Confronting Christian Nationalism – Part 1 with Rev. Dr. David Rice

Christian nationalism is a growing issue in the U.S., raising important questions about the relationship between faith and politics. 

How does our faith shape the way we engage with political issues? And are our political allegiances influencing our faith in ways we may not realize?

While we’re certainly not a news or political network, this is a timely and necessary conversation. Power—both religious and political—can be used to bring about justice and healing, but it can also be wielded in ways that cause harm and are profoundly abusive, especially when done in God’s name.

In the first episode of a two-part conversation, we’re joined by Rev. Dr. David Rice, an alumnus of The Seattle School and Digital Strategist for BJC, where he leads online engagement and the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. 

David begins by sharing his personal story—how his upbringing, ministry experiences, and cultural influences shaped his understanding of faith and politics. He also speaks to the challenges pastors and faith leaders face when addressing national issues from the pulpit, often being accused of being “too political.”

We invite you to come back next week for part two of this conversation as David, Dan, and Rachael dive deeper—defining Christian nationalism, exploring our collective longing for control, and considering how we can engage with our communities in meaningful ways.

About Our Guest:

Rev. Dr. David Rice is BJC’s digital strategist, leading online engagement for the organization and its Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign.

BJC is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that brings people together to tackle today’s serious threats to religious liberty, including the targeting of religious minorities, the rise of Christian nationalism, and the politicization of houses of worship.

Ordained in the American Baptist Churches USA, Rice joined BJC’s staff in 2024 after previously serving in rural parish ministry and starting his own communications consulting firm.

Rice earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in missiology and organizational leadership from Western Theological Seminary and a Master of Divinity degree from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. His undergraduate degree is from Huntington University, where he studied youth ministry and Bible.

Rice, who has lived on the West Coast and in the UK, now lives in Michigan with his family. He enjoys cycling, gardening, cross-country skiing, sourdough bread baking, traveling, and Arsenal football.

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Well, Dan, we have entered the waters of our conversation today, often in some of our conversations around spiritual abuse, around what it means to be faithful Christians at such a time as this. But today we’re going to talk a little bit more explicitly about Christian nationalism and to do so, we’re very fortunate to have one of my friends, and I would say former colleague in the sense that we graduated from the Seattle School together in the MDiv program. David Rice is here to join us. So welcome, David.

David: Hey, Rachael. Hey, Dan. Thanks for inviting me on.

Dan: Well, and your credentials are amazing. So Rachael, you need to just sort of give this man his proper due.

Rachael: Yeah, well, David is a reverend Doctor, as I mentioned. He is a graduate of the Seattle School. He’s a pastor and currently serves as the digital strategist for Christians Against Christian Nationalism. He oversees their social media accounts and growing Facebook community. But what I want to mostly say is my experience of David, not just in school, but over the years as we’ve had a few touch points, is that he’s an incredibly wise, kind and humble person, and he’s been courageous and faithful in ways that I know have been incredibly costly at such a time as this. And so I actually deeply trust him to join us in this conversation, and I look forward to you getting to hear more from him. He lives with his family in Michigan. We’re just so grateful, David, that you said yes to joining us in this conversation.

David: Yeah, happy to be here. Anything to disassociate from the winter in Michigan? I’m all there, so thanks.

Rachael: Absolutely. I’m feeling that a little, I mean, we don’t get as cold as you in Philly, but we’re in a little bit of a cold freeze and we saw snow and ice on the ground, so it’s…

David: You understand.

Dan: Yeah.

Rachael: I just want to stay inside and be warm.

Dan: Well, it’s 74 balmy and sunny right now in Seattle.

Rachael: Seven… Are you kidding me? That’s troubling.

Dan: No, I’m lying. Absolutely.

Rachael: I was like, what?

David: It’s a good segue into propaganda, Dan.

Dan: Thank you, David. Because I was about to say that distortion of truth because there were days that it was 74 and balmy in Seattle, not currently, but the fact that I could say it is, it’s a lie, yet it has been. And therefore there’s a degree to which all propaganda has a certain truth that gets distorted, but always for very nefarious reasons. So as we enter into this discussion of hard, hard matters really that matter, not only to our country, but to individuals, families, this has been and will continue to be Christian nationalism, a deeply divisive, divisive, depending on how you pronounce that word issue. And also one that opens the door to having to do the hard work of coming back to the question of what’s the gospel. So we’d love for you to take us into what has been your experience and what brings you to this conversation.

