Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to writer and church leader Danté Stewart. 19/10/2022

Elizabeth 

Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, and listening across our differences. Every week I speak to someone who has some kind of public platform. Often someone who has experience of one of the many divides we draw between human beings. I try and understand the stories that have shaped them and how they’ve got to where they are now. I’m interested in the unconscious or semi–conscious ethics and principles that drive us and the way they clash; the stories we tell about ourselves and about other people and particularly other groups, and ultimately, in growing myself in empathy and understanding in these divided times. In this episode, you’ll hear a conversation I had with Dante Stewart. Dante is an American writer and church leader. His journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time among many others. And his most recent book is ‘Shoutin’ in Fire – An American Epistle’. We spoke about his southern Pentecostal childhood, his experiences in a white majority church, parenting while black, and much more. As usual, there are some reflections from me at the end, and I really hope you enjoy listening. 

I am shortly going to kick off, Dante, with asking you what you hold sacred, which is not your classic icebreaker easy question. And it’s designed to be something I think that stops us in our tracks, because I’m not sure any of us immediately know, but I hope it’s a generative question because I’m really interested in the deep values that drive people, the deep principles that we’re trying to live by, and often how different they are from each other, and how helpful it can be to surface them in order to build some empathy and some understanding, and some sense of each other as these incredibly complex, beautiful human beings. But I’m gonna give you a minute’s reprieve for asking what you hold sacred to a tiny warm–up, which is just how do you get on with the word? Are you drawn to it? Does it propel you? Does it feel spiky? How does it sit with you? 

Dante Stewart   

Yeah, immediately when I think of sacred, I think of like, pressing into something as a sort of type of depth, but in also a sort of type of spontaneity. But then also, when I think about that word sacred, the immediate image that comes to my mind is myself and my family, my children, my mother, my father, my grandmother, my brothers and sisters, and cousins. I think about the everyday of life, the mundanity of life, the kind of everyday joy of life, but then also like, in this season of life, sacred to me is also about being able to live with grief and what not just holds grief, but what grief holds as well. And so like, as I think about the word sacred, my mind goes there. I think also about the James Webb Telescope images, like I want to go dance among the stars and kind of get lost in the stars. And like I was talking to my wife the other day, and I’m like, ‘Yo, it’s no way possible that we are alone in this thing we call universe!’ My plausible, argument is that there is one liveable planet in each galaxy. That’s easier for me to believe, you know, and there’s something about ‘the sacred’ about the question and remaining open to the questions of life and the depth of the question and pursuit of the question. And things like that… 

Elizabeth 

So, I’m hearing these themes of yourself in this kind of beautiful constellation of your family. And something about depth in that every day, you know, that tension that is so creative between the normal things of life that then just drop through into what’s profound on such a regular basis. How do you think those sacred values, those threads have led you? How do you think they’ve shaped your decisions? Can you point to points in your life where you’re like, ‘Okay, because these things are sacred to me, I did this or not that or I wish I’d done this, and not that?’ 

Dante Stewart  

Yeah. When I think about that, I immediately, you know, think about the younger me. My son just turned 4; he had his birthday yesterday. And I wrote a letter and really had been writing it, I haven’t finished it yet, it’s not where I want it to be just yet. You know, I started writing a letter to him, not for him to read at 4 years old, but for him to read it like at 14. But to think about what was his daddy was thinking about him when his dad was 30 and he was 4 years old? Just like, 10–12 years later, his dad is 42. And now he’s like, 14, 15, 16 and thinking about okay, what would I want for my son? And a lot of those questions are wrapped up in regret and things I’ve learned and the challenges I’ve faced; and even like, the remaining opening to the power of self–reinvention. You know, when I think about my life over these last years, especially, from college to today, I have lived a lot, I mean, I’ve gone through a lot, I’ve experienced a lot. And if I’m thinking about how that word ‘sacred’, you know, has led me here. I never really had a framework for the sacred or, what is most real, and even what does sacred even mean to each one of us. And if I had to try and put a definition to it, it is like the thing in our own hearts that we hold most dear and deeply, you know, and the thing also that we’re most afraid of. So it’s a polarity. When you think about things that are sacred, you want to protect them. You want to make sure that they have longevity, you want to make sure that they are given the best you have to offer in any other day. But then also it is the fear of losing that thing. So, when I think about my child, I think about him growing up in his world, and even the ways in which me and my wife have to talk about our experiences as people living in America right now, and even the stories that we have inherited from our grandparents and parents. That is a challenging thing. I am afraid that things will be lost, whether that’s like culture, whether that’s artefacts that made us, whether that’s the stories that have given us ideas of freedom, and what matters and the intuitive things that have made us who we are and what we’ve done with it. How we’ve taken what we have been given and made it black in this world and made it us and made it ours. And l don’t think I’ve ever had a framework for that. But then, the older I get, the less I’m concerned about arguing or proving or being something to other people or trying to be whatever to whoever. And the more I’m concerned about, okay, like, ‘What is it that you got? What is it that you have that you want to give to somebody else?’ And I’ve really been struggling with that in this season, if I can just keep it a hundred with you. This has been a hard season of trusting myself. When I think about what led me here, I think about that intuition, that discipline, that belief, that grit, that self–reinvention, about learning how to live with what I lose; but also learning how to live with what I got. I think about that as sacred. Education is about what others want to give to you. Intuition is about what you have already in yourself that must be brought out. And so, I think about this letter that I write to my son, and how I want to highlight how it’s led me here. I think it’s that: it’s life, it’s failure, it’s regret, it’s finding myself and losing myself and finding it again. And figuring out how to do that every single day to get better at it with each week. 

Elizabeth  

How much is it modelled on Baldwin’s letter ‘Letter to my nephew’? 

Dante Stewart 

I’m actually glad you went there because like… how much is my letter to my son modelled after that? 

Elizabeth 

Knowing you love Baldwin; I assumed it was part of it…  

Dante Stewart  

Yeah. Oh, 100%.  I literally just pitched that to Esquire. It was like, ‘I wrote this letter to my son, and it’s like Baldwin’s letter to his nephew… so it’s the same feel. So, I think so much of my letter to my son is modelled after that, because I think that letter that Baldwin wrote to his nephew was not about perfection. It wasn’t about the answers to life. It wasn’t even about guiding his nephew into the future where he is free. But it was, ‘Alright nephew, this is what I’ve learned, this is what I’ve been given, and I want you once you leave this letter to ask better questions.’ Like, it’s the question that matters in this intimate moment between… I was about to say, ‘a father’, which in some sense, he was fathering this young kid. He was trying to let him know there are some things that I’ve learned about your family that you don’t know yet, but I want to introduce you to it. You don’t know your father, like I know him. You don’t know how afraid your father is; not of just simply the world, but of himself. And there are going to be some moments where you see yourself, and you’re gonna look in the mirror, and you want to see what the world tells you. And you’re going to be afraid of yourself as well. And what are you gonna do with it? There are going to be moments where you are so angry at the situation that you have been forced into, that you are going to question is love even possible? And I’m going to have to bring you back to the family, and let you realise that like, ‘Yo, love out there may be confused, but the love in here is committed. ‘There are going to be moments where you meet people who see you as less than, and they’re going to see you as inferior. But remember that what they do, and what they make you endure is not about your inferiority…that you are less than, that you don’t have, that you don’t possess a certain type of creativity, brilliance and beauty that’s worthy of the best things in life. No, it’s about them. And there are going to be moments where you’re going to have to remind yourself and kill the noise. And say that it’s not about them, it’s about me and what I hold, and I got enough. And there are gonna be moments where your country wants to celebrate freedom every July 4th, or every Freedom Day, wherever the country celebrate it and you need to question are we celebrating too early? ‘And when I think about that, I guess my letter…and that’s why I haven’t been able to finish it yet: because everything I just said about the nephew, I am feeling. The noise isn’t killed in my life. I don’t know how to ask the right questions. I don’t trust myself, and I’m trying to find out how to do it. So, I guess I need to face it and finish it. And so maybe I need to be like James and say like ‘Just write, just show up, just do it. You ain’t got to save your son. All you’ve got to do is lov’em. He’ll save himself. 

Elizabeth  

I can talk to you about James Baldwin all day. And I really hope to come back to it, but I want the listeners to just get a bit of a sense of your story and where you’ve come from before we land back there. So, I ask every guest about the formative ideas in their childhood, and I speak to people from very wide backgrounds, perspectives, religions, no religion… So, you can take this wherever you like. Is there a religious, philosophical or political idea that was really formative in your childhood? And through that just give us a little picture of young Dante running around in what has been, I think, called the ‘Corridor of Shame’ in South Carolina? That seems like a terrible thing to call a place. 

Dante Stewart  

Oh, so there’s this image that I have, it’s in my journal. And I carry this image everywhere I go. And I’m like, 14, 15, 16. 

Elizabeth  

Is it you in the front of the photo there? 

Dante Stewart  

Yeah. Yeah, that’s me right there. There is this image and I go back to this often: a young man, a deck of cards, lying, having fun, faking it until I actually make it. And I realised that I never could have imagined what cards I would have been dealt in life. But eventually, that young kid will learn how to play and realise that you just might lose, but you just might win; and that’s from childhood. I grew up in a place like you said that those in South Carolina called the ‘Corridor of Shame.’ And I was listening to a documentary from back in the day on the area I grew up in, and the documentarian was showing us in these trailers, and showing our area, he was like, ‘Can these kids you know, imagine? Can they even dream of being an athlete? Can they even dream of being an artist? Can they even dream of being a writer?’ And when I saw that, I was like, ‘Yo!’, and it was like, last year sometime, or maybe two years ago… I was like, ‘Yo, yeah, we can! We can imagine: why? Because I’ve seen others do it. I’ve seen people like my friend, Shawn Jeffrey go to the University of South Carolina and make it to the League, people like Mike Colter, come from our area, and go be an actor; people like Viola Davis, who is from our town that we claim, even though she went up North, like so many black people, we still claim Viola… she is still ours. She goes on to be one of the best actors in this world.’ And I write down these affirmations and I wrote down this affirmation: ‘Corridor of shame? Nah, I walked through it. And I became a writer.’ And you asked about – are there religious and philosophical ideas of my youth? Yes. Where did I learn that? I learned it in the Pentecostal church. There’s another image of me as a young 10–year–old. I have on a brown suit and as a young kid, I used to be in front of the church air guitaring to the music. And I thought about like, this idea that this one university asked me to come speak on about ‘risk’. And so, I started asking my mama, I called my mom, and I was like, ‘Mom, was there ever a moment in time where you knew I was like, different? You know, or like, I got something about me that’s just like I don’t know what this dude gonna do, or what he’s gonna be, but he’s gonna be something…’ So, I wasn’t trying to boost my head or anything like that. But I was trying to find myself, trying to go back to my childhood and figure out what was it about this environment? This is what people call the ‘Corridor of Shame.’ That’s what they call it. What was it about our environment that made me who I was? And my mama reminds me of being this young kid up in front, risking it all, you know… you can face a lot of rejection in Pentecostal churches. Even though everybody’s jumping up…you’re going out in front? And things like that and people will be like, ‘Nah go back lawn kid, go back to your seat and go sit down!’ But nah, it was just something intuitive about me: I belong up front. And that’s a risk because when you feel like you belong up front, you belong at the top, there is also so much insecurity about it. Because also belonging up front and at the top can also be like this kind of coping mechanism of what you feel you don’t have or what you can’t attain or what you’re most afraid of losing. But then I’m so glad that the Pentecostal church that I grew up in never put me down. They never said, ‘Sit down, child.’ They also believed that I belong there as well. And I think that that is the religious idea: that there is something beautiful about this one little life that God has made. And even though we as a community will fail that little life again and again and again and again, we at least do believe that that one little life belongs up front, on stage, in the limelight with a mic in his hand, and other kids belong there as well. And if kids can believe that enough, when they do walk into a place where they call it the ‘Corridor of Shame’, they will realise that they got God with them. And they don’t just got God, but they’ve got something else and that’s called audacity. They’ve got the audacity to believe that whatever other people say about them, whatever other people believe about them, it’s gonna come, but then you’ve got audacity, you’ve got your family, you’ve got God, you’ve got who you are, you’ve got what you’ve been given. And that’s my upbringing. That’s why I think about those ideas that I’ve been given, that you’re worthy to dance. There is something about faith that should be expressive. There’s something about life that like even when you come from these menial jobs, and you come from this racist world, this sexist, this homophobic world, and things like that…that when you encounter God, and you encounter us, there should be a type of freedom. And the sad part is that oftentimes, that freedom comes with transaction in Pentecostal churches; that for that freedom you must be this certain type of person in order to experience that freedom. And so, that’s also a part of where I grew up that I’m like, ‘Nah, I need to reinvent that. I need to reshape that; I need to rethink that.’ But it did at least give me the audacity to believe that I can do anything, I can be anything, I can go anywhere. And even if I don’t reach it today, at some point, I will. And even if I don’t ever reach it, wherever I’m at is going to be the best place anyone can ever land.  

