This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Episode Transcript
Lee
Pope Francis
In these times when social concerns are so important...
Lee
That is Pope Francis speaking to a joint session of Congress in 2015. It was a historic occasion: the first time a Pope had ever addressed a joint session of Congress. And in the midst of that address, he held up 4 Americans as worthy in various ways of emulation: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and then a fourth.
Pope Francis
In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.
Lee
Want to make America great? The Pope provided both recipe and exemplar.
Pope Francis
A nation can be considered great when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed as Dorothy Day did.
Lee
Turns out a lot of the senators there that day had no idea who Dorothy Day was.
Martin
Actually Senator Kaine would later say that some of his fellow senators came up and said, well, why is the Pope talking about Doris Day?
Lee
Ah. [Laughs]
Martin
Totally got it wrong.
Lauren
And that is documentary filmmaker, Martin Doblmeier.
Lee
Well, hello Lauren. Welcome back.
Lauren
Good to be back Lee.
Lee
And you were saying?
Lauren
That is documentary filmmaker, Martin Doblmeier, whose most recent film is entitled Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story.
Martin
Dorothy Day really was, I think, one of the most inspiring and courageous women of the 20th century, bar none.
Lauren
Lee's interview with Martin in just a moment.
Lee
Delighted today to have Martin Doblmeier, American documentary filmmaker known for directing films for public television, including films such as Bonhoeffer: The Power of Forgiveness, An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story, Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story, and as well, just out this year, the Dorothy Day story. And so we're grateful to have Martin Doblmeier with us today. Welcome Martin.
Martin
Nice to be here. Thank you, Lee.
Lee
Good to have you in Nashville. You get to Nashville very often?
Martin
I get here… I don't get here enough. I've been here before, but it's... we just love being here. It's a great town.
Lee
And an old music lover. You've been around loving music for a long time.
Martin
Yeah, well you can't not love music when you come to Nashville, and I actually went by a store yesterday, just on the ride from the airport, I saw this vintage guitar store. So I'm hoping to get to that before I leave.
Lee
Carter Vintage Guitars, I think it is. Yeah. Very good. Yeah. How did you get… Tell us just briefly, a little bit about your love of music and how that's kind of worked into loving being here in Nashville.
Martin
Well, what kid doesn't love music? I mean, I grew up when the Beatles were just breaking. I still remember seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, I'm that old. And I just remember how it just changed everything for all of us. I mean, that was the unifying moment in America when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. And I played my guitars and we had our bands and everything. But while I was going to school studying religion in college, I actually got to be the manager of a nightclub in Connecticut, where I was able to bring in people like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Freddie King, and just the Blues greats. And so I'm 21, 22 years old, and, and I'm studying religion Monday through Thursday, and then on the weekends, I'm running this nightclub and hanging out with the Blues greats, and that was just a wonderful life experience for me.
Lee
Very nice. Well, welcome to Nashville. Glad that you're here. With the Dorothy Day story this out this year, the third in a series on...
Martin
We're calling them prophetic voices...
Lee
Prophetic voices, Reinhold Niebuhr, being the first, then Howard Thurman. Now Dorothy Day. Early in the film, you have Pope Francis's address in 2015 - joint session of Congress here in the United States - where he enumerates four great Americans that he wants to mention. And he talks about Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. And Senator Kaine, in your documentary, reports that his colleagues in the Senate are saying “who's Dorothy Day?” For those who might not know who are listening, kind of overview of Dorothy Day's story, and what got you so interested in telling her story.
Martin
Actually Senator Kaine would later say that some of them actually came up… some of his fellow senators came up and said, well, why is the Pope talking about Doris Day?
Lee
Ah. [Laughs]
Martin
Totally got it wrong. Dorothy Day really was, I think, one of the most inspiring and courageous women of the 20th century bar none. She makes a conversion from being really a sort of a communist sympathizer in her youth to becoming a radical Catholic, and that propels her to become politically socially active. And she founds a newspaper called the Catholic Worker Newspaper, which starts publishing in May of 1933 and has continued to publish without interruption ever since. And parallel to that, shortly after that starting of the newspaper, she was writing about the situation for poor people in America. This is now in the heart of the depression. People ask, well, you're writing about the poor, what are you doing about the poor? And that propelled her to go out and get a house and start taking care of the most immediate needs of people who were poor in her midst. And she started what has been called the Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality. And they have continued now since 1933. So it's a remarkable legacy. When she dies - Dorothy Day - in 1980 at the age of 83, there are 30 Catholic Worker Houses in America and that number has just amplified since that time. There's now 200, almost 250 homes for the poor and destitute all across America and even beyond America. And that's all tribute to the thing that she began now back in 1933 and has been needed and necessary ever since.
Lee
I always found her story just so moving and compelling. What are some of the particular stories about her you kind of carry with you, or do you have some that you kind of carry with you that you think of regularly?
Martin
Well, I think what's really interesting… you probably were hearing about Dorothy Day because she received an honorary doctorate degree from Notre Dame and she was very much revered when - especially in the later part of her life - when she was being celebrated by major Catholic institutions all across the country, which was really quite different. I mean, the institutional recognition of Dr. Dorothy Day's work was always at question, because in the midst of always doing this basic care for the poor, which everybody admired, she was at the same time questioning how these people were poor, why they were poor. What are the institutional reasons for these people to be in such desperate dire straits?
Lee
I think I remember I've quoted... I think this came from her. I've quoted numerous times where she will say something like, “When I feed the poor people applaud me. But when I ask why people are poor, they tell me to keep quiet and stay to my business.” But it was not just the works of mercy, but works of justice that were central to her.
