Episodes

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe discuss the Trump administration’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission and how it is actually a means to prop up a specific type of Christianity at the expense of other interpretations and faith traditions.

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Transcript

DDM – Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET – And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM – This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET – Hello and welcome. Producer Carl Thorpe is joining me today.

MET – On May 1, 2025, Donald Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission. This sounds auspicious – who doesn’t like a little religious liberty? But, as is historically the case, religious liberty is a bit of a misnomer. Consider what religious liberty means as we talk about it historically. We often talk about how the Pilgrims or the first European settlers were coming here for religious freedom. But that’s not exactly right. Yes, they were fleeing religious persecution, but they weren’t coming here to set up a place where people could worship freely. They set up little villages and towns where THEIR religion was the only religion and they could oppress anyone who didn’t follow their rules. And they came with violence on their minds. You might not remember, but in our Christian Nationalism episode I quoted from a sermon or two about how the whole goal of Protestantism in America was to wipe out Indigenous people. Religious liberty and freedom in America started as an exclusive and violent thing, and it’s important to keep that in mind as we think about how it is being “protected” today.

MET – So when we talk about religious liberty we have to be honest about what we mean. Certainly, there were some early Americans who believed all faiths should be treated equally. But one only has to look at early state constitutions to see that most colonial and Founding Americans saw Christianity as the faith that should most be protected by the state. Religious liberty and freedom meant freedom to be a particular kind of Christian. But at the same time, Christianity was written out of the Constitution. There was a concerted effort to keep God and king separate – and I think it’s interesting to note that there were political reasons for that.

MET – Trump’s Commission, then, may be the most historically in-line approach to religious liberty of many Presidents in a while. The Religious Liberty Commission has one goal: to fight any anti-Christian bias. It is not a commission designed to fight for the liberties of people of faith; it is a commission designed to advance Christianity, and Christiantiy means something specific to this administration. For example, Trump has already signaled his willingness to go to war with denominations like the ELCA and the Episcopalians. He has threatened, and even affected, their financial and legal situations and how they can relate to their members and the people they help. Trump is not looking to protect Christians; he is looking to protect those who support him in the name of religion.

CRT – If you remember, Trump, his team, and all of MAGA lost their collective minds when a Christian, Episcopal Bishop, Mariann Budde, exercising her religious freedom by calling on Trump to show compassion and empathy for trans children. They called for her to be fired or worse. She got death threats. Let’s not even get into their responses to Pope Francis and now Pope Leo.

CRT – But even before the current Trump administration, progressive religious speech and activity has routinely been targeted as illegal. In Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Christ Episcopal Church and Mission First Church run aid programs for the large population of people living in poverty in their small town. They provide hot meals, groceries, toiletries, and mental health counseling. The town, however, declared that they were in violation of zoning ordinances because as a church, they were only supposed to be conducting worship and activities normally associated with worship. In July of 2022, they issued a zoning ordinance violation to the churches. The churches responded by saying that serving the needy in their community is worship. It is an expression of their religion. After appealing to the town board and explaining that worship is more than showing up on Sunday mornings, the zoning violation was dismissed. However, both churches continue to receive threats of fines and other consequences of running various aid programs.

CRT – Just this year, A separate Christ Episcopal Church in Tom’s River, New Jersery also faced zoning problems when they attempted to convert part of their property into a shelter for unhoused people. After they submitted their proposal for a zoning variance, citing their deeply held religious beliefs as a primary factor for wanting to provide housing, the mayor of the town announced that he intended to force the church to sell their buildings and property to the town so he could raze the church and convert the land into a public park. Failing that, he would seize it through eminent domain. The church, their diocese, and the National church prepared for a lenghty legal battle to protect the church from the town, however the mayor’s preffered town council candidates lost their primary fights, and his majority on the town council will be eliminated come the November elections. Faced with this, the mayor backed down on his plan to take the property. However, the request for the zoning variance was denied. The church ended up deciding not to fight the town on the zoning ordinance, as they feared the legal fight necessary could put their congregation at risk.

CRT – In 2018, Scott Warren was arrested for allegedly harboring undocumented immigrants. He was part of an organization called “No More Deaths,” a non-profit organization that works to prevent deaths by migrants crossing the deserts of the Mexico-US borderlands. To that end, they hike into the wilderness and leave supplies, food, and water for immigrants to find. Warren was arrested after he found two undocumented immigrants in a barn that his group used as a base of operations. He gave them food and water and allowed them to stay for 3 days. Eventually, he and the migrants were arrested. Warren was facing felonies that could amount to twenty years in prison. Warren and his lawyers relied on Arizona’s Religious Freedom Restoriation Act. in an attempt to get the charges dismissed. He testified that he had deep religious convictions that compelled him to assist anyone who was in need. However, this did not work and his case went to trial. After a mistrial due to a hung jury, he was eventually found not guilty by a different jury. He did end up charged and found guilty of one misdemeanor for driving on a restricted road on his way to leave supplies for migrants in a nature preserve. That act also resulted in him being charged with a misdemeanor for “littering,” however the judge dismissed that as humanitarian aid with a nod to the state RFRA in his decision, as well.

CRT – There are even cases making their way through the system that take a religious freedom angle towards female reproductive health. For example, Kentucky’s intermediate court has allowed a suit to proceed involving a Jewish woman who was going through IVF to attempt to get pregnant. Her claim is that her religious belief requires that she procreate if possible and that Kentucky’s abortion ban post Dobbs is unclear as to how it applies to IVF.

CRT – In December of 2024, Indiana’s Supreme Court left in place a lower court’s injunction in favor of Hoosier Jews for Choice, a group of women who claimed that their deeply held religious beliefs would require them to get an abortion in certain cases that the law does not allow. One plaintiff claimed that a baby’s life begins when it takes its first breath, and until that time their beliefs required protecting the well-being, both physically and mentally, of the pregnant person. They also argued that their religious beliefs would require them to abort a pregnancy if testing indicated significant fetal abnormalities that would cause the baby pain or other suffering. Another argued that all people have bodily autonomy and that if a pregnancy or birth of a child would infringe on her full humanity or dignity that it would be necessary to abort. Other plaintiffs argued that they were compelled to reproduce due to their faith, but the bar on abortions that their beliefs would require in circumstances were banned, so they could not get pregnant.. Eventually, an injunction was placed on the law, but only for the specific plaintiffs in this case.

MET – There’s this story in the Bible that I return to often because I think it has a lot to tell us about power. You probably know it – the Pharisees try to trick Jesus and ask Him if people should pay taxes and Jesus asks who is on a coin. The Pharisess say, “Ceasar,” and Jesus says, “Render unto Ceaser that which is Ceasers.” Now, one of the most important lessons of this is that we know a thing belongs to someone if their image is on it. And we know we are made in God’s image; we belong to God. But ANOTHER important message here is that some things belong to Ceasar, and some things belong to God. The king (or the state) has claim to some things, and the heavenly kingdom has claim to the most important stuff.

MET – This message is getting really lost right now. There is also the story of Christ’s temptation in the desert. Satan tempts him to be the ruler of all the world, or at least of all he can see. Satan says he will make Christ a King – a mighty ruler of humanity’s world. If Jesus will just bow to Satan. And Jesus tells Satan a definitive no. It’s interesting – The gospel of Matthew tells a story of a future King in the Nativity scene, but Jesus spends so much of his life rejecting kingship. Christ wants no part of the institutionalized politics of our world. He says that is a temptation of Satan we should keep far from him.

Look, this isn’t me talking – Christ makes it very clear he wants no part of our state. He is not here to take part in our institutions of politics or government. So why do we keep trying to enshrine Him there? But at the same time, I am not telling you we that have to scrub all mention of religion from the public. It’s silly to think that we should never acknowledge the Christian roots of our society. Just as we have Greek roots. That’s the history of the West. If you want to understand Shakespeare, for example, you should probably know the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology pretty well. Protecting all faiths doesn’t mean removing Christianity from the public. It means not privileging it.

CRT – One of the areas that religious freedom and infringement of religion into the state often comes up is public schools. I worked at two different public schools. The first was an elementary school where I was a paraprofessional. I saw Christian teachers who pushed the envelope as far as how much they could get away with as far as proselytizing to co-workers and even students. One year, they decided to put pictures of Christmas trees on each other’s doors. This was supposed to be a fun little game. If a tree showed up on your door, you were then supposed to make one for someone else. These trees were supposed to be decorated by the teachers themselves, but I know for a fact that at least one teacher had her students all make one. Many of the trees had overt Christian symbolizm on them. Eventually, a tree showed up on my door. Rather than continue the “game,” I decided to cover my door with images from other religious traditions that had a celebration, feastdays, etc in the winter months. When I got around to putting up an Islamic symbol, the teacher across the hall who was part of starting the Christmas Tree thing complained to the principal that my Islamic picture was offensive to her because of her religious beliefs and that her fiance was in the military. The principal told her that if Christian symbols are displayed on the wall, then other religious symbols had to be allowed. I was able to continue my ever growing display of religious symbols from around the world and varying traditions. The principal’s stance was that decisions on holiday decorations had to be content neutral. If any were allowed, all had to be allowed.

CRT – After getting my preliminary certification, I moved to a middle school in a different district to teach language arts. The novels we read from the district approved list were full of religious allusions, imagery, and symbolism. I was always careful to talk about these objectively and in a fact based manner. I noted, however, that many of the other teachers had strict policies that nothing religious could even be talked about. I don’t know how you teach excerpts from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe without talking about Christianity. You have to talk about religion when you talk about Gary Paulson’s Nightjohn, which is about an escaped slave who returns to the plantation to teach others to read as a means of liberation. I guess you could skip most of the second chapter where the narrator tells us that they weren’t allowed to pray and weren’t supposed to know anything about God. But I can’t really see how you get around talking about one of the major events of the book, and that is when Nightjohn has his toes cut off in punishment for teaching Sarny to read, and her saying “John he down for three nights” before he is back teaching her again. Eventually, Nightjohn announces that he has to leave them for a time, however he promises that he will return to them soon.Sarny doesn’t believe he will even make it out, and if he does, he won’t come back, but unlike the apostles, however, Sarny is witness to her messiah’s return from the North.

CRT – The book ends with an afterword called Words

“Late he come walking.

Late in the night when they in the white house are all asleep and we be asleep and nobody can know nothing, late when the moon is down and the stars are hiding in clouds, late when it isn’t the day before and it don’t seem like ever the new day will come—that late he come walking.

In the night he come walking. Late in the night and when he walks he leaves the tracks that we find in the soft dirt down by where the drive meets the road, in the soft warm dirt in the sun we see his tracks with the middle toe missing on the left foot and the middle toe missing on the right and we know.

We know.

It be Nightjohn.

Late he come walking and nobody else knows, nobody from the big house or the other big houses know but we do.

We know.

Late he come walking and it be Nightjohn and he bringing us the way to know.”

CRT – I don’t think it would be crazy to compare that to Mark 7:30-37, the King James Version:

“Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.

But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.

For the Son of Man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.

Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning:

Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.

And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.”

CRT – In Nightjohn, Sarny and the other slaves are the ones awake and waiting and watching for their Savior.

CRT – Outside of literature, how can you even teach about MLK without talking about him being a minister, without talking about how his famous speeches were sermons. You cannot hear him say “No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream” without talking about Amos 5:24 which says “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

CRT – These two schools show you the two extremes: one in which the teachers felt free and compelled to try and spread their Christianity and push it upon students and co-workers, and one where they were so afraid of being accused of that, that I don’t understand how they were able to teach.

MET – So that is so important to understand about how we think about religion and religious liberty and religious freedom in the public and how we see and understand that. And it is such a confusing, concept. So many people think they understand it, but most people do not. And some of that is because there are shifting narratives about how we understand this. That is because, quite frankly, we have understood it differently at different points in time. That is because the political narrative has changed, the legal narrative has changed, and I want to give you an overview of that.

MET – For example, in 1992 a somewhat moderate (by today’s standards, anyway) Court decided in Lee v. Weisman that a school could not coerce students to pray. Specifically, that mean there should not be prayer at things like graduations celebrations, commencements – all of those school sponsored events where students are supposed to be. The thing is, some of those are not technically required. So, for example, if you go to a baccalaureate celebration or event, you may not be required to be there, but it could be sort of the expected progress of your senior year. But, if there is a prayer, it is as if the government is forcing you to take part. And in 1992 we as a country decided that was unacceptable.

MET – In 2005, in McCreary v ACLU, there was a similar decision in which the Court decided that displaying the Ten Commandments in school houses and court houses violated the establishment clause and advanced religion. The state could not, according to this decision, propagate one religion over another by posting that religions’s dogma in official state spaces.

MET – Please note – this has been challenged over and over again and in the last 2-3 years has pretty much been forgotten as a number of red states in the South have passed laws requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms.

MET – There has been a dramatic shift in national attitudes about religion and the state – but that’s not exactly true. There has been a dramatic shift in how a small group of voters and those in power think of religion and the state. It behooves us to consider why. And I think it comes back to the story of Jesus in the wilderness. The Bible is very clear that it is a corrupt and sinful temptation to combine the role of Christ with the powers of the state – Christ rebuffs Satan in the wilderness without any hesitation. But what we have in America today is a religion that embraced that temptation

MET – We see the shift in cases like Carson v. Makin, in which a family sued the state to get tuition assistance to go to a religious school. The state of Maine offered tuition assistance to go to non-sectarian private schools with the aim of all Maine children receiving a free or as close to a free education as possible. However, those who chose a religious education did not receive that help because the state did not want to support religious education because of the establishment cause. A Maine family sued and won, so now it is possible for states to support religious education.

MET – The long-term impacts of this have not panned out, yet. For example, Trump’s Commission is supposed to work against anti-Christian bias. So what happens when someone wants money for non-Christian education? Will they have support? Do they get money? The jury seems to be out on this.

MET – Another notable case is Kennedy v. Bremerton. In this case a football coach was insistent that his religion required him to pray at the 50 yard line at every game. It is important to note that he was given the opportunity to pray at any number of other locations where it could be a bit more private, but he insisted that his religion required that it be public, specifically at the 50 yard line. He insists he didn’t require anyone to join him. But all of the players, sometimes from both teams, joined. The Court decided this was not like other football cases (Santa Fe v. Doe) from decades before, which decided there should be no prayer at football games, and that it was different from Lee v. Weisman (because it wasn’t school sponsored), so this prayer was fine. This is a wild decision – think about the incidents Carl talked about earlier – people claimed taking care of immigrants or the homeless was a matter of practicing their religion – and the judicial system was incredulous. But apparently praying at the 50 yard line is a pillar of the faith. The Court has clearly made some jumps in its reasoning. And has swung around to supporting state sponsored religion.

MET – But as Christians, I think we need to be very careful about what state sponsored religion says about our religion. If we believe we need the state to support Christianity then we have acknowledged that the state is more powerful than Christ. The whole point of the resurrection is that Christ cannot be contained. Christ was executed by the state; it was a political death. But he literally conquered that. That’s like, the whole thing. The state tried to kill him, and you actually could not keep him down.

MET – So what are we saying when we tilt the scales in favor of Christianity? Do we no longer believe in Christ’s divinity? Do we no longer believe in Christ’s resurrection? There ARE places where Christians are persecuted. But being driven underground is not the same as being bothered. And this Commission is basically saying, if I, as a Christian, am bothered by other people, it means Christ needs the power of the state because my faith is not strong enough to sustain me.

MET – This goes right back to our Christian Nationalism episode. A state that wishes to enshrine a faith isn’t doing it because it believe in the faith – it is doing it to co-opt that faith and institutionalize that power. And the people who encourage that to happen are gleefully handing over the responsibilities, import, and power of their faith to the state.

MET – That’s not religious liberty; that’s acquiescence.

Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe critique the harmful practice of pitting women against each other, as exemplified by the historical contrast between Eve (sin, death, fall from paradise) and Mary (grace, salvation, reclaiming paradise). They argue for a re-examination of Eve’s story, highlighting her agency, pursuit of knowledge, and moral responsibility as positive attributes rather than sins.

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Transcript

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

DDM [00:38] Welcome! So today we thought given that we’ve done an episode on Mary, it only makes sense to look at Eve. And the reason being is in tradition, Mary and Eve have often been held up as a contrast. Now, let’s be honest, Elizabeth, contrasting women against each other, that’s already hugely problematic. In fact, I think this is one of the outcomes of patriarchy.

DDM [01:04] As women, we’re taught to compete with one another, to hold up other women as examples of what not to do or what not to be. And really, I’m not okay with this. And I find this whole compete and contrast of women very unhelpful. I know I’ve hated it when it happened to me in my life.

DDM [01:22] And I hate it equally when I see it being done to other women. And so I’m hoping we can find a way today to look at Mary and Eve in ways outside of this patriarchal contrast, while also highlighting the danger of this contrast. In the patriarchal narrative, sin enters through Eve, but grace enters through Mary. Death enters through Eve, salvation through Mary.

DDM [01:54] The fall from paradise happens because of the choice of Eve, but the choice of Mary leads to the reclaiming of the heavenly paradise. Very neat and tidy theology, isn’t it, right? Black and white. But of course life, and I believe the sacred, is never black and white, never neat and tidy, as Elizabeth and I will unpack today.

MET [02:19] Before I jump into a lot of content, I do want to make a comment about the way Deborah has started talking about contrasting women and comparing them, and even setting up this situation where, “Oh, you know you’re not like other girls, or this woman does this, etc., etc.” And I think it’s really interesting to think about the Mary episode we just did and we talked about the cult of motherhood, and that’s precisely what we were talking about. “Oh, I’m a better mother than you, because of X, Y, and Z. Which of course, women don’t say out loud, but that’s 100% what that cult of motherhood is, right? The “I want to compare myself to other mothers.” So that’s really what we’re talking about at a fundamental level, this tendency to pit women against each other. So I think it’s really interesting that you started with that. Okay, so now I want to jump into some commentary about Eve specifically. So we know I grew up Baptist.