David: Yeah, well, thanks, Dan. Yeah, so I grew up here in the Midwest. I was born in Texas, but my family moved around a bit when I was nine we finally landed in the Midwest in Michigan, and I would say I grew up in a conservative, evangelical, church-world, which as a kid frankly, was a really great way to grow up for me. I grew up in a small town, actually just outside of Hillsdale, Michigan. I have loved ones who are graduates of Hillsdale College, so that’s a bit of the universe I grew up in. I grew up Christian schools. My folks were in Christian camping and retreat ministry. And so as a kid, I got to live at these wonderful Christian retreat center conference center properties and ride my bike and be with my friends all day long. And it was a really great way to grow up. When I was 17, though I was a senior in high school, I started to ask questions. And something that I’ve known since then is that communities often in evangelical and the more conservative spaces, don’t like a lot of questions being asked. It’s not always the case, but that was my experience, and I’ve known that’s been the experience of others. I started to ask questions around why weren’t more of my peers who were not Christian attracted or interested at all in our local church community? Why didn’t the way in which they were potentially being invited into following Jesus through the local Young Life ministry, yet I’m not calling themselves Christian yet, why wasn’t that shared with the local church that I grew up in, where I felt loved and nurtured? Could we make room for my peers? And the answer, no one ever said no. You know what I mean? But in effect, what I picked up on was that’s not really what we do. And so I developed a big heart for my peers who were not raised in the church and weren’t raised in Christian homes, but were curious about Jesus. And so that really drove me to do the things I did in college and graduate school, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, happy to say more about any of those things, but that was kind of the beginning of this journey for me. And then, go ahead, Rachael.

Rachael: Oh, I was just going to say, you and I have talked about this. I had a very similar upbringing, not as, I was more in public schools and my parents didn’t have vocations outside of ministry outside the church. But one of the things you and I have talked about, and I don’t want to keep going where you were going, is just that sense that politics and faith being entwined was very normative in that upbringing. It was kind of like Christians are a certain… the Republican and there’re a certain kind of Republican, and these are the very particular things we care about. And this nation is a God’s nation. And so there just was, I mean… It was not abnormal to pledge allegiance to the United States flag and pledge allegiance to the Christian flag in the same setting and to have both flags in the room. So again, just a very normative experience for those things. That’s just part of how we were socialized as young people.

David: Yeah, that’s right. And in my family of origin, my family experience was a little different than the Christian school that my family sent myself and my siblings to. That school, which again, I was loved and nurtured and had a really good experience all the way through high school graduation, I would say was more fundamentalist in their interpretation of the way in which not only faith played out in the world, in the lives of individuals and communities, but how it interacted with politics. So yeah, I mean, there was no question that there was one political party for whom Christians could belong. There wasn’t another option. And we never asked questions of things like that. I didn’t grow up calling myself a Republican, but I grew up knowing that there was only one way to engage in politics in the United States of America for faithful, “faithful” Christians. And so that’s what was sort of embedded in my imagination as a kid and even as a teenager. So I mean, for instance, the school I grew up in, we would host an annual patriotic day where we were heavy arts school. So I was in band and choir and handbell choir growing up all through high school. Lovely. We would do a spring concert of all classical patriotic music, and we would invite every elected official from our local county officials all the way up to the VP and the president of the United States to come to our concert. And so obviously national officials never did, but sometimes state level officials in Michigan did. And it was a strange time. This was the nineties during the Clinton administration. So I think if Clinton would’ve accepted the invitation, I think there would’ve been severe ambivalence in the community in which I grew up. But the invitation, there was always a very big show made of the invitation still being extended. We would still invite our enemies to come to our annual concert, I think is one way I would put it these days, because that’s what Christians do. We care for and love our enemies, and we invite them to our social gatherings. So that’s the environment I grew up in. And I think even in my college years, that was, none of that was really challenged a whole lot for me until the 20, what was it, the ’04 presidential election the year leading up to that election. So really before it got going, the college I went to hosted a debate between a prominent figure that I would say was associated with the religious right during the ’80’s and ’90’s, and the then current president of Sojourners, Jim Wallis. And so they debated as Christians in a conservative evangelical university community what it meant to be engaged in politics. And I think for me, along with taking political science and sociology classes along with studying theology and courses for ministry, really opened my eyes to begin to see like, oh, there are Christians who approach our political work differently, and they’re still faithful orthodox Christians. That had never really been presented to me, I think, in a way in which I could understand until I think at the time I was probably 21 years old. So that opened a whole new world for me to just imagine that Christians could engage in the political order from a variety of perspectives. And so that was fascinating to me.

