Stanley Hauerwas & Jonathan Tran: Is Christian Faith Political?
In this Theology Lab interview with Stanley Hauerwas, named by Time Magazine as "the best theologian" in America, and Jonathan Tran, author of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, two theologians offer their perspectives on how Christians engage in political life as Christians. This interview covers topics such as faith and theology, Scripture, how Christians might approach voting, political parties, baptism as a way of life and a marker of polity, and the meaning of truth telling, honesty, and faithfulness in public life.
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In this interview with Stanley Hauerwas, named by Time Magazine as "the best theologian" in America, and Jonathan Tran, author of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, two theologians offer their perspectives on how Christians engage in political life as Christians. This interview covers topics such as faith and theology, Scripture, how Christians might approach voting, political parties, baptism as a way of life and a marker of polity, and the meaning of truth telling, honesty, and faithfulness in public life.Resources
Here's a link to the discussion guide for this Black Theology course: https://live-highrock-network.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/DiscussionGuideBlackTheology2022v2-1.pdf
Generated Transcript
speaker-0 (00:00.366)
All right, I am eager to get this session started. This is going to be a session about how Christians engage with politics. And we've got two well-recognized folks with us who have written on this topic in the past, and they are in the process of writing a book on the topic right now called Christians and the Promise of Politics, a very intriguing title. Let me introduce first Professor Jonathan Tran. Jonathan is a professor of theology and great texts and also Dean of Faculty at Baylor University's Honors College.
He was a guest at last year's theology. The topic was God and money. He's the author of Asian Americans and the spirit of racial capitalism, a book that a lot of folks at High Rock have read and had really rich discussions around. Jonathan, thanks so much for being with us.
speaker-1 (00:45.758)
It's an honor to be on with you all again.
speaker-0 (00:48.6)
Stanley Howard Woss has had a very distinguished career teaching at Notre Dame and Duke Divinity School. His work is in theology, ethics, political theology. He's the author of many books, maybe the most popular is perhaps Resident Aliens, but also Community of Character and Peaceful Kingdom. I just finished reading his memoir. I hope that after tonight's session, you might be encouraged to give this a look. It is a very moving and thoughtful.
account of aspects of Stanley's life. And Stanley carries the accolade, of course, from Time magazine of being described as the best theologian in America. Stanley Howerwas, thanks so much for being at Theology Lab.
speaker-2 (01:31.79)
Thank you very much. I say that time magazine description is the second or always finds a way to humiliate you.
speaker-1 (01:40.096)
You
speaker-0 (01:40.75)
When we get started with the topic of history, Stanley in 1986, you wrote a essay called the Christian critique of America's Jonathan, you're really familiar with this. Jonathan, I'm actually asked you to get us started. Maybe give us a little overview here.
speaker-1 (01:57.218)
This essay was written in the late 1980s. And one of the things that's really interesting about this essay in terms of the current history is there's a there's a pretty wide conversation in, say, among the Christian Christian centers, maybe Christian right and left center, right, right and left of center about Christian nationalism. What's particularly amazing to me about Stanley's essay from, you know, decades ago is how much he anticipates the Christian nationalism.
But the way he unpacks what the problem of Christian nationalism is, would be critical of Christian nationalism of the right, which we're quite well aware of now, but also versions of Christian nationalism on the left. That is, think Stanley's equally worried about both. And he thinks, my guess is that you think Stanley that the over concern about the right is just the way the left smuggles in their Christian nationalism.
