Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. In case you haven’t noticed, Christianity is going through massive changes in our time. It’s burgeoning, growing like crazy in some parts of the world; it’s shrinking and struggling in other parts of the world, such as our part of the world and, certainly, in the European part of the world. Something big is happening in the whole story of Christian faith. No one has been more insightful and thoughtful about that than our guest today, Diana Butler Bass, who’s been looking at this and thinking about it and writing about it for at least a couple of decades now.

Diana, you may know, is a writer of an influential book called Christianity for the Rest of Us. She’d done a number of books leading up to that; that’s been a particularly significant book for a lot of congregation who are studying it. She has also written a book called Practicing Congregation, which is a book that our own congregation is getting ready to study, and many of them are purchasing it today and next week so they can read it in time for our get-together in early April. Diana is a church historian by training and has taught at a number of colleges across the United States. And now she’s published a new book called A People’s History of Christianity. What she seems to be doing, and we are going to ask her about this, is reaching back to our past to find usable resources for us as we chart where we think our faith is going, where the spirit is leading the churches. So Diana, it’s very exciting to have you with us today.

Diana Butler Bass: Thank you, Sam. I know you enjoy history so it’s great to be here.

Lloyd: I do, I do. Tell us about this A People’s History of Christianity; where did you get that title, and what’s that meant to suggest?

Bass: That’s a great question, because the original title of the book was called After Jesus, intended to attract people’s attention to all that stuff that happened after Jesus lived. And as I began to write it and sent the initial chapter to the publisher, it became more evident that I was not just writing about after Jesus, but I was writing very specifically about Christian people and their practices. And my publisher, who happens to also be the publisher of Howard Zinn’s great book, A People’s History of the United States, said, “You know this is looking rather like A People’s History of Christianity; what do you think of that as the title?” And I said, “Oh, catchy! Okay!” So that’s what it’s a book about: people and their practices.

Lloyd: And you say there are two big stories about Christian faith. Tell us about that.

Bass: At the beginning, one of the things that I attempt to do is help the readers understand what would be the narrative arc of the book. And all histories have a narrative line; something that we begin with as a starting place, and a sort of a direction that the history moves. And as I struggled with what the narrative arc would be for A People’s History of Christianity, I realized that most histories of Christianity have a narrative arc that I called “big-C Christianity”; and that is the story that we typically tell about the church, is that it goes from Christ to Constantine to the Crusades to Calvin and to a Christian America. And those big C’s, if you put them all together, it’s not a really pretty picture. It’s a picture of what I would call manifest destiny Christianity; it’s a picture of wars; it’s a picture of institutions that are rather exclusive. And so it becomes a story that doesn’t put our faith in very good light. So I thought, well, I don’t want to write about that. I don’t want to write about big-C Christianity. What’s the alternative? And as I thought about where big-C Christianity started, it occurred to me that that story really begins in Scripture itself; it begins with a great commission: the words, “Go ye into the world and make disciples to the end to the earth.” But those words are contested words; we don’t know if Jesus ever really said those words. And so I thought, well, that’s kind of strange: start a church history in words that maybe were in later editions to the New Testament. So, my next thought was, if we start with Jesus himself and what his intent was for the community that gathered around him, what words would those be? What… Where does that start our history as the church?

And I went back to not the great commission but I went before that to the great command to love God and love your neighbors yourself. And then my imagination opened up and I thought, well, what if I wrote a church history that was about that: how people through time have successfully loved God, how they have modeled that love of God in their lives, and how they have loved their neighbor? And what would that story look like? And so that’s what this book became: the story of how we’ve loved God and loved our neighbor through time.

Lloyd: So it’s sort of an alternative history lifting up and focusing on the life-giving, hopeful pieces of the story.

Bass: Yes. When a reader came up to me recently… The book just came out this week; I was in Ohio yesterday, and this woman was a professor in Ohio State University and she came up and she said, “Oh, I read the new book! I really like it! Thank you so much!” And then she said, “Most histories of Christianity are about war. I’ve never seen a history that’s about love.” And when she said that, my heart rejoiced as it were, because that’s what I indented it to be: an alternate history, a history about what happens if Christian people really do act the way that Jesus asked us to.

Lloyd: Instead of focusing on the doctrinal arguments or religious wars or the kings and princes or Henry VIII’s divorce: the particular pieces of the story that unfortunately the Anglicans have to talk about a little bit.

Bass: But if you do like stories about romance and those sorts of things, I put in Abelard and Heloise for you.

Lloyd: I saw, I saw. But you know one of the things that struck me so much along the way? Even in the experience of seminary, it was so inspiring to study Old Testament and New Testament. But then we got to church history, and we ground through one set of arguments, one set of splits, one set of conflicts, one set of crusades and wars, and, somehow, the air would start going out of the balloon. It reminded me of… There was a Robert Southey, a 17th century English poet, who said, “I would follow Christ for sure, but he drags behind in that leprous bride, the church.” Or, [Willimon?] who said, “The problem with Jesus is he married beneath himself.” It becomes very depressing this inspiring vision and here we have the church. And so what you’re doing is saying, well, there are some things there to pull out and talk about.

Bass: Yeah, the book in some ways began in a conversation that I had with a friend that was much like that. A friend of mine who was a colleague, who teaches religious studies… We were sitting in a bar in Santa Barbara, California, one night having some very nice wine, and, you know, after you had a couple of glasses of really nice Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, interesting questions begin to emerge. And my friend, who likes me, turned around and said, “You know, Diana, I can’t figure out why it is you’re still a Christian.” And I looked at her and I said, “What?” And she said, “You’re too smart to be a Christian.” And I didn’t know how to respond, and so I said to her, “Well, you know, I understand there are all these intellectual arguments, and it is hard to be a Christian, but,” I went pious on her and I said, “But, you know, I really love Jesus and I think that Jesus loves me.” And she looked at me and she shook her head and she said, “Jesus?! Jesus?! I don’t have any problem with Jesus. It’s all that stuff that happens after Jesus that makes me so mad!” So this was, in a sense, my long belated answer to my friend that night over those nice glasses of Pinot Noir. And an attempt to say, yeah, she is right. There is so much that is terrible that the church has done, and, in the name of Jesus, we have embarrassed ourselves and, you know, I think done harm to the name of Jesus. But there’s this other story, and this book is that attempt to at least say, Christianity isn’t nearly as bad as what you think it is. And so it’s kind of a modest claim in that way.

Lloyd: Well, let’s look at one of those periods a little bit. Maybe the first 500 years, a time when the church was at first defining itself, working out as doctorate, also spreading rapidly, and some conflicts emerging about who’s in charge of what a parlor church; by the 500s, the Roman Empire has collapsed. So, a midst of public event, the public refining of its conviction about the trinity and the divinity of Christ and the rest, you find some people simply living the joy of their faith. Tell us the story from that period.

Bass: I think, probably, my favorite part of the section on the early church, which is entitled, The Way, is the several pages that I write about the Christian practice of hospitality. And I write about it in relationship to a couple of people: Marcella, who is a widow, who lived in Rome, who opened her house as a house of hospitality, and it really became essentially the first convent for women that we know of in the Christian tradition. And I also write about it in relationship to Basil the Great, who was one of the great Eastern theologians considered to be one of the four Cappadocian theologians that are very influential in the Christian tradition. So I write about it in relationship to those two people; but as I write, I also write about just regular folks who opened their homes and practiced this amazingly radical act of welcoming a stranger. And as I read about hospitality in relationship to the early, to ancient Rome… Romans practiced hospitality, you know, they’re ancient people, and hospitality is something that our ancient ancestors valued. But the Romans practiced hospitality along stripped lines of social class and biology. So you offered hospitality only to people to whom you might be related or to people whom you had an economic relationship and a patronage system or to people who knew someone you knew; and so you’d have to be in the same, essentially, social class. When Christians came along and began welcoming the stranger, and we think about Jesus’ words, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” our early brothers and sisters took this very literally, and they began to welcome people into the community, and they did it, not on the basis of any of those kinds of lines that existed in the Roman empire, they literally welcomed anyone. And as they did that, the critics in Rome started looking at the church and saying, “We can’t believe you! You welcome anybody!” And it was a terrible insult, and Christians began to get a reputation of being social radicals and folks who were willing to upset the class structure on the basis of this practice of hospitality. So I think that that is a very powerful vision of the church, and, you know, usually we think of hospitality as just, you know, being nice, giving people milk and cookies, but in the ancient church, hospitality was a way of being community that violated the empirical structures of Rome, and it set them up as an alternative community with a different vision of what it meant to be family, what it meant to be brothers and sisters.

Lloyd: You saw the wonderful sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, who makes very strong arguments at the reason Christianity spreads so rapidly, wasn’t simply the compelling nature of the beliefs themselves, but because often in these jammed, dangerous urban centers, people were actually living a different way, a way which they could connect, plug in, feel safe, feel welcomed, and, in fact, basic practices like hospitality were the revolutionary thing in a time that were instrumental in building the church itself.

Bass: Yeah, I think that Rodney Stark has written a couple of excellent books about the early church and in both of the two that I’m thinking about, he makes that same point: is that Christianity did not spread on the basis of what Christians believed, but it spread on the basis of what Christians did; and those things were hospitality, healing, caring for the least of these. Those kinds of practices were very important in the world in which they lived and acted as a way of attracting new people to the community.

Lloyd: When you got to talking about the Middle Ages, I’m thinking you used “Cathedral” as the title in one of those, it caught my attention. You were talking about the similarities between modern people and the people of the Middle Ages. Say something about that.

Bass: Yeah, often times today if you hear people talking about, oh the church exists in a situation that is just like another situation historically, folks will usually say, “We’re just like the early church,” meaning our world is more pluralistic, that there’s more need for the practice of hospitality, there’s all kinds of ways you can make parallels between us and the first five centuries of Christianity. But I’ve never actually heard anybody say we were more like the Middle Ages, and so I just thought I’d try it out and see how people would respond. But there’s a couple aspects of the case that I make there: one is that medieval people did not really see a separation between the sacred and the secular. And it was in great buildings like this where the space actually combines the earthly and the mundane and the heavenly. And these kinds of church building are, I think, emblematic of the world view, that very cohesive and connected world view that medieval people had. So here we are in postmodern culture, and the divide that we have between sacred and secular, see look I can’t even divide them verbally, in modernity is breaking down, and one of the mark of postmodern people is that inner mixture of these two worlds: that transcendent world and the mundane. And so I think that we are much more like medieval people in that, and the other thing that makes us a bit more like medieval people is that medieval people, and I love looking around here (I always do), medieval people told their stories in pictures in these windows where light comes through and you can read the story in light and image. And postmodern people, we have learned to read our stories in light and image; it’s called a Mac Book. And we now very much understand ourselves in a culture where we communicate visually as much, or perhaps even more than we do in writing.

Lloyd: You talk a lot through your book about the separation that has happened in the church between piety, the spiritual side of the faith, and ethics, the practical living of the faith. Do you see that all away along the way? Worse at some times, better at others?

Bass: The book… I struggled with this a bit in writing the book because when you think about the command to love God and love neighbor, as you get to that, what you’re really talking about are practices around devotion, the love of God, and the practices around ethics, the love of the neighbor. And so every single section in the early church, medieval church, the Reformation church, is divided up in that way. And so I talk about devotional practices in one section and ethical practices in another section. What was interesting to me as a writer is that, as I was working on the project, sometimes I’d come across people and I couldn’t figure out which side to put them on. You know, do you put Bernard de Clairvaux into devotion? Or do you put Bernard de Clairvaux into ethics? Do you put Thomas Aquinas into ethics? Or do you put him into the love of God? And so I had to make, what I would consider, some arbitrary choices at time and putting people in the narrative. So, that to me points out that ultimately these strands are very hard to disconnect. But, historically, we have done that, so I sort of followed that convention historically until the last chapter when...In the last chapter, I didn’t talk about anybody famous, I went out and I interviewed twenty-five young Christians; and I asked them what they thought about trying to pursue a life of loving God and loving neighbor, and how that works out in the contemporary world. And every single one of the people I interviewed said there’s no division between the love of God and love of neighbor, that you cannot separate devotion and ethics. And so following their lead, I enfolded the last chapter into a single chapter. But it’s a good question. I think that they’re right. I think you need to hold them together.

