James K. A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin University, Michigan, where he holds the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview.
He trained as a philosopher with a focus on contemporary French thought, Smith has expanded on that scholarly platform to become an engaged public intellectual and cultural critic. An award-winning author and a widely-travelled speaker, he has emerged as a thought leader with a unique gift of translation, building bridges between the academy, society, and the church. His most recent book, How To Inhabit Time was reviewed in en last month.
en: Tell me a little bit about how you came to faith?
JS: I grew up in Southern Ontario in Canada, and I did not grow up in a Christian home or in the church. I started dating Deanna, who is now my wife of 32 years, and it was actually through meeting her family that I first heard the gospel, though I think I had been primed to hear it. I’m reading Bono’s memoir, Surrender, and I think that U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree was almost like pre-evangelism for me – the sense of yearning and longing, looking for something more and ultimate. That sort of tilled the soil, so when I heard the gospel presented to me, it answered a longing and a yearning. Deanna’s family and the church community that she was a part of also embodied an embrace that I had been looking for, especially as somebody who came from a broken home with an absent father. There was an intellectual answer to questions I had, but also an effective embodiment of God’s love that I was drawn to.
en: Then you went to Bible college to train to be a pastor originally?
JS: Yes – Deanna’s family were part of the Plymouth Brethren, a tradition with a very anti-clerical tradition. There were no clergy, no ordained pastors, instead there are lay ministers, and so within a year of becoming a Christian I preached my first sermon. The Bible college I went through was in this tradition. I went there expecting to go into pastoral ministry, but it was while I was there that I really discovered theology, and then philosophy, and that there were Christians doing philosophy. And that was my wake-up call.
en: And it was your love of philosophy that led you to run a whole semester purely on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age?
JS: Yes – I was working a lot on Charles Taylor, so I said to my students let’s sign up to read this 900-page book in a semester. It actually catalysed the idea for How (Not) To Be Secular as I realised that his analysis of our cultural moment helped these young people make sense of their own world. It was a really, really fantastic experience. (For more on Charles Taylor see Culture Watch in this issue).
en: Taylor redefines the secular – tell me about what the word ‘secular’ means to you?
JS: I find Taylor’s account of the secular helpful because for him it’s not just about the sacred/secular distinction. The secular is not synonymous with being religious or anti-religious. He would say the secular, or secularity, is this condition in which what we believe is contested, and contestable. Nobody can take their worldview or ideology for granted as the default for a culture, because our cultures are fraught and contested. We live in what he calls a cross-pressured situation, where everybody believes different things. Even if you have strong convictions, you live amidst other belief systems and worldviews, so you’re always going to encounter challenges and even be haunted by doubts. I think that that does a lot to explain our society, our cultural moment – more than Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens.
en: How do you think, as evangelical Christians, we should see that contested-ness as an opportunity rather than just a challenge?
JS: No matter how ardent our atheist neighbours might be, or how sceptical our agnostic neighbours might be, they also live in a contested space. Their worldviews are haunted by doubts too, which means that there are always cracks and openings to have conversation. It’s why I don’t think Christians should be so defensive and alarmed by the cultural situation. I think they should be listening for the openings and opportunities to bear witness rather than just guarding their own turf.
en: You’re Canadian but have taken US citizenship – what is it like being a relatively new American and in public life, speaking and writing in post-Trump America?
JS: First of all, I would say being a white Canadian, who’s a new American, is obviously so different from other kinds of folks who are immigrants. That said, I think it does give us just enough of an outsider perspective on things. What’s harder in the United States is not just being a new citizen, it’s actually being a Christian who is engaged politically and publicly but has a critical stance to Christian nationalism. That’s a more contested identity in the United States sadly, especially amongst evangelicals. I definitely think that there are people who write you off if you’re not part of the Christian nationalist project. But it’s not because I’m Canadian. It’s because I’m a Christian.
en: Do you think Christianity is incompatible with modern capitalism?