Elizabeth  

Yeah. You write so beautifully about the influence of Pentecostalism on your childhood and the kind of beauty and grit and reckoning with suffering and struggle that you received in your childhood. And obviously, a big part of that was the context that you were still living in, are still living in. And the context that your grandparents, particularly growing up in the South, had lived through. I think what your book gave me as someone who I hope, you know, has been trying to educate myself on the realities of life for people of colour, is it felt like it moved from the intellectual to the experiential. Could you just say a little bit about that sense of threat? Which it feels to me like just… you had this beautiful family life of joy and beauty and creativity and the presence of God but stalked around the edges by a sense of a world that was not safe and violence that your parents were trying to train you to avoid. Could you say a bit more about that? 

Dante Stewart  

Yeah, I think so many of our…especially being black in this country, you want to protect your children from the world you know that at some point they’re going to experience. So, you want to give them as much as they can of your world and of yourself as a sort of type of armour, as a sort of type of way out, before they experience that, but you don’t want to keep them ultimately away from it. So, you try to keep them away from the assault, and give them the artefact. So, when I think about my mother and my father, as young as when we were kids, they would always… whenever we go visit a different place, we would always find museums on history: particularly on like black history. Let’s say we go into [Washington] DC, we go into every single museum that’s in DC, like every historical museum. If we are in Tennessee, we are finding the black places; we’re finding the museum…we’re finding something about us in that place. And I think about the power of that, like even as a child, even though I didn’t have the framework and language for that, I was given a kind of alternate definition of what it means to be black in this country. And so, my parents tried to keep us protected from those assaults. But at the end of the day, like I said earlier, I can’t save my son. I can only give him the right type of questions. And if there’s anything I wish would have happened is that I would have been able to ask more questions. I wish we would have been able to talk more about their lives. Even as a writer right now, it’s so hard to get my family to talk about their lives, like a part of it is that they don’t want to go back there because they grew up in a generation where you don’t talk about your problems, you kind of get to work, you go do it… like there’s not a certain type of emotional heart, softness that is seen as an emotional good: that is seen as a vulnerability that is too much of a weight to carry because it gets you off track of what you’ve got to do every day. So, I don’t have time to think about this: I’ve gotta go provide for the family, I gotta go check in, I got to clock in, etc… And so, me, having children now, I started asking more questions like, I wish back in the day, we would have been able to not just watch the documentaries, but be immersed in them. Not just see the books but have a conversation about the books. So, my mother is an avid reader. Like, I mean, all these books I’ve got in my background, like all these black books, this whole section is black books, right here, this whole kind of black section and things like that…my mom and I read most of them. She is an avid reader and an amazing, incredible storyteller because of the literature that she holds within herself. She didn’t just visit the library: the library lives within her. So therefore, like for me, as a writer, and as a speaker, as a minister, as a pastor, so much of what I do, what I feel is a reflection of my mother and my father and them kind of immersing me in this kind of world of literature and things like that. But it’s so hard even now, to get it out of her. I’m like, ‘Yo, you read all the books, like I wish you would have sat me down and talked to me earlier about it.’ And of course, we’ve got time right now and now it’s not too late, thank God. But then I think about if I was able to not be so protected from the world, to not be able to risk what it means to be audacious; like why should audacity only be confined to the front of the church and not in front of the world? So, I can be up front in the church and play my guitar, but then like ‘Oh, don’t go out and protest like that…no, no, no, don’t as a Christian… we can’t really talk about those things because it’s like too hard…’ and so a part of me has to honour and respect that, but then a part of me kind of regrets that and I wish that y’all wouldn’t have protected us from that because when you do become a writer, when you do become this type of person, who has been tasked with dealing with the soul of a person, the soul of a people, the soul of a nation, you need more than your own thoughts. You need others to open up, and you, like Tony Morrison, translate that into meaning. And if that opening up doesn’t happen, that work is just going to be a little bit harder. So, I’m trying to be a little bit better with my kids in that by giving up myself much, much earlier. 

