Podcast appearances and mentions of jon guerra

What can ancient stories teach us about creativity, courage, and our own place in the modern world? In this episode, Stephen Roach welcomes poet and priest Malcolm Guite back to Makers & Mystics to explore his poetic retelling of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. Malcolm reflects on how these stories shaped him from childhood and why myth still carries moral and spiritual weight in a disenchanted age.Together, they discuss the role of storytelling in recovering a sacramental vision of the world. This conversation is an invitation to re-enchantment—to slow down, commit to your craft, and take your place in the great unfolding story.IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL HEAR ABOUTWhy Arthurian legend endures: its moral and spiritual resonanceTaking up the tale: how myth becomes personal meaningRe-enchantment: seeing the world with wonder in an age of distractionThe value of slow, faithful creative practiceSend a textJoin Malcolm Guite, Jonathan Pageau, Stephen Roach, and so many others!http://www.thebreathandtheclay.comUse the code "mystic26" for a special podcast listener rate!Support the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC. Sign Up for Our Newsletter! http://eepurl.com/g49Ks1

In this episode of Makers & Mystics, Stephen Roach sits down with cultural critic, writer, and iconographer Jonathan Pageau to explore the state of contemporary storytelling and the enduring power of myth.Pageau, creator of The Symbolic World, explains how symbols operate beneath conscious awareness to shape imagination and culture. Together, they discuss why traditional narratives appear depleted, how propaganda differs from true myth, and why fairy tales continue to communicate truths modern culture struggles to articulate.The conversation turns toward artists and storytellers, what it means to create work rooted in beauty, transcendence, and enduring symbolic patterns rather than novelty or cynicism. The conversation also connects with the theme of The Breath and the Clay 2026 —what it means to make space: space in our art, in our imagination, and in our lives for transcendent meaning to take root.Jonathan Pageau will be our keynote presenter for this year's event in Winston-Salem, NC, March 20-22. http://www.thebreathandtheclay.com Send a textJoin Malcolm Guite, Jonathan Pageau, Stephen Roach, and so many others!http://www.thebreathandtheclay.comUse the code "mystic26" for a special podcast listener rate!Support the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC. Sign Up for Our Newsletter! http://eepurl.com/g49Ks1

In this episode of Makers & Mystics, Stephen Roach continues the series The Pace of Beauty with Dr. Timothy Patitsas, author of The Ethics of Beauty.Focusing on Chapter Six, The Mystical Architect, they explore the inseparability of beauty and goodness, the cruciform nature of the artist's journey, and how trauma has shaped modern art's uneasy relationship with beauty. Together, they consider architecture as a foundational pattern of experience and the slow work of cultural renewal through restored patterns of beauty.Learn more about Dr. Patitsas and his work: https://www.stnicholaspress.net/store/the-ethics-of-beautySend a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC. Sign Up for Our Newsletter! http://eepurl.com/g49Ks1

Singer-songwriter Jon Guerra joins Mark Labberton to explore devotional songwriting, public faith, and the tension between the kingdom of Jesus and American cultural power. Through music and reflection, Guerra considers how art can hold grief, courage, and hope together in turbulent times. "Love has a million disguises, but winning is simply not one." In this episode with Mark Labberton, Guerra reflects on songwriting as prayer, the call to love enemies, and artistic courage in moments of cultural crisis. Together they discuss devotional music, George Herbert's influence, the Beatitudes and American culture, citizenship and immigration imagery, increasing polarization, suffering and grace, and the vocation of Christian artists. Episode Highlights "Love has a million disguises, but winning is simply not one." "When Jesus says to love your enemies… he is giving us a means of survival." "This is not sentimentality… the only way to resist becoming what one hates." "My songwriting… would be a means of coming into contact with the invisible God." "Beauty puts us in contact with invisible things." About Jon Guerra Jon Guerra is a singer-songwriter based in Austin, Texas, known for devotional music that blends poetry, theology, and contemporary cultural reflection. His albums include Little Songs (2015), Keeper of Days (2020), Ordinary Ways (2023), and American Gospel. Guerra has also composed music for film, including Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life (2019). The son of immigrants from Cuba and Argentina, his work often explores themes of citizenship, prayer, justice, and the teachings of Jesus. His songwriting draws inspiration from figures like George Herbert and Howard Thurman, and seeks to connect spiritual devotion with public life. Helpful Links and Resources Jon Guerra website: https://www.jonguerramusic.com/ American Gospel album: https://jonguerra.bandcamp.com A Hidden Life film: https://www.searchlightpictures.com/ahiddenlife Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman: https://www.beacon.org/Jesus-and-the-Disinherited-P1781.aspx The Porter's Gate: https://www.portersgateworship.com/ Show Notes Devotional songwriting George Herbert influence on the pursuit of prayerful craft "Music for attending to the soul." Monday morning prayer music framing devotional practice Beauty and invisible realities in artistic experience American Gospel song introduction and cultural critique Beatitudes inversion in American culture "How do I give Christ a say in this conversation?" Love Your Enemies composition and album Jesus Howard Thurman's influence on enemy-love theology (Jesus and the Disinherited) Emotional formation through news, anger, and public life Death of ego and kingdom discipleship Kierkegaard and faith beyond ideology Worship as reordering power Kingdom of Jesus song and Pilate encounter Allegiance to a greater kingdom beyond nationalism Citizenship as foreignness imagery Immigrant family background shaping songwriting Citizens song written after 2017 inauguration "Come to you because I'm confused." Five-four musical structure expressing disorientation Groaning beauty and Romans 8 resonance Artists as "holy fools" naming reality Moltmann and theology near the cross Simone Weil: gravity and grace reflection "Love has a million disguises, but winning is simply not one." Hashtags #JonGuerra #DevotionalMusic #LoveYourEnemies #ChristianArt #AmericanGospel #PublicFaith #Jesus #Gospel #SpiritualFormation Production Credits Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.  

This replay episode features excerpts from a 2017 conversation with author Brian Zahnd, exploring his insights on Christian aesthetics and the role of beauty in faith. The discussion centers on Zahnd's book, "Beauty Will Save the World," and his argument for understanding Christianity through the lens of beauty rather than relying solely on truth claims and moral arguments. Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC. Sign Up for Our Newsletter! http://eepurl.com/g49Ks1

What does it mean to repair what has been broken, and can there be beauty in that work?In this episode of Makers & Mystics, Stephen Roach is joined by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg for a thoughtful conversation on repentance, accountability, and the demanding work of repair. As part of our ongoing series on beauty, this episode explores repentance not as performance or apology, but as a process of truth-telling, learning, and transformation.Drawing from ancient Jewish wisdom and contemporary justice work, Rabbi Danya reflects on how individuals, communities, and institutions can move toward healing after harm—and why art, imagination, and beauty are essential for sustaining the work of justice and hope.Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC. Sign Up for Our Newsletter! http://eepurl.com/g49Ks1

The Beauty of Authenticity — John Van DeusenSongwriter John Van Deusen joins Makers & Mystics to explore the beauty of authenticity in art, faith, and vocation. In a creative landscape that often rewards certainty and success, John reflects on the cost—and freedom—of making honesty the point.At the center of the conversation is his latest album, As Long As I Am In The Tent of This Body I Will Make A Joyful Noise, a shape-shifting, faith-inflected collection that resists tidy resolutions and embraces vulnerability, doubt, joy, and embodied life.Together, host Stephen Roach and John Van Deusen talk about creative calling, audience expectation, near-successes, family life, and why authenticity remains a risky—but faithful—posture for artists.Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

What if beauty isn't an escape from the outrage and exhaustion of the world—but a form of resistance against it?In a culture overrun with anxiety and uncertainty, turning toward beauty can feel almost defiant. In this episode of Makers & Mystics, host Stephen Roach is joined by theologian, poet, and cultural critic Jonathan P. Walton to explore how beauty forms us for resilience, integrity, and repair—both personally and communally.Drawing from his book Beauty and Resistance: Spiritual Rhythms for Formation and Repair, Walton reflects on the spiritual and emotional work required to live truthfully in a hurried, narcissistic culture. Together, they discuss the tension between joy and guilt, the importance of celebration and lament, and the danger of the false self in spiritual formation.Jonathan introduces the Four Rs—Rest, Restore, Resist, Repeat—as a crafted rule of life that helps us resist what deforms us while cultivating beauty, depth, and intentional living. He also shares the backstory behind his poem “Change of Plans,” offering insight into how community, faith, and honesty shape the long journey toward wholeness.This conversation is an invitation to slow down, tend to what is wounded, and rediscover beauty not as escape—but as faithful resistance.Resources & LinksBeauty and Resistance: Spiritual Rhythms for Formation and Repair — Jonathan P. WaltonSupport The Podcast —  Join our Patreon growing community! http://www.patreon.com/makersandmysticsSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

What role does beauty play in a fractured and hurried world—and what might happen if we allowed it to slow us down?This episode marks the beginning of a new Makers and Mystics series, The Pace of Beauty, exploring how beauty invites us into a more attentive and spiritually grounded way of living.In this opening conversation, Stephen Roach is joined by Winfield Bevins, author, artist, and founder of Creo Arts, a missional arts community awakening the world to the beauty of the Christian story.  Together, they explore the themes of Winfield's book How Beauty Will Save the World and reflect on the intersection of art, faith, and community.Winfield shares personal stories of how art became a lifeline during a formative season of his life, and how creative practices can function as spiritual disciplines. He emphasizes the transformative power of beauty and the arts in a broken world, advocating for a deeper integration of creativity within the church. Book Offer for ListenersOaks Press is offering listeners of Makers and Mystics a free copy of Winfield Bevins's book How Beauty Will Save the World. Simply cover the cost of shipping and use the code MAKERS at checkout.Get your copy here: How Beauty Will Save the World — Oaks PressResourcesHow Beauty Will Save the World by Winfield BevinsCreo ArtsMakers and Mystics PodcastSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Moving at the Pace of BeautySeason Introduction — Makers & Mystics PodcastElaine Scarry writes that “beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster.” Beauty is immediate in this way. It strikes us unaware and de-centers us, throwing us off balance and ushering us into a moment of euphoria. Beauty comes to us in a flash, a sudden recognition, or a moment of beholding; however, its effects call for a much slower pace, one of deliberation and contemplation.The pace of beauty runs counter to the breakneck speed of modern society. When we are hurrying along from one task to the next, we don't take time to notice the tiny flowers along the roadside. We don't see the grains within the hardwood or the elaborate stitching within a hand-woven rug. Beauty, then, is sometimes hidden and only reveals itself to those willing to slow down and surrender their gaze. In this new series of Makers and Mystics, we're going to explore the pace of beauty and how it serves as a conduit of grace and creative unction. We're going to hear from a collection of artists, theologians, and creative instigators on how beauty impacts them spiritually and creatively. Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

In this episode of Makers and Mystics, host Stephen Roach is joined by Jared Farley of Porter's Call, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the emotional and mental health of touring artists and their families.Together, they explore the tension between persona and person, stage life and home life, and the unique pressures artists face when identity becomes brand. The conversation examines the impact of fame on the human soul, the importance of sustainable rhythms, and why community and storytelling are essential for healing and wholeness.Jared shares insights into why the soul is not built for fame, how isolation fuels addiction, and how intentional care and connection help artists return to themselves. Whether you're a touring musician, a creative professional, or someone seeking greater integration in your life, this conversation offers practical wisdom for the journey toward wholeness.ResourcesPorter's Call: https://www.porterscall.comBackline: https://backline.care/Makers and Mystics Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/makersandmysticsSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

In this episode, Stephen Roach sits down with creative collaborators Justin McRoberts, Whitney Hancock, and Corey Frey for a conversation about the art of building authentic creative community.From introducing their new online offering, "The Light Between," to a behind-the-scenes look at the upcoming Breath and the Clay 2026 event, themed "Making Space," this conversation explores how artists can create meaningful spaces for vulnerability, process, and mutual discovery in their creative work.This episode is a celebration of artistic collaboration, meaningful friendship, and the quiet transformation that happens when we make room for mystery. About the Guests:Corey Frey is a visual artist, poet, and musician based in Frederick, Maryland. Alongside his wife Christy, he co-founded The Well Collaborative, a community devoted to wonder, hospitality, and creativity. Corey serves as Exhibitions Manager at the Delaplaine Arts Center and is also a co-host of the Makers & Mystics Creative Collective book clubs.Justin McRoberts is an author, speaker, musician, and spiritual director whose work bridges storytelling, faith, and creative formation. Through books, retreats, and mentorship, Justin helps people uncover their voice and live with greater authenticity. His work invites individuals and communities into deeper reflection, meaningful transformation, and a more embodied approach to creativity and spiritual life.Whitney Hancock is an embodiment coach and creative director whose work centers on restoring presence, emotional honesty, and embodied spirituality. A former founding director of the Redding City Dance Company, Whitney now leads spaces—online and in person—where movement, breath, and nervous system awareness help people reconnect with the sacred intelligence of their bodies.Stephen Roach is the founder of The Breath & The Clay and host of the Makers & Mystics podcast. He is a poet, creative mentor, and multi-instrumentalist with a background in ethnomusicology and film composition. His forthcoming book, How To See Invisible Things, will be published in October 2026 with Zondervan Reflective.Opportunities & Resources:

In this inter-seasonal episode, Stephen Roach is joined by returning guests Paul Anleitner and John Mark McMillan for a discussion of Guillermo del Toro's new Frankenstein adaptation. Together they explore del Toro's visual storytelling, the spiritual and theological roots of Mary Shelley's original vision, and why horror remains one of the most powerful vehicles for truth in our modern age.What We DiscussMary Shelley's Origin Story The Geneva “ghost story” challenge, volcanic winter, and the dream that inspired Frankenstein—plus the timely synchronicity with Stephen's upcoming book.Del Toro's Visual Parable Color symbolism, the contrast between Victor and the creature, and how the film communicates its meaning through pure imagery.Theology, Philosophy & Monsters Del Toro's spiritual connection to the story, humanity's desire to play creator, and how horror works only within a moral universe.Ambition, Ego & Shadow Victor and the creature as two halves of the same self, crucifixion imagery, and why many successful people feel they've “created monsters” of their own.Why Horror Still Haunts Us Horror as enchantment, ancient narrative patterns, and our longing for stories that reveal hidden cosmic significance.GuestsPaul Anleitner – paulanleitner.substack.comJohn Mark McMillan – johnmarkmcmillan.comHostStephen Roach, author of the upcoming How to See Invisible Things (October 2026). makersandmystics.com • thebreathandtheclay.comSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

In this brief inter-seasonal update, Stephen Roach shares what is happening within the Makers and Mystics community, where the podcast is headed next, and what to expect at the next Breath and The Clay event, March 20-22, 2026. The Breath and The ClayJoin our creative collectiveSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

In this season finale, Stephen Roach closes out our exploration of creative flow with a rich conversation with several artists from the Makers & Mystics Patreon community. Joining the discussion are artist and educator Angela Houk, writer and branding expert Steve Brock, and poet and visual artist Corey Frey.Together, the crew explores the interplay between resistance and flow—how creative blocks, limitations, and even frustrations can actually become the conditions that allow new work to emerge and personal character to develop. As Wendell Berry reminds us, “the impeded stream is the one that sings.”This episode examines:Why resistance can be a gift in the creative process.How Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow connects to happiness and fulfillment.The balance between focus and receptivity in both art and relationships.How preparation, practice, and openness set the stage for flow.The “radical middle” where challenge and skill convergeConnecting the experience of flow to the Holy SpiritThis is a thoughtful, inspiring conversation on navigating resistance, finding flow, and staying open to the creativity that emerges when we least expect it.Connect with the guests:Angela HoukSteve BrockCorey Frey–––Support the Podcast If you'd like to go deeper in these conversations and be part of the Makers & Mystics creative collective, consider joining us on Patreon. You'll gain access to monthly online gatherings, bonus content, creative prompts, and a vibrant community of artists pursuing faith and imagination together.

Behind the curtain of cinema lies a hidden language, spoken not in words, but in sound.In this episode of Makers and Mystics, Stephen Roach interviews Foley artist Ronnie Van Der Veer, exploring the intricate world of sound design in film. Ronnie shares his journey into Foley art, the importance of creating realistic sound effects, and the techniques he employs to enhance the cinematic experience. The conversation explores the creative process behind sound symbolism, and practical advice for aspiring Foley artists. Through case studies of films like 'The Occupant' and 'The Forgotten Battle,' listeners gain insight into the art of sound and its profound impact on storytelling.About the guest:  Ronnie van der Veer is an award winning foley artist from the Netherlands. From his studio just outside Amsterdam he has worked on movies like The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos, Girl by Lukas Dhont, war movie The Forgotten Battle and various Netflix, Disney and Amazon Originals. Ronnie uses his background as a drummer in his work as a foley artist.See more of Ronnie's work:www.foleytales.comInstagram https://www.instagram.com/foley.tales/Films referenced in this episode:  The Forgotten Battle: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10521092/?ref_=nm_knf_t_2The Occupant: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7230422/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_cdt_t_6Connect with Makers and Mystics:Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/makersandmysticsInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/makersandmysticsAPPLY FOR OUR NOVEMBER 21-23, 2025 WRITER'S RETREAT IN THE BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAINS OF N.C. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaiDW84Ktc1KH1JLt236fNPaiKW22E_XnzJqIgjHc5zijzfA/viewform?usp=headerSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

What does the life of a bizarre fifth-century monk have to offer our lives in the modern world today? This episode of the Makers and Mystics podcast explores the life and influence of Simeon Stylites, a Syrian Christian ascetic known for his extreme devotion and outlandish lifestyle of standing atop a pillar for 37 years. Stephen Roach highlights Simeon's early life, his ascetic practices, and the profound impact he had on society during his time. The discussion reveals how Simeon's unwavering commitment to prayer and his role as a public figure offers an example for how we stand atop our own pillars and digital platforms today. Join the Makers and Mystics creative collective Apply to attend The Breath and The Clay writer's retreat, November 21-23rd, in Moravian Falls, NC. Support The PodcastSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Amy Leigh Wicks is a poet, actress, and educator from New York City. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and an MFA from The New School in New York. She recently served as Dean of Performing Arts at Bethel Conservatory of the Arts and is the author of The Dangerous Country of Love and Marriage (Auckland University Press, 2019) and Orange Juice and Rooftops (Eloquent Books, 2009).In this episode, Stephen Roach talks with Amy about the intersection of presence, performance, and poetic confession. Their conversation explores the emotional depth of character work, the daily rhythms that sustain creativity, and the subtle terrain where vulnerability gives way to transcendence.At the heart of the conversation, Amy unpacks the idea of confessional transcendence—the mysterious way raw honesty in art can lead beyond self-expression into something sacred and universal. Through personal stories and reflections, she explores how poetry and acting together deepen her awareness of beauty, pain, and the human condition. The episode culminates in a moving reading of her poetry that embodies the very themes explored.Resources: Get Amy's Book: The Dangerous Country of Love and MarriageSupport The Podcast! Show some love! If this, or other episodes, have helped you in your creative/spiritual journey, become a monthly patron. Follow us on InstagramSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

As artists, we live our lives between worlds, the one in which we imagine and the one in which we must survive. But what do we do when the life we imagine and the life we live are incongruent? Often our lives look much different on paper than they do in our dreams.  Joining us for this conversation is author, speaker, and public health professional Prasanta Verma. Prasanta's first book, Beyond Ethnic Loneliness, was released in April 2024 and is a 2024 INDIES Foreword Book of the Year Finalist. Prasanta is a graduate of the Kenyon Writers Workshop, a Write On Door County Writing Residency, and one of her essays won Honorable Mention in the WI Writers Jade Ring Essay Contest in 2023. Prasanta writes to help us feel seen and find a sense of belonging, and wants to help us envision a society where we are healthier and more connected. She is both an academic and creative, and is currently working on her doctorate in public health.In this episode, Prasanta shares about the concept of the ghost life and how art bridges the gap between our lived experiences and our aspirations. She shares insights on the importance of community, the difference between solitude and isolation, and the need for radical acceptance to keep creative flow through life's unexpected turns.Resources: Join the Makers and Mystics Creative Collective Follow Us on InstagramPrasanta's SubstackSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

“How do we hold both urgency and intimacy in our creative practices? How can an artist become a vessel of divine presence — not only in churches, but on club stages, in studios, and in everyday life?”In today's episode, I'm joined by jazz and gospel pianist Julian Davis Reid — a Chicago-based artist-theologian whose work sits at the crossroads of sound, spirit, and scholarship. Julian is a founding member of the jazz-electronic fusion group The JuJu Exchange and the creator of Notes of Rest, a ministry that invites the weary into the rest of God practiced in the Bible and Black music.In our conversation, Julian and I talk about finding flow as a spiritual discipline, the tension between performance and presence, and what it means to make art that is both urgent and intimate. Support the Makers and Mystics podcast! Follow us on InstagramSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

How does imagination shape not only our art but our spiritual formation? And what does it mean to hold space for play, growth, and even disappointment within our creative process?In this episode, Stephen Roach is joined by Jon Guerra — a singer, songwriter, and film composer based in Austin, Texas, whose work is marked by its devotional nature and spiritual depth.Jon shares the inspiration behind his latest record, Jesus, a deeply personal and contemplative album born from the tension between daily life and artistic calling. The conversation explores his experience scoring Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life, the unpredictable and iterative nature of the creative process, and how imagination serves as a vital tool in both spiritual formation and the search for creative flow.Topics Include:Imagination as a tool for spiritual and artistic formationFinding creative flow amidst life's changing seasonsThe role of play, growth, and disappointment in the creative processScoring for film and the collaborative, iterative nature of that workThe inspiration behind Jon's new album JesusThe relationship between daily demands and sustained creativitySupport The Podcast:One time donation or monthly Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

In this concluding segment of our Artist Roundtable, Stephen Roach, Corey Frey, and Donna Matthews continue their conversation on ecstatic experiences, flow states, and the artist's impulse through a Christian lens. This episode explores ecstatic states in both Pentecostal and Orthodox traditions, highlighting the shared hunger for transcendent encounter across streams of faith. The discussion also hits on the need for a deeper theological framework around flow states, offering both spiritual and practical insights for artists navigating these immersive creative moments.About The Guests: Donna Matthews is a musician and creative artist. In the 1990's she played lead guitar in Elastica and lo-fi, DIY band Klang, and in subsequent years devised and facilitated creative workshops for people in recovery from addiction. She is currently in her final year of a practice-based PhD in Music at the University of Glasgow. Interested in issues such as poetic intuition, inspiration, and gift, her work explores how the intuitive state might be conveyed through aesthetic form, while also exploring improvisation as a means of 'undoing form' to experience the inspired state.Corey Frey is a visual artist, poet, and musician. He and his wife, Christy, are the founders of The Well Collaborative, a community in Frederick, Maryland, dedicated to wonder, hospitality, and creativity.  Corey works as the Exhibitions Manager at The Delaplaine Arts Center in Frederick's downtown area. He is also the co-host of the Makers and Mystics podcast's creative collective book clubs.Stephen Roach is the host of the Makers and Mystics Podcast and the founder of The Breath and The Clay creative arts organization. He is a published author, keynote speaker, and multi-instrumentalist with a background in ethnomusicology and film composition. He has penned five volumes of poetry, a practical guide for artists titled Five Creativity Killers and How To Avoid Them, and his most recent book, Naming The Animals: An Invitation To Creativity, published by Square Halo Books. Stephen lives in North Carolina with his wife, Sarah, and children Evangelyn Belle and Isaac Brighton. His next book, published by Zondervan Reflective, is scheduled for release in October 2026. Resources: The Gifted State: Previous episode with Donna MatthewsIf you've been inspired by this podcast, please consider helping us continue our work of advocating for the arts by becoming a monthly patron at http://www.patreon.com/makersandmystics As an independent creator, your generosity enables us to continue our work! Thank you!!Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

