Why Should Christians Engage Politics? (Vincent Bacote) | Faith & Politics #13

00:00:01
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.

00:00:11
Speaker 2: I'm Dr.

00:00:11
Speaker 3: James Spencer.

00:00:12
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.

00:00:28
Speaker 3: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian.

00:00:30
Speaker 2: I'm Dr.

00:00:31
Speaker 3: James Spencer, joined by my co-host, Dr. Ashish Varma.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: And our special guest today is Vincent Baycoat. He is professor of theology and director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College. And we're going to be talking a little bit about theology and politics. as part of our ongoing series to hopefully prepare you to think well as the midterm elections come up. So I'm going to pitch it to Ashish and let him ask the first question today and excited for this conversation.

00:00:59
Speaker 3: So Ashish, take it away.

00:01:01
Speaker 4: Thanks, James. Yeah, well, first I want to say I'm very excited. I see the gray in your hair and I see the gray in my hair. And I remember that we go back to when there was no gray in my hair and far less in your hair. So it's been a while, I guess that's saying.

00:01:16
Speaker 5: You know, I mean, if we look closely, we see that there's a little bit of brown hair trying to hold on. But the pigments in my hair are diminished around here.

00:01:32
Speaker 4: It does that, it seems to, over time, right? This is all to say that there's been some time that's passed.

00:01:42
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:01:42
Speaker 4: But it's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. vince was my i'm not sure how we called it when i was in the phd program you were my my student teaching supervisor i.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: Guess yeah yeah i mean you were you were a preceptor for us when we expanded uh the freshman theology class to.

00:02:02
Speaker 6: You know 100 plus students typically and so you you were a group you were part of a trio of students who did the precepting and did and did the grading and and at least in my sections i you know, make sure everybody had an opportunity to actually do some lecturing.

00:02:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, which was great. So it's great to have you here. You've had a long interest in public or political theology or both. You've written on the topic. Do you want to maybe start off by helping us understand why do you care about this topic?

00:02:35
Speaker 2: I care about it for, you know, because I care about rock and roll is really what it comes down to. Because because this is the 80s here, and some could say I was in my metal phase, if you will. Not that the metal phase is gone, but a lot of people in my Bible said it was kind of a problem, me listening to groups like Iron Maiden, Motley Crue and stuff. Hey, why are you listening to that music? Blah, blah, blah. And it seemed to me from an intuitional level that you could appreciate someone's artistry without wanting to be that person that you can appreciate the good that is coming from them while critiquing their lifestyle. I mean, using Motley Crue as an example, very sleazy people, of course. But the point wasn't being sleazy. The point was, you know, there's a group, right? I mean, so, but I didn't have any theological language for that. And so, but it always seemed to me that Christians ought to be able to engage culture And that it's okay to do that, that you're not worldly because you engage culture. And so if, if you think about people that are more culture affirming versus culture denying, I was around people that tended to be more culture denying. And so really, whether it's music and film, whether it's politics, whether it's business, whatever it is, life beyond Sunday, uh, and how Christians ought to be engaged in that as Christians, discerning that as Christians, has been something that's been part of something I've cared about since college. It wasn't really until I was in seminary that I really began to get, I would say, significant theological formation from my engagement with Abraham Kuyper. I heard of Francis Schaeffer before I went to seminary. So that was some... attention to that because Schaeffer was a culturally engaging person. And that's really how it happened. And then my dissertation was about the doctrine of common grace and the Spirit's work in creation being the dynamic force, if you will, of common grace, that common grace making possible our ongoing engagement with the first command in Genesis 1. So that And that command, God's never said that I forget that. You know, Psalm 8 is a great example of that. I mean, Psalm 8 can't be, gee, I remember when God said we can engage the creation and I praised you for what we had. Sorry, we don't have it anymore. That's not the disposition of Psalm 8. Psalm 8 is that we still are, God still as human beings gave us this privilege and opportunity to be the people that are stewarding the world. And so for me, talking about that, when we have the agency for public engagement, because everybody has had the same levels of agency around the world, that, that responsibility and opportunity still remains for us. And that certainly extends to politics as much as it extends to how I'm thinking about film, culture, education, whatever it is. And that, but that, that's still a culture. My, my inclinations are to be a culture affirming Christian, that culture affirming Christian doesn't mean anything goes. It means, uh, But that I can recognize that there are things in the world that come from non-Christians that I can appreciate, that I can engage, that sometimes we can maybe be persuasive to them sometimes. But also that Christians have an obligation as Christians to participate in the world as people who can help orient the world toward having, if you will, at least being a little bit better. Hopefully a lot better in some cases, but at least a little bit better. And if you have the agency to do that, then Christians ought to be doing that. And it ought to emerge out of our theology rather than out of having a kind of what I would say an ad hoc approach to it, which I do think tends to be the case with a lot of Christians. I mean, I sometimes wonder if you took a survey of most evangelical Christians in the United States and you asked them, why should we be involved in politics and culture? From what you believe, what is the basis for that? And what informs how we ought to be going? going into the world, how we ought to be discerning what we're doing in the world, what orients us towards the issues that we care about, what makes us sensitive to issues we may not know about, but when somebody tells us that's an issue, we recognize that it is an issue we should care about. Those types of things. When it comes to that, my sense is that most people cannot give you a theological foundation for that. They can say, I'm a Christian, I should care, I should be like Jesus or whatever. It's like, okay, great. Can you tell me what it is about being Christian that makes you care, that orients you into the public? What is your language for talking about what that posture is? You know, how many people would use a language like stewardship, for example, to talk about that in terms of the way that we're thinking about engaging the world, as opposed to, well, I'm an American, I'm a Christian, you know, we're in this Judeo-Christian nation. So you're telling me these facts, but are you telling me those facts in a way where what you know about them in terms of theological basis, that those are the things that are themselves the reason, rather than you find yourself in an environment with political agency, at least conversations about political agency. And then you're thinking about being some kind of Christian who does something Christianly in the world. And so to me, having that theological foundation for that public engagement is really important.

00:08:30
Speaker 4: That's great.

00:08:31
Speaker 2: That may have been a longer answer than you were looking for.

