The Subtext: Is Nate Bargatze Guilty by Association?

**Savannah Locke** (0:00)
Hi, Lee. Welcome to our show.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:01)
Hello, Savannah. Welcome to our show.

**Savannah Locke** (0:05)
Lee Camp, I have suggested that you should do a huge celebration party for the paperback release of your book, Scandalous Witness.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:13)
Well, let's just do that just like right now. Let's just make this the party, the three minute party or less.

**Savannah Locke** (0:19)
Well, here's my party is that I loved the book, Scandalous Witness, and I think that it deserves something bigger than a studio could ever hold. Perhaps.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:28)
Well, thank you.

**Savannah Locke** (0:29)
At a restaurant or a theater.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:31)
Yeah. I doubt we'll do that, but thank you.

**Savannah Locke** (0:36)
How are you feeling about the release? How is it going so far?

**Lee C. Camp** (0:38)
Just feel good. I'll be interested to hear from folks about it who didn't read it the first go-around in hardback, and yes, I hope that it finds a lot. I hope, as I often say to other people, they asked me to blurb a book or so forth, I'll say, I hope this finds all the readers that need it, and I hope that will be true of this book.

**Savannah Locke** (1:01)
Well, it made me read your other book, Who Is My Enemy.
You had given me these books. I said I read them. I guess I only read two of the ones you gave me, or maybe even one, because I'm just finished Who Is My Enemy this week, and Lee, it's so good. And this is my takeaway. When I read Scandalous Witness, that feels like you now. Like as I'm reading it, I hear you now as you currently are. Reading Who Is My Enemy, definitely still you, but also a different version of you that I've never met.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:39)
Yeah.
And probably all three of my books are different versions. And they were kind of scattered, I don't know, seven, eight years between the first two, and maybe 10, 12 years between the second, number two and number three. But yeah.

**Savannah Locke** (1:51)
When was Mere Discipleship? Was that the first, second or third?

**Lee C. Camp** (1:54)
That was the first one that came out in 2003 in first edition, and the second edition was maybe 2008

**Savannah Locke** (2:00)
And then Who Is My Enemy, the subtitle is Questions American Christians Must Face About Islam and Themselves, was right because in the preface, you talk about Barack Obama saying that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.

**Lee C. Camp** (2:16)
Right.

**Savannah Locke** (2:16)
And that was in 2012 or something like that.

**Lee C. Camp** (2:19)
Yes, somewhere in there.

**Savannah Locke** (2:20)
And so that released around that era. And then Scandalous Witness is the latest iteration of Lee Camp's mind. Anyways, reading Who Is My Enemy was really good, and I think it really made me appreciate.
You took some heat for that. You took some heat for those beliefs in pushing Christians to consider their phobia. And I kind of love that.

**Lee C. Camp** (2:49)
That was, yeah, I tell that story in the first chapter of that book about this bizarre episode that happened, that I was misrepresented by the local paper. And, you know, religion is such big news in the Bible Belt. And so, you know, there was a top fold front page story about this lecture that I did, of all things, misrepresenting the lecture. By eight o'clock, I mean, it was crazy. Eight o'clock that morning, it was crazy. I mean, I was, you know, the local station had a call-in survey and found me stupid by a wide margin.
But by 10, I was getting calls from Fox News and Detroit Talk Radio and starting to get called every name in the book. And it was just a very wild experience. But anyway, it led to a book and a grant to go study and visit with lots of wonderful people in the Middle East. And so, yeah, it was wonderful to get to write.

**Savannah Locke** (3:43)
I mean, such a good read, Lee.

**Lee C. Camp** (3:45)
Oh, thank you.

**Savannah Locke** (3:46)
And just, I think it was more vulnerable than the other two. You were very self-disclosing, I think in very good ways.

**Lee C. Camp** (3:53)
Yeah. Yeah, I love that book and it got the least number of readers.
But I do love that book and I wish that more people would read it.

**Savannah Locke** (4:02)
I'm gonna go on a tear. I'm gonna go on a tear later this year, maybe on The Subtext. We'll do like a whole thing and I'll do an interview on that book too. And we can do some party for that as well.