Divided: White Christian Nationalism, MAGA and Where We Are Now

Kim Schultz: Welcome to Our Seven Neighbors season five. This is our final episode. We did it. This series is presented by the InterReligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary in partnership with Axis Mundi Media. My name is Kim Schultz, and I'm the director of inter-religious engagement at CTS and producer of this podcast. And as you probably know, season five is titled Religion and Resistance in America and hosted by none other than Reza Aslan. Reza, welcome back.

Reza Aslan: Thanks, Kim. Last one.

Kim: Last one. Nine episodes, Reza. <laugh> Guests speaking about the continued fight for pluralism and that it was never easy. It was never a given.

Reza: That's right. Throughout this season, we've told stories about a lot of our neighbors, indigenous peoples, Muslims, Catholics, Jews, Chinese immigrants, Mormons, atheists, all different traditions and different histories. Yet again and again, we encounter the same pattern. A community arrives, its loyalty is questioned, its religion is declared foreign or heretical. Its place in America becomes contested and then eventually, often through great struggle, sacrifice, conflict, it secures a place at the table. But what happens when a movement emerges that rejects the table altogether? What happens when a vision of America insists that one religion, one culture, one story should stand above all the others? Well, today's guest, Pamela Cooper-White argues that this movement actually has a name. It's called Christian Nationalism. We've been talking a lot about it this season. Pamela believes that Christian nationalism represents one of the greatest challenges facing both American democracy and American Christianity.

So for our final episode, we're stepping back from the past asking what all of these histories mean now. Because if this season has taught us anything, it's that pluralism was never inevitable. And the question before us today is whether we're still willing to fight for it.

Kim: Great. I can't wait for this conversation. Let's bring in Dr. Cooper White.

Reza: Let's do it. Pamela Cooper-White, thank you so much for joining us on this, our final episode of season five of Our Seven Neighbors. It's so great to have you.

Pamela Cooper-White: Oh, thank you. It's quite an honor to be part of this series. It's a great series.

Reza: Thank you so much. Throughout this season, we've seen that every religious community that comes to the US has had its own share of problems dealing with the complicated fabric that is American religiosity. We've seen Native peoples who've been forced into boarding schools in the name of Christian civilization, Muslims who are treated as perpetual outsiders, Catholics accused of divided loyalty, Jews confronting the traditions of exclusion, Chinese immigrants, Mormons, even atheists who are often denied the right not to believe. And although each of those stories has been different, it feels like looking back, each of them has been faced with some version of the exact same question, which is, are you fully American? And I think that the thing that's really fascinating about Christian nationalism is that it represents an attempt to answer that question once and for all by simply declaring that America belongs to one religious community and cultural tradition and that's it.

And your book, The Psychology of Christian Nationalism, it's not just an exploration of this movement in American politics, but it's also treats it kind of like a psychological phenomenon. Like why are people drawn to it? Like what are the fears that sustains it? And obviously most importantly, what, what does it tell us about the future of American democracy? So we got a lot to talk about today, but let's just start at the very, very beginning because this is a phrase Christian nationalism that gets thrown around a lot. I throw it around all the time. But I think people mean different things by it. So when you use the term Christian nationalism in your work, in your book, in your, in your speeches, what exactly is it that you are describing?

Pamela: Right. Well, nationalism itself is an ideology regardless of where it is across the world. It's an ideology that says that there is one ethnic cultural group of people who are the true representatives of that nation or that group and they should run everything. And so Christian nationalism is a version of that in which white longstanding ethnic Americans who are also Christian, but in this understanding of Christian nationalism in this movement, we're also talking about predominantly right-wing, even fundamentalist, conservative Christians. So not all Christians. And so it's the fusion of the desire to have a white ethnic heritage in America that is fused with a right-wing Christianity.

Reza: But I guess you kind of mentioned this a little bit when you were talking about the diversity within even evangelical Christianity. It's not really about Christianity so much as it is about power, right?

