February 8, 2026 • 35 mins
What role have white evangelicals played in the current struggle against fascism? Once a political actor tasked with influencing SCOTUS to overturn Roe v. Wade, Reverend Schenck has since come to regret his involvement with the religious right, which he describes as a “cult.” He now calls himself a “dissenting Evangelical organizer.” Our hosts ask the reverend what brought him around.
Join hosts Angela Rye, Andrew Gillum, and Bakari Sellers PLUS guest-host Tamika Mallory for this segment from episode #117 that aired 02-05-26
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Native lampod is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with
Reason Choice Media. Nobody knows the troubles are seen? What
role do white males play? What role do white male
evangelicals play? One of the blessings we have about this
show is we get to talk about it, all right,
and so we have Reverend Shank here joining us on
(00:22):
the show. We're going to bring them in. It's kind
of like a fifth will. This is the way I
wanted to introduce you, Reverend. We found a video of
you actually testifying, and I wanted to play that clip
right here. It's testifying to Congress about your work influencing
the Supreme Court of these United States of America. And
then I got a question about Clarence Thomas on the
other side. I'm just joking, go ahead, and wrote a clip.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I am here to present facts as I know of
them about Operation Higher Court, a Christian mission that I
directed as part of Faith into Action for twenty years
to bolster conservative Supreme Court justices in the views they
already held. Operation Higher Court involved my recruitment of wealthy
(01:07):
donors as stealth missionaries who befriended justices that shared our
conservative social and religious sensibilities. In this way, I aimed
to show these justices that Americans supported them and thanked
God for their presence on the Court and the opinions
they rendered. Our overarching goals were to gain insights into
(01:31):
the conservative justices thinking and to shore up their resolve
to render solid, unapologetic opinions, particularly against abortion. I called
this our ministry of emboldenment. I believe we pushed the
boundaries of Christian ethics and compromised the High Court's promise
(01:52):
to administer equal justice. But I'm also conscious we were
never admonished for the type of work our missionaries did,
quite to the contrary. In one instance, Justice Thomas commended me,
saying something like, keep up what you're doing. It's making
a difference.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
So the right Reverend Robert Shank, did I pronounce your
last name correctly?
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yes? But sometimes I am the wrong reverence. And that's
what that.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Was all about, I understand. So I just wanted to
start the conversation with I think the two most important
words in the English language, other words, thank you, and
then I nearly said enough, So thank you for your
time and thank you for the work that you are
now doing. Ain't the work you used to do, but
thank you for the work that you're now doing. What
role do white male evangelicals play in changing culture, changing society?
(02:46):
We talked about ice, we talked about jelly roll earlier,
and sometimes you see a muted voice. I think it
all ties in together. What can we expect, what should
we expect? And what are we not seeing?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Well, what we're not saying is some of the change
that's happening right now, and a lot of it because
of Minneapolis. I just read a report from Christianity Today,
which has historically been the journal of record for American
(03:23):
white evangelicals, and there's a lot of a lot of
disruption in the in the positions of evangelicals in Minnesota
right now because of what they're seeing playing out in
(03:44):
the streets. H You know, I hate to say it,
but you asked about, you know, white evangelicals. I think
white males in general get a little more attention from
white evangelical leader's keen sense of the obvious. They are
(04:08):
been happening for a long time. But the reason I
mention it is because, of course, the killing of Alex
pretty as compared to even the killing of Renee good
Renee Good was white, she would normally command attention, but
(04:30):
discounted by the fact that she's gay, that she was gay.
So but here we go, white male of a certain
age and a gun owner gets the attention that others
don't get. So I think that's part of the reason,
(04:54):
but not the whole reason. I think a fair number
of white evangelical leaders are now feeling uncomfortable with the violence,
the threats, with the behavior after the shootings, with the
(05:15):
abduction of children and their imprisonment in cages. It's starting
to trouble the conscience. Not enough to tip the scales,
not anywhere near, but it's changing. And I'm sorry for
such a long answer to your short question, but I'll
just add this. I do think it's critically important now
(05:38):
that white male evangelical leaders start airing their conscience and
their descent. And I know there are many of them,
but they are silenced by fear. But they have to
find their courage. And the reason they do is be
(06:00):
because this administration will pay attention to that in a
way they won't pay attention to anyone else. They'll write
everybody else off. They're black, they're socialists, they're leftists, they're communists,
their nutcases. But suddenly when when white males like me
start speaking, I know from my contacts in the administration,
(06:23):
I maintain friends who are working for Trump right now
in the White House, and they will say, I got
a little attention here that bothered some people. Not for
the right reasons, but it bothered them.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
So if I could ask you, you know, there's a
conversion moment biblically speaking, where Saul is converted to Paul.
You're talking about finding your courage. I want to know
what helped you to find your courage. And in this
moment where you're talking about having friends in the White House,
(06:58):
knowing now which you understand to be their agenda, how
they choose to move forward, how are you maintaining those friendships,
and how do you intend to help them to convert
from Saul to Paul.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Yeah, well, thanks for framing it that way. I talk
about three conversions in my own life. My initial conversion
to the Christ I saw in the Sermon on the
Mount who blessed the poor, who blessed the forgotten, the
margin lies, the lonely, the grieving. Then in the eighties
(07:32):
I was converted to what I now call Ronald Reagan
Republican religion, which is distinctly different from Christianity, and I
spent thirty five years in that religious stream, doing the
kind of work I'm now repenting from. Then I had
a third conversion reading the work of church leaders in
(07:56):
nineteen thirties Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler and
his racialized dictatorship, and that was the first crack.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
There were a.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Few little, tiny threads before that, but it was really
confronting that history and seeing that what I was engaged
in for thirty years was identical to what the Ivan
gaelicche Kirche, the Evangelical Church of Germany was doing in
(08:30):
that era. In fact, it would be evangelical leaders who
declared Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party a gifted miracle
from God. Well, I was seeing the same, and so
that was part of it. The other substantial part of
(08:52):
my third conversion out of that right wing cult was
my wife, who made a late in life professional change
from being an occupational therapist to a psychotherapist. And when
(09:17):
you're married to a psychotherapist, you can't escape the therapy
no matter how hard you try, and that was a
huge huge help for me, and I would enter my
own period of therapy, which helped me face myself in
a way I ever had and the realities of what
(09:38):
was going on around me. So that was a lot
of it. There was more. It was a long and
complex formula equation that got me to the other side.
But I'm so glad it did.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
When you think about the dates. I was just trying
to help me understand some of the time periods of
your third conversion, just so I understand where to where
to sort of place my question.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Well, it's been a kind of ten year progression for me.
Those versed cracks appeared in oh nine, ten, twenty ten.
It was particularly jarring when when I attended the eightieth
(10:34):
birthday party for the now late televangelist Pat Robertson, who's
built a right winging religious empire that continues to this moment,
and his guest of honor at this big banish where
virtually every e white evangelical luminary in this country was
(10:57):
in the ballroom celebrate with Pat, and his guest of
honor in twenty eleven was none other than Donald Trump,
and I was shocked by that. I didn't think of
Trump as part of our our culture. In fact, in Bible,
(11:23):
yes exactly. And when I was in Bible College what
we call our seminaries to prepare for ministry, way back
in the early eighties, I was told that Donald Trump
was the classic example of everything it meant not to
(11:43):
live that say, Christian, and that he makes a great
sermon illustration for that. And I had used him as
that over the years. But there he was at Pat's
birthday party, and I asked one of my colleagues, a
name well known in the white evangelical world, why is
he here? And the answer was because he and Pattern
(12:05):
now part of the same billionaire's club. Pat had just
sold the Family Channel, his family became the heirs in
the process, and now they were billionaire pals. And that
was distressing to me. And it would be at the
twenty sixteen Republican National Convention that I finally made the
(12:27):
break left the movement. Theoretically, it took me two more
years to extract myself legally and financially.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
But wey, I'm sorry. Can you say more about the
financial piece? You said to extract yourself financially to what
does that mean?
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah? Well, first I was running an organization I had
spent thirty five years building, which had fifty thousand donors
spread across the United States, hundreds of churches. We were
raising millions and millions of dollars, and I had legal obligations.
And you know, I've lose nothing by being candid and
(13:11):
completely honest these days, and that's what I was trying
to do in Minneapolis. But I wasn't. I wasn't fully
courageous all at once, and and I'm not even at
this moment. I was afraid of donor lawsuits. I was
afraid of contractors suing me. So I carefully deconstructed that operation.
(13:41):
It took two years to do it, and to safely
extract myself. Once I did, I left all of that behind.
Every bit of that went for a little while I
was driving Uber to pay my bills, all the cost
of it.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
You know, I'm appreciative of your transparency, even with us
now and our audience. And we didn't get to say
welcome home at the start of this interview, but that's
something we say to our guests when when they make
themselves available to this community. I am I work for
a long time on the other side of some of
your court work at People for the American Way, which
(14:20):
is also known as the House of Bork because we
led the effort to defeat Robert Bork's nomination to the
to the High Court. So I understand that that space
very well, I am. I don't understand as well the
space of white evangelism, mostly because if we subscribe to
(14:42):
the same Jesus, the same God, the same scripture, and
I know scripture can be used creatively by whoever wills it,
but we miss each other at that intersection of what
scripture seems to say to white evangelicals and then what
it says and in the black tradition of the Christian faith.
(15:05):
And it absolutely shows up differently in our politics, certainly
in American and society and culture. I just wonder, on
the other side of this of of your evolution, where
you now where and how you now carry the message
to other white evangelicals around how they see the lights
(15:32):
come to evolution, come to transition. Because by and large,
we're kind of we're kind of on the right track
on our side, and it's still fighting to stay on
the what we believe to be the right track. Yet
a lot of our brothers and sisters on in the
Christian evangelical side still tolerate outrageous forms of hate and
(15:56):
terror uh and cruelty by the administration and what their
politics often produces. How do you how do you sort
of theorize the best way to move other white male
evangelicals closer to the truth of the faith and away
(16:20):
I think from some of the cruelty in devastating, destructive
politics of the far right.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Well, it's not easy, although I did retain thousands of
just those sorts of folks on my social media platforms
which I use as my pulpit these days, and I
remind them of their conversions, what drew them to Christ.
