Where Goodness Still Grows with guest Amy Peterson- Episode 386

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Welcome to Voices in My Head. In My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames Twitter. And please join my mailing list at rickleejames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm so glad that you're here with us for what I know is going to be another great conversation today. Well, the evangelical church in America has reached a cultural crossroads. Social media and recent political events have exposed the fault lines that exist within our country and our spiritual communities. The corruption and blind spots of the evangelical church have led to the departure of so many from faith, who cite hypocrisy and partisanship as reasons they can't stay. Chillingly, many of the virtues we believed were a central piece of our religious heritage, including kindness, purity, modesty, hospitality, and faithfulness, have been hijacked and used for political and cultural gain. But all is not lost. My guest today, author Amy Peterson, wants to reimagine virtue as a tool, not as a weapon; as wild, not tame; as embodied, not written. As someone intimately familiar with, fond of, and also deeply critical of the world of conservative evangelicalism, Amy dissects the moral code of American evangelicalism and reexamines what it really means to be faithful in the modern world. Her latest book, Where Goodness Still Grows, traces the virtues from their original meanings and imagines what it could look like for us to embrace and celebrate them. Where Goodness Still Grows is more than a book. It is a thoughtful, poetic, and deeply powerful call to reclaim our faith. And it's a book I deeply needed personally in 2020. Author Amy Peterson, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Well, I am really glad to be able to just have a few minutes today to have a podcast visit with you. Your book is so well written, and I hope that it will be a help to many people today. I wonder if, as we start the show, if you could just describe to our listeners a bit of your background and maybe some of the ways that, that books like The Book of Virtues by Bill Bennett played a part in writing your newest book.

Yeah, absolutely. I grew up kind of evangelical of the evangelicals. I grew up in the South in pretty conservative evangelical churches. I was homeschooled until 5th grade, and we were at church and Awana several times a week, and it was really a really happy and rich childhood for me. My parents were very involved at church and my dad was also involved in Christian radio. And so my whole world was kind of immersed in this Christian subculture. And, you know, I— some people get the wrong idea when I say that I was homeschooled or grew up conservative evangelical. It wasn't that we didn't interact with outside ideas or voices, but it was that we had this sense, um, that the Bible was preeminent. And we, while we weren't particularly conservative, I did have the sense growing up that the Republican Party was the party that cared about the things we cared about. Family values, pro-life values. And that Democrats generally couldn't be trusted and weren't Christian.

Gotcha.

Um, so the Book of Virtues—

Very similar to my background, yeah.

Yeah?

Mm-hmm.

Um, the Book of Virtues is a collection of short stories and fables and poems that was edited by Bill Bennett, who was a prominent conservative figure in the '90s. And it was a book that— did you have it in your house growing up?

I don't remember if we actually had it in our house. I know I had seen it a number of times, and it could have been that my dad was a pastor my whole life, and so I may have seen it in his study. But I'm familiar with seeing it somewhere, but I don't remember it being sort of the central place, more like you describe in your home as being one that was like read as a family together. But I know I came across it at some point in my life and in my childhood.

Yeah, a lot of times people who grew up like us won't recognize the name, but then if you do a Google image search and look at the COVID you go, "Oh yeah, that book," because it was just on every family's coffee table for a period of years there. And in the book, Bill Bennett sort of divides these stories and fables and poems into chapters based on virtues like modesty or honesty or faithfulness. And there's a lot of great, great stuff in there. And so I think as I've grown up, I mean, this is maybe jumping ahead a little bit, but growing up from there, I started to see that the Republican Party was not holding fast to some of those virtues that I had associated with it in my childhood, um, was not really holding on to the virtues that Bill Bennett names in the Book of Virtues. So I, kind of dealing with this like, uh, cognitive dissonance of like, the people who I grew up with taught me about these virtues, and now I'm seeing a lot of people sort of not caring about the virtues anymore. So I went back to the Book of Virtues to look at it and try to figure out what went wrong. Like, did I miss something? And the thing that I— well, I mean, one of the main things I, I learned was that Bill Bennett said that he edited that volume because he had conversations with school teachers in Chicago about how their students needed a resource for character formation. Now, he was talking to teachers whose student population was pretty diverse, pretty under-resourced, not primarily white middle-class kids. But when he went to put together this volume to be a resource for them, he chose almost all white male European voices, almost as if, um, and I mean, I think that there are some truths that can transcend culture and context and be valuable, but I think that if you limit the voices you're listening to about virtue, to voices who, um, maybe just come out of one stream of tradition or culture or context, you're really limiting how well you're going to be understand— you're going to be able to understand what virtue is. And, and I think that that's kind of a clue for me of what maybe has been going wrong in evangelicalism in the past few years as we've started to care about some things like power, maintaining our own safety and security, wealth, more than we care about loving our neighbors. I've probably just jumped way ahead.

