A transcript of this episode is available here.
Daniel White Hodge, Ph.D. is a professor of Intercultural Communications . He is the author of several books, most recently Homeland Insecurity: A Hip Hop Missiology for the Post Civil Rights Context. His next book is forthcoming in December 2019.
He is the host of Profane Faith, a podcast that examines the intersections of the sacred, secular and profane. Follow on Twitter at @danwhitehodge.
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To support The Podluck, please visit our Patreon page.
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Daniel White Hodge, Ph.D. is a professor of Intercultural Communications . He is the author of several books, most recently Homeland Insecurity: A Hip Hop Missiology for the Post Civil Rights Context. His next book is forthcoming in December 2019.
He is the host of Profane Faith, a podcast that examines the intersections of the sacred, secular and profane. Follow on Twitter at @danwhitehodge.
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To support The Podluck, please visit our Patreon page.
Hey y'all and welcome to The Podluck serving up bite-sized tastes of the best theology. I'm your host, Megan Westra. Grab a plate and let's dig in
Megan Westra:Hi and welcome to The Podluck. I'm your host, Megan Westra. Thanks for tuning in again this week. I am so excited today to introduce you to Dr. Daniel White Hodge, a friend of mine who is a professor of intercultural communications in Chicago. Dan has 25 years of experience in multiethnic and intercultural youth work, and is the author of several books most recently Homeland Insecurity: A Hip Hop Missiology for the Post Civil Rights Context, which I cannot recommend highly enough, a fascinating book. He is currently awaiting publication of his next book, which will be out in December of this year, called Baptized in Dirty Water: A Gospel According to Tupac Amaru Shakur. I first encountered Dan's work a number of years ago, listening to him talk about putting artists like Tupac in conversation with things that the church is struggling with or things that, y outh are struggling with today, or the questions that they're asking. I find his work to be very fascinating and enlightening, and it helps me ask questions in a different way than I typically would on my own. Dan is also the host of a podcast called Profane Faith, which is one of my favorite podcasts to listen to. Again, welcoming and inviting voices on his podcast that invite me to think about things in different ways or pushing me to think about things I don't always consider when left to my own devices, really working around the intersection of the sacred, the secular and the profane, which he mentions in passing in our interview today. If you listen to, I think it's either the very first episode of Profane Faith or maybe it's the second episode, he really digs into why that threefold paradigm, sacred, secular, and profane, really shapes his work. So I am very excited for you to hear what Dan, has in store for us today, a round this question of"what does it mean to be saved?" I really enjoyed getting to talk with him, and I got to talk to him in person, ca use h e is just in Chicago. So close enough that we got to hang out a little bit. I go t t o meet his dogs and his little cats, and podcast interviews are always better when there are snuggles with animals involved. So yeah, enjoy this episode with Dan dishing it up on the question of"what does it mean to be saved?" You can follow him online on Twitter and check out his other work including his podcast, Profane Faith, on whitehodge.com. I'll put the link to that in the show notes. But for today, enjoy this dish here at The Podluck with Dr. Daniel White Hodge talking about what does it mean to be saved, particularly with an eye to the sacred, the secular and the profane.
Dan WhiteHodge:You know, this is a good question. I've thought a lot about this, particularly in the last year. Well, and really since the 2016 election and even prior to that, my movement away from defining myself as an evangelical having come out of the youth ministry world. I mean, I think I'm still involved with kids, but just in a completely different manner, right? Than youth pastor or you know, YoungLife area director, and the goal there was right, like get kids saved. Get them hemmed up and, and you know, you gotta fill those green sheets out. Well actually, they were the blue sheets you had to send in every month to say how many kids have been saved. You would get a phone call if there wasn't the right number. So I think, you know, as we think about capitalism and you know, western societies push for more, a lot of that has crept into right salvation and what it means to be saved. I mean, you had the movie wh at, back in the early two thousands with the, the apt ti tle S aved, w ith Ma ndy Moore i n i t. And you know, it's like, what does that mean? I think it's just become such a, a saying like,"oh, they're saved, they're saved." I was raised very fundamentalist in a Seventh Day Adventist. And prior to that I was with the Nation of Islam. So t here wasn't really a sense of salvation per se, but when I became Seventh Adventist, there was a strong sense of salvation connected with, of course, the end times and the apocalypse and Isaiah and Daniel and all that. All these prophetic, third an gels m essages and revelation. That was what in meant, in many regards of being saved, there was a sense that you could lose your salvation and that you could backslide, and then have to regain it. So consequently, I was baptized three times. And the last one took! But gosh, what does salvation mean now? I thought I knew it. I thought I knew what it meant. But I think for me it means more of an ongoing relationship and an ongoing process. Right. I don't look at it as an event. I think that's