Unlearning Religion with Shannon Wright: Navigating Faith, Spirituality, and Race

Hello everyone and welcome once again to the unlearned podcast. I am your host with Abigail Smith and you have entered into the series We're calling unlearning religion, and I am very, very excited about this, cause I get to talk to really dope people who are very, very smart, and today I am talking to one of my mentors growing up and, uh, there's so much we could talk about, but we're going to stick to the topic. Um so, uh, i'm Shannon Wright. Uh, from Houston, texas. We've known, you've known me since I was 14, 13, 14, 14, Kylie. Um, and she was like the cool she was, she was the cool person that I just wanted She, she drove us around in a car. Uh, we will pile up and bump into early 2000. Yeah, yeah, yeah, We were. We were breaking all the time. We were breaking all kinds of rules. Um, it was bad. We were just talking the other day about, um, why it's okay that 23 year olds, um, you know, pseudo parent 15 year olds and this is not something that should be done. We've both been in that position and we've looked back and it's like who, who? let me?

do that. Why was that Okay?

Um, I had no good judgment. Well, she didn't do so bad. I don't think I'm too bad. No you're horribly, um, you're one of my, you're one of this great success. Well, success is a big word, Um, but uh, but yeah. So, uh, Shannon has truly been a huge influence in my life And so, um, she's also literally one of the smartest people I know. So I wanted her to come and talk about, uh, this, this topic, um, of unlearning religion, because we, um, we, all of us, a lot, a lot of us have grown up in a um, in a religious context in some way, Uh, and a lot of us have had to figure out, you know, is that something I want to keep? Is it something I don't? um, where do I want to land on it? And then some of us just keep it and don't know why, Um, and then some of us discard it and don't know why. So I think, um, I've wanted to explore, through different voices You know, what is this journey like of, of kind of unlearning um religion, especially from the angle of what, uh, what I was taught, what I grew up in, what I was used to, and like if that has changed or shifted, what, what did that look like? Um, and I think it could, I think it could be really interesting, And so your journey has been particularly interesting. It is, it is the most. I mean, your journey goes from Houston to Wellesley, to Harvard, to South Africa, to other places, And, um, there's just this beautiful thread of of growth and you know all the things that I think you can offer.

So, anyway, I just want to hear about it and just talk about it, And so if you could just share, first of all, just who you are, where you come from, Yeah, um, so I'm from Houston, texas, grew up at a Southern Baptist church, first Baptist Church of Houston, which was a mega church that had a bowling alley and basketball courts and a little cafe called the Garden of Eaton, which I still give them credit for It was a well played.

Well played FBC.

Um and uh. You know, in some ways I would say, my unlearning process started there because I was incredibly fortunate to have a great youth pastor who had my back when I was a troublemaker and I was absolutely a troublemaker from like 13 or 14, not in any kind of. I mean, there was no risk. I was going to, you know, get in trouble with the law, but I was. I asked a lot of questions. Sometimes I did because they were genuine questions. Sometimes I was just kind of a jerk. One of the things I figured out early is they can't kick you out of Sunday school. There you go, right, like I was going to play it safe at school because, you know, even in eighth grade I was. I had an idea that I wanted to go East for college. Sure, um and so I wasn't going to do anything. It would go on my permanent record and I wasn't sure exactly what that was. So I was going to play it safe on that. But I figured out I was like I can kick you out of church. So you know, i had a friend who was like me and they would always try and split us up and be like you're. You know, this year you're in this class and you're in this one, and we'd be like bet and we go to the same class. Cause, what are they going to do, what? what are you going to do? You know, at school they'd send you the office. They can't. They can't do that at church?

Where are you going?

Yeah, you're just, i'm going to class with my best friend, you're not going to fight it. But? but? so I asked a lot of questions. And so, when they would, when the Sunday school teachers inevitably would complain to the youth pastor. The youth pastor would say she's doing exactly what she's supposed to be doing. She's kicking the tires, she's in the process, she can't live on her parents faith, she's figuring out what she believes. Don't shut it down, Don't shut her down. And my folks did the same thing because, because I think when they got no, uh, they got nothing from the youth pastor on occasion they'd come up with a, they'd call my parents? Yes, And I can remember hearing my dad on the phone being like I mean, I just think if you don't want you know difficult, strappy questions, you maybe don't teach 15 year olds, Yeah, But why are you interrupting my Sunday? I'm just trying to watch Arkansas play. What you're telling me is my teenager is being a teenager.

And I don't see a problem with that, um.

