Interview

Recently, I got to visit Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a historic site where the National Park Service presents a lecture on the church’s history and impact in the city. A key figure in the presentation is Martin Luther King Sr., a Civil Rights leader even before his son became the better known MLK.

I loved the presentation, but something kept gnawing at me as I left. The park ranger who gave the presentation would often pause to interject on the greatness of Rev. King — praise he deserves — but at times he would slip into a sort of deification. King lost his namesake son and his wife to assassinations, and he managed to publicly proclaim love and forgiveness for their killers. The ranger seemed under the impression this came out of a superhuman reserve of grace that he and the rest of us could never achieve. While I understood the point, I wondered if Daddy King (as he was called) would have agreed.

Bishop Mariann Budde got a lot of attention at President Donald Trump's inauguration when she called on him to be merciful to those he had attacked during his campaign. Now, she reflects on her word choice, why she believes “mercy” was the right word, and the tension of leading a church through a political minefield.

The Constitution isn’t just a symbol, it’s the base document for our democratic republic. And Jamelle Bouie says that in a time of crisis, it's important to remember that in a democracy, we have ownership over its meaning. 

The culture war and a moral panic around "wokeness" has many in Christian higher education living in fear. Now, one former educator is charting a new path.

As a theologian, ethicist, professor, priest, and author, Gary Dorrien has helped shape and excavate the overlap between social justice and faith for nearly 50 years. He has written definitively as a historian and prophetically as an activist, all while teaching generations as a professor of religion. Now, he explains why it was time to tell his own story. 

As Semler, Grace Baldridge has spent the past few years proving there was a space for people like her in the Contemporary Christian Music scene, even if she had to dig that space with her bare hands. Now, with the release of her debut album, she's looking back on how she did it — and what’s next. 

In 2019, poet and reporter Eliza Griswold began reporting on Circle of Hope, a church founded in the spirit of a radical evangelicalism that motivated the likes of Tony Campolo, Ron Sider, and Jim Wallis. Her new book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church documents her experience.

The church, founded in 1996 by the couple Rod and Gwen White, had spread to four locations by 2019. Griswold saw the flourishing, growing community as an intriguing example of evangelicalism untied from the Religious Right.

Digging through the basement of the Bishop Payne Library last year, I came across a book titled Black Christian Nationalism.

I laughed, snapped a photo to send it to my friend and co-editor Josiah, and kept on looking for the book I had meant to find. Josiah and I joked about how the book might confound liberal Christians who are overly focused on rooting out “white Christian nationalism” without clearly defining what that phrase actually means, considering whether it's a problem in their own congregations, or listening to good-faith criticisms of their efforts. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the book. Written by Albert B. Cleage, Jr., a pastor from Detroit, it is a provocative proposal that drew from separatist politics and liberation theology in the quest for the freedom of Black people.

What I’ve most appreciated about Downen is that investment in community. To report on abuse in the SBC, Downen had to earn the trust of everyone from powerful, complementarian pastors to radical, queer exvangelicals. His reporting, as we discussed below, is focused on impacts of power and policy instead of being driven by personalities.

In our interview, we discussed how anti-democracy organizing and Christian sex abuse overlap, what reporters need from their communities, and why he treats religious organizations as institutions with power.