Washington National Cathedral

Sam Lloyd: Good morning, and welcome to the Sunday Forum. I want to just note as we begin that we are going to press a little bit later here, and go on until about eleven o’clock, so we have our full conversation with Brian McLaren. It is an old trick: to bring people into church and then not start on time, so we can encourage the prayer life of the group we have gathered here. So I hope you have had ten minutes extra to work on your prayer.

We are privileged to have Brian McLaren with us today, who is by far one of the most creative forces at work in the church today whether it is evangelical or mainline, he is teaching us all important things about what it means to live the Gospel in this time.

Brian, as you may know, is the author of a number of seminal books, and he just rolls them out one after the other, and each one of them is a must read. I encourage you to buy all of them when you gather for coffee just following this conversation. In one of them, called Generous Orthodoxy, he provides a pretty good description of himself, and I thought that this might be useful to get us started.

The title is Generous Orthodoxy and the subtitle is this, Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian. (Laughter) Well, that is who we have in front of us, and he is either all of those things, or he is very confused and trying to figure out which one he is, but this is what we want to explore today. It is a real thrill to have you with us today.

McLaren: Thank you, and I am so happy to be here.

Lloyd: Let’s start with all this talk about something called the “emergent church.” It is a term that many here will be familiar with, this creative new movement happening somewhere along the lines of the evangelical tradition but is beginning to touch just about every part of the Christian church.

McLaren: Yes, you know, my friend Phyllis Tickle has an interesting kind of scenario. She says that about every five hundred years, the Christian church has a rummage sale and it sorts through all of its treasures and decides to leave some behind and decides that others are worth keeping, and then it kind of moves forward.

I actually think that something big is happening around the world. I think that in the global south, we use more the word post-colonial and we figure out what it means to be post-colonial Christians. And in the global north, there are a lot of other post- words, post-modern, post-Enlightenment, even post-Christendom in some ways, and so this big change is going on. Here in the U.S. this, I think, is a phenomenon that began in the 1990s with some mostly evangelicals, although there have been mainline folks, and pretty quickly Catholic folks, involved very early on. And they were realizing something that really I think is just going to hit the public media really this year, and that is some pretty disturbing statistics about the dropout rates of young adults and when people started paying attention.

By the way this was a lot of mega church pastors, and one thing that mega church folks do really well is they count people, and they were counting and noticed that between eighteen and 35 or eighteen and forty, there was a big demographic dip in their church attendance. So when people started paying attention to this, they started to realize that there was a lot going on. It was not just superficial issues of style, musical style, or preaching style, or leadership style, although those were part of the picture.

But they started realizing that there were deeper issues going on. There were shifts in the way we believe. There were shifts in the way we understand our faith in relation to other faiths, very deep philosophical, cultural shifts, and that is really what this has been about. It has been a conversation among Christian leaders grappling with these shifts in culture.

Lloyd: If you would, describe semantically what shift is all about. You said that we were shifting because we are really missing the boat with a lot of people. What is the energy driving the shift? What is the direction that it is moving in?

McLaren: Well, you know, this is where it really gets complex, and it was a lot easier for me ten years ago. And now I think that I see so many layers of it, I probably am not nearly as clear as I used to be in addressing that, but here would be one way to say it.

The story of the last five hundred years, in many ways for Christianity, was the story of colonialism. Southern European Catholic Christians spread Catholicism around the world. Northern European Protestant Christians spread Protestantism around the world. But Christian faith always went hand in hand with colonialism by European nations. We in the U.S. picked that up with our own version of American colonialism that we could talk about. When you have faith and economic and military power put together, you develop ways of arguing, ways of promoting your beliefs, that were very effective. But then we reach a point after World War II, I think, where there is a profound rethinking about the whole project of colonialism, and the whole project of industrialization, and all of the rest, that goes along with it these last five hundred years and that rethinking, that critique of Western civilization on itself, I think, is the drive.

The way I would say it would be this. Five hundred years ago, the medieval world view and the Christian faith were fused, and through everybody from Copernicus and Galileo to Luther and Calvin—and, in their own ways, Thomas Hooker and Cranmer, they were in the process of separating Christian faith from the medieval world view. Then, in the last five hundred years, the Christian faith became enmeshed with a modern world view. And now I think that we are in the process of a similar kind of disembedding taking place, and I believe that the Christian faith has to play a key role at this juncture—just as we did in the last juncture—of actually helping imagine and create this next way of living out our faith in the world.