MET [03:27] Baptists don’t really have a concept of original sin, the way some denominations do. And for a lot of people in churches, Eve is this kind of originator of that concept. We don’t think of we, Baptists, as I once was, we don’t think of people being born into a life of sin that way. People are born largely innocent, and then we make bad choices.

MET [03:57] I think I’ve talked about things like the age of accountability before. And that is where you are born largely innocent, and then you get to an age where you are then accountable. And after that point, it’s complicated. But there’s also… Baptists do adult baptism, so there is a point where you get to a point in your life where you say, “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” So it’s not like you have this original sin, that you are automatically condemned in some way, but you grow up to say, I accept Jesus Christ, and at that point, okay, so all of that is to say We are not born with this concept of damnation so much as we choose our sins. And that’s actually kind of important to the Eve story.

MET [04:50] Eve chose to disobey. She and Adam were created without flaw, but Eve, being so wily and deceitful, chose the wrong path. But it’s not that we’re all immediately damned because of her. We’re damned because we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

MET [05:12] I don’t know if you remember me talking about the Roman road in an episode.

DDM [05:16] I do. I have dreams about it.

MET [05:17] So Eve’s problem is that she is inappropriately willful. Now that is 100% woven into the Baptist narrative. Women are supposed to be submissive, and we can totally see what happens when they are not, right?

MET [05:36] Women can’t be trusted. Women will choose the wrong path. I remember when I was a kid, maybe late elementary school, early middle school, and a friend’s parent was complaining to mine about their kid’s Sunday school teacher. And I need to clarify. We weren’t even from the same church. This was a friend’s parent at another church complaining to mine about a Sunday school teacher, and it speaks volumes about our community that it was totally normal for parents to just stand around and casually discuss their kids Sunday school teachers, like they with their math teacher or their English teacher. That’s just how ingrained in the community this was. So this mom was mad about how the Sunday school teacher was teaching the creation story.

MET [06:26] And the teacher in question kind of skimmed over the serpent and Eve story and gave a rosier view of it than this mom would have liked. Because the Sunday school teacher didn’t want to tell the kids as young as this mom’s kid about sin in a really harsh way. And the teacher didn’t want these kids to think of God as judgmental or vengeful. And my friend’s mom was having none of it.

MET [06:52] If there is no sin, then why did Jesus die? This is what she demanded of my father. And my father just kind of shook his head and didn’t say anything because he recognized that he did not want to get involved in this furor.

MET [07:04] But this is indicative of a very particular theology that I and my friends grew up with. Eve didn’t imbue all of us with sin. She was the first to make a sinful choice and thus opened up the way for all of us to make sinful choices afterward.

MET [07:23] She was disobedient and we are following in her footsteps. It is because of this disobedience from Eve down to me that Jesus had to die. Our disobedience to God is so bad and makes us so rotten to the core that God had to sacrifice his child to make up for our disobedience, and that was the only way we could be forgiven. We required atonement, and our sins were so bad that the sacrifice had to be that great.

MET [07:50] It’s kind of a loveless and gruesome theology, right? We’re told God sacrifices Jesus because he loves us that much. I mean, there’s a part of me that’s thinking, if he really loved us that much, why wouldn’t he just forgive us?

DDM [08:05] Yeah, Elizabeth, I mean, that kind of theology, I really don’t even know where to start, sis. It’s pretty horrendous. But I need to say that it is frightening to say that for many, this is how they both see and teach our faith. And it’s very common to find this kind of thinking out there.

DDM [08:24] But let’s just go back to Eve in the beginning of Genesis. First of all, in the Genesis story, God commands Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So that’s really important for us to remember. Adam was commanded not to eat.

DDM [08:41] Eve really only heard of this commandment secondhand through Adam. It was never a commandment given to her by God in all the times that they walked in the garden and spoke. So I think that’s a very interesting distinction there that sometimes we just gloss over or forget about. We’re very quick to blame woman, to blame Eve for this fall from paradise.

DDM [09:05] And as you’re right, this has been used to justify the subordination of woman by naming all woman now as morally weak, easily deceived and spiritually inferior. But what if Eve’s choosing to eat that fruit was, as scripture says, for gaining wisdom? What if Eve was actually simply seeking truth and maybe her choosing to eat of that fruit was in fact the first human act of freedom and of taking moral responsibility? You know, what if Eve was the first to question, to want to understand, and that she chooses to want to know for herself, even if that’s going to come at a cost.

DDM [09:49] It’s interesting as well in the Genesis text that Eve chooses to have her eyes, as Genesis 3 verse 7 says, opened. I think that’s a beautiful phrase. You know, maybe having one’s eyes opened is the beginning of adulthood. Or moving from a child-like way into an adult seeing.

DDM [10:11] Her eyes were literally opened. And so in scripture, Eve is not seen so much as passive. She’s not silent. But in Genesis we actually see that Eve is a full person with integrity in her own being.

DDM [10:25] She speaks, she questions, she acts, she learns. And I think, let’s be honest, that is what it means to be an adult human being. And I sometimes wonder about this, because it’s almost like very often in our cultures, we almost want women to almost be the perpetual child, and we even think about how women are often infantilized. But we might say that without Eve, without our eyes awakening, there was no free will. There was no free will, then there is no freedom to even be able to choose to love. Then there’s no need for grace, compassion, all the qualities that really make humanity, I think, quite incredible.

DDM [11:10] So if Christ grew in Mary’s womb, maybe Eve was the soil out of which the entire story of Jesus will grow. Maybe hers was that fertile soil for moral choice, for questioning, for searching for wisdom, for free will, and ultimately for the capacity to be able to love and receive grace and grow in some ways into full consciousness as adult humanity.

MET [11:40] There is this poem that you reminded me of that I want to read to you, because it relates a lot to what you were talking about. And it is called “The Autobiography of Eve” by Ansel Elkins.

Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
 
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
 
I leapt
to freedom.

DDM [12:37] Oh my word, that is profound.

MET [12:43] Every time I read it… I just think, man, that image… It just it gets me every time. Okay, that’s an aside.

MET [12:57] When I got to a point that I was actually thinking about Eve and not just using a blank stock figure for her every time I thought of her, and I admit that this happened shockingly recently, I decided I had a real problem with her sin. I think it’s really awful that it was a sin to know the difference between good and evil. Why wouldn’t a person want to know that? Why would a person choose to remain ignorant?

MET [13:28] Okay, I’m about to say some really controversial things here. I can’t imagine being told, and as you know, it’s really Adam who has told these things, but I can’t imagine being told, this tree will grant you knowledge and wisdom. It will be a grave act of disobedience, however, if you eat of it. And I can’t imagine not immediately thinking the guy making the rules was a fascist.

MET [13:54] Honestly, don’t we talk about how keeping people ignorant is how authoritarians remain in power? Like we have literally said that on this podcast, but Genesis gets a pass. And it comes right back to that obedience thing. In some ways, this is kind of a pre-Frankenstein story.

MET [14:15] Someone wants to be God, so they choose to seek knowledge they should not have, and things go terribly awry. The reason that it never seemed to me that Eve’s punishment fit the crime is because nobody ever made it clear to me what the crime was. In the beginning, God knew good and evil. Humans, being innocent, knew nothing of either.

MET [14:38] Eve wanted to understand these things. In short, she wanted to be like God. It wasn’t Eve’s disobedience. It was her ambition.

MET [14:49] And maybe she was taken in by the serpent. Maybe none of that would have happened. She could have been very naive. But she wanted it.

MET [15:00] She desired to know what God knew. In that way, her story is much more similar to Lucifer’s in Milton’s Paradise Lost than this kind of gendered tale of deceitful and wily women, but also somehow dumb and malicious woman. Because in any other telling than what we get in Genesis and church tradition, Eve would have been the hero. And then there’s Adam.

MET [15:26] Oh my gosh, talk about throwing somebody under the bus. Eve says, Hey, babe, have a bite. And Adam says, Thanks, Shug. And when God shows up, Adam immediately throws Eve under the bus.

MET [15:37] And now for the rest of Western history, women are mendacious, manipulative and deceitful. But Eve’s sin, as I said, was less about disobedience and more about ambition. So Adam’s betrayal is even more spineless than it seems. Because Adam isn’t just throwing Eve under the bus.

MET [15:55] Adam is assuring God he would never seek such knowledge, but his ambitious wife convinced him to take a bite. Eve isn’t a seductress. She’s not a manipulator. She’s an explorer, and that is unacceptable. So it’s really weird to me that we’ve been defining gender roles based on this story for generations. Eve is fearless, provocative and displays leadership, which is ultimately why she’s punished. Adam is cowardly and lacks initiative, and he’s punished too. It’s important that most of us never learn anything beyond the narrative that this story is about Eve’s disobedience, because if we looked into it any further, we’d find some uncomfortable lessons about authority and what it means to be a leader.

DDM [16:37] And you know, Elizabeth, you’ll stress on the phrase, “she wanted this knowledge,” and you’re framing in terms of ambition. Theological traditions use the word desire. And it’s interesting because I think there has been this very passive way of seeing Eve.

DDM [16:55] Eve is silent, only hears the commandment of God through her husband. She’s deceived, cursed, used as a warning. But what if we began to see her, instead of being passive, as an active person? She looks, she reflects on what she sees, beautiful fruit.

DDM [17:13] She knows, as you say, knowledge is a good thing. She questions, she challenges the snake. She chooses, and then her eyes are opened. I really can’t help but stress again that she really is the first act of free will in that garden, because she does want to be like God.

DDM [17:33] And I don’t think that that’s a bad thing, because she was created in God’s image. She was made to be like God, and she knows this deeply. She wants to be more like God than she is, and so she eats. But I think there’s also more to this.

DDM [17:51] Eve survives the eating. She moves from childhood into adulthood morally and physically. She goes on to create life after leaving paradise as God created life. She births.

DDM [18:06] Except she does this now all with her eyes open. And she knows that there is good and evil. I think it’s also interesting for us to look at that word know for a bit. Because in biblical Hebrew knowledge was not something we know with our heads, but it was something that we knew in relationship with.

DDM [18:28] It was a deeply intimate way of knowing. And so to know something is the same word that is used for making love in the early part of Genesis. Adam we’re told knew Eve. It was about a knowledge that came from deep experiential intimacy.

DDM [18:47] And I think part of the problem of the story is that we’ve idolized innocence and childlike faith But I think what is more profound is when sacredness is birthed out of struggle, out of deep adult faith that knows it’s okay to question. It’s okay to reclaim our voices. It’s okay to seek knowledge. And even when we are exiled and pushed out of systems, to still know we will survive and we will create new life and we will birth a new world, and ultimately refine salvation and wholeness again in new ways.

DDM [19:21] But certainly, let’s be honest, this is not the way that the patriarchy has interpreted the story, nor, I think, has it been the way that Western empires have interpreted it. The powerful want to read into the story submission, obedience, and divine punishment. But we know from the life of Jesus and Mary that God is not the God of the powerful, but the God of the hungry who will be filled.

DDM [19:57] Again, that desire that the poor will be exalted. So maybe we should really be reading the story of Eve and Genesis through the eyes of God and through the eyes of Jesus and not through the eyes of power.

MET [20:14] That is a really important message for me personally. And I don’t mean to individualize my experience and say, “Oh, you should only think about this through my eyes.” But I do want to tell you a little bit about where I’m coming from. It has been really hard reckoning for me anyway, with the fact that my faith actively works to oppress and harm people.

MET [20:43] That is very sobering for me. And that’s more true or less true depending on the tradition and location. But as a whole, Christianity is an institution steeped in patriarchy and colonialism, and that’s putting it lightly. And if those are our guiding lights, then it is hard to be a force for good in the world.

DDM [21:05] It’s such a demonic subversion of our faith.

MET [21:07] Yes. So I think about how we have used and abused Eve over the centuries and what she would say about the church today sometimes. Would Eve have rocked some important foundations during the #MeToo movement?

MET [21:26] Would Eve have warned us about the scandals in the Catholic or Southern Baptist churches? Would she have known about the abuses of children and women because she has dealt with powerful men? Would Eve have called out the blatant racism against Bishop Curry from his own members of the faith when he spoke at the royal wedding? See, I think she would have done all of these things, because more than any of us, she knew the difference between good and evil.

DDM [21:56] And that’s a blessing. And that is a blessing.

MET [21:59] Yes. Institutions do not always make good choices. Institutions are mired in systems of power and ideology that actively keep some people under a boot and some people in a silk slipper.

MET [22:15] Eve may have been ambitious, and if you think ambitious is a sin, then I guess that’s a mark against her. But in the end, she knew the difference between good and evil. As you say, her eyes were opened. She knew the difference between right and wrong.

MET [22:29] So maybe she’d have had a lot to tell us about if we’d stop thinking of her as the root of the problem and not the start of the story.

DDM [22:37] Absolutely, and don’t we need today more and more men, women, children who know the difference between good and evil? I think also we need to reject that blame narrative whenever we find ourselves slipping into it. Both Eve and Mary are two remarkable women who made choices that shaped our world. Eve acting despite the cost to enable us to grow in knowledge of good and evil, to move from that childhood innocence into adult faith, and that first person to exercise free will.

DDM [23:10] Mary also acting and despite the cost having the courage to birth God as an unmarried woman and to take on the responsibility of in some ways teaching God what it means to be human. You know, these two women really are bookends to the scriptural story of what it means to be human, to grow in knowledge and love, and to have to navigate these choices in ways that may cost us, but also remind us that we are survivors and more resilient than we may have ever known, and that to want to be like God is our birthright.

MET [23:58] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://PriestAndProf.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@PriestAndProf.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church.

MET [24:24] Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [24:28] Music by Audionautix.com

In this episode, Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Rev. Deborah Duguid-May explore the varying manifestations of Mary, Mother of Jesus, and interrogate whether the version the Church has propagated is empowering for women or oppressive.

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DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET [00:38] Hello, today we are talking about Mary, as in Mary, mother of Jesus. Okay, so I’m not going to lie, when Debra recommended months ago, we do an episode on Mary, I groaned so hard, because I figured it would be Debra thrilling about motherhood and spiritualism. And I would just kind of be sitting here throwing in a few comments about Mary versus whore in the Western canon. Okay, the thing is, I am completely uninterested in Mary as a character.

MET [01:15] And I know that is probably blasphemous to some of our listeners. And it may well be blasphemous to Deborah. That’s what we’re talking about today. But let me tell you my experience with Mary.

MET [01:28] The way Mary was always described to me was that she was quintessentially good. That was Mary’s whole shtick. Mary was so good, so holy, so pure. Now, I wasn’t taught that Mary was sinless, just that she was good.

MET [01:49] So good that God chose her out of all of the women in the whole world to be the mother of his child. Honestly, what am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to feel any connection with a character whose defining characteristic is goodness, so beyond the standard of normal human goodness that God says, hey, bear my child. This is not something I get.

MET [02:17] And maybe it’s not something I want to get. That is weird. And it makes Mary not like other people in a way that makes her particularly difficult to empathize with. If we don’t talk about Mary as being so freaking good, we tend to get Mary wrapped up in the cult of motherhood, right?

MET [02:36] Okay, so let me be very clear on something. I love being a mother. I love my kid more than life itself. But I absolutely do not put any stock into what is often called the cult of motherhood.

MET [02:50] I don’t know if you are familiar with that phrase. But the cult of motherhood is this weird narrative that women get sucked into that everything about kids and raising kids and being a mom and pregnancy is great and beautiful. And somehow you are less of a woman if you show any dissatisfaction with any of that. The cult of motherhood leads to things like the mommy wars, where you have women battling tooth and nail to show that they are the most invested in being a mom, and they love motherhood more than anyone.

MET [03:22] And for these women, they appreciate the magic and the mysticism of motherhood all the time.

DDM [03:29] And you know, even if people aren’t aware of that phrase, the cult of motherhood.`

MET [03:35] Right, we know what that is. We feel it, we know it. We’ve been online,

DDM [03:36] We feel it.

MET [03:38] Right? This is patriarchal nonsense. Here’s some reality for you, okay? Pregnancy is awful.

MET [03:47] I absolutely do not buy into that womb goddess or whatever nonsense some women try to sell me because I have been pregnant and I know the score. It is murder on your feet and your back and even your teeth.

MET [04:04] It is profoundly uncomfortable and even dangerous. Your body does weird stuff you absolutely are not prepared for. When I was pregnant, I did not commune with some spirit of creation. I communed with whatever would help me not feel sick, right?

MET [04:18] I mean, I remember, so funny story. I was all proud of the fact, oh, I don’t feel all that sick all the time. And Carl and I were walking through the grocery store and we walked by the olive bar and the smell of sweet pickles had me running through the store. I thought, this is it.

MET [04:35] I am going to lose every part of my body. Oh my gosh. And I had to go on bed rest, which I absolutely did not do well. And I treated Carl terribly when I got hungry.

MET [04:48] When I got hungry, I became a monster of a person. I mean, I will be asking for forgiveness for the rest of my life.

DDM [05:01] For those of you can’t see, he’s nodding. Absolutely.

MET [05:02] And childbirth sucks. It is not beautiful. It is not a mystic experience. It is awful.

MET [05:08] And people die that way.

DDM [05:10] I split. I split.

MET [05:11] Oh my gosh, yes.

