Episodes

Rev. Deborah Duguid-May interviews Linda Ketchum and Paul Pompili about “Save New York’s Rural Economy: A Journey of Empathy Caravan.”

This interview, presented in its entirity, was recorded in September 2025 about an event that took place in August 2025.  The discussion continues to be relevant today.

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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.

CRT: This interview took place in September 2025 to describe a journey taken in August 2025. The discussion is still very timely today, in June 2026.

DDM: Welcome. So today I want to, especially welcome Linda Ketchum and Paul Pompili. They are both members of Trinity Episcopal Church here in Greece, New York, which is a suburb just outside of the city of Rochester. You’ll recall that Elizabeth and myself have in past episodes discussed the issue of immigration, agriculture, work, poverty.

DDM: Well, today we will be having a discussion and conversation with Linda and Paul, who recently participated in what was called the Journey of Empathy Caravan in early August, which really touches on all of those above issues and podcasts. So welcome to you both.

P P: Thank you.

DDM: Can you begin by telling us just a little bit about what the journey of Empathy Caravan actually was?

L K: Sure the journey of Empathy Caravan. It was a series of events to raise awareness of the value that immigrant workers bring to our economy in New York State. So from August 2nd to August 9th, starting in Eastern Long Island, a caravan of cars and trucks and vans traveled westward to the Hudson River Valley, then up to Albany, and then the north country up to the St. Lawrence River near the thousand Islands, and then down through the middle of the state through the finger lakes region, then to Rochester and we ended in Buffalo. So we traveled a thousand miles had 50 stops. So the stops included visits at churches and synagogues. We had meetings with farmers and workers support groups. We had prayer vigils outside of two ice detention centers. So it was all organized by the Rural and Migrant Ministry. So, and then one thing to know here, in addition to, you know, expanding the empathy for immigrant workers, the event was also called Save Our Rural Economy, to raise awareness that we need immigrant workers for the health and survival of our economy. So the farms and the vineyards need them, the restaurants need them.

L K: The landscapers and gardeners that made the Hamptons so beautiful, and our healthcare system . They all need the immigrant workers. The list goes on.

DDM: Right, and I think for people who are outside of this geographic area, when they hear New York, they probably think of New York City. I remember before I moved here, I just thought New York was a big city. And then I moved here and I was like, oh my gosh, most of the state is actually rural, which I think many people who may be listening in on this podcast are not aware of how rural the vast majority of our state actually is, you mentioned , rural migrant Ministry. Can you share for our listeners briefly what the Rural Migrant Ministry really is and what it does?

P P: Yeah, it’s, an organization that started in 1981 by a group of churches.

P P: There was a point where the migrants around that day, they would go to work in the farms and their children would sit alongside the farm because there was nowhere to bring their children. So what a lot of the local people did is they got together and they built , a childcare center, a daycare center, and that was 1981.

P P: That’s basically how it got started because the farm workers needed childcare. So it’s evolved today into an organization that is in support of not only the migrant workers, but immigrants in general, especially with the climate, that we have today

DDM: Right. now, that’s fascinating, Paul, because, I’ve worked with rural migrant ministries for a number of years, but I’d actually never heard that story. And isn’t that beautiful? Just to hear how local communities see a need, respond to the humans, you know, around them.

P P: What was surprising for me personally was that story was one of the very first ones we heard on the caravan and it was in the East Hamptons. So when most people hear the Hamptons and the East Hamptons, you think of all this wealth and. That’s all it is out there. But we started there and learned very early on for a reason.

P P: It was very enlightening. Very enlightening.

DDM: Fascinating. And what inspired the two of you to join the caravan? I mean, that’s quite a commitment to make.

P P: I didn’t wanna go. No, I really, because I am not an activist at heart. Never have been.

DDM: I know you Paul,

P P: And it just never was my way. Linda and I have been kind of really polar opposites in that, over the years together we’ve come much closer, to the middle of whatever that is each.

P P: So I went in support of her ’cause she said, I’ll go without you and that’s fine. I’m okay going alone. I wouldn’t let her wanna that. So I went with her in support to her I did, and I received a lot of benefits from it.

DDM: I’m sure I’m sure.

L K: And so for me, you know, civil rights and law enforcement and the criminal justice system, that’s been a focus of mine for some time, and I’ve been very upset. Seeing what’s happening with ice, just really kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and, that’s the Immigration and Customs of Enforcement Agency.

L K: I thought when I heard about the caravan, you know, this was a way to get involved with a group that was taking some action to support the immigrant workers because they’re, they’re all targets for ice detention and deportation.

DDM: right. And I think what we are all witnessing now by federal ice agents has been very disturbing. But while many of us are not comfortable with what is happening, I think for a lot of people that doesn’t lead. To action, whereas you both actually decided to do something in response to what you were seeing.

DDM: I’m just interested, do you feel that your faith played a role in your motivation to join the caravan?

P P: I believe so. Right, because I mean, our faith tells us we should love everybody and there’s a, a portion of our society, some religious, some not that don’t believe that. And this was a way to really act on that and put myself through the test, do I really believe this? You know, do I really want to love everybody?

P P: And so I think that was. For me, regarding the faith, that was probably the biggest thing is that we are all human beings. We’re all people. We have our own beliefs, we have our own faiths we have our own everything, of everything, so to speak. And it’s not up to me to decide I’m gonna go with this one, but I’m not gonna love this one.

P P: You know, it’s up to me to just be as loving or understanding or, there’s so many words you can probably describe it as I possibly can and just be the best at it that I

DDM: And I think somewhere that narrative is being lost in our culture at the moment in the USA, but also in other parts of the world where we are seeing just the rise of almost the legitimation of hate speech. You know, the capacity to be able to say, I hate my enemies as, as legitimate. You know?

DDM: And I think for many years we worked under the assumption that to love. Everybody is actually the way we’re called to be, and I think that’s really being eroded in our civil discourse now in a way that maybe it hasn’t in the past as much.

L K: Yes. I think even the word empathy is being mocked by some people.

DDM: I noticed that in the beginning, Linda, because with the Caravan of Empathy and I thought, wow, nowadays even the word empathy is often being seen as a negative thing, you know?

L K: Yes. It’s just so, I don’t know. It’s so perverted destructive.

DDM: It’s a distortion. Such a distortion of common…

P P: during the caravan with the signs on our cars, you put yourself out there. I mean, you’re out there and, there’s all kinds of people. Most of them really were welcoming, beeping their horns. And one town we rolled into actually had a band out on sidewalk. but then there were the other side of it that harassed us and heckled us.

P P: And there was one stop where guys driving the car around the gas station yelling out the window, just being as bad as you can be, you know, and but that was the only one of that type during the whole week. So you have to kind of expect that.

DDM: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And Linda, I’m interested in your faith, how that may have woven into this experience.

L K: Well, being a member here of the Episcopal Church, we have been supportive of the rural and migrant ministry in Western New York. And so this was a way for me to see, oh, how does it operate in the rest of the state?

L K: And I am also very drawn to interdenominational and interfaith activities.

L K: So the idea that we could be with people from many different churches, that we were going to go to some synagogues, you know, that was an appeal for me also. And…

DDM: And would you say that’s partially what was behind your decision to do the entirety of the caravan? Because if I’m right, you could choose to just do a portion when it came through your community, whereas you both chose to do the route in its entirety.

P P: I tried to talk her into just doing Rochester.

L K: Yes, most people, I mean, I think that’s how it was promoted. When the caravan comes through your area, please join us for few stops. And when I saw the schedule, I just thought, you know, this would be an interesting way to take a road trip through all of New York State.

DDM: I love that.

L K: You know, let’s see it and I’m glad we did it this way because, you know, Paul mentioned the signs on the cars.

L K: So, you know, that’s the first thing we learned. We started at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton. And when we got to the parking lot people came up to us and they said, we’ll help you decorate your car. And we said, what? And, ’cause we didn’t know what to expect, so. All the cars had big signs.

L K: They said, “who will milk the cows?” “Who will pick the apples?” “Save our rural economy,” “have courage, have empathy,” so the experience of actually traveling from place to place, from city to city, town to town with the core group was very special to us.

DDM: Yeah.

L K: Sometimes when we left at the beginning there were, I think about 20 cars and trucks. We were in some places out in the country where it would be five or six cars, you know, and we went together, we had our lights blinking so people knew we were in a procession. And then when we got to Rochester we we were up to 34 cars at one point.

DDM: Wow, that’s incredible. That really is, I’m interested. Was there something that you experienced or learned or heard during this entire caravan that really stands out for you?

P P: One thing I learned that still will hold, stay with me probably for the rest of my life is how well I, I should have known this, but it brought it to the surface how scared the immigrants are to even come out into public. They don’t go to the grocery store. There was one woman at one of the detention centers.

P P: She waited until our next stop, which was several miles away, to tell her story of people she knew that was inside that detention center, that when they went in, they were able to work and they were physically able to do work. And when they came out, they were basically in a wheelchair.

DDM: From their experience of being

P P: inside, inside the detention center.

DDM: So that the abuse that took place

P P: that’s the, yeah, I think that’s the assumption you take out of her story, but she was so afraid to say it while we were to tell that story while we were there at the vigil and at that detention center, they’re very scared. I mean, there’s volunteers that go to the grocery stores and get food for them and bring them to ’em.

P P: Those people are. Go through training on how to deal with law enforcement if they get stopped because law enforcement is aware that this is going on. It’s a horrible thing and it really makes you stop and really think how fortunate in my case how I am to be white skinned.

DDM: Right,

P P: Very much so.

DDM: Because we know that this isn’t happening to

P P: They’re not taking the immigrant, Italians

DDM: Or from Ireland, exactly.

P P: They’re taking, everyone that’s a black and brown skin and it’s a terrible thing.

DDM: Right, right, right. You know, just to add into this, I recently had a family stay with me who actually were documented. They have legal status here in terms of asylum, but. They were so petrified because people are being taken up whether they’ve got legal paperwork or not, and they were so petrified their children were gonna be taken from them because they had a newborn baby and a little 4-year-old.

DDM: And they’ve subsequently just left the country. But again those are agricultural workers who’ve left again, even though they were documented because it’s just become too frightening to stay. Yeah. Wow.

L K: And those workers are highly skilled workers as well. You know, that’s one thing that we learned, we stopped at an agricultural center. It was called the Chester Agricultural Center in, in Orange County. A farmer spoke with us and he made a point of telling us, you know, we were looking out on the farmland and he said, there’s about 270 acres here.

L K: And he said, the immigrants who have farmed this land years ago, they were British, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish, and Irish. And now. More recently, they are Jamaican, they’re Mexican, and they’re Egyptian. And he said they are highly skilled. Nobody should think of this as unskilled labor that you could just send, you know anybody in.

L K: And then, and they, they can do what they do in a day.

DDM: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we forget how much of the agricultural industry is highly skilled, you know? Yeah, no, absolutely fascinating.

L K: And one thing he told us is that people think when you have crop losses, it’s because of the weather or it’s because of, you know, the economy. But he said often their crop losses are because of lack of availability of the workers. The immigrant workers that they need.

DDM: Yeah. And a lot of these are my right are not large, big agro businesses. They’re family farms.

P P: Small family farms.

DDM: Yeah. You see, and, and I think that’s the problem. You wonder how much of this is an assault actually on small agricultural family businesses. That indirectly ends up benefiting agrobusiness because I know from myself living in the rural areas, you know, the agro businesses are so big and have such a large basis that they can afford to go through these H 1 B programs where they bring in workers from, you know, Haiti or the Dominican Republic.

DDM: Whereas your average family farm, I mean, you’re not employing necessarily 150. Workers and you can’t afford the legal fees to set up all these programs for yourself necessarily. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

L K: Yes. And speaking of money there is a whole economy with this. I mean, another thing that we learned, we were at the orange County Jail, which is actually serving also as a federal detention center. And, a local man met us there. He’s not the county executive yet, but he is running for office.

L K: But he told us that the jail was built, it was originally planned for 300 people, but they built it for 800 for the express purpose of getting a contract with the federal government for immigration detention.

DDM: Wow.

L K: He says that their county has a yearly budget surplus of $200 million because of this. So this is the money that is there, and his intention if he is elected as the county executive is to end that contract.

L K: But that’s the kind of money in these small places that, you know, I think some towns will not want to lose.

DDM: Wow. So people are literally becoming wealthier on the backs of imprisonment and fear.

DDM: It’s really frightening. I know I learned a similar thing when we once went up to Buffalo with a group for education to go and see some of the buffalo. Facilities around there for processing and around that area, there’s all these hotels like the Holiday Inn and those kind of sort of things. And you assume that these are fully functioning, operating for the tourist economy. And somebody was telling us that no, they keep one floor.

DDM: For the tourist economy, but the rest have actually been converted into detention centers. And I was stunned because you’re looking at all this. Commercial tourist infrastructure thinking it’s there to serve, you know, happy holiday makers coming to Buffalo, when in fact behind those walls and curtains are just floors of detention holding centers, which I think your average person has absolutely no idea of. Was there something on this caravan that really connected with you from perhaps a faith perspective?

L K: Yes.

