ASM195 Activist Theology with Dr. Robyn

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this week we're talking with dr robin about activist theology on ask [Music] [Applause] sciencemic [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer questions about really whatever you want to talk about because i believe every sincere curiosity deserves an honest response this week we're speaking with one of my heroes dr robin henderson espinoza about their work around activist theology we've got a show to do so what do you say let's get it started now based on the feedback i'm seeing online some of you are going to be really excited that we have a third interview in a row on a science mic and some of you are mortified going where are my science questions but there's a reason for all of this uh the people i've had on ask science mike the last two weeks stephanie tate and anna jane joyner you know they both had really time sensitive things they wanted to talk about on the program and that's also true of this week's guest dr robin henderson espinoza who is a trans queer activist latinx scholar and public theologian whose new book activist theology comes out october 1st and they're having a launch party september 29th in nashville i know i've got a lot of nashville friends listening and that's why i wanted to get you aware that this event was happening the same week this podcast comes out so we'll get back to a more traditional ass science mic format next week but for this week i want you to listen this conversation now there's a lot of people who listen to science mike some of you identify as christians some of you are spiritual not religious some of you are atheists some of you don't even care at all some of you are mormons some of you you know there's so many different religious identities there's so many different political affiliations and when you hear trans career activists latinx scholar and public theologians some of you are going to get really excited and some of you are going to get really afraid but i want everyone to listen because just like our conversation with stephanie tate that was faith-centered i think this conversation and in fact this book will be not only enlightening and informing but restorative to every listener of this program uh wherever you think this conversation is going you don't know until you listen so without further ado let's start our conversation with dr robin henderson espinoza i am just so excited to be talking with dr robin this morning who probably uh has no idea uh what impact their work has had on me oh lord i have followed you for years now um in my constant search to be a better contributor to society and a better christian and that's weird for me to say because you know about half of the audience for this podcast doesn't identify as christian and probably a quarter of them literally have no interest whatsoever in things and around christianity but but christianity is very important to me and your work as a public theologian has been incredibly influential in how i view the world and how i view right action and how i contextualize the changes that are good and necessary that society is going through i wonder if we could start with like something relatively easy sure could you help um a very mixed audience in terms of religious identity understand what a public theologian is oh lord i'll try i mean first first let me say that i am also skeptical of calling myself a christian because i think in these days right now christianity equals white supremacy and i have been very explicit about that over the past several years um but like you said christianity is very important to me and um i've been socialized as a christian i have three degrees in christian theology i've trained as a christian social thinker um and i do this thing called public theology which is apparently a thing that people do now um i sort of stumbled in on it after i started my doctoral program and really public theology is thinking in the public square and i i do it from a theological and ethical lens of i believe that everything is theological that the ways that we think about values and norms are driven by a sense of theological understanding or a spiritual meaning and so i just tend to think in the public square and i do lots of theologizing and philosophizing on twitter and um and facebook that's what i think public theology is so i can imagine if we were in a room with all the listeners of the podcast right now uh and you equate as do i uh christianity with white supremacy i can imagine like a third of the room cheering one third of the room holding their breath in absolute terror right um so would you mind unpacking that just a little bit for people who uh maybe don't understand that connection today yeah i mean i i i sort of um come to this idea from theology and from my training that when we begin to layer over ideas of dominance in this sense nationalism and in particular white nationalism when we begin to layer our faith claims with policies and politics and expressions um we get to a place where christianity seems parallel with that of white supremacy and you know if people wonder well what do i mean by supremacy because someone recently asked me what do you mean by capitalism which i also think is racialized and disenfranchising people of color and lgbtq people but white supremacy is a system of dominance whereby there is a racialized hierarchy that puts white people on top and everybody else below and white supremacy is not new um white supremacy is something that's been happening for a long time uh prior to the transit atlantic slave trade um but we see white supremacy expressed in this country throughout the past 200 years from slavery to mass incarceration and up into today so i want everyone to breathe and take a breath white supremacy is real it is not new i did not make it up you did not make it up mike um but it's a thing that is holding us all down and we are either on the side of freedom or we are not it's it's just that black and white to me i think that's what drew me to your work and so excited me about your work and so confuses me about how to communicate your work with a lot of people who haven't done their own work done their own study and done their own scholarship uh to understand what terms like white supremacy means um or how one can be a public theologian who's skeptical of being labeled as a christian but when i say your work has been influential to me following you on twitter hearing you work through ideas and and discuss ideas in the public sphere reading the books that you recommend has helped me on that journey of understanding more the relationship between you know the church today especially the american church and capitalism and white supremacy and in the ways that those things combined are so antithetical even oppositional to you know some of the tenets of the the faith that we all claim to profess which brings me to like what i really want to talk about with you today yeah this episode is going to air on monday september 23rd and there's going to be a launch party on september 29th in nashville and there's a lot of nashville listeners of ask science mike uh celebrating your book coming out uh october 1st called activist theology i'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that book and what the genesis was and and where you're taking the reader with it yeah that book has been three years in the making and as anyone who might be listening maybe have tried to write a book or wanted to write you know that the process of writing can take on many shapes and forms and this book did that i turned in a draft in december of 2017 and um fortress press said look we like your work but this is not the book that we want to publish and so over the year 2018 i rewrote the entire book and rewrote it as story and and basically took the reader through my own becoming an activist and not just an activist but a theological activist and someone who holds divine doubt as a gift and i wrote and i wrote and i wrote and i wrote and i wrote about being in charlottesville in 2017 i wrote about resilience i wrote about the silence of my white father who employed undocumented workers whom he called wetbacks and i basically spill the tea about my life in some of the moral dilemmas that i have struggled with and i wrote it down and i it's now in a book wow what was that like revisiting some of those elements of your story to put on the page you know i just think that it's important to be honest you know everyone thinks oh you you're you're you've arrived at these decisions at your politics without a cost and it's really important to to recall that there has been a great cost to me arriving at my politics the cost of being estranged from my father who who died over 10 years ago and no one called me i found his obituary online and i write about that and i write about that's the ultimate silence and i can never repair that relationship and i could never go back and try to help him along so i write about the cost of what it means to to live your theology and ethics out loud i tend to call myself a radical political theology theologian and there's a cost to that and people don't realize that when you are charting your own becoming that things fall away and for me so much of the things that i've fallen away have been my blood family and when you then sort of piece together your life and your family you realize that it's the people that you choose to do life with or the people who are going to be there for you and that that also comes at a cost right it was a it was a great opportunity for me to really be honest with myself and with the potential readers and there was a lot of grief that i went through when i wrote the book and just realizing like oh yeah that was a thing and that was hard but i think the book it takes the it takes the reader on a journey of becoming and it's really a book for anyone asking the questions and i and i i tend to think about myself as someone who lives the questions and if you're asking the questions maybe maybe you will be transformed to live the questions and maybe maybe this is a book for you i don't know i am speechless i'm actually speechless that if people who listen no that's not a common state for me when i read about the book and i've already ordered my copy and anyone else who wants to order theirs if you go to the show notes on ask sciencemike.com there'll be a link to the book where you can just go ahead and buy it right now even while you're listening you can go right now in your podcast player tap the show notes and uh and buy this essential book but based on the description of the book i didn't realize that your story and narrative were part of the book um and i'm so pumped that's the case yeah because for people who are so many listeners in this program are former evangelicals and former theological conservatives and formal political conservatives who have this new dawning and growing awareness of some of the more insidious structures of our world that are held up by their previous identity and they're so hungry to figure out what to do next and when we offer resources and when we communicate uh uh readings and we communicate you know great works of theology and scholarship it's often such a big lift at first because you're trying you're learning all these new terms and trying to navigate these new things but seeing that play out in a first person narrative with your life experience that's so powerful like i was already excited to read the book yeah now the second it comes out i'm clearing my calendar and reading it in one sitting yeah um that is such a needed thing in our world that's not a question that's just me saying yeah how excited i am well and let me say this and and this may feel like a contradiction or it may stump some people and they may say no i'm not interested in dr robin but like the book is very evangelical in this in the sense that i am making an argument and i believe what i am saying is the truest truth and you know like i would never come out as a christian but i've been deeply formed as a christian and also i write about following the ways of jesus in the book around love and compassion and justice and in that sense the book is a bit of a claim to even to being evangelical but i don't mean it in the sense of conservative fundamentalist evangelicals where you have to have a relationship with jesus or anything um and people have commented robin this is so much more orthodox than what i even knew you were capable of and and part of that was recovering the root of my story and i think that the the downside of being an ex-evangelical is that we tend to cut off the root system and we and we separate it you know and we don't turn back and what i did was i said no i'm going to turn back and i'm going to recover that root system and cull from that root system and see what is there um and i did that and i i talk as much as i can about becoming rooted in our story and sometimes that means recovering our past now i would never advocate for putting a person in harm's way i'm a big believer in harm reduction but recovering our story is some of the work i think that needs to be done so that we can be rooted and so that we can be grounded and i think a lot of us we don't have root we don't have a root system because we've been so damaged by the institutional church that that we cut off our root system and so i i try to advocate for returning to our roots in some capacity as you say that and name that i feel a grief and an awareness of the ways that i've cut off the roots in my own life that's one of the reasons i think your work is so important for those of us who were evangelicals and who have believed themselves to be white and become aware of the relationship between white supremacy and the evangelical church we cut off the roots because we can see no way to redeem them and i think there's something i say a lot to my audience is that we should listen and we should follow the work of people of color and women of color and lgbtq folks especially queer folks and disabled people and other marginalized people who are doing the work of of of reframing and redefining the world of theology because it is actually their perspectives that not only create a world where they can survive and where they can thrive and they can flourish but remarkably actually also can in some ways lead the way home for those of us who feel trapped between the way we present into the world and the way we've been socially indoctrinated and the way we want to exist in the world as supporters and on equal footing with everyone else yeah i mean i i i love what you're saying here because i think that what i try to do in the book is talk about what i call the logic of dominance and we we have a dominant way of thinking about things and it's usually informed by whiteness culture of whiteness um and when we begin to listen to the voices of the choir as i as i have said it's texturized right the choir texturizes the narrative in a way and that's what i hope this book does is texturize a little bit from my trans perspective from me being a mixed-race latinx and for me being raised by a woman of color who is not from this country and what not i hope that it texturizes a little bit to move us out of the logic of dominance and into a vision for collective liberation what role has queer theology played both for you and in the book in subverting that dominance well i you know queer theology and queer theory is highly contested terms in the academy and i i try very hard never to define activist theology in in the book um i gesture toward it and i and i i write about it but i never normatively define it and i think that is an influence of queer theory and queer theology in the sense that i'm not trying to own activist theology i'm just trying to start a conversation i'm just trying to contribute to the discourse because i think we can look at other places where activist theology has been written or or it's bubbling up but we don't name it as such and i think the same is true for queer theology and core theory that there are there's a way to destabilize the narrative by inserting the eye there's a way to destabilize the hegemony of the academy by inserting the eye and that's an influence of of queer theory in queer theology so it's there but i i just gesture to it i don't i don't really name it what about the role that class plays in these systems and in your life yeah i mean i i talk very frankly about and i'll just say it here because you're gonna read it in the book anyways but i talked about when i took my first faculty post in berkeley california you know i thought it was gonna be an avant-garde place where i'd be sitting