Lisa Fields: Hello. Welcome to the Jude three Project podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Fields. I’m the founder of the Jude three Project. Well, thank you for watching another episode of the Jude three Project podcast. As always, I’m your host, Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude three Project. And today, I’m joined by doctor Vincent Bacot. Doctor Bacot, welcome. Hey. It’s great to be here. Thank you for joining us. Tell our audience a little bit about who you are.
Dr. Vincent Bacote: So I am in my twenty seventh year, teaching theology at Wheaton College. I’m in my nineteenth or twentieth year as also being the director of our Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College. If you had asked me this when I was in college, where I thought I’d be a theology professor, not when I started. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but guided other ideas. And, for me, I kind of sum up my thing, if you will, as being somebody who wants to build bridges between faith and life. And so it’s important for me that what we believe matters, but also how we’re living it matters and also how what we’re believing is informing what we’re doing with our living. To me, that that’s really always been really important to me. Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Fields: called Black and Evangelical. because I think when people hear evangelical now, because of what’s going on in our world, there are so many negative connotations with it. And then when you add black onto it, you think of, like, Clarence Thomas. You know? Tell our audience a little bit about, like, the origins of the film and why you thought it was important.
Dr. Vincent Bacote: Sure. Well, first, thanks so much for being part of it. You’re a vital part of of our documentary. So in 2008, I was at Fuller Seminary for an event with some other black evangelicals. It was a group called the Obsidian Society, and this was the second two years where they had had a meeting there. And while I was there, one of the people who was there was a man named Ronald Potter. Mhmm. And his sort of color commentary throughout the weekend that we had together indicated to me that he seemed to have in his head the entire history of black evangelicals. And by this time, what I knew for certain was that if you were gonna look up books, magazines, articles about black evangelicals, you were not gonna find a whole lot. You find some things Mhmm. But you you wouldn’t find a lot. And certainly a lot of things he was talking about, there wasn’t much information unless you were gonna be having a conversation with him. So this idea came to me that the best way to get the word out was really kind of an archival idea, just to have the information somewhere, was to put Ron in front of a camera, and I will extract the information from Ron. Well, it took thirteen years, but we finally got to, got Ron to the Wheaton College campus, and by then Christianity Today had become a partner in the project. And so we brought Ron to campus in and so we brought Ron to campus in fall of twenty one. He gave a public lecture that evening. The afternoon prior to the lecture, I did an interview with him where I naively believed that I can probably get all the relevant information in about ninety minutes. Mhmm. Extremely naive idea because after about eighty minutes, we were in the early 1970s. Mhmm. So, I knew that we were gonna have to do at least another interview with Ron, And then, honestly, Ed Gilberth, who was with CT at the time over the Big 10 initiative Mhmm. He’s how the connection was made with CT. He and I knew that we needed to interview Ron again and probably some other people as well. Mhmm. And so, actually, the next interview we wound up doing was with doctor Bill Pannell, who passed away about a year and a half ago. And I did about a two hour interview with him out at Fuller, and that was, really on the pathway to what became 24 interviews. The reason it became a documentary and not just kind of a sort of collection of interviews with me talking to people was we got connected with a filmmaker named Daniel Long, who’s a Fuller alumnus who has his own film company called Long Winter Media. And Dan asked us, well, so how are you gonna tell this story? And, which was a really good question. And so, honestly, he, me, Ed, and Dan talking through all this is really how it kinda became, a documentary, and so, you, about fourteen months after I interviewed Pannell was when The Weeknd went ahead you, Nicole, and others, on campus, And, and then we still did more interviews after that, and and, and so the the documentary, is now available on YouTube. We we had a music licensing thing that we were dealing with that, made it only be available on a specific website, and you could only watch it there. Now it’s on YouTube, and people can watch it, you know, in the varying ways because of that. And, but that’s that’s how it became together. And and so it’s really telling part of a much larger story. You did mention, of course, the word evangelical Yes. Which is a word that, I think we can say is has been having a major public relations crisis. It’s been a contested term arguably prior to, say, 2016, but, the crisis the crisis of the term, I think, kind of got to a fever pitch then, and that fever hasn’t really broken, because of people thinking of evangelical meaning first more a political or sociocultural identity rather than a theological identity. What the term ideally meant was Protestants, you know, Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, people who would disagree about all kinds of things. I mean, aliphite level disagreements with things, but who would say to their family and that they they agreed about the authority of the Bible that you need a conversion experience at this, that that conversion experience is focused on the saving work of Jesus on the cross, and that this is a faith that you need to share. If you ask people today what evangelical means, they’re probably not leading with