
The Current
We're seeking inspiration toward deeper discipleship through conversations with people working toward justice, cultivating deep spiritual practices, forming community and connection in significant ways, and helping one another heal from trauma. As we follow Christ to the margins of society, to the wounded and grieving, and into the hard work of peacemaking, we find that we are not alone on this journey. Join us to resist despair, and to regain some hope in the world, in the church, and in Christ.
Most weeks, Pastor Chris Nafis is talking with scholars and practitioners who are inspiring and faithful, and some weeks Pastor Chris is engaging with the book of Acts. Each week, we find the Spirit calling us deeper into the death and resurrection of Jesus, into a life with God, and into loving one another well.
This is a ministry of Living Water Church of the Nazarene, which gathers in San Diego's East Village, the epicenter of homelessness in this city. We are committed to meaningful worship, community formation, and service. Join us sometime :)
The Current
Jamie Gates: The Lessons of South Africa: Apartheid, Justice, and Reconciliation
Dr. Jamie Gates offers a powerful, deeply personal exploration of growing up as a white American in apartheid South Africa, revealing striking parallels between South Africa's racial history and America's ongoing struggles with justice and reconciliation. As someone who straddled two worlds - attending all-white Afrikaner schools while his missionary parents ministered in Black communities - Gates provides unique insights into how segregation shapes society and how religious institutions either challenge or reinforce these divisions.
The conversation takes us through the theological underpinnings of apartheid, where religious language was weaponized to justify racial separation. Gates explains how certain churches provided spiritual backing for apartheid while others worked actively against it, creating multiple versions of Christianity within the same nation. This historical exploration feels urgently relevant as Gates connects it to contemporary American politics, particularly the dangers of "colorblind" approaches that ignore measurable disparities and the privilege inherent in claiming political neutrality when others are suffering under unjust systems.
What makes this episode particularly valuable is Gates' nuanced perspective on Christian engagement with divisive issues. He challenges the false dichotomy between maintaining relationships across political divides and speaking prophetically against injustice. Instead, he suggests Christians can and must do both - keeping "holy friendships" with those who disagree while still standing firmly with the marginalized. His personal journey through these tensions offers wisdom for anyone struggling with how faith intersects with politics in polarized times. Whether you're interested in international justice issues, theological responses to racism, or practical ways Christians can bridge divides while maintaining integrity, this conversation provides thoughtful pathways forward rooted in both scholarship and lived experience.
Hey and welcome back to the Current. This is Pastor Chris Nafis, and today I'm very grateful to have joining us on the podcast Dr Jamie Gates, who is a professor of cultural anthropology in the Department of Sociology, social Work and Family Sciences at Point Loma Nazarene University. He is the founder and the former director of the Center of Justice and Reconciliation at Point Loma and has been deeply involved with issues of justice and poverty, especially around human trafficking. But today we talk about his work in and around South Africa someone who grew up in part of his childhood there and has been deeply engaged with issues around apartheid and racial justice kind of following and leading pilgrimages into that space and we talk about how those things connect to what has happened and what is happening here in the United States. I hope this conversation will spark you to deeper engagement with issues of justice and give you some hope that there are people doing good, peace building work in the world In the name of Christ.
Chris Nafis:Here it is All right. Well, jamie, we've known each other for a long time now. You've been really helpful in me processing all the stuff going on in the Nazarene Church and just sort of trying to live a faithful life here in San Diego. Thank you for all your investment in my life and and thanks for doing this with me. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Jamie Gates:I love it. I'm grateful for your friendship. I'm grateful for the work you do. I really believe in what you're up to.
Chris Nafis:Well, thanks, and same for you. That's why I want to hear more about what you have been up to and what. What you are up to, um, I know you fairly well, although I'm still, like this week, discovering new parts of your journey that I didn't really know. But not everybody knows you. Could you kind of just introduce yourself a little bit for people listening?
Dr. Jamie Gates:Sure, I'm currently a professor of anthropology at Point Loma Nazarene University. Have been there since 2001. Came here out of grad school and I started the Center for Justice and Reconciliation there out of my calling and their calling on my life. I've done a lot of work in the community here in San Diego, border work in San Diego Tijuana and work going back and forth between here and South Africa. I'm currently on sabbatical so I have time to do podcasts with friends.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Um and uh, I'm in the middle of writing a book on the counter human trafficking movement in san diego county. Um, students drug me into that movement, uh, back in 2005, way back then, and was, and god had it such that we got immersed in that as a, as as a university, with students and colleagues and in such a way that there's a big story to tell about San Diego and what transpired there. So I'm working on a book right there. So on that, right now I'm in the middle, in the hard parts of got to work on it and hard parts that it's also difficult material. It's also about a difficult subject. It's heavy stuff.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, difficult material. It's also about a difficult subject. It's heavy stuff, yeah, yeah, and I think like when I came first came to san diego, that was mostly what I knew about your work was that you were really involved in all the human trafficking stuff. And even when we first were going to do this episode, I was like, let's talk about human trafficking. Then we kind of shifted because, uh, I didn't know all about your history with um, south africa and south africa is like around the news a lot these days. You know we have a South African who's, you know, basically in charge of the government at the moment.
Dr. Jamie Gates:The shadow president.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, and there's some other South prominent South Africans, you know, I think of Trevor Noah and some others. There's a lot, and then there's these. There's some political stuff happening with South Africa. So we kind of pivoted and decided, well, let's dive deep into that. So we kind of pivoted and decided, well, let's dive deep into that. Your PhD is actually in studying South Africa. I just learned that today. Can you tell us a little like tell us your story? How did you get connected to South Africa?
Dr. Jamie Gates:I wouldn't be who I am today had I not grown up in South Africa. So my parents took me there when I was eight years old as a missionary kid, and my parents were missionaries out away from the cities and the rural parts of South Africa for most of my life there. I lived in Johannesburg a couple of years, but as a kid I grew up as a white American, but they immersed me in local schools, so I grew up in Afrikaner schools in this farming valley in northern South Africa. What was then called the Transvaal is now Limpopo and Mpumalanga area. That had lots of farmers and it's the Los Coptan Valley. It's one of the most fruitful farming valleys in all of South Africa.
Dr. Jamie Gates:So I grew up essentially in a farming town, riding horses and motorcycles out of my friends out in their farms and going to school. But remember, in those years South Africa was segregated, heavily segregated, and so I grew up in mostly an all white community while my parents were being pastors in all-black communities, and so moving between those worlds was like a huge part of my upbringing yeah, yeah, I mean I think that was probably a pretty unique perspective, being sort of americans in their white community but like working in in black churches in that community.
