Question Your Answers with Pastor Kristian A. Smith

This week, we’re diving into faith and doctrine and how it shapes our worldview. Pastor Kristian A. Smith – public theologian, Spiritual Humanist, and digital pastor of The Faith Community Virtual – is here to share about his journey of deconstructing his theology and what can be fruitful and reorganizing when we have the courage and community to ask the big deep questions about faith.

• Follow Kristian on Instagram  
• Check out the Faith Community Virtual 
• Read Kristian’s book: Question Your Answers: A Deconstruction Survival Guide

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:06

Hello everyone, welcome to Becoming the People. I'm Prentice Hempel. This is an episode where I get into a little bit of terrain that I haven't touched as much. We're talking about religion today. We're talking particularly about the Christian faith, but we're talking really broadly about faith and doctrine and oppression through those means. I am someone who grew up in the church, and I know that for many of us who grew up in the church or in organized religion, there's not just the kind of books that we read or adhere to, there's not just the community of the church, but it's a it's a shaping of your whole worldview, your sense of who you are, of who God is, of what it means to be right or good or bad. It shapes your family and how your family operates. It can shape your communities, and it can shape our political landscape and reality. And all of this is happening, and sometimes it's really invisible to so many of us just how deeply our religion and our faith is shaping the world around us and what we allow ourselves to think and what we don't allow ourselves to think. And thinking thoughts that are outside of what we've been taught can feel scary. There can be almost a kind of existential threat when you start thinking outside of the box that you've been offered. Like, who will you be if you start asking these questions and getting answers that you didn't anticipate? Who will the people around you be? What does it mean about existence itself? These are really, really big questions that people either face or run away from alone. And one of the people that I have been paying attention to in the last period is Pastor Christian A. Smith, who talks about church and comes from the black church in particular, which I really relate to, but talks about this questioning and what can be really fruitful and freeing and reorganizing when we have the courage and the community where we can ask these big and deeper questions about our faith. So I really wanted to talk to him. He is from, I think he's a fifth generation or he comes from five generations of Baptist preachers. He is a pastor himself. He is a theologian. He wrote a book called Question Your Answers, which I really, really love that title. Um and it I think it speaks to the core of his work. I think he is the voice for so many in his own congregation of people who are really committed spiritually, are committed to living spiritual lives, um, but are also committed to being as wide awake as possible. He's not really, I think probably he gets a rap for having people leave faith, but uh, that's not actually what I think he's doing at all. I think he's creating spaces where we can tell the truth, where we can ask our questions, where we can say, actually, this doesn't work for me. The way that the churches have been operating and who they've been operating for, there needs to be a reorganization of how we do church, um, how we do, how we organize our faith traditions, so that they serve more, serve more of us, and that they serve love, which I think is really, really the core of his message. Love is at the very center, and he's letting his belief and understanding of love reorganize how he builds his own congregations, but how he also interprets and reads scripture. We talk about obviously that in this conversation, but so much. We talk about certainty, we talk about queerness, we talk about fundamentalism, we talk about belonging, and we talk about Christian nationalism, which was something that I really wanted uh to speak with him in particular about as we see the kind of erecting of the this Christian nationalist core in the United States. I'm from Texas, where they're trying to make it obligatory for kids to read scripture. What does that mean? Who are they trying to make us be? And who are they trying to make us be in relationship to each other? And I'm really interested in this path, I think, that Christian is laying out, of people that get to be deeply engaged, deeply questioning, deeply loving, that that be the center of how we practice together. So I don't want to give too much away, but when I tell you I was excited that he said yes to this episode, I was so, so excited, so, so grateful. And um I think this is a really, this is a really important episode, and I think he's a really important figure in this moment. So I hope that you all enjoy it. Some of you may be bristling at talking about faith or religion or Christianity, but I I hope that you come to it with an open heart and mind and see what there is for you in your own journey and path here. And uh thank you so much for listening. Christian Smith, I am really glad to be with you today. I was really looking forward to talking with you. So thank you for coming on the podcast and for being willing to be in this conversation with me.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

Likewise, I'm glad we were able to get this worked out with all of the scheduling that we both were trying to work out. Yeah. All the we thank you for the flexibility making it happen.

SPEAKER_03 5:39

Of course. I I imagine both of us are sitting in front of these microphones, probably more than we want to admit. But uh yeah, I'm glad we can make it work.

unknown 5:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

When you talk for a living, you kind of get in front of microphones a lot.

SPEAKER_03 5:52

Absolutely, absolutely. Which it's sometimes I'm like, I have to stop talking so I can do some more living, so I have something to talk about. But yeah, it's it's all balancing that out.