Pamela: Well, that's absolutely right. And you know, if we wanna talk theologically, pretty much everything that is represented by the Christian nationalist movement you could say is heretical or distorted or not Christian at all. One of the things that I observed in my research for the book was that Christian nationalist preachers tend to jump from what they view as a very cherry-picked, wrathful God of the so - called Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. And they jump directly to the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation because one of the underlying theological foundations of Christian nationalism, which a lot of people who are part of the movement don't even know about, it's an idea that the America is the new Jerusalem. It's the shining city on the hill, as Reagan liked to quote from Cotton Mather. It is the place where the salvation of the world is now going to take place.

So it's a very apocalyptic millennial notion of what Christianity is about. And this post-millennialist theology undergirds a notion that until Christians cover what they call the Seven Mountain mandate, which encompasses religion, education, politics, economics, entertainment, everything in life, until Christians of their ilk control all of those things, Jesus won't come back in the second coming and we won't have the redemption of the world. So there is this kind of cosmic fervor that goes with the people who are, are the deepest invested in it because they believe that America has become degenerate, the rest of the world has become degenerate, and it's their job to save the world so that Jesus can come back.

Reza: We had this conversation in our very first episode with Peter Manseau, the great Peter Mansot, who talked about how important that myth is to the sort of origin of Christian nationalism. Let's listen.

Peter Manseau [Clip]: I think that we are still grappling with really a concerted effort of myth making. There were points in the history of the United States when it was advantageous to certain groups of Americans to put forward this idea that we were founded on this idea of religious freedom. And usually it meant particular types of religious freedom, religious freedom for me, but not necessarily for everyone else.

Reza: But I wonder, many Americans, well-meaning Americans, when they hear these kinds of criticisms of Christian nationalism, whether they themselves agree with Christian nationalism or not, often tend to see it as a criticism of Christianity itself even though, as you rightly say, this is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's heretical to traditional Christian theology. But why do you think that confusion still persists? Is it purposeful? Is that, is that because Christian Nationalists are, are desperate to make that confusion?

Pamela: Well, I don't think it's that new. I think that there's a certain kind of conquest narrative that is pretty much baked into Christianity ever since Constantine. And so the early church saw itself embroiled in who's really a Christian? Who's really a Jew? Are Jews Christians? Are Christians Jews? You know, the earliest, earliest church, Christianity was simply one more sect within Judaism, but when it became... I mean, this is kind of like Pete Hegseth language, right? I will conquer in the name of Jesus Christ. Then suddenly it became a religion of conquest. And when that happened, the seeds were sown for that to be baked into Christianity really for the rest of history. So it's not like there's one understanding of Christian history. It's not like there's still, I, as a Christian myself, I believe wonderful fruits of Christianity in terms of particularly Jesus' teachings around justice and love and mercy and many of those in his own mind wanting to bring Judaism back to those roots of love and mercy and, and justice, which was not popular in the Roman Empire.

And so there is, as your wonderful book, "Zealot" says, there is a revolutionary side to Christianity that wants to overturn systems of domination. But then because it became co-opted by a system of domination very early in its history, there is also the side of Christianity that wants to wage spiritual warfare and dominate the nation and the world.

Reza: One of the things that I really appreciate about your work is that you take the attraction to Christian nationalism seriously, even as you critique Christian nationalism itself as an ideology. And I just wonder what is the longing among ordinary people that Christian nationalism satisfies?

Pamela: Well, to some extent, I'll probably get to this sooner than later, but I've been thinking a lot about paranoia and how paranoia functions within all of this. But there are conscious motivations and then I'm also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. So I believe that there are unconscious motivations as well. And the conscious motivations, one which is something that's common I think to most people is the desire to belong. And you know, in a society that is famously now ever since the book Bowling Alone came out, the atomization of social life of, and the individualization of social life of people. People are lonely. Loneliness is one of the, a markedly increased disease in this country. So people gravitate toward groups where they feel not only that they belong to a group, but that they belong to a group with a purpose, a really important purpose. And Christian nationalism presents itself as a cosmically holy purpose.

