People are still spiritually curious, passionate, and committed today even while many are leaving traditional churches. Watch this pivot podcast episode with Dr. Dwight Zscheile and Dr. Andy Root to dive deep into the intersection of Christian faith and our secular age.

In today’s pivot podcast episode, we are taking a deeper dive into the transformation or displacement of sacred impulses and rituals onto secular sources during this secular age. Listen to this whole episode to hear what insights Jean Jacques Rousseau, Lesslie Newbigin, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer can provide about how people are engaging in spiritual transformation apart from traditional sacred rituals and spiritual practices. People still want a mystical experience and to be part of a sacred journey. Discover your role as a spiritual leader in a secular age.

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Andy Root: You can see I'm starting to make a space for making a case of a of a very low anthropology as opposed to a high one. And we're in a cultural moment where we have a very high anthropology, and Rousseau gives us a very high anthropology. All things are possible now for those who believe and surrender to the gospel. All things are possible for those who optimize themselves. Um, you know who can who can follow one of these paths?

Dwight Zscheile: While we're seeing a decline in people participating in legacy churches in Western culture today, that doesn't mean that spirituality or longings for transcendence are going away. In the US, robust majorities still believe in God or a higher power. The sacred is alive and well, but increasingly displaced from traditional religious institutions and practices onto other things. Today, we're going to be talking about how we can understand institutional religious disaffiliation amidst widespread spiritual curiosity, passion and commitment in some provocative forms. Hello everyone. I'm Dwight Zscheile. Welcome to the Pivot podcast. If you're new here, this is the podcast where we talk about how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. In today's episode, we want to take a deeper dive into the transformation or displacement of sacred impulses and rituals onto secular sources, simply trying to get people to affiliate and participate in religious institutions is missing a deeper, and I think, more interesting challenge in today's culture. And I can't think of a better guest than the one we have for today, Dr. Andy Root, who is the Carrie Olson Boston Professor of Youth and Family Ministry here at Luther Seminary. You may know Andy from his many books, dozens of books exploring contemporary culture and what it means to be the church today. Andy, welcome to the Pivot podcast.

Andy Root: Thanks. I'm, that was really impressive to watch you do that intro. I mean, I feel nervous watching you do that.

Dwight Zscheile: So, Andy, your latest book is "The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms," which is a provocative title. And you started this book. I think I may have been in the meeting that you referred to at Luther Seminary of some of us faculty thinking together years ago about evangelism and discipleship. And you had this idea of reading memoirs. Tell us about that.

Andy Root: Yeah. Well, it actually was on a trip and I received a memoir. I'm not a memoir reader. I am, uh, I'm a TV watcher. So, like, you know, relaxing with a book is not what I do. I read for a living. So I'm, you know, I watch TV is how I relax. But someone gave me a memoir, and I'm also one of those strange people that if I have the book, I feel like I. It becomes a homework assignment, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not going to shelf it in my office until I've read the thing. So it was like in the stack of books, but it was, uh, Westover's "Educated." And what was really profound, I mean, it was an amazing book. As anyone who's read it knows. I mean, just like a classic classic, I guess, of the last five, ten years of a memoir. But it really was a story of transformation. I mean, it was a story about how education, uh, changed her life in a really significant way. And that just got me thinking about how all these memoirs and I started to dabble into some memoirs, because that one was so good. And there was there was so much fodder there for, I guess, just reflection and thinking about. And I was just kind of amazed as I picked some of these up on, you know, top ten lists of certain years, that there was always these overtones of spirituality, but even deeper than that of, of a kind of sense of mysticism, which is, I guess, how you talk when your whole life gets changed by some engine of transformation. Like I said in the "Educated" book, it's education. Um, and so, yeah, that just got me really fascinated by it in how inside of this kind of secular age, there are these deep stories of how people's lives are changed. I mean, this is this is not a kind of purely rationalist age where people are like, uh, you know, you live, you die. That's it. Like, there are these pursuits that people are on to find significant transformational change. And I think the memoirist, at least in the last decade or so, maybe the last two decades, has kind of become the mystic that talks about these transformations. But what's really interesting is, um, well, you know, 90% of them, you know, uh, nine and a half out of ten will make no reference to a personal god, ever. But there is a significant transformation, but not not in any kind of classic philosophical or religious sense of a God who changes them. There's there's a different way that they think about transformation.

Dwight Zscheile: And that different way is often going deeper into the self. Yeah, right. So say more about that. And in the book you, you talk, you do a little sort of intellectual genealogy for us in Western culture, going back to a particular figure in the Enlightenment who is probably more influential than many of us recognize. Do you want to say more about that?

