Episode 84 - Christian (Part 2)

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hey lisa hey baby i wanted to bring you in here while i was doing the intro to this podcast because when i told you the guest you had an emotional reaction quite a bit more extreme than most guests that when you find out who the guest is you're like oh that's cool when i told you that jennifer knapp was going to be on this podcast it was more than that what and apparently jenny mike's wife had a similar reaction jenny doesn't listen to this podcast when she found out jennifer knapp was going to be on here [Music] she can remember i don't know she might listen to her first literature podcast we'll see but i i wanted to bring you in for this introduction because apparently jennifer knapp means a lot to a lot of people out there you know i liked her music but you seem to have some sort of connection with it that seemed really deep well jennifer was like for me i feel like her music was really it was raw and honest and vulnerable in an industry that often can cover up vulnerability [Music] jennifer was kind of for me breaking the mold on what a christian artist was yeah even just for like what what it means to be a girl in christian music she just was herself and it didn't seem like she was trying to be someone else or fits something that they were trying to make her into the vulnerability and honesty of her emotions that she was putting into those words like all came out in the music and it was i remember my my friend jc and i just lay on her living room floor on jc's living room floor and just cry and listen to jennifer naff because she was awesome well she's she's one of the the early people to ever come out in a very hostile world towards people coming out as gay and obviously that was a really hard thing for her but somehow she's held on to her christian faith even though it has evolved and so for this second part of the christian series we were lucky enough to sit down and talk with jennifer over skype and see why she's still a christian it was a great conversation i am real mad that i wasn't on that conversation well i'm [Music] all right well welcome to the liturgist [Music] podcast [Applause] [Music] why am i still engaged in this space of christianity you know i i can't even begin to answer that for everybody else but like what keeps drawing me back and the one thing i can say personally is that the way i engage christianity now is wildly different than when i started and like to the point where even like how i began in the beginning seems like a mystery to me like why did i drink that kool-aid is one of the things that i i say because you were in college right yeah i was in college uh i was pretty much on a two-year vendor i hadn't been sober for a couple of years and you know when i talk about how i entered into christianity the i the concept that i was a valuable human being worth fighting for worth living that there was some kind of dignity that the divine saw in me and my person was a traumatic revelation to me the why why i continue is there's been some kind of truth in this process i don't spell that with a capital t necessarily or and i don't necessarily link it to believing in particular things like you know noah had to get on the ark and put all those you know like two by two on there i think that's somewhat for me even to this day fantastical but underneath of that story of redemption and grace and the participating in life with the care of the preciousness of that that is something about the story and the narrative of christianity that still compels me to this day when jennifer one of the darlings of christian music in the late 90s just dropped out of the game suddenly in 2002 it started a lot of rumors and when she came out in 2010 there were a lot of angry and mean people but somehow she seemed to always speak with such grace and kindness even to those who disagreed with her in an interview with vox she said this about her detractors i really feel uncomfortable with the idea that someone not understanding me is my enemy as opposed to someone who hasn't yet had the experience to be comfortable with other people who are different than they are [Music] i think one of the things that i've resisted along this way is to say that i get to throw the baby out with the bathwater if there's something meaningful that i can participate in with other people a language that helps us look at the depth and the richness of our lives i mean christianity is one way to do that it's a spirituality and a religion that does that we also do that in the way that we write in the way that we tell stories but there's something about that process that's immensely meaningful to my life and it's it's something i just keep pulling on the thread yeah and i think even that's one way that i continue to engage especially in american christian culture i think one of the decisions that i made was like do i want to just simply be angry at this or do i want to say yes this has been a gift to me in some ways and it's been a problem for me and others so if i leave and i just simply you know abandon the process that has something in it that's meaningful to us do i not give it a chance to even be redeemed and i i don't know if that makes sense but it's you know i'm not necessarily out to be a card-carrying christian either you know i still struggle with with being labeled as a christian because that i think in this culture people think that that means that i'm on side with jerry falwell and i'm you know thank god i'm i'm not but at the same time like does that mean that i discredit somebody else's experience because it's going sideways for me i don't know i just i want to be part of that laboring toward how we process our lives spiritually philosophically and in real time contact with other people i think there's something significant to that i think when we lose that we lose a little something of what it means to be human so do you go to church no when i have to no i mean i'm not a member of any one particular church and i don't necessarily prescribe to a particular denomination so that kind of out of the way i still am participating in faith-based communities i do go into churches and speak a lot i find new ways to connect and i think that speaks something to a lot of people that i've talked with through the years where we've had this experience inside of christianity but a few of us are actually going to church what i call the old-fashioned way right sunday morning at 11 o'clock and we go through the ritual and the right i think that that raises an interesting question to me is like what is church and what does that look like and how do we show that it's something i've really had to to struggle with because i i don't miss it you know in that sense like there's nothing that i feel like i'm missing because i'm connecting with other people who are giving me fruitful conversation and teaching me and sharing wisdom in other ways so is that you know i question you know am i failing the church in some way by not participating in that or am i part of a movement that's trying to figure out what it means to have a spiritual practice in kind of a new place in a new time what's it been like for you in the music part of your work since you've come out yeah you know i i call this career 2.0 right so i had three records that i did during my christian music career and then after i came out you know i knew that i was going to have quote unquote a secular performance future but at the same time i i knew that i honestly wasn't really interested in participating in ccm and part of the the decision for me as an artist to kind of liberate myself from just talking about issues of faith actually it helped me feel a lot freer to explore spirituality you know the undercurrent of life in ways that didn't feel as restrictive to me like in the in the former genre there's an expectation that you'll talk specifically about jesus and your relationship you know there's always this character of jesus or of god in the conversation that has to be overt so no matter where you start in the conversation you have to put that being into the song and how you interact it never felt like as an artist when i was writing that way that i got to be the center of it or that a human being gets to be the center of it it's just always in reaction a response and in career 2.0 where that's not necessarily my concern the thing that surprised me is i realized that my theological thinking actually still shows up in the music that i write it just doesn't have the religious language and so in early on when i started writing again i found that i had to break myself of the habit of using the kinds of words that to me invoked christianity and so it challenged me as a writer to have to to look for new ways of being able to say the things that i wanted to say without kind of triggering off uh for somebody else but even for myself this