Martin
Yeah. She would say sometimes, “When I actually feed the poor, everybody loves that. But when I questioned why they're poor, they call me a communist.” And in fact, she didn't really mind that so much because in her youth, she actually saw communism, socialism, as a more fair way to distribute wealth in America. And this is during the 19-teens. Yeah. And there's major questions that are arising now about how capitalism has gone awry, how it's made incredible fortunes for a handful of people. And that left so many of the average worker, where her heart was, destitute and poor. Does it ring any bells about what's what's happening in America today? So that's why I think people look at Dorothy Day as this really interesting although complex figure who resonates with the issues that we're still facing in the 21st century.
Lee
I think another thing that I always... what made her such a compelling figure to me, this sort of Bohemian sort of lifestyle that she lived. She fell in love numerous times and, having an abortion, being pregnant a second time... that I guess her second pregnancy with this man that she loved clearly so deeply led to her conversion.
Martin
You know, she did have the abortion. It was very traumatic. I mean, she was abandoned by the man who she had the child with, and that was just heart wrenching. Then she goes out and she gets married again, kind of on the rebound, and that doesn't work out so well. She leaves him. So she's spinning for a while in her mid twenties, and then finds a person whose name was Forster Batterham. And he just steals her heart. She becomes pregnant. They're not married. And she comes to find out that he won't marry her. And now she's faced with a decision, because having been traumatized by the earlier abortion, which was done apparently in a very crude way... and she was fearful that she would never have children. So now she's grateful for the notion that she believes God has given her a child and she doesn't want to lose this child. So she has the child Forster will not marry her. She's been living this Bohemian lifestyle for so long. She decides that marriage is the direction she wants to go in. He doesn't want to do that. And so that begins the breakage. And she's, for five years, Lee, she - for five years - she's writing him letters. Trying to reach out to him saying, won't you do this? We have a child. Can't we just sort of build a normal life together? And he won't do it. And so she finally gives up on that notion. And in a moment of desperation, she's literally throwing herself on God saying, you know, I have, in the meantime, now become Catholic. She was raised originally in a home that was at best agnostic, at most atheist. And so there was no religion upbringing, but she always felt this haunting, that God was hauntingly calling her. Couldn't quite figure that out, but she's reading scriptures and stories and sort of filling herself up. She's made the decision with the birth of her daughter that she wants to become baptized in the Catholic faith and wants the daughter to be baptized. Her husband, by common law, won't marry her, but she's going to go down that path. And that's the beginning of a change in her life that will never end. And it goes on now for the next 50 years of her life: she decides to follow a path to become Catholic and that just continues to grow and grow and grow.
Lee
And it's remarkable that she kind of holds together two things a lot of people seem to presume you can't hold together. Namely, it's relatively quite conservative Catholic convictions alongside this sort of radical social agenda. How do you see those holding together in her when so often those seem to be separated?
Martin
Well, I prefer to use the word that she was a traditional Catholic rather than... ‘cause I think the word conservative is so… it comes with so much baggage in our times. I say traditional Catholic and she was. She went to mass every day. She prayed the rosary every day. She revered, studied and revered the lives of the saints. So she's a very traditional Catholic, almost like a pre-Vatican two - for those who know the Catholic tradition - a pre-Vatican two kind of Catholic. And yet it's that very foundation that she felt in the Beatitudes and the teachings of Jesus Christ that propels her to act in a way that we would now call politically and socially radical. She was absolutely committed to it. She would not think that deciding that we should be pacifists - full-on uncompromising pacifists - is being radical herself. She would not think that... she would say this is simply what she felt, as though God was calling her to do so. It's that combination of rather traditional faith that propels her to be what we would now think of as much more forward thinking in terms of political and social issues.
Lee
Yeah. Another line I remember reading, she would say, “Don't call me a Saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily.” What's behind that when she would say something like that?
Martin
Well, during the latter part of her life, she lives to be 83. And it's clear that while she's into her sixties and there are all kinds of stories that are coming out about her, she is a bit of a... she's in New York, first of all. So she's in the media center of the world. So there's all kinds of media that's coming out around her, and she's already being declared a Saint. I mean, she's still alive and active and people are treating her like a Saint. And there's plenty of stories about how people would sort of see her coming, and they would… “Oh, St. Dorothy.” They would think of her as St. Dorothy. She realized in some ways she felt as though that actually could be counterproductive. And so, she's famously supposed to have said - nobody's really... I haven't seen this written, but Robert Ellsberg, who was one of her biographers and a great biographer, said that one of her famous lines was “Don't call me a Saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily.” In some ways, it's kind of Dorothy Day because it's counter to everything that she believed. She revered the saints, felt as though they needed to be celebrated more, and followed the saints, the lives of them, and internalized a lot of what they had done in terms of how she wanted to construct the actions of her own life.
Lee
Yeah. One of my favorite pictures is on the cover of your film. That's one of my favorite pictures in, I guess, American religious history. Dorothy Day as an, I guess, elderly woman, maybe in her seventies at this time, sitting in a chair, seeing her seated. And in the foreground of the picture, on the right and the left, you can see just the sides of two, I guess, were FBI agents with guns, holstered at their sides, standing over her. And I make up that in the picture, is this sort of attempt to intimidate her? Because she had been on the FBI watch list for years and years. And here she is, sitting there very nonplussed, not threatened at all by these guys standing over her with their guns. But at the same, to me, that speaks so deeply about who she was as a woman. Arrested, what, eight times or so, and put in jail. And this ability, and this very confident woman - confident in the work that she was called to do and confident in her faith - she's just not concerned with this threat of violence or imprisonment.