Lloyd: You lift up some names that some of us may have heard but not known much about, like Hildegard of Bingen and actually brilliant mystics, sometimes theologians who aren’t part of the banner list that people hear a lot about. Say something about Hildegard.

Bass: Hildegard may well be my favorite saint. My husband, until he met me, had never heard of her. And then, when we were moving my books to our common house after we got married, he was picking out book after book after book of Hildegard of Bingen, and he said, “What is this? Who is this person?” And she was a mystic who lived in the valley of the Rhineland in the late 1000s, early 1100s. And she was an abbess, and at the age of three she had her first visions. Rather remarkably, the church accepted them as legitimate visions. A woman who begins having visions at three years old... And the medieval church examined her and said, “This is of God,” and that’s very unusual; so she must have been just an amazingly powerful person. Women came from all over Germany to live in her abbey. She was a preacher, she was a musician, she was a healer, and she wrote a textbook on medicine, essentially, that we still have today. And one of her great callings in life was that here’s this woman who had a preaching ministry, and she literally was an itinerant preacher; she went from town to town to town in the Rhineland valley, and much of her preaching was on the renewal of the church. At one point she called the local bishop a goat. Now, I would never do that to John Chane. I love John; he’s not a goat. But I have to admire Hildegard. There are some bishops in the Episcopal Church I would like to be able to do that with. And I admire Hildegard for going out there and doing it at a time when a woman could be burned at the stake for saying something like that. And so I write about her powerful ministry of the Word and the other part that I bring out of her in the book is the idea of hope. Hildegard was a person who had a tremendous view of history, and, out of understanding history, she didn’t find a spare but she found hope; and so I thought her voice was one we really needed to hear today.

Lloyd: Jumping forward a bit to the post-Reformation and after the era of Calvin, one of those big C’s, what do you see… Each 500 year piece seems to have brought its own complexity but contributed something important to where the church was going. Looking at that stretch from say, what would you say, 1500-1900, 1800, I don’t know where you stopped talking about the Reformation, but the breakthrough from Martin Luther to Calvin to the Anglican Church to the Methodist Church, a little but after that, what was the fresh insight that came with the Reformation period that we still need?

Bass: The insight that I wanted people to remember from the time of the Reformation is the fundamental insight that words are transformative. I was writing the chapter on Reformation history during the presidential primaries. And I can remember, very distinctly, one day I was sitting and I was writing and CNN was on in the back and Hillary Clinton, whom I respect so much, was on television and she said, “Oh, this other guy, Barak Obama, it’s all about words.” You know, and she was very dismissive of words, and she was talking about actions and how actions were important. And here I was reading these wonderful primary source materials from the Reformation where all of the reformers were making the same claim; and the claim was, words can change the world. And the way in which our late medieval and Reformation ancestors understood words was rather different than we understand words today. I think we understand words as primarily as symbol of some sort of philosophical category and words primarily speak to our minds. But in the Reformation period, and I write this, is that words spoke to the heart; words land here and it’s that you hear words in your inner being. Words can then conform you to Jesus, the Word. And so I try to bring that out through the Reformation practices of prayer, teaching, singing, preaching, and all the practices that our ancestors had about the Word.

Lloyd: And coming down to the present, one of the issues you raise a good deal is the tendency for modern people to intellectualize their faith and the urgency for and the remarkable activity in the area of experiential religion. Would you say something about that?

