What would Jesus ride?
Will Braun pedals spirited social change
BY Bryan Borzykowski
Photography by Thomas Fricke
If you happen to pass a guy riding his bicycle on the Trans-Canada Highway, there’s a good chance it’s Will Braun. The editor of Geez, a “magazine of spirited social change” with a Christian bent, gave up flying four years ago and now bikes almost exclusively. “Colorado, New Mexico, Canmore, Kitchener and all the states and provinces in between,” says Braun, listing the locales he’s biked in or through. Now, this Winnipeg-based writer and editor hopes others will give up motorized travel too.
In August, Braun and Geez magazine launched the De-Motorize Your Soul campaign, a program that calls on travellers to avoid airplanes for a year, and give up driving one day a week. Braun knows it’s going to be tough not getting into the car, but to him, avoiding motorized travel makes a lot of sense. “At some point we’re going to have to stop using as much fossil fuel as we do now, and that goes for everybody.”
Avoiding air and car travel isn’t a unique idea—every September 22 is International Car Free Day—but what makes Braun’s cause original is that it’s steeped in spirituality. The campaign encourages people to pause for a moment before exiting the house, and utter a prayer for the “grace to go slow.”
“Religious people have ignored the environment to a large extent,” he says. “Are the churches on the forefront of fighting global warming? No way. But Christianity certainly includes the notion of caring for what has been created.”
Braun’s religious and environmental leanings are a product of growing up in a Mennonite family on a farm in southern Manitoba. At home, questioning authority was commonplace, and a respect for the environment was paramount. In 1996, the 33-year-old lived with the Lubicon Cree people in northern Alberta for a month and witnessed firsthand the “drastic environmental and social implications” of the oil patch. “That lodged somewhere in my being,” he says.
In 2002 Braun chose to give up flying. “I was flying all over the place,” he says. “Many people working on environmental issues spent a lot of time in the air, and it bothered me, so I quit.”
Now Braun bikes to his part-time job as editor-in-chief of Geez magazine. Launched a year ago, the quarterly mag takes a humorous but tough look at social action and religion, and it’s rapidly gaining readers across North America. What attracts people to Geez—and Braun hopes, to the De-Motorize campaign—is the emphasis on organized spirituality rather than hierarchical religion. “We don’t want to use religious jargon,” he says. “We write in a way that should make sense to people who don’t even like the Church. The most gratifying feedback is from people who don’t identify as Christian, but they consider it worthwhile to talk about spiritual matters.”
When first asked to guide the magazine in 2005, Braun was wary, but soon came around. “Christianity is a big part of our culture today, for better or for worse,” he says. “Especially in the States where there’s this superpower Jesus phenomenon going on. Where George Bush invokes God as the de facto commander-in-chief. So we’ve got to take religion and Christianity seriously, but have a good time doing it.”
It’s clear from talking to Braun that he is having a good time. The biking hasn’t got to him yet, and his magazine is growing by the day. But don’t think he’s only running this campaign to please some sort of higher power. “Part of it is virtue, but another part is that I’m a sucker for adventure and I think those two go hand in hand very well.”