Martin
Yeah, no. We like the photograph too, which is why we've sort of used it as one of the iconic photographs for the story of Dorothy Day, because it does show her, in her older years. And yet the body posture that you see is somewhat defiant as she's being intimidated by police who've got their hands on their guns. It's really quite a photograph, but that happened, in the 1970s when she was in California. So she made the trip all the way from New York in her seventies, all the way out to California, to be part of the demonstrations for Cesar Chavez in support of the Farm Workers Union, something that she really believed in. She would be arrested out there. And the famous background to the story is that she was actually telling the policemen at that time, “If you come back tomorrow at the same time, I'll be here tomorrow. If you don't arrest me, I'll be here tomorrow. And I'll recite for you the beatitudes, which is the reason why we're here. And maybe you would like to hear that, officers.”
Lee
[Laughs] No, I didn't know that part of the story. That's pretty great. So what, did they go on and arrest her then?
Martin
She was arrested while she was out there. And it was for the eighth and last time that she was arrested. And she's in her seventies, she gets out shortly afterwards, she goes… but she made her statement. She was out there to support the Farm Workers Union. And of course the Farm Workers, you know, history then shows that they actually were able to turn the understanding of America from support of the farm owners to the farm workers. Farm workers were in terrible shape at that particular time and really needed to have the national media get behind them. So she felt as though she could bring some attention to what they were doing and hopefully some change would happen for the situation of the farm workers. But that is so Dorothy Day. She was actually always - throughout the course of her 50 year career - always out there campaigning for the people who really needed to be spoken for. She was clearly, I think, one of the great champions of the poor, and at the time, in the sixties and seventies, the farm workers - especially in California, but also in other parts of the country: Florida and in Arizona - they were living very desperate lives and then they needed champions. Chavez becomes one of them and Dorothy Day, as best as she could, became one of them too. And of course she and Chavez become good mates. Chavez comes to her funeral, when he comes all the way from California to New York for the funeral of Dorothy Day, when she passes away.
Lee
Another anecdote I remember reading years ago was that she would say something like, “If you think that love is utopian then just come be with us as we clean up the vomit, as we tend to the poor, as we see the very harsh realities that the poor have to deal with.” And I think that sort of hard-nosed realism, grounded in the concrete, specific forms of love that she's portraying to practice, is so compelling. And it's this sort of realism, I guess... in some ways it also kind of leads to her being arrested so many times with… she's looking at the air raid drills in New York city and realizing this is just propaganda. There's nothing of substance to what's going on here. But tell us a little bit about that story and how she kind of is able to do this very realistic social critique while also holding onto very high standards for her own practice of love.
Martin
Well, I'm old enough actually to remember that we would have air raid drills. That's how that's how old I am. I remember that the nuns in Catholic school would force us all to get down and get underneath our desk. And we were all taught to put our hands over our heads as if. That would do anything to protect us if a nuclear bomb was dropped on the city.
Lee
I remember doing those as a child in school, in Alabama public schools in Alabama.
Martin
And you know, you're a good dutiful student and you just do it. And it puts the fear of God… and I mean, all of us were traumatized by that, just the notion of it. But she felt as though what we were doing with these kinds of drills were in some ways showing that you could protect yourself against a nuclear bomb being dropped, which was total lunacy. And she felt that all you were doing... and the phrase that came up is “anesthetizing us to the horrors of the notion of using nuclear weapons.” So she is one of the first people - and her Catholic worker organizations - they are out on the streets saying, no, we're not going to participate in these civil defense drills. And she gets arrested. She gets arrested every year from 1955 until 1961 for protesting, not participating in the civil defense drills. She's out on the streets with banners and everything else. Her numbers are growing all the time. Meaning that the second, third, and fourth year they're doing that, they have many more people who are joining the demonstration. She gets arrested every time. And finally in 1961, they just ended the drills. So in some ways I think the Catholic workers felt as though that was a big, big triumph for them. But in many ways, that's part of the way Dorothy Day operated. If she just felt as though this was wrong, the principle of it was all wrong, she would be out on the streets, risking herself to be able to make a statement to say, “This has to stop.”
Lee
And similarly, I did not remember this, but I learned it from your film, that apparently the Catholic worker begins the Vietnam protests. Do I understand that correctly?
Martin
Yeah, I think they're some of the first draft card burners that are actually from the Catholic workers, and actually one of the Catholic workers tortures himself. And I think it was at the United Nations, and that just sent a shockwave through the Catholic worker movement. That was... they didn't want that. That was not their intention to do that. Someone in their minds took it a little too far. But they wanted to be very clear about their vocal resistance to the war in Vietnam. It was even more clear to them that that had to be resisted than it was for the second world war. They were out early. The Catholic worker initially resisted the notion of going to war to stop Hitler and the Japanese, and that drew them an incredible amount of resistance within their own movement. People who said, “No, this is a just war. We need to be out there doing something about that.” And I have felt at least some of this because as I've been on the road now with the film, showing the film, I'm getting responses from literally thousands of people that are coming out to see the film. I've already gotten pushback from people, especially people who are parents of those serving in the military right now, and I have people come up to me and say, “This is very off-putting for us because our son or daughter is serving in the military. They're currently in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else in the world, serving what they think is an important, , playing an important role in defending American values. And watching your film on Dorothy Day is very disturbing because we see ourselves as good Catholics or good Christians and good faithful people. And we don't get how it's possible that we should feel as though we aren't serving the proper way. We're not doing the right thing.” And I think this kind of story leaves a lot of people to go home and really evaluate how they think about this. The Catholic church has this long tradition of what they call the Just War Theory - goes all the way back to St. Augustine. And at the same time, now there's an opening within Catholic tradition to say, you know, the pacifist position should have an opening within our faith tradition to speak for it. And I think Dorothy Day is in part responsible for that.
