Q&A with NakedPastor: drawing inclusions

The cartoons show rainbow sheep, trans Jesus and churches harming the vulnerable. We ask David Hayward, aka NakedPastor, to talk about these and other issues with his voice rather than his pen.

Interview: Jonty Langley

David Hayward has been called the most prolific Christian cartoonist working online. And that’s good news, because his work gives voice to deconstructing Christians, church folks who reject the politics of right-wing hate and those on a spiritual journey that seeks inclusion rather than othering.

Hayward’s NakedPastor cartoons draw on his 30 years of experience in pastoral ministry as well as his own deconstruction journey, are often very funny, and more often pack a righteous gut-punch. Shibboleth magazine was delighted that he took some time to talk to us. 

Shibboleth: Did you ever imagine, when you started cartooning, that you would have the kind of reach you do? 

David Hayward: Oh my goodness, no. If somebody told me in 2005 when I started cartooning that I’d be here today, I would have laughed in their face. I had no idea.

I’d been blogging for about a year as a pastor. That’s why I chose the name NakedPastor, because I wanted to run a pastor blog, but I wanted to be completely open and honest and transparent and not hide anything, hence naked. I wanted to bare my soul and also sort of pull back the veil on what really goes on in a church and in the ministry and the life of a pastor. 

I’d been around art all my life – my dad was an artist on the side, and I’d been painting and drawing. I like a cartoon, in one frame if possible, and with few or no words. For me, the gold standards would be things like The Far Side or The New Yorker cartoons. So I thought, why don’t I try cartooning and see what happens? And that’s when things started taking off. Five years later, I was able to give seeing if I could do this full-time a go. 

I started cartooning in 2005 and I challenged myself to draw a new cartoon every day. I figured I’d last a month because I’d run out of ideas. But here I am, 21 years later, still drawing cartoons. I drew one this morning.

So much of your cartooning is about injustice, about what the Church has done wrong in terms of excluding or oppressing people. Is that why you’re so prolific?

I think my core passion is that I want to be me. I want to be able to be me. I want to be my most authentic self. And I have that same passion, therefore, for other people. I want other people to be able to be their most authentic self too – [to have] the freedom to be able to be that.

And so that’s who I speak up for. That’s who my cartoons are for. My cartoons are kind of like a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they uplift and defend and are a voice for the marginalised, the people who are put down or aren’t allowed to be who they are. And then the other edge of the sword is against those who don’t want that. 

That’s a pretty good insight into the sort of engine behind a lot of my cartoons.

You either love my cartoons or you hate them. You love them because they’re defending you or advocating for you or affirming you – the people who are marginalised. We can talk about sexuality, gender, race, colour, religion, women, children. And then on the other side, you get people who want [those people] to be controlled and not to be their most authentic selves. They hate it because it’s affirming people they don’t like or including people they don’t want to be with.

Jesus features quite a lot in your cartoons. Is that ever nerve-racking? Who do you see Jesus as? 

I’m careful about pronouncing what I believe, because I do not want to influence people to believe the way I believe. I’m very cautious about that. There’s a lot of teachers out there and influencers and schools of thought and Theo-bros who want you to believe the way they do, and I avoid that at all costs. Never, ever, ever do I want anybody to be able to say, “I’m a Haywardite.” That would totally devastate me. 

It’s not that I’m holding my theological cards close to my chest or anything. It’s that I’ve come to a point in my life where I feel that the best life is one that sort of transcends theology and doctrine.

So when I’m drawing  Jesus, for me, whatever your take is on Jesus, whether you believe everything evangelical, that he was prophesied and born of a virgin and was the Son of God and died and raised from the dead and now sits at the right hand of God and all that, if you believe all that stuff, you can appreciate my cartoons. Or all the way at the other end of the spectrum where you don’t believe Jesus ever existed – you can still appreciate my cartoons. Because the theology around Jesus, the Jesus that we hear about around the world from Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and atheists is that: well, if there was a Jesus, he would be like this. That’s what I’m trying to convey in my cartoons – if there was a Jesus, then he ought to love this person. It’s as simple as that.

I hope people don’t think I’m conveying, “have you met Jesus as your own personal Lord and Saviour?” I hope they’re not thinking that. I hope they’re thinking, yeah, if Jesus was real, he’d certainly love gay people, like without a doubt. That’s what I’m hoping is communicated through my cartoons with Jesus in them. And yeah, he does show up quite a bit!