Dan: I would love for you to put words to what you experienced in that and what it began to, shall we say echo within your own heart?

David: Yeah. I mean, one specific instance was the debate turned on the budgeting process in the US Congress. And I don’t remember the name of the figure on the religious right, but I do know that one of my good college friends was the liaison from the university that picked him up from the airport and drove him to campus. So I had some inside intel on who this guy was even before that evening. And my dear friend was not impressed with this person as a human being in any way, shape or form, and let his friends know that. So perhaps I went into that evening bias, but what I heard Wallis say, the religious rights individual was kind of using the typical talking points that all of us would’ve known coming from those systems and communities. What I heard Wallis saying was that budgets are moral documents and they reflect our morality, and even more so our faith in a budgetary sense. And so do we use our budget as the United States government to say care for the poor and the least of these, do we help people who are in need and cannot help themselves? Do we pursue things like violence or, I’m sorry, peace and diplomacy rather than violence, that a budget tells us quite a bit about who we are and what we value. And that was a new idea for me. No one had ever spoken like that as a Christian, a person of faith in the circles that I had been in up until that point.

Dan: Well, and certainly Jim’s work has underscored along with many others that scripture addresses the issue of poverty and the misuse of power, and particularly the use of money and power to do harm to, in one sense, those who don’t have. And so the reality of sexuality, yes, gets addressed, but way more the matter of power and the intersection with power brokers that is the priesthood, the prophetic word as to exposing all that. So obviously that was a radical move for you, but already moving you in a direction to at least question some of the fundamentals that you had been brought up with. And again, back to that question, how were you metabolizing those two worlds working within you?

David: Yeah, I would say very slowly. So this was a multi-year process for me through my twenties and into my thirties when it came time… so I worked in churches and in public school system in Fort Wayne, Indiana after I finished undergrad. So I was exposed because of where the neighborhood that my newly wedded wife and I could afford to live in, plus where her work was, which was in a very impoverished government subsidized neighborhood. Because of all those things, I got to see the kind of intersection of the white, wealthy suburban church. And I worked at one after undergrad, we would drive out to the suburbs for me to lead worship in a large mega church and where youth ministry and young adult ministry and do some teaching and preaching. But then every day we lived in an impoverished neighborhood in the middle of the city. So I saw the intersection of how all these things, power and privilege and money played out in our neighborhood, and particularly with the kids and families that my wife Wendy worked with, and she helped direct a preschool and a federally subsidized housing development. The primary way we would see our people, our white suburban evangelical folks from our church come into that neighborhood was on mission trips or cleanup days. And it just struck me as very, very strange that there was no involvement other than let’s get these people to pick up garbage in the neighborhood once a year. And the disconnect that I sensed between the impoverished families that we got to know and these children that my wife worked with every day and loved, and the really wonderful high school teenagers that I worked with in ministry out in the suburbs, the disconnect between the two is just very palpable. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t have any solutions. I could just tell it was sort of an emotional and intellectual reaction for me. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew something was wrong. And so that led me to graduate school at the Seattle School at the time, Mars Hill Graduate School. And yeah, that’s how I ended up in Seattle.

Rachael: Well, and David, one of the things you and I have talked about is, and I hear you putting words to this, you started to, there was a shift happening in you. There was a growing dissonance in what you knew and what you were discovering, and you were changing, or the movement was changing that you knew and you weren’t changing with it. However you want to put words to that. There was a dissonance, there was a growing dissonance. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit more, whether it’s what you were noticing in that dissonance, what in some ways you were leaving so to speak, or letting go of or unlearning or however you want to talk about it. What were some of those realities?