(16:53):
And you know, there's a passage in the New Testament
Book of Revelation where the resurrec that Christ is speaking
to the church from the heavenlyes if you read it
that way, and he says to a particular church in
a particular place, you're doing everything right, but I have
(17:13):
this one thing against you. You have left your first love.
So I try to remind evangelicals of their first love, Jesus,
who I regularly reintroduce as the dark, complexted Middle Eastern
(17:38):
man of the levant who had very dark skin and
afro textured hair, wool hair exactly, and I put him
out there and I just let them sit with him,
and then I remind them of what he said. And
I do get folks numbers, but regularly who come, usually
(18:03):
through a direct message because they're afraid to go on
the page, and they'll say, you know you've got me
on that, You've got me thinking, and yes, that was
the reason I gave my heart to Jesus all those
years ago. It's still small numbers. The other task I have,
which is the larger one, is to expose this as
(18:28):
not just un Christian, but anti Christian. So I try
to do that through my writing, through you know, on
social media platforms and elsewhere, and then in conversation with leaders.
I just invited a unabashed self identified Christian nationalist leader.
(18:55):
He heads a small denomination in the United States with
progressive leaders up in Boston. In two weeks. He accepted
the invitation to a dialogue with them. We'll see what happens.
But I want to do more and more of that.
(19:16):
That's part of the repair work. There's far more than that,
and it's much closer to people who have suffered because
of what I did. But that's some of the work
that I that I try to do.
Speaker 5 (19:35):
Nobody knows.
Speaker 6 (19:39):
Rama Shane, I can I ask you. You know, you
talked about some of these folks that you're in relationship
with and how they have looking at all that's going on,
and particularly Minneapolis, they've changed, their hearts have changed in
some ways. Do you think that that means they're going
to show up at the polls differently? Are they going
to vote different Are they talk about that or do
(20:01):
you think because you know, one of the challenges that
I have faced in working with white women. You know,
I was one of the leaders of the Women's March.
I have been on the streets of America organizing, marching
with galvanizing thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of women, and
oftentimes the numbers, the math doesn't math. As we say that,
(20:24):
you know, they will say we're with you, We're with you,
We're with you. And then when we look at the
numbers after an election, it is very clear that some
people either weren't telling the truth or they definitely didn't
go and do the work at home of organizing not
just us out in the community, but being there to
organize their mothers, their aunts, their sisters, their friends, their
(20:45):
you know, their family members. So how do you see
this translating to as we are approaching the midterm elections.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Yeah, that's a great point, and it reminds me of
the work I have yet to do to organize white
evangelicals of conscience as I call them, or dissenters. M hum.
I'm hopeful that a fair number of them are troubled
(21:18):
enough that they just simply won't vote. They'll they'll just
sit it out. Hoping they'll vote for a Democrat is
probably too too great of a leap of faith for me.
But maybe they'll we'll take them sit at home. Well,
they can stay home, and I think that's more likely
(21:39):
what they'll do it, and it would be a good choice.
And I will be saying that to them. I'll say,
if if you just can't, here's one way you can
preserve your conscience in this. Sit it out. So that's hosibility.
(22:00):
I do know of some already who in the last
election voted for a Democrat for the first time in
their electoral lives. I voted for Joe Biden, first vote
for a Democratic candidate in how many years, was it?
(22:25):
Because the last time I voted for a Democrat before
Biden was nineteen seventy six, So it was a long time.
Is that forty four at Carters for Carter? Yeah, so
it was forty four years. And there are others. I'm
(22:46):
not unique. I am not unique. There's a lot. I
didn't vote for Trump either time. By the way, I
voted for other Republican for another Republican in twenty.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Sixteen, I if I can ask you, Reverend, there was
just an arrest civil arrests made of nine Pea individuals
who the Department of Justice is calling defendants on the
other side of a protest at a church city's church
(23:21):
in fact in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where one of the pastors,
David Easterwood, serves as an icefield director. And I'm curious
to know if you think there's ever an appropriate time
to protest in church one and two, if you think
that journalists should be exempt from any type of criminal
(23:44):
indictment for covering said protests, Well, I did it.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
I did it at the Washington National Cathedral back when
I was a leader in the national pro life anti
abortion movement. I confronted Bill Clinton in the sanctuary during
a communion service, and I was applauded for that. I
(24:11):
was made a hero in the conservative Christian world for
my disruption of a communion service on Christmas Eve. By
the way, on Christmas Eve. So I'd like to say
I did one better event these folks did on a
(24:34):
comment Sunday morning, and I was made a hero for it.
I'm reminding people of that. You want to denounce this.
You applauded me when I did it, and that was
I guess about nineteen ninety six ish something like that.
I have to go back and records. But in any case,
(25:00):
and ironically, the administration is using a law that we
decried and that anti abortion activists and other white evangelical
(25:20):
champions of religious liberty regularly denounced, and that is the
Face Act, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,
which we decried. We fought it in court, we raised
tens of millions of dollars to oppose it, and now
(25:43):
they're using it against Don Lemon, against the others. It's
and I'm reminding my folks of that too, and hoping
it will give some pause. Say wait a minute, what
when we do here and Incidentally, this is a family
(26:06):
issue in the church, and you know, families routinely disrupt
one another's Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas celebrations with their differences,
and that's what's happened here. So again it shows the
(26:27):
hypocrisy that that I'm confronting my my family with.
