A Public Theologian for the Nones

Or: What I should have said to Lauren Jackson of the New York Times

Photo by Shunya Koide on Unsplash

I have a problem. I’m almost always better in the aftermath of a conversation than I am in the conversation itself. Ask me something right now and I can give you something, but give me a few days to chew on it, to turn it over, to play with it the way a cat plays with a mouse, and I’ll give you something truer.

So this post is that. The thing I figured out after I hung up with Lauren Jackson, the journalist behind Believing, a NYT weekly newsletter “about how people live religion and spirituality now.”

I should confess that our conversation had a couple of strikes against it from the start. I had just wrapped the final day of recording the audiobook for Beyond Wellness. Seven hours in a recording studio trying to stay caffeinated enough to sound enthusiastic, which had turned my brain entirely to mush. I could barely string a coherent sentence together. And poor Lauren had just flown in from London for an event at UVA, her alma mater, and was running on whatever you run on after a transatlantic flight and car rental hiccups. We were both, in other words, depleted.

And yet. Something in that conversation kept working on me after we hung up. Which is how I know it mattered.

If you haven’t read Lauren’s latest piece in her Believing series for The New York Times, go do that first. She’s asking exactly the right question for this moment: since we’re living through war, political upheaval, and a general sense that everything is breaking apart at once, where do we turn? What voices help us navigate collective crisis? That’s where she lands on public theology, and that’s where she interviewed me.

Lauren herself is a fascinating interlocutor for this question. She grew up in the Mormon church, and when we talked on the phone she mentioned she was driving a route she used to take to her local congregation. She’s someone who has her own complicated, textured relationship with religion, which is exactly why she’s asking the right questions. And why her newsletter exists at all. (More on that in a moment.)

She asked me, among other things, whether I consider myself a public theologian.

I gave her an answer. But I think I have a better one now, one I’ve been working on since we hung up.

The short answer is: yes. But only if we get to redefine the term.

Here’s why the label theologian has always made me uncomfortable. I did my doctoral training at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where there was at the time a fairly sharp distinction between two kinds of intellectual work. Theologians do constructive or confessional work: they think from within a religious tradition, using its resources, its language, its commitments. It’s not just intellectual labor. For a Catholic moral theologian, for instance, doing theology is also an act of faith, it’s faith seeking understanding, as the old formula goes. That’s different, fundamentally, from what a religious studies scholar does. We can be normative, we can care, we can even be moved, but we’re not working from inside the tradition in the same way.

I don’t sit in any one tradition. So “theologian” felt like a word that belonged to other people.

But then a friend said recently to me, half joking, half not, Liz, you’re becoming a public theologian for the nones.

And that felt both very true and very uncomfortable.

A brief detour into Rebecca Solnit’s Facebook page.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about David Marchese’s interview with Rebecca Solnit on The Interview. Lauren flags this interview in her piece from last weekend too. David has been, somewhat quietly, turning that show into one of the most theologically interesting conversations happening in mainstream media right now. I wrote that Solnit was doing a kind of public theology for people who would never use that word, drawing on Buddhist frameworks, liberation theology, a deeply hopeful vision of collective action, and that I wasn’t sure she even knew she was doing it.

She got on Facebook and told me she absolutely knew she was doing it.

I loved that. I also found it genuinely surprising, because “theology” still sounds, to a lot of ears, like a very specifically Christian, and maybe specifically institutional, word. It surprised me that she’d claim it. And it got me thinking: if Rebecca Solnit can claim it, maybe I can too? But only if we’re working with a new definition.

What public theology used to mean, maybe what it should mean now.

Lauren’s piece is a great primer on the history. Public theology in its classic form meant progressive Protestants (folks like Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr.) bringing religious reasoning to bear on public life. It was not evangelism. It was a claim that religion had been thinking about poverty, power, suffering, and justice for a very long time, and had something to offer that purely secular frameworks did not.

Some version of public theology retreated to divinity schools and seminaries by the early 21st century. And then a more problematic form has seemed to be taking up a lot of air time in public square: religion as the currency of culture war, religion as the vernacular of authoritarianism. Pete Hegseth calling on American families to pray for military victory in the name of Jesus Christ is, technically, public theology. It’s also a good reason why a lot of people, the people I’m most interested in talking to, have deep and justified allergies to the whole concept.

But Lauren and I discussed how we both see something else happening. People are hungry. Not for the old forms, not for traditional clergy or spiritual gurus not. Something more rigorous. More honest. More willing to sit with the mess.

I see it in my inbox. I see it in my classroom. I’ve watched my Substack go from zero to over 13,000 subscribers in six months, and I don’t think that’s because I’m a particularly dazzling writer. I think it’s because people were looking for something and stumbled into this space and found it gave them language for things they’d been feeling but couldn’t quite articulate. The fact that a post about the theologian David Tracy, a very academic theologian, a University of Chicago theologian, could go viral on Substack suggests something real is happening.

