The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community by Adam Russell Taylor

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community by Adam Russell Taylor America is at a pivotal crossroads. The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. A new public narrative is needed to unite Americans around common values and to counter the increasing discord and acrimony in our politics and culture. The process of healing and creating a more perfect union in our nation must start now. The moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beloved Community, which animated and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, provides a hopeful way forward. In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reimagines a contemporary version of the Beloved Community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. In the Beloved Community, neither privilege nor punishment is tied to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status, and everyone is able to realize their full potential and thrive. Building the Beloved Community requires living out a series of commitments, such as true equality, radical welcome, transformational interdependence, E Pluribus Unum (""out of many, one""), environmental stewardship, nonviolence, and economic equity. By building the Beloved Community we unify the country around a shared moral vision that transcends ideology and partisanship, tapping into our most sacred civic and religious values, enabling our nation to live up to its best ideals and realize a more perfect union.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for coming by. As always, go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. You can subscribe to all the stuff we're doing over there. Go to our other groups at Goodreads. Also, go to Fortress Chris Voss.

Go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all the different places that the Chris Voss show is at. You can see everything we're doing over there. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies.

I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors,

limited edition, custom made, numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing guest on the show. He's written a really important book you definitely want to read and share. And it's going to be one that should be mind blowing for you to learn about. The book is called A Perfect Union, A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community. And it's by Adam Russell Taylor. And the book just came out September 14th, 2021. It's going to be exciting to talk to him about that book so that we can find out more of what he means by the beloved community.

But he is the president of Sojourners and an author of the latest book that we just mentioned. He previously led the faith initiative at the World Bank Group and served as vice president in charge of advocacy at World Vision USA. I'm sorry, World Vision US, and the Senior Political Director at Sojourners. He has also served as the Executive Director of Global Justice, an organization that educates and mobilizes students around global awareness, global issues. Welcome to the show, Rev. How are you? Good. It's great to be with you. I'm sorry if I just call you short there.

The Rev. I follow the actual The Rev from MSNBC. His name is Casey right now, but I follow him every morning when he gets up and does his workout. So, yes, yes. The Rev. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the book launch. Give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs. Yeah.

So Sojourners, you can find at www.sojo.net. You can find me on Twitter at Reverend Adam Taylor. And excited to be with you today. There you go. There you go. Reverend Al Sharpton. That's who it is. There you go.

Yes. If you ever watch his morning Instagrams that he does live when he's working out, they're almost like little John Lewis vignettes or vignettes, whatever, mini sort of speeches. And he gives like really great stuff. And then, of course, I'm trying to lose weight and work out. And so he inspires me to get like him. So it's pretty freaking awesome. What motivated you to want to write this book?

There are a number of things. I became increasingly anguished and worried about the degree of what I call in the book toxic polarization that has seeped into our politics and our culture. It's not just that we don't like each other, particularly those from the opposing political party of persuasion. Polling has shown that we now have gotten to a point where we have contempt for the other and we distrust them and ultimately want to defeat them. And part of what I was trying to wrestle with is how have we gotten to this state of such extreme polarization? And how are we so why are we so divided as a nation? And so I really reflected both on history, because I don't think you can know where you're going unless you've been borrowing, borrowing from a quote from Maya Angelou. But also, I started to try to diagnose that challenge and started to realize that one of the reasons I think we are so divided

and polarized is that we don't have a shared moral vision about where we want to go. And to make matters worse, there's been a number of more pernicious and what I would call kind of dystopian visions out there that I really think are taking us in the wrong direction. And so this book really is an effort to try to paint a picture of the kind of America that I think the vast majority of us actually want to co-create and to reimagine and to recast the moral vision that animated the civil rights movement, which is the vision of the beloved community, but put that vision in more contemporary terms and be able to unpack it in greater detail. So that was a big kind of motivation for the book itself.

And then as I got into it, I started realizing that there's all of these incredible leaders and organizations around the country that are doing the actual work of building beloved community. They don't often capture the headlines they you know may be doing things not quite at scale if you will but i really wanted to lift up those stories and i call them glimpses the beloved community in the book because ultimately there is this kind of beloved community revolution that's happening under the radar screen and i'm hopeful that the book can help to shine a spotlight on those efforts so that ultimately we can scale them up and make them more successful. I thought this was really cool. You had John Lewis actually do the forward for the book.

