14. William Gibson (Church of Scotland) – When Christianity Gets Co-Opted by Power

a lot of people who are Christian nationalists would not describe themselves in that way. But it's very easy to see when you're outside of it. How is American Christian nationalism being perceived globally? Yeah, so I can only really speak to what I think and those who are close to me, because there's definitely those who maybe support MAGA or even support Trump here as we have our own kind of equivalent movement and the likes of Nigel Farage and Reform UK here. But for many of us, it's seen as a corruption and a weaponisation of Christianity. We also look on and concern recognising that is not a problem unique to America. We have those same concerning nationalist and populist political movements attempting to attach themselves to Christianity here. In 2024 in the UK, race riots occurred, focusing on hotel accommodation, which was accommodating asylum seekers and refugees. And last year, there was the largest British nationalist rally we have seen with the use of Christian symbolism all over the place. And a lot of that had people with MAGA hats on. There's some cross pollination there. And I think it's worth quoting the joint churches response in full here, because this was a signed document signed by Christian churches and organisations across the theological and political spectrum. I think maybe it can give you a little bit of insight as to how broadly this type of thing is viewed here in the UK. Because I mean, this was people from evangelical networks, Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches, Church of Scotland, Church of England, all over the spectrum. So the letter says this. We are deeply concerned about the co-opting of Christian symbols, particularly the cross during Saturday's Unite the Kingdom rally. Many individuals and communities felt anxious, unsettled and even threatened by aspects of the march. There were undoubtedly diverse motivations for those engaged in the event. We respect the right to free speech, to hold different views on issues such as immigration, the importance of healthy debate between religious communities and the need to disagree well when consensus is difficult. We also understand that for many of those involved in the rally, there is a deep sense of frustration at feeling unheard and forgotten in the democratic process. We know that we cannot heal this wound unless the church and society as a whole rises to do more to address the issues of poverty, inequality and exclusion. However, this rally included racist, anti-Muslim and far-right elements. As Christians from different theological and political backgrounds, we stand together against the misuse of Christianity. The cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other. Jesus calls us to love both our neighbours and our enemies and to welcome the stranger. Any co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith to exclude others is unacceptable. As Christian leaders, we are proud of our country and commit ourselves to work with others, building a more united kingdom where the values of love, humility and compassion shine through in every community and we do so unapologetically, in the name of Jesus Christ. So I was really glad to see this response and I hope that the church here continues to have such a robust response as well as campaigning and community organising to address the root causes of the political disaffection that causes these nationalist movements to occur. So for those living in the US I would say, work together. At this point in time, collective action and a collective voice is needed. We can look at the Confessing Church in 1930s Germany as an example. It arguably came together too late to make a real difference and it's up for debate right now whether or not the American church is already too late but that doesn't mean that it should not act. And this might require working with people with whom you deeply disagree on other topics but if the ability to speak freely about different ideas is undermined and taken away, those differences won't matter for much longer. I just want to sit with that for a second. This is a really hard time in history, isn't it, to be living through? It is. And sometimes individually we do feel really powerless. And so you're right, collectively getting together really is very important. Also, people who are in Christian spaces who want to follow the servanthood, the love, the compassion of Jesus, we do need to come together even if we don't agree on everything in order to make sure that we all have a voice for years and generations to come. 100%. Welcome to The Sacred Slope, where the slippery slope meets sacred ground. I'm Alexis Rice, and if you're new here, this is a podcast for people navigating faith after certainty, for Christians who are deconstructing, reconstructing, or simply trying to follow Jesus in ways that are more loving, just, and honest than the versions of Christianity many of us were handed. Today we're traveling to Scotland because I came across someone online who genuinely stopped me in my tracks, and I wanted you to hear from him too. I'm joined by soon-to-be Reverend Dr. William Gibson. William is a Scottish scholar of modern church history, a PhD student in theology at the University of Glasgow, and a candidate for ministry in the Church of Scotland. One of the things I love about conversations like this is that they help us step outside of our own normal bubble. When we listen to people and to Christians from different places and traditions, it widens our understanding of our faith, of culture, of what's normal. It reminds us that Christianity has never belonged to one person, political party, one country, one culture, one denomination. Before we begin, I just really want to say thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Thank you for continuing to be on this journey as we grow together. If you are here listening and learning and staying curious, I know that many of you are fighting for your faith. You're grieving, you're questioning, and you're trying to find more loving, inclusive ways to follow Jesus in a time when a lot of churches are preaching Christian nationalism from the pulpit as the only way to be faithful to Jesus. And it's not true. In fact, a lot of people really strongly believe that it's completely antithetical to Christ. And in my opinion, that's why a lot of people have left church spaces. We've seen this over the last decade plus. And that does not mean that you have to be excluded from a faith. So today, William helps us zoom out, looking at how American Christian nationalism is perceived globally, how Christianity is shaped by culture, and what the gospel has to say about power, greed, and solidarity. And if this episode resonates with you, I would like to ask you if you can please take a moment to follow, to rate, review, and share it. If it helps this conversation reach someone else who might feel alone, if you can help in that way, it would mean the world. So here's my conversation with soon-to-be Reverend Dr. William Gibson. There's beauty in unraveling, safety in the questioning. Home is where you're wandering. You're right where you're supposed to be. You're right where you're supposed to be. Welcome back to the Sacred Slope, friends. Today, I'm joined by William Gibson. Hi, William. Hello. Great to be here with you, Alexis. Thank you so much for being here today. William is a Scottish scholar of modern Scottish church history. He's a PhD student in theology and religious studies at the University of Glasgow and a candidate for ministry in the Church of Scotland. William studies how faith, power, culture, and economics shape the church in the real world. He's published work on trade unions and theology, bringing a powerful lens to conversations about labor, capitalism, and Christian ethics. And before theology, he trained in law, which shows up in how carefully he thinks about interpretation, power, and how religion is used to shape societies. And I want to name something honestly. Across the world right now, we are living through, I know a lot of you could feel it, there's another wave of deconstruction happening. Over the last year, and especially now in 2026, many people are witnessing things with their own eyes and ears and realizing, this is not what I was taught that Jesus was about. And for many, that grief is real, that anger is real, and that quiet question is real. If that is the Christianity, then where do I belong? So for people who are feeling that way, this conversation is for you. It's for the ones who are exhausted, who might be questioning for the first time, or maybe who have been questioning for a decade. For the ones who are still listening, even if you're not sure why, from Scotland, a place shaped by post-Christiandom, deep theological tradition, and a long memory of what happens when church and power become too comfortable together, William is going to help us zoom out today of the American bubble. Because Christianity has never belonged to one country, it's never belonged to empire, and maybe especially right now, that matters more than ever. So William, thank you and welcome to the Sacred Slope. Thank you, and thanks for creating a space like this. I think it's really important to have these conversations in the times that we're living in. Let's start with what did your faith look like growing up in Scotland? What role did church play in your childhood and your community? Yeah, of course. So I actually was born in Germany. My dad was in the Royal Air Force and we traveled about a lot. So I was born in West Germany and then moved to London when I was two, and then moved to Scotland when I was three. But my dad is thoroughly Scottish from Paisley, sadly passed now. But my mum, she is from Wales originally, but spent most of her life in a place called Lossiemouth, or just outside of Elgin, right up the north of Scotland on the kind of north coast there. And my mum was raised Catholic. My dad was Church of Scotland. And when I came into the world, I was baptized Church of Scotland, along with my sister as well. When we eventually settled in Scotland, when I was about four or five, I can't remember when it was, but we started going along to a local Church of Scotland and we were there for quite a while, fairly content and happy. And then when I was about eight or nine, I just found myself getting bored with it, really. It was quite a traditional church, like organ, hymns, and just your standard kind of mainline church, really. And so I found it quite boring at that stage. And one Sunday I just asked, why do we do this on a Sunday? And my mum and dad weren't like overly religious. So they