William Cavanaugh on Idolatry and Power | Faith & Politics #5

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer. I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Ashish Varma.

00:00:06
Speaker 2: And we have a guest today who we're really excited about, William T.

00:00:11
Speaker 1: Kavanaugh, who is from DePaul University.

00:00:13
Speaker 2: He's a professor of Catholic studies and director for the Center of World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology. He's also the author of The Uses of Idolatry and a number of other books. One of my favorites is Torture and Eucharist, excellent book about the Pinochet regime in Chile, as well as Migrations of the Holy, which I'm sure we'll touch on, and Theopolitical Imagination, which was one of his earlier works. And so we're excited to welcome William Kavanaugh.

00:00:43
Speaker 1: Bill, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

00:00:45
Speaker 3: Oh, thanks very much, James and Ashish. Good to be here.

00:00:49
Speaker 2: Well- We're in the midst of this series on faith and politics, and you've written an awful lot on topics related to faith and politics and ancillary to faith and politics. And so I guess my first question, and I'll try to make this a little bit of a softball just to kind of get our conversation going, is how do you actually think about politics from a theological perspective? Is it for you something that is separate from politics? Christianity, faith, theology, or is it something that's a little bit more integrated?

00:01:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's integrated. And I think you can see that, you know, just in the Bible already, Jesus is using political language, talking about the kingdom of God. And Jesus is referred to as the king, you know, king of the Jews and so on. So there's all kinds of political language. The word gospel is is originally derived from a Roman political ceremony that the Evangelium that's from the Greek, which is the good news of the return of the emperor and so on. I mean, there's all kinds of political language that's there in the Bible already. And I think the way that we tend to think about it these days has kind of gotten separated. So we tend to separate Sunday from Monday through Friday. And a lot of that has to do with the way we define what we mean by politics and what we tend to mean by politics these days is having to do with power in the nation state. And that is a relatively kind of new narrowing of the term power. politics that's associated with Max Weber and others in the 20th century. But if you go back to Aristotle's idea of politics, it has a much broader sense of just what does it mean? How do we organize ourselves to get along? How do we serve the common good together? How do we structure our lives together? And so in that sense, it's got a much broader sense. It's not just about who to vote for every four years. or every two years. Um, but it's about how do we, you know, how do we live together?

00:03:17
Speaker 2: When you think about that sort of integration of theology and you, you think about that broader sense. So like when, when politics had this notion of public life together, was there also a Christian or a theological sense about how politics worked within society that would have been different from that broader public life?

00:03:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I mean, you look at, um, The way the church thought of itself, the term ecclesia, the biblical term, the Greek term for church, has roots in the Hebrew sense of assembly, kind of assembly before God. And in ecclesia, in Greek, ecclesia is kind of the assembly of the citizens of a city-state. And so there's a sense in which it's not so much just about having power over the whole, but it's a sense of kind of how we see ourselves as doing something different in the world. And I think the church in a lot of ways in the early centuries thought of itself as kind of being a, a third thing, a tertium quid, other than the individual on the one hand or the powers that be on the other hand. It was this other kind of community that was ushering in the kingdom of God. And that made it both public but not kind of looking for power. And so the early Christians for the first three centuries, for the most part, did not participate in the military, for example. They thought that a Christian could not kill, but that didn't mean that they were just thought of themselves as a private club or something like that. It was something more than that, this kind of public community that was the herald of what God is doing with the world.

00:05:30
Speaker 2: And you sort of pull that through in Migrations of the Holy, so how the state or the nation takes up some of the sacred terms, let's say, of Christianity and becomes in and of itself almost like a religious organization making quasi theological claims, even though it wouldn't frame them that way. I don't know whether I'm representing that well, but maybe you can explain it a little differently.

00:05:56
Speaker 3: Sure. Yeah, I think I think that's pretty clear. And that's that's not anything new. you know, the Roman emperors considered themselves gods, and so you have this kind of dense intertwining of political power, what we would call political power, with divinity, with sacredness. It's worked out in a different way in the medieval period where you've got two different forces. You've got the church on the one hand and the the ecclesiastical authorities, and then you've got the kings and princes, on the other hand, who thought of themselves as also serving the kingdom, and you have this kind of tension between these two parties. But then in the early modern period, it tends to be all the sacredness kind of gets sucked into the state, the kind of new nation state that arises in the modern period. And so that's why I call that the migration of the holy. It's actually a term that I borrowed from the historian John Bossie, who looks at the way that all of the kind of trappings, the kind of liturgical trappings that used to be the province of the church now become the... the province of the state. So Queen Elizabeth I, for example, borrows all this kind of imagery from Corpus Christi processions and suppresses Corpus Christi processions at the same time that she's kind of putting herself in the place of the Eucharist in all of these kind of ceremonial ways. And so that's a very clear kind of movement in the early modern period. And you can still see it even in so-called secular nation states like the United States. There's all kinds of that sort of symbolism. If you look up into the dome of the Capitol building, for example, what you see is a painting on the dome called The Apotheosis of Washington. the becoming God of Washington. It's George Washington ascending into the heavens surrounded by these mythological figures. It was painted by Constantino Brumidi, who had previously worked for the Vatican. And so all of this very much continues.

