Righteous Anger and White Christianity: A Conversation with Robert Callahan, II

This episode of Faithful Politics features Robert Callahan II, a Texas attorney, writer, and advocate, discussing his book, Fire in the Hole: Embracing Our Righteous Anger with White Christianity and Reclaiming Our Wholeness. The conversation explores the intersection of race, faith, and politics, focusing on the challenges faced by marginalized groups within white Christian spaces. Callahan shares how personal experiences, including the racial and political turmoil of 2020 and his struggles with spiritual abuse, inspired his writing. He highlights the role of righteous anger as a tool for transformation and discusses the systemic racism and prejudice often embedded in church culture. Alongside hosts Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram, Callahan dives into theological perspectives on reconciliation, activism, and maintaining faith amid injustice. This thought-provoking dialogue examines how Christians can embrace love, justice, and inclusion while addressing deep-seated cultural and institutional issues.

Learn more about our Guest: https://www.robertgcallahan.com

Guest Bio:
Robert is an accomplished attorney and author, dedicated to fighting for justice in his practice at Callahan & King, PLLC in Waco, Texas. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Gonzaga University and a Juris Doctorate at Baylor University School of Law where he teaches a course entitled Integrating Faith and Legal Practice. In 2020, Robert was named Lawyer of the Year by the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers' Association. As a writer, Robert has an undeniable talent for blending humor and insight as he tackles the issues of law, race, and religion. Robert and his wife celebrate an interracial marriage which has gifted them with three beautiful children, two demanding dogs, and a mountain of student loan debt.

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, faithful politics listeners and watchers. If you're joining us in our YouTube channel, we're extremely happy to have you. Thanks for being here. I'm your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? And today we have with us Robert Callahan the second, right? Who's a Texas attorney, writer and advocate for justice and reconciliation within the Christian faith. He draws from his personal experiences and extensive research. Callahan examines the intersection of race, faith, and politics in his newest book, Fire in the Hole, embracing our righteous anger with white Christianity and reclaiming our wholeness. Excuse me, I got a little bit allergies. And I can already tell from the title of your book that we're going to have a very fierce debate and comments in the comments section of the YouTube channel for this episode. It's gonna gain us a lot of fans, Will. So many fans. People writing awesome, encouraging comments. Absolutely. But we're not afraid to have tough conversations and we are just so glad that you could be here with us today, Robert. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, so I have to ask, you know, so you're Robert Callahan, the second. Is there a difference between having the second or junior behind your name? Because my my brother's a junior. That's all I'm asking. Definitely. my friend group. apparently, apparently there's one school of thought that to be a second, it has to be the case that there was someone with your name and then it skipped a generation and then someone else got your name. and then that's how you actually become the second. And then there's some people that think that junior and second are interchangeable. There's some people that think that junior is the immediate generation after the identical name. Mm. In any event, what I did figure out later, I started calling myself the second in high school, not to be pretentious, but because my father has the exact same name. And once my voice started to change a little bit, it became really hard for people to distinguish. And so like, you know, people would call, like he would get work calls and I would answer the phone and people would be like two minutes into a diatribe and I'd be like, I let me get my dad, you know? And so I just, yeah. really interesting. So that's where it came from, but I did figure out one of my friends did a DNA, well not a DNA test, like a family search for me a few years back and we found out that there is another Robert Gibson Callahan that was a couple of generations before my father. So he wasn't the first one, therefore I'm either the second or potentially the third. I don't know. Also, I mean, you here in Faithful Politics, are the hard hitting questions that we really like to dig into. appreciate you lending your expertise, but your book. So Fire in the Hole. Here it is for those that can see it on our YouTube channel. It is a fascinating book that I think is very much needed right now. And for those that aren't watching us on our YouTube, Mr. Callahan the second is a person of color. So it's even better that we get to hear your input and insight from this. So why did you write this book? You know, I started writing Fire in the Hole not from a sense of like a mission to set out to do something specific. It was literally just a writing exercise to help me keep my sanity. And it began in the summer of 2020 among all the unrest that happened with. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Philando Castile, I just name your hashtag. And I got the closest that I've ever had to having an actual literal mental breakdown. And I realized that I just couldn't process it anymore. And so I intentionally unplugged for a period of time. And I did that very cautiously because there was part of me that felt the need to bear witness to everything that was happening, but also to stay informed. and. I unplugged and I entered this 24 hour period of what was supposed to be prayer and reflection and fasting. And it was those things, but what I found myself needing to do the most was right. And at the time it was interesting. I felt like that was not the holy practice that I was looking for. You know, I felt like, no, I should be praying. My mind is wondering, I have to write this thing down, but that's not the work I should be doing right now. I should be praying like that kind of a thing. When I got done with that 24-hour period I had written a couple of chapters worth of information and at that point I didn't know that I was writing a book and I didn't intend to write a book I was literally just writing my feelings out and so at the end it I was like, you know, what is this? Is this a Facebook post? This is way too long for a Facebook post and I was still on Facebook at that time no more but I was at that point and You know, so it's not a Facebook post. So what is this? this an article for the op-ed for the newspaper? Is this something that I'm submitting to a publication? Like what is this? And so I just kept writing in order to help me process my feelings and then pretty soon I had just so many chapters I was like I think this is a book. So there we are. Wow, that's really amazing to hear kind of the backstory to the book. And thank you for sharing about like that experience and what it was like to start putting things down. It's making me feel like I should start writing. I get angry a lot. So maybe that's like a good thing. I'm kind of being joked, making a joke there, but I do actually get angry quite a bit, but about probably different things. But I'm... I'm wondering, with like at the risk of like asking about the obvious, when you were going in and writing all of your feelings out and you said you're on the verge of a mental breakdown, What was going on in your head? Like what was making you so angry? I know a lot of people can make assumptions and think about, I'm sure it was this about Breonna Taylor, right? Sure, it this about George Floyd or this about the experience as a black man in America. But what was it for you personally that was driving this? Yeah. Great question. So it was in part seeing just the trauma, just witnessing the trauma that was happening, you know, just lives that were being lost from different forms of brutality. Ultimately, really, I think it's appropriate to call them lynchings. And there was also the pushback against the movement. for social consciousness about this. There were a lot of people in the church that were around me that were looking for answers, I think appropriately so, and saying, my gosh, how have I missed this? What resources can we look to? And we started to see nationally, both in the church and politically, kind of a backlash where there was a sort of like a diminishing of the pain of minorities. And within that, I include not just racial minorities, but women, the LGBTQIA, community and also the disabled, especially racial minorities, there was this sense that we're losing ground on the right because the people that are in the middle and the people that are usually part of the religious right are starting to ask questions they've never asked before. And so we need to kind of put a stop to that. And that's when we started hearing the weaponization of words like CRT and the weaponization of words like woke and things like that. So that was extra layer of frustration that was on top of it. I was also processing my own personal hurt from having left a congregation that we were in for 10 years. And I talk about this church in the book, I call it Toxic Fellowship Inc. or TFI, as my moniker to protect the guilty. know, I talk about it as sort of a microcosm of I think that other people have been in similar situations and in similar environments and can relate to a TFI. And so I, you know, I was processing the herd of having been so deeply invested in a congregation that was multi-ethnic for so long, it was non-denominational and I thought that this was going to be the church that I was going to be in just for the conceivable future. And feeling betrayed by the leadership in the church, people that I worshiped beside, people who were saying the most vile things on social media, the church's refusal when we begged and pleaded as minorities to ask them to disciple us all, but our fellow congregants better in these issues. there are just absolute refusal to do so. So that was another layer. There was a lot of political uncertain. I think that I have a very creative imagination when it comes to doom and gloom. so, especially as a lawyer, I started seeing just lots of different... different timelines, kind of like Dr. Strange, know, like these different possibilities of things that could happen and how, you know, like what if, you know, Trump decided that he wasn't going to give up power then like, what would we have? then like, you know, we've got COVID that's going on in the nation and we've got like that became racialized and politicized. And then we have, you know, what happens if the government says for the, because we don't have a vaccine yet, you know, early 2020. So what if the government says for the good, of the nation, think that churches cannot meet in person right now. they're just chomping at the bits to do so, then we have this huge fight potentially between church and state. I just saw all these different things sort of looming on the horizon and to some extent you can't over anticipate what's going to happen because fear is ultimately about things that have not arrived yet. But I think that there were a series of just very illogical outcomes that were brewing on the horizon and it was just all too much together. And so I had to take a step back and process all of it. And even with therapy, it wasn't enough. Even I've struggled with depression my whole life. I was only diagnosed within the last... 12 years, but even with those tools and resources, it wasn't enough. And so I needed to sort of get some solitude and start talking and writing about my feelings. That's really deep and thank you for sharing that. So your book addresses righteous anger with white Christianity. And I think it's such a prescient topic given an interview that we did some time ago. I guess kind of depends on when this airs, but we'll say a couple of weeks ago. with Robert Jones, he's the president of the PRI, Public Religion Research Institute. Yeah, and he wrote a Time article, and I'm gonna butcher the name of the article, but it's something along the lines of like what white Christians wrote, speaking about sort of the most recent election. If you were to scroll and read through all the comments on our YouTube channel, and Josh and I do make a pretty good effort to try to read all of them, respond to... some of the nice ones, you know, try to engage in conversations with some of the less nicer ones. But there is one comment in particular that really kind of stood out to me. I'm going to read it to you. It says, to add the label of white or any other label impugning immutable characteristics in a negative sense is a classic othering strategy often employed to dehumanize the target group and it has historically led to negative outcomes for those so labeled. There were lots of comments kind of along that same vein, but I thought that the way the individual wrote this particular one, you know, made it easy just to kind of talk about. So I'd love for you to help us understand, you know, is this like a white fragility thing? You know, when we talk about white Christians, you know, help elect Trump, or we talk about white, you know, Christians do X or do Y, good or bad, like... Why do you think it sort of sends, I don't know, like a shock through some white Christians? Yeah, I was really hesitant to use the phrase white Christianity initially. And it is a challenging subtitle. And the reason why I think that it's appropriate is the following. First of all, I think that it's even a step further than white fragility because, you know, white fragility explains the barrier that keeps us from being able to have a dialogue in order to productively hear one another. But we're talking about really the, if a dialogue is happening at a table, we're talking about the edifice in which the table is sitting or the table itself before we can even begin the dialogue. So ironically, White Too Long by I believe Robert P. Jones. does a good job of explaining some of these issues. I intentionally sought to figure out what is the animal that we're coming up against. When we look at 2016 Pew Research data, And it says that 81 % of Americans who identified as white bodied evangelical or born again Christians voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And then in 2024, it goes up to 82%. What is that group? Are we dealing with, is it white supremacy? Is it Christian nationalism? Is it evangelicalism? I'm in Waco, Texas. And here in the South, if I say evangelical, You know that everyone around me knows kind of the group that I'm talking about, but you get up in the Northeast, then evangelicalism doesn't have that political, tinged theological connotation to it. Right. And if you leave the United States, if you look at the evangelical church in Africa, the Latin American evangelical church, like these are not problems that they have. abroad and so the issue is not the theological construct of evangelicalism. So it's not that, right? And to that point we've seen some of these issues that are at play within the Southern Baptist Convention which famously was founded over slavery. We've seen it within the Catholic Church. We've seen it within the Presbyterian Church. We've seen it within the Methodist movement. So like it's not confined to one theological designation. So it wouldn't be honest intellectually to blame this on evangelicals, right? And some people take huge umbrage to being lumped in that group. Also, the problem is not just white Christian nationalism. because we're not talking necessarily about churches where they have a Christian flag on the stage next to the American