"Do I stay Christian?" That's the title and focus of Brian McLaren's most recent book. It provides reasons both to depart and to stay. We're processing through some of the lingering doubts inspired through Christian history and questions of faith with Brian on this episode of Compass.
Brian McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – one that is just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He gained a lot of notoriety for writing several well-regarded books, including A New Kind of Christianity, A Generous Orthodoxy and Everything Must Change. His newest books are Faith After Doubt (January 2021), and Do I Stay Christian? (May 2022).
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ryan Dunn:
This is the Compass Podcast, where we seek out the divine disruption in our everyday lives. My name is Ryan Dunn, I profess to be a Christian. My saying that likely conjures up feelings within you. You may have heard that and felt a sense of relief or connection as your internal voice said, "Hey, me too." Or you may have felt a bit of tension enter your system with my confession because the name Christian carries some negative connotation for you. It might be attached to judgment or past trauma, or have been connected to a political ideology that you reject. If that's the case, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the trauma Christians have caused. I'm sorry for the judgment carried out in the name of Christianity. I recognize these things have happened and continue to happen. I know Christianity represents harm to some peoples and groups and I'll admit that it makes me uncomfortable, even angry.
Ryan Dunn:
So why stay Christian? Or why do I profess and claim the name of Christian? Well, whether you're asking that question too, or whether you're curious about other people hanging in there on a system that carries so much baggage, this episode provides some answers. We're talking to someone who has become an old friend of this podcast. Brian McLaren is one of the few guests who have made multiple appearances and really, that's because he keeps writing material that speaks to our deepest questions and discomforts as people of faith. His latest book is called, Do I Stay Christian? That's a question that sits inside a lot of people, especially within the audience of this podcast for spiritual seekers. We're going to spend some time processing that question with Brian.
Ryan Dunn:
If you're not familiar with Brian McLaren, let me tell you a few things. He is an author, speaker, activist and public theologian, a former college English teacher and pastor. He is a passionate advocate for a new kind of Christianity. One that is just, generous and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He gained a lot of notoriety for writing several well regarded books, including, A New Kind of Christianity, A Generous Orthodoxy, and Everything Must Change. His newest books are Faith After Doubt, and Do I Stay Christian? That's just what we're wondering about too. So let's sit down for a chat with Brian McLaren.
Ryan Dunn:
Brian McLaren, thank you so much for joining us once again on the Compass Podcast, how goes it with your soul today?
Brian McLaren:
Oh, I am very happy today. I live in southwest Florida and I get to be a volunteer several times every summer for sea turtle monitoring. Today we were out and doing sea turtle nest monitoring and released a bunch of baby sea turtles. Nothing could be much more fun than that.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah. Oh, so you're actually there at the moment of, I guess birth is what you would say. As they're coming out of that [inaudible 00:03:06].
Brian McLaren:
What happened, we dug up a nest today that had about 150 babies, but about 10 of them got stuck in the nest. One hundred forty of them had already left and we rescued the last 10 and let them get out. Then I volunteer with a bunch of people who take all kinds of scientific data. We did that for five or six different nests today, it was a lot of fun.
Ryan Dunn:
Oh, very cool and life-giving to you, no doubt. Which can be good, considering the day and the age that we are in, in which there's so much that distracts us from the goodness of life and the way that life is continuing on around us.
Ryan Dunn:
I certainly appreciate you coming back on. I feel like we keep going to this well, but you keep coming up with content that is relevant and timely. Your current case of having written the book, Why Stay Christian? is definitely something that speaks into the heart that many people are feeling a tension in right now. This book, it doesn't really make a case for belief as you're stating why stay Christian, it's more about identity. I'd love to hear from you, can you really believe as a Christian or affirm that Christianity is true and yet not fully identify as a Christian?