So what could be better than belonging to a group like that? And some of the recruitment tactics actually are very close to cult recruitment tactics and especially the retention of people becomes a kind of a cult like you better keep doing this or you're going to be punished. But that's not how people are drawn in. They're drawn in because they're love bombed and then the, the punishment comes later. And then there's a lot of fear. You know, we talk about the politics of resentment in this day and age and how a lot of people seemingly have voted against their own best self-interest because they don't trust whatever the government is that's in power. And so they vote against it because they're angry and they feel disenfranchised, they feel left out. And that includes both people who feel that it no longer is important to be white.

And so there's the fear of losing white supremacy, which for some people may be the only thing they could still cling to as a, as a way of their own dignity and identity. And then there's also the fear of losing male supremacy, patriarchy, which is still very much a part of evangelical and fundamentalist church culture, but let's not pretend that it's not also a part of mainline church culture too, to some extent. And so the fear of losing white supremacy, the fear of losing patriarchy, and then finally all of that can slide over truly into paranoia where a big percentage of MAGA adherence and Christian nationalist adherence are also believers of QAnon that's been documented. So conspiracy theories also reinforce cult adhesion. And so all of those things work together. And somebody who's going to say a megachurch where there's this fusion of what looks like patriotism, but it's really nationalism, it's not just love of country, it's desire to dominate together with language about how Jesus loves them and it's going to save them and you know, very compelling music and production quality and all of those kinds of things come together.

It's really hard to resist all of that if you are a lonely, disgruntled person. So those are conscious motivations in the sense that people would agree that, yeah, they don't like what's going on right now and that they, they find something in this that, that feeds their need for something that they feel resentful about lacking. They wouldn't use the language I'm using maybe, but they would agree that they are really mad and that this is a place that has helped them to figure out a way to address that. And then on the unconscious level where, you know, admittedly, when you're talking about the unconscious, it's more speculative, but I go back to Freud's really prescient book, Group Psychology of the Analysis of the Ego. It was written in 1921 on the heels of World War I. And so Freud had seen originally he had been very patriotic and pro - Kaiser, pro - war.

He sent his sons off to war proudly and then became very disillusioned by the horrors that he witnessed and the fear that he had for his own boys and repudiated war altogether. And at that point, he wrote this book about group psychology because he wanted to understand what draws people in unconsciously to a movement that can become so violent and destructive. And people already knew about peer pressure and about the, you know, the kind of ways in which horizontally groups can retain people and force them to stay in line. But what hadn't yet been discussed was what Freud's contribution was, which was that there's always a narcissistic leader to whom people can gravitate. And Freud proposed that what happens is people hand over unconsciously their own, he would've called it at that time, the ego ideal or later the super ego, hand over their conscience to a narcissistic leader who promises to fix everything that has gone wrong in their lives and provide simplistic answers to the great existential questions of life that they have.

And so if you just follow this person, you will be saved. And when Trump says things like, "I am your retribution. I am your salvation." He's absolutely right out of the playbook that Trump was describing. And every strong man leader that you see around the world is doing the same kind of thing and attracting people in the same kind of psychological way. And if they're savvy, they will fuse that with religion as a nativist idea that the true Russian is Russian Orthodox and follows Putin. So the true American is the Protestant evangelical Christian who follows Trump. There's a lot of overlap between MAGA. It's not identical, but a lot of overlap between MAGA and Christian nationalism because MAGA in the title, Make America Great Again addresses this idea that things have gone to hell in a hand basket and I am suffering because of it and this great man and his movement will fix it.

Reza: First of all, that was one of the best <laugh> explanations of the appeal of Christian nationalism I ever heard. So thank you for that. But one of the things that you said about paranoia and fear and about sort of cultish aspects of it and the conspiracy theories that overrun Christian nationalism, it reminded me of a conversation that we had with Dr. Pamela Nadell who was describing antisemitism as a recurring American tradition. Let's listen.

