[Oe List ...] 12/22/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev. David M. Felton: A Conversation with Rachel Laser - Part 1; Spoung revisited

Thu Dec 22 08:51:50 PST 2022

   Americans United for the Separation of Church and State   
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A Conversation with Rachel Laser,
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State

Part 1: On the Toxic Merging of Conservative Politics & Fundamentalist Christianity
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|  By Rev. David M. Felten
December 22, 2022

The following is Part 1 of two columns drawn from an interview with Rachel Laser, President of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, December 1st, 2022. It has been edited for length and focus.

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David Felten:  For those who may be unfamiliar, what is Americans United and what's its mission?
Rachel Laser:  Americans United brings together religious and non-religious Americans to fight in the courts, in Congress, across state legislatures, and in the public square for everyone's right to believe as they choose and live as themselves, free from other people's religious dictates.
David Felten:  Is this some kind of newfangled organization that's just come along since the '60s in order to disrupt the American way of life?
Rachel Laser:  I'm very proud to say that we've not only been in existence for 75 years but were founded primarily by people of faith who were worried about the effect that losing church state-separation would have on religion as well as on American society. We are constantly working with faith denominations alongside secular groups when we submit friend-of-the-court briefs and when we write letters to Congress and state legislators. In fact, our board has many faith leaders on it and our new board chair is the past two term president of the National Council of Churches. In our latest round of board additions, we've added a Seventh Day Adventist, an Orthodox Jewish leader, and a Baptist pastor.
David Felten:  I don't think most people realize that most of the major mainline Protestant denominations support AU financially, too, right?
Rachel Laser:  It’s been trickier for the mainline Protestant denominations to fund AU as they have struggled with some of their own funding, but we work together with all of the mainline denominations on various issues on a daily basis. And we have many mainline Protestant members who support AU.
David Felten:  So, since you've come on board five years ago, what have the biggest challenges been facing the Separation of Church and State?
Rachel Laser:  It's been a combination of the Supreme Court, the emboldened Christian Nationalist movement, and the struggle of many Americans to hold on to hope. The Supreme Court's an obvious one. We now have a majority that is ultra conservative and was put in place because of their hostility to Church-State Separation. The emboldened Christian Nationalist movement is really a reaction to the fact that we're winning — that our society is evolving towards its best self, that we've expanded the tent rather than narrowed it, expanding equality and letting more people in. We've had our first Black President, we've had an unprecedented number of women elected to Congress, and we've seen marriage equality become the law of the land. We've witnessed the MeToo movement and witnessed an ever more diverse religious pluralism in our society.
But unfortunately, there's been this grip of fear that's overtaken a large number of Americans who are afraid of losing power and privilege. And that backlash (which Van Jones actually called a “whitelash”) has resulted in a true emboldenment of Christian Nationalism. I was just listening to Nick Fuentes say we need to be ruled by Catholics and not Jews in America and it's that transition in society — from veiled antisemitism to thinly veiled antisemitism to owning and proudly touting and spewing antisemitism as a power move — that both reflects and perpetuates the serious threat to church-state separation in America today.
David Felten:  And I’ve heard this backlash being compared to the behavior of a wounded animal that knows it's cornered, and so it gets more and more vicious.
Rachel Laser:  Exactly. But the third challenge is more internal rather than external. It’s related to the loneliness and despair so many of us have felt during the pandemic and this difficult and extended political moment in our country— which has led many people to feel very dispirited and hopeless.
So, we need to hold on to hope and continue to get out there and do the work of correcting the record, of voting, and making sure we’re reaching the next generation and teaching them the truth about our democracy’s foundation, including that church-state separation is at the foundation of both freedom and equality. If people remember that the reason we're seeing this level of backlash is because we’re winning, they are more likely to take action rather than to throw their hands up.
David Felten:  OK, then. Who is behind this pushback and what is the history of the movements that are seeking to tear down the advances that we're making?
Rachel Laser:  In the Kennedy v. Bremerton case (the praying football coach case that Americans United argued in front of the Supreme Court on behalf of the school district and the school children), we added up the annual revenue of all the friend-of-the-court briefs that came in against the Bremerton School District and they totaled a billion dollars. So, what we're fighting is a billion-dollar shadow network that’s behind the Christian Nationalist movement right now. They have a cable network empire and are being funded by the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Leonard Leo and many others who are determined to hold onto existing power structures. They are driven by fear of all the changes that are diversifying our country and spreading equality. Ultimately, they are being guided by conservative goals to maintain power for the traditional class of power in America, often claim a religious basis for their ultra-conservative views.
David Felten:  So, it's a disingenuous embrace of religion in order to further conservative political ends.
Rachel Laser:  Well, conservatives really did change the theology within certain religions to support their end goal of maintaining their power. For example, when it comes to the abortion issue, the Southern Baptist Convention celebrated Roe v. Wade in the Baptist press back in 1973.
David Felten:  Until Jerry Falwell discovered it could be a political tool.
Rachel Laser:  That's where I'm going — and it’s documented in many books including Anthea Butler's White Evangelical Racism, Ilyse Hogue's The Lie That Binds and many others. What happened was a coming together of the Christian conservative movement with those who were resisting desegregation, but who no longer felt they could outwardly advance their racist goals. They realized that folks like Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum were having great success in advancing the same power structures through arguing for the traditional family and cloaking their views in religion.
And therefore they pivoted together and joined arms. There was an important meeting where Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority as a way of advancing these same goals: maintaining white supremacy, male hegemony, and Christian hegemony — but cloaking them in religious fundamentalism and arguments about the traditional family. So, going back to whether this is a religious movement or a conservative movement, it blends. In the mid 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention was supporting abortion rights, but by the end of the ‘70s, they actually changed their resolutions and started to oppose abortion rights. The rank and file were then taught that opposing abortion was part of their theology, but that theology had shifted to support the end goal of preserving conservative political power structures.
David Felten:  And it’s important for all of us (especially those of us who are faith leaders) to be aware of the names of these people and groups in order to shine a light on what they’re up to – including campaigns like Project Blitz (best known for providing boiler-plate “model legislation,” proclamations, and talking points for conservative state and local legislators to introduce bills that support a Fundamentalist agenda rooted in Christian Nationalism).
Rachel Laser  Many people have no idea that such a thing as Project Blitz exists. And again, it's this sort of shadow movement that’s so very dangerous, operating so effectively and in such a coordinated way.

