Today, Jonathan and Sy speak with author and housing advocate Kevin Nye about the Church and homelessness. We get into:

- The ineffective housing policies Christians often promote

- The bad theology behind those policies

- A run-in Kevin had with institutional resistance to his view that governments shouldn’t criminalize homelessness

- How churches can get things right in ministries to unhoused people

- Plus, hear our thoughts on the interview,

- A discussion of how we are resisting the negative ways the election is trying to shape us mentally and spiritually

- And our thoughts on all the discourse around Ta-Nehisi Coates’ controversial new book

Mentioned in the episode:

- Kevin’s article on Christians mistakenly rejecting housing-first policies

- Josiah Haken’s book, Neighbors with No Doors

- Kevin’s article on Christianity Today’s coverage of homelessness

- His article in RNS about a Supreme Court case on unhoused people’s constitutional rights

- His book, Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness

- His Substack, Who Is My Neighbor?

- Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, The Message

- Our newsletter with links to a couple of Coates’ interviews

Credits

- Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.

- Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.

- Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.

- Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

- Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

- Editing by Multitude Productions

- Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.

- Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribers

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Kevin Nye: If you're an average middle class American Christian and you want to become wealthy, have a private jet, a mansion, here's your spiritual steps. Get closer to Jesus, you'll be rewarded with physical wealth. Well, if that's true, the opposite of that would be true, which is that if you are in deep dire poverty, it must mean that you're that much farther from Jesus.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Intro and Housekeeping

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.

Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra, today is gonna be a great one for you. We have a conversation that we're gonna have before we get into our interview, kind of about the election. A little bit of a catch up, since this is actually going to be our last show before the presidential election, which now that I say it into a microphone, is a little bit scary [laughter]. We're gonna be having a conversation today with author, theologian and housing activist Kevin Nye. I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. Basically, the church is extremely involved in housing policy in America, and we are often going about it the wrong way, and that's often because of a lot of bad theology and some falsehoods that we believe about unhoused people, and so Kevin will help us get deep into that.

He's a great resource and a great person to talk about it with, as well as some of the more systemic issues of why we have such an entrenched way of thinking about unhoused people. You'll be able to hear Jonathan and my thoughts about the interview afterwards, and we will get into our segment Which Tab Is Still Open, where we go a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. This week we're talking all about Ta-Nehisi Coates and his new book, The Message and some of the discussions that have been happening around it. Also, one quick note. My voice might sound a little groggy, because about 12 hours ago, I was at game one of the American League Championship Series [laughter] and I screamed my face off.

Is that a wise thing for a podcaster to do before recording? Maybe not, but I trust that you all will forgive me [laughs].

Jonathan Walton: Yes, and for the uninitiated, we’re talking about baseball [laughs].

Sy Hoekstra: Yes, that's a good point. American League Championship Series, that's a baseball series [laughter].

Jonathan Walton: But before we get into all that, please friends, remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to support this show and everything we do here at KTF Press. We've been creating media that centers personal and informed discussions on faith, politics and culture, and that helps you seek Jesus and confront injustice. You've been listening for a while or the first time, you need to know we're resisting the idols of the American church by elevating marginalized voices and taking the entirety of Jesus' gospel more seriously than those who narrow it to sin and salvation. The two of us have [laughs] a lot of experience doing this, have been practicing this in community for a while, and as Maya Angelou would say, we're always practicing Christianity.

So if you wanna do that, you could do that with us. We'd love for you to become a paid subscriber. You get all the bonus episodes of this show, access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats, and you can comment on posts and more. So again, go to KTFPress.com to join us and become a paid subscriber.

Sy Hoekstra: A couple of quick announcements before we get into everything. In two weeks there will not be an episode. That's just a couple days after the election. We're gonna let things settle a little bit.

Jonathan Walton: Hopefully so.

Sy Hoekstra: I mean, hopefully settle a little bit before [laughter] we have our sort of clean, edited podcast discussion about the election. However, we are going to do something a little bit different the day after the election. So that'll be Wednesday, November 6th at 1 pm. We are going to be having a Substack live conversation. So that means basically, if you have the Substack app, you will be able to watch us just have a live conversation about the election, what happened the night before, what we're thinking, how we can move forward faithfully now that the voting is done, and all of the potential chaos that comes after that. If you don't have the app, you can download it on the App Store or the Google Play Store. Anybody who's on our email list will get an email notification or a push notification from the app when we start.

So if you're not on our email list, go to KTFPress.com and sign up. Even just the free email list, you'll get that notification. The email will have a link to download the app if you don't have it. So Substack live Wednesday, November 6th, at 1 pm to talk about the election. A little bit more raw, unfiltered, that sort of thing [laughter]. And then we'll have a finale episode, we'll announce the date later once we have that set. You'll be able to comment in the chat of the Su...

How Christians Can Help End Homelessness with Kevin Nye