Bass: Yeah, that whole insight about the Word, as we get closer to our own time, raised huge problems as well as being a profound insight about the transformation about human beings. And the problems that raised as Europeans began to value words more, they tended to move words up from the heart to the head, and the access to words through printing and through very, you know, renewed sort of passion about the intellectual life, raised new philosophical questions about Christianity. And so for the 300 years between about 1650 and 1950, our modern ancestors were very absorbed in a quest for truth and much of that quest for truth they conceptualize as an intellectual quest. But, as we get towards the twentieth century, there began to be sort of new understandings of where truth was located. And the quest for truth not only was about ideas, but people began to move it into being a more experiential quest. And so in the last century, I think one of the things that has happened is that we’ve worked very hard in the West to reconnect the head and the heart and that’s kind of where that whole narrative eventually comes in the book.

Lloyd: Now, I’d like to bring you fully into the present and ask you what you seemed to be doing in this fascinating book is create a kind of usable history for the reinvention of the church, or we can call the resurrection of the church, what life is going to come out of what is, in a lot of places, coming apart right now. Thinking about your journey through 2000 years of history, tell us a little bit about that new church that’s taking place and how you see it building on what’s gone before. I think a lot of us are here to learn what that new church is going to look like. You’ve written Christianity for the Rest of Us, presents a marvelous picture for that. But for this conversation today, say something about the new church that’s coming and some of the building blocks for that.

Bass: The kind of Christianity and the kind of Christian community that is coming into being now, folks roughly refer to it as emerging Christianity—I hear a lot of people talking about that, or emerging church—is a form of Christianity that is based in practice. I’ve even heard Rick Warren say that we’re in a time of new Reformation and that the Reformation we are engaged in at this moment is one of deeds and not creeds. And if that’s coming from Rick Warren in a very evangelical side of the church, you’re also getting from more traditionally liberal portals of the church a renewed interest in ancient practices, these things that I write about: hospitality, prayer, meditation, healing, doing justice, all those things. And so I think that that’s really a very important part of the shape of emerging Christianity. It’s not believing about God, but it’s rather knowing God in ways in which we become different, that we are transformed, that our lives find new meaning. And so practice is an incredibly important part of it, and that’s of course what I emphasize in here—this is really a history of Christian practices. But along with practice, it can never be just about what we’re doing, because if a faith is just about doing things, then, first of all, we become busy to the point of burnout, and, already, Christians have plenty enough to do. And, you know, if it is just about practices as well, we begin to lose out trust in God; we forget the idea of grace, which is one of those important words that the Reformation reminded us about. So practice has to be for emerging Christianity tied to what I call the “why” of faith. That is, emerging Christianity asks us to remember, to remember the ancient stories, to remember the text that we have inherited, to remember the traditions and experiences of our ancestors, and to know that as we practice our faith, we stand in a community of memory, a line of memory, that ties us through time, and that it’s not just about us but that it’s about all of us and God. And then the third thing that I think is a key component for emerging Christianity is… I often ask myself, well, what’s the goal? What’s the purpose? You know, why would anybody want to become a Christian? You know, I hate to say this here, but, you know, it’s really a lot easier to sleep in or go to Starbucks, you know, on Sunday morning. Sorry!

Lloyd: Well, let’s not talk about that.

Bass: You know, why do we do this? And as I’ve done my research over the last decade and as I’ve written, people have told me and I have seen embodied… One of the things that we’re all about today and that emerging Christianity is about, is not about finding the answers to our questions—there are some questions that are just never going to be answered—but it’s about wisdom. What does it mean to know God? The classic definition of wisdom is to know God and to be able to do something about that in the world. And I think that as emerging Christianity is taking shape, that that’s really the longing that we’re sensing across North American and across western society, is that this isn’t just about getting the answers right on a doctrine test that’s going to get us into heaven, but what this is about is finding wisdom, knowing God and acting on that knowledge in a way in which God’s beauty, justice, and love is manifested in the world. So that’s what I think is the shape of Christianity as it is changing in the 21st century, a change of kind and not degree. I think that when the atom bomb was dropped in Japan, that that ended modernity; and I’m going to say that with some confidence. Historians don’t often say stuff like that, but I think that that’s where the modern period ended and something new began. And for fifty years now, we’ve been living in that something new. And I think this is what it’s beginning to look like: practice, tradition, wisdom. And that’s what I tried to write a history that grounds that new vision as we begin to move forward into a world that we can’t see, but, at the same time, is a world that I think many people are longing for, and a world that is very exciting if we let our imaginations go there.

