Yeah.

Welcome to the Aaron Harber show.

My special guest, Professor Eddie Glaude from Princeton University.

Professor, thank you so much for joining me.

Oh, it's a pleasure.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So, I mean, you're a department chair.

Yeah.

You were previously the president of the American Academy of Religion.

I mean, you've authored a number of books.

You're a famous television commentator as well.

I'm honored to have you on the show.

I'm blessed.

This is an honor for me, I appreciate.

So the first thing I know, everyone expects us to talk about politics, which we will.

But I'd be really interested on your take of the state of religion in America today.

It's a complex landscape.

You know, it's a complex landscape.

We see the data shows that mainline American Christendom is has basically flatlined.

It's not growing.

Most of the growth is happening in Pentecostal an neo Pentecostal kind of spaces.

We also see a large expansio of American Muslim population, as it were.

And, you know, to be honest with you, we are in the midst of a very complex iteration of Christian nationalism.

There's always been this intricate relationship between a certain understanding of the US nation state and a certain religious imaginary.

And that has playing a particular role in our politics today.

Whether it's the Seven Mountains Grow group or folks who are trying to give it give voice to an apocalyptic vision in relation to America's role, whether folks are bridging, racial ideologie with their religious ideology, something that's all that goes back to the 19th century in some ways.

So it's a complex landscape.

And we're not quite sure where we're going to land.

What about faith in America?

Different kinds of faith, not necessarily always tied to an organized religion where where certain people describe their spirituality in different ways.

Yeah.

My colleague Robert Woods now has written about this a lot in terms of spirituality, folks who are not churched but who have a deep sense of, a relationship with the Supreme Being, however they might describe.

That's appropriate.

They they have a sense of ethics or moral orientation, but they'r they're not committed to dogma.

You know, it's almost like reading William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, where he says, I'm not going to be dealing with the institution, and I'm going to be dealin with what people believe, right.

How they feel in some ways, what they think.

And so there are a large number of folks who are unchurched, right.

And we're seeing this interestingly having impact in evangelical spaces, especially as they flat their loud, conservative evangelical are loud in terms about political discourse, but they're experiencing some interesting tensions as well.

But we see it at liberty among students.

You see it, in places where young people are not identifying themselves as evangelical anymore, not as many.

And so there are tensions a people are trying to figure out their beliefs.

Now, this is really important to talk about because we always thought the US was not susceptible to increasing secularization.

That was a European thing.

You know, religion is crucial critical to American identity.

But what we're seeing now, more and more are these unchurched people, these folk who're unidentified with any kind of religious system or tradition, but who consider themselves spiritual.

How about the relationship, as you have observed, but also historically between religion and politics?

Oh, remember America.

John Winthrop imagines the new world this, you know, the Americas as a new cane.

This is.

We're on our way, right?

A different covenant.

I mean, there's a way in which America is imagined as a new promised Land, right?

We're the new Israelites.

The religious architecture for the imagining of American identity, right, is unassailable.

We know it to be true.

And so not only that, doc, it's it's also, critical to justify in particular, institutions mean the way religion even a Princeton Theological Seminary generated justification for the institution of slavery.

The way in which we think about, how that was navigated and negotiated in relation to the emergence of an American identity.

Right.

Post the revolution.

Right.

Thinking about the impact.

I'm I'm not doing this in a linear way, but thinking about the impact of the the Great Awakening, the second Great Awakening.

All of this is critical to American self-understanding, but it's it's complicated.

We don't want to just think, you know, make the Puritans of New England right.

The ideal religious you know, expression of the US.

Because what's happening in New England is different than what's happening in the Mid-Atlantic states.

It's different tha what's happening in the South.

This very distinctive religious voice is emerging from these places and we tend to think that Puritan New England gave us, you know, our religious identity.

Not quite, not quite.

When we think about the South, for example the split over slavery, right.

Those Methodists those Baptist who initially said that you cannot hold slaves and be part of our you.

Right.

And eventually that split.

That's why you have Methodist South Methodist North that came together.

That' why you have Southern Baptist.

Right.

Before one bullet was shot in the Civil War, before one cannonball was fired.

American Christendom i split over the issue of slavery.

So when you look at religio and politics, when you look at religion and race, it's certainly not linear.

No.

And, when you consider, for example, even just going back 50 years and in the 50, 60 year and the civil rights era, right, and the different ways religion played out where you certainly had religion being used as a justification for restrictions on voting rights or for segregation.

And you also had religion being used, by those in the civi rights movement to, to motivate people to say, you know, it's it's time for a change.

Well, I mean, it's a complex it's a complex question and requires, I think, a nuanced answer.

I'm not going to give you that.

