Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Michael
If you can't read the Gospels and see that Jesus was about something other than lethal means to advance the kingdom, then there's nothing that's going to change your mind.
Lee
That's Michael Budde, Professor of Catholic Studies and Political Science at DePaul University, well known for his work critiquing the historic failings of Christianity alongside passionate calls for reform.
Michael
It's not a matter pf human beings being able to build the kingdom of God, but to act as if it's already begun seems to be fairly consistent with what Jesus left us with.
Lee
Today, the ills of Christian nationalism and Christian condoned violence, and what a countercultural vision of Christianity might look like.
Michael
Start to model to the rest of the world what it is that we think God has intended for all of us.
Lee
All coming right up.
[00:01:00] I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
One of the things that's long fascinated me about the Bible is the way it contains within itself a sort of compendium of critiques of people of faith. Some of the most harsh criticisms of people of faith is found, for example, in the 8th century BC Hebrew prophets.
They cursed and railed against the social injustice, violence, and arrogant privilege of people practicing their religion with great piety while refusing to practice the justice, hospitality, and gratitude which their faith actually required.
In the same way, I've long found myself fascinated with adherents of particular traditions who take up the texts and stories which the given tradition asserts to honor, and then, like prophets of old, call the [00:02:00] religious to task.
I should also add that this interest of mine is not merely academic, a sort of merely intellectual curiosity. It has much more significance, because very often it is these prophetic indictments of religion which open up new potential paths forward, paths toward the redemption of grave social ills. They point out not only the ways in which religion engenders grave hostility and violence, but the ways in which that very religion can address and redress social ills.
One example of a religiously driven social ill pressing on American culture today is the rise of Christian nationalism. And our guest today is an example of one who, from within the Christian tradition, issues his own sort of prophetic indictment, both of Christian nationalism, and corollary Christian endorsements of violence.
So today, our [00:03:00] conversation with Professor Michael Budde. Michael Leo Budde is Chair and Professor of Catholic Studies, Professor of Political Science at DePaul University, where he's also Senior Research Professor in the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology.
Did his PhD in Political Science at Northwestern. He's the author of numerous books, which in various ways call American Christianity to account, which leads me to note that I like to think of Mike as what John the Baptist might look like and be like if he lived in the 21st century and had decided to be an academic.
Welcome, Mike Budde.
Michael
Well, look what happened to him.
[Lee laughs]
Thank you. It's great to be with you.
Lee
Yeah, you've, you've survived a lot longer than John the Baptist did.
Michael
Well, he-- I, I'm a little more diplomatic than John was.
Lee
You've been here at DePaul, how long now?
Michael
Lee
30 years. It's a long, distinguished academic career. And before that, you were down in my home state at, at Auburn University.
Michael
I was in Alabama for [00:04:00] three years.
Lee
Michael
Lee
Yeah. Um, your, uh, most recent book, Foolishness to Gentiles: Essays on Empire, Nationalism, and Discipleship. The foreword by Steve Long is classic to this book. A good friend of yours, acquaintance of mine, who's taught some of my former students himself.
I just want to read this first couple opening lines. He says, “Michael Budde is my friend. He is a dear friend, but he is not an easy friend to have. He knows too much, and what he knows is often disturbing. He is like the butcher, who knows what go into sausage. Unlike the butcher, who mercifully keeps that information from us for fear that knowing the conditions for its possibility might keep us from frequenting his establishment, Budde directs our gaze to those conditions again and again, until we, in fact, see clearly the cultural productions that are [00:05:00] otherwise hidden from view. He will not give us the luxury of looking away.”
So with that, uh, introduction-- [Laughs]
Michael
And these are my friends, keep that in mind.
Lee
So with that introduction by Steve Long, what, what are some of the things that you don't want us to look away from?
Michael
I don't know if it's so much not wanting to look away from things, but I think it's, I think there's a lot to be gained in looking more deeply and seeing connections where circumstances or, or movements or ideas sometimes look to be presented in isolation.
I think part of that is a, kind of a vestige of my, my own kind of academic journey. I was trained in the social sciences, but my deep research and writing interests have been in theology. So straddling that kind of a fence means that you're, you're kind of an intellectual trespasser from the start.