those four things. Yeah. They’re leading with a political Yeah. Camp. Yeah. And also it’s arguable that arguable that some of the reason that that change in identity happened is when people began looking at the evangelical movement as a voting bloc Mhmm. And certainly, arguably, it was a voting bloc as early as late seventies, early nineteen eighties, but that really kinda got intensified arguably, you know, maybe twenty years ago during the the administration of the second George Bush, and also because of the way the media was treating evangelicals as a conversation topic. And why were they a conversation topic? Because you had a bunch of evangelicals in the White House. Mhmm. And so people are saying, well, who are these people? And so but but that’s making the question about who they are is who are these people, these religious people that are connected to politics? And so then you get this larger thing happening. Now what also happened, at least in certainly at least in the last decade, but maybe maybe what’s happening before that, if you took a survey and asked people if they were evangelical, now that survey includes people that might not actually know the Bible very well at all, might not go to church very much at all, might not be particularly moral, but they kind of like Jesus, they kind of like The United States. Generally speaking, they’re probably committed more to Republican politics than anything else or some version of Republican politics, and that’s what, to them, what being an evangelical is. And so that’s become this kind of dominant framing of it. And so that that does complicate using the term. But here here’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to use the term though. The term root word is evangel. That’s the word for gospel. That’s the word for good news. The crisis we’re in is one where if you say the word evangelical to people, they think well, they don’t first think the good news people or the greatest news of all people. They think, they might be these religious people, but they’re religious people who are thinking about how they’re adversarial to people who don’t hold some version of what their commitments are. They believe that God is sponsoring whatever their commitments are, and, but they’re not necessarily people thinking. The first thing I think is people who say, we’re gospel people above all. And or or certainly a gospel that’s mainly about, okay, how are people connect getting right related to God through Jesus and then living lives that emerge out of that. But evangel is in the term, And I think it’s one of the question to ask is, does the term evangelical basically have to be be something where people start thinking about the way some people would say or maybe, like, every ten or fifteen years, people will say, well, I’m not so sure I wanna use the word Christian. Mhmm. I wanna use the word Jesus follower instead, or friend of Jesus. In other words, something other than the word Christian. Right? So in other words, is evangelical a word where people are saying, it’s not that I don’t have gospel commitments, it’s not that I care about the Bible, the Jesus, sharing my faith, etcetera. I don’t like the connotations that have come along with the term. So the connotations of Christian meant something about people who were gonna be mean and always tell people they’re just going to hell or whatever, then if evangelical means those people who are more political than anything else who want Jesus to sponsor their politics, then in the same way that they want to distance themselves from that, they wanna move move away. Is is that what should be the case? John Perkins was asked, because he was in campus on 2018. I mean, he became to campus many times. He was asked, because it was during the, you know, the fever pitch of the crisis, the fever pitch that goes on, do you think we should still use the word evangelical? He says, of course we should. And his reason was because of the root word. Mhmm. Because gospel is the root word. And why and why am I going to seed that, give that up when got the gospel part is the most important thing? Yeah. And for for our audience we’re recording this in May. I should know this because it’s exam week. John Perkins was a very famous evangelical leader, very focused on racial reconciliation, community development, rooted in Mississippi, a person who if anybody had a right to say vengeance is mine to white people, John Perkins is that person because of things that he experienced. But he got converted, and being and and and as a person who got converted, he had to deal with the anger that he had, and so he he he decided he wasn’t gonna go that way. He was going to be the person that loves your enemy. I mean, they may treat me like an enemy. I’m not gonna treat you like an enemy. And and and he eventually became somebody who created, ministries out of out of, out of Mississippi, but also, in in Southern California. And so, I’d say to people who don’t know about him, you know, read his book Let Justice Roll Down, read or read some short article about his biography. You can find lots of them. A lot of people have written about him. He was a he was a very significant figure. So for him to say that is really important because arguably, if anybody had a good rationale to say, you know what? I’ve had it with that label. I’ve had it with those people. John Perkins, you know, he’s got the receipts. I mean, on his body, arguably, and he’s got had a steel plate in his head. Right? So why does he have a steel plate? Well, because of getting beaten within an issue of his life. If anybody could say, I’ve got reason to say forget those people, Forget that label. He’s that person. And he says he’s he he wanted to keep the label.
Lisa Fields: really making sure our audience divorces the political block from the actual definition of the word itself is important Yes. To set the tone for this conversation, to to share, like, what are some highlights that you don’t think people know about the history of Black evangelicalism?