went, yeah, good point. And we left. So I wasn't in church for a few years after that. But then in my teenage years in secondary school, or if you're from America, high school, I was in a religious religious education class. And some people from the local non-denominational evangelical church came in to a class where we were talking about life after death. And they invited me along to the youth group. And it intrigued me enough that I decided to go along, went to youth group, ended up at a youth camp where we were doing skiing and snowboarding in the Scottish Highlands over winter. And they were doing strange things like praying over their meals before they ate and praying for car journeys before they went somewhere. And I thought, why would God care about things as insignificant as this? So I ended up going along to the church on the Sunday and find myself at the altar, giving my life to Jesus. And that was it, really. That's how I came into the non-denominational evangelical worlds. And I was there until I was about 16 when I moved to Glasgow and went to a church that's a kind of almost spinoff from Hillsong, like the pastor used to work there and stuff. So very mega church wannabe type church that I was at. And I eventually had a crisis of faith. I was pushed out for saying that I had doubts and questions. I lost the relationships and friendships that I had there and find myself in this space where I was really kind of unsure about all of it. And we'll talk about this a little bit later on. But I went on a bit of an ecumenical adventure where I tried out lots of different churches, was exposed to the breadth and depth of the Christian tradition and find myself back in the Church of Scotland somehow. So here we are. When you look back now, what do you think you got right about Jesus early on? And what assumptions did you later realize you needed to unlearn? Yeah, I think the things that probably got right was this idea that God is active in the world, like God can be present and real to us as individuals and in communities. And the importance of having a truly living faith, a faith that transforms not only the way that we think or what we say that we believe, but actually how we act and how we respond to the world and love. I think that was a really important part of what I was taught, especially in that church that was at the youth group. And also the real sense of community, because within that youth group, I met a lot of friends who are still friends of mine today. A lot of them no longer have a faith. Some of them still do. But there was a really strong sense of community, especially within that youth group. And I was quite fortunate to be in a place where it wasn't overly controlling. It was a very different story with the church that I went to when I started at university for the first time and the one that was up in Glasgow. But yeah, there were some good things that active presence of God, the sense of community, a living faith and some assumptions that I probably made at the time that I've later had to unlearn was this idea that having strong faith is the same as being absolutely certain about what you believe, that faith should offer us simple answers to the biggest questions in life, the questions that humans have been wrestling with for centuries and millennia, that faith should for some reason give us simple answers when that's just not the case. It invites us to wrestle. And also the idea that any individual church could have the wholeness or the completeness of the Christian faith. I've really had to move beyond that. And I think especially in the work that I've done with ecumenism, that's just become more and more apparent. You said the Church of Scotland and we have an international audience. So for those who may not be familiar with the Church of Scotland, what is it? Is it evangelical? Is it reformed? Is it mainline? How does it function culturally, especially in a country that is often described as post-Christian? Yes, so it's a Presbyterian denomination. By many, it's considered the mother church of Presbyterianism, which means that it is broadly evangelical, reformed and Calvinist. However, that comes with some quite important qualifiers. There's a distinction to be made in church history between the fundamentalist forms of evangelicalism that we see in America and the broad evangelicalism that can be found in Europe. In its broadest interpretation, evangelical is referring to the good news, the Evangelion that we believe is worth sharing. And mission is viewed not simply as an act to try and convert people, but it draws on things like the five marks of mission, which acknowledges the work for justice, care for the earth and responding to need through loving service as all being part of mission and what it means to be the church. When it comes to being reformed, the Church of Scotland comes directly out of the European Reformation. So European reformed ideas began arriving in Scotland in the kind of mid 1500s. And by 1560, they had written this piece called the Scots Confession, which came into Scots law, basically, which established what many people considered to be the Church of Scotland, but not in its current form. There was a lot of back and forward debates through to the kind of mid 1600s over what type of church governance the Church of Scotland would have. So it went between episcopacy and Presbyterianism until eventually in the 1640s, they adopted what's called the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is a very Calvinist document. And that was the subordinate standards of the Church of Scotland for centuries, still is in a lot of ways. But the way that the church relates to it has changed over the years. And with that, the Westminster Confession kind of laid out this is what we believe as a church and that the relationship with the Westminster Confession began to change in the 19th century. Because you saw things like historical criticism come in. People began to question the very literal interpretations of the Bible. People began to learn about evolution and Darwin's theory of evolution. They began to doubt some of the Calvinistic teachings that were within the Westminster Confession. And so different denominations began to adopt what were called declaratory acts. And declaratory acts basically allowed for people within the church to have a sense of a liberty of conscience. So they were able to hold to the central teachings of the faith while having liberty of conscience on things that weren't considered to be the substance of it, which if you were to speak broadly, it's essentially what the teachings of the Nicene Creed are. The Apostles Creed would be broadly considered that sort of central substance of faith, although there's been debate over that over the years. So for some within the church, they remain thoroughly Calvinist. But then on the other end of the church, it's a very broad sense of being reformed. So they would be influenced by the likes of Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer, Maltman. So I probably fall more on that broad reformed end of the spectrum when it comes to the Church of Scotland. There's some parts of Calvin's teachings which I appreciate, especially stuff on church polity. I like Presbyterianism. And so with that, there's difference of opinion within the church. It's a very broad church. You could walk into one and you would think this is no different from the non-denominational evangelical down the road. And you might walk into another one and it's very high church, could look almost Anglican to some people. So there was a very important event that happened in 1929, which established the modern Church of Scotland. Because over the years, Presbyterianism has a tendency to fracture and go into different groupings. And so you get all these little groups of Presbyterians all over the place. And that happened a lot in the 1800s until there were two very large denominations, the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church of Scotland. And in 1929, they eventually came into union to form the current Church of Scotland. But the main debates leading up to that were about the relationship of the church to the state. So the United Free Church were more on what's called the voluntarist end of the spectrum. So they believed that the church should be completely free from all state interference, that the only head of the church is Jesus Christ. Whereas the Church of Scotland opted for having the national recognition of religion and they received state support for a while. And so the Church of Scotland had to change laws and parliament to be able to actually go into union. They had to renounce this relationship with the state. And so it ended up in a position where it was both free and national. So the monarch is not the head of the church, it's Jesus Christ, it's the head of the church. But at the same time, the state recognises religion, but it doesn't publicly fund it, for example. And the way that it's structured, if you don't know much about Presbyterianism, there's a hierarchy and authority, but both of these are found in the courts of the church rather than in like bishops or archbishops or within individuals. So you get three different levels of courts within the Church of Scotland. You have what's called the Kirk session. So the Kirk is just a Scottish word meaning church. So if I say Kirk randomly, it just means Scottish church, basically. So you have the Kirk session, which is your local grouping. Then you have the Presbytery, which is a more kind of regional group. And then you have the General Assembly, which is the national level. And Presbyterian really just means it is governed by elders. So if you look at the Kirk session, it's made up of the elders of that church. The minister will generally act as the moderator of that court. So they are present to facilitate debate, facilitate conversations. But it's the elders who make the vote on what happens at that level. The minister can obviously give guidance and direction, advice, all that sort of stuff. But it's the elders who make the decision there. It's the elders who call a minister. They are the ones that decide if they get the job there. So within that, there's a sense of democracy present. Democracy is one of the kind of central values of Presbyterianism at its best. It doesn't always work out that way, but at its best as democratic. It recognises this idea of the priesthood of all believers and that everyone has a voice. So the elders are there and the Kirk sessions, they'll deal with things like, what do we do if the roof is leaking and how are we going to fix it? They'll deal with local issues. They'll deal with decisions around what the local mission