No, it's all right. It's all good. And just to kind of bring around what you were saying a little bit, because you write about in the book sort of talking about the end of a world and kind of the start of a new world for you, kind of having to break free in some ways of some of the old ways of looking at things, partially because of the way that these virtues, as you just described, often were kind of myopic in some ways. They were written from very few other perspectives than just this one. And, and you even write about in the book how in many ways it was sort of a weaponized version of the virtues that was used to uphold existing hierarchies. And I thought that was very interesting. And so coming to your book, finding that, as you call it, it's kind of— your book is a record of both the lament and the new life. And I really liked the way that you put those things. And you start talking about in your book virtues that we need to dive into. And you do a wonderful job of maybe dealing with some misconceptions of what we thought these virtues were about in the book. And I just found page after page going, "Yes, you are so well putting into words things that I'm feeling in my heart, ways that I'm trying to describe the discomfort that I'm feeling." And I really felt like it was a very timely thing for me to find and probably for a lot of other people to find too. And so your book, you have said, is not a definitive answer about the virtues, but it's a book hopefully intended to spark some discussions about what virtues look look like in our own context. And so I wonder, what are some of the, the conversations that you hope this book will help us to have with each other?

Mm, I just feel so deeply concerned about the church right now. It seems like we're really unable to have a lot of conversations without falling into name-calling and We're really having a hard time agreeing on like what truth even is, what sources we can trust for truth. Um, but, but I believe that God reveals truth to us within community. And so that's part of my hope with this book is that people can use it to sort of cultivate conversations within community, because I think You're exactly right. This isn't— this book isn't trying to be, here are the final answers about what virtues are and how we live into them. It's more like, here's me sifting through what I once understood about virtue and figuring out where was there beauty and truth in that, and where was it maybe falling short? Where's there something that I can let go of now and build something a little, a little better? And all of that will depend on exactly where you are and who you're with, um, and all these sort of contextual questions. But so I guess what conversations do I hope people are having? I hope that this book helps people talk about how do we know what's true. I hope it helps people talk about, um, sexual ethics. And I think you mentioned that I, I say some of these virtues have been weaponized. I think particularly against women, um, our interpretations of the virtues of purity and modesty have been weaponized against women. And I hope that we can begin to about some healthier, more God-honoring ways for us to be in relationship with each other.

Sure.

Um, well, yeah, I just— I hope we start talking.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the hardest thing that I've experienced right now anyways. I'm finding that even raising questions is a way to quickly get shouted down, uh, and, and I'm— and I'm— I lament that. And maybe lament is a good place to start because it's chapter 1 of your book. But I do think it's important that we begin having some of these conversations we're not having very well. And I wonder if, you know, part of it is the fact that right now especially, we are literally a people who are not, are not together, you know. We are literally at a place in our country where like pandemic is running wild. I just heard the projection this morning that they think by January we'll have 400,000 people probably dead because of the coronavirus. And so I think more and more is like the winter months come on, we're gonna find ourselves more and more separated from each other. And so a lot of the conversations that we're having are through things like social media, which have just become so incredibly toxic and, and hard to have a conversation. So, and you throw into that right now that we are in an election year with— what is it, I think something like 60 days or something like that to go before this election— and it just seems like conversations are very rarely actually had. There's a lot of yelling going on and a lot of shouting, and if you ask a question, you get called a heretic, you know. And it's, it's just a really hard environment. So, so let's dive in a little bit, and maybe depending on time, we'll try to get to as many virtues as we can that you wrote about. But you did such a good job in raising some good questions for us to think about. So let's start with lament, if that's all right with you.

Sure.

Because, because you start right out in Chapter 1 talking about Recapturing Lament, and I wonder if you could answer for us maybe how lament is different from grief.

Yeah, the lament is the practice of grieving what is wrong in the world and calling on God to repair it.