So in a lot of ways I felt like I had actually quite a bit of freedom to explore and make that my own. So, you know, i'd already in my teen years kind of shifted politically to saying, uh, i identify in a different, you know, i with a different political party than my parents did, and then the majority of evangelicals did even then, although they've certainly taken a ride in the last 30 years. But, um, and then I went to Wellesley and, uh, i majored in religion, but it was, you know, the scholarship Of religion, uh, the history and the context. There was some theology, but not primarily. I did some theology in Divinity school, uh, years later, when I went to Harvard, because that was preparing people for ministry, but this was, you know, this was the first time that I was hearing like Paul didn't, you know likely, didn't write first and second Timothy. And you know here's what the, you know the apoc, you know revelation fits into a genre of apocalyptic literature that you see in a lot of other. You know oppressed societies where the code is so that Rome doesn't know what you're talking about. And so I have really had to struggle with how do you reconcile those things, uh, or are they reconcilable with sort of a faith? And I think what? what was essential for me was figuring out what are the essentials, and the rest of the stuff is not that important. And and we can and and a guiding principle has been that great Augustine quote about an essentials unity, and non-essentials liberty, and all things, charity, with charity being that, you know, from its Latin root, keratos, which is love. We're going to be loving about this whole thing. On the. You know now the challenges, we don't all agree on what the essentials are, but essentially the idea was freedom of conscience on a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, on the, on the essentials, we do need to be unified And and be able to speak in one voice on that. And then, even when we disagree on what the essentials are, we're going to approach it with a degree of grace and kindness for each other, right, and so that's been kind of a guiding principle. Um, yeah, i don't know whether or not I've been at a lot, you know, i guess I grew up Southern Baptist, then I was at, you know, for about 20 years at a EPC church in Houston, um, which was intentionally multi-racial and really Presbyterian, i think, only in its form of governance. Right, right, right. We had an elderboard right. Theologically, i don't think people were deeply attached to the doctrine of predestination, for example. It's not why you were at city of refuge. If you were there, you were there for other reasons and people were kind of refugees from a bunch of different denominational homes at that point. Yeah, um, i worship part at an Episcopalian church now and have done that for a while. While also going to another church, my dad says I'm theologically promiscuous. Well, that's, um, that is a. Well, i'll be using that term at some point. That's great.

So so all right. So you, you've done a lot of studying, right, and you've done a lot of um, scholarship and, and, and, and you know a lot. So how has how has that played out in real life, um, and your day to day activities, right? How has how has that played out in real life, um, and your day to day activity how you deal with people, how you um, how you make decisions, and, and how is that pr that your journey with religion impacted your day to day life?

Uh, i think what it's actually done as much as I've loved academic study and have a gift for that and, and will always be, i think, a voracious reader has been to actually not lean too heavily on that Um, partly because I would see none of my professors listen to this. You're all lovely people and I thought the world of you, um, people who lived in such a tower, um, like an, an intellectual ivory tower, and they were writing sometimes extraordinary things but that were only going to be published in peer reviewed journals that 50 other academics were going to read, yeah, um, and I just thought that's not for me. I don't want any part of that Um, and and I think there were a couple of things that in that I would say are ways where I really think, uh, god kept me. I was, i was very, i was very susceptible to kind of the arrogance that comes with always having been like the smart kid.

Yeah.

Yeah And uh. I think what was helpful was, uh, when I worked one of my first jobs after college, or about two years after college, I started working at Star of Hope, the homeless shelter in Houston. I worked with the kids. I had that job through most of my 20s It was. It was a place where, like, nobody cared that you had read Bonhoeffer and Calvin and that you could like parse the Greek, you know Like that had no purchase there. Yeah, and it, you know, a life of study was still because that was formative for me, still affected how I approached it. For example, one of the things is that I went to Barnes Noble I was in, I'd actually interned at the shelter, yeah, some, some of my sophomore, junior year of college, And I looked around and I said, okay, city of Houston, Houston is not 98% black. The people who live at this shelter are 98% black. So I need to either be willing to say I guess black people just can't get their act together. They're inherently less capable of like living independently than everyone else, Or there is something else going on here, Like what is, and I, fortunately, had had some classes in college that had touched on sort of and this was mid 90s. So language that we very much take for granted now, but ideas of systemic racism. And I had read for the first time Martin Luther King as a theologian rather than as sort of the secular saint who just wanted us all to get along. You know, we read his Sarmons in a class and has really grappled with that theology which in some ways sounds very evangelical and and in other ways is, you know, kind of a call to action that is very specific to the black church and not, you know, is that? I think at the time a lot of white evangelicals would have said like that's not really the gospel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like it's a nice. It's a nice thing to do, but it's not really core to the gospel. And so I went to Barnes and Noble and, just like, bought out the African-American studies section. I was like I can read my way out of this problem is what I can do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and I am incredibly grateful to have had that And, in fact, one of the things I've worried about in the last several years. I really since kind of 2014 Trayvon Martin was 2014. And then, of course, 2020, with George Floyd we had suddenly a lot of people saying like, oh, i think race maybe plays a bigger role in society than I thought it did, and but it came at a point when a lot of the people who had talked about race or who'd been thinking about it longer were just tired and tapped out, right, and so a lot of the questions that you would see people saying, like you know, asking questions about race and racism on social media or being told go. You know, google is your friend. Yeah, no one has to answer your questions. No one owes you their emotional labor. Yeah, and I was like, don't tell these people to go to Google. Google is a cesspool, yeah, and you are just as likely to get like some dude blogging in his dad's basement as you are any kind of, you know, reputable source And at that point, when you know nothing, you don't know how to distinguish between the legitimacy of those sources, right? So you know, my fear was, if you don't want to have those conversations. There are people, like you know, stormfront, who are more than happy. They absolutely have explanations for your questions about why minorities are poorer in general. They'll give you they're not the answers you want anyone to you know to really take seriously, right, but they're more than happy to. They're not going to tell you to Google it Correct. They'll be like that's right. No, that's absolutely true. Read this crazy thing that we wrote. So I'm grateful, looking back, that essentially Barnes and Noble curated it for me. Someone who knew far more than I did was like WBW boys John Hope, franklin, derek Bell, lonnie Gwinear, you know, angela Davis, like these are the people that you read And you know. So I had that grounding in black history, black literature, black theology. That was very helpful. And then, in terms of sort of living it out at the shelter, what was valuable on the other side of that was people who were like I don't care what you've read, it's not impressive to me, that's right. I had one parent once who told me she said I don't care. I think I was trying to show off a little bit. Yeah, we were in an argument, maybe and I was trying to sort of like beat her down with my bachelor's degree And she was like I don't care that you're smart, i care that you're kind and you seem comfortable in any room that you're in and you love my kids. So and I was like, oh yeah, this is not. This doesn't have the currency here, and I've intentionally chosen to be in a world where that's not the currency And I am so grateful for that because I think I could have been really an intolerable jerk. Yeah.

