(gentle music) - [Announcer] Thank you for joining us for Worshiping Trump, with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Rob Schenck and Lenny Duncan, moderated by Kirsten Powers.

Before we begin, thank you to our founding sponsor, the Kerry & Linda Killinger Foundation.

- Hello, and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Kirsten Powers.

I'm going to be moderating a fascinating conversation today with three people who have a lot of ideas and fresh perspectives on the intersection of faith and politics and culture, and the topic that we are tackling today, Worshiping Trump.

We have with us the Rev.

Rob Schenck, who is an ordained evangelical minister, who has directed a home for recovering heroin addicts and has led pastoral and missionary work around the globe.

He spent 30 years as a political activist on the religious right, which landed him squarely in the middle of some of our country's most contentious debates.

His most recent book is titled "Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister's Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love".

The Rev.

Lenny Duncan has been everything from a high school dropout, drug dealer, sex worker, poet, hitchhiker, drifter, seminarian, political activist, and is now the Pastor of the Jubilee Collective in Vancouver, Washington.

He's the author of the forthcoming book, "United States of Grace: A Memoir of Homelessness, Addiction, Incarceration, and Hope".

It's out May 18th, so pre-order it as soon as we're finished.

And finally we have Dr. Kristin Du Mez.

She is a Professor of History at Calvin University where she focuses on the intersection of gender, religion and politics in recent American history.

Her new book is titled "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation".

And I would like to know also that the organizers did reach out to an evangelical that supports Trump, and we couldn't find anybody.

So we'll do our best to try to represent that perspective.

But let's welcome our panelists, Rev.

Duncan, Rev.

Schenck, and Dr. Du Mez.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I wanna start with Rev.

Duncan.

How surprised were you when white evangelicals supported and rallied around Donald Trump?

- Not at all (clears throat) The interesting thing was that I knew from the minute he came down, that golden escalator, he was gonna be president of the United States.

And part of it is because, I think part it because and Saturday Night Live famously did a skit about this, right?

Where like no black people were surprised, if you remember, then the election nights skit where all the white people were like, this is the most shocking thing never happened.

And all the black people were like, okay.

This is directly from their playbook.

You're talking about a movement that was built on segregationism, right?

That didn't work for them, so they moved it to women's bodies and the anti-abortion movement.

And they've constantly weaponized themselves as a political ideology that has come down over and over again with white supremacy and some of the worst politics of our country over and over again.

So this wasn't surprising at all.

This is exactly where the evangelical movement has been headed since it started.

- Rev.

Schenck, you have been, you still consider yourself an evangelical and you have been part of the movement for a very, very long time, and you've rethought some of your core views and have talked about that, particularly on abortion.

How did it seem to you when you saw him come down that escalator, or did you expect to see even white evangelicals rallying around him?

- Well, had I known Rev.

Duncan at that time, maybe I would have been better prepared because it did take me by surprise mostly because frankly, when I was on the religious right, the hard religious right, I often use Donald Trump as the epitome of what it meant to be an immoral person, to violate the 10 commandments, For example.

In fact I can remember in one sermon checking off the numbers of commandments that Donald Trump had violated flagrantly (laughs) He was a great sermon example.

So when my folks went over to Donald Trump and I watched him work the room.

In fact, the first time I encountered him in person was at the 80th birthday party of one of the premier Christian celebrities in the country, and he had worked the room that was Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, CBN, and I watched him work a room, and as I saw each table full of my colleagues, very conservative evangelical leaders from all over the United States fall in line, frankly, by that time I was mortified.

I thought something very terrible was happening here.

And that worked in concert with my own examination of the parallels between what happened in Nazi Germany to the Evangelische Reichskirche, the evangelical church of that country of that period, and what was happening among my own peers.

And that put me on a different path.

So I didn't see it coming.

And I suppose I should have.

- Mm-hmm.

We'll have to get back to the Germany reference.

Dr. Du Mez, I just want you to weigh in on this.

- Yeah.

So as a historian, I have been looking into evangelical understandings of masculinity for a number of years already, particularly militant conception of Christian manhood, Christian masculinity, and I noticed how already for 15, 20 years, they've really been embracing this kind of warrior masculinity.

And when I looked into it, I saw that there was a much longer history actually.

So the idea that a Christian man, a Christian leader needed to be aggressive, needed to be tough, needed to be able to do whatever needed to be done to protect faith, family and nation.

And so that was in the back of my mind and I hadn't actually been paying super close attention and I'm very bad at predicting the future as a historian anyway, so I can't say that I knew right away that that Donald Trump was going to be the next president, but I was watching evangelicals very closely, especially through the primary season, and seeing more and more and backing Donald Trump really from the grassroots up, from the bottom up, not initially from the leadership.