But by way of virtue signaling and, you know, scapegoating the scapegoating the right. So I mean, one way to get to the history, Scott, is to think about this. So when when the left of center Christians today critique Christian nationalism and they're thinking about things like the January 6 insurrection, they're thinking about Project 2025 and they're certainly thinking about former President Trump, what they seem to imagine with that creek
critique smuggles in as an undefended premise is they already know what the relationship should look like. It should look like left center progressive Christianity with its political commitments and anyone on the other side of that must be a Christian nationalist. Whereas the power of Stanley's essay is that it interrogates that way of putting things all together. And one of the things that's interesting about the history is that he reminds us that it was actually the left
in the 20th century that got us into these problems in the first place. We need to remember that the right used to think used to in their own problematic ways, reduce Christianity and the gospel to one's personal relationship with Jesus. So there was no political outlay for that. There was no political implications. The political implications was a kind of problematic type of quietude. It was the left that felt overly confident that the state needed to be deeply informed.
speaker-1 (04:26.156)
by Christianity that in maybe some subtle sophisticated ways as we progressive academics tend to think, you we wanted Christianity to enshrine the halls of power, but just in subtle progressive ways. And so it was really the left that dragged the right into politics. And we know this happens largely in a history that's deeply related to questions like abortion, questions around racism, desegregation and stuff like this.
What Stanley reminds us is that was the left's idea. And so whatever the right has become, say this kind of really scary Christian nationalism, that's a monster that the left created. Is that right, Stanley? Is that how you?
speaker-2 (05:10.07)
Yeah, there's not. My line is there's nothing wrong with the left other than they don't have a Jerry Falwell. are all well as the beginnings of the Christian right. I mean, political significance. And I wanted to that summary by Jonathan just right. I.
I wanted to just make a footnote about word history.
So oftentimes you hear people say, well, what's being threatened today is Christianity and democracy. And they think they know what they mean when they say that word democracy.
What that requires is a narrative display of what kind of conversations we ought to have with one another if, as a matter of fact, we are to be democratic. I'm not a great scripture-quoter, but Paul's admonition at
weakest should always have the first and last word is the condition that makes democracy possible. Not egalitarian, not freedom of the individual, but that kind of regard are those that
speaker-2 (07:02.242)
don't seem to have the power that we think democracy gives one of them.
speaker-1 (07:08.276)
I mean, one of the things I hear from that, Stanley, and I don't know what you think about this, but the current election is being touted as, you know, maybe the most important in American history, partly because democracy itself is in question. Like if we vote one person into the White House, then we will have democracy or continue and then we vote the other person democracy will have ended. The democracy I learned from
Stanley Hauerwas is of a far more robust kind of the kind that he just talked about, which is the weakest get the first and last word. If that's what democracy is, it doesn't really matter which of the current candidates win the election. We don't have democracy or democracy has been so enfeebled by say corporate power. It's been so overshadowed by
issues of serious concern like environmental crisis, it's unclear to me what we're fighting for. There's no doubt there's some significance about this election, but to cast it as a fight for democracy strikes me as not simply hyperbole, but political hyperbole to get people to side with who can claim themselves the most serious American or something like this.
speaker-2 (08:30.094)
Jesus said, come follow me, but it didn't mean that we needed to be stupid. I, I agree entirely what you just said, Jonathan, but, lives are on the line, Trump scares the hell out
speaker-0 (08:49.538)
This question gets us into the church. What does it mean as both of you say that the church is itself a political body? I think for a lot of us here, the idea of thinking about the church as a polity, as a political body might be new. So what is that? And then how does the church's understanding of itself as a political body? How is that something that can be politically significant, significant for how we relate to politics in general?
speaker-2 (09:20.718)
The church is a political body.
is discovered.
in the very existence of baptism as a way of life. Namely, the church as a politics is about the shaping of souls for the future of God's kingdom in a way that makes possible the discovery of God's will in a way that
There are a other ways of doing that.
I want to say the richest understanding of politics is already in the structure of the discourses that make our lives possible as Christians. mean, the baptism is about death, being raised from death.
speaker-2 (10:34.456)
That's the most basic political stance one can take. I contrast this with modern liberal view. John and Barbara gets tired of me saying this, but the liberal view is to create social orders that produce people that believe they should have no story, except the story they chose when they had no story. We call that an American freedom.