Lloyd: One of your themes is how Christianity is wedded to modernity. Say something about what—you use a lot of pretty philosophical terms—

McLaren: Yeah, I know, especially on a Sunday morning. (Laughter)

Lloyd: —but you’re getting at some important things about what we need to wrestle with. What’s the struggle with modernity about?

McLaren: Well, let me maybe give three examples. One of the characteristics of modernity intellectually is analysis. We try to understand something by taking it apart and critiquing it. We find what is wrong with it, and we break it down into its pieces. So a simple example, if some of you remember in biology class in tenth grade, you wanted to understand the frog, and so you dissected the frog, and you took all of its parts, and you understood the frog by going downward.

We do the same thing with the Bible. We want to understand the Bible, and we break it into testaments and books and chapters and verses and sentences. And we really feel that we have nailed it when we get down to Greek roots, prefixes, and suffixes, and there is a lot of understanding that comes from analysis. But when we move into the post modern world, people realize that there is another way of thinking.

Analysis is good going from the whole down to the parts but there is another way of thinking, going from the whole to bigger wholes. And, for example, you take the frog, and you say that we understand some things by dissecting him, but we understand other things by realizing where does that frog live? Well he lives in this little swamp, and that swamp is part of a watershed, and that watershed is part of an ecosystem, and so we then try to understand whatever it is we are looking at in light of larger wholes that it is part of. That shift in thinking has large implications on how we preach, how we teach, how we evangelize. Huge implications.

Lloyd: You talk a lot about stories: stories that shape our lives, thinking about what the true narrative is for our lives, with these competing ways of telling the story of our lives. And the church needs to weigh in with a new story.

McLaren: Actually, that’s one of these other big shifts. I think that we could say that modernity was the era of systematic theologies, where we organized all of our propositional doctrines in outline, and that was what we wanted to convey. But now I think that part of this deep and profound shift that we are in the middle of, involves rediscovering the Christian faith as a story. A story of God and creation, a story of Abraham, Moses, David, the Prophets, Jesus, Paul, and then it comes all the way to us.

How we understand the faith as a story, I think, is—well, it’s in some ways relatively new territory, because we just have not practiced seeing our faith that way. Then understanding how our story will relate to other stories, and figuring out the role that we all play in this story, because it is not finished yet. And that becomes to me very motivating and a very exciting way to understand our faith.

Lloyd: One result of that is that it begins to shift away from what you describe as a very private way of understanding religious experience and a lot of focus on personal salvation, whether in the more Catholic tradition or the evangelical tradition. It is about me and my private relationship with God, and my own personal salvation.

McLaren: It seems that we have these two things that have been separated, that should not have been. One is a privatized personal faith, and the other is a social and institutional faith. And we have some people who major in one and others who major in the other, but I think that part of what this idea of a story helps us do is that it says, well, look: both of these are part of the big story of Christian faith. There is a personal dimension. A dimension of personal commitment, personal repentance, being in a real relationship with God through Christ. But there is also, then, the process of living that out and manifesting that in our society and our institutions, in government, art, business, education, and all dimensions of life.

Lloyd: Generous orthodoxy: tell us about it. What is it?

McLaren: Well, first of all, it is a plagiarized term. An important theologian of this transition, Hans Frei, I believe is the one who originally used the term. And then my friend the late Stanley Grenz picked up the term. And I guess the idea is this. Just as we have polarities between private and personal, we also have a polarity in the church. One side has focused on orthodoxy—what are the right beliefs that we should hold? And the other has focused on orthopraxy—what are the right actions for us to be involved with in the world?

I think that the idea of generous orthodoxy basically says this: if you have right ideas, but you do not translate them into love, on good authority we can say that without love you are not worth much. And so trying to get those reintegrated is, I think, the challenge of generous orthodoxy.

I also think part of this comes from increasing our sense of history, because a lot of ideas that people consider timeless Christian ideas—especially here in popular Christianity in the United States—do not have a very long history. When you look at Christian faith over two thousand years, now you see this community that is amazingly resilient, and there is a deep continuity. But there is also amazing flexibility and adaptability and resiliency, and I think that the idea of generosity and orthodoxy tries to keep the continuity but also have this adaptability.