Speaker 5 (26:36):
Got it, but carry I know we have to push.
I did just want to ask this final question for
me and that that's on the rev. Just sort of
how in your in your most connected way, as you
as you as you consider how some of your former
compounderies and maybe even still Compoudreis might think about this,
but just the hierarchy of threat that white evangelical men
(26:59):
sort of consider when considering their politics. So for instance,
if if we, if they, if the other side wins,
and in there, if I'm them, the other side would
be Democrats. I guess what is is it? Is it
that they're going to promote black people above us and
our sons and our children. Is it that they're going
(27:22):
to make abortion free and available everywhere?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Is it?
Speaker 5 (27:25):
Where do you when you get to the real crux
of what barrier sits in the way of me being
able to get over what coalition or alignment or agreement
looks like with the other side. I mean, you can
see bodies strown in the streets. You can see protesters
mishandled disrupted. You can see even women who are approaching
(27:49):
abortion clinics be railed against and cried and insulted and
made to feel in fear, to watch children even put
in cages. Because this isn't the first time the Trump
administration has done that. They've done that before. But there's
still these walls that exist that keep otherwise decent people
(28:09):
from being able to make the leap to say Godly,
that just isn't right and it is not just right
because it happened to my wife. It's not right because
it happened to another fellow family member of the human
you know race, and it's indecent. What are I always
try to think about, what's the thing that's keeping you?
(28:29):
Is your fear of me?
Speaker 1 (28:31):
That big?
Speaker 5 (28:32):
Have you made me out to be that much of
a threat, that that's keeping you from being a better human?
But what is it? As you think about what that
hierarchy of either threat or fear dislike I don't even
know what to call it, because I don't know what it.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Is well, I think fear is the best or at
least principle way of understanding of understanding it. And I
don't want to be Maudlin, and I don't want to
turn your quality podcast into my confessional books, but I
(29:14):
think it is.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Yeah, we got the.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Okay, okay, Well, no reason for you to associate in
the first place. But you know, I'll confess that for
uh thirty years, I did business with fundraisers who created
(29:40):
millions of messages that went out across the United States.
And I was a small, a bit player. I would
send out five to ten million communic case a year.
(30:01):
Many of my friends that I kept company with in
those days would send out hundreds of millions of messages,
mostly connected to fundraising platforms. And I'll describe those to
you this way. In one exchange that I've thought about
many times and I've written about, with one of my
contracted fundraisers, he sat at a conference room table and
(30:25):
he told me in nineteen he said, look, let me
put it this way. The more fear and the more
anger you'll give me, the more money I will raise
for you. You give me a lot of fear and anger,
I'll raise a lot of money for you. You give me
(30:46):
a little fear and anger, I'll raise a little bit
of money for you. So you decide. But let me
tell you this, he said, I want you to think
of Helen. She lives on a rural road in Kansas,
neighbors three miles away. Her husband's been dead for several years.
She rarely ever sees her kids or her grandkids. They
(31:07):
all live in other states. The biggest moment in her
day is when she goes to her rural mailbox on
the roadside, pulls out a letter from you and reads
through those eleven pages with multiple underlines and exclamation points.
And when she's done reading, she is terrified of the
(31:31):
world her children will inhabit. And you're going to tell
her the only way that she can solve that problem
is to send your organization one hundred dollars, and you're
going to get that hundred and probably two hundred. Every
single time I fired him, I canceled, but I acquiesce
(31:55):
just enough to hire another group. Almost most at that
level that's being done and has been done now for
forty or fifty years. People have been shaped and formed
in that year, and now they've taken the reins of
(32:17):
government power, and they are also afraid, but they're more
cynical when they are afraid. But the people who are
giving them that power and that money are terrified of
the world as they imagine it. And this has to
do with what I call the southernization of American evangelicalism,
(32:40):
who were once the leaders in the abolitionist movement. The
first women's rights a conference was held at an evangelical
church in Seneca Falls, New York in what was that
eighteen forty But in any case, evangelicals were once the
leaders of social progress and innovation. They were champions of
(33:06):
minority rights, and they were overrun by the Southern churches
that wanted to preserve the Confederacy, and they did it.
Anybody wants to read some really revelatory work on that.
Charles Reagan Wilson, American Southern historian, writes on the religion
(33:33):
of the Lost Cause in a book, his principal book,
which is very readable, only about two hundred and fifty pages.
Baptized in blood. It's really worth reading it. It helps
you to understand the white evangelical mind as it's been
formed over the last one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
Appreciate that, appreciate reverse incentives.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I mean, I just first of all, I just kind
of want to want to wrap this up by where
I began, which is to say, thank you for coming on,
thank you for your journey, thank you for sharing your journey,
and thank you for being what we but I believe
to be the most powerful thing you can be in
this country, which is an example. So I think we
all say on this show Native Lampard, I'm the newest
member here, but welcome.
Speaker 5 (34:18):
Home, welcome home, come home.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
You feel very undeserving of that.
Speaker 6 (34:25):
Thank you, praying for you, praying for you, Robert, thank.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
You, thank you. That, ladies and gentlemen, was the Reverend
Robert Shank, former right wing activist turn dissenting evangelical organizer,
and right here on the other side, we will do
our calls to action and get us on out of here.