00:08:33
Speaker 4: No, that was good. I was hoping for a long answer because that gives you.

00:08:38
Speaker 2: All these spurs.

00:08:42
Speaker 4: Well, I think because the spurs that you gave us to work off of here, I want to put a bookmark in one of them in particular to come back to. And that's the way that you were talking about engagement in a way that seems broader than than the ways that oftentimes we tend to think of political engagement. So specifically the direction you want to take is where I want to put the bookmark. If you don't mind, can we talk at first, the way that you're thinking of political to me sounds like an older, fuller, maybe even more the way that Aristotle thought about the political citizen sort of approaching engagement where it's not limited to, but not exclusive against either. an engagement with the realm that we tend to see of as politics.

00:09:32
Speaker 3: Is that fair to say?

00:09:33
Speaker 2: Sure. That's very fair to say. What I would say is that what we call, what political life is a species of our larger engagement of or management of the world. I'm of the view that were there no fall, there would still be political realities because as humans went on, at some point people would have had to cooperate with each other around public projects. instead of everybody having their own way to get to what, you know, river or wherever it is, eventually people would get together and say, hey, let's band together and make a river. At some point they would talk about how you're going to pay for this, who's going to have the responsibility for this, who's going to manage these things, and other forms of common life. So that management of common life would happen regardless. We think of politics in terms of the need to have guardrails that need to have protection because post-fall, humans are very good at taking advantage of other humans. And so we need things in place in order for our life to be at least relatively survivable, to have some kind of public justice reality in place to say, hey, you can do these things, you can't do these things. If you do these things correctly, there could be consequences if you harm people in certain ways. Or that in order for people to be able to do what they would like with their lives, we need to create a kind of society that enables people to have the agency to go about their lives without the fear of being attacked all the time. In other words, all that's emerging out of the presumption that when God gives humans the world to manage, that big picture of what we would call public life, and I'm calling public life life outside the context of worship generally, that public life and the domains we share with other people, that we have responsibility in that domain. So that's really how I'm getting at it when I'm thinking about this larger political reality. So I'm thinking about it doctrinally more than philosophically. Right. Um, but obviously, uh, I mean, it, it resonates with what you're talking about.

00:11:55
Speaker 1: So if you were just to make a quick juxtaposition, like when I think about this through scripture, you have Romans 13, one through four, that's a little bit more of the restraint of evil sort of vibe, right? Like bad people do bad things. The government is there for justice. But then I think back in the old Testament, Jethro's advice to Moses was, to assign elders to manage the people. It's a form of politics to some degree, but it isn't responding necessarily to the evils of society. It's responding to the people management, the societal management of society. And so those two aspects of politics and others would certainly even make an appearance in scripture if we're paying attention.

00:12:39
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, we all... We all belong somewhere, and depending upon where you belong, you may have the opportunity to be a person who has some active management. You might run for mayor. You might run for town council. You might run for the school board. You might run for the Forest Preserve, or whatever it is. Those things are available to you. Not if you're in North Korea. Right. And not if you're not in the right family in Saudi Arabia. Right. Not if you're part of the junta in Myanmar. So, you know, everybody doesn't have the agency. That's why I wanted to mention agency earlier. But when you have a country like the United States, for all the problems that we have right now, people still have way more political agency than most people have ever had in world history. And so... There's opportunity with that agency. And that agency isn't just about necessarily what's happening in Washington, D.C. What's happening in your town? What's happening in your county? What's happening in your state? There are other domains, levels, where people can participate in the management of public life. Or at least you're paying attention to it and you might vote in these local elections as opposed to only voting locally. at the state or national level of elections. You have a role as a citizen where, at the very least, you can be involved in choosing those people. You can communicate to those people. And so that's a form of participation that, depending upon whatever political system you're in, you can't assume that everybody has that.

00:14:34
Speaker 4: I think that's an important detail that we often miss when we're reading scripture. And we tend to make, in the broad sense of we, we tend to make too easy of steps to, the Bible says, Romans 13, 14. Therefore, here's how we should act in the present. When I think about someone like Paul, we've talked about before in this podcast.

00:14:54
Speaker 2: That.

00:14:56
Speaker 4: Even as he can appeal to having Roman citizenship, he has no real political agency in the sense of the ability to bring about any sort of change. when he's writing to Philemon and sending Onesimus back to him, he has no ability to overcome social structures within the environment. So he's now thinking in a real way from the margins. To your point, that's not the case by and large in the United States and for Christians. So what kind of a challenge for you does that set up rather than simple sorts of ways of thinking about, well, the Bible says, attend to your government leaders as from the Lord and respect them and honor them. To our situation where there's a lot more at stake in terms of our personal involvement. How does that change things for you?

00:15:48
Speaker 2: Well, I think part of it is, it's interesting to think about this. When people are talking about, whether they're quoting Romans 13 or they're quoting 1 Peter 2, and saying God puts those people in place, What are people assuming in the original context about how those leaders got there?

