It's like, no, that's not what you know, she was more Christian than any of these fake Christians, right?

Yeah, and that's the hard part about seeing people try to, you know, reverse engineer or retrofit their position.

You know, Dolly was someone who I always need to remind these people.

She was for trans people.

She supported marriage equality.

She, you know, gave 30%.

300 million books to people.

And he was.

That's what you and, you know, John Fea was saying, our friend, [laughs] and so many others have tried to, you know, preach for many years now, right?

Yes.

It's, it's trying to have a life for me that does no harm.

I think, you know, Dolly always did that.

So there were people in her life and in her orbit who she, I'm sure she didn't agree with, but she always saw their humanity.

She always treated them with decency, and she never left anyone, I think, belittled in her presence, and that's so hard for all of us.

Um, uh, you know, I wrote a book in my, 10 years ago before all this started called A Bigger Table, and it was about building sort of expansive community.

Yeah.

Uh, this is a numbers game, and this is a good and evil game

gameYeah.

I think, Chris, I, I was just talking yesterday, I spoke in a local community, and I talked about writing A Bigger Table, and I wrote that during, you know, 2015, around that time, and I said, "I wish you could have met me then because I was a, a different pers- I was effervescent, I was bubbly, I was optimistic about the future." Uh, I think what's been happening, Chris, is, uh, someone like myself, I am privy to stories.

People give me a front-row seat to their experience of being human through this platform.

They write me, they send me emails, and they share with me their suffering and their pain, and you acquire, you accrue that enough over a decade, and you feel a responsibility.

You hold that, at least I do.

And so that tends to bring out a defense posture in me for marginalized, oppressed people.

... moving off that point.

So what did you begin to realize? And tell us about this.

Yeah, you know, Tom, I think we all have been immersed in this sustained urgency, this continual state of conflict for so long that we forget that this is not our natural default state for us individually or as a nation.

And when I got out of the country for a little while, the geographic distance helped me get some mental and emotional space.

And I just began to realize, you know, this is just not a healthy way.

Our systems are not built for this.

None of us, no matter where we are on the political spectrum.

And so we're all operating at less than optimum capacity, I think, as human beings.

That's so

Well, how does that suspicion of empathy affect or change how we follow Jesus?

Uh, I think it, it should make us, uh, more concerned than ever to be clear about how much we value human beings, because the idea of valuing humanity is often rejected by people who just want this afterlife focused, it's all about the soul.

I, you know, I had a pastor of the church where I was fired.

I was new at the church and I was talking about our students and our ministry, and they were going through so many things, you know, divorce in their family and drug issues and all, all these things, and I was trying to learn about all of their lives so that I could attend to them.

And he wanted me to do more spontaneous baptism events.

And I'm sitting there trying to, like, help him understand what I'm trying to do, and he said, "John, it's no exaggeration when I say that I have absolutely no interest in ministering to people." And I was like, I had this poker face, but I realized, "Okay, this is the moment I can no longer work here." Um, but for him, it was about that transaction.

He wanted people saved, and it didn't matter what their condition was.

Right.

For people who are unfamiliar with you, give us just a minute or so about your past and what brought you to this moment, and then if you could expound on that, please.

Sure.

Yeah, I began probably about three decades ago as a local church pastor and entered that quite naive and started going through the church and becoming a part of the system.

And it was during that time that I realized how attached so much of Christianity was to conservative right wing politics.

And as I moved through that, it became more and more difficult for me to stay aligned with this thing that was so antithetical to Jesus.

And so I started speaking out more explicitly on matters of race and gender, and that became a liability for me in that setting.

And so I was one day fired for my stance, but it allowed me to speak with a clarity, with an authenticity that I never could as a local church pastor.

How is it? First of all, in your opinion, what is it that is corrupting Christianity in the United States?

And I thought that was a really fascinating way to look at it.

Yeah, I think we can get so obsessed with the people at the top of this thing, but to realize this trickle-down toxicity, this fragility that young men are being born into, and this idea that the world owes you something, that the most privileged people, white, cisgender, heterosexual men, are being conditioned to believe that they're oppressed.

And when that story runs through their heads, everything is about grievance, and it's about getting back at people, and it's about shoving things in people's faces to show how dominant and strong they are, when in reality they are the weakest people on the planet.

You know, even looking at something like the response of conservative men to the Epstein files, right? This would be the time when all these professed protectors of women and children should be stepping up, but they're silent and they're invisible because they are beholden, their identity is placed in this man and his movement.

And what that does is it denies anything resembling courage.

They are incapable of it, and that's the really sad thing, because these guys are raising children, they have wives and partners, and they are just lost and adrift right now.

