The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Progressive Evangelical, and Charlamagne Tha God

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

Eliza Griswold spoke recently with Doug Pagitt, a pastor from Minneapolis who is a politically progressive evangelical Christian. Pagitt left his church to found an organization called Vote Common Good, which aims to move at least some religious voters away from decades of supporting conservatism, and toward messages of inclusion and tolerance that he identifies as Biblical. And the radio personality Lenard McKelvey, known professionally as Charlamagne Tha God, talks about why he wrote a book, “Shook One,” about his treatment for anxiety disorder. Charlamagne wants to reach black men, in particular, to try to remove a perceived stigma around mental-health treatment in the black community.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker, I'm David Remnick. Eliza Griswold writes for The New Yorker about a lot of things, but especially about the intersection of faith and politics. Now, Eliza, you've been talking to a guy named Doug Padgett, who's a pastor. Who is he, and why did you want to talk to him? Doug Padgett is a progressive evangelical, and he is really, really, really running an effort to bring religious voters into the Democratic Party. He is explicitly helping to move people away from Trump, but also republicanism in general, saying,

listen, this isn't our history. And you guys have been used for a long time. So let's return to what the core really looks like. Well, what does that mean? Well, I mean, if we do look really back to the 70s, I mean, he often likes to say that, you know, when we're looking at the 70s, we're looking at the most famous American white evangelical is Jimmy Carter. a progressive. So we've lost that identity over the past 40 years, and he's trying to really get us back to what the breadth of evangelical really means.

The Bible and the teachings of Jesus are about inclusion, and they're about love, and they're about the God of all, and that there's children from many other families and all of these narratives that are in the Bible. They really lean to a much more progressive understanding, as we would frame it, you know, sort of the left and the right these days. And that's the That's part of the reason that the religious right has had to work so hard and part of the reason they work so aggressively to not allow any space between their conservatism and their evangelicalism. Because if they let any air in there, it's just going to start to break apart. In a way, what you're doing is reclaiming Jesus from the Christian right and saying Jesus was a radical. This is what he said.

This is how he lived. And we are going to live and work according to those teachings. much. I'm a little nervous just in my own temperament about reclaiming language because it feels like then one side has it or the other side has it, like a football analogy. Now we are on offense and we have the ball and you have to stop us and then you have the ball and we have to stop you. I'm not sure that's the best way to frame this conversation. Conservative Christians, they want to stand with Jesus. And so do progressive Christians. And this is, the good news of all this, it means we have to stand with each other as well. So the question then

becomes not only how do we talk to ourselves about this Jesus, but how do we talk to each other? Okay. So if we're not talking about some dualistic notion of reclaiming language, we certainly are talking about reclaiming voters, right? So tell us what are you up to with vote common good. Do you think these voters actually exist and how can you prove it? Yeah, there are a day. So what we're doing with Vote Common Good is we are going to try to influence the national narrative around the role of religion and politics so that voters who feel that they're religiously motivated and could never vote for a Democrat see that that's a possibility. We think there's three kinds of voters that they can go after. They can go after those who voted for Democrats in the past and were lost in the last 10 or 12 years. Obama, right? Significant number. Yeah. And Hillary Clinton, you know, gotten half of the support that Barack Obama did. the electoral college wouldn't have been a loss for her.

And then we have these newly enraged voters, people who have just woken up and they're furious because the Trump administration and the Republican complicity with the Trump administration is just so far from common decency or what we would call the common good. And then there's a group of people who've sat it out, they don't vote, it doesn't matter to them.

And this set of conditions could bring them in. And we have a number of campaigns that we're using to invite people who haven't voted. voted before. See, I know to you, that you hear that these people exist, but I don't think the most of us do, right? And I myself doubted you. And then recently have been meeting some people who are living within conservative families

who don't hold their families' political views anymore, who say they may be willing to risk that vote. So I was just at a large national conference of the extreme right called the Values voters summit. We were there asking for voters there to take our love in politics pledge, which is built around 1st Corinthians 13 definition of love and asking our politicians to comport themselves in their political lives in a way that is loving. Well, we were kicked out of the event. Yeah, we were kicked out of the event. But before that, I was hearing different people talk. And I heard a very prominent, religiously motivated former politician. She used,

was saying to someone else, for a lot of us evangelicals, the things Donald Trump is doing, talking about himself as the ultimate wisdom and his lack of support for the Kurds, it's just something that we're finding totally intolerable and we don't know what to do about it. Now, I'm just suggesting that if she's saying that, in a safe place around the most committed group of people on these issues, the change is happening. But look, most people don't think about politics and most people don't think about their religion. And most people don't think about how the two impact each other. So groups like ours, we think need to exist to be that moment in time when people will think

about those two ideas and put them together. So, okay, so you are trying to help Democratic candidates learn how to speak more effectively to people of faith. That's correct. How are you doing that and where do you see people doing a good job and what do they have to do better? To your question, who's doing it well? Actually, most people.