projects are going to be or where they're going to direct local funds to and things like that. Then at Presbytery, the regional level, you would look at things like how the church can cooperate together, regional planning, if churches are going into union with one another, which is happening a lot just now because, as you kind of mentioned at the start, we're in a kind of post-Christendom Scotland. So all churches are in decline, which means that the Church of Scotland is having to sell a lot of buildings as part of that. Churches are becoming one. In some cases, I've heard of five separate churches becoming one congregation, so they're having to sell off buildings. A lot of that is done by the Presbytery. Then you have the General Assembly, which is more topics of doctrine, discipline, the bigger questions about what we're going to do, national strategy, church law, all that type of stuff. So democracy is one of those central principles. And then solidarity is the other one. It's not congregationalist in the sense of there's a lot more power within the local church, actually. There is a kind of shared sense of power, so where the richer churches will contribute more to be able to assist poorer churches, for example. The closest analogy in the US would be the PCUSA. So the Presbyterian Church of the USA would be the closest to what the Church of Scotland does here. Interesting. Something I'm curious about, I'll give you a little story. I was talking to a family member in the Netherlands, different denomination she was raised in, and I told her that I was raised that the creation story is seven actual days and the evolution is not real, that if you believe that, then you can't be a Christian. And she about fell off her chair. She's like, I've never heard of anybody, anybody who has a Christian faith that doesn't believe in evolution at the same time. She just didn't understand it. And it kind of blew my doors open and just like, wow, what's going on here? So I'm just curious about what does that look like in Scotland in general? I know we're going to make generalizations, but how central is biblical literalism in Scotland, in the Church of Scotland? How do science, how does evolution, how does critical scholarship even fit into faith spaces where you are? Yeah. So, I mean, it's definitely present. And this is talking about Scotland in general, not the Church of Scotland. There's probably very limited spaces where biblical literalism would be present in the Church of Scotland. Generally, at least there's an acknowledgement of the need for engaging with biblical criticism like historical and cultural references within the Bible. There's not that sort of strict literal fundamentalism. You might find it in some places, you might find it in some individual members, but it's definitely not widespread in the Church of Scotland. But in Scotland in general, as present. But I mean, that's within the cultural context of 51.1 percent of Scots answered no religion on the most recent census. So the majority of Scots would say that they have no religion. That doesn't mean that they don't have a faith, don't have a spirituality of some kind. They just don't identify with any of the kind of denominational or religious markers that are available to you on the census. But worryingly, there has seemed to have been an increase recently in the number of churches that maybe are pushing more of a biblical literalist line. And these churches seem to be more looking to America as their sort of reference point. And they look a lot more like the evangelical churches you would see in America. So the evangelical church that I went to as a teenager actually had quite a lot of influences from South Africa and from Ghana, which was interesting. It was a very different type of evangelicalism. They still sung house song and Bethel and all that. But then you saw more of this sort of American evangelicalism when I went to the house song spinoff in Glasgow. But, yeah, fundamentalist and evangelical theology from the states seems to be exported to other countries that I see churches popping up all over the place. I see some American evangelical movements and organisations that are doing big conferences and things here. And you're beginning to see more influence in things like politics, too, which is concerning. So in twenty twenty four, Scotland brought in buffer zones around health care centres who provide abortion as part of their health services, which the law was designed to prevent people from campaigning or trying to influence someone's decision directly outside of health care centres because you had a lot of people that were going in that weren't necessarily going in for an abortion either because they'd because they provide a lot of other services, it's part of the National Health Service, they're often found in hospitals. And last year JD Vance was spreading false information about all of this, claiming that people living nearby had received letters warning them against praying in their own homes, which was just false. So whatever you think of abortion, whatever your opinion is on it, we can be clear that bearing false witness and lying is not something that would be supported when we look at scripture. And another example of this is Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a US based Christian fundamentalist organisation. Yes, the ADF. Yep, they've tripled their funding for their UK arm in the last year. So there seems to be an increasingly worrying amount of US influence on some of these faith spaces, not all, but it's still worrying to see. And I think in general, the church broadly has had a good response, but you are beginning to see a bit more of that influence. And I was really surprised last year, for example, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, that a lot of people that I maybe wouldn't have expected to have aligned with his political ideology, came out praising him. People who I thought were maybe not as literalist when it came to the Bible, were posting about it. So there are some concerning trends, in my opinion. You mentioned worrying as a Christian, as someone who's studying to be a pastor, who is getting his PhD in theology, and you said that these types of Christian spaces coming into Scotland is concerning to you. Can you unpack that a little bit? Yeah, of course. So going from my experiences of the sort of evangelical, very literalist churches that are here, and I suppose I need to caveat as well, as I've already said about the Church of Scotland, when I said evangelical, it's not the same as the US. Also, broadly, non-denominational evangelicalism isn't the same as in the US. Like a lot of these independent, non-denominational, evangelical churches in the UK are nowhere near the level of literalism and fundamentalism that you would find in a lot of US churches. But there are a handful that are specifically trying to emulate that style. And in those churches, the number of people that I've seen hurt, harmed, that have experienced some form of religious or emotional abuse, is truly astounding. And I hear news stories all the time from people. So I think that's one concerning thing. But also, it just makes it a lot more difficult to actually be doing good work in the community, especially around Christian unity. Because a lot of churches historically in Scotland have been pretty good at working together. There have been issues around sectarianism with Catholicism and Protestantism that is more historic and rooted in things like immigration and stuff in the country. But over the last 50 years, there's been a lot of work around ecumenism, a lot of work of churches doing things together. And there's beginning to form some different networks of churches that are basically saying, we don't want to work with any of these sort of mainline institutions. We're doing our own thing. And some of the theology that they're promoting is frankly, either just wrong or as harmful. Thank you. That's really helpful. This podcast is mostly American. However, there are people all over the world listening. And so what I find really important is that we need to learn from each other all around the world and understand where our assumptions about our faith, about our culture, about our period in history are challenged. And we can only do that by talking to people who are different than we are and having different experiences. So in the faith area, how does Christianity in Scotland or in Europe generally differ from Christianity? What are a couple of assumptions that Americans often make about Christianity that don't hold up necessarily globally? So, I mean, we're in a very interesting space, as I've already mentioned, because we're both in a post-Christendom, but also an increasingly post-secular age too. There seems to be an increased interest in spirituality, especially from Gen Z, even if this isn't borne out in dates of church attendance or membership. So we're in a really kind of strange and different space, whereas America is very much still in, I suppose it's Christendom era of the majority of people in the US are still Christians, still have a faith, still believe in God of some kind, whereas that's not the case here. While we also see this kind of move away from institutions, while there's still an interest in spirituality, which is kind of what I saw and when I described my ecumenical adventure, I went and tried the Orthodox church, a Catholic church, a Franciscan meeting, a Quaker meeting, Baptist churches, more evangelical and Pentecostal churches, Presbyterian, Episcopal, all of it. And it was so eye-opening for me. And Lamorna Ash, who's a journalist here in the UK, wrote a book recently called Don't Forget We're Here Forever, which is all about this environment. And if you want to understand the kind of UK context of Christianity and the way things are looking just now, it's an excellent account of it. It goes through that sort of adventure of the different denominations and expressions that are present. And Lamorna was coming from a place of having no faith at all before it and coming to the end of it and going tentatively. I think I could probably call myself a Christian. So it's an excellent read, highly recommend it. But there's a couple of assumptions that I think people maybe make. One of the assumptions would be that maybe some people think that all the mainline churches in Europe are exceptionally sort of woke or liberal. And I mean, people make that assumption here too. So it must be even worse in the US if they're looking over here at us. So, for example, the Church of Scotland allows for gay ministers, allows for gay marriage. They don't force that upon other ministers. I know, crazy, crazy idea. Gay people