Episode 13 Transcript

Ryan:

I'm here today with Anthony Bradley, professor of religious studies and director of the Center for the Study of Human Flourishing at the King's College in New York city. Anthony, welcome.

Anthony:

Thanks for having me.

Ryan:

Anthony is also the rare truly interdisciplinary scholar. Not only does he have his PhD in historical and theological studies from Westminster Theological Seminary, but also he is a licensed pastor and has a master's in criminal justice from John Jay College, a master's in ethics and society from Fordham University—and I see that you also were a biology student.

Anthony:

I was, I was, that was my major. And I had a brief career as a chemist. I was a pharmaceutical chemist before I switched disciplines.

Ryan:

Yeah, so genuinely interdisciplinary, and his work really bears that out. One of the things that struck me in your work, Anthony, is that your acknowledgements in at least one of your books, talk a lot about people who have helped you be a better writer. And this is something that every writer experiences, and every academic writer experiences, but you rarely see it in acknowledgements. It's as if we all just sort of like, you know, matriculated in the profession, knowing how to be good writers. So what was your reasoning behind exposing yourself as someone who needs help writing?

Anthony:

That's a fantastic question. I think it was just sort of the epistemic humility to know that other people make me sound smart, right? I mean, when I rely on people who are better at words than I am, it really does allow me to present my ideas in ways that really make a community better. I first experienced the value of this—and this is when I was sold—it actually wasn't from publishing books; It was from writing op-eds. And I would write these newspaper op-eds, and the editor would just tear it up, right? And so I'm thinking, I have a PhD. Come on, I know how to do this. But what I noticed is that when my editor would rip it up and help me rephrase it, it actually was better. And I thought, huh, you mean editors make me better? And that was sort of, it was sort of the entering in the humility of saying, hmmm, I'm not perfect. I'm not omniscient. And actually when I submit myself to people who have good skills and different eyes, they actually improve the quality of my work. So I'm at a point now where I only submit things that are pre-edited. And when I submit a book manuscript, I pay out of pocket to have somebody copy edit it first, before I send it to the publisher for the final copy.

Ryan:

You're a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, America's first Black fraternity. How did Alpha Phi Alpha start? And what does it mean to you to be a member?

Anthony:

Great question. So that fraternity started in 1906 at Cornell university. And for me it's a part of my family history. I was raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was raised in a community of people who were basically middle-class, but a lot of graduates of Spelman and Morehouse College, HBCUs in Atlanta. And in the church community where I was raised, most of the African Americans who were professionals were members of Black Greek organizations, and Alpha Phi Alpha was one of those. Famous people that might come to mind might be… Martin Luther King was a member of that fraternity, Thurgood Marshall, men like that. And so for me to be in a legacy of Black men who saw themselves as wanting to make a difference in mind, body, and soul was really important to me. So I wanted to make sure that I had some really important tie back to the community that raised me, and these Greek organizations had a role in that. So it really helps me keep myself grounded and a foot firmly planted in issues relating to the Black community.

Ryan:

A lot of, some of my students feel, as they approach graduation, torn between two ideals. One is to be successful in New York City, right? Let's let that stand in for meritocratic success. And the other is to move into a house down the street from their parents, and get married and raise kids and have a comfortable suburban existence. What considerations should a student like that have?

Anthony:

I'm actually burdened pretty heavily for this on the part of Gen Z and younger millennials, because they get berated with mixed messages. On the one hand, you need to go do something amazing, right? You need to go change the world, climb a mountain, pursue your dreams, find a passion, and go kill it out in the marketplace. And then they get this other message of, well, you want a good life. You want kids and a family and soccer and all the good things that you had. And they're really torn between that.

And what I've seen, just with our own alumni who live in the city—I would say that I'm impressed that a lot of Gen Zers now are making decisions based on place and relationships rather than a career and upward mobility, in terms of career advancement. And what I'm finding is what really matters is your quality of life, and if you're able to have good friendships, good connection, good community, you're going to have a much more fulfilling life than simply making a lot of money and being disconnected from other people.

And in so far as students can craft their next steps out of college in ways that that allow them to have the best relationships they can have—they actually don't need the perfect job. They don't need the perfect career, because there's so many more things in life that are fulfilling than going to work and being productive in an office building. And I think those relational aspects, those community aspects, that connection of having close friends with whom you laugh, and cry, and share dreams and fears, with whom you can do nothing with—I mean, those are the relationships that make life matter and allow you to persevere through the seasons of difficulty and challenge and celebration.

Ryan:

Carry the same theme over into Christian culture. In 2013, you tweeted “Being a radical missional Christian is slowly becoming the new legalism. We need more ordinary God and people lovers.” Is that a trend that you're still seeing happen? And what does that look like?

Anthony:

So there's sort of been a bit of a transition, right? The millennial generation was often characterized as wrestling with production-based narcissism, that you're loved and valued on the basis of what you can do in your production.

And so lots of aspirations to do something amazing for God, right? You can't just be the sort of Christian that's mentioned in Thessalonians, where it says, “make it your ambition to live a quiet life, and work with your hands, and to mind your own business.” That's what it says. And what I noticed is that no one ever motivated young people to just be normal, and to mind their own business, and to work with their hands, and to live a quiet life, to actually have that as an aspiration.

What I found is—and this really hit me when I saw students literally having anxiety attacks in my office because of the performance pressure to go do something amazing, and they didn't want to do anything amazing. They basically wanted to get married, have kids, get a minivan, have a barbecue, and be involved in ballet and soccer. And I'm saying, that's great! But this idea that you have to do something extraordinary and amazing and noteworthy, actually created this idea that your value comes from your performance. Your acceptance comes because of your performance. And even in the Christian context, your acceptance to God is based on how well you do amazing things for God.

