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Brad speaks with Zach Lambert, pastor of Restore Austin and author of "Better Ways to Read the Bible." Together, they explore how the Bible has often been used as a weapon to exclude and harm, but also discuss more inclusive and healing approaches to scripture.
Zach shares his personal journey from being excluded in youth group to leading a church that embraces diversity and affirms LGBTQ+ members. The conversation covers harmful interpretive lenses like moralism and hierarchy, and highlights better alternatives such as fruitfulness and flourishing, emphasizing interpretations that promote love, justice, and community.
They also address the dangers of Christian nationalism and Christo-fascism, offering hope for a more compassionate and just expression of faith.
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Is there a good way to read the Bible?
Some of you probably think there isn't.
Some of you have probably never read the Bible, but the worst people you know are those who claim to read it often and use it to bludgeon you anytime there's a discussion about morality or politics.
Whether you grew up in a Christian home, a Christian church, a Christian culture, or if you've only had the unfortunate experience of encountering those Christians who use the Bible as a weapon.
Well, today I speak to Zach Lambert, who is the pastor at Richard Austin, a welcoming community and church for all people.
And he talks about his experience as a youth group kid and the ways that the Bible seemed to be for him and for many others, something that was hurtful and traumatizing rather than healing and helpful.
He argues that there are better ways that we can read the Bible.
Now you may not be a religious person or you may be done with religion in some kind of formal sense.
But I think this conversation is important for everyone for this reason.
We're facing an authoritarian crisis in the United States, and as I've said on this show many, many times, we're not going to be able to defeat it without working together.
That includes atheists and humanists.
It includes ex-evangelicals.
It also includes Christians who are not Christian nationalists.
It includes Christians who don't want to use the Bible as a weapon to hurt others, but as a way to gain insight and wisdom into building a community that is beneficial to all of us.
I think Zach is trying to do that, and I enjoyed our conversation immensely.
For subscribers, I spent some time with Zach in the bonus content talking about what he thinks is Christian fascism and how it's on the rise in this country and why that term is perhaps more fitting than Christian nationalism, because it spells out the extremism and the emergency that we're living in at this moment.
I'm Brad O'Neishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, the founder of Axis Moon Dedia.
This is Straight White American Jesus.
Let's go.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
As I just said, joined by a first-time guest, and that is Zach Lambert, leader of Restore Austin and the author of Better Ways to Read the Bible.
Zach, thanks for coming by.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
I'm a big fan of the show, man.
How's that?
Well, I appreciate that and and just appreciate what you're doing down in Austin with your community.
And now we get to talk about your book, Which is great.
There's going to be a lot of questions for some folks right off the bat.
Is there a good way to read the Bible?
Can you read the Bible in ways that are not hurtful, exclusionary, violent, and so on?
What does that look like?
Let's start just with a little bit of your story.
I was a youth group kid, but I was a convert.
And so my goal when I got to youth group was like to be the best youth group kid.
Yeah.
Um, you were the uh the rabble rousing youth group kid.
And that's part of the story.
So tell us what happened in youth group.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I opened up the book with this story of uh getting formally kicked out of youth group.
And it it really came, I mean, it was it was cumulative to be to be candid, but the the final the straw that broke the cannibal's back, so to speak, was that we were in a Bible study, a middle school Bible study, talking about it was around Easter time.
We're talking about Jesus on the cross.
And somebody youth pastor says, Well, you know, Jesus on the cross said, Father, father, why have you forsaken me?
And he said that because God had completely abandoned Jesus on the cross, turned his back because you know, Jesus had all of our sin on him, and God can't be around sin.
And so to protect God's own holiness, God turned God's back on Jesus.
And, you know, I popped my little hand up, probably did not wait to be called on and said something to the effect of like, I thought you said God was a good father, and he's like abandoning his son in his greatest time of need.
Uh, that doesn't seem like a good thing.
And also, if God can't be around sin, then like, how can God be around any of us if we all still struggle and fall short and all of that kind of stuff?
And he was just not a youth pastor that I think was equipped to deal with that level of questioning and push back.
And so he said, Zach, go sit in the hallway.
I went to my normal spot.
That was a frequent request from him or demand from him.
But that night he came out and he said, Hey, before you leave, when your parents come pick you up, I want to talk to all three of you.
So I said, okay.
So my parents get there, he pulls us into a side room and says, Your son is is disrupting my Bible studies.
He's causing the other kids to doubt their faith.
He's asking too many questions.
He is no longer allowed to be a part of our youth group.
He can come on Sunday morning for Sunday school, but Wednesday nights done, camps done, mission trips done.
We're not going to allow him to disrupt this youth group anymore.
And I will tell you that half of me was ecstatic because I was not a convert.
I was a cradle Christian and I hated youth groups, and uh especially in my very fundamentalist Southern Baptist church.
But another half of me that I don't think I would excavate to a little bit later, was pretty broken, I think, because there was a piece that like literally everybody else in my family was all about Christianity.
My my parents were in vocational ministry.
I grew up in Christian schools in church all the time.
My grandfather was a deacon.
And so hearing that I was no longer allowed to be a part of youth group, I think actually meant for me at least as a seventh grader.
It felt like he was saying, you're no longer allowed to be a part of the thing that is most important to everyone in your life.
And that was really damaging.
And so it took a long time, I think, for me to re-engage with any expressions of church and faith.
And I know so many of the folks that are a part of this straight white American Jesus community have probably, you know, similar stories of feeling like, gosh, there was just so much trauma inflicted upon us that it made it almost impossible, or maybe actually impossible to go back to anything.
I want to hold on to that because I think it's a big part of uh of your work, and that is you were excluded from the thing that was most important to your family.
And so I I think when people think of religion, they're like, well, what do you believe?
And over and over again on this show, we've tried to insist that religion is about many, many things.
It's about what you do, it's about community, it's about family, it's about history, it's about uh identity, uh, it's about ritual.
And when you as a seventh grader who was getting accosted by this youth group leader for not believing or at least not professing belief in the right way, that was one dimension.
The other dimension was you're now excluded from the thing that is the most that is the heart of your family.
Exactly.
And I think there's a lot of people out there with whom that will resonate, and people who've been excluded for uh any number of reasons uh based on their identity, their sexuality, their gender expression, so on and so forth.
Yeah.
So let's let's jump forward, folks.
There's way more to that story.
And if you want to know Zach's, you know, path to to where Zach is now leading a church, you'll need to read the book.
But you eventually decide you want to read the the Bible differently, and you wanna you want to see it with fresh eyes.
Yeah.
And that that really includes sort of understanding that anytime you read the Bible, you are employing a certain lens of interpretation.
And I think anybody who's been to graduate school knows that you read any text, you're bringing some kind of interpretive framework to it.
But what was the process like of learning that you had a certain thing you were bringing to the Bible, and that was affecting what it what you were taking out of it as a reader.
It took a long time, honestly, because in the spaces I grew up in, I was conditioned as a straight white American male, that I didn't have any lenses, that my viewpoint was just normative.
Everything else was kind of aberrant.
I was taught that I was just reading the Bible, you know, just kind of the plain reading on just interpreting it in black and white, maybe not even interpreting it, just reading the truth in black and white.
And it really wasn't until seminary, uh, and I went to Dallas Theological Seminary, one of the most rigorously conservative seminaries in America.
And but I had I had some professors who uh exposed us to some, I exposed me at least to some new things, some new ways of reading scripture, some new understandings of biblical interpretation, specifically about our social location and how that changes things.
And I think the the one I really remember was the professor did it inadvertently.
And so I did a hundred and twenty-hour master's program at DTS, which was, you know, it's just massively long.
It was about 40 classes.
We had to read about five books a class, right?
So 200 books were assigned to us.
I can count on one hand the number that were assigned that were not written by straight white men uh of European descent.
And I remember one class we got assigned this book by Justo Gonzalez, who's this brilliant scholar.
And I remember the other professor said, hey, just keep in mind when you're reading this book to know that, you know, you know, who sto's a Latin American guy, and so there's going to be some bias when you read this.
And so just, you know, keep that in mind.
Don't take every, you know, take everything with a grain of salt.
And I remember having this visceral moment of like, they've never said that before.
It was like my third year in seminary or something.