David: Yeah, it’s a great way to frame it, Rachael. I mean, I remember preaching a sermon in the young adult ministry, which was a sizable ministry in the suburban mega church, which are dear people that I loved and loved at the time and learned a lot from. And I remember, I don’t remember everything I said in that sermon because it was 20 years ago, but one thing I remember, I was talking about poverty around the world in different ways and the relative nature of the amount of folks at the time that lived on less than $1 a day, which was at the time a sizable portion of the global population. And that upset a group of young adults in that ministry that I would even bring this up. And they asked, they confronted me after the sermon, which was a new experience for me. And then we met at Panera later on this week so they could tell me how wrong I was to even consider that, as a Christian in the world, in a wealthy democracy. One man in particular in that group, who was probably about my age, early twenties, who had developed a very successful real estate career at a very young age and had grown up in Eastern Europe as a missionary kid, was just deeply offended that I would even bring up this concept that perhaps we as American Christians are maybe a little on the side of greedy, that perhaps that’s something we should consider how we use our money and our power and how it affects people around the world. That seemed to, he seemed to have a dramatically outsized response to me bringing that up. As a Christian pastor, I didn’t have any tools or training to know how to handle that well. So I remember listening a lot, trying to engage in some dialogue, but it began to show me that just because I was experiencing some sort of internal transformation on my perspective as a Christian person in these communities, it doesn’t mean that transformation would easily translate to others in the communities. And I think I learned that in ways that were really painful over time. Simply because something was impacting me from my perspective in a really positive way, doesn’t mean I could then bring that to the community and they would react the same way. I think for many folks, it was just threatening. It was threatening, it was different. They were not primed to receive new ideas and messages that were outside of the mainstream white evangelical subculture. And so that set me on a trajectory to wonder where could I be at home? How do I nurture myself as a pastor and a person? How do I develop the tools to be able to work with people wherever, whether it’s in evangelical subculture in North America or elsewhere, to do this work that I feel more and more drawn to rather than sort of acquiesce or ignore what’s happening inside of me when people push back and when people are triggered or get upset from being confronted perhaps by our very American understanding of what it means to be a Christian.

Rachael: If you don’t want to go here, we don’t have to, but this got actually real personal for you in your pastoral role within a faith community that’s very beloved to you. And this is skipping ahead, probably a decade of pastoral work, and I wonder if you’d want to share a little bit about that experience, and in some ways as we talk about Christian nationalism, what became even more clarified for you?

