January 11, 2025 – Christian Nationalism and Hate Violence: What Can We Do?

 

REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:

 

Zev Mishell is the National Program Associate at Interfaith Alliance and a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. He previously studied at Princeton, which is where I was for eight years, and so, very proud of that fact. He graduated with honors for his thesis and has published in numerous media outlets, including The Forward, Religion News Service, and the Tel Aviv Review of Books.

 

Zev has dedicated a lot of time and effort to crafting a comprehensive Interfaith Alliance report titled “Together Against Hate,” which offers an analysis of how interfaith movements can combat hate-based violence by coming together across lines of difference, and also how White Christian Nationalism is fueling a radical rise of hate in America. The publication includes case studies of best practices, recommendations, and a guide to organizations dedicated to countering hate and extremism in America. The release date is Monday, January 13th, and I am very happy to have Zev Mishell join us today with a preview.

 

Zev, welcome to The State of Belief.

 

ZEV MISHELL, GUEST:

 

Thank you so much for having me, Paul.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Zev, so tell us about your background. You come to this with a specific kind of personal investment, and also you’ve done a lot of academic work in this. Let’s talk about what your background is and how it lends itself to this broader work around questions of hate in America, but also what an interfaith response to hate might look like.

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Paul. I think when I think back on my story, I’m very much a child of the American Jewish community. I was raised in an Orthodox synagogue, going to a Conservative Jewish day school, going to a Reform overnight camp. So, Judaism and Jewishness and Jewish religion really set the parameters of who I was and what my world looked like. And in Jewish institutions, I felt like I was given a real love of learning and a commitment to social justice, a commitment to helping others, a commitment to thinking about and reflecting on the legacy of the Holocaust, of which my grandfather and grandmother were both survivors, and a real commitment to believing that through learning and through teaching and through real commitment and showing up for one another, we can make the world better.

 

And so, after I finished high school, I spent a year living in Israel at what’s called the Yeshiva, which is a Jewish learning institution where I studied Torah, basically from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. And that institution really instilled in me that love of learning, that learning both for a specific end and on its own is just so immensely worthwhile; and that learning and growing is the way that we can actually come to a greater understanding of one another.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Wow, that is an incredible background. Let’s stay there for a little bit, because as someone who has actually traversed between the different traditions within Judaism, I think that actually can be a really interesting learning place for many of us who do interfaith work. Intrafaith work has its own kind of intricacies, and I think the fact that you really grew up in these various locations within your own tradition in some ways gives you a facility of language and a way of approaching thorny questions, perhaps, that really can lend itself not only to a continued broad academic learning, but a way of applying that in a complicated, messy thing like American democracy and interfaith work.

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

So, I think the American Jewish denominational landscape is really interesting. And that as the years have gone on since the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, the rigidity between particular denominations has become less and less fixed. And so, for example, growing up, my family kept certain parts of the tradition. We were Sabbath-observant, we kept kosher, but we also knew that there were certain commitments we had to egalitarianism that meant that although we attended the Orthodox Jewish day school, And although we attended an Orthodox shul, an Orthodox synagogue, those commitments also translated themselves into the education my parents wanted to have. They wanted my sisters to go to Jewish day school. They wanted them to have an opportunity to study Torah. They didn’t want them to be fit into a particular box. But I also think having this opportunity to know and to understand the internal diversity of any given religious tradition really instilled in me the sense that there are no fixed answers. We can make an effort, or we could try to construct a certain kind of answer or solution towards understanding a community or understanding of people.

 

But I think what this raised me on was the sense that contradictions and complexity isn’t an issue. And I think oftentimes the issue is when we don’t have those things, when we try to have fixed answers, try to have simple solutions. And so I think transversing the background, from my uncle, who’s an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, to my summer camp where I went from being the least observant at my Orthodox synagogue to the most observant at camp. I think it really instilled in me the sense that there’s a lot of fluidity within religious practice and that we’re all growing and changing.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Right. And when someone says, “well, Judaism says,” or “Christianity says,” you’re always like, okay, you know, the joke is, two Jews, three opinions – and with Baptists, it’s the same thing, you know, two Baptists, three opinions and we’ll just start another Baptist church, So, this is interesting.

