Michael Rhodes on What the Bible Says About Politics | #12

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast.

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Speaker 2: I'm Dr. James Spencer.

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Speaker 1: Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. We're joined today by Michael Rhodes. Michael is a lecturer in Old Testament from Cary Baptist College in New Zealand. And he's also been a pastor and involved in community development. He's the author of a new book, We've actually had Michael on the show talking about his previous book, Reimagining Biblical Politics, Just Discipleship, and then Formative Feasting and Practicing the King's Economy. But this book that we're talking about today is Reimagining Biblical Politics, What Scripture Says and about public life and why it matters. And so, Michael, welcome back to the show. I know you're going to be doing some other stuff with this. You have a sub stack that you write on regularly, and then there's a podcast coming out. So why don't we just start giving people that information, and then we'll roll into the book and the topic and see where this goes.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks, guys. It's great to be on the Thinking Christian podcast. Great to be back. That's fun. So yeah, the book is Reimagining Biblical Politics. It's out Um, it's hopefully an accessible resource for people who read books. Um, but there's also, uh, a companion podcast. Um, that's, uh, the first season of the crossroads podcast. So if you look up crossroad podcast, which is cross and then R H O D E S my last name, it's a terrible pun, but the first season of the crossroads podcast is called re-imagining biblical politics. And if you search for that on your podcast thing, you'll probably find it as well. Um, And then, yeah, you can follow me on Substack if you're interested. The book and the podcast, we can maybe talk about this, are– I've tried to create resources for thinking about politics in the Bible that intentionally do not address contemporary American political issues. And that's to give the church a resource, a partisan divided church, a resource that they can use together. If you follow me on Substack, you will discover that I have lots of opinions and I'm happy to tell you about those things. you know, sort of like buyer beware. But yeah, that's where I am on the internet.

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Speaker 2: Very cool. Well, no, it's good to have you back on.

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Speaker 1: And yeah, I thought the structure of the book was really cool. You're basically, and if you want to re-describe this, but you're basically walking through a series of biblical passages to help people frame out what scripture says about politics or what biblical texts would have some sort of implications for politics maybe.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. So, I mean, in my church, I know not everyone's the same. In American life, there are some churches that are obsessed with politics and there's some churches that like never want to touch it with a 10-foot pole. In my circles, it was very common if you were thinking about like electoral politics or state national politics, you know, If you ask what the Bible says, you basically immediately quote Romans 13, and then you're basically done and move on. As we say in New Zealand, done and dusted. Not much more to say. And so part of the thing I wanted to do in this book is say, what does the whole of Scripture, how might the whole of Scripture shape our political imagination for faithful political discipleship? And there's sort of two huge things that I discovered in the process of doing the research for this book. One is the Bible says all sorts of stuff about politics. And what it says, it says in many different voices. So if you think about scripture as like a choir of voices, they might all be singing the same song, but there's some dissonant harmonies in the bunch. Or if you think about the Bible as like a photo mosaic, if you step back and see the whole, there is a big picture. But if you zoom in, there's a bunch of little snapshot images that are all quite diverse that make up this big photo mosaic. And so in the Bible, you've got people like John in Revelation who basically says, hey, Babylon is a beast. No collaboration. Get out of there. And you've got voices like Jeremiah that are saying, you're in Babylon. Pray for the flourishing of Babylon and seek the flourishing of Babylon while you're there. You've got voices that say, like Paul does, you know, submit to the governing authorities. You've also got Paul's example of not submitting to the governing authorities, but fleeing an official trial, which he thought was unjust, which he talks about and Acts talks about. But even if you get beyond Paul, you've got characters like the midwives in Exodus who openly disobeyed the Pharaoh, lied to him about it, and God rewards them. So you have this great diversity of political witnesses, and I think every biblical voice is a gift. It is a great cloud of political witnesses that can help foster a deep Christian political posture capable of more faithfully navigating our complicated, complex world. On the other hand, amidst all this diversity, I think there is one big message that comes through again and again, which is that the Lord reigns, that God is King, that God is on the throne. And that runs all the way through Scripture, from the first chapter, which portrays the Creator as a sort of royal king who creates creation and then inhabits it, to Exodus, when they come through the waters of the Red Sea and they sing, the Lord reigns on the shores of the Red Sea, to the Psalms, where the Lord reigns as the center point of Israel's worship, to Jesus' preaching, preaching the good news of the kingdom of God, all the way to Paul in Rome at the end of Acts, declaring the good news of the kingdom of God, to Revelation where what the saints are singing, you know, that great crowd of witnesses from every tongue and tribe and nation and people, what are they doing? They're praising the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. So God reigns gives this unifying structure to scripture politics. But then how you flesh that out, both among the people of God, which is a political question, and in relationship to cultures and peoples and nations that don't recognize God's allegiance, which is another political question, those things are quite diverse, and I think it's all a gift. And so in the book, the structure of the book is trying to help readers encounter that unity and diversity in a useful way for their discipleship.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, that's helpful.

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Speaker 1: I'm glad you talked a little bit about the unifying aspect of it, because it does seem to me that when I was just looking through the book, it's like, yeah, all of these are somehow fitted into faithful testimony, faithful action within the world. Even though you have different political arrangements, even though you have different, you know, different actions, you know, am I submitting to government? Am I obeying government? Am I rejecting government? Am I lying about it? Am I doing, you know, all of these.

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Speaker 2: Are classified as faithful actions.

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Speaker 1: Ashish and I have talked about this on the podcast in the past about the tensions involved in sort of lying being, you know, part of the range of faithfulness and how that relates to, you know, a virtue perspective and that kind of stuff. And so I felt like some of the chapters that dealt with that were actually really helpful. The midwives in Egypt were a great example. Rahab would probably be another, you know, she does something very similar there. And so, yeah, just really interesting.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. And what's interesting is, there's also ambiguity in the text in certain places. So the midwives lie and, and hustle the Pharaoh. And it says explicitly, and God saw that they feared him and bless them, gave them houses, probably families of their own is the idea there. But when you get to a book like Esther, I mean, if you read Esther afresh, like you pretend like you haven't read it before. And like, it's not supposed to give you easy answers at every point. You're going like, wait, what? And oftentimes they're going, should they really have done that? And the book never settles that question. So whereas some texts sort of say, hey, look, let's put some other options on the menu of faithful political discipleship, other texts as narratives, as ambiguous narratives, force us to have a certain kind of humility and skepticism about even our own political practice because we're kind of going, oh, man, I wonder what God thinks about that. I wonder what God thinks about us. And we can't get to the answers too quickly in a book like Esther. So I just found, you know, like I've sort of been reflecting. I've written a few books, three of them, this being the third, I realize now are part of an informal trilogy, Practicing the King's Economy, Just Discipleship, Reimagining Biblical Politics. They're not written that way. I didn't know that at the time. They're written at different sort of levels. This is a much more accessible book in some ways than Just Discipleship. But really the trio is aspects of Rhodes' discipleship that were weak that he wanted to know more about from the Bible. That was sort of the driving. So economic life, justice life, politics. Obviously those are related. But so this was a genuine research project. What does the Bible say? And I just was delighted to discover how challenging, rewarding, helpful, I found scripture to be, in my political thinking, when I asked these questions and lingered in these texts.

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Speaker 4: Thanks for all that. I really appreciate the way that you're setting up your projects. It sort of flows into what I wanted to ask you, so I'll just get right into that. Early on in your newer book, you You do a good job of delineating the difference between what you're doing when you're saying a political being, political disciples, those sorts of things. And the way that I think on a general basis, people tend to think of in our current age, what is a political being?

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Speaker 2: Do you mind talking a little bit about that?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think what you're getting at here is sort of hidden in the title, you know, Reimagining Biblical Politics, what Scripture says about public life. So in sort of the popular language, when we say politics, we mean government stuff, you know, statecraft. We mean elections. We mean running for political office. We might mean protest. And often, tragically, in an American context, at least if your circles are like mine, we We mainly hyper focus on like the news hour and national federal kind of electoral stuff. And part of what I want to say is throughout scripture, the Bible not only says that the Lord is king, but it describes the people of God as an outpost of that kingdom, you know, a city on a hill to use Jesus's language, right? Like, and so the life of God's people in public is political, right? when God's people live out God's reign and way, when we live out our king's agenda, when we embrace our king's political agenda as a people and as individuals, this is political. So when churches foster children, when we welcome the immigrant, when we love our neighbor, when we forgive our enemies, this is a public action. And you see this occasionally in obvious ways, like a few years ago, the white supremacist shooting at the black church in, I think it was Charleston, or the shooting at the Amish school, both occasions where the faith community as a faith community responds to horrific violence with the loving forgiveness of Jesus. And that is a public political act. It has public political significance. And on those occasions, that political significance was noted by People who have no interest in church otherwise. So I think all of that stuff is political and part of seeking the good of the city in that Jeremiah 29 way. That is political, even when that involves more, as it does in Jeremiah 29, raising families, getting involved with agriculture and that kind of stuff, rather than running for office or whatever else. So in the book, I often talk about the politics of God's people as a community that recognizes God as king. As outpost politics, right? City on a hill, a people living out allegiance to God. And then I talk about another kind of politics, our pilgrim politics, which is how people who recognize God as king get involved with the nations and places and cultures and communities that do not necessarily recognize God as king. And that I'm calling pilgrim politics at the risk of making you think about the guys with the buckles on their hats, you know? I'm not giving you like Thanksgiving imagery or something. But what I mean by pilgrims, like the sort of like that sojourner image, you know, and if Jesus says you're the city on the hill, he also says you're the salt of the earth. You got to get out there. And so Christians are called to engage, I think, politically in a variety of ways in that second sense, you know, but I want to broaden the range of things we see as political and therefore involved in our political discipleship.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, that's great. Can I ask a follow-up?

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Speaker 3: Is that the question you were asking, Ashish?

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Speaker 4: It very much is. Very much is.

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Speaker 2: Okay, cool.

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Speaker 4: Actually, the way you responded leads into a follow-up I was already thinking about, so I'll just jump into that as well. For better or for worse, I would probably argue for worse, especially in the American climate, we tend to think in terms of very clearly delineated lines between political identities. Yes. And as a result, as you hinted to with your comments about the distinction between your book versus your sub-stack, that creates very clearly delineated lines in church politics and church identity. And then the further result is that it can become too easy, unfortunately, to begin to see the church as a political animal in that first sense you talked about, rather than as an outpost. for something else, right?

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Speaker 3: Yes.

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Speaker 4: But I appreciate the image you give of a photo mosaic. Because I think what you're describing in that photo mosaic is the fact that inherently, even the way that the Bible talks about political identity in your second sense, requires blurred lines already, right? There's no clear answer that's universal, that's good for here, there, and everywhere, and never mind for here versus, say, in New Zealand. Can you talk a little bit Yeah, so could you talk a little bit about why maybe the blurred lines is a good thing as opposed to maybe the boogeyman that modern Western Christians can often think, well, blurred lines means lack of definitiveness and therefore something to be scared of.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's such a great question. So let me say a couple things about that. One is... It's helpful to know that the Bible itself doesn't give one answer to many political questions because it helps give us permission to accept that there will be no one right answer on many political questions in our own context. That doesn't mean there'll never be a right answer, a right answer. It just means in many political contexts, there'll be a diversity of possible approaches. And Part of the reason, if you look in Scripture, I think that you see a diversity of approaches is simply that the situation changes. So even if you had a group of people who did agree on everything, right, your political discipleship would still have to be nimble and flexible because the situation changes, right? The midwives do what they do in part because of the options that are open to them, right? Daniel... who gets kidnapped, put through the Babylon, you know, Future Leaders of Babylon training program, he has different options. And he navigates those options differently. And we, again, have different options than Paul or Peter or, you know. And so part of the thing is just the situation is always changing. And so we have to have discernment how to figure out how the stable convictions that we have get fleshed out you know, in the messy world that we live in. And we have different callings and gifts. And so I think there's a lot of room for like blurred lines. What should we be doing now? Because part of what we're trying to figure out is how to read our current moment, you know? And that's a really crucial part of political discipleship is learning together to read our current moment. What's going on and what are the possibilities in front of us? And then how does Scripture shape us to navigate those faithfully? As we do that, we're going to have all sorts of discernment disagreements because we're going to read the situation differently. And we are going to disagree about how exactly to live out Scripture's vision in our messy, muddled world. and part of that is, this is kind of the other side of it. There's just a lot of stuff that the Bible doesn't tell us. The Bible does not tell us how to navigate a democracy because it does not ever write to people who were living in one. Like, obviously the Bible does not give us a blueprint on AI or gerrymandering or, you know, two party political system. Like we don't have, the Bible does not give us a blueprint on, And once you recognize that you don't have blueprints on those things, you realize you actually don't have blueprints on much at all. Right. You do have some blueprints. And I think among God's people, we have more clear demands. But for instance, my opinion is that like the Bible demands in unequivocal terms, no ifs, ands, buts about it, that we love God. and care for vulnerable immigrants. Like Deuteronomy 10 says that. The Lord loves the immigrant, so you shall love the immigrant. And frankly, it doesn't say, it doesn't put any asterisks beside that. Like this kind, that kind, etc. Right? On the other hand, that doesn't mean the Bible tells us exactly what number of immigrants should be welcomed into America's pluralistic society. It doesn't tell us exactly how to handle situations where that doesn't. It gives us some values, right? But it doesn't tell us exactly how to navigate that. And so it is possible that for Christians to disagree about some of the details, but they need to be called to the costly center of that commitment. And that's why I feel like sometimes in the church, we sort of waffle. You've got pastors right now in this country who are afraid to say what the Bible says about immigration because it will be perceived in a certain political way. And unfortunately, if you're a preacher of the gospel, you're just not allowed to pick and choose, you know? You're just not allowed to pick and choose. The same is true for like sexual sin. You're not allowed to pick and choose talking about sexual sin because that might trigger certain assumptions about how that gets fleshed out in the way we vote or something. You're just not allowed. On the other hand, especially in sort of like a preaching moment, the pastor has neither the expertise nor the authority to say, and this is exactly how you tease out this commitment to love the refugee, the immigrant, in the public square. The priesthood of all believers have to hear the word of God and then go out and discern together how they're going to do that. And there will be inevitable ambiguity in that discernment process. And that discernment process can be a gift because the members of the body of Christ see different things and we can help each other see what we're missing. And so, yeah, part of what the book is trying to do is give us resources to come together around the mandate and then release us For the work of discerning how to live that mandate out in a messy, complicated world, right? So I don't know if that gets into what you're asking, Ashish, but I think that's sort of how I would say it. Again, even if you go, oh, I know we're supposed to welcome immigrants, and I'm convinced that we are not doing that, and that what we're doing is wrong towards immigrants, I want to do something about that. Well, think about all the options the Bible puts on the map. Your church could, as a church, get involved in caring for immigrants. Some of you could go out and advocate. People could run for office. People could change the way they do business. The Bible would give you lots of different avenues for potential action in line with this commitment. And that's just one thing Christians are called to care about. And part of the problem in our current partisan sort of state-national-city politics is our two-party-by-design system forces us to pick, at different moments, teams that have opinions on all sorts of issues. So even if we knew what God cared about with one issue, we have to think about and discern, well, how does that play out when I've only got a couple options? So it's very complicated.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:23:03
Speaker 1: A lot of things raised there. So let me start with this one first. You mentioned, you know, sort of picking one side or the other during an election. And I've often thought about this when I go to the store around Thanksgiving.

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Speaker 3: Right.

00:23:16
Speaker 1: Because you go through the checkout line and you get to you can say they ask you if you want to round up to help feed a family for Thanksgiving.

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Speaker 3: Right. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: I don't care whether you round up or not.

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Speaker 1: But my concern is that sometimes when we round up, we go, okay, I'm done.

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Speaker 2: I gave it the office. Now I don't have to do anything else.

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Speaker 1: There's a sort of a minimum standard that we set that becomes a maximum standard for what we should do. And oftentimes I think voting ends up being that. We spend a lot of emotional energy and intellectual energy trying to figure out who to vote for between one of two quasi-identical candidates in a lot of ways. And also just the recognition that let's say we're voting for president, right? We know that there's a system, at least in the United States, of checks and balances, things that this person is going to have to navigate, negotiate, compromise, like all of those different aspects. So even when they're promising to do something, we know they can't really promise it. Like there's a whole mechanism that has to be taking place there. So On some level, we just spend an awful lot of time figuring out who to vote for when, in reality, there are a lot of other ways that we can participate in.

00:24:30
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:24:32
Speaker 1: I'll let you either agree or disagree with that or nuance it, but then sort of the following up there is I think the expanded view of politics that you talked through is actually really helpful because my guess is a lot of times pastors are struggling to convey something like, hey, we're supposed to love immigrants.

00:24:51
Speaker 3: Yes.

00:24:51
Speaker 1: Because people are defaulting to the wrong understanding of what it means to have what it means to participate in politics in the first place.

00:24:59
Speaker 3: Yes.

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Speaker 1: And so there's a lot there that just I think when we say we, you know, we need to care for the immigrants.

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Speaker 2: We need to clarify who the we is. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: You know, sometimes that we may very well just be the church. And, you know, the country does what the country is going to do. We can't control it, but we can. testify within it.

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Speaker 3: So, man, that's great thoughts, James, and I have a number of kind of things I'd want to say about that. So maybe one response to just clarify. When I say the church has this ambiguity and this discernment and so the pastor's not telling you how to do these things, that could be read as saying Christians should not be aggressively involved, wholeheartedly involved. That's not what I mean. I think Christians should walk out of the doors of the church. They should collaborate with other Christians of like mind, and they should get involved. And we should have strong opinions. So I'm not arguing for like, well, we're kind of all in the middle, so whatever. I'm saying the local church, the preaching task, gathers around Scripture and then sends people out for the risky, complicated, messy work that will always leave us like an Esther going, I'm not sure we got that all right. But like in Esther, we have to act because they had to act. They had to respond. And it is true that inaction is a choice as well. So just to clarify that on my end, because as you're talking, I was realizing you could hear me saying something I'm not saying. I do agree that we need to do both of those things that you described. We need to expand our understanding of political action to include the public work of God's people. In our churches, in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, in every area of life. We need to see that as a properly political thing. And I would also say we need to expand our pilgrim political action. It's like the way we engage the state to include far more than federal and national elections. And, you know, just like I'm not a political scientist, but it doesn't take a brainiac to see in a huge number of the states in our country. your presidential vote means nothing. Like I'm in Tennessee, like my, I, it doesn't matter who I vote for, right? Like Tennessee is going red for the predictable future, you know? And if I like that, I like that. If I don't, I don't, but that's what it is. On the other hand, like your city council meeting is open to everybody. And in Memphis city council, anybody can talk to the city council about anything for two minutes at the end of the meeting. And it's, Your local police chief has to pay attention to you if you walk in, right? And if you call your council member or maybe your local state senator or whatever, they have to listen to you in a different way. Now, that doesn't mean I don't think we should be involved in national politics, especially if your read on the national political situation is that there's a lot at stake at any one point in time. I would tend to agree that there's a lot at stake currently. But I do think in general... We should be a lot more involved in school boards and residence associations, city councils, local protests, local– you can rant on Facebook. But if you write the editor of your local newspaper, as I did last week, they'll usually take a pitch for you for an editorial. So you have more options even in your pilgrim politics locally that I would love to see Christians take. And, you know, like I'm a Bible scholar, right? Like I've been involved with community development, which is usually not involved with partisan politics very much. And I've been a pastor and a Bible scholar. So my pilgrim political action is as a lay person. But as a lay person, you know, I've been involved with local advocacy and protests. I've been involved with res associations that have fought for speed bumps. You know, I've been involved with trying to take care of slumlords on my street. And you have a much more direct line there. So yes, I want to expand the range of possibilities. And I agree. Sorry, one more thing I want to say. I do agree with you, James, that sometimes our primary public action is going to be in the church. And I actually think if you're thinking about the whole body of Christ, I want to be really careful how I nuance this, but there is a certain theological priority to our response in the church. So I don't believe Christians can contribute to the common good unless we've received the uncommonly good news of Jesus and are living it out in uncommonly good ways in our lives. So I don't think we have anything to offer the state that we aren't already stumbling towards our own life. So I think there's a certain logical priority. But I will also say that there is this rumor going around among conservative Christians in particular that justice work, poverty work, that kind of thing is the church's job and not the state's job. And one thing I show very clearly in this book is that on the few occasions where we get glimpses into how we should engage the political authorities, it's people like Daniel saying, break off your sins with justice and show mercy to the oppressed. It's the non-Israelite king at the end of the book of Proverbs telling you what the non-Israelite mom said to him, open your mouth not to guzzle down food and wine and self-indulgence, but speak up for the rights of the poor. That's what political power is for. So, I don't think you're saying this, but I'm, you know, I, why I'm so angry. I get actually angry that so many Bible thumpers keep saying, uh, well, you know, that's the church job. Cause like, it's like the text literally says the opposite. So that's another thing I'm trying to get people to do is, is wrestle with that. But you're right. You're right. The church response. And that's political.

00:31:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's a great clarification. I was not I was not meaning to say that. What I was meaning to say is when the when non-Christians, when the government isn't doing what they should be doing, the church still has a responsibility to do what they should be doing.

00:31:32
Speaker 3: Absolutely.

00:31:33
Speaker 1: And so it's not that we would never participate with them to the extent that people are doing things that promote the true, the good and the beautiful. We should recognize those things and plug in with them and do those things with them. But we have a responsibility that sets apart from the political winds.

00:31:49
Speaker 3: Yes.

00:31:49
Speaker 1: And so we've got to feed in there. But that's a great clarification, Michael.

00:31:54
Speaker 3: I really appreciate that. Let me say that about that, James. I think so often we as Americans have such a hard time reading the truth of our situation. So you look about the text and we say, oh, you know, Paul, he didn't run for office. He didn't care about. And you think, Paul didn't have that option. That was not on the table.

00:32:13
Speaker 2: It's going to run for Caesar.

00:32:15
Speaker 3: Exactly. Every single person in the Bible, I think, would look at us and go, oh my gosh, do you see the freedoms and opportunities you have? Like Jeremiah said to seek the shalom of the city when they had nothing, when they were exiled victims, when they were like, and you're enfranchised voters who have the right to assembly and use what you got, you know? And so I think they'd be amazed by how some of us are reluctant to do that. But I love what you're saying about the church. The church is God's people are called to do what God's people do no matter what. And one of the things I do in this book and in the podcast to try to put flesh on the bones of biblical discipleship, I don't go into the American political scene because I wanted to give a gift to a partisan divided church. But to put flesh on the bones, I tell stories from church history and from around the world of how Christians are practicing political discipleship. And that led me to go on something of a deep dive on the contemporary house church in China, particularly Wang Yi, a currently incarcerated pastor and leader in the house church. And, and, and mainly through the work of my friend Hannah Nation, who, um, is involved in a house church theology project where they're translating writings coming out of the house church in China into English so we can learn from them. And I highly commend those books and her podcasts and whatever. But one thing she was pointing out to me in a recent conversation is right now, some of what's happening is Chinese Christians in the house church are facing persecution because they refuse to stop caring for abandoned children, ministering to sex workers, feeding the hungry. Like they are willing to be jailed for showing love and mercy and kindness in ways that run afoul of the party. And I think that too, in America, we just have lost that sense that yes, we seek the good of the city. Yes, we try to make, leave our states and nations better than we found them. But at the end of the day, God's the one who tells us to care for the poor and live holy lives and welcome refugees. And we're not allowed to fudge on that stuff. That's our mandate. Whoever's in charge. I love that point you're bringing up.

00:34:47
Speaker 4: The word that keeps popping in my head is lines. Now bear with me for a moment here. I've had a fascination with lines for a long time and it roots back to being in college and listening to this Coldplay song called Yellow. And the singer says, I drew a line for you. And I just, I got stuck on that one at the This is a love song. He drew a line for her. And I actually think that's an incredibly profound thing to say. And let me explain real quick why to get to our conversation. There are lines all around us. Our language creates lines. Our institutions create lines. And if I'm hearing you correctly, and I think I am, you're sort of challenging the idea that churches should honor those lines in some absolutist way. Now, what I mean by that is that I'll give a quick story and then work to Paul, who you just mentioned, as I sing sort of breaking lines rather than affirming lines. I was at a church for a long time, just to be blunt, a very white church in a very white community, but not a totally white community. And I went to the pastor and I just said, why is this church white? Why is it that I can look around me and I can count in one hand people who look like me? And he said, well, that's just the community that we're in.

00:36:11
Speaker 2: I said, is it?

00:36:11
Speaker 4: Because when I come into this church, for other reasons, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I see people from various countries in Africa here learning English as a second language. And yet they're nowhere to be found on a Sunday.

00:36:23
Speaker 2: Why is that? I said, well, I don't know. Good question.

00:36:28
Speaker 4: He said, I think it is a good question. You're the pastor. Isn't that something you should think about?

00:36:32
Speaker 3: Lines.

00:36:33
Speaker 4: The church, and I take this to be a systemic problem for churches in the U.S., that we operate and we build churches according to lines that have been drawn for us. And those lines say, these people in, those people out. These policies in, those policies out. These issues that matter, those issues that don't matter. And when the church begins to draw... to locate itself within those lines, I see it doing something remarkably different than Paul, even though ironically often appealing to Paul. To the point of Paul, Paul is, he's a marginalized member of a marginalized community in an empire, right? He's a Jewish person who has rejected the sort of religious substrata that would give him some level of significance within that minority marginalized group. So he's, Following this guy, Jesus, who even his own people, not in totality, but in large part, have rejected. At least the elite of the group have largely rejected. And now he's meant to address issues, right? Whether it be practices that are going on in Ephesus in the midst of the Temple of Artemis, right? Or practices of slavery that now claim people who are believers on both sides of the line of slave and master.

00:37:58
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

00:37:59
Speaker 4: And what have you. And he has, as you say, no ability to politically make any changes there. And yet he situates himself, I see it, as someone who says, I see those lines and I'm going to build right on top of it rather than within those lines. And now we've got the question, precisely because of that, of Christians who are both the slaves and the masters that he has to now address. I don't see our churches doing that. And to me, that's concerning and that's why, to get back to an earlier conversation that we were working through, that we end up with overly clear lines than when we look at Scripture, rather than hazy lines with photo mosaics. Do you have thoughts on that?

00:38:44
Speaker 3: So many thoughts, Ashish. How long you got? Yeah, I mean, I think.

00:38:49
Speaker 2: All day.

00:38:50
Speaker 3: Just to say, I agree with you that, and I think this is part of what we were saying, that churches in America, um, have a huge problem gathering in congregations, the ideological diversity and experiential diversity that's represented in the body of Christ. So, uh, our local churches tend to be way more ethnically homogenous, class homogenous. Um, And I think probably increasingly politically homogenous in a partisan sense. than our neighborhoods or schools are, right? Than the Christians in those neighborhoods and schools, right? And so our local congregations at our worst become gathered around Jesus, but also a set of perspectives that are deeply influenced by our social location, our level of affluence, our ethnicity, our background, our immigration, citizenship status, all that stuff. Is that resonating with what you're saying, Ashish?

00:40:01
Speaker 2: Definitely.

00:40:02
Speaker 3: You know, I think, I mean, I've been involved with sort of intentionally multicultural churches since 2008, I would say. First in Kenya in a congregation that sang six languages and for 12 years in Memphis in a congregation in South Memphis that was trying to primarily reconcile across the black-white divide. And now in South Auckland where, you know, my church is about a third Pacific Island or Cook Island. And there's so much to say there. Two things I'll say is one is that often one culture is sort of arranging the chairs in the room, sort of setting the kind of shape. And they often don't realize they're doing that. And so even when you have people who's from a different culture, different class, different immigrant or whatever, they may be welcomed in, but it's subtly demanded that they adopt the perspective of the majority group, whatever the case that is. And often people if your church leadership is from that majority group, they just don't see that. They don't recognize that, in part because we often just think that what we see is Christian, is biblical. And that's why, like, coming back to politics, when you see statistics that show things like, and I don't have these in front of me, but like white evangelicals by belief, so not just identifying, but white evangelicals by belief, Black evangelicals by belief are almost completely opposite on a number of political issues. I think in general, in America, for instance, people who aren't white are much more aware of diversity and viewpoint diversity because they have to be because they are navigating a culture in which white people are mostly in charge of the cultural dynamics. the white folks on that, on this side of the spectrum often think of their political views as just Christian, you know, it is obvious to them. And so you have these yawning chasms of perspective and that, that go unacknowledged often, or that in leave us in different churches, or, and this is a third option. You have a church that brings together political diversity and, And you keep the peace like you and I do probably at some of certain family gatherings. We just don't talk about.

00:42:44
Speaker 2: It, you know?

00:42:46
Speaker 3: And so part of what I am trying to do in this book, especially at the end, where in the last chapter, I basically name and draw on some statistics that show just how divided we are in terms of our partisan allegiance and how that partisan allegiance distorts what we see. Let me give you one quick example. because it's just amazing and it'll kind of put flesh on the pants for me. We're talking about, they've done like a study where you can show people a video clip of police officers interacting with protesters. And when, if you, if people who identify as politically liberal see that video clip, they, they describe the violence of the protesters differently than if they think the protest is a pro-life protest versus a LGBTQ protest. So for a progressive, if they think they're LGBTQ protesters, they're not as violent as they describe them if they think they're pro-life protesters. People who identify as politically conservative do the exact opposite. They're looking at the same data, same stuff, and they're seeing it differently because of their partisan sort of And so in the last chapter of the book, what I kind of say is this is the world we're living in. And the algorithms make it worse. And the increasingly strident identity connections with the parties make it worse. What are we going to do? And I kind of lay out a process for what would it look like for a church to not only announce what needs to be announced politically from Scripture, but then to intentionally gather members of a congregation together to discern in light of Scripture. how to respond to specific situations. And my hope is that if we can do that, then our churches will begin not only to actually send out people to do stuff more faithfully, but by creating spaces where genuine disagreement can be surfaced, we actually will make our churches better places for diverse communities. Because I can tell you firsthand from my experience in South Memphis, listening to my black brothers and sisters, the news lands differently based on our racial experiences. And if you were in a black church and what's in the news is the death of black men, right? And police encounters gone wrong or a vigilante gone wrong. if you're in a black church, that stuff's being talked about, right? There's space for grief and pain and lament. And in many multi-ethnic churches, if somebody names that as a grief, people get very agitated. White folks can get very agitated. They think that's political, that's whatever. And in my experience, black folks are going, hey, this is, worship is a space where we lament things that grieve us and we're grieving. And, you know, so often in the room, our differences in experiences and political experiences are leading us to make our congregations spaces that aren't nearly as life-giving for one group of people, the other. And of course the tragedy of course is that it is often those who've been most marginalized in society who suffer the worst in that. Cause we don't meet on, on, on equal footing in terms of our social and economic power. So yeah, it's a huge issue. And this book is only hopefully contributing to a small part of that. But I do think it's a significant part of that. Yeah.