SPEAKER_02 6:03

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 6:04

I want to, there's so many places I want to go with you because your work is so personally relevant to me in my journey, but I think it's it's it's gonna be one of these conversations that really hits home with so many people that listen to this show, to this podcast. But I want to start with you first because I have so much curiosity about you, Christian Smith. And I know one of the things that I read or maybe I heard you talk about that you come from many generations of Christian pastors. And so I wonder if you could start with just telling me a little bit about uh the world that you grew up in, the kind of the church world, the set the scene for us. Where does Christian Smith come from?

SPEAKER_02 6:45

Yeah, born in Oakland, raised in San Diego from the age of 10, to Pastor W. James Smith and Tony Annette Robinson Smith. Uh my dad was my pastor. Uh, his dad was a pastor, his dad was a pastor, his uncle was a pastor. Uh so yeah, five generations of Baptist preachers that I come from. I was raised in the National Baptist Convention. There's like three or four of them. I don't know which one. Like, you know, all these conventions split one from another over some, you know, traditional or issue of doctrine for whatever reason, or people just power hungry and want to have a position. Uh so I grew up in the space when it came to um like the theology around sexuality, when it came to like saying gender-loving people, it was very much don't ask, don't tell. Um a tolerant space as long as you didn't make a big fuss out of it. Uh, and that's just what I was raised in, while at the same time, my parents always telling me to treat everybody right. So even though my dad wasn't theologically affirming, he was like friendly with everybody. So growing up in Oakland on the block, my church was on MLK, right across the street from the block where the the trans sex workers, you know, posted up. So like my dad had a cool, like cordial relationship with the trans sex workers across the street. They would call him pastor, they would come to church. I remember one time, like one of them came down during the invitation and got saved, like in their outfit. Not like you gotta change before you come in here, and then after church, they went right back to the corner. So, like that type of interaction was normalized for me, even though my theology suggested otherwise. So I just kept living. And um, I I acknowledged a call to preach in 2007. And one of the first things my dad told me was a call to preach is a call to prepare. So he was like, I want you to get educated, don't just get up and start preaching and not make a commitment to educating yourself. So 2013, I went to seminary, and that's where my theological evolution really took shape. Uh I think I had a really good foundation to be open to the level of critical thought that seminary would invite me to engage in. And that's where my theology around human sexuality was challenged. My theology around biblical authority was challenged, and it just kind of set me on this path to where I am now doing this inclusive, justice-oriented advocacy work in ministry.

SPEAKER_03 9:50

There's so much there that I want to get into. I want to just, were you an inquisitive child, like growing up in the church or just in life in general? Were you always someone who was kind of asking? My mom would say to me, You would argue with a signpost, is what she would say to me all the time. Because I was just like, Why this? Why you say that? Uh, were you that kind of child growing up? Always inquisitive.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

So I wouldn't say I was inquisitive in particular. You know, maybe maybe my mom could speak more to that. I feel like I was more like a go with the flow in general, but I was trained to craft arguments. Like my parents trained me to think critically. They just didn't give me permission to use it with my theology, with my with my church doctrine. Like that part you were mostly supposed to accept and embrace, not so much wrestle with it and question it and pick it apart. But in other aspects of life, it was like think critically. All right. You you say you want this privilege, you want this luxury, state your case. Why should I do this for you? So I have to like come up with the logical, sensible reason why my parents should grant my request. So that kind of reasoning was always at work, just not until I got to seminary where they said, okay, we give you permission to use that critical thought to with all of this theology stuff. And then it just kind of took off from there.

SPEAKER_03 11:19

So was it about the first moment that you start to kind of question the theology as you've been, as it's been handed to you, was in seminary, was it around gender sexuality that you started to feel the cracks? Or where did you first start to allow yourself to ask the questions without covering it up with, you know, I'm not supposed to ask questions about this? When did you actually start to let your curiosity lead?

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Day one, orientation. Uh, I wrote about it in my latest book, Question Your Answers. At the time of this recording, it's it's an ebook. I plan to release the paperback this summer. But I tell the story like my first day in orientation. Different professors were getting up sharing commentary. And uh one of the professors, Dr. Karen Massey, she got up and she told us, she said, I want y'all to know right now, the Bible is not the word of God. And I was like, Oh.

SPEAKER_03 12:19

Wow. I mean, I felt that.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

Okay. I was like, oh, okay, like this is what we're doing, right? So at that moment, it was like, okay, either you're gonna run or you're gonna lean in. So I decided to lean in. Like, let's see what they're talking about. Let's see, let's see why she made that claim so boldly. And that opened me up to like, okay, let's go. And it just took off from there. My first, my first semester of seminary, I had uh Old Testament and church history, two classes that really, really rocked my whole understanding of faith and theology and just the history of Christianity and all of that stuff. And it just was like a uh a ripple effect.