idea that i was trying to talk to you about religion i didn't want to talk about religion i wanted to talk about you know what it's like to be be human and when the spiritual shows up and that that was kind of a gift i was really surprised that that shows up and even like strangely enough the last record i released about a year ago which i'll be touring this fall it's called love comes back around and when i was writing that record i was i wanted to write a record that was kind of romantic and talked about what love is in its various forms and i was so pissed off because i didn't really know where to start except for first corinthians 13. love is patient love is kind it keeps no records or wrongs you know there's something quintessential about that that i wanted to tap into and i think being free from feeling like that had to be you know in a religious context really helped me touch on some things that were intimate and truthful without having you know to feel like i was trying to conform to love in some way but rather to let love be a gift three of us here in this in this conversation have have had complicated relationships with the specifically christian music industry and what it's labeled and how how does this what does it expect of us and how do we fit what we're supposed to fit because we're saying about god or because you know because we're saying about these with this language and this metaphors and these ways of speaking about life and meaning and what it means to be human in ways that include christian language now all of a sudden yeah are you in this camp are you in in this group of people that makes music that is a sort of propaganda to make people turn into christians theoretically or become more hardcore christians or whatever so as somebody who that kind of felt forced on me i feel a very complicated relationship with the word christian the reason i ask you jennifer whether you go to church that's one of the main things that came up while mike and i were talking like i don't go to church anymore i love a lot of the christian what i think of as metaphors and language i think christ the teachings of jesus i love the ideas like the cosmic christ there's so much in mystical christianity's history that i am like yes yes yes yes love saint francis love all that but i'm curious about jennifer you say you don't want you're not necessarily consider yourself a card-carrying christian but you're still in the story somehow i just i'm curious i would love to parse that story out a little bit more with all of us even just a bit selfishly because i i don't call myself a christian at this point but it's not because i don't love jesus or that i'm not interested in christian theology even i am very interested in continuing to talk about christian theology and when i go to occasionally find myself in a church it's not very often but how why would i call myself a christian if i don't go to church what is that is there some sort of tribal belonging is it a system of belief that i i believe enough i i like the language enough to put myself in a boss so like the different mike calls himself a christian although most christians don't call me a christian but michael's mike goes to church mike loves going to church i love it so much [Laughter] i don't love going to church very much because you ain't going to the right church i love comic-con i also love harry potter world at universal like i just love weird things see and all the things that you mentioned mike are things that i would run away from really fast like the idea of going to a group setting right it's very rare like my personality type i don't actually crave these communal gatherings which is really strange i think as a musician i found a place to kind of enjoy what happens when people come together i deeply appreciate that at the same time i also know that i'm a person that when i've experienced ritual over and over and over again i know that i turned my brain off and i become desensitized right to the meaningfulness of a moment like surprise works much better for me and to use kind of a trendy christian culture word like seeking is a much more meaningful experience for me rather than repeating something over and over again hoping to manifest a feeling but i'm in the same boat with you guys like i think there's that rub that i have i like when i say i'm a christian on one hand i know that there are people who with the things that i definitely theologically believe would say oh you're disqualified from from being a christian and at the same time it doesn't necessarily make me comfortable when i realize that there are people who pay attention to when i say that that it's an endorsement of christianity that you know right now troubles a lot of us i've i've made a personal choice at some point to say that you know this is a starting place and christianity is the word that i use to talk about the tradition that has the language and has a tradition at which i begin with but it's not necessarily like the end of where i'm at doubt from the stage or doubt on a microphone and going man i don't know if i believe in that was enough to get you disqualified from ever working again and now i've just kind of embraced that and say well i'm kind of working at it the way that i do the concept of church being linked to christianity has always been a troubling one for me because you know what happens if i'm not in church do i cease to be somebody who's looking toward the divine and if i don't necessarily perfectly relate to christianity does that mean that other religions don't you know and other spiritual practices don't have the right or aren't in some way legitimate is a deeply troubling thought to me [Music] i do not see myself as a christian i once did but with my current interpretation of spirituality or the current expression of spirituality christianity just really does not cover it i don't really see much value in the bible currently or at least for myself most makes me angry i think there will come a day where i will be able to reassess the bible and christianity and maybe find beauty and connection to the divine through christianity and christian expression but currently very refreshing to fully distance myself from it i am a christian because i have felt the holy spirit and i truly believe i've felt god and his guidance in my life and i believe that he created me as a beautiful human being i am a master student of biblical studies and i would say that i am not a christian in any kind of philosophical or spiritual sense i had a professor tell me a few months ago that he likes to call himself a disciple of christ rather than a christian and that really resonated with me the word christian is literally just an adjective given to people of faith in the new testament if you looked at each part of me and my religious identity technically yes i would be a christian but i have a lot of trauma connected to the church and just general distaste for organized religion i am a person of faith i'm on this journey but i'm also a very confused theologian and i have dedicated my life to discovering what it really means to be a christian i like to say yes i'm a christian in the sense of someone who follows the teachings of jesus politically i would want to distance myself just about as far as possible from the term christian i still consider myself a christian not because i have a set of intellectual beliefs i usually don't but because i practice christianity i participate in the sacraments i pray sometimes i try to follow christ's way i read the bible which honestly these days is not helping me much and i try to make peace with my shaky belief in god as i figure out who god is it all depends on how you define what you mean by christian i've actually found it easier to say that i'm not a christian or that i don't believe in anything rather than having to have these constant debates and arguments and discussions on what it means to be a christian it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists [Music] so we're in this space of where people don't know if they're christians or not and there's not a lot of spaces where that's okay i feel like our culture has lots of spaces if you're like oh yes i'm definitely a christian and i also feel like we're creating spaces and culture for oh i'm definitely not a christian but if you're not sure or if in some crazy way you're okay if people do or do not identify as christians um and are just interested in exploring and discussing spiritual ideas even if you're not personally spiritual there's not a lot of space for you and that's why the liturgist podcast exists and that's why our gatherings exist we've from the beginning felt like when we come together from different perspectives from different stories with different emphasis and different parts of the journey all right there together in the mix in one big messy situation it actually provides space for people to be who they are after every gathering we have i leave feeling exhausted but inspired and seen and part of something that's bigger than myself and we've got a few more coming up before the end of the year so if you'd like to join us in a non-judgmental communal semi-spiritual experience well next week october 5th and 6th we'll be in london in the uk just in case you thought it was london georgia next week that's next week we leave wednesday and then uh november 16th and 17th we'll be in minneapolis minnesota and on november 30th and december 1st we'll be headed to nashville tennessee you can learn more and grab your tickets at theliturgistgathering.com in london we'll see you very soon yeah better look at a calendar are you a christian william um yeah i i am though just like you two um and mike as well like i feel like i i doubt my question a lot i'm also like you said jennifer very deeply concerned about the representation of what that means and whether the word evangelical or the word christian means now but i'm just of the belief that if the gospel can be used to oppress us then it can be used to liberate us so that is the only i think idea or thought that tethers me still to a type of formal belief in the christian faith or even an understanding of christian orthodoxy so to speak though i i do think there's space to wrestle with what is orthodox what is actually traditional because that's a it's a big history and it's a wide history so yeah i feel like a lot of what all of you feel with it complicate it i will say growing up in the black church there was something about the music and the the spirit of it all that still kind of lingers in my soul a bit so when you said earlier you're like uh i don't go to church and i was like that's cause you don't go to the right ones you know like i there's something still like i'll still show up to a church and the choir and the music and the the mood and the spirit of the room will still really deeply impact me or there have been times even in the last year where i've gone to church and they've like you know come up for prayer if your family members sick or will anoint you with oil and and that was a really powerful experience for me to go up there and get my head anointed with oil and to think of you know a family member that has cancer i find those things deeply meaningful um still even if i can sit there and pick apart everything the pastor's saying which i can but uh yeah so that keeps me i stay enough around it to feel comfortable what did you mean by um if the gospel can oppress us it can liberate us i think historically speaking the gospel has been used in our american cultural context as a type of slaveholder religion the gospel was given to the african slaves as a way to suppress them oppress them emotionally spiritually and physically and so when my ancestors was handed this religion at least in the in the last several hundred years i can't trace it back further it was meant to be used for my detriment to keep me submissive to keep me quiet to keep me part of the status quo and so i think looking back at our history realizing that when the slaves heard the story of moses and the children of israel they saw a god who was looking for their liberation and their freedom and i think that's traditionally generally speaking how historically speaking how you know black evangelicals have interpreted their faith as freedom being the ultimate ideal of god that god wants freedom and he wants to break the backs of pharaohs and oppressors and you know to the point of even sending plagues that god cares about justice i think that story is deeply moving for marginalized people to know that god is not just passive out there and just observing suffering that he is engaged in it and willing to raise up deliverers for the sake of freedom so for me that's what i mean when i say the gospel if it's been used to oppress us it can be used to liberate us and i think that was a hermeneutic that slaves naturally took a hold of without being taught without being learned so so i agree with you jennifer in terms of like your journey of trying to find maybe new language new metaphors and also a new hermeneutic for how to look at the text how to engage with it and you know just have a a meaningful practice i guess for how we live yeah liberation gosh that's the one thread i have never been able to kind of get away from that the gospel shares with me like it's a completely radical idea to to say to a human being you were free i think for me that was like early on the appeal of the gospel was like i was i was free and what does that mean i think maybe in that that time so to speak like i could see a door opening up in front of me and as i began to explore that and a lot of my music and the way that i talk i also found that as i spoke of that freedom going man you don't own me you know of all the forces that are external to me that i could name like as a woman i've experienced you know a certain amount of of my culture saying no you can't do that you're not allowed you know this is a place that you're supposed to stand these are the times that you're allowed to speak with something i was just understanding something of the notion of what was in front of me i would resist that right no i'm free and then you know again as a queer person inside of a faith community that's like no you can't be this and i would be that just didn't make sense to me no i'm free i've run into over the last 20 years realizing that when i say that i am free is a really rebellious thing to say yeah in our culture because it terrifies people if i use paul as an example to say everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial as a gay christian i i think it's hilarious that i quote paul at this point paul's kind of an asshole i mean really yeah and you know i have problems with paul like paul and i would go to the mattresses you know i like but there's something about that that i find extremely intriguing that i can do anything like the possibility that's before me is anything the question is what is beneficial and i think we're what christianity inspires me to understand something about the extreme importance and significance of what we do with our freedom how do i treat my life knowing that i can do anything for example on like a somewhat lighter end of things you know i had a church it was like alcohol's off the table christians don't drink alcohol and i was like no i can but is that beneficial for me i i love scotch i think it's a holy nectar whiskey and i i love whiskey but there's a certain point where when i remember that the freedom that i have to be able to engage in that i must ask myself is that beneficial and that is the part of talking about freedom the blessing it is to have life and will that we've been bestowed particularly look at it from a christian viewpoint you know what do you do with human free will right if we're not just tethered to god and only blessed by god when we're doing exactly the conformist thing that god wants us to be seems contradictory to this message of what it means to have freedom and when you start to exercise that freedom we consistently tend to hear no matter where we do it is you know you're going to cause damage to other people in your freedom the challenges that we do we do that i mean we hurt we can and we do have the power to hurt other people you know this concept right that we talk about often in the academic circles where the liberated turns to oppress the oppressor like how do we stop this cycle is one that's immensely intriguing to me and i i don't want to give up on that challenge [Music] i love that you identified the the feeling of threat because just recently i had a friend i was going to do a house show at this house and my friend's parent basically said oh i don't want him to come because he's a threat and it's funny because i think anyone who i mean the threat is right it's it's your body it's what you believe who you surround yourself with and what that does to you know people's ideas about the world or ideas about about god and i kind of had this funny moment where i said you know what they should be afraid i am a threat i am a threat and i used to feel paralyzed by that right in church circles where people would assume like i'm a threat for whatever reason like but now kind of in a funny way to because of freedom like you're saying to go you know what i am a threat i am dangerous what i believe and can say and who i surround myself with will radically shift things and that's okay now how i use that freedom how do i use that for the betterment of people and not just for the striking down of something or just being condescending like like you said and that's what still intrigues me about the gospel is the reality of yeah i am a threat my body is a threat my belief system is a threat especially to existing power structures now how do i help liberate myself and other people in