In the coming days, the United States Supreme Court will hear a case on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) – a federal law that guarantees all people treatment for emergency medical conditions. However, anti-abortion extremists are trying to exclude pregnant people from EMTALA’s long-standing protections. This has the potential to not only drastically impact access to life-saving reproductive care, but also religious freedom. The same goes for the recent SCOTUS oral arguments on access to mifepristone, the leading medical pregnancy termination drug. And of course, we're fast approaching the 2nd anniversary of the Dobbs decision, reversing Roe v. Wade.

Infringing on people’s rights to make personal decisions based on their own moral beliefs is one way that religious extremists are seeking to chip away at our democracy and impose their Christian nationalist agenda. One way to push back is to stand together for the values most Americans actually hold.

This week on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush speaks with Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward to unpack the EMTALA and mifepristone cases and their impact on democracy. Paul also speaks with the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis of Middle Church about the upcoming Freedom Rising Conference, which will convene community leaders, organizers, and educators to determine how the interfaith movement can work together to save democracy in this pivotal moment.

“These are attacks on our democracy, plain and simple. They’re attacks on everything about the way of our life in America, about the ability to hold our freedoms, about the ability to raise our families, about the ability to be in communities with people. And so I think we need to see that for what it is. And one thing that people can do is just to make sure that they are engaged in their local communities, that they are registered to vote, that they are encouraging people to vote.”

- Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward. An attorney, activist, and organizer, she is also a member of the board of Interfaith Alliance.

“Whether our political party is Democrat or Republican or Independent, we know that our democracy is eroding, and if we want to stop the failure of democracy and the destruction of Mother Earth, we remember that God is for the healing of all the people and for the protection of the planet. And we, we are co-creators with God. We are co-stewards with God. We have a responsibility to load in at this time so that love can win in November. And that's what we're organizing for.”

- The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, longtime senior pastor at Middle Church in New York City. Author of the book Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Frocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World. Jacqui is an activist, preacher, writer, and teacher. She also hosts the Love, Period podcast.

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While some traditions and congregations may be more inclusive than others, LGBTQ+ people have always had a presence in faith communities. When faith communities are affirming of LGBTQ+ people, it creates opportunities for more welcoming spaces, challenges forces of division, and fosters a society that embraces pluralism and intersectionality. This affirmation and inclusion also expands religious freedom for all by promoting peaceful coexistence and challenging the exclusionary and discriminatory white Christian nationalist agenda.

This week on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is joined by Dr. Royal G. Cravens III to explore the history of LGBTQ+ inclusion within faith communities. They discuss how faith and LGBTQ+ communities can empower each other to engage in positive political action and dismantle the barriers that often separate faith and acceptance.

"I think the one thing that's so important for me to say now is that the idea that one person can't be both LGBTQ+ and religious, that's a false construction. It's a political construction, largely. It's something that was created to fuel political division. And so I think it's really important if you can understand that, then it makes sense that LGBTQ+ people are deeply influenced by faith; that faith, how we're socialized into it, because it's part of the world that we live in, especially in American politics, that it makes sense that it would influence how LGBTQ+ people engage.”

-R. G. Cravens III, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. R.G.’s recent book is titled: Yes, Gawd! How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States. The author of several important recent SPLC reports, including CAPTAIN, which stands for Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives. he is the previous recipient of the Bailey and Cynthia Weber Award from the American Political Science Association and has held fellowships with the Social Science Research Council and Public Religion Research Institute.

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Language and the words we use possess the extraordinary ability to bridge divides and bring people together, fostering understanding and solidarity among diverse communities. However, when wielded maliciously, they can also serve as a dangerous tool for sowing discord and causing division. This week on The State of Belief, the weekly radio show and podcast by Interfaith Alliance, host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush talks with crisis communications expert Helio Fred Garcia. They delve into the power of language, its implications, and discuss available strategies for resistance, particularly in the context of the current election year marked by an alarming escalation of divisive and dehumanizing rhetoric on the campaign trail.

“We can, at whatever level of society we happen to be at, we can be diligent and say, this demonization and dehumanization stops with me. I'm going to be the person who lives by the standard - and behavior that we walk past is behavior we condone. And so we need to call it out when we see it.”

- Fred Garcia, founder and president of the crisis management firm Logos Consulting Group, and executive director of the Logos Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Leadership. A coach, counselor, teacher, and public speaker, Fred's books include Words on Fire: The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It. He's on the faculty at New York University and Columbia University and is a past chair and long-time member of the board of directors of Interfaith Alliance.