That's. I think that. So okay, so this is, this is good, because when people, at least in my experience, when people think about the idea of religion, i think knowledge, smart speaking a certain language, those, those you know kind of in in crowd, kind of mentality is is kind of the way that we, we typically think we say religion, right, and I, and just just so we're clear and we're clear about that And this context, right So. But religion, that idea of religion, spans across all types of religions. Like you have, you know how to talk, you know what to say, you know what to do, all this stuff There is a certain level of expectation And I, i do think that what you're saying, what I, what I love, is kind of this distinction between that and then just the real, the real, the real, the real, the real. And I do think that what you're saying, what I, what I love, is kind of this distinction between that and then just the real time interactions with real people who are much less concerned about the lingo and the, the, the language and the protocols, and more concerned about what. What result do I see as a result? you know, as, what's the fruit that I see as a result of you knowing? all what you know So and that's still you know I, i have very conflicting feelings because, on the one hand, one of the things that my studies have taught me is that the Bible is this incredibly complicated document.

It's written in two or three different languages. It's come to us through translations and you know Latin We've. you know there's some things where we just have bits and pieces of it. You know there's an argument over like where should Mark end, because you know the oldest transcripts have Mark ending really just after, like the, the crucifixion. I don't even think it goes to the resurrection. It has that little like like addendum. It's like when did that get added? And where I think no, there's, i get in a weird way, i get why the Catholics were against the Reformation because they're like you can't put this in every language. There's so much room for abuse here. Like people are going to wile out with this. You know it is valuable to have the context and to understand like what? what would this expression have meant in this time? What would you know? why is there this emphasis? Well, do you? what do you understand about the ancient Near Eastern cultures? Guess what? They're not like yours, right, and so there's not a one to one correlation. And so there's no, i don't think there's any. There's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, they're not like yours, and so there's not a one to one correlation. I think there's so much value in doing it. And at the same time, i'm very sort of small d democratic about access to the Bible, because I think, in the US in particular, that the best theology has come out of black churches, very often by pastors who did not go to seminary and might not have gone to college. When you look at, even like, the way slaves read the Bible through this liberationist lens that their college educated slave masters absolutely could not, you know like, could not even conceptualize That was. That was so outside their framework And they gave it to slaves with the idea of, like you'll read in here, you know that slaves should obey their masters, and they're like, i'm actually reading about a liberationist God who, you know, leads us out of Egypt and drowns all the Egyptians in the water. Yeah, yeah, and that's my God, that's, that's my jam. Yeah. So there is, i feel like, within me, sort of this battle between. I greatly value the study of the Bible. I think that kind of academic study, looking at sources, learning the original text can be incredibly valuable. I'm so glad there are people who have devoted their lives to that and written commentaries and stuff like that. Yeah, and at the same time, i think sometimes some of the best insights come from people who have none of that.

Yeah.

And and read it on what would appear to be a very superficial, literal level to a scholar and yet find something that is that just cracks it open for them.

Yeah, so all right, i want to. I want to kind of I don't in my head it's, it's, it's connecting, but it's very possible that this is going to make a lot of sense as to how we get from what you just said to hear. But I do want to like, because I feel like what you're, that, what you just said, as far as you know how, and I'm going to paraphrase it the how the black church operationalizes scripture into a very practical way, that that really does inform how I live day to day And and and that being very that, not coming from historically a space of scholarship because of the lack of access, right, so so it, it is a very like common man, day to day kind of exchange.

Mm, hmm.