Do you ever find yourself thinking about the broader context of Christian cartooning and your place in it – or outside of it?

I think where I’m fishing is in the sea of human experience, which includes religion and spirituality and depth psychology and politics and so on. That’s where I’m fishing.

I sort of take a holistic view of the world, where all these things intersect and we’re all one and we’re all in this together – whether you’re Hindu or Christian or atheist or agnostic atheist or South African or Canadian. I live on a river – it’s a big river called the Kennebecasis River. I could go down and dip a cup into it and say that’s the Kennebecasis River, but it’s not really – that’s only a part of it. The Kennebecasis River is huge and deep and wide, and it’s a collection of streams and springs and lakes and melts, and it’s a combination of all kinds of sources. And that’s how I see humanity and all that we’re in. It’s an amazing river, but it’s very much a complex combination of all kinds of things. And that’s the way I see the human race, that combines all the things we’re dealing with.

Some people say, oh, I miss when you did more religious cartoons, I don’t like you getting into politics. But to me, these all intersect.

What is the Church’s role – or a Christian’s role – in that intersection with politics?

So politics comes from the root word in Greek, polis, which is city. So it’s people together, people gathering together. And that takes not only empathy, sympathy, compassion and co-operation, but it takes some management too. It takes some kind of organisation. So that’s the kind of politics I’m talking about. I’m not talking about presidents and senators and congresspeople, although they’re included in it. For me, it’s how we treat one another as people in order to live happy lives. 

And of course, I find it ironic when politicians tell religion to keep its nose out of politics, like JD Vance or Trump did to the Pope. And yet they’re saying that we should have the Ten Commandments in schools and we’ve got to read our Bible. It’s hypocritical. They’re aware that these things intersect. 

For me, what Christianity or any religion is trying to do is seek out the best good for all of us. And that for me is a healthy politic, learning how to live together, all of us, by co-operating, not by killing people or removing people or deporting people. To me, the healthiest, most dynamic and creative and happy communities are diverse, not homogeneous. That’s why I think the Church, any religion, any spirituality, cares about the health of the community it’s in.

Your work comes at systemic problems like patriarchy or heteronormativity more at the level of individual experience than that of theory. Do you ever get the urge to editorialise and push people a little bit further over the line, or are you happy to let the art stay the art?

Like most artists, I don’t like explaining my art. And I try to be clear in my art. I don’t want to be secretive or draw in code or anything like that. I really do want people to understand my cartoons. So, I try to make them as simple yet clear as possible.

And I do go after systems. When I was still in the ministry, I read a profound book by Philip Zimbardo called The Lucifer Effect. He’s the one who conducted that experiment at Stanford, the students being prisoners and guards for a weekend, that got so out of hand that he had to shut it down within one day. The guards had become abusive, and the prisoners, these students, who were all emotionally healthy and stable, were all suffering. It was a complete disaster.

But he took away from that and started talking about systemic evil. He actually became an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib trials, where these good soldiers became extremely abusive to the prisoners. And I actually wrote him and said, holy smokes, I’m a pastor of a church and I’m seeing what you’re talking about in the Church, systemic evil. And so we had a little chat back and forth. It was a huge eye-opener to me that good people in systems – the system can weigh you down. It seems like the gravitational pull is towards the dehumanisation of its members.

I came to the conclusion that my full-time job as a pastor was to make sure that doesn’t happen – that had to be my number one priority, to make sure we don’t surrender to that gravitational pull to dehumanise our church members. 

Of course, it’s people protecting and benefiting from these systems that hate on me and don’t like what I’m talking about. But the victims of these systems, they understand. They see through it. Women who are victims of the patriarchy. Black people, brown people who are victims of white supremacy, on and on and on it goes, they get it. But the people who are instigating or perpetuating these systems, who are enjoying the benefits of these systems, are going to protect them by forcing them. 

In my younger, less mature years, I would go after the people. Now I try more to go after the systems – and if anybody knows, they know who I’m talking about.

The people who benefit from and perpetuate those systems – how do we reach them? As a Christian I don’t want to go down the path of violence, but also the Nazis weren’t defeated last time by talking nicely to them.  There are so many bigots, and they’re not going to disappear. What do we as Christians?