what, particularly evangelicalism, well, western evangelicalism gets caught up with, right? It's like the event."Let's get these people saved. We're goin g to g o do homeless ministry, but we'r e goi ng to preach to them first and get them all saved and you know, do the altar call and that whole thing." And I'll confess, I was dipped and dyed and raised in that. And in my r ambunctious days of being a street pastor, gosh dog, that's what I did. It's shameful for me to even say that, but that was who I was, you know, 25 plus years ago. So a doctorate and some degrees and b ook s later, it's like, okay, what does, what does, what does salvation mean? Well, I think it's in community. I think it's in relationship. I think it's like what I tell folks about being woke. I think there's a moment of being woke in consciousness and being aware of things, but then no one is 100%. You have to learn more about whatever it is. Like, let's say you are LGBTQ, but it's like you're a white, cis male, right? That identifies as gay. You may have to learn more about race and you may have to learn more about what does it mean to be white and privileged in that space. I know my cousin who was gay fought for a long time, he was Mexican American. He fought for a long time to get his quilt on the AIDS quilt that they were doing back in the 90s, the quilt across America and all that of that stuff. Because he was Mexican, it was like, it was just difficult. And it wasn't really until he passed away of AIDS in'96 that they put his quilt on there. So it's like, you know, dealing with that type of stuff, right. That's going to take them to a different level of consciousness. And I think there's different spaces, right, that we can connect. With women who can connect with, you know, those who are marginalized cause like, oh, being a woman and being, being looked at. I mean, we were talking about this in my class just yesterday, on sex and gender, and one of my students was like,"yeah, I was just cat-called my on my way to class right now." So it's like t here you can identify and say, okay, yeah, I got that. But I do think it's a process and I'm also don't want to be one of those super woke people where a s to say, alright, you know, I'm the best and I know how to do. It's like k ind o f like the beef between like Deray and and Shaun King, right? And don't get me wrong, I think Deray put out some amazing stuff in regards to Shaun King a nd we do need to investigate those types of things, but I don't w ant to be a fundamentalist just on the other side, I guess is what I'm saying. And for me, that's made me look at salvation differently, as a process. It's difficult because I don't think you can ever get away from the fundamentalist root idea, because that was the way I was socialized. It's social learning theory, you know, it says that you know, that it's embedded in you. You learn from that. And so there's always moments where you feel like, I was talking with Kevin Garcia about this, there's always moments where you feel like,"am I doing the right thing? yeah. Okay. I'm, I'm okay. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good." Because there's so much of that right? It's like,"Oh, you have to do these certain things to be saved. You have to do your devotionals." I don't do the typical Christianese life of what it would be prescribed to be. I don't wake up early in the morning. I hate mornings. I'm a night person, so I don't wake up early in the morning and do devotionals and do my quiet time. I don't knock anybody who does. That's just not me. It took a long time for me to get to that place, to be able to admit that because again, that was what I was shown."This is the only way to interpret God," and I think in this age of information, this age of technology, this age and the era of Trump, I think that we're seeing a lot of that and that's causing a lot of disruption. I also believe that we're moving from an era where you were prescribed, all of us were prescribed a method on"how to fill in the blank,""how to be successful, how to be a husband, how to be a wife, how to be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Right? And we're no longer there. I call it the Tony Robbins era, right? He was like a motivational speaker, well he still is a motivational speaker, still making millions. But that was a previous generation. This generation, particularly those born after like 2003, they don't care about that stuff. They could care less about answers. And you know, these pathways to this, I mean it's being asked right now, do I really need to go to college when there's youtube? I mean that's a serious question, right? As somebody who used to build homes for a living long, many moons ago, gosh, I wish youtube was around. Cause I could have figured a lot of things out without having to go up to Sacramento and take the contractor certification like that. Don't get me wrong, there's something about being certified, something about that piece of paper that says,"yes, you have this degree," but this new generation are asking those questions. Like why as opposed to school being this uplifting thing in a way for me to move from one, right. Why can't I just go on youtube, learn this and go do it myself or become an influencer myself on this? And so I think the same thing impacts salvation. I think we have to ask those questions like, what does that really look like? And I don't necessarily have an answer for that. That's the thing. I don't have an answer for that. We're in that era, we're in that era of what is truth? What is reality? What still sounds good theologically? We're seeing that play out. It's like a cold and hot air mass moving in and, and you have a big storm because those two bodies of air are fighting it out. And we're seeing that right now. It's like theres this big wart, there's always been, but now it's just