The New Yorker Radio Hour - William Barber, and the Question of Faith and Politics

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

The North Carolina pastor William Barber, who spoke at the inaugural prayer service at the start of the Biden Administration, wants politics to be guided by faith and morality. But conservatives, Barber thinks, are deeply confused about Christ’s teachings. Then Paul Elie considers Biden as only the second Catholic President. Elie thinks that Catholics demoralized by decades of the Church’s abuse scandals are welcoming Biden as a “moral authority” outside the religious hierarchy. 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.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Well, we are in a jam today. Trouble is real. And whether we like it or not, we are in this mess together as a nation. When this word of the Lord came to Isaiah, his people were also in a jam. The morning after the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Reverend William Barber delivered the homily for the inaugural prayer. service. The prayer service, usually at the National Cathedral, follows the inauguration every

four years. It's a given, part of the whole ceremony. But the event tells us something about a president's relationship with religion. And in that context, the fact that Reverend Barber was asked to give the homily was deeply significant. Barbara is explicitly political in his ministry. He wants government policies to reflect Christian values. His agenda, though, is nearly the opposite of what the Christian right has successfully advanced for so many years in Washington. We can't accept the poverty and low wealth of 140 million Americans before COVID and many more million cents. We must have a third reconstruction. We must address the five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, denial of health care,

the war economy, and the false distorted moral narrative. of religious nationalism. These are breaches that must be addressed. And according to the text, repairing the breaches will bring revival. Barbara is firmly in the center, or more so, on the left of the Democratic Party on matters of poverty, voting rights, gay rights, environmental protection, and more. And yet he expresses frustration, deep frustration with the party. He thinks it lacks a coherent, inspiring moral vision to reach the country.

Barbara is pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and he's president of a group called Repairers of the Breach. He and I spoke in 2017 not so long after the election of Donald Trump, a very different turning point in our nation's history. Now, you've written, I can't remember a time when I did not know God, both to be real and to be about bringing justice in the world, and yet you had what you call serious reservations about the church. Two different things.

What were those reservations? Two different things. I can't remember a time when God, a sense of God, was not formative in my reality. But my father did have some struggle, even within the church, the so-called black church, because there were persons who would say to him, we don't need to be involved in politics. We just need to pray and have praise services and, you know, and just don't be involved. You know, Dr. King faced the same thing. And, you know, Dr. King was put out of his denomination.

because of that. So I struggled with that. I said, well, maybe I'll be a lawyer, an attorney. And when I got ready to go to college, I actually looked at the catalogs to make sure there weren't any courses on religion required. You had had your fill, you thought? Well, of that, not of God, not of justice, not of love,

but the formalized kind of. I was hurting, and I was hurting because of some of the things I'd seen. And then somewhere down the line had a real strong epiphany. And actually one day I called my father and said, Daddy, I'm wrestling with something. He said, come home. I already know. I said, come home.

He said, I already know. Just come home. And when I went home, we went driving. And he took me down to Nags headed around the beach. And we just drove along the coast of the ocean and talked. And we talked about, you know, theology. We talked about the church. The church is not a perfect.

entity, you know, whether or not my work should be inside or outside, the difference between the church as an imperfect entity and the reality of God and reality of justice, reality of love. And I revealed to him that I felt a calling to ministry and preached my trial sermon in March of 1984. Now, the black church writ large has been a sanctuary, a place. of truth-telling, a place of relative safety since for hundreds of years. And at the same time, particularly in the South, but not only, the evangelical white church has been growing more and more right-wing now for decades. Now, as a young man, did you start sensing this, this tension between

your own church and the growing moral majority and all the other evangelical movements that were growing? You've used a lot of terms that I don't use this. same way. So it's going to take me a little bit to pat that. I've got all night. Okay. First of all, I'm an evangelical. The black church has been traditionally evangelical. The term was hijacked. Because in the Bible, theologically, there's no such thing as an evangelical that does not begin with a critique

of systems of economic injustice. And when Jesus, the ultimate evangelical, right, that brown-skinned Palestinian Jew, that was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, the ghetto, right? The poor place. His first sermon said, the spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news. That's evangel. That's what that means. To the poor.

