Theology in the Raw - 769: #769 - Beating Guns and Killing Death: Shane Claiborne

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

Preston and Shane sit down for the first time on Theology in the Raw to talk about Christianity, the church, Mother Theresa, guns, gun violence, when he’s getting his dreads back, conservatism and progressivism, and many other topics. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I am so excited about this episode. I've been wanting to have Shane on the podcast for, I mean, a long time, a number of years, really. We've gotten to know each other a bit over the years, mainly from a distance, but really share a lot of common interests and convictions, as you'll hear in this podcast. interests and convictions, as you'll hear in this podcast. So, you know, I was going to read his bio, his, you know, the list of books he's written and where you can find him. But you know what? It's Shane Claiborne. And you're mostly, most of you are Christians. You should know who this guy is. And so without further ado, here is the one and only Shane Claiborne. All right, I'm here with the one and only Shane Claiborne,

and we have so much to talk about. But I want to start with probably maybe the most serious question that I've had about Shane for, I would say, at least the last six years, and that is, when are the dreads coming back? Oh, man. Yeah. Is that behind you? There are times that I miss him. I'm not very aerodynamic on my bike with them and stuff. But I had a pillow every time I was, you know, on an airplane automatically with them. But, you know, it was funny. I was, you know, I don't know if you know this, but I shaved my head when I went to Afghanistan. head when I went to Afghanistan. I also did it when I went to Iraq, because it was kind of a cultural dynamic. But when they first told me, they're like, yeah, if you're going to go to

Afghanistan, you're going to need to shave your head. And I'm like, oh, because I'll stand out as, you know, an American. They're like, no, actually, we're more concerned about you being mistaken as an extremist. Wow, interesting. Grab the scissors, man. Yeah. So I shaved it all off, but, and then for a while I had a deal with my wife. She liked it short for a little while. So, uh, I got a back massage for every week that I left it short. So that's been a good drive. So they're not coming back. You're, you're killing it, man. No, yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll grow them. I wish I can grow a cool dress. Do it, man. Yeah. Well, I'm glad there. I wish I could grow a cool dread. Do it, man.

Yeah, well, I'm glad there wasn't the Samson dynamic going or whatever. You know, I guess I can preach just the same with or without hair. Yeah. So I want to start. Let's go back. And I shared this with you offline. But I can't remember if I was teaching at Cedarville or maybe just finishing my PhD in Scotland. But I was in some real academic kind of environment. Um, but man, just really wrestling

with, you know, being raised like you, like you and many Christians in a really conservative environment, but then just, you know, reading the gospels and seeing the tension between Jesus and the church and, and all this stuff. And then I read your book, Irresistible Revolution. And it was just, it was, it was a lifeline to me because you put words to just things that we're feeling or thinking, or just contradictions I'm seeing in, in just as I'm reading the Bible, not within the Bible, but between the Bible and the modern church. And can you take us back to, I don't know if you can, for people that haven't read that book, I just, I mean, I mean, maybe it's dated now. I don't know. That's not dated. I mean, you just came out with a new edition, I think, didn't you? Well, it was somebody else's idea, man. Yeah. I was to, uh, on the 10 year anniversary, which was not long ago to do a, you know, revised, like write notes

in the margins kind of thing, you know? So that was actually really fun. So I was able to write about my second trip to Iraq, you know, because I kind of had a first trip that I wrote about there and I'm able to, you know, talk about where some of those friendships have gone over the years and the, the ways that stories end for good, for better or worse, you know, it was fun. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's been cool to, to, uh, see the fruit of that.

I know all the writers that spoke into my life. In fact, one of them, Philip Yancey, just came here to hang out in Philly. I took him out for a cheesesteak. His book, The Jesus I Never Knew, I took to India with me. I had it in my pocket while I was big. I had it over there, carried it around with me, read it. like in my pocket while I was big, but you know, I had it over there, carried it around with me, read it. So yeah,

I'm so grateful to see how the spirits moved in different ways. And yeah, but for me really, the irony is the deeper I fell in love with Jesus, the more I found myself at odds with the kind of white evangelicalism that led me to Jesus. It's like, man, and I mean, we look at the climate we're in right now, and boy, so many of our brothers and sisters that are still in the evangelical church aren't always taking Jesus that seriously, it seems to me. So I like how Gandhi said, I love Jesus. I just wish the Christians acted more like him.

Kind of where I ended up. One of the most impactful stories in that book, and it's been, gosh, 12 years since I read it, I think, that time when you went and spent, was it a year with Mother Teresa in Calcutta or a summer or something and yeah it wasn't a year it was it was right it was between my uh years of college so I went about as long as I could go almost three months you know it was like 10 or 11 weeks in the summer um oh man but it was it was transformative for me you You know, I hadn't really spent much time outside of the U.S. or

even outside of the kind of little world I grew up in. And so being in India, I worked in orphanages and I worked in the home for the dying, as Mother Teresa called it, the home for the destitute and dying was her first home. And, you know, she was still alive the first time I went. So I got to meet her and I learned to pray in a deeper way. I learned, you know, what it can look like to follow Jesus. And the leper colony, you saw, gosh, this is how impactful that was. I mean, how different you learned what a Christ-like community should look like by hanging out with a leper colony because they actually like actually physically tangibly needed each other. You know, we had one person making the shoes,

one person making the shirts, whatever. And can you just, I don't know. Yeah. This is actually the fun of having you on the screen here is I can, this, this like right here, this was made, uh, in that, in that little village of folks who had leprosy, you know, and, um, yeah, I mean, I went there, so it was, it was interesting because there was an opportunity where one of the monks or one of the brothers, uh, the men that were a part of Mother Teresa's order left. And, and so they had a place that I can crash there by that i mean a spot on the floor

