last 10 years I’ve been getting these questions when I travel abroad, my answer is like, “You cannot understand these spiritual maladies in our country, unless you’re willing to look at white supremacy. You can’t understand. It is baffling. It is madness. The only way to trace back how in the world are we in a point where we preserve and protect these three things, it always goes back to the unconfessed original sins of our country.”
Bishop Mike McK…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: The spiritual malady in this country has to do with the fact that we’ve never done our work. There’s never been a truth and reconciliation commission.
Bishop Mike McK…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: And so on some level, that whole thing of, “We have to protect ourselves,” that instinct of like, somebody’s going to come and get us, we have the right to protect all our shit, all of that, that is rooted in the fact that we never did our work around the enslavement of human beings and around the land theft and genocide of human beings.
Bishop Mike McK…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: And we know that we live in a castle that we kind of got through some unseemly and unethical needs. On some level, we might not admit it, but we know and it’s that truth underneath there, that fuels this fat, well, we better be able to arm ourselves. We better be able to kill anyone we find at all threatening that we think is going to come and take our stuff. And then we have to be able to incarcerate as many of them as possible, and if we want to, we need to be able to kill them. So to me, it’s all rooted in that.
And you know what? I say that as somebody who right now, I’m writing a book about forgiveness, and I have my assistant doing some research for me about Stand Your Ground laws; about the castle doctrine. Because my nephew, at the end of August, had a mental break. When he’s like me, young addict alcoholic, in and out of treatment centers, 23-years-old. He was in detox again and he had a mental break and he thought, “Oh, there’s demons and I got to get out.” He was disassociated. And he goes to a house in the neighbor. He gets out of the detox, goes to a house in the neighborhood, banging on the door, saying, “It’s Henry, it’s your cousin, let me in,” thinking it’s a family home. He just needs some help. He needs some mental health help. And he gets inside this house and the man shot and killed him.
And so I am trying to go, where does this come from? Where does it come from, this idea? Because I went and walked the Camino de Santiago to grieve my nephew. I had to just get out. I was like, I cannot be Nadia Bolz-Weber for anyone right now. And I went and I walked the Camino, and I told that story of how Henry died to maybe five or six people who were from other countries. And they’re all like, “Well, how long will this man be in prison?” I’m like, “Oh, no, no. I’m sorry. No, no. That’s legal here.” And sister, they were horrified, horrified at the idea-someone gets into your house, you can kill them, point blank and no questions asked frankly.
And so I’m trying to go back and go, where does it come from? What is the sickness that causes a situation? And while I’m looking at that, I also have compassion for how terrifying it would be for somebody who is not in their right mind to get into your house. And then the reason that I think that we have to change our gun laws, this is where I want to be clear, it’s not because I’m nonviolent, it’s because I am violent. I should not have access to a handgun, you know why? If someone got into my house, I think I would kill them.
We have created a situation with these guns in our country, where in a split second, we think they might have a gun, so we better kill them first. So all of this feeling of being threatened all the time that we have, creates so much death, and creates so much violence, and I wonder what would happen in this country if we actually sat down as a people and did our work and just told some truths man, just told some truths about stuff. We’ve never done that.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well, first let me say that I am so sorry for the loss of your nephew and that you and your family are having to experience that grief. I simply can’t imagine.
The Chapel, your online community, when we talk about sitting down, you talk about just doing that work. You ask hosts and all members to respect and keep to nine commandments. The stated purpose is to keep everyone in right relationship with each other. Honoring difference is one of those commitments. Why was that important enough to you to make it one of the nine, and what have you learned about creating environments where this is the foundational thread of your relationship?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Well, the reason is because people behave poorly towards each other online because they can. We have no covenant with each other. I actually have met Monica Lewinsky a couple times. And she said to me, because I asked her, I said, “How do people treat you?” She goes, “Honestly Nadia, I could count on one hand the number of times that somebody’s been awful to me in person. Every day of my life, people have been awful to me online since I was 21.” Why? Because we have no covenant for how to treat each other and there’s that anonymity.
And so the importance to me was going, look, also when we have daily prayer, we say in The Chapel, you’re going to hear some theological language and maybe there’ll be a type of prayer that you’re not comfortable with. You’ll be okay. We’re all going to take turns being uncomfortable. It’s really important to us. So I think that we can create these little bubbles of comfort in our lives where we need to make sure there’s no ideas we’re not comfortable with, there aren’t people around we’re not comfortable with; we can just create these little bubbles, and we’re pruning down the ability for us to grow as spiritual beings when we do that. It is only by encountering difference that we ever can actually know who we are. It’s the only way.
So I think that… And the funny thing is, as I’m answering this, I’m realizing I’m answering this question on both sides ideologically. I think that what I see in liberal circles online too, is a complete lack of being willing to look at subtlety, of being able to actually listen to any kind of critical thinking. There’s just so much reactivity without any listening and people are terrified of any heterodox ideas. You know?
Bishop Gregory …: Yeah. I wonder if I could just follow up on a bit of how you’ve responded to Bishop Easterling’s question. She initially talked about and you responded to the question about, how is the way we’ve gotten sideways about difference, connected deeply to not being well-formed spiritually. And then the Lewinsky illustration of in person nobody’s ever really been that harsh or unkind to me, I think I’m paraphrasing, but online. What’s the connection between this spiritual malformation, my words, and virtual courage that people don’t seem to have when they’re in physical proximity?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: I’m not sure, but I can say for my own experience, that if I’m going to be honest, the majority of my spiritual formation happened in the basement of churches and not the sanctuaries of churches. I’ve gone to AA meetings and church basements for 30 years, and people there are able to speak honestly, honestly about their lives and connect to God and to one another. And I see it a lot more often in a church basement than I do in a church sanctuary. And I think one of the reasons is because the starting point of 12 step work is not seeking righteousness actually. It’s not becoming better disciples. It’s not progressive sanctification. The starting point is failure. The starting point is humility. The starting point is to go, I admit I’m an alcoholic and I actually on my own will and power, am hopeless. And I have to rely on a power greater than myself. I have to admit I can’t do this by myself. I have to rely on God. I have to be really honest about my failings. I have to clean up my side of the street. I have to try to be of service to others. And to me, I’ve seen that kind of formation in people through that process in a way that I think the church could really take note of.
Bishop Gregory …: Thank you.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Absolutely. And also what I hear you describing, Nadia, is a vulnerability, that unfortunately it seems like what is presently now pervasive in too many Christian communities is not about a vulnerability, because what you just described in that 12 Step Program really should be our understanding of our baptism. We don’t need baptism because we’re perfect. We need baptism because we are not perfect. So again, why have we lost this notion of vulnerability and the beauty and the sacredness that comes through that vulnerability?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Yeah. Well, because the world breaks your heart. I mean, so many of us have experienced a world that is harsh and has broken our heart and where we have been hurt. So it is, as Brené Brown says, it does take some bravery. But as it pertains to conversations around race, I think on one end, I see a lack of humility in people who are trying to preserve an idea that they’re already good. So why are you trying to tell me I’m racist? I have a black grandchild. I can’t be racist. There’s that nonsense, trying to preserve that sense of self.
And then on the other end, you have people who spend so much time calling out other people as a way of deflecting what might be going on for them, or they’ll do a lot of… Once they sort of learn some of this stuff, we end up doing some performative stuff so that people can see we’re good. We’re posting the right stuff online. We’re trying to co-opt our black friends into like saying, we’re the good white people. I mean, do you know what I mean?
Bishop Mike McK…: Yes.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: There’s just so much nonsense. And both of these things I think when we are doing them are really rooted in a deep insecurity. So I think this is why the conversations around anti-racism that I feel the most drawn to are ones where the foundational principle is your belovedness. All of this, no matter who it is, and that we can go back to that. Instead of the foundational thing about you, is that you have white supremacy that you haven’t dealt with. That’s not going to be the foundational part of you. It really is a belovedness. And when the conversation can go back to that, we can actually have grace for each other as we’re facing these challenges. It’s a thing I see absent in these conversations a lot. Because it’s so important, we think it’s a betrayal of the cause to show grace to anyone. I think it’s actually a place that people can actually land if they know that there’s some grace to it, they’re more apt to keep walking that path.
Bishop Mike McK…: Nadia, I want to follow up on something you said, and that was that the world breaks your heart. I’m of the opinion that the church has broken too many hearts as well. So as you talk about humility and being open to anything, how do we create a church, a body believers, a beloved community that really respects people, and is so very open to people bringing their pain or their stuff or whatever that I want to be a part of a community like this? What would you say to the church?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: The most important thing is to start with as much honesty as you can, because unless we do that, we’re just going to be what I call redecorating the phone booth. It’s like in the sense of you can go, we don’t have phone booths everywhere like we used to and then you can then think, oh, well that means that nobody cares about communicating with other people on phones anymore. Of course, we don’t know that’s true. You can say people aren’t going to church as much, oh so they aren’t as interested in spiritual formation and prayer. It’s not true. So the church ends up saying, “Hey, let’s redecorate the phone booth rather than being honest enough.” And one of the things I feel like I’d love for us to do more, is to be as honest as we can about what is our deepest value, not what does our website say our values are, but based in what we do, based on how we spend money, based on what we talk about the most, what are our deepest values?
And one of the examples I like to give is like look, if everybody in the congregation hates the fake flowers that are on the altar, but nobody will ever say anything. You have to do the work of, “Well, why would that be?” Oh, maybe it’s because Agnes puts them there, and in a super codependent way, Agnes over functions at church and does a lot of the work nobody else wants to sign up for. So what that means is our highest value is keeping Agnes happy at all cost. And that’s why we will suffer through ugly paraments or fake flowers, because we need to keep Agnes happy so that we aren’t the ones who have to do the bookkeeping or do whatever she’s doing.
So to do really honest work about what do our practices say about our values, not what does our website say about our values. Because so often churches are confused about the difference between being friendly and being welcoming. So often we have these very friendly churches that cannot see all the ways that they’re not welcoming. God bless them. So they’re like, “We were so friendly when people visited, why aren’t they coming back?” Well, there’s a million ways like a worship service can be unwelcoming, and you don’t see it because you’ve been in it and you’re so familiar with it for so long. So even inviting people who aren’t even churchgoers to come and say as honestly as they can, what did they not understand? What felt uncomfortable to them? What did everyone around them seem to understand and they didn’t?
I mean, the first time I went to a Lutheran service, they gave me a red hymnal and then a green hymnal, and then they gave me a worship book, a little folder thing that then had code in it. It said like LBW42. I don’t know what the hell any of this means. And everybody around me did. And then there’s an insert that has the readings, and that’s different. I mean, it was impossible to break through code, and they were so friendly, and I felt the whole time like I didn’t belong.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well Nadia, we are asking all of our guests two questions. So if you would, I’d like to ask you those questions now. How do you talk with people about racial justice who don’t think, act, or look like you?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: I don’t think I do. (Laughter) I don’t think I do, do that.
Bishop LaTrelle…: That’s honest.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: If I’m honest. I’m trying to think when have I done that? I can say that I try to tell my own story as much as I can. I try to talk about my own struggles, and at different points when I learn things and things that are hard, and I try to keep it in that, because I’m not an expert in this. It’s not like I’m going to do a keynote on this stuff. To me, it’s personal. It has to do with the relationships that I’ve had over the last 10 years and the ways that those have changed me. It has to do with the fact that when something happens in the news cycle and I react to it differently than my friend Theresa reacts to it, I have to ask myself, “Oh, why is that?” It is a constant work like that of seeing things and hopefully once you see them, you can’t unsee them. But talking about being a beginner with this stuff and being willing to talk about that, that’s all I really have to offer because I’m not like an expert in any way.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well, I think you are offering far more than you are giving yourself credit for.
The next question I would ask you is, how do you care for your soul in the midst of anti-racism work or any work that is trying to bring about transformation and change?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: I publish essays every week or so on my, it’s called The Corners, it’s my Substack. And the one that I published that got the most, that half a million people read, it had the most reads of anything I wrote. It was around bandwidth, because I don’t know that our psyches were developed to be able to hold, respond to, and care about every form of human suffering and injustice and natural disaster and violence that happens to every person throughout the whole planet every minute of the day.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Our psyches were developed to be able to hold and respond to and care about the injustice and the violence and the stuff that happens in our village. And so, so many of us are experiencing this, the fact that we have this older wiring, but we have this modern stimulus of things clamoring for our attention. And it’s hard. It’s like, oh my gosh, I have to do something about immigration, and I have to do some anti-racism work, and what about the environment? And now there’s this other thing asking and to go…
My friend Suzanne taught me these discernment questions of like, what’s mine to do and what’s not mine to do? What’s mine to say, and what’s not mine to say? What’s mine to care about, which is harder, and what’s not mine to care about? That’s not to say, it’s not worthy to be cared about by someone. But I think understanding our capacity and what is ours to do, and to bless the fact that other things will be cared about and done by other people. So it’s not like putting our heads in the sand, it’s actually being effective. Because we can have that discernment, what’s mine to do. And then to bless and support others and what’s theirs to do. And I think having that clarity really helps the overwhelm.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Amen.
Well Nadia, thank you for being you, first of all, and for creating bold spaces of belonging for saints and sinners. And now I would ask my brother bishops, what would you highlight from today’s conversation? What’s going to continue to resonate with you?
Bishop Gregory …: I’ll be haunted by this question, created by something that Nadia said, the world breaks your heart. And then Bishop McKee questioned-asserted that sometimes the church breaks our heart. And just that dichotomy, the question that’s haunting me and I would say in a good way, to do good work I hope about it is, has the church become too conformed to this world? sort of a Romans 12 piece- are we cut so much after the pattern of the world, and as I’ve said from time to time, did we particularly in American Protestantism, did we campaign for the job of becoming the chaplain to the white middle class and we got the job?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: One of the things that breaks my heart is going, is the way the church has just seems to have bought into a set of values and judges itself according to those values and feels like it’s always coming up lacking and maybe those weren’t the standards we were supposed to be needing to begin with.
Bishop Mike McK…: One of the things that resonates with me is something that is deep inside anyway, and that is about our work to do. I cannot change the world. I think sometimes many clergy and lay people as well, I would say do overreach and that they think I can take on this prophetic stance for the whole world when there’s so many injustices or challenges in local communities that really need our attention and our work. And I’m just reminded of that by this conversation today. I want to thank you Nadia for giving that to us today again, as a reminder to me.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: That was my problem with this thing my denomination was so in love with years ago called, and forgive me if you guys like it, but natural church development. It was this process by which people in your parish would rank how your church is doing in these 10 categories. And then whatever you suck at, that’s been what you’re supposed to really focus on. And the consultant would show you a water barrel with the wooden slats, and one is lower than the rest, and your barrel can only hold as much water as the lowest slat. And everyone’s convicted going, “Yeah, let’s do this.” And I’m like, “Hold on. If my church is excellent at a few things, but not at others, I bet the church down the block is excellent at those. Who says we have to be good at all the things? Come on.”
Bishop LaTrelle…: Amen.
Bishop Gregory …: Absolutely. Thank you.
Bishop Mike McK…: Amen.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well you certainly make me think about the quote, “When the gospel has become bad news to the poor, to the oppressed, to the brokenhearted and the imprisoned and good news to the proud, self-righteous and privileged instead, it is no longer the gospel of Jesus Christ.” So Nadia, again, just want to thank you for being with us today, for sharing your heart, for calling us all into a covenant of vulnerability, and for just bringing so much resonance to the Unfinished Church podcast.
Beloved, please tune in next time when we connect with Eboo Patel, about examining our perceptions.
Bishop Mike McK…: Episodes are available on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop Gregory …: Connect with us and find related resources on our website, the unfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church- Conversations that transform.
Bishop Gregory …: I’m Gregory Palmer.
Bishop Mike McK…: I’m Mike McKee.
Bishop LaTrelle…: And I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations, to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
Beloved, I am excited about the vulnerability, the authenticity, and the clarity that Nadia brought to this conversation around anti-racism and about calling the Church back to who she is supposed to be for the real work of transformation.
Bishop Gregory …: I think because it models laying bare our imperfection around race, among many other places where, as persons and as the institution of the Church, where clearly we have not always hit the mark and maybe missed it more than we’ve ever hit it. And until we allow that to be laid bare, the wound can’t even approach healing.
Bishop Mike McK…: This conversation is helpful because I think we begin to understand the importance of authenticity. A word that is often misused or used too often, but we have authenticity embodied in this conversation with Nadia Bolz-Weber. And I so appreciate about her honesty, not only about herself, but about the church that we all dearly love.
Bishop LaTrelle…: And I think that Nadia invites us to let go of the fear, that to engage in this conversation, to recognize where all of us hold some bias, some preconceived notion, all of us fall short of the glory of God that, that doesn’t mean that we need to hate ourselves. That doesn’t mean we need to be afraid to enter into the conversation.
From vocabulary, to clothing, to hairstyles, to the nature and content of what is being protested. God’s creation is diverse. Today’s conversation is about respecting these beautiful human differences even if we don’t prefer them or understand them. Respecting different forms of expression requires an understanding that we may not really know what is going on. As the theologian Aretha Franklin reminds us, R-E-S-P-E-C-T find out what it means to me. Our baptismal vows and communal practices of baptism bathes this practice in grace, mystery and connection across time, all ages, nations, and races.
We are thrilled to be joined today by author, speaker, activist and public theologian, Reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber. She writes and speaks about personal failings, recovery, grace, faith and whatever else she wants to. Nadia’s unique and uncensored approach to living out the Gospel and building community is rooted in respecting difference with humility, grace, and forgiveness. It is great to be with you again, Nadia; welcome to the Unfinished Church.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Thank you so much, Bishop. I’m delighted to be joining you guys.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Excellent. Let us embark upon this rich conversation. The gospel of Matthew includes the scripture “don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged. You’ll receive the same judgment you give.” Yet Christians seem to be judging others quite a bit. I mean, the society that we’re living in is becoming more of a vituperative by the day. And a lot of that vitriol seems to be centered in race. Where have we failed in our spiritual formation?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Oh, where have we failed in our spiritual formation? I think that in terms of Christianity, I feel like there really has so seldom been a deep commitment to humility. And sometimes people teach humility, but it’s as a way of being able to abuse people easier. So that’s not what I’m saying, but it feels like in all sectors of the church, there isn’t this sort of spiritual humility, intellectual humility, religious humility, to say every single one of us is not really going to get any of this completely right. Like the scripture says, maybe we shouldn’t judge how far everyone else is off the mark continually when we ourselves are probably off the mark and don’t even realize it.
So I feel like both in the liberal and the conservative church, there’s an enormous amount of hubris. So often our psyches have a hard time withstanding any kind of criticism, any kind of inclination that we might not be getting something right. Because when somebody actually has a lot of maturity, when they have a sort of solid, healthy ego, criticism isn’t threatening. So I think that we haven’t done a lot in the church to sort of become these really integrated people that can actually withstand a little bit of pressure, a little bit of criticism. It’s interesting that judge not lest ye be judged.
I have a friend who is one of these people who their online presence was really one of calling other people out a lot, like piling on. Somebody made an error of some kind, and she was the first to call them out and to get other people on their side and to pile on. And she’s in this moment of repentance from that. I’m like, man, you live by the call out, you die by the call out. If that is your brand, if that’s going to be your brand, God bless you, but it’s a matter of time.
My friend Jacob Smith is an Episcopal priest in New York and he goes, “Look, we’re all three bad days away from being in an internet scandal, and most of us are already on day two. Everyone needs to relax.” So one of the things I see in our conversations with race and where people get very defensive and they don’t want to take in any kind of new information, is that most people are so wrecked with insecurity and have such a lack of spiritual maturity, that they put all their energy into preserving this idea that they have of themselves that they’re right. This is what we do. I think that we are in so much more danger of harming ourselves and other people when we’re certain we’re good, when we’re certain we’re bright, that when we think we’re being virtuous, than we ever do when we’re certainly acting out of our vices.
So I think sometimes this need to like, I have to maintain a self-understanding that I am good. Now, if somebody’s going to be giving me information that says, “Actually you know what, as an overeducated privileged white lady, there’s a bunch of stuff you don’t understand yet.” Well, if my self-understanding is I already know stuff, I’m going to get really defensive. If my self-understanding is solid enough and my psyche and my maturity is solid enough, I’m not threatened by that. I want to know, oh, I wonder, I could have curiosity. What is it? This was hard for me as well. It’s hard for a lot of us. I thought I know stuff about race and then when I was confronted more and more with things I didn’t know, I had to fight through a little resistance to go, what do I want more? Do I want the truth more or do I want to be right more.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Because so seldom are these going to be the same thing.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Exactly. Well, it sounds like you’re describing the difference between convicted humility and a facade of humility, or even humility as a weapon. And God knows we weaponize scripture and the like enough.
I’d also like to ask you about the violent that pervades our society. It seems particularly predicated on othering and a righteous indignation, that some believe gives them license to actually act out violently. How do we then reframe our discipleship to recognize that Christ comes as the Prince of Peace, and to bring reconciliation and healing?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: I do a lot of speaking in other countries, and if you’re in other, what are called Western developed countries, the ones that we have the most in common with, and you’re an American, you will eventually get the questions. I mean, I swear to God, every time I’m over there, after a while people would be like, “Look, we got an American. We got to ask her these questions.” And the questions they always want to ask me about, they’re like, “Look, there’s so many similarities between our cultures. Can you help us with some things that are very difficult to understand in America?” They want to know about, you can probably guess it, gun laws, mass incarceration, the percentage of our citizens that are incarcerated, and relatedly, the death penalty. These three things, as they’re lived out in the United States of America, are madness to other Western developed.
They cannot understand them. So they’re like, “Nadia, can you help us?” And my answer, and this has been for the last 10 years I’ve been getting these questions when I travel abroad, my answer is like, “You cannot understand these spiritual maladies in our country, unless you’re willing to look at white supremacy. You can’t understand. It is baffling. It is madness. The only way to trace back how in the world are we in a point where we preserve and protect these three things, it always goes back to the unconfessed original sins of our country.”
Bishop Mike McK…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: The spiritual malady in this country has to do with the fact that we’ve never done our work. There’s never been a truth and reconciliation commission.
Bishop Mike McK…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: And so on some level, that whole thing of, “We have to protect ourselves,” that instinct of like, somebody’s going to come and get us, we have the right to protect all our shit, all of that, that is rooted in the fact that we never did our work around the enslavement of human beings and around the land theft and genocide of human beings.
Bishop Mike McK…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: And we know that we live in a castle that we kind of got through some unseemly and unethical needs. On some level, we might not admit it, but we know and it’s that truth underneath there, that fuels this fat, well, we better be able to arm ourselves. We better be able to kill anyone we find at all threatening that we think is going to come and take our stuff. And then we have to be able to incarcerate as many of them as possible, and if we want to, we need to be able to kill them. So to me, it’s all rooted in that.
And you know what? I say that as somebody who right now, I’m writing a book about forgiveness, and I have my assistant doing some research for me about Stand Your Ground laws; about the castle doctrine. Because my nephew, at the end of August, had a mental break. When he’s like me, young addict alcoholic, in and out of treatment centers, 23-years-old. He was in detox again and he had a mental break and he thought, “Oh, there’s demons and I got to get out.” He was disassociated. And he goes to a house in the neighbor. He gets out of the detox, goes to a house in the neighborhood, banging on the door, saying, “It’s Henry, it’s your cousin, let me in,” thinking it’s a family home. He just needs some help. He needs some mental health help. And he gets inside this house and the man shot and killed him.
And so I am trying to go, where does this come from? Where does it come from, this idea? Because I went and walked the Camino de Santiago to grieve my nephew. I had to just get out. I was like, I cannot be Nadia Bolz-Weber for anyone right now. And I went and I walked the Camino, and I told that story of how Henry died to maybe five or six people who were from other countries. And they’re all like, “Well, how long will this man be in prison?” I’m like, “Oh, no, no. I’m sorry. No, no. That’s legal here.” And sister, they were horrified, horrified at the idea-someone gets into your house, you can kill them, point blank and no questions asked frankly.
And so I’m trying to go back and go, where does it come from? What is the sickness that causes a situation? And while I’m looking at that, I also have compassion for how terrifying it would be for somebody who is not in their right mind to get into your house. And then the reason that I think that we have to change our gun laws, this is where I want to be clear, it’s not because I’m nonviolent, it’s because I am violent. I should not have access to a handgun, you know why? If someone got into my house, I think I would kill them.
We have created a situation with these guns in our country, where in a split second, we think they might have a gun, so we better kill them first. So all of this feeling of being threatened all the time that we have, creates so much death, and creates so much violence, and I wonder what would happen in this country if we actually sat down as a people and did our work and just told some truths man, just told some truths about stuff. We’ve never done that.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well, first let me say that I am so sorry for the loss of your nephew and that you and your family are having to experience that grief. I simply can’t imagine.
The Chapel, your online community, when we talk about sitting down, you talk about just doing that work. You ask hosts and all members to respect and keep to nine commandments. The stated purpose is to keep everyone in right relationship with each other. Honoring difference is one of those commitments. Why was that important enough to you to make it one of the nine, and what have you learned about creating environments where this is the foundational thread of your relationship?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Well, the reason is because people behave poorly towards each other online because they can. We have no covenant with each other. I actually have met Monica Lewinsky a couple times. And she said to me, because I asked her, I said, “How do people treat you?” She goes, “Honestly Nadia, I could count on one hand the number of times that somebody’s been awful to me in person. Every day of my life, people have been awful to me online since I was 21.” Why? Because we have no covenant for how to treat each other and there’s that anonymity.
And so the importance to me was going, look, also when we have daily prayer, we say in The Chapel, you’re going to hear some theological language and maybe there’ll be a type of prayer that you’re not comfortable with. You’ll be okay. We’re all going to take turns being uncomfortable. It’s really important to us. So I think that we can create these little bubbles of comfort in our lives where we need to make sure there’s no ideas we’re not comfortable with, there aren’t people around we’re not comfortable with; we can just create these little bubbles, and we’re pruning down the ability for us to grow as spiritual beings when we do that. It is only by encountering difference that we ever can actually know who we are. It’s the only way.
So I think that… And the funny thing is, as I’m answering this, I’m realizing I’m answering this question on both sides ideologically. I think that what I see in liberal circles online too, is a complete lack of being willing to look at subtlety, of being able to actually listen to any kind of critical thinking. There’s just so much reactivity without any listening and people are terrified of any heterodox ideas. You know?
Bishop Gregory …: Yeah. I wonder if I could just follow up on a bit of how you’ve responded to Bishop Easterling’s question. She initially talked about and you responded to the question about, how is the way we’ve gotten sideways about difference, connected deeply to not being well-formed spiritually. And then the Lewinsky illustration of in person nobody’s ever really been that harsh or unkind to me, I think I’m paraphrasing, but online. What’s the connection between this spiritual malformation, my words, and virtual courage that people don’t seem to have when they’re in physical proximity?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: I’m not sure, but I can say for my own experience, that if I’m going to be honest, the majority of my spiritual formation happened in the basement of churches and not the sanctuaries of churches. I’ve gone to AA meetings and church basements for 30 years, and people there are able to speak honestly, honestly about their lives and connect to God and to one another. And I see it a lot more often in a church basement than I do in a church sanctuary. And I think one of the reasons is because the starting point of 12 step work is not seeking righteousness actually. It’s not becoming better disciples. It’s not progressive sanctification. The starting point is failure. The starting point is humility. The starting point is to go, I admit I’m an alcoholic and I actually on my own will and power, am hopeless. And I have to rely on a power greater than myself. I have to admit I can’t do this by myself. I have to rely on God. I have to be really honest about my failings. I have to clean up my side of the street. I have to try to be of service to others. And to me, I’ve seen that kind of formation in people through that process in a way that I think the church could really take note of.
Bishop Gregory …: Thank you.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Absolutely. And also what I hear you describing, Nadia, is a vulnerability, that unfortunately it seems like what is presently now pervasive in too many Christian communities is not about a vulnerability, because what you just described in that 12 Step Program really should be our understanding of our baptism. We don’t need baptism because we’re perfect. We need baptism because we are not perfect. So again, why have we lost this notion of vulnerability and the beauty and the sacredness that comes through that vulnerability?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Yeah. Well, because the world breaks your heart. I mean, so many of us have experienced a world that is harsh and has broken our heart and where we have been hurt. So it is, as Brené Brown says, it does take some bravery. But as it pertains to conversations around race, I think on one end, I see a lack of humility in people who are trying to preserve an idea that they’re already good. So why are you trying to tell me I’m racist? I have a black grandchild. I can’t be racist. There’s that nonsense, trying to preserve that sense of self.
And then on the other end, you have people who spend so much time calling out other people as a way of deflecting what might be going on for them, or they’ll do a lot of… Once they sort of learn some of this stuff, we end up doing some performative stuff so that people can see we’re good. We’re posting the right stuff online. We’re trying to co-opt our black friends into like saying, we’re the good white people. I mean, do you know what I mean?
Bishop Mike McK…: Yes.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: There’s just so much nonsense. And both of these things I think when we are doing them are really rooted in a deep insecurity. So I think this is why the conversations around anti-racism that I feel the most drawn to are ones where the foundational principle is your belovedness. All of this, no matter who it is, and that we can go back to that. Instead of the foundational thing about you, is that you have white supremacy that you haven’t dealt with. That’s not going to be the foundational part of you. It really is a belovedness. And when the conversation can go back to that, we can actually have grace for each other as we’re facing these challenges. It’s a thing I see absent in these conversations a lot. Because it’s so important, we think it’s a betrayal of the cause to show grace to anyone. I think it’s actually a place that people can actually land if they know that there’s some grace to it, they’re more apt to keep walking that path.