MET [05:13] And breastfeeding sucks. It’s hard and it’s painful and half the time it doesn’t work. The first year of your kid’s life is awful. Sleep deprivation is literally a form of torture used by the army.

MET [05:24] But somehow I’m supposed to find it magical when I’m scooping poop every three to four hours? Right, who convinced us of this? I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Now we have convinced women that they are supposed to be in love with this supposedly beautiful spiritual process when any objective observer will tell you that this is ridiculous and we deserve to get paid.

MET [05:47] So the reason I think Mary plays into this is because often Mary gets used as this kind of mother goddess figure or whatever to make us feel better about the fact that we’ve been doing this work for generations and many of us have been doing it without any help or without any credit. So we’ve made it into spiritual work to make ourselves feel better about the fact that nobody is coming to our aid. You know, so we elevate it to something holy because otherwise we would have to acknowledge that it is dirty and it is hard and the patriarchy has made it virtually impossible to do.

MET [06:23] Now, I am very lucky. I have a partner who has been there for me at every turn. My partner has been active and an equal helper in child rearing. And I am well aware of how rare that is.

MET [06:36] And maybe that’s why I never got sucked into that cult of motherhood. I didn’t need anybody to convince me that it was amazing and great and spiritual and perfect because I could be realistic without losing my sense of self. And because I have been honest with myself about motherhood, I have a much better relationship with my kid, I think. I don’t see them as evidence of my martyrdom or my holiness or whatever.

MET [07:00] They are not proof of just how good a mother I am. They’re a fully realized person, irrespective of whether I breastfed long enough or gave them a Pinterest worthy nursery. My kid is amazing. I value them not just for their achievements, which, yeah, make me look good, but because they are kind, empathetic, and a great conversationalist.

MET [07:22] We have an honest relationship, not one designed to make me feel good about being a mom. So when I do something for my kid, it’s because I want to, and I hope it enriches them or their day, not because I am invested in making myself look good in front of other mothers. I have a teenager who really does like to sit and share a cup of coffee with me. And I can’t say that would be the case if I had spent their entire life invested in motherhood instead of them.

MET [07:50] So let me be very clear about this. I love my kid. I love my family. I love, truly love, love, love being a mother.

MET [07:58] But I am honest about what that entails. And because I am honest with the world and my family about what motherhood is, I have a much stronger relationship with my kid and my husband. I think this hits on an episode about Mary because she kind of comes in two manifestations generally, holy virgin or holy mother. And I think both are kind of bogus.

DDM [08:23] All right, so as Elizabeth said in the very beginning, we knew coming into this topic, we would probably be on opposite ends of the subject. But honestly, the irony is, Elizabeth, I actually agree with you a hundred percent and wasn’t expecting to when we first planned this conversation. Totally, totally, sister. Like you, I love my six kids. I love all the foster kids that I raised, but I never defined myself in terms of motherhood,

DDM [08:52] and never was a traditional mother by any classification, which was much to the irritation I often think of my children who used to moan every morning. Why can’t you be like other mothers? Why can’t you pack us a school lunch? Why can’t you do this or that?

DDM [09:08] The reality is I was working multiple jobs and really doing a lot of that traditional stuff I don’t think was my skill set either. You know, motherhood, I agree with you, has been so co-opted by patriarchy that it is often very unhealthy for both women and children in all those ways and more that you were naming. But now this is where we differ. I don’t see Mary being chosen to bring the Christ child into the world because of her, and I’m doing air quotes, goodness.

DDM [09:40] If we in Christianity define sin as alienation or being fragmented from the world, from ourselves, from any sense of sacredness, then to say Mary is without sin, which really only the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions do, we know Protestant traditions don’t, To say that is to say that God could see in her a woman, and this is how I understand it, who was not fragmented, who somehow had managed to not become alienated from her own sense of self, had somehow not managed to become alienated from her others, or from a true sense of what is sacred. And that in some ways ties in with her holiness, air quotes again, which again is not so much about being good but about the root of the word holiness which comes from wholeness.

DDM [10:32] So Mary had somehow, even though she was probably only about 14 years old, had managed to maintain a sense of wholeness and of integrity in a world that very often made it almost impossible for people to do that. And that’s why I think in some ways for me that she was chosen because of her capacity to hold her own wholeness and not become alienated from her true self despite living in a very patriarchal world. Which is why, ironically, we see her not consulting anyone, even though she was still a young girl, about whether or not to say yes to carrying the Christ child. You know, in all of the Gospel texts we see that Mary asks no one’s permission.

DDM [11:16] She doesn’t go back to her father, she doesn’t go to her mother, she doesn’t go to her fiancé. And that ties in, for me, with what I believe is the biblical meaning of virgin. You know, virgin actually in the Hebraic scriptural sense was not so much about whether a female hymen was intact. Virgin with woman, all these virgin martyrs we have in the tradition, really spoke much more about the sense of autonomous.

DDM [11:46] So to be a virgin was to not be under the control of somebody else, invariably a male figure. So in the Christian tradition where we have all these virgin martyrs, it actually really didn’t have really hardly anything to do with their sex lives, which, let’s be honest, we actually know very little about. And it’s probably better that way when we start to unearth some of the stories. But it’s more to do with the fact that they were no longer under the control of either a father or a husband.

DDM [12:19] So they were seen as independent women functioning outside of the patriarchal system. So I see Mary as, despite being young, this incredibly strong, independent woman who makes her own choices and who has somehow managed to retain a sense of wholeness and yet deep connection, despite living in this world that so often leaves women feeling fractured and powerless.

MET [12:47] So I think it’s super important to think about what words mean. And I’m actually going to refer to the last podcast we released kind of along those lines, Carl and I talked about literature. and I’m going to make a connection to that because what I’m going to be talking about now is Mary as kind of a character and kind of continuing that when we think about what words mean and also stories and narratives, it all gets wound up. So I want to talk about Mary, in terms of the stories that we weave, because as we talked about in the last episode with literature, I think we can’t really separate Mary the biblical character from Mary the stories that we tell about her.

MET [13:45] And I think when you talk about what words mean, that becomes an important part of that. So anyway, like I said, if you listen to the last one, most of you know that I didn’t start my scholarly career in communication or rhetoric. My undergrad and master’s degree are actually in literature. And it’s funny, our pastoral assistant came in earlier and was giving me a hard time, and he was saying, you just really don’t know how to not talk like a professor, do you?

MET [14:13] Well, no, Joe, I do not. So I apologize for my academies. It’s just who I am as a person.

MET [14:21] But that being said, if you know anything, and I mean anything at all, about women in Western literature, You know that they fall into one of two categories, and that is Madonna or whore. That is just what we do with women. For the last thousand years or so, we have basically been categorizing women in literature, movies, poetry, music, whatever, in one of these two categories: “holy and blessed and pure virgin” or “Whore of Babylon.”

MET [14:52] And really, this kind of is ultimately my biggest problem with Mary. Mary isn’t a saint or an intercessor anymore. She is an archetype. And I’ve talked about archetypes before, and I’ve talked about things like public memory before when we talked about Mary Magdalene, and some of this all comes to a head here. The version of Mary that has been at the heart of Christianity for almost 2,000 years has so infiltrated our society that it has defined all women. And that version of Mary, not the version of Mary you’re talking about, but that version of Mary is not empowering. And it is not even holy.

MET [15:37] That version of Mary is pure and submissive and chaste, and some of you may even remember from your intro to Lit Classes what I’m talking about. If you don’t remember this from your intro to Lit Class, I’m guessing it’s because you weren’t paying attention, because I guarantee your TA or Lit Prof talked about this. Women in the Western canon have been defined by these kind of two polar opposites of womanhood for thousands of years, right? The virgin or the woman of ill repute.

MET [16:05] And those were pretty much the only categories for women to fit into. So Mary has never been an intercessor for me. She’s always been a tool of the patriarchy, to be perfectly honest. Ultimately, no matter how you dress her up, this version of Mary that the church sells is designed to keep women obedient.

MET [16:23] And I know, Debra, We want to protest, and we want to tell each other all about the series you did on Mary, and how it’s not the case, and Mary’s great. You know, a month at Trinity doesn’t contradict the bazillion years we’ve been telling this story. And that hurts me. The narrative of Mary as quintessentially good isn’t just bad theology from my background, and we can’t really excuse it that way. It is the way women’s roles have been defined for generations.

MET [16:56] Mary is not the mother of God in Western culture, that’s just a MacGuffin. Mary is a substitute for what men want out of women. I wrote this article years ago about a theory I proposed called a constitutive character. You could say that word constitutive if you wanted to.

MET [17:16] Basically, the idea is that there are figures, either historical or fictional or whatever, there’s a character. And we use that character to define ourselves. So we say who these people are, but when we say that, it’s actually a reflection of ourselves more than it is a definition of that person.

DDM [17:36] Absolutely. I was thinking that about when you were speaking about Mary, you know, it says a lot more about the West than it does about Mary.

MET [17:43] Yes, that’s exactly right. So I use the example of Jesus in this article, right?

MET [17:45] If you look at all the different versions of Jesus being described out there by all of his followers, and there are a lot of “Jesi” out there, right? But that’s not it. It’s that for each group of followers, Jesus is a reflection of them.

MET [18:02] Mary is also a constitutive character, but she is a reflection of the patriarchy. Mary is much less a mother of God than she is the ideal of powerful men. And in my mind, the ideal of powerful men is generally the opposite of what God had in mind. So I just have to assume that whatever we know about Mary has got to be in the wrong.

DDM [18:23] Yeah, no, 100%, 100%. And I agree with you where in so often Mary has become this projection of patriarchy, you know. And in the West, absolutely, there has been this incredibly unhealthy binary dividing woman into whore and virgin. But you know, I think what we’ve got to remember as well is that for the Christian tradition, it really doesn’t begin as a Western tradition, but as a Middle Eastern tradition.

DDM [18:54] And then within Christian theology, there is, of course, the Eastern tradition, there is the African tradition. So, you know, Mary is, in reality, so much more than just the product of the West. There is Mary in so many ways before the West. There’s Mary of the East, there’s Mary of Africa, and not all of these traditions have defined women in such binary ways as the West has, which despite its continual belief that it is the society that defends women’s rights, has not historically been any less dangerous for women, let’s be honest.

DDM [19:31] Um, the reality is I think that for some women Mary has been incredibly empowering, particularly when you can see beyond the patriarchal narrative or not allow her to be defined by that narrative, you know just as a priest I’ve heard countless stories of women From women of how she’s given them the strength as a role model to make hard decisions that went against every cultural norm or expectation Many have seen in Mary that young revolutionary who proclaims at the very beginning of her young adult life that Song of Mary. Which is interesting because the Song of Mary is actually said in our evening offices every day of our lives throughout the Christian world.

DDM [20:20] East, West, Middle Eastern, African. The Song of Mary is right in the heart of the evening prayer. And in the Song of Mary, or what is called sometimes the Magnificat, there are these words God has scattered the proud in their conceit he’s cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly he’s filled the hungry with good things but the rich he has sent away empty And so Mary, throughout history, despite what I think patriarchy and literature and these narratives, maybe even you might even say priestly narratives have done to her, Mary still remains in her own words the one who proclaims unapologetically that God is not on the side

DDM [21:08] of the proud and the mighty, but the ordinary grassroots people. That God will fill the hungry, but the rich will be sent away empty. And Mary names the God who is always on the side of the poor, the marginalized, the outcast, and will judge the powerful who exploit God’s people. And then I have to ask myself this, I mean, where else did Jesus learn this from?

DDM [21:33] Like, hello, you know? I mean, this is in some ways almost what Jesus himself will mirror later on, the same words as his mum. And that’s why I believe for me Mary was chosen. is she saw into the heart of true faith and could be trusted to shape God’s child.

DDM [21:52] But she was never afraid to speak out. And so Jesus goes on to be a person who will not be afraid to speak out. She acts in ways that destabilize the powerful and the mighty. And so Jesus goes on to act in ways that will destabilize the powerful and the mighty.

DDM [22:09] So for many, Mary is the one, biblically, who shows us the courage to stand up against the powerful, to speak out and to stand with those who suffer and are oppressed. And so, you know, I agree with you that in many ways our literature does say less about Mary and more about our Western society and maybe even our obsession with sex and with what women are doing with their bodies, you know. But I want to end with this because for myself there’s another side to Mary and that is the Mary in a way obviously beyond literature but maybe even beyond the scriptural text. You know, there’s the Mary beyond all of our narratives and tradition, beyond archetype.

DDM [22:57] And that’s Mary the woman herself. And, you know, the reason I say this is because some people will know this if I’ve been their parish priest. But when I was 14, I didn’t grow up in the church. I didn’t grow up at all with, I mean, I didn’t even hardly ever go to Sunday school.

DDM [23:15] So I didn’t have the pictures or the images even in my head. We were a pretty secular family by all accounts. And I remember when I was about 14, I was lying in bed at night and this woman came into my room. She had a blue gown and she had white underneath and she had this shining bluey silver star from her forehead and she was fairly dark.

DDM [23:42] She was really a dark woman. And she came in and she sat on my bed and I was speechless, you know, because I was like, and in my little head, I was thinking to myself, is this God? Because I had no idea what God looked like. I didn’t grow up in the Sunday school.

DDM [23:58] And she sat on my bed to the extent that the pillow actually went down. And she spoke words over me that I will never forget. and she came from the time I was 14 probably about three times in the evening and kind of like spoke these words over me. So in my head she became the first image that I ever had of God and I didn’t know that she wasn’t God until when I was about 15, 16 I went with a friend to a Roman Catholic Church and I saw her in a statue they had this

DDM [24:35] dark statue this was in South Africa of Mary And I remember turning to my friend and saying, who is she? I mean, that’s how unchurched I was. I was like, who is she? And my friend said, no, that’s Jesus’ mom, Mary, you know?

DDM [24:49] And I was like, oh my God, I’ve met her. And my friend was like, what do you mean, you know? And so from then I developed this fascination with Mary. Like I wanted to know everything about her.

DDM [24:59] And I got my friend during geography class to teach me the Hail Mary.

DDM [25:03] And I used to recite this during geography class, which shows you I had no real interest in geography, I guess, but subsequently when I was about to be ordained I was very nervous that what does it mean to be ordained as a woman in a tradition that traditionally men have been ordained into and for those of us who believe that it actually becomes the body and blood of Christ at the consecration I kept asking myself if I consecrate will it become the body and blood of Christ or is this just all a joke? And I was in a retreat and we were in this little cloister room we didn’t really leave much and I was really wrestling with this issue and I guess it was about integrity you know is what I’m doing genuine or is it actually just something fake?

DDM [25:52] And Mary came to me again in that room and said, who do you think brought the first body and blood of Christ into this world? It was a woman. And she was like, of course you can do this.

DDM [26:05] She was like, if I could do it, you could do it. And I never asked that question after that moment in time. And subsequently there’s been so many times in my life when I’ve really been at a crossroads or grappling with something and Mary will come to me, shaping me, teaching me, challenging me and reminding me of who I am. So that’s why for myself, Elizabeth, I adore Mary, not because of scriptural text, not because of literature or even how others see her, not because she’s essentially an archetype.

DDM [26:41] I love her because in a way she’s always been there for me. because I trust her, her love and her care for me. And because of my experience in my relationship with her, that’s something that, you know, can’t be taken away. Not patriarchy, not even our scriptural tradition, not what anybody else says.

DDM [27:00] And so I guess for myself, my deepest wish is that people would actually begin to relate to Mary. for who she is as a person in her own right, maybe to begin to speak to her, to allow her to break through all these different layers of historical narrative in a way to allow her to be unchained from the past and maybe to be encountered again in the present.

CRT [27:29] Producer Carl here and I felt like I needed to share a poem. This is by Jay Hume. I’ve been told I was pronouncing his name wrong. This is the poet that I talked about in the literature episode.

CRT [27:42] This is called The Holy Family. Christ had brothers, do you remember? Half-forgotten in gospel song, bit parts with single lines, denied by those desperate for a virgin mother to remain untouched. Perfection is what happens when myth overtakes the reality, when wanting erases the truth already there.

CRT [28:07] Imagine being venerated by those who deny your children. Imagine centuries of men disclaiming the love of your kin. Imagine it said that you never held your husband, never cradled him close, closer, soft curve, hard flesh, whispered promise. Imagine.

CRT [28:28] Acting on love doesn’t make you any less holy. This wanting cannot preclude a person from faith. I think on dark nights Mary pulled Joseph closer, counted their five sons, their daughters, each one miraculous, the oldest God. I think many times they added to holy creation, their Savior sleeping soundly, a baby still and snoring at their feet.

MET [29:00] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church.

MET [29:25] Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [29:29] Music by Audionautix.com

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe discuss the connections between literature and faith. They share their love of reading, background in literature, and then discuss some favorite poetry.

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Transcript

DDM [00:03]: Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May. And

MET: I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET: Carl and I are back with you today and we’re here to share with you a bit of our expertise that we don’t often get to delve into anymore. Today we’re talking about literature and the Bible.

MET: Now, there are whole podcasts devoted to this topic, so we don’t plan on trying to be comprehensive – that would be impossible. But we wanted to talk about a few connections and provide some examples. So before we get into anything really analytical or otherwise smarty-pants sounding, I’d like to talk about how this is personal.

MET [1:13]: Carl and I actually both have degrees in English (the number of books we have in our house is obscene). So, obviously we are readers and have a love for stories, the written word, etc. Let me tell you about my love affair with words.

MET: Oddly, it probably began with my dad. I say oddly because when I was young my dad wasn’t around a lot of the time. He was an oil hand and was out on the rigs a lot in my formative years. But when he WAS home, he read to me. I mean, just about every day. I distinctly remember when I was very young that he read all of Winnie the Pooh by Milne and he would go through a few pages every night. It was really important and special to him. I have no idea how old I was at the time, but it was one of the first books I remember. And I’ve pretty much been reading every since.