I've never heard a qualification on any other book that was assigned to me.
Why was this one qualified?
And I remember it was like a couple of days later, I'm in the bookstore and the a Christian bookstore on our campus, and I see sections for like there was like a black theology section, you know, and then there was like a feminist theology section or uh or disability theology section.
I remember thinking there's no white theology sections or masculine theology sections or um heterosexual theology sections, because again, those were just considered theology.
They didn't need any extra adjectives.
It was just like this is regular theology, everything else has to have a disclaimer.
And then I began to realize like, oh, I have a social location.
I remember Rachel Held Evans, I heard her on a podcast one time say, you don't think that young white male seminary student is a social location?
It's like that's one of the most intense social locations there is.
And I was like, oh my gosh, she's talking about me.
And it was like, and then I became determined, well, I have to remove all of my social location.
I have to strip away all my biases, and I have to read the Bible purely.
And thankfully I had enough people in my life that were like, hey, that's not possible.
But what I became convinced of is that while we can't remove every bias or every lens is the terminology I use in the book.
Um, we can choose which lenses we put on and which lenses we use when we do biblical interpretation.
And the kind of central thesis of the book is that some are better than others.
There's so many questions I think people are going to ask.
So I think there's there's people listening who, just like you were hurt by by certain forms of Christianity or religion in general, and they felt excluded because they were gay, they were, they were uh non-binary, they were mixed race, they were one of those people in the church who was uh Latino and uh was told they had a bias and not everyone else did.
There's so many reasons why.
There's other folks out there who are like atheists, humanists, uh secular Jews, and they're listening right now.
And I think both those groups share in common this question of can you read the Bible in a way that is not exclusionary?
And if you're doing that, and and here's my follow-up.
If you if you do read the Bible in a way that's affirming of everyone, you know, and their identity as as part of God's plan for who they are.
Uh is that a real reading of the Bible?
Or is that one that you a uh a liberal woke uh LGBT, uh LGBTQ and for affirming church leader wants there to be because uh that's what you are hoping to get out of it.
Now, that's not me asking that.
Yeah, you know, full I'm I'm just trying to play the the the uh the person wondering at home if it's even possible to read the Bible this way coherently and and in some way accurately.
Yeah, it's a very fair question.
And and it's really deeply connected to my story, and you alluded to this earlier.
So I faced pushback, uh some form of marginalization as a middle schooler, you know, really pushed aside, not because of who I was, but because of questions that I asked or whatever.
And then I began to uh encounter folks and and become uh deep friends with folks who experience the same thing, but because of their identity.
Uh, like you said, because of because of who they were.
And what happened though is I saw those folks engaging with scripture in ways that I had never seen before, in ways that were so life-giving in ways that were identity affirming in ways that move them closer to the kind of person and work and and teachings of Jesus.
And I that was my first kind of foray into there must be better ways to read the Bible because these folks who have been pushed out, because of their very identity or existence, have found these better ways.
In fact, there's a quote in the book that I use from from Frederick Douglass, who talks about how, you know, the Bible, in a lot of ways in his time was the uh the slaveholders' book, right?
Now they edited a bunch of parts about freedom and anti-slavery stuff out of the Bible, the slave holder's Bible, if you ever want to look that up, it's fascinating.
Um Frederick, you know, he acknowledges that and basically says the Bible has been used in ways to keep me and my people in bondage.
But does that mean that we throw it all away?
No.
We need to do, we need to engage with it in healthier ways because I Rachel Held Evans to talk to her about talk about her a second time.
She has this this really great quote in her book inspired where she basically says, we have been entrusted in scripture with some of the most powerful stories ever told.
And I think that is objectively true.
And we look at how they've, you know, engaged with the rest of society, how we see everybody knows about Adam and Eve, you know, everybody knows about Moses and the Exodus, and we've seen TV shows and movies and all of that stuff.
These are powerful stories.
So we've been entrusted with some of the most powerful stories ever told.
And we now have agency.
We have a choice for how we interpret those stories and then how we wield them.
Are we wielding them as a weapon of harm or are we wielding them as a tool for healing?
And I think that not only is it every bit as justified to, you know, use them as a weapon or excuse me, use them as a tool of healing rather than a weapon of harm, it's not only like okay.