Do you want to touch on that a little bit? Yeah. Of course, I am so honored and humbled that Congressman John Lewis agreed to do the forward. It literally was something that I asked just months before he ended up passing on and going to glory and wasn't sure what was going to happen. But I found out literally the weekend after he passed away that he had approved the forward before he died. I don't know this for sure, but I think it might be the last forward that he wrote for a book, which is just really an honor. And it's so meaningful to me because his life embodied the beloved community. You think about the sacrifices he made, what he fought for,

particularly the right to vote, which sadly we're still defending and fighting for today. John Lewis really represented the best of us in so many ways. So I thought there was no better person who was living at the time that I wrote the book to write the foreword. Yeah. I'll never forget the picture of him standing. There's a lot of iconic pictures of him, but the picture of him standing at the Black Lives Matter thing that they put on the pavement there in Washington, D.C., that leads to the White House. And evidently that was, he demanded to get out of the hospital to go witness that himself. And so quite extraordinary. Of course, his funeral and his last ride across the, was it the Selma Bridge?

Yeah. Yeah. Just an epic man. You think about the struggles he went through and stuff. So that's awesome. So you refer to this thing called the beloved community, quote unquote, the beloved community. Where's this come from? It was originally coined by a theologian named Josiah Royce in the early 1900s, and then really became popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

So Dr. King, in a lot of his speeches, would refer to the beloved community. And actually, in a really signature moment, after the Montgomery bus boycott victory, just one of the early victories of the civil rights movement, he was giving a speech and he was talking about kind of the ultimate goal of the civil rights movement. He said the end goal is reconciliation. The end goal is redemption. The end goal is the creation of the beloved community. And so in Dr. King's mind, I think this is true of other civil rights leaders like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and so many others, their ultimate goal was not just civil rights. It was to transform America and to help build something that was in line or modeled our deepest held religious values and our civic values. They appealed to the promise of the American creed of liberty and justice for all, but they also appeal to deep religious and spiritual values around

equality and around human dignity. And so in my kind of remixed version of the beloved community and my most succinct definition is to build a society and a nation where everyone is seen and valued, where everyone is enabled to thrive and everyone can realize their full potential. And then I have a policy definition in the book, which is to build a society where neither punishment nor privilege is viciously tied to race, ethnicity, gender, ableness, sexual orientation, et cetera. And while it's a high bar, I should think of the definition that most Americans would really resonate with and would believe in and could provide a measuring stick, a roadmap, if you will,

for how we could create together a radically more inclusive and just America. Is it true that people on the left, on the liberal side of things, want these beloved communities? Are they on board with this stuff? And the right, not so much? Is that... You know, it's a good question. I mean, I think the beloved community has been a little bit more used and associated with the left. But even within the left, since the civil rights movement has faded a little bit from

the popular imagination. And that's part of the reason why I feel like we have an opportunity to recast it, to reimagine it in ways that I think would resonate with lots of different generations and people across many different backgrounds. I would say this, though. One of the reasons I love the vision is that it resonates across religious traditions. It's not just a Christian vision. That's certainly my faith tradition. But the notion of tikkun olam in the Jewish tradition of repairing the world is very much a vision of beloved community.

The vision of family justice in kind of Latino culture is very much a vision of beloved community. So I talk about these different expressions of it. And at its best, it taps into the deep well of the more traditionally considered conservative emphasis on responsibility and family and community. And it taps into the more progressive well of human rights and of human dignity. So I think bringing together the best of what I think these kind of political ideologies have to offer and hopefully enables us to transcend the very broken politics and partisanship that we're currently mired in as a country. I like the vision of it, if I understand it correctly, that, hey, here's something we can all work together and maybe come together on to build a better union. But do we have to reconcile

the past, though, as you mentioned earlier? We absolutely do. So one of the chapters in the book is entitled, And the Whole Truth Will Set You Free, very much building on the words of Jesus that the truth will set you free. And I make the argument in that book that we desperately need a shared baseline of knowledge and understanding as a country about our history, the full breadth of our history, the good, the bad and the ugly. And I think we need to celebrate the good. But sometimes we have these blind spots and pretty serious denial about the ugly parts of our history. And to me, this isn't about navel gazing or self-loathing. This is about acknowledging the fullness of our history so we don't have to repeat some of those mistakes. And you can't really do the work of healing and

repair if you don't actually acknowledge the harm that's been done in the past. And so, you know, I really try to lean into telling some of these stories. And it's interesting. So I also wear another hat. I teach as an adjunct professor at Pepton University. I don't get to go to Malibu, unfortunately, but I teach here in Washington, D.C. And I have really brilliant students, but sometimes I'm flabbergasted at how little they were taught about just really seminal moments in our history. Like they know very little about the period of Reconstruction and what ended Reconstruction. They don't know anything about the Southern strategy and the role that played in the kind of political realignment in our country of many white Southerners leaving the Democratic Party, the Republican Party. And so they're obviously just a small example of a broader challenge that we face across our public education system, let alone across our society at large. James Baldwin once said, those who refuse to acknowledge

their history remain captive to it. And what makes matters worse in this current moment is we are having this kind of backlash against efforts to teach and emphasize a broader understanding of our history. You have 12 states around the country that have passed bills that in different ways either censor or ban teachers from teaching about systemic racism or teaching about kind of the fullness of our history or teaching about diversity, equity, inclusion and its importance in our society. And so in some ways, we're actually going backwards rather than forwards in this effort. And I think it's essential that we are empowered with this knowledge because ultimately it will help set us free as a society.