are children of God and beloved and should be serving and leading. What a woke idea. But I mean, within the Church of Scotland, even you will have people who voted to allow for gay marriage to happen, not because they would do it themselves personally, but because they're committed to this idea of liberty of conscience and that they could see that in good faith, other people thought that gay marriage was something that they wanted to do and that God was calling them to do. And so they were not wanting to prevent them from doing that, even though they would not do it themselves. So even within a denomination like the Church of Scotland that has these sort of progressive policies, if you want to put it that way, there's actually a lot of diversity and not everyone is going to agree on all issues. And I think it's something that's just more generally applicable is that we need to get better at being curious with one another and asking that just because someone says that they think one thing on one issue doesn't mean they're going to agree with or think the same thing on a whole host of other issues. Because someone might come to you and say that they have a very pro-choice stance, for example, but then still be against gay marriage or vice versa, where someone might say that they're very in favour of justice and peace for the Palestinian people, but then at the same time have some really outlandish thoughts when it comes to vaccines. So you just don't know. And we need to be engaging with people as individuals. So yeah, that's probably one assumption is that just because churches have a policy that allows for people to have liberty of conscience and to act on the convictions that they've come to in good faith from reading scripture, from being part of the Christian tradition, from being led by the spirit, that just because they allow for people to act on those convictions doesn't mean that the entire church is kind of monolithic in their view on things. One of the other things I'd say is that I regularly come across this idea of centring America and discussions of nationalism. So, for example, here in Scotland, we had a vote on Scottish independence in 2014, I think was when it was, and we voted to stay in the United Kingdom at that point in time, it was 55% to 45%. And now there is continued support for Scottish independence as roughly a 50-50 split in terms of opinion polling on independence. So it's still a very live issue for a lot of people. And the party of government in Scotland for, I think, coming up to close to two decades now within the Scottish Parliament has been the SNP or the Scottish National Party, which is a nationalist party technically. But within Scotland, we talk about this idea of civic nationalism. So this is very different from the sort of white American nationalism that you might find. And my undergrad dissertation supervisor, he wrote a book called Honey from the Lion, which was all about the ethics of Christian nationalism, the different debates on it. And he basically said, well, he kind of draws on St Augustine for this, but he's from City of God and talks about how if a Christian was to support any form of nationalism, it would come with very important caveats. One is the need to renounce imperialism. The other is to renounce essentialism, especially biological essentialism, where you're kind of reducing the nation down to blood and soil and renouncing absolutism, where you view the state as the absolute rather than God. And we see that with like the Barman Declaration and the Confessing Church in the 1930s in Germany. So, I mean, I don't know if I agree with that. I think that even if all of that was possible and in the ideal sort of situation where you support a nationalist movement and they're saying that they do all of those things, that the temptations are there and that even within the Scottish independence movement, for example, you will see people who have a sort of essentialist view of nationalism, that they believe in independence because they want a country for white Scottish people. So even if there is a broader sense of civic nationalism, you can see the dangers and temptations there. But even then, it's still a more nuanced discussion about nationalism than what you're seeing in America. And that means that you can have even more nuanced discussions about what nationalist movements could look like that are for the liberation of countries that are under forms of neocolonialism, for example, or that are under attack from imperialist countries. So if you look at Russia with Ukraine, would we say that we don't support Ukrainian nationalism and the desire for national sovereignty there? It's a difficult and interesting conversation to have. And the same applies to the likes of Palestine. Would we support the freedom and independence of Palestinian people to have their own state and their own land and run it without having apartheid present? So it just complicates the picture. And I think it's too easy to go into black and white and it's too easy to think that we know what we're talking about because we might be experts on talking about Christian nationalism in America. But that doesn't mean that the same conversations are happening in other places and totally different contexts with totally different things to consider in the conversation. So that's some things to that might be assumptions that people would make when looking here. Yes. And I love that. That segues so well into one of your clips that I'd like to play now. One of them is Christianity is culturally mediated. That really stuck with me. Is your Christianity influenced more by white American culture than it is by Jesus? Well, let's find out together. My name's William. I'm a student minister in the Church of Scotland and a PhD student in theology. So I'm going to give you three tests here. One of them is a piece of art, another song and another a carving. So let's start with the art. Then when you look at this piece of art, what do you see? If you were to say art from something like a Buddhist temple, then you would only be partially right. This piece is simply called creation by the Thai artist. So why China Wong, who became a Christian in his early twenties and influenced by the art and his culture when he looked at men painting and Buddhist temples, decided that he wanted to tell the Christian story in a way that was culturally relevant because, yes, this is the Garden of Eden. This is Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Next, I'm going to play a couple of seconds of a song. So when you hear that music, what do you think of? Do you think potentially some Indian, maybe Hindu music? Again, you would only be partially right. See, this song is called Amrit Vani, which is also a Hindi word which is used to talk about Hindu sacred songs. But when you read the English translation of the word, it says this, the immortal word, victory be to Jesus. Now, lastly, take a look at this carving. What do you think of when you see it? If you were thinking of potentially some traditional African wood carving, then again, you would be partially right. This is the Yoruba Transfiguration by Lamide Fakie. Fakie used traditional carving methods and used Yoruba art to talk about how Christianity is not the replacement of indigenous Yoruba culture. So how did you get on? Did you immediately recognise that these were Christian works of art or did you jump straight to thinking that they were from a different religion? If you failed to pick up on the Christian themes, then maybe it's a sign that we need to begin to challenge some of American Western white hegemony. When taking our faith seriously, there's a real need for us to recognise the ways in which our experience of Christianity is culturally mediated, is experienced within a particular culture at a particular time. This is not the way that Christianity has always been expressed, neither will it be the way that Christianity will be expressed going forward. So let's learn from one another and have a blessed day. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that? Why is it important for people to understand that our faith mirrors our culture? We are all living in a context, to quote Kamala Harris, you know, did you fall out of a coconut tree? People didn't understand as much as they should have, but that we all live in a context. What happens when people assume that their version of Christianity is the default or the only faithful one? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I think it's simply a recognition of the way that things actually are. We're all influenced by our culture and religion is not immune to that. So, for example, here in Scotland, we have distinctly Scottish hymns, like there's hymns in CH4, which is the church hymnry that a lot of Church of Scotland churches will use that have like the Sky Boat song, for example, within it as the tune for the hymns. We have prayer books that are distinctly Scottish. We have prayer books and Bibles that are translated into Gaelic and we have musical styles that aren't found readily in other environments. For example, historically in a lot of Scottish churches, you might have found Gaelic psalm singing, which is a sort of call and response form of music. You have a caller and then from there, the congregation will join in and they'll sing through the psalms in Gaelic unaccompanied by music. Interestingly, this actually had an influence on American gospel music as Scots moved to the US after the likes of the Highland Clearances or in search for the promise of a better life. And that connection was celebrated at Celtic Connections previously. And you can listen to that on an album called Sam and Soul. And what you'll see is it goes between these Gaelic psalm singers and like gospel singers. And it's amazing to see just the connection that's there, but how they are both still entirely different from each other just because of the way that culture has had an impact. But the idea for that video that you've shared actually came from last year. I was at the World Communion of Reformed Churches for the General Council, which was in Thailand and Chiang Mai. And they had some artwork on display from a Thai artist called Sawai Chinna Wong. And Sawai Chinna Wong was raised in, I think it was a smaller village near Chiang Mai. And he grew up seeing a lot of the artwork and Buddhist temples and being raised in Buddhism. And in his 20s, he converted to Christianity and he wanted to be able to tell the Christian story in a way that was culturally appropriate. And so he began to paint stories from the Bible and the style of Buddhist artwork. And it is really incredible if you go and look at it, because it's totally