ruptured. It's like you've had a wart and you didn't really want to deal with it and you tried to put cover up on it. You try to put a bandaid on it, you try to put all these things on it. But now it's like, it's just busted. And now the puss and the blood and the nasty smell is just out. It's always been there. And you've had little eruptions and we've had little things over here, but now it's like you cannot look away anymore. And we have to make a decision. Are we as a society going to deal with these things? It's like, you know, the issue of gun control. You can ban all the guns. That's not gonna still stop what is happening. You can impeach Trump. It's not going to stop what's happening. I think that's the harder work. And so for me, salvation is much harder than just the singularity of an event. More so it is a process and the hard work of becoming a better person through therapy, through self-realization, through self-consciousness, through the partners and the peoples that you have in your inner circle who will help you get better. And that's a really painful, messy process. It's not an easy thing to do, than to just say,"oh, I'm saved. And that's that." I don't think evangelicalism is going to survive this particular storm. That's just my own prediction on that. It'll be a miracle if Christianity in general survives. But I think what comes out on the other end will be a completely different understanding of what Christianity is. And I think that once we start to look at and get out of the colonization of what we see as sacred scripture and get back into, okay, what would the disciples really trying to do? I'm not a Pauline fan. Why did he get all these books? And why weren't like, if we're g oing t o use that line and measurement of like, okay, t he people who walk with God a nd like w hat's i n i t, w e, w e've h ave to open that door up to anybody who had visions. Anybody who had a, some kind of dream. Anybody who h ad some kind of spiritual encounter. So I'm not a big fan necessarily of P aul's, s o I don't necessarily p rescribed to Pauline theology. I'm more of, let me look at the gospels. Let me look at the folks who were walking with Jesus, who knew that cat, right? As a researcher, I want to go t o primary evidence, not somebody who has some vision and a lot of people have visions. That's great. But I'm looking for people who actually walk with Jesus and were like, there in the midst, k new Jesus hung out with Jesus, right? So those are the cats I pay attention to and I try to listen and see what the narrative of Christ is in that process. I also think that, you know, when you start involving science and all of this stuff like that, I think that, you know, um, there's a lot of quantum theology that we haven't necessarily begin to undertake. I am just going to sound crazy, but I believe that there has been life on other planets for a long time, but I think that the knowledge of that would disrupt society in such a way that I don't know if we're really willing to deal with the second genesis story or a third or fourth or a hundredth genesis story, because then that would unwind the fabric of our theological imagination of what we think heaven should be. Right. And what we think and who we think God should be in that space. It'll be interesting when the James Webb telescope goes up in 2020. It's a telescope designedto pick out a atmospheric gases in planets, particularly all the exoplanets, that exist, particularly ones that are closer to us.I think about Alpha Centuri. You know, we've found all these planets that are out there, that are earth size. And so this, the James Webb telescope will actually be able to detect life on that planet. It'll be attributable organisms and whatnot. I mean, and, and that's, it's already here. It's already in our, in our, in our solar system. But again, NASA, right? As I say, NASA: Never A Straight Answer. That's really what NASA stands for, right? I think we have to begin to ask ourselves, what does God look like in that space? And that's good. I think that's gonna present a lot of, you know, new realities. Right?, I think the evidence is there that, you know, there was a life on, on Mars, previous life. I think we have to ask ourselves as a society, as a species, like what are we, where are we going to go with this? In the history of the United States, t here h as been maybe 12 years of so-called p eace. The rest, we've been at war, we've been fighting something a nd we're on the brink of that now, internally. I'm not talking about even stuff with Iran a nd Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, I'm talking about internally. So what does salvation look like in that space? I me an, I don't know. An d I don't know what the afterlife looks like. Right? Ca use I haven't met anybody who's been dead for a couple of days, not a few minutes, like days. I want somebody who's been dead like five days to come back and tell me,"all right, this is what happened." So I don't kn o w. T hose are some of the things, those are my thoughts and musings. I'm working on a book on looking at God through an astrophysics and astronomy lens and really begin to think, you know, on the scale of so cieties and whatnot. There's four types of societies. There's type ones that, that have been able to harness the energy from their planet and they are able to consume all that energy and make them turn that into technological advancements. A type two, those who could, a re able to harness all the energy from their sun, people r efer to this like what's called a Dyson sphere, which is essentially huge solar panels that are surrounding the sun and t hen then they beam that energy back to whatever societies or civilizations within that solar system. I mean that would take stuff that we don't even have right? The smallest piece would be essentially the size of the distance between the