And I think it's essential for the pursuit and the realization of a more perfect union. Yeah. James Baldwin was brilliant. I really love him as an orator and debater. It's really epically sad that you can take everything he said from 60, 70 years ago and just copy and paste it right on today's problems. Nothing has been resolved. And I'm not sure nothing, but it seems like nothing. Maybe there was 1% that got resolved. I don't know. I'm a little more hopeful than that, Chris. But no, you're doing better than I am.

That's why we're here. Progress and regress, right? History is this progress and regress dialectic. The challenge is, and over the last two years with the podcast, we've had a lot of great authors on, going back to the original live of The Shining City on the Hill, going into a lot of how this plays out, the separation

of the black and white church. And so a lot of the history of this country, in fact, I was just reading, I think it was in WAPO, about how Washington Post, about how the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims landing and eating their first Thanksgiving dinner, the Indian tribe that still survives to this day still regrets it and probably should just kill them all, which probably wouldn't have been a better idea. I don't know. I don't know. I'm being funny. The challenge, and I saw this when I read Cass, the book Cass, is the shame and the horror of what we did as white people to just everybody, pretty much,

and is really hard to live with. And that's part of one of the things, the hurdles you have to overcome. I always say the one thing man can learn about his history, the one thing man can learn about his history is the man never learns about his history. And thereby we just go on on a cyclical nature. But the real, what I see in the two political parties is right now is we are in this reckoning spot where white people, especially in the GOP, realize that they are a becoming a minority. It's just a fact of life. It's a fact of just the way things are going. That's just how it works. And there's a lot of fear that when they lose power,

that they'll be treated as poorly. I've heard people say this, you'll be treated as poorly as we treated other people, and there'll be time for revenge, which I don't think is really going to happen. People just want to be respected and they want equality. But then it's a loss of power. It's a loss of money power too,

which is what a lot of this country is about, is money power. And it seems loss of money power too, which is what a lot of this country is about is money power. And it seems like the left that I'm on and the liberals, their side is, okay, we realize that women are going to become more powerful and more workforce and society. Same thing with minorities. We're just going to embrace the reality of progress because what's the one line, my favorite line from No Country for Old Men, you can't stop what's the one line, my favorite line from No Country for Old Men, you can't stop what's coming. That's vanity. And so that's really what we are.

We're in this battle with the racism of what this country is built on for what, 450 years or something to the progress. And that's our biggest battle is dragging us back and forth between these two things. I don't know. That's my opinion. Hardest and biggest fault line in American politics have always been race, starting from before the founding of the nation. But certainly our Constitution inscribed within it a dehumanization of could vote, that could exercise their full rights of citizenship. So that was about 10% of the population. So even a lot of white union, which has to be tied to the pursuit of more perfect democracy and a more inclusive democracy. And that's an ongoing struggle, an ongoing journey. But that's one that we have to keep pushing for. perfectionism or exceptionalism put in different words, that often can be a stumbling block because we don't realize that there's huge contradictions and imperfections in our

democracy. One of the things that it's really important for us to recognize, and this is something that I think Dr. King understood so well, that when you participate in racism, when you support it, you prop it up. You are not only dehumanizing others, you are dehumanizing yourself. Put in religious terms, we believe that every person, you, me, and everyone else is made in the image of God. And so if I hold a racist view and take a racist action against someone else, that then dehumanizes them and me. It denigrates the image of God in them and me. And so one of the things that I think is so important for us is to help is the need to break out of what's often called a limited good and a zero-sum perspective. It's basically the

perspective that if one group advances or gains, that has to come at the expense of another group. And so far too many white Americans have been convinced that any advances by African Americans is going to have to come at their expense. And I don't actually believe that's true. I think that's a false premise. Yes, they may have to make some sacrifices. Yes, there may be some additional opportunities that we need to afford to those who've been shut out for so long. But ultimately, I believe we all will thrive and we'll have greater opportunity, greater flourishing when we finally dismantle and sever the umbilical cord of racism. And that's not going to happen anytime soon. We've been in this struggle for over 400 years. But I think that is one of the key challenges before us. And it really is going to require this kind of change in mindset and mentality. Last thing I'll just say really

