How to reclaim the Bible from the hands of tyranny -- With Rev. Jennifer Butler

Jennifer Butler, CEO of Faith in Public Life, is here to discuss her new book "Who Stole My Bible: Reclaiming Scripture as a Handbook for Resisting Tyranny". The solution? Historical empathy. Hear her definition of this term, and more.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason. And I'm delighted to have a special edition of Good God today that we are inserting in our American faith program, our series, and this is about American faith also. And so today, we are welcoming the CEO of Faith in Public Life, the Reverend Jennifer Butler. And Jennifer, we're so glad to have you with us today.

Jennifer Butler:
I am so delighted to be with you and see the good work you're doing.

George Mason:
Thank you. Thank you so much. And in a moment, we'll talk a little bit more about this, but I'm holding up her most recent book, and it's titled Who Stole My Bible, Reclaiming Scripture as a Handbook for Resisting Tyranny. So the truth of the matter, Jen, is that sounds an awful lot like people on the right might do the same thing, right?

Jennifer Butler:
It sounds like, yeah.

George Mason:
And so we're going to kind of get into that a little bit about the nature of the Bible and all those sorts of things. But I want to give people a little bit of background. First of all, you are a Presbyterian minister ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA, and you have spent time overseas as a missionary and working in ... Well, I say overseas. It was really Central America, right? South America.

Jennifer Butler:
Yeah.

George Mason:
Very good. And then in 2004, you became the executive director of Faith in Public Life, which was a fairly new organization. And if we could characterize it for people a bit, we would say that it's a coalition or network of people of a more progressive nature of faith, interfaith as well. Anything else you want to say about the organization to introduce it to people?

Jennifer Butler:
Sure. Well, today we're mobilizing around 50,000 faith leaders all over the country. They run the gamut of faith traditions and often even political ideologies. That's becoming harder and harder in this polarized environment we're in, but I've been really excited over the years to work with Catholic priests and mega church pastor, evangelical pastors and Southern Baptists, as well as liberal Presbyterians like myself and Muslim and Jewish communities. And our chief goal is really to help faith communities enact their values in public policy, to really advance our goals of human dignity and love of neighbor through public policies so that we can create a nation where everybody flourishes.

George Mason:
Yeah. So I think this is an ongoing question that people in the pew have about activism and advocacy like this. And I think people are being honest about their reticence at times about, you talk about taking our faith and making public policy out of it. When people ask you that question, church-state separation, all those sorts of things come to mind. And yet we see that there's no way to really separate faith and public life. So how do you answer people who have an honest question about that?

Jennifer Butler:
Yeah. Well, especially I'd say more conservative members of my family, where I like to start is that Jesus is Lord of my life. And if I really want to follow in his way and implement the Sermon on the Mount, then that means that Jesus is Lord over my public life as well, over how I assert myself as a citizen here, how I vote, what kinds of laws I, as a community member, work to implement. And so that's one aspect of it.

Jennifer Butler:
The other it's very important to me, and I think in a democracy, to really honor all faith and ethical traditions. We all come to the public conversation from different backgrounds. I have friends and colleagues who are secular humanists and atheists and Baptists and Muslim and Jewish. And it's our moral values, who we see ourselves to be, have to be debated and have to be a part of the public discourse. We enact certain policies because of the way we see the world and because of the way we prioritize or don't prioritize human dignity and love of neighbor.

Jennifer Butler:
And so what I want to do is model a conversation and the style of organizing that invites everybody in to have that debate, to even be specific about why they have the values they do. Do they follow the philosopher, Ayn Rand, who hated Jesus and hated vulnerability and thought we should deliver power to those who could excel and the weak were weak for a reason? Or do I follow the belief that God hears the groans of those oppressed, and I want to work to create a society where nobody is held down and everybody has a chance to flourish?

