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 and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Stephen Backhouse 0:07
Well, most Christians think it's their job to make their nation great. And at the moment that following the way of Jesus interrupts the narrative of the nation, then they dropped Jesus at the first hurdle. And this happens over and over again. You can sort of maybe try and run a country according to the 10 commandments, but you can't run the country, according to the Sermon on the Mount. And you just see (that) Jesus, his way gets dropped almost immediately. And Christians do not like Jesus very much. And they get all sentimental and when weepy eyed about him, and they might sing songs all in unison, but they don't like his way at all. And instantly, the reaction I always get is pretty much “Oh, yeah, it's all very well, you know, turn the other cheek and all that stuff. But you can't run a country that way”. You know, you think of Jesus's approach to foreigners, Jesus's approach to money, and Jesus's approach to violence, all three of those things a country needs the opposite of what Jesus said and did. The attitudes that Jesus had towards foreigners, money, and violence, a country requires the opposite attitude in order to succeed.
Seth Price 1:23
Over the past, almost three years, the show has been going almost three years, I have intentionally tried very hard to not be political. Although my penchant for wanting to do podcasts started from political reasons, with some good friends of mine (I see you Awkward Rhino), however, I'm coming to think and realize that being Christian, following the way of Jesus is a political position. It doesn't mean it's a partisan one, it does mean it's a political one.
This conversation, I'm sure will upset many of you. And for that, I am sorry, actually re-listening to it a couple times in the edit, and then working on the transcript that I'm sure by the time this releases is not ready. It upsets me at times; this is the Can I Say This At Church podcast. I'm Seth. And this is one of those topics that a lot of people think should not be talked about at church, separation of church and state.
Keep my Jesus out of my voting! Keep my voting away from my Jesus! That's wrong!
So I brought on Stephen Backhouse to discuss just that. This conversation will stretch you. So let's go to roll the tape. Dr. Stephen Backhouse. It's always the hardest part in it.
Seth Price 2:50
It’s always the hardest part isn’t it, where do you start? Yeah. Dr. Stephen Backhouse. Welcome to the Can I Say This At Church podcast. And Sean, I know you're listening. Thank you for connecting to the two of us. Thank you for connecting the two of us. Yeah, that's how you say that sentence. But Welcome to the show. Thanks for spending the afternoon or evening, I forget exactly what timezone you're with that.
Stephen Backhouse 3:09
Yeah, it’s evening for me Seth. It is dark outside, I am calling from West Sussex, which is on the south coast of England. And it's near, sort of near, the City of Brighton is the largest city that I'm near. But my accent is Canadian. So I'm a Canadian who moved to England 20, some 22 years ago. And here I am. coast of England and I love it.
Seth Price 3:31
Yeah. So the first question I usually ask people and so this will be even a little more interesting to me is kind of what are some of those things in your life that have kind of pivoted you to make you do what you do today. Whatever those are, and some people give the trite answers of you know, I'm a husband. I'm a father. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fun and all but I think the real thing is like the good ones. So what are some of those kind of how did you get into what you do now? And what do you do now?
Stephen Backhouse 3:55
Okay, so what I am is I'm a political theologian. I'm a freelance political theologian, I run a thing called Tent Theology, which is, I travel around the UK, Canada, actually the states as well. And I used to before Coronavirus, locked us down I used to be a traveling theologian, and churches or networks would invite me to come and live with them for a weekend or a week. And I would teach theology open up spaces for agreeing and disagreeing Christianly with each other about all sorts of stuff.
You might be surprised to hear that churches do a bad job of teaching their Christians about Christianity. And normally, then we sort of outsource this off to the university and the seminary. Which by the way, also does a bad job of teaching Christians about Christianity, Because it separates, tends to separate, believers from their worshiping communities. And so Tent Theology was a way to try and like, take, you know, intellectually credible and serious theology into worshiping spaces. And so that's what I do. And that's what I did.
But then before that I was an academic I worked for various universities in in Canada and also in the UK. And I was used to work for St Mellitus College, which was a large Anglican Seminary in London for the last 10 years. That's what I did before I quit my job to go freelance.
Seth Price 5:24
What would cause someone to I don't know if they have tenure tracks at that college, but I would assume after 10 years, you're on a want to make a career out of this have like retirement, what would cause someone to go to heck with all that I'm just gonna go freelance.
Stephen Backhouse 5:36
I was what you'd call the core stuff I was running. I was running a master's program. I was a lecturer in social and political theology. And I also was the graduate Director of Graduate Studies. And I just spent a lot of time before that I was at Oxford University as an academic. And I've also been at McGill in Montreal. And I just got to the stage where I was looking at, I was going to conferences, or I was sitting in board meetings, or I was marking essays, and I just thought, this is what I have to do now? My career path is to run a college, or to become some sort of Professor some sort of academic.
And I looked around, I was like, it's pretty much just going to be more of this and less of teaching. So this is the dirty secret amongst academics is that you get into it, usually, because you really like teaching your subject. But the longer you do it, and the better you are at your teaching, you kind of get promoted out of that in order to become an administrator.
Seth Price 6:40
That seems unwise, take somebody something that somebody is good at, and then say, don't do that anymore.
Stephen Backhouse 6:43
Yeah. So I was like, having to do a lot of really boring paperwork in order to get into teach an hour a week or something. And I thought, actually, this isn't right. I don't want the life that I'm gonna be getting.
Seth Price 6:55
I thought that's what TA’s were for, so that you could continue to teach someone else did all the paperwork.
Stephen Backhouse 6:59
No, that doesn’t happen either.
Seth Price 7:00
But that's what the movies say. That's the things in the movies.
Stephen Backhouse 7:04
Yeah. Anyway, I mean, maybe it's good for some people. I don't want to say it's bad for everybody. I don't think just because I did it, everybody has to do it. But I myself knew this isn't me. And I, in fact, you know, I took a year, my wife wanted to go do a course she traveled around the world for me, and come to various cities, because I was gonna do a masters or a PhD. And so then she wanted to do some stuff to do with her career development in the States. And to do that meant, I would have had to put my job on hold for a year, because they weren't going to give me paid leave. And I was like, no, fair enough. She's traveled around the world for me, I'm gonna do it for her. So I took an unpaid year. And that was brilliant. That was exactly what I needed.
