Theology in the Raw - 671: #671 - A Conversation with Jonathan Merritt

Episode Date: May 28, 2018

On episode 671 Preston has a conversation with Jonathan Merrit. Jonathan has published more than 3000 articles in respected outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. Learn more about Jonathan here, and follow Jonathan on Twitter.

🎵 Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of Theology in a Raw. I am here, as you can see, with my friend Jonathan Merritt. Jonathan is coming at us live, although this isn't recorded, but it's live as far as I'm concerned, from, as his hat says, New York. Is this right? Are you in Brooklyn right now as we're talking to you? I am. I'm in Brooklyn. I have a hard time leaving Brooklyn because I spend so much on rent.

I feel like I need to be here. Oh, man. You know, I've never been to New York City. I've been to almost every city in America, and I've never been to new york city can you can you find an excuse for me to come to new york city i thought i was the excuse you can come visit anytime anytime you want there you go i mean you can go back to your college days crash on the on the couch here many you you'd be you would be impressed if i gave you the list of people who've slept on my couch.

I mean, it is like the place. Some Christian author, somebody comes in town, they're like, can I crash on your couch? I'm like, yeah, if you want to. Yes, you can. As early – You're welcome. So at the – we both spoke at the Bad Christian Conference a few months ago, and my hotel room was a couch at one of my buddy's apartments. And so I actually, as a 42-year-old, I thought I was past that kind of stage, man.

I was crashing on a buddy's couch. So, hey. Well, and let me tell you, this is not just cheap talk. It actually applies to the audience because I know there are a lot of people who are listening or watching and they're saying gosh if I could just make it yeah like Jonathan or Preston and they think you're you know they think you're like touring the country and five star hotels and like champagne in your fruit loops and then when you realize no no you're going to like Paducah kentucky to stay at the travel lodge and like closing your eyes so you don't see the cockroaches and getting paid and losing money to go give a talk like it is not a sexy life and then you do all that and everybody hates you yeah so so congratulations you've made

it i thought it was just me. So this is pretty universal. Yeah, just to back up what Jonathan's saying, I rarely do this, but this is my office. I don't have a – that bed was decorated by my kids. My bookshelves are about to fall apart, and I've got my ghetto-looking lighting that I tried to do. This is my ceiling here so uh this is uh it's like it's like a little cinco de mayo oh yeah totally man so when you make it when you get this platform in christianity this is this is what it is so uh because let me tell you too because this is actually my roommate's room you can see see his lovely bed. Is he in bed right now or no? Is that?

No, no. Would that be awesome? If I was like, good morning. No, he is not here because if I tried to do this in my room, there's no room. You cannot walk around my bed. That's how tiny my bedroom is. Oh, my gosh. So talk about making it.

You should see my – I don't even have a closet. I don't even have a closet in my room. That's how small it is. talk about make making it you should see my i don't even have a closet i don't have a closet my room that's how small it is yeah so welcome to making it jonathan we're like we're like five hours into a conversation right now or so it would seem we haven't even introduced you yet so for for uh i i think i'm gonna guess a large portion of my audience both in the podcast and in the YouTube world. I just started my own YouTube channel just a few months ago. So you're one of the top five interviewers. Who's Jonathan Merritt?

Give us a snapshot into your, I mean, you can skip over all the details of your childhood, whatever. But yeah, who's Jonathan Merritt? What makes you tick? And we'll go from there. I want to talk about your new book as well. You know, I got in trouble once. A client of mine was like, really bothered because I had changed my Twitter profile to say, a fly in the ointment of the religious aristocracy. But as cheeky as that is, I think it's kind of true in this sense. So I'm a religion columnist. I'm an author. I'm a writing coach. I'm a guy. My business is words and ideas. And the calling that I have, as I often say, you know, you're really provocative.

And they say that as a, I think as a little bit of a dig or criticism. I take it as a compliment because I actually believe that I've been called in this space to provoke, to provoke conversations. And the way that I do that is because I'm untethered, kind of like you are now, I'm untethered from an institution or a church. I'm able, I have the freedom to say things that other people don't have the freedom to say. So what I hope I can do is to be a voice for people who feel like they, they cannot express their own voice and to say things they wish they could say out loud, to ask the questions that others are too afraid to ask, to raise criticisms that others feel like they would get fired or they would, they would put their relationships at risk if they said it.

So the most common thing I hear from people when I write a column in The Atlantic, I'm a contributing writer to The Atlantic or Religion News Service or Washington Post or in a book that I write, the most common thing I hear from people is, thank you for saying this. It's what I wish I could say. That is so, I get that same thing so often you're giving voice to what i what i believe what i'm feeling uh what you said articulates what i'm thinking but i couldn't say that so thank you for saying it for me i that's yeah and it's i think it's one of the reasons why people may be surprised to know this because look i'm a fairly progressive guy that's not like you know nobody's gonna nobody's gonna clutch their pearls hearing me say that i'm a fairly progressive guy. That's not like, you know, nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna clutch

their pearls hearing me say that. I'm a fairly progressive guy, if you follow my writings. You are a bit more of a centrist. I think you're seen on some issues in particular as more traditional or more conservative theologically. And yet, people may not know this, you and I are great friends. We get along and we really respect each other, even where we disagree. I mean, I think you would say, Jonathan, I don't agree on this issue, but he comes from a place that's grounded in scripture and history. It's thoughtful. It's not just reactionary. And I would say the same thing. This is a guy who's reflective. He's thoughtful. He's trying to live in a way that's consistent with what he believes the faith teaches, the Bible teaches. And I think one of the reasons why we are such good friends is because we are kindred spirits in that way. We're trying to be courageous in the articulation of our views, even though our views don't align. And so I think we can respect what we see as a similar impulse in each other. Well, also, I so value like, not just free speech and the kind of political,

although I do value that, but I, I know that I'm wrong in many areas. Like I know that, like, I don't, the worst thing for me is to sit in an echo chamber where I listen to a bunch of people that are also centrist on every issue. And right where I'm at, I want people to the, and I don't like these categories. And I know you don't either, but to the left, to the right, whatever, like I need to be pushed and pulled and challenged. So, and I not only am not afraid of that space, I actually think it's necessary. Like if everybody was just like right where I am,

right where you are, that wouldn't be healthy. I need voices. I mean, the extremes need to just go away, but the healthy kind of like pushbacks from both sides, I just – I think that's so healthy. Like it's necessary. So yeah, I mean – and even where we disagree, like you said, I just want to say it. I mean you're so thoughtful and I feel like even when you're – not even, but especially when you're being provocative, you're being provocative for the right reasons.

