26. Antifascist Gardening Theology w/ Ciarra Jones

ANTIFASCIST DAD PODCAST Episode 26: Antifascist Gardening Theology with Ciarra Jones MATTHEW: This is Matthew Remski with episode 26 of Anti-Fascist Dad Podcast. Anti-Fascist Gardening Theology with Ciarra Jones. CIARRA: He made the garden what I think the Garden of Eden was supposed to be. That's how I felt about my grandfather. He created a kingdom of goodness in his garden. I talk about in my work how every time I came to his garden, the first thing he would say was, Ciarra, I'm so glad you're here. You're my friend. MATTHEW: Oh my God, he would say that? CIARRA: Yeah. Even now when I go see him, that's the first thing he says to me. You are my friend. And I think about that so much, about how we relate to God. So many of us were not taught that we are God's friend or that God is our friend. But Alice Walker says in her work around gardens that nature shows us God is always trying to please us back. MATTHEW: That is Ciarra Jones, a public theologian and activist. We'll be talking about how she builds her public theology from gardening lessons and also how she uses it to intervene on white Christian nationalism and fascism. That's coming up. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm at YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to every second part of these main-feed episodes, including this one. Just a reminder: my book is almost out, April 26th. You can pre-order it through the link in the show notes. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. So when I was in high school and then in college, I remember the sweetest feeling of coming across a new writer. There were a few old used bookstores down by the university. Abbey Books, About Books, Atticus Books. These were narrow, winding shops that smelled of hardwood and bindings, with a metal stool for every section you could find. And I spent a lot of hours finding one writer after another. Thomas Merton, Arthur Rimbaud, Calvino, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Ursula Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston. That was scrolling, then. And when I picked up a book and that first page arrested me, that was it. I knew I was in the mind of someone very different from me. I had something to learn. It was a different world. And I sank down on that metal stool. I didn't even feel how hard it was. And I would just read until I would have to take a breath. I mean, I was breathing, but the kind of breath that separates one part of time from another. All of those booksellers are gone now. And I'm not sure where the books themselves went. There were thousands of boxes full of books. Atticus Books is still online. But all of this is to say that my own scrolling through the world today sometimes gives me the same pause and concentration. TikTok isn't physical, labyrinthine. You can't go into the back corners of it. Or if you do, you don't have the reassurance that there's an elder sitting behind a crowded desk at the front who you can go to with a question. And yet every once in a while I come across an account that's like one of those books. It stops the scroll, as they say. And I sit down and witness. It's book-like in the sense that the video isn't leaping out to grab me by the throat. I have to go into it. And there are many types of accounts like this. Some of them are little peeks into some tiny beautiful craft. There's this one Anishinaabe kid who takes little index-card-sized pieces of birch bark and folds them and uses his teeth to press patterns into the bark so that when they unfold you can see luminous dragonflies or beetles. And then there's a woman who fixes old jewelry with hammers and torches and solder and you can kind of smell the flux coming out of the screen. While she's doing this, she's talking about socialism. You never see her face. And then one day I came across Ciarra Jones in her family garden in Sacramento, California, giving a Black and queer theological response to the ideology of Charlie Kirk. And it felt like I was sitting down again in the old shop, and that I'd flipped to the end of an Octavia Butler novel, some part where I was coming out the other side of dystopia into a garden. Jones grew up in the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church, and then she got her schooling at UC Berkeley and Harvard Divinity, where she learned her way out of what she calls the dying-to-the-flesh theology that leads to self-aversion and then projects outward as dehumanizing policy: anti-reproductive justice, carceral punishment, healthcare neglect. These are the building blocks of fascist logic. She now talks about religion as a social determinant of health. And a lot of these talks are filmed in the sunshine of her grandfather's garden, which she says has taught her a lot about patience, change, and support. Usually I split these interviews in half, but not this week, because I just couldn't find a break point and it didn't feel right. The Patreon Part 2 for this week, which is up now, is a review and analysis of the stirring victory of Avi Lewis here in Canada, who just won the NDP leadership as a democratic socialist. I'll be talking about what that means on the ground. All in all, it's a pretty happy content week. And that seems appropriate because we're also in the first week of April and I just started cleaning up the garden. All right, here's Ciarra Jones. Ciarra Jones, welcome to Anti-Fascist Dad. I'm so glad we've been able to make the time. CIARRA: Oh, what an honor to be here, Matthew. I was just telling you before we started recording, I'm a big fan of the pod. I love what you do. I'm so excited to dig into today's conversation. MATTHEW: I am as well. Okay, let's start with something very basic. What is public theology, and what do public theologians do? CIARRA: I love that question. And first I'd like to highlight the difference between a theologian and a seminarian, or someone who went to seminary school. I went to divinity school, and I name that to say my background wasn't just focused on Christian theology through a fundamentalist lens, but on the sociology of religion broadly. How do we understand faith and religion as a project connected to colonialism and imperialism, but also to liberation tied to identity? How do we see religion not as something that is an absolute truth? I grew up Assemblies of God Pentecostal, and I was taught that all frameworks of God I was given were absolutely true and that challenging them was a sin itself. So I see public theologians as distinct from the work of ministers or pastors. Public theologians are really here to ask the question: how are we defining God in this moment, and