Multiracial democracy demands an understanding of the tension between civil rights and religious liberty and the willingness to engage in difficult conversations to protect the rights of everyone, according to Maya Wiley.
The civil rights attorney gave the keynote address for the Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. The annual lecture is sponsored by Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
Maya Wiley
Wiley serves as president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund.
“What we have now, and what we should be talking about, is a political effort to whitewash white supremacy, to whitewash neo-Naziism and to whitewash ethno-Christian nationalism, and to try to define that, and any disagreement with that, as denying people their free expression of religion rather than the imposition of their ideology and beliefs on the rest of us,” she said.
“Faith and Freedom at 250: Religious Liberty, Justice, and the Unfinished Work of Democracy” was this theme of the Oct. 21-22 series.
Religious liberty should not be the exclusive right of the powerful to force their beliefs on others nor an instrument with which to secure political and cultural dominance, Divinity School Dean Corey D.B. Walker said in opening the series.
“American democracy stands battered and is under considerable strain, under the pressure of authoritarian populism and nationalist religion,” he said. “Religious freedom is being reinterpreted not as the safeguard for pluralism but as a mechanism for privileging Christianity. This is a deeply disturbing and troubling turn in American political life with profound implications for the future of democracy.”
Democracy, and the protection of it, requires a dedication to reciprocity, restraint and a sincere willingness to accommodate differences, Walker added. “It’s a civic and political commitment to protect the freedom of belief, practice and nonbelief on equal terms within a pluralistic society. It is rooted in the recognition that human dignity exceeds any single tradition.”
Democracy, and the protection of it, requires a dedication to reciprocity, restraint and a sincere willingness to accommodate differences.
But sharing those values is challenging in a society in which discussions about constitutional and religious liberty and religious liberty are lost in the noise of faith-based discrimination, BJC Executive Director Amanda Tyler said.
“Religious liberty is often misunderstood because too often the dominant conversation is simplistic and zero sum, when really a more nuanced and complicated conversation around religion and how it interacts with civil rights is needed, one that respects the complexity and the diversity both from a theological perspective and also a historical perspective.”
The U.S. got an early start on creating circumstances for tension between faith and racial liberty, Wiley said in the keynote. In Colonial Virginia before the advent of chattel slavery, freedom for Black indentured servants was increasingly tied to their conversion to Christianity. When the number of freed Africans began to grow uncomfortably large, freedom for indentured workers was limited to whites, which made it about race.
Founders like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington sought to protect religious freedom by erecting a wall of separation between church and state while at the same time owning slaves, she noted.
“George Washington said he was an abolitionist while he found every way to hold on to his slaves. Thomas Jefferson was a racist and a slave owner who wanted to hold onto slavery even as he was writing these freedom provisions in the Constitution, and he is the one who said we can’t have an establishment of a single religion and he is the one that said there has to be a wall” separating the two.
And a similar logic is found among Christian nationalists attempting to deny religious freedoms to others while claiming it is their religious liberty that is threatened, Wiley said.
As an example, she cited Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has introduced Doug Wilson as a religious leader of sorts for the Defense Department. Hegseth brazenly disregards the wall of separation by pushing Defense Department employees to pray as Hegseth prays and as Wilson preaches.
“That’s an establishment (of religion),” she said. “He is free to express that, to organize a church around it. We allow hatred and we allow bigotry to be viewpoints in a democracy. We just won’t allow you to enact that on other people.”
Religious schools that want to partake in public funding while requiring students to undergo religious training is another place where the tension between religious liberty and religious freedom erupts, Wiley added.
“If you’re getting public dollars, you can’t turn a child away who’s Muslim, you can’t turn a child away who’s United Methodist, you can’t turn the child away who’s Jewish if they choose and want to come to your program. You don’t have to take (tax) money. That’s a choice nobody’s forcing it upon you.”
Ultimately, the “original sins” of racism and bigotry present at the country’s founding will not prevail, Wiley concluded. “We as a people and as a majority already know what makes us special. The values of this country are freedom and the freedom to identify who we are and live our lives the way we choose and also to respect the ability of others to do the same.”