The Day I Turned Off Talk Radio
Learning to communicate in a secular world
In my twenties, I was passionate about politics. I could not only name all nine Supreme Court Justices, I could list all 100 US Senators.
The pastor of the church I was on staff with in Albany, New York, introduced me to conservative talk radio, and when I moved to Ithaca in the mid-1990s, I listened to it for at least a couple of hours on most days.
Moving to Ithaca, New York, was a shock to the system. There was no Republican party, and the city’s mayor was a registered socialist. The Conservative Party reached out to me shortly after we landed because if I joined, I would bring their membership up to six.
Choosing Gospel or Politics
About three years into our time in Ithaca, I began thinking about planting a church. And one day it hit me, if I continued to allow politics to be such a significant part of my life, very few people in Ithaca would listen to anything I had to say.
My political opinions would get in the way of my ability to talk with people about Jesus. I had to choose which mattered more, the gospel or my political views.
I had something in my life that I was passionate about, but I recognised that it was not even close to as important as my faith. As it does for many, the lines between the two often got blurred.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a difficult choice.
I knew my political view would be a barrier to the vast majority of people I lived amongst, and if I wanted them to listen to me when I talked about Jesus, I needed to deal with this thing that had become intertwined with my faith.
That day, I turned off conservative talk radio and never turned it back on.
There was a process of detox I went through — both from the voices I was listening to, and the ways they shaped how I saw the world.
In looking back, I recognise the extent to which I was being formed by those voices.
Once those voices were gone, I found myself becoming a better listener with people I didn’t agree with. And I gained a deeper love for my new city.
A Paradigm Shift
I have spent my adult life in secular and minority Christian settings. And I feel at home there.
My wife and I planted a university ministry at the University of Albany, which had a student population that was more than 50% Jewish. A Barna report from 2017 listed the city of Albany as the least “Bible Minded City in America” among the 100 largest media markets. (See the article to read their definition of “bible minded”).
After Albany, we moved to Ithaca, which was in Tompkins County. Tompkins had the distinction of having the lowest religious attendance of any county in New York, including Manhattan.
And for the past thirteen years, we have lived in Dublin, Ireland. While Ireland would have been considered a religious nation 40 years ago, it has been in the midst of a rapid process of becoming a secular country over the past 5 decades.
I love living and ministering in secular settings. That will come through frequently in this space.
Back to my decision to turn off my radio.
It wasn’t enough to remove those things that would get in the way of the gospel. I needed to grow in my understanding of who these people were because we came from very different worlds.
When Everyone is A Christian
While my adult life has been in secular settings, as a child, church was a central part of my life, and the lives of most people I knew. In fact, on Wednesday afternoons in elementary school, representatives from local churches came into our public school to provide “religious instruction”. Most of us were split up into Catholics and Protestants, but there would always be a few who “abstained”. These classmates with no religious affiliation were difficult for my eight-year-old brain to comprehend.
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