and uh but it was this village that the property was along the train track so it wasn't worth much um and someone donated it to mother Teresa because literally the train tracks went right through this village of 300 families or whatever you know but she built this community there 300 or so families that in in i mean that the caste system is still very real you know so that like when we say outcast i mean there it was literally um with the caste system you couldn't go in restaurants and you couldn't you know shop in public places't, you know, shop in public places, things like that. So she took this group of people that were totally outcasts. And she said,

these folks are very special to God and they deserve dignity. And so we're going to create a village together. And, and it was named Gandhiji Primnivas, which means Gandhi's new life. And if you, you know, those that know much about gandhi know that his idea was like we're going to build a new society in the shell of the old one a new world in the shell of the old one where you know the spinning wheel was one of the

you know iconic images that we'll make our own clothes we'll grow our own food we'll march to the sea and get our own salt and wean ourselves off of the kind of oppressive social structures that are hurting us and and so you know literally they made their own clothes their own shoes they uh and i got to spend uh some time there and and i think it's also where my imagination was opened up to what it can look like to build a community that is trying to build an alternative way of living together in this world. And, you know, I first saw one glimpse of what that could look like in Calcutta. And then you also, was it before or after when you went to Willow Creek, which are on staff at Willow Creek for like a year? On staff might be a stretch, but yeah,

I came back. I was an intern. So I came back and I was literally, I think it was like one week. I was back from Calcutta and I took the internship at Willow Creek. So I moved out to Chicago, suburbs of Chicago. And I mean, I can remember sitting in the food court at Willow Creek. Yeah. And, and just thinking like, wow, these two extremes exist, not only in the same world, but in the same church, you know, in the same, like, this is one version of Christianity and that's another. And to be honest, like, as I write about Willow Creek, there's a lot of things that I learned. I don't look back at that time in a, in a judgmental

way. Like I really learned a lot just as I learned in India. I learned a lot, you know, in South Barrington, Illinois. So this is what I love about you and your trajectory is you're willing, because a lot of people that have a similar trajectory, and I would even say my trajectory is similar to yours in many ways. Sometimes they just, it ends up being, they go to the other extreme where, you know, anything that smells conservative, evangelical, whatever, is just of the devil. It's what's wrong with everything in the country and everything. But you maintain a prophetic critique, I think, of any brand of Christianity that's not imitating Jesus. Imagine that. But I appreciate that you do see, you still see values and things that are good in some of the most conservative branches of evangelicalism. Can you, what are some of those things? You look back

on your faith journey, you know, and you've been in a wide range of evangelical contexts or not even non-evangelical. I mean, what are some things that you feel like conservatives, for lack of better terms, are like, man, I still applaud these, you know, values or things that conservatives are doing or saying? Yeah, well, so first of all, I do find myself a little bit of a political misfit. You know, I don't really feel at home in any camp or party. And that's been like that way for a long time. And one reason for that is because my overarching ethical umbrella is a consistent life ethic. You know, that every person is created in the image of God. And when someone's dignity is squashed or someone's life is cut short, that matters to God, you know. And part of what grieves me is that we've so narrowly defined what it means to be pro-life to one issue, really, to abortion,

that a lot of pro-lifers would be more accurate in saying they're pro-birth or they're anti-abortion, because they really just think about that in terms of one issue. Whereas for me, I do care about abortion. I care passionately about eradicating abortion and reducing abortions, but I also care about gun violence, the death penalty, you know, welcoming immigrants, caring for creation. You know, there's a whole host of other pro-life issues other than just abortion. So, and that means that, you know, I don't think there's a political party that really feels like it captures that very well. And I mean, in the last election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were both for the death penalty, which was a major issue I was working on then.

You know, I mean, so I think when it comes to a value of life, the political parties sort of fall short, you know. Jesus kind of transcended the political categories of his time, but he was pulling and affirming some of the best in them. So you had the Essenes that kind of lived life on their own, really detached from society. But there was something there to pay attention to. John the Baptist kind of pulled on some of that tradition, I think, in the desert. But then there's, you know, you had the Sadducees and the Pharisees. And the Pharisees had a lot of good ideas, but they really heaped heavy burdens on people

and were real self-righteous and didn't live up to the things that they put on paper, you know. So Jesus is kind of like, yeah, they say good things, but, you know, don't live like them. So, yeah, I kind of feel that, you know. Now, I will say, you know, when it comes to concern, I have a very high view of Scripture, you know. So I often say that the problem isn't exactly fundamentalism. It's selective fundamentalism. You know, because if you look at the Sermon on the Mount, I'm a fundamentalist. I'm trying as hard as I can to take the words of Jesus literally. When you look at things like the

Jubilee, I mean, this is God's systemic dismantling of inequity in the world, redistribution of property. I mean, many of the Christians I know, if they read the Jubilee, they'd be like, well, that's socialism or communism. You're like, no, it was God's idea to like, make sure that we didn't create massive inequity in the world, you know? So I, yeah, I really don't find, and I also think that self-righteousness is not partisan, you know? And there's a kind of fundamentalist, legalistic, conservative self-righteousness that you and I are familiar with. That's kind of what we were raised in.

