Two Evangelical Leaders, Jim Wallis and Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, on ‘Radical Faith,’ Climate Change and More
RUTH GRAHAM Was it you?
MEYAARD-SCHAAP No, it certainly wasn’t!
You know, we recycled. But if the truck didn’t pick it up at the curb, I don’t know if we would have done that either. I don’t remember derision, necessarily, around climate change or environmentalism. Growing up, what I mostly remember was silence.
Key Insights From ‘Taking the Lead’
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Conversations about leadership. We asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead. Here are some key pieces of advice from the “Taking the Lead” series:
Women’s basketball coaches. Cheryl Reeve and Janice Washington have very different levels of experience; one is a three-time W.N.B.A. Coach of the Year and the other is the new head coach at Lincoln University. But they both believe that, as Reeve put it, “the biggest challenge facing women’s basketball is societal norms and being held down.”
Climate activists. Despite a decades-long age difference, Bill McKibben and Xiye Bastida agreed that “for an activist to have hope is the most important thing,” as Ms. Bastida put it. Mr. McKibben added: “If there is hope, it lies in people deciding to join together to do this work.”
Fashion designers. Christopher John Rogers and Dries Van Noten discussed what it takes to maintain independence in an industry where conglomerates seem to set the fashion calendar. “I want to make a place where people feel comfortable to express themselves, to learn, to create, to challenge me as well,” Mr. Rogers said.
I had an older brother whom I respect a ton, three years older than me, who studied abroad in New Zealand at a Christian program called Creation Care Study Program. He came back totally transformed. The climax of his transformation was, soon after he came home, he announced to my Midwest family that he was now a vegetarian because of the choices he had made. And that went over as you might expect. To my parents’ eternal credit, they didn’t quite understand it, but they wanted to and they worked to understand it.
That sent me reeling, because I didn’t know anybody like me who had ever made that choice. I had a caricature in my mind of people who were vegetarians. They were throwing red paint on fur coats on the weekend. So it was painful because I needed to either suspend my own assumptions and change the way I thought and change my assumptions about the world, or write my brother off as one of those people that I thought was crazy.
And, you know, thanks be to God that my brother was patient and generous in bringing me along. And he was kind of the first person that helped me understand that his choice to become a vegetarian and the other choices he made after returning from that experience wasn’t him rejecting our Christian faith and the Christian values that have been instilled in us. It was him living more deeply into them.
WALLIS The parallel here is there were particular relationships that were transformational.
How have you brought faith into activist spheres that are largely secular?
WALLIS The left wants to say the answer is to become more and more secular, leave religion. I think the answer to bad religion is better religion. It’s our faith, [Kyle] and I were raised in it, and we didn’t just become liberal, lefty, secular. I would say more than ever, the future is going to be leaning into faith. With secularism and dying churches, it’s going to be only those who lean into a deep passion — I would say radical faith — only that will survive.