Andy Root: Yeah. So, you know, this is part of the problem with with reading one of my books is there's always these genealogies at play. I'm a I'm a bit addicted to kind of genealogical thinking, which is really just trying to, I guess the best way to say it is trying to do a kind of DNA test on how we, how we get these forms of imagination that we have. And and it seems to me it seems a really we're in a significant moment where the self carries a lot of weight in the in this cultural moment. And one of the places that I really reached in this book that I'm not sure is right, but I'm I'm wagering might be right is it appears to me that when you find yourself at moments, kind of historical moments where, um, there's, there's an infusion of guilt within a society. Um, that then you find unique forms of mysticism that come out, you know, so like in the 14th, early 15th century, you have I mean, it's just an awful time in Europe and you have, uh, a plague going through that's killing a third of the population. You have two popes, and it feels like Christendom itself is coming undone. And then you get all these awakenings of these mystical traditions that come about through the Rhineland, through parts of Italy and things like that. And so what I found kind of fascinating is thinking, my gosh, you know, is it possible in reading some other social theory, it seems like in this late modern time, guilt has returned, ironically. That guilt is here again. But it's taken a different form that guilt isn't, oh, there's a plague, or the whole society has disobeyed God's law, or there's pockets of people doing witchcraft, and therefore disobedience has come. The new guilt is that you feel like you let yourself down, that you could have been more with your life.

Dwight Zscheile: You weren't true to yourself.

Andy Root: You weren't true to yourself. You weren't brave enough to kind of access the inner resources that could have really led you to live well. The the kind of motif I used throughout the book is a kind of inner magnificence. And so there is a presumption that each self is magnificent in and of itself. And that doesn't just come from nowhere. And I do these motifs. It's a little bit weird, I guess. The whole book is like, I use my experience in Airbnbs to kind of frame this.

Dwight Zscheile: You did a lot of traveling in that book.

Andy Root: I am a bit flexing my air miles in this. Uh, but we were in, uh, my family and I were in Paris right as the, the lockdowns had ended. I mean, it was like right after Europe opened up, but then there was like, Paris was taking in, France was taking in, uh, visitors. But then it was another ten days until they stopped the curfew. So we were there the day our last day was going to be the day the curfew ended. And you could just feel it in Paris, like they just could not wait. And we happened to be staying up by the Sorbonne, and there were young, young adults just gathering. And you could, you know, it was going to be an all night party, you know, a celebration of the pandemic being over, not realizing, of course, that the Delta virus was coming under the surface here. Um, but I walked up, uh, we were going to stay up all night, too. And, like, we're going to sit on the sand and drink wine, and it was going to be great. And then 9:00 came along. We're like, we're old and tired. Let's go back to bed. But I walked up to the Sorbonne just to take one more look at the Pantheon up there, and there's a statue to the right if you walk up from the Luxembourg Gardens. And all these young adults were sitting on this statue, and I almost immediately knew who it was, that it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, uh, this great French writer, actually citizen of Geneva, who takes over Paris as the the great writer of the, of the early 18th century. And all these young adults were sitting around the feet of Rousseau and not purposely.

Dwight Zscheile: It was just a great place metaphor, though.

Andy Root: Yeah, an amazing metaphor. They were sitting there just, you know, to drink and, um, they were playing on a cordless speaker, Bon iver's, uh, song where he sings, "and at once I knew I was not magnificent." And it was really ironic that they're singing that in Rousseau's ear because Rousseau's big point, uh, coming kind of out of the enlightenment, helping birth forth the enlightenment is the real. He takes a very different, the exact opposite, the kind of image difference of Augustine, uh, where Augustine makes this assertion in his own confessions that the human spirit, that the human being is fundamentally in a state of sin and needs something from outside of it to rescue it. This rescuing happens internally, but it is something outside that has to come internal and save the self. Rousseau likes the internal stuff just fine, but Rousseau thinks that the reality of our brokenness, or what's gone wrong with humanity, isn't that there's something fundamentally sinful inside of us. It is that we are magnificent, that we are innocently perfect as we are. And what happens is that Paris corrupts us, civilization corrupts us. So there's all these images of kind of I mean, they're they're baseline to directly kind of racist, where there's this kind of sense of in an age of discovery, which I think is a misnomer in itself. But there's a sense that the people who are outside of civilization actually are pure in themselves. There's this, this kind of racist sense of, of the noble, noble savage. But that's taken a kind of different form. And I think a rousseauian kind of perspective of the self just festers everywhere in our culture, that there is a deep sense that you have a responsibility to find your magnificence, to be your magnificence. And all these memoirs really are stories of how people were kind of tripped up from. Being magnificent and found ways to overcome this in some way. And there were some activity they took and then wrote a memoir about it that helped them find their way into their magnificent self. Um, so yeah, there's a lot of weight on the self as magnificent. And I think part of what drives this kind of spirituality is that shockingly, like, you know, Rousseau's frenemy Voltaire, who used to hate Voltaire and pick on him all the time. Um, the idea was, once we can get these overweening priests out of our life, guilt will be gone, right? We'll have a Western world. We won't have guilt. And yet, here we are in late modernity, in a hyper consumerist society. And I think people feel really guilty, you know, like they ate too much. They didn't work out. They weren't brave enough to start a podcast like this one. You know, like there's all sorts of things that they failed to do and they feel like, uh, if they could find a guru who could help them, it kind of spiritual sage, if they could read examples. Um, you know, they're almost like stories from the medieval period of, like, Pilgrim's tales, you know, that these memoirs become that now how you found yourself, um, by the strength of yourself in many ways.

