Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears, software, and the help of a friend and so it may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Bonnie Intro 0:00
We need to have this broader look at our faith, because we need to understand more about other Christians, what they believe, why they believe it, how it relates to what we believe, so that we aren't treating each other with mutual suspicion and distrust so that we can engage productively across denominational lines. That can be very hard to do, I think, the longer you're in one tradition and just become accustomed to that tradition and accustomed to thinking of it maybe as the only true variant of Christianity. I think we start to maybe even doubt the faith of those who believe a little bit differently than we do, even though they're still very much focused on Jesus, very faithful, very in agreement on all the core of our faith.
Seth 1:!7
I wanted to try this a little bit differently. Before we get started, I say it often and I say it frequently, and I mean it every single time, this show will not continue to be a show, if I'm honest, after the first year, just because everything has to be renewed, without the support of our Patrons. I'm happy and I'm pleased to say that the show is well on its way to be in a position that it can at least pay for itself. Thank you to Patrick and Teresa and Lee and Jewel and Luke and the others like you, some of you since the beginning and some recently, that have come on and supported the show on Patreon. If you haven't not yet done that, please do that.
Minimum is $1 a month, maximum is a mortgage payment a month, and I don't expect any of you to do that. Some of you get books. Some of you just get open and honest conversations. A lot of you get easy and early access to the show each week, days, sometimes weeks before the show is out. I also post new things, little miniature clips, updates, goofiness that comes out of my brain. I appreciate each and every one of you and I would ask any of you listening, consider doing that today. Either as soon as this episode is done, either way, consider doing it today. You mean more than you know to the success and the growth of this show.
Today on the show, I spoke with Bonnie Kristian. Bonnie has written a fantastic book, one that, honestly, I wish I had six or seven years ago and one that I've recommended to some of the staff at my church. I think we should give this to every high schooler and everyone that's going into college as just a, “Here’s our gift to you. There are not really answers in here, but here's what you can expect to be challenged with as your faith has to become more flexible.” A Flexible Faith came out in May 2018. I highly recommend you go get it, and you'll find links for that in the show notes.
A bit about Bonnie. She is a theological and political writer with a national following. She has columns and by lines on places like The Week, Time, CNN, The Hill, Relevant. She is well written, well versed, and knows her stuff. I can't wait for you to hear today's conversation. I can't wait for the thoughts and the ideas that it sparks in you as you listen to it. Let's roll the tape. Here we go. Bonnie Kristian.
Seth 4:01
Bonnie Kristian, thank you so much for joining the Can I Say This At Church podcast. I know that we have rescheduled at least three or four times. I appreciate your graciousness and your flexibility on your calendaring, and I'm excited that you're here.
Bonnie 4:14
Yeah. Thank you for having me, though, to be fair, I feel like I have to take credit for at least one of those reschedulings, in the in the name of honesty here.
Seth 4:24
Well, I was willing to bear the brunt of that. It's fine. No worries. We're everybody's busy. I can't tell you how pleased I was when I got your email asking about the opportunity to talk to you on the show. If I'm honest, and I just a minute ago recorded the intro for this episode, I wish I had the book that you wrote about seven years ago, it would have saved me at least a lot of time in figuring out what my options were outside of my fundamentalist evangelical upbringing. I'm sad that that's not the case; but before we get into your book, what would you want people to know about you, because you hold a lot of hats?
Bonnie 5:06
I do. The short version is that I'm a writer, A Flexible Faith is my first book.Most of the writing that I do on more of a weekly basis, most of what pays the bills, it's more political. I do some some theological writing outside of book stuff. I’m the weekend editor for The Week, which is a very confusing sentence. The Week is a news magazine, and I run the website on the weekends. I'm also a Fellow at a foreign policy shop called US Priorities, where I write foreign policy commentary on the news of the week, the day. I do some freelance writing as well. That's mostly what keeps me busy.
I live in the Twin Cities with my husband and our dogs, who hopefully do not interrupt this podcast too badly. I moved up here for seminary a couple years ago. We like the area and are planning on sticking around. That's most of most of it.