And I started paying attention to the language that I was hearing to justify this support, language about he's our ultimate fighting champion.

He will protect us.

He will protect Christianity.

And (laughs) this resonated with what I had heard before, what I had read in this popular evangelical literature, right?

That millions of books on this rugged Christian masculinity had been bought and read and studied by evangelicals for a couple of decades now.

And so that was really the connection for me, what I came to see with the election then, it really crystallized around the Access Hollywood tape release.

Right?

I thought, well, we've seen this before.

And then with the election, the language that I was hearing in by some pundits, how could evangelicalism betray their values?

From the history I had studied, I realized that wasn't the right framing.

We just needed a better understanding of what evangelical values actually were.

- Can you just say a little bit more about that?

Because you're saying that it wasn't a betrayal of the values.

- Sure.

- What exactly do you mean?

When we think of family values of evangelicals are the moral majority, that sounds quite lovely.

But if you look historically at what's really at the core of angelical family values, it really does come down to the assertion of white patriarchal authority.

And the whiteness is important in the patriarchal authority.

And historically you can see that in terms of the origins of the religious right, the role of protecting school segregation, and really the reassertion masculine power.

And this is back in the Cold War era, Vietnam War era, right?

All of this was really the catalyst for the rise of the religious right and for the formation of contemporary evangelical political and cultural identity.

And if you locate the assertion protection of white patriarchal authority at the heart of family values, evangelicalism, that's where you can really see the consistency here.

- It's, mm-hmm.

- Go ahead.

- No, I was just gonna say that's 100% it is that from my perspective, what we're constantly running into is the deaf gas of white supremacy in the public sphere, and it's grabbing anything it can, and part of what it's grabbing is the evangelical movement.

This is a movement that can even recognize, this is a movement that would put Christ to death today.

If a brown man robbed a religious bank after having a street-style protest, they would absolutely support his death, right?

This is, they wouldn't even recognize Jesus if He showed up.

So it all is about reinforcing white supremacists or white heteronormativity on the world.

You even look at what some of the problems that it's having with in the UMC Church right now, right?

That's just a product of colonialism.

They went over there and did missionary work where they convinced a bunch of African bishops that the best way to live in the world is to have 2.5 kids in the nuclear home and support capitalism and all these American values, and now the UMC is gonna be split in half because those same bishops came back and they won't allow QUEER kids into their denomination, right?

This is all a product of colonialism, white supremacy, and the reinforcement of that.

And it's very important to America and this republic that that continues to happen, and evangelicalism is the fuel for it.

It's the religious fire that they throw on it.

It's how they get people fired up about it and believe just like the doctor was talking, it's about king and country and serving the Lord and protecting their family.

It's (snaps fingers) - Right, as pastor, can you speak because a lot of people in our audience are not necessarily religious.

And so could you speak to them what you just said, that they have created this image of Jesus that is incorrect?

Could you explain to somebody who perhaps isn't a believer or isn't familiar?

Although honestly, I often find that people who aren't believers know more about Jesus than some of the people in the church, but if you could just maybe explain what they're seeing incorrectly.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I think the big mistake that religious leaders, particularly American religious leaders have mistaken the story of Christ is it's through a conspiracy of the state and religious leaders that the Messiah is killed.

You have to understand for Jesus to be publicly lynched, and that's what we experienced in the gospel, which Jesus being publicly lynched the same way Emmett Till was lynched, the same way that Trayvon Martin was lynched, the same way that George Floyd was lynched, by the same systems.

Think about it.

He's arrested in the middle of the night for false charges.

His friends have to escape an arrest.

He's then publicly lynched, ripped naked, which is sexual assault in front of the entire community, beaten to the core, who's experienced that model in America other than black Americans?

Whose life is that in this republic?

Right?

And then how's he died?

Well, it's through a conspiracy of religious leaders working with the state.

Who is the state?

Rome.

And who does Rome represent?

Well, it's the first time European show up in the Bible, and it's also (laughs) it's also it's empire.

It's what we're building now.

It's like the American empire.

So it's the exact same thing.

So what we have is a story of a savior through a conspiracy of religious leaders and political leaders being murdered by law enforcement, legally.

- Mm-hmm.

Rev.

Schenck.

- Do you know what I mean?

That's a different way of putting it, yeah.

- Yeah, no, Rev.

