Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus · The Sophia Society

The Resistance is Alive and Well w/Jesse Nickel

·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

“Blessed are the peacemakers” means active peacemaking, not passive inaction.

Gary Allen opens the penultimate episode of season five after a spring hiatus. He introduces Dr. Jesse Nickel, a Columbia Bible College faculty member who teaches in the biblical studies program and has written about peace, violence, and peacemaking. Nickel joins the show to talk about the way of peace and nonviolence in Trump's America. Allen frames the discussion as urgent for the political, social, and environmental crisis people are living through. He says the show keeps coming back to God, politics, sexuality, spiritual formation, and how to move forward post-evangelicalism. The conversation starts with the difference between temporary ceasefires and the deeper peace Jesus calls people to create. Nickel argues that human peace lasts only as long as both sides decide it is in their interest not to kill each other. He contrasts that with a peace that is lasting, deep, healing, reconciles, and transforms. Allen then brings the question down to daily life. He asks how people can be peacemakers in their personal, interpersonal, professional, corporate, and spiritual lives. From there, he widens the frame to empire. He points out that many people in the West live inside systems built through war, conquest, subjugation, marginalization, and the centering of some lives over others. Gaza and other wars sit in the background of the discussion as examples of how violence shapes ordinary consciousness. Allen brings Jesus forward as the model of peacemaking. He names Jesus as oppressed, colonized, and the victim of imperial violence. That leads into a critique of white evangelical formation. Allen says nonviolence was never taught in that world. He recalls the way the Old Testament was cherished for its violent God and conquest narratives. He suggests that Jesus was often treated differently from the God people had been taught to admire. The episode keeps pressing on that mismatch between inherited faith and Jesus' teaching. It stays direct, theologically serious, and politically alert throughout. By the end, it has moved toward a more creative and demanding account of what it means to live nonviolently and be peacemakers in our world.

As heard by us

A serious, thoughtful case for peacemaking when empire keeps pressing the question.

Holy Heretics frames peace and nonviolence as a live Christian question, tying personal peacemaking to empire, Trump's America, Gaza, and white evangelical formation.

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Why you'd press play

If you want nonviolence taken seriously, not softened into vibes, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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