Because it was during that year that I was able to step back a bit and to see what I love doing what I didn't love doing. And then when I came back to my old job said, well, we've got your timetable Ready to go? And I said, Actually, I'm going to go freelance, and thank you very much. Yeah, I love that, you know, if anybody from supervisors thing, I mean, I have genuine love in my heart for the place and the people. But it wasn't the job for me and I knew that.
Seth Price 8:07
That sounds the best for both. So I want to ask you a question and it's gonna sound loaded. So because I'm here in the States, so you're in London, and then from Canada, so that you're slightly removed. I've always been fascinated by the amount of politics that people not in America, keep track of in America and like, why? And then why does that matter to the church? Because here you either have people using religion as a way to help the government control people, or vice versa, or we're not supposed to talk about it at all.
And so as a political theologian, which even that word doesn't make much sense to me, political theologian, like how does all that fit together? But I'd like to start kind of with often I have so man…I have friends in New Zealand from this podcast, and Australia and a bunch of places and they keep up with the news better than I do. And I live in Virginia. You know what I mean?
Stephen Backhouse 9:00
Yeah. Right. I don't know how much other people follow American news. I mean, for me, it's well because of my work. So my particular work is-it actually did arise from from my background. So I was I grew up in real Bible Belt Canada, like the kind of people I grew up around were self described fundamentalist evangelicals. They were very similar in culture to the kinds of people you might imagine. You know God, guns, and gays. We don’t like gays. We do like guns.
Seth Price 9:24
I saw a sign that said that today on my way to pick up my daughter. It literally said “Trump 2020: God, Guns, America”. That's literally what it said on the big blue (yard) sign.
Stephen Backhouse 9:36
Yeah, a lot of the people that I grew up with they they wish they were American so they could vote for the Republicans. And I grew up in a Christian school system, where we were taught six day creationism. We were taught rapture. All of our people were all Americans. It was James Dobson. It was, you know, Liberty University, stuff. I grew up an American evangelical.
Seth Price 10:06
In Canada.
Stephen Backhouse 10:07
Yeah, in Canada. So then I moved to England when I was 19, for an adventure. And I found that I was around a whole lot of people that didn't actually identify their Christianity with their conservative, nationalist, patriotic, politics. And they didn't have a culture warrior mindset, and they didn't think it was their job to, you know, defeat their enemies and own the liberals. You know, whatever it is that I was told I had to do to be a Christian. And it was kind of a disorienting experience for me, because I was in rooms with Christians who didn't all believe the same thing about abortion, or gay people, or patriotism, or politics, you couldn't tell. In England, it's much more integrated, so that, you know, one church will have-will just genuinely have multiple views on all these things. And they're still in one worshiping room together, right.
And the same differences, like you see in the state don't happen in and, you know, and genuine, like, disagreement about, you know, left wing or right wing politics, or climate change, or abortion or whatever, but they'll still be in one worshipping, church together. And that really blew my mind, you know, because I basically found that I was around Christians who you couldn't easily tell what culture they were part of. They didn't all belong to the same subculture. And that made me start to think about the relationship to being a follower of Jesus and your home culture that you're born into.
And so I was doing a bit of existential crisis as a 19 year old. And I discovered, I was working in a bookshop in British…this is my way of paying my way around the country and doing my adventure. I was working in a bookstore and I was using my employee discount to work my way through some of the world's classics, these books that you've always heard, never read. And so I discovered, “I discovered Seth!” I discovered Tolstoy, I discovered Dostoevsky! That was very good of me to discover Dostoevsky, but I also discovered Soren Kierkegaard who was a Danish philosopher. And I bought a copy of his book, Fear and Trembling. And here I was a 19-20 year old guy. And I read this Danish philosopher who died in 1855. And who never left Denmark, basically. And he was describing my little evangelical, nationalist, experience. And he was saying, there is a difference between being a follower of Jesus and being a good member of your nation and your tribe. And how Christendom has overtaken Christianity. And so we think of ourselves as primarily members of a civilization and not as followers of Jesus.
So that was the Kierkegaard moment. And I've described it before. It's like, the bottom of my world dropped, I actually experienced vertigo reading a book. I've only ever had that experience once before, and that was reading a Batman comic.
Seth Price 12:57
I thought you're gonna say the Bible, but Batman is fine!
Stephen Backhouse 13:01
No no no! Batman and Kierkegaard!
And as a result of that, I was like, wow, this guy is describing the kind of experience I'm feeling right now. And so then when I decided to go to university, in England, I chose the subject so that I could study more Kierkegaard, and then I ended up doing a masters on him. And then I did actually have a couple of masters Kierkegaard, which is ridiculous. And then I did my PhD,
Seth Price 12:59
Also on Kierkegaard
Stephen Backhouse 13:01
Also on Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s critique of Christian Nationalism. And looking at how to use Kierkegaard as a critic of this idea that your Christianity and your patriotism are the same thing; or that patriotism is a virtue.
And so that led me into political theology, because to look at Christians relationship to their nations and states, you have to start to look at what a nation state is. And I've ended up drawing from a lot of those wells of thinking politically, Christianly, about our politics.
Seth Price 13:58
So you referenced at the beginning that churches don't do a good job about teaching Christians about Christianity; and seminaries don't do a good job of teaching Christians about Christianity. And so I'm curious as to your thoughts on that, because that those are two fairly large claims. But then also, do you feel like that lack of education is what leads to the idolatry of nationalism? And I use that word with intentionality.
But how are they falling short in teaching? Because like, literally seminaries have one job, although maybe that job is just to teach people how to fit back into the system so they can continue to get funds to build payroll, but I don't know a lot about how seminaries work but just the banker part of my brain feels like that's what they are. They're the engine that drives finances, but I don't what do you mean by seminaries and churches both aren't doing a good job?
Stephen Backhouse 14:45
Well, what we've done is we've basically outsourced our Christian education our discipleship, our forming the Christian person. We've actually outsourced that to a thing called the university. And so now a young person says, “I, you know, I really feel something for Jesus and His people, I'd love to help serve his church”. And we say to her, “Well, well done, what you need to do now is you need to go to the university, and you need to get a degree. In fact, you probably need to get two degrees, and then you'll be ready to run a worshiping community”. Right? And, so then she goes off, and she's a keen young Christian, and she goes off to university. And she's taught all sorts of academic subjects, which have a place and a purpose. But they're not that good at forming the Christian discipleship.
