A Live Conversation on the Church, Healing, and Truth-Telling With David Gushee and Keri Ladouceur

We recorded this live gathering in Chicago with the Post Evangelical Collective, and it still feels uncomfortably current. Alongside Dr. David Gushee and Keri Ladouceur (director of the PEC), we sit with a question that haunts a lot of post-evangelical and progressive Christian spaces: how do you keep loving the church after trauma, public rejection, and the weaponizing of God-language against vulnerable people?

From there, we shift to the political and spiritual crisis so many families are living inside. We talk about Christian nationalism, authoritarian power, and the painful question of staying in relationship with people who support what you believe is harming democracy and your neighbors. David names the need to defeat destructive movements without surrendering our commitment to co-humanity, while Keri brings the conversation back to embodiment, connection, and the slow work of refusing the strategies that make us into the thing we oppose.

We also dig into misinformation and “epistemic fragmentation,” that dizzying reality where we cannot even agree on what is real. We explore what churches can model instead: information integrity, truthful speech, and practices that rebuild trust. Then we turn to healing Scripture after it has been used as a weapon, learning to read a not-flat Bible with complexity and community. We close with a candid conversation about masculinity, shame, and brave spaces, and a final invitation into embodied resurrection where tending our own wounds becomes part of resisting what is happening around us.

=====

Want to support us?

The best way is to subscribe to our Patreon. Annual memberships are available for a 10% discount.

If you'd rather make a one-time donation, you can contribute through our PayPal.

Other important info:

• Rate & review us on Apple & Spotify
• Follow us on social media at @PPWBPodcast
• Watch & comment on YouTube
• Email us at pastorandphilosopher@gmail.com

Cheers!

Transcript

Why This Live Recording Now

Kyle 0:01

Hello friends, so this is a bit of an unusual episode. We know you haven't heard from us in a while and we're hard at work producing new episodes, which we will begin releasing in April. And in the meantime, we want to share this special episode with you. This is a recording of a live gathering that Randy and I did in Chicago with the Post Evangelical Collective. We recorded this way back in fall of 2025 and just sat on it for a long time and honestly kind of forgot about it. The content is a little dated. A lot has happened in the political and social climate of the United States since we recorded this, but unfortunately, most of it is still very current. In it, you'll hear from Dr. David Gushy and Carrie Latticer, both former repeat guests on our show, and you'll also hear from Randy and I as we have a QA session with the two of them. This was recorded in front of a live audience with live audio equipment, so please forgive any audio artifacts of that. We hope you enjoy.

Randy 2:12

And

Welcoming Guests And Setting The Room

Randy 2:13

we have had a number of fun conversations with these two, and we just figured let's take this opportunity to record a live episode here today at First Free. So I'm going to invite my co-host, Kyle Whitaker. Let's give Kyle a hand as he joins me on stage. If you want to know who Kyle is, listen to our podcast. But he's a philosopher and he's extra smart, which makes him extra dangerous. He's got a decent sense of humor, too, and good hair. He's compared to Jesus quite often. White Jesus, that is, the white Jesus that hung on the bedroom wall of all of our collective childhood homes. Um, and also then Carrie and David, would you join us up here and let's just have a conversation, please? Carrie and Dr. Gushy, thank you for joining us. This is a little awkward because this is our first ever live interview, but welcome back to a pastor and a philosopher walking to a bar.

Keri 3:06

Thanks for having us.

Randy 3:08

We're gonna jump right into it because we've heard from you guys a bunch today, or a little bit, and I want to hear from you a little bit more in some specific ways. Knowing

Why Stay When The Church Hurts

Randy 3:16

both of your stories, I know that both of you are have been almost lifelong church people. You've given yourselves and your lives, which means you've given your families, you've given your livelihoods, you've given everything about who you are to this idea, this dream that I think is of God's called the church. You also both have been profoundly hurt and traumatized and rejected by the church in in ways that many of us have gone through, but maybe even more acutely. And yet, because I know both of you, I know that you have a tremendous passion for the church still. So can you both tell us in your experience why that is? Why do you still why have you not given up on this idea and dream of the church when you've been hurt by her so much? And when you're on lists and you're kind of targeted personally as to these people are dangerous by people in the church, how do you make sense of loving the church still so much? And we didn't tell them about these questions ahead of time.

Keri 4:17

So uh, I mean, I will say for sure there was a season that I like begged God to let me out of this. Uh, like calling or invitation is how I would describe it. And I gave myself some permission in that season of really trying to wrestle through what do I believe, as I was kind of picking up the pieces of my own faith shattering uh and finding signs of the divine in my own body and things like neuroplasticity and uh the ways that trauma works, understanding trauma at like a physiological, generational, ancestral level that gets passed on to us, and the reality that that could be healed, I could not ignore like there was some sort of divine design at play. And Christianity was my native language, and so sort of returned back to the life and teaching and ministry of Jesus. Actually, it was in counseling when I asked a counselor, a trauma counselor, like, how do you do what you do? If you see the darkest of the dark and you hear these awful stories of pain and suffering, and she said, I look for beauty. And the more I started trying to engage this practice of looking for beauty, the more I kept finding the divine in creation, in nature, in my own body. And because I had this native language of Christianity, I actually had this sort of sense of, but my experience of hurt and pain, and I mean, frankly, being obliterated by the church, that was not the way of Jesus. Like that was business over the body, and it was organization over the organism of the church. And so I went to seminary, like, well, then what is the church in that time? And what I kind of put back together, like picking up the pieces of that chattering, have been like the most compelling vision of my life. This is the thing I want to give my life to because I believe in its redemptive potential so much because of how I have experienced that in my own life. And I think it is so audacious that Jesus would trust us to be the presence of Christ in the world. Like what a strategy of all things, of all the ways that you're going to usher in redemption and restoration of all things into the entire world through us, through humans, through people. So audacious and so winsome and compelling to me that we get to be a part of the active participation and that sort of redemption and restoration. So I I think I I just love the church so much and I'm so compelled by her beauty and redemptive potential now more than ever.

