The Civic Role of Religious Leaders

Hannah? Civics 101. All right, Nick.

“So we have talked before on this show about the separation of church and state.”

What exactly that means?

And we have an episode on it and maybe it doesn't mean what you think it means and what

it really means has wished and washed. And even if you say, you gotta keep them separated. And you're in a religions back now hotter than ever before, I'll be there to tell you. Many of the delegates here said their vote is based on Jewish values, especially the teaching that Jews are supposed to help prepare the world.

To Koon alone, woven into the U.S. political conversation is another discussion about religion and its role in the country. Meanwhile, some have mobilized around what GOP leaders have labeled an invasion at the Southern border. Indonesia about a protest convoy calling itself "God's Army."

Yeah, politicians most certainly do not tend to keep them separated, Hannah.

“Yeah, but today I don't want to look at how politicians have brought faith or religion”

into their rhetoric. I want to ask faith leaders how they approach politics. Or I guess what some might call politics and they might call, you know, right and wrong. K, today's my oins is here to show us how some are urging their congregations to take us stand in a peaceful way.

More than a dozen faith leaders from across the state gathered today to express their concerns with the direction of the statehouse. Take care at home, faith leaders gathered with community members outside of Trump Tower this morning to protest property tax hot. Protesters have been gathering at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis for weeks.

Federal agents use it as their headquarters. Today they were joined by dozens of clergy members. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]

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[MUSIC] [MUSIC] All right Hannah. So we know that religion and politics are the train that meet a whole lot in the United States.

“And you want to know what the religion side has to say?”

Well specifically, I want to know what faith leaders have to say about their role in civic life. In activism, in vouching for issues that are politicized. When and why? Do they decide to speak up beyond the pulpit? Now I did reach out to dozens of faith and religious groups and leaders.

And I get the impression that a lot of people are quite busy. So today we are hearing from one Jewish and three Episcopalian faith leaders. It's great to be with you. I'm Bishop Rob Hirschfeld and the Bishop of the Episcopal Diasis of New Hampshire. I am Rabbi Abbey Weber.

I am a Rabbi in Center City, Philadelphia. My name is Jason Wells. It's fine to be dressed as Reverend Jason Wells. These are Michael Curry. I've been called a lot of names, other names. I don't think so.

And Hannah, I know that religious leaders have gone involved in politicized issues.

Maybe always worldwide since the beginning?

Well yeah, I think about it like this. People have political beliefs. People have religious beliefs. The things you believe are true, the things you believe are right.

These beliefs lead to a whole lot of words.

And even sometimes action.

“Now I'm not conflating, spiritual, or religious belief and political belief.”

But I do think they often rhyme. And there is a long history in this country of faith leaders stepping out from behind the pulpit and taking to the streets, showing very publicly that they perceive a wrong and they stand opposed to it. Or they perceive a right and they stand for it. And of course, it is continuing today.

It is a call for God to establish his order in the chaos that has been created by this administration right here in our city.

A lot of the glory is that every human being could get less of raise immigration or social status is honored. Hearing the cries of the world and responding like our beloved Bodhisattva Kwanyan, we will take up the call of nonviolent direct action marching. We pray that living according to the truth of God's love, we will all find the freedom and the abundant life that God promises to all God's children.

Which is our nation's promise. So today I've got a dispatch. It's an audio postcard from faith leaders who have taken action in their communities. Now Nick, I am far better versed in the ways of secular civic action than I am in faith based action. I don't know about you.

“Hannah, I think you know that I'm in the exact same boat as you on this one.”

Right, so I'm going to let these faith leaders speak for themselves for the most part today. I asked them all in various ways when and why they take action in their communities beyond their places of worship. What drives them? What helps them to make that choice? Do you want the cowardly answer or the courageous one?

The former is the more accurate one to be honest. I mean, you go through all the emotions I need to do. I mean, you go through every conceivable emotion. And you also try to figure out is there another way to get to the same end without creating a real problem that's going to make life difficult for me.

You know, you go through all of that kind of stuff. I mean, you can Jesus say count the cost. You know, before you jump in, you count the cost. It didn't say don't necessarily do it, but he said count the cost. So you kind of do you do a calculus?

We want to be loud and right. We don't want to be loud and wrong. If we're going to speak up and use our voice, we want to make sure there isn't a justice that we understand the injustice before we speak up. Or if you're in the Ignatian tradition of St. Ignatius who said, you know, you kind of count the pluses and the minuses. And think through what's being called for and pray God to help you do what is going to be the right thing.