And so, you know, I would submit things to a theological [00:06:00] journal and they say, this is interesting, but we don't do social science. I'd send the same piece to social scientists and they'd say, this is nice, but we don't do theology.
But I found that if you push on those points, then I think you sometimes open up conversations that might not be otherwise available in either of kind of the traditional silos or the traditions that would keep them separate.
Lee
Yeah. So imagine somebody's listening and they're already suspicious, and they say, look, all this theology stuff is supposed to be about spirituality, it's not supposed to be about social practices or social sciences at all. What would you, how would you respond to that?
Michael
There's a long and august history of thinking that way.
I think it tends to be disembodied when taken to, taken to its logical conclusion. People don't live that way. Nobody's born a Christian. We have to be formed and nurtured in material, bodily, communal ways to learn the language of faith, to learn what it means to pray, to learn what it means to, [00:07:00] to engage scripture - those aren't things that are automatic or self evident.
You acquire those in community with other people. And because, invariably, other people are involved, you can't simply make it an individual self improvement project, because then you end up talking to yourself in the closet and don't get into the richness of why it would matter...
Lee
Michael
...to say that Jesus is Lord, or that, you know, any of the claims of the Christian tradition.
Lee
So, unpack that some more for us as far as embodied social practices. What have been some of the embodied social practices that have been most important to you in doing the theological work that you've done?
Michael
You know, I've been really fortunate. I've been able to find like minded people in a variety of Christian traditions, in different academic settings, and in pastoral context too.
I've learned a lot from colleagues in something called the Ekklesia Project, which started [00:08:00] more than 20 years ago as a network of pastors, scholars, and lay people who shared a common intuition that there was more to being a Christian and to being church than what seemed to be on offer in kind of mainstream culture.
It seemed that, the mainstream seemed just too tepid and too easily accommodated to whatever the cultural enthusiasms of the moment might be. And so that opens up a whole other world of people who you might not meet and you might not learn from. And say-- oh, this is, this is how the Anabaptists would wrestle with this. And this is, this is what it meant for the Reformed tradition to take on a serious set of questions.
And the nice thing about that is that it, it breaks down some of the arbitrary borders between traditions and confessions and allows, allows us to talk about things that really matter.
Lee
Michael
Where we continue to struggle together and where we move forward together.
So I've been, [00:09:00] I've been really fortunate. I've gotten to, to learn with and from people that I never would have had a chance to know in my hometown of Joliet, Illinois, which was mostly only known for prisons when I was growing up.
Lee
So when you think about some of the things that you're wanting people to pay attention to that stand in tension with, opposition to, or potentially subversive to Christian faith in the cultural moment, historical moment in which we find ourselves, which are some of those that are most distressing or bothersome to you?
Michael
Well, I think if, in fact, being a Christian is, as we say, the primary and determinative identity and allegiance to which we ascribe, then it means that we have to rethink and maybe circumscribe some of the other claimants on our very real and very practical allegiances, identities, and loyalties. And in these days, that's everything [00:10:00] from the market to the nation to questions of supremacy and different sorts of power dynamics.
All those things that the world often takes for granted, I think for Christians are things that ought to be explored in, in the sense of, well, if we believe that being a Christian comes first, then what are we to make of the fact that in many regards Christians don't look much different than their non-Christian neighbors, in terms of, say, voting patterns or in their willingness to support armed interventions internationally, or, you know, I mean... you can get into a whole bunch of different issues once you start to lean on, lean on that.
Does it make a difference to say that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not, and a whole bunch of other things are not?
Lee
Yeah.
So let's start, let's start there. You've highlighted market, nation, and power dynamics. Let's, let's take those in reverse order.
Power dynamics. What are, what are some of those particular [00:11:00] power dynamics that you've worked on that you, uh, think Christians ought to be paying more attention to than they are?
Michael
If and when we take our, our baptism seriously as Christians, we become incorporated into a community and a movement that's larger than any nation state, that's broader than any ethnic or ideological community or movement, and ties us together with people that we haven't yet met. And in some ways their fate becomes inextricably tied with ours.