00:16:05
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:16:08
Speaker 2: And when we think about, okay, the way our leaders show up are not the way those leaders showed up in the United States. And how, because the audiences that Paul's writing to, none of these people are telling their kids, you know, and one day you might be president of the United States of America if you're an American citizen. None of these people are, you can't imagine that. But, you know, some kid somewhere is learning about the way that things are in terms of our government in the United States of America. And because some were the teaching siblings, even if not everywhere. And when they're learning at some point, somebody is saying, and maybe one of you will be president one day. Now, obviously, most of the time those teachers are lying. But the fact is, the reason they say that is the citizen is can be the person who has that managerial position. That big stewardship position. Really that big service opportunity position. That's a very different reality than you've got to be in the right family or you have to get close to the right family to play the game. Now that's the way it is in a lot of other places around the world. But that's not generally the way it is in the United States. Because there's all these stories about how did this person get there? And they didn't always get there because they made all these connections with the people in charge. Sometimes they got there in spite of those people. All that to say is that we can still say that God puts in place government for these purposes. And it's important to have rulers, government officials. But there's been all kinds of processes for how that's happened. And if you're in an environment where there's more agency, because you're a participant in that process, then that probably, I think what we can presume faithfully is, however people are winding up in those positions, we're not just passive. Because we don't, because we're actually in a situation where people wind up in those situations because they emerged from the citizens. And they participated in that larger process, which if you're a citizen and you take advantage of being a citizen, it's one of the things you can do. If you think about what's happening at First Peter, for example, where they have about this much political agency, they're told to be good citizens, right? And they're also told, you know, don't use your freedom for indulgence, basically. So there's some kind of, at least a little bit of agency they have, at least in terms of the kind of people they're going to be, which I guess means don't just join, you know, Honor the king, but don't join the party of the people that are living lives of debauchery. But if we're thinking about a situation where you're not in that exilic reality, then we have to say, I think, that there's forms of Christian faithful participation that can include, okay, I'm in a situation where I can write to the governor. I can write to the president. I can write to the mayor. I don't just say, okay, they're in place. I'm merely a subject. I have more agencies. So, and I'm, and I'm, and just by virtue of being a citizen, you might say, and this is speculation, of course, if first Peter is writing to people in the United States of America, then they might be being told to be, okay, leaders are in this place, etc., etc., but then they're being told, be a good citizen. Be a good citizen doesn't mean just let other people drive the bus. You're in a place where your responsibility as a citizen actually includes a way to seek the good of others by your participation in the political system. That doesn't mean that everybody has to run for office, but in other words, you have the opportunity to do things like vote, and if you vote for the right people, you might have a better type of common good because you vote for better people than worse people. And so that participation would be presumed as opposed to participation being absolutely not presumed. In fact, the opposite. In a situation like First Peter. And so I think we have to take into account what's assumed already about how you get leaders. The fact of leaders is important. Merely being subject to them as if they just showed up and it's just passed down from family member to family member, or if people are killing off.

00:20:55
Speaker 7: Each other, the people who replace the people that they kill, they replace, whatever it is, then you're just subject to that.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: But if you're in a country where it's like, hey, you're a citizen, it could be you. In theory, then there's already something about presuming that participation that I think we should think about.

00:21:18
Speaker 3: How do you think?

00:21:19
Speaker 1: Like, I can remember growing up and not really knowing who my parents were voting for. I knew they voted, but it was a much more private thing back then. And you didn't have the sort of public presentation of... you know, statistics, evangelical Christians voted this way, or at least it wasn't as in your face. How do you think about that sort of, because now it becomes part of our public witness, right? It becomes just like you would judge a Senator or a legislator who's voting for a particular law or not voting for a particular law. It becomes part of their voting record. It feels like we've been, we've gotten like sort of a public voting record. I'm just interested to hear how you would think through that, given the polarities and the vitriol that our political process often raises.

00:22:13
Speaker 2: Well, the first thing I would say is that, you know, it's funny because my mom would never tell us who she voted for. Yeah. I would say, Mom, who did you vote for? None of your business.

00:22:21
Speaker 3: That's right.

00:22:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think there are probably still people who would say that, but... And also, I mean, I'm not the kind of person, am I where I voted today?

00:22:31
Speaker 7: That's all you're going to know. I'm not going to tell you everything. I'm not going to give you a rundown of what's on my ballot. But I think when we think about things like 81%, perhaps.

00:22:43
Speaker 2: That those are opportunities, I think, to inquire about Okay, what is it that led to this 81%? Part of my argument about why you get the 81% is Trump was going against Hillary Clinton, not against someone like Joe Biden. Now, apparently, you know, Biden was told by the operatives. Probably a combination of it's her time and also even if it was your time, you wouldn't win. Whereas I think after Beau Biden died, he kind of had like a sympathy vote that might have won it for him. But especially if he was going against Trump. I mean, but they didn't know that he was going to be going against Trump when my time that he wasn't even doing this thing.

00:23:28
Speaker 6: Right.

00:23:30
Speaker 2: So I said to my classes after Tuesday, Thursday class. So Thursday, go to my class after Trump gets elected. And I say, here's what you have to understand. Some people are relieved and some people are devastated. Who are the devastated are the people that are thinking about how Trump announced himself using xenophobic language about rapists, thugs, all that kind of thing. The other people that are relieved are all the people that thought post Obergefell that there was a gigantic progressive snowball at the top of a mountain and that a Hillary Clinton guy elected. She's the one appointing Supreme Court justices. She's the one that's going to bring people who have traditional morality, if you will, to heal, especially around sexuality. And that institutions like mine were going to be either forced to go private to maintain justice our positions around those things or we were going to be forced to a lot of accommodations if we were going to still be able to have state funding and all those types of things and it was that and so for i think for a certain percentage of people someone who said i'll make a deal with you was trump did say to certain christian leaders hillary clinton met with no christian leaders at all yeah uh and i mean such the miscalculations are on that are just amazing but um But some people, I think, inside the beltway types were really kind of enjoying what they thought was a certain kind of momentum, and then that's not what happened. But Trump makes a deal, and people think, okay, he's going to do what we want. And if someone says, I'm going to support you around the issues you want, I'll make a deal with you, people chose... To either not vote. Occasionally there are people who voted for like Jill Stein or somebody. But some people voted for Hillary because they just couldn't stomach Trump. But most of the people, they're thinking cultural wars have been lost. A lot of people have been articulating that narrative. And he may not have been the person that I wanted. Some people did want him. But at least he'll do something for us. I mean, and I realize for some people, they're like, I still don't understand how, et cetera, et cetera. Which I want to say is, if you keep hearing that basically we're all about to get steamrolled around this, and we've been losing for the last few years anyway. Yeah. On all this stuff. I think some people are like, you know, I'm going to vote for him. And then, you know, some people, you know, there's just this interview with Tucker Carlson. where he talks about being in a room with Donald Trump. And he said, it's like the man has a spellbinding powers. And that's what I call the apprentice version of Donald Trump versus the art of the deal version of Donald Trump. The art of the deal version of Donald Trump is you're boorish. You're a liar. All this other kind of stuff. The apprentice version of Donald Trump. I remember watching the show myself thinking he's just not, he's not the villain. It's Omarosa. It's other people.

00:26:35
Speaker 7: Right.

