Quick to Listen

For many Americans, our thoughts drift to North American’s original people only once or twice a year. But thanks to the Cleveland Indians’ World Series appearance and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, you may have thought about Native Americans at some point before our national holiday. Thanksgiving offers a critical time for many of us to reflect on our nation’s history, says Randy Woodley, a Keetoowah Cherokee and professor of faith and culture at George Fox University. “Thanksgiving is a deep mythology within the American psyche,” said Woodley, who suggests that many of us have sanitized the holiday. “For three days they had this festival and no one questions what happens after,” he said. “The story is so treacherous and ugly that our mythology only includes what we want to feel good about.” For decades and later centuries after this peaceful and celebratory meal between the Pilgrims and Native Americans, settlers clashed violently with Indians and forcibly converted them to Christianity and “civilized” them. There was little understanding from Americans that Natives had something to offer them and their culture. They still do, says Woodley: the values of generosity and consensus. Woodley joined Morgan and guest-host Richard Clark to discuss why he himself chooses to celebrate Thanksgiving, how he learned to love Jesus despite the religion’s ugly impact on his ancestors, and the uncomfortable conditions it took for settlers to share their faith with Native Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump is now the president-elect, the winner of at least 279 votes and 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, according to exit polls. Many people--including white evangelical leaders--did not see Trump’s victory coming. “I’m surprised,” said Ed Stetzer, who holds the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair for Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College. “This is an overwhelming statement. It’s a repudiation of a lot of the system and President Obama.” The election revealed a split between “rank-and-file” evangelicals and leaders. Prior to the election, more than 60 percent of pastors told LifeWay Research they were not voting for Trump or were undecided. About 1 in 5 “evangelical insiders” told World Magazine at the end of the summer that they backed Trump. “Most evangelical leaders I know are not enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump,” said Stetzer, who formerly headed LifeWay Research. Despite this split, the group still represents people the same spiritual beliefs, said Stetzer, who recently worked with the National Association of Evangelicals to create a new definition of “evangelical.” And the goal of leaders isn’t necessarily to represent those beliefs of the masses. “It’s to be prophetic,” said Stetzer. Stetzer joined Morgan and Mark to discuss the limits of the evangelical umbrella, how white evangelicals’ voting affects evangelicals of color, and why Christians aren’t listening to their leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Best-selling author and blogger Jen Hatmaker’s books are no longer sold by LifeWay Christian Stores. Last week, the national Southern Baptist bookstore chain announced that it would no longer sell Hatmaker’s books because her perspectives on LGBT issues “contradict LifeWay’s doctrinal guidelines.” LifeWay’s announcement came several days after Hatmaker commented on same-sex marriage. “From a civil rights and civil liberties side and from just a human being side, any two adults have the right to choose who they want to love,” said Hatmaker in an interview with Religion News Service. “And they should be afforded the same legal protections as any of us. I would never wish anything less for my gay friends.” LifeWay’s assertion of its theological standards on LGBT issues offers Christians clarity in a post-Obergefell world, says author and writer Rosaria Butterfield. “It isn’t just enough to tip your hat to a creed that was buttressing the gospel at a different point in time,” said Butterfield. Organizations which require employees (and at times, other individuals affiliated with them) to sign a statement of faith remind people “that there’s actually a price to be here,” said Butterfield. Butterfield joined Morgan and guest host Ted Olsen, CT’s director of editorial development, to discuss the relevance of ancient creeds, how LGBT rights affect the future of evangelical institutions, and how the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision affected society’s definition of personhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two weeks from today, Election Day will be over. But will we have a president? Yes. Well, maybe not. “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense,” GOP candidate Donald Trump said at the last presidential debate after the moderator asked if he would accept the election results. Trump’s suspicion towards the system reflects the views of 4 in 10 Americans who agreed that the election could be “stolen” from him as a result of voter fraud. This is but one area in which American democratic institutions have come into question. In recent years, law enforcement and the criminal justice system have been increasingly accused of racism and racial bias, while former Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders accused the country’s economy of being “rigged.” Some of the other rigged accusations may have merit, says Elesha Coffman, an assistant professor of history at Baylor University. But applying this term to the United States’ elections is “horrifying.” “It is unprecedented to say, ‘I don’t know, I’ll keep you in suspense,’” said Coffman. “It was profoundly undemocratic and profoundly