Bishop Mike McK…: Nadia, I want to follow up on something you said, and that was that the world breaks your heart. I’m of the opinion that the church has broken too many hearts as well. So as you talk about humility and being open to anything, how do we create a church, a body believers, a beloved community that really respects people, and is so very open to people bringing their pain or their stuff or whatever that I want to be a part of a community like this? What would you say to the church?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: The most important thing is to start with as much honesty as you can, because unless we do that, we’re just going to be what I call redecorating the phone booth. It’s like in the sense of you can go, we don’t have phone booths everywhere like we used to and then you can then think, oh, well that means that nobody cares about communicating with other people on phones anymore. Of course, we don’t know that’s true. You can say people aren’t going to church as much, oh so they aren’t as interested in spiritual formation and prayer. It’s not true. So the church ends up saying, “Hey, let’s redecorate the phone booth rather than being honest enough.” And one of the things I feel like I’d love for us to do more, is to be as honest as we can about what is our deepest value, not what does our website say our values are, but based in what we do, based on how we spend money, based on what we talk about the most, what are our deepest values?
And one of the examples I like to give is like look, if everybody in the congregation hates the fake flowers that are on the altar, but nobody will ever say anything. You have to do the work of, “Well, why would that be?” Oh, maybe it’s because Agnes puts them there, and in a super codependent way, Agnes over functions at church and does a lot of the work nobody else wants to sign up for. So what that means is our highest value is keeping Agnes happy at all cost. And that’s why we will suffer through ugly paraments or fake flowers, because we need to keep Agnes happy so that we aren’t the ones who have to do the bookkeeping or do whatever she’s doing.
So to do really honest work about what do our practices say about our values, not what does our website say about our values. Because so often churches are confused about the difference between being friendly and being welcoming. So often we have these very friendly churches that cannot see all the ways that they’re not welcoming. God bless them. So they’re like, “We were so friendly when people visited, why aren’t they coming back?” Well, there’s a million ways like a worship service can be unwelcoming, and you don’t see it because you’ve been in it and you’re so familiar with it for so long. So even inviting people who aren’t even churchgoers to come and say as honestly as they can, what did they not understand? What felt uncomfortable to them? What did everyone around them seem to understand and they didn’t?
I mean, the first time I went to a Lutheran service, they gave me a red hymnal and then a green hymnal, and then they gave me a worship book, a little folder thing that then had code in it. It said like LBW42. I don’t know what the hell any of this means. And everybody around me did. And then there’s an insert that has the readings, and that’s different. I mean, it was impossible to break through code, and they were so friendly, and I felt the whole time like I didn’t belong.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well Nadia, we are asking all of our guests two questions. So if you would, I’d like to ask you those questions now. How do you talk with people about racial justice who don’t think, act, or look like you?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: I don’t think I do. (Laughter) I don’t think I do, do that.
Bishop LaTrelle…: That’s honest.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: If I’m honest. I’m trying to think when have I done that? I can say that I try to tell my own story as much as I can. I try to talk about my own struggles, and at different points when I learn things and things that are hard, and I try to keep it in that, because I’m not an expert in this. It’s not like I’m going to do a keynote on this stuff. To me, it’s personal. It has to do with the relationships that I’ve had over the last 10 years and the ways that those have changed me. It has to do with the fact that when something happens in the news cycle and I react to it differently than my friend Theresa reacts to it, I have to ask myself, “Oh, why is that?” It is a constant work like that of seeing things and hopefully once you see them, you can’t unsee them. But talking about being a beginner with this stuff and being willing to talk about that, that’s all I really have to offer because I’m not like an expert in any way.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well, I think you are offering far more than you are giving yourself credit for.
The next question I would ask you is, how do you care for your soul in the midst of anti-racism work or any work that is trying to bring about transformation and change?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: I publish essays every week or so on my, it’s called The Corners, it’s my Substack. And the one that I published that got the most, that half a million people read, it had the most reads of anything I wrote. It was around bandwidth, because I don’t know that our psyches were developed to be able to hold, respond to, and care about every form of human suffering and injustice and natural disaster and violence that happens to every person throughout the whole planet every minute of the day.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Right.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: Our psyches were developed to be able to hold and respond to and care about the injustice and the violence and the stuff that happens in our village. And so, so many of us are experiencing this, the fact that we have this older wiring, but we have this modern stimulus of things clamoring for our attention. And it’s hard. It’s like, oh my gosh, I have to do something about immigration, and I have to do some anti-racism work, and what about the environment? And now there’s this other thing asking and to go…
My friend Suzanne taught me these discernment questions of like, what’s mine to do and what’s not mine to do? What’s mine to say, and what’s not mine to say? What’s mine to care about, which is harder, and what’s not mine to care about? That’s not to say, it’s not worthy to be cared about by someone. But I think understanding our capacity and what is ours to do, and to bless the fact that other things will be cared about and done by other people. So it’s not like putting our heads in the sand, it’s actually being effective. Because we can have that discernment, what’s mine to do. And then to bless and support others and what’s theirs to do. And I think having that clarity really helps the overwhelm.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Amen.
Well Nadia, thank you for being you, first of all, and for creating bold spaces of belonging for saints and sinners. And now I would ask my brother bishops, what would you highlight from today’s conversation? What’s going to continue to resonate with you?
Bishop Gregory …: I’ll be haunted by this question, created by something that Nadia said, the world breaks your heart. And then Bishop McKee questioned-asserted that sometimes the church breaks our heart. And just that dichotomy, the question that’s haunting me and I would say in a good way, to do good work I hope about it is, has the church become too conformed to this world? sort of a Romans 12 piece- are we cut so much after the pattern of the world, and as I’ve said from time to time, did we particularly in American Protestantism, did we campaign for the job of becoming the chaplain to the white middle class and we got the job?
Nadia Bolz-Web…: One of the things that breaks my heart is going, is the way the church has just seems to have bought into a set of values and judges itself according to those values and feels like it’s always coming up lacking and maybe those weren’t the standards we were supposed to be needing to begin with.
Bishop Mike McK…: One of the things that resonates with me is something that is deep inside anyway, and that is about our work to do. I cannot change the world. I think sometimes many clergy and lay people as well, I would say do overreach and that they think I can take on this prophetic stance for the whole world when there’s so many injustices or challenges in local communities that really need our attention and our work. And I’m just reminded of that by this conversation today. I want to thank you Nadia for giving that to us today again, as a reminder to me.
Nadia Bolz-Web…: That was my problem with this thing my denomination was so in love with years ago called, and forgive me if you guys like it, but natural church development. It was this process by which people in your parish would rank how your church is doing in these 10 categories. And then whatever you suck at, that’s been what you’re supposed to really focus on. And the consultant would show you a water barrel with the wooden slats, and one is lower than the rest, and your barrel can only hold as much water as the lowest slat. And everyone’s convicted going, “Yeah, let’s do this.” And I’m like, “Hold on. If my church is excellent at a few things, but not at others, I bet the church down the block is excellent at those. Who says we have to be good at all the things? Come on.”
Bishop LaTrelle…: Amen.
Bishop Gregory …: Absolutely. Thank you.
Bishop Mike McK…: Amen.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well you certainly make me think about the quote, “When the gospel has become bad news to the poor, to the oppressed, to the brokenhearted and the imprisoned and good news to the proud, self-righteous and privileged instead, it is no longer the gospel of Jesus Christ.” So Nadia, again, just want to thank you for being with us today, for sharing your heart, for calling us all into a covenant of vulnerability, and for just bringing so much resonance to the Unfinished Church podcast.
Beloved, please tune in next time when we connect with Eboo Patel, about examining our perceptions.
Bishop Mike McK…: Episodes are available on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop Gregory …: Connect with us and find related resources on our website, the unfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church- Conversations that transform.
Resources
Listening is an important first step in the work of antiracism. Are you ready to do more? Here are some helpful resources to help you dig in deeper to the topics discussed in this episode.
About Nadia Bolz-Weber
Nadia’s Pastoral Letter following the murder of George Floyd
For Reflection & Action: Take Inventory on the Diversity of Your Closest Circle
Meditation on Patience
This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy Communion
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
About Nadia Bolz-Weber
Nadia’s Pastoral Letter following the murder of George Floyd
For Reflection & Action: Take Inventory on the Diversity of Your Closest Circle
Meditation on Patience
This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy Communion
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
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EPISODE 2
Examining Our Perceptions with Eboo Patel Named “one of America’s best leaders” by U.S. News and World Report, Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith America: the leading interfaith organization in the United States. Under his leadership, Interfaith America has worked with governments, universities, private companies and civic organizations to make faith a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division. He served on President Obama’s Inaugural Faith Council, has given hundreds of keynote addresses and has written five books, including We Need to Build: Fieldnotes for Diverse Democracy, published in March 2022. He is an Ashoka Fellow and holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. Patel lives in Chicago with his wife, Shehnaz, and two sons. Patel joins the bishops in examining the dangers of projecting one’s values onto others and the sacred work of building intercultural relationships. |
full transcript
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Welcome to The Unfinished Church. I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
I’m Gregory Palmer.
Bishop Mike McKee:
And I’m Mike McKee. You’re listening to The Unfinished Church podcast. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
Bishop Mike McKee:
In our conversation with Eboo Patel, I was struck about how many times a day that we can come in contact with a person of another faith tradition than ours. And I’m not talking about just another Christian tradition, but another faith tradition, and Eboo highlighted this in so many good ways. And in fact, one time I was reminded about something he said that really hit home. And that is about the bias experienced by his sons who are Indian Americans and playing basketball. And what people thought they were capable of or not capable of.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
I had a similar sense in the conversation with Brother Eboo, and that is, how easily all of us jump to conclusions and work through these lenses and filters that we already have. Some of them we’ve inherited. Other people have talked in our ear through the years, perceptions about groupings of people by race or ethnicity or by national origin, et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes, I find myself seeing someone through the lens of something I heard about my parents, say, about a particular group of people. And to think that we’ve worked to undo all of that and it’s still going on, and the painful thing, and yet the leveling effect, that we all actually still do it.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Well, it really resonated with me because it took me right back to a time much earlier in my professional life, when I was working as a prosecuting attorney, and someone made an assumption about who I was because of the color of my skin, thinking that rather than being a member of the bar and a person there working in the court, that I was there because I had a case to be adjudicated.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
And I can tell you, the sting is real. I can feel it even to this day. And I had to think about how much I wanted to call people on it because I had to continue to work in that system. And I needed that judge to be able to continue to respect me or to gain respect for me. Because again, I had been misperceived. But it is a very daunting experience, and that’s why I think these conversations are so important.
Bishop Mike McKee:
In a conversation I had with Eboo Patel to prepare for this podcast, he mentioned to me a book that he was working on, and it is now in print. And it is called We Need To Build. And we certainly do. So, I want to introduce you to my friend, Eboo Patel. This is The Unfinished Church. Let’s get started.
Eboo Patel:
It’s terrific to be with you. Thank you for having me, Bishop McKee.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Thank you. So, today we are talking about implicit bias, those assumptions, often unexamined or unconscious, that shape how we see and interact with other people. From your perspective, as someone who daily navigates intercultural relationships and promotes interfaith cooperation, in what ways do you see implicit bias rear its head?
Eboo Patel:
I have a friend who was a faculty member at University of Illinois in Chicago, and we were actually undergraduates together at the University of Illinois Champagne, and we had known each other through the years. He is an African American man, and when he was a younger professor, on the first day of class, he would sit amongst the students and five minutes into class having started, 10 minutes into class having started, nobody would know who the professor was, and he would just pretend he was amongst them. And they would kind of look around like, “Is the professor here somewhere?” And nobody would look to him as the possible professor.
Eboo Patel:
And then, of course, he would stand up and introduce himself. “My name is professor David Stoval, et cetera, et cetera.” And it was this incredible exercise in people’s implicit bias, because nobody thought that the young Black guy, who dressed like an urban hipster, was the person with a Ph.D. who was going to be teaching the class and had written the books. And I thought that was such a great way of confronting people with, “Hey, what is your image of what a professor is?”
Eboo Patel:
In my own life, the truth be told, in most of the rooms that I walk into these days, I am a known quantity. I’m the founder of an organization, I write books, I give speeches. And so, people have seen pictures of me on posters before I walk into a room. And so, the implicit bias I experience is minimal compared to what I did experience growing up, and I watch it with my kids.
Eboo Patel:
And my kids are 11 and 14. They’re both basketball players. We’re Indian Americans. And when they bristle, knowing that when they approach a basketball court, nobody thinks that they’re going to be any good, and it’s made them tougher as players. And that’s not a bad thing when it comes to basketball, but boy, can that wear you down in life in general.
Eboo Patel:
And I never want to forget the implicit bias that I experienced in all those years where I was not a known quantity; where it wasn’t my face on posters. “Eboo Patel will be speaking at SMU next month,” or something like that. Because it’s daily pin pricks that can collectively draw a quantity of blood.
Bishop Mike McKee:
My fellow bishops and I believe that the theological bedrock for building healthy intercultural relationships is the belief that all are created in the image of God and have sacred worth. So, what are the core convictions that undergird your interfaith work and your relationships?
Eboo Patel:
You know, as you said before, so much of what I do comes out of being a Muslim, and how that tradition intertwines in such a complimentary way to what I understand the ideals that are America, the higher ideals. And so, I’ll put this in Islamic terms for now, but just know that I see a lot of resonances between these deep stories in Islam and, I think, the hopeful version of the deep story of America.
Eboo Patel:
So, in Islam, we believe that everybody’s born with the breath of God. That the way we are created is that God picks up a lump of clay and gives it his breath, and thereby creates Adam, the first human being, the first prophet. And he says to Adam, “You are going to be my Abd and Khalifa, my servant and representative on the planet. You are the steward of my creation.”
Eboo Patel:
And then God sets up a contest between Adam and the angels. And God says to the angels, “I want you to name the different parts of creation. Tell me the names.” And the angels say, “Oh, God, the only knowledge we have is to sing the glories of your name.” And then, God turns to Adam and says, “You tell me the names.” And Adam has the knowledge and the ability to do it.
Eboo Patel:
And for me, that was such a powerful moment, reading that passage of the Quran when I was a graduate student at Oxford, because the term names is not singular. It’s plural. God has made creation diverse. It’s not a monoculture, it’s not one thing over and over again. It is many things. And Adam, our common ancestor, our first guide and profit, created with God’s breath, as we all are, had the ability to name and flow with diversity.
Eboo Patel:
That’s the gift that we human beings have. And so, so much of my work with Interfaith America, formerly IFYC, is about that fundamental equality that human beings have, the diversity in the world and our gift and responsibility to nurture that diversity in positive ways.
Bishop Mike McKee:
So, it’s interesting, just as a comment, that, when you begin to tell a story from your own faith tradition, how it sometimes may intersect with our own stories that we have. That we have some common shared stories among religions, and I think that’s important for all of us to know.
Eboo Patel:
I mean, we Muslims believe, in a very focused way, that there’s one God, and that God sends many revelations. The revelation ends with the Quran, but the previous revelation is the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels. These are all revelations of God, and they’re continuous. And there are common themes. And monotheism and mercy are the most important of those common themes.
Bishop Mike McKee:
In this podcast, we have used, each time, the language of the Beloved Community to cast a vision for the society in which racial prejudice no longer has any power. How do you talk about your vision for society and how does racism interfere with that vision? And I think one of the things I would also ask you to think about, in terms of that is in your book, you have a chapter called “The Service or The Genius of Religious Institution.” And so, I’d like for you to reflect on that for us.
Eboo Patel:
So, I love the Beloved Community, by the way. I love the various ways that religious language has helped us describe our nation. City on a hill, Beloved Community, New Jerusalem, better angels of our nature, almost chosen people. There’s a reason that GK Chesterton said that America is a nation with the soul of a church. And that’s not just because of the religiosity of the people, but because we have imagined our country with religious language, and that religious language is continually expansive.
Eboo Patel:
So, I think of America, now, in Muslim terms, as the New Medina. Medina was the city that the prophet Muhammad moved to when he got harassed out of Mecca, and amongst the first things he did was to build a pact of loyalty between the diverse religious groups and tribes of Medina, something called the Constitution of Medina.
Eboo Patel:
So, the way we talk at Interfaith America about the nation right now is we call it a potluck nation. Of course, the old version of this is melting pot, but what a nightmare, if you were invited to a potluck dinner, and you brought your grandmother’s famous crusty bread recipe, and you were met at the door with this giant melting machine that melted it into some tasteless goo, and you saw somebody bring in their famous dip, and you thought to yourself, “Boy, that would go really great with my grandma’s crusty bread.” And it had to deal with the melting machine, and melted into some tasteless goo.
Eboo Patel:
And so, we would much rather have a flavorful feast together in this notion that America, at its best, welcomes the distinctive contributions of diverse people. It creates really tasty combinations between them, and then it serves it to the community, so that the community, the nation, can feast. And religions actually do this, right? So, religious communities have potlucks.
Eboo Patel:
Fannie Lou Hamer would talk about America as the welcome table beside a Baptist church in the rural South. And one of the things I love about religious traditions is they articulate a vision of the good. In fact, it’s often articulated in scripture. And the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita or the Gospels or the Hebrew Bible. You have this cosmic vision of the good, and then you approximate it as closely as you can on Earth. And you build institutions, which are some approximation of what you believe the cosmic vision of goodness to be.
Eboo Patel:
And we do that really well in religious communities, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit for it, and we don’t get enough credit for it. And I’ll give you an obvious example, and that’s Methodist
Hospital in Dallas. Or all of the Methodist and Catholic and Lutheran and Jewish hospitals and Muslim health clinics around the country and the world. Why do we do this? Because we believe that physical health and spiritual health are connected. We feel like those are joined in a version of the cosmic good. And we attempt to approximate it on Earth, and we never do it only for ourselves. Methodist Hospital has Hindu physicians. It has Muslim patients. It has atheist administrators. I just think that’s a remarkable fact of religious life in America and the world. And we ought to recognize that that is what we are doing. And just take a moment to feel some pride that we are attempting to live up to the highest ideals of our tradition. And then we should get back to work.
Bishop Mike McKee:
As a response to that, I think you call that something that I’ve been noticing that perhaps one of the most diverse communities I’m around is the medical community. You walk into the hospital, and you see people from everywhere, who literally are working in the hospital. They’re physicians. They’re administration. You said that perfectly. And so, I think about Methodist hospitals, which are everywhere, and how it is that they really exemplify what we’re talking about, in terms of that diversity and this larger, significant community.
Eboo Patel:
I run into people all the time who are like, “Is interfaith cooperation even possible?” And I’m like, “It was the story of your birth. You were born in an interfaith situation. You were born at a Catholic hospital and a Hindu doctor delivered you, and she was supported by a nurse who was a Jehovah’s Witness, and the room was sanitized by a Muslim, and the CEO was an atheist who grew up Jain. And the pediatrician is Jewish.” And that’s everywhere, all the time. By the way, those people voted differently. They have different views on important matters, and that did not stop them from making sure you were delivered as a happy, healthy baby. And that’s what interfaith cooperation is all about.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
This is really exciting to be reminded of the institutions that faith communities inaugurated or birthed. And so, healthcare, childcare, elder care and higher education. And initially, a lot of the religiously birthed institutions were about access for those that maybe didn’t have access. But as you think forward with us and with the audience, what’s the next horizon of institution creation that religious organizations or faith-based communities should be paying attention to?
Eboo Patel:
Thank you for that question, Bishop Gregory, and you and I have a long history, and I owe you a lot. I owe you a lot for our moments together when I was a graduate student. I just want to let you and the audience know how grateful I am for your taking time with me when I was a graduate student trying to figure out my path and my soul. And there you were, and you took that time, and I’m grateful.
Eboo Patel:
So, one of the exercises that I open my speeches with when I speak to audiences is, imagine all the faith-based institutions in your city disappearing overnight. Let’s take a walk in the morning. Let’s see what’s gone. Let’s begin with the churches and synagogues and mosques. And maybe you shed a single tear that people will not have a place to worship. But there’s actually more than that. Where’s the AA group going to meet? Who’s going to make sure that kids’ backpacks are filled with food on Friday afternoons, the way that the synagogue, Temple Sinai in Chicago, does for a local elementary school, and synagogues and churches all over the country do?
Eboo Patel:
Who does employment training? Who does AIDS? All those congregations, that’s what they’re involved in. And then let’s look at the hospitals, and let’s look at the universities, and let’s look at the social service agencies. It’s precisely what you said, Bishop Greg. And to just do that visual exercise, I just think it gives people pause. Nobody knows that Methodists started 120 colleges and universities. Y’all are not very good at telling your own story in that regard. But USC, Syracuse, Emory, Duke, bunch of smaller places, SMU, they wouldn’t exist if the Methodist community had not founded them. I think that’s a big deal.
Eboo Patel:
So, what’s the future? I think the future is interfaith efforts to doing this together. And I think we ought to be proud that virtually all of the institutions that faith communities built, all the civic institutions, right? Sunday school is a little bit different. How we do funerals and burials are a little bit different. But the hospitals, the schools, the social service agencies, they almost all serve everybody. I think the future is going to be the Muslim Methodist disaster relief services, the Jewish Jain Hospital. I would like to think that’s the future.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Wow. Thank you.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Eboo, I love that future. That’s so positive and forward thinking. And we’ve been talking about the institutions, the aspects of our religious lives and even our secular lives, that have been living into their better angels. And yet we know that we’re mired in a milieu that still has, as Isabelle Wilkerson called it, our American caste system. And so, to get to this new horizon, this better future that you and Bishop Palmer were just talking about, how do we rest ourselves from where we are if we are not even to admit who we are?
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
There are so many that deny that we do have something akin to a caste system, especially when those that are not in the dominant culture are still yearning for proximity to what America deems the dominant culture. And those in that culture are accustomed to having themselves and their culture be the measuring stick with which everyone else is judged or aspiring to. How do we disabuse ourselves of all of that, so that we can get to this better future that you’re talking about?
Eboo Patel:
Thank you for that question, Bishop Easterling. So, I just want to say in the podcast, all of these good, good people told me to call them by their first name, and I was just raised, you called religious leaders by their titles. And so, I’ve tried. Every once in a while, I slip and say Mike, because I’ve known Mike McKee, we’ve had back and forth several times a year for the last five or eight years or so. But anyway, just to let folks in the podcast know, one cannot outgrow one’s upbringing too far.
Eboo Patel:
So, Bishop Easterling, I love the Baldwin line. I imagine you love it, too. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced. And so, I go see every August Wilson production that comes through Chicago, because that’s, you’re facing American racism, every decade of the 20th century. I have a friend, Brad Braxton, familiar to some of you, he told me this line, which sent chills up my spine. He said, “There are places in the Atlantic Ocean where the sharks still circle because they are accustomed to being fed.”
Eboo Patel:
I mean, we have to face this and we do not have to stay there. We have to face this and we do not have to stay there. So, to tell the story of America only from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Barack Obama is a lie. And it’s also a lie to tell the story that the oppressions of 350 years ago are exactly the same. So, how do we face the past in a raw and brutal way? How do we tell the stories of overcoming and achievement, and how do we help more people on the path in overcoming and achievement?
Eboo Patel:
It is simpler to say it than to do it. But here’s the thing. We can do it. Every kid who wants to join a basketball team should be able to join a basketball team. Every kid that wants to play an instrument should be able to play an instrument. Every kid that wants to have an arts educator should have an arts educator. There are things that we can do.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: Thank you.
Bishop Mike McKee:
So, a couple of questions, as we begin to wrap up, Eboo. The first one is, before I say it, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. But we’re asking each of our guests, all of them, the same two questions. How do you talk with people about racial justice who do not think, act, or look like you?
Eboo Patel:
Through stories. The Jesus way. And I think, to tell Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is such a great path on that. I mean, I watched this with my kids. I’ll tell you a story right now. I’m sharing a lot of the stories from my new book, We Need To Build, but here’s one of them. I live near this great concert venue called the Old Town School Of Folk Music. And I’m walking by the venue with my son, Zade. This is three, four years ago. And there’s a poster of a band that my wife and I really like called Tinariwen. They’re this roots music, West African band, many of them are Muslim.
Eboo Patel:
And the poster has them dressed in robes and in head wraps. And they’re set against the desert in West Africa. And I pointed the poster out to my son, Zade. And I said, “Zade, Mom and I are going to take you to see Tinariwen. We love this band. The music is terrific.” And my son looks at me and he says, “Dad, that’s ISIS.” We’re a Muslim family, like Muslim prayer every night, and really positive stories about Islam. And this is a poster at a concert venue of a band. And my son’s instinct when he sees dark men in robes and head wraps is, “Those must be Muslim terrorists.”
Eboo Patel:
Because there’s poison in the culture. Right? There’s poison in the culture. The culture is telling you that you are violent. That people who look like this are violent. Even if they have instruments in their hands. Look, I am 46. I’m 22, 23 years into building an organization. This happens to me very infrequently now, but it happened all the time growing up. And I watch it happening. I just watch the invisible poison in the culture seep in, even in Whole Foods, liberal, multicultural embracing America, which is where we live. And not every place is like that. That’s where we live. And it still has an effect.
Bishop Mike McKee:
So, as a follow up, a question we ask everyone is this. In the midst of all of that, how do you care for your own soul or your own spirit?
Eboo Patel:
Thank you for that. So, I’m actually good at that. And I’m lucky. I run an organization. I get to set my own schedule, largely. I have an unbelievable set of staff and colleagues. I have the unbelievable good fortune and grace of God to have basically invented a path and to walk the path that I’ve invented.
Eboo Patel:
That doesn’t mean that things aren’t hard sometimes and I don’t work too hard sometimes, or whatever, but I was raised thinking I was the luckiest person on Earth. I now think I’m probably the luckiest person for several planets around me, and I just walk that path. I get to live that way. I don’t think that’s a very good answer to your question. I totally don’t think it’s going to help anybody on this podcast, but let me put it this way.
Eboo Patel:
When something internal says, “It’s time to back off a little bit,” I try to get some time to back off. When I think to myself, “Boy, I really need to write down these thoughts.” I try to get some time to write down those thoughts. And when I find myself in a situation, going back to a high school reunion, thinking to myself, “I cannot believe that I was subject to conversations about popularity and clothes for however many years between middle school and high school, and I’m surrounded now by conversations about God and ideas.” I remember how lucky I am, and I’m unbelievably lucky.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Thank you. So, we really appreciate you being with us and sharing your thoughts, and as always, in any conversation with you, Eboo, always learn something and I’m always inspired. And I want to thank you for being with us. And I know that Bishop Easterling and Bishop Palmer may have something else to say, too. And I encourage them to do that as we begin to wrap up.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Well, thank you, Bishop McKee. I appreciate that. And two things that struck me, Eboo, as you’ve been talking to us, and I am very grateful for this conversation, and the ways that you have just inspired me. I look forward to that book, We Need To Build. Do I have that right?
Bishop Mike McKee:
Yes.
Eboo Patel:
You have that right. And thank you for saying that. I’m looking forward to talking to Methodists about that book.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Amen. Amen. We will give you that opportunity. But two things stick out for me. I think about the story that you opened us with. A professor sitting in the classroom amongst the students and wondering if anyone will notice. As a former prosecutor, I remember walking into a courtroom and having a judge bark at me to go back out and wait until my attorney showed up, and I was the prosecuting attorney. And I’ll never forget how that made me feel. So, we need to be able to tell our own stories of how we’ve been abused through bias. But then, I also hear you say we need to confront stories that continue to perpetuate bias. So, that’s what resonates for me and what I will continue to think about as I allow what you’ve taught us today to percolate within my own spirit. Thank you.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
It’s great to be with you. It was a grace to meet you the first time and to occasionally run into you around the country. And thank you for today. I have never been in your presence, even if I was in the audience just listening, that I have not learned and grown and walked away with at least one provocative question. Thank you.
Eboo Patel:
Appreciate it.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Friends, please join us next time as we talk about choosing a path forward with Opal Lee.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church: Conversations That Transform.
Welcome to The Unfinished Church. I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
I’m Gregory Palmer.
Bishop Mike McKee:
And I’m Mike McKee. You’re listening to The Unfinished Church podcast. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
Bishop Mike McKee:
In our conversation with Eboo Patel, I was struck about how many times a day that we can come in contact with a person of another faith tradition than ours. And I’m not talking about just another Christian tradition, but another faith tradition, and Eboo highlighted this in so many good ways. And in fact, one time I was reminded about something he said that really hit home. And that is about the bias experienced by his sons who are Indian Americans and playing basketball. And what people thought they were capable of or not capable of.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
I had a similar sense in the conversation with Brother Eboo, and that is, how easily all of us jump to conclusions and work through these lenses and filters that we already have. Some of them we’ve inherited. Other people have talked in our ear through the years, perceptions about groupings of people by race or ethnicity or by national origin, et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes, I find myself seeing someone through the lens of something I heard about my parents, say, about a particular group of people. And to think that we’ve worked to undo all of that and it’s still going on, and the painful thing, and yet the leveling effect, that we all actually still do it.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Well, it really resonated with me because it took me right back to a time much earlier in my professional life, when I was working as a prosecuting attorney, and someone made an assumption about who I was because of the color of my skin, thinking that rather than being a member of the bar and a person there working in the court, that I was there because I had a case to be adjudicated.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
And I can tell you, the sting is real. I can feel it even to this day. And I had to think about how much I wanted to call people on it because I had to continue to work in that system. And I needed that judge to be able to continue to respect me or to gain respect for me. Because again, I had been misperceived. But it is a very daunting experience, and that’s why I think these conversations are so important.
Bishop Mike McKee:
In a conversation I had with Eboo Patel to prepare for this podcast, he mentioned to me a book that he was working on, and it is now in print. And it is called We Need To Build. And we certainly do. So, I want to introduce you to my friend, Eboo Patel. This is The Unfinished Church. Let’s get started.
Eboo Patel:
It’s terrific to be with you. Thank you for having me, Bishop McKee.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Thank you. So, today we are talking about implicit bias, those assumptions, often unexamined or unconscious, that shape how we see and interact with other people. From your perspective, as someone who daily navigates intercultural relationships and promotes interfaith cooperation, in what ways do you see implicit bias rear its head?