Like once you give permission to Democratic candidates to say, feel free to talk about religion, it's okay. You don't have to get it right all the time. And you certainly don't have to bluff that somehow you're more religious than you actually are. And secondly, knowing religiously motivated voters, this is what all the advocacy groups do when they feel that they have a constituency that's not well represented. They try to allow the candidate or the candidate staff to meet those people. But so many of these Democratic politicians, their lives have not crossed or intersected with religious people, especially evangelicals or white Catholics in some parts of the country. And that's part of the problem. They feel nervous.

So we introduce them to people. We let them meet with pastors and with leaders. So they're like, hey, I have a friend in that world. And I can feel confident that what I'm about to say, my friend would say, that's a legitimate thing to say. Okay, a few weeks ago in the CNN town hall, Elizabeth Warren was asked how she'd respond to a voter who came up to her with objections to gay marriage on religious grounds. Let's say you're on the campaign trail and you're approached. You have been. And a supporter approaches you and says, Senator, I'm old-fashioned and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.

What is your response? Well, I'm going to assume it's a guy who said that. And I'm going to say, then just marry one woman. I mean, you can find one. She got snarky at the end. And as someone who's a big fan of snark, I appreciated it at one level, and my heart just sunk at the other, which is, you know, that's what got the attention in the world that I was in was,

see, this is what they're just mean, these progressives. They don't believe, they don't respect us. They don't respect us. I thought of the first part of that clip because you had said to me, she's actually doing a pretty good job. Can you explain why? Elizabeth Warren has a way of responding. She gives long answers, and she roots it in as many of the places in her life that have brought her to this conclusion, of which for her, her own personal faith has been something that has really motivated her.

So she's comfortable tapping into it. What I have noticed is that if a candidate is good at talking about their history, their upbringing, their influence, then they'll do that well with the Bible and with their church history or with their with their Jewish faith like if I were coaching Elizabeth Warren on that answer when the man said what what do I do here yeah her answer was started out pretty good which was well you don't have to you're not under jeopardy no one's going to ask you to marry someone you don't want to marry right's good but I also would have had her ad there it seems that your faith is really important to you for me I've come to this not from a faith perspective, but I've come to it from this other perspective. But just acknowledging

that it's legitimate for a person to use their faith to frame the way they think about it, to say, if your faith drives you to care about these issues, then I want to be the candidate that represents you even if I don't represent your faith. I don't know why candidates aren't saying that stuff all the time. Okay. Speaking of which, let's talk about Mayor Pete for a minute. Because here we have somebody who's fluent in talking about where he comes from and his faith in a way that feels effective to me, but he's gay. Would he ever be able to reach a conservative voter at the edge because of his homosexuality or no way? I hope so. If you had asked me in 2014, would evangelicals be able to surround themselves around someone like Donald Trump? There would

have been no way. I would not have hedged the way I'm hedging on Mayor Pete right now. I'm not sure if the countries, to the conservatives and the religious conservatives who say, look, things have just moved so fast. And when people are being honest with me, I hear this a lot. I do too. They're kind of used to religious people being bad in their marriages, rude and generally unlikable people. So a religious person's like, oh, I'm used to that. I see Donald Trump. What they're not used to, you know, are these other changes that they think are so new. So I think we have to be empathic to the experience of someone's fast change, but also to say to them, you're going to be okay. Like, you've, a lot of things have changed in your life, you know, and not allow people this to get out, but also to recognize

that it is their experience. Yeah. So you get pushback, not just from conservative, religious people. You get push back from Democrats who don't really want the Democratic Party affiliated with religion, right? What does that sound like and what do you say to them? We've actually had more people express their concerns and worry or pushback from the Democratic political side than from the religious side. The pushback is generally, the Democratic Party has been one of the places where people for whom faith is not their organizing principle have felt like they have power, like they're included and they're part of the American expression and experience.