Thank you, very Shank, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 5 (34:46):
We appreciate your time.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Native lamp is a production of iHeartRadio and partnership with
reisent Choice Media. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. And with that we out
Native lampod is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with
Reason Choice Media. Nobody knows the troubles are seen? What
role do white males play? What role do white male
evangelicals play? One of the blessings we have about this
show is we get to talk about it, all right,
and so we have Reverend Shank here joining us on
(00:22):
the show. We're going to bring them in. It's kind
of like a fifth will. This is the way I
wanted to introduce you, Reverend. We found a video of
you actually testifying, and I wanted to play that clip
right here. It's testifying to Congress about your work influencing
the Supreme Court of these United States of America. And
then I got a question about Clarence Thomas on the
other side. I'm just joking, go ahead, and wrote a clip.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I am here to present facts as I know of
them about Operation Higher Court, a Christian mission that I
directed as part of Faith into Action for twenty years
to bolster conservative Supreme Court justices in the views they
already held. Operation Higher Court involved my recruitment of wealthy
(01:07):
donors as stealth missionaries who befriended justices that shared our
conservative social and religious sensibilities. In this way, I aimed
to show these justices that Americans supported them and thanked
God for their presence on the Court and the opinions
they rendered. Our overarching goals were to gain insights into
(01:31):
the conservative justices thinking and to shore up their resolve
to render solid, unapologetic opinions, particularly against abortion. I called
this our ministry of emboldenment. I believe we pushed the
boundaries of Christian ethics and compromised the High Court's promise
(01:52):
to administer equal justice. But I'm also conscious we were
never admonished for the type of work our missionaries did,
quite to the contrary. In one instance, Justice Thomas commended me,
saying something like, keep up what you're doing. It's making
a difference.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
So the right Reverend Robert Shank, did I pronounce your
last name correctly?
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yes? But sometimes I am the wrong reverence. And that's
what that.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Was all about, I understand. So I just wanted to
start the conversation with I think the two most important
words in the English language, other words, thank you, and
then I nearly said enough, So thank you for your
time and thank you for the work that you are
now doing. Ain't the work you used to do, but
thank you for the work that you're now doing. What
role do white male evangelicals play in changing culture, changing society?
(02:46):
We talked about ice, we talked about jelly roll earlier,
and sometimes you see a muted voice. I think it
all ties in together. What can we expect, what should
we expect? And what are we not seeing?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Well, what we're not saying is some of the change
that's happening right now, and a lot of it because
of Minneapolis. I just read a report from Christianity Today,
which has historically been the journal of record for American
(03:23):
white evangelicals, and there's a lot of a lot of
disruption in the in the positions of evangelicals in Minnesota
right now because of what they're seeing playing out in
(03:44):
the streets. H You know, I hate to say it,
but you asked about, you know, white evangelicals. I think
white males in general get a little more attention from
white evangelical leader's keen sense of the obvious. They are
(04:08):
been happening for a long time. But the reason I
mention it is because, of course, the killing of Alex
pretty as compared to even the killing of Renee good
Renee Good was white, she would normally command attention, but
(04:30):
discounted by the fact that she's gay, that she was gay.
So but here we go, white male of a certain
age and a gun owner gets the attention that others
don't get. So I think that's part of the reason,
(04:54):
but not the whole reason. I think a fair number
of white evangelical leaders are now feeling uncomfortable with the violence,
the threats, with the behavior after the shootings, with the
(05:15):
abduction of children and their imprisonment in cages. It's starting
to trouble the conscience. Not enough to tip the scales,
not anywhere near, but it's changing. And I'm sorry for
such a long answer to your short question, but I'll
just add this. I do think it's critically important now
(05:38):
that white male evangelical leaders start airing their conscience and
their descent. And I know there are many of them,
but they are silenced by fear. But they have to
find their courage. And the reason they do is be
(06:00):
because this administration will pay attention to that in a
way they won't pay attention to anyone else. They'll write
everybody else off. They're black, they're socialists, they're leftists, they're communists,
their nutcases. But suddenly when when white males like me
start speaking, I know from my contacts in the administration,
(06:23):
I maintain friends who are working for Trump right now
in the White House, and they will say, I got
a little attention here that bothered some people. Not for
the right reasons, but it bothered them.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
So if I could ask you, you know, there's a
conversion moment biblically speaking, where Saul is converted to Paul.