And then she comes back, and she's totally unfit for service. And that is a story I saw all the time as well, as one working in—and then you're always trying really hard to change the system, and you are working in the university, and you're trying to instill some sort of Christian formation in people. But of course, you're always running against the furrow that you're being forced down. Because at the very end of the day, I was having to assess people based on whether they were good at writing essays or not.
That's what it really comes down to. Because the Principality that is the university says, Well, we need to assess your intellectual mind. And so you could have questions and concerns about somebody's character all you wanted, but you pretty much had to pass them and send them off back to the church if they were good at writing essays. That's kind of what it came down to.
Which was very frustrating. So that's not really equipping anybody, well, for a church leadership. But at the same time, churches then have no space within themselves for training, and intellectually seriously engaging, with Christianity, because they just outsource it to the university all the time. So I haven't found…and I’m not saying it's never the case. But like an average, as an average story, I think that just kind of happens again, and again and again.
And so then when you see like things like patriotism and stuff, now, this is where I'm influenced by your kind of Anbaptist, Stanley Hauerwas kind of stuff. I don't know if Stanley Hauerwas is a friend of the show.
Seth Price 17:15
He should be I should email him.
Stephen Backhouse 17:17
But the idea that the church can be an alternative politics, which doesn't mean a separation from the world, it means the church itself, the formation. Jesus people are themselves an expression of a form of politics which is not represented by the partisan shouting at each other or that kind of thing. So it's an alternative politics.
And what you get amongst Christians, your average Christian will grow up, actually thinking that the church's job is to make America as great as it can. The church's job is to make this country great. And that your job is to really just be, it has to kind of do whatever it takes to serve the nation, or to when the nation back for Christ and all this kind of thing. It pretty much is like William Cavanaugh, the great American Catholic political theologian, he says, “the nation has captured or colonized the imagination of the Christian”. That they basically think of their themselves as primarily—their identity is rooted in their nationality.
And that the church is just a little adjunct to that. Whereas if you really saw yourself as being formed as a person of Jesus in the kingdom of Jesus, your relationship to your nation as your primary identity fades, or it gets put back in its place. And you don't see that happen in almost any church I've ever been in. Not your average church. It happens amongst groups of followers of Jesus, for sure. So that's partly where I see the nationalism coming in. It's just people uninformed or untrained in the way of Jesus that think of Christian as being white or speaking English, or, you know, they think of it in terms of something to do with their inherited ethnicity or nationality rather than with something to do with following a way of Jesus through this world.
Seth Price 19:13
Yeah. Is this something that is just so I 100% agree that the church is … no… that the people in the church are being used for political means and political gains, and they're being used by fear, because people are afraid of whatever they're afraid of. I mean, we saw that reference the other day in one of my Facebook posts, which we won't go into here just because of privacy.
But I struggle with people when I'll tell them that and like, I'll say, you know, I'm just going to try to rest on trying to be a good Christian. And when that butts up against my politics, I'm going to defer to Christian. So I find that people look at me as a weak man or a weak American or weak because I'm not exerting power. So how does the church do that? Because I think for the church to divorce itself from politics, it's going to have to give up power, but it's going to require a lot of power to do that. So how do we ride that line? Because I don't think most churches are really equipped to do that well. The church that goes to church on Sundays only, (will say that) “I don't know what to do”.
Stephen Backhouse 20:20
Well, most Christians think it's their job to make their nation great. And at the moment that following the way of Jesus interrupts the narrative of the nation, then they drop Jesus at the first hurdle. And this happens over and over again. You can sort of maybe try and run a country according to the 10 commandments, but you can't run the country according to the Sermon on the Mount. And you just see him, Jesus’s way gets dropped almost immediately, and Christians do not like Jesus very much. They get all sentimental and weepy eyed about him, and they might sing songs all in unison, but they don't like his way at all. And instantly, the reaction I always get is pretty much “Oh, yeah, it's all very well, you know, turn the other cheek and all that stuff. But you can't run a country that way.”
You know, you think of Jesus's approach to foreigners, Jesus's approach to money, and Jesus's approach to violence, all three of those things-country needs the opposite of what Jesus said and did. The attitudes that Jesus had towards foreigners, money, and violence a country requires the opposite attitude in order to succeed. And so you run across this all the time and Christians, they will, immediately-it almost happens without fail-it's so predictable, that they will, they will immediately say, Well, yeah, but that's Jesus just as a private, it's a private ethic. But you know, publicly, in order to run a country, you need to do the opposite. And so they've justified to themselves how they can do it.
And you see that all the time that kind of thing. Or they will call themselves Christian, but what they'll be doing is just quoting the Old Testament over and over again, or Romans 13 with absolutely no context to it-to Romans 12 & Romans 14.
Seth Price 22:01
Or the whole book.
Stephen Backhouse 22:02
Jesus will not get a look in. And I’ve had to mark thousands of undergraduate essays and I am always looking for this stuff because this is my job is to look at how Christians talk about violence, for example. And it's like, without fail, you'll read some essay or some article about “Should Christians, you know, own hand guns, or should they go to war? Should they kill their enemies?” And they pretty much all start with one little paragraph where it will be something like, “yes, we know Jesus said to love your enemies, but…” and then the rest of the article will be justifying all the reasons why it's okay to disobey Jesus.
And Jesus only gets mentioned in order to be disagreed with by self-professed Christians. Nobody spends all their effort trying to figure out well, how might we try and obey Jesus? What would our world look like if we tried to live a politic that actually didn't immediately try and kill your enemies to solve a problem for example.
Seth Price 23:02
I don't even know how to imagine that because that's not the world that we live in.
Stephen Backhouse 23:07
And the fact that you can't imagine it is because your imagination has been colonized by the nation.
Seth Price 23:11
Hmm.
Stephen Backhouse 23:12
It's been colonized by the way of violence, the way of money, the way of the tribal patriotic instinct, which is, I must preserve my resources for people who look like me and sound like me as much as possible. And whatever you want to call that nationalism, patriotism, tribalism, I, they're fuzzy words around the edges, but they all basically mean, “I need to be with people who look like me and sound like me as much as possible”.
