Shane Claiborne: Christians and Conflict - War, Political Issues, Social Media
⭐ An engaging conversation with Christian activist Shane Claiborne explores what it means to follow Jesus amid political conflict, cultural division, and moral tension. The discussion examines how faith shapes decisions when no political option fully aligns with Christian convictions, emphasizing compassion for the poor and vulnerable. Claiborne reflects on personal transformation, critiques Christian nationalism, and calls believers back to the teachings of Jesus. The interview also addresses social media’s role in activism, the importance of authentic community, and the challenge of unity without uniformity. Ultimately, it invites Christians to center love, justice, and humility in public life and faithful witness.
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Description
An engaging conversation with Christian activist Shane Claiborne explores what it means to follow Jesus amid political conflict, cultural division, and moral tension. The discussion examines how faith shapes decisions when no political option fully aligns with Christian convictions, emphasizing compassion for the poor and vulnerable. Claiborne reflects on personal transformation, critiques Christian nationalism, and calls believers back to the teachings of Jesus. The interview also addresses social media’s role in activism, the importance of authentic community, and the challenge of unity without uniformity. Ultimately, it invites Christians to center love, justice, and humility in public life and faithful witness.
Resources
📚 Check out Shane’s book, Jesus for President.
Generated Transcript
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for life. And that means I care about more than one issue. means my priorities might be different than either party. And certainly to care for the poor and the most vulnerable.
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Shane Claiborne, as you probably are aware, is a well-known Christian activist. Pastor Megan talks to Shane about what it looks like to discover Christ in conflicts. What do do if you have two options before you, and maybe they're two political options, but because of your Christian convictions, neither option wholly satisfies? What does it mean to follow Christ? What does it mean to find Christ in a conflict like that?
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you
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Questions like this, as well as how Christians should relate to social media are all on the table. Here's the interview with Shane.
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There's a reason that Scott introduced you as a public activist or people might call you a modern day prophet because you've been doing ministry in the public eye for decades now. Have you noticed changes in the way that the church has engaged with the prophetic voice or a prophetic witness over the decades that you've been engaged with this?
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First of all, I think it's maybe important just to rewind a little bit and say, and I didn't go into a lot of depth, but on a lot of the issues I feel really passionate about, I felt very differently 20 years ago. I grew up with guns. My family are still gun owners, almost everybody in my family. Now would say that they are in the majority of gun owners category that
care about gun violence and care about policy changes that would save lives, but they're gun owners. I grew up for the death penalty. I grew up, my dad was in the military, so I really didn't question war. I was very comfortable with the, what is it now? The God, guns, and country or whatever. I was raised in all that. So it gives me a lot of grace and it gives me a lot of patience when someone-
is for the death penalty. And they really think that the Bible, you know, has all the justification for it. So I have a lot of like, patience to like, think through those conversations. But what I'm deeply, deeply troubled by is I think we've taken our eyes off of Jesus in a lot of and my friend says, my Reverend Barber, Bishop Barber, the Poor People's Campaign, he says, when we take
When we lose our focus on Jesus, we can end up talking a lot about things Jesus didn't talk a lot about and not talking much about the things that Jesus had a whole lot to say about. And so I think staying centered on Jesus is so important. mean, that's why our whole movements, Red Letter Christians, you know, referring to the Bibles that have the words of Jesus in red. I think Jesus was the
full manifestation of God, the Word become flesh. So everything should be bounced off Jesus. And the word Christian means Christ-like. It means like Jesus. That's what we're supposed to remind the world of Jesus. When our Christianity doesn't look like Jesus, when it doesn't act loving, that's a real problem. And what I feel right now is that there are very much competing versions of Christianity
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or I would even say one of them is sort of a Christian nationalism that doesn't really want much to do with the real teachings of Jesus. I mean, when you look at the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the real things that Jesus said and talked a lot about, the 2,000 verses of the Bible that talk about showing hospitality to...
