It is unlikely that the name Shane Claiborne will be new for Radix readers. Along with being co-founder of Red Letter Christians and a founding member of The Simple Way, Shane is known as an activist, speaker, and best-selling author (including, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, and Executing Grace – How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us). Maybe more importantly, he is known for his love, compassion, and humility. And that gives him real credibility.
In this interview, Shane shares about what he currently is doing, what activism means to him, and how God sees people. Sprinkled throughout is hope, enthusiasm and joy—all attributes that Shane wears well.
You can also find out more about Shane here:
Facebook: facebook.com/ShaneClaiborne
Twitter: @shaneclaiborne
Instagram: @shane.claiborne
Radix: We are very excited to be able to talk with you. Both Joy and I, and Radix too, appreciate the weight of your voice, vision, and work. It speaks of the heart of our Father. Thank you for being with us. To start off, please tell us a bit about yourself.
Shane: It’s wonderful to talk to you. I grew up in east Tennessee, and my ancestors grew up in the hills where Dolly Parton grew up. My great-grandfather was a mail delivery man who rode on horseback. Those people from the hills are my people. I fell in love with Jesus and the Bible Belt and dedicated my life to Jesus when I was in junior high school. I’ve been figuring it out ever since. I went to Eastern University, about a half-hour outside of Philadelphia. I studied sociology and the Bible. I love how Karl Barth said we need to hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn’t become a ticket to get into heaven and an excuse to ignore the world we live in. Our faith should fuel us to engage the injustices of the world and transform the world from what it is to what God wants it to be. That’s what I’ve been up to for the last twenty-five years.
In Philly, where I live, we’ve got a little community on the north side called The Simple Way. Then there are a bunch of other organizations over the years that I have started, from affordable housing to turning guns into garden tools. My wife Katie and I live in a “skoolie,” an old school bus converted into a solar-powered tiny house with a composting toilet. Hallelujah! You know, we’re just living our best life now.
Radix: I was just listening to an interview with you, Randy Knie, and Kyle Whitaker while I was driving through an upscale part of Vancouver yesterday, and you mentioned your wife telling you not to kill the spiders in the bus because they get rid of the stinkbugs.
Shane: I’m not sure about the stinkbug theory, but I’m rolling with it. We’ve got a pet spider named Wanda that lives up in the corner. Katie named her. But as long as Wanda stays on Katie’s side, I’m cool with it.
Radix: That’s tremendous.
Shane: I have had many adventures over the years. I have written a few books. I wrote The Irresistible Revolution, then Jesus for President, and then a lovely project called Common Prayer. Then recently, Executing Grace, about the death penalty, and Beating Guns. I am finishing a book right now about what a better ethic of life would look like, and how everybody is made in the image of God.
There have been a lot of people who have shaped me over the years. I had a wonderful opportunity to work with Mother Teresa for a little while in India. That was very formative for me. I worked at Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago—sort of an evangelical megachurch. Those were two pretty different worlds: Mother Teresa and Willow Creek. They reflect a broad spectrum of community and the people who helped shaped me.
As a follower of the Prince of Peace, as Jesus is so often called, I have become increasingly passionate about becoming a peacemaker in the world. That has led me to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other conflict zones to try to stand against violence in all its ugly manifestations. I have a passion for life, and that means helping to end the death penalty, addressing gun violence, standing against war, and caring for the environment. I am pro-life, not just “pro-birth.”
Radix: The experiences that you have had, and the projects you invest your life in, reflect a cultivated way of seeing the other and of seeing people, which is a reflection of how you’ve come to believe God sees us. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Shane: When God made the first human being and breathed life into dirt, it was beautiful. There is this refrain through every stage of creation: God says “It is good.” When he gets to humans, he says, “It is very good.” But it’s also good for us to be helping each other. After God makes the first human, he implies it’s not good for us to be alone. We’re made together; we are made in the image of God, and God is a reflection of community. There is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit: and it’s in that image we are made. That’s why we long to love and be loved and belong.
That’s why I feel so passionately any time a life is crushed or desecrated. Because that image matters to God. He takes it personally when we crush another image.
Radix: The first time the word sin is used in the Bible isn’t when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, but for the sin of Cain, who killed his sibling. That murder was also the inaugural act done outside of the Garden of Eden. We have been doing that ever since. This shapes how I think about sin and the sacredness of life.
We are also told in that story that the bloods cried out from the ground. The bloods cried out to God. It’s actually in the present tense and it’s plural. It’s not blood, but bloods. Some of my Rabbi friends that know Scripture and Hebrew tell me it’s important to get that distinction. It’s not just Abel’s blood that cries out, but any blood that is shed over the centuries cries out to God. The blood of Michael Brown in Ferguson; the blood of Breonna Taylor; and the blood of Ahmaud Arbery’s – all that blood cries out. George Floyd’s and the Native Americans in the U.S. and Canada and people all over the world who have been crushed: all of that blood cries out to God.