 

You went to Yeshiva in Israel, but then, afterwards, you went into Princeton University, we’ve shared our stories there. And there you continue to go deep, both within your studies, which included a study within Middle Eastern studies, I think, but then also involved in some of the interfaith opportunities that Princeton allowed.

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

Yes, when I was at Princeton, I was really, really committed to Jewish life. And so I was involved in Conservative minion. And as a part of my work with them – and a minion is, it’s the word, basically, for a Jewish religious community that isn’t through a synagogue structure. It’s ten people, basically, create and amount to a minion.

 

But my work there was so, so life affirming. I don’t know, to be building community in college, to know that you could have a place for yourself to create a space that had serious learning, serious prayer, and knowing that through one’s community you could have a greater connection to others, I think, was one of the biggest lessons at Princeton. And although I think I had my own sense of disagreement with the way the community started trending in my later years and the sense of alienation that I think a lot of Jews, and especially younger Jews, feel towards our Jewish institutions, I really, really believe in, and often prioritize as the most important part of my life, the Jewish community. And it comes very naturally to me, because my parents had always taught it to me. My grandfather, my Zayde, was a longtime synagogue and school educator. And so these values of community and showing up for one another were very, very central to my upbringing.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Showing up for one another and belonging to one another is so important. And right now, we’re in a moment in our country where the question of who do we belong to and who will we show up to, specifically within the American context, who belongs? Who is really American? These are questions that our current political landscape and realities of some of the unfortunate new trends that we have witnessed are bringing into question.

 

And some of those questions are leading to violence, which brings us to the study that you have really painstakingly taken, which was: we were in a moment, working with the Southern Poverty Law Center and so many other groups that were documenting the rise of hate in this country. And the question of, well, what do we do about this? What do we do about the kind of fracturing, but then also the implications of the fracturing? And so, one of the things I felt was really important was: let’s take a deep dive into what are the ways that people are successfully countering hate in America.

 

And so, we decided we were going to try to do a white paper. And I think it just exceeded all my expectations. Why don’t you talk a little bit about what it felt like just to start with this project, and imagine what does it look like to do a landscape, to do a real major approach to what hate looks like in America, and what an interfaith response might also look like.

 

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

I think it’s often it’s really, really tricky to say that hate is any one thing, because hate comes in so many forms. When we talk about the rise or the documented rise in hate crimes over the past three years, what we’re really getting at is that the data that the FBI has been reporting on has been showing an across-the-board increase in attacks against almost all groups that are featured within the FBI database.

 

And so, for example, FBI defines a hate crime as a crime that’s motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity. And so, when we think about what a hate crime has looked like, there have been increases across all of those categories. And so when I was diving in, one of the most complex places was noting how different forms of hatred are understood within different categories.

 

So, for example, antisemitism and Islamophobia, or as it’s more commonly called now, anti-Muslim bigotry, are often positioned against one another as opposites or as intention. And one of the challenges of the white paper was to disentangle what that is and why that is, and why, when we’re thinking about a holistic approach to combating hate and hate crimes and hate-based violence in the United States, we can’t have these different forms of bigotry and violence against minority groups be positioned in opposition to one another, rather than as a part of one collective whole that’s pushing down people from many, many different backgrounds, and is generally causing tremendous amounts of violence for minority communities in the United States.

 

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Can you get into a few of the statistics that we’ve seen? You know, numbers tell a story. They’re not the only story, but they can tell a really important story. I think for me, some of this was just being shocked at hearing some of the statistics, for instance, that the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations were sharing. Do you have a few that you could share with us now?

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

So when we’re thinking about what makes this moment so perilous, obviously we know that the Trump-Vance administration is going to be inaugurated in a few weeks. We know what that will look like. We knew what that looked like for the four years between 2016 and 2020.

 

But even in the years leading up to the rise of, really, the return of the MAGA movement to power, we can see that since 2015, there’s been an 80% increase in documented hate crimes against minority groups. And we can even see each of the past three years has marked the highest level of hate crimes the United States has ever seen. And even in just the last year, there was a 63% increase in anti-Jewish attacks, 49% increase in anti-Muslim, and 34% anti-Arab increase, attacks against, incidents of anti-Arab attack and discrimination.