JS: I think that Christianity does not sit well with an unfettered view of the market as God, which is what a lot of kind of libertarian streams of capitalism uphold. Capitalist economies have actually improved the lives of a lot of global citizens. I think what has gone wrong is the imperial versions of capitalist economies where we still colonise, and that our first-world consumption is at the expense of the developing world’s health and justice. There’s something deeply incompatible with a capitalism that is all about consumption as a way to happiness. That said, I think the alternative is probably worse. It’s a mess. I’m anti ‘crony capitalism’, [but also] anti ‘anti-consumer capitalism’ [the opposite of crony capitalism]. Without necessarily thinking that there’s an end here, I actually think that there are aspects of the Christian imagination that underwrote the emergence of free markets. So I’m trying to sort of walk that tightrope between the two.
I believe that governments are good gifts, that should be stewarded and exist for the sake of the vulnerable. We’re probably on the Democratic Socialist [in US terms] end of the continuum – I say ‘we’ because my wife and I, we participate in this together. My model is the great Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper, who led a party that was absolutely a Social Democratic Party, as an ardent Christian. He articulated an early critique of capitalism that I would heartily endorse.
en: You’ve talked about some of our collective practices, I find your reflections about habits really interesting – could you unpack this a bit?
JS: A big part of my project, my book You Are What You Love is focused on this, on how our being in the world, and the way we live and move and act, is much more driven by habits of devotion and affection than it is by beliefs about morality and obligation. We have both. But I think that we are habitual creatures before we are reflective and thinking creatures. The way we live is mostly the product of the habits that we’ve acquired. And those habits that we’ve acquired are mostly, or fundamentally at least, dispositions that aim us towards a certain vision of the good life that we have absorbed, often unconsciously. We absorb those habits and dispositions of yearning and hunger and longing and loving through rhythms, rituals and routines that we’ve been immersed in. They aren’t just something that we do, they do something to us. This is what, to me, explains a lot of Christian capitulation and assimilation to the cultural default. We don’t realise that our participation in these rhythms and rituals of a culture are subtly training us to love something other than the shalom that God articulates as reflective of the kingdom. It’s where I think Christians need to be a lot more intentional and reflective about considering what are the liturgies and litanies of a social media ecosystem, and what is it doing to me. It’s not just asking ‘What am I talking about?’ It’s asking ‘What is this doing to how I inhabit the world’ or to my participation in cultures of consumption and acquisition and disposal. I think all of these are forming our habits and affections in ways we don’t realise.
I think Christian worship has to be liturgical. Because if you just go to church for a 45-minute lecture to get a bunch of ideas about God, that’s not going to reach the engine room of your heart’s habits. You need a formation, and discipline and discipleship that are also working on that level of habit formation. I think that’s the gift of the liturgical traditions, the spiritual disciplines, the monastic heritage of how we think about spiritual life.
en: People keep trying to work out what’s going on in England, watching people go into cathedrals. They’re still saying things like the Book of Common Prayer, you know, the language that you think is really traditional, but lots of young people seem to be almost inexplicably drawn to it – really fascinating.
JS: I don’t think it’s inexplicable; it makes a ton of sense, because I think we’re ritual creatures. And, in this post-Christian secular context that we’re talking about, I think it will be precisely the sort of thick, weird, strange particularity of Christian ritual that is more attractive than, say, doing a cool coffee shop and rock concert, or a little performance/lecture hall sort of thing. I’m always puzzled by evangelical Anglicanism in the UK, which seems bent on not being Anglican. It’s very puzzling.
en: In your 2020 article on racism in the church you reflected on viewing racism in terms of behaviour rather than belief. How can evangelicals become more attuned to our behaviours in this area?
