What We Learn from the Black Church About the Culture War

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0:00:00 – (Justin Giboney): Jesus, if we, if we want to remember his people were under an occupation and he still critiqued his own people and you know, the religious establishment and all that, these are, this is what you have to do if you love the truth and if you don’t, if you love your narrative more than that, then you don’t do it. Those are the, those are the options.

0:00:33 – (Collin Hansen): Here in Birmingham, Alabama, I often teach about the civil rights movement as the most effective faith based movement for social change in American history. We have a bitter heritage here in Birmingham of violent segregation, but the same city produced the heroes of the struggle, the ordinary men and women, and in this case especially children who stared down the police dogs and fire hoses in the march for freedom.

0:01:00 – (Collin Hansen): Well, Justin Gibney honors such heroes as Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth and commends their example for today in an informative and provocative book, Don’t Let Nobody Turn youn How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us out of the Culture War, a new book published by ivp. Justin is the co founder and president of the ANT Campaign. And the endorsement of this book by Bob Roberts calls Justin a strange mix of Tim Keller and Martin Luther King Jr. Writer wrapped up in his own personality and voice.

0:01:32 – (Collin Hansen): I like that. It’s high praise. And let’s learn more now on Gospel Bound. Justin, thanks for joining me.

0:01:38 – (Justin Giboney): Collins, always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

0:01:40 – (Collin Hansen): These interviews typically start with a question about why did you read the book? But I thought that was not really sufficient. This is a book that really comes with a burden. So Justin, could you tell us what was the burden behind writing this book?

0:01:53 – (Justin Giboney): I like how you put that. The burden was, I think, probably twofold. Number one, it’s a very personal book. So as you know, I write the book starting with the story of my maternal grandmother, also her favorite gospel artist, who is Mahalia Jackson. And so I wanted to in many ways help people see the civil rights generation for who they were. I think the civil rights movement in general has kind of been co opted sometimes by the right to create a kind of colorblind narrative, many times by the left to launder some of their issues into the civil rights spirit.

0:02:37 – (Justin Giboney): And I wanted to clear the record, but also be very clear that this was an orthodox movement. This was a movement based on the authority of scripture and their promises of God.

0:02:49 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, it’s something I’ve learned a lot from you about and talked with you a lot about over the years. And I really appreciate you drawing it out here. I would love to hear more about that. And of Course, it’s very clear in the book, but I think it’s one of the most compelling aspects of the book. Tell us more about your own family background and some of that inspiration.

0:03:07 – (Justin Giboney): Yeah, so my mother is a preacher’s kid. Her father was a civil rights era preacher in a small Pentecostal denomination. And really, I was raised in that black church tradition. And so it really had a profound impact just on, you know, on how I saw politics, how I saw culture and things of that nature. And so, you know, when I go on to law school and, you know, I end up going to Vanderbilt University, which my grandfather was from Tennessee, but he could have never, you know, because of segregation, he couldn’t have gone there.

0:03:46 – (Justin Giboney): It just kind of colors my outlook on different things. But at the same time, being from Denver, Colorado, even going to some churches, some other denominations, I also was able to have diverse interactions with a lot of different kinds of people, and I think that was helpful as well.

0:04:05 – (Collin Hansen): We hosted you for a Keller center event, and I was so excited. And when you talked at length about Fred Shuttlesworth, and I fly out of Shuttlesworth Airport here in Birmingham, Alabama, but I think not many people still know about him. I think he remains largely overlooked. No doubt he’s in the shadow of King, which Fred would not have appreciated, something he experienced in his own life and often struggled with.

0:04:34 – (Collin Hansen): But what is it that draws you to write and to reflect so much on the ministry of Shuttlesworth?

0:04:40 – (Justin Giboney): Shuttlesworth was different. For one, he’s a man that I think Dr. King called the bravest or most courageous man in the civil rights movement. I mean, you talk about praise, that’s high praise from someone like that. The other thing that really interested in me in Shuttlesworth is he calls himself a biblicist and an actionist. And when he’s talking about being a biblicist, he’s talking about believing in the authority of Scripture, believing what the Bible has to say, not seeing the Bible as just kind of symbolic and cute to, you know, to give us a little bit of direction.

0:05:14 – (Justin Giboney): No, I believe what Jesus said. I believe what the Old Testament says. All those things, right? So you see that orthodoxy. He called himself a biblicist, but he’s talking about orthodoxy. And as far as an actionist, this is applying biblical principles in the public square. This is someone who, you know, his house and his church gets bombed. He somehow survives, gets up the next day and goes forward with a bus boycott.

0:05:40 – (Justin Giboney): Right? That was the kind of the terrorism of segregationists was to try to change his Calculus to say, you know what? This might not be worth it if they’re gonna bomb my house. And he refused to change that calculus. He knew how important it was to move forward and not be pushed, turned around by fear.