Chris Nafis:I mean, maybe just backing up just a little bit, could you tell us like I think many of us have like some general sense. You know, we've heard of Nelson Mandela, we know about the end of apartheid somewhat. I think some of us have at least Americans have like a fuzzy understanding of like South American politics and sort of all that happened there. You came in from what I understand. You came in right in the thick of it.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Sure, the latter years what we didn't know then would be the latter years of apartheid. So I left in 88, mandela becomes president in 94. And the whole transition happens in those years where I go to college and of course, as a kid any big kid growing up in a place, you just grow up in it and you don't know the full, you don't have great perspective on what you're growing up in the middle of. But I go to college in those years and I'm getting a lot of perspective from the outside. You know who knew about the as a kid. They in South Africa, the media, carefully controlled the message on a regular basis and even in schools. I can tell you a lot about how the schools shaped a particular kind of patriot and ways of thinking about being both Christian and patriot in South African schools growing up. But more generally, south Africa is so right. So South Africa is.
Dr. Jamie Gates:You know, in the United States we like to tell the story of 1492, columbus sailed the ocean blue. We kind of create this, you know, hallowed history of the way that Europeans discovered the United States, typically writing out the people who are already here. But that's another longer story In South Africa, kind of similar. But it was 1652 when the Dutch settled and there had been some Portuguese you know way stations in the Cape and everyone at that point was looking for trade routes and efficient trade routes. So the Dutch settle in 1652.
Dr. Jamie Gates:The British come not long after that, you know, not even 100 years after that, and of European settlements they start to put settlements in South Africa and the European heritage settlers become sort of British and Dutch, as you know. I don't know if you know Most people may not know this, but they're in tension with one another. Most of South Africa's history, all the way to the Boer Wars, right another. Most of south africa's history, all the way to the boer wars, right the, the british are are established some of the first concentration camps um that europeans use against one another in in in the boer wars in 1899 against other europeans.
Chris Nafis:Yeah right, so this was like this.
Dr. Jamie Gates:This was like in some ways, the british and the for connor's, who become known as the offer connor's. Later the british and the dutch settlers are fighting one another for territory and for, of course, what eventually becomes the. The real, the central reason is the wealth in south africa. So they discovered gold and diamonds in the in 1860s, 1840s, through the 60s they figure oh, there's tremendous mineral wealth here and it causes this. It's part of the scramble for africa, this great rush to colonize all of Africa. But there are already deep European settlements by the time.
Dr. Jamie Gates:The scramble for Africa happens in all over the continent, right, and that happens in the late 1870s, 80s, 90s. So South Africa becomes a. South Africa by the beginning of the 20th century becomes an end as quasi independent nation. They become the union of south africa, which takes four, two british and two dutch heritage provinces and unites them across south africa. Remember, this is all europeans making the decisions, or people who used to be europeans at least making these decisions.
Dr. Jamie Gates:It becomes the union of south africa in 1910. So that is really the first major separation from britain, from the, from the, the colonizing aspects, and by that time there's now generations of european south africans of british heritage and dutch heritage, south africans living there, you know, for hundreds of years, and africaners in particular consider themselves uh, african, not european. Deep european roots, but it would be like you know all the people in america who think about themselves as european, but they really have irish or italian, or you know british roots, but, but they've lost even the memory of when those. Or you know British roots, but but they've lost even the memory of when those roots started, you know.
Chris Nafis:Right, I'm American, I live here in my peer I'm. You know, I can't count the generations, right, yeah?
Dr. Jamie Gates:And, like in both nations, the, the racial divide has always been there heavily and the, the Europeans, built their nation on the backs of South black South Africans in particular. So South Africa has 11 different languages now. That tells you something about the diversity of South Africa. In the midst of all that, but for you know, when apartheid gets established in the early 20th century, so apartheid really becomes formally a system of government in 1948. But it's growing in the early years of the 20th century and into these laws that, like in 1910, the Group Areas Act, these land laws that begin to segregate everybody by where they live, by what jobs they can have access to, by what educations they can have access to, by whether they can own property or not own property, whether they will be allowed to be managers or whether they have to remain in low-paid and entry-level positions. All of South Africa gets segregated like that.
Chris Nafis:And what are the lines Like? Is it purely race? Is it just white black? Is it Dutch?
Dr. Jamie Gates:The dominant line was white versus everything else. There was a time later in the century where they started to create, in between, categories like indian, and colored is a big category in south africa that's not used the way we use it in the united states. There's an entire subpopulation of south africans who own the identity of being colored um, who speak afrikaans as their primary language, afrikaans and english, who are of mixed race, who come from their ancestors, come from many parts of the world, but in South Africa there's this. There's this texture, beauty of of diversity, but the apartheid system broken into five races and you had to fit into one of those five race categories.
Dr. Jamie Gates:You even created passports for folks, internal passports where you had to carry your identity documents and you couldn't like when I was growing up in this farming valley, hrblersdal, the little town, about a few thousand people back when I was growing up and it's now probably more like 10,000 now. But you couldn't stay overnight if you weren't white, unless you had a pass. You couldn't stay overnight if you weren't white, unless you had a pass and unless your pass was signed recently by your employer in whose dwelling you were also staying for that night. So some like housekeepers and persons working in the gardens and so on would do that, and that's how divided it was. So literally had the next closest housing villages, towns, cities that were black, like 45 minute drive away from the town.
Chris Nafis:So people had to commute by bus if they were working in town, if they, if they were not white yeah, so, and this is like late 80s, early 90s, it's just not that long ago and you know some of us that are getting old enough that I can say I remember some of the days, you know, like I remember some of the things from my early childhood reading the news, and so some, some people listening to this may may remember some of the actual history of this as it developed.
Dr. Jamie Gates:So you know how, yeah, you can be in your forties and remember and remember segregated beaches right, I'm in my fifties now. Beaches right, I'm in my 50s now, and it was you know we were going to. You know I remember the non-white, the white, non-white signs on benches and on entryways to, to buildings. It was being heavily challenged in the 80s, for sure, and there was a lot of pushback, um and protest.
Dr. Jamie Gates:One of the things I remember is the, the level of the ongoing level of violence and fear that was in all communities, heavily in the black community in particular. I mean it was militarized, right. I can remember living through a number of uh states of emergency, they would call it, where the entire basically martial law, where the government declared things unrest is happening too far and wide and they bring the military into neighborhoods all over the country, in particular into black neighborhoods. And while I wasn't living in black neighborhoods, the fear that was there was in part stoked by all of this extra state violence that was coming at the population and we were supposedly protected. But it didn't feel like protection, it felt like stoking flames. It felt like, you know, um, barely suppressed anger and and, and it felt like it was causing that anger as much as it was sort of trying to somehow control.
Chris Nafis:You know the, the frustration yeah, so the state crackdown just like escalates everything and you felt like that as a kid in particular. Yeah yeah, and, and being in both those communities, you probably were hearing sides of it that maybe some of your schoolmates were not.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Yeah, it's interesting because, like in the evangelical world, in Nazarene churches and others that we were missionary friends with in the area, it's almost like there was like this don't talk about politics rule, and so apartheid is happening all over the place and as a kid, I'm being raised like without much language or without much conversation happening in the house about all of that. It's almost like the people that grew up in civil rights era and said, well, I didn't know this was happening. Well, we knew, but we didn't know. It was this weird space of we see this going on, we're talking across, but even the pastors like black pastors, nazarene pastors wouldn't talk too much about the things that were happening in their neighborhoods because we needed to stick to church conversations.