00:08:32
Speaker 1: Ashish, anything?

00:08:36
Speaker 3: I have a.

00:08:43
Speaker 4: I have a somewhat funny question, but there's a method to the madness, so if you can bear with it. So I like sci-fi a lot, and one of the things that actually irritates me about sci-fi is that when you watch, there seems to be this very linear projection of the development of societies. So you can go from one planet to the next, and as you arrive at the next planet, you know where they are, and they can map them relative to especially the US, but generally speaking, Western nation civility development. And then they project that into the future, right? Because in the sci-fi shows, we're living in some sense of where we project that going. I couldn't help but think of this when I think about one of the claims you're working through in your Migrations of the Holy, where you talk about what to me is pretty significant, especially for our conversation, but you say, We didn't have to end up in this notion of the nation state in the way that we think about it. And of course, that is taken for granted. Not only did we have to end up here, it was good to end up here. And whatever we project that to mean going forward is the best path forward and the way that popular consciousness seems to take our development. Why is it that you, you would want to push against that when, when you make your sort of claim of, we didn't have to end up here.

00:10:09
Speaker 3: It's always a good idea to, to think about different ways that history could have ended up. Um, Because once we think that the way we do things is inevitable, then it makes it very hard to change. Then we just accept the status quo as if it were our fate instead of our destiny. And I think that's always a kind of dangerous thing. So it's always good to think about alternatives. and to think about different ways that we could have gone as a way of thinking about different ways that we could do things in the present and could do things in the future. That's one of the things that is, I think, really embedded in the Christian tradition through the Genesis story, right? The fall is often misunderstood as pessimistic. Doctrine that it means that things are messed up and there's nothing we can do about it But the fall is actually an optimistic doctrine because it means that there was an original condition That was good that we fell away from And this is as opposed to you know, the way the Babylonians told the story for example in their creation story they basically say, you know things were messed up from the get-go and It's the gods are violent, there's a war amongst the gods, and that's how creation happens. And the writers of Genesis tell a different kind of story that, no, it was good to begin with, and then things got messed up. And so they're as realistic looking out at the world and seeing the damaged condition that we live in, as realistic as the Babylonians. But the way they tell the story gives us hope then that because things are not just the way they are, always have been, then things are not just the way that things have to be either. And so all of our eschatology is embedded there in the first few chapters of Genesis. The idea that we have hope that God is good and that creation is good. And the final word in the universe is love. And therefore we can do things differently even though we find ourselves in this predicament now.

00:12:48
Speaker 4: So I take one of the significant developments that comes out of imagining otherwise, or at least the possibility of otherwise, is that it gives us the potential to say maybe that there are better choices, especially the church can make when it thinks about engaging publicly. Is that a fair takeaway then?

00:13:08
Speaker 1: Absolutely.

00:13:14
Speaker 4: Do you mind going into some of what, you know, in a perfect situation where the church sits down and says, teach us, Dr. Kavanaugh, what are some of those takeaways that you'd like to see the church imagine?

00:13:30
Speaker 2: Well, let me ask it this way, because again, I mentioned like Torture and Eucharist is probably my favorite book you've written. I just, I'm wondering if, the situation described in that book under the Pinochet regime and the importance that the Eucharist takes on that is even beyond the importance that it probably should have had in the church in the first place. But I'm wondering if part of what the church needs to do is recognize forces that require our resistance or forces that require a counterpractice At a sensitivity level well beyond what we see under the Pinochet regime.

00:14:15
Speaker 1: Right. And so that this starts to sort of.

00:14:19
Speaker 2: Guide our our political imagination and our public life in ways where we say, no, we're going to we're going to push against this ethos. that the surrounding culture is trying to cultivate us into, we're going to actually resist that. And we're going to do that by being a different sort of people with different sort of practices, shaping ourselves into a different sort of community, similar to what you, you argue in torture and Eucharist, but at a very, um, at a different level of extreme activity. So maybe, maybe that helps frame this a little bit.