Turns out that form of freedom is a manipulative power grab by some over others. And if you don't believe that, that story is the story that determines us. You can see it this way in terms of institutions. Do you think you ought to be held responsible for a decision you made when you didn't know what you were doing? No, that it's against freedom.
But what that does is make marriage unintelligible. You never know what you did when you promised life while in monotonous bedell. And that's the reason why marriage carries a history that embodies a conversation that makes a whole community glad that these people exist.
speaker-0 (12:01.234)
Hey, Scott here. If you're enjoying this video, you can like and subscribe to Theology Lab's channel below and you'll see our latest releases and what's happening at Theology Lab right now. Also, the description and comments have a link to our podcast that features folks like David Brooks, Kristen Kobus-Dumay, and others. Enjoy the video.
speaker-1 (12:19.992)
You know, one of the things that Stanley had a lot of his, well, I think all of his students read was the great theorist of participatory democracy, Sheldon Wolin, who taught politics at Princeton for a long time. Many of us think he's, you know, one of the greatest political theorists of the 20th century. Wolin has a book, an iconic text in political theory called Politics and Vision, where he tells the history of political theory in the West.
And he narrates the emergence of Christianity as, you know, what he describes as a whole new way by which humans inhabit time and how do they do so with each other. And this this packs time with meaning because time is now not for, say, the bureaucratic state, which was the Roman Imperium in which Jesus was born and, you know, died in.
but rather time is for one another, where one another includes God. And Woollen says this changes the course of how we understand political existence. Right, I think that's the politics that Stanley's talking about. Most of us think about politics as Stanley writes about in quite a bit of detail for decades. Most of us think about politics as statecraft.
and think about reduce it to matters like things like voting in the general election, which for someone like Wolin would be absurd that you could reduce our democratic citizenship to one day of voting. That means we've already ceded power. But even the idea that politics is something that happens over there by way of serious, you know, the representatives who we surely don't know and surely don't speak for us.
The idea that you can reduce that to politics tells you everything you need to know. So part of the problem, I think Stanley's tried to get Christians to think about is if you even the way we think about the question, Christianity politics, we imagine politics is something out there and we try to theorize the relationship between this Christianity and that. politics is a way of being together. And what Walens gives us shows us is that Christian Christians, namely the church.
speaker-1 (14:43.082)
offered entirely new way of being together. So let me give you an example just to flesh it out. And I've always thought about what Stanley just said about marriage is critical. So, you know, in the church, Stanley said, you know, you get married. He often repeated this idea in classes. You get married in the church because you you're doing it in front of people who who will then hold you accountable to something you had no idea you were doing because you'd never had.
life-long fidelity before. And so you get married in public, that is the church, because they're going to hold you accountable to the vows. That's a politics. Now think about that politics as compared to a rival politics. You get married in the state, the state gives you a license for however long you want to stay married is going to be dependent completely on you two and the state. There's no intervening politics in there.
It's in some sense the evisceration of a public versus in the church. The church said, OK, you all are married now. It was really only the church's ability to name you as unmarried if that came to be somehow that thought. I'm guessing now terrorizes us. We would much rather be subservient to the public or the lack of public, which is the state than to a public called the church.
But as Stanley's always saying, you're only baptized into one of them, or supposedly you're only baptized into one of them, but perhaps you're not. One of the things my wife and I have done for years is we do pre-marital, pre-engagement counseling. I teach at a university, so oftentimes it's young couples. But the couple commits to...
If in and it's a very serious conversation that takes place over many hours, over many weeks, they commit to if something were to come up in our conversations that suggest they should not get married, they commit to considering not getting married. Right. That's a politics. That's the church saying we play a role in the most serious deliberation of your life, your deliberations of your life. Marriage being one of them. What?
speaker-1 (17:03.66)
Stanley talks about in terms of death in naming the silences is another. These are politics that is what Wollin means by a whole new way of inhabiting time together.
speaker-0 (17:17.762)
There's something that I'd hope our listeners get to take away from the way that both of you answered this kind of question is that we tend to think about politics as serious business. But what I think that both of you do a very good job speaking to is that there's even something more serious, that's even more political, and that being our baptism, the narrative that governs our lives. So I hope that folks are kind of tuning in to the way that you're maybe expanding what we think of as politics and what has political power.