00:26:36
Speaker 2: And he, The point being that, in fact, Tim Alberta also said this, who wrote The Kingdom, Power, and the Glory. So when he was here, he was talking about being in the room with Donald Trump. And depending upon which version you get, it's easy for people around him to think he's not that bad. Interesting. And also, if you add to that, though, also just whatever kind of aura he has, because I remember Donna Brazile, a Democratic operative, saying, There was no way Ron DeSantis was going to get the nomination because he doesn't know how to work a room. Donald Trump knows how to work a room. And so all I have to say is that sometimes when people are saying, how could anybody ever vote for that guy? And how did some of these Christians who were in the same room with him, why would they do it? Because when they went in the room, they got mesmerized and they remained so. And so you, I mean, I think there are a lot of people that are, if you will, kind of just caught up in a certain you know aura we'll call it um but the point is is that and then if you're in and then pragmatically they're thinking about certain things being delivered to them yeah and and and never mind everything that was said about character prior to 2016 because of the sense of crisis prior going into 2016 yeah yeah so now i didn't vote with trump okay so But the point is that I think it's important to understand what the environment was. So a lot of people, they were at least relieved that Trump won. Because it's like, okay, you know what? We've been saying for years that we're up against it because we're evangelicals. We're really going to be up against it if she gets elected. And didn't you add to that, by the way, I said to my class, I said, for most white evangelicals, only an angelic visitation would have made them vote for her. Because the image of Hillary Clinton that lots of evangelicals had from the 90s when she was the first lady, you know, all these people who are remembering whether it was a 60 Minutes interview or whatever it was, where she was talking about she wasn't going to be a traditional first lady, stand by your man, all this other kind of stuff. Some people were so turned off by that. And then on top of that, people were thinking, And I think she's really this kind of feminist Marxist character, even though she was a pretty mainstream secretary of state. None of that matters. That initial impression stopped for a lot of people. And so they were like, if you think I'm voting for her, wait on it. It was kind of what they would say. And so the point is, is that I think the problem is, so even if everything that I said is completely accurate, which I think is mostly accurate, I mean, I'm not omniscient, so I could be missing something. But when the public reputation of evangelicals prior to 2016 was we wanted Bill Clinton to be impeached. And we kept talking about character matters. And now you're equivocating about character. And you have people saying things like it sounds like you just like being around. You like finally being in the room with power. Yeah. And you, and, and, and, and as long as things don't get too crazy, you'll be, you'll, you'll say you rather explain it away. Uh, I mean, you, you won't say he's not a perfect, I mean, everybody would say, well, yeah, he does things that make me nervous, whatever, but they would say, but yeah, but he's our guy that makes, that does those things. Yeah. And so I think to other people and to some of the people who grew up in homes or churches where people were talking about character, massive dissonance around all of them.

00:30:42
Speaker 6: Yeah.

00:30:42
Speaker 2: So you get that reputational piece that then when people are thinking about voting and voting being a dimension of witness, and that voting, by the way, also happening by a point when, because these began to happen at least after 2005 for certain, You start hearing people saying, well, of course, you know, you're going to vote Republican if you're a Christian, which obviously is for people who've never been in a black neighborhood since 1965. I mean, you know, when all the thing begins to change, because it's like, who do you think most people in these black churches are voting for? You probably have a few Republicans in those churches, but not a whole lot. And I think a lot of those people are authentic Christians. Those people aren't even on the horizon when people are saying that. And it's because people are thinking about sexuality and abortion. Yeah. And so all I have to say is that I think 2016 is when there's the presumption that if you're an evangelical, you're voting for... I think with conservative Catholics, it's always kind of been more divided because of the social thing. But with evangelicals, It's like, well, since Reagan, at least, it's like, well, you're going to mostly vote Republican, even though you would have people that would explicitly be Democrats for life, like in the 90s and in the early aughts. But at some point, the presumption that these are just the people who do that. And of course, here's another problem that's happening along with that. The assumption that evangelical identity is more about those political commitments than about something like the Bevington-Rodrell Act. Yeah. About the Biblicism, Conversionism, Activism, Crucicentrism, all those things. Or what I call a Bible ecumenism, right? Where Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, and Anglicans and others, and Pentecostals are all saying we're part of the same family, even though we have massive disagreements about many other things. We have nothing in common that we say we're family. That version, that Bible ecumenist identity of evangelicalism, massively obscured by the presumption that you're mainly talking about a voting law. Now, is that Karl Rove's fault? I mean, I don't know. Or the media taking evangelicals seriously because of their association with Bush the Younger. Maybe you have Gerson and others in the White House. Now you've got Primetime Live and all these people interviewing people about evangelicals. Now, why they interviewed Joe Laustein to talk about evangelicals on that program, I don't understand. But he was one of the people they interviewed. I thought, you've got to be kidding. But hey, big church, I guess, right? He wasn't the only one, but that threw me off. I'm sorry, go ahead.

00:33:41
Speaker 3: I was just going to say, it goes to your early point.

00:33:44
Speaker 1: We don't allow these ideas to emerge from our theology. We're ad hoc-ing it, and then it opens us up to being defined politically as opposed to being defined theologically.

00:33:57
Speaker 2: And so.

00:33:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, when I've thought through this, I've always argued people, look, our politics should emerge from discipleship. It should be rooted within it. And so, you know, like if you don't do that, then you're just, it's wins, right? Like whatever political wins you're carrying and whatever seems to be the right approach at this moment, you tend not to see things holistically because the politics is inherently narrowing.

00:34:25
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

00:34:27
Speaker 1: And that narrows you, and then you find Bible verses and theologies that will support whatever agenda you're moving toward. But theology has a way of widening you, not narrowing you.

00:34:37
Speaker 2: Well, I think another reason that it happens is the Biblicism that people do have is, to your point, what's the verse that's helping me to support X, Y, or Z? And it's really not about having a kind of systematic way of thinking about things. And it's not about having a clear connection between theology and ethics. The ethics is about either a crisis that emerges for me personally, so I care about it, or an authority figure I trust tells me about something I should care about. And so the issue is either on my doorstep because of some way it's close to me personally, or because it's put on my doorstep by the people that I trust. yeah and so i'll talk about those issues because hey these are the things that we talk about why well because an answer is almost because it's what we talk about the answer because because no no hey it's what we've been told well in 1970 for example whatever evangelicals were thinking about in terms of ethics abortion was not the issue right yeah sexuality was divorce was an issue you know um You know, I'm sure drugs were the issue. Such a revolution was the issue. But the things that became the issues, they get presented, okay, here's the issue that we care about. And when it's what we care about, even if somebody gives reasons for it, the point is presented to you as a crisis.