Eboo Patel:
I have a friend who was a faculty member at University of Illinois in Chicago, and we were actually undergraduates together at the University of Illinois Champagne, and we had known each other through the years. He is an African American man, and when he was a younger professor, on the first day of class, he would sit amongst the students and five minutes into class having started, 10 minutes into class having started, nobody would know who the professor was, and he would just pretend he was amongst them. And they would kind of look around like, “Is the professor here somewhere?” And nobody would look to him as the possible professor.
Eboo Patel:
And then, of course, he would stand up and introduce himself. “My name is professor David Stoval, et cetera, et cetera.” And it was this incredible exercise in people’s implicit bias, because nobody thought that the young Black guy, who dressed like an urban hipster, was the person with a Ph.D. who was going to be teaching the class and had written the books. And I thought that was such a great way of confronting people with, “Hey, what is your image of what a professor is?”
Eboo Patel:
In my own life, the truth be told, in most of the rooms that I walk into these days, I am a known quantity. I’m the founder of an organization, I write books, I give speeches. And so, people have seen pictures of me on posters before I walk into a room. And so, the implicit bias I experience is minimal compared to what I did experience growing up, and I watch it with my kids.
Eboo Patel:
And my kids are 11 and 14. They’re both basketball players. We’re Indian Americans. And when they bristle, knowing that when they approach a basketball court, nobody thinks that they’re going to be any good, and it’s made them tougher as players. And that’s not a bad thing when it comes to basketball, but boy, can that wear you down in life in general.
Eboo Patel:
And I never want to forget the implicit bias that I experienced in all those years where I was not a known quantity; where it wasn’t my face on posters. “Eboo Patel will be speaking at SMU next month,” or something like that. Because it’s daily pin pricks that can collectively draw a quantity of blood.
Bishop Mike McKee:
My fellow bishops and I believe that the theological bedrock for building healthy intercultural relationships is the belief that all are created in the image of God and have sacred worth. So, what are the core convictions that undergird your interfaith work and your relationships?
Eboo Patel:
You know, as you said before, so much of what I do comes out of being a Muslim, and how that tradition intertwines in such a complimentary way to what I understand the ideals that are America, the higher ideals. And so, I’ll put this in Islamic terms for now, but just know that I see a lot of resonances between these deep stories in Islam and, I think, the hopeful version of the deep story of America.
Eboo Patel:
So, in Islam, we believe that everybody’s born with the breath of God. That the way we are created is that God picks up a lump of clay and gives it his breath, and thereby creates Adam, the first human being, the first prophet. And he says to Adam, “You are going to be my Abd and Khalifa, my servant and representative on the planet. You are the steward of my creation.”
Eboo Patel:
And then God sets up a contest between Adam and the angels. And God says to the angels, “I want you to name the different parts of creation. Tell me the names.” And the angels say, “Oh, God, the only knowledge we have is to sing the glories of your name.” And then, God turns to Adam and says, “You tell me the names.” And Adam has the knowledge and the ability to do it.
Eboo Patel:
And for me, that was such a powerful moment, reading that passage of the Quran when I was a graduate student at Oxford, because the term names is not singular. It’s plural. God has made creation diverse. It’s not a monoculture, it’s not one thing over and over again. It is many things. And Adam, our common ancestor, our first guide and profit, created with God’s breath, as we all are, had the ability to name and flow with diversity.
Eboo Patel:
That’s the gift that we human beings have. And so, so much of my work with Interfaith America, formerly IFYC, is about that fundamental equality that human beings have, the diversity in the world and our gift and responsibility to nurture that diversity in positive ways.
Bishop Mike McKee:
So, it’s interesting, just as a comment, that, when you begin to tell a story from your own faith tradition, how it sometimes may intersect with our own stories that we have. That we have some common shared stories among religions, and I think that’s important for all of us to know.
Eboo Patel:
I mean, we Muslims believe, in a very focused way, that there’s one God, and that God sends many revelations. The revelation ends with the Quran, but the previous revelation is the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels. These are all revelations of God, and they’re continuous. And there are common themes. And monotheism and mercy are the most important of those common themes.
Bishop Mike McKee:
In this podcast, we have used, each time, the language of the Beloved Community to cast a vision for the society in which racial prejudice no longer has any power. How do you talk about your vision for society and how does racism interfere with that vision? And I think one of the things I would also ask you to think about, in terms of that is in your book, you have a chapter called “The Service or The Genius of Religious Institution.” And so, I’d like for you to reflect on that for us.
Eboo Patel:
So, I love the Beloved Community, by the way. I love the various ways that religious language has helped us describe our nation. City on a hill, Beloved Community, New Jerusalem, better angels of our nature, almost chosen people. There’s a reason that GK Chesterton said that America is a nation with the soul of a church. And that’s not just because of the religiosity of the people, but because we have imagined our country with religious language, and that religious language is continually expansive.
Eboo Patel:
So, I think of America, now, in Muslim terms, as the New Medina. Medina was the city that the prophet Muhammad moved to when he got harassed out of Mecca, and amongst the first things he did was to build a pact of loyalty between the diverse religious groups and tribes of Medina, something called the Constitution of Medina.
Eboo Patel:
So, the way we talk at Interfaith America about the nation right now is we call it a potluck nation. Of course, the old version of this is melting pot, but what a nightmare, if you were invited to a potluck dinner, and you brought your grandmother’s famous crusty bread recipe, and you were met at the door with this giant melting machine that melted it into some tasteless goo, and you saw somebody bring in their famous dip, and you thought to yourself, “Boy, that would go really great with my grandma’s crusty bread.” And it had to deal with the melting machine, and melted into some tasteless goo.
Eboo Patel:
And so, we would much rather have a flavorful feast together in this notion that America, at its best, welcomes the distinctive contributions of diverse people. It creates really tasty combinations between them, and then it serves it to the community, so that the community, the nation, can feast. And religions actually do this, right? So, religious communities have potlucks.
Eboo Patel:
Fannie Lou Hamer would talk about America as the welcome table beside a Baptist church in the rural South. And one of the things I love about religious traditions is they articulate a vision of the good. In fact, it’s often articulated in scripture. And the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita or the Gospels or the Hebrew Bible. You have this cosmic vision of the good, and then you approximate it as closely as you can on Earth. And you build institutions, which are some approximation of what you believe the cosmic vision of goodness to be.
Eboo Patel:
And we do that really well in religious communities, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit for it, and we don’t get enough credit for it. And I’ll give you an obvious example, and that’s Methodist
Hospital in Dallas. Or all of the Methodist and Catholic and Lutheran and Jewish hospitals and Muslim health clinics around the country and the world. Why do we do this? Because we believe that physical health and spiritual health are connected. We feel like those are joined in a version of the cosmic good. And we attempt to approximate it on Earth, and we never do it only for ourselves. Methodist Hospital has Hindu physicians. It has Muslim patients. It has atheist administrators. I just think that’s a remarkable fact of religious life in America and the world. And we ought to recognize that that is what we are doing. And just take a moment to feel some pride that we are attempting to live up to the highest ideals of our tradition. And then we should get back to work.
Bishop Mike McKee:
As a response to that, I think you call that something that I’ve been noticing that perhaps one of the most diverse communities I’m around is the medical community. You walk into the hospital, and you see people from everywhere, who literally are working in the hospital. They’re physicians. They’re administration. You said that perfectly. And so, I think about Methodist hospitals, which are everywhere, and how it is that they really exemplify what we’re talking about, in terms of that diversity and this larger, significant community.
Eboo Patel:
I run into people all the time who are like, “Is interfaith cooperation even possible?” And I’m like, “It was the story of your birth. You were born in an interfaith situation. You were born at a Catholic hospital and a Hindu doctor delivered you, and she was supported by a nurse who was a Jehovah’s Witness, and the room was sanitized by a Muslim, and the CEO was an atheist who grew up Jain. And the pediatrician is Jewish.” And that’s everywhere, all the time. By the way, those people voted differently. They have different views on important matters, and that did not stop them from making sure you were delivered as a happy, healthy baby. And that’s what interfaith cooperation is all about.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
This is really exciting to be reminded of the institutions that faith communities inaugurated or birthed. And so, healthcare, childcare, elder care and higher education. And initially, a lot of the religiously birthed institutions were about access for those that maybe didn’t have access. But as you think forward with us and with the audience, what’s the next horizon of institution creation that religious organizations or faith-based communities should be paying attention to?
Eboo Patel:
Thank you for that question, Bishop Gregory, and you and I have a long history, and I owe you a lot. I owe you a lot for our moments together when I was a graduate student. I just want to let you and the audience know how grateful I am for your taking time with me when I was a graduate student trying to figure out my path and my soul. And there you were, and you took that time, and I’m grateful.
Eboo Patel:
So, one of the exercises that I open my speeches with when I speak to audiences is, imagine all the faith-based institutions in your city disappearing overnight. Let’s take a walk in the morning. Let’s see what’s gone. Let’s begin with the churches and synagogues and mosques. And maybe you shed a single tear that people will not have a place to worship. But there’s actually more than that. Where’s the AA group going to meet? Who’s going to make sure that kids’ backpacks are filled with food on Friday afternoons, the way that the synagogue, Temple Sinai in Chicago, does for a local elementary school, and synagogues and churches all over the country do?
Eboo Patel:
Who does employment training? Who does AIDS? All those congregations, that’s what they’re involved in. And then let’s look at the hospitals, and let’s look at the universities, and let’s look at the social service agencies. It’s precisely what you said, Bishop Greg. And to just do that visual exercise, I just think it gives people pause. Nobody knows that Methodists started 120 colleges and universities. Y’all are not very good at telling your own story in that regard. But USC, Syracuse, Emory, Duke, bunch of smaller places, SMU, they wouldn’t exist if the Methodist community had not founded them. I think that’s a big deal.
Eboo Patel:
So, what’s the future? I think the future is interfaith efforts to doing this together. And I think we ought to be proud that virtually all of the institutions that faith communities built, all the civic institutions, right? Sunday school is a little bit different. How we do funerals and burials are a little bit different. But the hospitals, the schools, the social service agencies, they almost all serve everybody. I think the future is going to be the Muslim Methodist disaster relief services, the Jewish Jain Hospital. I would like to think that’s the future.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Wow. Thank you.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Eboo, I love that future. That’s so positive and forward thinking. And we’ve been talking about the institutions, the aspects of our religious lives and even our secular lives, that have been living into their better angels. And yet we know that we’re mired in a milieu that still has, as Isabelle Wilkerson called it, our American caste system. And so, to get to this new horizon, this better future that you and Bishop Palmer were just talking about, how do we rest ourselves from where we are if we are not even to admit who we are?
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
There are so many that deny that we do have something akin to a caste system, especially when those that are not in the dominant culture are still yearning for proximity to what America deems the dominant culture. And those in that culture are accustomed to having themselves and their culture be the measuring stick with which everyone else is judged or aspiring to. How do we disabuse ourselves of all of that, so that we can get to this better future that you’re talking about?
Eboo Patel:
Thank you for that question, Bishop Easterling. So, I just want to say in the podcast, all of these good, good people told me to call them by their first name, and I was just raised, you called religious leaders by their titles. And so, I’ve tried. Every once in a while, I slip and say Mike, because I’ve known Mike McKee, we’ve had back and forth several times a year for the last five or eight years or so. But anyway, just to let folks in the podcast know, one cannot outgrow one’s upbringing too far.
Eboo Patel:
So, Bishop Easterling, I love the Baldwin line. I imagine you love it, too. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced. And so, I go see every August Wilson production that comes through Chicago, because that’s, you’re facing American racism, every decade of the 20th century. I have a friend, Brad Braxton, familiar to some of you, he told me this line, which sent chills up my spine. He said, “There are places in the Atlantic Ocean where the sharks still circle because they are accustomed to being fed.”
Eboo Patel:
I mean, we have to face this and we do not have to stay there. We have to face this and we do not have to stay there. So, to tell the story of America only from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Barack Obama is a lie. And it’s also a lie to tell the story that the oppressions of 350 years ago are exactly the same. So, how do we face the past in a raw and brutal way? How do we tell the stories of overcoming and achievement, and how do we help more people on the path in overcoming and achievement?
Eboo Patel:
It is simpler to say it than to do it. But here’s the thing. We can do it. Every kid who wants to join a basketball team should be able to join a basketball team. Every kid that wants to play an instrument should be able to play an instrument. Every kid that wants to have an arts educator should have an arts educator. There are things that we can do.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: Thank you.
Bishop Mike McKee:
So, a couple of questions, as we begin to wrap up, Eboo. The first one is, before I say it, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. But we’re asking each of our guests, all of them, the same two questions. How do you talk with people about racial justice who do not think, act, or look like you?
Eboo Patel:
Through stories. The Jesus way. And I think, to tell Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is such a great path on that. I mean, I watched this with my kids. I’ll tell you a story right now. I’m sharing a lot of the stories from my new book, We Need To Build, but here’s one of them. I live near this great concert venue called the Old Town School Of Folk Music. And I’m walking by the venue with my son, Zade. This is three, four years ago. And there’s a poster of a band that my wife and I really like called Tinariwen. They’re this roots music, West African band, many of them are Muslim.
Eboo Patel:
And the poster has them dressed in robes and in head wraps. And they’re set against the desert in West Africa. And I pointed the poster out to my son, Zade. And I said, “Zade, Mom and I are going to take you to see Tinariwen. We love this band. The music is terrific.” And my son looks at me and he says, “Dad, that’s ISIS.” We’re a Muslim family, like Muslim prayer every night, and really positive stories about Islam. And this is a poster at a concert venue of a band. And my son’s instinct when he sees dark men in robes and head wraps is, “Those must be Muslim terrorists.”
Eboo Patel:
Because there’s poison in the culture. Right? There’s poison in the culture. The culture is telling you that you are violent. That people who look like this are violent. Even if they have instruments in their hands. Look, I am 46. I’m 22, 23 years into building an organization. This happens to me very infrequently now, but it happened all the time growing up. And I watch it happening. I just watch the invisible poison in the culture seep in, even in Whole Foods, liberal, multicultural embracing America, which is where we live. And not every place is like that. That’s where we live. And it still has an effect.
Bishop Mike McKee:
So, as a follow up, a question we ask everyone is this. In the midst of all of that, how do you care for your own soul or your own spirit?
Eboo Patel:
Thank you for that. So, I’m actually good at that. And I’m lucky. I run an organization. I get to set my own schedule, largely. I have an unbelievable set of staff and colleagues. I have the unbelievable good fortune and grace of God to have basically invented a path and to walk the path that I’ve invented.
Eboo Patel:
That doesn’t mean that things aren’t hard sometimes and I don’t work too hard sometimes, or whatever, but I was raised thinking I was the luckiest person on Earth. I now think I’m probably the luckiest person for several planets around me, and I just walk that path. I get to live that way. I don’t think that’s a very good answer to your question. I totally don’t think it’s going to help anybody on this podcast, but let me put it this way.
Eboo Patel:
When something internal says, “It’s time to back off a little bit,” I try to get some time to back off. When I think to myself, “Boy, I really need to write down these thoughts.” I try to get some time to write down those thoughts. And when I find myself in a situation, going back to a high school reunion, thinking to myself, “I cannot believe that I was subject to conversations about popularity and clothes for however many years between middle school and high school, and I’m surrounded now by conversations about God and ideas.” I remember how lucky I am, and I’m unbelievably lucky.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Thank you. So, we really appreciate you being with us and sharing your thoughts, and as always, in any conversation with you, Eboo, always learn something and I’m always inspired. And I want to thank you for being with us. And I know that Bishop Easterling and Bishop Palmer may have something else to say, too. And I encourage them to do that as we begin to wrap up.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Well, thank you, Bishop McKee. I appreciate that. And two things that struck me, Eboo, as you’ve been talking to us, and I am very grateful for this conversation, and the ways that you have just inspired me. I look forward to that book, We Need To Build. Do I have that right?
Bishop Mike McKee:
Yes.
Eboo Patel:
You have that right. And thank you for saying that. I’m looking forward to talking to Methodists about that book.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Amen. Amen. We will give you that opportunity. But two things stick out for me. I think about the story that you opened us with. A professor sitting in the classroom amongst the students and wondering if anyone will notice. As a former prosecutor, I remember walking into a courtroom and having a judge bark at me to go back out and wait until my attorney showed up, and I was the prosecuting attorney. And I’ll never forget how that made me feel. So, we need to be able to tell our own stories of how we’ve been abused through bias. But then, I also hear you say we need to confront stories that continue to perpetuate bias. So, that’s what resonates for me and what I will continue to think about as I allow what you’ve taught us today to percolate within my own spirit. Thank you.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
It’s great to be with you. It was a grace to meet you the first time and to occasionally run into you around the country. And thank you for today. I have never been in your presence, even if I was in the audience just listening, that I have not learned and grown and walked away with at least one provocative question. Thank you.
Eboo Patel:
Appreciate it.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Friends, please join us next time as we talk about choosing a path forward with Opal Lee.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church: Conversations That Transform.
resources
Listening is an important first step in the work of antiracism. Are you ready to do more? Here are some helpful resources to help you dig deeper into the topics discussed in this episode.
About Eboo Patel
For Reflection and Action: Understanding Implicit Bias
Meditation on Paying Attention
“What I Want My Kids to Learn About American Racism” by Eboo Patel
“Don’t Criticize, Create” Advises Patel
We Need to Build by Eboo Patel (May 2022)
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
Read about how the Baltimore-Washington Conference of The United Methodist Church is focusing on creating Beloved Community.
Become aware of your own implicit biases by taking the Implicit Association Test.
About Eboo Patel
For Reflection and Action: Understanding Implicit Bias
Meditation on Paying Attention
“What I Want My Kids to Learn About American Racism” by Eboo Patel
“Don’t Criticize, Create” Advises Patel
We Need to Build by Eboo Patel (May 2022)
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
Read about how the Baltimore-Washington Conference of The United Methodist Church is focusing on creating Beloved Community.
Become aware of your own implicit biases by taking the Implicit Association Test.
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EPISODE 3
Choosing a Path Forward with Opal Lee Named “one of America’s best leaders” by U.S. News and World Report, Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith America: the leading interfaith organization in the United States. Under his leadership, Interfaith America has worked with governments, universities, private companies and civic organizations to make faith a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division. He served on President Obama’s Inaugural Faith Council, has given hundreds of keynote addresses and has written five books, including We Need to Build: Fieldnotes for Diverse Democracy, published in March 2022. He is an Ashoka Fellow and holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. Patel lives in Chicago with his wife, Shehnaz, and two sons. The “Grandmother of Juneteenth” shares her wisdom with the bishops about how God prepares, redeems and restores us to be the people we were created to be and how we can create communities of dignity and hope. |
Full transcript
Bishop LaTrelle…: Welcome to The Unfinished Church. I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling.
Bishop Gregory …: I’m Gregory Palmer.
Bishop Mike McK…: And I’m Mike McKee. You’re listening to The Unfinished Church Podcast. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations. To build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
I’m so glad we had this conversation with Opal Lee because she is so full of energy at her age, and that’s because she has a significant, called purpose in her life that she’s answered. I’m convinced of that.
Bishop LaTrelle…: And I was moved by the fact that even though she and her family have faced tremendous hardship, she talked about their home being destroyed because of who they were and I will presume because of the kind of activism that her family was engaged in, she’s not lost her hope, she’s not lost her joy, and she’s not taken her hand off the Gospel plow. What a tremendous witness and example she is to all of us.
Bishop Gregory …: The thing that struck me is that this notion of what it means to persevere, when you have a mission, you stick with it and you see it through until you can’t do it anymore, and even though there was this watershed of getting the Juneteenth peace as a recognized national holiday. Obviously she’s going to be a part of the celebrating and implementing of that but she’s on to other things, both nationally, regionally, and globally. So it wasn’t like I made it to the top of the summit and sort of pat herself on the back. It’s like, okay, I got these hungry people to feed, there’s climate change, there’s a lack of access to medical care.
The other thing that struck me is she is not worried about what people think about her, and yet, not anything that comes out of her that exudes a mean bone or spirit in her body. Some people are on mission and they’re just mean about it. I mean, they’re doing things I agree with. Their cause feels right to me, but I don’t have any sense that they actually like or love people. I genuinely believe she loves people, which includes her friends and her enemies, and that comes through as a clarion call. That you can be on mission, you can persevere, you can be relentless, and you do not have to ever lose sight of the Imago Dei, the image of God, in every person even the people that have worked against your best interests. Thanks be to God.
Bishop Mike McK…: That’s so true. You know, and this activism is not just Juneteenth. She’s been doing that other stuff for decades, and that’s how she became so well known in the Fort Worth community, is that her activism was backed by her own personal witness or activity in the community on behalf of others.
Bishop Gregory …: Well, I was just responding to what Bishop McKee said. I mean, what you just said about it was backed up by her own witness and I mean, she’s a reliable witness. I know we have at least one former member of the bar here. She was a credible witness. So credibility means a lot. Consistency means a lot. Is this something we see running through the vein of a person’s whole life, or is this episodic? And is this something about getting the spotlight to shine on me? I mean, she is heads down and straight ahead, getting real work done. We’ve got too many show people and some of them in the name of Jesus and it’s a show, but nothing’s nothing’s happening. So I don’t know if you all are going to edit this out or not, but I’m okay if you leave it in, because she is not here, as I used to hear people pray, Lord, we are not here for form or fashion nor show to the outside world.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well, and you can’t be a reliable witness if you can’t offer testimony. That’s what a reliable witness is. They offer testimony. Testimony comes through what you’ve experienced, what you’ve seen for yourself. What you know for yourself. Her testimony is real.
Bishop Mike McK…: She actually walks the talk. I mean, everything she’s advocating or witnessing to, she’s living it out. That’s what a disciple of Jesus does. Friends, we are excited to invite you to this conversation with Opal Lee. You’re going to enjoy it and you’re going to be hearing from a real follower, disciple of Jesus. Enjoy.
Ms. Lee, or may I call you Miss Opal or call you Opal? We welcome you today.
Ms. Opal Lee: Thank you young people, and remember you are all young people if you’re not 95. I’m delighted and you can call me whatever you like.
Bishop Mike McK…: Okay. So let me say this to you, Opal. You make 95 look very young.
Ms. Opal Lee: If you got lots to do, it will, and you need all the time you got. Well, let’s say young if you want to.
Bishop Mike McK…: Okay. Which, we want to talk about in some different ways with you this morning. Tell us about your experiences growing up, that shaped your faith. How did your family, the church, your community, shape your faith?
Ms. Opal Lee: I’d have to go way back. My mother was one of 19 children. Three sets of twins my grandparents had. And so, I spent a lot of time with them and so did my two brothers, but in that household, and it was a 40-acre farm, breakfasts, everybody, even if you had chores, you heard that bell that said, come for breakfast. And we’d all sit down and my grandfather, who was a circuit-riding preacher, would sit at the head of the table and each person at that table, young or old, had to say Bible verse. And you’d better know more than one because if somebody said one that you planned to say, you’d have to get up from the table, go get the Bible, learn a verse before you could eat. Well, there was the noon prayer. He wasn’t available then, but at night for the evening meal, we gathered again. And of course he prayed, but all of us had to participate. Every one of us. And when my mother got married and moved to Marshall, Texas, that pattern followed. And my grandfather would send people to my mother. He’d do that to my grandmother. Bring somebody that needed food or clothes, a place to stay, and instruct them that they were to see after that person till they could get on their feet.
So I guess you could say I was sort of steeped in the Bible and knowing that you were to look after your fellow man. In Marshall, my mother joined a Methodist church because it was close to where she lived. My grandfather didn’t care where you went to church so long as you would go. When we left Marshall for Fort Worth, my mother, we left on Saturday, my mother had a job on Sunday and she was away a lot, because she worked and worked and worked some more. But we knew as children that at our meals, we had to have a blessing and say our verses, whether she was there or not. When our house was destroyed by people who didn’t want us in the neighborhood, things were disrupted, but we still had to continue that. And see, I forgot to mention that there was a… Grandpa, we all gathered in the evening after chores, and he did the prayer. It was like, I say, now, being on your knees at church. Once those prayers were said, you could go finish your chores if you hadn’t, or if you had places to go, that was the time, but you didn’t leave until Papa had prayed.
So, Fort Worth again. My mother worked extremely hard and it was left to us to have our meal, say our verses, and so it stayed with me. I did the same thing with my children. I had four of them-girl and three boys. And again, I was away working a lot and they too were supposed to say their blessing before they ate. And we knew, we knew if my mom brought somebody home that needed something, or they had to stay with us a while until they got on their feet, it’s sort of in our DNA that we are supposed to help our brother. I think somewhere in the Bible we’ve been taught that we are our brother’s keeper, and so in my family, we are responsible for people.
Bishop Mike McK…: Opal, one of the things that, when you tell some of those stories, reminds me is that this is just part of your makeup from the very beginning of your life in east Texas, and then you come to Fort Worth, my hometown, and you engage in some significant activism over the last several decades related to public schools, related to hunger, and things of that nature. How did you think, although you’ve been really clear about this, how did you stay engaged in that activism throughout your life? I mean, where does that resilience come from, and when you got to a place that it was so difficult, what did you do?
Ms. Opal Lee: Pray. That’s what we were taught to do. Pray, and something’s going to happen. It might not happen when you ask for it, but pray. And then again, if there’s somebody else to tend to besides yourself and your family, and it happens all the time. I mean nonstop. There’s always somebody who needs something and they’d find me or somebody would send them to me. So I didn’t have any time to regret or be sorry, or wonder what’s my fate, how come I don’t have this. I never had the time for that kind of stuff. You did what you could with what you had, and sometimes you were surprised because you got maybe a little extra in your paycheck or somebody passed on something that somebody else didn’t want. So I just don’t know what to say except you have to continue to look after people and look after yourself, and sure enough, if you look after somebody else, you’re not going to worry about what’s happening at your place.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Ms. Lee, as a follow-up to that, if I could ask you, this is Bishop Easterling. The kind of activism that it has taken to secure both the Juneteenth holiday and the work that has come after that, some would argue, is political and then others would say politics has no place in the church. How do you respond to that?
Ms. Opal Lee: Well, for me, it’s never come up. I’ve never bothered about what others said. You know? It just sort of rolls off of me like water off a duck’s back. If you have something to do, you do it. Criticism, you’re going to get, but you shouldn’t let it stop you from doing what you know is right. I felt like Juneteenth needed to be a national holiday. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Why it took me 40 years? I don’t know. I had other things to do, I guess. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other. And I too heard that political thing.
Somebody was supposed to let us have an RV, and I wouldn’t have to go to hotels and motels, but they decided that what I was doing was too political. I didn’t give it a second thought, and when I was walking two and a half miles, another two and a half miles, I went from Fort Worth to Arlington to Grand Prairie to Dallas, Balch Springs and Chaco. Two and a half miles, two and a half miles, until I reached that point. My teammates decided, “Hey, you’re not going to do it like that. You are only going to go where there are Juneteenth celebrations or festivals and where you were invited.” Okay. I was invited all over these United States. So the criticism for me, I just put it behind me. I don’t give it a thought.
Bishop Mike McK…: So Opal, not only the Juneteenth holiday, but you had several other endeavors in your community that were really important. Could you just name those so we have a sense about how you have really persevered for a long time?
Ms. Opal Lee: What happened somewhere along the line… I mean, it really started when I was a teacher. They called me a visiting teacher, and that wasn’t it, but I would go to the homes. There were children who’d come to school hungry, didn’t have shoes, didn’t have a decent place to stay, and it was my responsibility to alleviate that. That’s what I did as a visiting teacher. So when I retired, that stuff still followed me. People still needed things, and I would get food for the elderly. There was a food bank that I joined and it burned, and so there’s this huge building behind my house with a big sign on it that said for sale, and I asked and they wanted $4,000 a month, and we moved into it. How about that for faith? We didn’t have a dime, but we paid that for 11 months, and do you know, that place services some 500 families a day?
We didn’t have $4,000. The people who owned the building came to us and said, “Seems like you’re doing a good work,” and the river authority gave me the use of 13 acres on the river. Oh, have we had a good time. We’ve got the best farm manager in the world. He gives some of the produce to the food bank, to the WIC program, and then he goes to the market on Saturdays. We are delighted. That is…
And so, we chose to work with people who had been incarcerated and couldn’t find a job. We felt like if they were taught farming, you know, a lot of people think that stuff on the grocery shelf, they don’t know where it comes from. But we thought if these young people, these people learned farming, and they were given, they’d earned a certificate from one of the colleges and the time that they had spent in jail was not wasted, we felt we were doing a service. And that’s what we are hoping other farmers will do. Take somebody in. Teach them what you are doing. They got to be paid, but we sort of think that that might spread. That somebody else might take it up.
Bishop Mike McK…: You see Juneteenth as a bridge, and much of your work has a focus on unity. How have you been able to build bridges based on trust and get to the place of assuming the positive intent in others?
Ms. Opal Lee: Well, I just wish there was a little more of me because don’t seem to have a problem with getting responses from people who are not on the same page I’m on. And I don’t just quiz them. I like to know what they are doing, and we talk, and sometimes it’s like a light bulb. Oh, I didn’t realize that. I didn’t know that this happened. I certain it wouldn’t have been a part of that.
People simply haven’t been told. We need books that tell the story of what actually happened, so that we can heal from it and get on with the business of living. And if I didn’t have anything else to do with that, I’d be like Johnny Appleseed going all over the land, talking to people and changing their minds. And I’ve asked people to make themselves a committee of one, to change the mind of somebody they know that’s not on the same page they on. And just think; if the 3 million people… We took 1.5 million signatures to come and we were going to take another 1.5 million when we were called to the White House. Just think. If 3 million people would change the minds of somebody else, boy, we’d be in really good shape. It’s a dream, but it could happen.
Bishop Gregory …: Ms. Lee, this is Gregory Vaughn Palmer, and thank you for your witness and your perseverance with grace through the years. This is maybe a similar question as has been asked by Bishop Easterling. She talked about, and you responded to, people’s resistance to the mixing of religion and politics. And in this age where you’re telling us we need to know our stories, all of us, and to know the real story, and I may add with all of its nuances, there is this huge backlash against, shall we say, the conversation about critical race theory. Saying that it’s only going to divide us. Now state legislatures are spending as much time, in some cases, trying to outlaw certain textbooks, certain narratives from being told in the classroom.