different from what you might expect. And yeah, I think it's just really worthwhile to go look at. So from that, I started thinking, yeah, of course, this is the way that things are. And recognizing those cultural influences allows us to learn from other people, approaching difference with curiosity rather than concern of worrying, oh, is this heretical, is this the wrong thing? Actually recognizing that people are just expressing their Christian faith and their own context and assuming that only one expression as a default not only limits your own knowledge and horizon of learning, but it diminishes our understanding of the gospel. Jesus spoke into a particular context and used parables relevant to those contexts. And we should do the same. We should be looking at how we can tell the Christian story and share the Christian gospel in our own context and our own cultures. And that will look different. But we can learn from each other when we do that. I love that so much. Thailand is such a beautiful place. I spend about a month backpacking there with my husband. And in Chiang Mai, there's the Doi Suthep temple. Yeah. Oh, it's such a beautiful temple. If anybody goes to Thailand, like just check out the wats. They're really special. Yeah, I love that. Chiang Mai was incredible. And I think as well there, it was just great because you had the World Communion of Reformed Churches represents over 100 million Christians globally from different reform denominations. So it's a massive organization that meant that you had people from all over. We had Christians from Lebanon and Syria and Palestine, as well as from Argentina and Cuba and Brazil and America, and then all across Asia as well, just from and Africa all over the place. And you got to see all these different expressions and the worship was built in such a way where we sang in different languages every morning. There were interpreters and translators at the back of the hall speaking into headsets. And so the way that different cultures and languages interacted, and there was obviously lots of debate on lots of big topics. But there was this really powerful moment at the end of the conference where we were all going around the conference hall singing, we are marching in the light of God. And it just changed to a different language, like every time that we sang it through. And everyone was just dancing and celebrating. And it was this beautiful moment of recognizing unity within diversity. And I think we learn a lot from it, but also it's just part of the beauty of being part of the body of Christ. Oh, that's so incredible. I'll put some info in the show notes if people would like to learn more about this. I've never heard about it and I think it's incredible. Is it for leaders? Is it for everyday people? The General Council happens once every seven years, but there's other aspects of local gatherings or regional gatherings. But the World Communion has member churches, which are generally Presbyterian, uniting churches, congregationalist churches. And it was originally started as the, oh, it's such a long name, was the original one. It was like in the 1800s and it was called the World Alliance of Churches Holding to the Presbyterian System of Governance, I think, was the whole name. Something along those lines. And then in the mid 1900s, it changed to the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. And then in the early 2000s, it became the World Communion of Reformed Churches as it is now. So basically, the communion attempts to discern the will of God for these churches together, collectively, and come out with statements on different issues concerning justice, decolonial theology, the environment, peace, theology, all of these things. And it can't force any of the member churches to do anything. It's there to try and discern the will of God for these churches. And the idea is that then whoever's went as a delegate will come back and share that with their churches and encourage engagement at the regional and local level with these ecumenical bodies, essentially. But I was there as like a facilitator for the youth delegation. So I wasn't actually there as a delegate for the Church of Scotland. There were other Church of Scotland delegates. I was helping facilitate the youth caucus. And I was also helping with the media team where I got to work with lots of interesting people. There was a massive team there from the PCUSA who were on the media team who were just great to work with. But yeah, lots of fun. We are going to segue into something that is quite important. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because you have clips about capitalism, greed, and the Bible and what the Bible has to say about this. And this is a topic that I would say, especially in the last decade, has been so overlooked in MAGA Christian spaces in exchange for focusing on other quote-unquote sins and then greed and capitalism at its max is not even talked about as a sin. I will caveat this by saying in general, a lot of Americans don't love hearing about this. Don't love hearing about this topic. It hits something obviously in an American psyche, the belief that, hey, if I work hard, I deserve as much money as that comes to me. And so if you're coming and telling me that I shouldn't, you know, that that's not mine, I find that, you know, offensive, I'm going to get defensive. But here's the thing is that a lot of us are Christians in this country and the Bible has a lot to say about greed and unrestrained capitalism. We probably need to unlearn capitalism to be a good Christian. And before you go calling me a woke Marxist, hear me out. My name is William. I'm a student minister and PhD student in theology. And the reason that I say that we need to unlearn capitalism is because I've seen too many churches that are basically businesses with Jesus branding. I've been in churches where I've been told that studying business would be more beneficial than studying theology, where volunteers and staff were required to sign NDAs, where volunteers were used to do work for the pastor's private business without pay, and where unaccredited courses were sold with whole modules dedicated to the idea of honouring authority. In the life of Jesus, we see a different story. One where the labourers who join for the last hour of the day get paid the same as those who work for the whole day. One where the poor are blessed and the rich are the ones that find it hardest to enter the kingdom of heaven. And where you're forced to make a decision, who are you going to serve, God or mammon because you can't do both. Now, does that mean that I think that you can't be a Christian and a capitalist? Well, I think it'd be pretty hard, kind of like a camel going through the eye of a needle. Because capitalism is defined as an economic and political system in which a country's trade or industry is controlled by private owners for the purpose of profit. Whereas in the Christian story, we hear that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, that we have a common inheritance of divine grace and creation and the resources that we've received. As Pope Leo reminded us recently, the world's resources are meant for all. But currently, our survival is dependent upon our participation in capitalism. So I suppose the answer is that we can participate while also working to build a more just world wherever we find ourselves right now. Because if we accept capitalism as divinely ordained, the way things are and the way that they're always going to be, then our ideas of theology and faith will become distorted. Our view of the economy of salvation becomes one that's more focused on earning and deserving than on the free gift of grace. Our understanding of God becomes one of a boss of bosses rather than the God revealed in the humble carpenter who preached good news to the poor. Even faith itself becomes a sort of utility rather than a gift. We come to value faith for its usefulness and we cite studies that say that religious people are happier, that they give more, they have a greater sense of meaning. We end up seeing theology as valuable because it gives us answers. But in doing so, we miss out on the joy of the free, undeserved, unearned gift of grace. We miss out on what the Westminster Shorter Catechism describes as the chief end of man, which is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Jürgen Moltmann puts it like this in his book Theology and Joy, called the joy of God and the enjoyment of each other in God. Because God created and gave us life out of love, not out of utility. And this is not a joy that dismisses injustice or just simply sits and waits for a coming utopia. Rather, it is a liberating form of enjoyment that creates, builds and prepares for a better world, where the first are last and the last are first, where the high are cast down and the lowly are lifted, where the hungry are fed and the rich are sent away empty. Have a blessed day. How is unrestrained capitalism antithetical to the way of Jesus? First of all, to kind of segue from what we were just talking about with the World Communion of Reformed Churches is that there were a lot of conversations that came up there about the ideas of capitalism and it was maybe framed sometimes as exploitative economics. But there was a general recognition, especially from non-Western churches, that capitalism is harmful, especially when we see the impacts of colonialism, which is tied up with capitalism and with racism historically. And when we see the impact of the climate crisis that affects the poorest countries and generally those who have been affected by colonialism in the past. So a lot of these non-Western countries, it's just assumed that kind of anti-capitalist witness is part of Christian witness is just there. And so that was interesting to see. But more broadly, I think when reading the Bible, it's always important to remember who it is that's writing and who they are writing to. So for the Hebrew Bible is either to a nomadic or. or relatively small nation in the context of surrounding superpowers. Now the authors probably would have had to have been part of a privileged, educated and literate class but their concern with the welfare of the poor is a reflection of the broader tradition found in Judaism and in Christianity and is expressed by liberation theology as God's preferential option for the poor. And we see this all throughout scripture, within the early church, a lot of the early church fathers talk about how all riches come from injustice that if you have something and your sibling is without and has nothing then that is stealing. Mainly because it comes from this assumption that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. Ownership