DDM: I’m interested,

L K: So, the rural and migrant ministry, they have a couple of slogans and one is, it’s we, not they, and it’s actually a hashtag that they use in their social media and their promotion. So hashtag it’s, we not they.

DDM: Lovely.

L K: And I think it’s a very important message because it’s not okay.

L K: They’re the immigrants. We’re the citizens, you know, they’re the workers. We’re not. It’s all of us together in community. And for me, what it also brings up is in the Episcopal church, in our service, we have a prayer called the general confession. And in one version of that prayer, there is a part that goes

L K: we repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf.

L K: And I always think of that phrase, the evil done on our behalf because I, I think we need to look at this as we’re part of the evil that’s being done here. We benefit from it. We need to, try to do more to reduce it and to minimize it.

L K: But I think it’s not right, and it’s not healthy just to look at it as, oh, other people are doing bad things and we’re not, we’re trying to stop them. You know, we’re part of this system of injustice and exploitation and I, I think it’s it’s a responsibility.

DDM: Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the advantage of churches like the Episcopal Church or some of your more traditional churches, is there was that real understanding that sin is not individual, it’s collective. Sometimes we’re benefiting and there’s a complicity in a system, even if we’re not active proponents of that system.

DDM: We’re complicit in it, and even if it’s simply our silence. What is enabling this to happen? Because I think we are living increasingly in a culture where freedom of speech we’re seeing is under attack. Uh, people are afraid to speak out. My own father phoned me this week and was really saying to me, Debs, please don’t say anything.

DDM: Maybe you should reconsider doing your podcast because of the consequences of speaking out against these things, but. If we don’t speak and use our voices our privilege, our complicity is just escalated. You know? I love that saying in our tradition, all that’s needed for evil to triumph us, for good people to do nothing, to say nothing.

P P: Yeah. For me, it’s probably a lot more simplified. to simplify things in my head in my life, but that I learned that it’s okay to care, it’s okay. It shouldn’t be an issue that’s divided by political party.

DDM: it’s such a human issue.

P P: All of us are human beings, whether it’s immigrants or whatever the topic is. That played a lot to me with my faith because,

P P: You know the old saying if you’re gonna talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk. like that. So am I just going to, you know, speak my faith once a week in church, or am I gonna practice it every day?

P P: And this was an opportunity to really look for myself, look in the mirror and say, Hey, are you doing as you believe. are you doing. As you speak. And so that was big for me. In that way and in a lot of ways during this whole week on the caravan, it changed me all the way down to allowing somebody to tape signs on my car. I mean, I’ve always looked at my car as it’s a tool to go from point A to point B. Whether it’s a small car, medium car, but it doesn’t matter. And I never put anything on the car. Even like during the last election, Linda wanted to put bumper stickers on and we agreed on just the kind that stick on the glass because they’re removable.

P P: And now we have those on a window in our home. We still have them home for the candidate, but I was outnumbered. I had to let it go through.

L K: We were told that it wouldn’t leave Marks. We weren’t so sure, but we just put tape all over the car with a lot of signs.

DDM: But you know, I was thinking when you both were speaking, because we speak about in a way our capacity for our hearts to be expanded. To be loving, to be compassionate, but having your heart expanded is, is very uncomfortable down to the practicality of. I really don’t wanna have signs on my car.

DDM: You know, I was identifying with you when you were speaking that, but sometimes what does it mean to allow everything that we own to actually be a tool for goodness, justice, for love, for compassion, you know which, isn’t always comfortable, you know?

DDM: What coming out of this experience do you wish more people knew about immigrant workers ICE raids, detention.

L K: One thing is that I wish more people understood that nobody is safe. I, I don’t feel that any of us are safe right now. There are masked men in unmarked cars. They are taking people off the streets, out of homes. There was a raid in a small packing facility in a small town called Cato, New York.

L K: And up to 60 people were taken. Many of them had legal papers to work here legally who’ve already been deported, but people are being taken without any warrant, there’s no judicial arrest warrant. There are reports that people have the blank warrants in the car, and they will fill in the names after they round up the people.

L K: And, it, it’s very dangerous. So, we stopped in a very small town in Western New York, and one of the speakers, he said he had a friend there, a childhood friend who still lives there and works for ICE, and has worked for ICE for many years. And he said, now the pressure from Washington is immense.

L K: It’s all about numbers now. And so, what’s happened there, we were told is that some of the business owners and the farmers, they’re working with the workers because instead of having the workers all go and stay in one place, because that is what ICE likes, they like one place where they can take a lot of people.

L K: So they figured out how they can move around and just have one or two people stay in different places.

L K: So there is actually some local people who might just hear through the grapevine, you know, be careful tomorrow. So there is definitely unhappiness here over a job that used to just be legitimate law enforcement.

DDM: Right.

L K: So I think these are human rights abuses that we’ve just a accepted, you know, the lack of privacy. I mean, one person on the caravan she told us of a man she knows who was detained and kept in the handcuffs and chains with other men in a van for 24 hours without water.

L K: There’s no place for them to go to the bathroom. So the ice, they don’t wanna give them water. And so these human rights abuses that we all just kind of accept are not acceptable.

P P: People are uninformed. I was with a friend of mine about a week ago, and we were having this discussion about immigration and he said, no, they’re only rounding up the criminals. They’re only taking the criminals. And I said, “no, that’s not true.” ‘Cause when we were on the caravan, we learned of an Episcopal priest, I think it was at Scarsdale somewhere. Her daughter is a student at…

L K: I think it’s at Purdue right now. She was high school graduate of Scarsdale high school. Her mother is here legally from South Korea. Her mother is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of New York.

DDM: Right.

P P: Right. So I told him this. The daughter went in to renew her visa. ‘Cause she was getting ready to go back to school and it wasn’t coming up until the end of the year. She went in, did what she had to do inside. When she came out, ICE was there and picked her up.

P P: The next day she was shipped to…

L K: Louisiana Detention Center.

P P: Now she since has been released, but the horror that she had to go through that’s gonna live with her, if not the rest of her life, for quite some time.

DDM: Absolutely. And especially, I mean, you think her daughter, just what could happen to her? I mean, any of us who are parents, you think if that was your child,

P P: And my friend, thankfully, he believed me. believed what I was saying. He says, well, I didn’t know that

DDM: I think that’s the problem. There’s so many of these stories that people are just not hearing.

P P: They’re, misinformed on the topic. A lot of people don’t pay attention to it because they have their own things going on in their life, and

DDM: Of course. Of course.

DDM: What have you both done since the caravan last August? And what are some of your thoughts about what you may be planning to do in the future?

P P: There’s this weekly protest on Fridays at 12 Corners in Brighton.

L K: I think it’s the First Unitarian church. They have organized it. Because one thing that we learned on the caravan. Oh, there was a small town we went through where six Roman Catholics, they said, we stand here, with our signs once a week in the town square. And we’re just wondering, you know, are we all by ourselves?

L K: Is anybody else with us? And then we went, through another town where every Wednesday they have a protest or a vigil, they hold signs. And it’s just, it put it in our heads that doing something once a week as a ritual is helpful.

P P: Helps to raise awareness people who aren’t aware.

DDM: Right.

P P: So what we’ve been doing is we go on Friday, it goes from five o’clock to six. It’s at 12 Corners and each week there’s a few more people there. The last time we were there it’s over a hundred people.

DDM: Wow.

P P: In 12 corners, and everybody’s got signs except me. I go there to protect Linda. I am the protector.

L K: Paul. The first time we went, somebody came up to you and asked you a question.

P P: Yeah, that’s right. Yes. She remembers everything. Yeah. I’m sitting on the bench there, and I am observing the people because you never know if some kook’s gonna come over there and you wanna protect your family. ’cause one week we brought my granddaughter with us, so we had her to a watch out for, so the woman comes up to me and she says, may I sit here?

P P: I said, sure. She says. Were you in the caravan last week? And I said, yes. So she introduced herself as the person from the Unitarian Church, and she organizes this protest. She’s one of the organizers, her church is, and she’s part of that. And, so she remembered us from the dinner that we had there that night. So I thought that was so neat. And so she’d come up to me each week, you know, and one week she gave me petitions. I forget what the petition was for.

P P: But anyways, it’s that kind of relationship that has started, you know, and hopefully we’ll continue on.

DDM: Right. And it’s almost like that networking and a network of people who, who are prepared to put their bodies where their values are a way.

L K: Yes, exactly. Because you know, as we got closer to home in the caravan, when we went through the Finger Lakes area, some people joined us and they had signs that said, “free Elena, Louise and Raymundo.” These are local people in their community who were taken and then they’re trying to get them released.

L K: So they joined us in Auburn, at the Harriet Tubman house. So we went there, which was very special. And they stayed with us through Rochester and into Buffalo. And I, talked to the one of the women there and I said, you know, I’m gonna remember this. And a week later we saw a notice that there was a rally in Geneva.

L K: To free Elena, Luis and Raymundo. So. We went and I saw at least five or six people there who were on the caravan with us in this part of New York state. And you’re right. And one woman came up to me and she said, oh, I lost the piece of paper you gave me with your, your email address and your phone number.

L K: And I’m so glad that you’re here ’cause I wanted to tell you about this rally. So you’re right, this type of networking it’s very, very important now.

DDM: And I was just thinking as well the fact that Paul’s going to a protest once a week is unbelievable. If you know Paul, it’s not who Paul normally is, but, I was thinking, you know, part of what’s so important about that is the raising awareness because, you know, a lot of people, as you say, are just simply not aware of these issues if they’re not touching their intimate lives.

P P: And a lot of people that may have these type of characteristics that I do in this topic might be afraid. To go to one of these protests, you know, ’cause there’s a lot of us that have been changed by the politics and the ongoings of our country in the last 10 years.

P P: And so we may have been here at one point, but we are now here, you know, we’ve moved, not that we have changed. You know, we have changed,

DDM: But the political landscape

P P: we’ve become more aware of a lot of the things that are going on. In this case, we’re talking about immigration, which is huge. It’s huge. The nursing home we were at. There’s many immigrants in that system working in the healthcare system, at the nursing homes throughout the country. And if you took them out of that work, out of the nursing homes, who’s gonna do it?

DDM: It would collapse.

L K: Nursing homes, home healthcare, the hospitals. Yes. So we did have one stop where a doctor came. Came and talked to us and he told us about the whole healthcare economy there. And without the immigrant workers it would just collapse.

P P: Yeah.

L K: But you’re right, there is a lot of fear right now.

L K: And, you know, we’re all in a computer, we’re all in a computer on the wrong side of fascism. So, that is true. And, i’ve been thinking a lot about a movie I saw back in the eighties. We’re. Baby boomers. So we grew up with a lot of the books and the movies about the resistance during World War ii. There’s a movie, a French movie with English subtitles. The director is Louis Malle, it’s called Au Revoir Les Enfants. It’s about boys in a Catholic boarding school in France and the priest who leads the boarding school. He also uses it to hide two or three Jewish students from the Nazis. And so it really is kind of a coming of age movie, but also you see at the end.

L K: It’s not really a spoiler ’cause you know how it ends, but the Nazis come in, they arrest the priests. He goes to a concentration camp, where he dies. They take the boys, they find them. And it’s based on a true story. This director Louis Malle lived through this when he was I think 11 years old.

L K: In France and so I think clergy now are all at risk of something similar. If we don’t stop what’s happening.

DDM: Yeah. We forget about the parallels in this story with history. We’ve been through this before and we know it doesn’t end well. know, how can others support the rural migrant ministry that was so foundational to this whole

L K: So on their website. If you just go and search for rural and migrant ministry, you can sign up for a newsletter. There’s a way to donate and you know, there are many activities there that you can sign up for. They have annual dinners and then also while you’re on the website, if you search for the Journey of Empathy Caravan, you can see a lot of the local news coverage that we had going town to town.

L K: And you can see the daily schedule that we followed.

DDM: Lovely. Well, I’m so grateful to the two of you for firstly making that commitment to go and see and hear what too many of us just don’t see and hear in our communities. And then of course, for coming today to share a little of what you saw and heard and learned. And I’m also really grateful to each of you who are listening into this podcast for your openness to hear the stories of people who are vulnerable in our communities, perhaps more now than ever.

DDM: As Paul and Linda shared, I really encourage you to go to the Rural and Migrant Ministry website, but also maybe. To consider becoming a part of the Rapid Response Network, which you can also get onto through their website. They offer multiple opportunities for training on how local individuals and communities can respond to ICE raids, how to help vulnerable families, and really just to become a partner for Justice and hope in your own community and for our international listeners.

DDM: Maybe some questions are, how are immigrants being treated in your country right now? How are your agricultural laborers being treated? Are you struggling with some of the same issues that we in the USA are facing? And how are you managing to make a difference with your voice, your body, your car, your faith?

DDM: Please reach out and let us know. And thank you once again, Linda and Paul for being with us today.

P P: Thank you.

L K: Thank you for having us.

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

DDM: Music by Audionautix.com

Join Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe for a discussion about Armageddon and the end of the world.

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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] Today, Elizabeth and I want to be looking at the religious ideas that are openly being expressed by people like Pete Hegseth, Lindsey Graham, but in particular around the theme that we are in the end times and approaching the final battle of Armageddon.