I think it and it and because of that it has a very high. I think what some people would, would, would ascribe a high moral value to it. But it and, and so I. But I want to, because I think at the same time you have a lot of people who, who would look at who would look at that and not What? because because of the seemingly lack of sophistication around, scholarship is like, well, that's, it's just, you're just talking about, you know, it's just morality, like, it's a, it's not a. If you don't have, if you don't have the, if you're not able to really dig into the, the, the, the proper theology of a thing, that aren't you just really just you know helping people be more moral than anything else and just trying to live a good life and less about the, the technicalities of you know, the gospel, or technicalities of theology, and maybe dismiss the depth of of what, what, how, that's being offered. I'm not even sure I'm making a whole lot of sense, but my, my, i think that kind of the distinction between, you know, religion and spirituality and morality, like we, i think sometimes we use those terms interchangeably And they're really not the same term, and we have we there. There has to be a distinction between the three of them, and I'm and I'm interested, i'm interested in hearing what, how you would define those things, that's interesting because I would have.

I would have said the. The biggest danger I see is I feel like we create a. We speak of religion and spirituality as these very separate things, and I think it's a false dichotomy Where I think in a lot of the sort of the common dialogue that's happening right now, religion is seen as like these oppressive structures that are all about legalism and rule following and just crushing your spirit, and spirituality is you're like Magical encounter with the divine in which you skipped through the fields barefoot and never the twain shall meet. And and I think, like that's a gross misreading of both of them That in fact, a lot of the people that we look on, at least within the Christian tradition, but even outside of Christian traditions, a lot of mystics would say we claim these people Teresa of Avila, bernard of Clairvaux, saint John of the Cross These were people who had these like mystic spiritual encounters in which they saw Christ and you know, sort of were slain in the spirit in a sense, but like sort of were transported, you know lost time and coming back to themselves. And yet those were people who were all members of religious orders. Yeah, i think that routine anchors them. Yeah, because you're not waiting for a flight of fancy at every time because you've got to go out. You've got prayers at set times where the whole community comes to pray and you have a task, and it might be Gardening, you might be on the scrub, the floor duty, you might be like you're part of a. You know you have a task that helps this community to function. You have an obligation to serve the poor, so you're out in the community doing that and that the the structures of daily life, that that were so embodied and so physical. You have to do these things, or what allow the space for that spirituality to grow and not become self indulgent, not become. I think sometimes we already live in a culture that so values the individual and sort of rugged individualism and spirituality can become that where we say that's something that I do by myself, yeah, that's my yeah. How many times have you heard someone say, like my relationship with God doesn't have anything to do with church? Okay, but if you're a Christian, it actually needs to, because we're told, yeah, that we need to meet as part of a collective body of worship and the value of that, i think, is that A it will remind us there is no such thing as a perfect community and if you keep looking for it, you're just You're gonna be on the hunt to the end of your days. Yeah, people are people, your people to. Yeah, there are people who find you hard to put up with. Yeah, you, this is a spiritual discipline to learn to be in community with people that you don't necessarily like, who you might disagree with on many things where you're like I think they're just dead wrong on that thing, or I find that incredibly exasperating, or I don't even know if he saved, to use the language of my childhood. And yet ritual has traditionally been And religion is, is the father? I mean that's, they create the rituals. Yes, has been an entrance point into these encounters with God for most of us. Whether it is The Lord supper, yeah, taking communion, or walking the stations of the cross, or baptism, or, you know, the palm leaves on palm time. There's so many rituals that the church creates, yeah, that they become transformative for people. One of the things I love about liturgical traditions is that they pray together. They're all reading from the prayer book. Some prayers are call and response the pastor speaks one line, the congregation speaks the other, others. You sort of are all saying them together, and that the beauty of that is that it doesn't rest on emotion. And so, for those of us who came from evangelical traditions or more I won't just say evangelical, but maybe more expressive emotional traditions we see those as being really cold and sort of cut off, when in fact I think the beauty of it is that it's not dependent on emotion, that you can show up and be like. I don't even know if I really believe it today, but I'm going to let these prayers carry me along Because I will rely on the faith of the people around me. Yeah, they call them in the Book of Compray. These are the prayers of the people. Yeah, like not just you, and they use we, they don't just use I, so it reminds you that you're, you're part of this group. I don't have to get by on my own faith. Today I am buoyed by the faith of the people around me, and one of these days I'll be the one with the stronger faith and someone around me will be struggling and I will carry them along with mine. Yeah so I think of of religion and spirituality is at their best. These are streams that merge and that, in fact, make each other stronger and better.

And I am, i agree with that and I think that the the, the challenge that I'm seeing is to you know that How do I want to say it? that the disdain of, of, of what, how people see religion, and I and I and I, and I think I, my, my, my thought is that at least most people I have these types of conversations with that may have a less than positive view of religion is connected to the institution that that religion is, lives in right, and so you know the church, or you know what we're going for for our purposes, the church, but, to your point, like that, that is an institutional They're, they're, they're connecting this. I did the idea of a religion to an institutional flaw, right, whatever that might be, which is bound to happen, because, again, people are going to people, it is what it's going to be, but the concept of religion And the rich, like and I love how you said that like the routine of of religion, can lead you into a space that is, that can be transcendent, but, but it's but you're not dependent on that. You don't. You don't, you're not dependent on that moment to always be there in order to have access to Right right you keep showing up for the ritual.