If your attention is not on dealing with the issues that hurt the poor, the brokenhearted, the sick, the left out, the least of these, the stranger, and all of those who are made to feel unacceptable, you don't have right-wing evangelicalism, you have heresy. Is that what you would call? Yes. You have theological malpractice.

It doesn't fit orthodox Christianity. What we've had... But let's break it down for a second. How do you account for the fact that Donald Trump, whose behavior and rhetoric and past is in no way a moral avatar and his interest in religion is of recent vintage

and yet his support was extremely high in that community broadly broadly defined that's right by that particular group it was opposed in a many way but yes okay and that's where you see now I think where we can see it so clearly those

Kevin Cruz in his book and other have documented this. When they wanted to speak against, for instance, Franklin Delano Rosa's New Deal, and they wanted to take over elements of the Christian pulpit, that came up this weird theology. If you're good, you go to heaven.

If you're bad, you go to hell. If you're good, you're wealthy. If you're bad, you're in poverty. It's actually a strange form of Calvinism that just is abusive to Calvinism in itself. Calvinism with private planes. No. Yeah, right, right.

And so... Does Creflot Dollar bother you in that way? Or any of those that simply preach in that way because it is not consistent with Orthodox theology. It's not consistent with the theology of the Bible. It's not consistent with the critique. But let me make one more... But how did Trump get such a wise...

Well, that's what I'm saying. But if, in fact, then your theology says, whoever is good is wealthy, then you would fawn over a wealthy businessman, right? Because his purse strings... Despite his moral behavior. Despite his moral behavior. Because maybe the religion you're promoting

isn't really about moral behavior. Maybe it's really a purstish religion, like paid puppets of the empire. Because any time a religion sense to say the only moral issues are prayer in the school, where you stand on abortion, being against a woman's right to choose, private property, and making sure you can prove that Jesus was a founding member of the NRA. That is not Christianity.

Think about, this is how you can see it, my brother, Emily. They're so loud on things like abortion and prayer in the school. and so wrong and so quiet on things like health care and living wages and acceptance of all people and treating the poor. Now there are 3,500 scriptures in the Bible about love and justice and mercy and how you treat the stranger and how you help the leases. And it's not talking about private charity either. It's talking about how we shape society. It's talking about the nations. Jesus said, I will say to the nation.

when I was hungry, not to individuals, to the nation, that's governments. 3500 script. There may be three scriptures about homosexuality. None of them trump the scripture that says you've got to love your neighbor as yourself. So how do you claim to be a conservative if you dismiss 3,500 texts, but then build a whole theology around three scriptures that most of you misinterpreted? That's not conservative. That's not because conservative means to hold on to the essence of.

How do you deal with a complex moral issue like abortion in your church where I would bet there's not unanimity in the pews? It's not unanimity. First of all, one of the things we say to people is, first of all, let's get the folk out of the room for a minute. We love them. But who want to come in here and talk about a woman's right to choose and they claim they want the baby to be here,

but then they don't want to give the woman health care to get the baby here or health care to the baby after the baby gets here. They don't want to pay the parents a living way so they can take care. So you really don't have any credibility to talk about abortion because all of your policies abort people's possibilities, dreams, and hope. So you just, you don't need to be in this conversation. Secondly, it's easy. You can be, I'm not pro-abortion.

You know, like I say, just go out. That's not even, we shouldn't, it's not pro or con. I can say that I believe in life. I want persons to have children, but there are so many situations where that may not be possible. There are situations where people have to choose. And even if they choose to have an abortion, I choose to love. I choose to care for them. What I want to get the conversation to higher ground.