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As many faith traditions across the globe celebrate important Holy Days this weekend, it provides an opportunity for introspection and diving deeper into our personal relationships with faith. At a time in our history when an extremist religious minority seeks to weaponize faith in the service of an authoritarian political agenda, it’s important to build bridges and connections across traditions to lead with shared values of truth, justice, and love. This week on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, Rev. John Pavlovitz joins host Rev. Paul Raushenbush to examine how faith can buoy us through challenging times.

“But the parts about the fighting with and for my faith tradition, so the part about Christianity, is really important to me because it acknowledges that I have come through this tradition. I love it, many things that I have experienced as a part of it, but I also see its toxicity. And so there's the honesty about the tensions of saying, I have a deep spirituality and I have an incredibly complicated relationship with organized religion, and so how do I do that work? And how do I follow Jesus' command to love the least and love my enemies who may be oppressing the least?”

- John Pavlovitz, an ordained pastor, writer, and activist from North Carolina. He is the best-selling author of numerous books including If God is Love, Don't Be a Jerk and A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community. His new book, coming April 2, 2024, is titled Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty is Trending.

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Over the past several years, the global church has been grappling with sex abuse scandals and how to address and lift up the needs of survivors. In their new book, Surviving God: A New Vision of God Through the Eyes of Sexual Abuse Survivors, theologians Rev. Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Rev. Susan M. Shaw work to dismantle traditional theological constructs that perpetuate the grave issue of sexual abuse, shedding light on how these patriarchial beliefs diverge from the compassionate and just essence of the gospel.

This week on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is joined by the authors to delve into the authors’ lived experiences and unveiling the intricate intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and religion. They discuss what can be done to offer a hopeful pathway to a reimagined church committed to healing and justice.

 As I think more theologically every day, I'm thinking that our image, our metaphors, our understanding, our language, our words about God actually really, really has a deep impact on our actions, our thinking, our modes of behavior...If we continue to use this language in the church, it really allows abuse, allows domination, allows colonialism, allows subjugation, allows genocide, all these things, they are intersecting forms and acts of violence perpetrated against other people.

- Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, professor of theology at Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. She's the author or editor of more than 20 books, including Hope in Disarray: Piecing Our Lives Together in Faith and Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World.

Grace and I went into this book as survivors ourselves, and so we want survivors to know that we are speaking as people who understand what they've gone through and what they continue to go through. And while the book has a lot of difficult material, and we're going to talk about that, but we also ended on a note of joy. And so we want survivors also to know that we're going to get to the joy as we talk about it.

- Dr. Susan M. Shaw, professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. Her books include Reflective Faith: A Theological Toolbox for Women, and God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home, and Society. An ordained Baptist minister, Susan makes her congregational home in the United Church of Christ.

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The outsized, but often forgotten, role of women in the Civil Rights Movement has come up several times recently on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance's weekly radio program and podcast. Now, host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush welcomes an expert on the subject, Dr. AnneMarie Mingo. Her new book, out on March 26th, 2024, is titled Have You Got Good Religion? Black Women's Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement.

"Unfortunately, we still see that today, where many of the women who are the strategists, the architects, those who are making it happen, are ignored. But one of the things that I've always appreciated that the women that I studied didn't get caught up in, was the fact that they were ignored. They still did the work anyway."

- Dr. Anne Marie Mingo, associate professor of ethics, culture, and moral leadership, and director of the Metro Urban Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. An ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, AnneMarie is the founder of Sister Scholars, an organization that supports Black women pursuing doctorate degrees. The compelling conversation raises up the everydayness of activists who never make headlines, but who ensure the words of prominent leaders are followed up with action.

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Since long before the MAGA movement and the January 6 insurrection, white Christian nationalists have been pushing an agenda that marginalizes and discriminates against communities of color. We have seen how right-wing extremists have hidden behind Christianity as a cover for white supremacy, antithetical to Christian values of acceptance and justice. We can’t overcome Christian nationalism in the U.S. without having important conversations about the intersection of faith, race, and justice, and how white people must be involved in the work to desegregate religious spaces to make room for everyone.

This week on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is joined by Dr. Jemar Tisby to dissect and discuss the complexities of racism in white evangelicism and the crucial role of cross-cultural relationships in achieving racial justice.