Seth 6:12
Are you still in seminary now, or are you done?
Bonnie 6:15
No, I graduated in 2016, so now I'm looking into PhD programs, but that's probably, at least, a year away from starting, just in terms of needing to funding and write your proposal and all that sort of stuff, which is not done yet, at all.
Seth 6:33
Religion and politics are two things we're not supposed to discuss. Doing what you do for a living, do you find it hard? Have you gotten any pushback from writing a book on religion? Or have most people just been like, “Nah, it’s fine, not a big deal. Do what you want to do. Who cares?”
Bonnie 6:49
You know, for a long time I was very concerned about writing about both publicly and doing it well, especially in the sense of, I'm so wary of, in any sense, communicating, “Here’s my politics, and you have to agree with them. As if, these are the most Christian politics are the only Christian politics” I never want to be communicating that. I mean, obviously, I think there's a good fit, and my my faith in inspires and decides a lot of my politics. I don't want to communicate that message of, “You have to think like I do politically or I have doubts about your faith.”
For a long time, I kept my main website strictly on politics stuff, then I drew up a little side blog where I did theology. Then eventually, sometime when I was in seminary, I was just like, “You know what, this is dumb. Why am I keeping these things separate? There's no reason to be sort of compartmentalizing my life like that. I can have this caution mixing things inappropriately without keeping things separate in such a weird way.” Some of the writing that I do on a weekly basis is sort of at the intersection of religion and politics. I'll write about how how religion affects our politics, which happens so much here in the States, topics about civil religion, that sort of thing. I think it's not totally out of left field, for my more political-interest readers at this point, in a way that maybe it would have come as something of a surprise five years ago,
Seth 8:37
The book, A Flexible Faith that you've written, I like how you approach, over the course of, I think, 18 or 20 chapters, some really big columns or pillars of any version of Christianity that we are or that someone would profess to be, be it Orthodox or Catholic or Messianic Judaism, and a lot of things that I'd never really thought about before. I'm curious, why did you decide to write it? Was it seminary that did that? Or was it something you'd been struggling with since you were a youth? What is the birthing of this book?
Bonnie 9:14
I really usually go back to two audiences that I have in mind, and each of those comes with its own motivation. One would be Christians who are good with their faith, with their church context; obviously you are never at a good, final place, but you're not in a big season of doubt, you’re not in a big season of questioning. You're happy with the congregation, that sort of thing. Even in that space, I think that we need to have this broader look at our faith, because we need to understand more about other Christians, what they believe, why they believe it, how it relates to what we believe so that we aren't treating each other with mutual suspicion and distrust, so that we can engage productively across denominational lines. That can be very hard to do, I think, the longer you're in one tradition, and you sort of become accustomed to that tradition and accustomed to thinking of it maybe as the only true variant of Christianity. I think we start to maybe even doubt the faith of those who believe a little bit differently than we do, even though they're still very much focused on Jesus, very faithful, very in agreement on all the core of our faith.
The second audience and motivation is for Christians who are in a season of doubt or questioning. There have been a lot of books, more memoir-style books, that talk about the experience of going through a time of deconstruction. Those books are great, and I think can be super useful if you're going through that and you want to read about someone else's experience and use that to process your own experience. What I wanted to do was really say, “All right, this has happened to you. You can’t go back to where you were before you had these questions, but you don't want to stay in this limbo of questions and doubt forever.” So let's have a really practical way to say, “What comes next? What else is out there? What are your options within Christianity? What can you begin to learn about to start to rebuild your faith?”
Seth 11:24
Why did you choose these 18 things? Why those topics as opposed to… Well, I don’t want to give it away. I have other questions lined up specifically for a few chapters that I have questions about. Why these? Why not [others]? There's so many things about church that we could question or drill down.