We respond by reminding them that that's a really good pushback, first of all, because it's true. We have those same concerns. The pushback to, shouldn't we keep a separation between church and state, we say, yes, we're not talking about putting Christian values or Jewish teachings into our laws. We're talking about asking voters to vote for these candidates. And when people feel left out, we want to make sure that they understand that religious people don't have to be intolerant or only think about. their own self-interest. Like, we don't think you should vote for Christian candidates. We think Christian people should vote for candidates that support the common good.

That's what we think they should do rather than their political party commitments. I don't think the current situation where Republicans are religious, Democrats are not religious, is the only future. The American structure is changing, and we have to allow religion and politics to also be part of that structural change. that's Doug Padgett, a pastor and founder of Vote Common Good. He spoke with the New Yorkers Eliza Griswold. Eliza, what does Doug Padgett have to say about abortion? That's a huge divide, obviously, between the Democrats and religious voters.

Is there any way to bridge that? You know, Doug really grew up inside the pro-life movement. I mean, he wasn't a big activist, but historically he was within that movement. And he thinks that really we're looking at criminalizing abortion. Like if people want to repeal Roe v. Wade, there's no way to reach them. But Doug believes people are mobilized really around Trump's racism and his sexism. And so when Trump speaks the way that he does, he turns off those constituents. And really, Doug thinks that they are numerous enough.

Like, do they have to be masses and masses? They could be a couple of percentage points, and that might make the difference. A couple of percentage points means everything. Yeah. Thanks so much, Eliza. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

As the presidential candidates go around trying to make their cases, one of the stops, almost obligatory at this point, is the syndicated radio program, The Breakfast Club. It didn't start out as a political show. It was a morning show big on hip-hop and sports and celebrity gossip. But that all changed in 2016. The first candidate, I will believe, we had I think it was Bernie.

I'm pretty sure it was Bernie Sanders. One of the hosts of the show is Leonard McKelvey, professionally known as Charlemagne the God. Why? Because you had Killer Mike, and you had Simone Sanders working on his campaign at the time, and Nina Turner was working with him, and they all was like,

yo, Bernie, if you're trying to get to black and brown people, you need to go on the breakfast. This is a good luck for you. Yes, so he did it. Then Hillary after him. And this year, every single Democratic the candidate damn near has come through. It was Charlemagne who grilled Elizabeth Warren about how she once identified as Native American,

and he compared her to Rachel Dolazol. But he's not only or not primarily a political person. His most recent book is much more personal than that. It's about his experiences in therapy. And he's addressing in particular the stigma of mental health treatment in the black community. Charlemagne the God came to our offices at One World Trade Center recently, and he sat down with a small audience for a conversation with the New Yorkers, Natalie Mead. Before you walked into the room, I sort of gave the crowd some biographical information about you,

including the fact that you grew up in Monk's Corner, which is a small town in South Carolina. What was it like to grow up there? Monks Corner is like a rural area. The population was like 7,000 people when I was coming up. It's like 10,000 now. I mean, it's a rural area. So, like, it's really, if I wasn't playing football, which I wasn't. Like, so all of my other cousins, all my cousins was playing football, so they had something to do.

Right. Like, I didn't have anything to do. So, you know, I don't mind it's the devil's playground. So I ended up, like, hanging in the trap, you know, and that's how I got involved in selling drugs and, you know, a whole bunch of nothing. I want to talk to you a little bit about, you know, being in the trap. And you talk about how you buried something. Tell us about that story. Oh, that was, man, I had bought.

what you call a half ounce of crack. And the reason I bought that is because the most money I think I ever made was like $1,100 at one time. Wow. Back then it seemed like a whole lot of money. And I was dating this young lady at the time, so I thought I was bawling. So she came home from college and I took her and her friend to the mall. And whatever I bought her, I bought her friend. Wow.

Stupidest thing I could have. Very generous of you. Stupidest thing I could have ever did in my life. So I think I spent like $700. Wow. You know? Like I was buying like a bathroom bodyworks basket and buy her friend one too. And I remember I had like, you know, $400 left, $300, something like that.