You want to stir people's thinking. You want to challenge presuppositions. And you're a true, healthy, provocative person isn't just trying to provoke just to provoke like a Milo or somebody, you know, but like they're actually trying to stir people up to seek the truth in a more genuine way. And that's just splashed all over everything you write and speak and do. So I love your voice, man. I appreciate that. It's funny, like a great example of this recently. I, I started, I brought to the fore an issue about a guy in the Southern Baptist convention named Paige Patterson. And I kind of picked this fight, which has now become a news story that, and I've written about it and lots of other people now have written about it. And I've

had some people who've come to me and said, you just hate Patterson, or you just hate the SBC, or you just have a personal vendetta. And that actually is not true. I mean, I love the SBC. I don't really know Paige Patterson that well. He's never done anything to me, so I'm not angry at him in any way. I have no personal vendetta. But he made some very misogynistic comments, some very dangerous comments about domestic abuse. And what people don't always realize is, is it's not about, for me, picking some personal fight. It's about the conversation that in these circles we have got to have a conversation about domestic abuse violence against women uh the the

the impulse to um to leave uh powerful men alone to to make to give them unchecked power not to criticize so what i'm what i'm hoping do, there's like the question behind the question. The question is, what do we do about Paige Patterson? Believe it or not, I'm not all that interested in that question. The real question is, what do we, as Christians of mutual good faith, what are we going to do about domestic abuse and powerful men who abuse that power? And so that's what I'm behind. And people often

misunderstand that because we're in this moment of like, personality, celebrities, and people, people misunderstand what we're doing. And I think the same is true for you. Yeah, that's good. Refresh our audience. And even for me, I followed it a little bit of that. But I didn't get into the nitty gritty of it last The last few weeks have been pretty crazy in my life. So I've been able to keep up on stuff. Give us, for the one who doesn't know too much of what's going on, what was it that he said and how did that kind of blow up? Yeah, so it started with, there's a guy named Paige Patterson.

He's the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that touts itself as one of the largest seminaries in the world. It's a part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest Protestant nomination in the United States. Over 15 million members, they say. Which means it's about 4 million. Yeah, about a third of that, probably. Maybe I've heard numbers internally in the SBC that say it's around seven. Okay.

Realistically, by their internal estimates, not made public. But there you go. There's a little fun insider fact for your listeners and viewers. But he had made some comments. And these comments, I should say, I didn't discover these for the first time. They were made public, I think, for the first time by a website called the Wartburg Watch, which is run by some women, which may explain why people didn't hear them in the SBC. But then I found them recently and I popularized them. I began to tweet about them and write about them. The main comment was regarding what a woman should do when she is being abused by her husband. And what he said was, I cannot counsel divorce. I never counsel divorce.

And essentially that it may be advisable for a woman who's being abused to stay in her home. He told a story in there about a woman who came to him who said she was being abused. He sent her home. He told her rather than resist her husband to submit in every way, that at night after her husband went to bed, that she should

get next to her bed and pray quietly, not aloud for her husband. The next Sunday she comes to church. She has two black eyes. She says, I hope you're happy. And he says, as a matter of fact, I'm very happy because what you have done has brought your husband to church for the first time. what you have done has brought your husband to church for the first time. And it made this women out to be sort of sacrificial lambs for the sake of their husbands. A lot of people reacted to that. It then prompted kind of a full review of his comments, which over the years, which are very troubling. He objectified and sexualized a 16 year old girl in multiple sermons, not just one, now we've found, talking about how attractive the 16-year-old was, that she was all there, that she was built, and that this was the biblical view of how we see women, is the way he told the story. There was a 1997 quote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he said of women,

joked or quipped of women, I think every man should own at least one. So these are really abhorrent. Own? Yeah. So this is a guy who has a major platform. He has yet to resign. He is still slated to give the keynote sermon at the Southern Baptist Convention next month. And lots of criticism about this person. And he recently sort of issued a kind of sort of apology, but it's become a big issue because if you look at Christendom, and I think maybe I'll write about this, you look at guys like John Piper, Votie Bauckham, John MacArthur, these are shockingly prevalent views. I mean, John Piper said, you know, well, if a woman gets smacked around a little bit, maybe she should leave, maybe she shouldn't. Maybe

her submission is aligning her with Christ's suffering. And so this is a conversation we have to have because some people, many progressives are making the argument that complementarianism which if you're not familiar not you but your listeners i know you are uh it you know is this kind of view that that uh women are are to have these separate but equal roles which we've heard before but i'm not a complementarian but some some people say, you see that, here's what happens. If you believe that men and women should have different roles, it will lead to violence. It will lead to oppression. These things are connected.

