Bonus. Religion in the Public Sphere (Zachary Davis)

Episode 43.
Zachary Davis, a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormons), has been deeply involved in producing podcasts and other media about religion. In this Bonus episode, we discuss the role of religion in the public sphere. He talks about the importance of bringing your whole self into the community, and makes the distinction between scholarly work and devotional practice. Part of his own public expression of his faith is through the various podcasts and publications he produces and manages, including the Ministry of Ideas podcast and Faith Matters magazine.


Highlights:
·       Zach’s first HarvardX work with professors at Harvard Divinity School led to years of ‘swimming in religion’ and thinking more deeply about the role of faith. 

·       The Ministry of Ideas podcast and Faith Matters magazine are both vehicles for discussing religion in the public sphere.

·       The separation of church and state really means not establishing a state religion.

·       Scholarship on religion and religious devotional practice are two different things, and not at odds. 

·       The US is a unique country, given the diversity of religions. Living together peaceably and respectfully is important.  

·       Attending services and reading the holy scriptures of other religions are ways we can each learn about other paths.

Social Media links for Zachary: 
Website – https://www.zacharystevendavis.com/about
Ministry of Ideas podcast – https://www.ministryofideas.org/about/
Faith Matters – https://faithmatters.org/about/
Wayfare Magazine –http://wayfaremagazine.org/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/zacharysdavis
Note: The Ministry of Ideas podcast and Wayfare magazine are both vehicles for discussing religion in the public sphere.


Social Media links for Méli:
Talking with God Project – https://www.talkingwithgodproject.org
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/melisolomon/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066435622271

Transcript:    https://www.buzzsprout.com/1851013/episodes/13129045-bonus-religion-in-the-public-sphere-with-zachary-davis


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The Living Our Beliefs podcast offers a place to learn about other religions and faith practices. When you hear about how observant Christians, Jews and Muslims live their faith, new ideas and questions arise:  Is your way similar or different?  Is there an idea or practice that you want to explore?  Understanding how other people live opens your mind and heart to new people you meet. 


Comments?  Email  Méli – info@talkingwithgodproject.org

The Living Our Beliefs podcast is part of the Talking with God Project – https://www.talkingwithgodproject.org/

Transcript

Zachary Davis transcript

Bonus – Religion in the Public Sphere

[Music] 

Méli [00:00:05]:

Hello, and welcome to Living Our Beliefs, a home for open conversations with fellow Christians, Jews and Muslims. Through personal stories and reflection, we will explore how our religious traditions show up in daily life at work, at home, in the community, in good times and and bad. There is no one size fits all, right answer, just a way to move forward. For you, for here. For now, I am your host, Mailey Solomon. So glad you could join us. This is episode 43, and my guest today is Zachary Davis. Because this is a Bonus episode, we will focus more on an issue, faith in the public sphere this time than on his personal faith path, though you will hear about that as well. Zachary is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. Professionally, he is the executive director of Faith Matters and the editor of Wayfair magazine. He is also the founder and principal of Lyceum, an educational media studio, and the host and executive producer of the podcast's Writ Large Ministry of Ideas Making, Meaning, and Illuminations. Zach is a founding member of the Hub and Spoke Audio Collective and the organizer of the Sound Education Conference. Previously, he was vice-President for content at Himalaya Media and a founding producer at HarvardX, a remote learning platform hosted by Harvard University. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife Mariya, and their three children. Links to his social media handles are listed in the show notes. 

[Music] 

Méli:

Hello, Zach. Welcome to my Living Our Beliefs, podcast. I'm so happy to have you on today.

Zach [00:02:05]:

Me too. Love spending time talking with you.

Méli [00:02:08]:

So this is a bonus episode and as such, focuses on ideas rather than a personal faith path. But I would like you to just let the audience know what your religious and cultural identity is.

Zach [00:02:26]:

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons.

