In August, my husband and I, with our now-senior dog Teddy peacefully sleeping in the back seat, did our annual drive back across the country from New Mexico to Washington, D.C. When we first started making these trips, we decided to drive, rather than fly, so that we could take Teddy, who is too big to fly in an airplane cabin. But now we also look forward to getting out of the D.C. bubble and into red and rural America.
This year, as we crossed back first into Texas, I thought about our lawsuit challenging the state’s Ten Commandments mandate for public schools. We then drove through Oklahoma, home to two more active Americans United lawsuits challenging this state’s public school Bible-instruction mandate and Christianity-infused social studies standards. Next up was Arkansas, the site of yet another current Americans United lawsuit, challenging the state’s Ten Commandments public school mandate. As we made our way into Tennessee, I thought about our still ongoing Rutan-Ram lawsuit on behalf of a couple who were turned away from a taxpayer-funded foster care agency because they are Jewish and not evangelical Christian. If I’m doing my math correctly, that’s 21 hours and over 1,300 miles of driving through four states that Americans United is taking to court.
But throughout this ride, even in tiny towns, we kept finding bathrooms with signs reading “all genders welcome.” We met a lot of good people, too, like the man sitting outside a gas station in rural Oklahoma selling baseball hats with American flags and “U.S. Army” on them to raise money for suicide prevention because his cousin had recently taken his own life.
As a fellow American and champion of church-state separation, I refuse to give up on red and rural America. It’s just too much of the country to write off if we want to fulfill our mission of keeping church and state separate, and it’s also inaccurate to assume it’s pointless. I’ll never forget when I first came to AU and asked our state legislative policy counsel how we could possibly be succeeding in defeating private school voucher bills in the South. His answer: AU works with rural coalitions to fight these bills because, among other reasons, many rural folks don’t have private school options and resent the defunding of their public schools.
Case in point: Our Oklahoma plaintiff Erika Wright is the founder and leader of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, a Republican and a devout Christian. Unlikely bedfellows abound throughout these states. In Oklahoma, I had breakfast with a group of Christian pastors — including a Southern Baptist — who support church-state separation. The Republican Oklahoma Attorney General successfully blocked his state’s approval of what would have been the nation’s first religious public school. In Tennessee, our plaintiffs Gabe and Liz Rutan-Ram are working with a Republican state senator (Dr. Richard Briggs) to pass an adoption bill to eliminate religious discrimination like that which the Rutan-Rams experienced.
We have work to do in addition to our lawsuits in red America. An important part of that work is having conversations rooted in curiosity. This approach can help us better understand how people in these states are feeling about such brazen attacks on our foundational American promise of church-state separation. Listening and engaging in dialogue can also help us identify the shared beliefs we hold about religious freedom and church-state separation.
That’s why I said an immediate yes when Doug Mishkin — whom I know from my time at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and who also litigated a case in 2017 with Americans United — called to ask if I wanted to participate in a dialogue with him and a few local leaders he met in Dayton, Tenn., where the Scopes Monkey trial famously took place 100 years ago. Doug had recently visited Dayton as part of his preparation for a class he was teaching on the trial. He walked away surprised at the continued dissonance between his perspective and theirs. But Doug had also begun a friendship with a community leader there and wanted to continue to discuss the issues of the trial that are still dividing us today.
Stay tuned for details on how you can tune into this dialogue across divides, taking place this November in the historic Scopes courtroom. The road to true church-state separation is long, but it’s a road we must travel together.