0:06:00 – (Collin Hansen): Do you have a favorite Shuttlesworth story? I mean, an incredibly colorful character?

0:06:05 – (Justin Giboney): Yeah, I mean, that’s one of them, you know, but there’s another one where he gets beaten again. He’s trying to desegregate the schools. Gets beaten, is in really bad shape.

0:06:13 – (Collin Hansen): Phillips High school in the 50s. Yeah.

0:06:15 – (Justin Giboney): Yeah. And his, you know, his congregation and a lot of the folks in the area wanted to riot and wanted to really, you know, shake some things up in a more violent way. And he comes in and says, that’s not what we’re going to do. He refuses to do what we see a lot of people doing today, keep people enraged, but rather to inspire him. So if I’m not gonna resort to that, and I’m the one who got beat up, then certainly you shouldn’t resort to that because it was outside of the ethic of the movement.

0:06:48 – (Collin Hansen): Describe some of the differences between Shuttlesworth and King. There’s some pretty clear overlaps between them. And we have the famous photo of them with Ralph Abernathy in the working man shirts during the Birmingham march marches. But different congregations, different. Different class backgrounds. You describe some of the. More. Some of the. Some of the differences between Shuttlesworth and King.

0:07:11 – (Justin Giboney): Yeah, man. I think they had a difference in just general disposition. Shuttlesworth was more of a fighter. He was on the ground. He wasn’t the kind of educated, polished person that you might see that you might see in King. He took a very different perspective and wanted to take it to people now, you know, same ethic in general, but wasn’t as much on the theory and all those things, but really on the ground and still a good strategist, just in a very different way. So you just see two different perspectives. And I would say that the movement needed both.

0:07:49 – (Justin Giboney): But I would think in certain ways, Shuttlesworth might have been a better representative of the actual people in the. Like, not the leadership, but the people that made up, you know, the bulk of the movement. He just reflected from class and all those things. He was more of a reflection of that. Yeah, yeah.

0:08:09 – (Collin Hansen): I don’t know what your experience is like, Justin, in Atlanta, living there, or other places that you visit, but certainly in Birmingham, I’m constantly straddling these two experiences. One is, it’s clearly. Just like you mentioned about Vanderbilt, it’s clearly a very different place than it was before, clearly a very different place. And Shuttlesworth, King, Abernathy, and others deserve more of that credit than anybody else. I mean, certainly another similarity between Shuttlesworth and King would just be their sheer courage, just sheer courage in the face of, as you said, that terrorism back in the 50s and 60s.

0:08:50 – (Collin Hansen): But at the same time, and I always want to appreciate the differences of the changes, at the same time, it feels like I’m constantly also thinking, why haven’t we made more progress? Why is it more visible? Why isn’t it more spiritual since the days of Shuttlesworth? And like I said, I don’t want to be ungrateful for that, but I just keep reflecting on why. Why haven’t we come as far as we think that we should have an answer for that question?

0:09:23 – (Justin Giboney): Well, yeah, I think that’s part of human brokenness. We would like to think that our kind of moral knowledge and how we grow in becoming better is like technology, right? So once we invent the wheel, once we have a technological advance, we always hold onto it. But that’s not necessarily true in society. We’re not always the moral superiors to those who came before us. I think we. And that’s another one of the reasons that I wrote the book, is we have lost some of the primary lessons and principles that the Civil rights movement showed, not just America, but showed the world.

0:09:59 – (Justin Giboney): We just haven’t held onto those things. It’s almost like when Josiah has to go back and he has to get the word and say, hey, remember, we have to remember the word. That happens sometimes. And. And that’s one of my major pushbacks against the thought of kind of progressivism and us always progressing towards some type of moral perfection. That’s not. That’s ahistorical. And, you know, there’s really not a whole lot of proof that that’s how things work.

0:10:25 – (Justin Giboney): We have taken some steps back from the ethic that we were shown, from the civil rights movement. And our pride, even the lessons that we somewhat learned, our pride in many cases, keeps us from actually applying it in ways that we should.

0:10:40 – (Collin Hansen): I think one of the biggest challenges I face, Justin, is that people think history is inevitable. They think that it had to be the way that it played out, and it helps them to not understand the courage and uniqueness and improbability of what happened in the civil rights movement. There was no group of people who thought this was going to happen. There was no sense that segregation was on its last legs, not in Birmingham, Alabama. And I don’t think any number of Other places, including Atlanta or Albany or Montgomery or Selma or any number of these different places across the south and beyond.

0:11:25 – (Collin Hansen): But when you do understand the contingency of history, that it didn’t happen before, that there was a unique set of circumstances and people that the Lord raised up to very high cost, you see that pretty Obviously, whether it’s 16th Street Baptist or King in Memphis at the highest cost, which is why so many people had not done it before, because they knew what the cost was going to be. So it was a unique set of circumstances. So it seems as though if it didn’t happen before, and then suddenly the Lord raised up this generation in the 60s, then, well, it’s not inevitably going to continue then either.