In this Artist Roundtable, Stephen Roach, Corey Frey, and Donna Matthews explore the concept of flow states, ecstatic experiences, and their intersections with art and faith. They discuss how creative processes can lead to profound spiritual encounters, the importance of vulnerability and surrender in accessing these states, and the role of discernment in navigating spiritual experiences. This Two-Part conversation highlights the deep longing for human connection, speaking in tongues, and the challenges artists face within faith communities.About The Guests: Donna Matthews is a musician and creative artist. In the 1990's she played lead guitar in Elastica and lo-fi, DIY band Klang, and in subsequent years devised and facilitated creative workshops for people in recovery from addiction. She is currently in her final year of a practice-based PhD in Music at the University of Glasgow. Interested in issues such as poetic intuition, inspiration, and gift, her work explores how the intuitive state might be conveyed through aesthetic form, while also exploring improvisation as a means of 'undoing form' to experience the inspired state.Corey Frey is a visual artist, poet, and musician. He and his wife, Christy, are the founders of The Well Collaborative, a community in Frederick, Maryland, dedicated to wonder, hospitality, and creativity.  Corey works as the Exhibitions Manager at The Delaplaine Arts Center in Frederick's downtown area. He is also the co-host of the Makers and Mystics podcast's creative collective book clubs.Stephen Roach is the host of the Makers and Mystics Podcast and the founder of The Breath and The Clay creative arts organization. He is a published author, keynote speaker, and multi-instrumentalist with a background in ethnomusicology and film composition. He has penned five volumes of poetry, a practical guide for artists titled Five Creativity Killers and How To Avoid Them, and his most recent book, Naming The Animals: An Invitation To Creativity, published by Square Halo Books. Stephen lives in North Carolina with his wife, Sarah, and children Evangelyn Belle and Isaac Brighton. His next book, published by Zondervan Reflective, is scheduled for release in October 2026. Resources: The Gifted State: Previous episode with Donna MatthewsIf you've been inspired by this podcast, please consider helping us continue our work of advocating for the arts by becoming a monthly patron at http://www.patreon.com/makersandmystics As an independent creator, your generosity enables us to continue our work! Thank you!!Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Overfamiliarization can blind us from recognizing the beauty and power of certain truths. When we think we have heard the story before or believe we already know what a particular truth has to offer, we lose the curiosity that opens us to deeper revelation. The work of the artist is to disrupt that familiarity, make the known strange again, and the familiar unfamiliar again, so that we see the world anew. My guest today is New York-based visual artist Faith Bryant. Faith's original style of oil painting recasts the gospel story through the lens of surrealism and deep color theory. Her work explores the complexities of Christian faith, personal identity, and the journey of healing. Through her layered compositions and hidden imagery, Faith invites viewers to take a second look at the truths we thought we understood.Connect with Faith on Instagram @edenesq_Support the podcast with a single donationJoin the Makers and Mystics creative collective Join Stephen Roach, Tanner Olson, Sarah Westfall, and many other presenters at the Cultivate Online Retreat. June 20-22. Details and registration here. Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Elizabeth Bowman is a self-taught impressionist painter based in Charlotte, NC. Her work is steeped in imaginative renderings of biblical stories and visual meditations on the life of faith.In this conversation, Elizabeth shares how motherhood and prayerfulness give shape to her art, the importance of rest and reflection, and how she finds creative flow amidst the demands of everyday life.http://www.patreon.com/makersandmysticsMusic By: Some Were At SeaSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Barbara Hannigan is a world-renowned conductor, soprano, and performer whose work pushes the boundaries of classical and contemporary music. Known for her fearless interpretations and deeply expressive performances, Barbara has built a career that defies convention and celebrates the transformative power of sound.In this episode, Barbara and I discuss her recent album Electric Fields, which offers modern arrangements of centuries-old vocal music. At the heart of the album are the compositions of Hildegard of Bingen — a 12th-century mystic, composer, and visionary whose sacred works still resonate with profound clarity today.In keeping with the season theme, we explore Barbara's experience of finding flow in those transcendent, improvisational moments when the music seems to move through her rather than from her — and how this state of creative surrender shapes both her artistry and her life.Mentioned in this episode:Electric Fields by Barbara HanniganArtist profile: Hildegard of Bingen Connect with Barbara Hannigan: https://www.barbarahannigan.com/home| https://www.instagram.com/hannigan.barbarahttps://outhere-music.com/en/albums/electric-fieldsSupport the Podcast: As an independent creator, your support makes this work possible. Learn how you can become a patron and keep these conversations alive at http://www.patreon.com/makersandmysticsMake a one-time donationSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

In this episode, Stephen Roach explores creative flow as a generative, life-giving way of being. He highlights the need for trust in the process and the vulnerability that comes with sharing one's art. Stephen encourages listeners to embrace rhythms of rest and rebirth and imitate the ocean. Join the Makers and Mystics Creative Collective Support the podcast with a one-time donation. Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

I would imagine most of us think of inspiration as a sudden flash of insight that hits us out of nowhere and compels us create. It's not something we control. The wind blows where it wishes and we don't know where it comes from or where it goes. But what if inspiration were a discipline? Brooklyn-based author and artist Carey Wallace has written an incredible book titled, The Discipline of Inspiration.  Here, she addresses this question and shines a new light on how we think about our relationship to the things that move us. Poet and songwriter Patti Smith writes that "This book articulates... the beautiful compexity of what drives us to create and what we encounter when we do."In keeping with our season theme of finding flow, consider how nurturing our inspirations prepare us for those beautiful moments of creative transport. We'll be talking more about this in the Makers and Mystics creative collective. Music by: Some Were At SeaSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

We're sad to announce that KTF Press is closing down, and this will be our last episode of Shake the Dust. But both of us will continue to do work in different places. In this conversation, we cover:- Why KTF is closing- What will happen to our newsletters, articles, podcasts, and books- What we're both doing next- What the experience of running KTF has been like for us- What we want to leave listeners with- And a benedictionWhere you can see some of our upcoming work:- Jonathan's new book that you can preorder now! Beauty and Resistance: Spiritual Rhythms for Formation and Repair- Jonathan's new Substack, The Crux- Sy's new website for his freelance workCredits- Follow Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.- Follow Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.- Editing by Sy.- Production by Sy and our incredible subscribersThe transcript for this episode was autogenerated by Substack and may contain errors This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com

Leah Song is a storyteller, song-catcher, musician, poet, and community builder. She's best known as the front-woman of the beloved band Rising Appalachia, which she leads alongside her sister Chloe.As a solo artist, Leah draws from the rich traditions of Southern soul, the diasporic sounds of the Celtic Isles, and her deep studies of folk music from across the Americas.In this episode, Leah talks with Stephen Roach about her journey through music, exploring the intersections of various cultural traditions and how the pace of our lives impacts creative flow.  Resources: Join the Makers and Mystics Creative CollectiveSupport The Podcast with a one-time donationPatreon: Patreon.com/makersandmysticsSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

What does it mean to sing about Jesus when the name has been co-opted by politics, performance, and power?  In this episode Dr. Moore welcomes singer-songwriter Jon Guerra to discuss Guerra's new album simply titled "Jesus." Guerra shares how his music serves as devotional art—less Sunday morning worship and more Monday morning prayer—and explains his journey back to the words of Christ after experiences that created distance. Moore and Guerra explore themes of nationalism, church collapse, and finding authentic faith in a politically charged culture. Guerra reflects on his time as a worship leader during the painful public downfall of James MacDonald's ministry, offering honest insights about power, performance, and platform in Christian leadership. The conversation moves through Guerra's creative process, including his work on Terrence Malick's films, and unpacks the countercultural message of songs like "Citizens"—which confronts the marriage of faith and political power. As the child of Cuban immigrants, Guerra also opens up about his fear of scarcity and how it shapes his understanding of Jesus's teachings about treasure and provision. At a time when Jesus's name is often wielded as a tribal symbol, Guerra's music invites listeners to encounter Christ not as a political mascot, but as the One who welcomes immigrants as citizens and calls us to a narrower, and better, way. Join Jon on tour this spring, and listen to Jesus here. Special offer for listeners of The Russell Moore Show: Click here for 25% off a subscription to CT magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Flow begins with attentiveness. In this episode, Stephen Roach shares how tuning the room became a creative and spiritual practice.Welcome to Season 15 of Makers & Mystics. In this opening episode, host Stephen Roach invites listeners into the unfolding journey of Finding Flow—not just as a creative high, but as a sacred rhythm and intentional spiritual practice.Anchored in a story from his experience as a touring musician, Stephen shares how he developed a pre-show ritual: using a sustained drone and improvised melody to “tune the room”—to draw the audience (and himself) into a space of collective attentiveness. It became more than a musical practice; it became a way of entering flow, of opening space for something beyond performance to emerge.In this episode, Stephen explores:What it means to prepare a space for creativityHow flow requires attentiveness and surrenderThe parallels between creative flow and spiritual presenceWhy the environment we create—internally and externally—matters to our artWhether you're a musician, painter, poet, or simply someone longing to move through the world with greater presence, this episode will help you begin to tune your own room—and step into your creative flow.Featured Music: Songs of WaterJoin the Creative Collective: PatreonSupport the Podcast with a one-time donation: SupportFollow Us on Instagram:  @makersandmysticsFive Creativity Killers Book: Get the book mentioned in this episode.  Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Easter, regardless of what anyone personally believes about it, represented the most pivotal day in human history. Everything about the world changed that day. Could that also be true for us? This past Sunday, we considered how Easter can change how we live our real, everyday lives. Mike Koch and the band performed songs by Sting, Houndmouth, Jon Guerra, and Bethel Music.

Easter, regardless of what anyone personally believes about it, represented the most pivotal day in human history. Everything about the world changed that day. Could that also be true for us?This past Sunday, we considered how Easter can change how we live our real, everyday lives.Mike Koch and the band performed songs by Sting, Houndmouth, Jon Guerra, and Bethel Music.

Have you experienced those moments when the grind gives way to an effortless grace? When a poem or painting tells you what it wants to become, or when a melody sings itself into being?   This state of creative flow is one that artists and athletes, saints and mystics alike, each aspire to attain. It is a state where time bends low and reveals a slice of eternity. When our minds are absorbed, the world around us dissolves. Five minutes becomes five hours. Attentiveness and reverie are caught in a kiss that transcends technical ability and becomes magic.In flow, we become the act we give our hands to accomplish. The painter becomes the painting. The dancer becomes the dance. We enter into something greater than ourselves, a move of the Spirit that is ever in flux and available to us all. This season on Makers and Mystics, we're going to explore how to find flow,Not just as a creative high—But as a practice.A rhythm.A spiritual discipline And a way of life.We're going to talk about what keeps us from entering it, and why it matters—not just for our art, but for our own development and well-being.You'll hear from painters, poets, musicians, and makers of all kinds - each sharing stories of what enables them to find flow and the challenges that have kept them from it. You'll hear from theologians and thinkers who see creativity as a sacred conversation.We're going to talk about the discipline behind flow, the resistance that rises against it, and the mysterious grace that shows up when we least expect it.So if you've struggled to find flow —Or if you've ever wondered how to maintain your creative inspiration  —Or if you're simply longing to move through the world more awake and more alive…This season is for you.Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

In this final conversation of our BC25 introductions, Stephen Roach, Corey Frey, and Dr. Marie Teilhard discuss the complexities of art that challenge conventional boundaries. They explore themes of heretical art, the distinction between shock art and risk art, and the importance of trust and exploration in the creative process. **Trigger Warning: This episode deals with sensitive subject matter such as self-harm and cutting. Follow Makers and Mystics on Instagram: @makersandmysticsConnect with Dr. TeilhardConnect with Corey FreySpecial Thanks to our patrons and friends who help us keep this train running. If you've been inspired by the Makers and Mystics podcast and would like to show the love, you can give a one-time donation here or become a monthly patron here. Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Passage: 3 Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules. And all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.” 4 And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. 5 And he sent young men of the people of Israel, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. 6 And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. 7 Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” 8 And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” 15 Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. 16 The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days. And on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. 17 Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. 18 Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights. (Exodus 24:3-8, 15-18) Song: Miraculous Salvation by Jon Guerra and Tenielle Neda Lyrics: In unexpected places In unpredicted ways You are bringing your salvation To people who need grace Oh miraculous salvation To save someone like I There's nothing in myself That You would desire But in Christ You plead my case In Christ You paid the cost Oh miraculous salvation That pursues the lost Through unexpected people You are working our change To an undeserving people You are lavishing your grace Oh miraculous salvation To save someone like I There's nothing in myself That You would desire But in Christ You plead my case In Christ You paid the cost Oh miraculous salvation The kindness of God And You keep Your covenant of love To a thousand generations The essence of God made manifest In the person of our Savior Oh the miracle of mercy Extravagance of Grace To take a heart of stone One with flesh replace Oh what humbling redemption Forgiveness freely gave Oh the miracle of mercy Extravagance of grace Miraculous salvation Nail upon the cross Miraculous salvation Bought by son of God Oh miraculous salvation That we know Your love Oh miraculous salvation Now we know Your love Prayer: Almighty God, heavenly Father, because we are so weak in ourselves that we cannot stand even for a moment, and moreover, our sworn enemies—the devil, the world, and our own flesh—do not cease to attack us; will you, therefore, keep and strengthen us by the power of your Holy Spirit, so that we may firmly resist them and not go down to defeat in this spiritual war, but remain persistent until we finally obtain the complete victory and reign together with your Son, our Lord and Protector Jesus Christ, in your kingdom forevermore. Amen. — Zacharias Ursinus.

Amanda Cook is a writer/musician/lover of books whose music explores the intersections of faith/doubt, love/loss, hope/despair, and fun/notfun. In this episode, Amanda talks with Stephen Roach about her latest EP Survey: Part 2 along with her thoughts on reconciling faith and art and the motivations behind her creative process. This episode continues our introductions to the presenters who will be with us at BC25.Resources: The Breath and The Clay (virtual & In person tix available.)Follow us on InstagramHelp us continue our work by becoming a monthly patron or by giving a one time donation. Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

What role does contemplative prayer have in healing the fractures of our modern culture and those of our own fragmented lives? And how can our spiritual and creative practices offer an antidote to the chaos of contemporary life?In today's episode, we're exploring these questions with best-selling author, counselor, and teacher John Eldredge. Drawing insights from his latest book, Experience Jesus. Really: Finding Refuge, Strength, and Wonder Through Everyday Encounters with God, John highlights several themes that align with those of our upcoming Breath and Clay creative arts gathering. He shares insights on what it means to live in the hour of fragmentation and how we can reconnect to the integrating center of all things. Resources: Makers and Mystics Creative CollectiveThe Breath and The Clay event! March 21-23rd in Winston Salem, NC. Use the code DREAM25 for a discount on registration! Credits: Episode Sponsor:  Be. Make. Do. Podcast. Music: Some Were At Sea Produced by Stephen Roach and Brightbell CreativeSend us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Kendra Adachi is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lazy Genius Way, The Lazy Genius Kitchen, and The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like A Lazy Genius. As an expert in compassionate time management, Kendra helps others stop doing it all for the sake of doing what matters. She Kendra hosts the nationally-ranked The Lazy Genius Podcast and lives in North Carolina with her husband and three kids.In this episode, Kendra shares about:bringing our whole self to the tableviewing our life as a painting, not a puzzle moving past binary perceptions of art and time Kendra will share a keynote talk and join us for a discussion panel on reconciling art and family at The Breath and The Clay creative arts gathering, March 21-23, 2025, in Winston Salem, NC. Links/Resources: Connect with KendraLearn more about The Breath and The Clay eventCredits: Episode Sponsor: MM Creative CollectiveMusic: Some Were At Sea Produced by: Stephen Roach Send us a textSupport the show Get Tickets to The Breath and The Clay 2026 featuring Malcolm Guite, Jon Guerra, and Jonathan Pageau! March 20-22 in Winston-Salem, NC.

Passage: 6 And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.' 8 You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” 9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother'; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.' 11 But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”' (that is, given to God)—12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” (Mark 7:6-13 ESV) Song: Getaway (https://open.spotify.com/track/75YGqDOySZH5mQ8pHmEg54?si=6c5bcad67cba4cdf) by Jon Guerra, Lindsey Sweat, Taya Gaukrodger Lyrics: Are you burnt out On religious things Are you worn down Lacking inner peace Take a real rest Walk along with me In the pastures of my presence You can be yourself and you can Say what's on your heart I already know it all Doesn't matter what you say Come and get away with me I know where you are Where you've been and what you've seen Doesn't matter how you come Come and get away with me Get away get away with me (Get away get away with me) Are you burdened From all the heavy days It's not your job To shoulder all the weight Let me do it Let me come and take The lies you've been believing in The truth is that you have a place to Grace upon grace upon grace Let it lead Get away get away with me Grace upon grace upon grace Let it lead Get away get away with me Grace upon grace upon grace Let me lead Get away get away with me Say what's on your heart I already know it all Doesn't matter what you say Come and say it all to me I know where you are Where you've been and what you've seen Doesn't matter how you come Come and get away with me Oh come away come away with me Get away get away with me Prayer: Father, what we know not, teach us; what we have not, give us; what we are not, make us; for the sake of your Son our Savior. Amen. -Old Anglican Prayer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.ktfpress.comOn this month's bonus episode, Jonathan and Sy are talking political education in this new era of traditional and social media bowing to Trump and the MAGA movement. We get into:- The beliefs about free speech behind the changes at Meta that Mark Zuckerberg recently announced- How our understanding of healthy discourse differs from those beliefs- And tips for staying politically educated in this new environmentCredits- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy.- Editing by Sy.- Production by Sy and our incredible subscribersTranscript[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Sy Hoekstra: The moderation isn't really a problem, it's sort of the greed behind the companies. Like, the people who have realized, “Oh, I can make a ton of money by making people super angry [laughs]. And I don't care what that does to our public discourse, because it makes me money.” That's the real problem to me. It's not actually the fact that somebody has said, “I will not let people say anti-Semitic things on my platform. “[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Hello, hello, everybody. This is Sy. Jonathan and I are still recording these monthly bonus episodes on Substack live. Thank you if you were able to join us for the live recording this time around. I'm just here to tell you that the recording cut off the very, very beginning of what I said when we started. So if I just dropped you in, it wouldn't make any sense. What I'm gonna do is seamlessly transition us from this to the live recording. Now ready? Here we go. Welcome to this bonus episode of Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. [transition to live recording] I'm Sy Hoekstra.Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Welcome again to this bonus episode recorded live on Substack. Thank you to everyone who is joining and watching right now and watching later, and again, thanks for being a subscriber to this podcast. We appreciate you.Sy Hoekstra: We are going to be talking today, as the headline says, about how to be politically educated, how to keep yourself politically educated in this new era of Trump. And not just Trump, but also both legacy and social media platforms, kind of bowing the knee to him and doing his bidding [laughs]. Political education has always been central to what we talk about at KTF Press, and our reasons for doing it and what we're trying to accomplish haven't changed, but the way that you go about doing it is actually starting to change in significant ways. So we thought we would take some time to talk about kind of the reasons behind the changes that are happening in the media and how that means we need to be paying attention going forward in order to remain people who are informed and who can be helpful and who can serve the kingdom of God in our politics.So we're kind of merging the whole show together. Normally, we have our conversation and then we do separately the Which Tab Is Still Open, which is where we have a segment where we talk about diving deeper into one of the things from our newsletter, one of the highlights that one of us brought out from the news in our newsletter. When we were talking about this conversation, I was like, “I wanna talk about the Meta stuff and Mark Zuckerberg and those announcements that he made.” And as we had the conversation, we sort of realized that's actually the whole episode [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yeah, exactly.Sy Hoekstra: We're doing a whole episode of Which Tab Is Still Open. I will explain those of you who don't know, give a brief summary of what it is that Mark Zuckerberg said exactly last week, and then we will get into the meat of the conversation. And then we'll be talking about how to find trustworthy sources and how to better understand the political and news climate that we are in in this new Trump era. So this is gonna be a really good conversation. I'm sure you'll all enjoy it. Jonathan, though, before we get started, it's your turn to talk [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Well, if you're listening to this live, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting this work so we can do more of it. If you become a paid subscriber, you'll get access to this video, audio and all of our live and bonus episodes from like [laughs] the last four years. You also get access to archives of everything that we've done, our Zoom calls as well. So please, please, do become a paid subscriber. You'll also get the ability to comment and interact with us more, and you'll be supporting everything that we're doing as we push for just political discipleship and education and leave behind the idols of the American church. Welcome to all y'all who just signed on.For everybody, if you do like Shake the Dust, definitely go to Apple, Spotify, give a great review. That helps people discover the show and lets us know that y'all appreciate what we're doing, and we are so excited to jump into this conversation today. Go for it, Sy.Sy Hoekstra: All right, let me get us caught up. And for the people who are live, feel free to comment or question in the chat at any point, and Jonathan will be monitoring that. We will incorporate that into our discussion. And join us live, by the way, if you wanna have that opportunity, if you're listening later. So like I said, what I'm gonna do is explain just the brief bullet points of everything that Mark Zuckerberg said in his reel last week [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And all of the changes that are happening at Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram and Threads.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And then we will get into the conversation about it after I go into that. Like I said, Which Tab Is Still Open right at the top of the show. So here are the announcements that he made, and they're all about content moderation and filtering content and everything on Facebook and Instagram and Threads. So the first thing, he has six announcements. I'll go through them really quickly. One is they are ending their fact checking program [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: They are completely getting rid of all of their mostly third party fact checkers and replacing them with community notes like they have on Twitter, meaning users will be doing the fact checking and trying to post notes to correct disinformation on Facebook, instead of having professional fact checkers doing that. He will be limiting moderation on certain subjects. He specifically mentioned immigration and gender. People who have subsequently reported about the policy changes have said there are also things about race and some other subjects that will not be moderated. And this is like basically saying that censorship on those subjects is out of touch with mainstream discourse now.All of this he made pretty clear, was revolving around Trump's election. They're gonna be focusing their content filters, like their automatic, not the actual people doing the fact checking or the humans doing the moderation, but the robo content filters [laughs] on illegal content and high severity violations, as he described them. So that's stuff like drugs and terrorism and child exploitation, that sort of thing. And then anything that is not on those subjects, in order for the filters to act in any way, people will have to affirmatively report them. The filters won't act preemptively. They're gonna bring back what they call civic content, which is like their political content.They had been, as a lot of you probably know, sort of hiding it. You had to go into your settings and say that you specifically wanted to see it to get it in your feed. So they're taking away that filter, that'll be back in your feed. And then the [laughs], there's two more. One is the safety and content moderation teams. They are moving to Texas, where they're, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, “where there will be less concerns about their biases.” They are currently in California, so that tells you which biases [laughs] he cares about and which he doesn't. Also, by the way, other reporters have said a lot of their content, there's some of their content moderation teams are already in Texas, but…Jonathan Walton: It's true.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It's a hand wave, yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Exactly. The rest of them will be moving to Texas.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And then finally, he said he'll be working with Trump and the US government to push back on governments, he specially named Europe, Latin America and China, who want Facebook to be doing more moderation and content filtering, which he always refers to as censorship, to push back against them, combined with the power of the American federal government. Specifically noting that over the last four years, it has been difficult, because the American government was asking for more censorship.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And all of this he justifies under kind of a heading of giving people a voice and allowing people to share their real experiences and free speech. He mentions the constitution and just our culture of free speech and discourse. Those are kind of the, I don't know, bigger ideological points that he gives behind it. I will just note before we start, this is very similar to the moves that Twitter has made and, important for us, this is similar to what Substack has been the whole time. Substack has been a non-moderation, almost entirely unmoderated platform for a very long time. They only moderate material that is either illegal in some way or pornographic. They have pretty much let everything else be, which has caused some controversy.So we will get into it, Jonathan. As I said, anybody can comment or ask questions as we go. But Jonathan, before we jump into what we think good political education is in the midst of changes, like what's happening at Meta, I wanna talk a little bit about kind of the ideology, the world view behind this, what the politics and economics behind this way of thinking are, because that will inform how we think that you move forward. So tell us what you think about what the world view is, what the ideology is behind these sorts of changes, and how does yours differ from that worldview [laughter]? Because spoilers, it does differ.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I've got a significant amount of disagreement with all of this.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Lots of dissonance that I feel around it. And there's a meme that someone put out really, there's amazing art happening right now around the different things that are happening in culture, particularly around war, injustice, violence, et cetera. So if you're not following amazing artists on Instagram or, we'll dive into how to use social media a little bit more later, but find some great art, find some great photos, find some things. And I found one that basically showed Trump sitting on a throne with a stream of visibly cartoonish but totally recognizable CEOs dropping million dollar coins at his feet to signify the reality that there are many, many CEOs right now, basically tithing a million dollars paying tribute to our new leader.And I think that is what we need to hold as the reality, is that all of this is subservient to the reality that these CEOs are trying to make as much money as possible and to protect the empires that they're building, and there is no larger framework of engaging in a social good. The reality is wherever the wind blows that's going to be the most profitable for their company, that is where they're going. And I think this is signified by how Morning Brew Daily, one of the most popular podcasts on the planet, talks about how Elon Musk invested money in the election. That was how they framed it.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: He “invested” $227 million in Trump becoming president. We should not call election manipulation and subversion of democracy an investment. But I think that's exactly how the powers that be see and engage with our current political system downstream of Citizens United in 2010 and all that kind of stuff. So I think we have to remember that we sit on stolen land that's set up in an exploitative, capitalistic system, and the moves that are being made are to protect the accumulation and the unbridled accumulation of that capital. And I think pretty explicitly now and enshrined into law, like with Citizens United, is this political and economic marrying which has ballooned into just all kinds of campaign finance violations that are no longer violations, and secret organizations and all those kinds of things that I wish were different, but am recognizing, praying and working against so that they actually will be.Sy Hoekstra: It's interesting to me that you mentioned those things in particular, because as we have said with Donald Trump in so many other arenas, he is not particularly unique in… like everybody always donates to presidents' inaugurations. Companies have always donated money to senatorial campaigns or to whatever.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: That's not new. The idea that your whole goal of your company is to maximize wealth for your shareholders is not new. It's just as usual with everything else. Trump magnifies things and puts them out in the open, not just him, but the whole culture around him, puts them out in the open in a way that they weren't before. And that's the chief thing that surprises people about him a lot is just how brazen he is.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: But, yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think the things, part of what we're maybe uncovering there is the things that change in how you politically educate yourself are not about radically new ideas that are coming down the pike. They're just about things crystallizing and elevating in a new way, and that's why we have to change. But, yeah, you're right. It's a cohesive thing. It makes sense with how we've had 40 years or so of sort of Republican orthodoxy being the purpose of a corporation is primarily to maximize shareholder value, maximize the value for people who own the company, and then that will in turn, be in the best interest of society, which is sort of an article of faith, that those interests will be aligned, that it is useful for people [laughs] who want to make a lot of money to propagate that faith.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, go ahead.Jonathan Walton: No, I was gonna say, how about you? What are some of the things standing out for you as we engage?Sy Hoekstra: Oh, there's so much, Jonathan. There's too much.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: I have so many things written down [laughter]. So I will pause and allow you to talk as I go through this.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: So I think you're right in what you're talking about is the motivations behind what CEOs are doing, but more broadly, the reason that things like what Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or other people are saying about their social media platforms, there's ideologies that justify those things in the minds of people who aren't making money off of them [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And one of those values or one of those, I don't know, it's a phrase, it's an idea that a lot of people have, is the marketplace of ideas. So this is a big part of our, quote- unquote, First Amendment or free speech culture in America. It's the idea that if you just put all your ideas out there in the world and all the justifications for them, the best ones will win out. Like products. You have a bunch of companies competing selling similar products. People are gonna buy the products that are the best at the best price, and the other ones will not do as well as whoever manages to provide the best product at the best price. It's the same. It is the marketplace of ideas.You provide the best ideas with the best justifications, you get them out there, they will beat all the other worse ideas, and the good ideas will dominate society. And so I say that that's important because that's kind of the reason that people say so there should be no moderation.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: Nobody should be blocking anybody's content, because actually, the way to defeat ideas is by presenting better ideas, not by destroying them or censoring or moderating them. Now I'm not in favor of censorship [laughter]. I'm not in favor of shutting people down in oppressive, authoritarian regimes. I just think the notion that better ideas, if they're put out there, will just automatically be bad ones is absurd [laughter]. And that bad ideas can be propagated through things like money and advertising and political power and whatever. You can do things short of all out censorship and oppression that are bad for our civic discourse [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: That is a thing that I firmly believe. It is not that there's one bad guy of censorship, and as long as we defeat that, then everything will be, all the conditions will be perfect for beautiful, productive public discourse [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And I think part of the problem is that the idea, doesn't really account for either emotions or power dynamics

