More than anything I wanted to just start by thanking you for inviting me, for what you do, and for what you’re in the midst of doing, for the Model Policy Guide that you put out, for taking time to go and to advocate, to go and sit down, to go and be a presence, to go be in front of – from Ted Cruz to Sheldon Whitehouse – the whole range of folks who serve, right from Tammy Baldwin to Joni Ernst, we’ve got a remarkable array of backgrounds and values in the United States Senate. And they need to be, we need to be reminded, that we represent a very broad range of views, of beliefs, of backgrounds and attitudes in this country. I take seriously the idea that I need to represent all of Delaware. I take seriously that even folks who do not share any of my worldviews, several of whom I spoke to this afternoon, deserve effective and engaged representation. At the end of the day I think that is one of my core commitments as a senator; a commitment to secular government. So thank you for taking the time to make sure that our elected representatives understand the whole range of who they represent.
Some may think that I am an unlikely person to be addressing you this evening. As you heard, as United States Senator, I am dedicated to the separation of church and state, and to the equal protection under the Constitution, which I swore to uphold whether you are religious or secular. But as a citizen, I am a practicing Christian and a devout Presbyterian and a recent speaker at the Senate prayer breakfast.
So, I think it’s interesting that we have a chance to visit together. If you actually look at what I dedicate my time, and my heart, and my energy to, I doubt that my values or the things that I fight for in Congress differ very much from the ideals that you hold or the issues on which you spent time lobbying just this week in Congress. And so, I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about that. How it is that someone of my values, whose path runs unmistakably through my own religious faith journey, ends up in a place where I think we are natural allies in advocacy around things of lasting difference. And forgive me for the self-indulgence, but I’d like to take a few minutes, and just hopefully this is helpful, to walk you through how I came to be who I am and what I try to fight for in the Congress and how I came to be here.
I am of course aware that for many the Bible, which I consider scripture, has been used as a document, as a foundation to justify discrimination, has been the basis of intolerance based on outdated teachings and moral codes and has been a source of pain and distance and discomfort for many. It is quite a different source for me. And so, forgive me, I’m going to quote my favorite passage of scripture, something I suspect is not often done at Secular Coalition.
It is Mathew chapter 25; my hunch is that it may be either vaguely familiar to you or actually familiar to you. It is the passage in which Jesus is teaching about what really matters. In summary, He says, for I was hungry, you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.
The person who was making an inquiry as sort of what does this matter says when did that ever happen that, I didn’t do it for you. The answer is truly whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters you did for Me.
Now that has spoken to me, has helped drive my actions and my engagement, my commitment in no small part because my own parents lived that, made that real in my life. And that has shaped a lot of who I am.
I was active in my church as a volunteer as a kid; my parents were instrumental in showing me those principles in action. My dad taught sunday school and after one particularly powerful sermon that sighted this passage, raised his hand to his own surprise as a suburban Republican businessman just trying to raise three boys and volunteered to start going to our state prison, and visiting with prisoners, and building a relationship that ultimately led to a deep relationship with a man who was a convicted murderer; that ultimately led him to risk having that murderer come home and spend furlough weekends with us, with his young children in this safe suburban neighborhood. In a way that I don’t think he thought was a big deal at the time. But now that I have teenage children and I have a home that I try to keep safe, I recognize was radical. Was an opening of our own family space to someone who was considered by society at the very edge of who was acceptable and who was welcome.
My mother, we were just talking about this the other day, helped welcome a refugee family from South Vietnam and helped change their lives and transform them from penniless with nothing but the clothes on their backs to folks who had a real remarkable opportunity and over the decades we were involved with them as a family, we got to see them transform into engaged and settled Americans.
So, in small ways and in big ways, I was raised by parents who took these words to heart and did things with them.
I spent time myself in South Africa working for Desmond Tutu, going across the country working with the homeless and homeless shelters, and volunteering with kids in inner city schools, and then when it came time to do some graduate study I went to, yes, that institution in New Haven. And while working in a homeless shelter in New Haven, a friend who had a pony tail down to here and was doing criminal justice work said to me, “There’s this crazy lesbian lefty nun you’ve gotta come listen to.” I said, “Sounds good to me.” I audited one class at the Divinity School and thought she was amazing, and took a second class, and a third class, and a fourth class, and ultimately one sunday the Dean of Admissions said to me, you know we do let law school students into the Divinity School. And so in what was for me a surprising step, I chose to enroll in the Divinity School.