And yet, we act as if being an American Christian, for example, or a German Christian or a Brazilian Christian, the Christian part is the less determinative of those terms. That it's, it's what's good for the country, it's what's good for the nation, that circumscribes and hems in what we can realistically accept about our Christian [00:12:00] vocation.
Lee
I mean, this takes us back to where we were a moment ago in talking about intertwining social science categories with theology, because here you're making baptism rather explicitly a social practice or even a political practice.
Michael
It's certainly an ecclesial practice that has social implications, and social practices have political implications. That's not the same as politicizing them in a negative way.
It's to recognize that Christians are called, both as individuals and as a community, and things that would tear that community apart in the name of a lesser good, whether that's national power, whether that's capitalism and fragmenting society in order for some individuals to get ahead at the expense of others... those things are not just social or political issues. They also have direct theological implications for the church.
Lee
So when you say that, if you look [00:13:00] at labels like American Christian vis a vis German Christian, and that we've allowed American and German to be more determinative of identity than Christian, uh, what would be some examples, particular examples of that dynamic?
Michael
Oh, there's just, there's a lot, I think, when you start to peel the onion. I think the, the extent to which, like most countries, churches in the United States have always thought that their country engaged in just wars, even when the judgment of history or even the judgment of contemporaries outside would say, this is not a just cause.
But everybody's church, everybody's clergy, everybody's bishops have all fallen in line. I think that's a, that's a signal kind of an example that, that goes across historical eras. I think that's, I think that's a neuralgic point that, you know, has yet to be really addressed in a substantive way by [00:14:00] any of the church traditions.
Lee
You, correct me-- being much more a lifetime Catholic than-- obviously I'm not. But my recollection is that World War I, maybe, both the French Catholic bishops on one side and the German Catholic bishops on the other side appealed to the pope, claiming that their side was a just war. And my recollection is that the pope didn't respond.
Michael
Correct. Correct. Yeah. And the Second World War, everybody's clergy said, this is a just cause. What had been, you know, what had been considered criminal acts in wartime in one generation, became regrettable collateral damage in the next generation.
So, in that respect, questions of war and peace, questions of the role of violence, and whether or not Christians can embrace or tolerate that under any circumstances, or if so, what would those be, invariably those have... those have become, in effect, weaponized against the Christian tradition, [00:15:00] in the interest of state, all states, regardless of ideological disposition.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Michael Budde.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
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Coming up, the case against so-called “just war theory,” why Christians should instead be committed to an ethic of nonviolence, and why religion should be a call to action rather than an opiate for the masses.
I'm remembering a experience I had October of 2001. So this was, you know, a month after September 11, and I was doing some lecturing in Germany that next month. And it was like a two or three day long event. And one day at break, I was walking with an older German lady and she was reminiscing about her husband being in Youth for Hitler and her brother being drafted early in the, in the German military.
And she's telling me about the bombing of Dresden and that she lived there and that she gets up, [00:17:00] you know, and I don't know how many thousands of people were killed in the bombing of Dresden, but thousands, many thousands. And reminiscing how they got up that day and they just went to school. And then, you know, they went on to school.
And so, I'm listening to her. And so, finally, I've kind of hit this kind of moment where I just blurted out, I said, “So, you're telling me that you all thought it was a just war. It was a justifiable war.”
And she stopped in her tracks, and she turned and looked at me, and she said, “Don't you Americans always believe your wars are just?”
And it was this sort of... shattering moment to realize the ease with which that tradition can be used by the powers that be. And as you say, always for the good of the state and not so much for the discernment of the church.
Michael
Yeah. And, you know, people have recognized that over, over the years. And, you know, I think there's a greater awareness in a lot of circles now that what had initially been a criterion of discernment within the churches, to be done [00:18:00] very carefully and with great seriousness, has in fact been sort of co-opted and turned into a legitimation by state actors.
Lee
Michael
And that it's, it's lost whatever sort of moral or ethical or certainly theological purchase it might've had. And it's just become a checklist that then, is then ironically presented back to well meaning Christian citizens in language that they think speaks to this more robust and more cautious tradition, but in fact operates as a blank check, in far too many circumstances.