But there's also a progressive self-righteousness. And I see that in a lot of circles that I'm in, folks, that, you know, if you use a plastic straw, whoa, like chewing tobacco when I was in high school, you know, oh, you are a sinner, man. when I was in high school, you know, Oh, you are a sinner, man. You know? So anyway, I, you know, I, I think that like Jesus did not just come to, um, make bad people good, but to bring dead people to life. And it's not just about, I think that living in a life giving way is really important and you can, you can keep the rules and still be really mean or judgmental. And that's part of what I think Jesus is coming to free us of.

You said that you kind of feel tribalist, or you don't have like a political party you resonate with. I mean, is there any kind of sub-community, what am I trying to say, like a tribe? Let's just say capital or lowercase T tribe or denomination, whatever, and Christianity that you resonate with the most. I know, I know you've kind of, you got some Catholic leanings and also some UMC and other circles you run in. So Anabaptist, whatever. I mean, is there one that's like, oh man, if I had to pick one

actual tribe within Christianity, this one I resonate with the most. Well, that's a great question. It's an interesting thing to think about. I guess where I'm finding a real home is in the historic black church and the charismatic church that has survived slaveholder religion, you know, as my friend John Wilson Hartgrove calls it, like the idea that there are folks that the liberation story has been real to them, but so is a personal relationship with Jesus. And so a lot of folks that I find leaving white evangelicalism aren't going anywhere, you know, and it kind of ends up allowing the most toxic forms of Christianity to colonize the whole thing. Because I find tons of life happening outside of white evangelicalism. And that's not to say that there aren't white evangelicals that are living really beautiful, faithful lives.

beautiful, faithful lives. But I do think that Donald Trump has revealed some deep problems with our Christianity and just in general. It's been said that Donald Trump did not change America, he revealed America. I think the same is true of the church too, is Donald Trump didn't change white evangelicalism, but he's revealed it. And when we continue to have over 70% of white evangelicals defending things that are indefensible and that daily are a betrayal of the values of Jesus and the Beatitudes, Sermon on the Mount, the fruits of the spirit, you know, all of that, like you just can't get further from the teachings of Jesus than some of the things we're seeing in our country. So it's not a partisan thing. This isn't just like left and right, but right and wrong. But I do find like, I find a lot of love in the Catholic church and the liturgical, you know, church in general. I think Pope Francis is rocking it, you know, and, you know, St. Francis of Assisi, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, so many of the Catholic saints and, you know, Christian saints are inspirations for us. But like I said, you know, I love being alongside of spirit-filled, liberationist folks like Reverend

Barber and Tracy Blackman, you know, that those are the folks I'm leaning into these days. And they're, they're, you know, in the same vein, like Dr. Martin Luther King. And I'm finding a lot of life there. Since you mentioned politics a couple of times, do you have a favorite democratic candidate in the making right now? Or what do you think of Tulsi? We need a commercial break, don't we?

Yeah, no. You know, I find that there's some really, really great conversations happening. I'm encouraged by a lot of the folks that we're hearing from. I mean, when I, when I think of voting though, I'm going to say this, like, I think part of our posture as Christians is that we're not looking for a Messiah. We're looking to do damage control. And too often I think the danger with politics is we think, you know,

this is the hope of America. This is the hope of the world. And so when the early Christians were saying, Jesus is Lord, they were saying Caesar is not, you know, and so I, you know, I think we did, we wrote a whole book, Jesus for President around that. I mean, I do think that like, I do think that the way I will be thinking about Election Day is doing damage control. I find myself, as a Christian, compelled to do everything I can to stop the policies and rhetoric of Donald Trump. So I find it less voting for someone and more voting against someone. So you would probably, yeah, you could weasel out of this if you want. I don't know how public.

I'm doing a good job of weaseling out of it so far, but yeah. Honestly, you know, I've often said like, I want to engage everyone and endorse no one. I want to endorse the values that I see in Jesus and then say, whoever's like aligned with those the most, that's who I'm going to vote for. But like when it comes to treating immigrants, I care deeply about that. Welcoming immigrants. Jesus said, when you welcome the stranger,

you welcome me show hospitality, the foreigner, you may be entertaining angels unaware. So this is holy work. And there's a lot, a heck of a lot at stake, you know. Same with gun violence, you know, the death penalty. So I care about these issues because, to me, loving my neighbor as myself

includes caring about the policies that affect my neighbor, you know. So I think it's irresponsible to say I'm affect my neighbor, you know? So I think it's, it's irresponsible to say I'm loving my neighbor and not engage in political things in a nonpartisan way. Yeah. So, so, uh, yeah. So, so you might be, let me put this in a real diplomatic way. You might lean towards, um, supporting, supporting to be too strong, endorsing maybe a candidate that would have the best chance of getting rid of Donald Trump. That would be the kind of. Yeah, I think I think in the federal election, that's one of the things I'm going for. You know, there aren't too many people that are challenging the massive military industrial complex that we live in, you know? And so that's one of the things for me is like,

what does it mean to follow Jesus when you live in the biggest military superpower in the world? Like, you know, we, so that, you know, but inequity between the super rich and super poor, my gosh, I mean, that's something Jesus cares about, you know? I mean, you read the first chapter of the gospel of Luke and it says, the mighty are cast from their thrones, the lowly are lifted, the hungry are filled, the rich are sent away empty. And that's not Karl Marx. It's not even Bernie or Elizabeth. That's Mary. That's the gospel. I taught a class on ethics. This was back at Cedarville. And my, one of the assignments, we dealt with the uh, war, abortion, just kind of