Now, I was very active in the progressive community in my law school, and most of my friends were politically active progressives. But I was unprepared for their response. When word started filtering out that I had enrolled in divinity school, some of them literally disowned me. My own roommates moved out. Several folks literally stopped speaking to me, and acted as if I had lost my mind. Either made offensive jokes that kinda not funny or cut me out of their social circle. In ways that were unexpected to me and personally hurtful. And it took me quite a while to get through all of this. Some of them, sort of up here just dismissed divinity as a serious field of study and said, you know, “Chris, you are a scientist, you are a chemist, you trained as a chemist as an undergraduate how could you possibly believe in this insane stuff.” And others had a far more edgy and political response. And as I tried to heal and to reconnect with those relationships, with folks who had meant a great deal to me, who I had worked with hard in the homelessness clinic or in taking classes with, I came to learn that many of them had personal experiences of deep pain, and of alienation, of abuse literally or figuratively in their own childhood or their own communities that had driven a big wedge between them and religion. And that helped me understand what was, what I saw, real bigotry. Frankly we were a group of progressives who were really proud of how welcoming and open we were and virtually any possible lifestyle or worldview or attitude was something we would embrace right up until the moment when I said I believed in God and was unwelcomed.
I wrestled with that for quite a while.
Eventually I came to understand that for many of my colleagues in the progressive political journey, accepting someone of expressed faith was one of the hardest moments of tolerance and inclusion for them. So I have been passionate about trying to help bridge this difference for a while. Because frankly, in the political coalition that works for progressive values, there are truly progressive Christians and Jews, and there are truly progressive nonbelievers or secularists who have found common cause, and getting past some of our misunderstandings of each other, which often means getting passed some of our childhood experiences or youthful experiences that can be very painful and very personal, is absolutely essential to building the bridges to a sustained coalition of action.
I also suspect that one of the main reasons my choice was so difficult for so many of my progressive friends to understand was because religion had come to be so closely associated with right wing politics rather than dedication to any progressive values. One’s grounding in faith had become more associated with dogma, with arrogance, with a certain rigid certainty than with my own experience, which was an association with questioning, with tolerance, with inclusion, and with doubt.
One thing that divinity school actually drove home for me was the centrality of doubt to faith – that faith without doubt isn’t faith it’s extremism.
After all, when you spend hour upon hour studying scholarly interpretations of ancient and opaque texts it is hard to be overcome by anything other than humility in the face of what is a largely unsolved and unsolvable mystery. And in my particular church, I’m Presbyterian, the tradition of our church is one that gives each individual relatively wide latitude to understand what is the intersection between the eternal, or the religious, and the secular, or the daily. In my own church upbringing, the idea of one person having a monopoly on truth would be considered not prophetic but fanaticism.
So when I think about this country’s founding and the central tenet of secular governance, I also think about the importance of doubt and of humility.
As a person of faith, I think it is foundational to our country that if we allow people to choose their path of faith they must of course be also free, welcomed, celebrated to choose not to have faith in a supreme being, but instead to be optimistic about the possibilities for ethical living and good citizenship rooted in first principles, rooted in however you derive your principles for living. And although I started by perhaps puckishly quoting from the book of Matthew, there is, I’m aware, nothing uniquely Christian about those values. It’s just as easy to get there through faith as it is through other experiences that help us just discern how to treat each other respectively and kindly.
And if that’s true, then surely it is those universal values of equality and of justice and of inclusion that transcend one’s faith orientation or secular orientation that should be our guiding light as policymakers.
Religious freedom must also be freedom to not have our values or practices forced into the public square. I’ll remind you, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams, “Say nothing of my religion, it is known to God and myself alone.”
If we take seriously the value of one’s individual freedom to choose faith then we must also take seriously the right of our neighbors not to be oppressed by discrimination even it is informed by one’s deeply held religious tradition. And it is exactly that intersection that is once again at the front of the news, that is once again at the center of the national debate.