So let’s assume for a moment you’re talking to a group of people that feel that telling the whole story is divisive. It’s too painful. Say a word about how you come alongside them to help them to know that knowing the truth actually can heal us, because you talked about you want to get it out there so we can be healed, and then I think you said get on with the business of living. How can knowing the truth of our stories, even the painful parts or especially the painful parts, participate or be a part of the healing of the land?
Ms. Opal Lee: Well, I’m going to be speaking to AT&T employees tomorrow or the next day. Again, I’ll talk to them, probably say the same thing I’ve been saying here, but I want to put in their minds, everybody that works there is not on the same page. And so I’m saying to those people, you know a person that you work with. Why don’t you start changing that person’s mind? It ain’t going to take a day or two. You got to work with them and it’s hard, but I think people’s minds can be changed.
I know because I’ve changed some minds. I know that if people understand that knowing the truth and being able to see that there are things we can do so that doesn’t happen again. I think we are all on a mission. We should be. There are too many things that need to be addressed. Homelessness and joblessness and healthcare that some people can get and others can’t, climate change. All these things need to be addressed, and I think we could do it. I think we could make this the best country in the whole wide world if we only understand freedom. Not for black folk, not for Asians or Mexican Americans. Freedom is for everybody, and as long as we are not free, we’re going to have these issues. And my point is, let’s get on with the business of making this free for every one of us.
Bishop Mike McK…: Thank you. One last question. So you’ve shared about your perseverance, your activism, your dreams about our country. How do you care for your own soul in the midst of this work?
Ms. Opal Lee: I think that the work is important, and I’m a person who reads the Bible often, and I do have set time for my prayers and I’m still doing my prayers when I eat my food at home or out in the cafe or wherever. So I’m hoping my soul is being nourished when I do something for somebody else, and I hope I’ll have the strength to do so many things that I think need to be done.
Would you believe I had this idea because I read about this woman in Uganda, who was the mother of 44 children, 38 of them still living, and I am so proud of her I don’t know what to do. You may need to know that the doctor stopped her from having children. You may need to know that her family, she was 12 years old when they married her to somebody and she ended up with her first set of twins, and now she’s had twins and twins and triplets and triplets and quadruples, 38 children she has. I want to do something. I want to send some containers, railroad containers that are furnished for those people. I want to send three containers. Now they got containers over there, so I guess if I asked the railroad over there about those containers, maybe I could get them there and it wouldn’t be so expensive. But how come I’m dreaming about somebody in Uganda and I got folk right here that need help? But the Lord’s going to help me see whether I can do that or not or if I need to stay here and just help where I can.
Bishop Gregory …: Amen.
Bishop Mike McK…: Friend, you have given us so much to think about, and now I ask my colleagues, Bishops Easterling and Palmer. What would you highlight from today’s conversation?
Bishop Gregory …: Well, I would highlight, what’s been stimulated in me by listening to Ms. Lee, this remarkable servant of God, leader of a movement, woman of great faith, and it stirred up in me two songs that I can’t wait till we stop recording so I can go in a room and close the door and just start singing. One is the hymn that has the words of its first line, “Oh, for a faith that will not shrink though pressed by every foe.” So when I think going forward of Ms. Lee, I’m going to be thinking of a faith that will not shrink. That’s the water off the duck’s back. The other is out of the African American tradition of spirituals. The song that says, “Lord, I keep so busy working for my Jesus. I ain’t got time to die.” Ms. Lee has evoked in me, if you got something to do, keep on doing it. Thank you Ms. Lee.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Amen and amen. And I would add that what resonates within me from this conversation and will be with me is as we think about choosing a path forward, it’s important that what is instilled in us every day, this reclaiming of scripture, this being immersed in God’s word, prepares us to be able to understand the amazing grace that we have been offered and that we can extend that amazing grace to others, assuming positive intent. Sometimes having to look past what appears on the surface, but assuming positive intent, as we all go on to perfection to really to continue to become the beloved community. It requires something of us, but in the end, it blesses the whole. So, that will resonate with me and thank you so much Ms. Lee, for what you have imparted to us today.
Bishop Mike McK…: Ms. Lee, every time I hear you speak, and the couple of times that we’ve been together, I always find myself to begin to smile more and more and more, and it’s because your very presence and your words just exudes joy, and so that I think with a sense of joy that we’re capable of so much more than we think, and that joy is a gift from our God that comes from people who’ve allowed God to nurture their spirits. And so, I’m reminded again about your sense of joy and you’re continuing to be steadfast and the work that you know that God has called you to do in our communities. So I want to thank you for being with us this morning.
Ms. Opal Lee: Thank you for letting me be with you. I’ve enjoyed this. I have. Let’s do it again.
Bishop Mike McK…: Friends, please join our next conversation about seeking relationships with Fred Shaw.
Bishop Gregory …: Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org.
The Unfinished Church. Conversations that transform.
Bishop Gregory …: I’m Gregory Palmer.
Bishop Mike McK…: And I’m Mike McKee. You’re listening to The Unfinished Church Podcast. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations. To build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
I’m so glad we had this conversation with Opal Lee because she is so full of energy at her age, and that’s because she has a significant, called purpose in her life that she’s answered. I’m convinced of that.
Bishop LaTrelle…: And I was moved by the fact that even though she and her family have faced tremendous hardship, she talked about their home being destroyed because of who they were and I will presume because of the kind of activism that her family was engaged in, she’s not lost her hope, she’s not lost her joy, and she’s not taken her hand off the Gospel plow. What a tremendous witness and example she is to all of us.
Bishop Gregory …: The thing that struck me is that this notion of what it means to persevere, when you have a mission, you stick with it and you see it through until you can’t do it anymore, and even though there was this watershed of getting the Juneteenth peace as a recognized national holiday. Obviously she’s going to be a part of the celebrating and implementing of that but she’s on to other things, both nationally, regionally, and globally. So it wasn’t like I made it to the top of the summit and sort of pat herself on the back. It’s like, okay, I got these hungry people to feed, there’s climate change, there’s a lack of access to medical care.
The other thing that struck me is she is not worried about what people think about her, and yet, not anything that comes out of her that exudes a mean bone or spirit in her body. Some people are on mission and they’re just mean about it. I mean, they’re doing things I agree with. Their cause feels right to me, but I don’t have any sense that they actually like or love people. I genuinely believe she loves people, which includes her friends and her enemies, and that comes through as a clarion call. That you can be on mission, you can persevere, you can be relentless, and you do not have to ever lose sight of the Imago Dei, the image of God, in every person even the people that have worked against your best interests. Thanks be to God.
Bishop Mike McK…: That’s so true. You know, and this activism is not just Juneteenth. She’s been doing that other stuff for decades, and that’s how she became so well known in the Fort Worth community, is that her activism was backed by her own personal witness or activity in the community on behalf of others.
Bishop Gregory …: Well, I was just responding to what Bishop McKee said. I mean, what you just said about it was backed up by her own witness and I mean, she’s a reliable witness. I know we have at least one former member of the bar here. She was a credible witness. So credibility means a lot. Consistency means a lot. Is this something we see running through the vein of a person’s whole life, or is this episodic? And is this something about getting the spotlight to shine on me? I mean, she is heads down and straight ahead, getting real work done. We’ve got too many show people and some of them in the name of Jesus and it’s a show, but nothing’s nothing’s happening. So I don’t know if you all are going to edit this out or not, but I’m okay if you leave it in, because she is not here, as I used to hear people pray, Lord, we are not here for form or fashion nor show to the outside world.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Well, and you can’t be a reliable witness if you can’t offer testimony. That’s what a reliable witness is. They offer testimony. Testimony comes through what you’ve experienced, what you’ve seen for yourself. What you know for yourself. Her testimony is real.
Bishop Mike McK…: She actually walks the talk. I mean, everything she’s advocating or witnessing to, she’s living it out. That’s what a disciple of Jesus does. Friends, we are excited to invite you to this conversation with Opal Lee. You’re going to enjoy it and you’re going to be hearing from a real follower, disciple of Jesus. Enjoy.
Ms. Lee, or may I call you Miss Opal or call you Opal? We welcome you today.
Ms. Opal Lee: Thank you young people, and remember you are all young people if you’re not 95. I’m delighted and you can call me whatever you like.
Bishop Mike McK…: Okay. So let me say this to you, Opal. You make 95 look very young.
Ms. Opal Lee: If you got lots to do, it will, and you need all the time you got. Well, let’s say young if you want to.
Bishop Mike McK…: Okay. Which, we want to talk about in some different ways with you this morning. Tell us about your experiences growing up, that shaped your faith. How did your family, the church, your community, shape your faith?
Ms. Opal Lee: I’d have to go way back. My mother was one of 19 children. Three sets of twins my grandparents had. And so, I spent a lot of time with them and so did my two brothers, but in that household, and it was a 40-acre farm, breakfasts, everybody, even if you had chores, you heard that bell that said, come for breakfast. And we’d all sit down and my grandfather, who was a circuit-riding preacher, would sit at the head of the table and each person at that table, young or old, had to say Bible verse. And you’d better know more than one because if somebody said one that you planned to say, you’d have to get up from the table, go get the Bible, learn a verse before you could eat. Well, there was the noon prayer. He wasn’t available then, but at night for the evening meal, we gathered again. And of course he prayed, but all of us had to participate. Every one of us. And when my mother got married and moved to Marshall, Texas, that pattern followed. And my grandfather would send people to my mother. He’d do that to my grandmother. Bring somebody that needed food or clothes, a place to stay, and instruct them that they were to see after that person till they could get on their feet.
So I guess you could say I was sort of steeped in the Bible and knowing that you were to look after your fellow man. In Marshall, my mother joined a Methodist church because it was close to where she lived. My grandfather didn’t care where you went to church so long as you would go. When we left Marshall for Fort Worth, my mother, we left on Saturday, my mother had a job on Sunday and she was away a lot, because she worked and worked and worked some more. But we knew as children that at our meals, we had to have a blessing and say our verses, whether she was there or not. When our house was destroyed by people who didn’t want us in the neighborhood, things were disrupted, but we still had to continue that. And see, I forgot to mention that there was a… Grandpa, we all gathered in the evening after chores, and he did the prayer. It was like, I say, now, being on your knees at church. Once those prayers were said, you could go finish your chores if you hadn’t, or if you had places to go, that was the time, but you didn’t leave until Papa had prayed.
So, Fort Worth again. My mother worked extremely hard and it was left to us to have our meal, say our verses, and so it stayed with me. I did the same thing with my children. I had four of them-girl and three boys. And again, I was away working a lot and they too were supposed to say their blessing before they ate. And we knew, we knew if my mom brought somebody home that needed something, or they had to stay with us a while until they got on their feet, it’s sort of in our DNA that we are supposed to help our brother. I think somewhere in the Bible we’ve been taught that we are our brother’s keeper, and so in my family, we are responsible for people.
Bishop Mike McK…: Opal, one of the things that, when you tell some of those stories, reminds me is that this is just part of your makeup from the very beginning of your life in east Texas, and then you come to Fort Worth, my hometown, and you engage in some significant activism over the last several decades related to public schools, related to hunger, and things of that nature. How did you think, although you’ve been really clear about this, how did you stay engaged in that activism throughout your life? I mean, where does that resilience come from, and when you got to a place that it was so difficult, what did you do?
Ms. Opal Lee: Pray. That’s what we were taught to do. Pray, and something’s going to happen. It might not happen when you ask for it, but pray. And then again, if there’s somebody else to tend to besides yourself and your family, and it happens all the time. I mean nonstop. There’s always somebody who needs something and they’d find me or somebody would send them to me. So I didn’t have any time to regret or be sorry, or wonder what’s my fate, how come I don’t have this. I never had the time for that kind of stuff. You did what you could with what you had, and sometimes you were surprised because you got maybe a little extra in your paycheck or somebody passed on something that somebody else didn’t want. So I just don’t know what to say except you have to continue to look after people and look after yourself, and sure enough, if you look after somebody else, you’re not going to worry about what’s happening at your place.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Ms. Lee, as a follow-up to that, if I could ask you, this is Bishop Easterling. The kind of activism that it has taken to secure both the Juneteenth holiday and the work that has come after that, some would argue, is political and then others would say politics has no place in the church. How do you respond to that?
Ms. Opal Lee: Well, for me, it’s never come up. I’ve never bothered about what others said. You know? It just sort of rolls off of me like water off a duck’s back. If you have something to do, you do it. Criticism, you’re going to get, but you shouldn’t let it stop you from doing what you know is right. I felt like Juneteenth needed to be a national holiday. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Why it took me 40 years? I don’t know. I had other things to do, I guess. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other. And I too heard that political thing.
Somebody was supposed to let us have an RV, and I wouldn’t have to go to hotels and motels, but they decided that what I was doing was too political. I didn’t give it a second thought, and when I was walking two and a half miles, another two and a half miles, I went from Fort Worth to Arlington to Grand Prairie to Dallas, Balch Springs and Chaco. Two and a half miles, two and a half miles, until I reached that point. My teammates decided, “Hey, you’re not going to do it like that. You are only going to go where there are Juneteenth celebrations or festivals and where you were invited.” Okay. I was invited all over these United States. So the criticism for me, I just put it behind me. I don’t give it a thought.
Bishop Mike McK…: So Opal, not only the Juneteenth holiday, but you had several other endeavors in your community that were really important. Could you just name those so we have a sense about how you have really persevered for a long time?
Ms. Opal Lee: What happened somewhere along the line… I mean, it really started when I was a teacher. They called me a visiting teacher, and that wasn’t it, but I would go to the homes. There were children who’d come to school hungry, didn’t have shoes, didn’t have a decent place to stay, and it was my responsibility to alleviate that. That’s what I did as a visiting teacher. So when I retired, that stuff still followed me. People still needed things, and I would get food for the elderly. There was a food bank that I joined and it burned, and so there’s this huge building behind my house with a big sign on it that said for sale, and I asked and they wanted $4,000 a month, and we moved into it. How about that for faith? We didn’t have a dime, but we paid that for 11 months, and do you know, that place services some 500 families a day?
We didn’t have $4,000. The people who owned the building came to us and said, “Seems like you’re doing a good work,” and the river authority gave me the use of 13 acres on the river. Oh, have we had a good time. We’ve got the best farm manager in the world. He gives some of the produce to the food bank, to the WIC program, and then he goes to the market on Saturdays. We are delighted. That is…
And so, we chose to work with people who had been incarcerated and couldn’t find a job. We felt like if they were taught farming, you know, a lot of people think that stuff on the grocery shelf, they don’t know where it comes from. But we thought if these young people, these people learned farming, and they were given, they’d earned a certificate from one of the colleges and the time that they had spent in jail was not wasted, we felt we were doing a service. And that’s what we are hoping other farmers will do. Take somebody in. Teach them what you are doing. They got to be paid, but we sort of think that that might spread. That somebody else might take it up.
Bishop Mike McK…: You see Juneteenth as a bridge, and much of your work has a focus on unity. How have you been able to build bridges based on trust and get to the place of assuming the positive intent in others?
Ms. Opal Lee: Well, I just wish there was a little more of me because don’t seem to have a problem with getting responses from people who are not on the same page I’m on. And I don’t just quiz them. I like to know what they are doing, and we talk, and sometimes it’s like a light bulb. Oh, I didn’t realize that. I didn’t know that this happened. I certain it wouldn’t have been a part of that.
People simply haven’t been told. We need books that tell the story of what actually happened, so that we can heal from it and get on with the business of living. And if I didn’t have anything else to do with that, I’d be like Johnny Appleseed going all over the land, talking to people and changing their minds. And I’ve asked people to make themselves a committee of one, to change the mind of somebody they know that’s not on the same page they on. And just think; if the 3 million people… We took 1.5 million signatures to come and we were going to take another 1.5 million when we were called to the White House. Just think. If 3 million people would change the minds of somebody else, boy, we’d be in really good shape. It’s a dream, but it could happen.
Bishop Gregory …: Ms. Lee, this is Gregory Vaughn Palmer, and thank you for your witness and your perseverance with grace through the years. This is maybe a similar question as has been asked by Bishop Easterling. She talked about, and you responded to, people’s resistance to the mixing of religion and politics. And in this age where you’re telling us we need to know our stories, all of us, and to know the real story, and I may add with all of its nuances, there is this huge backlash against, shall we say, the conversation about critical race theory. Saying that it’s only going to divide us. Now state legislatures are spending as much time, in some cases, trying to outlaw certain textbooks, certain narratives from being told in the classroom.
So let’s assume for a moment you’re talking to a group of people that feel that telling the whole story is divisive. It’s too painful. Say a word about how you come alongside them to help them to know that knowing the truth actually can heal us, because you talked about you want to get it out there so we can be healed, and then I think you said get on with the business of living. How can knowing the truth of our stories, even the painful parts or especially the painful parts, participate or be a part of the healing of the land?
Ms. Opal Lee: Well, I’m going to be speaking to AT&T employees tomorrow or the next day. Again, I’ll talk to them, probably say the same thing I’ve been saying here, but I want to put in their minds, everybody that works there is not on the same page. And so I’m saying to those people, you know a person that you work with. Why don’t you start changing that person’s mind? It ain’t going to take a day or two. You got to work with them and it’s hard, but I think people’s minds can be changed.
I know because I’ve changed some minds. I know that if people understand that knowing the truth and being able to see that there are things we can do so that doesn’t happen again. I think we are all on a mission. We should be. There are too many things that need to be addressed. Homelessness and joblessness and healthcare that some people can get and others can’t, climate change. All these things need to be addressed, and I think we could do it. I think we could make this the best country in the whole wide world if we only understand freedom. Not for black folk, not for Asians or Mexican Americans. Freedom is for everybody, and as long as we are not free, we’re going to have these issues. And my point is, let’s get on with the business of making this free for every one of us.
Bishop Mike McK…: Thank you. One last question. So you’ve shared about your perseverance, your activism, your dreams about our country. How do you care for your own soul in the midst of this work?
Ms. Opal Lee: I think that the work is important, and I’m a person who reads the Bible often, and I do have set time for my prayers and I’m still doing my prayers when I eat my food at home or out in the cafe or wherever. So I’m hoping my soul is being nourished when I do something for somebody else, and I hope I’ll have the strength to do so many things that I think need to be done.
Would you believe I had this idea because I read about this woman in Uganda, who was the mother of 44 children, 38 of them still living, and I am so proud of her I don’t know what to do. You may need to know that the doctor stopped her from having children. You may need to know that her family, she was 12 years old when they married her to somebody and she ended up with her first set of twins, and now she’s had twins and twins and triplets and triplets and quadruples, 38 children she has. I want to do something. I want to send some containers, railroad containers that are furnished for those people. I want to send three containers. Now they got containers over there, so I guess if I asked the railroad over there about those containers, maybe I could get them there and it wouldn’t be so expensive. But how come I’m dreaming about somebody in Uganda and I got folk right here that need help? But the Lord’s going to help me see whether I can do that or not or if I need to stay here and just help where I can.
Bishop Gregory …: Amen.
Bishop Mike McK…: Friend, you have given us so much to think about, and now I ask my colleagues, Bishops Easterling and Palmer. What would you highlight from today’s conversation?
Bishop Gregory …: Well, I would highlight, what’s been stimulated in me by listening to Ms. Lee, this remarkable servant of God, leader of a movement, woman of great faith, and it stirred up in me two songs that I can’t wait till we stop recording so I can go in a room and close the door and just start singing. One is the hymn that has the words of its first line, “Oh, for a faith that will not shrink though pressed by every foe.” So when I think going forward of Ms. Lee, I’m going to be thinking of a faith that will not shrink. That’s the water off the duck’s back. The other is out of the African American tradition of spirituals. The song that says, “Lord, I keep so busy working for my Jesus. I ain’t got time to die.” Ms. Lee has evoked in me, if you got something to do, keep on doing it. Thank you Ms. Lee.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Amen and amen. And I would add that what resonates within me from this conversation and will be with me is as we think about choosing a path forward, it’s important that what is instilled in us every day, this reclaiming of scripture, this being immersed in God’s word, prepares us to be able to understand the amazing grace that we have been offered and that we can extend that amazing grace to others, assuming positive intent. Sometimes having to look past what appears on the surface, but assuming positive intent, as we all go on to perfection to really to continue to become the beloved community. It requires something of us, but in the end, it blesses the whole. So, that will resonate with me and thank you so much Ms. Lee, for what you have imparted to us today.
Bishop Mike McK…: Ms. Lee, every time I hear you speak, and the couple of times that we’ve been together, I always find myself to begin to smile more and more and more, and it’s because your very presence and your words just exudes joy, and so that I think with a sense of joy that we’re capable of so much more than we think, and that joy is a gift from our God that comes from people who’ve allowed God to nurture their spirits. And so, I’m reminded again about your sense of joy and you’re continuing to be steadfast and the work that you know that God has called you to do in our communities. So I want to thank you for being with us this morning.
Ms. Opal Lee: Thank you for letting me be with you. I’ve enjoyed this. I have. Let’s do it again.
Bishop Mike McK…: Friends, please join our next conversation about seeking relationships with Fred Shaw.
Bishop Gregory …: Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org.
The Unfinished Church. Conversations that transform.
resources
Listening is an important first step in the work of antiracism. Are you ready to do more? Here are some helpful resources to help you dig in deeper to the topics discussed in this episode.
About Opal Lee
Opal Lee wants you to walk for freedom
Juneteenth: Staying the Course of Freedom and Flourishing for All
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
About Opal Lee
Opal Lee wants you to walk for freedom
Juneteenth: Staying the Course of Freedom and Flourishing for All
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
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EPISODE 4
Seeking Relationships with Fred Shaw Shawnee descendant, historian, and storyteller, the Reverend Fred Shaw who serves on the Native American Ministry Plan of The United Methodist Church. He has served as director of a national school for American Indian United Methodist pastors who maintain their cultural heritages while being deeply immersed in what it means to be a Christian pastor. Among his many talents, Fred is an historical actor and lecturer, scriptwriter, voiceover artist, author, and photographer. Rev. Shaw is also a retired clergy member of the West Ohio Annual Conference, having served in local church ministry for 41 years. A Shawnee descendant storyteller shares insights with the bishops about embracing the gifts and perspectives of indigenous peoples and building transformative relationships. |
full transcript
Bishop LaTrelle…: Welcome to the Unfinished Church. I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling.
Bishop Mike McK…: I’m Mike McKee.
Bishop Gregory …: And I’m Gregory Palmer. Thank you for joining us for the Unfinished Church. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations, to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
Would you imagine with me for a moment what it would feel like to be in your own home land, but it’s not yours anymore. It’s been snatched from you by other people, interlopers. To have your language ripped from your tongue, to be given clothes to wear that are not your clothes, to be told that you can no longer worship your God in the way in which you understand God, and in the customs of your culture and your community. It is taking this unimaginableness into ourselves that has to be the bridge to our understanding, both our lack of relationship with Native American, indigenous Indian people here, and our need and our call to be in relationship with them. It will never happen if we don’t know their stories, the depth of their pain, the pathology of what happened to them, and the call to be agents of healing and of reconciliation.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Bishop Palmer, you make me immediately think about the saying that we’d have so much more compassion for one another if we understood one another’s stories. You also make me think about the fact that this is why it is imperative that we sit down at table, look one another in the eye, and listen to one another. I can read about the stories of dispossession that you’ve spoken of. I can think I understand it. But until I sit down and listen and am willing to really allow my mind to be transported to the times when this happened, I don’t really understand. And I think when we do that, our ability to hate, our ability to disregard, our ability to deny will be diminished. And then we’ll be able to move into a space of real authentic relationship.
Bishop Mike McK…: One of the things that has really come into my understanding that I have to admit I did not know a lot about, and I think that’s the way history gets taught, is to keep us from learning all the things that we really need to know about why we’re in the state that we’re in. But I would say that the Christian Doctrine of Discovery is very, very alarming. The idea that a group of people from Europe were allowed to go to another land far away and to do anything possible in order to convert people to Christianity is like thinking that somebody else doesn’t have something to offer, and the end justifies the means. And that is alarming. And that may be why there’s still so much distrust of people and why there’s still so much violence.
Bishop Gregory …: Today our guest is Fred Shaw, a Shawnee descendant, historian, storyteller, and pastor. It is a powerful conversation. Fred’s vulnerability, his openness and his wisdom are worthy of our hearing and of our deep respect. Let’s listen in.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Thank you, Bishop Palmer. It’s an honor to be here, and I’m so grateful that the United Methodist Church is seeking new relationships and deeper relationships with indigenous people.
Bishop Gregory …: Amen. Thank you. We are living in interesting times, and it seems that the more we learn about our country and our church’s history, the more we have yet to learn, and dare I say to repent for, actions that started centuries ago, but the pain and the rollout of which still exists today. Brother Fred, would you help us to understand from your experiences and perspective the relationship between indigenous people and the United Methodist Church?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Well one of the first questions usually asked of me is, how can you be an American-Indian and a pastor? There seems to be some sort of concept that you have to be one or the other. But the reality is, I was raised in the old Methodist church. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister for 54 years, and my father taught Sunday school for 40 years.
Bishop Gregory …: Wow.
Rev. Fred Shaw: And I grew up in that kind of an atmosphere in which my family was accepted in the church, but we also maintained our culture, our heritage. We did not have the language, that had been lost to us when we had to go underground in 1832. But we still had our same ideas of relationship to the earth, how you cared for it, and my dad was what you might call a horse whisper. That was one of his great talents. He passed that on to me, and I have to my son. So we still have those interrelationships with the church from that.
But as far as the church as a whole was concerned, it very often was adversarial in that the church, although it believed it was being altruistic in trying to save our souls, our spirits, and our bodies by having the schools and getting us to be “civilized,” the reality was that they really were used by the government and others in order to help remove us. They truly wanted to help. And Thomas Jefferson, even very early in his presidency, believed that the only way to save the American-Indian people was to remove them from contact with white civilization, because he saw that they were being corrupted very quickly. That rationale continued even through the ruthless removals of Jackson, that well, we’re saving them. We’re getting them away from all this other horrid stuff that’s around them. It just simply wasn’t accurate. It was a way of legitimizing what was being done.
What native people did was they looked at what was being done around them. And for instance, Red Jacket, who was a [inaudible 00:07:13], an Iroquois, said to a missionary one time, “I’ll listen to you when I see that the people living around me are actually living by what you’re teaching them Jesus said.” And until he saw that kind of authenticity, he was not willing to listen.
One of the problems is, really, there’s no problem with native people and Jesus. There’s a problem of native people with the church and how the church has acted toward them. The church viewed native spirituality as idolatry or as of the devil. And that was reflected in a lot of names that were given to different aspects, especially sacred places. So many spiritual places for our people were named by the settlers who came in as devil. For instance, Spirit Lake in North Dakota is called Devil’s Lake because it was a spiritual place of the Lakota people. The Devil’s Tower in Wyoming was the Bears Lodge, but named the Devil’s Tower because it was a spiritual place of the people in that area. And there’s lots of examples of that throughout the United States.
But as far as that’s concerned, you understand how they would feel, those people coming in. They were aliens. Imagine an alien spaceship coming into one of our churches and seeing us sitting there and then standing and praying and singing toward a cross. They would say that we worshiped the cross because they don’t know the rest of the story. They don’t know that the cross is a symbol that calls us into relationship with a loving God. Well, the people who came in did not understand that if they saw us praying at a tree, that we were not praying to the tree. We were giving thanks to the creator for the beauty that was in front of us, another way of being in relationship with God. And they did not understand that. And so that was a part of the problem.
I became aware of just how much more accepting native people are when I was invited to go to a sweat lodge on Puget Sound. It was led by a very traditional man. And a sweat lodge is like being in a prayer meeting in a sauna, and it gets hotter on every round of the prayers and deeper, spiritually. And I was there with Roy Wilson, who is a Cowlitz and also a United Methodist pastor. The man who was leading the sweat lodge said, “There are two with us today who, in addition to following the Red Road, follow the Jesus road. And in honor of their presence with us as brothers, I would like to end this with the prayer that their master taught.” And we ended a traditional sweat lodge with the Lord’s prayer.
Bishop Gregory …: Wow. Wow.
Rev. Fred Shaw: That was very exciting to me.
Bishop Gregory …: That’s fabulous.
Rev. Fred Shaw: The other thing I would say about our relationship is that when I was the director of the Native American course of study for local pastors, one of our students is Dene, Navajo. He was raised up in one of our boarding schools, or a boarding school. And after a couple of years in the program, he wrote me a note and he said, “You know, for the first time in my life, I am Dene and I am Christian. And I do not feel that I am betraying one or the other.” That’s where we need to get with the church.
Bishop Gregory …: So that’s about right teaching versus, let me say, wrong teaching. And that said, how then, might you say, has the Christian Doctrine of Discovery contributed to all of this and manifest destiny? How has that affected you and all other indigenous people?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Well, as soon as you have the Doctrine of Discovery, of course, you have this statement that any Christian prince can send out representatives and claim land that is occupied by those who are not Christian. What happened was they quickly were seen as subservient then. Not only could you remove them from the land, but you could also use them. And even the church that had condoned this, debated for many, many years as to whether or not we even had souls, whether we could be converted. Once we could be converted, then we became a commodity, adding the numbers. And if we didn’t add in, then we were removed quite physically. And that was one of the legacies of the Doctrine of Discovery.
The problem is, the Doctrine of Discovery is still functioning. It has never been rescinded. And there is even documentation of government law and court cases being founded upon the Doctrine of Discovery when it comes to land issues. So it has deprived us of not only land, but resources, and even our sacred space, because we are connected to those places. Manifest Destiny, of course also, immensely. It was a divine right to remove people so that they could have their, the destiny that God had in mind for this nation, from sea to sea. I think that could have been part of God’s destiny, but I think it could have been worked out a whole lot differently in cooperation, in understanding, and not just simply by taking and removing.