 

And one of the most startling things about statistics that the FBI compiles is that even though we’re seeing record-breaking numbers of hate crimes, hate-based incidents – last year the FBI recorded 11,862 incidents for the year 2023, this is only a small fraction of the actual number of hate crimes that we see in the United States. And so, for example, in 2015, the Bureau of Justice Statistics put together their own measurement of how many hate crimes there are. And they think that only a small fraction, something around 1% of all hate crimes, are actually reported to law enforcement and actually end up in the data that we have.

 

And so when we’re working with the data, We have to see the rise within its proper context, which is that even though we know that there are limitations to what the numbers actually are telling us, the fact that they’re still rising only marks further and further just how bad hate and hate-based violence has become in the United States.

 

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Wow. I mean, that’s a big part of the challenge here is that people don’t feel like they can report a hate crime, sometimes. Do you have enough trust with the police or the FBI or whoever would be the person that you would report the hate crime? Do you have trust enough to report it? And, you know, I think sometimes Muslim Americans don’t feel like they can. I think sometimes Jewish people don’t feel like they can, and trans people. These are not always the most harmonious relationships between communities. And so I think it’s a really important point that you’re making, that even though these incredibly high statistics are there, they actually underrepresent the crisis at hand. And so that feels really important.

 

So why don’t we dive into the report and some of the mechanism by which you built this report, because I think that was actually one of the most gratifying pieces about the actual report that you made, “Together Against Hate,” which is going to be out, and you can go to interfaithalliance.org, on January 13th, and you will be able to download this report. But part of the great thing about making this report was you got to interview so many people. And so it was actually, in some ways, part of the process of developing the report was the engagement with other communities and helping them feel heard and seen and in some ways creating a collective process.

 

So, who were some of the people that you were talking to that in the moment you were like, oh, I’m really learning something right now. I mean, this is really an exciting moment for me personally, but also is going to enrich our report so much.

 

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

Yeah, thank you for that question, because I think any report of any size always relies on the help of other people, and should be in conversation with them, and should really be influenced by their insights. And so, I remember one of the most important conversations I had was with Lisa Jacob of Christians Against Christian Nationalism, which is an initiative of the Baptist Joint Committee. She’s one of the local organizers based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and she was just sharing some of the challenges that she’s been facing in terms of organizing against White Christian Nationalism, marking the rise of hate crimes in her area, even describing how the government and legal system was really organizing against them, was organizing against the people who are trying to keep their community safe.

 

And so really being in conversation with her and with other activists – I had a chance to speak with Rev. Cassandra Lawrence, who at the time was with the Shoulder to Shoulder campaign; Nina Fernando; Scott Nakagawa from the 22nd Century Initiative, really extraordinary activists who show us that there is a history here.

 

And I think anytime you put together a report, you want to say that this is the idea, and we’re going to start now. And we create these threshold moments, whether the beginning of a new administration, the beginning of a year, the beginning of a new religious calendar, which for me as a Jew happens in September. But I think they really showed me that there is history here of people who have been working against hate crimes, who have knowledge and an institutional understanding of which organizations are out there and what strategies have worked in the past.

 

And so, for example, when I was in conversation with Scott, he was always talking about how, in Portland, when he was organizing against White supremacist groups there, there was such a close connection between law enforcement and those White supremacist militias. And so, it really led to an environment where it was extremely difficult. And so he talked about it, and he shared things that I never would have learned otherwise, about safety precautions, about how do you prepare people for the risks that they’re taking when they become activists? How do you really step into this moment and confront hate?

 

And I think there’s often this feeling that we have, like when we’re reading the news, it comes through and in some ways the news is so horrible that we dull what we’re experiencing. And I think it takes a real connection and a real conversation with people who been involved in activism and even been involved or have experienced hate-based attacks to really put what’s at stake in context, and to give people who are working in national organizations or working as researchers or working in academia, giving them a sense for what it really feels like to be involved both as potential victims of these attacks and as people organizing against it.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

It’s so important.

 

And you mentioned there’s a history to a lot of these activists, and that is really important. There’s also a history to hate, and that has kind of gone alongside the American project from its inception. And so one of the ways that you and I, in conversation with many others, decided that we were going to help frame this, just for this current moment, was the context of White Christian Nationalism, which has a history from the beginning of people claiming that Christians have a privileged place here, that White people have a privileged place here, not to mention men and, of course, heterosexual men, and it would go on and on and on. I think it’s important to take a moment to hear from you how you framed the role of White Christian Nationalism in this current moment of skyrocketing hate incidents.