classic ethical ones and then economics. And it was part of their assignment. I had read through the gospel of Luke and, um, note every time Jesus made a, a statement about economics, about wealth, about poverty. And that, that was, uh, it was cause I, I, I did that shortly before I assigned that. And I was just like, this is everywhere, especially in Luke. I mean, Luke's like, you know, the progressive gospel. Yeah, it was fascinating just how often, even stories are retold in other gospels, Luke puts that emphasis on this, you know, how you view wealth, how you view the poor, whether you care for them or not, is a main barometer on your commitment to Jesus. Totally, man. Yeah. I mean, there's over 2,000 verses that talk about that, right? God's concern for the poor and justice for the poor. So, you

know, in Jesus's final account of the judgment in Matthew 25 is all of us are going to be gathered and we're going to be asked, when I was a stranger, did you welcome me in? When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was sick, did you, you know, provide health care? Did you take care of me? You know, so I think those things do matter to God. And, and they should matter to those of us who claim to follow Jesus too. So let's, we can move beyond politics there. I don't want to get in any trouble, but I got a question that may not come out in your book. So I mean, you're, you're, you're an activist, you're out in the community, locally, globally, you got a punishing speaking schedule. But you, I'm looking at your, your background here. You got a ton of books and I often see you as... I've got a couple of years on here, I think.

I'm strategically placed right behind the rest of the walls. But I mean, you're an incredibly thoughtful person. Do you have a, you must do a lot of reading is what I'm getting at, or at least thinking or journey or something. Do you have like in your schedule? Cause you have so much output do you do do you set aside time like daily time weekly time to let's like comb through books and really fill your fill your mind up or yeah I think so I'm glad my wife isn't here to correct me but she says I need to read more fiction and stuff like that yeah yeah I I read I try to read a lot especially when I'm writing about things that I'm, you know, still learning about, like guns. I didn't know a ton about guns.

I got probably like 15 books over there on guns that I, you know, really poured into. And same with the death penalty, you know, did a lot of reading on that. Even, you know, how the biblical death penalty worked. And so, yeah, I, I love, I love learning stuff like that, you know, and, and there's things that still I'm invited to speak on and I'm like, you know, I think I probably need to read and learn a little bit more about that before I'm ready to talk about it. I mean,

someone was just asking me yesterday about abortion and I, I, I I'm reading about that right now and learning about it. Cause I don't think it's as simple as like overturn Roe versus Wade. I think the question is like, how can we do the best job at protecting life and including the mothers and women that are affected by this? And, and of course, you know, then the question is, do you need another dude writing a book about abortion? So I'm leaning into a lot of women, you know, as I listened to that, but yeah, so I love reading though, man.

I did try reading a little fiction. I read, I like the, I read some Kurt Vonnegut, you know, I actually got to meet Kurt Vonnegut before he passed away, but I, I, I read trying to read a little bit of fiction. There's my wife. So she's actually, there's my wife so she's actually no way um hey how's it going he was asking me if i read a lot and so i was but anyway um yeah so i i um i've really enjoyed having an excuse to read you know about stuff that i don't know a ton about do you like have a set are you like a routine person do you have like from 9 to 11 tuesdays and thursday, it's nothing but reading time. I'm, I'm, nobody can interrupt me or,

or are you not really a scheduled kind of person? Oh dude, I totally love structure and I'm terrible at it. So yeah, I would love to have like reading time from nine to 12 every day or so. And it might, I, I like that in theory, but it never works that way. So, you know, I have times where I'll try to set aside time to write and read, but I'm always interrupted or too much of an anarchistic soul to keep all the structures I put in place. I'm sure you're in high demand both locally in your community and abroad and emails and all that.

How do you not go crazy? And you seem like the type of person that is somewhat available. Like, I know when you travel, you like to stay at people's homes and you make it, you talk to people. I've been at you with conferences and you take time to talk to people. You don't rush off to the green room and hide out. How do you not go crazy? I mean, I keep a good rhythm. You know, I guess all of us have to figure out ways that we energize our soul. So we're not, you know, riding on fumes, you know, but I I have a very rich life. And part of that is like travel. I limit my travel to not be gone more than like 10 days a month or so. You know, so I'm not gone more than I'm away. And, um, being in my neighborhood, being in, hopefully in the garden and a little bit like all that puts wind in my

sail, you know? Um, and the other thing is like talking about part of what I've, I've gotten a lot of life out of talking about specific things like the death penalty and guns is they are things you can kind of put your finger on, you know, and we get so overwhelmed with information and all the chaos and all the issues of justice that are out there that I like to kind of hone in on those. And particularly, I, you know, talked about the death penalty and gun violence, because I think these are not only political crises, but they are spiritual crises because Christians are on the wrong side of these issues by and far when it comes to gun violence and the death penalty. So kind of trying to poke some holes in the theology that justifies those things has been really energizing. The other thing I'll say is I love collaborating.

So a lot of my books I've done together. I did a book with John Perkins, who's almost 90 years old, you know, son of a sharecropper. I did a project with Ben Cohen, the Ben from Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. Really? I didn't know that. We did a project called Jesus Bombs and Ice Cream. You would like it, actually. We ended up, it's the first weapon conversion we did.

So we turned an ak-47 into a shovel and a rake and we dropped uh buckets of ben and jerry's from helium balloons you know the balcony so it was awesome but you know i i love um i love writing with other people tony campola and i did a book together and yeah you know i did one with jonathan wills hard growth so i i really like the collaborative stuff when you kind of put your minds together on stuff. So let's get into guns and death penalty. Let's start with guns and violence. I mean, how many mass shootings are there this year?