Schenck, I'm interested in your reflection on this and how it plays into the support of continued support and worship of Donald Trump, because I think if we had somebody here who was a pro-Trump evangelical, their head probably would've exploded by now, right?

They don't, why is it that so many white evangelicals can't see this in this story when it's so clearly what's happening?

This is not, Jesus was not a Westerner.

Jesus was not a a big strong Rambo man.

He wasn't any of these things that they keep suggesting that he is.

In fact he was poor and brown.

Why are white evangelicals who I always hear saying all they care about is the literal truth of the Bible so resistance to seeing the literal truth of the Bible?

- Well, because it challenges us.

I direct the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young, brilliant, brave Christian leader in Nazi-era Germany.

He was an early opponent of Adolph Hitler and national socialism.

He would lose his life in that struggle at age 39.

But Bonhoeffer reminds us that when we read the Bible, we have to read the Bible against ourselves, not for ourselves.

It's not to reinforce who we think we are and our presuppositions and imaginations, it's to challenge all those things.

And that's why I'm gonna say, as we do in evangelicalism, yay and amen to Rev.

Duncan will preach there, which was pretty inspiring.

And when you hear the truth spoken, and one of the truths I've been speaking lately to my colleagues, most of my colleagues and friends support Donald Trump, in fact ardently defend him to this day.

And one of them literally defended him on the floor of the United States Senate in the first impeachment.

So I keep company in conversation with these folks and we text and we talk and we email and we exchange opinions and ideas, and most of them are unaware that Jesus was a man of color.

- What about geography?

I'm sorry, I have a really hard time with this.

It's like, it's geography.

Look at, at who do they think lives there?

- Well European Israeli.

Israeli with European blood, that's who they imagine lives there.

And incidentally, I'm gonna talk as something of an insider here, my father was Jewish of Ashkenazi descent.

My mother born Catholic, raised Episcopalian and converted to Judaism to marry my father, and I was raised in a Jewish environment, but it was European Judaism.

And that's what people imagined because most of the leaders you see in Israel are of European descent.

So let's say Jesus looked like the German, and in fact, most of them have a portrait in their church or in their home that reflects that.

And so that's how they've been formed.

I was formed a little bit differently.

I was aware that Jesus was a Middle Eastern man from the Levant and therefore looked more like a North African than he would have like a European.

And that always kind of left me with curiosity.

Like, does anybody really know what Jesus looked like here?

He didn't look like a Scandinavian immigrant as we see in most churches in the Midwest in the United States, but most evangelicals have grown up only on that.

That's how they've been shaped and formed.

So some of this, it is educational.

Some of it is simply administering doses of reality, but an awful lot of it will be denied and refused, so this is a struggle I'm engaged in because frankly I'd like to stay in evangelical.

I'm not sure that I can, but I would like to.

I've been one for most of my life, going on 50 years now.

And there's a good thread that runs through the history of evangelicalism.

There are Pacifist churches, peace churches today that do wonderful work advocating for social justice.

They are welcoming people, loving people.

I would like to identify with that wing of evangelicalism.

The other may be so toxic now that it's irreparable.

I'm not sure, we may have reached a fatal stage of the demoralization of American evangelicalism.

- Well.

Dr. Du Mez, what do you think about that?

Do you think that there is a, I don't know, the strain that Rev.

Schenck is talking about?

- There definitely is.

There's always been, as one historian has called it, a moral minority.

Within the evangelical movement, there's always been a social justice wing.

We have the evangelical left.

And what I see today is many of those or at least some of them have walked away, right?

Are unable to hold this together anymore.

The evangelicalism now has really essentially come to mean white conservative, Republican politics for many people.

And some people wanna kind of fight against that and reclaim evangelicalism, but others are now becoming evangelicals because they're joining that understanding of evangelicalism.

And so the power dynamics are certainly on the side of the kind of white conservative, Republican understanding of what it is to be an evangelical.

But you do have a dissent within the white evangelical community.

I've been observing that significant dissent.

And I think in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, in light of the last four years, and even escalating in the last several months, I think post-January 6, I've seen an interesting sorting out, kind of resorting within white evangelicalism, that there are many people who are kind of looking across this chasm, the chasm cuts through churches, through families, people who thought they believed the same thing, people who said the same words, who prayed the same prayers are now looking at each other and saying, who are you?

What do you believe?

And so what I see happening this ever angelical reckoning that somebody like Ed Setser has referred to is real.

But what I see is it's largely an individual reckoning.

So I see a lot of white evangelical saying, this is not what I believe, how could you?

And some of them are leaving their churches.

Some of them are trying to change their churches.

You have pastors who are trying to preach (laughs) against this, but many of them are losing their jobs.