Bonnie 11:41
Yeah. There have been some sort of similar books in the past across the spectrum by Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy is a big one that I've mentioned that in the book as a resource for further reading. Then there's a Zondervan series; I don't know what this whole series is called, but the books are typically called Four Views On Hell or Three Views on…whatever. Those do it book length what I do in a few paragraphs in each chapter. I looked at things like that, just to see, when other people have come to to a similar project, what have been the questions that they found important to a lot of people to answer. So I looked at books like that, to find out what other people had thought. Then I also included more, and I'm not really sure if this is the best way to put it, but more lifestyle issues, if you will. Things like, can Christians be rich, should Christians vote, things that I think don't tend to get quite as much attention from those books, which are usually a little bit more interested in areas of theology proper. I think those tend to be really important to people on a practical day-to-day basis, so I wanted to cover that as well.
Seth 12:59
I wholeheartedly agree. I have one of, I think, its Zondervan’s Four Views on Hell. When I say hell, it has purgatory in there, which I'm not sure that counts as hell, but it is something akin to that. What you hear people argue about in church picnics and on Facebook and on Twitter and at PTA meetings are the topics that you have in your book. Most people could care less about transubstantiationism, but they do care about how we vote, or the way that we lean politically. I do appreciate that, I just was curious. I wonder how much of that is an inference of what you do now, how much of your, “Here's what I write about, here’s what I hear on the internet and in publications of what people are worried about.” Then how does theology connect to that?
Bonnie 13:49
Yeah, I definitely think it affects it coming from not so much an academic theology background, but from like a news and journalism background. Definitely, that has played into the selection of topics.
Seth 14:01
At the very beginning, you set the stage. I'll be honest, I haven't read Greg Boyd's book. I don't know if you got this from his, but you talked about the concentric circles. The best way that I can describe that to people that don't have the book in front of them is if you picture the target logo, but you add a few more circles after it. And so you've got Jesus at the center, then how do we spread out from that?
Bonnie 14:22
So it’s Jesus at the center and it's not even like our belief about Jesus, but the person of Jesus Himself. That's the core of the faith. Then the first smallest circle around that is what we would call dogma. These are super basic beliefs that all orthodox Christians can agree to about what God is like and what He's done and what He wants from us. I used the apostles creed in the book as a good encapsulation of dogma. If someone says, “Roughly in 25 words or less, what does it mean to be a Christian?” This is the sort of thing you're going to come up with. Things that a Catholic and a Baptist and a Methodist, everyone agrees on, it’s so, so basic that way.
The next circle further out would be what we can call doctrine. That's the sort of thing that divides denominations. Things like just God choose who is saved. Things like how should we do baptism? Things like predestination, that's the doctrine level. Those are super important, but they're not the sort of thing where it's really definitional to what it means to be a Christian, it's usually more of an explanation of the dogma level stuff; okay, so we all believe that, here's how we disagree on how it works.
Then the largest circle would be opinions. That’s the sort of thing where we could agree to disagree within a denomination or even within a single congregation. The things that I'm discussing in A Flexible Faith are all either doctrine or opinion level issues, and you can even debate about what properly goes in each of those categories. It's never about Jesus in terms of questioning His divinity and His place in our faith. It’s never about dogma-level issues. The assumption is that's all settled, that is what it means to be Christian, and we're working out and exploring different ways to be a Christian, given that foundation.
Seth 16:25
For those listening, [review] what some of those sound like; some of the topics, as I'm looking at here are: Does God plan everything that happens? Why do we get baptized and how? What happens at the end of the world? There’s a lot of those type of topics.
Seth 17:30
I am curious. What made you decide to do the Q&A? Those are my favorite parts, partly because I already knew some of the information in the chapters, although I was surprised at what I didn't know. But the Q&A's to me, I really enjoyed those. I almost want a whole book of Q&A's.
Bonnie 17:49
Yeah, I really enjoyed doing those as well. For people who haven't seen the book, in-between each of the chapters there's like a five-question Q&A with Christians who are living out their faith in more unusual ways. Depending on what your tradition, your background is, maybe some of these will be familiar, maybe they'll all be totally unfamiliar. The idea is that you could spend a lifetime in church and most of these people you'll probably never encounter, which I think is a loss. I went with the Q&A, I could have just written about them and done like a little report, but I really wanted to have that element of personal introduction, meeting them, in their own words, and finding out from someone who's in that tradition, what is important to you? Why, in many cases, did you choose to be here? What do you think this facet of Christianity has to contribute to other Christians? I'm never going to become a Benedictine nun, but that doesn't mean that I don't have things to learn from them.
