Brian Mclaren - Choose Either Doubt or Authoritarianism

welcome back everybody joining us live on instagram and everyone in podcast land welcome back to another episode of ideas digest the live podcast practice where we fear no idea and we practice humanizing those we might disagree with by doing a strange weird thing is listening to them and seeing if we can understand them my name's conrad now if you are a new friend of the show welcome you're very welcome it's great to have you here but i will warn you straight up i've started doing this just to give you a heads up this podcast isn't for everyone now even though everyone is welcome don't get me wrong i was just scrolling my instagram and i received a comment from someone on one episode saying quote this person who i guess they just listened to is so uninformed what a waste of my time now i loved this comment it it made me smile because this person has just entered the ideas digest experience you're welcome and his feedback is what a waste of my time um so unfortunately you know different people different experiences but i loved it so much because they obviously listened to the episode and i think probably pushed through enough to have wasted at least some time now after experiencing this this feeling of discomfort okay that's what they just experienced listen to the episode what a waste of my time experience a lot of discomfort now when you get to this point you can either unfollow and just ditch or you can keep pushing through and keep listening because that uncomfortable space that's the space i'm trying to occupy and i think if you stick with it long enough you might learn to love it so some episodes might be a struggle others might be better than some others but if you stick with it i think you'll enjoy it and i think a lot of you are joined enjoying it as well because the numbers are steadily steadily growing so disclaimer out of the way i want to welcome new friend of the show brian mclaren brian thanks for joining me here live on instagram and on the podcast i'm glad to be with you so brian i was reading your latest book uh and watching some of your clips on youtube just doing my due diligence here as a podcast host and i came up with some clickbait this is just what i do to like i it it should if done correctly it should misrepresent your ideas on some level so here we go you can tell me you can tell me what you think about it uh here we go the clickbait i came up with was choose either doubt or authoritarianism nothing makes clickbait better than an ultimatum brian out of 10. how well does this clickbait sum up your idea i love it i love it i wish i would have put that in the book it's great i could you could tag it on a byline okay i just just got the credit there that's good yeah yeah yeah thanks i'll give that a not bad out of 10. before we get to the clickbait brian where you can you can kind of explain it and go where you want to go i'd like to play a little game with you now that game i have called it confessing my assumptions and our assumptions as an ideas digest community uh can can i confess some assumptions to you brian and you can correct the record all right because i've done some googling and with people like yourself who are prolific authors it makes my job easy because the assumptions are all out there so i'll i'll start with you know a australian-centric one and i'll be honest uh because because we're i'm australian here um we have our own prejudices and assumptions about americans i'm assuming you are american yes okay so us australians might be thinking american guy this guy's arrogant brian do you think you're better than me because you're american and i'm australian um have you watched our politics lately i actually have i definitely have yeah i think no american can feel superior to anybody after the debacle that's been going on in our country so well that's that's pretty bad i have been watching it has been at least for me so far away pretty entertaining but very obviously serious if you are american um all right that was the easiest one i've got after some googling brian you've gone liberal this is an american thing as well like i don't think australians say oh he's gone liberal but as i as i search it's like that's the common thing like liberal's a dirty word yeah and you're one of them yes i'd say it's at least that bad and probably worse yeah oh okay the the l word we should censor this may be for american audiences uh okay another one and this one's a bit similar uh but it was a recurring theme you're you're like a lefty imposing your politics onto the bible oh i love that um uh well what am i supposed to say except that only a person who is a right winger who is imposing their politics on the bible would ever think to say such a thing oh yeah okay well rebutted well-roboted everyone's imposing their politics on the bible not not bad uh this is this might be one you've gotten a lot over the years you're a false teacher leading people astray well these days i really hope i am leading people astray from a patriarchal and uh eco eco-damaging form of uh religion okay so yep we'll we'll double down on that one hopefully is at some level leading people australia uh and last one you as you read the bible you're putting yourself as an authority over the bar over the bible rather than under it yes well i hope i'm doing neither of those i i hope i'm okay i'm putting myself as a member of the community who's part of a ongoing uh conversation and sometimes argument and sometimes debate about uh what's really important all right uh brian what have i missed any have you gotten some that i've missed what are some assumptions that you frequently get well i i just have to tell you conrad i'm remembering i was in norway once in a tiny little town that it was it was such a small town that me coming there meant that i got a newspaper article written about me and the journalist was a non-religious person and he had done what you just said he googled about me and googled me and so he sat down with this thick uh pile of photocopies and he looked a little nervous and he said well to begin did you know that you are the son of satan i miss that one damn it yeah and would you like to respond to that one is that true or not well it certainly was true in the person's mind who said it wow the son of satan that is heavy yeah i thought i came hard-hitting but that's that tops it so this this clickbait that i've that i've put that i've tried to sum up and just squeeze into a little ball of a sentence choose either doubt or authoritarianism where would you start yeah to unpack those ideas for me yes well you know one thing i would say conrad is that everything i can think of that's human can be beautiful and it can be horrible and every beautiful thing that's human can really easily be corrupted so i think there's a dimension to faith and another word for faith is trust that can be really beautiful you know two people fall in love and they become they take a monumental risk that the other person won't destroy them and so they begin to reveal themselves and they they trust the person enough to reveal and then the other person trusts enough to reveal back i mean when you think about the beauty of mutual trust it's it's a beautiful thing but then you think about people who learn how to manipulate trust we call another word for trust is confidence they learn how to manipulate confidence and we call them con artists so here this beautiful thing of trust can be horribly abused and that's what i think authoritarianism is authoritarianism involves uh so it involves manipulating people's trust so that they end up placing confidence in someone who is not it doesn't have their best interests at heart um and i think this is one of the challenges with faith faith can be a deeply beautiful and important dimension of people's lives but it it renders people vulnerable to uh to being manipulated by authoritarians and that's why i think it's very very important for people to learn how maybe we could say to manage their faith to develop their faith to um curate their faith so that they become less susceptible to manipulators and and doubt plays an important part in that does that does that make sense yeah i think you packaged it quite well so as you're saying to unpack and and question you you would call that element as shorthand doubt so doubting is that process of because i'm seeing you describe faith as is it trust completely or faith is there's lots of trust elements in faith like are these words interchangeable as you're using them well no they're not really interchangeable but in that in in that example i