Dr. Jamie Gates:So I'm sure my parents had longer and deeper conversations than we had. And my parents did some beautiful things, like the first time the local farmers sat down with a black man at the dinner table was when the pastors would come over and the farmer friends would come over at the same time, and that there was that kind of interpersonal breaking down of barriers that was going on in our home but not much conversation about the big picture.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, I mean, honestly, that sounds that feels very familiar to me, because I feel like that that we kind of feel that way now, where you know we have the rise of Donald Trump and all it's just very contentious, where, like, all the news is about these big dramatic things that are happening around the Trump administration, part one and now part two. Um, and you know, and I feel like in right-wing circles like there was lots of drama about Obama, biden, those things going on, but like it feels like in church we're really not supposed to talk about it, like we're supposed to be like somehow neutral. And I think we have this big culture of like churches they have politics and in some ways that can be helpful to maintain community community. But then when there's like true injustice going on, like it just you know, when you, when no one speaks anything, you end up siding with the oppressor, usually, right, what did that look like for you going?
Dr. Jamie Gates:no, I I had the privilege of in 15, of doing a uh, a tedx for point loma and uh, it was on this very issue of how deadly silence is, in particular and particularly the church, it's silence on issues of justice. And having sort of reflected back on my experience and looking at South Africa and the church was many things in South Africa all during the apartheid years and in the post apartheid years. But I'll say that in those earlier, since we're talking about that you know the church was apolitical, like the evangelical or the Nazarene sort of trying to I'm not sure that's possible, but we were at least claiming to be apolitical, which means nobody challenged the status quo you couldn't speak to. And you know the church was under threat if it had spoken to give the leaders some credibility here. They were under threat that if they spoke against the government they would lose their ability to be in south africa, so they would kick the church in nazarene out, for example. That at least was the, the stated fear at the time and likely the the, the truth right, um. But then there was, you know, then there was a dutch reform church which was an arm or fueling the apartheid structure. You know the hendrik vervoet, the founder of the apartheid system.
Dr. Jamie Gates:One of the first prime ministers was a sociologist, theologian, so a sort of graduate trained, you know, theologian and sociologist, who was the architect of apartheid. And so apartheid was preached from the pulpits in some ways, well before it was woven into law in South Africa, and so there was a theologically driven sense of God's purpose in the world, a sense of God's mission in the world, a sense of who we are is God's blessing to Africa, to all of what's happening in South Africa. I mean, I'll give you a quick example of a holiday that is revered in South Africa. That was revered and still it's a complicated relation to the past, but the they called it in Afrikaans the day of the promise or the day of the covenant. I think the day of the covenant when in on December I hope I get this right December 16, on December I hope I get this right December 16, there is a celebration of when God delivered the Afrikaner four-trekkers or the pioneers you would think about in the United States, the people in the covered wagons right the Oregon Trail, kind of people in South Africa.
Dr. Jamie Gates:The Dutch, the Dutch and those that inherited the land they think from God were in this big battle against the Zulu nation. Maybe people have heard of Shaka Zulu and others, but this was relatives and on this day, with a small circle of wagons relatively small circle wagons, but superior firepower, you know, guns and such they were able to expel. It's called the Battle of Blood River. They were able to expel thousands of Zulu impis or fighters, and they had famously prayed to God that if God were to give them this day, they would forever be a Christian nation and they would forever honor that particular day as a national holiday.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Um, that story was grown into what it has become in the 1930s and 40s as the, as they established the four trekker monument just outside of pretoria, as a, as the nation was, as apartheid was gaining steam, as a as a structure and as the, as those with dutch heritage. Um built that system. That was one of the stories that sat at the center many stories like this, but that story sat at the center of god's call to this. You know, I, I think when in the united states we use the phrase manifest destiny, right, and that's the, that's one of their versions, that one of the stories. That is the pillar, a pillar story in building of their notion of manifest destiny so kind of like we have in the united States.
Chris Nafis:We have these stories of like you know, like the Thanksgiving story of you know, like this it's not a violent story, but I mean it is a violent story, but it's not told as a violent story of like this great feast with everybody involved in the hospitality of the native people, or maybe the story of Custer. Okay.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Custer is told as some kind of victory.
Chris Nafis:Yeah.
Dr. Jamie Gates:But for Native Americans it's told as a raping village and he lost Right. Right.
Chris Nafis:We beat him in that space we have cowboys and Indian stories and those kinds of things. Yeah, so there's a lot of parallels and I mean they're not even that far apart. So it seems like for me, I think, because I was born in the 80s, like the 80s, 90s doesn't feel that long ago, but like for us the civil rights stuff was when we had segregation in the 60s, it wasn't out, yeah, like 20 years prior, you know. So, yeah, okay, so so we have this like really religiously driven sense of, like racial superiority or like giftedness that the dutch feel like they're they didn't offer to this land.
Dr. Jamie Gates:This is odd blend of religious ideology, but it also was 19th century racial theory, you know, coming out of the united states, coming out of europe. You know, these ideas of, of, of, um, uh, social, evolutionary ideas that there is a civilization at the top of all society and clearly the ones that have been most successful, you know, economically, materially, technologically, are, are, the, are the winners of all society and clearly the ones that have been most successful, you know, economically, materially, technologically, are, are, the, are the winners of this social evolutionary trajectory, right, um and uh. So it was this, it was this um pastiche, or this blend, or this um, this odd recipe of some theology, some 19th century racist ideas, you know, even even the anthropologists, like in my profession, who came to see race is one of the really important markers we need to, we need to measure and see how this is influencing society. But, yeah, they're, they're, they're looking for skulls and how the. The term Caucasian, right, you know it comes from from their research on finding a larger skull in the Caucasoid mountains.
Dr. Jamie Gates:And it was, you know, it was bleached, it was whiter. So in the theory of the hierarchy of human populations, you know, whites and white Europeans in particular, thought of as the highest peak, but sometimes really nonsense. Science like makes its way into even the language you use today. Science like makes its way into even the language you use today, like this notion that caucasoids and australoids and negroids and those, that kind of hierarchical thinking from the 19th century, it's still around. Yeah, it hasn't.
Chris Nafis:It hasn't been washed out or cleansed out of our language yet yeah, I mean, I know what we're saying, but we're kind of using these languages that that uh kind of are built on. I mean, in some ways, that's how language works. Right, like we evolve, we pick up words a long way, but, like there's definitely some of these things are, are definitely there, I think, still in our culture below the surface and obviously, as we've seen a resurgence of like just overt white supremacy in our country and, I think, in South Africa, right, like there's, these things are still out there One of the great dangers that exists in both countries.
Dr. Jamie Gates:both as a kid and growing up and studying this later, there's this thought floating around right now even especially, it's becoming like in law right now that in order to not be racist, you need to stop measuring race. Right, you need to stop saying that it's a thing and somehow that will erase or that will make things more equal. It'll be colorblind. Oh, such a dangerous concept. Right, it was growing up and it is now Like the sense. It's only when you started to look at the disparities that existed by racial division that you're like oh wait, there's something real that's happening here. There's something measurably, you know, people are being treated different. I forgot. There's complex reasons why that exists to some degree, but we at least got to start with the basic social facts that they're disparities. Why do those disparities exist and how do we then correct those disparities?
