Part 3: This One’s For the Pastors with Brian McLaren

If you’ve seen my film, True Believer, you know that I’m the central character, but that wasn’t always the case. When we started filming in 2016, I was hellbent on not being in my own movie. Having worked in the documentary field for some time, I’d seen and worked on my share of films where the filmmaker had unnecessarily inserted themselves into their stories. It wasn’t until 2019 when my editorial team essentially staged an intervention, that I bent. But from 2016-2019 I was telling a different story, one about an earnest, white, male, evangelical pastor who was conflicted about his conservative congregation overwhelmingly supporting Trump.

Pastor J, as we’ll call him, generously opened up his family and community to our cameras and crew, allowing us to document intimate moments of prayer before bed and tense Bible studies with their closest friends. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wanted someone else to serve as my proxy. I was also certain that the folks I wanted to reach would respond better to a white male pastor than to me; I’m not convinced I was wrong. So as I followed a historical lead or met a new theologian, I swiftly introduced them to Pastor J, hoping he would have the same transformative relationship and experience on camera that I was having behind it. The same was true of meeting Brian McLaren.

After I met Brian in the North Carolina sticks, I immediately connected him with Pastor J, forging a shared pastoral mentorship of sorts, as Pastor J was at a crossroads Brian had been at decades prior. This strategy ultimately proved to be unfair to Pastor J, putting undue pressure on him to go through a process that was mine, and it painfully meant that Brian’s story arc was tied to footage that would not see the light of day. The moment I realized I had to be the one telling my story was when I realized I was asking Pastor J to take risks with his family that I wouldn’t take with mine. You never see my stepson in True Believer, despite him being ever-present in our home and lives throughout the filming process. It was unfair of me to ask Pastor J to take risks with his family that I was unwilling to take with my own. This also means that I have an abundance of gorgeous and challenging footage with Brian McLaren, framed around the pastoral experience during the time of Trump. I hope you’ll share the below conversation with your well-meaning, perhaps fearful, conservative, and non-denominational pastor friends, as well as those under their leadership. I think you’ll agree that Brian’s wisdom is unmatched.

The below interview was conducted at Brian’s home on Friday, December 15, 2017. His relevance today is both prophetic and haunting.

Kristen: What do you say to an evangelical pastor who is afraid to lose their job, to lose their community, to lose their livelihood, but who’s feeling a conflict of conscience because of what’s happening in the nation and in the church right now?

Brian: I wish I had kept a tally of how many of these conversations I’ve been in and the number of evangelical pastors who say to me, “I have sold my soul. I depend on this job. I can’t say what I really think. Way too many times I’ve either been silent or I’ve made a false confession.” In other words, I’ve said I agreed with people when I really didn’t. I mean the number of evangelical pastors – and a couple of Catholic priests through the years who have told me this. It really breaks your heart. Because it’s like they’ve experienced moral injury. You know they need therapy. They need soul work. They need spiritual direction just to recover their integrity and authenticity. So that’s the first thing I would say to them is before you worry about other people, you’ve got to get back in touch with your own authentic soul, your own self, your own conscience. You have to find who you are and what really matters. And this is not easy – I had to do this. This is what happened to me from about 1990 to 1996. A lot of people leave the pastorate. I actually stayed in the pastorate while I went through that process and it wasn’t easy and I think it might be easier now because there are more people to talk to about it and I had virtually nobody from 1990 to 1996, except a few close friends in my congregation who were on the same journey saved my life. And my wife was on this journey which made it way more doable. But I think then there was a process that’s already happening and will continue to happen and that is a lot of pastors and priests are going out to say, “Is this congregation willing to move?” And if they are, “Am I willing to take the time it’s going to take and the energy it’s going to take to help them move?” And I think there are more and more cases where the answer is yes. But I don’t think they’re nearly enough. I wrote a book called The Great Spiritual Migration. There’s a kind of migration that has to happen. We need a lot of people who will migrate to starting new faith communities that will just see things differently and work differently and they won’t try to bring people along from step 1 to step 9; they’ll find the people who are already at step 8 or 9 and help them now keep moving forward.

Kristen: Can you speak to me more directly and boldly as though I’m one of those pastors and I know perhaps it’s time to leave or I haven’t been authentic? What is your advice for me?

