This summer, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued two major decisions with religion at the center of the cases. In Groff v. DeJoy, the court bolstered protections for workers asking for religious accommodations, and in 303 Creative v. Elenis, SCOTUS sided with a Colorado web designer who did not want to provide services to same-sex couples.
The Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart is a Religion and Public Life Government Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, as well as a preacher, teacher, and activist. The Rev. Washington-Leapheart is the new Strategic Partnerships Director for Political Research Associates, an organization that infuses the struggle for justice and democracy with the information, analysis, and strategy about the U.S. and Global Right that will be most effective in disrupting and weakening antidemocratic movements and institutions. She is also an Intergroup Relations Facilitator and Adjunct Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University.
HDS Communications recently spoke with the Rev. Washington-Leapheart about the significance of the Court’s recent rulings, the broader impact of the decisions on all Americans (religious or nonreligious), and the work it will take to build meaningful coalitions across divergent belief systems.
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Harvard Divinity School: A Pew Research Center survey from last year found a significant increase in the number of U.S. adults who say the Supreme Court is “friendly” to religion. And Americans are more likely to say the court’s decisions have helped the interests of U.S. Christians and harmed the interests of people in the U.S. who are not religious. What's your view on Pew's findings here?
Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart: The idea that the Supreme Court is friendly or friendlier to religion now seems to suggest that people think the only way to be religious is to be a conservative Christian, which is a very particular kind of Christian. So I would say that these decisions are unhelpful even to Christians who don't share the same theological worldview as some conservative, Evangelical Christians.
Ultimately, we have to qualify these terms, and we have to be more precise in our definitions so that we can really get a sense of who is included and who is excluded. I am a Christian, yet these decisions are in no way connected to my best interests as a Christian person. So which Christianity, whose Christianity, what kind of Christianity is more favorably looked upon these days in the United States is, I think, a question we've got to answer.
I think our way of talking about these SCOTUS decisions is also unhelpful because many people currently don't see themselves as part of a coalition of folks who need to be pushing back against the legislation of a certain kind of religious worldview. One of the things that I'm hopeful about in this moment is that we will broaden our narration of religion so that we're not just using religion as a stand-in for Christianity. As an organizer by training, I am interested in work that helps more people to see that they, too, have a stake in a successful movement against theocratic government. Most people are actually implicated in this struggle.
HDS: As a Black-queer church girl, according to your Religion and Public Life bio, and given your previous position as the Faith Work Director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, what do you think will be the larger fall out of SCOTUS's ruling on 303 Creative v. Elenis, in which the court backed a web designer who refused to design wedding websites for same-sex couples? What do you anticipate will be the bigger impact of this ruling?
NWL: I was working at the Task Force when the Masterpiece Cakeshop case was heard in 2018, so I learned a lot about SCOTUS procedure. I listened to oral arguments for the first time and was there on the steps of the Supreme Court to speak to media when the decision was read.
First of all, we're going to see even more lawsuits that attempt to use the courts to rubber stamp approval for discriminatory business practices coded as religious obligation. This happened with Jack Phillips, the owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado, as well as the web designer in the 303 Creative case. Even more individuals and companies will be emboldened to argue that it’s not just their legal right to refuse care and services to LGBTQ people; it’s also their moral right and their God-ordained mandate to do so.
I also think there’s an ongoing theological fallout—it will continue to be acceptable for people to describe their own piety in terms of someone else. I grew up in a conservative religious environment where I was, as a girl child, always told that what I was wearing could cause somebody else to stumble, for example. The idea is that somebody else's ability to be faithful is wrapped up in their proximity to other people’s decisions and other people’s bodies. I think that the reframing of one's personal and devotional commitments in this way is really dangerous. I don’t want to live in a country where the terms of collective rights, justice, belonging, and flourishing are prescribed by the moral convictions of a few.
HDS: Kate Shaw recently wrote in the New York Times that, "...since Justice Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court has sided with religious plaintiffs in every major religion case except a few exceptions on the shadow docket, representing an essentially unbroken streak of wins for Christian plaintiffs." Who has the most to lose with the recent court decisions involving religion that have favored mainstream Christianity? Members of minority religions? The LGBTQ+ community? Everyone who is not an Evangelical Christian?