in that way only belongs to God, all belongs to God and all of it has been given as free gift and which we must share. And so unrestrained capitalism rewards the worst of human tendencies, of violence, of greed, of selfishness and our response as Christians shouldn't be just to accept this as the way that things are but to recognise that the gospel is transformative. It transforms us as individuals to be generous and justice seeking but also should be transforming our communities, our societies, our politics. Not in a way that lords it over other people in the way that we see with Christian nationalism but in a way that seeks to serve and better the lives of others. And I'd say that Europe isn't immune here either although a lot of what we have in terms of socialised medicine or other utilities for example that is definitely much better than in the US, there's still a general acceptance of neoliberal capitalism. For example here in Scotland a lot of people consider Scotland to be much more progressive but there's also a failure by a lot of people to acknowledge Scotland's part and empire in the past and that the position that we're in as a country now is in large part due to colonialism and slavery. Glasgow was known as the second city of the empire, a lot of the streets are named after slave owners, a lot of the buildings were built to facilitate tobacco traders and cotton traders. So there's a long history there and Scotland has benefited through capitalism and through colonialism historically to be in the position that we're in to do a lot of these social programmes and the UK as a whole is in that position too. But I think that there is a much stronger emphasis here in Scotland on serving the poor and justice. There is maybe less open conversation about anti-capitalism as part of Christian witness in the 21st century, not as open as I found at the World Communion of Reformed Churches. I would find that even the people that would be labelled as conservative within the Church of Scotland will generally still have a heavy focus on serving the poor, ending poverty, on doing justice and justice being part of the gospel. But they probably wouldn't have that conversation about being anti-capitalist and being Christian. But for me, from a reformed perspective, I appreciate Karl Barth's words. So he said in the Church Dogmatics that fundamentally the command of God is self-evidently and in all circumstances a call for counter-movements on behalf of humanity and against humanity's denial in any form and therefore a call for the championing of the weak against every kind of encroachment on the part of the strong. The Christian community has undoubtedly been too late in seeing this in the face of modern capitalism and it cannot escape some measure of responsibility for the injustice characteristic of this development. The main task of Christianity in the West is to assert the command of God in the face of capitalism and keep to the left in opposition to its champions, i.e. to confess it is fundamentally on the sides of the victims of this disorder and to espouse their cause. So anti-capitalist witness for me is part of being Christian, it comes from those Christian convictions and part of it also comes from my own experiences working as a retail worker. I used to work at Apple as a genius is what they called you, a very fancy name, but basically you were just serving people and helping them reset their passwords. So I used to work at Apple and when I was there I saw the impact that megacorporation making tons and tons of money giving us less than 2-3% in pay rises each year had on the morale and the sense of meaning that my colleagues had. I saw the way that they treated people and from that I felt that as a Christian I had to act, I had to do something to help and support my colleagues and so we started talking about unionising and we eventually became the first unionised Apple store in the UK. So that was a fun experience but from that I experienced so many things where I just went oh this is all so Christian. We went along to a trade union rally which was for the RMT which is the Rail Workers Union because they were on strike at the time and when we went there there was this guy called Mick Lynch who, quite a big name within the trade union movement, he was all over the media at the time and was really talking about the exploitative form of economics that we have in the UK currently, the massive inequalities between the rich and the poor and so he'd become quite popular on social media and things like that. So when we went there the hall that he was speaking in was overflowing and when he started speaking about these themes of justice you would hear people from the audience going yeah that's right and I was thinking oh this just reminds me of being in Pentecostal settings in church. It felt like the preacher from the stage going let justice roll like a river and the audience going amen, praise God. You could feel that sense there, that similarity and then as I began to research it and because my research is focused on modern church history in Scotland and the UK you see that the trade union movement in the UK is deeply connected to Christianity. It's the Methodists that were the toe-puddle martyrs, some of the first people to be deported from the UK for setting up a union and they were Methodist lay preachers and members of the Methodist church. When the Labour Party was founded in the early 1900s there was a church service at the Labour Party conference that had over 5,000 people at it. They had socialist Sunday schools in the early 20th century. There was all these things that were going on at the time and a lot of people within the trade union movement who were deeply influenced by their upbringing in the Christian faith and for me it just came out of that. So as I began to study not only the history but also the theology I wrote a chapter about it in the book Awake, Emerging and Connected and the chapters on theologising trade unions and so from that developed this idea of a theological ethic of solidarity and it requires relationship, partnership, collective action and all of it being grounded in the incarnation. So if we want to show solidarity with oppressed people then first of all we should be in relationship with those people, hear of their concerns, hear what it is that would actually help them and in partnership work with them, lift up their voices. In partnership we learn about what we can do that actually helps. It's not just performative like wearing a pin or flying a flag if that's not going to actually help the situation and collective action, recognising that we can do more together than we would ever do on our own and all of that grounded in a recognition that God becoming human and the person of Jesus, the word made flesh is the ultimate act of solidarity. That in all of our suffering, all of our pain, God has come alongside us, understands the pain and suffers it to the point of death with us under systems of oppression, brutality and violence. So yeah, that's a lot of what I talk about in that. So you can go check out the book. It's SCM Press that published that. Awesome. We're going to put that in the show notes. I really loved hearing about that. William, let's name the elephant in the room. We're going to talk about American white Christian nationalism. I would like to play a clip right now that was deeply impactful that you made about what you're noticing as a Christian about MAGA Christianity right now. The new imperial religion wears a red hat with a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other. It's God is mammon who offers salvation to those who are productive citizens of the empire. It's priests are billionaires who do what they can to uphold the myth that if you work hard enough, you could join them too. It's Messiah is the president and the white Jesus acts as their mascot, a metaphysical Easter bunny used as a miracle weapon in service of the mighty. It's good news is that of the Pax Americana, the peace of America enforced at the end of the barrel of a gun and under the watchful eye of the surveillance state. It's virtues are envy, strife, deceit, malice, arrogance, and violence of every kind. It views mercy, empathy, love, and compassion as sins. It's sacraments are patriarchy, racism, and bigotry. It's symbols take over every element of life and spread far beyond the empire's borders. And it's final goal is to return to that which never existed, a time when America was great. I have heard stories of a man who lived in similar times in a similar world. He preached that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. He taught that God did not seek to condemn but to love, that the rich would find it hardest to enter the kingdom, and the true peace comes not by means of violence, but by love and solidarity. That we see God not in the places of power, but among us, in bread and wine, flesh and blood. He died at the hands of an empire, crucified as an enemy of the state, and we find him speaking to us here and now as one resurrected and returning to us again and again, bringing good news that the empire will not win, that good will conquer evil, love will conquer hate, that peace will prevail over violence, and justice will flow like a never-ending stream. May we follow him. A lot of people who are Christian nationalists would not describe themselves in that way, but it's very easy to see when you're outside of it. How is American Christian nationalism being perceived globally? Yeah, so I can only really speak to what I think and those who are close to me, because there's definitely those who maybe support MAGA or even support Trump here, as we have our own kind of equivalent movement and the likes of Nigel Farage and Reform UK here. But for many of us, it's seen as a corruption and a weaponisation of Christianity. We also look on and concern, recognising that it's not a problem unique to America. We have those same concerning nationalist and populist political movements attempting to attach themselves to Christianity here. In 2024 in the UK, race riots occurred, focusing on hotel accommodation, which was accommodating asylum seekers and refugees. And last year, there was the largest British nationalist rally we've seen with the use of Christian symbolism all over the place. And a lot of that had people with MAGA hats on. There's some cross-pollination there. And I think it's worth quoting the joint church's response in full here, because this was a signed document signed by Christian churches and organisations across the theological and political spectrum. I think maybe it can give you a little bit of insight as to how broadly this type of thing