I know exactly what you’re talking about. For the past couple of years now, it’s been really, really hard to sustain any level of hope, right? The age-old question – why do the wicked prosper?

A little over a month ago, I had to undergo emergency surgery. 28 staples later, I’m still recovering. But when I was coming out of the anaesthetic, I had this sort of picture of a garden. Years ago, I was a country pastor. And I lived in the country, and Lisa and I had three little kids, and I planted a garden – we had chickens and we had a pig, and I’d go hunting and fishing. It was a very pastoral lifestyle. I saw this garden and everything, and how much work it took to clear some land, clear some trees, uproot roots, dig out rocks, throw in some manure and other fertilisers, plant seed, constantly weeding, tending, fertilising, protecting it against pests of all kinds – anything from a little bug to deer and moose. It was a full-time job – daily chores, mundane, putting on your rubber boots and getting out there and doing the work every single day. But that’s how gardens grow. When you plant a seed, something’s gotta happen.

And I took a lot of encouragement from that. That that’s how love wins. It’s by just doing the little mundane, boring daily chores of small acts of kindness. This doesn’t mean there’s not going to be a storm come through, or hailstones, or a plague of frogs, or my neighbour with his muscle car doing spin-outs in the garden, or whatever. Anything can happen. But what do you do the next day? You slip on your rubber boots again, you get back out there, you fix it and you replant and you just believe. We want to eat, we want to have a harvest, so this is how we do it. We just plant those tiny little seeds and take care of them by weeding and all the boring stuff.

That’s how I kind of view my work now, planting seeds of love. It sounds so cheesy, but I honestly believe this is how it works. It wouldn’t mean carpet bombing all around my gardening and getting rid of all the pests. Just tending, and taking care and being a steward of the land in the space you’re in. And this is how Orbán was voted out [in Hungary], by somebody walking to the polling station and voting. That’s like planting a little seed, you think: what’s planting a little seed going to do? But you put enough of them together and it has a pretty amazing outcome.

You look at the planes that go and scoop up a bunch of water from a lake to fight fires and you think, what good is that doing? But it works. Thousands of those trips put together eventually puts out the fire. I think that’s how we have to view what we do – just these small acts of kindness, small acts of love, with the belief that when you plant a good seed, a good harvest will come. 

The people in power, they think big. Kill a whole civilisation, shut down the whole port, tear up the whole world, deport every person of colour. They think big like that because they think that’s how it’s won, but it’s not. It’s not how it’s won. It’s won by you going to plant a seed, and then me going to plant a seed, and then my neighbour going to plant a seed. That’s how love wins.

Where do you find the strength to carry on doing what you’re doing while this world is on fire?

I went into surgery really depressed about the state of the world and my own health – man, I was sick, I was in so much pain. And I had been struggling lately with the whole the world-is-burning thing. And then coming out of that anaesthetic and seeing that picture, it really did encourage me.

And then I posted a picture of myself in the hospital bed, just letting people know I’m not on my game right now. And I heard from so many people. Little old Joan in Arkansas, USA, thinking, I’m going to email David and just let him know I’m thinking about him, and I hope he has a good recovery. She thinks, I’m just going to take a step here and just wish him well and send him my love and let him know that we’re thinking about him and he’s not alone. That one is enough. But when you get hundreds of them, I mean – that’s what makes the world go round. I really do believe it. 

And the cross has been central to my Christian theological spiritual path. For me, the cross symbolises that even though the world looks on and sees defeat, that enormous good is going to come out of this somehow. And I’m not speaking here theologically necessarily. I’m speaking about life – how unless a seed dies, nothing can come of it. I think that’s how the world works and how love wins.

I just decided I’m going to be kind – to everybody. Even my enemies, I try to be kind. Believing that when you plant a seed of kindness, kindness will be harvested. Again, I’m sounding really corny and cheesy today, but I really do believe it. 

Check out more from David Hayward

David Hayward is a former pastor turned cartoonist and artist, known as NakedPastor. His cartoons have struck a chord among the liberal and post-evangelical Christians, deconstructors, the politically progressive and the spiritual-but-questioning. His latest collection is Flip It Like This. Site: nakedpastor.com Socials: @nakedpastor