NWL: I think everybody loses with these SCOTUS decisions, including the people who think that they're winning. I think Christianity is losing; it’s losing its right to stake a moral claim, losing its spiritual authority, if it has any left, and losing the battle for regard in the public imagination. When people think of Christians, what picture comes up in their imagination? Not a picture of someone who looks and loves and lives like me!
It's no coincidence that the assault on teaching authentic and blemished American history is concurrent with the legislative and legal assault on LGBTQ rights. They're all connected. As long as we're not willing to tell the truth about our history, we will inflate this nation’s moral standing in a way that will backfire and hurt all of us.
Certainly those who were already vulnerable to religious violence are even more vulnerable, because where can we escape it? Religious violence has left the house of worship, left the pew, and has taken residence in state houses, city halls, school boards meetings, sheriff’s offices, and federal courtrooms. Even our places of refuge—the ones we the vulnerable created ourselves—are not free of invasion by this violence.
And I maintain that all of Christianity is losing when we surrender the Christian narrative and the Christian imagination to folks who would use them to completely and permanently marginalize other human beings.
HDS: It seems many of the cases involving religion that SCOTUS has ruled on, or soon will, involve aspects of religious liberty or religious exercise. What are your thoughts on this? The U.S. Constitution grants the right to practice one's religion freely, but does that mean one can do whatever they want (including discriminate against others) in the name of religious freedom?
NWL: My thought on these recent cases is, Here we go again. There's just a different community of people in the crosshairs this time. Fifty years ago, religious liberty was deployed to entrench racial segregation. Universities were saying, Listen, we don't want to have to desegregate, and by religious right, we shouldn't have to. We're a restaurant, and we don't want to have to serve Black folk. And by religious right, we should be able to do so.
So the use of religious freedom in this nefarious way is not necessarily new. It is in fact part of American history. To me, this signals that we need to have a certain kind of vigilance around the idea of religious freedom. We don't have a common definition for it. We don't have a shared understanding of what it means to be free and faithful at the same time, so every generation has to think about how to secure this freedom in a way that is ethical and moral. We can't just act like because it's written in the Constitution, we all know how to live into it and we all know how to apply this principle equitably.
HDS: What keeps you up at night regarding this Supreme Court?
NWL: What keeps me up at night is the lack of crosstalk and collaboration between progressive movements who are working on issues that are connected. We exist within silos. We have the racial justice folk working over here. We have the LGBTQ justice folk working over there. We've got progressive faith movements in yet another silo. When are we going to all get in the same room and decide that we need a bigger coalition of folks who may not be able to agree on everything but who can agree on the fact that we don't want this country to be a theocracy? What is the repair and transformation work necessary to enable justice-minded white evangelical Christians and the very ones their tradition has historically kicked to the curb to meaningfully organize together?
I too have demanded ideological purity on the Left. But I am learning just how myopicthat is. The people we dismiss and ignore are being organized by the Right. Rigidity of belief stains any struggle, progressive or otherwise, and will keep undermining our ability to build a strong, formidable movement against religious authoritarianism.
HDS: Is there anything to feel hopeful about going forward, whether it's directly related to SCOTUS and some of these decisions or even outside of the political realm, perhaps coalition building?
NWL: I feel hopeful about the kind of theological education taking place at institutions like Harvard Divinity School. My involvement with HDS is grounded in the institution's commitment to have a different kind of conversation.
We can't continue to talk about good religion and bad religion, about good Christianity and bad Christianity. We have to talk about how all religious traditions are internally diverse. We have to talk about the fact that it’s possible to be a religious person who applies a critical lens to religion. You can be a confessing believer, and you can think rigorously and critically about your own tradition and the other systems within which that tradition operates.
That's the kind of progressive theological education we need so that people have an analysis outside of binary thinking. These are the kinds of religious leaders and other professionals we need today.
I'm also hopeful about this current generation of youth. They are untethered to the institutional commitments that many of us have. There's no tension for them in terms of leaving institutions that aren't serving.
HDS: They're fearless.
NWL: In some ways, they are. And that gives me a lot of hope. Now, fearlessness has to be organized and channeled and refined, and fearlessness can’t just be done from behind a screen. But we need some moral courage, and today’s courageous young people give me a lot of hope for that possibility.
—Interview conducted and edited by Jonathan Beasley