Brian: If you are a pastor who is aware that your congregation is more devoted to the Fox News of Rupert Murdoch than the good news of Jesus Christ, and you realize how dangerous that is but you know that if you confront it you will probably get fired, the first thing I would say to you is you are in great, great, great danger. If you remain silent and complicit, you lose your integrity. You will be injuring yourself morally in ways that you may never recover from. Your soul is in danger. I really mean that. So what you need more than anything else is you need at least a couple of friends with whom you can be honest. And if that means going to a Catholic retreat center and finding a spiritual director; if it means making a phone call to a couple of those old friends from seminary or other pastors of a different denomination in your city who you know are a little closer to where you are; you have a desperate need to find a few people. Parker Palmer calls this “divided no more.” If you’ve been living with one face that you give to other people but your real soul is divided from that, you need to find some people with whom you can take off that personage, that mask, and you can be the real person with them. Then you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do as a leader, but do not try to do something as a leader until you get a safe space to get back into being a human being, an honest human being and an honest Christian. I think we’re in a situation that could be a whole lot like Germany in the 1930s. We’re in a very, very serious situation. We don’t have time to waste, but we’ve got to deal with the authenticity of who we are first and foremost because what we’re able to do depends on us first becoming divided no more.

Kristen: Can you speak a little bit more about the serious place we’re in? What are the stakes right now, especially as it relates to people of faith not taking a stand?

Brian: I hesitate to tell people what I really think sometimes. Not because I’m afraid, but because I just know how hard it’s going to make their lives. We really are in a crisis of planetary proportions. We’re knocking the climate out of whack and when ice melts, sea levels rise and when water heats, it expands. Those are the laws of physics. You’re not going to change that. And if we don’t deal with this problem of climate change…You think we have immigration problems now? Imagine billions of people around the world having to move. Imagine climate patterns changing and droughts and crops failing and all the rest. I mean where that leads us is not pretty. So just take that first. It’s urgent and inevitable that we grapple with the fact that human beings love money more than they love the earth upon which we depend. Then add to that that we have an economic system where rich people are getting more and more power, more and more wealth. At what point do we say enough is enough? If one percent of the population owns 40% of the wealth is that too much? What if one percent of the population gets 99% of the income and wealth? I mean at what point do we say, “This is crazy? This is wrong? Something is out of whack?” You know this is feudalism. It’s happening and everything is going in that direction and under the guise of populism, oligarchs are gaining more power around the world and funneling more and more wealth to their buddies and to their families and more and more people are left out in the darkness. That is happening. Every single day that is happening and it’s getting worse. And then you add to that when you have an unstable environment, mass migration, all of the rest being inevitable, and you have amassing of wealth in the hands of a few, and then you have the proliferation of weapons at all levels… It creates so much fear. And then one more piece. People need somebody to blame and who are they going to blame? Gay people. People of color. Immigrants. Jews. And you start to see the worst elements of history, the perfect recipe to repeat those things on our watch. And if you don’t care about it being on your watch; in your children and grandchildren’s lifetime. I mean the urgency – I wish I didn’t feel that. I wish I could just be a normal person and just wake up and think, “What am I going to have for breakfast?” But I’ve got to tell you, every day I wake up with that awareness and it doesn’t make life easier but on the other hand, I would be a fraud if I didn’t say that that is the reality that we’re living in.

Every year I travel and I speak to so many Christian clergy - evangelical, Roman Catholic, across the board. And I speak in churches of all different denominations and I meet a lot of people my age who are really unhappy with what’s happening. They feel like whatever Christianity is becoming, something is really wrong with it. It’s being affiliated with ugly, ugly things. They’re disturbed. When I’m with younger people, I see two groups of people. Some of them just want to be good boys and girls and they want to fit in and do what their parents want them to do. They want to become worship leaders and they want to become pastors and they just want to become good people who fit in. And a lot of them have not begun yet to have any second thoughts or misgivings about the Christian machinery. They’ve inherited, “It’s the best thing they’ve ever known.” They’re good people. They want to be supportive. Then there’s this other group of young people who are starting to think something is wrong. You know? They’re thinking what some of the older people are thinking. We call this thing Christianity but gosh, it doesn’t seem right. There’s an awful lot of fear and the Bible talks a lot about not fearing. There’s an awful lot of hate and judgment, you know, against immigrants or you know they have friends who are gay and they think, these people are wonderful people and they’re being treated like they’re the worst people in the universe by church leaders. They’re feeling conflicted. What I want to say to people who are in that state of feeling conflicted, whether they’re young or whether older, you’re not the only ones who’ve ever asked these questions. A whole lot of us have been asking these questions for years. Some of us for decades. You’re not being a worse Christian by taking those questions seriously. You’ll actually be a better Christian or a better human being by taking those questions seriously. And don’t be afraid to take the first step. You’ll have to do it one step at a time, but don’t be afraid to take the next step. And to the people who are happy, all I’d say to them is I don’t want to bother you. I don’t want to attack you. You’re trying to do what you think is right. All I would say is when – if and when the questions arise, I hope you won’t be afraid. I hope you won’t be afraid. Do not fear. Those questions are important. God gave you a mind. God gave you a conscience.