I would say that when we actually employ some of the Christ-like understandings of how even Jesus used scripture, we see that I think it's the best way.
I would say the only truly faithful way to engage with the text is to use it in ways that uplift.
Well, I know we're going to talk more about the different lenses and stuff, but I think I come back a lot to this idea that Jesus said the most like he gave a one-sentence mission statement about why he came, John 10, 10.
I have come to bring life and life to the full.
And so if our biblical interpretations are not leading to the thing that Jesus said he came for, to be bring people fullness of life to let them flourish, then it's actually bad Bible interpretation, regardless of how many people have written about it or how many seminaries teach it.
If it's not doing the thing that Jesus said it's supposed to do, then I think it's problematic.
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You you mentioned this earlier in the book that they're the Bible has most often been used as a weapon.
Uh it's it's a a tool to hurt people when it is meant to be something that heals people.
And uh, you know, there's a really succinct definition of that in the in the first parts of the book that I think are really helpful.
So in the book, you have four lenses uh that you think are bad lenses, just to be reductive here.
Yeah.
And four lenses you think are more helpful or good or better lenses for for when one reads scripture.
So I'm gonna try to hit two of each, two bad ones and two better ones, and we'll see what we we uh we we come across here or figure out.
The first one is uh the moralism lens.
And, you know, you you tell me where I'm wrong, you you correct me, you fill out my uh my basic understanding here.
But from what I take and and what you're saying about the moralism lens is the moralism lens takes a verse of the Bible.
Uh it it takes something that appears to be a definitive moral statement, something like divorce is bad, divorce is evil unless you're in a uh a situation of adultery, or those men who lie with men or have sex with men are are abominable, yeah, and says, okay, we have this like six-word sentence, and therefore there is a moral uh directive here that says homosexuality in every case is wrong, or divorce is wrong unless there's adultery.
And that means if you're a bat a woman who's uh uh undergoing abuse in your marriage, but there's no adultery, you might need to stay in the marriage because no adultery, sorry, that's what the morals of the Bible say.
Yeah.
Is that demoralism lens?
Do I have that right?
And why is that a bad way to read the Bible?
Yeah, I think that's really succinct.
I think it's a bad way to read the Bible because it is overly reductive to what's actually happening in the text uh quite often.
It also ends up leading to really problematic things.
You identified two situations where it has been used as a weapon against queer people or against women in abusive relationships.
I tell a story in the book of a woman who was in an abusive relationship who uh was told by her pastor, a fellow clergy member here in Austin told her, I know that you are getting, you know, abused in this relationship, but God hates divorce.
Three-word phrase, it's in the Bible, it's a moral imperative.
God hates divorce.
And yeah, God doesn't like that you are getting abused, but actually God hates divorce.
So whatever you're enduring with abuse is not nearly as bad as the wrath of God that will come from divorce.
Now, I think the reason that something like the moralism lens is complicated or or the reason it's so prevalent is because it's it's sometimes true.
There are moral imperatives in scripture.
There are over 2,000 verses about caring for the poor and the marginalized.
Those are moral imperatives.
There are uh Jesus said the most important thing is to love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself.
I think that's a moral imperative.
The problem comes that we have to decide what is what I would say descriptive of something happening in a specific time inside of a context and then prescript it as a moral imperative for all time, right?
And we're we're making these judgments again based on a set of criteria.
And I think that one of the best sets of criteria is like, who does this benefit, right?
So uh a moralistic lens like God hates divorce in all cases except for maybe adultery, who does that benefit?
Well, it it it benefits abusive husbands and heterosexual relationships because now they are able to do whatever it is that they want to their wives and still remain in power over them.
But I think what's what I try to do in the book is to peel back and say, okay, there is a couple of uh times where it says God hates divorce, but there's another really interesting thing when you look at the divorce commands in scripture, and that is that uh basically every single one of them are directed to men exclusively.
Now we have to ask why that is.
Well, because men were the really the only ones that could initiate divorce in the ancient culture, especially in the Greco-Roman culture of the first century.
Women were, according to Roman household codes, treated like property.