why? How can we contend with how these definitions of God are impacting us in positive and negative ways within our systems and social structures? And how can we challenge and tease these ideas together? That's how I see the work of public theology. We do the work of education. We teach people about the sociology of religion, and we ask the question: where is power and privilege living in religion? And how do we continue to challenge those systems so no one sits outside of them? MATTHEW: So I would imagine a fair amount of that is having a really distinct kind of radar. If somebody is talking about God or religion in the public sphere, you really want to listen for what's being communicated on a political level, and then maybe intervene with some pointed questions about what people's conclusions might be. CIARRA: Absolutely. When you asked that question, it made me think about how when I grew up in the fundamentalist church and was thinking about ministry and the work of theology through that lens, biblical text becomes a foundation through which we are always wrestling. Something that Pamela Lightsey says in her work Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Theology -- I love that work -- is that for queer womanist theologians, queer obviously highlighting sexuality and womanism pointing to how Black women experience biblical texts, God is not just textual. God is experiential. And so for me, as a Black queer public theologian, my question isn't just about what biblical text is saying. My question is about how marginalized people are experiencing God and how that matters. So, for example, if we think about reproductive justice or abortion, if you're talking to someone who is a minister in the fundamentalist church, they're going to be thinking about abortion only through biblical texts -- which does make me laugh, because the Bible does not mention abortion. It's not a biblical thing. MATTHEW: Yeah. So good luck looking for it. CIARRA: Exactly. You're going to be looking forever. But the foundation of that argument is: this is what God wants, and therefore we contort to that desire, even if it maims and breaks human beings. For me, as a public theologian who is also a queer womanist theologian, my ethos is: we do not adhere to a theological construct that harms people. So even if this construct is, to someone, ontologically true -- meaning they believe it is true, true -- I will not stick to a truth that dehumanizes another. And so I think for a lot of fundamentalist Christians, it is about how do we adhere to the truth of God even when that truth dehumanizes? And for me, as a public theologian, it is: how do we question who has the right to define the truth of God, and how that right is already tied to power? That is the conversation I am having. That's the foundation. It's not biblical text and adhering to it. It is humanity, and questioning how God is responsive to our humanity. And how are we, as Dorothy Soelle says in her work, the hands of God, the feet of that justice. MATTHEW: So there are two levers, though. Because you're going to point out to the person who's speaking on abortion textually, supposedly, that they don't really have a basis there. But additionally, there are dehumanizing elements to their argument that don't work with regard to being a fan of a God of love, as you say you are. So you're going to use two angles. CIARRA: Yes. Well, the abortion text thing is easy because it's not in the text. So I can be like, well, this is not textual. Or we can talk about when in the Bible it was a sin when men masturbated -- I don't know how much you talk about sex on your pod. MATTHEW: Sure, go ahead. CIARRA: It is literally a sin. Biblical text in the Old Testament talks about it as a sin, to ejaculate outside of a woman's body. So there's so much we can talk about when it comes to sin and sex, if we wanted to go that route. So yes, you're right: in that example I did mention pointing to biblical texts. But I'll be honest, Matthew -- and I'm curious your thoughts on this -- growing up fundamentalist Christian and now having my degree in theology, I'm not in the business of convincing. When I was a fundamentalist Christian, you're actually trained to convert and convince. That's like what you're really trained to do. I took classes on Christian apologetics when I was a younger Christian before going to college. And now I think, if someone is so stuck in a certain version of the text, maybe what I should say is: I don't feel my work as a public theologian is to convince them out of it, because I think that's the process for people. But I'm curious, even, your thoughts on that, and where the text lives in the work. MATTHEW: Well, I'm never really in that situation. The work I've done over the last ten years as a kind of critic of religious excess has been more on a deconstructive level. Often I'm in the position where I can take something obvious, like the political effects of a text -- A Course in Miracles, for example -- and I can say: look at how this supposedly progressive vision of Jesus, evolved from the New Testament and including all kinds of New Thought aspects and a vaguely Orientalist veneer on top of it -- look at how it plays out in the politics of its communities. It actually serves neoliberalism. It turns people inward toward a self-project. It doesn't really congeal communities. So I have some experience with that, and I think there's a lot of dialogue I enter into with listeners and interlocutors that is fruitful that way. But I'm not that much of a fan of being the disillusioner anymore. There's a way in which, coming out of a skeptical discourse that I think in American culture is influenced by New Atheism, there's a tendency toward a kind of willingness to take things away from people without replacing them with sources of support. And I'm much more hesitant about that now than I've ever been before. I think that even when people are involved in religious environments and communities that have negative downstream political effects, they're there for a reason, and they're receiving benefits from those systems that we can't necessarily see. And it's a delicate thing, ripping people away from that. CIARRA: I love that you highlighted all that, and I just agree with it. As you were talking, I kept thinking over and over again about a liberatory construction of the Parable of the Sower -- which talks about how we receive the message of Jesus, whether our ground is fertile or spiky. I love that parable, because I think about being a gardener. How we sow seeds into the ground in which it comes. And I think when I think about growing up fundamentalist and the transformation