George Mason:
Well, let's follow up a little bit on what you just said as an example of how this has taken place, because you mentioned Ayn Rand. And of course, there's a very important story that is to be updated even right now, and that is the action, the public action, at the Capitol building when you joined with others, including the Reverend Raphael Warnock, to go and put yourself outside the office of Paul Ryan, who at the time was talking a lot about Ayn Rand. And tell the story of that and update it now in terms of where we are right now.

Jennifer Butler:
Oh my goodness. Are you thinking of the Affordable Care Act protests that I write about in the book?

George Mason:
Yes.

Jennifer Butler:
So many of us in my network, we had worked to help pass the Affordable Care Act actually. We had united and run a campaign in six states across America to advance that bill. So we were horrified when we saw that the Republicans under Trump's leadership in 2017 had designs to gut that bill, to take actions that would have dis-enrolled 20 million people from healthcare. So I called it a death bill at the time. It truly was a death bill. It would lead to the deaths of many, many Americans, including people in my family who had benefited from that legislation.

Jennifer Butler:
And so we called a state of emergency. We rallied the faith community. We had 300 faith leaders gathered there on Capitol Hill. After that press conference, we marched to Paul Ryan's door. And of course, Paul Ryan being the Catholic house leader who has championed his Catholicism, but at the same time, we have a long history of challenging him because he also subscribes to Ayn Rand, who I just mentioned, who has a very different philosophy than Jesus and is very sort of anti-poor.

Jennifer Butler:
And so we took our holy texts. The thing I loved about this rally is it was multi-faith. We invited all the faith leaders to bring their sacred scripture and to bring healthcare stories. And so we brought our texts to the door of his office. It's important to understand that we were trying to get a meeting with him, and he would not meet with us. And so we were extremely frustrated with that. We felt shut out. He wasn't listening to the voices of the faith community, and we preached outside his door from all faith traditions. And people told their testimonies, basically the stories of the people they loved in their communities who might die or fall seriously ill if this legislation they were trying to advance were passed.

Jennifer Butler:
We left a stack of about 100 holy texts outside Paul Ryan's door. We said the Lord's prayer. We sang. And that began months of activism by the faith community that ultimately helped defeat the bill that had been introduced. It was called the Vikreth to defeat the Affordable Care Act and take out some of its major provisions, wiping 20 million people off of healthcare.

George Mason:
Well, it was a powerful story of the action. And I realize that I'm conflating two stories here because there was another one recently where Raphael Warnock was part of an action in the Capitol, in the rotunda, in which he was arrested for protesting in the State Capitol. And of course, now he's been elected as a senator for the state of Georgia.

George Mason:
And so I think what I'm really trying to get at is that, and you talk about this in the book, there is not an inevitability about the progress of democracy and human rights. Sometimes we fall back on saying, "God is in control, and in the end, everything's going to work out, and we simply need to pray and be patient. Because as Dr. King liked to say, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." That's not, though, an invitation to quietude, that there is a sense in which if we are participating, then we are much more likely to see those changes take place in a positive way. And if we're not, we're leaving them to other forces.

Jennifer Butler:
That's exactly it. And I think as Americans, we fall prey to this idea of a progressive view of history, that history is always progressing, like you say, the moral arc of the universe. It only bends in that direction if we make it so, and that's what the Bible really teaches us too. I see in the Bible the story of people who resisted systematic oppression throughout history, and against all odds were able to contest that and push the arc of history in a different direction, from the Hebrew slaves in Egypt all the way through to the Book of Revelation. And that's what we're truly called to do.

Jennifer Butler:
As I told that first story, that was our first healthcare rally, but we spent from, I guess that was February or March, all the way through to August until McCain gave his famous thumbs down to defeat that bill, we must have done nine actions like that, one in which Raphael Warnock was arrested, one in which I was arrested, one in which we carried coffins up to the yard there of the Capitol and laid them down. Members were very upset about that because they didn't want coffins being identified with that bill.

Jennifer Butler:
It's because the American people stood up to that that the impossible was achieved. When we first started that work, I thought, "Okay, I'm being faithful here. We're not going to pass that. We're not going to be able to stop passage of this bill." But ultimately, we were able to do that. And that's what hope is all about, about achieving the impossible by stepping forward on what our scripture teaches us and what our faith calls us to do.