Lloyd: It looks like you are creating a framework within which a lot of people could come and gather. You so clearly honor the evangelical tradition that was your home, deeply rooted in biblical tradition, even Pentecostal experience. But you have discovered the liturgy and the importance of form in worship as well, and a sense of living with the ambiguity and complexity of scripture and the rest on the other side.

But you are saying that this generous orthodoxy is a kind of house a lot of people can step into, and learn from one another, and deepen their own biblical experience, but also their liturgical experience; and deepen their own rootedness in Christian teaching, but also wrestle with the ambiguities of it. Is something like that where you’re going?

McLaren: I hope that is what this thing is about. You know, it brings to mind an insight from human developmental psychology. In human development, and I think this would be true in cultural civilization development, we go through phases. You have infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and so on. And in a way what happens to us when we cross one of these invisible boundaries is that we differentiate the new us from the old us.

So a teenager has to differentiate himself from his childhood life, and in some ways we—all of us who are parents—have experienced this, and we might not remember, but we experienced it as teenagers ourselves. We had to differentiate from our parents, and our children need to differentiate from us. But if you only differentiate, then you create division. So it seems to me that first phase is differentiation, but then there has to be integration. And this is where we go back and re-own our past and re-own our story.

I think that what has happened in Protestant settings—especially more on the evangelical side, where I am from—is, we do a great job of differentiation but a very poor job of reintegration. And this to me is one of our challenges now. How could we integrate the fact that we have the Eastern church and the Western church, and in the Western church we have Catholic and Protestant, and increasingly Pentecostal has its own identity, and how do we integrate liberal and conservative? So this to me is our great opportunity.

Lloyd: Sitting in a place like that, it sounds an awful lot like the Anglican tradition to me. (Laughter) Protestant, Catholic, liberal, conservative, liturgical, biblical, is that where you are headed? Come on home!

McLaren: (Laughter) Well, let me say that the best pastor I ever had was an Episcopal priest. And in some ways that inspired me to become a pastor and played a big role in my becoming a pastor. And it’s a long story, but I almost became an Episcopal priest, so I would not say I made it almost to the finish line, but instead I made it almost to the starting line. (Laughter)

But, you know, to me, this is a great moment for the Anglican tradition because, if we go back five hundred years to that juncture between the medieval world and the modern world, the Anglican tradition saw Catholicism in some ways continuing the medieval trajectory, and then Puritans and Protestants breaking away in this modern trajectory. And the Anglicans said, let’s take via media, a middle way, and let’s try to retain what we can from the past and learn what we can from the new. It is a perfect example of what I just said. They differentiated… now we will not get into Henry VIII and all that, you know, there are other factors, but they differentiated—

Lloyd: That’s an awkward moment for us.

McLaren: —That’s right, but everybody has them. Some just aren’t as obvious, but they differentiated, but, I think, tried to integrate in a beautiful way too. This is a great heritage, I think, for this moment. And I would just say to all of our Episcopalian brothers and sisters here, you know that I know that these are some rather shaky times, but in the long run I think this is a great corporation to get stock in. (Laughter) I think that there is a good future for Episcopalians because of this rich tradition you have, and many other reasons as well.

Lloyd: So we can sell futures in Anglicanism, are you saying that? (Laughter) Let’s stay with that for a minute. If Anglicanism in its own roots holds these dynamics together pretty creatively—and that is our heritage—why is it that, the current division aside, why is it that we are losing members and not just, us but why are mainlines struggling right now?

McLaren: Well, first of all, this is a complicated question, and there were easy answers. I do not remember if it was the 1960s or early 1970s when someone named Dean Kelley wrote a book called Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, and there was a very obvious answer that he brought. But that answer is now being called into serious question by the work of some people like Robert Wuthnow and others. So the answers to why there is a mainline decline are highly complex, and I think that the first thing we should do is reject the easy answers. I think that there really seven or eight really interesting answers. I don’t know, but I can give my opinions on this. I do not know what level of detail we want to get into.

Lloyd: Just give us two reasons.