Radix: I love hearing the passion and the love with which you speak. People don’t often put the words activist and love together in the same sentence. What does being an activist mean to you?
Shane: Sometimes folks say that I’m a Christian activist and I’m not sure there are any Christians who are not active. Love is a verb. Love and justice require more than just petitions and doctrinal statements. They require action with our lives. That’s what has caught people’s attention throughout the history of Christianity, and it’s deeply embedded in the Scripture. The New Testament talks about faith and works. It’s all throughout the Scripture. We can’t be inactive as Christians. Love requires something of us. Scripture says that greater love has no one than this, than to lay their life down for another person. There are many ways we can put our bodies and lives in the way of injustice and stand up for the life and dignity of everyone.
There is a great verse in 1st John that asks, “How we can say that we love God and then pass right by our neighbors in need and not show compassion on them?” In that same epistle, we are told that no one has seen God, but if we love one another, God’s love is revealed and made manifest. The way that we make God’s love visible is by loving those around us. Jesus said that people will know we are Christians by our love. It breaks my heart that we’ve often reduced Christianity to a doctrinal statement. The things I believe and hold true are very important, but let’s remember that God so loved the world that he didn’t just send a doctrinal statement.
God said, “The Word became flesh, put on skin, and moved in among us.” That is what Jesus is. I think we are losing a lot of young people in the Church not because we’ve made the Gospel too hard, but because we’ve made it too easy and we have reduced Christianity to a doctrinal statement. The truth is that a lot of young people want a revolution; they want to change the world. And when I look at Jesus, that’s exactly a big piece of what he had in mind.
An activist is not someone who is just a reactionary or always deconstructing and protesting. I like how one of my friends puts it: “We are not just protesting, we’re ‘protestifying.’”
Radix: I like that.
Shane: We are not just saying that stuff is wrong; we are proclaiming how things can be made right. God is restoring and redeeming all things. For me and those I work with, who are transforming guns into garden tools, that’s a proclamation: all things can be new. Metal that was crafted to kill can be recrafted to cultivate life. Sometimes I’ll hold up a shovel made out of a gun and say to people, “This is what a gun can look like when it gets born again.”
Radix: I was recently talking to a few friends about you and what you are doing–turning guns into garden tools–and they asked, “Can guns actually make good tools?” I told them I was pretty sure that guns are made with good steel and are super tough.
Shane: You had better believe they are. You have never seen a shovel like these. As a side note, you also see how cheaply some of our own store-bought tools are made, which speaks to our disposable society. We are good at using things and getting rid of them, but we are making garden tools that you can use for the rest of your life.
Radix: You have said a number of times that the Gospel spreads faster by fascination. What you are doing is fascinating and exciting, and we, as Christians, are supposed to have that and be that.
Shane: I’m convinced that the Gospel spreads best not by force but by fascination, and it seems that this is exactly what Jesus is doing. In fact, there is this beautiful Scripture in Luke’s gospel where John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one we’ve been waiting for?” Since John is getting ready to be executed, he is probably a little impatient. Jesus’ response is brilliant: he tells them to go tell John what they’ve seen and heard. It’s an invitation. He is saying, my life speaks for itself.
If people ask me if I am a Christian, do I have credibility? Can I say, “Tell me what you see and what you hear”? I can wear a Jesus t-shirt or display a Jesus bumper sticker, but does my life smell like Jesus? Does it point to Jesus? Because in the end, that’s what matters.
We as Christians have often been known more by who we’ve excluded than for who we have embraced. We have become known for the very self-righteousness that Jesus absolutely called the religious folks out on—being a brood of vipers. I can’t say that, but Jesus did. My point is, we have not always cultivated a reputation as disciples of love.
The Barna Group performed a study that asked young people what they think of when they hear the word Christian. The number one answer was “anti-homosexual,” number two was “judgmental,” and number three was “hypocrite.” That breaks my heart. What didn’t even register for those young folks was the word love, yet that is the one quality Jesus said we are to be known by. We’ve got work to do. Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I believe in trying to be the change we want to see in the Church.
Radix: I think that God has the ultimate personality. Because we share in that image and personality, we can each evidence an aspect of God’s personality. I want you to answer this question because I know I am going to hear God in the answer: what does God really think about people?
Shane: I think back to the verses in Genesis where God said, after making us, that not only was it good, but that humanity was very good. God was stoked, totally thrilled and pumped about humanity. That is one of the reasons why God would have no other idols or images–because God wanted us to be the image bearers of God in the world.
Dorothy Day said the only true atheist is the one who can’t see the image of God in another person. We can hold a child or look into the face of someone who is asking us for change on the street and realize that we are looking into the eyes of God. This is why God doesn’t dwell in temples made by hand. We are literally the temples, the sanctuary in which dwells the holiest of holies. We are where God dwells.
It’s also the place where we are invited to see God. Mother Teresa said that when we look into the eyes of the poor, we can see Jesus in his many disguises. I have seen that over and over again. We can also look in the mirror, and no matter how hard this world wears us down, we can look into that mirror and say, “I am made in the image of God, and no matter who tries to convince me otherwise, the Creator speaks differently.”
We also see in Scripture that the mighty are cast from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. That’s why I think it’s so important to be able to emphasize the dignity of people who have been historically dishonored—people like African Americans, the Indigenous folks, and pretty much anybody who isn’t white. We are all parts of the Body. Now we are seeing the members that have been dishonored being honored. My friend Alexia Salvatierra calls this God’s affirmative action.
Radix: I love what you said about God being stoked with humanity and the importance of seeing the image of God in each face, including our own. I work in chaplaincy, and sometimes there is this tendency with community resource providers to differentiate between the service provider and the recipient. We are providing resources to people, and we are connecting them up with needful things, but there is also a beautiful mutual reciprocity that happens. We, the helpers, get blessed too. Can you speak to that a bit?
Shane: I like that old quote that says, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” I see that in Jesus. He didn’t just come to help the poor. He took on the flesh of everybody who had become marginalized in our world. He could have come as anybody that he liked, but instead he came as a brown-skinned Palestinian Jewish refugee in an occupied land. He was born in a manger because there was no room at the inn. He came from Nazareth where it was said that nothing good could come from it. This is divine solidarity: leaving the comforts of heaven to join the struggle here on earth; not just coming to help the poor, but being born into the margins and then dying among two convicted people.
Jesus also tells his disciples that he no longer calls them servants, but friends. Friendship is a beautiful thing. The professionalization of our social work models, and the ways they are crafted to protect them from liability and all that, creates challenges for a friendship model. I am not knocking social workers. I was one, and in many ways still am. But we can come to see people more as clients and consumers, which is a real challenge to a friendship model.
Mother Teresa always pushed back on professionalization approaches. Her mission was not always the most efficient; it didn’t have the cutting-edge technology. There is valid critique there, but Mother Teresa’s mantra was that we are not called to great things, but to do small things with great love. I have come to realize that someone can feed a lot of people but still have the love part missing. You can create a house for someone that is not a warm home because the person in it is very lonely. You can have good healthcare but still not have someone to hold your hand when you die. As important as our social systems are, friendship and community and love are what we all are really longing for.
There is a tendency within activist circles to want to speak for people, to be the voice for the voiceless. Scripture tells us to be that. But often, I think we end up trying to be voices for people who are not voiceless. These people do have voices—it’s just that too few are listening. Rather than us grabbing the mic, we should pass the mic. Rather than standing in front of people, we should stand beside or behind them. We should amplify their voices instead of trying to be their voices.
Radix: How can we do more meaningful things in our community? Your point about standing behind people is a powerful answer. Can you expand on that a bit?
Shane: Many of us don’t have a compassion problem so much as a proximity problem—a relational problem. It’s not that we don’t care for the poor or those on death row—we just don’t know many of them. Mother Teresa said it can be fashionable to talk about poor people but not fashionable to talk with them. We are very good at talking about people and advocating for people. What we aren’t good at is knowing immigrant neighbors. It’s important that I lean into those spaces. Otherwise, it is so easy to create this gravity towards people who are just like us, politically and culturally. Dr. Martin Luther King lamented that one of the most segregated hours in the world is eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning. As Christians gather to worship, we often mirror the patterns of racial segregation rather than diversity.
We have to go out. That’s Jesus’ commission. He didn’t call for people in prison, or the sick, or the hungry to come to the church. Instead, we are to go out. Sadly, we have been very good at moving out of the neighborhoods that Jesus moved into.
Radix: How can we increase our sense of hospitality to be a better neighbor? Do you have any guideposts for how to do that?
Shane: One of the most important lessons I learned in Calcutta is that you don’t have to go there to find a Calcutta. As Mother Teresa said, Calcutta is everywhere if we only have eyes to see. So we are to pray that God would give us those eyes to see the lonely, the ostracized. It’s also easier to love someone on the other side of the world than on the other side of town. The gravity of the Gospel should pull us towards suffering rather than away from it. The Gospel is truly countercultural. In our culture, we are prone to move away from the people who don’t look like us or think like us. The Gospel is different: we are supposed to be pulled towards the pain of the world.
There are a lot of ways to get there. Frederic Buechner has a great line I am going to paraphrase: We’ve got to take our deepest passions and connect them to the world’s deepest pain. And when our passions meet the world’s pain, then that’s when we find our calling.
We are all wired with different skills, gifts, and talents; the next step is to align those things by putting God’s kingdom first. Then we are serving a higher purpose. And when that happens it’s such a beautiful thing.