And I was basically seeing as a theologian, like, the Bible doesn't say that at all! In fact, the Bible encourages people to do the opposite, right? To scale it back, to tone it down, and to really invest oneself in the things that actually matter, which has much more to do with loving those around you and focusing on the development of your character.

Ryan:

Why does the concept or the category of poor white trash exist? If you're a white supremacist, isn't it enough just to have light skin?

Anthony:

That's a good question. I think what I've noticed is that poor white people often get ignored when we think about public policy. And this hit me a few years ago—I read this book called The Redneck Manifesto, which was a book written to highlight the fact that lower-class white people in this country, the people that we mock, who live in trailer parks and things like this, they have often the same sorts of pathologies that we attribute to inner-city areas. And there's also a lot of pain and struggle and suffering in those lower-income communities as well, but our attention is often placed on cities.

And so that term white trash (and there are other synonyms: redneck, cracker, things like that), those sorts of synonyms really started in the mid-18th century, when upper-class elites in this country were simply trying to figure out why it is that the working-class whites would not aspire to be more intellectually accomplished or to have higher standards of living. It was a way that the elite could separate themselves from the other. It was an othering mechanism.

And essentially you had from the UK—well, from what we call now the UK—the British oppress, as we all know, the Scotts and the Irish. And so when the Brits came over and the Scotch Irish migrated, the same sorts of tensions that were prevalent over there between the Brits and the Scotch, and the Scotch and the Irish, they basically exported all those over here. When they came over here, you had those same frigid dynamics. And that's how we got to the term hillbillies, right?

The hillbillies were descendants of William of Orange. And when they came, migrated over to us, they were called the Billies. They're actually called the Billies over there in Northern Ireland. When they migrated over, these upper-class elite essentially push them out into the rural areas. And that's how we got the term hillbillies. So there's a narrative in this country about lower-class white culture that has been unexplored. And I think it probably explains a lot of our political tensions today.

Ryan:

The largest eugenics sterilization project in United States history was focused on Appalachian “white trash.” Why was it seen as necessary to control specifically the reproductive capabilities of the Appalachian poor? Is this a carryover from chattel slavery, that a certain kind of reproductive control of enslaved Black people is now being imposed on the poor white people?

Anthony: I think it had more to do with the advances in the progressive era from the late 19th century. It had a lot more economic motivations and simply carry over, because it began in the UK as well. The eugenics movement began really in this conversation between the English and Americans.

And so what happened? It was during the progressive era—I tell the joke that the industrial revolution was “picking up steam.” And then I pause, and no one laughs. That's how that goes! So, the industrial revolution was picking up steam, and what was noted, particularly in the Northeast and these industrial cities, is that there's this group of people who are basically slowing progress and getting in the way, and that we would advance much faster if we removed the sort of bottom quintile from our population. This is a kind of social Darwinism, right? We allow the fittest to reproduce, and if we remove those that aren't fit, we will make even more progress.

Now, this was came to an abrupt end with World War II, but in the beginning of the 20th century, they were forcibly sterilizing thousands of lower-class white women, calling them feebleminded, because they did not want this population to slow down all of this industrial progress you were making in the West, and in particular in the US and in Britain.

Now what's also really terrible to think about is the connection—there's a great book called Hitler's American Model—is that the Germans Studied the American Jim Crow system and began to research eugenics. And that was the birthplace of the program that the Nazis used to exterminate the Jews. And so what we learned in the book Hitler's American Model is how, it's basically the Third Reich of the Nazis used American eugenics and the Jim Crow system to model their oppression of the Jews in Germany.

Ryan:

So there's a particular narrative that I think plays a prominent role in arguments for colorblindness. And this is that, waves of immigrants from all parts of the world came over to the US and initially were viewed as colored, racial others. So there's this whole category of the “Black Irish.” And you just described a kind of racialized oppression of the Scotch Irish, who came to the US. So first of all, how does an immigrant class become white? And then, if it weren't for the fact that they did have pale skin, would they have been able to become white?

Anthony:

That’s a great question. The second one: I would have to say no, I don't think you could become white. What a lot of people probably don't realize is that whiteness as we know it now is really a post-World War II category.

You had to earn the right to be white. In fact, if you were of English descent, that was really the only class of people who were considered truly white. Everybody else had to earn it. So this is one of the reasons why so many immigrants had to change their last names from the Jewish, from the Italian, Polish, Greek names that they [came] with, because that was part of their process of becoming white. What's really tragic about that history is that one of the ways in which immigrants from Western Europe could sort of prove their whiteness was to disassociate themselves, if not oppress African Americans. In fact, there's lots of good research on this that shows that one of the first things that immigrants learned when they came in the early 20th century was racial slurs against African Americans. So, if you could basically prove that you weren't Black, that was the gateway into proving that you were white.

And there are terrible stories of Greeks being chased down in Chicago by these lynch mobs, and these guys yelling out “I'm not Black; I'm Greek,” As a way to say no, you got the wrong guy. And so as long as you could disassociate yourself from African Americans, you could achieve whiteness.

But what really allowed whiteness to be the thing that we have right now was World War II. Because for the first time, you had all of these immigrant groups bound together, working together for the same cause. And what happened? You had guys on the line in these trenches who learned, “Wow, my dad said Italians were like this and that and Polish people were like this and this. And you're not like that at all. You're like me. We're both white, right?”

But you didn't have that, because African Americans weren't integrated. So they didn't even have the opportunity to work side by side with other soldiers, to be seen as the same. World

War II equalized whiteness in ways that wouldn't have happened otherwise. So when we came back from World War II, you had basically two classes of people. You had the colored, Negro race, as it was called then, and white people. And whiteness as a new category, back then, was opened up, in the 1950s, to include all these immigrant communities that would not have been considered white.

And last point here, if anyone watches the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, you'll see there's a character in that sitcom, Archie Bunker. It's set in Brooklyn, 1970s. He's a white guy, lived in Brooklyn, has a blue-collar job, and you can see the last stages, the remnants of the distinctions between whiteness on that show, as he talks about the Polaks, as he talks about the Italians, as he talks about the Greeks, things like that. And where we are today, it took us a war to get to, as we worked out these categories between us.

Ryan:

In the public school district that my family lives in, there seems to be an ideological divide between—well, first of all, there's a kind of de facto segregation between two elementary schools. One is up the hill and one's down the hill. The one up the hill is 90% white, the one down the Hill, 90% Black, or 95%, I think, actually. There's a huge discrepancy in test scores and overall performance between these two schools. And so there's this ideological divide between those who look at the low test scores of Black students and say that the school is failing, or the school system is failing, to provide them with an equitable education, on the one hand. And then there's those who look at those scores and say that they are evidence of a lack of parental involvement. But what I don't hear in this debate is the role that trauma plays in many children's lives and in many poor children's lives. And in our school district, that typically means many Black children's lives. How does childhood trauma affect educational outcomes?

Anthony:

That's a great question. I think that a student's experience of sheltering in place during COVID may make this may make more sense to them in ways that it may not have earlier. Right? Like so many of my students were not able to concentrate. They weren't able to focus. They were often distracted because they were trying to complete their coursework back at home with three or four siblings, two dogs, a cat, parents, right there, all this activity. And they couldn't get their work done because of all the distractions. Well, you can think of trauma as a distraction in the sense that your brain loops, recounts really terrible traumatic events, and triggers actually impair your capacity to function.

When I was a high school, I taught high school part time when I was finishing up my PhD. And I'll never forget this one student from the city of Philadelphia. The school I was teaching was right on the line of private school between the county and the city. So we got both communities. Philadelphia is the only city I know in the country where the public school buses all kids to school, public or private. So because of that, our private school was able to get a lot of kids from downtown, inner city Philadelphia.

I had this student, brilliant student, absolutely brilliant student, probably one of the smartest ones I've ever had, Puerto Rican kid. I remember one day I asked him about his homework, and he didn't have it. And of course, as a teacher, you're going to chastise a student because he didn't have his homework. But I took him out in the hallway, and I'm like, “Hey, where's your homework?” He starts crying, and I asked him, what what's going on? And basically, someone had been murdered in front of his building, and the blood is still on the sidewalk. And the body tape is around where the body was. And he had to walk through that to get in his apartment. And he was so shaken up by the fact that a human being died in front of the building, that he wasn't able to focus. And the idea, I think, for someone like me, who grew up in a very quote unquote boring middle-class home, where there was no trauma, no drama… I mean, the only drama was like, we're going to have pizza tonight or cheeseburgers. And that was like the big traumatic event. When you live in a very comfortable setting, you don't realize what's not happening to you that's happening to others.

And so children who grow up in very chaotic, very painful, physically abusive, sexually abusive, violent contexts actually don't have the capacity to study and focus and get work done. And then secondly, they often don't get the help they need in terms of mental health services to come back to a place of agency so that they can actually be productive. So what you tend to find, and this should be in some ways be an intuitive correlation, is that students that experienced very high amounts of trauma and abuse also struggle the most in school.

Ryan:

What would trauma-informed Christian youth ministry look like?

Anthony:

I think if we were thinking about the fact that a lot of children do come from trauma, I think that we would be more patient with the expectations that we have of them, and that we would really interpret much of their behavior in light of their trauma, rather than interpreting your behavior in light of something like deviance, or rebellion, or something like that.

I'll give you an example. I did youth ministry for 14 years. One of the things that we noticed in the church context especially for high school boys, is that whenever a boy grew his hair out over his face, kind of over his eyes, and became a heavy, heavy marijuana user—in almost every single instance of that I've ever seen, he had very broken issues with his dad. So lots of high school boys to process will numb the pain of their fathers, numb brokenness, by using drugs and alcohol, by abusing drugs and alcohol. And so I think a trauma-informed approach would say, hey, the goal is not behaviorism, where we sort of get the kid to be good. The goal is to help him deal with the brokenness and trauma of his family. Right? Maybe when we deal with the real core issue, it actually will address the issues that affect the behaviors that we see are actually undermining their thriving. And then you get the proper help.

Ryan:

You've written that Black theological scholars are able to offer unique contributions to the practice of faith and applications of the biblical text, given the knowledge that our experience of the Trinity is shaped sociologically as well as biblically. Can you say more about this? What does it mean for Black Christians’ experience of the Trinity to be shaped sociologically?