of the paradigms through which we see the world -- the prisons through which we see the world -- it is such an aggressive approach. I think about it through a colonial lens, or manifest destiny. We have seen this kind of work happen through colonial violence, through tearing people from their homes, tearing people from their land, under the idea that we are bringing people into modernity. In her book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas talks about how white American settlers saw Manifest Destiny as God acting through American history. It was a colonial project in the name of God. And I think about it: when people come to my page, I don't want to pry God out of their hands, their closed fists. I don't want to do that to someone. And I love that you highlighted that our constructs of God, even when they seem toxic or corrosive from the outside, from someone who's deconstructed -- underneath that are family systems, community, financial and fiscal systems. Something I say all the time is: religion is a social determinant of health. And when we do the work of deconstruction, we need to do it in a trauma-informed way. So I like to see my work as giving to people who already have open hands, and they give back to me too. It's a bidirectional process. But I don't see it as the work of conversion and convincing I was raised in. It is: if you'd like to come along and get to know this more liberatory construction of God with me, please come along at your pace. And the last thing I'll say is my garden informs that a lot, because nature and natural systems transform slowly, and people do too. I try to have a deference for that. MATTHEW: I'm going to get to the gardening in a bit because I think that's so important. But I just want to celebrate for a moment that we have named something pretty important, which is that if you come out of a rigid ideological framework for religion, it's pretty easy to flip that around into the mirror and adopt the same kind of paternalism toward the person who's growing out of it that you're actually trying to undo. So -- what does public theology add to anti-fascist resistance that other approaches may not be schooled in, might not have access to? CIARRA: My own answer surprised me just now. That question made me think about the work of Tara Brach. Do you know her work? MATTHEW: Yeah. I was just on a panel with her, actually. CIARRA: Oh, okay. I have so many questions. If you know her well, please tell her I'm obsessed with her. MATTHEW: Okay, I will. CIARRA: Her work really has impacted me. It was a big part of something I've been talking about recently -- I'm actually working on my book proposal. Something I've been talking about a lot in my proposal is that so much of my time at Harvard Divinity School was beautiful for the work of cerebral deconstruction. Tara Brach's work helped me understand embodied deconstruction -- how systems of power and privilege, or how ideas of a certain framework of God, live in us. In fundamentalist Christianity in particular, there's a lot of theologies of separation. There's dying-to-the-flesh theology. This idea is heavily connected to original sin theology, the belief that our corporeal bodies are bad. Some fundamentalist scriptures might disagree with me on that exact framing, but there's a lot of the idea that the body itself is bad. We have dying-to-the-flesh theology -- this killing of the body over and over again, this renewal of the mind over and over again, so that we can be perfect in the way Jesus is perfect. And over time, I think that actually creates what Tara Brach talks about in her work as an aversion to the self. And I think when we create systems that have an aversion to the self, we create systems and structures that are averse to other people's bodies too. So when I think about the work of deconstruction, it is first asking: where do systems of power and privilege live within myself? Where am I a perfectionist toward myself? Where am I lacking compassion toward myself? Where am I saying I need to maim and fissure and fracture myself in the name of a patriarchal God? It could be in the ways we don't allow ourselves little joys or little pleasures. In my work I do talk a lot about sexual revolution in the body, because embodiment -- there's a lot of celibacy theology and killing of sexual pleasure as a way to get closer to God as well. And so when I think about how the work of deconstruction is also related to fascism, it is related to how we consider how we uphold systems of power and privilege in our own selves, and also how we then project those systems onto others. If we see our own bodies as bad, then of course we're going to create policies that are not great in healthcare, that are anti-reproductive justice, that harm Black and brown folks, because we're not considering the body. Of course we're going to create a carceral state steeped in punishment, if we do not care about people's bodies -- if we see their body as bad, if we see our own body as bad. And so when I think about how I see public theology and anti-fascism tied, it is asking: where are constructs of God tied to the harm of ourselves and others? And how does deconstruction help us build a more expansive society with larger social constructs and more inclusive social structures? The last thing I'll say here is that it makes me think about Father Gregory Boyle's work -- he wrote Tattoos on the Heart. Something he says is: we want to define God so widely that no one is outside of the circle of compassion of who God is. And so I see the work of deconstruction and anti-fascism tied in this way: we're teasing out where the construction of God is too small for both ourselves and others, and how we expand that, and make sure our social structures expand along with it. MATTHEW: Do you think -- to make that very practical -- if I was to practice that sort of theology, or really get into Tara Brach's understanding of how I regard my own internal self over time, would it just become much more natural for me to recognize how my attitudes toward others have curdled the truth of who they are? Or would I see in the surrounding society that it would just feel unnatural -- that I could almost instinctually identify the cruelty of everyday bigotry? Is that kind of the result? CIARRA: Yeah. You're asking: okay, there's a lot of language here around deconstructing God, deconstructing systems of power and privilege in ourselves and others -- but what does it look like in practice? I love that question. I'll use myself and my queerness as an example. So I grew up Assemblies of God Pentecostal, as I've mentioned. And the one thing you cannot be if you're Pentecostal is gay. There