Dwight Zscheile: So let's just tease out a couple elements of that. Um, so Rousseau's assumption is that it's really outside structures of society that that kind of corrupt and pervert us. And if we are our true selves, can act in the world, we can actually reform those structures and have a kind of utopia. Right? So very basic enlightenment, you know, kind of myth, if you will, very tenacious in Western society, um, to this day. So, so if the old way of thinking about conversion was, you know, I'm going to actually come to terms with my sinfulness, my brokenness, my estrangement from God, not even really my estrangement from my true self. That was there was a threat of that in the tradition. Um, but then God rescues me, you know, this transcendent reality actually delivers me from that. Now say more about how that narrative plays out. It's it's all internalized. Yeah. But then, um, but then there's a sense that the world is also very oppressive to the self.

Andy Root: Yeah. That the world is filled. Well, what really happens, I think, in, in our late modern times, the world becomes filled with either haters or fans. So there are those who affirm you, um, see you as you are welcome. You give you their kind of recognition that you deserve, that radiates back in and plays this kind of dialogical move where it both tells you how you always were, but also substantiates it in some way. You know, there's this there's this weird inner dynamic that actually shows that this is an abstraction in some ways, because you need some kind of discourse. You need to to put this in theological language, you do need some word from outside of you to to speak into your life. And so even this dynamic has that. But the idea, of course, is that, well, if things are going bad or I'm not hearing a positive word, it's either because those people are haters. And so now I just have to learn all a Taylor Swift to shake, shake, shake that off, um, and and find my internal self. But there is a kind of sense that you're in an economy of attention. You're in an economy of how you present and perform yourself. And so when the self then becomes constituted, which I don't think Rousseau would have ever imagined, like where we've taken this beyond. So I don't think Rousseau would have imagined the self as a performative agent like that. You're always performing yourself and you're needing to get feedback, and you're you can even get kind of algorithms and, you know, analytics on how well you're getting your performance back, who's seeing you, who's not seeing you, how many likes you have, how many you don't. So I don't I think Rousseau would have been Rousseau would have like, seen the social media world and been horrified by it because it actually became a way to echo. Well, it became a way for teenagers to lay in their beds and never be able to leave the corrosive civilization movements of Paris like it's there. All the time. So he'd have been horrified by that. But he did create the conditions for us to think the issue is, and this is my kids school, my kids very progressive magnet school. I mean, they basically tell the every student that you are perfect just the way you are. It's the haters out there. It's it's certain people who have different political perspectives than us. It's it's, uh, it's just people who are mean that that are making it bad. So you have to we have to make a world where mean people cannot tell different identities how they should live their lives or different selves, their value. And theirs is something that's of course true about that. But there is also something that just turns you even further in to yourself and and ask you to perform and perform and perform and perform. And that's where the guilt comes in, because you ultimately, as you perform, have to look at other everyone else. And how are they performing and how am I doing this? Absolutely. Yeah. And so now all of a sudden it's like, well, I guess I have a good life. It's not like that person. Or look how much better that person writes or look at. Look how much you know, that person is so much better at this or that, and you're just kind of always living under that guilt I think.

Dwight Zscheile: Mhm. So, um, so the idea that you, you have to basically save yourself is, is really the premise. It's an enormous burden to place, you know, to think about a society having as its foundation the individual self, certainly from a traditional Christian perspective. Um horrible idea if you think, if you believe that human nature is actually messed up, broken in some deep way. Um, you know, I'm thinking about Leslie Newbigin's, um, you know, statement that that West modern Western culture is the greatest foe the church has ever faced. Really? Because at its core is this assumption that we can save ourselves. So, um, so as you think about kind of how this plays out in the life of the church, I mean, how have churches actually taken these ideas in and absorbed them and actually are propagating them in some ways? Right, because the church is very much implicit in this. Right?