SPEAKER_03 13:07

You you it was it like you were able to see the Bible kind of in its historical context, and yeah, like absolutely yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

Yeah, like you know, the Bible was presented as like this um this like magic book that fell from heaven that God had just dictated and just dropped it on us and said, Here, do this. And and seminary was like, No, that's not how that worked. Like, this is a whole tradition, particular culture, different writers, different angles, different agendas, different beliefs about God. And it's all brought together in this canon, but it's not this magic book that was dropped from the sky. So you need to wrestle with it, you need to pick it apart, you need to be critical about it, you need to ask questions, and there are gonna be times you need to reject stuff in here. So that just changed everything.

SPEAKER_03 14:01

Okay, so for you, this is what I want to know. Cause I grew up in the church. I grew up going to church in Texas, in the town that we grew up in. We were never like um, you know, there's some people that were just in the church, you know, every day of the week that they could be in the church. We weren't quite like that. My mom liked to, she liked to go to a lot of different churches. Like if we woke up one day and she was like, I don't want to be in church all day, so we're gonna go to a white church today.

SPEAKER_02 14:31

In my tradition, they would call that church hopping.

SPEAKER_03 14:33

We were church hopping, absolutely. We were a church hopping family, absolutely. We went to church and almost every Sunday, but we were church hopping for sure. Um so you know, for me growing up, I never quite um bought it as it was sold to me. I was like, huh? I have a lot of questions, and every time I would pose the questions, you know, get the answers of like, that's not for us to know, or you know, ask Jesus and you'll you'll get the answer. All of those kinds of things are kind of dead in you in your questions, and you learn not to question. But I I I always had questions. I always had questions and things didn't sit right with me. Now, as I've gotten older, my relationship has changed. I've come around it through other back doors, and I'm like, oh, I can I I understand more of the value in the lessons here. But I didn't get it growing up, even though I was in the church. But there are people around me that I mean, my grandmother was, she would sneak up on you and be like, if you died right now, where are you going?

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Oh god, no.

unknown 15:43

No, baby, no.

SPEAKER_03 15:45

Absolutely, absolutely. She hit you with that one too, just out of nowhere all the time.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Like, you made me shift in my seat now. Wait a minute. That was like an invitation.

SPEAKER_03 15:58

And I'm a smart mouth too. So when I got to be like 13, I'd be like, probably first the graveyard. And she'd be like, don't play, you know. Don't play with God. Don't play with God. Uh but the I mean, people were really see steeped in it around me. And what I have noticed is that there really just is a, you know, there's the culture of not asking questions, but when people start to have that inkling or that, like, well, there's this part that, you know, um, I can't quite reconcile. There's a fear that comes up. You know, the whole world view is is coming into question. And I'm I'm thinking about for people that are listening or people that are that come to you, to your congregation, or even you and your story, like, how do you address the kind of deep-seated fear that we can have, even to start to open ourselves up to thinking more expansively about our faith and about Christianity in particular?

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Yeah, there's so many layers to that. You know, we're we're talking about what I what I wrote about in my latest book, like not merely the beliefs that pay that people have, but the infrastructure that holds the belief system together.

SPEAKER_03 17:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

And fear and control are major components of what hold fundamentalist belief systems together. And I say fundamentalist because I'm I'm not just talking about Christianity. In our context, that's where we see it most clearly in Christianity. But fundamentalism in general is just like this rigid, narrow commitment to a strict set of rules and regulations, and everybody is judged based on their adherence. It's uh it's rooted in control, so it wants to control how you behave, how you see the world, how you interact with people, how you interact with yourself. And it's all based in a theology of certainty. So everything is certain. That's why your granny asks you, where are you going when you die? You gotta be certain. There's no room for the mystery of theology because we don't really know what happens when we die. We have a lot of different beliefs about what happened, but we don't really know. But when you are indoctrinated into a theology of certainty, now you feel like I gotta be right because if I'm wrong, I'm not gonna just be intellectually wrong, I'm gonna be eternally wrong. So my whole life is in danger if I get this wrong. My eternal life is in danger if I get this wrong. Not only am I concerned about my eternal life, I also have to deal with my existence now, my material existence. And if you were raised in church, a lot of your community is tied to church. Like as a church kid, like that was like a big part of my community. But the thing is, your community is built around a shared belief. If your beliefs start changing, now you're no longer welcome into the community. Particularly if you share those changing beliefs. Now, some people their beliefs change and they just keep them to themselves because they want to stay a part of the community. But if you start voicing those beliefs out loud, now your your not only is your afterlife uh impacted, but your current life is impacted because you've lost an entire sense of community, which leaves a void in your life. So there's so much fear involved in rethinking your beliefs and reimagining your faith that I try to always hold space for because this is not easy. It's not everybody's not gonna do it because of how difficult it actually is to stand on your own two feet and say, I choose to believe this, I choose not to believe this, this is why. And it goes beyond some canned Bible verse that somebody gave me to fear monger being to believe in.