was giving i i i'm i'm using uh trust as a rough synonym for faith um and maybe we could say it like this we often use the word um blind faith and we also use the the phrase love is blind um but i would say that anyone who enters into a loving relationship uh doesn't stay blind for very long you become aware of the faults of the person that you're in relationship with they become aware of yours and then suddenly your blindness disappears and you have to start thinking critically you realize oh when i say that to this person i love i really hurt their feelings oh when they say that to me it really makes me insecure and so now we start to have to do critical thinking i wonder why that is i wonder why i react that way i wonder why this other person reacts that way i think similar things go on in religious faith um that we might enter into it blindly but then we start thinking gosh they told me if i prayed for a million dollars that if i prayed in the right way i would get it and i didn't get it and so i wonder what's going on there or they told me that if i had faith in god all my diseases would be healed and i'm still getting sicker than i was before so how do i deal with that so that's the critical thinking process that makes sure that our faith doesn't stay blind how did you i suppose go on this journey to discover what you're talking about the necessity of this doubtful process that unpacks this faith journey that we go on what's for those of you who might be unfamiliar what's your background and journey that's ultimately led you to to i guess speak so positively about something that is characterized as so negative like doubt is generally don't doubt you know doubting thomas that's a bad thing whereas when i hear you talk about it you're talking about it as an integral part of the faith journey um yeah talk to me about your background and your journey to these ideas yes well um i grew up in a really conservative religious background and um where uh there was a good deal of authoritarianism and some of the hardest kinds of authoritarians in authoritarianism to deal with come up in religious contexts where the authority figures are dead they're from previous centuries and you're not allowed to question them because they aren't around anymore and what makes and then that we have a new level of difficulty added onto that when there are people who interpret those authority figures uh and and they pretend that they're not the authority figures now that they're doing the the interpreting so in your upbringing who were those dead authorities i thought who were those dead authoritarians well i mean there was a there was a group of them that were in the bible right moses and david and uh isaiah and luke and paul and everybody else um but then we had another set people like martin luther and john calvin and uh augustine of hippo and and thomas aquinas and so we have this whole range of authority figures some of them we don't even know their names but uh their authority is working through the people who are teaching us things that we're supposed to believe and that's a complicated thing for anybody to grow up in if you start asking questions i started asking questions originally because i was really interested in science as a kid i loved nature i loved animals and plants and i started reading about evolution and that was probably my first experience of doubt because evolution made so much sense to me and my church told me you're not allowed to believe that you have to believe the earth is 6 000 years old and created in six literal days and so on so that created a real tension for me and and so even as a kid even before my teenage years i was creating spaces in my brain where i had to say i know the authority figures believe this i'm not going to get in a fight with them about it because i know they're not going to change their mind but i'm creating a little space for myself privately to not go along with that and i think that continued through my life in fact as a teenager i thought i'm just on my way out of this whole religious thing altogether um i ended up having some kind of spiritual experiences and relationships that made me go deeper into faith but then continually put me at odds with elements of of my tradition where i had to have the the i don't know if you want to call it courage or privilege or uh i had to create the space where i could think differently than the people around me and you like what what has been your background at like career yeah so i through that i um when i was in in university i was a an english major i became a college english teacher and you know literature is interesting because it's all about interpretation and when you especially when you go to higher education in literature you start realizing that all texts are interpreted and and there's all different kinds of theories of literary interpretation and you start to deal with uh how all meanings are contested and and there are stories behind every word and uh so all of that gave me new tools in some ways to think critically about my faith i ended up becoming a pastor and during my years as a pastor i continued to have to grapple with elements of my faith especially you know i was teaching the bible two three four times a week and as a result i i wasn't just giving a few sermons i was really deeply engaged with the bible and then as a preacher i start noticing things in the bible that i hadn't noticed before many of those things were in tension with each other many of them were in deep tension with what i had been taught and what people in my religious community uh accepted as common sense and all of that forced me to have to do even more of that kind of critical thinking which meant i would i would have to doubt conventional uh beliefs and opinions so do you think your background in studying like literature and english and then taking that to the bible did that give you a different lens and a different set of tools to critique the bible that currently yes or back then or even currently doesn't exist now when we like when when conventional pastors read the bible yes are you reading it differently because of yes your education yes uh what did it what a great question yeah yeah you know what happens in a lot of um a lot of uh traditional religion this happens in christianity but it happens in judaism islam buddhism uh many many uh i i'm there might be exceptions but every religion that i'm aware of um there there is a certain kind of innocent uh naive level of engaging with the text where you have to take everything literally um i have a friend who's hindu and he told me when he was a child he had a children's book of stories from the bhagavad-gita and there's a tradition in hinduism that you depict you know how in christian art they often depict uh saints uh and holy people as having a halo well in in some hindu art they depict gods as the color blue um and so my friend told me when he was a little boy reading the story book with his mother where krishna was blue and vishnu was boo who was blue he said to his mother did they really exist and were they really blue and she got very angry at him for even asking that question of course they did and of course they were you know um and that approach to text was the same approach i was given to the bible but what's interesting when you study literature you start to realize oh no there are conventions there are literary there are literally literary conventions that say when you paint somebody blue you're not saying they really were blue the painting is a way of getting across a message it's not telling the truth but it is telling the truth it's not telling a literal truth but it's it's telling a different kind of truth and and you become very comfortable with that when you study literature but in many religious settings they are not comfortable with that they might be comfortable with it if you're reading harry potter or cinderella or shakespeare but when you read the religious text you have to take all of that literary and uh knowledge and push it aside because literature was my background i think it wasn't easy for me to put aside and i couldn't see a good reason to put it aside as you engage with the bible you using these different tools is that is this doubt that you're talking about is this inherent within these literary tools that people use to engage with all other texts then you just brought them to your theological understandings is that is doubt present in yes other aspects of literature well let me give you an example um uh there's a great work of english literature called paradise lost by john milton and um you can read that