You're talking about finding your courage. I want to know
what helped you to find your courage. And in this
moment where you're talking about having friends in the White House,
(06:58):
knowing now which you understand to be their agenda, how
they choose to move forward, how are you maintaining those friendships,
and how do you intend to help them to convert
from Saul to Paul.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Yeah, well, thanks for framing it that way. I talk
about three conversions in my own life. My initial conversion
to the Christ I saw in the Sermon on the
Mount who blessed the poor, who blessed the forgotten, the
margin lies, the lonely, the grieving. Then in the eighties
(07:32):
I was converted to what I now call Ronald Reagan
Republican religion, which is distinctly different from Christianity, and I
spent thirty five years in that religious stream, doing the
kind of work I'm now repenting from. Then I had
a third conversion reading the work of church leaders in
(07:56):
nineteen thirties Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler and
his racialized dictatorship, and that was the first crack.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
There were a.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Few little, tiny threads before that, but it was really
confronting that history and seeing that what I was engaged
in for thirty years was identical to what the Ivan
gaelicche Kirche, the Evangelical Church of Germany was doing in
(08:30):
that era. In fact, it would be evangelical leaders who
declared Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party a gifted miracle
from God. Well, I was seeing the same, and so
that was part of it. The other substantial part of
(08:52):
my third conversion out of that right wing cult was
my wife, who made a late in life professional change
from being an occupational therapist to a psychotherapist. And when
(09:17):
you're married to a psychotherapist, you can't escape the therapy
no matter how hard you try, and that was a
huge huge help for me, and I would enter my
own period of therapy, which helped me face myself in
a way I ever had and the realities of what
(09:38):
was going on around me. So that was a lot
of it. There was more. It was a long and
complex formula equation that got me to the other side.
But I'm so glad it did.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
When you think about the dates. I was just trying
to help me understand some of the time periods of
your third conversion, just so I understand where to where
to sort of place my question.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Well, it's been a kind of ten year progression for me.
Those versed cracks appeared in oh nine, ten, twenty ten.
It was particularly jarring when when I attended the eightieth
(10:34):
birthday party for the now late televangelist Pat Robertson, who's
built a right winging religious empire that continues to this moment,
and his guest of honor at this big banish where
virtually every e white evangelical luminary in this country was
(10:57):
in the ballroom celebrate with Pat, and his guest of
honor in twenty eleven was none other than Donald Trump,
and I was shocked by that. I didn't think of
Trump as part of our our culture. In fact, in Bible,
(11:23):
yes exactly. And when I was in Bible College what
we call our seminaries to prepare for ministry, way back
in the early eighties, I was told that Donald Trump
was the classic example of everything it meant not to
(11:43):
live that say, Christian, and that he makes a great
sermon illustration for that. And I had used him as
that over the years. But there he was at Pat's
birthday party, and I asked one of my colleagues, a
name well known in the white evangelical world, why is
he here? And the answer was because he and Pattern
(12:05):
now part of the same billionaire's club. Pat had just
sold the Family Channel, his family became the heirs in
the process, and now they were billionaire pals. And that
was distressing to me. And it would be at the
twenty sixteen Republican National Convention that I finally made the
(12:27):
break left the movement. Theoretically, it took me two more
years to extract myself legally and financially.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
But wey, I'm sorry. Can you say more about the
financial piece? You said to extract yourself financially to what
does that mean?
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah? Well, first I was running an organization I had
spent thirty five years building, which had fifty thousand donors
spread across the United States, hundreds of churches. We were
raising millions and millions of dollars, and I had legal obligations.
And you know, I've lose nothing by being candid and
(13:11):
completely honest these days, and that's what I was trying
to do in Minneapolis. But I wasn't. I wasn't fully
courageous all at once, and and I'm not even at
this moment. I was afraid of donor lawsuits. I was
afraid of contractors suing me. So I carefully deconstructed that operation.
(13:41):
It took two years to do it, and to safely
extract myself. Once I did, I left all of that behind.
Every bit of that went for a little while I
was driving Uber to pay my bills, all the cost
of it.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
You know, I'm appreciative of your transparency, even with us
now and our audience. And we didn't get to say
welcome home at the start of this interview, but that's
something we say to our guests when when they make
themselves available to this community. I am I work for
a long time on the other side of some of
your court work at People for the American Way, which
(14:20):
is also known as the House of Bork because we
led the effort to defeat Robert Bork's nomination to the
to the High Court. So I understand that that space
very well, I am. I don't understand as well the
space of white evangelism, mostly because if we subscribe to
(14:42):
the same Jesus, the same God, the same scripture, and
I know scripture can be used creatively by whoever wills it,
but we miss each other at that intersection of what
scripture seems to say to white evangelicals and then what
it says and in the black tradition of the Christian faith.
(15:05):
And it absolutely shows up differently in our politics, certainly
in American and society and culture. I just wonder, on
the other side of this of of your evolution, where
you now where and how you now carry the message
to other white evangelicals around how they see the lights
(15:32):
come to evolution, come to transition. Because by and large,
we're kind of we're kind of on the right track
on our side, and it's still fighting to stay on
the what we believe to be the right track. Yet
a lot of our brothers and sisters on in the
Christian evangelical side still tolerate outrageous forms of hate and
(15:56):
terror uh and cruelty by the administration and what their
politics often produces. How do you how do you sort
of theorize the best way to move other white male
evangelicals closer to the truth of the faith and away
(16:20):
I think from some of the cruelty in devastating, destructive
politics of the far right.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Well, it's not easy, although I did retain thousands of
just those sorts of folks on my social media platforms
which I use as my pulpit these days, and I
remind them of their conversions, what drew them to Christ.
(16:53):
And you know, there's a passage in the New Testament
Book of Revelation where the resurrec that Christ is speaking
to the church from the heavenlyes if you read it
that way, and he says to a particular church in
a particular place, you're doing everything right, but I have
(17:13):
this one thing against you. You have left your first love.
So I try to remind evangelicals of their first love, Jesus,
who I regularly reintroduce as the dark, complexted Middle Eastern
(17:38):
man of the levant who had very dark skin and
afro textured hair, wool hair exactly, and I put him
out there and I just let them sit with him,
and then I remind them of what he said. And
I do get folks numbers, but regularly who come, usually
(18:03):
through a direct message because they're afraid to go on
the page, and they'll say, you know you've got me
on that, You've got me thinking, and yes, that was
the reason I gave my heart to Jesus all those
years ago. It's still small numbers. The other task I have,
which is the larger one, is to expose this as
(18:28):
not just un Christian, but anti Christian. So I try
to do that through my writing, through you know, on
social media platforms and elsewhere, and then in conversation with leaders.
I just invited a unabashed self identified Christian nationalist leader.
(18:55):
He heads a small denomination in the United States with
progressive leaders up in Boston. In two weeks. He accepted
the invitation to a dialogue with them. We'll see what happens.
But I want to do more and more of that.
(19:16):
That's part of the repair work. There's far more than that,
and it's much closer to people who have suffered because
of what I did. But that's some of the work
that I that I try to do.
Speaker 5 (19:35):
Nobody knows.
Speaker 6 (19:39):
Rama Shane, I can I ask you. You know, you
talked about some of these folks that you're in relationship
with and how they have looking at all that's going on,
and particularly Minneapolis, they've changed, their hearts have changed in
some ways. Do you think that that means they're going
to show up at the polls differently? Are they going
to vote different Are they talk about that or do
(20:01):
you think because you know, one of the challenges that
I have faced in working with white women. You know,
I was one of the leaders of the Women's March.
I have been on the streets of America organizing, marching
with galvanizing thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of women, and
oftentimes the numbers, the math doesn't math. As we say that,
(20:24):
you know, they will say we're with you, We're with you,
We're with you. And then when we look at the
numbers after an election, it is very clear that some
people either weren't telling the truth or they definitely didn't
go and do the work at home of organizing not
just us out in the community, but being there to
organize their mothers, their aunts, their sisters, their friends, their
(20:45):
you know, their family members. So how do you see
this translating to as we are approaching the midterm elections.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Yeah, that's a great point, and it reminds me of
the work I have yet to do to organize white
evangelicals of conscience as I call them, or dissenters. M hum.
I'm hopeful that a fair number of them are troubled
(21:18):
enough that they just simply won't vote. They'll they'll just
sit it out. Hoping they'll vote for a Democrat is
probably too too great of a leap of faith for me.
But maybe they'll we'll take them sit at home. Well,
they can stay home, and I think that's more likely
(21:39):
what they'll do it, and it would be a good choice.
And I will be saying that to them. I'll say,
if if you just can't, here's one way you can
preserve your conscience in this. Sit it out. So that's hosibility.
(22:00):
I do know of some already who in the last
election voted for a Democrat for the first time in
their electoral lives. I voted for Joe Biden, first vote
for a Democratic candidate in how many years, was it?
(22:25):
Because the last time I voted for a Democrat before
Biden was nineteen seventy six, So it was a long time.
Is that forty four at Carters for Carter? Yeah, so
it was forty four years. And there are others. I'm
(22:46):
not unique. I am not unique. There's a lot. I
didn't vote for Trump either time. By the way, I
voted for other Republican for another Republican in twenty.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Sixteen, I if I can ask you, Reverend, there was
just an arrest civil arrests made of nine Pea individuals
who the Department of Justice is calling defendants on the
other side of a protest at a church city's church
(23:21):
in fact in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where one of the pastors,
David Easterwood, serves as an icefield director. And I'm curious
to know if you think there's ever an appropriate time
to protest in church one and two, if you think
that journalists should be exempt from any type of criminal
(23:44):
indictment for covering said protests, Well, I did it.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
I did it at the Washington National Cathedral back when
I was a leader in the national pro life anti
abortion movement. I confronted Bill Clinton in the sanctuary during
a communion service, and I was applauded for that. I
(24:11):
was made a hero in the conservative Christian world for
my disruption of a communion service on Christmas Eve. By
the way, on Christmas Eve. So I'd like to say
I did one better event these folks did on a
(24:34):
comment Sunday morning, and I was made a hero for it.
I'm reminding people of that. You want to denounce this.
You applauded me when I did it, and that was
I guess about nineteen ninety six ish something like that.
I have to go back and records. But in any case,
(25:00):
and ironically, the administration is using a law that we
decried and that anti abortion activists and other white evangelical
(25:20):
champions of religious liberty regularly denounced, and that is the
Face Act, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,
which we decried. We fought it in court, we raised
tens of millions of dollars to oppose it, and now
(25:43):
they're using it against Don Lemon, against the others. It's
and I'm reminding my folks of that too, and hoping
it will give some pause. Say wait a minute, what
when we do here and Incidentally, this is a family
(26:06):
issue in the church, and you know, families routinely disrupt
one another's Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas celebrations with their differences,
and that's what's happened here. So again it shows the
(26:27):
hypocrisy that that I'm confronting my my family with.
Speaker 5 (26:36):
Got it, but carry I know we have to push.