00:46:42
Speaker 2: It's interesting.

00:46:42
Speaker 1: I mean, when you talk about these kind of biases, I think sometimes people can kind of go blank or just, you know, kind of sit back and go, ah, that can't be true. But I remember one time going out with a young woman who I used to work with. and she was Ethiopian, and she took me to an Ethiopian restaurant. And I had this impression, I'm like, oh, they've set the table differently than I would have.

00:47:09
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:47:09
Speaker 1: And that made the eating experience completely different for me, right? There was a lot more use of hands. There weren't utensils. You're tearing things off. You're dipping things, right?

00:47:19
Speaker 2: That little spongy stuff. The spongy stuff, exactly. Yeah, right?

00:47:23
Speaker 1: Like you've got all that different thing, but it's like, the people who set the table largely control the experience. And now I'm being sat at this sort of, for me, it was a strange table, a different table that I'm used to, but this is now the environment that I'm in and I get to sort of interact with it. But I think that idea of the people who set the table really do control the experience is essentially what you're getting at. It's like these biases, these challenges, these frustrations, Part of what we're seeing there is there are aspects of, and there's an interesting study, I think it's from Campbell University. They talk about the people who watch more progressive news channels versus more conservative news channels have different fears than the opposing groups. And so it flip-flops. But the inversion is interesting and significant. And so I think part of what we probably as a church ought to watch out for is asking the question, who's setting our tables?

00:48:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right.

00:48:29
Speaker 1: Like who's setting the table? Who's serving up the experience for us? And how much can we really, it's not even to me, trust, right? Trust is part of it. But it's also like, we have to know that these people who are providing the experiences to us have blind spots as well. They're engaged in motivated action. They're you know, they're doing things for various purposes as well. It's not like they're sitting in the back room, twisting their mustache and going, Oh, how can I manipulate the masses today? Like, I don't think that people are really doing that. I think we've just got a fundamental problem that we're all limited beings and we have constraints of what we can understand. And so we're sort of, we're sort of prime to put out what we're already thinking.

00:49:13
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:49:14
Speaker 1: Sort of the way I think about it, but I really appreciate the thought process there.

00:49:18
Speaker 3: Yeah. I, I, do think there are more people in back rooms twisting the mustaches than I used to think there were. But in general, I think you're right. And, you know, in my book, Just Discipleship, I have a chapter called Arranging the Chairs in the Beloved Community. And the book is looking at the Lord's Supper, but in dialogue with research that shows that multiracial churches like the one that I was in, if you compare on a series of metrics, all majority white churches, majority black churches, and then you compare multiracial churches on like six metrics. This is research done by Corey Edwards, a black Christian sociologist. In general, the multiracial churches just act like the white churches on those six areas. So there's black and white people in the room, but it's the majority culture that's arranging the chairs. And so the experience you're describing in Ethiopia, any cross-cultural experience is disruptive. Any. Right. The added factor that we face is that our cross-cultural moment is shot through with a history of injustice and oppression and pain. And, you know, this is why I think it's significant. We've kind of gotten off track, but I think this is not off track. We've gone in a different direction, but I think it's significant that Paul says, in the body of Christ, Christ has arranged his body so as to give greater honor to the parts of the body that lacked it. Or calls us to consider others' interests before our own. He's saying, you're going to have a hard time doing this, but you've got to. It's vital to the outpost of King Jesus, being an outpost of King Jesus, and not.

00:51:07
Speaker 3: Giving its actual allegiance to some other ideology or party or political thing, you know? And I did want to give a shout out to Miranda Cruz's book. I think it's called Faithful Politics, maybe is the name of it.

00:51:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really fantastic. I've had her on the show, too. She was great.

00:51:28
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:51:28
Speaker 2: Excellent.

00:51:29
Speaker 3: She's great. And she does it sort of from a historical perspective. But I like the fact that she just names. Actually, in a two-party system, if you're going to engage politically, we have to affiliate with parties under some circumstances, right? That's if you want to get involved. But we have to be hyper aware of the way when we affiliate with a party, there is enormous pressure to assimilate our views to the full basket of goods in that party. And that's where political discipleship is so important. And that's where political community is. A cross-party affiliation is so important to help us realize the dangers. And I just want to say here, I keep coming back to Daniel. I can't shake Daniel. In the book of Daniel, Daniel refuses to work for some rulers. He will not work for some of them. He does go to work for Nebuchadnezzar. He's willing to work for Nebuchadnezzar. But he criticizes the hell out of Nebuchadnezzar. And I mean that theologically. And the principle I take from that is faithful politics is willing to criticize the hell out of its own political team. And that is really hard. That's not something we want to do. I don't want to do that. I struggle with that.

00:52:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Ashish, I'm going to ask a question, man. Sorry, go ahead.

00:52:54
Speaker 4: Well, in light of that, how would you recommend going about the process of self-elimination? And what I mean by that is that it's one thing to criticize the hell out of someone or something. It's another thing to recognize that you need to. Sarah Ahmed writes this piece on a phenomenology of the body where she speaks of one of the things that people of color tend to grow up with in majority white cultures is this strong sense of a line between their bodies and their environment versus those who grew up as a white person in a white body or identify themselves as white and implicit ways, there's a blurred line. So now we're going the opposite direction of the line and sort of dynamic. But the result is, is that a lot there, there does seem to be a lack of a sense of understanding of just how deeply they're formed to their environment, as opposed to those of us who have a keen sense very early on. Oh, something's different. Now, the way I'd flesh that out is like, it's very easy to, to eat Indian food or listen to Indian music or Ethiopian food or Ethiopian music and.