0:12:07 – (Collin Hansen): Is that part of your point as well?

0:12:10 – (Justin Giboney): Yeah, that’s part of the point. What they did took not just an understanding of conventional wisdom and what was predicted or likely to happen. It took moral imagination. It was the ability to say, okay, here’s what’s happened historically, here’s what’s going on now, and here’s what’s likely to be. But here’s what God said should be right. Moral imagination is seeing what ought to be, not just what has been or what’s likely to be in the future.

0:12:36 – (Justin Giboney): It’s believing that if everyone is redeemable and if God is as powerful as the Bible says he is, there’s nothing that we shouldn’t be able to strive to do. That’s right. And that’s a major point, because I think today I’ve been talking a lot about how Christians are giving up on each other because of, you know, every election when we have reconciliation efforts or whatever, everybody goes backwards. Right. During the election for some reason, or if there’s some racial event, everything goes backwards. And so it’s getting to the point to say, well, the other group hasn’t changed.

0:13:10 – (Justin Giboney): Now they’re just not going to change at all, and things aren’t going to get that much better. Let’s huddle in our little tribes. I think that’s just a lack of moral imagination and really a lack of faith. Christians have to believe things can get better, that other people can do better, and we have to push for that to happen. Otherwise we end up with this sort of cynicism that just accepts the moment and all of its toxicity and just tries to get what we can get out of that toxic moment instead of trying to change it.

0:13:42 – (Justin Giboney): And in many ways, that’s where we are right now.

0:13:45 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. It seems, Justin, that cynicism is in some ways the default setting. And it’s very hard to break out of that. And there’s a lot of political and media incentive to perpetuate that cynicism. There’s a lot of motivation to say, no, no, no, it can’t be different. Nothing can ever change. But I live every single day in a place where I have every reason to give thanks for people who had that moral imagination, who refuse to look around and say it has to be this way.

0:14:24 – (Collin Hansen): And I often reflect on how, whether it was black or white, the vast majority of people did not have that imagination in the white community. Because if you stepped out of line, massive repercussions for your family, to the point of probably needing to move, at best, lose your job, maybe even lose your life. And on the African American side, same things, losing your job, losing your life. It was in many ways easier to accept the status quo as terrible as it was, because there was an option that was worse than that, which was not having any income at all and losing your life in the terrorism that we saw there with 16th Street Baptist and whatnot. But that doesn’t change anything. You need that moral imagination to go along with that courage, or else you’re stuck in that loop, which places in the South. And we could apply this to other scenarios as well.

0:15:21 – (Collin Hansen): Had been stuck in for a very long time. And also it was a condition that was created, not received, in the sense that somebody had to have the moral imagination or immoral imagination to be able to create that situation in the first place. Hadn’t always been that way either, either with slavery or segregation. Now, you write in the book that the lack of color in the history of the culture war is glaring.

0:15:47 – (Collin Hansen): I’m just going to pose the question of your own book subtitle, but explain what is the culture war and what is it that you see in the black church that can help lead us out?

0:15:57 – (Justin Giboney): Yeah. So according to James Davidson Hunter, the culture war is a fight for the identity and the values of America. What will America represent? And this culture war, as also James Davison Hunter would say, was a fight between white progressives and white conservatives. We see it kind of starting in the 20s, and it just kind of grows throughout this time. You see it in the sexual revolution and then coming back with the Moral Majority. Right. It’s this back and forth between progressives and conservatives. Now. It’s not to say there was no one of color somewhere in these conversations.

0:16:33 – (Justin Giboney): They just weren’t the principals. Right. And so while we were always subject to the outcomes and. And the consequences, we never really had a seat at the table to say, hey, this is how things should go. And also, I wanna be very clear on two things too. It’s not that the culture war issues aren’t worth fighting for or debating over. Right. They really are. I think that’s important to note. And it’s also not to say this is not. This book isn’t just an exaltation of the black church. It’s actually a challenge too, to today’s black church, to today’s white evangelicals and all that, to say there’s a higher standard for that we can reach.

0:17:09 – (Justin Giboney): So when we look at this culture war, we see it just become a kind of nasty rivalry. It’s almost a series of overreaches. When the left gets in power, they push it too far, throwing stuff in school that shouldn’t be in schools, all this stuff pushing abortion to the furthest level. When the right gets in, you see a similar. Just overreach and excess. And we just see this over and over, just this long cycle.

0:17:34 – (Justin Giboney): There are a few things that I think the black church can speak into this. One of the most important is how we see ourselves and how we see our opposition. One of the things you see in the civil rights generation, even as they’re being oppressed, and you can hear it in the songs, you see it in their writing, they’re always aware of. Of not only the evil in their opponents, but the evil in them. They’re always saying, you even hear it and lift every voice and sing, right, Lest we forget where we met thee and become drunk with the wine of the world. We forget thee, right?