Randy 6:55

Thank you, Carrie.

David 6:57

I don't want to overstate the trauma from me. Um, I'll just say a few things that probably you've not uh I've not said anywhere or you've probably not read. But so I wandered into a Southern Baptist church when I was 16 years old, and four days later I was born again. Um and so and that church um despite various flaws, it took good care of me and loved me. And so that was the groundwork experience of grace. And um so I never forgot that. That made me a Southern Baptist for uh about 35 years. I was a Southern Baptist, and there were a lot of good moments in those years. They employed me as a pastor, as a youth minister, as a professor at two different schools, three different schools. When I wrote Changing Our Mind in 2014, I was hurt because what I thought I was doing was inviting Baptists and evangelicals into a conversation about LGBTQ inclusion, and they said, No need for a conversation, we're done with you. And so there were personal friendships broken, including with the person who was my best friend and broken contracts and invitations and loss of status and community. Um and that did it did wound. Fortunately, my home church by that point was already moving towards inclusion, so I didn't lose my home church and I didn't lose my job. And so some of the damage was limited. But more profoundly. After I wrote that book, and there was so much negative pushback, I also got to hear from so many of God's marginalized children who reached out to me.

Randy 8:57

Yes.

David 8:58

And then I got to be in spaces where they met, like Reformation Project and Q Christian Fellowship and various kinds of gatherings in different places. I'll never forget, a few years ago I was in Germany at a conference of LGBTQ German young people. There were 300 people in every seat in an auditorium like this, all of them raised evangelical, all of them LGBTQ, and all of them there worshiping God with every fiber of their being because they were allowed to, because they were included, because they were welcome. And I saw grace everywhere on the other side, among the the broken, rejected pieces and persons of the church. And so it became very clear to me that there's no such thing as the church. There's, I mean, theologically there is, but in reality, there's churches and there's branches of churches, and there's healthier and less healthy, more life-giving and less life-giving. And I learned not to identify the church as a whole as a problem, and to look for the beauty, and to look for the places where the church was being the church, and and being okay with that. So one of the best things that ever happened to me in terms of my spiritual life was being exiled from majority evangelicalism and ending up in rooms with people who had been long rejected and who were now finding their way home because they were finding a space where they were welcome.

Kyle 10:34

So beautiful. Thank you.

Coexisting With Authoritarian Christians

Kyle 10:37

So my role on this podcast, if you haven't listened to it, is to be the wet blanket.

Keri 10:43

You're so good at it.

Kyle 10:44

So I'm about to take it in a different direction a little bit. Um, I really appreciated both your your talks. And uh as somebody who's sort of adjacent but mostly external to the church at this point, it does give me, it makes me a little bit excited that there might be something else coming. Um, but I do have some reservations. So I I'm mostly interested in the last thing that I think, David, we talked about, which is what does it mean to be a church across the kind of divide that we're currently witnessing? And I want to make it as pointed as I can. Um so, David, last we spoke about democracy, which was like a year and a half ago. Okay, so some stuff has happened since then. But a big theme of our conversation was the difficulty of locating a threshold past which continuing to try to find common ground or fellowship with someone else is no longer a good idea or reasonable or moral or maybe even Christian, right? And I raised, at the time, a comparison, I felt confident raising it because you discussed the analogy in your book, between MAGA Christians and early 1930s, Nazism, right? I realize that's a that's a complicated subject. Um, but it paints a nice analogy, right? Um and at the time you were not quite willing to say that we were at the point where our stance should be they can't be reasoned with, they must be defeated. Now, since then, Trump was re-elected a second time. He has created an extrajudicial paramilitary force in ICE. Uh, he is attempting to militarily occupy cities he doesn't like. He is actively dismantling the government with no real resistance from Congress. He's passed legislation to enrich himself and other billionaires at the direct expense of the working class. Uh he has created detainment facilities for immigrants whose apparent goal is explicit cruelty. He has actively flouted court orders, which everyone said would create a constitutional crisis, but here we are. There's no significant pushback from SCOTUS. He's openly talking about a third term. We'll try to make it happen. Uh political assassinations are on the rise on both sides, and I could go on and on and on. So we're less than a quarter of the way into this guy's presidency, right? And he still enjoys a near 90% approval rating from his base. I just Googled that. The room for charitable interpretation of his supporters is diminishing. Um and with it, the off-ramp to a peaceful, nonpartisan coalition building, but also a kind of religious fellowship. And so I want to put the point to both of you where are we now on that that question of can I coexist as Christian with those folks?

