You're listening to the Bible for normal people the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete ends and I'm Jared bias.

Hey, buddy. Welcome to this episode of the Bible for normal people and our topic today is.

So when did white Christian America lose its mind and our guest is Xavier Picket.

Yeah, Xavier is a visiting assistant professor at NYU and he had a lot of good things to say about white Christian America.

I mean the word I don't use the word at all during the interview, but I kept thinking like systemic racism and how deep it is.

And he gave a lot of insight about like the civil war and how the Bible was used and stuff that you know,

you think some of this stuff might be more recent, but the black church has been thinking about this and black theologians have been thinking about this for a long time.

That's what I kept thinking is how much we have to learn from. We talk about these ancient writers and St. Augustine and these people who've been thinking about a long time

well in this modern conversation of race and the Bible. It's not like these are new things. It's just do we actually want to take the time and effort to find black authors who have lots of things that they could teach us about this particular moment and how our conversations in the Bible and the church have been shaped by things that happened a few hundred years ago.

And our tone deafness to all that that's part of you know white privilege and that systemic race is even if we don't mean it.

It's the fact that it's not on a radar screen is the problem all to itself.

Well Xavier talks about willful ignorance and I think there's something there's really something important that I think was up to

and said Claire said something about like it's really hard to understand something when so much rise on you not understanding it.

And I think that's it's easy to be ignorant of things when it's helpful for you not to understand it not to search it out.

World and how you look at yourself in the universe you live in yeah well good. Let's have this conversation with Xavier Piquet.

The church what seems to suggest that the Bible is a pro-slavery document that you actually have to work extraordinarily hard to read a Bible otherwise and not just read a Bible to actually understand how what people even at that time have a different view.

It's not a severe recent history that we have any human rights and equality and so we can think about women as property.

It's really hard to get a view of the Bible that that seems to just that the Bible is an abolitionist text.

Welcome everyone to this episode of the Bible for Normal People and today we have Xavier Piquet so welcome Xavier. Thank you so much for being on with us.

Thank you guys for having me.

So we want to start as we often do by basically we want to know what turns ordinary normal folks like you into nerds.

So just walk us through a little bit of your religious history your spiritual background and its intersection with the Bible that kind of leads us to where we are now.

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