MET [00:58] We have talked about Christian nationalism before, but current events are making this an even more vital conversation. As Deborah mentioned, there is a theme emerging from political leaders that has long been kept in the shadows of American leadership but is now being brought into the open. And that is that part of America’s job as God’s chosen nation is to bring about God’s will, which is ultimately the end times as certain evangelicals understand it.

MET [01:32] This isn’t new. In the Reagan years, political leadership used Armageddon and the Rapture as an excuse not to take action in environmental crises. The thinking was, “Yeah, we could do something about the changing climate and carbon emissions,” because we absolutely knew about it then, “or concern ourselves with deforestation, but Christ will come back before the forest will, so why bother?” The message coming from the Pentagon, at least as it is being reported out from watchdog groups, is even more sinister. The war in Iran, and I guess it’s a war, is not just a battle over oil or money or even a distraction from bad politics at home. It serves a spiritual purpose, and that is to usher in the end times.

MET [02:23] Now, let’s be very clear, this is not a good thing. Depending on which version of the end times you believe in, and yeah, there are different versions because as Deborah will tell you, it’s all nonsense, so of course they can’t get their story straight. Either there’s going to be a huge global war led by the Antichrist, all Christians are going to be taken up in the Rapture, and the rest of us heathens, because Deborah, Carl, and I would definitely be counted among those, will be left behind in this new hell on Earth, or all Christians will be taken up and then the Antichrist will start a war with who is left.

MET [03:03] I think there are other iterations of this, but those are the main ones I can remember. And we’re sending Tomahawk missiles to girls’ schools to make sure one of these things happen.

DDM [03:16] So let’s unpack some of this. Firstly, we have to start by saying that this thinking is not a traditional Christian belief, but it really is a 19th, 20th century development based on misconceptions around biblical prophecy that believes that the world will end in a massive Middle Eastern war called Armageddon.

DDM [03:40] Now, for the first 1,800 years of church history, this was not a Christian belief at all, so we really need to understand that this is a modern interpretation being placed onto scripture. In the New Testament, the early Christians expected the end of the world to come soon after the ascension of Jesus.

DDM [04:03] They believed Jesus would come again in their lifetime, and God’s kingdom would be established. But they did not in any way equate this with a geopolitical war or map out nations and military alliances the way we are seeing this being done today. The apocalyptic imagery in the Book of Revelations, the whole beasts, dragons, battle of Armageddon, that was generally interpreted symbolically or spiritually by early theologians.

DDM [04:37] This battle between good and evil was understood to happen throughout history in every age and generation. And so Armageddon was not a literal future battlefield, but the spiritual conflict between good and evil always present in the world in every people and community. That’s how Revelations was always understood in the church from the beginning.

DDM [05:02] This only changed in the 1800s with a preacher called John Nelson Darby, who developed what was called dispensationalism. He developed an idea that history was divided into stages or dispensations, and he developed the concept of a rapture where Christians would be taken up into heaven before a time of suffering.

DDM [05:28] He developed the concept of a literal battle of Armageddon centering on Israel, and this idea was used by Christian Zionists and gained popularity as the modern state of Israel was being created, and it was also used as a theological justification for Israel’s existence as a state This kind of thinking continued to be developed and expanded until the 20th century, where authors and preachers made these ideas extremely popular amongst the common people.

DDM [06:01] Hal Lindsey and his best-selling book, “The Late Great Planet Earth,” “The Left Behind” series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Now, these works of fiction, and they’re fiction, presented these detailed scenarios where modern political nations play roles in the Battle of Armageddon, and ideas of the rapture were vividly shown.

DDM [06:25] And so millions of readers and viewers came to view this fiction as literally what the Bible predicts. But serious theologians know this is simply fiction, and dangerous fiction, because books like Revelation were really written to encourage Christians living under the Roman Empire. The language is highly symbolic, using symbols people understood in that culture and in that time, and ancient biblical place names don’t even map accurately and neatly onto our modern political countries.

DDM [07:03] But despite scholars and theologians, these ideas became incredibly popular for psychological and social reasons. At times when there is seeming chaos in the world, the rise of violence and what we would call evil, these ideas give people a framework to understand this chaos, this evil, this violence, and a sense that people psychologically need that everything is happening for a reason and moving towards the ultimate triumph of good and their own people over evil, which of course is always the other nation or the other group of people.

DDM [07:42] And so what we call in theological circles apocalyptic literature, of which Revelations is a form, the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is a form. These forms of apocalyptic literature always arise during times of war and suffering as a way of saying, “Your suffering is not meaningless, but it has purpose, and ultimately, you will triumph.”

MET [08:10] Okay, so I didn’t grow up in a household that was obsessed with the end times the way some evangelicals are, but I definitely grew up thinking Revelation was about the literal end of the world and bought into the Armageddon rapture stuff. In fact, one of the things that Carl and my mother-in-law still give me a really hard time about is when we first got married, I would panic whenever I lost track of Carl in the grocery store or if he left the house without telling me, because if I find myself in the store or the house by myself and I couldn’t see anyone else around me, my initial thought was not, “Oh, Carl went to go get tortilla chips,” it was, “Oh no, everybody got raptured and I missed it.”

MET [08:55] This caused great amusement for my in-laws who had not been exposed to this kind of thing and were also a bit concerned that I assumed Carl would be taken up, but not me. But as I learned more and more about apocalyptic scripture, I began to understand it as something completely different.

MET [09:15] Not as something predictive, but as something descriptive or even argumentative. The closest analog I have to apocalyptic scripture is protest rhetoric. I have taught classes in protest, democracy building, and social change, and in some ways that is applicable and in some ways it is not. It isn’t because the writers of the Bible and literature of that time were not looking to build democracy, and they were not shaped by the traditions of the West.

MET [09:48] If anything, they were giving shape to the traditions that the West would eventually adopt. But really, the West would take as much or more from the Greeks or Romans and just kind of pick and choose from their actual religious roots. But at the same time, there are similarities. Any people wanting to protest against their oppressors have certain things in common, and so will their rhetoric.

MET [10:10] So in books like Daniel and Revelation, I see things I recognize from my own work, like solidification, polarization, definition of terminology, and things like promulgation, all of which come straight out of social movement studies. For one, there is a good deal of work to solidify the group of protesters here.

MET [10:32] The people who are being oppressed are tightly bound in a group of articulated traits. The people who this was for knew who they were and why it was for them. This was a narrative that brought a people together. It brought them together in opposition to a greater power. But that is what good protest rhetoric does.

MET [10:55] People want to believe that good protest rhetoric brings us together, but that’s not completely true. If you want to make change, you have to show that change is necessary, and that means you have to point out a problem. That requires solidifying around an issue, showing how oppression exists. It’s the important first step.

MET [11:16] That actually leads to another important part of the process, which is polarization. I know it’s not pleasant to think about because we like the idea of all holding hands and kumbaya-yaing our way into wholeness, but change doesn’t come because you’re all happy with each other. Change comes because one group of people says, “No, this will not stand.” If oppression is happening, then there has to be an oppressor. You can aim to make peace with your oppressor, but you can’t just ignore the oppression. ultimately has to be a good guy and a bad guy. And a lot of people love to say, “Oh, MLK didn’t think that way,” but that is because they don’t know jack about MLK. Because MLK talked about white moderates being a bigger threat to justice than the KKK and said white moderate people need to just get out of the way ’cause they’re the real problem. He identified who the enemy was, but we don’t like to quote that part because it’s uncomfortable to, you know, white moderates.

MET [12:16] There are also some terms thrown around that the ones doing the speaking, and not the establishment or Rome, get to define. The ability to define your own terms is crucial to guiding the narrative. So when the author starts throwing around terms like The Dragon and Whore of Babylon, he’s also doing more to create solidification.

MET [12:41] He’s setting up a shibboleth. If you don’t understand these terms, then you are not one of us. And all of this is supposed to spread the word. A sermon or plain old letter might not do the trick, but a vision of monsters might. If you wanna talk about how serious things are and get your message out there, put it in terms of the world ending. That’s a good way to go viral.

DDM [13:07] And, you know, for people who don’t see themselves as religious, even still, we cannot dismiss these religious ideas because they are incredibly powerful and strong, and they shape and influence global foreign policy and thinking, especially in the Israel and– especially in Israel and the USA. Remember, this religious thinking was developed in the USA and then picked up and used by Christian Zionists and later Jewish Zionists.

DDM [13:36] It focuses on the understanding that the Jewish people must return to the political state of Israel before the end times can happen. And this thinking has shaped the funding to repopulate historic Palestine with people who call themselves Jewish and try to populate this newly created country of Israel, and especially we see that taking shape in the illegal informal settlements in Israel.

DDM [14:02] But this thinking also equates, obviously, the state of Israel with the biblical Israelites, which is completely inaccurate biblically. But it claims that those who bless Israel as a state will be blessed by God. Organizations promoting this view is CUFI the Christians United for Israel, and they believe Israel has a God-given right to the land from Egypt all the way into Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and they call this the Greater Israel, which is why Israel is the only nation that has not set its borders because they are still reclaiming the land that they believe belongs to them, and why we see the constant destabilization of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and now Iran by Israel and the USA.

DDM [14:53] But what is crucial to understand is that in this thinking, war is not something to be avoided, but rather something to be embraced because Jesus will not come again until after the Battle of Armageddon, according to them. So to bring about a global Armageddon is to bring about the return of Jesus, and so a global devastating war is ironically for them, in fact, to do God’s will.

DDM [15:21] And American Bibles like the Scofield Reference Bible actually include commentary explaining all of this and adding all of these political thoughts to the scriptures.

MET [15:36] The Bible actually is the source for a few rhetorical devices and genres. One of those is called the jeremiad. Now, the Book of Revelation is not a jeremiad. I wanna be clear about that. But these things kinda go together in my head because they do similar things. Biblical rhetoric often performs similar roles, and that’s not because it is boring or uncreative, but the audience has similar requirements because of their culture or setting in many situations.

MET [16:10] You could say the same thing about an American audience or a Nigerian audience or whatever. A jeremiad is a form of speech that combines lamentations over a society’s moral decline with a demand for reform and a hopeful prophecy of renewal. It’s named after the book of prophecy in the Bible, Jeremiah, and it follows a three-part structure: denouncing current sins, comparing them to an idealized past, and calling for repentance.

MET [16:43] I’m not actually gonna go over a big example or do a lot of analysis on this one. What I need you to know is that a jeremiad is a kind of prophetic speech. It calls out our bad behavior now and claims that things were better in the past and we can get better again. There’s a lot going on here. First, you have to be convinced that things are terrible now.

MET [17:08] Maybe they are, or maybe things are just different than how you want them. But for a jeremiad to be productive, you have to believe that now is awful Secondly, you have to be convinced that at some point in the past, things were way better. There was some happy, ideal point in the past when things were good and bright and happy, and all the problems that plague you or us now don’t exist.

MET [17:36] It is very important that you believe things were better in the past, because if I can get you to believe things were once so much better, I can get you to believe that they might be again. This is a hugely powerful bit of persuasion. If I can get you believe that things will be like they once were, and I can get them there, you are putty in my hands. If you haven’t put it all together, Make America Great Again is the soundbite version.

MET [18:06] I think this is important to think about in terms of revelation and Christian nationalism and foreign policy because the Trump admin has been promising for over a decade that they are going to make things like they once were. But they are also leaning on interpretation of the Bible that promises a future of war, literally the end of the world. So they’re going to make things great like they once were before, but they are also going to bring about the end times. The end is what is great. I know people say it all the time, but it’s true.

MET [18:44] This is very much a death cult. And that sounds outlandish and polemic and completely unhinged, but they’re saying it right there out loud. The goal is to both make things better and bring about the end of the world, and there’s only so much interpretation you can do with that

DDM [19:02] it’s really frightening. So whatever your view of religion, these ideas are currently being very actively used politically to justify war crimes, environmental destruction, regime changes, and they are now being used openly. They’re not biblical, but they have become dominant teachings in many churches. I think we need to, especially as Christians whose faith is being hijacked for political ends, call these out for what they are, evil heresies to further political empires and their power with no concern for the destruction of ordinary people and even the world in which we live.

DDM [19:43] We need to say out loud and clearly each time these ideas are expressed that this is not what our faith teaches.

MET [19:55] Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, 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 cost of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [20:23]Music by audionautix.com.

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe describes the way her understanding of rhetorical history shapes her faith.

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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.

MET [00:38] I had this student once who had the greatest opening line to her presentations I have ever heard. It always made me laugh, but also feel really good about life because this young woman came from a really conservative background, and she had gone to a hardcore religious school, and she had a lot of glass-breaking moments in my class when I informed her what she had been taught by her pastor was not, in fact, true at all.

MET [01:04] But she was a genuinely good person, and she wanted to make people feel good in her presence. She cared about others. So at the beginning of every presentation, this hardcore religious kid would smile as big as she could and say, “Hello and welcome, guys, gals, and non-binary pals.” And it was like some tension melted in the room because we did, in fact, feel welcome.

