Kate Bowler: On What We Can Become
It is not without a dose of irony that professor Kate Bowler—a prolific historian and author about the Prosperity Gospel—was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at the age of 35. After all, her work had revolved around parsing a spiritual point-of-view that if you were a good person, a good Christian, good things would invariably happen…like wealth and health. From her diagnosis, she wrote a bestselling book: Everything Happens for a Reason—and Other Lies I’ve Loved and added an entirely new dimension to her scholarship at Duke. She’s now in remission and the host of the Everything Happens podcast, and has written several more bestsellers, including books of devotionals like The Lives We Actually Have and Good Enough. In today’s conversation, we covered a lot of ground—the inherent goodness of people, when we rise to the occasion, and whether evil as an absolute exists. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM KATE BOWLER:
The Everything Happens Podcast
Everything Happens for a Reason—and Other Lies I’ve Loved
Kate Bowler’s Website
Follow Kate on Instagram
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: The only time that I've physically been with you, as you might recall, I came to Duke to interview you in person, and it was right at the precipice of Covid because when I flew down there, it was obviously in the air and it was a cause for concern, but I remember seeing you and being like, should I, are we like doing something dangerous?
KATE BOWLER: I don't associate you with that at all. I just associate you with like, well, the building I'd never been to, how great you are, and it's funny that we've only met once cause it's it was like fully sealed in my heart lock box.
ELISE: It was really nice. I loved that conversation. And then when I went back to LA, I went and had lunch somewhere at like a student spot flew home that night and it was a different world and it was a different experience. Like I just remember sitting there and the woman next to me didn't wanna touch her silverware, and I'd had a conversation on the way with the woman sitting next to me, and on the way back it was just, everyone was paralyzed. It was just moment in time of like, wow, wow.
KATE: Yeah. Those moments have a real crystalline quality to it.
ELISE: Yes. Oh God. So how are you? How's your health? How are you? Everything seems gangbusters, which is probably overwhelming in its own way.
KATE: I'm feeling really good right now. I just had a good scan a couple weeks ago and I've gotta wait and have one other little procedure and kind of find out where I'm at. But I think I'm in a really good spot, so I can always feel sort of the horizon open up when that happens. And so I'm feeling really good. This last year was harder than I wished it were because I had this just brutal year of chronic pain, it’s because of all the abdominal surgeries I've had, it just kind of pushed over a set of dominoes. And so I really only had about 45 minutes of clear brain space a day, and that made me very, just like, is it happening? Is it happening? Is it happening now? Do I have to concentrate? But I found ways to kind of fill that time with something creative and good. And then the rest of the time, honestly, I was just, I was just trying to get through as best I could. So I feel great that so much of that is cleared up. I just feel kind of like a brand new, brand new little baby.
ELISE: Really? So the pain as dissipated and did you ever figure out what it was?
KATE: Yeah, I've been doing like a nuts regiment of different kinds of physical therapy and trying to mash it together and just, I had a theory about if I combined a couple things and did these appointments like multiple times a day, I was like, I bet you anything, it'll work, but it's just me trying to gerrymander my own kind of care. But then it worked, so it took about three months for me to even just be able to drop the amount of intense pain meds I was on, but then all of a sudden the fog clears, a brain works again, and then I just felt, you know, just gloriously new. So I'm still in it. I still do a lot of appointments, but I'm so much better than I was even if few months ago.
ELISE: Oh, good. Kate, I mean, you're such a fascinating person to watch in the world for all of these reasons. Again, like your ability to hold conflicting ideas simultaneously and move through them and reflect them back to us. Obviously, I think you become sort of a beacon. And then, how do you think, obviously, however, many years ago you would never have said like, this is the space, this is my cabin in culture. Come hither.
KATE: Totally. No, never. I never would've thought that, it's true. Because at the beginning, when I first started writing about like feeling exiled from the world of health, wealth, and happiness, I think I was also just so lonely that the second I started to feel the companionship of having ideas and then being able to share them with other people, that was so just so wonderfully addicting cause I've made most of my good friends and emotional, intellectual companions for the journey by, just by doing this work out loud. So it's just funny that it's changed my life so much, you know, in terms of my like network of friends or even just imagining the kind of books I would write. I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever would've presumed to write like even more like a book of blessings or something like that cause before I was so disciplined into like Kate Bowler, you will stay in your lane and your lane is, you're an effing historian and you'll write, those books take six years and you'll sit alone until they're done. So this has been actually a much less lonely, much friendlier way of kind of sharing the ideas.
ELISE: Yeah. And obviously sort of the great irony, right, that you were historian specifically of Prosperity Gospel and this idea of like goodness precedes all the good things of life, right? They're, they're tethered together, and then you have a much more complex experience, and then it's interesting just even thinking about who you are and who you're becoming and, and who you've been for people and this idea of Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've loved and, and No Cure for Being Human, which is another gorgeous book, but it's also, I wanna say like maybe everything does happen for a reason on some sort of grander scale.
KATE: Your love for me in saying that, I really feel it because you're like, look, like, you have stuck a landing on being in a vocationally open space. And I do feel like everything's meaningful, you know, but it’s different than saying that everything's causal, cause I have felt like, you know, I spent my whole twenties interviewing televangelists and megachurch preachers and learning all about this very intense religious world called the Prosperity Gospel, which does say that everything is super hyper causal. You do this, you know, if you're good, good things will happen to you, if you're bad, bad things will happen to you. And so, you know, good luck person who gets stage four cancer, good luck. And so, in wanting to move away from that because I mean, the burden of that is that all of our choices then feel so fraught and then we feel like we're always trying to, you know, we look in our hands and all of a sudden we're like, our hands are full of puzzle pieces that don't fit and we're just trying to like mash 'em in, cause otherwise we won't get that beautiful feeling we get when we look at the big picture. But, I totally agree though, my love, that like we do sometimes end up with these mountaintop moments where we get to look back and say, man, like some things really came together so beautifully that I couldn't have orchestrated. But now I feel the, the coherence of like, so, you know, being able to be an expert in one thing that I genuinely did learn lessons from in the end.
ELISE: Yeah. Well it's interesting, too, to think about your books, which are largely memoir, right? But they're also in the context of you as a historian and in writing, you know, my own book that is a blend, and you're contextualizing my own life against this larger backdrop, which is similar, I think, to what you do, but also for you to say, okay, I'm gonna be a historian here. A diagnosing abstract from a place of remove about this corner of Christianity and then to actually be drawn by the nose forcefully into it is also quite cosmic to actually have to go into it and to insert yourself into this version that doesn't align with most of our lived experience, unless you're Joel Ostein and you have like 15 million, I don't know. And a lot of Ferrari's and Porsches.
KATE: Yes. I guess what happened with cancer and with the feeling of the limitations of my own life was it felt like a grand humbling, like Kate, whatever you thought you were gonna get to do, you know, with your 80 years of academic life and your grateful fleet of graduate students and your many, many leather bound books. I really, I had a very clear, clean ladder, like sense of how it was supposed to go, and then to have that all wiped away. But then in that leveling feels so much more of like a sense of real purpose in like, well, now that I'm here, now that I’m, Ariel style, where the people are, I felt so much more interconnected and then in a way, so much freer to say, well, now that I'm here, you know what else can we learn when life comes undone? And that sense of then connection with other people, I do think has probably been the most meaningful part of my life and now I can't even imagine. So I've now spent maybe five years being able to, like, when I go somewhere, I get to hear all of these stories of other people whose lives come undone. And that very horizontal, cracked, open sense of the world has honestly totally changed how I think and I hope how I interact.
ELISE: It's so beautiful and as you're speaking, it's like that's also the story of what you've studied at its source, right? Leaving everything or losing everything, being cast into the desert, like deep despair is sort of the heart of all of the Judeo-Christian religions. How do you think about, I don't even know, interestingly, like reading your books and then knowing sort of some of your interests, I loved your conversation with Elaine, I love her and her work, how do you define your faith and what interests you? Like what draws you in deeper?
KATE: That's such a big, lovely question. I mean, I'm very Jesusy, which is to say, I feel the hilarious tension of having like big cosmic beliefs about things, God is love, et cetera, et cetera. And then also constantly being drawn into the absurd and wonderful particularity of like one dude's story. And I think that's what's so funny about revelatory religion, right? Is we feel like we get a story and then we're supposed to peer through a keyhole at the rest of life. I've studied Christian history for a long time, and I guess that's what I find so compelling about the story, about how we learn to belong in the community of faith is, we are called to a really small set of claims about love of neighbor and a God who will never be separated from us. And a story about how somehow God completes and saves the world despite our many, many apocalypses and how we're like, determined to destroy ourselves and and everyone around us. I find those, I find those set of themes endlessly fascinating over and over and over again. So it's usually the same set of questions like, well then what does it mean to be a person of hope? Or like, what does it mean to have courage? You know, how much, how much in the face of unknowing does it require that we constantly get back up again? God, why do you keep requiring interdependence of me? I'm not good at it and I don't like it. And then, how much do we get broken down and broken in by learning how to be defined by love and like those four little themes, I swear to God I could be, I am interested in them spiritually, intellectually, forever and always, and that's I think fundamentally how I think about what are the big sort of notes in the song of what I hope is Christian faith.