moon and the earth, which is about 250,000 miles. So if you can imagine that's the smallest piece on th ere. The most simplest piece that would be something type three ar e t hose wh o a i n't a ble to harness the energy within their own solar system and by type fo ur, well that's God itself, right? It's like that is who is able to create life when you know the messing with DNA.So I mean those are all the questions that I as ked m yself when I start to look at this. And this has been something I've been looking at for about the last decade and trying to keep up with the math and understand some of these kind of mi nd b l owing t hings, particularly getting into quantum theory, but it's like sacred texts supports all of that. When we burn away all the colonialistic,"you can only look at it this way." It's like, no, I mean the Holy Spirit is just, it's just, it's quantum mechanics to be in two places at one time to have two objects exist in the same space that are involving, you know, the same types of matter or different types of ma tters. I mean that could be the Holy Spirit, right? I mean, when you think about quantum matter, wh en y ou think about dark matter, t hat encompasses most of our space and the fact that magnetism is what holds us together. There's more space in between us right now in this room. So if God is somebody who's figured out how to work that, yeah, of course they can pass through walls. Of course you have manifestations of spirits and gh osts a nd all that. So I think for me the question of salvation in that sense is much broader, right? Than just being saved and going up on some cloud and playing harps and playing, you know, music or whatever, the flute. For me, it's much broader than that. Those are the things that I wrestle with and I don't know. I don't have an answer, a complete answer. And I think that drives some people insane. I think that was probably, with my last book because I didn't give people answers and you know, and consequently it doesn't sell. It doesn't sell. I don't want you just to ring the alarm."What do we do? What do we do?" I don't think most of us know what to do. Even the people who say they know what to do, they don't know what to do. They don't know what to do. I keep seeing these books coming out from Christian publishers talking about, you know,"the age of Christianity in the age of doubt and reason" this is what you g otta do. No, you don't know that. You don't know that. Especially when y our sample size hasn't even i nvolved any ethnic minority whatsoever. I take issue with all that. And so back to the original question, I think there's just, there's a lot involved with that. And when, again, when you start to involve aspects of applied science, and metaphysics it takes things to a different level. Right? And it begs the question, what are we fighting for? Right? What are we, what are we pushing up against? Cause as humans. It seems like we, you know, as a species things like we need something to fight against. And I guess it's as a black man, I'm just exhausted from fighting. It's like you gotta fight white supremacy. You gotta fight white ignorance. Then you get into liberal spaces and you gotta fight white liberalism. And then you get into white liberalism, then you gotta fight microaggressions and it's just like, ah, God, let me just go water my grass and you know, plant some certified sod seeds and just watch it grow. That for me is part of salvation. Having my mind straight, you know, being able to take medication because some scientists and chemists somewhere figured out that the chemicals involved in Zoloft will help depression and anxiety. And it won't take it completely away, but it'll at least level it. So it takes that edge off, right. That for me is salvation. You know, that for me is watching these pets act crazy. Salvation is being with my wife, being with my kid, you know, having these kind of discussions that her and I have all the time. I wasn't having these discussions at age 12, I mean good night, you know, that for me is salvation. Going to a Cubs game, that for me is part of salvation. In that process and that journey, and those are things that again, go beyond the tangible, evangelical outcomes of"you have to do this and you have to do that." So for me, the spiritual and the normal stuff, the ontological process of being with God is a daily thing, not just a moment. Right? I think that's for me goes back to my work, sacred, secular, and profane. It's like, it's easy to be sacred, but where do we live in the other realms with the profane and the secular? And that for me is where I find God much stronger than in the sacred. That's kind of where I'm at with salvation.
Megan Westra:This has been The Podluck. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure that you click subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes as they continue to come out. We're only in week three of the regular season y'all. There's so much more to come. Also, if you enjoyed this podcast, please make sure to leave a rating or even better write a quick review. This helps The Podluck be more visible to other people and helps other people find out about it and tune in as well. To support The Podluck, please visit our Patreon page. For as little as a dollar a month, you get access to a Slack channel to discuss this and other episodes with people who are wrestling through this question of what it means to be saved as well. And for a little bit more, I'll send you a sticker or some other goodies at the end of the season. Join the conversation online or share on social media using@Podluck_Podcast for Twitter or@ThePodluckPodcast on Instagram. Thanks so much for tuning in. Again, my name is Megan Westra and I have been your host. Join us next week as we dish out our next round on The Podluck.
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