Faith, Power, and the Cost of Discipleship with Rev. Rob Schenck
Faith, power, and politics have become deeply intertwined in our culture, leaving many Christians asking hard questions:
Is this what following Jesus is meant to look like? And how do we stay faithful when the way of Jesus seems so different from the voices claiming to speak for him?
In this episode, Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen welcome Rev. Rob Schenck back to the podcast for an honest conversation about power, discipleship, and the state of American Christianity.
Together, they explore the difference between the way of Jesus and the pursuit of control, the cost of discipleship, and why humility, grief, and love matter more than ever.
If you’ve felt confused, discouraged, or unsettled by the intersection of faith and politics, we hope this conversation offers both perspective and hope as we consider what it means to follow Jesus in a complicated time.
About Our Guest
Rev. Rob Schenck is a minister, non-profit executive, author and speaker. He holds degrees in Bible and Theology, Religion, Christian Ministry, and Church and State. Schenck is the founding president of The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute in Washington, DC, an institution dedicated to applying the theological and ethical insights of this brilliant World War II-era Protestant church leader, Nazi resister, and moral philosopher to the social crises of our time. You can find his podcast at Schenck Talks Bonhoeffer.
Rob is, in his own words, a “recovering member of the religious right.” His memoir, Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love, is a 44-year odyssey taking him from his initial conversion from nominal Judaism to born again Christianity, to a second conversion from a simple faith to a highly politicized religion, and, ultimately, to a gospel marked by God’s expansive and permanent grace offered equally to all.
He and his wife, Cheryl, a psychotherapist in private practice, have two adult children and live in Washington, DC. You can follow him on Facebook @rob.schenk
Listen to our previous episode with Rev. Rob Schenk, “Rediscovering the Gospel,” here.
About the Allender Center Podcast:
For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.
At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
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Episode Transcript:
Dan: Rob Schenck, thank you. Already we’re just jumping in. It is so lovely to have you back and to invite you into the complexities of our day. And again, I confess before we began, I still attempting to understand our current and to use the word political, I don’t even think that’s the category. To understand our current realm of engaging American evangelicalism is really our topic. And as you may have heard from other podcasts that we’ve done with Rob, Rob was the chaplain to the Supreme Court for a period has been involved for a significant … Let’s just say a lot of your life, sir, was in the context of what could be called a more right-wing oriented engagement with the gospel and I don’t know what to then say, the gospel sort of. And in all that, the reality of inviting you back on, I think we’re just living in an era that feels more and more confusing. And I’m going to begin with our Secretary of Defense I will not use the word Secretary of War, Hegseth, recently prayed a prayer. And speaking of the prayer itself, if you’re not aware of that, all I would say is just take his name and a pulp fiction prayer. He literally prayed a prayer that came largely out of the movie Pulp Fiction where the assassin spoke that prayer before shooting somebody in the head. And our Secretary of Defense used that prayer and claimed it was biblical. I don’t know if I have any more room in me to be surprised by members of the current administration, but I really was taken back that did he write it? Did an aide write it? But did they not think that people would compare that to a prayer from a violent and in some ways degrading context of the violation of another human being in that language? So I can wonder, but let me just say you heard the prayer directly, maybe not in the room, but what did you do, sir?
Rob: Yeah, I did hear it in real time. I must say by the time I heard it, I had heard so much from the man you referenced, whom I will call the Secretary of War. And the reason I do is because I don’t think he’s in a defensive posture. I think he’s in a very aggressive, hostile, belligerent, intimidating, menacing posture. And I think he means to do that. It’s quite intentional. It’s scripted, if you will. And I still have contacts in the Pentagon. I used to visit there routinely. I had friends who were placed highly in the civilian ranks of the Pentagon. I didn’t know that many military personnel. A few I did and I did some Pentagon funerals during my day. And so I know the culture there and it was during my years, very much a defensive position to shield Americans from harm from threats. In this instance with this administration, it’s deliberately aggressive. They want to be the first to act, not the second. And we’re seeing it played out, of course, in Iran, but even before that in numerous instances, including by the way, what has now become invisible, which is our armed forces attacking civilian boats in the Caribbean.