a way that causes people to feel beloved and to feel part of the oneness [Music] yeah i'm really intrigued by like the concern that we're starting to hear in public discourse and conversation right i think we're we're doing a better job perhaps of being more aware of the power structures that are in play and like we're talking about this these notions of wanting to to actually participate in society but would become a threat because we're we're pushing against things have actually damaged us in the past and i i don't know it's it's it's strange to me that you know any time that somebody tries to solve a problem in our polarized culture right now it still comes with a certain element of finger pointing and i think that's a real challenge that's that we're facing right for for those of us who are on a space of of wanting to truthfully look at where where power threatens our own liberation and at the same time understanding that i desperately want for my fellow human beings around me to know what liberation is to know what it means to be loved to have dignity to be able to function in society and to join with me in the fight against trying to say that the evils that that we experience and that we recognize i don't know if that i'm convinced that i have to kill every evil thing that i see but rather i wonder sometimes if it's the nurturing something that appears to be evil back to health does that make sense i it totally makes sense to me but am i letting evil off then we start to engage in issues of justice right what does justice look like and it does justice have to be forcibly putting some someone back into a position of rightness it's an interesting thing that i'm i sincerely wrestle with i i think as a culture we just struggle in general to tell the truth and to love meaning can i tell you the truth about this right here in this moment or how i feel about this and still know that i'm loved still know that i'm accepted even if i failed or even if you fail and i i think we dance between the pendulums of both of that and so like i feel like we've been very anemic actually probably as a culture when it comes to justice or when it comes to liberation and i feel like we're growing in that we're gaining strength and i think oftentimes it looks like we're doing it wrong but i think that balancing between truth and love is very very important and i think people feel like they have to choose between the two and i don't i don't think you have to choose i don't think any of us should have to choose i think you should be able to communicate truth and always know that you can experience love which by that i define as acceptance and belonging and safety it's interesting to me that you you talked about truth and love and one of the first things that i heard it was kind of a trigger for me in a in a way because how many times i've had somebody come up to me inside of the faith community and say you know i'm telling you this because i love you you know you need to not be gay anymore right and a myriad you know you're living in sin and god can't love you and yeah you know and on that conversation goes but a distinction that i heard in the way that you said it is it's a different way than i've heard it in the past which is you know if i speak to you of the truth that i have with me the earnestness of what i know will you still love me and that's particularly resonant to me because that's kind of where i feel like the movement for the lgbtq inclusion has been we're telling you our truth now we're hoping that you will believe us and that's the challenge to you to know this truth about me and that you will still love me that's that's a dramatic difference between i'm telling you the truth because i love you that to me still goes back to the elements of of what i have learned with the gospel that here i am i'm willing to stand before my deity in some way the way that i am and say can you still love me this way because i felt like the answer has always been yes yep and if i want if there's something that i can i hope to religiously replicate is that with everybody that i meet right um to be able to say wow mike i can't believe you're into that um yeah i might repeat back is that beneficial like talk to me about that tell me how that's beneficial for you not with the spirit of interrogation but with a spirit of curiosity and knowing and and figuring out how to find out what love is in your truth i'd love to talk about that with the caveat that i am not evangelical anymore now i'm unevangelical like nothing interests me less than convincing other people that their lives should be more like mine nothing interests me less than convincing people that their faith should be like mine but with that said like and this might sound triggering at first so just preemptively assume i'm going a different way than these words will sound but i actually believe at this point in my life that we are all living in sin being gay and being in a gay relationship doesn't happen to be one of those sins but we are all living in sin if the best and most compelling theological description i've ever heard of sin is a culpable disturbance of shalom culpable meaning like something you do or don't do disturbance meaning the lack of creation or the resistance of and shalom being a state of wholeness and peace and if if shalom is that and culpably disturbing shalom is sin having any awareness of anthropomorphic climate change and not making an absolute and total reordering of your life immediately is a state of sinfulness because we are literally going to burn up the world right like and not in some distant 10 000 year timeline like a few hundred years potentially the globe is uninhabitable and we all keep flying on airplanes and eating beef and running air conditioners and doing these things that provide us a little comfort to get through the day at the expense of other people and so like and i listen to this conversation that we're having that's fascinating and i hear so many things i resonate with like is the resurrection a thing did that really happen that kind of sounds ridiculous to me what is new life what is freedom um and then i hear some people saying like i don't find that in church and i get that because church has been such an institution of oppression and persecution and danger for so many people but i didn't on accident compare the church to comic-con or to harry potter world at universal because at both comic-con and harry potter world people come together in a social consciousness and use a collective imagination to make mythology real when i walk down the streets of diagon alley in orlando yes god i am in the wizarding world i can point a wand at a window and utter a magic phrase objects will respond to magic when i walk around at comic con and i see people dressed up as characters from beloved mythologies i see my imagination walking around in flesh and in blood i dare say incarnationally and so when i contemplate the idea that at one point god took a physical body out of a tomb as a representation that it doesn't matter that we are born in sin that we are evolved organisms that are innately wired to look after our own needs first even if it comes at the expense of the other an empty tomb says creation itself has a plan for that and so the reason i like to go sing songs and take the eucharist is so that my imagination my imagination that there is some other way that there is some other story that leads to the redemption and not the destruction of creation becomes real in that space so i have a lot of caveats if i'm going to go to church i don't go to churches that aren't affirming of all sexualities and gender identities i don't go to churches that won't ordain women and queer people and have them in full and complete not only membership but leadership of the community but i have to go to a place personally where the imagination becomes real and then like there's this notion is the church exclusive if i go to a christian church am i saying that every muslim and buddhist and hindu and zen person and every non-religious person is in some fundamental way wrong about creation and i think about john philip newell's beautiful image that when faith traditions are young they are tiny saplings that have to be protected so they can grow but once they are full-sized trees they are meant to provide shade and comfort to all that come near them and that no great tree is any better than one or the other it simply matters which one is closest to you in proximity is a place that you can find comfort care and shelter so i like really resonate with people who feel that they are in some way the church in exile or in the christian diaspora they can't walk through the doors of a church building anymore but in some way are still fascinated with a story of resurrections told by christ with the weird strange teachings of paul the apostle this mythology and the hebrew bible all these things compel