Latest / Tomorrow's American Catholic Podcast / The Narrow Way of Service with John Fugelsang

Transcript

The Narrow Way of Service with John Fugelsang · Tomorrow's American Catholic Podcast

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Tomorrow's American Catholic.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: This is the official podcast of Tomorrow's American Catholic,
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: a journal and publishing platform animated by a central question.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Who is Tomorrow's American Catholic,
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_03: and how is their understanding of themselves,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: their faith, and their church evolving in time?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: In each episode,
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: we speak with a spiritual practitioner who helps us envision new forms
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: of Catholic culture and ways of being Church.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: Our guests come from a range of backgrounds and traditions,
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: and we seek to proceed in a spirit of contemplative hospitality and synodal dialogue
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: where we can learn from one another.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: We thank you for taking some time to listen with us today.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: If you're interested in exploring further,
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: You can find additional podcasts as well as our written work at our website,
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: tomorrowsamericancatholic.org.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: And now on to today's conversation.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: We have today with us John Fugelsang,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_03: who is an actor, author,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: political commentator,
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_03: comedian,
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_03: and broadcaster who currently hosts the progressive talk show Tell Me Everything
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: on Sirius XM.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: John's many and varied acting credits range across film, television, and stage productions.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: He has hosted and co-hosted multiple shows,
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_03: including CNBC's Bullseye and the political talk show Viewpoint.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: He's also a regular guest on CNN and MSNBC,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: and he's contributed to the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_03: In 2007,
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: he premiered his solo show,
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: All the Wrong Reasons, off-Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: And he followed this with another off-Broadway show,
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: Guilt, A Love Story, which was nominated for a Drama League Award.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_03: And as a comedian, he's appeared at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival and at the U.S.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: This is quite a bio.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm impressed.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay, yes.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: I was going to say,
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: actually,
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: I will interrupt to say,
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: usually they come together pretty quickly, but yours was so varied and diverse.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: No, I'm all over the place.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a bit impressed you would go this deep, yeah.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_03: We tried to give the whole range.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's a range of work.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: I'll just note briefly then,
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: because this might be of interest to our listeners,
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: the Dream On film of 2015,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: which was nominated for a Best Documentary at
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: the New York Independent Film Festival,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: kind of trace the contours of the American dream.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: How it's evolved over time.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: And I just want to mention your new book,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_03: Separation of Church and Hate,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible,
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: Fundamentalist,
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: Fascist,
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: and Flock Fleecing Frauds,
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: which Anne Lamott called a brilliant and wise book,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: Rich in Spiritual Knowledge and Humor.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_03: So, John,
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_03: thanks for bearing with our extended bio,
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: but we just want to give our listeners the whole range of what you're doing.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: I'm so honored.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_03: I'm so honored.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not worthy.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Michael, you forgot the most important part about his bio, though.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: That was that his father was a Franciscan brother.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, that's what I get for rushing Michael through it now.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm going to have Catholic guilt all day.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is how it is.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: But we do like to begin with our guest background, John, and you have a very interesting one.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: You've told the story in different formats, but our listeners might not be familiar.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_03: Could you give us some of your background?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: You're so kind.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: My mother grew up in the in the south.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia during the Great Depression,
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: and she entered the convent right out of high school.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: The Daughters of Wisdom put her through nursing school and sent her off to Africa
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: to work with lepers in Malawi.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Before they did, they briefly stationed her in Brooklyn, New York at Holy Family Hospital.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: My dad had grown up in Brooklyn during the Depression,
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: and he was a Franciscan brother who wore the Jedi robes and taught history
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: to Catholic boys and coached the basketball team and...
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: when my dad first entered the Brothers,
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: his family was delighted that their child,
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: the former altar boy, was now going to be a Franciscan because of a brother.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's like close to a priest, right?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's got to be good.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: You got a guy on the inside that helps you get to heaven, right?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: You got a brother and that can only help having a brother in there.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And everyone was really happy.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then over the years, the teachings and ways of St. Francis had quite an impact on my dad.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: And he became like my father's Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and Elvis all in one.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And soon my dad's family didn't know what to make of him.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he was still Jack from Brooklyn,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: but he's talking about the civil rights movement all the time.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's talking about Gandhi.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's getting these degrees and studying Eastern religions.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he's writing conscientious objector letters for Catholic men who didn't want
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: to go to Vietnam War.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: What did the Franciscans do to this guy?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And my father sort of turned out to be a different kind of Christian
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: than his parents had expected him to be.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: My dad The brother met my mother,
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: the sister,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: and then fell madly in love with this quiet Southern nun
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: that he knew he had promised God he would never want.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't tell her, carried a torch in secret for 10 years.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: They became pen pals.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: When she was in Africa,
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: he would write long letters about everything going on in the States,
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: Vietnam and civil rights and LBJ.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: My mother's mother superior would open these letters and read them to
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: the whole convent in Africa.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: My mom was last to get her mail.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: Eventually, after 10 years, he finally Told her he loved her.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's a long story.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Eventually talked her into going on a date.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And they left the clergy and were married two months later.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: And they tried to raise us to be progressive,
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: free-thinking Catholics,
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: which is why I do comedy because I can't afford the therapy I so deeply require.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up like millions believing that Christianity is about
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: the stuff Christ taught.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: That Christianity is about the teachings Christ commanded.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you believe in Jesus for your personal salvation and the miracles and
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: the magic tricks, and that's all great.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: But it's humility.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to the margins to help the least of us.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Matthew 25,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: individuals and nations will be judged,
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: heaven or hell, on how they cared for the poor, cared for the sick.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome the stranger.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we're kind to those in prison.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus said, pay your taxes.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus was against the death penalty.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus challenged or overturned his own religion's laws on stuff ranging
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: from food purity to Sabbath observance to the death penalty to divorce laws.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I grew up kind of like millions of Americans thinking,
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: what happened to this religion of empathy and peace and love that I was raised in?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like it's been hijacked by this mean,
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: superiority-obsessed, White supremacist tax-free click.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of folks have gone through that.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And when they say that the largest growing religious demographic in America are,
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: well, some say it's Mormons, some say it's Islam, some say it's none of the aboves.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I've come to believe the largest growing religious group in our country are people
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: who were raised religious And now consider themselves spiritual because they're
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: so morally turned off to all the hypocrisy and cruelty we've seen from so much
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: of organized religion.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we're at a place now with all this strife and discord where It's
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: a great opportunity to remind people of what the teachings of Jesus actually were
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: and what a society based on those teachings that doesn't have to be a theocracy,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: but what an actual Christian society, according to Jesus, might look like.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because the older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced we can't ever have a Christian government.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I've also come to believe the teachings of Christ might be America's last hope.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's a long, wordy, preachy answer to a very short, tight question.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, it's important.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: And I was actually rereading about your background and your parents' story,
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_03: and there's a quote from your father I loved.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: There are two things that God can't do.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: He can't stop loving you, and he can't stop forgiving you.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk a bit about their gospel witness?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: It seems like at that time,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: they were kind of way ahead of their time at that era to be as progressive
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_03: as they were within the church.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: Could you talk a bit about their gospel?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_03: Understanding the gospel is now
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: filtered to you.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's lovely, Michael.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, like many, I'm sure, I'm sure many can relate to this.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: My parents were very conservative in some ways and very liberal in other ways.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think most of us are that way to some degree.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going by what those words mean in the dictionary,
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: not the Fox News definitions of those words.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Most of us are progressive in some ways and conservative in other ways.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I had the most conservative and the most liberal parents on the block.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we weren't allowed to have long hair in the 70s and 80s.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like we weren't allowed,
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: my dad didn't want us to be Republicans, but by God, he dressed us like Republicans.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was very small,
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: my father,
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: who was a high school principal,
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: wouldn't let me stay up to watch Battlestar Galactica premiere.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I was so mad.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that night he came into my room and I was lying awake out of spite, refusing to sleep.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, come here, I want to show you something.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: And he pulled me out of bed to come to his bedroom.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh, he's going to let me see the end of Battlestar Galactica.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: This is weird, though, because dad's a principal.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't let us get out of bed at night.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: It was very late.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: But my father had the late news on.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned this briefly in the book,
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: and he was watching the replay of that earlier day's news of President Jimmy Carter.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Signing the Camp David Peace Accord between Israel and Egypt.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: He could not believe an American Christian president had helped bring peace to
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: a corner of the Middle East.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad just wanted his kid there to witness a Christian,
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: a Muslim, and a Jew embracing in peace and nonviolence.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: I had no idea what I was watching.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: I knew who Jimmy Carter was, but the rest of it, I was like, wow.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Moshe Dayan had an eye patch,
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: which was pretty cool for me as a little one, but that was about it.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I could tell by my father's face...