SPEAKER_03 20:23

I really appreciate you breaking down the layers of the fear, and I think the the social aspect of what we lose, the belonging piece of what we lose. And I think you know, I also think about for black folks, the church historically, not in very recent times, but historically been a place of you know, political development, political understanding, understanding the world, the social, political, economic world around us, and how we a place where we come to coordinate how we're going to engage with this. So there's so much to lose for a lot of people, the community piece, the the kind of that worldview piece that you're talking about, and a sense of like there's solid ground underneath me, my eternal life. When you said that, it just kind of puts it into a certain kind of um clarity. Like people are grappling with their eternal life, and that that's on a whole other, that's on a whole other level. That's a lot to ask people to kind of dig into.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

Especially when you're asking them to do it in their developmental years. You're asking six, seven-year-olds, eight-year-olds, do you know where you're gonna go when you die? Like, dang, I haven't even had a chance to live yet. Christian, what do what are we doing here? You know what I'm saying? Like, that's that's a lot of pressure to put on a child, which is why faith traditions do so much work to reach young people. I mean, it's and I'm not just talking about other faith traditions, I'm talking about the work that I do. I really, really want to get into working with young people to give them a solid foundation of critical thought and and mystery and imagination. And agency and autonomy and beloved community. So they don't have to unpack all of this foolishness that kids get indoctrinated with. Because, like, our connection to the divine and faith, like, that's not going anywhere. It's going to change and morph over time. You know, but we have a connection to spirituality. It's just kind of ingrained in who we are as a whole. Now, there are exceptions. There are black atheists who don't do really, really do spirituality. I respect that. I ain't trying to convince or convert anybody. I'm just talking about the reality that, like, in general, we're spiritual people. So we need frameworks that develop a healthy sense of spirituality from the time that we're young. So we don't have to do all of this deconstruction and the church did this to me and the theology did this to me. Let's start young the same way the fundamentalists do and talk about what does it look like to love yourself and how you live that out in the world.

SPEAKER_03 23:06

Which is a I don't think that question, that question, how do you love yourself and how do you live that out in the world, that's not a question that was really offered to me, you know, growing up in the church. That's not actually what I felt like we were grappling with. So that's a that's actually a really powerful question opposed to to a young person or to offer rather to a young person. There's one thing I'm just thinking about here, because what I'm really trying to speak to is like people who are on those edges of maybe having questions, but feeling afraid to share them or having them just inside. I want you to be like explicit and honest. Like, what has been the cost for you in doing this deconstruction work? Like, what are the costs?

SPEAKER_00 23:52

How much time do you have? Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_03 23:56

So not very much, you're saying.

SPEAKER_02 24:00

Um, the cost has been great. The cost has been great. Uh I was I was celebrated in my faith tradition. Like my trajectory was pretty much set. I was an itinerant preacher, traveling the country, preaching in all these different places. As my theology was beginning to evolve. Um, and once I started sharing my theological perspectives publicly on my own platform, all of those invitations dried up. The people that called me nephew were now condemning me on social media. The people that called me son were now keeping me at arm's length. Uh there was really no place for me in the black church that I had only known. I ain't never not been a black church kid. And there was a period where I was like, man, I'm not sure the black church is ever gonna rock with me again. Uh, so I lost a big sense of community, a big sense of opportunity. Uh, I lost money. Like being an itinerant preacher, it helped pay the bills. Uh uh, I lost, yeah, I lost a lot of stuff. And I also say this: I feel like I gained even more. Because I gained some amazing relationships that I otherwise would not have. People that I probably wouldn't have allowed myself to get so close to. Now I have like such great relationships and opportunities like this to sit with you. I would have never been sitting here with you had I stayed on the path that I was on. Not because we would have been enemies, but we just wouldn't have been in the same, you know, sphere. Uh so I lost a lot and I gained a lot as well. And I wouldn't trade anything for my journey.

SPEAKER_03 26:02

I love to hear that because I think that's what holds so many of us back from saying the things that are truths to us, like breaking through those things that have become calcified in our own culture inside of us. There is gonna be a cost, but there's also a reward every time you speak the truth or every time you um speak what is congruent, what's in alignment with who you are. And I I just want people to hear that, you know, because it's like all this stuff can be really scary. I know when I started saying, I don't know if I want to continue that practice in that way in my life, yeah, immediately hell shows up immediately. Eternal damnation shows up right away. Like, are you sure? Um so you need that.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