Elizabeth  

Yeah. There’s this scene in your book where you are, I think a student at the time, and driving home entirely legally on a normal night, minding your own entirely legitimate business, and get pulled over by a cop and call your mom. And the threat that you are in, in that moment is so vivid. The sense that a wrong move, a wrong word, a misunderstanding, could be the end of your life. And I cried very hard through that scene; I could cry again…that sense that, you know, they knew that if you went running in certain neighbourhoods at certain times of night, because you’re an athlete, and you needed to do some exercise, that that could end in trouble. You know, you and your siblings got shot at by a white guy and the judge threw it out. This is not in any way to blame them, this is a sort of a cause–and–effect thing, how much do you think that attempt to protect you from essentially from racist violence was related to your going to a white majority university, joining a white church and for a while, actually being quite dislocated or disassociated from the Black Pentecostal tradition, even maybe from your own family? 

Dante Stewart  

Hmm. I mean, the only person that I blame is myself. You know, there’s a sort of type of responsibility that one has for your humanity, to learn as much as you can, to do as best you can to learn who you are, to know who you are, connect with where you come from, and to live in it, be shaped by it. But then also be open to other experiences as well. And I think going into these white churches, like in these white spaces…so much of this space is like a vacuum. It’s like a utopia, like alternate reality. And it causes me or caused me to be oblivious to like, ‘You can’t do what other people do in this world and get away with it. You can’t be what other people are in this world and get away with it.’ And that’s not necessarily like a blame of myself as much as a kind of indictment on this country; really, an indictment on this earth. Because I’m sure the same thing happens in the UK, where like, you could be black in the UK and because of the colour of your skin other people see you as not worthy of being given the best in life. Not worthy of movement, not worthy of freedom, not worthy of breathing, not worthy of just being ordinary and normal, but that your very presence is a threat to what they believe to be safe and normal and right and good. And so, when that white cop, did that to me that night, when he like questioned me that night or when that white man shot at us that day, or even when white people criticised me when I was in their churches there it was all the same threat. It was like your being here assaults my own idea of myself and what I believe to be normal. That ain’t on me, that’s on them. And I can’t even blame myself for trying to just be normal, to do the thing that is normal in this world, and it just so happened that other people can’t even deal with what that means for them or for us, or what that means to have me free and other people free in this country, like me and others. Like, I can’t blame myself for that. Of course, I can blame myself for like, yeah, I could have done better in this situation or that situation, but I don’t even want to think about it in those frameworks of like, that morality of responsibility as much as – it’s about them. What is so wrong with white people that to look at another person’s freedom, you believe it to be your oppression? That another person’s movement in a world like Baldwin says in that letter to his nephew that when one star moves, it’s like the whole universe has blown up and burned up. That’s on others. Yeah, that’s about as much as I can even say about that. 

Elizabeth  

Yeah. And so, you had this experience of being part of a white church and it sounds like…you know, being re–baptised, actually, in a white church and feeling very at home there and very kind of part of a community. And then that sense ebbing really, it seems to have been kind of increasingly punctuated by black people being murdered by the police, you know, every few weeks, or every few months, you know, again, and again, it just kept happening. And the church that you were in, didn’t really want to talk about it or didn’t know how to wrestle with it. And eventually, the tension was too much. And you had to leave and went on to write this book about your experiences. It’s called an ‘American Epistle’. And it the thread I think, is so much about identity as a black person, as a Christian, as an American and all these times in which it feels like one has to be primary over the other. And our expectations are that we have to bury one under others. And very often it was your identity as a black man. How painful or scary was the process of writing a book that is called an ‘epistle’ that is so much grounded in faith, but it’s also so raw and so challenging… How much courage did it take to write what you wrote? 

Dante Stewart  

Oh, it took everything. Even right now, there is a part of me that is even afraid of reading the pages, that I haven’t read in my book in forever. Like, there is a part of me that is like, ‘Alright, I’m done with it, on to the next project.’ There’s a part of me that wants to bury that. And it was like the book I knew I needed to write. Because there was no book like it. I mean, I read a lot of books, and I just, I have not read a sort of spiritual autobiography or spiritual memoir, that that fills in those depths, that same way. I’m not saying that my book is like this super unique book per se, you know, but I knew that it was one of the books that I needed to kind of get out of me. And it took so much courage because vulnerability and honesty really are what this book hinges on. Like it is what makes this book: it’s vulnerabilities, honesty, this like turning over the self, the breaking open the self: to look at myself and to realise that this is also a reflection of the nation. This is also a reflection of my family. This is also a reflection of us and trying to figure out how do we open this body up to the place where it can crack open book, it can be put back together again and become whole and have breath back into it. So, in some sense, the book begins in an oxygen mask, but it ends in breath and breathing and the lungs fully functioning. And so, when I think about like, courage and how much courage did it take? It took everything and that’s even a part of why I feel like I’m struggling right now with this book on grief that I’m writing. My next project is on grief and I’m really struggling through it because I’m like, ‘I cannot do what it takes to write something like that again’, knowing fully well that I don’t have to re–write that book. That book is already written. I just have to write whatever I’m feeling right now in myself, but then like yet it took everything, and it’s gonna take everything, continues to take everything out of me but I didn’t have to do it alone.  

Elizabeth 

That was very beautiful about what it took… I wanted to ask you a question that maybe it’s just because I’m British, this always feels like a very private question, possibly more private than asking about someone’s sex life, which I will not do. I wanted to ask about your spiritual life. Now you have this rich, Black Pentecostal childhood and then a time in a White Reformed Church, which I think was disappointing and bruising towards the end.  

Dante Stewart   

Oh, indeed.  

Elizabeth 

You’re now studying, ministering, pastoring. We talked about Rowan Williams earlier, there were points in the book where I thought, ‘Okay, he’s just gonna give up, like a Christianity is too hard. This is it; you know…’ and feel free to share as much as you’re comfortable. But what is your relationship like with those different traditions now? With God, with your faith? 

Dante Stewart   

Yeah, I think for me, now, I can take a part of everything that I’ve been through and I’m just building the pieces. You know, like my son and I, we were playing the other day. He loves ‘Thomas the Train’. He sings like “accidents will happen now and again”, like he’s just hooked on this song. We have many trains in the house and many pieces. He’s started building the pieces, he’ll take them out, he’ll rearrange them and then he turns it into this kind of circular thing, and pushes his trains along and moves it, and shapes it, and shifts it and it gets longer and goes around. He keeps doing that, then he breaks it all up, puts it away, do it again, create something different. So, I think of my spiritual life like that: that every piece of the many books, and the many traditions that I’ve encountered over my life, it is like a train track, that there are various pieces that one day will give me what I need. So I go to the text, I go to the Bible, that gives me what I need. But then another day, you know, I have to go to, you know, to a book or something like that, or another day, I have to listen to some music. And I think each one of these traditions is like that train. It’s like, you know, you have all these pieces, and you get the chance and the autonomy to decide how those pieces are going to fit together. And when they don’t work, you’ve always got a chance to do it again. And so, like when I think about my upbringing, I’m very much still Pentecostal. When I think about being in a White Reformed Church, you know, I think I developed like a desire to prove them wrong. And I mean I really went on this reading thing where I got exposed to what they thought of us. And then when I got to the point where I broke away from the tradition, I was in a really serious time where I was like, reading and was like, ‘I want to prove them wrong, I want to prove them wrong, I want to prove them wrong…’ And I learned a lot through that. I learned so much about what I did not want to become and then, you know, I’m back in the black church space, and now I’m back in a space where I’m like, you know, I’m at Emory and I took a class, ‘Intro to Islam’ and I realised that this Muslim faith is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And then I have friends who tap into African spirituality and I have friends who are Buddhists, and there’s a beautiful part about faith for me, that when I think about sharing faith it’s not as like an argument like Paul at the Areopagus, where we have shown Christian faith is simply relating to other people as like wars to be won, people to be won, people to be convinced, but sharing faith is like Christmas time. So, we all bring the gift to one another, and we want to give something to you, that is from us, that will help you remember us throughout the year until that time comes again for us to give another gift. And I think of faith like that: it is sharing the bits and pieces of our lives, the train tracks of our lives, bringing one another along and saying, ‘You can bring your Thomas that you have over there, your train tracks, you could bring them over here, and we can learn how to fit these pieces together.’ So like James Baldwin shapes that faith, I mean, music shapes that faith, just simply being in nature, shapes that faith. I was thinking about that Alice Walker quote from ‘The Colour Purple’: ‘Have you ever found God in church?’ And she was like, ‘Nah, Nah… like any god, I found, I brought that god with me.’ And I think in life that people have brought God to me. I’ve brought God to other people. And we’ve continued this divine conversation, week by week. That’s my idea of faith and spirituality. And yes, I’m very much a Christian: that’s my tradition. I’m very much committed to the Church and love the Church and want the best for the Church, but then also, as I’ve grown and matured, I realised that I don’t know if I’m concerned about Heaven or Hell. I don’t know if I’m concerned about that; as much like Jesus, I’m very concerned about how we live together right now. You know, when Jesus tells His parables about what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. He always reminds us of something that’s inside of our lived experiences. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a fig tree. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a woman who lost the coin. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a shepherd who’s lots his sheep. And I want to say, okay, the Kingdom of Heaven is like James Baldwin writing that letter to his nephew. The Kingdom of Heaven is like going out on a date night, the Kingdom of Heaven is like making a pour over in a Chemex, the Kingdom of Heaven is like black women going to the Combahee River Collective and trying to develop language for black feminism. The Kingdom of Heaven is like Stonewall Rebellion, in the 1970s. The Kingdom of Heaven is like sometimes people getting out of a country and relocating. The Kingdom of Heaven are like all these various things, and our experiences that remind us as Jesus says, that ‘The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but I’ve come that you may have life and life to the fullest’, and whatever the Kingdom of Heaven is like, it must be like each one of us experiencing the things that make us feel most alive. 

Elizabeth 

I want to end on why… well I hope it doesn’t feel like a difficult question going into this. I wondered if it might be…which is really about relating to white Christians, and I am one of those. And one of the threads we try and pull out is what are the kind of skills, habits, practices that we need to see each other in the ways that we’re different, and there’s many, many ways we’re different, and in the ways that we disagree, and there’s many of those too, as fully human, as fully valuable in your lovely phrase, you know, ‘as fully deserving of love’. So, I’d love you to start by saying, you know, you said you are in a phase where you are just trying to prove people wrong, and that sounds entirely legit. What is your relationship with wider white Christianity like now? And bear in mind I’m unoffendable. 

Dante Stewart  

Oh, yeah, you good. Oh, trust me. I don’t mind talking about that at all. 

Elizabeth 

And you know, talk about that if you wish and then, what have you learned about courageous conversations across difference? What helps us when things are painful and hard and naughty? And we get defensive, and we get angry, what helps? 

Dante Stewart 

I think my relationship to white Christianity is complicated. It’s probably the best way to describe it, as like, you know, I have individual white Christian friends. And I do things with white Christian organisations. But I also know white people and I know white people much more than white people know me. And I know that white people in general, you know, as a whole, not individuals, but white people in general, as a whole, are more concerned about protecting the world that benefits their children than they are about dismantling a world that harms mine. At what point in the history of humanity have white people as a whole, just like men, as a whole…at what point as these individuals, as these groups, these social groups that are tethered and bound to values and punishments, histories and myths and narratives, ideas and, and resources …have those communities, those groups utilised what they had, to create a more loving and joyous world for everybody and not just for one group? There’s never been a point in time. And one can answer that question. And I can almost anticipate a rebuttal: ‘Well, humans have always done this and things like that.’ And I’m like, you know, okay, yes, I give you that. That’s true. But I’m not concerned about the humans back then. I am concerned about the humans right now. And if the humans back then have created these things and ideas and systems have been conjured up in the imagination and have been sustained and protected by history, then what can happen when individual people turn into groups and imagine the world again? What happens when that can happen as a daily practice to try and reshape the world? And so, for me, that relationship is complicated. I’m cool with white Christians. I’m not cool with white Christianity. I’m just going to just shoot it straight. I don’t know when the last time was that I read a book by a white Christian outside of Rowan Williams, because I know that those people aren’t writing for or to me. And I know that many of these communities come with commitments, that once we leave the church, so does the love. I know that you’re right about God, but you vote like Satan. I know that you will sing ‘Hallelujah’, but then when a woman needs reproductive care, you call her a baby killer. How can I trust that? How can I trust the community who has given me no reason to trust? And how can I trust a community that has not been built for me, or wants to build a world where both of us can exist as free and equal? I can’t trust that community. I can’t trust that tradition. I can’t trust those individuals …that I learn, and we are still friends to this day, and we trade ideas, and we live as if our lives are normal, like our friendships… our giving and taking of one another shouldn’t be the norm. I mean, maybe we’re trying to solve the world’s problems, but we’re not really concerned about that: concerned about living together as best we can, as equals. Because at the end of the day, no matter how much anyone of us talk about what oppresses us, the fact of life is that we need one another. And when I say need, I’m not talking about charity. I don’t need anybody’s money. Our community does. I’m not concerned about your love, or your like, but I am concerned about how you live with us. When we talk about need, it ain’t about giving something that doesn’t cost you anything. It is about fundamentally shifting your own idea of yourself, so that you deal with you, as Tony Morrison said. You leave me out of it. And so then how does one live together? I don’t know. But we’ve done it. And I want to live and learn from the people who’ve done it. When I think about how we can live together and disagree and love…we do it courageously. There’s nothing wrong with a point of view, but there’s something wrong with holding it as if it is objectively true and right at all the time, etc. There’s nothing wrong with believing that your ideas of the world are right, but there is something wrong when your ideas of what rightness in a world is actually harms another person. That you evade that harm that it does. And you try and erase that history and that truth and what it means for everybody. It ain’t wrong to have your own culture; but it is wrong when you start to think that your culture should be everybody else’s culture and they must assimilate to it, and you believe that your culture is the norm. This thing is about arrogance, and assimilation. And if we’re going to live together, we got to get rid of both of those before we can actually be free. That’s not the only thing we’ve got to get rid of. But I think those are two meaningful things: arrogance and assimilation. If we can do with do away with those two things in the way we relate to one another, there’s possibility for all of us. 

Elizabeth 

Dante Stewart, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred. 

Dante Stewart 

Oh, it’s my pleasure. I can’t wait to come to the UK. 

Elizabeth 

I think the thing I’m left with, after speaking to Dante is a lingering thought/thread about parenting, and generational inheritance, and the way that our identities, and our sense of safety, and our sense of belonging, and how much space we take up in the world are all so strongly shaped by the care that we receive in our early years. And that dichotomy, really of Dante’s life that he had this incredible and has this incredibly loving family, and incredibly loving and encouraging church environment that, you know, cheered him on and empowered him to use his gifts, but all the while was in the context of a society where the threat of racist violence was there at all times. And yeah, I did find the passage in which he’s on the phone to his mom, while waiting to see if a police officer would shoot him essentially, incredibly difficult to read: that horror and terror for your children that certainly Dante’s parents, and he and other parents of colour, particularly in the States, I think, feel. That line of ‘I don’t have to work out how to save my children, I only have to love them’, really cut me to the heart. And we all worry about our kids, I think all parents, but I don’t have to worry about that with my kids. And that’s not fair. And I’m really grateful to Dante for helping that move from something I knew intellectually to something I knew emotionally. And I’m glad I’ve got to talk to him a little bit about white Christians and white Christianity. And I always find it’s helpful to name that tension. Often, in conversations with guests, I might be personally representing a group that has caused pain or the guest has disagreements with and, it was a really helpful thing for him to say there’s a big difference between individual white Christian friends and his problems with white Christianity in general. And I am still pondering that that kind of language that I think is both really helpful for naming some things that need naming, whether it’s white feminists, or you know, white middle–aged men, it’s noticeable that most of the ones that are most relevant at the moment are white prefixed. But also, some of the complexities of using that language and I’m aware of the defensiveness, frankly, that it can sometimes provoke in me and what I do with that, and what’s a healthy response to that. I’m thoughtful about that. That’s all from me from this episode of The Sacred with Dante Stewart. 

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