TheDoor Interview

By Becky Garrison
ONLINE EXTRA
July/August 2004

      Like many Door readers, Donald Miller finds the message of Jesus personally and culturally relevant, but is troubled by the way Christianity is practiced today. Door contributing editor Becky Garrison became intrigued by his search for the essence of Christian spirituality as he was working in the highly secular community of Reed College. She gave this campus ministry leader a buzz so they could riff about his latest book, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. (Thomas Nelson Publishing.)

DOOR: How would you describe your childhood recollections of God?
MILLER: The prevailing idea I had was that he was a very distant sort of old man type, fatherly figure who had a lot of money. Since, I grew up very poor, I saw not having any money as a separation from God. To me, God was somebody, who had his crap together, which our family certainly didn't.
DOOR: Now, what is a slot machine God?
MILLER: That's a God that sort of doled out reward and punishment based on luck or chance. The more times you pulled the knob, the better chance you have of gaining favor with God or getting good rewards. I think I did a lot of prayer based on that kind of perception of God.
DOOR: How did studying literature in college help you in your faith journey?
MILLER: The elements of story really helped me understand that the Gospel was true because the Gospel provided an explanation for why the human heart responds to those elements in a story. I couldn't explain who I was or why I existed as a human, and so literature put flesh on those elements for me.
DOOR: How do you respond to those that say "good" Christians shouldn't read certain stories in the Bible cause they're "dirty?"
MILLER: That's ridiculous. There is no question that there are portions of The Bible that are erotic. I think a lot of people who teach the Bible want to stay away from that. But I suspect that our culture has turned scripture into a self-help book. So we're taking the idols or the false Gods of our culture, and then we're picking apart bits and pieces of the Bible that help us defend that. But if we look at it as a whole, it's a book that is not afraid of humanity in the way that John Steinbeck or Norman Mailer would look at humanity. God wants to go into the dirty places and he isn't hiding from them.
DOOR: How was your faith informed by attending a secular college like Reed?
MILLER: When you go to a place like Reed College, your faith is either going to fall apart or it's going to become true and refined. I would say my faith was radically transformed because I had to sit across from homosexuals that I liked and I had to face the idea that these weren't bad people the way the church had defined them.
DOOR: How do you feel the church uses love as a commodity?
MILLER: When we talk about relationships with people, we use phrases like "invest in people," "this person is priceless," or "this relationship is bankrupt." By using economic metaphor we've begun to think of love like money. There is this sense that we can't love homosexuals because that's endorsing them. So, we spout little cliches like "hate the sin, but love the sinner" but we don't actually do that. We sort of isolate ourselves from the world because we fear them, we don't understand them. I think the root of that problem is the fact that we treat love like money. We exist in this social economy where we use affection as dollars.
DOOR: Now, explain how the sex life of penguins serves as a metaphor of why you believe in Jesus.
MILLER: I was watching this documentary one night on PBS about the mating habits of penguins. They swim hundreds of miles north until they hit ice and they fly on their bellies another thirty or forty miles. About five hundred penguins get in a big circle and they procreate. Then the female penguins will lay an egg, and the men will pick up the egg, and sit on the egg for about a month while the females leave for nearly a month and then come back. The day they come back is the day the baby penguins are hatched, and then the men leave while the women take care of the baby penguins. So the sort of ridiculous cycle that takes place, that nobody can explain, this is just the way penguins do it.
DOOR: But what does penguin porn have to do with faith in Jesus Christ?
MILLER: I began to sort of believe that if we can't explain penguins and the way they procreate, but yet it does happen, then why can't it be true that Jesus was the Son of God?
DOOR: Huh?
MILLER: I mean, there's this feeling inside of my chest that testifies to that idea that I didn't need a scientific explanation because as I look around me there aren't scientific explanations for most of the things that take place in our lives but they happen.
DOOR: Explain your summer living as a Navy Seal for Jesus.
MILLER: It's a part of my biography that I'm not exactly proud of but I was a fundamentalist at one point in my life, where I worked at a their camp in Colorado. It was miserable. We fasted, prayed, memorized a bunch of scripture, fasted, and did all of that to make ourselves great Christians in order to redeem ourselves rather than trusting in the grace and mercy of God. We thought we were in training for some sort of holy war. Of course we weren't going to be violent about anything, but we definitely looked at it that way in terms of being kind of militant Christians. I fast and pray probably a lot more than I ever have but the motive is completely different. I'm not doing it because I think it's redeeming me; I'm doing it because I want to be obedient to God.
DOOR: What did your experience at a book party for Trendy Writer teach you about your own faith?
MILLER: I went to hear this writer that I enjoy speak.
DOOR: Come on, name names.
MILLER: I won't mention his name out of fairness to him because he could have just had a bad night but I think he's a good, capable writer out of the Northwest here.
DOOR: Darn, it. Well go on.