them but they can't use the word christian i don't care because for me i need a social collective imagination other people find liberation in silent contemplation alone and whatever leads you to that liberation to that freedom to that imagination that there is some way that humanity can be saved is freedom is the gospel is the church and i love it and i support it and i consider any person who seeks a better tomorrow for everyone and not just themselves my brother my sister my non-binary kin in this great tradition [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] sometimes we talk about things that are too weird for the liturgist podcast yeah i mean all the heavy hitting topics psychedelics earlobes sports things like that if you're uh kind of longing for the first season less structured very conversational approach to the podcast if you want to see what's happening behind the scenes before it happens if you want access to weekly meditations that are guided by the folks who host the liturgist podcast we do all that over on patreon which is how the liturgist podcast exists at all we don't do ads on this show and part of that's because it's a niche unique audience that would be hard to find the exact right ad score but also more importantly we take this space very seriously and we don't just want to throw anything into the space we know this is a safe place for a lot of you and not only do we want to ruin the flow of the show but we've never wanted to be tied down to corporate interests or people needing us to behave and stay in a certain box and sometimes that just happens with advertising money something gets something seems out of bounds and uh we always want this place to be as open as possible and for that reason patrons are not just like icing on the cake for us to be able to make this happen patrons are absolutely necessary to this work because there's a lot of work a lot of human hours involved and energy um that simply could not and would not happen without the patrons so we are so appreciative to all of you who financially make this show possible but there's also another element of the patrons that we don't often talk about and that is sort of the core community that they provide for the whole ethos and vibe of the liturgists as a whole and even if you're not part of that community directly it influences you if you're a listener to this podcast or anything that we make there's sort of a core group of people that regularly talk together there's people that get together there's discussions that happen even after every podcast we put a thread up on patreon so people can discuss it there with the other patrons and it's always inspiring there's so many wise thoughtful huge hearted people that are part of the patreon community and uh and that community really does influence everything we do as a liturgist so if you're not a patron but you love this show or anything that we do as the liturgist we would love to invite you into our little community for as little as a dollar a month you can be part of it and it it helps it goes a long way um so go to the liturgists.com and just click the little join us button in the corner and we'd love to have you join us i've really enjoyed hearing all of you talk about freedom in different ways it makes me think even how freedom has changed for my life when i think about what i thought freedom was when i was 16 was that i wouldn't masturbate anymore that's that was freedom wow and then i want to ask you how that worked out got him got him all you got to do is turn 35 it takes care of itself [Laughter] speak for yourself versus and then at a point for me becoming free was letting go of christianity letting go of my faith that was the boxes that was the chains for me and then not too long after that being okay with the religion again was like the aversion to it were my chains to be free to love christianity to be free to be able to go into a church without freaking out without as soon as i get home on my laptop and writing an angry blog post about it um so freedom has evolved for me and that the way i think about freedom now more i i'm probably more from like a buddhist lens where freedom from a small individual sense of separateness that results in suffering is kind of when you say freedom that's my that's my immediate go-to how i think about it so it's interesting hearing all these different ways of talking about freedom so i would just love to hear more from you jennifer on like what those walls felt like what it felt like to burst out how freedom has evolved for you and how does it how does your faith continue to pull you into new realms of freedom yeah well i resonate a lot with what you're saying i think what i pull out from that is there are moments in time where we have different things that are binding us right so i would say that kind of like you were saying like there are different kinds of bondages that i've experienced at different points in time in my life you know what what is hindering me from having this full and abundant life right what is what what fear is holding me back what am i afraid of in front of me like that's been different at different times like when i was 18 or 19 years old i just did not understand at all that i was a person of any worth i just did not value myself and it showed i damaged myself i hurt myself and in the process of that i just was leaving a trail of tears with other human beings as well i think you know when i was in ccm music and was you know at the time i left in 2002 i i felt like the guitar was an oppression i felt like christianity was an oppression i i felt like i couldn't measure up to the expectations that everyone wanted of me as a woman as a performer as a christian in a lot of other ways and i that just became so critical to binding me up that i didn't even know how to proceed and i i had to go away from that recognizing that in some way it felt like a loss and moving away from a lot of things see you know i'd seemingly had success i had a career musicians would love to have the career that i had and i was like i can't i can't do this one more step like i i wasn't a human being inside of this i didn't know who i was i was suicidal i just i was every day i got up i hated every person in the audience for being there and supporting me you know like i was just like this is not good this is really not good and that that fractured something in my spirit because i knew that something wasn't right it wasn't earnest the way that i wanted to love myself or other people later on it was in my hiatus during that seven years you know i was trying to figure out how to to untangle the not that it all kind of like ev everything in my life seemed like it was just one one big thing like my christianity was tied to my musicianship my christianity was tied to how i felt about myself my sexual orientation was a factor that i was trying to contemplate you know and if i wasn't one thing did that mean that these other things weren't valuable i had to go through this whole process and i was just bound up and kind of fast forwarding ahead like the first move that i'd made it was like it was okay for me to walk away from the church or whatever i stopped doing quiet times i just stopped worrying about all the quote unquote things i was supposed to do to be a christian you know i stopped trying to work on the profession of christianity and so i just said you know i'm just going to go be me i want to what does everybody else do so i you know like i didn't think about church and religion anymore it didn't mean that i stopped well i was surprised because it turned out it didn't mean that i stopped thinking spiritually it it didn't mean that i stopped you know having a spiritual life but it was a strange choice i didn't know it then but it was a liberation like you were you were saying like to be able to go i i don't have to do christianity this way anymore i just thought when i made that choice initially that it meant that i i wasn't a christian anymore that it kind of turned out not really to be true each one of those moments was a different point to engage in choosing freedom to be able to look at that critical point and say i i know somewhere in the core of my soul that i am not meant to be bound and what is the next move that i am going to make and i will turn toward and in the direction of freedom what i what i've been shocked by is by repeating this practice and that's kind of what i think i've gained over the last 20 some odd years is that i've had opportunities to recognize where i can enter into and with faith and with hope what freedom might be and turn toward that and see if it repeats itself again and i'm stunned every time like so when i came out in 2010 you know this is career suicide and i'm like well i don't have anything else to lose i haven't been working for seven years nobody probably missed me i'm dead in the water anyway so why don't i turn back