I preached a message at my church in December called the cost of freedom. And it was the second time I preached it at my church. It's the first message I ever preached. Like, I wanted people to know out the gate what we're doing is gonna cost you the freedom to ask all of these questions and be your true self and be authentic, that is costly. And I use a familiar story that people know if you've been in church, about uh the children of Israel when they're coming out of 400 years of bondage in Egypt, and then they go into the wilderness and they're there for 40 years. Well, the wilderness is where freedom happens. When they were in bondage, they knew where their meals were coming from, they had a routine, they had a rhythm, and bondage became familiar. So when they got into a place of freedom, all their familiarity went out the window. And we're creatures of habit. So you lose your rhythm, you lose your community, you lose connections. Freedom is costly. It is deeply, deeply costly. And I think people have to consider that as they enter into it, it'll catch them off guard. It'll be jarring. You'll be like, why is everybody turning on me? I expect that. Expect for people to change their relationship with you if you start asking questions that they're uncomfortable with.

SPEAKER_03 28:13

So, what do you equip yourself with when you're in the wilderness, when you're in that unknown space?

SPEAKER_02 28:18

A sense of inner knowing is the most important thing that I can speak to. And that's just based in my theology. When people ask me, like, how do I come to my conclusions? Like, I go back to the greatest commandment. When I when I let go of the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it. And I was thinking, what am I gonna replace that with? Because that's so uh fundamental to my theological framework, but I don't believe that anymore. So if my default question isn't gonna be, well, what does the Bible say about that? Well, then what's my default question gonna be? And I landed on the greatest commandment, where this attorney asked Jesus, what's the greatest commandment in all of the law? And Jesus responded, Love God with your heart, soul, mind, and your strength. And the second part is like it. In other words, a second part is of equal rank. Love your neighbor as yourself. And then he says, Everything in the law and everything in the prophets hinge on these two. So love God and love neighbor as self go together. It's a package deal. Like you can't take one without the other. And what a lot of people leave out of that greatest commandment is the as-yourself part. People say, Yeah, you know, love God, love neighbor. And I'm like, Yeah, that's cool, but you forgot probably the most important part because Jesus doesn't even command his followers to love themselves, he assumes it. It's the basis for how you love your neighbor. You can't give something you don't have. So, my theology recognizes that self-love is at the core of the gospel. Self-love is the core of the good news. So I work really hard to love myself better every single day, which means paying attention to myself, my emotions, my needs, my hangups, how am I feeling? What's my mood? What makes me come alive, what causes me anxiety, what do I want to do with my time? Where do I want to invest my energy? What type of people do I want to be around? Like, and and paying attention to that helps me to be better for the world around me. It equips me to navigate the wilderness when everything is going crazy around me, but I'm at peace on the inside. So that's that's what has held me. Like, I got me. I got I tell people all the time, hold on to yourself. If you lose everything else, hold on to yourself. Because if you got yourself, you got enough to start all over again. So, yeah, that's that's what has held me.

SPEAKER_03 31:16

That's a word. Because yeah, I talk about it in a kind of psychology sense, talk about self-abandonment, like what happens when we leave ourselves for everything else. We leave our own sensations, we leave our own bodies. So much can happen, but that staying close to yourself, it's like and you have everything. I want to ask you um a little bit more about your your your theology, like the greatest commandment being one of the cores. What what do you feel like is the core of the message that you're spreading and you're bringing to your congregation? But also as you're you're speaking and you're making, I see you everywhere. I mean, like Christian everywhere, and making all these interventions and being in these conversations. What's the what's the core of the theology that you are are spreading? What what what's the good word?

SPEAKER_02 32:00

The the core of the theology is that your love for God is expressed through how you love your neighbor, and your love for your neighbor is a reflection of how you love yourself. So in our community, you know, we have a a weekly live stream that we do in our Patreon community, TFC Virtual. And every Wednesday night we uh, you know, do a live stream and it's like a podcast recording. We got people from our community who are in a live virtual audience. And we've been doing some version of this for six years now. And in every single recording, we lay out the one rule for our community. And the one rule is that we respect and honor each and honor each other's lived experience. So we don't uplift theory or doctrine above what people have actually lived. So if you have a theory or a Bible interpretation and it contradicts somebody's lived experience, we challenge you to take that as an opportunity to learn from what that person has lived. Because your scripture doesn't cancel out their lived experience. It just can't. And so that's what I'm trying to spread every time. I'm trying to help us to recognize the importance of people's lived experiences. Because even the people that wrote scripture were writing from their perspective of their lived experience and how they identify with the divine. And to help people navigate that, because we come from traditions that are so steeped in sin consciousness, which is another topic that I talk about and question your answers, where everything is about sin. We're obsessed with sin. The reason your granny asks you, do you know where you're going when you when you die is to make sure that you don't fall into sin. Because if you fall into sin, you know you're going to hell. So there's this like constant reinforcement of sin, sin, sin. Everything is about sin, trying to avoid sin. Don't fall into sin. Sin is here, sin is there, sin is everywhere, sin is in you, sin is around you. You're a sinner, you're a filthy rag, your heart is deceitful, your mind is wicked. You need somebody to save you. You are born in sin and shaven in iniquity. It's like constantly reinforced. So my theology even helps us to reframe our understanding of sin so that sin is not, is not um defined through a lens of shame and stigma, but defined through a lens of harm. Because the problem with the way sin is currently understood is just you get these certain activities and identities that are stigmatized by your faith tradition, and then shame is associated with that. And it all depends on what faith tradition you were part of. Because if you grew up Pentecostal holiness, like playing cards and going to the movies was a sin. Smoking the cigarette was a sin. But I grew up National Baptist, and the deacon smoked cigarettes in the parking lot in between service.

SPEAKER_03 35:11

Come on, right?

SPEAKER_02 35:13

So we we we try to reframe people's understanding of sin and associate it with harm instead of shame, so that when harm is present, that is the evidence of sin. And that's that's just what I'm spreading wherever I can.

SPEAKER_03 35:35

Christian, what do you say to the people that are like, you can't just remix the scripture for this moment in time? What do you say to those folks? Because I know you get that probably every single day of your life. What do you say? All the time.

SPEAKER_02 35:53

What I say to that is like, let's take a step back because a lot of people conflate their doctrine with the Bible. Doctrines are created by emphasizing and extracting certain parts of the Bible and then either neglecting or reinterpreting other parts of the Bible that contradict your doctrine. So, for example, if you have a doctrine that says alcohol is bad is wrong, you will find every scripture in the Bible that seemingly condemns consumption of alcohol. But if you want to preach a message of moderation, like don't overconsume it, but you know, it's free for you to consume in moderation, you'll just find all of the scriptures in the Bible that suggest alcohol isn't uh an issue because both of them are in the Bible. What people don't understand is their their understanding of sin does not just come straight from the Bible, it's filtered through their doctrine. There, they're whoever created the doctrine that they have internalized decided for them what sin was based on their reading of the scripture. The text does not interpret itself. We're looking at we're like we're we're looking at ancient writings that have been translated and interpreted so many times. And translation in and of itself is an act of interpretation. The translator has to look at the language and the cultural mores and the context and the different words this could mean in English, and who's talking, and who are they talking to? And of these five, six, seven different options for what this word could mean to us, the translator says, I think it's this word. That's an act of interpretation. When we hear the words of Jesus, or when we read the words of Jesus, we're reading the words of a man who spoke Aramaic, it was translated into Greek, then translated into English. And as an Aramaic speaking man, he was quoting his Hebrew scriptures. So there's like four or five languages at play all at the same time. So everybody is doing the work that I'm doing. I am just honest enough to say this is my perspective on it. But what fundamentalists do is they say, no, this is the only understanding of it. Anything outside of this is heresy, it's antichrist, and God condemns it. And I'm just like, but all of y'all are saying that, and none of y'all agree. So I'm just saying, let's allow people to figure out what works for them.

SPEAKER_03 39:15

Hmm. Man, that's provocative stuff, Christian. And I love it so much. I love it so much. I want to come back to a thread that you just laid out there. But first I want to ask, I'm gonna tell you a little bit of a story. When I was 14, and I had this moment where I was like, oh, I think I'm queer. And my church was having one of those old time revivals, like we were outside in the hot Texas sun for some reason, but we were all dressed up, like I don't know. But it was one of those. I don't know if you've ever been to anything like that. But in the middle of the sermon, the pastor's wife gets up and she's like, I have to interrupt. I'm getting a message from God right now. And the message is that there is a young girl here who is struggling with her sexuality, oh God. And the message is don't go to hell, stay the course, don't sin in this way. I got physically nauseous in that moment. I had to pretend that I needed something out of the car, and I went to the car and I just cried as a 14-year-old because I had been praying every night before I went to bed. And I was praying, and this is something I haven't really shared, but I used to pray that I would wake up and not have those feelings anymore. Or I would pray if that weren't possible, I pray not to wake up as a 13, 14-year-old kid. And obviously, I'm not the only person that's had experiences like that, and I had that experiences like that so often. Um, but it feels like right now, this point around queerness and in our community is I don't know if it's a wedge point. I don't know how you'd interpret it, but there's something about that that is that is causing people to either double down or grapple with aspects of the doctrine that they have been living under or have ascribed themselves to, and it's calling something into question. And I wonder, and I've heard you speak very openly about queerness in the relationship to theology, but I think I have a question one about like why do you think this has been such a wedge point for maybe all Christian traditions? I think so. I mean, there's been a lot of splintering, but I guess I really think about our community. And what do you how would you describe what's happening now? What what where the conversation is going in our community around queerness and faith?