Rachael: That’s right.
Rob: With some intelligence, but not 100% of anything. In fact, it’s far less than that. And we kill civilians. I call them summary executions on the waters. And so this has become a very violent shoot and ask questions later if you ever get around to it and unlikely any questions will ever be asked, at least by the perpetrators. So we’re in that time and listening to the Secretary of War deliver that prayer was very much in keeping with his scripted role in the administration. I think it’s antithetical to the prayer instruction that Jesus gave to us as he delivered it to his disciples and bequeathed it to us. Pray, when you pray, pray this, our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And Dan, you’ve probably handled this text with much greater finesse than I ever have and capacity, but I’ve preached it many times and stressed the point that it’s a model prayer. It’s a structure for prayer. It’s an instruction for prayer. In other words, all your prayers should have these elements in it. And to me, the most important one relevant to all this is we pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done here on earth in the Pentagon, on the waters of the Caribbean, in the Strait of Hormuz, wherever we might be discussing it. It’s not our will. And that prayer that you referenced from Pulp Fiction. We were joking before we started recording. Hard to joke about any of this, but you have to find some levity or we’d all collapse. But I suggested that maybe it came from the Book of Pulp Fiction, how you could pull this as a source of anything sacred. It’s profane by definition. The film is profane. The script for the film is profane and meant to be so without apology. It’s part of the force of that film is how profane it is. So this was a profane prayer and had nothing to do with God’s will. In fact, as the prayer is structured, it’s an imposition of human will dominating another by first terrorizing that person then taking their life the ultimate act of human domination over another. So to me, this is the antithesis of Jesus’ instruction for prayer and it really gets to the heart of the whole thing because I talk a lot about these days the Jesus hermeneutic, that if it doesn’t comport with the mission, the message and the model of Jesus, then it’s simply a wrong interpretation of the text. It’s flat out error. So if you ask the question, would Jesus pray or act according to this prayer delivered by the Secretary of War? I don’t think it takes a trained theologian to come to the conclusion that no, Jesus would likely not ever pray this prayer.
Dan: And therefore his disciples are not meant to pray this prayer. I don’t generally think of Tarantino as a very overt follower of Jesus, but in film intended to in some sense show the horror of vengeance without any bounds and in language that often is a reflection of a perversion of the understanding of violence in the context of divine justice. And we begin even with the notion that divine justice through the warp and the arc of biblical narrative is all moving toward the cross, not toward a particular group of people because all of the movement is to Jesus bearing something of the rage of the kingdoms that indeed have taken the position of we will be God. So in that larger realm of what we begin to have a comprehension of, it just puts us in so many binds. Rachael, I want to just turn to you and go, how are you in this era?