00:54:05
Speaker 2: Say, that's cool.

00:54:05
Speaker 4: I like that. Because it doesn't create any sort of challenge upon us.

00:54:10
Speaker 3: That's right.

00:54:10
Speaker 4: There's not a direct conflict. It's more, that's cool. It can be complimentary to what I do. But the rub comes in when ways of envisioning, organizing, operating start to come up, come in to a point of clash. And then that's where those sharp distinctions between body and environment start to come in. And in my experience, the church, especially in a majority culture, a church that belongs to it, that honors the lines of a society, has a hard time being able to recognize those distinctions. And so they sort of fall into it. But how do you start to attune yourself to be more attentive to to hear difference and not react automatically, but begin to say, maybe I should question why I have the view or the position that I do.

00:55:03
Speaker 2: Does that make sense? Yeah.

00:55:06
Speaker 3: I mean, this is such an important and in-depth question and, and one that in many ways is probably more located in just discipleship than in, in re-imagining biblical politics in terms of a direct address to it. But, just to share a story and again even using a specific example I recognize will alienate some listeners but I think it's important and I won't name my friend because I haven't asked her permission in this context but when Trayvon Martin was murdered and I grew up an upper middle class white kid on the all white side of town at a Christian school that was started during busing and in a church that hadn't almost no black people in it. So that was my upbringing. And then I moved back to Memphis and I was involved with sort of Christian Community Development Association oriented ministry and church. So I was living in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood and just sort of finding my feet, you know, and then this national tragedy happens. And I was in really close relationships with black people for the first time. And I was talking to this black woman who was really, was sort of becoming a kind of mentor of mine. We were working on a project together. I respected her a lot. And, you know, she mentioned, I think she mentioned how painful it was to her that the multi-ethnic church that she was in had said nothing about this national tragedy, you know? And, and I sort of, we were emailing and I, I sort of, I, I, I resonated with her stance, right? Like I, I felt like I'd seen enough to, to feel that a grievous injustice had occurred. But I sort of tentatively said, well, I think, you know, most churches know we aren't supposed to be like political in that way. And so, you know, they don't, you know, they're trying to avoid being political. And she responded, she said, Michael, I don't want partisan churches either, but every church in this country lamented after 9-11. And this is like our 9-11. And that conversation was like a turning point for me. It was like a fork in the road because I realized that the problem wasn't so much with my theology, you know, that there are certain things the church shouldn't do and certain things the church should do. The problem was with my perspective and that my perspective was completely out of touch with the actual experience of black brothers and sisters of Jesus. And so, you know, This idea of proximity, which, you know, someone like Bryan Stevenson talks a lot about, or relocation, which John Perkins, who was my mentor and hero from afar, talked about. I don't think you can really begin to see, begin to see what you're not seeing without shared life together. And it has to be a certain kind of shared life together. You know, I've often told people in some ways every marriage is a cross-cultural marriage, right? Because even though my wife is white and I'm white, we were both raised as Christians and she spent a lot of time in the South. You know, that first Christmas, all of a sudden I'm looking around at what we're doing from her perspective and I'm going, ooh, I didn't know that not everybody did it this way, but now I do. Now I see that this is weird and I'm uncomfortable. All of a sudden I'm uncomfortable. And the way I respond to that is different because I love Rebecca and I want to not simply rebuild my home. childhood home, or her childhood home, what I want to build is a home together. And that's going to involve the painful work of realizing just how much difference there is in our family cultures. And so it's not just proximity, it's proximity out of love, out of love and out of commitment to go with each other and to walk alongside each other. And so, I mean, that is inadequate. And this is why books are written and conferences are held and church plants and everybody continues to struggle along. But at heart, we have to love one another closely enough and longingly enough to begin to at least understand their other ways of seeing the world and why people might see them that way. I've been talking about that. mainly in, in racial terms right now, but I absolutely think it's true in political terms as well. And, um, I just think we have no idea. Um, another side of this that does come up in the book is that, um, uh, We are prone to over-identify our political community with the kingdom of God. And that's true in Israel. When Amos has to show up and tell the Israelites they think that God's on their side, but actually he's not. And they think that they're chosen and they're right about that. But that means that they're going to be especially judged for trying to combine injustice with worship. That happens among God's people. where we take challenges to the failures of the church as assaults on God's kingdom rather than the chastening of God. It also happens in our nations where throughout history, Christians have wanted to claim that God was on the side of their political community. And honestly, a lot of the stuff that I think keeps us from understanding, someone like me kept me from understanding some of how my neighbors from other experiences thought politically was that I came from a community. That's not true. I came up in swimming in waters where it was quite comfortable for people to say, you know, America is on God's side. And the one place where I do bring in American politics is to show that every single one of our American presidents, last four at least, and their vice presidents on both sides of the aisle have all idolatrously basically quoted scripture and and put America in the place of God's people or Jesus, right? So, like, you know, Hillary Clinton called, or maybe it was Barack Obama called America the last great hope of the world. Okay, that's idolatrous, you know? Hillary Clinton called America a shining city on a hill. Jesus said that about the church. You know, Mike Pence said, let's fix our eyes. That's Hebrews. Where does it end? on Jesus. Where did Mike Pence go? Let us fix our eyes on old glory. The flag literally substituting, right? George Bush talked about the hard work of the American people and then said, and the light shines in the darkness. That's Jesus, not the heart. So there is a history on both sides of our political aisle of claiming that God was on America's side in a unique way, that we were a shining city on a hill. And that's wrong. It's idolatrous. And if you believe that you go down the wrong track and, but it's easy for those of us whose communities have had a good time in America to believe that it's impossible for people who've been victims, their grandparents and parents. And, and so this is another place where diverse viewpoints help us to go, no, there's beautiful things about this place and there's hideous things about this place. And so I think that's another way that our, our sort of, when we get together people across races and classes, we're looking at two different countries and two different histories in a sense. And until we reckon with that, until we unwind the theology that justifies that bad theology, like we're in really deep trouble, you know?