ELISE: Yeah. So interesting. I also love Jesus and you know, my dad's Jewish and I sort of had this Wonder Bread version of Jesus where I was like, you know, and you hear, I just like sort of grew up in the soup of parents who would probably call themselves atheists but a deep reverence and connection to nature and this feeling of like, I've been here before. I can't believe I'm here again. Uh, why? And then also just sort of a presencing, a feeling of not aloneness. And it's only in recent years have I even come to sort of pay attention to Jesus and what he was saying, and then start to separate it from the stories that have been to told in the centuries since, or the way that he's been defined, or, you know, and I'm like, oh, right, he didn't commit these things to pay. Like this is a game of telephone, a cultural game, and what was lost and what have we gotten wrong and how has he been translated or interpreted in ways that he's been weaponized, where it's like that's not actually anything, has nothing to do with what he said and his aphorisms and who, what he did in the world is quite stunning. Who do you like to read? Who do you think tells like a nuanced, compelling version of history that might be slightly truer? Who do you look to for sources?
KATE: I guess this one I easy for me only because I work in a divinity school, so it's a lot of me wandering like up and down a hallway being like, Warren, Warren, what do we think about original sin? You know, and then like Warren comes out with, so that's a little bit mundane of a Friday for me. And, so when students come in and they either wanna be, you know, they nonprofit workers or social workers or a lot of chaplains and many wanna be pastors or some kind of academic. So we do teach these big kind of history courses and those ones are always the time when I get a chance to kind of like, rehearse and retest my own knowledge and assumptions, because I'm not a Bible scholar, but I love Bible scholars and for instance, I interviewed one just recently and he'll always write like a big fat academic book and then he'll write the same book in an accessible way, which God bless him for it. But he blew my mind last week when he was saying that there's this verse that's the equivalent of everything happens for a reason in the way that people read it. It's Romans 8: 28, and it's that God works, you know, for the good of all those who love him. And that's how it usually reads. And that sounds like, oh gosh. Like if, you know, if you are good, then God will divinely conspire to make all the details work out. And that sounds really nice and also something I'm pretty sure I don't agree with. And he was no, no, no, like the actual translation is like God works alongside all those, you know who love him. And it was this wonderful translation of the cooperation God wants to have with all those who are trying to do good for others. And he was like, no, this is actually the right translation. I was like, I love a good Bible scholar for helping me. But so people like that really do encourage and inspire and challenge my own assumptions that I know what I'm reading. I also just really, really like historical theology, which is basically like just, you know, history of theological ideas over time. I do read a lot of that and I, but in that, those cases, I usually just read my friends, Warren Smith, Steven Chavin, you know, people I work with.
ELISE: Anyone who's listening, regardless of whether you consider yourself interested in religion or not, I do think it's eyeopening, just those subtle distinctions between a God, as you said, who's sort of doing things for you as long as you're obedient in your goodness versus a God, a universe, that is co conspiring and co-creating. And maybe it's not what you would choose, right? You would never like look at the menu and say like, yes, stage four cancer, young child at home. Perfect. And yet at the same time, like one of the stunning things about this, like living project, being on this planet is what we experience, what we endure and what we become, rather than a linear life, right?
KATE: Perfectly said. That is so perfectly said. Oh my gosh. I could not agree with that more.
ELISE: Yeah. And it's not fun, necessarily.
KATE: It's not fun, necessarily. It will be my new memoir title. Thank you for that. perfect.
ELISE: It's not always a great time, but it is meaningful, you know, and it's interesting too, I don't know, have you ever interviewed Pauline Boss who wrote, she coined that term ambiguous loss, and so she's written several academic books about it, but came up with this like idea, that these losses that are not so easily codified. Right? And certainly not necessarily recognized as cultural rights where you're like, oh, there's a funeral because there's a body. Right? So it's like victims of 9/11, extreme homesickness, like before the time of telecommunication. Ghosting, miscarriage, et cetera. And she talks about sort of the essential quality of meaning making in terms of people being able to reorient themselves and yet certain things in life have no meaning and that inherently is a meaning, which I thought was so beautiful because she's saying, you know, she's like, say your child is murdered, you’re not supposed to like find the meaning, right, find the value, but meaningless is a meaning, which is so hard.
KATE: That's a really nice parsing those things. I do think that's really good hard work for all of us when we are trying to decide like what stories we tell ourselves about why something happened is like depending on like the nature of our burden, we need to tell different stories. People with, you know, addiction write to me all the time and say, there's parts of this story that I need to be able to say, I can act my way out of this happened because I made these choices. And then there are parts of course that happened to me, the likes of which I could never have set up. And so when we're always trying to decide what does something mean to me, the next always inevitable question is like, then how then do I act now that I know? And in some cases you kind of just have to like turn to face the abyss for a hot minute, you know, where you're like, oh, I didn't get to choose. And then the other times we have to then say, what do I have now? Such that I can choose the next beautiful, difficult, hard, lovely thing, and watching people make those choices, it creates awe in me every time I see someone, like, take a horrible thing and then figure out that next little sliver of agency. I could watch that all day.
ELISE: Oh, it's so interesting. It's like too, and this is hard to tease out, but you think about our animal nature, right? Like the very qualities of humanness, like our fear, our response to threat, the ways in which we are mammalian, right? Like that we are just animals on this planet trying to make good choices. And then those moments when we can sort of not overcome, but those transcendent states where you do begin to affect the world and not be affected by the world, but it's that dance. I think so often we also just wanna like, affect the world, control certainty, instead of saying like, well, you're living in both friends. You're not masters of the world, unfortunately, as much as we constantly want to quote unquote overcome, right? Or get over something or get on top of something. How do you, in those moments where you feel fear, where you feel your animal nature where you don't get to be transcendent…
KATE: Yes. Absolutely. That's a perfect way of putting it. What those moments when you are not in any way transcendent when you are made of plastic and garbage and ice cream.
ELISE: How do you work with your fear?
KATE: Yeah. Wow. Because some things hit what I think of as like the emergency button, capital E, capital B, you know, where you're like pull a thread and then you're just like not wearing a sweater anymore and you're like, good God. And I have some of those buttons where for a bit, nothing seems louder to me than this is awful, this is terrible. I can't figure this out. I'm never gonna overcome this. And I do, I've had feelings like that recently where I realize it's like a particular cord that gets mashed, usually it's like urgency. Oh no, I have limited time. And it might be too late. The feeling of like withdrawal of something I can never get back. You know, a relationship is gone. A thing is over, a dream has died. That kind of feeling, so like urgency plus a loss, plus then my immediate shame and it's like bam, bam, bam. And then it's over. And then I find that my fear is so loud and I have loved in those moments having the kind of friends who are not just friends, but they're like a witness to your life where they say, Oh, love these buttons feel really familiar to you. I know it really feels like you can't make a choice right now. I just wanna affirm that like it does feel that urgent, that is a real loss, I know it feels like you can't do something next. So that has really helped me get past the initial like, flooding feeling that fear can bring. But I think the other bit I've just been trying to learn is that not all fear feels the same. And for a bit, the harder my life got, the more I kind of mushed them up and put them all in the same bag. I've been scared of cancer treatment for such a long time. I feel sort of hyper alert. I get really, and then, you know, I used to have to travel all the time for medical travel. So I'd walk into an airport and my skin would prickle, I was having these like, just awful, saliva run thin kind of feeling. And then I realized, I think you need to start like learning of strong, a clear vocabulary for fear. There could be thrill, there could be excitement, there could be anxiousness, there could be physical worry, there could be just hyper anticipation. So, I started doing dumb things like zip lining. So, cause I'd cry half the time and then I was like, oh no, this is, this is actually just you metabolizing fear. Or I talk to people about their scary experiences and I try to ask them like, cause I find sometimes that just like you, just the right word can kind of help shade out some of the different colors of how scary fear is on a cellular level to us.
ELISE: Yeah, no, I think about it too and I think maybe this is the invitation of this next stage of my life as someone who really has had my stuff together, you know? And have experienced gradations of loss, but nothing catastrophic. Although I think that the story of humanity is like nothing is catastrophic until you're dead. And then even then, is that a catastrophe? We don't know, right? Maybe it's just an invitation, but I think too about just fear of darkness, fear of chaos, fear of allowing. And the way that culturally, we've assigned so many values to the night, to darkness, to the womb, the void, how, whatever you wanna call it. And it's like, well, what if we actually just go into it? What happens?