That is flat as possible, I think.

You know, one part of American speech, political speech is indebted to what the late Saxon Brnovich, the American civilization scholar at Harvard called the American Jeremiad the jeremiad as a form of speech in which one holds the nation accountable to a certain set of principles, a covenant.

And you've backslash there's backsliding.

And the only way we're going to save ourselves is that if we have to live up to the covenant.

Right.

And so the jeremiad as a form of political rhetoric, it's always been right, a particular way in which we'v engaged in political discourse.

And that Jeremiah discours could be from the vantage point of someone we might deem is conservative, or someone we might see as progressive.

Whatever those words might mean.

And so that's just a kind of backdrop.

The Jeremiah everyone is speaking in those in that language.

Oh, America is going to hell unless we live up to our principles.

These are principles we need to live by.

And until we do right, by those principles right we will lose our chosen steps.

You hear that rhetoric in Doctor King?

You can hear that rhetoric in George Wallace.

And remembe the letter from Birmingham Jail.

The letter from the Birmingham jail is not written to loud racist.

That's written to white clergy.

Right.

It's written for and to white liberals.

Right.

So we're all participating in this Fuller, right?

It's not settled which side it's on.

Right.

It's the solution in which we engage in debate and deliberation.

Now, what's fascinating, the late Richard Rorty philosopher would say, right, this stuff is, you know, this religious stuf is a conversation stopper.

Why?

Because we can't ge at the underlying assumptions.

Those assumptions are not subject to the liberation of question.

So those person who hold religious convictions, who enter into the public domain, they don't enter into the publi domain with the openness to be convinced otherwise.

I hold the truth.

And by virtue of that fact, you should listen to me.

So there certain folk, according to authority in the light, and other that wear religious commitments, distort and disfigure democratic deliberation.

I don't hold that view.

But I worry that when you know certain kinds of secular assumptions that demand that someone who holds religious commitments leave them at the door before they enter into the public domain, you create the conditions for bad faith.

So why don't you hold that view?

Because there's certainly a lot of rationality behind that argument.

I don't want people to engage in bad faith.

If the reason why you don't believe in same sex marriage is because you have a certain reading of the Bible, I want you to make that reasoned, explicit, and then you and I could have an argument on Christian grounds about what the Bible says, but I can't get to that claim if I've prohibited it fro being it from being expressed.

You see, so often what happen when we try to put these sorts of restrictions on religious folk, right?

We create the conditions for them to wear the mask.

And we think one thing is motivating their choices in their decision making, when it's actually another.

And I don't think religion is a conversation stopper.

We all bring the fullnes of our experiences information into the public square.

So do we have thos conversations in America today?

No.

Not really.

Not in a robust way.

We're fighting each other.

The public sphere is has we don't have a robust public sphere, robust public, you know idea of the public good anymore.

For the last 40 years, 50 years, we have become self-interested person in pursuit of our own aims and ends in competition and rivalry with each other.

That's a definition of the political rationality of neoliberalism.

Without using all of that technical gobbledygook from academe, right?

How do we change that?

Well, we have to understand that we live together, that there's a sense of mutuality, that we're all on the rafts.

But that, you know, if it's going to go down, we're all going down together.

And if that's true, then the conception of the good we ought to share, we ought to participate in giving it meaning and substance, making it concrete.

Instead, we're more interested in our own pride, the people that we care about.

Right As long as mine are doing good.

As long as I'm doing good, we're okay.

As long as I'm on that sinking boat and I can get a life jacket.

Yeah.

When there are no life jackets to be found, when in fac we have to repair the boat.

But.

So, talking about race you know, one of the things that that really interests me is, you know, what are the what are really the challenge to challenges today when you look at race in America and racial justice, racial equity.

You know, I've been writin about this here because I think at the heart of it all, I think at the heart of it all is that we've yet to discover who we are.

We've yet to figure out who we are as Americans.

And the reason why we've yet to figure it out is because we don't want to look the fact of race squarely in its face.

There is a you know, there's when you look at the founding and we're coming up on the 250th anniversary of the nation.

When you look at the foundin and you look at the compromises that brought the nation state into existence.

And Andrew Delbanco, the historian at Columbia, has written beautifully about this.

And to think about all of the disassociation, all of a of the dirty magic to render invisible the contradiction that's at the heart of the Commerce Clause, the contradiction that's at the heart of the fugitive slave Clause.

The contradiction is at the heart right of the 3/5 clause.

The contradiction i at the heart of representation in the country, right?

Right.

Because we don't want to name it, we've failed to look squarely in the face who we actually are.

You know, Ralp Ellison has that wonderful line in Invisible Man on the lower frequencies.