MILLER: Supposedly he's a Christian guy but when I went to hear him speak, he read a little bit from his book and then read some stuff from newspapers. He was definitely into facets of Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity, and that's fine. But this guy was just coming straight off the air waves of National Public Radio and was just saying exactly what people wanted to hear and he wasn't able to back it up.
DOOR: Sounds like he was pleasing the crowd versus speaking the truth.
MILLER: I get weary of when I hear people present their religious idea and it's very cozy and neat, and it seems more like something they believe to comfort themselves than something they believe because they've come to objective ideas and it's the truth. I saw in Trendy Writer what I could have easily become, and where I was going. But that's not the truth. Now, the liberals are going to be very angry with me about some things I've said and certainly the conservatives are going to be furious with me about some thing I'm going to say, but the truth has facets that people like and don't like.
DOOR: Give us an example of an issue where you tick off both the conservatives and the liberals.
MILLER: One of those issues is homosexuality. Conservatives will say, Don you shouldn't embrace these people or accept them in our community or let them be in leadership positions because it's a sin, and they're all pissed off. Certainly it's a sin; it's something that God probably wants to deal with people about. But homosexuality is not a sin any more than, say, gluttony is a sin. And that means we love them, we keep them in our community. If they repent about it and want to try to change, that's great. If they don't I'm not going to kick them out of our community. When science says people are born homosexuals, I would say absolutely people are born homosexuals. Satan is an unfair guy, he rules this world.
DOOR: But there are those liberal Christians who would disagree with you that homosexuality is a sin at all.
MILLER: That's an area where the liberals are all pissed at me. But I think the balanced view is yes, it's a sin, and we're all sinners, and that doesn't disqualify this person from leadership or anything else. It's a hard thing for people to get their minds around but I think it's accurate and biblical.
DOOR: How do you react to evangelicals that present Christianity as being cool and hip?
MILLER: I think the Gospel is the message that Jesus wants us to present, and we don't need to be God's marketing machine. We need to present the Gospel accurately because that's what God has asked us to do. I think if somebody passes from this life thinking that Jesus was cool, that's not very helpful. They need to know that Jesus was the Son of God who died to forgive them of their sins, and enter into a relationship with God. I think the church has bought into this idea that if we make Jesus look cool we win. But what these fellows are trying to do is make themselves look cool, not Jesus. They're looking at a culture that rejects the idea of Jesus, they say "But I want to be a Christian and I also want to be cool so I'll try to make Jesus cool." That's about you, not Jesus. We certainly need to repent of that.
DOOR: Describe your approach to campus ministry.
MILLER: The culture at Reed is different than any other culture I've seen in terms of being very pagan and very intellectual. So, I think part of the reason we do things the way we do them at Reed is not because we sense that it's right, it's because we want what we do to reflect the culture. If we were to take this thing to the University of Texas, it wouldn't work. It would need to be something different because it would need to reflect that culture.
DOOR: How would you explain the confession booth you and the other brave Christians at Reed built for the Renn Fayre? (For our faithful Door readers, "The end of the school year at Reed College is marked by Renaissance Fayre, a festival beginning with the thesis parade and featuring a celebration of music, food, sports, arts and crafts ... blah, blah, blah – Reed College brochure, Ch. 6, page 35.)
MILLER: Our little Christian group built a booth in the middle of the campus that said "Confession Booth" on it. And then when students came in almost wanting to play the game as it were, we wouldn't let them confess their sins. Instead we confessed to them for the church as a whole that we had as Christians misrepresented Christ and we wanted to explain Christ to them, but we didn't use any sort of formula, we spoke from the heart.
DOOR: So what did you guys say to them?
MILLER: We thought the Crusades were wrong. The white evangelical church's racial oppression in our own civil rights movement was wrong. We confessed our part in not feeding the poor or representing the heart of what Jesus wanted on this earth. Also, we confessed to the use of war metaphor, as it was an "us against them" kind of mentality even at Reed College. It ended up being a very beautiful place of healing for a lot of people, who just didn't think God liked them. We wanted to explain that God did like them, and the reason they didn't think God liked them was probably something that we had done not God. That turned out to be a really powerful event on campus.
DOOR: Given the rise of organizations like the International Church of Christ across the nation's colleges, how has Reed managed to keep cults off its campus?
MILLER: The school rejects and literally drives people off of campus if they come in with some sort of dogmatic idea. How we've managed to do it, I don't know. I think a lot of it is because our individual relationships with the students is good, healthy. We love them, they know that we love them, we care about them. It is no longer a cool thing to bash Christians on the campus at Reed. Again, when I talk to people, or when people ask about Reed they want a formula of how we do it and it's kind of like explaining a relationship with your best friend, things just happen. I don't know why they happen or the way they happen. We just click, we're a good fit, and our personalities work well with their personalities.
DOOR: What do you say to those who are turned off by Christianity because they equate Jesus as being a card-carrying member of the Republican Party and Pat Robertson's best friend?
MILLER: I would start by apologizing that these people have misrepresented Christ on numerous fronts. Jesus was not a political figure; I don't think he cared at all about politics. I think there is this desire to build this Christian utopia on earth but there are a couple key things that people ignore when they try to build this Christian utopia. One is the brevity of life. We're all going to die, then who the hell cares? And two, if we build utopia on earth, it doesn't redeem anybody. Jesus was about going, "hey this is a completely f*cked up system that is happening here on earth. I have come to pull you out of this. If you want to come that's fine." And so, our primary purpose is to follow him out of it, and try to get other people to follow him too. And so if we're trying to build a political system, what in the world does that have to do with the mission of Christ?
DOOR: Another perspective is a lot of the major sociopolitical movements such as slavery and civil rights were started in large part by the church.
MILLER: I don't mean to ignore the ideas of social justice. But if a civil rights movement is saying that people should be free, that we should have equality, there should be freedom, but it doesn't go on to say that you can be free from the consequences of your sin, it's just a deficient system. You're just setting people free for what the Bible calls a vapor, a very short life. We've completely lost the Gospel, and I think we need to be about the Gospel again.
DOOR: Now, how did you merge the culture of the woods in the Unitarian Church without abandoning the truth of scripture?
MILLER: I was living in the woods for a while with a group of hippies, and I really liked them. They described themselves as pagans and yet I just found them to be loving, and wonderful people, dear friends. Then I immediately got a job after living in the woods for a period of time out in Colorado at a very conservative camp that I described to you earlier and experienced the complete opposite. So, I started attending a Unitarian church there because I missed the community that exists in a culture that has no laws and doesn't use things to judge each other with as certain Christian cultures do. It was much later that I realized that we can have that in our Christian culture by not using economic metaphor and treating love as a free gift for everyone, that we give to people generously and liberally and not holding judgment on other people, that's something God does. That's how I sort of merged into two, whereas I didn't have to throw away scripture in order to create this kind of community.
DOOR: What attracted you to Rick's church, Imago-Dei?
MILLER: The churches I had been going to was sort of suburban, evangelical churches, conservative in both theology and political opinion led by a staff of white men. I didn't have a lot of problems with them except the idea that my personality just didn't fit with these guys. What led me to help Rick in terms of starting this church was not so much that I believed in a great vision or was moved by God, I was desperate. It was either that or just stop going to church altogether. So we started this church a few years ago, and it's become a thriving, healthy thing, because they really love, and it's been wonderful. When I think about church it's now a positive word that goes next to my heart pretty powerfully and warmly where used to, it was cold, and miserable, and depressing.
DOOR: Why is it important for single Christians to be living in a community instead of by themselves?
MILLER: That's not law or a biblical idea, but in my experience I was unhealthy living alone. I needed people around me to irritate me, to call me on the carpet, to pray with me, to forgive me. I needed that in order to become healthy. And it's worked for me. I don't think that we're supposed to live our lives alone. I think we're supposed to live our lives with other people, and the toughest lie that I've ever had to contend with was that life was a story about me. It isn't a story about me, it's a story about God, and he made us, and he made us to live together. It's humbling to live with other people, but it's also wonderful.
DOOR: Why do you feel that your style of writing is not a commodity in this exploding multimillion dollar Christian publishing market?
MILLER: My style of writing just isn't so much self-help kind of stuff. It's going to offend some people because it's raw, real and it's scary because there is stuff in there that I don't feel comfortable being that vulnerable about but there it is. A lot of books that come out of Christian publishing companies read like press releases. They are just perfect and they're not offending anybody in their demographic, the author is very careful to show how humble he is, and how accomplished he or she is, it just reads like a bunch of bullsh*t to me.
DOOR: Why do you think Thomas Nelson considers this their riskiest book to date?
MILLER: I think it's a very honest book. The more I talk to evangelical publishers, the more I realize they want to print books for real people but a very, very small handful of book store owners just won't have it. So they tend to cater to those people, but they desire to do more books like "Blue Like Jazz," and I hope they eventually can print people like Ann Lamott and perhaps more literary titles that deal with humanity the way that Solomon does in Song of Solomon.
DOOR: Why did you name the book Blue Like Jazz?
MILLER: I was outside a theater here in town and there was a guy playing a saxophone. And I watched him for a good fifteen minutes, and the guy never opened his eyes, I could see that his soul was really being moved by it. After that I kind of started to like jazz music. It was a real strange event for me because it's not that I heard a song I really like that changed my mind, I just watched this other guy loving it. And so there have been periods sometimes when I didn't like God but through these relationships with other people and watching them love God and how they reconciled some of the tension they had God, I was able to follow them and do that too. That's really the heart of this book, it's the same journey.

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