Pamela Nadell [Clip]: This is a recurring theme of American life, effort to establish some kind of uniform Christian society that would also exclude Catholics and Jews and Mormons and Muslims and so many others. But

Reza: Of course, antisemitism is sort of the ultimate conspiracy theory and it still to this day has a fundamental role in Christian nationalism. Why do you think that is? Is it because of the tradition of the Jews as the killers of Christ? Or is there something else involved in this? Well,

Pamela: Antisemitism is something I've studied a lot and it's not one thing, right? On the one hand, Maga is equally anti-Muslim, I think, as they are anti-Jewish. And they're pretty much anti everybody who doesn't subscribe to Christianity as they define it. So even I as an Episcopal priest would be considered a heretic and I'm not gonna be going to heaven when the rapture comes. You know, this is clear. So there's that level, there's that layer. We have the truth and nobody else has the truth. And that kinda goes back to a pre-modern and early modern anti-Judaism, which has its roots in the third, fourth, fifth century as different sex within Judaism began to separate and Christianity began to separate. When you get to a racial definition of antisemitism, this is a pseudoscientific racial taxonomy that the Nazis glommed onto, but it's a, it's a 19th century pseudoscience that then the Nazis perpetuated.

Now you're talking about racial inferiority. And so antisemitism and racism also are intertwined as simply also anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Muslim sentiment. All of that gets rolled together as a kind of fear and dread and hatred of the other, however the other is defined. And when you're already in a kind of a cult-like understanding of identity for yourself, then otherness is threatening. Diversity is not a good, and this is why there's such an attack on DEI because diversity threatens the very proposition that my group has the truth. And so to rewrite history to try to say, see, my group always had the truth and it still has the truth. So there's that layer to it. And then, you know, there really is a very ancient, longstanding kind of conspiracy laden hatred of Jews, which in part some theorists, including Freud, though had to do with envy because once...

Well, certainly in Austria, there were the Austeude and the Eastern European Orthodox Jews were, they were considered scum kind of by everybody. They were strange. They didn't speak German. They, you know, they were holding to old village ways, ghetto ways, stuttle ways, whereas those who wanted to come up in the world economically and socially were trying to assimilate, which we learned during the Holocaust was a strategy that doesn't work. If they hate you, they're gonna hate you anyway. But for a time, Jews in Europe did become, some did become very wealthy and very powerful. And so the longstanding white Austrians who did view Jews as schwartz and blacks wanted to somehow say these people are trying to take over the world. There's a international conspiracy. They are dirty, grasping, money grubbing, and either they're sexually impotent or there's hypersex. They couldn't get that right, couldn't figure that out.

And for all of those reasons, we need to get rid of them. And first, we're gonna try to just get them out of the country and then if that doesn't work, we're gonna try to get them off the planet. And so that kind of thinking, conspiracy theories that begin with paranoia can slide over very, very easily to hate and violence. So I do think we've seen a resurgence of this. It's always there underground. And I think we've seen a resurgence of this ever since Trump's first presidential campaign where he made it okay through his own rhetoric to come out and say hateful things that maybe people felt all along, but they didn't think that they could say.

Reza: This conversation is reminding me of one of the episodes we did with Dr. Farina King about indigenous communities. Mm-hmm. And we were talking about how Native children were forced into Christian institutions, the purpose of which was to erase their indigenous identities. Let's listen.

Farina King [Clip]: Having an off-reservation boarding school that was meant to separate Native American children, youth from their families, their communities, and really in that way, you know, ceremonies, the teachings of their lands and home to pipeline them away and try to assimilate, rewire them. And in many ways I, I see it as a hijacking.

Reza: I'm thinking about now about the way in which Christian nationalism under this administration has infiltrated the institutions of government and has in a sense created a situation so that all of us are in some way or another dealing with the same horrors that those native children dealt with years ago, which is that those institutions that we rely on for government services are making a clear distinction between who is the proper kind of American as we've discussed and who is not. And that just, I gotta tell you, it scares the crap out of me when I think about that.

Pamela: Well, and right now it's who is the proper recipient of benefits where there's a lot of competition for, there's a lot of scarcity thinking that goes into this too, right? But competition for resources. And so the first groups that you want to eliminate are the non-true Americans. But I think what I'm hearing in your comment also is that where does it stop? Because the line keeps moving further and further and further. And as long as power is seeded by Congress to a president who feels like he has to at least keep up with his base who have these post-millennial ideas, then he needs to enact what you probably know about as Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation, very conservative Heritage Foundation and that whole program. It's 900 plus pages of program and policy that would, were to go into effect should he be elected and he was.

And some of the things in there are purely for the economic benefit of major corporations, but a lot of them really do have to do with a Christian, conservative Christian understanding of domestic and public life, including such things as banning abortion entirely. The, in my view, rather paranoid focus on trans and non-binary youth and also schools and education. The reason they wanna dismantle the Department of Education, which is actually a goal in Project 2025 is so that private religious schools can benefit the most. There's more there than that, but this is a whole agenda that was set out for him with a big input from Christian nationalist leaders who want their own power in the administration.

Reza: That last thing you said was really fascinating to me because one of my favorite conversations that we've had so far was with Lee Eric Schmidt, because as a prominent atheist thinker and scholar, he reminded us that so often in these conversations that we've had, and you and I, I'm sure have had these kinds of conversations so often, we always forget about the atheists, right? We always talk about, you know, religious diversity, the freedom of belief without remembering that it's also the freedom not to believe. And when we talk about Christian nationalism and its impulse towards power, we often, I think, rightly talk about what that does to non-evangelical Christians, even as you rightly say, to other Protestant communities, let alone Catholics, like we talked with, uh, John McGreevy about. But it occurs to me that when you have the levers of government, including the Supreme Court, that are being infiltrated by Christian nationalist ideology, what does it mean for those who just are not religious at all?

Like it's one thing to say, "Well, I'm a Muslim and you see me as other and I'm gonna fight for those rights." But we sometimes forget about the religiously unaffiliated. What does Christian nationalism mean for those Americans?

Pamela: Well, I think increasingly disenfranchisement from social services, from education, from, I mean, the, the kinds of pressure that are being put on universities now to supposedly diversify the intellectual discourse, but actually it's to allow some kind of backlash conservative takeover of - Right. Universities. And And as far as Atheists and the Unaffiliated go, there's a sort of a, a subset of fear, you know, that evangelical Christians in particular are very, very convinced that there is persecution going on against Christians in the United States, which is statistically vanishingly small. <laugh>

Reza: Yes. And not just Christians, but specifically white Christians. But yes,

Pamela: You're right. Specifically white evangelical Christians. Right. Right.

Reza: The largest religious community in the United States.

Pamela: Yes, right. Right. So they see the Pew poll that is showing that the fastest growth among different groups that Pew tracks is the, the so - called nones, N-O-N-E-S, the unaffiliated. And that scares the heck out of them because they feel like that means their institutions are imperiled. And if their institutions are imperiled because they don't have members and money, then the power of the leaders will also be imperiled. And so it gets into a paranoia about losing their power, which is really one of the primary motivations why the leaders are in this anyway. So yeah, I think just the specter of atheists, oh my goodness, you know, they're gonna take over the world and that, that's the last bastion and now it's gonna be completely degenerate and Jesus will never come back and the world is gonna go to hell.

Reza: Yeah. Your book was published a few years ago in, in 2022. And obviously we're now several years further into this story. I'm curious, how worried are you today about Christian nationalism?

Pamela: Well, let me say, uh, uh, one of the questions I get asked the most when I'm out speaking is what would you write now? You know, what would you change or add to the book? And I am coming out with an expanded edition this fall. I'm not redoing the body of the text, but there's an epilogue that I've written because when I was asked to write the book by Fortress Press, the focus they really wanted was the third part of my subtitle is How to Talk Across the Divide, addressing increasing political and religious polarization in the country. And so there's a lot in the third chapter about how to talk when to talk, should you attempt to talk to somebody who's gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy thinking and outright untruth. And so I do a kind of a triage around when you can and when you probably should walk to my - Yeah,

Reza: Your, uh, your red yellow green Framework, which I love.

Pamela: Yes, yes, right.

Reza: If you don't mind, just very quickly walk us through that.

Pamela: Okay. But I wanna, I wanna get back to your question

Reza: Yes, of course.

