Mark Labberton: It’s really a joy to welcome back to Conversing today David French. David is known to many of you as a New York Times opinion writer, which he’s been doing since January of ’23. He tends to write about law and culture, about religion and armed conflict. He comes from a conservative theological background and has found himself in the context of divided hostilities around Christian faith and around a whole field of other things which we know are dividing our population in the US. It’s such a gift to have him back again today as we continue the conversation. And today we’re going to focus in on three particular things that I think David especially emphasizes and that we can learn from. Welcome, David French. It’s wonderful to have you here again.
David French: Well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Mark Labberton: You know, I’ve followed your work carefully over the last many years now. In my mind, there’s three words that describe you personally to me and also describe your work. And I want to explore these three words and see how it is that these things have developed in you.
One word is the word attention. There’s something about the way you live in the world that is just obviously highly attuned to attentiveness. Secondly, you’re very aware of human agency and of the dynamics of agency, which come and go and are high and low—and we live at a time when agency is volatile and both overasserted and dramatically underasserted, and all the complexities related to that. And then you are, thirdly, a student of power, and you understand, I think, many elements of power: military, political, social, and spiritual.
I want to jump into those three words and ask you, as we look briefly at each of them, a little bit about how those things have actually developed in you. So let’s just start with this whole business of attention. In some ways, I’ve often thought that a definition of a human being is to pay attention in the rich way that human beings can do that. And as Christians, to pay attention to the world in God’s name is a way of describing what it means to try to live as a disciple. But how did it get cultivated in you early, and how did it grow and develop?
David French: That’s a really good question. I would say a couple of ways. One is I’ve always kind of had a bit of contrarian in me that, you know, if somebody says, “Go now,” one of my first questions is, “Why?” Right. So. And I think that some of that is just kind of your disposition, your makeup, right? So I’ve been dispositionally contrarian for some time.
And then when you grow up in a fundamentalist church where contrarianism is sort of not encouraged—fundamentalism is collectively contrarian in the sense that we, the entity, is standing against the world. But it is individually very conformist. In the “we,” we must all think the same. We must all act the same. We must all hold the same bespoke interpretation of the Bible. And so I was contrarian within my fundamentalist tradition. And whenever you do that, it’s putting you in a pretty uncomfortable position. So I have this kind of inherent dispositional contrarianism that is always making me ask, Why? Why are we doing this? What is the reason? And I think there’s just something inherent in that that requires you—that makes you pay attention to detail, that makes you listen to arguments.
And then the other thing that really transformed me, I think, in a lot of good ways was when I left—I grew up in rural Kentucky. I went to college at a small Christian college in Nashville that I love, Lipscomb University, where I teach now. And then I went to Harvard Law School, and it was about as different from Lipscomb as you could possibly imagine. And at a very contentious time, where somebody like me, a conservative Christian from the South, was not—like, they were not waiting for me with open arms. Let me just put it that way. And so I found myself around people hearing thoughts, ideas, worldviews, theologies that I’d never heard before in my life. And it really taught me how sort of contingent and place-based my own beliefs are—that I’m a product of a lot of things that were not in my control at all. You know, one of them being my core disposition. That wasn’t necessarily, you know, something that I—that was something maybe I was more born with and nurtured within me. Or, you know, the socioeconomic status of your parents, the race of your parents, all of these things.
And so it really did help me understand how contingent so many things are, in which you can take two people with very similar dispositions, very even similar parenting styles, from different parts of the country, and by the time they get to law school together, they’re really different people. And so that got me interested in—and this is something I write in my New York Times bio—the story behind the story. Like, let’s go deeper than the disagreement that exists on the surface and understand, like, what’s deeper than that.
And so that’s made me—I would say, you know, growing up in that environment, then going to one very different, almost fundamentalist in the exact opposite way, I would say, and having that experience with that kind of contrarian presence makes you attentive. It does, you know, and I think hopefully in a good way. Hopefully in a way that makes me examine my own priors, that makes me curious about people. But I think that question of why really goes to an inherent curiosity. And it’s something that I’ve really tried to cultivate. I’ve tried to become more curious the older I get instead of less curious.
Mark Labberton: You know, one of the things about attention is that we are, of course, formed to pay attention to certain things and not to pay attention to other things. So as you became more aware of this contingency that you’re describing, which is very much a part of human knowledge, period—but as you became aware of that and you became aware of the lenses, the contingent lenses that you had been raised with, and still today, as you try to be a journalist and do the analytical work that you do—how do you juggle that sense of your own locatedness, your own specificity as a human being with a certain social background, et cetera, et cetera?