McLaren: Okay. One reason, I think, is that in the 1960s a lot of mainline pastors made a choice. They felt that the moral position to take was to say that Dr. King was right and Viet Nam was wrong. And I think they were right. But in doing that, they distanced themselves from a lot of their congregation, and they did not succeed in bringing their congregation along.

Because mainline churches up to that point had been, if we could say it this way, the civil religion of America. They were the mainstream, and there was not much of a prophetic voice going on in the 1950s after World War II. The mainline churches were right at the center line, and to develop a critical attitude toward our own nation, a prophetic attitude… it was a delicate move. I think that part of what happened after the Sixties and early Seventies was that mainline stopped being the civil religion of America, and evangelicalism became the civil religion of America in recent decades. But I think that we are at this important moment where we have to imagine another relationship for vibrant, robust Christian faith to not be a civil religion that basically, you know, baptizes, and helps the government succeed in what it wants to do, but that we have a higher allegiance to Christ as Lord, and we try to live by that higher allegiance. Now that would be one reason.

Another reason, I think, to be very frank, is this. Evangelicals have tended to be rigid in their doctrine but very flexible in their methodology. Mainline folks have been more flexible in their theology but quite rigid in their practice. And my guess is that the way forward means we need to get some flexibility in practice that will be as big a challenge for some mainline folks as to loosen up a little bit on some of the doctrinal systems that the evangelicals have to deal with.

Lloyd: And so we are in a time—certainly in the mainline—for a lot of experimentation, a lot of trying not to turn loose of the heritage, but to use it creatively in ways that can be more engaging and accessible.

McLaren: And that word may be differentiate but integrate, or transcend but include—I think is really the key. I think that the worst thing mainline folks could do is reject these great treasures from their heritage, but I think that they need to, in a certain sense, say but have creative freedom as well.

Lloyd: After you wrote this book, A Generous Orthodoxy, which was really sketching out what this new kind of church needs to be, you turn quite particularly next to scripture. You wrote a book called The Secret Message of Jesus, and all of a sudden you are back to talking the Bible, and you are talking about what was at the core of everything Jesus said. Why did you go there, and why did you write as if this is the explosive piece of who Jesus is that we need to lay hold of? Tell us about that.

McLaren: Well, boy, I, this is such an important question. Maybe I could say it like this. As an evangelical, we really cherish the Bible, but I felt like what we had done is, we had sort of flattened everything out in the Bible, so Jesus was just one little episode in the middle of the Bible. And what it seemed to me that the Bible itself did not have Jesus be just one episode. It was more like Jesus was the mountain peak, and we saw things leading up to Jesus, and we saw things flowing away from Jesus.

So it felt to me that we needed to lift Jesus and his message up higher—but here is a great problem. For an awful lot of us—evangelical, Roman Catholic, and maybe to a lesser degree mainline Protestant, but still to a surprisingly great degree—I do not think that we have ever really gotten the core message of Jesus about the Kingdom of God. There is no question that’s at the core of his message, but for many of us, when we hear the phrase “Kingdom of God,” we think it’s about going to heaven after we die.

We forget that in the Lord’s Prayer we don’t pray, “Our Father in heaven, hollowed be thy name, may we go to your kingdom in heaven where your will is done, unlike down here on earth.” You know, it’s not what we pray. We pray “may your kingdom come here on earth, may your will be done here on earth,” and we develop this very detailed theology. And this goes way back to pre-modern Christian theology about our evacuation from this earth to heaven, rather than about God’s invasion of this earth through Christ. And that, to me, is what we have to rediscover. I believe that if we get that, it will change everything for us.

Lloyd: And so that leads to your brand-new book. You are saying that, if we really begin to lay hold of Jesus’ vision of what you called God’s ecosystem, God’s economy, God’s new way of relating, then everything about the structures of our world have to start changing?

McLaren: Well, yeah. This kind of has been about a twenty-plus year preoccupation for me because—I won’t do the whole story, but… way back in the late 1970s, I started asking the question, what are the biggest global crises we face? When I started really dealing more deeply with the message of Jesus, the message of the Kingdom of God—what he meant by that and how we would translate that into our world—the natural question was, how does the message of the Kingdom of God, Jesus’ message, relate to today’s global crises? What are those crises and how do these two go together? So that was really the stimulus behind the book, and, you know, you write books in different ways. Sometimes you know exactly what you are going to say, and your outline is all worked out. But for me, I began this book with those two questions: what is the message of Jesus; and what are the top global crises and how do they go together? And I kind of… the book became my opportunity to grapple with those questions.