Pamela: Well, yes. I said, you know, the first thing you need to think about, because I told, I told the editors, this is not gonna be a kumbaya kind of love everybody book. This, there are times when you can't talk to somebody because it will only reinforce their defenses. This comes from my psychology background. But also it can turn ugly very quickly. And that's not necessarily your goal. So is this the right time? Is this the right place? And am I the right person? Are the first things you really need to ask whether you should engage? And if the answer is no, <laugh> like the Thanksgiving table with your, you know, your drunk belligerent uncle who likes to be provocative, probably that's not the right time or place and you're probably not the right person. That's the red light. And some psychologists say, that's it. You just, you can't talk to these people.

But I don't wanna categorize them as these people because I also think followers are different from leaders of this movement. And I think many followers have been kind of pulled into something that they did not intend and don't fully understand all its ramifications. The yellow light is maybe you can have a conversation and the most important thing to do then is to listen and to try to understand where they're coming from. How did this appeal to them and what is it that attracts them now? And give them the, the understanding that you really want to know and you're curious, genuinely curious. It's not like you're out to get them. And then a green light is when somebody really wants to consider some of the basic belief systems and wants to know what you think and you can share back and forth. That's the best. That's the green light.

Yeah. And sometimes the green light doesn't change somebody's mind, but they remember having had a good positive experience having a conversation and maybe that's planting a seed for down the road, "Oh, well, she didn't have two horns and a tail. And maybe these people who are lib tards or whatever they are, maybe they do have something worthwhile to listen to. " Right. Planting the seed is a long haul strategy, right? And I did write this book. It came out in 2022 during the Biden administration and many of us were hoping that it would not be President Trump a second time around. So what I feel now and the reason I felt really compelled to write an epilogue is that I don't want to leave with the impression that you only get involved with activism if you can't talk to people and you need to channel your outrage and your energy.

And I really wanted to reframe that to say we have to do both things all the time. And I've believed that my whole life anyway, I've, I've been very involved in various movements. And I think right now, the urgency of what we're facing means that if I have to make a choice between trying to have a convincing conversation with somebody that I care about or I wanna be out in the square in Gettysburg protesting every Saturday at noon, that's where I'm gonna be now because I think... Or in the State House or at convenings of the town council or wherever something is going on, I'm also involved in some ice watch activities, which we haven't been very activated yet right here where I live, but we're ready. <laugh> I think we have to do those things now. And for some people, civil disobedience may in fact be the call because we really can't just be quiet about this.

So dialogue I still believe in and I think it's really important and wonderful and I wouldn't take that chapter away. But given all of the things that have happened since the Trump administration came into power, I've updated some of that from the book too, what's going on now. I think we really need to be much more public theologians. We need to be publicly visible and we need to throw what I've called a sacred bunky wrench into the systems of domination.

Reza: I like that. We more or less always end the conversation the same way on this season. And it's about just leaving the listener with one hopeful thing to remember. When it comes to the relationship between Christianity and democracy and, and belonging in America, what do you think that would be for you? What would you like our listeners to always remember as they look ahead to this country's next 250 years?

Pamela: Right. Well, as a Christian, what I see as the glaring problem is that Christian nationalism almost never refers to the teachings of Jesus. So from a Christian point of view, I would wanna say there are still many, many people who are trying to live their lives and to make public witness to those things that Jesus taught. And also the prophet Micah, I love the, you know, to love justice, to do kindness and to walk humbly with your God. That to me is the core of a genuine Christian faith and it's grounded in a genuine Jewish faith as well. And there's so many examples of people like Reverend William Barber who are out there on the streets doing the Moral Monday demonstrations. There are people who are working at all levels of government to try to put the brakes on some of this really egregious stuff.

We're not alone. And I think one of the things we have to do is to continue to come together in various ways and various venues to say, "Hey, Christianity isn't that. Christianity is something else. And at its best, it is not an exclusive club, but it's a way of living in the world that doesn't mean that other people's good, wholesome, and healthy ways in the world are not also valid. It's a way of living in the world that allows for the freedom and the peace of everybody. And that's hopefully at a political level what democracy is about as well.