David 13:35

Well, at one level we share a society, and for probably most people in this room or most who may be listening, we have meaningful personal relationships with family members, in my case. And the decision is basically whether we can remain in relationship with people who we find on the other side of this supportive of a president and a movement that can be fairly described the way that you just described it. I don't see anything unfair in your description. Um I think that it's funny, I was I was watching uh my favorite movie of all time, Casablanca, uh, the other day, and there's a line where the Bulgarian young lady says to Rick, the devil has the people by the throat in my country. And I remember similar language was used um when I was doing my dissertation on the Holocaust, country by country, as fascism spread, whenever the Nazis would arrive in a country, there already was a pre-existing fascist movement that they would empower or inflame. And so I remember in Lithuania, there I think it was Lithuania, there was somebody else who said the devil had the people by the throat and they started doing atrocities to their Jewish neighbors without even being asked. They did it on their own. I think we're talking about um at that level a transpersonal power of evil. Walter Wink would have called it a powers and principalities that simultaneously dazzles, intimidates, and seduces. And it's interesting because liberal democracy is based partly on politicians who are ordinary people but who seem like, and the whole system is ordinary people elect other ordinary people to do ordinary things in ordinary time and then to transfer power to the next. We don't need dazzling, we just need competence. But there's something in the human being that is also open to being dazzled, seduced. Wow, what a show. Wow, what a what a showman. Wow, look at the magic happening. People are attracted to the magician. And sometimes they're attracted to the magician who also carries a baton and wields it against perceived enemies. I don't have much, if any, common ground with people who think that everything that's happening there is like good. Who sees it as not a problem and not a threat to democracy. And I do want that movement to be defeated and discredited, and I do want ordinary politics, maybe better than ordinary politics, to follow whatever we're dealing with here. And yet I still have my sister and my cousin and my friend who are all in or partly in, and I'm unable to think that it's okay as a Christian to just say I'm done with you, I won't relate to you, I'm giving up talking to you. I said in a version of this talk uh a few weeks ago that if we are to avoid civil war, actual civil war, they're gonna have to be some people on the 40% that's on their side and the 40% that's on the other side able to speak to each other, able to recognize each other's co-humanity, and to desire to preserve a democracy without bloodshed, further bloodshed. And so I think the Christians should be up for that without ever giving ground on the wrongness of what we think we see. This is wrong, and I want to remain in conversation with you. That's what I'm hoping for. It isn't always possible.

Keri 18:13

I think I would just add, people are drawn to the magician when they're disconnected from their own magic. And I think there's something about reconnecting ourselves and one another to our humanity and to our divinity. Uh I mean, I think about my mom when I think about this conversation, who is um a part of that approval rating group, I would guarantee, and for years has discredited the work that I do. I found out a couple years ago actually used to email Dr. Gutchie and tell him he was leading the young people astray by this sort of you know movement and that he's contributed in. But she said to me in the last year, the most difficult thing is that she doesn't agree with anything I believe, or that I preach much much as what I preach, but that I am the only one of her children who still loves her. And she doesn't know what to do with that. So I think again, if we're gonna deploy the sort of strategies, we will become the very thing that we don't want to be. And so the paradox of what does it mean to show up? Um, how do I engage with what I don't endorse? It's very evangelical to cut people off that you don't agree with. Yeah, even as a progressive Christian.

Randy 19:24

Yep.

Keri 19:25

So how do we deploy new strategies in this space that are staying present to the realities that are, that are connecting with our own magic and believing in the magic, the humanity and the divinity of the people in front of us rather than othering them or writing them off or cutting them off. That's the only way I see through this moment.

David 19:44

By the way, did you get that news nugget? Carrie's mother reached out to me, I think it was on Facebook, to condemn me for supporting the movement that her daughter was in. So when Carrie speaks about pain, she speaks about pain like that. And um and I I love Carrie and I respect you so much. Yeah, thank you.

When We Lose Shared Reality

Randy 20:12

Um going off of that, following up on that for both of you, um, David, during your talk, you spoke to our culture and said that our cultural reality and said, other words, we are epistemically fragmented or epistemologically frag fragmented. So, first of all, for those of us without with fewer letters before and behind our name, um, can you tell us what epistemologically fragmented means?

David 20:36

I have no idea, but I I saw it on Chat GPT.

Randy 20:40

This is higher ed, friends. Reverend Doctor, could you could you tell us it's epistemologically fragmented?

David 20:52

That's just kind of fun. I like that one. That's a good one. Um Epistemology is how we know what we know, the theory of of knowledge. Um so to say that we're epistemologically fragmented is to say that um we don't share uh knowledge. We don't share agreement on how one comes to reliable knowledge about things. So um for people who are going to um you know QAnon Reddit sites or something, uh versus people who are uh listening to the BBC or or people who are watching videos on TikTok, right-wing TikTok, versus people who are watching videos on left-wing TikTok, there we just I mean, there really is no shared reality. In fact, I actually think that any event that gathers Americans in a large way that makes us have a common reality even for a little while is actually probably pretty good for us right now. Like the world's Series or the Super Bowl or something. But even there, did you hear that the fact that Bad Bunny has been invited to do the halftime show at the Super Bowl, there's going to be counter-programming? Yeah. Like, we can't even agree on halftime entertainment. Even halftime entertainment is politicized left-right now. But anyway, so epistemologically fragmented means we don't we don't have a shared epistemology. We don't have a shared way of knowing anything. So if I say, here's my account of reality, and somebody else says, I don't recognize your account of reality at all, because my my reality is this other reality. And I am not a relativist to say my account of reality is no more valid than their account of reality, which they may have picked up on a QAnon site or something. There are better and less good, truer and less true accounts of what is true and real. And the fact that, you know, have you ever been in a conversation with somebody and they're what they're reading, what they're listening to, to gather their information is so different. You can't even have a conversation. Like I have a I have a good friend whose sister was somewhere deep in QAnon land, and she was quite convinced that Joe Biden was a demon and that you knew that because his eyes were red. And the only reason we didn't know his eyes were red was because the mainstream media was correcting the red color of his eyes whenever they took a picture so that we wouldn't see that he was actually a demon. Now what are you gonna do with that?

Randy 23:37

That's a real question.