JS: First of all, you have to get people to that place of how much our being in the world is shaped by the habits we’ve acquired rather than the beliefs that we’ve assented to. Once you have that framework, then you can bring folks to a new kind of reflective way to consider the racism, which isn’t about what you think about other people. It’s about how have you learned to inhabit the world in such a way that maybe you have subtly and covertly learned to centre people of your own kind. I think that’s going to be a long process – you don’t go to one lecture, a retreat, or read one book and get this. And it’s unsettling. I don’t think Christians, in particular evangelicals, are very good at embracing discomfort. I would say we’ve done church for 40 years now, which has been mostly about how to come and be comforted, whereas the prophetic side of the tradition is leaning into the discomfort of the gospel’s challenge to us. I think it’s a long process for people to realise that, but once we can get to that place then we can start to change. This is not just about changing people’s beliefs and attitudes. We also have to start asking: how do we change our rhythms, rituals and practices? How do we change our institutions so that we are incubating different habits. This is a generational or multi-generational project, but we have to get to work on it.
en: How did you come to write your travelogue-style book on Augustine?
JS: I did my PhD at Villanova University, a Catholic University in the Augustinian tradition. While I was focusing on a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger, I learned that the backstory of his philosophy was a 1919 encounter with St Augustine. I teach Augustine every semester and I think he’s incredibly modern in many ways. His sense of what we would call interiority, this sense of the depth and wells of the inner life, and how he is so singular in his exploration of that. There are many ways in which he anticipates notions of self-knowledge, self-reflection and self-consciousness that we totally take for granted. In many ways he’s very much ahead of Freud, in seeing a kind of unconscious dynamic in our lives.
en: Your book talks about human life as an exile and our refugee spirituality. Can you explain more about the idea of refugee spirituality?
JS: In many ways the parable of the prodigal son is kind of a paradigm for Augustine, and much of his work. We’re all prodigals who’ve run away from home. What healing and redemption look like is actually the homecoming in which we meet the Father and are embraced and welcomed. For Augustine there is there is an eschatology to this, a sense that ultimately we are longing for a home that we’ve never been to. There’s a sense of return, but almost more like an immigrant or a refugee. We’re fleeing something, to get to a place we’ve never been to. Yet that place we’ve never been to, the coming Kingdom, is the home we were made for. Augustine himself was an immigrant from North Africa to Italy, and then he returned back to North Africa. He knows what it feels like to be alienated and to feel like you’re in a foreign place. He also knows the sense of discovering a home that you’ve never been to before, which I think is a really beautiful way of thinking about what we are praying for when we say Kingdom Come – the arrival of the home we’ve not yet seen but have tasted.
en: Tell me about your three most recent books and how they tie together?
JS: What ties them together is this deep sense of spiritual formation as habit formation. The sense that discipleship is not just a question of what do I know, what do I think, what do I believe, but rather a question of how am I being formed to love, and to long for what God loves. In ‘You are what you love’ there is a model of the human person as a lover, as a desiring creature – we need to be attuned and attentive to how our loves and affections are being shaped, how those habits are being formed. My Augustine book dives into that further, and considers why our idolatries are themselves usually deformed habits or longings. We misplace our love, putting it onto created things instead of the Creator. Augustine is a great diagnostician of our tendency to over-expect from the material world. How To Inhabit Time then considers how our conversations about spiritual disciplines and liturgical formation have not yet taken seriously our mortality and our temporality as embodied creatures. It tries to take seriously how much our habits and dispositions are the products of histories that live in us that are in our skin, and under our skin, and in our bones. In many ways we are the products of histories that precede us. We have to reckon with our past if we are also going to know what it looks like to live into a different future.
en: How do you see people today trying to manipulate time as a commodity or trying to fight against it?
JS: I think this is itself probably a function of the dominance of consumer capitalist mindsets. We tend to treat everything as a commodity, available for us to control and master for our own benefit and pleasure. We’ve fallen into the trap of imagining that time is something for us to manage and control, rather than realising that we swim in time. Learning how to inhabit time is mostly about giving up the sense that we are in control and stand above it. We need to accept our temporality and how God is with us in the midst of it. That makes a big difference. It’s not like you don’t plan a calendar, but there’s a different set of expectations in terms of how much you think you’re in control. And time is not just an ether. Our history is not just what’s behind me, history is what’s in me, what has accumulated in me. I think it makes a difference to accept that, and then figure out how to live with those realities.
en: You describe the value of cross-generational friendships as being a bit like time travel. How particularly as Christians, do you think they are valuable for us?