0:18:17 – (Justin Giboney): This is basically saying, God, don’t leave us to our own devices. We are wretches, just like they are. But for you, we end up going down the wrong trail too. What does that do? It gives you a certain level of humility to say, just because I have a good cause doesn’t mean I’m going about my cause the right way. We tend to think that if we’re fighting against the right people and we have a good cause, that’s enough.

0:18:44 – (Justin Giboney): History tells us over and over again a cause is not enough. The spirit of the cause is just as important as the mission. And if we allow ourselves to be corrupted, if we respond in the way that the world responds, we become evil. While fighting evil. You rarely hear anybody that’s in the culture war talk about how we have to make sure that we don’t become evil too. No, the other side is purely evil. We’re purely good. Simple as that. Let’s just move forward.

0:19:14 – (Justin Giboney): Very important. So how we see ourselves, but also how we see our opposition. Nobody is irredeemable. This is. I mean, this is so important because, again, it doesn’t allow us to just dismiss everything the other side does as bad. It doesn’t allow us to accept or justify everything we do as good. That is one of the main problems with the culture war. There’s a lack of critique of our own side, because the assumption is that we always get it right, and if we get it wrong, it’s really not that bad, because surely they’re doing something worse on the other side.

0:19:50 – (Justin Giboney): I think that’s a big part of it. The other thing is, when you look at the civil rights generation, they did not fit the culture war binary. They did not just say, hey, everything in this social gospel way is all about just social justice. And that’s it. That’s all we need to worry about. The oppressor and all this. No, no, no. They also understood individual sin and the importance of moral order. So they were talking about justice on one side and moral order on the other. They weren’t trying to. And the interesting thing, if you look at some of the writing of black denominations early on, when the culture war first starts, they’re watching the culture war.

0:20:29 – (Justin Giboney): This is not something they weren’t aware. They’re watching the American church kind of split in two, and they’re commenting on it. They’re saying, hey, we can’t really choose either of these because if we go to the right, we lose our bodies because there just isn’t justice there. And we. That’s what we’re talking about, some of the things that were going on in Birmingham. But if we go to the left, we lose our souls.

0:20:52 – (Justin Giboney): Because they’re not following the authority of scripture. They’re watching this split, and they’re saying, neither of these is right. And so we have to chart a different course. That’s not talked about very much today. It’s assumed in a lot of areas that to be a black Christian is to be on the left. It’s just ahistorical. That’s never been the case. But it also doesn’t mean to be on the right. It was a different way of going about it.

0:21:17 – (Justin Giboney): I think that helps us in the culture war because we can start to choose the right positions and not always be concerned about being on the right side, because there is no side that’s always gonna take the right position.

0:21:29 – (Collin Hansen): Tell us a little bit more about the shift in the 1960s from the early 1960s to the late 1960s, because you hear a lot of conversation right now that’s denigrating third way politics as supposedly dead. Even though I think it’s plainly evident that everybody’s playing third way at some level. It’s just pretty much unavoidable. Nobody is all the way on one end or all the way on the other. You’re always kind of in the middle of somebody.

0:21:59 – (Collin Hansen): But I think a lot of people to your point there, don’t understand the shift of what happened in the early 1960s to the late 1960s, because by the time he was assassinated, King had really gotten caught in a third way. A third way that turned out to be correct, but a third way that was very unpopular at the time. And that’s between an emerging black power movement and then the abandonment of the white liberal establishment of King, especially with his criticism of Vietnam, which led to the rupture with President Johnson. And again, King was correct. Not only that, but also his pushing for more aggressive anti poverty initiatives and the juxtaposition of that with the money that was being spent on this foolish war in Vietnam. So is there anything we can learn about that dynamic?

0:22:51 – (Collin Hansen): It did not go well for King, politically or otherwise. And tragically, he loses his life in 1968. But he was correct in retrospect. And as many people commented in the wake of his assassination, the comments were, white Americans lost their best friend because they don’t understand what the alternative is. Is there anything instructive in that episode, do you think?

0:23:17 – (Justin Giboney): There’s a whole lot. It’s almost like, where do you begin with that whole dynamic? Because it was a serious turn at that time. So you see, you have a number of things. I’ll try to get to a couple things. You have a number of things happening. King starts to talk about a poor people’s movement because he recognizes how people with economic power tend to play poor people against each other. Black, poor people, white, poor people. So even when you have the great migration, when African Americans start moving north, you even see in cities like Chicago, well, when the poor white people would go on strike, they invite the poor black people up to take those positions. This creates automatically this friction between the two.

0:24:01 – (Collin Hansen): This was the story in Birmingham as well in the early 20th century. Segregation. Using segregation as a way of keeping poor white and poor black from uniting in a movement.