Méli [00:02:33]:

So the focus today is about the role of religion and faith in the public sphere. As you note in your bio, you run the Faith Matters and Ministry of Ideas programs. We're going to focus really on those, if you could just say what they are. Let's start with the Ministry of Ideas. What is it and who are you trying to address with that?

Zach [00:03:04]:

Yeah. So I grew up in a very devout LDS home. We read scriptures as a family. I went to church every Sunday. I was really interested in following God's commandments, and I wanted to be a good person. Like many Mormons, I went on a mission, which is a two year service period where you go somewhere else in the world. You are sent. You don't choose where to go. And I went to southern Spain. So for two full years, I was teaching strangers about Jesus. And that's it. That's all we did. All day, every day. I came back and went to Brigham Young University, which is the LDS University in Utah. And while there, I came to believe that my understanding of my religion was at the very minimum, limited. There were a lot of things I didn't know, and it caused lots of questions in me, and I wasn't even sure God was real anymore. I wasn't sure that anything was true. And so I entered a period in my 20s with a lot of uncertainty about religion and God and what it was for. But I'd had a good and positive experience being raised in a religious community. I just knew that people were trying to be good. My parents and neighbors loved me, and so I think because of that nurturing and love that I'd experienced growing up, I stayed interested, I stayed curious about just what religion was and the big questions that religion tries to ask. So I thought I was going to go be a diplomat or work in politics or something political. But in my early thirty s, I found myself really just wondering what was my path going to be? I ended up moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I got involved in an online education initiative that Harvard was running called Harvard X. We would work with professors to create beautiful, well produced, free online courses. And my first assigned course was with a Harvard Divinity School professor of the New Testament named Laura Nasrala. She was teaching a course on the New Testament on the Letters of Paul. And so suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself professionally thinking a lot again about religion and how to think about religion from an academic and a scholarly frame. It became kind of new to me again. And because I had such a good experience with that course, I ended up working with six other Harvard Divinity School faculty members to teach a huge course called World Religions through their scriptures. So Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, each one with a world class scholar learning all about their beliefs and their practices. And I found myself just swimming in religion again. Because of that amazing experience, I ended up enrolling as a student at Harvard Divinity School. And because I loved media, I started podcasting and I started a show called The Ministry of Ideas. The show was meant to be about ideas in general, the ideas that shape our world. But because religion is so crucial to all the things we experience in life, religious questions, religious stories kept coming up in the show. And so Ministry of Ideas ended up having kind of a lot of religion in it. And Harvard Divinity School saw what I was doing and said, hey, we love it, let's support you. Why don't you come and house the podcast with us? And that's where it stayed up till now. I'm still producing podcasts that grapple with the big questions. Because of that podcast experience, I was approached by a Latter day Saint foundation called faith Matters, and they had a podcast, a conversation show, and they saw that I was kind of savvy with media and religion, and they invited me to come and be their Executive Director and work on their initiatives. And so we do all kinds of stuff. We have the podcast, we publish books. We have a big annual gathering, like a big TEDTalk kind of festival. And then recently, I just founded and edit a print and online magazine called Wayfare Magazine.

Méli [00:07:39]:

You have been one busy guy doing really fantastic things. I am part of your audience on many of those elements, and I just want to note one of the things you talked about there, Zach, about how in your work with the Ministry of Ideas and the prophet at Harvard Divinity that religion was kind of bubbling up and reentering your life rather unexpectedly. But I gather you sound very energized by your work, and you took on Faith Matters when they approached you. Part of the issue in our focus today of religion and the public sphere is also how you as an individual, as a believer, show up in the world and how much your own faith shows up through your work, how those things flow into each other and affect each other. So, first of all, I just want to check that that's a fairly accurate representation.