are a lot of things you can maybe be. You cannot be gay. And so I knew that very early in my faith practice. Around the time I was 16 or 17, I felt my first crush. The first thing I did was pray that queerness away. From 16 to 19, that's what I did. I repressed that. But in that time I was also a traveling youth minister. So I preached a lot around my area. I talked to young folks about queerness. And I talked about -- I'm 16, I'm parroting information from adults -- how queerness is not right and straightness is right. At a very young age. And so I'm doing this violence to myself and I'm also saying this language out loud, doing this violence to others. There are two things happening. When I came out around 19, luckily that wasn't rhetoric I had said a lot. But the two people I had said that rhetoric to, I was like: hey, I'm gay. And I'm really sorry that at 16 I said being gay was wrong. Because how crappy is that. But I had no idea there was another framework. And yet you see, within my own story, a repression of self and harm done to others in the name of that repression. And the moment I began to deconstruct -- as I learned there was a queer God, and I have to give a big shout-out to my professors at UC Berkeley, who, when I told them I'd been praying the gay away, said, read all these scholars, find all this freedom, and they freed me -- MATTHEW: Wow. CIARRA: Not the church. Academia freed me. Which I think is important. But the moment I understood that, there was a breaking of a self-hatred that allowed an expansive compassion for others. And now my work is advocating for queer folks. And so I think in that story you're able to see how the praxis goes from internal to social. MATTHEW: It's such a great story. I have two brief questions about it. One is: when you have the first inkling of the contradiction -- because you can acknowledge to yourself that there's a crush, but you also know that there's something wrong -- does it feel like there's a split self there? Like, is there someone within you who's saying, no, that can't really be -- is that how it feels to begin with? CIARRA: I really appreciate you asking that, because something I've talked about is how deconstruction and embodiment are tied, and how we have learned to feel God in the body. And I do think that for me, that level of religiosity did something to my own mind. MATTHEW: Yeah. CIARRA: Almost like OCD-level compulsions, because you're learning to renew your mind over and over again. But it actually is anxiety. So for me, I would hear my queerness as this little voice in the day. I never actually been asked that. I really appreciate it. It would just be this little voice that I would quiet. And I think you're taught to see it as a separate, sinful voice when you're in the church. Like it's almost an intrusive voice coming into your own mind. And it took me a long time to understand that that voice was me too. That it wasn't some satanic or demonic force. It actually was my own self. Which is really wild if you think about it. MATTHEW: Well, yeah. Because the disciplining voice -- that's actually the foreign voice. That's the one that's been taken on. CIARRA: Wow. You want to know why I think that's so powerful? And why gardening was really the beginning of my embodied theology? Gardening was the first space where -- in academia, I met a God on paper that helped me contradict and push back against a white supremacist patriarchal God. But in my garden, I met a God in practice that allowed me to embody the truth of a non-white, non-patriarchal God. One allowed me to uproot it and the other allowed me to plant it. And they both had to be in that process: academia, the uprooting; and gardening, the planting. And a big thing that happened in gardening was the replacing of that punishing patriarchal voice with a softer one. Because when you prune a plant and you do it wrong and it lives the next day, you think: I don't need to be so perfectionistic. Or when you come into your garden and you don't know what the hell's going on but it's still thriving, you think: maybe I know a little more than I think, or maybe I'm doing a little better than I think. You learn to let go of these rigid ideas. The church is very tied to prosperity gospel. So for me, even deconstructing my queerness was tied to acceptance. It was tied to my belief that God would or would not literally physically protect me. It was tied to my belief that God would or would not fiscally bless me. It was tied to my belief that God would or would not bless me with a partner. There was so much tied into our theologies around our sense of safety, our sense of goodness. And I think in my garden, I felt received by a God that loved me. Even though the Church expelled me, I was able to find a new construct: an embodied God, a collective God, a kind God, a God that loved me on my worst day. All of those things combated the white patriarchal framework of God I found in the Church. MATTHEW: So the second question about this connection between internal mending of this split and then stopping teaching that split to other people: do you think that those who have, in your words, disfigured themselves -- or had themselves disfigured -- by this internal split, that when they're teaching that other queer people shouldn't be queer because they themselves are internally contradicted, do you think they press the case a little bit too much? CIARRA: Yes. Internal contradiction -- you feel that everyone can see it. MATTHEW: Yeah. CIARRA: You think it's visible to others because you feel it every second of the day. In general, we have created theologies that do this. Dying-to-the-flesh theology itself -- take queerness out of it -- is this idea that to love God the best, we are disintegrated, because to be integrated is also to give too much space to our sin. And again, that's why I love the work of Tara Brach, because she says so much of transformation is first accepting who we are. And in my work, I call it being a good enough gardener. Everyone who comes into a garden: the garden already sees you as good. There is no one who comes into a garden excommunicated. You are already accepted as good. You are already part of the ecosystem of belonging. There is no barrier to entry. MATTHEW: The good enough gardener. You're like the Donald Winnicott of gardening. CIARRA: I gotta use that. And Kate Bowler does "good enough" too. So you've gotta -- But that's all to say, I want to answer your question with a quick anecdote. When I first realized I could not deny my own queerness -- I had some sense of it at 16, and when it became undeniable I was 19 -- the first person I called was my sister. And I said: in our