SPEAKER_02 41:48

People can be evil. I mean, I mean, at the end of the day, uh that's that's really what comes to mind. Like, I don't believe humans are innately corrupt. I believe humans are innately complex. So, like, we have the capacity for good and evil, and what our community, what our circumstances nurture in us is kind of what we live out. And people like hierarchy, they like somebody to look down on. So you always have these caste systems. Throughout human history, we hear stories about how in different societies, like a certain group of people, were the lower caste, they were the people that were kind of forgotten, left on the margins. But there's always been groups that are marginalized, whether it's black people or Jewish people or queer people, left-handed people, disabled people. And it's one of those things where it's just easy to latch on to because we're afraid of what's different. We're intimidated by what's different and what we don't understand. So the theology is it's really like anti-Christ and anti-human, because it it doesn't give you the freedom to just be. And your story is why I go so hard in the work that I do, because I've heard it so many times. I've heard it so many times. So when I talk about doing the work of harm reduction, and people say, Oh, you know, what are you talking about? And I'm like, no, there's real harm here. Not, not like when, when, when your word from God causes somebody to not want to live anymore. The fruit of your theology. Yeah. The fruit of your theology is suicidal ideation. That is harmful. That is a rotten fruit from a rotten tree. And I refuse to be silenced when I know how many people have this story because I talk to them all the time. I just, I can't, I can't sit around and perpetuate or even accept something like that. I gotta speak out against it. I I wouldn't be me if I didn't.

SPEAKER_03 44:45

I mean, it just, you know, it hits something in me to hear that. I mean, I really wanted to talk to you because I feel so much alignment with what you share, but also, you know, there's something I think that's healing in in all of us is that we talked about belonging in the beginning. We all crave that belonging. You want to belong where you are, you want to belong, you know, with your folks and your community in those moments where you're like, gosh, I can't, I can't belong here. And this feels like I can't say that where we are is all good and grappling with these questions, but I think the fact that we're able to have these conversations feels like something that I'm holding on to. And it feels it feels reparative to that 14-year-old kid, honestly.

SPEAKER_02 45:27

I'm really I'm really glad to hear that. Because, yeah, that's that's why I do this work. That right there is why I do this work. Because when I tell people this work is a matter of life or death for a lot of people, that's not hyperbole. I'm not saying that to be sensational. Like we really dealing with people's lives, like lives are at stake. And I'm not gonna trade out somebody's material existence and their quality of life here for some belief in an afterlife based on some arbitrary list of rules that your doctrine created to keep people in control. Like that, I can't get with it. When you put it like that, Christian. I'm doing what the Bible says. Like, judge a tree by its fruit. And if the fruit of your doctrine is anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation and self-loathing, we need to get rid of that. We need we need to cut that tree down.

SPEAKER_03 46:49

I love to hear it because I know a lot of people probably like, Christian, you're going too far, you're going too far, but that that being the measure makes so much sense. It makes so much sense to me.

SPEAKER_02 46:59

And and Prentice, it doesn't mean we got to throw the whole thing out.

SPEAKER_03 47:02

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 47:02

And I think when people hear me say that, they think I'm saying, throw out the entire thing. I love the black church. I love it. I love the message of Jesus. I I mean, Jesus was actually a pretty dope individual if you read his story. He really cared about the marginalized. When he introduced his ministry to the world, he said, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me and has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, release for the captives, healing for the sick, and liberation for the oppressed. He came out the gate saying, I'm here for the poor, the prisoner, the sick, and the oppressed. I'm not trying to throw out Jesus. I'm trying to dismiss the BS that people have created in his name because they don't really see him as a messiah or a model. They just use him as a mascot. They apply his name to whatever agenda they want to push in the world. And usually that agenda is harmful because it results in the things that we're talking about here. So, yeah, I love the church. I love what it has done, the good things it has done for us. And I can call out the harmful things that it has done. Because both of those things can be true at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 48:23

And are. And I want to talk a little bit about this as we're starting to round out, uh, this piece around power. And when you talk about, you know, Jesus came out the gate ready to, you know, talk about the prisoner, talk about the oppressed. And I, you know, I've looked around in this moment and I'm like, the fact that people would imagine that, you know, I can't speak for Jesus, but that Jesus wouldn't be anti-genocide. That that Jesus wouldn't be anti all of the uh Christian nationalist nonsense. It it it I don't even know if it's anti. I don't even know if that's like the position Jesus would take, but I think Jesus would have something clear to say for us about that, certainly wouldn't be pro these things. And I want to just stop here around the Christian nationalism piece for a minute because I think my sense is that black folks and black churches are being actively recruited into um this Christian nationalist project and will need to be recruited into that project in order for it to be successful. But it caused me to think back on the folks that I've listened to over time, and I heard you talk about um John Henrik Clark. It's one of the people you look to, and certainly a person that I look to, and Howard Thurman, and I wanted to offer these two quotes and just hear your response to them. The first one is John Henrik Clark, where he wrote that um that religion could become the handmaid of the conquerors, and that people can become spiritual prisoners when they inherit someone else's image of God. And Howard Thurman wrote: too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be one on the side of the strong against the weak. I wonder if you can respond to maybe the mandate of Christian churches right now, especially against the backdrop of what seems to be power in the form of Christian aschism seizing the church and church communities as we know them.