0:24:13 – (Justin Giboney): And people start to realize this isn’t just a matter of race. These are class issues. And we need to start focusing on poor people in general and showing people what they actually have. In common. Neither side, if you want to say neither political party was really covering that. And this is why, when people say, well, just choose a side, Mike. There’s so many things that the parties are both getting wrong together or both getting wrong for different reasons that that makes no sense. It’s unimaginative.

0:24:42 – (Justin Giboney): It just leaves us. It’s a recipe to maintain the status quo. King starts to see that another dynamic that comes in is King is getting a lot of pressure from what become really black secular activism. Right. Which are the Kwame Tures, the Black Panthers, who are saying, no. All this turn the other cheek stuff, all this integration stuff. Absolutely not. They start pushing back against that. And so we see this shift, and it’s one of the things that we talked about earlier. Why didn’t we just take what the civil rights movement had and kind of build on it? Well, you see this turn towards movements that are really more, in some certain instances, belligerent.

0:25:26 – (Justin Giboney): And so we begin to see this change from the civil rights generation turning, you know, there being even within our own community a turn to a different focus. And that’s not to say the civil rights movement got everything right. But certainly the core ethic was a more productive ethic than a lot of the things that took over. And I also don’t want to talk about even the black. I understand why people wanted to be more militant.

0:25:57 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. A lot of frustration.

0:25:59 – (Justin Giboney): Yeah. I mean, when. I mean, you look at what happened to Fred Hampton, you look at what was happening in Chicago. Cause it wasn’t just happening in the South. You look at what was happening to African Americans in Chicago, places like that, it was terrible. I can talk in theory about what I would have done, but I understand the turn to more militant ways of going about it. Do I think it was more productive? No. But what I don’t want to do is sound like I’m just condemning it, like it just came out of nowhere. No. People were suffering, getting killed and being treated extremely poorly.

0:26:31 – (Justin Giboney): And you see something different come out of that, rise out of that.

0:26:35 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. I just think it’s so important, Justin, to talk about the difficulties in these situations, because it helps to normalize the situations that we face today. If you go back and you have a sanitized vision of King as the guy with the federal holiday, you just don’t understand why. How people regarded him when he died. Extremely unpopular, for the reasons that we laid out right there. Because there were all sorts of frustrations of, well, we’ve made progress, but why haven’t we made More progress. And then he again, his vision continues to expand, to see, wait a minute, all these things are linked together. The foreign wars, the economic situation, the poverty between poor and white.

0:27:20 – (Collin Hansen): Because Johnson had launched his war on poverty, primarily focused on Appalachia, primarily whites. But there’s limited funding. So, okay, don’t have enough money for Vietnam and Appalachia and the inner city, let alone the rural south, all these different places. And so when you understand the difficulties of what they faced from all sides, it helps you to understand, oh, well, my situation is not unusual and maybe even isn’t nearly as bad as their situation was. And I think that unlocks a little bit of the moral courage, which unlocks a little bit of the moral imagination to say, okay, if the Lord used these people, they were clearly not perfect people.

0:28:01 – (Collin Hansen): They were not necessarily popular. They didn’t have everything figured out. But then he can use me, recognizing my own flaws and sins and mistakes in their. One of the things that you wrote, you said, we apparently believe that the situation is so dire that we must be mean and dishonest to survive. Justin, I’d say that this is maybe the most painful lesson that I’ve learned in ministry. I was doing chapel at a college a number of years ago, and I implored these students, do not believe that you can lie in the service of the Lord.

0:28:43 – (Collin Hansen): And I’m sure this went over most of these young people’s heads. Why is this old guy talking to us about this? But it is so normal, I find, in ministry to people to offer what they believe to be. I mean, I think I’m assuming the best when I say that they’re righteous lies or people who are just pure charlatans are all over the place in ministry. But the question is not about them. It’s about us. How do we avoid succumbing to this same temptation ourselves when we get frustrated that we’re not making more progress?

0:29:17 – (Justin Giboney): Again, history helps us with that. Now, obviously, the scripture helps us with that. This moment is not the exception to Christian principles. And I hear so many people saying Trump is so bad or progressives are so bad that we. This is just a different moment. No, it’s not. And that’s another reason why this book is important. I’m not just talking, in theory that doing things the right way, doing things in a Christlike way is actually better and often more productive.

0:29:46 – (Justin Giboney): Right? More, you know, more effective. The civil rights movement is proof of concept. This. We have to get this through our heads. This is not the worst moment ever. This is not this is when Christian principles matter the most. Because if we don’t believe in unity in the church now, if we don’t believe that loving your neighbor is the right thing to do now, we never believed it. And people are watching us from outside the church, looking how we react.

0:30:13 – (Justin Giboney): And anytime we don’t get the person in office that we like, sure, we may think the person’s doing terrible things. That may all be true. You cannot react outside of Christian character because it shows that you never believed the standards that you were trying to hold other people to in the first place. It’s wrong. And I see even people from pulpits, you know, even when we look at, you know, the Charlie Kirk assassination and all this, going completely outside of the Sermon on the Mount, going completely outside of the primary things that Christians should be focused on in these moments when it matters the most to say no. This is why Christianity is different, because we don’t just react to the moments that you can shrug off differently.