Lee
Daniel Bell, who I think I may have met at an Ekklesia Project gathering that you mentioned a moment ago, he's got, I guess, one of the classic books on this. The name of the book I'm drawing a blank on. Do you remember the name of his book?
Michael
He's got a couple, but yeah.
Lee
The book of Dan's, which I was thinking of, is Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the [00:19:00] State.
So, a quick historical note here. All writings that have been preserved from the 1st through the 3rd centuries indicate that the early Christian leaders insisted that followers of Jesus ought not participate in war. Jesus had said, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. This, said those early Christian leaders, ruled out war as a legitimate Christian practice.
Then, in the early 4th century, Christianity became a legal religion in the Roman Empire. And then, by the end of that century, Christianity was the only legal religion in the Roman Empire.
Corresponding to this significant political shift came another. From that point forward, the mainstream of the Christian tradition insisted that war should always be seen as regrettable, as a last resort, and that there should be clear criteria specifying when war as a last resort was legitimate. Was the cause just? Was the motivating intent just? Were civilians [00:20:00] protected? And more. This came to be known as the just war tradition. Not as in, “it's just war,” but as in asking the question, when is war justifiable?
Throughout the centuries, a vocal minority has insisted that Christian practice requires nonviolence. But Daniel Bell, along with much of the Christian mainstream, is arguing for the just war tradition.
Yet he also insists that Christians have too often allowed militaristic forces to co-opt them for illegitimate warring by using the rhetoric of the just war tradition. Dan insists instead that Christians must take the rather demanding criteria of that tradition seriously, and say “no” more often to the powers that ask them to take up arms.
Michael
Dan has done work trying to hold the just war tradition in the church up to its own convictions.
Lee
Michael
And, you know, to point out where it's been co-opted and how it's been turned into [00:21:00] a, an object of state rather than a practice of Christian discernment.
Lee
We'll put links to those in the in the show notes.
So continuing on down, thinking a little bit about power dynamics, you say at one place in this most recent book, “I hate writing about why Christians shouldn't kill people.”
Unpack that for us.
Michael
There are forests that will never grow back from trees being cut down to feed the paper mills of arguing over whether Christians can kill people. It has such a long history, and it, it seems at some point to be a pointless exercise.
If you can't read the Gospels and see that Jesus was about something other than lethal means to advance the kingdom, then there's nothing that's going to change your mind. No amount of rhetorical flair or historical, you know, sophistication. If you don't get it, you don't get it.
People outside the Christian tradition get [00:22:00] it sometimes more than we do because they're less vested in looking for loopholes than, I think, many of us historically have been. Because if in fact you take this Jesus of Nazareth seriously, that you're supposed to love your enemy and turn the other cheek and return evil with good, then everything else gets a lot more difficult.
How are you going to maintain an empire with a standard like that? How are you gonna, how are you going to build peace and prosperity in a competitive world if you don't have people willing to serve in the armed forces at the discretion of somebody who just says, when you go, you go?
So that's, that's the frustration, is that it's not that the case can't be made. The case can be made, I think, really compellingly... except that there's so much in our history that we would have to kind of come to terms with about the search for usable violence in the Christian tradition. We've, [00:23:00] we love our, we love our loopholes and our exceptions.
Lee
Does that discourage you as an academic, what you just said? I mean, I think that... I don't know about you, but I know for me, one of the things when I first started thinking about getting in academics, was when I had a professor in seminary who, against my modernist inclinations, made me realize the way I was a creature of history.
That is, the way in which historical forces from centuries ago shaped the way I looked at the world and thought about the world. And that when he gave me new ways to think about who I was and new ways to think about the world and the way I interpret the world or experience the world or read scripture or read whatever text, all of a sudden, it was like some lights came on and I thought, oh, the history of ideas has great power to help people see things differently.
Uh, and so that was kind of one of the first places I thought, I could do this for a vocation, you know. [00:24:00] But I also have this kind of experience sometimes where it's like, and even in recent years, where I've thought, I'm not so sure that grappling with ideas carefully makes much difference. It's terrifying, you know? But I don't know, what's your experience with that?