David: Yeah, that’s great. Happy to talk about it. Yeah. So in 2012, we left our beloved Pacific Northwest, come back to the Midwest. We had two little boys by then. Were both born in Seattle. I always say Seattle is a cultural bubble, and it still is my preferred cultural bubble. I feel very connected to it and really love it, and was nurtured there in significant ways, both as a person and vocational. So in 2012, we came back to Michigan primarily to be closer to family. My wife’s family was all in Michigan still. In 2014, I accepted an invitation to become a pastor of a 119-year-old church, a lovely community in a rural area. I call it a rural resort area. So rural, not in the sense of a lot of Midwest, it’s not farmland, it’s lakes and rivers and woods. So there aren’t really cornfields where I live. I still live in this community. It’s a lot of woods and lakes and rivers, and it’s beautiful. It’s actually a community where my wife’s family has been connected to for generations where they’ve had cottages, and now my in-laws live here because there’s these large lakes where we live that people love to use as a summer playground, folks from the city. Historically, there’s a lot of connection here with the big three auto manufacturers in Detroit, When the unions were powerful and strong in the middle of the 20th century, one could work a union auto job, live in metro Detroit, and also afford to have a small home in northern Michigan. So in Michigan, we say where I live, we call it up north. So I live up north. If you’re in the Midwest, up north is basically anything north of Lansing, more or less. So yeah, so I live up north. It’s about a two hour straight shot down the highway to Lansing from where I’m down 127. But yeah, this church community had a pastor who was retiring. I was 32 at the time when I started. I think that’s right. The pastor who was retiring had been at the church longer than had been alive. He had been there 33 years. So I made sure I reminded that of him regularly. So he was retiring and on his way out, I had never been a senior pastor before. I’d worked at some churches doing youth ministry doing… After we left Seattle I did a little bit of work in a larger church with discipleship and adult ministry, but I’d never been “in charge” of a church that I was confident in my abilities. Right. I’m a Seattle School graduate of the famed MDiv program, rest in peace. And yeah, I was both humbled by the invitation, but also confident that there were really good things I could do in and with this community as their pastor. So I started and I fumbled through it and didn’t know what I was doing. It was a community. Our county has 25,000 residents year round. It’s one of the highest poverty counties in the state of Michigan. So there’s a lot of wealth on the lakes and a lot of poverty off the lakes. And this is the kind of poverty that doesn’t get a lot of attention, it has in recent years a bit more, it’s white rural poverty. Which just, at least in the circles that I’ve been in over my life, doesn’t get as much attention as other types of poverty in the US in my experience. So this church was made up of all kinds of people. We were one of the churches in the area that if you hadn’t been welcomed, say in another church, you could find a safe haven in our church. That was just sort of the reputation, well, before I got there that, so we were very diverse theologically and politically. It was an interesting mixture of all types of people, various perspectives on any controversial topic that you can think of. And we were a Baptist, we are a Baptist community, and we really held those Baptist ideals closely of soul freedom, the priesthood of all believers, and that made room for folks to believe different things about consequential issues and still stay unified as God’s people. So that’s how I pastored and led in that community. The other thing though, was that following a retiring pastor for so long, who was such a known entity in the community, I had really big shoes to fill, and nobody can fill those shoes. It took me a number of years to figure that out. But yeah, there was a large disconnect between what the church, by and large, what they said they wanted from the next pastor and what they actually wanted. So that took me a number of years to figure out as well. So it was a lot of wrestling with my own identity as a person and a pastor, very different from the retiring pastor, my personality, my skills, my gifts. So yeah, I kind of fumbled my way through it. Learned a lot. I remember preaching a sermon once where I forgot to use the scripture that I had chosen for the sermon, and someone left the church over that, which I mean, I might’ve done the same. I probably not, but I got it, right? I felt really badly. So I was learning how to preach. I was learning how to write sermons. I was learning how to lead in a community that was largely a blue-collar community, which are my roots, but not what I had been in for a number of years as an adult, trying to figure out when folks, and this certainly wasn’t everyone in my church, but when folks don’t regularly read books on theology, which is something I had grown to love, how do you disciple them? How do you invite them to follow Jesus when works of theology that are dear to me are not something that they’re going to pick up and read. So that was challenging. There were all kinds of systems dynamics at play with a single pastoral leader for three and a half decades that I say I had to learn to unwind, name them, present them to folks in the congregation, and then try to unwind and move through so that we could get somewhere different. The church when I arrived had been declining in every measurable metric for about 15 years. And so I was invited to turn that around, which in hindsight was probably not the best invitation for me, but out of my own ambition and belief in myself, I thought I could do that with God’s help. That’s sort of how I felt about myself. It didn’t work out how I had hoped. So we did a lot of good work. I’m really proud of a lot of the pastoral work that I did with people there, how I learned a lot about myself and grew a lot. But 2014, when I arrived within months, the 2016 presidential election primaries were underway. So most of my pastoral tenure from 2014 to 2022 was really in the mix of everything happening politically with Christians in American society during the last decade.

Dan: Well, I dunno how to ask it. What did you discover?

David: What did I discover? Well, I discovered that for many folks in our congregation, what it meant to be an American and what it meant to be a Christian, were the same thing. And I’ll say our, because I’m sure this bleeds into my own life too. Our identity as Christian people, as Jesus followers is so intertwined with our identity as Americans that it’s really difficult to disentangle the two. And I think of it a bit like surgery. Even when I began to name some of these things for most people in our congregation, not all but most, it was so foreign and so strange that I think they didn’t even think this was an issue. That was the impression I got from a lot of folks somewhere between bewilderment and anger is really what I received as I began to name these things. And the impossible position of a local pastor in America today is that there are 17 bombs going off at once, culturally speaking, and you have to determine which ones do I say something publicly about and which ones do I not say something publicly about? And no matter what you do, you alienate some group of people in a politically mixed church. And so that’s the impossible task of an American pastor right now.

Dan: Well, could you give an example? If we’re sitting in a lovely coffee shop, your version of it in that rural setting, and I say to you, well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, David. What do you mean as a Christian? What do you mean my Americanism?