foreigners and widows and orphans and the most vulnerable, how we treat the least of these. mean, these are really central, not fringe, you know, verses of parts of our gospel. So, yeah, I'm very concerned. And I think that there are many people that are rejecting a version of Christianity that has already sort of forsaken Jesus. And so when people tell me
that they were done with Christianity, find I have to say, tell me a little bit more about that. And as they tell me what they're done with, I'm I'm done with that too. I think the sweet Lord Jesus is done with that. So I think this kind of Christian nationalism is not only dangerous for the democracy, but I think it's really dangerous.
when it comes to the public witness of Christianity and authentic Christianity. So there's a lot of young people that it's not the atheists that are the ones turning them from the faith. It's the Christians who are looking very unlike Jesus and are defending things that are indefensible, have forfeited any moral integrity for the sake of political power. And it's absolutely toxic.
I'm not going to name names because we're polite here, Megan, but I think we see it every day. You know, we see it every day. And I'm not here to judge individuals. I think a tree is known by its fruit. I like if that is true, then, you know, this is my concern is that, you know, some of the things that we're seeing in our current administration. And I was very critical of the Biden and Harris administration when it comes to war and Gaza.
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a number of other things, but I think I'm very concerned about the state of our country because a lot of what's driving us is fear, is scarcity, is xenophobia, like these other people that we don't want here. And those are very contradicting to the gospel of Jesus that is about how we care for the most vulnerable. I mean, yeah, that's, you know, when I read scriptures say,
Perfect love casteth out fear. I think that's a promise we need to declare and stand on because I think fear and love are competing forces like opposing magnets. push each other away. And so the real question for us is what does it look like for love to be the driving force? And even how we welcome immigrants. Yeah, we need massive immigration reform. No one's saying we just don't need any kind of regulation or borders or whatever.
I think we just want to say, what does it look like for love and hospitality? What does it look like to welcome the stranger? Because we were once strangers and we want to treat people like we would want to be treated ourselves.
speaker-1 (07:12.482)
Social media sits in this funny space, especially for you as a person with a public witness, where, you know, I think, I just, wonder how do you think about the use of social media with activism, with like speaking to issues of justice for you personally, but then maybe for just like the everyday lay person on Facebook, who I just, I don't know, I struggle with like, is that a helpful way to engage with the individuals in our lives?
Is it just shouting into the abyss and creating more division? I mean, what do you think?
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I think that social media is a tool. Just like a hammer can be used for good or for bad. I think it's a much more complicated tool than a hammer, especially with algorithms and like billionaires that like own it now. It's like I think things are ever changing on it. To be honest, like I think it's increasingly complicated to actually follow your friends and just see like, you know,
I remember when we had Skype, do you remember the Skype and the MySpace people? But we did calls with children in Afghanistan, teenagers in Afghanistan. These are like 16, 17 year olds that we were calling on essentially on Zoom, right? And the kids on my block are listening to these kids in Afghanistan talk about, like we asked them, what gives you hope? What are your dreams for the world? And they're finishing each other's sentences.
and the world shrunk and it humanized other people that we're only seeing on TV as terrorists and enemies and all this stuff. And we did those regularly. So I think there's ways that we can shrink the world a little bit and see this kind of how much we have in common. We've been doing that a lot with our friends in the West Bank and Gaza. We've had...
all sorts of forums with Palestinian Christians who are just amazing, know, theologians and friends. Some of them have been here to stay with us and in our community. And I've been over there, you know, I've been all over that region and been to Iraq and Afghanistan. So I feel like all of these things can open doors to relationships. I also think that
Social media can open doors to dialogue and that's what I try to do with it. I try not to talk at people, but with them. There's people that I think, not only do I disagree with, but I think they're doing things that are actually really dangerous and harmful to the gospel. And so I try to reach out in person to folks like Sean Floyd and Franklin Graham and others. And there are...
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some private conversations that we've had here and there. But yeah, I don't spend a lot of time on it. I think we need to like moderate our time on social media. You can get really narcissistic quick. And so I use it as a platform, a microphone, and also use it for, you know, for people to see my little one-year-old baby and share things that give me hope. think it can be such a downer. So I think we need like,
You know, we were doing like circus, my wife and I are both circus people. So we juggle and fire breathe. And so I like, put some of that on my social media too, cause I think the world needs more circus, you know, but anyway, like, yeah. So I don't, I don't, don't think we need to be absorbed with it and nothing can replace real friendships and real community. So I sometimes tell people if all you have is virtual community, then you.
It's like eating virtual food. You will be malnourished and unhealthy. And so I think, you know, we have to have real in-person relationships and community. We long to love and be loved. And so you can only get so far with love through pixels and screens. And so I think we need real life relationships. And that's why I'm also like, think virtual church and stuff, like there's some cool things that can happen with the message proclamation, but I think we also need
embodiment, need community, we need to our screens off.
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Yeah, I think it's been interesting. went, we had a virtual church just like everybody else did during the pandemic. And there's been, I mean, there were, it would made a church accessible to homebound folks, right? Folks who had not been able to access in-person church community before. And I've, some of those folks are on this call now and they've been able to like maintain really rich spiritual relationships. And some of them flood into in-person connectings. But it was always that question of
how are we being transformed through our communities so we can go transform the communities that we also like are physically embodied in as well. And I just, I wonder if we took that seriously to our social media use. How is our social media use tied to our embodied presence and that whatever we would say there or how we would engage there, does it reflect how people could see us in real life too?
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Yeah.
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so I think one thing our church is just really wrestling with when it comes to the church's witness. And, and I don't, mean, how important is it that we stay unified, across these differences, especially when some of the differences that we have around what it means to follow Jesus in an embodied way, just rub up against each other. Is it appropriate at any point to choose to just split?
in order, you know, is that the better call? How do you decide to do that? Or is Unity the higher calling for the church's witness?
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Whoa. Yeah, I mean, so I think unity is a really beautiful and important thing. When I look at Jesus's longest prayer in the book of John, it's for us to be one as God is one. So I think that's, you we were made in the image of a communal God and, you know, we are meant to live into that unity.
I also think that there is a form of unity that is about uniformity and not a unity that comes in the context of diversity. so uniformity is not the goal. And unity and uniformity are very different. Oneness is different than sameness. so I think that we need, and I often, I mean, there's many theologians that have done this, but
I hold the contrast between the uniformity of the Tower of Babel project, right? That was about, you know, one people that were very impressed with themselves and God scatters them and creates culture and diversity and language and that's different, right? So then you have...
Pentecost, which we see the unity that's in the context of, it's very deliberate in the book of Acts, all of the different rural, urban, like cultures and people groups that are together. And they are in a unity of the spirit that they can understand one another. And they share everything and it's an outflow of their love. So I think that kind of unity is magnetic and beautiful. So I think that
When I look at the body images of Corinthians, it says, are all one body with many parts. And we kind of focus on that a lot of times in our preaching and teaching. But then it says, if one part of the body suffers, we all suffer with it. And if one part rejoices, we all rejoice with it. So I think that's the question is, if one part of the body is hurting, are we hurting with it?
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Are we hurting with Gaza? Have we been hurting with our black brothers and sisters and siblings that are saying like, we can't breathe? know, like does that pain affect those of us that are white? And you know, it's interesting because at the end of that passage on unity and the body of Christ, it says the parts of the body that have been dishonored,
are given special honor. And my friend Alexia Salvatierra says that's God's affirmative action. God is affirming the parts of the body that have been dishonored. And this is where it gets tricky, right? Because, I mean, this is what Black Lives Matter was about, right? It's giving special honor to the parts of the body that have been dishonored. I mean, you know, the response of All Lives Matter
is problematic because we're giving special, it doesn't say Black Lives Matter more or White Lives don't matter. But to say Black Lives Matter is to give special honor to the parts of our body who historically have been called three-fifths human, who in the Dred Scott case, we said they don't have any rights that white people have to acknowledge. You know, this is about
Correcting that and this is what is hurting. These are the pains of our country right now, right? Are over how we tell history and all of these things. So I think this is a part of where we've got to have truth and love together. There's a comedian that said, if your spouse comes up to you and says, baby, do you love me? You don't say back to them.