And that is the instinct that the New Testament dismantles again and again and again. The politics of the organization of people and and who you think is a valid person to give your power away to, or who you think is a valid person to spend your resources on, or who do you think it's a valid person to include in your group, those early Christian’s imagination, which was centered around Jesus in His Kingdom, that's a fundamentally political set of texts, the New Testament, and they're all about dismantling nationalism, at the expense of building a new nation, a royal priesthood. There's only one nation in all of history that hasn't been founded on the murder of enemies, and the exclusion of foreigners and that's the new nation.
Seth Price 24:29
The new nation?
Stephen Backhouse 24:30
Yeah, the nation in the New Testament. The early church saw…
Seth Price 24:36
Oh, I was running my head through geographical locations for today.
Stephen Backhouse 24:37
There is no nation, no flags, you know, open, you know, go and look up flags on Wikipedia. Every single flag, no exception is based and built on practices that were the exact opposite of anything Jesus said or did. And there's only one nation and that's the one that the Christians called themselves. They said “we're a new nation were drawn from Gentiles and foreigners and Jews, and we are a new nation's the only nation in all of history that wasn't founded on the murder of a human being”. It's based on the murder of Jesus but it wasn't based on the killing of their enemies.
Seth Price 25:13
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm with you there.
So I want to pivot to something that you said at the very beginning I don't even remember if I was hitting record yet. So you said, you know, you were doing Bible studies as you got into quarantine. And I'm sure there are many reasons for that. But you would reference President Trump tear gassing people throwing people out of the way, and posing for a photo-op as a springboard for I should really do something else here. Talk to me a bit about that, like so I that image like, what was it about that, that you're like, that's it. This is enough.
Stephen Backhouse 25:41
All right. So here I was sitting in lockdown. So I was normally supposed to be traveling around to churches, and I couldn't do that. So what I did was I started making some Bible studies. And I was recording them and then sending them out. And people were paying me for them and stuff, which is great. But then halfway through that, the making of that, Donald Trump did his thing where he used the violence arm of the state in order to violently clear out peaceful protesters in front of the church so that he could then have a photo-op holding up a book he doesn't read in front of a building, he doesn't attend, in order to, you know, give a clear message to his Christian base. And it worked. And it works over and over again. It absolutely worked.
And I was getting a whole lot of emails then because of the people that I know. And they were asking me like what's going on? People despairing. People in the UK people in America. Of all the things Trump has done that that for some reason that really touched a nerve. I think people just had enough they're going crazy with locked down, the George Floyd protests were in full swing. People were just despairing, right.
Seth Price 26:51
Still are.
Stephen Backhouse 26:53
Still are! And it's a bad, bad world. And Christians have shitted it up. They are the worst. There are people calling themselves Christians have…am I allowed to swear?
Seth Price 27:05
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Stephen Backhouse 27:07
…they are the fucking worst. The people who call themselves Christians are representing some of the worst ideas that humankind has ever produced, you know, and they are just perpetuating them. And the conspiracy theory stuff is just, they've lost their tiny minds. And like, what do you do? And I get people emailing me all the time. Like, basically, I've lost my faith! How can I be associated with these kind of people? Who are…they're not holding their nose and saying, “Wow, whoa, is us. We got to the state where we have to support Donald Trump. Oh, whoa, is us the lesser of two evils”. These are people with gleeful enthusiasm embracing the things this man says and does. And not just this man, but like the whole party, the aims of “Make America Great” and the aims and ideals and attitudes that come with hyper nationalism and racism and disdain for enemies, disstain for others, distain for the weak. You talked about that, Seth, being told you're weak. Like just the utter embrace of a bullying, domineering, power. And I get these emails from Christians going, what is going on here? Like, I'm going to stop being a Christian. And so this is where I had to start something new. And I just I kind of put the Bible study on pause and said, Look, we'll come back to this. But right now, we just got to talk about this.
And, and I started trying to talk about the difference between being a follower of The Way of Jesus and being a Christian. Because being a Christian, you can call yourself a Christian legitimately and you can say and do diametrically opposite things to other people who call themselves Christian. But it's a lot harder to call yourself a follower of The Way of Jesus and say and do a whole lot of things. Right. So it's just kind of a way of like putting a thin piece of paper between being a Christian and using that as a license to do whatever you want, you know. So yeah, I mean, that's kind of where that came from. It's just this passion to like, I still think Jesus is pretty good. And His way is really good. It just, most Christians don't like it. And so I don't like the word, I don't die on that hill anymore, I don't care. I'm not trying to defend the word “Christian”. It's indefensible.
I mean, some of the best people you'll ever meet in the world are Christian, and some of the worst. And they both call themselves Christian and there's no point getting involved in some debate about who's an authentic Christian or not, because that word is so broad now. It really does mean white English speaker and it really does mean Tutsi in Rwanda and it really does mean you know, Nigerian, it does mean Serbian genocidal maniac. Yeah, like, and it also means Mother Teresa, it also means Seth Price. It also means, you know, yeah, that word just means so many things that it basically is not a useful word for determining what you should do in life, what you think is valuable, how you should treat your enemies. So we just need to stop using it, frankly.
Seth Price 30:20
So what do you say you're a follower of Jesus?
Stephen Backhouse 30:23
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't pretend that solves all the problems. I just…I don't pretend. I didn't invent it. That was people in the book of Acts called themselves, right?
Seth Price 30:32
Yeah.
Stephen Backhouse 30:33
I mean there in the original there is a verb to it, a follower of the way. It's not a noun, it's a verb. And that just seems more useful. And it also means that I don't have to defend-I don't have to be the little culture warrior that I was brought up to be. Defending this thing called Christianity against all enemies. I don't have to do that. Some of the most potent enemies against the followers of Jesus are people who call themselves Christian and I can see that. Yeah, very clearly. It is absolutely true that Christians are persecuted in America today. just so happens, they're all persecuted by other Christians.
Seth Price 31:13
Well, that was so I have a couple of devil's advocate questions that I've written down. And so when I have a Facebook memory that keeps popping up as around this time of year, it wasn't too many days ago. And all it says is I never get more pushback from people than when I quote Jesus to them. Like just literally they just did just get mad like, Yeah, but you can't do that.
Stephen Backhouse 31:33
If you don’t demonic manifestations if you're cynical about that, if you're some really liberal and you don't believe in demonic manifestations, you go to an American church on the Fourth of July, and stand on the pulpit and say, patriotism is a vice or go around and say “don’t kill your enemies”. You will see demonic manifestation, you will see rage, you'll see spitting anger. You’ll be demonized.
Seth Price 32:33
As a follower of The Way, if there's a different Christian that diametrically believes opposite of me. And so let's call that…I don't know. Jerry Falwell, Jr., Jim Jefferies, doesn't really matter. Like so I'm just gonna use a big name because I don't want to list out any ...
Stephen Backhouse 32:50
Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving.
Seth Price 32:54
(laughs)
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, sure, Uncle Bob. So how do I stand on the side of the oppressed when the person that says that they're oppressed is believing opposite of me? And they're fully believing that they are being oppressed? What they believe in is being oppressed. How do I, as a follower of the way, step in and be like, let me reset your metric what you feel like is oppression is actually your addiction to power and patriotism? Like how do you begin that conversation to begin to unveil the layers in a way that you’ve found that maybe people can actually hear?
Because I haven't found any successful way to do that. They just dive back into it. You see, they're oppressing me. Like, they want to take away liberty. They want to tell me when I can and cannot worship at church. They want to, you know, I mean, like they feel oppressed, but not a Christian impression. And I don't know how to split those two apart and begin to speak to it.
Stephen Backhouse 33:37
Can I tell you a story? Do you have time? Can I tell you a story?
Seth Price 33:39
Yeah.
Stephen Backhouse 33:40
I discovered it from Tolstoy, probably in one of those books that I bought when I was in a bookshop. So this is the story once upon a time. Get ready, Seth, we're gonna have a storytime once upon a time…there was a peasant. And this peasant had a field. And it was time to plow the field to get it ready for putting some seed down. So he got his plow, and he was pulling the plow. And he came across a demon that was buried in the field. And this demon was buried waist deep in the mud. And he's “rrraaannnaagnn” he's throwing dirt clods at the peasant. And the peasant is like “Oh, no, I've got a demon in my field.” So he turns around he trudges home, and he and the peasant he gets his best rope and he trudges back and he approaches the demon “rrraaannnaagnn” wraps the rope around the demons shoulders, and he pulls and pulls and pulls. And he sprains his back and he breaks his rope. He trudges back and he goes to the neighbor, and he borrows the neighbor's horse and the neighbors best steel chain, it goes back “rrraaannnaagnn”. And he wraps the chain around the demon's shoulders and he attaches the chain to the horse and they pull and pull and pull and the chain breaks and the horse sprains his back. So now the neighbor is in debt. Now the peasant is in debt to the neighbor because he's broken his chain and knees and he lamed his horse. So now the peasant has to sell his own daughter into serfdom in order to pay off the debt. So now this peasant is his home, he's alone, the winter is coming. He hasn't sown his field, he doesn't have anybody to help him. He's dying of cold and hunger. And Tolstoy says, “Why didn't he just plow around and move on”.
And this is Tolstoy's story of Jesus said do not resist an evil person because sometimes resisting evil makes it worse. Sometimes, you throw all your resources at evil, and it just makes it worse.
Seth Price 35:51
So just plow around. Just leave it alone?
Stephen Backhouse 35:54
Just, sometimes, you just plow around and move on. It doesn't mean there's not evil. See Christians were really good at using the Bible to identify evil, we think we're really good at, oh, this is how you identify good from bad. We're not that good at using Jesus to show us what to do once you've identified good and bad. We think that being right is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. It's not one of the fruits of the Spirit.
Seth Price 36:19
Being right is the first beatitude in it? I've seen it in there. It's the first one.
Stephen Backhouse 36:24
Yeah! Beat your relatives in an argument.
Seth Price 36:28
The problem I have with that parable is in this example, close friends and or family members are the demon in the field. And I lose communion with them like community when I go around them, and I don't want to lose communion with them. You know what I mean? Like I don't…that's not what I…that's not my goal?
Stephen Backhouse 36:47
Well, alright. What do you think Jesus is talking about when he says, Who are my mother, my brother and my sisters. They're the ones who are with me. He says, at the end of in Mark. He said your mother and brothers are waiting outside. And by the way, they think you're crazy. And he says, well, who are my mother? Who's my family? It's the the ones here. You know, let the dead bury their own dead. Unless it looks like you hate your mother and father, you're not a member of the kingdom.
But if those verses, if that sentiment, has any meaning at all, it means something like not primarily identifying your relationships and your destiny with your family. That's when he says I haven't come to bring peace but a sword. It's going to divide families.
You know, and that's not violence. He's not enacting violence on them. But I don't know man, like, I think that we are so, as Christians here, I'm not talking to followers of Christ, as socialized Christians, we've been born into a world where we think it's our job to make everyone else agree with us and to follow what we think is right. That's part of the toolkit of what we're supposed to be doing in this world. And I don't think that's true.
Seth Price 38:03
You are the second person in 48 hours, it's told me that almost verbatim, almost verbatim.
Stephen Backhouse 38:09
And the reason I don't think that is because if Jesus is anything. If Jesus is the Son of God, if Jesus is the image of the invisible God, if he in any way speaks with the words of God, if he's in any way the image of God, then the first thing you learn about God is that you can kill him. You can say no to him, he never dominates you. He does a miracle in front of your eyes and then you get offended at him. And you're allowed to! It doesn't mean you're right. It just means he's not gonna beat you in an argument. That's not his job. That's not what he's doing.
Which is the kenosis right? Philippians 2, it's where he doesn't dominate with his will. But instead he empties himself; he doesn't make himself nothing but the empties himself. Which is another way of saying in Philippians 2 he withdraws his will to make space for other wills.
Seth Price 39:01
Hmm.
Stephen Backhouse 39:03
So it's this kind of ultimate act of like, non dominance, right. It's self control. It's the fruit of the Spirit of self control. Yeah. So I mean, I don't know how this works with your Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving. Because in a way, it means what you do is you look at Uncle Bob in the eye and you say, here's my will, I think this…and you can think whatever you want. I'm not going to try and change you. There's space at this table for your will.