text innocently uh and it's a really interesting text but when people really start delving into the text some of them say you know who the most interesting character in paradise lost is it's not god it's not adam it's the devil he's by far the most dynamic and interesting character and so then people start saying i wonder why that is what does that tell us about john milton you know well at that point now we're not having an argument or discussion about the devil we're having a discussion about john milton and what was going on in him and then we might say what does that say about puritan british society because john john milton was a kind of puritan figure and then we start might start talking about the psychology of being a puritan or a conservative or a fundamentalist and and how in a certain way that makes the devil even more interesting right what what happens in literature very often is you look at one thing and then the rings start going out to look at other things and um and uh what i think what happens when you approach the bible without those traditional liberal versus conservative or literal versus liberal um uh and you are approach the bible in a literary way you're just working with a different set of rules and that different set of rules gives you a lot more room to play and a lot more room to explore and a lot more room uh to look for meaning and here's where you get in trouble with authoritarians because some people say in my church those aren't the rules we use to read the bible and what's interesting about that is their rules aren't certainly aren't derived from the bible their rules just come from their tradition right so in some ways the question is whose set of rules are we using when we when we read the bible now look i'm not some saying anything goes you can do anything you want with the bible i think there are all kinds of literary sound literary practices for engaging with the text defined meaning too but um but i think it's sort of sad that in religious many religious settings they really constrict you the way you read the bible you're only allowed to read it with a very limited toolbox and you're saying that when we read any text for example the bible we are applying rules whether we realize it or not so if i'm reading something without your literary background and understanding of yes i don't know literature uh i i'm applying a different set of rules and i just might not be aware of them yeah and then kind of when you study this stuff you go oh now i'm applying this and the study is applying these labels and rules but we all have rules is that kind of what you're saying yeah and another word we could use along with rules is the word tools so um for example uh when you approach a piece of literature this is true of the bible you can do something called a marxist reading of the text that sounds that sounds very very bad to say in america you would say marx marx's reading this is horrible that's right but um you know a marxist reading gives you a set of tools you look for class conflicts you look for the elites you look for the proletariat the bourgeois and you're looking for all of these certain kinds of economic and power dynamics push that away for a minute you can take in a feminist reading feminist reading brings a different set of tools let's look for the relationship between men and women let's look for the relationship between fathers and daughters mothers and daughters and now we have a new set of tools that we bring to the reading of the text if you're only looking with a marxist framework you'll miss a lot of the feminist issues and vice versa well maybe we say well let's bring both of those and then we might bring a psychological approach a freudian approach and we'd look for uh id ego and superego and we might bring a historical approach we'd say how does this text fit in with what's going on historically around it and we might use a psychological approach we look at the psychology of the author and so on so we'd have all of these different sets of tools that we could bring that we could bring to the text and we'd be saying all of these will help us not only understand the text better but after we've understood the text it might help us understand ourselves better and our own society better and through that engagement we increase our capacities to me that's a wonderful way to engage with any any text including the bible so a critique i i keep hearing pop up is like the um when oh what's that what's that latest thing that donald trump uh banned and christians were like all these all these different lenses you listed the feminist lens the marxist lens um the uh yes oh yes yes yes he he banned critical race theory thank you yes thank you yes critical race theory like all these different lenses that you're approaching and i've seen pop up in the christian podcast sphere as i look at different commentaries on what's going on it it seems for example against critical race theory being like people are looking at the bible and talking about critical race theory and this is very anti-biblical or marxist lens this is very anti-biblical and the way i see you looking at and engaging with these things is going this is a lens this is a lens this is another one and what do you see when you put these glasses on and you're describing it as almost a deepening picture as this text sits there you're saying there are many different perspectives i can look at this text with and it doesn't sound like you're saying here is the correct tool or lens to look through it sounds like you you're talking about them as like an equal footing being like well what does this perspective say and what does this perspective say is that how you're describing it yes exactly right exactly right and that brings us full circle back to your um initial comment about authoritarianism because one of our great struggles it seems to me is that in some of our religious traditions certain people have the authority to say you cannot bring that tool to the table here you cannot bring up any discussions about power and economics here that's out of bounds you can't bring up issues of of power and sexuality here that's out of bounds and and in a certain sense one dimension of doubt is to say i doubt your authority to tell me that i'm not allowed uh maybe i'm not allowed to do it on your property because you'll kick me off of your out of your building if i talk about that well you probably have the authority to do that but this is where we end up with struggles and and it's where people suffer because uh you know for me i i have some empathy for the 12 year old version of myself that was interested in science and i went to a church that told me you aren't allowed to think those thoughts about science um and it was a tough thing for a 12 year old to try to negotiate you know and doubt as you're describing it is that necessary pushback against being told here is how it is and you're saying it's a good thing to push back and say well i don't know about that and are you sure about that is how are you if you were to define doubt in this sense in the way in which you use it because in your book you go through and doubt is that central almost tool that you're saying this is a necessary tool how would you define it yeah well you know i i i don't know if i'd want to say this is i'm defining it this way but i would say the word doubt relates to the word double that's why that b is in there in english um to doubt is to be in two minds to have two thoughts here's what i've heard but here's what i wonder here's what one person says but here's what another person says and in fact this is exactly what we see going on for example in the sermon on the mount jesus says you have heard it said but i say to you i'm asking you to have a second thought about what you've heard it said you've heard it said you should love your friends and hate your enemies i'm here to tell you i actually think you should love your enemies too i'm asking you to have a doubt about what you've always heard and open your mind to the possibility that there's another way to see this um and uh that's that's you might call that critical thinking yeah you might call that having second thoughts you might call that uh abstaining from group think yeah you might think of that as questioning authority figures or questioning tradition or holding out the option of non-conformity it sounds like doubt or critical thinking as that practice of engaging with everything we should do it with politics with uh religion with spirituality with these different things and you're saying that is the practice that almost sounds central you