MET: I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that I have a pretty active imagination. Carl will tell you that if I am sitting quietly it probably means my mind is going about a million miles a minute. There is always something going on in my head. Reading gave me both something to focus on, and a way to exercise my imagination. And I was intent on it.

MET [2:33]: For example, I hated books with pictures in them. I know young kids are always trying to get out of doing real reading by trying to find books with as many pictures as possible, but I sought out the chapter books that eschewed illustrations – because I did not want things sullied by what somebody ELSE thought the story looked like. If I was reading something I was imagining in my head what the people and places looked like. I had their voices pitched in my head. I had given them accents appropriate for their station or location. I had a world based on this narrative. The last thing I wanted was for some other dingbat to come along and try to tell me what things looked like because I ALREADY KNEW. I did not want somebody else’s notions of what a story looked like because I had that taken care of. I was a relatively reserved kid, and bookish, and didn’t like kids books and didn’t want pictures. I think a lot of adults thought I lacked imagination. But the reality was that I was immersed in it.

MET: So I grew up inhaling novels, short stories, whatever. And I got so far ahead of my peers. I groaned at everything we read in school because I thought it lacked substance. So, once again, my dad took things into his own hands.

MET [4:00]: When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my dad realized I was about to give up on my English classes. I loved reading, but school was just awful. So, he gave me something that probably changed my life – a literature textbook. I think it was meant for seniors in high school or freshman in college. It was a very basic collection of British lit covering all eras, so there was really no focus, and an actual expert would have rolled their eyes, but I was entranced. I read it from cover to cover. It had poetry in it like I had never read. It had stories in it like I had never come across. That book, as much as anything else in my life, set the course for my academic career. I just had no idea you could do those things with words. And I had no idea there was such a rich history of story-telling and craft. I probably became a literary scholar with that book.

MET: I learned to read and analyze that way. I learned to understand things through this process. I knew how to make sense of a text well before any of my peers, and by the time I was in high school everyone knew that if you had questions about a literary text, I was the person to ask.

MET [5:18]: In high school I was a stand out in the performing arts and I had a reputation for just GETTING reading and writing. Everyone knew I could act. Everyone knew I could sing. And everyone knew that there was no way I was going to be valedictorian, but the valedictorian came to me for help in English. So, when I was on my way to college, and I mean literally driving there, to move in, I was planning on majoring in theater and minoring in music. Everyone thought I was going to be the next big thing on Broadway. And here is where it’s both a little sad, but also maybe a little serendipitous because it led me to the success I have today – my lack of self-confidence got in the way. I was afraid I wasn’t pretty enough to make it on stage. And I was afraid I would never be a good enough dancer to make it in the chorus. So, I literally gave up on my theater dreams right there in the car, and decided to focus on the other thing I loved – literature. When I got to college, I signed up to major in English. That set me on an intellectual path that eventually got me here

CRT [6:31]: I was a voracious reader as well when I was a kid. Both of my parents and my sister were readers, so there were always books in every room of our homes. I wasn’t as worried about pictures in my books as you were (and I’m sure you won’t discount such magnificent illustrations in children’s books as the scene where Chester tries to drive a steak through Bunnicula’s heart). Like you, I found much of what we read in school to be drivel until I got into AP English classes in high school. I did have the advantage of a parent, my Mom, with two English degrees that regularly engaged with me on the books I was reading. She read the books I read for AP and we discussed literature regularly.

MET: Before we get into a lot of lit, like what you’re talking about, we should explain just how different our literature backgrounds are. I studied lit at a very conservative, very religious school. There was 100% an agenda there. And, to be frank, I did not get a very good literature education. There were a few classes here and there that were standouts – I’ll mention one or two in a bit – but it was not great. I hardly learned anything modern. I didn’t learn ANY theory at all. I mean NONE. Which maybe doesn’t sound like a big deal but I was SO behind when I went to grad school. It’s a miracle I came out in one piece. And what I did learn was just bad or wrong a lot of the time.

MET: I remember a roommate who was also taking a lot of lit classes walking into our house one day after a few English classes and throwing her books on the ground and proclaiming loudly, “Not EVERY character is a Christ figure!!!” My professors forced a Christian interpretation on a lot of things where it was inappropriate.I remember one day in class where a professor had us read a poem by e.e. cummings. I don’t know how much you know about cummings, but he’s a modern guy, and isn’t scared of taking risks. This poem is about sex. I mean, it’s about a car, but it is 100% about sex. And it is graphic. You would either have to not know how to read or live in a bubble with no contact with the outside world to miss the fact that this poem is about sex. And my professor stood in front of an entire class of seniors and acted scandalized because we had suggested it was sexual because, according to him, it was obviously about a man proposing to a woman.

MET [9:14]: Let me tell you something – this is an important lesson about art: all those well-meaning lit and art teachers who told you art can mean anything you want it to were lying to you to make you feel better about not knowing what the heck you were talking about. Art does NOT mean anything you want it to. Art can be interpreted in any number of ways; but that does not mean all interpretations are valid. Sometimes you can be flat-out wrong.If you read 1984 and then tell me it’s about how the government should invest in more surveillance programs you are, in fact, dead wrong. This is a major failing of education. If we were teaching students to understand texts, the world, ANYTHING, which teach you that there are only one or two answers,we’d have jettisoned standardized testing ages ago, and we would have fired all the hippies who wanted everybody to feel good about themselves who went the other way and said, all answers are valid. These are equally nonsensical positions. The world is complex and nuanced. If you want to understand it, you have to think that way, too. Which means there can be a lot of right answers, some will be better than others, and you can always be wrong. The question isn’t, what is the right answer? The question is what does the evidence indicate? Making sure you can’t answer those questions is a way of keeping you unable to challenge power. If you stay docile and unable to analyze a problem you can’t figure your way out of a situation. As long as we aren’t able to think through things, we are not a threat to those with money or political clout. So don’t tell me your humanities classes don’t matter.

MET: Which brings me back to this English professor. And this prof was dead wrong about e.e. Cummings. There was no textual evidence for his claims. I got a lot of that at my school. When I got to grad school I understood literature pretty much by sheer force of will.

CRT [11:29]: Like you, I didn’t head to college expecting to major in English, though I took a bit longer to realize where I needed to be. I started out as a computer engineering major. Unfortunately, engineers really ought to understand things like math and physics and more math. Those were not my strong points. So at the end of my first, abysmal semester at Texas A&M University, I decided to take a bunch of non-engineering core courses, intending to figure out some other major. None of those classes were English classes, as I already had the basic English credits due to AP exams in highschool. But I took two sociology courses, a journalism course, political science, and philosophy. And it was amazing. It was clear that I needed to be working with words, not numbers.

CRT: Nearing the end of that second semester, I was certain that I was going to major in sociology. I went to my advisor to start the process of changing, but at the last minute, I chose English. I honestly can’t remember why. It might have been that at the time I thought teaching might be where I was heading career wise, and it seemed much more likely that I would be able to get a job teaching English than sociology. Maybe it was the voice of my Mom in my head who got two degrees in English. But for whatever reason, I ended up switching over to English.

CRT: Unlike Elizabeth, I was in a program with an extremely diverse faculty that were not bound by the University to teach a certain worldview. As an example of the type of course that I had access to in my program that Elizabeth did not was a undergrad/grad bridge course in feminist theory.

CRT [13:03]: My primary interest in literature was post modern literature. The basic premise of postmodern anything is a profound skepticism and abandonment of grand, overarching narratives made up of capital T truths that can explain the world. Truth, in postmodern literature, is relativistic, and the truths we choose to believe are more often created by power structures rather than objective facts.

CRT: When I was studying literature as an undergrad, I was an outspoken atheist. I saw many connections in the texts that we read with the faith that I had been a part of when I was younger, but it wasn’t personal to me. I assume that meant that I was approaching literature from a very different angle than you were, Elizabeth. How would you say your faith and literature connected in your mind?

MET: The question of how my love of literature and my faith life connects is pretty simple actually – but as I got older and started to think in a more adult fashion about that connection, it took on a more mature pallour. I’ll explain. There are a few things I love about lit – the story, the meaning, and the quality and interplay of the language and text, that kind of thing.

MET [14:18]: When I was young, my family was insistent that I knew the stories of the Bible. To a weird extent. I mean, I didn’t just go to Sunday School, I went to Bible Study, Mission Friends, I read my Bible all the time, and my family gave me Bible stories on tape to listen to. But we didn’t talk about them a lot. I was just kind of left to my own devices to figure out why they were important or what they meant. So I learned really early on that the Bible was full of complex, contradictory, and REALLY wild, supernatural, and dramatic stories. So it wasn’t hard for me to think of the Bible as a book with a lot of good stories in it. And that appealed to me.

MET: Meaning was important. As early as 11 or 12 I learned that texts have many meanings. And because I had figured out that the Bible was a text, I put it together in my head that the Bible could possibly be interpreted in more than one way. And I thought that was FASCINATING. I also realized very quickly that had major implications for the arguments that I did not understand but I knew were going on out there in the religious world. Instead of turning me off, that made me want to know more. I wanted to figure out what this text was, what were its many meanings, and what they meant to people.

MET [15:42] And as for the language – my interest there is probably what should have indicated where my intellectual life was headed as much as anything else. I had heard sermons before on what words means in Greek or Hebrew or whatever and what that meant for the Bible or for the people of the day…and it was almost always in service to a particular ideology, which I didn’t necessarily pick up on, but I DID recognize that this meant language mattered. I realized that there was slippage around these words. I remember someone in my youth group lecturing me on why I should only read the King James Bible because the language is so much more beautiful, and I remember thinking, but not saying, if you are reading the Bible for pretty language as opposed to historical language or contextual language you’re going to get a very different Bible. These were not welcome additions to my Southern Baptist Youth Group retreat share circle conversations. So before I even knew what any of this meant, I had an appreciation of the Bible AS literature. I liked it as a book. I mean, yes, it was holy scripture. But I also just kind of thought it was an interesting read.

MET: When I grew up and learned more, I actually figured out I was way more right than I knew. For example – The Psalms are lovely. But we too often don’t think about what they are. They are songs or poems. If we think about them just as essays or monologues we don’t really get what’s going on. The Psalms aren’t just a guy writing down his thoughts. They are art. The Song of Solomon is pretty much erotica. Right there in the middle of the Bible. And it generally gets skipped because of that. But the Bible includes a whole dirty book. What are we supposed to do with that information in context with the rest of the Bible? There are two creation stories. They don’t match. How are we supposed to read a Bible that literally can’t get its stories straight unless we acknowledge that the operative word is “story?”

MET [17:59]: And then in college I took a life-changing class that made the connection in the opposite direction. I took a class on religion in literature. It was maybe one of my favorite classes ever. I think if the professor and I had ever sat down and talked about policy in any way about any thing we might have been at each other’s throats. But it was a great class.

MET: We read literature with religious themes. We started the class reading very old hymns as poetry, and then read ancient Christian poems, and worked our way up through major writers who had included religion in their writing as a major theme. I was introduced to Flannery O’Connor in that class. That rocked my world. I actually named a dog Flannery. Flannery O’Connor was problematic in about a thousand different ways, but between her novel Wise Blood and her short story Parker’s Back I was pretty sure she had uncovered the mysteries of the Bible Belt. So all my life I saw a connection between literature and religion. Even if I couldn’t articulate it always, it was a part of my thinking.

CRT [19:10]: As I said, I don’t really have a lot to say as far as connections between my faith and my background in literature, but I guess my love of postmodern literature definitely led me to a more universalist view of religion. All roads leading up the same mountain. Stuff like that. Isn’t it more limiting of God to insist that he revealed themself to all people the same way than it is to allow them to appear to people in different ways throughout time and place? I once heard a priest talking about alien life in the cosmos and whether or not Jesus would have visited them. He found that question a bit silly, because in his mind aliens wouldn’t necessarily need a savior, and if they did, God would take the form of them to do it, just as Jesus came in the form of a human.

MET: Well, I’m definitely interested in Jesus’s humanity.

MET: It doesn’t do a lot of good to talk about these things without getting into specifics, so I’m going to talk about some poetry. Now, understand I could talk about this for hours. I am ready right now to tell you about the Dream of the Rood or religious themes in Gawain or if you want to talk about prose I am prepared to have a multi-session discussion on Flannery O’Connor or John Steinbeck. We could make this happen. But, I say as Carl’s eyes get big and he shakes his head at me, I will not do that to any of us. I am actually going to use an example from John Donne and James Weldon Johnson.

MET [20:46]: John Donne wrote poetry during the Elizabethan Age and was what you would call a metaphysical poet. His works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style. He is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, and ironies. These features were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. Another important theme in Donne’s poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised.

MET: What Donne is particularly famous for among budding lit scholars outside of all that mumbo jumbo, though, is his strange poetic juxtaposition in his writing. And by that I mean, he is basically known for two things: very spiritual poems about how loving and great God is and how much we need him, and incredibly dirty poems that you would have been embarrassed to read in your intro to lit class.

MET:This is beyond a Song of Solomon situation. Donne’s poems are basically erotica. Which lit students find delightful when compared to his incredibly virtuous and holy works, So I thought we’d take a look at something he did and see if we could locate the spiritual.

MET [22:19]: I’m going to tell you about a weird little poem Donne wrote called “The Flea.”

MET: “The Flea” is, in it’s most straightforward interpretation, a man trying to convince a woman to have pre-marital sex with him. He uses the insignificant flea as a metaphor – if a flea bites him, and then bites, her, then their blood has mingled in that flea’s body. Their bodies are already unified, and it was no sin. So this next step wouldn’t be, either.

MET: The flea, he says, is their marriage bed. He also says it is three lives in one – the woo-er, the woman, and the flea. This is a point where Donne moves the poem from just the physical to the spiritual – three spirits in one is a reference to the Trinity, and comparing their marriage bed (or the flea) to something as holy as the Trinity moves the seduction away from something sinful into something sacrosanct. So, when the woman kills the flea with her nail, Donne (or whoever is dictating the poem) is rebuffed. Killing the flea is a rejection of the seduction – she has killed the supposed “marriage bed,” she knew was not one, but was just his manipulation. So Donne actually gives the woman in this poem a bit more agency, a bit more personality than a lot of women had in things like chivalric literature.

MET; That is a very short synopsis of a complicated poem, but I wanted to highlight a few things:

MET [23:59]: This was the time of Queen Elizabeth. And people my parents and grandparents age love to tell us how in the old days things were so much more wholesome but that is absolutely untrue. This is back in the 1600s and Donne, who was a priest, is talking about how to most effectively seduce a woman into premarital sex. And this was widely read poetry.

MET: There has never been a time when things were more wholesome. We have always been obsessed with sex and drugs. We have always been a people who want to have sex and get intoxicated. We want to feel good and make bad decisions. It is who we are as a species. And anyone who tells you “not in my day” is either lying or has such selective memory that they are not worth arguing with. Don’t believe me? Read Shakespeare. Read Greek mythology. Read literally anything.

MET: The reason I say this is because Donne takes this idea and juxtaposes that with the holy. Throughout Donne’s work he says, “Okay, we’re physically bound andsexually obsessed creatures – how does that connect us to God?” And I can’t think of a more interesting question to explore in art. And one that could span the ages.

MET [25:24]: The other poet I want to tell you about is James Weldon Johnson.He was an American writer and civil rights activist. Johnson was a leader of the NAACP, where he started working in 1917. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies, collecting both poems and spirituals of Black culture. He wrote the lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, which later became known as the Black National Anthem, the music being written by his younger brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson. In 1934, he was the first African American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life, he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, a historically Black university. In recognition of his scholarship and impact, New York University established the James Weldon Johnson Professorship in 2020.

MET: Those of you who took American lit courses (and I realize this might be way out of the experience of some of our international listeners) will remember that the Harlem Renaissance was a time of real rejuvenation in Black culture and arts. It wasn’t just that more Black people were involved in the arts, it was that Blackness was being infused into the arts.

MET [26:51]: And that’s why I wanted to talk about Johson’s poem “The Creation.” I first came across this poem at a speech tournament When I was young my dad taught speech at high school for a few years, and when one of his students couldn’t make it, I often got roped in to sub in for a random event here and there as a junior high student. One of the events that is common is poetry recitation – you memorize a poem and recite it dramatically. A young woman that was at a tournament I subbed at recited this poem “The Creation” and I was just blown away. I couldn’t have told you why, but I wrestled with this poem for years after that.

MET: Johnson tells the story of the creation in Genesis. It’s not a wild departure in any way – you know what’s coming next at every turn. But what Johnson does is different in that he tells the story in the tradition of Black story telling. When God looks over his creation, he simply says, “That’s good.” That simple phrase, “That’s good,” hit me like a ton of bricks. My God had always said, “It is good,” or “It is finished,” or something so weird in syntax or strangely phrased that it was supposed to sound churchy, I guess, but in this poem God simply says, “That’s good.” And the idea of a God who can just look at something and say, “Yeah. Pretty good,” filled me with such joy and hope that I didn’t know what to do with it. This was a God who got me.

MET: And the God of Johnson’s poem was so relatable. Johnson’s poem starts out with God sitting there and saying, “I’m lonely – I’ll make me a world.” I get that. That was me as a kid. We were all lonely children who made up worlds for ourselves. We understand this God’s motivation. And when God makes a man, the imagery Johnson uses isn’t a thunderous creator, but that of a mammy leaning over a child. This is a tender God. A God that cares for his creation. Johnson’s poem isn’t amazing because of it’s creative content – the story in Genesis isn’t new.It is amazing because it tells the story in a new but faithful voice

CRT [29:25]: I want to talk about a contemporary poet named Jay Hulme. H-U-L-M-E. And I’m going to ask Elizabeth to read these poems and then I’ll talk about them. I want to start with a poem that goes along with the poem Elizabeth was just talking about.

MET:

God as a Carpenter; hands shot through with nails

In that moment, perhaps,
He remembered the things
He’d created,
	In thirty years
Of hammer striking wood.
And in His pain He thought
Of all Creation
	As good enough;
Still good.

CRT: Jay Hulme is a transgender man who found God just before the Covid-19 pandemic began, having been an atheist since birth. Much of his poetry since 2020 has been about his journey as a queer Christian in a changing, often hostile world. Like his imagining of God on the cross in the poem Elizabeth just read, Hulme looks at the world as something that is still good, even as his very identity makes people revile him.

CRT: Many of his poems have direct analogues in the Bible. For example, in Matthew and Mark, we find the story of the woman who was hemorrhaging who touched the hem of Jesus’ cloak in the faith that she would be healed. Jesus notices and tells her that her faith has healed her. Hulme writes his version as this:

MET:

Jesus at the Gay Bar

He's here in the midst of it —
right at the centre of the dance floor,
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin.

At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed, beg to be
anything other than this;

and He will reach His arms out,
sweat-damp, and weary from dance.
He'll cup the boy's face in His hand
and say,

my beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.

CRT [31:39]: This is, perhaps, the first time one has encountered the idea of Jesus being at a gay bar. For many Christians, that is the last place they would expect to find him. And if he is there, for many believers, he would be there to drive the people out like he did in the temple with the money changers, but no, here he is dancing. Like the woman in the Bible, a boy touches the hem of his robe in hopes of being healed.. To be something other than “this.” In the Bible, Jesus tells the woman that her faith has healed her, but people at that time would have seen the fact that she even touched him as a huge transgression of Jewish purity laws. She was likely suffering from years of menstrual bleeding, and purity laws dictated that she not touch anyone, least of all an unrelated man. She was unclean. Jesus doesn’t chastise her for that. He doesn’t even forgive her for touching him, which the law says would have made him unclean as well. Similarly, Jesus doesn’t chastise the boy for touching him, but here we see a change. Jesus tells the boy that there is nothing in him that needs to be healed. Jesus tells him that he is already whole, and Jesus sees no need to “forgive” the boy for anything. Hulme once again references the Bible in his poem “Like Thomas”

MET:

Like Thomas

I have been building myself
out of scraps of shattered dreams;
God hands me flour and water,
says: I know what it's like.

The surgeons say I have only to
count backwards from ten
and when I wake I will be reborn.

And reborn I touch
my own body for the first time;
incredulous at the miracle
right before my eyes.

CRT: Here, Hulme touches the scars on his own body from gender affirming surgery as proof of his own rebirth or resurrection, just as Thomas touched the scars on Jesus’ body.

CRT [33:44]: In addition to Hulme’s grappling with faith and identity in his poetry post conversion, Hulme’s earlier work is at times in conversation with faith, though it very often is unpleasant From “Broadmead”

MET:

They told me I was Satan
Those side street preachers
With gospel grin

CRT: From “I Am a Man” when talking about leaving home after coming out

MET:

Pitchforks raised to chase
away the man I have become
I left them, on a hurricane Tuesday
When the weather broke against me
Like the wrath of a God
Others told me existed.

CRT: I wonder how one is able to even imagine a loving God when your identity is supposedly an abomination and the cause of your own family denying you. In Hulme’s case, I think it is because of his command of words and language that he was able to find a place on the margins for himself and others like him in Biblical narratives that are supposed to be settled, capital T truths.

MET [34:53]: Okay – I have loved getting to talk about some things near and dear to me – literature is never far from my heart. And I have loved getting to do that with Carl. We hope we have given you something to think about and maybe inspired you to do a bit of reading. Rev. Deborah will be back soon, and we have some good things planned. Carl and I have loved experimenting with you over the summer. It’s good to know we can try a variety of approaches.

MET: Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prophet. find us at our website, priestandprof.org.

MET: If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org slash donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM: Music by Audionautix.com

In this mini episode, Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discusses the nature of public vs private communication and how those differences relate to the faith.

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DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET [00:39] Hello!

Rev. Deborah is still on sabbatical, and our producer actually has shingles, so things are going to be a bit shorter than usual, as it’s just me and Carl is not up to a whole lot.

But there was something I wanted to chat with you about before Rev. Deborah came back, because it might shine some light on some things we’ll do in the fall and winter.

I actually want to talk to you about the public vs. the private.

So, if a student wants to sign up to major in my program at school, they have to choose a concentration. This used to be broken up into interpersonal/organizational, and public/mediated. These words generally mean nothing to undergrads. They very likely mean nothing to you. So, let me explain.

Think of these as levels of audience. There is the first level, which is interpersonal. That’s person-to-person. That’s what you do with your spouse or your buddy or your priest. After that, things are kind of categorized by size of audience. There’s organizational – which is how an organization communicates within itself or to an outside receiver. There’s public communication, which is largely what I do – a person speaking to a crowd. Which has a lot of crossover with mediated communication, which is when the communication is just that – a matter of new media. Depending on what quote-un-quote level of audience you are speaking to, you communicate differently, and you study that communication differently.

Okay, I didn’t really tell you anything that was brilliantly insightful, there. But, I start there to remind you that there is a difference between certain kinds of communication – there is public communication and private communication. You may know this from your job – you make a public memo or flyer for everyone to see; you send a private email or memo to one team member about their particular work. Once again – this is not rocket science.

But I was thinking about how this relates to the faith. Matthew 6:5-6 says, “And when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they [a]will be seen bythe people. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6 But as for you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.” But if you go to a liturgical church you know very well that public and communal prayer is integral to a church service. Is Episcopal prayer non pleasing to God because it is done out loud? That seems dubious.

And actually, this takes me back to our very first episode. When I introduced myself to you I told you how I was raised in a very individualized faith. And that’s actually a bit of a paradox, you know? On the one hand, it was very self-centered, individually focused, and without a lot thought for the community. At the same time, there was a lot of emphasis on the public nature of the faith. So it was all about YOUR relationship to God, but kind of how you related to him in public. And that’s a little weird. You would think if it was about an interpersonal relationship, it would be a bit more private. But Episcopalians do the reverse, and I don’t know if we can call ourselves any better. We have this beautiful communal faith – our focus is on the body of the church, both as a physical representation of Christ and a collective community. We pray together, we worship together, we sing together, and we commune together. And yet our faith is very private. You don’t see a lot of Episcopalians telling their friends about how the church has changed their lives for the better. Episcopalians aren’t good at telling people, “I see God in you.” Episcopalians have 100% bought the narrative that it is inappropriate and uncomfortable to talk about religion. They have to be reminded that, yeah, Jesus told us not to pray on street corners, but he also told us, “19 [a]Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to [b]follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you [c]always, to the end of the age.”

Wow, it’s almost like God doesn’t expect our relationship to Him to be one-dimensional.

One of the things that seems to be really hard for some people to wrap their heads around is that God is multi-faceted. God is multitudinous. And, he expects maturity and complexity from us. We are, as Paul observed, not to be content with milk, but should move on to the meat of our relationship.

What I mean by that is that God expects us to understand a bit of context. He tells us, no, I don’t want you to stand on the street corners and pray. That’s what hypocrites do. But that is absolutely different from saying he does not want us to proclaim. God asks us to consider our circumstances. A public street corner with an audience that doesn’t really want to hear you in a show that doesn’t do anybody but you any good is not sharing the gospel. A one-on-one conversation between you and your friend who wants to know how you’re handling things is a very different situation. And this is the difference between a public faith and a private faith. A person who preaches on street corners or college campuses or prays over food loudly in restaurants to make sure the waiter can hear them is the hypocrite praying on the street. They may be doing things in public, but there is no faith to it. A moment with a friend in which you share how God is a part of your life may seem private, but in that moment you are sharing in a very communal thing.

I’m asking you to think about this as we move into the fall and winter because there’s a lot going on in the world right now that asks us to re-imagine our faith in terms of its relation to the public or the private. Who can talk to about what at work? What religions get public funding? Who prays where? What faiths have power over and access to schools? How much influence will religion have over judicial review?

All of these are questions about how the public intersects with religion. It would behoove us all to have some idea of how we situate ourselves in terms of those things as well.

MET [08:03] Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prophet. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [08:30] Music by Audionautix.com

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discusses her approach to the faith and this podcast. She explores the value of rhetoric in understanding theological issues.

Producer’s Note: Due to some technical difficulties with our Virtual Church recording session, we are going to delay that episode until we can re-record some sections. This week, we are doing a solo episode with Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

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Transcript

MET [00:38] Hello, all. Today it’s just me – Rev. Deborah is on sabbatical, and we had a few technical difficulties recording the virtual church episode, so Carl and I will get that out to you in the future, so I’m going to talk to you for just a bit on my own. So, it’s probably going to get a little heady, today. Buckle up for some schoolish-type-talk!

MET [01:00] No, really, I actually thought I would take a minute to talk to you about where I’m coming from. Sometimes it may seem like I am coming out of nowhere. I talk about all these wild rhetoricians or communication theories or whatever, and it may not seem abundantly clear why I make those connections sometimes. When we talked about Mary Magdalene I was going off about public memory and when we talked about South Africa I was giving you theories about whiteness and the law – I admit this is not normal. If you have a cup of coffee with a friend and say, “Hey, did you hear about…?” They are not going to respond to any of these things in the way I do.

MET [01:42] So, why? What is the point of all of this? How does it fit? And am I just a navel-gazer shoe-horning my particular ideas into a discussion about theological things?

It is quite possible that I AM all of those things. But if you’ll give me a chance to explain myself, I hope you’ll at least find my shoe-horning amusing.

MET [02:07] I teach a class in rhetorical theory. You may have heard me talk about it before. I really enjoy teaching it. It’s interesting, challenging, and for the most part the students are starting from ground zero. On the first day of class, when we’re going over the syllabus, I tell my students, I know you don’t want to be here. That often gets a laugh, or some shocked faces. But, I acknowledge, this is a class about both rhetoric and theory – two things that most people spend their entire college career trying desperately to avoid. And often I see some people get a bit more comfortable in their seats at that point. Because if we all start from the same place – and that place is that we all think this is going to suck – we’re at least in the same boat. But I go on from there. My aim, I tell them, is not to turn them into rhetoricians or theorists. I don’t expect any of them to go on and study rhetoric for the rest of their lives or think about theory forever and ever. My aim is to show them that these big, pie-in-the-sky questions that we think of as irrelevant or just for philosophers and people that don’t do anything with their lives actually matter. That some of these ideas are being played out in their everyday lives, right beneath their noses. That rhetoric, and all of the “nonsense stuff” that comes with it, is actually pretty essential to the way we function. People are pretty incredulous at that, but it gives us a starting point other than, you have to know this because KNOWLEDGE.

MET [03:52] I also tell them there is value in this kind of thing because of the KIND of learning I am asking them to do. The truth is, at least 70% of the jobs out there will be gone in 5-10 years. AI is coming for us all. And in their hearts they know this, because they have all been cheating and getting AI to do their work for them. What they haven’t put together yet is that if they are replacing themselves with AI now, then they are making themselves useless in 5 years. If they want to be useful, employable, and helpful in a few years, they have to show that they can do what the bots cannot. And if you spend your years in college getting the bots to do your work, you absolutely cannot do that. The thing the computers cannot do, is be human. They can do pretty much everything else. Really – everything. But they cannot understand the world the way a human does. They can’t make human connections and decisions. So, I tell my students, if you are thinking about how to make yourself as marketable as possible in the coming AI takeover, your goal shouldn’t be to learn to code, but to make yourself as explicitly human as possible. This is one of those classes where you learn to do that. In rhetorical theory we will wrestle with the questions that are at the heart of the human experience. And if that seems pointless to you, then the machines have already won.

And that may not immediately make you think of a project like this – but it really is an important connection.

MET [05:44] What I do is essentially a humanist project. Historically, rhetoric has been defined as just persuasion. But in the last century people have reconsidered that approach. Yes, there is a matter of convincing people – but that’s more than just a claim and evidence. There’s actually a lot of evidence out there that starting with a claim and presenting your proofs and then coming to a conclusion is a pretty terrible way to convince people because most people don’t believe proven evidence. Most people just don’t buy facts that don’t already justify what they believe, regardless of sources, logic, or presentation. So there are larger questions about emotion, narrative, and identification. These are the things we think about now. How do you reach people? How do you find people at their most human? And when we’re talking about spiritual matters, and how spiritual matters relate to public life, we are talking about inherently human matters.

Let me tell you about my rhetorical theory class again.

MET [06:58] I taught it at the grad level a few times, and it was always really well-received, but the approach threw people for a loop. Basically, I told my students on the first day we were going to read a whole bunch of really smart theorists and philosophers and at the end of the semester they were going to define three things: truth, reality, and rhetoric.

They generally laughed, and I said, no, I’m serious. You’re going to write your own rhetorical theory. Based on what we learn in class, you’re going to take on the mantle of western philosopher and define things that we’ve been struggling with for thousands of years. Good luck.

Man, you should see how they squirm.

But we make it through. And by the end of the semester they feel so smart and have so much to say. But they also know how much they don’t know, and that’s as good a thing to learn as any.

But let me break down the challenge here:

MET [08:04] Let’s say you want to define truth: is it capital T truth? Is it inherent and intrinsic? Is it immutable, and irrespective of the world around us? Does truth exist and not change regardless of the circumstances? Or is truth contextual? Are there different truths based on perspective or situation? Can a thing be true at one time, and not true at another? This question in and of itself is often baffling for my students, because they say they believe one thing, then find themselves defending the other. What I don’t tell them in the beginning is there is a theorist or philosopher who has covered pretty much any position they take – there’s nothing new under the sun – but watching them try to justify what seems to be a very inconsistent opinion is both amusing, but also encouraging as an instructor. They are learning.

Then we have to approach reality: For most of them, they just assume truth and reality are the same thing. If it is true it is real, and if it is not real, then it is not true. But, I ask them, doesn’t that depend on how you define truth? For example, if you are an American, you have been raised to believe in certain immutable truths – that all people are born equal and have the rights to life, liberty and happiness. We’re taught this from infancy on up. Equality. It’s the bedrock principle of America. So it is true that we are all equal. I have yet to have a student say they do not believe in equality. But, is that the reality? This generally causes great consternation. The question then becomes about not just what is real, but what is truth’s relationship to reality. It is true that women are equal to men. I absolutely, 100% believe that to be true. I also recognize the reality that we are not. What does one do with this discrepancy?

MET [10:28]Then consider rhetoric: If rhetoric is persuasion or identification, what does it have to do with these things? Consider the relationship to truth – if truth is immutable, then rhetoric is actually a really bad thing, because rhetoric could be used to persuade you from the truth. However, it is also pretty powerless in how it affects larger questions because it cannot affect the truth. The truth is sustained with or without rhetoric because it is intrinsic. However, if truth is situational, then rhetoric is EXTREMELY important, because that is HOW you create truth. If truth is made in the moment, you convince people of what is true at that time. You create truth as you go. Making a persuasive speaker one of the most powerful people in the world.

I think about all of these things when Rev. Deborah sit down to do a podcast because it weighs heavily on what I do when I am speaking to you. As a rhetorician, I am very interested in questions of truth, narrative, and persuasion. As a Christian, I am very aware that questions about truth, narrative, and persuasion are very dicey for a religion that claims, in many circles any way, to have a monopoly on truth.

MET [11:57] My job, in this podcast, is to provide a perspective on these topics that is not necessarily clerical, but considers the questions we pose from an intellectual, if Christian perspective. But, my intellectual perspective is shaped by my academic background. And my academic background demands that I constantly ask myself, where is the truth, here? What is real? Who is being persuaded of what? So the Bible is a fascinating document. It would be easy to say, “The Bible is true and that’s that.” And I’m comfortable with saying, “Sure, the Bible is true.” But is that different than saying the Bible is real? That’s a question I think we should all be asking ourselves. And, I am quite convinced, a thing is no less true just because it is not real. That can be a hard pill to swallow. But it’s something I wrestle with a lot as a person of reading and a person of faith.

MET [13:02] And I’m not here to argue that the Bible is a work of fiction with great truths in it. I absolutely believe that there is a great deal of the Bible we can look at and say, “Yeah, that happened!” The proof is in the pudding. But I am certainly not ready to think in any kind of literal terms. We don’t do ourselves any favors to say the world was literally created in seven days or that Joshua literally caused the sun to stop in the heavens.

MET [13:32] I also have to deal with questions of persuasion in the faith. I come from an Evangelical background where there was a huge emphasis on going out there and convincing people that they were going to go to hell if they didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. This is another one of those things that, honestly, most people aren’t just going to buy into. There are whole online groups devoted to making fun of Christians who do terrible things in the name of Jesus’ name to supposedly spread the good Word, and somehow the unsaved are supposed to think, “oh, yeah, I will definitely become a Christian, now.” At the same time, that reality question is such a humdinger. There are whole institutions built on convincing people that truth and reality are the same thing. If the Bible says it is true that Methuselah lived 900 years, then that is the reality.

MET [14:31] The reason I tell you these are particularly human questions, is ultimately, one of the last things you have to ask is “who?” Who benefits from you believing in a certain definition of truth or reality? Who benefits from you thinking that there is or is not a place for persuasion or identification in the stories that we tell? And that, dear friends, comes down to power. If someone has spent years telling you, that this is the way it is and there is no other way, they either benefit from that story, or have been so crushed by it themselves that they are reproducing it because they don’t know any other way. Someone wants you to know a particular narrative. It behooves you to ask who.