KATE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that a lot. I mean, what happens if we just take that little extra half step toward it and I mean, sometimes we think, we find that we're really not that bad at it. I mean, that takes a minute for our eyes to adjust to the light. But like, I meet people all the time that were positive that they could never possibly, you know, thrive with that little, you know, love, water, light. Like all the things that you imagine makes life, that natural growth, but man, are people a wonder when they are stripped down to the studs. I think people find that they are capable of incredible love for other people, that suddenly empathy just gets like turned right up because they know the burdens of their own pain. I find that people are really then attuned to what life doesn't require anymore. Turns out email would probably be the first, really the first thing to go in that universe. But I think darkness, ironically, has such a bright quality to it when we kind of just scoot up a little closer.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, and it's like the, the yin yang, like the light, the two, the counter polarities, like things doesn't exist, lightness doesn't exist without darkness and shadow, and we're so scared of it. And yet at the same time, it's like this is our invitation to wholeness. All of the stuff that we're afraid of is what completes this whole project.
KATE: I guess I always worry about becoming brittle, you know, because I think I did kind of a good job with the initial horror show that was cancer. And then I was like, oh, wow, I learned my lessons. But then I have been a little worried that like, gosh, having that kind of like buoyancy you're describing where you can just kind of soften up in it rather than being like, good god, I did this before. I've already become this person. I don't wanna do it again, but yeah, I kind of wonder if survival is like doing what you're describing for the fourth time, as opposed to the first or second, which did feel character building.
ELISE: How do you think about qualities like, you know, sort of thinking of this idea of goodness, like good and prosperity, if your good, good things happen, if you're bad, that bad things happen, how do you, what do you think is badness? What do you, do you think that evil exists? How would you even, what is that in your worldview?
KATE: Yeah. I do think evil exists. I think, I do have, I guess this is in part what, there’s is a lovely theological term for it that I've always found really satisfying and it's cause most of our, I think secular paradigm for good and bad is, you know, we can put all kinds of things on that spectrum, but I think we imagine in our culture that like, you know, in very therapeutic terms, like a self-expression, individuation, you know, and then maybe some like bonus service, but like that for the most part, there's kind of a flowering self-expression. And then the bad bit would be like a deformation into, you know, group think or oppression or a lack of self-expression. And I guess I still really like the growth paradigm that the therapeutic has really taught us, but I really, really like the theological term for growth, that is sanctification, that we really can sort of in becoming more fully ourselves and more fully human, that we are simultaneously hopefully like sloughing off some of the bullshit that then really does comprise evil: selfishness, instrumentalization, oppression, lack of justice. And that's why I love the language of holiness. It's like we can, that we can grow more sacred as we become more human, but that does require the opposite of it, which is that we can just also devolve. And oftentimes that's tragedy does that too. We just become a real dick, having realized scarcity of resources. Like good. I'll get mine. And that I think turns away from other.
ELISE: I think that's beautiful and like in a Jungian matter matter, you just think about like the dense shadow. And I agree. I think our job as humans is to own those shadowy parts. Recognize we're all capable of evil, fear being pushed by fear, scarcity into behaviors that we would condemn and others, and that it's our job to sort of be present with that and to be Alchemist like just exposing that shadow to light, moving it, processing it, getting bigger, getting more whole. Not by disavowing those parts, but by owning them and recognizing like you can't escape these human instincts. They are part of us. But, and I think we get into trouble when we otherize evil, we turn it into Satan or whatever, and maybe that that exists. I don’t understand it in the model of like, if God is everything, then isn't that God too? But can you, how do you understand that sort of this, we're not gonna be trapped by Satan this, this war that we have with or the bad people over there, sort of this binary instinct. What do you think about that?