upbringing, I cannot be this. I kind of refuse to be this thing. I was calling her to confess, because confessional culture is big in the church. But I think also I just didn't know what I was seeking. I think just to be seen in my experience. And the first thing she said was: the church we were raised in propagated the idea of a small God. And I believe God is so much bigger than a God that can't accept your queerness. How petty and weird is that God? MATTHEW: First thing she said. CIARRA: And the second thing she said was: do you want to stand on the pulpit and ask people to fracture and fissure themselves? And I think there are a few things happening for folks who preach this message while they themselves are queer. One: I think it is a way to deflect from what they feel is the world already seeing that contradiction. So they're doubling down on the fact that they don't hold it, and doubling down on the fact that others should not hold it. It's a way to obfuscate the deep work they need to do around reflecting on their own identity. And it's also a way to project their own self-hatred onto others. And I don't think most Christians are even aware of that. To be generous -- and I do have a lot of frustration at the harm ex-gay theology does -- I truly think a lot of ex-gay ministers are imprisoned themselves. I'm not saying that makes it okay. But I truly don't believe you can ask others to suffer in that way and not be suffering. I just don't believe that's possible. MATTHEW: That just doesn't accord with your view of human nature. Like, why would you do it? CIARRA: Yeah. What do you gain? So anyway -- some of it is projection. But I think another part of it is we have taught people that salvation and suffering are intertwined. And so we've taught the church not to really care when people suffer in a theology, if we believe that theology is renewing them, if we believe it's getting them closer to God. We say that is good suffering. It is good distress -- almost eustress, to use the word for positive distress -- instead of realizing: no, we've created a corrosive theological construct. So part of it is a projection and a way that ministers are obfuscating their own deep work. But another part is that we have said: this suffering is okay if it's bringing people closer to what we think is a good construct of God. And that is such a failure. MATTHEW: Yeah. So there's a cost-benefit there. Okay. You've said a lot indirectly about gardening, so let me go directly there. This is a family garden, first of all. CIARRA: It is. MATTHEW: Okay. How far back does it go? CIARRA: Oh, man. Well, my grandparents were both born in the 1930s in Monroe, Louisiana. They were both children of sharecroppers. And my grandfather has a green thumb. He just turned 95. Shout-out to my grandpa. MATTHEW: Is he still there? Is he in Louisiana? CIARRA: No, he's in Sacramento. My maternal grandparents came to California through the Great Migration. My grandpa served in the Korean War. Anyway, they came up here, and 25 years ago, he built a garden plot in my family's backyard in Sacramento. So we've been using that same plot for 25 years, planting in it. MATTHEW: And he built the beds. CIARRA: He built the beds. They were my neighbors, so he had his own beds. And then he came over -- I'll send you the photo, I have the photo -- came into the backyard and built the beds. MATTHEW: Okay. Now, is he a stickler? Does he have a way that you've got to do it? CIARRA: So what I love about my grandfather -- I think I know God the most through my grandparents. My grandma Frank, my grandma Mary, and my grandpa Don. They are God to me. The three of them are God to me, ancestrally. And something I love about my grandfather is: I say in my work that he was always observing the garden, but he was never disapproving. He would come and he would look and he would be so happy. And the thing is, he is a master gardener for real. Me, my brother, my mother, and my grandfather all garden. My sister isn't into the gardening. But he is the master. We could never get our tomatoes or our zucchinis as green as his. So he would come through, give us tips, but I think he just felt so proud that we loved something he loved. But to his credit, he made the garden what I think the Garden of Eden was supposed to be. That's how I felt about my grandfather. He created a kingdom of goodness in his garden. I talk about in my work how every time I came to his garden, the first thing he would say was, Ciarra, I'm so glad you're here. You're my friend. MATTHEW: Oh, my God, he would say that. CIARRA: Even now, when I go see him, that's the first thing he says. You are my friend. And I think about that so much, about how we relate to God. So many of us were not taught that we are God's friend or that God is our friend. But Alice Walker says in her work around gardens that nature shows us God is always trying to please us back. And I think a lot of our conversation today has been around how we contort ourselves into a God who is displeased with us, and how we've created systems against ourselves and social structures against others because we've said there is a God who is displeased with us. But a gardening God is always pleased with us. And I think what's interesting is that fundamentalists will say: that's an easy God. And I will say: that's the hardest God there is. Because we seem very averse, as humans, to accepting that something or someone is pleased with us. And we've created a world of displeasure because of it. And so I think my work is to say: God is pleased with you and God is pleased with me. And can we create a system that is as gentle as God wants to be with us? Because that's the God I meet every day. MATTHEW: Okay, so this makes me wonder -- you know, part of me really needs a Black grandfather, because I do a lot of gardening. We've got raised beds that are going on 13, 14 years now. Now I just want to offer the possibility that there might sometimes be a distance between the poetry of gardening and the drudgery, the uncertainty of it all. Or have you all got that figured out? CIARRA: Me specifically? MATTHEW: Yeah, you specifically. CIARRA: No, that's the best part of it, Matthew. It's a messy thing. That's what makes gardening so exciting. It's this messy, confusing thing. I don't mean that in a bad way, but sometimes gardening is like Tetris and sometimes it is like gentle springtime. I actually use gardening a lot in my consulting work with businesses, because employees can be so frustrated with each other. And then I replace the problem with plants. Now everyone's not defensive, and we're talking about it. An example I often use with organizations is called the squash