Do We Really Want to Give God Away?

Religion plays a complex role in this moment. But what do we stand to lose, if anything, by giving it away?

Photo: Getty Images

The Supreme Court leak that spells the demise of Roe v. Wade served as a wake-up call to some in our country. Despite a Democratic President and a Democratic majority in the Senate and the House, America is rapidly moving into an era of conservatism. Activists have been shouting about this cultural shift for more than a decade, but have been called alarmists by people in the mainstream media. They, just like the prophetess Cassandra in the Trojan War, are being proven right as the smoke of destruction rises: The end of Roe will inevitably cascade into more uphill legal battles that could be disastrous for marginalized people all over the country, particularly as the Supreme Court braces for more challenges to voting rights and LGBTQ+ issues. In response, people have gathered en masse all over the country, brandishing signs that point to the absolute absurdity of our American institutions. 

Many of these protests have, rightfully, targeted religion. “Get Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries,” read one sign. “Your Church Is Not My Country,” read another. The role that the mass mobilization, fundraising, and strategizing of the religious right plays in this moment can hardly be understated—but the role that religion plays more broadly in this fight is much more complicated. One of the key takeaways I’ve gathered from my time studying religion is that any and all efforts that seek to finally undermine the religious right have to examine religion with a much more discerning lens. Otherwise, we risk once again underestimating the powerful role religion can play in mobilizing people to pursue their vision of justice in the world.

I am proud to be a part of the inaugural cohort of the Masters of Religion and Public Life program at Harvard Divinity School. The program consists of 12 students who come from different areas of the public sector—journalism, music, education, the arts, law, and so forth. Each of us was tasked with identifying the role that religion plays in our respective fields. For some of us, like the lawyers in my cohort who were seeking to reframe “religious freedom” in the service of trans liberation, this role was immediately apparent. For others, like me, it was a bit harder to identify. I thought I came here to better understand the destructive role that religion plays in the world, so I could fight against it. I didn’t anticipate that, in exploring that work, I’d also come to appreciate the role that faith plays in brokering peace and forging coalitions in a world that’s more divided than ever.

To be clear, I am not seeking to be an apologist for religion. It is important—especially right now—to identify how religion is a part of the problems we are facing. But I also now understand that, by placing the blame solely on religion, we are letting many other factors and nefarious actors off the hook. Religion is just one category of power that is animating our world. In the fight for reproductive justice, for example, religion is accompanied by capitalism (a system reinforced by the traditional family unit and household), sexism (the belief that women’s bodily autonomy should not be determined by women themselves), and the state (which benefits from the criminalization or control over our bodies). These powerful forces all intersect to serve a white supremacist interest: they reinforce the belief that a small group of white people in power should dictate how others live their lives. 

Some of us are tempted to point the finger at religion right now because the religious right has been so effective with their activism, mobilization, and fundraising. This erases a very crucial point about the fight for reproductive justice in America, one illustrated by Kate Hoeting in this newsletter just last week: The religious right’s adoption of an anti-abortion stance was not borne out of a need to preserve the “sanctity of life.” It was a political tactic adopted by a small group of evangelicals and fed to their worshippers as a response to the end of segregation in schools. Once their churches started losing their coveted tax status due to their refusal to integrate their affiliated schools, the leaders of the religious right needed a more palatable strategy than plain old white supremacy to get their way in America. They found their strategy in rallying their base against abortion—despite the fact that the Southern Baptists had previously supported abortion access in America.

In this instance, religion became a powerful motivating force for people to adopt the anti-abortion cause. Similarly, as Kate (who works for Catholics for Choice) pointed out, religion has acted as a powerful, motivating force for people to adopt the pro-choice cause. This paradox has been evident in practically all of our social justice movements, even though we don’t readily articulate this nuance. It’s true that the white evangelicals and original slave owners used their Bibles to justify white supremacy. It’s also true that Black Christians used the same text to justify their liberation—to organize some of the largest, most sweeping demonstrations for equality in our nation’s history. It’s true that officials of the Catholic Church once used their religion to stop safe sex education and condom access in New York City at the height of the AIDS pandemic. It’s also true that Catholic nuns, priests, and worshippers mobilized all over the city, providing beds, healthcare, and spiritual counseling to queer people who were staring Death in the face. It’s true that religion has made strange bedfellows with imperialism, asserting Western dominance over nations that refused to conform with our ideals. It’s also true that religion was (and is) used as a force to fight back against these notions of empire. 

When it came time to decide how to conclude my final project for HDS on this newsletter, I felt it was crucial that I articulate some key takeaways of how we may misrepresent religion in our daily conversations, in our mainstream media, and even in our activism. I would like to reiterate that I—especially considering my position as a gay person who left the Catholic Church in protest as a teenager—am not here to defend religion writ large, or solely portray it as a force for good. Rather, I have learned during my time in the MRPL program that some of our commonly held “wisdoms” around religion are missing crucial context, and in the process, are letting many nefarious forces in this world go unchecked and under-examined. In addition, some of these talking points and universal claims about religion are unintentionally reproducing notions of othering, racism, and Western supremacy—even though those are all things that progressives claim to despise. 

In the coming days, I’m going to publish one section of my final thesis, which uses anecdotes from my time in the media to illustrate the complexities of religion in the public square. There are five overall takeaways that I hope each of us can spend a little time exploring and understanding as we continue to do our best to rise to the urgency of this moment in history. First, I want us all to be able to identify what Donna Haraway called “the god trick”—or our propensity to accept a broad, sweeping, normative idea as universally true. Second, I want us to better understand our position in the world relative to religion, particularly how our steadfast (if misguided) belief in secularism feeds into the idea of Western supremacy. Third, I want us to resist absolutist or binary claims about religion (ie: “Religion is violent!” “Religion caused all the major wars in the world!”) that release other agents of power from their accountability in the world’s problems. Fourth, I want us to grasp that religion cannot be relegated to just a private or just a public sphere, but it is an animating force all around us that we give value to. And finally, I want us to understand that by painting religion with such a broad stroke, we are also allowing a singular perspective of faith to rule as the all-powerful and the almighty. With a bigger fight ahead of us than ever before, I conclude by asking: Do we really want to give God away? 

I’ll see you back here tomorrow for part one. And for more on this particular entry, please catch me on my Instagram tomorrow at 7PM EST, where I’ll be in conversation with the New York Times bestselling author and poet, Cleo Wade.