00:14:57
Speaker 3: Yeah. The first thing that I would say is that the church should not think of itself as an oppositional group genetically. It's not as if we should always be opposed to the wider culture. We are not meant to be a sect. We're not meant to be a minority. There's nothing inherently good about being a minority. But we find ourselves often in situations where it is important to resist. But there's nothing good about resistance in and of itself or about being different or anything like that. But we do find ourselves in situations where there are times when we have to say no and we're not very good at saying no. And one of the things that, one of the reasons for that is because we tend to think of our national belonging as something which is more important than, even if we wouldn't articulate it that way, we tend to think that it's more important and more basic than our church affiliation. And so the public thing is national belonging and the church, our Our church belonging is something that we do on Sundays, and it's a private sort of thing. It's the people that we hang around with and go to Bible study and go golfing with and that sort of thing. And reversing that is very hard. And that's what happened in Chile in a lot of ways is that The idea that the church would be oppositional to the authorities that were running the country was not something that was in the habits of the church. And they had to learn that after the military coup in which you've got people being tortured and killed and this surveillance state that was imposed upon them. And the church did respond. And so this is, I'm talking primarily about the Catholic Church, although Lutherans were also, the Lutheran Bishop Helmut Frenz was also very courageous in Chile as well. But they... But they did very quickly kind of pivot. And it's a relatively happy story, as it was not in Argentina, where the church tended to just go along with the military regime. And human rights abuses were horrible in Argentina, much worse than in Chile. So it's these kind of habits of thinking that we have. We don't tend to think about our our primary loyalty, you know, for Catholics, this is, this comes to fruition in a, not necessarily a good way with the first Catholic president, which is John F. Kennedy, you know, so Catholics are, they tend to be, you know, most Catholics come in large numbers in the 19th century and, And they tend to be suspected, as Muslims are today, as being anti-American and undemocratic and, you know, suspicious and, you know, obedient to a foreign potentate, the Pope and so on. And so there's all this kind of suspicion of Catholics. And so then finally, in 1960, we get the first Catholic president is elected. And we celebrate this, but the way he got elected is by promising that his Catholicism will have nothing to do with how he governs the country. So what a victory this is that, you know, now we've got our first Catholic president and it's, you know, on the basis of this complete disavowal that it means that Catholicism won't do anything at all in public. And that tends to be the kind of Pyrrhic victory that we have. We're so... you know, interested in gaining power in the state. And we think we're going to do good with it. But, you know, it's like Stanley Hauerwas used to say that the church went to Washington to change Washington and Washington changed the church. Yeah.

00:19:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that's what I agree with you. I don't think we're meant to be a sect. I think, you know, when I think about things like the true, the good and the beautiful, we should affirm the truth, the good and the beautiful wherever we find it. But we should also recognize the limits of the sorts of goodness, truth, and beauty that the world has. can actually show us. And so there is a sense where we're not trying to be marginal, but we're trying to be part of an integral to the public life. And to do that, your work spans things like like torture and Eucharist, but also being consumed and the economics of that, the way the church needs to rethink its economic practices, the uses of idolatry deals with that a good bit. And so there's all these things that sort of the world is trying to understand how to navigate that the church through tradition, through revelation, through various other aspects have insight that the world simply doesn't accept. And so that's our point of resistance. And so maybe the question is then, how do we proactively pursue those unique resources? And how do we reinforce ourselves with those unique resources in ways that will allow us to point beyond the good, true, and beautiful that the world is capable of showing us?

00:20:59
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, exactly. So we have all of the resources that we need. We have Jesus. in the sacrament and in the word. And we have the Holy Spirit and we have God the Father. And so it's a matter of being obedient to that calling. And there are lots of different ways of making that happen. I think one of the problems oftentimes when we think about having an impact on Christians having an impact in the public sphere, we think that we need power to do that. And there's different ways of defining what power means. But what I mean when I say that is that we think we need to have elected officials and judges who are on our side. And that then, it can often become the The end to which all kinds of means are used. Right. And I think we're seeing that in a lot of the Christian nationalism that we're seeing now. Right. It doesn't matter who is, you know, who is in charge as long as they're on our side. It doesn't matter how. how they behave and what they do, as long as it means power for Christians. And I think, you know, again, this is going to be a Pyrrhic victory. It's, you know, the more power we seem to gain, the more people seem to be avoiding the church because they're disgusted by that kind of, you know, so people will celebrate having our champion in office by staying away from the church in ever greater numbers. And that's probably the fate that we deserve.