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.ktfpress.comIn this month's bonus episode, we talk all about why and how to have difficult conversations about important political subjects with people who disagree with you. We get into:- What are goals are in these kinds of conversations- Strategies for regulating our emotions and achieving those goals- The power dynamics to keep in mind when having these conversations- And afterward, our segment Which Tab Is Still Open?, diving into a fascinating conversation with Rev. William Barber about what Democrats could gain if they paid attention to poor votersYou can find the video of the portion of this episode that we recorded live at ktfpress.com.Mentioned in the episode- Disarming Leviathan by Caleb Campbell- The Deeply Formed Life by Rich Villodas- Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero- When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert- Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Shila Heen- Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, and Ron McMillan- John Blake's interview with Rev. William BarberCredits- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.- Editing by Sy Hoekstra- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscriptIntroduction[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Sy Hoekstra: Hey everyone, it's Sy. Quick note before we start. Stay tuned after this recording of our conversation, which we did on Substack Live because we recorded our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, separately due to some time constraints we had. Thanks so much for listening, and the episode officially starts now.Jonathan Walton: If your relationship is broken by what you think about trans rights, then I think we need to examine what kind of relationship you had in the first place, because I think our relationships have to be much more than our opinions about the latest political topic of the day.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking… [long pause] Jesus, confronting injustice. I am Jonathan Walton [laughter], and we're live on Substack.Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan starts the live by forgetting our tagline [laughter].Jonathan Walton: It's true. It's true. So welcome to Shake the Dust. My name is Jonathan. We are seeking justice, confronting injustice. See, this is live. Live is hard. Go for it, Sy.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Thank you for being here, Sy.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, sure. I'm Sy Hoekstra, that's Jonathan Walton.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: We're doing this live, if you couldn't tell. This is a live recording of our podcast. We are gonna ease into it, and then we'll be good. Don't worry.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: We're doing this live as a recording, and then we will be releasing the audio and the video later to our paid subscribers. So if you're listening, welcome. Alright, we are gonna be talking today about a subject that comes to us from a listener that came in as a question on our finale episode, but it came in a couple hours too late, and I missed it before we started recording. But it was such an interesting question that we decided to make a whole episode out of it. So thank you to Ashley, our listener, who sent this in. We will be talking about basically, how to regulate yourself and actually strategies you can employ when having difficult conversations with people you disagree with on important subjects, the power dynamics and everything all around it, and literally just how to do it, which is actually kind of something that a lot of people have been asking us.Ashley comes at it from a really good angle that we'll be talking about too. So we'll get to all that in a moment. We will also be talking, as we usually do in our episodes, doing our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, diving a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. And this week, we will be talking about a really great interview with William Barber, the Reverend William Barber, and basically how poor people can but often don't affect elections because of the ways that the Republican and Democratic parties approach poor people. So we will get into all that in a second. I will apologize for my voice still sounding like I have a cold. It sounds like I have a cold because I have a cold, and [laughter] I have the eternal fall-winter, father of a two year old in daycare cold [laughs]. So bear with me, and I appreciate your patience. Before we get into all this, Jonathan Walton, go ahead.Jonathan Walton: Well, if you are listening live, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for tuning in, and I just wanna encourage you to become a paid subscriber of our Substack. If you do that, you get access to video and audio of this conversation afterwards, you also get bonus episodes and our entire archive of bonus episodes as well. Plus, when you become a monthly paid subscriber, you also get access to our monthly Zoom chats, and you'll be able to comment on our posts, communicate with us on a regular basis. And so that would be great. Plus, you'll be supporting everything that we can do to help Christians confront injustice and follow Jesus. And so that's particularly in the areas of political discipleship and education, as we try to leave behind the idols of the American church. And for everybody, if you do listen to this, please go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you might listen, and give us a five-star rating. If you wanna give less than that, you can also but you can keep that to yourself.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Thank you so much for your support and encouragement. We really appreciate it.Sy Hoekstra: Four stars and below, give us those ratings inside your head [laughter]. Also, if you have any questions and you are listening live, feel free to put them in the chat. We can answer those as we go. And alright, Jonathan, let's jump right into it.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: We got this question from Ashley. She comes at it from an interesting angle. I wanted to talk about the things that she doesn't wanna do, and then get into her questions. So she said, when she's talking about people that she disagrees with on important political or religious subjects, there's a couple of things that she did growing up. One of which was the only reason that you're engaging in these conversations as a conservative Evangelical, is to change people into you [laughs]. Is to win people over to your point of view and make them the same as you. That's your goal. Then she said she kind of grew up a little bit, went to college, became what she called it, an ungrounded liberal arts major [laughs] and started getting into what she described as the sort of millennial slash Gen Z cusp age that she is.Just it being cool to shut people down and just defeat them, destroy them in an argument. So she's just like, “I don't wanna be there just to make people into me. I don't wanna be there just to destroy people.” But she said now she finds herself in a position where most of the people around her largely agree with her on important subjects, and she just doesn't spend a lot of time around people who don't. So just kind of wants to know how to get into that, because she thinks it is important. She was saying some political organizers really convinced her that it is important to be doing that. And she just wants to know how you regulate yourself, how you go about it, and all that.What's the Goal When You're Having Difficult Disagreements on Important Subjects?Sy Hoekstra: And although that question was really interesting, and we're gonna jump into the actual strategies, I think Jonathan, the place to start is when you're having these conversations with someone, if you're not trying to cut them off, if you're not trying to turn them into you, and you're not trying to shut them down, what are you trying to do? What's the actual goal of what these conversations are? And for those of you who might be listening live or listening to us for the first time, this is Jonathan's wheelhouse [laughter]. This is right in what Jonathan does all the time. So Jonathan, go ahead, tell us what is the actual goal of these conversations?Jonathan Walton: Yes. So I wanna start off by saying that none of this is easy.Sy Hoekstra: For sure.Jonathan Walton: I'm giving you a cookie cutter, boxed up wonderful version of a cake that you don't… Like all the ingredients are in there, all you need to do is add water. And life is not like that.Sy Hoekstra: Yes.The Goal Should Be Connection, not Cutting off or ColonizingJonathan Walton: But if you're not trying to colonize someone or make them into you, and you're not trying to cut someone off just because they disagree with you, or you're not trying to cancel them, shut them down, hold them accountable in a way that leaves them feeling like a puddle of ignorance in front of you, then what you're actually trying to do is connect with them. And so I think that God made us to be in relationship with other people, and being in relationship with other people means that we're able to sit before them, to see and be seen, without trying to consume or control the other person. It's impossible to connect with someone that you're trying to control. It's impossible to connect with someone, to love someone that you're trying to consume, like to be enmeshed with and turn into yourself.And so I think one of the ways that we, what we're actually trying to do, instead of colonizing someone, instead of consuming someone, instead of controlling someone, is to connect with them. And so the foundational question that we need to ask ourselves when we're in conversations with someone who we disagree with is, “What do we want from the relationship?” So, yeah, we want to connect. And then we ask ourselves the deeper questions, hey, Ashley, [laughter] a deeper question of, “What kind of connection do I want with this person?” So for example, I know a couple. They voted differently in the election.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Than each other, or than you?Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Than each other.Sy Hoekstra: Okay.Jonathan Walton: I don't know if how I voted will even come up, because that wasn't the premise of the conversation.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: But this couple, their actual argument is not about like you voted for Trump and you wanted him not to vote for him. The actual thing is, how do we love each other amidst a disagreement? Because they don't know how to hold the reality that I believe something different from you and we can still remain connected. The only option they have is to consume the other person or calling them out, “You need to think like me.” Or be consumed, “I need to think like you.” Or, “Do we need to get a divorce?” Like, no. It is possible to remain connected to someone while being in disagreement, even vehement disagreement. I think what we actually need to agree on is, how do we wanna be connected? I think that's the foundational question.Connection Versus ConversionSy Hoekstra: Yeah. I like that a lot. It's funny, when we were talking about this, this did not… I don't do emotional health and relationship discipleship and all that kind of thing that Jonathan does all the time. And your answer did not immediately occur to me [laughs]. I was thinking about Ashley's question, and I was like, “Wait a minute, what is the goal? I don't even know.” Anyways, I think the framework of connection is super, super helpful, and I appreciate you laying it out for us. And it's helpful for a couple of reasons. One is, it roots us in actual relationships, meaning your real life circumstances are what's guiding you. Your goals in your relationships is what is guiding you in how you approach the question of how you have these conversations.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And then it's something that is sort of an antidote to that evangelical tendency to try to convert everyone, like you were talking about.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Meaning, it's like, if you have a separate goal, then you can leave those other goals behind. But those other goals, if you don't have a new goal, those goals always stick. How you were raised is not going to change or move or be as prominent in your mind if you're not replacing it with something else.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah.Sy Hoekstra: It's something that you can focus on, that you can actually do. Meaning you can make as much of an effort as you can to connect with someone, and they might not work, but you know that you did everything that you could, as opposed to trying to change someone. If your goal is changing people or defeating people, that never works. It very rarely works. And this is a weird thing that a lot of, I've realized growing up in evangelical churches, you couldn't face this directly, the fact that the overwhelming attempts that you made to evangelize someone didn't work [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right.Sy Hoekstra: That was just a reality that you had to ignore. The vast majority of the people that you tried, they ignored you and walked on their way. And you couldn't just stop and go like, “Maybe the thing that I'm offering them is actually not all that attractive [laughs]. Maybe the church or the community or whatever, is getting in the way of…” That stuff you couldn't face. You had to believe that you had the best way, and you had to change people, or you had to shut them down. You had to shut down your opponents if you were talking about, atheists or whatever. And that stuff, it leads to constant anxiety, because you don't control the outcome, but you want to.You feel like you have to control the outcome, but you do not control the outcome. And when it comes to connection, again, you don't control the outcome, but the goal is that you attempt, you do everything that's in your power to attempt to reach your goal of connection with this person.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And then it also filters out the people that you don't need to have a connection with [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: You don't have to respond to trolls. You know what I'm saying? You don't have to convert everyone. Because you're not trying to do all those things, it takes a lot of pressure off you. But I'm sorry, you were trying to say something. Go ahead.Jonathan Walton: Well, no, I think just to give some other resources, I'm pulling from Disarming Leviathan by Caleb Campbell. I'm pulling from Deeply Formed Life by Rich Villodas. I'm pulling from Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero. I'm pulling from Difficult Conversations. There's like, Crucial Conversations and Difficult Conversations and I get them mixed up.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: And also I'm pulling from When Helping Hurts. Because, oftentimes too, When Helping Hurts, I think it's really good, because we can start out with really good intentions, with trying to do something, quote- unquote, good for someone, when I think in reality what Sy was saying is true. We can only control what we desire, how we communicate that desire, and then pursuit of that desire.There is Vulnerability in Pursuing Connection as a GoalJonathan Walton: And then the other person actually gets to respond to that. And what's difficult about being vulnerable in connecting is that if you're trying to convert someone or control someone or colonize someone, they are rejecting a message or an idea. Or is it whereas if you are trying to connect with someone, you could feel rejected.And I think it's easier to try and persuade someone, or convince someone of an idea, rather than it is to connect with you as a person. I've been rejected by people, not just romantically [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: That too, though.Jonathan Walton: And it hurts. That as well. It's true. Tears.Sy Hoekstra: Sorry [laughter].Jonathan Walton: But one of the things is… No, it's cool. It's alright. Things worked out, praise God. But I think there's a vulnerability in, let's say I'm having a conversation with someone and they say, “Hey, Jonathan, I don't actually believe that police reform should happen. I think it's a few bad apples.” I have a few ways to go in that conversation. I could say, “Hey. Have you seen these statistics from this magazine and these FBI reports?” And go down deep into why Memphis is rejecting federal oversight. I could do that. Or I could say, “Oh, I feel afraid when you say that, because the results of that are, I'm afraid to walk outside my house because there aren't people actively pushing for reforms in the police department that occupies my neighborhood.”And that is vulnerability, because they could then invalidate my fears with their response, or whatever the thing is, but I think that that's the costly work of following Jesus in those moments.You Don't Need to Have Conversations with People Whose Goals Are Not ConnectionSy Hoekstra: Yeah. And just one more note on the goal, because we're starting to get into how these conversations actually work. But I did just wanna say one more thing about the overall goal of connection first before we move into that, just because I think this one is important. Especially for people who do ministry work of some kind, or talk about the kind of things that we talk about publicly, is if your goal is connection and the other person's goal is not connection, that's another reason that you don't have to talk to them [laughs]. Meaning, here's what I'm talking about here. I've seen you, Jonathan, in situations with people who do the kind of classic Christian thing when they disagree with something you're saying in public. They come to you and they say, “Hey, I've heard you talking about, let's say, police brutality. And I have some thoughts, I was wondering if we could just talk about it. Could we set up some time to have a Zoom?”And I've seen you go like, say to this person in not so many words basically, “I don't actually think that your goal is to have a conversation right now. I think you're upset with what I'm saying and you want to try and change me. Is that correct?”Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: You just said that to them, and not rudely. You put it in kind words, but you're just like, “Am I right in thinking that that's really what you want here?” And if they can't say no, then you will say, “Okay, I'm sorry. I don't really think I have time for this,” [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And move on. Which is something that I don't think a lot of ministers feel the need to do. But if someone is cutting off the possibility of connection from the jump, and all they're saying is, “I want to change you,” or they're refusing to not say that all they want is to change you, [laughs] you don't have to talk to them. You have no responsibility to talk to that person because you don't have a responsibility to get into an argument with anyone. Even as a pastor. Your responsibility is to shepherd people and to lead people, and if our conversation is just going to be an argument, you don't have to talk to them. You may still want to, everything I say is subject to your personal relationships with people and your individual circumstances, but that's an option, and I want more people to know that [laughs], because I think a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to just win arguments when they don't need to be having them.Winning Arguments Is Not What Leads to RepentanceJonathan Walton: Yeah. And also too, I think we've misidentified what the fruit of a won argument is.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: So for example, if I preach a sermon, or I have a conversation with a small group of people and I give a call to faith, and someone decides to follow Jesus, I did not win an argument. They're not saying I have the best ideas, or I presented things in a really compelling way, none of that is happening. What's happening is the Holy Spirit is working within them for them to respond in some way. It's the kindness of God that leads to repentance. The Gospel is the power and transformation. I can't say, “You know what? What I drew on that napkin, or what I put in that card, when the PowerPoint slide opened and everybody went, ooh,” like, no. That was not the power. It is the power of God that draws people nigh into himself.Sy Hoekstra: Nigh unto himself [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes. KJV baby. KJV [laughter].How Do We Achieve Connection in Difficult Conversations?Sy Hoekstra: So let's get into then the actual strategies and kind of the meat of the question.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: That's it. Let's get into, how do you regulate yourself and what do you actually do to achieve the goal of connection?We Have to Know Ourselves to Connect with OthersJonathan Walton: Yeah, so I think the first thing is that we can't know other people unless we know ourselves. So for example, if… let's say I was having a conversation over the weekend with someone, and they said to me, “Well, I can't believe they would think that way.” And then I said, “Well, if I were in your situation, I would be pretty angry at that response. Are you upset? Do you feel angry?” I have to know, and be willing to name that I would be angry. I have to know, and be willing to imagine, like how to empathize. Like I'm listening to them, then I wanna empathize with how they're feeling, and then ask them, “Does that resonate with you?” To build some sort of emotional connection so that we stay grounded in them as an individual and not stepping up to the argument. Like “Oh, yeah. Absolutely, what they did was wrong.”I don't wanna participate in condemning other people either. I wanna connect with this person. We could commiserate around what happened, but I think we should prioritize what is happening for the person right in front of me, not just rehashing what happened to them. You know what I mean? Like figure out what's going on. So I think we have to know ourselves to be able to know other people, which includes that emotional awareness and intelligence. And then I think after that, we should affirm what's true about that person. And then, if we've done that, then be able to ask some questions or share our own perspective.Sy Hoekstra: Or what's true about what they're saying.Jonathan Walton: Yes, what's true about what they're saying, yeah. And then be able to lean in there. And if there is an opportunity and the person desires to hear what you think about it, then that's great, but I guarantee you, they will not wanna hear about what you're saying if you don't connect with them first. And so creating or building a foundation of trust that you're not trying to just convert them or consume them or colonize them, but you are trying to connect requires that first part. So slowing down, then knowing how we feel, and then being able to connect around that level is a great place to start.Connect with Whatever Is True in What the Other Person Is SayingSy Hoekstra: Can you tell us what finding what's true and what someone is saying and then affirming that value, what does that actually sound like?Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely. So let's go to a different script. There was a woman that had a conversation with me and was very upset that Black people could vote for Trump. This was a racially assigned White woman saying these things. And she was, I mean, raising her voice very loud, and so I said my goal… I did actually speak over her. I said, “So my goal in this conversation is for us as a group to remain connected and aware of each other and ourselves. What is your goal in what you're saying?” And I think that kind of threw cold water in her face because she didn't know what to do with that. And so she slowed down, then she said, “Well, I don't know. I haven't processed anything,” that was kind of what she blurted out.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I knew that, actually [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I said, “It's great that like you need… this is a space to process.” I said, “What I would love for you to do is to slow down and tell us what you want, because I don't think you want me to be angry, and that's actually how I'm feeling right now. Was that your goal, was for me to feel angry and disconnected from you?” And she goes, “Well, you shouldn't be mad at me.” I said, “I can own my feelings. I didn't say you made me angry. I said my feeling in what you're saying is anger. Is that your intention? Is that what you're trying to foster? Because I would actually like to have my emotional response match your intent.” And it was not an easy conversation, but she did say after about 15 minutes of this kind of back and forth, she said, “I wanted to just close my computer,” is what she said, “But I didn't.” And then I said, “I'm so glad you chose to stay.”Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: “I'm so glad you chose to remain in our group. And to affirm again, you are valuable here, we desire your contribution and things like that.”Sy Hoekstra: And you were specifically in like a cohort that you were leading.Jonathan Walton: And I think it is hard to move towards someone who… Yeah, I was leading. I was leading. And everybody else was silent. They were not saying anything, but I had follow up conversations with one person after that, who said they were very grateful that I did that, because they were like, “I didn't know that you could be patient like that with someone so animated.” They were like, “I don't understand how you were calm in that situation.” I said, “Well, I was calm because I knew who I was. I was facilitating the conversation. I was leading the dialogue.” And I said, “When I'm with my mom,” not my mom, my mom passed away. “But if I was with my dad or my brothers in that conversation, I would have to do the same thing, but it will require more work because of the emotional history that's there. This history of my family and stuff under the bridge.”So each relationship is gonna bring with it its own porcupine quills, if you will, but that doesn't mean our steps change. I think our goal is to love our neighbor as ourselves. And if we don't know ourselves, we can't love our neighbors. So in the way that we would want patience and want grace and want respect, I think we need to extend that as best as we possibly can by trying to build a connection.Sy Hoekstra: And if you're talking about, I think that's really good for a discipleship situation. Anybody who disciples people, I hope you just learned something from that story [laughs]. But if you're having, by the way, Jonathan, I've noticed as we're talking, there's a very long delay. So I apologize.Jonathan Walton: No worries.Sy Hoekstra: I just interrupted you with something that was related to something you said like three sentences later, I'm sorry [laughs].Jonathan Walton: You're all good [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: So I think when it comes to a political issue, if you're talking to someone who's saying something that you find very hurtful or very upsetting or whatever, which is where I think a lot of these questions come up for people. For a lot of people it's, “How do I talk to a Trump supporter?” That's kind of the question.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And then, like Jonathan said, it's going to be very hard. It's going to depend on your relationship with that person. And this work can be hard. It's very hard to get people to talk about their emotions, but that's what we need to do when somebody's talking… if they're being very anti-immigrant. You need to find a way into how they're communicating and what they're saying as angry as they are, whatever. An underlying thing might be, “I feel insecure about the economy of our country, I feel insecure about my job. I feel like I'm not gonna be able to provide because somebody's gonna undercut me in wages or whatever.” All that stuff. And the way to connect with that person is to say, “That makes sense, that feeling. And if I felt that that was happening to me, I would also be insecure.”Maybe it is also happening to you, you know what I mean? You have to just find a way into that feeling, and then say, “But the way that I feel secure is X, Y and Z, about…” If you want to talk about solidarity and lifting everyone up actually makes all of us more secure. You can get into the nitty gritty of immigration and economics, if you know that stuff, and say [laughs], “Actually, in general, immigrants really help us economically. And so I actually feel more secure. I know that immigrants commit crime at lower rates than citizens. And I trust the numbers that say that, and that comes from police departments. We can go look at your police department stats. So immigrants coming in actually lowers crime. I know that's a shock, but. So I feel more secure.” All that kind of like, you try and find a way to connect on the emotion and speak in a… What I'm doing right now is summarizing and being slightly glib, but [laughs] I think that's the best you can do.People You Connect with May Not Change, or Take a Long Time to ChangeSy Hoekstra: And I know to some people, if you have a really obstinate person that feels hopeless and impossible, and I think what we're saying is you give it your best shot, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And there's nothing you can do about it not working. And it might also be something, by the way, where you talk to them now and that's the beginning of a 10-year process of them changing.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: You don't know. This is why I said that stuff's out of your hands, is what I mean. So that's where we need to find our own internal piece about it. And then, I don't know, there's a number of other thoughts I have about what you have to do to prepare for all that, like the prep work that goes into it. But do you have other thoughts about that, Jonathan?Jonathan Walton: Well, I mean, I think just all of what you said is true, and I just wanna lean into what you said about, you cannot rush the process of that relationship. Because if your relationship is broken by what you think about trans rights, then I think we need to examine what kind of relationship you had in the first place. Because I think our relationships have to be much more than our opinions about the latest political topic of the day. We've got to be able to have conversations with people that are deeper and contain the multitudes that a person holds, as opposed to the latest tweet or share that they had.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: We're talking with people, we're not talking with a minimally viable product that's before us like, “Do I want this or not in my life?” And so I think even in the, let's take the example, like Caleb Campbell did a great example of this immigration. If someone actually believed that they were going to be invaded, I'm making quotes with my fingers, but invaded and they're gonna lose their job and they're gonna lose their emotional and spiritual and social security, not Social Security like the actual entitlement program, but social security like their feeling of social safety, that is objectively terrifying. If that is the narrative, then we can actually connect with people around why they're afraid.And if we connect with them why they're afraid, not convince them why they shouldn't be scared, then you actually have the opportunity to share with them why they may not need to be afraid. Because, as Sy said, immigrants crime actually goes down. Immigrants actually pay billions of dollars in taxes. Immigrants actually start businesses at a higher rate than our native population. All those things, but we can't get there unless we're connected. We cannot correct people without connecting with them. So, yeah.Getting Good at Connection Takes PracticeSy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think this takes a ton of practice.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: You will be bad at it at first, and that's [laughter]… So I think another part of it is you have to know why it's important to you. That's another thing, and that's a personal thing. But you have to understand why connection with someone whose political beliefs or whatever you find kind of abhorrent [laughs] is something that is important to you, that work has to be done on your own and ahead of time.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: You also have to take into account… sorry. You'll just get better at it over time. So meaning it, I'd say it's only like in the last few years that I've really been able to participate in extremely difficult conversations about politics or whatever, and just be okay [laughter], no matter what the consequence of it is. And sometimes that's still not true, depending on the relationship I have with the person, but I don't know. You've got to remember that people… actually, at the beginning I remember I told you she talked about, as a young person or as millennials and Gen Z wanting to shut people down. And I actually don't think that's a generational thing. I think that's just a young people thing.I think when I was 22 I thought it was awesome to shut people down [laughs]. And I think all the most recent, this is something I know from justice advocacy work, but all the recent neurology science basically tells us you don't have an adult brain until you're like 25 [laughter]. You don't have your impulse control, you know what I mean? It's just hard.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And it just takes time to retrain yourself to do something, It can take years. So fear not, is what I'm saying, if you think you're bad at this.Being Aware of How Much You Know about a SubjectSy Hoekstra: And then I think something that's kind of deceptively emotional is the things that don't seem emotional, like knowing your facts and being able to bow out of conversations when you don't know your facts [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: Like if you have a feeling that something's wrong, but somebody's saying something wrong, or bigoted, or whatever, but you don't have the information, A, it's gonna make you much more comfortable if you do have the information, if you've read up on it, if you know the subjects. Because you find as you dig deeper into different political issues and hot button topics, there really are only so many opinions that people have, and they're usually based on relatively shallow understandings of information. So you can know a lot of the arguments ahead of time. You can know a lot of the important facts ahead of time. You've just kind of got to pay attention and that's something that happens over time.And then if you don't know that stuff, and you try and engage anyway just based on instinct, you're gonna have a lot of times where you say stuff that you regret later [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.Sy Hoekstra: You're gonna have a lot of times where you maybe even make up something just because you wanna be right and you wanna win.Jonathan Walton: Yes, you wanna win.Sy Hoekstra: And then bowing out and letting someone believe their terrible thing without you fighting against it, sometimes that can be really hard, but that's an emotional issue, that's something about you being…Jonathan Walton: Right. That's a feeling. Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's always gonna be feelings, and that's why you got to have your goals clear, and whenever you can, know your stuff.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Adam just said something, really quick. He said, “I've literally had notification of high heart rate from my Apple watch during such conversations.”Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Yes.Jonathan Walton: And being able to have conversations without a high heart rate notification is becoming more normal.Sy Hoekstra: Yes. Good.Jonathan Walton: Yes, that has happened to me so many times. And it's true. It's fewer, it's less than what it was before that.Sy Hoekstra: That's so funny. I don't have a smart watch, so that's never happened to me, but that's so funny. And I'm glad that it's improving for both of you [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And it's a way to track if your spiritual formation's actually forming you [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: True.Engaging in Hard Conversations with Connection as a Goal is ExhaustingSy Hoekstra: So one more thing though is, this is exhausting.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: One of the reasons it's exhausting is not just because the whole thing is hard, but the issue is no one's ever gonna come to you, again, I guess, unless you're a pastor, and say, “Hey, next Wednesday at 4:00 pm I wanna talk to you about immigration.”Jonathan Walton: Right [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: They're going to come to you, you're gonna be having a dinner, and there's gonna be a completely random out of nowhere comment that you do not expect coming and your instinct may be in that moment to get angry or to just let it pass because you don't wanna deal with right now or whatever. And all that you have to take that into account. Again, over time it'll get easier to respond to random acts of racist bigotry, whatever. You know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: But it is something that's hard to do for anyone, and so you need to take the exhaustion of constantly being on alert into account when you think about, how do I wanna connect with this person? Because if it's someone where you have to be on alert the whole time and ready to go at any moment [laughs], that's difficult. And that's somebody that you might need to hang out with less or whatever.Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.Sy Hoekstra: You have to make those decisions for yourself. And so I'm just saying, be willing to take that into account. Be alert to that way that you can become exhausted. Because, again, if you're really tired and you just have a snap reaction, you can say stuff you regret later.Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Alright, Jonathan. Do you have… Yeah, you have thoughts. Go ahead and then we'll get to...Jonathan Walton: No, I was gonna say, off all of that, I think is mitigated by asking myself, “What kind of connection do I want with this person?”Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And all of us have relationships that are not as healthy as we'd like them to be. And if my goal is not to convert someone or I don't feel this like abnormal, huge weight of this person's salvation, because that's not my responsibility, then I can say, “You know what? I just can't be with that person right now. I just can't do that.” And be able to enter into that in a healthier way, and it'll be a more loving thing.The Power Dynamics of Difficult ConversationsSy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely. Let's just get into, I think that's a lot of the meat of it, but let's talk about just some of the power dynamics and other things that are going on during these conversations. Jonathan, I'm happy to start if you want, but you can go ahead if you have some things you wanna flag for people.Jonathan Walton: Well, I think if we're not thinking about power dynamics then we're missing what's actually happening. So when men to women, able-bodied to disable-bodied, rich to poor, educated to uneducated. All of these things are playing all the time. So somebody's like, “Oh, you're playing the race card, or you're being ageist,” that's just the table. It's not a card. That's just the society we live in. We live in a segregated, stratified society. And so to be able to be aware of that, I think respects whether you are in the ecosystem or whether you've been lifted up by the ecosystem because of the hierarchies that we live in. I think that's just something we have to take into account of where we are and where the person that we are engaging with is or is perceived to be, then that can be a gift, just in the conversation. Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: So that's sort of like keeping in mind whether you're talking to someone who's basically [laughs] above or below you on different hierarchies, which is gonna be important. Like, if you're talking, if I as a White person am talking to a Black person about race, I have to understand the dynamics. For me, at least, what I'm thinking about is I have to be personally familiar with the stuff that Black people hear all the time [laughs], and how it is often heard, and that sort of thing. Not because I need to apply a monolithic understanding of race conversations to any individual, but just to know that that individual is probably going to hear something I say this way, or feel this way about something.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: I'm sorry about the sirens in my background. I live in Manhattan [laughter]. So I think that's one thing. But then the other way is I as a disabled person, if I'm trying to talk to an able-bodied person about disability stuff, I just need to take into account how much more tiring that's going to be, and the work that I may have to do after the conversation to process whatever terribly insulting thing was said to me [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And I do that all the time. That's something I have to do when I get home from dropping my daughter off at daycare. It just depends on what happened on the way there, or whatever. Another thing is that the, a person you're talking to can always walk away [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Nobody needs to be in this conversation, and that you need to be able to accept that. You need to be able to let people go the way that Jesus did when they rejected his teachings. Because if you don't do that and [laughs] you try and force them into conversations with you, again, that's what we're trying to avoid doing, is panicking about the results and trying to make somebody like you because you think the world needs to be the way that you are. That's the colonialist mindset [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: And then I think one other thing for me is how the person… this is back on the hierarchy thing. How what somebody else is saying is affecting other people around you, or the other person that that person has to interact with. Meaning the person that you're trying to connect with might be someone, like not the person you're talking to. It might be somebody who's sitting next to you, it might be somebody who's not there.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: So that's just the other thing to keep in mind, because you might be trying to show somebody else that they have support, that's a huge thing. That's the person who you have a conversation with after your cohort call that you were talking about earlier. And it might be just like, if I'm talking to another White person and I know, actually doesn't matter if I know them or not, but if I'm talking about connection, if I know people of color who have to talk to this person and they're saying something that I think I can head off or correct in some way, then I should do that. And I should keep in mind my connection with that White person, but I've also top of mind it's gonna be the connection that I have with people of color who interact with that person too.Okay, those are my thoughts on that big question. Jonathan, do we have anything else to say about these conversations before we move to Which Tab Is Still Open?Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Well, I don't have anything more to say about that conversation. I do have two problems that our live audience will get to engage with.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: One is that I need to get… it's one o'clock.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And so I have a time stop.Sy Hoekstra: Right now?Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And my phone is also telling me, yeah, because I was thinking, I didn't know we're gonna talk past one o'clock, but…Sy Hoekstra: [laughter] Well, we started like 12:15 so.Jonathan Walton: We did. We did, we did. And then my phone as we entered into this conversation is on the red.Sy Hoekstra: Is about to die. Alright, cool. So then I think what we'll do, Jonathan, is we'll record the Which Tab Is Still Open separately, and just add that to the bonus episode.Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.Sy Hoekstra: So again, everybody, if you wanna hear the recordings of this afterwards, and now I guess the extended version of this episode, become a paid subscriber at KTFPress.com, or just on, you're on Substack right now if you're listening to us. Become a paid subscriber, that would be amazing. If you wanna get our newsletter that's actually free, you can follow us on the free list and get us that way. Thank you so much for joining us today, we really appreciate it. Give us a five-star review on Apple or Spotify and we will see you next month. We do these once a month now that we're in the off season. And our theme song is “Citizens”, by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. Joyce Ambale does the transcripts. I'm doing the editing right now and the production of this show, along with our paid subscribers. Thank you all so much for joining us, and we will hopefully see you next month or on the paid list.Jonathan Walton: Yep, bye.Sy: Bye.[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Which Tab Is Still Open?: Rev. William Barber and Poor VotersSy Hoekstra: And now this is the separate recording of Which Tab Is Still Open. We're gonna dive a little bit deeper into one of the articles from the newsletter that Jonathan brought up recently. Jonathan, why don't you tell us about the article, and we'll get into a little discussion about it.Jonathan Walton: Yes. So our good friend, John Blake, award winning journalists and former guest on this podcast interviewed Reverend Dr William Barber on his thoughts after the election. It was one of the most interesting things I read post-election, because Dr Barber has a perspective most politicians and pundits just don't. He takes a perspective of poor people seriously, like Jesus [laughter]. And so one of the things he argues was that about 30 million poor people who are eligible voters usually don't vote because neither party is addressing the issues that are important to them, like minimum wage, affordable health care, strengthening unions, etc.There was talk about strengthening unions, but not in the ways that communicate about the needs and priorities of low wage and poor workers. Republicans mostly blame poor people for their poverty, that is a consistent thing over the last 60 years. And Democrats ignore them altogether because they see them not as a viable voting block to mobilize, we should get middle class voters, which is not the same as the working poor. Barber has a history of successfully organizing multiracial coalitions of poor working class people in North Carolina to make real difference in elections. So it's not just a theoretical thing, like you can actually win elections by doing what MLK did, which Barber is in the tradition of you can have a multicultural coalition of impoverished or economically impoverished, marginalized people in the United States and actually have and hold power in the country.So even as Kamala Harris lost in November in North Carolina, voters elected a Democratic Governor and Attorney General and got rid of the veto-proof majority in the state legislature, even with all of the nonsensical gerrymandering that exist there. So Sy, what are your thoughts on all this?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I'm very happy that somebody in the mainstream news is actually talking about this [laughs]. That's one thing. I just haven't heard... This is one of those things where if somebody, if the Democrats got this right, they could win a lot more. I don't know how much more, Reverend Barber is very optimistic about it. I haven't dug into the numbers the way that he has as a political organizer, but he basically says if you swing like 10 percent of the poor vote in any direction in many states, and you could change a whole lot of stuff.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: I mean, you can read the article for his exact arguments. But it is definitely true that we don't address poor voters any real way, like we get stuck on, I've talked about this before, the bias toward, quote- unquote, real America, which sort of amounts to working and middle class White people and really does not address actually impoverished people. And the average, Reverend Barber is very sensitive to this, which I think is why he's effective, is the average welfare recipient in the United States today is still White. That hasn't changed. Welfare recipients are disproportionately Black and Brown. But the demographics of this country are such that you can be disproportionately high as a racial minority, but White people are still gonna be the majority of the welfare recipients.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And the potential interest alignment between those groups has always been intentionally broken up by elites in this country. And the thing that this raises for me is our constant, throughout our whole history, our belief that basically, poor people's opinions don't matter, that poor people's interests don't matter, and maybe poor people shouldn't even be voting in the first place. We had to have a movement in this country for universal White male suffrage [laughs] in the first few decades of this country, that was a fight. And the reason was they did not want you voting originally, if you didn't own property. And the belief behind that was, if you don't have property, then you don't have a stake in society. You don't have a sufficient stake in society to, I don't know, uphold the responsibility of voting.And in a lot of different ways that bias or that bigotry, frankly, has shot through a lot of different ways that we think about economics and politics. And just the idea like, it does not make sense to start with. If anything, the people with the most stake in how the government treats them are the people with the least power, with the with the way that society is run, are going to be the people who suffer the most when society is run poorly [laughs]. And the people who have the most independent wealth and power, meaning they can, regardless of what the government is doing, they're going to be generally alright, because they are wealthy landowners, if we're talking about the beginning of this country. They're actually kind of the least interested in how society runs, and maybe the most interested in maintaining the status quo and not having things change, which I think is what we're actually talking about.I think we're actually talking about not having significant change [laughs] in our economics, when we talk about the people who have the most quote- unquote, responsibility or the most sense of responsibility for how the society goes. And I think all of that bleeds into how both parties think today, because both parties are made up of elites. And I think there was this huge and terrible reaction to the CEO of United Healthcare being assassinated. And I was reading some stuff about it that basically said, if you're talking about healthcare, which is one of the issues that William Barber brought up, I think the reason that a lot of people don't understand the anger and the glee over the fact that this guy was killed online, which there was a ton of, which I don't support.But if you're trying to understand it there's so many elites who are the healthcare CEOs themselves, the politicians who write healthcare policy for whom, the biggest problem that health insurance is ever going to be is maybe a significant amount of paperwork. Maybe you get something declined or not covered, and you have to fight a little bit and then you get it covered again. It's not something that's going to bankrupt you or kill you. But that's a reality for many, many people around the country.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And if it's not bankrupt or kill, it's long, grinding trauma over a long period of time.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And it's just so easy for us to lose sight of stuff like that and then not understand as a political party, why addressing those problems directly wouldn't matter. And when I say us in that case, I mean people who are economically comfortable and who have educated and are doing okay in this society. And so all this is what Barber's comments bring up for me is, he is trying to pay attention to real needs that real people have, and alert his party, the Democrats, to the fact that if they understood and paid attention to and took those needs seriously, they would have a ton of voters who nobody's counting on right now. Like there's no strategy around them.It's not you would be stealing voters from the Republicans, you would be bringing in a whole bunch of new voters and doing something that no one is expecting, and you'd be able to [laughs] actually make a big difference that way. Jonathan, if you have any thoughts or just your own responses to me, or your own thoughts.Jonathan Walton: Well, I think there's a there's a few things like, yeah, I'm grateful for John Blake and for media personalities that take the time to center the most marginalized people, because that was not the conversation. All the post mortem of the Democratic Party and the celebration of what Trump did, neither one of those things included real solutions for materially impoverished people in the United States. They were not a group of people that were, when you said, counted, it's literally they're not counted. They do not count in that way. There isn't analysis, there isn't engagement. And so that I think is deeply saddening. So I'm grateful for John Blake for highlighting it. I'm grateful for Barber for the work that he does.I think one of the things that highlights for me is the… because you use the word elite, and I think there was an essay a while ago that I read about the word elite and what it means and how we use it. Like Tucker Carlson says the elites, when in reality he is elite. Elite is Hell.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: The money that he makes, the universities that he went to, the position that he holds. Me and you are elite. We both have Ivy League educations, we both have graduate degrees. We are both financially secure, we are both educated and well connected. And the majority of, some of that, that I realize is that if I have those things I am insulated from the suffering that millions of people experience around health insurance. And because our classes in the United States are segregated and our churches are also often segregated, we are not going to have relationships with people that are struggling with these things. It's very difficult, at least for me, to live in Queens, to have conversations and relationships that are cross class.My children participate in activities that cost money. That's a proxy for a class decision. I drive, I do not take the train. That is a class communication. I live in a home and I own it, I do not rent. That's a class. I drive to a supermarket like Costco. You have to pay for a membership to be in Costco. These are all economic decisions, and there are going to be certain groups of people that I do not interact with every single day, because I have more money. And so I think if we stretch that out across the Democratic, Republican independent leadership in our country, the majority of us do not interact with people that are from a different class, higher or lower. And so we have these caricatures of what life looks like, which is why an executive can say it doesn't matter if we deny or defend or depose or delay or all the things that were written on these bullets that came from the person that killed the United Healthcare CEO.The reality is, I think we do not… I don't think, I know this, we do not prioritize the poor in this country. And to what you were saying, it's not that we don't prioritize poor and marginalized people, it's a strategic, intentional exclusion of them. So [laughs] like you said, the reality is, if you were not a wealthy land-owning White person, you were not allowed to vote or hold elected office. And so that's a reality. So each time a tier of people wanted to be included, there was an argument, there was a fight, there was war, there was violence. And so I believe that there is an opportunity that Barber is talking about too. It does not have to be violent to include people who are poor and marginalized.It's really just a decision to and the time and intentionality to do it. And I wish that the church did that. I wish that politicians did that. I wish that we did that as a society. And I recognize in my own life it is even still difficult to do because of how our society has set up invisible and very real fences between economic communities.Sy Hoekstra: And it's remarkable for you to say that in some ways. I mean, it makes sense that you would be the person to notice it, but it is remarkable in some ways for you to say it because you grew up as you've talked about many times, quite poor in the rural south.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And you are actually directly connected to people who don't have a lot of money, right?Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And that's still your reality that your day to day life does not involve that many poor people.Jonathan Walton: Right. And that is, to be totally transparent, that is one of the hardest things about getting older and having children. When we go home, when I say home I'm thinking Brodnax.Sy Hoekstra: The small farming town in Virginia that you're from.Jonathan Walton: Yes. Where I'm from. It's exceptionally clear to me that the access that I have to resources, the decisions that I'm making each day are infused with the wealth and resources that surround me, just by virtue of the location that I live in. So we have to do really, really, really hard work to include people who are across classes in our lives, so that when we consider what we're going to do with our power, they are included in that decision. And I think Barber did a great job of explaining why that is strategically important as well.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so two points. One is, thank you for talking about that. For those of you who don't know, Jonathan and I are good friends. That's why I can say, “Hey Jonathan, let's talk about [laughs] your background as a poor person.”Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: We've talked about this a ton on the show before, Jonathan is very open about it in public. And that, I actually think, hearing you talk about the tension and how your hometown is versus your new adopted home, a lot of that is actually part of the answer. Just people being willing to be totally open about their own financial circumstances, and the differences they see between places, because that is something that we hush up and we talk about, we make it shameful to talk about your money. We make it shameful for everyone to talk about their money. You're not supposed to talk about it if you're rich, you're not supposed to talk about it if you're poor [laughs]. You're basically only supposed to talk about it if you're right where the Republicans think real Americans are [laughter]. You know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And yeah, just being willing to talk about it openly and in a not ashamed way actually goes a long ways to breaking some of the taboos that hold the silence on these issues. That's one thing. The other thing is, you said at the end just now, that William Barber would argue that it is strategic to basically address the needs of the poor voters who are not voting. But earlier you said it is a strategic exclusion, or like a strategic that they're evading talking about these issues.Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. So in the Constitution, there is a strategic exclusion of poor, marginalized, non-White-land-owning-educated-well-healed people. There's the intentional strategic exclusion of those people for the maintenance of power and dominance, right?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And I think there needs to be a strategic, intentional inclusion of those people, and the intentional redistribution, and I know people hate that word, redistribution [laughs] of resources, so that people can be included in our society in a meaningful way.Sy Hoekstra: Well, Jonathan's a communist. You heard it here first.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] It's not the first time I've been accused of loving the Marx.Sy Hoekstra: Loving the… [laughs]. But I think the other aspect of it is just, the reality is that the donors that support both parties, these are not priorities of theirs. In fact, a lot of times they're opposed to the priorities of theirs. They are the healthcare CEOs. They are the people who have to negotiate against the unions. They are the people who would have to pay up the higher minimum wages. So that's part of the thing that makes it challenging. But Barber's been able to do the work [laughs] in North Carolina and make a difference there. And it's not… and he was one of the people, organizing like his is what made North Carolina a swing state in the first place from a traditionally deep red state. So it's worth trying, guys [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It is.Sy Hoekstra: Take a look, Democrats.Jonathan Walton: Worth trying.Sy Hoekstra: It's worth trying [laughs]. It's not just worth trying for political victories either. It's also worth actually addressing poor people's needs [laughs], to be clear about what I'm saying.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I think I was convicted. Like, Shane Claiborne said this and others like Merton has said this, and Howard Thurman said this, and MLK said it, and Jesus said it. The center of the church should be marginalized people. That should actually be the thing. “The poor will always be with us,” is not an endorsement of poverty. That's not what that is. You know what I mean? [laughter] Some people were like, “Well, people are supposed to be poor, and I'm supposed to…”Sy Hoekstra: I know. I know. Or, the poor will always be with us, and that means that we should not try to end poverty, because Jesus said you can't end it.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, right. That, no. But the reality that that is a broken, tragic theology that aligns with White American folk religion and requires no sacrifice from people who are on the upper end of a dominant hierarchy. That's what that is. Yeah. I hope that even if the political parties of the United States do not pay attention to what to what Barber is saying, that the Church will. That would be great.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Amen to that. Alright. I think we're just gonna end it there. I already did the outro and everything, the credits and all that stuff in the Live episode, so I think Jonathan and I at this point are just going to say thank you all so much for listening. We will see you in January for the next episode. Goodbye.Jonathan Walton: Thank you. Bye [laughter].[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: How what somebody else is saying is affecting other people around you, or the other person that that person has to interact with, meaning the person who youJonathan Walton: [burps].Sy Hoekstra: [laughs], remember, I can't mute you if you just burp into your microphone.Jonathan Walton: Yes, sir. My apologies. [laughter] Welcome to live everyone.Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to live Substack.Jonathan Walton: I drank a ton of water. They saw me just do that [laughter].