Yeah.

But it's grieving over who I thought we were, and I had this image of what the leaders of our country did to steward the people who laid their lives on the line for us, that they had a certain amount of respect, and that their wellbeing really mattered as they entered into discourse about national, you know, domestic and international affairs.

He doesn't even know what he's talking about, right?

That's right, that's right.

Well, anything with an "-ism on the end, you know, they just throw out there.

And because it's a long word and their base cannot handle long words.

And we see this is the last throws of a movement that has tried everything and is now dying.

I mean, it really is.

Trump is out of gas.

But it is very clear that we were founded on freedom of and from religion, if that was your choice.

Okay, so why did you leave the church?

Well, I had been a pastor for about 17 years and started to see the church change, my particular church, but the larger church, as Obama was elected, going through his terms.

And then in the 2016 presidential campaign specifically, I started to watch Trump ascend in this process, and I started to realize if I'm gonna be a spiritual leader of any kind, I need to speak explicitly into what's happening, because Christians were softening their convictions.

They were suddenly, you know, moving the goalpost, which they've done for 10 years now.

And I started writing more explicitly, but I could nudge my congregation because I had been there a while, had an equity of trust.

But I got to a new church, and I always say after five months, I heard God calling me to leave that church, and it came in the form of my pastor's voice saying, "You're fired." And my words on equality and gender and sexuality and race were uncomfortable for them, so I found myself outside of the system.

So how do you sort through all of, all of that?

Yeah, I can remember being online around the 2016 election and talking to a, a queer woman of color, and I'm trying to convince her to stay in the faith that she was losing.

Do you see any sort of a movement across the moderate Christian church to push back on this kind of thing?

I absolutely am, Tom.

You know, I'm in touch with so many of these leaders and through emails, through my travels.

And I was just talking to a Methodist pastor who I actually ran into on a greenway here in North Carolina.

And he was saying, you know, I finally reached a place where I cannot in good faith call myself a spiritual person, a person of Jesus, a leader in the church and be silent.

And there's a lot of reasons that churches have been hesitant to enter into the fray of social justice and issues of race and gender and sexuality.

It's terrible that they are.

But for people who want to follow the law and be ethical, how do they do it?

How should we think about our neighbors and acquaintances who still support Donald Trump? How do we

reconcile this? Well, you know, Tom, I think there are people who are in various stages of support, various levels.

So many of them are seeing some of the things that we've been telling them for a decade.

And I think there is so much identity tied up in their support, so much self-preservation and really the inability or unwillingness to say, hey, I was wrong.

But I think there are people who are slowly peeling away.

And those people are.

I think we can still have relationships with and still find commonality with them.

Who do you think are the people who are supporting Trump now and why?

But lay out your promise here for our viewers and listeners.

Well, ever since this pope was installed, we could see that Trump and Vance were already talking about him because we know that he was not their ideal choice, that they worked really hard not to have someone who was a more moderate, more progressive pope.

championing things like loving our neighbor and caring for the poor and being the peacemakers, all the things that Jesus preached about, every time those values are embodied or articulated, we get Trump or someone in his regime pushing back against it.

And it's really telling because they cannot handle anything resembling Christ's likeness.

And that's the irony of a party that would call itself Christian.

They have a seat in the United Nations.

Yeah, well, I think, Tom, what it is is they're so used to the conservative evangelical culture that has fallen in line, and you've seen all the high-profile celebrity evangelists selling their souls and kissing the ring, and they've underestimated the intestinal fortitude of this pope.

And I think that's been where they've misstepped because now they're caught.

With a brief intro as to your background vis-a-vis Christianity, could you share that with us, please? Sure.

Sure, Tom.

Good to see you.

I'm a three decade veteran in local church ministry, pastor from quite early on.

And over that time, I began to see the ills of the church and the system that I was complicit in.

And ever since then, I've been doing my best to speak into the marriage of church and state that we're seeing here in America.

Yeah.

How can we speak to our neighbors who claim Christianity and yet proclaim in the name of Christianity these deeply hateful policies and endorsements of politicians who really are exactly what Jesus tried to drive out of the temple in those early days? Right.

What are your thoughts on that analysis and what would you add to it or dispute and or fine tune it?

I think.

What's happened is during that time, moderate people of faith have slowly been squeezed out of a system where they no longer found themselves belonging.

And so moderate people, progressive people of faith began to see the conversation on religion to the religious right.

That became the only voice.

And people didn't just leave the church.

The conservative church, they left church altogether.

How are they doing? How are these more progressive denominations doing?