Reza: Pamela Cooper-White, I can't imagine a better way of ending this season than with this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Pamela: Thank you so much. Really, really an honor and a pleasure.

Kim: Reza, what a fascinating conversation, truly. I love this as our final conversation for the season.

Reza: Yeah, it was such a great summary, right? Like, uh, I loved the way that we were able to just kind of weave back and forth to some of the other conversations that we had. And she was wonderful. It's a great explanation of this really dangerous movement in American democracy and American Christianity.

Kim: Full agreement with that, but was there... Why was this episode important for you to include in this series? Because this was a conversation we had of wanting to finish it in a certain way. So why was this conversation important for you?

Reza: Well, if you go back and listen to the previous eight episodes, there is a kind of boogeyman that constantly shows up and it's Christian nationalism. And we certainly have talked a lot about it in the way that it has created a very exclusionary sense of American identity, the way that it has attacked religious communities. But we haven't really taken the time to delve into the movement itself to understand what it is, why it's so appealing, what it wants, and why the importance of its grip on power is such a threat to all Americans, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Kim: Dr. Cooper White spoke about the importance of a public theology, which is actually one of CTS's main tenets and philosophies. Are there any thoughts on that for you in this particular moment in time that we find ourselves in?

Reza: Well, after spending this season talking about religious freedom, religious exclusion, religious pluralism, I've become convinced that pluralism isn't a fact about America. It's a choice. So I guess that's what I would say as we close this season, is that every single one of us can simply choose pluralism. Mm. That we can choose it in our actions, in our thoughts, in our words, in our deeds, certainly in our public theology, but that it is a choice that has to be made every day all over again. And that's the only way that the promise that is the founding of this country can actually be fulfilled.

Kim: Beautiful. Reza, I can't thank you enough for joining us and partnering with Chicago Theological Seminary on this season five of Our Seven Neighbors. We are so grateful for all you bring and all you have brought to this season.

Reza: Well, it was truly wonderful. Thank you for having me.

Kim: And that does it. Nine conversations, nine episodes, nine neighbors. And what a brilliant way to end it all. Thank you to Dr. Pamela Cooper White. We are so grateful for all of our guests, in fact. Make sure you listen to all nine of this season's episodes if you haven't. Meet your neighbors. They're all really great conversations. We could not have been more lucky to have Reza lead this season and these conversations. So thanks for stepping back into the CTS community, Reza. We're grateful. Special thanks also to Hazel Gomez for the guest research each episode and to rabbi Dr. Rachel Mikva for her guidance this season. Did you know that we have five seasons of our seven neighbors? If you haven't, go listen to Stories from the Black Spiritual Diaspora with host Dr. Camila Muhmind Oseguera in season two. Or join host Dr. Jose Morales to explore the themes of immigration, mass migration, and colonization through an intersectional Latinx lens in season four or listen to any of the other previous seasons.

I want to end by sharing the meaning of our podcast name as I don't think I've done it yet this season. Our first season, five or so years ago, highlighted voices against Islamophobia through storytelling and activism hosted by rabbi Dr. Rachel Mikvah, in fact. It lifted up models of creative social transformation. So the naming of the podcast was rooted in those conversations. One of our Muslim advisors suggested the Islamic concept of the seven neighbors. And if you're not familiar, in Islamic tradition and classical texts such as the Hadith or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, the concept of a neighbor is not limited to the house directly adjacent to yours. Rather, Islamic teachings define a neighbor as extending up to seven houses in every direction. And by some scholarly accounts, 40 houses. That's a lot of episodes. The duties that are owed to your neighbors, seven or however many you want to count, is having zero tolerance for harm to them, sharing food with them, mutual assistance, and protecting their dignity.

So we thought that would be an appropriate title for our show. And so now think about your seven neighbors, or nine as the case may be, and maybe explore your neighborliness and the suggested neighborly duties and then maybe expand it wider, farther in hopes of making the world a better and more just place to live. Peace to you and your neighborhood and your neighbors from all of us here at the Inter-Religious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary. And thanks for listening.