00:22:59
Speaker 4: One of the words that's come up a few times already is idolatry. I think of Alistair McFadden, the Scottish theologian who talks about he's interacting with questions of sin and interacting with ideas in psychology and in the medical world. And one of his contentions is that There's a lot that we gain from understanding issues in psychology, understanding issues of disease, things like that. But we do lose something if we don't bring the category of sin into the conversation. And that's a case that he makes. What do we lose if we are afraid to actually trade on the language of idolatry and what that means in this conversation?

00:23:48
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, interesting. I mean, there are good reasons to avoid the language of idolatry, because it is associated with a certain kind of chauvinism. It's associated with violence in the Bible, in colonial history. And I think what you find in the Catholic world and maybe the Christian world more generally is, you know, around the era of decolonization in the 1960s, you get away from using the terms idolatry because that's, you know, I just read through David Livingston's account of his travels in Africa in the 19th century and he's full of, you know, disparaging the locals and their idolatry and their superstition. And so there's good reasons to avoid the language of idolatry. But ultimately, I just don't think you can avoid it. And it needs to be recovered for very good reasons, because what we're really faced with is not just, you know, people doing bad things, but it's not just sin, but it's a false kind of worship. And that sort of language is really necessary because we need to realize the stakes and the extent to which we create gods and then fall down before them and obey. And so what you find already then in the 1970s, You get this group of liberation theologians in Latin America who are recovering the language of idolatry and saying, you know, for so long the enemy has been Marxism and atheism. But what we find in the real enemy in Latin America is not atheists, because there's not that many of them, but the real enemy is people who worship a false god. And they're talking about specifically the certain kinds of economic problems practices that turn capital into this god to which millions of lives are sacrificed. And so in the context of post-colonial context, you have them recovering the notion of idolatry precisely because it really captures the nature of what we're dealing with, the idea that you can't, the current economic arrangements can't be questioned. We just need to bow down in front of the so-called free market and let things go the way they're going because there's nothing we can do about it. The market is sovereign and we just need to obey. And I think that's really dangerous. So the language of idolatry, I think, is really necessary. Pope Francis really used the language of idolatry a lot, especially when talking about economics, and I think for very good reasons.

00:27:10
Speaker 2: In evangelical politics, I would say economics is fairly.

00:27:16
Speaker 1: Undertreated.

00:27:19
Speaker 2: If we think about it, we only think about it in terms of whether my taxes are going to go up and whether inflation is going to increase and how does this work itself out for me.

00:27:30
Speaker 1: And my family.

00:27:31
Speaker 2: Is that different in Catholic circles where there's a deeper sort of consumerist tendency, a notion of the greed, which is idolatry, and the economic systems and the way that they can deform us? Or is that also as anemic as it might be within evangelical circles?

00:27:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, we don't have any problems in the Catholic Church. We're fine. So....

00:27:57
Speaker 1: Everybody should convert.