I love everybody. Right. And that's I think there's something beautiful about saying Palestinian Lives Matter. Right. There's something beautiful. I mean, obviously, we we we want to hurt with any part of the body that's hurting. So that's why on October 7th, we cried out against the violence of Hamas and we stood and continue to stand against anti-Semitism.
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that far too often throughout hundreds and hundreds of years has targeted a particular group of people, Jewish people, right? And yet we also see how that pain can be transmitted into violence against a different group of people. So anyway, all that to say is like, Dr. King's a great teacher on this. He had a sermon called, When Peace Becomes Obnoxious. And he,
He names this tension of a counterfeit unity and a counterfeit peace that is just the absence of conflict, but it's not the presence of justice. And he says, we need to rebuke the obnoxious piece. We need to rebuke the counterfeit unity. And I think those words are really relevant today.
That kind of answers your question, but I think that this is a tension, right? Like even in Jesus' teaching, right? Jesus came to bring peace, but then he also said, I didn't come to bring peace, but division. And then you look at how he speaks to people. And obviously I think Jesus is the incarnation of love, like with skin on. But if you look at his language, his harshest language, his hardest language,
is not for people on the fringes of the faith, but it is for the religious people that he calls a brood of vipers, the teachers of the law, the folks who he says you're heaping heavy burdens on people. In fact, he went even further than that, didn't he, Megan? I mean, we ain't supposed to get preachy tonight, but he said you go across land and sea to make a single convert and then you make them twice the sons of hell that you are.
So I mean, I don't know how you call somebody a brood of vipers in love. I'm not going to dare to try to do that myself, but I do think we need to pay attention, right? That Jesus is talking about that self-righteousness and that religion that is hurting people. And he's even going to say to them, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.
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I mean, it could not be clearer. The people that you have locked out, everyone that you hate, they're coming in ahead of you.
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And I think, you know, like, I think it's easy to sit again to your point of like being the self-righteous one and being like, Jesus couldn't possibly be talking about me. Jesus is obviously talking about them, whoever that is. And I just, think for those of us who identify as Christians to your, one of your very first points we have to be paying attention to is our fear driving the bus when we are talking about who gets to sit at the table, at the Lord's table.
when we think about who is deserving of God's mercy.
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Yeah, it's really worth rereading that beautiful, beautiful story that's probably familiar to many of us, but of the tax collector and the Pharisee that go up to pray. And one of them says, you that I'm, or the Pharisee says, thank you that I'm not like, you know, these people, especially the tax collector. And the tax collector, who was a tax collector? Like probably like actually had some heavy burdens and he can't lift his head to heaven and just says, have mercy on me.
And yet like that humility is really what is clearly celebrated by Jesus, the posture of even when things are not right in our heart, like not looking down. The self-righteousness is toxic. And Megan, to like dissect that just a little bit more is that it has a lot of different forms, right? That self-righteousness that says, thank you that I'm not like them. And I grew up with a conservative version of that.
That was like about moral purity and we don't have sex before marriage. We don't smoke or drink or any of that stuff, whatever. We listen to all Christian music, all that stuff. It was about kind of detail. But there's a very progressive side of self-righteousness that is also saying, thank you that we're not like those people. And it has a moral elitism. It has a superiority. has its own cancel.
