Sally Evans: 0:04

Welcome to Holy Echoes, listening to prophets then and now. Holy Echoes a new podcast from the Center for Interfaith Relations, where I revisit prophets of past Festival of Faiths with a spiritual leader of today to listen for echoes of revelation, enduring guidance and visionary hope. Together, we listen for the wisdom that persists. In our second episode, we listen back to Reverend Dr Martin Marty, called the most influential interpreter of religion in the US by TIME Magazine. He was a leading scholar, author and advisor and a professor of theology and History at the University of Chicago.

Martin Marty: 0:52

Thus it comes to the point of exclusion. Carl Sandburg says exclusivist is the ugliest word in the English language. There's no logical reason that religions have to use their sense of community necessarily over against. But somehow the warmth of community or the urgency to get your signals right leads to that Dr zarasov Pelican, who is my teacher, my friend, known to many of the clergy here, at least, who'd been to seminary and read his five volumes on history of Christian thought would know that he is capable, before breakfast, of telling the difference between a Petri passionist and a modalistic monarchianist of sabellian inclinations. I mean, he knows all that stuff, and there are long words for it. And he was once asked, what happens with religious groups that create a problem? And he said, Well, I have a technical term for that. Think of them as a football huddle. All you see are the behinds, though an important conversation is going on inside, and then they break the huddle and they tackle someone else along the way. What I think we're learning, and what I think the Theater Heritage Trust that all the adventurers represented in Rome are trying to learn, is that you can have the full integrity of your own faith. You can believe in the truth of it without necessarily, therefore coming off and forcing the other to be the stranger. That's a hard thing to learn. It is not a common thing in human history, and that's, I think, where we are early in this century.

Sally Evans: 2:32

Listening with me to this trusted advisor on faith in society today is Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, Vice President of Programs and Strategy at Interfaith Alliance, a partner of the Center for Interfaith Relations. He's also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a columnist for MSNBC. He's the author of "Just Faith, reclaiming progressive Christianity". Prior to moving to Washington, DC in 2022, he and his husband lived in Louisville for five years, and I remember that, Guthrie. It's great to be talking with you again. On holy echoes,

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons: 3:09

it's great to be talking with you. Sally, congratulations on launching this new podcast, and it's a joy to return to this speech that Dr Marty delivered at the Festival of Faiths 20 years ago. He's such a leader in this field of religion and society, and to return to it the same year since Dr Marty passed away earlier this year, is really special. So thank you for having me on.

Sally Evans: 3:36

It is our pleasure. Well, as you listen to Martin Marty from as you said now 20 years ago, what do you hear echoing in the times we're living in now?

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons: 3:49

Sure, three things stuck out to me revisiting this speech from Dr Marty. The first is there has been, sadly, some continuity of the conflicts that he discussed in his address for the Festival of Faiths, he mentioned, for instance, there was a controversy at the time about an Alabama judge putting up the 10 Commandments in the courthouse. And I was just in Dallas a couple of weeks ago organizing a summit on religious freedom and public schools, and we were talking about this issue of states across the country are trying to put up the 10 Commandments in public school classrooms, and you're talking about how that's an infringement on religious freedom. And so there has been some continuity in these controversies that was sort of demoralizing in some sense, to hear, but also that previous generations have addressed some of the same issues, and so we can learn from that. The second thing that stuck out to me was how I love how Dr Marty talked about how religion can be a booster in conflict, not necessarily. Necessarily where the conflict was born out of, and there can often be a political impetus that then religion can solidify and exacerbate the conflict. But I love how Dr Marty asked us to think about how what is the original source of that conflict, and then how religion boosted it, rather than necessarily being rooted in religion. And the last thing I thought about, which, you know, I'd love to, you know, talk to you about Sally, since you are, you know, have experience in the news industry, is he talked about how the news really focuses on conflict in interfaith relations. And there's a great quote newspapers picked up their hard edge when he was talking about interfaith relations, and how we focus on the conflict between religions rather than all of the kind of work that's being done to bridge and bring people together. And that's certainly something we see in our politics and culture today. So there was a lot of resonance from this for our moment that we're talking about here in 2025

Sally Evans: 6:12

You mentioned the news, you know, really focusing on conflict. And immediately I'm like, well, conflict gets the clicks right? You have to have something that is a bit alluring. There's a lot of times just such pressure, depending on your news outlet.