know saying jesus was doing it there you're kind of saying this practice is central to the biblical text and the christian tradition would you say that yes i think so i i think so i i won't say it's central to the christian tradition in meaning that we've always practiced it well uh i think it's a mixed bag you know for example a guy like martin luther comes along and he says i'm willing to doubt the fundamental authority figures of my religion and my culture um i'm willing to doubt that but as soon as he gets power and anybody doubts what he's saying he's ready to put him in jail sometimes right he he's got a pretty harsh attitude to anybody who questions his way of thinking so we human beings are you know not very consistent at our at our uh our average performance but i i think this is what jesus is about i actually think anyone who reads the bible and and they read it with second thoughts they'll realize that this is woven through the bible uh uh see i mean you think about moses sets up these laws and then micah comes along and says you know what uh those laws aren't really what matters what really matters is doing justice loving kindness walking humbly with god you don't have ten commandments those three will pretty much sum it up right so you you start to see well in the bible itself we have people being taking permission and being given permission to question and doubt and and they they enter into conversation and into they can test ideas and and uh and then you see later people's voices come up and they side with this person and not with that person and and we see those things that's part of human life and what to me is a little bit sad is when in the name of the bible we tell people you're not allowed to think for yourself the bible has done all your thinking for you and you would say that when when someone says that you're saying that's the form of authoritarianism that imposes one rigid reading of the text and saying you can't read it any other way you can only read it that way and that is what you're talking about as a form of authoritarianism i think so yeah when you look at this it seems like a growing and i don't know if it is or not statistically but it seems like a growing generational shift of people growing up within church we've spoken to a lot of people on the podcast who've just heavily deconstructed in that very deconstructed space that you you talk in your book about these four stages uh four stages of doubt or four stages of spiritual development and talk to me about those four stages and then the this stage that seems to be very prevalent right now which is the deconstructed one the one that seems to doubt everything that people push back and say well it's this nihilism nihilist moral relativism that says nothing matters and we're all subjective what's the point yeah talk to me about that journey and where a lot of people are ending up sure sure so i'll just run through these four stages and and the first thing i always have to say by way of disclaimer i've been interested in human development stage theory uh you know for decades and what i do is i try to synthesize the work of about a dozen of the major theorists in the field and i i offer a four-step model or four-stage model of uh faith development um and this is descriptive it's not prescriptive it's not saying everybody fits into these but this seems to be a pattern you find it across theorists and i found it in my own experience and when i've shared it with others they say yeah this kind of matches my experience stage one is simplicity and it's the stage of dualism it's the stage when we're children where we learn to say that's safe that's dangerous that's a friend that's an enemy um that's uh good that's bad dualism putting things into those two categories and a lot of people stay in that stage through their whole life often because their religious community tells them to be a good christian to be a good muslim to be a good jew this is the only way you're allowed to think but what happens to many people is they get a little bit older especially in puberty in their teenage years and and they they grow up and they go off on their own and they were taught for example certain prejudices let's say their parents were white and racist and they told them people of other races are just inferior to us and and they go out and they meet people of other races and they think these are some of the best people i've ever met and a lot of white people i met were not so great and so now they start questioning and they realize life is more complicated than i thought before and they say oh it's not just that that white people are good and non-white people are bad some white people are good some aren't some not some people of of color are good and some aren't and so now we've complexified that uh that stage or that the the binaries of simplicity and in some ways now life just becomes complex and very pragmatic how do i figure this one out how do i deal with this one and um stage two feels a lot like a game like oh i'm playing a lot of different games and i have to learn the rules of these different games um and a lot of people stay in stage two for their whole lives they're dealing with the complexities of life is it still searching for rules that's stage two is it still looking in and saying that um here's the rules but it doesn't apply in this situation so what is the rule is it like just stretching the rule but still trying to stay within it i think so i think so it it's and it's some you know in some ways you could just think of it as a math problem in my childhood i only had to put things in categories of two but now i find out some things are in categories of three or categories of four and and i'm coping with a more and more complex world but in some ways i'm making adjustments and fine tunings to the basic rules i was given as a child um you might think of it like this i'm given a contract as a child and then i get older and i start putting uh qualifications to the contract yeah footnotes to the contract uh provisos to the contract um you come to stage three which i call perplexity and that's when you say i want to throw out this whole stinking contract that this contract causes a lot of trouble this doesn't make sense to me the people who gave me this contract were trying to control me and we become suspicious of of all these uh of so many of the elements of the framework that we were given uh when we grew up we not only question other people we even start questioning ourselves it's when we in a sense say you know what i was criticizing all those white people i'm a white person wow i've been criticizing patriarchy and male chauvinism i'm male what do i do with that oh i criticize how straight people treat gay people i'm straight and now we we go in this process and this is why i wouldn't characterize it as moral relativism as a throwing out of morality in some ways it's saying i'm realizing that the morality i inherited was not so moral it's realizing there were a lot of moral flaws to the morality i was given and now i want to interrogate that and it's not that i'm saying anything goes it's that i'm saying i'm aware that any way i try to write a new set of rules is imperfect and a lot of people reach that stage of perplexity and they have nowhere to go they think that's it that's all there is to offer and but i really agree with what you said conrad for many of them this it's almost like they begin to see through everything it's like they're they get x-ray vision and they see through everything and nothing seems to have value or substance anymore and that can lead to a kind of nihilism or weightlessness where nothing really matters and and there are all kinds of dangers that come up with that and that's what drives many people to say i'm not comfortable staying here either in fact one of the things that happens is they say i'm criticizing everybody else what am i doing and then they start they they in a sense turn their scrutiny that they've applied to everyone else upon themselves what kind of person i'm going am i going to be and i think that often becomes in a certain sense they doubt their doubt you know and that pushes them to an even another level that i call harmony where now in a sense love and empathy and compassion and justice become unifying principles in life and help us put together a new vision of life that sees the strengths and weaknesses of simplicity the strengths and weaknesses of complexity the strengths and weaknesses of perplexity and we try to put together a bigger hole where does apologetics fit into that is is apologetics is that kind of a stage two game