Cotton Mather gave a speech or a sermon very early on when he arrived here in the colonies. And the diseases, the plagues that were going through, had removed almost 90% of the population before them. And he likened that to God’s angel going before the Israelites to remove the infidel from the land and praised God for all these deaths. And that’s a scar that is very hard to heal, to think that our deaths were the occasion of praising God.
Bishop Gregory …: And is it not accurate to say that a great number of the deaths that came from these plagues were diseases that were brought by European settlers?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Yes. And we had no real resilience against them. It takes about 500 years for the genome to change. We’re just on the cusp of finally being able to handle some of the things. And then we get this new thing called COVID, which has been a tremendous blight upon many of our people, especially on reservations.
Bishop Gregory …: In some recent discussions that we had in the North Central Jurisdiction through the specially called session of the North Central Jurisdictional Conference, Dr. Jerry DeVine, who was one of the facilitators in a session said, and I quote now, “No one here today participated in the creation of these historic realities,” referring to the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny. And then he continues, “However, no one is exempt from living in the systemic outcomes of those realities.” Say a word about how the systemic outcomes of those realities, you’ve already hinted at it, have affected both native people and affected other sisters and brothers in the human family.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Yeah. The most obvious, of course, is that our economic system in the United States is based upon land and resources that did not belong to the United States, but instead belonged to indigenous people. And there’s no way that’s ever going to be repaid. There’s no way you could repay it without bankrupting the nation. That’s one of those realities. And so everyone who lives here in the United States benefits in some way from that, except, and there, we have the Native American people who are on reservations, because they have been put very often into the least valuable lands. And the resources that were found there then were stripped off of them to benefit those outside. And that continues to be really a problem.
Also, for us, being removed from the place where we had our origins is a way of stripping us of identity. And so other people’s identity has been enhanced by ours being taken away. And where we often found ourselves was in a land that was so foreign to anything that was sacred to us before. It’s like the Israelites crying out in the Psalm, “How can you sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land?” My people, when we were removed from Ohio in 1832, were sent out to lands that did not have maple trees. Our culture was based in the maple forest. Our sweetness of life was in the maple. The things that grew in that forest, the clearings where the women were able to plant the corn, the beans and the squash, all of that had to be completely reinvented as to how do you relate to the land where you are. But in the meantime, we are looked upon as less than because we are still struggling to adapt to a different land. Sometimes that’s beyond capabilities.
Bishop Gregory …: So this adaptation, this reinvention, obviously there has been enormous capacity, even though you may still be struggling.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Oh, yes.
Bishop Gregory …: That leads me to ask this, and perhaps then other colleagues will weigh in with questions. What would it look like to fully embrace the gifts and perspectives of indigenous people, both in the church and in society more generally?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Okay. Well, the very first one that comes to mind is you’d have powerful women because we have very much egalitarian societies. Now, the European Sioux first came in, you know the old joke. They saw the man sitting in the shade of a tree while his woman was out in the field, struggling in the sunshine, hoeing the weeds out of the field, and thought they could invent a better system than that. Well, the reality was if that man had gone out there into that field, she’d have chased him out with a stick because his maleness should not interfere with her female gift of caring for the plants. He was there in that shade tree to make sure she was safe while she carried out her role. That was his role. And those roles are equally necessary, one to the other. He’s now going to go out and hunt. He’s going to bring in meat. She’s going to provide the corn, the beans, the squash. She’s the one who owns the home, all of this. And that’s very different than the European coming in and saying everything’s about the male. And the male is the one who has the power. The male is the one who owns everything. So it’s very different there.
Another thing that would be really different, I think, is that we have what we call the medicine circle. And that is a way of looking at life in a balanced manner. And I always think of what Jesus said about loving God with all of your heart, and with all your mind, with all your strength, and with all your soul. Well, that is also what John Wesley was saying when he gave the four foundations of theology – scripture and tradition, experience and reason, the mind. All those four things are same thing that Jesus said. Well, that is also the circle. It is all of those things. And when we hold everything in a circle, we begin to understand the necessity of each for the other. One cannot be greater than the other. You have to have balance.
And if we had that balance within the church, we wouldn’t have emotional arguments going on that are requiring logic, or logic being thrown at somebody feeling something just from their heart. We would know that, although we’re spiritual beings, we’ve got to work together if we’re going to become souls. That’s what experience is. As we open up our lives to that which is other than us, and really begin then to live as human beings. And if we sit, stand in a circle, no one is more important than anyone else. And if we look at one in the circle and say, “You’re different, get out,” we will then find that the circle breaks, and the one who had been holding it all together, was the one we said we didn’t want. But that is true of every human, every race, every animal, every plant, and every ecosystem. Whatever we decide we don’t need to protect, don’t want in our circle, one day, we’re going to find out that’s what was holding it all together.
Bishop Gregory …: My gracious. Thank you, Fred. Thank you.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling has a question.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Oh, all right.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Thank you so much, Bishop Palmer. And Fred, this is fascinating. It’s a privilege to be with you and to hear your story. What I’d like to explore is, you talk about, again, one culture privileging its approach, its understanding of spirituality over others, castigating our indigenous brothers and sisters, and the ways that you have experienced God and the sacred and the holy. What do we risk? What are we missing in not allowing the approach, the spirituality, the way of being in the world, to inform and reorient the entirety of Christendom of the beloved community? What are we risking?
Rev. Fred Shaw: I think what we’re risking is the Earth itself, the survival of all people. I often am struck by the fact that John Wesley had his simple words- do no harm, do all the good that you can, and be in God’s presence daily. And I remember the fact that the great laws of my people that I learned was, first of all, do no harm. Do all the good you can to the people. Be in God’s presence, walking every day. And then we had a fourth one, and that was walk in balance, harmony, beauty, and love with all things. And I think that’s what the church has lost over the years. We have tended to think only of human beings and what human beings want, and what we need is relationships with everything.
Bishop Gregory …: I think we had another question coming in.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Thank you.
Bishop Gregory …: Thank you, Bishop Easterling. Bishop McKee.
Bishop Mike McK…: Thank you Fred, for being with us. I appreciate it very much. You said a phrase a minute ago, I thought was very interesting. We need to open up our lives to others, to others meaning other than ourselves. Could you talk about that for a few minutes and about what it would be like for us to do that?
Rev. Fred Shaw: All right. I was raised really in a very isolated community, in that my family had gone underground back in 1832. The neighbors of the area had lied for us and said that we were citizens who had moved there with them and therefore could own land. My second-grade school teacher is the one who told me that story because she was descended from one of the people who had hidden my family. She told me one day, “You need to be proud of who you are. You need to also know about everybody else.”
Well, many, many years later I married that woman’s daughter, and my horizons began to expand a lot more. Nancy had already traveled through seven European countries. She’d traveled through a lot of the United States. And I suddenly realized there was more to life than where I had been living, traveling no more than two hours away from the farm. And I began a lifelong adventure of being with people and finding out that they, each and every one of them, was just so wondrous, and that they all had their own stories. And every time I took another story into myself, I became more than I’d been. And I felt a fullness and a connection with them.
I personally believe that all of us are spirits, but we have to go through experiences that open us up to other people who are spirits. And in doing that, we begin then the nurturing of the spirit into a soul, that which is going to be given back to God as a thankful gift for everything that we’ve experienced on this earth. For me, that’s the most important part of my Christianity and my spirituality is what I’m going to give back to God. I’m not going to sit there and play a harp. I don’t like the harp. I want to be doing something. And I think God’s going to have things for us to do. And we’ll be better prepared if we have as full of background as we possibly can.
Bishop Gregory …: Wow. That’s rich. That’s rich. Boy, you are really sharing vulnerably, openly and with great wisdom with all of us. And here on The Unfinished Church podcast, we’re asking all of our guests the same two questions. And so let me give you the first of those two, as we move toward an end. How do you talk with people about racial justice who don’t think, act, or look like you?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Get them laughing. Find that common ground first. One time, I was on my way to do a program, and I was in full regalia, face paint, nose ring, everything. And I was running out of gas in a part of a town that others would’ve said was blighted. And I’m standing at a gas station and pumping gas in full regalia. And several young black men were walking down the street. They looked at me and said, “Yo dude, that’s good.” And then I walked inside to pay, and there was another young black man there. And I walked in, and he looked up at me and we made eye contact. I put my hands up in the air and said, “I’m friendly.” And he said, “Oh, I sure hope so.”
And then I told him where I was going, and where I was going was to a country club to speak to the business women’s association. And I said, “I’m lost.” And he said, “I can see that.” And then I said, “Well, can you tell me where it is?” He said, “You expect me to know that?” And he and I got to laughing. It was just so outlandish. Here’s a young African American man and at that time, still a young native man, and we’re standing there laughing at the absurdity. And when I left that gas station, I had myself a new friend. And so did he.
Bishop Gregory …: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Rev. Fred Shaw: I think that’s the way you begin. You see each other’s humanity.
Bishop Gregory …: Yes.
Rev. Fred Shaw: And you listen to each other, and you find out where things are in common. And to this day, I’ve never seen him again, but I love that man.
Bishop Gregory …: Yes. Yes.
Rev. Fred Shaw: I really do.
Bishop Gregory …: Absolutely. Well, I said there were two questions on The Unfinished Church podcast we were going to ask everybody. Here’s the second one. And then we’ll turn to Bishops Easterling and McKee to see if there’s anything that just leaped out at them that they want to hold onto. But here’s the second question, Brother Fred. How do you care for your soul in the midst of this work of storytelling, of sharing culture, of opening yourselves to others, and in a world where there is so much racial and cultural animus?
Rev. Fred Shaw: One of the things that I do is I revisit people that I’ve been with in my mind and where they began to understand. I was with a group one time of just little second graders, and I’d been telling them stories. And I told them about the removal and all the things we had to give up if we wanted to stay put, if we didn’t want removed. You had to give up your language. You had to give up your spirituality, as far as outwardly. You had to change the way you dressed. You had to do all these different things. But as I first began to give the class the questions, I said, “What do you think you would have to give up if that happened to you today? What do you think I had to give up to still be here?” And this little second grader looked me in the eye and said, “You’d have to give up your heart.”
Bishop Gregory …: Oh, my. Wow.
Rev. Fred Shaw: And I could hardly speak after that for a while. That’s how my soul is strengthened.
Bishop Gregory …: Yes.
Rev. Fred Shaw: I know that the things that I have done have mattered, not because of me, but because what God does with it afterwards.
Bishop Gregory …: Amen. Amen.
Rev. Fred Shaw: And how other lives are changed. Plus, I have horses.
Bishop Gregory …: There you go. There you go. You have horses.
Bishops Easterling and McKee, anything that you want to hold onto and you want others to hold onto?
Bishop LaTrelle…: I just so appreciate the picture that Fred has painted for us of if we were to engage in the way that I think God designed us and created us to engage with one another, that is the beloved community, and it feels a lot like Heaven to me. So I just appreciate the picture that he’s painted and pray that we can live into this holistic relationship and respect of and for one another. Thank you, Fred.
Bishop Mike McK…: Fred, thank you again for being with us. So very much appreciated, especially what you talked about in terms of our relationship with the world, the earth, as you talked about it. Generally, we think about our relationships with other people because I think we human beings may be more transactional than we are relational. But I really appreciate what you said about the world and the earth in which we live, especially given the things that are happening around the world in terms of climate change and people who are living on the margins. So thank you for being with us.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Thank you, Bishop.
Bishop Gregory …: In the next episode of The Unfinished Church, please join us as we explore the importance of listening for understanding with Brian McLaren.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop Mike McK…: Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church, conversations that transform.
Bishop Mike McK…: I’m Mike McKee.
Bishop Gregory …: And I’m Gregory Palmer. Thank you for joining us for the Unfinished Church. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations, to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
Would you imagine with me for a moment what it would feel like to be in your own home land, but it’s not yours anymore. It’s been snatched from you by other people, interlopers. To have your language ripped from your tongue, to be given clothes to wear that are not your clothes, to be told that you can no longer worship your God in the way in which you understand God, and in the customs of your culture and your community. It is taking this unimaginableness into ourselves that has to be the bridge to our understanding, both our lack of relationship with Native American, indigenous Indian people here, and our need and our call to be in relationship with them. It will never happen if we don’t know their stories, the depth of their pain, the pathology of what happened to them, and the call to be agents of healing and of reconciliation.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Bishop Palmer, you make me immediately think about the saying that we’d have so much more compassion for one another if we understood one another’s stories. You also make me think about the fact that this is why it is imperative that we sit down at table, look one another in the eye, and listen to one another. I can read about the stories of dispossession that you’ve spoken of. I can think I understand it. But until I sit down and listen and am willing to really allow my mind to be transported to the times when this happened, I don’t really understand. And I think when we do that, our ability to hate, our ability to disregard, our ability to deny will be diminished. And then we’ll be able to move into a space of real authentic relationship.
Bishop Mike McK…: One of the things that has really come into my understanding that I have to admit I did not know a lot about, and I think that’s the way history gets taught, is to keep us from learning all the things that we really need to know about why we’re in the state that we’re in. But I would say that the Christian Doctrine of Discovery is very, very alarming. The idea that a group of people from Europe were allowed to go to another land far away and to do anything possible in order to convert people to Christianity is like thinking that somebody else doesn’t have something to offer, and the end justifies the means. And that is alarming. And that may be why there’s still so much distrust of people and why there’s still so much violence.
Bishop Gregory …: Today our guest is Fred Shaw, a Shawnee descendant, historian, storyteller, and pastor. It is a powerful conversation. Fred’s vulnerability, his openness and his wisdom are worthy of our hearing and of our deep respect. Let’s listen in.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Thank you, Bishop Palmer. It’s an honor to be here, and I’m so grateful that the United Methodist Church is seeking new relationships and deeper relationships with indigenous people.
Bishop Gregory …: Amen. Thank you. We are living in interesting times, and it seems that the more we learn about our country and our church’s history, the more we have yet to learn, and dare I say to repent for, actions that started centuries ago, but the pain and the rollout of which still exists today. Brother Fred, would you help us to understand from your experiences and perspective the relationship between indigenous people and the United Methodist Church?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Well one of the first questions usually asked of me is, how can you be an American-Indian and a pastor? There seems to be some sort of concept that you have to be one or the other. But the reality is, I was raised in the old Methodist church. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister for 54 years, and my father taught Sunday school for 40 years.
Bishop Gregory …: Wow.
Rev. Fred Shaw: And I grew up in that kind of an atmosphere in which my family was accepted in the church, but we also maintained our culture, our heritage. We did not have the language, that had been lost to us when we had to go underground in 1832. But we still had our same ideas of relationship to the earth, how you cared for it, and my dad was what you might call a horse whisper. That was one of his great talents. He passed that on to me, and I have to my son. So we still have those interrelationships with the church from that.
But as far as the church as a whole was concerned, it very often was adversarial in that the church, although it believed it was being altruistic in trying to save our souls, our spirits, and our bodies by having the schools and getting us to be “civilized,” the reality was that they really were used by the government and others in order to help remove us. They truly wanted to help. And Thomas Jefferson, even very early in his presidency, believed that the only way to save the American-Indian people was to remove them from contact with white civilization, because he saw that they were being corrupted very quickly. That rationale continued even through the ruthless removals of Jackson, that well, we’re saving them. We’re getting them away from all this other horrid stuff that’s around them. It just simply wasn’t accurate. It was a way of legitimizing what was being done.
What native people did was they looked at what was being done around them. And for instance, Red Jacket, who was a [inaudible 00:07:13], an Iroquois, said to a missionary one time, “I’ll listen to you when I see that the people living around me are actually living by what you’re teaching them Jesus said.” And until he saw that kind of authenticity, he was not willing to listen.
One of the problems is, really, there’s no problem with native people and Jesus. There’s a problem of native people with the church and how the church has acted toward them. The church viewed native spirituality as idolatry or as of the devil. And that was reflected in a lot of names that were given to different aspects, especially sacred places. So many spiritual places for our people were named by the settlers who came in as devil. For instance, Spirit Lake in North Dakota is called Devil’s Lake because it was a spiritual place of the Lakota people. The Devil’s Tower in Wyoming was the Bears Lodge, but named the Devil’s Tower because it was a spiritual place of the people in that area. And there’s lots of examples of that throughout the United States.
But as far as that’s concerned, you understand how they would feel, those people coming in. They were aliens. Imagine an alien spaceship coming into one of our churches and seeing us sitting there and then standing and praying and singing toward a cross. They would say that we worshiped the cross because they don’t know the rest of the story. They don’t know that the cross is a symbol that calls us into relationship with a loving God. Well, the people who came in did not understand that if they saw us praying at a tree, that we were not praying to the tree. We were giving thanks to the creator for the beauty that was in front of us, another way of being in relationship with God. And they did not understand that. And so that was a part of the problem.
I became aware of just how much more accepting native people are when I was invited to go to a sweat lodge on Puget Sound. It was led by a very traditional man. And a sweat lodge is like being in a prayer meeting in a sauna, and it gets hotter on every round of the prayers and deeper, spiritually. And I was there with Roy Wilson, who is a Cowlitz and also a United Methodist pastor. The man who was leading the sweat lodge said, “There are two with us today who, in addition to following the Red Road, follow the Jesus road. And in honor of their presence with us as brothers, I would like to end this with the prayer that their master taught.” And we ended a traditional sweat lodge with the Lord’s prayer.
Bishop Gregory …: Wow. Wow.
Rev. Fred Shaw: That was very exciting to me.
Bishop Gregory …: That’s fabulous.
Rev. Fred Shaw: The other thing I would say about our relationship is that when I was the director of the Native American course of study for local pastors, one of our students is Dene, Navajo. He was raised up in one of our boarding schools, or a boarding school. And after a couple of years in the program, he wrote me a note and he said, “You know, for the first time in my life, I am Dene and I am Christian. And I do not feel that I am betraying one or the other.” That’s where we need to get with the church.
Bishop Gregory …: So that’s about right teaching versus, let me say, wrong teaching. And that said, how then, might you say, has the Christian Doctrine of Discovery contributed to all of this and manifest destiny? How has that affected you and all other indigenous people?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Well, as soon as you have the Doctrine of Discovery, of course, you have this statement that any Christian prince can send out representatives and claim land that is occupied by those who are not Christian. What happened was they quickly were seen as subservient then. Not only could you remove them from the land, but you could also use them. And even the church that had condoned this, debated for many, many years as to whether or not we even had souls, whether we could be converted. Once we could be converted, then we became a commodity, adding the numbers. And if we didn’t add in, then we were removed quite physically. And that was one of the legacies of the Doctrine of Discovery.
The problem is, the Doctrine of Discovery is still functioning. It has never been rescinded. And there is even documentation of government law and court cases being founded upon the Doctrine of Discovery when it comes to land issues. So it has deprived us of not only land, but resources, and even our sacred space, because we are connected to those places. Manifest Destiny, of course also, immensely. It was a divine right to remove people so that they could have their, the destiny that God had in mind for this nation, from sea to sea. I think that could have been part of God’s destiny, but I think it could have been worked out a whole lot differently in cooperation, in understanding, and not just simply by taking and removing.
Cotton Mather gave a speech or a sermon very early on when he arrived here in the colonies. And the diseases, the plagues that were going through, had removed almost 90% of the population before them. And he likened that to God’s angel going before the Israelites to remove the infidel from the land and praised God for all these deaths. And that’s a scar that is very hard to heal, to think that our deaths were the occasion of praising God.
Bishop Gregory …: And is it not accurate to say that a great number of the deaths that came from these plagues were diseases that were brought by European settlers?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Yes. And we had no real resilience against them. It takes about 500 years for the genome to change. We’re just on the cusp of finally being able to handle some of the things. And then we get this new thing called COVID, which has been a tremendous blight upon many of our people, especially on reservations.
Bishop Gregory …: In some recent discussions that we had in the North Central Jurisdiction through the specially called session of the North Central Jurisdictional Conference, Dr. Jerry DeVine, who was one of the facilitators in a session said, and I quote now, “No one here today participated in the creation of these historic realities,” referring to the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny. And then he continues, “However, no one is exempt from living in the systemic outcomes of those realities.” Say a word about how the systemic outcomes of those realities, you’ve already hinted at it, have affected both native people and affected other sisters and brothers in the human family.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Yeah. The most obvious, of course, is that our economic system in the United States is based upon land and resources that did not belong to the United States, but instead belonged to indigenous people. And there’s no way that’s ever going to be repaid. There’s no way you could repay it without bankrupting the nation. That’s one of those realities. And so everyone who lives here in the United States benefits in some way from that, except, and there, we have the Native American people who are on reservations, because they have been put very often into the least valuable lands. And the resources that were found there then were stripped off of them to benefit those outside. And that continues to be really a problem.
Also, for us, being removed from the place where we had our origins is a way of stripping us of identity. And so other people’s identity has been enhanced by ours being taken away. And where we often found ourselves was in a land that was so foreign to anything that was sacred to us before. It’s like the Israelites crying out in the Psalm, “How can you sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land?” My people, when we were removed from Ohio in 1832, were sent out to lands that did not have maple trees. Our culture was based in the maple forest. Our sweetness of life was in the maple. The things that grew in that forest, the clearings where the women were able to plant the corn, the beans and the squash, all of that had to be completely reinvented as to how do you relate to the land where you are. But in the meantime, we are looked upon as less than because we are still struggling to adapt to a different land. Sometimes that’s beyond capabilities.
Bishop Gregory …: So this adaptation, this reinvention, obviously there has been enormous capacity, even though you may still be struggling.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Oh, yes.
Bishop Gregory …: That leads me to ask this, and perhaps then other colleagues will weigh in with questions. What would it look like to fully embrace the gifts and perspectives of indigenous people, both in the church and in society more generally?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Okay. Well, the very first one that comes to mind is you’d have powerful women because we have very much egalitarian societies. Now, the European Sioux first came in, you know the old joke. They saw the man sitting in the shade of a tree while his woman was out in the field, struggling in the sunshine, hoeing the weeds out of the field, and thought they could invent a better system than that. Well, the reality was if that man had gone out there into that field, she’d have chased him out with a stick because his maleness should not interfere with her female gift of caring for the plants. He was there in that shade tree to make sure she was safe while she carried out her role. That was his role. And those roles are equally necessary, one to the other. He’s now going to go out and hunt. He’s going to bring in meat. She’s going to provide the corn, the beans, the squash. She’s the one who owns the home, all of this. And that’s very different than the European coming in and saying everything’s about the male. And the male is the one who has the power. The male is the one who owns everything. So it’s very different there.
Another thing that would be really different, I think, is that we have what we call the medicine circle. And that is a way of looking at life in a balanced manner. And I always think of what Jesus said about loving God with all of your heart, and with all your mind, with all your strength, and with all your soul. Well, that is also what John Wesley was saying when he gave the four foundations of theology – scripture and tradition, experience and reason, the mind. All those four things are same thing that Jesus said. Well, that is also the circle. It is all of those things. And when we hold everything in a circle, we begin to understand the necessity of each for the other. One cannot be greater than the other. You have to have balance.
And if we had that balance within the church, we wouldn’t have emotional arguments going on that are requiring logic, or logic being thrown at somebody feeling something just from their heart. We would know that, although we’re spiritual beings, we’ve got to work together if we’re going to become souls. That’s what experience is. As we open up our lives to that which is other than us, and really begin then to live as human beings. And if we sit, stand in a circle, no one is more important than anyone else. And if we look at one in the circle and say, “You’re different, get out,” we will then find that the circle breaks, and the one who had been holding it all together, was the one we said we didn’t want. But that is true of every human, every race, every animal, every plant, and every ecosystem. Whatever we decide we don’t need to protect, don’t want in our circle, one day, we’re going to find out that’s what was holding it all together.
Bishop Gregory …: My gracious. Thank you, Fred. Thank you.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling has a question.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Oh, all right.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Thank you so much, Bishop Palmer. And Fred, this is fascinating. It’s a privilege to be with you and to hear your story. What I’d like to explore is, you talk about, again, one culture privileging its approach, its understanding of spirituality over others, castigating our indigenous brothers and sisters, and the ways that you have experienced God and the sacred and the holy. What do we risk? What are we missing in not allowing the approach, the spirituality, the way of being in the world, to inform and reorient the entirety of Christendom of the beloved community? What are we risking?
Rev. Fred Shaw: I think what we’re risking is the Earth itself, the survival of all people. I often am struck by the fact that John Wesley had his simple words- do no harm, do all the good that you can, and be in God’s presence daily. And I remember the fact that the great laws of my people that I learned was, first of all, do no harm. Do all the good you can to the people. Be in God’s presence, walking every day. And then we had a fourth one, and that was walk in balance, harmony, beauty, and love with all things. And I think that’s what the church has lost over the years. We have tended to think only of human beings and what human beings want, and what we need is relationships with everything.
Bishop Gregory …: I think we had another question coming in.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Thank you.
Bishop Gregory …: Thank you, Bishop Easterling. Bishop McKee.
Bishop Mike McK…: Thank you Fred, for being with us. I appreciate it very much. You said a phrase a minute ago, I thought was very interesting. We need to open up our lives to others, to others meaning other than ourselves. Could you talk about that for a few minutes and about what it would be like for us to do that?
Rev. Fred Shaw: All right. I was raised really in a very isolated community, in that my family had gone underground back in 1832. The neighbors of the area had lied for us and said that we were citizens who had moved there with them and therefore could own land. My second-grade school teacher is the one who told me that story because she was descended from one of the people who had hidden my family. She told me one day, “You need to be proud of who you are. You need to also know about everybody else.”
Well, many, many years later I married that woman’s daughter, and my horizons began to expand a lot more. Nancy had already traveled through seven European countries. She’d traveled through a lot of the United States. And I suddenly realized there was more to life than where I had been living, traveling no more than two hours away from the farm. And I began a lifelong adventure of being with people and finding out that they, each and every one of them, was just so wondrous, and that they all had their own stories. And every time I took another story into myself, I became more than I’d been. And I felt a fullness and a connection with them.
I personally believe that all of us are spirits, but we have to go through experiences that open us up to other people who are spirits. And in doing that, we begin then the nurturing of the spirit into a soul, that which is going to be given back to God as a thankful gift for everything that we’ve experienced on this earth. For me, that’s the most important part of my Christianity and my spirituality is what I’m going to give back to God. I’m not going to sit there and play a harp. I don’t like the harp. I want to be doing something. And I think God’s going to have things for us to do. And we’ll be better prepared if we have as full of background as we possibly can.
Bishop Gregory …: Wow. That’s rich. That’s rich. Boy, you are really sharing vulnerably, openly and with great wisdom with all of us. And here on The Unfinished Church podcast, we’re asking all of our guests the same two questions. And so let me give you the first of those two, as we move toward an end. How do you talk with people about racial justice who don’t think, act, or look like you?
Rev. Fred Shaw: Get them laughing. Find that common ground first. One time, I was on my way to do a program, and I was in full regalia, face paint, nose ring, everything. And I was running out of gas in a part of a town that others would’ve said was blighted. And I’m standing at a gas station and pumping gas in full regalia. And several young black men were walking down the street. They looked at me and said, “Yo dude, that’s good.” And then I walked inside to pay, and there was another young black man there. And I walked in, and he looked up at me and we made eye contact. I put my hands up in the air and said, “I’m friendly.” And he said, “Oh, I sure hope so.”
And then I told him where I was going, and where I was going was to a country club to speak to the business women’s association. And I said, “I’m lost.” And he said, “I can see that.” And then I said, “Well, can you tell me where it is?” He said, “You expect me to know that?” And he and I got to laughing. It was just so outlandish. Here’s a young African American man and at that time, still a young native man, and we’re standing there laughing at the absurdity. And when I left that gas station, I had myself a new friend. And so did he.
Bishop Gregory …: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Rev. Fred Shaw: I think that’s the way you begin. You see each other’s humanity.
Bishop Gregory …: Yes.
Rev. Fred Shaw: And you listen to each other, and you find out where things are in common. And to this day, I’ve never seen him again, but I love that man.
Bishop Gregory …: Yes. Yes.
Rev. Fred Shaw: I really do.
Bishop Gregory …: Absolutely. Well, I said there were two questions on The Unfinished Church podcast we were going to ask everybody. Here’s the second one. And then we’ll turn to Bishops Easterling and McKee to see if there’s anything that just leaped out at them that they want to hold onto. But here’s the second question, Brother Fred. How do you care for your soul in the midst of this work of storytelling, of sharing culture, of opening yourselves to others, and in a world where there is so much racial and cultural animus?
Rev. Fred Shaw: One of the things that I do is I revisit people that I’ve been with in my mind and where they began to understand. I was with a group one time of just little second graders, and I’d been telling them stories. And I told them about the removal and all the things we had to give up if we wanted to stay put, if we didn’t want removed. You had to give up your language. You had to give up your spirituality, as far as outwardly. You had to change the way you dressed. You had to do all these different things. But as I first began to give the class the questions, I said, “What do you think you would have to give up if that happened to you today? What do you think I had to give up to still be here?” And this little second grader looked me in the eye and said, “You’d have to give up your heart.”
Bishop Gregory …: Oh, my. Wow.
Rev. Fred Shaw: And I could hardly speak after that for a while. That’s how my soul is strengthened.
Bishop Gregory …: Yes.
Rev. Fred Shaw: I know that the things that I have done have mattered, not because of me, but because what God does with it afterwards.
Bishop Gregory …: Amen. Amen.
Rev. Fred Shaw: And how other lives are changed. Plus, I have horses.
Bishop Gregory …: There you go. There you go. You have horses.
Bishops Easterling and McKee, anything that you want to hold onto and you want others to hold onto?
Bishop LaTrelle…: I just so appreciate the picture that Fred has painted for us of if we were to engage in the way that I think God designed us and created us to engage with one another, that is the beloved community, and it feels a lot like Heaven to me. So I just appreciate the picture that he’s painted and pray that we can live into this holistic relationship and respect of and for one another. Thank you, Fred.
