Episode 24 - Dethroning Whiteness with Lisa Sharon Harper

What is the actual Good News? Join Anni and author, activist, and visionary Lisa Sharon Harper for a poignant conversation about honoring God’s image in all of humanity.

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Transcript

Welcome to season two of Barely Christian Fully Christian.

I'm your host, Anni Ponder, and I'm so glad you've stopped by for the conversation about loving Jesus, being repulsed by the un-Christ likeness of so much of what the world sees from Christianity, and my personal favorite, honoring the Holy Spirit as the Divine Mother, or as I call her, Mama God.

The conversation that follows is one I'll likely be thinking about for years to come.

My professor, Lisa Sharon Harper, joins me for a deep dive into the work we all must do in order to honor the image of God in every human.

If you've always known there must be more to the good news than what the White Evangelical Church has put forward, I think you'll be particularly interested in how Lisa puts the gospel into words for her great-great-great-grandmother, Leah.

Well, I want to give a really big-hearted, warm welcome to Lisa Sharon Harper, who among many things in this world is my professor.

So we'll get into that a little bit, but I want to tell you, those of you listening about who she is in the world, in case you haven't heard of her, I can't imagine that you've not, but Lisa Sharon Harper is the founder and president of Freedom Road, a groundbreaking consulting and communications group.

Lisa is a theologian whose writing, speaking, activism, and training has sparked and fed the fires of reformation in the church.

Lisa's book, Fortune, How Race Broke My Family and the World, and How to Repair It All, was named one of the best books of 2022, and The Very Good Gospel was named 2016 Book of the Year by Englewood Review of Books.

Lisa is host of the Freedom Road Podcast, co-host of The Four Podcasts, and author of her substat column, The Truth Is.

The Huffington Post identified Lisa as one of 50 women religious leaders to celebrate on International Women's Day.

Lisa is currently earning her PhD in Womanist Ethics at the I looked up how to say this, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

That's good enough.

Okay.

And she's serving as affiliate faculty at St.

Stephen's University in Canada, which is how I know her because I am now taking my second class from her.

And her dog, Babe, is joining us from her house.

Babe always has to have her say.

Well, you know, as a woman should, absolutely.

Hey, Babe, come here.

Come on.

Lay down.

You're good.

As I told you on one of our class Zooms, I think last semester when Babe was voicing her opinions during class and you were shushing her, I said, you don't know how affirming it is to know that a theologian and a justice worker I really admire still has to deal with dog issues.

So that puts us on more even ground.

She's been particularly barky today for some weird reason.

They don't get it.

Well, maybe she knows something that we don't know.

Yeah.

Well, welcome, Lisa.

Today, I am really excited by something you just put out on Substack.

You wrote an article called Dethroning Whiteness, and you're telling a little bit about your story and your work with the people in Brazil.

And so congratulations on your very good gospel, going out to the folks of Brazil, being translated into Portuguese.

That's exciting.

Yes, I'm actually really super excited about that.

The whole thing was so God.

I mean, it was just so God.

All up in it while I was there, it was God truly who wove the whole thing together.

I was first invited by one conference and then connected with a friend who was there.

And she was like, Oh, let's have you at my church.

And her church happens to be the largest church in Latin America.

And so, yeah.

And I mean, I had already spoken there once for like an evening thing that had 100 people.

But this time, they actually asked me to speak for the 11 a.m.

service.

So here I am, like, you know, within 24 hours, 11,000 people have seen the very good gospel talk, the talk on the four words that change everything.

So I'm just like, yes, you know.

But even as much as that, there was so much work that was done in terms of training and consulting with pastors across Brazil, from across Brazil, who all kind of came into Sao Paulo for this training.

And in like straight up anti-racism, they wanted to know, how do we become an anti-racist church?

That was what they wanted to know in that language.

I was like, this is not the US of A right now, because people are running.

I mean, even honestly, even like, quote, progressive spaces are running from anything that sniffs of DEI.

And so I was encouraged by my time in Brazil and also stunned to find out how parallel our stories are and how connected they are.

I was honestly, literally, my jaw is still like dragging on the floor from the things I learned there.

Like look at what God is up to in Brazil.

Could you give us a wee look at your, the previous time you were there when you were invited to speak and a hundred people showed up.

Talk about that.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting.

I mean, so that was 2018.

In 2017, to go back a little bit further, I was in Charlottesville in August when everything went down in Charlottesville, and it was horrific.

But one of the things that actually was a star in a very dark sky, in that whole traumatizing experience, was that the night before we had a mass meeting, and mass meetings are times of encouragement and hope and vision.

And I was asked to be one of the speakers during the mass meeting.

In fact, I was the last speaker during the mass meeting before the worship set.

And the speaker before me was Cornell West.

And so, and he and I have actually marched together several times.

But he had never heard me preach before or speak.

And so it turns out after Charlottesville, where we were, we marched together to the, I believe it was called Liberty Park, which is a real misnomer.

And that, you know, we did that.

And afterwards, he was invited to speak in Rio for a conference called Festival of Reimagination or Festival de Reimaginar.

Reimaginar, I'm still trying to get the Portuguese.

I know, I don't have Portuguese at all.