Okay.

And, and so it's more than just feeling sad, but it's also taking that sadness to God and asking God to fix what is broken. And I think lament is something we practice, um, in for, for like a number of kind of griefs. So like there's the grief of, um, your own personal sin, and you can lament that. There's the grief, uh, that's born of living in a world that's broken and where there are systems that lead to a lot of pain and suffering for a lot of people, and you may not be, uh, that may not be something you're directly responsible for, but you can still lament it. And then you can even lament the things that you're not directly responsible for or indirectly responsible for, the things that are just the result of living in a fallen world. Um, you can lament those things too.

Yeah, and you know, it's interesting.

Does that help? Starting place for thinking about what lament is?

Yes, I think so. And I especially love the way that you described it as sort of grieving the brokenness of the world and calling on God to fix it. I may have misquoted you a little bit, but I think that was sort of the gist. And really, that's what we see in something like the Book of Psalms. And like, you know, for at least 40% of the Psalms are these laments that are crying out to to God, look how broken everything is, Lord. Look how much pain I'm in. Look at our people. And how long, oh Lord, until you're going to come to fix this? And so I think that's a good way. It's almost like naming the grief and then praying for God to do something about it. I find that to be very important right now because I've said a number of times with a number of guests on this program, I think what we're experiencing in our nation right now is grief, and we don't know how to name it as such. And because we are in grief, people don't realize that often what we're going through and what we're feeling are these different stages of grief, often like when we lose a family member, but we're actually grieving things that are more difficult to put our finger on. Like, we're, we're week after week experiencing, well, this year, you know, my child didn't get to have a birthday party with friends, and, or we didn't get to have Who knows, maybe it's going to be Christmas this year. Grandma and Grandpa didn't get to come over. We didn't get to finish school and graduate this year the way we wanted to. You know, college is in question. Am I going to get to go to college? And just a number of things. So I think it's very wise of you to start your book in that way with lament as sort of a way of crying out Here's what we're experiencing, that we're naming it, and we're finding a way to cry out to God in the midst of it as we seek some sort of healing in the midst of our grief. And yeah, kind of, kind of getting the idea of what you were going for, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the church has often not done a good job of helping us know how to lament, because, um, instead we hear so often like Rejoice in all things. This is the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it. And that is scripture too. But I love that you pointed to the Psalms, and I also love to look at the Book of Lamentations. Um, in fact, talking about like the things we're grieving right now with our kids reminded me of something I did with my kids recently. You know, the Book of Lamentations is a book of poems, and the poems in the Hebrew are acrostic poems. So like the first verse begins with A, and the second verse with B, and then C, and so on. And early in the pandemic, when I realized how many things like birthday parties and Easter dinners were being canceled, and I was feeling like, I don't know what to do with my own feelings about this. I got my kids and we just wrote the alphabet down the side of a piece of paper. And I said, okay, we're going to make an acrostic of our grief. Let's start with A and name some things we're sad about right now with A. And they said, all the kids who need school lunches and don't have them anymore because school's closed.

Wow.

And, and we just went through the alphabet and it was such a meaningful way to really practice this discipline of lament and let ourselves feel the real grief and then to call on God to repair it. Yeah. It's a good practice to do with your family, but also for anybody who's listening and just is looking for some way to try to figure out how to deal with this grief. I really recommend write your own acrostic of grief as a prayer to God.

Yeah, that's a great idea. I had never thought about that before until you suggested it, and I do think it's a very good thing. It might be the kind of thing that, you know, Sunday school classes or groups that are meeting even at a distance now on Zoom or something, they might decide, hey, you know what, this week we've missed a lot and let's listen to each other and kind of hear each other and what it is that we've lost. But such a great idea. And so we're starting this journey with lament, which is so needed. And you're right, I feel like so often we've done a poor job of helping people have the permission to lament and come in. And we actually had a person in our church— I haven't heard her do it very much anymore— but it seemed like every time somebody would someone would pass away in our church, a family member or something, this person would come up to them at church and like the Sunday after, you know, the funeral and say, "Praise God, they're with Jesus. Let's rejoice together," you know, type thing. And yeah, and then this person's spouse died. And then I stopped noticing this person doing that so much to other people, you know, and there's a sense in which we're so bad about getting through the uncomfortable places, and yet it's so necessary for us. So anyway, I've talked long enough. We need to get back to your book, but it's really good and it's a great place to start, I think. And you go from there into Chapter 2, dealing with kindness. And I love talking about kindness for a lot of different reasons, partially because I also run this fairly popular Twitter account and podcast about Mr. Rogers. And there's a lot of kindness that I see people longing for day after day, and they're drawn to the quotes of people like Fred Rogers who really embodied kindness. And one of my favorite theologians, ethicist Stanley Harwas from Duke, he even says in his writings, he says, I believe that kindness He says, "I believe kindness to be the very character of God." And so I love that you have a chapter that is about kindness. And so in Chapter 2, you deal with kindness and you make the case that there are times when calls for civility or kindness are actually attempts to silence people and in effect gloss over real problems. So I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about this, because we are in a place that we're desperate for kindness. But how are some ways that you've actually seen kindness become this attempt to silence people or to gloss over real problems that need to be dealt with?