00:36:17
Speaker 6: Yes.

00:36:18
Speaker 2: And then, again, you're trusting your leaders, arguably. here's the crisis. And my point isn't that they're not necessarily legitimate crises, but just to put an obvious point on it, a lot of these same people, if I said to you, do you realize that racism has been a crisis for a couple of centuries? And when I bring it up to you, you say that that's political and why are you bringing it up? Or it's only about personal prejudice. We shouldn't talk about that. Why are you being divisive by bringing that up? I mean, It's like abortion is not divisive. I mean, and on it goes. In other words, it's not mattering because what's leading people to care about things is like, well, here are the things we care about. Here are the things that we're committed to. You're making it complicated if you're bringing race into this. Yes, it is complicated. Do you know why? Because some people, you talk about race and they're African-American, they're really mad. because they've been like an impression cooker. Other people, strangely, they also think it's an important issue, but they're just not mad. Yeah. And so you can't just nail down how people can talk about the same thing, but there are all these differing emotions around it. Right. And they're telling you about different experiences. Some people are talking about personal prejudices. Other people are talking about systemic realities, et cetera. It's a complicated thing. But you bring that up, and people are like, why are you bringing that up? Can you show me in the Bible why I should care about this? And I think it just didn't get put on the radar as one of the issues. And to the extent, maybe for some, that it's a quote-unquote democratic issue, or the ways that it was being, the policy that was happening around it was happening more from Democrats. For some people, that was probably also a complicating factor, I imagine. Yeah. Interesting. The point is just that why are some issues the issues that matter to people? It's not because the question I'm asking is, all right, if somebody tells me that something is an issue, and let's just say it's assisted suicide, which, of course, we really do have to think about now, I mean, because it's happened. I mean, more states are talking about these laws.

00:38:49
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:38:51
Speaker 2: Well, if I haven't thought a whole lot about it, I might go, well, you know, the government needs to tend to those things, but it's not one of the things that we need to put on the front burner, like we're putting abortion on the front burner. Well, and again, if I'm thinking about it, because what seemed to be our issues for whoever the we is, that's very different than if I'm oriented to ultimately care about those things because of my theological anthropology.

00:39:16
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:39:17
Speaker 2: Because of The way that I think about love of neighbor, to say, oh, of course it makes sense. Of course it's worth it. one of our issues, or it should be an issue, even though it hasn't been an issue for me. I see it as something I should at least care about. But if I have the bifurcation between theology and ethics, it's a much harder thing to do.

00:39:46
Speaker 4: So there were a lot of strands there that I think are really important. I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean in a good way. I think what you're showing is... Well, on one level, you gave the number of 81%. Sometimes it's been as high as 85%. You pointed out that if you walk into a Black evangelical church, you're not necessarily getting the same voting splits.

00:40:09
Speaker 2: Right. Highly unlikely.

00:40:12
Speaker 4: Right. So the dynamic of race that's often seen to be a political issue... and the way that many churches and even institutes talk about it, and I have stories there, we won't go into them, seems to be a way of saying, let's not talk about race. Race is not a real issue, it's being derived by politics. But on the other side, what has been overwhelmingly the issue for white evangelical voting over the last 45 years is not seen as a political issue. I said I wouldn't go into stories. I'll give one quick story without names and places. The majority of my work over the last decade has been in issues of race and theology. And at an institute that I used to teach at, I was outright called out for being politically motivated, even though I never once mentioned politics, never once mentioned elections of any form, never once told students who to vote for or who not to vote for. And yet the person who led the way in making that declaration to me sat in a meeting with me and in a discussion of abortion stopped, as an aside, proclaimed to the room, I don't understand how anyone could vote for fill-in Democratic candidate.

00:41:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, of course.

00:41:38
Speaker 4: And I thought it was an interesting moment of, I'm politically motivated, supposedly, because I'm talking about real issues in race and theology. but you're not politically motivated even as you deliberately bring up voting. So as a setup here, I think about many years ago at this point, I don't even remember how long ago, you were the leader or you're the panel host of a group that included Randall Balmer. And the topic, as I recall, was on evangelicals and politics. Randall Balmer was has been very outspoken on especially, uh, the political motivations behind the ensconcing of abortion as the evangelical issue.

00:42:23
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:42:23
Speaker 4: And he, he goes so far as to argue, I'm inclined to say persuasively that it was a deliberate effort to distract from fallouts of the civil rights movement and to minimize sort of gains that were had, especially by black Americans in that period. Do you have thoughts on that? Um, I realize there's a lot right there.