Lee
Yeah, I guess it was the early 1980s that the United States Catholic bishops began to say that pacifism was a legitimate witness to the gospel alongside the Just War tradition. Do you think she played a part in that beginning to be a possibility in American Catholic practice?
Martin
Yeah, I was around and followed that. I was actually a journalist writing, doing a lot of journalism during the 1980s, when that was happening. I personally was very proud of the Catholic church for coming together as an organization and making those kinds of statements. I know how difficult it was, how much resistance they got to those statements, how well-researched they were before they made their proclamations, but this is the mid 1980s. Dorothy Day's has only passed away a few years prior to them. So there's no question that Dorothy Day... in that the notion of a Catholic committed to pacifism - total uncompromising pacifism - had an influence on that.
Lee
You are listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We're most grateful to have you joining us. Please go over and leave us one of those five star reviews on Apple Podcasts and subscribe there or wherever you subscribe to podcasts.
Lauren
And remember, you can find our links, photos, books, and related videos from our extensive YouTube channel all at tokensshow.com/podcast.
Lee
I loved the conversation there with Martin Doblmeier, and him pointing, as I've always loved in Dorothy Day, to her holding together both works of mercy and justice, and kind of holding together in both of those, especially being attentive to the poor.
Lauren
Yeah, that's right. In listening to her story, it really reminds me of this sort of uncomfortable truth for many of us that in scripture, there is mention after mention of the person of God needing to defend the rights of the poor and the needy. You know, Jesus talks so little about sex, for example, but so much about the poor. And yet we do a much better job focusing on getting sex right, and we say very little in the church relatively about getting it right when we defend the rights of the poor. And she reminds us of that being this obvious element of what it means to be people of God.
Lee
Yeah. And this sort of notion, too, of holding together things that most people don't presume you can hold together - her holding together being a traditional Catholic and being a social radical, I think is just fascinating.
Lauren
It reminds me of a quote that I heard from Pope Francis that I've often returned to, which is, when asked if he was a liberal or conservative, he said, “I'm neither, I'm a Catholic.”
Lee
Hmm. Yeah, it seems to me as someone who's not a Catholic, but I've learned a lot from being in Catholic contexts, it's amazing to me about how the Catholics do seem to be better about trying to hold together. You certainly have so-called traditional Catholics who are sociopolitical conservatives and liberal Catholics who are sociopolitical liberals, but it's fascinating that they seem to be more prone to be able to hold being a traditional Catholic and being a social radical together better than Protestants are. Seems like we kind of divide one against the other, rather than being able to hold them together somehow.
Lauren
I wonder why that is.
Lee
Yes. Maybe it's because the word Catholic means universal. I don't know.
Lauren
Maybe... I wonder if there's something there with our history of, for Protestants, we were so allergic to the idea that there were any outward signs of righteousness. We made it so interior that I wonder if we diminished our sense of outward signs of righteousness in this kind of discipline of caring for the poor.
Lee
Yeah, I wonder, too, if there's space… I remember, as you were saying, I remember flashing back to my first semester in grad school at Notre Dame. And at break, we were discussing... we were in the home of one of the professors who was... he was a well known liberal Catholic moral philosopher - moral theologian - and so we had started talking about Catholic different camps and groups, and I realized that they had these sorts of very conservative groups who had their own sorts of papers and they would write up all the liberals and then they had the liberals who couldn't hardly stand the conservatives. And at one point I said, “Y'all don't understand how unusual this is for a Protestant, because if we have those sorts of differences, we just break away. We go start our own group.” And they started laughing and they said, “Yeah, that's the beauty of a papacy.” They said, “You Protestants assume that because we have a papacy we all think the same thing.” And they said, “Actually, the papacy allows us to have a greater amount of diversity and stay together.”
Lauren
That's pretty interesting.
Lee
Yeah isn't it fascinating? Last kind of comment here. I do always admire those who can put themselves in a situation where they will get themselves arrested. I just think that's fascinating. And this woman, Dorothy Day... those of you who haven't seen this picture that I described in the interview, you can go see that on the webpage, but it is this provocative, beautiful picture of this elderly strong woman, just nonplussed, not intimidated by them at all. And the fascinating way in which she was able to see social formation going on in those air raid drills, and that line about... she wanted to call to attention the ways in which those air raid drills and the social practices anesthetized us to the horrors of the world.
Lauren
Well, yeah, I think if you try really hard, you could probably get arrested.
Lee
I bet I could. [Laughs] Yes, I haven't done it yet though. There's still time. Yeah, maybe so. Well, coming up, I talk with Martin about his films on Howard Thurman, Reinhold Niebuhr, and how doing public theology can get you in trouble with the FBI.
So maybe there'll be more there for us.
Lauren
Part two in just a moment. You are listening to Tokens and Lee's interview with documentary filmmaker, Martin Doblmeier.
Lee
How did you get started wanting to tell stories like this, just in the, what, 30, 40 years now doing documentary filmmaking? What's driven you and kept you going in such work?