KATE: Well, you are like, encroaching on a part of my brain that is like, really loves to talk, really loves to talk about it because I spent so long, I mean, gosh, at least 15 years in a part of Christianity that does talk a lot about Satan and evil, and so I've, you know, I've seen exorcisms, I've had people try to exercise me. I am weirdly chill. You and I are wired very similarly, so, cause there's like a very ethnographic interest in everything, so I'm like, oh sure. What's going on? Oh no. Please stop trying to cast these demons outta me, just happened like, look, at least have a dozen times. So I guess I have thought a lot about how people spiritually describe what they think evil, and then the personification of that would be in their mind, which is, could be, you know, demonic spirits or Satan. I think so much of it comes a from, yeah, like an oppositional sense of like, God is love, God is whatever. So therefore, why do we like what you described before, like the presencing thing. I think that's such a perfect word. And why does it feel sometimes like the things that undo us are so compelling that they feel like they overtake us. And so the personification of evil becomes such an, like a natural inclination. It also helps us have compassion for people who seem overtaken by things that are so terrible that we can't, we, we need another answer to like, but how, how could they possibly have done that? And it, it helps us, it helps us ritualize and separate from things that do take our lives apart. So people then talk about, you know, I'm not saying it's helpful, but demonization of physical ailments. It's, in one way, it's also trying to affirm the goodness of what someone is supposed to be. So it kind of has a really interesting effect on groups and how we think about our deepest dreams for our lives that we could be, you know, whole and healthy. And I think we've all met people where we're like, what is, what is taken over? Like, who is driving that bus? And I think it's an easier answer for people to say forces that are beyond them.
ELISE: Mm. And so do you personally have any, I mean, it's like a question that's consuming for me, unsurprisingly, where I'm like, is there, what, what is it? And I recognize it as extreme shadow and also as like an archetypal energy or force that can be very distorting. I don't know that I could say, like it I can't quite anthropomorphize it.
KATE: Yeah, I hear you. I love that this worries you, I think about this stuff too, a lot, so it actually worries me too.
ELISE: Well, you see it, right? You see people and you watch them get bent, big, big cultural people and you're like, oh, I see if this, if you sort of start as an amoral entity, I can see these people getting bent, distorted, and what is that?
KATE: Yeah, I really haven't spiritually put a lot of energy into imagining like a personification of evil who is like working to my detriment all the time. I have not, though I do think that it is so genuinely hard to be good sometimes like that the greatest evils are not, you know, murder or any of the other exciting sins. I mean, that's terrible. PSA, please don't murder, but I find that the, the most compelling ones are just always the easiest ones, like, you know, slander, condescension, jealousy, withdrawal. Like our deep desire to have a lack of love and call it, oh my gosh. And lately call it self-care. I’m obsessed with these news stories about people who choose great evil, but they mask it in like, I just really had to choose me. I'm like, what? Because you know, most of what is like good and I think holy and lovely also just doesn’t have a great reason for it. Like we look at Mother Theresa and people like that with awe and a little confusion because, because sometimes the path to good requires so much self-sacrifice that like, we want a million other reasons to not choose that road. So I'm not saying the monastic ideal is like the, the only one that helps us, like a distinction between good and bad. But I do find that most of our conception of evil is so exaggerated because the most, because the evil we would choose is already so acceptable to us.
ELISE: Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I guess I think of it, too, just listening to you and I just think of it as like a density or not a gravitational pull because I also take issue with the way that our culture is structured as like we just need to get outta here and up there, like the ascension, instead of sort of recognizing it as a cycle of bringing us down and deeper into ourselves. And then before we go up, you know, some sort of spiral, but there is a density, a taryness, I think, to some of those sticky instincts.
KATE: I find evil is a really helpful category when I think about structural evil. When I almost bankrupted my family with medical bills. I have spent tens of hundreds, what feels like thousands of hours on the phone with someone named Linda, who is hired by a company designed to have sent me an insane and absolutely irrational bill for two needles that will then, you know, prevent anyone I love from keeping their bungalow or for example, the future of genetic testing that will be, all of our information will be bought by companies that will be then used to exclude my offspring from receiving fair access to healthcare. Like we don't really have to look very far around us know that genuine evil rules the primary logic of structures that like do us harm. And so in those versions, I sometimes feel like the personification of it helps give me a better sense of justice and a stronger sense of like, these are, as you know, my preacher friends would say powers and principalities and they would use language like that, and I find it very dramatic and I sort of find it helpful.
ELISE: Yeah, well I think structure, of any kind, shape, right? So that it's not so amorphous and I feel this way or this is what I was trying to do in On Our Best Behavior was to give shape and structure to an oppressive dominance based patriarchy in the way that it shows up in our lives. Instead of saying, sort of using language where it's like it, they, it becomes a boogeyman where you're like, what are we even talking about and how is this alive in us? Or systemic Racism is another example where you're like, actually you have to define it. You can't just deny it. And what is the system of misogyny? What is the system of racism? You know, whatever it is, like, then you can start to undo it. But otherwise you're sort of casting around at this like terror in a way that feels maddening.