They were essentially uh women, children, slaves, and like animals and land were all basically in the same category of like belonging to the male in the household.
This was true in marriage too.
I mean, women were essentially sold by their fathers to their husband to be for some kind of dowry, and it was an arrangement that they had little to no say over.
And so when you understand the kind of context of even the way marriage existed, maybe we actually hear God's heart when God says God hates divorce, because a lot of times when men would divorce their wives for no reason at all, just to, you know, want to marry more women or whatever it was, um, women were considered like damaged goods goods in that culture.
A lot of times they were ended up on the street or in prostitution or dead.
And so, like, of course, God hated that.
God hated when this vulnerable population of women were discarded by their husbands.
Now, if that's the actual truth that is all over and above the like quote unquote God hates divorce, God hates when this vulnerable population is being abused, then we can fast forward that and see a woman in an abusive marriage.
God hates that.
God wants that woman to step out and be divorced, right?
Because that is actually like the equivalent interpretation from what God was actually upset about in the biblical culture.
There's a there's a lot there.
I I have to say, I don't think we have time, but I I really appreciated when you were talking about Matthew 19 in the book, and you point to the like four or five verses in that chapter about eunuchs.
And I can tell you, as a youth group kid, as a as a youth pastor myself, somebody who was like went to seminary.
Whenever we looked at those passages, there was never a sermon about the eunuchs.
There was never somebody who was like, Let me give you my best 25 minutes on the the those people who are marginalized and minoritized because of their sexual identity.
And you know, it was just one way for me to be like, you know, I haven't gone back to Matthew 19 in a long time.
Yeah, I'm no longer in ministry, I'm no longer a pastor, I'm no longer, you know, doing that on a regular basis.
And here I am looking at Matthew 19 as I read your book, thinking, man, all those years of reading these chapters and think talking about divorce.
Yeah, we never talked about the eunuchs that are here.
And they were like they there's as much material on the eunuchs from Jesus as there is on divorce or more in that chapter.
Anyway, some of you are lost now, you're like, what are we what are we talking about?
Uh, y'all.
So what you need to do is take your Friday night and go read Matthew 19, get a cup of tea, okay, and focus on the verses about the eunuchs and ask yourself what's going on there.
It's amazing.
That's a great Friday night.
All right.
The second lens we're going to talk about is the hierarchy lens.
So the hierarchy lens, and you know, you again, you tell me, is one that really focuses on social relations and who should have authority.
This is of course something we talk about a lot.
Yeah, whether that is in uh Charlie Kirk telling uh Taylor Swift that she needs to be a good wife and submit to her soon-to-be husband, Travis Kelsey.
I don't know.
Did we see that on online the other day?
I did.
I don't don't tell me why.
Uh, or if it's Doug Wilson, who was just on CNN uh with a big interview talking about how women need to submit to their uh their husbands and so on and so forth.
Pete Heggseth, of course, agrees with that.
Am I on track here?
Is that what the moralism or excuse me, the hierarchy lens leads us to?
What else do we need to know?
Yes, that's exactly right.
I think succinctly it's leveraging scripture to prop up power structures, which elevate some and diminish others, usually based on gender, race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, even citizenship status, we're seeing that like crazy right now.
This is the lens of uh Christophas or or Christian nationalism.
And I think when we realize that, and then we also connect it back to this was the lens of chattel slavery that said, well, actually, going back to this really obscure passage in the old testament, there's this theology called the curse of Ham that I'll just touch on really briefly.
So if you remember the story of Noah, Noah, you know, is the famous for building the ark and doing the whole thing.
Well, after the water recedes and he gets off the ark with his family, he has a pretty wild night and he gets hammered drunk and he falls asleep naked in his tent, right?
And he has one of his sons named.
We've all been there.
We've all been there.
Yeah, you know, Noah's just a real guy like the rest of us, and I appreciate that.
Except that when his son Ham walks in, sees him naked, Ham is, you know, embarrassed, not sure what to do.
He goes and gets his other brothers, and they come in, except they come in kind of with their backs to Noah, so they can't see that he's naked, and they grab a blanket and they toss it over him.
Well, long story short, Noah finds out and he just gets absolutely livid mad with Ham because he saw Noah naked, even though 100% Noah's fault.
And he curses Ham and says, you will be subservient to your brothers for the rest of time.
Now, when we actually engage a little bit, like from an academic and contextual standpoint, we realize this is really just a setup so that the people of Israel feel more justified to uh essentially try to exterminate the Canaanites, Which was said to come from Ham.
And so, like, we understand why the story is constructed the way that it is, but we grabbed it, we being uh specifically like white Europeans or white Westerners who, you know, invented chattel slavery, specifically in America.
And we said, well, actually, you know who the real descendants of Ham are, it's Africans.
And so we are allowed then to be in hierarchy and domination over them because of this Bible verse where they were told to be subservient to us forever.
And that it was the it was like I said, it was the theology or the lens of chattel slavery.
It was the lens of Nazi Germany.
And it was the it was over and over the lens of the crusades, over and over.
This lens has led to tremendous, tremendous harm and weaponization and violence.
And we're seeing it again with the rise of Christophascism in this country, where as to you point out, Doug Wilson and Pete Hagsath are able to say things like, This is actually like the subjugation of women is God ordained.
You know what I mean?
The enslavement of Africans is God ordained.
And for people who are attempting to follow God, even people who are trying to do it in good faith, there is no more powerful, you know, compelling reason to do something than to say God wills for you to do this.
This is God's desire.
This is God's structure for the whole world.
And so when we take that and kind of we bat like I call it baptizing bigotry, like we we make it to where we give all this religious justification for these horrible things.
And again, we're we're seeing this ad nauseum right now.
I mean, the Department of Homeland Security a few weeks ago released a couple of different videos with, you know, Isaiah Bible verses over them with, you know, B-roll of ice agents terrorizing immigrants and saying, you know, Isaiah's response to God was, here I am, send me.
So ice agents are doing the same work as Isaiah.
Just wild stuff like that.
Same thing with the, you know, movement to repeal the 19th Amendment.
So women can't vote.
Same thing, like God ordained hierarchy.
And so this is, I think, as far as negative lenses go, probably the most prevalent of the four to our cultural moment right now.
It does seem to be everywhere.
Uh, it does seem to be one that has uh kind of a resurgence.
Uh so the places I'm seeing it are are in places you'd expect, and I think people listening do expect that's in gender, that's in women submit to your your husbands, that's in women submit to men in general.
Uh, that is also though, I think coming in nationalistic ways that people are perhaps not used to, which is to say God ordained nations from the beginning.
Even if Adam and Eve had not sinned, there would have been nations, and therefore, if I'm a citizen of one nation, I have a God-given directive, and I am actually superior to you if you are in my country as a visitor, a foreigner, an undocumented person, and therefore I am even if you're a Christian, I can violently remove you from this country and feel good about it because God's given me that authority as a citizen uh of this earthly nation and so on and forth.
And it's even it's even like deeper than I can or I'm allowed to.
It's like I have a God given responsibility to do this, is what people are being told.
And the again, the leverage that comes from that, like God is asking you, you are God's agents on earth when you are doing these terrible things.
That's a it's powerful motivator.
All right.
So those are two bad ones.
There's two more, and folks, you're gonna have to read the book to to get there's no way to cover that all today.
But I uh some of you listening are like, we know about the bad ones, guys.
Just we know, okay.
Uh, how can you read the Bible in ways that are are uh inclusive, that are uh healing?
And also in some ways, you know, as we touched on earlier, faithful to the text itself.
Yeah.
So there's two lenses I want to I want to hit on.
One is the the fruitfulness lens.
And you know, I think a lot of folks are familiar with Bible verses that say you'll know them by their fruit.
Uh but that seems to be forgotten in many cases.
Tell me about the fruitfulness lens and how that is a better way to read the Bible.
Yes, you referenced it.
So so Jesus made this this point toward the end of his ministry life where he said, You will know my followers by their fruit.
And then, you know, Paul in in Galatians enumerates this kind of fruit of Jesus' spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
So my thesis in this chapter is essentially that we should be judging our biblical interpretations by the fruit that they produce.
Uh are they producing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, et cetera, in us and in our communities around us, or are they not?