“I think this is really the beating heart of racial justice is that at the end of the day, it's all about people. It's all about love of neighbor. And so for white people, relationships means actually having meaningful relationships across racial and ethnic lines, which takes an incredible amount of intentionality because of the intentionality that went into segregating people from one another, white people from other people. For Black people and people of color, I think relationships mean solidarity with other people of color, forming coalitions. We're stronger together than apart.”

- Dr. Jemar Tisby, professor of history at Simmons College in Louisville, Kentucky. He is also a best-selling author, national speaker, and public historian. Dr. Tisby is the author of three books: The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church's Complicity in Racism, How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Towards Racial Justice, and coming in September, The Spirit of Justice: Stories of Faith, Race and Resistance. He also hosts the Pass the Mic podcast.

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On March 7, 2024, interfaith leaders from across the country will gather in Minneapolis for an Interfaith Symposium at Augsburg University. The symposium offers an opportunity for people to build community, collaboration, and trust by participating in vital interfaith dialogue. During a time when religiously motivated hate crimes are on the rise and Christian nationalists are hard at work attempting to overturn democracy, these interfaith conversations are more important than ever.

This week on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush speaks with Manu Meel, CEO of BridgeUSA and keynote speaker at the symposium, and Prof. Najeeba Syeed, executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg University, about the importance of interfaith solidarity in building a stronger, inclusive society and resilient democracy.

“There has to be a conversation about: what do we do when there is a community, an individual in our community, there's some dynamic where someone is being targeted for hate? What and how do we engage that interfaith space around that reality, that lived reality?”

-Dr. Najeeba Syeed, executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. For more than two decades, Najeeba has been a professor and practitioner in the fields of conflict resolution, mediation, and interfaith studies. An award-winning educator, she has taught extensively on interreligious education and restorative justice.

“When you give people of radically different perspectives, the opportunity to hear each other in a constructive space, you realize that we very much overestimate the capacity of our differences to rip us apart, and we very much underestimate our capacity to actually see the commonality.”

- Manu Meel, CEO of BridgeUSA, a ​​student movement creating spaces for constructive political discussions on campuses across the country. He hosts The Hopeful Majority podcast and was included on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2022.

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Religious extremism is hardly a new phenomenon in America – but now more than ever, buoyed by an emerging Christian nationalist movement, it threatens nearly every corner of American public life. This week’s Alabama Supreme Court decision that frozen embryos constitute human beings – a ruling steeped in religious doctrine – is another painful reminder of that reality. In order to confront the threats to faith and democracy today, it’s our responsibility to understand the deep historical roots of these trends and how they have manifested over decades. This week on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, journalist and best-selling author Tim Alberta sits down with host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush to take us on both a personal and deeply reported journey of his experience with the evangelical church. 

 “I think one of the thematic throughlines of the book is understanding the ways in which our faith identities have become wrapped up in, almost inextricable from, our political identities and our kind of cultural, social identities and our national identity and understanding how that has happened and how it's progressed. Some of it has happened very subconsciously, I think. In other ways, there's been a conscious, concerted, very well-organized, well-funded effort to effectively merge the evangelical church with the Republican Party.”

- Tim Alberta, staff writer for The Atlantic and the best-selling author of the new book, The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It is a fitting follow-up to his other best-seller, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. In his new work, Tim weaves together the expert observations of a skilled journalist with the insights of an American who grew up as a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor.

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This weekend, movie-goers across the country are making their way to theaters for the new film “God & Country,” the latest project from Rob Reiner exploring the role of Christian nationalism in American society. Among the experts featured in that film is scholar and author Dr. Anthea Butler, who provides an important academic perspective on this anti-democratic ideology that is quickly permeating all corners of society. This week on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is joined by Anthea Butler to dissect the intersections of white Christian nationalism in both religious and political spheres, so that we can work towards fostering a society that values religious diversity and upholds the principles of equality and justice for all.

“I think the first thing people can do is to not say ‘vote,’ but to actually participate. What I mean by that is that it's important to vote. It's important to get people registered to vote. But if you think voting is the only thing that's going to do it, you are sorely mistaken.” - Dr. Anthea Butler, a leading scholar of African American religion and history, nationalism, race, politics, and popular culture. The author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Dr. Butler sounds a warning in “God & Country” about the direction Christian nationalism is taking this country - and how hard it may be to ever come back. Dr. Butler is the Geraldine R. Siegel Professor in American Social Thought and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

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