It's got its own theological policing, just like conservatives do, liberals do. And so I think that's all very, very dangerous. And it comes a point where we really just got to step back and say, like, I'm working on the contradictions in my own heart. I'm going to try to have a lot of grace with other people, even people I don't agree with.
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Yeah. I'm moving into everyone. moving into the Q and a stuff here. Cause one of these questions is a perfect like lead into that. So I'm just popping into Q and a, but you've spoken, you know, with conviction about your positions on the current conflict, between Israel and the Palestinian people, like what's happening in Gaza. have you navigated friendships with folks who don't share your position on the whole, or, or even some key parts of that?
Have you found ways to hold your convictions and continue to be in relationships with people?
speaker-0 (23:20.684)
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I have a lot of friends who would consider themselves Zionists, both Jewish and Christians. Most people that I'm able to really have a, to be really honest, have a real heartfelt relationship with are deeply grieved by the loss of life. And I was just having a conversation with someone who I disagree with passionately. And he said, we
You know, we shouldn't call it a genocide. And I said, OK, I'm not I'm not going to like that's a word like. the fact is the biggest group of casualties of deaths in this war are five to nine year olds. Five to nine year olds, thousands of them. It's a war on children. And, know, and he said, well, Hamas is using on those human shields. And I said, listen, even if even if that's true, let's think about this, right?
If you have a shooter, let's say like in Uvalde, right? Who's taken a bunch of kids hostage. None of us thinks that the solution to that is to blow up the school, kill the children and the teachers to try to take out the shooter. Like this is just creating so much pain and we're not going to arrive at peace by killing other people's children. know? So think we've got to...
to figure out a way to create common language to grieve the lives lost. And I when I went through the Tel Aviv airport recently, I saw all the images of the folks being held hostage from October 7th, and I just started weeping. Compassion doesn't have to be a limited resource. We can have outrage by the lives lost on October 7th, and the folks that are still being held hostage are those who died because of Hamas.
and say two wrongs don't make a right. And the big difference though is that the violence that's taken tens of thousands of lives in Gaza wouldn't happen without the funds and bombs and weapons being sent from the United States. So we're not arming Hamas in the way that we're arming Israel. And so I think we have a moral obligation to try to not, it's like if I'm,
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you know, giving the kids in my neighborhood guns. And then I'm going, now don't kill kids or anyone. I'm just trying to make some money here. You know, so I think like we've got to like really call out those that are profiting from war, like Lockheed Martin and you know, the weapons contractors that and try to figure out like how can we build for peace? And I'll just say to conservative folks that, you know, I find the labels very clunky, to be honest, y'all. So I don't like these conservative and liberal. very, clunky words, but
My friend, Muenther Ezek did a 45 minute interview with Tucker Carlson and it is a really odd and nuanced and refreshing conversation. mean, he's just sort of going, if we care about the persecuted church, like there's only about 900 Christians left in Gaza. This is some of the oldest Christians we have.
And like, we should care about everyone, know, Muslims and like, no matter who they are, they're a child of God. But it's impossible to care about persecuted Christians overseas and not care about the Christians in the West Bank or in Gaza or Syria.
and also not to want to welcome refugees. mean, some of these folks are coming out of persecution and we're going, we care about you as long as you stay in Syria. So I think that's the things we've got to really name is problematic.
speaker-1 (27:08.972)
Yeah. Stanley Howarowas was a guest on the series earlier this year. so out of that series, someone says, what do you think about the criticism that the problem with Christians or the church getting too immersed in politics is that they forget they are the church and lose its prophetic role? Is there any wisdom to that? Does that excuse Christians from being political?
speaker-0 (27:33.282)
Wow, we're gonna have to do another night, Meg. Maybe Stanley should be here, because I'm pretty sure we're gonna see eye to eye on a lot of things, but not everything. I know him very well, and I love that brother. Yeah, I mean, I think Dr. King, I leaned really into Dr. King because he navigated a lot of these things, personal salvation, social transformation. He said things like this, this is a powerful, like,
speaker-1 (27:35.66)
I know.