00:28:02
Speaker 3: No, I wish I could say that it was different, but it's not, not much. You know, Catholics are as divided as evangelicals are politically and economically and so on. We do have this whole tradition of Catholic social thought. which is, you know, reflections on kind of bringing the gospel to bear on economic and political realities. And that's been a tradition since 1891 is usually considered, you know, Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII's encyclical about, you know, trying to counter rampant capitalism on the one hand and rampant socialism on the other hand and trying to figure out what, what a Christian. So we, we do have that tradition and that's, that's, uh, really good. But, um, but I don't think that the average Catholic is any better than the average, uh, evangelical and in, uh, in their day-to-day lives. Um, and to me, that's, um, that's a real issue. And one of the things that I really like, uh, when I'm teaching undergraduates, is you can really teach theology through economics in a lot of ways because it's so hands-on and practical, right? So we talk about, you know, ordering things from Amazon, for example. You've got this dynamic, look at Psalm 115 or Psalm 135, where you've got this notion that you make idols of which are lifeless, but you attribute life to them. In the meantime, they're taking life away from you. You become as deaf and dumb and mute as the idols themselves, according to these Psalms. There's a lot of that in the scriptures. And you can see the same kind of dynamic in our economy where things take on life and life is drained away from people. And so you have this kind of thing-centered economy where you go online and all you see are things, and you click on them, and then they appear magically on your doorstep. And with a smile, right? The Amazon packages with the smile, right? It's this personification, you know, on the commercials, the little packages, sing and dance and so on. and this animation of these things. And the people then that are making these things, they might be 14-year-old Thai girls making 50 cents an hour, the cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo making $ 3 a day in these horrible conditions to keep our cell phones running and everything. All of that and the environmental degradation and the guy who delivered the product to your door who's got no benefits and is making minimum wage, and this is his second job because he's got to try to feed his family and all that. All of that is just invisible to us by design, right? And so our whole economy is is based around the centrality of products, what Karl Marx called the commodity fetishism, the making of fetishes out of commodities. And at the same time, life is drained away from so many people that are caught in this kind of economy. And so when you start really looking at these very concrete day-to-day practices, and really start digging into that, then you realize just to what an extent there's this idolatrous economy that we're caught in. And most of us, and it's designed so that we don't think about it, right? And when we do think about it, then we get these feelings of helplessness. And we'd rather just kind of think of this as our fate, right? That's just the way it is, and there's nothing to do about it, right? You have to order from Amazon because it's just there, you know? And it's like, no, you don't have to order from Amazon. And there's a lot of other different things that you can, economic practices that you can undertake that... can contribute to a different kind, different kinds of economies, right? We have a tendency to think about the economy as if it's just this big thing that is, you know, unavoidable. There's nothing we can do about it. Nobody's actually running it. Um, but it's made up of all of these decisions and there are, there, there isn't just one economy. There are economies. There are farmers markets that are a different kind of economic space. Um, in all kinds of different ways that we can practice. What I try to do in my little book, Being Consumed, which is just a little 100-page long, but I try to kind of point to different sorts of economic practices that Christians are undertaking in attempts to kind of make this kind of economy not inevitable.

00:33:39
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:33:42
Speaker 4: Some of those examples are pretty powerful in that they show how entangled we are in ongoing colonial practices. The world being carved up and ordered in the way that it is has created a cadence for the world to have to play into. That's really how idolatry works. It consumes everything around it by forcing all things into this structural, as Willie Jennings calls it, enclosure. And yet at the same time, I often feel at a loss, not because I could choose to order a book from a publisher instead of Amazon, but over the fact that if I don't buy the bananas, for instance, how are those underpaid, brutalized workers on the Costa Rican banana farms going to make money given the way that the order is set up? Or if I don't have a cell phone, I might be fine, but the people working in the cobalt mines in the Congo, um, unfortunately depend upon it where it just seems a bit like a, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. And we should take these things seriously. We should think about them. How do we, how do we address that sort of rock and a hard place dynamic?

00:35:04
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, the problem is that we've come to think that, um, taking advantage of someone's desperation is a virtue. And that, I think we need to start there, right? I mean, this is what I talk about in the first chapter of being consumed, is that a free market is free, according to Milton Friedman, if a transaction is voluntary and mutually informed. And so if the Thai girl knows that she is getting 50 cents an hour, and that's better than starvation, then it's a free transaction. That's the free market, right? And I think the problem is that we've defined freedom in this very narrow way, in this very self-serving way, rather than a broader sense of what freedom means might actually mean, which is a kind of more positive sense of freedom. So not just the negative lack of interference, but a positive sense of the flourishing of all of the parties involved. And in order to do that, you need to start looking at the power disparities that exist in that kind of economy. And so the fact that the you know, the Thai girl might be happy or the, or the cobalt miner in the democratic Republic of Congo might be, you know, happy to have a job in $ 3 a day, um, because it's better than what the alternative is. Um, that in and of itself is, we need to stop thinking that that's those parameters that have been set, um, are, uh, are inevitable in this way. We need to start asking the question of the power dynamics that are involved there. Why is the cobalt miner so desperate that he needs to do this horrible work for $ 3 a day? And so that leads you into all of these kind of larger questions of how the system got set up in the first place. And so it's never simply a matter of are they working? Well, therefore, buying something from their business is good. It's always these much larger questions of how much are they getting paid? How is the environment being treated? All these other kind of questions that we would prefer to forget. So, yeah, so I mean, it's, I remember something that Desmond Tutu said during the apartheid boycotts, when people were boycotting South Africa because of apartheid. And the argument was that, well, we can't, you know, the people, the South African people will suffer if we don't buy their products. And Desmond Tutu said something of the effect of, let us decide that, right? I mean, we're already suffering under this regime. Let us decide what kinds of suffering we're willing to put up with and what kinds we're not. And so he was calling for a boycott, even though in the short term, that was going to be bad for business and some people might lose their jobs. But he was after something much larger than just the perpetuation of an unjust status quo.