Chris Nafis:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris Nafis:And I mean I don't know if we can talk about that at length, for a very long time and this has been something that I've been studying recently in the last several years some of the history of race and the separation of racial identity from ethnic identity and separation of people, like the places that they come from and the time that they come from, and all that kind of stuff, which is all all mixed up and you know, like I think here and sounds like also in south africa, it's really complex because we have these, um, kind of outward markers of like our heritage and where we come from, but they they're so they've been passed down for so long that, like you said, you feel you know there's africaners that feel like they are native africans they've been there for hundreds of years.
Dr. Jamie Gates:I think that's fair right.
Chris Nafis:It's a fair argument and and so when you have those like two different groups that are divided in these visible ways by um, but both claiming like heritage and slant, I mean that's where a lot of the big conflicts in the world come.
Chris Nafis:This is israel, palestine too, right, and and you know a lot of rights access yeah, so I mean, I guess what we wanted to get to today was talking about, like, what does it mean to be a christian in the midst of all of that? Yeah, you know what I mean, especially when your church is kind of driving you to be silent. Remember, I was saying there are many.
Dr. Jamie Gates:There are different kinds of churches, different kinds of Christian churches, happening all at the same time. Sure, sure, yeah, you know there's. There's evangelical Nazarenes who are like let's get them in the rowboat, let's get them saved and off to heaven. Right, issues in the are secondary if it's. Yeah, we don't want people killed and we don't want evil in the world, but the world's gonna end and we'll move on, right. So there's the millenarians, and not nazarenes, weren't all that. But that's kind of the trajectory. They, they fell in um. And then there's the.
Dr. Jamie Gates:You know the, the dutch reform folks, you know as kai pairing good, kai pairing calvinists. They were like you know, um, all the world is gods and it needs to all be sanctified and all the systems sanctified. But they had a very weird sort of twist on what sanctified systems looked like. It was sanctified for a sub category of the nation more than anybody else, right? So it was boundaries around who could fit into that. The kingdom in the world, right?
Dr. Jamie Gates:And then you had, I would say, like represented in Desmond Tutu, for example, the Anglicans, who were thinking about the church and the Catholics. In many ways, the Catholic churches and parishes were the quickest to indigenize, to have black priests to have, you know, black languages in their services and so on. And the Anglicans followed and did that as well. The Evangelicals and Dutch Reformed separate systems. Even the Nazarenes had separate districts for separate language, followed the politics of the land, the language politics of the land, right, until well, after apartheid, unfortunately, even for the Nazarenes.
Dr. Jamie Gates:But the Catholics and the Episcopalians, and what we know of as Episcopalians here in the States, or the Anglicans Church of England, folks in South Africa had started to build Christians who were African Christians right, in this case black African Christians more than most, right. And so those Christianities were going on all at the same time. South African English speakers, white English speakers, tended to be the more on the quote, liberal end of things, so they would tend to have churches that were blended before other denominations, methodists fell across the spectrum, structures that were in South Africa, yeah, so what does it mean to be Christian in that space? Well, unfortunately, you have a menu of options, right? So if this one doesn't fit how you think about the world, you go over to this one, right, right, and now what we got going on here?
Chris Nafis:Yeah, that is what we got. We have a big church marketplace, right? And if you don't like what's going on in this church, you just hop to another one, and that could be anything from politics to music, to you know the carpet.
Dr. Jamie Gates:But here's what's interesting. What drove you know the carpet, but here's what's interesting. What's what? What drove me, what really opened my eyes a lot. Let me say it that way, as I'm starting to study these things now as a young adult and moving into a career with studying, I've spent my life trying to study this very issue we're talking about today, and so and I feel like I've learned a couple of grains along the way about, about it, but that's it. Um, but it, while hendrik, for vowoerd, is creating it with good, in good conscience, like as a good upstanding Christian political leader, is creating the apartheid system that destroys millions of black South African lives. He goes to sleep fine at night. He's, his family are singing in worship, you know like he has no self-awareness about the harm that he's causing.
Chris Nafis:You think, or you think he's, I don't know about that.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Yeah, okay, I don't know about that yeah, but I think there's a higher like he's, he and others like him, and maybe not him in particular, but I'm thinking theologically. There's a space where you justify all kinds of ugly things if there's this higher goal in mind and you're moving towards that higher goal and that somehow excludes that many people right yeah, or somehow is even on the backs of, whereas you know you're, you're, you're missionizing to them, you're not in the kingdom with them?
Dr. Jamie Gates:yeah, I think, and so. But at the same time you've got um the praise songs of the church morphing into protest songs on the streets of South Africa. And I mean, the clearest example is what becomes eventually the national anthem in South Africa, or the blended national anthem, because they take the old white south african national anthem. You know, I can even sing that in afrikaans, still like right. But now they take that one and they blend it, so it's it's. You first sing and then you move into the old south af. So so the transition in South Africa, we can talk about that and I'll have a Mandela and all that kind of stuff. But the point here is that there's a Christian hymn that unites South Africa that becomes its national anthem. That is both beautiful and it's a little bit scary in that theology at the in the hands of politicians, always, always dangerous.
Dr. Jamie Gates:But yeah but so I'm. I'm intrigued by this nexus between power and theology, power and the church. Because, I don't know, protestants are really frustrated historically and exist historically because of their critique of aligning, aligning the church and the state too closely. Right, yeah, what were indulgences? What were, what were the 95 theses all about? If they weren't about, you know, saying Rome controls every piece of our lives in ways that that's not scripture or something else. That's not scripture or something else, but that's not scripture. Yeah. So let's move to sola scriptura, sola fide, right, yeah, to distance ourselves from the structures that are clearly evil.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, but then, like at the same time, kind of as you expressed earlier and now, I feel like there's this pressure. I feel it as as a pastor even in a church like ours that is pretty open about like at least local politics around homelessness and stuff, you feel this pressure to just be apolitical all the time and and I think that kind of comes as like a swing away from that right, like we have this hard separation of church and state. Pastors shouldn't be telling you who to vote for and those kinds of things which. And then sometimes I'm like amen, yeah, we shouldn't be. But uh, but at the same time, like when there's like actually tremendous injustice happening and maybe we need to be more involved even than that. But you know like we're, I don't know how you've been studying this.
Dr. Jamie Gates:What do we do? I mean my, I had, I had, um, let's call it guilt. I was feeling the guilt of the church, the shame of the church, for the longest time for not being a part of the apartheid resistance, and I think we should own that. I think we have to confess that and live with that. But, to be honest, the position of being apolitical is a privileged position.
Dr. Jamie Gates:When you're the one who, where the boot is on your neck, there's no neutral place to stand yeah and if we had seen ourselves as the one on whom the boot on, on whose neck the boot is, we probably would have had to speak it differently, preach it differently. So I think you can still be, you know, as grace-filled and as gentle as Jesus and still say basta, no mas, like. It's not okay when families are being deported, it's not okay when neighborhoods are being bombed right, apartheid, south africa. When the, when the big trucks are going in and shooting kids. Right, the whole world saw in 76, you know the famous, the famous shooting of kids in soweto. Right, uh, the, the hindu pictures. The memorial is still there. We can go there and I'll take, I'll take friends and family and students to go.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Say this happens when we're not paying attention, like we militarize, and you start shooting kids. Yeah, that happens when you really see people as wholly other, right, um, and so you know the neutral position, the, the I don't see color position. Yeah, is, is, is a, is a space that we've allowed our, our privilege to not have to deal with that, to act as if we shouldn't deal with that, and I don't think that's a fair place to be, and I think the only thing that drives us to a different place, though, is just to think of Jesus as somebody who was incarnate in the space where people suffer most, in our lives and in other people's lives, and so like. If the church isn't aimed at those who suffer most, if it isn't calling us to be present with those who suffer most, it's hard to see the boot on the neck.
Chris Nafis:It's hard to see a theology that has to respond to the boot on the neck right, right, and I mean, and maybe this is, you know, I'm thinking about like contemporary time, like what we're dealing with now, yeah, and maybe it's because we're in it and it's easier to see things when you're 20 years, 30 years, 50 years removed and you can kind of see the bigger trends.
Chris Nafis:But it feels a lot of the times like the there are, there are varied priorities that are kind of at odds with one another. You, you know, so like in some ways, so, for example, using the Trump stuff, right, like there's a whole group of working class people that are very frustrated with, you know, low wages and you know struggling industry and wanting to see, you know, a resurgence of American manufacturing and all those kinds of things and that kind of, and they want, and they're frustrated about immigration, feeling like people are taking their jobs. And on the other side, you can look and you can say these are the people who are struggling, right, and the church needs to be there for those folks. On the other side, you have people who are immigrants, who are fleeing violence or whatever poverty whatever from their homelands, and the church would be like, well, we need to support them. And then you have, you know, like the black community has been loud in recent years about the significant injustice that they face, and that's what's up.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Yeah, Trayvon Martin and everybody else Right, right In the thousands actually.
Chris Nafis:Yeah.
Dr. Jamie Gates:In the interim.
Chris Nafis:And there's I mean there's. So there's all these different people that are vulnerable and, of course, in our context, we're talking a lot about housing and homelessness and there's just not enough housing and housing too expensive. And you know, there's this huge, you know wealthy class of people that seem to own every, all the property everywhere and they're raising rents and all stuff, and those, you know, in some ways those parties interests align really well, you know, and it would be nice if we could find some coalitions to say like, hey, we got to restructure some of the things in our society because it's not, it's not working. Like we got people getting really, really rich and a lot of people increasingly becoming impoverished and even, even people that are sort of middle class, like really struggling even to afford a place to live.
Chris Nafis:On the other hand, like a lot of those people are, they're set against each other by the powers that be, and so you know they would say, well, uh, we got to deport everybody or we got to close the borders because that's what's going to bring back jobs. And you know, maybe it's because we're in it, like, it feels harder to like take sides. I don't know. Does that? You can see where I'm getting that like sure, I've been thinking a lot about that.
Dr. Jamie Gates:In that I would ask the question for those of us that study the civil rights movement or have studied apartheid, south africa or second world war, the rise of uh hitler, the rise of the nazi regime, right, what? Where would you have stood if you were there then?
Dr. Jamie Gates:right and, if that doesn't haunt you a bit, right like what is happening in the united states, I'm seeing signs of apartheid, and apartheid laws start to be implemented, start start to roll out, you know, in presidential language, and then being backed up by, you know, people who've been wanting this to go that direction for quite some time and it's scary. So you know who's going to be. Are we going to be? Are we going to be the Bonhoeffers? Are we going to be the Corrie ten booms? Are we going to allow the politics and the fear of losing federal funding and you know that really kind of undergirds students' ability to go to college, getting federal loans, for example, if they take those away? Are we going to be able to continue to have a center for justice and reconciliation?
Dr. Jamie Gates:And I think this is a moment where we have to be able to say what is core to who we are as Christians, like if we're willing to take our religious exemption that I think this administration wants to stand strong behind religious exemption for lots of their reasons, but can we use religious exemption for a church or for a church-based university to say no, actually we're not going to do away with the diversity of our student population, because we think that reflects the diversity of God's work in the world.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Right Now. We have particular theological reasons. It's not the sociological or the or the, the, the. You know, I actually love the language, diversity, equity, inclusion in general, you know, but that's become like this political buzzword. I think why I like that language is because I think it works well outside of a church context. But it's not our language. So if we do away with that kind of language in the midst, it doesn't bother me as much. What bothers me is if we do away with the practices of creating space for people who have been underrepresented, if we don't create a campus or a church community, that that, that that reaches across the, the social lines that we've created, that are hard to reach across.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, when we begin closing out like resegregating on on, you know whether it's racially or or social, socioeconomically or whatever we're getting into into trouble. And there's, it's socioeconomically or whatever we're getting into trouble and there's, it's no secret.
Dr. Jamie Gates:You can predict. You can predict if we do away with measuring the racial differences in schools, you can predict schools will resegregate and it's in part because other parts of society are still pretty heavily segregated, like neighborhoods. If your neighborhoods are based on, if your schools are based on neighborhoods right and you're not able to introduce or transfer kids, right. Or maybe even a harsher comment here might be if you privatize all of schooling Right Then you have no incentives for people to formally move across those lines and interact with one another and the polarization will grow even larger.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, yeah, it's like well, the in the big part of the sort of the colorblind stuff is like, well, let's just, we'll just start, we're all on even surfaces but we're not right like it's. Like it's ignoring all the history that's put different people at different levels in different places and in it, instead of trying to address those things, which is always imperfect and address trying to address those things, ignoring them, just kind of favors the people who already have the biggest advantage.
Dr. Jamie Gates:If you have capacity, if you've got advantage, you can take more advantage.
Chris Nafis:So I guess where this connects to South Africa for me, at least in the moment, is I feel like South Africa has been lifted up at times because of some of the reconciliation work that happened after apartheid, right, and there are people that were kind of coming and confessing and there was forgiveness and there was all this. There was this whole process of like peacemaking, reconciliation and you know, like some of the big names nelson mandela, desmond tutu they're a big part of like this whole process and now it seems like that those did it work. I guess is my question, and what, what fell short in South Africa is South Africa has plenty of its own troubles at the moment.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Right, its economy is one of the strongest in all of Africa, but it's it's, it's um shaky, you know it. Uh, its political infrastructure has too much corruption in it. There's too much um people who are um bilking the system for personal gain. Um, it has to. Its crime rates are too high across the nation. Its murder rates are too high. It's carjackings, in a very visceral kind of sense it's, you know, it's kidnappings and carjackings are too high across the nation. Its murder rates are too high. Its carjackings, in a very visceral kind of sense, its kidnappings and carjackings are too high, higher than a lot of countries, right, yeah, some of the very personal kind of crimes.