Zach [00:08:51]:

Yeah. So I would probably consider myself in my 20s some kind of agnostic, because I was just questioning, didn't know what was real, what was true. I eventually came to realize that the obsession with what you believe in your head is a very Protestant idea. It's not historically or traditionally how many communities experience religion, which is more like a way of life, a community, a set of stories that can guide and shape your life and a way of experiencing the sacred. And so I started doubting whether it mattered, whether a lot of the stories of Christianity were scientifically, literally true, and much more interested in what kind of person can I become? By living the values that Jesus taught and by entering into communities where everyone is struggling to make their way through life with morality and with compassion, those things became way more important than the historically testable kinds of things. So, yeah, I'm a very active participant in my faith. I teach Sunday school. I love religion because I think religion is a way for us to learn how to love, to have opportunities to love, and to think deeply about mystery. And it is a mystery that we're here at all. It's a mystery we can have a conversation across distance today. It's a mystery that we're conscious at all. It's a mystery that we're on this planet. I mean, there's so many deep, beautiful mysteries, and I think religion helps us to recognize those as gifts.

Méli [00:10:52]:

One of the things that I found interesting about courses at Harvard Divinity when I was doing my master's at hebrew College. It was really interesting to be studying religion from an academic standpoint and find myself often one of the few people who actually practice a religion in the course. Have you found any kind of dissonance between the academic and what you just described about the values of really living, the religious values of your faith?

Zach [00:11:31]:

I mean, academia is doing a different thing than a devotional practice. It's just a very different mode. Growing up, I was actually really smitten by academia. I thought these smarties thinking their big thoughts and writing them down, that that was the highest form. I've listened to the part of my heart that is more romantic than rational over time. And I've come to see that boy, what's drier than a monograph about theology, right? That is so dry. But what's more alive than a palestrina mass or a frau angelico painting or the experience of loving somebody right in front of you? So I am more drawn to the artistic. I'm more drawn to the human. But they're both valuable and beautiful and lots of amazing theology and scholarship contributes and fertilizes the practice of faith. And it's really that ongoing dialogue between critics of a tradition and affirmers of a tradition and then being willing to be sensitive to what is alive today, to not just inherit a tradition and pass it on unchanged. But to be a conduit for a living source that we, ourselves, our lives can become expressions of that sacred source that we all have access to.

Méli [00:13:08]:

And this connects to our topic today in the sense of these tensions between the doctrine, one might say orthodoxy and orthopraxy the doctrine and the practice of a religion. And the other correlate is the personal and the public. And I'm seeing this a bit as a quadrant. Somehow these relate to each other, the challenge. And you address this in your work, I think, beautifully. But this tension of how we as individual practitioners of a religion, of any religion, work with and are in community with and in the larger sense of community with people who are walking other paths, I think both of us are addressing this issue in our work. So first I want to check whether you see it that way and how you see that playing out in your work.

Zach [00:14:13]:

Well, we have an amazing experience here in the United States of being so religiously diverse. It's unique. It's unique in world history, as far as I can see it so many different kinds of ways to follow God. And that's not easy. It's not easy to rub shoulders of people who see things so differently about the things that matter most to you. But I think you can also see it as this glorious exchange of sacred values. And I do think that the different traditions have absolutely blessed one another with new ideas and new liturgical innovations and that together we're walking side by side on slightly different paths but towards the communion with God that everyone seeks. There is a private dimension that each believer works out their path by themselves, with their family, with their community. But there's this public part where we all have to govern ourselves. We all come to matters of economics and politics and culture with different goals and visions of the good life. And how do we forge some working conditions? I think there's for the one thing is it's just the practice of living in a liberal democracy is like, you're not going to get everything you want, not everyone's going to live the way you do. So what do you need to feel secure in worshipping and practicing religion the way that you want to? That, to me, is the question. So I'm interested in religion being part of public conversations because I think if you suppress people's religious commitments and say the only thing we're allowed to talk about in the public sphere is things that we can measure through the social sciences or economics, then you'll get people extremely frustrated that they can't bring their full selves into society. And then I think they end up feeling trapped in a corner, lashing out, et cetera, et cetera. You end up having people make arguments using science because it's the agreed upon authority for things that are ultimately about sacred values. Even just taking a look at the gender debates today, there are religious values at stake. But ultimately it can be difficult to navigate these conversations if you pretend that religion shouldn't have any say. So it's a constant dialogue in how to balance religious freedom with individual rights.