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: That this was very important to him and very significant to him.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I had never seen him smiling that much.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: And to my dad, this was everything that America and Christianity could and should be.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: So we were raised, you know, in a house that was my dad's Holy Trinity was.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and Dr. King.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: it was very progressive in so many ways politically,
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: but socially very conservative in many ways.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: We went to mass every Sunday, every holy day, every holy day.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, even after school, you know how that is.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: You want to come over and play Atari?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'd love to, but it's Ascension Thursday.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: I can't.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: So we were both the most Catholic kids,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: but we were also the only kids whose parents voted against Reagan.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was pretty confusing for a while until I got older and started
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: to pay more attention to the teachings of Jesus than the teachings
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: of my organized religion.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: John, thank you for that.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think we grew up in the same household.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's pretty common.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of us are conservative, liberal parents.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: as I had mentioned to you before,
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: my parents are immigrants from Ireland, and they had six kids, five boys.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: And my mother absolutely was going to have one of her sons become a priest.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: So she shipped my brother and me off to seminary in high school.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: I lasted two years.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of got kicked out.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: And my brother made it through four years and then he left.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: my mother made me go to confession and go see the priest at our parish
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: when I got kicked out of seminary.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, man, I'm sorry.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: But you'll also appreciate this.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: My mother had a really good sense of humor.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: She'd have to, I would think.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Six kids and Irish.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and being Irish Catholic.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: And somebody asked her one time about that, you know, having so many kids.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, well, you know, we are Irish Catholics.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so we practiced the rhythm method for birth control.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then she stopped and then she said,
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: and you know those Irish men, they have no rhythm whatsoever.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I grew up in a household with my mother with that sense of humor at
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: the same time,
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: insisting that we kneel down on the side of her bed every night to pray the rosary
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: with her.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it sort of shapes who you are, I think.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: For good or bad.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, for both.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think, you know, there's a little bit of both in there.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we forget that.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: We forget that today,
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: with how important our, for me, my spirituality and my faith was very important.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm still sort of Catholic.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm probably about as Catholic as you are.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: I understand that feeling, yes.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I call it my asexual orientation.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have to remember that line.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: But it was that faith that shaped me and turned me into who I am.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so talk a little bit about that for you, too.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: How was it that, you know, that faith, understanding that it is both good and bad?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: How did that shape you to who you are?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: You're going deep.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, the whole point of Easter is that everything can go wrong.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: That every disaster can happen, that all your worst nightmares can come true.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: The story of Easter is that everything you've worked towards
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: and everything you've built and everything you've sacrificed for can all be taken
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: from you.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: The story of Easter is that your friends will sell you out and the cops and
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: the government will sell you out and the church will sell you out.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Your friends will deny they knew you and you'll be this naked,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: bleeding loser, abandoned and forsaken.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Taunted by the people who cheered you on Sunday.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: The story of Easter is one of love and acceptance followed by rejection
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: and suffering and torment and loneliness and humiliation and death.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the story of Easter is not about Jesus coming back from the dead.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's about what he doesn't do
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: when he comes back from the dead.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I speak to our agnostic and atheist friends.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: I never ask anyone to take all of the Bible as literal fact.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the story of Easter is about what doesn't happen when he comes back.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's no revenge,
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: there's no payback, there's no settling the score with the people who wronged him.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus never creeps up on Pontius Pilate like Clint Eastwood and hang him high,
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: showing the holes in his hands and saying,
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: next time you crucify a man, you be sure you finish the job.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: None of that.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't go after his friends who sold him out.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: So on American, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's so un-American.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's all forgiveness.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's all forgiveness for everyone.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's a reset.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's another chance.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: If there's one theme to me of the Bible, it's order and chaos.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: That the universe is in order and we monkeys, the Homo sapiens, keep throwing it into chaos.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: The Garden of Eden,
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: you got order and mankind can't follow the rules and throws it into chaos
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: and God forgives us and gives us another chance.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then humankind becomes so defiled in this world that God sends a flood
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: to kill us all, but he keeps enough of us alive because we get another chance.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then God comes to live and experience this creation himself in human form
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: and tells us to love each other and tells us to get rid of these hierarchies.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we respond by murdering him in the most brutal, humiliating way possible.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we still get another chance.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's the story of the Bible,
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: not the plot,
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: but the story of the Bible,
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: that we humans can defile and foul up this place and just make it as awful
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: as possible and we'll still get another chance.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Easter doesn't mean everything's going to work out okay.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: It means after everything went wrong, we still have a chance to make everything work out okay.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Easter doesn't mean...