0:30:57 – (Justin Giboney): We react to the major moments and the moments that shake us up differently. And I just see a lot of even Christian leaders refusing to do this, to do that. This is not the exception to Christian principles at all.

0:31:12 – (Collin Hansen): Relatedly, in the book, you talk about the tyrant impulse, which you describe as, quote, the urge not to win the debate, but to summarily end the debate through intimidation or force. You mentioned the Kirk assassination. Are you worried about an increase or resumption of politically motivated violence as we’ve seen in the past? I mean, it can go as bad as the 1860s or the 1960s. Do you worry about that at all?

0:31:35 – (Justin Giboney): Oh, yeah, I definitely worry about that. Because people have come to such a point of desperation. And even within. Let’s just talk about church people. People come to such a point of desperation. People lack that moral imagination that we’ve been talking about. When you lack that violence. I mean, when people talk about, okay, civility’s not gonna get it done. I’m tired of hearing this talk about civility.

0:31:58 – (Justin Giboney): What do you think the alternative is? The alternative to civility is violence. And most of the people who sit around and say that and preach it to others aren’t ready for that type of outcome. So you gotta be very careful what you’re telling people. This is not a game. You know, we can talk about just war theory and all that, but war is not what you. You don’t want people ending debates with violence. I don’t care if you agree with what somebody had to say or not. That’s not the way to End the debate. If the merits of the case are on your side, sit down, make the case and win the debate.

0:32:34 – (Justin Giboney): But when we’re told that there’s no honest brokers out there, nobody can be persuaded. You just don’t think it’s worth making. It’s always worth making. And that’s the difference between a king who was willing to do the hard work of. Of being artful while telling harsh truths and telling and being honest about what people are doing and what they should be doing. And then the person that just runs out there and gets pats on the back for throwing a public temper tantrum. That public temper tantrum which seems authentic today or passionate today, does nothing to help anybody.

0:33:07 – (Justin Giboney): It’s much easier to do that than to be artful and actually persuade someone who disagrees with you.

0:33:13 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, it’s performative. It’s not productive.

0:33:16 – (Justin Giboney): It’s performative. Exactly.

0:33:18 – (Collin Hansen): There are young people who are looking for a path forward. They’re being drawn towards some really bad alternatives that we’re mentioning here. But somebody looking up to you in ministry and activism, what is it that you would most want them to know? It might be something you’ve already said here, but they’re saying, justin, I want to be involved in this kind of activism. I want to change the world.

0:33:42 – (Collin Hansen): I’m hopeful about this. I’m optimistic about this. I’m pursuing Christ in this. What’s that bit of advice you’d give them?

0:33:50 – (Justin Giboney): My advice would be that whatever calls you take, whatever group you join or movement, you start to pursue that. Be willing to critique it. Be willing to critique yourself. You will not be able to persuade others or to get things done. You, if you’re not willing to be honest about what you get wrong and what do we talk about? That’s a hard thing to do because no tribe, no party, no ideology is going to easily allow you to critique.

0:34:20 – (Justin Giboney): Just doesn’t happen. I mean, and that’s why, you know, all this stuff about. We recently heard, you know, there’s people talking about, there’s nobody. We’re not going to go against anybody on our side. Well, that’s easy to do. That’s what gangs do. That’s what cults do. Right, right. You know, they say the other side gets every single thing wrong. And they’re all. If you believe that, you’re in danger of being in a very bad situation because you are, you are not a critical thinker.

0:34:47 – (Justin Giboney): And a Christian always has to be willing to think critically. We cannot be indoctrinated. So what I want People to know is anybody that says the other side gets every single thing wrong and historically has done so, wants to indoctrinate you and wants you not to think, because once they get you to agree with that, then you’re just going to rubber stamp everything they say, and they know that. So don’t ever believe that you should want to follow leaders that want you to think for yourself, that are open to being critiqued and seeing what’s right and wrong and how we can improve.

0:35:19 – (Justin Giboney): And one great example of that, historically, that I have to always bring up is people miss the fact that Frederick Douglass actually critiqued the abolitionist movement. Oh, yeah, this was someone who was once a slave. He goes and looks and says, no, what you’re doing wrong. And I’m not just gonna say that privately. I’m gonna say publicly that this way of going about it is wrong. If Frederick Douglass can do that, don’t you let anybody ever tell you that in this moment, this moment’s too crazy or this moment’s too critical for you to think through things and critique those around you.

0:35:57 – (Collin Hansen): Became a big point of contention between him and William Lloyd Garrison, didn’t it?