Now, I don't believe that one of these things necessarily leads to the other. But I think it's now incumbent upon egalitarians to make this argument because they want to protect women. to make this argument because they want to protect women, and these more misogynistic patriarchal forms of it. And in order to distance itself from causing all that, it needs to be the loudest voice in critiquing it so that when there is a bad form of complementarianism because i would say intrinsically you could have and and i i've been very open with my views on this and my view is i don't i don't know where i'm at i was raised in a very i mean i went to john macarthur's school i mean raised in a very very heavy complementarian i'm not at all there anymore if i anyway this isn't about where i lay but i'm i'm kind of open to whatever at this point. But even from an objective standpoint, there could be a beautiful and healthy form of complementarianism if it sort of rebrands itself and becomes the loudest critics of the abuses. Why let all the non-complementarians be the ones that are critical of some of the abuses? Then it just looks like, oh, so you actually agree with the abuses or you do believe that this view of complementarism does lead to that.

It's – I mean – and we can maybe talk about sexuality later. But because as a – whatever, traditionalist, I'm like we're the ones that need to be the loudest voices against gay bullying in the school and suicide rates and homelessness. Otherwise, it can become very easy for us to say or for other people to say, oh, so your view is causing that. I'm like, I don't think it's causing it. But, yes, people who hold to this view are often, maybe exclusively, the ones who are doing the damage. I don't think it's intrinsically related to the view itself. Therefore, I and we need to be, you know, the loudest critics of the abuses. So yeah, I agree. But don't don't you know, you said something and I want to I want to get your

thoughts on this. I mean, look, I'm a journalist, so I may end up interviewing you. So I love that. I love that phrase. Get your thoughts. And that's a mild way of saying I'm going to push back on. You're talking about complementarianism needing to rebrand itself and you say, you know, it's to untether itself from patriarchy. But isn't complementarianism by definition patriarchy? I mean, it says now they would say, ah, it's not a hierarchy. It's separate but equal. Not really. Not really.

Because it says the top tier, the leaders, the people with authority must be exclusively male, which by definition is a hierarchy. You know, if it swims like a duck and it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a freaking duck. So isn't it, isn't it by definition patriarchal? If you assume a secular definition of leadership, see, I think this is a missing link that within the Christian vision of leadership, the leader is not – it's non-hierarchical leadership. It's servant leadership. It's the one washing the feet. It's the one giving himself up for the other. So I think that whole argument, which, again, I think it works very well if we assume a very secular vision of leadership.

And to the – just to push back on the complementarian view, I think many complementarians have not assumed the countercultural Christian vision of leadership. They've assumed a very secular vision of that. So that's why I don't think a genuine, robust New Testament vision of different roles or whatever, it doesn't say the leader is better, the leader is more powerful, the leader is more important. It just – it inverts that whole thing. So, yeah, I guess that's what I'd say. But I'm not trying to defend, I'm trying to say that I don't, again, it could

easily fall into patriarchal forms, I think. It also depends on what you mean by patriarchal, too. I think that term's thrown around quite a bit. But I know what you mean by it. So, yeah, I would say it's not intrinsically related to that, but. Uh-huh. Okay. I mean, I, I, I, I agree with what you're saying about leadership in terms of that the church has, uh, accepted a form of leadership that is, that is unique to,

perhaps unique to, uh, 20th century Western American corporatocracy. And that's sort of just been bled into the church, right? Where it's like the pastor has the final say, the pastor has the final word, what the pastor says goes, we have to ask the pastor, we have to run everything, right? So there's the guy at the top and everything else kind of cascades down. You have org charts in churches churches and so there is a hierarchical structure and so when they say yeah it's not about the hierarchy it's like the emperor has no clothes we all know that that's exactly what it's about yeah anyway so i would say yes in terms of traditional classic pervasive evangelical church structures yeah yeah it is hierarchical and i think that that's that

would be i think it shouldn't be really i think that the the pastor the leader the teacher is one one slice of the pizza that forms the whole thing so that if he doesn't show up on sunday okay that's just as bad as if you know-year-old grandma who is a prayer warrior or whatever stereotype doesn't show up on Sunday. Like if one of those don't show up, the body is equally hindered. So it's – I don't know. And that's a certain ecclesiology I have that probably most people wouldn't share. Hey, let's talk about something else let's talk about your book man and this is actually going to be related and and i'm uh do you you have a call yeah i have a copy

somewhere it's on the floor it's not because i don't like it i have about 50 books on the floor because i just took my desk cleared it so i can't see it right now but you have a copy you want to hold up yes yes it doesn't it doesn't believe it or not it doesn't make it right now, but you have a copy. You want to hold up? Yes. Yes. It doesn't. Believe it or not, it doesn't make a good rug. So if you get a copy of this, don't put it on the floor. But it's not a final copy. You know, when you write a book, you get these little things that say uncorrected proof, which means this one is full of typos and errors. I doubt a manuscript produced by Jonathan Merritt is full of typos, but go ahead.

You'd be surprised. Behind Every Good Writer is a great editor. Oh my gosh, yeah. So it's called Learning to Speak God from Scratch. And the subtitle is Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing and How We Can Revive Them. So that's a provocative title. Can you unpack that for a bit revive them. So that's a provocative title. Can you unpack that for a bit? I mean, that's real. I remember when I got the mail, I was like, oh my gosh,

this, I don't even know what the book is about yet. And I'm like, that's a, that title is drawing me in. Yeah. So what it basically, the problem that the book is seeking to unpack, explore, and hopefully address, maybe shine a light forward to a solution is, is that there is a crisis in Western civilization that most people have not noticed. It's a quiet crisis. It's been going on for about half a century. And that crisis is, is the death of sacred words and a massive decline in spiritual conversations, which is to say that in America, we fancy ourselves to be religious. There's a widespread religiosity in the US. If you ask people, are they religious? Many people, most people will say yes. 75 plus percent will say they're christian and then some measure will say they're jewish they're muslim they're whatever but then and and even

among the people who are not religious of course you know this is true one of the largest uh fastest growing uh religious affiliations is the spiritual but not religious. So even people who say, I'm not religious in that, I'm not tied to an institutional form of spirituality, I still believe that spirituality is important to me. So even among the non-religious, many say they believe in a higher power or God. Many will say they pray regularly to something or someone. But then when you ask, okay, these things are important to you. Do you talk about them? Most people say, no, I don't. I don't talk about them that often. If you say, okay, this word represents something that is important to you, salvation,

God, or even moral words like courage words, kindness words. How often do you use these words? We can track that now, how often those words appear in literature. They're on a massive ski slope. They're declining. We're using sacred words less and less and less. Some of them upwards of 75% decline in the last 50 years. And if you look even at practicing Christians, practicing Christians are not having spiritual conversations with regular frequency.

So there is a crisis of sacred language in Western civilization. And my book seeks to ask, why is that? Is that a problem? And what should we do about it? Do you answer the why? Or do you put out certain theories? I do. I answer the why because I conducted a study in this book of over a thousand Americans. And I sat down and said, how often do you have spiritual conversations? And I first look at Google Ingram data to see which words are surviving and which words are dying. Then I look at conversations generally, because you could say,

well, you're not talking about salvation using the word salvation, but maybe you are using that, you're talking about that spiritual concept using different words. But then I went to the people and said, how often are you having what you believe to be religious or spiritual conversations?

Boom, it's almost nothing. About 7% of Americans say that they have a spiritual conversation on about a once a week basis. Practicing Christians say they have spiritual conversations on a once a week basis, about 13%, about 13 percent of Christians, that's all. A massive number say never, or once or twice a year. So most Americans are not talking about these things with any type of frequency at all. But then what I did was I took people who didn't have these spiritual conversations with any regularity. And I said, why? And I got a range of answers. Of course, there's their graphics in the book. If you look at the book, you can see why it is that people are not speaking God, what I call speaking God. And there's a whole range of reasons. Some people say religious conversations cause fights.

They tend to end in arguments. About 28% say that. Some say, I just don't care about these topics. About 23%. Some say religion's been politicized. These words now, they put me into a political camp that I don't want to be associated with. About 17%. Another 17% say, I don't know what these words

mean anymore. And that can come from a range of reasons. For one, some of these words have become the tread on the tires have been worn down. You know, we've used the word grace so often in such nondescript ways. You've written a book on this. In such nondescript ways, I don't even know what it means anymore. It's like taking a bite out of a cloud, you know, it's just meaningless. And so there are a lot of reasons why we don't use these words. And I talk about each of those in, there's the politicization of it, there's the divisiveness of sacred speech. So I talk about all of the exploitation of sacred speech. A lot of religious leaders have misused sacred speech. They've turned words that were meant to heal into words now that hurt. They've fashioned the sacred language into bludgeons, into weapons

that they use to defeat their theological or political enemies. And when they do that, people go, I'm not touching that. I don't want to be drawn into that battle. And so there are a lot of reasons why people are not speaking God with any regularity. And yet the majority would identify as spiritual, but not religious. So it really has become a private thing because your your study showing how they talk with other people about it but so they may still have some sort of spiritual identity or longing or searching or whatever but in terms of a shared community that that's it's a lot less is what i'm hearing is that is that would that be right right so either well well you have a large number of people who still consider themselves to be

religious. You do have a growing number of people who are spiritual, but may see it as somewhat more private. I mean, they go out, they go do yoga. Right. Out, out. They don't care if people know they do yoga, right? So it's not totally privatized necessarily.

But you have some religious people and some spiritual people, but this is something that unites them all. But here's what's interesting because you say, well, they still have this inner. So in other words, well, maybe we're thinking about these things, but we're not talking about these things. But I have a whole chapter in the book that talks about this, the cutting edge research that's being done in linguistics, which is showing that there is a tight connection between the words we use and the ways we think. In other words, the things that we talk about shape the things that we think about, and the way that we talk about things shape the way that we think about things. So if we do not talk about God, if we do not talk about faith, if we do not talk about grace or kindness, we don't think about God.

We don't think about faith. We don't think about grace or kindness. And when we don't think about those things, our behaviors are less shaped by those things. So if we don't think about them, yeah, you may, you may say you're religious, you may say you're spiritual, but that is not something that is, is going on in your mind with any regularity and it's not shaping your behavior. If you're not talking about it, you're not thinking about it. If you're not thinking about it, it's not, you're not doing anything that's related to those. It seems to go back to Jamie Smith's thesis about the necessity of liturgy that, you know, the non-liturgical churches, which I go to, well, yeah, every church has its liturgy. However they define it, it's a different question. But more the classic liturgical practices, it seems like it's combating or at least drawing on exactly what you're talking about, whether they know it or not.

But just the repetition, the habitual nature of rehearsing, of repeating, of whatever, isn't just, you know. Some people say, well, that's just not authentic, whatever, you need to be yourself. It's like, well, maybe, but just the sheer routine and practice of repeating and reciting and going through liturgical practices actually does cultivate behavior and identity. You're saying these studies would basically say, yeah, that, of course, that's... Yeah, so you're touching on something that is really, really important here, and I talk about it a little bit in the book, but I don't fully flesh this out. Maybe I need to write an article about this, but the reason why I think liturgical, one of the reasons why I think liturgical communities are making a comeback, if you will, even among young people, is because liturgy is built on a premise that we're now learning is true from linguistics, which is that language is not just expressive. Language is formative.