Andy Root: Yeah. And this is I mean, for me, this is particularly where kind of I mean, it doesn't take much. The beginning of this book is, is very much a genealogy. It's kind of a cultural construction all the way through the middle. But if if you know my work, you can see the kind of theological elements come out and you can see I'm starting to make a space for making a case of a, of a very low anthropology as opposed to a high one. And we're in a cultural moment where we have a very high anthropology, and Rousseau gives us a very high anthropology. All things are possible now for those who believe and surrender to the gospel. All things are possible for those who optimize themselves. Um, you know, who can who can follow one of these paths? So, uh, I, you know, this is also a book where I fell off the wagon and became, I used to be a diagram aholic, and, uh, then I used to read other people's diagrams, like, look at other people's diagrams and books and be like, this makes no sense to me. What is this? And so then I, like, stopped doing that. I was like, oh my gosh, that's how people feel when they see all my diagrams in my books. But this book, I fell off the wagon and I'm back diagramming again. So I noticed that a diagram in the middle in the book, because I think one of the things and this gets to your question of where this impacts the church, is that this kind of movement towards a high anthropology tends to embed itself in two different ways, I think in and this is one of the confusing things I think about our larger cultural moment is we keep on saying we're in a polarized time, and we are I mean, in many ways we are polarized. But what makes the polarization so dizzying is it actually isn't two teams or two groups against each other. It's three. And this is something Charles Taylor does at the very end of a secular age where he's like, you know, really the conflicts in modernity are if you particularly if you look at religion, you can see this like people who have a hard time with religion. The first will be what he calls the exclusive humanists. And they really want a modern moral order and think what religion does. And the problem with religion is it's repressive, uh, that it tells you exactly what, uh, Rousseau is trying to abandon. That, that you're broken, that you're sinful, that you need something outside of you, that that your own way of finding your your own inner genius isn't isn't good enough. Yeah. Um, and those people exist and are pretty, pretty strong within our society. And they find religions sense that there is something beyond, um, just exclusive human flourishing, that there may be something bigger, like the kingdom of God or some kind of eschatological reign, or that there's an image of God within us that has no correlation really, even to ourselves, but it's just bestowed upon us by by gods word or gods like that. That to them seems problematic, and they're uncomfortable with that. But there's another group of people which are very strong now in our cultural moment, who actually hate that exclusive humanist stuff. They hate the kind of modern moral order, like, let's make safe spaces for everybody. Everyone should be able to express themselves. We better watch our language and we have better. We better organize our language in a certain way. And these are people that Charles Taylor, sometimes he calls them the neo nicaeans. Sometimes he calls them the counter-enlightenment people. And they are really embedded in a kind of sense of will to a will to power. And you can see this in kind of pop culture texts like, um, Yellowstone is the kind of glorification of the kind of counter-enlightenment. And they actually think that the exclusive humanists that they keep talking about to have freedom. We need to have spaces where people can really articulate their selves. They think that's crap. Like they think that that's actually a ploy by elites or others to keep the truly heroic down. So the kind of counter-enlightenment upholds a kind of will to power in a heroic piece. Yeah. And both of those two kind of play now, the counter-enlightenment perspective, they actually have a hard time with religion too. And the problem they. With religion is that, well, for instance, you believe in something beyond death, like, you know, and you believe in that. There's some kind of reconciliation of all suffering just feels like a real fairy tale, you know, that you would that you would think that it seems like it keeps you from really embracing life and living it, living it fully. So these two both exist, um, and they both critique each other and they both critique religion, and sometimes they'll team up. But I think really what's happened with American Protestantism in this moment is holding this kind of sense of beyond or being what I call in the book beyonders, which means thinking that there's something beyond just human flourishing and there is something beyond death, like holding to that distinctly assertion that there is a, a, a, a God who exists and lives and speaks and moves history. Um, that that's been hard. Very hard. Uh, I think over the last two decades, three decades to hold on to. And we've seen Protestantism in different forms slide down the triangle to try to find cover in each in each of those, um, you know, either to become feel much more comfortable with fellow exclusive humanists than say, you know, others and, and the others have slid down more towards, you know, the, uh, a counter-enlightenment perspective and, and feel like, you know, if you see it as a triangle, those Protestants become more unlike each other. So it's like one side is, well, I'm, I'm, I'm fine with this group and I'd vote for this person, but it's those other people that go to those kind of churches that I really hate. Like they're, you know, they're the they're the bad people. So there's been a certain sense of not being able to hold on to this sense of what it means to be people who are beyond hold on to something beyond and to think of Protestantism that way. And I think it really does have its core in a very different anthropology, that to stay beyond her is to have a low anthropology. I think because you need something, you realize that you do not have the capacity or the resources or, um, whatever you need. You don't have it within you that you can only make a confession and surrender to something beyond you. Right. Um, and to to hold that there's something beyond means that one must surrender. And you can see why both perspectives find that a problem and not just a problem, but hideous. One side to surrender means, oh, that's a dangerous game for your identity, that you allow other people to impose, that the other side thinks that that's just an utter loser's lament that you would surrender, you know, like weakness. Yeah, it's utter weakness. You should. You should drive like Beth on Yellowstone. She never surrenders, you know, she she she'll go down in F-bombs and, uh, in a trail of gunfire before she'll ever surrender. Um, and then the other side just feels like surrender could just be a hurtful, a hurtful thing. It doesn't. It doesn't hear people's uniqueness. It becomes completely repressive and oppressive. Yeah.