KATE: It's funny, I think you're totally right that our language for evil can be so broad, like so diffused and amorphous that it can't name things that undo us, like clinical trial consent protocols, just to name one. But the, it can also then be so individualistic that it's like only the Unibomber, you know, only and I, who, you know, just I think we do get caught, especially in American religion where we either go hyper individualistic and we imagine each person along this sort of path of individual progress or so collective in our imagination that we have no account of, I think our own sin and our own progress.
ELISE: And our own culpability and our own adherence, our own involvement or engagement with these systems, and I think the last few years and decades have been so helpful and instructive, as difficult as they've been for people to recognize, oh, right, okay. I understand systemic racism now is something that I'm participating in and I am a part of. Even though I never subscribed, I never made a conscious agreement to participate in this yet I understand how it's alive in me and alive in the world. I think it's like what has to happen, even in these conversations about any structured evil, darkness badness, is to bring it into our bodies and to say, I recognize that this is alive in me. I recognize like I don't wanna pay a higher premium. You know, so that Kate gets appropriate care, whatever it is. I want my, like take home pay to be, I want my bonus as a pharma executive. You know, all of these things that like are very easy to rationalize, but until we recognize it and then identify it in ourselves as something that's also collective, we can't undo it I don't think, to own the own the darkness.
KATE: I think that’s one of the reasons why I've always really loved, thinking about like the cultural, like the big broad cultural scripts that we tell ourselves about how we imagine like whether our lives are gonna work out, frankly. Lately I've been working on a history of self-help, so I've been reading hundreds of self-help and so I just, so I've been thinking a lot about how much we expect for ourselves and how much, you know, so how much we, what our, what our experience of our entitlements are really. And the follow-up questions is like, well then what do we owe one another? And I’m really hopeful that we're evolving past our very hyper individualistic understanding of like, my health, wealth and happiness is the great goal. And that we're trying to like fold in a more collective, and I hope, generous sense that like our lives will require love. Our lives will require courage and interdependence, you know, and it's probably going to never fall along any of our demographic, political, religious, sociocultural dreams that advertising companies have for us, but instead it's gonna require a very collective sense of what can we become.
ELISE: Ooh, Kate, I can't wait. I hope that that's, is that a book for all of us?
KATE: Okay. I know, exactly. I'll write it just for you. That's what I'll do.
ELISE: May I please have that book? I love that. And I feel like the paradigm shift required for all of us and the way, like the bigger umbrella for that world is also personal responsibility. It's like, yes, individual culture, this rugged individualism has gone so far to become depraved. And yes, there is a lot of value in cleaning up our stuff before we project it onto each other. And so it's like, it's a personal responsibility. Yes. Take care of yourself. Take care of your messes and in service of something that's so much bigger than any one of us.
KATE: Yep, it's so true. If I could pick one thing that everyone would have to do that no one will do, I just want everyone to like join the Rotary Club or like some kind of Girl Scout organization or just realize that like so much of my sense of responsibility, it no longer weekly requires that I care about things other than myself and I just, I'm imagining that at some point our endlessly book club model of what we think collective action is gonna break down and we'll just all go back to being weird Rotarians. That's my prophetic imagination.
ELISE: Weird Rotarians unite. I love it. Kate, this has been such a joy. Please call me when you're next in the neighborhood.
KATE: I insist, your endlessly curious mind and the fact that you have such a soft and nimble heart makes me so excited every time I get to talk to you.
ELISE: Kate is a very special human with a mind I deeply admire, both for her historian sensibility that leaning towards a larger context or frame in which to find ourselves, paired with her deep, deep humanity and the way that she lets us see her insides against this bigger tapestry of her outsides. I also love her because she is obviously a person of deep faith and writes about religion and writes books that are memoirs and also books of blessings, but there is nothing pushy about her system of belief, in fact, I would call it really just faith, a person of faith who is will to hold a lot of peoples lives in her experience without projecting how we should all live. So, I love her podcast, I love her books, I love her sensibility and the accessibility of her feelings is really something to behold. She is not frozen or hardened, she is so soft and all of her experiences are miraculously accessible to her, even as she has experience many hard things. Alright, I’ll see you sext week.