David French: Well, that’s another great question. I think the short answer to that is I always try to seek out the best expression of opposing views. So one of the things that it’s really interesting—if you look at partisan news consumers, they often do actually expose themselves to a lot of thoughts from their opponents, but they often don’t expose themselves to the best thoughts from their opponents. What they do is they expose themselves to the worst thoughts from their opponents, which invariably has the effect of making you feel really right.
So, for example, if you’re somebody on the right and you’re constantly looking at content from Libs of TikTok, which will highlight this extremist in Portland or that extremist in Vermont or whatever, you can become very familiar with all of the worst expressions of the opposing side’s point of view. And it can even fool you into thinking that you have some sort of well-rounded view that just so happens to tell you you’re really right. Like, you are really on the side of the angels.
But then few things will shake you more than finding somebody who’s thoughtful, has high integrity, who looks at evidence carefully, who speaks persuasively versus, you know, in a demagogic way—you know, somebody who has sort of core values of dedication to truth and looking at the world, trying to find what’s best for people—and they come to a conclusion different from you. Oh. Oh, OK. Maybe I need to think more about this. Maybe. And so I think that if you’re looking at the best expression of the other side’s point of view, you’re always going to be walking through life getting challenged, just constantly getting challenged. And so I think that that is something that is a great life habit. And it’s also very countercultural.
And so, you know, people are—there’s an infinite appetite for media content that reaffirms your worldview. You love that. You know, you love that. And then there’s a very limited appetite, sadly, for information that contradicts it or challenges it in a thoughtful or persuasive way. And in fact, when you encounter it, it is so dangerous to sort of that partisan fundamentalism of our age—when you do encounter thoughtfulness on the other side—that, Mark, here’s something you’ll notice all the time once you know to look for it: you will find that highly partisan, angry people will just try to discredit thoughtful disagreement, not by engaging with it, but by slandering it.
So, for example, an awful lot of people out in sort of conservative evangelical world try to prevent anyone from reading me by saying, “He’s a heretic. He’s a wolf,” or whatever. “Don’t listen to the heretic. Mark and avoid.” Right. And so what they’re doing is they’re trying to create a prophylactic effect against thoughtful conversation by slandering the person on the other side. And so that’s how challenging thoughtful engagement can be, because once you break through the stereotype that someone might have of you—
I remember I was giving a speech not long ago. And whenever I give a speech in a conservative community now, there are people who try to get it cancelled. It’s like, just like clockwork: “Don’t listen to him. He’s horrible. He’s terrible. He’s the worst. He’s a wolf. He’s a heretic.” And I gave a speech recently in North Carolina, and after it was over, a gentleman came up to me and said, “You are nothing like what they said you were going to be.” And I was like, “Who’s ‘they’?” And he listed some people. I was like, “Oh, well, of course.” I mean, I’m thinking, you know, they’ve been lying about me for years.
But this is something—thoughtful engagement is so dangerous to what I’m going to call both theological or political fundamentalism that there is a concerted effort to slander thoughtful people into irrelevance. In other words, you know, making them look to be like wolves, heretics, you know, all of those words. You know, in the secular world—you know, secular politics—they’ll overuse terms like “racist” or “homophobe” on the left. On the right, they’ll call you a coward or woke if you dissent from the party line. So notice what’s happening. It’s all using language designed to shut off conversation, not to invite it. And so, you know, that’s why it’s often quite difficult to push through and ask these questions like why, thoughtfully, intentionally, and try to get thoughtful and intentional answers. All of that is dangerous to sort of the larger theological-slash-political partisan fundamentalist project.
Mark Labberton: So how does all this converge with you around issues—not issues of faith, but how your faith is forming you as a child with this disposition that you have and with this curiosity that you have and with this countervailing wind that you’re blowing into a system that is not ready for this? So long before you had the kerfuffle that happened with the PCA several years ago, there was a life of some of this already happening. So how is your faith helping to inform and shape, in the way you’re describing it, the kind of attentiveness that you want to bring to the world?
David French: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. This goes back to—I was in sixth grade. I remember this very well. I got, from the elders of our church—when you finish sixth grade, you were given a Bible with your name engraved on it. Now, we had Bibles all over our house because my dad was an elder in the church. I mean, I’m—you know, not only am I multi—I was multigenerational a cappella Churches of Christ. Like, we had Bibles everywhere. We had little New Testaments. We had the full Bible. We had it all. But this is the first one with my name on it. So I was already a voracious reader. So I just sat down and read it from cover to cover like it was Lord of the Rings. Like, I just cracked it open and started reading.