David: No, it’s a great question. Let’s make it really concrete. Lots of different directions here. One would be with a simple one in the wake of what happened in Charlottesville with Unite the Right protested and all the chaos ensued. I believe that was 2017. That was one instance. I think that happened on a Friday or Saturday. The next day, Sunday I didn’t change my sermon, but I included in our order of worship a time for me as the pastor to directly address that what we saw in Charlottesville has nothing to do with Christianity. I mean, now on the other side of January, 2021, January 6th, why happened in Charlottesville feels tame to a certain extent, obviously it wasn’t, and I didn’t live there. So I have a friend who was a pastor in Charlottesville at the time, and he experienced significant levels of trauma. I would say, being a pastor in Charlottesville during that season. I just saw it on the news, but what I said publicly was this, I named what racism is. I said, this has nothing to do with faithfully following Jesus. This is a cultural construction, and it is a construction that has to do with power and othering people who are different than the folks that are dominantly in power. It’s been used for generations and various societies, including ours. But what I also did is I named my own experience of being racist as a young adult teaching in an urban school district as a 22-year-old conservative evangelical, and having feelings of why are these children high school students who come from a different place than me who look differently than I do culturally are very different. Why are they so disruptive in the classroom? And so I told my own story of having to begin to take a closer look at my own tendency to be racist in those specific spheres and to say, all of us are here in some way, shape, or form. These are the cards we’ve been dealt. But what it means to be Christian is that we’re honest about it. We begin to repent of it. We work to repair it, and we work to follow Jesus through it all.

Rachael: That’s right.

David: It’s easy for us. I’m speaking for me in the community. Whereas a pastor, it’s easy for us in a 99.9% Caucasian blue collar community to separate ourselves from all of these conversations. They are just things that happen on the news. And yet there are ways in which we are complicit in the system. We are not the primary actors, but we do play a role. And so what it means to follow Jesus is that we’re honest about that and we do what we can to repent and to repair. So that’s what happened in Charlottesville. As with many things in my congregation over eight years, the response was mixed. Some folks, I remember a gentleman came up after church, shook my hand, thanked me for saying what I said, thanked me for repenting of my own racist tendencies from especially young adulthood. I would say that was a positive response. I don’t recall getting any nasty emails from there, but I do know that that stirred up a conversation in our community around the pastor getting political. And so that was sort of a theme that led in the coming years to other events that happen in our country.

Dan: I know this is coming too quickly, but how did this all play out? If you were to take a handful of minutes to go, geez, where did this movement in you, the conversation and the context of your community? Again, I’ll underscore David, you’re a kind and generous man, but you’re also a truthful man and you know your own capacity for deceit and deception, something of your own brokenness. So just to underline, you’re not a man looking to, shall we say, create your own kingdom. You really are a kingdom of God follower. I would love for you to be my pastor. I love my pastors, but I’d love for you to be my pastor. So where did all this go?

David: That’s a great question. Thanks, Dan. It’s very kind. It was difficult to pastor during the first Trump administration, and I’m not sure if there’s any other way to say that, and I can go into lots of detail, but I won’t right now. I think if folks are a pastor, they understand that statement and they feel it deep in their bones. With the beginning of the pandemic, our church fared, okay. Again, we were very politically mixed, very politically diverse. So people had various opinions, but we largely held things together. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, we held a variety of conversations, mostly in my backyard about race and whiteness and power. And again, these are largely not folks who have gone off to university and study things like sociology or power dynamics or things like that. Some are, but we held those conversations by the end of that summer of 2020, my sense was it had just been so difficult for people to, if I’m honest me too, that maybe we’ve been part of systems that are harming others and being confronted with the ways in which we have to operate differently in the world. That was exhausting and people needed and decided to check out from those further conversations. So as I came back to folks for round two of conversations in the fall of 2020, there was really almost zero interest in continuing them. We had brought in conversation partners, a sister church of ours in the Detroit area who I was friends with a pastor, and so we were developing some things around that. He and I were working together to try to get our congregations in conversation. A primarily African American congregation were three hours up the road and a primarily Caucasian congregation. And yeah, I think the ways in which folks had a capacity to engage in that really dissipated headed in the fall of 2020, we were in election season. In the fall of 2020, people were exhausted by COVID. It was just a lot. And so if I’m being really kind, I have a deep level of empathy for folks in the ways that they needed a break. I’m also very aware at the same time that there’s a lot of privilege in being the people who can take a break from these conversations,

Dan: Who can take a break, yeah.