Anthony:

Yeah, I think at least in the Black context, you're thinking about who is God, and what does God intend for his world and his people. And it's actually, I think, fair to the text to recognize—when I say the text, I mean the biblical text—it's fair to recognize that our social location has a lot to do with our interpretation of the Scriptures, our approach to the Bible has a lot to do with our social location, where we are, how we lived, how we're raised. As human beings, right, we bring those things to texts, bring those backgrounds to texts. A

And in the Black experience, because of histories of our oppression and things like that, the experience that was brought to the text highlights the Old Testament narrative, where God is a restorer and liberator of the oppressed. And so in the Black experience, there is much more affinity to Israel, in relating to God as the God of Israel who saved them from Pharaoh, right? Who fought their battles for them and provided justice and mercy on their behalf. That's the God in the Black experience that comes to recognize what the Trinity is. You have the Father, who's protecting and guiding his children. You have the Son, who provided both forgiveness and resurrection, power to enable his people to fight against the evils that are out there in the world. You have the Spirit, that actually empowers and provides the tools by which God's people can actually enter in to fighting against injustice and evil.

And that Old Testament God, the God who rescues because of his grace and mercy, that's the God that was heavily leaned on during the civil rights movement. And so if you listen to a lot of the sermons of people like Martin Luther King Jr., if you read the text, there are going to be more images from the Old Testament narrative than there are going to be references and images that are brought from the New Testament. So that position of oppression and being on the margins highlights certain parts of the Biblical story over others. And that's how the Black experience really engaged so much with that redemptive story

Ryan:

Narcissism among Christians is a common theme in your work. What is missional narcissism and what are the alternatives?

Anthony:

This was highlighted—there's a book by Jean Twenge called The Narcissism Epidemic, where she highlights that, at least for millennials—there's always debate on which was the worst generation ever, right? But there's really good data that indicates, if you look at the DSM-5, the diagnostic manual of psychology, and the attributes for clinical narcissism—what psychologists began to note, probably beginning in the early 2000s, is the number of cases of narcissism. And what they begin to see is that so much of what the millennial culture was embracing, being vulnerable to, were some of the symptoms of clinical narcissism. They're sort of leaning that way.

And so I basically connected the dots because of what I saw in a lot of Christian culture. Again, this idea that you are amazing, and not only that, our local church is amazing. And if we are not here, the world is going to suffer. It's an idea that we are incredibly important. We matter; we are the ones changing and shifting our society and culture. I, myself, as an individual is brilliantly awesome. Not because of anything I did; I've just been told that. And so we created a situation where a lot of evangelicalism, a lot of conservative evangelicals believe they're the most important people in the world, and they're the most important Christians in the world. A lot of them think that their little local church of 200 people is the most important church in the whole city, and that they don't need to work with anybody else because they're self contained and amazing. And I begin to see trends of both individuals believing that they're awesome, and these churches also believe in that. They're just the most amazing thing. And what's absent is the focus on humility. Like, what happened to that virtue? It's almost disappeared in a culture that values performance and materialism and influence and power and things like that.

And so what I saw were Christians really being vulnerable to caring about those very same things instead of the classic cardinal virtues, which I think allows people to live much better lives.

Ryan:

You've talked about a kind of dilemma of Black evangelicals, having the difficult burden of having to navigate between four worlds: the several-hundred-year-old well-established Black church universe, the evangelical church subculture, mainstream Black culture, and mainstream Anglo-oriented American culture. Tell me about this experience.

Anthony:

Yeah, that's it's really, really important. Anyone who is in a racial minority group, we'll be able to relate to this in America. If you're not a member of the dominant culture, you have to basically be experts on your dominant culture, right? So your culture and the dominant culture, because you are in and out of it all the time, right? You participate and remove yourself. So if you are a minority, you basically have to be experts on all the intricacies of your own subculture and all the intricacies of the dominant culture. In religious context, it adds another layer because you also then have to know all the norms of your subculture’s religious practices and the norms of the dominant culture’s religious practices as well. So the intersection of those things can be quite maddening, neurotic, and time consuming.

For me, what does it mean? I basically have to know all the music. I've got to know, on the one hand, Drake, Rihanna—on the other hand, Taylor Swift and pop culture stuff over there. And then not only that—when I go to a white church, I have to basically sing the songs that they sing, like “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” Christian contemporary music out of Nashville. But then when I go to a Black church, I have to be able to change the key, completely change the cadence, change the rhythm, and sing “This Little Light of Mine,” in a completely different way, or I have to know all the Negro spirituals and hymns that aren't written down anywhere.

That can be—it's just so exhausting and time consuming to have to be experts at Black church culture, Black church music, regular Black culture. So Chris Rock and Erykah Badu, but then I've also got to read The Onion and be able to talk about reruns of Friends and Seinfeld and stuff like that. I have to know all this stuff in order to navigate between these two worlds.

Ryan:

Exhaustion and tiredness seems to be a theme that I'm seeing a good bit these days on Black Twitter. I think in your early work, you wrote about tiredness as an affect that colors everything. Can you say a little bit more about what's the—you're not saying that you don't have enough sleep, you're talking about—is there something that various experiences of exhaustion and tiredness have in common, and that is particularly a part of the your experience of Black Christianity or Black life?

Anthony:

There's that phrase, “race battle fatigue.” When I first read that, I thought, what does that mean? And then I read the article and sat for about two minutes, and I was like, that's it, that explains it. What happens is that you basically–think about bandwidth or maybe gasoline in a gas tank. You extend so much energy talking about race issues, and your tank gets empty, and you can't get it refueled. There’s not even an opportunity to, because you're always talking about race, like, ah, again, again, and again and again and again and again, and you just get exhausted. It just wears you out mentally to not be able to not talk about race.

And I think this is one of the reasons why all the Black kids sit together at lunch—or when I graduated from Clemson University, when I was at Clemson, all the Black students sat in one section of a dining hall. Why is that? Why do we do that at Clemson? Because for at least one meal of the day at dinner time, we weren't Black. We were just people, and we didn't have to talk about race. We didn't have to talk about racial tensions. We didn't have to talk about anything else; we can just sort of be.