00:39:10
Speaker 2: It does point us to something, I think, that we don't often address in what I'll say our public life is or our political life. And what I mean by political life in the United States is You know, sort of the Republican and Democratic machinery that is going to own offices and, represent us in government. Public life, just sort of the way we live, I think that we don't often think through how stuck we actually are. Or if we do think about how stuck we actually are, it feels a little bit hopeless to get out of it. I can think of ways when I'm just sitting around and go, I don't actually need some of these things that I buy.

00:39:53
Speaker 1: And so I can stop buying them.

00:39:56
Speaker 2: But then there's a whole other apparatus where it's like, well, where else am I supposed to get that if I actually need it? It creates sort of this interesting tension because we can't escape it totally. And that may just be life in the world. But then we could also think through ways of working against it, even as we're using it. I think that's probably the way I have tended to approach some of this. It's like, I can't really escape this. You know, I'm not, I'm not going to be great living in a tent, um, out in the woods somewhere. Like I have to buy a house. I have to buy into, you know, centralized banking. I have to buy into mortgages. Like, you know, some of that just feels like I have to, um, But at the same time, you can sit back and say, but I don't know that these policies need to continue. I don't know that the next generation really needs to do it in the exact same way we've done it. And there might be reform here. What do you think of that kind of an approach to these things that feel, as I think Ashish is.

00:41:01
Speaker 1: Saying, like they just feel like you get structured into it?

00:41:06
Speaker 3: Right, and you do. I mean, I am not, I can't claim any kind of, you know, purity on these kinds of matters. But I do think that we need to stop thinking that the alternatives are either the status quo or living in a treehouse. All kinds of stuff. you know, that can, can happen. Right. And so I've got a house and I've got a mortgage and I've got a car. Right. And so, so what can you do with that? Well, we put solar panels on our house. Right. And so we produce more electricity than we use. We've got one car and I get to work on public transportation, you know, and so we, bought a house in a place where that's accessible to public, uh, transportation. Who do we get our mortgage from? We got our mortgage from the local community bank rather than one of the, the big, uh, conglomerates, right. Um, uh, where's your, uh, retirement funds? Well, some of it is with the self-help credit union, you.

00:42:20
Speaker 1: Know, um, all the different really helpful that.

00:42:24
Speaker 3: You can do. Um, And and so I really want to push back against the idea that there's nothing, you know, that we're trapped and there's nothing we can do because there's all kinds of things that we can do. And there's more that that needs to to be done. And it needs to be done at all sorts of levels, not just the the. personal levels of trying to shop local and go into the farmer's market and that sort of thing. But all the way up to the political level, there's so much more. I mean, there's so much more that could at least be done to stop making it worse.

00:43:08
Speaker 1: I mean, the.

00:43:11
Speaker 3: Current policies are you know, climate change is great. Let's burn more fossil fuels, you know, and I mean, at the very least, you could, you know, dial back on that rather than, you know, putting, you know, as in the first Trump administration, when the head of the Environmental Protection Agency was a coal industry lobbyist, for God's sake, can we just get back to a little bit of sanity, you know, so there's, there's all kinds of things. But then there's also kind of You know, businesses that if people could think creatively about the kinds of businesses that we need and start them. You know, there's a corporation in Spain, the Mondragon Corporation, that was founded by a Basque priest in the 1950s. And they have over $ 3 billion of sales every year. But it's all worker-owned and worker-run. And so the highest paid person can only make eight times more than the lowest paid person in the corporation. The typical CEO to worker ratio in most large Forbes 500 companies is like 400 to 1%. Instead of eight to one, but it's a cooperative in the sense that the workers have an input into any decisions that the management makes and the workers own the corporation, you know, so it's eliminated the tension between shareholders and workers. That's the basic tension at the root of so much of this is the difference between capital and labor, right? People with money want other people to work for them and make them more money. And so there's this antagonism between the owners of capital and people who have nothing but their labor to sell. And if the workers were also the owners, then the world would be a very different place. And so it's thinking in these, I mean, this is a multi-billion dollar company and It can be replicated elsewhere, I'm sure, and it has been replicated elsewhere. But if we start thinking in terms of worker ownership, the idea that the main purpose of a corporation is not just to make money for the shareholders, but it's to make the world a better place, then there's so many different ways that that can be done.

00:45:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, very helpful.

00:45:57
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:45:59
Speaker 4: Is there a way you think that we can be actively exercising our agency to put pressure on corporations to think that way, local governments to think that way, rather than to be thinking, you know, the lobbyist wants this and they give me the money. Go for it.

00:46:16
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:46:17
Speaker 3: Yeah. There's lots of different ways. I mean, you can boycott. I don't buy anything from Amazon, for example. You don't have to, right? There's other ways of getting things. You can support labor unions. You can put your retirement accounts in sustainable funds as opposed to unsustainable funds. I mean, I Those things have their limits too, but it's better than nothing. You can put your money in credit unions instead of the large banks. You can do shareholder activism. You can write letters. You can organize at the local level. You can organize at the national level, get involved in politics. You can get involved in business. There's all kinds of different ways of going about it. You can give your money away. Some of it. Because there's all kinds of great people doing great things with charitable works. My church here in Oak Park through the hard work of some great lay people When in 2022, the governor of Texas just started busing migrants up to Chicago and dumping them on the streets. Some people got together and said, well, what are we going to do? And so we now have a flourishing migrant ministry. We've taken over an old school building. We provide clothing and food and legal help, sometimes medical help. uh, accompaniment, spiritual accompaniment, all, all kinds of things that, you know, over 500 volunteers have been involved, uh, at one point or another. Um, there's, there's all kinds of, uh, things that can be done. And those are the things that give you hope. Yeah.

00:48:30
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's almost like.

00:48:33
Speaker 2: When you think about just even that, that piece with the church at the end, you know, caring for the immigrants that are being dropped off, um, There is something about the church's theology, about the church's commitments and convictions that allow us to do this or should allow us maybe to do this, should lead us to do this better than other groups. It's not that other groups don't do good things. They can't be involved in humanitarian action. But it just feels like as Christians, we should be almost proactively looking for these kind of opportunities. and trying to understand how to plug into these various aspects.

00:49:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who are not Christians that have have come and helped out at this ministry, but I do think there is something that motivates it and animates it and was there from the beginning. And that's Matthew 25. This is the idea that if you're looking for Jesus now, where do you find them? Well, you, according to Jesus, you find them in those who are hungry and thirsty and strangers and in prison and sick and so on. Yeah. That's, you know, that's what Jesus said. You know, if you're looking for me, here's where to find me. Yeah. And so, so you go out and do that. And if you treat people as if they were Jesus, it makes a difference.

00:50:05
Speaker 2: And you mentioned Stanley Hauerwas earlier, I think in his Brazos commentary on Matthew, when he talks about the poor, he makes the statement, Jesus is the poor. And so you have this notion where when you're interacting with the poor, when you're interacting with the marginal and the downtrodden, you are in some sense interacting with Jesus.

00:50:24
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's not Stanley Hauerwas. That's Jesus.

00:50:32
Speaker 1: It's slightly different levels, but yes, I get, Good.

00:50:36
Speaker 4: For Howard Walsh to notice, but yeah, Jesus said it.

00:50:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:50:44
Speaker 2: Well, we're kind of closing in on the end here. I guess sort of my final question is, you know, as Christians approach this sort of midterm election that we're coming up on, what sort of framing would you encourage them to take as they're evaluating candidates, as they're thinking about this as one relatively small, though not unimportant act?

00:51:06
Speaker 1: Right.

00:51:07
Speaker 2: In sort of moving toward the type of community that you've described.

00:51:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, Lord. I mean, I'm not sure I can answer that question without sounding partisan.

00:51:23
Speaker 4: Go for it.

00:51:24
Speaker 3: It just seems like things have gotten so crazy that just looking for a little bit of sanity and a little bit of decency, a little bit of honesty. that's a really important thing. I mean, I think Christians need to stop thinking in terms of who's.

00:51:45
Speaker 5: Going to benefit us, who's going to make sure that Christians have power, and they need to start thinking the opposite way.

00:52:02
Speaker 3: That wasn't what Jesus was talking about. Jesus was saying, no, don't go looking for the people in power. Go looking for the hungry and the thirsty and those who are strangers and welcome them. Who's welcoming the strangers and who's killing them and putting them in cages and so on? Who's demonizing them and scapegoating them? Yeah, those are the kind of questions that I think we ought to be asking.

00:52:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, so reframing toward not how can government serve us as Christians, but how can government serve those who are currently marginal in our society, who are currently downtrodden, who are currently, you know, very Lucan themes here, right? So to those people who are on the sides of society who are very vulnerable, how can our government help them and who in our government is going to help them would be okay.

00:53:05
Speaker 4: Sounds a bit like JFK Redux.