It's our season finale! We're answering listener questions and talking:-        Staying grounded and emotionally healthy post-election-        Some mistakes people are making in their election analysis-        Why the politics of identity will never go away in America-        How the Church can and can't fight anti-Blackness and other forms of injustice-        Where you can hear us in between seasons-        And a lot more!Mentioned in the Episode:-        Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor by Rev. Caleb Campbell-        Our newsletter from last week with a worship playlist and sermon Jonathan recommended-        The Webinar Intervarsity is doing with Campbell on Tuesday – Register here.-        The article on patriarchy by Frederick Joseph: “For Palestinian Fathers, Sons, and Brothers”-        Our free guide to processing and acting on the injustices you encounterCredits-            Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Editing by Multitude Productions-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscriptIntroduction[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Sy Hoekstra: The beauty of the church is not in how good it is. The church is beautiful in the light of Christ, not in the light of its own good work and goodness. The church is beautiful when it is people collectively trying to put their faith in the grace that governs the universe, and not put their faith in their own ability to bring the kingdom of God into this world.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. We have a great show for you today. It's our season four finale. We're answering listener questions and continuing our discussion from our Substack live conversation two weeks ago, about where to go from the Trump election as followers of Jesus.Sy Hoekstra: And because this is the finale, let me just take a quick second to tell you where we are going from here. We are gonna be doing our monthly bonus episodes for our paid subscribers, like we usually do when we are not on a season of this show. We are going to be doing them though slightly differently. You will have the opportunity to hear them at one point if you're not a paid subscriber, because we're gonna record them like we did two weeks ago on Substack Live. So if you want to see those when they are being recorded, download the Substack app. If you get on our free emailing list, you'll be notified when we start. You just need to go ahead and get that app, it's both on iOS and Android.And if you wanna make sure that you're getting our emails in your Gmail inbox, because we've heard some people tell us they're going to the promotions folder or whatever Gmail is trying to do to filter out your spam, but actually filtering out the stuff that you wanna see, you just have to either add us to your contacts, or if it's in the promotions folder, just click the “Not promotion” button that you can see when you open your email. Or you can actually just drag and drop emails that show up in your folders to your inbox, and then it'll ask you, “Hey, do you wanna always put emails from the sender in your inbox?” And you can just click, yes. So do one of those things, add us to your contact, drag and drop, click that “Not promotions” button that'll help you see those notifications from us.Jonathan Walton: If you'd like access to the recordings of those bonus episodes, plus access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats, become a paid subscriber at KTFPress.com. We would so appreciate it and you would be supporting our work that centers personal and informed discussions on faith, politics, and culture to help you seek Jesus and confront injustice. We are two friends resisting the idols of the American church in order to follow Jesus faithfully, and would love for you to join us. So become a paid subscriber at KTFPpress.com.Sy Hoekstra: And we've said this before, but we should probably say it again. If you want a discounted subscription or if money's a barrier to you joining us as a paid subscriber, just email us, info@ktfpress.com. We'll give you a free subscription or a discounted subscription, no questions asked. You will not be the first person to do it if you do. Other people have done it, we've given it to them. We won't make it weird because we want everyone to have access to everything that we're doing. But if you can afford to support us, please as Jonathan said, go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber. Let's jump into it, Jonathan.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, man.Sy Hoekstra: We, a couple weeks ago on our Substack Live, we were talking about processing through grief and like what we have been hearing from people. We've had lots of questions and lots of conversations since then. So we're sort of combining, amalgamating [laughs] lots of subscriber questions into one, or even just questions from friends and family. I just wanna know how you are continuing to process the election and what you're thinking about grief and how we move forward, or how we look back and see what exactly happened.Staying Grounded and Emotionally Healthy Post-ElectionJonathan Walton: Yeah. So I think that one of the things I just have to acknowledge is that I'm tired of talking about it, and not okay talking about it. Like just the level of energy it takes to have regulated, like emotionally regulated healthy conversations is exhausting.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And so, just naming that. So last week I think I was in a better place than this week recording. And so I'm recognizing I need to be able to take steps back and set boundaries so that I can be in a healthier place. And I just encourage everybody to do that. We all need rhythms and disciplines that keep us grounded. That is not like, oh, when I'm in this season, I need spiritual discipline. No. We actually are supposed to have them all the time. But I think in moments like these and seasons like this, we actually need them just in a more pointed way. It reminds us that we do. So those are things that I'm doubling down on, like starting to listen to worship music.If you check out last week's newsletter, I actually had a worship set from a worship leader in Columbus, Ohio, who basically said, if you can't sit across someone who has a different political perspective than you, then you probably can't worship with them. So let's start off with worship. And so they made a, I don't know, a six hour playlist of songs from different traditions and said like, play it without skipping it. Without skipping a song. Don't be like, “I don't like this song, I don't like this. I don't like…” This reminds me of them. Like, just listen to the whole album because somebody who is different from you meets Jesus through the words of the song. And he said, “You would never know that I don't like some of the songs that we sing [laughter], but I sing them. And I thought that was just a really honest thing.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. You said it was six hours long?Jonathan Walton: It's a lot. I haven't made it through a third of it.Sy Hoekstra: Okay [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It's long. And the sermon is also linked in the newsletter as well. It's just a great message from Pastor Joshua.Sy Hoekstra: This is a pastor in Ohio that you're familiar with?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: How did you get connected to this?Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So someone on the political discipleship team for InterVarsity, shout out to Connie Anderson, who's written…Sy Hoekstra: Oh, great.Jonathan Walton: …a lot of our stuff. Our InterVarsity stuff.Sy Hoekstra: Yes. Not KTF stuff.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. She just, she said, “Hey, I really appreciated the sermon and I was able to listen to it, and I'm working my way through the songs. And if I skip a song, I'm gonna go back, because I'm not the only person on my Spotify. Shout out to all the Moana and Frozen tracks that get stuck in there.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: So all that to say, that's like the first big thing, is setting boundaries, trying to have healthier rhythms so that I can be fully present to my family and myself.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Having Difficult Conversations by Meeting People Where They AreJonathan Walton: Also, I think it's really important to remember, particularly when I'm frustrated, I have to remember to meet people where they're at the way that Jesus met me. I have not always known that Christian Nationalism was bad. I didn't always have another term for it that captures the racialized, patriarchal environmental hierarchy of it called White American folk religion. I didn't always know about police brutality and the rural urban divide. I didn't know about those things. And what I desperately needed and unfortunately had, was patient people who were willing to teach me. And so as we're having these conversations, there's a book called Disarming Leviathan, ministering to your Christian Nationalist neighbor. It's really, really good. We're doing an event that you will hear about in our newsletter as well with the author of that booked Caleb Campbell.Sy Hoekstra: And when you say we, in that case again, you mean InterVarsity?Jonathan Walton: Oh, shoot.Sy Hoekstra: It doesn't matter [laughs].Jonathan Walton: I do mean InterVarsity. There's a little bit of overlap here because the season is so fraught.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Jonathan Walton: Like [laughs], and so you're gonna hear about that in a newsletter as well. InterVarsity Press is promoting it, InterVarsity's promoting it. Pastors and teachers are promoting it because the reality is, we all need to figure out how to tackle difficult conversations.Sy Hoekstra: Yep.Jonathan Walton: And we use that verb specifically, like it's elusive. We have to go after it [laughs] to be able to…Sy Hoekstra: You have to go wrangle it.Jonathan Walton: Yes, because it's hard. It's really, really hard. We would rather run away. We would rather run away from difficult conversations. So meeting people where they're at, we do that because Jesus meets us where we are. Our compassion, our gentleness is in outpouring of the compassion and gentleness that we've meditated on and experienced for ourselves and are willing to embody with other people. So those would be my biggest things from the last week or last two weeks since we last talked about this stuff. What about you?Healthy Reactions to the Election Are Different for Different PeopleSy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's good. We actually had, speaking of people who have a, like a different rhythm or need to adjust something now to be emotionally healthy, we actually had a subscriber, I won't give any details, but write in who's overseas, who basically said, “I've got too much going on in the country that I live in. I can't deal with American stuff right now. I need to unsubscribe from you.” They're on the free list. And I was like, “Man, I understand [laughs].”Jonathan Walton: Yes, right. I would like to unsubscribe from this [laughter]. No, I'm just joking, just joking.Sy Hoekstra: I appreciate that he wrote in to explain why he was unsubscribing. That doesn't necessarily happen a lot…Jonathan Walton: Right. Right, right.Sy Hoekstra: But it's very understandable and it's really sad, but I totally get it. And I want people to take care of themselves in that way. And I think, I mean, the flip side of that is we had a ton of people in the last week or week and a half sign up for the free list because I think a lot of people are just looking for ways to process, right [laughs]?Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: They are looking for people who are having these conversations, which happens. We got started, this company got started during the 2020 election, putting together the anthology that we put together, and we had a lot of response at that point too, and people who are just like, “Yes, I need to hear more of this processing.” And the difference now is there are fortunately, like a lot of people doing this work from all kinds of different angles all around the country, which is a very good thing, I think. We could be tempted to think of it as competition or whatever, but the church [laughs] has to come at this from as many angles as possible. There need to be as many voices doing the work of trying to figure out how to follow Jesus and seek justice as there are people promoting Christian Nationalism, and we're… those numbers are nowhere close to parody [laughs].Jonathan Walton: No.Sy Hoekstra: Not remotely close.Jonathan Walton: Absolutely. No, they are not [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Unfortunately, that's a reality of the American church. So, anyways, I appreciate all those thoughts very much, Jonathan.Mistakes People Are Making in Election AnalysisSy Hoekstra: I think when I'm thinking about the conversations that I've had, I have a couple thoughts that come to mind. I think a lot of the things that I think about in the conversations in the last week and a half are people trying to figure out what happened, like looking back and like playing the blame game [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And the excuses that people are making, or the blame is shifting for why Trump matters now, because you can't say he lost the popular vote anymore. Obviously he won the electoral college the first time, but he lost popular vote, and then he lost the popular vote to Biden plus the electoral college. Now he's won it, and so people are not as able to, to the extent that people were still trying to paint him as an aberration from the norm.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: …that's getting harder. It's getting harder to say, “Oh, this is just a blip on the radar and we'll come back to our normal situation at some point, some undetermined point in the future. But so they're shifting blame to other people. It's like, oh, various non-White groups increased their votes for Trump. Or young people increased their votes for Trump or something.Which Party Wins Tells Us A Lot Less about America Than Who Is an Acceptable Candidate in the First PlaceSy Hoekstra: To me, a lot of that stuff, if you're trying to say that Donald Trump represents a problem with the whole country that you're trying to diagnose how it happened, all those conversations are a little bit silly, because the problem is that he's like a viable candidate who people voted for in the first place. But the people to blame for electing Donald Trump are the people who voted for Donald Trump, which is more than half of the voters in America. Not much more, but more.And the reason it's like a little bit silly to talk about what's different than the prior elections is, the prior elections were like Trump's gonna win this election, the popular vote. Trump's gonna win the popular vote by like two or three percent probably. It could be a little bit different than that, but basically Trump's gonna get slightly more than 50 percent, Kamala Harris is gonna get slightly less than 50 percent. And that's usually how it goes. That is the reality of this, how this country works. We have a winner take all system, and so typically speaking, it's a little over 50 and a little under 50. The swings between who gets elected in any given year, president, we're playing with marginal things. Democratic strategists, Republican strategists are trying to figure out how to fiddle with the margins to get what they want.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: It was only seven states in this country that actually mattered [laughs]. Like 86 percent of the states in this country were decided and then we're just playing with seven states. We're just playing with little numbers. And so all of these, like all Black people went slightly more for Trump. Young people went slightly more for Trump, whatever. It'll go back later. I don't know if you saw this, Jonathan, on Monday this week. So last week, if you're listening to this, John Stewart brought out the map of the 1984 election. Did you see this?Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. It was so interesting [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: It's like it was completely one color.Sy Hoekstra: It's red, yeah.Jonathan Walton: And you're like, “What? Whoa, this looks like a candy cane without the White” [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Right, exactly.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: If you've never seen the Reagan-Mondale electoral map, literally the entire country, except for Minnesota is red. The whole country went for Ronald Reagan. So that's like, it's one of the biggest landslides in history, and the popular vote for Ronald Reagan, I decided to look that up, was less than 59 percent.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: Right?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: You get the whole country. You have to get 270 electoral votes to win, he got like 520 something.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah.Sy Hoekstra: He crushed Mondale. But eight years later, bill Clinton is in office and we're kind of back to normal. We're back to America's normal, right?Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: It's so small, these little things, and we just have to stay focused on, the problem here is that both of our parties in different ways, to different degrees are just infused with White supremacy and White American folk religion and patriarchy and everything else. And Donald Trump can be a viable candidate in the United States.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: That's the problem [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right, that is the problem.Sy Hoekstra: We have to stop talking about, I don't care what Gen Z did. Gen Z will change just like everybody else has changed. Election to election, things will be different. Anybody who thought that, “Oh, just a new generation of people in the United States of America growing up is gonna fundamentally change the United States of America.” How? Why did you think that [laughter]? Why? Why? Why would the children of the people, who were the children of the people, who were the children of the people who have been in the same country for years and years, generation after generation, why would that just be something fundamentally different? It's the same people, they're just a bit younger. I don't know. I never get those kinds of arguments.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Facing the Reality of America's BrokennessSy Hoekstra: What I'm saying is, I think underlying a lot of those arguments though, is a desire to have some control over something. To have something that we can say is certain that we're changing, that we can be the good people that we thought Americans fundamentally were again, or something like that. It's about control and trying to wrap your mind around something. I think instead of just facing the reality that we live in a deeply flawed country.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Which is, should be biblically speaking, unsurprising.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: But it is also difficult. It's unsurprising and it's difficult to deal with. Facing the reality of the brokenness of the world, not a fun thing to do. We've talked about this before.The People to Blame for the Election are the Mostly White and Male People Who Voted for TrumpJonathan Walton: Well, I think it would be helpful for people to remember, in all the things you're talking about, Trump did not win the popular vote last time, he won it this time. Trump won the electoral college, right? Let's actually just for a moment identify the voting population of the United States of America. So there are 336 million people in the United States per the population tracker today, right?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: There are 169 million people who voted in the election in 2020. The numbers are not final for 2024.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's gonna be less, it'll be less than that though.Jonathan Walton: It's less. So let's say 165 million people voted in the election this time. And that's generous. Right?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: So that's less than 50 percent of the country that actually voted. Then we take into the account that 70 percent of this country of the voting population is still White. Okay friends?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Roughly, I would say. Yeah, that's true.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: People give different estimates of that, but it doesn't get much lower than like 65 [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right. So let's even go with 65 percent.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yeah. Right. [laughs].Jonathan Walton: So let's say 65 percent of that voting population is White, and then half of that population is male. And Trump did an exceptional job at mobilizing White slash men in the United States to go and vote. An exceptional job. Looking at that population and saying, “We are gonna make sure that you feel invited, welcomed and empowered.” Joe Rogan's show [laughs], these other influencers, how he advertised. If you look at who was on stage in these different venues when he was campaigning, all men. And the women, I think it's very important to notice this. I think when he gave his acceptance speech, his now chief of staff that they called the Iron Lady or something like that. The Ice Lady, Iron Lady, something like that.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: That's what they called her. And then she declined the invitation to speak. And so I think that when we are sitting here saying, “Oh man, how could people vote this way?” We are not talking about the entire population of the United States.Sy Hoekstra: Yes.Jonathan Walton: We are talking about a little less than half of the voters in the United States, and then we are talking about 50 percent of that group. We're not talking about people under 18, generation alpha. We're not talking about the vast majority of Gen Z. We're talking about the same voters we've been talking about for the last 30 years [laughs]. The voting population of White adults in the United States. That's who we're talking about. We could blame, oh, this group or that group, but I agree with what you're saying. We have to face the reality that at some point we have to talk about race and we have to talk about gender. When we talk about identity politics, we don't name White and male as an identity.Sy Hoekstra: Right. Yeah.Jonathan Walton: We don't. We call it something else. We say, oh, like the working class or all these other things. But we need to just say, if we look at how White people are voting and we look at how men are voting, then we have the answer to I think, how Trump was elected. But those two things are third rails. Or like in New York City, you don't touch the third rail, it's electric because of the subway.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: So we don't talk about that. And I think, I don't say that because I wanna blame people, I'm just naming statistics. These are just numbers. The numbers of people who are voting, the demographics they represent, this is the group. So when Sy says, who is responsible for Trump's election, it is the majority of White Americans who vote, and men in this country of all races who lean towards hey, opting into patriarchy in ways that are unhelpful.Sy Hoekstra: It's not of all races [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Well, I will say that the increases of Black men, the increases of Latino men, Trump did grow his share of the Black male vote by double digits. Right?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, but it's still a minority of the Black male vote.Jonathan Walton: It is. I'm just saying, I do not want to discount the reality that patriarchy is attractive to all races.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah.Jonathan Walton: That's what I wanna name. And so when Fred Joseph, amazing author, talks about the attractiveness of patriarchy, I think that is something that all men need to say no to.Sy Hoekstra: This is an essay that we highlighted in our newsletter like a month or two ago.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: I'll put the link in the show notes.Jonathan Walton: We have to say no to patriarchy.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And so anyway, that's my rant in response to this [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, no. That's good, and that actually gets into it, the other thing I wanted to talk about was, which even though I think some of these blame game conversations are such like nonsense, we are still able within those nonsense conversations to say a lot of things that are just demonstrably false [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right.The Politics of Identity Will Never Die in AmericaSy Hoekstra: And what you just said is one of them. Like I've seen some people talking about, “Oh, the democrats lost because they ran on identity politics,” or, “Identity politics is over.” And I'm like, “What are you talking about [laughter]?” Donald Trump is all identity politics.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: It was all about White men and how they were gonna be comfortable and empowered how Christians are gonna be in powered again.Jonathan Walton: How women are gonna be taken care of, whether they like it or not.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah right. Men are gonna be back in power. How citizens are gonna have what they deserve, and then we're gonna stop giving it to the illegal immigrants, right?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Like everything Donald Trump does is about identity. And the bigger thing to say is identity politics in America is not a current or temporary trend. Identity politics is baked into the foundation of the country, and it was not Black people who did it [laughs]. It was the founding fathers who created a system where only White men could be naturalized and only rich White men could vote, and we enshrined racial slavery, all that stuff. Identity politics has been here from day one. It's not like a liberal thing. It was a thing that we baked in on purpose, and it's a thing that came from European culture and it's still fundamental to European culture to this day.Sy Hoekstra: And I, what I think what people mean when they talk about identity politics is, it's another one of the endless string of words that we use since racial slurs became impolite. We can't say the N word anymore. It's another way of saying it's Black people talking about Black people stuff. Right? When people talk about identity politics, they're saying the wrong identity politics, because everybody is talking about identity politics all the time. They're just, like you said, not calling it identity politics. They're talking about “real America” [laughs], right?Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: They're talking about, we know what they mean by real America. They're talking about White men and they're just saying this is the default culture. We're all just assuming this is the default culture, everything else is identity politics. Nonsense.Jonathan Walton: Right, right.Sy Hoekstra: So that's one of the nonsense things that shows up in the conversation as a result of a nonsense thing that we say that we think all the time on some subconscious level that we're not always talking about identity politics, even though we absolutely are. And it's because it's been forced upon us. It's not because somebody's trying to create divisions.Jonathan Walton: Right.The Democrats Are the Party the Non-White Working Class Voted ForSy Hoekstra: A similar thing is, I heard people talking about the Democrats are not the party of the working class anymore. The working class is not voting for the Democrats because, and then, obviously the White working class is voting for Trump, and then start to talk about the gains that Trump made among the non-White working class. Again, the majority of everybody in the non-White working class is not voting for Donald Trump. And assuming that voters have some idea of what's good for them and who better represents them, maybe not who best represents them, but who better represents them, the Democrats are still the party of the non-White work—we're talking about the White working class again, you know what I mean? We're trying to make it about economics and it's actually about race. That's a thing that we're doing all the time, constantly [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Well [laughs], the reality is that economics is about race.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: It's like, if we could just like get some daylight between them, then maybe we could make a separation. And so then it just becomes about keeping that separation in place, because if we bring them back together, the system falls apart. It literally crumbles if you call it out. And something that I'll just name, because I think in all these conversations, even as me and Sy are saying, oh, this Democrat about that Democrat, like this is the Republican or that race, when we call out differences, when we name things, our goal is not to dehumanize anybody, dismiss people's needs or grievances, or minimize the reality and perspectives that people have.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely.Jonathan Walton: The goal and hope is that we would actually grasp reality, name the idol and follow Jesus.Sy Hoekstra: Right. Yeah, exactly.Jonathan Walton: That is our goal and our hope and our aim, because if we can't say it as is, we will never be able to address and communicate with the most marginalized people. And we'll never be able to communicate a vision that draws people in power towards something even more loving and beautiful, unless we name the thing as it is. And so hopefully that is breaking through to folks who might come across this conversation.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I agree. I can get very passionate about these facts and stats and whatever. And I'm not trying to say that anyone who doesn't…Jonathan Walton: No [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: …agree with me is somehow a bad person. I'm just, this is, it's important, like you said. It's an important goal that I'm trying to move us toward.Jonathan, we got a great question from a listener that I wanted to talk about. You cool moving on, or do you have more thoughts?Jonathan Walton: No, no. Let's do it.What Can the Church Do about Continuing Anti-Blackness?Sy Hoekstra: Alright. So what can the church, practically speaking, do about ongoing anti-Blackness in the country? And not just correct disinformation or post on social media, what can the church practically speaking do? That was the question. Jonathan, solve anti-Blackness. Go.Support Black Spaces, No Strings AttachedJonathan Walton: There's a reason that enrollment at HBCUs is surging right now.Sy Hoekstra: Ah, okay.Jonathan Walton: And that is because when the world is unsafe or feels unsafe, or the reality that, “Oh, trying to get to the master's table and eat is actually not that great,” we're gonna recede back into our communities. And so I think one thing that the church can do is support Black spaces. So financially support Black spaces, empower Black spaces. I did not say create Black spaces moderated by you, that you will then curate for, andSy Hoekstra: Control.Jonathan Walton: Yes, control would be the right word, for an experience that other people can observe. Like, “Oh, this is what Black people really think.” Like no, just support Black spaces. Black, sacred, safe spaces that help and care for us in this moment. The number of Black women that are being harassed online, like showing up to their jobs, walking down the streets in different cities, is radically disturbing to me.And if we wanna get into the intersectionality of it, like when we talk about like Black, queer people, the numbers that the Trevor Project is recording, it's like the Trevor Project is a alphabet community support organization, particularly to prevent suicide. And so their phone calls are up in the last two weeks. So I think we as a church, as followers of Jesus need to create and then sustain spaces for Black folks to hang out in and feel a part of that we control. Kathy Khang, the author of Raise Your Voice said in a workshop that I was in one time, “Spaces that marginalized communities are in, we feel like renters, we don't feel like owners.” So we can't move the furniture. We're not really responsible for anything, but we're just, we could exist there and do what we need to do.Sy Hoekstra: But it's not a home.Jonathan Walton: It's not a home. And so I would want to encourage churches, small groups, bible studies, community groups, parachurch organizations to create spaces for Black folks by Black folks to be able to thrive in and feel a sense of community in. The other thing that I would say is that the church could educate itself around the complexities of Blackness. And so there's the Black, racially assigned Black Americans in the United States that are the descendants of enslaved people. Then there's Caribbean folks that are the descendants of enslaved Africans and the colonizers there. And then there's Central and South American and Mexican. There's a lot of beauty and complexity in Blackness.And so obviously, Ta-Nehisi Coates's book The Message, talks about that in ways that are exceptionally helpful and complex. So that would be a great book to dive into. And again, create educational, engaging spaces around. This education, quote- unquote, educating yourself, not asking Black folks to spend their time educating you. Doing that work, creating those spaces, supporting those spaces financially, time, resources, et cetera, and creating spaces for Black folks to feel and be safe, I think would be just exceptionally helpful in this season. Yes, share on social media. Yes, send messages to your friends. Yes, do all those things on your own time and on your own dime. But I think these are two things that could be helpful because it's not gonna go away the next four years. It's probably gonna be more intense. And so I think creating and sustaining of those places would be helpful.Sy Hoekstra: At least sustaining, you don't have to create.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that's true. There are some that are already there. That's true. Find a place, donate, support, host. Hey, provide the space. Buy food, yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And the reason I say that is you could end up with people who just go to Black people and are like, “Hey, we'll give you money and you get to do a bunch of work to create a space or,” you know what I mean? And there's also the instinct to say, if we're gonna support something, we have to create it.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: We don't. We can support things that other people are already doing. There might be people in your congregation who are already doing that as their job. Just give them money. You know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: The more you're not in charge, the fewer strings are attached. Jonathan already talked about that. Even if those strings are implicit or not even there, but they're just perceived to be there, and that could be a problem too. So it's good to just give money to stuff that already exists or give support. Give volunteer work, whatever. Good, I appreciate that. Thank you for having practical answers.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No worries. I'm glad you sent it to me earlier so I could think about it.Educating Ourselves on Fighting Racism Works (Sometimes)Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yeah [laughs]. Continuing to educate ourselves is a good thing too. And I think I've actually seen some of the difference in that. I know this is, there is so far to go and there's so much to do in terms of educating ourselves, but I can personally tell you from having watched a lot of Christians go through the Trayvon Martin case and Ferguson and everything. And I'm saying Christians who want to be supportive of Black people, who want to be helpful, who want to be anti-racist, all that stuff. I saw a lot of people who in 2012, ‘13, ‘14 were just like babies. Just starting out, didn't know what to say. Didn't know whether they could go protest, didn't know why All Lives Matter wasn't appropriate. Like, “Don't all lives matter though?” All that kind of stuff.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Even when you're trying to be helpful, you know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: Right, right, right.Sy Hoekstra: And then 2020 comes around and I saw a bunch of those exact same people being like, “I'm gonna go march! Black Lives Matter, let's go.” You know what I mean? So people really can learn and they really can change. And the problem is that you just have to keep doing it to every new generation of people that comes up, and it takes years to do. It's not something that you can do in a couple of sermons or one course that you take or whatever. And again, I know they're so far to go, I'm not trying to say… I understand that you can work for years. A White person can work for years, and the differences can be trivial and frustrating and like enraging. But it's also true that people can learn [laughs]. And talking about meeting people where they are, that's kind of what I'm saying to White people as we're trying to educate ourselves and others.Educating Each Other about Race Is a Long, Continuous ProcessJonathan Walton: Yeah, and to build off of something that you said before too, it's like Donald Trump was elected eight years ago, and some people were not alive eight years ago. And some people were 10 years old, eight years ago. So they didn't even…Sy Hoekstra: And now they're voting.Jonathan Walton: And now they're voting. So like Trayvon Martin was killed 12 years ago. They may not have the same knowledge as you, the same awareness as you. So yes, the education and the engagement is ongoing because there's always people that are coming up that had no idea. And I think just going back to what we said in the first part, like you were just saying again, meeting people where they're at because maybe they were too young and they just don't know. Like I was having a conversation this past week and someone said, “Yeah, my mom and dad have been sick. I've made 10 trips to another city the last two years to try and take care of them.” Maybe their world is just small because they've been engaged in loving the people closest to them through illness.We must meet people as best as we possibly can where they're at. And I confess, I have not always done that. And so being able to not be prideful and not be dismissive, and not look down on someone from being ignorant to simply not knowing. And even loving someone who's exceptionally misinformed. As we're doing this recording, one of my friends is meeting with a Christian nationalist right now. Like they're going there. They said, “Alright, can you pray for me, I'm going to have this conversation.” Because it is one conversation at a time that these things change.Sy Hoekstra: I appreciate that. You just reminded me of another story I had, and I won't give details about the individual, but there's someone in my life who is a White person who's from the south, who lives in New York City, who's just one of those people that makes Black people uncomfortable, Jonathan. Just like the moment you meet him, you're like, “something… hmm, I don't know.” And I've heard other Black people talk about him this way. I've heard stuff that's made me uncomfortable. And he was just an easy person to kind of like shun or avoid.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, for sure.Sy Hoekstra: Until I ran into another extremely kind Black person who told me… we ended up not because of me, because of someone else, in a conversation about this guy, and how he sort of makes people uncomfortable. And he was like, yeah, but he just said in not so many words, I kind of tolerate him because he lost his entire family in Hurricane Katrina, and he lives in New York City and basically has nobody and just works this kind of dead-end job and is not a very happy person. Actually, he is kind of a happy person. He's sort of trying to make the best of it, and he doesn't know what he is doing. You know what I mean? It's just like, you have one of those moments with someone where you're like, “Boy, that changes my view of this person.”Jonathan Walton: Right [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: I still don't think any of the things that you're saying to make people uncomfortable are okay, and I'll try and interfere in whatever limited way I can or whatever. But you hear something like that, your heart changes a little bit. You know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Your attitude changes and like, you just, we gotta get to know each other better. We gotta listen better.We Need Endurance and Truly Practical WisdomSy Hoekstra: I think this question about what can the church do about anti-Blackness, for people who are like kind of our age or older, or people who have been through the 2010s and everything that happened up till now. It's just, it's a question of resilience. And whenever you're engaged in anti-Blackness work or any sort of activist work, you're gonna have these questions of resilience of like, what can we do, because this problem is just still going. And then there's another question of the practicality of it when you're asking that question in the church. I'm gonna define the question a little bit or reframe the question a little bit and then give answers.When you ask the question of something like, what can we practically do about a problem in a Christian context, the question is a little bit strange sometimes, and I think you just gave some good practical answers, but we have both noticed, we talked about this recently. In the Christian world, the word “Practical” often means something different than it does to the rest of the world [laughs].Jonathan Walton: That's true. That's true. Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: The phrase practical application just seems to have a different meaning to pastors than it does to everybody else [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And what it tends to mean to professional Christians is, when you're talking about practical application, you're talking about a new way of thinking or a new goal for how you should feel about something.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Or like a new “heart posture” or something like that.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: It's a new attitude, but it's not practical. You actually said recently, you came out of a sermon going, “Okay, I kind of know how to think, I don't know what to do with my body. Now, after listening to this sermon.” You know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right, right [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: I know what to do with my heart and my head. I don't know what to do with my hands and my feet. And we're supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, not the heart and the brain.Jonathan Walton: Right [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: And I think, actually, I don't wanna sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but I think that problem, it at least promotes racism [laughter]. It promotes institutions remaining as they are. You know what I mean? It promotes, like when we talk about practicality and we're just talking about how we kind of think about things, like the world of ideas and emotions and not what we do politically or whatever, that is a subtle way to reinforce status quo institutions.Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, it is.Sy Hoekstra: And it's not anything to do with the person who asked the question. I'm just acknowledging the reality of how that question lands to Christian ears.Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes. Especially institutionalized Christians. Yes, absolutely.The Church Isn't Necessarily the Best Place to Go to Fight RacismSy Hoekstra: And another thing is, I will say, we're talking about the church, the whole wide capital C church. The Black church, is gonna keep doing what it's always done. Black church is gonna do anti-racist work. Obviously, there are problems and questions and whatever that Black people have in their conversations among themselves within the Black church about how to do that best, or what things may be getting in the way of that or whatever. But if you're talking about big picture here, Black church is always fighting racism. I think we're kind of asking questions about the rest of the church. The White church in particular, and then some other churches as well. If we're just talking about the American church in general and what it can do to fight anti-Blackness, if you look at the history of just big picture American church, there are Christians in the United States on both sides of this past election.There are Christians in the United States in history on both sides of the Civil War. There are Christians in the United States on both sides of segregation versus civil rights. There are Christians in the abolition movement, there are obviously Christians in the pro-slavery movement. Christians set up the system of racism and slavery. European Christians did.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: The American church, if you just look at history, is a weird place, is a weird institution to look to, to end anti-Blackness. We have been consistently ambivalent about it for centuries. Do you know what I mean? I understand…Jonathan Walton: No, listen. It's true, and that's sad.Sy Hoekstra: Yes, yes.Jonathan Walton: That reality is depressing, right.Good Things Come from God, Not the ChurchSy Hoekstra: Horribly depressing. And so I understand, one, you just don't want that to be real. So you say, “Hey, what can we do?” Or, you want, and when I say you, again, I don't mean the question asker because I haven't had a conversation or back-and-forth. I'm just saying this is what people could be asking when they ask this question. It could also be the instinct of a lot of White evangelicals, which I can tell you this question asker is not, have the instinct when we say, what can the church do, of kind of thinking that if there's anything good is going to happen in the world, it has to come from the church, and that is so wrong. It is not biblically accurate. You can't look at scripture and go, “Yeah, everything good has to come from the church.” Goodness comes from God. God is the source of goodness, and God sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous, and we are very much among the unrighteous. God is the source of goodness, and so we need to acknowledge that we can find goodness outside of the church.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that's a point worth repeating.Sy Hoekstra: Right [laughs]. We can find goodness outside of the church. I will repeat it [laughter]. We can in our congregations have fights that can go on for years and years about how we can just try and move anyone toward anti-Blackness work, and you can work for forever and you can see no fruit. And you could have spent all that time taking the few Christians, because there's always a handful, even in a [laughs], in any church, there's a few people who are sympathetic to whatever you're trying to do.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: You can just take them and you are the church, you and your Christians, and go do work with somebody else. You can go to your local mutual aid organization. You can go to your local Black Lives Matter chapter. You can go to whoever. You can go find the people who are doing the work and work with them, and that's fine, because it's still good and it therefore still comes from God. And we don't have to subtly participate or subconsciously participate in the idea that everything good has to come from the church, which is ultimately a colonial and colonizing idea. That is what a church that is going into a country trying to colonize it wants you to think, “Everything good comes from us, so you gotta come here [laughs] for the good stuff. And all those people out there, those are the bad people.”Jonathan Walton: [inhales deeply and sighs] Right. No, I mean, yeah, everything you're saying is true. That was my big sigh there [laughter].All Justice Work Requires Real, Local CommunitySy Hoekstra: So I read a thing this week from Camille Hernandez who wrote a really great book called The Hero and the W***e, which is a look through a womanist theological lens at what we can learn from what the Bible says about basically sexual violence. Fascinating book. Anyways, she was talking about her reading of Mariame Kaba, who I've cited before in this show, who is a famous abolitionist organizer, who basically said a lot of people who have a lot of influence, activists who have a lot of influence, can be sort of confused and unmoored at times like this because they have a lot of influence. They have a lot of people that they can call to go do a march or whatever. But what they don't have is a local community. So like what I was just talking about, taking the few people in your church, if you have a few people in your church and going and doing the work somewhere else, that's your small community.You need people who are on the same page as you, who you love, and they love you and you're there to support each other, and they will ground you in times like this, doing that work together. We'll ground you in times like this and it will give you a way to move forward. It will give you a sense of purpose, it will give you accountability. That's also a fraught word if you grew up in the church [laughter]. But it will give you the good kind of accountability to be able to do the work of anti-Blackness or fight any other kind of injustice, frankly. So that's one important thing.KTF's PACE Guide Will Help You Engage Practically with InjusticeSy Hoekstra: I also think if you want a good framework for how to do things practically when you are fighting anti-Blackness or other forms of injustice, go get our PACE guide [laughs]. We have a guide that we produced a few months ago.If you have signed up recently on our newsletter, or if you want to sign up for our free mailing list, you get it in the welcome email. If you were on our list before a few months ago, you have it in one of your old emails. It's basically a guide for when you encounter issues of injustice in the news or in your everyday life or wherever, how to process it and do something about it in a way that is, actually takes into account your limitations and your strengths, and helps you think through those things and help you kind of grow as you run through this cycle of steps and questions and prayers that we have for you to go through as you are thinking through these things. So PACE is the acronym. You can find out what it stands for and how to go through it if you go get that guide, sign up for our free emailing list if you don't have it. And that will give you a good sense of how to think through you personally in your context, how you can fight anti-Blackness.Jonathan Walton: Exactly.Sy Hoekstra: But yeah, on a bigger scale, the reason I'm talking about small things like community and how you personally can work, is I'm not thinking on as grand a scale as what can the church do to end anti-Blackness. Because we're not God, we are not saviors. We are not here to fix everything. God is here to do all those things. So I'm more asking, how do I join in with stuff that's already happening? And again, that's not like a correction to the question asker. It's just where I'm at [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Well no, it's a reorientation.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: I think something that, and I don't know if this is a generational thing, and I think that me being 38 years old, I have been shaped in a certain way to believe and want institutions to answer big questions as opposed to gathering a group of people and having a community instead of an institution. There's still work that God is doing in me around that, in that communities are vehicles for transformation in the kingdom and institutions it seems are vehicles for power in the world. That's something I'm wrestling with myself because I do think that one of the answers to anti-Blackness is beloved community, not as a concept, but like a practical thing. Like we are checking in on each other, we are going out to dinner, we are sharing recipes.Sy Hoekstra: Yes.Jonathan Walton: We are sending memes and funny videos like that. That is actually some aid that can lift our spirits each day amidst an empire that desires to destroy us.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think a lot of my journey trying to figure out how to do more justice work and follow Jesus, has been asking those smaller questions about what can I do in my own community? Just because I have, you and I, we have limited influence, and we have a church institution that has supported anti-Blackness in a lot of ways and those are just realities. And they're really sad, and the idea that a lot of the church is kind of useless and sort of opposed to the things of God, a lot of people don't wanna accept that. But I think if you don't accept that, you're gonna be running into these frustrations a lot. Like why is the church not doing this? And then trying to find probably solace in just really small things. Like okay, is my church's theology better than yours, or is my… You know, like in things that are not making a difference in the world [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right. Right.The Church Has to Trust in Grace, Not Save the WorldSy Hoekstra: So, I don't know, man. Look, the beauty of the church is not in how good it is. The church is beautiful in the light of Christ, not in the light of its own good work in goodness. The church is beautiful because… the church is beautiful when, not because, when [laughs] it is people collectively trying to put their faith in the grace that governs the universe, and not put their faith in their own ability to bring the kingdom of God into this world. And that's such a hard thing to do. We so wanna make an institution that is good, that is fundamentally good and that we're a part of it [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Well, it's a hard thing to do and accept.Sy Hoekstra: Yes.Jonathan Walton: Because in how we have been cultured downstream of colonization, if there is no effort, then I don't get a gold star, then I'm not included. Like, what do you mean? What do you mean that I'm supposed to play a small part? No, no. I'm supposed to be a star.Sy Hoekstra: I'm supposed to change the world.Jonathan Walton: I'm supposed to change the world, and I'm supposed to build something. I'm supposed to make something. Like we're an entrepreneurial event, we're supposed to do that. And Jesus hung out for 30 years, and then went and got 12 seemingly disqualified people [laughs] to go and do this thing, and then drafted Paul who was woefully unhelpful, the majority of Jesus' journey to then go and take his stuff to the rest of the world. Come on man. This is [laughs]… it's really hard to say yes to that.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: But when you experience it like you were saying, to live in the grace that governs the universe changes your life.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. People who are free of the need to prove themselves by defeating evil, right [laughs]?Jonathan Walton: Lord have mercy [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: That—look, to me that is a beautiful thing. That is one of the things that animates me, that motivates me. That makes me want to get out there and do more. Which is, I don't know, it's counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive to me, but it also works on me. So [laughs] I'm gonna keep focusing on it.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Season Wrap-Up Thoughts, Outro, and OuttakeSy Hoekstra: Do you have more thought—I think that's a good place to end it, Jonathan. I don't know if you have more thoughts.Jonathan Walton: No, I don't have more thoughts.Sy Hoekstra: Okay, great.Jonathan Walton: I appreciate that you as a White person, or racially assigned White person who's aware of their heritage and trying to engage as best you possibly can across this difference, have so many thoughts. I think that is helpful actually.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, good. Thanks. I appreciate that [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I say that because there's a pastor that I follow, Ben Cremer, he's in Idaho, and experiences that I've had with different leaders, it is exceptionally empowering and feels like a burden is lifted off of my shoulders when people who don't have to carry the burden of Blackness are trying to be thoughtful around how to stop anti-Blackness.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I mean, ditto ableism man.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: If this is your first episode, I'm blind and Jonathan does the same thing to me on those grounds. And I think that's a lot of why our thoughts in relationship works. I'm not good at taking compliments, so I'm just throwing it back on you [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No worries. It's all good. If you haven't seen it, somebody should google “Christian Affirmation Rap Battle” where they just try to compliment battle each other. It is amazing. [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: I'm absolutely gonna do that because that sounds like brilliant and pointed satire.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Alright. Thank you all so much for listening. This has been an incredible season, man. I've had a lot of fun. Fun is a relative word [laughter] when we're talking about the things that we're doing. I've had, I don't know, a very motivating and helpful and stimulating time talking to a lot of the people that we talked to four years ago when we started this, who wrote for us.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: If you haven't listened to those interviews, go back in the season, they're really, really helpful. I feel like they're probably even more helpful in light of how the election turned out. And I don't know, I just appreciate this. I feel like it's been fun. We didn't do it this time, but when we're doing Which Tab Is Still Open and adding, talking about some of our newsletter highlights, I've really appreciated that. I feel like it makes the episode very meaty when we have an interview and some other conversation in there too, and I've just liked what we've put out this season. So thank you, Jonathan for participating in that. Thank you everybody so much for listening.Jonathan Walton: Yep. Yep. And I'm deeply appreciative. I think a brief Which Tab is Still Open that I thought was gonna close was our anthology.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, alright.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] I will say we started this four years ago with the anthology and as we're ending this season, the anthology is probably one of the most relevant things.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: The leaders that wrote in it, the contributors to it, that work and those essays, I hate and love that they are still relevant.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, right. Same.Jonathan Walton: …and helpful. If you don't have a copy, you should go get one.Sy Hoekstra: Keepingthefaithbook.com, that's where you can find it.Jonathan Walton: Yep.Sy Hoekstra: Thank you all so much for listening. Remember, get the Substack app to listen to our monthly recordings of the, the live recordings of our bonus episodes. And if you want to get the recordings of those bonus episodes after the fact, or join our monthly subscriber Zoom calls, become a paid subscriber @ktfpress.com. Or get a discounted or free subscription by just writing into us if money is an obstacle. Make sure you add us to your contacts or drag and drop our emails to your inbox if they're in your promotions folder, just so that you can get everything from us that you need. That's how you're gonna get notified if you don't have the app. That's how you'll get notified when our Substack Lives start.Our theme song is Citizens by Jon Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robin Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale, and our editing for a lot of this season was done by Multitude Productions. We are so incredibly grateful for them, they have been friendly and fantastic. Thank you, Brandon, our editor.Jonathan Walton: Appreciate you.Sy Hoekstra: I produced this show along with our incredible paid subscribers. Thank you so much. If you are one of those paid subscribers, we will see you next month. Otherwise, we will see you for season five.Jonathan Walton: See y'all.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: A multi disc Encyclopedia Britannica.Jonathan Walton: Basically.Sy Hoekstra: Do you remember those? Did you have that when you were a kid?Jonathan Walton: I, we definitely bought, my mama definitely bought them. You are absolutely right.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: She did. That man showed up with that suitcase and he left empty handed. That was his goal, he made it.Sy Hoekstra: Oh no [laughs]. Oh no.Jonathan Walton: And you best believe we read all them books.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe

Trump Wins, Good Faith Reacts America elected a new president, and a familiar administration is poised to return to the White House. What does it all mean for Christians? Host Curtis Chang is joined by "founding friend" David French and public theologian Russell Moore to explore the intense emotions many are experiencing in the wake of this election. Together, they dive into listener questions about the global repercussions of another Trump presidency, the complex feelings some Christians experience about the political choices of fellow believers, and the evolving role of the church in a deeply divided America. Confronting shared experiences of anguish, alienation, and anger, the trio offers thoughtful insights into how we can navigate this challenging landscape of emotions about the known and unknown implications of the vote. Referenced in this Episode: Engage with our course The After Party  Read an interview with Reinhold Niebuhr HERE Read Henry David Thoreau's Walden online More on Augustine and the fall of Rome Neil Postman predicted Donald Trump in 1985 Explore the J.R.R. Tolkien Society HERE 85 quotations from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings C.S. Lewis on courage Listen to The Kingdom of Jesus by the Jon Guerra, Sandra McCracken, and Porter's Gate   More From David French: Read David French's opinion pieces HERE Follow David French on Threads   Listen to David on the Advisory Opinions podcast   More From Russell Moore: Read Russell Moore's Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America  Listen to The Russell Moore Show podcast Explore Russell's Christianity Today pieces   Listen to Songs For the After Party, get sheet music, lyrics, and prayers for your church.  