problem, from my own garden. There was a year where my squash were not blooming, and I was pissed, Matthew. I was going out in my garden every day, staring at it. And to respond to what you're saying -- there is a part of gardening that is maddening. MATTHEW: Yeah. CIARRA: But I find God in there too. So the squash problem: I had a year where my squash were not blooming, not growing. I was pissed. For about a week I was staring at them for hours, just staring at the squash. MATTHEW: Right. CIARRA: And then I realized the issue wasn't the squash. The squash had too many leaves. The bees were not coming to it. They couldn't reach the flowers to pollinate. The moment I cut back the leaves and created more space for the bees to reach my squash, they were blooming. MATTHEW: So the leaves themselves obstructed the pollinators. CIARRA: Yes. The leaves -- I did a bunch of googling, and it was saying there's too much leaf, and the bees won't come. And especially if you look at squash leaves, they're spiky. They're protective. MATTHEW: Right. CIARRA: The moment I pulled them back, it was fine. And the reason I name that is because I learned so much about God and social structures in that moment. One: we're an individualistic society. So when I'm failing, or others are failing, I'm looking right at them or right at myself. I'm not thinking about the environmental or social structure. So I already failed that squash by looking at it individualistically. I forgot it existed in an environmental context. Two: I decided that the squash's ability to thrive didn't rely on community. I thought it wasn't collective. But it actually needed collective thriving to exist. And I needed to create that pathway, as the gardener. And so there was so much in that experience. Yeah, it was frustrating that my squash didn't bloom, but I left with a better understanding of myself. On my worst day, I don't need to hyper-fixate on what I'm doing wrong. I need to ask myself: what's going on in my environment? What do I need in community? How do I call a friend? How do I reach out to others? That was a complete deconstruction of the fundamentalist meritocracy theology I learned, which is: if I thrive, it's because I'm a Christian who works hard; and if I fail, it's because I'm not praying enough. I'm not trying enough. I think that's just one example of how gardens, even in their worst moment, are so much gentler than our social structures in our worst moment. MATTHEW: Okay. Now, did grandpa know about the leaves? Like, you didn't have to Google if you'd gone to him. CIARRA: I did not ask him for advice on that specifically. Some of it is because he's gotten a little bit older. I feel like I don't want to bother him with stress. But there are a lot of other things he has helped with. He's a master tomato guy in particular. And one thing he's taught me a lot about is how to prune tomato plants. So he's that guy. And actually, one other grandpa lesson I'll share, from my other grandfather -- you might really like this term. It's mudita. My grandpa Don is a really well-traveled man. He speaks multiple languages and he loves Sanskrit. And when I told him about my love of the garden, he taught me the term mudita, which is sympathetic joy -- or sympathetic, compassionate joy: feeling joy for another, with another. And something I think is really cool about both my grandfathers is that not only did my maternal grandfather teach me so much about flowers, both of my grandfathers are very gentle men. I think they also just broke a contract of a patriarchal God, because I didn't experience either of them as patriarchal. They are both like six-four, statuesque, gentle men. So I think that was a blessing too. I experienced men that were not the same as the God I was given. MATTHEW: All right, so this is a good time to talk about Charlie Kirk, I think. Speaking of patriarchal figures -- or patriarchal wannabe figures. This is okay. Also, just connecting everything we've been talking about to your public interventions and what you do on TikTok: I first came across you through your commentary on Charlie Kirk. And maybe you did a few videos after he was killed. But let me just start with this: why was he a terrible debater? CIARRA: Something I highlight around Charlie Kirk's debate style, which I really abhorred, was that it was based in Christian nationalist sentiments around morality. He had a very rigid construction of morality. If you went right or left from what Charlie felt was moral, you were already trapped in this idea of traditional values as the foundation from which we should form our society. Any deviation from that was already heretical, or progressive slop, nonsense. But the other side of it was it was incredibly domineering. And so it was more about how small could you make your intellectual partner or adversary feel, versus how well could you respond to their argumentation. And one reason I don't really do the work of arguing with those within the fundamentalist church is because I do see that culture, that style of debate, come through the church in ways that I don't think are helpful. MATTHEW: Well, I guess that was part of my question. You were able to describe his technique so well -- I was wondering whether you were able to clock it from personal experience. CIARRA: Yes, absolutely. My time at Harvard Divinity School -- something Harvard does so well is that it's incredibly interreligious and diverse. Your professors are cross-disciplinary. I had professors in the School of Psychology, the School of Anthropology, the School of Policy. You're not just talking to pastors and ministers; you're talking to people across disciplines. Which is really important. But I also think we had a subset of men in our classes that we would call philosophy bros -- which tend to be white men studying Barthes or Foucault or some other white philosopher who felt they had unlocked the key to absolute truth and that no other prism or perspective could be real or valuable. The biggest thing I come across with these philosophy bros, who I also see online, is: they do not believe that Black and brown people are reliable narrators. They believe there is a duplicitousness to marginality -- that marginalized people are lying about their experience as a way to grab power that they feel white folks have unethically hoarded. And I think for a lot of white men like Charlie Kirk, instead of being able to see that marginalized folks actually have a lived experience that helps them see whiteness most clearly -- something W.E.B. Du Bois says in his work that I love: of whiteness, I am singularly clairvoyant; there is a way that Blackness sees into whiteness -- for Charlie Kirk