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons: 6:30

And there's a desire, though, at the same time, for bridging, for connection, for seeing others in their full humanity, even though maybe different than how we experience life, and so I think that there can also be human interest stories that the news wants to tell, and those are, I've done a lot of writing for major news outlets and worked with journalists, and the surprise factor of people actually getting along and working together in an interfaith way can also be an inspiring story that can get clicks. So we have to not feed the that ground and actually tell exciting, good stories that get attention, because it is easy when people fight, that's kind of easy to get clicks for that. So we have a harder task in front of us, but I think, a Righteous One and a divine one, and something that can really get at people's hearts and minds if we tell really interesting stories.

Sally Evans: 7:30

I'm so glad there are storytellers and writers like you out there, Guthrie, who are doing the divine harder work. Another quote from Martin Marty in this piece here, he says, You can have the full integrity of your faith. You can believe in the truth of it without necessarily forcing the other to be a stranger. Man, this is tough to live out, and we find that, you know, in most religious communities, there's this dedication to mission that often can lead to some form of exclusion, kind of by nature, and Martin Marty kind of references different examples of this. I'd love to ask you to think with me about how we can keep the integrity of our faith without excluding others who happen to believe differently.

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons: 8:19

That's a great question, and I loved how Dr Marty talks about xenophilia. I've done a lot of interviews, and I've talked a lot about xenophobia, the fear of strangers, the fear of others. We hear a lot about xenophobia in our political discourse and religious discourse, but I don't think I've ever talked about xenophilia before, which was, which is a beautiful concept that Dr Marty discussed in his speech about love of strangers, love of and that that is the root word of hospitality, that that is the calling We have, not just to say, you know, not to use this kind of fear of like those are the xenophobic people over there, and then we want to exclude them, or, you know, respond to calls for exclusion with our own forms of exclusion. But rather, in everything we do have a posture of hospitality and inviting people into conversations. I think we are not just trying to find commonality, but appreciating the particularity of different religions. It made me think about how I spent my career working in religious freedom advocacy, and I was thinking about how I first got into this work, which was a lawsuit that was filed in 2011 in Alabama by several Christian bishops because the Alabama legislature had passed this really anti immigrant. Act, law, and these bishops sued the state of Alabama saying that the state was criminalizing Christianity's call to Be a Good Samaritan and aid undocumented immigrants, aid anybody who needed help. And I was so convicted by that I actually went to Alabama and helped get started something called the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, and then worked on immigration reform nationally. And so throughout my career, though, I've seen so many different religious freedom claims that that is sort of the thing that binds us together as American as the beauty of our US religious freedom tradition is that we are all able to practice our unique faith differently, but appreciate it. You know, something that very recently happened, which is sort of a different faith from you know, that was, I got into it because of my own Christian faith. But then I saw recently there the US Secretary of Defense, Pete hegseth, do this big speech about our military, and he said he didn't want to see any beards in the military. No one in the military should wear beards. And I don't have a beard, you know, I'm also on the military, but this was really offensive to our friends at the Sikh Coalition, because for them, wearing a beard is part of their religious practice, and they also want to serve in the military. And so just it was a different religious freedom claim, a different way of practicing your faith, but I can. I don't have to see the truth of it, or, you know, be sick or be really even need to even find commonality with my faith. I can say that is something that's deeply important to their faith tradition, and so let's make room for it in our military and in our country, for very different practices of faith. I think we are aiming for not a civic orthodoxy or an American orthodoxy, around a specific set of beliefs, which is even whether that is so you sometimes hear that kind of on the far right, like we need a fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy. But then you also hear it in a different way, sort of in more progressive or moderate circles where it is let's reduce things to a common set of things we can agree on across religion and make that a new orthodoxy. I don't think we need any kind of orthodoxy. We need a foundation of freedom to believe whatever it is we want to believe, about God, about the divine, to not believe in any religion, and that that is what unites us.