Méli [00:17:14]:

Yeah, quite. But it is interesting. You just spoke of the challenge, the need, really, and I hesitate to say the right to bring our full selves to the room. And yet these issues, as you mentioned, that the gender identity issue that's so alive and problematic these days. That's part of the discourse, right? That the folks who say, no kids and teachers should not address this point in the classroom. They're using a religious argument and you're coming at it saying people should be able to bring their full selves. And you're speaking of it also out of religion. Am I understanding you correctly?

Zach [00:18:03]:

Yeah. And more than anything, I just think we shouldn't force people to keep their sacred beliefs private. It doesn't mean they'll get their way. But I think it's okay if people come to questions of public concern and say, I'm a Muslim and I'm very anxious that the teachings at school will go against my community's values. And that can be part of the conversation. I just think that part of a pluralistic society should be we have enough respect for one another, we see the dignity of each other, that we allow you to express what's of most importance to you with the acknowledgment that we have to find a way of living together in peace. But I think the emphasis on keeping private your religious beliefs ultimately makes us feel pinched, makes us feel that we aren't really authentically ourselves when we debate these big questions.

Méli [00:19:10]:

Yeah, I totally agree with you, but it does seem that part of the challenge is the dominance of Christianity and what over the last decade or so, the dominance of the evangelical, the right wing of Christianity. And so the discomfort, the pinching you mentioned is really understandable. If I think I'm going to get attacked and people are getting attacked all the time because they don't fit into the straight, white, cisgendered, dot dot, dot, it's really understandable that they will hesitate to speak out. And yet people are speaking out. And I think it's a bold thing to do. Certainly I can say as a Jew hesitancy is kind of baked in because of the history. I do it anyway, but I'm mindful that's, right?

Zach [00:20:12]:

And that's where building trust in one another, which is very hard, but being okay if people believe differently than you. But that difference doesn't mean hatred or anything. Difference can be okay. I think that's powerful. And I think why I am interested in religious media is because I think people do want to wrestle with sacred, important values. We have let basically economics and materialism dominate our values in American life for many, many decades. Because people are uncomfortable saying, actually capitalism, the way we run, it goes against my religious values, that we care for the poor, take whatever value it is. I think it's okay to come and say like, I'm inspired by a scripture that says X. I think that's good. I think we can be inspired by the vision of a good life. And a lot of times people just need to feel empowered to express it.

Méli [00:21:28]:

But what also comes to mind, Zach, is sometimes those expressions are just so hypocritical. I'm doing this out of my religious beliefs and that it's really garbage. I don't think that there is a litmus test that we can use to judge a politician or a leader's or any citizen's statement of faith. But part of what troubles me in the use of it is the hypocrisy and really using religion writ large as a cudgel against those you would like to disappear. No idea what the solution is, but perhaps you have a thought about a bit of a solution?

Zach [00:22:15]:

Well, I think we're all pretty good as human beings at detecting hypocrisy. We kind of all have a bullshit radar that's pretty good. I agree that there are prominent political figures that we know probably aren't the most virtuous people who will use religious rhetoric sometimes. But I'm more talking about our friends and fellow citizens like ordinary people when we speak to each other at town halls or when we write op eds. I think it's a good practice to assume everyone is trying their best to live a good life and to leave a better world for their children. And there might be good, maybe misguided, but there might be good reasons why people support things. They might be fearful of something. I mean, human beings are just so complex. But one thing I think most religious traditions try to do is to see another person as carrying the image of God, to see them as in some ways bearers of dignity. And what modern media forms do is they dehumanize one another. And it's like very easy to see people as monsters. And evil. I think evil is very, very rare. I think differing values is very common. But a lot of times those different values are just an emphasis. You may care about these values more, I may care about these values more. Well, let's figure out where the Ven diagram of our shared values comes together. I think that's all possible. I myself love that I'm a red state kid living in the bluest of blue states. I know how both sides of our culture war think. And I can assure you, whatever side you're on, you don't have the full truth and you don't have full goodness. And nobody entirely knows how to set up the perfect society. So we need to just wrestle together, grow up in the dark together, and try to love one another along the way because we have one life and who wants to spend it just bitter and frustrated the whole time?