Very different than Spanish, it's not the same thing.

Anyway, he couldn't make it.

So he said, why don't you, you should, you should tap Lisa Sharon Harper for this, which blows my mind.

I was like, what?

I mean, I had never been to Brazil before.

And in fact, I didn't know that he was the one who invited, who recommended me until after the event.

I said, how did you guys even find out about it?

Well, we're now West recommend.

It was like, what?

So anyway, at that same time, I had just been to the Justice Conference in Chicago, like a couple of weeks before that.

And I met Ed Kivich and Fernanda Kivich, his daughter.

He is the pastor of that largest church in Latin America called EBUB.

And he was, I don't know if he spoke at that Justice Conference, but the Justice Conference at the time, which was a large, multi-city, global conference that popped up in various places around the globe.

It started in Bend, Oregon and kind of went out from there.

But this particular Justice Conference, he was there, and they were trying to recruit him to do one in Brazil, to host it at his church.

So we met, we got to talk, and then when I told him, hey, I'm going to be in Rio for this festival, he said, well, why don't you come down to my church and speak for us?

And so I did.

And 100 people showed up.

I don't know exactly what night it was.

I just know it wasn't a Sunday morning.

And so it was all cordoned off and it looked really small.

I had no idea how large that church was.

But it was really still even then it was really powerful.

And I gave it a much earlier version of the four words that try and change everything that anybody can download now and watch online.

But it was much more involved.

It was much less honed.

But at the same time, it was, this is what shalom is, and this is what our call is in the scripture.

Our call in scripture is actually to work toward the shalom of all things, the restoration of shalom on earth, of God's peace, the state of things and the state of relationships between all things on the first page of the Bible.

So people responded really well to it.

It was really actually very, very powerful.

But I just really, I started to think about the challenge that pastors of mega churches and pastors, not even just mega churches, pastors of white churches have in moving their congregations forward in this work of justice, this work towards shalom.

It is treacherous.

And the number one reason that I have been told for decades that pastors are silent at exactly the moments when their voices are needed, when injustice is happening is because they are afraid of losing their tithers, their large, you know, large bucket tithers.

And so I was, I was just really struck by that.

I've been thinking about that for a long time.

So when I came back this time, and the pastor invited me to speak in his slot on Sunday morning, I was blown away.

And it just turns out they've had a true transformation at that church ever since Bolsonaro.

His thinking about Shalom and about the Very Good Gospel has been transformative for him and the way that he engages these critical moments, these moments where, in his words, where the temptation is to try to hold both sides.

You want to try to hold both sides?

But what you don't realize is that in doing that, you're actually doing injustice.

You become a party to injustice.

Because you're treating injustice as if it has equal moral standing with justice, and it doesn't.

So, let me say, it's not looking at both sides of the issue.

It's trying to hold everyone together.

And really, in the name of unity, and everybody, we all know how powerful that call to unity is, like unity of the church, unity of the church.

But the problem is, is that when you have part of your church wanting to legislate things that will literally kill other parts of your church, or destroy the lives of other parts of your church, how do you hold that, all of that?

So, what he has come to understand, in light of Bolsonaro's presidency there, and Bolsonaro was very much, he aimed to be like a Trump, but he ended up being more like a clown.

And well, not that Trump isn't a clown, but anyway, you know, he aimed to be like a Trump, and, but he, it's so hard to say, but he wasn't as intelligent, because Trump is not very intelligent either.

So, let me just put, the Brazilians, they characterize him in that way.

I actually think he's very, very similar.

And in the midst of that, this pastor, Ed, spoke up, and he denounced Bolsonaro in the largest church in Latin America.

Wow.

Yeah.

And the thing that makes this so amazing is that this church was planted by Southern Baptists.

Mind blown.

Wow.

So this is so hopeful, Lisa, because this is testimony of what the Spirit is able to do.

When we have soft hearts willing to be molded, we can go from a Southern Baptist theology to one that says, no, I'm going to speak for justice and speak out against oppression.

Well, what it is, is I'm going to stand on the actual gospel.

I'm going to believe, I'm going to actually believe Jesus.

When Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers, the shalom makers.

I'm going to actually believe the gospel, the actual gospel, which is not only about inviting Jesus into your heart.

In fact, that's never anywhere in the actual scripture.

Like I just put in here where you talk about trying to tell your third great grandmother, the American white evangelical gospel.

When you when you talk about was that in your Ted talk, the four words that yes, it was it was in that talk in the Theo ed talk and it was in it's also in the book and very good gospel.

Everybody go watch that or read that because it's so profound.

You trying to share that version of the gospel with your third great grandmother, who's like, that's not helpful to me in the least.

Yeah, my third great grandmother, Leah Ballard was the last enslaved woman in our family.

And she was adult.

She was likely what they called a breeder, as in she had 17 children, 12 of which were born after abolition.

The first five were born probably within about five years or so, probably one a year she had.

And none of them are anywhere to be found on any post-Civil War listing of human beings, nowhere.

In other words, likely she bore them and then they were sold away.

Or they died because children didn't live that long then.

So enslaved children didn't live that long.