And I'm like, oh, I got to re-up. So what I did was I took consignment. So I took a half ounce of, you know, crack. And it was actually not cocaine. It was this substance called isotol, right? That's how they, it was like, so it really wasn't crack. Right. And it was nothing, really.

And so I couldn't sell it. And then when I couldn't sell it. And then when I couldn't sell it, I was like, man, yo, like this just isn't working. So then I buried it because I was hiding it, you know, and then somebody stole it from me. You said that you were paranoid? Like, you thought the cops were coming? Yeah. Well, you know, I didn't realize I was dealing with anxiety and having panic attacks back then.

So I was on probation and I had stopped smoking weed, which is so crazy to me because when I used to smoke weed, I used to have the worst panic attacks in the world. And then when I got on probation and I stopped smoking weed, I wasn't having to stop smoking weed. I wasn't having these panic attacks is bad. So this one day I smoke weed I had a panic attack. Why I didn't realize the correlation at the time I have no idea, right?

But I buried the dope because I just knew that the police was coming and when I said I scared everybody. I scared everybody. I was like, yo, the police are coming, the police coming, the police coming. So everybody's like, man, let's sit outside, man. Let's do a bugging, right?

Yeah. So we're all outside and yes, the police absolutely came. Damn. So that was one time with my anxiety 100% helped me. Yeah. Sounds like your instincts were really taken off too.

Yeah, in the weed. In the weed. So why did you decide to write a book about your anxiety? That's a good question. I don't think I necessarily decided to write a book about my anxiety. But I was going to therapy. And in therapy, I was keeping a journal of everything that I was experienced. Just keeping the journal of my journey in therapy.

And I was like, this is the most interesting thing going on in my life right now. And I just happened to tell it to my book publishers. And he was like, hmm, that wouldn't be a bad idea, you know? And so there's a guy in my book named Dr. Ish Major. Yes, let's talk about him. He's an actual psychiatrist. So when I was keeping this journal and explaining my feelings, Dr. Ish, you know, came in and read that stuff. And he just gave clinical correlations to the stuff that I was explaining I was going through in therapy.

And then it became this book. So when did you first realize that you were dealing with anxiety, like a diagnosable, clinical? generalize anxiety. First time I got diagnosed was 2010. Okay. I was back home living with my mom.

I was like 31 years old. I had just gotten fired for the fourth time from radio. My daughter was like one or two. My now wife was back living at home with her parents

and I just started collecting unemployment for the first time. You know, Biggie Small said being broke at 30 you give a brother to chills. So like being at home with my mom collecting unemployment checks with a daughter,

that's not the way I wanted my life to be. And I remember driving down I-26 in South Carolina on the way. from Mount's Corner to the Orangeburg, and I just had that same feeling that I've had several times throughout my life. Like, you know, your palms start sweating, your hands start shaking, your heart starts beating through your chest.

You feel like you're about to have a heart attack, mouth gets dry, pull over, drink some water. I'm like, try to take a few deep breaths. I'm like, yo, I'm going to go to the doctor tomorrow, figure this out. In my mind, I'm like, I'm eating too much chick filet. The sodium is killing me, right? And so I went to the doctor, and the doctor tells me what he always tells me. He's like, yo, you got an athlete's heart.

You're fine. Yeah, I was the first time when somebody said, to me, do you have anxiety? And I was like, anxiety. I was like, I'm like, I have anxiety. He was like, it sounds like you have had a panic attack. And he was like, have you had these symptoms before? And I'm like, yeah. And he was like, yeah, I think you have panic attacks. And he's like, are you stressed out about anything? And I'm like, hell yeah.

So in my mind, all I got to do is get me another gig and everything will be okay. And the next gig I got was the breakfast club. But you know, four or five years later, you know, even though you have success and you got books and TV shows or whatever it is, like, you know, you're still having. having those same symptoms, still having those panic attacks. So I said to myself, I'm going to stop flirting with the idea of therapy and actually try to go get a handle on it. I also started to realize that anxiety and, like, bouts of depression was something

that was just kind of common. Talk about how that was common in your family life. I know you talked about your grandmother when last time you met, and there was a hurricane amongst corner and you. Well, you know, I didn't know what that stuff was back then. Yeah, because you were like 10-11, right? Yeah. So, you know, we just used to be like, your grandma's nerve bad.

