ROBB RYERSE

My guest for this episode is a man of many, many hats  - author, pastor, politician, husband, father to name a few.  Aside from being the current Political Strategist and Political Director at VOTE COMMON GOOD , he has been an outspoken thought leader  encouraging and embracing inclusion within the Christian Church. He is also currently a candidate for the United States House of Representatives  for Arkansas 3rd District, having begun his political career as part of the BRAND NEW CONGRESS initiative in 2018 - running alongside politicians the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.   It's hard to encapsulate Robb's life into a small bio here, but needless to say he's a fascinating human and we had an equally fascinating conversation, primarily centered around his experience growing up in a fundamentalist religion and the ways in which that upbringing has inspired him to create and recreate his own understanding of what it means to be a Christian.  Whatever your religious or political leanings, if you come with an open mind and curiosity I can guarantee you will find something of value here to further expand your mind. And that's what our little corner of the podcast world is all about.  

Let's get into it. 

LINKS

Robb Ryerse Instagram

Brand New Congress

Vote Common Good

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Christopher. Before we get started with this conversation, I want to give you just a little bit of backstory. I was very lucky to speak with a gentleman named Rob Ryersee, who is a politician and author of multiple books. He is a pastor and really a thought leader around what it means to explore our culture, our political beliefs, our ideologies, our religious beliefs, and find the common ground where it might seem like we don't have commonality. And it is a very short snippet of what was a much longer conversation. I will have more conversation with him to come, but I really wanted to just focus on religion for this one and how he brought himself to his current understanding. And if you are easily triggered or offended by people using critical thought to discuss religion and their own personal experience with religion, this might not be the podcast for you, but I would encourage you to stay and listen because there is nothing truly offensive, but it is really a discussion and an exploration of that evolution. And uh hopefully we will have a chance to have him back with us. I recorded this about a year ago. A lot has changed in that time, but I think it's important, then there's some really uh wonderful um nuggets in this conversation for you to think about and to kind of chew on and see how you feel about. And um, again, hopefully in the future he'll come back and we can dig more into his politics and kind of address what's going on in the world today. But for now, enjoy the conversation. And without further ado, here's Rob Ryersy. This is Unsided. Unsided. Here we are, everybody, and we are with Rob Ryersy. Rob, it's so nice to have you with me and with us and our listeners today. I'm gonna go ahead and let you tell us just a little bit about who you are, if you don't mind. I'm uh I'm Rob Ryersy.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

25 years I spent as a pastor, and uh I now work in politics. Yeah, I um been married for 28 years or so and have four kids. And yeah, that's probably where he'd start. I'd knowing me though, I would probably be the one asking questions, not answering them.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

I I I had I'm not surprised. The very little that I know you, and mostly I know you from a brief phone call and listening to your book Running for Our Lives, which is a great book. Here's what I've been most excited to talk to you about, Rob. Is you're you're in Arkansas. I know you're not from Arkansas, is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 2:20

That's right. I'm originally from Cleveland, Ohio.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Okay, right. So you're still from we consider Cleveland, Ohio uh Middle America, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I'm from Oklahoma. So we share a similar background. And you still have a church, vintage fellowship, is that correct, there in Fayetteville?

SPEAKER_01 2:38

We actually retired from pastoral ministry uh in uh 2021 and then uh got the church through COVID, and then it was kind of time to be done. We kind of we decided to call it retiring from uh from ministry. Um, and uh and then forward to the church uh kept going for about a year, year and a half, but uh is on hiatus now. Were you raised evangelical Christian? No, I was raised a fundamentalist. What's the difference? The Baptist denomination I grew up in. Um, my grandfather helped to start back in the 1930s growing up, and we weren't allowed to have anything to do with Southern Baptists because they were too liberal. Okay. Okay, just to put it on the spectrum for you. So I grew up like in a denomination that was like, you know, very rules oriented. We couldn't go to movies, we couldn't listen to rock music, we not footloose, yeah, couldn't dance. Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

That would have been a fundamental sect of uh okay of the Baptist church, got it.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Yeah, and we didn't even like like we didn't call ourselves evangelical because they were liberal compromisers.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

What does that mean? Liberal compromisers?