Lloyd: What did you learn?

McLaren: One of the first things I learned is that there is some really interesting work being done by everybody from the United Nations to some top economists to Rick Warren who was here a few weeks ago, and trying to grapple with this question what are our biggest crises? One group of economists put the question this way: if you had three hundred billion dollars to spend, how could you spend that money to reduce the most human suffering? There is another way to say it: how could you use that money to improve our future possibilities the most? Really, really important question.

And what I ended up doing is that I took all of the lists that I could find, and started trying to find some way to integrate those lists, and I came up with… Really, what sort of emerged was this sense that each of these crises is part of larger systems. Remember, I talked about analysis versus looking at larger systems. And when I could see the larger systems at work, I saw there being four primary crises, and I think that the message of Jesus has something profound to say to each of them.

One is a crisis related to the planet, one is a crisis related to poverty, one is crisis related to war and peace, and then the fourth is a crisis related to religion. One way to say it is that our religious communities in general are not mobilizing us to address the first three problems. Sometimes they are distracting us from the first three problems, and sometimes they are actually making the first three problems worse.

This is why I think in many ways a lot of people think going to church on Sunday is kind of a nice civilized thing to do, but I think that if we really start to grapple with these things, coming to church to on Sunday becomes a revolutionary and world-changing participation, and one of the most dynamic things that could possibly happen that our future depends a great deal on.

Lloyd: So you have quickly gone to meddling with our lives—(Laughter). We were back talking about orthodoxy and being generous, and now we are going to read the Bible with Jesus, and now you are wanting take down all of the structures of society, is that right? (Laughter)

McLaren: Well now I hope not. (Laughter)

Lloyd: No, but what you are saying, one leads to the other, you cannot stop along that trajectory.

McLaren: Yeah, exactly right. I mean, here in this city, you know we saw this when… You know, do you ever just wonder how did white Christians before the Civil Rights era, how did they maintain Christian faith and racism so comfortably for so long? How did it happen?

Then it makes you say, well, what are the issues that we are maintaining today? And I think that one of them is the sense that we don’t have great responsibility for the welfare of the planet. It is a crazy idea that we aren’t responsible for this planet. The idea that the gap between rich and poor—and this intensified for me because in the last 10 years I have been in something like getting close to forty countries, I think, and I have walked the streets of some of the poorest slums in the world—that the gap between rich and poor is irrelevant to our faith. That is a crazy idea we have got to get behind. The idea that our faith is a private matter, maybe it helps us get along with our husbands and wives and coworkers better, but it has nothing to say about how Christians relate to Muslims, or about how America relates to other nations. Anyway, those are the things that I hope that we can start to put together.

Lloyd: One more question, and then I want to go to the audience. How do you imagine individual congregations putting all of this together? You have been unfolding in book after book an amazingly creative vision of where the church can go. Are you seeing it starting to happen here and there? And, if so, what does it start to look like?

McLaren: You know, this keeps me up at night, as you can imagine, Sam. But first I should say—especially for folks here in the D.C. area, but maybe some of our folks on line would be interested in this too—one of the things I am trying to do relating to this new book is get people together to talk about that very question. How do we take some of these ideas and embody them in our lives and in our congregations?

So this spring I am going to eleven cities, and we will be here in the D.C. area on March 7 and 8, the first full weekend of March, and you all would be welcome. My web site is brianmclaren.net—you can go there—or deepshift.org. Don’t forget the “f” (Laughter)—and you will get to this other site, and you can find out about that. But this is a conversation that we really have to take seriously, because, if this does not get embodied in our churches, first of all we miss a huge opportunity to address serious problems.

Secondly, though, I think that we start losing a good reason for the younger generation to keep coming to church if we don’t start leveraging our faith in action and love in a sensible way toward these really catastrophic—potentially catastrophic—crises. I think the liturgical churches have some steps ahead of us on this, and I think—and I am not just saying this, I really mean this—but the Book of Common Prayer is a secret weapon in this because, in the Book of Common Prayer, you have prayers that get you praying for peace. You have prayers that you pray for the stewardship of the planet. You have beautiful prayers that talk about our common humanity and us caring about our neighbors.