George Mason:
So I think we've now moved into a conversation about the book itself, which is about the book, the Holy Bible, right?

Jennifer Butler:
The good book.

George Mason:
The good book, that's right. The good book that is sometimes used for evil at the same time, right? So Brian McLaren, the wonderful Christian advocate and writer, writes the foreword to this book. And right at the beginning, he tells the story of Frederick Douglass, the former slave, who was talking about his master's conversion to Christianity at a Methodist camp meeting and how much he had hoped that that would mean something, that it would mean a change in his behavior toward his slaves. And actually instead of making him more kind and humane, Douglass writes, "If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways."

George Mason:
So you tell in the book the story of how the Bible has been co-opted, taken over in this way, appropriated from the original context by people who were trying to defend their power, privilege, and frankly, white supremacy. You even talk about the slave Bible in 1806 that was brought to the Caribbean right after the Haitian slave revolt. And it was excerpts of the Bible. Of course, all the liberation from Egypt was taken out, and only law was left pretty much, about slaves obeying their masters.

George Mason:
So what you described in this book, Jen, is that we have a tendency to take our ideology, our own circumstances, and to go with that to the Bible and find only those passages that really help reinforce what we want to see happen as opposed to the actual story itself. But we are also susceptible to that. Can you talk more about how it is that Paul Ryan could be a devout Catholic on the one hand, but so susceptible to Ayn Rand's philosophy of individualism on the other? And how, in evangelical faith, we see the Capitol riot and people with Jesus saves signs and this deep conviction that they are doing God's will, and it's based upon the very same Bible?

Jennifer Butler:
A really good question. So I think what happens is when there's something very powerful and transformative, the powers that be need to control that set of beliefs. And so throughout history, what we see is all forms of tyranny seek very quickly to subsume religious belief, because at the heart of every faith tradition is a focus on human dignity and love of neighbor. And so that's very dangerous to the project of empire and oppression that has to be subsumed.

Jennifer Butler:
We see that even in the story of creation itself. I write about how so often we've, particularly those of us who are white Christians, have tried to interpret that story as a debate around science and how actually the world came to pass. But the story of creation is actually a rebuke of the prevailing belief of the time that human beings were created to be slaves of empires. It's actually a rebuke that says, "No, God created, and God called us good. And therefore we're to treat everyone with love and dignity."

Jennifer Butler:
So I think our scripture really is a rebuke of oppressive systems, and yet often oppressive systems try to take our scripture and turn it into something else. And there's a really good book, actually I have it right here because I'm taking notes on it, White Too Long by Robert Jones.

George Mason:
We did a Good God with Robbie Jones on that book.

Jennifer Butler:
That's right. You told me that. Yeah. And so this book is excellent because I think for a lot of us, we're going back and looking at the history of our country. How did we come to this place that we're in now where on January 6th, people stormed the Capitol trying to hang Mike Pence of all things? So that book really details the history of how we got to this place and how our scripture and our gospel that's so beautiful, that really truly is good news, was subsumed to the ethic of white supremacy. And so we need to take it back.

Jennifer Butler:
And I think what I spend a lot of my ministry doing is I think a lot of folks are rightly understandably embarrassed by what has been done in the name of religion. What I try to say to the readers of this book is that it's morally incumbent upon us to take our faith back, to really be vociferous about what our faith tradition actually says, because it'll help call people out of the wilderness and into a new way of living together.

George Mason:
So, in the book, you talk about how reading the scripture in the way that you're suggesting gives us something that you call historical empathy. Tell us what you mean by historical empathy and why that's so important in having eyes of faith in the world.

Jennifer Butler:
Yeah. And this comes actually from reading some of the rabbis and their work on Hebrew scriptures, and so I'm indebted to the rabbinic tradition. But God, throughout the Hebrew scripture, says, "Remember. Remember you were once slaves, and I freed you." And in fact, that's the preamble to the 10 commandments and to all of the legal code. And we forget that. We forget to remember. We forget to remember those who've been oppressed, whether they're our ancestors or whether they're our neighbors down the street. That's the grounding of everything God tells us to do and tells us to be.