Let me go into this this question here. So Stanley, this is this is a quote that comes from a community of character. It's on it's from a chapter in the book on the church's relationship to liberal democracy. You write that the first task of the church is to exhibit in our common life the kind of community possible when trust and not fear rules our lives to exhibit in our common life, the kind of community possible when trust and not fear.
rules our lives. So when we're talking about politics and trying to have constructive conversations here, I wonder what it is that makes this kind of trust in the church possible. Can you speak to that for a bit? What makes this kind of trust possible and why is it politically important?
speaker-2 (18:38.318)
I think what makes it possible and also difficult is Christians' obligation to tell one another the truth. And truthfulness is a hard and demanding process that we learn to go about it through our relationship with one another.
It can be British analytic philosophy was often criticized for looking at very small moral problems having to do with promises. But life is an ongoing promise and promises that produce the possibility of our trusting one another in a way that
has been made possible through being grafted into a narrative, which you've got nothing to lose but the truth. So how trust grows from our sense that we keep promises for one another. And we discover what promises we've made we didn't know we made is.
ongoing.
process that comes through conversation.
speaker-0 (20:17.942)
Stanley, could you say a little bit more about theological reasons that Christians are obligated to tell one another the truth, especially in ways where the goal here is that we can build trust with one another?
speaker-2 (20:33.74)
are obligated to live in a way that is unintelligible if God does not exist. So how we discover how the church has made possible lives that wouldn't exist without those kinds of interactions with one another. The silly thing is
I believe Texas is the best state in the union.
So, and I have been living in exile most of my life. Those are silly things, but we...
Give me an illusion any day that makes me satisfied with myself and I will seize it as a way of life. Don't ask me to tell myself the truth about who I am.
speaker-1 (21:40.672)
One of the things that Stanley often talks about in terms of trust is trust is gained in large measure by coherence. Do the things that you say match up to the way you live your life. Do the things that some set of group of some set of speakers match up with one another. And so Stanley is always talking about things like intelligibility and coherence. So if you're a church that walks around saying.
We offer the world a whole new way of being together, but attending your church is about as meaningless as, you know, watching football on Sundays, then people are going to have good reason not to trust you. And then they're going to say, well, I'd rather just watch football on Sunday. I think that tells the plight of many millions of Christians in America at this point that there was that there's broken trust to use your language, Scott, because of things we say are.
violently at odds with the way we live as Christians. One thing Stanley often talks about is this is why the horror this gets to part, of course, not entirely, but part of the horror of the church's sexual abuse scandals. And whether we're talking about the scandals that occur in your neck of the woods with the Catholic Church or in mind with the nearly 800.
cases of local Baptist churches aiding and abetting systemic sexual abuse in Texas congregations, what it reveals is perhaps a great contradiction at the heart of Christianity. puts a lie to all of Christianity because if at the end of the day, what makes us a politics is a baptism, that we are bodies gathered around the one risen body, Christ,
such that we can trust each other in that baptism, your body is mine and mine is yours, then for someone to sexually violate that, to abuse, is to distort the deepest truth of Christianity from the inside and to suggest that it's just one big lie as a way to exploit and violate one another. That's how trust is broken. That's how you become an incoherent people.
speaker-1 (23:59.778)
That's why people leave. To me, these are much greater dangers than things like, you know, supposed monster out there called Christian nationalism. think the scariest things is what Christians have done to each other. They render the entire gospel not simply incoherent, but potentially not true. And that's that's just what Sally's never been willing to compromise on. He thinks that he doesn't.
