[Delusional by Andre Henry]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. The music is the song Delusional by my next guest, Andre Henry. Some of the lyrics there, "It must be good to be you. Only believe what you want and anything that you don't know. Well, that just couldn't be true." Andre Henry, award-winning singer-songwriter, activist, columnist for Religion News Service has a new book that's been described as part memoir part manifesto that chronicles his personal political journey from growing up in a mostly white evangelical Christian environment and feeling a patriotic love for this country that a kid would feel to an awakening that shut the foundations of his faith and his early political assumptions.

Following in the footsteps of fellow Georgian and fellow Christian, Martin Luther King, he now advocates nonviolent civil disobedience and much more of it than we're seeing in the country or the world right now to bring about more racial progress. Now on Friday's show, as some of you heard, we talked to a leader of the group Extinction Rebellion about their nonviolent civil disobedience for action on the climate. I think we'll hear something similar or at least related in part of the conversation to come. Andre Henry is angrier than his younger self, but there is also a politics of spirituality and joy, or I should say a politics and spirituality of joy in this book and that you can also hear in his music.

With us now is Andre Henry whose new book is called All the White Friends I Couldn't Keep: Hope--and Hard Pills to Swallow--About Fighting for Black Lives. Andre, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Andre Henry: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with you as a kid and the milieu in which you grew up. You write, "I grew up in the American south, in the world of white evangelicalism. I attended their churches and youth camps, trained for ministry at their schools, preached at their churches. For a long time, I felt like a beloved part of that world. At one point, I even imagined myself making a career in it. Maybe I'd start a church or write Christian books or teach theology." Can you fill in some of the details there for our listeners? Where in the south? How active was your family in religion? How integrated were you into what you call white evangelicalism?

Andre Henry: For sure. I grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia. My family is an immigrant family, they're from Jamaica, and I'm not very religious as a family. We didn't pray together in the mornings or all go to church together like some of the other families I knew growing up, but my grandmother was very devout and she went to an Assemblies of God Church, just a few minutes away from our home. I went to church with her every Sunday, and I was very taken up with the life of the church. I just loved being at church whenever the doors are open. I was involved in every ministry as I grew.

I was part of the children's ministry and then the youth ministry, and as I got into the youth or high school ministry, I would volunteer with the children's ministry and so on. I went to Bible college and eventually became a pastor in the Assemblies of God denomination before I left evangelicalism.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You did go to seminary and you got, if I'm seeing it correctly, two degrees from Christian universities, and you layout early on the influence on your thinking of two iconic men of religion, John, from story of Jesus and Martin Luther King. To what extent is your current political thinking interwoven with Christian spirituality even today?

Andre Henry: That's a great question. Like I talk about in the book, I think that my journey has brought up a lot of questions about what does the Christian spirituality outside of the colonial traditions that we've inherited look like? That's the journey that I'm on right now, but I will say, as I've written somewhere else, that for me, a lot of my thinking about justice and what is right and what is wrong and about social justice, systemic justice or systemic injustice comes from reading the Hebrew prophets that we have in what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. Amos and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Isaiah, those guys were the first to tell me that God cares about the lives of the oppressed.

Brian Lehrer: John, right? The first words of your book really are how you see John as a political truth-teller in his time. Calling out Roman lies and oppression, right?

Andre Henry: Yes, absolutely. John who was a disciple of Jesus and wrote the Book of Revelation. It occurred to me when I was in seminary that this guy is a political prisoner living under Imperial rule in ancient Rome and seeing his comrades and compatriots, fellow subjected people actually coming to worship the Emperor Caesar, who is their oppressor and sheering for the project of empire, which has victimized to them and writes this apocalypse to unveil the violence that the Imperial ideology has meant to hide.

Brian Lehrer: What's your best understanding of how there can be so much conservatism in the name of Christianity if that was central to the Jesus story? Not to mention Jesus' own story, not just John in the ways that you describe.

Andre Henry: I think that a lot of that has to do with the way that Christian theologies have been able to be constructed in the service of empire. I shouldn't say that gently. I'm sure that many conservatives don't read the Book of Revelation or any other part of the Bible in the way that I've just explained except for maybe on the rare occasion that maybe there's some conservative activism against abortion, but even that type of activism that I was familiar with growing up, didn't go to like the systemic analysis of society. It didn't really go to the prophets and especially not to Revelation in the way that I did in the book to explain their position.

Brian Lehrer: It's interesting that you go to the Book of Revelation which I'm not extremely familiar with. I'm a white Jewish guy just for transparency to you, but the way I've seen the Book of Revelation come up in the political discourse over the years is mostly as something from the Right that the real fire and brimstone conservative preachers use to basically say, "Jesus is going to come back. Jews and everybody else are then going to be damned to hell unless they convert." That's the political context of the Book of Revelation when I usually hear it referenced.

Andre Henry: Yes. That's similar to the way that I heard the Book of Revelation used when I was growing up, and it was actually going to Bible college and to seminary where I learned more about trying to understand these texts in their original context and what that might have meant. Seeing just how new those kinds of interpretations of that particular texts are about the rapture and the tribulation.

