Although evangelicals have been the flavor of the month for some time in the mainstream media, it’s rare that you see a thoughtful profile on one of them. Conservative evangelicals are distasteful to much of the media on the Eastern seaboard, so the search has been on to find someone who is more palatable to mainstream media tastes.
And thus Shane Claiborne, one of the more interesting Gen X thinkers out there, was a perfect choice for a recent Washington Post Magazine piece.
He’s spent more than two decades living in inner-city Philly; he got some serious cred traveling to Iraq during the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and doing time in Calcutta helping Mother Teresa. He has hung out with the unglamorous poor and stayed on message for a long time.
On a gloomy Tuesday morning in April, the Christian activist Shane Claiborne was in the studio of WCPN, Cleveland’s NPR affiliate, waiting to go on air. The overhead lights glinted off his thick-rimmed glasses. The 43-year-old had spent the past five weeks on a national tour, living on a retrofitted school bus, speaking at community centers and churches every night, trying to accelerate regional movements against gun violence. His collaborator, Mike Martin, a Mennonite blacksmith from Colorado, was sitting to his left…
The story then refers to the verse from Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
Claiborne and Martin had been enacting the verse on tour. They were promoting a book they had written — “Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence” — and at every stop, they were using Martin’s forge to convert a rifle into a garden tool. The point was to give communities a chance to grieve, but also to convince them that change was possible. It all reflected the broader project that has made up Claiborne’s career: promoting what might be called an alternative version of evangelical Christianity, one more concerned with social justice than with personal salvation. Or, as he would put it to me later, a bit wryly: “Getting Christians to connect their faith to issues that I think matter to God and are affecting our neighbors.”…
Philadelphia has been Claiborne’s home for 27 years. He moved there from rural East Tennessee for college, and his career as an activist began during his junior year, when he and some classmates got involved in advocacy for the city’s homeless population. He and his wife, Katie Jo Claiborne, now live near the epicenter of Philadelphia’s heroin crisis, working with a nonprofit Claiborne co-founded that provides food and housing assistance to the poor.
After describing a conversation Claiborne had with a gun-rights advocate, there is this:
This brief exchange captured Claiborne’s dynamic with the Christian right at large — which is to say, with most of his fellow white evangelicals. He believes that as a group, they’ve lost their bearings, and for 16 years, he’s been trying to get them back on course, by calling constant attention to the example of Christ.
What follows, for those who haven’t heard of Claiborne, is an intro to this unusual activist who’s walking the walk, as we say. The photos show a fairly well-groomed-looking guy, but when I met up with Claiborne some 15 years ago, he wore a uniform that he never seemed to change; a bandana over dreds, an earring and an off-white shirt that looks like the upper half of a Franciscan habit. You can see a video of him back in 2008 here.
As the reporter follows Claiborne around the country on a 37-city tour for his newest book, I think he does a good job of bringing us up to date with whom Claiborne is, starting with where he was born: Maryville, deep in the hills of eastern Tennessee. He grew up Pentecostal but swerved toward the Anabaptists around the time he hit college age.
His most obvious predecessor is Jim Wallis, the 71-year-old founder of the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners. Wallis was a media fixture during the George W. Bush administration, and his 2005 book “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It” spent weeks on the bestseller charts. Wallis helped Claiborne early in his career, and the two remain friendly.
If I have a complaint, it’s that the piece sidetracked into space wasters like the swipe at Jerry Falwell Jr. that had nothing to do with the gist of the piece.
Further down, there were eight paragraphs that went into a history of the Religious Right, much of which has been said before and wasn’t necessary to the piece. Instead of the heavy concentration on politics, I would have liked to have seen more bio on Claiborne himself. And what about his wife, Katie Jo? It’s a shame she is barely mentioned. What kind of woman would marry a complex guy like Claiborne? We’re not going to find out here.
Listen to the video atop this piece. Claiborne is a quote machine. I would have liked to have read more of them in this piece.
Fortunately, the article swings back toward community, one of the first things Claiborne was known for. That’s what attracted me toward interviewing him some 14 years ago, just before he and other activists announced a new group called Red Letter Christians at the National Press Club in 2006. I’ve spent my life researching folks who live in intentional communities, so I was greatly interested to hear of his work in the September 2005 issue of Christianity Today, which featured him in a cover story about the “new monasticism.”
That movement didn’t go very far, but Claiborne hung on in Philly. What intrigued me was how he was refusing to commercialize his group. As I described him in my 2008 book Quitting Church:
Still trying to live the simple lifestyle, Claiborne showed up at the press conference in his trademark brown bandanna and khaki baggy pants and tunic. His group is snowed under with requests by people who want to come visit, spend time hanging out, join the community or at least interview them. He listed several prestigious media organizations he had turned down because it was too hard to have an authentic life in a poor neighborhood with television cameras in tow.
At the time, I was researching what would be my 2009 book Days of Fire and Glory, about how large community in Houston, with 400 people in households, was inundated with visits by media, curiosity seekers and casual visitors to the point where it was difficult to live any kind of authentic life among themselves. It took years for people much older than Claiborne to grasp how there can be too much of a good thing.
In 2006, I was intrigued to see how wise this young man (at the time) was; how he embraced poverty with apparently not a look back and how he was willing to stick it out long term in a Philadelphia ghetto.
So I’m glad the Post discovered this guy, albeit a decade late, but back in 2006, evangelicals –- from the Left as well as the Right — weren’t really in fashion. Then politics intervened.
Now the final barrier: Evangelical women. Claiborne is interesting, but he’s still a guy. Why are articles on evangelicals so often about the men?
Back in October, I emailed Richard Just, the magazine’s editor, about profiling interesting evangelical women. The most daring among them are the pro-life activists like Abby Johnson, Kristan Hawkins and Lila Rose. Also Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life, Aimee Murphy of Life Matters Journal/Rehumanize International and Destiny Herndon Del la Rosa of New Wave Feminists. I had done a 2017 profile of Donald Trump advisor Paula White for this magazine so surely there was room for a few more.
I never heard back.