MET [01:33] She didn’t know it, but she was a master rhetorician. What she inherently understood about audience, pathos and ethos, delivery, and messaging takes years to teach, which makes me think she had been absorbing it over her lifetime, which probably means she had grown up hearing some mighty good preachers.

MET [01:56] This young woman had come up in the tradition of the Black church, so things like audience, delivery, pathos, and ethos would have been incredibly important to a service. So she might never have taken a public speaking class, but had absorbed more about public speaking than half the people with communication degrees.

MET [02:17] Okay, so why am I telling you this? It’s a charming story, and it raises some interesting questions about whether one can actually teach another person to be a good public speaker. But what I really wanted you to notice was a kind of flashpoint. Over the last year and a half, I have talked to you about a lot of different kinds of rhetorics.

MET [02:40] We’ve covered classical theories, the postmodern, political rhetoric, legal rhetoric, religious rhetoric. I’ve taken you on a whirlwind tour. This is an interesting story because it covers so many of them. It is both political and religious. It is invitational and constitutive. It is Aristotelian and feminist.

MET [03:03] There’s just a lot. And I realize as I tell you this, I’ve taken you through your paces and gotten you to where you can recognize all of this. But I don’t know that I’ve ever made my fundamental connections for you. So today, if you’ll give me just a few minutes, I wanna take us back to the beginning.

MET [03:23] Carl and Reverend Deborah were kind enough to let me have the mic by myself this time because I wanted to take you on a journey that is specific to me, both as a person of faith and as an intellectual. So a bit of rhetorical history and theory. I know it’s just what you were thinking you needed today, but also you are here with me, so you had to know it was a possibility.

MET [03:49] Now, there are basically three roots to the rhetorical tree, the Sophist teachings, Aristotle’s theory, and Plato’s critique and elevation. I’m actually gonna start with Aristotle, not because he was first, but because he ended up being the most important. Plato won Christianity, but Aristotle won science and the Enlightenment.

MET [04:15] I mean, I guess we can argue about who was most important really, but I’m starting with Aristotle regardless, mostly because he ended up being the most important to rhetoric. Aristotle began with a few basic assumptions. One, the audience is rational. This is really important to understand. If you assume the audience is rational, it makes a difference in how you make your argument.

MET [04:42] It also lifts some of the burden on you to police yourself, if I’m being cynical, because a rational audience can sniff out problems. A rational audience can be persuaded by a good argument using evidence and reason. Aristotle also assumed that audiences were relatively universal. By that I mean he made sweeping generalizations about the elderly or the young or the rich or the whoever, and said, “These are their characteristics.

MET [05:13] Here’s how you appeal to them.” On the one hand, they were straight up stereotypes. On the other hand, we do the same thing with market research and voting demographics all the time. We just have numbers to go with our claims. I will note that any time I have presented Aristotle’s claims about people to modern undergrads, they have decided he got it about right.

MET [05:39] But this is also important to understand because his audience kind of was universal. It was all landowning male wealthy citizens of one city-state. I mean, if you only know one kind of person and they’re all the same, you’d probably jump to some conclusions too. Finally, Aristotle took these assumptions and said, “Rhetoric is discovering or using the best available means of persuasion in any given case.”

MET [06:10] This means given the audience, so they are old or they are rich, et cetera, what kind of things will they respond to? What is the best combination of proofs? There are inartistic proofs, which is just the stuff you don’t come up with, the stuff you bring into the argument, and there are artistic proofs.

MET [06:31] That’s what you bring to the argument. And this is why it matters that the audience is both, A, rational, so able to make considered decisions and can be persuaded, but also, B, young, so prone to rash decisions or whatever. The artistic proofs are appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos, and that just means how much you depend on appeals to logic, emotion, or your character.

MET [06:56] You are probably wondering at this point what on earth this has to do with me and my faith. I promise I will get there. We’re going the long way today. The second person who is worth talking about is Plato. Plato actually hated rhetoric. He hated rhetoric because he associated it with the Sophists, who I’ll talk about in a minute, who he believed to be dangerous and idolatrous. As far as Plato understood rhetoric, it was completely relativistic and could easily let the wrong people gain power.

MET [07:34] Plato was really certain of two things. There is a right and ultimate truth, and there are right kinds of people, and they should be in charge. For Plato, rhetoric shouldn’t be about persuasion. It should be about what he called the dialectic, a philosophical back and forth and an ongoing search for truth.

MET [07:57] Rhetoric should be a search for transcendence, not a bid for power. And along those lines, Plato wasn’t real big on democracy, whereas Aristotle’s and the Sophists’ versions of rhetoric went hand in hand with democracy. Plato believed what we need are philosopher kings, people of great knowledge, wisdom, and character who will take on the mantle of leadership and basically be a benevolent dictator.

MET [08:25] This is the difference I need you to understand. Plato is at the heart of both Christianity and fascism. Aristotle leads to the Enlightenment and colonialism. That just leaves the Sophists. Here’s what you gotta know. Everybody hates the Sophists. The Sophists were, depending on how you frame the story, itinerant teachers of rhetoric who went from town to town, sharing their knowledge in a radically democratic fashion, or flamboyant rabble-rousers who went to a town and took whoever’s money they could until they were thrown out of that town and went to the next.

MET [09:08] The Sophists were easy to recognize. As I said, they were flamboyant in their dress and hairstyle, and that in and of itself bothered the traditional, more civically-oriented teachers and politicians of the day. Once again, things have not changed. You’ve got the people in charge And you have the folks in edgy clothes and wild-colored hair demanding something different.

MET [09:33] Ecclesiastes 1:9 says there is nothing new under the sun. This is a reminder that in many ways that is very true. There will always be those with institutional power who hate upstarts who look and sound different with challenging ideas. What those challenging ideas were is of particular interest. For example, the Sophists had a very different approach to education than Aristotle, Plato, and all of the other rhetoric teachers in the Greek world.

MET [10:05] The established rhetoric professors, the ones who had their own institutions, were very selective about who they taught. They let in the sons of wealthy, established families who showed great promise in math, logic, rhetoric, and even physical prowess. The Sophist said, “Ha ha, not really,” and would teach anyone who had the cash.

MET [10:29] Now, a couple of things about that. It is at once both a hugely democratizing step in education, but also a sign that money still talks. It is democratizing in that there are no established hierarchy barriers. If you had the cash, you could get the education. Farmers, merchants, whoever. If you could save up the money, the Sophists would teach you. This means that the Sophists were offering anyone access to the education and power that were reserved for the propertied rich and powerful.

MET [11:06] So yeah, there were many reasons and excuses to hate the Sophists, but you had to figure that was one of the biggest. They were opening the doors of education to anyone. However, there were still barriers. Education was very expensive. You had to save up the money. Sometimes that could be close to a year or two’s worth of salary for some people.

MET [11:31] But if you had the money, they would teach you. Then there was what was taught. The Sophists taught about rhetoric, politics, and all the things that people like Aristotle, Isocrates, and Plato were teaching. But they also taught the equivalent of how to do your taxes. The Sophists taught things like how to make business decisions, how to comport yourself in public, and how to account for your money at the end of the day, as well as persuasion politics and democratic theory.

MET [12:05] So the democratization part of their education is vital to understand. Sophistic education wasn’t just about how to be a good senator or whatever. It was about how to be a successful and prominent citizen. Once again, you can see how this would upset those in power. The last thing they needed was for the commoners to have access to knowledge that would allow them to improve themselves and their lives in significant ways.

MET [12:36] Finally, one of the biggest reasons people like Plato hated the Sophists was their supposedly moral reasons. The Sophists had very different ideas on truth. For Sophists, truth was very much a matter of the moment. Truth was something that you created as a matter of context. Truth happened at a particular moment in that particular context at the right time in the right situation.

MET [13:05] You could imagine a guy like Plato, who believed in capital T truth, had a huge issue with the Sophists. But the Sophists believed and taught that truth was a creation of context. That, of course, made rhetoricians particularly powerful, because a person in that context could potentially be a truth maker.

MET [13:29] Now, it would appear that I have forgotten this is a podcast about issues of the faith, and I have taken it upon myself to lecture you about rhetorical history and theory. But actually, I want to tell you about how this comes together for me. Christianity borrows heavily from Plato. We get our notions of truth, hierarchy, and much of our philosophy from Plato.

MET [13:54] Our religion is surprisingly Greek and Roman for being based on an Aramaic Jew. And I don’t necessarily like what we got from Plato. Platonic thinking breeds exclusion. It creates environments where there’s not just insiders and outsiders, but blessed and cursed. And Aristotle’s clinical approach probably shaped Paul’s systematized and rhetorically constructed letters throughout the New Testament.

MET [14:23] Paul, being well-versed in Greek, probably knew all about these folks and had put their theories to good use. A study of the letters in the New Testament as documents and letters instead of theology reveals some pretty classically rhetorical artifacts. It is very easy to point to how Plato and Aristotle have affected Christianity.

MET [14:46] And because our faith is so vested in Plato and Aristotle, especially Plato, we assume that is right. There are ultimate truths, and there are ways to present your case. And I’m not here to contest any of that But I want to tell you for a minute about the Sophists and how I see their philosophy shaping my faith.

MET [15:09] For one, the Sophists opened up knowledge to everyone, or as much as anyone did in that day and time. This radical inclusion is incredibly important to my faith. I wouldn’t follow Christ if I did not believe he was open to everyone. Part of Christ’s revelatory approach to community was that he did not put up barriers.

MET [15:34] He was not a gatekeeper. There were no rules about who he would and would not share his message with or his table. I wouldn’t say Christ practiced radical democracy because I don’t think I would apply any statist theory to his work. But I do think he practiced radical inclusion in community.

MET [15:56] And of all of the rhetorical theorists of the classical age, it is the Sophists who got closest to that. In fact, Plato, who we borrowed most heavily from, was kind of the opposite of that. The Sophists were the ones who came closest to providing a picture of the kind of actions I see in the Gospels. And the fact that those in power hated them just lends credence to that.

MET [16:22] Secondly, the Sophists taught the kinds of things that affected people in their day-to-day lives. Plato and Aristotle were great if you were going to trial or were trying to get a body of legislation to pass a law. But the Sophists attended to your life, your mundane, everyday choices, as well as the grandiose.

MET [16:42] I see that in the Gospels as well. When Christ told a parable, it was often about someone relatable. In Luke fifteen, Christ tells the story of a woman who lost one coin and went searching for it. How many times do we hear about shepherds and their sheep? We also hear about rich men, but very often we hear as much about their servants as well.

MET [17:07] Christ’s lessons were about how to treat your neighbor more than how to relate to systems of power. Jesus wanted you to know how to function in the day to day as much as he did about how to function in the halls of power. Finally, and this is the clincher, the Sophists taught that truth was contingent.

MET [17:30] This is the stickler for a lot of people. If there is one thing we are certain of in Christianity, it is that there are certain truths that should not be questioned. And I’m not here to say whether that is or is not the case But I wanna talk about where I find God. All too often, God is not in the grand walls of a church.

MET [17:54] God is in small moments. God is in the time I spend with my husband and daughter. God is in those moments in the classroom when I know we’ve made genuine progress. God is when Carl, Deborah, and I finish up a podcast, and I know we’ve made a quality product that I think will help people. I’m not claiming I make God or truth, but I do find God and truth in the contextually defined moments of my life.

MET [18:23] It is one thing to say that God is everywhere all the time. It is quite another to know for a fact He is working in your life. Sometimes truth is found minute by minute. Sometimes God shows Himself in the most mundane circumstances. The Sophists taught that truth was a product of context. I am not telling you that God is a product of context.

MET [18:48] But in my life, God is found in those small moments that are defined by context of community, family, and even resistance. In that way, God is a God of context. For while He is always with me, I feel Him most when I am doing His work, and that is something I create. So what is the point of all this? For me, it is a matter of figuring out how we understand God.

MET [19:20] I’m a thinker. I understand the world as an intellectual project, so it matters to me what framework I view the world through. For some people, that isn’t a big deal, but for me it is. So when I consider this thing, rhetoric, that I have literally devoted decades of my life to, it matters how that colors other parts of my life.

MET [19:43] And what I have come to understand is that the connections are not always as clear as tradition would have us believe. Plato is not for me, though he is very much at the heart of Christianity. Aristotle doesn’t speak to me, though he probably did to Paul. But the Sophists, those folks who were accused of atheism, rabble-rousing, and disrupting the very fabric of society, that makes sense to me when it comes to the life of my faith.

MET [20:14] I can see where my mind and my spirit intersect there. So as I close today, I encourage you to think about a few things. How do you see the different parts of your world connecting? The Bible says we are supposed to love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds. How do you draw connections between all three?

MET [20:37] Where do you find your faith? Is it in big moments in church or in small moments in your life? What is meaningful to you? How do you live that out? Who is included in your faith? Are there barriers or is anyone invited? Consider these things as you move through the next two weeks. It’s your rhetoric homework

MET [21:16] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, priestandprof.org. 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 [21:45] Music by Audionautix.com

In this episode, Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe is joined by Producer Carl Thorpe for a brief discussion of prayer and the Bible in public schools and their experiences as educators.

