Episode Transcript
ANTI-FASCIST DAD — PATREON PART 2
Episode 15: Mother and Minister in Minneapolis
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Rev. Angela Denker
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Matthew Remski: Welcome, Patreons, to Part 2 of Episode 15, “Mother and Minister in Minneapolis,” with Reverend Angela Denker. I’m really grateful for your support, and I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your work and days.
Now, in Part 1 of our interview, Angela walked me through the current day-to-day in Minneapolis, and then the deconstruction of White Jesus as the promiser of individualistic and nationalistic salvation.
We discussed her role as a public theologian, which I’m starting to appreciate more as a profession because I’m familiar with the world of yoga and Buddhism—gurus and spiritual influencers. But what interests me about the public theologian role is that institutionally it’s tied in with all kinds of other responsibilities: care visits, hospital trips, funerals, weddings, soup kitchens.
And so what I’m seeing from Angela—and I saw this with Father David Inczauskas, and I hope to interview a public theologian who posts on TikTok. She’s named Ciara. She goes by the handle thegardeningtheologian. She’s super, super interesting—is this rich closed circuit that loops daily service into moral reflection.
And I think that if you’re really paying attention to your parishioners on a daily basis, your religion just has to be flexible and generative and responsive.
And then at the end of our conversation, we got into the hardest question of all, I think, which is: where in anti-fascism or religious dignity does the principle of nonviolence meet its limit?
Spoiler alert: there’s no answer here. We don’t solve this problem. But I think it’s a problem that everyone has to be struggling with at this point.
Okay, so pivoting now to your day-to-day again, as a woman, as a mother and cleric, are you also an explicit target of strains within white Christian nationalism, or the teachings of somebody like the late Jerry Falwell who criticize or rail against the effeminacy of the liberal Jesus?
Angela Denker: Yeah, definitely. I mean, short answer, yes.
And I think this is why the murder of Renee Goode was so terrifying to American women, because it had a very misogynistic feeling—especially when you see the footage of the agent who, after she’s trying to de-escalate, she’s telling him she’s not mad at him. He calls her the F-word, B-word at the end of that video.
That is an attitude towards women who don’t behave in an appropriately submissive way, which is the teaching of right-wing American Christianity. It’s the teaching of White Jesus. I go into great detail into the teachings of Mark Driscoll in my book—Mark Driscoll, one of the leading early-ish proponents—and John Piper, who’s right here in Minneapolis.
These teachings about hierarchy that put men necessarily above women are foundational to the kind of Christianity that these folks believe in. And so White Jesus is also necessarily part of a hierarchical structure that is important in the family as well.
So Tia Levings has done some great work here in explaining her experiences as a real-life trad wife, and talking about how her husband would spank her, beat her because of the teachings of the church.
That’s that hierarchy that puts husbands and fathers in the place of God and gives them the right to abuse their wives and children because of some misguided, lying vision of who Jesus is as a violent, angry man.
Matthew Remski: Was it difficult to find and build your own sense of ministry and faith in an American Christian environment with so many streams of misogyny tied up in it?
Angela Denker: Yeah, I definitely think so. I began my career in some ways in a good training ground for this work. I was a sports writer and I was a hockey reporter, hockey beat writer. So I spent a lot of time in male-dominated environments.
And really I’ve told people that I experienced a significant amount less misogyny probably in the hockey locker room than I experienced often in the church.
But at the same time, there’s this contradiction, right? Where we have a dominant American right-wing Christian culture that is hostile to women’s voices, that is hostile to women’s empowerment.
And then I also speak to you here in Minneapolis, where we have a robust community of women pastors, many of whom are leading this justice work that’s being done right now in resistance to ICE.
So that’s been one of the most fruitful things for me of doing this work in a place like Minneapolis—even despite the difficulties that we’ve had over the last few years—there is this strong community, and I would say that is the case in many American cities, for whatever reason.
And I think part of it is because the entire staff of the New York Times religion department went to Wheaton College, which is an incredibly conservative Christian college that generally does not affirm ordination of women. So there’s an erasure in national media of women pastors and clergy members.
In many ways, however, there is this community of female leadership, and there’s also a community of male colleagues who work productively with women, who lift up women’s voices, who share ministry with women.
So I think it’s a mixed answer: a great deal of harassment, a great deal of incorrect assumptions, a great deal of—
One thing that I watch a little bit is the rise of James Talarico in Texas, who has been an outspoken anti–Christian nationalist. I think he’s great.
And also he’s a seminary student. We have women clergy members who have been doing this work for decades.
And the amount of respect and attention and esteem that’s given to somebody who is a seminary student—who’s great—but I just find it interesting to note how much respect he’s just automatically given as a white man.