Brian McLaren:
Well, I'm going to guess that a lot of people do, but that question points to a deeper question, and that is how do you define Christianity? Some people would define Christianity as these seven core beliefs and others as these 23 core beliefs and others as these two core beliefs. I suppose different people would define it differently and they would assess other peoples' Christian identity in different ways.
Brian McLaren:
I just got an email this morning from a person who read Do I Stay Christian? She said, "I love Jesus, I believe. But I really don't want to identify as a Christian anymore because I think Christianity has been taken over by white Christian nationalists here in the United States and I just don't want to be associated with that. To be identified as a Christian puts me in too close proximity to something I think is horrible." She had no big problem with Christian beliefs, her problem was what that identity, what it seemed to put her in league with.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah, and sometimes I hear people delineate between being a Christian and being a follower of Jesus. Have you heard that as well?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah. I mean, I understand. I used to say things like that myself. I now am starting to realize that issues of identity are complicated. As you know, I have a chapter in the book where I talk about the cult of innocence. I think one of the things that I used to do when I'd say, "Well, I'm a follower of Jesus," as if to say, "Oh, those other people, they're just lowly Christians. I am a follower of Jesus." I don't think that kind of superiority is all that helpful in the long run. I understand why it's tempting, but I think it has unintended consequences.
Ryan Dunn:
In speaking through to today, do you identify as Christian?
Brian McLaren:
I do, it's my orientation. I love Jesus, I want to follow Jesus. I am deeply, deeply grieved by so much of what Christianity has done in the world and is doing in the world. Honestly, I deeply fear that Christianity will do worse things in the future than it's done in the past and that thought both makes me want to leave sometimes and also makes me want to stay and exert whatever influence I can.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah. Well, we'll get into that a little bit in terms of, I guess, the proactivity of wanting to stick it out, wanting to stay. But I am curious, you mentioned that people define what it means to be Christian differently. That it might be ascribing to 23 tenets of faith or something like that. For you, what does it mean to be Christian, who gets to be Christian?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah. Well, first of all, here's an interesting thought. In the New Testament, in Paul's second epistle to the Corinthians, he says, "From now on, we recognize no one according to the flesh, because in Christ we're a new creation." And elsewhere Paul wrote, "No longer do we see people as Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. We're all one in Christ."
Brian McLaren:
It's interesting to ask, I wonder if Paul would consider the idea of Christian and non-Christian? In other words, would he say, "When we're looking through the eyes of Christ, do we continue to stigmatize based on Christian, non-Christian?" I'm coming to think that the more deeply I live into the vision of Jesus and the love of Jesus, the more I will just see everybody as a human being who's beloved by God and I will see everyone that way too. Not to mention the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, as Jesus said is God's beautiful creation. But if somebody said, "Brian, you're allowed to define Christian," I would say a person who seeks to follow Jesus as the central thrust of their life ought to be called a Christian.
Ryan Dunn:
It sounds then you almost get to pass along I guess the judgment of who might be Christian, who not, to Christ, right?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah, this is one of the problems. I mean, it's just a problem. You and I didn't create it, but we have to live with it. That the word Christian can have very, very little to do with how a person lives his or her life. As people identified as Christians as an expression of their understanding of Christian faith, open their home to the homeless, welcome in refugees and strangers and aliens and outsiders and Christians slam their door to the homeless, and throw into jail refugees and aliens and so on. In the name of Christ, people show love to people who are considered outcasts and in the name of Christ people make people outcasts.
Brian McLaren:
I think this is just a reality. At the end of the book, I refer to a passage where Jesus says, "Look, God is able to raise up out of these stones, son of Abraham." In other words, you guys say you're sons of Abraham, big deal. What difference does it make? In fact, he says, "You call yourselves sons of Abraham," and he says, "and you're trying to kill me." He says you can have this name that has great associations with it, but what really seems to matter to Jesus is not the label on the tree, but what kind of fruit the tree bears.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah, I'm a part of the United Methodist denomination and certainly there is a mirrored conversation happening within our denomination at this point, as far as who's Methodist and who's not. That point comes back around again and it's like in talking about God will raise up out of the stones. There's going to be a church, whether it's called Methodist or not. God will still be at work in the world and therefore there will be a church presence in the world. That our need to put a label on that and even to maintain some of the systems that have been there is a little frivolous in the long run, isn't it?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah. I mean, I understand why it's so painful and why it means so much to people. Of course, there's a lot of money and there's a lot of brand loyalty and all kinds of other assets that I understand have value. But it really does point out this problem that once you start thinking about it, you realize that the Bible has a whole lot to say about it. The issue is that it's very easy for us to have a label and let that label become a substitute for actually making intentional decisions about how we spend our lives and how we invest our lives. Of course, there are so many dimensions to it as you well know as a Methodist. But many, many different religious communities are having parallel struggles and battles and they're really related to larger struggles because in many ways they're proxy battles for economic identities and for racial identities and for cultural identities. I suppose those struggles are unavoidable for us complicated human beings.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah, it is a part of our human condition. Well, I'm guessing that you wrote the book, Do I stay Christian? because that's a question that you yourself were asking. Can you take us back a little bit? When was the first time that you started having thoughts about possibly not assuming the name Christian?
Brian McLaren:
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, wonderful loving parents. But I remember my first feeling of conflict really happened when I was really, even in the single digits. I was a kid who loved science. I loved to go to the library and check out books on dinosaurs and fossils and trees and fish and birds and snakes and any living thing I was interested in. I picked up the idea of evolution and in my mind, I didn't really see any conflict between believing in evolution and believing in the Bible. I just assumed the Bible was something of a poetic description of where things came from. Just for me, I could hold the two.
Brian McLaren:
But I remember being probably 11, 12 years old, 13 at the most and I remember my Sunday school teacher. Maybe I asked the question, I don't remember asking the question, but I remember him saying, "Oh, you can either believe in God or evolution. You have to make a choice." I remember thinking, "Okay, I'm 12 years old, six more years, I'll be 18 and I'll be out of this religion." That was my first time. I just thought, "If you're telling me I can't believe what seems so incredibly obvious and that I have to interpret the book of Genesis literally," I remember thinking, "that makes no sense to me as a pre-adolescent kid."
Ryan Dunn:
At a point there, it starts to become a little bit personal. When you started your ministry, you were a pastor over a church. Was that at a more fundamentalist, as you called it, church?
Brian McLaren:
We were an unusual church. We were in some ways counter-cultural people from the '60s and '70s who did a experimental faith community. We were a fusion between liturgical, we often borrowed from the Episcopal prayer book and we had a lot of folks from evangelical and charismatic backgrounds. Our church was in Maryland. Maryland is one of the most Catholic states. Probably the single largest group of people were people who had dropped out the Catholic church and then we became a way for them to get back into church. It was not really in that category, although we had people in that category. Part of our big challenge was trying to help the lions and the lambs live together in peace, so to speak.
Ryan Dunn:
I asked that question because in a role like that and no doubt since then, you hear your fair share of criticism. Sometimes criticism can be constructive, but also many times criticism can be nothing but harm, even made with an intent to harm. When we start talking about the historical harms of being Christian, which certainly you dedicate a good portion of the book to that's one thing. But then when harm becomes to get personal, that can be something else. Does that change our need to exit? Is there a different criteria?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah, that's a really, really good question, Ryan. There are people who at the deepest levels of their being have been traumatized by religious systems. I think of a friend of mine who was horribly, horribly abused by Catholic priests who he trusted. To have your spiritual life sexually manipulated by a religious authority figure, it is no surprise to me that he felt he needed to get as far away as he could from church of any kind. There are so many people and women who've been abused in certain ways, LGBTQ people who've been treated hatefully in other ways. What I, as a pastor, learned to do when people were in an abusive situation is I would tell them, "Let's help you get out of that situation. Your safety really matters." That's, I think, an important consideration.