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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.

MET [00:38] Hello, it is good to be with you. Producer Carl is with me today, and we are here to talk to you about our experiences both as people of faith and as educators. One time, years ago, I had my students in political rhetoric do some group projects on major political and cultural issues of the day. One group got prayer in school. The group got up there and they were setting up their slides and getting ready in general, and then they turned to the class and they said, “Okay, we’re ready.” And one woman who I knew to be pretty conservative and religious said, “Okay, before we start, I’d like for us all to bow our heads and start with a word of prayer.” And everyone in the group clasped their hands and bowed their heads. You could feel the chill run through the room. The rest of the class started shifting very uncomfortably and some of them gasped. I was ready to jump out of my seat and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s calm down here.” When the woman raised her head, opened her eyes wide and said, “Just kidding, but your reaction gets us ready to talk about today’s topic.” There was a collective sigh of relief and many people laughed out loud.

MET [02:00] It was easily one of the most memorable intros to a presentation I have ever had in one of my classes, and I don’t think I will ever forget it. No lie. I loved it. I thought it was perfect. I gave them a ton of points for that. But this woman was exactly right. For most people, the notion of prayer in class makes us really uncomfortable. But at the same time, there are some people who think it is absolutely essential.

MET [02:31] I grew up doing things like see you at the poll, which if you did not grow up in an environment where people were constantly trying to shove religion anywhere and everywhere, it was a yearly event where students gathered before school and gathered around the flagpole to pray. I guess we were supposed to pray for our schools or the nation, but that was never really made clear. We were just kids who were supposed to pray. And we did, and we sang our God is an awesome God and we’re our best evangelical selves. And there were signs up all over my church that said quippy things like, “As long as there are tests, there will be prayers in school.” I was surrounded by folks who generally believed that things would be better if we could shove as much Christianity into school as possible. I did not know this was a relatively new attitude, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

MET [03:27] For just a second, I’m going to ask Carl to give us a tiny bit of insight as someone who was a K through 12 teacher. Carl, can you tell us about your experience as a junior high teacher dealing with religion and school?

CRT [03:40] Sure. Back in Texas, I worked for two years as a paraprofessional at a wealthy elementary school and then three years as a classroom teacher at a low income middle school. Every morning, we had a moment of silence after the Pledge of Allegiance to both the American flag and the Texas flag, which is very weird, but that’s something for another day. This was intended to be a time where students and staff could pray silently if they wanted. We were supposed to ensure that our students were motionless and silent during this brief time. Many teachers required students to stand. Now let’s ignore for a moment the students who were not religious in any way. And let’s be honest, Texas most certainly didn’t take any of them into account either.

CRT [04:20] This was supposed to be non-sectarian. However, I often wondered about those students whose former prayer wasn’t respected by this. What about those students whose former prayer were supposed to be audible or who prayed in a prostate position or prayed facing a specific direction? A moment of silence privileges those whose faith allows for silent, private individual prayer. And honestly, even the groups who definitely could and did engage in silent private prayer, such as those who organized and attended to see you at a poll event Elizabeth described, would have preferred audible, specifically Christian prayer if they could have gotten away with it. The moment of silence was the best they could get away with at that time.

CRT [04:59] And speaking of CU at the poll, at the middle school I taught at, this was not a once a year thing. It was at least weekly and at times more than that. And many faculty and staff members participated, including the principal and some of the vice principals of the school. The students who participated were given more leeway in terms of behavior and discipline because they were good Christians who made mistakes. Rumor had it that the administrators who participated often prayed for forgiveness with students who were sent to their office as one part of their punishment for behavior issues and let off the hook, so to speak. Teachers who wanted to participate were excused from before school duties such as monitoring students coming off buses, et cetera, so they could go pray. Administrators and other teachers would say things like, “I haven’t seen you at the flagpole. You know it lets our students know how much we love them and respect them when we participate.”

MET [05:47] I wanna be very clear so much of that is so illegal.

MET [05:51] Also, historically, it hasn’t always been this way. Believe it or not, Baptists were some of the chief opponents of prayer in school for a long time, right up until the time the moral majority, which we have talked about before, took over American politics. And for some people, this seems so counterintuitive. Surely the largest evangelical group in the nation would want prayer in school, right? That’s what so many of us have learned for most of our lives. But no. For most of the Baptist tradition, there was a persistent effort to keep religion out of schools and other manifestations of state.

MET [06:37] So let’s talk about why. Let’s say you decide to make a public prayer at something like a town hall meeting or a school event. That’s a state sanctioned happening, right? Which means the state gives tacit approval for everything that happens. So, the state has a vested interest in what is said, which means the state has a controlling interest in what is said. In short, the state may have a say in what you say in your prayer. If you pray at a state event, the state gets to have a say in that prayer. For example, a lot of places have said you can have a prayer as long as it is inclusive and represents a number of belief systems. A Baptist of yester year might say, “No. When I pray, I pray to Jesus Christ, son of God, creator of the universe, and it is an infringement on my religion for you to tell me I have to pray to anything or anyone different.” In other words, historically, the more conservative religious groups wanted to keep religion out of the state because they wanted to keep state out of religion.

MET [07:54] The problem with combining the two is that it is not a one-way street. Once you inject religion into the state, it is impossible for the state not to become part of religion. And that may be great if you pray to the state, which quite frankly, a lot of so- called Christians right now do. But if you pray to Jesus who rejected worldly power, this is pretty much as blasphemous as it gets.

MET [08:22] Of course, I come with receipts. I’m going to give you a brief rundown of some of the most significant court cases dealing with religion in schools to give you some idea of how this is trending. The first case I want to talk about is Engel v. Vitale. What happened was the New York State Board of Regents authorized a short, voluntary prayer for recitation at the start of each school day. A group of organizations joined forces in challenging the prayer, claiming that it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The question at hand was, does the reading of a non-denominational prayer at the start of the school day violate the establishment of religion clause at the First Amendment? The court held that the state cannot hold prayers in public schools, even if participation is not required and the prayer is not tied to a particular religion.

MET [09:21] In an opinion authored by Hugo L. Black, the court held that respondent’s decision to use its school system to facilitate recitation of an official prayer violated the establishment clause. Specifically, the policy breached the constitutional wall of separation between church and state. The court ruled that the constitutional prohibition of laws establishing religion meant that the government had no business drafting formal prayers for any segment of its population to repeat in a government-sponsored religious program. The court held that the respondent’s provision of the contested daily prayer was inconsistent with the establishment clause. Okay, that’s a lot of complicated words to say that you can’t voice prayers over the PA system or whatever, even if they are voluntary.

MET [10:14] For the record, this would come up again in Santa Fe v. Doe when there was a case over prayers at football games. That’s a complicated question because for decades, it was illegal for schools to have prayers before football games, but schools did it all the time anyway. Then in 2022, there was another prayer at Football Games case about a coach leading his team, and they decided that was acceptable, even though it was quite public. For the record, I have a huge problem with that case and wrote a whole book chapter on it. So if you want my thoughts, send me an email and I’ll shoot you the whole document.

MET [10:54] A second case from 1963 is Abington School District v. Shchempp. The facts of the case are that under Pennsylvania law, public schools were required to read from the Bible at the opening of each school day. The school district sought to enjoin enforcement of the statute. The district court ruled that the statute violated the First Amendment even after the statute had been amended to permit a student to excuse himself. The question was, did the Pennsylvania law requiring public school students to participate in classroom religious exercises violate the religious freedom of students as protected by the First and 14th Amendments? And the court decided public schools cannot sponsor Bible readings and recitations of the Lord’s prayer under the First Amendment’s establishment clause. It’s wild to think of a time when this was a question. At the same time, there are a lot of people out there right now who are trying to shoehorn the Bible into classrooms. So what are we thinking?

MET [12:06] Lemon v. Kurtzman is a particularly important case, both for the test it led to and for how it is largely being ignored by modern courts. Both Pennsylvania and Rhode Island adopted statutes that provided for the state to pay for aspects of non-secular, non-public education. The Pennsylvania statute was passed in 1968 and provided funding for non-public elementary and secondary school teachers salaries, textbooks, and instructional materials for secular subjects. Rhode Island’s statute was passed in 1969 and provided state financial support for non-public elementary schools in the form of supplementing 15% of teachers’ annual salaries. The appellants in the Pennsylvania case represented citizens and taxpayers in Pennsylvania who believed that the statute violated the separation of church and state described in the First Amendment.

MET [13:14] Appellant Lemon also had a child in Pennsylvania public school. The district court granted the state official’s motion to dismiss the case. In the Rhode Island case, the epelees were citizens and taxpayers of Rhode Island who sued to have the statute in question declared unconstitutional by arguing that it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The District Court found in favor of the Appalees and held that the state violated the First Amendment. Okay. So the question in all of this is, do the statutes that provide state funding for non-public, non-secular schools violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment? The court held that a statute must pass a three-pronged test in order to avoid violating the establishment clause. The statute must have a secular legislative purpose. Its principle or primary effect must be one that neither promotes nor inhibits religion, and it must not foster excessive government entanglement with religion. The court held that both the state statutes in question had secular legislative purposes because they reflected the desire of the state to ensure minimum secular education requirements were being met in the non-public schools.

MET [14:45] Now I’m gonna shift gears for just a second. Kitzmiller v. Dover is a case that doesn’t always come up in these conversations, but I think it’s important. The Dover case is actually about intelligent design. I include it here because after evangelicals seem to have lost the prayer in school’s battle, until recently, they turned their eyes to science classes. It is not an exaggeration to say that intelligent design is one big bit of hogum. If you’re not familiar, it is an alternative theory to evolution that some states have tried to shove into science classes and argue that it wasn’t evolution, but an intelligent designer that created the world. And I love that. It isn’t God, just some unnamed, far off, intelligent designer that created the world and absolutely did not follow the laws of established science, but set the world down whole cloth. It is creationism without Genesis. It is garbage, but Christians love to propose it as an alternative scientific theory that fills in the gaps. Friends, it is not scientific, and there are no gaps. I remember a student years ago in a class announced that evolution couldn’t be accurate because there was a missing link. I told them, “The missing link you are looking for is Australopithecus africanus, and we’ve known about it for decades, and just because most people are wildly ignorant of science doesn’t mean we should teach people to be more ignorant.” My students were shocked, offended, and educated. In 2004, the Dover School Board mandated that biology teachers mention intelligent design as an alternative to evolution using the textbook of pandas and people.

MET [16:54] This one didn’t even make it to SCOTUS. It stopped at lower levels. The judge concluded that intelligent design is not science and cannot decouple itself from its creationist and thus religious antecedents. The decision deemed the policy unconstitutional and halted efforts to introduce ID into public school curricula nationwide. One of the most recent ways we have seen all this rear its ugly head is in places like Texas and Alabama, where states have tried to make laws requiring states to place the 10 commandments in classes.

MET [17:32] A case that has come up is Stone v. Graham. Sydell Stone and a number of other parents challenged a Kentucky state law that required the posting of a copy of the 10 Commandments in each public school classroom. They filed a claim against James Graham, the superintendent of public schools in Kentucky. The court ruled that the Kentucky law violated the first part of the test established in Lemon v. Kurtzman, and thus violated the establishment clause of the Constitution. The court found that the requirement that the 10 Commandments be posted had no secular legislative purpose and was plainly religious in nature. The court noted that the commandments did not confine themselves to arguably secular matters, such as murder, stealing, et cetera, but rather concerned matters such as the worship of God and the observance of the Sabbath Day.

MET [18:26] Look, if it isn’t clear by now, this is a mess. The rules change depending on the court and half the time red states don’t follow the law anyway.

CRT [18:36] I don’t know if you know this, but there isn’t just one list of 10 commandments among Christians. The Catholic and some Lutheran versions combine having no other gods and making no graven images into the first commandment, whereas Protestant traditions separate those into the first two. For Catholics and against some Lutherans covering your neighbor’s wife and your neighbor’s possessions are divided into the ninth and 10th commandments, while other Protestant traditions combine them into the 10th, which carries an off-putting emphasis on your neighbor’s wife being one of his possessions. In Texas, for example, they mandate the Protestant version of the 10 commandments as found in the King James version of the Bible, excluding the Catholic version, which again is probably intentional. So even something that claims to be non-denominational most certainly isn’t.

CRT [19:22] Similarly, mandates for teaching Bibles in schools usually privilege one specific translation over others. Again, Catholics and some Orthodox churches include a set of books often referred to as the apocrypha in their Bibles, and they are usually excluded from versions specified in these mandates. So even if you are 100% on board with biblical principles and texts being taught in public schools, students of other denominations of the religion that these laws and mandates seek to privilege are still being excluded.

MET [19:51] Okay. So what does all of this say about our faith? Honestly, I don’t think it’s anything good. If we are so unsure about our faith and insecure about it that we feel the state has to mandate it, then we are not doing our jobs. If we are willing to turn our religion over to the state to take care of its keep because we need the power of the state to keep it going, then we are failures. I don’t think the drive to put religion in schools indicates any great belief in the great commission. I think it represents a profound lack of confidence in your own beliefs. If your beliefs are so small and so fragile that you depend on the state to make them valid, then that’s not faith. That’s bureaucracy. And I do not believe Jesus came to be a bureaucrat. I do not believe salvation comes in the classroom. I do not believe we can depend on the power of the state to justify our faith, and if you do, then your faith is ridiculously weak. We talked just recently about God and the public, and I think there is a place for that, but I would never depend on the state to be the source of my religion, and I am thoroughly convinced that it is an unchrist-like way to approach Christianity.