in cafes listening to independent music or poetry and talk in theory but my reality of living in california was i was on food stamps and on public health and and i just was very honest about what that experience was and what it meant for me to try to survive in a system where class ascendancy didn't work in my favor so i write very honestly about capitalism in my own struggles around class and that it's it's hard it's hard to live we live in a world where it is hard to live that's one thing i think that people so often miss yeah uh if you're middle class then there are a lot of times where you're trying to figure out how to get all your bills paid and it feels like struggle and it is struggle yep i don't want to minimize those struggles but the level of anxiety there is usually about um how will my credit report look right not about will i have food shelter safety right and that the middle class experience is not actually the normative experience even in the united states and we so often forget that um we tend to in the middle class think there's like the middle class and then and then literal homelessness and that there's no space in between and when you look at the demography uh around income in this country and around household wealth uh somehow the middle class is asleep to the economic reality of what it's like to live in america yeah and when we forget that it makes it impossible to have a genuine justice orientation in our life and in our faith right oh gosh what a remarkable insight you've shared with us thank you well i mean and let me just piggy back onto that i i talk about our greatest social violence is poverty and that we don't really know how to talk about poverty and poverty comes in lots of different ways um i talk about being saddled with student loan debt and you know i don't know i don't know if i'll ever be able to even attempt to pay every time i every time i apply for income-based repayment it says you don't owe anything because i don't make enough to to start paying on my student loans um and we don't we don't talk about that is about poverty we have we have created hell on earth and and and one of the expressions is poverty and it is a social violence wow wow i mean it's sobering you know yeah that's something that's happening with me anymore is there's a time in my life where a statement like that would have rolled past and i would have felt awkward and i would have tried to jump forward and make a radio and now i uh i just have to sit and grieve for a moment yeah i mean this is where i i'm like it takes a village we have got to start doing work together to start flipping the script on reality so that people can live so that people have a chance so that people can flourish i mean i'm deeply invested in human flourishing but we don't have the conditions to at our disposal for human flourishing what we have at our disposal is violence that comes in the form of poverty a militarism of war of white nationalism and you know transphobia etc that that those things are creating conditions for death not for flourishing and we need to get our hands dirty is there anything else you'd like to share with uh with the listeners today i mean i'd love to hear what folks think about the book um i know that some folks won't like it and that's okay um but i'd really i'm genuinely interested in what people think about the book what do you feel what what is conjured up when you read it there's a lot of my story in it and there's a lot of reflection in it and i'm really curious you know can we actually chart a conversation together through being in dialogue with one another can we actually bridge our deepest differences so that we can create a better life not just for me and you but for everyone i i'm really curious about that dr robin's new book activist theology is available october 1st basically everywhere books are sold if you're looking for the next step in redefining and reclaiming your roots of faith if you're trying to figure out how to come to terms with the intersection of faith and white supremacy and capitalism and what you can do and how to be involved in in creating solutions and creating human flourishing i can't recommend enough that you pick up this book i'd also recommend that you go to irobin.com that's irobyn.com and see all the opportunities you have to follow dr robin on social media especially those of you in nashville who can experience their work in person at the launch party for activist theology on september 29th dr robin thank you for taking the time this morning it has been an honor to speak with you thanks so much science mike oh there's a lot going on with ask science mike uh i'm so excited uh i don't know if you can tell this from your side of the table but downloads on that science mic have never been higher than they are right now so there's a lot of energy coming back to this program that really excites me and part of that is uh the fact that we have a great team of people working on it so i'd like to thank caitlin hermstad for producing ask science mike i'd like to thank greg nordeen for directing and sound designing and editing ask science mike andrew galucki for his pre-production work and all of my patrons on patreon who make this show possible i thank you not only for your ongoing generosity but your new generosity i've seen so many increased pledges and new pledges the last couple of months uh i definitely feel the love and i feel so honored to have the opportunity to talk with all of you every week thank you so much for listening and i'll talk to you soon [Applause] [Music]