Dr. Jamie Gates:It still has, though, the strongest education system in all of Africa. Right, it still has more wealth than than nations, has a stronger military than than nations across the rest of the continent. You know there's a few that could compete, you know could argue that are that are that are close. It still has the strongest middle class and upper class, you know, in terms of socioeconomically. So South Africa is so much going for it and I think, everyday people there's so much.
Dr. Jamie Gates:The racial integration across South Africa is so much more than it has ever been in history. You can look at like the rise of interracial marriages is like pretty is stronger in some ways than it is in the United States. You can look at the cultural blending that's going on and new things that are being created culturally in South Africa. It's just fascinating. Jazz is a great example. You've got phenomenal global musicians coming out of South Africa is just fascinating. Jazz is a great example. You've got phenomenal global musicians coming out of South Africa. So you know, when the world, when a political entity like the United States wants to use or at least the administration wants to use South Africa as a whipping person right as to say how terrible it is, how gross the things are, they use terms like genocide, like there's a white genocide going on of Afrikaner farmers is what the president is declaring.
Chris Nafis:And the shadow president. People might not be paying attention. Oh my gosh, Some of this is happening.
Dr. Jamie Gates:That is like Rwanda 800,000 people being murdered in 90 days, 100 days that's a genocide Right. What happened to Jews in the Holocaust? That's a genocide right. And and and to others, the. The percentage of the, the farm murders, the murder of farmers in south africa, or the murder of lots of people in south africa, is a grotesque injustice. And it is happening. The scale of murders of farmers is not much higher than the general population and in fact black young men are the population that are murdered more by far, even percentage wise, numbers wise, by far more than anyone else in South Africa. And we should be deeply concerned about the murders of the farmers, the white farmers, and we should be deeply concerned about the murders of the farmers, the white farmers, and we should be deeply concerned about the murders of the young black men.
Dr. Jamie Gates:To lift up Afrikaner farmers as if there's a genocide in South Africa, just pours ugly fuel on flames that for decades now South Africa has been trying to help massage into a better set of relationships.
Dr. Jamie Gates:And for our political gain, the US's political gain, this administration's political gain, for them to do that, it really just benefits a very narrow range of people in South Africa. And I think here I will say, you know, the farmer's fear is real, like they're out in the middle of their farms, far away from towns and police infrastructure and so on. They're by themselves a lot right and they're vulnerable in that sense. So the fact that their fear of murder is higher than the incidence of murder is understandable, right. I would also say that you know there african very prominent politicians like julius malema, who literally regularly threaten boers like like one boer, one bullet kind of language, like like like murderous kind of language. Yeah, sorry, boers is a is a is a slang term for afrikaner, was also a historic term for farmer, but boer being really a code word for afrikaner, white and, in this case, farmer, right.
Chris Nafis:So there's people kind of that are opposing the, that are kind of going back to colonialism and and frustrated with the fact that you know so many people who are native people lost their land. You know, now, hundreds of years ago, right, stoking those racial tensions also, but then, like some French figures doing that, uh, what's what's happened, from my understanding, is that trump has kind of picked up on that and, likely with the influence of, you know, his south african doge guy, elon musk, uh, stoked some of those racial tensions to kind of escalate those tensions. Well, those tensions are there, yeah, no doubt those tensions are there.
Dr. Jamie Gates:They didn't create them, but they're definitely fanning. Fanning those flames. And you know, the government in south africa recently passed a law that is some say 30 years too late, some say should never have been passed, but it's a land reclamation law that, uh, the government can use it's. It's like in the united states. We have the uh um, eminent domain laws in the United States and if they want to put a bridge through a neighborhood, they will. And the eminent domain laws have done real damage in the United States. They've ripped through black communities, they've ripped through communities and you can even look at Barrio Logan and the bridge here in San Diego that was built in the history and the people that resisted. They're finally done. And so we've got Chicano Park, because they were eminent domained out and needed to at least have some semblance of life left in that neighborhood. Right, this is a little bigger than that. South Africans fear what happened. People of means in South Africa fear the collapse of the economy like what happened in Zimbabwe.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Zimbabwe implemented land reclamation and they just, and in a very short amount of time and at a fairly large scale, not not the whole economy, but they took a lot of farms that were being farmed by white farmers for a generation or so or more, um, who had the expertise in farming, and they turned them over to folks who were new to farming and the farms collapsed, infrastructure, the food infrastructure collapsed, and Zimbabwe's economy over decades of some of this happening.
Dr. Jamie Gates:So they're looking at that as like if you do anything like that in South Africa. So South Africa hasn't and won't, I don't think, do that at any kind of scale. They put a law in place that will help transition land faster, because it's been 30 years and barely any land, percentage wise and quality wise, has transitioned from white farmer hands to black farmer hands. Black South Africans are 83% of the country, white families I forget the percentage of the wealth, but off the top of my head but are significantly less likely to be the poorest South Africans. It's not that there are no dirt poor white South Africans, but all of that history, all of that you know, connectedness, all of what has been in place in South Africa, even you know 40 years beyond the or 30 years now, beyond the establishment of the new South Africa, has a momentum to it that protects most white South Africans way more than it protects most black South.
Chris Nafis:Africans, so we can see the kind of some of the injustices, some ways, that are the any mean. I feel like we feel this here too, like any attempt that that's made to bring you know some equity back to the situation around race and history is met with such resistance and such fear from people that actually have money and power, which, from people that actually have money and power, which, and again, like maybe not again, but you can, you can understand like if you feel like someone's going to come and take your land, your possessions or do violence to you and you can see how people can really easily and legitimately become scared by those kinds of things.
Chris Nafis:Um, but there's, you know that's not necessarily happening. You know, like people talk about, um, uh, people talk about stuff happening here, but like there's like little to no chance. You know that they're the government's going to come and, you know, raid the bank accounts of white americans and then give big payouts to the black community. Like I just don't, it's not like a realistic thing that's happening but I think people are.
Dr. Jamie Gates:We're more sophisticated than that yeah. We can go down that path a little if you want, but I think we do. We do have ways of of of gutting wealth out of black communities, for example, that that aren't exactly the government coming in and stealing it.
Chris Nafis:But Well, so it's been happening in the reverse way. But I think what people, I think what some of what you know, some of the, the right-wing people, have been stoking fears about, is the is the reverse of it right, that that there's going to be this um, that somehow we're going to go back in history and that people, you know, white people now are going to be punished for the things that white people did 100 years ago and that wasn't me, that was great, great grandpa. I didn't even know, and I think there's, you know, like those things need to be handled carefully, like, if we're going to try to make, you know, build towards a more equitable society, it can't just be, you know, because you're going to create more harms, if you're just like taking from one people and just giving up, but no one's really no one has any like realistic plans to do anything like that. But I think people can use the fear of that kind of thing to drive political ambitions and to drive, you know, policies that that that have the opposite effect, that continue to, uh, like, establish wealth and establish privilege for groups that already have it.