Seth Price 39:31
With the way it's worked for me is I just haven't shown up to the table. And this is the danger of starting a darn podcast is you have to deal with them trauma in the middle of it. Yeah, yeah, I just have severed relationships that are genuinely missed. That's why I asked. Because a lot of the relationships that I've severed are because of politics, not because of religion, because most people can agree to disagree on religion, but they can't seem to disagree…
Stephen Backhouse 39:57
But dude! It is religion.
Seth Price 40:00
Politics?
Stephen Backhouse 40:01
Yeah. People go “oh patriotism can become idolatry”. It's like no, patriotism has never not been idolatry. Even your most benign patriot is still putting their destiny, and their identity, in a man made structure. Any Patriot, you ask if you say, is it legitimate to kill for your church? They go No way! And then you say, “Do you support the troops”? Oh right…so you do think it's legitimate to kill a human being for your country. But you don't think it's legitimate to kill for your religion?
So what do you ultimately believe? This is a migration of the holy. This is like, the religion what you think is sacred hasn't gone away. It's just shifted,
Seth Price 40:42
A migration of the holy, what is that?
Stephen Backhouse 40:44
Yeah. So William Cavanaugh talks about this. This is his story and I talked about, and he points out, he's like, there's a narrative out there that killing from a religious point of view is irrational. But killing for a national point of view is rational. And all that's happened is that the nation state has now become the arbiter of when it's okay to kill or not, our nation has become the ultimate, reasonablem, thing in order to take or give up your life for. And he said that it's not that the idea of the sacred hasn't disappeared, the idea of the ultimate arbiter of morality hasn't disappeared, it's just been migrated-it's moved to the nation state.
And, you know, people are still killed all the time. All that happens is it's not like there was religion and politics. It’s that there is just human groups. And they, they might be called different things. But it's always the same sort of idea that they're investing their hopes and their fears and their identity in their institutions. And all that we're seeing with this is that Christian institutions are kind of withering on the vine. They don't have the command over people's imaginations anymore.
Seth Price 41:50
Especially not in the current climate that withering is exacerbated.
Stephen Backhouse 41:55
No! Yeah, they clearly don't do that. The people who call themselves Christians in America, and also in England, are clearly like, so patently swayed by desires and fears and, you know, ideas that have nothing to do with the way of Jesus. It’s just patent right. And you just think, Oh, this is generations of people, but utterly failed to be formed in the way of Jesus.
And I think it's a result. So what we say is, so this happens in the UK, let's talk about the UK. UK people go. There's a lot of, you know, Christians here, especially sort of conservative Christians, like, Oh, this used to be a Christian nation. It's not a Christian nation anymore. And everybody's ignorant. You know, they do a poll and nobody, you know, 1% of the population knows what Easter is or something like that. So then they'll be like, “oh, we're not a Christian nation anymore. People are ignorant about the Bible. They don't know the difference between the Old and the New Testaments”. And, you know, ”Don't you wish we had the old days back again, when we were a Christian nation”. But I look at that, and I'm like, well no what we're experiencing now is the result of having a Christian nation. England was the most christianized nation that the world has ever known. And now we have generations of utter massive ignorance about Christianity. It's a totally secular nation. Even the people who call themselves Christian are utterly ignorant about the tenets of their own faith. Like this is the result. This is what happens when you overly identify being English with being Christian; this is what you get.
Seth Price 43:33
Yeah.
Stephen Backhouse 43:37
And this is what Americans are seeing now too. It's like Christianity is a thousand miles long and one inch deep and you see it it's so clear. Do you know that, you probably know this, like the different polls they do like of self professed Christians in America score worse on general knowledge about Christianity than non Christians.
Seth Price 43:56
Oh, yeah. There was a poll, Harvard, Pew Research, somebody…Barna? Somebody did a poll not long ago, I took the test. Arrogantly, I'll say I scored quite high, but I would expect myself to score high because that's literally all that I felt like I was commenting on one of your posts to that or someone pizza gate. So he said as like, I literally don't know what this is. And it's because the bulk of the time, all I read is religious books. So I just don't spend much time because you know how long it is to prepare for a podcast. You got to make sure you don't sound like an imbecile. It doesn't surprise me.
I can't tell you how many people like I was talking with someone at my work the other day, they asked me a question about a word. And I’m like but that's not what that word means. The way that they use the scriptures. Like that's not, that's not what that means. Yeah, you took it out of context. I was like, that's just not.
And they didn't know what I was talking about. They didn't even quite know what I meant by context, either. It was just like, I think I told them exactly like, you think that they wrote that to you in Charlottesville, Virginia five years ago? Like, yeah, what do you…you're gonna have to put in some work here. Even the people the day had to put in work!
Stephen Backhouse 44:56
So that person…so okay, this is partly where we were talking about education at the beginning and also nationalism. This is where these two things intersect, because evangelicals, Protestant evangelicals in the UK, but especially in America have imbibed a political notion of sovereignty. So during the Protestant, sorry, am I going on too much?
Seth Price 45:17
No! No! (and really…I mean this…no!!! Keep going)
Stephen Backhouse 45:18
During the Protestant Reformation, you know that you know, where the word Protestant came from, right?
Seth Price 45:22
No, no, no. Martin Luther just throwing out a name.
Stephen Backhouse 45:28
The word Protestant was first used because of German Princes that were protesting against the Emperor. And they were using Martin Luther’s theological reforms as a vehicle. Because they saw that Martin Luther’s attempt to carve out some space, from the Roman Catholic monolith was also part of the German princes plan to carve out space for sovereignty from the overarching Empire.
Seth Price 45:58
So it's just co opted?
Stephen Backhouse 45:59
Well, they kind of went hand in hand. So the German Princes were the patrons of Martin Luther, and Martin Luther found protection from the German princes. And what it was, was the rise of the idea of sovereignty. That different groups should be sovereign, and that the German Prince should be allowed to run his land, the little fiefdom that he was in charge of, he should be sovereign in that land. And he should have the choice to choose what religion was being followed, for example, in that land. But it's this idea of sovereignty, which is a theological idea, because in fact, only God is sovereign.