So what would it mean to redefine public theology for this moment?

The version of public theology I want to claim looks something like this:

It’s theologically grounded, meaning it takes religious traditions seriously, learns from them rigorously, draws on their concepts and frameworks, but it doesn’t belong exclusively to any one of them. It moves across traditions. It picks up liberation theology here, Buddhist ideas of Sangha there, the Hebrew prophetic tradition somewhere else. It’s intellectually honest about what it’s doing, rather than proof-texting for inspirational content.

It holds the critic and the seeker in the same hand. This is important to me. I think we need public theologians who don’t leave the skepticism behind, who make religion’s PR problem part of the theological work, not just a disclaimer before getting to the good stuff. Religion has harmed people. It has been weaponized. For many people, engaging with it again means first having the courage to name that. For some that means talking about religious trauma directly. For me, it means doing something a little different: showing people where religion is already operating in their lives, hidden in plain sight, secularized and naturalized to the point of invisibility. That’s part of what my new book Beyond Wellness is about. That’s what a lot of this Substack is about.

I should say here that two of my colleagues and friends, Charles Mathewes and Paul Dafydd Jones at UVA, both more legible as public theologians than someone like me, and both quoted in Lauren’s piece, wrote something about this that I find helpful. They argue that the public theologian shouldn’t conceive of their work as a one-way street, speaking to a public from a fixed point of origin. The theology should learn from the public, not just the other way around. Your thinking should actually change through the conversation.

That resonates deeply with what I’m trying to do here. But I’d push it one step further.

They also write, in the same essay, that public theology is “not simply a niche bougie interest, like artisanal pickling or hot yoga.”

Reader, I do hot yoga every Sunday with my seventeen-year-old daughter.

I’m not sure Chuck meant to give me an opening, but here we are. Because I actually think hot yoga, or at least what happens in that room, CAN BE a kind of embodied, communal, cross-traditional practice that a reimagined public theology should be paying attention to. But that’s a different post.

The point is: I want to take their listening dimension seriously and push it even further.

The stereotype of a theologian, even a public one, is someone who sits inside a tradition. A Presbyterian, a Lutheran, a Buddhist, a Jew. They speak from that community and, at their best, to the wider world. The tradition is the ground they stand on. The community is what authorizes them.

I don’t have that. I’m not planning to acquire it. So if I’m going to claim this title, it has to mean something different.

What I keep coming back to is the image of hosting a dinner party. Setting the table. Sending the invitations. You bring people together, you create the conditions for something to happen, but you don’t control what gets said, and you’re not the most important person in the room. The theology doesn’t come from you and flow outward. It arises from the conversation itself.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do here, in this Substack. I’ve written elsewhere that I see this newsletter less as broadcasting and more as facilitating a seminar where everyone participates. The comments, the pushback, the DMs from readers who take an idea somewhere I hadn’t thought to take it, that’s not a side effect of the work. That is the work. And it’s what I try to do in my books too: less “here’s my argument” and more “here’s what I found, what does it mean for you?”

And I think it might be exactly the right posture for this moment. The old model of the public theologian, the Niebuhrs and Tillichs, singular authoritative voices speaking from on high, that’s not where we are. What I keep being drawn to in Solnit’s work, and what I’m trying to do in this space, is something more like creating a classroom. A container. A place where the conversation can happen collectively, where people bring their own experiences and confusions and half-formed ideas, and where the point isn’t my wisdom but our thinking together. That feels both more honest and more useful right now.

Back to the nones.

Why for the nones specifically? Because that’s my people. Not because I have nothing to say to people with robust religious commitments, I hope I do. But because the people I’m most drawn to reach are the ones who have every reason to find the word “religion” off-putting, who maybe carry some version of the allergy I described above, who love Rebecca Solnit and aren’t sure they realize yet that what she’s offering them is theological. People who are, as I am, both skeptical and seeking at the same time.

That’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve been sitting with since I talked to Lauren. The seeking isn’t comfortable for me. I’m much more at home in the critic role. Analyzing, exposing, complicating. The seeking is harder. It involves a kind of hope I don’t always feel entitled to. It involves being honest, in public, about an evolving relationship with something I spent a long time keeping at arm’s length.

What does seeking look like for me on a Tuesday? Mostly writing this Substack, trying to be brave about what I actually think. On Sundays, it looks like going to hot yoga with my seventeen-year-old daughter. The two of us, sweating together, before she leaves for college. Trying to practice, not just think, what it means to live in a body with some intention.

That discomfort, the critic who keeps finding herself seeking, the scholar who keeps finding herself in the room, is not something I think I’ll solve anytime soon. But maybe I don’t need to. Maybe that tension is productive? A public theologian for the nones can’t be someone who has arrived. She has to be someone still in the work, still at the table, still setting more chairs out.

That’s what I’m doing here. I hope you’ll pull up a seat.

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