Jennifer Butler:
And so that's what I mean by historical empathy, and that's what we're to practice. It's the core of spiritual practice. And yet, so often in the hijacking of Christianity, we're blending, I think, a prosperity gospel that says, "If you're wealthy, it's because God has blessed you. If you're poor, it's because you're not in sync with God and you're not following God." That's not what scripture teaches. Scripture says if we want to draw close to God, we should go and be with those who are oppressed and marginalized. Only then can we come to know God, God's grace, mercy and love.

George Mason:
Right. Even if you think about this idea of remembering and you only do it with regard to the story of our own country, it's important to remember it rightly, not just to remember it, because the people who first came to the shores were not coming as empire colonists. They were coming to flee empire. They were actually, if I could put it this way, they were the losers in terms of their religious experience. And when they came, they were not trying to be empirists themselves initially.

George Mason:
So when we go back and have people say, we need to go back to the founding of our country, we were founded upon Christian values and all of that, well, what we should be remembering is the circumstances that brought them here and the fact that they actually were slaves in Egypt, so to speak. They felt themselves to have been delivered from the forces of empire, and not to set it up again was part of the reason for their being here.

Jennifer Butler:
That's right. And there's that beautiful strain, I think, of American democracy. And then sadly, there's the strain of very early on, we started using slaves to build this empire and to build democracy. And that's why it's called our original sin. We haven't been able to free ourselves from it yet. For me, as a Southern Christian who grew up in Atlanta in the '80s, I've had to go back and learn my entire history.

Jennifer Butler:
My Aunt Flo told me this story of how she named her granddaughter Lucy, or encouraged that name. And she did that because her middle name is Lumpkin. Well, so I had to go look up well, who was Governor Lumpkin of Georgia? This is in our family tree. And what I had to learn was Governor Lumpkin is the one who signed the decree to push the Cherokee out onto the Trail of Tears and push them out of Georgia. That was a land grab that was about power and greed. And he owned slaves. My whole family owned slaves.

Jennifer Butler:
I had to learn about the history of, oh, I never noticed Brown vs Board of Education, school desegregation, that was a court decision in the 1950s. I was the first class to go to one of the desegregated Atlanta public schools. I didn't start kindergarten in the 1950s. I started kindergarten in the '70s. And so my mom's generation was supposed to experience that. It was my generation that got to experience that.

Jennifer Butler:
And so putting together my own personal history, the fact that so many of our family and friends actually withdrew their children from Atlanta public schools at that moment of time, put their children in white segregation academies, that my cousin's school turned down the application of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Son. We forget our history. And once we know our history, then we know better. And again, scripture tells us over and over again, remember, remember, remember.

George Mason:
Good job of teaching us to remember how to read scripture, but I'm not sure that many people ever knew that, knew how to read scripture to begin with. And this is one of my contentions. I'm a Baptist, of course. And as a Baptist, we don't actually have a magisterium teaching us how to read scripture. We don't have creeds to follow. So we pretty much had said, "We're just going to go with the Bible," which is easily said, and it's more difficult in the doing, right? Because it's one thing to say, "We're going to follow the Bible." It's another thing to say. "And how do you read the Bible? How do you understand the Bible?"

George Mason:
Your book, I think, is ideal for people in the pew, for people in congregational life who are looking for studies, Wednesday night studies or Sunday school material. You talk about how to find the thread of what the meta-narrative is of the text, how to find yourself in the text and not only as the winner, but to identify with the victim and the other side. So I think this is a book that is really accessible to people without theological education, but who love the Bible and want to learn how to read it anew. Any ways that you want to suggest to people that they might use it or that you've heard from people that they've found it useful to them?

