Matthew here with the fourth installment of Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.
Rob Schenck joined me in Episode 199 to discuss his deradicalization from the Evangelical anti-abortion movement. Today he joins me to discuss some things he’s learned about hope, faith, resilience and building community in hard times.
Show Notes
Costly Grace - Rob Schenck
199: Inside Anti-Abortion Christian Nationalism (w/Rob Schenck)
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Hello everyone.
Welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project, your regular timeline cleanser, featuring interviews with folks reflecting on hope, faith, resilience, and building community in hard times.
You know, all the things that conspirituality itself can't or won't do.
These are short, personal visits in which I ask my guests the same five questions about their life wisdom as it is in this moment.
My name is Matthew.
Today, my guest for a super succinct tour through my five big questions is Reverend Rob Schenck.
He's the author of Costly Grace, which is his memoir of deradicalization from the evangelical right.
He was an anti-abortion crusader, and I mean crusader.
As he recounted in his memoir and then discussed with me on episode 199, he was a Jewish kid from upstate New York who got into a laid-back love and forgiveness type of evangelicalism in the 1970s, but then began to radicalize through the politics of the war against but then began to radicalize through the politics of the war against
He went so far as to get morbidly theatrical with it, out of a sense of urgency and faith, and by displaying fetal remains at protests.
So he has these totally harrowing confessions, not only about how much he realizes he hurt women, especially marginalized women, but also about how he felt prey to his own lust for validation and power and how he realized at a certain point that he'd sold himself and but also about how he felt prey to his own lust for validation and power and how he realized at a certain point that he'd sold himself and Well,
So I've heard people get really honest about their addictions, about their criminal activities, about their forays into cult life in which they acted against their conscience, but I've never really heard someone so lucid on the temptations of religious charisma when the big money comes to call.
I've never heard someone so clear also about making amends and being fine with people, still being enraged that he contributed to this current war against women's freedom, and nonetheless being willing to speak out against his former culture, but also into it.
And he's also gone on to be a real student of his own recovery, digging deep to find a type of Christianity that would have been true to his earlier self.
So you'll hear him talk about the focus of his graduate studies, which he completed after exiting the anti-abortion industry.
He focused on a theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Christian who was executed by hanging for standing up to the Nazis in some really effective ways.
Bonhoeffer once wrote, silence in the face of evil is itself evil.
God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act.
Now, just a note, we recorded this which makes Rob's first answer about what terrifies him most all the more poignant.
Here's my discussion with Rob Schenck.
Rob Schenck, welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
It's so great to talk to you again.
It's a pleasure to be with you, Matthew.
Thank you.
Okay, so we'll go right into it.
Here's the first question.
What terrifies you most in these times?
Autocrats exercising arbitrary rule.
That really has me sleepless at night.
Because I think of it as one of the things that kept the human species suppressed for at least millennia, maybe longer.
And we seem to be regressing, not just in the United States, where we have the specter of a possible Trump second term, but in Europe.
And, you know, it has certainly existed for a long time in other parts of the world.
But for that to gain the ascendancy again leaves me sleepless at night.
Well, in light of that, which I think is going to resonate with a lot of people, what is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story that you return to for reliable wisdom and relief?
Well, it sounds a little morose, but the story I go to to find hope is...
Someone I've learned a lot from posthumously, the young German church leader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a moral philosopher, theologian, and resistance activist in 1930s Germany.
He would eventually be murdered by the Nazis for challenging the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler.
And yet...
It's a very hopeful story in that, first of all, Bonhoeffer and his fellows never gave up their resistance.
They never capitulated, even though they suffered enormously.
And in the end, they prevailed, obviously, with the assistance of a military might of the United States and the Allied powers, of course.
But there was a rebuilding of Germany, and frankly, notwithstanding its minor turn to the right these days, they've rebuilt a wonderful culture in Germany.
And if that can happen after the catastrophe of the Hitler- Is there a particular turning point or critical moment
in Bonhoeffer's life that you think about or you return to time and again?
Yeah, I had the honor of talking with one of the last living persons to have spoken with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the final days of his life.
Franz von Hammerstein was a teenager when he was arrested by the Nazis simply for being A student in a catechism or spiritual preparation class led by another Nazi resistor, Martin Niemöller.
And Hammerstein was on a transport vehicle with Bonhoeffer and later in a cell with him.