Bishop Mike McK…: Fred, thank you again for being with us. So very much appreciated, especially what you talked about in terms of our relationship with the world, the earth, as you talked about it. Generally, we think about our relationships with other people because I think we human beings may be more transactional than we are relational. But I really appreciate what you said about the world and the earth in which we live, especially given the things that are happening around the world in terms of climate change and people who are living on the margins. So thank you for being with us.
Rev. Fred Shaw: Thank you, Bishop.
Bishop Gregory …: In the next episode of The Unfinished Church, please join us as we explore the importance of listening for understanding with Brian McLaren.
Bishop LaTrelle…: Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop Mike McK…: Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church, conversations that transform.
resources
Listening is an important first step in the work of antiracism. Are you ready to do more? Here are some helpful resources to help you dig in deeper to the topics discussed in this episode.
More about Fred Shaw and the Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band
Native American Comprehensive Plan of The United Methodist Church
“Pastor Reflects on Abuses at Indian Boarding Schools,”
from United Methodist News
11 Facts About Native People In Society and the Church from GCORR
No Holiness But Social Holiness by Steve Manskar
General Rules of the Church
Resolution 3331. Doctrine of Discovery
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
More about Fred Shaw and the Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band
Native American Comprehensive Plan of The United Methodist Church
“Pastor Reflects on Abuses at Indian Boarding Schools,”
from United Methodist News
11 Facts About Native People In Society and the Church from GCORR
No Holiness But Social Holiness by Steve Manskar
General Rules of the Church
Resolution 3331. Doctrine of Discovery
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
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EPISODE 5
Listening for Understanding with Brian McLaren Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist and public theologian. He is a passionate advocate for a new kind of Christianity–just, generous and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is a faculty member of The Living School and podcaster with Learning How to See, which are part of the Center for Action and Contemplation. He is also an Auburn Senior Fellow and is a co-host of Southern Lights. His newest book is Faith After Doubt, and his next release, Do I Stay Christian? can be ordered now. McLaren is a popular conference speaker, guest lecturer and frequent guest on television, radio and news media programs. He has taught or lectured at many seminaries and denominational and interfaith gatherings. McLaren is married to Grace, and they have four adult children and five grandchildren. His personal interests include wildlife and ecology, fly fishing and kayaking, music and songwriting, and literature. This best-selling author and theologian joins the bishops in a conversation about choosing curiosity of certainty, fostering a climate for seeing and telling hard truths and nurturing the gifts that can create deep and genuine friendships. |
full transcript
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Welcome to the Unfinished Church.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
I’m Gregory Palmer.
Bishop Mike McKee:
I’m Mike McKee.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
And I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
I’m so looking forward to our hearing this conversation with Brian McLaren. One of the things that he says that continues to resonate with me is this notion of the family secret. And I think we can all relate to that. One of the ways, or one of the problems with doing the work of anti-racism, is that some folks believe they’re going to have to disavow a family member, that as they look back and are honest about their family’s history, they’re going to have to hate their grandfather. They’re going to have to disavow their relationship with their great-grandmother. And we know that, that’s not necessary, but there’s some human compulsion that we think if we admit that our families owned slaves, or that there was racist rhetoric, that we would need to completely disassociate ourselves with them. That’s a painful thing to have to think about. And it reminds me of that great saying, “If we ask people to change, we better be there for them when they do.” How are we going to be a part of the healing with them?
Bishop Mike McKee:
One of the things that resonated with me was this capacity to listen well. And if you remember, Brian McLaren talked about an incident in his own life, his faith journey, in which he talked about doubt, his doubt. And the person who was listening to him didn’t just nod his head and say, “I understand, I hear you.” Instead he offered something else, something so good that I’m excited that other people are going to hear that story in a few moments. So I think this idea of secrets and listening is so important to understanding what it means to overcome racism in our own lives and in the lives of those who we remember who came before us.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Well, I’m going to get on the train with both of you about this family secret thing. And the phrase that keeps popping into my head comes out of family systems theory. And I don’t know if it was Mary Boham or Ed Friedman, but “secrets are the plaque in the arteries of communication.” One phrase that I remember. So just imagine that sociologically, imagine that between nations, that the secrets actually keep us from coming together. We think we’re protecting ourselves, maybe protecting other people, we’re actually making the harm go on longer. So, that’s one of the things that I take away from the conversation, that we’ve got to overcome our secrets and open up the arteries of communication between us, wherever the differences are. The other thing that occurs to me as I listen to him is that book he did a number of years ago, entitled A Generous Orthodoxy. His spirit and his tone exuded generosity. And it is possible for us to have strong convictions and to not be vitriolic about them.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
This week, we are talking about listening for understanding with Brian McLaren. The word of God repeatedly calls us to listen – “Listen to advice and accept instruction that you may gain wisdom in the future.” That’s Proverbs 19 and 20. “Whoever has ears, let them hear,” from Matthew, the 11th chapter, the 15th verse, and “a cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud, this is my beloved son. Listen to him,” from the book of Mark the ninth chapter, the seventh verse. Yet empathic listening, sacred listening, isn’t something that comes naturally for most people. It is far more natural to begin formulating our rebuttal rather than releasing ourselves to be fully present to the speaker. Deep listening requires courage, humility, and the possibility of needing to expand one’s thinking. Bridging the gap of racial inequity in this country and building relationships across racial difference will require this type of listening.
We are thrilled to be joined by author, speaker, activist and public theologian, Rev. Brian McLaren, a former college English teacher and pastor. He is a passionate advocate for a new kind of Christianity, one that is just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. Brian, welcome to the Unfinished Church.
Brian McLaren:
Well, I feel like I’m right where I belong if we’re talking about being unfinished.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Amen. Amen. So let’s get right to the deepest things that we know. In your journey from fundamentalism to where you are today, you have clearly learned to enter conversations with curiosity and not certainty. How did you muster the courage to begin your journey to think and listen beyond your original construct of beliefs and bias?
Brian McLaren:
First that question, I think contains the answer in it, because I do think all of us are raised within one sort or another of a bubble, where there’s a set of expectations. In fact, it’s part of what makes us feel safe as children. We’re around family members and extended family and friends, and maybe even church brothers and sisters. We see the world the same way, we share assumptions, and it feels like a safe and comfortable world to grow up in. But I think for me, even when I was a student in secondary school, and I would meet students from other religious backgrounds and other racial and ethnic backgrounds, and I would see they had a different viewpoint on the world than I had.
And I remember feeling if I’m faithful to my religious community, I just have to judge these people as wrong. But if I judge these people as wrong, I feel I’m being unfaithful to Jesus who said to love your neighbor as yourself. And part of loving your neighbor as yourself is wanting to be listened to and paid respect, and not written off before you even get your first word out because of who you are, or how you look. And so I think for me, it began even when I was in high school, it certainly intensified in college, but I often tell the story of a real transforming moment for me that happened when I was in graduate school. My wife and I had just gotten married, moved into a new apartment, and that was part of graduate student housing at my university, and my next door neighbor, my neighbor above me in the next department, was an Iranian family. And there was a little boy named Armen. I think he was about eight years old. And Armen became, in some ways, my first interfaith and cross-cultural ambassador.
And he was such a charming and persistent and resilient kid that he and I just hit it off, and he was my first Muslim friend. And I remember feeling this friendship is changing me.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Well, indeed. And scripture always tells us, the little children shall lead us.
Brian McLaren:
Listen, this is a case in point. That’s right.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
So if we could go even a little bit deeper on the sacred practice of listening, in your book, Faith After Doubt, you state, it’s scary to be a sinner falling into the hands of an angry God, but it can be equally scary to be a doubter falling into the hands of angry believers. Doubt can breach the psychological fortress in which we felt safe, and you talked about feeling safe a moment ago. Tear up the internal map by which we’ve navigated the world and threatens to separate us from God’s favor and love. And then beyond all those losses, it can rob us of the relationships most near and dear to us. So I ask you, what advice would you give us on how to engage in this kind of deep listening across lines of division beyond the framework of fear, that fear that keeps us so bound?
Brian McLaren:
Oh, my, Bishop, when I was in college, I was going through an extended period of doubt and I remember being deeply afraid. I wasn’t sure God existed anymore. I wasn’t sure about so many things that I’d, not only been brought up to believe, but had become very personally committed to. And I had a dear friend who one day, we didn’t use this term back then, but he was really like a pastor to me as just a layperson, and like a spiritual director to me, even though that wasn’t a term I’d ever heard of. And I got up my courage and I told him about all my doubts. I just said, I’m just not sure of this and this and this. And I poured up my heart. He’s sitting across this living room from me and he says, well, Brian, he said, I really hear you, that you’re having doubts, and God doesn’t seem real to you. He said, I just want you to know, God is real to me. And right now I have enough faith for both of us. So it really doesn’t matter to me how your faith is or not.
Brian McLaren:
And then he said to me, if you were to become an atheist tomorrow, it wouldn’t change our friendship. I’m your friend, no matter what. And that little phrase, friend no matter what, I remember said something to me that I don’t think I had ever experienced. I wasn’t sure if my parents would be my friend, no matter what, if I didn’t believe what they taught me. And to have a human being say it and I think meant it. And so I think one of the things that really helps is if we’ve ever experienced unconditional love from anybody, it helps us then have the courage to really listen and to be open to things that might upset the apple cart, so to speak. To have a friend, or a soul brother, a sister, a friend, who knows us and accepts us unconditionally, I think helps us have the courage to enter into some challenging and dangerous territory. A lot of people maybe have never had that though.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Exactly. And don’t you think, especially on the topic of race, especially with how divisive and explosive that topic is right now, to be able to claim that kind of safe space, that kind of no matter your question, no matter your history, no matter what you bring to this conversation, I’ll be your friend, no matter what. I just would think that would be such a gift for us to be able to bridge this chasm that we have right now around racism.
Brian McLaren:
This is the, I think you just touched Bishop Easterling on this key idea that has made sense to me for a long time. And I wonder if it’ll make sense to other people. I think that white people’s problem with people of color is actually a problem with other white people, or it’s largely a problem with other white people. In other words, the prejudices and biases and bigotry and unexamined assumptions of their fellow white community, poses to them a threat. They know that if they were to disagree with those things, they aren’t sure they would be accepted by other white people. And it’s as if there’s this unwritten contract in a lot of social settings that we allow a certain amount of diversity. But if you disagree on these things, you touch the ungrounded electric cord, and you’re going to get a shock in response.
And here is where you brought up the word courage before. And I do think there comes a moment where people make in a split second, they decide, do I have the courage to differ from the people that I’ve never even thought about this consciously, but there are people who have power over me, the power of potential rejection? And am I willing to risk that on behalf of what I think really matters?
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Indeed, indeed. In an article entitled, “Racism among white Christians is higher than among the nonreligious. That’s no coincidence,” written by Robert P. Jones, he states white Christians are consistently more likely than whites who are religiously unaffiliated, to deny the existence of structural racism.
Brian McLaren:
Yes.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
So now I’m going to turn this topic on its head. If that is the case, what do those of us within sacred circles need to stop listening to? How do disabuse ourselves of these notions?
Brian McLaren:
Well, speaking personally, I remember the groundbreaking moment for me. I was in my fifties, and I’m a pretty well-read person. I take my faith seriously. I’m curious. I love to read. And it wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I even heard of something called the Doctrine of Discovery. And the story that goes way back, everybody knows the date 1492, but the date 1452 ends up being even more significant, because on that date and in the years that followed, Pope Nicholas V and the following popes, issued a series of letters to the Christian Kings of Europe, telling them, and people will think I’m making this up unless they go read it themselves. And they can easily do that by googling Doctrine of Discovery. But the Pope said to the Christian Kings of Europe, go into all the world and make slaves of all nations. This unbelievable “great commission,” that came from the highest leader of the Christian religion.
And when I learned about this, things started clicking into place. I felt like I’d uncovered the family secret. And when I uncovered the family secret, and I realized that deep in our history was this sense of superiority for Christians, let’s call this Christian supremacy or, and another term for it is Christian exceptionalism, Christians were given the right, God-given right through the Pope to make slaves of other nations. Once I saw that, I realized that European Christian supremacy became white supremacy. And so now there is a theological dimension to this supremacy. When I understood that, I realized that this was pervasive in Christian history. And the Protestants, when they broke away a few decades later, they had their version of it, and the Catholics had their version of it.
But so in a certain sense, Bishop, what I feel is, it’s that we have to take everything from our Christian history from 1452 to the present, and look at it with a certain amount of critique to say, where is that supremacy built in, subtly or in obvious ways? Where is it built in? And I think we’re not going to get to where we need to be until we’re willing to interrogate our family secret in that way. Does that make sense?
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
It makes absolute sense. And I love that turn of phrase, the family secret, if you will. And again, these familial relationships, not only our family of origin, but our Christian family, we’re so connected to that, to be able to say that there’s something wrong from its inception, that there was something that was inappropriate baked into it. For me, there’s always this resistance from individuals that are engaging the topic of anti-racism. You’re asking me to disown my ancestors. You’re asking me to hate my family of origin. You’re asking me to hate my great, great grandfather. And I guess what you’ve just articulated helps us understand that. To be willing to go back and deconstruct something from its inception might feel like disengaging with that community. But in fact, it is simply, if I hear you correctly, it’s going back and then reconstructing what was meant from the beginning, what would’ve been appropriate from the beginning.
Brian McLaren:
I think that’s right. And there’s an interesting way that, what Jesus said about the truth setting you free, really applies here. Because if I look back and realize that my ancestors were part of a religion that was perpetuating a set of assumptions, hidden between the lines, hidden, it was intentionally hidden. If I realize this, then it doesn’t make me hate my ancestors, it makes me in a sense, have compassion on them that they were part, that they themselves were sucked into something. They were never given an alternative to it. They were never given a say in it. They were born into it and raised into it.
But see, what that does is it simultaneously allows me to name, if I want to use the word sin, or to name the wrong, or to name the injustice, to not feel superior over anybody, but to understand that this was part of the deck of cards that they were given. And then it simultaneously puts a moral summons on my life. Am I going to perpetuate the family secret, or am I going to make a break with it? And am I going to acknowledge the harm that has been done by this secret? And now try to be part of healing it. I feel this acutely, because I know that this Christian supremacy was so deeply embedded in my ancestors. And I know that it resulted in all kinds of supremacy, including racial. Yeah.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Absolutely.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Brian, it’s so good to have you with us today. And as I was listening to you, there was something that occurred to me about American Christianity. We are certain about so many things and it is like, we prefer that certainty over any kind of clarity about a moral vision.
Brian McLaren:
Yes.
Bishop Mike McKee:
What God really might be doing in the world. And I contend that, that may be a particular issue, one issue for the church right now. So how do we get around this certainty? How do we engage with people who are so certain that what they say and what they believe is absolute God-given truth? How do we get them to an awakening of the spirit within each other?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah.
Bishop Mike McKee:
I think that’s a challenge for American Christianity.
Brian McLaren:
I think that’s an understatement, Bishop, that’s right. It’s a challenge. We have to do it. We have to engage it. But the first thing is we better expect it’s going to make some people mad first. When we study about the dying process, we often say that there are stages in the dying process. And when a person gets a diagnosis that they don’t want to hear, their first reaction is denial. And I think denial is just this part of, it’s part of us. I happen to be present at a terrible accident scene once. And there was a person, I don’t want to describe it because it was quite gory, but the person who’d been severely injured, I’ll never forget what he said as he was lying on the ground. He said, I don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want this to be happening. And I just remember as he said it, I thought, I totally understand how you feel.
And I think what happens is, a lot of our lives are difficult. We’re dealing with a whole lot and somebody comes and says, your entire culture is hiding a secret. Your entire culture is built on a myth. You’re stage managing everything to keep a family secret, secret. People who might be able to understand this is anyone who’s had addiction in the family. We’ve all met families where dad was an alcoholic and mom and the kids, he might beat them up, and they wear long sleeve shirts to cover the bruises. Everybody is conscripted to help keep the secret. There is just no easy way to be the first one to break the secret. Look, sometimes this is super costly. I think about a friend of mine. She had been sexually molested by a family member. And when she went public, her entire family turned against her, and they just felt like you’re ruining our family. You’re destroying our family.
So these things are not easy. And all that I think we could do at this moment for anyone who’s listening, who on some level knows we’re keeping a secret, we’re covering something up, their certainty has a tiny bit of a crack in it. Then all we can say to them is, we love you. We understand this is a process for you to come to develop the courage to face this secret. You might not be ready today, but today you might say, I hope I’ll be ready tomorrow. In other words, you start a process of moving toward readiness. But there are other people, and these are the ones that in some sense I’m most worried about, they would hear a conversation like this and all they would feel is fury and anger. And the thing I would say to them is, I certainly hope you could at least imagine this. Maybe we’re wrong, maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’ve become part of a group that’s deceived us all. But if you think that’s possible for me, I hope you’ll be open to the possibility that it’s possible for you too.
And you, at least, if you love the truth, you at least owe yourself to give the same scrutiny to what you believe as you’re applying to what seems so disturbing that I, or others, might be saying. And I don’t know if there’s any shortcut around that, Bishop McKee, because if people, to quote Jesus, “if they love darkness rather than light, they will not step out into the light.” They won’t want to learn the fact. And I just think that’s a harsh, moral choice. And let’s be honest, one of the terrible things our churches do, is they allow people to show up Sunday after Sunday, and traffic in the language of forgiveness and grace, when they’re unwilling to seek the truth, if that truth is painful.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
That’s powerful. What you’ve described in essence, Brian, is convicted humility. That convicted humility that I think is so important for this work and any work that’s going to take us beyond superficiality.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
As you were talking about this readiness, and as I was listening to you, I was hearing a couple of things leap from the Gospel pages. One phrase is repent and believe the gospel. And then I was thinking about this image of repentance. And I was thinking about the way Matthew narrated the ministry of John the Baptist as people were going out to him. He has some fairly harsh language, you brood of vipers, et cetera, but this phrase sticks with me. So let’s say repentance comes for any individual, any group, any tribe. And there’s this phrase that haunts me, and I’d love to know what you think a picture would look like. He says, therefore, produce fruit that proves your repentance. King Jimmy says, refers to it as repentance and neatness. What does the fruit of repentance? So let’s assume we help through our preaching ministry to get people ready to that place of readiness you’ve described. It’s all the Holy Spirit. We know that, but what does that fruit look like?
Brian McLaren:
The beautiful thing about fruit is that it calms, when the conditions are right, the fruit calms. And what’s so beautiful about this in the Gospel, I think especially for the apostle Paul in Galatians, he says, look, if you want to figure out the condition of the heart, look at the fruit you’re already producing. In other words, the condition of your heart will produce fruit. And if the fruit is anger and dissension and fractiousness, and if people are biting and devouring one another in a hateful division, you already know what the condition of your heart is, the fruit is telling you. And if you’re gentle and peaceful and patient and kind and forbearing, if you’re willing to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice, if you see that having your heart, there’s no more evidence you need of the condition of your heart and the presence of the spirit at work and your life.
And so it seems to me, that part of what’s going on in our nation right now is that we have one group of people who are facing our history and facing the truth, and they’re bringing forth fruit of repentance. So this might mean that white people, for the first time in their lives, aren’t trying to tell people of color the way things are. But they’re asking people of color, help me understand the way things are for you. I can speak to this very personally, because I grew up in a white subculture that assumed that white people were right. And my paternal grandfather, I remember he could not stand Dr. King. I grew up, I was coming of age in those times. My paternal grandfather could not stand Dr. King. He always called him that communist. That was his way of attacking him.
My father, I lived just outside of Washington, DC, and while the March on Washington was going on, my father put my brother and I, just little boys, in the backseat of our station wagon and drove us down so that we could go and see that. He said to me, “History is taking place. I want you kids to remember this. This is an important day in history.” And he knew that the changes that were happening needed to happen. And he knew that we were young and couldn’t fully grasp the significance of it. But to this day, I remember looking out the window and seeing the crowds of people who had amassed in Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign. And because my father had the courage to differ from his father, I remember to this day being there. And I’m so grateful for my father’s example in that.
But very often I would say, Bishop Palmer, that the first fruit of repentance is very often the courage to speak up and differ from those around you. It doesn’t mean having to attack and tell people they’re… and call them names. But it very often means saying, “Dad, I don’t see it that way. Mom, I don’t see it that way. Brother, I understand what you’re saying. I don’t see it that way. My heart’s changed. I used to think like you, I can’t think that way anymore.” And that takes some courage, but I think it’s like breaking a sound barrier, that’s also breaking the spell of denial.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Thank you.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
That word courage just keeps coming up, doesn’t it? That word courage just keeps resonating as a part of this conversation. And what a rich conversation we are having. And Rev. McLaren, we’re asking all guests two questions. So I wonder if you might allow me to pose these to you now. How do you talk with people about racial justice who don’t think, act, or look like yourself?
Brian McLaren:
A moment comes to mind that has been repeated, I think about three times, but the first moment came in 2008, right after the presidential election. And I was in Wilmington, Delaware, I was there to speak. And it was early in the morning, I was walking down the street from my hotel to a coffee shop. And I, as a white man walking down the street, an African-American is walking in the other direction and our eyes met. And I smiled and I said, it’s a good morning. And he smiled at me and he said, yes, we can. And it was a moment where the two of us in just a second it took to pass each other, gave each other a signal that we understand the dynamics that are going on.
A couple of just four, maybe five years ago, I was walking down the street, again, I was traveling. I was walking down the street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and there’d just been a mass killing. And a man was coming by walking his bicycle up the sidewalk, a man there in New Mexico, probably of Mexican descent, and our eyes met. And this was a day when we were all reeling from yet another mass killing. And he caught my eye and he said, good afternoon, my brother. And he’s, as a person of color, caught the eye of a white man. And he didn’t want to just let us walk by without making eye contact. We made eye contact. And I think there are these moments where we just make contact as human beings. And we say, we’re stepping out of the roles that racial categories have taught us to occupy separate worlds and never address the realities we face.
And so I would say Bishop, that’s one of the things that I try to do, I try to make those personal contacts and it’s almost a kind of signaling to one another. I’m your friend, I’m not your foe. I’m your brother, I’m not your enemy. And I think it shows in a hundred different ways, sometimes in words, sometimes in deed, that we rebuild those connections.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Yeah. That is very powerful. The second question is how do you care for your soul in the midst of this anti-racism work?
Brian McLaren:
One of the things I find myself saying to myself quite often, I’ll be speaking to a group and I’ll feel enormous affirmation from some people and from other people, I can feel the daggers. I know that I’m making their lives more difficult. This is especially for white folks. If they accept what I’m saying, it’s going to put them in trouble with many people in their social circle of other white people. And so when the daggers come, or the resistance comes, I just try to do two things. For my own ego, and I try to say this isn’t about you, this isn’t about you, you just made their lives more difficult. Of course, they’re upset a little bit with you. And in that sense, I try to then have compassion for them.
It just happened to me this week. This past week, I was speaking at a retreat for pastors and one pastor came up afterwards and he said, “This was very hard for me. These conversations were very hard for me.” And he explained about his congregation. And I just said to him, I know it’s hard. I’ve been there. And my heart goes out to you. And I thank you for being willing to bear the pain. I didn’t let them off the hook and say, don’t worry about it. I said, thank you for being willing to bear the pain.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
I appreciate that. It reminds me of a statement I heard once. And I confess, I don’t remember the individual who said it, but it was, if we ask people to change, we better be there for them when they do.
Brian McLaren:
Oh my.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
And so just that connection of, I hear you, brother. Again, not letting off the hook, but being present to that moment, that epiphany and that confession of what they’re going through, sometimes I think is just enough, to allow someone to continue this very difficult work. We shouldn’t make light of how difficult this work is. Again, we’ve talked about what it can cost someone in terms of relationships, but also just within themselves, to be willing to confront something and admit I was wrong. So I appreciate that. You give me much hope and the statement that I’m going to carry forward, perhaps it was even the way you said it, when the conditions are right, the fruit comes. There’s a hopefulness in that for me. There’s the right kind of certitude in that for me. I wonder if there’s something that either Bishop Palmer or Bishop McKee would say has resonated for them in this conversation.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
What leaped out at, let me say a dozen things leaped out at me, but the one that I’m latched onto at this moment, is this notion of friend, no matter what. What does it mean? And I know I’m taking a little license here, but I’m wrestling with the voice of Jesus or the words of Jesus. I no longer call you servants, but friends. So, I feel pulled by your conversation, brother Brian, into what does genuine friendship look like in a hostile world?
Brian McLaren:
Thank you.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Bishop Easterling, I would echo what you said about fruit. Seems to me that one of the dangers that may be happening in the church, I don’t know if I should use the word danger, is that we are not focused on bearing fruit. Some people think that we are, but sometimes I think we’re focusing on weeds that grow and forget it is really fruit that we are supposed to produce instead of a lot of weeds and a lot of trouble for people. And I think this is a right time for American Christianity to recover this centeredness of the Gospel that should be ever present in the life of the church and the life of individuals as well.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Indeed. And I want to thank you, Brian, for your honesty, your transparency. I think that for, again, hearkening back to the scripture, one of the scriptures I opened with for those that have eyes to see and ears to hear, you’re modeling what it is to take this journey. What it is to walk this path toward truth, this convicted humility. I think it’s important for us to have individuals such as yourself to look to for persons to be able to say, if he could do it and still be a man of God, still be a man of faith, still have relationship, I can do it too. So I thank you for your courage and your witness and for being a model for those who in their heart of hearts know that something is amiss. The family secret is there. We need to walk out into the light.
Brian McLaren:
Can I just say how grateful I am? I just think of all the Methodists in the country who might be looking for the courage. And I’m especially thinking of from the majority white culture who might be looking for the courage to address some of these issues of systemic racism and even racism expressing itself in their own families. And there’s a certain kind of God and country thing that gets put together, a kind of Christian nationalism, that makes it sound like to bring these issues up makes you both unChristian and unpatriotic. But it seems to me what you three are doing through this conversation, is you’re giving a message to Methodists and Christians in general in this country and elsewhere to say, you know what? Some of our leaders are taking the lead in having these conversations. So I won’t be alone if I decide to take this step as well. And I think that helps us all be more courageous when we know we’re not the only one.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Well, thank you, Brian. Thank you for sharing your heart with us today on the Unfinished Church podcast. Beloved, please tune in next time when we go deep with Willie Jennings about cultural humility.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Episodes are available on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church. Conversations that transform.
Welcome to the Unfinished Church.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
I’m Gregory Palmer.
Bishop Mike McKee:
I’m Mike McKee.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
And I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
I’m so looking forward to our hearing this conversation with Brian McLaren. One of the things that he says that continues to resonate with me is this notion of the family secret. And I think we can all relate to that. One of the ways, or one of the problems with doing the work of anti-racism, is that some folks believe they’re going to have to disavow a family member, that as they look back and are honest about their family’s history, they’re going to have to hate their grandfather. They’re going to have to disavow their relationship with their great-grandmother. And we know that, that’s not necessary, but there’s some human compulsion that we think if we admit that our families owned slaves, or that there was racist rhetoric, that we would need to completely disassociate ourselves with them. That’s a painful thing to have to think about. And it reminds me of that great saying, “If we ask people to change, we better be there for them when they do.” How are we going to be a part of the healing with them?
Bishop Mike McKee:
One of the things that resonated with me was this capacity to listen well. And if you remember, Brian McLaren talked about an incident in his own life, his faith journey, in which he talked about doubt, his doubt. And the person who was listening to him didn’t just nod his head and say, “I understand, I hear you.” Instead he offered something else, something so good that I’m excited that other people are going to hear that story in a few moments. So I think this idea of secrets and listening is so important to understanding what it means to overcome racism in our own lives and in the lives of those who we remember who came before us.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Well, I’m going to get on the train with both of you about this family secret thing. And the phrase that keeps popping into my head comes out of family systems theory. And I don’t know if it was Mary Boham or Ed Friedman, but “secrets are the plaque in the arteries of communication.” One phrase that I remember. So just imagine that sociologically, imagine that between nations, that the secrets actually keep us from coming together. We think we’re protecting ourselves, maybe protecting other people, we’re actually making the harm go on longer. So, that’s one of the things that I take away from the conversation, that we’ve got to overcome our secrets and open up the arteries of communication between us, wherever the differences are. The other thing that occurs to me as I listen to him is that book he did a number of years ago, entitled A Generous Orthodoxy. His spirit and his tone exuded generosity. And it is possible for us to have strong convictions and to not be vitriolic about them.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
This week, we are talking about listening for understanding with Brian McLaren. The word of God repeatedly calls us to listen – “Listen to advice and accept instruction that you may gain wisdom in the future.” That’s Proverbs 19 and 20. “Whoever has ears, let them hear,” from Matthew, the 11th chapter, the 15th verse, and “a cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud, this is my beloved son. Listen to him,” from the book of Mark the ninth chapter, the seventh verse. Yet empathic listening, sacred listening, isn’t something that comes naturally for most people. It is far more natural to begin formulating our rebuttal rather than releasing ourselves to be fully present to the speaker. Deep listening requires courage, humility, and the possibility of needing to expand one’s thinking. Bridging the gap of racial inequity in this country and building relationships across racial difference will require this type of listening.
We are thrilled to be joined by author, speaker, activist and public theologian, Rev. Brian McLaren, a former college English teacher and pastor. He is a passionate advocate for a new kind of Christianity, one that is just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. Brian, welcome to the Unfinished Church.
Brian McLaren:
Well, I feel like I’m right where I belong if we’re talking about being unfinished.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Amen. Amen. So let’s get right to the deepest things that we know. In your journey from fundamentalism to where you are today, you have clearly learned to enter conversations with curiosity and not certainty. How did you muster the courage to begin your journey to think and listen beyond your original construct of beliefs and bias?