It was a really interesting part of the book to compile. There were some pretty amazing moments in how I was connecting with those people. I think the craziest one was, I interviewed a member of a Latin-American based community from El Salvador; I got in touch with him, I think it was recommended to me by a journalist in Oregon maybe, to connect with a nonprofit in New York, which put me in touch with, I want to say, a priest or a lay missionary in Africa, who had this guy's contact. It was crazy. Like it was spanning, I think, at least three continents to get in touch. Then we spoke by Google Translate, because he doesn't speak English and I don't speak Spanish. I'm plugging my stuff into Google Translate. For the questions, I have a friend who speaks Spanish check it and [confirm], “Yeah, this makes sense.”
Seth 19:58
That could have gotten dangerous, because I'm sure you've seen those those nice, funny videos, where someone will just plug in five sentences into Google Translate, run it through 20 different languages, and it ends up saying….
Bonnie 20:09
Accidentally send them some horrible insult.
Seth 20:11
Yeah. Which one is your favorite Q&A? That’s probably not fair.
Bonnie 20:15
It is not fair, and it's a hard choice. I really enjoyed Claire Stover from the Bruderhof, which is the common purse community. A lot of their locations are in upstate New York, and that's where she is, but they have locations elsewhere. I thought her story was super interesting, because if I remember correctly, she had a career on Wall Street, and then she gives that up and goes to this [community]. They're not Amish. They use technology, but they’re still a common purse community. They have all their goods in common. You have a little bit of personal property, but you share all your money. It was a super interesting conversation with her, but they’re all great. It’s hard to pick.
Seth 21:01
The story of Dirk Willems, is that how you say his last name?
Bonnie 21:05
I think so.
Seth 21:06
I had never heard that story. I tried to put myself in his shoes. Correct me if I'm saying this wrong, this is from memory, for those listening. He basically was incarcerated, escapes, the guy chasing him down goes to drown in a lake because he's fat, and Dirk wasn't because he's been starved. As a Christian, he turns around and goes to save the guy, at his own dismay, obviously. I can't imagine myself doing that, ever, ever. I think that was my one of my favorite moments in that entire book. It put me in a place where I felt challenged, and it wasn’t “Scripture.”
Bonnie 21:46
Yeah, it's a crazy story. I'm in a Mennonite community, and I did not grow up Mennonite. I had not heard it before joining this community. The story is that, not only does he go back to save this guy and then get burned at the stake for his trouble, but that he spins around without hesitation. It’s not like there's a couple minutes of Dirk kind of standing on the ice thinking about, “Should I go back? I'm probably going to get killed.” No, he's just, “Oh, I have to save him.” It's not even a second thought. It's a crazy story. I don't know that I would want to go back either. Especially because it's not like he was in any way at fault for this guy drowning. It's not like he did any violence to the guy. I think no one would have faulted him for going on and for saying, “Let his fellow guards rescue him. That's not my job.” But he didn't do that.
Seth 22:49
Couple of specific topics I want to ask you about. The first one is this. As I read through it, I don't know that I've ever had a thought since I began my deconstruction phase and my rebuilding phase, and I'd like to borrow an adjective or a way that someone described it to me on Twitter - it shouldn't be a deconstructing, it's more like our restoration, where you're just getting rid of really, really bad tarnish, and uncovering something more beautiful underneath. I found myself, when I read through, I don't fit into any category. I don't know if I grew up as a fundamentalist evangelical. I now think I hold to Christus Victor, but I also still hold parts of my faith that are more fundamentalist. There are other parts that I think the Eastern Church has it right and the western Church has it wrong. For those like me, how do I know what kind of a Christian I am? Or is that even a question that I need to be asking?