Rachael: Well, before I say that, I was thinking about Galatians or Colossians and the way that Paul talks about what is this mission of God? Because I grew up in a context that we watched in my teenage years, we’re in a basement of the youth room watching the Left Behind TV series anticipating these end times, feeling lots of pressure of who’s the enemy of God, trying to sort out all these things, what will this conflict in the Middle East be that will basically like somehow that conflict will usher in God’s plan and how in some ways the mission of God still seemed so small despite all this work of God from the beginning of the story to reconcile all things and to gather all things of God’s creation because God is the creator of heaven and earth and the universe. And I’m thinking about that because the Artemis crew just came back and just all their beautiful, humble wonder of like we’re on this floating rock in a vast universe. And if that doesn’t make you think about a creator God, but somehow in some of my formative context, this mission of God got so reduced to this very small remnant, despite all this salvific work of God throughout time, throughout a people, throughout a person that is Jesus and the cross and the resurrection and the ascension and the gift of the Holy Spirit somehow at the end of all things, only a few people are really going to be who God is gathering into this new heaven, this new earth and this new creation. So to me, what I feel in these days is actually if I can get out of my own defensive rage, which feels really protective or even like maybe some mockery that feels safe. If I can mock what I used to know as just how ridiculous it is, Dan, you’ve done enough story work with me to know I have this propensity to want to mock violence to make it feel less terrifying. I actually feel deep heartache that so many people have been deceived. We were talking beforehand that this is not new like possibilities of humanity. This is not a new propensity to want to turn toward cruelty and coercive power as a means of staying safe and holding on to power and control. I mean, it’s a very old story that has played out through every culture, every era. It just happens to be playing out in, I think, apocalyptic ways in our time because you can’t see someone reading that prayer and not feel like the profound revelation and unveiling of God being like, look at this absurdity, look at this absurdity. It’s kind of like the golden calf. This is so far from what I am asking you to care about and asking for your hearts to be turned toward, but to actually follow the Jesus mission, the message and model, well, Jesus didn’t call down the angel armies that he could have to decimate people to maintain his power. He gave it up to overcome the powers of this world. We want something so much more triumphant and I think it reveals we don’t actually believe God is who God says God is because that fear of death, that fear of losing cultural power, a place of imperial power just seems like I can’t give that up. Surely that’s where God is. And I know my own places where I’m like, yeah, power seems better than vulnerability than the questions of where is God in these places of profound heartache in our world of profound inequity. Is God really working to bring all things together in restoration to gather all things into himself because it feels really fragmented and it feels really scary. And so I have compassion there, but I do feel like at least in my reading of this cultural moment, the spirit is unveiling in a way that you’re going to have to choose who you serve and I understand that that’s hard and scary.
Dan: I’m curious, Rob, as Rachael says, this is a golden calf moment, as for me, I haven’t had that though and I’m like, it does feel that way. Moses departs. They’ve just come through incredible trauma, but also where there’s been redemption and the gold that they have in rightfully in some sense taken now gets formed into something that gives them focus capacity to in one sense see versus the unseen and the unknown. So I’m with you, Rachael. I’m curious, is that a thought you’ve had before or where does that take you?
Rob: Well, it immediately takes me to the fascination this administration has with gold. It shows up everywhere. The oval office is now festooned with it. The arch that is imagined that will dominate all structures in the nation’s capitol that Donald Trump has designed in his mind and the architects have now done renderings of is capped with gold. There’s a lot of gold in this present political season. So I think that that gold is itself instructive, tells us something. And we’ve seen it literally at some of the conventions. There’s an actual gold statue of the current chief executive and commander in chief of the Armed Forces. And there’s talk of a gold statue in the future presidential library, a towering gold statue. So as Rachael says, this is an old story that’s played out over and over again. I was listening to a panel discussion that long ago with a Mennonite Christian sister who also was a full member of an indigenous tribe. I wish I could remember which one, but in any case was an indigenous person and someone on the panel, these kinds of things were being discussed about the president administration, its policies and practices. And she was asked as an indigenous person, as a peace Christian, a member of the Mennonite Church, which is of course Anna Baptist and very much pacifist-
Rachael: Pacifist, yeah.
Rob: … oriented. She was asked, “So now that this is all happening, how does it hit you? ” And she said, “Well, actually it’s been hitting us for about 500 years now, so we’ve had time to think about it.”
Rachael: That’s right.
Rob: And it was so profound. I mean, we’re waking up to this because for the white privileged class, this is something new. For other persons it’s nothing new at all.
Rachael: That’s right.
Rob: It’s just the same as it’s always been. And that’s been helpful to me to keep in perspective, but it’s even more ancient than that. It’s not 400 years old, it’s 4,000 years old and older. And we can go back to that moment in time that’s recorded for us with that first golden calf and there have been so many since there of an incalculable number, but go back to that initial one and think about how instructive it is for us. We have that story for a reason and we continue to learn from it over and over and over again and it helps me to look at these outrageous horrors and realize that this is an opportunity for many people to learn something really important to see something because it’s so flagrant. In other instances, it’s veiled, it’s subtle, it escapes attention. This is just flagrant in flagrante in the extreme. So we learn from it and one of the things I’m learning, I think I mentioned the first time we sat down, and by the way, I’m quite honored, almost humbled that you didn’t weary of me and that you invited me back so soon I’m almost embarrassed. Thank you for that. I’m very honored and very grateful for that reception. I think I may have mentioned in our first conversation that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this young, brave, brilliant World War II hero church leader who began his work of resistance to this kind of monstrous human behavior in his 20s and was murdered at age 39, engaged to be married. So he was a very young man, brilliant. And his first published book that really captured very broad attention was The Cost of Discipleship. And there is a cost to being a disciple of disciplining oneself after Christ. It’s costly, it’s very hard. And as Paul reminds us, St. Paul, that is, the Apostolic figure, reminds us we can become weary with well-doing. It’s wearisome to follow Christ. As Bonhoeffer tells us, we read the Bible not in defense of ourselves, not to justify ourselves, but we read the Bible against ourselves, challenging ourselves. It’s a mirror. We look in the mirror and we behold what kind of person I really am. This is hard work. It’s painful. It’s difficult. It requires determination and discipline, thus the term disciple. It takes discipline to be a disciple and we get weary of that, it’s tiresome and some folks and myself included, if you ask me, “Are you a disciple?” I would have to respond by saying it depends upon what hour of the day it is.
Rachael: That’s right.
Rob: I ebb and flow. I move in and out. In one moment I am and in another, I am anything but a disciple. So we’re all like that. It’s a dynamic experience. It’s not static. And so all that to say a lot of folks are giving up on this weary way, this giving up on the cost that is exacted from us in the process of discipleship. And I think we’re seeing this played out dramatically on this political stage right now. We’ve seen it in other places before. Now it has an unusual amount of coercive power attendant to it that it has not had before. I mean, I saw it when I was in Minneapolis. I was there the day that a soul was killed by federal violence and Alex Pretti was gunned down by federal agents empowered to take his life in an instant because they didn’t like what he was doing. That was the sum total of it. I mean, there were plenty of eyewitnesses. We all watched video after video. We now have testimony under oath that these guys just didn’t like him. They didn’t like what he was doing. They did like what he was saying and they took his life to get rid of him, the bother of him. So we now have a force that attaches to this kind of anti-discipleship that has not existed before, at least not in modern times. So now we’re in a different dimension and there’s a different element to it, which is a very big deal, but I’m sure we’ll talk about all angles on that.
Dan: To me, there has been this shift from character as a calling that reveals the capacity to lead. And in that, a shift that the character now required is this intersection between crudity and cruelty. And again, I know we’re talking about the national and perhaps even larger international stage, but the reality is I see this far more in the reality of kind of my day-to-day life as I work with a lot of marriages and I have seen this almost empowering of a shut your mouth because you’re not being submissive. And maybe it will not say with that level of outright crudity, but it’s there the energy of we need to return to a day in which women don’t vote. We need to return to a day in which men are returning to the kind of power that they have somehow culturally been deprived, not even forsaken, but deprived of. So I’m watching marriages that I’ve been working with over the span of the last year and a half, two years that are becoming infused in a kind of political/psychological/idolatrous, where cruelty and crudity is seen as a return to righteous stance for a man. So when we begin to get critiques, by the way, and it’s not a big surprise of, why do you have to go political? I’m like, oh, we’re talking political. We’re talking personal. We’re talking relational. We’re talking interpersonal, let alone intrapersonal. As you understand this interplay of crudity and cruelty, what have you seen to help us, help me, help me understand better what’s going on?
Rob: Yeah, I keep going back to the metaphorical called roads, that broad road that leads to destruction that Jesus spoke about and the narrow road that leads to life. And Jesus said they were different from each other. One was broad and easy and many, many people traveled it. The other was narrow and arduous and few are those who find it, fewer those who even by implication go looking for it. And once on it, again, it’s not an easy road, it’s that road of discipleship. And so I’ve had to come to peace with the fact that I’ll always be kind of trying to keep with the remnant, the small group, the oddballs and that’s not easy either because it can be lonely. You can start feeling like as the current political language has it, I’m with the losers. There are all these big winners. It’s out there. Everything’s big for them. It’s big money, big audiences, it’s big power, big influence. You’re bigger than anybody else in the room. Bigger the better as we have it. So what’s this small thing and narrow and hard and difficult and why? But that’s the path. And so I think about this, Rachael, I think you said early on in this conversation that in some way these things are easier, they’re natural. I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth. I think you said something about that. And I do think first of all, it’s always easier to go with the crowd. So you kind of get lost in the crowd and you’re a little more comfortable and you feel a little more secure and stronger because you’re part of something bigger. When you’re with a smaller group, survival is a question, vulnerability, exposure, all of it that can be threatening. So this isn’t easy and it’s nothing to brag about either. Nothing at all to say, oh, I’m part of the remnant. I’m part of this exclusive little group. There’s no room for that either. I do think it begs asking what should be the characteristics of this group that travels this narrow path, this hard way. We have descriptors. Jesus himself says, they will know that you are my disciples, that you have disciplined yourself after me if you have love one for another. So love is huge. Love is a giant character trait there that we seek to emulate and never easy, not easy to love. These days I do a lot of weddings for lots of reasons, but one of them is just I find it such joyful work. So I do about 30 weddings a year as a civilian chaplain and I just enjoy it immensely. My wife, Cheryl, will say, “Why? You must have a wedding today.” And I say, “Yeah, what makes you say that? ” She said, “Because you’re smiling the whole morning.” And I do. I smile. I just can’t wait to get in there and relive this miracle of two lives fusing and bonding in this unique way. And I just love it. And people will say to me, “You’ve been married 49 years. Wow, how did you keep it going that long?” These couples will ask me in one form or another. And I say, “Well, it hasn’t been easy. And I can tell you I’ve fallen out of love as much as I’ve fallen in love, but these days I’m falling for Cheryl harder than I ever have in this season of life.” And all of that, just to say these things are love is this dynamic energy that has its origins in God in almost every wedding ceremony I do. I invoke that passage from 1 John 4, God is love. It’s as profound and simple as that. The very nature of God is love. So I’ve been asked by atheist couples, as a minister, can you marry us? I tell atheists, of course I can preside at your marriage. Of course I can solemnize your marriage vows because the very nature of this thing comes from something divine in my estimation. I’m not preaching that to you. I’m just saying I understand it as having its anchor in the divine, in the creator, in God. So to me, all marriage is sacred in that sense. So I guess I just changed the subject. Didn’t mean to do that. I’ll go back to love as being a central quality of the disciple and love is not an easy thing as anyone who is married can tell you, of course. Anyone who has ever loved, anyone who has ever been loved will tell you this is no easy thing, no easy task to love. So there’s that. But then Paul goes on to say what characterizes these travelers, peace, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, self-discipline or self-control. And then there’s others that just keep going on and on and on. And we have to measure that and say, okay, is this model that up on the national power platform of the now, some call it Christian nationalism or Christian nationalist religion. Does it bear those traits, those characteristics, those marks of character? Is it profoundly loving? Is it joyful, patient, kind, good, self-controlled? Or is it something else? And I think the answers are becoming quite obvious. And I have to just tell you this little aside, if I may keep rambling, I apologize. But weirdly, I just bought and read the Satanic Bible written by Anton Leves, the high priest of the Church of Satan Incorporated based in San Francisco, no kidding. It’s by the way, the Church of Satan Incorporated, which is very important, but anyway, it’s incorporated. And when you read it, it’s the diametric opposite of the gospel of the attitudes right down to if someone strikes you on the right cheek, haul off and bash him in the left. As I read it, I’m reading the manifesto of this new movement that reports to be the gospel, but is in fact the anti-gospel.