Finally, I want to tell you about some very specific ways that my field intersects with the faith, so just in case you think I’ve been feeding you a bunch of nonsense up until this point, I can prove that I’m coming from a place of actual connection.

MET [15:44] If you study rhetorical theory, you will very likely take a chronological type of approach. Start with the Sophists and work your way up to things like networked media. When you do that you can kind of follow a basic trajectory of how the West felt about things like these big questions about truth, reality, etc. One of the things that had a huge influence on our perspective on these things was institutional power. Whoever was in charge had a lot to say on what we believed. Now, if you’re an astute listener, you will automatically realize that the same people have been in charge for a really long time and have just recently started to, for a variety of reasons, share the institutional power; so that should give you some insight as to who was influencing our ideas about truth and reality and for what purpose. But for a few thousand years the people who were telling us what is real and what is believable were propertied, educated, white men. And if that is who is deciding what is true and real, you can probably see who benefited from that.

MET [17:00] There have been shifts here and there, though. And one of those happened in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t necessarily a particularly progressive shift, but it happened.

In the Middle Ages, we actually took a few steps backward. The Greeks and Romans had spent a long time building democracy, fashioning a rational way of looking at the world, and generally moving civilization in the direction of progress. Then Rome became an Empire, and empire is generally a bad thing and leads to regression and Rome fell to tyranny. When Rome began to fall apart, another power swooped in to take over – and that was the church.

The Church was no less an empire than Rome was. And the Church was much more invested in mandating truth and personal behavior. The Church took over the finances of the Western world, the state power, and began to regulate the lives of pretty much everyone living within its reaches. So all of those issues that the Classical philosophers and thinkers had been wrestling with – what’s true? Who counts? Who is a citizen? Who gets to be educated? – fell to the Church. And the church had an answer – Wealthy men. Because God said so. And it pretty much stayed that way for over 1000 years.

MET [18:30] The reason I bring this all up is because rhetoric, had kind of been through a number of manifestations through the Greek and Roman years. For the Greeks, rhetoric mattered immensely. That’s because in democracy, persuasion is ESSENTIAL. You don’t vote for a thing unless you are persuaded to do so. You make decisions based on who convinces you that they have the best idea. Rhetoric fell out of favor in Rome precisely because it was LESS democratic. As Rome fell to authoritarianism, it became less important for people to be able to express themselves in a cogent or effective manner because their voices didn’t matter. When people’s ideas don’t matter because only one person is in charge, rhetoric because an afterthought. When people have agency and can exact change in their world, then rhetoric is an essential. Once again, an astute observer might ask why in the last 50-100 years this subject has been taken out of the education system to the point that most people don’t even know what it is. But I digress.

This was the legacy the church inherited, and the Church made no efforts to change that. The Church was looking to maintain power and was not interested in fielding any questions. So it made sense that there weren’t too many major leaps in rhetorical theory for a while.

MET [20:08] But there was one person who stood out – St. Augustine. You will notice I said “Saint.” He was one of the integral fathers of the church and helped figure out early theological issues. He also wrote a book on rhetoric.

A word on St. Augustine – he may well have been bi-racial. That does not show up in any religion class or Sunday School lesson in general. Once again, we ask who is teaching us and why. In fact, I didn’t know this until I was watching a ridiculous television show about demons and detectives when one of the characters mentioned that Augustine’s mother Monica was probably Black. I was stunned. And so I did some fact-checking. Yeah – it’s definitely reasonable to think that. One of the most important Church fathers may not have been a white man. That was conveniently left out of my theology classes.

MET [21:12] Augustine wrote a piece called De Doctrina Christiana. In it, he sets out guidelines for interpreting scripture. What is notable is that he is not a literalist. Scriptural literalism didn’t pop up in Christian theology until much later. Augustine notes that there is figurative language, symbolic language, and even opportunities to think about grammar and structure when interpreting scripture. So he acknowledges in the very beginning that scripture teaches a variety of lessons, each of which may be equally true. He also talked about things that should be enjoyed and things that should be used. And his position is that God is enjoyable – we should take pleasure in our relationship with God. Other things are tools. This is in sharp contrast to the Puritans who would come later. But most importantly for our purposes, Augustine wrote about how eloquence should serve God, wisdom, and the proclamation of the gospel. An orator does not create truth – an orator serves truth and delivers it. God is the source of truth and wisdom and the orator is the vehicle by which that is delivered. Augustine gives some very good directions on how a speaker (in this circumstance, a priest) might do that, but ultimately, a speaker serves a cause, not himself.

MET [21:48] Consider that in terms of this podcast. Are we Augistinian? Do we simply share truths as they are handed to us by God? Do we interpret? Do we have more agency than that? Are we crafting a particular message for you that you should be wary of, the very same way I warn you to think about institutional powers? These are things I am quite sure you don’t think about. But I do. A lot. When I sit down to work on these podcasts I ask myself about my responsibilities to you, my discipline, and my faith. And because my discipline is such a terribly human one, it really does impact how I practice my faith. Because my faith is built of human things. Things like words and relationships. Without those things, I don’t know God. So looking at my faith through a lens that helps me understand words and relationships in general, helps me make sense of things that otherwise, I would have a lot of difficulty understanding.

MET [24:01] I know I have taken you on a heck of a journey today. You probably didn’t want to think this hard or hear about my classes this much. You’re probably missing Rev. Deborah’s optimism and her spiritual take on things. But I wanted to take this opportunity to explain where I am coming from, so the next time I drop some crazy term or theory on you, maybe you won’t think I am incredibly random or that I have lost my mind, but you’ll see how I am just trying to make sense of things, like you. And this just happens to be the best way I know how.

Okay. Thanks for listening to me through all of this. I’m happy to try to explain anything more if it didn’t make sense, so absolutely shoot me an email if you have questions. Carl, Rev. Deborah, and myself are just trying to make sense of the faith in this weird, new, mediated world. Let us know how we’re doing, or how we can help you.

MET [25:05] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [25:36] Music by Audionautix.com

In this episode, Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discuss the relationships among food, power, and labor. Rev. Deborah talks about the rise of agribusiness, and Dr. Thorpe discusses Cesar Chavez.

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Transcript

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010\. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

DDM [00:40] Welcome. So today Elizabeth and myself want to speak a little bit about agriculture, our food systems, farm workers, and some of the issues that are important for us to be aware of as we consider issues of justice, human dignity, and the earth itself, which of course are deep biblical values central to our faith. Elizabeth, I don’t really know if you watch the Super Bowl at all.

MET [01:09] No.

DDM [01:10] Okay, you too.I also don’t watch the Super Bowl, but I remember a couple of years back, I sometimes on my Facebook feed will see different adverts that come out on the Super Bowl. And there was a Super Bowl advert about, and God made a farmer. Did you ever see that one?

MET [01:27] God made a farmer?

DDM [01:31] Yes. You skipped that one

MET [01:31] Just the ridiculousness. Okay, whatever. I’ll leave that.

DDM [01:34] There we go. Well, I must say, honestly, it was one of those adverts that was really designed to pull on your heartstrings.

DDM [01:42] It was this beautifully curated advert about the sacredness of farming, the humanity of farming. They had this farmer sitting with this little foal, and it was highlighting the creativity of farmers to meet any challenge, the hard workingness of farmers, that kind of strong masculinity, but also soft. The son wanting to follow in the father’s footsteps and it was really highlighting this whole concept of almost this idyllic family farming with great honor and integrity. I don’t know what farming was like in the past in the USA.

DDM [02:19] I mean, I do know that America used to largely be a nation of farmers, but that’s certainly not the reality today in the USA. So much has changed. And I felt like that video in some ways was idolizing maybe something that’s was in the past or maybe something that’s never actually been. I’m not sure, because I didn’t grow up in this country. But the reality is that what I know now is that only 2% of the population are actually farmers. And farming is… it’s not at all what the advert was portraying. And what I’ve done because I’m passionate, you know myself, I’m passionate about agriculture and about farming.

DDM [03:01] What I discovered is after World War II, farming in this country changed dramatically. Because in World War II, you had all your war ammunition factories. They were producing weapons and gunpowder, all the nitrogen-based bombs that were being produced. And so when the war ended, the big question was, what do you do with all these chemical factories that have now been built after the war?

DDM [03:28] And so they began to build and produce nitrogen-based fertilizers out of those war ammunition factories. Nerve gas, which I discovered, was slightly modified to create insecticides. You had your development of DDT, and these were huge corporate businesses. And I think there were incredible promises kind of post-World War II of what chemical fertilizers could do to your produce.

DDM [03:59] All kinds of chemicals were developed to boost yields, eradicate weeds. And so farming pretty rapidly shifted into a chemical process that needed obviously both chemicals but also heavy equipment. And ironically, I always think this is quite funny, it was called the Green Revolution. And the thought was that these chemical ways of farming would make food available and cheaper for people all over the world, and that it could be the end of poverty.

DDM [04:30] And so farming started to shift to these large monocultures, which is obviously the planting of one single crop. And there was a great increase in food production. But these monocultures obviously were susceptible now to rampant disease and insect problems. And so farmers had to keep spraying and spraying more and more stronger insecticides and herbicides in order for their crops to survive.

DDM [04:55] And so farming started to become more and more costly, and farmers therefore became more reliant on government subsidies. And one of the things I learned, which I thought was fascinating, is that it actually costs more to produce many of our crops today than they are actually worth. Yeah, and we put more calories into producing the nutritional value of one calorie.

DDM [05:18] But the reality is, is those subsidies were increasingly being used to support chemical companies. And farmers were basically told adapt or die. And for many small farmers they started dying. About 330 farmers leave their lands every single week.

DDM [05:37] Increasingly we know in our country that farmers cannot afford to farm. And this whole shift in farming really was called the birth of agribusiness. It was a term that was first coined in 1955\. But agribusiness really is that large scale farming involving monocultures.

DDM [05:56] It often involves owning the whole system from the development of treated or genetically modified seeds to owning the farms or leasing privately owned farmland. to owning the methods of farming, the companies that produce the machinery and equipment, the chemicals and the fertilizer, the pharmaceutical companies, the food processing and distribution and even retail to customers. So agriculture has really expanded to develop such a monopoly on food production and distribution at almost every level of the process. And so those who are actually in charge of food production increasingly are not farmers but businessmen.

DDM [06:43] And increasingly farmers themselves have become captive to agribusiness. They either have to rent out their land to agribusiness to survive financially. They can’t compete with the cheap produce that agribusiness produces. And so more and more farmers increasingly are just put out of business.

MET [07:02] So this is a really random thought. But when founding fathers way back when Thomas Jefferson had this idea that the best way to organize him, like he had this idea that we’re going to be a nation of yeoman farmers, and he wanted to just divide America up into these large, pretty much just squares of farmland. And that was going to be his version of democracy, is these gentlemen farmers who are just going to create this utopia.

MET [07:32] Anyway, that was Thomas Jefferson. But it’s funny to me that what you’re describing is very much more of a Alexander Hamilton kind of won the day with capital and money. Okay, that has nothing to do with what you’re talking about.

DDM [07:46] That’s so fascinating, those two different models of agriculture and how that impacts society. That’s fascinating. That’s really interesting. Well, I mean, for me, the contrast between what it’s become and that advert on the Super Bowl was just so stark because really our food systems aren’t about food anymore.

DDM [08:05] They’re not about healthy soil, about farmers or labor. They’ve really simply become, as you said, about profit, you know. And so everything is simply reduced to a commodity. It’s something we use to make money.

DDM [08:17] Food is increasingly not grown for flavor or nutrition, but it’s about the bulk food and often quite toxic food. And we’ve seen the shift now away from what was called that quote-unquote green revolution to increasingly what became then the gene revolution. And so newer food developments were all about genetically modifying seeds, genetically modified plants that can now actually survive the chemical toxicity of the land and what’s being applied. And so you’re really looking at almost a biotechnology revolution.

DDM [08:55] And so what we’re seeing now in agriculture is a number of crop varieties are now being made that if the insect eats the plant, the insect will die. I mean, my question is, what damage does that plant then do to us if we eat that same plant? You know, seeds are modified to be sterile. So increasingly you can no longer save seed or use seed that crops produce, which again makes us completely dependent on the seed companies.

DDM [09:24] Pesticide industry basically bought out the seed industry and so it’s harder to find not only seeds that aren’t genetically manipulated but also chemically treated. And then the final blow in this entire shift was the whole patency issue. In the Constitution, creating patents was allowed, but it’s interesting that food was always excluded on moral grounds. So the idea was you couldn’t patent nature.

DDM [09:53] But in 1978, that was overturned for the first time by one vote in the Supreme Court. Are you aware of this?

MET [10:03] I don’t know much about that.

DDM [10:03] Okay. Yeah, and once that happened in 1978 there was a race for patenting everything so genetic engineering became more and more rampant genes were patented and Wherever genes go then you own whatever they take root in if you own that patent So if you’ve patented a gene and it goes into a plant you now own that plant if it goes into an animal you own the animal so the question is If that gene goes into a human, is that human owned? So Monsanto owns, I think it’s like over 11,000 patents of seed and they actually send, as an industry, people into the World Food Bank to research what seeds are not patented and then they immediately start proceedings to patent.

DDM [10:54] Because they realize whoever controls the seeds controls the food not just for the USA but ultimately globally. And so the problem that many farmers have found is that if Monsanto finds any of their seed has taken root in your land, they then legally own your crop and they can sue you for patent infringement because they say you are growing their seed without their permission. The problem is seed spread with the winds and the birds, you can’t control them. And so increasingly seed saving is becoming a legal issue because you’ve got to ask, is the seed patented?

DDM [11:32] Farmers have often had to destroy thousands of pounds of seeds that they save because of contamination. Farmers become too scared, therefore, to save their own seed because they can’t afford legal battles. But the reality is, is 75% of the world’s 1.4 billion farmers depend on saved seed to farm. So this is a huge issue.

DDM [11:57] And multinational companies are increasingly prosecuting farmers, because for them it’s about controlling that monopoly on food. The other issue that has been really a problem from the environment and justice issues is the standardization of food. So we’re finding that increasingly a crop variety is being reduced now to only one or two varieties. So previously we had thousands of varieties of tomatoes, of potatoes, of collards, of whatever the crop was.

DDM [12:32] But 97% of food varieties that were being grown at the beginning of the 20th century have now become extinct. And so the environmental impact on that is absolutely frightening. The other issue which I think sometimes we don’t realize how it’s impacting also immigration into this country is that the USA started exporting all of these genetically modified crops. These crops then were taken into other countries.

DDM [13:02] They destroyed and contaminated local varieties in those countries and the problem is again the same thing happened as we started to see farmers being put out of business because we produce food cheaper than any country in the world and they couldn’t compete and so as farmers lost land and lost the capacity to to farm and have that business increasingly those families are thrown into poverty and then of course look for a different place to be able to find a way to survive and sustain themselves and their families. And so there was this myth that biotechnology would feed the world. And that’s absolute nonsense because we have currently 800 million people starving every day around the world.

DDM [13:46] The issue is not about the amount of food we produce in the world. The real issue is how we distribute that food, how we actually enable that food to go to where it is need. So really the problem is equitable access and distribution. So I think sometimes when we speak about these issues, and that’s partly why I did this whole long introduction, is because we don’t understand the very real power of the agribusiness industry.

DDM [14:17] It is just one of the biggest global powers. They are in the Environmental Protection Agency, they’re in the Food and Drug Administration. Monsanto supports political candidates on both sides in this country of the political divide. They fund research in universities that leads to research that is beneficial specifically to the agribusiness industry and sometimes it even becomes a marketing arm of those industries.

DDM [14:43] And so I think, you know, any of looking at these issues, if we don’t take seriously how farming is actually completely changed in this country, we really don’t understand how to address those issues. Sorry, that was a mouthful.

MET [15:01] OK, that was a lot. I will be very honest, I don’t know a lot about the process of agriculture. That’s just not, that’s not my jam. But what I do know about is the migrant struggle, and people that are involved in this and kind of public discourse. And some of it, and I’m going to talk about this in just a second.

MET [15:22] Some of this is as much my background, you can’t not have some kind of not insight, but awareness of some of this just coming from Texas, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, I went to a high school that was something like 60 or 70% Hispanic, right? I mean, there is a large influx of immigrants from where I’m from.

MET [15:51] So while you gave us this huge introduction about the process of agribusiness, I’m going to talk about some specific ways that people are involved in this process and the way agribusiness affects communities. So I’m taking this in a slightly different direction, but I think in the end we’re going to see how these things all kind of come together. I’m actually going to begin with a discussion about Cesar Chavez.

MET [16:21] Do you know a lot about Cesar Chavez?

DDM [16:22] I know some because he was really a South African hero.

MET [16:27] In no way does that surprise me. I’m just going to say this, if you’re interested in learning more about Cesar Chavez when I say this, there’s a lot of good information at the United Farm Workers website and the site for the Cesar Chavez Foundation. I’m putting that out there because for a variety of reasons that I’m about to go through, people don’t know as much about him as I think they should. But I have found that Chavez is sort of a regional hero.

MET [16:51] Like I said, where I grew up, pretty much every major city had a Cesar Chavez Boulevard, right? San Antonio, Austin, they all found a way to honor Chavez because he really is the MLK of the migrant and agricultural worker population. And like I said, it makes sense that, you know, he would be a folk hero in South Africa.

DDM [17:11] Absolutely, in South Africa, land issues.

