Shane Claiborne

Shane Claiborne (born July 11, 1975) is an evangelical Christian leader, an author, one of the founding members of the non-profit organization, The Simple Way, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, cofounder of the Red-Letter Christians.

Claiborne is also a social activist, advocating for nonviolence and service to the poor.

He is the author of the book, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical.

Claiborne grew up in Maryville, Tennessee.

His father, who was a Vietnam War veteran, died when Shane was 9 years old.

During his childhood, he attended a Methodist church.

After being invited to a Pentecostal church by high school friends, he became a Christian and was baptized.

He studied sociology and youth ministry at Eastern University and obtained a Bachelor of Arts in 1997.

During his studies, Claiborne worked alongside Mother Teresa during a 10-week term in Calcutta.

He has written about how his work with Mother Teresa impacted him and made him realize the need to support a consistent life ethic, to protect all human life from conception to natural death.

He spent three weeks in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team (IPT), a project of Voices in the Wilderness and Christian Peacemaker Teams.

He was witness to the military bombardment of Baghdad as well as the militarized areas between Baghdad and Amman.

As a member of IPT, Claiborne took daily trips to sites where there had been bombings, visited hospitals and families, and attended worship services during the war.

After his studies, he served at Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago.

In 1998, with five others Eastern University graduates, he founded The Simple Way in Kensington, Philadelphia.

In 2000s, he became board member for the nationwide Christian Community Development Association.

In 2006, he published the book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, a plea for Christian voluntary simplicity and social justice.

In 2007, with Tony Campolo, he founded Red-Letter Christians, with the aim of bringing together evangelicals who believe in the importance of insisting on issues of social justice mentioned by Jesus.

(The name comes from the convention of printing the words of Jesus in red ink in some editions of the Bible).

On June 20, 2007, a seven-alarm fire at the abandoned warehouse across the street destroyed The Simple Way Community Center where Claiborne lived.

He lost all of his possessions in the fire.

The Simple Way immediately set up funds to accept donations to help those who lost their homes in the fire.

In June 2008, with Chris Haw, he visited churches and community centers in cities across the United States in a refurbished used vegetable oil fuel school bus, labeled "Jesus for President", to give talks on Christian social justice.

In September, they released the book Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals.

In 2008, he was featured in the documentary The Ordinary Radicals.

He co-directed the three volume Another World is Possible DVD series.

Claiborne wrote the foreword to Ben Lowe's 2009 book Green Revolution: Coming Together to Care for Creation.

In 2010, he has received an honorary doctorate from Eastern University.

In 2011 he has appeared as both a guest and co-host of the TV show Red-Letter Christians with Tony Campolo.

That year also, he declared his unwillingness to pay taxes to fund U.S. military activity.

He withheld a portion of his income taxes meant to correspond to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military, donating that money instead to charity.

He wrote a public letter to the Internal Revenue Service to explain his decision.

On May 7, 2011, Shane Claiborne married Katie Jo Brotherton.

He is a member of an Anabaptist church.

On January 26, 2016, he released the book Executing Grace - How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It's Killing Us.

It makes a case for the abolition of the death penalty through social and spiritual arguments.

In 2023, he published the book Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person, a book that calls for extending the Christian definition of the "pro-life" movement to other issues than abortion, such as armed violence, poverty and the death penalty.