So we believe that she was a breeder, which meant that her job was to be raped systematically in order to breed money for her master.

So when I imagined myself going up to her and saying, great, great, great, Grandmom Leah, I have good news for you, and pulling out the four spiritual laws, if anybody here is familiar with that.

In other words, there's like these four spiritual laws that white evangelicals came up with in the 1950s and 40s.

And it goes like this, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

I mean, come on, just that alone.

Let's go ahead and sit with that for a second.

Just for a moment, this enslaved woman whose her first five children are nowhere.

She has no idea where they are and they might be dead because she's enslaved, right?

And I go up to her and say, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

The second one is, you are sinful and therefore separated from God.

I mean, it's like a knife that just keeps going in deeper.

And then the third one is the twist.

But Jesus died to pay the penalty for your sin.

And so therefore, if you just pray this little prayer, that's number four, if you get to go to heaven, prayer at the back of the gold booklet, the forced virtual laws booklet.

And so I imagine myself sharing this with my third great grandmother, Leah, and when I was really honest with myself, I had to admit that this would not make her jump for joy.

This would not be received as good news.

It's not good news at all.

Yeah.

And she, in fact, I like to joke now that if she was living in the 1980s in the US, she might have she might have said, Lisa, are you smoking crack?

Like, what do you do?

You not see me?

Do you not see me, child?

Yeah.

No, come on.

Come on.

Come on.

And so that threw me into a year of depression because I had shaped my entire life around the gospel.

I am an evangelist first.

And I was in ministry on the college campus with the College International College Ministry.

And I had given up actually a career in theater because I had started out as a playwright in order to do this ministry.

So, I mean, I had just given up so much.

And so I just when I realized that my third great grandmother would actually not receive my good news as good news, it just threw me.

And so after a year of depression, or actually in the midst of that year, I was really processing this and just sitting in Genesis.

And I ended up sitting in Genesis for 13 years.

And now I think it's actually 22 years now.

Before I wrote the Very Good Gospel in 2016, it was published.

And so I think that what I what I found was that that truncated understanding of the Gospel came to us from the social location of empire, not from the social location of Jesus, who was colonized by an empire that was explicitly supremacist.

They didn't understand color to be the thing about race, but they did actually create the thing we call race.

And what they imagined it to do is to order society, to say these people are created to serve society in this way, this race of people.

And this race of people is created to serve society in this way.

And that goes right back to Plato.

And then Plato's student, Aristotle, was the one who undoubtedly, I mean, if it didn't come from Plato, it definitely came from Aristotle, included, or added to this rubric, human hierarchy.

And he, I mean, verbatim said, if you have been conquered, you've proven that you were created to be enslaved.

And so it's those, it's that logic, it's the logic of domination, the logic of hierarchy that the Pope, Pope Nicholas V, read Genesis 1 through that lens, right?

So when Pope Nicholas V reads Genesis 1, he doesn't think all humanity is made in the image of God.

He thinks, well, he might actually think all humanity is made in the image of God, but he thinks the only people who are human are people like him, right?

Only Christians are human, really.

Like literally, that's what they thought.

And later, only white people are human.

And at the same time, even back then, only men are human, right?

So you have this understanding of the, quote, good news of the gospel that I had been handed in college, I had been teaching in ministry, that actually came from empires that didn't believe I was human.

And so, you know, after wrestling in Genesis and really asking the implications questions, what if this is true?

What does this mean in terms of what our relationship with God is supposed to be?

Or what God considers to be very good?

And that just led me down this road that led to the writing of the very good gospel.

And I'll never, ever forget, ever, writing the first chapter.

Like, when I wrote, or actually it was chapter two, and I was actually researching chapter two.

And chapter two is about the vision.

It's about, you know, it's like, okay, let's actually dive in to Genesis one.

And what does it say?

And I was researching the context, because nobody ever told me the context within which it was written before.

People just always have all these little theories about, well, it's about creation was made in seven days.

If it's not about that, it's about this or that.

Yeah, Moses, all the things, right?

And yeah, but when you learn the context within which it was written, I mean, I had no idea.

Like it was written by colonized, enslaved people who were on their way out of oppression.

They had been oppressed for 70 years, and they were now it was that was that was finished.

Like it was done.

And now on their way out, they decided they're going to write their own creation narrative.

And it's actually an epic poem.

And so when I found that in the research, that blew my mind.

And I was like, wait a minute, if this is a poem, then that means the words on the page are not there.

They're about much more than the words on the page.

They're usually about something much greater.

The words on the page are usually metaphors or similes or something that's trying to describe something else.

And then I realized, what if they are describing in the beginning?

In fact, let me read it.

I have it with me right now.

On that first page, in the first paragraph, it says, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.

Well, you know me, I love word study, so I always want to go back and say, what does that really say that?

Does that really say that?

What is it really saying here?

And just doing a word study, just that alone, began to unpack this.

I'm like, what?

So, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void.

That formless void, first of all, it doesn't mean that there was nothing there and then God created everything.

It means it was chaos.

Like it's actually chaos and darkness covered the face of the deep, the deep.

The deep was the place where the gods of their oppressors in that moment lived in the deep.

And so, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.

I thought, what are they describing?

Could they be describing their enslavement?

Could they be describing how the last 70 years felt since they were conquered and the Babylonians came and carted them away to Babylon in the exile?

Like, could they be describing darkness covered the face of the deep?

Destruction, that word darkness actually literally means destruction or desolation.

Wow.

Like, that just paints a whole other picture.

Like, you know what I mean?

And I understand that.

Like, as a person of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved, I understand the poetry that means more than the words on the page.

Absolutely.

Embedding themes deep in words.

Yeah.

And also, I mean, think about it.

It could also, in some ways, I don't know this to be true, but I wonder if it was almost like code, because they didn't have the freedom to say it out loud, you know?

I mean, that just brings to mind all these Negro spirituals that we love, you know, wading in the water and following the drinking gourd.

And yeah, this is, this is deeply meaningful.

And if you just do a surface reading, you're going to miss the entire plot.

Yes, exactly.

And then I came to this place where it says, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

And I always imagined that wind to be like, you know, kind of, literally like the spirit is sweeping over the waters with this feeling, you know.

And, but actually, that word swept over actually doesn't mean to sweep over.

It literally means to brood as a chicken broods over her eggs.

So it's actually a birthing image.

It's like, it's like the Spirit of God is like, like this, it's like brooding.

Yeah.

It's like something's going to happen.

Something's about to be birthed and it's sitting over the water, over the place of their oppressors gods, about to birth something in the darkness, in the middle of the desolation.

Yeah.

In the middle of the destruction, in the middle of all the D words.

Like, this is what God is doing.

God is hovering.

And, and it's a feminine word.

And it's, I was wondering if you're going to pull that out because that was really important.

The ruach there, she's, she's on the move.

She is on the move and she is doing what she's do.

She's giving birth.

Yes, she is.

That's how God goes to war against the gods of their oppressors.

God gives birth to light.

You know, I wept.

I literally sat in my research chair because I had a little research chair in my apartment where I was doing, I did all my research.

And I literally put my hands in the air and I looked up and I just thought, Oh my God, the oppressed.

God cares about the oppressed on the first page of the Bible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that was the process of writing the Very Good Gospel.

And it felt like holy ground, yeah.

Well, it is holy ground because what you're doing is re-refocusing the narrative back to the actual plot, which is every human being bearing God's image.

And you talk about in your book, all of creation being something precious and holy, and to be stewarded and protected, and that's our mandate.

And then you go into how when we engage in hierarchical oppression, one person over another, a group of people over another, what we're really doing is stripping those people's ability to have dominion as God gave to all of us in that very first portion of scripture.

Yes.

And that is the process of dehumanization.

Right.

That's what it means to be dehumanized.

Yes.

Is to strip the ability to exercise agency.

Yes.

Make choices that impact the world.

And there are lots of different ways we do that, but the most, you know, the fastest and surest way to do it is through oppression.

Yes.

Or poverty.

And we see both of those actually coming down hard right now in the United States.

Yeah.

Just last week, they, or it's all blending now.

I think it was last week that they passed the legislation, the big horrible bill that will absolutely impoverish.

I mean, further impoverish the bottom third of our country.

Yeah.

And it will impoverish many middle class people.

Like it'll just take the bottom out for them.

And it literally eviscerates the safety net that has been in place since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in our country.

Like it goes.

And you know, what's funny is that it's actually not funny, but back in 2016, the year that the Very Good Gospel was published, I joined the Nuns on the Bus as a non-none.

And I was the very first non-none to ever ride on their bus.

Wow.

Yeah, it was really cool.

Just for one leg, I joined them as they were headed to and at the Republican Convention of 2016.

The convention where Donald Trump was nominated to be their candidate the first time that he won, or really didn't win, but you know what I mean.

Yeah.

So outside the Nuns on the Bus, what they did, they did this really creative thing, which they're known for doing.

They really just listen.

That's one of their amazing gifts that they give to the world as they listen really well to everybody.

So they wanted to listen to the Republicans that were lined up, trying to, the delegates trying to get into the convention.

And they asked them when, like they asked everybody the same, like, I don't know, 10, 15 questions.

One of the questions that I got to ask a bunch of people standing in that line, waiting, delegates waiting to get into the convention was, can you name the point that you want America to go back to in order to be great?

Tell us when that is, please.

Yes.

Yeah.

To a person, everyone said before the New Deal.

Before the New Deal.

The time when, before America had taxes, the time that led to the Roaring 20s, which led to the stock market crash, which they don't, they don't, they don't trace those dots all the way.

They don't remember that, right?

Exactly.

But they want to go back to, you know, pre 1919, before the United States had taxes.

And before the United States had a safety net for anyone, to a time when the majority of people in the United States actually were poor.

I mean, living below the poverty line.

White, black, doesn't matter who you are, the majority were living poor.

And it was really only Delano Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that changed that through the New Deal.

And then even greater reforms were made after World War II, were in the midst of World War II, through taxes, they were able to pay for World War II and create the middle class, through things like the GI Bill.

So the GI Bill actually gave away free land and free education to white people, building the middle class in America.

But they are literally eviscerating education, like absolutely eviscerating the education system.