A lot of this has to get worked into liturgy, and it has to get worked into song and prayers and sermons and leadership development. I believe the priests and pastors of the future won’t just be people who maintain religious institutions, but increasingly they will be the people who are mobilizing people with a vision of hope and a revolutionary hopeful mind set to make a difference in business and education and government and all of the other areas.

Lloyd: Let’s go to the audience.

Question #1: This is political question, but small “p,” not capital “P,” please. What parallels do you see with a message in the yearning you are experiencing with your book vis-à-vis what you see happening in the present presidential election right now?

McLaren: Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it, that there has been a lot of talk about sort of the generational shift that is going on in this election. And I think that one way to say it is that our older generation—there are lots of exceptions to this and I am sure in this room there would be so many exceptions—but generally our older generations that were formed in the era of World War II and then the Cold War, we tend to see the world in certain ways. We were conditioned to see the world in certain ways. But I think the younger generations, they have grown up in a very different world, where they have grown up saying, gosh, global warming is a problem, care for the environment is a problem. And there is a whole different set of ways of seeing the world, and I think that we are seeing that playing out in the selection cycle.

I think that my hope is that in this election cycle we won’t get distracted by the wedge issues that help one party edge out the other, but that people like us can make sure that these bigger questions get on the agenda. I think that one of the things that we Christians have failed to do in recent elections is, we have tried to stake out who is right or wrong on the issues that our political parties bring to us. I think a far more radical thing is for us to bring a new set of questions to the agenda, a new set of questions to our political parties, and say, look, if you are going to be our leader, you’d better have some answers on this question. These are important to us and that helps, I think, as my friend Jim Wallis says, who will be here next week, in this way we change the wind. And that is very important.

Question #2: Thank you, Brian, for what you have been saying, and what I guess you have been writing and doing. I am encouraged by it. We are meeting right now in a place where Caesar and God have some frequent meetings. I would also note that up above us is an image of Christ on the cross, and since you mentioned that as being an emphasis in your thinking, I wonder what you would say that the cross has to say to us regarding violence and war.

McLaren: Thank you for asking that question. You know, a lot of New Testament scholars believe that we have at least two hymns of the early church in the letters of Paul. And one is in Philippians 2, and the other is in Colossians 1, and at the end of this Colossians I poem, or hymn, or whatever it is, there is this amazing little phrase Paul says: “Christ made peace by the blood of his cross.”

And I think that we lose the powerful implications of that phrase that would have been sung of chanted or prayed in the early church. In Paul’s day, all around the Roman Empire outside of major cities, there would be crosses, and those crosses would not symbolize religion. Those crosses would symbolize, this is what Caesar will do to you if you upset the pax Romana. This is what will happen to you if you question the authority of Caesar Augustus, which by the way, means Caesar who is worthy of worship.

And Jesus goes on one of those crosses, I think, among many profound meanings, to say the Kingdom of God does not bring peace by eliminating all of the opposition. It does not bring peace by torturing people and making people suffer who disagree. It brings peace by God in some way, opening God’s own heart to the suffering of forgiveness, and embracing us in our evil and wrong, and invites us into reconciliation, so Christ makes peace by shedding his own blood—as opposed to Caesar who makes peace by shedding anybody’s blood who dares to disagree with him.

Now, the implications for that for us, I think, are not easy. I do not think that you can just—“click”—here’s the easy answer, but I think what it does is that it tells us that the Kingdom of God works in a powerful and profound way to bring transformation in the world—secretly, like yeast and bread, Jesus said—and for us as Christians in this powerful city, it means that we should be thinking very deeply about where our confidence is in the message of Jesus, and in the Kingdom of God, to bring transformation in our world. And it will not happen in the ways that a lot of people around this city assume.

Question #3: I think television and the internet are two simple answers to your earlier question, why are you losing so many members. But, to get to my question, you know how, in today’s society, we are struggling with so many different societal questions and such. Could you talk a little bit about how do you wrestle with the question of those who would say that it is fundamental to our nation that we are a nation that is based on freedom from religion, as opposed to freedom of religion?