Michael
It's a sobering thing to realize that, you know, nobody in a crisis has ever said, quick, get me an academic.
[Lee laughs]
You know? Nobody in their right mind, anyway, would say something like that.
I think part of it is--
Lee
Michael
Well, that's-- it's probably a good thing.
Lee
Michael
No, you... I think part of it is learning how to keep score differently. Because I think, clearly, you know, institutions that shape ideas and dispositions in a culture like ours are powerful. They're deeply entrenched. They resonate so well. We talking about, you know, money, God, and country, all in the right order. And talking about whatever iteration of the American [00:25:00] dream is being sold at any given time.
Against that, no, you're not going to have a lot of immediate impact. And I think part of why it's worth doing what it is that we do, on a good day, is that we keep alive a set of openings for people to discover later. They say you write-- you, you write for posterity when your peers have just tuned you out. And I think maybe there's something to that, unless you're just a, a house chaplain or a house intellectual.
I think sometimes, because you can't anticipate the turns of history, you're trying to leave some, some tracks and some resources for people in another context to say, ah, okay, here's a key to a door I didn't know was locked.
Lee
Michael
Or here's, here's a path that could have been explored that maybe we can explore now.
Lee
Michael
But no, on, on a day-to-day basis, bet on Goliath, I mean, you know, over the course of a [00:26:00] season.
Lee
Michael
That's usually a good idea.
Lee
Has that been a challenging frame for your work, for you to accept personally? Did you come to that slowly or have you always kind of thought of it that way?
Michael
I grew up in Chicago, so my affiliation was with the Chicago Cubs.
So you're-- when you've been raised to lose, there's kind of a natural affinity with the, with the idea of the cross. There's a natural affinity that you lose, you lose, you lose. Maybe you win, you know, you win in the, in the, in the last scene, but you may not be around to see it.
Lee
Michael
Now the Cubs won a World Series, after only 108 years.
Lee
Michael
So we're still riding high here.
Lee
Michael
But optimism is its own punishment, I think. You know, in a lot of these... these matters.
Lee
Yeah, [00:27:00] yeah.
Moving a little more explicitly into nation, talk a little bit about citizenship, which you've already kind of at least implicitly pointed towards, and/or patriotism.
And let me maybe pose a more pointed question on that, on that note. So C. S. Lewis points at patriotism as a helpful formative practice in that it's one of the few things around that shapes people beyond individualistic self-centeredness, and that it at least gives them a sort of consciousness of community.
Uh, and so that's kind of one, at least as I recollect, one way he frames the social good of patriotism. But you're clearly not going that route in your writing, [00:28:00] or it seems. So talk to us a little bit about that.
Michael
I think Lewis's understanding of what was natural and seamless is shaped by the context of being an Anglican in England where church and nation, you know, sort of raised each other and were thought to be natural partners.
And I think that there's a certain neighborliness that citizenship provides. But historically there's an unfounded degree of naturalness that we ascribe to the state or we describe to nation.
Lee
Will you say that line one more time?
Michael
I think there's an unwarranted degree of naturalness that we assume rather than demonstrate.
Lee
Michael
You know... and states as institutions go back about 500 years, and that's about it. They're modern. The configurations of peoples that we have now are themselves the product of history and happenstance and sometimes determinative political action. We're going to exclude these people, you know, we're going to depose these people, move these other people [00:29:00] in. There's nothing natural about that.
And so the part of what makes nationalism so powerful is that it, it draws upon all the emotional resonances of family and community and stuff, but it's a construct. It's, it's...
Lee
So it's parasitic off of natural forms of affection.
Michael
It draws upon the resonance those have in people's lives.
Lee
Yeah. While it itself is not natural.
Michael
The fatherland, the motherland, our mother country. And in fact, these were constructed historically in order to get people in sufficient numbers to kill for, pay for, and die for the regime in power, who didn't have deeper roots, who didn't have a center around which things, things rotated.