And they're doing things that are going to tank land values across the country, which they want to do because they're aiming to buy it all up and corporatize, privatize, or corporatize land in America so that they can become the robber barons that they were legislated against by Teddy Roosevelt.

So Teddy Roosevelt broke the robber barons by creating regulations for the first time in American history, and they don't want regulations.

They want greed.

It is greed, right?

At the heart of all of this that we're seeing.

And you pulled something out in your article that made me think further because that's where I've gone a lot in my kind of trying to understand what's at the root of what we're seeing.

And I get down to, this is greed, this is love of money.

And then you said, I think it's actually even worse.

I think it's actually just a desire not to love the least of these.

And that's fueled by love of money, right?

But it's like an absolute no thank you to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who says, take care of the least of these.

No, we're going to use your name and your emblem.

We're going to put it on a flag and we're going to march through the streets and we're going to build an empire of our own, of elites.

Yeah, I'm not even sure it's a choice not to love.

I think it's just that they don't love.

I mean, I don't know what happened to them in their childhood that causes them unable to love, but it's just they don't love and they don't love.

And it's not they as in some outside.

It's the church.

It's the majority of the white church.

The majority of the people in white churches in America don't love Jesus, don't love God.

They just don't.

Jesus himself said, I am the least of these.

What you do to them, you do to me.

Literally.

Go and see them, care for them, provide for them, listen to them, because as you do it, you are doing it to me.

He names them, the thirsty.

Okay, Flint, right?

Okay, clean water.

The thirsty, the hungry.

Okay, SNAP benefits.

Okay, literally taking children's food off their plates in education like ending the free lunch program or the supplemental lunch program or breakfast program in impoverished schools.

Nope, no more.

You have to go to school hungry.

No, we're going to create hungry.

We're going to create hungry in order that we can have more money.

That's literally what they're doing.

Literally, you know, sick.

Oh no, no, no.

We're taking away 13 million people's health care.

13 to 20 million, by the way, people's health care, taking it away so that when they get asthma, forget them, they die.

You know what I mean?

They suffocate.

Or they have to go, or worse, they have, not worse, but as bad, they have to go to the emergency room and wait, and sometimes die in the emergency room because they have to wait too long because too many people are going to be in that emergency room.

And let me tell you, I have some experience of this.

In the last six months, my mom was really, really sick and she has great, she has Medicare, right?

Because of her Medicare, she was able to have the two major surgeries in a three month period, four month period because of complications and several doctor's visits.

But we ended up going to the emergency room once we went.

And because of all the cuts that have already come, we literally didn't even get seen that night.

We decided to just go home.

We literally sat there in the emergency room at Penn University Hospital for like eight hours, eight.

And she is suffering, this old older woman is suffering.

And she did not get seen.

Thankfully, she already had an appointment with her doctor the next morning.

She was able to be seen the next morning by her doctor.

But we thought, Jesus is having an emergency right now.

And it turned out that she just had to bear through it until the next morning when she could see her doctor.

She never even got seen, because that is what emergency rooms are like, and that is what life is going to be like for at least 13 million more people.

Why?

So that they can have more money.

The prisons.

Okay, you know, I was in prison and you did not visit me.

It's not just about visiting in prison, by the way.

I mean, it's really advocating for prisoners is what Jesus was saying.

These, you have a whole prison industrial complex that is developed in order to imprison more people and in order to protect the imperial state, right?

And so what does it look like then for communities that have an inequitable interaction with the prison system?

People like African Americans in the United States who are 17 times more likely to see the inside of a prison than a white man, 17 times.

Or what is it like to be an immigrant, a brown immigrant in the United States right now, where now the Congress last week just elected to triple the budget for ICE.

Triple, as in 30 billion dollars more has been given.

Billion, not million, billion, 30 billion dollars has been allocated toward ICE.

It's now the largest American agency in American history.

It is three times the size of the FBI.

And a lot of that is to build prisons for immigrants.

And this is for something that when I first started in this arena of theoethics and organizing the church, literally, like back in the early 2000s, even up to really till 2016, because it was Trump that changed it.

Immigration status being undocumented or unauthorized in the country was literally a legal, legal civil infraction, civil infraction.

In other words, it was the equivalent of a traffic ticket.

Right.

A traffic ticket.

Yeah.

It was not a criminal offense.

Trump, one of the first things he did was to change that through executive order and to make it a criminal offense, not even just executive order.

I think he just instructed his attorney general to make it a criminal offense, and he did.

It was literally one of the first announcements that he made as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, by the way, was an acolyte of Strom Thurman, who was what they call a Dixie-Crat, who ran for the presidency on the Dixie-Crat ticket.

In other words, a break-off from the Democratic Party, tried to get all the Southerners to vote against the Democratic Party and this new party called the Dixie-Crats in the 1950s.

And their number one platform was keep segregation alive and don't make lynching illegal.

Keep lynching legal.

Keep lynching legal and keep segregation alive.

This was the platform that Strom Thurman ran on, and Jeff Sessions was his mentor, mentee.

Jeff Sessions was the attorney general that said, we're going to criminalize immigrant unauthorized status.

That was the first time in American history that it's been criminalized.

