Some conversations want to be in a coffee shop, not a studio — and this is one of them. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty and I share a particular endangered species of Baptist heritage, the small, ecumenical, justice-formed wing whose patron saints include her father, Glenn Hinson, the Baptist church historian who taught half my div-school professors how to take the contemplative tradition seriously. So before we got anywhere near the politics of freedom, the problem of wealth, or the murderus super chickens of late-stage neoliberalism, we sat in her father’s legacy for a while. The conversation took a different shape because of it. What follows is a slow take — on the perversion of freedom in white Christian America, the way our politics has lost any room for loss or failure, and what theological education has to do now if it is going to do anything at all.

Highlights from the conversation

• Glenn Hinson and the Jordan River. What it meant to grow up with a Baptist historian father who wore a “Fundamentalist Anonymous” ballcap and stopped his seven-year-old from being baptized on religious enthusiasm. His final words — “I’m ready to step out into the overflowing love of God” — frame the whole conversation.
• Freedom is not what we think it is. Her new book Authentic Christian Freedom takes the culture-war binary apart and rebuilds freedom from the ground up — grounded in interrelatedness, not individual liberty, with Pauli Murray as the guide.
• The problem is not poverty. It is wealth. Her award-winning The Problem of Wealth is the self-convicting book she has not stopped writing. We talk about why Charlotte’s 38th-place national ranking in economic mobility is a theological problem, and what her seminary course More Than Money, Math and Markets is teaching pastors-in-training who used to work at banks.
• The space we do not have anymore. A long riff on the way late-modern neoliberalism keeps us dynamically unstable — you stay upright by pedaling faster. Elizabeth extends the diagnosis: there is no public space left to acknowledge loss, and no space to admit failure either. The story of the family that threw parties when things failed earns the bullet.
• Murderous super chickens. A metaphor from an evolutionary study where selecting only for the super-laying hen breeds killers. The flock with the highest output had no super-chickens at all. It becomes the parable for what mainline congregations have been quietly forming our kids to become.
• “I exist to be respected.” Her father’s maxim. Elizabeth’s closing reflection on the cost of being theologically clear in pastoral spaces, and why telling your own story is the door back to connection.

About our guest

The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty is the J. Roy Davis Family Chair of Theology and History at Union Presbyterian Seminary’s Charlotte campus, where she teaches theology and ethics. Ordained in the PC(USA), she previously taught for nearly two decades at Bellarmine University, and earned her PhD from what is now UPSem. The books that anchor this conversation: Authentic Christian Freedom: Deconstructing the American Gospel of Liberty (the newest, on freedom’s misuse in white Christian America); The Problem of Wealth: A Christian Response to a Culture of Affluence (Orbis, 2017 — winner of the Catholic Press Association’s first-place prize in Catholic Social Teaching); and Dutiful Love: Empowering Individuals and Families Affected by Serious Mental Illness.

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