Two hundred and is it 50 or 60 or something? I mean, it's insane. It's crazy. It is crazy. I mean, it depends on exactly how you define a mass shooting because there's different definitions, you know, how many people were injured, how many people were killed. But basically what we're seeing is almost one a day. You know, after Sandy Hook, 20 young kids were killed. Our whole nation had a kind of come to Jesus moment and it was like never again. And then we've let it happen again and again and again, you know, and we've had, you know, 2000 mass shootings since Sandy Hook. So, you know, and mass shootings are just a small percentage of, you know, the casualties of gun violence. We're seeing 105 lives lost every day to guns. And so as one who's pro life, you know, I think every single one of those is a person made in the image of God whose life—God had a plan for their life. And as the Cain and Abel story, that inaugural murder, it says the blood cried out to God from the ground.

So I really believe that God is deeply ag grieved by our epidemic of gun violence. What's the solution? So, man, when I peeked into that conversation, more the kind of broader political one, man, it's gnarly. I mean, it's – oh, hold on a second. I got to turn my – I should have had that off. Shoot. Let me get on airplane mode. Yeah.

So in a sense, I mean, I'm asking a complex question that doesn't have a one sentence response. But what is the solution? Do guns kill people or do people kill people? Is it both? And I mean, what if you were if somebody elected you to some office that, all right, you're in charge, you have unlimited money, reduce gun violence, go. Right. What are you seeing?

Yeah. So I have a lot of thoughts on this. And the first one is that when we end up with these dualisms, you know, it's either or. And so one of those is this idea that what we have is not a gun problem, it's a heart problem. And I think that's a false dualism, right, a false binary. I think, like, why can't it be both? Like, we have a heart problem and a gun problem.

And God heals hearts, but people change laws. And I think we need to kind of think in terms of both, you know, no matter how, I mean, if we got rid of every gun in this country, which is not what we're going for, but let's say we did what people would still find ways to kill each other, you know, people have turned a pressure cook, you know know the guy in the Boston Marathon turned a pressure cooker into a bomb folks have weaponized cars and driven them into crowds like we will find ways to kill people but the fact is that there are some things that are actually designed to kill and something is like AR-15s assault rifles are designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

And that's what they keep getting used for. And that's where we stand alone in the industrialized world is by allowing weapons, military weapons to be, you know, just prolific in our country on the streets. And they're the weapon of choice of mass shooters. So I think what we need to do is to really hold out that this is a spiritual crisis and we need God to heal violent, hate-filled, racist hearts. And meanwhile, we also need to change some laws so that we don't enable and empower people, sinful, broken people to do so much damage in the world. And so, you know, I think about cars and cars aren't designed to kill, but they can. And we've learned some things about keeping people safe, you know, with that technology. And we've added seatbelts, you know, you have, you're required to take a test, If you're irresponsible with your car, then you lose your license. We've got limitations on how the irony is like cars are not designed to kill, but guns are.

And we, we, it's one of the most untouched industries in our country and they exploit that immunity. You know, there's, I found this out when I was writing her book, there are more there are more regulations on toy guns than real guns. Literally. Yeah. like if you if you and I were like playing paintball or like let's say we're playing with nerf guns and I shoot you in the eye and it does you know you put your eye out you can sue nerf but the gun industry is it has an immunity from that and gun dealers that deal with guns irresponsibly are immune. So that's some of the stuff that you look at.

When you really look at it, you're like, man, this stuff is really nuts. It's not gun owners that are the problem. It's the gun profiteers. Okay, that's a good distinction. The folks that are the gun capitalists. So I'm, I'm encouraged though. I'll say, I'll say this man is overwhelming majority of gun owners want to see some changes made. Yeah.

And when the NRA, I differentiate between gun owners and gun extremists. Okay. And the NRA, the national rifle association, they say that they represent 5 million people. And if we give them the benefit of the doubt, what that also means is that over 90% of gun owners are not represented by the NRA and are much more reasonable. A recent study showed that 62% of gun owners find themselves at odds with the ideology and the uncompromising rhetoric of the NRA. So to me, that's really good news.

We've had vigils where we have hunters against gun violence that come. We've got this one group of gun owners against assault weapons. And on their shirt, it says, you don't need 10 rounds to kill a deer. So I think we need a better conversation around guns. And there's things like, you know, should there be a limit to how many bullets you can shoot without reloading? Should domestic abusers be able to get guns? Cause there's a clear link there. Should stolen guns need to be reported or things like, uh, one of my favorites is called one handgun a month

that would limit the amount of handguns one person could buy get this to 12 a year per person and you're like what in the world you know and yet that law gets gets blocked by the uncompromising kind of gun extremists uh you know in the nra and you go who needs more than 12 hand guns in a year you're like someone that's selling handguns, you know, irresponsibly. So I think we just need a better conversation. Well, I live in Idaho, dude. So yeah, we hung out here. So, I mean, guns is such a part of the culture, but it is, I'm glad you made that distinction

because it is, I mean, hunting is a religion here. this, I mean, hunting is a religion here. And I found that even though Idaho is very conservative, very white, it's not, I wouldn't say it's very racist, actually. I thought it would be a lot more coming from Southern California. I was like, I'm coming to White-a-ho where there's like, you know, it's like 98% white, you know. But even though they would be more politically conservative, they would fit that category, I think. The people I talked to would be very, very, very concerned about loose gun laws and people that don't know what they're doing with a gun or even people with a mental illness that have a gun or a history of violence. And yeah, that distinction between the profiteers and gun owners, I think, is a good one. So I was nervous to tell you this, Shane. I own some guns.

You own some guns? Yeah, yeah. No, that doesn't surprise me. I like to hunt. I'm a terrible hunter. But once a year, I go hunting. I got a shotgun. I got a deer rifle.