We are back! We weren't planning on holding this episode until right before the US Election Day but here we are. Jon Guerra is an immensely talented devotional music singer songwriter and his new project American Gospel is a beautiful, timely project that some of our listeners put on our radar a while back so we were delighted to have this conversation with him! We talk music, faith creativity, film (Jon composed some of the music for Substantive Cinema favorite film A Hidden Life), what it means to be a faithful and hopeful believer in such difficult times and more! If you enjoy the episode, please consider giving us a 5 star review and share it with a friend! Shoutouts: The Song That I Am Shogun The Chosen (series) Reading Genesis Passions of the Soul Buy American Gospel Sign up for his mailing list on his website If you're newer to the show be sure to check out our library of 150+ episodes with folks like Karen Swallow Prior, Jemar Tisby, Kaitlyn Schiess, Propaganda, Josh Larsen, Stephanie Stalvey, and John Carroll Lynch. Share Your Questions/Suggestions/Feedback With Us: Email: thesubstancepod@gmail.com DM on Instagram Support Us: Support the show with an individual donation on CashApp to $TheSubstancePod or become a monthly Patreon supporter at patreon.com/TheSubstancePod --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thesubstancepod/support

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.ktfpress.comListen to a recording of our monthly subscriber chat from this past Tuesday, where Jonathan, Sy, and our subscribers get into:-        How to practice hope and peacemaking in fearful times like this election season-        How peace is different than unity, and takes power dynamics into account-        How hope is shaped by God's presence with us, the depths of evil and suffering we see around us, and perspectives outside our context-        And we discuss and contextualize the news about increased BIPOC support for TrumpCredits-            Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Editing and Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscript[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Intro and AnnouncementsSy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra, and this is a bonus episode where we are bringing you the subscriber conversation that we had just a couple of days ago. You might notice that I, both in the recording and right now sound a little bit sickly just because I have COVID. Don't worry, everything is fine. It's been pretty mild, but I sound stuffy.We are bringing you a great conversation today about hope and about peacemaking in difficult times and times like this election, frankly. Why hope is so hard to have, both because it's risky, but also because it can seem privileged and naive, and why we think it's not and we do it anyways. Some stories of where that kind of hope comes from. And we talk about peacemaking and how it's not the same as just unity and kumbaya, but how we sometimes strive for unity in the name of peace. And sometimes we strive for a little bit of strife, maybe, to tell some truth in the name of peace. Not maybe, we definitely do that a lot [laughs]. And then we get into a little bit about some kind of changing, somewhat changing demographics about who is voting Republican and why that is. And that actually makes sense when you understand it from the perspective of whiteness and colonization.Quick favor to ask, if you like this podcast, which I know you do because you're listening to the subscriber only feed, go give this show a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And if you're on Apple, give us a written review too. They are so encouraging, and the ratings and the reviews help other people find us and see that other people think that this show is good and worth their time.Also, in case you missed it, we are going to be doing a Substack live conversation on November 6th at 1pm, that's the day after the election. If you're listening to this, you're already on our mailing list, so that means you will be notified via email. You will need the Substack app. There will be a link in that email, but you can also download the app at any time, iOS or Android, and then you'll be able to watch our live video conversation. We've already done the tech check and everything [laughs] to make sure that it all works. It's a new feature on Substack, and we're excited to talk to you, kind of in that new format. So do join us, Wednesday, November 6th, at 1pm to hear our reactions to what happened on Election Day and whatever is going on after it. There's a lot of possibilities. Trump will have declared that he won no matter what happened, that's my guess, and we will be moving on from there. So please do come join us. That'll be, I don't want to say, a fun conversation, but it'll be an interesting conversation for sure, and you will find some grace in it and some people who share your values. So join us then, and alright, without any further ado here is our monthly subscriber conversation for October.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Let's pray. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, deliver us from the evil one. For thine is kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.Sy Hoekstra: Amen.Jonathan Walton: And thanks again for all of you all for being here. Sy is gonna set up our time.What does it mean to have hope or be a peacemaker in stressful times like the election?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, thanks for coming. We just figured we wanted to, I mean, obviously we do this every month, but we wanted to talk some about kind of what it means to be a thoughtful peacemaker in a time like the next week [laughs] or the next couple of months to come, depending on what exactly happens next week. And first of all, you'll hear I'm a little stuffed. I apologize. I have the COVID virus.Mindy: Oh no.Sy Hoekstra: I've been okay, don't worry. It's been a mild cold for me. Welcome Allison. And so I will sound nasally, but [laughs] that's all. And so I guess we wanna talk a little bit about that, and then we wanted to get into, assuming people don't have questions. At any point anybody can interrupt with questions that they have, you put in the chat, or you can just join the conversation and ask questions. So we wanna talk about what it means to be a peacemaker in this time. And then also, a little bit about interesting things that have been happening around, like where voting demographics and stuff with the with the Trump campaign. So Jonathan, I think you had some thoughts to get us started on what you think it means to follow Jesus' instructions to be a peacemaker in a time that is as unpeaceful as this. So [laughs] do you wanna get us going?Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think we may have talked about this a little bit on the podcast last week, just about how the invitation from culture, particularly the people texting me to give to campaigns [laughter] and emailing me. I got a text, it literally said, “We have texted you six times. You have not made a donation.” And I was like, “That is true, I have not made a donation [laughs]. I did not know you had texted me six times.” But Walz wanted me to know that. But the feeling is that I should be afraid, and then as Sy mentioned on the podcast, is that his sense is that he should be cynical. And so this invitation to cynicism and to fear, and just no. Jesus says no to that [laughs].So what does it look like to be hopeful and have our hope be set on the hope that does not disappoint in that way, and then that we can ask questions and be introspective, and do the radical interrogation that is necessary to follow Jesus in ways that are transformative and helpful in a world that is fractured and falling apart, and not be cynical. And so, I don't know if you all have thoughts about that or feelings about that, but how are you pushing towards hope when you're pressed to be afraid, and then how are you, or do you have questions about leaning into radical interrogation and asking good, hard, deep questions without slipping into cynicism? I have thoughts, but that was something I wanted to open up with, particularly in light of CNN, and a certain rally that happened in New York City two days ago. Does anybody not know what I'm talking about when I say the rally?Sy Hoekstra: You might as well just say because people listen to it later, so [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Okay, great. So there was a… shoot, what's his name? Shoot. Donald Trump [laughter] had a rally.Sy Hoekstra: What's his name. Old What's His Name?Jonathan Walton: Well, because I was writing another… so I did not write this blurb. This will not show up in the newsletter, but I was trying to write, and it turned into too many links about the Nazi rally from the 1930s at Madison Square Garden, and that comparison to the rally that happened yesterday, and like they're strikingly similar. Also the similarities between Elon Musk and Henry Ford and their anti-Semitism racism, but that's an essay, friends. That's not a blurb in our newsletter, and takes more time and energy than I have right now. But all that to say, Donald Trump was at Madison Square Garden, and he did a rally there were however many thousands of people there. And it was littered with racist, xenophobic nationalists just… it was a lot. It was a lot of them in one speech with lots of people.So I honestly can't tell you what other content was there, because there were so many groups that got kind of called out, which was similar to Trump's presidency. But I think the invitation from that is to be afraid and then to be cynical, because it's quite likely that he could win. And so that feels for me particularly pertinent to present to being hopeful and present to asking good, hard questions and loving the Lord with my mind in that way. So yeah, any thoughts, comments, puzzles that you'd like to share Allison sighed. I mean [laughs], Mindy sighed. And David looks very reflective [laughs]. So feel free to share about that, what you all are thinking and feeling. David, looks like you almost started. Did you have anything to share? No? Alright.Making Peace Involves Taking Power Dynamics into AccountSy Hoekstra: Okay. I could talk a little bit, Jonathan. The guy who spoke, the guy who most of the comments that the media is focusing on, was a comedian who opened for Trump who told a bunch of racist jokes. And I think when I think about what it means to be hopeful and peaceful in this moment, I do contrast it a little bit with what I think a lot of people who I think would probably be sort of politically in the middle. Oh, David says he can't unmute himself, Jonathan.David: Now I can.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, there you go.David: Sorry, go ahead.Sy Hoekstra: Okay, well, I'll keep talking, and then you can go, I guess, since I started [laughs]. But I've just been contrasting in a little bit with what I think some people in kind of the middle would view as peace, which is…Typically the default in our conversation is, without recognizing this or making this explicit, the default is people who vote for Trump are real Americans, with the concerns that we should care about and we need to understand and empathize with. And lots of other people, especially people who are marginalized, are more marginal. Not to say that no Trump voters are marginalized, but more marginalized than the demographics that vote for Trump are like DEI concerns, you know what I mean?Like some kind of special concern outside of the concerns of real Americans. And so I do think that, in part, what it means to be not cynical and not fearful and hopeful and peaceful is to reject that binary and to say, for me to be a peacemaker, I need to take into account power dynamics and say that the thing that has to happen is, yes, everybody needs to be understanding and kind and empathetic and everything toward each other, but because there are power dynamics, there actually are people who need to do that more than others [laughs]. And it is not that the elite liberal media on the coasts needs to understand the farmers in the middle [laughs]. That's not the power dynamic.The power dynamic is everybody who has positions of privilege, whether they're on the coast or in the middle or whatever else, whatever part they're part of needs to be making an attempt to understand people who have less of a voice and less of a say in the world than they do. So that's my initial thought. I don't know, David, if yours is related to that at all, but you're welcome to go ahead.God's Often Confusing Presence in Our Grief Is a Foundation for HopeDavid: No. Thanks, Sy. And I agree. I think it's there's a combination of, what do you do? What should I do? And I don't have a lot of clarity on that. And I think you're right. I mean, I think some of us have more responsibility than others to do and to stand up for the people who are going to be feeling marginalized no matter what happens in our church.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I was just gonna say, what are you doing as a pastor? It's an interesting question.David: Yeah, this coming Sunday we have All Saints Sunday, and the gospel reading is the end of the raising of Lazarus. And I was talking to someone this morning who said, “This really should be the reading for the Sunday after the election, because we can say it's been four days and it stinks”Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].David: Which I guess is the cynicism temptation. But just sort of in reflecting on that, I think that's one of the things that I've been trying to wrestle with, is being in the space of Jesus both knows what he's going to do at the end, it's gonna be good, when he tells us what to do we're gonna say, “Oh no, no, no, that's not a good idea.” But we haven't gotten to that point in the story yet. And we're at the point of the story where we're weeping, and God is weeping with us and present with us. And I think for me at least, I think we have to be grounded in that first. That God will show up. No matter what happens, God will show up. God will show up in a way that we don't expect, don't understand, and probably will resist at first, but we don't know what that is yet.And right now, emotions are raw, and they're gonna be raw, and just knowing that God is present in that, I think that has to be the starting point. Because if we don't start there we're gonna just do whatever comes to our mind first, and that's probably not gonna be the right thing, because we're reacting out of a place of fear.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.David: And there's a lot to be afraid of.Jonathan Walton: Right. [laughs] Mindy nodded, yes, there's a lot to be afraid of.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.David: But there really is a lot to be afraid of.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: What you're saying is…David: Regardless of who wins, to be honest.Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely.Insisting on Hope is Difficult and Emotionally ComplicatedSy Hoekstra: And what you're saying is not to delegitimize that reality.David: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And it's a hard thing to do to insist on hope [laughs]. It's not just a hard thing to do because you're risking, like, what if I hope and I'm wrong and I get hurt? But there's also just, there are people who are going to see hope and think it's the wrong thing to do, and it might even be an insulting thing to do, depending on where they are, and we're still called to it, and that is just genuinely complex.

Today, Jonathan and Sy speak with author and housing advocate Kevin Nye about the Church and homelessness. We get into:-        The ineffective housing policies Christians often promote-        The bad theology behind those policies-        A run-in Kevin had with institutional resistance to his view that governments shouldn't criminalize homelessness-        How churches can get things right in ministries to unhoused people-        Plus, hear our thoughts on the interview,-        A discussion of how we are resisting the negative ways the election is trying to shape us mentally and spiritually-        And our thoughts on all the discourse around Ta-Nehisi Coates' controversial new bookMentioned in the episode:-        Kevin's article on Christians mistakenly rejecting housing-first policies-        Josiah Haken's book, Neighbors with No Doors-        Kevin's article on Christianity Today's coverage of homelessness-        His article in RNS about a Supreme Court case on unhoused people's constitutional rights-        His book, Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness-        His Substack, Who Is My Neighbor?-        Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book, The Message-        Our newsletter with links to a couple of Coates' interviewsCredits-            Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Editing by Multitude Productions-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscript[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Kevin Nye: If you're an average middle class American Christian and you want to become wealthy, have a private jet, a mansion, here's your spiritual steps. Get closer to Jesus, you'll be rewarded with physical wealth. Well, if that's true, the opposite of that would be true, which is that if you are in deep dire poverty, it must mean that you're that much farther from Jesus.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Intro and HousekeepingJonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra, today is gonna be a great one for you. We have a conversation that we're gonna have before we get into our interview, kind of about the election. A little bit of a catch up, since this is actually going to be our last show before the presidential election, which now that I say it into a microphone, is a little bit scary [laughter]. We're gonna be having a conversation today with author, theologian and housing activist Kevin Nye. I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. Basically, the church is extremely involved in housing policy in America, and we are often going about it the wrong way, and that's often because of a lot of bad theology and some falsehoods that we believe about unhoused people, and so Kevin will help us get deep into that.He's a great resource and a great person to talk about it with, as well as some of the more systemic issues of why we have such an entrenched way of thinking about unhoused people. You'll be able to hear Jonathan and my thoughts about the interview afterwards, and we will get into our segment Which Tab Is Still Open, where we go a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. This week we're talking all about Ta-Nehisi Coates and his new book, The Message and some of the discussions that have been happening around it. Also, one quick note. My voice might sound a little groggy, because about 12 hours ago, I was at game one of the American League Championship Series [laughter] and I screamed my face off.Is that a wise thing for a podcaster to do before recording? Maybe not, but I trust that you all will forgive me [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes, and for the uninitiated, we're talking about baseball [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Yes, that's a good point. American League Championship Series, that's a baseball series [laughter].Jonathan Walton: But before we get into all that, please friends, remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to support this show and everything we do here at KTF Press. We've been creating media that centers personal and informed discussions on faith, politics and culture, and that helps you seek Jesus and confront injustice. You've been listening for a while or the first time, you need to know we're resisting the idols of the American church by elevating marginalized voices and taking the entirety of Jesus' gospel more seriously than those who narrow it to sin and salvation. The two of us have [laughs] a lot of experience doing this, have been practicing this in community for a while, and as Maya Angelou would say, we're always practicing Christianity.So if you wanna do that, you could do that with us. We'd love for you to become a paid subscriber. You get all the bonus episodes of this show, access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats, and you can comment on posts and more. So again, go to KTFPress.com to join us and become a paid subscriber.Sy Hoekstra: A couple of quick announcements before we get into everything. In two weeks there will not be an episode. That's just a couple days after the election. We're gonna let things settle a little bit.Jonathan Walton: Hopefully so.Sy Hoekstra: I mean, hopefully settle a little bit before [laughter] we have our sort of clean, edited podcast discussion about the election. However, we are going to do something a little bit different the day after the election. So that'll be Wednesday, November 6th at 1 pm. We are going to be having a Substack live conversation. So that means basically, if you have the Substack app, you will be able to watch us just have a live conversation about the election, what happened the night before, what we're thinking, how we can move forward faithfully now that the voting is done, and all of the potential chaos that comes after that. If you don't have the app, you can download it on the App Store or the Google Play Store. Anybody who's on our email list will get an email notification or a push notification from the app when we start.So if you're not on our email list, go to KTFPress.com and sign up. Even just the free email list, you'll get that notification. The email will have a link to download the app if you don't have it. So Substack live Wednesday, November 6th, at 1 pm to talk about the election. A little bit more raw, unfiltered, that sort of thing [laughter]. And then we'll have a finale episode, we'll announce the date later once we have that set. You'll be able to comment in the chat of the Substack live, so you can put your comments and your questions there. So come prepared to dialog a little bit. We're excited to try this new feature that Substack has rolled out. Also our next Zoom chat for subscribers will be this upcoming Tuesday, October 29th at 1 pm.So if you want to join in on that, please become a paid subscriber. If you already are a paid subscriber, then the link to register for that is in your email already. Go back to your emails from us and check for it, submit your questions. We have had some really great conversations at the four or five of these that we've done so far, and we look forward to another one this Tuesday.How Has the Election Been Shaping Us? And How Are We Resisting?Sy Hoekstra: Alright Jonathan, before the interview, we're gonna start off with an election question that will kind of let us give some of our final thoughts going into actual voting day. This is a question that you came up with, and I like it a lot, actually. Jonathan, how has this election been trying to shape you and how have you been resisting it?Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think just hanging out in this space of formation, like we're impacted by things around us, and it's literally making us into new people or different kinds of people. I have an injury in my hip, and it's like, I ran marathons and did lots of sports and work, and so my hip is shaped differently because of the pressure that I put on it.Our Political Culture Tries to Instill Fear, but Jesus Doesn'tJonathan Walton: And so I think that culture is trying to shape me into an anxious, fearful person, because violent crime can be down in the United States, but my fears about my daughter getting older and going to the train, I'm terrified.Sy Hoekstra: Really?Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. It's terrible. It's terrible.Sy Hoekstra: Interesting.Jonathan Walton: People are like, “Oh yeah, my kid walked to the train,” I'm like, clutch my pearls.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Oh, you're one of those New York City parents.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And some of its familiarity, I never did that. That just wasn't my reality. I think it's more that than all of the fears that people have. It's just unfamiliar to me. And so I think that the Democrats would love for me to fear the apocalypse, and the Republicans would love for me to fear the apocalypse [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: Different apocalypses.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, different apocalyptic visions for the state of this country and the world. And that is a very effective fundraising tactic. It's a very effective way to get people out to vote, because having people be motivated by fear rather than love is better for the prince of the power of the air. It's better for the wills within us that are not submitted to God and trusting him for our well being and the well being of those around us, and leaning into that. And so I think that I want to reject the gospel of self reliance. I want to reject the gospel that I have to control everything and hold it all close and accumulate more and protect that which I accumulate, like all that I got. I just have to say no to that, because I don't wanna be afraid all the time and then make all the people around me more afraid. I don't think Jesus made people afraid.He made demons afraid, but off the top of my head, I cannot… like Judas wasn't even afraid of Jesus. The fear and reverence of the Lord and all of those kinds of things where the angels and the Father say, “Don't be afraid,” Jesus speaking to people did not instill fear in them. I don't think I need to be motivated or driven or attracted or tempted towards fear about anything.Sy Hoekstra: I mean, there are people who seemed kind of afraid of him, but they were all powerful and largely oppressive people.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] That's true.Sy Hoekstra: Herod seemed pretty afraid of Jesus [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Herod was terrified. Yeah, that's true. I don't think that Jesus' goal in conversation dialog was for someone to be afraid.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, that's correct.Jonathan Walton: And then for them to be compelled to follow him because they were scared. Like that… it is literally the opposite of a fire and brimstone call to faith. It's not congruent with the Christ of scripture.Resisting Cynicism by Choosing Where to Place Our HopeJonathan Walton: So what about you? How do you think our current political [laughs] realities, would love for you to be in the world?Sy Hoekstra: It feels like they would love for me to be a cynic. I don't know, someone who's just a real downer. Because I would say, if you'd asked this eight years ago, I would have said they would want me to be depressed. Because at that time, Trump just felt so dark and foreboding in a way that was deeply sad to me. Not exactly scary, but just really, really depressing. I think now I'm actually thinking more about the Democrats when I say that, because as we are recording, the Biden administration has said some very tentative things about a maybe possible weapons embargo if some undefined humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not vetted in the next month. So we'll see how that works out over the next week and a half until this publishes.But basically, up until now, it's kind of been you've got to toe the party line. You got to be effectively totally pro Israel to be in line with the Biden administration and also with the Harris campaign. That could lose them Michigan maybe or whatever, but ultimately coming out for a ceasefire or something else they must have done the calculus is gonna lose them more.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: The reason that that makes me cynical is just so much in politics, it's just about that. It's just about, are you gonna get elected or not? I think Jonathan, and I've been convinced for a long time, it is pretty impossible to be a politician and follow Jesus, because if you follow Jesus you're not gonna be a politician anymore [laughter]. Because the whole point is you got to get reelected, and you got to do whatever it takes to do that. You've got to change your mind on issues, you've got to spend money, you've got to be a hypocrite. Doesn't matter, you've just got to get reelected. There are probably certain scenarios, like certain places that you could be elected and have integrity for smaller offices than the President [laughs], that would lead me to some amount of cynicism about the whole system and despair if my faith was in the system. If I was looking to who the next president is to determine my hope for the world.And it's kind of a cheesy Christian thing maybe to say, but my hope is in Jesus. But I think it's actually, even honestly, if your hope was not in Jesus, if it was just in something other than what's happening in our current politics, that's a very powerful thing. You know what I mean? It is a very powerful thing to genuinely have your emotional steadiness in something other than whatever's happening in politics. And for me, that's Jesus. But you know, so that's where I'm trying to sit, and that's why I'm trying to resist the way that the election is trying to make me a cynic.Can Christians Be Politicians Faithfully?Sy Hoekstra: You keep taking breaths like you have something that you wanna say immediately [laughs] [unclear 00:11:14].Jonathan Walton: I'm thinking, if I heard you right you were like, you believe it may be impossible to follow Jesus and be a politician?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And I was thinking about that because I think it's like, we would have to define follower of Jesus and define politician.Sy Hoekstra: Sure.Jonathan Walton: But it's interesting to me that it is impossible to be a servant of empire and follow Jesus. Like it's possible, because Jesus calls them out to be a non-Christian religious person. It is possible for Cornelius to be in the military and be faithful to God.Sy Hoekstra: I see what you're saying.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, but what you're getting at is the incoherence of that reality that we try to assert. So for example, I think it's possible to be a Christian politician. It is impossible to make politics Christian.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And if you want to be a Christian politician, you're gonna have to recognize that your job is going to be constantly, ceaselessly trying to pull you away from Jesus [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. It is impossible to follow Jesus and be a politician, if a politician is what you are trying to be.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I got you.Jonathan Walton: It is possible to follow Jesus and hold elected office, you know what I mean? But there are some people whose complete identity, which is what you're talking about, “I'm only here to get reelected. I wanna accumulate power, I wanna do that,” like it is impossible to be a politician.Sy Hoekstra: I think it's a little bit harder than that though, because it's not just about your identity if you're a politician, your job is to get reelected. That's what everyone is looking for you to do. That's what your party's looking for you to do, all people who work for you, obviously, that's what they're looking for you to do [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: Literally, if you don't get reelected, you can't do the job anymore. So it's like it is an integral part of the job description itself. It's not even just an issue of where your identity lies. You know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: That's true. Listen, if you're listening to this, I would love to hear what you think.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: Love to hear what you think. Unfortunately, the philosophical argument, the dominoes could start to fall around lots of professions. It's interesting. We're probably gonna talk about this as a subscriber chat now. So there we go [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: There we go.Jonathan Walton: Cool.Sy Hoekstra: Cool. Thanks for that little brief discussion as we go into the voting booths, which is in like a week and a half from when you're listening to this, if it's the day it comes out. And as we continue to behave politically after the voting happens, which I hope everyone listening to this show is doing [laughs], let's try and be shrewd. Innocent and shrewd, right?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: That's what Jesus wants us to be.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: And let's continue to think hard about that. I appreciate that discussion. Let's try to find a way to continue it. We are gonna get into our interview now before we come back and talk about our thoughts on the interview and some stuff about Ta-Nehisi Coates [laughter] in Which Tab Is Still Open.Interview with Kevin NyeOur guest today, as I said, is Kevin Nye. He is a writer and advocate working to end homelessness through engaging best practices. He has written on the intersections of homelessness and faith for Religion News Service, Sojourners, Red Letter Christians and more. He has presented at national conferences on the topic of homelessness. His first book released in August of 2022 and it was called Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness. Kevin currently lives with his wife and son in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he works as the housing director for an organization addressing youth homelessness.Jonathan Walton: Let's get into our interview.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Kevin Nye, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.Kevin Nye: Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here.The Effective ‘Housing-First' Policies Evangelicals Often RejectSy Hoekstra: You and I met about a year ago at the Evolving Faith conference, just after you had published what I thought was a really great article for Sojourners about kind of the difference between treatment-first housing policy and housing-first housing policy, which can, they can sound a bit wonky to people. But you talked about how it's a really important distinction, and how a lot of times Christians are making the wrong choice in choosing the treatment-first policy and favoring those types of policies. And so because I think this distinction will actually help us get at a lot of underlying kind of spiritual and theological issues when it comes to housing policy, can you tell us what these two different approaches are and why you think a lot of conservative Christians are picking the wrong one?Kevin Nye: Absolutely. So the treatment-first methodology, it's kind of the one that we've been using for almost 100 years in response to homelessness, but it also sort of infects a lot of our thinking about many different things. And it essentially says that if you are in poverty, if you are in homelessness, that you have to sort of prove your worthiness of getting out of that. So if you are experiencing homelessness, we know that ultimately the destination that you're hoping for is to be in housing of some kind, an apartment, a house, what have you. But that in order to get there under the treatment-first model, it suggests that you have to sort of check a bunch of boxes. And those boxes have looked different, according to the program, and according to the time that it's been implemented, but they usually include some level of sobriety.So if drugs or alcohol are part of your life, they have to stop. If you struggle with your mental health or even your physical health, that you have to ascribe to a particular treatment plan, and demonstrate your willingness to do that and to stay on it to then achieve whatever objective is set for you by some institution, which often is a shelter or a government program or a Christian institution, like a Rescue Mission. And then depending on which avenue you're going or which institution is involved, that can include a lot of other more arbitrary types of rules, like that if you demonstrate your worthiness or your dedication by applying for a certain number of jobs per week, or attaining employment first, or attending Bible study every day at the Rescue Mission. There's sort of all of these expectations to demonstrate that you are sort of good enough, worthy enough to invest in with this long-term opportunity.That is opposed to the housing-first idea, which we've known and understood for closer to like 30 years and have been studying and practicing ever since, which suggests that rather than do or accomplish all of these things to prove that you deserve housing, housing being sort of the end destination, we lead with the housing because we recognize that housing is the stabilizing force that makes so many of those other things possible. And then we don't just plop you in housing and say, “Good luck,” but we put you in housing and then ask you, “Okay, now, what do you wanna work on?” Now that you have this baseline of stability, of safety, a literal home base, what's next? Let's tackle it together. Now that you can get a good night's sleep. Now that you can charge your phone in an outlet overnight.Now that your documents and your medications are safe. Now that you can buy food to store it in a fridge, rather than go to whatever dinner is available for free for you across the community, or save up enough to get fast food just to fill your belly. All these things that we sort of take for granted that a home with four walls, a roof and a door provide for us are those things that we actually need to be successful. One's ability to stabilize a physical or mental health condition is really difficult if you don't have a safe place to go every night, like where you can store your medication safely, where you can eat a healthy diet, where you can have a normal routine. And even something like drug use and alcohol use, we understand are things that are responsive to a chaotic situation.That if you are living on the streets every day, you are more likely to seek out the soothing effects [laughs] of alcohol, the numbing effects of substances, or the energizing effects of other types of substances, in order to try to get things done that you need to get done. But that even folks who are deep in the throes of those kind of problematic relationships with drugs and alcohol do so much better with housing-first, rather than saying, “Hey, you need to fix all of these things before we even help you feel safe and stable.”Sy Hoekstra: It also strikes me all three of our mutual friend, Josiah Haken, wrote a book where he talked about kind of myths about homelessness. And one of them was the myth that, basically, homeless people are dangerous.Kevin Nye: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And he was like, the real reality of being homeless is that you're actually in more danger than everybody else constantly. You are the one who's the most likely to be the victim who's most likely gonna be robbed, have your stuff taken. And that stuff that's on you, like you said, is all your documents [laughs], it's all of your medicines that you need to remain in your sound mind or whatever. And just having a place to not be worried about that as much feels like an enormous burden lifted off people too, in addition to all the other enormous burdens lifted off people that you just mentioned.Kevin Nye: Absolutely. Yeah, Josiah is great, and his book is really good, too. Neighbors with No Doors, for your listeners to go check that one out.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, yeah for sure.Christianity Today, and Why the Church Doesn't Address Homelessness WellJonathan Walton: This is something that I'm very passionate about. Like Sy said, I've known Josiah for years. I spent a good part of my formative young adult years on the streets with friends. And so a few months ago, you wrote a post on your Substack about an article of yours that Christianity Today was like, “Yep,” and then said, “No.”Kevin Nye: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] So can you tell us about that story, why you decided to go public, and the difference between knowledge and opposition. Because I think some people that are listening to this might think, “Oh, well, if we just know better, then we'll do better.” And I don't think that's true. So could you tell us about your journey writing, then having it get rejected, and then that difference between knowledge about something and opposition. Could you break that down?Kevin Nye: Sure. Yeah, the Christianity Today thing was interesting. When you're a writer on a particular topic and that topic sort of starts to get national attention, which is what was happening, at the time there was a Supreme Court case that was gonna be heard, since then has been heard, Johnson versus Grants Pass, Oregon.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Kevin Nye: We could talk forever about that, but essentially, whether or not municipalities have the right to criminalize homelessness was sort of being decided at the national level. And I wanted to write something about the faith perspective of that. And I have my own Substack and outlets where I can do that, but I thought that this being such a national issue, and my take on it wasn't particularly edgy or controversial. It was just, “Hey, maybe we shouldn't criminalize poor people for being poor.” [laughter]Jonathan Walton: Maybe. Let's try that.Kevin Nye: I thought that that was something… and actually part of what I was writing was not, “Hey, this is what I think.” It was, “Hey, this is what a bunch of churches and faith groups are thinking.” And part of my article was actually about how churches were rallying to support unhoused people in this case and writing into the Supreme Court. So it was almost like, it's kind of pro-church [laughs]. And so I thought given all of that, this would be a pretty good pitch for Christianity Today who is a more conservative publication who I hadn't published with before. I'm more likely to publish with Sojourners, which is less obviously conservative or Religious News Service, which is a little bit more like they're reporting news about religion, not religious news.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Kevin Nye: But I thought this was the right pitch for CT. They had expressed interest in me writing for them before, and it was just about finding the right thing, and I thought this one was it. So I sent it in, and I got a really good response. They agreed. They said, “Hey, this seems like the one. We definitely wanna work with you on it.” And I was pretty upfront from the beginning about what my stance on it was. And they seemed willing along the way, and even a couple times in the process, I just said, “Hey, I just wanna be super clear, this is where I'm going with it. It may be a little different than what you guys are used to publishing on homelessness,” and I just kept getting thumbs up along the way until it was time, essentially to publish it.I had sent it in, it had gotten the final edit, and they had said, “Hey, we're probably gonna publish this on Friday.” And then two hours later, I got an email that just said, “Hey, hold that thought. Just came from a meeting. We might be going in a different direction.” And then I didn't hear anything for 24 hours, and then it was, “Yeah, we are going in a different direction for our coverage.”Jonathan Walton: But did they pay you for it?Kevin Nye: They did. They paid me a kill fee, which…Sy Hoekstra: Which is not the whole thing.Kevin Nye: Yeah. And part of me was like, I wanna be like, “I don't want your money,” [laughter] but then I was like, “I'll take your money and I'll use it for something good.”Jonathan Walton: I can deposit this. Yeah. Right [laughs].Kevin Nye: Yeah. And so I ended up just then sending it to Religion News Service, and said, “Hey, sorry that this is coming late.” Because the deadline was that the Supreme Court was hearing it that week, and so it was sort of a timely piece. And I sent it over there, said, “Hey, I'm sorry this is such short notice, but do you guys want this because another publication didn't want it?” And they ran it. I sat on that for a while deciding whether or not I wanted to say anything about it, because I never want to, I don't wanna stir up trouble just for the sake of trouble. And I don't wanna trash this publication for no reason, even though they've given us some pretty good reasons over the years.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Kevin Nye: But I was like, I don't wanna pick a fight just to pick a fight. And part of that is a professional consideration. As a writer I have the potential to burn a bridge there. So I just sort of said, I'm gonna wait to see what they meant by our coverage is going in a different direction, because it does imply they're gonna publish something, right?Sy Hoekstra: Right.Kevin Nye: And for all I know it could have meant, “Hey, we actually got someone really, super, more qualified than you to write this.” Or, “One of the lawyers who's on the case wanted to write something for us.” And I'd be like, “Well, yeah, of course.” I suspected that wasn't what it meant, [laughs] but I'm gonna withhold judgment, at least publicly for a bit [laughter]. And so I sat on it, and then a couple months later, the Supreme Court ruling came out. So it was supposed to publish when they heard it, and then they had a couple months to deliver a ruling. They delivered a ruling, and Christianity Today had still not published anything, not even about homelessness, period. And so then I thought, “Okay, the ruling just happened.” It also came out the same day that they ruled on presidential immunity.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Kevin Nye: So it was like, okay, there's a lot of competing things to talk about right now so I'm gonna give them a week, two weeks, to see if they put out anything. And then when they didn't, that's when I sort of decided that I wanted to write about not being published, and again, not personal, but write about the fact that nothing was being published about this when it is such a significant ruling about what I would argue is one of the top five most significant issues on everybody's mind, which is housing and homelessness. And sort of how that feeds an ignorance and a lack of Christian conversation about this topic. And again, it wasn't, “How dare they not publish me.” It was sort of like, “How could they not publish anything, especially when they had something to publish, and they chose not to?”Jonathan Walton: Why do you think they killed it and didn't write about it?Kevin Nye: My guess is that ultimately, there is a pretty powerful voice that is Christian and institutionalized in the form of the Gospel Rescue Mission. And those who have supported it have worked in it, worked around it, worked adjacent to it, that does genuinely believe that we should make homelessness harder so that A, either people stop choosing it, which is ludicrous, but more so B, will drive people into institutional settings, like shelters, like Christian shelters, where evangelism can happen, sort of Christian teaching can happen. And the reason I believe that is because there was only one faith perspective that wrote into the Supreme Court in favor of criminalizing, and it was the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission.Criminalizing Homelessness to Force People into Religious SheltersAnd they actually wrote in that publicly available letter that they felt that since it had been ruled at a lower court that they couldn't criminalize, the numbers at their shelter had been declining. Now they failed to mention that this happened at the same time as COVID, and might be another reason that people didn't wanna come into a public shared space type of shelter setting, but that because the city could not use criminalization to compel people into the Rescue Mission, that people were not getting services that they needed. But if you dig into the Gospel Rescue Mission over there, which I did extensively, you learn that they have some of the most egregious rules and expectations of people, and have a very poor reputation among the unhoused community there for how they treat people.And so what then truly is at stake here is in a town like Grants Pass where the only shelter is a Gospel Rescue Mission, can the government criminalize homelessness and force people into a religious setting where they are being taught against their will Christianity in the form of chapel and required Bible studies on a daily basis? And now I don't think Christianity Today thinks that we should institutionalize all unhoused people and scream the Bible at them, but I think that Christianity Today is reluctant to anger the voices who are pretty large and hold a lot of power that defend that institution.The theology behind Misguided Christian Housing ProgramsSy Hoekstra: Can we get a little bit at what some of the reasons are underneath all this stuff? I mean, aside from the [laughs] opportunity to evangelize, forcing people into your program to evangelize them, because that's just your whole end goal as a Christian or whatever, is to convert people, and so the means by which you convert them doesn't matter. Which is, I'm putting it that way because I'm just kind of processing that, because it's gross. It's in line with manipulating people into Christianity by scaring them about hell.Kevin Nye: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Like why not just scare them about prison or anything else?Jonathan Walton: Yeah, right. I'll put you outside.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly [laughs]. But I wonder what other… you've dug into the theology of this, you've dug into people's reasoning for supporting this kind of programming and the powers that be supporting this kind of programming. What are the other motivations, theological reasons that you see behind treating vulnerable people this way?Kevin Nye: Yeah. Well, I mean, the way I framed it obviously, is sort of the most insidious version of it, but I think that most folks who… I mean, especially your frontline workers in a place that, genuinely believe that Jesus is the solution to homelessness. That people who are experiencing homelessness are doing so because of a personal failure, a moral failure, and that if they commit their lives to Jesus, that that will allow them to leave behind the life that led them into the situation that they're in and propel them towards a new life. That's the nice way of understanding what's happening, which I genuinely believe a lot of folks in these settings are operating it from that more positive version.Even what you described as scaring people with hell to get people to accept Jesus, I know people that are in my family who they genuinely believe that the people that they love and care about are gonna go to hell if they don't. And there is this motivation that, again, because they have this belief that is toxic, that the way… if you are committed to that belief, to then address this problem can be very problematic. My experience by and large, has not been that people who experience homelessness are not religious or are not even committed Christians.Sy Hoekstra: Seriously.Jonathan Walton: Exactly.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Kevin Nye: And on top of that, an informed understanding of what causes homelessness is not moral personal failure, but very measurable and understandable social issues like the cost of housing, like our mental health systems, like the stagnation of wages, so that housing is more expensive and people aren't making any more money. So one plus one equals two, fewer people can access housing.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, there's so much to say there, but things I wanna highlight, you're basically saying that Jesus is the answer to homelessness, allows you to avoid asking systemic questions, allows you to avoid talking about systems that need to change. It also kind of turns Jesus into something that he never said that he was. He never said he was the answer to homelessness. He also never even said, “If you state a belief in me and read the Bible and pray and x, y and z, then you will automatically start making significantly better moral decisions.”Kevin Nye: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: That's not even true about Jesus. He also didn't say, “If you believe in me, all of a sudden you won't be addicted to meth,” or whatever. You know what I mean?Kevin Nye: Right.Sy Hoekstra: None of this is true. There's a real powerful underlying fundamentalist current in that perspective. In a just don't worry about the politics, don't worry about basically any real earthly concerns, just Jesus, everything else will fall in line after that.Kevin Nye: Yeah, and it's, I think a lot about how it's just an extension of prosperity gospel. That it's the same idea that says if you're an average middle-class American Christian, and you want to become wealthy, have a private jet, a mansion, here's your spiritual steps. Get closer to Jesus, you'll be rewarded with physical wealth. Well, if that's true, the opposite of that would be true, which is that if you are in deep, dire poverty, it must mean that you're that much farther from Jesus.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: Right.Kevin Nye: And I think even people who would reject the Joel Osteen prosperity rich end of that gospel, still believe a lot of that same stuff, but on the poverty end.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. That's so true.Jonathan Walton: The connection for me happens, is yes, the prosperity gospel, but then also the plantation spirituality.Kevin Nye: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: The people who are rich are obedient, the people who are poor are disobedient. And what disobedient people actually need is supervision and discipline.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Kevin Nye: Yes.Jonathan Walton: And so the housing-first, the entire mentality that you are flipping over is saying you don't actually have to be good or better or on the right side of things to receive, which is the opposite of the plantation, which is the opposite of Capitalism, which is the opposite…Sy Hoekstra: You might even call it grace, Jonathan [laughter].Jonathan Walton: I mean, I was gonna get to the title of the book at the end, but like…[laughs].Kevin Nye: And not even just to receive, but to receive in a way that allows freedom and choice. Because that is one of the biggest differences between these two models. And I think, a lot of why it's we need to hold housing back until we've programmed into a person what they should be acting like and being like then we give them housing, because once they have housing, they're free to make their own decisions, and we're afraid of what that looks like. Versus that housing-first model that, baked into housing-first is choice and options and autonomy. And even in the process of getting into housing, it's not just, “Hey, here's the apartment that you get,” although that is how a lot of systems end up working, just because of scarcity of housing.But in a good housing-first model it's, “Here's all the types of housing that are accessible to you. These ones are subsidized this way, these ones are this way. This is in this part of town, this one is connected to these types of services. What works for you?” And then after that choice comes more choices like, “Hey, what's the thing that you wanna work on first?” Which is the treatment-first model says, you got to get sober before you do anything else. And that is just not true. I think that's a big piece of it too, is how much the treatment-first system allows us, whether we're government or religious, to exert social control over people.Jonathan Walton: All that to say, there are people and systems and structures, institutions in place that keep this ideology enforced.Kevin Nye: Yes.Jonathan Walton: It is moving forward. Something, harking back, we had an interview with Lisa Sharon Harper, who I believe you know.Kevin Nye: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And one of the things she said was, the hope is in the work. As we do the work, we will find hope, because we're close and we see progress, we build relationships, that's the fruit of being in the work. And so as people are, what we were just talking about, these institutions, these individuals are reluctant to this evidence-based policy actually being rolled out in the church, where do you see good work being done inside and outside of the church, where you can find that intersection of hope and work?Kevin Nye: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: As people do start to say yes to Matthew 25.Kevin Nye: I mean, I think that my… so my book came out two years ago now, and when I wrote it, I sort of hoped that it would be revelatory for people. That a lot of Christians would be like, “Oh, this is new information. This is a new way of looking at it.” And there was a good amount of that. But what really surprised me, and gave me a lot of hope, was how much response I got that said, “Yes, this is what we over here already believe, and we've been doing.”Sy Hoekstra: Oh.Kevin Nye: Sometimes like, “We didn't know it had a name. We didn't know there were other people thinking and talking about this.” And so in those two years, as I've gotten to travel around and do some speaking and stuff like that, I've gotten to see and hear about a bunch of programs, churches that are merging this sort of faith-based and evidence-based. And, yeah, it's just been, it's filled me with a ton of hope. And where they're, I think the next growth is for them to get organized together, because right now the Rescue Missions are organized. They have a centralized network, and so they can speak together with one voice in opposition to these best practices.But there's not sort of a focal point or a voice box for all these other ones that are doing, like you said, the hope is in the work, they're doing it in their small, local ways, but don't have a collective together to speak to each other and on behalf of one another and on behalf of the things that they believe in. And so that's part of the project I'm working on right now. My next book project is to sort of give voice and awareness to a lot of these ideas that are being implemented in different places that people don't really know about outside of those local communities, and sort of name what is working and why, and hopefully inspire responses from faith communities and individuals that align with best practices and align with their faith.Jonathan Walton: One, I wanna dive into your book, because I actually haven't read it yet, so I'm looking forward to grabbing it. And I'm glad to hear that you have another one. What would you say is the bridge from the one you wrote to this one?Kevin Nye: A lot of different things, but to make it very black and white, it's the first book is about how to think differently about homelessness, and this book is about how you actually go and do that, and how those change beliefs get worked out in things as nitty gritty as program design.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Totally.Kevin Nye: Without being boring, hopefully.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] That's great. Where can people find you or your work?Kevin Nye: So I'm on most social media. I'm not too hard to find there, but my handle is a little different everywhere you go. The best sort of landing spot is my Substack. So that's Kevinmnye.substack.com. And so any new thing that I'm writing, whether it's there or I publish with Sojourners, or I'm speaking somewhere, I always put that out in my newsletter there. And hopefully as some more news comes out about this new book project, I'll be able to make announcements about that there.Sy Hoekstra: That's awesome. We will definitely link to that. Kevin Nye, we so much appreciate having you on the show today. Thank you so much for being here.Kevin Nye: Yeah, absolutely. It was a blast.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Our Thoughts after the InterviewSy Hoekstra: Jonathan, I loved that conversation. Tell me what you are thinking about coming out of it.The Church Is Actively Contributing to the Problem of HomelessnessJonathan Walton: There's a lot. I think that the thing that frustrates me the most, and I think this is true about a lot of just injustices that I'm thinking about right now, is that the church is actively contributing to the continuing…Sy Hoekstra: To the problem.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. When we're literally supposed to not do that. Like, the whole Grants Pass amicus brief, I'm just like, “Really guys?” That takes energy. That takes effort, that takes meetings, that takes emails, takes drafts. It takes time to do that. You can't just like, “Hey, I'm gonna write an amicus brief,” and just submit it. There's an effort that goes into sustaining injustice, and that to me I think is concerning and exhausting.Societies with Colonial Roots Won't Provide “Unearned” BenefitsJonathan Walton: The other thing I think about is, I mean, I would say White American folk religion, talk about a plantation mentality, but it even stretches into addressing injustice. I was having a conversation with Maya yesterday.Sy Hoekstra: Your seven-year-old.Jonathan Walton: Yes. No, she's eight. She's eight.Sy Hoekstra: Oh. I forgot.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. But we were talking about the difference between fairness and justice. And she said, “Baba, is it better to give someone what they need or give someone what they ask for?”Sy Hoekstra: You have the deepest child [laughter].Jonathan Walton: She literally asked me that. And I was like, “Ooh.”Sy Hoekstra: Does Maya wanna be on this podcast [laughter]?Jonathan Walton: No, but she was reading a book. I have a discussion or something at school, and this is what she asked me. So I started talking about the vineyard. I said, “Maya, who gets to decide what is needed? Who are the different people?” And she goes, “Well, someone outside is deciding.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, well, then let's go read the story about Jesus in the vineyard.” Like the kingdom of God is like a vineyard.Sy Hoekstra: You're talking about the parable where he pays all the workers the same, no matter how long they worked, and the ones who worked the longest get angry [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Exactly. And then we went and read… she had only read the first half of the parable about the two sons. She hadn't read the second half. So then we talked about the similarities between the father who runs out to meet the prodigal son, and then how the person in charge gets to decide how grace or resources or whatever are distributed. And I was like, it would seem to me that that person gets to define what is just and what is fair, and what is equitable. And we didn't get to talk about power, but that was ultimately what I was thinking about.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And I don't know how to explain it to an eight year old. But she said everybody should get what they need. But she's like, “How can we do that?” And I said, “Maya, that right there is the fundamental question that we try to put together.” There are people who think and believe and will work tooth and nail for people not to get what they don't think they deserve. “I don't think that person deserves a home. I don't think that person deserves to live where I live. I think they should, quote- unquote, wait in line,” if we're talking about immigration. “I played by the rules. Don't pay off that debt. I worked at a job…” We're constantly doing that. There's a Hawaiian activist, her name escapes me right now, but she said, “You got to remember you live in a colony.”Like the United States is a colony. That's what it is. Another Peruvian scholar is like, coloniality is a real thing. And so in a colony, you cannot have people get things that they quote- unquote, didn't work for. The kingdom of God should literally break the brains of imperialists, which it does [laughs], because it just, it blows up everything. So all that to say, I hope, and we'll pray and will work in the influence that I have to say, “Hey, can we do what Kevin was talking about, like housing-first, resources first, hugs first, communication first?” All that.For Evangelicals, Grace Is Not TangibleSy Hoekstra: Yeah, totally. I had kind of similar thoughts. I was gonna talk about how the moralism underlying all of the policy, like the treatment-first policy like, “You have to earn this, and we are suspicious of you, and we have all these stereotypes going in that we're just not going to question and we're gonna follow. And until you prove yourself worthy of our generosity, we're not gonna give it to you.” And so it's sort of like, we can talk about grace and generosity and all of that all day long, but we're not gonna put our money where our mouth is, especially not government money [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right, exactly.Sy Hoekstra: That's kind of the other side of the coin of the coin of what you were talking about, which is so there's this lack of grace generosity, but I think yours is actually a step further, which is if you're denying grace and generosity, you're going to have to take active steps to reinforce the frankly, evil way of doing things [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And that's the amicus briefs and everything else. What I was just saying, that kind of moralism, it really is connected to the more fundamentalist side of evangelicalism about how, basically, grace is a spiritual thing. It's not a tangible thing. It's not a material thing. It's not something you practice outside of forgiving someone for wronging you. It's not something you do with your money and your resources. It just doesn't really have any business in the public square, or in public policy, which is not a distinction the Bible draws.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: The best you can argue is maybe it's a distinction that under your theology you think the Bible implies. It's definitely not explicit [laughter]. You can look at Leviticus, where there are so so many different provisions where God is requiring people to use the fruits of their own labor to provide for the poor in their neighborhood, and not in particularly efficient ways [laughter]. And Jesus is obviously, or John the Baptist is telling people, “If you have two coats, give one away.” There's the spirit, the direction where everything's going with the kingdom of God is so opposed to that way of thinking, in my view, that it's incredibly frustrating that we have to… Kevin, in particular. I'm frustrated for him, for advocates, and then for most of all, for the actual people who aren't getting housing, who are literally out on the streets. Some of them are freezing to death or starving to death because of our insistence on this moralism.Jonathan Walton: Right. The fundamental thing is at the end of the day, moralism is an argument that you need to earn the stuff, like you were just saying. And then it's like, I'm gonna create an entire ecosystem that justifies your poverty and my comfort.Christians Should Actively Invite Unhoused People into Our NeighborhoodsSy Hoekstra: My other thought was around markets, and a lot of how some of the intractability of housing policy is that so many people just have decided that when you put out public housing or low income housing somewhere, that that lowers the value of the property around it.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Which is by economists, the way they speak, it's an inevitability. It's just the way things are, and it can't be changed. But that is ultimately because the potential buyers of that property are bigots toward poor people [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. No, it's true. Right.Sy Hoekstra: It's such widespread, systemic bigotry that it changes the value of homes and buildings and land. And that's a choice. It is a choice that I will grant you most societies have made [laughs]. Like most societies, rich people want to cordon themselves off from everybody else and to use their money to try and escape the things about this world that are difficult and make us sad and uncomfortable and hurt. But that doesn't mean that it's not still a choice for which God absolutely holds us accountable. Go and read Amos, or whatever [laughter]. There's no question, it does not make God happy, and that we have a different way to go. But what we would need is something that seems kind of impossible at the moment, which is a… you've heard of a NIMBY?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: NIMBY people, like Not In My Back Yard. So that means, “Don't put that new methadone clinic, don't put that new housing project anywhere near me.” We would need a YIMBY movement.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: You actually have to have people who say, “Yes. I want poor people around. I want people who are trying to recover from drugs around. I want people who have mental health issues around. Because of my positive value for human life and communal flourishing.” And that truly feels impossible to me. I don't think it is, again, I think it's a choice. And one thing that I'm trying to do, I have narrow influence in the world. One person over whom I have a lot of influence is my two year old. I walk around New York City with her all the time. I take her to daycare, other places. And I'm trying to make a point that, we're not going to be afraid of the person who's having the mental health crisis, because the actual reality is, in that mental health crisis, they are in more danger than we are. They are the ones at risk, we are not.Most of them are not violent. A lot of us want to be violent towards them. Aka Jordan Neely, who was killed on the subway because he was having a mental health crisis, and people were sufficiently afraid of him. And so if I'm on the subway platform with my daughter and someone's having a mental health crisis, and they're not that far away from us, and people will move away from that person because they're afraid, I will stay there. And that has never been a problem, not once. You can tell me that that's dangerous or risky, and I don't care, because I know you're wrong, and I'm going to teach the person that I have the ability to teach that you're wrong [laughs]. And we're gonna stay there, and we're gonna be completely fine. I've been here for 16 years now. I've lived in New York City, and I've been around people having, I've worked with even my clients as a lawyer.These are not alien, weird people having scary freakouts to me. These are real people, who by the way, are fully conscious when they're having their mental health crises, and they can see everyone walking away from them, and they know how afraid everybody is of them, and that affects them deeply.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And I'm not gonna be part of it. I will be the yes in my backyard person, even if nobody else is. There are other people who are. I'm not saying it's me against the world, but that is something that we need to insist on it.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and honestly I think that ties literally perfectly into Which Tab Is Still Open.Which Tab Is Still Open? — Ta-Nehisi CoatesSy Hoekstra: Oh, yeah. Let's get into it. So this is Which Tab Is Still Open. This is the segment where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter, which you can get by joining the free mailing list at KTFPress.com. You'll get resources articles, podcasts, books, everything, recommendations from Jonathan and I on ways to grow in your discipleship and in your political education. So go to KTFPress.com, sign up for that free mailing list. Jonathan, we're talking about Ta-Nehisi Coates today. Why don't you tell us what we're talking about exactly?Jonathan Walton: Yes. So Ta-Nehisi Coates has a new book, it's called The Message. A very significant portion of it is about his trip to Israel and Palestine, occupied West Bank, Hebron, places like that. Some important points he makes are that when you see how Palestinians are treated up close, it's not really that hard to see it as apartheid or Jim Crow or any other exploitative, discriminatory system that has been set up. And he took a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, and found it profoundly moving as well, but just couldn't shake that the lesson Zionists took from the Holocaust was that, “We have to obtain our own power at all costs to prevent this from happening again.” He's had some really fascinating media appearances while promoting the book that we'll link to in the show notes.One of them, you mentioned the newsletter, was a great interview with The Daily Show. The interview that instigated a lot of this fervor and dialog and will probably help him sell a lot of books, which he's also said [laughter], was with CBS because he was basically ambushed by Tony Dokoupil, and was called an extremist in asking him pretty nonsensical questions for people who are against genocide, totally normal for people who are for Zionism. And the question he asked that many people ask is, “Does Israel have the right to exist?” And it's a rhetorical question, which Ta-Nehisi Coates actually answered when he said that countries don't have the right to exist, they exist by power. Just that turn was really great.But about the interview, there was controversy, because it came out that the interviewer went around CBS's editorial process and just went off on his own without telling anybody what he was doing. So Sy, what are your thoughts?The Power of Clarity and Focus in Prophetic Truth-TellingSy Hoekstra: I am so happy that Ta-Nehisi Coates is back writing nonfiction [laughter]. That's my main and primary thought. Everything he wrote in the 2010s is very formative for a lot of my thinking. I just love his approach to writing and journalism. He said many times he just, he writes to learn. He really appreciates the power of writing, and he has an incredible amount of moral clarity, a really impressive inability of everyone who's trying to distract him, to distract him. Like he's very focused. Like that question that you just brought up was a good example of it. Somebody says, “Does Israel have the right to exist?” He says, “Israel exists. States don't have the right to exist, they just do. They establish themselves with power. And now I'm gonna talk about, because Israel does exist, how does it exist, and why is that a problem?”It's just, I'm going to acknowledge your question. I'm going to say very quickly why it doesn't make any sense, and then I'm gonna get back to the point that matters [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And that is something I want to emulate in the way that I go about my writing and my commentary and all that. I mean, those are kind of my… [laughs] I'm not sure I have a lot of substantive thoughts about what you just said, I'm just happy he's back. He took a long path down the fiction road and was writing comic books and all kinds of other stuff, which is also very cool. And he also did that because he was like, “That's the challenge for me as a writer right now. I've never done this. I'm a little bit scared of it. I think being nervous is good as a writer. And I'm gonna go do this thing that makes me sort of uncomfortable, instead of just continuing to churn out bestsellers about whatever.” You know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: [laughter]. Right. Let me go and be challenged. Right right right.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, which I really respect that too, even though it means there were several years where I didn't get his commentary on stuff that I would have appreciated [laughter]. That's what I have been thinking as I've been watching him. But how about you, and you said you were gonna connect it back to what we were talking about before?Jonathan Walton: Yes. So one, amen, I'm glad he's writing nonfiction as well.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It's really powerful to me what truth telling does. He is stewarding a platform. He is leveraging his voice. He is doing what I would hope followers of Jesus would do in the ways that we can and the lives that we live every day. You're leveraging your platform with your daughter. You are her biggest influence. You and Gabrielle. The stewardship of his power and platform to elevate and center the most marginalized voice in the media landscape over the last 65 years, people from the Middle East. That we say the Middle East, because we're the center of the world.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: And so that reality comes from… I've listened to so many interviews. I listened to his one with The Daily Show, MSNBC, Zeteo with Mehdi Hassan. I listened to the one with Trevor Noah. I'm gonna listen to the one for Democracy Now!, I'm gonna listen to the one with The Gray Area, because I need to be reminded every day that there are people willing and able to say the hard things, not be distracted or dissuaded from what they're trying to say, and be willing to communicate that they would risk their own injury. He said, “It doesn't matter what someone else has done to me or how evil someone is, we should not kill them.” Over and over again. There is no world where it's, “Oh, it's complex. Oh, it's complicated.”No, no, no, it's not. It's not complicated. It becomes complicated if you don't think about it. Everything's complicated if we don't think about it. But if you actually sit down and think about what it would mean to be Palestinian and what it would mean to be a Jewish person post Holocaust, post multiple pogroms, I would love for us to arrive at the point where we're like, “I don't want to perpetuate that against anyone else, because it was perpetrated against me,” which is love your neighbor as yourself.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: Which he's not a follower of Jesus, but where we have instead landed is where he is willing to wrestle, he talked about this with Trevor Noah, he would hope that he would not become someone who would commit acts of violence to keep acts of violence from happening to him. That, I think is a rub. Like Nat Turner's rebellion and what happened on October the seventh when the quote- unquote, Hamas escaped. Even the words we use to describe the attack that happened, it literally is described like a breakout a lot of the times, in Zionist literature and communication. All of these things frame the Lebanese, or frame now the Iranians as not people. And what Ta-Nehisi Coates is trying to do is actually say they are people.And that gets back to what you're talking about with, yes in my backyard. This is a person. Jordan Neely is a person. The person on the street having the mental health crisis, the person who's going through a messy divorce and doesn't have anywhere to go, the folks that are unemployed or bust up here from Texas, these are individuals made in the image of God, who do not deserve harm. That is the thing that draws me back to Coates' interviews, because he's not avoiding the hard questions, but what he is doing is communicating a truth that the people asking hard questions don't like. We are no better than the person that we're shooting or bombing or killing. We're just not. And so why are we doing that to someone who is literally just like us?And so I will keep watching, I will keep listening, keep reading. I hope that there is a shift happening. I'm not optimistic. I'm grateful for him and driving the conversation, because it feels something has broken through that I hope continues, because that was a conversation on CBS Morning Show. That was a conversation on progressive, liberal, conservative. Like people are talking about the book, even if you're critiquing it, you got to talk about it. I'm glad that that's happening, and I hope that this is taking the trajectory of what happened in South Africa, that's the best case scenario.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: It's not the best case scenario, but politically in the limits that we have, it's the best case scenario.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And I think he thinks that way. Like when he talks about the power of writing, he's not talking about the power of my book to end the war, he's talking about the power of my book to influence some people who so