So see, in other words, people like if you're in a low church, low evangelical, low form of worship, evangelical churches, they see predominantly languages say what I think so you know in that case it becomes very individualistic like why am I going to repeat something that I didn't write and that I didn't think what liturgy says is is that actually this historic language it's not about expressing something that you're thinking it's about shaping what you think, shaping the mind, shaping the behaviors. And so liturgy operates in a formative framework of language, whereas most evangelicals are in this post-enlightenment expressive framework of speech. So if you begin to see language as important in shaping you as a person, as a spiritual being, as an embodied being, as a being

that thinks and behaves, then you come to really appreciate liturgy, not because it is saying what you're thinking, but because what it is saying is shaping what you're thinking. Oh, that's so helpful. That's so helpful. I have two very different directions I want to go to right now. The curveball I wanted to throw would be in light of what you're just saying. Could this not support the what I would consider the very conservative concern about Christians who believe in a traditional sexual ethic but are still gay, the pushback is that when you identify as gay, that's not a neutral thing. You should say you maybe experience same-sex attraction, yada yada, but when you have a gay, when you keep rehearsing the language of being gay, gay Christian, that that is not a neutral thing,

that that is actually shaping you towards something that could be unhealthy. I'm repeating the argument. I'm not saying I agree with it. And in fact, I've written on this. Well, I would say I want to preface this by saying the part of that, that I would reject is that, is that if you, if you use the term gay, it reinforces something that is unhealthy. I would reject that. What I would accept is, I would accept you're exactly right. This is where I think conservatives are making an unsustainable compromise, that they're allowing for a use of language as if it doesn't really matter.

Ah, you can, if that's what you feel, express it. But so long as your mind and your behaviors don't necessarily align with that, we're all good. Well, that, that, um, it is, is counter to this integrated view of language, which is the way you think and the way you speak and the way you behave, those are all interconnected. So for somebody to say, I'm gay, I'm going to be gay, but I'm not going to do gay, creates this dualistic framework that actually flies in the face of the way that we know language works. If you begin to say I'm gay and you think that that will not influence the way that that you think and the way you behave, then you just don't know how language works.

Wow. So you're saying I mean, you're obviously not making a statement for or against, but you're saying it would be, it is a bit inconsistent or naive. I mean, in a sense, you're saying that the more conservative view on this thing, that a conservative Christian who holds her traditional ethic actually shouldn't identify as gay, you're saying that that's actually a very consistent concern. I think that if I held to that theology, which I don't, that would be a consistent concern. I think that what you're hearing coming from Wesley Hill, for example, is a totally unsustainable framework. And it's unsustainable for two reasons. One, linguistically, it misunderstands or perhaps it ignores the way that language works. So it's totally out to lunch on linguistics. But I think also theologically,

I don't know how you can read the Sermon on the Mount to say, well, you can be gay, you can think gay thoughts so long as you don't do gay things. And here's Jesus saying, well, if you believe in your heart this thing, you might as well have done it. Jesus understands the connection between thinking and behavior. Jesus understands the connection between thinking and behavior. Jesus understands the connection between language and thinking. And so he's speaking in this holistic way. As the sort of post-enlightenment binary thinkers, we think we can compartmentalize these things and they do not work. If you're going to use a language, you have to know that, you know, just like the famous line that ideas have consequences, words have consequences too.

Words shape our ideas, ideas shape our behaviors. And so I think that to operate outside of the way that we know things work. Here's a great example. We live in a context that is, that adopts a, our language is futured, right? So we talk about tomorrow. So I can say to you, I'm going to go to the grocery store later today. That's a future tense.

Well, not all languages have a future tense, right? So if you go to like Chinese, for example, Chinese, they will say things all in a single tense. And you have to understand from the context when it may occur. But if you compare our society, and you go, ah, it's just words. No, it's not just words. In the United States, because we think about the future, we smoke a lot less. We are in China,

for example, they practice more unsafe sex. In China, they will save less for retirement. Why? When you don't think about the future or when you don't talk about the future, you don't think about the future. When you don't think about the future, you don't align your behavior around what the future might bring. You're talking in the present, so you live in the present. And when you look at, it's not just future tenses. When you look at all of these other ways that we use language, a great example would be Hebrew. Hebrew, as you know, it's gendered, right? Every noun has a gender. In Swedish, no nouns have any genders. And in English, we're somewhere in between.

Well, it doesn't matter. It's just language. No, that's not actually true. A Hebrew child will come to understand their gender, statistically, a full year before a Swedish child and English speakers somewhere in between. And people have made the connection to that is at least in part related to the nature of the language itself that they're raised. So, so if you look at, at linguists now that are, there's these, the, the way that language shapes thought, the cutting edge studies that are done on language, you see a connection between language shapes thought, the cutting edge studies that are done on language, you see a

connection between language and thought and language and behavior via thought that reoccurs over and over and over and over and over again. If this culture speaks about X differently than this culture, then this culture will think differently about X than this culture. And they will relate via their behaviors differently to X than this culture. And that's just the way language works. So what you're saying is Michelle Foucault wasn't completely out to lunch. All this to say, we have to be more realistic about the way that our language works, and not all of us are. That's so good. Jonathan, I want to go back. I want to circle back around.

You, in passing, kind of described yourself as more progressive. You were raised in a SBC environment, right? Southern Baptist, standard, conservative, evangelical, right? Is that – does that understand it? I mean – Yes, I was raised by a Southern Baptist minister. My dad was president of the Southern Baptist convention. Yeah. Uh, he is a TV preacher. You can watch him on the Trinity broadcast network, uh, Sunday mornings to this day. Uh, very conservative. I mean, I went to Liberty university.

You did my undergrad there. I did. I went to a Southern Baptist seminary for my MDiv. I did my THM at, at Candler at Emory university. So that's United Methodist. That's more liberal. Uh, but most of my education is conservative. Most of my background is conservative. When I was in church work, I was a teaching pastor for four years at a Southern Baptist church. So that's my heritage. So can you describe, describe that trajectory? So what, I mean, so for my conservative audience, they're going to say, well, what happened? And my progressive audience is going to say, what happened? Yeah. I, you know what?