SPEAKER_02 50:27

Yeah. And the ruling class uses uh Christian nationalism, the religious right, uh, to put forth their agenda. So, like, not everybody in the ruling class actually believes or practices Christianity, but they know that having a religious, divine component to their diabolical plan is very important. Because people want to believe in something bigger than them. And if you can convince them that the power over them is dictating these things to them, they'll they'll fall in line. So what uh the religious right tends to do is accuse everybody else of playing identity politics when in actuality that's exactly what they're doing. Everything is about identity politics. So Christian is is is a identity that they have uh you know mandated as everybody needs to be a Christian. So then we don't judge people based on their fruit, we judge people based on how they identify. So black people get caught up in this whole circus by being indoctrinated to believe that our Christian confession is more important than our black identity, even though Christianity never saved us from any of the stuff that we've had to deal with in this society.

SPEAKER_03 52:12

Wait a minute, Christian. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 52:17

I'm saying it's like it's real. Like, like the whole I'm Christian before I'm black thing is an extension of the religious right and Christian nationalism to separate us from our own causes, our justice causes, that aren't just based on our own identity as black people. Because when we get free, everybody gets free. When we get access, everybody gets access. So the identity politics of the religious right and the ruling class are always at play. That's why we can justify a genocide because the identity of the people committing it. Because we're supposed to identify with Israel. Ain't you read them in the Bible? Israel, they the chosen ones. So genocide be damned, they the chosen ones. It's identity politics. So I'm challenging people to look past a person's identity. What kind of person are they? Look, look past their who they're romantically attracted to. What kind of person are they? Look past what religion they practice or whether or not they practice a religion. What kind of person are they? Because even if you even if you hold strongly and dearly to a theology of, you know, the afterlife, judgment, heaven and hell. When Jesus talks about judgment day in Matthew 25, he says God's gonna call all the nations to him. And I think that wording is so important when he says all the nations, because he doesn't say all the Christians. He doesn't say all the Jews. He said everybody. Doesn't matter what they believe, doesn't matter if they went to church every Sunday, if they prayed and read their Bible. He said, He's gonna call all the nations and he's gonna separate them. And this is how he's gonna decide the separation. When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was thirsty, did you give me something to drink? When I was a foreigner, did you welcome me in? When I was a prisoner, did you come to see about me? When I was sick, did you take care of me? Or when I was hungry, did you cut off my snap? When I was sick, did you cut off my health care? When I was a foreigner, did you sick ice on me to drag me out of my house and throw me in detention caps, in detention camps? So I want us to get out of the identity politics and seek justice for everybody. And when we look at who are the oppressed among us, black people got something to say, queer people got something to say, disabled people got something to say, women got something to say. And if we all come together as a whole, we can we can turn this whole thing upside down. But you know, we're so fractured because of how we're indoctrinated and to the identity politics. I hope that made sense.

SPEAKER_03 55:37

It made perfect sense, Christian. Sorry, it made perfect sense. It's actually just really touching my heart right now. And I think we'll end on that note. And I just want to express my gratitude to you uh for the work that you're doing. I can only imagine the struggle of it, but I'm so grateful for the fruit that your work is bearing in the world. And thank you for being on your path. Thank you for answering the call, Christian. Uh, it's it's so needed.

SPEAKER_02 56:04

I appreciate that. Thank you for the affirmation and for having me. This was a great conversation.

SPEAKER_03 56:10

Thank you. Hi, y'all. Thank you so much for listening to Becoming the People. Uh, we are going on a bit of a hiatus. We're going to take a break to rest, reflect, to do what we need to do, and we'll be back with new and exciting guest episodes so soon. Um, so please subscribe so you know exactly when we're in your feed, and we can't wait to be with you soon. Becoming the People is produced by Devin Delania, sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Our theme song was created by Miata. And if you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially, especially leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't already, please join us over at the Patreon, Prentice Hempel. We are having a great time over there, building community, learning together. Come join us. And as always, thank you for listening to Becoming the People.

SPEAKER_05 57:06

We're becoming the people, the people, the people, the people, the people, the people we're becoming the people, the people and the people, the people, the people.