McLaren: What a great question, and it is a very salient question for me this week, because I was invited to be… a guest blogger this week on this political blog that is seen as kind of a left-wing secular blog. And it is interesting that it is my second time to be a guest blogger there. And if you’re interested, if you go to my web site, I think that there will be a link to it in a day or two, but whenever, I go there this is what you hear: people who are really afraid of religion, and they just think whatever religion gets on the scene, things go south really fast. And they kind of wish we would all shut up and go away, and if we have to believe all of that stuff, that we would have the good sense to not admit it.

It is a kind of religious don’t ask, don’t tell policy that folks would like. You know I think that is unrealistic and counter productive, first of all, just pragmatically speaking. By the way this is something that I have learned from my Muslim friends, and they tell me that one of the reasons why there has been a resurgence of fundamentalist Islam is because, after World War II, secular dictatorships moved in, and, when they tried to crowd out religion, religion became the way for people to express their desire to not be desacralized by dictatorship.

And, in a certain way, here in the United States, you could say that the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism is related to secularism that pushed Christianity, and wanted to get it sort of off of the table. And Christians are saying, no, we do not want to be pushed off of the table, we do not want to be marginalized, so to me this is our real challenge. First of all, we have to prove ourselves, because there has been so much bad use of religion in the public sphere in the past, and we cannot forget that. The reason that these people want us to shut up is because they’ve heard a lot of stupid and hurtful things—

Lloyd: They are not crazy, are they?

McLaren: No, they have good reasons. One of the things I did in this blog is I said, let’s go back and read the story of the Thirty Years War, 1618 to 1648… in many ways, creates the backdrop for the enlightenment that produces our constitution. And you learn about the Thirty Years War, where the Protestant League and the Holy Roman Empire went at it, and you realize there really is a danger.

So we have the burden of saying, how can we enter the public sphere as people of faith, acknowledging we live in a pluralist world, many different religions—how can we do that in a responsible, mature way? Thank God this Christian community here at the Cathedral is trying to create space for that sort of thing to happen. This Forum, I think, is creating space for that to happen, but it’s a new practice. And we have a lot of outspoken people who, I think, model some unhelpful ways of doing it. And now we need more people to model some productive and constructive ways.

Lloyd: Don’t you think that has something to do with the success of the interest the new atheists have garnered to themselves? Because there has been such a negative reaction to the way Christianity and other religions have been lived out.

McLaren: Absolutely, and in fact, you know, it is interesting, and I don’t know if any of you ever thought of this, but I remember when I was a little boy and I was in church, and I was really bored and started reading the Bible to try and stay awake, and I came across the book of Ecclesiastes that sounded a little bit like an atheist book someone sneaked into the Bible, and I remember thinking, “I wonder if my parents know this is in here.” You know, somebody made a mistake to let this in here.

The Bible itself gives a place to the voice of the skeptic. The community of faith realizes that having the skeptic around is very, very important and I think that the new atheists in some ways are mirror images of fundamentalist Christians, because they are hostile, and it is us or them, and it is the winner-take-all mentality, but in other ways they have a voice that we have to hear.

Lloyd: They force us to look at the shadow side of our own behavior.

McLaren: That is exactly right, thank you.

Question #4: I guess I should say good afternoon. You’re saying a lot of good, marvelous things, but one thing I am hearing you say over and over again is what our pastor has, the dean, Dean Lloyd, has preached so many times, the two great commandments of God is to love the Lord with all your heart, body and strength and mind and soul, and to love your neighbors as yourself. That particular, two commandments that need no other, are the two commandments that will cause us to come together, for we would not treat ourselves terribly. Another thing you were saying was–

Lloyd: Question, we have to have a question. What is the question? Do you have a question for us?

Question #4: —Can’t you see that God is right? The other thing that you were saying is that the prefixes that we put so much on the denominations, Episcopalian, Catholics, and so forth and we should look at that as the commonality is Jesus coming together listening to talk about the Lord and believing what God says.

Lloyd: Thank you for that.

McLaren: Let me just say that in my book, when Sam read why am all those adjectives, some of you might have been a little nervous to hear the word fundamentalist. But what I say is that I would love to be a fundamentalist if the fundamental of the faith is to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. And that is pretty fundamental. I will sign on for that one.

Lloyd: There would be a lot of fundamentalists.

Question #5: I would like to ask an interfaith question. You do such a marvelous job of synthesizing and integrating polarities and avoiding false dichotomies. In terms of interfaith questions, not only about the Muslims but other world religions, what about some role for monalotry? As I understand it, monotheism only began through the Babylonian captivity. Before that, Judaism was monaltrous: it worshiped their God but recognized other peoples worshiped their gods. Is there some modified role for that kind of world view to promote world peace?

McLaren: First, I think you’re asking a very important question, because you are realizing that theology gets expressed in the way we treat the other. And so this is something that I am very interested in, and increasingly involved in, Christian/Muslim, Christian/Jewish, Christian/atheist dialogue—and I hope, in the future, Hindu and others—because I think these become really important.

Let me say two things about it, because it is a huge question, and there are two little things that might be helpful. One is, for me as a Christian to enter into dialogue with others does not require me to leave my Christian faith back there and then try to come into this neutral zone, where I pretend to not be a Christian. And that is one way to do it, and it is the way that the Enlightenment taught us to do it. But there is another way to do it, and this is the way I am exploring, and that is to say that I am a Christian—meaning I follow Jesus and I want to live by loving God with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving my neighbor as myself—and if you are Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or whatever, you are my neighbor, so my faith drives me toward you to love you.

I am engaging in respectful conversation because, to be faithful to Christ, he taught me to love my neighbor as myself. So I see you as this wonderful person whom I get to try and treat you the way I would want to be treated. I think that is one thing that helps us moving in this direction. The second thing is—this goes back to Sam’s point earlier about “story”—this is where it is very significant that the Bible, the biblical story, begins with these two creation stories that include all animals, all plants, and all people. And we have a story that has room for everybody. We’re being faithful to our story when we acknowledge that there is room for all of these different kinds of people in God’s world. God made room for them there, you see. Learning to accept otherness as part of our story—deep discipline we need.

Lloyd: One final question.

Question #6: So many of my friends, especially here, are not Christian, and are very cynical about Christianity, largely due to the evangelical hard-line positions, and the Jerry Falwells and whatnot. I just wondered if you could speak a little more to that. Do you see a shift beginning at all or where do you see it coming from because it is really strong?

McLaren: You know, that is a really good question to end with, because this is so important. First I’ll recommend a book by two young guys that is called unChristian that explores that theme. Let me close by telling you a couple of experiences that I have had in the last eight days or last two weeks. Our little Everything Must Change tour was in Charlotte, and I had this weird experience during one of the breaks, a half-hour break for coffee, and at the beginning of the break a young woman comes up to me and says, hi, I am so and so, I was brought up Southern Baptist but then when I was a teenager I just threw it all away and I have been an atheist ever since, she said, but today I think that maybe I can say that I believe in Jesus again. And then twenty minutes later, someone else came up to me—hi, I grew up Pentecostal—and just the same story: I went to college, I became an atheist, but I think today I can believe again…

And what I am noticing is, when we stop preaching Christianity as a religion of whatever sort, and we start inviting people to be followers of Jesus, and we present Jesus in this way as part of this beautiful story of the Kingdom of God, a lot of Christians who have left become drawn back. But another blog I was involved with this week is the Washington Post “OnFaith” blog, and I was actually defending the archbishop of Canterbury in this blog, who said some statements recently you may have heard related to Muslim law in England, and so I was trying to bring a little sanity into what has become a very reactive discussion.

I think that if you look on the site it was either two or three different people who said, I am a Muslim: if more Christians thought this way, I would consider converting. (Laughter) I was not trying to do it for that reason, but you just realize that part of what is driving people away from our faith is a faith that’s symbolized by the raised fist, as opposed to a faith that symbolized by the outstretched arms of Christ.

Lloyd: On that inspiring point, we have to stop. This has been a great conversation. Join us next week for, in many ways, a part two, when Jim Wallis comes to talk about a great awakening happening in faith and politics. Hope you will stay with us, as coffee is on in the back in the west end of the Cathedral, and Brian is going to stop by for a cup of coffee back there too. Please join me in thanking Brian for today. (Applause)