Attendees of the third annual Summit for Religious Freedom (SRF), which kicked off Sunday morning, are hearing a lot about storytelling – and rightly so.
Facts, data and history are important, but at this moment in our national life, they only take you so far. Personal stories pack a wallop and put a human face on an issue like church-state separation that can often seem to be legalistic and theoretical.
Several SRF speakers emphasized the power of stories. During a welcome address to attendees, Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser gave a shoutout to AU supporters who are serving as plaintiffs in lawsuits or who have told their stories in other ways. She shared a proverb often attributed to the Hopi people: “Those who tell stories rule the world.”
In a powerful keynote address, historian and author Jemar Tisby also shared stories, including information about Black leaders such as Charles H. Pearce, Frederick Douglass and Fannie Lou Hamer. These courageous leaders, he noted, fought not only for basic human dignity but also tangible rights, such as the ability to vote.
Tisby noted that adherents of Christian Nationalism, which he called “the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the church today,” also tell a story. It’s of a nation founded by and for white Christians. That story motivates many, but it has a serious fault: It’s not true.
Black political witness, he noted, is “a different story, a different narrative” and while it was not often approved of throughout much of U.S. history, it remains a story worth telling. (To read more of these stories, check out Tisby’s book The Spirit of Justice: Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance.)
A second keynote speaker, April Ajoy, kept the audience spellbound with her own story: a tale of her successful escape from Christian Nationalism.
Ajoy talked about growing up a pastor’s kid who, at a young age, was sent out to protest against legal abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. She remained trapped in the world of Christian Nationalism through college and into her 20s. But for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that her brother came out as gay, she began to do something dangerous in the world of Christian Nationalism: ask questions. When her fundamentalist faith fell, so did her far-right politics.
A story, Ajoy noted, has great power. That is why, she quipped, “I air my dirty laundry out for all to see.”
Ajoy urged attendees not to give up on friends and relatives ensnared in Christian Nationalism, telling the more than 700 SRF attendees in person and online, “We don’t need to tell them what to think; we need to tell them how to think. I want to leave you with some hope. I believe that if I can change, anyone can change. … Storytelling in general is so powerful.” (For more on Ajoy’s story, read her book Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith.)
Tatiana Chance, winner of Americans United’s David Norr Youth Activist Award, also told her story. Worried about unhoused people lacking access to menstrual products, she decided to do something about it, launching a nonprofit called Help 4 Huhas. That was just the beginning of Chance’s activism, which also includes fighting for reproductive and racial justice.
Her story, Chance said, is not a complicated one: “I saw an injustice, and I got to work. … This is a story of how all of us are doing something small to make this world a better place.”
Americans United will continue to use SRF and other vehicles to elevate stories about the importance of church-state separation and the issues that connect to it. Maybe you have one. If so, tell it. You never know the difference it might make.
Photo: Jemar Tisby addresses SRF. Photo by Chris Line.