MET [26:30] 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 cost of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [27:00] Music by Audionautix.

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe debunks the claim that America is a Christian nation and how God is embedded in our culture and politics.

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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 – I am about to say something that will ruffle some feathers, but here we go – legally speaking, America is absolutely not a Christian nation.

MET – I know there are a lot of you who have been raised, or at least been told, to believe that America was founded as a Christian country, but I am about to explain how that is 100% a fabrication.

MET – On the one hand, there were definitely colonies that were founded on religious beliefs. I’m not denying that. A number of the first European settlements in America were Christian. And I think it IS important to note that they were Christian and not religiously free. The pilgrims and the colonists absolutely did not come here for religious freedom in the beginning. They came to establish religious communities. It really wasn’t until the Baptists were doing their thing in places like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania that there was any notion of religious freedom. So in that regard, I will grant you that the colonists established Christian communities.

MET – But that is not the founding of America. That is the founding of a bunch of disparate, religious colonies with no connection, guiding principles, or system of laws that make up any kind of community or government, let alone a nation. America came late.r

MET – America came once the colonies had formed into something like states, and those states wanted to join into something larger. And even that was contestable. Some of you may remember that before the Constitution we had something called the Articles of Confederation.Those were a failure because they did very little to create any kind of connective tissue between the states. They didn’t create a nation – they created a coalition of separate nation states that were somehow supposed to get along. That, to no one’s surprise, didn’t work.

MET – Which leads us to the Constitution.

MET – The Constitution is what makes America America. It quite literally constitutes us. So if you’re going to talk about the founding of America, the place to start is less with the colonies, and more with the debates about constitutional monarchy and the Bill of Rights.

MET – Which brings me right back to religion.

MET – Here’s the thing more people need to know – there is no God in the Constitution. He’s not mentioned. Not even once. Some people might get all up in arms and say, “What about our rights from the Creator?” but hold your horses – that’s not in the Constitution. That’s in the Declaration of Independence. And the Declaration isn’t a legal document. It’s the opposite, actually. It’s an angry break up letter, at best. But really more of a manifesto or declaration of treason. Yes – treason. So, literally, the opposite of a legal document. It’s definitely illegal.

MET – But even if it were, and I will pretend for just a second, what does it really say? That we are imbued by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. God does not give us our rights. Our Creator does. Look, Thomas Jefferson was a very smart, and very specific guy. If he wanted to say we got our rights from God, he would have said it. But he said our rights came from our Creator. Thomas Jefferson, like the vast majority of the Founding Fathers, was Deist who was deeply invested in Enlightenment philosophy. He didn’t believe in an all-powerful God who commanded the universe, and it is dishonest to put those words in his mouth.

MET – So what does this mean?

MET – Thomas Jefferson believed, like most Enlightenment thinkers, in natural rights. That’s literally what he said – that certain rights are self-evident. They are so inherent and so clear that we can see them obviously in the world around us. Those rights are given to use by Natural Law. That, may indeed, come from a Creator. But NOT God, per se. Nature, the ultimate creator, grans us rights. That is why they are self-evident.

MET – Okay, how can I make such a bold claim? The evidence is in the constitution. The Founding Fathers were looking to separate themselves from the monarchy (and really, the monarchies) of Europe. And the monarchies of Europe were defined by the Divine Right of Kings. The Divine Right of Kings is a fun little tautological idea based on Romans 13: 1-2 and Proverbs 8:15-16. Romans says, Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. And Proverbs argues, By me kings reign,and rulers decree what is just; by me rulers rule, and nobles, all who govern rightly. These verses led to the idea that kings are basically infallible. In short, you should submit to the king, because God made him king. And you know God chose him as king, because he is king. You don’t get to be king unless God wants it.So it’s a free pass for any monarch to do pretty much whatever they want because, according to the Divine Right of Kings, their words and actions are sanctioned by God; so to question them is to question God.

MET – What does this have to do with the Constitution and the Founding Fathers? And the answer is – very specifically and intentionally, NOTHING.

MET – By that I mean, the Founding Fathers very specifically and intentionally left God out of the law because they were trying to get AWAY from monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings. We were literally fighting a whole revolution to separate ourselves from kings. We had to eliminate God from the equation, otherwise we would get into very tricky territory about who had power and why.So the Constitution leaves God out. Instead of deriving its political power from God, the Constitution derives its power from the people – literally the government of the United States is supposed to get its authority from the consent of the governed – not a higher power. That’s legit written into the Constitution. So not only is America not a Christian nation, it was specifically designed to keep all of that complicated Christian stuff OUT of the federal government because it disempowers the democratic and republican (small r) nature of the nation they were trying to form.

MET – And just in case you needed that made any more clear, in 1797, right after the Constitution was ratified and the government was established, the Founding Fathers made a very clear statement about..In the last years of the 18th century, the United States entered into a treaty with Tripoli, a Muslim Barbary State. Article 11 of this treaty reads, and I am not making this up, As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. So in 1797 we announced to the world we are in no way a Christian religion and we had no problem with Islamic nations. Weirdly, the Christians of the 20th century missed the memo.

MET – NOW, I am going to complicate this all further by telling you that legally we are not a Christian nation, but culturally, that is a more nuanced question. I will die on the hill that Christians have no legal claim to America. But I am more sympathetic to claims that our cultural legacy is Christian. And that comes down to some of what I said earlier – the first colonies were religious, we have long had a Christian majority in the country, and I will definitely admit there is a difference between the law and the social climate.

MET – But here is something to think about. Let me give you a few facts about church attendance:

MET – Church attendance in colonial America varied significantly, with high, often enforced participation in 17th-century New England (up to 70% in some areas) contrasting with lower, more varied attendance elsewhere. While 18th-century,, the Great Awakening boosted attendance, estimates suggest formal church membership was low (roughly 17–20%) on the eve of the Revolution, despite high cultural adherence.Please note that – in the 18th century, that’s in the 1700s, church attendance maxed out at 20% of the population.That is a very surprising statistic for a lot of people. During the era of the Founding Fathers, we get various estimates. Some historians who study these things believe that less than 10% of the population attended church. Others put that estimate at closer to 50%! So it’s kind of hard to know. But, regardless, it would seem that at the best and most generous estimation, less than half of the population went to church

MET – Church attendance actually hit its all time high in the 1950s. That was when we were at our most churchy – we were the most Christian of our Christian selves at that point. And church attendance hovered right around 50%. That’s it – at the time in our history when Christianity was the most vibrant and had the greatest influence over America about half of the population had any regular involvement with a church

MET – Now, this is obviously a much more complex issue than just who goes to church when. The influence of Christianity is more than just how many people go to church. The cultural impact of Christianity reaches beyond the church walls and into sociological, economic, and political concerns well beyond church attendance.But on the other hand, there is something really striking that I need you to understand. Church people are, and always have been, the minority in the United States. People may identify as Christian because they aren’t atheist or they celebrate Christmas, but actual Christianity, as in, engagement with the faith, is actually pretty rare.So when people say this is a Christian nation, they aren’t making claims about how many Christians there are in the nation – because there just aren’t that many. And there never have been.It is actually a very small part of the population that has any involvement with the faith at all. And people think that back in olden times people were way more quote unquote Christian, but they really weren’t. America doesn’t hit its Christian stride until well into the 20th century.

MET – So when we make claims about America being a Christian nation, what are we saying?

MET – In actuality, it’s a claim about a very small group of people having an incredibly outsized influence over the population as a whole. Because the nation at large doesn’t really have any connection to the church. But the church claims to have a connection to the nation.

MET – More likely, it is a claim about culture. We are not a religious nation at all. There is no evidence to support that we are a particularly religious nation but we have what I will call a God problem.

MET – God is everywhere in our society. We hear about him in our economics, in our pop culture, and in our politics. But we don’t adhere to him. We are a Christian nation in that we insert God into anything and everything, but we are not Christian by any theological, practical, or spiritual definition. We don’t go to church, we aren’t theologically grounded or educated, we don’t adhere to scripture, and we don’t reflect any particular belief system. And yet, God is a huge part of our culture.

MET – My claim, then, is that our God problem is really specific to America – we have taken the trappings of faith, embedded them in our politics and culture, but stripped the actual Christianity out of it. The result is we have politics with the language of God in it, but God gets left out. And I say this not as a political statement as much as a historical one. I have LITERALLY just outlined for you all of the ways God has been stripped out of our public lives. But at the same time, we have added him back in time and time again, but in a way that adheres to our faithless lifestyle. We have God without the God. We have a God of politics and culture – not of faith.

MET – All of this brings me to what you probably guessed was coming – Donald Trump’s antics of the last week or two. Now, I could go on and on about his battle with the Pope. It is abundantly clear that there are people, generally those who support Trump, who feel that the Pope’s brand of Christianity is suspect. Given that the Pope’s brand of Christianity is kind of global and important, that’s a big problem.And there is obviously tension between MAGA Catholics and traditional Catholics.

MET – But what I want to focus on is THE IMAGE. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, stop now and Google it. On April 12th, Trump (and it was Trump himself) posted an image of himself dressed as Jesus, surrounded by divine figures and happy supplicants, with rays of light coming out of his hands, apparently healing a sick man. One of my biggest problems with the image was that the man he was healing looked a lot like Jeffrey Epstein, but that is neither here nor there. Trump has since deleted the image and backtracked claiming it is just evil, liberal media who sees Jesus in this image.It is obviously him as a doctor!

MET – Dear listener – do not let him talk to you like you are an idiot. That was a religious picture of Trump as Jesus and anybody who tells you any differently is insulting you. I mean, really, don’t talk to that person anymore because they have told you what they think of you and you deserve better. It’s Trump as Jesus. It’s blasphemy

MET – But how did we get to a place where ANY politician thought it would be acceptable to portray themselves as a deity? Where did this idea that a person could be a god or a messiah come from? This is our God problem. We are not a Christian nation. But God is endemic to our politics. We have so intertwined God into our politics, and made discussions of God a part of the political scene, that it is common for people to substitute a political leader for God, and God for a political leader. The God problem is not whether we are or are not a Christian nation, the God problem is whether we can tell God from our politics. And the thing is – we often can’t. We have so muddied the water between our politicized faith and our faith of politics that our president actually thought he could replace Christ. Like, he literally thought his supporters would appreciate it if he just supplanted the Messiah.

MET – That is not a God problem; that is a God emergency.

MET – We cannot claim to be a Christian nation if we live in a country where it is possible to substitute a person for Christ. And we cannot claim to be a Christian nation if so few of us are actually involved with the faith. Right now in America the percentage of people who attend church regularly is actually quite high. We’re coming in at about 30%. So in some ways we are MORE of a Christian nation now than we were at the founding – so do with that what you will. But that’s generally not what people mean when people say we are a Christian nation. But what they DO mean is suspect, at best. What they OFTEN mean is that God is at the helm, or that God is at the heart of our nation. And BOTH of those are debatable, at best.

MET – What IS clear is that God is everywhere, even if he is not a driving force. Because God has been politicized. God has been turned into an economy. God has been turned into pop culture. And if THAT is what you mean by a Christian nation, sure, great. There is something about God everywhere you look. But for those of us who take God seriously, that should be a sign of trouble, not joy. Because the God I believe in cannot be secularized by politics and pop culture.

MET – The God I believe in does not fit into the economic models we are working with in these United States. The God I believe in is not the sanitized and cheapened version so common in the public sphere.

MET – If that is what is meant by a Christian nation, maybe we are one. But I don’t know what that has to do with Christ..

MET – 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. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM – Music by Audionautix.com

We at The Priest & The Prof took a break from production over Holy Week and the week after Easter.  We will return on April 16th with a new episode.

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe talk about anger and argue that it isn’t always wrong, harmful, or sinful.

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Transcript

DDM – Hello and welcome to The Priest & 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. Today, Producer Carl is with me again, so everybody be nice to him. Today we’re talking about something a little different, but is as important to our spiritual lives as just about anything else we’ve covered, and that is anger. Now, it may not seem like it, but anger is just as an important part of our emotional and spiritual development as really anything else.

MET – We learn how to regulate our emotions as part of our emotional and social development, and figuring out what to do with anger is a big part of this. Just as a completely anecdotal and non-academic observation, I see a lot of this in people younger than me right now. Specifically in the struggles of young men. Now, more than at any time in history, men are expected to manage their emotions in an intelligent, empathetic, and sensitive way. Before, they have not really been expected to do this, and now they are not equipped to do this. The result is a huge backlash, and the advent of what is called the ‘manosphere.” Men are convinced they are being held to impossible standards and women are just asking men to be basic humans. The result is a lot of frustration, alienation, and a male loneliness epidemic. Much of this is because of an expectation that people learn to manage their anger and aggression.