And so I see institutionally very little shifting yet within white evangelicalism.

The institutions are holding strong.

The donors, the constituents are very powerful.

And so many of the evangelicals themselves who are saying, this is not what I believe, find they have to walk away.

They end up leaving.

And so this reckoning is happening largely on the individual level.

The institutions are, I'm not seeing much institutional change at all.

- And may I just add an asterisks to the professor's remarks there quickly, and that is if white American evangelicalism can be reclaimed at all, it will probably require a revolution, a reformation on the scale of the 16th-century reformation, because it has to be so radically changed and transformed to the core.

I don't think trimming around the edges will help.

The core has to change.

And this is where my hero, I keep, I always reference Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he's worthy of some attention in our time because the backdrop of his own crisis in Germany reflected much of what we're experiencing in the white evangelical church here in the U.S. And Bonhoeffer, when he was challenged even as a young teenager, he was asked by his family, why would you want to join up with a moribund institution as a theologian or a member of the clergy?

He said, if the church is more abundant and corrupt, then I shall reform it.

He was that bold and brash.

And I think we have to go to the core that both the professor and, and Pastor Duncan referred to here.

We have to go to the absolute core of it.

And that will be very painful and tumultuous, but it has to happen.

- Yeah.

Pastor Duncan, do you think that that's a possibility?

- Yeah.

I say it's already happening.

The good thing for the Christian Church is that QUEER people and BiPAP people are coming to save your asses, like we always do, like we always do for the republic.

Right?

The good thing is that you've got people like James Cone and womanist theologians who have been setting the stage for this for a long time that most of the candidates coming to mainline seminaries are either QUEER or QUEER-adjacent, that there are trans people who are like representing the power of the (indistinct) day or the divine in this world, that this reformation has been happening the entire time, and what we're really seeing out of evangelicalism is its response to that.

And most major American seminaries, you can't even gender God without getting an F on a paper, but most pastors are afraid to tell you about the Sacred Feminine from the Fulton.

It's beyond the fact that they are trying to, 'cause education is a part of it, but as a pastor and as a clergy member, we play a part in it.

And clericalism is really the problem with the church right now.

It's a fact that most people wanna retire off the widow's mite.

Most pastors want to retire off the widow's mite.

At our church at Jubilee Collective, our whole thing is we don't even call ourselves a church, and our saying is our job is to work pastor Lenny out of the job.

We need to be preparing people for the world beyond the Christian Church because there will be no Christian witness in America if we do not throw ourselves wholeheartedly into the work of dismantling white supremacy.

And I think the timetables moved up.

I used to think it was 58 years from now, I think it's like 10 or 15.

Not only are the institutions dying, but the sacred story of the revolutionary Jesus Christ may be gone from the North American continent.

And it will only be a phenomenon of the global South.

And that's because that is who Jesus always is with, the people on the streets.

Here in Portland, he's out marching every day.

I don't know what Jesus is doing in your town.

And it's not the Christ that evangelicalism knows or the mainline church for that matter.

We have just as much sin, just as much brokenness and just as much to pay back to this republic as anyone else.

So as a pastor, it's our own desire to keep our own jobs, our selfishness and our fear to tell the truth.

That is the problem with the church.

It falls a lot at our feet.

- Yeah, but think something we've all been talking about is that with the white evangelical church though, they're very focused on and very good at, frankly, amassing power.

And so it's not, it's we speak of it as a church, as a religion, as a spiritual movement, but it's also, we were talking during the break, it's sort of like a corporation or a business or an ideology.

It's, which is why it's hard to imagine it going away, because I think right now we're seeing a lot in the news, the latest move that they've made is to come out against critical race theory and completely distort its meaning.

People who actually work in anti-racism I know were like, what are they even talking about?

It was just sort of coming out of nowhere.

Like no one really even believes what they say that it is and, but they're very good at framing the conversations that culture is having even people outside of their sphere of influence.

So I don't know if any of you wants to weigh in on this, but I'm interested in your thoughts about what they're doing or what they're trying to accomplish.

I certainly have my ideas with this critical race theory.

- I would say their goal is accomplished though.

It's Christian nationalism.

Their goal is accomplished.

I don't know if the evangelical church is even a church anymore if it's just become a nationalist ideology.

And that's what it really is.

And critical race theory plays a part in that.

You have to keep white people pure and you have to keep this country pure and keep them in power.

And there I think lies the critical question, what is the nature of the American evangelical movement now?

Is it the church?

Are we even Christian?

And I would argue that in fact, we are not.

