Aaron Simmons has been asked to leave numerous churches over the last decade. Not over theology or the Bible. But because he votes the wrong way and wants to have open discussions about abortion, race, justice, and other issues. A fourth-generation Pentecostal, he didn't leave evangelicalism. It left him. But he persists--attending an evangelical church whilst voting for Bernie and trying to create space for a more responsible and ethical American evangelicalism.
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AXIS Moondy AXIS Moondy Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I'm joined today by my colleague and also friend, J. Aaron Simmons, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University.
Aaron has He's authored many things.
He's edited many things.
He is the president currently of the Soren Kierkegaard Society in the United States.
He has a recent book that just came out, Christian Philosophy, and that is Conceptions, Continuations, and Challenges.
That's from Oxford.
Another book, Kierkegaard's God and the Good Life, from Indiana University Press.
A book called God and the Other.
A book called The New Phenomenology.
Aaron, every time I look at your CV, I'm just amazed at how much you've written in a short amount of time.
So, thanks for joining me.
Oh, happy to be here.
Really glad to do it.
And so, you know, there's a bunch of reasons I wanted to have you on, and one of them is just, you know, we've been friends for a couple years now.
We met at a conference, and every time we get together, I feel like we just sort of talk for three, four, five hours about everything from philosophy to religion to ethics to whatever it may be.
And, you know, I know, you know, one of the reasons we have such good conversations is we share a kind of intellectual background, philosophical and otherwise.
But we're also coming from different places.
I've said on this show many times and told my story that I'm an ex-evangelical and I'm now sort of identify as a secular person, but somebody who's in deep dialogue all the time.
with religious folks, communities, texts.
And you know, you come from a very different perspective.
You no longer identify as an evangelical, but you are sort of evangelical adjacent, is maybe a way we can put it.
Yeah, I like that.
Is that fair?
Yeah, that's very fair.
I certainly was raised evangelical, white evangelicalism, and did my best probably for about a decade in my 30s to try to maintain that affiliation.
And then after Trump got elected in 2016, given the widespread evangelical support for him, I recognized that was no longer an identity that I could Remain comfortable with.
So the way I put it is I didn't really leave evangelicalism, but it left me.
Yeah.
And so now I identify still as a Pentecostal, which I have always been.
I'm actually fourth generation Pentecostal, and still attend a church that would broadly be considered a white evangelical church.
It's a Assemblies of God church here in Greenville, South Carolina.
My background is the Church of God in Cleveland, Tennessee.
My grandfather was a pastor in the Church of God.
So all of those relations continue.
The identity has shifted because I no longer want to affiliate with anything that would put me in the camp of 85 plus percent supporting what it is that Trump represents.
And for me that was so far from my Christian commitments.
That I had to break with that identity in order, or break with that term, it's a better way to put it, break with that term in order for my Christian identity to be something I thought was responsible.
It now leaves you in a peculiar place, and you are now a Southern, born and bred Southerner.
You work at a university, a landmark university in many ways, in the South, Furman.
You live in South Carolina.
So you're a Southerner through and through, no one's gonna doubt that.
You are Christian through and through, as you mentioned, fourth-generation Pentecostal.
And you just voted for Bernie Sanders.
So this is, we have a really weird situation, and I feel like we're in one of those movies where we start like at the opening scene is the end, and you know you have to lead up.
Somehow to this very odd scenario that's happened, like we're in the desert and someone's climbing out of the back of a car with an injury or something and we're like, what happened here?
How did they get here?
So now we got to back up.
So Aaron, I want to sort of figure out how we got to you, this tried and true Southerner, Pentecostal, Christian philosopher and Bernie supporter.
So, can you tell us a little bit more?
You grew up, you're born in Tennessee, I know, but you've spent your life in the South and in Christian churches.
Like, what was that like?
You know, what were you like as a young person all the way up to, like you said, in your 30s, kind of remaining what you would call an evangelical?
Yeah, I mean, it is.
I'm sort of thinking about like, you know, if this were a film, how far back would that little, you know, five weeks ago thing flash?
You know, how far back would it be?
So, in sort of a very short outline, maybe I can put it this way, I was born in Cleveland, Tennessee.
My parents were both professors and now have retired from their relationship there, but they both were professors at a Church of God College, wonderful university.
And when I was, I guess I was about seven or eight, my little sister was three years old, got diagnosed with cancer.
And so we actually ended up moving to Tampa, Florida for her treatment.
And this ended our entire life, really put the brakes on all kinds of things that had been normal up to that point.
And so from seven to, I guess, 18, I, I grew up, you know, playing drums.
I was a very good drummer and played drums in the youth choir, toured all over the country on youth group trips, you know, went to a very interesting multicultural church, still predominantly white, but very multicultural for a white evangelical church there in Tampa, Florida.
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