Dwight Zscheile: So but what's interesting to me about that is you think about kind of say, say the sort of left wing progressive side being the exclusive humanist, where the assumption is still like a lot of energy is in churches, around is around. How do we remake society to be, you know, more just it's sort of a lot of political activism or a lot of this kind of therapeutic individualism. It's like create these spaces to discover your true self, affirm identities. And then you have now the sort of right wing counter response, that is, whether it be a kind of muscular Christian nationalism where a lot of people who, you know, identify as evangelicals don't even go to church. Right, but but are very much caught up in this same, you know, reaction to that. But all of that is taking place without God. Yeah. On a basic level, I think that's one of the key points you make in this book. Um, so as we think about, you know, our audience for this podcast, many of whom are trying to lead local churches and navigate these really fraught cultural waters. So what what would be your counsel, um, to help, you know, leaders actually, you know, draw people's attention to understanding these cultural formative forces, right, that people are experiencing and to be able to differentiate and not get pulled into it.

Andy Root: Yeah. Well, I think it's really hard to not get get pulled into it. And I mean, the one thing I'll just add as I try to answer that question is that, you know, right now it's really easy to see kind of a left right in the exclusive humanists on the left and the counter, enlightened people on the right, a kind of nationalism versus a kind of, uh, identity politics kind of thing. But that's what's interesting about the triangle is it doesn't always it hasn't always worked that way. So if you go back into the 1980s, those who were pushing for a kind of exclusive humanism were on the right. They were they were saying, we can't have gangsta rap because the land you can't talk like that. We need to be polite. I mean, there's there's been a kind of classic Protestant response to uphold a polite society. And so that was like, you know, the you think at the end of the 90s or you listen to an Eminem rap and he's like the people who are trying to censor him, "the FCC won't let me be." That means the that means the right. So the right used to be the exclusive humanist. And you think of the kind of Marxist, UK, um, kind of anarchists that were very left wing, but they were they were the counter-enlightenment people. So it isn't really a right left necessarily thing. And and this is why I think it's really helpful to think that this is embedded within modernity itself. This is this has been a process through modernity. So it's different than just are you a kind of political conservative or left. Right now we can see it just starkly within the American context that exclusive humanists are on the left and they're kind of university ideological people. And then on the right are kind of supposedly kind of, uh, well, Cabela's shopping, um, you know, uh, hunters and camo gear and, um, you know, kind of, you know, "Back the Bleep off" as the bumper sticker they have on their truck. You know what I mean? Right. But it doesn't have to always function that way. Yeah. But I think what we have to do moving forward and you know I guess this is the this is what maybe is contested or not is looking at the memoirs, the ones that found their way back into a sense of a personal god or even tried in the oddest way, recovering kind of classic Christian practices. They were all these memoirs. They were not people that were like the leftovers of religion who still were, you know, trying to be apologists for some kind of, you know, late 19th century or mid 20th century kind of form of Christianity or something. These were these were people who had lost someone. Um, these were people. The most stark example were the memoirs of addicts, um, where where people had to realize that their own action, their own desire to be magnificent, led them into an utterly bankrupt position. And then they would be told by the true monks of our age, the people in the A.A. halls who are, you know, chain smoking. They would be told, you have to pray, you have to learn to pray. And they'd be like, well, I don't believe in this. We don't give a crap if you believe it or not. That's what you have to do. You have to pray. And the and these beautiful narratives like Mary, Mary, uh, Mary Karrs' "Lit," um, or another one called uh, "The Recovering" and it was, uh, Jameson's. I think it's Jameson. I think the title is "The Recovering." There were these stories of having to surrender and having to realize all the kind of dances to be magnificent couldn't get you anywhere. And Jameson tells this great story that she, uh. I mean, she's a writer. She's writing her PhD on alcohol and the great authors of the 20th century. Like when you when you get into, like, Hemingway and you get into, you know, Scott Fitzgerald, these guys like, uh, you get into, um, uh, James Joyce, like alcohol was, was part of what, you know, you did. So she's writing in kind of alcohol and these writers of the 20th century, and she ends up an alcoholic. I mean, she's drinking. She says, you want to see people who hardcore drink, go to the Iowa's Iowa Writers Workshop like they're you. You do. You critique each other's writings and you drink. So she ends up in AA and she doesn't really want to be there. And she there's also like the new trope, which is if you're a writer, it's good to spend some time in AA post. David Foster Wallace, uh, and his, you know, his his magnum opus. You get gathering stories from Alcoholics Great for your writing. Um, so she gets up there to give her first kind of, you know. Hi. My name is. And I'm an alcoholic. Uh, and she starts telling her story, and she's performing it, and she knows she's performing it, and she's kind of lying to herself that she's performing it, but she knows she is. But one of these sober drunks in the back yells out while she's talking, this is boring. And basically pointing out like this is completely disingenuous. And the performance you're trying to perform like you can't, you can't be as and BS or like we we see this. And she had she had to come to the point that she realized, like she there was no performance that could save her. And the only thing was to make a confession was to make a confession of the impossibility that's within her. And so for me, there's a deep theology of the cross at play here within this low anthropology, that the real heart of a kind of spirituality or a kind of mysticism or a kind of Christian life that can bring this real transformation where death is released into life, um, where newness, uh, finds itself on, on a, on a, on a on a deep ground is in these moments of confession and surrender to something outside of us, which usually is a confession of a significant death experience. You know, whether it's the confession that you are an alcoholic and there's nothing within you that can save you, and all your cleverness just gets you more trapped. Or you. You realize that you are going to die like these memoirs of imminent dying where people they're often the last chapters, them writing a letter to their child that they're leaving behind. And they're just these incredible moments of people surrendering like, uh, confessing their finitude that the self is not magnificent, but in its confession of its need. And when the self confesses its need, there is something profound that happens. So I do think we have to take steps into thinking of that. And, and I do think exclusive humanists and maybe counter-enlightenment people do have a do do have something we need to be aware of, of how those can be manipulative and they can become problematic. Um, but there is an inner logic to those that is dynamically transformational of how we have communities where people make confessions of loss and of impossibility. And I to me, it's the only way to medicate the performative dynamic. Um, so even at the pastoral level, there's a deep temptation, I think, in these moments of decline, for pastors to feel like they have to perform well.