We are no longer a Christian movement.

We are no longer a church.

I lived through that transformation.

I made my public profession of faith in Jesus Christ in 1974.

By 1985, I was sitting in the front row at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals when Ronald Reagan addressed us, and felt the glow and the power.

And it's very seductive.

And I don't mean to, excuse myself, I'm deeply ashamed and I'm embarrassed and I regret the 30 years I spent on the religious right, but I became a convert.

In that moment, I became a convert to a new movement and it was a political movement and it was informed and energized by the reach for power and domination and control.

And I watched it unfold and it all but ruined my faith and it took another conversion for me to relocate Jesus Christ and the gospel.

- If I (indistinct) yeah, real quickly, I just wanna let everyone to know that we will be taking questions, but we're just gonna talk for a little bit more and probably about five minutes, we'll start taking questions.

So go ahead.

- Sure.

So as a historian, I've examined evangelicalism, and not just kind of top-down leadership, but also evangelicalism as a popular culture, as a consumer culture even.

And so I (laughs) affirm everything you said in terms of it isn't ideology, right?

But it's not just an ideology.

It's an ideology that has been really perpetuated through sermons, through devotional practices, through Bible studies, right?

It's mixed together.

It is a faith, right?

It is a religion and it's an ideology.

And so people are reading books or they're listening to Christian radio, right?

They're listening to Focus on the Family and they're learning about how to raise your kids, but in a way that is caught up in this ideology that also has very clear political implications.

And they're reading devotional literature that presents a Jesus that does not look like the Jesus that Rev.

Duncan was describing at all.

This Jesus is a white man on a horse with tattoos down his leg, and he's charging into battle wielding a bloody sword, slaying his enemies, and that is the Christ that they are to follow.

Right?

And so it is a faith.

It is a genuine faith and it is linked up with Christianity.

And I think one of the things that history can do and that I try to do in this historical study is to show how the two became entangled, right?

This kind of biblical Christianity with this cultural and political packaging.

And because so many evangelicals have lived inside this evangelicalism subculture, right?

They have not heard the outside stories.

They have not heard the stories of the brown Jesus.

They have, this is Christianity, default Christianity to them, and it is Christian nationalism, and it is linked up with white supremacy, but it has always been packaged and sold just as plain Christianity.

And so they need to get step outside of that culture, of that consumer culture and they need to encounter other ideas.

And when that happens, that's when you see this change happening, that's when you see this epiphany.

And I've seen it so many times, I've heard from so many readers who this is, I lived this, this was the story of my life, but I never understood how all these pieces fit together.

And it's because they have largely controlled their own narrative, consumed their own story and needing to hear that outside story, that is what will challenge it for them.

- And also, I just wanna say that's true, that's very true.

I don't wanna sound like I'm trying to say that they aren't Christian.

No, they're inherently Christian.

Christianity created racism.

That is what the (indistinct) was.

It was the first time blood was used to define the difference between people.

That's, The Mother Church invented racism and race, and Mother Church supported to transatlantic slave group, colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, these are all the creations of Mother Church.

And so to pretend that we're, I just don't wanna come off as this.

I'm trying to say as a pastor that I represent some different Christianity.

No, I inherit that 1,800-year-old apostolic tradition of oppression and all the other good stuff too.

- Yeah, exactly.

That's all mine.

- Yeah.

Which is why I think it's both and in the church, right?

The church has both been an unbelievably oppressive, brutal force in this world, and it's done a lot of wonderful things and it has a lot of wonderful things to offer.

I think the question is how do Christians make things right in this world, the things that they've broken?

How do you then come forward and try to fix where you've made a mistake?

And I I'll say Pastor Schenck, you have modeled that a little bit with reckoning, and I'm gonna move over now to some questions from the people who are watching and it relates to how you reckoned with your work around abortion.

Somebody asks, how does the panel feel that the issue of abortion is so divisive and attractable for our country?

Can we have any hope that we'll find common ground or make some kind of peaceful compromise on this issue?

And I'm wondering, Pastor Schenck, if you could talk a little bit about that and just tell a little bit about your story.

- Well, I'll just start by saying, I entered what is commonly referred to as the pro-life movement back in the late '80s.

When I did, we identified very closely for good or for bad with the civil rights struggle.

We sang all those songs.

We listened to those voices.

MLK was a popular figure in that movement, but that quickly waned when we shifted attention away from our concept of vulnerable human beings, both a mom and child, and shifted towards curing that problem through legislation, through bullying tactics, through violence in word and eventually in deed.

There were people in my wing of the movement who were present in events I hosted, but eventually picked up guns and started shooting abortion providers and others.

So that shift occurred very early on in the movement and it took me a long time to face the reality of that.

Once I did, I realized this is no longer about vulnerable human beings.

This is about dominating and controlling vulnerable human beings.

Again, for the same reasons we've been discussing up to this point, I had to come to terms with that and a whole lot more, including the propaganda that we had published and promoted for three decades and eventually became a tool for individuals who could not have cared less about the victims or the vulnerable.

They cared only about one thing, using abortion as a quick means to mobilize voters in their favor.

And that was the Republican Party.

It became crystal clear to me too late in the game that the individuals I was working with in Washington, D.C. in the Congress and elsewhere regarded the pain and sorrow and drama surrounding abortion as anything worth their attention.

It was only will it get us the votes we need?

And that was the end of the matter.

And at that point I had to start re-evaluating and that came too late in the game.

- Yeah, and I think it's fair to say Trump weaponized that issue pretty well.

- Most definitely.

- Yeah.

So for another question from somebody who's watching, they'd like to know how the prosperity gospel influenced evangelical supportive Trump.

Dr. Du Mez.

- Yeah.

That was a very influential wing.

And you can get kind of pure a prosperity gospel, but then just the influence of these teachings throughout American evangelicalism, right?

Because evangelicals are rather promiscuous consumers within this larger movement.

And so the reach of the teachings of success, of what leadership looks like is somebody who is wealthy, right?

In this case, I looked a lot at ideals of leadership in terms of masculinity in terms of power, but you can be a warrior on the battlefield, you can be a warrior in the world of business, right?

And there to the ends will justify the means.

And so if you are, for somebody like Trump who appeared to be incredibly successful, incredibly wealthy if you ignore all of his bankruptcies and his debt and so on, right?

That he absolutely kind of fit into this framework of clearly God is blessing him, and his success is proof of that rather than what I think probably many or at least our pastors here today would argue that the model of Jesus is not one of worldly success, right?

It's one of divesting of power.

It is one of poverty, of self-sacrifice, but the influence of the prosperity gospel throughout evangelicalism and through this popular culture, through televangelism and so on certainly did set up many evangelicals to see somebody like Donald Trump as somebody who was anointed by God, who was this model of success, even though that really, I think, contradicts the heart of the gospel teachings.

- Yes.

- And I would only add to that quickly that money of course equals power.

- Yes.

- And when we discovered, I can tell you from the inside, when I would sit with fundraising professionals who told me that the more anger and the more fear that I can gin up, the more money I will get for you, the more money you have, the more power and influence you will have.

And I watched that take charge, just take possession of the movement I had identified with for three decades at that point, and it completely changed the nature of it, completely changed it, and I would say at that point, I had apostatized from the gospel.

So this all again, and remember that the temptation to power in evangelical theology comes from Satan, not from God.

- Yes.

Pastor Duncan, this is for you, what did you see when Trump cleared the crowd with teargas to hold his photo op at the St. John Church during Black Lives Matter rally in front of the White House?

- Yeah, at that time, I was mostly spending my time in Portland in front of the Justice Center, putting holy water and praying over all the people who were being shot at by federal agents and being kidnapped by Trump's personal army, which is by the way very disturbing when a border patrol starts operating in the interior of a country.

That's usually what happens before republic falls.

But what I saw, honestly, what I talked about is a couple things.

The first thing it was proof that the church is no longer God's chosen vessel on earth, I believe, like in the bottom of my heart.

And that's a hard thing to swallow as a minister, and this'll be my last call as a minister.

Once I finished this call, I can no longer with integrity work for the Christian Church.

I've informed my bishops and everyone about that.

The second thing is this is exactly what we're going to see out of the so-called Christian Church as it continues to go forward.

What we saw was exactly what you would expect, this Davidic-like figure like the doctor's talking about.

Right?

And we forget that in the Bible, David is, he commits sexual assault.

He murders his friends.

Like he's not a great guy, right?

But evangelical is create this narrative around this tough guy, this Davidic figure who, even though he's not so great, God will find a way to fix everything he does and it will build up the new Israel, the new city on a hill, America.

And in that moment, in front of the National Cathedral, we saw exactly what we saw during the lynching of Christ in the gospel.

We saw through a conspiracy of state leaders and religious leaders, the collective consciousness of America being okay with chemical weapons we don't even use in warfare being dropped on black people in front of the Episcopal National Cathedral.

Now, you can say that Trump is disgusting for doing that, but then a week later, the National Cathedral had the American flag blasted all over it, right?

You know the National Cathedral.