0:36:01 – (Justin Giboney): Yep. I mean, he didn’t want to get rid of the Constitution. He thought that was the mechanism to get it done. So he thought that morally and strategically, that was a bad way of going about it. And he said, so can you imagine that we have this grand objective that we agree on, and you’re willing to say, no? That’s not the way to go about it. We’re not together on that publicly. This wasn’t just a private conversation. He said it publicly. So that’s why when people come to me and say, well, how could you talk about progressives when Trump is so bad? Or how can you talk. How can you critique, you know, this side or that side when. When you know someone, the other side is so bad?

0:36:36 – (Justin Giboney): That’s not the way things work. Jesus. If we. If we want to remember his people were under an occupation and he still critiqued his own people and, you know, the religious establishment and all that, these are. This is what you have to do. If you love the truth and if you don’t, if you love your narrative more than that, then you don’t do it. Those are the options.

0:36:59 – (Collin Hansen): Is this what can save a political party from flipping over into that territory of, well, you have a couple different options, and some get some right and some get wrong, to flipping over into straight up. Oh, no, no, no, no. This is. This is unacceptable. I’m thinking here Whether it’s the Nazis, 1930s, 40s, communists, the Democrats in 1860, you know, is basically nothing but a pro sl. I mean there were divisions, I should say, but the Southern Democratic Party very much just. I mean slavery was the end all be all to everything in there is this. What prevents that from happening when there has to be that clean break? Or how do you prevent that from happening? Because it’s not like it’s rare in history where an entire political party, entire governing party can slip into just something absolutely horrible.

0:37:49 – (Justin Giboney): Yeah, that self examination and accountability for any movement is a must. I mean we can talk about all the movements that have broken our hearts and we’ve seen them fall and leaders that all these cover. That’s where coverups come from. Because we think what we’re doing at the end of the day is so good that we can just. We don’t need to really get into that. No, we do. Because when we don’t examine ourselves and hold ourselves accountable, we end up. We’re not good enough as people to have a pure movement or pure organization without that examination and without that honesty. It doesn’t mean that you need to. Every time somebody makes mistakes, you gotta tear them down as much as you can. But it means we have to be honest about where we can go wrong. No movement is good enough not to do that.

0:38:37 – (Collin Hansen): I love that about needing to be honest about where we can, where we can go wrong. I think Justin, working in politics has given me a different perspective on these things. Maybe it’s the same way for you. I mean, not everybody’s had that experience working in local or state or federal government. And you mentioned earlier the competing or alternating overreaches. And when you’ve been around politics for quite a while, you see that happen and you come to expect it. And so when people make statements about, oh, this is going to change everything, this is going to change everything forever.

0:39:26 – (Collin Hansen): And you realize usually the group that is in power, when that’s being said, is the one that’s in most political danger because that’s usually what precedes their overreach and their collapse. Also, it’s easier to keep opposition parties together than it is to keep governing parties together. Because you have to have a bigger coalition to govern. And then all of a sudden people are upset because things don’t change. It’s easier to be against something than it is to be for something.

0:39:56 – (Collin Hansen): Do you have any advice for Christians who are in either political party right now? I mean, this Democratic Party that appears to be in the political wilderness but the Republican Party has a president who is, just by the polling, deeply unpopular. At the point in which we’re recording this interview, that can change. But in a polarized country, that’s kind of become the norm of pretty unpopular presidents. So let’s just say the Democrats or the Republicans, they sit you down, they say, hey, we’re listening.

0:40:25 – (Collin Hansen): What advice do you give them?

0:40:26 – (Justin Giboney): I say, you have to listen to people. And when we talk about being in politics and learning, I think in a way, I learned the hard way. I was part of an administration here, and I think the administration did good work. But I remember I was talking to one of my mentors, and I told her, I said, man, why is this group going against us? Why don’t they just get out the way and let us do what we need to do?

0:40:47 – (Justin Giboney): And she got really mad, and she said, who do you think you are? You need these people. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re actually right on this one. You think that you’re just supposed to get out the way and let you do what you need to do, let you do whatever you want to do with the city, because you guys think you’re that right, you’re not that right. And that’s a message that we all need to learn.

0:41:12 – (Justin Giboney): Your opposition sometimes keeps you honest. And I would ask people, when’s the last time that you looked at somebody who disagreed with you and said, you’re right? And if you haven’t done that, you’re missing something. You’re either prideful or you’re blind to what you’re doing wrong. We need to hear those voices that are pushing back against us. Nobody. This is why nobody needs to have this type of absolute power.

0:41:41 – (Justin Giboney): But it is easy. As I found out that day, and I had to go back and really examine myself. I found out that day it’s easy to fall into that idea that just, we’re good, just let us do what we need to do. You’re stopping the good from happening when sometimes they’re saving you from yourself.

0:41:58 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, that’s really good. That’s really good. Sometimes I have to explain to people, especially because of my background in politics and some of my personal inclinations and weaknesses, I have to say, I don’t actually enjoy being right. What I love more than that is learning, because learning is what allows you to course correct and politics is a lot of you not being right about stuff that you can’t control.

0:42:33 – (Collin Hansen): You can come in with ideology, and everybody does. That’s fine. Certain assumptions about how things ought to work, certain moral convictions, about, hey, I’m going to stand with this, whether or not people like it or not. Those are good things in politics. But at the same time, you are going to be overwhelmed when you’re in charge of something, you are going to be overwhelmed with what you don’t know.

0:42:54 – (Collin Hansen): And if you have an attitude toward everybody that’s cynical, that you cannot learn from anybody, that is the surest guarantee that you will collapse, your political base will abandon you. And it seems as though we’re getting to a point where the leaders of our major political parties do not want to live in reality. And we’ve seen this. People want to pick on President Biden. It seems very clear in the reporting people were not telling him the truth, but what was happening, and I’m not sure that he wanted to know the truth.

0:43:29 – (Collin Hansen): I think we can see plenty of that in President Trump as well. But it seems this is a pretty easy way to go wrong in politics.

0:43:36 – (Justin Giboney): And I would say that it’s at the heart of what I see as being wrong with Christian nationalism. It’s this idea that let us take over, let us have this privilege to where what we say is right and our culture has been right for the longest. So let us control this, and we really don’t need the contributions of others. Now, if we look at that historically, why the rest of the country and why people outside of the Christian nationalist ideology would ever believe that, there’s no record of credibility to show people that that’s actually been the case and you led us in the right direction at all times, but that Christians can never. If you look at the Bible, there’s nothing to indicate that God’s people had all the answers or that they didn’t need other people’s contribution or that they could lean on their own wisdom.

0:44:28 – (Justin Giboney): Where did we get that from? It’s this pride that has completely whitewashed the whole history to make us believe that the only thing wrong with America is when progressives got in the way or those black activists got in the way. If they would have just let us do our thing, we would have been fine. Where does that come from? It’s so dangerous and unchristlike that, I mean, it’s something we really need to. I think people really need to push back against in a different way, because I think one of the problems that we’re having right now is a lot of the Christian nationalism is being pushed back by really identitarianism on the other side.

0:45:18 – (Justin Giboney): And so you have a. A poor response or reaction to something that is dangerous with something else that’s very dangerous. And so sometimes the folks pushing back against it don’t have a lot of credibility themselves.

0:45:30 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I think power is a shortcut when persuasion doesn’t work, or at least you perceive that it doesn’t work. Discipleship, evangelism, apologetics, persuasion, coalition building, all those things are very difficult. They’re not guaranteed to work. Power presents itself as a potential shortcut to that. And the shortcut to power comes through demagoguery, which has always been a problem. I mean, it’s unhinged. Plenty of democracies before or plenty of democratic efforts throughout history. It’s why people were so afraid of that.

0:46:08 – (Collin Hansen): The combination of demagoguery and populism. Now, we’ve described different ways in this interview where populism has been a good thing. Fred Shuttlesworth would be an example of somebody who was very much a champion of the people, the people against the powers, Powers, even in his own community, on multiple sides in there. So in and of itself, that’s not bad. But it’s the demagoguery. It’s not hinged to a certain principle or as we keep going back to a moral framework.

0:46:36 – (Collin Hansen): It’s simply whatever will work to be able to rile up the masses, which is a means of gaining control and ultimately of consolidating power. Funny how those populist movements don’t seem to result in major benefit to the people, but a consolidation of that power that benefits often the elites there as well. My read of history there not necessarily others, but that’s often the temptation there. So I think that’s the temptation that we see. And then the way to build that kind of political base is through various forms of identity politics these days.

0:47:13 – (Collin Hansen): And those are very concerning. Well, any last word you want to say? I don’t want to end it on that note necessarily, but. Any last words to add of advice, Justin?

0:47:24 – (Justin Giboney): No, this has been a great conversation. I just want people to know that when people imply that being civil and being charitable is not effective, ask them to show you a more effective effort than the civil rights movement, which did just that. We have been fooled into thinking, as I said before, that these public temper tantrums where we insult people, tell them how stupid they are, tell them how racist they are, or whatever actually is an effective way to get things done. It’s not, and I hope this book, don’t let nobody turn you around, shows us that going about it in a more Christlike way is number one, even if it wasn’t effective would be right, but it’s still more effective than the other way of going about it, which is just short sighted and may give us results immediately.

0:48:21 – (Justin Giboney): It’ll always fall apart or just turn us into monsters.

0:48:24 – (Collin Hansen): My guest, Justin Gibbony the book Don’t Let Nobody Turn youn How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us out of the Culture War SNU from ivp Justin, for many years has been one of my favorite people to interview. Really appreciate the time, man.

0:48:38 – (Justin Giboney): I appreciate what you’re doing, brother. Thanks for having me.

0:48:47 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and discussions. To sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review gospelbound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.