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

So, the way that I framed White Christian Nationalism was something that sits at the intersection of a number of very, very damaging and violent ideologies. And so, I think there’s often this tendency to want to situate religion or religious movements within one particular category, rather than seeing them as confluence or at an intersection of racism, of misogyny, of White supremacy, of all kinds, hatred, of homophobia.

 

And so, one of the things that White Christian nationalism sort of captures, and in my research I’ve been noticing, is that often in both well-publicized hate crimes and in less well-publicized hate crimes, we see that people who are affiliated with White nationalist militias, with people who are affiliated with White supremacist activities or groups, they often have either an explicit or tacit association with Christian supremacist organizations. With organizations that insist on the United States only holding and instilling one particular type of religious belief. And there’s something really terrifying about reading that.

 

I’m sure many of the listeners have either read or seen the TV show “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but often when I was reading about movements like the New Apostolic Reformation or a new Christian movement called Dominionism, they really raise the specter of these issues. And so when we’re thinking about hate crimes, when we’re thinking about this particular legal category and how violence against minorities of all kinds has evolved in American history, it’s important to recognize the well-funded movement that is sponsoring and supporting these types of Christian nationalist organizations who are trying to use religion and the privileged place of both religion and Christianity within American society to push for a supremacist agenda.

 

And so, one of the things the report was trying to do was to really draw a connection between those things, and to say that this is our Interfaith Alliance approach. There are other approaches to understanding hate crimes. There are other approaches to understanding hate-based violence. And that there are problems with using the framework of hate to talk about incidents of violence against minorities.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

When we talk about hate, What are the pitfalls of talking about hate and hate crimes? What did you mean by that?

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

One of the biggest pitfalls is elaborated on by this scholar activist named Kay Whitlock, who wrote a report for Political Research Associates about some of the issues with the hate framework. And so, one of the reasons why she found it so problematic is when we think about hate, we’re thinking about acts of interpersonal violence between one person and another. We’re thinking about the person who shoots up a synagogue or a mosque, or vandalizes a particular institution, or attacks an African-American, or writes a homophobic slur in a bathroom. We’re thinking about incidents that are criminal and are, of course, horrible, but we’re seeing them in an interpersonal way and not through the systemic things that cause them.

 

And so for her, she locates and says that one of the biggest problems with the hate framework is that by flattening into thinking only in acts of interpersonal violence and not in the systems and structures that exist in our laws and in our legal systems and in people in positions of power, we end up overlooking the way in which those people play a disproportionate role in harming society’s most vulnerable. So that was the first problem.

 

And the second problem she elaborates on is ,she says that one of the things it does is, instead of creating a space where we can have a conversation about how homophobia and racism and misogyny permeate all of society and implicate everyone in very, very different ways, it creates tacitly an us and them. An “us,” the non-haters, and “them,” the haters. And this isn’t a point to say that we should be in dialogue, but instead it says that it obscures the way in which people who are good and are caring are also a part of these systems. And so, it ends up creating this binary, positioning them against one another and making it more and more difficult to think about what it would look like to pass both systemic solutions, and to have uncomfortable conversations about how to talk about hate in one’s community or how to build a more inclusive space.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

That’s really, really profound and challenging. And I think it informs a certain amount of humility in assigning solutions, although we do try to assign the solutions. And one of our broad messages is that there is a role for religion and religious communities and interfaith communities, especially, in pushing back against hate. It’s very clear, and certainly it’s stated very clearly in the report: religion is often a motivator for hate, unfortunately; specifically, as you mentioned, the Christian Nationalist framework.

 

But religion can also offer some ways of finding solutions. And so that feels really important to me, too, especially as Interfaith Alliance is really trying to find the best way forward to ameliorate against this crisis of hate in this country.

 

So what were some of the things you heard – because you also did some case studies. And that was, I think, a really important aspect of this report. It’s in the report, really talking to some instances where people did step up and did address hate, especially in their local community, but more broadly. What were some of the good conversations that you had there where, you know, I think I can imagine you all sometimes being like, oh my God, this is really hard to feel hopeful, hearing all of what I’m hearing. But I can imagine, also, talking to these people who have really done the work and say, we actually accomplished something. It’s not hopeless. So, who are some of the people that you would like to lift up right now who have done some really amazing work and who show up in our case studies?