He doesn't allow us to have kind of some abstract God. It's either a God that's incarnate and the rubber meets the road or, you know, we're whistling Dixie.
speaker-2 (24:39.726)
I was going to say that the one thing that I think is the greatest challenge today is people think they should protect God. It doesn't come natural to think that God is there in my life in a way I cannot avoid. So if you think that you need
to protect the God. And as a matter of fact, you can be sure that the God you're worshiping isn't the God of Jesus Christ.
speaker-0 (25:20.142)
Let me take us to a question about politics in this present moment. Let's talk a little bit about how this kind of conversation has to do with the usual politics that people think about, like US politics and upcoming election. Do any of the views that you have articulated here, do you think they require voting a certain way or maybe go in the other direction of discouraging voting altogether? So I don't think you're advocating.
for Christians to be withdrawing from the world of politics, as some people have suggested. But what does it look like to advocate in terms of our regular politics? So this gives you a chance kind of to speak to politics in the present moment.
speaker-2 (26:04.59)
Until recently, I was deeply influenced by one of my former students named Mike Baxter. Mike said, don't vote, it only encourages them. But I do vote. I have voted in the current political world in which we live. I think voting
majority rule is just as disastrous as a minority rule.
And so voting can be a way to keep.
majority from destroying the minority. I think the English Parliament parliamentary saying is always used as normative for this. that's when they vote, they do so only after they've had an extended set of arguments about what you ought to be voting about.
So voting is not an abstraction that you get in from just nowhere, but it helps determine the goods for our people that otherwise would not be discovered without voting. So voting is a procedural process through which you discover goods that you could not have discovered.
speaker-2 (27:53.346)
without voting. That's the most idealistic set of bullshit I've ever said. But it is the reason that I continue to vote. Do you vote, Jonathan?
speaker-1 (28:11.438)
Stanley and I have talked about this in relationship to him because I was raised under Stanley's don't vote. It only encouraged them. Now, he told us as his students that he voted, but he'd say something like, you know, I voted for X over against Y. Don't make a big deal out of it. It's just what I did.
I think, I mean, you may, you all may get a chance to hear more about this. think Stanley's shifted just slightly. He's more charitable in his view of American voting. I think I've largely stayed the same. don't, well, maybe the way to put it is, so you, you referenced this, Scott, that sometimes people, and you weren't saying this, but you reference other people talking about Stanley Hire was encouraging people to withdraw from the state. And I always just think that's just,
really silly. mean, again, you're not saying this, but other people have said this. I'm like, there's nothing in Stanley's work that suggests you ought to withdraw from the state. What Stanley is calling you to is the genuine ground of politics, which is God's life, into which we participate as are insofar as we have any being at all. This is what you said earlier, Scott, as super important. What that super important thing doing that is we're called to the politics of God and the politics of the church.
is it relativizes our other commitments? It doesn't diminish them necessarily. It just relativizes them. We all have various loves. We're finite creatures. We give our time and attention to certain things. I think we're calling people to a politics that we think scripture attests to as the kingdom of God manifests in the world is at hand now. It is spoken of in a political way. Jesus was not crucified for doing too many quiet times.
He was crucified as a political adversary to the state. So we think we're calling people to that politics. What does it say about other kinds of political involvement? It doesn't say you can't participate. It just says you expect certain kinds of things. So, for example, sometimes people say Stanley's against us participating in the state because he's not really for justice. But that's just an absurdity.
speaker-1 (30:32.652)
Of course he believes in justice, he believes in Jesus. Right? Of course he believes in justice. He believes in the God of the old and new Testament, which is thoroughly portrayed as a God of justice. But he also believes what Augustine said, that no state, no city of man, no terrestrial kingdom can be truly just. Why? Because they don't love God as God justly deserves. So we already know that.