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: That your sins are wiped clean and that justice has been enacted.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: It means we still get another chance in spite of all this suffering
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: to take this brief whisper of time we have on earth and pass the baton to those
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: in front of us and try to reduce the suffering and make it better on earth as it is
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: in heaven while we're here.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me,
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: that's why Easter has to come in spring because spring doesn't care about all
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: the death that happened in winter.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Spring's not interested in how sad it was when everything died.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Spring's just coming and life is coming back.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Whether you're ready for it or not, life will come back.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me, that is what has gotten me through so many times.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: The story of Jesus to me is inseparable from the yin and the yang and
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: that you can't have one without the other and that neither would mean anything
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: without the other.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: The suffering is part of life.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Our Buddhist friends are correct about it.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all just one quick,
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: quick little Buddhist sand painting that blows away with no trace of it
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: when it's gone.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: But we have this time,
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: and this time we have to use to do the things Jesus said to be of service.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And real Christianity is not about domination, but about transformation.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about being superior to other religions.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's about being superior to your former self.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the teachings of Jesus are there screaming at us all the time,
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: while media and religion are trying to convince us it's all about,
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: you know, being better than other groups of people.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know what I think?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: Please.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: I wish you'd join in and class this thing up, Barbara.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: You are a wonderful preacher.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, this is not what I want to hear.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's really what I'm always dying to hear on a Sunday.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: the church as an institution is somehow afraid of That radical message.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so the gospel becomes domesticated and our schools become appropriated.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so we water everything down to the point where it becomes... Branding.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Logos.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I even think,
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: you were talking about how,
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: you know, the far right has taken the Bible as its own, you know, but...
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Same way with the EWTN and the Blessed Mother.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: I feel that way about the American flag.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like, we're just going to claim this as ours.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it takes on a whole new...
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: We've ceded patriotism.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: We've ceded spirituality.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how it was in Jesus's time, too.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the whole story.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus was killed...
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because a minority of the conservative religious joined forces with authoritarian government.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: What we're witnessing in this White House is literally what killed Jesus
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: because they are about power.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: They worship power.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Fundamentalism has to believe not that I'm better than you, that God thinks I'm better than you.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what's ruining Islam.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's what's ruining Judaism.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's what's ruining Christianity.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: The fundamentalists of all the world,
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: when our atheist friends say, oh,
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: religion's responsible for all the violence and Oppression of women and homophobia,
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, I'm always like, I had this fight at Bill Maher's house once.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, it's not religion.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's the extreme conservative fundamentalist wings of all religions, right?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: The overwhelming majority of moderate and liberal and even conservative Christians,
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Jews,
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: and Muslims are getting along just fine right now around the world in families
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: and schools and businesses and neighborhoods.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it is the malcontents.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: It is the violent ones of all the world's religions.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: Who get all the press.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Nice people getting along with people who are different.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretty boring.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're not going to get clicks for that.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: They're not going to get any engagement for that.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: No ratings for that.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: But someone hates and is spreading hate.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Put that on TV right now.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's going to be the imprint to our culture of what religion is, the hate.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because the majority of spiritual people are out there being spiritual,
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: but it's the fundamentalists who believe the same five things,
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: no matter what the religion.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, men are second class citizens.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't matter your religion, Hindu,
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Judaism,
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: the more to the right you are of any religion,
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: the more you just believe that God thinks 51% of humankind is a little bit inferior
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: to 49%.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's all religions.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, the sex hangups, right?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Sex is only there for procreation.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: If women or gay people are enjoying it, it's evil, evil, evil.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: All religions, the more to the right you are, the more you believe that.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: Number three, violence is okay if my side does it.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: All the fundamentalist religions think that God gives me a pass from what
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: the holy books say about hurting other people because I'm on God's side
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: and you're not.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: Number four, they always focus on punishment over healing, always.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And number five, the victim mentality, the persecution narrative.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Bad things happen to me, so I'm allowed to do this now.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Those five traits unite fundamentalist Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say that fundamentalist Christianity has more in common with fundamentalist Islam.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Than it does with moderate or liberal Christianity.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: They don't follow Jesus.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the point that my book's about and that my next book's about.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: They don't follow him.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: They use him.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: They don't like his teachings.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus's teachings are kryptonite.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: They are a live grenade to authoritarian systems like fundamentalism or Christian nationalism.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can't have a top-down authoritarian hierarchy coexist with the Sermon on the Mount.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: The Beatitudes are chaos.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's just love all over the place.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: There's no water there.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is why they always fight to put the Ten Commandments in schools and
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: in courthouses, right?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever seen our right-wing brothers and sisters fight to put
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: a single teaching of Jesus on a building wall?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Ever.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Ten Commandments can coexist in any government.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Ten Commandments can happen in capitalism, socialism.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Ten Commandments can exist under the Nazis.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's a list of things you can't do.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't challenge power.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Ten Commandments are great.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a fan.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, every six-year-old should learn not to covet your neighbor's wife like I did.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: But again, they don't challenge power.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: They don't challenge authority.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's why they're still useful to those in power.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the Beatitudes blow up any notion that any person is above any other person in this world.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why you will never see the right wing quoting it.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: They use Jesus, not follow him.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: First of all,
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: let me say,
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: you're sounding very Franciscan, so you really got that from your father.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Dad.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean that as a compliment.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'll take it as a compliment.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm writing a book now on why it's time for Franciscan Renaissance.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I can't wait.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait for this.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm writing a book right now that is going quite a bit into Francis and his life.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: Is it?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, nice.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'll share some of my research with if you want,
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: because my whole premise of my book is that we have to reimagine who St.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: Francis was.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, no.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Your book has credibility.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have that.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have that.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: I have no credibility or tenure to defend in my work.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't know.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: You're a son of a Franciscan, so that gives you some credibility.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: I only worked for him for 10 years.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Which, as you know, to Franciscans, it's like herding cats.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, my God.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is so fun.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: No,
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: my credential is being a comedian and being a talk radio host because I've learned
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: from conservative media that being a talk radio host means you're allowed
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: to pretend you're an expert on everything and publish books about it.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really worked out well.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: But to get
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: back a little bit to what you were talking about,
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: and one of the things that really fascinates me is our whole patriarchal society
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: that we have.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: I find it interesting that for Christians in particular,
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: you did mention the resurrection.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: And the first person to see the resurrected Christ was Mary Magdalene.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: The same women who were the ones who didn't abandon him were the first ones to see him.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I've written about this, about how Jesus could have appeared to anybody.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: He could have chosen anyone.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't an accident that he picked Mary Magdalene and the women.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: He could have because he was God, according to our teachings.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: So he could have.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Chosen anyone.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: He could have gone and first appeared to Peter or anybody.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: He chose Mary Magdalene,
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: and he chose Mary Magdalene and the other woman,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: and he said, go and spread the good news.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: Why is it that then we turn that around and say, oh, but women can't preach?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: Because Jesus kind of told them to do that first.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: One of my favorite subjects.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's a quote when I was reading a little bit about you
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: that I actually marked down because I thought it was really powerful.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: You were talking about your mother and your father and their romance and whatnot.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: You said about your father,
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: he was someone who was completely unable to separate his devotion to God
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: from his devotion to his wife.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, wow,
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm And we make this,
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: the Catholic Church makes this requirement for celibacy when,
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: if love isn't made real right in front of us,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: then it becomes an abstract, you know, this idea.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Wow,
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder how you feel about the whole celibacy requirement in the priesthood.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: I just think priests would be better people if they were in relationship with...