00:42:43
Speaker 2: Yes. Well, part of what Randy's talking about is the original reason that, in a way, evangelicals became, at least the larger populace, became more engaged. Because a lot of people are saying evangelicals were always involved in politics. If you mean evangelical leaders were always involved in politics, fine. That's not what they were telling the laity. They were telling the laity to stay out. The laity were getting involved in the 70s, initially around Bob Jones' death. losing this tax status because of the interracial dating policy. And so that made people nervous about the government doing something that kind of put the squeeze on Christian institutions. And at some point people said, you know, it's not a good look. If that's our reason we're getting involved in politics, then it seems like we're getting involved in politics because we want to kind of be propping up you know, kind of views of racial hierarchy and stuff. And it may be that people also thought, look, I don't, they may have personally not liked the policy. They cared about what was happening with institutions, et cetera. But so it really winds up, it winds up happening that they change it to abortion because of, I can't remember what, Paul Weirich was the one who said that they should make that change, but they made that change. And then that became the issue really. I don't know how much of the effort was actively trying to obscure or push against things that were happening in the civil rights movement. I would say, I think, for a lot of white evangelicals, there are probably a lot of people of goodwill that just didn't know what to do about a changing world when you had these assumptions about things and now you've got to take more seriously. The law is saying you can't, you know, hey, we're pushing against discrimination in certain ways. I think for a lot of people, if your formation has not really told you that actually caring about every human being in practice, is more than just singing a song about we're all in the same family. And that you really have to think about what that means. And of course, if you start thinking about what that means, then you have to start thinking about one, you're arguably state of your own heart, but second, uh, the way that you've kind of organized your life where when you wanted to, you could hang around minorities. You didn't want to, you could almost act like they didn't exist. Um, And remember, act like they exist. It's not because you're trying to erase them. It's just that your ordinary life just doesn't include taking into consideration the circumstances of people. And now you've got to take into consideration things that maybe you didn't have to before. And for some people, that's an extremely uncomfortable thing because people don't know what to do about it. And of course, and also if you're used to kind of managing things and being in charge And you discover you don't have any tools in the toolbox for this thing. You know, there's going to be either apathy or pushback, I think. And so I think for a lot of people, I think that that's kind of part of the circumstance. I mean, I think, you know, you know, I've done this documentary about black evangelicals called Black Plus Evangelical. And in one of the interviews I did with Bill Pinnell and Carl Ellis, and it's in the film. This is a year or two, I think, after the Skinner speech in Urbana in 1970. At some point, somebody says to Penel, and I guess to others, you need to understand that there are people who want you to succeed, but not too well. Because, you know, I think it was Penel who said this. when Skinner makes this address in the 1970 Urbana conference, okay, you have more black students there than you did in 67. But still, you're not talking about like a thousand students. You're not even talking about 500. And in this auditorium, in this stadium, this, you know, basketball arena, you're getting this raucous applause from at the end of Skinner's Address for mostly white kids. And so it's crazy, right? It's like, what? What's going on? And, you know, a message that ends with the liberator has come. And so that was very unsettling to some people because they didn't know, well, what does that mean? You know, what are the implications of that? And my sense is that it's more the uncertainty about what that means and what ways that that creates alterations of a status quo that really makes people nervous because, I mean, people just don't know what that reality is going to be. And maybe for some of those people, they're thinking, I kind of like the reality that we have and I also like being in charge. Can we just keep doing things this way? And it's great to care about your things, but still let us run everything. And let us tell you what to do. And for some people, it's just hard to give that up. And for other people, I don't think they know what to do in terms of facing... the ugly realities of the history of race and then trying to actually be part of a witness that, where at least Christians are in pursuit of a society that makes things better. That's a complicated thing, I think, for people. Because if you don't, I think with anyone, if you get in a situation where you have this uncertainty, then you're probably going to default to certain things to help you keep the situation in control. The tendency is not going to be, let me dive into the discomfort. And in diving into this discomfort... I don't know what this is going to look like, but it's way better for the kingdom witness. I mean, to me, that is a very, it could be a very exceptional response for anyone. The tendency, I think, is more to say, can I just find a way for this to make me still remain kind of comfortable rather than to see this discomfort as a doorway into something greater. Some people do step into that doorway, but... Other people, it winds up being complicated. And then other people that did step into it sometimes, it was more complicated than they anticipated. And it just becomes, to my view, unsurprisingly messy because caring about, say, reconciliation, diversity, whatever language you use, the fact that I care about that does not give me the sanctification and competence to execute that. Right? I think a lot of times people desire that. things to be better around race and culture. I think sometimes there's this idea that it shouldn't be so hard if we all care about it. It's like, yeah, but you're all still people who are on the way. And you're also on the way in probably ways you don't even recognize. And all that stuff is going to show up when you're trying to move into this thing that is so antithetical to the way that most ways humans have lived in world history, which is, hey, We're over here. You're over there. Maybe we have a truce or maybe we have a war. Yeah. I mean, there's also the, let's all have, you know, really live together and live and work on doing it.

00:51:13
Speaker 1: Well, this might be a good time to pivot to Davison, but I, I think too, there's these sort of structural elements that sort of catches.

00:51:22
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.

00:51:22
Speaker 1: And, and I think that on some level, people don't want to do the small things because they don't feel like it has an effect. But if we try to do the big things, we were working constantly. It feels like against machinery that we are never going to beat. And so there's this sort of inertia that kicks in where it's like, I don't think the small things matter. And I don't think I can do the big things that there's these, you know, there's that sort of start and stop of it. If you know what I mean, that I think is really interesting.

00:51:56
Speaker 2: I don't know about that quite that way, but no, I think that's really helpful.

00:52:01
Speaker 1: It's an old consulting trick. When I go into institutions, I'd always give them near-term things that they could do without putting any money toward anything because it kick-started the momentum.

00:52:14
Speaker 3: They could start to see results.

00:52:16
Speaker 1: They could start to actually get some traction. And once they started getting that traction, then it was easier to do something like midterm where they might have to put a little money into it, you know, in longterm where they might have to transform the institution toward it.

00:52:30
Speaker 6: Right.

00:52:30
Speaker 3: But that's what I find most difficult.

00:52:33
Speaker 1: I think with people is they, they get, there isn't a small thing that seems like.

00:52:40
Speaker 3: It's worth doing.

00:52:41
Speaker 1: And, and I don't mean that in a, you know, really horrible way, but it doesn't feel like it's having a bigger effect. I should say it like that small thing that doesn't seem like it's having a bigger effect. And so you, you start to feel that sort of futility of even bothering.

00:52:56
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:52:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:52:58
Speaker 1: And then we default to leaving it to the politicians and the leaders and all those kinds of things, which again, I, I haven't read Davidson in a long time. So correct me if I'm wrong, but in part, that's what I feel like my problem with Davidson is that part of Yeah.

00:53:14
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:53:14
Speaker 3: Sorry. Yeah.

00:53:16
Speaker 1: That's my problem with it. It's almost like it's not sociologically. I understand where he's coming from, but just sort of psychologically, I think he's missing some things. And certainly I think theologically he's a little off. So I'll just leave that as a touch point.

00:53:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the small interesting thing about the small things part is I do wonder how much the small things part is almost anti-American. What I mean is.

00:53:43
Speaker 3: That's a great point.

00:53:44
Speaker 2: Because you and I, we like to go big. We like to go big. It's like, what story are you going to tell when you go, you know, it really was about the incrementalism that did it for us. That's how we got here.

