Studying theology with a cowboy - a blog review

Matt Whitman

I'm constantly on the lookout for intelligent Evangelicals. I'm so put off by the mindlessness of the lemmings who have sacrificed biblical Christianity for political ass-kissing in recent years that I feel sorry for the sincere believers. I grew up among good people and feel a real sense of sadness watching how their church got hijacked. I also believe the best way to keep those who oppose you in check is to follow what they're up to. For that reason, I run down one rabbit hole after another to see what the Evangelicals are up to.

To my surprise and delight, I came across a guy a few weeks ago who strikes me as a sincere dude, to use a word he himself is fond of using. He's got a blog, and I found myself telling friends the other day that for the past couple of weeks I have been enrolled in an Introduction to Theology Course taught by a cowboy.  I think of it as Theology 101, but there’s no need to give it a name. The dude I'm talking about is a guy in Wyoming named Matt Whitman. His vlog is called The Ten Minute Bible Hour, and he uses it to share his knowledge of theology, the Bible, and the history of Christianity with the world at large. He is a teacher of religion, rather than a missionary, and a really good one. Definitely a popularizer, but without knowing the academic world in which theology makes its way, I’d wager he’s right up there with the best of the lot. I label him a cowboy because he sounds like one. And he's an outspoken Wyoming Cowboys fan.  Until recently he has pastored a Free Evangelical Church in Lander, central Wyoming. If I’m not mistaken he has now left Lander, a town of fewer than 8000 souls, for even more rural Wyoming (or maybe South Dakota), the Black Hills. He is nonetheless clearly a man of considerable erudition. 

Let me lay my cards on the table. I've got a huge bias against the people of Wyoming. Not because they're cowboys, not because they tend to get behind the NRA and have saddled us with the likes of war criminal Dick Cheney, although that hardly prepares a warm place in my heart for them. But because with a population of fewer than half a million eligible voters, they get as many votes in the Senate as the 25 million of us in California get. T'aint fair, I say. T'aint right.

So right from the get-go, this city boy from the land of fruits and nuts whose idea of sports is watching the Igor Moiseev ballet on YouTube doesn't line up all that well with the Wyoming Cowboys.  All the more reason to celebrate the fact that I've become a fan. I like the guy. He's proof that there's room for a whole lot of difference among us in this country. That, plus the fact that although I'm not a believer, I remain, as I said, after all these years, fascinated by the intersection of politics and religion, and am therefore still open to listening to what sincere religionists have to say.

I wish I could find a way to talk to those who have remade their church into the political action group which now provides the cannon fodder for the party of the super wealthy and their I-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-Congress leader. But that is a goal for some future time, if ever I can find a way to talk to people who advocate not talking with the enemy at all, the enemy being anybody who disagrees with them. In the meantime, I am fascinated by the things Americans talk about with each other, especially those things I don't find folks in Europe and Japan - my other homes - much interested in at all. The more Europeans and Japanese profess to be baffled (and that includes my Japanese husband) about America's preoccupation with religion, the more interested I get in seeing if I can somehow explain it.

 I have learned a whole bunch from listening to Matt Whitman's videos. The last time I checked, he had some 274 of them posted. The introductory video of the lot is dated February 3, 2015 and he is apparently still going strong nearly five years later. I’m surprised I didn’t run across him sooner. Shows you how much is going on out there in YouTube land.

According to his bio, he is from Colorado originally, but moved to Chicago, where he graduated from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which seems to produce the most earnest and intellectually capable evangelical theologians and preachers America has to offer.  He's a family man with three kids. He writes, acts, directs, and hosts the The Ten Minute Bible Hour, as well as a podcast called No Dumb Questions.  If you go digging for more information, don't get him mixed up with the Matt Whitman who is a councilman from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I have no idea how big his following is. That introductory video has 36,000 views, and more recently he claims it’s up to 37,200 if those numbers are any indication. I’m not really interested in the numbers. I assume his audience falls into two categories, those of a liberal Protestant persuasion who are already inclined to be receptive to his message, and those who would like religion explained to them, for whatever reason, in plain language. As an outsider to the church, I have to admit I can't get all that worked up about the fact that Whitman's church has now decided it no longer insists you must believe that when Christ comes back he will literally set up a kingdom on earth for a thousand years. Of interest to me is the way in which theology is being done these days, at least the theology of what I'm calling the "low" churches. And how they're all still pedaling as fast as they can in light of the fact that their numbers are dwindling in Europe and the United States and they're being replaced by people from Africa and Asia. I'm also interested in him because he seems to represent white Christian rural America, the kind of folk who live at the opposite pole from the culture in which I live, the kind of folk we city folk are accused of looking down on.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, just listen to a video of Whitman doing a pretty good bible study with another country-boy friend of his, from Beulah, North Dakota. If "country-boy" sounds like a slur to your urban ears, this should cure your bias. They're two smart, personable dudes. And they're both Evangelical preachers.