Dr. Vincent Bacote: Sure. Well, so for one, Black evangelicalism, if we’re thinking in the largest frame, I mean, we can even be going all the way back to someone like a Phillis Wheatley, the, you know, this person who’s an African American poet, Christian, who believes this evangel. She may I mean, the term that we use, evangelical, probably would not have been a term that she used, but she she fits this. And so you you really have arguably the history of black church in certain ways being a history that is in terms of these things that you describe about these markers of what make it evangelical. This is essentially what black Christians have believed. And so whether they whether they were associated with how much they were associated institutionally with a movement that used the name, you know, there’s variance with that part. But in terms of the actual identity of that, Black church has always been about being good news and particularly good news where it’s important to proclaim this faith and it’s inescapable to talk about having to practice this faith for if for existential survival, if not only physical survival. Mhmm. And so you and so you have that. Now it’s true, just like with any family of Christians, some Christians wanna say more about the vertical dimensions of the faith. Other people wanna talk about the horizontal realities of what we need to be doing down here as opposed to just thinking about how we’re connecting to Jesus, talking about that connection to Jesus. But even those people that are talking about the vertical part, at some point, they’re gonna say something to you about the horizontal because it’s just, you don’t have the luxury. And I think this is an interesting thing in a way in a contrast to this, due to the larger institutional white evangelicalism is that a lot of the history of white evangelicalism has been about getting the information right. In other words, part of the reason for this sort of coalition that’s interdenominational coalition that happened among, you know, institutionally more white denominations than anything else was reacting to changes that were happening in what we call your mainline denominations, where where people were questioning the authority of the Bible, questioning whether certain things were true about Jesus. And so there was, the point was so much focus on the information. I mean, yes, people need to know the truth and they need to have this conversion, but so much of it is often about, you know, being able to say we are committed to the actual truth of this faith. Now there might be somebody who listens to this and says, well, you know, but evangelicals were also people who talked about missions. They did talk about personal piety. I’m not saying that they didn’t care about life, but what I am saying is that you do wind up having the weight being so much arguably on a certain kind of way of saying, when I say I’m an evangelical, when I say I’m a gospel person, it’s about me getting the information right. Mhmm. And there’s the presumption that because I have the information right, that kind of what tags along is kind of a caboose is, and of course I care about living right, but there’s more of of a potential liability of saying, okay. Well, how do these beliefs actually cash out in terms of the way that people are gonna live live their lives? Mhmm. And I think for a lot of black evangelicals, for sure, they will say, hey. You say we say we believe these same things that you say you believe. And this is one of the reasons why why the doc why the documentary has the plus, and it’s titled Black plus evangelicals, talking about being this this in between experience. There’s a lot of Black evangelicals, they had this experience in a parachurch group or in, a an a predominantly white evangelical church, and they’re like, I love what I’m learning about the Bible. I I I’m I’m I’m getting so much information, and I and I and I appreciate what I’m learning. And I like my new friends, so to speak. But then there winds up being differing priorities about the things that, of course, we should talk about as, important Christian issues in the horizontal reality of life. And for a lot of black evangelicals, especially when that came to questions of race, there wound up being either apathy toward those things all the way to people being accused of being divisive. I mean, I wish I could say that that was only in the past. That still happens, actually. And because of that, for a lot of Black evangelicals, even if they were in a lot of, whether they were in para church groups like the Navigators or Crew or whether they’re parts of denominations, whether it’s the PCA, Southern Baptist Convention, Anglican Church North America, whatever it is, a lot of people have had this experience of I’m there, I we we say we believe the same things, but I wind up with a crisis of belonging because, it’s like the majority gets to say which issues are the ones that matter. The ones that I want to bring up are either maybe given lip service, but aren’t there doesn’t seem to be as much of a full court press on addressing those issues. And for a lot of people, their excitement leads to a kind of, frustration. Mhmm.
Lisa Fields: Let’s let’s talk about a prominent figure in black evangelicalism. Let’s talk about Tom Skinner. Tell our audience who Tom Skinner
Dr. Vincent Bacote: is. So Tom Skinner, who sadly died at the age of 53, I think it was, ’53 or ’56 in the middle of the nineteen nineties, was definitely what you would call a singular figure. So, he was a gang leader who got converted, who started his own ministry and whose ministry blew up, and he formed an organization called Tom Skinner Associates. And so Tom Skinner became, in a way, kind of like a Black Billy Graham. He held crusades. In the documentary, has, you know, we have some clips of showing when you had these crusades. It looks a lot like a miniature version of Billy Graham crusades, these things happening in Harlem, for example. And the the reason he’s most prominent in our documentary is because he gave an address at the nineteen seventy Urbana Conference in the middle of the week called The Liberator Has Come, and there had been a concerted effort to get more minorities to come to that 1971 after the the the the black students who were there being frustrated with a small number who were there in the 1967 Urbana. Their campaign worked, and and they it also worked to get Skinner to speak. Skinner gives this address about a holistic gospel. And when it ends when he pronounces that the liberator has come, it’s like the second it finished, the the applause, the response was explosive. And of course, as Bill Pinnell mentions, he goes, most of those kids were white, And they’re the ones who are just blown away by this, affirming this. And so the reason that that’s so so huge is that, okay, you’ve got this black leader speaking to this predominantly white audience, and they’re the ones saying, we’re with you. We really get this. And so it’s it’s a hinge moment because it seems like we’re being heard. Because, I mean, he made sure in the way that he talked about that he’s talking about the gospel, but let’s say if you talk about the gospel, you have to attend to these lived realities that especially these lived realities that have happened in in the West and certainly in The United States Of America around slavery and racism, not only those, but definitely those. And, you know, it’s one of those moments where it’s like, oh, we’re really being heard, and are what kind of changes might happen? Now it’s true that for some people that were in that room, predominantly white people, in other words, some of the white people were in that room, it changed their approach to the way that they wanted to do ministry. But Bill Pannell notes in the documentary that some of the leadership also was kind of scared of what happened because they didn’t know what to do with all these white kids losing their minds in response to this black preacher, losing their minds in response to, you know, this black preacher in the middle of of the week. And I think that gets that points out an interesting, I think, conundrum that a lot of times black evangelicals have had to deal with. There seems to be a stated commitment to saying we need to be together, in ministry together, pursuing these ends together, you know, a a multi ethnic kingdom. But when it comes to the nitty gritty of it and particularly when it comes to really taking seriously, really, the complicated reality of dealing with a range of African Americans because some people are gonna be, they’re gonna be kind of neutral in terms of their emotions to you. Other people, they’re glad to be involved, but I mean, but they really do have a burden in their saddle. Mhmm. And and people might think, why do they seem to be kind of upset all the time? It’s like, well, no. They’ve got a burden to to talk about, and they’ve got experiences that they gotta work through, and they’re expecting these gospel people to help them work through all this and to acknowledge this and to be committed to trans committed to transforming those things. And so you’ve got this whole diversity of experience. And of course, that’s not what the white majority has been focused on knowing about or developing the competence to address. And so there’s, I think, you know, this kind of of nervousness about, well, what do I do with this? Right? And, and of course, what I do with this often winds up means being not a whole lot. Mhmm. And some people, they stick it out and they and they and they, to this date, inhabit evangelical orbit in terms of the institutional evangelical institutions. But, others will say, I’m just gonna go be part of a traditional Black church, or, I’m gonna start my own thing, or or whatever it is. And so it’s always been this complicated reality, to deal with. And and but but Skinner is such an important figure. Now here’s an interesting thing. So that’s 1970. Skinner, you know, so let’s say this is like the mega wattage moment. It’s like Tom Skinner. Right? You know? He had a radio program, O. Moody. And of course, the reason he had that radio program and there’s a lot of support for that program because mainly you had this, again, incredible communicator. Mhmm. Being on the radio, basically doing this kind of, you know, sort of standard evangelical, you know, internal piety type of emphasis. And so that was fine, but then at some point he starts talking about more holistic questions about how we need to address urban crises, how we need to, you know, really attend to matters of justice. And so, and we show in the film, we have the clip of it, a picture of the actual letter. He got a letter from Moody Institute, Moody Bible Institute, saying, We’re canceling your program because it’s become too political. And so Tom Skinner got canceled. And so you might say that if he’s on the mountaintop of the evangelical movement in a way in 1970, he is experiencing, at least with some, a relegation, a marginalization, in the evangelical movement because he wanted to articulate a holistic gospel. And and here’s the thing about this. That’s a kind of paradigm of what a lot of people have experienced in terms of their evangelical as long as as long as you keep the message within certain guardrails, then everybody’s fine, Everybody will platform you. But if you start talking about a holistic gospel around certain things, then the nervousness makes people, you know, start questioning you and it’s and sometimes people, they get canceled, deplatformed, or there winds up being ways that people are have are experiencing more conflict, and people and people either leave or they’re asked to leave. And and and and I think the the frustrating thing about it is, you know, is that happening because people are just afraid of what might happen? Is is it and and and the thing is, look, I don’t know what’s going inside the minds of people when they when when all these things were happening. Is it are there certain changes you’re afraid of? Are there, or or is it just such a great uncertainty about what all these changes could be that people say, I just wanna be comfortable? Mhmm. And and and and I and and can’t we agree to say that, look, we all love Jesus. We all have we all committed to the same Bible, let’s sing Kumbaya together and be happy that we’re all committed to the Bible, and that’s the thing we focus on. And let’s say, you know, that we hope that God eventually does something for these problems. But for us, let’s focus on arguably a mostly vertical articulation of the Christian faith. And of course, and for some minorities, they’re fine with that, but a lot of people, they’re like, you know what? I’m at decision time, and I’ve gotta decide. Do I stay or do I go? And here’s one of the interesting things about this in terms of documentary. One of the reasons I wanted the documentary to be done is after 2016, a lot of evangelicals that were articulating their frustrations with their experience a lot of black evangelicals articulating their frustrations with institutional evangelicalism, and they were at a moment of decision. And they were deciding, do I stay or do I go? Some people have stayed, some people have left, you know, gone to other contexts. But what the way that some people would respond to that on social media, for example, would be to suggest that their that their experience was, like, the first time that it happened. It’s like, no, this is actually, unfortunately, washed. It’s a cycle. It’s a cycle. It’s wash, rinse, and repeat. Yeah. Mhmm. And, and so I wanted people to see that, but I also wanted them to see that there are people who experienced that, but their response to that did in some cases, they can they stayed where they were and and still in different ways tried to navigate challenges and make change. Other people would move to other contexts and still try to, you know, have fruitful ministry in some other way. The point being is that they stayed in the game. And I think one of the things that sometimes happens with the way that that the piling on about about the negative experiences would happen to social media is that for some people, everything becomes about the complaining and the frustration, which which which that needs to happen, that needs to be processed. But the so what or or the what’s next, doesn’t get articulated as much. And it’s almost as if the negative experiences removed people from their agency to believe that there’s something that they still have to do. Mhmm. You know, that there’s an Ephesians two ten, works that God has for them to do, and they’re still there for you to do. You might wanna doing them somewhere else, because where you thought you would do it with, purportedly, the Bible people, there’s a lot of inertia there. You have to get into another lane. Other people, like Ruth Bentley talks about, she stayed, she was on Wheaton’s board. Some people, they say other people, it’s not for them to stay. But are people discerning what the lane is knowing that they still do have this opportunity for fruitful ministry? It just may be in a different place, unfortunately. And And sometimes I think the frustration winds up obscuring the fact that, okay, there’s still work for us to do, and you can do that work, and you can still be a person who’s hopeful even as you describe your great disappointment, even devastation, betrayal, being duped. I mean, whatever language you want to use about what you thought was gonna happen with the good news people. Mhmm. So to me, that’s a really important another important reason for the documentary.
Lisa Fields: Well, thank you, Doctor. Nabayko. How can people watch the documentary? You said it was on YouTube. Is there like a website with all the information, all those things?
Dr. Vincent Bacote: So, there are a couple of different places. You can just look up Black and Evangelical documentary on YouTube and you will find it. You can look up, blackandevangelical.com, blackasinthethewordandevangelical.com. That will take you to a website that we’ve created on my Center for Black Christian Ethics, where we have the film, and the trailer, and also what we’ve created, some resources, we’ve created a study guide, we’re developing short form content from it’s forty hours of content in terms of the interviews, so there’s a whole lot more. This is obviously not in this ninety four minute documentary, so So we’re we’re we’re producing more content from that. So we’re we’re building that out. And so that that’s a great place to go, a hub where we’re continuing to build and expand with the Black Evangelical Project. Yeah. And how can people get in contact with you on social? At Vincent Baycoat or at v Baycoat, depending upon which, place it is. Instagram and Facebook. I had to get off of x for my the state of my soul. So and I’m also on threads.
Lisa Fields: Well, thank you, doctor Vayko. This has been a great conversation. Y’all make sure y’all watch Black and Evangelical, on the platform see he already mentioned. Remember, you can support and see all our past episodes at you through project.org. Remember to get my book, When Faith I mean, I’m saying the old book. You can get that one too, When Faith Disappoints. But When Heroes Fall, wherever books are sold, remember, we cannot do what we do without generous support from people like you. So consider being a monthly giver or a one time giver at g3project.org, hitting that donate tab. Until next time, grace and peace and god bless.