is that the game of stage two i i think it's the game of stage one and stage two yes in stage one apologetics we show how other people are wrong and we show how we're right in stage two apologetics we try to understand the complexities of other religions but very often our goal is to be the number one and and so it has a sort of pragmatic uh goal it sounds like stay yeah the stage two is the game of how can everything kind of fit apologetics like how can i still remain in the right camp and this third deconstructed stage that it sound that i'm coming across a lot of people questioning the system being like this system is broken for these reasons these rules not only do the rules not work but the system that created the rules is corrupt and therefore all these rules are kind of redundant and they don't make sense and i you know they might be led out of religion into atheism like some people i've spoken to or some people um and and maybe you can shed some more light on this but my impression of what i'm discovering is some people might throw the whole thing out and go okay i don't need whatever this religious system is because it's so broken and and i just don't need it and some others it seems like you're saying when you go into the stage of harmony of finding is it is it is it people finding this cohesive and wide enough structure of love and inclusion going all right all these all these granular rules they're very complicated they exclude they don't really work the system's corrupted i can't apply these but does that require everyone then to go back to back as far as they can and get to something big enough where they go this seems to be flexible enough to fit in all the complexities if i just try and love somebody if i just try and live in harmony like realize i'm a hypocrite realize you're a hypocrite so how do i engage with people with that understanding that i'm flawed and the system's flawed is that what what happens you kind of find this space within what we're calling love and inclusion this is that what happens yes i i think i think so um maybe i could use an example if you think of the biblical library stage one would fit beautifully with the idea of law here are the rules ten commandments uh make sacrifices you know uh wear this don't wear that uh do this on this day don't do this on that day so that works very well in the mindset of simplicity um but then you get to complexity uh and uh you start saying well it's not that simple what do we do with this and what do we do with this and and now we have hundreds and hundreds of commandments that multiply through the hebrew scriptures and then we get to the wisdom literature like the book of proverbs that says you need those laws but you also need some common sense wisdom to deal with the complexities of life so in a sense we go from law to um to wisdom literature and then we have um the prophets and i would also say other parts of the wisdom literature like the book of ecclesiastes that say you know what i've looked at all this i see an awful lot of wasted effort i see an awful lot of vanity i see an awful lot that doesn't fit in with what i learned before so that moves us into stage three the prophets move us into stage three you could do all the right sacrifices but if you don't have the right heart it doesn't mean anything right so now they move to this deeper stage and i think many of them move into that fourth stage of harmony um but and then jesus comes on the scene and i think what jesus does is he says yeah i haven't come to abolish the law and i haven't come to abolish the prophets but i've come to fulfill them in other words i've come to take him to the next level and that next level is a universal non-discriminatory love um it's what jesus talks about in the sermon on the mount when he says the way your father is in heaven is perfect is he loves everyone good or evil this is a a universal and non-discriminatory love um and then he says the greatest commandment is love and and paul picks up the exact same theme that love is the thing that really really matters so this seems to me to be the sort of direction that we find in in the biblical library itself with these ideas you cop fire from i would call it both sides so speaking to i'm pretty sure your friend and friend of the show bart campolo who is like humanist chaplain gone down that path he it sounds like if you if you listen to that episode and i put your framework on top of that episode those stages you're describing he spoke very much about himself going going through that and he ended up coming out going listen this system i don't need it he he might say to you brian you're playing these games with strict scriptures you have to apply this critical like english lit lens and it you know we all it's just you have to do so much with the text to really get this love message out i'm going to throw it away that's one side that says brian why s why stick with it like what's your kind of response in a conversation like that yeah you know um first bart's a friend of mine and um i understand and appreciate why he took the road he took um [Music] and i don't want to argue with him about that i think there are an awful lot of people who have who inherited a form of faith that was so destructive to their being and they weren't given any deeper and wider way to stay with it so i understand why they just need to get away so i don't really want to criticize uh bart especially because the way he's chosen to live his life is i think very much in line with what we're talking about in that uh stage four um uh i know he would call himself a secular humanist i might call him a christian humanist who doesn't know he's a christian and and but i don't need to do that because i don't care what he calls himself right uh um uh but here's the thing uh i i would if i were to argue with bart i'd say i think he's giving way too much credit to the fundamentalists he's allowing them to set the rules of the game and i just don't i i don't want to do that i don't think they're allowed to do that because if you let if you let the crudest and least nuanced thinkers in any field define the rules of the game you will have to leave that field let me give you an example i i i have a a friend uh he happens to have the same last name as me but he's uh uh not we're not related um his name is peter mclaren and he is a marxist theorist of education and peter makes devastating critiques of the educational system devastating critiques and um uh but you know what and you could imagine someone saying i'm just done with education i want nothing to do with it but what peter says is he says look you don't throw out education because it's being corrupted you challenge those people who are turning education into something that limits human imagination you challenge them because education has a noble tradition and has unexplored potential that we want to bring out so i understand why people would say i'm sick of the school system i'm going to quit it i don't criticize them for that they have every right to do that and their departure gives an important message to the school system and to you know educational systems as they are but i also respect my my uh surname's sake uh peter mclaren who said let's give it the blistering critique that it needs and then let's use that to let something new uh emerge from that critique yeah it sounds like you're saying who has the authority to define what something is and if you see value in it you have almost just as much claim so when people say brian oh you're not a real christian it sounds like your answer would be i mean who gets to say who's a real christian who's not i believe i am you believe you are i'm i'm happy to engage with this and fight for what i think is valuable within this tradition so i guess my question then to you brian is what is valuable within this tradition as to why you stay within it and almost fight for it in a way going like you know what i think jesus meant this i think the bible does this i think this is helpful because of these reasons what what do you get out of this tradition that you might lose if you say just ditched it all together yes well look the problem i i'm not criticizing your question conrad but i'm i'm about to criticize my difficulty in answering it you can criticize anything this is who i am um yeah i mean this is who i am uh so uh uh if i it's my it's it's what's formed me um and so uh if i if i had not found any worth in it if i had found that it was as flat and rigid and destructive as i think more fundamentalist readers of the bible and of the christian tradition to me are i would have left it but