SPEAKER_01 3:47

You know, like I don't know. Like that, I mean that in the like that whole thing where you know Christians at times think that, you know, their denomination or their group are the only ones who have it figured out. Um, you know, we were we as fundamentalists were uh you know had the the pure truth and everybody else was you know was mistaken in some way.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

You know, based on what I have heard from your book and what I've seen online, you are one of the few, at least forward-facing um pastors and politicians who was willing to speak outside of a rigid kind of dogma. I was raised in the Evangelical Assembly of God Church. And when I say I was raised in it, I kind of chose to go. I didn't, I wasn't ensconced, my family wasn't ensconced in the community in the way that it sounds yours was. Sounds like yours was with your grandfather starting the church. But I started taking myself when I was seeking something higher. My family all went to church, disciples of Christ, Catholic, I mean, kind of the whole gamut, Baptist, Southern Baptist, and I chose Assembly of God. And there was something within the Assembly of God denomination called Absolute Truth. Have you heard that term before?

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Is that is that mirrored in in the religion you were raised in? Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. How do they talk about that in uh in the way you were raised?

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Yeah, they yeah. So, you know, absolute truth is is totally an idea that we were raised with. And it was all the idea of, you know, absolute truth was essentially what it, you know, what it boiled down to was it was our interpretation of what the Bible says. So there'd be, you know, we'd hear phrases like, well, the Bible clearly says this or that. The Bible clearly says that, you know, gay people go to hell, or the Bible clearly says that, you know, women can't be pastors. The Bible clearly says that God created the world in seven literal days. The Bible clearly says, and and and that was always, you know, the absolute truth. It was our belief, our interpretation of what you know we thought the Bible said, you know, that was what was absolute truth.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

I feel like when we spoke about it mostly, it was spoken as though, and I think this encompasses everything you just said. We needed to convert people to our way of understanding and interpreting the Bible because of that absolute truth.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Yeah, if others didn't come to our way of interpreting it, then they were also going to be bound to, or, or, you know, to eternal conscious torment, which when you stop and think about exactly what I mean, there were a number of things that were kind of bricks in the wall that that began to crumble. And one of them for me was the idea of eternal conscious torment. And and I remember I was I was driving a car with a pastor friend one day. This is after pastoring for, I don't know, eight or nine years in this fundamentalist denomination that I had grown up in. And I and I said to my friend, I said, another pastor, I said, Brian, I said, wouldn't it be just like God to let everybody in in the end? You know, and like that kind of surprising grace, that unexpected love, like wouldn't that wouldn't it just and that just that seemed to me to be a much better story. And and my friend was horrified. No, no, if God does that, he can't like he's no longer God. And but for me, uh like yeah, that whole idea of we've got the truth, we have to convert everybody to the truth. And if everybody doesn't see the world and God the way we do, then they're spending eternity in conscious torment that we call hell. I'm like, I don't know. That that story's that's not a good story.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

It just didn't sit with you. And you know, I gotta, you did mention that in the book as well. That's one of the first times I've ever heard a pastor, someone who still is a Christian, who hasn't walked away, who still uh believes in the basic tenets of Christianity, which, although I'm not a press practicing Christian, I also believe in the basic tenets of what I believe Christianity to be. Just like, you know, my partner who is Muslim, the Islam tenets are very similar. Uh in Judaism, they're all there's a similarity to them. The thing that was always fascinating to me was this need to be right. And you talk about this a lot, not just in religion, but you talk about it in politics, identity politics. Your take on identity politics in the book is fascinating. But I'd love to hear more about how you came to even did you always understand that there was that that that we needed to be more expansive in our inclusion?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