And And again, uh, my my point here is that if they are not, and especially if they are producing the opposite of that fruit, instead of love, they're producing hate, you know, instead of of joy, they're producing shame, you know, all those kinds of instead of kindness, they're producing cruelty, then the spirit of God is not there.
The spirit of God is not in those interpretations, and thus those interpretations are wrong.
So that whole chapter, I spend unpacking it specifically related to the LGBTQ plus community and the toxic fruit that has come out of anti-LGBTQ plus Bible interpretation that has led to, you know, significantly higher suicide rates, can significantly higher addiction rates,
things like conversion therapy that's now illegal in 26 states in DC, uh, because of the horrific toxic fruit that came out of it, and the brokenness that the church has experienced when we've kind of cut off an arm, so to speak, by excluding this entire community.
And we can look at that and we should look at that objectively and say this is toxic fruit.
This has not yielded any love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, et cetera.
And again, my proposition here and and my experience leading a church that's fully LGBTQ affirming, where we have I I pastor next to LGBTQ plus folks, they're on our leadership team and board and all of those kinds of things in every level of our church, is that not only has it been really beautiful to see them be able to step into a space where they can fully participate without any kind of restrictions, not in spite of who they are, but actually because of how God has made them.
But it's also made our church so much better, man.
Like we are such a fuller picture of the image of God and the abundance of God's love when we are all together in this diverse and healthy family, diverse and healthy community.
And we just simply are not that without our LGBTQ siblings.
And so that's really the kind of the baseline of the fruitfulness lens.
And I'll say this is the most pastoral one.
We use it quite a bit in not just Bible interpretations, but one question I get, and maybe you've got some, you know, earnest Christ followers listening to this, people that are trying to be a different kind of Christian in our world right now and really unsure how.
I think the the fruitfulness lens actually provides a really great barometer for kind of how you're doing, right?
So are your beliefs and behaviors leading to more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, et cetera, in you and in the world?
And if not, then I think they should be re-examined.
For for uh, well, due to bad choices I made in my life, I'm writing a book about really, really radical Christian fascists.
And it's means I have to read a lot of bad things every day.
It's a really good choice.
One of the things I read recently was was a book on Christian nationalism from somebody who, from a pastoral perspective, said wrote these words.
You need to learn how to hate.
Gosh.
And uh yeah, and that was like the beginning of a chapter that's basically like learning how to hate is your way to learn how to love.
Yeah.
And it was like reviling to to read, but in the context of your book and what you just said, it really is one of those clear examples of like if you look at people who are faith leaders or teaching others how to be uh cultivate their spirituality, and their lens is love means learning to hate.
There's just a kind of empiricist uh positivist like look at that that says, I don't know if this is a great community and a great like tradition I want to be part of.
If I like go somewhere on a Sunday to like be uplifted and participate in a community, and the message I'm hearing is you need to learn how to hate.
It just there's just a sort of like way to empirically say, this does not seem like a great place.
So, all right.
Before we run out of time, the the next one I want to talk about is the flourishing lens.
And I talk about human flourishing a lot on this podcast.
So I love this part of the book.
Tell me what it means to read the Bible through the lens of human flourishing.
Yeah.
So I alluded to this earlier with Jesus' one sentence mission statement.
I came to bring life and life abundantly.
He kind of juxtaposes that to the opposite of the way of Jesus.
He calls it the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but I have come that they may have life and life to the full.
This was not a one-off.
The the from the beginning to the end of Jesus' ministry, this is a consistent message.
You have his Very first opening sermon at his hometown synagogue in Luke 4, where he says, I have come to preach good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, to set the prisoners free to declare the year of the Lord's favor to all people.
And then fast forward all the way to one of his last public messages, Matthew 25, the famous ta you know passage where he says, you know, when people are hungry, you got to give them food.
When they're thirsty, you got to give them something to drink.
And when you do that, you're actually taking care of me.
I am one with the poor and the oppressed and the marginalized.
And your job is to help them partner with them, co-labor with them for the purpose of flourishing.
And so what I really deeply unpack in that is to say, this is God's desire.
This is Jesus' desire is for all people to flourish, to have fullness of life.