my honest experience is there really are treasures there there really are there's a pearl of great price there's really treasures there and i don't want to walk away from those treasures um i understand people who do and and there are so many offensive things in the christian religion i don't blame them in fact the follow-up to this book faith after doubt that i'm just finished the first draft of now is called do i stay christian and i'm grappling with this question of christian identity and and so i i understand all of that but my honest experience is that uh that there really are treasures and i love them and i want to inhabit them and i'm not finished with them yet there's more i feel there's so much more for me to learn and i've also found a way of being a christian that doesn't cut me off from the treasures that anyone else has to offer to so the way i'm a christian means when my buddhist friends come to me with their treasures i'm so happy to learn from them and when my jewish and muslim friends and when my secular humanist friends come i want to learn all i can from them uh and the the best thing is my friends of other traditions don't say you're not allowed to have any of our treasures unless you convert and join us i'm sure there are some people that say that but not my friends my friends say to me anything i have i'm happy to share with you and i say to them anything i have i'm happy to share with you um yeah that is a very interesting answer to the question and i think i think i do understand it i'm hearing this interconnectedness of your life's journey growing up fundamentalist to going into theology and being a pastor for many years and wrestling with people in their faith and it sounds like to me your answer is some might maybe some people would think it would cop out but i'd not i don't think it is in the sense that you're just saying i you are currently deriving value from it as you grapple and journey through it and because you are getting value from it i mean that's the answer to the question yes and look maybe to bring maybe to bring bart campolo back into it i i have so much respect for bart and i think bart reached a point in his life where he thought there is nothing in this tradition except headaches and criticism and judgment and worthless debates and that was his honest experience and he responded to his honest experience if that had been my honest experience i would have left as well um but my experience was i just threw all that stuff away that was uh hassle but i kept finding oh but there's these other people out there and they offer this new set of treasures and there's other people there who have their they've embodied something else and so there are great treasures for me um there so it just hasn't been my experience to say it's nothing but garbage there is a lot of garbage right and there's a lot of hassle uh but here's my problem i am stuck being an american and there is so much hassle to being an american and and there could be a point where i i apply for australian citizenship oh man it's pretty bloody difficult to get in i don't know about that that's part of it that's part of the problem um but you know what i'm saying like any and and i face i'm a human being and and the fact is human beings are a hot mess uh and so i'm stuck being a human being and i've got to make the best of it and i've got to look at the worst in the human tradition and say let me please stay away from let me please not replicate that and i look for the best in the human tradition and i say let me please embody that and so i'm doing that in my particular location in the christian tradition in the christian wing of the human tradition i'm trying to live that out yeah i want to pull out what some listeners hopefully if they're still listening they'll be very uncomfortable and very dissatisfied with the answers you're giving a certain subsection because it sounds as if when you know we bring up bart campolo who obviously is a secular humanist you know atheist doesn't believe in a god and you're over here saying i do but then you're also not saying my journey is the journey you're saying my journey has led me here and so it's my journey and given bart's experience or anyone other anyone else who has a different experience to you it doesn't sound like you're giving people who might be uncomfortable the answer they might be looking for that says brian which is the best one which is the right one it sounds like you're kind of saying for me this is the right one for me and that may not be the right one actually for bart so it sounds like you wouldn't even be saying to but come on mate give it another chance become an actual pastor i think you're a christian anyway come on and it doesn't sound like you have any interest in trying to say my way is is more right than your ways that what i'm hearing well um yes i think it is what you're hearing and but maybe i could go back to those four stages we talked about if a person is in that stage of simplicity the only tool they have at this moment is the tool of saying who's right and who's wrong so if they're saying is brian right or is bart right i understand why they need to ask that that's what you ask when you're at that stage that's the tool that you have then you get to the stage of complexity and you have a few more tools in the toolbox and then you'll say um i wonder how i'm going to deal with the fact that there's a brian in the world and there's a bart in the world how do i want to relate to both of them and you have sort of a practical pragmatic problem to deal with and then you get to that third stage and and you'll think you know you have another set of tools that you bring to it so what i'd say to people who who are trying to figure out who's right and who's wrong what i'd say is if you need to say that i'm wrong i understand in fact if you need to say that bart and i are both wrong i understand okay uh i understand why you'd need to say that yeah that is an interesting analogy when you keep using the metaphor of tools in saying that all i've got at the moment is this hammer and then as as as you doubt and question and just life throws stuff at you you will shift and change inevitably and you'll suddenly go ah i've got a screwdriver now and so when listening to another conversation you'll go well i actually don't even need to decide whether this is right or wrong the hammer maybe i'll just pick up something else and maybe that will help me engage and move forward and as life takes you on your journey you just inevitably will come across more tools to help you analyze things that are complex and don't make sense is that kind of a summary that's beautifully it's beautifully said conrad and this is where authoritarianism comes in again because some of us live in communities where authority figures tell you the only question you ask if you're a christian the only response the only tool is judgment good or bad saved or damned biblical or unbiblical as if and of course that works with the assumption you know what biblical is right um or or your denomination or group knows um and it also has an assumption that biblical only has one answer to every question um uh but then you'd say but what if we took another tool the tool of curiosity i've never heard anybody say anything like that before that really sounds strange i'm really curious why he would say that or maybe empathy i wonder what brought him to the place where he felt it was necessary to respond that way right now we find out oh there's judgment that's certainly one response and then another response is curiosity and maybe i could try all three of those tools on and have some flexibility in fact maybe before i should have my judgment i should have a little bit of curiosity and empathy so that's where that that um that metaphor of tools i think uh uh is helpful and here's what's interesting a lot of people can have empathy and curiosity outside of religion but in their religious community they're only allowed to have judgment another way to say that is they might be in stage two three or four outside of religion but as soon as they come in a religious context they've been told that that's the only tool that you're supposed to use can it operate on the inverse can it operate on the inverse that goes within religion you you might be you know loving inclusive and acceptive and then on the political you can have these four stages that or being in the first stage is this framework that you've painted am i stretching it to say perhaps can this apply to this political realm as well where it becomes political parties become your religion does it work in