It's In the Code, Ep. 21: In the World But Not of the World
ANNOUNCING THE FIRST SWAJ LIVE EVENT! https://www.bradonishi.com/nationalism/
You may hear Christians say they are called to be “in the world, but not of the world”? What does that mean? When someone talks in this way, what kind of Christian are they likely to be? How does this way of talking relate to different conceptions of Christian identity, to contemporary Christian nationalism, or to the ongoing “culture wars” that affect so many of us? Dan tackles these questions in this episode.
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What's up, y'all?
This is Brad from Straight White American Jesus, and you may know by now, but I want to announce something pretty big, and that is our very first Straight White American Jesus live event in Denver on November 18.
We're going to be talking about white Christian nationalism and the future of democracy.
The event will take place just a few weeks after the midterm elections, and so we'll be talking about everything that's happening In those results, as well as the future of the country.
The lineup that will be joining us is pretty incredible, if I'm honest with you.
Robert Jones, Catherine Stewart, Sam Perry and Phil Gorski, Larisha Hawkins, Jacqueline Hidalgo, Kyati Joshi, yours truly, as well as my co-host Dan Miller and Sarah Mosliner.
You can attend in person.
Buy a ticket.
Come see some friends in Denver at the University of Denver where we're having the event.
You can also participate virtually.
All the info at bradonishi.com slash nationalism.
Go get your tickets now.
Hello, and welcome to the series, It's in the Code, a series within the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, Straight White American Jesus and It's in the Code are offered in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, so we thank them.
Thank all of you who support us, those who are partners and patrons who support us financially, who make it possible to do this, as well as all of those who support us just by listening and by chiming in.
And for the series that's in the code, I particularly, as always, want to thank all of you who continue to reach out with great ideas, feedback, questions, comments about the series.
And I can be reached at Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Love to hear from everybody.
As always, I respond to as many folks as I can, and I know I don't get all of you, but you're the driving force behind this, and we thank you for that.
With that in mind, I want to announce we shared about this on the main weekly roundup.
Last week, and we'll be keeping this in front of folks until it happens, but Straight White American Jesus is having our first live event entitled Christian Nationalism and the Future of Democracy.
This will be taking place Friday, November 18th in Denver, Colorado.
If you're interested in this, if you go to bradonishi.com slash nationalism, you can go to Brad's website.
The information is there.
We'll be getting the information out in other venues and contexts as well.
But this is an event that will bring together some of the biggest figures thinking about and talking about Christian nationalism at present.
You'll know from the date that it's scheduled for right after the midterm elections, and I will be hosting a roundtable.
Sarah Mosliner, a friend of the show, will be hosting a roundtable with those folks talking about Christian nationalism, the significance of the midterms, and a range of other things.
And as you'll see, if you go to the website again, bradonishi.com slash nationalism, you can buy tickets in person.
But if you say, I live far from Denver, Denver's a long ways to go, it will also be live streamed and you can buy virtual tickets.
So please check that out.
Reach out if you've got questions.
We'd love to have as many people as possible participate in this, whether in person or virtually.
Really, really excited to be doing this, something we've been trying to put together for a long time.
And excited to finally see it sort of becoming a reality.
So, having said that, shifting into our own sort of discussion for the day, I want to tackle a concept here, another one that lots and lots of people have reached out about.
And I've gotten comments on this from people coming out of certain kinds of Christian traditions, people who are Maybe within those phrases, really bothered by this.
I've gotten this from folks who have certain Christians in their life and want to know what this means.
And it is the notion, the claim that Christians will sometimes make or say that they are called to be, quote, in the world, but not of the world.
And I've had a lot of people, as I say, have reached out.
So what in the world does that mean?
No pun intended.
How do we understand that and I've also for people within Traditions where this phrasing figures prominently and it did in mine when I was conservative evangelical this notion that we as Christians were called to be in the world not of the world was a really sort of central rallying cry a way of understanding our own Christian identity in our place in broader society and
For folks coming out of those traditions, and say the coaching work that I do, I run into a lot of people who really struggle with this, who have a hard time overcoming, let's say, some of the negative legacies of this and sort of making sense of it.
So I wanted to finally, this is one of those things that's been kind of sitting on my back burner for a while as I work through other topics, get to it.
And as we commonly do, it can be useful to begin by thinking about where the language comes from.
One of the things that I like to be able to explain to people sometimes is why do certain kinds of Christians talk this way to begin with?
Those who grow up in certain Christian contexts, some of these ways of speaking become very ingrained.
They become very much sort of second nature.
It's clear to us what they mean.
But to those who are, as I like to call them, the uninitiated, they can seem really, really weird.
And so what does it possibly mean to say that I am in the world but not of the world or something like that?
Well, the first thing to note is that it's not a specific Bible verse.
Lots of Christians who talk this way think that it is, that there's a Bible verse that says you're called to be in the world, not of the world.
It's not quite the case.
It's kind of an amalgam of some Bible passages and Certainly, more significantly, a theme that runs throughout the Bible.
Throughout a lot of the Christian and Jewish scriptures, there's a concept going back into the Hebrew Bible of the Israelites as the people of God, but as, you know, the stories of them being in exile, of being a kind of pilgrim community, of being God's people, but not really at home anywhere, of being strangers in a strange land.
This idea of God's people or God's community sort of as a pilgrim community is an idea that carries forward into the New Testament.
Most of the writers of the New Testament are Jewish.
They're coming out of this context.
And so you get in the Christian New Testament, a certain vision of now the church, the Christian community as a kind of pilgrim community living in a foreign world.
And it carries forward both this Jewish sensibility from the Jewish tradition of sort of not having a permanent place, But also the experience of Christian communities when the New Testament was written, almost all the writing that was produced, all the writing that was produced, was produced within the concept of, excuse me, within the context of the Roman Empire.
So you have this sense of a Christian community under foreign occupation, as well as being within a broader sort of pagan culture and not really fitting in, and the sense of its own distinctiveness, that they are in the world.
They exist in society, but there's a sense in which they are not defined by it.
They are called to something different.
And this is what it sort of comes to, this idea for the Christian community, the world is not their ultimate destiny.
It's not their ultimate home.
They are called to live a different kind of life and eventually to go and to be with God.
And the language of being in the world, not of the world, most explicitly probably comes from the Gospel of John, where this theme of the distinction between the Christian community and the world really plays out a lot.
The language of the world and God's mission for the world in all of this is a very As Bible scholars would say, a very Johannine theme.
So, where does the language come from?
It comes from the Bible and from Jewish and early Christian traditions and this way of understanding oneself.
And that's important because this metaphor of the world is really central to a lot of Christian identity.
And the basic meaning of the phrase, the notion of being in the world, not of the world, it plays out across different Christian traditions in different ways.
We'll talk about that in just a minute.
But the basic idea is straightforward enough.
It's the idea that the Christian community is distinct from, or is called to be distinct from, the society in which it exists.
It is called to be, in theological terms, a redeemed community within a fallen reality.
It means that the Christian community does not share the values of the broader world.
And that's the basic idea.
And like a lot of the themes or slogans or sort of rallying cries that we've talked about in this series, this one has impacted different kinds of Christian communities in different ways.
The basic idea that cuts across this, again, is that the church somehow embodies a different reality or different values from those of the quote-unquote world around it.
But the expression of this difference varies from tradition to tradition.
That's where it plays out differently.
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