And yet we know that that is not the majority of people's experience, that they are not experiencing flourishing.
And so something is in the way of that.
And I actually think that's my favorite definition of sin.
I think sin is one of those terms that's been so weaponized.
But I think if we can right-size sin as anything that gets in the way of our flourishing, uh, something we do to ourselves or somebody else does, or systems and structures that exist that prevent flourishing, that that's actually kind of what God calls sin.
It's preventing this thing God wants for us.
And so our job, I think, is to again partner with each other and with God in order to remove anything that gets in the way of people's flourishing.
And that really is the work of justice.
It is the work of liberation.
And so I talk a lot about liberation theology in that chapter, which is this idea really centered on uh the that God has uh what's called a preferential option for the poor and the marginalized and the oppressed.
And that makes sense if we think of God as kind of, you know, the this this purely good parent that, you know, I I've got two kids, two kids that are they're 10 and six, and they go through ups and downs in life, right?
But if one of them is doing pretty well and then one of them is just immensely struggling, I am drawn to the one that is struggling, right?
Because that's the one that kind of needs the extra help.
It's the same thing with liberation theology.
We as the people of God should be drawn to the folks who are needing some extra help, and not in a savior way, not in, you know, a paternalistic way, but in a way that actually listens and partners together and grows and realizing that it's not just our job to do justice, but that actually we become more like Christ when we have deep relationship and oneness with the marginalized and the oppressed, because that's who Jesus said he was one with the marginalized and the oppressed.
As I'm listening to you, I'm just wishing that somehow this was a prevalent ethos in American Christianity, at least American, white American Christianity.
And we're seeing the opposite.
If you have time, I want to ask you a few more questions about your role as a pastor and at restore and what we're seeing in terms of you used the word Christian fascism earlier.
I want to ask you about that.
I want to ask you about Christian nationalism from your perspective as a uh a faith leader.
But before we go and and jump into kind of some of those bonus questions for our subscribers, friends will just say uh better ways to read the Bible.
If you're somebody who was hurt by faith, you will really enjoy this and it may be really healing.
If you're somebody who's never like been part of the Christian tradition and you're you're here at Straight White American Jesus, listening all the time, trying to figure out uh that all of this in our politics and our public life.
Yeah, this this will help you understand ways that people can actually be uh Christians who are inclusive, who want people to flourish, who want people to live their full and and best lives uh in everything and and and uh they are and who they are.
So uh Zach, tell us about where to find the book, where to find you online, what uh what are the ways we can keep up with what you're doing?
Yeah, the books everywhere books are sold.
So, you know, Amazon Barnes and Noble is back ordered currently on bookshop.
All my uh all my folks are mostly indie readers, you know.
So they flooded bookshop, which was great.
Uh, it's also at a you know, tons of local bookstores, plug for book people, our local bookstore here in Austin, that's just phenomenal.
You can order it directly from there and get like a signed copy and they'll ship it right to you.
So they're fantastic.
And then I do most of my long form writing on Substack.
Uh, Zach W. Lambert is my handle there.
I write under uh the banner of kind of public theology, uh, very similar to a lot of what you do, Brad, and what other folks in this space do, just trying to connect those two things, you know, kind of uh sociology and politics and all that with uh with the Christian faith, at least healthier versions of the Christian faith.
And then I'm on every social.
So Twitter, Instagram, all that at Zach W. Lambert.
And my I really always say this, and I think it's important.
My my DMs are open uh on everything.
And that's not because I'm a glutton for punishment, although I do get a lot of meme DMs.
Uh, it is mostly because there are some folks that feel like, gosh, I I I need to ask a pastor.
I feel like I need to ask someone something like this, you know, a question, a concern.
And I want to be a space where if you don't have that somewhere else, you can shoot me a DM anytime.
And I try not to ever miss any of them.
So please reach out if that would be helpful.
All right, friends.
Uh, subscribers, stick around.
I'm gonna ask uh Zach a couple more questions about Christian fascism, Christian nationalism.
He has a very interesting and developed set of thoughts on this.
If you're not a subscriber, now's a great time to subscribe.
So you can get bonus content on Mondays like this.
We will be back Wednesday with it's in the code, Friday with the weekly roundup.
