Shane Claiborne

Christian Pacifist Shane Claiborne

on May 19, 2020

For many years I’ve critiqued Christian pacifist Shane Claiborne, who founded The Simple Way in Philadelphia and leads Red Letter Christians. So he was very gracious and brave to join me for this conversation!

Claiborne advocates a perspective increasingly popular in parts of USA Christianity that insists faith in Christ requires rejection of all violence. So I ask him if faithful Christians can serve in law enforcement or the military, and whether God might have purposes both for pacifists and believers in lawful force. I also ask him if his activism against the death penalty also leads him to support legal restrictions on abortion.

I’m not persuaded by his answers. But Claiborne’s convictions are clearly passionate. And I appreciate his work among the poor in Philadelphia. God has purposes for pacifists, which is a special calling. But the universal church has long taught that government, upheld by force, is divinely ordained for justice.

It was good, after years of critique, to converse with Claiborne directly. I’m grateful for his good spirit, and I hope this conversation continues. Hopefully you’ll enjoy our exchange.

Transcript for the full interview below.

Tooley: Hello! This is Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and today I have the somewhat surprise pleasure of speaking with Shane Claiborne, head of The Simple Way ministry based in Philadelphia. Admittedly, I have been a critic of Shane for many years and he is very gracious and courageous to come on and have a direct conversation, which I have been looking forward to. So Shane, tell us a little bit about yourself in terms of your church background, the major intellectual and spiritual influences that shaped your vocation, and how you came to be in the work that you’re in these last fifteen years or so.

Claiborne: Thanks again for reaching out to me. I’m always glad to have a conversation together and learn a lot from folks who disagree with me. For me, I grew up down south in East Tennessee actually. In this pandemic, I’ve been doing some of the ancestry thing because my wife found out its free right now, so we’re doing this little trial. My people are from the hills—in the caged coves smoky mountains. I grew up there, fell in love with Jesus when I was middle-school age, and really started my own spiritual journey out of that. I grew up Methodist–as I was telling you before we started recording here–and I really have been shaped by a lot of those Wesleyan roots. I love John Wesley and his fire. Sometimes I would joke that it’s in the Methodists hymnals, but you don’t always see it in every Methodist church. But that Wesleyan fire and his commitment to poor folks [makes] seeing the gospel as something that impacts how we hold our possessions. I sometimes quote [him when] he said, “If I find money in my hands, I get rid of it as quick as I can before it corrupts my heart.” And, of course, John Wesley said, “If I die with more than 10 pounds, may every person call me a liar and a thief.” So that, you know, is some beautiful stuff. I’ve been doing a lot of work around the death penalty and the Methodists have one of the strongest statements around the death penalty: that capital punishment undermines the redemptive work that Jesus did on the cross and the possibilities of redemption. I love that statement. But anyway, we are from Tennessee [and] came up to Philadelphia. I got involved in the charismatic movement because I really loved this sense that God is alive in the world and the Spirit is available to us and lives inside of us. So, I got re-baptized and got involved in a Pentecostal church. [I] still kind of kept my Methodist roots and—of course now I have been mentored by Catholics—got a lot of friends here in Philly who are Quakers, so I’m a bit of a spiritual mutt. I’ve mined some of those different treasures of the Church that have different traditions (and most of the kind of denominational histories have some bones that need to be spit out anyway), but you know from each of them there’s some real gems to embrace. That’s kind of how I’ve been shaped and, as far as people that have spoken into my own journey. There is sure so many. I’m like you Mark, I’ve got them on my wall here: Saint Francis of Assisi who’s one of those inspirations for me, Dr. King at his jail shot, Dorothy Day over here. There’s a lot of different folks that I think have really influenced how I think of my faith. [That’s] a little with my backdrop. I’ve been living here in Philly for over 20 years now. We’ve got this little community across the street there. You can see that’s where we started our community 20 years ago. We were really inspired by the early church [like] in the Book of Acts where it says no one claimed [that] any of their possessions were their own, but they shared everything they had [and] worshiped in their homes. It was [this] kind of beautiful sense of the gospel being ripped out of dinner tables in living rooms, and not so much the Megachurch. But that’s kind of what we’ve been building there for 20 years. We’ve got a neighborhood community. We started it [as an] intentional community, but it formed a village. We’ve got murals in community gardens and all kinds of stuff going on these days.

Tooley: You did self-identify as an urban monastic, but you got married a few years ago. So, I guess you’re no longer monastic in that sense.

Claiborne: I did get married. [Monastic] was never something that was my primary language…because if I said, “we’re a new Monastic community” to my neighbors, it doesn’t mean anything to everybody. Some of them just might say, “well I know your little nasty, but take a shower!” I think [that] the history of monasticism is a wonderful one. The desert monastics ([and] that kind of thing in the period of Constantine when the church was getting confused) went [into] the desert to sort of build a new society in the shell of the old one. A lot of the monastic movements like Saint Francis and Clare in Assisi were youth movements that were correcting where the church had kind of gotten it wrong and maybe [had] become a little too contaminated by the principalities and powers and lost the heart of the gospels. So, that’s kind of what we’re after. These days, I do a lot of my work with Red-Letter Christians which is referring back to the old Bibles that have the word Jesus highlighted in red. There came a point where we just said, “man, let’s just start reading the Sermon on the Mount again. Let’s read the words of Jesus and try to live our lives as if he meant the stuff he said.” So that’s what we’ve been after.

Tooley: Now, you are a leading Christian exponent of nonviolence, and it’s on that issue that we’ve often challenged you. Typically, most of Christianity has made the argument that to have a good society where people can live in relative peace and justice you need to have a military, you need to have a judiciary, [and] you need to have police in jails and prisons to uphold some sense of order [for] God has ordained that order. How do you define Christian nonviolence? And do you recognize the providential purposes of, say, law enforcement?

Claiborne: Well, there’s a book that comes to mind that our friend Ron Sider wrote…[about] the early church on killing—and this is really just the words of the early Christians in there— and what it shows is how consistent their ethic of life is. In the first few 100 years of Christianity, Christians were passionate champions for life. They spoke consistently against violence in every manifestation. This book has a whole chapter on abortion; they were passionately against abortion. It’s got a whole chapter on militarism; they spoke unilaterally against killing in war and militarism. There’s a whole chapter on the death penalty because they were passionately against the death penalty (of course, they were also dying from the death penalty, so that probably helped light that fire). They spoke against the gladiatorial games—this kind of romanticizing celebration of violence. So, I really take some of my cues from that—this language that has helped us through the centuries as a seamless garment or a consistent ethic of life. I came to see it my own upbringing: I grew up with guns, I grew up in a military family, I grew up for the death penalty, arguing all the scriptures that I thought justified the death penalty. But I kept leaning into Jesus. And there’s something that was hard to reconcile with some of those ideologies. The irony is, I think, that in America we can say we’re pro-life and still be pro-guns, pro-military and pro-death penalty, but anti-life on a lot of the other issues. We just narrowly focus on what it means to be pro-life on abortion. We might be more accurate to say, “I’m pro-birth or I’m antiabortion.” So, that’s been the challenge that I’ve been pushed with personally to have a more consistent ethic of life and to say every single person is made in the image of God. Whatever destroys life is on the wrong side of God. I mean, these are people that are made in the image of God and their life matters. So, I care about gun violence and the death penalty and war and militarism [because] Jesus said, “blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God.” And I think it’s an ideal; it’s an aspiration. It’s not always what comes naturally to me. I’m not a of a zealot, so I can’t say I wouldn’t respond nonviolently in every situation. But I can sure say I would aspire to. I believe that’s what Jesus calls me to. I think of old Peter who, when the soldiers came to get Jesus, picked up a sword and cut off one of the guys’ ears. Jesus’ response is stunning. He scolds Peter and says, “put your sword away. Enough of that! You live by the sword, you die by the sword.” And then he picked the ear up and healed the man that Peter had wounded. The power of that to me is just unmistakable. In Tertullian, and so many of the early Christians, they really went back to that story. Tertullian said [that] when Jesus disarmed Peter, he disarmed every Christian because—if there was a case for using violence in a redemptive way—Peter sure had a strong argument for it. But Jesus is showing us another way. I really believe that it’s impossible for me to love my enemies and simultaneously prepare to kill them. I think [that] the cross and the gun give us two really different versions of power: one says I’m willing to die and one says I’m willing to kill. I just think it’s really difficult to try to hold  a cross in one hand and a weapon in the other. There is something worth dying for, but nothing that I would kill for. That’s the “perfect love [has] no better version than [to be] willing to lay down one’s life for another.” I think the moment that we try to use the violence, we end up mirroring the very thing that God wants to heal the world of—that violence that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel.

Tooley: Do you believe that faithful Christians can serve in law enforcement [or] in the military? And do you believe it’s possible [that] God has callings for different people for different purposes? Maybe some are called to nonviolence. Maybe others are called to purposes that may include violence in some circumstances.

Claiborne: It’s a great question. I think [of] John Yoder and Walter Wink and other folks who have really wrestled with that. When I personally look at the early church, one of the debates that they had held that people can be in the military. Of course, the 3rd or 4th century military folks weren’t just fighting wars. They were building social infrastructure, roads, and aqueducts and other things, so it was very conceivable to think [that] you could be in the military and still not kill. That was really what some Christians came out to say: you could be in the military as long as you commit not to kill another person. To not fight in a war [because] of our fidelity to Jesus means that we’re not going to use violence even in war. There’s so many wonderful examples of that in church history. So I do believe that, once we choose Jesus, [it] is a call to love our enemies and to not use violence. I don’t see a way to justify violence in any form. I think that someone can serve in noncombatant roles, but to follow Jesus creates collisions with some of those identities. That’s why…when you got baptized, your new life in Christ meant renunciation of your old life. I think we would agree that if you owned an adult bookstore and you became a Christian, you would want to rethink the job. But somehow, we don’t extend that to roles where violence is used for working for companies like Lockheed Martin that are some of the biggest proliferators of violence and war in the world—military companies that are building weapons that cost massive amounts to life. I have a close friend who works for one of those companies that has really wrestled with his own vocation. Can I be a Christian and work for a company like Lockheed Martin? I think those are questions that the church is calling people to make disciples of Jesus. That means some careers are incompatible with those calls that we see essential to the gospel.

Tooley: You, of course, are very active in opposing the death penalty—and of course your goal is to abolish the death penalty altogether— and you are pro-life. Would you legally restrict abortion? And to what extent would you restrict it, if it were up to you?

Claiborne: Well, first of all, I got involved in the death penalty partly because I saw that there were lots of Christians that were vocal on abortion and other issues. But on gun violence and the death penalty, we actually haven’t been the champions of life. We’ve been the obstacles. That’s why I wrote a book around both of those because I saw that the death penalty wouldn’t stand a chance in America if it weren’t for Christians. The Bible Belt is the Death Belt. Where 85% of the executions happens is in the Bible Belt. It’s also the states that held onto slavery the longest. That became very problematic to me because one of the questions that’s raised by the death penalty—[it is] a very deeply theological question—is anybody beyond redemption? And how much do we trust imperfect human institutions, like our government, with the irreversible power of life and death? And of course, with gun violence, Christians own guns at a higher rate in the general population. The highest gun owning demographic in America is white evangelicals. Following Jesus [with] one hand with the cross and owning a gun—particularly advocating for the legality of assault weapons and things like that—has been a big passion of mine because to me those are very personal. [In] every corner of our neighborhood, we have stories of those who died from guns. So it’s not just a debate to me. I think proximity makes a world of difference. And I would say on abortion…one of my heroes is Mother Teresa. We’ve got her on my wall too. But one of the things I admire about her is how consistent her passion for life was. She is passionately against abortion, but she was also passionate about the death penalty. She’d call governors in the night before an execution. She spoke out passionately about the violence and the impact of war. When I went to India where I worked with her in the orphanages that she started, what struck me was that, to be pro-life for Mother Teresa, [it] was not just about bumper stickers and T-shirts. I don’t even know if she had any of those. It was about taking in kids that were abandoned in train stations. It was about taking in 14-year-old moms [who] didn’t know what they were going to do. In some ways, I think we need more than ideologies. we need to take responsibility of what a love of our neighbor looks like. In my neighborhood, that’s what pro-life looks like. If we are going to tell someone they shouldn’t have an abortion, then we need to be able to build a community around them and support them. That is something I care deeply about—eradicating abortion. The problem is [that] in our partisan politics, you don’t have a party or a candidate that’s very consistent. Even in the last election, Hillary Clinton, the leading candidate for the Democratic Party, was for the death penalty and had a terrible track record on abortion. Then, on the other side, Donald Trump… I mean, his life ethic is just an absolute train wreck on almost everything. So, I didn’t find a home very easily as one who cares about pro-life for all of life: from the womb to the tomb. We can do a better job at reducing abortions— and health care  is a part of that—having more support for those who are really vulnerable. I don’t think legalization is the primary lens [or that] the answer to our gun problem is just to overturn the 2nd amendment. I don’t think the answer to abortion is just to overturn Roe vs. Wade. I do believe that we all have to be asking how we can do a better job [in] protecting life, and a lot of times we’ve been better at protecting guns than protecting lives. Sometimes for folks on the left, the conversation has just been about rights and not about life and the dignity of the child and of the mother. How do we try to be a stronger advocate for life? I think, on the other hand, some of the rhetoric from folks on abortion has been a hindrance to actually reducing abortions in real ways by just having an ideology that is so polarizing in our country. So, I think we need to have a better conversation around abortion, but we also need a better conversation [about] what our consistent ethic of life could look like. I’m considering writing a book on that, so I might tap you if I need to have a conversation partner, Mark.

Tooley: I look forward to it. Finally, Shane, obviously you’re associated with the left side of Christianity. I would be associated with the right side of Christianity. Where do we intersect and are there commonality’s where we could, if not collaborate, at least have common conversations about the common good?

Claiborne: First of all, I’m not very comfortable with those labels of left and right and conservative and liberal. I find them really unhelpful and—depending on who you talk to—some of my friends would tell you I’m very conservative and some of my friends would tell you I’m very liberal. But like how Chesterton said, if I’m too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives, I might be right where I’m supposed to be. But these things are not about left and right, but about right and wrong. A couple of things I think I hope we would find common ground on, Mark, is what is surfacing in our country or in this area of Donald Trump is very troubling. Someone said that Trump didn’t change America, he just revealed America. The pandemic didn’t break America. It just showed how America was already broken. So, we’re seeing a lot of that. But when I look at the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness—I’m very concerned about the policies and the rhetoric of Trump and of the Christians who defend him. So much of what he does looks very little like the fruits of the Spirit and very much like the seven deadly sins. When I look at the beatitudes of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, I’m very concerned. It’s actually my love for Jesus that creates my deep concern about Trump and those who enable him. I think we’ve got a lot of challenges in our country right now, and some of this is about the different lenses we see the world through based on our social location. There is a major fault line of race in our country. Even as we think about the 80% or so that voted for Trump and continue to defend him of white evangelicals, over 70% of non-white Christians are opposing him. There is a racial fault line that I think when people here say make America great again, you sort of ask, what does that look like for a person of color? What era of American history would a black person want to relive? And you understand why many people when they hear “make America great again” here “make America white again.” There is this sort of fragility of white power that has dominated so much of the policies and rhetoric in our country. On the back of the first black president, we see this sort of whitelash—whitness lashing back—and that white supremacy is in so many different forms. So, I look at Jesus and I see the things that he said. I see what Jesus blessed in the beatitudes: blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers. Those are the things that Jesus blessed and those are the things the people [want] that, in many ways, the policy of this current administration is cursing. When I read Jesus in Matthew 25 with the sheep and the goats where he says that, in the end, we are all going to be gathered before God and we’re going to be asked—not just doctrinal questions—but we are going to be asked, “when I was a stranger, did you welcome me in?” And that’s got some really important implications when it comes to welcoming asylum seekers and refugees and immigrants. “When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was sick, did you make sure I was cared for?” Our works don’t earn our salvation, but they do demonstrate it. Matthew 25 is a litmus test of how we’re doing as a country and as individuals, and I’m very concerned because I don’t think we are doing a very good job at taking care of the least of these. In the end, God doesn’t care how the power is doing, God cares how the poor are doing.

Tooley: Shane Claiborne, head of The Simple Way in Philadelphia, thank you so much for this conversation. It was a welcome break to engage with you directly and I hope our conversation will continue. Come visit us sometime when you’re in DC and when normalcy hopefully returns.

Claiborne: Thank you, my brother. Hey Mark, can I say one more thing? You can stop the recording or keep going, but I just wanted to say that I think one of the things I hope we can agree on is the toxicity of self-righteousness. I’m very concerned. I could show you emails that I get from [both] the left and the right [that] have a very similar tone. I hope that you and I and others can be a part of a better conversation and disagreeing well. Self-righteousness is nonpartisan and Jesus called it the yeast of the Pharisees. I think it does so much damage when we say, “thank you that I’m not like those people.” [It is] so important when we can have a posture of humility. That’s what I’m trying to do, and it gives me some grace with others because I feel like I’ve been on the other side of so many of these issues.  I can appreciate that scripture that [says] we’re working out our salvation with fear and trembling; that it’s not just a moment, but a lifetime of being shaped by the Spirit of God. That’s just my final lingering thought I wanted to say.

Tooley: Thank you, Shane! You have been very civil. Maybe our conversation will hopefully be a model for others.

Claiborne: Reach out to me anytime. I’m glad to give you my information. Like I said, I learned far more from people who push back on things that they might not see eye to eye on then people that are just going to say “amen” to everything. The idea of iron sharpening iron… I’m seeing that at the forge. It works very good!

Tooley: Thank you again. God bless!

 

  1. Comment by Eternity Matters on May 19, 2020 at 1:33 pm

    Shane is a muddled-thinking foolish man. Nothing wrong with owning guns. Self-defense and protecting others is completely legitimate.

    He uses weasel-words to justify his pro-abortion stance. He claims to love his neighbor while letting them be slaughtered with impunity. He doesn’t care deeply about eradicating it at all. He endorses candidates who want to force you to pay for abortions up to the child’s first breath. But he wants a “better conversation.” Sure. Abortion KILLS 20,000 children per week and the death penalty kills ONE person a week who survived 10+ years of appeals.

    And the notion that God won’t reach whomever He likes is false. Shane acts like it is bad that you might kill a murderer before he supposedly would repent, but that just makes the murder that much worse. After all, the murderer may not have just taken the victim’s physical life but his eternal life!

    “Red letter Christians” tip their hands at their foundational error. Jesus is God and is in agreement with all of scripture. He quoted the Old Testament extensively, and referred to its most controversial elements without apology: Sodom & Gomorrah, Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, etc.

    And Jesus didn’t hand-write the Gospels. They authors had some eyewitness accounts and some reliable second-hand accounts, just like the epistles. And all were inspired by God.

    The “red letter” Christians are nearly always false teachers who pretend that the only words of the Bible that really matter are direct quotes of Jesus (i.e., the words that are printed in red in some Bibles). Their logic fails on many levels, and they can’t even get their own pet verses right.

    If they were the least bit consistent they’d agree with Jesus’ “red letters” that say you should live on all the letters. Matthew 4:4 But he answered, “It is written, “ ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”

    The red letters say to live on all the letters. Why don’t they obey that simple teaching?

    The “red letters” crowd is full of nonsensical hypocrites.

    Black Letters Matter!

  2. Comment by Eternity Matters on May 19, 2020 at 1:35 pm

    And he says Trump’s Christian supporters don’t look like the Sermon on the Mount blah blah blah, as if the fornicating, perverse, coveting, Molech-worshiping pro-aborts of the Left do represent the SOTM? What a tool.

  3. Comment by Eternity Matters on May 19, 2020 at 1:56 pm

    And on racism he’s also completely wrong. Abortion kills blacks at a rate over three times that of whites, and that’s not an accident. Yet he defends the act that kills more blacks in a week than the KKK ever has!

    And black-on-white violence and murder are more than 10 times the inverse. Is that racism? Why does Shane ignore it?

  4. Comment by Jeffrey Allen on May 19, 2020 at 2:21 pm

    Please include transcripts of the video.I can’t hear them well enough to follow. You seem to be doing alot of videos lately.
    Transcripts would be the best of both worlds. Videos for those who like them and written texts for the others.
    Now I feel bad for sounding like a grouchy old person. ,Really I
    am not a grouch but I am retired.

  5. Comment by Eternity Matters on May 19, 2020 at 8:34 pm

    Hi – have you tried clicking the “gear” icon at the bottom right of the YouTube screen and then the subtitles option? That seems to work. Be blessed!

  6. Comment by Jeffrey Allen on May 19, 2020 at 10:23 pm

    Thanks so much. I had no idea that this was available. There are so many videos I have skipped over on news sites. This is great. Thanks again

  7. Comment by A Conservative Social Worker on May 19, 2020 at 10:45 pm

    Like Mark Tooley, Claiborne’s arguments did not change my viewpoints, but with that being said my respect for the man has grown immensely by watching this video. I was extremely pleased at the very end about his caution of self-righteousness from Christians from both Left and Right, and that it sabotages any chances of finding common ground. I pray that such dialogue will continue between those like Mr. Tooley with Shane Claiborne, as this is vital, as “iron sharpens iron” quoted from the Scriptures.

    Lastly, in watching Claiborne’s seeming interest in genuine dialogue and not otherwise wanting to pick a fight, I’m even more disappointed that Jerry Falwell, Jr., refused to meet with him while he was in Lynchburg for the Red Letter Revival. Had this occurred. and at least a cordial bond could have been demonstrated, that would’ve been huge.

  8. Comment by Douglas E Ehrhardt on May 20, 2020 at 4:23 am

    Thanks Eternity, couldn’t agree more .I live in a very left wing area and hear Shane’s opinion regularly. Very sad.

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