Yeah, I mean, I will say that for most of my life, kindness is a virtue that I was uninterested in because kindness seemed like a really bland virtue. I thought of it as the virtue of being a doormat. And I think particularly women are socialized to be kind in a way that is just sort of to be nice, tamp down your opinions, don't cause trouble, don't, you know, be divisive. And that's actually not a very good understanding of what kindness is. Um, the word kindness, if you look at its etymology, it's related to kinship. Yeah. And so to be kind is to recognize your kinship with others. And that doesn't mean that you ignore the differences or that you ignore, um, the injustices that others are perpetrating, but it does mean that you work to see the image of God in every person you interact with.

Hmm.

And when scripture talks about, um, the kindness of God, what we ought to understand from that is that that God became our kin in Jesus. And so our whole redemption is only possible through our kind Lord, God becoming kin with us through Jesus so that we can become like God. And I think once we recognize that and use that as our foundation of under— of self-understanding, um, and of spiritual understanding, it helps us begin to begin that work of seeing, seeing the image of God in every person, whether we like them or not, agree with them or not, and letting that be the foundation of our relationships with others and of the way that we see others. That doesn't— that's not a call for us to just ignore the differences or the injustices, but it is a call for us to, I think, respect And I'm sorry, you cut out for about the last 4 seconds there.

You said respect and I didn't hear the last part. I wonder if you'd be able to say that again.

Sentences. You know, again, that's not a call for us.

Amy, are you—

Problems are making trouble. Amy, are you— Can you not hear me anymore?

I'm sorry, you cut in and out a couple of times and I wasn't able to hear. You had said something about respect and then I lost you and then you came back in. Are you still there?

Yeah, can you hear me now?

I can now. It just said poor connection. It seems like you're back again though, so I apologize about that.

It's probably my fault, my internet works We're switching to fiber internet next week, but it's been having some trouble.

I totally get that. No, that's okay. What you said was great. We only missed a few seconds of it in there, so— but we will move on to another virtue because I want to be conscious of our time together. But I appreciated what you had to say about kindness in the book and kinship and the way that not even just people— you also talk about things that are not people that we find kinship with, and I found that to be fascinating. Fascinating. But I do want to get into a couple of other ones just for the sake of time. You go from kindness into hospitality, and how do you define hospitality, and what are some of the connections that you see between kindness, which we were just talking about, and hospitality itself?

I think that these two virtues are deeply related. If kindness means recognizing your kinship with all other creatures, Hospitality means extending welcome to all creatures, just as you would to your own kin, to your own family. And this has been an especially difficult, an especially difficult virtue for me to sort of reconcile with what I see among so many evangelicals right now who want to close the borders, who don't want to take in refugees. And that's not all. I mean, some evangelicals are doing great work. There's the Evangelical Immigration Table, Matt Sorensen. They're doing fantastic work advocating for immigrants and refugees. But, but I think if we look in scripture, we see that in the Old Testament, for instance, when God's giving law to God's people, Love for the stranger and love for your neighbor were, for God's people, commands on equal footing, and there were specific laws to ensure that Israel wouldn't treat aliens or outsiders unfairly. In fact, the command to care for the stranger is repeated 36 times in the Torah, which is more even than the command to love God. Wow. Yeah.

That's it.

So hospitality is essential to our understanding of ourselves and our calling, I think. Yeah.

And it's— that's been one that's been really hard to reconcile over the past few years for me, being that we're in the evangelical community that holds so tightly to being pro-life. And, and I've often thought about the irony of people who constantly are screaming about babies being ripped from their mothers and how evil that is in the womb, but seem to be the ones that are championing children and babies being ripped from their mothers at the border and separated. And then now we know that's turned into also a lot of child abuse. There's been a number of recorded abuse situations that have happened to these children, which, which is just heartbreaking to me. And I, and I've often wondered— I've even had conversations with people before whereas a couple of summers ago was when it really heated up, at least in the media. And we were seeing all of it really enacted before our eyes, and we were seeing on camera what it meant. And a number of churches, including my own denomination that I've been a part of my whole life, the Church of the Nazarene, the leadership of churches and the Methodist Church and different mainline churches, they got together and condemned this, you know, and said, you know, we don't do this. And people within my church and ministers in my church, I had conversations with them, and they said, no, we're with Trump on this. And I said, why would you go against not only what the Bible says, but your own denomination that you're a pastor in says, says no, we can do this. And I was still getting answers from them saying, nope, Trump's right. And I just could not— I still can't fathom it. I can't reconcile it. I don't think there's anything holy or godly about it. And I was so glad to see you writing about it in that way, that there really is this connection of caring for the strangers that is so dear and very near to the heart of God that we actually see this as part of our, um, part of our discipleship, you know, uh, is, is, is loving our neighbors this way and, uh, and caring especially for refugees. And I, I put out a music video a couple of years ago and it had a lot of footage that one of my friends brought back who works with refugees both in and out of the country. And when I released the video, which really was just showing pictures of children and a lot of people who were like living in train stations and people who are without homes, I kept getting these nasty comments on the videos saying, you know, better keep them out of our country, we don't want them here. And those were the Christians. And I thought It's heartbreaking.

Yeah. I was like, how do we stay in our Christian communities when that, when that's happening? You know, I mean, that's not Christianity, that's Christian nationalism. Yeah. And I think that's one of our biggest problems right now is that Christian nationalism has infiltrated our churches. And so even when yes, denominational leaders and, you know, national leaders, uh, can, can stand behind immigrants and refugees, people at the, at the local level have fallen prey to this Christian nationalism.

Yeah.

Um, that's causing them to identify more with a political party or leader or to pledge allegiance to the US and not to Jesus.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's heartbreaking and it's mind-boggling. And I've had a number of conversations and, and I've, I've never been able to get anywhere on it. It seems like if a person believes something, they believe it. Um, so it's, so it's a hard conversation to continually have day after day, but it's one that I feel like is very important. There's a real disconnect between our discipleship because I feel like we have maybe been more discipled by our favorite 24-hour news network than we have actually been discipled by Christ and his church, and that's a real hard thing. Well, you know, there's another area of interest, and I think that a lot of this call to hospitality you know, is a call to repentance in many ways. You know, we have to look at the ways that we have not only not loved God with our whole heart, but we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. And, and so you're writing about, in many ways, a call to repentance and a call to shift. But that leads right into your next chapter, which is a chapter about purity. And, and really, you, you talk about purity culture, and I found this especially interesting because as you point out, purity in the Bible has nothing, or an incredibly small amount to nothing, to do with sex. Um, and so I wonder if, if for those of us who were raised in sort of this idea of purity culture and the way it was connected, um, with sex and, and a number of different ways that that incarnated over the years, what is your idea of the biblical understanding of purity connected with.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, you're right. Scripture barely connects the word purity to sex. I mean, the vast majority of references in the Bible to purity are in the Old Testament, and they mostly have to do with the precious metals that were used in temple construction, or with the incense in the temple, or with rituals for staying clean and presenting yourself holy before God. Throughout the Bible, the word purity is often used as a synonym for righteousness or in calls to holiness. And while I do think sexual ethics definitely plays some role in our understanding of what righteous and holy living is, in the Bible, the word purity just really isn't primarily about sex.

Right.

So it's a strange choice of a word, but, um, so people will need to really get the book to get the whole argument here, because I do sort of look at why choosing that word is problematic. But, but you want to know what I think a biblical definition of purity is. I think in the Bible it has to do with righteousness and holiness. And I think in the Bible we also see pretty clearly that righteousness and holiness are gifts to us, gifts of grace from Jesus, not something we can attain through our own works. Right?

Right.