Curtis Chang and worship leader Isaac Wardell are joined by renowned musicians Matt Maher, Sandra McCracken, and Jon Guerra, alongside poet Kate Bluett and Grammy-winning songwriter Dee Wilson. These talented artists are pivotal contributors to The Porter's Gate's worship album for the Redeeming Babel project, The After Party. They share their unique perspectives on how worship music can help navigate the current political challenges faced by American churches of all denominations. The group also offers an inside look at the creative process behind powerful tracks like "The Kingdom of Jesus," "The Lord Will Have His Way," and more.   Listen to Songs For the After Party, get sheet music, lyrics, and prayers for your church   Bring The After Party course to your church or small group!    Referenced in this episode by Curtis and his guests:   Read more about Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher Listen to “My Deliverer” by Rich Mullins' Ragamuffin Band Listen to Howard University's gospel choir perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing” Transcript of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March 17, 1966 speech  Lost audio from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s February 26, 1965 sermon Listen to Matt Maher's song “Sons and Daughters” Watch the trailer and clips from Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life HERE Listen to the score from Terrance Malick's film A Hidden Life HERE Read 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 (the ministry of reconciliation) HERE   Learn more about our guests:   Isaac Wardell & The Porter's Gate The Music of Matt Maher The Liturgical Poetry of Kate Bluett  The Devotional Songwriting of Jon Guerra The Work of Sandra McCracken  The Common Hymnal of Dee Wilson