that space it really does and i should say to be really honest this is what i see going on in my country i'm sure folks in australia you watched what happened here on january 6th and i think there were two groups of people who were who are who both were present on january 6 at our attempted coup one were religious people who were in stage one and the other were stage two and three people who found no meaning and so they reverted to stage one but now politics is their religion and their nation is their religion and their political ideology is their religion and and they get along just fine um uh and i know this because i have a dear friend uh here where i live who is 100 in the trump camp he was cheering on the people on january 6th and i know him and because i have the tool of curiosity and empathy i don't just judge him i disagree with him deeply and he knows that but i also he's my friend i love him and i seek to try to understand him he is not religious at all he is not religious at all but and i think he is a stage three person and life was so complicated in stage three that he now has in a sense reverted to stage one and his political ideology he's willing to tolerate all those religious people but his real thing now is nationalism yeah do you think that there's an interplay on some level that when being under some level of what you describe as authoritarianism within a religious structure having a pastor saying this is the only way to read this text they are right they are wrong we are in they are out do you think there is like what's the danger of that is there any danger of that coming over into the political realm does that this authoritarianism within one structure does this prime people for authoritarianism in a political realm or in other areas of their life yeah you know if anybody's interested i have a little um it's a like extended essay on my website that you can download um a little ebook uh it's called the second pandemic authoritarianism and your future and so if people are interested i've been thinking a lot about the subject of authoritarianism and after world war ii there was a lot of research done on authoritarianism uh especially uh by a canadian who i'm just drawing a blank on his name at this moment it'll probably come to me bob altemeyer and bob altermeyer has done a lot of research on authoritarianism in different nations different cultures and basically his proposal is that about 30 percent of human beings it's no fault it's it's just a a difference are born with a psychological structure that he calls authoritarian followers and and one way to describe it is these are folks who experience a high level of anxiety or a high level of shame that is relieved when they submit to an authoritarian figure and when they submit to that authoritarian figure they derive ecstasy they derive security they derive joy uh and let's say that that maybe is true let's just hold that up as a hypothesis that about a third of us are prone it's no fault it's like some of us are prone to diabetes and some of us are prone to depression and some of us are prone to anger and some of us are prone that when we're anxious or feel ashamed we we find great relief in an author authority figure um if that's the case then this would show up in politics it would show up in religion it would show up in business and i think that's exactly what i think that's exactly what we see and and when you study authoritarianism you find that religion and authoritarian that religious authoritarianism and political authoritarianism often go hand in hand as do business authoritarianism and military authoritarianism it sounds like like i was prepared to kind of ask you the question of like is there a particular accepted doctrine that leads people to authoritarianism but it sounds like you're saying it's not it's not necessarily an idea or doctrine but almost a biological something going on that might coalesce these people so biologically people might experience this high of submitting to or need let's say to submit to an authoritarian leader and they might coalesce within like a fundamentalist church that might have that and then they might just because of that tendency enter into finding these authoritarian leaders in the political it sounds like you're kind of saying that that might be the case rather than saying if you if you subscribe to penal atonement theory you're more likely to vote for this authoritarian yeah i think i think to to bring us to the level of complexity i think both are true i think and i think they i think they mutually reinforce one another and what you just described in many ways is what's happening i think in american politics and it's happening in brazil and it's happening in mexico and it's happening a lot of other places too but um uh what maybe i could give two analogies conrad that would make sense um uh a lot of people tonight i had a a can of beer when i ate when i ate dinner and so i went to the liquor store and i bought a six pack of beer um i've never been drunk in my life it's no virtue i just i i like to have a beer now and then i've never had 10 beers right so uh i've never had 10 cokes i don't think i'm capable of drinking that much it's no virtue it's just not my thing but i i'm aware that some people are triggered by alcohol and they become alcoholics so that doesn't mean that all liquor stores and all bars are bad it but it means that the fact that they exist that's the place where people who have a problem with alcohol have to be especially careful um uh i i'm not a gambler but i've been to a casino and i've played a few you know uh games at a casino but for some people the casino be triggers them into an addiction and so what we could say is not all religious leaders are authoritarian but you can bet where they're authoritarian leaders they will attract people who are attracted to authoritarian leaders and so this so i i don't know if that analogy makes sense but that that's how i see it it's something like that yeah yeah it's not a hard and fast uh rule but it's a pattern you're observing uh within the religion yeah and then you would you would also say people who um there's other research that says one to three percent of people have authoritarian leader characteristics narcissism aggression and and it's not surprising some of those narcissistic people would be attracted to ministry some would be attracted to politics some might be attracted to uh theater and being uh celebrities uh rock stars you can imagine where a narcissistic person would be attracted where they would get a lot of attention a lot of adulation a lot of respect um and and if a narcissistic person ends up in religion it's going to do damage and if they end up in politics they're going to do damage and they're going to maybe become authoritarians who attract authoritarian followers so to me it's just a yeah it's a pattern i think that's that's not hard to observe once you know what to look for yeah it sounds like you're saying a genetic predisposition to a vice we accept it within alcohol like you know my family has a history of alcoholism so be careful and then so you're almost extending that saying well if you have a predisposition to authoritarianism be very careful of ministry and politics because that's you can be drunk on that very quickly that's what it sounds like yeah the i mean the problem is that the people who are most susceptible to it probably won't be open to that kind of statement right yes which is what makes life which was what make life makes life complicated um so yeah and and i should just say i haven't had a chance to keep up with all of the comments but i know someone said ask him about how he others those who don't agree with him i was that one that was gonna be my next question because brian you've been so generous with your time i i've gone over time that's for sure and that that was my final question people in the live chat pushing through normally i ask how how do you how do other people see you and we've kind of covered a bit of that but how do you see other people and especially with what the question is saying and saying you you're kind of saying well you know there is no necessary right or wrong people are on different journeys but then surely on some level there is this well you know fundamentalism leads to these sorts of things and i don't think that's the way to go how do you see other people without othering them as you go on your journey and them on theirs yeah yeah well look it's very clear if you've read any of my books uh i have uh you know i have things i'm trying to promote and i have things that i think are super destructive