David: Right. Who can take a break. And I live in a community where it’s easier, I think, than most to take a break from conversations around race and power. So by the time January 6th, 2021 came around our congregation, we had engaged in some, not all, but a certain amount of people engaged in significant conversations. We had talked about election season a little bit. And then when that happened for me as a pastor, it was clear that our church and the leadership of our church needed to make a clear call that even though the language and symbols of Christianity were being used as justification for what happened at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, but this has nothing to do with faithful Christianity. It’s a distortion of Christianity. It’s using the Christian faith toward violent political ends. And so I convened our elders over, I think at the time, over email, maybe it was a text thread. I drafted something. I said, I think we need to speak with a unified voice to our people. And for various reasons, all of the elders said, we don’t want to do that. And so that was the beginning for me of realizing, I’m not sure I can keep doing this, doing this pastoral work in this community. I was heartbroken. I had said things publicly on social media, but they didn’t want to say things publicly as the leadership of the church. Not that any of them were particularly radicalized by any of that, maybe a little bit for some of them, but these are not QAnon folks. Some of them would identify as conservative, some would identify as liberal men and women. But there was a hesitancy, I think, to appear divisive in our church and to “get political” in the life of our church. And that I think in a way sent me a little reeling because I had such strong convictions around these things to call what is evil, evil and to call what is wrong, wrong. And to say that clearly as a unified voice, knowing that some folks in our church would not be able to hear that in a generous way because of their own political convictions and the way in which they had been caught up in the propaganda around what was happening with the 2020 election. Just want to again say for any pastors listening who led through that time, pastored during that time, it was an impossible time to be a pastor knowing that no matter what you did or said, particularly with COVID, you would alienate half your congregation. It was just impossible. It was impossible to do well. And as someone, Dan, you named something within me is that I generally like to make people happy. That’s just kind of how I operate in the world. I’m very aware of that about myself. So I want my congregation to be happy with me. I don’t want to be the one standing up and saying, the way in which you’ve given your heart to this political movement has been too much, and I’m inviting you to take a step back from it, and let’s be begin to engage politics as Christians again, not as partisans. How do we begin to have that conversation and do that work? And to a certain extent, that message, the ways in which that came out and the ways in which I communicated that it didn’t really land for a lot of the folks in my congregation. So that began a process for me of asking these really big questions around how long can I stay here and do this when I have to censor my own pastoral instincts in order to keep providing for my family? That’s really what it came down to for me. Am I called to this? What does that even mean? Am I called to pastor elsewhere? What does that mean or look like? So it had a lot of implications for me personally, vocationally. But I mean, frankly, just financially not knowing if I say the wrong thing or say too much, it’ll upset people who support our church, which provides food and housing for my family, all that. It was a very stressful time.

Dan: Well, and obviously you’re no longer there, and it’s impossible in any context like that to give a singular solitary one reason explanation. Yet I think it’s at least fair to say that you created a context of invitation and disruption of honor and reflection that was, shall we say, not received well by all. And in that as funding decreased, your job no longer exists in that same way. I love that you still pastor, but not in that particular context. But as we come to a juncture where we’re going to say, oh, we want you back. We’re going to have another discussion. But what I would underline is that you began to speak in a world that preferred silence, where the reality is that malice and judgment and othering of others became a more, not in one fell swoop, not simply after Charlottesville, not just after January 6th, but a movement toward greater malice, not love, greater judgment, not openness. And in that, as we move to talk about Christian nationalism, we’re talking about systems. People we’re talking about movements, but nothing monolithic, nothing where you can say, this individual, this group represents all forms of that. But if we don’t know what we’re up against with regard to who’s defining the gospel, who’s indeed inviting my heart and others to Jesus, then we’ve got to have hard conversations. And I think as we move into the category of Christian nationalism, your experience, particularly in the context of your work there and your work current, you a lovely conversational partner. So plan to join us another round on this.

David: I’ll be there. Thanks Dan.