Lloyd: I want to go to questions from the audience. I want to follow up with one more and then we’ll start the questions. Staying right with you, one of the things that you said a few minutes ago, what seemed to me, is that people are interested in experiential religion. I think the whole talk about “I’m spiritual and not religious” is partly about not wanting anybody to tell you what you ought to do, but it’s also about yearning for an experience of the transcendent, experience of God’s presence in some way. And yet all this talk is about doing things: practices, ethics, and all the rest. How do those two things go together? I mean, for example, I know in your practices are contemplation, meditation, worship. So there are all those windows that open to the presence of God, but how do you the see both the urgency of people’s hunger to experience an awareness of God fit with the practices?

Bass: I think that’s a really good question, and it’s not one that I’ve written about, and here I’m going to go just sort of way out on a limb of conversation between me and you. And, I think that the question you ask is actually a much deeper question because it’s not just about what we do or, you know, how we engage the world, but it ultimately winds up to be a question about who we are as human beings. And part of the problem of modernity is that we actually split human beings into different capacities. There was the moral capacity, which we thought was located in the intellect, there was the capacity of affection, which was the capacity that we located in the heart, and, then, there was the capacity of action, which was a capacity we located primarily in hands. And so, in a sense, modern philosophers divided up human beings like a cow, you know, is that there was the sirloin and the rump roast and the, you know, the different parts of it. And so we, I think, became fundamentally disconnected. And so when we talk about practices, it’s usually something we do and it was a nonintegrated capacity. What’s been happening in moral philosophy, and really the philosophy of humanness over the last fifty years, is to try to move us back together as human beings and to recognize that there’s not a neat division between moral capacity, affectional capacity, and active capacity, but that all those three things are interrelated. So a practice is both something we do with our hands, but it’s something we do actually contemplate and reflect on in our understanding and it’s something that, if we let it happen to us, it makes our hearts different. And so I think you can talk about practices without it having to be just the busy work of keeping us distracted from what’s happening in our wholeness, but that practices need to be undergirded with this essentially postmodern understanding of us as whole-beings. And I think that that would be a more profitable place for us to be preaching. It’s very, I mean you know this and I know you know this, but it’s a very Hebrew understanding, it’s going back past that Greek division of the soul to a much more mealy, earthy, biblical, Adamic vision of who we are.

Question #1: We’ve got a couple of questions to start out with here as we continue to collect others from the audience. First of all, what persons and movements in today’s church are Christians likely to look back on as a model decades, or even centuries, from now?