So if we zoom back out to Plato, and we see that this thought at least goes as far back as him, probably further, but we can find it with him coming out of his own mouth.

There is natural hierarchy and order, and some people are just better than others and fit to rule.

Let me just say, Plato, it really is the, it's Plato.

He has seeds in Socrates and others, but it's Plato because Plato, Plato had this thing called dualism.

Yes.

He put into it, and Platonic dualism is really the issue.

This is where there are good people and bad people.

Right.

And so when we start looking at this philosophy that's been here the whole time, and we see how it crops up over and over and over in the hearts and minds of humans who come into power, who have privilege, who wield it to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of others.

It's just so very old.

Oh, is that on your end or mine?

Oh, it's mine.

Oh, Amber alert or storm warning.

Is experiencing a statewide intermittent 911 outage.

What?

Okay, that's weird.

Right.

Keep going.

See, now this is what we're talking about.

Okay, so here's where I was going to go with it.

statewide 911 outage.

You don't think that has anything to do with the budget or, you know, come on.

What?

Never, never before.

Anyway, keep going.

Okay, well, let me think about where I want to go from here.

Here's my question right now.

You talk a lot about dethroning whiteness.

I love that term in particular.

When I first started hearing talks like this, back at the beginning of my awakening to, hey, I have some decolonization to do.

You know, those sorts of words were very offensive to me and blah, blah, blah.

I'm sure you've heard this a million times in your conversations.

I really appreciated how you took the time in chapter nine of Very Good Gospel to help white folks like myself and other folks who have privilege and don't know about it, to begin to say, wait a minute, is there a chance that Plato's philosophy, this is what I'm going to put this out here.

This is what I call the Dragon's philosophy.

Is there a chance that it has infected me at any level?

Is there any shard of it living in me?

And you offer some really helpful ways for folks to begin to ask that question.

And it requires a little humility.

It requires us to get past our initial, like I'm sure when you first start talking to people who have not ever begun to notice that they have some privilege, right?

That they're like, oh, well, you know, like this guy in the movie, you just had us watch Descendants about the Clotilda, right?

This descendant of, I think he was the descendant of the captain of the ship.

He was talking to the other guys on that boat.

And he's like, well, at least, you know, my ancestor was a nice slave holder.

And they're like, a what?

I'm sorry, that's not a thing.

So, okay.

As you encounter folks who are in the initial stages of, oh, I've got some weeding to do in my heart and my mind.

I love how you offer these steps.

And I wonder if you might want to just take a moment to talk about them.

First, you say you need to help yourself become aware.

You need to go and take Harvard's implicit bias test, right?

Like, see it?

I did that a few years ago, and I was like, oh, it's here.

It's living in my body.

This dragon's philosophy makes it so that when I look at a black person, I have more hesitation at clicking the word good than when I look at a white person.

And I'm trying so hard not to.

I'm aware of it.

And it's implicit, right?

Then you...

Unconscious, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's just, it's been sown in to, you know, I use a lot of metaphor in my thinking.

So to the garden of my heart and my mind, where thoughts and convictions live, it's been sown like the enemy coming in and sowing seeds of weeds that Jesus talks about.

So you say first, just know that this is a thing.

And I don't hear anywhere in your writing or teaching ever, any sort of, and now you should feel guilty and feel ashamed.

I just hear like, just know that it is, and then work to get rid of it.

Yeah.

Basically, I mean, or just work to train your mind to think differently.

Yes.

You know what I mean?

Like, because our minds have been trained.

I mean, the thing is, and it's not only white people.

It really isn't.

People of any hue can hold white supremacy in their minds, hearts, and souls.

Because all of us have been soaking in the assumptions of white supremacy for at least 2,000 years.

Absolutely.

I mean, really, you have to go back.

I actually had this thought.

When was the last time?

This is a great, it's a great, it's an interesting question.

When was the last time that people of European descent went somewhere else in the world and did not think I should be ruling here?

I should tell them how to be.

Yeah.

I can't name a time when.

When was the last time?

Well, I can tell you the time.

It's before the Greek Empire, 3,000 years ago.

You have to go back 3,000 years to get to the place when people of European descent did not go somewhere else in the world and say, I could do better here, right?

And why is that?

That has to do with the philosophical rubric, the ways of knowing, the ways of thinking, the pathologies, the ways that the thoughts kind of took you in the Western world.

And because the Western Empire won militarily, we've all been soaking in that.

Absolutely.

For at least 2,000 years, right?

So since the Roman Empire, we've all been soaking in that.

Yeah.

So we all really have to do the work of decolonizing our minds in order to see the actual truth.

Yes, which I want to close in a minute by having you tell that actual truth to your great, great, great grandmother, Leah.

I would love to hear that coming from you.

But before we get there, you say, okay, the next step, once you've become aware that you have internalized white supremacy and you don't have to stay in shame and guilt.

You're just human.

That's what it means.

You're just human.

This is your environment.

As soon as you know that, then the next thing you say is grow your empathy.

Listen to the stories of people who do not share your ethnicity.

Read books and articles written by them.

Watch movies by them and about them.

The practice of placing ourselves in the shoes of others lowers the presence of unconscious bias.