Yeah. You know what? I learned to read the Bible for myself. And there was a great study that was done. This will be unbelievable to some of your readers and listeners, but there was an interesting study that was done by Baylor University not too long ago that showed a correlation between how liberal one might be theologically and how often one interacts with the Bible. In other words, liberal one might be theologically and how often one interacts with the Bible. In other words, statistically speaking, the more you interact with the text, the more progressive you become theologically. That's what they found. You can Google this. You can look at it. If you disagree with it, that's on you, but that's what it says. All I know is, is I found that to be true. In other words, somebody goes, well, you were raised Republican and conservative and da, da, da, but you're pro-immigration. And I say, welcome to stranger,

dude. Like for me, I go back to the text. Now I read the text differently than I did. And that's really what happens when you start to engage the text, you start to have more nuance. You do become, the text, you start to have more nuance. You do become, I would say, less literalistic. You read the text less flatly, but I take it more seriously than I ever have. And as I began to say, what does the Bible say? And do I believe it? And do I have the courage to live it? Suddenly I did become more progressive, but I would say my real journey has been less from right to left and more from closed to open. I've become more of a mystic than I used to be. In some ways, I'm still very conservative. Look, here I'm writing a book. A lot of people out there, a lot of conservatives have said, we need to get out there and start sharing our faith.

We need to be more confident in talking about God. Yeah, actually, I believe that's true. This is a problem. And now I've got the receipts. Now, my answer to that problem is going to be something that conservatives are far less comfortable with. But this is not a question that is keeping Epiphanians up at night. Yeah, that's fascinating. I've seen it true in my own life. I mean, in my more, whatever, my more progressive views or views that have kind of gotten me kicked out of many conservative circles have come not by reading books, but by reading the Bible and by trying to take it seriously. And going back to what you said earlier, being in an environment where I can genuinely be exegetical,

where I could actually go where the text leads without having this kind of pre, you know, end point that I must line up with, which is profoundly liberating and exciting. I love that old, you know, there's that famous quote, at least it's famous in theological circles, people like you and me, theological books, you see this a lot, that Karl Barth quote about life being lived with the Bible in one hand, and, you know, some quotes say the newspaper and the other, the New York Times and the other.

in one hand and you know some quotes say the newspaper and the other the new york times and the other but i i think that they'll begin to transform your theology which i think really should happen like if you're growing in wisdom and you're growing in the knowledge of god your view should change sometimes i look at conservatives it's like you're 80 years old man you were really lucky that you figured out the world when you were 22 and you were going to Dallas Theological Seminary because your theology has not changed a whit at 22. I think that's a problem. I think your theology in some ways should grow and change and expand as your knowledge of God, your experiences of God grow and change and expand. So people say, what should I do if I want to grow and challenge my views? I always say, one, you should read the Bible more and you should read the Bible more intentionally.

And two, you should become more worldly. Not in the sense that you are, you know, conformed to the patterns of the world, to borrow from that biblical phrase. But travel. phrase, but travel. Read what great thinkers in other fields are writing and put these things in conversation with each other. Put word and world in conversation with each other. And if you can do that consistently, something happens when those two things butt up against each other. It's a chemical reaction that will necessarily change the way you see, the way you think, the way you behave, the way you speak, and the way that you understand your own calling as a follower of Jesus Christ. And I would even add to that, when you do read

secondary literature, Christian secondary literature, go outside your time period. Don't just read, you know, in post-Enlightenment writers, read pre-Enlightenment. Don't just read Western, you know, majority world or sorry, sorry. Yeah. Don't just read Western, you know, high socioeconomic. Western, white, male, evangelical, whatever it is. You should always, you should always be challenging your structures, gender, race. And part of that is because of a really dangerous assumption that evangelicals make, which is evangelicals believe in contextual theology for everybody else you know they'll say oh that's just

a womanist theology that's just black theology that's just liberation theology and it's like yeah what are you doing we're doing the real stuff the authentic stuff i'm just doing i'm just doing theology there's no adjective right there's no adjective on theirs it's like no you male evangelical theology 21st century calvinist whatever they do not see the adjective on front of their own theology everybody else becomes the out group that is contextualized they're just they're just i just believe the word of god brother it's like yeah but but, but no, but no, actually. So it's learning to recognize our own context. When you have the courage to place adjectives in front of your own theology,

you will then be prepared to challenge the context that those adjectives represent by reading more widely. And it's not, you can't, you will never be able to read the Bible from a desert island or, you know, there's no view from nowhere, but just being aware of those things that are shaping your reading. That doesn't even mean you necessarily, it doesn't even mean you got it wrong. It doesn't mean because I'm reading as a white straight male in America, that everything I read is just, I'm just reading that in a text, but being aware of the pre-commitments and biases that I have can help you be more honest and humble, I think, with your interpretive conclusions. Jonathan, you know, a few, I want to say this though,

because this is important. And I think a lot of your listeners will appreciate this because of from whom the wisdom comes. Tim Keller years ago said something that was fascinating, that when he goes to prepare a sermon, he reads, and I can't remember the number of perspectives that he says, he gets commentaries from all these different places and time periods and everything, and he reads them in conversation with each other. And he says, if you read only one perspective, you're narrow-minded because you're just seeing the world through a single lens. If you read two perspectives, so you go, all right, I'm going to read all these conservatives and then the gratuitous

liberal, you'll become cynical because you'll say, well, who the heck can know? He says, this is true. And he says, no, that's false. Who can know? Where you really become thoughtful and you develop your own thoughts is when you create these streams together, where you read multiple perspectives, you begin to have your own thoughts because you're reading from all these perspectives and all these critiques. And so that is, I think, incredibly important if you fancy yourself a theologian, a pastor, a thinker, a blogger, a writer, a salesperson, somebody who's talking, has spiritual conversation with your coworkers. You have to read widely so that you're not just parenting one perspective. You don't become cynical, which will cause you to fall silent.