And the higher ground is how do we start? aborting the hopes of the poor? How do we stop destroying health care? You think about the hypocrisy of having clergy in the Rose Garden with the president clapping for him signing an executive order about so-called religious leaders and not chastising him on his position to deny millions of people health care. And they claim to be Christian clergy. Now, watch this. This is a very simple country boy analogy. If I'm not mistaken, the one thing Jesus did was set up free health clinics. I mean, every way you look in the Bible, Jesus healing for it.

He never charged a leper or copay. Now, you believe in Jesus now. You believe in Jesus. But you're going to applaud someone. something else is going on underneath that that's ugly, that's cynical, that doesn't make sense, that's not good for the health of our culture, and as a denial of the basics of our faith. In the words, salvation means healing. Reverend, your most recent book is called The Third Reconstruction.

In it, you argue that this country needs what you call a third reconstruction in order to save the soul of America. Tell me what you mean by that. I actually believe that much of what we're seeing, we're in the birth pains of a third reconstruction. And those who are the adversaries of America reconstructing itself and who, in many ways, are the social and political descendants of those who've always fought reconstruction, they see it happening. If you know history, you understand that what we've seen with Donald Trump is as American as apple pie. is the call and response of history. The call is more justice, more racial progress.

The response is the progress of racism, the fear, and the reaction. And what should surprise us is not so much that Donald Trump use these tactics, but that he and others, Ryan McConnell and others, have been so successful at using them in the 21st century. And one reason I've been writing about the Third Reconstruction is because I think too often too many people do not notice. history. Do not know this history. Do you think we're too caught up in the day-to-day hysteria of what's going on?

Sometimes and just we keep dumbing down politics. We need to understand this history because actually we're seeing it played out. What do we have now? The cry against the tax cuts. What helped to bring it into the second reconstruction? Cry about tax cut. First reconstruction. The cry about tax cuts. The tax cut was always about disabling the government from being able to to make the playing feel more level and fixing the problems that the government created in the first place. This brings us to your role.

Now, you've just changed your life a little bit. You've left your job in the North Carolina NACP. I laugh when you say job because I see some folks, it's a volunteer. You know, people don't realize that. The president of the NWAS, it's work, but it's volunteer. It's purely loved.

Volunteer. But it's been replaced by something that's potentially much, larger, which is to lead a poor people's movement. What does that movement mean? First of all, last year, from April to November, I did a tour with Dr. James Forbes, former Marriottis, Pastor Merritt's Riverside, Dr. Leo Thiel Harris from Union, Sister Simone, Tracy Blackman. We did 22 states, called it the Marl Revival Tool, and we put out a higher ground moral agenda. Thousands of people showed up.

Hundreds of clergy activists, even people who are not people of faith, but who believe in the moral arc of the universe showed up to be trained in moral activism, moral articulation, and moral analysis. It showed us that there was a heart that people know we need, as I said, the convention is some moral defibrillators. People who are willing to say, wait a minute, some of these issues are not about left versus right, they're about right versus wrong. Health care is about right versus wrong. Living wages, right versus wrong. dealing with systemic racism. It's about right versus wrong.

And that we need to stand up not as partisans, but as people of conscience. Something was wrong in the spirit of the country. And we knew that we needed to have this poor people's campaign. So we decided when it comes to prophetic voices, Brother Remnant, you don't simply have commemorations of what they did. I'm kind of tired of commemorations now. Well, we go back and say back then they did this.

you figure out how to reimagine and re-engage what they did and what was the unfinished business. You've had a movement called the Moral Monday movement as of 2013, I believe. Actually, the forward together moral movement started in 2007 when Democrats were in office. And I want to talk about that because a moral movement can't just challenge extremists who've taken over the Republican Party. We have to challenge the conduct of Democrats. And especially right now, I'm very concerned when I hear Democrats. talking only about the middle class. They think that's all that went wrong in this past election.

One of the things we have to do is recover our moral foundation. When some of these extremists say they want to read the Constitution, I get happy. I said, please, let's read the Constitution. Or when they say, we want to talk about what's in the Bible, please, please, let's have that conversation. Because if we have it, then it will expose the holes in the hypocrisy and may even cause you to repent. And come join us.