and other philosophy-bro white men who feel they have unlocked the key to all knowledge, it is this belief that there is an objective truth without seeing their own subjectivity, and without being able to honor that part of truth actually includes subjectivity. It includes identity. They're not antithetical to one another. MATTHEW: You know, I recognize philosophy bro in myself, but I also want to say that there has to be something sociological going on at a particular junction point. Because I grew up having my mind blown by Barthes or Foucault or Baudrillard in the 1990s. But I was never in a diverse intellectual environment where a Black queer theologian would have challenged me on anything. So what I existed in was a sense of exhilaration that somebody had given me some sort of key to the culture -- that gave me more power over my conceptions and my reality than I'd thought I had before. And that felt very nourishing. However, when that did become challenged later -- in social environments online or in person -- I was like: wow, I'm not so sure of what I'm sure of anymore. I'm not patting myself on the back. But I just don't think I had the social reinforcement to keep that going. I just want to point out the difference between having the intellectual thought and validation, and then really being willing or supported to put it into a kind of sociological movement that then you just run over other people with. And I think that's what you're getting at. But that's an interesting junction point. CIARRA: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a few things that are hard about just the process of learning new things. It is so exciting when you come into that first wave of any new information. For example, when I was at Berkeley and all of a sudden I learned about liberation theology -- it was so exciting. MATTHEW: Oh, yeah. CIARRA: At Harvard, some of my professors were tearing to shreds the original thought leaders I had learned about. And they didn't even know I had read them. And I think that is a part of being in academia that the church has not embraced as well: the refining over and over again of knowledge and knowledge production. This understanding that when you get a new idea, it doesn't mean your last idea was bad. That is just what the process is. The church has said: good ideas exist in perpetuity. And the one thing you can learn from academia is that ideas are renewed over and over again. I've had professors arguing in my classes -- both top scholars -- and they're arguing. I name all this to say: it is so exciting to learn new information broadly. And I think part of what the church teaches us is to be protective of our new information. Whereas part of what I learned in academia was: it is not a failure to keep learning over and over again. To have one idea in a class and then have a discussion and think: my classmate who is a person with disabilities is saying this part of the framework was great, but I'm missing something. Let me think about what I'm missing. Or: I have this great framework, but my classmate who is queer-identified is saying I'm missing this lens of queerness. Let me think about that. And I think the one way that racism really shows up in the knowledge-production process -- and in the deconstruction process, too, which I have some feelings about -- is that even when we're having processes of new ideas come forward, we have a way of saying only white men can prop up these new ideas. A concern I do have in the deconstruction space, as it's come into the mainstream -- because I'm saying the same things now I said 13 years ago, and suddenly deconstruction is a very hot topic in the media -- is that I worry Black and brown voices are being drowned out in the same way I've seen in academia, where philosophy bros are seen as the most authoritative voice in a space that Black and brown and queer voices have been screaming into for hundreds of years. So I do worry about the reproduction of that erasure as we're seeing deconstruction and reconstruction come into the mainstream. MATTHEW: I want to turn to mood and affect. And I want to be careful here not to suggest that you're the Black queer theologian who's soothing to my white ears. But also -- you are clearly presenting, embodying some kind of relaxation and equanimity, maybe related to gardening, in what you do. Even when you're talking about Charlie Kirk or philosophy bros. And I'm wondering how you think about that, or what you do to prepare yourself for it. CIARRA: I do think going to Berkeley and Harvard was helpful, because Berkeley and Harvard are Socratic seminar institutions -- meaning all of my classes were debates for six years. So all of my higher education involved you debating for literally six years. And I mean, I had even in my time at Harvard -- classroom debates so intensive that students wouldn't speak to each other for six or eight months on campus. Would not look at each other. So I think part of it is I've seen both the beauty of people having powerful academic exchanges where they have AHAs and this new mutual sight of one another's experiences -- and I've seen the vitriol of how people react when they feel that their perspective, the paradigm through which they see the world, was denigrated by a colleague, and how that reverberates and fractures through a community. So over time it made me develop a posture of letting things roll off my back when people don't agree with me or don't think like me. Because I realized that was something I was carrying from the fundamentalist church -- and maybe something I was carrying as a woman, as a Black woman -- this idea that it's my job to change anyone's mind. My job is to get free, and to free those who want to get free with me. That's it. That is my job. That is all of our human call: to get ourselves free, and to free who wants to come along with us, easefully. And I think as I've left the church and spent more time out of academia as an independent scholar, I've realized my ego has gotten very small in this work. Maya Angelou says success is liking what you do, liking who you do it with, and liking who you are. And those are the three things I use to drive my success metric as well. If people change their minds when they come into my work, or feel connected -- that's great. But seeing so much ego in the process of identity formation, identity deconstruction, academia, and the church made me realize: one, that's not good for my stress; and two, I think there's a better way. So I try to be a little more restorative and open, and not internalize difference as negative, but as part of the process. MATTHEW: Yeah. I'm thinking about it because I mentioned I was on