Rachael: Well, you’re saying that, and I think just thinking a lot about lament and the kindness of God leading to repentance because I think when you were putting words to the indigenous Mennonite pastor, reverend, it’s so easy for me as a middle-class white woman, former evangelical, probably still tangentially evangelical to look right now and be like, “Oh, gross them, that’s not my Christianity.” And yet, Dan, when I hear you putting words to really this return of something around misogyny and hyper-patriarchy, and we also see this rolling back of civil rights and this sense of like, “No, no, no, no. These privileges are only for white people. I actually have to see my place in the story as someone so much closer to what we’re seeing play out. And that’s why I think it really is apocalyptic in the sense that it has been in the water. It just hasn’t been this shameless, this exposed, this clear, this unapologetic. And I think there’s a genuine invitation toward profound lament that this has been in the water of a lot of Western Christianity in the mix of it, not the only thing, not the only thing that we take in. My friend Vanessa always says, these are malformed aspects of Western, especially white Western evangelical Christianity or even Catholic Christianity when you think about colonialism and the doctrine of discovery and different things. And so I guess I’m owning my own sense of like, oh, discipleship. Yeah, it could be so easy because I have been a little bit down a road of discipleship of repenting of unlearning and learning to be want to pile on. And I do think there’s a need to name clearly what’s happening and to see it. But mostly what my heart feels is a deep lament that this has been a part of something I was shaped by and even though I find it grotesque in its shamelessness and its book of Pulp Fiction-ness, it’s familiar. There’s a familiarity to it. It doesn’t feel unfamiliar if I’m honest. And so I think love, I was thinking about what you said about love and that there is also this sense in the gospels and in some of the New Testament letters and epistles of therefore whatever prohibits your capacity to love, even if on its face value, it’s not necessarily evil on its own, but if it is impeding your capacity to love and embody these fruits of the spirit, it is actually like anti-Christ, anti-gospel of this world in a way that is not for your good and it’s not part of the kingdom of God and not for flourishing. And my experience of God has been a kind of like step into the life. This doesn’t have to be the end of your story. And there’s profound lament that comes with that kind of awakening to things we’ve taken in as a part of God’s kingdom that get revealed to not be part of God’s kingdom and that relinquishing and that repentance, that move to turning away. So that’s just where my heart went when you were talking about love and yes, how hard discipleship is.
Dan: What I’d underscore from both of what you have each said is that there is a stance of engaging. I am a gold-hoarding idolater in certain realms when one of my grandchildren picked up what I considered to be, part of my idolatry, a book and threw it. I flipped out and Becky looked at me immediately and she goes, oh, don’t go there. I mean, thankfully it was enough to be able to go, if you rip that book up, I’m going to be just fine. I prefer you don’t. So to go from the cataclysmic to the bizarre to the reality that again, I don’t think we have a whole lot of capacity in our day to, shall we say, change large currents and structures other than to keep saying, how do we come to our own realm of engaging? How am I becoming more crude? How am I becoming more cruel? And even if I critique it, is there in me another stance of crudeity and cruelty as I deal with someone who I would view as my enemy and then I’m like ooh.
Rob: And there’s that love thing again.
Dan: Yeah, there’s that love thing. What does it mean?
Rob: Love your enemy. Uh-oh.
Dan: Well, where we are feels like at the moment, and I hope it’s true that I painted myself into the corner or better said, thank you, Rob, for the paint and painting me in the corner of, look, these are not going to be resolved quickly, but to be able to read of this and not just defend it because it’s indefensible, but on the other hand, not just rage against it, but I do love your word, Rachael. And that is, may there be more space in me to love, which will show itself by more grief, but also for honor to address I am a calf-builder in many ways and may I wait for Moses. May I wait for the 10 commandments to come?
Rob: And I’m often asked how I can stand remaining in Washington DC and interacting with these folks, especially now. And my answer is often very simple because I am so much like them. I recognize myself in them.
Dan: We say, Rob again, thank you.
Rob: Thank you. Thank you.