But that doesn't mean we don't care about our neighbors and we didn't. That doesn't mean we don't care that resources aren't justly given to local school systems, that lots and lots of people don't ever have access to equitable health care. We care about those things because we love our neighbors. We care about the election because we think that's an extension of it. We're also going to be pretty chastened in what we expect the government that doesn't love Jesus to do.
how it imagines its goods, how it orders its goods. So we can simultaneously call people, including non-Christian people, just like non-Christian people should call us as their fellow citizens, we should absolutely call people to the highest good that the city or the state can offer, just like we should call it to account when it doesn't. That doesn't mean we're withdrawing. doesn't, and just because we rank
our loves in certain kinds of ways doesn't mean we consider them important. It just means we're finite creatures. order our loves according to the way we inhabit the world.
speaker-0 (32:04.654)
gonna move now towards some questions that we've gotten from the audience here. First two, these are close. Let me try to pack these two together. Someone is asking about, when we think about discipleship and politics, is it more important to form communities around how we engage issues? Or does a specific approach necessitate a specific end or like a shared view, right?
speaker-2 (32:32.078)
I'd like to hear you answer that question in terms of the kind of work y'all are doing in your church.
speaker-0 (32:42.228)
I would think it would be the former in that naming specific issues and what the right sides are in them is not the default approach. Typically it's how are you formed in your character and in values that would line up with God's kingdom, that those are the things that should inform inform your politics. I don't think that that applies in every single situation, but and I would say the majority of them.
speaker-2 (33:12.27)
I think I asked the, responded in the way that I did because I don't think there is an in principle way to distinguish from those both two necessary steps. And some communities will need to do X and others need to do Y.
speaker-1 (33:35.128)
I mean, I imagine that what you've been doing the last few years at High Rock, Scott, is a model of what you're former is that is cultivating the kind of conversation that is capacious enough, that is charitable enough, generous enough to host really difficult things that people feel like they can't talk about. You know, and so they we say things like, well, don't talk about X or Y because it's too inflammatory. And then we add to that.
definitely don't talk about it at church. Whereas you might say, if you can't talk about it at church, don't go to church. I don't know what the point of church would be. That's not to say that's the only reason you go to church, but church is, you know, again, back to Wolin, a way of inhabiting time when we share commitments in a way that allows certain political judgments to be, to run consistent with those. That doesn't mean we all.
agree, right? I mean, I'm guessing there are a lot of different views in this room on the question of reproductive rights and abortion. I would never say that some view on it, you know, leads this or that in terms of your your your your life as a disciple. I can imagine any number of views on this. It's an incredibly difficult question, but that doesn't mean that I don't have a judgment about it.
I just had to recognize I inhabit a space where people may view something very differently and they love Jesus. And I can't presume that because they think something different than me, that they don't love Jesus. And that's part of the problem with the politics at the moment is just, you know, if you're wrong right now, it seems like you're not just wrong. You're wrong all the way down. You're wrong in your soul or something like that. yeah, that's, you know, anyways.
speaker-0 (35:26.968)
Well, I appreciate you saying this and posing the question back. I think one of the tensions in this series is that we were in our goal here is not whether we would talk about, you know, a topic like abortion and then find just ways to compromise. Like we're bringing in folks that have different views on it and then testing how far does a shared identity and Christ go in continuing a relationship?
and seeing where there's going to be tensions there, but somehow they may be possibly a shared identity in Christ can still add something. But I know how those how you maintain those things together and where the limits are. It's hard to say. I think that we'll kind of have to figure that out this year as we go. Let me go to this question here. The political entity of the USA was birthed through slavery and other evils, all sanctioned by Christians of the time.
In what way then has the left dragged the church into politics? Hasn't the church always been in politics for both good and ill?
speaker-1 (36:30.85)
The history I was telling there was about the 20th century, but the long history of American Christians and the various forms of politics that has been American America is more complicated than this, the 20th century. But I mean, we need to remember that there were lots and lots of Christians advocating for slavery using Christian political arguments. have biblical theological arguments.
But there are also lots and lots of Christians arguing against slavery using biblical theological arguments. Many of those people were black. And because of the injustice of our world, we didn't believe they had either the right to read scripture or much less to speak for it. So, yes, it's an incredibly complicated question. This is, again, my critique of all the the hater aid right now around Christian nationalism just presumes that that's a subtle question. It's an enormously complicated question.
And it's not simply that one that occurs, say, in America. It's occurring all around the world and has occurred around the world for Christians for two millennia. And so we're not settled on what it means for the, quote, church to relate to the, quote, state. But we can narrate particular moments in that history. And the recent history is the is the left pulling the right in.
and creating the monster that is now what we really, you a lot of us on, I probably consider myself the far left, we're pretty worried about on the right. So we could complain about them, but we helped them come into being.
speaker-2 (38:10.35)
I think America is a slave, genocidal nation. And the question is, what do you do when what was done is so wrong? There's nothing you can make it right. How do we tell our story honestly? Christians need to be helping all of us find ourselves located in this nation to
say we have a confession of sin to make. And that's not normally what politicians do.
speaker-0 (38:49.754)
I actually, there's a question I want to put in here that I think is related to this, that gets into, want to say the, the need to have conversations, conversations like this. Stanley, there's a line, I think it might be from that same chapter in community of character where you say that difference in diversity in the church is not a threat. In fact, it is the line is that it is a condition of our faithfulness. And this is in this context of struggling towards
being truth-telling communities. Why is this idea of differences and diversity coming together important for something like the Christian community?
speaker-2 (39:32.574)
First of let me say I don't like the word diversity. It's an abstraction that just says it's made a lot of difference. what we were saying about slavery and genocide is true. Then the hospitality that African-Americans have shown is to be built on as part of what thinks
possible for us to be a more nearly just society. It's not diversity. That's a witness of people who have suffered mightily, refusing to let their suffering determine enemies that are truly unjust but are being offered forgiveness. It's a remarkable feat.
Uh, really, we need difference. I always think, uh, that difference comes in different inflections of speech and we should reach out and do that way to hopefully have people that we have to learn to listen to cause we don't get their accent. So how
Difference comes away from creating more interesting communities is what I'm about. mean, if people think about the church growth business today, which I'm not a fan of, but church growth is attracting mainly people that look like one another. How to
be interesting to get. That's why I think Jonathan and I are trying to suggest that the church can become if, as a matter of fact, we take seriously our speech. People will think, I wonder why now those crazy people are about.
speaker-1 (41:53.62)
This is why Stanley's emphasis on nonviolence is not a side note to his political views. So nonviolence is the opposite. mean, violence is the opposite of conversation. You have violence because something someone says so threatens you, so offends you, so bothers you that you need to invoke the power of violence to silence them. And that's why a democracy predicated simply on voting.
on majoritarian rulership is, you as he's saying, a form of violence because it stops the conversation. People lose, they stop talking to each other. People win, they stop talking to each other. And so violence runs through everything he says as the grounds for a possibility of politics as conversation, especially when what we mean by conversation oftentimes is people who are different than us. The problem with a lot of the diversity stuff over the last, you know, decades.
is that it was his own form of violence, strangely in the name of equity and justice. And what we didn't do when we talked about diversity was have serious conversations oftentimes about the things that diversity was supposed to help us think most through. So things like the history of this country that one of your astute people just asked about, you know, the history of slavery. So how do we...
How do we sustain the conversation? One of the things we need to first decide is that we're not going to be violent. Jesus, of course, gives us that it's embodied by one of the most thick accounts of democratic life in America's history. That is the Black church and civil rights movement at its core committed to nonviolence. If you don't have that core commitment, then politics, violence becomes, as they say, politics by other means.
And we're just hoping for, know, I think we feel called to a different politics, which looks like nonviolence.
speaker-0 (43:57.198)
Well, Jonathan and Stanley, that brings us to the end of our time. Stanley, thank you so much.
speaker-1 (44:04.43)
Thanks for having us on.