We speak for you, right?

And so I think at the hear of the problem with race today, is our refusal to acknowledge as a nation, right, how black we really are.

Now, I say that in a provocative way.

Right?

Meaning what?

Oh, we can't think about America without understanding the centrality of this contradiction.

I mean, the first American public theater is minstrelsy.

The first major film production, birth of a nation.

Fascinating.

The literature, the American Renaissance, Melville's.

Well, we can go down.

What's at the heart of it?

Our music, our dialect, the way our English sound has everything to do with how deeply diverse we are.

We've always been this at the heart of our identity.

But for some reason, an this is America's original sin, which means that it's not really ours is probably England's.

America's original sin is that it believes that white people, because of the color of their skin, ough to be valued more than others.

And then everything follows from that with whatever happens to the native peoples, whatever happens to say, okay.

Everything follows from that hubris, right?

I use that as hubris to call for tragedy.

Right.

You're you're being polite when you use.

Hubris, right?

Yeah, but a lot.

Of other terms.

All right.

I, I want to go.

I really want to go into some issues related to race.

But before that, because of your work, because of, of what you discuss nationally, I, I'd like your take on what do you think are the most serious challenges to our democracy long term?

The most serious challenge i that we don't have the ability to engage in substantive and thoughtful deliberation.

If the citizenry doesn't have the information requisite to make informed decisions about the distribution of resources, the distribution of burden and benefit, then the idea of self-governance that's so central to democracy makes no sense.

So if we don't have the ability to engage in the kind of argument and deliberation requisite to hold each other accountable and to hold representatives accountable, then democracy is a wrap.

And so there's the ecosystem of information dissemination, so fragmented that we don't know what truth is.

We don't know what we don't even debating fact right.

That it makes we'r all kind of in our silos, right.

Affirming our own conceptions of the world.

And we think democracy is going to work.

No it won't.

So the first thing we have to do is to begin to understand what is the nature of the public sphere and public responsibility.

So that's at a certain level of abstraction.

The next element is that if we don't address the issue of race.

At its heart, I've never been the problem.

Never.

Black folk have never been.

This is James Baldwin.

I've never been the N-word.

The question is, why do you need the N-word?

Why do you call me the N-word?

You know, and so then he says, I'm goin to give the N-word back to you.

Who's really the N-word here?

Right?

So the question is never about the problem isn't black folk.

The problem isn't brown folk.

The problem is this notion of whiteness that distorts and disfigure so much.

So Abraham Lincoln can't even become the kind of man his conception of democracy requires, because he's too willing to throw it away.

In defense of this notion of whiteness.

Right.

So if until we begin to understand the diversity that's at the heart of who we are as Americans, we're going to continue to make decision that are going to short circuit.

The very virtues that democracy is required, to put it more bluntly, a certain kind of understanding, a certain understanding of race, a certain understanding of who we are distorts.

And this figures our character such that we can't become the kinds of people democracies required.

Those two issues for me.

Then the third issue, greed.

Greed.

And of course, greed carries with it in total selfishness.

The public good is anemic over the last 40 years, because we've become what self-interested perso is in pursuit of our own aims.

It ends when we take care of our own selfishness, greed for money.

I mean, I guess Max Faber was right about the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism.

We live it, you know, intimately.

But what does it mean when folk are so preoccupied with making money that they're willin to throw everything else away?

What would it mean, morally and ethically, for there to be a trillionaire in the world?

I find that to be evil.

One person with $1 trillion.

So greed distorts the good everyone's hoarding, an so you don't have a distribution of resources across folks so that of everybody, no matter the color of their skin, no matter their zip code, no matter their gender, no matter their ability, can not only dream dreams, but to make that dreams a reality.

That's a John Dewey formulation.

It's called effective freedom.

So when it comes to great wealth, does having great wealt automatically corrupts someone?

Not necessarily.

And if and if if it were someone aligned with with your philosophy, your perspectives, who had great wealth and that trillionaire was using their wealth to do good things, would you reconsider?

Philanthropy is not justice.

Philanthropy is not justice.

So if I'm interested in justice, right, I don't.

It's not about distributing resources in this way and that way that could assuage your conscience or that could generate some.

No no no no no.

We want to create the conditions under which effective freedom can be manifest.

Well, I'm going to jump on the other side of the fence and argue that on your side of that argument is that having that kind of wealth be distributed by one person is not healthy.

Oh, no, no not at all.

For I'm the country.

I'm trying to talk about a system that allows for people to hoard, to hoard resources.

Right.

And what does that mean?

Right.

For the bottom 90, 90%.

And what's the what's the benefit?

What's the reward?

What what what's the idea of the good that animates that life?