David 23:38

So conspiracy theories and ever more bizarre spin-offs of what is real make it very, very difficult to occupy a shared cultural space. Thank you, Dr. Geshe.

Building Hope Through Embodied Resistance

Randy 23:49

So, Carrie, we need these two people like these two bros on the ends to define big terms for us. But it's the practitioners who then get to, I think, help speak into the reality of how do we navigate this fragmented, epistemologically fragmented world we find ourselves in. So can you give us some wisdom?

Keri 24:07

I I think about this often when it comes to preaching. Um so you're talking about sort of the sites and sources that people take in. I I have a Master of Arts in New Testament, but I have an Instagram degree on like trauma and physiology and healing. And the reality is no single person is defining reality the same way right now because we define reality through our own experiences as well. Right? Our wounds, our projections, how we experienced our mother or our father impacts how we receive the men or women. All of that is present with us. So I think how we're making meaning in these moments is one, it's very challenging because we're also judging how people are responding to moments and they're not getting the same moments that we're getting. The algorithm and then the algorithms of our lives, right? So I wrestle a lot with what does it look like for me to have capacity for complexity, internal capacity for complexity to hear someone else's reality or narrative that's so wildly different from mine? And what are those initial sort of impulses to want to just shut it down or tell them how wrong they are, right? Which does nothing in the conversation. Um, so I think there's a real invitation to be aware of what are, if any, sort of grounding, rooting stories that we're operating from. It is that the audacity to have hope in this moment? Where does that come from? Is it the, you know, the doom and gloom? There is no, but to be, I think just the awareness that no one is defining reality in the same way, whether that's how you my son and I were crossing the street recently, and this guy was on a bike and he had to like clip his feet into the pedals, you know, his shoes to cross. And so we waited until the last minute and darted across the road. And my son was like, that guy was just being a jerk to all those drivers. And I was like, huh, what makes you think that? He's like, because he stood there for so long and waited till the end. And I was like, oh, I think he was clipping his feet in, but let's talk about like what makes you think that that was his impulse. That was how he made meaning, right? And all of us are walking around with this impulse to make meaning. We can only do that either rooted in reality when we are present to reality, or we're making meaning and telling stories. We have hysteria or hostility or conspiracy theories based on the ghosts of our past. So I think there's this real invitation to be present to our own stories of reality, to expand our own capacity for complexity, to understand somebody in front of us has a very different perception of reality. And then how can we have some sense of shared vision for how to move forward out of very different realities?

Kyle 26:43

So this reminds me of an interview I just heard with a psychologist. So I am an epistemologist, and there's lots of theories about why people believe misinformation and why they find their way to echo chambers and how you can get them out of it if you can. And what's really motivating this, psychological theories, philosophical theories. I heard an interview with a psychologist is kind of standing against one of the main theories of psychology about that, which is that people are have motivated reasoning, it's called, so they want to believe a thing, and so they find their way into communities that believe that thing. He argued that it's actually the opposite, it's unmotivated reasoning. People are just lazy. They don't want to do any reasoning at all. They don't want to do cognitive effort. And as you're as you're describing those things, Carrie, I'm thinking, but that's harder. Right? That takes work, and it takes a guide that you have to trust enough to help you do that work. Um and Randy, I've heard you talk about every time we try to take concrete steps towards justice or towards uh any of these things we talk about all the time. We have a program, we schedule a thing, we ask people to come, they don't come. Uh we ask people to give a minor amount of money to support this thing, they don't give it, we have to cancel it. Um do you experience similar things like that, Carrie? In in in your case, it it just reminds me of that old cartoon where you know you have two booths and one is an inconvenient truth and the other is a convenient lie, and there's a giant line at the lie booth and a tiny little trickle of people at the you know at the truth booth. Yeah. Um it's given that, right, given that it's just harder uh to do the cognitively virtuous thing, and given that we've all forgotten why cognitive virtues are important to begin with, how much hope do you have uh for the church? And because like this is a moment where that is all that practice should have been done for decades now, and we've let it atrophy. And now we're realizing we don't have that muscle anymore. So where do you think we are?

Keri 28:34

Uh I mean, I could just tell you how I'm thinking about this right now, and I I'm aware of how much easier it is to build culture around cynicism than to build culture around hope, right? Like call out culture, naming what's hard, what's broken, what's not working, blaming, all of those things can be our impulse that we reach for. Uh I I have experienced in my own life and in these churches the power of embodied resurrection and of embodied resistance. And so I'm seeing churches right now and interacting with individuals that are saying, oh, if if I can uh sort of count the steps of what this sort of system or structure leads to, then what does it look like to divest from that? Who are making like real actual steps to try to divest from, or you know, boycotting organizations that are profiting off of war right now, even when it's in community, like be how we actually orient our actions, our money, our time, our decisions, what we support, what we there's actual implications to that. And so until we're willing to divest from these sort of majority, so I'm spending time with people who are doing that already a great deal. I'm having conversations with churches on what are what are the stories that have gotten us here and what what mainline denominations, uh some of the mainline denominations I'm engaging with are grappling with, oh, we have contributed to what this is. We were a part of the founding Protestant stories that have led to this moment. So they're asking, what does it look like to use our buildings or our resources for liberative, redemptive purposes in the community instead of what they have been used for? So I'm trying to stay as close as possible to people who are embodying resistance. That is giving me a ton of hope, and I'm full of stories that I can tell that could help, I think people have expanded imagination for what could be, not just sort of finding the easy, gluttonous answer for, you know, how do I make uh how do I make this make sense or reconcile what's happening around me? We are meaning-making machines. Like it's actually beautiful that we're constantly making meaning. And unless we have dealt with our own history, again, that's what's informing the meaning we're making. Or when we don't want to deal with our pain, we would rather outsource it and blame somebody else, make them the problem, or oh, this is how we have gotten here. That idea that like uh the external forces are giving us easy answers. When we're connected to our own stories that we're projecting on the moment, I think it gives us a different capacity to make meaning or to dream. When we are living from a place of survival, fear, shame, fight or flight, allostatic load, overload, stress, uh, all of us have adaptive patterns, right? That we deploy pain management strategies and adaptive patterns. When we stop living from that place of survival, all of that energy I'm finding becomes creative energy. The energy still exists, but it can become creative energy for a different way to live, to show up, to spint, to interact. But I think what we have to have then is what is the kind of world that we are imagining? What actually is the reality that the church is trying to embody? I think we need enormous dreams as the alternative to this moment. And you can't outsource that.