Ryan Dunn:
There's a line there though also that involves leaving church, but maybe not necessarily leaving Christianity, or if we want to say leaving Jesus or following Jesus, there's a line there. Have you heard stories of where it bleeds over, where a rejection of the church becomes a rejection of faith?
Brian McLaren:
I think of a young woman who used to attend my church when I was a pastor and she'd belonged to a very high authority religious group. They put her under so much pressure to say things she didn't mean, and to apologize for things that she didn't really think she'd done anything wrong. I remember when she came to see me she said, "It's not that I've lost faith in the church alone and it's not that I've lost faith in God." She says, "This experience has made me lose faith in myself as a person who is able to stand up for what I really believe in. I realize I said things I didn't believe to make them happy." She said, "So I don't even know whether I can talk about having faith in God or Jesus right now. I feel my very ability to trust myself has been shattered."
Brian McLaren:
I don't know if that communicates, but I remember it communicated to me when she said it and I realized, yeah, this is part of the nature of religious trauma. It damages you in ways that you aren't even capable of saying, "Well, I still believe in Jesus, but I don't believe in this religious institution." It can shatter your whole ability to feel safe belonging anywhere. That's because as I say in the book, in a sense, when a person trusts a religious leader, they're giving them access to very deep and sensitive parts of their own soul. And when that trust is abused, yeah, the pain is very deep.
Ryan Dunn:
Well, you've heard those stories. You've come in first person contact with some of the harm yourself. What reason do you have for staying?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah. Well, first as you know, when I wrote the book, I wrote it in three parts. Part one is no, part two is yes, part three is how? The question, do I stay Christian, there are good reasons why people say no. I think all the people who say yes, have to take the no section seriously, so that they say yes with their eyes wide open. For the people who feel like saying no, there are good reasons to say yes. I think it's worth people who are going to say no to pay attention to those things too. I say at one point in the book, "The only way I can say yes is by also saying no." I have to say, "Here's what I'm saying yes to and here's what I'm saying no to in my own tradition." Then the question is, how am I going to live? And that's what that third part of the book deals with.
Brian McLaren:
I was a young fundamentalist kid, I was on my way out. I ended up having this very powerful spiritual experience in my teenage years. But what I said yes to was, I said yes to God as the God of love. I said yes to Jesus as someone who loved everybody and said the greatest commandment was love. Every time I read the gospels, that's what I still see. Every time I read the New Testament, that's what I see. Even when I read the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, I see that's their ultimate message too. That's the message that we get from the prophets and even we see it in the law.
Brian McLaren:
That really has been the guiding, central thrust of this whole thing for me. Is that I want to continue to be a person of love, but here's how that's affected my yes and my no. It means that, of course I love Jesus, I love God, I love the holy spirit and I want to love my fellow Christians. Even the ones who I think are doing the most harmful things. And I want to love my Muslim neighbors and friends, my Buddhist neighbors and friends. I think saying that I want to love everyone without discrimination does not make me less of a Christian. I think it is part of what it has come to mean to me to be a Christian.
Ryan Dunn:
Looking back historically, I mean, well, you give so many examples. I can't even go into it specifically. But for sure there are events in Christian history that we're meant to learn from in the way that we want to deny those behaviors that were there before. We can take the crusades, for example, or antisemitism as another example. There are also humans as Christians, who we have built upon, but who also have said some awful things. For me, the disheartening chapter was where you start talking about some of the well, antisemitic things that some of our heroes of faith had said along the way. How do we reconcile with that? Do we need to cancel people like Augustine? Or how do we take Augustine's goodness and grace, and yet still wrestle with the fact that he said some things that we wish he had not?
Brian McLaren:
Yes, yes. I wrote this book, Do I Stay Christian? as a pair of books. The previous book was called, Faith After Doubt. One of the things I tried to say in both of these books is that doubt is not the enemy of faith. Doubt is the enemy of authoritarianism. In other words, anytime a person tells us, "You have to believe what I say because I say it," anytime a person demands a authoritarian domination over our own personal responsibility to think and make decisions about our lives, I think alarm bells should go off. Part of what I think has to happen is that Christians have to understand that yeah, Augustine said some incredibly beautiful things, he was just a man. And Aquinas said some incredibly brilliant things and he was right about some things and wrong about some things like all of us.
Brian McLaren:
It's not to say, "Oh, I'm just as smart as Augustine or Aquinas," they were exceptional geniuses. But it is to say that just because a brilliant person or a respected person thought something, doesn't mean I have to accept it without scrutinizing it myself. I think that's part of what it means to be an adult. It means to say, "I have to take responsibility for how I am going to live." I personally think this is something that every generation has to do. They have to say, "My parents love me. My parents gave me life. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for my parents. Now, my job is to try to make sure I am no worse a person than my parents were and please God, maybe I can even build on everything they gave me and take a few steps farther so that I give my children an even better start so they can do better than me."
Brian McLaren:
That's to me, the attitude I would hope we'd have. The irony is that somehow in many Christian settings, the farther back you go, the more authoritarian power we give to the leaders. I don't think they would want that. Here's the way I'd say it. If Augustine were here today, he would be one of the most thoughtful, creative, innovative thinkers who would be addressing today's issues with the same brilliance he tried to address the issues of his day. Just repeating what he said in his day, I think dishonors him. Or Martin Luther for that matter, who had some of the most horrible, antisemitic, vile, vicious, hateful things that a person could ever say and that had terrible historical impact in Germany. It doesn't mean we have to cancel him, but it also means that we have to say, "To the degree we respect him, we also have to tell the truth about him." I think we have to say he would want that too, yeah.
Ryan Dunn:
Okay, that's fair. That's fair. Well, one of the things that we're encountering today within the United States that is a stumbling block when it comes to faith for so many, is the relation that faith seemingly has with politics. Right now, one of the big buzz words is Christian nationalism. We have this enmeshing of Christian ideology and national ideology, even nationalistic religion. Is it natural to separate faith and politics? Can we do that? Should we do that?
Brian McLaren:
Yeah, the whole idea of separating faith and politics, I think has a very ugly history in America. What it meant is that Christians could go to church and worship God and celebrate Christmas and have the Eucharist and hold slaves and never put the two together. Let slavery be a political issue and if it's theological, we'll use the Bible to justify criminal behavior. That kind of separation, I don't think is what anybody has in mind. Here's the way I would frame it. If there is something good and moral in the universe, if there's anything good and moral in the universe, there's a kind of person who wants to exploit it for bad and immoral purposes. Now, here's my word for that kind of person. They're a scoundrel. A scoundrel is someone who will use anything good to achieve his ambitions and desires.
Brian McLaren:
So a Muslim scoundrel will use Islam to achieve base, personal or petty purposes, ambitions. In India, a scoundrel will use Hinduism to achieve their own purposes. In the United States, we have many scoundrels who love to use Christianity to achieve their own purposes. Some of these scoundrels have no moral code and they know that they're being deceptive, perhaps the most dangerous of them. It's not that they have no moral code, it's that they have very, very little self-reflection. They never question themselves. They are so sure they're right that they end up being scoundrels without even knowing it.
Brian McLaren:
This to me, is the reality that we face. I don't think we should say Christian nationalism without saying white Christian nationalism, because in America, it's the fusion of white supremacy and Christianity that has plagued our entire history. From the attempted genocide of the native peoples, to the enslavement of African Americans, to the mistreatment of Asian Pacific Islanders, right up to the present moment. Yeah, it's a real thing and it's one of the reasons I felt that this book, Do I Stay Christian? needed to be written because I think anyone who wants to say, "Yes, I will stay Christian," I hope will say, "and I will say no to white Christian nationalism in doing so."