And when they spoke, von Hammerstein told me that Bonhoeffer told him, it will be up to you to rebuild the church in Germany, the Christian culture and witness after its complete corruption during the Nazi co-optation of the German church.
And he said, your generation will do this.
And when I heard von Hammerstein say that, and he told me, I took that charge very seriously, and I've lived my entire life accordingly.
And he was in his late 80s when I met him.
He has since passed.
But when I heard von Hammerstein repeat that hopeful statement by Bonhoeffer as the world was collapsing and burning around him and his own life was soon to be extinguished,
the fact that he could Transmit that vision and that a young, a teenage boy would take it up and live it out seriously.
That was transformational for me.
The third question is, what is the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships and how do you work to overcome it?
The proliferation of disinformation, misinformation, lies, propaganda, the world I occupy is still a very religious one.
And I would say not just the politicized religious versions of all those things, but the magical thinking that attaches to them in a religious way.
So, in my world, people either say, God will take care of it.
We don't need to worry about all these problems in the world.
God will take care of it.
There's that kind of magical thinking that dismisses the challenges that face us as a human species.
Then there's just deliberate lies and, you know, people who are spreading extremely destructive, harmful disinformation and misinformation.
So those are the things, the greatest obstacles right now for me.
But the way I overcome them sounds too simplistic, but it's By constantly being anchored in reality and the truth and sharing that respectfully with others, not contemptuously.
I think when I'm tempted to do that, you know, it won't be productive.
People just become more defensive.
They erect I try to think of the truth as an act of generosity towards someone who is in bondage mentally, Socially, religiously, to a lie, because they can't engage the world effectively.
The world doesn't work for them, because they're not connected to reality.
And I like to offer the truth, sometimes very gently, sometimes a little more forcefully, as an act of generosity to that person so they can find freedom.
And that kind of keeps me going.
And I do have people who tell me, you know, listening to you, hearing you, the way you treated me with respect, really has me opening my mind and thinking differently.
And so that kind of keeps me going.
I just want to note that I think the way you're tying the proliferation of misinformation to relational breakdown and distrust is quite profound because to combat it with kindness means that you are I
bought into propaganda and disinformation myself for a very long time.
I'm very aware.
Of how vulnerable we all are to that.
And maybe we're all just a few seconds away from embracing it, falling for it, falling into it.
And I guess I'm, maybe I'm a blithe optimist when it comes to human beings, but I like to think I'm optimistic that people can change.
I tell people, if you think someone you know or care about or work alongside of can never change, I hope you'll remember me.
Because I changed in a very dramatic way.
Late in life, after I was 50 years old.
Okay, so here's the next quite simple, easy question for you.
If you were responsible for comforting and guiding a child terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do it, and what would you say?
I actually have done it.
And, of course, I start with honoring their fears and affirming That they have reason to be afraid.
That fears are sometimes unreal and sometimes they're real.
And I would want to do all that work and have done that work with children up front.
But then I want to remind them, first of all, of how smart they are.
And how smart people are.
And how clever we are.
And that if we work together and share our knowledge with one another, and some people are smart about some things, and others are smart about other things, and if we put together all of our smartness, and we get even smarter together than we are separately, then we can meet the challenge.
And we can Solve the problem.
As big as those problems may be, we can solve them.
And we have.
And sometimes I'll tell a story about that.
You know, how my mother...
when she was six years old.
And lots of children were very, very sick.
Some of them even died.
Some of them couldn't live normal lives when she was small.
But with time, people put their smartness together and they came up with a vaccine and they came up with treatments.
And we've almost gotten rid of polio in the world.
Sometimes it comes back, but we've almost gotten rid of it.
And we can meet these big challenges if we work together to do it.
And that's why we need each other all over the world.
We don't just need five people or 5,000 people or 5 million people or 500 million people.
We need 5 billion people working together.
And that's what I'd like to see.
Last question, Rob.
If your wisest ancestor came to you in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would it be?
It does make me think of an ancestor who fled Russia at the time of the pogroms and got a family successfully here, which allowed my family to exist and flourish.
And if that ancestor or any other came to me, I think they would say, outsmart those who would be your enemy.
Outsmart them.
And it makes me think of my spiritual ancestor, Jesus, who said, be wise as a serpent.