So what we saw there was exactly what we saw.

Well, we always see that black people in this country are the canary in the coal mine for freedom and justice in this republic.

And what they do to us in the daylight, they will do to you in the dark.

And Christ is clearly with us because we're the ones who are still suffering in the streets.

Christ is more likely a black trans woman in this country than he is a white cis man.

And it's just the total perversion of theology, people's belief and truly being duped by the church.

And it's heartbreaking, but it's exactly what the church has always used for, to oppress those on the margins.

That's all the American church has ever been used for in a lot of ways.

- But there's one thing, you've brought up this David thing, and if we've heard it once, we heard it a million times, right?

Yeah, comparing Donald Trump's to King David, a man after God's own heart, but of course, I'm not trying to get to a theological here, but I think it does matter that they left out the part where David repented.

- Right, what- - So I'm just saying it does seem like that there is that they do tend to just pick out the things that they want.

Rev.

Schenck, you're more in that world, I guess.

How do they square that circle?

They also believe by the way that God killed Bathsheba, David's first child.

So that there was punishment.

I'm not saying I believe that, but that's what they believe.

So how do they square that circle with Donald Trump, that of course he's never repented, to our knowledge, for anything, and certainly hadn't at that time?

- I think, sadly, that we've so lost sight of the prerequisite set to Christian faith as I've always understood it, which is humility.

And with humility comes self doubt.

You have to ask yourself, where am I wrong?

How am I wrong?

Who have I violated?

And how have I violated them?

We think because it's an old model vet, the path to evangelical Christian faith starts at an altar of weeping, where we go to say, God, I am sorry for my sins and how I have sinned against you and against my fellow human beings.

Once you remove that initial step of humility and you say, no, I'm not wrong.

I'm right.

In fact I'm right on everything.

And I'm more right than anyone else.

Now, I think you have completely defected from the Christian faith.

There is no faith in that.

There is no dependency on God or a savior.

So this utterly contradicts the Christian message, and it nullifies any Christian faith.

So for me this is the meaning of revival.

You get to the place where you say, it's not the others who are wrong.

I am wrong.

We are wrong.

And that's both on an individual and collective moment of reckoning and repentance.

It's very painful, it's humiliating, and it should be.

- Mm-hmm.

Dr. Du Mez, how do you, this is, I always felt this is the question, how do you ever get the white evangelical church disentangled from politics, from Republican politics?

Now, obviously the institution's not gonna do that because it works for them, but how do you get the actual people to see that this isn't the way it's supposed to be and that there are people that are trying to use them for political purposes as people in power do?

I'm not saying that that white evangelicals are the only people who do this, I'm just saying that this is what happens because so many people grow up in such a modulus environments where everybody is white, everybody's evangelical, everyone's a Republican, everybody thinks all the same things, and so how do you introduce new ideas to people like that?

- Yeah.

It's really difficult.

It is, right?

This is so deeply embedded and this goes back generations.

So (laughs) I'm biased, I'm a historian, but I think that there's an incredible power to history here, right?

Because evangelicals in particular, I think, think of themselves as Bible-believing Christians.

And so they think of their values as biblical values and think that they're eternal, they're timeless (laughs) they're true, when what history can do is first, it can show things have not always been this way.

So in terms of what Christian masculinity looks like, if we look in the 19th century, we see models of Christian masculinity that did not celebrate aggression and this warrior spirit, but they celebrated self-restraint.

We can see there was a time in the early 20th century when many conservative Protestants did not embrace militarism, they were not Christian nationalists at all.

And once you understand that, then we can become curious, well, how did things get to how they are now?

And we can kind of let go of these notions that what we have been taught as these are just biblical values, this is what Christians do and what we believe.

In fact, no, we have to look at who said that this was the case?

Who created this?

And time and again, we can see that those who were promoting these ideas were largely doing so to consolidate their own power, and something that Rev.

Schenck said, which is absolutely true, that the discovery, that fear helps consolidate power.

So it brings in money, it brings in donations, tried and true.

We also see that many church communities and Jerry Falwell Seniors Church, and Mark Driscoll's Church, we see this model of if you can incite fear in the heart of your followers, that will create this kind of loyalty, self-sacrifice, they will give money, they will give you power.

And when I first started my research, I thought that evangelical militancy was a result of fear.

What I came to understand through historical research was that in many cases, this militancy came first, this us versus them mentality, and it required the continual stoking of fear in order to be sustained.

And once that clicked for me, this whole history kind of took shape.

And what I've seen is evangelicalism who lived inside this world, once they see this from a historical distance, once they can see how this came to be, it does break things open.