and i'm trying to do everything i can to impede those and get in the way of them and put my life and my voice as an obstacle to those things happening for example i think climate change is a real and present danger and i do everything i can to raise my voice about that but and climate change deniers think i'm wrong and i think they're wrong um i don't hate them i i understand they have reasons for denying climate change and i i continue to oppose them but i also try to love them and understand them and show respect toward them um so i certainly oppose them i think they're wrong they think i'm wrong and i try to disagree with them in a respectful way i don't hate them and i don't and one of the things you know one of the principles of ecology is that there is no away meaning you can't throw anything away um you throw something away it goes somewhere even if it's a landfill it's somewhere uh and and that's certainly true of people we can't throw people away um and so we have to treat one another with respect and if we disagree and if we think they're doing something harmful we have to explain we have to do everything we can to offer them a different a different approach um but we don't have to hate one another and discard one another and throw people away um and so yeah that's that's how i hope yeah that's how i hope i do it because is this is this another level is this a reinterpretation or almost could it be summed up with hate the sinner i hate the sin love the sinner cause it i feel like it could be that similar pragmatic reality that says okay if if you think climate change is a serious problem well if we don't address it my grandchildren are going to struggle they're going to pay for it economically they're going to pay for it health related they're gonna pay for it with more wars disputes over land all these types of things they're gonna suffer and if you deny that i think you are absolutely wrong but then you're still trying to say but i can try and use these tools to understand i can not throw you away as a person and it sounds it sounds as if this is where even fundamentalists that we might be character like painting a caricature of and talking about in this in this discussion they might even agree with you in that they might even say of course yeah like i don't hate the homosexual i'm just telling them that their ways will lead them to hell and i'm loving them and so in a way it's like there is that point of agreement but on very different political realities yeah yeah i think i i think look if if a fundamentalist one of the rules that that fundamental fundamentalist lives by is that i should love my neighbor as myself and i should treat others as they want as i would want to be treated um then at that point we're on we can disagree on a thousand other things but we're going to try to disagree with one another in a humane and dignified way um uh you know i i wouldn't want to say what i'm saying is hate the sinner and love the sin because i think uh uh i i i think they're that can be abused in a whole lot of ways but what i would say is we've got to love each other we've got to love everybody and then we've got to work through our disagreements uh in the context of love so there's certainly similarities between those two yeah when you say we've got to love everybody i think everyone i think everyone would agree with that when you say we've got to love everybody how might you emphasize what you're saying to be different from the fundamentalist preacher that gets up there saying we've got to love everybody but we've got to stop gay people from getting married how would you say when you're saying we've got to love everybody how is that how are you emphasizing that yes well um i suppose i could say it like this um when that person is saying hate the sinner hate the sin and love the sinner what they're saying is i'm not going to question my idea of sin i'm not going to question my story of what's going on in the universe my story is right my definition of sin is right and i'm going to work within that definition and that's and that's the way i'm going to uh uh understand everything and you know so my frameworks is my starting point and that's even going to define what i mean by love so uh so i'm sure you may be here in australia we've got this group called the westboro baptists who show up and hold up god hates signs and they they do this sort of thing i'm 100 sure if you ask them they would say we're doing this in love yeah yeah um you know they might also say hate the sinner because they can find a bible verse that tells them that god hates sinners and they'll quote that bible verse to justify them hating sinners but uh i i think there is a deeper difference but i i don't i wouldn't want to argue about that what i would just want to say if we can just start where each of us feel the obligation to try to treat the other as we would want them to treat us i i think we've got the the basis to at least have constructive disagreement you know and i'm hearing this thread as pulls that pulls through all your ideas which makes the clickbait work is this thread of doubt that says maybe the difference in what you're talking about is saying i'm still going to disagree i'm still going to look at someone's ideas and go you know what i think i think you're definitely wrong about that i'm definitely still gonna do that but if i introduce this threat of doubt maybe as i engage with you back and forth and say oh i think you're wrong if i can have this threat of doubt this stage three level of like well i fit this category as well can i apply this definition to myself to my own beliefs then maybe that leaves the door a jar open so that if your ideas are flawed and you're engaging with that exercise that doubt will hopefully kick you up the bum to maybe shift you exactly from that position exactly right exactly right yeah it's so interesting when you engage in conversation with someone where you're not ready to learn anything from them because you've written them off as evil and you're just there with your message in a unidirectional way to to get your message through to them until they comply until they submit uh maybe they're going to learn something from you i doubt it because what happens is people tend to respond you know with their own unidirectional communication we talk past each other but if i engage with someone where i say if you're speaking i want to learn from you i want to listen i want to at least understand you i i'm not in the conquest defeat mode i've got another tool and my tool is curiosity and empathy and humility new new levels of interchange are possible i think brian you've been so generous we've gone over time thank you so much for unpacking these ideas i feel like i could go for a lot longer as we pull out you've written a fair few books and you have a lot of interesting ideas i'd love to keep exploring but i i shan't brian where can people get a hold of your books and the stuff you're doing at the moment if they want to follow up some of your ideas you're talking about yeah well the easiest thing is just go to brianmclaren.net and at that site they'll get links to facebook and twitter and instagram and all my other resources yeah have i missed anything in this conversation where you might want to tighten up and clarify anything like that oh i'm sure i've left a lot of loose ends but you've done a great job and it has been a pleasure talking to you you asked really good questions and i it's really been a it's been a pleasure the time has just flown by for me oh awesome i've enjoyed it so much and i'm sure the listeners have joined uh have enjoyed it as well listen if you're listening to this and you are just bristling and disagreeing with everything and you've made it an hour 20 into the bloody podcast then you my friend are experiencing what i'm trying to do here at isis digest can we listen and sit with the ideas we disagree with if that's you well done if i've missed any questions send through on instagram what did i miss if you'd like to catch up with brian the information's there it'll be linked in the show notes below whether you agree or disagree i don't really care and as brian would say we have other tools that we're going to use for this so thanks for tuning in the this podcast episode will be up on the podcast and if you want to get in touch with us use instagram other than that thanks for tuning in and i'll catch you in the next episode

Channel: Ideas Digest

Views: 912

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Id: AjCdoHbepDg

Length: 77min 16sec (4636 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021