I also think of somebody like Tim Alberta, who’s a pastor’s kid. He’s not a pastor himself, not a theologian.
So it’s just that kind of stuff is a little frustrating to experience because there’s so many women who have important things to say who aren’t given the attention or the respect that they deserve.
Matthew Remski: You know, I have to admit, I think over on Conspirituality, we did a whole episode on Talarico and I did not clock that actually—that he’s just a seminarian. He might have a very compelling Christology and, you know, public theologian stance, but it’s not like he’s qualified in the way you are.
And while he preaches, he’s not doing the same kind of pastoral responsibilities.
Angela Denker: Right, yeah, yeah. It’s just like I said, you start to see it enough where you’re just like, man, why is this person just automatically getting that respect and attention that so many of us have fought so, so hard to be heard?
And especially when we see what’s happening in America today, and so many women in particular have been outspoken about the rise of Christian nationalism and were ignored and dismissed. It’s frustrating.
But I’m not knocking Talarico. I’m glad he’s out there. I think he’s awesome. I’m just noticing some of the distinctions between how men’s and women’s voices are treated in the Christian space particularly.
Matthew Remski: Okay, so I think we know who White Jesus is.
I want to spend some time building up—or maybe kind of distilling out—the much cooler, anti-fascist Jesus.
And maybe we can do that by looking at some parables and Bible scenes that I’d like you to try to sell to, let’s say, a non-Christian audience of boys and young men.
And I wanted to do this because, you know, as you’re out in the street with your comrades and your fellow parents watching and pushing back against ICE, and you are also bringing your public theology to bear there, there’s an opportunity to share that, right? To be able to say, well, this is why I have my moral convictions, or this is what supports them.
And I think being able to share that material ecumenically, or across a bunch of different cultural valences, is really good.
So we’ll assume that if you’re speaking with Christian kids, that’s gonna be easy. But let’s say that you are speaking in YouTube-short style—60 seconds each—just to the general public, and I’ll decide whether I’ll like, comment, or subscribe.
Okay, so the first one is: tell me what the parable of the prodigal son tells us about our lives today.
Angela Denker: Well, I’m an older sibling, so the parable of the prodigal son has always been one that took me some time to embrace because the older sibling is the one who stays back and does the work and is with the dad.
And the younger sibling goes out and parties and spends all his money and then comes back and gets a party right away. And I have a younger brother who, you know, may or may not have been a prodigal at one time or another.
But what we see about this depiction of God in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son is an unceasing capacity for mercy, for forgiveness, and for love that supersedes any sense of judgment.
And so when people want to define God according to who God hates, it’s just in direct contrast to a story of a prodigal son who is embraced back because of God’s love—not because of how well he repented, not because of how much he was willing to work.
You know, think about this rhetoric around poor people, around SNAP benefits. God, who is the God of the prodigal son, is a God ultimately that people deserve love and grace no matter what.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, okay, so I’ll put a like on that one and then just comment that the person that is typically within a capitalist system labeled as the failure—or the person who somehow has not pulled themselves up by their bootstraps—is the person that in this parable is welcomed back with no question.
Angela Denker: That’s right.
Matthew Remski: Okay. Workers in the vineyard.
Angela Denker: Yeah, this is a good one. So this is a story that Jesus tells about workers in a vineyard who are working a different amount of hours. Some work a whole day, some work six hours, some work four, some work two. And at the end of the day, they all get the same wage.
And again, as a, you know, white American Protestant kid raised in the hard-working Midwest, this story felt very unfair. And I think unfairness as an element of grace is something Americans need to embrace, and something parents need to teach their kids early on: that primarily our understanding of how we treat one another is not based in fairness, but instead based on love and morality.
And so Jesus’ teaching about how we should treat one another is not based on what is fair, but instead is based more, if we’re going to go into philosophy, more of a Kantian view of intent.
And functionally, how we treat one another matters because of how we treat one another, not because of the results of it.
So everybody gets the same wages. It sounds a little bit socialist. I think maybe our right-wing politicians might want to revisit this parable and see what they can do with it.
But there’s socialism in Jesus’ ministry throughout it, and I think it’s an important thing for Americans in particular to grapple with.
Matthew Remski: Okay, I’m gonna subscribe over that one now. Similarly, because this also involves questioning or investigating how we feel about money and fairness.
The parable of the talents.
Angela Denker: Yeah, you’re picking all the parables that I remember when reading through my Bible the first time I would highlight and be like, I don’t like this one.
Because there’s a harshness to the God in the parable of the talents that does not fit in some ways with, you know, the God of Matthew 20. Well, the God of Matthew 25 is harsh, but it’s grounded in a care for one another.