But they really were. Yeah, yeah. You know, and those pills she used to talk about taking that had to calm her nerves, that was like, you know, I guess what Xanax would be now, you know? So it's like we didn't, I didn't realize my grandmother was really dealing with real bad anxiety. I just thought she was the most paranoid, pessimistic person alive, you know, because she would be talking to me about these people in the woods that's watching her. And she'd be on the phone sound like, she had druggedy, like, I can't talk. talking the phone, you got to come see me. You know?

But she was really just suffering from bad anxiety. And when you look at her life, like, you know, she was the oldest of, I think, five or six kids, five or six, I believe. The oldest is six, but all her siblings passed away. Her parents passed away. She had an oldest son, you know, who was my uncle. I never met him, but he passed away. So you would understand why her nerves were bad, you know?

And then, like, you know, the first time I can remember having a panic attack was when Hurricane Hugo happened, you know, in Charleston, South Carolina. And we was all into this in this school for shelter. And like all the adults around us were panicked. You just heard about the worst things happening. This person is going to lose their house. And this is going to happen. That's going to happen. And so I remember having like this, this sense of insecurity that I never felt before. Because, you know, those are the people around you that's supposed to keep you secure and make you feel secure. So when you see them bugging out, you start bugging out too. So that's the first time I ever actually remember having a panic attack. Even my mom, to a certain extent, my mom

went to therapy, you know, more so after her and my father got a divorce. But, you know, she was dealing with her anxiety issues as well. I want to talk to you a bit more about therapy in the black communities. I know that you really had black men in mind when writing about this, about this topic. I mean, because I am a black man. Yes. Yeah. In case y'all didn't know this. Yeah. I mean, it's just something that we never spoke about. I don't think that people really understood what people were going through. And I think that a lot of times black people, we think we're doing ourselves favors by keeping secrets. So even if you are going through something, you don't say nothing about it. Like, you know, my father, Thanksgiving the last year, I had a cousin who

killed himself. He was 26 years old. And him and my father used to work together because my father does, like, you know, construction and stuff. So he would have him working some odd jobs with him. And then my father actually read my book. And my father told him, you told me that he tried to kill himself like 30 plus years ago and he was going to therapy two and three times a week and he was on 10 to 12 different medications throughout his life like what and I remember telling my mom that and I was like did you know pops was going through all this and my mom was like I thought he was just playing crazy to get a check so it's like nobody was taking it serious yeah recently in the news there were two incidents where two black people were killed

in their homes home was uh... Botham-Jean who was shot by an off duty officer who walked into the wrong apartment. She was recently convicted to 10 years in prison. And then there was a Tatiana Jefferson who was killed by an officer responding to a wellness check. And she was playing video games with her young nephew. So, and you talked about how you feel rage at first. And that could be a symptom of, that is a symptom of PTSD. How do you channel that?

And how do you sort of, I guess, process all that's going on in the world when there's so much negativity and so much oppression against our people still to this day. Man, I don't know if you can channel it to anything positive because at the end of the day, you're just constantly questioning, what do you have to do to make this stop? I don't have any answers to that, you know? I don't know how you stop racism. Like, I really don't.

Like, I was having a conversation earlier. We was interviewing somebody. It was actually Byron Island, and Barrett Island was talking about education. He kept on my education, education, education, education is the equalizer. And education can stop racism. And I'm like, no, it can't. Because if you're a racist and a bigot, you don't see my degree on me. You know, you don't know what I majored in.

You don't know what you see is the color of my skin. And, you know, like, all you're going to see is an N-word at the end of the day. So I don't, I really don't know what the answer is to that. I don't know how to make white people not be scared of black people. I really don't. I have no idea. I do not know how we can. ever look like less of a threat to them.

Because the truth to the matter is they shouldn't be scared of us. Like when you look at the history of the white man in America, who has been more inherently violent than them? Why are we, why are you afraid of us? We should be jumping at y'all, which we do, by the way. Yeah, that's true. You know? So I don't, I don't, I really don't know.

I don't have the answer to that question at all. Thank you, Charlemagne. Thank you. Peace. Leonard McKelvey, who goes by Charlemagne the God on radio and TV. And his book, Shook One, recently came out in paperback. Natalie Meade is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour,

and that's all we've got for today. Please join us next time for a conversation with Philip Pullman, the author of His Dark Materials, which is now on HBO. See you then. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario,

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