But part of the rise of the Protestant nation, or the humanistic reformation that rose as a result was that the idea of the sovereignty got migrated, it got migrated, it be stopped being a word that applied to the divine, and it started being a word that applied to your nation state. And then the sovereignty became an ideal which doesn't take long to get to individual sovereignty, and that the individual is sovereign. And you totally see the rise of individualism is happening at the same time as the rise of the Protestant evangelical reformations, right.
And so now we get a whole lot of people who are utterly convinced that the horizon begins and ends with them, individualism. That, you know, the gospel is primarily about your individual salvation. That the Bible is primarily a book that you're supposed to read by yourself in private, and that you get to interpret it for yourself. And that your opinion is as equally valid as anybody else's, including somebody who devoted all their life and their resources to studying at university. And so this is where we get a whole lot of churches, which value private or self self taught learning or Holy Spirit inspired Bible reading or something. And it seems utterly equally valid to somebody who has been a Professor of Hebrew for 50 years.
Seth Price 48:11
Yeah, let me ask you just a random question. So one of the things that has surprised me the most of the last almost three years of doing this show is how quickly professors and brilliant people have been able to just say, “yeah, sure, I'll come talk about Paul”, or whatever you want to do.
Do you feel like that's because overall, professors as a whole, are like this information is not disseminating to where it should be. And I will use any avenue possible to get this out, because somebody should know this. So because they've just been like, sure. Yeah. I'll be like, don't know who you are. Like, I emailed Tom Wright. And he's like, Yeah, sure. We'll let's do it. Okay. He doesn't know who I am. You know what I mean? Like, just totally surprising.
Stephen Backhouse 48:51
Yes. Now, I know, Tom. I mean, so people like Tom Wright and other academics they get into the game. They start as young, keen, Christians, and they love Jesus, and they realize it's intellectually satisfying, and that there's a rich, deep history to all this. And so then they go to their church, and they might go to a Bible study, and they say, feed me. And the church is totally unequipped. And so then they have to go to university to get fed. But they didn't go to university because they loved to have degrees after their name. They went to university because they love Jesus.
But now there's no home for them in their church, and they come back to their churches and their church has literally no space for somebody like them. And so now they're just stuck in universities. But what they really want to do is speak about Jesus to people yeah. Now they're being forced to pretend that they are objective. You know, a lot of theologians consider their work as an act of worship, okay. But they're in a secular university environment in which you have to pretend to be objective. But there's literally no home for these theologians.
And so part of my Then Theology as well, like I say, I always say to my academic theology friends, if I put You in a room in front of 30 people and you could say whatever you wanted, what would you say? What would you tell them? And they always have something to tell them. Yeah. It's not true that all these academic theologians are like, hoping you lose your faith and are cynically wanting to, you know, destroy Christianity—they are really not. They're just in university because there's no home for them anywhere else. And so they want to talk about it.
Seth Price 50:20
Well, yeah, I can echo that. Yeah. I've been blown away by how many people are like, yeah, let's talk. I'm like, just random, like Sister Elizabeth Johnson up at Fordham, like, just people. I'm like, Yeah, why would you say yes? And then as I come to think about it. I'm like, they just, I think they're just encouraged that somebody will listen.
I want to talk about maybe January, February of next year. So living in America, let's pretend President Biden is the president and or it's President Trump. Will things be any better if we just change that if we just change the mast from red to blue? Like, like, what's the hope there? Like, what's the point? How do I blahhh, you know, like, I don't even know how to voice that. Well, I hope you know what I'm trying to ask. Like, I just don't, I just don't understand because I just don't…
Stephen Backhouse 51:07
Okay. You're asking the wrong guy for hope, dude. (laughter)
Um, we need to start taking seriously Kirkegaard go and read his attack upon Christendom. I wrote a biography and this is a shameless plug, go and read the biography I wrote of him. Kirkegaard: A Single Life. I wrote an easy to read biography of Soren Kierkegaard which also includes summaries of everything he ever wrote. That came out a few years ago, 2017 I think. Go and read that or go and find his book he wrote called The Attack Upon Christendom, which is the thing he wrote at the end of his life.
Where we need to start taking seriously when Kirkegaard said Christendom has done away with Christianity, it no longer exists, we actually have to take that seriously. What if he was right? What if all the noisy industry, and money making, and music, and videography, and YouTube Bible studies, and churches and Super PACs, and Chick-fil-A's, and museums of the Bible what if all these things had nothing to do with the way of Jesus?
Seth Price 52:19
You leave Chick-fil-A out of this.
Stephen Backhouse 52:21
You know, what if this huge superstructure; and what if we took seriously when Jesus said, I never knew you and think about but we all shouted in unison Lord, Lord, and we did all these things. He’s like, I don't know who you are. You're not with me.
And I just think there's a lot of people who are unprepared to even sit and maybe take the hit and wonder whether there might be some truth to even those statements. Because when people say, oh, our nation! Let's make our nation Christian again, or we used to be a Christian nation. You never ever were, it never was! You never fell from some heady heights. You never turned the other cheek. You never tried to treat your enemies as better than yourselves. You never tried to deal with the problem of power by submitting to it, you know, but you asked for hope.
Seth Price 53:10
Yeah, well, I don't honestly don't think there is any. That's why I asked but because I don't see…
Stephen Backhouse 53:14
It is not my job to give false hope. I think America is a broken country. I think you're in a really bad state. I think that what mostly passes for Christianity in your country is rotten. It's really rotten. And it almost incapable of seeing the truth. The moral compass of the vast majority of people who call themselves Christian in America is spinning wildly, is demonstrably broken. And that when you actually talk about The Way of Jesus to Christians, they get spinning mad at you and they hate you. That to me is not a culture that is ready to start acting like Jesus. So what's the hope?
The hope would be that people start to actually become sober. This is the other thing Kirkegaard said. He said, just become sober. Our first job is to stop getting drunk on the numbers of Christendom, on thinking that the amount of people calling themselves Christian makes them Christian. You're drunk on the numbers, you're drunk on power, just get sober. And then maybe when the dust clears, you get a better idea of where the land lies, what you're actually dealing with. So to me, there's hope in truth. I don't think that President Biden is not going to all of a sudden mean that Trump supporting, conspiracy theory, enemy hating fake news, loving people are just going to disappear overnight. It's going to get worse. We're going to get worse than Trump. Because Trump isn't an ideologue he's just latching on to whatever ideas are giving him power. But now we're seeing the rise of people who actually believe that stuff. So now you've got a QAnon Congresswoman for the first time. So Trump is just a pure nihilist in a way he's just saying whatever it is to get him in power. But we're now seeing people who re do believe this stuff. And they are rising, so it's gonna get worse, for sure. Yeah, that is your hope.