And being able to just sort of be and take a break from being Black, I think, really speaks to why so many people are exhausted right now, because you're not able to take a break. It's just this constant barrage of issues. And we're talking about it again, and again, and again, year, after year, after year, and people are completely worn out about talking about the exact same thing again, and again, and again.

Ryan:

I was talking to a neighbor recently, and he said, “I'm getting the feeling that this time is different, that something's happening.” He's expressed to me before similar exhaustion, but he was saying, “I'm getting the feeling that people are finally starting to hear what we've been saying.” Do you have a feeling that this is some kind of inflection point?

Anthony:

Absolutely. I've talked to several friends, colleagues, Black scholars. They were all saying the same thing. This seems to be very, very different. The duration alone is pretty historic. Thomas Sugrue, who's a historian at NYU, he said that this could be the first time in American history we've had this level of protest last this long in every state in the country. We just haven't seen anything like this. So there is a sense that this is very different, and there are multiple conditions that probably contributed to this being different: shelter in place, the advent of social media, cameras on phones, those sorts of things. People not being able to be distracted by sports, the constant news cycle, that timing on all these things probably added to this. So it's just so fascinating to think about.

This is one of the first times, I would say since… And this is a new idea—I'm just thinking about it right now! I think this is one of the first times, I'd say maybe since the eighties, early nineties, where the entire country was focused on the same thing. The advent and the introduction of cable television really did disperse the way that we consumed media. And what we saw as we got into the 1990s is that as the options increased, as the internet expanded, as people had more, more places to go, and they were receiving different streams of information, you could be blind to lots of things, totally blind. You could be completely cut off from a lot of the realities. But I think because of the constant news cycle, the constant posts on Instagram, and Twitter, and Snapchat, and Facebook, there was the content swirl that forced everybody to focus on this. It was impossible to be on any social-media platform and not be confronted with this. It was impossible to log on to any of your favorite news networks and not be confronted on this issue. It was everywhere. I think it really seared itself in people's consciences in ways because everybody was experiencing it together.

So we'll see. I'm not able to predict what it will look like. We'll see in the next six months to a year, two years, or maybe longer, what fruit will be born from all of us collectively.

Ryan:

What is a criminal?

Anthony:

Whew, that's a complicated question. It depends on who you ask. Typically, criminals… I guess the basic definition would be someone who's committed a crime, actually broken a law, which basically means we're all criminals, because we all break laws all the time. So I'd say a criminal is everyone. And everyone is a criminal. The difference is that some of us go to jail and prison, and some of us don't. Whatever state you're in, if you check the laws in your state, there are hundreds of them, and you have broken one. And by the time that the sun rises tomorrow, you would have broken a few of them, even in your own home you would have broken some laws. So we live in a country of criminals; we're all criminals. But some of us have to pay for our crimes and some don't.

Ryan:

I was listening this week to the economist Tyler Cowen's conversation with legal scholar and criminal-justice reformer Rachel Harmon, and Cowen repeatedly asked Harmon, what technocratic tweak could we make to the criminal justice system that would produce the most bang for the buck, so to speak. And Harmon kept resisting the questions. So one takeaway from this conversation would be that the problems are so complex and intractable that a marginal revolution is not possible, that it is not possible to change policies around the margins and hope for meaningful reform. But another explanation that occurred to me could be that technocratic solutions don't address people as persons. I know that you have drawn a lot on the personalist tradition. So how is a personalist approach to criminal-justice reform different from a legal and technocratic reform?

Anthony:

The personalist tradition works on building systems and structures that are concimitant with the virtues of what it means to be human. And so human dignity becomes the telos of the entire system. So you're thinking about ways in which the criminal justice system undergirds, promotes, ennobles human dignity—not dehumanization. So the point of punishment, I would say retribution, is actually humanizing the person. This isn't rehabilitating them. Or it’s just propping them up get a job. But thinking about ways to restore the dehumanizing aspects of people that often lead to criminal deviance.

And if we thought about the criminal justice system from the person up, rather than from policy-down, opinions down, political ideology down—if we thought about it from the person up, we would first begin with the virtues of what it means to be human. And then we would extrapolate out and think about the ways in which to organize, to create a justice system that actually humanizes both perpetrators and victims, and humanizes local communities, so that we can restore people that have broken the social contract back to civil society. Which is really what we want.

Of course, there are some cases that are so egregious they have to be removed from the community permanently. But if the goal is rehumanizing people, then it changes how we process them through the system. It changes how we arrest them. It changes how we build prisons, the architecture. It changes the way we dress them. It changes how we feed them. It changes how we counsel, how we parole. It redirects, reorganizes the ways in which we think about all of those contact points, to see if those contact points are making the person more human.

And if anyone's ever been to a prison or jail, the architecture alone will make you a worse person. And there should be no expectation that anyone who goes to a maximum-security prison, living in the architecture of that, is going to come out better. Right? Human beings, the way that we're made, we need certain inputs, because those things form us. And not only that, environmental inputs—those things do form us.

And humanizing the ways in which we treat inmates can actually change the way that the time away from the community allows him to successfully reenter and thrive. So there's a, there's a small movement in architecture right now, thinking about redesigning prisons in ways that foster things like lots of natural light, lots of green space, meals that are actually good. And it's not because people who commit crimes deserve the Club Med of prisons, but people who commit crimes need to be restored so that their humanity can make a contribution to the common good later. You don't want them to remain criminals or to remain in criminality. You want them to make transitions out of those, and something as simple as building architecture can have a massive effect in that.