JS: I think it’s valuable for us as humans, but I think it’s valuable for us as Christians too – you can see it actually playing out in Christian communities. One of the reasons why I think this is the case is how we experience time and seasons, rather than just the mere tick-tock of chronology. I think there are common seasons of a life as it is James K.A. Smith unfolding over time. When you’re in the midst of a season it can be very difficult to recognise that. But if you can have a conversation with a friend who is further down the road in time, so to speak, they have come through that and the season often coalesces in retrospect. It is as you’re coming to the end of something that you recognise what you just went through. Whereas if you can have a friendship with someone who is older, who has come through that, they can send you encouragement, and hope and insight from the future so that you can say: ‘Oh, this is what I’m going through. It’s not strange, it’s not unexpected. It’s not forever.’ It gives you a patience in the midst of the season, but it also lets you reflect on ‘what should I be taking from this?’ That’s a great gift. And I have the same responsibility to be that friend to those who are younger. I think it goes a long way to overcoming the loneliness of our societies. I think one of the great travesties of the church, and for evangelicals in particular, over the past 40 years has been our stratification of Christian communities by age. We did these little niche specialty experiences based on where you were in your life stage. I think that sequestered us from being able to share this kind of wisdom across generations.
en: You describe the people of God having a memory, but a selective memory. Is there anything in particular you think we’ve chosen to forget, especially as evangelical Christians?
JS: I think we have chosen to forget how ethnically defined our forms of Christianity were, and are. I don’t think we’re honest about that. I think we have also chosen to forget our complicity with all kinds of systems and structures of injustice. We love to tell ourselves the stories of Wilberforce and the Clapham sect and all these wonderful stories where evangelicals were on the side of justice. But there are a lot of other stories that could be told, that we choose not to tell. And I also would say that I think the way that women have been treated in the history of evangelicalism was a travesty. We are not very honest about that. It’s maddening and saddening to me how much that still persists.
en: Yet you’re very clear about how God is able to redeem our histories – that no experience is wasted?
JS: Exactly. In fact, God will be most able to redeem that, and recreate it, when we reckon with it. God’s redemption of it is not the erasure or the forgetting. In fact, I would say that it’s when we try to just erase it and forget it that it most distorts our being. Whereas when we can, by God’s grace, reckon with those histories, that’s when He can gather up the fragments to make a different mosaic that is beautiful going forward.
en: You talk about formation taking time – how do you think time has changed you?
JS: In some ways I’m not always sure that I know how to sort this out from just becoming middle aged. But maybe that’s natural too! I think it’s been embracing or accepting limitations, and realising how important patience and humility are to this project of formation. I’ve become less and less surprised by the aspects of me that I don’t love that persist. And it’s not like I’m okay with those things. But I realised that to unlearn disordered habits is probably a lifetime adventure. There’s something about a kind of sanctified patience in realising that formation takes time. I would say it’s also embracing the communal aspect of it, and realising that when others make me uncomfortable by pointing out my blind spots, or my way of being that is not a blessing, that’s a gift. To receive the discomfort and the critique as a gift, and be curious about the critique. I’m still a defensive person, I think that’s natural, but I feel like I’m letting go of the walls and letting the walls drop a little bit more.
en: Reflecting on your recent books and their focus on time and journey, what’s been the most surprising part of your journey so far?
JS: I would say I’m surprised – and I shouldn’t be – but I do still think I’m surprised at how little I know. In other words, the more I know, the more I realise I don’t know. That’s such a cliché, but my younger self would definitely be surprised how much that has proven to be true. The other thing I would say is, I think I have been surprised at how vocation is never settled. That there’s a sense in which you are discerning what your call is. I’m surprised that, in my mid-50s, I’m still wondering if I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And maybe that’s healthy!