That's right, and at some point you have moments of transcendence I always think about. There's a piece in the Chronicles of Narnia where, as land takes Lucy up on the mountain, yeah, and he says right now you see very clearly, but when you just send back through the clouds, it won't be like that. Things will be cloudy and you, you won't remember it as clearly. So you have to remember the signs, remember, remember, remember the signs. He says it three times Because when you get back down there it won't look the same And I love that. That understanding I think that Lewis had was like you're not going to live in the state of spiritual euphoria all the time. Right, most of the time it's just a slog. It's the daily life of you know, did I load the dishwasher and I've got it? you know the dog threw up and the. You know just the, the dailiness of your life, and but I'm going to show up for these sort of appointments that I have and it might feel like nothing, whether it's sort of you know, daily prayers or your, your Sunday worship or your, whatever your, whatever your disciplines are, i'm going to show up for those and give those the opportunity, kind of in the way that, you know, we look at like an extraordinary athlete, someone like LeBron James, right, where his play is so creative, you know. But it's only creative because he's practiced the fundamentals nine billion times. He doesn't have to think about it because he has so mastered the. The found that he's practiced every shot from every angle so many times. When he gets out there, the creativity can flow. Had he not mastered the fundamentals, he doesn't get to be that creative player Exactly. You know, I think in a similar way, you know musicians who, who can riff and creative, comes from the foundation. Ee Cummings the poet. I remember my ninth grade teacher saying She'd been teaching for like 40 years, so she clearly knew at this point where she spoke. She was like you're all going to start to want like to write like EE Cummings and not capitalize anything And, you know, leave out punctuation. Yeah, don't know, i don't, i won't take it, i'll mark it wrong. Ee Cummings can break the rules of grammar because he knows the rules of grammar like he knows his bedtime prayers Right. And so when he breaks a rule, it's very strategic. Yeah, he knows exactly the impact that it will have. You are not good yet? Yeah, none of you at 14 are capable of that, that's right. So you do your grammar homework Right. You take that grammar homework and you do those part of Sipples and those gerenes. Yes, because that is why EE Cummings gets to be EE Cummings. Yeah, is that? he did that work? Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, you know, you know. So how do you encourage or empathize with people who have genuinely been disillusioned by spaces that uphold these routines and for whatever reason? And it's like I don't buy into that And I've been so jaded by it that the only way I'm going to connect is through these high, transcendent spiritual moments, and I'm going to get there wherever I get there, and I'm not going to do this routine thing. And so I think that for some people, that this unlearning process can bring up moments of pain and hurt where it's like all right, i'm not looking to just throw everything away, but I'm also not looking to do that again. So how do you help around that?

I'm sympathetic to that And I think that there can be a time where maybe you leave for a while for a little bit of healing, or you go elsewhere. Certainly, in the last few years we've seen a lot of coverups around sexual abuse but also, more broadly, abuse of power. We've seen it in the Southern Baptist Convention. We've seen it in the Catholic Church. We've seen it in almost every denomination. Those two got a lot of heat and light because they are the two biggest denominations in the country. A lot of pastors who maybe weren't super denominationally affiliated but were big stars have had scandals come out about them. I understand how disillusioning that can be Sometimes. I think it can be as simple as try out a tradition that's not your own. If where you felt hurt, if your religious trauma happened with the Baptist, let me check out the Methodist, check out the Anglicans, because I think there's great value in learning that your denomination did not have the monopoly on God in the first place. And therefore, when they failed, god did not fail, because God is in all of these other places. When I have watched over the past several years great sadness, some of the stuff that's happened with the SBC and can say I'm disappointed. And there's been abuse of power, unquestionably. And also I know so many of those people are just decent people And I'll always know that our music is the best. Having been in the Episcopal Church I'm like all the music are hymnal I will take to my grave. But I remember thinking what if the SBC ceased to exist? There's an argument to be made for that, particularly if we look at Jesus saying why are you expecting the fig tree to grow apricots? It's going to bear the kind of fruit it's going to bear. It's a denomination that was created to sustain slavery. They split from the other Baptists over whether or not it was fine to let missionaries own slaves. It's whole origin was in that evil. Maybe you just need to cut it down from the roots. And as sad as I would be to lose some of the cultural like what to me was very formative and is still sort of in my religious DNA, christ will always have a church. He will always have a church. When the Catholic Church was super corrupt in the 14th century and selling indulgences and bishops had women on the side and illegitimate kids they didn't acknowledge. It was just wild. It was a wild time Christ still had a church, even if it was just like these little menastic communities that had withdrawn from the world and said we just want to pray and worship and serve the people around us and not get caught up in all that. So it might be that you try something else. What I would just warn people about is not to try and go it alone for too long, because we are meant to be people of community, and that's not just Christians, that's all of us We're wired for people. We're wired for community. I think, when we look at, everybody had a mental health breakdown during the pandemic and it was because we were all isolated and looking at each other through screens, which are not a proxy for person-to-person encounters. Our kids have worse mental health than they've had since. We've been tracking their mental health. We're not meant to do this alone. So if you need to take some time alone to sort of nourish your wounds, i think that's fine. Andrew Sullivan, a political commentator who I really love, talked about how and he had always had a complicated relationship with the Catholic Church Cradle Catholic, raised Catholic, also gay. So he was like I had to learn how to stay in a tradition that thinks I'm an abomination. But the Catholic Church is who I am And I think Catholics are better at this You get a sense of. This is just so much bigger than whatever the current moment is doing. This is a church that exists across continents, across centuries. Whatever little petty thing you're mad about now, or even if it's not petty, even if it's really a big and a crisis, the church has weathered it. It's come through. The creed is the same creed they've been saying since the fourth century. Do you still think it's true? Then, like, hang in there. But he even says he said I didn't go to church for a year after the child abuse scandal broke And I mean and this is a guy who had made it he'd made it through the AIDS epidemic, seeing his friends die, still showing up to church. But the cover up and how widespread the cover up of child sexual abuse was just broke him. And then when he started going back, it was just occasionally he went back. He'd go back on Ash Wednesday, maybe he'd go back on Easter, kind of the High Holy Days, and eventually gets back into a routine of going. He was never not going to be Catholic. I think Protestants are much more comfortable kind of hopping around between traditions. That's also in our religious DNA, which is to break away from something and do something new. I guess my caution is always just we live if you were doing that in, let's say, uganda or Indonesia, a place that is already a very communally oriented society, that's one thing. You're doing that in a society that's already so individualistic and is constantly telling you in a million different ways you can do what you want. If that relationship isn't working for you, sever it. Are you mad at your parents? Go no contact. There are so many ways in which we encourage people to sort of be atomized and to put their own self fulfillment and sense of well-being ahead of everything else, and so I think I would simply say tend to yourself, but also really seek discernment on where you're, the point at which that tips over into being self-indulgent, the point at which genuine grief becomes cynicism. Watch for the curdling, watch for the moment when the milk curdles. Try and catch it before that, and be aware of that. You're in a society that so facilitates that it makes it harder to recognize, and it's therefore, i think, a more dangerous trap for American Christians than it is in a lot of other places.

That's really good. I want to go back to something that I just I don't think we can ignore And I kind of I want to go back to your time at Star of Hope and I want to go back to you know your Umm, your period of diving into Black theology, black scholarship and your relationship with the Black community And what your, if there was a necessary unlearning of your religious upbringing to get you to a place to engage a completely different community people experiences and the way that you did right, because you know, i know a lot of we talk about this all the time I know a lot of white people. White people are not the same, they're not, they're not equal right, especially in their engagement with Black people, and I grew up in a very diverse context. I'm very comfortable with a lot of different types of people And I have observed all different types right, and there are. I can literally on maybe two hands, count the number of white people that I feel like, yeah, they get it in a different way, in a way that is not normal, and you are one of those people And their faith has informed that journey for them, but also almost to a person. It did not start that way. It was not a core. You know, for some it was less core than others, but it wasn't something that they grew up understanding and knowing and really truly believing. That happened later. So I would love for you to just kind of like outline how did you get from here to there And what shaped that Like? why did you? why?

I think so. There were ways in which I think my parents made choices that greatly benefited me later, that set me up, maybe, to be able to see things. One was that if you look at studies and I think Nicole Hannah Jones at the New York Times before she did, the 1619 project was really looking at religion or not religion, sorry education And that one of the things she pointed out was there's really this very small window of time, about 10 years, when public schools made a genuine effort at integration. Where you know, magnet schools needed to reflect the makeup of the district, bussing was available, but where there was really an effort to have kids in thoroughly integrated schools didn't happen everywhere, happened to varying degrees, but that's the period when I was in elementary school and middle school And so I grew up where about half of my teachers were black. I think that for white kids that's so valuable because think about the almost veneration you hold teachers in.

They're your first authority figures outside of your parents right, you worship teachers.

When you're little, you see them in the grocery store and it's like you've seen a celebrity And it's also very disconcerting. We thought they lived in the classroom and like slept, hanging upside down like a bat in the supply closet. So it's very weird. But so those were my early authority figures. My classes were very diverse. One of the first best friends that I can remember was Nafisha Brinson in the second grade, and I'm still mad that in fourth grade Hayawatha Adams told Nafisha that she could be friends with a white girl or she'd be friends with all the black girls, but she had to choose. So then Nafisha and I had to be like on the down low with our friendship And we only got to talk when we took the erasers outside to clap all the chalk desktop them, and somehow the teacher had observed all this happening, so she would always choose the two of us to do that And she did not say anything when it would take us 25 minutes to clap the erasers. That is phenomenal. But that was also that meant that when I you know, years later saw that book, the Beverly Tatum book, why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? I was like because Hayawatha Adams, yeah, but like I get it. Like that gave me a framework then for understanding what had happened to me as a fourth grader, where I didn't understand that there was a much bigger dynamic playing out about identity and these kids. We were all the first generation to integrate our schools And where you belonged and how you fit cross-culturally And you know it's all fine to be friends at school, but is it OK if my black friend comes home and can I go over to their house? But I'm grateful that my parents chose that type of school for me because I had been in private school for the first couple of kindergarten and first grade. They wanted my mom in particular, i think, wanted me to be in integrated schools, so they had made that choice. First, baptist Houston wasn't totally white, so it wasn't what we would call a multiracial church, but just because it was a mega church and it was Baptist, there was some diversity And I remember your dad actually, who was my pastor for many years, saying that our pastor at First Baptist was better on race than most white Baptists were because he had been a jazz trumpeter in his youth. And so he was like we always felt like John got it. He was comfortable with black people. That's the first step, If you just feel like someone's not freaked out by your presence. It's a low bar but let's start there. But John at least is comfortable sitting in a room with black people because he had been doing it as a musician for years. So I think those little elements were hugely influential. But Star of Hope was absolutely a conversion moment for me. It was a Luther nailing his theses to the door at Wittenberg Paul, on the Road to Damascus. I mean that was really where I went. The culture has lied to me, or at least has withheld the whole story. There you go Right, and in many ways perhaps because they didn't know it. I mean, i think what I found out through conversations with my parents is how intentionally white kids are blinded to certain things, and they had certainly grown up in that kind of world where it just there were no encounters.

They didn't know what they didn't know.

Yeah, that's right. And so Star of Hope was suddenly the majority of my coworkers were black. My boss was black. All the kids that I worked with were black And I just thought, if I'm going to do well by them, i've got. I've just like I said, i've got to start. I can read my way through this. That had always worked for me before. That you can read your way to proficiency. And you do need to do the homework. Yes, that's the equivalent of doing your gerunds and participle so you can come out and be EE Cummings and be creative. You've got to do the legwork of. What's the history here? What are the sociologists saying? What are the historians saying? What are the theologians saying about this moment? You've got to reach your Du Bois. You've got to reach your John Hope Franklin.

Yeah.

James Cone.

Yeah, you're.

James Cone, you've got to do that. But ultimately you're going to do a lot of trial and error in your relationships And you're going to mess it up sometimes. And I think what was always extraordinary for me was feeling like a community a black community that had no reason to trust me would hand me their trust And when I would break it, they would hand it back. That there was just this extraordinary sort of generosity of like well, i mean, you're at least trying. And I think a key decision that I made was I need to live in this community. This can't be a place that I parachute into. I want the kids that I teach to see me at the grocery store, to see me at church, to see me in the community, so that I don't feel like because, again, the value of reading is that you learn oh, the white savior complex is a real thing. There's a name for it, because you're not the first person to have done it. That's correct, and you need to be really aware of that, because that's a way of centering yourself and giving yourself more power than you really have. And so I think what happened then was just because I lived there, because I was at a multiracial church because I was building up friendships with the people I worked with at Star of Hope that that led to conversations. One of the things I think is hard is that statistically we are outliers in every way in terms of having friends across a variety of races. The majority of people still have very monochromatic friend groups And you can't have hard conversations with people you don't know, you don't trust them. You don't trust them right The same reason that you wouldn't talk about an experience of abuse with someone that you just met a day ago. So I think sometimes some of these very well-meaning post-2020 or post-2014 efforts where it's like let's bring these people who don't know each other at a moment of heightened emotional and psychological tension and attempt to have these hard conversations. I think my best friend, misha. We've been friends since we were 19. We're 46 now. We have done some life together. We have had a lot of conversations, including some really messy, hard stuff around race. We've taken civil rights driving tours together. We've talked about the different angles we bring to it. But that's also possible because in many ways, the foundation of our friendship is not about that. That's right. The foundation of our friendship is we both think Britney Spears is better than Christina Aguilera. We went to the Janet Jackson concert two weeks before 9-11, and still both look at that as that was when Innocence ended Wow. Was that Janet Jackson. That was the last gasp in our body glitter and our crop tops and our low-rise jeans, because it was very 2001 of us And we both believe that breakfast for dinner is the very best meal. We're constantly one-upping each other with jokes and repartets. We both immensely value humor. Her kids are so dear to me and are my nieces And I love them as much as I love my biological nephews. That is the foundation. Is we really like each other? But because I know that Mija would absolutely give me an alibi if I committed a crime, That if the police called Mija and were like where was Shannon on the night of January 12? She'd be like with me. They'd be like do you want to check your calendar? Because that was months ago. No, she was here the whole time. I don't even need to know why you're calling Right, i just know she was here the whole time, right, and she knows that I would do the same for her Right And that, in small ways, we have done that for each other So we can have those conversations. I think a lot of I have done a lot of learning from you, from your dad, from coworkers, from friends, from people at Star of Hope, who started as the parents of kids and became friends That's right From fellow churchgoers. But as those relationships became authentic friendships and moved from kind of a superficial level, then you could talk about hard things because you trust that if you say something wrong, if you are wrong about something, if you've got blinders on about something, they're not going to immediately think this is a terrible person. Why? people are so afraid of the word racist So it's immediately like I'm not racist. But if you have that sense of, they're not going to think I'm a terrible person. They might think I said a racist thing. They don't think I'm irredeemable, yeah yeah. That then opens you up to, i think, be vulnerable and open in a way, and have conversations, and I just think I've benefited tremendously from blind people willing to take a chance on me, willing to roll the dice and be like I mean your dad when I was 22 or something. I don't know what he saw on me at 22. I was real rough material at 22. But, for whatever reason, your dad was like I think I can do something with this And he poured a lot into me. There was a lot of investment of time and energy and that I'm immensely valuable or thankful for to this day. I had a professor at Harvard who was the same way, peter Gomes, who was this huge luminary. I mean, peter Gomes was on the Colbert show. He was one of the celebrity professors at Harvard. He wrote books, he had podcasts. He was a big deal. He was this old. It was like if Oscar Wilde had come back as a black man. Every class he wore a three-piece suit. He had a cravat, not a tie.