David 31:55

Um just something that I would just add. I've been emphasizing that the local congregation can be a place where leaders model healthier relationship with words. Um speaking only truthfully, um, speaking simple truths, being very, very careful with social media use so as not to not to become a propagandist or a culture warrior, just to score the cheap point against the other side. Modeling careful processing of of information. Hey, we're thinking about doing this, and here's the analysis that went into the the data set that we were looking at to come up with this decision that we were going to invest in this ministry over here or or or work on this campaign over there. My uh teacher I I don't know I don't know where he got the phrase, but it's in we put it in Kingdom Ethics. It's called information integrity. I think we need to model information integrity because information integrity has largely been lost in our society. The constant lies that bombard us from the White House on down degrade our capacity to know what is true or to even value what is true. You talked about the virtue, the virtue of unmotivated truth seeking and of speaking only what is true. The church that ought to be a part of our culture, and I think uh it's something for us to do right now.

Randy 33:28

Yeah. And I don't I like the big crowds, but I'd rather be in that short truth line personally than the convenient lie, right? Um I've got two more questions, Kyle. I don't know what you got. I can have as many as you want, but I'm not sure. I saw I see that.

Returning To Scripture Without Harm

Randy 33:44

I see that screen. Holy moly, how do you do it? Um David, you s you said this thing that stuck in my brain pastorally, and I want to flesh out a little bit for both of you. You were talking about how do we meet the moment. That's my words, to your idea. But how do we meet the moment as the church? And you you made a statement of I think we need to be more scripturally rooted, right? And I was like, whoa, I like that. I like the idea of the church being and us being more spiritually rooted, but or scripturally rooted. But the reality is that for many of us here in the post-evangelical landscape, the scriptures are are are both they're complex. They give us life and we find Jesus in the scriptures and the scriptural narrative, and at the same time, the scriptures have been weaponized against many of us or many of the people that we love. And the scriptures can even be, this sounds really sacrilegious for former evangelicals or currents, maybe in the room or listening, the scriptures can be a place of pain and trauma because of how they've been used towards and against us. So the idea of being more scripturally rooted as a church and as a movement is very appealing to me, but how do we navigate? I think it's where did that question, that that statement come from? And then Carrie, I would look to you to say, how do we do that as post-evangelicals becoming more scripturally rooted?

David 35:03

Um, just as I said uh earlier, the problem is not the church, the problem is expressions of the church. I would say that the problem is not the Bible, the problem is abuses of the Bible, readings of the Bible, weaponizations of the Bible. And I'm not willing to give up the identity Christian or the involvement in church or the centrality of Scripture because of the abuses of such by many or the way it's been hurtful. But I also think that there is a lot to be done in the preaching and education ministry of churches to show a healthier relationship with scripture. For one thing, uh, we know, should know, that not all scriptures uh point as clearly to the character of the God we meet in Jesus as others do. In some churches, we were taught to value the Joshua holy war passages just as much as the Sermon on the Mount. And there's no way that can survive in post-evangelicalism. I mean, we have to have a not flat Bible, a Bible that recognizes a treaty treatment of scripture that sees the peaks and valleys of the Bible. Um also the Bible contains much more internal dialogue than we were taught as evangelicals. I just finished this is a preview, I just finished a book on Job. I'll be preaching on that tomorrow in Milwaukee. Come on. Come on. Um and I am convinced from close study of the book of Job, reading all the scholars, that Job is written to dialogue with the primary interpretation of what happens in the world in the Deuteronomic tradition, that bad things happen to bad people or good things happen to good people. Yes. So the book of Job is a challenge to much of the rest of Scripture. And even within the book of Job, there are multiple voices competing with each other. So the book of Job should be the ultimate post-evangelical book to read because the complexity is baked into the book. And our churches should be places where we can revel in that complexity. Whereas before we were taught to flatten that complexity because it was dangerous. Right? So, how about preaching where we say, I want to wrestle with a text with you all today? I'm not sure I've got there's no one interpretation, but here's my reading today, let's talk about it. And then we just have fun with the text. That is the Jewish mid-rashik tradition. That's that you know, that's just a healthier way of grappling with sacred stories, right? Sacred texts. I think you you kept putting together spiritual and scriptural, and I that's good because I am doing it too. If you're in a time of threat and you're trying to create a community ready to meet the threat, you need strength. The strength needs to come from healthy people and healthy sourcing of the community. Deeply grounded people who have a tradition that they're confident in and they're drawing on and they're ready to meet the moment. I know what to do because I'm grounded in this tradition. And part of that tradition is the Bible. But we have to help people read it in a way that gives life rather than takes life.

Randy 38:12

I had trouble staying in my seat here, David, just so you know. That was that was you can stand up, you can wave your hands. That was fire, yeah. Was that fire right there? I think so, yeah. Okay.