quickly is that I really believe that one of the most important forces that helped shape and determine the 2016 election was the fact that in the year prior, the Census Bureau started to report out about that statistic you just mentioned, that by the year 2043, this country will be a country in which whites will be in the minority and people of color will be in the majority. Former President Trump was able to exploit the fear and anxiety around that statistic within many parts of the white population. But of course, there's another vision, which I think is a lot more in line with the kind of biblical vision, let alone the vision of heaven, where we see our diversity as a strength, not a weakness, as a real asset and not a threat. And that's really how I've understood it. I literally come from a background where my father is white, my mother is black. They made the controversial decision to marry each other in 1968, same year Dr. King was assassinated,

and just a year after interracial marriage was legalized across the country. And they instilled in me this belief that my diversity was a gift and was a strength. And in a broader sense, so is our nation's diversity. And so I think we need to paint that picture of what a more inclusive, multiracial democracy looks like and how that can be, if there's a place for disaffected, marginalized, white, working-class Americans in that kind of vision, just like there's a place for everyone else. Yeah. And you talk about the economy of scarcity or the mindset of scarcity where people think,

if I have to help this person up, then something comes out of my basket, when really a rising tide lifts all boats, and that's the beauty of America, especially with our melting pot sort of thing. I saw, I think it was, what's her name, Molly from, I forget the name of the publication, but she posted something about, how can you be worried about immigrants taking your jobs? We don't have enough Americans to fill all the jobs. We've got about 4 million that are vacant right now. How are we in an immigration crisis if there's not enough people to work?

There you go. I've been watching, and I've got a few friends here in Utah that go out and fight the battles in the Department of Education to fight for critical race theory. And, of course, welcome to Utah, red state. They're fighting against it, like you mentioned a lot of other states are. How do we get people to, I can give them a copy of your book and be like, hey, let's all kumbaya and join together. But how do we get these people down this road? Because we've got to not only hop the critical race theory, and over the last two years we've had so many authors on that have explained to me

so many real stories of history that were whitewashed, that never learned as I was growing up and that were buried. I read cast and I think it took me like two months to get through the book cast because it was just so heartbreaking, so wrenching. I'd have to stop at moments through it and just go pull up the side of the road, just go, Oh my God. And the horrors of what we've done in this country. And like you say, until we can grasp it and sit down with a common vision, but then we've got to overcome that. We've got to overcome the people that really want to do it. How much does Facebook play into this?

How do we get down over all these hurdles, if you will, maybe? Yeah, so certainly social media, not just Facebook, have played a role in kind of supercharging a lot of the polarization we're seeing, including the disinformation that people are being exposed to. Increasingly, people can create their own alternative reality with an echo chamber with people's views that either agree with their own or are exposing them to a lot of just conspiracy theories and flat out lies. So one, I think that there's a desperate need to try, not just try, but to successfully change and reform social media to be much more accountable and much more responsible.

And it feels like there's a little bit of a tipping moment with the whistleblower that came out against Facebook recently. There's a lot more pressure on these social media companies to change some of their practices and for there to be greater regulation. So I think that's really important. I will say, though, that one of the reasons that I think we are so divided is that we aren't actually in relationship with each other. If you look at the resegregation of America, our public school system is in many

respects and in most places more segregated today than it was in the 1950s and 60s. There was a survey that was done called the American Value Survey that asked Americans, how many people of different backgrounds do you have in your close social network? So these are people that you trust, you talk to regularly. It found that 70% of white Americans in this country don't have a single person of color in their close social network. So it is so much easier to scapegoat and to demonize the other

when you have no relationship with them. But when you're actually talking to them, having dinner with them, working with them, et cetera, you start to hear their story. You start to gain a sense of empathy, let alone compassion for them. And then it really can have powerful transformative effects. So I think part of what we have to do is break out some of our comfort zones and start building deeper relationships. And again, you got to convince people that's not too scary and that actually they would really benefit from that. But I think that's absolutely essential. Then when we broaden it to our political realm, sadly, we have all of

these perverse incentives that are now built into our political structure that I think are corrupting and poisoning our politics. I don't know if your reader, your viewers, listeners know this, but about 80 percent of congressional seats are decided not in the general election, but in the primary, because so many congressional seats have been gerrymandered by one political party or the other. And so it drives the competition to the extremes, because if most of the races are actually in the primary, you're going to likely get the more partisan strident candidate that's going to win. And so it's just one of a number of factors I could point to where we've got this kind of us versus them, zero sum, contemptuous politics that is coarsening our culture. And ultimately is, I think, one of the biggest barriers we have to finding common ground and creating progress. And bills like the Freedom to Vote Act are essential because not only will they level the playing field and protect people's right to vote, which are very much under assault right now, they would help eliminate gerrymandered districts. They would create a whole series of reforms and ethics and campaign spending

that would really re-incentivize the kind of politics of the common good that we so desperately need. So those are just a couple common good that we so desperately need. So those are just a couple of things that I would touch on. Obviously, it's a complex problem. There's lots of different challenges involved, but I think we know what some of the solutions are. Yeah. Like you say, one of the problems that we've had is we've been separated between redlining and even freeways and neighborhoods, and we've made it so that people aren't, we're not together. And so we don't mix our cultures very well or understand each other very well or gap that bridge. We have so many different hurdles to jump over, too.