In the parable of the talents, God is disappointed that someone would not use their talents or use their money as God has asked them to, and instead buries it. Now, I don’t think this is a parable about investment or the stock market, as some might imagine, but I do think it’s a parable about hoarding.
And I do think it’s a parable maybe about caring more about your 401k or your retirement account than caring about your neighbor who doesn’t have a place to sleep at night.
So there’s an invitation in the parable of the talents to live your life understanding that God is a God of abundance and there’s an abundant world—and not to hoard and bury resources, whatever they might be.
Matthew Remski: So I have heard a liberation theology version of this that takes the— you know, the allegory is not so much being about where the master is standing in for God, but rather Jesus is telling us—Jesus is telling the story of the worker who refuses to play along with the acquisitive task of investing the talents.
That what he’s going to do, actually, is he’s going to keep his daily bread as his daily bread, right? He’s not going to go out and he’s not going to try to magically make the money multiply and increase.
He’s going to live modestly. He’s not going to participate in the game of capital.
Angela Denker: Yeah, that’s a—I think I actually have heard that, and I like that. But I, you know, I gotta be honest with you: I’m a Lutheran, right? Like, we—and I’m a journalist.
I am not someone who is looking to outright sell people on Jesus, if that makes sense.
I think it’s—you know, for me, it’s—I’m much more comfortable with a religious leadership and a theology that asks questions and invites people to, in my theological understanding, with the revelation of the Holy Spirit, be invited into a deep understanding about Jesus.
So I have sometimes, I guess maybe I have a bit of a hesitancy about prescribing absolute meaning. And I’m not saying that’s what it would be, but to the parables, it’s not, you know—I don’t know.
I definitely would not be like a YouTube-short preacher. So, you know, I appreciate the exercise. Probably not my preferred format, but it was fun, and I appreciate the reminder.
Matthew Remski: I do think that when I’m talking to a range of people about anti-fascist community, I want to foster the kind of discussion that really gets to: well, how did you come to your values, and how do you think about the most important things in your life?
And invariably, with people who come to anti-fascism with some kind of theological understanding or religious devotion, those values are there, and they lead to ideological conflict or tension.
And so I think just greater understanding and dialogue is really helpful for broader movement-building.
And maybe this gets to the hardest question of all that I’ve got for you, which is that throughout your book, you elevate the loving and the vulnerable and the peacemaking Jesus.
So I’m wondering if that is a Jesus that is committed to nonviolence absolutely—or conditionally—or somewhere in between.
Angela Denker: Yeah. Well, we’re talking a few days before we’re going to remember Martin Luther King Jr. Day, right? And I think about every Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I revisit his sermon on “Love Your Enemies.”
And I revisit so many of his words because I think that there has been such an attempt on the Christian right to anesthetize the words of Martin Luther King Jr.—and his understanding of nonviolence, but also his understanding of love.
Love is a much pointier weapon than people understand it to be. And I think love that is not grounded in the truth is not really love.
When it comes to the absolute nature of nonviolence, again, within the Lutheran theological tradition, there has been room for conversation about holy war there, certainly.
You know, I guess I would look to the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a committed pacifist and ultimately who joined the resistance efforts against Adolf Hitler very reluctantly.
He’s been depicted by, you know, prominent Trump supporter Eric Metaxas as sort of being some kind of evangelical assassin. That was not Dietrich Bonhoeffer at all. I wrote about that for Slate. If anyone’s curious about reading, I did some interviews with his family members.
But all that to say that I think that a faith that is made up of platitudes or niceness is worthless. Bonhoeffer would have called that cheap grace.
I also remember, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. saying that a riot is the language of the unheard.
And I think in American history, we have a tradition of punishing those without power for their violent actions, but ignoring the violence of those in power.
And so I would be apt to look at some sort of power analysis first before condemning violence of people who have very few other options.
That being said, you know, we don’t have guns in our house. I would not own a gun. I shot one one time with pastors in Las Vegas many, many years ago, and I was very turned off by the entire experience.
Matthew Remski: You shot a gun with pastors in Las Vegas? That sounds like a whole other episode.
Angela Denker: We can talk about that later. I was also pregnant.
Matthew Remski: Oh my gosh. So no guns in your house. You don’t have firearms, training yourself—you wouldn’t do that.
Let’s say, just to press the issue a little bit, that a set of community members came to you as their pastoral guide and they said: we believe that because ICE is being so aggressive in pursuing our community members, we would like to put an armed guard in front of our church. We believe that that’s the next step in enforcing what we believe is a necessary sanctuary for our neighbors.