Keri 38:22

Uh similarly, I mean, I had to sort of walk away from the faith tradition that gave me that flat warrior god uh literal reading of the Bible. So I these days I'm trying to often bring multiple perspectives on a text. That's one of my favorite things to do when I'm preaching. It's like one scholar says this, and one scholar says this. What do you do with that? Uh, reading the Bible in community, because again, we bring ourselves and our projections, and that's so meaningful and helpful to be able to interpret via somebody else's life experience or perspective. Uh, I'm looking at the Bible a lot right now, like as resistance art, like a bank sea. You when you're reading the text through the lens of Jesus, like, and that's you know, one of our kind of commitments, the life teaching, ministry of Jesus being the basis for how we approach the text. Um, it shows us what resistance looks like. And I'm reading the headlines now, like, oh, that's a banksy. Oh, that's a bank. I'm I'm looking for stories of resistance like the ones that I find in the text. So the Bible uh is coming alive in new ways. One of my colleagues, one of our colleagues in the post-evangelical collective just wrote a book about this, how to read the Bible, and offered us, you know, some new lenses to apply if the lenses that we were given have made it too fuzzy to read. Uh, and I think that is a helpful resource. But reimagining exactly in verse, how to read the Bible. Yeah. Um offering the Bible its place. I mean, you say the Bible is not problematic for you, but I also I talk to people, even just how we got the Bible and what is a part of it and what didn't make it into the Bible. And you know, the process of that is problematic and has power wrapped up in it. And um, so finding threads of shame or emotion, where does that show up in the Bible? Finding where creation shows up in the Bible. It's given me new imagination. And I will say, in the the previous paradigm, the sort of Da Vinci code, end times, eschatological imagination that was given to us through the that's one of the lenses I have had to let go, which has then offered me so much freedom to reimagine. Wait, what actually, what is the ending story to this? Oh, it's that Christ unleashed a different kind of power that we get to live according to now. Christ inaugurated the work of redeeming and restoring all of creation back to God's original purposes for it, and we get to participate in that. Like, oh, now I want to go back to the text again and again and see people how people did that in community, then it's a lot easier to make sense of the Bible's own inconsistencies or contradictions. So holding it in a different way feels really necessary for it to serve imagination moving forward.

Randy 40:54

So tasty. How many questions do I get? One or two?

Kyle 40:59

One or two?

Randy 40:59

One good one, two shorter ones.

Kyle 41:01

One good one or two bad ones. Okay. Excellent. Um I want to open a can of worms, but I'm afraid I won't have time. I have a shorter one. If this doesn't, if this isn't a good one, we can we can strike it and I'll go to a different

Masculinity Beyond Shame And Control

Kyle 41:15

one. Carrie, so what you're just talking about reminded me of something you said. It may not seem connected, but it's connected in my brain. When you mentioned masculinity in your talk, um, and I wanted to ask you about this. First of all, I want to know what does a positive vision of masculinity even mean? Or a positive vision of femininity, or any gender for that matter. And the way I think it's connected is it seems to me this is analogous to a problem that liberals and democrats in the United States have right now in general, which is we are a pluralistic coalition. We're not a coalition at all. We're just a pluralistic, we're just a pluralism, that's what we are. We have uh values that are different and maybe sometimes incommensurate. This is something we talked with David about before as well. Um and so when you have on one side a clear vision and on the other side you have complexity and disagreement, Job, uh, this is a PR nightmare. Right? Um and it's and it's not just that we haven't thought of the right strategy yet. At least I don't think it is. There's a lot of democratic strategists trying to figure it out at the moment, um, writing interesting books about it. But to me, it it gets at like foundational reality, and I want to use the analogy of masculinity here. So, one of the things that I think was accomplished, at least I consider it an accomplishment in the period of change that David described in his talk, uh, is that we as a society came to question the idea that genders have fixed essences that entail particular forms of rigid social expression or relational role play. What the positive vision you referenced on the other side is giving is the opposite of that. And so if that was correct, then what they're offering is a lie. And if I'm not willing to combat that with an equally catchy lie, uh then all I have to offer is complexity and how many people are lining up to read Job. And so uh Many, many people now.

Keri 43:04

You just wait.

Kyle 43:05

Yeah, just wait. So maybe I've set it up enough. Take that and run with it.

Keri 43:10

Uh what is a positive vision for masculinity? Yeah, and a way for it.

Kyle 43:14

Yeah, what does it mean to come against something like that with whatever we have?

Keri 43:19

Well, I think uh any positive vision for masculinity or for femininity is a positive vision for humanity and for mutuality. Um I I think this is an anthropological question as well. And I think, you know, if if I affirm the dignity and value of my trans friends, they would say there is some sort of embodied essence to masculinity or femininity for them to know that they were not born in the body that they resonate with. So um I'm still making meaning of some of this now, but I I like to imagine there's uh divine feminine energy and divine masculine energy within each one of us. Um I think we have demonized and wounded the masculine. In so many ways. So Bell Hooks, you know, talks about if we don't cut men off from their emotions and from their senses, don't worry, the other men in their life will do that. Willie James Jennings, one of my favorite Bible scholars, talks about the holy trinity of the colonizers Christ is the military, the merchant, and the missionary, right? Henry Nowen talks about how often we will reach for power and control as a cheap substitute for love. I'm thinking so much about the wounds that we have inflicted on men by not letting them be full humans, by offering them only a disembodied experience of what it means to be human. I think even right now I'm talking like Dr. Angela Parker and others with uh what is the trauma of dominance? How disembodied, how dehumanized would you have to be yourself to dehumanize someone else? So I think a positive vision for masculinity is a positive vision for wholeness or for someone to live into their fullness. It's interesting, even in this working group, lots of folks were like, I don't know if we need a positive vision for masculinity, we just need a positive vision for humanity. And I'm like, sure, sure, except this is where we're bleeding. This is where the pain is. So uh what is the invitation for men to embody the fullness of their humanity and to bring the full, the wounded parts, the parts that they've had to sort of disconnect or cut off in order to show up? How do we help them remember those parts so that they can bring the fullness of who they are with unique, distinct expressions of what masculinity looks like?