Martin
Well, it's always... I mean, I wish I could say I had the moment like St. Paul, where… you know, the moment where I was knocked off the horse and everything changed. But I'm in high school, and my high school teacher - I went to a Catholic boys' school - and I still remember the day that our religion teacher gave us a copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his letters and papers from prison. And I was so moved by that book, but I carried it with me into the dugout playing baseball. So I would literally be sitting in the dugout, reading letters and papers from prison, waiting for my turn to get to bat. And it just never left me. And so I made a decision early on in college, even though there wasn't yet at the time a program specifically in religion, that we sort of crafted one out of the classes that were available. And then by my sophomore year, there was a program. I was a little bit responsible for that. Or they saw me as somebody who could help out with that. And there was a program in religious studies at school. And so I took all of that. Took all my courses. And then as my last course in college, I decided... it's 1975, and I was going to go to Eastern Europe, at the time... was still under the wall of communism. And I was going to study what it was like to be a person of faith in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Spent the whole summer of 1975 there, and came back and wrote my paper. And newspapers saw what I was doing. I kind of on my own... I mean, I was naive about all of this, and I got hired to write for newspapers and that sort of propelled me down the path. So it's been like this, trying to understand what God's calling me to do and how I should respond to it, and looking for the signals that are going on in the lives of people all around me. And over time, you're just... I guess you sort of develop like a musician. You just sort of develop your riffs, you get your place, you get your rhythms, you start to feel comfortable that you can just sort of pick up the instrument and do it. And for me, the instrument was the communication through film. I don't think of myself first as a documentary filmmaker who happens to be making films about religion. I think of myself first clearly as somebody who is interested in religion, faith, and spirituality, how to live our lives in this world and in this way, and my way to communicate that, my way to engage them, is through the filmmaking. I get to sit down with Jesse Jackson and talked to him about social justice and religion, because I'm a filmmaker, not because I'm just some guy who walked in off the street. The filmmaking gets me the entry to be able to do that. And now people have seen the films and know the films over the years, but I could walk away from the filmmaking thing tomorrow. I could use another vehicle of expression, whether it was theater or book-writing or playwriting or something else, but the religion, faith, and spirituality component, I can't walk away from that. And I think there's so much more to be able to do.
Lee
Right. So we're in a particularly volatile time, it seems, in American history. I was wondering as I was watching three of your films this week... I thought, I wonder, when Martin is putting these together or when he watches them after they're finished, if he has any particular moments where he thinks, oh, I really wish someone would pay attention to that story. You know what I mean? Do you carry on this sort of inner dialogue about, you know, how desperately so-and-so - and no need to name names - but how you wish so-and-so might hear this or so-and-so might hear this, or, I don't know...I guess what I'm getting at is that all of these things - even though you're talking about things that happened in some cases 9,000 years ago - they seem so terribly relevant right now. So how are you processing that in your internal dialogue with yourself?
Martin
Well, if you like, a practical example of what you mean is do I wish that Donald Trump would invite me to come and give a screening at the White House of Dorothy Day?
[Laughs]
Yes. I'd love to have it happen. We're in Washington, D.C., and if he called me up and said, come over in an hour, I'd like to see your movie, I'd be there in a heartbeat. But is that going to happen? I, you know, I don't know. I mean, ultimately my job is to make the film, and it's been gratifying to see the response these films are getting. I said that it's actually gotten to be number one on Amazon for documentary films, this new film on Dorothy Day. And we're thrilled about that. It's a countercultural film. I mean, I get that. I mean, we're in Nashville right now and for a while, the number one film I think had been Ken Burns's Country Music, right? So how do you knock that off?
[Laughs]
So, but we were like number one for new documentary films and we were thrilled about that. And so my job is to open up my heart, to listen, to make the best possible film I can make. And then hope to God, literally hope to God, that somebody can pay attention to it and go forward and just see what happens. That's the way I think about it.
Lee
Yeah. Prior to the Dorothy Day story, you tell the Howard Thurman story. That came out, what, last year, 2019?
Martin
It did. It was released in February for Black History Month on public television in 2019.
Lee
How did you get started telling the Thurman story? Or maybe before that, tell us a little bit about the outline of the Thurman story.
Martin
Well, Thurman is really one of the unsung American heroes. He's an African American theologian. And he really, I mean, he is one of the more important influences and mentors to both Martin Luther King Jr. and so many of the leaders... the iconic leaders of the civil rights movement. He was part of the reason why the civil rights movement was not just a social and political movement, but it was also a spiritual movement. And Howard Thurman is at the heart of that. He's the one who gives them a sense of foundation. One of the great living civil rights icons, Otis Moss Jr., had the privilege to interview him for that film. His line was that Howard Thurman was the one who gave us the reason for the march, how we march, and what we do after the march. And so all that is clearly attributed and, you know, Lee, when you interview somebody like Jesse Jackson or Congressman John Lewis, who was so pivotal in the civil rights movement, or Otis Moss or Vernon Jordan, and you ask them, “Would you talk a little bit about this extraordinary character Howard Thurman?” And their eyes just light up. And you can see that even now they carry with them a memory from 40 and 50 years ago that still invigorates them and inspires them today when they want to talk about Howard Thurman. Thurman is the - first of all - he's the grandson of slaves. His grandmother was born into slavery in Florida. And she's the one who really teaches him, as he would say, more about God and faith than any of the theological education he ever received. He always attributed his grandmother's understanding about that, because she firmly believed that no matter what the wider culture is going to tell you or teach you as a young African American boy growing up in America, that you are first and foremostly a child of God. And that God has a place for you, and that God loves you, and God is going to give you the opportunity that you need. And that gave him the foundation. And so as Jesse Jackson would say later on, as a fully mature man, Howard Thurman would teach us that in the civil rights movement, they may beat us, they may break our arms, they may break our legs, but in fact, they cannot take our soul from us. And that's all Howard Thurman.
Lee
I'm drawing a blank on the story that you tell that Thurman would tell about his grandmother. There's there's some episode maybe that...