destabilizing, and you really wonder if and when Trump goes down … what all is he taking down with him.” Coffman joins Mark and Morgan on Quick to Listen to discuss whether the Gilded Age should be seen as an aberration or norm, the problem with trying to use the criminal justice system to make a point, and whether gerrymandering leads to accusations of rigged elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After 21 years, Books & Culture will cease publication after the release of its November/December 2016 issue. "Publishing print in a digital age is hard. Publishing print that is thoughtful is even harder,” writes Christianity Today president and CEO Harold Smith in the last issue. “And as a result, all that red ink has sadly forced Christianity Today to end the exceptional run of this outstanding Christian thought journal with this issue." When Christianity Today created B&C in 1995, “some people thought Books and Culture was going to be sort of a culture war vehicle, like Chuck Colson but a little more intellectual,” said John Wilson, the first and only editor of the publication. “I honestly think that if it had been like that it would have been more financially viable, but that wasn’t the intention from the outset,” said Wilson. “…We weren’t a movement magazine.” B&C co-chair Mark Noll helped start the publication in 1994, the same year his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was released. “I’m quite depressed about the state of the world as is reflected in its closing,” said Noll, a history professor at Notre Dame University, who believes the magazine thrived because of Wilson’s vision and expertise. “John’s singular ability in an age of polemics and partisanship and gotcha-journalism was to emphasis the long-term, to be thoughtful rather than reactive, to try to bring insight rather than onslaught,” said Noll. Noll and Wilson join Mark and Morgan to discuss where B&C’s departure leaves the evangelical intellectual world, the specific conditions that made the publication possible, and how Noll’s Calvinist convictions inform his attitude towards the closure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By now, you’ve probably seen the 2005 video of Donald Trump bragging to then–Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about his aggressive groping and kissing of women. If you’re running for election as a Republican, it may have encouraged you to change your strategy. (Arizona Senator John McCain dropped his endorsement. GOP House Leader Paul Ryan has said he’ll stop campaigning for Trump.) But so far, Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporters—including James Dobson, Eric Metaxas, Tony Perkins, and Jerry Falwell—haven’t wavered in their support. (Read CT’s full report.) “The whole thing is baffling yet predictable,” said Jemar Tisby, the president and co-founder of the Reformed African American Network. While allegations of Trump’s previous sexual attacks on women currently make the news, his campaign won the primary while proposing a ban on Muslims from entering the US and attacking a Mexican-American judge for his heritage, actions indicative of a larger thread in Republican history, said Tisby. “That Donald Trump, out of 16 candidates, would end up being the nominee is on one hand utterly perplexing. On the other hand it doesn’t surprise me in the sense that what he’s playing to what has been present in the GOP for decades,” he said. But will this be true in the future? “I’ve seen a lot of people want to say ‘The Religious Right is finished. They don’t have the clout that they had,’” said Matthew Lee Anderson, the founder of Mere Orthodoxy. “I think that it’s way too premature to say that sort of thing. We do need a couple of election cycles…One of the things that I will watch very carefully will be what happens at Liberty University on November 8.” Tisby and Anderson join Morgan and Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief, Mark Galli, on Quick to Listen this week to discuss what has and has not changed for evangelicals following the latest Trump scandal, how Billy Graham’s political philosophy shaped Christian engagement, and what personal blind spots have been revealed in their own lives over the course of the election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do people have the ability to turn to God on their own initiative? Can individuals contribute to their own salvation? Did God create Jesus? These are 3 of nearly 47 positions LifeWay Research asked 3,000 Americans in a recent study for Ligonier Ministries on heresy. The study, which included a sample of 586 evangelicals, asked respondents their beliefs on 47 theological statements. When the report was released two years ago, the results indicated that many self-identified evangelicals held unorthodox views on the Trinity and salvation. This year, the National Association of Evangelicals and LifeWay Research developed a new definition of evangelical. But the results were similar. LifeWay Research director Scott McConnell doesn’t think researchers’ definition of evangelical needs to change, but he does believe the survey suggests just how “shallow many people’s beliefs are.” “The fact is that God’s message to us and God’s relationship to us is really a tapestry. Each of those threads of belief and love and relationship are woven together,” said McConnell. “It takes an individual really loving God enough to want to know this whole message and want to understand how it fits together.” One potential obstacle: People—evangelicals—don’t take or make this time to learn about God. “Sometimes, as Christians in America, we’re so busy running from one thing to another without taking the time to really closely see how this relationship with God works,” said McConnell. “I think you can see this in the variety of responses [to this survey] where people are in the right theologically on several questions and then completely missing it on others.” McConnell joined Morgan and Ted on Quick to Listen this week to discuss what contributes to Christians’ misunderstandings of the Holy Spirit, what the limits of these findings are, and if pastors should preach any differently in light of the survey results. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Katelyn Beaty is moving on. Christianity Today’s first female and youngest print managing editor, the leader of This Is Our City and founder of Her.meneutics, and one of CT’s first podcast hosts, Beaty cemented her legacy in her nine years at the organization. Katelyn spoke with Morgan and The Calling’s Richard Clark this week on Quick to Listen as they discussed the last decade. On the success of Her.meneutics: I don’t attribute that to my stealth leadership. It was really about starting a conversation, gathering more women writers, and giving them a chance to write for the print magazine…A lot of those writers ended up having a larger platform to the broader church and not just staying in their lady cocoon. On her first CT editorial calling Christians to stop bashing Hillary Clinton: “Jim Wallis liked it. I guess that’s no surprise.” On reading CT in college: “I remember printing [the editorials] off as if ‘this is the premiere Christian opinion on this topic. This is a model on cultural engagement.’” On the importance of genre: Working on this upcoming Ann Voskamp profile, for awhile I thought, ‘Should this just be a straight interview?’ She’s super interesting to listen to. Very articulate. Speaks in complete sentences which is not true of all our interview subjects. But I ultimately decided to go with the profile genre because it allowed me to draw in what others have said about her. On the internet: “I think the temptation is to look at what’s happening online and try to replicate it in a print magazine.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, we’ve been having a national conversation about candy. "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?'' states a tweet posted by Donald Trump Jr. earlier this week. "That's our Syrian refugee problem." "This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first." Trump Jr.’s image has gone viral—but not necessarily because its message resonates with the truth. “There are theological problems with comparing human beings made in the image of God to candy,” said Matthew Soerens, the US director of church mobilization at World Relief, a group which helps the government resettle refugees. He added: “It’s a good rhetorical tool but it’s based on bad data.” Only two refugees out the thousands that have been admitted since the 1970s had committed terrorist attacks, said Soerens, citing a recent report from the Cato Institute. “There’s been none since the 1980s.” “If you include that, the odds of being killed by a refugee who commits terrorist activity in the United States if you’re an American is 1.36 billion,” said Soerens. In spite of this debate, this past fiscal year, the US welcomed more than 10,000 Syrian refugees. But while Christians have been increasingly persecuted by ISIS, fewer than 150 entered the country this year. So where are they, asks Nina Shea, who directs the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute. “They are facing genocide by ISIS...the worst human rights violation of all,” said Shea. “They are not coming into the United States in the proportion that would be fair.” Soerens and Shea joined Morgan and Katelyn to discuss what obstacles may be facing Syrian Christians trying to enter the United States, why many may have remained in their homeland, and whether the US should double the number of refugees it admits annually. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week, the Crossway board of directors and English Standard Version (ESV) Translation Oversight Committee announced that, after 17 years, it would be making no further revisions to the ESV translation. “The decision now to create the permanent text of the ESV was made with equally great care—so that people who love the ESV Bible can have full confidence in the ESV, knowing that it will continue to be published as is, without being changed, for the rest of their lives, and for generations to come,” the publishers wrote in a statement. (Read CT’s story.) What’s behind Crossway’s decision? Craig Blomberg, who has advised the translation teams of the ESV, New International Version, Holman Christian Study Bible, and New Living Translation in various capacities in his professional career, shared his insights on Quick to Listen this week. “The ESV is produced by a publisher, and men on the committee, many of whom I know, are of the mindset that they want to foster confidence in the Bible as God’s Word,” said Blomberg, who is also New Testament professor at Denver Seminary. “I don’t know to what extent the word has gotten around to media, publishers, general public, but when the ESV was first created, the committee continued to meet on a regular basis, as do other Bible translation committees, and made a number of comparatively minor changes and updates to what they believed were improved translations to various passages and then simply introduced them in the new printing without any publicity or any fanfare.” Here’s Craig Blomberg, a New Testament professor at Denver Seminary, offering Morgan and Katelyn an inside scoop into the translation process, whether the number of translations serves or hinders the church, and what’s up with the dozens of Bibles tailored to moms, athletes, and small children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices