On Abortion and Religious Faith

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With us now, the Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis, Senior Minister at the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village, and author of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness that Can Heal the World. We'll talk both about the Buffalo massacre and the religious response, at least in Reverend Lewis's church, to the likely pending reversal of Roe vs. Wade. Reverend Lewis, it's always great to have you on the program. Thank you for joining us today.

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: Brian, thank you so much for this invitation. It's always good to talk with you. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: I will say to the listeners that, like the segment that we just had with Jonathan Haidt from NYU, you were scheduled to appear today anyway, and the emphasis of our conversation is going to change because of the events in Buffalo over the weekend. Let me ask you first, how did you deal with the Buffalo massacre from the pulpit yesterday if you did?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: I certainly did, Brian, and I did what I think you've been doing on the show today, and I know what I've been doing in my work, which is to really to try to connect the dots between these uprisings of fascism and the gun violence in our nation. I think what would be so important to me would be if American people would wake up and look, Brian, and see how this is all of a piece.

When you've got someone who go hunting for Black people in a grocery store because he believes actually that somehow the Jews and the Blacks are in cahoots to make sure there's not enough white people, and that Blacks are a suck on the economy, that's exactly the source of the uprising of fascism.

A court that wants to take away a pregnant person's right to choose, it is the same disease, and that disease, I'm calling whiteness, Brian. It is coming for all of us and all of our freedoms.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, for all the white people in the audience who have no truck with the Buffalo shooter, and are pro-abortion rights, why do you say whiteness?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: Yes, thank you, Brian. I think we've gotten stuck on language in some ways in the progressive world, where somebody like Peggy McIntosh talked about a knapsack full of white privilege. I think, for a couple of decades, that had traction for us in the social sciences and in religious spaces. We began to have conversations about anti-racism, and we defined racism as prejudice plus power, and that had traction in progressive spaces.

When George Floyd was murdered, and I think if we went even back to Trayvon Martin, the conversations in the Black Lives Matter space were really trying to get at an understanding that there is something systemic and broad-based that is anti-Black in this nation. It is as old as Thomas Jefferson's notes on Virginia, where he makes observations about indigenous people, and about the African people who are enslaved.

That founding father describes the Indians as beautiful and calmly and sensitive, and describes the Blacks as not really feeling, their grief is transient, they don't really love their partners. It's more like a kind of animalistic ardor or sexual moment.

Those seeds were planted in our nation's DNA, Brian, as far back as then. Sadly, we exported those feelings of white supremacy, white superiority, Black inferiority around the globe. We exported it to South Africa, they modeled apartheid after us. We exported it to Germany, they modeled the extermination of Jews, antisemitism, after us. Our biases have been scientifically "logged in" in Philadelphia and in Germany.

I'm calling it whiteness, Brian, to invite people to think about a system of laws, a system of policies, a system of patterns, that are economic, ecological, sociological, even theological, that cause a man, a boy child to kill Black people in a grocery store, because he believes in the white supremacy and he believes that the whiteness should cancel out Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Latinx people.

That's the message that he has injected in this nation. Whiteness is my code for all of the systems of white supremacy that are plaguing us.

Brian Lehrer: How do you build a multiracial coalition, and you are a multi-racial coalition, a bridge-builder, your congregation is diverse. You talk to so many people from so many different religious denominations and races, within that construct to bring in as many white people as you can who might not respond well to framing it that way to the anti-racist project that we're trying to promote?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: I think that's an excellent question, Brian. I want to say that I'm multivocal. I have many ways to talk about this phenomenon. My congregation has grown by 750 people since you and I last talked, I think, maybe a couple of years ago, around COVID. Because I think white people listen and understand what I mean. I'm not the only person saying it. White people are talking about this to Robyn DiAngelo, Robbie P. Jones.

The language, I'm going to say, I turn to my congregation, and I'll use theological language. I'll say every human being is created in the image of God. That Imago Dei means every human has value and worth and we need to pay attention to that. I'll turn to a psychological community, and use my PhD in psychology to say, we need to create a container, an environment that is good enough for Blacks and Latinos and Asians and Indigenous people to thrive.

I'll talk about racial identity development, and I'll say that this white supremacy disease, the whiteness disease can get inside all of us as what W. E. B. Du Bois might call a white gaze.

We have internalized what is beauty, what is smart, what is value, what is worth. If we're paying attention now to what's being said in the media, more than Jacqui Lewis is making a connection between this shooting, this massacre, and all the other ones, all the other massacres, and all of the state-sanctioned violence against Black people, and this idea that 60% of the abortions that happen in our country, Brian, happened to white women.

From a perspective of white supremacy, we need to make sure there's white babies that go into white adults. From a perspective of white supremacy, you want to make sure that there are straight protestant, white power structures that limit your rights and mine, so we can make America white and pure for the very first time.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk about the particular kind of grief, if you think there is a particular kind of grief, that comes with a mass murder like this on top of other mass murders of recent years motivated by racism and white supremacy, not to mention the whole history of our country, but this kind of concentration of them in this respect as the main domestic terrorism threat in these times?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: The griefing is excruciating, Brian. I can hardly say it. You started off by asking me what did I do in my pulpit yesterday. I think my congregation saw my sorrow. I think they saw my anger and my sadness, and my urgent sense of hope that we are the ones who need to make a difference. The grief is palpable, is tangible. In all the relationships, I find myself with other senior fellows at Auburn seminary, across the country. Rabbis, sick activists, Muslims.

They're writing saying, "Jacqui, this feels terrible." They get it that this massacre is about something that's dying in our nation, Brian, or maybe that's been a little bit dying for a long time. The grief is prophetic. It is excruciating and catalyzing. If we let it, it will crack our hearts wide open, and new conversations will happen. My Black male friends who say they didn't know that abortion issues related to them and their family.

Then they had an insight that was like, "Oh, actually, I'm here because someone couldn't have an abortion and was raped." That's a new kind of conversation. It's a new kind of conversation where my friend, Sharon Brous and I, who's a rabbi in California, do analysis about how most of these mass shootings happened because of white men who have been disenfranchised and who are wounded and who it will have a certain kind of pattern. It leads to this kind of shooting. It is a new kind of conversation when even my  friends who watch Fox News say, "Wow, Fox News, you don't have to go deep into the social media to be indoctrinated into anti-Blackness." I'd like to think, Brian, I'd like to believe that this kind of catastrophic moment causes new partnerships and new alliances.

Then someone who's listening to me and hears me say whiteness will be like, "What does she mean?" They'll pick up a copy of Fierce Love, or they'll pick up Kristin Du Mez's book on Jesus and John Wayne, or Robbie Jones's book on White Too Long. They'll move to a new understanding because they've been hurt, because they're grieving and because they don't want to be this kind of America anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Have you dealt with the abortion rights issue from the pulpit in terms of a matter of Christian faith?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Christian faith is the main source of the anti-abortion rights movement. How do you deal with it as a pro-abortion rights pastor in the Christian tradition as a Christian thing?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: That is such an excellent question. I think you know that one of the things that we value at Middle Church is educating people as a part of their faith. I turn my people on to articles, to books, to resources in media that can teach them about the real roots of, for example, this moral majority.

We've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks, in March, on International Women's Day, before that, anticipating this Roe v. Wade dismantling to teach them that actually, Jesus doesn't say anything about abortion, and to teach them that before the '70s, and this uprising of the Moral Majority led largely by Francis Schaeffer, and friends should read his son's book as well to hear him talk about that, the Baptist, the Catholics, the conservative people were not anti-abortion.

That this anti-abortion movement was fanned into flames by some leaders in the GOP who were angry by and disappointed that schools had become segregated, that their private white schools would not receive public funding.

Brian Lehrer: You mean had become integrated, right?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: I'm so sorry.

Brian Lehrer: You mean that people on the GOP were happy that the schools had become desegregated?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: That's right. Thank you, Brian. That the schools have become disaggregated, that your little children would have to sit in the classroom with Blacks. thanks for correcting that.

They looked for an issue to rev up the masses, to make a moral majority they call that that will be a voting bloc against progressive issues. They tested school prayer, and they tested pornography.

When Roe v. Wade was passed a couple of, let's say, pro-life candidates seemed to get some traction, and this whole movement was built so that a moral majority could block progressive issues, could block issues that would make a multifaith religious landscape that would make a pluralistic society, that would be for women's rights to choose be for Blacks rights to live and survive, be pro-Jewish, and Muslim, and Sikh, and Buddhist, and other religious so-called minorities.

You know what, Brian? They've been successful because Christians haven't dug deep enough to do their research to know. In our congregation, we know, and we're understanding that true religious freedom means that a woman or a pregnant person gets to make a decision about what happens to their own body in conversation with their partner, their family, their clergy, and that's what we pray for is for God's people all to be free, to have liberty, to acknowledge their child of godness in the ways that they are called to.

Brian Lehrer: When you talk about the modern anti-abortion rights movement springing up in the 1970s at a time of desegregation which is a separate issue, do you see any racist motivation to galvanizing of an anti-abortion rights movement? The stats have been coming out since the Alito draft ruling was leaked about how much of a disparate impact there would likely be and there's already being in many states that are restricting abortion to the extent that they are where, disproportionately, Black women, more than their percentage in the population, do get have abortions.

Maybe it's another way of demonizing Black people which galvanizes a certain kind of white vote as they demonize poor people, which also has its racial overtones for the disparate impact.

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: I liked the word you made up there, Brian. I like galvanate. That's good. You know what, Brian? I think it's really interesting and complex opportunity which I think is why it's so deadly, this movement, because it actually is 60% of the abortions that happened with two white women. On the one hand, there's this sense that, to have a strong white populace, and you've heard this, you've read this, there's the desire to have more and more of a cadre of white babies that will go into white adults so folks can have white flourishing children never mind the hundreds of thousands of Black and brown babies waiting to be adopted.

That's one piece, to prohibit white women from having white abortions to white children that need to roll up and go up and be a white army, if you will, of straight white folks running the world. That's one piece.

The other piece is, yes, families that are Black and brown and poor are affected by this decision in profound ways, and we do get a chance to have what Ronald Reagan did by creating a welfare mother to hate. We get a chance to have a Black woman needing an abortion to hate. I think the insidiousness of the racism underneath both of those strategies should cause us all grief.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to run out of time in about a minute. After something like Buffalo, how do you preach that the Lord is merciful?

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: Friends, find my sermon at middlechurch.org, it's called Let's Go. God's mercy is the only thing that has me speaking to you today, and not curled up in a ball, grieving the horror that is white people hunting Black people in America. God's mercy, God's womb, God's love sustains me and makes me think about the hope I find in conversations with you, Brian, and the stories you tell.

My beautiful multi-ethnic, multiracial, multi-class community gives me hope and is absolutely the fruit of God's mercy and my prophetic grief that will drive me into the streets and enter the voting booth, and that will continue to activate me to make a more just society in relationship to my Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist, and other Christian friends.

All of that is a product of God's mercy, and that is what I preached yesterday. John of Patmos's vision of a healed and whole world in which there's no more death, and no more pain, and no more heartache, and no more racism.

Brian Lehrer: Ending on a badass profounder notice, I think we could with Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis, Senior Minister at the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village and author of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness that Can Heal the World. Thank you for joining us.

Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: Thank you, Brian.

 

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