toward music and see what happens because i just i wanted that back that belonged to me like music is a gift in my life whether anybody listens or not maybe i would have a career maybe i wouldn't but i wasn't not i wasn't going to be bound up by saying oh i can't play music anymore because i'm gay or i can't play music anymore because i really don't want to engage with the church anymore with my music i was like no i'm ignoring that i'm turning back to this one thing here and seeing if by saying yes to hope and possibility that this will turn out to be the gift and life-giving because it certainly was life and that gift seemed absent without turning in that direction so for me that was what shocked me about that is you're yeah like this is a suicidal moment to be able to say yeah i'm gay you guys are going to have to deal with it and still claim my faith there was a victory in that even though that i knew that i was going to be losing the support inviting people to say terribly wicked and destructive things strangely enough like i just felt like it was the right time in the moments like i know that that's going to come so let's let's do that and see what happens next on the other side of that threshold was connecting with people who were not only other lgbtq people who were still engaged in their faith community but were other people's affirming that dignity in me and and understanding because they had done something similar that understood the kind of courage that it took to turn and return to participating with other people to to turn back to the comic cons in the universal studios and say i want to be a part of what's going on here and can i come in and there is a place that has been there you know i found a reconnection i love henry now and talks i think it's um from loneliness to solitude is i think that's the right name in the book but he talks about the distinction between being you know lonely and as a difference from being in solitude right the regeneration in those singular spaces those introverted spaces which for me is brilliant i i would like to tell everyone that i'm an introvert and a hermit by nature but what music has done as an example has been a gift in my life that's allowed me to return to other people at some point a song that i write in my room and by myself is deeply meaningful and a spiritual experience but there's another level that that takes when i begin to share it with other people then communion begins to happen connection with other people begin to happen and then i start to understand that while in the air in my lungs and the life that i have is a gift and i can leave that you know i may be completely satisfied to live in a cave for the rest of my life but there's an abundant life outside of that and there's in connection with other people so that's a strange thing about kind of to me about cycling through these moments to be able to find liberation it it it doesn't just happen individually there's something mystical and amazing that happens when we're willing to enter back in with other people man i love what you're saying there jennifer i mean as a buddhist-minded person i'm not sure that i agree that freedom doesn't primarily happen in the individual's experience but i don't know that i would necessarily say that either like i don't i don't know that i would say like there's a an end requirement of it i'll stand by that contestation because even for me i'm like am i for example not a christian because i'm not in an organized church like there's something about that i'm like yeah i'm not buying that either but i do think there's like as an example like studies in solitary confinement you know this it's really hard for an individual in a dark room to find a sense of their own identity without the social and i i feel like there's something meaningful about that that there is something there that seems to be true about having to connect with other human beings without seeing ourselves in some mirror or participating in some way if we're not doing anything in the world we are we part of the world it's a you know it's a it's a question that i'm willing to entertain that seems to hold true at some point having to connect and share even the knowledge that you find alone with other people are you conflating though the idea of freedom and personal identity is that is that one and the same um that's a good question i i hope i'm not [Laughter] you know i'm not trying to argue that i i really i love your perspective i love so much about what you're saying and i totally relate man what you said about music pulling you out to other people is like oh that just really resonated with me i love that and so relate to it yeah but it's it's a deeply personal thing to do that i can get liberation from somebody else right you know if i'm literally shackled somebody else can come up and unlock the shackles and then thus liberate me but in my mind you know what do we do about the metaphysical liberation and i'm i'm not sure that there's a way to do that that's incredibly lonely it's you know a deeply personal experience no one else can make you free if you don't believe and trust in your own freedom and invest in your own concept of that so i don't know if that rescues the conflation at all but i mean there's a certain point where i definitely go you know and it's been troubling to me in my religious life was saying valuing my own ability individually to contemplate the divine and what that means for freedom for me as an individual i am assuming perhaps that somewhere in there there's a second step to with that liberation then what is my responsibility now that i have it how do i act in a free space with responsibility becomes maybe the next here question for me i think it's all interrelated though right like it would have to be like if we are mimicking creatures right then you can't truly be an individual without the model you know for how to be how to live right and so i'd imagine ultimately in our psyches and our in our sense of self there is this interdividuality right like we're we're not totally autonomous in and of ourselves that we are connected to each other we're interrelated to each other uh and so everything that works out in the individual is a mirror of everything that works out in the collective i don't even know if we can even divorce any of those ideas like as creatures as human creatures so freedom then is ultimately it is very pers it can be very personal but that is also still a reflection of the collective uh freedom as well too and so christ ultimately to me as a symbol represents the individual and the collective i think the image or the metaphor of christ represents it perfectly and that's probably why i'm a christian is because i think i see that image clearly compared to any other image or metaphor from any other religion i see very clearly in the person of christ in terms of his humanity and his divinity and the incarnational reality of him so to me that that question is answered in christ it sounds silly to say you know christ answered that question that's answered in christ and we're all living in sin these are the takeaways from the liturgist podcast [Music] sociologists tend to view human cultures one of the spectrums they used to evaluate them as how individualistic or collectivist the culture is so america's a very individualistic country most of europe is very individualistic india china brazil tend to be much more collective cultures there's another spectrum that's recently been proposed about how tight or loose a culture is but that has nothing to do with what i'm about to say so i won't go into it oh i'm interested it is super interesting because we start taking cultures on multiple spectrums you start giving really good predictors for how people in those societies will behave what their moral codes are what they approve what they disapprove of which leads me to my next point there's no such thing as individual human consciousness it doesn't exist and when we study the human animal we are less collective than you social insects so we have much more individual identity and survival capacity than say a solitary ant or be but compared to almost any other animal on the planet we are more socially inclined and less capable of individualistic survival and psychological coping the most introverted solitary hermit human animals are way way way more collectivist than the average tiger it's just it's not close and so like we can talk about like liberation truth the all these theological components but me being science mike i always jump back and i go well those are navigating mythologies that humans use to cope and there's a great book called consciousness and the social brain it's one of my favorites that goes into this social theory of human consciousness where uh basically if a person goes off by themselves a little piece of a group consciousness carries off from the group and then immediately