How would you approach that as a pastor?
Angela Denker: Yeah. Again, I am not someone who thinks that increased weaponry or security is necessarily what’s going to make us safe. So I would be pretty resistant to that.
That being said, I do have friends and colleagues who have been pastoring bilingual churches who have been having to institute stricter security measures for a very long time now.
I mean, some of them are no longer meeting in their sanctuaries. They’re meeting in house churches scattered throughout the Twin Cities. They do have security.
But I’m very suspicious in this current American context about the ability of the police force to protect civilians.
I’m not all that confident that police presence makes things safer. I wish that that was the case, especially, but I just think historically it really hasn’t been—especially for nonwhite folks.
So I would be resistant to that.
That being said, I thought you were gonna ask me about some sort of sabotage attempt or some sort of resistance activity. I would be more open to some sort of resistance that was, you know, less—not with the goal of killing.
But I think that there is space within a nonviolent strategy for actions that— I keep thinking of, you know, throwing sand into the gears of fascism.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, I think it’s the same question. I think it’s the same question, right? Whether we’re talking about arming ourselves, or sabotage, or any kind of other civil disruption that perhaps goes beyond typical norms—I think it’s the same question.
Angela Denker: Yeah, for me it’s distinct, right? I think to me there’s something about houses of worship that is not compatible with guns or weapons.
And so for me, that question about maintaining the sanctity of a congregation—outside of needing to have weaponry there or advanced security measures—I just, for me, there’s something about maintaining the sanctity of a house of worship and maintaining the accessibility of houses of worship in a distinct way.
Matthew Remski: What do you think the future holds for you and your comrades?
Angela Denker: Many of us are having conversations about what is most appropriate for each of us to do.
And for me, as someone who is a caregiver to little kids, I’m not out there as much as some of my colleagues are. You know, I do attend protests, but I don’t attend all of them. I don’t typically attend ones that are at night.
I don’t attend the ones that are outside the detention center. I haven’t yet. I’m not saying I never will.
But so for me, you know, I have not had any of that. I think for other members of the clergy, there have been more considerations like that—not within necessarily my own congregation.
And again, I just think that role of discernment as a faith leader: finding out where you’re most effective and what your most effective work is.
For me, it’s often words and writing and connecting people with journalists who can share their stories—connecting the media work with the faith work.
But for many of my colleagues who are more present, you know, I had friends yesterday who were tear-gassed and were having trouble seeing as of night. So I think the question of gas masks might be one of the more immediate places where people are going to need some extra equipment.
Matthew Remski: Angela, thank you so much for your time, and I hope that you all keep safe, and I really thank you for your work.
Angela Denker: Thank you.
Matthew Remski: So in Episode 1, Angela and I pinged Bishop Rob Hirschfeld of New Hampshire saying the following at a vigil for Renee Goode. I’m going to run the clip.
Bishop Rob Hirschfeld: Here we are now, I believe, entering a time—a new era of martyrdom.
Renee Goode being the latest of note of those martyrs.
New Hampshire’s own Jonathan Daniels, a man also of white privilege, stood in front of the blast of a sheriff in Hayneville, Alabama, to protect a young Black teenager from a shotgun blast. He died and was martyred.
We know of the women, the Maryknoll Sisters, who stood alongside the poor and the oppressed in El Salvador and were brutally raped and murdered in the name of Jesus.
Oscar Romero, in a mass, called upon the death squads of El Salvador to lay down their arms or risk excommunication, was martyred the next Sunday at the altar.
I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness, and I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.
Matthew Remski: I want to comment on this politically, socially, and then also philosophically.
So politics first. To my ear, this is some of the most radical rhetoric coming out of the liberal world.
And by liberal world, I mean the world that includes mainstream Christianity, which has traditionally supported the capitalist status quo and provided a spiritual framework for compliance instead of challenging brutal systems. It too often rationalizes, defers, forgives, preaches hope.
It supports the liturgy of liberal manners writ large, which encourage people to have faith in the systems that regulate all this cruelty.
So here we have a representative of that culture actually saying, hey, the system has failed. The time for statements and eloquence is over.
And for him, that means no more persuasion, no more theological argumentation.
We just have our bodies now and each other.
And I feel that this is the statement of a religion that has become profoundly material, no longer choked in idealism.
And I think in the case of Christianity—and I think Reverend Denker would agree with me—that vision might more accurately reflect the origin story of an unarmed prophet executed by the empire because he tried to give his followers a sense of dignity and self-worth.
So Hirschfeld is standing there in his cassock. He’s carrying the dignity of his education and his institution, and he’s talking about death and martyrdom through the somewhat bureaucratic language of wills and estates and inheritance.