Bass: Oh, that is a good questions and it’s so hard to answer that question because when we’re involved in our own time, we get ourselves invested. And so it’s hard to have, I think, the appropriate historical vision on the period in which one lives. Now, that being said, I always, as a historian and when I was teaching undergraduates, I would ask my students to do this. If we imagine ourselves as historians a hundred years from now, if we’re sitting there, what will people look back at us and say? What will they see as our heroic moments? And what will they see as moments like, “Oh, my gosh! What were they thinking?!” And I sense that one of the really profound and wonderful things, if we actually can pull it off, is if we can get Christians around the world to understand the environmental crisis we’re currently facing, and to understand that God gave us this beautiful treasure of this planet to care for and to store to our… to the generations yet unborn. If we can really mobilize the church to make the changes that need to happen in order to save this planet, our great-grandchildren, historians will look at us and say, thank you! And if we don’t do that, if we give them a world that’s full of trash and a world where they can’t breathe and a world where there are great deserts in the plains that now grow wheat, those same children will look at us and say, “How stupid were they?! Why couldn’t they see?! It was so clear and they did nothing!” So, I think that that environmental impulse is going to become, if we follow that path, that that’s going to become one of those great transformative moments that the church can really do something to change the future and I look forward to that and being part of it. And I look forward to teaching my daughter and her children, eventually one day, to be part of that too. I also think, and this comes from my friend Brian McLaren, whose name occasionally comes up around the idea of emerging church or emergent church, which is a movement of renewal in evangelical communities. Brian usually does hang out with more conservative folks although he loves mainline types, and one day Brian and I were out to lunch and I had just come back from a meeting, and I won’t tell you what denomination this was in, but it was a very frustrating denominational meeting in which I spent three days of my life sitting around, trying to help folks get it, trying to understand emerging culture and postmodern stuff, and they didn’t get it. I mean, they did not get it at all. And so I came back and I’m having lunch with Brian and I started complaining. I said, “Oh, your life is so easy,” you know. “People get what you’re talking about.” I said, “I spend all my life trying to turn around the Titanic! It’s so frustrating!” And Brian kind of laughed and he said, “Well, you know, it’s better to try to turn around the Titanic than 15,000 guys in life boats.” And I thought to myself, “Well, that’s interesting!” You know, I never really thought of our church as sort of the Titanic. And it is actually easier to turn around a big ship, takes longer, but it’s easier to do ultimately, than 15,000 guys that are going their separate ways.

But in that conversation, Brian also said to me, “You know, Diana, I don’t think you realize how good mainline churches really are.” And I said, “Tell me more. I need to hear this today.” And he said, “You know, when I think people look back on the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, and they say, ‘Who were the courageous Christians? Who were the ones that took risks?’” He said, “They’re not going to think about the evangelical mega-church down the street.” He said, “They’re going to think about you. Who was it in the middle part of the 20th century who overturned 2000 years of Christian tradition and said, ‘Women should be ordained. We got it wrong?’ Who was brave enough to do that? You guys were brave enough to do that. Who was it once you finally heard the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., was willing to go and walk across the bridge in Selma and die: Episcopal priest, Methodist ministers, UCC clergy.” He said, “It wasn’t a southern Baptist minister. It was you guys. Who is it that’s willing to face difficult issues about family and sexual identity? Everybody else is scared to death about these things because they’re afraid they’re going to lose money or their church is going to break up.” He says, “It’s you.” He said, “When you look back at the 20th century, 21st century, you’re the bravest churches I know.” I sat there and I thought to myself, you know, we think of ourselves as the declining church. And yet here is my friend, who spends all of his time with the evangelicals, and he actually thought of us as the bravest church. So, I don’t know, maybe history will see us that way. It sure would be great. It’ll be great. It’ll be worth all the pain, wouldn’t it be?

Question #2: This question asks… This person asks, “Does the history of Christianity offer any useful examples of religious pluralism of different faiths and religious traditions finding ways to live together in peace?”

Bass: Oh, absolutely! It’s not the dominant story, as Sam has said several times, this is an alternative history, but one of the things that I write about in the medieval chapter is medieval Spain. And of course, in medieval Spain, as tough as it was and it didn’t always work perfectly, but never the less Muslims, Jews, and Christians developed ways of living together in which they could create a society in which they shared wisdom from one another rather than just trying to kill each other all the time. And so that’s a great example of historical pluralism and one that is much needed in the world today.

Question #3: This question has to do with what most brings a person to faith through your own study. Do you find it is specifically through religious institution or alternative—I guess it’s alternative ways—personal relationships or things of that nature bring a person to faith? It’s a big historical question.