One other quote from a founder, George Washington wrote beautifully about this idea in a letter to the Newport Rhode Island Congregation. Although it could have been addressed to any group of believers or nonbelievers alike, it was to one of the oldest synagogues in America, he wrote, “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that tolerance is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoy the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” And he closed, “While everyone shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Today, the dominant voices of faith self-identify or self-professed faith in our national politics unfortunately still remain most associated with dogmatism, with a certain rigid hubris and certainty that says I have the answer, and the rest of you, be damned. I recognize that if doubt and humility are central to my faith experience, than that leaves open the distinct possibility that others are right and I am wrong, and I think starting from that point is the beginning of the bridge building which I hope we will continue.
The certainty that has become associated with religion in the far right in politics is a genuine problem, I think, for our bridge building, because it makes it seem as if religious values can only manifest themselves in conservative diatribes about homosexuality or abortion. In the association of religion, or Christianity, with Republican Party politics, I think there has subsequently been a real backlash against religion or expressions of faith especially amongst progressives.
As a progressive person of faith, this has been profoundly harmful and not just with my roommates and my social circle. But more broadly, in terms of where we can go, together.
It has caused discrimination and bigotry that is counter to our values as our country. That is true whether we are debating the rights of committed gay couples to enjoy the blessings of marriage or to be served at whichever business they choose or whether the church’s teachings should have an impact on public policies regarding reproductive health. Equality and freedom from discrimination are fundamental to who we are as a country. They are the birthright of every American and no matter what your upbringing teaches, that must be for us non-negotiable.
Second, the association of religion with certainty and conservatism has served to diminish the power of progressive voices of faith. It has made it seem as if the more religious one is the more conservative one must be. Yet here I am, a devout, believing Presbyterian, and I am proud that my church ordains both gay and lesbian clergy, and blesses marriages of opposite sex and same-sex couples alike.
A year ago January, I had the distinct honor of preaching at the wedding of a close couple who I dearly love who were the first to wed under Delaware’s new marriage equality statue. And I think as small acts of engagement, of positivity like that, that cross the bridge between the progressive and the faithful happen across our country, there will I hope be somewhat of a diminishing of what has so long been the distance between those of progressive political values and those of progressive faith.
Lastly, and I think this is a point we miss far too much, the destructive influence of religion in conservative politics has served to drive a wedge between religious and secular Americans who should be working together. I know I have made that point more than once. I share your profound belief in secular governance, yet I am also mindful and informed by the fact that in my view every major social movement in American history had its central animation, in part, in houses of worship. Whether the labor movement, the American Revolution, abolition of slavery, the social gospel, the civil rights movement, it was the combination of folks from the African-American church to Catholic parishes to synagogues to Protestant congregations all over the country that were central drivers of social change.
Building and sustaining an alliance between those social change movements outside and inside houses of faith, is the only way we can be successful in the long term in continuing to transform this to a country where all backgrounds are respected and included.
Faith doesn’t manifest itself uniformly and progressives of faith need to be able to speak openly about their values, not to evangelize but to allow these alliances to be formed and to be built sturdier.
From the purpose of coalition building, whatever the cause may be, we have to recognize we need as many allies as possible. I’m not going to guess how your visit to Senator Cruz’s office went today, but my hunch is as you look at today’s Congress you recognize that we need each other more than we ever have before.
Though we have come a long way, too many LGBTQ Americans are still treated as second-class citizens by their government, state or federal, because of who they are and who they love.
Though we’ve made a long journey in the 5o years since Selma, too many African-American men today are put behind bars with their futures extinguished because of draconian drug laws.
While we’ve created more wealth than any nation on Earth, too many of our children go to bed hungry and too many of their futures are diminished simply because of their zip code.
I have huge confidence in our country’s ability to continue perfecting our union. And a big reason why is because the values that bind us together transcend whatever your childhood experiences were, whatever your religious affiliations or secular views may be, because they are greater than any of those. So whether you pray five times a day, or once a day, or never, I am equally hopeful that we can transcend those differences and be woven together by our advocacy for a more just and equal society.
So thank you. Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for coming to Washington. We have a lot of work to do, together.