Um, the late economist Kenneth Boulding wants to find patriotism as the, as the last religion that still requires human sacrifice. And I think, you know, if you put it in those terms, you can see that it's, in fact, [00:30:00] parasitic on a lot of religious dispositions, themes, and so on, from the sacred nature of flags and buildings and monuments and so on, that are meant to get people to put aside any other considerations and put that community first.
And that... that's a good strategy if you're building political power. It's a bad way to think about what it means to be, to be a follower of Jesus, because it cuts against, I think, the, the notions that certainly the Sermon on the Mount would encourage us to not lose sight of.
So yeah, you know, patriotism and nationalism, they're effective at certain things. There's no doubt. That's why they're still so powerful and still so compelling. But they have a corrosive effect on anything other than a kind of watered down notion of religiosity, where what you get is: be nice, pay your taxes, do your civic obligation. [00:31:00] And that's great. Nobody ever got crucified for that.
And I think that to the extent that that's what so many of us have learned to be comfortable with, it's a real loss. And I think that we need to be reminded by our brothers and sisters elsewhere that it doesn't have to be that way.
Lee
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, why faith should be neither a cause for despair about grave injustice, nor an opiate of the masses, as Karl Marx famously put it. But instead, a realistic program of social action.
What, for you personally, has been your journey in holding [00:32:00] such claims about what Christian faith entails that is a minority viewpoint within American Catholicism, American Protestantism both, emotionally? You pointed earlier to kind of friendships that have helped form you as a way to sustain that. And you pointed to the, being a fan of the Cubs, I guess is another kind of thing that's, that's-- forms you in that sort of minority viewpoint. Are there other things that have helped sustain you emotionally, spiritually, in continuing to articulate this way of thinking about what faith calls us to?
Michael
Well, you know, I mean, at the same time, I mean, I fail constantly.
I mean, the way I, the way I live is at a significant remove from the way I would like to live. I think that, you know, to kind of live more fully into the notion of discipleship that I think is worth one's time, requires a [00:33:00] community of people who are willing to share materially, emotionally, you know, I mean, all different kinds of levels.
I've never been very good at finding that or being part of that. So I'm, I'm no better off than anybody else who's struggling with the gap between to what we aspire and the situation we find ourselves in.
You know, I'm, I'm one of those people that books matter, you know, because they introduced me to people I wouldn't get to know otherwise.
When I was a kid, I grew up in a, kind of a blue collar town, you know. Everybody was nominally Christian, at least in my circles. You know, and very patriotic and stuff. I guess it was... I was a teenager, about the time that all of my friends were bailing out of the church because it was... the usual thing - too hypocritical, it was too, too boring, there was nothing to it.
I stuck around a little bit longer, just because I have a, kind of a suspicious nature. I figured there had to be more to it than what they were [00:34:00] showing us, because nothing this bad could have lasted this long. And for me, it took wandering into a used bookstore, and finding a book entitled No Bars to Manhood by Daniel Berrigan.
Lee
Michael
Who was a Jesuit priest who became famous for opposing the Vietnam War and later nuclear weapons. And this, this was a short book, it was a book of... reflections, you know. Different books in the, in the Bible, you know, Isaiah, Jeremiah, so on. And it was just a-- if you take this Jesus stuff seriously, you're going to get in this kind of trouble and this kind of trouble. That, I understood. That made sense to me.
And that was kind of a key that opened the door to all the other traditions in church history where people had... you know, taken a more, a more serious kind of attempt to engage in Jesus as the Prince of Peace or in finding ways to, to [00:35:00] go the extra, the extra mile and go beyond what the, what the culture told them was acceptable or, or required of them.
And so that's been-- you know, that, hope comes in lots of unexpected places. And for me, it's been being able to discover stuff like that along, along the way.
Lee
How old were you when you wandered into that bookstore?
Michael
Lee
Michael
Lee
Yeah..
You... in this new book as well, you say, “I believe that the context for politics worldwide, and within the United States in particular, is in the early stages of a profound shift that overall promises to be significantly more violent, more oppressive, and more aggressive.”
Unpack that for us and tell us kind of what factors you see as, as driving that.