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microcosm of Dr. King's kind of theology, I think was he said, a law cannot make a man love me, but it can make it harder for a man to kill me. And that is where I think we start to go. Yes, we believe in heart change. No law can change a racist heart. Only God can do that. we can make, you know, we also needed laws and policies to change. We needed
to ask the question, what does love and justice look like in policy? Dr. Cornel West says that justice is what love looks like in public. So what does it look like to love my neighbor in policy? To say, an extension of loving my neighbor is caring about the policies that allow them to flourish or not to flourish. I I'm heartbroken for my immigrant neighbors right now.
DACA recipients. I mean, listen to this. My wife teaches in the, she's in education. She is in the elementary school. When Trump was, Trump's victory, just trying to unpack that, just create space, you know, for kids to share. And she asked, you know, what are, what are the things you're thinking? And she's not going to like, you know, endorse or anything like that. And the kid said, I'm scared that my,
Muslim friends are not going to be allowed to live in the United States. I'm scared. These are fifth graders. I'm scared that they might try to make us slaves again. These are not people that are political pundits. These are third graders and fourth graders and fifth graders. So I think that's a part of we go, my gosh, you know, I think we're in weird times politically. Like, I mean, the paralysis between two parties,
one of which is, in my opinion, has been really hijacked, I feel, for lot of my conservative leaning friends that, like Russell Moore and others that are really have a moral conscience and can't defend the kind of rhetoric and policies and things that we're seeing. So, my gosh, yeah, I think, I mean, we wrote a book, Jesus for President. It's about political imagination, right? It's about hope. And I think that's one of the
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really profound parts of the political and theological imagination of the early churches. When they were saying Jesus is Lord, they were saying Caesar is not. And so that old hymn, my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I think the danger is that we say, politics, like it's all messed up. It's all equally messed up. These are not equally messed up options, right?
And please, I had some like, I got pretty involved because I was concerned about Trump being reelected. I'm not in the business of endorsing people, but I did want to try to stop Trump from being reelected. I had some suggestions for the highest parts of the democratic establishment and none of them would they hear. And one of them, Megan, was to make room.
for non-alignment. said, what you need right now are Palestinians who are gonna say, I disagree with what's happening right now. I am heart wrenched by what's happening to our people and we need an arms embargo, but I think the other option is worse. I thought we needed pro-life on abortion. People to say,
I care about abortion, but I also care about other issues of life. You I think that's part of what we've got to be able to expand, get out of the confines of the hot button culture wars. We've held two town halls on abortion that were so powerful. I mean, we had tens of thousands of people that watched those because we're just having a better conversation about abortion. And same with gun violence. Like you can't be pro-life.
and ignore gun violence. It's the number one cause of death of our children, more than cancer or car accidents. So I think we've just got to go, I want to be a champion for life. And that means I care about more than one issue. It means my priorities might be different than either party. And certainly to care for the poor and the most vulnerable, however we define that. But right now there's a lot of people that could care less about the poor.
speaker-0 (32:48.922)
and it's very much about me and what, how much my groceries costs and my gas costs and maybe one's doing, I like to say, I think of voting as damage control. I'm trying to do harm reduction. That's where Stanley and I would agree. I think he says he votes and it's the most unexcited decision he makes every four years or something like that. But like, I want to do harm reduction. and I think that the, that we, I'm not looking for a savior.
but I'm voting for whoever I think is going to do the least amount of damage to the world and especially to my vulnerable neighbors. Okay, sorry I talked so much, Megan.
speaker-1 (33:27.886)
Do not apologize. Do not, we ask you to be here.
speaker-0 (33:31.071)
Breakout groups will have to do a whole nother thing with that. But anyway, yeah, it's been a gift to be with you.
speaker-1 (33:37.678)
Thank you so much.