— Rev. David Felten with Rachel Laser
 Read online here
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Americans United for Separation of Church and State is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit educational and advocacy organization that brings together people of all religions and none to protect the right of everyone to believe as they want — and stop anyone from using their beliefs to harm others. AU fights in the courts, legislatures, and the public square for freedom without favor and equality without exception. If you’d like to find out more about how Americans United shields our shared laws from the influence of any one religion so we can be free to come together as equals and build a stronger democracy, check out their website at au.org.

Rachel Laser is the President and CEO at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Rachel Laser is a lawyer, advocate and strategist who has dedicated her career to making our country more inclusive. For her biography, visit her profile page at au.org.

Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David is the proud father of three reliably remarkable human beings. Visit his website here.
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Question & Answer

Q: By Jean-Jacques

In my studies of different mystical traditions, including Christianity, I have come to learn that Christ was the Spirit of Love and Jesus was the human soul who personified it on earth. And that He, Jesus, was not the only person to have been able to do that. Others such as the Buddha, Milkezidik had also a certain union with this Christ, the changeless manifestation of the Supreme (God). What are your thoughts on that?

A: By Rev. Matthew Syrdal

Dear Jean-Jacques,

I’m hearing a couple of different questions, about how to understand the doctrine of the Incarnation? And is it universal - that is, can it be applied to other religions like Buddhism? Wow, this is a big question. And while I am no expert, I too have always been interested in these sorts of questions.

Christianity does have a rich history of mysticism, as does both Judaism and Buddhism. One of Judaism’s mystical-magical lineages is Kabbalah (Qabalah) which is quite ancient. And Christianity’s mystical lineage goes back to Jesus, and early expressions can be found in gnosticism and later desert spirituality among others.

The theological origins of and sources for the Cosmic Christ, folks like Matthew Fox, would be a better resource than I. Quite early on in the primitive Church the image of Christ was associated with a whole constellation of cosmic inquiries: the masculine divine logos of the Greeks or ordering and sentient principle of the cosmos, the feminine and eternal Ruach, the creative breath or Spirit of God, and the feminine personification of Wisdom (Hokhmah) as co-creatrix with God from the beginning. Christ as the preexistent Word for the early church sort of fulfilled all these transpersonal and teleological functions of origins: creation, redemption, and renewal for the cosmos and the individual personality. Folks like Teilhard de Chardin and Ilia Delio, process theologians and evolutionary mystics see the Christ as the Omega point of evolution itself that is part of nature, not just ‘above’ it. There is an implicate order found in the cosmogenic processes of the universe itself that has a divine telos, an inherent wisdom and purpose that tends towards wholeness. But what I hear you processing is what has been termed Christ-consciousness, and perhaps, the Buddha-nature specifically.

The famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung who discovered the collective unconscious began to view the Christ of faith through the lens of myth which led him to discover and elucidate his idea of the archetypes. He found fertile ground for his development of a new myth of the Self in alchemy, Hinduism, and Christianity. In Hinduism he saw a parallel between the Atman (Self, or divine center of the personality), Brahman (or divine heart of the Cosmos) in Christ and the Godhead. For Jung, Christ was an image of the archetypal Self. That is to say that the microcosm (Self) is a reflection of the macrocosm (the universe), the the true nature of the Self is Cosmic and the true nature of the Cosmos is reflected in the Self. Of course Jung’s inquiry was primarily psychological, not theological.