We've seen that in some of the Nordic countries where they built prisons in ways that are quite beautiful, they've had great recidivism data from people who served time in those facilities.

Ryan:

You've argued that a major missing piece in criminal justice reform is getting civil society involved. So civil society is made up of mediating institutions, forms of voluntary association that occupy space between families and government, things like labor unions, churches, sports leagues, fraternities. But we're living through a steep decline in precisely these kinds of association. So what's the answer, new forms of civil society, renewal of the old forms? What shows the most promise to you today?

Anthony:

I think it's really fascinating to think about the Black Lives Matter protests that are happening now. That was initiated by a civil society institution and was able to really captivate on the heels of George Floyd’s death. The Black Lives Matter movement as a nonprofit was able to organize through various media forms all sorts of protests. As a protest crew, they were able to really capture that. And that's what civil-society institutions can do—they can rally people in local ways to do amazing things, to make their communities better.

I think this generation, in particular, of college students and young adults, they seem to have more interest in nonprofit capacities, both internationally and locally. They seem to be more interested in what nonprofits can do or interested in starting and participating in nonprofits. And that's the right direction. That's the right way to say, how can we provide alternatives to introducing solutions to my local community, that allow citizens and neighbors to actually participate in making their communities better and to make contributions of the common good.

Because it's not really the burden, the way our country was set up, it's not really the burden of government to produce and create human flourishing. The states, they’re to provide the structure in which human flourishing can happen, but really it's the institutions of civil society that are the engine of human flourishing. What we've done in the West, beginning in the late 19th century, around the 1860s with Otto von Bismarck, as he was trying to fight off Marxism, is that we began to rely more and more on the state to create, to actually produce a human flourishing. And so I think if we're able to think locally about the ways that the various spheres that we participate in are actually making our communities better, they're making our neighborhoods better, they're making our city better, so that we aren't reliant on the depersonalized ways in which those things tend to happen, through the means of state programming and federal programming.

And so I'm hopeful of not recapturing the old, necessarily, institutions, but recapturing the spirit of local compassion and care and love for neighbors. When you connect with people in your own community block, by creating those third places that really facilitate people's thriving and allow them to live well, enjoy life, and connect with their neighbors so that the whole town, city, county I can can flourish and thrive—and to do that locally, together, I think, is probably where we're going to see some of the best advances in this area.

Ryan:

So where does the church fit into this, and individual congregations? I've been seeing a lot of expressions of frustration and outrage: Why wasn't the church leading the charge here? Why are churches following along? Why (from some conservative circles) are evangelical pastors getting involved in Black Lives Matter—shouldn't they have long ago been anti-racist on their own terms? But at the same time, as I've been reading your work, you're very cautious about congregations and the church at large taking on a kind of missional narcissism, savior complex. And so I'm really curious—I don't know how you're going to respond to this question of, what should churches be doing? And what should they have been doing?

Anthony:

I think what's happened is that we're facing the basic struggle that Christians have often, I would say always have, even since AD 33—it’s, what's the relationship between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world. You can take it all the way back to Augustine. That's been the great tension point. And we're still trying to figure that out today. it's a mystery, because we're in this world, but not of the world, if you're a Christian. And so that's just the basic tension and way in which we live. When it comes to issues like this, the Christian tradition is full of examples of where churches are encouraged to exercise prudence and to think about their capacity to help as an organization, as an institution, or to send individuals into particular places to bring about change and the common good.

So what I would say in terms of that, is that I think some churches in some cities rather than some counties and some cities, probably should sit and listen right now. And I think there are some churches and some cities who actually should be in the middle if not leading their communities, and healing and being places of reconciliation and restoration. I think local churches have not done a good job of seeing themselves as community centers, and seeing that the building that they're in can play a massive role in facilitating resolution of all sorts of conflicts and tensions in the community.

And the church can really lead in that. I think churches have the staff holding and the categories to really invite the community to resolve many of the issues that plague them. But most churches doors are closed throughout the week. Right? Maybe Wednesday night it's open for youth group, Bible study, but what's your building for on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday? And could you be using it as a way to resolve many of the issues that people are having in their local communities, and to bring the city officials into a neutral place? Those conversations and problem-solving sessions can happen. I think that that's a really good way that churches can be involved without having to take a position. It's that churches can create the space for the conversation, dialogue, for the discovery process to happen so that communities can arrive at effective solutions.

On the other hand, it just depends on where it is, I think. Some churches, pastors who were advocating especially against particular instances of violations of human rights and human dignity, need to be on the forefront, being involved in issues that are reminding the community that X or Y is wrong, and explain to them why it's wrong, and to lead people in thinking about ways to institute and apply the best framework of justice to rectify remedy, address redress. Those really gross violations of human rights and human dignity.

Ryan:

I canvassed listeners for questions for you, and one listener familiar with your work asks, what would be a personalist analysis of the Black Lives Matter movement—acknowledging that the Black Lives Matter movement is not a monolithic movement, but maybe the parts of it that are most intelligible to you.

Anthony:

If you go to the Black Lives Matter site and you read their mission statement and values, it's not very personalized. It's issue driven. And so the personal school, again, is going to think about building ways of providing justification for Black lives based on anthropology, based on human dignity. So one of the things I wrote a few years ago—and this is not overly creative—I said Black lives matter because Black lives were persons. And when we think about what it means to be a person, whatever it is about Black life applies to that. And the extent to which Black lives are not able to experience personhood, those may be opportunities for us to highlight injustice and to create ways to intervene so that Black lives can experience humanity, so they can experience personhood. So a personalist approach to Black Lives Matter is going to think about the ways in which Black lives are being encouraged or undermined from embracing very, very basic attributes of being human.

Ryan:

One of the things I appreciate about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is that he explicitly acknowledges the theological and ecclesiological underpinnings of the African-American struggle in the civil rights movement of the 20th century. And he rejects Christianity as a resource for liberation. Instead, he argues that American Blacks have to de-Christianize and de-theologize their struggle. It's an impressively forthright anti-theological book. Now there are of course historical reasons for Black people to be suspicious of and to reject Christianity. But Coates is speaking theologically, and it seems to me that he rightly targets hope as the doctrine of Christianity most at odds with his pessimistic account of Blackness and the legacy of slavery in America. Is Christianity necessarily at odds with various forms of Afro-pessimism, or is there something to be learned from Afro-pessimism that can be described and comprehended in biblical and theological terms?

Anthony:

That's a wonderful question. I think Afro-pessimism really is an asset in so far as it clearly exposes the weaknesses of white, Western Christianity. And perhaps what he really means is that the white, Western presentation of Christianity is that which ought to be rejected. I wonder if he were familiar with Eastern Christianity, if he would make the same claims, because of the ways in which Eastern Christianity developed theologically and the sorts of emphases that the Eastern Church actually has. So Afro-pessimism is, I would say, an asset. And highlighting that, I would not conflate Christianity, the 2000-year-old historical tradition, with the specific form that was delivered through Western Europe. Those are not the same thing, right? And so I think Western European articulations of Christianity—because it was done by mortals with blind spots, influenced by their own social and historical location—it packages Christianity in a certain way, for a certain community, for a certain time. And in the US we simply, in many traditions, just adopted that and continue to do two things. One is that we regurgitate them. Maybe that may be too strong. We repeat the things that are good, but I think we're also repeating and embracing some of the blind spots as well. And I think that the challenge is that we often accept a Western theological canon as a closed canon, without any gaps or blind spots or core flaws, instead of interrogating it and trying to strengthen it by highlighting those flaws and trying to come up with creative ways to address them. I think if Christians across the world were talking to each other and helping each other with each other's blind spots, I think that we would actually get a fuller picture of what Christianity actually is, that actually fits with the biblical story itself and what the ancient creeds were intending to communicate in the first few centuries after Christ’s resurrection.

Ryan:

Is there a point at which a robust Christian doctrine of hope would have to come into conflict with Afro-pessimism?

Anthony:

Yeah, I think hope is going to force you to think about, to whom or to what are you putting your hope in? And because Afro-pessimism is anti-supernatural and presupposes God's non-existence, that's going to be the point at which the discussion about the existence of God is going to have to be raised. Because hope is a means of approaching and experiencing a certain telos. It's telling a story. Hope is situated in a narrative and a story. And if you reject the story, then the appeals to hope don't make a lot of sense. I think that's what made the civil rights movement different between the Black Power movement and the Christian version of the movement that we got from Dr. King. Because the Christian themes of hope are actually derived from a hope of the resurrection itself. And all of that entails, presupposes, and demands that people at least are open to the possibility that God actually exists. And Afro-pessimism, because it's anti-supernatural, because it presupposes God's nonexistence, is going to come into conflict with the framing of a word like hope.

Ryan:

You're the editor of the Oxford Bibliographies entry on Black liberation theology. The Oxford Bibliographies are one of my favorite resources out there, and I'm telling my students basically every week to go use them. And it's probably an under-appreciated labor of love to edit one of these, because you're constantly keeping it up. If you were to add a section on critical race theory, what would you say about the intersection of critical race theory with Black liberation theology?

Anthony:

I think it would be a small section, because if you look at the time in which a critical race theory emerged and liberation theology emerged, they were within five or ten years of each other. They are basically addressing the same issues that they were seeing in society through different disciplines. One was through religion and theology. The other was through sociology, law, social sciences. They were sort of saying the same things, using different disciplines to address those issues, so they're actually pretty similar. It's ways in which we think about particular disciplines in light of the history of Black oppression in this country, and in ways in which we construct notions of Blackness based on those historical models of, those historical histories of injustice and oppression, and to use those histories as a way to interrogate current and future theories about race and culture, about the church, about God, even, and how we move forward.

And so that section, I think, would be really sure small, because they're basically the same thing but in completely different disciplines. And they have so many similarities in the critique and in the tools that are offered to do analysis today that readers won't find much difference in the framing and the application of both of those.

Ryan:

That's fascinating. And as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong), you don't identify yourself in a very substantial way with the Black liberation theology tradition. Would that be fair to say?

Anthony:

That’s fair to say, yes.

Ryan:

And so what native resources does evangelicalism have within its own tradition for a Christian reflection on social issues and issues of race?

Anthony:

Yeah, sadly, not a lot. American evangelicalism, because it's pretty heterodox and decentralized, and unorganized (and by that I mean, there isn't a central organization of evangelicalism), the best that people can really do is pursue a particular denomination’s resources, denominational resources. I was raised in the United Methodist Church, and the Methodist Church has a ton of its own, has its own social teaching canon. I know the Lutherans have one; the Anglicans have their own. That's the best that we're going to have available to us in this country.

The Catholic tradition has the Vatican, and they have a social canon teaching that's about 200 years old, so for them it's pretty easy. You just go to the Vatican website and put in a topic and boom, it comes up.