MET – But anger is not new to the public. Anger has been an important part of American rhetoric since its founding. In 1741, Jonathan Edwards delivered his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” At that point, sermons were very much a part of public discourse. They were the public speaking of the day. The sermon, which is quite long, is based on one single verse. I think I’ve talked about it before. Deuteronomy 32:35: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” So, starting out very positive! And the whole sermon, I mean the entire thing, is about how God has the power to send us to hell.

MET – Have a few tastes: “There is no want of power in God to cast wicked men into hell at any moment. Men’s hands cannot be strong when God rises up. The strongest have no power to resist him, nor can any deliver out of his hands.—He is not only able to cast wicked men into hell, but he can most easily do it.”

MET – Or, my personal favorite: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”

MET – Right? Cheerful stuff. Historically, we have been taught that God is angry. It’s a bit of a paradox. God loves us and wants to show us mercy. But the reason we need mercy is because we are so awful.

MET – But Jesus has very different ideas about anger. Jesus does, in fact, get angry. Many people, especially girls and women, have been told it is wrong, sinful, or improper to show anger. Friends, that is a tool by those in power to keep you in line. It’s why women are told over and over again they they are too emotional and they need to keep it together. Because women have things to be angry or sad about and if we let that go on somebody might have to be held accountable.

MET – But anger is not a sin. And I know it’s not because Jesus got very, very angry. Jesus got angry when he called Peter Satan. Jesus got angry when he flipped over tables in the Temple. The difference is that Jesus didn’t get angry at people who were annoying him with their problems – he got angry at the people who were causing problems. He got angry at religious leaders and merchants. He got angry at the rich and the powerful. Jesus got very angry – but not at the everyday people around him. Jesus wasn’t angry at the “sinners” in his midst. He was angry at the people who put them in a position where they were disempowered.

CRT – Often, we try to sanitize his anger. Take the “widow’s mite” story. You know, the one where the rich person gives a large amount of money to the temple followed immediately by a widow who gives all that she can. We often hear this story in the context of stewardship drives where the widow is held up as an example to us all of how we should give all that we can to the church. But that interpretation ignores what immediately precedes and follows the widow depositing her coins. Jesus tells his followers that the scribes “devour widows’ houses for the sake of appearance” and that the temple, “adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God” will be destroyed. The widow deposits the last of her coins, and those two coins will do little more than further feed the scribe’s hunger. This is unjust, and Jesus makes that clear. This woman,as a window, has no means to make a “honest” living, yet she gives all that she has to survive on to a system that already has more than it needs. Is the temple system all that different from economists and politicians telling people to give up Starbucks and Avocado Toast so they can afford skyrocketing gas prices and the housing market that hasn’t kept up with inflation since the 1970s? Who is benefiting from those ever increasing costs? Surely not the people who need the most help.

CRT – So we’ve talked about God being angry with us and Jesus being angry with the institutions that promote injustice, but what about us being angry with God? I remember talking to a religious leader in college shortly after my grandmother had died. I was told that everything that happened, good or bad, was part of God’s plan, and we are expected to accept it and be grateful at all times. I was told that I needed to think of God as a parent who knows what is best for me and I just needed to accept everything and be thankful. So when my Grandmother died, it was God’s plan. If I couldn’t accept that, it was sinful. God, I was told, picks and chooses who should suffer, and we should be glad about it because that suffering was somehow good because it was in furtherance of “God’s plan.” Is it any wonder, then, that I rejected the idea of a God who was beyond question and ended up an atheist for many years?

CRT – But God’s story, as told through the Bible, doesn’t bear that out. The prophets of the old testament did not accept that the world was the way it was because of God’s plan. The Bible is full of figures who express anger, not just at other people, but even directed at God. Jeremiah says “You will be in the right, O Lord, when I lay charges against you, but let me put my case to you. Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive? You plant them, and they take root; they grow and bring forth fruit; you are near in their mouths yet far from their hearts.” The prophet Habbakuk rails against God, saying “Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing; why do you look on the treacherous and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?” The prophets saw fit to question God and demand justice. Why can’t we? Why do we tell people who are suffering that they should not express their anger and frustration with God? Why do we just accept suffering as the plan and will of a loving God?

CRT – Jonathan Edwards says we have to accept that because we are worthy of nothing but suffering and damnation. God is rightly so disgusted with us that he has to hold his nose and accept us rather than destroy us. Is that love? How is that any different than telling an abuse victim that they deserve whatever their abuser does to them?

CRT – Elizabeth will tell you that the idea that we are all worthless and repulsive in the eyes of God hasn’t gone away. Many Christians hold onto the idea that they are abject sinners and it is only through unearned and unfathomable grace that God deigns to save us from damnation. This leads to harmful rhetoric like “hate the sin, love the sinner” that is used against the LGBTQ+ community like it is supposed to be so gracious and loving to call someone’s God given identity something worthy of hatred.

CRT – I think that there is something to discuss there about how we are told to love our neighbors as ourselves, while at the same time we are told that we are wretched creatures unworthy of love. If we are taught to hate ourselves, then why would we need to extend love to anyone else? But that’s probably a topic for another episode.

CRT – What if we just stop doing that? What if we instead assume that all living creatures are worthy of love, respect, and salvation? Shouldn’t we be allowed to be angry if they are not?

MET – One thing I think it is important to me that we get across today is that it is not wrong for you to feel anger. If you’ve ever been to therapy you’ve probably been told many times that feelings aren’t wrong. We have to feel our feelings. Anger is one of those. But as is often the case, you have to get to the root of that anger.

MET – When we hear people who are angry speaking in public or trying to advocate for themselves, we often react very differently based on who they are. For example, Jasmine Crockett just lost a primary in TX to James Talarico. I’m not here to tell you who was a better or worse candidate, but I can tell you what people said about them. Crockett was seen by many people as ‘unelectable.’ She was too volatile, too angry. Too hostile. It must be noted that Crockett is a black woman.

MET – Okay, we know that does not make a person unelectable because Donald Trump is in office. His whole schtick is that he is mean and doesn’t care about people’s feelings. But the difference between Crockett and Trump is that Trump is an old rich white guy, and Crockett is a young black woman. And we allow old rich white guys to be as angry as they want to be, and we find angry black women to be problematic and abrasive. And this isn’t some liberal, DEI nonsense This is provable and and observable. People like Condi Rice because she is completely moderate in public. People hate Michelle Obama because she has the audacity to be opinionated. Trump isn’t bound by any of the same restrictions because he doesn’t have to worry about the color of his skin changing the way people see his aggressive approach to things. In fact, many people see his aggression as a positive. Whereas for Crockett, it made her unelectable.

MET – This is absolutely a matter of tone policing.

MET – Tone policing is when you tell certain people that they need to watch their tone, usually for the sake of civility, in order for their point to be taken seriously. The idea is that we must all remain calm, unmoved by our emotions, and detached if we are to discuss matters of importance. It’s a classic approach to discourse that supposedly favors democratic republics by allowing for the marketplace of ideas to work its magic. It also makes sure that the people who are not affected by the issues are the ones making the decisions

MET – Because you know what? Sexual assault and harassment make me mad. It infuriates me that 1 out of every 3 women in America will be sexually assaulted in their lives. It infuriates a lot of people. But the people who are most affected by it don’t get to speak about it because they are upset? We’re supposed to just turn this issue over to people who have no connection to the issue because they can calmly talk about it? Racism makes me mad. The school to prison pipeline makes me mad. I’m really mad about trans people being stripped of their rights and identity. But because I am angry about these things I can’t take part in public discourse, I guess, because I might let an emotion show?

MET – That is how oppressors maintain power. By keeping people out of the conversation who have a vested interest in it, those who cause the problems are able to keep it up.

MET – HOWEVER. We are also called to love gently. We are supposed to love our enemies. Blessed are the meek and the peacemakers, right? What is love in a volatile world? Can you seek justice, a process that inherently causes strife, in a way that turns the other cheek?

MET – I’m actually going to turn to the Civil Rights Movement here, for just a bit. I’m actually often prone to think about Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael in that regard, but when it comes to being peacemakers in an angry world, the folks who were a part of MLK’s portion of the movement were probably the best example. And I’m not going to tell you it’s because they were so peaceful and non-violent. They were non-violent. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t angry. You can’t read the words of these leaders and not feel the frustration and fierce anger .I think about Fannie Lou Hamer and her testimony in Congress. She was very forthright about what happened to her and how she was treated. She was mad she couldn’t vote. And it inspired her to get people to the polls.

MET – So consider the protesters of the Civil Rights Movement – the protesters were peaceful, but anyone who says the movement was is whitewashing it in unhelpful ways. Because the Civil Rights Movement was terribly violent. It’s just that the violence came from the state. We’ve seen the pictures – we’ve seen the dogs and the firehoses turned on protesters. And we know non-state actors went as far as to set bombs in churches and set fire to homes. The Civil Rights Movement was INCREDIBLY violent. But the violence came from white folks who were acting against progress.

MET – So this question of how we can be angry and gentle at the same time is front and center. The Civil Rights Movement was a group of people who were collectively angry on both sides.One worked together to harness their anger to make the world a more whole and loving place. The other side just showed themselves to be monsters.

CRT – I want to go back to the idea of God as the loving parent who knows better than us for a minute. Who among us hasn’t been angry with our parents at some point in our lives? Maybe it was something as simple as we didn’t like the rules they set forth in their household because we felt they were unfair. Maybe a parent hurt us or failed to protect us. Maybe a parent refused to let us live our lives in the way we want without judgement. Whatever the reason, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, we have all been angry at our parents. Same goes for those of us with children of our own. Every parent has been angry with their children at some point. We get angry because our kids don’t follow our rules. We get angry because our kids make decisions that we feel aren’t in their best interest. We get angry because our kids are angry at us. We can say the same about siblings, spouses, and friends.

CRT – Anger is a part of relationships. In a lot of cases, I think that anger is very much like the anger expressed by God, the prophets, Jesus, and even the Civil Rights leaders Elizabeth just talked about. That anger is rooted in feeling like the deity, person, institution, what have you, hasn’t lived up to our expectations. To the ideal we have. The prophets were angry that their people were oppressed by nations that were more powerful than them. Jesus was angry that the religious leaders were corrupt and enriching themselves rather than caring for the poor and marginalized. The civil rights leaders were angry that our country claimed liberty and justice for all and then refused to provide it based on the color of one’s skin. We’re angry at our parents because they are supposed to be the arbiters and first teachers about love and fairness and protect us. We’re angry at our kids because they are supposed to take the lessons and examples we provide and live them out in a way that we envision for them.

CRT – Anger that someone or something hasn’t lived up to our expectations is rooted in and requires some kind of relationship with whomever or whatever you are angry with. And the question then becomes if that anger is a means to better that relationship or, conversely, a reason to destroy or harm that relationship. But if there isn’t a relationship there and the expectations that come from that relationship to be angry about, then you’re just screaming into the void.

MET – Ultimately, I think anger can be righteous, but for me, the question is, “what are you angry about?” If you are angry about your kid’s tattoo or what they are majoring in – honestly, get yourself together. In no way is that a justifiable thing to be angry about. If you are angry about getting the wrong coffee order or losing the parking space you wanted, honestly, just go home. You are not really fit to be in public at that moment. If you are angry about injustice or inequality – then that is righteous. If you’re angry because of hurt, it’s an opportunity to make a relationship whole.

MET – God is not asking you to put your sense of justice, or even your emotions away. God is asking you to harness them for good.

MET – Thank you for listening to the Priest & 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.

MET – 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.

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe discuss their relationship to place and how that impacts their faith and the Church.

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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! Today, I have the privilege of having Producer Carl on the mic with me.

CRT – Hello!

MET – Yeah, so it’s an exciting day. Carl and I want to talk to you a little bit about “place,” so I would like to tell you a little bit about my past.

MET – I think I have shared with you that I moved around a lot when I was young. When I share how, I guess you would say, “mobile” I was growing up, people often assume I’m from a military family – but actually it was oil. My dad was just a plain old oil hand for most of my life, so when the oil ran out in one place, we would pick up and move to where it was flowing in another place. Those are called booms and busts. We moved to where the oil was booming, and we left when it busted – to go to another boom. And that’s pretty much what we did until I was a teen. Then when I was in my early teens we settled in the Permian Basin, which is one of the top oil producing areas in the nation. Our connection to oil waxed and waned over the years, but much of my life was shaped a lot less by family connection or tradition than petroleum.

MET – Because of that, when I was a kid, I had a different understanding of place than a lot of my friends did. So many of my friends had a hometown or a house they grew up in or a best friend since kindergarten. I had layovers. I had places that I would be for a year, maybe two, just long enough to make a few connections, and then start all over. So place meant something very different to me when I was growing up. Place wasn’t something you were connected to – it was somewhere you were going to. I didn’t have a hometown or a place I grew up – I had a favorite town I had lived it. That is a VERY different perspective on life than what most kids get. For example, I liked Bracketville better than Abilene because there was a lot more outside adventure, but I realized as I got older, that as a teen Bracketville would have been terrible because there were no opportunities for teens to be involved or do anything in Bracketville. Abilene (and later Midland), had opportunities to be involved in music or theater, for example. Bracketville teens just snuck across the border into Mexico for the weekend and got hammered. I cannot emphasize enough to you that these are not realizations a 14 year old should be having. They aren’t traumatizing, in any way. But an 8th grader should not be so familiar with the tenuous nature of place that she can recognize that the place she lived in while she was in 2nd grade that she loved so much would not have been good for her while she was a freshman. These are adult realizations.