Bonnie 23:47
Yeah. I think, as much as we might claim we don't like labels, I think we all like labels. It’s nice to be able to say, “Here are the five boxes I fit in.” And it's tough, because for many people, obviously there's a degree to which internal consistency of some views are not going to fit well with others. There’ll be some degree within which that'll sort of sort you into categories. I think many people, especially now, where we are much more fluid about drawing from different traditions and changing traditions as our faith evolves, than it used to be in the past, I think there'll be many people who, like you, will find that they don't fit neatly into one category or another.
My answer, I guess, is try to find the closest healthy community in your area that works and go with that. Certainly don't try to force yourself to conform to the community's views where they different from yours; if that difference maintains, that's fine. I would encourage people to not let that inability to find a denomination or a group that perfectly agrees with you on every subject to become like a real sticking point or something that you really focus on. That would be nice if we all found a church that was what we agree on, on every issue, but it's not going to happen probably. I think we need to learn to be okay with that and to be able to worship and commit to people who are not in 100% agreement with us, both on the macro scale of recognizing the church universal, but also on the local level of saying, “We can be a congregation in a community together, and we can still disagree on some stuff.”
Seth 25:54
A couple specific chapters that I think are more and more pertinent as each day goes on. One of them is [where] you talk about gay relationships. You basically talk about how we can't take those clobber texts that Paul writes when we want to condemn gay relationships, and then not also say that you can also use heterosexual relationships to also be just as sinful and just as wrong. I'm curious your thoughts on that. You don't express a lot of opinions in the book. Most of the chapters, you don't actually tell us what you believe, and I do like that, but there's a part of me that doesn't like that because I'm used to people telling me, in their books, what they believe.
Where do you come with that, because I don't see that as a topic going away anytime soon, it's only going to get more vocal, more and more vocal. I can tell you just personally, I spoke with my wife, who's a nurse, not long ago. We had watched a show, it's a made up show on TV, and this little girl was born with both genitals. It it wasn't until there was a medical emergency that they found out, and the mom had to be in a position of, “No, here's what they are.” But had they waited six more years, she'd be deemed gender questioning, or she'd be deemed something else. How, as Christians, do we come down with? I guess, where do you come down on that?
Bonnie 27:21
Well, intersex cases like you described are really tricky and, I think, their own category where you are born biologically with both sets of genitals or some combination of reproductive organs. That's an incredibly difficult scenario that I, in some sense, especially for the parents, I wouldn't wish on anyone, because it's such a grave decision that you're faced with making for the child's whole life. I remember hearing in maybe elementary or middle school about that case from the 90s, where I don't even know if that was a case where the child was intersex or where they had like an accident in circumcision and so the boy was raised as a girl but always felt like a boy. I don't remember the details, but it was terrible because when he reached like high school or adulthood, he was just struggling with these overwhelming feelings of that something was wrong. He eventually did, I believe, live as a man and then I think committed suicide; his whole life was ruined by mistakes that had been made in his parents’ and doctors’ best intentions, decision-making when he was quite young.
As far as gay marriage more broadly, that is one of about two-thirds of the chapters where I don't give my own opinion mainly because the book isn't really about me. While I do like to share my view on the issues where I'm most passionate, in many cases, I felt like I I didn't really have anything of note to add or anything of value to add. As far as that topic specifically, our congregation specifically is beginning later this summer a community discernment process on that because it's coming up for a vote in our denomination, I believe, next summer. I want to go through that with my community, and I didn't really want to you know stake out a big position on my own because I knew, as I was writing, that this was coming up, without going through that with my church. That was my decision for that being one of the the majority of chapters where I don’t weigh in.
Seth 29:49
In the Mennonite tradition, and I'm not familiar with them, and and I should be more familiar because where I live in Central Virginia, there are a lot of Mennonite communities around me.
Bonnie 29:57
The Old Order, right?
Seth 29:58
I don't know. I'm going to say sure, but I honestly don't know.
Bonnie 30:02
I went to college in Bridgewater, near Harrisonburg.