flag, although that does exist here in Texas particularly. We're not talking about churches where they would even necessarily from the pulpit advocate for a certain political stance or support for a political candidate vocally, although it may sort of within the culture of the church be felt and implied and understood. So, you know, we're not necessarily talking about people that would go and storm the Capitol or who would have, you know, flags flying off the back of their truck, which is a popular thing here to see in Texas or, you know, outside their house, whatever have you. So how do we, how do I pin down this ultimately? it seems like at least moderately, prejudiced, if not, you know, implicitly biased or racist, misogynistic, bigoted towards the LGBTQIA community. And I'm not just talking about neutral, I'm talking about offended by the notion of people that identify that way. Cisgender normative, hetero patriarchal, nationalistic, capitalistic. Like what is this thing that we're talking about? Right? Because none of that just rolls off the tongue. So what I came up with is whiteness is the culprit. And by that, I mean that in the most academic sense possible. And here's the issue. As a black male, I know that when I say that, it lands different on listeners than it would if Josh were to say whiteness. Josh or you you hear people like Beth Alison Barr, Kristen Cobuz de May talk about whiteness and they're allowed to do so in just very clinical terms, you know, and they're, they're given the leeway of being able to talk about this as the things that we consider to be normative as part of Western ideology that also has this tinge of our idea is supreme and to the condescension of minorities, you know, like they're, allowed to have that discussion, automatically, when I start talking, automatically defenses go up. And I get that. That's just a natural reaction. But I think that notwithstanding, there has to be a recognition of like, need to be able to name this thing. And I don't think that it is productive to create a label or to engage in othering just for the sake of doing so, right? Like one of the things that I wrestle with, and I talk about this in the book, is that for me as a liberal, it feels as though the right is allowed, the political right, the religious right, is allowed to come up with pejoratives and slurs towards the left who will... see themselves as believers like woke CRT intersectionality like all these things Begin to have negative connotations to them, right and they can lump those things together Right and so masterfully that you know woke began as a term that was used exclusively within the black community You know for for us to explain, know, someone's level of social consciousness, right? Like going all the way back to like the 50s But I talk about how Eric Mason's book 2018 woke church. started flying off the shelves in 2020 when people were looking for resources to understand like what is going on in the nation around us. And so as a sort of a backlash, a reaction to that, there had to be this sense of like, no, we need to take woke away. And, know, Lee Atwater talked about this in the Southern strategy when he's having this conversation with Ronald Reagan, he's talking about you start off to say in the N word and you just say it, you say it, you say it, but then eventually you can't say it anymore. It's not politically correct. So you start talking about welfare. queens and school busing and like, you know, things like that. There are intentional narrative dynamics that are at play in order to take that word and overly broaden it in order to make it the antithesis of everything that a Republican would identify with, right? And so now the word woke no longer even belongs to black culture. You know, like, we don't, we don't, we've lost it now. It's, it's, you know, it comes with this, I had a conversation online with some friends and they talked about how they kind of the word with blue haired white liberal women and with the LGBTQIA quote agenda. And so like it's, it's so well deployed now that it basically means anything that's on the left, right? So I don't think that it's, I don't think it's productive to come up with labels. And I think that we are challenged as believers who want to be intellectually honest, not to dehumanize the other side. So we have to play fair while they're allowed to play dirty, right? And so that is the challenge. So I wanted to be very intellectually honest about what is this creature we're fighting against. So I came up with two definitions for white Christianity. And the first comes from page 13 and I say that white Christianity must serve as shorthand to describe those whose orthodoxy and orthopraxy are dictated by an unshakable yet misguided tangle of faith and right bridled political and social conviction that are antithetical to everything Christ represents. Okay. So we're talking about this, this marriage between a political ideology and a theology, right, that affects how we apply the gospel in society. And then now we're going to start drilling down and talk about like what we think is normative. on page 14, I have sort of the NIV version, right, or the message version of what we just heard was if that was the KJV, right. So the second definition I offer is white Christianity is also that subset of Christianity that intentionally ignores or does not consciously consider the effects of racism or prejudice in either the church or society on the marginalized nor cares to having been given the resources and information to do so. So what we often see is that churches that are multi-ethnic have people that are in the pews that are saying, I am dying to be your resource. You know, especially if your pastors are not theologically trained and, and I, and I point that out, not to say that that's necessarily a dig or a disqualification, but what happens is there's this paternalism where pastors that have no more theological training than the minorities that are sitting in the, in the aisles, believe and assume that they know quote, what the right theological answers are and what's best. And so. There are minorities that are begging like, hey, can I please introduce you to Tennessee Coats, to Jamar Tisby, to can I please give you black theologians, Robert Cone, that you can look into? you read the works of, like everybody loves Martin Luther King Jr., right? So like, how about, have you actually read any of his work? Can we talk about the application of the gospel? to the very specific groups that are being oppressed in real time in front of us today. And there's just no desire whatsoever to engage in that conversation. so it's not even, again, going back to the beginning of your question, it's not even white fragility. Like we just can't come into the room and sit down together and talk about it. And so I wanted to be very, very, very specific about what this is. And I think at the end of the day, it is, it's whiteness. the idea of white supremacy cloaked in the illusion of theology. Hmm. I mean, there's so much that you just said and so much to that week, like so many directions we could go, you know, as you were talking, I was, you know, we're often thinking about, you know, how are we going to address this? What's being said? Also, you know, the questions that we feel like we want to ask. But one of the things that I heard as you were talking is that there's this. There's this almost like it's obvious when you look at it, but it can be very hard to define this culture, this cultural force. of whiteness that is almost co-opted, well it has, right? That's what I hear you saying, it's co-opted Christianity, co-opted the gospel, co-opted these things that, know, anyone who knows, like starts to learn about the gospel, starts to learn about, you know, the rise of Christianity, understand, you know, it rose in another part of the world. It wasn't a white religion until hundreds of years, until, into its, into its founding, into its