He’s using references to money and possessions to convey the seriousness of sacrifice to his people—the gravity of it.
And I also hear a deeper message, though, because once you set your affairs in order at a time like this, wouldn’t they just stay that way?
Like, who’s going to do that and then come back from this moment and behave somewhat in the same old way?
Wouldn’t you always be living in the moment of action and giving and sacrifice?
And in that case, what would capitalism mean to you then?
And as I listen to him, I think we have to wonder what opposition politicians will be willing to say the same thing—to tell their constituents to prepare for the consequences of throwing themselves between fascism and the vulnerable.
Because if they did say that, I think we would feel we were hearing the beginning of some kind of plan, but we’re not hearing that. And why is that?
Maybe the advantage of the Christian cleric who takes on the heritage of civil rights and Oscar Romero and liberation theology is that the instruction to get your affairs in order points to a fulfillment of values that make capitalism, nationalism, and empire irrelevant.
It’s the place where “this is my body given up for you” intersects with “you can’t serve God and mammon.”
And these are statements that, beyond a crisis like this, point to where liberals generally don’t want to go, which is socialism.
On the social level, if you are in the spiritual-but-not-religious category, you probably have some experience navigating the fragmentary and sometimes narcissistic world of spiritual influencers, where people have to present themselves as entrepreneurs of their internal life.
On the extreme end of this, we see Burning Man shaman cosplayers and Catholic tradwives in prairie dresses, everyone performing their spirituality.
And I think this happens in part because the expectation is that practice must change the way we appear to others. We should be able to radiate our virtue, even if we kind of know that the experiences that we have spiritually are generally private—they can’t really be communicated.
And I think we also have the sense that anyone who really wants you to know how radiant they are is probably selling something.
And they can’t get away with that without also revealing a sense of anxiety.
When I watch Hirschfeld’s speech, I remember that most Christian clerics don’t have to worry about this stuff, and that’s partly because their religion has to be woven into their daily and administrative lives.
You can wear the collar at the office.
Now, of course, this is privilege as well, because there are more stable professional outlets for Christian clerics that have nothing to do with how well they do on social media. Also, as men, they are the societal norm. And so, you know, why do they have to put anything on?
And, you know, I think that’s probably what most of us want from anti-fascist community: a merging of theory, communications, and daily service that functions as an anchor or a magnet. So you don’t have to pour so much energy into the charisma part.
Because probably if you’re caught up doing that, it means you’re lacking organizational support. Of course that’s not your fault, but it’s also kind of your job.
Lastly, philosophical note. Returning to the issue of how religion can be used by a radical flank and even by people who have struggled with failures in their churches, I think that healthfulness can be thought of with a metaphor that I’ve been chewing on, which is: do you have—or are you encountering—theological scar tissue?
And here I’ll refer back once again to Marx’s idea that religion is downstream of material conditions. That’s part of what he means when he says religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
So if we start from the very broad premise that religion emerges in response to a wound—be it the fact of your existential vulnerability or your uncertainty about everything, or the fact that you have been enslaved or colonized or alienated by capitalism—the question is: what kind of bandage will you use for that wound? And when you heal, if you heal, what will that scar be like?
Now, scars can range from hardened and contracted to pliant, flexible, and almost invisible.
So the metaphor is that when you run into a religious person or tradition—or you feel these things in yourself, in your own history and set of relationships—and the sense that you get is a sense of impenetrability, toughness, defensiveness, insensitivity, you are running into scar tissue: theological scar tissue.
And of course, this shakes out in rigid and defensive doctrines about bodies, sexuality, the protective power of fathers, the supposed safety of hierarchies, and everything you think you’d need to survive terrible traumas in the desert or in the shadows of tyrants.
The tissue stores the injury. It hardens around history. It keeps people alive, but it doesn’t change very much, and it hurts if you try to stretch.
Now, all the Jews and Christians and Muslims who found an expression of faith in rebellion against capitalism, imperialism, or fascism—some of them had this scar tissue to begin with. But people like Martin Buber, Dorothy Day, and Amina Wadud had to tear it out or re-wound themselves to find a generative sort of grace.
I think that when religion actually helps heal the wound of material suffering, if it leaves a scar at all, the scar isn’t stiff.
It has full range of motion, and instead of being numb, it’s super sensitive. It becomes one of many places on the body of the activist where they can feel not only the pain of others, but how the weather is changing, how the times are changing with it, and how they might have to change too.
So if that’s how a religious person is responding to you and to fascism, that might be a clue that they’ve made something really powerful and good and new out of all the old stories and rituals and ways.
Okay, everybody, thanks for listening. Take care of each other.