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: You don't think celibate men wearing dresses should be giving out marriage advice?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what you're saying?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Barbara,
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's an interesting question to ask John because his mother
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: and father took a vow of celibacy.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so if they didn't break that vow, he wouldn't have been here today.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: You want to talk existential crises.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: When I was 11, I realized that my parents promised God I would never happen.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm technically not supposed to be here.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that made me a neurotic for about 20 years until I realized that I'm...
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Religion's all about the contradictions and the paradoxes and you have to embrace them.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so I embraced mine because of religion,
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not supposed to be here, but because of religion, I get to be here.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I've learned to walk through the contradictions that way.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: In the case of celibacy,
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know, it's what we call some unholy bullshit, if you don't mind my saying so.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: The first pope, St. Peter, was married.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: All the preeps and popes and bishops were allowed to marry for over a thousand years.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Married priests is technically the conservative point of view.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was only in 1139 AD that Pope Innocent II made celibacy the law of the church,
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: not because Jesus was a bachelor and not because sex is bad,
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: but because the church was greedy and they didn't want priests and popes
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: and bishops leaving land and wealth to their children.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: That is why celibacy became the law of the Holy Roman Empire,
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: greed, way before the Da Vinci Code.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's why it happened.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: In reality, there's nothing in Jesus' ministry that says that priests need to be celibate.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's a control system.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a mechanism.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying it's not without beauty and there have been great, kind...
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: Generous priest and it's a life of sacrifice,
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: but yeah, it's got nothing to do with the Bible or Jesus.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll just go out on a limb and say,
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've seen that a thousand plus years of celibacy hasn't really led to
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: the most desired mental health outcomes for your priest force,
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Catholic Church, if you know what I'm saying.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: Let these people marry and watch these problems go away in a generation.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: And again, because you're asking them to give advice to married couples.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Come on.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's crazy.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like when I married a Protestant, I couldn't believe how sane other churches really were.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: And how sane my wedding was.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because to your point earlier,
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Patrick,
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: I had my massive New York family over here, my massive Southern family over there.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: What's that in the corner?
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's my wife's entire extended Protestant family at that two tables.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: How nice.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: But you're right about the women.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: So Jesus was the greatest destroyer of hierarchies,
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: and there was no greater second-class citizenry in his day than
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: the majority population of women.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: And my favorite part of the book was learning more about this,
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: because I thought I knew how bad women had it.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: But you read these stories, and you don't understand the context.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: At one point, I say it's like the gospel according to Ike Turner.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Women were legal property.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you were tired of your wife, according to Deuteronomy, you just say, hey, I'm done with you.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: And no lawyers, no prenups, just divorce, kick her out.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: That day, that day, kick her out.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then if your wife didn't have family to go live with,
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: her options were begging or prostitution or death.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: Divorce was a death sentence for women in this time, in many cases.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: And again, their legal property, women's anatomy was weaponized against them.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: Menstrual blood,
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: which gives us all life,
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: was used to convince generations of women that they were ritually unclean in
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: the eyes of God and shamed by the own body functions God gave them.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, all the misogyny, right?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then Jesus shows up and he blows us away.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: He talks to women, which was not allowed.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: The longest private conversation he has with anybody in the Bible is with
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: a Samaritan woman at the well, and that broke all the laws of his religion.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: Absolute favorite stories.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I mean,
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: but like as a kid, they teach us these stories and they don't give us the context.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that was,
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: the story of Mary and Martha when the apostles were over the house
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: and Mary's sitting at Jesus' feet learning and Martha's doing all the housework
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: and cleaning.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And there's like 13 guys coming over, even Judas.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: And Martha's got to do all, even for Judas, Martha's got to do all the damn cleaning.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus finally says, hey, Martha, you're stressing everybody out.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Mary made the right choice.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Chill, baby.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: I paraphrase from the Hebrew.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, you're a kid reading this in church.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, I still feel bad for Martha.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: She's doing all the work.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: What they never told us as kids was that it was illegal for Jesus to teach Mary.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was illegal for women to learn.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And by sitting at the rabbi's feet, Mary was in the position of the teacher's favorite pupil.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: They don't give us context on any of this to know
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: that what Jesus is essentially telling this woman is,
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: education's more important than housework, lady.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's the story he's given us.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus is by far the greatest feminist in the Bible.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then he dies.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then Paul rewrites it all to his specifications.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, Barbara, go ahead.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I was going to say that I love the teacher,
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Cynthia Bourgeau, and she wrote a book on Mary Magdalene.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And what it says,
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: and a lot of research shows that Magdalene is not where she was from necessarily,
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: but it was the word for the tower.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: So Jesus Jesus' nickname for her was the tower.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: She was the one that got it.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: She was one of the investors too.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: Her and Susanna.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, let's not forget who paid for this.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Who are the executive producers?
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: These guys just flopping on couches everywhere.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: These 13 guys for three years.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, no,
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: we find out that they had benefactors and they were women and Magdalene was a woman
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: with money.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Who Jesus apparently drove a demon out of.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then she took a shine to the crew and help support their endeavors,
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: which to me is a deeply interesting part of the story
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: that doesn't diminish Jesus's divinity at all.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: I find the truth is,
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: or at least the facts of the Bible are much more interesting than what we're raised
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: with.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: But obviously we're raised that,
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: she was a prostitute because one of the early popes decided that the story
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: when Jesus is over having dinner with Simon The Pharisee and the woman comes in
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: and is weeping and weeping and on his feet.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the Pharisee's like, oh, I wish you knew what a slut she was.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus is like, look at her.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: How can you say that?