In love. The church, and not only a black church, but the church and religion were a huge impetus to the civil rights movement. There were lots of leaders of the civil rights movement, lots of factions and differences of opinion, all the rest, is the church in the same position that it was in 1954 through the late 60s now.

to be that moral underpinning. When I went, I was in Charleston, South Carolina after those terrible murders and was spent a lot of time at that church, but when I spoke to younger people and Black Lives Matter movement, it was well outside the church structure. There was a real gap between the older folks

in the church and distinctly older and the younger movement that was well outside the church. Is that a complication for today's movement? Well, you know, I'd love you to talk to all the young people that are part of the Moral Monday movement, and many of them are Black Lives Matters and many other groups. See, I have, again, we're having a little linguistic thing because to say the church, the church has always been problematic. You know, the church has always been problematic. Well, let me put it to you this way.

Is the progressive movement broadly defined more secular than it was a half century ago? I think that progressives made a mistake when they walked away from the centerpieces of faith and morality because they were mad with Jerry Falwell. You know, I think progressives make a mistake when we don't know and remember the power of moral underpinning and what power has been. Now, I'm not talking about a movement that says you have to be Christian. That's the genius of the Marlonne movement. There are people who are atheists that come to our rows and say, amen. What we found is that there are these deep moral foundations that transcend our limits. They transcend our limits.

We have figured out a way in North Carolina and what we figured out on the moral revival. If you look at the groups that came and at all our revivals, we had Black Lives Matter, we had environmentalists, we had fight for 15. In fact, one time in Birmingham, we were in a Jewish synagogue downtown, training 200 activists. We had Muslims, Christians, Jews, in a Jewish synagogue, Black Lives Matter, people not of faith, charismatic, policy people, are gay and straight, all in the same rooms all day long. And I think that we make a big mistake. When I see progressives now, and I love so many of them, talking about all we got to do is work on the white, work middle class. and they're not talking about expanding the electorate

when they give every reason for this election but without dealing with the issue of race I've said to a group the other day on this election if you know the history of reconstruction not only do you know what has happened as is American as apple pie you know how to defeat it is when we come together when we're willing to put our minds to work

and our bodies on the line what if we didn't focus on Trump because Trump is a symptom. And what if we said this is not the end of a movement but a launch in the movement? And what if we said we were working our silos sometimes, but we want you to know we're all in this together? And we stand on our deepest moral principles and not just curse the darkness, but point people to the light. What if we use something like that to literally shock the very heart of this nation? I want to see what would happen if we finish that leg of the poor people's campaign.

I want to see what would happen if we could come to. together and I believe Walter Wink was a great theologian at Union Theological Seminary. He wrote a servant. I remember reading some years ago called The Blessings of an Enemy. This is going to sound strange. Don't you get mad. Let me finish. Sometimes you have to look at what your enemy did to defeat you to find your strength. If the forces in this last election, This is not just this last election. This has been a 40-year battle. If, however, in order to win,

they had to lie almost every other 10 minutes. They had to find a way to put pornographic sums of money into the electoral process. They had to spend years pushing voter suppression. They had to use fear against Muslims, against immigrants. If somebody cheat you, they don't cheat you because you're weak. People only cheat you when they can't beat you in a fair fight. Then that says that we are stronger than we realize.

And this is not the worst thing we've ever faced. People made it through slavery. People made it through the denial of women's rights. People made it through the depression in this country. People made it through apartheid. And Jim Crow, is our time to stand up and be the moral dissenters, the moral defibrillators, and the moral dreamers, and to make it through this moment and use it to change the course of history, to change America.

And in some ways, if we work together, we'll change the world. Reverend Barber, thank you. Thank you very much. I spoke with William Barber in 2017. He's the pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church, president of repairs of the breach, and co-chair of the poor people's campaign. In a moment, we'll look at Joe Biden's faith.