01:03:40
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:03:40
Speaker 4: Well, and I think, I think the way that you're describing things shows us just how how specifically the political conscience has to be local, right? That it's not just on some national election. Because this becomes, this isn't just some moral ethical issue. It's an issue that creates the boundaries between communities, creates the boundaries that churches honor, creates the boundaries where houses are built and how much they cost, right? And you think about someone like Trayvon Martin, the boundary by which he's judged as someone who according to some, ought to have been shot. These are political dynamics that the church has to wrestle with locally.

01:04:22
Speaker 3: And one thing I say in the book early on is, you know, Rebecca and I came out of college excited about the kingdom of God, excited about mission, and with a felt sense of call to help God's people embody God's good news to the poor. And since 2008, when we graduated from college, we've been on that journey. But at the beginning of the journey, we would have said, that that had nothing to do with politics. We wanted that as an alternative to politics. Like that's a politics is ugly and bad. This is mission and justice and good stuff. And it was actually the experience of living in South Memphis for 12 years and being forced to confront political issues just in the daily grind that made us go, oh my goodness. And then listening to the answers that came out of our mouths and then going, I don't think that whole, I don't think that's going to work. That's what drove me to want to do this book. It was like, oh my goodness, my neighbors are being evicted while paying rent by their slumlord. That's a political issue. That's going to have to be solved in a court with lawyers and stuff. And then it was going, I'd like to buy a house, but the house across the street is being sold for $ 19, 000. And if your neighborhood is so divested that you can sell a house for $ 19, 000, that's houses aren't worth what they cost to build or repair. And so the whole neighborhood is sliding further and further in the slum. And then you discover there's a history to that, that 38126 was the most prosperous, the first black millionaire lived in my neighborhood. And his home was literally taken by the state. And working class black owned homes were taken by the state and turned into large-scale government housing projects for the poor. So now all of a sudden you understand my community was– I'm not saying every community was this way. I'm saying this community was designed poor by– created poor by design in very specific ways. And it's also the place where the poor people's grocers were lynched, whose lynching inspired Ida B. Wells. And it's also the neighborhood where MLK was shot. And it's also the neighborhood where the I Am A Man– protest signs were printed in the bottom of an African Methodist Episcopal church to come along. So, yes, you're absolutely right. And so, like, we have to attend to the ground under our feet and the neighbors beside us. And when the structures of our neighborhoods and our cities have made it to where none of the neighbors beside us are from another ethnic group or economic class or whatever, then we've got to resist that, right? We've got to resist that so that we can, uh, experience a kind of discipleship to follow Jesus in real places with real people, not with sort of like fake artificial half answers, uh, you know, which is what I think we end up with. So, um, that was a bit of a rant, uh, but, uh, You said it. You said it. That's my story. My story is not being a political scientist. It's having the Bible, being in a place, trying to love my neighbor and going, oh, my gosh, I've gotten so much of this wrong. And there's so much I don't know. And I want to do better.

01:07:47
Speaker 1: Well, bro, I mean, I appreciate it.

01:07:50
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, it's really helpful. I think it gets to the heart of what you're trying to do in the book.

01:07:56
Speaker 1: I think it's a lived experience and it's a great illustration of what all of us need to be doing.

01:08:00
Speaker 2: We have similar stories in my area. I live down in near East St.

01:08:03
Speaker 1: Louis, which used to be a relatively prospered area, but different mechanism. But economic realities, companies coming because Missouri's laws for environmental dumping hadn't caught up with the rest of the nation. And so you have an influx of the urban poor in East St.

01:08:22
Speaker 3: Louis.

01:08:24
Speaker 1: There was white flight. Sometime during the early 60s. And now that neighborhood is a mess. And so you see how these different mechanisms can actually produce the sort of challenges we see.

01:08:35
Speaker 2: And they are political issues. And so, yeah.

01:08:39
Speaker 3: And you know what's cool about that, James? And I've seen this firsthand. When God's people get involved in places like that, and we allow the Bible to shape our politics, it will change the way we live. And it will change the way we engage the state, but it won't erase all of our like sort of political philosophy differences. And that is okay. Like I worked on political issues with people who voted Democrat, Republican and immigrant and independent. A few months ago, I talked to a pastor who's in Arizona and he said, we have decided that We share convictions about immigrants, even though we vote Democrat, Republican, and Libertarian. And we've actually gone to City Hall and said, we disagree about the details. But as Christians, Democrat, Republican, and Libertarian, here are some things that we insist you honor in the way you treat immigrants. You honor the image of God. You honor the integrity of the family. You honor religion. just process these things have to be true even though we disagree about exactly what you might be doing and so i think if we get this there's actually this like life-giving like uh exciting opportunity to break out of this thing this hyper partisan toxic political environment that we know is bad for us everyone is talking about how it's bad for us i think 80 percent of christians in america suspense suspect that something is wrong you know And there is a better way. But from my perspective, it requires some sustained lingering in the strange world of scripture, letting that unsettle us, and then intentionally returning to these questions together with fresh eyes. And that's the resource that I hope the book offers.

01:10:35
Speaker 1: That's awesome, man. Your passion comes out, brother. We could probably do this the rest of the night and not get.

01:10:43
Speaker 2: Tired of it.

01:10:43
Speaker 1: But we got to close this out. But Michael, it's always a pleasure, bro. And I just recommend people reimagining biblical politics. It's available on Amazon. It's probably available on Baker's site. Put the links in the footnotes. Check out Michael's podcast. It is Crossroads, R-H-O-D-E-S, right? Uh, and, uh, and we'll put that link in the show notes as well, but, uh, and then check out a sub stack, um, for more, uh, for more commentary on, uh, politics and Bible and, uh, these, this sort of second way of doing politics, uh, out in the world.

01:11:18
Speaker 2: So Michael, just thanks again for being here, brother. Really appreciate you.

01:11:22
Speaker 3: James Ashish. It's been really fun. Thanks for having me on.

01:11:25
Speaker 1: All right, everybody take care and we'll catch you on the next episode of thinking Christians. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.