And if you're a Protestant, the best that you can do is look at what particular denominations have said about particular issues. If you're in a non denom, you don't have any resources unless somebody in your church or your pastor comes up with something out of his or her head and just puts it on a blog. But the non denom world doesn't really have its own canon of social teaching, and they have to cherry pick their way through it.

At least denominations have thought through these issues, usually in community. And so you get better reasons for the thought-out positions because a community of people has been activated to think carefully in a very nuanced way about these really challenging issues facing the world.

Ryan:

So Vincent Lloyd has identified a natural law tradition in civil-rights-era Black theology. How would you describe the relationship between somebody like Martin Luther King Jr.'s natural law ethics and the standard form of that in Catholic social thought?

Anthony:

This actually reflects back on the discussion of personalism. Personalism has several different forums. There's one based in Thomism; there's one based in idealist philosophy; there are other versions of it. And what King learned, the version that he learned at Boston University, was more of the idealist-philosophy version of personalism. Because of that, he’s influenced by the idealist stream of personalism plus Black church tradition, which I think saved him from going off the idealist end completely, kind of pulled it back toward a more Thomistic approach, actually.

But the starting point is going to be very, very different. So in the Thomistic line, you're going to get much more emphasis on how we think about what reason tells us about the human person in light of their being created by God. The idealist position is going to be much more pragmatic and utilitarian, in terms of that. So King's use of that versus the Catholic tradition is going to overlap some, but not a whole lot, because how they got there are both very different.

My own interest in personalism and thinking about natural law in this sense is really influenced in lots of places. I'd say the biggest influence is probably going to be the Catholic tradition because that's where the work's been done. Protestants haven't really done a lot of work on personalism directly. Actually the last—I can't think of a Protestant personalist perspective being pursued directly since World War I or II. It's been a long time. The creation of the national World Council of Churches is probably the last time we had a personalist, a human-rights kind of humanism in the Protestant world. It's kind of died.

So one of my personal crusades is to bring personalism back. I've been using a lot natural law versions for that. The best I've found is Christian Smith's version at Notre Dame. His book What Is a Person? is the best. It is the best natural law introduction to what it means to be human.

Overlapped with King's work, you'll see some key differences there as well. I think, again, if MLK had not been a Christian, I think his personalism and his use of natural law would have been very different. I think that Black church tradition really did keep it in the boundaries of something that a Thomistic personalist will more likely recognize.

Ryan:

The Conference of National Black Churches is ten years old this year. What do you see as its successes? And what's the future of a coalition of Black churches?

Anthony:

It's interesting that the Black church really struggled to find its place in the Black community in terms of its role as leader. What's really been fascinating about these protests is that the churches are spectators.

Ryan:

Even the Black churches?

Anthony:

Everybody's been the spectators. They've shown up post hoc. They weren't the organizers. They show up at events that have been organized by somebody else, for the most part, and often they'll intervene. They'll step into situations and help lead. That happened in Brooklyn. At a protest in Brooklyn, a Black pastor pulled up in a van with a trailer and a microphone and started preaching. Things like that.

There are places where Black church leaders are organizing events, mainly for their own church members, but they're not really seen as community leaders like they used to be. They aren't necessarily the go-to people. Very interesting. A column came out in the Washington Post—maybe it was the Times, but I think it was the Post—Black politicians are also not seen as go-to people in terms of finding solutions and leading on this. And so this Black church caucus, I think, has an important conversation to have, by addressing their role in the Black community, and how to reestablish themselves as credible leaders of the community when it comes to issues that plague so many parts of our society.

I think what we saw after King's death in particular, and I would say with the expansion of lots of welfare programming in the 1970s, is that the Black church slowly got pushed on the margins. And by the time they got to the 1990s as a community influence or stakeholder, in a lot of places the Black church wasn't a place needed to get things done.

Ryan:

What was doing the pushing?

Anthony:

Well, it was a combination of a couple of things. One is a lot of the Black middle class left the communities. And so you had people who—the Black middle class, the kind of people like Rosa Parks and MLK—who used to live in these communities, moved out to the suburbs, but they would drive in to go to church, and then drive back out. And so their role in those communities basically dissipated.

But you also had situations where the expansion of social programming made some of the church programming irrelevant. So there's a situation here in Harlem—you saw it happen here in Harlem—lots of churches in the city used to use to run all sorts of food programs, soup kitchens, food pantries, and things like that. And then the city passed an ordinance that said that you can only distribute food that's prepared in the building.

So you'd have these mothers, all the old and retired women in the church, right? What would they do here? Go home and cook something in the sort of big, massive aluminum pans, right? And they would bring it down, and you would serve it to people who needed food. Well, that became illegal. You had to prepare the food in the building, but guess what? In order to have a kitchen that you could cook food in, it had to be a restaurant-grade kitchen.

So these small Black churches were having to put kitchens in their churches that were the same quality of a five-star restaurant in the financial district where stock brokers eat. And what it did is it inadvertently cut off this sort of programming that a lot of Black churches had in Harlem. And what happened? You also cut them off from the people that they're serving. You also cut them off from being seen as leaders. You also cut them off relationally as well. So when people are in crisis, they don't go to the church anymore, because they don't know those people. So what are they left to do? They have to go to agencies in the social service system, because the church doesn't interact with the people anymore because of the expansion of some of those programs.

So those were the two unintended consequences of African Americans moving out, and the expansion of some of these local programming and the barriers to entry that are created by regulations and ordinances and things like that.

Ryan:

Anthony Bradley, thank you so much for your time.

Anthony:

You're very welcome. Happy to be here.