Sally Evans: 13:07

Let's go back now and listen to one more excerpt from Dr Marty

Martin Marty: 13:13

Voltaire said, If England had one religion, it would do what one religion societies always do. It will kill everybody else. If it had two religions, that would do what two religion societies always do. They kill each other. Fortunately, England, he said, then had 30 and they have to get along. And Madison used that as an illustration of how you can rely on the diversity which is cultivated here too, as an instrument if there's a lot of kinds of interaction, but again, when there's strangerhood, you must polarize and demonize the other. It can paralyze and you neglect justice and mercy and education. We should be doing other things than fighting each other religiously. Third, it will breed suspicion and hatred against the community. And we're concerned about the national community. We're concerned about the interfaith community. We're concerned about the ecumenical communities within, eg, the Christian and when you make the stranger out of the other, or never overcome strangerhood born into it, you will see that bread, it'll breed suspicion and hate against individual persons. You tend to demonize somebody. If you listen to the late night cable TV or the radio, you'll usually find very quickly both sides demonize individuals. Somebody gets singled out, and very often that's on the grounds of inter religious mistrust, that secularist, that fundamentalist, right? They become types, as opposed to diverse kinds of people, and it can fuse people, therefore, who might be seeking spiritual Concord. We work in the assumption that most Americans like to be part of a national community, and of their religious communities so important on the. One on one, face to face, backyard, family stories and no one writes these up. They don't become part of the Heritage Trust. They don't become part of interfaith gatherings. And yet, the more that goes on that people meet each other on these sets of terms, the better off a community is and a nation is.

Sally Evans: 15:18

There's this mistrust that is a result of the frequent us, them, rhetoric where people are referred to primarily by labels like the religious right or radical progressives, radical left Christian nationalists or woke. I'm curious if you see this as an issue as well, and how you see language affecting that foundation of freedom, the ability to have even religious discourse today, and just how we can be mindful of that

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons: 15:53

We can never dehumanize anybody or equate ideologies with actual, lived people. I try not to say Christian nationalist in terms of an actual person, unless sometimes, like Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress calls herself a Christian nationalist. Maybe that's fair. But we talk about Christian nationalism, this ideology that conflates what it means to be a Christian and the faith practice. And there are 2 billion Christians around the world, and Christian is practiced so much differently, you know, Sally and I are, you know, we're both Baptist, but there are 1000s of kinds of different Baptists. So there's many different forms of Christianity, but Christian nationalism does is conflate that religious practice with a us versus them nationalistic political program. And so we do see an organized Christian nationalism political project in our country today, but the vast majority of people are not Christian nationalists. And sadly, that can sometimes sound like you're calling Christian all Christians, Christian nationalists. And your Research Center found that 6% of American really qualified, based on a series of questions, such as, the president must be a Christian, that's one as Christian nationalists, 6% but like 50 plus percent of the country are Christians who are not Christian nationalists, and so we need to be very careful not to stereotype, not to in any way label a group of People in a way that dehumanizes them and lumps people all together based on the worst interpretation of their belief. And so there it's very, very hard to find somebody assume you don't agree on something, right, and to find that the bridging work of finding something to work together on in unique ways, and not reducing people to any sort of category. Next.

Sally Evans: 18:07

Dr Marty suggests that diversity can actually be a very helpful tool if there are encouraged opportunities. I'm curious if you've seen any examples of this in your work, where people have had a chance to have genuine connection across different faiths.

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons: 18:28

I think sometimes it can sound small to have personal conversations in terms of the scale of problems in society, but actually there is good social science research to show that personal conversations and personal relationships can transform how we think about entire groups of people. I spent several years working with American Muslim communities around responding to this idea that President Trump first put forward when he was a candidate for president, the first time in 2015 where he wanted to ban Muslims from coming to United States, and said, Islam is at war with us. And I was working with American Muslim communities, and we found that knowing someone who is Muslim radically transformed your view of American Muslims at large and Islam at large. And so I was part of a campaign called the shoulder to shoulder campaign, and we went all around the country, specifically encouraging people to go to an interface if tar that were during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims break their fast, there's Iftar. And across the country there are interfaith istars, where people who are not Muslim are invited to come and experience this. Just showing up and meeting somebody is transformative for people's entire worldview and the. Call these trainings faith over fear. There is fear. We have to acknowledge it, and we are also called to have faith. And for people of faith that that is a antidote to fear. And so it's both the personal connections, but also asking, taking the next step and asking, how are these policies and what's going on our country impacting you? We can't leave it at the personal conversation. We have to go a step deeper and ask about how our collective life, the common good, is impacting the people we're now in relationship with.