But you will actually form your own thoughts and views. And I think Keller is right in that regard. That's good. That's good. Good stuff, man. Jonathan, you just described yourself as being considered and you own this description of being provocative. What are some of the top provocative articles or things that you've written that really, really stir the pot? And I would like to know on just a real relational level, how do you mentally, physically even, and spiritually handle maybe some of the criticism or pushback when you do seem to poke the bear with different topics?

Well, one topic that I've rankled a lot of people with is on LGBT issues. Yeah. And it has not been intentional. I mean, if you really look at what I've read, like only a small portion of what I've written has been on LGBT issues. But it has come up again and again. I wrote the article on Trey Pearson, who was like this Christian rocker who came out. I broke the story also on David Gushy, who was a big evangelical ethicist who changed his mind on LGBT issues. I wrote on Jen Hatmaker, you may remember, who when she said she was LGBT affirming.

The Eugene Peterson story where he said he was affirming and then his agent said, no, he wasn't affirming, who wrote a statement for him. So that, I've been on the front lines of a lot of those conversations for a number of years. So that has been something I would say I've contributed to that is rankled people. I think of this page Patterson, I think we'll, we'll,

we'll go it down in the books as being one of the significant stories that I've, I've written about. So I, I wrote a lot. I was one of the guys on the front lines of the mark driscoll conversation that was happening so i wrote a lot about uh about that back in the day um that that was a big one and then um i would say some of my my hobby lobby was a was a huge story for me when i was saying like hobby lobby is not a christian. This is insane. Businesses can't be Christian. Only people can be Christian, like get it together. That was a fairly big story. uh trends church theology arts and entertainment um business all of these things sometimes the most significant stories are crux of kind of theology and politics so when i write about politics it ends up being kind of a bigger a bigger thing okay cool, cool. Who are some significant,

significant, helpful voices in evangelical Christianity today? Who are some people that, and I'm going to assume that knowing your disposition that you probably don't even agree with them necessarily on a number of things, but who are some people that you're like, I'm so glad that this person is speaking and, and maybe some people that have influenced your own life. Well, I certainly Eugene Peterson is one of those thinkers that for me is a really, really important voice and has shaped a lot of pastors. He's older now, certainly has shaped my thinking.

I think Tim Keller is one of the most important voices because he represents, I would say, the most hopeful voice in what is becoming a very vibrant new Calvinist movement. And that movement is not healthy by and large. It is defective. It is insular. It is oppressive. It in some ways operates a bit like a cult. It shuns people. It is predominantly white, almost exclusively male in terms of its key figures and key thinkers. But then here you have Tim Keller, who is, it comes from that view, but is thoughtful, winsome, well-read, he's measured. He is a thinking man and he's somebody that I really, really appreciate. I would say Alan Jacobs is somebody I really look up to. His most recent book on how to think or how not to think was incredibly helpful for me. And then I would say reading some of the thinkers out there who are columnists. The New York Times has some of the best Christian

columnists in the business. David Brooks is an incredible thinker. Ross Douthat, incredible Catholic thinker. And actually, I would say David Brooks, we should acknowledge, comes from a Jewish background. But if you read his stuff, you'll see some transformations there. And he writes a lot about Christian thought. Pete Winner is an incredible Christian thinker who's a New York Times columnist. So they've got a great stable there. I love Mike Gerson. Mike Gerson is great at the Washington Post. And these are principled conservatives. I mean, they're, you know, Winner and Gerson were speechwriters for George W. Bush. David Frum at The Atlantic is a great columnist, a conservative columnist. So these are some of the folks that I look to from our context, which is kind of white evangelicalism. I think where these days is among mystics that, that the mystic voices out there are really growing and.

Yeah. And so I try to read, I try to read a lot of folks who come from that community as well. We're going to wrap things up, Jonathan. One last kind of question, and this could be a long discussion or it could be short. Are you cynical, hopeful, or excited or discouraged about the future of evangelical Christianity? And I just read, those are just the four terms that came to my mind. I didn't pre-plan that. But when you think

the next five, 10, 15 years of American evangelical Christianity, what comes to mind? So there are sort of three problems that evangelical, I'm a realist, I would say. There are three problems when it comes to evangelical Christianity, at least in its conservative Western expressions. One is an image problem. People don't like evangelicals. They see them as anti-intellectual, hateful, judgmental, opportunistic, money-grubbing, money-hungry. They don't trust them. They're just not well-regarded. they're just not well regarded. Now, evangelicals, because of their persecution complex, wear that as a badge of honor.

But I think it's actually a problem that they would do well to address. In addition to their image problem, they have an identity problem. And part of this has been brought on by the election of Donald Trump, which has revealed schisms happening within evangelicalism for a long time. There are schisms along certain political lines, certain theological lines, certain generational lines, certain racial lines. And so who are

evangelicals? I mean, if you get a room of prominent evangelicals together and you give them all a piece of paper and you say, give me the definition of evangelicalism in one line, or what makes you in or out, you'll get almost as many answers as you have people in the room. And so there isn't a unifying matrix. And part of that is because of the structure of evangelicalism you know i was talking to the girl i co-host my um uh podcast with is kirsten powers from cnn and she's catholic and i said you know in some ways kirsten you're so lucky you have a pope you have a catechism so you if somebody goes well catholics believe this you can say yeah no they they don't necessarily believe that because the catechism doesn't say that. You have an authority. You've got the structure. We don't have that structure. We don't have a pope. We don't to say many of the majority views, both theologically and politically, are now overly beholden to white, Western, wealthy, and male frameworks. In other words, they are rooted, I would say, more culturally than they are theologically or biblically. Now, what we do is we reverse engineer, right? So we say, this is what I believe, but the epistemology of that belief is Western,