Brian McLaren:
First that question, I think contains the answer in it, because I do think all of us are raised within one sort or another of a bubble, where there’s a set of expectations. In fact, it’s part of what makes us feel safe as children. We’re around family members and extended family and friends, and maybe even church brothers and sisters. We see the world the same way, we share assumptions, and it feels like a safe and comfortable world to grow up in. But I think for me, even when I was a student in secondary school, and I would meet students from other religious backgrounds and other racial and ethnic backgrounds, and I would see they had a different viewpoint on the world than I had.
And I remember feeling if I’m faithful to my religious community, I just have to judge these people as wrong. But if I judge these people as wrong, I feel I’m being unfaithful to Jesus who said to love your neighbor as yourself. And part of loving your neighbor as yourself is wanting to be listened to and paid respect, and not written off before you even get your first word out because of who you are, or how you look. And so I think for me, it began even when I was in high school, it certainly intensified in college, but I often tell the story of a real transforming moment for me that happened when I was in graduate school. My wife and I had just gotten married, moved into a new apartment, and that was part of graduate student housing at my university, and my next door neighbor, my neighbor above me in the next department, was an Iranian family. And there was a little boy named Armen. I think he was about eight years old. And Armen became, in some ways, my first interfaith and cross-cultural ambassador.
And he was such a charming and persistent and resilient kid that he and I just hit it off, and he was my first Muslim friend. And I remember feeling this friendship is changing me.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Well, indeed. And scripture always tells us, the little children shall lead us.
Brian McLaren:
Listen, this is a case in point. That’s right.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
So if we could go even a little bit deeper on the sacred practice of listening, in your book, Faith After Doubt, you state, it’s scary to be a sinner falling into the hands of an angry God, but it can be equally scary to be a doubter falling into the hands of angry believers. Doubt can breach the psychological fortress in which we felt safe, and you talked about feeling safe a moment ago. Tear up the internal map by which we’ve navigated the world and threatens to separate us from God’s favor and love. And then beyond all those losses, it can rob us of the relationships most near and dear to us. So I ask you, what advice would you give us on how to engage in this kind of deep listening across lines of division beyond the framework of fear, that fear that keeps us so bound?
Brian McLaren:
Oh, my, Bishop, when I was in college, I was going through an extended period of doubt and I remember being deeply afraid. I wasn’t sure God existed anymore. I wasn’t sure about so many things that I’d, not only been brought up to believe, but had become very personally committed to. And I had a dear friend who one day, we didn’t use this term back then, but he was really like a pastor to me as just a layperson, and like a spiritual director to me, even though that wasn’t a term I’d ever heard of. And I got up my courage and I told him about all my doubts. I just said, I’m just not sure of this and this and this. And I poured up my heart. He’s sitting across this living room from me and he says, well, Brian, he said, I really hear you, that you’re having doubts, and God doesn’t seem real to you. He said, I just want you to know, God is real to me. And right now I have enough faith for both of us. So it really doesn’t matter to me how your faith is or not.
Brian McLaren:
And then he said to me, if you were to become an atheist tomorrow, it wouldn’t change our friendship. I’m your friend, no matter what. And that little phrase, friend no matter what, I remember said something to me that I don’t think I had ever experienced. I wasn’t sure if my parents would be my friend, no matter what, if I didn’t believe what they taught me. And to have a human being say it and I think meant it. And so I think one of the things that really helps is if we’ve ever experienced unconditional love from anybody, it helps us then have the courage to really listen and to be open to things that might upset the apple cart, so to speak. To have a friend, or a soul brother, a sister, a friend, who knows us and accepts us unconditionally, I think helps us have the courage to enter into some challenging and dangerous territory. A lot of people maybe have never had that though.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Exactly. And don’t you think, especially on the topic of race, especially with how divisive and explosive that topic is right now, to be able to claim that kind of safe space, that kind of no matter your question, no matter your history, no matter what you bring to this conversation, I’ll be your friend, no matter what. I just would think that would be such a gift for us to be able to bridge this chasm that we have right now around racism.
Brian McLaren:
This is the, I think you just touched Bishop Easterling on this key idea that has made sense to me for a long time. And I wonder if it’ll make sense to other people. I think that white people’s problem with people of color is actually a problem with other white people, or it’s largely a problem with other white people. In other words, the prejudices and biases and bigotry and unexamined assumptions of their fellow white community, poses to them a threat. They know that if they were to disagree with those things, they aren’t sure they would be accepted by other white people. And it’s as if there’s this unwritten contract in a lot of social settings that we allow a certain amount of diversity. But if you disagree on these things, you touch the ungrounded electric cord, and you’re going to get a shock in response.
And here is where you brought up the word courage before. And I do think there comes a moment where people make in a split second, they decide, do I have the courage to differ from the people that I’ve never even thought about this consciously, but there are people who have power over me, the power of potential rejection? And am I willing to risk that on behalf of what I think really matters?
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Indeed, indeed. In an article entitled, “Racism among white Christians is higher than among the nonreligious. That’s no coincidence,” written by Robert P. Jones, he states white Christians are consistently more likely than whites who are religiously unaffiliated, to deny the existence of structural racism.
Brian McLaren:
Yes.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
So now I’m going to turn this topic on its head. If that is the case, what do those of us within sacred circles need to stop listening to? How do disabuse ourselves of these notions?
Brian McLaren:
Well, speaking personally, I remember the groundbreaking moment for me. I was in my fifties, and I’m a pretty well-read person. I take my faith seriously. I’m curious. I love to read. And it wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I even heard of something called the Doctrine of Discovery. And the story that goes way back, everybody knows the date 1492, but the date 1452 ends up being even more significant, because on that date and in the years that followed, Pope Nicholas V and the following popes, issued a series of letters to the Christian Kings of Europe, telling them, and people will think I’m making this up unless they go read it themselves. And they can easily do that by googling Doctrine of Discovery. But the Pope said to the Christian Kings of Europe, go into all the world and make slaves of all nations. This unbelievable “great commission,” that came from the highest leader of the Christian religion.
And when I learned about this, things started clicking into place. I felt like I’d uncovered the family secret. And when I uncovered the family secret, and I realized that deep in our history was this sense of superiority for Christians, let’s call this Christian supremacy or, and another term for it is Christian exceptionalism, Christians were given the right, God-given right through the Pope to make slaves of other nations. Once I saw that, I realized that European Christian supremacy became white supremacy. And so now there is a theological dimension to this supremacy. When I understood that, I realized that this was pervasive in Christian history. And the Protestants, when they broke away a few decades later, they had their version of it, and the Catholics had their version of it.
But so in a certain sense, Bishop, what I feel is, it’s that we have to take everything from our Christian history from 1452 to the present, and look at it with a certain amount of critique to say, where is that supremacy built in, subtly or in obvious ways? Where is it built in? And I think we’re not going to get to where we need to be until we’re willing to interrogate our family secret in that way. Does that make sense?
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
It makes absolute sense. And I love that turn of phrase, the family secret, if you will. And again, these familial relationships, not only our family of origin, but our Christian family, we’re so connected to that, to be able to say that there’s something wrong from its inception, that there was something that was inappropriate baked into it. For me, there’s always this resistance from individuals that are engaging the topic of anti-racism. You’re asking me to disown my ancestors. You’re asking me to hate my family of origin. You’re asking me to hate my great, great grandfather. And I guess what you’ve just articulated helps us understand that. To be willing to go back and deconstruct something from its inception might feel like disengaging with that community. But in fact, it is simply, if I hear you correctly, it’s going back and then reconstructing what was meant from the beginning, what would’ve been appropriate from the beginning.
Brian McLaren:
I think that’s right. And there’s an interesting way that, what Jesus said about the truth setting you free, really applies here. Because if I look back and realize that my ancestors were part of a religion that was perpetuating a set of assumptions, hidden between the lines, hidden, it was intentionally hidden. If I realize this, then it doesn’t make me hate my ancestors, it makes me in a sense, have compassion on them that they were part, that they themselves were sucked into something. They were never given an alternative to it. They were never given a say in it. They were born into it and raised into it.
But see, what that does is it simultaneously allows me to name, if I want to use the word sin, or to name the wrong, or to name the injustice, to not feel superior over anybody, but to understand that this was part of the deck of cards that they were given. And then it simultaneously puts a moral summons on my life. Am I going to perpetuate the family secret, or am I going to make a break with it? And am I going to acknowledge the harm that has been done by this secret? And now try to be part of healing it. I feel this acutely, because I know that this Christian supremacy was so deeply embedded in my ancestors. And I know that it resulted in all kinds of supremacy, including racial. Yeah.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Absolutely.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Brian, it’s so good to have you with us today. And as I was listening to you, there was something that occurred to me about American Christianity. We are certain about so many things and it is like, we prefer that certainty over any kind of clarity about a moral vision.
Brian McLaren:
Yes.
Bishop Mike McKee:
What God really might be doing in the world. And I contend that, that may be a particular issue, one issue for the church right now. So how do we get around this certainty? How do we engage with people who are so certain that what they say and what they believe is absolute God-given truth? How do we get them to an awakening of the spirit within each other?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah.
Bishop Mike McKee:
I think that’s a challenge for American Christianity.
Brian McLaren:
I think that’s an understatement, Bishop, that’s right. It’s a challenge. We have to do it. We have to engage it. But the first thing is we better expect it’s going to make some people mad first. When we study about the dying process, we often say that there are stages in the dying process. And when a person gets a diagnosis that they don’t want to hear, their first reaction is denial. And I think denial is just this part of, it’s part of us. I happen to be present at a terrible accident scene once. And there was a person, I don’t want to describe it because it was quite gory, but the person who’d been severely injured, I’ll never forget what he said as he was lying on the ground. He said, I don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want this to be happening. And I just remember as he said it, I thought, I totally understand how you feel.
And I think what happens is, a lot of our lives are difficult. We’re dealing with a whole lot and somebody comes and says, your entire culture is hiding a secret. Your entire culture is built on a myth. You’re stage managing everything to keep a family secret, secret. People who might be able to understand this is anyone who’s had addiction in the family. We’ve all met families where dad was an alcoholic and mom and the kids, he might beat them up, and they wear long sleeve shirts to cover the bruises. Everybody is conscripted to help keep the secret. There is just no easy way to be the first one to break the secret. Look, sometimes this is super costly. I think about a friend of mine. She had been sexually molested by a family member. And when she went public, her entire family turned against her, and they just felt like you’re ruining our family. You’re destroying our family.
So these things are not easy. And all that I think we could do at this moment for anyone who’s listening, who on some level knows we’re keeping a secret, we’re covering something up, their certainty has a tiny bit of a crack in it. Then all we can say to them is, we love you. We understand this is a process for you to come to develop the courage to face this secret. You might not be ready today, but today you might say, I hope I’ll be ready tomorrow. In other words, you start a process of moving toward readiness. But there are other people, and these are the ones that in some sense I’m most worried about, they would hear a conversation like this and all they would feel is fury and anger. And the thing I would say to them is, I certainly hope you could at least imagine this. Maybe we’re wrong, maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’ve become part of a group that’s deceived us all. But if you think that’s possible for me, I hope you’ll be open to the possibility that it’s possible for you too.
And you, at least, if you love the truth, you at least owe yourself to give the same scrutiny to what you believe as you’re applying to what seems so disturbing that I, or others, might be saying. And I don’t know if there’s any shortcut around that, Bishop McKee, because if people, to quote Jesus, “if they love darkness rather than light, they will not step out into the light.” They won’t want to learn the fact. And I just think that’s a harsh, moral choice. And let’s be honest, one of the terrible things our churches do, is they allow people to show up Sunday after Sunday, and traffic in the language of forgiveness and grace, when they’re unwilling to seek the truth, if that truth is painful.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
That’s powerful. What you’ve described in essence, Brian, is convicted humility. That convicted humility that I think is so important for this work and any work that’s going to take us beyond superficiality.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
As you were talking about this readiness, and as I was listening to you, I was hearing a couple of things leap from the Gospel pages. One phrase is repent and believe the gospel. And then I was thinking about this image of repentance. And I was thinking about the way Matthew narrated the ministry of John the Baptist as people were going out to him. He has some fairly harsh language, you brood of vipers, et cetera, but this phrase sticks with me. So let’s say repentance comes for any individual, any group, any tribe. And there’s this phrase that haunts me, and I’d love to know what you think a picture would look like. He says, therefore, produce fruit that proves your repentance. King Jimmy says, refers to it as repentance and neatness. What does the fruit of repentance? So let’s assume we help through our preaching ministry to get people ready to that place of readiness you’ve described. It’s all the Holy Spirit. We know that, but what does that fruit look like?
Brian McLaren:
The beautiful thing about fruit is that it calms, when the conditions are right, the fruit calms. And what’s so beautiful about this in the Gospel, I think especially for the apostle Paul in Galatians, he says, look, if you want to figure out the condition of the heart, look at the fruit you’re already producing. In other words, the condition of your heart will produce fruit. And if the fruit is anger and dissension and fractiousness, and if people are biting and devouring one another in a hateful division, you already know what the condition of your heart is, the fruit is telling you. And if you’re gentle and peaceful and patient and kind and forbearing, if you’re willing to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice, if you see that having your heart, there’s no more evidence you need of the condition of your heart and the presence of the spirit at work and your life.
And so it seems to me, that part of what’s going on in our nation right now is that we have one group of people who are facing our history and facing the truth, and they’re bringing forth fruit of repentance. So this might mean that white people, for the first time in their lives, aren’t trying to tell people of color the way things are. But they’re asking people of color, help me understand the way things are for you. I can speak to this very personally, because I grew up in a white subculture that assumed that white people were right. And my paternal grandfather, I remember he could not stand Dr. King. I grew up, I was coming of age in those times. My paternal grandfather could not stand Dr. King. He always called him that communist. That was his way of attacking him.
My father, I lived just outside of Washington, DC, and while the March on Washington was going on, my father put my brother and I, just little boys, in the backseat of our station wagon and drove us down so that we could go and see that. He said to me, “History is taking place. I want you kids to remember this. This is an important day in history.” And he knew that the changes that were happening needed to happen. And he knew that we were young and couldn’t fully grasp the significance of it. But to this day, I remember looking out the window and seeing the crowds of people who had amassed in Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign. And because my father had the courage to differ from his father, I remember to this day being there. And I’m so grateful for my father’s example in that.
But very often I would say, Bishop Palmer, that the first fruit of repentance is very often the courage to speak up and differ from those around you. It doesn’t mean having to attack and tell people they’re… and call them names. But it very often means saying, “Dad, I don’t see it that way. Mom, I don’t see it that way. Brother, I understand what you’re saying. I don’t see it that way. My heart’s changed. I used to think like you, I can’t think that way anymore.” And that takes some courage, but I think it’s like breaking a sound barrier, that’s also breaking the spell of denial.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Thank you.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
That word courage just keeps coming up, doesn’t it? That word courage just keeps resonating as a part of this conversation. And what a rich conversation we are having. And Rev. McLaren, we’re asking all guests two questions. So I wonder if you might allow me to pose these to you now. How do you talk with people about racial justice who don’t think, act, or look like yourself?
Brian McLaren:
A moment comes to mind that has been repeated, I think about three times, but the first moment came in 2008, right after the presidential election. And I was in Wilmington, Delaware, I was there to speak. And it was early in the morning, I was walking down the street from my hotel to a coffee shop. And I, as a white man walking down the street, an African-American is walking in the other direction and our eyes met. And I smiled and I said, it’s a good morning. And he smiled at me and he said, yes, we can. And it was a moment where the two of us in just a second it took to pass each other, gave each other a signal that we understand the dynamics that are going on.
A couple of just four, maybe five years ago, I was walking down the street, again, I was traveling. I was walking down the street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and there’d just been a mass killing. And a man was coming by walking his bicycle up the sidewalk, a man there in New Mexico, probably of Mexican descent, and our eyes met. And this was a day when we were all reeling from yet another mass killing. And he caught my eye and he said, good afternoon, my brother. And he’s, as a person of color, caught the eye of a white man. And he didn’t want to just let us walk by without making eye contact. We made eye contact. And I think there are these moments where we just make contact as human beings. And we say, we’re stepping out of the roles that racial categories have taught us to occupy separate worlds and never address the realities we face.
And so I would say Bishop, that’s one of the things that I try to do, I try to make those personal contacts and it’s almost a kind of signaling to one another. I’m your friend, I’m not your foe. I’m your brother, I’m not your enemy. And I think it shows in a hundred different ways, sometimes in words, sometimes in deed, that we rebuild those connections.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Yeah. That is very powerful. The second question is how do you care for your soul in the midst of this anti-racism work?
Brian McLaren:
One of the things I find myself saying to myself quite often, I’ll be speaking to a group and I’ll feel enormous affirmation from some people and from other people, I can feel the daggers. I know that I’m making their lives more difficult. This is especially for white folks. If they accept what I’m saying, it’s going to put them in trouble with many people in their social circle of other white people. And so when the daggers come, or the resistance comes, I just try to do two things. For my own ego, and I try to say this isn’t about you, this isn’t about you, you just made their lives more difficult. Of course, they’re upset a little bit with you. And in that sense, I try to then have compassion for them.
It just happened to me this week. This past week, I was speaking at a retreat for pastors and one pastor came up afterwards and he said, “This was very hard for me. These conversations were very hard for me.” And he explained about his congregation. And I just said to him, I know it’s hard. I’ve been there. And my heart goes out to you. And I thank you for being willing to bear the pain. I didn’t let them off the hook and say, don’t worry about it. I said, thank you for being willing to bear the pain.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
I appreciate that. It reminds me of a statement I heard once. And I confess, I don’t remember the individual who said it, but it was, if we ask people to change, we better be there for them when they do.
Brian McLaren:
Oh my.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
And so just that connection of, I hear you, brother. Again, not letting off the hook, but being present to that moment, that epiphany and that confession of what they’re going through, sometimes I think is just enough, to allow someone to continue this very difficult work. We shouldn’t make light of how difficult this work is. Again, we’ve talked about what it can cost someone in terms of relationships, but also just within themselves, to be willing to confront something and admit I was wrong. So I appreciate that. You give me much hope and the statement that I’m going to carry forward, perhaps it was even the way you said it, when the conditions are right, the fruit comes. There’s a hopefulness in that for me. There’s the right kind of certitude in that for me. I wonder if there’s something that either Bishop Palmer or Bishop McKee would say has resonated for them in this conversation.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
What leaped out at, let me say a dozen things leaped out at me, but the one that I’m latched onto at this moment, is this notion of friend, no matter what. What does it mean? And I know I’m taking a little license here, but I’m wrestling with the voice of Jesus or the words of Jesus. I no longer call you servants, but friends. So, I feel pulled by your conversation, brother Brian, into what does genuine friendship look like in a hostile world?
Brian McLaren:
Thank you.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Bishop Easterling, I would echo what you said about fruit. Seems to me that one of the dangers that may be happening in the church, I don’t know if I should use the word danger, is that we are not focused on bearing fruit. Some people think that we are, but sometimes I think we’re focusing on weeds that grow and forget it is really fruit that we are supposed to produce instead of a lot of weeds and a lot of trouble for people. And I think this is a right time for American Christianity to recover this centeredness of the Gospel that should be ever present in the life of the church and the life of individuals as well.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Indeed. And I want to thank you, Brian, for your honesty, your transparency. I think that for, again, hearkening back to the scripture, one of the scriptures I opened with for those that have eyes to see and ears to hear, you’re modeling what it is to take this journey. What it is to walk this path toward truth, this convicted humility. I think it’s important for us to have individuals such as yourself to look to for persons to be able to say, if he could do it and still be a man of God, still be a man of faith, still have relationship, I can do it too. So I thank you for your courage and your witness and for being a model for those who in their heart of hearts know that something is amiss. The family secret is there. We need to walk out into the light.
Brian McLaren:
Can I just say how grateful I am? I just think of all the Methodists in the country who might be looking for the courage. And I’m especially thinking of from the majority white culture who might be looking for the courage to address some of these issues of systemic racism and even racism expressing itself in their own families. And there’s a certain kind of God and country thing that gets put together, a kind of Christian nationalism, that makes it sound like to bring these issues up makes you both unChristian and unpatriotic. But it seems to me what you three are doing through this conversation, is you’re giving a message to Methodists and Christians in general in this country and elsewhere to say, you know what? Some of our leaders are taking the lead in having these conversations. So I won’t be alone if I decide to take this step as well. And I think that helps us all be more courageous when we know we’re not the only one.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Well, thank you, Brian. Thank you for sharing your heart with us today on the Unfinished Church podcast. Beloved, please tune in next time when we go deep with Willie Jennings about cultural humility.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Episodes are available on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church. Conversations that transform.
resources
Listening is an important first step in the work of antiracism. Are you ready to do more? Here are some helpful resources to help you dig in deeper to the topics discussed in this episode.
About Brian McLaren
Faith After Doubt by Brian McLaren
Confessions of a Christian Nation (video)
John Wesley’s sermon “Catholic Spirit.”
Get to know someone who doesn’t look or think like you. This resource sheet from Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity can help.
Conversation Tools
Resolution 3331. Doctrine of Discovery
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
About Brian McLaren
Faith After Doubt by Brian McLaren
Confessions of a Christian Nation (video)
John Wesley’s sermon “Catholic Spirit.”
Get to know someone who doesn’t look or think like you. This resource sheet from Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity can help.
Conversation Tools
Resolution 3331. Doctrine of Discovery
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
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EPISODE 6
Growing in Cultural Humility with Willie Jennings The Rev. Dr. Willie James Jennings is currently associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale University Divinity School. He is author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, a standard text read in colleges, seminaries and universities, and After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Jennings is the recipient of the 2015 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his groundbreaking work on race and Christianity, and his recent commentary on the Book of Acts won the Reference Book of the Year Award from The Academy of Parish Clergy. A frequent lecturer at colleges, universities and seminaries, Jennings is also a regular workshop leader at pastor conferences and a consultant for the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion and for the Association of Theological Schools. He served along with his wife, the Rev. Joanne L. Browne Jennings, as associate ministers at the Mount Level Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, and they served together as interim pastors for several Presbyterian and Baptist churches in North Carolina. They are the parents of two wonderful daughters, Njeri and Safiya Jennings. This Yale professor, poet, and prophet joins with the bishops in exploring the idea of decentering whiteness and how a posture of justice, mercy, and humility compels us to dismantle systems of oppression so that all may be free. |
full transcript
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Welcome to The Unfinished Church. I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling.
Bishop Mike McKee:
I’m Mike McKee.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
And I’m Gregory Palmer. Thank you for joining us for The Unfinished Church. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations, to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
As I reflect on our conversation with Willie Jennings, I’m struck by this notion of cultural humility, and the idea that we’re all in one sense living in somebody else’s house. And what does that do to help us to act more humbly, and may I say generously, toward those who are around us, thinking about not only what we have to give and making sure our story is known and our tune is heard, but understanding that other folks have a story and they’re singing a song and that what makes the world hum, as it were, and function in a more healthy way, is that somehow or another that’s brought into a different kind of harmony.
So this cultural humility thing is something that I think we’re always working on. The other thing I walked away from Dr. Jennings’ presentation was around this notion of hope as a discipline, hope as a discipline, not as some, let me say pie in the sky, but as a discipline that I practice on an ongoing basis.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
I was right there with you because that phrase has stuck with me. And so often when we think about the church and even going on to perfection, there’s some aspects of it that I think we relegate to an eschatological phenomenon. But hope being a discipline is real. We rise every day if we embrace it as such, ready to repent, ready to forgive, and ready to reconcile. And that will help us to really be able to embody heaven on earth. The other thing that struck me so much with Dr. Jennings is yes, this notion of lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and that if we open our life with openness, we also set a great stage for being able to talk across the aisle, across cultures, across genders, across all of these human demarcations of difference.
Bishop Mike McKee:
I’m glad you said that, Bishop Easterling, because I have also been thinking about lifelong learning, that phrase, which has been used a lot in the last several years. But those of us who are in the business of preaching and teaching all the time, think that we probably don’t have anything else to learn, or we may function that way. And so this continual journey on learning more and more and more has to do with more than just what we’re particularly dealing with at a given time, but this whole breadth of knowledge that could be very important in terms of our openness to other people and about what they’re passionate about, how they are culturally formed. And it is a way then that we can realize there’s some ways in which we can actually use that lifelong learning from other people to begin to frame an idea or a notion of what a person really is like, or who this person is, and understand their unique giftedness they bring to any conversation.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
So friends, hang on to your seats, because our next guest is likely to make you squirm just a little bit. Willie James Jennings is a scholar, author, lecturer, a master teacher, and someone who is wise beyond his years, a pastor, a friend, a lover of jazz. Join us as we listen and learn with Dr. Willie Jennings.
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
I am so glad to be here with you, Bishop, and the other esteemed bishops for this wonderful conversation.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
So I want to begin on this wise, what does authentic cultural humility mean to you and how does it appear differently depending on one’s racial slash cultural identity?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
Well, Bishop, thank you first of all for inviting me to this conversation. And that is such a crucial question. For me, what cultural humility means can be summed by really one crucial word, and that is learner, to be a learner, and to approach one’s life with the openness of being a learner. And this of course has been one of the missing elements, the missing enzyme, if you will, of so much of Christianity in the west and all the various cultures that have formed inside that Christianity of the west.
What that means is that the kind of humility that should have been a part of what it means to become a Christian, has been missing from so many walks of faith for so many peoples. So that in point of fact, the Christianity that so many of us have inherited, begins with us imagining ourselves as teachers to the world, instructors of all flesh. And then later on, somewhere down the line, maybe a bit of a learner. And so cultural humility has to begin with not only understanding ourselves as learners, but rethinking what it means to understand the faith inside the ongoing legacy, inside the ongoing journey of someone learning.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Wow. Wow. Thank you. In the Hebrew Bible, and of course in the Bible of the Hebrew and Christian tradition together that we sometimes call the Holy Bible, Route 66, et cetera, in Micah 6 and 8, there is the invitation and the call for the fully formed person in God to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with one’s God. What does it look like from your perspective to put legs under that and how if more people were living in that way, formed by that notion of Micah 6 and 8, how might the world be different?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
Well that’s a fabulous question, Bishop, and I think it begins for us as Christians by situating ourselves in relationship to that story. What I mean by that, is that is a Jewish story. It’s the story deeply inside of Israel, Micah speaking to God’s people, Israel; and we, those of us who are Gentile, those of us not born within the Jewish community, are those listening in on this instruction. And then for us to take it as an instruction to ourselves already positions us differently as we live our life of faith. The walking humbly, the doing justice is first something that we receive as those who’ve been brought into a story that was not ours. That there was a humility that allowed us to even enter into this story.
That is, there were those who were followers of this God of Israel, that when this God became embodied and said, I am now including Gentiles, they humbly accepted that fact. And when that same God said, love them, those who have been your enemies, do justice unto them, show mercy unto them, even though they had not showed you mercy. They did that. And so as Christians, we echo, we enter into a echo of those who did precisely that in making real the doorway for our entrance into faith. So what that means for us, is that the very shape of our Christian life ought to be characterized by those three elements you name so beautifully.
So it begins with a recognition that we have entered into the story of another people, a story that was not ours, which requires an ongoing humility. If I’m eating dinner at a table not set for me, but I have been invited to it, then I would be foolish to start to act as though that this is my table. If I am now enjoying recipes for beautiful food that I did not create, it would be the height of hubris for me to say, I created this. This is my recipe.
And if I have been prayed over by others and received that blessing, as we began to eat that meal, it would be the height of arrogance for me to think that I was the one hosting the dinner. So it begins, the humility, begins there. And so what flows from that kind of humility? A sense of mercy, a sense of justice that I have what I don’t deserve and no one, no one should be treated as though they don’t deserve what they have, because I know I didn’t deserve what I had.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
It sounds like also bubbling up in there is this whole notion of what does it mean to live with gratitude? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the inheritances that we’ve all received from … We all are eating from trees we didn’t plant and drinking from wells we didn’t dig. Thank you for walking us down that.
So in your writings and along the line here, Bishops Easterling and McKee are going to leap in with some questions of their own, but let me put this one out to you. In your writings, and we all reframe it through our own lenses, but one of the things that you have written about explicitly and implicitly is this notion of at some point, the goal of being American was to become white. Whiteness got centered in a way as it was normative and therefore, it was good. Therefore, everything else was certainly not as good, if not indeed evil and bad. And some of us have lived that narrative of what that’s like and internalized it in tragic ways. So I want to ask you what is required of Christian leaders, if we are in our work and ministry, to stop promoting or centering whiteness, and why is that critical for all disciples of Jesus Christ?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
Bishop, this is a really important question you’re asking me, and this is why I’ve begun some of my comments by again reminding the listeners of the importance of how we enter the story. We enter the Christian story, recognizing that this was not our story. We entered from the margins. We were not at the center, but we were brought in by grace. The tragic history of Christianity, especially moving into the 14th and 15th centuries, is that Christians began to imagine that from the very beginning we were at the center, that we replaced Israel as God’s people. And we moved to the very center of God’s concern, God’s attention and most importantly, God’s plan for the salvation of the world, that we were at the very center of it. Now here’s what most people need to understand. Historically, that sick sense of centeredness, let’s call it that, that sick sense of centeredness became the ground on which whiteness comes to be.
Whiteness is that sick sense of centeredness that the whole world revolves around the way I see the true, the good, the beautiful, the noble, and I have been charged by God to bring the entire world to maturity. God is counting on me to do this. Now, this is the legacy that we as Christians in the West inherited from what’s known as modern colonialism. We inherited this vision of a Christianity centered in the West, executed by those who we would call Europeans, charged with the task of bringing the whole world to maturity.
That’s what’s at the very center of whiteness. So let’s give a quick definition of whiteness for your listeners so that they won’t be confused by this. Whiteness is not phenotype. Whiteness is not appearance. Whiteness is not culture, and whiteness is not even a part of creation. Whiteness is a way of seeing the world and a way of being in the world at the same time.
Whiteness is a way of imagining though how the world should be, organizing the world, how the world should be shaped. And whiteness is having the power to realize that organization. And one other little element-whiteness is also a way of feeling comfort, safety, and normalcy, based on that reality, based on a world organized in the way I think it should be organized.