existence. And that was a very complicated history that happened. And European Christianity specifically, that became, started to happen once Rome started to get all of its power. And we don't need to go on to that, but I'm just saying that when someone has started to look at it, were, well, this isn't a white religion. This is something that started in first century Palestine. And it was really people of color. It went into... It went into Africa before it went into Europe. I mean, that's like a fact. Like you look at the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts chapter six. He was a black man that was in Ethiopia. He brought the gospel back to Ethiopia before it ever got into Greece or ever got into, you know, Rome and all of that. And so you have, like, when you start to look at it, you start to see like, yeah, there has been this co-opting that has happened. But I would love to like, so there's all these like different threads going on. And I'm trying to think what I've been trying to more recently because people start starting to think I'm super liberal and because I hang out with Will too much. think that's the problem. No, I'm kidding. Political osmosis, right? And honestly, at the end of the day, I don't... whatever, dude, I don't care if people think I'm liberal, liberal or conservative. I really want to get after the truth. And I mean that as with as much genuine, as much genuineness as I can muster and authenticity that I want to get at the truth. But I'm trying to think of someone who's listening to our program and they've voted for Trump or they, you know, they're part of this right massive amount of white Christians in America. right? 82 % like super majority of white Christians who have now listened to this and maybe they're hearing you talk. And I hope that they're hearing you talk, right? We want to people to be listening to this and understanding it and wrestling with these issues. And they're, they're, they're angry themselves about, you know, being called racist or, or just being, you know, painted with broad brushes as to what they think and all this. And we actually had Someone come on to the show who had from Utah, BYU, who had done an entire book length, like a monograph, him and his partner at the college doing research into the mindset of a Trump voter. Right. And so it's tough to try. Right. It's not a monolith, although obviously there are overlaps and characterizations that you can look at, but I try to put myself into the mindset of someone and when, and hearing this and listening to this and how are they going to feel and how are they going to feel when they hear things like anger, like this anger at white Christianity, there's anger. And then at the same time, there's this like, we need to be intellectually balanced and, and fair, right? Honest. And I agree with that. So My question is, where is anger? What's the right place of anger in this process? Because when we think anger, we don't like anger. We get uncomfortable with anger. We get awkward around anger. There's a black man angry about the way that people have been treated of color. Then a white person can get very uncomfortable with that anger. But I don't want to be uncomfortable with that anger. I want to support that anger and I want other people to support that and understand it. So where does it, what is the purpose of this anger? Help us feel it and understand it so we can share that with you. Go ahead, sorry. great question. Anger's role is first a catalyst to help those who are survivors of spiritual abuse to exit those environments that are toxic for them. And if you just think about spiritual abuse as a... a form of emotional abuse, that makes complete sense, right? Like if we are talking about an abusive husband towards a wife, there comes a point, you know, I see this a lot as my work as an attorney, where you have to, you have to, Admit that the water has gotten too hot as the frog in the pot and you can't be there anymore And it's hard to do if the next thing that happens is just like the next thing right like you're just used to The temperature of the water rising and you eventually can get cooked to death you have to get angry enough to get out of the of situation but So that's the first application But you know, I wanna touch on this, ironically, I didn't wanna talk about anger when I first started writing this book. The actual, the title of the book when I began the proposal was I'm Glad You Asked. And it was supposed to be this book that was going to be very, just congenial and it was going to be, the goal was going to be to bridge. the relationships between white people and black people in the church and help them understand all the things that they don't understand. Like, why is the idea of CRT, Marxism, woke? Like, why is that offensive? Like, know what? Answer all these questions. And what I ended up coming to is that you should know, you should know the answer. And in the information age, I cannot give anyone the benefit of ignorance anymore. because what was happening in 2020 and the things that I was fearing, I feared for, I literally feared for my life. There was a point after Ahmaud Arbery's death, a lot of people were going on runs. I don't know if you remember because that was like the context of his death was that he was on a run. And so people were going on these runs and they were posting, I run with Maude. And so I was on a run. And there was a transformer in my neighborhood that blew up as I was running past it on a telephone pole. I thought that I was being shot at. I, and again, so when I tell you that I almost had a breakdown, like I came home in tears. like There were people that drove by our house. Again, this is Texas. So, you know, one of the things that's really popular around here is like people will flag American flag, Texas flag, Trump flag, and or the don't tread on me flag, you know, the, the, the snake on the yellow background. And someone along the way in the spring summer of 2020 figured out that there was a black family that lived at this address. as they were driving by, saw me and my kids playing in the front yard. then at least two, three times a week after that, they were committed, did not live in the area, but committed to driving by. our house just to kind of send a message and they would park in front of the house across the street and there's only so much you can do because you know freedom of speech blah blah blah and you know there was it was it was a whole ordeal and so like this is real stuff that we were dealing with and are dealing with and you know i have an app on my phone that is wonder if I can find it real quick, but like it's a shortcut that's set up so that if I am being pulled over by the police, I say, Hey Siri, I'm being pulled over by the police and Siri sends a message to, yeah, here it is. I don't know if you can read this. says got pulled over right there in the middle. And so I, so if I say, Hey Siri, I'm being pulled over. Siri starts recording on the camera and it sends a message to Three different people saying this is what's like I'm being pulled over. It's like a scripted message I'm being pulled over. These are my coordinates. This is the address that I'm at and it actually pulls up the map and In it like so they they know to check in with me if they haven't heard from me in 10 15 20 minutes They know where to go. They know, you know These are real realities that that we have to live with as minorities So, you know, I did not want to write a book about anger but I, I realized that I was not being genuine to myself unless I did. And the frustration that many minorities have, there's a, a really foul history in particular when it comes to the word angry black person, the phrase angry black person in our nation, there's, in the sixties, I believe. the diagnosis of schizophrenia, one of its insidious origins was that it was being deployed against black people who were angry at the injustice that was going