Frank Peretti's America Episode 3: Cosmic Clash of Modernism vs. Spiritual Forces (Interview with Lisa Sharon Harper)

Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel, founder of Freedom Road--a consulting group dedicated to helping people do justice more justly (Check out her excellent podcast here).

“I wasn’t taught to interpret Scripture. I was just given Scripture and told to do it.”

19 min: Peretti’s books were a spiritualization of the culture wars which launched in the 1980s through the moral majority. 

26 min: Viv Grigg says that the “powers” move us away from the ethics of God. What does it mean to be ruled by God? It means to come under the constitution of God. Belief for the Hebrews was not a mind thing, it was in the body, and it has to be lived out in the world. And that’s what ethics are. 

31 min: In the book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America the authors state that the one way for white evangelicals to change their worldview is to be immersed in communities that are unlike themselves

32 min: “The good news is that Jesus, the king of the kingdom of God, has come to earth to confront the powers of the earth who are hell bent on crushing the image of God.”

40 min: Recommendations for people who are deconstructing but still want to be aware of power and principalities: immerse yourself in the teachings of communities of color. 

The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can be Made Right by Lisa Sharon Harper

The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone

Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman 

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas

In many ways it is a uniquely European and western project to separate the spirit and the body and to secularize the world. 

48 min: “I think that the unspoken project of western civilization has been to usurp God, to become God, to control everything.”

49:30 Race: A Theological Account by J. Kameron Carter. 

“The only way to live without connection to the spirit world is to think that you are God, and to live at a level where you don’t experience oppression, where you ARE the powers.” 

“I really believe that it was used to forward a political movement, and it was one that was consciously galvanizing white evangelicals to rally around a political ideology that they knew . . . would ultimately result in the winning of the original culture war, which began with Brown V. the Board of Education.” The culture war is not just about sexual politics, but it is also about race. It is about the desired rule and control of white men over space. 

49 min: “The Spirit of God comes against oppression.”

D.L. recommends William Stringfellow’s book An Ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange Land. A white theologian in the 70s, his understanding of principalities in the Bible shifts from the personal to the institutional.