So whiteness is a framing of life and a framing of existence that starts with a sick sense of centeredness. But here’s the problem for us. It is all rooted deeply in a Christian mistake. And what is that Christian mistake? That we replaced Israel as God’s people, and God does everything only, exclusively, through the Christian. Therefore, historically, the European started to imagine himself, and primarily we’re talking about men, but women as well, imagined himself as the very center of what God is doing.
So the first thing that we have to do as Christian leaders, the very first thing Bishop, is give people the Christian story that many people have never gotten a memo that they were Gentiles brought into the faith, brought into another people’s story. That is to say, many Christians have never gotten a memo that’s in Ephesians two. Remember you Gentiles, you were outside. You were without God and without hope in the world, but through Christ you were brought in. And so many people have been taught to read the Bible, think their faith as though they were always the point, which means this humility you asked me about earlier, this humility that is so crucial to being a Christian, is missing from so many Christians. Because they don’t understand what it means to come from the margins.
The great woman Catholic theologian, M. Shawn Copeland, talks about a thinking margin, what it means to be a thinking margin. There she’s thinking primarily, talking primarily about African American women and their important work as Christian women, their important work in thinking the faith from the margins. But what she’s also pointing to is the reality of Christianity itself, that we are thinking margins. We come in from the margins, so we know what it’s like to be at the margins, but to be brought in by grace. And so we carry that humility. So the first thing that has to happen is that Christians have to be introduced to their story. And so many have never been introduced to their own story of a people formed to join another people. That’s the beginning.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
And you do this so masterfully in multiple places. But remind us, you remind us of this in what I refer to as your Magnum Opus, The Christian Imagination, and of our amnesia and our misreading. And it sounds and feels in my head and heart like what you’ve been describing is what became the fertile soil for white supremacy, for, let me say, American exceptionalism. Am I off base here, or?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
It’s moving right in that direction, because this vision of centeredness is a distortion of what’s present in scripture. So when we read scripture, start to finish, we read the story of God’s involvement with God’s own people. Israel. We read that involvement intensifying with the life of Jesus and Jesus’ ministry. And so the story of the world, and in fact, the story of the universe, opens out through Israel. So what happens is when Israel’s pulled out, you drop something else in there. And once you drop something else in there, if you try to take that out, for so many people, the whole thing falls apart. So for so many people, whiteness and their Christianity, whiteness and a certain kind of evangelical vision, are so intertwined that they cannot imagine the one without the other. And because whiteness was presented in this way, it was presented as always positive.
And so when somebody like me comes along and starts to say things like this, for some people, this sounds like hate speech. They will be upset with you, because what you’re saying sounds like hate speech. Why do you hate white people so much? And it’s because they have never seen a distinction between that way of being in the world and who they actually are. Now for all people of color, for the most part, all of us have gone through some process of seeing the difference between the vision of what we are, of who we are, and who we actually are. All of us have gone through that important and painful process of pushing away the derogatory vision of being Black or being Asian or being Filipino or being Hispanic or Latinx or Native American. We’ve pushed away the negative vision, pulled out from it the little slivers of truth that speak to who we are.
And we’ve tried to weave together a vision of who we truly are apart from that image, because that image has brought so much hell and destruction to us. And for most of us, we’ve done it inside of our Christianity. Our Christian faith has helped us do that, helped us do that sifting and pulling. But whiteness has been always presented as positive. And so people have used their Christianity to weave it even more tightly onto themselves. Why would I want to separate myself from something that’s always positive? That always centers me at the very heart of everything good and positive, everything that God wants? So for some people, the very idea of trying to see who they are apart from whiteness, makes no sense. They’re like, what are you talking about? I don’t understand what you’ve been saying, Dr. Jennings. And the reason it’s so challenging is because it feels so painful.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Now there you’ve touched on something, Dr. Jennings, something that is part of why I think so many won’t address it is because of how painful it is. But as I hear you talk, you know, Bonhoeffer is synonymous with cheap grace. Now, when I think of Dr. Willie Jennings, I think about cheap Christianity. And I think that for so long is what we’ve been offering, peddling in the public square.
So how do we encourage pastors, Christian leaders, to engage this kind of painful process? And some might even say that to ask folks to engage in this or to even promote it is the very antithesis of humility, because they’ll say, well, isn’t it pretty heady for you to say that we have to go back to the beginning and reimagine our understanding of Christianity. But tell us what we risk if we don’t live into this pain, if we’re not willing to do this work, what are we perpetuating by allowing this narrative to continue?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
Bishop, that’s a wonderful, wonderful question. And I tell you, at the heart of it is precisely the warning that your question is putting on the table for us. And that is, if we as Christians in the West, refuse to face the important work of extracting our Christianity from whiteness, then what will happen is that our witness, our witness will suffer profoundly such that people will say back to us, you’re right. There is no difference between your Christianity and whiteness. And so therefore, as far as I’m concerned, your Christianity is already at an end. It has no future for the world I want to live in.
And so for many people right now, especially young people in their twenties and early thirties, the jury is out, friends. The jury is out whether Christianity is a good idea, set of ideas, or a good way of living. The jury is out. And it has not returned yet. And I tell you right now, it doesn’t look good. And it’s because so many people are refusing this work. Now what would be required? And you mentioned Bonhoeffer and the German Christians. And we must always take a lesson from that, the German Christians, what was so damnable about the behavior. It’s not what they did-
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Indeed.
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
It’s what they didn’t do. What they refused to do that made it so horrible. It’s not what they did. It’s what they refused to do. They saw the concentration camps. We now know that so many of the Jews who were in concentration camps were released into the communities to go do yard work and housework. So they saw what was going on, and they did nothing. And in like manner, what we have to understand is that this is a straightforward step. What is the step?
For so many Christians who identify as white to join hands, join arms with their BIPOC sisters and brothers, who every day, every day are working to extract the racial horror from who they are, trying to claim who they are, apart from the racial, and who could be exquisite teachers, wonderful collaborators, great partners in helping them do this work, not doing it for them, not doing it for them, but working beside and watching and saying, how can I follow you just as you are renouncing the negative images of blackness and of black people, the negative stereotypes of Asian people, the negative stereotypes of indigenous peoples, I too will renounce the abundant positive, overly aggressive centered visions of whiteness.
I will renounce that, I will step away from that. I will lock hands with you. I will enter fully into your ways of life so that I might know my own life, free from that foolishness. Yes. But now obviously, we have to remember, this is a crucial step. There’s that famous passage in Hebrews, I think is always important for us to remember, where it says that Moses, when he came of age and knew who he was, he rejected the ways of Egypt and followed the ways of Israel. And the passage says, and in this way, followed the Christ. In this way followed the Christ. But so crucial I want to say that again, when he realized who he was-
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Who he was.
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
That’s when he said, no, I’m going here. I’m not going there. And in that way, followed the Christ.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Amen.
Bishop Mike McKee:
So, Dr. Jennings, I really appreciate what you’ve been offering us today. I want to circle back on the sins of omission. It is so easy for all of us to condemn the sense of commission, because they’re right there in front of us. And to be honest, it just would not be culturally cool to do anything but. You would strike at that. But the most dangerous thing, I know you alluded to it, are these sins of omission, that we just sit idly by, or we do not pay enough attention to things. So give us a word, I think a prophetic word for the church that many of our clergy probably should be saying, or find a way to say in their own way to the church about our future.
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
And Bishop, thank you so much. That’s a wonderful question for me to be thinking about with you all about this. What I always say to pastors is that, especially if you’re in this country, the place you live, the shape of the place you live, is never shaped by accident. For so many people, the reason that they are inside sins of omission is because the very built environment, the neighborhood, the shape of their community, constitutes the sin of omission. It shields them. It protects them. It hides them. It creates ignorance for them in terms of what’s going on around them, beyond their immediate neighborhood, beyond the 10 minutes from the mall or the 15 minutes from downtown. It shields them from a world, a racial world that is full of the pain and suffering of their community. And so, as I always say to pastors, do a geographic reality check of your church and your community.
Where is your church? Where is your church located? Where are the communities of color located in relationship to your church? Where are your people located? Where are the communities of color in relationship to where your people are located? Where are the resources? Where’s the stores? How are goods and services flowing in and out of the communities around your church and around where your people live?
And if you do that kind of geographic analysis, that kind of geographic check, that kind of geographic work, what you’ll see are the ways in which race continues to be nurtured. And the racial antagonisms of this country continue to be nurtured by the very shape of the communities that our churches are in and that where we live. And so what has to happen? Pastors have to invite their churches into deep discernment and prayer, praying one crucial question. Lord, who should I be?
Who should we be in this place? And that place means three things. Where this church is, who should we be in this place? And then individually, who should I be in the place where I live? Who should I be? And then there’s a third element to that. If I’m learning that the very place I am in is contrary to the discipleship I claim to be living, then I have to discern what is the spirit of God saying to me about where I should be? Remember, in the book of Acts, my dear brothers and sister, remember in the book of Acts, the sign of the spirits coming is almost everybody in the book of Acts is doing something they don’t want to do.
And in most cases, they’re being asked to go someplace that they would prefer not to go. And so we have to do that work because race and place in the West are intricately woven together. And so the omission that we see, it’s not simply in people’s heads and hearts, because if we think about omission, simply in people not wanting to do right, most folks would react very quickly and say, well, I want to do right. I try to treat everybody I meet kind. I speak kind. That’s not where we want to have people focus their attention. Focus their attention, where do you live? Where’s your neighborhood? Where’s the church at? What are you doing? Who do you drive by? Who do you ignore as you’re driving? Where is your attention being turned by the very shape of your living? That’s where the omission starts to show itself most profoundly.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Well, listen, we are needing to get ready to go, and it feels like we are just warming up. And I know it’s frustrating to all of us, but you have fed us and given us a rich conversation. One question we ask of all of our guests in some way, shape or form, in this work of dismantling racism and participating in the power of the Holy Spirit in building God’s beloved community, how do you, Dr. Willie Jennings, care for your soul?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
You know, these days, the most important thing I do is that I sit and talk with other sisters and brothers and we laugh together and we enjoy the small things. And we remind each other that we are in a great work of hope. And as I like to say, Bishop, hope is not a sentiment. It’s a mistake to ever understand hope as a sentiment. And it’s even greater mistake to understand hope as a feeling. As I like to say, hope is a discipline. And so I get with sisters and brothers to discipline myself in hope. We are commanded in scripture to hope, we aren’t invited. Would you like to hope? No, hope, hope in God, and it’s a discipline to live in that hope. And so I feed my soul by being with folks who understand that we are in this shared work of the practice of hope, disciplining ourself in hope.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Wow. What a fabulous way to end. And thank you. Thank you.
Friends, thank you for joining us. We pray our time together has been helpful to you and we pray God’s blessings on your continued work.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church, conversations that transform.
Welcome to The Unfinished Church. I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling.
Bishop Mike McKee:
I’m Mike McKee.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
And I’m Gregory Palmer. Thank you for joining us for The Unfinished Church. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations, to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.
As I reflect on our conversation with Willie Jennings, I’m struck by this notion of cultural humility, and the idea that we’re all in one sense living in somebody else’s house. And what does that do to help us to act more humbly, and may I say generously, toward those who are around us, thinking about not only what we have to give and making sure our story is known and our tune is heard, but understanding that other folks have a story and they’re singing a song and that what makes the world hum, as it were, and function in a more healthy way, is that somehow or another that’s brought into a different kind of harmony.
So this cultural humility thing is something that I think we’re always working on. The other thing I walked away from Dr. Jennings’ presentation was around this notion of hope as a discipline, hope as a discipline, not as some, let me say pie in the sky, but as a discipline that I practice on an ongoing basis.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
I was right there with you because that phrase has stuck with me. And so often when we think about the church and even going on to perfection, there’s some aspects of it that I think we relegate to an eschatological phenomenon. But hope being a discipline is real. We rise every day if we embrace it as such, ready to repent, ready to forgive, and ready to reconcile. And that will help us to really be able to embody heaven on earth. The other thing that struck me so much with Dr. Jennings is yes, this notion of lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and that if we open our life with openness, we also set a great stage for being able to talk across the aisle, across cultures, across genders, across all of these human demarcations of difference.
Bishop Mike McKee:
I’m glad you said that, Bishop Easterling, because I have also been thinking about lifelong learning, that phrase, which has been used a lot in the last several years. But those of us who are in the business of preaching and teaching all the time, think that we probably don’t have anything else to learn, or we may function that way. And so this continual journey on learning more and more and more has to do with more than just what we’re particularly dealing with at a given time, but this whole breadth of knowledge that could be very important in terms of our openness to other people and about what they’re passionate about, how they are culturally formed. And it is a way then that we can realize there’s some ways in which we can actually use that lifelong learning from other people to begin to frame an idea or a notion of what a person really is like, or who this person is, and understand their unique giftedness they bring to any conversation.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
So friends, hang on to your seats, because our next guest is likely to make you squirm just a little bit. Willie James Jennings is a scholar, author, lecturer, a master teacher, and someone who is wise beyond his years, a pastor, a friend, a lover of jazz. Join us as we listen and learn with Dr. Willie Jennings.
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
I am so glad to be here with you, Bishop, and the other esteemed bishops for this wonderful conversation.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
So I want to begin on this wise, what does authentic cultural humility mean to you and how does it appear differently depending on one’s racial slash cultural identity?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
Well, Bishop, thank you first of all for inviting me to this conversation. And that is such a crucial question. For me, what cultural humility means can be summed by really one crucial word, and that is learner, to be a learner, and to approach one’s life with the openness of being a learner. And this of course has been one of the missing elements, the missing enzyme, if you will, of so much of Christianity in the west and all the various cultures that have formed inside that Christianity of the west.
What that means is that the kind of humility that should have been a part of what it means to become a Christian, has been missing from so many walks of faith for so many peoples. So that in point of fact, the Christianity that so many of us have inherited, begins with us imagining ourselves as teachers to the world, instructors of all flesh. And then later on, somewhere down the line, maybe a bit of a learner. And so cultural humility has to begin with not only understanding ourselves as learners, but rethinking what it means to understand the faith inside the ongoing legacy, inside the ongoing journey of someone learning.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Wow. Wow. Thank you. In the Hebrew Bible, and of course in the Bible of the Hebrew and Christian tradition together that we sometimes call the Holy Bible, Route 66, et cetera, in Micah 6 and 8, there is the invitation and the call for the fully formed person in God to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with one’s God. What does it look like from your perspective to put legs under that and how if more people were living in that way, formed by that notion of Micah 6 and 8, how might the world be different?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
Well that’s a fabulous question, Bishop, and I think it begins for us as Christians by situating ourselves in relationship to that story. What I mean by that, is that is a Jewish story. It’s the story deeply inside of Israel, Micah speaking to God’s people, Israel; and we, those of us who are Gentile, those of us not born within the Jewish community, are those listening in on this instruction. And then for us to take it as an instruction to ourselves already positions us differently as we live our life of faith. The walking humbly, the doing justice is first something that we receive as those who’ve been brought into a story that was not ours. That there was a humility that allowed us to even enter into this story.
That is, there were those who were followers of this God of Israel, that when this God became embodied and said, I am now including Gentiles, they humbly accepted that fact. And when that same God said, love them, those who have been your enemies, do justice unto them, show mercy unto them, even though they had not showed you mercy. They did that. And so as Christians, we echo, we enter into a echo of those who did precisely that in making real the doorway for our entrance into faith. So what that means for us, is that the very shape of our Christian life ought to be characterized by those three elements you name so beautifully.
So it begins with a recognition that we have entered into the story of another people, a story that was not ours, which requires an ongoing humility. If I’m eating dinner at a table not set for me, but I have been invited to it, then I would be foolish to start to act as though that this is my table. If I am now enjoying recipes for beautiful food that I did not create, it would be the height of hubris for me to say, I created this. This is my recipe.
And if I have been prayed over by others and received that blessing, as we began to eat that meal, it would be the height of arrogance for me to think that I was the one hosting the dinner. So it begins, the humility, begins there. And so what flows from that kind of humility? A sense of mercy, a sense of justice that I have what I don’t deserve and no one, no one should be treated as though they don’t deserve what they have, because I know I didn’t deserve what I had.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
It sounds like also bubbling up in there is this whole notion of what does it mean to live with gratitude? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the inheritances that we’ve all received from … We all are eating from trees we didn’t plant and drinking from wells we didn’t dig. Thank you for walking us down that.
So in your writings and along the line here, Bishops Easterling and McKee are going to leap in with some questions of their own, but let me put this one out to you. In your writings, and we all reframe it through our own lenses, but one of the things that you have written about explicitly and implicitly is this notion of at some point, the goal of being American was to become white. Whiteness got centered in a way as it was normative and therefore, it was good. Therefore, everything else was certainly not as good, if not indeed evil and bad. And some of us have lived that narrative of what that’s like and internalized it in tragic ways. So I want to ask you what is required of Christian leaders, if we are in our work and ministry, to stop promoting or centering whiteness, and why is that critical for all disciples of Jesus Christ?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
Bishop, this is a really important question you’re asking me, and this is why I’ve begun some of my comments by again reminding the listeners of the importance of how we enter the story. We enter the Christian story, recognizing that this was not our story. We entered from the margins. We were not at the center, but we were brought in by grace. The tragic history of Christianity, especially moving into the 14th and 15th centuries, is that Christians began to imagine that from the very beginning we were at the center, that we replaced Israel as God’s people. And we moved to the very center of God’s concern, God’s attention and most importantly, God’s plan for the salvation of the world, that we were at the very center of it. Now here’s what most people need to understand. Historically, that sick sense of centeredness, let’s call it that, that sick sense of centeredness became the ground on which whiteness comes to be.
Whiteness is that sick sense of centeredness that the whole world revolves around the way I see the true, the good, the beautiful, the noble, and I have been charged by God to bring the entire world to maturity. God is counting on me to do this. Now, this is the legacy that we as Christians in the West inherited from what’s known as modern colonialism. We inherited this vision of a Christianity centered in the West, executed by those who we would call Europeans, charged with the task of bringing the whole world to maturity.
That’s what’s at the very center of whiteness. So let’s give a quick definition of whiteness for your listeners so that they won’t be confused by this. Whiteness is not phenotype. Whiteness is not appearance. Whiteness is not culture, and whiteness is not even a part of creation. Whiteness is a way of seeing the world and a way of being in the world at the same time.
Whiteness is a way of imagining though how the world should be, organizing the world, how the world should be shaped. And whiteness is having the power to realize that organization. And one other little element-whiteness is also a way of feeling comfort, safety, and normalcy, based on that reality, based on a world organized in the way I think it should be organized.
So whiteness is a framing of life and a framing of existence that starts with a sick sense of centeredness. But here’s the problem for us. It is all rooted deeply in a Christian mistake. And what is that Christian mistake? That we replaced Israel as God’s people, and God does everything only, exclusively, through the Christian. Therefore, historically, the European started to imagine himself, and primarily we’re talking about men, but women as well, imagined himself as the very center of what God is doing.
So the first thing that we have to do as Christian leaders, the very first thing Bishop, is give people the Christian story that many people have never gotten a memo that they were Gentiles brought into the faith, brought into another people’s story. That is to say, many Christians have never gotten a memo that’s in Ephesians two. Remember you Gentiles, you were outside. You were without God and without hope in the world, but through Christ you were brought in. And so many people have been taught to read the Bible, think their faith as though they were always the point, which means this humility you asked me about earlier, this humility that is so crucial to being a Christian, is missing from so many Christians. Because they don’t understand what it means to come from the margins.
The great woman Catholic theologian, M. Shawn Copeland, talks about a thinking margin, what it means to be a thinking margin. There she’s thinking primarily, talking primarily about African American women and their important work as Christian women, their important work in thinking the faith from the margins. But what she’s also pointing to is the reality of Christianity itself, that we are thinking margins. We come in from the margins, so we know what it’s like to be at the margins, but to be brought in by grace. And so we carry that humility. So the first thing that has to happen is that Christians have to be introduced to their story. And so many have never been introduced to their own story of a people formed to join another people. That’s the beginning.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
And you do this so masterfully in multiple places. But remind us, you remind us of this in what I refer to as your Magnum Opus, The Christian Imagination, and of our amnesia and our misreading. And it sounds and feels in my head and heart like what you’ve been describing is what became the fertile soil for white supremacy, for, let me say, American exceptionalism. Am I off base here, or?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
It’s moving right in that direction, because this vision of centeredness is a distortion of what’s present in scripture. So when we read scripture, start to finish, we read the story of God’s involvement with God’s own people. Israel. We read that involvement intensifying with the life of Jesus and Jesus’ ministry. And so the story of the world, and in fact, the story of the universe, opens out through Israel. So what happens is when Israel’s pulled out, you drop something else in there. And once you drop something else in there, if you try to take that out, for so many people, the whole thing falls apart. So for so many people, whiteness and their Christianity, whiteness and a certain kind of evangelical vision, are so intertwined that they cannot imagine the one without the other. And because whiteness was presented in this way, it was presented as always positive.
And so when somebody like me comes along and starts to say things like this, for some people, this sounds like hate speech. They will be upset with you, because what you’re saying sounds like hate speech. Why do you hate white people so much? And it’s because they have never seen a distinction between that way of being in the world and who they actually are. Now for all people of color, for the most part, all of us have gone through some process of seeing the difference between the vision of what we are, of who we are, and who we actually are. All of us have gone through that important and painful process of pushing away the derogatory vision of being Black or being Asian or being Filipino or being Hispanic or Latinx or Native American. We’ve pushed away the negative vision, pulled out from it the little slivers of truth that speak to who we are.
And we’ve tried to weave together a vision of who we truly are apart from that image, because that image has brought so much hell and destruction to us. And for most of us, we’ve done it inside of our Christianity. Our Christian faith has helped us do that, helped us do that sifting and pulling. But whiteness has been always presented as positive. And so people have used their Christianity to weave it even more tightly onto themselves. Why would I want to separate myself from something that’s always positive? That always centers me at the very heart of everything good and positive, everything that God wants? So for some people, the very idea of trying to see who they are apart from whiteness, makes no sense. They’re like, what are you talking about? I don’t understand what you’ve been saying, Dr. Jennings. And the reason it’s so challenging is because it feels so painful.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Now there you’ve touched on something, Dr. Jennings, something that is part of why I think so many won’t address it is because of how painful it is. But as I hear you talk, you know, Bonhoeffer is synonymous with cheap grace. Now, when I think of Dr. Willie Jennings, I think about cheap Christianity. And I think that for so long is what we’ve been offering, peddling in the public square.
So how do we encourage pastors, Christian leaders, to engage this kind of painful process? And some might even say that to ask folks to engage in this or to even promote it is the very antithesis of humility, because they’ll say, well, isn’t it pretty heady for you to say that we have to go back to the beginning and reimagine our understanding of Christianity. But tell us what we risk if we don’t live into this pain, if we’re not willing to do this work, what are we perpetuating by allowing this narrative to continue?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
Bishop, that’s a wonderful, wonderful question. And I tell you, at the heart of it is precisely the warning that your question is putting on the table for us. And that is, if we as Christians in the West, refuse to face the important work of extracting our Christianity from whiteness, then what will happen is that our witness, our witness will suffer profoundly such that people will say back to us, you’re right. There is no difference between your Christianity and whiteness. And so therefore, as far as I’m concerned, your Christianity is already at an end. It has no future for the world I want to live in.
And so for many people right now, especially young people in their twenties and early thirties, the jury is out, friends. The jury is out whether Christianity is a good idea, set of ideas, or a good way of living. The jury is out. And it has not returned yet. And I tell you right now, it doesn’t look good. And it’s because so many people are refusing this work. Now what would be required? And you mentioned Bonhoeffer and the German Christians. And we must always take a lesson from that, the German Christians, what was so damnable about the behavior. It’s not what they did-
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Indeed.
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
It’s what they didn’t do. What they refused to do that made it so horrible. It’s not what they did. It’s what they refused to do. They saw the concentration camps. We now know that so many of the Jews who were in concentration camps were released into the communities to go do yard work and housework. So they saw what was going on, and they did nothing. And in like manner, what we have to understand is that this is a straightforward step. What is the step?
For so many Christians who identify as white to join hands, join arms with their BIPOC sisters and brothers, who every day, every day are working to extract the racial horror from who they are, trying to claim who they are, apart from the racial, and who could be exquisite teachers, wonderful collaborators, great partners in helping them do this work, not doing it for them, not doing it for them, but working beside and watching and saying, how can I follow you just as you are renouncing the negative images of blackness and of black people, the negative stereotypes of Asian people, the negative stereotypes of indigenous peoples, I too will renounce the abundant positive, overly aggressive centered visions of whiteness.
I will renounce that, I will step away from that. I will lock hands with you. I will enter fully into your ways of life so that I might know my own life, free from that foolishness. Yes. But now obviously, we have to remember, this is a crucial step. There’s that famous passage in Hebrews, I think is always important for us to remember, where it says that Moses, when he came of age and knew who he was, he rejected the ways of Egypt and followed the ways of Israel. And the passage says, and in this way, followed the Christ. In this way followed the Christ. But so crucial I want to say that again, when he realized who he was-
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Who he was.
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
That’s when he said, no, I’m going here. I’m not going there. And in that way, followed the Christ.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Amen.
Bishop Mike McKee:
So, Dr. Jennings, I really appreciate what you’ve been offering us today. I want to circle back on the sins of omission. It is so easy for all of us to condemn the sense of commission, because they’re right there in front of us. And to be honest, it just would not be culturally cool to do anything but. You would strike at that. But the most dangerous thing, I know you alluded to it, are these sins of omission, that we just sit idly by, or we do not pay enough attention to things. So give us a word, I think a prophetic word for the church that many of our clergy probably should be saying, or find a way to say in their own way to the church about our future.
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
And Bishop, thank you so much. That’s a wonderful question for me to be thinking about with you all about this. What I always say to pastors is that, especially if you’re in this country, the place you live, the shape of the place you live, is never shaped by accident. For so many people, the reason that they are inside sins of omission is because the very built environment, the neighborhood, the shape of their community, constitutes the sin of omission. It shields them. It protects them. It hides them. It creates ignorance for them in terms of what’s going on around them, beyond their immediate neighborhood, beyond the 10 minutes from the mall or the 15 minutes from downtown. It shields them from a world, a racial world that is full of the pain and suffering of their community. And so, as I always say to pastors, do a geographic reality check of your church and your community.
Where is your church? Where is your church located? Where are the communities of color located in relationship to your church? Where are your people located? Where are the communities of color in relationship to where your people are located? Where are the resources? Where’s the stores? How are goods and services flowing in and out of the communities around your church and around where your people live?
And if you do that kind of geographic analysis, that kind of geographic check, that kind of geographic work, what you’ll see are the ways in which race continues to be nurtured. And the racial antagonisms of this country continue to be nurtured by the very shape of the communities that our churches are in and that where we live. And so what has to happen? Pastors have to invite their churches into deep discernment and prayer, praying one crucial question. Lord, who should I be?
Who should we be in this place? And that place means three things. Where this church is, who should we be in this place? And then individually, who should I be in the place where I live? Who should I be? And then there’s a third element to that. If I’m learning that the very place I am in is contrary to the discipleship I claim to be living, then I have to discern what is the spirit of God saying to me about where I should be? Remember, in the book of Acts, my dear brothers and sister, remember in the book of Acts, the sign of the spirits coming is almost everybody in the book of Acts is doing something they don’t want to do.
And in most cases, they’re being asked to go someplace that they would prefer not to go. And so we have to do that work because race and place in the West are intricately woven together. And so the omission that we see, it’s not simply in people’s heads and hearts, because if we think about omission, simply in people not wanting to do right, most folks would react very quickly and say, well, I want to do right. I try to treat everybody I meet kind. I speak kind. That’s not where we want to have people focus their attention. Focus their attention, where do you live? Where’s your neighborhood? Where’s the church at? What are you doing? Who do you drive by? Who do you ignore as you’re driving? Where is your attention being turned by the very shape of your living? That’s where the omission starts to show itself most profoundly.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Well, listen, we are needing to get ready to go, and it feels like we are just warming up. And I know it’s frustrating to all of us, but you have fed us and given us a rich conversation. One question we ask of all of our guests in some way, shape or form, in this work of dismantling racism and participating in the power of the Holy Spirit in building God’s beloved community, how do you, Dr. Willie Jennings, care for your soul?
Dr. Willie James Jennings:
You know, these days, the most important thing I do is that I sit and talk with other sisters and brothers and we laugh together and we enjoy the small things. And we remind each other that we are in a great work of hope. And as I like to say, Bishop, hope is not a sentiment. It’s a mistake to ever understand hope as a sentiment. And it’s even greater mistake to understand hope as a feeling. As I like to say, hope is a discipline. And so I get with sisters and brothers to discipline myself in hope. We are commanded in scripture to hope, we aren’t invited. Would you like to hope? No, hope, hope in God, and it’s a discipline to live in that hope. And so I feed my soul by being with folks who understand that we are in this shared work of the practice of hope, disciplining ourself in hope.
Bishop Gregory Palmer:
Wow. What a fabulous way to end. And thank you. Thank you.
Friends, thank you for joining us. We pray our time together has been helpful to you and we pray God’s blessings on your continued work.
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:
Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bishop Mike McKee:
Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church, conversations that transform.
resources
Listening is an important first step in the work of antiracism. Are you ready to do more? Here are some helpful resources to help you dig in deeper to the topics discussed in this episode.
About Willie Jennings
Looking to improve intercultural competence? Check out the Intercultural Development Inventory.
Learn more about cultural humility in this video from the Baltimore-Washington Conference.
Resources from the United Methodist General Commission on Religion and Race
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?
About Willie Jennings
Looking to improve intercultural competence? Check out the Intercultural Development Inventory.
Learn more about cultural humility in this video from the Baltimore-Washington Conference.
Resources from the United Methodist General Commission on Religion and Race
What does The United Methodist Church say about racism?