It would be physically impossible. I mean, I'm a pacifist. I wouldn't use it anyway, but it would be physically impossible the way these they're distributed throughout the house between the, the, the ammunition, the gun, the whatever, um, for, for me to even use it, even if I wanted to on, on a actual human. Um, but, uh, yeah, I was, I was, I was like, man, is Shane going to break up our friendship if, if he finds out? I grew up with guns. And I mean, half my family are still, I mean, almost most of the folks in my family are still gun owners. But, you know, I think even they are really leaning into this conversation around common sense gun reforms.

And this is the thing where with gun owners, I love talking about things like the second amendment, you know, because, um, it was written at a time when guns shot one round a minute, maybe two, you know, and now we have guns that shoot a hundred rounds in a minute, even more than that. And, and, and what's interesting is James Madison, one of the authors of the second amendment, he said this, liberty can be endangered by the abuse of power, but liberty can also be endangered by the abuse of liberty. Oh, wow. And it takes a minute to soak that in.

There was a reason that they wrote well-regulated in the Second Amendment, because they knew that one person's unregulated right to own guns can infringe on another person's right to live. And that danger has always been there. So the idea that, you know, even Justice Scalia, the most conservative Supreme Court justices, as the ruling extended the militia rights to individuals, that was only like 2008, that they always thought we needed some very urgently important, you know, regulations around that or else we're going to end up in the funk that we're in right now. But here's the other thing, man, is that I think that the conversation should go even deeper with Christians who have a higher authority than the Constitution. And that's Jesus and the Bible. And you, you sort of go, man, if, what would it look like if Christians took our commitment to Jesus as seriously as our commitment to the second amendment?

And that's where I think we, we really realized that that this is also a spiritual crisis. Um, when, uh, as I researched for Beating Guns, we found this out, that the highest gun-owning demographic in America, unsurprisingly, is white evangelicals. But we own guns at a higher rate than the general population.

So, you know, we're worshiping the Prince of Peace on Sunday and Pack of Meat on Monday, you know? And there's a, I think like when you look at this, there's something very deep about power that it unveils for us. And the cross and the gun give us two very different versions of power. And one says, I'm willing to die. And the other says, I'm willing kill. And, you know, that's why we dedicated a real whole book to this is because I think there's all kinds of other important conversations that we need to have about what we put our trust and our hope in to deliver us. Right. And, and I think, you know, how we've come to, to really subject ourselves to fear.

And I think that's a lot of what's driving our policies in our country right now is we are held hostage to fear. While scripture says so clearly that perfect love casteth out fear. Fear and love are enemies. And there comes a point where we have to choose. Are we going to live on the side of love or the side of fear? There's also the identity piece when it comes to guns, American culture, our history, the symbolic power that a gun has. This is something that drives me crazy.

People talk about a gun being kind of a neutral thing. of a neutral, a neutral thing. And that's just so cold. That's sociologically and psychologically incredibly naive to think that this object does not actually have psychological influence in you just by having it. I mean, it, it, it influences the way we posture ourselves, our identity, the way we think. And this is, this would be the big difference between, well, yeah, I don't need to keep talking about my guns. But, you know, people get so up in arms over like the Second Amendment or the taking away our guns. I'm like, look, if the government made a lot of take away my guns, I would probably drive them to the whatever and say, here they are. Who cares? Like, you know, same thing if they told me to give up my baseball bat.

It's like I love baseball, man. I got my bat right here. But my identity isn't in my like it's like this isn't why I'm here. It's not for these things, these hobbies or whatever, you know, I can go to the store and buy my meat. I don't need to, you know, hunt it. I prefer killing my own meat, but if not, whatever, you know, like, I just think there's such an idolatrous spirit that I think is one of the main roots that needs to be pulled up, an idolatrous spirit that I think is one of the main roots that needs to be pulled up, an idolatrous spirit that sees guns as woven into our identity or even the Second Amendment, that this freedom we have to own guns is such a huge part of our humanity. And I think that leads to so many other idolatrous symptoms that stem from that.

Yeah, I think that this conversation around idolatry, it might sound a little like extreme or outdated to some folks, but, you know, to be, to be real frank, I mean, idols are things that we put our trust in, you know, they're things that we, they aren't God, but we kind of treat them like they are. And we give them a certain reverence that really belongs only to God. And we, you know, I think when we really begin to trust in something other than God, like we end up getting that out of whack. And I've been traveling around for the folks listening, this won't be very helpful, but we traveled around the country with this Bible case that a pastor friend of mine gave me.

And he said, check this out. This is one of the top selling Bible cases in the entire country. And I looked at it and I'm like, doesn't look like much. Looks like a Bible case. You know, he goes, hold on, open it up. And you open it up and you see that it's actually a concealed carry, you know, gun case that says Holy Bible on the front of it. So I carry that around to say like, you like, to folks that think that this is extreme language

around idolatry, when you have a top selling Bible case that's designed to carry a gun instead of a Bible, like it's not that extreme. And the NRA knows that. Warren Cassidy, one of the executives of the National Rifle Association said,

and I'll quote this, I quoted it, I want to make sure I got it right. So he said, you would get a far better understanding if you approach the NRA as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world. They know that there's a, you know, reverence to the gun and this, you know, the sacred stuff that resides in this wooden stock and blue steel and, you know, through my dead hands. You know, like we've made a certain idolatry out of it. And I think what idols do is it's been said it behooves us to be careful what we worship.