00:54:03
Speaker 3: Let me tell you about the 999th step. It was really crucial.

00:54:05
Speaker 2: Everybody's just like... That's very different than a story where, and then, you know, if somebody said, either they start with a little step, they go, you know, and six months later, boom, this many people were doing this, right?

00:54:23
Speaker 3: That's right.

00:54:23
Speaker 2: And it gives the impression of like a revival type of event happened where, look, voila, ladies and gentlemen. Right. And it all happened because they all made one decision. Yeah. Maybe there's one decision and look at all this stuff. Listen, spectacular, isn't it?

00:54:43
Speaker 1: And the reason we all love watching highlights of Steph Curry and never want to watch him practice, you know, shooting his thousand basketballs in practice. It's like, that's what it takes, but that's not what we want to see.

00:54:53
Speaker 3: Exactly.

00:54:54
Speaker 2: Exactly. I think with Hunter's book, the attraction of Hunter's book was, I think it dialed back for some people, the fact of needing to make a big change. in order for Christians to do something. And also you have more Christians all of a sudden in the late 90s starting to talk about, we ought to be involved in culture, we ought to be thinking about transformation. And I think there's this way, and maybe it started more with missions than with politics and stuff, but among evangelicals, there are these big, massive things that we need to do for God. And so I think a lot of people read Hunter and thought, okay, you know, one of them takes a load off of trying to, do I need to do some big spectacular changing the world thing to do something significant? And I think they also probably picked up on the fact of, and do I have to make people my enemies in order to accomplish it, accomplish this? Especially if the people that you're talking about are people that I know. And it's like, they're not, I don't, I don't have to be enemies. Like a certain nerd was told me that they're, they're the people that we need to overcome or beat or whatever. Um, and, and, and obviously there's an understandable and proper attraction to saying, if we're going to be like Jesus to people, we can't be making them enemies or fundamentally treating them like enemies. Who's going to disagree with that? My hesitation about Hunter's work with the way that it all kind of lands is on the one hand, he, he, regards the way that most evangelicals were going to seek change as you mainly get change in society through political means. His argument was that it happens more by these networks of social elites. It's almost like, hey, if you get the right people in the room, those are the decision makers. That's how change happens. I mean, that's true to that, obviously, but it doesn't attend to the way that sometimes you do have these grassroots realities that get to the movers and shakers, but they started it. The grassroots played a big role with this. I think for someone like myself, the biggest problem was that there's a false dichotomy between choosing a big spectacular thing and incremental actions of faithful presence that might make things better. Because everybody doesn't have the luxury of the incremental thing. And some people, they really, they want a significant change in circumstance to happen around something political, something environmental, something cultural, whatever it is. And so they're hoping that there are ways that change can occur. And there's the whole question about whether Christians should seek that. And my argument would be Christians should seek that as long as they do it with humility and not with a kind of, mindset of that. I see so clearly that when we do this, we really will have a realized eschatological society. We've got way too many people trying to that one, and they all kind of wind up in the same categories. And yet another group of people who thought that they would bring the fullness of the kingdom, and then we saw that they were just wrong. Hunter also says at the end that for some people, their way of wanting to change the world is that the world can be managed And also that if you think that you can change the world, that there's this way that your mind works where you just justify what your plan is because of the end that you're intending. I'm happy to say that there are people that do that. But that's not the only thing I'm going to say, because I'll also say that that's not what everybody who's thinking about change is doing. They're not thinking about how do I get my aspirations for change to be things where... Whatever the principles are, or whatever the theological argument is, is, I'm going to find a way to form and shape that to serve what are really more my ends than what I'm discerning are a Christian response to seeking a world with more love for neighbor and seeking the good of all people. as opposed to a world where we're continuing to put up with the ways that people are less neighborly, in ways that are from the interpersonal to the structural realities of society. And so, to me, Pay the Prince is a great place to start. It may be what some people are only able to do because of their work and cultural circumstances, but there has to be more if we're going to attend to the fact that there's a world where there's all kinds of big injustices that happen. Yeah. and where people's everyday lives are being impacted by certain forms, certain, certain negativities. So we, we can aspire to things and pray and seek them, but we do that with humility, always with an eye on knowing that whatever planet it is, it has to be subject to revision because our minds are limited. Our perspective is limited, but we want a better world. Yeah. And if we have agency, of some sort in that, then how am I helping to play some role in that? And so to me, that's a really important thing, I think, for us to think about asking those kinds of questions while saying, in the meantime, yes, there's a definite and important place for doing the small things. And also, for some people, the best thing to tell them is, Hey, guess what? Do you know you're not the Messiah? That's right. You're not. Therefore, you start small. You are not the person who's reading 2 Peter 3 about hastening the end. I've got to be the person that does all the hastening, which I always wanted to be a kind of a post-millennial disposition. And if I do that, Jesus is going to be back and we did it. Well, really, I did it because I did my part.

01:01:24
Speaker 6: Yeah.

01:01:25
Speaker 2: I think the point about those texts, I would argue, about hastening the end is, yes, God says he wants his people to live more and more like him and to be in terms of their character, but also in terms of the way that they're living with others in the world. And of course, God says, more please all of you. And that more please all of you is somehow part of God's plan about there's going to be more of this. And at some point he's going to show up. makes the world completely perfect, then he's going to come back. Right. Especially, you know, there's all these other things about, it's like, yeah, by the way, you can't really know the time. Yeah. And even if it says the day is going to come like a thief, even in the verses prior to that in 2 Peter 3, it's obviously not the hate. And when we do enough, the trumpet's going to blow. Right. So we need to cast aside any of messianic pretension, is what I would call it. Being willing to do small things, but also to dream big.

01:02:32
Speaker 6: Yeah.

01:02:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And we can do both. And some people, they're just dreamers. I mean, don't tell them not to dream. Doesn't mean that because they dream that it's magically going to happen. And sometimes the big dreamers need people that are saying, you know, we need the granular people to show up. And to say, let's talk about the million little steps. that are necessary and maybe how we can do one or two of them and decide which ones to do. We need all of that.

01:03:00
Speaker 6: Yeah.