on in society. So you can do a Google search and I think if you find, if you search schizophrenia diagnosis origin black people, you'll, you'll find something about it. and so I can't help but be honest and it was, it was like, you know, in Jeremiah 29, This is one of the verses that I quote in the book is Jeremiah talks about how frustrating, how hard it is to be a prophet for the Lord and feel like every time that you open your mouth, you're told to shut up and you're mocked and you're put down. But then if I don't say something, then it's I'm going to go crazy because it's this fire that's trapped in my bones and I can't do anything else but speak. What else am I going to do? And so I have no choice. I have no choice, I'm damned if I do, I'm damned if I don't. there's a lot of different, I thought it was very important for there to be theological. underpinnings for everything that I had to say in the book. And I tried really hard to build a case, you know, as a lawyer, I, I'm very aware of the need to present evidence, right? So you don't just go, just make an assertion. You have to have receipts, right? And so it was very important that I have scriptural support for the things that I was talking about. And so like one of the verses that I come back to rather than going to that idea of like, Jesus flipping the tables and the temples and like that kind of thing sort of been overused. What I focused on to start the conversation instead was in first Samuel, Saul as the newly appointed king of Israel has his first challenge that's presented to him. believe it's in chapter 11 and he gets word that there's a community that's sort of remote that's been taken siege by a foreign entity. And they're allowed to send messengers saying, please come rescue us. Otherwise they're going to take one of our eyeballs and they're going to kill many of us and just all these different horrible things are going to happen. And the Bible says that when Saul got the message that the Holy Spirit came upon him and he burned with anger. And when I read that, you know, it's awesome how you read scripture and it in different points in your life. It has different meaning. When I read that, it came alive because I was like, wait, wait, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit. What? Wait a minute. Anger, anger can can be a good thing. It can be a tool. And the Holy Spirit is the one that endowed it upon him. Okay, wait a minute. So then you start seeing scripture with a different lens. And so I really want those who identify as survivors of spiritual abuse to understand that there is a place and a time for your anger that is good and is right. And when you understand that, then it will lead you to freedom. I've been talking for so long, but I do want to say this too. If you look at two things, like so Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, like one of the top things, if not the top thing, I haven't looked at it in long time, but one of the top things is security, you know, and so it's so important for people who feel victimized, who feel vulnerable to feel safe. And what's ultimately happening is that survivors of spiritual abuse are inhabiting environments where because they're told you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, suck it up, all need to get into the color's not a real thing, yada, yada, yada, we can't talk about this, we're not gonna talk about this. Too many people in the church identify within the majority and so it would be, quote, divisive, that's the magic word. disturb the quote unity of the church. Those things, we're not going to discuss those things and so therefore you have to suck it up. You cannot be safe here. Another thing is the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief. If I get these correctly, it's denial, depression, bargaining, anger, and acceptance eventually and importantly these are not all linear you can go through them in different phases in different orders and you can go to one and then end up regressing go back to another one or progressing and going to a different one but if you think about those right depression if you've if you've ever been through depression hand raised I have if you've ever been through depression depression can be debilitating where I'm talking like you don't have motivation to get out of the bed. You don't have motivation to leave the house, get dressed, get showered, none of that, right? And so it has this paralyzing effect. If you think about like fight, flight, fawn, reflex. depression is not, while it is a emotion that you have to experience and it is right and healthy to go through it for a time, it is not a emotion that will ultimately save you when you are in when you're in hurt, okay? Bargaining the way that that manifests is you know, hey if I stay in this church Longer like it is this is no longer a great place and a lot of people are leaving But if I stay I can be the change, right? Because the Bible has taught me and Christianity has taught me that I'm David or I'm Esther and maybe I was chosen for such a moment as this to go through this abuse so that I can save other people, you know, by being the one that I'm the chosen one. I'm Neo, right? I'm the one that was needed in this time. I have the power to change the direction of the Titanic. And so, you know, we're thinking like, if I stay in this environment, if I introduce my pastor to these minority pastors, if I give them these resources, if I talk to my friends about X, Y, and Z, if I have people over, if we have listening panels, if we have conversations, we love to have conversations, we have conversations and dialogues and coffee meetings and lunch meetings and this and this and this, then I can make this environment hospitable. That's bargaining. Right? And what it, if you think about that in any other context that is emotionally abusive, that is not healthy. You would tell your sister or your, your, your friend, your loved one, if they were in an abusive environment, you do not say, well, maybe like, yeah, he hits me or he spits on me or he insults me and yells at me every night. But if I stay here, then maybe I can disciple him better. Like sister, get out. Like, you know, You cannot bargain yourself to death. bargaining isn't gonna help you. Acceptance is what we eventually wanna move into. So that's premature. Denial, that's natural. For me, that manifested in... We had the church that we were at for a decade had these fantastic community outreach programs. I mean, we had ministry to the unhoused. We had drug recovery houses, one for men, one for women. We had mission like huge, huge mission focus in 2000. Man, when was the Syrian refugee crisis? 2016 ish. whatever that was, that we literally sent like 4,000 people from the different church plants in some capacity to go be volunteers. Literally in some cases pulling people out of the water, right? So like outreach was this huge idea. So how could it possibly stinking be that a church that is so community focused, we had a ministry that was dedicated to a underprivileged neighborhood in the same neighborhood that the church was in, a school in an underprivileged neighborhood, committed to teaching the kids that were kindergarten, first, second, and third to read because what we learned is that, this is scary, one of the ways that the Texas Department of Corrections determines how many beds they need for a given year is by looking back at the reading levels of third graders. that would be approximately the same age as the incoming quote class of inmates. Right? So they, yeah, yeah. So they use third grade reading levels. Basically, if you are, if you are not reading at a third grade reading level, Texas essentially says, okay. Well, we're to need a bed for that kid potentially. So we, so we focused on, you know, like the, program for helping the kids in this, this neighborhood in the school, you know, read and get their reading averages up. How could it possibly be that a church