is viewed here in the UK. Because I mean, this was people from evangelical networks, Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches, Church of Scotland, Church of England, all over the spectrum. So the letter says this. We are deeply concerned about the co-opting of Christian symbols, particularly the cross during Saturday's Unite the Kingdom rally. Many individuals and communities felt anxious, unsettled and even threatened by aspects of the march. There were undoubtedly diverse motivations for those engaged in the event. We respect the right to free speech, to hold different views on issues such as immigration, the importance of healthy debate between religious communities and the need to disagree well when consensus is difficult. We also understand that for many of those involved in the rally, there is a deep sense of frustration at feeling unheard and forgotten in the democratic process. We know that we cannot heal this wound unless the church and society as a whole rises to do more to address the issues of poverty, inequality and exclusion. However, this rally included racist, anti-Muslim and far-right elements. As Christians from different theological and political backgrounds, we stand together against the misuse of Christianity. The cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other. Jesus calls us to love both our neighbours and our enemies and to welcome the stranger. Any co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith to exclude others is unacceptable. As Christian leaders, we are proud of our country and commit ourselves to work with others, building a united kingdom where the values of love, humility and compassion shine through in every community and we do so unapologetically in the name of Jesus Christ. So I was really glad to see this response and I hope that the church here continues to have such a robust response as well as campaigning and community organising to address the root causes of the political disaffection that causes these nationalist movements to occur. So for those living in the US, I would say, work together. At this point in time, collective action and a collective voice is needed. We can look at the Confessing Church in 1930s Germany as an example. It arguably came together too late to make a real difference and it's up for debate right now whether or not the American church is already too late, but that doesn't mean that it should not act. And this might require working with people with whom you deeply disagree on other topics, but if the ability to speak freely about different ideas is undermined and taken away, those differences won't matter for much longer. I just want to sit with that for a second. This is a really hard time in history, isn't it, to be living through? It is. And sometimes, individually, we do feel really powerless. And so you're right, collectively getting together really is very important. Also, people who are in Christian spaces who want to follow the servanthood, the love, the compassion want to follow the servanthood, the love, the compassion of Jesus. Yep. We do need to come together, even if we don't agree on everything, in order to make sure that we all have a voice for years and generations to come. A hundred percent. What do people who are not part of those movements that you talked about in Scotland, in the UK, like when you're watching this on the news, by the way, I'm so sorry that you have to consistently watch all this on the news about what's going on in America all the time. But what do people in Scotland or in Europe or outside the U.S. say when they're watching all this unfold right now under the banner of like, this is Christianity? I think there's just a real feeling of heartbreak. I grew up with the idea that America was this great place to go and visit and be. I mean, I suppose in part, that's because of American propaganda and movies and TVs and the like. But I went to I've been to America twice. I went for when I was still part of the evangelical church to different youth conferences to speak at them. And I spent time in Texas and Colorado and Florida. And what I encountered was lots of really caring and loving people and generous people, people who voted Republican, people who the one person that stayed with had a gun room. And yet I can't say that they weren't loving and caring and kind and compassionate. And I've still kept in touch with some of those people. And when I see the way that they're talking about MAGA, when I see how they're responding to immigrants, when I see how they're responding to recent events around ICE, I can't help but feel heartbreak over the person that they used to be and how changed they've become because of the poison that is American Christian nationalism. And I mean, I'm a member of the Iona community and then our family group. We have a member who's American and we talk regularly about the concerns that they have. I have friends who live here who are American, who have moved because of concerns over the situation. And when I speak with them, when I speak with friends of mine and the PCUSA and other churches, I just feel really worried for them. And I don't know how I would respond in the situation that they're in. I don't know what I would do necessarily. And I think it's really heavy. And that's why I think it's so important to be doing action collectively, coming together, get involved with mutual aid groups, get involved with food banks, all of these things. If your church has social services that it runs, get involved with them, because I think if you're trying to figure it out on your own, you're not going to be able to. And if you can get involved with something that's a form of collective action, even if it only helps 100 people a week, that's 100 people. Isn't that amazing? And yeah, I think that's really important. But in general, when we're looking at it from this side of the pond, I just feel heartbroken that this is where we've ended up because it doesn't just impact Americans, even though it is impacting them most directly. It impacts Venezuelans, it impacts Ukrainians, it impacts Gazans and Israelis, it impacts the entire global order in terms of the way that things have been working on a basis of relative peace for the past 50 years, through the likes of the UN, which has almost become completely delegitimized because of the actions of Trump and the West. And so it's a frightening time to live in for sure. I think it's important to acknowledge that. Yeah, absolutely. But we're going to take some pages from history and we're going to talk about Christian authoritarianism versus Christian resistance. This is the good news. This is not the first time in history that there has been Christian authoritarian takeovers. You know, a lot of Americans, they're reaching for World War II language, Nazi-era language, whether or not that's completely accurate. I would love to hear from a European and theological perspective, what is accurate? What's overstated? What do we need to understand more carefully? And what kinds of inspiration can we draw from Christian resistance in the past? Yeah. So two years ago, I worked for the student Christian movement and I was their theology and resources project worker. And a big part of my role was to talk about the theology and life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And so we got to go on a summer pilgrimage to Berlin, which was exploring the themes of peacemaking, of Christian resistance to the Third Reich. We looked at Martin Niemöller, we looked at Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church, and it was a really incredible experience. And I think one of the things that you realise pretty quickly is how messy all of it is. And if we take Martin Niemöller as an example, he's well known for his poem. First, he came for the communists, but I did not speak up because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Jews and so on until he says, then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up for me. And he wrote that as a confessional because he didn't do enough. He was a German nationalist. He was someone that served in the German Navy in the First World War, won medal, was awarded medals for his service, was part of putting down left wing uprisings in the 1920s, voted for the Nazis three times. He even said that Hitler was bringing about a national revival. And in 1933, when he joined the Confessing Church, he did so not because he was opposed to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews, but because people of Jewish descent were being barred from being members of his church. And so even then it wasn't out of actual concern for what was happening. It was because it was affecting him and the church law and how when he was eventually arrested and put in prison for criticising the Nazis, he said that he was promised by Hitler that he wouldn't, that Hitler would protect the church. And obviously he didn't and that never happened. And yet throughout those years in prison, he reflected on it and came to a place of repentance where he was able to write that poem and then spent the rest of his life advocating for pacifism, for peace. And I suppose his life serves as a warning, whereas Bonhoeffer was probably different, although similarly complicated in the sense that he was from a fairly privileged academic background. He had the opportunity to be out of the US. He spent time obviously in Harlem, learnt from the black church there, saw how Jim Crow was actually teaching a lot to the Nazis about how they could treat people. And he was there and just felt that he couldn't abandon his country in its time of need. How could he help to rebuild the church after the war if he wasn't present during it? And so when he came back to Germany, he has this interesting dilemma where he has to discern, well I'm going to need to be involved with the Nazis to some extent to stay alive and he was a kind of informant to the allied forces as well. So there's this compromise thing and he talks about this idea in Christian ethics that sometimes the right thing to do could still be a sin. Sometimes the morally correct thing to do could still be a sin, which is when you are in these situations of authoritarianism, trying to figure out what is the right response here can be really difficult. Is violence appropriate? Is it not? Do we take a purely pacifist perspective? How involved should we be to be able to stay alive, to speak up for people, to try and change things? And where do we stay silent? Where do we speak out? And for Bonhoeffer, inaction could be a greater sin than actually enacting violence in some instances. So he's a very interesting character but what you see as you study both Bonhoeffer and