I did just want to ask this final question for
me and that that's on the rev. Just sort of
how in your in your most connected way, as you
as you as you consider how some of your former
compounderies and maybe even still Compoudreis might think about this,
but just the hierarchy of threat that white evangelical men
(26:59):
sort of consider when considering their politics. So for instance,
if if we, if they, if the other side wins,
and in there, if I'm them, the other side would
be Democrats. I guess what is is it? Is it
that they're going to promote black people above us and
our sons and our children. Is it that they're going
(27:22):
to make abortion free and available everywhere?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Is it?
Speaker 5 (27:25):
Where do you when you get to the real crux
of what barrier sits in the way of me being
able to get over what coalition or alignment or agreement
looks like with the other side. I mean, you can
see bodies strown in the streets. You can see protesters
mishandled disrupted. You can see even women who are approaching
(27:49):
abortion clinics be railed against and cried and insulted and
made to feel in fear, to watch children even put
in cages. Because this isn't the first time the Trump
administration has done that. They've done that before. But there's
still these walls that exist that keep otherwise decent people
(28:09):
from being able to make the leap to say Godly,
that just isn't right and it is not just right
because it happened to my wife. It's not right because
it happened to another fellow family member of the human
you know race, and it's indecent. What are I always
try to think about, what's the thing that's keeping you?
(28:29):
Is your fear of me?
Speaker 1 (28:31):
That big?
Speaker 5 (28:32):
Have you made me out to be that much of
a threat, that that's keeping you from being a better human?
But what is it? As you think about what that
hierarchy of either threat or fear dislike I don't even
know what to call it, because I don't know what it.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Is well, I think fear is the best or at
least principle way of understanding of understanding it. And I
don't want to be Maudlin, and I don't want to
turn your quality podcast into my confessional books, but I
(29:14):
think it is.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Yeah, we got the.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Okay, okay, Well, no reason for you to associate in
the first place. But you know, I'll confess that for
uh thirty years, I did business with fundraisers who created
(29:40):
millions of messages that went out across the United States.
And I was a small, a bit player. I would
send out five to ten million communic case a year.
(30:01):
Many of my friends that I kept company with in
those days would send out hundreds of millions of messages,
mostly connected to fundraising platforms. And I'll describe those to
you this way. In one exchange that I've thought about
many times and I've written about, with one of my
contracted fundraisers, he sat at a conference room table and
(30:25):
he told me in nineteen he said, look, let me
put it this way. The more fear and the more
anger you'll give me, the more money I will raise
for you. You give me a lot of fear and anger,
I'll raise a lot of money for you. You give me
(30:46):
a little fear and anger, I'll raise a little bit
of money for you. So you decide. But let me
tell you this, he said, I want you to think
of Helen. She lives on a rural road in Kansas,
neighbors three miles away. Her husband's been dead for several years.
She rarely ever sees her kids or her grandkids. They
(31:07):
all live in other states. The biggest moment in her
day is when she goes to her rural mailbox on
the roadside, pulls out a letter from you and reads
through those eleven pages with multiple underlines and exclamation points.
And when she's done reading, she is terrified of the
(31:31):
world her children will inhabit. And you're going to tell
her the only way that she can solve that problem
is to send your organization one hundred dollars, and you're
going to get that hundred and probably two hundred. Every
single time I fired him, I canceled, but I acquiesce
(31:55):
just enough to hire another group. Almost most at that
level that's being done and has been done now for
forty or fifty years. People have been shaped and formed
in that year, and now they've taken the reins of
(32:17):
government power, and they are also afraid, but they're more
cynical when they are afraid. But the people who are
giving them that power and that money are terrified of
the world as they imagine it. And this has to
do with what I call the southernization of American evangelicalism,
(32:40):
who were once the leaders in the abolitionist movement. The
first women's rights a conference was held at an evangelical
church in Seneca Falls, New York in what was that
eighteen forty But in any case, evangelicals were once the
leaders of social progress and innovation. They were champions of
(33:06):
minority rights, and they were overrun by the Southern churches
that wanted to preserve the Confederacy, and they did it.
Anybody wants to read some really revelatory work on that.
Charles Reagan Wilson, American Southern historian, writes on the religion
(33:33):
of the Lost Cause in a book, his principal book,
which is very readable, only about two hundred and fifty pages.
Baptized in blood. It's really worth reading it. It helps
you to understand the white evangelical mind as it's been
formed over the last one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
Appreciate that, appreciate reverse incentives.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I mean, I just first of all, I just kind
of want to want to wrap this up by where
I began, which is to say, thank you for coming on,
thank you for your journey, thank you for sharing your journey,
and thank you for being what we but I believe
to be the most powerful thing you can be in
this country, which is an example. So I think we
all say on this show Native Lampard, I'm the newest
member here, but welcome.
Speaker 5 (34:18):
Home, welcome home, come home.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
You feel very undeserving of that.
Speaker 6 (34:25):
Thank you, praying for you, praying for you, Robert, thank.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
You, thank you. That, ladies and gentlemen, was the Reverend
Robert Shank, former right wing activist turn dissenting evangelical organizer,
and right here on the other side, we will do
our calls to action and get us on out of here.
Thank you, very Shank, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 5 (34:46):
We appreciate your time.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Native lamp is a production of iHeartRadio and partnership with
reisent Choice Media. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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Hosts And Creators
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Andrew Gillum
Angela Rye
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