It's really true.

It's scientifically proven now.

Like literally soaking in the stories of others, scientifically lowers implicit bias in our souls and in our minds.

So if you want to deal with it, it's not impossible.

You can make choices that actually help you to see more of the truth, help you to see the world in a less distorted way.

Because it's a distortion that makes, I mean, let's put it this way.

It's a distortion that makes the United States of America or North America or Europe, the largest continent on the planet.

It's not.

It's not.

It often looks like it right on the maps, on the maps we draw.

That's distorted vision.

So if we don't want to have distorted vision, if we actually, if the truth matters to us, then we can do things that actually bring our vision back into reality and help us to engage the world in a very healthy way that benefits us and others.

And if it's the world.

It gives us new stories because something I've been learning, one of my teachers might have been you, said, look, when somebody has an idea in their mind, it's very, very difficult, not impossible to get that idea out.

But you can offer them a better idea to follow and pursue.

And so if I as a white person go, most of the stories in my mind center white people in our experience.

And that's really all I know.

That's what I was raised to know.

Maybe a really good thing, not instead of, well, I need to stop thinking and caring about white people.

Maybe just start caring about people of other ethnicities and listen to their stories and watch them on TV.

It just seems like, why not invite everybody to the party and center some folks of different color or ethnicity for a moment, languages, like get out of our own little paradigm.

And then you go on and you say, that's not all.

Next, get to know some people of different ethnicities, have relationships, make friends.

You say, go and get yourself in some community with people who aren't all just like you.

And then you cited this study, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith reported on a sociological study they conducted.

They found that the only way worldviews changed was for an individual to be immersed in communities populated by people the individual had been biased against.

That's right.

Yeah.

So go and make some friends.

Go and make some friends.

I mean, and the thing is, back in the 1990s, that was the big thing.

Everybody has to have a black friend, right?

Like, so if you want to be not racist, go get a black friend.

And that ended up being a commodification of blackness.

That now every white person who had a black friend was now anti-racist and could just write that off and say, check, I'm no longer racist because I have a black friend, which of course is not the truth.

It actually was the furthest from the truth in the 90s, because so much else was left out.

So if it's not possible for you to get a black friend, then what you do is you join, and actually I don't know, you're probably going to mention this, but you join groups that are working toward the justice that sparks your own spirit.

Your souls call for shalom.

What is it that your soul is yearning for?

The peace that your soul is yearning for in the world.

Research that issue and go.

Go to the places where people are showing up for those issues.

And, don't speak.

And don't expect to be the leader when you get on that ship.

That's right.

Don't.

Don't speak.

Follow.

Because that also is a process, that's part of the process of the humility that is needed.

When one person, I'm sorry, not one person, but when a people group has enjoyed the false understanding of themselves for 3,000 years, that they are not only the most supreme humans, but actually have been reaching toward being little G gods, right, where they can name and claim and order the entire world and universe according to their worldview.

That is really a God.

That's not, that's not a human being.

So when you have, you've occupied the place of God, then what you need to do is you need to humble yourself and live in your own flesh and understand that you are dust.

And that process of coming and rejoining community and following is a part of the healing of the soul that had been captured by the Spirit of whiteness, which claims to be above humanity.

Yes.

The next thing you say is straight out of Paul, take every thought captive, challenging, and intentionally lowering our implicit bias scores.

And one really helpful thing is that researchers recommend that we focus on a person's unique traits.

Can you unpack that a little?

What does that mean?

Yeah, I mean, it's actually it's it has a lot to do with what I read in M.

Scott, M.

Scott, M.

Sean Copeland has a really amazing book.

She is a womanist theologian, and she wrote an incredible book called In Fleshing Freedom.

And and it's it's not she's not the only person who talks about this.

Also, Emily Towns talks about this in her book, The Cultural Production of Evil.

They both talk about the need for particularities.

That that particularity is where we find our humanity.

That when we another like another word that people use in these in these circles is essentialism.

So when you essentialize, in other words, when you boil a whole people group down to these essential traits that everybody has, in other words, if you're black, you love rap.

Right.

I mean, and basketball, you got to be a good basketball player.

You can certainly dance like these are.

And also you probably came from you lived in the hood.

You grew up in the hood.

Like these are you basically have already painted people's stories before you have let them open their mouths to speak one word about their own lives.

Yeah.

And what you find when you talk to actual people is that they are not your story about them.

They are very complex stories woven by God.

Yes.

Very complex.

And that's what it means to be human.

Yes.

It actually means to forsake the essentialization of people.

In other words, to boil them down to some Jack in the Box story.

But to see them as unique image bearers and with specific traits and giftings.

I liked how, did you watch Soul, Disney's animated?

I loved how I watched the whole thing, loved the movie and then I watched the making of.

And they were talking about getting a DEI team to help the animators really not get boxed into, oh, you know, our main character is a black man and so he likes these things, right?

And their biggest piece of advice to the animators was get really specific, make him like specific things, right?

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

And let me say, I mean, as a playwright, because I started as a playwright before I was ever theologian or ethicist or anything.

And as a playwright, one of the things I learned was that the story becomes more human and more relatable to more to the masses of people, the more specific it becomes.