Méli [00:24:46]:

Some people seem to. But I'm with you. I completely share these thoughts. And again, I'm hearing attention that I recognize as well of finding in that Venn diagram of the commonalities where we overlap and yet valuing and celebrating the diversity of our plural society, that there is a tension there. And I think we are trying to accomplish both. And not so simple. But as you pointed out earlier in the conversation, Zach, this is part of our history of the United States and our founding documents, this supposed separation of church and state, which clearly is really problematic. We like to throw it around, but in point of fact, as you found in your studies and work with the ministry of ideas, religion flows through life and it flows through our society, all over the place. So better to recognize it. Hopefully we can find some healthier ways of recognizing it.

Zach [00:25:55]:

Yeah, maybe it's better to think less that there's a separation, a full bright line between religion and government, which is what we mean by church and state, usually, but rather there's just no official established church like they have had in Europe. So religion is wrapped up in government because government is made up of people and their values. So trying to remove religion completely may not be really the vision and the goal. Certainly it's how do you protect minority rights, minority religions, people who are not religious? But I'm not sure why we would want no influence of religious ideas and commitments to be part of how we establish our communities.

Méli [00:26:50]:

I think we'd have to ask an atheist or an agnostic how they feel. An animist someone who isn't following, as we say, organized religion. I can't speak to that. I don't think either of us have the right to speak to that. But I agree with you. I think that that is part of the question. I think that's part of the challenge. And again, it comes out of being in this really unique, pluralist society that we're recognizing more today than the Founding Fathers did and who we, the people include. So, looking a little into the future, Zach, what do you see moving forward that would help us to find a more civil and less volatile, less antagonistic way of living together?

Zach [00:27:48]:

I love the idea of going to one another's church. Ask a friend: ‘Where do you go to church on Sunday or Saturday or Friday?’ See if you can go with them. It's so fun. It's so fascinating. Religious communities are just amazing and interesting. And as you learn what sacred values other groups have, you'll start to appreciate why they may think the way they do, read their sacred texts super easy and talk to an atheist. Why do they find religion unconvincing or something to be opposed? There's good reasons for that, too. Everybody has good reasons. There's so much to learn from one another. We just have to listen.

Méli [00:28:31]:

Good ideas. It would be fun to set up a visit each other buddy system.

Zach [00:28:38]:

Bring a Friend to Church day.

Méli [00:28:40]:

Take a friend to your sanctuary. So even right there, I would gently push back on the languaging. But, yeah, I agree with the ideas. Well, thank you so much for coming on my Living Our Beliefs podcast today. I so appreciate this conversation and look forward to listening to more Ministry of Ideas podcasts. You have a good afternoon.

Zach [00:29:05]:

Thank you so much. Pleasure to be with you.

[Music]

Méli [00:29:11]:

Thank you for listening. If you'd like to get notified when new episodes are released, hit the SUBSCRIBE button. Questions and comments are welcome and can be sent directly to info@talkingwithgodproject.org. A link is in the show notes. Transcripts are available a few weeks after airing. This podcast is an outgrowth of my Talking with God Project. For more information about that research, including workshop and presentation options, go to my website, www.talkingwithgodproject.org. Thank you so much. Till next time. Bye bye.

[Music]