Dwight Zscheile: Exactly. I want to talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Because, yeah. Because that's where I think, um, you know, the church in that, in that sort of cultural framework becomes yet another enterprise that we need to save and rescue and with our own energy sort of prop up. And, and it's in the places of, of death in the life of the church that you actually get this, you know, breaking open of, of divine agency where we have no one, we have no nothing else to rely on. But it seems like the church in the West is, you know, slowly coming to terms with that. Um, in the, in the sort of great unraveling that we're seeing right now, but in many places. And the pandemic accelerated it. But in many places it's still the default is still we can save ourselves. And um, and then that burden that it places on pastors is just enormous. Yeah, right. If you feel like not only do I have to sort of, um, cater to or sort of somehow affirm all of these seeking, performing selves like that, I'm, you know, responsible for pastorally but also then this whole organization, this institution. Yeah. So so what would be your advice then to to leaders who are, um, trying to be faithful in the midst of all of this and help people experience the power of God's agency and deliverance?

Andy Root: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the first thing to be really aware of is that, the burnout that you feel in that a lot of your people feel is a real spiritual epidemic. And to take it as.

Dwight Zscheile: Has deeper roots. Than what we often think of.

Andy Root: It isn't just that you can't manage your busyness. It isn't. It isn't that you need a kind of time, uh, you know, a consultant to help you organize your calendar or something like that, that it really does rest in the fact that we have no other kind of moral evaluation of good action than the expenditure of energy. So the only way we can evaluate which action is better than another action, or say, why one person's action should earn them $1 billion and they get to be on Shark Tank and someone else's action? Well, they just, you know, it comes down to that person expends more energy, you kind of creatively or whatever, that it's the expenditure of energy. I don't know if this I'm sure this isn't true with you. It's true to me. Every fight with my wife about who's going to unload the dishwasher is a a scorecard of who's expended more energy today. You know, like,

Dwight Zscheile: Ah, there you go.

Andy Root: Ah, I had to pick up the kids or ah I had to mow the lawn. I mean, it just becomes like, who's expended the most energy? And if that happens, then you can see why busyness becomes valorized. Um, because the busiest person is the person who's expending the most energy, and they're therefore living the best life, but it's utterly, utterly hollow. Um, and so what becomes really tempting for pastors is to feel like you're losing ground, especially in this day and age. It feels like staff have to do more because people.

Dwight Zscheile: Volunteers don't have time.