Jennifer Butler:
Yeah. I have this big smile on my face because I do so love the Bible. And so when I hear you talking about that, I get really excited. We're hearing from a lot of congregations that are doing small groups with this. And I think I wrote, the first two chapters talk about just how to read the Bible, and there are a couple of different methods in there that I teach about. One is really to understand that it is the dynamic collection of stories of people who wrestled with the very same questions we're wrestling with today over how to achieve justice, what to do in polarizing times, how to resist the trend toward autocracy.

Jennifer Butler:
And so when we understand it that way, and we understand that God is still speaking to us today through the book, it becomes really a dynamic conversation that can help guide us in a meditative way, but also in an instructive way about history. And so it's really a quite exciting project, as opposed to what I was taught sometimes growing up in some circles is that it was literally dictated by God and written by hand straight from the mouth of God. And that's actually a pretty flat and boring way to look at scripture and less spiritually dynamic and convicting, in my mind, then to see the successes and the feelings of a community struggling toward God.

George Mason:
Right, right. We use the Bible to engage politically, and yet you could argue that, in a sense, you are making a case to use the Bible to justify a more progressive political agenda, to support the Democratic party, and this is an attempt to simply be the religious left to counter the religious right. And it's something that I think we're all susceptible to in terms of how to figure out how to have our faith guide us and not be subsumed by a political party or culture. How do you answer people's questions like that when they challenge you about that?

Jennifer Butler:
Well, I talk a lot in the book about idolatry and the moment with the golden calf, and I think idolatry and understanding that concept is really critical to holding ourselves to the test. I write about idolatry is lifting up and following a plan that's other than God's plan as outlined in Sinai. It's the worship of that which leads us away from God's plan of liberation from oppression.

Jennifer Butler:
And I think if we find ourselves following an earthly leader, whether that is a pastor, a president, a member of Congress, with unquestioning loyalty, that's the moment at which we have to question whether we're truly following our beliefs or whether we're in love with some other source of power.

Jennifer Butler:
And so for me, I always walk into a meeting or into any advocacy work with a visionary questioning approach. Never walk lock step with any elected leader or earthly leader. And so I've tried to scrutinize everything we do. Are we committing idolatry here? That's an important spiritual practice.

George Mason:
Well, and I think it should be known that the Faith in Public Life group was formed in 2004, not as a reaction against a conservative Republican who would be elected to be our president and a new administration, but actually on the heels of Barack Obama's election. So it's not like this was a resistance matter to the Democratic party or to the Republican party, either one. It was something whose time had come in terms of having people of faith becoming more involved in public life.

Jennifer Butler:
We very much have worked across the aisle over the years, and we pride ourselves on working with people who we don't agree with on every issue. And that's really important to us. But we find the areas where we do agree and where our values send us in the same direction. And we realize that in working together on issues where we do agree, we build trust and we build relationships, so we can wrestle on the more difficult conversations that we need to have.

George Mason:
Wonderful. Well, what are a few of the things that are on your immediate agenda right now that you would make people aware of if they wanted to join the network and become part of this movement?

Jennifer Butler:
Well, we're going to be advocating all year long on restoring our democracy and protecting voting rights. And so there are a number of bills coming to Congress where we can shore up our voting system. A lot of folks don't realize that in 2013, the Voting Rights Act was gutted. And so right after that, a number of laws came forward and were blocking people from the polls. And we're going to be sure that every vote matters and every vote counts. We're concerned about COVID and about growing economic instability and how to protect the least of these in our COVID policies and economic policies. And those are going to be very much top of mind.

George Mason:
Very good. So Faith in Public Life, Google it, find the website, join the movement if you feel led to do so. And the leader of that movement is the Reverend Jennifer Butler, also the author of Who Stole My Bible, and you can pick this up on Amazon and I'm sure other places as well. Jen, thank you so much for being with us on Good God, for all the ways in which you are helping to lead this movement of people of faith in public life.

Jennifer Butler:
Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation.

George Mason:
Thanks so much.

Speaker 3:
Good god is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White. Social media coordination by Cameron Vickery. Good God, Conversations with George Mason is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2021 by Faith Commons.