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Look at this woman.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: She doesn't, well, I think it was Pope Gregory decided, oh, that woman was Mary Magdalene.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: Mary Magdalene, yes.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it was prostitution she was crying about.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: I've decided that.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that's all it took.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's never in the Bible anywhere.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: But 2000 years, we're raised to believe that she was this.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was a music director at a parish for,
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I sat through all the masses and every year they used to bring
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: in some seminarians to get up there and pray for vocations.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: We'd all need to pray for vocations because, you know, we just don't have enough priests.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I used to say all the time, well, wow, wow, wow, stop crying.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want married men.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want gay men.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want women of any kind.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Knock it off.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like crying about it.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: And the irony of it today is that if you're an Episcopalian priest
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: and you're married, you can convert to Catholicism and be a married Catholic priest.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: We got a couple of married priests that way.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: And again, this is biblical.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is all the hangups of dead guys.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's the hangups of dead guys controlling our behavior now,
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: and it's got nothing to do with Jesus.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, God didn't come down and strike lightning on those churches
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: at those married Episcopal priests and how Catholics preached that.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And again, for me, like, this is the first issue.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the first issue that radicalized me as a kid was the death penalty.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: But the first issue that really made me recognize that I had strong differences
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: with my church,
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: it was either homophobia or the treatment of women in the priesthood to realize that
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: The Catholic Church believes that 51% of the population is unworthy of saying mass.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: And if the Virgin Mary came back, they wouldn't let her say mass.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: They wouldn't let her say mass.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just this whole like,
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: wow, it's almost like men wrote this whole system based on nothing Jesus ever says.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: They'll take a couple of lines of Paul,
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: as you guys know better than me,
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: a couple of lines of Paul and use that to justify centuries of misogyny
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: while also ignoring,
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know, in the same passages of Paul that he made Phoebe a deacon.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the same letter where he says women can't speak in church,
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: you see him saying that Phoebe's a deacon.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: So which one is it?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like different guys have rewritten this stuff over centuries, isn't it?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the men who ran the ship said, oh, no, ignore the female deacon.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Don't talk in church, ladies.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: And to this day,
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: so many of these right-wing friends,
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: and y'all know this better than me, they follow Paul.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: They don't follow Jesus.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I've found this,
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: the most fun thing you can do with your MAGA loved ones or coworkers or People
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: in your social media feed, just ask them sometime.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you find yourself in the conversation with the Trump supporting loved ones,
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: you know, family reunion, you know, there's a lot of fun you can have here.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to fight them.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: Make them fight God.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's what my book's about.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: Make them argue with Jesus.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to argue with them yourself.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I always say,
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: you know, ask them, give me one teaching of Christ that Donald Trump fought for.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Give me one teaching of Jesus from the gospels that he campaigned on.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Or fought for legislatively.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: Give me one teaching of Jesus from the Gospels that the MAGA movement or
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: the Republican Party have fought for in this century.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: Just ask them, bring it back to Christ.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: One teaching of Jesus.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do this,
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: you'll find out quickly how little your friends know that book they wave
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: over their heads so bombastically.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've done this hundreds of times on the radio for the last 10 years.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because the first
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: thing they're going to say is, well, he's anti-abortion.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: Abortion is always the number one answer.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: Number one thing, yeah.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they don't know.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: The Bible's not against abortion.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus is against the death penalty.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: But abortions are legal and free in Israel right now because the Bible never bans them.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, Patrick.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: I was going to say, not only the Bible, but it was up somewhere in the late 16th century.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot the Pope's name, but he issued an edict.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: And that was, it was the quickening or the insolument.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: And he described that as happening at 22 weeks.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: Abortion was fine up until that point.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then after that, it was a sin.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the official Catholic Church's teachings up until the 1800s
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: when another Pope came and changed it.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, Aquinas wrote that For a male fetus, it's eight weeks.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: And for a female fetus, it's 16 weeks.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: When he wasn't
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: writing the just war theory.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: And again, like if you don't read the Bible, you won't know, right?
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the second most common thing I get was, oh, the strong border.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd be like,
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: The only commandment in the Bible about borders is the commandment
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: to welcome
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: the stranger.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: it's a great one,
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: to have this with your friends,
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: with your right wing friends,
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: like the God of the Hebrew scriptures commands us to welcome the stranger,
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: commands us to treat the alien as one of our own.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: And his son shows up in Matthew 25 and Jesus says individuals
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: and nations will be judged by how they welcome the stranger.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: So put it to your right wing friends this way.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Why should I listen to you and Donald Trump?
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: And reject God and Jesus.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to fight with these folks.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: Let them fight with this Bible they pretend to follow.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: Let them fight with Jesus.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: They don't follow him.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: They use him.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the more we know the teachings,
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: the more that ordinary lay people know the actual teachings,
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: the harder it is for these people to pull this camouflage act.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: This was the Catholic Church early on,
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: their whole My whole understanding and idea was not to have people know
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: the teachings.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: Only the preachers, only the licensed people can preach.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's what St. Francis fought about.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: St. Francis believed that everyone should have access.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: This is it, Patrick.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: You're nailing it.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is why our MAGA friends don't know the Bible, right?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's by design.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's 1700 years of gatekeeping.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: My mom used to say that when she was in the convent,
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: for many years, the nuns weren't allowed to read the Bible.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: My father refused to believe this.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, you're crazy.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's not true.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: My dad couldn't believe she would say such a thing.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I researched it.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: It really is true.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: My mother always said the nuns were told,
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: no, you go to mass every day and father reads the Bible to you.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is how the church kept its power.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: You got to realize they were the filters.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: People weren't getting Jesus.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: They were getting Jesus filtered because most people were illiterate for
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: the first several hundred centuries,
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: a few centuries, thousand years, people are illiterate.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: They can't read the text themselves.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact is that critically engaging with scripture On Jesus is historically
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: a very recent concept, 2000 years of Christianity.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: We've only been reading the Bible for ourselves for about 400 years out of 2000 years.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the Catholic Church had a built-in firewall for a millennium, Latin.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: They made sure that people could not ever directly know the teachings of Jesus.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: They had to come to the church to have it filtered through.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Jesus' teachings on institutions,
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus' teachings on authority were for a thousand years filtered through authority
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: and institutions.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: So people knew Jesus is the divine son of God and he built this here church and it's
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: the only path to salvation if I believe him.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: But they didn't necessarily know what he said about money.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: What he said about wealth, what he said about violence, what he said about women.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't necessarily know how he uplifted the lowest of us and told the rich
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: that they were screwed and that God preferred the poor.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't necessarily know that he commanded individuals and nations to welcome
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: the stranger and that he identified with the prisoner.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, just he's God.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't want to go to hell,
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: you'll believe in the man's story, not necessarily believe in his teachings.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's Christian nationalism.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: They'll fight for Jesus.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: They'll worship him in public, but they won't listen to him.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_03: There's no incarnate Christ there.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_03: There's just the symbol of Jesus holding the gun that we might see at the rally or something.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's just a total perversion of...
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_03: Of what it's all about.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And his movement's all about humility.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: His movement's not about total domination of the school board.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: His movement's about going to the margins.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: The last shall be first.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: How you treat the lowest is how you treat me.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you think that you're better than other groups of people or nations
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: or entire faiths because you believe in Jesus,
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: then brother, you don't actually believe in Jesus.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned humility.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know the difference between the Jesuits and the Franciscans?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: What?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: We still pretend to be humble.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_02: The Jesuits have given up all pretense.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's hilarious.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: You could use that with Jim Martin sometime.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_02: He's a good guy.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: It also goes against just what John was saying,
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: back to Barbara's quote earlier about the idea of the incarnate love.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: We hear a lot about the crisis of masculinity and all this kind of idea.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_03: And when you think about Jesus breaking down these transformative barriers to women,
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_03: you see it's really, it's a tenderness and a gentleness.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's like the complete inversion of what we're seeing with the Christian nationalist movement.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's just like, How do we get that message across?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_03: when you really do sit with the Gospels,
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_03: you see it's just, it's a revolution of tenderness.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_03: He's a chain breaker.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of my favorite stories is the story of the bleeding woman.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Which Sam Cooke sings about in Touch the Hem of His Garment.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: And y'all know this one,
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: that she's bleeding for a dozen years and this means she was ritually unclean in
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: the eyes of God.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: She wasn't allowed to go out in public
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: because you guys know women's bodies were weaponized against them.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you were menstruating, you couldn't be in public.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: You were unclean.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: If you sat on a chair a menstruating woman had sat on, you were unclean.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you touched a menstruating woman, you're unclean in the eyes.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: If she gives birth, she's unclean.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: If it's a female baby, She's unclean for twice as long.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: They got the message across to the women.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: Women were taught.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: And again,
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: in many cases,
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: this was about hygiene,
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: but the real message was this body shame that was instilled for centuries, right?