MET – All of this is to say, I don’t feel about place the same way a lot of people do. I’m not sentimental about any particular town or house. I guess if you HAD to locate my place in any way, you could say I’m from the desert, but honestly, I’ve lived in New York so long, that it rivals how long I lived in the dry, arid lands because I also lived in the hill country and coastal plains while I was in school and grad school, and that was more than a decade of my life, as well. I am, in a very real way, placeless. My home is where my husband and my kid are. And right now that is here, outside of Rochester, NY. If we picked up and moved tomorrow, I would not leave my home behind, because it would come with me. My home is very much a matter of the people I love, and has little to do with WHERE I am.

MET – Now, I say that, but at the same time, there are some markers of “place” that even I can’t get away from. Our first apartment in Greece, NY will always hold a special spot in my heart because it was where my kid spoke their first words and took their first steps. It was a crappy place to live in a not-so-great spot – but it was the home I could provide for a while, and it was the stepping stone to a somewhat better life. Did I like it? No. But it did mean something to me. When I see pictures of it, I do feel a certain amount of sentimentality. But I’ll never go there again. I don’t long for it. It’s just a spot where special things happened, and I remember that.

MET – And I recognize some places are more special than others. I, like many people, was horrified when Donald Trump demolished the East Wing. You can argue all you want that the ballroom is an improvement (it’s not – if you have seen pics of that and thought, yeah, that looks great, then please don’t go into interior decorating), but it is nouveau riche and garish. But that’s not what bothered most people. What bothered most people is that he tore down a whole wing of the White House. That is the People’s House. There’s something special about that place. About that house. The fact that somebody could do something so flippant and just tear it down was astounding to so many in the public. That’s not a strip mall. It’s not JUST a building. It’s a place that matters.

MET – And I’m not ready to make the grand proclamation that place doesn’t matter at all! It matters that I’m from Texas. That affects the way I talk and think and eat and a whole host of things. But my cultural background and where I happen to be are two different things. Yes, my heritage is one thing. But the physical spot I am in is just that – the physical spot I am in. And that is a matter of circumstance – not great, theological or philosophical meaning

CRT – Unlike you, we didn’t move around a whole lot when I was young. We moved to the San Antonio area in Texas when I was very young and, even though my parents divorced when I was in elementary school, both remained in the same area until I was in high school, and even then when my dad moved away, I stayed with my Mom and step-dad until I left for college. Even so, I didn’t feel a huge attachment to the homes we lived in. Sure, I had my room and my things, but I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the places I lived.

CRT – We didn’t have an exclusive church home, either. Growing up Catholic, it was vitally important that we attended church every Saturday evening or Sunday morning, so it was often a matter of finding a Mass at a time that we were able or wanted to attend rather than making time for a specific church. I didn’t participate in many activities at the churches we attended, both because of our inconsistent attendance at any one specific parish and the fact that those churches didn’t have a whole lot of activities during the week for kids and teens. So it should come as no surprise that I didn’t feel much connection to “church” as a place either.

CRT – It may not come as a surprise, then, that when I went away to college, I didn’t find myself missing church and therefore didn’t connect with a church community when I left. Church had always just been a thing that I did on the weekends out of a sense of obligation rather than a sense of belonging. It wasn’t until I started attending church with you, Elizabeth, in grad school that I ever felt that kind of connection, like I had a “church home.” But that wasn’t because of the physical place. It was a home because of the people there and what we did in that place. That connection is something that I have wanted to find and cultivate for our kid. A sense of belonging to a church, not because I want them to be connected to a physical place, but because I want them connected to the people and what a church does.

MET – Of course, as is my wont, I’m going to tell you a little bit about some comm theory!

CRT – Shocking!

MET – I know! Come for the churchy stuff, stay for the intro lesson that you ignored while you were in college, right? Actually, this is something that Deborah would find interesting if she were here, because I know she is really fascinated by things like architecture, etc. But what I want to talk to you about is something called “material rhetoric”. I think I may have mentioned it before, but I want to talk about it again. This may well seem like a contradiction in terms – rhetoric is literally just words, so How can it be material? Well, that’s what I want to address.

MET – There are a couple of ways to think about material rhetoric – you can think of material rhetoric in the sense that rhetoric itself is a force in the world – it makes material change. Carl and I have been talking about this recently; we have been going back and forth. We can talk about rhetoric as an actual thing that causes action – it is material in the sense that it is both a product and produces. Or you can think about material things that ARE rhetoric, or rhetorical. And it’s that second one I want to focus on.

MET – This is this concept that material things can be rhetorical, they can make an argument. One of the most common examples is something like a memorial or a museum. Many of you have probably either been to Washington, D.C., or have seen pictures. And you may have seen, or seen images of two pretty unique things: the Vietnam War Memorial or the Korean War Memorial. These two memorial really stand out in relationship to the other memorials in DC. Now, I want you to think of the Lincoln Memorial for a second – huge, white, imposing – it’s really a testament to a giant of a man and a life well-lived. Many of the memorials in D.C. are dedicated to glory and triumph – they want us to remember what we have accomplished. The Vietnam and Korean memorials are very different. They tell very different stories. Soldiers’ names are written on black walls, and on the Korean wall, ghostly images are coming out of it. These memorials aren’t meant to inspire feelings of glory – they are dark. They are gloomy. These memorials tell stories about wars that killed a lot of people – and maybe we didn’t come out on top. These memorials mourn the dead as much as they celebrate them. These memorials were designed not to make everybody feel amazing about our accomplishments, but to make us stop and think about what we lost. THAT’S what is meant by “material rhetoric.” These are material things – they’re made of stone and iron and even water – but they make an argument. They tell stories. Museum layouts are designed to fashion a narrative. Where I went to school, where Carl and I went to school, is very clearly an old military school based on design and layout.

MET – There is something that the material realities of a thing, or a place, SAY about the message, or even truth of that place. And that I get that way more than just blind allegiance to a place because of sentimental connection. I may not understand why a person is deeply connected to a place emotionally, but I understand that some places make arguments. I understand that some places are telling stories. And I think when it comes to church, I am much more interested in that, the story, than some emotional connection to a building. What story does the church tell? Does the church say, we were once big and bustling but now we can’t fill the pews? Does the church say we have created a space where everyone has room and we are trying to meet all of our congregent’s needs? Those are two VERY different statements!!

MET – I never got wrapped up in loving a church or a specific church spot just because I was never at any church long enough to get enamoured. But that also taught me that God is not spatially bound. I was going to find God in any number of churches. The building was just a facade. The church, like my home, was about the people in it. And I also learned that the people in it could be good or bad arguments for God in ways that buildings did not always mirror. A beautiful visage did not always mean a Godly church.

MET – Material rhetoric is a big part of church life – we claim that material things have argumentative force all the time. We claim that the bread is the body and the wine is the blood, and somehow this means something. These physical things are a part of our metaphysical experience. But I think because liturgical churches get really caught up in the physical, they tend to…get caught up in the physical. God is not bound by our limitations. God is not bound by our buildings. God is not bound by our rhetoric or even our spaces. God is beyond materiality.

MET – In the Gospel of John the writer tells us that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God. That term used for “word” there is logos. It can mean word, but it can also mean “reason.” It’s where we get our word “logic” but also “logo.”. God has always been with us – as reason, as symbol. But not as a physical place, necessarily. Now, that is a claim I don’t think Deborah would like because she is kind of obsessed with bodies and the physicality of the faith, but John, unlike Luke and Matthew, starts us off with a God that rejects physical constraints. John’s gospel rejects the confines of a specific place.

MET – And my understanding of church has always been beyond the confines of a physical place, as well. I can name at least five different churches, off the top of my head, that I attended regularly by the time I went to high school. If I believed that place was essential to church (or God in general) then I would have to believe that some, or even all, of those churches, were invalid, because God was in a place – and I did not stay put. I was a kid – I was in children’s ministries and youth groups. And for somebody that was constantly moving having a place to turn to – a church – that was important. And I found my faith there. In each church. Because God found me there. Because God, like me, is not limited by place. He is placeless. He wandered in the desert, he walked the roads from Jerusalem to Nazareth, he and his friends moved from town to town telling their story – my faith is not a story of people who settled down. I am leery of people who expect God to do that, now.

CRT – I want to talk about one of the first sermons I ever preached. It was right here at Trinity, and it was on the Transfiguration of Jesus. You know, easy stuff, right? One of the things that always struck me about that story is that it speaks to me about the places we find God. In both accounts of the Transfiguration, Jesus leads three of his disciples, Peter, James, and John, up a high mountain where he is transfigured in radiant glory. During this, he is seen to be talking with both Moses and Eli’jah.

CRT – Now, Mountains are often sacred places in the Bible and in other religious traditions. Think of Moses on Mt. Sinai, the Greek Pantheon of Gods living on Mt. Olympus, even the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Mountains, and other high places, were where people on Earth could get as close to God or the gods as possible. It was where the physical and metaphysical realms almost touched. So if Jesus was going to be transformed in all his Glory and if he was going to commune with the great prophets of the past, then a tall mountain is of course the place where that was going to happen.

CRT – And Peter, recognizing that this place seems to be especially sacred, offers to set up tents or booths for Jesus, Moses, and Eli’jah so they can all stay up on the sacred mountain together. But Jesus doesn’t let them put down roots in that place, because God is coming down from the mountain to the people. Jesus makes the world a holy place by being in it. That’s what we are called to do as well. We aren’t called to build the biggest, prettiest, church building to contain God. We are called to bring God with us into the world.

CRT – Because that is what Christ did. Jesus didn’t set up shop and expect those that needed to feel his touch and hear his words to come to him. He went to them. He didn’t perform his miracles in royal places or in the synagogue. He performed them in the streets where the people who most needed those miracles were. He got his hands dirty, sometimes literally, to touch and to heal people who in many cases wouldn’t be welcome in those clean, holy places.

CRT – There’s a poem by Jay Hulme that comes to mind. If you heard our episode on Literature, I talked about him. He is a trans poet who grew up an atheist but was fascinated with church architecture. During his visits to cathedrals and churches in England, he came to believe and was baptized just before the Covid pandemic lockdowns began. But he, too, doesn’t only look for Christ in those buildings. The poem is called “Abide with us, Lord Jesus”

in the bleak earth, mould-dirt, in the tent and the tenement and the cold corner we found for ourselves.

Dwell amongst us in the ashes, in the filth and the fright and the freezing fear of eviction that comes with each knock at the door.

Make your home in the dust-dark doorways of dilapidated factories and dissipated department stores.

Our endless prayer: Come, Lord.

CRT – Hulme doesn’t go to a church and look for Jesus there. He calls out for Jesus to come to him in the least of holy places, even sofar as to call him to living homeless on the streets.

CRT – A lot of time and energy is spent discussing and debating the differences between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. I’m not going to get into most of that, but I am often stuck by this: the God of the old testament and the God of the new testament have different relations to place. In the Old Testament, a great deal of time and energy is spent on specific holy spaces. The temple, the tabernacle. And a lot of time and energy is spent setting forth rules on who is allowed to enter those places and directly encounter God. In the New Testament, however, God leaves those holy places and dwells among the rest of us. So the question is, does Jesus go to unholy, unclean places to let the unholy and unclean meet him, or does it mean that everywhere and everyone is holy.

MET – Ok, so Listen, Carl and I are not here to tell you that you shouldn’t love your home church. And we don’t want you to think that you shouldn’t think fondly of the place you were baptized or the church you grew up in or sang in the choir at for years. But we are here to warn you that if you start looking for God in a specific spot as opposed to the people there, you will be lonely.

MET – In the Gospels, at the crucifixion, the veil at the temple is torn in two. Symbolically, that’s supposed to mean (I guess) that there is not a separation between God’s priests and his people anymore. The clean and the unclean. But it is also a comment on the sacrosanct nature of the place itself. God has torn the veil in two because God is not confined to a holy spot. God is not in the Holy of Holies anymore. He is in the world. He is the people we see in our lives every day. If we think of God as a place then we are limiting him. And if you are limiting God, then you don’t really believe in a God that has the power to redeem and save because God is small enough to be put into your own private box.

MET – So, sure – think fondly of the places where you have felt God. But don’t fall prey to the illusion that he is somehow stuck there. Your church is the convenient place for you to find God, not the place where God is relegated to.

MET – Places certainly can be holy. But many places can be holy. A place is holy because God is there, and God is where people are doing his work. So classrooms can be holy. Homeless shelters can be holy. Hospitals can be holy. And these places should be no less revered for their connection to God than the church, because somebody may find him there. We don’t need an altar and a cross to find and worship God. God is where we are. If we don’t notice, that’s our problem.

MET – 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. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM – Music by Audionautix.com.