And so part of the problem with purity culture is that it's asking you particularly to think of yourself as pure by following a set of rules. And in the Bible, purity is not something you can attain by following a set of rules. It is just a gift to you from God. Um, so, so when I think about purity now, or how I would talk about that with my own kids, I would want to say something about, um, when you're close to Jesus, you are pure, no matter what you've done or, or what you haven't done. Um, purity means embracing your unity with Christ, and in that unity, finding that you're free to open fearlessly to others in ways that are safe and healthy and truly loving. In ways that draw others into that fellowship with Christ too. Uh, did I lose you? I—

yes, sorry, you cut out again for a second. I heard purity in Christ. I think we got the fullness of what you were saying about it, but I love that definition of purity being having to do with your relationship with Christ and your nearness to Christ and the way that Christ makes you pure, rather than a set of rules, um, that, that if you violate, you're not pure anymore, uh, type thing. Um, so what's so interesting to me about that, and, and I'm, I'm especially interested in this topic because I'm a father and, um, and I have a son who I know I'll be, you know, having some probably awkward conversations with, you know, in the next few years. He's 7 years old right now. And I always think, like, I want to do right by him, and I want to present Jesus to him in all matters. And yet, what so often purity culture, as we would call it in the church, produced, actually produced a lot of guilt, a lot of shame, a lot of fear. To even, to even ask questions in a healthy way, I think, at times. So, so let me ask you this question, if I could, while I have you here, because we've talked about how purity in Scripture, it really doesn't have a lot to do with sex. It has a lot more to do with our relation to God and our relation to him. How do you recommend— because you have some good suggestions in the book book, but how do you recommend talking to children about sex? Um, and, and while we're on that topic, I just— to flow into it, because the next chapter is about modesty, um, kind of using some of the, the principles, like, what are your suggestions as a parent for, for maybe approaching this in a way that, that maybe wasn't approached through what we would call purity culture?

Sure. Well, I think that when kids are really young especially It's important to use anatomically correct language when you're talking to them. When you're talking about bodies, just make body talk a natural part of conversations, and then you can discuss without shame or embarrassment, answer questions honestly and directly. And I think it's also important to teach your kids that their bodies are their own. No one can touch their bodies without their permission. And so I take that very seriously. So even if I'm playing around and tickling my kids, if they say stop, I stop because I want to go ahead and get that in their mind that if someone says stop, you stop touching them, right? But I think that that kind of talk about agency and consent isn't enough. It's really important, but on its own, it's still kind of reductive because sex is about more than agency. I mean, it's unpredictable and powerful and in some mysterious way, marriage images the relationship between Christ and the church. Um, so, so I think those are good starting points. I think there needs to be more than that, and, um, I think that's a whole nother book.

Yeah. Oh, sure.

Um, I do— I can recommend— I haven't read this yet, but my friend Rachel Joy Welcher has a book coming out, I think this month, um, called Talking Back to Purity Culture. And I, I think it deals like more in depth with some of those questions that you're asking. So people might to take a look at that.

Great. All right, well, I'm making a note of it right now because I want to have a look at that for sure. Uh, Talking Back to Purity Culture, it sounds like another very interesting book for sure. And, and thank you for taking some time to talk about that. Um, and, and this leads us into modesty because you do a great job in, in the book of talking about modesty. As you know, you were always kind of taught, and, and I think most people were taught in a similar culture that modesty was really more about not being too revealing with the way you dress, you know. And yet you'd write about, you know, biblically speaking again, if we're going to get the word for what it means, modesty has a lot to do with our, for instance, our talents, our gifts, and our wealth. Would you mind talking just a bit about that as well, this virtue of modesty and ways that we could talk about it better?

Yeah, of course. You know, it's kind of funny that women, girls, we hear a lot about the way we dress as we're growing up and how we should dress modestly to protect our brothers. But, you know, Jesus, when he dealt with the issue of male lust, his solution was not about how women dress. It was gouge out your eyes. So just going to throw that out there to start with.

Doesn't seem like a great solution.

Um, yeah, I, I— in the, in the book, I look at a couple of scripture passages in particular that are often used when we talk about modesty. And what I find is that, um, in context, the word modesty in these passages has a lot more to do with being modest about your wealth and your power, um, than, than being specifically related to your body. Now, I think beauty is a kind of power, and so it's not totally unrelated to your body and the way you dress, but that's not the primary understanding. And in fact, I think what scripture is calling us to is something quite a bit more difficult, because scripture is calling us to be modest with our power and our wealth. And, um, in America, we are very wealthy people, um, and, you know, Sometimes we can let our wealth keep us separate from those people in our society who don't have, have the same sort of standard of living as we do. We let it become a barrier. And so the biblical call to modesty is about inviting us to make sure we're taking down every barrier that might separate us from our kin, from other people., or that might make it, uh, more difficult for them to feel comfortable at church, comfortable seeking God. Um, go ahead.

No, that's, that's great. And I, I think it's good for us to, to rethink what we mean by modesty, to rethink about the way that we live and the way that we use our talents. And, and it gets back again to hospitality, I think, in some ways, and, and kindness.

Absolutely.

Yeah, all these things. It's not it's sort of like the fruit of the Spirit when we're talking about these virtues. Because, you know, the fruit of the Spirit that we read about in Scripture that Jesus talks about— and the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control— that's all supposed to be one fruit together. And, and these virtues you're talking about, they do all, all kind of weave together as a part of a whole. And I think that when we talk about this idea of modesty, We have to approach it from kindness and hospitality and some of the other great virtues that you've written about that need to be recaptured. I want to be conscious of our time together today, and there's so much more. And I want to make a plea for people listening to check out the book Where Goodness Still Grows: Reclaiming Virtue in an Age of Hypocrisy by my guest today, Amy Peterson. It's a really great book. I wanted to hone in, if we could, just for the last couple of minutes that we have together today, because if I could, I'd talk to you about your book all day long and go to every facet about it because there's just so much good in it. And I'm really proud of the work that you have done here. I'm proud of you and the way that you've presented it. But I want to get into specifically love-motivated evangelism and the idea really, which leads into the next thing when we're talking about discernment, these ideas of— they're very interrelated in that so often you grew up, I think, like I grew up in many ways after reading about what you wrote, feeling like our love for another person almost was driven by our desire to evangelize them. Yeah, yeah. And like, yes, I want to love them and be kind to them and be hospitable so that I can finally get to a place where I can introduce introduce them to Jesus and make them a Christian. And you write about in the book, the idea really should be, I'm going to love this person because Jesus wants us to love people. Because, because we are just supposed to love them. And it doesn't matter if they change, it doesn't matter if they share our views or whatever. It's because we have been called to be people of love. And part of the reason I think that this intersects so well with what you write about in the chapter about love with the virtue of discernment is because you, you talk some about, um, Jewish midrash in that section, and this approach of, of coming to the Bible is something to be wrestled with and something to be even disagreed with, and, and to really, um, almost like Jacob wrestling God, you know, this idea that we come to the word to wrestle with it and to work out what it means to be people of faith, to be and salvation together. And I think that all gets back to the way that we live, like loving people not as a commodity and, and not as a way to like have another checkmark in our book. But if we're really going to get serious about the way we approach Scripture, we're going to find that all these things are interconnected. It's not that we love people so that we can make them like us. We love them because that's an outgrowth of what it means to be one who has been so changed by love and by the love of God. God. Um, anyway, I've talked too much about it, and I want to hear, hear your thoughts about it. But this idea of, of loving a person for the sake of loving them versus loving them for the sake of getting them to make a decision— what, what can you talk to us about on that, on that topic, and some of the ways that your views have changed over the years?

Yeah, well, I definitely remember growing up there was a lot of apologetics Catholics. And so a lot of the way that I was trained to interact with people who weren't Christians was sort of defensive and fear-based. Get to know people who aren't Christians, but not because you need friends, just because you might have a chance to convince them that Jesus is the way, right? And I remember in college, I mean, college was really— I went to, I was homeschooled, then I went to Christian high school, and college was the first time that I really had a chance to actually meet people who weren't Christians. And I found that I barely knew how to interact with them because always in the back of my mind I was thinking, uh, I wonder how I could get Jesus into this conversation so that I could win this person over.

Right.