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

Religion is contextual, and it can manifest itself in extremely damaging and violent ways. It can divide us from one another. It can create supremacist outlooks. It can create and be influenced by ethno-nationalist outlooks. And maybe it’d be better if we could just say, religion is terrible. We can get rid of it. Fine. But we can’t. Because ultimately, so many people find spiritual and political inspiration from their religions.

 

And so, Paul, earlier you were speaking about the inauguration on January 20th is also marking Martin Luther King Day, a very, very prominent and beloved pastor. And so I think religious communities cannot cede that ground. And if it were possible to cede that ground and we could make the world look more clear and less complex and less contradictory, maybe we would – but the loss would be immeasurable.

 

And so one of the most powerful examples I found was the first case study in the report talks about the NoOn9 campaign, which is that in 1992, An organization called the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which was really a precursor to the type of White Christian supremacist organizations we see today, they got a measure put on the ballot that would have amended the state constitution to describe gay or LGBTQ identities as “abnormal and perverse.” And when activists were looking at the polling data, looking at what this measure could do across the state of Oregon, it was looking a lot closer than they wanted.

 

And so, one of the things that they need to do is they needed to mobilize communities across the state. And one of the most important of those communities were faith communities, people who were in houses of worship, people who we in the media or in national organizations just toss away and think of as holding a particular set of views, or we put into boxes. But instead, people in faith communities organized. They organized to make sure that LGBTQ people were welcome. They used churches and synagogues and mosques as meeting houses for conversations. They used those meeting houses as places to be in conversation with one another and to really make sure that everyone was welcome, which eventually ended up backfiring on the people who put the ballot measure on.

 

They, instead of seeing this as a negative, had created an environment where more and more people were comfortable coming out of the closet. They created a more welcoming environment than it had even been previously by mobilizing and by activating and by really strengthening their communities in a moment of challenge and real fear. And so when we look back on these moments of success, when we look back and remember that as dire as it is, there are moments and there are glimmers of success.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

That feels so real to me, because imagine if everybody had just rolled over and religious groups had just said, well, you know, that’s fine with us. We’re not in it. We don’t care. And imagine if that had been adopted just because people were like, yeah, you know, they’re abnormal. Remember ‘92. This was a very different moment for LGBTQ rights in America. The AIDS epidemic was really at its height. And so, there were lots of impulses towards sidelining people. And instead, you had a group who decided, no, we’re not going to let that pass, and actually we’re going to organize. And it’s a great example of against the odds organizing.

 

And it just feels really important as an example of what interfaith communities can do if they recognize, oh, this group is being targeted, what is our responsibility? And it can get people out of their comfort zone, maybe talking to people they haven’t talked to before, but it can lead to a more cohesive and welcoming community in the long run. And I just think that that’s a really, really powerful example.

 

What’s another one that comes to mind as you think about this?

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

 

One of the most important things in general, it’s just telling the truth. I think we’re in a moment where truth is so under siege. I read recently that some of the tech giants have been removing fact checkers. They’ve been removing people whose job it is to make sure that the news we have and the media we consume is faithful to what actually happened. And instead, they’re choosing to support censorship, and they’re infringing on the truth, and they’re using truth as something malleable.

 

And obviously, this has been a tactic of authoritarians for decades, if not centuries. But I think we’re in a moment right now where that is so, so on the front lines. And so, one of the other cases we were looking at, is we were looking at how the Bend the Arc chapter in Pittsburgh responded to the White supremacist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue. And so, one of the ways they pushed back was they organized a petition in the aftermath of the shooting and said, President Trump, you’re not welcome here. Unless you condemn White Nationalism and White supremacy, you are not welcome in our synagogue and you are not welcome in our Pittsburgh Jewish community. And that petition ended up receiving over 400,000 signatures.