So I would say (laughs) read history, and then also very important, listen to people who are different from you, particularly brothers and sisters in Christ who look different, who you've largely excluded from your communities historically in the present day, and those conversations also I think can shake this up.

- And may I.

- Only time for one.

Oh, sure, go ahead.

- May I just add a quick, a word of advice to the pastors I hear from every week now who are agonizing over this and want in some way to help their own communities get past this, one of the things I've been recommending is that pastors preach a 52-part series on the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept.

Start there.

The implications (indistinct) - Sounds wonderful.

Okay, I think we have time for one more question, and I think I'm gonna give this to Rev.

Duncan, and then maybe the others can weigh in.

This is a question from somebody who's watching.

They say, doesn't all this confusion and corruption of religion over so many thousands of years across so many religions beg us to abandon it entirely in favor of a new paradigm of oneness excused from any allegiance to a deity, a God or a leader?

- Often you're gonna hear this argument, right?

(Duncan clears throat) And I understand it.

Why turn to the divine?

As a QUEER black men, knowing the history of slavery in this country, knowing what the Christian Church has done, knowing the people that I'm up against in academia, knowing how I went from a GED in county prison to working on a PhD, that whole journey from here to there, why do you show up?

Why do you do it?

Man has always searched for answers, and sometimes some of us have landed upon the divine.

I think what makes America unique is that we have tried to export that to everywhere, our vision of the world.

And we've tried to enforce it upon the world.

And theologically, we do that because basically American churches support every mission in the world.

So why continue to do that work?

I don't know, to be quite honest with you.

I was not a raised Christian.

I had very little Christian values.

I was houseless.

And I encountered something that I think is worth exploring.

And I think there's something beyond the church and beyond the institutions and beyond our histories of oppression, there is something that happens in between there that is unexplainable, unimaginable and that you cannot touch and that has been inspiring resistance for thousands of years.

And I can just tell you from a Christian perspective that what the Bible really is is the story of a creator who steps into (clears throat) human history for the express purpose of liberation and some people call that salvation, but we experienced that as revolution throughout history over and over again, and somehow this belief that the universe, the divine, that something out there wants that liberation for you, wants that freedom for you, whether it be sexual, whether it be like just free, whatever it is.

- Mm-hmm.

- That is spurred on human history.

And so I explore that.

I think what the question really speaks to is why do we allow that to, why do we use that in such oppressive ways?

And I don't know.

I just think part of that's just human nature.

Part of that is just the way we are.

- I hear it- - But that's why I do it.

But that's why I do it, you know what I mean?

As a black organizer, like I got to believe there's a God watching my ass, 'cause ain't nobody else watching my ass.

(Kirsten laughs) - I think something that I hear commonly and certainly is occurred to me on many occasions is just religion does ultimately end up doing so much harm in so much damage, and so why not just have, people say, why not just have a relationship with the universe versus having religion?

And maybe we just quickly get the other two to weigh in and then I think we have to wrap this up.

- Well, historically speaking I'm not sure how you would accomplish that, right?

Given that there is throughout human history, this kind of draw to the divine to religious identity.

I think we've also seen a lot of corruption and a lot of evil done outside of religious frameworks too.

So I'm not sure that that's the panacea that we might wish it to be.

So I think that living in the reality that we find ourselves in, we need people working to do good and to seek unity within religious frameworks drawing on the strengths of their religious traditions and outside.

And I think we can often find a lot of common ground, but I think I would say both and.

- Great.

- Yeah.

Maybe my angle would just be that I'm not sure there's a difference between true and good religion, seeing the world religiously and seeing it non-religiously, because the best of religion, I think, harmonizes with the universe as we know it, with humanity as we know one another and as we don't know one another, that's the best of religion is humanistic, the best of humanism looks religious.

I think maybe there's a false dichotomy there and we convince ourselves that one or the other is better and maybe that's starting us all the way down that wrong road again.

So to me, it's just, we're on the path to living the best we can and improving ourselves as well as we can along the same path believer or non-believer.

My posthumous mentor, Bonhoeffer, said the greatest friend to the Christian is an atheist for many, many reasons.

- Yes.

Well, that's a wonderful place to end this, and thank you so much.

This was a fascinating conversation and I just really appreciate all of you so much.

So thank you for your time.

And thank you everybody who joined in this conversation and for your questions, and I believe is this right?

I'm just reading this, but up next is going to be Dr. Jane Goodall.

That sounds absolutely amazing.

So I hope you can join that one, and thanks again for joining us, and have a great weekend.

(energetic music)