Kristen: Let’s say you become the pastor to the soul of the US and there are people who want to be good. They don’t understand they’re working with forces of white supremacy – how do we talk about organizing? What does that even look like?

Brian: When I look at what I feel is the sickness of the soul of America and the sickness of the soul of American Christianity in both its Protestant and Catholic and other forms, I think how can we help? Especially in this unacknowledged history of racism against the native peoples, against African Americans, against Latinos, and a whole succession of people through our history. Against the Asian people. How can we help the American soul face and heal from its racism? Going around and calling people racist will only increase resistance and defensiveness. I think we have to help there be a movement in the United States of faith leaders. This is especially important in Christianity, but it includes Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, all of our different religious communities – we have to build relationships across races. So we have to white Christians, black Christians, Latino Christians, Asian Christians, Native American Christians – we have to have these Christian leaders form real relationships and that’s not easy for the white people because they’re used to running the show. They’re used to being in charge. And they’re going to have to listen to some pain. And they’re going to have to learn a new posture. They’re going to find out how unintentionally they’re insulting people and they’re controlling people, but it’s part of growth. The benefits far outweigh the cost. If we have that kind of thing – and it’s happening. I’m so grateful for people like Reverend William Barber and my dear friend Jackie Lewis and Michael Ray Matthews and Lisa Sharon Harper and Mark Charles and such a wonderful array of Christian leaders who are building these multi-racial relationships.

Kristen: When you consider what you called the sickness in the United States and the Christian church, in light of being the father of four children and the grandfather of 5, how do they motivate you? And how has that changed you in terms of your work?

Brian: I took a sabbatical last year and toward the end of my sabbatical, I was having spiritual direction and I was just off the road so I could be quiet because I talk all the time; I just needed to be quiet. And I had sadness come over me. I don’t know if the word depression is the right word. I can’t express this sense of grief that was one of the deepest senses of grief I’ve ever experienced. And as I realized what it was it was related to happiness that my grandchildren are not being raised in the context of evangelical Christianity. And when I realized I was happy that they’re not being raised under the influence of James Dobson and Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson and Donald Trump and Mike Pence and all of that, but I felt this great sadness. First, it was that my children were raised under that influence. I realized I was looking at my 7-year-old granddaughter and I was also grieving the 7-year-old me that had been raised in this confining environment and simultaneously thought it was morally superior but had so much moral baggage and I realized my wonderful granddaughter is being raised without that. And the happiness about that created this weird sadness and I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m still grappling with it. But here’s the sad thing: My grandchildren cannot escape the fundamentalism of my youth because now it controls a whole lot of state governments and it controls the federal government as well. And so this struggle is inescapable not only for me but it’s inescapable for my grandchildren. And every atheist and every Muslim or Jew, they can’t escape this because of the power of fundamentalist Christianity – they call themselves evangelical but it’s just fundamentalism under a new name. It’s inescapable. So that’s reality and it’s one of the things that keeps me going when I think maybe I’m getting old enough that I could go fishing and forget about all of this stuff, but I can’t.

Kristen: You were a part of the evangelical machine for a while even though you say you never fully bought into it, you helped perpetuate it. Do you feel any sense of responsibility for what’s happening today?

Brian: I feel so guilty that part of my calling and mission was evangelism and I’ve probably helped a larger number of people become Christians than most people. I’ve had a lot of people I’ve helped become Christians. I brought them into our church and into closer proximity to some of the ugly forces of the religious right that were expanding its influence. It’s one of the worst feelings in my life to think I brought people in greater proximity to something that was harmful. I have that regret for my children, and I have that regret for many people, and it helps fuel the work that I’m continuing to do.

If you’d like to learn more about my work, please follow my documentary, True Believer, on Instagram and Facebook.

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