MET [17:15] But when I came up north, I found that nobody here had heard of him. My students have no idea who he is. And at first I thought, well, I guess that makes sense because there aren’t as many Latino and Latina people here. But that is a huge mischaracterization of what is happening, I think.

MET [17:34] Because there are very large, very important migrant populations in this area right here.

DDM [17:40] Especially in Western New York.

MET [17:42] Yes. Like for example, there is a Mexican market just a mile away from my house that caters to the migrant community. and my husband and I go there frequently to pick up hot sauces and chorizo. It’s just, it’s a great place.

MET [17:55] So migrants are here. Agricultural workers are here. Maybe not at the same level that they are in Texas and California, but stores like Wegmans depend on the work of migrants and people from countries all over. So we have to ask this blatant question.

MET [18:10] Why don’t white people know about this Chicano hero? and I will tell you, it is because the North is still segregated. And this is often shocking to my Yankee friends, but it is true in about a thousand ways. The community that I am in right now is an incredibly segregated community.

MET [18:30] In this very county, you have some cities with town lines right next to each other that are on one side about 75% minoritized people and on the other side about 95% white. And I love to hear the excuses of, “Oh, that’s not segregation, that’s just historically how it happened.” Like, “Sis, what do you think segregation is? What do you think redlining is? How do you think bank loans work?”

MET [18:53] Point being, there are a lot of people in this very town who are completely unaware that we have large migrant populations living within our very hometowns. But those people are separate from us. The people who provide us food and make sure we are taken care of are not a part of our daily lives.

MET [19:14] So nobody knows who Chavez is up here because the people he championed are persona non grata up here.

DDM [19:20] That’s so interesting.

MET [19:20] So with that little, you know, social justice rant, let me tell you a little bit about Cesar Chavez. Sorry, in no way should it surprise you that I started there. Chavez was born on March 31 in 1927\. He grew up in Arizona, where his past kind of speaks to who he grew up into.

MET [19:42] His home was swindled from his family by dishonest white men. So Chavez knew something about injustice kind of from early on, right?

DDM [19:51] And the loss of land.

MET [19:52] Yes, exactly.

MET [19:54] Chavez’s father agreed to clear 80 acres of land and in exchange, he would receive the deed to 40 acres of land that joined the home. But this agreement was broken and the land was sold to somebody else. So Chavez’s father went to a lawyer and advised him to borrow money and buy the land, and later when Chavez’s father couldn’t pay the interest on the loan, the lawyer bought back the land and sold it to the original owner. So it was just swindling in every way. Chavez did not like school as a child, probably because he spoke only Spanish at home.

MET [20:29] So it’s the same thing that affects children all over America today. Specifically because the teachers were mostly Anglo and only spoke English. And Spanish was forbidden in school, so there was no sense of English language learners. Some schools were still segregated, and he was punished with a ruler to his knuckles for speaking Spanish in these places.

MET [20:53] He felt that integrated schools made him feel like a monkey in a cage. And in 1942, he graduated from the eighth grade, but his father had been in an accident. And he did not want his mother to work in the field, so he did not go to high school and instead became a migrant farm worker. So this is kind of the background that leads into why he became the person he did.

DDM [21:15] Beautiful son.

MET [21:16] Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly what it was, right? Yeah. In 1948, he got married.

MET [21:21] You know, he had family life as it was. On his honeymoon in California, he visited the missions from Sonoma to San Diego. And then he returned to San Jose, where he met this guy named Father Donald McDonnell. And they’re talking about farm workers and strikes.

MET [21:41] And Cesar Chavez began reading about St. Francis and Gandhi and nonviolence. And after he met this guy, McDonnell, he came across another very influential person, Fred Ross. And Chavez became an organizer for Ross’s organization, the Community Service Organization.

MET [22:01] And his first task was voter registration. Then in 62, he founded the National Farm Workers Association. And this was later to become the United Farm Workers, the UFW. He was joined by Dolores Huerta.

MET [22:16] If you don’t know Dolores Huerta, you absolutely have to look her up. She’s an amazing woman, and she’s one of those people that just kind of gets lost in the fray of history. But she was every bit as important to this movement as Chavez. She’s just a woman. So people don’t talk about her.

MET [22:30] But this led to the birth of the union. And this is where Chavez gets into that activism, right? The boycotts and the hunger strikes and this tireless work that he did this emphasis on nonviolence, the movements that he made to get the farm workers involved in their own agency, right?

MET [22:55] And ultimately, Chavez was willing to sacrifice his own life so that this union would continue and that violence was not used. So he fasted a number of times, like this was an ongoing process for him. And I’m not going to go into like every single bit of the movement and the union. But Chavez was really involved in the activism of the United Farm Workers that really led to the changes that happened in the Southwest.

MET [23:22] And they weren’t like, there’s still mistreatment of farm workers, obviously, but there were changes. And the fact that there was a non-white person that wasn’t MLK, obviously, a non-white person that was standing up for this population that had been just completely forgotten for generations. And he was able to say, no, here we are, we deserve some rights, was a huge moment in the story of immigration in the US.

DDM [23:57] Fascinating.

MET [23:58] Yeah, he’s a really fascinating dude. And I think it’s really sad that more people don’t know about him.

DDM [24:03] Yeah, yeah. You know, I think so often in when we listen to this discourse around farmers and around labor, I think the problem is that so often in our strategies, we very quickly divide farmers and labor. And it can be very easy to demonize the farmers when I think the real enemy is very often agribusiness. And both farmers and labor have become victims in the system, of course, as well as the earth and all plant and animal life.

DDM [24:34] Because if you look at the reality, farmers are really not making much money in this country. But it’s the multinational corporations on either side that are really reaping in the profits. And the only way that farmers really stay in business is through those government subsidies. But the reality is that farmers themselves have become labor for the agribusiness. And I think the problem with any of these oppressive systems is that so often what happens is the one with even a little bit more power turns around and does to the weaker one what is being done to them. And so often what we see is that farmers will use the very little power that they have, ironically, to block changes in laws that would bring about justice for farm workers.

DDM [25:21] And as they are put by agribusiness under more and more pressure, they then put more and more pressure on workers and also, of course, onto the soil itself. And so really workers are the ones currently who suffer the most. It’s almost like they together with the earth are on the bottom of the chain of oppression and they’re working in the toxic environment with all of those chemicals. You know, the USA can boast of being the cheapest provider of food in the world.

DDM [25:49] But the reality is the cost is always borne by the workers. And so the cost of all this quote-unquote cheap food that we have can really be measured in the poverty and misery that result from the system that legally allows the exploitation of those who produce this food. And that cost falls on the shoulders of farm workers who labor in the fields to provide these cheap foods we enjoy and we boast about. And so I think the reality is, as you mentioned, so often in this country, you know, it’s the farm workers who’ve been excluded from the basic working rights that are available to everybody else, you know, the minimum wage, the 40 hour work week.

DDM [26:31] Child labor provisions, unemployment insurance, legal protections. So many of these farm workers just don’t have any access to. And so farm workers to this day ironically remain some of the nation’s poorest workers. And I only discovered this when I became involved in some of the farm worker movements here that New York actually has, and this maybe bears with what you were saying Elizabeth, you know the segregation in the North and you know some of the ways we don’t acknowledge the

DDM [27:02] reality of the North, is that New York has some of the worst, worst legal rights for farm workers in this country. I mean, they are ineligible for overtime. They often do not qualify for disability insurance, even though farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in the USA. They don’t qualify for employment insurance, even though their work is seasonal.

DDM [27:26] They often are working seven days a week. They do not have sick days or the right to a day of rest. Even to attend church services, they are exposed to some of the worst toxins and yet not given access to health care.

MET [27:41] Yeah, this is another one of those things that I talk about with my students, because they’re always shocked, like, New York, we take care of everybody. No. So I think that’s really important to think about spinning off from the conversation about Chavez, right? Like, if we’re going to talk about changes that are made, and why are they made, and who this affects, and that kind of thing.

MET [28:05] So one of the questions I always have is, Why do changes happen, right? And for me, one of those things is because there is a communicative force, right? I believe that one of the things that matters is what we say in public, right? I think it matters when the president stands up and says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

MET [28:31] And there are some people who think public speech doesn’t matter and that kind of thing, but I think it does. So I’m going to return to Chavez because you’re talking about the rights that farm workers do and do not have. Well, Chavez led a movement that made a change in the rights that migrants, at least in the Southwest, have. And I want to talk about how he made that difference.

MET [28:57] And the reason I want to do that is because I’m curious about what would it take to make that difference again.

DDM [29:06] Right.

MET [29:07] And I think it’s curious to think about what was different about his approach that I mean, he was a very different kind of speaker than a lot of other people. So it just kind of, I just want to go over a few things. Because he really did have a profound effect on policies in terms of how we treat our agriculturals in the Southwest. And I could easily talk about just the last few years and the work has been done to address agricultural worker rights in just my own community, right?

MET [29:41] But I think Chavez is a more generalized place to start. So one of the things Chavez did outside of all his political activism in terms of direct action was, as I said, he was a remarkable speaker. And this is notable because he didn’t come from a background of this erudite speaking education, right? Like I said, he dropped out after the eighth grade, but because he relied on his roots, he spoke from his cultural background, not as a polished orator.

MET [30:12] And I think that’s really interesting when you were talking about, what is a farmer? You know, the gentle, whatever a farmer is supposed to be. On the one hand, as I said, he was the MLK of his movement, and that is true. He was the visionary leader and the prophetic voice, but he wasn’t a preacher like MLK.

MET [30:32] He has many notable speeches, but there isn’t an I Have a Dream or Sermon from the Mountaintop or any of those. But there are a few things worth noting about his speaking abilities that indicate why he was successful in motivating action. One, he was excellent at using narrative. He spoke using stories, stories from his life and experience, and stories from the people he knew.

DDM [30:58] Powerful.

MET [30:59] Yes. He spoke in narratives that dramatized the issues he was trying to advocate for. He seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the fact that people need appeals to pathos.

MET [31:12] People need to have an emotional connection to the issues at hand. We may have talked about this before, but if you’re going to make an argument, it should have three kinds of appeals, right? Appeals to character, logic, and emotion. And the appeal to emotion is called an appeal to pathos, and Chavez understood this.

MET [31:33] People don’t respond to stories that are completely lacking in humanity. Chavez knew how to make a story human. He also knew how to make a story have impact. Just because a speech has emotion does not mean it should lack reason.

MET [31:52] And Chavez was known for making very reasonable and logical arguments as well as tapping into people’s hearts. For example, he commonly made comparisons between the farm workers movement and other social movements, and this does a few things. It inspires a certain amount of hope, because if you can see success in another movement, there’s hope for yours. And it also provides a logical foundation for the structure and organization of Chavez’s movement.

MET [32:21] So if he could point out that this strategy over here had worked before, then it was reasonable to try it again. He also knew how to make appeals to character, and what that means is that he could make himself seem like (A), a member of the community, and (B), a person of ethics. And one of the ways he continually did this is by staking out the foundation of the movement, not as political, but as a moral and ethical imperative. And he couched his actions not as a political movement, but as a moral one.

MET [32:54] So finally, Chavez insisted on nonviolence. Hence, the hunger strikes and the boycotts. In many ways, he was really following the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr. and to some extent, Gandhi.

MET [33:06] But this also contributed to his character and political ethos. So because of all this, and I want to emphasize this is the stuff of successful rhetoric, it is of interest to think about why so many people were against him. For example, the phrase sour grapes and putting that in quotes was used to describe the boycotts and Chavez by detractors who wanted to belittle Chavez and those who are fighting for their rights. Sour grapes in the sense of like, oh, that’s just sour grapes.

MET [33:36] You’re just, you know, being whiny. but also sour grapes in the sense that they weren’t picking grapes. But here we can look at other social movements, right? Just as with the Montgomery boycotts or with Malcolm X’s rhetoric about self-determination, the criticism came from privileged white people.

MET [33:54] And the criticism was 100% about minoritized people demanding equality and the inconvenience that would cause people who benefited from their oppression. If agricultural workers were treated fairly white people might have to deal with a little discomfort at the cash register. And, as is so often the case, the majority of Americans are much more interested in saving a buck fifty than the human rights of those we have segregated away. That’s one of the reasons we segregate them, right? If we lived and worked with people and saw them every day and had community with them, it would be a lot harder to say, “Well, we’re crushing you beneath the weight of systemic oppression, but my squash is cheaper, so, meh.”

DDM [34:38] Yeah, I mean unfortunately what you say is 100% true, 100% true, you know. So, you know, I think these are huge issues that we really do need to be looking at, you know, because what we really need in our world is an agriculture that really starts to see the earth as a sacred gift and works with the earth to heal the earth rather than destroying and constantly taking from the earth. We need an agriculture that allows for polyculture and diversity from seeds to insect life and soil microbes to start being cultivated again because we know that diversity is the measure of a strength of a system.

DDM [35:18] We keep forgetting that in every aspect of our social and political lives. God created this phenomenal diversity in creation that over time we’ve just decimated. We need food to be grown that is nutritious and healthy as God originally created it to be. We need food to be distributed equitably so that food scarcity does become a thing of the past.

DDM [35:39] I mean Jesus is so clear about the hungry being fed in his own ministry. And we do need land to be owned by people. I mean, the amount of people that have lost land in the last couple of decades is frightening. And of course, people of color and indigenous people are the largest groups that have been expelled from their own land.

DDM [36:01] And so what would it mean for land to be owned by people and communities, not companies, and for labor to have a share in the profit of their labor? You know land always biblically was there for all to be gifted by and these are the systems our government should be subsidizing rather than these chemically genetic toxic systems they currently fund and the oppressive systems that obviously hold them in place. So there was a lot today that Elizabeth and I went through, but if you’re interested in agriculture, in the migrant movements of farm labor, if you’re interested, many of these Trinity Episcopal Church partner with a phenomenal organization called Rural Migrant Ministries. And I really encourage you, if you are interested, to check out their website and some of what they’re doing, because as you were sharing, Elizabeth, with Chavez, they really root themselves in narrative.

DDM [36:57] Much like he did. What are the actual stories of people? What are people actually living and experiencing? And how do we really allow that lived experience to increasingly shape our policies and our ways in which we are community together or not?

MET [37:20] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prophet. find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/.

MET [37:39] That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [37:49] Music by Audionautix.com

Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discuss Judas. They discuss both the Biblical depiction of him and the recently discovered and translated non-canonical Gospel of Judas.

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Transcript

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010\. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

DDM [00:40] Welcome. For anyone familiar with Christianity, they would have heard of Judas, the one who betrays Jesus and hands Jesus over to the state. Judas is a character that has also been portrayed in secular history as the traitor, the betrayer, all for money. In the Gospel of Luke, we read that Satan entered into Judas and drove him to betray Jesus. In the Gospel of John, he writes that he, one of the twelve, is a devil.

DDM [01:11] St. Matthew records that Judas hung himself with guilt for what he had done, and in the Book of Acts, we are told that Judas’ belly was ripped open and he died in a ghastly manner. In fact, even the Judas kiss has become a famous phrase. This is by far the dominant narrative and interpretation we have, and certainly been the official narrative of the church historically.

DDM [01:37] And yet I think sometimes people wonder if there’s more to the story. We know our own human need to scapegoat and make someone the villain, and so we find ourselves wondering, what perhaps in the story are we not being told? Was there another perspective to the story? In our podcast that Elizabeth and I did on Mary Magdalene, we spoke a bit about many of the other Gospels that were written, many of them around the 2nd century.

DDM [02:06] The Gospel of Judas, according to the historian Irenaeus, was written around 180 AD. And although the original was probably composed in Greek, the version that we have is a Coptic translation. It was discovered in a papyrix codex or book in Egypt in the late 1970s. It was probably originally composed in Greek, but the version, as I said, we have as a Coptic translation.

DDM [02:35] And translation of this Coptic version only began in 2001\. And in 2006, it was made available in printed form for the very first time to the public. So we’re dealing with a very recent development. There is a loss of text due to damage to the papyrus, but it’s really incredible, I find myself, to think that this gospel, after being lost for 1,600 years, is finally found and re-given to the world.

DDM [03:12] And once again, like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, this Gospel is written at a time when there were still many theological interpretations of Jesus, many different ways of understanding Christianity, and doctrine had not yet been formed into what we have today. So, this Gospel, the Gospel of Judas, records the conversation that Jesus had with Judas over one week, right before the Last Supper. And there’s a couple of very unique perspectives in this Gospel. Jesus is portrayed in the traditional four Gospels we have in Scripture as being very solemn, under great pressure during this week, when he literally musters all his courage and strength to set his face towards Jerusalem, and what he knows lies ahead of him.

DDM [04:04] But in the Gospel of Judas. There is joy in this Jesus at this time that almost wells up within him, and it almost comes out in this like carefree childlike laughter. So in contrast with the serious piety of the disciples, Jesus in the Gospel of Judas is laughing at them, telling them not to take things too seriously. Don’t try so hard to be quote-unquote right, because God is working out something much greater than any of them perceive.

DDM [04:37] In the Gospel of Judas, the other disciples become angry with Jesus for challenging them and their egos or their pride, whereas it is Judas in this Gospel, not Peter, who provides the confession of who Jesus truly is. Judas also sees Christ for who he is as the one, and this is an interesting perspective of how Judas sees Jesus. The one who comes from the primordial mother who is before all else. Judah sees Christ not as the tribal Israelite or Hebrew God, but as the seed which comes from the womb of all.

DDM [05:19] Now this is very different, I think you would agree Elizabeth, than the confession of Peter who sees Jesus as the coming Messiah, an anointed one. And I think we also must remember that at this time any books which were naming God as feminine were largely not being included in the canon of scripture. Now in the Gospel of Judas, because Judas can see Jesus for who he truly is, Jesus pulls Judas aside and asks him this crucial question. What is more important to you?