Yes, right.

And so if we can begin to search for the very unique traits that reflect God's image born by every single human, then we cannot write them off, then we cannot just push them aside and say, oh, you're all this way, because this is a specific designed being that God thought up in God's mind long ago and brought here and now.

And we can go, oh, let me learn who you are.

Right, yeah, exactly.

And then lastly, Lisa, you say we need to get rid of the idea of race.

Let's forsake race.

Let's go back to ethnicity and see the beauty there.

Can you just unpack that a moment, please?

Yeah.

This one has gotten me in trouble in different places, but I have to say, actually, I still stand by it.

But I also understand the nuance that's necessary with it.

And so I wanna make sure that I communicate that.

First, when I say for forsake race, what I'm saying is, forsake this category that was created to order society.

Forsake this category that in the North, like in the North American continent, particularly in the US, but actually not just only here.

Actually, you can literally trace it to everywhere in the world that there has been colonization.

Everywhere, and especially Western colonization.

The MO, the modus operandi, was then to divide the nations down according to race, racial hierarchy.

Yep.

And the people at the top were always white, even if it was in Latin America.

So I just came back from Brazil, and in Brazil, they have white people in Brazil, right?

White Brazilians.

In America, they would all be called Latino.

Isn't that ironic?

Right?

None of them would have been called white, but they are white in Brazil.

And at the bottom is black.

And in between, in Brazil, you have literally on their census 38 shades of brown, like 38 ways not to be black on the Brazilian census, right?

Not to categorize yourself as black.

I'm telling you, yes.

And but the in on Americans on the American census, the only one that has never changed is white, because that one consolidates and aggregates power.

Right.

And that is what whiteness was created to do, was to consolidate European power on this land.

So you will never see an American census that like breaks down whiteness.

Are you British American?

Right.

Are you Lithuanian?

Are you Irish?

Are you German?

No, it's just, are you white?

Because that consolidation creates a majority.

Meanwhile, you actually do see Japanese American Hmong.

You literally have a category for Hmong on our American census.

And you have African American or Caribbean American or African, like give all these different ways to disaggregate power of color.

And so that separates us.

It makes us fight for scraps, and it makes us not understand that actually we are the majority when we come out together.

So forsaking race, what do I mean by that?

I mean, forsake this category that is man-made, not made by God, and only meant to do one thing, determine who has the right to exercise dominion on this land.

So instead, let's then go back to the truth of who we really are, which is the stories that come out of our people groups.

That is our ethnicities that are created over long spots of time as our people have common struggles on particular land and in particular eras.

Let's go back to that and let's go back to the human identity.

Let's actually identify ourselves as human beings who don't need to set ourselves against anyone else, but actually can come together in a circle of humanity.

If we have to use the word race, can we just say, I'm a member of the human race?

If we have to, if you have to, go ahead and do it.

Go ahead and do it.

But my advocacy around that time when I, when the book first came out, was to say, okay, look, one very, very clear way that you can forsake grace is actually white people in particular.

Do not list yourselves as white on the census.

Actually, instead on the census, write in your ethnic groups.

A lot of people actually started doing that.

Like a lot of people did that in the 2020 census and also, I don't know if there's been like intermittent ones, but I think that had an effect and actually, I think it scared the bejesus out of the people who were like, replacement theory, replacement theory.

This is not replacement.

It's actually, it's about a reset.

It's coming back to who we actually are.

It is grounding ourselves in the truth.

It is.

Let's go back to your great, great, great grandmother's home.

And this time, if you knock on the door and you are armed, not armed, you are bearing the gifts of the true gospel of Jesus Christ, what words do you tell your grandma?

So I, I knock on the door and I say, great, great, great, great grandma, Leah, I have amazing news for you.

The king of the kingdom of God has come.

And he's come to confront the kingdoms of men that are hell-bent on crushing the image of God on earth.

And that includes you.

He is committed to your flourishing, to the flourishing of your inherent dignity, the dignity that has been covered over and twisted and tried to have been crushed.

But you have protected it through multiple different means.

You have actually exercised resilience.

So I want you to know, great, great, great, grandma, that the king is here and he's committed to you.

And he's working towards your freedom, your flourishing.

And then I would turn to her master.

And I would say to her master, oh master of my great, great, great grandmother, I have good news for you.

You are not actually a master.

You are merely human.

And that means you have the ability to come down off of the scaffolding of human hierarchy that you have built for yourself.

And you get to be not so lonely.

And you get to be not so anxious about being perfect for not being perfect.

You get to fail.

You get to try.

You get to be flesh.

You get to enjoy.

You get to party.

You get to do the things that you have not been able to do because you've been so stressed about trying to be God.

And you get to join hands, reconnect with your other siblings in the community of creation.

And we together get to reimagine how we will be in the world together.

Find a new way of being together in the world.

And I say that is very good news.

Amen.

Amen.

Thank you so much for listening.

Let's connect.

I'm always happy to hear from my listeners and readers.

You can find me at barelychristianfullychristian.com.

And now for more of my favorite song by Wynn Doran and Paul Craig.

Please enjoy Banks of Massachusetts.