or it's male, or it's wealthy, or it's some combination of all those things. And then we go back to the Bible to proof text why we came to that view. So it's not epistemologically biblical, but it has this kind of Jesus wallpaper put over it. And I think that that is unsustainable because as culture begins to dismantle those frameworks, then the faith becomes dismantled. To borrow from Jesus's words, we built our house on sinking sand. And all it takes is one good storm, be it Trump, be it globalization, be it the internet. You get one good tempest that comes through. And if you built your house on sinking sand, then your house will be demolished. And what we're finding now is that the evangelical house, having built on sinking sand, is notwithstanding the tempests

that 21st century society is bringing against us, and it's falling down. Now, what I believe, and actually, I bring this up in the book, is a framework. Why this is good news is, if you look historically at religious traditions, and I use this to talk about linguistics, but you can talk about theology this way too. Richard Rohr would say it's orientation, disorientation, reorientation. Or somebody might say construction, deconstruction, reconstruction. Or when talking about language, N.T. Wright talks about it in terms of luggage. You pack, you unpack, and you repack. What we are seeing right now is the orientation or the construction was sort of messed up. And it almost always is.

You know, if you read like Jesus Through the Centuries, which Pelican Rose is a great, which is a great book. He says, you know, every generation must come to understand Jesus on their own terms and in their own ways. And this is a constant battle, but what we're in right now is a period of deconstruction or disorientation. Now, does that make me less than hopeful? No, it doesn't because I read church history. So you see like, well, we've been here before. And as you know, as the gates of hell will not prevail.

In other words, we'll survive. We'll survive this. It's going to be painful because anytime you deconstruct, you tear apart. Anytime that you disorient yourself, it's stressful and it's hard and you have to ask difficult questions and people will fall away because they really fell in love, not with Jesus, but with the orientation or the construction they were given. But I do believe once we get through this painful part, the remnant that is left will rebuild. The church will have better days. It will find itself again. And then inevitably it will find that there are areas where it built its house on sinking sand and it will wash away and it will have to rebuild.

But actually I think that's the engine that drives the faith forward. It's the thing that makes faith sustainable throughout the centuries. That's fascinating. You know, I thought, faith sustainable throughout the centuries. That's fascinating. You know, I thought, I've often wondered more recently and about the significance of Christianity in a post-Trump world. And neither you or I are Trump fans at all. But I wonder if we'll look back and see that this Trump era kind of drove everything to the extremes and it almost caused like a reboot almost or almost like it just shook everything so hard that it kind of exposed that there is some creepy like nationalistic like idolatrous weird uber patriotic forms of christianity that have almost been brought to light and like gosh i i want to name names you probably know some of the people i'm talking about like what like that's your vision of christianity and then even conservative it's

you know conservatives like al moeller or others that they were like not really into trump at all maybe weren't strongly as strongly opposed as you and i were but um i don't know i just wonder it is for for all the damage that's been done and all the you know fallout and people being hurt in the wake of it i just wonder if long term this might have been kind of like a forest fire by people my friends that know you know they say actually forest fires are good for the long term environment, even if they burn down some houses. A lot of people, a lot of people have said that Donald Trump had to happen because anytime there's racial progress, there's a reaction to it. And they've sort of looked at it in the racial context.

The election of Barack Obama meant we had to have a Trump because there were too many racists in America, even if they didn't recognize they were racist, who would unite? Whether you buy that or not, I don't know. That's a political perspective, but a theological read of the situation is that Trump is apocalyptically significant. And I'm not the first person to make this argument that the election of Donald Trump was an apocalyptic event in the biblical sense and that an apocalyptic event is a revealing. It reveals something. One of my favorite thinkers is Barbara Brown Taylor. And she says that when apocalypse happens, when there's a revelation, there's a revealing of what's real, we enter a period of disillusionment and we resist that.

We hate that. We think it's bad. But disillusionment by definition, and I have a chapter on disillusionment in my book, which is why this is on my mind, but disillusionment is by definition a good thing. It is the loss of illusion. It is when you recognize that the things that you called truth were actually lies. And now you know they're lies. They've been shown to be what they were. So yeah, 10 years ago, we could say, ah, we're post-racial. Oh, we're beyond sexism. Oh, the religious right is dead. We're no longer beholden to partisan political power. Now we know the illusion is dead. Now we are able to confront American evangelicalism and Western male patriarchal expressions of Christianity for what they are. We see them in all their raw, naked glory. for what they are. We see them in all their raw, naked glory. And you cannot address what we now know Christianity often is if you're living under the lie of what you thought it was. And so now we know what it is. We can deal honestly with the truth. And I think that for that, because of that, and because of that alone,

you can say in some small way, thank God for Donald Trump. We got to end there. That's so good. It's so good. Jonathan, thank you so much for being on the show. How can people connect with you? Where can they find you? Yeah, I mean, you can follow me on Twitter, you can go to my website or check it out. You can go to speakgodbook.com. And actually, if you go there and you pre-order the book through any of the retailers on there, it's not an expensive book. It's paperback. I think on Amazon, 11 bucks or something. If you pre-order the book on there, you're going to get a ton of free crap. to get a ton of free crap. So you're going to get all kinds of downloads, artwork, and you're going to be put in for like drawings for a trip to New York. I'm giving away a trip to New York. I'm giving away all kinds of expensive gifts just because I want people to, I really believe in this book. I think it's helpful. I want people to read it. And what we didn't talk about is what is the solution to the problem, right? You pre-order the book. You're going to get that all 265 pages

of it. I am going to try to get that free trip to New York. Finally, the book you're gonna get that all 265 pages of it i am going to try to get that free trip to new york finally finally you're not getting it you're not winning i'm putting you you're blacklisted you you gotta come that comes with a hotel stay you're on the couch one of these days will make it happen jonathan you're awesome i think you're uh just such a provocative in the best sense of the term thinker. You always challenge my thoughts in agreement and in disagreement. Thank you so much for being on Theology in a Row, Jonathan. Thanks, Preston. Thank you.