You've got Fox News. Fox News plays on my, when I go to my gym, they have it on the TV, the stuff there. And usually I just read the chyron. And I'm just like, what the hell? And you saw yesterday with the, what was it? The Kennedy Jr. people that showed up at the grassy knoll there in Dallas. You're talking with some of these people and sometimes I just try and maybe educate them or not really debate them, but say, here's some data. Would you like some books or something?

Because we got books going around here. Or here, watch my show that we did on this they have no interest to it and how do we get through those people how do we especially when they're really delusioned and they're just living on fear when you watch like tucker carlson or something that dude is like that dude is like nazi hitler sort of shit going on these days so i'm not sure i have a good solution for tucker colson but i i will say this i'd be happy to i'm not sure you would read it though but i believe in miracles so i i would say that one i have a lot of hope still in the power of the church to be this vehicle of transformation in people's lives. Now, I'm not arguing that the church is always on the right side of history or is always a part of the solution.

Sometimes it's a part of the problem. But I do think there are a lot of pastors out there, even in very conservative churches, that literally are fed up with the vitriol and the polarization in our culture and our politics, which is seeping into the church. And many of them, and actually social news is doing a lot of work right now to try to come alongside them and support them in preaching and teaching in a way that opens up space for more civil, but also courageous dialogue on some of the most important issues affecting our country. But to ground that dialogue in some shared moral and kind of religious principles, particularly with the principle and the commitment to protect the most marginalized and vulnerable. It was a clear teaching and priority for Jesus. And so when you

really get to talk to these pastors, they agree with that principle. So if we can start there, then we can try to apply it to the messiness of our politics. And we actually start to realize we have a lot more in common than we realized. I think another piece of it is that we have to reach a younger generation. And this is why the battle over schools is so fierce. One, parents are often very concerned about their children as they should be. I am for my eight and 10 year old. But the school has become a battleground for a whole series of cultural wedge issues.

I think it's essential that we win this battle essentially about what kids are taught, because if they're exposed to a more accurate, a more full understanding of our history, that is going to shape their worldview. That's going to shape their understanding of our nation and where it's going and where it's been. it's a lot harder to reach someone who is in their adulthood, who's been fed all of these mistruths and misunderstandings about our history, and then gets that reinforced in many ways on social media or on Fox News, to then expect that you can give them a book, whether it's mine or Isabel Wilkerson's, and expect that to change them. It still can happen, but I just think that we got to reach another generation much earlier.

So I'm hopeful that we can and we will. Yeah. We talked with, I think with Eddie Glenn Jr. on the show, I think we were talking about where people, how do we cut race them off at the legs? Cause it's definitely a learned thing.

Children are born racist. And I think his thing was we need to teach more of it in college and high school. And I think I said we need to teach it at preschool or something. We need to get it because these parents that are racist, and then you have the whole, there's a whole different shades of racism. You have the closet racism, the people don't really understand it, the people that are, they're KKK, wearing the cape racist. There's a lot of people that they don't understand some of the subtleties of it.

Like even when I, Trump took office and I was trying to figure out what the hell this white nationalist thing was and what these code words he was constantly doing. Cause I was like, well, he uses the word culture a lot and a different heritage and stuff like this. And I'm like, well, what are these dog whistles going on? Cause what does this mean? And so I had to start digging into it and go, geez, And I'm like, what are these dog whistles going on? Because what does this mean? And so I had to start digging into it and go, Jesus, do I use these words? And you bring up another good point. We've had people like Robert Jones on from PRRI.

We talked about this before the show. Kristen Dume, who wrote Jesus and John William, a lot of great authors on that have talked about this problem with the church and this whole right wing of these white nationalists that have taken over. And over the last year or two, it's actually backfired on them supporting Trump because now the QAnon has started to really start taking over churches. And then there's been some people blowing out of the Southern Baptist thing. And I think you probably saw the recent articles

recently where a lot of preachers that are being kicked out or leaving the faith, there's a real reckoning coming. Is that going to help us, do you think, maybe? I do think there needs to be a reckoning with the church where we need to get back to the core teachings and life of Jesus. And unfortunately, Jesus has often been hijacked and co-opted for all kinds of nefarious purposes, if you will, throughout our history. Christianity was used to justify slavery and used to justify Jim Crow segregation. Used to have Christians who literally would come out of their church and go watch a lynching in the South. So we're going to be honest about the misuse of Christianity throughout our nation's history and world history.