For what we worship, we are becoming. Like it's changing us, right? And when you worship something that is a false God, it ends up changing our view of God so that God becomes more like us. And I think the opposite is true of real worship. When we're worshiping the God of the universe, Jesus, it changes us to become more like god and it we're we're you know our lives are being challenged in the narrative and so when you have bumper stickers that say jesus would still be alive if he had an ar-15 you're like whoa you know i think it's actually very true that god created us in his image and we decided to return the favor. You know, so you got an NRA gun token Jesus that's ready to take out anybody that comes against him. It sounds like something from the Babylon Bee or something.

Oh, yeah, dude, you can't make his stuff up. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Now, do you think that kind of whatever you want to call it, the classic evangelical gun kind of culture, do you think that's going to die off? When I talk to people that are 35 and younger, they may not be on the same

side of nonviolence, but the whole partisanship, the sort of moral majority 1980s stuff, they're just not, the majority I talk to might still be very theologically conservative, but this stuff, they, they're looking for a better way to talk about this. Do you, are you finding that too? I mean, Oh, absolutely. I think with almost every one of these conversations, um,

there's a generational, uh, disconnect, you know, um, they, I mean, especially true with the death disconnect, you know. I mean, especially true with the death penalty, you know, and gun violence. I think a lot of these things that there's an old guard white evangelicalism that is dying out. And it's not producing at least a charismatic, you know, magnetic new generation of leaders. There's still some forms of fundamentalism, but that kind of religious right moral majority of Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed, I think that's definitely dying out. As Russell Moore said, there's not many young John Hagees, which won't mean many anything to the millennials listening. But you know,

I think like that, the Pat Robertsons, that, that, that is an aging evangelicalism. And I thank God for it because I think it's become really, really contaminated with power and the prosperity gospel and American nationalism that's really just camouflaging itself as Christianity. But, you know, it looks almost nothing like Jesus or the Sermon on the Mount. So, I mean, I look at young millennials and there was a study done. You and I were talking about the Q conference, you know, and I think it was like 80% of millennial Christians are against the death penalty. And it's not in spite of their faith. It's because of it.

They've done good theology. They've, you know, looked at what scripture says about many of these issues. So I'm really encouraged. You look at young people that are rising up the march for our lives around gun violence, Black Lives Matter. The, you know, young people around the world that are rising up to take on the environmental issues. So I'm encouraged. What a fun time to be alive, I think. Have you had any breakthrough with Liberty University? I mean, I see stuff online that, you know, you've even spoken there and have reached out to them and stuff. I mean, are you allowed to talk about any behind the scenes conversations going on?

Not what we call a gag order. No, I'm just kidding. I can talk about anything I want. I think that Liberty, you know, the interesting thing at Liberty is that I have been to speak there. You've probably been to speak there too, right? I mean, I was invited to speak there several years ago. I got really close to riding snowboarding in the summer. They have a summer snowboarding hill. Yeah, I didn't want the rug burn. I was a little nervous about that. Like, I think snowboarding should happen on snow. But anyway, you know, it was good. I mean, I met a lot of great folks. I'll tell you this, like, after I preached, folks were like, I bet people were upset. I said, No, the first person that came and talked to me after I preached

was someone that was involved in the war in Iraq. And he came up and he said, I have, was involved in the war in Iraq and he came up and he said, I have, this has weighed on my heart ever since while you were there in Iraq, we were dropping the bombs on Iraq. And he said, I wanted to ask you just to pray with me that I, you know, and that was like one of my first encounters and they went from there, you know, I, and I found people really resonating, um, there, things have changed really dramatically with Jerry Falwell Jr. being in charge of the place.

There's all kind of exposes out there and things of all that. But I mean, what we did when we had the revival in Lynchburg was we just wanted to offer a counter narrative of what Christians care about. Because when Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham and others, Jerry Falwell has said that Donald Trump is the dream president of Christians. What happens is it's not just his reputation that's drugged through the mud, but you know, all of ours, if we don't respond to that with another narrative. And so we've, you know, I think we've been offering a different version of what Christians care about and especially Christians that care about the poor and the most vulnerable people. So, you know, we asked for permission to go on property to pray at Liberty, as you know, I think. And we wanted to be very specific. We

wanted to pray on the gun range. They built a gun range at Liberty, and they're encouraging all their students to get guns. So we wanted to pray for the victims of gun violence. We wanted to pray outside the drone training center because they're training militarized drone operators there. So we wanted to pray for peace. Wait, they have a drone training center? Yeah. I mean, you can't make this stuff up, man. So that's why we want to pray there because we literally feel like there's principalities and powers that we're up against that get exposed there. So the irony is that we were told if we came on campus to pray, we could be arrested, we would be arrested, and that we would be fined and spend time in jail. And all this at a university called Liberty that has championed the right to pray in public spaces. So anyway, I think what it did was it just held a mirror up, you know, and we were not there to villainize or vilify Jerry Falwell.

We were there to lift up Jesus. And I think Jesus is the best corrective for, you know, what's kind of gone wrong in certain parts of evangelicalism. So we had students, alumni, all kinds of other folks that really were with us. And for a long time, we were trying to get a group of Liberty students up here to work in an abandoned house, you know, and join us in Philly and learn from each other, talk to each other. I'm still really open to that. But yeah, I think what we felt is that there is a real oppressive, coercive power at work in a lot of those places. And that's unfortunate. You know, even people that were trying to tell the story in the student newspaper lost their jobs and things like that. So it was heavy, man. Yeah. I used to teach online classes at Liberty university for a couple of years, at least. And in my experience, it's not the students so much, or even the faculty. It's

just like you said, that does seem to be, I mean, I, yeah, we can name names, but I mean that it seems to be a small minority of people with a ton of power. That's kind of controlling the narrative that exists there from my, I mean, I'm looking on from the outside, but you ever hung out with Franklin Graham? You guys gotten together at all? And we've asked to over and over. And actually Franklin goes to the same church as some of my family in North Carolina, my wife's family, they worship in the same church. And so, yeah, here's the interesting thing is, is in every one of these situations, we've reached out privately.