begins to degrade and the longer that piece of the collective consciousness is removed the more and more degraded and less healthy it becomes until it re-emerges back into a social identity and so what's interesting to me is if you look at buddhism buddhism arose as a faith in a collectivist culture so you see this movement towards finding truth within in other words we are all in each other's spaces and emotions and physical proximity constantly and so you will find some freedom and some liberation on the other side of a sociological spectrum that you haven't experienced at the same time europeans are basically stealing a middle eastern religion in an empire that is designed around the notion of the individual and autonomy that's a very greco-roman concept and so these greco-romans take on christianity in conjunction with some jewish diaspora and then they say freedom is found in what the body of christ the surrender of the individual and so what i think when we find truth and find liberation spiritually the gift we get from these navigating mythologies is the capacity to take a click up in our view of the world beyond our indoctrinated cultural expectation so i think that's why so many americans encounter buddhism and are like wow because they're in an individualistic culture that has had a strange collectivist faith be transformed back into the personal salvation narratives in this highly individual lens and then buddhism says go into the individual which you as a westerner are capable of so that's no challenge for you and then lose yourself and then that's a big challenge for the american whereas perhaps for for a hindu to lose yourself that's that's no that's no challenge that's the easy part maybe the challenge in that culture is just go into yourself i guess i'm using science to be a peacemaker to say according to science you're all right looking at a different facet yeah of human biological behavior absolutely also we don't have free will well okay so individual consciousness is not a thing i agree on the fundamental level i you couldn't say that collective consciousness is a thing any more than you could say because you take it's all human civilization collective consciousness that's rooted in the ecology of the earth and in the food that we're eating and in the and that's rooted in this the orbit of our planet around the sun so there's no you can't ever draw a firm line around this is the real thing that's happening as its own thing it's all connected to all of it and to me i said that the experience of buddhism can be more individualistic i was referring to that look into yourself practice as opposed to like come to church and take the body and blood with everybody else um the real freedom and while i agree that the idea of freedom and truth and all these things are coping mechanisms like you said mike i don't agree that the experience of them is necessary i don't maybe you didn't mean it like that but i wouldn't say that the experience of them directly is a coping mechanism the experience of freedom is a different fundamental experience than of an experience of bondage there's an eye that is limited that i can't do something that to me is the feeling of bondage and at this point with my experience it's a it's a tricky thing to talk about freedom sometimes because when somebody feels like there is something else that is real that is chaining you as as though that's a real thing it's difficult and and not appropriate to say to that person that that's not true and i have enough love and compassion for the people that are believing their stories to not like try to dismiss it but i also first hand know what freedom is now and that we are all free at any given moment you are free and i think jennifer said earlier in the conversation it's a radical thing to tell that to somebody it is a radical thing to say you are free because if they don't feel free if they feel like somebody else is not allowing them to be free if they feel like something themselves is not allowing them to be free it can almost it can be threatening it can sound offensive and is offensive but who do you think you are and that's the to me like the ultimate when you get down to like oh all these lines start dissolving if you really look into them too closely who do you think you are you're god holding on to a story and uh getting esoteric i was about to say i'm a little lost right now yeah i actually am not lost i'm actually laughing because i'm the one who identifies as a christian expressing a materialistic atheist worldview and you're the one who does identify as a christian who's talking about the validity of the idea of god it's just kind of hilarious because i was literally down bondage and liberation are parts of a story that brains tell rocks never feel free or in bondage unless you believe romans 8 that says all creation is groaning and waiting for the liberation right maybe they are in bondage i believe it when i take the eucharist at comic-con [Laughter] um sorry jennifer i don't know if you were prepared for how deeply weird we are i don't think she was no actually i i'm like uh i'm enjoying listening this feels like uh like the conversations that i get through at a bar over a beer so many nights and uh loving the conversation i'm in i'm like man we should record this [Laughter] isn't that how this started right from a bar right yeah i i had just a little wondering uh so christianity we would often say right that like it's very we say like very individualistic but it's communal in the in the gathering i just politically speaking for a moment would it be far-fetched to say that um because i i think a critique typically of evangelical christians are how they're not they don't have a collective sense of like we are like as americans we're all one right they kind of seem to isolate themselves and like you know but it's interesting because it almost feels like to me that if you are a die-hard christian your sense of collective identity comes from just church alone they see themselves collectively as a whole the christian faith like when there was a billboard here in l.a that got taken down some people complained it was greg laurie holding a bible and i don't know saying come to my crusader church right and he's like a big you know the harvest guy he like fills out stadiums in orange county right whatever and people complained about it they took the billboard down within a day i think any christian like that i saw on my feed on facebook was like this is a disgrace you know whatever when it comes to any other social issue they're not saying anything but when it came to like that one it was like you know they were on 10 it was like i think it even got fox news coverage right like but so many other collectivist issues don't get like raised in that so do you think the problem is that american christianity sees itself as the whole instead of a part of a greater whole that's a big problem and that and that would be the fundamental disconnect of what we're seeing when american christianity sees itself as the whole and not part of the whole is that what you said yeah that's pretty good yeah yeah like uh they see themselves as a whole unto themselves um and so their issues their concerns are the world to them nothing like really else well the senate the christian story is that that the church is the center of god's work in the universe yes so the universe revolves around the church yeah absolutely and so climate change oh well you know when i left in 2002 like kind of did my initial you know screw christianity see a good night [Laughter] what i did was not long after that i traveled europe for a good while and europe's full of really great cathedrals great religious you know european religious history so i found myself in a lot of cathedrals i went and saw the book of kells and almost you know almost every time that i was in some of these spaces i was somewhat being cynical as i'm going in like look at all this old crap but at the same time i think one of the things that started to dawn on me is that i feel rather ignorant when i say this but it had never occurred to me that i'd grown up in an american christian culture that that the christianity that i had experienced was cultural right that it had the markings of regionally where i grew up and you know i hadn't kind of burst the evangelical bubble yet because in the way that i had experienced christianity there you know christianity was evangelicalism that's all to say is that you know i've had the the privilege of being able to experience and witness so many different kinds of christians you know i used to think there were california christians back in the day that's so real sorry that's like that really is a thing yeah well you know i was shocked like i remember you you mentioned a harvest crusades right so i i participated with harvest crusades uh back in the day in the in the early 2000s or so and i was