With the crowd cheering, balloons falling and television pundits starting to praise Kamala Harris for her Thursday night speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, the Democratic National Convention program still had another agenda item. Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt and Pastor Amos Brown took the stage to offer a benediction.
A variety of religious leaders offered invocations and benedictions throughout the DNC, but the final one was special. Holtzblatt is Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff’s rabbi, and Brown is Kamala Harris’ pastor. Their joint appearance was a remarkable embrace of religious pluralism. Emhoff and Harris’ interfaith family is an example for all Americans of our interfaith nation.
Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons
The benediction they delivered showcased the powerful religious currents in which Harris and Emhoff swim.
“God brought us out of the narrow place of oppression to freedom,” began Holtzblatt, senior rabbi of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C. “Let’s remember the treacherous road our ancestors traveled to freedom, their sacrifice and resolve to bring a better, more inclusive world.” She echoed two themes of the convention by declaring, “We are not going back” and dreaming of a country “with less vitriol and more joy.”
Holtzblatt asked God to “shine a light” on Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, “so that they may continue to pursue justice, equity and reproductive freedom.”
Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco, appealed to a future in which our nation lives our motto “E pluribus unum, one nation that embraces us all, every race, creed or color, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression, rich and poor, old and young, urban and rural.” He prayed for a future where “we live in peace and joy, where we set aside our rancor and division, where we heal our differences, and celebrate our common purposes as one nation, one American community, that great city on a hill that serves as a beacon for all the people and all the nations.”
Holtzblatt and Brown reminded the nation that Emhoff and Harris come from religious communities that shaped their worldviews. The Jewish and Black Baptist social justice traditions, while each distinct, share a common focus on the liberation of the oppressed and co-creating a just world with God.
Far too often, our national discourse about religion and politics focuses on white evangelical support for Republicans and Donald Trump. It’s true that most white evangelicals are conservative, although there are efforts to chip away at their support for Trump. Still, 78% of white evangelicals favor Trump versus 15% for Harris, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll.
“The lack of attention to social justice-focused religious expression has warped our national debate in favor of conservatives.”
The justification I most often hear for focusing on white evangelicals is that they’re a unified voting bloc. Yet, according to the same poll, Black Protestants favor Harris over Trump 89% to 9%. Multiple polls taken when Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee showed strong support for Democrats among Jewish Americans. Emhoff and Harris aren’t anomalies as Democrats informed by their religious convictions, and the lack of attention to social justice-focused religious expression has warped our national debate in favor of conservatives.
While the United States is a majority-Christian nation, we have no official religion. We are an interfaith nation, where people of all religions, faiths and beliefs, and those who want nothing to do with religion, are equal under the law.
We should be free from the government telling us how to pray or worship God, yet we’re experiencing a high tide of Christian nationalism in our politics right now. The answer to encroaching theocracy is a reaffirmation of the United States’ commitment to religious pluralism and freedom.
Kamala Harris reflects our interfaith nation back to us in both her marriage to Emhoff and her own childhood with a Hindu mother and Baptist father.
It’s always risky to bring religion into politics. To be done well, we must be clear that politicians are personally informed by their religious views but do not want to dictate their personal religious views on all Americans. That’s the difference between an interfaith nation and a theocracy. The pastor of the current leader in the polls to be the next president and her husband’s rabbi appearing together is a great example of bringing their religious values to the forefront while reaffirming religious pluralism.
As I stood in the convention hall at the Democratic National Convention, I witnessed the beautiful diversity of the United States. One form of our diversity is religious diversity. We the people have formed a society that allows religious communities to flourish because we don’t pick any one religion to be in charge. It’s one of the greatest aspects of being an American and something worth fighting to keep.
Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons serves as senior director of policy and advocacy with Interfaith Alliance.