Regarding your last question, “is Jesus unique?” I defer to mythic imagination as a large enough framework that might hold the possibility of both/and—the possibly that Jesus is both “unique” and “not-the-only-one”, a unique never-before-seen manifestation of Cosmic purpose that evolves the species-in-history-creation toward wholeness. All of what we see is perceived as in a mirror darkly of course, and so we must be content with the divine Mystery on Mystery’s terms. And as the proverb goes, life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. In other words real revelation is not head knowledge but a transformation of consciousness in its inner-ground. 

~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal
Read and share online here

About the Author
Matthew Syrdal, M.Div., is a pastor in the Denver area, a visionary, founder of Church of Lost Walls, and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt has begun a new venture called Mythic Christ, a mystery school and podcast for awakening mythic imagination and ritual embodiment. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country and his mentoring and coaching practice as a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute. His work weaves in myth, archetype, dreams, deep imagery, and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world of which they are a part. Matt’s passion is guiding others in discovering “treasure hidden in the field” of their deepest lives, cultivating deep wholeness and re-enchantment of the natural world to apprentice fully and dangerously to the kingdom of god.
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I hope this note finds you doing well and living into the joy of the holiday season.

I want to take a quick moment to ask you to help make it the most wonderful time of the year for ProgressiveChristianity.org. We are continuing to reach more people with our understanding of Christianity which comes from the teachings of Jesus focusing on love, equality, and justice. We cannot do it without you. You are essential in this effort.

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This Christmas season, I hope you will make the choice to give the gift of your support so that we can continue spreading the good news of God incarnate – news of love, equality, and justice. After all, 'tis the season!

Thank you!

Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin
President and Co-Executive Director

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

June 26, 2013, A Great Day for America

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
July 4, 2013

I was surprised at how elated I felt on June 26 when the Supreme Court handed down its two historic decisions affecting gay and lesbian people. The first decision mandated federal recognition of gay and lesbian couples in states that permit same-sex marriage by declaring the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to be unconstitutional. The second reopened the door for same sex marriage in California by refusing to consider the appeal from the court that had declared Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional. Impressive and, to some, as startling as those decisions were, the court in actuality took only baby steps toward justice by leaving the nation in a patchwork of conflicting practices in regard to the rights of same-sex couples. On the Proposition 8 decision they showed no great courage by allowing that proposition to go down on a technicality. This was hardly the sweeping and courageous change that was shown by the Warren Court in 1954 with its 9-0 desegregation opinion in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education. When these decisions were announced, however, the immediate reality was and is that the right of people to marry whomever they love was established, and that this nation will be forever different. There will be no turning back. Surely within a brief span of time, no more than five years at most, the patchwork pattern these decisions have left will disappear and marriage equality will be universal in this country, yes, even in Texas and South Carolina.

One of the things that helped to make this victory so compelling and ecstatic for me came when I listened to the reactions of the defeated voices. To our shame as members of the church, so much of that negative reaction came from Christian leaders. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York called June 26 “a tragic day for America.” The Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler, the fundamentalist president of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, called it “a sad day for America.” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said “the court got it wrong.” Evangelist Pat Robertson opined that Justice Kennedy must have gay law clerks working for him and that God would soon send something drastic upon this country because of these rulings. All of these responses broadcast loudly that their negativity had been defeated.

The political response from the far right was also loud and predictable. Republican Representative Michelle Bachman fulminated; other Republican House members proclaimed that such a change should have come, not from the nine people on the court, but from a majority of the voters. These Representatives seemed not to recognize that in our democracy basic human rights are guaranteed by the constitution. They are not decided by a vote of the majority. One wonders where Justice Clarence Thomas would be today if the rights of black people had been determined by a voting plebiscite rather than by the courts. It was interesting to listen to Tea Party members castigating the “liberal” decisions of the Supreme Court, whose majority was appointed by conservative Republican presidents: two by Ronald Reagan, one by George H.W. Bush and two by George W. Bush. On that court today also sit six Roman Catholic Justices, two of whom voted to recognize same-sex marriage. These reactions convinced me that the decision of the court was greater and more far-reaching than I had at first fully understood.