Whitman’s videos cover a lot of ground. He gives a great introduction to theology by breaking down things I tend to take for granted, such as the need to recognize what gets lost in translation, or the fact that there are as many stories as there are narrators. He’s absolutely great for beginners, in others words - a born teacher. He also does something I find admirable: he gets people from other faith traditions to tell their stories in their own words. Rather than talk about what Roman Catholics believe, or Lutherans, or whoever, he sits down with them, first letting them show him around their churches and explain their aesthetic approaches to religion and some of the symbolism, then sitting down with them and inviting them to introduce their faith in their own words.

So far he has done this only with the more liturgically-oriented Christian faith groups - those who center their worship on the Eucharist/Communion/Lord’s Supper (the terms vary according to the faith tradition), the Roman Catholics, the Greek Orthodox, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, the Anglicans and the Episcopalians, folks I like to think of as “high church” Christians. He has not yet done this with other “mainstream” groups like the “mid church” Methodists and the Presbyterians, but he has with a “low church” evangelical pastor, in what I think is the best video of the fifty or more I’ve seen to date. The most theological meat, in digestible form.

The terms high, mid and low, incidentally, are my way of describing what I see as location on a spectrum from high adherence to doctrine and ritual on one end to an inclination to think of religion as something between you and the Holy Spirit and nobody else’s business, on the other. Conspicuous by their absence are the outlier groups, the Quakers, Unitarians, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, or Pentecostalists, as well as the groups most likely to be labeled a cult (I’ve got the snake handlers in mind) by the mainstream groups -  Whether he has a reason for this is not clear to me. Maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to it yet; maybe he’s only interested in Big Box Christianity.

He can be extremely entertaining. If you aren’t into biblical exegesis, give a listen to his video on Pontius Pilate. Utterly fascinating history I had never come across before. Growing up Lutheran, I found his treatment of Luther a bit too simplistic (although I loved how he referred to him as “this German dude,”) but then I realized that without telling the story of Gutenberg and the printing press you can’t grasp the full significance of the Protestant Reformation, and my admiration grew once more.

I’m with those who maintain that without at least a passing knowledge of Shakespeare and the Bible, one cannot consider oneself familiar with the cultures of the English-speaking peoples. And without a passing knowledge of Christianity, with world culture. And no matter how well you remember what your were taught in school, it’s always useful to give yourself a refresher course now and then.

Dive in, I say. Listen to his lectures, his interviews, his discussions with colleagues. They each open doors to new knowledge and new ways of looking at old knowledge.

Let’s hear it, I say, for the Internet, for YouTube, for earnest, intelligent folks who take the initiative to counter the horrible aspects of social media with solidly good and useful educational television, updated now to the stuff you take in from your computer screen. Forget about what you were taught in Sunday School.  Get past your (I think justified) view that “bible study” is better described as indoctrination than as education. Give a listen to a guy who seems to have both a heart and a brain. A cut your everyday populist evangelical.

Go to YouTube, type in “Ten Minute Bible Hour” and have at it!

P.S. And lest you think I just curled up and put all four paws in the air in adoration of this guy, I did find a place where I disagreed with him. He made a short video making the argument that voting in the U.S. (unless I’m mistaken, and I’m sure I’m not) is making a choice between getting injected with herpes or getting injected with chlamydia. I used to think that, but these days I think the Republicans are way worse than either, and getting rid of them means voting for the other guys. It’s between chlamydia and indigestion, maybe. Sorry, Matt. I differ strongly with you on this.