Chris Nafis:I think what we're seeing, you know, is some of those fears being stoked in South Africa. Some of those things are being stoked here. You know again, like how do we like what do we do? Like what should, where should the church be in all of this? You know what I mean, like how do we respond to the things that we see, because sometimes they're so subtle that you're like, well, I don't know, I can't, you know, I don't know what to say about this or that and how involved to get, but like, well, where's, what do we do?
Dr. Jamie Gates:Oh well, there's a long got another hour we can sit here. I think there are actually a lot of things that we can do, but I think maybe the first thing is to remain Christian in contact with other Christians who actually don't agree with you very much. There's a lot of Nazarenes that.
Chris Nafis:I don't agree with.
Dr. Jamie Gates:And that think, probably think some of the ways that I think, and I know think because they've written about it publicly that they think some of the ways I think are heresy, right, and I might think some of the ways they think are heresy, but can we remain in relationship with one another? Can we? Can we, um, maintain holy friendships across these lines and can we model in the church, um, uh, pushing back against the polarization, not, not not accepting injustices as we see it, because I think there's a, there's a bottom level. If we're going to be christian in the world, we gotta first care about a world that cares for the widow and the orphan and the stranger in our midst. And if the widow and the orphan, stranger in our midst, uh, people in the margins, immigrant families, who are the, the most vulnerable people, the good right in the hebrew um, or or or the poorest in our midst, those who are left without social supports, like widows in the in, in both the script, in both our testaments, right, um, that's that's sort of baseline. If we can't do that together as christians, we're not being particularly christian. So let's, let's focus on that and the and, and let's come to some terms about when that is and where that is happening best. Beyond that being the non-negotiable, where are the spaces we can intersect with my dutch reform brothers and sisters who are calvinists and who you know, or you know even the?
Dr. Jamie Gates:The kind of christian nationalism that's in the united states is a lot like the christian nationalism I grew up with in south africa, and it was a lot. It continued to exist because there weren't. They were allowed to isolate themselves from everybody else. And so can I stomach not unfriending my white nationalist, christian nationalist friends and fellow church people so that, where my small sphere of influence, I might be able to bring somebody into a slightly better place? That said, I also find myself where I need to keep doing that. But I also need to probably have my feet on the streets sometimes, especially where the most vulnerable are being threatened around the policies, around the unhoused in San Diego County. If MAGA interests or if left-wing Democratic interests or if you know left wing Democratic interests are somehow, or centrist interests are more corporate than they are, you know, for the sake of the unhoused in San Diego, we got to speak against it.
Chris Nafis:Right yeah.
Dr. Jamie Gates:You see what I mean. I mean I know you live this, but I think that's a hard like. This is like sitting down with Christians say what are the most important? Who are the are the most important people to protect in the midst of this chaos that is flying around?
Chris Nafis:I don't think our 401ks are the most important thing to protect, right, except as they trickle down into the families that can't afford anything Right, and so that's where I would start, I guess, like I feel like I and I think I this really came through my Christian education and stuff that like there's this significant call to like maintain those relationships with people that disagree, you know, and I think even in some of the Nazarene drama that's happened, like that's been the call of our church, even has put things out there like can't we continue to be with one another even if we disagree on issues?
Chris Nafis:And I really feel that really strongly.
Chris Nafis:But I also feel this pull um and this, this kind of like growing need to like take a stand at some point on some of this stuff, you know, and to kind of say like yeah, we are brothers and sisters, but like this is, this is not of God, and I don't know how to do that really, like I don't feel like I've been, I don't feel like my all that Christian education and all the things that I've grown up in the church, I don't feel like I've really.
Chris Nafis:I feel like I'm kind of trying to give myself a bit of a crash course on like getting ready, cause I feel like there's going to be a time coming where, like, we need to be prepared to like to protest and be prepared to speak out and confront even people that we've loved for a long time about the ways that you know things are going. You know where do you, how do you draw those lines and how do you? Is it possible to do both those things at the same time? You know what I mean to stay connected and stay in good relationship with people who are on very different sides of political lines, but also not just be silent and be complicit in, like the, the oppression that is so rampant in so many places.
Dr. Jamie Gates:I mean I've tried to model that over the last. I was trying to, let's say, not model it.
Dr. Jamie Gates:I've tried to live into that at least the last 20 years being at point Loma with the center's work, but also my own church work, thinking about, okay, there's a, there's a few ways in which I can tackle with my expertise and my my own life and the way I see it, where I'm situated geographic. I'm sitting here in San Diego, tijuana, and that's where I live, and so issues related to the border and where we're being Christian, related to the border, versus where we're being idolatrous and nation state focused relation to in relation to a border, we can speak into that very clearly and from this perch where we sit right here. Um, when you know, I have these relations in South Africa, deep friendships, and it can go back and forth and we can unpack these things and I maintain friendships across very different lines in that space and then I bring other students and other colleagues into those friendships and we try and figure it out from there. Same with keeping deep cross-racial friendships and cross-class friendships in San Diego Through where we go to church, where you go to church, for example, how do people come into contact with people who are unhoused on a regular basis? You go to church, for example. You know how do people come into contact with people who are unhoused on a regular basis. You don't, unless you're shooing them out of your way or handing them something, as you're at an intersection. But if you go to church together they're.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Now you have to calculate them into your life decisions and into your politics and into your way of being red or blue in the United States, or suddenly red and blue doesn't make as clear a sense, right, and it's not just a purple space you're looking for, but it's a different. It's a different solution you're looking to because you're, you're in the midst of those connections, right. So I want to be careful not to come across as saying, oh, you know what is it, rodney King? Can't we just all get along, right, in the midst of really deep scars and wounds and divisions? I don't think we're called to kumbaya moments with people who are doing even unintentionally, doing even evil things in the world. That's got to get called out. That's the prophetic nature of the church. That's Jesus turning over the tables. But Jesus wasn't a zealot, wasn't killing people in order for the message to get across. Jesus is still nonviolent.
Dr. Jamie Gates:So how do we discern in context those nonviolent spaces? So for me it's been around immigrant justice and particularly care for the undocumented in our midst. For me I'll come alongside. I haven't done a lot of work in the area of on how for the unhoused, but for me it's also been in worker justice, where people are wage theft and all the way into human trafficking like this theft of freedom itself. That's been my space and so I think we have to pick a couple of spaces, even as a congregation, like where, where can we lean? Into some mid city where I go to church heavily in the French speaking Creole, uh community that's here. Into the into food justice? There's a few aspects where I think we lean in and then we invite others to become part of it with us.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, yeah, and I think like diving deeper into like a couple of issues can really help you to dive into the complexity of it. Because I think one of the things that you know the the polarized politics tends to try to do on both sides is just to flatten issues and make them black and white, and it's almost never that right, and so if you're in those spaces more deeply, you can understand and then you can maybe explain and help people that aren't in those spaces to understand a little bit better. But yeah, I don't know it's hard, it's hard to to I mean, it is hard to maintain those good friendships. I think everybody these days, in the United States at least, is feeling the difficulty of trying to maintain good relationships with people who think very differently.