Bass: Yeah, you know it’s one of those kinds of questions where, you know, the answer is individual as we are as people. You know, every different kind of thing brings a person into a new and deeper relationship with God. And, I think, that this sort of general answer would be most often through relationships, I think folks. If a friend says to a friend, “I want to share my story,” and you find something compelling in that story, often times it begins to give a kind of credibility to a faith, tradition that you may not have looked at before. And so I do think a lot of it is relational, a lot of it was relational in the early church, but that being said, I’ve heard some of the wackiest conversion stories from people ever: you know, people sitting in front of candle, getting converted, going down a road and Damascus and some supernatural Jesus appears to you. It’s a multitude of pathways and that’s one of the beauties, I think, about the Christian faith is that I don’t actually believe there’s one way to God, nor is there one way in which we all find our way to that God. We do have these various paths.

Lloyd: One last question.

Question #4: Could you quickly share with us what new discoveries you made while writing the book? What were some of the surprises for you along the way?

Bass: Some of the surprises were the people I didn’t even know about before I wrote the book. One of them, just as a quick example, I was with my family on vacation, it was last summer, we were taking a long sort of weekend in Cambridge, Maryland—I’m sure some of you know that nice Hyatt resort out there—and so we decided on one of these days we had off, that we would take our daughter on the Underground Railroad trail that winds through [Dorchester] and Talbot counties, out on the eastern shore of Maryland. So we’re following this little trail—these plaqus—through the back farms in [Dorchester] County. And one of the plaques told the story of a minister named the Reverend Samuel Green, who was a slave, and his master, who was a Methodist, freed him after Samuel Green had a conversion experience to becoming a Methodist, and he, at the beginning of his Christian life, began to demonstrate a great capacity as a preacher. And so the Methodist master felt bad for holding this slave in captivity who had this gift of preaching. So he freed him, and he became a Methodist pastor in a little African American congregation that served the slave community in [Dorchester] County. Well it wasn’t little very long, slaves started coming, he was a great preacher, he had a really successful ministry, and, before long, some of the slaves in his church started disappearing. And so the authorities began to suspect that he was a conductor on the Underground Railroad—and he was friends with Harriet Tubman—so they started watching him. Eventually they raided his house to look for evidence of his involvement in the Underground Railroad, and they didn’t find any—he was very savvy, he didn’t keep records of these sorts of things—but they did find, instead, a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To own a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Maryland as a slave or a black person, at that time, was a crime. He was found guilty of owning this literature, and he was sentenced to ten years hard time in a penitentiary in Maryland. And this case became a cause célèbre for both abolitionists in Maryland and for slaveholders. The slaveholders wanted to make an example of this fellow: “You can’t have a minister owning this terrible book!” And the abolitionists pointed to the injustice of the case. Well, after Reverend Green served five years in prison, his case was heard by the governor, who then freed him after five years in prison for owning a book. He was released, and he went North, as you might expect, was making his way to Canada for a different kind of life, of freedom, when he stopped in Connecticut and visited Harriet Beecher Stowe. And he told Harriet Beecher Stowe the story of how Uncle Tom’s Cabin landed him in jail, and she said to him, “Well, did you finish the book?” And he said, “No.” And she gave him an autographed copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and it’s the last record we have of the Reverend Samuel Green anywhere in history: Harriet Beecher Stowe giving him a copy of the book, where he then he moves on to Canada, and I suspect we can presume that he finished the novel. So what a surprise! You know, just on a vacation on a summer day, and finding a story like that about this kind of amazing witness to a practice of freedom that one man was willing to make in the middle part of the nineteenth century. So I had great time finding those stories, digging them up, and trying to represent them to folks like you.

Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation!

Bass: Thank you!

Lloyd: We hope you’ll be with us next week when we take a look at the economic crisis and what the response the church should be to that, what response we can be to that. Jim Wallis, a public theologian, editor of Sojourn will be with us both for the forum and the preach at the 11:15 service to help us think about how ways Christians can be responding in these time. Meanwhile, Diana Butler Bass will be back at where the coffee is, at the west entrance to the cathedral, where she would be happy to sign copies to her book and preach you, and by all means we hope you linger for the 11:15 service beginning in just a few moments. Diana, again, thank you so much!

Bass: Thanks, Sam, I really appreciate it! You’re great!