00:53:10
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, it is, right? It's different. The parties have changed, but it's this idea that the really important thing is we've got to get recognized by the people in power, and what we need is political power, and then we're going to change things for the better. And it almost inevitably backfires, right? I mean, the more, you know, the people that are studying secularization over the last few decades since the 1990s, one of the big factors is people have gotten turned off by the church being politicized in that narrow sense, right? Of the church trying to gain political power. And so the more we try to gain political power, the more people stay away from the church. So I think there's a sense of panic amongst some Christians that we've lost social status, and the country is becoming, it used to be a Christian country, and now it's becoming dechristianized, and so we have to do something about this. And that means getting the right judges and the right people in government to And it almost inevitably backfires. I was in Hungary a couple of years ago, and this is after, I think, I can't remember how long was Orban in power. He had been in power at the time for more than a decade and had really put all of the resources of the government behind reviving the Christian church's and had written Christianity into the constitution. And he was the champion of Christians. And I got there the week after the first survey revealed that for the first time in a millennium, fewer than 50% of Hungarians identified as Christians. You know, I think one of them had just gotten disgusted with, with Orban and that, kind of attempt to gain power and decided they just weren't Christians anymore. And that, I think, is almost inevitable. I mean, if people look at the church and see, you know, the kind of dishonesty and mendacity and power and cruelty that we're seeing now, they're going to stay away from the churches and for good reason. But if they saw that we were taking care of the marginalized and reaching out beyond ourselves and doing what Jesus told us to do, then I think there might be hope to be attractive rather than repulsive, for the church to be something attractive rather than repulsive.

00:56:11
Speaker 1: I know I said last question last time, but I lied.

00:56:14
Speaker 3: So....

00:56:16
Speaker 2: Do you see that as rooting back into the theopolitical imagination? It seems to me that part of what's happening is when the church joins with the political party, we're really surrendering a theopolitical imagination that is uniquely Christian. And we're adopting one that is idolatrous, that is worshiping something else. And so now we're giving other people reason to reject Christ on criteria other than the gospel. And we're giving them reason to reject Christ on reason of partisan politics.

00:56:49
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. They see the God that we worship in reality and they don't like the looks of that God.

00:56:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:56:58
Speaker 3: Because they see that we're not worshiping Jesus. Yeah. Yeah.

00:57:03
Speaker 4: I'm going to throw in my last two sentences as well, if that's all right.

00:57:06
Speaker 1: I'll go for it.

00:57:09
Speaker 4: So I've tried to tell students over the years, just try to get them to think through just how many of these intense policy-directed political leanings and decisions that they have leaned heavily into, or their parents have leaned heavily into, or their communities have leaned heavy into, how many of these have actually resulted in changing people's minds about what they think of the good, the true, the beautiful, never mind Jesus himself? And the answer seems inevitably to be zero, right?

00:57:43
Speaker 3: No remainder.

00:57:46
Speaker 4: But then when you throw in the added irony of statistics show that over the last 15 years, even conservative churches have bled significantly, right? Because for a long time, the narrative was, well, liberal churches are bleeding, conservative churches are staying true, and we maintain. But the numbers bled are just remarkable. So it really seems that the more rabid, more vitriolic stances that have just increased over the last decade and change have actually had the counterintuitive effect. And at a certain point, I think the church does need to wake up and say, let's get back to the sorts of things that Jesus himself, say, identify followers of him, right? Taking care of the poor, taking care of the migrant, taking care of the widow, taking care of those who've been socially outcast for racial reasons, for gendered reasons, for what have you.

00:58:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, amen to that. And it's not just a kind of strategy to gain more people in the pews, but it's just the right thing to do. It's just the truth, and it's what brings us joy, right? The Christian life is not some terrible burden that's been put upon us. It's a joy to live that to live that life, to try to live that life. You know, Jesus says that when we encounter people who are hungry and thirsty and so on, we encounter Jesus, and that's a joyful thing, right? And so I think rather than thinking about all of these things as some kind of list of tasks that we need to do and some kind of burden that's been laid upon us, it's really, you know, Jesus says, yoke is easy and his burden is light. Yeah. Indeed.

00:59:42
Speaker 1: Very good.

00:59:43
Speaker 2: Well, It's been a joy having you on. We've been excited since you agreed to be on the episode. So thank you for being on. Like I've read a ton of your books, really formative during my MDiv and MA years. And so very much appreciative of you and your work and glad to have you on.

01:00:01
Speaker 1: So thank you.

01:00:02
Speaker 3: It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, James. And thank you, Ashish.

01:00:07
Speaker 1: All right, everybody.

01:00:08
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to close it up there. Thanks, everybody, for being here. And we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian.

01:00:12
Speaker 1: Take care.