Niemöller's life is that when Christian resistance is present in the face of Christian authoritarianism, none of it's easy. There's not a simple answer, it takes a discernment and a real listening to the Spirit of God and a throwing yourself onto the mercy of God, recognising that the course of action that you take might be the wrong one but you need to act somehow, you need to do something because not acting is the greater evil in that situation. So it's difficult but it teaches us a lot about how we can respond in those situations. So I think there are certainly some parallels with World War II but I think it would be wrong to assume that the current situation in the US came out of nowhere. The tendencies towards this type of politics goes a long way back just because violence is now being experienced on American streets by white citizens doesn't mean this hasn't always been part of the American system. Just look back at the Iraq war, Jim Crow, slavery, the treatment of Native Americans and it kind of made me think about early last year when on a study trip to Turkey and we explored the seven churches of the book of Revelation. We also went to Colossae and to Hierapolis and Pergae and a few other places that are mentioned in the New Testament and it really reminded me of the kind of fragility that the early church existed in. Like you really saw the wealth and the size and the scale of these massive Roman cities and centres of trade and commerce and religious cults and things like that. And so I just remember when we arrived in Pergae walking through the gates that Paul and Barnabas would have walked through in the book of Acts and it reminded me of a quote from H.G. Wells book War of the Worlds and it says it was like bows and arrows against the lightning and how do you stay faithful in the midst of empire when the empire Babylon is the dragon, this beast of strength, of power, of might makes right when the way of Jesus is the way of the lamb. Because in the book of Revelation you hear that passage where it says and who is worthy to open the scroll? Well it's the lion of the tribe of Judah but when John turns around to look it's not a lion that he sees but a slaughtered lamb and I thought of Paul and Barnabas as I walked through those gates in Pergae going how must they have felt seeing this absolutely gigantic city that had fully working waterways and really advanced technology in terms of managing cooling systems and massive temples and saunas and everything like that and just thinking how could they think that this gospel of a crucified saviour would have any resonance here and yet over the course of centuries it subverted an entire empire. So I think it really highlighted for me the need to be faithful to the way of Jesus when you live in the midst of empire because I think that if you're in America there's a tendency in American theology to kind of equate America with God's chosen people when in reality if we're looking at biblical allegories America is closer to Egypt, it's closer to Babylon, it's closer to Rome and acknowledging what it means to be faithful in Egypt and Babylon and Rome is the question. the questions that need to be asked. Amen, William. Yes, thank you. You're clearly very well read and spend a lot of your time learning and continuously being curious. So I'd just be interested, for people who want to learn more, what scholars, books or accounts do you recommend? And I'd also love for people to find out more of you online too. Yeah, of course. So I could recommend so many things here. And I would say I've got lots of book recommendations on my TikTok, which is at William Gibson GLA. And you can also find me on Instagram with the same username. And I recently joined upscrolled, although I've not posted anything there yet. But TikTok and Instagram are the main places at William Gibson GLA, you'll see a bunch of book recommendations, especially on TikTok. But I'll give you probably some more obscure ones that maybe people haven't come across before. So the first one is by George McLeod, who's the founder of the Iona community, which is a ecumenical organisation in Scotland, a big part of what brought me back to faith after a crisis of faith. And I wrote my undergraduate thesis on George McLeod's campaigning on nuclear disarmament in the 1960s and how his theology of the incarnation impacted his campaigning. And he's got a couple of books. There's one called The Whole Earth Cries Glory. Another one is called Only One Way Left. I'd recommend that one. Only One Way Left is great. It's slightly dated in terms of the language, and it's definitely Scotland specific, but it's got some really great stuff in it. And I'd highly recommend it. You can find a lot of those books on the Iona community website. You might struggle to find them on Amazon, but you can have a look, obviously. Another one I'd recommend is a book by the Irish poet and theologian, Padraig O'Tooma, that's worth a read. It's called In the Shelter. And then a bit of a shameless plug here, but my chapter on theology and trade unions is amongst many chapters in an excellent book called Awake, Emerging and Connected. It's interfaith, it's ecumenical, and it's focused on themes of justice from mainly Gen Z and millennial theologians. And that's edited by my friend Dr. Victoria Turner. You'll be able to find that on the SCM Press website. This one's another one that would be really hard to find, but if you can find it, it's great because it's out of print. So you might need to look on places like eBay or secondhand book websites. But it's called Waymarks by Peter Miller. Peter Miller is a former warden of Iona Abbey. And when I was at the kind of felt most lost in terms of my faith and unsure of all of it, I was in this little town called Wigton in the south of Scotland, and it has the largest secondhand bookshop of all of Scotland. And I just stumbled across this book called Waymarks. And the subtitle is Signposts for God's Presence and the World. And honestly, that book just showed me a version of Christianity that I went, yep, I could get on board with this. And that's what kind of started that whole journey into the Iona community and eventually back into the Church of Scotland. And then the one that I recommended earlier was Lamorna Ash, Don't Forget We're Here Forever on the UK context of Christianity. It's beautifully written. I cried a couple of times while reading that. And I wrote a review of the book on my sub stack, which is linked in both my TikTok and Instagram bio. And then I was going to cover this in another question, but I didn't really get around to it. But I'll just read this to you from a collection of Irish poems. It's called Ode by the 19th century poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy. And I think it does a really good job of explaining the need to not only respond strongly to things like authoritarianism, fascism and Christian nationalism, but actually to build a positive vision of the world, a vision of what the church could be, a vision of what our politics could be. And I think it just does it really beautifully. So this is the poem Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy. We are the music makers. We are the dreamer of dreams. Wandering by lone sea breakers and sitting by desolate streams. World losers and world forsakers on whom the pale moon gleams. Yet we are the movers and shakers of the world forever it seems. We in the ages lying in the buried past of the earth, belt Nineveh with our sighing and Babel itself in our mirth and overthrow them with prophesying to the old of the new world's worth. For each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth. I have so much hope for what's going to come out of all this. And that is so much through a poem like that and through ministers like you. I hope that you continue your online work and your church when you have your own church is so incredibly lucky to have you. And for those who are not locally near you, thank you for your work online. I was wondering if you could, you know, there's people who have not been prayed over in a long time. They might be like you talked about in Scotland, those 51% of people who may not be in local church spaces. That doesn't mean that they don't have any kind of connection with the divine or God. Or for those who feel spiritually homeless or exhausted or disillusioned, but they're quietly still hoping that God is bigger than what they've been shown, that God is not about empire and oppression, that God is truly about love. And I was wondering if you could pray over those people. Yeah, of course. Let's pray. God of in between places, may you meet us where we are. You created day and night, yet you meet us at dawn, dusk and midday. You created land and sea, yet you meet us on beaches of sand and stone, on mountaintops and valleys and lakes. You gave us the gift of faith and the freedom to believe or not. Yet you meet us in the midst of doubt and uncertainty. You humble us when we are sure we know the answers and invite us to curiosity and question. You've given us the gift of each other as individuals and communities. You meet us in the institutions we have made and alone in the wilderness. You meet us in the messiness and hurt of our shared lives together and keep alive in our hearts the possibility of a new community of justice, joy and peace. You've shown us your love and yet we still suffer. But you meet us whether we rejoice today or whether we mourn. In lament and apathy and zeal, you are there. So today, loving God, meet us where we are. In hurt and hope, in pain and praise, in loss and love, in despair and in delight. For all those listening right now, be near and go with them into the weeks and months ahead. Amen. Amen. William Gibson, soon to be Reverend William Gibson, soon to be pastor William Gibson. What will you eventually have as your title? Well, I'll be doctor before I'll be reverend if all goes well. So I'll be doctor next year if all goes to plan and then reverend doctor in like two and a half years if all goes well with my probation replacement and things. We'll keep us posted and God bless you. Thank you for being on the Sacred Slope today. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for joining us today on the Sacred Slope. If you'd like to nominate a pastor, priest or clergy member anywhere in the world, send me an email at alexis at thesacredslope.com. Music was by Brett Rutledge, Eddie Irvin and Sean Spence. May the fruit of the Spirit guide you this week. I'm Alexis Rice. Go in peace, friends. There's beauty in unraveling, safety in the questioning. Home is where you're wondering, and you're right where you're supposed to be. You're right where you're supposed to be.