And it was interesting to me. I had two takeaways. Takeaway number one: God is really mysterious. Man, that was hard to decipher. And takeaway number two was, we’re getting like way—we’re way too certain about stuff. Like, we’re way too dogmatic about stuff. And I remember having a very heated disagreement with my Sunday school teacher, who was telling me that all my Baptist and Catholic and all of my friends who are not part of the a cappella Churches of Christ were all going to hell. And I was like, “I don’t know. I’ve read Romans. It doesn’t seem like that’s the case. I’ve read the Gospels. I don’t know.”
And so, you know, for me, one of the verses that really impacted me so profoundly was Paul writing, “We see through a glass darkly,” and “We know in part.” And I think the reason why it hit me so hard is when you grow up in a fundamentalist environment, you don’t hear that, because there’s a definite answer to everything.
So, for example, just to give you a sense of, like, how definite and certain everything was, you would have churches split in our—it’s even wrong to call it a denomination. The Church of Christ was a restorationist movement, but we don’t need to go into all of that history. But whatever—we’ll just call it a denomination for shorthand. We would have churches split over things like, Could you have a kitchen in the fellowship hall? Because there was a definite biblical answer. And it was, “Well, I don’t see evidence in the New Testament of kitchens in fellowship halls,” you know. And so everything had a definitive answer, for which there was—if you were in disagreement—
And the weird thing is—the sad thing is, a lot of the reason why the Church of Christ arose was the founders of the Church of Christ were actually wanting more forbearance. And they were wanting—you know, one of their statements was “No creed but Christ.” And then it just turned and turned and turned over the years into something very, very, very legalistic, which is always a temptation in any movement.
And so here I am reading Scripture—you know, the book of Job. You know, you read Job, and what’s so fascinating about that is God doesn’t really answer Job. He just says, kind of like, “Who are you?” And Job kind of concludes by putting his hand over his mouth. You know, and so there’s so much mystery. There’s so much mystery, the complexity, the infinite nature of God, that even in sixth grade, I’m, like, grasping that. And I’m thinking, Why are we so sure about everything? Right.
And I think it’s only by God’s grace and providence that he enabled me to read Scripture through the lens of curiosity and mystery, because I also have friends and people, including people very, very close to me—when they were in the Church of Christ, they were like, “You say this is Christianity? It’s so—no.” And then walking right out of the church entirely, because they were told this fundamentalist sect is what Christianity is. And then when they began to see all the cracks and all of the problems, they were like, “Well, then, if that’s Christianity, that’s bogus.” And they walked away.
And I really feel like it was just God’s grace, his mercy, his providence that allowed me—through the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit worked in me to open the Scriptures, to create that sense of awe and wonder and mystery about who God is. But that’s not to say that you don’t also have firm conviction. Like, I firmly believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that he was born to a virgin. He died. He was resurrected on the third day. All of these things, these core elements of the faith, I have deep conviction about. But then there’s a lot of it where people in good faith really are going to have trouble discerning the mind of an infinite God about these things. And so you walk with conviction and humility side by side.
And I think that one of the things that was so damaging to so many people in that, again, that fundamentalist upbringing was that humility was often seen as inconsistent with conviction. That, you know, you know stuff—you know all that you need to know. And now go out in the world and just tell everybody all of the truth, you know, as opposed to—you know, the model I see much more in Scripture is much more the “love God, love neighbour.” Love God—yes, you’re proclaiming who God is—but in loving the neighbour, it’s a very service-oriented approach to the world. And so I just think it was the grace of God, the work of the Holy Spirit, that from an early age, I was able to at least begin to glimpse that God was so much bigger than I would ever understand. And so that humility, in that circumstance, is mandatory.
Mark Labberton: David, I think that this issue of attentiveness is really significant. I know that when Robert Bellah wrote his well-known book Habits of the Heart, with all of the other scholars that were part of that, he defined democracy as paying attention. And so much of—the second piece, the second word that I want us to focus on, is this issue of agency. And agency is absolutely central to the operation of democracy. But it’s also central to being human. And the two are obviously deeply tied together. So talk to us now, in addition to this question of attentiveness: How did agency—the sense of your own personal agency, your agency as a human being, as a man, as a person in the world—how did agency develop for you? And was it dangerous or attractive, or what did you make of it?