But on the flip side, the Christian faith was the backbone, particularly the black church, of the civil rights struggle. It animated the civil rights struggle and provided the fuel and the oxygen for the civil rights movement. So I think that there's so much that can and needs to happen to try to rehabilitate the reputation of the church. And that requires really re-embracing a Christ that is both Lord and liberator. A Christ that's deeply concerned about the marginalized and deeply committed to justice. And I believe the churches that are doing that kind of radical work of justice and inclusivity are going to be the ones that are going to attract a younger generation back into the church and are going to be able to foster some of the healing that is so desperately needed.

What's interesting is a lot of the people that have left the Southern Baptist or have left many more conservative evangelical churches haven't necessarily left the Christian faith. They just have been so bruised and rejected by their experience in the church that they're lost and out there in the wilderness looking for a new spiritual and religious home. And certainly Sojourners is one place where we certainly inspire and provide a sanctuary for a lot of those folks, if you will. But I'm really hopeful that churches are going to be much more proactive in being the church, if you will, by being this kind of model for justice and righteousness and inclusion.

Yeah, that would be ideal, really. There's so many different hurdles that we have to go through this to get people, and people have to want to go down this road. I always want to go down this road. I'm like, do I have closet racist tendencies? Do I have something going on? Especially after Trump came into power, I was like, man, I need to make sure I'm clean, man. And just like the code words and stuff. I was like, I say culture every now and then, but I don't, do I mean it the way that they mean it? And am I quoting dog whistles here? And so I had to learn a lot of it. In the last two years, we've had a lot of great authors on that have talked about this. Anything more you want to touch on the book? This is a great discussion on racism and what people need to think about, but anything more you want to touch on in the book that we haven't touched on? Yeah, just a couple of things. So one of the chapters is called

redeeming patriotism. And I really try to get into the heart of what it would mean or what it looks like to have a more healthy version of patriotism. There's, as you mentioned earlier, this dangerous resurgence of white Christian nationalism. And to me, nationalism is when patriotism becomes toxic and poisonous, where the focus is not on having a love for the ideals of your country and your country, but literally having a sense of superiority and then often loving yourself at the expense of others. And so one of the brilliant parts of America is that we are a country that prides itself on this freedom of speech and it's the ability to critique America. So to me, one of the most important forms of patriotism that we desperately need in our culture and our politics today is not only those who are willing to critique where we fall short, and you can do

that in the spirit of tough love. You don't have to do that out of a kind of animus or a sense of hate, but also we need people who are willing to stand up when their quote unquote tribe or their party goes the wrong way. And that's why I have a lot of love and respect for the Secretary of State of Georgia, who stood up to Trump when he was trying to pressure him to invalidate the election in Georgia, despite the courts and their entire system saying there was not widespread voter fraud.

There really was no voter fraud in the state. And despite the risk of his reputation and even his job, he went ahead and certified and pushed back against that. And there's other examples like that, but they're typically the exception and not the norm. And I think we just need a lot more people of goodwill, of integrity that are willing to stand up for what is right, even if that means going against the grain and going against their own in-group. So that's one piece. Another piece that I'll just quickly highlight is that I talk about the markers, the commitments that will define

the building the beloved community. I actually build on Jesus' sermon on the mount and I take the beatitudes and build on those. And I outline six, what I call beatitudes of building the beloved community. And they include a commitment to Imago Dei equality, a commitment to radical welcome, a commitment to environmental stewardship,

which we certainly desperately need, particularly in light of all that we're learning from the current COP negotiations that are happening in Glasgow, a commitment to dignity for all, which is very much at the heart of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the heart of the Sustainable Development Goal Agenda,

a commitment to prioritizing nonviolence, which was a core ethic and way of life for Dr. King, and a commitment to what I describe as Ubuntu interdependence. And I'm ending with that one because one of the idols in our culture and also in the church right now is this kind of rugged, selfish individualism. We have made personal liberty almost into an idol. And I believe in the importance of liberty, don't be wrong. But if my liberty ends up coming at the expense of your life and your public health, then there's something seriously wrong with my understanding of liberty. And if you look at the way in which wearing a mask became one of the latest casualties in our culture war, it really exposed the degree to which we've got this thing twisted, where we put so much, or some Americans put so much emphasis on individual liberty,

ignoring our responsibilities to inform one another. When I was in South Africa in 96, when I first went there to study abroad, I discovered this African philosophy called Ubuntu. Archbishop Desmond II summarized it by saying, I am because we are. And it's this deep belief system that our lives are very much intertwined, interconnected. And that when you suffer and hurt,

ultimately that's gonna hurt and I'm gonna end up suffering in some way. And that in one sense, your wholeness is tied into my wholeness. It's actually what the prophet Isaiah describes in Isaiah 58 when he says, it's only after we do the work of combating injustice and engaging in compassion that our light will shine like a noon day, that we will become repairers of the breach, restorers of streets with dwellings. And so this understanding of our independence, that our wholeness is tied together, I think is such a powerful antidote to the excesses of selfish

individualism. And I think it's something that we desperately need more of in our culture and in our country. I would agree with you. Yeah, we definitely need more about, sadly, I think the capitalist nature of the American asshole is all about me. We're a pretty selfish breed here in America, especially the white breed, speaking from inside the country club. It's a real challenge. And we face, as you mentioned in the thing for the book, we're at a pivotal moment here. We're at a very dangerous moment of authoritarianism and fascism.

And what these white people on the right are willing to do is they're willing to throw away this democracy so that they can have an autocracy or a king to just do hard rule. And we don't have to play by the rules anymore. We don't have to make, we don't have to agree on stuff. We don't have to do whatever. We're just going to seize power the hard way. And they're willing to throw it away, which is really dangerous when you think of, you study history, and of course,

where we're headed with 2022 and 2024, especially if Trump is still, I don't know, still viable to run for office. I'm hoping his dementia kicks in, or his dependence know, still viable to run for office. I'm hoping his dementia kicks in or his depends to kick in, one of the two. Or both, really. Although I think the depends are already kicked in. Anyway, the – I was like, I can't comment on that one, but go ahead.

We'll just leave that one on the side. That's a Trump-sticky one on the side. But these people are willing to overthrow this democracy. They're willing to toss this whole baby out with the bathwater because what they see is why give anyone power in the future? Just take it for ourselves and just own it. And to me, that's one of the most scariest things we face over the next two or three years. It is scary. I do think that there is an authoritarian impulse and danger that is very imminent. And I argued very strongly back after

the January 6th insurrection, which I witnessed from just blocks away from the Capitol, that Congress, particularly Republicans in Congress, had found the backbone to convict him, to literally cast him out of public life. We know that didn't happen. I was actually reflecting recently, imagine how different our current reality would be politically if former President Trump had done what every single president has done across our history, which was concede defeat. And so much of the big lie was all built around his ego, his narcissism, denial of reality. And he is now forced and in some ways inspired this whole movement of the Republican Party to go after state recounts and to pass bills that if you've talked to Republicans behind closed doors, they'll even quietly acknowledge that this is all a kind of play to appease the Trump base who deeply believes the

last election was stolen. All of this is a real danger, but I do believe that the immune system of our system is us. Yes, it's our systems, our checks and balances, et cetera. But ultimately, those positions are occupied by people. And we need people of resolve, of integrity, of courage to be willing to stand up and to speak out and to exercise their vote, but also to lobby, to protest, to engage in all of the forms of civic engagement and activism that I think are increasingly going to be necessary in the next two election cycles. Sojourners has been working with the National African American Clergy Network

to mobilize clergy and now increasingly rabbis and imams to be this pro-democracy force in our country. We have an initiative called Face United to Save Our Democracy. And we literally, this last election cycle, mobilized 2,500 pastors and some rabbis in nine key battleground states to provide a moral presence, to be a chaplain at polling sites alongside lawyers so we could try to deter violence and intimidation and ultimately enable people to exercise their sacred right to vote. So it's actions like that that we need to put on steroids. And I'm certainly committed to that.

And social news is committed to that. Other organizations are very much committed to that. But this is not a moment to be complacent or to underestimate the threat or to be apathetic, because really, our democracy is at stake., two of them fail, and there's Hungary, and I forget the other one in 2020. But this is, we're at a really dangerous moment. You see how the white women came out, and they're the ones who won Virginia for the governorship. These guys are coming back, they vote, they show up, and I don't know if a large part of the left just decided to stay home or they weren't impassioned. It's one of those things where enough people in this country don't vote, and it's really sad that a minority group of people can run half this country and ruin half this country

just because they have these old racism gerrymandering and this weird sort of, where they count the college votes and stuff like that. But yeah, we're in a real similar moment. I don't know if you look at Betsy DeVos in a camera, what crazy version of Christianity she subscribes to and what she wants with the centers of national policy to be put in because they're trying to overthrow the schools. And part of that, this defunding of schools and going after schools

and trying to block this critical race theory is to get to her racist thing of having vouchers, which are created out of racism. And being able to, they wanted to turn this whole country over into a theocracy with her interests, in my understanding. And so I wonder if a lot of religions realize that if certain people like her were to get control of an administration like she just had, you probably wouldn't be friendly to the other sort of religions, the Jewish people and the Amans and stuff. My understanding is they want their version of Christianity. I don't know. And it's a complete violation and contradiction of one of the things that I think this country is built on that makes it such a special nation, which is the separation of church and state. It's the first amendment in