this panel with Tara Brach. It was with an organization called Science and Non-Duality, which put together this discussion on why contemporary spiritual cultures are so bad at calling out abuse within their communities -- and additionally bad at calling out political disturbances like fascism. What is this double layering of silence? And Tara Brach is one of the panelists. And I'm the odd one out in the sense that I'm not any kind of spiritual teacher. I'm not a chaplain, I'm not teaching meditation courses, I'm not a Yoruban non-dualist like Bayo Akomolafe, who is there. I'm the person who does journalism on spiritual abuse, and does cultural criticism. And the entire event opened with probably 20 minutes of intention-setting and connecting with the heart and deep breathing. And I was like: I haven't done this since I was a yoga teacher. And I thought: it's very interesting that in the work that I do, which is critical and politically critical, I don't see a lot of this. Taking time before we start anything to say: okay, what do we hope to get out of this? What do we hope in terms of how we're going to communicate? We've got rules, we've got an agenda, we've got difficult points to cover, we've got debates to have. But it just occurred to me: I'm never quite sure how I'm starting something. And that might have to change. So I just wanted to throw that out there, because maybe as you do your work, you have all of this theology on board, and you actually are preparing yourself, or you've set yourself up with something like that. Is that fair? CIARRA: Yeah, it really is fair. I found God in my garden. That's just the reality. So every day I can look out and I can see my garden teacher. I feel like I'm a student every day coming into a temple. Gardens force you to be embodied. They're such a space of embodiment because you're touching the leaf and you're touching the soil. I think, as I mentioned, for me Christian theology was so in my head -- it was about controlling and renewing my mind. That's how I experienced it. I want to highlight that for some people, fundamentalist theology really works for them. For me, it felt like a prison in my own mind. A lot of the work of deconstructing fascism also contends with the body: how do we relate to our bodies and the bodies of others? It's kind of random, but I like the work of Ask Polly -- she's an advice columnist -- and she talks a lot about how we are not machines, about how we've built a culture around the body as a machine. And I think, to be honest, Matthew, part of white Western culture itself, even outside of religion, is seeing the body as a machine. Recently I did a conference in the Bay Area called the Ember Conference. And before the general conference, we had a space called the Black Sacred Lounge. We had an altar for our Black ancestors. We had music. I did a planting ceremony with folks. It was a lot of crying. And that was the day before my workshop. Something I highlight is: part of the work of deconstructing fascism is believing that marginalized people have something to say. But I think for white folks also, seeing that our cultures have a lot to teach about embodiment -- about accepting the body, about grief, about loss, about being connected emotionally -- that's part of the work. I think Prentis Hemphill does this beautifully through the Embodiment Institute. So I just love that you highlighted that, because I do think part of liberation -- liberation is a garden, period. It is a place where we're learning from everything. And to your point, I think part of what gardens teach us is to get into the body. And part of what Black theology teaches us, particularly Black liberation theology, is: what does getting into the body look like in practice? How do we see the body as good? How do we see embracing pleasure and joy and connectivity as goodness? So I hope that you will do that before your sessions. MATTHEW: Here's a barrier. I am so aware of the wellness world's commodification of exactly that. A kind of -- well, you know, this is how we're going to go to our ayahuasca ceremony, or this is how we're going to convene at Burning Man, or this is the breathwork we're going to do before something. That makes me feel so awful and cringy, because there might be something earnest going on there, but I don't quite trust it -- because I don't quite trust my own. And so that's a real wound, I think, in white culture. And I'm happy to say that when I spend more time hanging out with radical Catholics, for example, or people who are really imbued with liberation theology, I don't get those cringe feelings anymore. Because they're doing their altar stuff, their liturgy, in a way that isn't innovated, isn't contrived, isn't commodified. It actually comes out of something. And so it doesn't have that cringe feeling. CIARRA: I love that -- this conversation about authentic ritual. And I do think you're speaking to something broader for people who are deconstructing, which is: where is authentic ritual for me? And I know for me it's taken over a decade to start to figure it out. And I found a lot of it in my garden. I do also go to a very progressive church, but I appreciate you highlighting that as well -- not wanting to co-opt other communities. MATTHEW: Exactly. CIARRA: And finding what is authentic for Matthew, and maybe your audience as well. That's really beautiful. And something I'll say -- which is why I like gardens -- is that I've found that the beauty of deconstruction has been releasing simple answers and living in questions. And knowing God is in that question too. God is not just in answers; it's in the questioning of what we think and what we believe. That's what I'll say: the ritual, I think, will appear when it's ready, for whatever that looks like for you. MATTHEW: Ciarra, thank you so much for your time. It's a pleasure to talk with you. CIARRA: What a gift to be here, Matthew. You gave me so much to think about. Thank you. MATTHEW: You know, sometimes I talk to someone and I think: oh, I hope we work together on something in the future. So I kind of got that feeling about that conversation with Ciarra Jones. Thank you, Ciarra. Up now on Patreon, but soon to be released to the wild, because I don't hold anything back here -- I have a little review of the Avi Lewis win from March 28th in Winnipeg at the NDP National Federal Convention. What that win means, how liberals and conservatives are melting down over it, because even though he doesn't have a lot of power yet, he's going to be in their faces talking about how disgraceful the capitalist status quo is. So you can catch that. It's up on Patreon now. That's the show, folks. Take care of each other.