Andy Root: Volunteers don't have time. So you have to do more. So it starts to build these kind of senses of resentment that I'm exhausted. I'm expending energy you're not. And it's easy to kind of start evaluating that. And I think we have to we have to try to pivot out of that. And and we're going to need some kind of theological and, and spiritual, some kind of contemplative ways of thinking of what like good, good action looks like. Now, part of it is we can't we can't just drop like, say, a medieval system where, you know, monks action is better than labor or knights actions like that, that that structural reality isn't isn't there. But then I think one of the things that can start to take us back into that, even when that structure isn't there, is how pastors lead, uh, in their own spiritual life, but then lead communities into making confessions of loss of burden. And so one of the things that I think is really important, uh, that goes back to this Scottish philosopher named, uh, John McMurray. And McMurray said, when you think about purpose and, uh, and this is one of the things that burns us out is like, I've, I'm trying to be purpose driven, you know, like, I'm, I'm trying to be really purposeful. And when you're super busy and if you want to be a good pastor, my gosh, you better be purpose driven. Which really, what we tend to mean is what's your intention? Be really clear about your intention. Be organized about your intention. Try to optimize your intention. But McMurray's point is, uh, purpose is not just intention. Of course. Part of it is you should be aware of your intention. Um, at that level, your church should be purpose driven. You should be intentional about what you do. But he says, don't forget, there's another element. The other element of purpose is motivation. What's motivating you? And I think pastors in this moment of decline, where they actually feel like their actions are quite weak or feel like they're that they're underappreciated, it's really easy to say, well, I'm being intentional, and therefore I resent everyone who isn't seeing this, but how do we move into actually the motivations of why we're doing this, the motivations of why we feel this way, like motivation coming to grips with motivation leads needs to lead to moments of confession, like, what's the reason you want the book contract? Or you want the the podcast? What's motivating you in in that? That's really a confession of kind of like, what spirit is possessing you here. Yeah. Um, and I do think we have to all of us have to kind of do those kind of audits. Um, and to remember again and again that, gosh, deep at the heart of Christianity is this sense of it's always from below, it's always from underneath that, that these moments of transformation come. It's, it's it really is the impossibility of, you know, barren wombs and overlooked people that in the biblical story, God works in, moves through and, um, trying to recover that I think in some ways is important. I think we do have the opportunity of a lot of failed, um, magnificent seekers amongst us. And how do we give them spaces to make confessions? And it may not be it may be a recovery of some of the old liturgical ways of doing confession. It may be other spaces that have to lead us. Into that in other ways of doing that. But I think we're in a time where people really deeply need to make confessions. I don't know if you've seen there's a book called, like The Craigslist Confessional where this person just puts on Craigslist, Craigslist, that they're at this coffee shop and people can come make a confession to her. No, no. Kind of no. Kind of, uh, you know, not a priest or anything like that. And then she published this book. I guess with these people's permissions, of these confessions these people made. So, I mean, you can think of a society of magnificent seekers, uh, who all of a sudden hit the limit and turn around and look for someone to be their pastor, to carry their confession, to give them a kind of communal space, to make a confession and the personhood to walk with them in that brokenness. And what do they find? I mean, they just find other busy people who are in constant competition, and they have to go on Craigslist to find someone to hold their story and bare their story. And, and, uh, I don't know, I think we have to look at that.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, and if the church is simply replicating that whole cycle of, you know, if the primary ask is, we want you to get busy volunteering and supporting our institution, you know, and faithfully. We've talked and on this podcast a lot about just kind of two things. One is just this the practices that subvert all of this in the life of congregations that, um, invite people to name both experiences of loss, but also of God's agency in everyday life, um, in ways that then kind of do a decentering of the self, um, and, and then the simplification of church life so that people, you know, if, if in that mode, being busier as a church means you have more energy. And I think that now is really come apart for a lot of people, I think it was pre-pandemic that was more plausible, less so now, um, to say, okay, how do we slow down and be really focused on what we are doing, and then that those things are actually about practices that lead us deeper into connection with God, each other, in our neighbors. And then the biblical story has to function as the primary story. And I think that's the piece that is so easy to miss for churches. You know, since we swim in these cultural waters to recognize, like they are the predominant stories shaping, um, congregations. And you can, you know, you can look at all kinds of versions of that on all the spectrum from the left to the right around. If you listen, it's like, no, there's there's some other stories really functioning here. Um, and, you know, whether it be the evangelicals who don't go to church and, but are really, you know, nationalists or this functions mythologically for them and in a deep way, providing meaning, but it's totally disconnected from Christian community. Or you can see the left wing version of that too. It's just a mirror image. Yeah. Um, so. Well, so I want to just, um, talk with you a bit about one figure that you've studied a lot and taught about and written about, which is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, um, and how he is helpful in this moment. Um, you, uh, you recently did a Faith Academy course that was filmed in Germany, in sites where he lived and worked and all of that. Tell us a little bit about about why Bonhoeffer matters and about that course.

Andy Root: Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, at the end of the day, like Bonhoeffer is my theological spirit animal. And, you know, like, in a sense, like everything in some sense comes back to, to his theological imagination. But what I guess what's so central about that is, first of all, this kind of low anthropology of the dynamic of confession that Bonhoeffer thinks is really significant. I mean, in, in the illegal seminary, in the Finkenwalde Seminary, that the book Life Together kind of comes out of and is a reflection on kind of Bonhoeffer's probably his most well known book, uh, he demands of his students. There's about 20 of them that are going to be confessing church pastors will be illegal. And he demands that they meditate on Scripture, which they makes them think their Lutheran pastor has gone to Catholic, and then they decide they're not going to do that. And he reminds them that that is not a choice, that this is. You have to do this because he's not sure you can stand up in this moment in the nazification of Germany and not have a deep prayer life. Um, but the other thing he does is that he demands that they each have a confessor, that they confess their their sins to each other. And for Bonhoeffer, that becomes Eberhard Bethge , who becomes his great biographer. And we only know anything about Bonhoeffer because, well, that's that's a little bit of an overstatement, but not much for sure in the English speaking world. If it wasn't for Eberhard Bethge , we would know little to nothing about about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Um, and they met when Bonhoeffer was leading the seminary, and Bethge was a student. And they, you know, through the second half of Bonhoeffer's life, last third of his life, his closest friend and his confessor. And Bonhoeffer says this really powerful, haunting line in life together, where he says, why is it, you know, why is it, um, that when I go alone in my room? I have no problem. No problem at all. Confessing my sins by myself to a holy, righteous God. But you ask me to confess my sins to my fellow sinful brother or sister and I'm overwhelmed with anxiety. So maybe it's because when I confess my sins by myself, I'm not really confessing my sins to God, but just to myself. Um, and that is a really quite profound statement. So the kind of relational dynamic that's necessary in that of what it means to have someone and have the, the church community, and that's really what Bonhoeffer means. It's one thing to be a church institutionally. It's another thing to be a church community, to be a reminder, as he says, and for him, that the mind is a community of persons who carry each other's lives, who hold each other's lives, who hear confessions and and teach each other's children how to pray. And that's really, I think, important about how that moves. So in a very much in kind of Luther's theology of the cross, Bonhoeffer is playing, but he's also giving it a deep relational dynamic that's there in Luther. But really, for Bonhoeffer, this, this sense of, of persons in relationship becomes the concrete place of, of, of revelation. And even in those memoirs, like the places you saw that where someone else needed to carry my burdens for me, where I, uh, where I just had the grief of the loss of my mother, like one of these. And I made a confession that I'm. I'm in Barcelona because I've lost my mother. And this person says I'm here, too, because I lost my mother. And they just are in each other's presence and carry each other's burdens and console each other. Um, is a very different kind of transformation than I didn't think I could ever run a marathon. And then I ran a marathon. And now I teach people how to run marathons. And once I learned how to run a marathon, it was I was amazed at how great I am. That's a very different story than. My sorrow was so deep, and yet someone held me and gave me a space and consoled me with their presence.

Dwight Zscheile: Yeah, well, I think in this cultural moment, Bonhoeffer is is a really, you know, powerful voice of sanity and faithfulness. Yeah. Um, when so many voices are, you know, are are leading us in other directions. Um, so. Well, Andy, thank you so much for being with us here on the pivot podcast. Um, uh, what's your next project you're working on? I know you, you have a couple of books a year, so.

Andy Root: Yeah, well, well, well, maybe not least, but yeah. So I promise that that that purple book there, uh, the mysticism books was the end of the series, the Ministry in a Secular Age series. So I can now be made a liar. So it is. Uh, but I mean, one of the things that that kind of pushed off that book was kind of thinking about evangelism. So I with Bethge, it could be volume seven, but it won't be, um, but there's a kind of a book thinking about really what we just ended with kind of evangelism as consolation and what it means to give consolation in a cultural moment of very sad times that I think, um, we're living in a society that's, you know, the first three decades of the 21st century, coming out of the 90s, that was really, really positive. Like especially the early 90s, the optimism Berlin Wall was down, the economy looked like it was going to pop with this new thing called the internet. Um, there was a ton of optimism. And, uh, basically since 911, there's just been every decade, every year has been sadder and sadder and sadder. And we have a society of incredibly lonely, sad people. Um, and one of the reasons is because we're absolutely committed to being happy, and it makes us incredibly sad. And so thinking about the necessity again of, uh, of giving consolation in the midst of deep sorrow and how that can become a kind of practice of embodied evangelism that isn't instrumentalized but becomes a kind of sacramental eventfulness that that converts, that changes, that transforms is kind of where I'm going with that.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, I look forward to reading that when it comes out. We'll have you back on to talk about it. Well, thank you all for joining us today. We hope that you found it inspiring and encouraging. We'd love to have you join us again next week, as we take another dive into how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. Dwight Zscheile s igning off for another episode of the Pivot podcast. See you next week.

Faith+Lead: The Pivot podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith lead. Faith lead is an ecosystem of theological resources and training designed to equip Christian disciples and leaders to follow God into a faithful future. Learn more at faithlead.org .