Martin
Yes, Thurman's grandmother, whose name was Nancy Ambrose. She would always reveal as she was growing up an enslaved person at that time that there were actually itinerant African American preachers who were themselves slaves who were being allowed to come to different plantations and to preach once a month, and once every couple of months. And Howard Thurman's grandmother clearly remembered and recounted the stories of whenever he would come to preach, no matter what the topic of the sermon, he would always end it by saying, “You are not slaves. You are not.” And he used the word [expletive]. He used that word. “But you are children of God and never forget.” And that's the story that Howard Thurman grew up hearing and became convinced that deep down inside, no matter what this culture is telling us to do, no matter how much the culture tries to push us down, belittle us, diminish us in every way it possibly can, that you are a child of God. And that God has a place for you and God holds you dear. And that's what gave them the energy to go forward.
Lee
That's a powerful story. And out of that kind of slave experience, he would go on to write a book about the slave spirituals, if I remember correctly.
Martin
Yes, Deep River was one of the first times that anybody ever put language to the storylines behind many of the different spirituals. So it's a wonderful little book, and it really was one of the first attempts to sort of get some background to some of the spirituals. And the interesting thing that we try to draw out in the film is that the songs, the hymns, the spirituals that became so central to the civil rights movement, were all drawn on the spirituals that were happening back, especially during slave times. And so the civil rights movement knew that it was connecting to its own ancestral heritage in two ways, number one, to those spirituals, but also two, that it was part of this ongoing unfolding story of Moses saving his people, bringing his people out of slavery. And so that's one of the reasons, too, why especially Martin Luther King was inviting people like Abraham, Joshua Heschel, and people like that into the marches, because King was smart enough to know that if we can connect this to our own - as African-Americans - our own ancestral roots in slavery, through the songs that we were singing and the traditions, but also to connect them to the Jews and the story of the Bible, of Moses delivering people out of captivity in Egypt, that the size of our movement just continues to grow and the character of our movement will actually be even wider than it would have.
Lee
And that ends up being a key factor in Thurman's - I guess I don't know if conversion's the right word - to nonviolence, is his own experience in India. If I remember that correctly, he travels there and begins to see the plight of the Indian population under the British colonialism. Gandhi is calling people, his brothers and sisters to nonviolence. And then he carries that back right to the United States.
Martin
He does. You know, Howard Thurman is the first African American who's invited to come to India and to meet - have private sessions and conference with I think maybe the most influential figure in the world at the time - that's Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi. And this is in the mid 1930s, and there's two things going on. So Gandhi wants to learn from Thurman what it's like to be raised as a Christian in... as an African American Christian in a country where you're still - now even in 1936, so, you know, generations after slavery has formally ended - but you are still living in a highly segregated country and everything that the white majority can do to push you down still continues. How do you live like that? And that there was a sense of how can you even come here to India and preach about Christianity when you see the results of Christianity in your own country? So Gandhi is sort of navigating through all that, but Thurman on the other side wants to learn, how is it possible that you can actually… to have had this kind of social political environment of your people in India, and yet resist it and hope to make a change in a nonviolent way? And the first thing that Thurman learns is that Gandhi is spiritually grounded. I think that's the biggest... Thurman writes about this a lot. He says that what he could not deny was that this was a spiritual, holy man that he encountered in Gandhi, who was rooted in tradition, who understood that God was in his heart. And that this is the anchor out of which he was operating. And so in some ways that's parallel to what Thurman had learned from his grandmother, that when God is at the center of your heart, you are able to do incredible things, because that foundation is strong for you. And so Gandhi taught this to Thurman. Thurman then turns around and comes back to the United States. This is the 1940s and during the Second World War and into the fifties, and he's traveling around America and he's preaching the notion of nonviolence as a way to resist all the oppressions that are happening to African American people, and Martin Luther King is in the pews and he's listening to Thurman preach, taking all these notes, and he then becomes the real mouthpiece for all that's going to be happening in the civil rights movement as a nonviolent resistance.
Lee
Yeah. It's remarkable. You know, as an American Christian to hear... as an American white Christian, to hear Gandhi ask this African American man, you know, how can you hold onto Christianity when you see the fruit of what Christianity has done or failed to do? I guess I would want to say failed to do, but...
Martin
And I think one of the big - and it's not just Gandhi, who's asking this - Thurman would, during the course of many months in India, give over a hundred lectures. And there was an unforgettable encounter, not only with Gandhi, but with a lawyer who said exactly the same thing. How is it possible that you can come over here to India and talk about Christianity when we know what's going on in America and how you as African Americans are being treated by whites? And these are Christian whites, you're Christian, how can you possibly do that? And he said… and Thurman's response, I think is prophetic in many ways. He says, “I'm not here to talk about the religion of Christianity, which has done this to my people… and has done this to my people over the course of history in our country. I'm here to talk about the religion of Jesus. I make a distinction between the religion of Christianity and the religion of Jesus. What Jesus did was to preach a gospel that talked about care for those who were in need, standing by those who are repressed, liberating the people who need to be freed, and who justifiably need to be able to walk in freedom. That's the religion I believe.”
Lee
And it's remarkable just from a theological perspective. And I don't want to get too geeky here, but you know, his book, Jesus and the Disinherited, by some will get critiqued for his Christology by not enough focus on the Christ of faith, ‘cause he's focusing so much on the humanity of Christ or humanity of Jesus. And yet his focus upon the humanity of Jesus gives Jesus much more normative power, of saying, “This is really who we're supposed to be.” Then the so-called Christology of folks on the Christ of faith is a remarkable sort of twist there.
Martin
Yeah, it is. But I think it's understandable given Thurman's own personal background and what he came from. There's a line in the film that says that it's interesting how whites talk about the Christ and blacks talk about Jesus. There's a difference in our understanding about how those two things really aren't necessarily the same, the Christ and the life of Jesus. Yeah. So... and I think his book, Jesus and the Disinherited - Thurman's book, Jesus and the Disinherited, when I read it as a white male, I found it to be absolutely compelling. And every time I've sat down, and in gatherings with African Americans who were sort of looking for the model of how to understand Jesus Christ, they found it just eye-opening and life changing.
Lee
Yeah. So here you are telling stories about people like Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, and in both of those stories, you can see so clearly a sort of manifestation of what's called Christianity in the American context, that from the perspective both of Dorothy Day and Howard Thurman is deeply antithetical to what they perhaps would call true Christianity or the religion of Jesus, to use Thurman's phrase. And so I suppose one story, one question I'm interested in, seeing as you've studied their story so closely and have told their story so well: what kind of account can you give, or do you give, or do you try to give an account for this of the ways in which Christianity can appear to grow so corrupt or fail so deeply to be what it seems to have been intended to be?
Martin
Oh, that's a great question. So, I'll cheat a little bit and go back even further and say the first film that I've done in this series is a film on the great American public theologian, Reinhold. And Reinhold Niebuhr's great gift was his honesty and frankness about the interconnectedness between the Christian faith and the human story, the human behavior, the patterns we see, so evident in human behavior. And one of the things that... one of the simple facts that Thurman does not ignore is that human behavior tells us again and again and again that people do not give up power. It has to be taken from them. Nobody wants to share the power that they have, the authority that they have. Even though it may have been wrongfully gained, they do not want to share that. And so, that's one of the guiding lights for Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, to talk about, you know, how we're not going to be just given as a gift our full share in this American story. We're going to have to campaign. We're going to have to get out on the streets. So that's why Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement all saw Niebuhr as one of the guiding visionaries for it, because that is the repetitive story in human behavior, that nobody wants to give up the power. And certainly over the last... the first centuries in this country, white Christianity was the dominant force, and it painfully did everything it could to make sure that it stayed that way.
Lee
Yeah. So Niebuhr has this sort of brilliant critique of power and the ways in which power becomes especially corrupt in social groupings. Moral Man and Immoral Society, one of his most famous books. I remember having read that Niebuhr said near the end of his life, that if he had that book to title over again, he would have made it, Immoral Man and More Immoral Society. [Laughs] But this sort of brilliant critiques of power and the way they're at work in social groupings. So how would you see that basic observation being crucial to this project then that you're doing of American prophetic voices?
Martin
Well then, that's a great question. So yes, I think that Niebuhr wisened up during the course of his life. He writes this book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, in 1932. He's about, you know, in his late twenties, early thirties, when he writes the book. It's a brilliant observation, is considered one of the greatest books on social behavior... still remains that. And, and yet at the same time, he realizes that it was even worse. As he got older, he realized that the situations were even worse than he had imagined. And so for me, the theme, you know... Moral Man and Immoral Society is based around the idea that as an individual, we're all capable of doing really noble things. Actually, we're capable of doing things that serve not ourselves first, but actually serve others. But once we get into groups, whatever kind of group that is - whether it's associations or even nation states - we have a self interest that is undeniable, and that's what he was pointing out to and resisting all the way through. And that, I think, holds true, too, through some of the stories that follow, with Thurman and with Dorothy Day. Thurman understands that. Thurman, you know, he understands Niebuhr. Thurman and Niebuhr are friends, they associated over the course of the 1930s. They connected, they didn't always agree on everything, but they certainly respected each other. And so that's part of Thurman's… his sphere of influence, and the same thing holds true with Dorothy Day. She did not interact with Reinhold Niebuhr, and she did not interact with Howard Thurman. And yet at the same time, she understood that here I am taking care of individuals who come knocking on my door, who need meals and who need to be housed and taken care of as a one-on-one. We can take care of these people. And yet at the same time, it's incumbent on her. She would believe to go out and speak truth to power and see if we can get these structures that are creating the situation changed.
Lee
I think too, another story that just came to my mind reading from Dorothy Day was that in her critiques of the system, she says we're all part of the filthy rotten system. And that's one thing, again, that makes her so compelling to me, is that she has, you know, the power of sin running through her too, that she's trying to take very, very seriously, but that doesn't excuse us from taking seriously what we can do to bear witness to a different sort of way in the world. But it does seem to me, that's a fascinating kind of - though she would be very different than Niebuhr - fascinating sort of overlap. They're both able to see the reality of what they might call sin, and its power in both individuals and systems and their struggle with that.
Martin
Yeah. They both did talk about sin. I mean, Niebuhr talks about sin quite a lot during the course of his work. And so does Dorothy Day. And Dorothy Day, she would also be critical of people who would come to her and talk about how they're living their lives on the interest of their wealth. And it would just be shocking to her. And she would... just the notion in her mind of having an excessive amount of money that would allow you to live off the interest rates just sent her reeling. And she would let people know that was sinful, as far as she was concerned, that while you're having such an accumulation that other people are suffering. And so she was radical in that sense. I mean, she was certainly not. And I think from my own point of view, I mean, I make these films because I started out 35 years ago trying to decide how I want to live my life, and in terms of faith. And you make a film like Dorothy Day and you live with this content for a couple of years, you read the books and you hear the stories and you interview everybody else. How can you not go home at the end of the day and think, oh gosh, am I, you know... I believe in the same God that she believes in, I read the same kind of text that she believes that she's reading. How can I not say to myself, “Does she set the bar? Is this what God's asking me to do? Am I failing? Have I just filled my life with Christian compromise and figured out a way to negotiate everything so I can live like this?” I think she struggled every day with trying to understand how she was supposed to live her life. I didn't always agree with it, but I think the challenge for all of us as people of faith is we have to listen to these kinds of models, like a Dorothy Day or a Reinhold Niebuhr, and say, “Look, these are people that are pointing away. How do I see this path and how do I live this path myself, and where am I making the compromises that I shouldn't be making?”