So I'm not demonizing the super rich, right?

I'm calling into question the world that produced them.

And the need to be super rich.

What about, you know, you were talking about engagement.

So.

So my my sense is, i I talk and have talked and work with and been involved with so many thousands of people.

My sense if I, if I can put this accurately, is that I think people are interested in, in engaging I think people I think Americans have that capacity.

I would argue they don't do it.

They don't d the research needed to find out what's really going on with a specific issue.

They're not learning about the history of our country.

They're arguing about, well, we don't want someone else's history to be taught, but at the same time they'll say, oh, yeah, we want history to be taught accurately, but then they really don't.

And I've alway put it, I guess, pejoratively, I've I've argued that for the most part, and I'm going to get a lot of flack for this when it comes to civic discussion, debate, understanding, gaining knowledge.

Americans are lazy.

Right?

Right.

And so they're not.

Most of us are not well informed.

We are not willing to take the time to research, even do minimal research.

If we hear some incredible rumor or statement and it fits our narrative.

We don't check into it to see if it's not true.

We repeat it.

We post it.

We magnify it.

Social medi has made that worse, I suspect.

You sound like Walter Lippmann.

You're giving me way too much credit.

Oh, and the phantom public, right.

That is to say, you know, Walter Lippmann is writing in the context of mass consumer culture that everyday, ordinary people are too distracted to take o the responsibility of democracy.

And what we need are or these bureaucratic elite who are principally responsible for these things because everyday, ordinary folk art informed aren't connected enough to, to, to do, to acquire the requisit information and knowledge to use your language is a too damn lazy or too damn preoccupied.

You shouldn't use them though.

But you know to to do.

It's a family show.

Yeah.

Right.

But but but but I'm also saying that we need to find.

So the the extensio of that argument by some is that decisions should only be made by the elite.

Right.

That's the opposite of what I'm saying.

I'm saying the elit should be focused on encouraging all Americans to take the time and make the effort.

Right.

So what would that mean?

What would that look like?

Would that mean that we've changed?

We shift from a 40 hour workweek to a 36 hour workweek.

They have it in France.

What would it mean to create a society where people are not overrun by responsibility?

Everyday, ordinary folk who are trying to keep their noses above water, who are trying to make ends meet, put food on the table, sneak in some enjoyment, rest on a Sunday if they can.

Right.

Hopefull they might have the weekend off, but for the most part, they'r working themselves to the bone.

Look at look at the number of hours Americans work compared to other countries.

We work like dogs, but also th people at the top are the same.

They're working ridiculous hours in their effort to maximize how much money and how much wealth they can have.

So you have a divided America where the the bottom of America has to work ridiculously to survive.

And the top of America has to work so they can accumulate wealth, and so they can have as much or more than their neighbor or than their corporate competitor.

And so where's the time to engage civically?

This is a great question, and it takes u to the heart of full of so much.

But but that then also makes us vulnerable to those people who know how to manipulate it with catchphrases, with easy answers, with accusations.

Because we won't tak ten minutes, five minutes to do the easy research to find ou if what they are saying is true.

Right?

Or and or those very persons who are working hard, working their behinds off to accumulate wealth will then deploy that wealth in order to impact political decision making.

And maximize so they.

Can continue to maximize their wealth.

So we have a captured so there.

But then of cours that wealth also affords them, an experience of leisure that folk and the bottom quintile of the don't have.

Right.

So, you know, I'm a, I'm a professor.

You know, I keep telling these folk who work so hard, my friends who are lawyers and in big law such, I'm part of the leisure class.

I get paid to read and write.

You have to, you know, work for this money that you work for, you know.

Remember the new bourgeoisie in the dawn of modernity, these folk will look down upon, you know, this folk working so hard in order to accumulate.

But they were looked down upon by the old money as it work.

Right.

So all of this is to say I think at the end of the day, that what we need to do is to really, really engage in a close examination of what we value, what constitute a meaningful life in this place.

Right.

Because you look up, you've been working all your life.

And next thing you know you're taking your last breath.

And where is meaning in that journey, right.

Because you blin and your baby's a grown person.

You blink and you look in the mirror and all the hair is gone.

You suddenly gray, and you're trying to figure out what happened to the joy.

When did you have it?

And so what constitute a meaningful life in this place?

And then you add to that, what does it mean to be responsible to another in the context of such an arduous journey?

Perhaps we're not lazy.

Perhaps we're intentionally shallow so that we don't even grapple with that question.

So we don't even have to grapple with that right?

Professor, thank you so much.

That was part one of our special three part series.

So make sure you watch our other two segments.

I'm Erin Harbor.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.

I'm Erin host of the Aaron Harbor show.

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