DDM [05:53] Belonging or the kingdom of God? And will you want the kingdom of God even if it means you lose your place in this inner circle of disciples? What Jesus is asking him is, will you live out your calling even if it results in the destruction of your reputation? Even if you are cursed by future generations?

DDM [06:17] The other disciples in the Gospel are far more interested in Jesus as their tribal national God, rather than God for all the world and the establishment of a far greater kingdom beyond the boundaries of Israel. And in this Gospel, the other disciples are the ones who will use the name of Jesus to lead many astray. And so in the Gospel of Judas, he makes the choice to follow his calling and destiny just as Jesus follows his. His calling is the one not who will betray Jesus, but who will hand over the body of Jesus in order that Jesus may fulfill his calling.

DDM [06:59] And so we can see that certainly this is a very different interpretation from the other Gospels, but it also for me reminds us of the complexity of how Judaism was being understood and all the different competing groups and theologies at the time of early Christianity. and how the life and death of Jesus was being seen and experienced or interpreted in many different ways.

MET [07:26] That is all so interesting. I do not have the theological background to talk specifically about all the different gospels.

MET [07:37] That’s not my thing. But what I can talk about is story craft. And as a writer, as somebody who studied a lot of literature, as somebody who appreciates a good story, I feel like Judas is pretty indispensable. Let me clarify what I mean by that.

MET [08:02] I’ve always found Judas really interesting, and I’m not going to lie. That’s because I have always found the villains of stories to be way more compelling than the heroes. One of the reasons I love Shakespeare so much is because I find Macbeth and Iago to be such fantastic love-to-hate them kind of characters. You know, I think in my senior year in high school, I wrote a whole paper about how, you know, if you don’t have a – it was about Hamlet or something, but like if you don’t have a good villain, that makes the hero, right?

MET [08:34] The hero doesn’t exist without the villain. And in many ways, Judas is kind of the most interesting bad guy of them all because his portrayal was so profound and had kind of a large impact. And that’s – you can say that theologically, you can say that historically, but once again, I’m interested in a storytelling aspect for a second.

DDM [08:50] Right, right, right.

MET [08:53] And this is in a literary sense, right? When Dante reaches the last level of hell in the Inferno, Judas is one of the three betrayers at the heart of hell because his is the worst sin of all, right? Like that’s the ninth level of hell in Dante’s Inferno. It’s Judas and a giant mouth.

MET [09:10] The Western world has long understood Judas to be the bad guy to top all bad guys. So I’m pretty fascinated by some of these kind of, and it’s interesting that you say the translation was in the early 2000s, because the timing is interesting.

MET [09:24] I’m pretty fascinated by some of these kind of postmodern attempts to contextualize, if not rehabilitate Judas. And these kind of go hand in hand with what we’re talking about with this gospel, because it’s this notion that he was not just some kind of stand in for a traitor, but a fully fleshed out character. So this relates, but give me just a second.

MET [09:46] In my propaganda class, we talk a lot about myth and narrative, because these are really powerful and persuasive things. The idea is that there are certain stories, myths, if you will, that are so ingrained in a culture that you just assume they are true. It does not matter if they are true, because you behave as if they are. The reason this is important in something like understanding persuasion is because if you appeal to a story that can be highly persuasive, that everybody already agrees on, then you’re starting from a point where we’re all in the same boat, we can all head in the same direction, because

MET [10:28] you’re starting with that common starting point. You’re making an argument that starts with something your audience already says, yes, I’m with you. It’s easier to go that journey with you. So let me give you an example.

MET [10:38] Let’s start with the American dream. The American dream, right, if you had to define it, is pretty much that if you work hard and keep your head down, you’ll be able to succeed in life and get your house and your 2.4 kids and a dog and a white picket fence and whatever else you want, right? Like we know this.

MET [10:54] Now, when I say this, often my students scoff, but I tell them a part of you believes this. I know that for a fact. And I know that because you are here. Some part of you believes that if you go to school and get a degree and work hard, things will be better for you, right?

MET [11:11] Like you’ve shown up. I know that you’re invested in this. And we talk about that on a small scale too. They believe if they work hard, they deserve success.

MET [11:20] So if they put in 15 hours on a paper or project, they think they deserve credit. If they get a D-minus on such a project and they come to me to talk about it and say, but Dr. Thorpe, I worked for almost 20 hours on this. And I say, those must have been 20 crappy hours. They would be both crushed and livid.

MET [11:41] B`ecause there is this idea that if you work hard and long, you should be rewarded. That’s the American dream. That’s the myth. And it is pretty important that most people believe that myth because what would happen tomorrow if we all woke up and realized that our work does not guarantee anything?

MET [12:00] The economy would come to a grinding halt because a lot of people would just stop working. We have to believe in the American dream to keep this country going. If we just woke up one day and realized, actually, work doesn’t guarantee much at all, we would stop. So it does not matter if these things are true. We are invested in them as if they are.

MET [12:25] So, okay, all of that is about myth and narrative. The narratives that are part of these myths are foundational not just to America, but to Western Civ. There are certain narratives, certain stories that are just at the core of who we are as a people.

MET [12:40] And I mean, half the world is invested in this. And even beyond that, there’s some universals within that. Things like “the hero’s journey,” or “the quest,” or stories of “the trickster.” These are everywhere. And the reason I bring this up in a story about Judas is because I want to talk about archetypes. In Western civilization, there are only certain stories that we tell. And because there are only certain stories, there are only so many characters. In many real ways, we just keep telling the same stories over and over again, and just kind of popping names in and out while we use and reuse the same characters.

MET [13:22] These are called archetypal characters. You may balk at that because all these characters seem different because of context and development. But the truth is, we’ve been telling pretty much the same dozen or so tales since the time of Aristotle. And with the exception of a few innovations in the postmodern era, we’ve been using the same characters to do it.

MET [13:43] These are characters like the hero, the wise old man or woman, the trickster, the princess or damsel in distress, the femme fatale, right? In whatever movie or book or whatever, you can say, oh yeah, I know who these people are.

DDM [13:59] Right.

MET [14:00] The reason Judas plays into this conversation so well is because as we have changed as a culture, Judas has gone through different manifestations of archetypes. Judas spent a long time as a straight-up villain. He was sort of a big bad wolf kind of a character, right? Evil, focused on one hero, and in some ways a bit seductive, not in a physical or sexual sense, but in a more persuasive and intellectual sense.

MET [14:26] He was the ultimate traitor and bad guy. But as a story-consuming culture, we have not been happy with that bland archetype. That wash of just straight-up evil doesn’t make sense to us anymore. We demand context.

MET [14:41] We demand backstory. We demand to know why Judas is the way he is. And as Judas’ story has developed, be it through pop culture or the Gospel of Judas or even through literature, Judas has transitioned through a few different archetypes. He’s gone from being the ultimate villain to something different, depending on who you ask.

MET [15:02] To some people, he’s more of an anti-hero or a trickster now, and that is absolutely fascinating to me, because Judas hasn’t changed. The story hasn’t changed. But for some people, the core understanding of who this character is, has. And not everyone would have him at the center of the Inferno anymore.

MET [15:23] And that is just wild to me. And most importantly, it says something about us. Because it isn’t enough to just say, oh, here’s this character, blah-biddy, blah-biddy. It’s a conversation.

MET [15:34] No. It is not that we think about him for just randomly bad guy, that he has transitioned into something else. The important question is what this says about us. What do we want or need from this story?

MET [15:51] What do we want or need from this character? How do we see ourselves reflected here? And I think that’s the real question that as a storyteller, this is really interesting to me.

DDM [16:03] No, absolutely. And I think that for me is also the real gift of us finding these new manuscripts. I mean, the fact that this one was written probably around 180 AD, you know, there were different, even back then, there were these very different competing narratives, you know, so we’re only just really beginning, I think, to understand and appreciate the extent to which there was this huge diversity in thought, in understanding of some of these central characters, which, as you say, we’ve only had one way of seeing in the past, and that there was not just also one way in which Jesus was being understood and experienced.

DDM [16:46] You know, and I just think for myself that there’s such a danger in thinking that there is only one way of seeing things, because the reality is we all see, perceive, and understand something depending on who we are, as you were saying, in our own context. And so hearing these other voices, whoever the other voice is, you know, is really so important.

MET [17:09] I had a friend in grad school who was an avowed, well, okay, he was an avowed atheist. I had a lot of friends in grad school who were atheists.

MET [17:17] Grad school is a place where you find a lot of that. He knew I was religious and that was not an issue. We talked about theological things and we had questions for each other and there was never any ill will or tension about any of it.

MET [17:30] We were just good friends and we felt like we had a lot to learn from each other. And if I might add, that’s exactly what it should be like between people of different backgrounds and philosophies.

DDM [17:39] Yes. Always.

MET [17:41] Like we just had a great time, you know, figuring each other out. But one day, we were talking about some of the nuances of the story in question. And he said he always thought the story of the crucifixion got it a bit wrong, bold claim. He said he thought Judas made the ultimate sacrifice.

MET [18:00] And I was a bit taken back by that because in my mind, Judas was treacherous. Thinking of him as doing anything Christ-like seemed a bit blasphemous. This probably showed on my face because, you know, I was shocked, but I was going to let him finish. And he said, there’s no reason to think Judas changed his mind on Christ’s personhood.

MET [18:19] Judas may well have still thought Christ was divine or the Son of God or the Messiah. Judas might well have realized who he was betraying. The question is why? Did he betray Christ because he felt Christ was ineffectual, because Christ wasn’t exacting the kind of change Judas wanted to see?

MET [18:37] There are a lot of guesses as to why Judas turned his back on Jesus, but he said not many of them are that Judas stopped believing. Which, he continued, means Judas may well have known what he was doing. Judas may have realized that there comes a time when sacrifices need to be made, and he made one. And if that is the case, then Judas knew where he would be heading, like to an eternity of damnation, in order to do the right thing for all the world.

MET [19:04] And that, my friend said, is a heck of a sacrifice. Now, I had no idea what to say to this, because I had never heard anything like that. And it seemed so antithetical to everything I knew, and pretty heretical. But that was 20 years ago.

MET [19:19] And I’ve had time to sit with that conversation a lot. And while I’m not prepared to make any statements like what my friend did, I am prepared to make a guess as to why a narrative like that might be appealing. The story of the gospel is really tough. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t make sense.

MET [19:41] It’s really hard to latch on to. We’re supposed to connect to, once again, characters, right? We’re supposed to connect to this person, this character. who is God incarnate, perfect in every way, who loves so much and so deeply that he died for all of us and then miraculously came back from the dead.

MET [19:58] And this is supposed to help us make sense of the world? Sis, please, how is this helpful? If you tell this to the average person with no context, they will move right along. The thing about perfection, the thing about the story, the thing about salvation is that it is unattainable.

MET [20:17] Why bother worrying about connecting to a figure that is unattainable? I mean, that’s why I’m not particularly interested in a lot of archetypal good guys. They’re uninteresting and I don’t have any connection with them. But Judas is 100% flawed and human.

MET [20:33] If we think about sacrifice in human terms, it’s understandable. My friend wasn’t trying to be blasphemous. He was trying to put the story in terms he could make sense of. A god who came to earth and was perfect and then died doesn’t make sense.

MET [20:47] A man who is willing to put his life on the line for others does. And even the act of betrayal makes Judas more accessible. Churches have done a lot of damage by making God and Jesus into these up-on-high, untouchable, and holier-than-us heavenly beings, when what we need is somebody who gets us. That’s what my friend was getting at.

MET [21:08] There is no way that the Jesus who has been portrayed by the church for the last millennia or two would get us. He’s just too much. But Judas is a sinner. He made big mistakes.

MET [21:23] That’s something people like my friend can latch on to. And once again, as we read and reread the stories, the question is less, what do these stories tell us? And more, what do these stories tell us about ourselves? And this is one of those situations where it doesn’t matter what the theology is or what the manuscripts say, because the story has been told in a particular way for a very long time.

MET [21:46] And the narrative matters way more than the primary source or the preacher or whatever, kind of like the concept of myth that we were talking about. Because we are invested in the story and behave as if it is true in that way. There are certain things we have been taught to believe about people like Jesus and Judas, and that’s the prevailing narrative so that’s how we live our lives.

DDM [22:14] Very interesting, eh? So I guess for me, I do need to always work with the primary text. So what I find interesting, and especially coming out of what you’ve just shared there, is in the Gospel of Judas, Judas doesn’t actually see Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. He sees Jesus as one who comes from a far more universal God, the Primordial Mother. So he and the disciples see Jesus very differently.

DDM [22:43] Judas also in the Gospel of Judas doesn’t betray Jesus, but actually is the one who helps him fulfill his destiny and sets him quote-unquote free from the physical body. And in the Gospel of Judas, Judas, by doing this, ends up sacrificing his reputation. That is really what he loses, his place in that inner circle, his historical legacy. Because, and he’s prepared to do this, because for him he’s doing something far more greater.

DDM [23:14] He’s being true to his own calling. And so he chooses the kingdom of God over his own personal reputation. You raised the issue of perfection and I just want to come back to that because, you know, in the Gospels, it’s so interesting how, you know, we end up obviously with these translated texts and we’re looking at them through our Western frameworks, but in the Gospels, the word used for perfection is telios, which doesn’t mean perfection in the sense of how we use that word in English.

MET [23:46] Does it mean without flaw?

DDM [23:46] No, rather telios means to be complete. It means to be whole, to be fully mature or developed.

DDM [23:54] So really the idea of Jesus is that he was a person who was fully complete. He was fully whole. He was integrated. So when the Gospels call us to be perfect, telios, again, it really means to be able to grow into being completely who we were called to be, to be whole people, to be integrated with integrity.

DDM [24:18] And again, that Hebrew word for perfect, which is tamim, means, again, to be whole, healthy, and having integrity. And I think, you know, you hit the nail on the head where we have created often this very unhealthy narrative about God based on very poor translations that end up with this unhealthy, unhelpful, ideology. You know, God incarnates, takes human flesh to show us what it looks like for a human being to be whole, to have integrity, to be a complete human being. And yet how we’ve distorted that so often, you know, in theology.

DDM [25:02] And I guess for me, that’s why the Gospel of Judas and all the other Gospels, in some ways, that’s what they’re trying to grapple with. What does it mean for our choices, although they may be very different, I mean, Judas makes a very different choice from the rest of the disciples, but what does it mean for our choices, even if they’re different from everybody else, to be choices that for us have integrity? You know, what does it mean when the way we see things and experience things may be radically different? But the question is, do they lead us into a greater sense of wholeness and health?

DDM [25:39] What perspectives enable us to live into a greater wholeness? And what perspectives have we been taught or have we internalized that actually break us and do damage to us as human beings? And I think those are some of the questions that are also important for us to look at when we read any gospel, but also when we look at any theology. Is it leading into greater wholeness, integrity?

DDM [26:03] Is it enabling us to become more fully human and more full human beings? Or does it really cause unhealthy damage to myself and others in this world?

MET [26:16] So I want to kind of sign off with this. Some of the things that Deborah and I have danced around really for the last few months are questions of the differences between how we say what we believe and how we do what we believe and how we integrate what we believe. And I feel like some of our last few episodes have really kind of brought all of this into a very synthesized conversation. So I want to kind of bring some of this to a head.

MET [26:54] You know that I am a communication scholar, so I’m very interested in the words and the language that we use. And today I was talking about being a storyteller, right? It’s just All my life I’ve been interested in what we say and how we say it and the narratives we weave. And you know, Deborah is just such a fantastic purveyor of theological knowledge and doctrine and just such a great teacher.

MET [27:19] And one of the things that I think we are trying to do is talk about how we tell stories and how we tell stories about ourselves and how we tell stories of our relationships. and the way that we as people dialogue and how that shows up in our theology and how that theology shows up in our life stories. So, when we do episodes like this, that seems, well, just kind of a one-off, well, it’s just about Judas, how does that – it’s not just about Judas, it is about who we are as people. And that’s kind of what – I want that to carry us through as we look through these next few episodes, because we’re going to be looking at some very specific topics.

MET [28:05] But I don’t want you to think of this as a lesson on Judas. I want us to think broadly in terms of what does this lesson say about us and how are we communicating ourselves to each other? Do you feel like that’s a pretty good way to?

DDM [28:19] Absolutely, absolutely. So when we look at this topic, for instance, today, how do you understand who you are? How do you understand your calling? That may be very different from the way other people understand theirs.

DDM [28:32] That’s okay. How are you understanding what is sacred? Maybe you name it in ways very different from those around you. That’s okay.

DDM [28:41] You know, it’s that really pushing and allowing other stories for us to reflect on them and say, so where am I? Who am I?

MET [28:51] Yeah. I think that’s so important.

DDM [28:52] How does that influence the choices that I’m making? You know, because the reality is, is integrity is the most important thing. So, you know, Elizabeth and I have some very similar values.

DDM [29:04] We live them out in very different ways. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the beauty and the diversity of this world in which we live, is that there’s so much space for diverse action, diverse belief systems, diverse ways of understanding, and the more we come into conversation with one another and our ideas, the more we can grow and spark these own inner journeys that we have within ourselves and in relationships.

MET [29:30] Yeah, so that’s what we hope you’ll keep in mind as we move forward with some of these kind of singular topics, is we’re not thinking about when we did Mary Magdalene, it wasn’t a lesson on Mary Magdalene, it was a lesson what these people say to us and about us.

MET [29:40] Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us and we look forward to future conversations.

MET [29:58] Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prophet. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [30:25] Music by Audionautix.com

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