Ryan Dunn:
Was that your hope in writing the book?
Brian McLaren:
One of my hopes for sure, yes, yeah.
Ryan Dunn:
Well, there are others. Well, let me just say what really terrifies me is there are a lot of scoundrels who are my age and they have children and they tend to be very forceful with their children. They threaten their children with disowning them and making their lives miserable if the children don't follow all the dictates of the authoritarian father, sometimes it's a mother. One of the things I hope is that younger people will not succumb to the pressure that their white Christian nationalist parents put upon them. Jesus had some shocking things to say when he said, "Don't think I've come to bring peace, but a sword." When he said that he wasn't talking about a physical sword. He went on to say, "Because in one household, a father will be against a son and a son against a father," it was all generational. The older generation and the younger generation will come in conflict.
Ryan Dunn:
I think what he was saying was, "I am inviting people and it's mostly going to be young people who are willing to accept my radical message," and that's what I'm about, that's what I hope will happen. Unfortunately, what I think is going to happen, the two unfortunate things that can happen, one is that an older generation of white Christian nationalists will succeed in recruiting their children. To borrow words from Jesus, "They'll turn their children into twice the sons of hell that they are." Another thing that will happen is that many, many young people will just leave faith and religion entirely and maybe they'll find something better. But what I fear is that a lot of them will just be disillusioned and jaded by what they've seen their parents do. I hope you don't mind me being that frank, but I think this is an emergency and that's why I'm so frank.
Ryan Dunn:
This book was partially written in hope of influencing a younger generation to maybe see an alternative of Christianity that they hadn't witnessed?
Brian McLaren:
I think that there are a whole lot of people who feel the same way I felt in my life. The only way I can say yes to Christianity is if I have permission to say no to the ways that Christianity has been and is being abused.
Ryan Dunn:
Well, where do you go from here?
Brian McLaren:
Well, right now I'm taking a rest.
Ryan Dunn:
No doubt.
Brian McLaren:
Yeah, this is a book that I poured a lot of my vital energies into. But my next book, the plan is to write a book called, Life After Doom, because so many people are feeling that the environment is doomed, that our democracy is doomed, that our economic system is unsustainable. This feeling of living in an unsustainable status quo, I think is a very, very deep struggle for many of us and so I want to grapple with how do we live in that context?
Ryan Dunn:
All right. Well, I'd ask you where you're going to take that, but I don't want to spoil the surprise. But I do hope that you'll indicate that like, "Hey, there's some hope coming here."
Brian McLaren:
Yes, yes. As I say, I've been gathering stuff. When I write books, I don't have the answer in mind. I start with a problem and I try to write my way toward an answer. But one of the things that has already become clear to me is so much depends on how we define hope. Because if we define hope as I see some encouraging signs, so I can return to my previously scheduled complacency, that's the kind of hope that I think is harmful. Despair is also harmful. It says, "Why even try? There's no use in trying, we don't have a chance." I think there's a kind of hope that gives us the courage to do the right things no matter how the odds look. Whether they look to be in our favor or not. That's one of the things I hope I'll be able to explain and explore a bit.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah. Thanks listener for being a part of this. A whole lot of food for thought.
Ryan Dunn:
If you want to know more about the Compass Podcast, check out umc.org/compass. That's part of the website for the United Methodist Church, who graciously resources this podcast. A couple other episodes that might interest you include one of our previous episodes with Brian McLaren, entitled Living With Doubt. That was episode 51 back in January of 2021. Or you might want to check out Wrestling With the Tough Sayings of Jesus with Amy-Jill Levine from September of 2021.
Ryan Dunn:
While you're checking out those episodes, hey, hit the like or follow or subscribe button. Thank you so much. We're back into new episode time, so we'll have another fresh disruption for your day to day in two weeks. In the meantime, peace.