Seth 30:05
Oh, then yes. I’m actually in Stuarts Draft, so I’m just down the street.
Bonnie 30:12
We would hear Buddies clapping by our dorm rooms at night. The rumor, at least, was that the Old Order Mennonite kids liked to go to the next town over where they would try on jeans and look at themselves in a mirror and that was their big teenage rebellion.
Seth 30:28
Well, Harrisonburg has great stores, so that's fine. In your tradition, then, is that something where it's like the Southern Baptist Convention or something where, “No, we said this, and now if you don't agree with us, you can no longer be part of this community,” or is it not that?
Bonnie 30:44
No, I mean, that's the question. So it was my understanding, and I was not a part of the church then, but my understanding is that one or two times ago, when they had the big national convention or whatever, the subject was brought up. I think it was summer of 2015, and it was either right before or right after the Supreme Court case was decided. The subject was brought up, and obviously it was very much in the news then, and nobody would felt prepared to take a vote. So they they said, “You know what, let's table this for four years until the next one for study and prayer and discernment, and we'll come back and we'll decide this at the 2019 meeting.”
There's a lot of disagreements about it. I know that there have been some very conservative churches that have split off from the main Mennonite Church USA to form their own smaller groups, because they want to maintain a very traditional perspective and they're concerned the broader denomination won't. I think there are a lot of people in the celibacy camp, and there are a lot of people in the affirming camp, and there are probably still even in the main denomination people in the traditional camp. So I don't know how that vote will go at the denominational level. I don't even know how the discussion and discernment is going to go in our congregation. I would say at my congregation, I feel confident saying it won't end up, we don't have a lot of old school traditionalist, the sort of people who would say, “There's no such thing as a gay orientation. It suggests your sinful desires.” I would say there are definitely going to be people taking the celibacy position, saying you can be gay, that is a thing, but marriage and sex is reserved for opposite sex couples. Then there will be affirming people as well. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm a little nervous to see how it goes down, to be honest, just because it's been so destructive for so many churches, this disagreement,
Seth 33:00
For those hearing that last 30 seconds, that last little bit of, “There are some that are affirming, there are some that are celibate, and there's some that are this other option,” that is the book. You'll notice there, and let me brag on you a bit, there’s just a grace there in not calling out anybody as wrong, which is hard. As you buy this book, that is it, here's all the options. It doesn't matter what the outcome is, here's the options. Then you get to wrestle with it.
Bonnie 33:28
Obviously, someone is wrong, right? Like those three positions are mutually exclusive, they can’t all be right. But to be wrong is not to be not a Christian on this and many other issues. And I think we need to be able to make that distinction of being able to say I disagree with you, this is an important issue. It has implications for how we treat each other and how we understand God and it matters, but disagreeing with you does not mean that I want to try to kick you out of the church
Seth 33:57
To build off of that, and that's where I was going with this, you recently wrote an article on Missioalliance, which is one of my favorite websites to go to, specifically because they give a lot of data, not a lot of opinions often. There’s usually data that backs up their articles. You recently wrote when one, think that's what it was called, How to Disagree [About Theology] Without Kicking [Each Other] Out of the Church. So, how do I do that? How do I show up on Sunday and come… I know humility has to be part of it, but I also know I'm not humble by nature. I don't think anybody is, maybe some of those Benedictine nuns are, but I'm. So how do we then do that? How do we disagree? Because, like you said, a lot of the views that we have can't both be right. They just theologically can't. As we approach the Bible and we approach scripture, how do we do that? How do we figure out who gets to be right this time without breaking off into the 67,000th version of Christianity that’s somewhere in the world now?
Bonnie 35:01
Yeah. So I think the concentric circle thing that we talked about helps a lot, just in terms of maintaining a perspective and reminding ourselves that different disagreements, some matter more than others. Disagreeing about the divinity of Christ, that’s one where we can fairly say, “If you don't think Jesus is God, by definition you're not a Christian at that point. That's what it means. If you disagree about how to do communion, that's not a defining issue in the same way. I think that helps just in terms of being able to step back and take a breath and be like, “Okay, this matters, it does not mean that they're not a Christian.” It's difficult, and I think even with that perspective, even with humility, it’s always going to be difficult.
I don't have some special wisdom in this. I certainly am as subject to the temptation to label someone a heretic as anybody is, someone I disagree with. I think that we have to remember that maintaining that degree of grace and forbearance to our fellow Christians is part of Christianity as well. If we're too eager to be slandering people and breaking communion with people that we disagree with, that doesn't exactly reflect well on our own faith, on our own Christianity. I think it just has to be a constant vigilance of ourselves, and we can't control how other people will come to the debate. We can certainly make sure that we come to it with a sense of, “I think I'm right, and I'm committed to the truth as best as I know it, and to always trying to find out more about the truth and hone my views to be more in alignment with it. But, I could be wrong, and let’s talk about that, in a spirit of grace.”
Seth 37:08
When you describe it that way, it’s a lot like a marriage. Often when I'm arguing with my wife, she's partially right, I'm partially right, and if either of us refuse to admit that, nothing happens, and usually it's damaging to the relationship. I don't have to be all the way right, and you don't have to be all the way wrong. We’ll keep it phrased that way on purpose, because I like to say that I'm right.
I'm curious, and I don't remember you speaking on it in the book, but with what you do for a living, Christians that have been gifted with influence, and so I think of a Paige Patterson or a Jerry Falwell Jr. or other names escape me at the moment, but Christians, and it doesn't matter if they're conservative or liberal or somewhere in between, as the political landscape in our country continues to change, as voting blocs continue to change. I'm a Millennial, so I'm now the biggest voting bloc, most of us are just too lazy to go vote. As the landscape changes, how do Christians that are either inheriting that power from someone that had it, like Jerry's kids in 10 years, how do we work with that so that we don't do detrimental harm to the church in such a way that the current trends of Millennials just checking out of “big church” altogether? How do we use that power to wield actual justice? How do we do it in such a way that we don't cause harm? I don't even mean intentionally causing harm, I just mean cause harm.
Bonnie 38:44
Yeah. I hope, and I think I see some evidence that Millennials and younger generations have learned from the errors of the recent past to not engage in the way that some of our elders have, which I think you're right has caused harm, regardless of intention. I do think that there's at least an awareness that the harm is possible and a desire to avoid that; whether or not we actually managed to avoid it is another question. I think that there's been, especially in the last few years, and very vivid negative object lesson for us of what happens when you do this badly. It's hard to say. It’s hard to say if it'll get any better.
I think that a lot of the stuff that we're witnessing now the president and with the white evangelicals’ support for him, people feel like it's a new thing, and in some ways it is a new thing. In some ways, what Trump is and does is very new, but in some ways, it's not. We've had civil religion in this country entangling the church and state for years. For centuries, for decades, the church has allowed the state to sort of cloak itself in religiosity and claim divine approval for the things the state is doing, and infuse our politics with religious overtones and undertones, and that's not new. It’s being used in some more obviously dysfunctional ways now, but I think a lot of it was already there, just less dramatic before. Even if Trump goes away and things return to “more normal,” I think a lot of these challenges to engage in the public square in a way that's functional and not destructive to our own faith and our witnesses as Christians will remain. I'm not very optimistic about this, as as you may gather.
Seth 40:58
Yeah, I’m not either. For those listening, don't hear me bashing the president. I don't like the president, but I genuinely think he wants to do a good job. I just think we disagree on what that good job looks like. I am curious, though, if we think about it in an ideological way. If history shows anything, when a force of power leaves a situation, something else takes its place. If the church can somehow disentangle itself from politics, what fills that gap? Because something's going to fill the gap.
Bonnie 41:31
Yeah, I mean, when I say disentangle from politics, I don't mean that we as Christians should stop speaking prophetically to culture and calling out injustice and saying, “This is wrong, we should not be doing this,” that sort of thing. I'm not calling for total separation from society. I'm not Amish, but I do think that it goes back to what I was saying at the beginning about the idea of wanting to avoid suggesting that my politics are the Christian politics.