David French: Well, that’s another one. That’s one I can pinpoint. I can pinpoint this. And I’m going to butcher the quote. But, you know, when I said I read the Bible like I’d read Lord of the Rings—I read Lord of the Rings at an early age. And I remember Gandalf talking—and I believe it’s in the Mines of Moria. And essentially, he says—you know, what was it? Frodo says, “I wish we were not—” You know, “I wish this didn’t fall to us.” Right. And Gandalf is like, “It’s not up to us to determine the times in which we live.” That is fixed. We had no input on that. “But we do have a great degree—” And I mean, I’m just paraphrasing here, but “We do determine how we respond to these times.”
And so that made a tremendous impact on me—just a tremendous impact on me—this idea that there is a lot that we don’t control. As I was saying earlier, we don’t control our parentage. We don’t control our race, our ethnicity, the time in which we’re born, the nation in which we’re born, all of that. None of that is in our control. We don’t control the schools we go to. You know, none of that is in our control. However—however—there are still things that are up to us. We are not robots. We are not automatons.
And one of the things—and I think it’s just different times in life, in different paces, different speeds, we are able to wake up to the reality that, Oh, this thing that I thought was a belief that I came to was actually something that was just implanted in me, almost like injected into me, right? Like a vaccine, it’s injected into me. And so I think a lot of life—I opened a piece not long ago where I said, “Many years ago, when I was younger and knew more about the world, I thought—” And I think a lot of life is embracing agency and becoming more and more aware of the tidal forces that brought us to a particular point, and beginning to separate out that which is genuinely, truly my own worldview, philosophy, et cetera, versus what is it that was injected into me, whether consciously, unconsciously, by place, by time, you name it. And I think that that’s a lifelong struggle. Lifelong process.
And I know for me, just last week, my wife sent me a text message where she saw something online, just a short comment. And it was something along the lines of, “We idolize the nuclear family as the biblical ideal, and how many of those are in the Bible?” And I was like, Wait, what? And then I started to think, you know. And I realized how much it was just injected into me. There was this particular way of doing a family that was sort of, like, the ideal around which the whole church should orient itself. And then there’s, like, zero examples of that scripturally. And you think, Oh.
Now, that doesn’t mean the nuclear family is bad at all. I love my nuclear family. I love it intensely. Providing for and being a part of my nuclear family is one of the core purposes of my life. But the extent to which we’ve basically said, “Here is what it looks like to be a biblical Christian”—to be in this construct—is extrabiblical. Right. And so, just things like that, where you just spend a lot of your life going, Oh, wait. OK. And it’s actually—it can feel destabilizing in some ways, but it’s also wondrous. It’s also wonderful. Right.
And so I think there’s such a tension. We have to give people grace, and especially younger people. I see a lot of younger people online who are just saying the most grossly ridiculous things, you know. And then I put myself at age twenty-five, if you’d given me a Twitter account, and I think, Oh, heavens. I can’t—I mean, wow. Because not only do I have a contrarian spirit, but I also sort of liked—especially when I was younger, I kind of loved mixing it up. And that is a terrible recipe for social media. And I think, There but for the grace of God goes my twenty-five-year-old self. So I will address a lot of these ideas, but I’d really—except in very unusual circumstances, where some of these people get great proximity to power—I’m going to really restrain myself, because we need room to grow. We need space. We need grace.
So there’s this tension between a lot of what we say being kind of the unthinking reflection of who we were born and built to be, and then a tension of, we are still responsible for it at the same time. And it’s a lifelong process of sorting and sorting out: What is it that’s sort of the product of all that I was born into, versus what is it that I am responsible for? And, you know, this is a persistent issue. It’s not just politics. It’s not just theology. It’s life. It’s, How do we interact with our spouse? You know, I grew up in one kind of home. My wife grew up in another kind of home, with very different models for how parents interact with each other. I was—you know, especially early in our marriage, I was like an avatar for my parents’ marriage. You know, my wife, to some degree, an avatar in some ways for her parents. And then you just make your own thing. And so when does that agency take over and the upbringing recede?
These are things we all battle with and all struggle with. And there’s a balance, I think, which requires—to circle back to our first point—attentiveness. It requires figuring this stuff out. But also, it’s a wonderful journey. The process of sanctification is a wonderful journey, but wonderful with also a lot of pain in it that requires repentance. It requires humility. Many times I have said to people over the course of the last twenty-five, thirty years, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was so strident. I’m sorry I got that wrong.” And that can be very painful. There are tears associated with that. That can be really painful. But it’s also ultimately beautiful. It’s ultimately wonderful. And it’s ultimately a great gift from the Holy Spirit that we’re able to become less certain—
Mark Labberton: Right.
David French: —and more curious.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. And what triggers the freedom to be curious? That’s a part of agency to me: claiming the freedom to be curious, as opposed to the necessity to conform or to belong or to find a tight fit of assurance, which is partly always the attraction of fundamentalism, again, whether on the right or the left. But that’s a lack of imagination so often.
David French: Well, and also, curiosity requires courage. I’m reminded of the C. S. Lewis quote that courage isn’t one virtue, but it’s the form of every virtue at its testing point. So just to put it in plain English: you don’t know if you’re honest. Every one of us thinks, Well, I’m an honest person—until honesty carries a cost. You might think, I’m the most faithful person in the world—until you encounter actual, true temptation toward infidelity. Or you might think, I’m brave. When the bullets are flying, I will stand up and be counted—until the bullets fly and you’re actually in mortal fear for your life. This is an old story in military service, right? The guy in the barracks who says, “Bring it on,” is often the guy who’s hightailing it out, right?
And so I think that, especially now, in a world where we’re pulling each other into these two warring camps, curiosity and openness requires courage, because you’re told what to think about everybody. And if you question that, you can be thrown out of your tribe. You can lose your community. And so I think curiosity—more than any other time in my adult life, actual curiosity requires more courage than any time since I’ve been alive.
Mark Labberton: That’s a very interesting observation. One of the things that’s also happening is that I think you could describe our time as being a time where there’s hyperagency that some people are expressing. And then there’s a subduing of, or loss of, agency, which other people definitely feel. And in that extreme lies both sides. Actually, I think that the overexertion of agency and the sense of being disempowered as an agent exist on the right and on the left. But just talk about—
David French: Totally. Yeah. I’m so glad you brought that up, because one of the things, when you have a highly partisan and highly polarized environment, is that everything starts to stampede toward the extremes. And so you’ll have some people who—you know, let’s just be stereotyped about it and say there are some people who say, like, the fact that two or three kids from your class in the inner city have transcended all of the difficulties of their environment and gone to Harvard means that everybody can do it. And it’s totally your fault if you don’t. Right. And so that’s the everybody-by-the-bootstraps sort of thing.
And then another one is that, well, the fact that so few people do transcend it means that we can’t hold people responsible for things like criminal misconduct, or et cetera, et cetera—that there’s sort of no agency there. All of the circumstances around you have doomed you from the start, et cetera. And holding people personally and individually accountable for their conduct is going to be inherently unfair.
And I’m putting these two as, like, kind of cartoonishly opposed to each other to make the point. But here’s the way it almost always ends up working out, Mark: I’m wrong? I didn’t really have agency there. I’m the product of my environment. You know, when you’re wrong? You totally chose that. Right. That is all you, buddy. And so it’s just this—we have so much grace for ourselves that we will locate our wrongdoing in circumstances outside our control that drove us to it. We had no choice. I did not know better. And then when somebody else wrongs us: You, buddy—you’re going to pay. And it’s the parable of the ungrateful servant in many ways. That was just our reading last Sunday, the parable of the ungrateful servant. Don’t hold me accountable, but I’ll hold you. And we feel—if we’ve been held accountable wrongly, when somebody else does not hold themselves accountable, we feel that injustice in our bones, and it makes us want to hold them accountable in the most extreme way possible.
There’s a balance there. There’s a balance. We are shaped by circumstance, and we do have material choices to make, you know. And so I will hear things like this all the time: “Well, you can’t hold them responsible—they’re young.” OK, we take that into account. However, that is not the end of the story. So when I was talking earlier about me being at age twenty-five with a Twitter account—I was morally responsible for that. It was understandable why I would have been an unholy terror with a Twitter account at age twenty-five. It was not the same thing as excusing it. Understanding it and excusing it are not the same thing. I still had moral accountability. But then there’s the question of grace toward me. Under what circumstances should you and would you show grace?
And so these are all—it’s all very—it’s a complicated dance, and we want to run to the extremes because the extremes make it simple for us. You know, and it’s like the old statement, “Hurt people hurt people.” You know, somebody who’s been deeply traumatized when they’re younger often goes on to inflict a lot of trauma on other people. This is a thing that happens. They have agency when they inflict trauma. But also, we should understand how this all happens. And so those two things, they feel in tension. But in reality, what you’re dealing with is the whole picture. They’re not so much in tension with each other as they’re completing a picture.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. It’s also, in this period of time, when there is so much authoritarianism in the air—globally as well as nationally and locally, even—it makes agency more vulnerable to, I think, a swing of emotions, where you can feel—even as a person such as me, with all the privilege of life that I have experienced and do experience—I still feel disempowered in this era. And it’s not because I don’t have agency. It’s not—because I actually know that I have agency, that I can actually do something. And I still feel as though my, quote, “influence” is dramatically different than I felt it was in the world. Even when I had far less statured agency than my life ultimately came to have, I had a greater sense that I could exercise a voice of influence. Whereas now it feels like I have more statured, given authority and agency than I’ve ever had, and I feel less empowered than I felt even earlier. So those are dynamics that are definitely not unique to me.
David French: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I also think that your previous view of yourself—I mean, and I mean this with no disrespect at all, because I’ve had the same view—was a little bit delusional.
Mark Labberton: Yeah, sure. I’m sure that’s right.
David French: Because the more stature you get, the more you understand power and how it works.
Mark Labberton: Right, right.
David French: And so the more you live and progress in the world—it’s interesting. I remember having more pride—literally, Mark, I promise you this—I had more pride in my writing career and more sort of sense of self-importance about being an important writer before I was hired by National Review ten years ago than I do now working at the New York Times. Why? I didn’t understand the world. Like, I thought that the fact that I could occasionally place op-eds in papers around the country, or that I could regularly write as a guest contributor to National Review and all that—you know, I’ll be honest, it made me feel like I was kind of, like, a big deal, you know. And I was very proud of it. And then the more I got into the world and looked back on my previous self, I realized: not a big deal at all. Not even—not just not a big deal. Not a deal.
You know, and then now—you know, God’s timing is always interesting. I feel like if I had been given a column in the New York Times twenty years ago, that would have been bad for me. That would have been bad for me. I would have thought, Look at me. You know, look at me. But then when I was given the opportunity many years later, when I have a much sort of greater appreciation for how the world works—my role in the world, my place in the world, how opinion is generated, how power works, all of these things—I was able to see my role more accurately. And when I saw my role more accurately, it’s much more humbling. It really is. It’s much more humbling. And so it’s so funny how that evolves. Like, when I was younger and had much less of a platform, many fewer people listening to me, I thought I was a much bigger deal than I think of myself now.
Mark Labberton: And I think it’s that illustration you just made—like, your younger self had a particular view of power. And then when your older self is institutionally in places and spaces that maybe your younger self couldn’t even really imagine, you realize, Hmm. Oh. This is not how things work.
David French: Yeah.
Mark Labberton: Well, that brings us beautifully to the third thing that I wanted to discuss, which is power itself. Again, these are three things that in my mind really distinguish your voice in particular ways. In certain ways, many writers might touch on these themes, but these feel really prominent. One of the things that I’ve benefited a great deal from is the way that you bring your attentiveness and your sense of agency to your analysis of power. So talk to us about how your understanding of power grew. You had some degree, clearly, of confidence in your attentiveness and in your agency, in the contrarian views that you would express early on. And you had a world of power that was there, but you were questioning some of that power that was surrounding you. So talk about how your perceptions of power grew as a child and into adulthood.
David French: You know, I underestimated—which might sound weird, because I’ve talked so much about coming from a fundamentalist background, where people in fundamentalism love to exercise power. Right. I didn’t know how powerful power was. OK. And I knew how powerful power was when it comes down to things like, if I’m a general in an army and you say, “Take that hill,” or “Take that town”—you understand sort of the brute facts about power. I didn’t fully—I didn’t fully appreciate the spiritual power of power and the spiritually corrupting power of power. That it can become such a temptation, it can become such a lure, that you are willing to throw anything and everything under the bus to get it. And also that it is so seductive precisely because you can fool yourself into virtue in the pursuit of power.
And here’s how you do it. And I’ve talked about this—when Russell Moore, Curtis Chang, and I did The After Party, we’re talking about Micah 6:8. The After Party is a curriculum for Christian political engagement, and it centres around Micah 6:8: Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly before the Lord your God. And we’re talking about, you can’t avoid justice. If you’re forsaking justice to be the kindest person in the room, you’re missing the mark. But in your zeal for justice, you cannot become cruel. And at all times, over both of these things, you have to show and live with an immense amount of humility, because you don’t know all the answers.
So I’ve written a lot about justice and Scripture’s emphasis on justice. And I said, here’s where we go wrong. We must pursue justice. But when we think we have to have power to pursue justice, then we’re on the road to perdition. Because if you feel like you have to have power to pursue justice, then what becomes the priority? Power. Power becomes the prime mover. It’s the thing that you have to have before you can do any other good thing.
And so—however, that’s not the scriptural model. How much power did Rosa Parks have when she pursued justice? You know, how much power did Harriet Beecher Stowe have when she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, right? So you can have no power. How much power did Jesus have, you know, in the Roman Empire? Well, he could theoretically have had all of it. But how much power did he exercise? Virtually none. I mean, the power he did exercise was not the power everyone was expecting. He exercised power over death itself. That’s pretty massive, but not political power.
And so for me, I had no idea how much—how truly corrupting that pursuit of power was. That old maxim from Lord Acton: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” You’re familiar with things like, money corrupts. You’re familiar with the drive that people have toward sex, or the drive—greed, all of that. Well, power gives you what? Money and access to sex and all of that stuff. I underestimated the extent to which people would pursue power, and do so believing completely, while they’re doing it, that this is absolutely necessary for the justice that is my ultimate goal and aim. And so this is one of the ways that politicians talk themselves into, you know, sitting in Washington for thirty or forty years. You know: “I have a wonderful view of justice, but you know what that requires? Me running things.”
And so Scripture, by contrast, is constantly rebuking the quest for power and constantly reaffirming the quest for justice. And the fact that those two things are so separate in the scriptural story should really tell us a lot about our own love of power, and also should tell us a lot about anyone who’s telling you that the church must exercise maximum degrees of political power to achieve justice. That’s not the biblical model. That’s not to say Christians should disengage from politics and hide their values under a bushel. But if your point is, for justice to happen, Baptists must be in charge—or Catholics, or whatever—that’s where you’re really struggling. And that’s where you’re going to be absolutely tempting people into often some of the gravest and most egregious of sins.
And yet in big parts of the country, especially where I come from, in the heavily evangelical South, we engage in a kind of Christian identity politics that says, “I’m evangelical. If I’m not running things, things are going to go badly.” And, you know, all you need to know to refute that notion is—you know, if you told my younger self that on January 6th, 2021, the president of the United States is going to have evangelical advisors all around him, that his lawyers—many of them are going to be evangelical or faithful Catholic—that the administration is going to be one of the most welcoming and open to evangelicals—you know, self-appointed prophets and apostles and worship leaders and everybody else—that we’ve ever seen in American history, I would have thought, Man, good times. Things must be going really well. Well, instead, all of those people did what? They rationalized an attempted coup. Why? Power. They had to stay in power. And why did they have to stay in power? Because you’ve got to have them in power if you want any justice. And you see how that works, and how corrupting that can be, and how you will tell yourself the whole time, This is for everybody else’s good, not mine.
Mark Labberton: And this is the core of Christian nationalism.
David French: Oh, the core. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We really struggle to define Christian nationalism in the particulars. Like, OK, so what exact—how will we know it when we see it? But I think the core part of Christian nationalism is really—it’s Christian identity politics. It is saying, for the nation to be good, Christians must rule, or a particular sect of Christians must rule. Now, sometimes that would look like an actual theocracy where Christians—but the way it manifests itself now, mainly—although we’re seeing it, really, you know, we’re seeing on the edges people saying that we should have a formally Anglo-Protestant refounding, you know, the Al Bowler stuff that people have read. But really, the way it manifests itself now in America, Christian nationalism is, on the edges, “We need a theocracy,” but its mainstream is “We need certain people with certain theology in charge.” That’s what you call that Seven Mountains dominionism, for example—that Christians should rule the high places of culture.
And so Christian identity politics, I think, in many ways is the heart of what Christian nationalism is in the United States. And in other places, it’s formal establishment of religion. That’s easy to spot. It’s easy to identify as Christian nationalism. But in the US, with an Establishment Clause and a Constitution, Christian nationalism tends to manifest itself, except on the extremes, as “Evangelicals should be in charge” or “Catholics should be in charge,” which then warps and distorts the church toward the will to power.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. You know, as I look back at least on these three things that we’ve been focusing on—this attentiveness, sense of agency, and power—all of those three things are most clearly shown to us in the Scriptures. In a way, those are at least three of the categories that we could use to describe and distinguish God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Particular kinds of attentiveness, particular kinds of agency, particular kinds of power are unfolding. And the counter to that—or what often functions as the counter to that—is a surrounding set of cultures all around the world, with different politics and different senses of attentiveness, agency, and power.