And give me the courage and the strength and the wisdom and the ability to stay loving through everything. Sometimes it means standing aside those who are discounted, rejected on the left or the right.

“That's where I think religious leaders real hard places.”

I think it's easier for me always to align myself with one side or the other.

It's much harder and scandalous to try to maintain relationships with those who have different ideas about what is best for the nation, for the community, for the church. I really struggled with the question of whether as a rabbi, I would primarily be serving my own congregation. And whether those would be the most vulnerable people in my community or if I would primarily be serving people who kind of didn't need my help, right, in the sense of they weren't the people who were poorest or who were struggling the most or who really needed support in society.

I want to make clear that I think everybody is deserving of support in society and that I actually think that one of the greatest issues in the United States is loneliness and lack of connection to community and institutions. I think everybody can benefit from spiritual institutions and spiritual leaders and at the same time going from working every day with people who are living on the street to working with people who come from more of a middle or upper class background. I really questioned whether that pivot would embody my ideals in the way that I want to serve in the world.

I believe that faith leaders do have a responsibility to address what we see in justices in our communities to listen closely to our communities to be in some sense because of sometimes our public position to be people who are able to ring those concerns to people in power.

And the main focus of the conference was this question of how do we as clergy organize in response to potential violations of our civil rights as Americans and as human beings.

“The numbers of people who have found themselves sometimes aligned with the powers of the world with government as it's seeking to promote justice and equity, treating people kindly with compassion.”

And sometimes they have found themselves in dire and real perilous opposition. We had a great training and we learned about different sort of resistance movements specifically in the context of democratic backsliding and authoritarianism around the world.

And we have a lot of opportunities to be able to do that. We have a lot of opportunities to be able to do that. We have a lot of opportunities to be able to do that.

Successful movement to halt democratic backsliding and growing authoritarianism that if you don't have the religious leaders on board, it's much harder. And if you do have them on board, you automatically have this one pillar of power in society. When I think about how face leaders are a unique and special voice in American civic life, certainly I think a Reverend Dr King, and one of his ways of thinking about that was to refer to the religious communities, his word was the church, but we would think of interfaith voices in this stage that our faith voices are meant and some sense to be the conscience of the state that was his phrase.

In other words, from Reverend William Barber, another faith voice in the public square, we are here not to be a voice telling people right from left, but to remind them of the difference between right and wrong. I remember getting into serious trouble soon after I was made bishop, and I said, you know, I think both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are wall builders, and because there was a sense in which elitism was throwing people out, and people were feeling not heard, and then of course the wall that we were supposed to see on the southern border.

“My role, I think at that point, was to say let's go have some coffee, let's talk.”

We had some street cred, it had been around, it really does make a difference sometimes. Anyway, he brought together folk read and blew deliberately and no hidden agenda except we're going to sit down and get to know each other as people. I'm sorry about how my personal story brought me to a particular way of understanding an issue people were whatever it was, and that approach can be profoundly transformative because it moves below issues and debate and my need to win the argument.

For me to make pronouncements and statements, but this whole religious business is about finding where we connect and about relationships.

“And in a world which is trying to tear that away and tear those down, that's the countercultural work of the church. I think if we do that, we will always find ourselves on the fringe.”

And it really hurts when your friends are furious with you for that. And you do whatever you feel you're called to do with others, hopefully, but called to do. I think it was key to the other side with fear and traveling. You know, you do to get to do. It can be lonely, hopefully you're in community, you know, I mean in some kind of community which does help, but I mean at one point I remember saying, I really want to be able to look myself in the mirror. In the morning and that's a selfish way of entering into, but I mean, I've just found that a sobering kind of thing can I look myself in the mirror and I look my children in their base.

And we have a prayer that we pray that we may find the way of the cross as none other than the way of life and peace. So there's something about the costliness of this path. And we're talking, you actually had a very specific method for how he carried out these campaigns. So step one was listen and determine the case of the injustice step two was to negotiate was to go to those who are in power, go to those who are the stakeholders, those who are decision makers.

And the other two steps were reserved for the times when those tools didn't work. If we've gone to do our voting, if we've signed our petitions, we've made our phone calls to our legislators all those things and the injustices are continuing.

“He then moved people to steps three and four, which belong together, they're inseparable step three critically for Dr. King was spiritual self preparation and then four was direct to action.”

