Advent Reflections On Religious Freedom And Pluralism

Advent candles. Creative Commons photo.

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(OPINION) “What’s the matter Phoebe?” It is a phrase my 3-year-old Benjamin utters many times a day. This is his shorthand way of asking his 1-year-old sister why she is crying. Why is she sad? What is wrong? Their personalities, the way they show up in the world, how they move and breathe and express themselves, are so very different.  

Our families — even the smallest members among them — together compose a microcosm of differences that exist in our larger society. Family is the primordial social unit, the first laboratory of pluralism.

Often, I want to jump in and intervene in what, on the surface, appears to be a clash of their different personalities, their seemingly opposite ways of inhabiting the world. Boisterous Benjamin joyously tries to pick Phoebe up, and she thuds a little too hard. I hold my breath, waiting for cries. And then, raw laughter erupts from her. Phoebe then snatches a wooden letter block from the three-letter-word her older brother is intently trying to build. Leaving his attempt at B-A-T a sad B-A. Again, I hold my breath. Benjamin, rather than snatching it back (which is not an uncommon occurrence) simply utters in a sing-song voice: “B-A! B-A! Sheep says B-A!” 

So what is the matter?

Matter is the essence of something, the substance, the source. But it is also tactile. Matter is not an ephemeral concept. It is palpable — as real as the tachycardic beating of my heart as I wait to see if these toddler sibling interactions will result in unrestricted wailing or effervescent joy.

We often chose to relegate the concept of matter to negative and limited ideations: “material reductionism,” “materialism,” “material girl.” Yet, matter is the very substance of animate life. We are soul beings and flesh beings.

My children remind me of this everyday. Our family is not some fictive abstraction. Our children came into the world just as Jesus went out of it for those dark three days before he was resurrected — with water and blood. And Jesus himself came into the world, as one popular Christmas hymn tells us: “Pleased as man with man to dwell / Jesus our Emmanuel.”

My roles as wife, mother, faith community member, philanthropy professional, writer, citizen … they all bleed into each other. I can change my outfit, but not my flesh. The matter I inhabit as I am changing a diaper is the same matter I inhabit as I write a policy report. And the basic questions I often ask in my own family are the same questions I ask as I try (and often fail) to carry out my civic responsibilities in our increasingly polarized political community. How do I live out my values — how do I love out my values — in the flesh? 

The matter of public life

Recently, one central “matter” of public discourse has been the not-new question of how religious and LGBT interests conflict — or coalesce — with each other. Tish Harrison Warren wrote an article for The New York Times entitled “When Gay Rights Clash with Religious Freedom.” This article’s title captures the flashy, almost violent undertones that feed our click-bait culture — the “clash” of one set of public goods and freedoms with another. Yet beneath the borderline war-mongering headline, Harrison Warren’s substance emerges warm, empathetic and focused on living, enfleshing, rather than simply rationalizing the seemingly insurmountable questions gripping many of us today: How can we possibly be “one” when we are “out of many?’’

E pluribus unum. A sacred paradox. A question to be incarnated. We are separate. Yet all connected. Our worldviews are not reconcilable if we are honest with ourselves. We order our lives based on different theological and ethical root systems. This is true in our interpersonal relationships, our kinship networks,  our houses of worship, our social services organizations, our public institutions and in every other space in our civil society matrix.

How, then, ought we live? How, then, ought we love? 

Harrison Warren takes up the nuances and complexities of loving our neighbors with whom we sometimes even viscerally disagree through the paradigm of pluralism. She writes: “ Pluralism is … a commitment to form a society where individuals and groups who hold profoundly different and mutually opposed beliefs are welcome at the table of public life. It is rooted in love of neighbor and asks us to extend the same freedoms to others that we ourselves want to enjoy.”

Pluralism always quietly teeters on the precipice of polarization. It is then necessary for us, as a society on the brink, to constantly examine and reexamine the expansions possible and limits necessary to empower all human persons to incarnate their sacred animating beliefs — to enflesh the matter of beliefs. For “matter” inquiries are not only questions that express concern: “What is the matter?” No. Matter inquiries are perhaps most ubiquitous in one simple, three-word phrase: “What matters most?”

For what is religious freedom for if not the ability to not only believe in our minds, but to animate through our physical bodies the answers to that very question.

And yet, we cannot be content to advocate only for our own rights to animate our own most-mattered beliefs in the world. No. It is counterintuitive and countercultural, but it is certainly true that perhaps the best way to proactively protect our own freedom is to advocate for the religious freedom of the neighbors with whom we most disagree. For freedoms are generally taken for granted when they are culturally popular, when they align with public opinion, when they are the essence of the downstream current. In this context, freedom rarely needs defending. It is only when one’s sacred animating beliefs swim upstream of culture, jostle and gurgle into white caps that appear ominous to cultural tides, that religious freedom needs the most protection.

Religious freedom is freedom to love

James K.A. Smith, in “You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit,” emphasizes that before we are rational thinking beings, we are loving beings. We are created to love — in the flesh. Indeed, in the Christian tradition, we are told that God is love. As Smith writes, “As lovers — as desiring creatures and liturgical animals — our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral.”

And yet, are we really capable of loving our neighbors as ourselves in a society where we barely take the time to understand our neighbors? To understand thow they understand their sacred loves?  When our loves are disordered and incentivized toward a surface-level, sound-bite self-love?

Where is the matter of hope here? The substance of faith? What does it smell like? Can we run our fingers through it? Is it real?

I was privileged to contribute to the recently published “The Routledge Handbook of Religious Literacy, Global Engagement, and Pluralism,” edited by Chris Seiple and Dennis Hoover. This open-source handbook provides a compelling vision of a living framework for cross-cultural religious literacy. Cross-cultural religious literacy insists we must first understand ourselves in terms of how we order our sacred loves (a personal competency), then understand others as they understand themselves and their sacred loves (a  comparative competency), and then how to engage together across spiritual and cultural differences — without sacrificing or equivocating our own sacred commitments — toward a civic love of neighbor (a collaborative competency).

Warren Harrison echoes a similar sentiment: “Without a commitment to pluralism, we are left with a society that either forces conformity or splinters and falls apart. … We therefore can — and must — ensure that all people have general access to goods and services, regardless of their identity, while also ensuring that people are not forced to participate in a service sacralizing that which they do not find sacred.”

The matter of religious freedom

I have spent the better part of a decade trying to decode religious freedom for millennials, social justice advocates, women’s rights advocates and those generally skeptical of religious conservatives.

I have learned more from those spiritual and religious leaders serving everyday in their organizations and communities about what religious freedom in the flesh actually looks like than I have ever learned from legal treatises and theological debates. Religious freedom is vivified not only in private spaces with coreligionists philosophizing together, but in the messy incarnate reality of human plurality.

In short, religious freedom is bodily, enfleshed, sensual. What does your religious freedom taste like? Crusty bread? Sweet wine? Bitter herbs? Apples and honey? Chana chaat? Cauliflower pakora? Wasna?

Can you touch religious freedom? Is it granite smooth and cold on your palm? Is it warm and oozy blood being tended by gauze bandages and crinkled, loving hands? Is it feathery and evasive, an endangered species of bird your sacred ethical beliefs call you to protect?  

Religious freedom, for individuals and the communities they form, is not without matter. Perhaps the overtheorizing of religious freedom is precisely what is the matter with it. In trying to rationalize our way to the best arguments to protect the spiritual rights of all, we have taken religious freedom from a pulsating incarnation to an ephemeral state of abstraction.

For better or worse, I have long been a cog in the machine of religious freedom abstraction. I’ve contributed to more articles, policy briefs, public comment letters, amicus briefs and legislative analyses than I care to count. And I will continue to do so. This is important work. But this work is not an end unto itself. The whole point of these exercises is to protect the fleshy, humble, small acts done everyday in the name of religion. Freedom to serve is freedom to inhabit a physical body, and a larger body of believers, to love according to how you believe God has called you.

Religious freedom is the yellow-tinged snot of a sick child in an Adventist hospital, being wiped by a tender medical assistant. Religious freedom is the stout warmth of a middle-aged Black church mother holding one of her many spiritual children to a bosom that never suckled them, but offers them spiritual and physical comfort daily in an after-school program. Religious freedom is even the blue light flicker of a smart phone being handed to an Afghani refugee by a volunteer from Islamic Relief as she walks the refugee through how to use the all-too-touchy touchscreen.

The mother of all matters

On an etymological level, “matter” comes from the Latin root “mater.” Mother. Matria Matrix. The matter of the thing is the mother of thing.

This linguistic history makes sense when we think about the ways in which we use the word mother in our modern English context. “The mother of all (fill in the blank),” is an expression we have all uttered. It does not refer only to a literal interpretation of one who gives birth to another being. No, this expression captures the matter, the essence, the source of the thing.

As I have written before, the advent of my own motherhood brought with it a deepening appreciation of the incarnational elements of religious freedom. Even now, there is some major part of me that wants to retreat into the intellectually satisfying legal arguments and theological inquiries around religious freedom. As I am caught up in the matter of mothering — the smashed peas and the diaper rash and poop on the floor (as I write this, actually) — I am tempted to tune out, pop in an audio book or podcast and lose my sense of the matter before me. And, if I am being honest, that is what I often do.

But, this Advent, as I observe my messy, oozy, flailing family, something else occurs to me. Perhaps this is what religious freedom allows. Our ability to choose what version of God to teach the next generation, to decide whether we will educate them in a faith-integrated way, to select a health care provider, a caregiver, a social service aligned with our own most sacred beliefs.

My family is a living testimony to the religious freedom this country affords, at its best. And yet, there is more to do. Love of other mothers and families compels me to ask, does everyone enjoy the same level of unfettered freedom my white, educated Christian family has? I pray the answer is yes. I suspect the matter is more messy.

Chelsea Langston Bombino is a believer in sacred communities, a wife and a mother. She serves as a program officer with the Fetzer Institute and a fellow with the Center for Public Justice.