that is so involved in the community and in marginalized people in the community would have a problem with whiteness? But it happened because they weren't willing to talk about Ferguson. They weren't willing to talk about the things that were going on while people in the, man, let me tell you, this hits me. just preach it rather. There was a time, there was a sermon. You probably know this message. It's been a while since I looked at it, but it's basically the woman that goes to Jesus and she's asking for healing for her child. And Jesus says something to the effect of like, know, we don't give our scraps to the dogs. And she's like, well, even the dogs can get scraps from the master's table, right? That scripture was weaponized in a room, in an event that was specifically geared towards minorities who were feeling alienated within the church due to the racism that was prevalent, recognizably prevalent in the church. In 2019, they said, okay, so we're going to start having groups of minorities get together and we're going to disciple each other and love one another and talk about how we can... then turn this love outwards and disciple the rest of the church, right? So this is led by the church. In that context, the pastor weaponized, the pastor that preached, weaponized that passage in order to say, minorities are dogs. And the message to be taken from this passage was, if you feel like a dog, your job is to press in further. Don't give up. when Jesus says you're not, you're a dog. Don't give up, press in harder, press in harder with your, you're a melanated compatriots in the community and force yourself to be in relationship with them more and love on them more. And eventually we'll get the scraps, which is love. That was the message. And I mean, it was jarring. I had a meeting with him afterwards. I had a meeting with other people and, and everybody was on the same page. That was the message. So, you know, that's what we're up against. Right. So, When I think about... Can we afford to be anything else but angry? Right? Because bargaining's not gonna do it for us, depression's not gonna do it for us, denial's not gonna do it for us. But wait a minute, anger. Anger, I can use that emotion. That can be productive. If I'm trying to run away from a threat, you know, anger is going to boost my metabolism. Anger is going to cause that blood flow to go to the limbs that it needs to go to in order to get my heart moving faster and to get me like, I can do something with anger when it comes to fight or flight. Right. and so it doesn't necessarily mean, you know, fighting doesn't mean, you know, protest and riots and burn the church down. What it, what it means is I need to be angry enough to protect myself to get out of that church. I need to be angry enough to protect my loved ones, to get out of that church, to make sure that everyone else that sees me in the pool doesn't think, the water's fine, come on in. Nope, we're getting out. To be loud as I'm exiting, if that's necessary, as much as my conscious demands so that other people know that this is not a safe environment, don't tread here. I can use anger to love my neighbor better. I can say how you're being treated is unjust. And so I'm intentionally going to target you with my love. LGBTQIA community, you are being oppressed. I may not, I may not, just full disclosure here, I'm affirming, but you know, even if you can't cross that bridge, if you say, I may not agree theologically with, you know, the LGBTQIA, from, from the perspective of, it being, of being, you know, a side affirming, right? However, I can love you because I'm angry about how you're being treated over here. And so I know that my calling is that I'm supposed to love you. So let me use this anger to build a table for you to sit down and have a place here. And when you sit down here and you have a place here, instead of it being sort of like that, you know, that idea that we were given that, you know, if you are doing Christianity right, the world should want what you have. Sort of like giving out samples at the restaurant or at the grocery store. Like, hey, if you're doing it right, I give you this sample and you want to go ahead and buy the whole thing, right? Instead of that, maybe what anger looks like is we're building this wider table. We're giving you the place of honor. And when you leave this table, you're going to leave feeling full and dignified. And that's enough. because that's what we're commanded, is love of God and love of neighbor. Those two things are the same in the eyes of Jesus. What did he say, right? Like is that those two things are, the second command is like the first, right? And so if you're going to believe that one is true, the other, you have to believe the other is true. Robert, I have to give you just all the praise in the world because your answer just really resonated with me. And also, you provided a ton of context. And then came back around to the question about Ingrid. I was just listening to you. like, yeah, yeah, man, yeah. Amen. Amen. That'll preach, know, and then, then, then, and then you brought it back around to the original. And I'm just like, like, I am not worthy. So kudos to you. I have ADHD tendencies like everyone else, but I am literally haunted by the spirits of my law professors who, I left a question on the table unanswered, they would just have my hide. Yeah, I know. You know, it was funny when you were talking, you were saying, what was the original title that you wanted to call your book? Yeah, because I was thinking to myself, you should have just kept it with that title, because it would have been not so much like a bait switch, but I'm sure you've seen this movie called Sorry to Bother You. I haven't seen it yet. okay. Well, it's about this, it's a really deep, hard-hitting movie that seems sort of like rom-com-ish, like whimsical on the front end. It's about this black dude who works at this call center and he's doing, like, telemarketing or whatever and he wasn't getting any hits. And this, his desk mate is this guy, I think it's Danny Glover, actually. You know, he tells him like, you can't talk to him in your normal black voice. you have to use like your white voice. he's like, don't got a white voice. And he's like, yeah, everybody's got a white voice. And like, and you know, like how Danny Glover talks and then they convert and he's like, here's his white voice, you know? And anyways, it's all about like racism and inequality and the title is a little misleading called Sorry to Bother You. So like you could just see somebody picking that, you know, turn it on and be like, okay. Yeah, this seems sort of like an interesting movie. So I was thinking the same thing for your book. you know, like you could title it something that seems very, I don't know, non-threatening. And then you pick it up and you're like, you know, it's much, different than like, know, like Anthea Butler's book, White Evangelical Racism. Like, you know what you're going to get with that book, you know? But if you had another book that... addressed the same topic but was little less dirty. Anyway, take that for what it's worth, think about it. it's interesting that you say that because that was one of the things that I wrestled with with the title, right? was like, didn't, literally I don't want, my goal is not to be controversial for the sake of being controversial or to offend people, right? And so I can see that idea of kind of like, gotcha, kind of like a Scooby-Doo trap with the little cardboard box and the stick and the string, kind of like, come on, come on, give the treat. I could see the value of that, but. candidly, when I, when I got done essentially writing this book, I realized that my audience, as much as I long for reconciliation and we talk in clear terms in the church about reconciliation all the time. And I talk about the difference between reconciliation and forgiveness and restoration and all restitution, all these things in