David 45:40

I'm I'm really pleased that that this is something that you're talking about and working on. Um I do think we need a positive vision of masculinity. And it's definitely the case that the right wing is is uh mobilizing and weaponizing a narrative that men have been emasculated and now we need tough men. And also, Kyle, you picked up on my overall narrative, and it's a good chance to re reaffirm it. I think that the word I've used is reactionary, that the right wing movement that I have been describing and critiquing just generally is reactionary to all of the social changes that I described from 1954 to 1974, which have mainly stayed with us. And so if it happened, then they're against it. So the idea, for example, of a society in which men and women share power, in which sometimes men are in charge, sometimes women are in charge. Um there's a lot of fluidity, uh, there's not fixed kind of expectations of what it is to be masculine or feminine. People are allowed to express their individuality and and power is shared, and gifts matter more than gender. They're against it. They want to go back to men are in charge. Uh, in the three main sectors home, church, religion, and society as a whole. I think that in some ways the left has lost a values and religious vocabulary to defend the social changes that were unleashed beginning in the 50s. Unable to say why, mainly saying you're bad for not agreeing with this. So you're working on that language. It's language of full humanity, it's language of mutuality, it's it's language of flourishing. It recognizes masculine energy and feminine energy, and we work with that and try to figure out what that is and enjoy the mystery of I've been saying this for decades. If the right has all the religious language and the left is stripping itself of either religious or moral language, we're gonna lose every time. Um, and part of what needs to happen in churches is to give good language for why we support a multi-ethnic society, or why we support a society where women share power with men, or every other change. And if we don't have that language, if we forfeited that language, then we're at a distinct disadvantage in the public conversation.

Keri 48:09

When I think about um how do I have empathy for this fear, I just recognize like, oh, if you have ever only found yourself in a position of power because of domination and coercion, then certainly you would fear someone else coming into a position of power, whether that's ethnic minorities, whether that's gender minority, right? If if that's what you have only ever inflicted, then of course that would fuel your imagination for what is coming this way. And I mentioned Willie Jennings because uh when he quotes that military merchant missionary, he says the greatest consequence of the colonizer is that it cut women off from their senses, cut women off from the land, cut women off from their senses. And so I can't unsee since I heard him talk about this, the way that we in sort of Western thinking and what we have propagated here prioritize rational thinking, right? Sort of up and to the right, black and white. I want clear, rational, systemic thinking. And all of the new neuroscience and psychology would say rational thinking does not actually exist. So at the leadership intensive church that I worked in previously, we did all of those leadership assessments. We wanted to know who the rational thinkers, the up and to the right. And what they, what neuroscience is saying is actually rational thinkers are the most dangerous because they are just disconnected and unaware of how their emotions are driving them. So I think that sort of rational, masculine paradigm is one that we need to have a broader imagination for the collective. What are our shared values, not just our profit lines? Uh, what is mutuality and everybody having access and equitability, not just diversity, right? Like there, I think it's a bigger conversation to even evaluate some of the paradigms and frameworks we think about masculinity and femininity through.

Randy 49:55

Yeah, as you were talking about that, Carrie, it just made me wonder what it could look like and what we what we have to put in place in our families, relationships, our churches, and then a movement, an organization like the post-evangelical collective. What does it look like for a movement or group to be a safe place for marginalized communities like women, women of color, people of color, queer community that's also safe for cis straight white males? Those sound mutually exclusive to me, but I don't want that to be the case.

Keri 50:27

And I'm convinced that the only way forward is together. If I now lead the post-evangelical collective and decide to sideline all the cis-het straight, smart white men because of what they have done to me, I'm actually inflicting the very same thing on them, right? This is what we do. We play out our history over and over again until we have the courage to tend to it and to show up to it. So we talk a lot in this space about what is not safe space, because minorities and women of color will tell you no space is safe for me. I have to walk in and evaluate the threat level and armor up my heart to the extent that's appropriate for the setting, right? Or constantly be looking. When we're looking back, we can't look up and look ahead, right? And so what does it look like for us to cultivate brave spaces where if you step over a line unintentionally, I can believe the best about you, but I can also say, hey, Randy, I know what you say you believe. When you did that thing or said that thing, you didn't live up to it. And you say, Thank you for loving me enough to tell me the truth. That's right. And in this conversation, particularly about masculinity, I'm so aware of how shame is the operating system of the versions of masculinity that we have been handed. And I am so committed to the flourishing of men because of the pain that I have experienced at their hands and the pain I know that they live in. And what shame brings up is self-protection and defensiveness. So I have to be for the men in my life, and they have to believe that I am for them for them to not, when shame comes up, we have an immediate opportunity to decide how are we going to respond to that. And if we're gonna let shame be what leads when we're confronted with loving feedback and with a reflection of, hey, you didn't live into shame will lead us to self-protection and defensiveness, and we come out swinging. So, what is belonging and brave space look like? I think it looks like all of us having courage to show up again to reorient what does this look like for how to move forward. I don't want to do that alone. I think that has to be together, and we have to have some commitments to what it looks like to be brave and courageous in a new way.

Quiet Resistance And The Bystander Problem

Kyle 52:33

Last question from me. So I reason for both of you, I recently heard Kristen Dumay say something along the lines of that historically what changes situations like we're in right now socially, is small groups of people who are not afraid of the authoritarian power uh forming around some kind of shared goal. And then that sort of catches on, and there's usually some kind of tipping point for that uh that causes that kind of uh bravery. Do you think we've reached that tipping point? And if you had to put your finger on what it is, what do you think it is, or have we not?

David 53:06

Are you talking about small groups of people gathering to resist the authoritarian power? I think quietly there is plenty of resistance to the way immigration enforcement is happening right now. And by almost by definition, much of the resistance is silent because you wouldn't want to call attention to the details. I think there are substantial numbers of people in civil society, in religion, uh in neighborhoods that are just not okay and they are looking to thwart what's being done, which is one reason why the deportation numbers are never satisfactory to the administration because they're not getting the results that they're looking for. By the way, studying the Holocaust, one of the things I learned is that if a if a group is going to be targeted, it really helps the perpetrators if the in-between group is either neutral or collaborates with the perpetrator. So in the Holocaust literature, there's perpetrators, bystanders, victims, rescuers. And the most, in some ways, the most interesting group is the bystanders. And generally, once the bystander moves into a resistance posture, they go underground because that's the most effective way to do it. So it seems like right now is not so much the time for pronouncement as it is the time for quiet co-resistance and getting out of the bystander position. Um so I I think we do not currently know how much of that is happening. We couldn't know, because if you're in a resistance network like that, you don't publicize it. You just do the work. So we'll we'll know later what what that is actually yielding. But there are other all other dimensions of authoritarianism that are being implemented. In every institution, the universities are being challenged. How much integrity will the universities have? The law firms, you know, the nonprofits, all the cross, the business, the business world, lots of caving in on the business side, right? So who is standing with principles and who's giving in? We're finding out, we're watching it.

Randy 55:24

Yeah. Carrie, I'm gonna I would invite you to have the last word for us. Um

Resurrection Through Healing Old Wounds

Randy 55:29

you talked about resurrection towards the end of your talk, and you said something to the effect of resurrection happens when we tend to the deaths in our life. I love that. And then you went on and said something to the effect of resurrection happens when we revisit our places of pain and shame as healed individuals, right? Could you just bring us a little bit, flesh that out just a little bit more for our listeners and for those of us in the room, that resurrection life that you might see being possible and taking a root as we have these conversations about heavy, painful, loaded things?

Keri 56:07

Sure. Um I guess I would go back to like in my own kind of reconstruction journey, I really had to wrestle with this question of sin, like total depravity or total evil, or you know, being born awful and terrible. And when I got to this place of understanding original goodness and belovedness, it made me wrestle with that question of sin even more. I don't know if you grew up with like an age of accountability, or maybe there was a list of, you know, like don't drink, don't cuss, don't have sex, you know, like the spiritual prosperity gospel fell apart for me. And the more I understood trauma, uh, the less the question of what have you done resonated with me, and more the question of what happened to you began to resonate with me. And actually, the more I've kind of gone down this road of like healing and trauma and quantum physics and neuroplasticity and our nervous systems and the cosmic way that our bodies were designed and created, uh, the ways that we carry physiologically, generationally, the wounds of our ancestors. And some of this comes from the kinds of healing I'm experiencing in my own life right now. Um, when we heal something in our own story, we can heal our children. You know, if you heal the mother wound or the father wound or the story of maybe you spilled milk when you were 10 and you got yelled and screamed at. And since then you have been trying to be a perfectionist and never mess up, right? Like all of us have these stories that we hold on to. When you heal those things inside of you, you also heal them in your children, in your children, you heal them ancestrally and you heal them in the collective. And so, this idea that how I show up to my life has implications for you and for the world that you live in, has implications for my kids. So I was emancipated when I was 16 years old, moved out of my parents' house the week after I turned 16. My daughter turned 17 in February, and to parent her and to provide for her every single day with this kid is a miracle. And it's it's healing something inside of me that 16-year-old Carrie never got from parents. It is like we are living, I'm watching things be resurrected in my own life and in my own story. So that like I just the power that Christ came to offer us to no longer fear death, to no longer fear threat because there was hope of resurrection on the other side of it, that invites me to go back into the deepest, darkest places in my own story, in my own neighborhood, and what's playing out in the world around us. And what I find is actually when we don't want to attend to the suffering in the world, it's because we haven't attended to our own suffering and our own story. That is the place. If we believe in a resurrected Christ, then tending to the places of death in our own story is where resurrection happens. And I our resurrection is embodied and our resistance to the status quo and to what is is embodied with how we show up to this life.

Randy 59:08

May we all live into that resurrection life all around us, right? Let's thank David and Carrie for chatting with us. Thank you, Kyle. Thanks

Support The Show And Stay Connected

Randy 59:35

for listening to A Pastor and a Philosopher Walking to a Bar. We hope you're enjoying these conversations. Help us continue to create compelling content and reach a wider audience by supporting us at patreon.com/slash a pastor and a philosopher. We can get bonus content, extra perks, and a general feeling of being a good person.

Kyle 59:51

Also, please rate and review the show in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. These help new people discover the show and we may even read your review in a future episode.

Randy 59:59

If anything we said pissed you off, or if you just have a question you'd like us to answer, send us an email at pastor and philosopher at gmail.com.

Kyle 1:00:07

Find us on social media at PPWB Podcast, and find transcripts and links to all of our episodes at Pastor and Philosopher.buzzprout.com. See you next time. Cheers.