You know, we often think of King's marches, the march across the petis bridge acts of protest acts of sit-ins, Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus. We might think of in our day and age any of the direct actions that might be protests, candlelight visuals, any of those kinds of direct action tools those are only follow the failure of civic tools to help us.

But also are necessarily followed by spiritual self preparation. You know, he wanted people to be ready for the stresses of what direct action might mean.

We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll hear more from Rabbi Abbey Weather, Bishop Michael Curry, Reverend Jason Wells, and Bishop Rob Hershelt about their approach to civic action as faith leaders in America. Stay tuned. So food delivery services have been around for a while and I've tried a lot of them and I love some and I hated others. I will say that green chef is the trusted authority on clean eating. They deliver only real farm source ingredients. So for my choice, I chose the Mediterranean option because I want to live another 1,000 years and the standout to me was the fish. Oh, I've had so much trouble fishing my life. Specifically in this box, the salmon with red peppers and olives, because I don't live by a fishmonger. There isn't one in my town and salmon, salmon my whole life, it's been a gamble.

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Also, I haven't made a fish in olive dish and maybe ever, so I learned something and that means it was a good day. So if you're interested in having someone else handle your meal planning and your grocery shopping in an organic affordable varied way, give green chef a try. Just head to greenchef.com/50sivix. That's 50,000 CIVI-ICS and use code 50 civics to get 50% off your first month and then 20% off for two months with free shipping. Again, that is code 50 [email protected]/50 civics. We're back. Today on Civics 101, Nick and I are hearing from faith leaders in the United States. When you are the person someone turns to for spiritual guidance, literally setting out what is right and what is wrong, especially when the country is, as we are hearing over and over again, often divided on what is right and what is wrong, how are these faith leaders conducting themselves?

“What questions are they asking? What is guiding their choice to move beyond their church, their temple, their synagogue, their mosque, their place of worship, to take their beliefs to the streets?”

Well, 20 faith leaders were arrested today, protesting outside the immigration and customs and enforcement building in southwest Portland. They were singing, praying and sharing stories outside the ice building, with the goal of raising awareness of the immigrants detained right now in the federal prison and Sheridan. Here's Rabbi Abby Weber again. If I said to my congregation, "All right, everybody, we're getting on the bus, we're going to the protest." They would say, "Well, does that violate our tax exempt status if you are trying to work on this political issue?"

And also, I'm going to have to study this for longer and we're going to have to have like many hours of deliberations in our board meetings to discuss whether it's appropriate for us as a congregation to take a side on this issue.

“So, I think there are a lot of reasons for that. I happen to have a lot of lawyers in my congregation as is the case in many Jewish communities.”

And there's just much more cautious about political things in a way that I have sometimes found frustrating and I'm impatient.

Bishop Rob Hirschfeld and it's freeing for a lot of people, but I can tell you that they're right about it, because we don't like being on the fringe. We don't like being ridiculed.

“You know, we don't like being told by the religious right, "Oh, you're all heretics. You don't really actually believe in Jesus."”

And we don't like being told on the far left, you're concerning too much with those who are oppressors. We like to be light. It's horrific culture and the way of Jesus was adored and loved and admired until he wasn't. Reverend Jason Wells When we have differences in politics in our own views, no when two views and when not to use your pulpit, we have many tools that are disposal, the pulpit is one of them. Instead of using a pulpit to sort of tell people the truth whether they want to hear it or not, invite conversation,

invite people to voice their thoughts back, which a discussion will do and a sermon will not. And to Bishop Michael Curry.

“I remember my dad used to say, "Don't ever judge a book by its cover. Read the book."”

And you know, I used to say, "Hey, you know, when you parents say that you sort of dismiss it and you get the BH73, you say, "Oh, well, obviously then you have smart. I was that I would understand it." But there is something to that I remembered when we were struggling as a church. We were in a meeting. It was just clergy. And the person leading the session wanted us to share our stories about something. I don't remember what it was, but it was a way of kind of getting.

And I remember someone stood up and objected to the story sharing of from our lives. He said, "If this is a way that I might have to like you, if I really get to know you."

“And I don't want to keep disagreeing with you.”

Everybody kind of chuckled, but he was telling me, "Is it even serious in a way?" But now that's the elephant in the room, so to speak, because with most people, if you get to know somebody, that's on the level of where there's the old priest to say, who was on my staff and Baltimore, that's where the knitting meets the gritty. And that's where common ground really is. And you know, there's some truth in that. One thing I was invited to do was to testify at a hearing.