As this wave of euphoria then floated over me I became quite nostalgic. The battle for acceptance and justice for the gay community has seemed like a long one and in that battle there have been both heroes and casualties. I thought of people like the Rev. Jimmy Creech, a Methodist minister serving in Omaha, Nebraska, who was removed from the Methodist Ministry by his Conference for presiding over the blessing of two gay couples in his church, one in 1997 and one in 1999. How wrong those Methodist leaders look today. They punished their prophet. I thought of the Rev. Janie Spahr, a Presbyterian minister, who has been hounded, harassed and finally punished by her church for living in a relationship of commitment with her partner and for acting in the cause of gay justice. Janie was in touch with truth. Synod Presbyterian leaders were not. I thought of the Rev. Paul Woodrum, who was the first priest to confront me about my prejudice against homosexual people. When I discovered near the beginning of my career as a bishop that he lived with his partner in the rectory of the church, I informed him that since I could not allow an unmarried heterosexual couple to occupy a rectory, I could not allow him and his partner as a homosexual couple to do so either. Prejudice sometimes masquerades as “evenhandedness.” Paul responded to my pious words by saying “The heterosexual couple has a choice: they can get married anytime they choose. Neither my Church nor my State has been willing to give that choice to me.” That was the comment that drove me to study sexual orientation with some doctors at the Cornell Medical Center in New York City, a study that turned my attitude, my life and my career around. In that study I became convinced that sexual orientation is a given, not a chosen, aspect of life. It is like gender, skin color and left-handedness. One cannot be judged moralistically because of what one is. This seemed so obvious to me on the other side of my prejudice. I realized then that I did not choose to be heterosexual. I also did not choose to be white, male or right-handed. Armed with this conversion of my mind and heart, my life had to follow and I took on the prejudice against homosexual people as my own cause and that work became a major focus in my career.

My campaign began with a charge to the people of the Diocese of Newark in 1984 to study “changing patterns in family life.” That sounds innocuous enough today, but the changes I asked them to consider was having this church bless the sacred commitments of gay and lesbian people. Their recommendations, when reported out in 1986, called on our clergy and congregations to give to gay and lesbian couples “the same recognition and affirmation, which have nurtured and sustained heterosexual couples, including appropriate liturgies, which recognized and blessed such relationships.” In 1986 this was a ground-breaking statement. It was the first time a unit of a major Christian church had put itself on the line for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people. To support this initiative of our diocese, I wrote a book entitled Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality, which appeared in book stores in 1988. This book has been credited with sparking the debate on gay rights in American churches. It called for all Christian Churches to develop liturgies for the blessing of same sex unions, to recover the meaning of “betrothal” and to offer it liturgically to young adults when they decide to live together outside the bands of matrimony, and for churches to develop liturgical services to recognize the death of a marriage, to be used when divorce occurs. When that book came out, my life was destined never to be the same. Those ideas put me into the category where the word “controversial” would be forever attached to my name in both the religious and secular press.

While that debate was still raging I acted once again on December 16, 1989, to ordain the first openly gay priest, living with his male partner in a publicly-acknowledged, committed relationship. I did this with the full support of all the decision-making bodies of my diocese. This prophetic act set off a massive wave of public and ecclesiastical negativity. Our presiding bishop, Edmond Browning, handed me and my diocese an official “letter of disassociation.” I was told that I had violated “the collegiality” of the House of Bishops. My wife and I then took our case across America speaking on radio, television, to the print media and in public addresses. We were spat upon as we walked through a crowd of demonstrators into a church in La Jolla, California. We were set upon and physically threatened by demonstrators in Rockford, Illinois, led by the Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kansas. I received sixteen death threats that were quite specific. Abusive mail and telephone calls poured into my office. The students at my own seminary invited me to speak to them on this subject, while the faculty boycotted the evening in protest. When one’s mind is convinced of the rightness of an action, one’s heart, one’s will and one’s life has got to follow. To hide in some safe haven of acceptable moderation is not an option if integrity is to be served. This battle in my church was tense and difficult, but attitudes were changing. We were heralding the birth of a new consciousness. Today, in 2013, the leaders of my church greeted the decision of the Supreme Court with excitement and approval. My former seminary now has a lesbian faculty member. Two openly homosexual bishops now serve my church with competence. When I retired as the Bishop of Newark in 2000 we had in our diocese 35 out of the closet gay and lesbian clergy serving churches, thirty-one of them living in publicly acknowledged partnerships. They were a powerful witness to the people of our diocese and to the state of New Jersey. I was and am enormously proud of each one of them.

Now the smoke of battle is clearing away. The victory is obvious. Gay and lesbian Christians are fully included in the life of my church and their claim to full citizenship in this nation has now been extended to them by the Supreme Court. There is no doubt in my mind that the struggle was worth the sacrifice. We have witnessed a new understanding of what it means to be human receive cultural affirmation. Justice and human dignity have been extended to one more group of people who were once marginalized and rejected by human prejudice. I rejoice in this day as a citizen of the United States. As a Christian I rejoice that the promise of Jesus to all people recorded by the Fourth Gospel: “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly,” has now been guaranteed to our homosexual brothers and sisters by my country and affirmed by my church. June 26 was a great day for America and let it be said by this Christian leader, it was an even greater day for the cause of Christ.

~  John Shelby Spong
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Announcements

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