shocked because first off like i was i was weirded out by the wealth of a lot of uh the mega churches in california i'd never orange county too like that harley davidson motorcycles and people who drank wine and in the south that's not on like you just did not openly drink wine and so i said oh you know i i had this perspective that there was a progressive nature to the christians in california that were different in the northeast you know i experienced them as rather and these are all stereotypes right so don't they're not necessarily what i captively think today but you know i'd experienced a more academic approach to christianity from the north then i and then in the midwest it was the way i grew up was just everybody was christian so what's the big deal you know so i all these kinds of different ways that that even within the the us i'd already had an experience as a musician that i hadn't really thought about that and given credit to the different ways that people practice this tradition that it wasn't just one thing even though the narrative that comes out of america is kind of tying into that what would jesus do movement and everybody's got the t-shirt and buying into the brand that's the perspective you know the experience that i thought that i was having but once i got outside of that spend some time out of the country and later lived in australia for five years where you don't hear the mention of christianity nearly as often as you hear it in the states and you don't realize that the frequency at which people talk about christian christianity in this in the state is dramatically different than some other western countries so that concept of that you know there was a way that was culturally um happening here that strangely recognizing that for me it was like oh wow like yeah some people do christianity this way but what is the same what is the common thread between what i've experienced in the u.s northeast the south the midwest the west coast versus europe versus australia you know versus other places that i've been and i think that was part of the rebuilding process for me and not just saying you can't couldn't just stereotype a christian but if you've never seen that and you haven't had that experience i you know or you only read from whatever the local christian bookstore gives you and you only listen to the kind of music that you know the brand that you buy into right if you're only a fox news listener you're going to only get that narrative and challenging ourselves with other narratives actually helps us see i think it's you know one of these conversations of diversity why diversity matters is it gives us perspectives that we don't get to experience necessarily ourselves and in our place and in our time yeah kurt anderson who wrote a book recently called fantasyland and he talks about how the the problem with america is how overly religious we are because and that's kind of core to america it's hyper individualism like you know you can do whatever you want to believe whoever you want to and he was saying that that how that pretty much has led to who we see in the white house because it's not an aberration it's actually like deeply part of the american spirit like you like you're saying is the the cultural lens by which we're overly fanatics and we see the world through a certain lens and so therefore because we're overly religious we then impose that myth in that fantasy and and not just want to live in that bubble but then you know want everyone else to to do the same and it's funny growing up in america you don't realize that's the core sin really you know i was thinking about that driving over here i was like man i grew up overly religious like when you're in church four days a week that's overly religious you know what i'm saying like there's a there's a number there's a qualifying number five days per week three is borderline four is overly i was going to say i think that's interesting though that you know we're that that's the assertion right that we're overly religious when church attendance is actually dropping at an exponential rate in the states like what does that actually translate to is there another way of because we definitely talk about religion right and faith and these things matter but none of us here are like you know go to church more than you know a few times uh yeah so what what how does that actually manifest i i think that might be the post-evangelical crowd or the the the the nons the annoyance but i think the the parts of christianity that are still like i think they're actually getting like more religious like they're not loosening up in in a major way maybe millennials might be that's a question um white millennials are yeah are we becoming more religious are becoming less or less religious equally spiritual uh americans of color are not abandoning church no not in all numbers black christians are not leaving the faith in any type of hispanic and latinx christians as well even among millennials see no significant decline yeah interesting yeah so it's a white people probably right the big the big much vaunted death of the church is really just the the death rattle of white christianity which is awesome i personally let that one go yeah fade quietly into the night like that whatever that speech is do not go gently into the night no white christianity go gently into the night we're going to give you a couple more shots here you're going to feel real sleepy are you sure this isn't a heretical podcast oh it is definitely yeah i want to set up a testimonial page of major christian faith leaders denouncing us my personal favorite is when ken ham said that we were more dangerous to the christian faith than atheism so yes wow because there's a gray yes seriously gray is more threatening than than atheism to them if jesus was brown and the church is brown i got no problem with that personally i don't either but i i will say just to be self-critical i i do think there are parts of of the latin church and the black church that have pulled from the white church and are deeply they're parts of the black church that are deeply unhealthy they're a part of uh the latin community in the religious tradition that are just you know that because that's who was the biggest right like everyone pulled from tbn everyone was pulling from you know the famous white preachers like that's where uh so there's there's that wrestle there like black spirituality or black christianity is not perfect right but the decolonizing movement of christianity led by christians of color yes that's why i'm so for that and so excited about it if they can they can hold on to the liberation aspects yeah of the church and hold on to these things that create this beautiful social cohesion and this this collective care for one another and then ditch hyper individualistic colonized components that that europeans and americans indoctrinated into those communities that would be a really beautiful faith it would look can i just offer a quick translation to those who aren't um following the same people on twitter that we might be following [Laughter] that's a good point wait that that these guys are not talking about skin color they're talking about systems of power systems of oppression that have existed and normalized themselves um through centuries and not that white people as people that are have light skin are somehow inferior this was not an anti light colored skin speech that you were hearing from them that might yeah that might have got a little insider so i would say it this way i love white people i love white people i love white people i'm out to get whiteness as a sociological construct of systems and identity identity yes i'm attacking whiteness yeah very true but back on the tracks folks you guys do have the ability to edit right we do oh yeah [Laughter] i'd run all that personally i i didn't mean to imply anything i'm just yeah i i might need to do a blurb about the the views expressed in this podcast why the liturgists are not necessarily those held by the guests well thanks for joining us and dealing with the madness today and thank you for for your life and your work and for being courageous and leading the way for untold numbers of people in the future that want to follow jesus but also have identities that are sometimes not acceptable to their world to their tribe and you just i think you're a hero to a lot of people and just thank you for being courageous and being you [Music] this has been part two of our series called christian we want to thank jennifer knapp for joining us this week thanks to greg jordin for production assistance if you like the music on this podcast make sure to check out on earth we just came out with our second volume of music a lot of it was from this podcast on earth volume 2 check that out and we want to thank our hosts william matthews michael conker and me science mike thanks for listening everybody