So I guess I’m curious: If those three things were to be best marshalled in a way that is not defined by Christian nationalism, but defined by the urgency and genuine suffering and pain and injustice of the world, and you were going to try to align attentiveness and agency and power toward best outcomes—how does that shape the culture, and how does it shape your understanding of the church?
David French: So I don’t want to, like, go back and repeat everything I said in The After Party, but we actually end the whole thing with—so we’ve talked about a Micah 6:8 model for Christian political engagement. We’ve talked about what does it mean to seek justice at the same time that you’re demonstrating kindness and humility. What is that about? Has there ever been an American Christian movement like that? Yes. Yes. The civil rights movement. OK. Now, it was not exclusively Christian. Obviously, there were atheists or Jews. There were people who are not Christian who were part of it. But at the beating heart of this, Martin Luther King and all of the people around him, they’re trying to live out a biblical ethic here.
And so, you know, it’s one of the sad, sad, sad quirks of history that the civil rights movement was in direct opposition to a lot of other Christians—you know, mainly white Christians in the South, who were directing water hoses and siccing dogs on them. You know, the evangelical church in America, sadly, has not—does not look at the civil rights movement and say, “That was ours.” And so in a lot of ways, white evangelicals, in a weird way, feel divorced from it. Like, that was not, quote-unquote, “us.”
And I think one of the things that, you know, Russell tried to do with MLK50 and the whole emphasis around, you know, the fifty-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death was to try to bring together white and black Christians, white and black evangelicals, and say, “Look, this is an ‘us’ now. It used to be an ‘us and them,’ but it’s all just ‘us’ now.” And I think here in the United States of America, it is very important. One of the reasons why I’m so frustrated that any sort of serious talk about race in the church is now labelled wokeness is that part of this is, we need to reconcile with the other parts of the American church that were actually showing the way on how to be Christian in public life.
And so, you know, when I gave a sermon—a guest sermon at my church before the 2024 election—I was talking about, Do we have a model? Do we have a model? And I pulled out the pledge card that Martin Luther King asked—you know—the protesters to sign. I don’t have it right in front of me, but it was like, here are the things that you should be focused on. And one of them was, we’re focused on reconciliation, not victory. That is shocking to our political ears, because you think, Well, nothing’s possible unless I win. Right. And here’s King saying, We want reconciliation more than we want victory. And I think about that all the time.
Because I think, you know, we’re very blessed. And I’m not going to say—because the civil rights movement—the civil rights movement was a human movement. So there were people who did—you know, there were flaws in it. So it’s not—you know. But if you want a model for Christian political engagement, we’re blessed to have one that overturned one of the most pernicious, persistent, vile, cruel legal regimes that has ever existed. And it overturned it in a way that brought reconciliation—not total reconciliation, but an enormous amount of reconciliation that people thought not possible. And here we have this model. And then if anybody brings it up as the model, you’ve got people going, “Woke, woke, woke.” You’re like, No, this was just Christian, Christian, Christian. This is the way of Jesus.
And so we’re blessed to have the model. And it’s a curse on America that millions and millions and millions of mainly, like, white evangelicals have been sort of brought up in a world where that wasn’t “us,” you know. And in fact, the “us” part of it was doing bad things back then. And so it’s such an unfortunate part of American history that that beautiful model for Christian political engagement has not then become sort of, like, the gold standard for everybody who calls on the name of Christ. Everybody. And it’s very grievously sad. And, you know, you don’t want to do that—”Wouldn’t it be a better world if—?” “Wouldn’t it be a better world if, dot, dot, dot,” on a million things. But, you know, wouldn’t it be a better world if the church looked at Martin Luther King—the whole church, the whole body of Christ—and said, “That is the way”?
Mark Labberton: Right. That’s a great place for us to conclude, partly because we’re at a time where so many communities of colour and people in communities of colour are feeling a lack of being seen, a lack of agency, and a lack of power. And to be reminded again that it’s not really necessarily having all those things in perfect alignment, but finding the right exemplars and actually living into these things, even when it looks like we have nothing that we would call powerful or victorious, which is certainly a part of the political landscape.
David, it’s a gift to have you always. And I think that this has been a very rich conversation for me, and I’m sure it will be for many of our listeners. So thank you for taking the time, and thank you for being who you are and contributing your voice as you do, so strongly and, I think, effectively. So I’m very grateful, and I appreciate your being here today.
David French: Well, thank you, Mark. Really appreciate it.
