Dan speaks with Dr. David Gushee, Professor of Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. The former president of the American Academy of Religion, he is a prolific author who writes often about his journey out of evangelicalism. He and Dan discuss his new book, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity. Their discussion delves into issues such as community, race, and sexuality--and how White evangelicals are getting those tragically wrong. Gushee proposes new ways of Christian believing, belonging, and behaving, one that emphasizes being a light the world rather than a vector of exclusion and political power.
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Axis Mundy Hello, and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I'm pleased to be joined today by Dr. David Gushie, who's been a guest on our show in the past.
He is the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and the Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University.
He has been in leadership positions in various professional organizations, has published and produced a great deal of material on lots of things related to the topics we discuss on this show.
Perhaps most relevant for the discussion we'll be having are some noteworthy books of recent years.
I believe in 2017, the third edition of his book, Changing Our Mind, which advocated for full LGBTQ inclusion in the life of the church, came out.
In 2017, he published Still Christian, Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism, and that was the context of our prior discussion.
And just recently, here in 2020, he has published After Evangelicalism, The Path to a New Christianity, which is going to be sort of our focus today.
So, Professor Gushy, thank you very much for your time, and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Dan, thanks for having me again.
I love talking with you, and I love the name of your podcast.
I love telling people that I'm going to be on Straight White American Jesus, you know?
I mean, people are so fascinated by not just the name, but what you all are about.
So it's an honor.
So thanks for having me back.
Yeah, well, it's interesting because so much of what you do captures the theme of we have, right?
This sort of presupposition of who or what Jesus was and what being an American Christian is.
So that is the segue into your book, After Evangelicalism, The Path to a New Christianity.
And as you and I discussed sort of where we might go with this today, I suggested that I think it's better to dive into maybe a few topics in some depth and try to cover everything.
So I really encourage people, again, the name is After Evangelicalism.
You can Google it.
You can go to Amazon and find it.
It's readily available.
It's designed to be read by regular people, not just academic eggheads.
Like me, and it is very affordable, so just throw that out to people.
But I wanted to start with what I think is a theme that runs throughout the book, and a theme that I think is near and dear to a lot of our audience, and that's the question of community.
And as you know, personally, through your own experience, But as many of our listeners know, one of the things that many people are challenged by, struggle with, as they wrestle with their Christian identity in a sort of post-evangelical landscape is, where do I go, right?
Some people leave their evangelical identity and they're done with church, they're done with religion, but as you know, Lots of people don't, and I think one of the issues that you've wrestled with personally and that you address in the book is where do people go?
So I want to just throw that over to you.
What do you envision as community or the needs for community, spiritual, sociological, whatever, that you are trying to address with this book or that you think that the post-evangelicals in particular are really sort of hungering for right now?
One way to begin to answer that is to say that the first thing I do in the book is to deconstruct the idea, or to half deconstruct the idea, that quote-unquote evangelicalism ever really was a community.
I look at the modern birth of the evangelical movement and
Conclude that it was a slight movement away from and definitely a rebranding of fundamentalism, white fundamentalism, and that it had a strategy of taking already existing groups, institutions, parachurches, denominations, schools,
And grouping them together under a new label or retrieve label called evangelical.
And that it did that so successfully that that bolsters and historians and regular people began to believe that there really was a thing called the evangelical community.
And people began to feel loyal and to be a part of an evangelical subculture.
Which I test out some in a tongue-in-cheek way at the beginning of the book with my, you know you're an evangelical if you can check 20 of these 25 boxes, you know.
It's certain figures, books, fools, songs, subcultural products.
So part of what I think is happening is people have left That kind of quasi foe community.
They've either been pushed out, or they've run fleeing from it, or they finally drifted away from it for one reason or another.
And now they're in some kind of wilderness space somewhere.
I think it can be documented, though it's early, that some are heading over to mainline churches.
And finding their way and becoming Episcopalians, or PCUSA, United Church of Christ, or United Methodist, whatever.
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