And you know, that's treating a person like an object or, or like a something to check off of your list, not treating a person as a person. And so, yeah, I thought that that was the most loving way to interact with people because I thought, you know, the thing that matters most is getting people into heaven. If I can save them from an eternity in hell, then that's the most loving thing I can do for them. But you have to treat people as people, not objects on your conversion checklist. And so the way I've started to think a little more about how is— how do I love my neighbor? And I think that loving your neighbor has to do with curiosity, being curious about them, like genuinely curious, not asking a question to hope that you can get them into a conversation where you can share the gospel, but just genuine curiosity about them, wanting to learn about them. I think loving your neighbor is about being willing to be a witness to their pain, to, to sit with them in their pain. And I think, you know, one thing that's helped me a lot is becoming a mother and experiencing the love of a mother. That kind of love begins with vulnerability, with being unprotected, and really lays down its life. It's about being more committed to the thriving of other bodies than the thriving of your own body in some ways. I think curiosity and presence and vulnerability are really at the heart of what neighbor love means.

For sure. Yeah, it's— that's such a great way to say it. And, and again, getting back to the idea of discerning, and when it comes to like Scripture, yeah, isn't it an interesting thing? I'm, I'm finding more all the time as I I have friendships with people who are not part of my faith, that they ask me questions about things that I'm wrestling with, too, like when it comes to scripture. So it's not necessarily that we never have these opportunities to share our faith. But I think part of sharing our faith is to come at it with enough humility to say, you know what, this is something I'm wrestling with, too. And I don't want to present like I have every answer. In fact, I'd rather come to our relationship more like the better that I know you and love you, the more that I get to know who God is because of that, you know.

Absolutely. And how different from the way we were raised to like think, no, we, we need to have a logical answer for every question anyone has.

Yes, exactly. And this came up the other night, and I'm, I'm, I'm actually not saying this to brag on myself. I feel like it was a Holy Spirit moment with my son the other night at bedtime. Because we were talking to him, and I try to remind him every night that we love him, you know.

Yeah.

And at this point, at 7, you know, he's got about as much interest in faith as most 7-year-olds do, you know. And I said to him, you know, I love you, and your mommy loves you, and, and, but you know who loves you just as much and even more than we do is God. And he looked at me and he said, very timidly, he said, "I love Mommy more than I love God, I think." And in his mind, he was being very honest. He wasn't being like— so, you know, the worst reaction would have probably been, "Well, you blasphemous!" You know, like, "How dare you?" What came to my mind was to say, "Did you know that the way that you love Mommy is a way that you're also loving God?" God. Like, it's, it's not an either-or type thing. And I think it's the way that you, you do such a good job of presenting this in the book, that the way that we love others, it really does help us to understand who God is, because God has created us all, for one thing. So if we can stop looking at people and, as you said, objectifying them into this thing that needs to be changed, for if for no other reason another notch in our spiritual belt or something, um, we actually can find that there are some really the wonderful things that people who are not necessarily the most faithful to what we would call faith can teach us about who God is. And so I really appreciate the way that you bring that out in your book. And boy, what some— what wonderful and robust relationships we will miss out on if our only goal is to evangelize people into our way of thinking, for sure.

Yeah.

Well, you've given so much to think about in your book. I want to thank you for coming on and talking a bit today. And I apologize, I feel like I've talked too much, but what you write about gets me excited and I feel like I don't always have a chance to—

Yeah, I love a good conversation. I don't want to be the main voice.

Well, I want to one more time just remind our listeners about your book. The name of it is called called Where Goodness Still Grows. I have so many pages of the book dog-eared. It would have been easier if I, if I just would have not underlined places that I, you know, I could have just like underlined the places I didn't want to go back to. It would have been much easier than, you know, I did so much underlining and bookmarking and things like that. It really has a lot of us, a lot of things for us to digest. And I hope that a lot of people will pick this up if they haven't yet. And I also wanted to make them aware that you've provided a very good free study guide online to go along with this. That, yes, from what I understand in reading about it, it was a study guide that you came up with working it out in a community of people who kind of went through the book together. So that adds to the communal aspect. So I want people to be able to go there. We are going to have links to your website, links to the book, links to everything, social media about you on our homepage at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com. One more time, really quick, I forgot to write it down, but what is the, the address of your website specifically, Amy?

Oh yeah, it's just amypeterson.net.

Amypeterson.net. Again, we will make sure and have all of that information in the show notes, but please go to amypeterson.net where you can find out more about not just this book but some of the other wonderful things that that Amy is doing and is a part of and is continuing to write. So Amy Peterson, it's been a real joy. Thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week.

Thanks for having me on. It was fun.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD me, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.