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: So this woman's been bleeding all this time.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: She goes to all the doctors.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: You guys know the story.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: She hears Jesus is coming.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: She goes into the crowd, touches the hem of his garment.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: He says, who touched me?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, me.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, daughter, you're healed.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's a happy story.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: They never teach us the context that this woman was breaking the law just by going
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: into the crowd.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: She broke the law of her own religion and made everyone
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: in this crowd risk them all being ritually unclean.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: When she touched Jesus, she made him unclean in the eyes of God.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like every kind of conservative religious rule and law you can imagine.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: She shatters the taboo and Jesus breaks it for good.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: He turns around and it's the only time in the Bible he ever calls anyone daughter.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he calls it to a ritually unclean woman who just broke the law
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: to make him ritually unclean too.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's no payback.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's no scolding.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's no shame.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: He calls her daughter, says that her faith has healed her and breaks a taboo forever.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: It is amazing that these misogynists think they're on the same team as this guy.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: And you're absolutely right.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's that we don't go deeper into those stories.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: Or the context of them.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: The context just blows away
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: every time.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because this guy lived under Roman military occupation.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: He lived in a police state.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was a slave state.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: You've seen Spartacus.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: They line the dead bodies of the crucifixes along the side of the road.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the empire saying, this is what happens to those who question Caesar.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if Jesus didn't want to die, all he had to do was say two words, hail and Caesar.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: We think, oh, the kingdom of God is within you.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: What pretty poetic church talk.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: That talk was treason.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: Just acknowledging that there could be another kingdom,
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: and there could be another king besides Caesar.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Rome murdered people for less.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: The story of Jesus is such an incredible example of resisting empire
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: and authoritarianism in really interesting,
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: creative,
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: loving ways that weren't violent,
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: but just made the domineering systems look ridiculous.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: Also a story of we've turned the whole theology of Jesus came to die for our sins
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_02: so we could get to there.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's it, man.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: All about meaning, not service.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: What Jesus said, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, it's like...
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: If you love me, you'll keep my commandments.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he said we're here to create the kingdom of heaven, not to get to heaven.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: He's all about service, not power.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: And we still teach a whole theology centered around, my whole purpose here is to get to heaven.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: Everything I do- Yeah, but that's a lot easier, right?
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's a lot easier to control people.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: Salvation is much easier than the last shall be.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: How am I going to run an empire with people saying the last shall be first?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: Personal, it's about you not burning in hell because fire hurts ghosts.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Fire can hurt a ghost.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: So because of that, I was like 15 when I realized, oh my God, fire can't hurt a ghost.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: And boom, my hell mythology disappeared for me.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: But because they thought fire could hurt a ghost, you got to believe in it.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it all became about believing Jesus' story rather than following his commandments.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that is core to the racket.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: My salvation.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to heaven.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: God likes me better.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: And what was that about those dregs?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm supposed to what?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give to my church.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: People prefer a transactional model.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: I want a vending machine, God.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: God will do that.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to put in good deeds and get out happiness from this machine.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: God can manipulate it in that way.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at everything that Jesus did, it was never transactional.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: He never really.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: No, you got to pick up your cross and follow me.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: Not have a good time, not you're better than other people.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: You got to pick up your cross and follow me.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: It is not supposed to be easy.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: When he says,
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: I came to bring a sword, he's not talking about a literal blade for bloodshed.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: He's saying that if you follow my narrow path of prioritizing the marginalized,
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: it's going to cost you something.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to lose friends.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to lose family.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: You protest this war.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: You got people that are going to not be your friend anymore.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: You protest this policy against trans kids or migrants.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: You got people that are going to say that you're a communist.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: He came to bring a sword.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it means.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's about love and empathy.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: And if you walk this path,
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: this narrow way of service for the least fortunate,
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: you're not going to win popularity contests.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not really as attractive as saying,
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: hey, believe in this and someday you'll get a harp.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting, too,
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: because one of our former guests that we had on was the pastor of our church,
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: Pat, and my church where Pat and I met.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: Father Tom Lynch.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that he's been working on for a long time is this idea
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: that oftentimes people are believers and they prefer to be believers.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: They can say the creed.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: I believe in this.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is all nice.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a space between that and becoming a disciple, which means to walk in the way.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in between those two, There's a desert.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: And like you said, that involves suffering.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: It involves loss.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: It involves surrender.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_03: The desert is a great image for that, Barbara, too.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_03: A desert between those two.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_03: Because I think of the desert of Exodus, you have to cross through that.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_03: That's beautiful.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: And without that, it's all nice.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's all nice.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is nice.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: And niceness is good.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: But niceness is a denial mechanism.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: You can do it.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: You can hide from all the ugly out there and wrap it up in nice and believe in
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: a world that's nice and sweet.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: And you know what?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: That can be comforting.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: Nice people are nice.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: We need them.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: But again, if you're denying the suffering of others, you're creating a fantasy land.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not faith.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's denial.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: Father Tom would also sometimes get up at the end of Mass and say,
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_02: I hope I've made you feel uncomfortable.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because if I haven't made you feel uncomfortable, I'm not doing my job.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: But that's the job, right?
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the Southern Baptist Convention was created because they wanted
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: to make slave owners feel more comfortable when they sat in jail.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not about comfort.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus did not come here to
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: afflict the uncomfortable.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, you don't transform in your comfort zone.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: You only transform when you...
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: Comfort zone will kill you.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: Comfort zone will kill you.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have a question for you, you know, about your comedy.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine, her husband is a political cartoonist for the New York Daily News.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this was a number of years ago.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: He said, you know, Bill says it's getting harder and harder and harder.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: Really to create satire because the world that we're living in right now is already
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: so full of irony, so exaggerated that it becomes harder to make comedy.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's trashier than it's ever been.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, when when wasn't the world beset with hypocrisy, strife and madness?
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, come on now, like when we had humans kept as slaves.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: And Christians were fighting to rape and mutilate their own property.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like when we had a civil war and 600,000 of us died over this,
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: when we had World War II with the Holocaust and with the atom bomb.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like every period of human life is bozo on a pogo stick crazy.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's always awful.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's always worse than it's ever been.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's always madness out there.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: Old folks are always like, well, it's never been this bad.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean...