the book. As much as I want to see those things happen, my audience. primarily for this book is those who have been wounded. I wanted this to be a safe place to be a balm for them. And so that's why the book is organized the way it is. There's, you know, we talk about the image of fire. The idea of you going to your backyard around a fire pit or bonfire or campfire. and having a really intimate personal conversation with friends deep into the night. That's, I wanted to have that kind of a gathering. so fire in the first part of the book is a rallying place. In the second part of the book, we stoke the flames by talking about specific ways that we've been hurt in the church. And then in the third part of the book, fire is a slight source. And we all together who have gone through this book, we then journey into a path forward using that light. So, you know, it was very important for me to say that my, understand I may be preaching to the choir and that's okay. That's okay. That's good. So my last question for you is, you know, hopefully something hopeful, and I'm curious if, you know, you are seeing any trends or movements within the Christian faith that are... moving in the right direction that are actually addressing some of these like racial inequalities that we see kind of broadly within the society, you know, and maybe to add to that, you know, are you seeing any indication that, you know, blended churches, meaning you've got, you know, a multicultural congregation, if you're seeing... you know, more of that, especially kind of where you're at. And if that is sort of like translating into, I don't know, just better community within, within Christians. Where I think I'm seeing hope is not so much in an optimistic, idealized view of what the church looks like. in some date in the future. It's not in this hope necessarily of reconciliation. I do strongly believe that the picture that we see in Revelation of every tribe and nation around the throne gathered, worshiping together, I do think that that is beautiful and I do think that that's the image of church that we should be aspiring for. That's what we should be having in mind when we pray, your kingdom come and your will be done on earth. As it is in heaven but where I find hope and it was important for me to find hope because There are too many books that talk about how we got here We we know how we got here right like we we we were all there So we we know what brought us here. We know why we're here. We know how we got here But how do we where do we go from here? How do we get out of it? How do we survive this and so my hope is not in the institution of church necessarily. My hope is in the work of loving God and loving neighbor and creating a mission for those that feel similarly situated to do that same work, to love, to number one, know that there is a way to go through this experience and keep your faith intact. because that was very important for me. There's a lot of people that have gone through deconstruction and deconstruction has gotten a lot of bad raps and, you know, been labeled as something that is, you know, sexy or just some way of facilitating sin and yada yada. And I just think it's so important that people understand that those that have not gone through it. most of us didn't choose to go through deconstruction. We were in it before we realized that we were there. And we're in it because of the cognitive dissonance of trying to reconcile white Christianity with the message of Jesus, right? And so my hope is that people can walk away from their experience with the church and know that they can still keep their faith intact and that they don't have to snuggle under the same blanket with their abuser. My hope is that when I'm talking to you all and someone else is hearing this, that it's going to seep in their soul and they're going to say, amen. They're going to say, thank you. Like I needed to hear this. This is a balm to me because I'm not getting this healing from somewhere else. So my hope is in the remnant of those that, that are committed to loving Christ through the pain. And it's so interesting. You, talk about trends like I can't speak to broader institutional trends and it's hard enough just to get to church in candor. I'm not there often. This is the crazy thing as an Enneagram 8 extrovert, if anyone knows Enneagram. I'm the entertainer personality. I get my battery charged by being among people. I despise now. going into the building of church and shaking hands and sitting through the worship. Like, I just want to sneak in the back once the sermon starts, let me hear the sermon and then I'll walk out. I can't be part of your small group right now. I can't volunteer for anything right now. Like I am just so beat up. But I still have this deep love for God, for Jesus. And so what I see in terms of trends outside of the institution of church is the people that are committed to loving Christ despite the pain. And I do not know what I thought missions were before. Like I have been on mission trips, right? Like I've been on mission trips out of the country. I've been there. I always thought that mission work was like something you did somewhere else abroad. And now I'm like, there are so many survivors. here around us, like the harvest is white. Like the laborers are few. Like the work is right here. You do not have to leave your building to do the work. And so my hope is in a harvest of people that can be the church for one another and love one another well and help each other survive through. this difficulty. That's where my hope is. think that's really well said, Robert. I really appreciate your story. I appreciate the conversation. I really have enjoyed listening to you. It's been challenging in its own way. You know, not that I disagree necessarily with anything that you've said, but just more like questioning my own self. Like, am I doing enough? Am I... Am I talking about the right things? Am I addressing the right things? I'm a pastor, so I'm trying to figure it out. was texting with Will with some colorful language about how upset it makes me that, you know, you have this guy absolutely butchering the acts of Jesus of that passage of the Syrophoenician woman. And yet they are on staff at an enormous church, it sounds like. And I'm here church planning, trying to struggle, have a diverse community, and it seems like, I don't know, I think people give it a lot of lip service. I love that. That's so cool. That's great. But they don't, there's not a lot more than lip service sometimes. And so I definitely resonate pretty deeply with the things that you're saying. And I want to be a part of the solution. And I think there's a lot of people like me that want to be a part of the solution. And it's a pretty challenging time, I think, across the board for people to keep faith, to stay connected to church. When you're describing your feeling, like it's so funny, because when you're describing your feeling of like going to church, like that's how I feel. Not about my church. I really do like love the people at my church, but I just don't, I don't trust pastors. I understand why people don't trust pastors. And I understand like being like, hey, I don't want to be... a part of all this pageantry and this basically this innocuous garbage that we put out and say this is is Christianity and yet we are in such a consumer society. don't exactly know why I'm saying this, but I just feel like it's from the heart. So just bear with me for one second and then I want to ask just how people can connect with you. I understand the tension of having a church and you're trying to keep the doors open. The financial realities are real. No one else thinks about it unless they are in it. Because why would you? I mean, it's just you're thinking about your own mortgage, your own stuff, your own life that you have to live and bills you have to pay and all that. It's very real, so I can appreciate everything that you're saying and feel deeply stirred by it in a good way. And on the other side, also understand why some pastors have trepidation with trying to get into this, because it feels existential. It feels like, if I go down this path, I might have a bunch of people that say, man, that's so awesome. You're so brave, brother. Thank you for doing that. That, but don't give, don't, don't help. Don't really do anything. And so you're taking all the burden. So I guess my point is like, it really does have to come from a place of very deep conviction that Jesus is telling you to do this. Not you're doing this because it's trendy. Not you're doing this because people, you know, will pat you on the back and say, a boy or add a girl or you're awesome and you're great and thanks for standing up for justice and all those things that are great. You have to do it because you can't, there's a deep conviction this is right and this pleases God and this is what God is going to ultimately bless. And that can be a really difficult place to get to, to be quite honest, because it doesn't necessarily work. the churches don't necessarily stay open. The bills aren't necessarily paid. You know, we've been given this lie that, if you obey Jesus, he's gonna keep all the bills paid and he's gonna do all these things. I'm not saying that won't happen. I think God does take care of you ultimately, but I don't know, man. I think we've been sold something in a consumeristic culture. And it's not good. So all that to say, I appreciate what you're doing. I appreciate this book. And I guess I was trying to bring out the genuine wrestling that I'm going through. And I'm sure other people like me would be going through. But I think it's really important that we're doing this. Talking about this, I'll give you a chance to respond if you want to anything I said. And then I just have a last practical question for you before we close. I just want to honor your effort. And I don't say that just to puff you up. I would have been completely fine in a hypothetical situation hearing someone say all those things and just letting them sit with it. However, I do think it's important to honor what you are attempting to accomplish and what you're wrestling with and what you're thinking through because... I have found different minorities. No, no one's a monolith, right? But what I have found is that minorities have a ton of grace for those that are trying, but doing something imperfectly. have no grace for those that are not trying at all. And there's, and the motive is so important, like you said, because what happens is if you do it, for the sake of being trendy for the sake of I'm going to switch from a conservative audience to a liberal audience, but I'm still going to be, you know, consumer driven, capitalistic. Number one, your audience is eventually going to see through it. Number two, you you can deconstruct and still be guilty of not decolonizing and perpetuate greater ill. So you have to be committed, not necessarily just to like, Hey, I'm going to make sure that this church is going. the lights are on and I'm ministering and making this ministry work. have to be committed to the evolution of your thoughts. You have to be committed to constantly learning. And like I'm learning as a male, how to not be a toxic man, you know, like that has been something that I'm 40 mumble years old and until 2019, I would have considered myself and I, and in the same way that a, an addict that goes through recovery says like, I know that I have an addiction. am I am always an addict. Like I am I am toxic. I am patriarchal until otherwise proven otherwise. That's my lifelong lineage. It just that is so therefore with that identity understand I'm going to make mistakes. I need to learn things. I need to be surrounded by people that can women who can guide me through mentor me, you know, without expecting their unpaid labor to to understand. how to be a better ally, right? Same thing is true with any other marginalized community. So yeah, you have to be able and willing to go through the suck. if you are, you know, the irony is, I think then what you said is that we do have this consumer driven culture of Christianity within white Christianity in the West here. And We understand at some level that the doors don't necessarily stay open if we alienate the wrong people. But at the same time, this lie that we have sold ourselves is, you know, the prayer of JBEZ. If I just, I pray, if I, for everyone else, if your issue is that you're, can't pay the rent, well, you just need to tithe harder. You need to get, and so like we, we weaponize it on one hand, it's a sword, you know, but like we don't. realize that the that sword cuts both ways, right? And so, but yeah, I mean, those are the realities. And I what I say with just huge humility, knowing that I am not a minister, and I'm not in the position of running a church and employing people and keeping the doors open, feeding the flock that way. Is that of all the professions in the world, of all of them, that could be chosen. Ministry is the one where you have chosen to die to yourself. And so it may not work. It doesn't necessarily look like an abundantly thriving church. It looks like a cross. And so, you know, there's a reason I know about myself that I cannot be a firefighter, right? I know I don't have what it takes. I cannot be a police officer. I don't have the temperament to be a police officer. I can't be a school teacher for the same reason. But I, I know that I have not taken on a ministry because I haven't felt called to it in that capacity directly, but, more specifically, because I know that it is complete dying to self. And I have to be okay with that because that's the role, that's the job. And so, you know, if I'm doing that right, then I'm doing ministry well, which is the goal. But that doesn't necessarily mean that my financial needs are going to be provided for. And so the model that we're utilizing traditionally for church may not be sustainable. And, you know, I don't know what we do with that conversation for a a later date. Yeah, yeah, I agree. That's really good. Robert, how can people connect with you and follow your work and kind of just in general see, you know, what you're doing and get your book and all that? Thank you for asking. the book is available in so many different places. You can order it through the publisher's website, which is Westminster John Knox. You can also find it on Amazon. And if you go to Amazon, the first two chapters allow you to read ahead. And there's the Kindle version and soon there's going to be an audio version as well. I'm on all of the socials. My handle is R Callahan Waco and Callahan is C-A-L-L-A-H-A-N on all the socials. Sky threads, Instagram, Twitter, Substack. I have a Substack called Friday Fire. I do have a Facebook account. Don't expect me to be too responsive over there. That's the bad place. But I'd love to hear from people. I'd love to hear their feedback. And definitely if they pick up the book, I would love to hear what people have to say about it. That's great. Well, thank you again, Robert, for coming on the program today, sharing your heart and your work. It's really been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. Absolutely. And to our audience, our listeners and viewers, thank you so much for joining us again. We value your time. Make sure you like and subscribe. Please hit the notification bell. We really try to get you amazing content with great people. I mean, we truly do. If you listen to this show, you will learn and you will be challenged. I promise that. And, but like Robert Callahan, we try to get people just like him that can help us think differently, challenge us. and we hope you'll join us with that and until next time guys keep your conversations not right or left but up take care and Merry Christmas depending on when this comes out. Happy holidays maybe you can edit that out well. I will. Don't worry. I'm stopping the recording right now.