Dr. Jamie Gates:And I would say if, if, if. If some of your friendships are toxic and hurting and literally causing you like depressive state, then you know you don't stay with an abuser.
Chris Nafis:Yeah.
Dr. Jamie Gates:You know, a divorce is not a bad thing if there's an abuse happening in that family and that's, I think, justifiable theologically and socially.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, Well, so you know I don't want to take too much of your time here, so we we've probably, you know, geared towards like some final conclusions, like what you know from all the things that you've witnessed and seen, especially in your years of south africa, kind of a lot, because you you were there during apartheid and you've kind of, uh, been a deep part of it.
Chris Nafis:For many years you've been in and out and engaged in issues, paying attention to what's going on there all the way through the end of, you know, through the end of apartheid and all, and the reconciliation, and then all the way to today's politics. Like you know, what do we? What can the American church learn from that? The wisdom that you've gleaned over the years? And that is a big question.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Yeah, let me let me redirect your question, okay.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, redirect it. I'm just in this way.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Um, I don't know about the church as a whole, what I, what I, what I can. What I can say is I have hope. Uh, I have. I have so much hope in the body of Christ that I'm going to, I'm in this search, I'm in sabbatical, I'm in this search for the next chapter of relationship between me and my work and my life, my family and South Africa and our friend, my friendships there, the work of the church there. I'm looking at starting a new study abroad there.
Dr. Jamie Gates:I'm looking at starting pilgrimages to South Africa to unpack these very things that we've been talking about by going and comparing what's happening there to what's happening here, Cause I think it just illuminates so much more and there are so many good faithful Christian communities in South Africa just also trying to struggle with these very things and trying to be a prophetic and a faithful witness, in particular in solidarity with those that are suffering, that I want people from here to go meet and build a friendship with.
Dr. Jamie Gates:And then there's a lot they can learn from each other along the way. And so I guess I'm in a space where I once had this great obsession with ecclesiology and the structure of the church, big C I'm at this point I'm like I think, if we can do faithful, faithfully engaged work with sort of a discipleship dozen and engage it and then let it witness. As you know, a congregation like your congregation, Mid-City we do things together that are for the unhoused both of our congregations, and then we collaborate together, you know, with St Mark's Episcopal down the road. We create an interfaith gathering of people who care and we figure out well, we all together we better get into the streets because they're about to make homelessness illegal in San Diego and criminalize all of our friends just for not being able to find a house. That's when we stand up together and we protest that, Well, that very thing is happening in Cape Town as well, or in Johannesburg, in a fashion, and I want us to learn from one another as the body of Christ in those different spaces.
Dr. Jamie Gates:So I definitely have not lost hope, but it's complicated to practically engage.
Chris Nafis:It is, yeah, and so you know, again, like kind of what you're saying is that it's those connections that are important and learning from one another and the collective work and and meeting our meeting one other in those spaces of caring for the poor. And you know, that's kind of what you were saying earlier and I think that's, I think that's really that's been where it has been so far. For me in life is like finding those places where we can actually live out our calling in Christ together in ways that are meaningful, live out our calling in Christ together in ways that are meaningful. And you know, maybe that is the hope, because you know, I want to start up a whole new conversation, but there's, it's hard to imagine some of the movements that we've seen in the past kind of coalescing today with the way that everybody and even the church and everything, just seems so fractured into these little pieces.
Chris Nafis:You know, and I don't think so, like I've been reading a book about the Dr King and the Montgomery bus boycotts and just thinking like I don't think that's possible today because they had such a strong network of people that they could quickly organize into a big boycott and they, you know, they arranged carpools and you know those things, and I just don't think on a large scale there's any coalition of Christians that can can kind of organize that way, maybe. So maybe one of the some of the work that we need to do is some of that connection, connection, community building and and kind of doing the groundwork for that Because I think we've been given groundwork for that and building congregations of people that are discipled this way.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, exactly the market pressures, the political pressures.
Dr. Jamie Gates:Squeezing out the gathering of people who don't think that way or into market niches that don't talk to each other because they can't. So I think, actually building a congregation of people who have this kind of deeper Teflon skin, who have this prophetic calling, if we're not doing that, if we're not infusing that into the larger bodies of those that gather around the communion table, yeah, you'll never have a movement like King King's Day, where the church was much more prominent in society, much more prominent of a third space, much more prominent of a, of a social entity. I think. I think we just have less of that now. But that doesn't mean I mean, if it's like what's happened in Nazi Germany, right, you know, the, the confessing church was a, was a small outgrowth of Lutheran and some other ecumenical groups getting together in very small spaces, but their voice became louder than anything that the Catholic church was doing or that the Lutheran church was doing. The dominant culture churches at the time. We're doing Right, yeah, yeah. So we gotta, we gotta do the right thing, sometimes loudly.
Chris Nafis:Yeah, yeah, that's good. Well, I'll kind of let that close us out. Any final thoughts? Anything you want to lead us out with?
Dr. Jamie Gates:and it's, it's really been therapeutic even to think about these things and to and to think back over the parallels with south africa and what's happening right now.
Chris Nafis:They're just so real yeah, there's a lot of connection and, as I've kind of dived into, you sent me some stuff last night to look through and everything just feels so familiar.
Dr. Jamie Gates:You know it's different, but it's like oh yeah, everybody should read the letter that the clergy and a really core group of clergy in south africa put out a letter in response to trump's declaration that white opera connor, um, south africans are should be refugees, um. And in response to Trump's belittling of South Africa. It's this really beautiful letter. Where can people find it? Google, yeah, google. South African clergy's response to Trump. Okay, that will get you there. It'll be the top find, unless the tech people hide it somehow.
Chris Nafis:Yeah Well, check that out and pay attention to the things going like. Hide it somehow. Yeah Well, check that out and pay attention to the things going on in South Africa. Like I said, a lot of parallels in their journey and the journey of the United States and, I think, some intentional connections, both in positive and negative ways, across those space, even though we're like as far away in the world as we can get Pretty much. There's lots of connections. Jamie, hopefully we'll have you back on. So our plan is when, uh when, jamie gets his book finished or close to finish, we'll come back on, we'll talk about human trafficking but I really appreciate this has been really good.
Chris Nafis:it's really been fun to learn a bit about um south africa connection and just to think about politics and and how the church can be faithful in the midst of just of everything. So yeah, thank you for your time, you bet.
Dr. Jamie Gates:People can reach me jgates at pointlomaedu, Happy to talk about these things.
Chris Nafis:All right and get ready to buy that book when it comes out, and hit subscribe on this podcast and share it with a friend, because we need more people that are in these spaces listening to the wisdom of people like Dr Gates and Rebecca Laird and Isaac Villegas and all the people that we've had on here. Let's continue the conversation. Send us a message or send me an email, let me know what's been meaningful, let me know if you have questions, if you have thoughts, if you want to have people that we need to talk to, and we'll hopefully keep this conversation going. Thanks for joining us and thanks again, dr Gates. Good to be with you, chris.