the constitution. I think that we really need to protect that. There's also in the book, I mentioned in this chapter called Unmasking America's Myths, a whole series of myths that are built in the DNA of our country. And one of those myths is the myth that we're a Christian nation. We have, many Americans have this false belief that we were started as a Christian nation when the reality was the founding fathers, some of them were deists,

including Thomas Jefferson. And all of them were committed to the separation of church and state because they believed religion flourishes when you give people the freedom to choose whether they want to practice religion or not. And they saw the danger, particularly after the 30 Years' War, wiped out a big chunk of Europe of religious sectarianism and kind of fundamentalism, if you will. So they created an America based on this principle. And I think we still need to defend it. It still is part extraordinary what we go through in this country. And I'd like to see democracy survive and us not fall to authoritarianism. But it seems like that's their slant nowadays. And hopefully more people can read your book, share your book, and maybe

we can open some more minds because that would definitely be ideal. I certainly hope so. And I wrote the book for that express for purpose, to create a moral vision that I really do believe that the vast majority, when I say vast, I'm talking about, I don't know the exact percentages, but at least two thirds of America, if not more like 70 or 80% of America would actually resonate with if they were willing to take the time to read it and to reflect on it. And we need to create space for healthy dialogue. We need to learn how to disagree with each other again. And from a Christian perspective, we need to learn how to love our enemies as well. There's so much of the opposite happening that is also such a challenge in our democracy right now. I think it's great that you're reaching out to churches. I subscribe to Right Wing Watch and, of course, the Southern

Poverty Law Center. And I see those videos from some of the preachers that are out there that are just toxic. And they're literally not even talking about jesus anymore they're just they're just punching politics from the pulpit which sadly obama didn't get nailed down with the irs and stuff those guys but i think that was part of the blowback to trump though wasn't it because some of the blowback was the churches were angry about Obama coming after churches that were getting too heavily in politics, I think. I don't know. Yeah. Well, and President Trump wanted to eliminate what's called the Johnson Amendment that prevents not just churches, but other nonprofits from engaging in overt political activity, particularly endorsing candidates.

And so Dr. King had a great quote that I just love. He said, the church at its best is called not to be the master or the servant of the state, but to be the conscience of the state. And I think the mistake that the religious right movement made was fight abortion, but that actually didn't come until about seven, eight years later. It was originally founded as a kind of partnership between Jerry Falwell and Paul Warrick, who was a political operative in the Republican Party, who agreed to form a union with each other, essentially, to try to create a movement of conservative Christians to oppose the desegregation of Christian colleges, including Bob Joe's University. So that literally was the roots of the movement. That's what it started around. But the movement made this mistake of trying to essentially take over one political party and align itself entirely with the Republican Party.

And I think that ultimately led them to be co-opted in that party. And now it's almost been co-opted into the cult of personality of former President Trump. I think the more faithful way of doing it is to try to hold all political parties accountable to our core values, religious values and priorities. And again, there's gonna be some disagreement about what those look like in practice. But we have to maintain some distance from the party apparatus and not get co-opted into that, and instead try to transform our politics according to protecting the weakest, the most vulnerable, those living in poverty, etc. And so that's really the way that Sojourners as an organization tries to engage and then ultimately transform our political system.

It's what I think we definitely need across the board. Definitely. Rev, it's been wonderful to have you on and a great discussion. I hope a lot of people learn from it. Give us your plug so we can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, so Sojourner.net. You can find me on Twitter at Reverend Adam Taylor. If you want to learn more about the book, you can check it out at sojo.net backslash amp you.

You can check it out on Amazon and lots of other places and do hope that you are willing to dig into it. There you go. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on at Reverend Taylor. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks to my honest for tuning in order up the book. Sure. With your friends, family, relatives, maybe put it in all those GOP Christmas stocking. you can just slide the book in there or something i don't know maybe that's what i should do if you're in utah i'll just pass it around let's just walk up

the block maybe as we're in utah so i can just walk around the book and be like have you heard about knock on the home warm ambition never mind anyway guys i ordered the book, A More Perfect Union, A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community by Adam Russell Taylor. It's out now, September 14, 2021. Order that baby up. Anything we can do to reach across the aisle, I'm willing to reach across the aisle and learn. We've got to somehow agree to converse and learn better. And we've got to turn off the Fox News. We just want to get educated.

It's hard to deal with these issues. I think hopefully a lot of people that go back and listen to the show over the last two years, reading casts and a lot of other books that I've had to read over the last two years, it's heartbreaking. It's hard. It's shameful. It hurts. It's ugly.

But there's no way we can reconcile it and come up to better results unless we acknowledge them and then we can do better. But until then, we can't do better. So that's my parting vision, guys. and come up to better results unless we acknowledge them. And then we can do better. But until then, we can't do better. So that's my parting vision, guys. Go to YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Foss, hit the bell notification. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there.

All the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Thanks for coming by. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I

use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon,

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