So I signed up to testify, and then I advertised it to my community. And I had like 10 of my congregants come to the hearing. And I spoke about a paragraph from the Shama, which is, there are a set of excerpts from the Torah, about biblical excerpts.

And the second paragraph of the Shama talks about the dire consequences of us not following the meets vote, of us not following the commandments.

Once I came to understand it through an environmental lens, it made a lot more sense to me. So I brought that up at the hearing to say, "My Judaism pushes me to say we need to learn to live in harmony with our natural resources." And that means investing in renewables for energy. And it was really nice to be there and to say that, and to get a lot of really nice feedback from members of my congregation about it. It is not just a faith leader, but it's my faith leader.

That was my rabbi, that was my pastor who was there, which has a particularly extra potent place.

When people come to a prayer vigil or a no-kings rally or something else, they're almost always doing this because they have a deeply, whether it's a religious value or not.

They have deeply held values about treating other people a certain way about the kind of nation they want to live in. And these are about their deepest values and people appreciate, I find, that clear faith presence, it makes that value visible in a person. It puts on flesh for a little bit, it becomes a visible thing. If those values became a person, hopefully that faith leader is it. The day before Ash Wednesday, we remembered someone named Janani Luam, who was an archbishop in Uganda.

Who found himself in conflict with EDM in the 1970s and spoke out against him, just started speaking, criticizing the totalitarian regime, knows he's going to die, but is not afraid to. And puts his body on the line in witness to this love, which is surpassing.

I've never grown up thinking that was a remote possibility in this place.

But it's interesting how when we read these saints lives, they're beginning to have a kind of resonance for a privileged guy like me who's lived in the life pretty protected from these things. But you begin to see around the edges and getting closer and closer to our usual life instances of real injustice and anger and hatred that we want to Respectfully lovingly speak against.

“I think there is a sense of many people in the pews, people who are paying attention to these kinds of questions.”

They often want to know, is that preacher in the pulpit, are they really with me? They may say to go love our neighbor, they may say that we're all created in the image of God and have infinite worth and dignity.

But do they really mean it?

Or is this a strike phrase that they really don't believe is this hypocrisy? And to see a faith leader, especially their own faith leader, really means the words that you might have heard on some day in fact are being carried through. Many, many rabbis have talked about being scared to bring up certain issues in their congregations because they think it will lead to too much controversy to much argument and their faith for their jobs.

“And I think that, I think that we need to not be afraid. We have to be courageous.”

There were a lot of rabbis during the civil rights movement who were very courageous.

And the thing we forget when we tell that story is there are a lot of rabbis who weren't courageous, who didn't speak up for the civil rights movement, who were even anti civil rights. There were a lot of Southern rabbis lost their jobs because if they did speak up, they would get booted out. We need to be courageous because, as we've talked about, religious leaders are a pillar of power. And we have a lot more power in society than we sometimes feel like we do. How will I live day by day? One step at a time? I don't know if y'all know that gospel story, I don't know if it's a story. One day at a time, sweet Jesus, one day at a time.

And there's something about that one day, one step at a time, and we make choices. And those choices have consequences. Now, I mean, martyrdom or death is pretty far down the road most of the time. Not all of the time, but most of the time. But it's that choice that we need to make and what's going to guide that choice.

“A nation always makes a choice on its soul. Will it be the better angels or will it be the selfish self?”

Those are the choices. And we all loop with that choice in small ways before you get to the big ones. And on my best days, I choose the right one. On the other days. I hope nobody ever knows about it. You know, that's sort of bad. And that's human. And the prayer is to pray that when it counts that I will host those in or yield it to the better angels and not simply to the base self. But, you know, don't kid yourself too much. We're human. That does it for this episode of Civics 101. It was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Capity-J.

Marina Henkey is our producer, Rebecca Lavoy is our executive producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. If you have questions about the way this country works, in whatever way it seems to be working or not, you can submit them at civics101podcast.org. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire, Public Radio. , not all darkness is dangerous. Sometimes it's the doorway to becoming whole. On the brand new podcast, The Shadow Sessions hosted by me, Hibbabel Fakay, a psychologist and trauma expert, we should light on the hidden corners of the human experience.

Through raw, unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing, the Shadow Sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change.

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