He had a cravat.

He had a fedora, he had a pocket square, he had a pocket watch. That's amazing, it was straight out of the 1890s. But he had been raised Baptist and he missed it and I missed it And even though both of us were like we'll probably never be Baptist again, i would go down into his office in the basement of Memorial Church at Harvard and we would sing old Baptist hymns And he was the person who just immediately got a read on me when I was there And he said he was like tell me about where you coming from. And I'm talking about the community I just left, city of refuge and Third Ward in Houston And these sort of several years where my whole life was in these few square blocks, right where I lived, where I worked, where I worshiped, was all the same And how deeply connected I felt to the people there. And he listened to all of that. And usually when I would tell that story, you know, or some people feel like, oh, that's fat, that sounds like an amazing community. Tell it, how were they? you know how does it work to be intentionally in a racial law? Peter Gohm just listened to me and he goes. So I would imagine that here you're a little bit lonely and a little bit sad And I was like, well, you nailed it And also now I'm crying in your office. I don't, i do not appreciate that. Wow, he just became one of the people that I just I just felt like I could trust implicitly and was going to give it to me straight every time And where we're. At that point we could both roll our eyes and be like some of these white people, though for real, and he was like well meaning well meaning, and that was kind of the code for like yeah but they're well. Wow, it was like the equivalent of bless your heart. You know, you can say anything terrible, as long as you end with bless your heart. Right Or bless their heart. Something scathing, but they're well.

Well meaning, that's fantastic, oh, that's so good. I'm just going to say I have absolutely no idea how to end this. I mean because the reality is we could be a friend of the probably literally another two hours In fact, if, if somebody had recorded our conversation. What two nights ago?

it was, it would easily I mean yeah, it was two.

or three hours, you know. But man, i'm so glad that. thank you for coming on the podcast, your first podcast.

Yes, my first podcast, but not her last.

Please invite her on to be on podcast. She will do remote. She will do. She will do that. She'll come. She came to see me So she might show up to you. Y'all ask her to be on a podcast. She needs to be on people's microphones anyway, I'm done. But thank you, I'm so. You know, I love you to death and I am like so grateful you've been in my life and taught me so much And, like I said the other day, genuinely I feel I always feel smarter and half the things you said today I'm going to go back and say and it's going to be like it's mine, You own it, don't worry, i will. No citations necessary, we don't know.

No citations will give me.

So that's just what it's going to be. So I'm absolutely.

I'm incredibly grateful to have had you in my life. There's a and you knew this, having worked with kids There's something extraordinary about realizing like the kids who were like little larvae when you knew them, they were like 14. They were still formative. I like real whole people who are interesting and you like want to be friends with them, and also the gap between you is not big at all anymore. I mean, that's what's wild now is like we you know, in terms of like career development and age and stage of life and everything are basically peers, whereas, of course, like when you were 14 and I was 22, it just felt like this huge, like she's an adult, she can drive Exactly They are letting me have all kinds of.

If there's no other reason that I'm around them, it's because they can get me places. My parents are not going to take me and they're going to feed me things My parents don't want to feed me and let you listen to music that they absolutely and watch Charm, which was not allowed. So I'm cool. I don't think she got a car, a TV and food. I'm straight Like that's going to happen, like that was, that was it.

So this is, and I learned so much from you and from just the conversations that you guys would have, even as teenagers, because one of the things I'm convinced of is that white kids grow up without a vocabulary for race. We're taught that it's it's rude to even recognize it. Yeah, you know that. If you, if you identify it, if you say why is that black person? blah, blah, blah, that your parents shush you like you've said a bad word. And so you absorb that in some way. It is a bad word, it's bad to talk about. You're not sure why, but we don't talk. We don't talk about it. Platt kids are so comfortable talking about race from such an early age. It's just a part of their daily lives. They have a language for it And, as a result, like when we start, that's another obstacle to overcome. When we start engaging in those conversations, it's like you're trying to talk to like a fluent speaker of Spanish and you have like the eight words you learned from Sesame Street. You are, you are not prepared for that conversation, and so I think just even it's developing a vocabulary, not stuttering over the word black. You know, like black folks, black people, yeah, i don't have to go, but Africa.

Yeah, people of color. I don't even get to get into that. That drives me absolutely up along. Yeah, yeah, yeah This, but yeah, so, man, you, you, you were, you were, just you're great. And again I just want to reiterate somebody, get her on the podcast get her on. Well, thanks again for listening to the online podcast, where we're just trying to help people gain the courage to change their mind in order to experience more freedom. So we will see y'all next time. Thank you once again for listening to the unlearned podcast. We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode. Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think. We're looking forward to the next time, when we are able to unlearn together to move forward towards freedom. Love yousages and thanks forrecipting the time.