Sally Evans: 20:37

Yes, thank you. I love your your vivid examples, they're really a wonderful addition to the conversation. Guthrie, you have are living this, my friend, my last question to toss your way. Marty has said in a separate interview that quote, nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive, to be aware of many different people and different ways and deal with it. End quote, would you agree? Though, what do you think the value is in doing the difficult work of keeping the richness of pluralism alive today,

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons: 21:13

The value of religious pluralism is the thing that makes me most proud to be an American, that we were founded on this ideal of religious freedom for all, and that actively cultivating pluralism allowed this religious communities to flourish in this country. And I'm not going to see that narrative or that freedom, especially ahead of the 250th anniversary of our country, which is coming next year, 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed, it is a time for a real grappling with what it means to be patriotic and to value this country that we have that specifically broke away from state religion in Europe, and the religious wars that were happening there such intense religious conflict in Europe, and the breaking free from that and charting a new course in human history. I talk about this a lot. I get goosebumps when I do because it is unique in the course of human history that we will have a space here where we will specifically encourage people of different faiths to live alongside each other and see that as a strength rather than a threat. So that is a value that we are working at everyday Interfaith Alliance, and while there's the hope I talked about in celebrating our religious pluralism, I'd be remiss not to say the situation now is much more dire than what Dr Marty was discussing 20 years ago at festival phase. We have everyone that is part of this wonderful effort, and I'm excited to be a festival face myself next month, and I was there last year, and and love what the Center for interfaith relations is doing. But we have to be wise to the fact that religious pluralism and this tradition that we have is acutely at threat by our political leaders today, and if we're not wise to that, we risk losing these values that we all cherish. And so I'm trying not to give in to the us versus them dynamic. And I think most people don't want a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. The vast majority of Christians don't want that, but there is an organized small contingent of people that have extreme power right now in our federal politics and in many state legislatures that are taking us in that direction. And so let's know the threat, understand it while not getting into a culture of fear and seeing threats around us, but we do need to grapple with that as we reaffirm these core religious pluralism values.

Sally Evans: 24:09

And I think what you've shared with us today, Guthrie, goes so far in helping us, like in a very tangible ways, have that faith over fear. You know whether it's seeking out and depending on the precise and accurate reporting that is so helpful as we navigate all of the headlines, whether it's taking time to develop those personal connections going to an Iftar dinner, but then also asking how the policies are impacting them, As you said, participating in the common action. So many of the things you shared are helpful for us, as we, like you said, find ourselves in this particular point in history and wanting so much to be able to, yeah, live out the full integrity of our faith while also being respectful. And making room for others along the way, I want to thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Guthrie again, vice president of programs and strategy at Interfaith Alliance, we're so grateful for your time today, for your insight and for your ongoing reporting. Thank you so much.

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons: 25:20

Thank you so much, Sally for the invitation to watch this Festival of Faiths presentation. Dr Marty, to reflect on it. And it is always such a joy just to get to talk with you, my friend.

Sally Evans: 25:32

You as well, Guthrie, and we look forward to seeing you November at the Festival of Faiths. A heartfelt thanks once again, to our guest, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons for such an illuminating and resonant conversation. Thanks also to Rip Reinhardt and his audio engineering skills and to the team at the Center for Interfaith Relations for their multiple levels of support in this project. I'm Sally Evans, and I hope you'll join us for the Festival of Faiths, November 12 through 15th with the theme of Sacred Belonging. Visit festivaloffaiths.org to check out the festival schedule and get your tickets.