Seth Price 55:12
Well…thank you so much.
This is a question I've been asking every single person this year. And so you can answer it go wherever you want with it. So if you were, you know, sitting across from someone, and they just randomly strike up a conversation, and you're like, I'm a follower of the way of Jesus. And they are like, Well, great. What do you even mean by that? Like, Who is God? Like? What's the point? Like? What are the words when you try to wrap your words around the divine? What do you tell people?
Stephen Backhouse 55:37
Well stop talking about God. I'm not a Godian. God is just this kind of divine gas, a benign gas in the universe. Like God is this empty word that you can put anything you want on to and most people believe in God, or they or if they don't believe in God, they have some idea of what the thing they don't believe in. And I feel a little bit like, just stop talking about God start talking more about Jesus. And it might not solve our problem. I'm not claiming this solves our problems. But at least we're now having proper Christian type problems. So that rather than talk about God all the time to everybody just talk about Jesus all the time. Talk about his way, talk about the way he dealt with power, talk about the way he dealt with foreigners, talk about what he did with violence and money. Say that you're trying to do that. And if people are offended at you well at least they're offended that Jesus they're not offended at some kind of deistic or, you know, religious thing about God. So that's one of the things I do is I just stopped talking about God, just talk about Jesus as much as I can. Because you know, God isn't invisible. God has a face. God has an accent. God had actions. God took a piss. God had bad breath. You know, like that's part of the offensiveness of being a real Christian, is that you're making God out to be some kind of human? Imagine that!
Seth Price 57:03
I've never heard…I mean, it makes logical sense, but God took a piss. I just, it's not a sentence that I've heard.
Stephen Backhouse 57:09
Every now and then this is, anyway, this is part of the offensiveness of Jesus is when he says, you know, believe in me, the word pistis. So you probably know it's not the word-faith or belief-is not a word of mental assent to a series of propositions. He's not saying, believe in the Trinity or believe in the virgin birth or explain the resurrection to a hostile audience.
Believe in me means follow me, have allegiance to me. That's what pistis means. So he's saying, don't be offended by me. The opposite of faith in the New Testament is not doubt its offense. So the point of Jesus is not that we're trying to force people to be offended by him. But what you do is you present Jesus and his way to people, and if they are offended, then at least they're offended by Jesus, right? It's not our job to make people not offended. It's just our job to present Jesus to people and they get to choose. Which is probably what I would say with your Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving, you know.
Seth Price 58:09
Definitely point people in the right spot. Where do they go? To read here, listen, all the things that Steven Backhouse is doing.
Stephen Backhouse 58:18
You want me to promote Steven Backhouse or promote some good resources? (laughter)
Seth Price 58:22
That's your call.
Stephen Backhouse 58:27
Steven Backhouse, you can easily find it tenttheology.com, which is the website for my little company that I'd have. And I also run a podcast there and the whole stuff about Trump and the Bible is you can find it through Tent Theology. And I wrote this book, Soren Kierkegaard; Kierkegaard: A Single Life. And I've done some other things here and there. I've done a lot of podcasts things on patriotism and stuff, but again, you can find it on my website. But in terms of like, resources for life, man, check out Bob Ekblad. Do you know who Bob Ekblad is?
Seth Price 58:58
No. How do you spell that last name?
Stephen Backhouse 59:02
Ekblad. Brilliant guy. Get people to go watch Liberating Fire. Somebody did a little short YouTube documentary on him. Liberating Fire, Bob Ekblad. Bob and Gracie are these lovely kind of people really doing the stuff. He's like an actual New Testament scholar who actually works with like illegal migrants and he's a political radical. Brad Jersak your listeners know already know he's very good talking about the Christ like way. Ched Myers is a brilliant commentary on the Gospel of Mark. He's an Anabaptist Mennonite scholar Ched Myers wrote, Binding the Strong Man.
There are some really good resources out there for people who are able to like see Jesus as a political, relevant political, actor today who has nothing to do with partisan ship but he's still highly political.
Seth Price 59:50
Yeah, yeah, I'll find that YouTube documentary today. I'm not I don't know who that is. But the other names I'm familiar with, but that is one that I'm not and I was like a guy
Stephen Backhouse 59:59
Yeah, Bob is a good guy. He takes oath taking very serious like he doesn't take oath. Because he sees that as buying he's even repented of his boy scout oath. He's like a god I was making an oath to is not the God of Jesus. It was an act of idolatry. Yeah, it's really interesting.
Seth Price 1:00:18
I might make the evening watch. So, Stephen, I appreciate both your ability to let my daughter interrupt us, but also your time from your family as well as all the time for the night. I really appreciate you. I'd like to have you back on I could talk politics for a long time I used to. That's all I used to talk about. But I'd like to talk about other things as well. Because I'm sure there are other parts of the Bible in Jesus, non political wise, that still scratch your itch, even if that's not what your main studies are. And so I would love to tackle some of those at some time in the future.
Stephen Backhouse 1:00:49
We will Seth. I'd love to!
Seth Price 1:00:50
Well, thank you again for tonight very much so.
Stephen Backhouse 1:00:52
Thank you for having me.
Seth Price 1:01:07
I keep thinking about a part of a book called who will be a witness from drew Hart from a while back where he writes from the Gospel of Luke that Jesus constantly laments that the people they missed the narrative. They forget the things that make peace, what the kingdom of God truly is. They miss the point of the parables. They make bad decisions.
When it comes to your politics I'm not sure what a good decision is. I do know, though, that it matters; wrestle with it. The parts of this episode that pushed you that you're like, no, that's not right. wrestle with that. I'll do the same.
I would like to thank Remedy Drive for their music in this episode. And I also want to say that this is part one of a larger conversation with Stephen, I have plans to bring him back for a part two. So stay tuned for that, because there is hope there are places we can go to. There are things that we can do.
I pray that you're safe, and that you know how beloved you are.
We'll talk soon