I have met robotics engineers who are designing robots that can dismantle land mines. When I asked them how they thought of that idea, they told me they had heard about how children, who were paid almost nothing, were being forced to decommission active landmines. In response, they created robots that could do it so the kids could play in those fields instead.
I know others who are working on clean water technology. A plumber I know told me he was retired and wanted to be a plumber for the neighborhood, so we made a list of everybody who needed work done; in some cases there were people using buckets because their toilets didn’t work. So here is this guy being a missional plumber.
It’s amazing what we can do if we use our gifts. I tell young people, what’s important is not what you are going to do when you grow up, but who are you becoming. The things we do can create change, but what counts is what we are becoming. What kind of lawyer or doctor do we want to become? We all have a choice in how to use and align our gifts with God’s purpose, which is to liberate the captives and redeem the world.
Radix: Is what you are saying exportable? And what are your thoughts on hope?
Shane: Someone asked Mother Teresa how she lifted five hundred thousand people off the streets. She said, I started with one, and it went from there. In Scripture, Jesus gives these images of a mustard seed and yeast—both very small things—making a big difference. Dorothy Day, of the Catholic Worker Movement, said our job is not to get bigger and bigger but to grow smaller and smaller. And isn’t that what God did in Jesus? He put on skin and moved into the neighborhood.
We just need to get out there. Too often we contemplate and overanalyze. Dr. King spoke of paralysis by analysis. What put fire in my bones was seeing too many kids get killed in north Philadelphia. That’s why we are beating guns into plows. I think, too, of wrongfully convicted people like my friend Derek, who spent almost twenty years on death row and dealt with six execution dates, in part because of the color of his skin, before he was declared fully innocent.
One of the best things we can do is tell stories and keep telling them. We need to amplify the voices of the marginalized. There is no shortcut to do it.
I think of the story of the Good Samaritan. One would think that the first two people passing by him, the religious people, would have stopped. Dr. King offered the suggestion that maybe the first passers-by were scared. They were too concerned about what could happen to them. But then the Samaritan stopped. He wasn’t worried about what was going to happen to him; he was more concerned about what was going to happen to the guy in the ditch. That Samaritan was totally ostracized. He wasn’t orthodox; he was of mixed race. Yet Jesus celebrates the Samaritan as the hero, not because he had a doctorate but because he demonstrated compassion. That speaks to hope. Despite the fact that the people who should have done something didn’t, someone else did.
God can use anyone. If he used the excluded person on the fringe, he can use you or me. God spoke to Balaam through his ass! And God has been speaking through asses ever since. If God does choose to speak through us, we shouldn’t think too highly of ourselves. We shouldn’t be putting our trust in anything other than the Spirit of God.
I love that old song, “My faith is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” I think there is a great temptation to put our trust in political parties or in candidates, or even in our own strength. We think that those things can change the world. We have to put our faith in God. And the irony is that God has chosen not to change the world without us. We are invited to be a part of the change, but God is not limited to our hands, even as much as God wants to use our hands.
Radix: If you were able to talk to all the pastors at once, what would you tell them?
Shane: I would tell them we have a discipleship crisis in the Church. We have a formation crisis. We are not necessarily creating disciples of Jesus, and we need to be reminded that we are to be known by our love. Some of that is because we have reduced our faith to a set of beliefs. We are told that even if we can move mountains with our faith and yet not have love, we are empty. We can have all knowledge, prophecy, and do miracles, but if we don’t have love, it’s still empty. Apparently, we can do a lot of things without love!
We are not called to make believers; we are called to make disciples. In the final judgment, we aren’t going to be quizzed on a doctrine test. I think most pastors and theologians would love the doctrinal test, but that is not what it’s going to be. It’s going to be Jesus asking us if we visited him in prison; if we welcomed him in when he was a stranger, an immigrant, or a refugee; if we fed him when he was hungry; if we gave him health care when he was sick and in need. So I’m really careful to clarify that I don’t think our works can earn our salvation, but I do believe that our works demonstrate our salvation. And in the end, if our faith is not good news for the poor that are struggling, if it’s not really manifesting concrete acts of compassion and love and justice, then it’s an empty faith. And if we are serious, it’s not just the poor who are struggling because of the way the world is. Things are bad for the poor and also bad for the rich. God came to give us life to the fullest, and a lot of us are settling for something far short of that.
Radix: Thank you so much for all this, and for the enthusiasm and the joy and laughter. This is deeply life-giving.
Shane: I love that old song, “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me.” Yeah, the world didn’t give it, and the world can’t take it away. You know, this joy is a fruit of the Spirit. It’s also an endangered thing. In many social justice circles where we deal with serious things, we can lose our joy, and that goes for liberals or conservatives. So we have got to keep that joy alive. I like that old Emma Goldman quote: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” Amen!