We've also reached out publicly because their statements are public. But we said we would love to talk with you. We're not here to lob, you know, grenades a mile away. Like we want to talk with you. And I asked Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham if they would talk privately with us or publicly, you know, if they would come to our revivals. I asked Jerry Falwell if we could pray together once a month, you know. So I think the important thing is that dialogue takes two, and we're holding a handout, you know, to open up that conversation. But I mean, I really would like to have a conversation about how Jesus informs how we are thinking about faith and politics right now in our country, because I think this is a it's an absolute crossroads in American history.

And we've got a role to play. Shane, I've taken enough of your time, man. This was fun. This is awesome. I can keep going on and on. Your latest book, Beating Guns, right? Yeah. And we've been beating guns in the plows. One of them for the folks that might watch is, you know, we've been inspired by Micah and Isaiah when they talk about beating swords in the plows and spears in the pruning hook. So we've been taking donated guns and turning them into garden tools and other beautiful things, you know,

out of those guns. So my friends at Raw Tools, that's their name, which is war flipped backwards, rawtools.org. We wrote the book together. It's got images of all the stuff we're making out of guns. tools.org we wrote the book together it's got images of all the stuff we're making out of guns but you know i think it's it's powerful in the matter of an hour we can go from a gun to a garden tool but it's also symbolic that you know we believe in concrete change and we want to see our streets also turned uh from death to life is that concrete symbolism i mean beating guns and the gardening tools has that been an effective, at least, conversation starter, if not part? It's unbelievable. Really? I mean, when we started this stuff, it definitely started as more of a symbolic, provocative, imaginative thing. But we found it's so much deeper than that. You know, like we're giving space for healing and for

the Holy Spirit to move, to honor people's grief and pain. So we always invite people that are directly impacted by gun violence to take the hammer if they want to. And I mean, we've had moms just beat on the gun barrel, like weeping and naming the names of their children. My friend Sharon Risher, whose mom was killed in Mother Emanuel AME Church in the South Carolina church as they worshiped, she named all nine of the Emanuel Nine killed in that shooting.

But then we had other things. We had a man that counted 18 times every time he hit it, one, two, three. And afterwards, it was like, man, there's something to that. And he said, yeah, I took the life of an 18-year-old. Oh, gosh. And so as I was beating on that, I was praying for healing. I mean, it is symbolic, but it's much more than that. I've come to think of it really as sacramental.

There's something holy that happens at the forge as we see the metal transform but also space for people's um grief and trauma that's raw tools they're in colorado right colorado yeah they're hubbed out of colorado we've got a little raw tools uh shop though now here in philly i've got a little blacksmithing shop and i've got so many I've got more guns than you do, my man. Mine are just chopped in half, but I've got like probably 40 guns in my basement all chopped into pieces. You can start a militia if you want to do, Shane. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. People could find you. I mean,

shoot, just Google Shane Claiborne. You got a website with a bunch of stuff on there. Some really interesting t-shirts, man. I was checking out the merch at The Simple Way, man. Some pretty provocative stuff there. Yeah, man. We got one shirt. What if Jesus meant the stuff he said? And it's got the whole sermon on the mount on the back.

Yeah, but we created a lot of these micro businesses too to try to support our work in the neighborhood. So folks can find all of my books and other great stuff there too. And the shirts and everything. It's thesimpleway.org. I just heard a story about you and I want to confirm it. A buddy of mine, I can't remember who it was now. Shoot.

A little fact check. Fake news. No, no. Somebody said that they were out there. They were at a conference where you spoke. This might've been years ago. I don't know. And you said,

I'm going to preach the greatest sermon you're ever going to hear. And then you quoted, you, you spoke the sermon on the Mount and got booed. Like some people booed you or something like they didn't like people were upset or. I don't know about that. I don't think it sold too many uh uh copies of the session um in the bookstore you know but um

yeah you know it was one of those times you know you have those times where you just feel like a nudge from the spirit and i bounced it off a few people and i'm like that's what i'm doing and it was a conference that i love but it's also a conference that can sometimes be a little like over the top over program, like, you know, and all this noise. And I thought, you know, I think sermon on the Mount just speaks for itself. And, um, and so, uh, yeah, I felt moved to do that. And then I did tell them, you know, if you feel like you need to keep your, you know, honorary, you know, you just, you just essentially paid, you gave me a lot of money to read the sermon on the mount.

So like, you can keep all that if you want. No, but it was, it was powerful, man. And people still tell me this day, like, you know, kind of how it, it cut through the clutter to sort of, you know, speak for itself. But I don't think that was really my original idea. I just felt like in that situation that that was the right thing to do. Oh, that's awesome.

All right, I'll let you go, man. Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it, dude. Good luck on your life, your ministry, your journey. Yeah, if you need to get rid of any of those guns, just let me know. No, I'm just kidding, bro. It's always good to talk, man.

Love you, bro. You too, man. Take care. Thanks for listening to another episode of Theology in a Raw. If you want to support the show, if you were encouraged, challenged, blessed, consternated by this episode or other episodes that you have heard on Theology in a Raw, then you can support the show for as little as five bucks a month. You can go to patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. That's Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N forward slash Theology in the Raw. Hopefully you

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