When really, in context it, seems like this is a follower of Jesus who was seeing the violence of that day and calling it out in an artistic and creative prophetic kind of way, but also in a coded kind of way that only people who understood the symbols that he was invoking, the Exodus, the stories of Daniel and that kind of stuff would understand.

Brian Lehrer: You draw a line from Martin Luther King in his time to your thinking today, including in his use of the words extremist and revolution in the context of his nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns. You write that Dr. King was, "A self-identified extremist for love. In his last years, King spoke of a revolution of values telling a Stanford University audience in 1967, 'I'm still absolutely convinced that nonviolence, massively organized, powerfully executed, militantly developed is still the most potent weapon available to the Black man and his struggle in the United States of America.'"

Then you write, "King was the first of many voices who convinced you that a militant nonviolent approach to racial progress is necessary." Would you talk more about what extremism and revolution have come to mean to you in a nonviolent context?

Andre Henry: For sure, and I invoke Dr. King saying that about himself because when I talk about nonviolent civil resistance and campaigns to actually move racial progress forward, that is the accusation that some people have and not just always an accusation, but people do feel like it's extreme. I felt like it was important for people to be reminded that people like Dr. King was not really moderate in his approach to fighting racism, but he was radical in that.

I think that a lot of people suffer from the same misconception that Dr. King says that he did for a while, which is that we think that racial justice can be achieved by a little change here, a little reform there, but when we start to understand that racism is at the root of how many of these European nations and nations in the Americas were founded, then it's a radical problem that needs radical solutions.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is singer-songwriter, activist, and religion news service columnist, Andre Henry. His new book is called All the White Friends I Couldn't Keep: Hope--and Hard Pills to Swallow--About Fighting for Black Lives. If anybody has a question or a similar story to tell or anything else, 212-433-WNYC, maybe you're a fan of his music, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. You also write that as your understanding and outspokenness developed, "People began to vanish from my life. Many of them were cherished friendships with deep roots, but those bonds proved to be brittle as I began to speak up about racism and revolution."

This goes to the title of your book, I guess, right? All the White Friends I Couldn't Keep. Why did you center that rupture of friendships right in the title of the book?

Andre Henry: Well, the book came out of a open letter that I wrote on my blog a few years ago where I addressed the white friends that I'm referring to in the book. As I was working on that, expanding the thoughts that I unpacked there, which was basically the story and political awakening felt compelled to join the fight for Black lives, and the white friend that I'd had up to that moment became my biggest opposer. There was all of this conflict contention between us to the point where those relationships broke. I had to leave them in order to pursue that path so that's how that became the center of it.

As I was working on the book, the original title of that blog just was the working title and it felt like such a great title to everyone on the team that we wanted to keep it and preserve it. I think that it shows when you look at the title and the subtitle detention already of this journey of me wanting to invest my body in the struggle for Black lives and facing this opposition from these people that I really loved and considered family and close friends.

Brian Lehrer: How have you put your body on the line, or what kinds of nonviolent civil disobedience actions have you been engaged in?

Andre Henry: Oh, it's been several years now so I've been in the streets marching after the killing of my neighbor, JR Thomas, in Pasadena. I convened a year-long public liturgy at the doors of the Pasadena police station in the wake of his killing. I've founded different activist groups, [laughs] I've planned campaigns and caravans since 2016, so yes, that kind of thing.

Brian Lehrer: How would you like to see it ramped up? Because I think that's part of your central organizing principle, right? That sufficient racial progress is not going to be made in this country through diversity programs and corporations through civil discourse in coffee shops not by those kinds of things alone but by-

Andre Henry: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: -ramping up large-scale nonviolent civil disobedience. What's your vision?

Andre Henry: I spoke with Erica Chenoweth who is a renowned scholar on nonviolent struggle. Her work along with her research partner, Maria J. Stephan unearth a lot of truths about a nonviolent struggle that are little known. For instance, the nonviolence struggle has been twice as effective as arm struggles around the world. That no regime had been able to withstand just 3.5% of the population and sustain nonviolent action and so on. I bring that up for context just to say that in our recent conversation Dr. Chenoweth told me that we're losing more battles around the world through nonviolence struggle than we're winning.

Not because nonviolent struggle is inherently weak, but because people don't know a lot about the strategic approaches that have been used throughout history, and the diversity of tactics that they already used. We're not using the most effective means of nonviolent struggle, and this is what I'm arguing for in the book is saying that it's great that people feel fired up when something terrible happens to use people power and take to the streets, but we need to learn from previous movements how they use that nonviolent people power in a strategic way to get more results. Otherwise, we're going to keep running in circles than doing the symbolic actions that don't actually disrupt the flow of racist power.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned in the intro, our segment on Friday with a leader of Extinction Rebellion, the direct action group for action on climate. They had an action in New York on Friday morning at the distribution centers for the New York Times Wall Street Journal and USA Today because of very shortcomings on climate that the group perceives with those publications, and 13 people got arrested. I'm curious if you know them or see the seeds of coalition or a connection to some of what they're doing.