01:03:02
Speaker 3: No, that's really helpful. Go ahead, Ashish.

01:03:04
Speaker 4: Well, one of the things that Hunter says that I think this fits well into what you are articulating is that he fears.

01:03:17
Speaker 4: So he calls for faithful presence of pullback from politics. I think that's moving in a direction that you're not compelled by. But one of his rationales for it that maybe is more compelling, but maybe to lead us in a different direction, is he says that he fears that politicians have drawn too many of the lines for us as to what we think matters and why it matters and to what degree it matters. Now, if he's right about that, But the answer is not to pull back and to be disengaged. How do we, as we enter into an election cycle, but also even when we're not in the middle of an election cycle, as we prepare ourselves to be thinking more broadly, how do we avoid letting politicians draw lines for us?

01:04:08
Speaker 2: Well, first thing is, are we actually willing to be informed? Are we actually willing to take time? to think about these things as opposed to merely being reactive and using slogans and thinking that somehow a slogan is a doorway into a totalizing understanding of something. And so I think one of the things is that am I willing to actually be informed? Am I willing to at least look at what candidates are really telling me? Am I going to go to their websites? Am I going to read what they have to say? Or am I going to just instead choose which alarmist commercials are going to tell me that the apocalypse will come if the other team wins? And then react in accordance with that. And of course, to me, no Christian should ever do that because you've hit the end of the book. So you don't need to be agitated and thrown into a kind of froth of fear. because somebody's telling you, you know, if our team loses, I'm not sure that God's able to handle it. It's like, well, you know, the history of the church is really quite a winding road, you know, wins and losses. And so we should never be surprised about that. And certainly anybody in the United States needs to step back anyway and recognize that the Bible says nothing about countries on this side of the Atlantic, except for the ends of the earth and the nation. That's all we've got. So we can't, overly center ourselves in god's narrative of salvation history we do have the uniqueness of the united states where again as i said earlier we have more agency than most people have had in history in political agency people have had in history we're a country where you've had religious pluralism where religious pluralism means the process the catholics aren't killing each other And none of them are killing the Quakers and Mennonites. I mean, all of that is amazing. But none of that means that we're the center of salvation in history. It means we're in an interesting moment, an interesting time. And now we're in this time of a lot of agitation, polarization, a lot of, I think, recognizing that whatever people think about the trajectory toward whatever they imagine the American dream to be, that it's a good time to interrogate when I think about what's important in life when I think about the life I ought to have how much of that is really informed by what scripture is telling me is a good life versus what's marketed to me by arguably corporate America and by politicians saying if you vote for us we'll help you get to whatever kind of consumer you can be to construct your own version of a personal kingdom. And we need to be asking those kinds of questions amid saying, all right, these midterms are coming up. Am I willing to just pay attention rather than to just pay more attention to the ways that alarmist voices are will make us just nervous about everything rather than saying, all right, I want to actually learn and know something here. In fact, one of the ways that I recommend to people is pick a single issue and really learn about it. And really learn about what's a way that this issue will make things better, whether that's how you're dealing with child care, how you're dealing with access to healthcare, how you're dealing with better attention to infrastructure in certain places. There's all kinds of things that are very mundane, but they do actually play a role in a lot of people's day-to-day lives. And politicians do care about them, but those aren't the things they're going to run on. So I think we need to... be willing to pause and to say, am I willing to do things in a certain kind of slower way and to be a learner about this? And as I'm being a learner, am I asking God to help me to think about what are the ways that things can be better for all of our neighbors? Yeah. And recognize that all of our neighbors, what's better for all of our neighbors doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's commitments are on the same level. You may have very particular ideas about what you think is going to be good for all of our neighbors, but whatever those are, if you're thinking about those things, are you really thinking about all the neighbors or are you thinking more about self-preservation, self-protection, all those types of things? Or are you thinking about really a common good and how the people that are running are, that you're looking at wherever you are, that here's someone who's really thinking about how to seek the good of not just, you know, dog whistles to me about, well, make things better for me. And it inclines me to either ignore others or to see that I need to resist what would happen for others in order for me to have what I need. Well, is there another way that's neither of those things where indeed here's something that's going to enhance the possibility of a better common reality for all of our people in society? And what's one issue connected to that?

01:10:09
Speaker 1: I actually think that's great advice. We got to kind of wind down the episode here. We're about done, but I'll just say this. I mean, I had the opportunity the last couple of years to address some of those minor issues. I remember writing a piece on tariffs. And I had no idea what tariffs were. I mean, I had a general idea what tariffs were. But until you start digging into it and you're like, okay, these had their place at one point.

01:10:35
Speaker 3: So do they have a place now? What do they do? How do they work?

01:10:40
Speaker 1: Once you start digging into them, you just get a better sense whether these are good ideas, bad ideas, some mix of the two. And I think when I dig into those issues, I do get a different perspective simply because I didn't know all the history of tariffs and why they were done and what they used to do and how it all changed and.

01:11:02
Speaker 3: Those kind of things. I mean, it was a fascinating history.

01:11:05
Speaker 1: And so you just sit back and go, I don't know that they're going to work now, but it's a fascinating history.

01:11:09
Speaker 3: And you.

01:11:13
Speaker 1: At least have some other frame of reference to go, well, maybe. Um, even if you don't necessarily agree with it, I do think it grants that sort of broader perspective.

01:11:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:11:24
Speaker 3: So yeah, really helpful. Thank you, Vince.

01:11:28
Speaker 1: Thanks for being here, man. This has been great and, uh, really appreciate your work. I've read a couple of your books over the years. And so, um, just really appreciate you, uh, being on the show and Ashish, thanks for arranging it.

01:11:40
Speaker 3: And, uh, yeah, we'll call it a day there.

01:11:43
Speaker 2: So thank you. All right. Well, thanks. It's a Glad to be part of the conversation. And I hope that, you know, many people get to be well informed, informed by what you're doing.

01:11:56
Speaker 3: Very cool. All right, everybody.

01:11:57
Speaker 1: We'll call it a day there. Thanks for being here and catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian.

01:12:02
Speaker 3: Take care.

01:12:03
Speaker 1: 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.