My first book is uh is called Fundamorphosis, How I Left Fundamentalism but didn't lose my faith. And it's and there's a chapter in there called I'd rather be good than right. Um and and and I think that kind of goes along with what you're just saying. So for me, it was like what I mean, we now have this word deconstruction that gets used a lot in kind of the what's called the exvangelical community. Um when I was going through this 20 some years ago, you know, we didn't we didn't have that word. Um the word was like, oh, I I became a heretic or I was backslidden or apostate or those kinds of things. So for me, I essentially, you know, I I woke up one day, you know, maybe it was turning 30 or and and I was like, I the answers I was given just stopped making sense. I was I was preparing to preach a sermon series through the book of Genesis at the the church that I was past in this fundamentalist church, and I knew that if I even asked the questions that I had in my head that I would be fired. Like if I said, Hey, like, doesn't that sound like Genesis one and Genesis two, which tell the stor the you know the creation story? Doesn't it sound like two different stories, like two different voices? And doesn't chapter one that we you know take literally, doesn't it doesn't that sound a lot more like poetry than like you know, prose? If I even asked those kinds of questions, let alone began to, you know, provide some answers to them, um I would have been fired. And and that led to uh really a a deep uh kind of spiritual depression, spiritual and emotional depression, where I for a long time essentially had to fake it. You know, I had to, I had to pretend. I had to stand up on Sunday morning for the sake of my job and and you know, say things, not say things I didn't necessarily believe, but uh but not be authentic and not be true and honest with the questions and the doubts that I was having. And that that ultimately led my wife and I to uh to make the decision that we that we couldn't do this anymore. Um, and and so we left uh where we were pastoring at the time in Michigan and uh and moved here to Arkansas, and we lost friends and you know, we had people who were gonna support us in starting a new church, and then they found out what some of the things I was saying, and you know, we were, you know, essentially excommunicated and separated from to use uh the terminology of that denomination. And and so I there was a couple of things like I had to go to a church where I could absolutely be myself as the pastor, and I absolutely I had to go someplace that I had to go to a church that I would go to even if I wasn't being paid to be there. And uh, and so that led us on the journey to start vintage fellowship, which was uh, you know, a completely different kind of church than you know, we ever dreamed that we'd pastor. We we were there for 15 years, and it was a more difficult and more fun than we ever could have imagined, you know. But it was a church where people could literally bring their doubts and their questions. I mean, I would say on a Sunday morning in a sermon, I would say things like, you know, most days I'm an agnostic, and I'm like, I don't know if you've ever had a pastor say that during a sermon, but uh, you know, yeah, and you know, and we're a place where everybody was welcome regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Everyone was invited to participate and you know, full participation of women in leadership and all of that kind of stuff. You know, you used the word inclusion earlier, you know, we we used to talk about like we actually it it it it kind of completely changed the way I read the Bible. I began to see that the Bible is this story of ever-increasing circles of inclusion. That every time like the story is over and over and over again, I think it's just me. Oh no, it's actually my family. I think it's just my family. Oh no, it's it's more than this. I think it's my country. No, oh, actually, it's and the circles just keep getting wider and wider and wider. And that's the story of the Bible. And you know, why we would ever get to a circle where where not everybody was included, like just doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

I remember sitting in the pew of of uh I even I'm I'm completely blanking on the name of the church that I went to. I think it was a little traumatic for me at the end. My my my particular church was very, very intense. I knew that I was participating in a great play. Everything felt like a passion play to me. I was the president of the youth group. I believed very much. I understood, I had seen in my life, it bore out that faith was real, that my relationship with God was real. I was already questioning my sexuality in my in my high school years. Um, but I wasn't feeling particularly scared of it. What I was more concerned about was how do I do good in the world. So I knew that if I, when I would come home and do my own Bible study, that to me they read very clearly as parables for how to live the best life, how to contribute to the people around you, how to be compassionate. But then I would go to church and I would watch it become bastardized for lack of a better word, for control or power. Um, I would also see the little old ladies and little old men who would come in who had nothing else but that community and how easily influenced they were. And we had a particular pastor who talked about what he deemed the age of accountability. Have you ever heard of this nonsense? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Okay. So he he, I'm sure it's different in every different religion, but he talked about it being 12. And if by 12 years old you had not accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and you died before you were 12, you were given a free pass. But if after that point you had not accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and been born again and washed in the blood, that you were bound to what do you call it? Eternal Eternal conscious torment forever.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

You're gonna be conscious and it's gonna torment you forever.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

And I remember just having this moment where I thought, oh no, no, no, no. Even if that's right, I don't want anything to do with that God. And and I had that visceral of a reaction, and I never went back to church after that moment. And then I went on my own journey and my own exploration of many different theologies, my own path towards spirituality. Simultaneous to that, I was discovering my sexuality. I moved to Chicago for school, I moved to Los Angeles. And without going too much into the details of my story, I found myself becoming more and more and more curious as I met Jewish people, as I met Muslim people, as I met Buddhists, I became more and more curious about how I could grow up in a world, in a section of this little town in Oklahoma where everybody indoctrinated me into something. Yeah. And how could I hold on to the pieces of that that were valuable to me? And how could I expand my mind to make room for all of the other people? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I imagine as a pastor standing up there, that was literally the center of your work, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:16

You know, I feel like my spiritual journey is similar in in some ways, um, though I kind of got to that point much later than you did. I remember when I was a kid, we had the we had this book, Grover and the Museum of Everything in the World. And so in this book, Grover would go into the Museum of Everything in the World. And and in this museum, you know, he'd walk through and there's everything in the world. And, you know, he would experience all he'd see all the stuff, and he, you know, go room to room, and there's everything in the world. And then he kind of gets to the end, he's like, Okay, I've seen everything. Is that all there is? And he finds this kind of door in the corner with cobwebs over it, and he w wipes the dust away, and it says the museum of everything else in the world. And he opens the door and he's outside. And and I and I feel like that's been my experience through the church, is that it was it was my whole world. And then I found out that there was like a whole world outside of it that was just as amazing and just as life-giving, and just as full of grace and opportunity, and just as full of contradiction and difficulty too. And and all of that was, you know, was was grace and was was a welcome for me. And I have and I have found that like I've really enjoyed being in the museum of everything else in the world.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

That's a beautiful analogy. I'm really curious why you chose Fayetteville to go and explore a more open and accepting church.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Yeah, all of our friends were like, Arkansas? You're moving to Arkansas? I mean, probably the best place to be. Yeah, I mean, it's it's not anything profound. It was, you know, we wanted to be, this was back um 2005, 2006. Um, we wanted to be someplace that was growing. And and so that was one component. We wanted to be someplace where the economy was good. Yeah, but you know, I I remember back to c in college, I had a I had a professor. He had a phrase that he would that he would say to us. He would say, he would he would say, guys, and it would, you know, it was always guys, you know, in these pastoral classes. Like, you know, you're gonna want to change things, you're gonna want things to be different. And he's like, you just need to remember that so many people in your church are dear saints who love the Lord. And he would use that phrase, dear saints who love the Lord. And and that was his way of saying, Listen, yeah, sometimes you gotta cut folks a break, you know, like they're doing the best they can. They their lives have been what their lives have been. And like, don't look down on that if just because it's different, if it's rural, if it's more simple, if it's not as educated, if it's poorer, whatever it might be. Like there's a there's an underlying goodness that exists in so many people that we often lose. One of the things that I've learned is that fundamentalism is less a set of beliefs and more an attitude. I have met so many people that have gone through the same kind of theological and political shift that I have, and they're just downright mean. Like they're they're mean and judgmental, just as mean and judgmental as like the fundamentalist leaders that I grew up with. And mean on the other side and the

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Other directors.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Progressive fundamentalists. Yeah. 100%. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

That's where the conversation, by the way, can get tricky. That I was telling you before when we talked, like I I it's important, I think, to be able to say things that, like in my community in Hollywood, I work in Hollywood, I'm a film producer. Yeah. Um, I have to be very careful about coming up against those progressive fundamentalists.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

So it does go both ways. The fault lies on both sides. Totally.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Yeah. For sure. And I I just think it's important to remember that, you know, there like there is goodness in folks. I have I have come over the last several years to really appreciate Ramdas, um, the the the spiritual teacher, you know, who kind of came to prominence in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I guess. And uh and one of the things that he talks about is that, you know, in he's passed away now, but but he would talk about how he would have, you know, his his uh little table where he would um uh meditate and spend time in the morning, essentially spend time praying. And he would have a picture of his uh of his uh of his guru there, uh Maharashi, and he had a Maharashi, and he had a he had a picture of Jesus and uh a picture of Buddha, and you know, these these ones he would venerate and then he would say, and then I would have a picture of Casper Weinberger, who was like Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Um and then I remember him in right before he died, I remember him saying that he had changed the picture out and it was now a picture of Donald Trump. And and the reason he would do that would be to remind himself that even the people that he considers his enemies or that you know on some spectrum would be considered enemies, they are still human beings. And, you know, in his view, they are still, you know, part of the divine. They are divine beings having a uh a human experience just like him. And I think you know, it's so easy to demonize each other and to divide. And, you know, I grew up with that in fundamentalism, in in religious fundamentalism, where it was always about who's in and who's out, who's on our team and who's not. And now I work in politics where like it is it's the same way, you know, blue no matter who, and you know, like, and it's it's so easy to demonize and dismiss other people.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

I think about it all the time. It's a beautiful thing to know that there are men like you and people like you right in the heart of that place of America where we think the conversation needs to be had the most, although it needs to be had everywhere. And you're having those conversations and you're providing that space and that grace. And I just think you're extraordinary. I could probably talk to you for hours on end. But but it I guess if if we're if we're wrapping this up and and there's anything that you would want. This is such a cliche question, but it's been with me all day long. If you were telling your children, uh, hey, this is the thing I want people to remember me for, what is that?

SPEAKER_01 23:09

I I hope that when my kids talk about me someday, I hope they use the word grace.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Uh Running for Our Lives is the book that I'm currently reading. And you said the other one is called.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

It's called Fundamorphosis How I Left Fundamentalism but didn't lose my faith.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Well, I'm gonna make sure I get that book and I take a look at that back book too. But Rob, you know, as we get this going, if there's an opportunity to continue the conversation somewhere down the road, I just think you're fascinating. And I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing and that you're putting out into the world and the goodness and the grace that you're showing all of us.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Uh well, I've enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Me too. Thank you very much, Rob. Uncighted.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Uncited.