He's only the second Catholic president ever and how it may shape his leadership. I found that there's that famous phrase from Kierkegaard. Faith sees best in the dark. I find the one thing it gives me, and I'm not trying to process it. I'm not trying to convince you to be to share my religious views.

But for me, it's important because it gives me some reason to have hope and purpose. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It comes as something of a surprise to remember that President Biden is only the second Catholic to hold the office out of 46 people so far.

The first, of course, was John Kennedy. and whether that has any significance to his policies or his leadership is a question that I wanted to ask Paul Eli. Paul writes for us frequently about the Catholic Church and issues of faith, and he's a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Now, Paul, I think we're a long past time when discrimination against Catholics was a real force in America. But what do you make of the fact that Biden is only the second Catholic president? What I think is just how clearly it reveals how dramatically things have changed since Kennedy was elected in 1960. At that moment, you had Franco and power in Spain. You had the church tightly wound in with governments in the countries from which so many American Catholics had come in Italy and Ireland.

The church was deeply tied into governments in Latin America. There was fear that something like that could happen here. That said, I don't think the animus. against Kennedy really was about that. I think it was a holdover of a long nativism of American Protestants against Catholics that led the KKK to identify papists as others, as people not like us. So here we are some years later, and I don't think anyone's concerned that the Pope is going to give Joe Biden an order that he must follow. And in some ways it's rich that actually the people who historically fear such scenarios, people on the left are now looking to Biden to bring his

religion into the mix. In a way, they want to see some of Pope Francis brought into the mix. I think that's right. One of the things that distinguishes Biden's Catholicism is that it's not doctrinaire. It tries to make common cause with people with different groups, and he has that in common with Pope Francis. And so there's the hope that Francis's openness, his informality, his flexibility, his confidence that Catholicism is relevant and the lack of anxiety about its place in any culture war

is going to inform Biden's approach to Catholicism as president. So where do you see the evidence that Biden's religious values, his religious practice, shape his policies? It's hard to tell. And that's perturbed a lot of people on the right. And it's given a lot of anxiety to certain Catholic bishops who are already concerned that his executive orders go against Catholic teaching, that he's about to enshrine a kind of take it or leave at Catholicism as legitimate in this country.

What I see is something much more obvious, but no less important. Biden values institutions. He has a concern for the common good. He likes to speak a language that others speak. And in this case, the language that he speaks that enables him to make common cause with others often has a religious accent, the common good, my brother's keeper, welcome the stranger, and so forth. it's at that level that he can strike a religious note and both emboldened people on the left

and possibly reach out to people on the right. Now, I think it's safe to say that Joe Biden is a more devout Christian than his predecessor, certainly more practicing one, although Trump remains a huge favorite among evangelical voters, despite his not being terribly observant, to say the least. Have American Catholics had the same devotion to Trump? It breaks down in different ways. Among white Catholics, especially in the heartland, there's a really considerable support for Trump. It's baffled a lot of people. I'm personally baffled by it.

What I think is really clear is that there's an equally substantial number of Catholics who are not only supportive of Biden, but are ready to move forward and coalesce around Biden if he can make a few bold moves and policy in his early months and do it in a way that reflects not just a concern for Catholicism, but suggests that he's speaking as. one of them. Biden seemed reluctant earlier in his career to invoke faith in any blatant, obvious way, and he's been more demonstrative about that in later years. Why is that? Well, David, I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One has to do with his personal story. The death of his son Beau led him to speak more forthrightly about grief. And then the historical context has changed since the 80s. In the 80s, it was the right and especially the Catholic right who urged public officials to conform public policy to their Catholic beliefs. Over the past three decades, things have turned in the opposite way, where now you have

a Supreme Court justice like Amy Coney-Barrant actually insisting during her confirmation hearings that her very deeply held Catholicism will not affect her rulings from the bench. And Biden on the other side is more and more comfortable speaking of faith because the ground has softened, and faith as public policy is part of the lingua franca of our time. But isn't that just a difference in the jobs they hold? The Supreme Court justice has to, you know, bob and weave through his or her hearings, whereas a presidential candidate is appealing at a different level. That's definitely the case.