Andre Henry: Yes, I am a fan of Extinction Rebellion, also Sunrise Movement, and other environmental organizations. What I really appreciate about Extinction Rebellion is that they do escalate in that way. It's a nonviolent escalation, right? Where it can be very costly with them, and it's not the Black Lives Matter movement doesn't do that as well, but there totally is, I think, a huge opportunity for coalition between groups that focus on racial justice and groups that focus on environmental justice.

In fact, Extinction Rebellion LA when they were founded, they had the intersection of race and climate in their four core values acknowledging that the effects of the climate crisis and just environmental racism already disproportionately affect Black and brown people. Climate justice is definitely a racial justice issue so there's definitely room for a coalition there.

Brian Lehrer: Carmella in Brooklyn wants to go back to our discussion of the Book of Revelation. Carmella, you're on WNYC with Andre Henry. Hello?

Carmella: Yes. Hey there, I'd just like to make the point that the Book of Revelation is also a major obstacle to environmental activism. A lot of evangelicals think the world will end before we will ever [inaudible 00:18:11] consequences, and I guess they currently see the real world as merely a test of sin or virtue for the world to come. I'm just wondering if he has any ideas on how to impact this view of the Book of Revelation in the evangelical community.

Brian Lehrer: Carmella, thank you. That's an interesting premise that if you believe that the world is going to end before climate change causes its worst catastrophic effects then there isn't an urgency about the climate.

Andre Henry: Right, and that is very true. Now, I can't really tell people how to get evangelicals to think differently because I think that one of my points in the book is that some people hold their positions because of their political visions and their political commitments. I actually argue to build power with people who share the same values as you. The Book of Revelation has been used in that way, and I think that the way that I'm using it in the book also speaks to the same way that people use that same book to excuse racism.

Well, racism isn't going to end until Jesus comes back and raptures us all, but there's also a way to view that text as bringing us into the proper stewardship of the world in that at the end of that book, God creates a new heaven and a new earth for humans to live on. It says the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nation, so there's a way to look at that text and see, "Okay, this book is not really about blowing things up but about recreation," especially if you're not reading it literally, which I'm not.

Brian Lehrer: Daniel in Bayside, Queens, you're on WNYC with Andre Henry. Hello, Daniel.

Daniel: Hello, Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. I've learned English listening to you. I love your show. God bless you. Regarding to the topic with your guest. I'm Colombian and I feel I identify a little bit with how he felt at his young age. It's just sometimes you find Christianity around you or where you are, sometimes it lets you down, but at the end what Christian means or Christianity means is follow Jesus. What Jesus did is he just accepted everyone regardless of their opinions, they were right or left, just [unintelligible 00:20:45].

I get the point from your guys, sometimes it's hard to feed them the dilemma of living in as a whole, as a community. It's tough then, but that's why he's Jesus. Anyway, I just wanted to say that. Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Daniel: Thank you for that--

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for the nice words at the beginning, and if you learned English in part by listening to this show, I'm incredibly honored. Thank you very much. Andre, anything you want to say to him? I know you write about a particular kind of dilemma in your book, and he used the word dilemma.

Andre Henry: Yes, I do write about that dilemma. I appreciate the comment. I just think that the conversation that I'm trying to raise is much bigger than, what does Christianity mean? What does that look like? All that kind of stuff. I hope that the main idea that people take from the book has more to do with really engaging the civil resistance part that's necessary to disrupt the flow of racist power and structural racism in the world.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we're going to run out of time in a few minutes. What are your goals with that? Martin Luther King, when he did his major nonviolence civil disobedience direct action campaigns, those were pointing toward things that eventually happened like the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Do you have any particular goals that you would articulate if a movement like that were to ramp up again today?

Andre Henry: Yes. Well, I think that the Black Lives Matter movement and the movement for Black lives has raised some of the things that I would say, I think that for one, the racial wealth gap would be closed. Basically, the vision of an economy and a political system and a culture where community care is at the center and neighborhoods are empowered to make sure that all of their residents have their basic needs met is really the vision I think that's an anti-racist vision because, at the end of the day, racism was really just about deciding that some people deserve or don't deserve to have their basic needs met because they're not human.

Brian Lehrer: You want to say anything as we go out the door and queue up the track we started with one more time. What you're doing musically?

Andre Henry: Absolutely. Sure. I'm working on new music always. I think that the book definitely covers my decolonizing journey, and I'm trying to do that in my music as well. Asking good questions about the ideas and the common sense that's been passed down to us. The thing that I always like to leave people with is that, I know that the book is hard to read, and the things that I have to say may be hard to hear for many people, but it doesn't have to be this way because we have that power to change and to write a new chapter of history through collective action.

Brian Lehrer: Andre Henry's new book is All the White Friends I Couldn't Keep: Hope--and Hard Pills to Swallow--About Fighting for Black Lives. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Andre Henry: Thanks for having me.

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