Lee
You know, one of the things that's fascinating to me... you know, here you have these three characters - and certainly as we both have noted, you know, Dorothy Day would have sharp areas of difference with Reinhold Niebuhr as would Howard Thurman - but one of the things that's similar about all three of them is that they both in various ways are seen, as - we might put this in scare quotes - un-American, or in some cases they were literally on an FBI watch list. Why have you found it compelling or important for you to tell stories about those who have been dubbed un-American?
Martin
Well, I didn't… that's a great question. I didn't go out looking for stories about people who were dubbed un-American. That wasn't my starting place. My starting place literally was to say, “I'd like to do something that I think as though is a service to people in the 20th, 21st century, who're trying to figure out how to live their life of faith in a calm, in a complex, and growingly more complex society and political environment.” And so I said, “How about if we take a look at some of these characters?” And we're going to do four now, that's Niebuhr, and Howard Thurman, Dorothy Day, and the last one in this series will be rabbi Abraham Heschel, who himself also was on the FBI watch list. I think to be honest, back in the 1940s, fifties, and sixties, J. Edgar Hoover who's heading up the FBI is just off the wall. In terms of anything that he thought could be considered subversive behavior, threatening to the American way of life, pro-communism, anti-American, you got on the list. There was a 500 page file on Reinhold Niebuhr. 500 pages. And this is a theology professor at Union Theological Seminary. He's not out there organizing and raising money, as you know, on behalf of communist behavior. He's simply identifying the rights and the wrongs of the American political behaviors. Dorothy Day's on... she's on the list. And she's been identified as someone who needs to be watched in the case of a national emergency. And there were even considerations that she would be brought up for sedition. Why? Because she's railing against American policy, especially during the Vietnam War. And she was railing against American military policy during the Second World War. Who's doing that? I mean, everybody sort of got on board in the Second World War. So Hoover is a little overzealous, I think, in identifying the people that would be considered threats. Remember, this is the McCarthy era. Anybody who got anybody who spoke out against the system was deemed a threat and a possible communist. So I didn't start off with looking at that, but I did find it interesting, undeniably interesting, that the people that I admired because of their courage to speak out and actually hold America accountable for not living up to the ideals of its own declaration - and these are people who do this out of a religious context - those were the people that I admired. I didn't agree with everything. I don't agree with everything from Dorothy day's life. I just don't. But at the same time, you gotta look at her and say, look, this is a life that's been lived with authority and with a sense of recklessness and out of conscience. And how can you not deal with that?
Lee
You used the word courage. I realized maybe I'm in...you know, I've been teaching two decades now, and maybe 10 years ago, it finally occurred to me, you know, I can teach a really great ethics course, but if my students don't have any courage, it really isn't gonna matter all that much. And so I've been pushing much harder my students to think about the four cardinal virtues along with the three theological virtues, and really trying to push them on trying to take seriously, you know, that Aristotle teaches us you become a courageous person by doing courageous deeds. So what - when you look at these lives - what do you see in their life that enabled them to become courageous people to speak in the ways that they did and to live in the way that they did?
Martin
Well, first of all, Lee, I admire what you're doing in terms of teaching ethics. Most of the time people are being taught how to have wild success in a commercial world that we're living in. And that becomes the ethic. You know, I talked to... I spent a lot of time on college campuses. I talked to a lot of people, and they really feel the pressure, incredible pressure to be financially, economically successful. And the whole question of where your values lie in order to get to that goal, which is the expectation that you have, your peers have, your parents have, that they are going to be... do parents talk anymore about, you know, holding firm to your ethical beliefs or saying… no no, we want to see you succeed in life. The career success is what the ultimate goal is. So you talking to them about the fundamental virtues of life and the notion of acting in a way of ethical behavior really is central, I think, to these storylines that we're looking at, and I applaud you for doing that. I mean, I think one of the things that Dorothy Day does is that she is so counter-cultural especially to what's going on in America today by - not only is she feeding the poor and taking care of those who are oppressed - but she's actually calling herself and everyone around her who's part of the Catholic Worker movement to live in poverty themselves. How could... that's ultimate counter-cultural in America. And that's a value that says that we don't have to buy into everything. We can live in the simplest way, care for those who are in need, and care for them on a one-to-one basis. Personal responsibility for those who are in need as an equal, not me with economic and financial success looking down and giving you a handout. I'm going to be in there in the trenches with you, and we're going to fight this thing out together. And that is as counter-cultural a statement in America today as you'd ever want to find.
Lee
Yeah. It's been a privilege to have you with us. Thank you so much.
Martin
This has been my joy. Thank you, Lee.
Lee
Thank you, Martin.
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our interview with Martin Doblmeier, documentary filmmaker, our interview occasioned by the release of his brand new documentary on Dorothy Day, entitled Revolution of the Heart.
Lauren
Thank you for joining us. Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And please remember to prefer us to a fellow podcast listener.
Lee
And if you have feedback we'd love to hear from you. Email us text or attach a voice memo, send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that make this podcast possible. My co-host Lauren Smelser White. Executive producer and manager Christie Bragg, Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producer Leslie Thompson of Rogue Creative Marketing and Media. Associate Producer Ashley Bayne. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Production assistant Cara Fox. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett. Thank you for listening. Peace be unto thee. This Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens, Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios, both in Nashville, Tennessee.