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: This seems to be the pattern we're locked in as monkeys, as a species.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: We're programmed for strife,
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: but some of us are programmed to keep the strife going and some of us are programmed
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: to uplift and help others through the strife.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's supposed to be messed up.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's supposed to be awful out there.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to be just what we're fated to, but I'm not an optimist.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: I am a recovering cynic and I've seen So much,
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's getting worse in so many ways,
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: financially,
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: financially in this country, since the late 1960s, especially since the early 1980s.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the middle class at the top of the bottom,
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: there's got to be a serious FDR style reckoning.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: I get all that.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm also of this opinion that as scary as it looks,
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: we are getting so much kinder all the time.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you had told me back in the 1990s,
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: that within 30 years,
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: we would have Marriage equality for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: That we would have an African American president.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: That we would stop putting people in jail for cannabis.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: If you had told me this in 1999,
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: I would not have believed that Americans were kind enough to get to that place
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: in 30 years.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm always astonished at how much kindness we have.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_02: These kids now can't believe how homophobic things were 20 years ago.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: They don't get it.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: You got kids now grew up with Muslim classmates,
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: grew up with gay classmates, grew up with immigrant and Latino and black classmates.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine in 20 years, they're going to be so shocked at how transphobic we were.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: Why were you guys so mean to the trans kids in the 2020s?
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they weren't doing anything.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: They were powerless.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: But this is what fascists and authoritarians always have to do.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's nothing new.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is Bin Laden, this is Hitler, this is all of them.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: You find a people that are suffering,
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: people that are struggling,
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: and you pick a marginalized,
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: powerless group that they can blame their problems on,
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's Jews,
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's the great Satan,
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's trans kids,
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: migrant workers, whoever it is this year, Muslims, you know, and you say, hey, hey.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: This little minority group is an existential threat to our way of life,
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: and only I can keep you safe.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: And when you do that,
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's Al-Qaeda,
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's the Iraq War, you know exactly how it's going to happen.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: These patterns keep playing themselves out.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why Jesus' teachings are more important than ever.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we can get people to go beyond Christmas,
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: to go beyond those three years he spent,
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: and I love the magic tricks,
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: don't get me wrong,
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I love the great Jew magician,
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: Houdini,
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: David Copperfield, Teller,
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: David Blaine is a great Jew magician, but the teachings of Jesus will save us.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: The miracles are the best parts of the Jesus movies.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: They're not really a great way to convert people to your side, but blessed are the meek.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: That is still a revolutionary ethic 2,000 years later.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus' teachings are still a threat to authoritarian systems of power 2,000 years later.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: Matthew 25 isn't about being a nice person.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's about dismantling unjust systems.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: I would disagree with you slightly in that I think the miracles are,
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_02: the miracles in themselves are not,
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_02: but it's the message that we miss out of the miracles.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I agree completely with, no, no, we don't disagree on
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_02: that.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: We can't prove the miracles, right?
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: 2,000 year old secondhand supernatural accounts.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, cool.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: Not a way to convince people to join your movement.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: My whole point is miracles aside, and I love them, but the teachings of Jesus.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I know, John, you're very busy.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_03: We're kind of coming up on time,
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_03: but we do like to always get our guests idea about Tomorrow's American Catholic,
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_03: which is the name of our journal.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you've kind of touched on this throughout a conversation,
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_03: some of your Structural critiques, but also your hopes for the church.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_03: So what comes up for you when you hear that phrase, Tomorrow's American Catholic?
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: What are your hopes for the church?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_03: How do you see things happening with Pope Leo now?
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_03: Anything, any horizon for us?
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I'm a big fan of this, Leo.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: when they first announced that the Pope was American and from Chicago,
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: as a Catholic, I was wary.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: As an American, I was curious.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: As a comedian, I was filled with hope.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: Chicago Pope, oh my God, what's that going to be about?
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like Southside Leo, the deep dish pontiff, right?
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: He'll forgive your sins and show you where to hide a body.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: I love this guy.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: How does Chicago Pope end Mass?
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: Conventionally, you end the Mass.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: The Mass has ended.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: Let us go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: Chicago Pope, he's like, guys, we good?
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: We good?
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: I thought he was good.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then he winds up being this really mild-mannered fellow.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the conservatives are mad he's not more conservative.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: The liberals are mad he's not more liberal.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the rest of the world's like,
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: wait, he's an American who speaks more than two languages and doesn't own a gun?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: And in his own quiet way, he has continued something that Francis began.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because Francis picked the cardinals that picked this guy.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it is something that I never thought I'd see in my life.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: It is reorienting the Vatican itself,
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: this historically brutal, cruel institution, reorienting it.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: Around the actual teachings of Christ after all these decades of sex hangups
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: and women as second class citizens and the gay people and the abortion and
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: the condoms.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, he's reorienting it around the actual stuff Jesus said.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: I know the Catholic Church needs converts and they like poor people not having birth control.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can't be devout unless you're pumping them out.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's a numbers game.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I grew very cynical over the years being half Southern,
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: half Brooklyn and seeing, oh,
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: the Vatican sends the liberal priests to the liberal parishes and sends
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: the conservative priests to the conservative parishes because at the end of the day,
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: it's about telling people what they want to hear and getting old ladies
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: to open up their pocketbook and giving the most amount of money.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: I got very cynical about it.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you have to get people to send you money.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's the grift.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: So to see two popes in a row willing
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: to have angry American Catholics not put their money in the basket.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: When this guy came out and quoted Matthew 25 at the height
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: of this anti-immigrant pogroms to say that Jesus commands you to welcome
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: the stranger and Trump getting so furious when this guy came out in the middle
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: of this God forsaken Iran war.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean,
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: like expecting the Pope is going to sign off
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: on your Iran war is like expecting your doctor is going to sign off
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: on your cocaine habit.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's insane.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you think the Pope is going to go for this war?
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the media keeps saying, oh, the Pope's fight with Trump.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: The Pope is going to fight with J.D.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Vance.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Pope's in a battle with Mike Johnson.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, the Pope's not fighting any of these guys.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: The media got it all wrong.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: The Pope is quoting Jesus.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: Trump, Vance, and Johnson are fighting and arguing with Jesus.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: The Pope's showing us how to do it.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to fight this, guys.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus says this.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: Why is he wrong?
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: Make them argue with Christ.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this Pope was willing to not have conservative Catholics put their money in the basket?
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, astonishing to me that he would recenter the whole institution back to
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: the actual nonviolence and care and health care.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: The command to care for the sick,
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: the command to welcome the stranger, the command to be kind to those in prison.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just astonishing to me.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the only thing that's going to save the church, be it Catholic or Protestant.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because as our religious participation is dwindling in this country and gone
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: below 50%, the fringe is expanding.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I like to say, oh, we're getting more popular.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: But the percentage of people who believe we were founded as a Christian nation,
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: which is a lie, is expanding.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: So the fringe is getting bigger while the overall numbers are getting lower.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's going to be turning a lot more people off to organize religion over
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: the next few years.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: Donald Trump has certainly done his job.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: But if the church wants to survive, it has to reorient itself around the teachings of Christ.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: Not superiority,
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: not judging other groups,
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: not sex hangups,
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: not fearing other religions,
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: not fearing powerless minorities,
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: not rewarding billionaires because they're so damn special.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: When you look at proper stewardship of the earth and its resources and taking care
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: of our environment,
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: you look at fighting racism,
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: fighting injustice,
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: you look at caring about immigrants,
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: caring about poverty,
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: wanting to have solutions,
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: caring about health care, these issues are all really popular with young people.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they all dovetail quite nicely with the actual teachings of Jesus.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's a way you can make people think your church is relevant again
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: beyond scolding them and telling them they're better than other groups of people.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: And if the church wants to survive with a dynamic congregation that is living
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: the gospel, going to Jesus is the only way.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right-wing politics...
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: Look at it, 45 years, 50 years of Falwellism.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: What does it give an American Christianity?
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: People hate Christianity after 50 years of Jerry Falwell,
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: Pat Robertson's way,
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: because it's mean and it's stupid and it's got nothing to do with Jesus.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: So we're at a great time as more of our conservative brothers
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: and sisters realize they've been hoodwinked,
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: bamboozled and led astray by this con man.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great time to greet them,
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: not with smug liberal I told you so's,
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: but recognizing that if we can reorient This movement around Jesus' actual commands,
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: we can begin to rebuild the American middle class.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: We really can.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: The billionaires are counting on us,
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: just hating each other enough that they can replace government
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: with their own oligarchies.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what scares me the most.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to find a way to save democracy.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that can only come,
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: in my opinion,
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: in this country from reminding people what Jesus fought for and making them fight
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: for it.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: I have to say,
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: Tell our listeners again the title of your book.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're so kind, of course.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you for putting up with my insufferable caterwauling here all this time.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm on a deadline for another book right now,
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: and I've been up till three o'clock in the morning every night,
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm running on bad coffee.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: My name is John Fugelsang,
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: F-U-G-E-L-S-A-N-G.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: My book is called Separation of Church and Hate,
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalist,
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: Fascist, and Flock Fleecing Frauds.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's an audiobook.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: We just won an award for nonfiction audiobook of the year.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you can buy the physical book wherever,
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: whatever non-evil website you like to buy books from.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I've read your book, John, and it's excellent.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: I would give it five stars and more.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: Coming from you, that means something.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so honored.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: What is your next book?
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, my next book is going to be much more political and get me in a lot more trouble.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: This book got me in a lot of trouble.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: I got some very pious death threats for this one.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: And this book's about all the issues that divide us and how the rights are on
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: the opposite side of Jesus.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: It takes every issue from feminism to LGBTQ issues to social safety nets and shows,
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: even if you're an atheist,
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: if you're arguing with a Christian fundamentalist about anything,
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus is probably on your side.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: The next book,
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to be about the people who've hijacked their religion since Rome took
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: over 1,700 years ago.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to be all about fake Christians,
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: the history of fake Christians,
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: why it's important to call fake Christians fake Christians,
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: because if we don't call out the frauds,
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_01: we are allowing them to put MLK in the same basket as the KK.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: Think about it.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: Think about it.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: They both claimed to be Christian.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: They both claimed religious authority using the same Bible,
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: but MLK and the KKK could not be more opposite in spiritual practice.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: These two things cannot be equal representations of the same thing.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a 1700 year tradition of authoritarians and empires
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: and dictators using churchy sounding language,
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: sacred sounding, sacred churchy, sacred words.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: To get people to sign on to agendas that are the opposite of Christ.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this book is about how to break the grip of the holy hypocrites,
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: the Bible bullies, the gospel grifters, and the theocratic thugs.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: What's most inspiring to me about Christianity is,
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: you know, yeah,
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: you have all of these awful Christians doing these awful things,
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: but the Christ followers always rise in opposition.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: To me, fake Christianity, I got three criteria.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, you use Jesus's name or movement to get power.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, with that power, you do the opposite of what Jesus said.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: And number three, an actual Christ following resistance rises up in opposition to you.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't call ordinary people fake Christian.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: I have no right to do that.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: Who the hell am I?
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in the movie Coyote Ugly, for God's sakes.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: I can't call anyone a fake Christian.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I do call those in power, clergy, or politics, or media figures fake Christians.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: When they use Christ for power, then do the opposite.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: So you look at the Crusades, this obscenity.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Francis rises up.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: The real Christians prove the fake Christians are fake.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: You got Columbus slaughtering the Taino in the shadow of the cross.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it's Bartolomeo de las Casas,
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: the Catholic priest on the third voyage who writes to the queen in protest of
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: the way the indigenous people are being treated.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_01: The first acts of protest by white people in this hemisphere were Catholic priests
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: against enslavement.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like the traditions there, that's the real Christians proving the fake Christians are fake.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: Slavery in this country propped up by Christianity,
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: but you got the Quakers, you got Frederick Douglass, you got Harriet Tubman.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_01: You got the real Christians there.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: Hitler is the greatest Christian nationalist of all time.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: But there's Bonhoeffer showing the Christ follower proves the fake Christian is fake.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: Segregation.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: Dr. King reads the scripture to show that apartheid is unchristian.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: And how many of us have talked so many parents and grandparents in the last 20,
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: 30 years out of so much homophobia.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's an amazing history of Christian activism in this world.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: But it's almost always in response to Christian authoritarianism.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the great thing is we all get to choose which Christianity we want to be a part of.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: The Roman Empire version that's about domination and superiority or the humble,
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: upstream,
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: not always easy,
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: Christ-following version, which is the only real version that counts.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_03: Amen.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_03: Transformation over domination.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_03: Amen.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_03: And thank you, John, so much.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_03: And thank you for...
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_03: A theme that was coming up for me a lot in our conversation is reorienting.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_03: I liked your use of that word and when you were talking about your horizon
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_03: because it feels like we're reorienting to the sources again.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_03: We're going back to go forward.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_03: I hope so.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_03: I think so.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: The fascists always fail, guys.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like, find me one authoritarian Christian regime in history that are now regarded as
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_01: the good guys.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: Find one.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_01: Good point.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_02: I may use that quote in my book.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_02: Please steal it.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to have to go back and listen to it again, but thank you.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_02: You've been noted multiple times in your book.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly, it's an honor.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just a humble first-time author here.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: But this was a book that I pitched this book for 13 years and proposals,
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_01: and I had 13 years of rejection for this book.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_01: I was told, wait, Christians and believers together?
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: Wait, atheists and Christians together are supposed to read this book?
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I had one editor say, oh, I don't know any of these fundamentalists.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: This doesn't impact my life at all.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: And after 13 years of rejection to make the New York Times bestseller list
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: the first week, I just want to tell your listeners, never give up on your projects.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: Please, if you have something you're working on, finish it.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: Get it out there.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_03: You can find additional podcasts as well as our written work at our website,
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_03: tomorrowsamericancatholic.org.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_03: If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please consider subscribing at our website.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_03: We are completely reader and listener supported,
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_03: and every little bit helps us to sustain our work.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_03: Gift subscriptions are also available.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_03: Our podcast co-facilitators are Patrick Carolyn, Michael Centauri, and Barbara Maraconda.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_03: Music is by Dana Music.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_03: We thank you for taking some time to listen with us today.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_03: And we invite you to continue to join us in discovering Tomorrow's American Catholic together.