I think Christians across the ideological spectrum have been very comfortable implicitly saying that for years. That has two effects, one on the political side of things, it means that everybody's claiming that God supports them and their agenda. That becomes a very convenient and facile thing politically. Then on the perspective of individuals, then it’s, “Well, you know, I don't like this political agenda. That means I must not like Jesus.” Neither is a good result. I'm not calling for Christians shouldn't be involved in politics at all, but we need to be a lot more careful about how we do it, and what our engagement communicates about us and about God and about God's relationship to our government.
Seth 43:02
Well, Bonnie, I want to give you back the rest of your morning. The book was on sale May 15. From what I can see on Amazon, it's being received well. I don't have contacts at the publisher, but it looks like it's been received well. For those listening, you'll see the link to that in the show notes. Where else would you point people to, Bonnie, to either engage in works like this, or to work through the theological topics that you bring up in the book?
Bonnie 43:31
At the end of every chapter, there's a reading list to learn more; so if that's a topic of particular concern to you, that's hopefully a start to help you engage more. On a more personal note, if you go to my website, which is just bonniekristian.com, you can get in touch with me there Twitter, which is @bonniekristian. On the website specifically you can sign up for my email list; hopefully sooner than later this summer, I'm going to be starting a series for subscribers of that, where each chapter has discussion questions. My plan is to sort of be answering those discussion questions myself by email to sort of engage with that further, and hopefully help readers think through it more themselves as well. That would be good to do.
Seth 44:19
That may become a full time job.
Bonnie 44:21
Yeah, yeah, I'm certainly not gonna finish all the questions this summer, maybe one chapter a month, and I'll finish a few years down the road.
Seth 44:33
Well, thank you for coming on. I've enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate your time.
Bonnie 44:37
Yeah, thank you so much.
Seth Outro 44:40
I have the benefit as editor and producer and whatever hat needs to be done for the day of letting things sit and coming back to them and releasing them in an order that, for some reason in the back of my head, makes sense. I didn't do that with this one. The turnaround time on the edit and the recording this one was was less than a day. A lot has happened in that day. Overnight, as I thought about the conversation with Bonnie and woke up this morning and looked at the notifications of arguments and hatefulness that I've had on the internet, I find that I am not doing a good job currently of allowing other people to be right as well as me. That's on me. A lot of that's my pride, and that's something I'm going to have to deal with. I'm realizing that now. You're probably wondering, why am I saying this on the podcast? But if I can't be honest here with you, what's the point?
Think about what you heard today from Bonnie, think about other people's point of view, and evaluate. I know I'm going to. I'm going to evaluate what I say to other people, either in person, on the phone, text message, Twitter specifically for me, and anywhere else that I interact with people. I think if I can learn to do that, and if you can learn to do that, that it's going to be a better last six months of the year, then the tumultuousness of these first six months. It's going to make things like Paige Patterson, just a few weeks ago, all that happened with that, it's going to make the SBC a better Christian organization. It’s going to make the CBF a better Christian organization. It'll make the Covenant Church and the Mennonite churches and the Catholic churches a better Christian place to be. If we can't further that ministry, then what's the point?
I hope, I really do hope, that you go out and buy Bonnie's book. It is tremendous. I can't stress enough how hard it is to write about opposing views and so in a way that I don't know unless you tell me which way you lean. I think that’s harder than it is, and if you don't think that it is, try it.
Thank you again to our Patreon supporters. Please become one. Stop what you're doing right now and do it. I appreciate you and you know who you are. I'm talking to you. You thought about it. I need you to do it
Seth Outro 47:36
The music today is from artist Wendell Kimbrough. You can find his music at wendellk.com. Wendell’s music is beautiful. I can't stress enough. Go to his website and get his newest album Come to Me. It's mostly based in the Psalms. It's beautifully sung, beautifully written, and just overall fantastic. Do support Wendell, and go get his music. The tracks that you heard today are on the Spotify playlist entitled Can I Say This At Church? Talk to you next week.