 

And so, in these moments where we can claim our voice and we can use our voice, we can actually insist on being faithful to the truth, and we can fight back against the people who are trying to see the truth as something malleable or trying to rewrite the past in a particular way. And I think that commitment to truth is one of the most important ways in which we can push back against hate right now.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

That’s a really important example because, of course, we know now and they knew then that the shooter, the murderer, had viewpoints that were clearly White Christian Nationalist, who trafficked in the Great Replacement Theory, which blames Jews for changing demographics. And he went in there specifically and he named HIAS, that does immigrant placement in America, first for Jews, but now mostly for Muslims. And President Trump traffics in that same kind of tropes and that same kind of ideology.

 

You know, the other part of the Tree of Life is just – and I’ve seen documentaries and been in conversations – that people really showed up across difference and said, we’re here and we condemn this across the board. And it just was, again, another example of interfaith communities coming together. And I think it was just so important as an example.

 

One of the things that we’re facing right now is the way that realities around the world are impacting communities. And you mentioned at the start that it was really important that we don’t pit anti-Muslim hate versus antisemitism. There’s a lot of people who want us to do that. And you, who are part of the Jewish community, but also really committed to countering anti-Muslim hate, what is your response to them specifically, in light of what’s happening in the Middle East? What are ways that we can have language that says we really are trying to bring people together, even as we counter hate?

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

I think one of the most important things to do is to return to the history, which is that when we think about the invention of what’s called antisemitism. Now, obviously, anti-Judaism, which is really the ideology of people who are opposed to Judaism as a religious or cultural system, is much, much older than antisemitism as a racially-based form of structural and interpersonal discrimination against Jews. And so, what does that actually mean? In 1879, there was an organization founded in Germany called the Anti-Semites League. And this organization was committed to the idea that as countries and nation states were forming in Europe, only people of their particular ethnic and racial background could be included as citizens of that country. And so, one of the ways that they wanted to sort of insist on that was by marking Jews as Semites.

 

Now, what is a Semite? Semite is a made-up word to refer to someone from what had once been called the Orient or the Middle East. So, from the very beginning, when we think about what’s called antisemitism, it existed to mark Jews from Europe as “other” – and as “other” in exactly the same way that Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry marks people as “other.” It was trying to orientalize and apply a certain system of thinking and of discrimination against Jews. And that same form of discrimination was also being applied to Muslims and to Arabs across the Middle East.

 

And so, when we think about what these dynamics are, I think we have to understand that there are moments of shared overlap in how these systems of bigotry function. And then also, and separately, to understand that one of the things that can give White Christian supremacy and White Christian supremacist movements more power is to pit these communities against one another. To say that Jews are on one side as a monolithic community and Muslims are on one side as a monolithic community, and that they are eternal enemies in a religious conflict. And I think that that ideology or that way of setting up, with really very, very complicated communal and interpersonal dynamics, exists to uplift and to support a particular narrative that comes on the back of both communities.

 

And so, what I’d say is we have to push back on that idea that Jews and Muslims are inherent enemies of one another. And to sort of say that these systems have implicated Jews and Muslims in different ways throughout history. You know, for example, Muslims are criminalized at much, much higher rates than the rest of the population in the United States. Antisemitism doesn’t function the same way in the United States, but there have been moments in history where it has functioned similarly. And to understand that there is this toolkit of structures of oppression that have been applied differently throughout history, and to not allow two different communities that should be on the same side as one another to instead be divided against one another.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

So, we have case studies, we have a framework, but we also offer some really solid recommendations. This is not, like, “and good luck!” We offer some recommendations that are broad enough that people can apply them in ways that make sense to them, but also are clear enough that they are action steps that people and communities and organizations and religious leaders could imagine.

 

So, why don’t you walk us through the five? I mean, obviously, people can go and learn much more. Go to interfaithalliance.org. It’ll be on the homepage on January 13th. The report is called “Together Against Hate,” and you can also look for that. But talk to us about the recommendations.

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

Yeah, so there are five recommendations that we’ve included in the report. The first recommendation is to inspire interfaith communities, to remember that one of the most effective ways that the right wing is able to advance their particular agenda is to say that they’re speaking for the religious voice. And when people come together across these differences, when they recognize common cause in resisting measures that hurt all kinds of different people in many different ways, they can serve as a counterweight to that narrative and to that effort to sideline other religious people who don’t support particular far-right, right-wing understandings of religion, far-right understandings of sexual orientation, far-right understandings of the economy. And they’re able to push back. So that’s the first thing.

 

The second thing is something that we already spoke about, which is the hate framework. Now we really, really need to push back on the idea that hate only consists of interpersonal violence with one another, and that hate can’t function in a systemic way. That hate can function when a governor or a mayor chooses to clear an unhoused encampment with people who have nowhere else to go. Hate can function when a government chooses to criminalize particular identities at higher rates, and chooses to build prisons to build private prisons for people who are disproportionately Black and Brown are being held. And so that’s the other thing is that when we understand hate, we shouldn’t be putting hate in the box. We should be remembering that it functions and affects people in many, many different ways. And we have to be sensitive and nuanced in how we understand and locate where we see it originating.

 

And so then the next thing is to prioritize religious literacy. And I think this is related to the first recommendation, but it’s really touching on this idea that if we don’t understand who religious people are, if we don’t understand their concerns, if we don’t understand that we and our families are of these communities in many, many different ways, we can end up relying and creating narratives that are just wrong. And we can end up creating a situation where we’re relying on poll data rather than actually being in conversation with one another. And I think this ends up playing itself out, especially within DC and New York-based nonprofits and think tanks, where they’re not actually scratching the surface to know what it means and what it feels like to hold a particular religious belief, what it feels like to belong to a community. But when you look at it on the surface, you come with a set of preconceived judgments where there are certain secular understandings of what a community should look like. And so I think that’s the third thing, prioritizing religious literacy.

 

The fourth is related to what we were talking about with truth-telling: sharing narratives of belonging, making sure that people see themselves represented in television and media, making sure that as this effort to infringe on the truth, to overturn Wikipedia’s fact-checking people – which I read about today, that there’s an effort to be reversing their own standards, to be targeting people who are Wikipedia editors – to resist that and to call a spade a spade. And I think we just marked the anniversary of January 6th. I don’t know, Paul, if you want to speak about that more as well, but there’s going to continue to be a sustained effort to remake the meaning of that day, to remake the meaning of a day that really illustrated the dangers and threat of American fascism. And so I think one of the most important counterweights to that are narratives of belonging, really illustrating what the reality actually looks like. How people’s lives show up differently, how we show up for one another differently, and to then support and to build on that narrative through really, really strategic media literacy.

 

And then I think the fifth is something that I’m unfortunately skeptical about within the next Congress, but it’s to really prioritize better data collection. We can’t actually make a dent in hate crime prevention if we don’t understand where and how it’s happening. There are many, many different ideas for how to implement or how to build strategies for better hate crime reporting. But until we have a better sense of which communities are under threat and how they’re under threat and how to organize against those who are hurting them, it will be very, very hard to be doing activism and to be doing advocacy alongside those communities.

 

And so I also want to just quickly take a moment to uplift one of our other case studies which was based in Minnesota, and they actually helped pass the hate crimes piece of legislation that Governor Walz signed. And they did really invaluable work on building connections between Jews and Muslims and people across all racial and religious differences to prioritize hate crime prevention in the wake of an attack on a mosque in Minnesota. And so this work is possible. It’s possible on the local level. It’s possible on the national level. We just have to continue believing and insisting that the people who are fighting against us cannot win.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Zev, this is so great. I’m really proud of the work that you’ve done and the work that a lot of us work together to make this happen. And I do want to encourage listeners, if you’re interested in having Zev come and talk, I mean, I’m sorry to volunteer you like this, Zev, but I do think you’re open to talking to religious communities or interfaith organizations across the country and saying, hey, I’d love to foster a discussion here about how we can approach hate in our community and what we can do. I would encourage folks to reach out to Zev. You can find his information on our website, or just reach out to info@interfaithalliance.org, and we can definitely talk about how your community can intersect with this report, and also hopefully be activated, ask good questions, have good conversations about it, and continue to be inspired by others, but also provide your own inspiration in the fight against hate in 21st century America.

 

So, thank you so much, Zev. Zev Mishell is the National Programs Associate at Interfaith Alliance and a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. Zev is the author of the important new report titled, “Together Against Hate,” which is released on January 13th. It will be available in full at interfaithalliance.org.

 

Zev, thank you so much for your important work and for being with us today on The State of Belief.

 

ZEV MISHELL:

 

Thank you for having me, Paul.