Michael
That particular section was in reference to the political consequences of climate collapse, of the [00:36:00] increased instability in the world, um, militarily, economically, that come not only from changes in climate, but also their impacts on things like food systems, on water availability, the rise of climate refugees, and so on.
And I think that politics is going to get a lot uglier as these things advance. And I think that it's going to be very important for the churches to find where they stand before things get even worse. They're bad now for lots of people. And they've been bad for groups in this country and abroad for a long time, who haven't had the comfort or the cushioning of the kind of the violent edge of politics and social life. But it's going to come visiting everybody else pretty soon.
And if we just go along with it, I think we're going to bring more shame on the, on the Christian name and the Christian tradition [00:37:00] that later generations are going to have to apologize for. Because one of the things that has held, I think, liberal democracies together historically, has been the prospect of unlimited economic expansion.
That... okay, well, yeah, I own the business and you work for me, but if we increase the size of the pie, you'll have more tomorrow. And conveniently you won't-- I won't have to give up any of mine at the top. That works as long as you can assume that there's unlimited access to goods, to resources, to services. But you can't have unlimited economic growth in a finite biosphere.
You know, we're learning about that now in everything from CO2 levels to topsoil to pick, you know, pick your poison. Without the assumption of unlimited economic growth, politics reverts back to being more redistributive. And redistributive politics historically has often and almost always been really ugly. [00:38:00] Because for anybody else to get, someone else has to lose.
And, you know, that's not new to people at the top. I mean, there's all sorts of studies and all sorts of contingencies that are already commonly discussed. I mean, they've been discussed for 40 years. About the political implications of economic limitations. But as they trickle out into the, the larger culture... I mean, and they, and they clearly are, I mean, people who are prepping for disaster, who are arming themselves to keep urban poor people away from them in their small town.
I think that, you know, you can, you don't have to be a genius to see that, yeah, there's, there's intimations of this all over the place.
Lee
You, on that note, you say, “The church is on the cusp of another potentially world class scandal against the gospel, perhaps on the level of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and more.”
[00:39:00] Any other comments or unpacking that for us?
Michael
Well, those are historically some of the, some of the failures of Christianity that subsequent generations have always had to apologize for. They become a stumbling block for anybody who came later. Like, how could you, believing what you do, or in proclaiming the Christ that you do, how could you have justified the Inquisition, the Crusades?
Forget whatever nuances you want to add to them and however you want to, you know, contextualize all that. They're still matters, they're still matters of scandal.
If Christians today put their tribe above all else, like we have done so loyally in the past, it's going to be a scandal in future generations that they're going to have to say, all right, when the chips were down, you closed your borders to people who were fleeing, fleeing famine and who had nothing to eat or nothing to drink. And you shot them crossing over the river. You put them on trucks and shipped [00:40:00] them. You know, the British want to send people to Rwanda for processing as refugees now.
I mean, it's... you know, it's not, it's not going to be a pretty picture and people are going to have to decide individually and as congregations where they stand.
Lee
So I can imagine somebody listening and say, um, dang this does, this doesn't leave us very hopeful.
[Laughs]
And, and I can imagine them perhaps pushing back and saying, so are we just left with despair?
Michael
No! We're Christians. We know the way, we know the way the story ends. We know that there's a new Jerusalem. That there's a new heaven and a new earth.
And to the extent that we start acting now as if it's already begun, it then becomes more real and more manifest. I mean, the fancy theological term for that is eschatology, which is, you know, the ultimate end of creation or [00:41:00] what, you know, where it's going.
And I think that's what makes Christianity such an interesting, interesting phenomenon historically is that we don't define what, what we do just based on what happened before. We're being defined by the future. So it's not a push from behind as much as it's a pull from the front.
And I think hope is, it's a theological virtue for very good reason. It means we have to keep score differently. It means that what looks like losing can ultimately be redemptive. But it also means that there's joy along, along the way, sometimes in ways and in circumstances where you wouldn't ordinarily expect it.
Lee
For those who are unfamiliar with some of the ways in which eschatology might-- and you have a chapter in your, in your, in this particular book on eschatology, but I can imagine some listening who might say, look, I've heard that pie in the sky stuff, and usually what that does is make [00:42:00] people not care about history and not care about social conditions.
Uh, it's the classic critique of Marx that it becomes an opiate of, uh, opiate of the masses. Now, you're clearly not saying that, but how, how so then?
Michael
Well, because I think it's, um... there's a real merit in trying to distinguish between heaven as the kind of reward place for individual virtue, and the new creation, which is a more biblical notion, especially in the book of Revelation, which is, everything gets taken up and healed and redeemed. Nothing gets wasted that's done good. And nothing is, nothing is futile in that, in that regard.
So it's not simply an opiate of the masses of, yeah, shut up and suffer now, you're going to get paid off later, because everybody wins. And everybody has a chance to be taken up into the consummation of God's story. [00:43:00] The rescue operation of history takes up the material world, takes up the natural world, takes up human endeavor. And there's no, there's no consolation prize for that.
Lee
And I suppose too, something else you mentioned a moment ago is that we seek then to try to begin to live the future out, even now.
Michael
Right. It's not a matter of human beings being able to build the kingdom of God. But to act as if it's already begun seems to be fairly consistent with what Jesus left us with.
Which is, you know, not, love your enemy but don't do it today because you have to kill him today. You know, in the by and by you'll be able to do that. No, it was kind of, start now. Start to, start to model to the rest of the world what it is that we think God has intended for all of us.
Lee
When you think about major figures that are, have been [00:44:00] heroes to you, you mentioned Dan Berrigan a moment ago, who are others that have been key figures that have consoled you, encouraged you, pushed you on?
Michael
I've learned a lot from the Anabaptist world. It's kind of an odd pairing. Um, it's not a natural, not a natural party date, but um...
Lee
Given that the Catholics were killing them 500 years ago.
Michael
Absolutely.
And you know, I've been able to, I've been able to learn a lot about the shortcomings and the blind spots in my own tradition.
And I had a professor in college who was a, who was also a Methodist preacher from Georgia, who put his arm around me one time and said, “Michael, do you realize if Catholics were allowed to read the New Testament, this would be the end of your religion as you know it?”
[Lee laughs]
And we had a lifelong friendship that pushed and encouraged and did stuff like that and showed me what it [00:45:00] meant to learn, to learn from somebody older and more experienced, and how to bring back the questions that he sometimes thought had already been settled.
So there's... uh, you know, you don't, you don't get to do the, the kind of privileged work that I get to do-- 'cause I'm grateful for it. This is not real work. You know, real work hurts your back. It hurts your feet. This is, this is a privilege.
Lee
Michael
You know, without lots of people from whom you draw encouragement and delight and challenge along the way.
Lee
We've, uh, had, uh, quite a few guests through the years talk about Dorothy Day. You also write about her a bit. You wanna share a little bit about how she's influenced your thinking?
Michael
Yeah, I, I didn't want to be a pacifist. It's not my natural disposition. It's quite the opposite. But Dorothy's example over the years kind of was one that said, well, you really can't have it both ways.
You can't claim to want to be a Christian and, you know, love somebody by shooting them, [00:46:00] you know, even, you know, even in a good cause. There's lots of things worth dying for, but nothing worth killing for.
So yeah, no, so, you know, the... so Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement have been, I think, you know, much to the delight of people around the world, has been an example of people who persisted against really unpromising circumstances and odds.
You know, they, they, you know, that movement lost a large number, more than half of its supporters, when it refused to embrace the American war effort in the Second World War. You know, but they persisted, and continued to open doors around the, around the world.
So yeah, I've, I've been, I've been fortunate to learn a lot from, from Dorothy Day and the people that came after her.
Lee
Yeah.
Been talking to Michael L. Budde, here at DePaul University, Chair and Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of Political Science, in his office suite.
Mike, thanks so much for welcoming me here. Thanks for your work, and thanks for sharing with us [00:47:00] today.
Michael
Thanks, Lee. It's been a great time.
Lee
Thank you.
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Michael Budde.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
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Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer. [00:48:00]
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together.
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