I guess, and this is almost a question for you, I think that President Obama helped now President Biden open up his vocabulary in matters of faith. Barack Obama was very articulate, very convincing on the role that Christianity had played in his life, and then spoke with great power after the church massacre, for example. This showed that a person could speak from the heart on matters of faith without being governed by faith or a slave to faith. And I think Biden was right by his side and picked up on that. What do you think? Well, I don't really know. President Obama's religion has always been a kind of mystery to me,

not that it necessarily should be an open matter, because he was clearly committed to the church he was committed to. But in many ways it seemed a matter of community, as much as it did, traditional religious faith. And I think that that's more true of Biden than maybe we've detected. Yes, he goes to mass on Sundays. Yes, he carries a rosary. But in a very deep way, he belongs to,

a Catholic community in the broadest sense. This is tens of millions of people who identify with Catholicism in some way, whether it's childhood influence, something they practice now, something that is part of where they came from, and that sense of community expressed in general language such as he uses is really an effective part of his self-presentation. I think it means a lot to him. Within the Catholic Church, there's so much tension between a liberal-leaning Pope,

Pope Francis, and a hierarchy of bishops that's become, if anything, more conservative over time to a non-Catholic, it's really startling how openly opposed many senior leaders are to Francis, and now we've got a president who's kind of a Francis-type Catholic. How is that going to play out in the political realm, if you can tell? I think the first thing to keep in mind is that the church and American society are in different circumstances. In America, we're yearning for unity. We feel that we've gone, down the road of division as far as we can go, and we need someone to kind of help pull things together.

The church, there's been a sham or surface unity that's been observed or imposed for decades and for centuries. Pope Francis has opened things up, and we're now hearing voices of dissent and disagreement that were sotavoche or behind closed doors in previous generations. So a consequence of Francis's openness is the very open disagreements that we're seeing now and in some ways they're a good thing. You know, it's interesting to me that some of the ideological backbone of Trumpism, both historically with Pat Buchanan and in contemporary terms with William Barr,

comes with particularly conservative Catholics. I think that's right, and I think the fact of the Second Vatican Council and the history of the church over the past half century has made it easy to forget just for how long the Catholic Church was the anti-liberal institution. one that was ruled by a quasi-monarch that insisted doctrinally and practically that it could not change, that maintained ties to all sorts of older forms of European absolutism after they were broken down by democracy. And that history is still very powerful for so many people. In a way, that's the history that I think was in play at the Capitol on January 6th.

We saw a rugged wooden cross present in that mob like a battering ram. We saw quasi-crusading imagery and a guy claiming the Senate chamber like a conquistador and saying, you know, this space is ours now. That's very old Christian history that's not gone. That's still in play. Now, the greatest challenge that I think the Catholic Church has faced in the last generation is the abuse scandals, which are so... horrific, and there are so many of them, has Biden taken any firm position on those scandals and

the church's culpability? I don't know Biden's position in particular. I know that it's the fact of the scandals that's shaping so much of the response to his Catholicism right now. Obviously, Catholics and progressive Catholics especially are yearning for some good news after three decades of bad news. At the same time, the leaders of the church, the bishop, the bishop, are sorely lacking in moral authority because of three decades of complicity and really criminal behavior, the sexual use of minors by Catholic priests. With their credibility low, the chance for a different kind of Catholic figure, one who has a kinship to Pope Francis in attitude and a lot of his positions, I mean Joe Biden, is moving into the breach and suggesting that there is

still some moral authority left in this tradition. Paul Eli, thanks so much. much. Thank you, David. You can read Paul Eli on Biden's faith, the Catholic Church, and much more at New Yorker.com. Paul's a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Berkeley Center for Religion, peace, and world affairs. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining us, as always. And if you want to keep in touch, find us on Twitter at New Yorker. Be well. 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 Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Callalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putuguele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. With additional help from Joe Plourd.

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