A Progressive Evangelical, and Charlamagne Tha God

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Eliza Griswold spoke recently with Doug Pagitt, a pastor from Minneapolis who is a politically progressive evangelical Christian. Pagitt left his church to found an organization called Vote Common Good, which aims to move at least some religious voters away from decades of supporting conservatism, and toward messages of inclusion and tolerance that he identifies as Biblical. And the radio personality Lenard McKelvey, known professionally as Charlamagne Tha God, talks about why he wrote a book, “Shook One,” about his treatment for anxiety disorder. Charlamagne wants to reach black men, in particular, to try to remove a perceived stigma around mental-health treatment in the black community.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.2	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.2	Eliza Griswold writes for The New Yorker about a lot of things, but especially about the intersection of faith and politics. Now, Eliza, you've
0:22.7	been talking to a guy named Doug Padgett, who's a pastor. Who is he, and why did you want to talk to him?
0:29.1	Doug Padgett is a progressive evangelical, and he is really running an effort to bring religious
0:36.2	voters into the Democratic Party. He is explicitly
0:39.6	helping to move people away from Trump, but also republicanism in general, saying, listen, this
0:44.8	isn't our history. And you guys have been used for a long time. So let's return to what the
0:49.3	core really looks like. Well, what does that mean? Well, I mean, if we do look really back to the 70s, I mean,
0:54.8	he often likes to say that, you know, when we're looking at the 70s, we're looking at the most
0:59.5	famous American white evangelical is Jimmy Carter, a progressive. So we've lost that identity
1:05.5	over the past 40 years, and he's trying to really get us back to what the breadth of evangelical
1:10.4	really means. The Bible and the breadth of evangelical really means.
1:11.8	The Bible and the teachings of Jesus are about inclusion, and they're about love, and they're
1:17.0	about the God of all, and that there's children from many other families and all of these
1:23.3	narratives that are in the Bible. They really lean to a much more progressive understanding, as we
1:28.3	would frame it, you know, sort of the left and the right these days. And that's part of the
1:33.4	reason that the religious right has had to work so hard and part of the reason they work so
1:37.7	aggressively to not allow any space between their conservatism and their evangelicalism,
1:43.6	because if they let any air in there,
1:46.9	it's just going to start to break apart.
1:49.4	In a way, what you're doing is reclaiming Jesus from the Christian right and saying,
	...

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