the more perfect union with Rev. Adam Russell Taylor (ep 3, 32).

Rev. Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners, the national Christian organization that has spent five decades insisting that biblical faith and social justice belong in the same sentence. His story starts with a wedding. His parents married in 1968, one year after the Supreme Court said a Black woman from segregated Louisville and a white man from outside Cleveland were allowed to marry each other, in a case that carried the name of a couple called Loving. Their son grew up convinced that America's diversity is its greatest superpower, that there have always been people who treat that superpower like kryptonite, and that the country has been locked in a tug of war from its founding over who gets included in We the people. His faith caught fire at Ebenezer Baptist, broke in Cape Town, and surrendered completely in the mist of Victoria Falls. From the Progressive National Baptist tradition that formed him, he carries one conviction above the rest. A commitment to justice and a commitment to following Jesus are interwoven and inseparable. From there the conversation goes directly at the season's hardest question. How does faith enter public life without becoming a weapon? Taylor tells the uncomfortable history of the religious right's founding, names what he underestimated when he wrote A More Perfect Union, including the patient local infrastructure the Christian nationalist movement built in places like Northwest Arkansas, and then offers the guardrails. Political, but never partisan. Principled, but never overly ideological. Engaged in our politics, but never used by our politics. Because the kingdom of God is never fully on the ballot. He puts the hope in the same place as the danger, the church, the neighborhood, the block, speaks directly to pastors trying to hold divided congregations, and names this a kairos moment, the kind of time when things grow fraudulent enough that something new can be born. Asked what wholeness means, he gives the season one of its clearest answers yet.  https://www.theunderview.com/the-more-perfect-union-with-rev-adam-russell-taylor-sojourners About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch