Sarah Levin, Co-Chair of the DNC Interfaith Council and Founder of Secular Strategies
Brad speaks with Sarah Levin, the Co-Chair of the DNC's Interfaith Committee and the Founder of Secular Strategies, a firm dedicated to mobilizing secular voters. They discuss the values that matter to non-religious voters and how they can be mobilized politically. Perhaps most importantly, they dig into the possibilities for including secular people in interfaith dialogue at the political level. Sarah articulates her commitment to working with, rather than against religious voters who want to cultivate an inclusive, science-based, and democratic ethos in the United States.
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My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I'm just so excited about our guest today, somebody who I came across in just researching various aspects of the nuns and secular people in this country and the Democratic National Committee and all kinds of things.
So, I'm joined today by Sarah Levin.
Sarah is the founder of Secular Strategies, which is a consulting firm That is mobilizing secular voters and leveraging interfaith coalitions and one of the missions is to counter the religious right with a pluralist left.
And Sarah's been working in this area a long time, worked for the Secular Coalition for America I was the Director of Grassroots and Community Programs for Governmental Affairs, was instrumental in the establishment of the first ever secular caucus in the Texas Democratic Party, and is now co-chair of the Interfaith Council at the Democratic National Committee.
So, Sarah, there's so many things I want to talk to you about, but first I just want to say thanks for being here.
I'm really grateful.
Thanks so much for having me.
I'm drawn to all the work you're doing because you're somebody who's establishing and mobilizing coalitions for secular voters and yet you are part of interfaith work.
That is fascinating.
So I want to get into all that.
Let me just start by asking you about your story.
How you became an activist and how you became kind of somebody working on behalf of the secular community in this country.
How did all that happen?
Sure, yeah.
You know, my personal story is a little off the beaten path, I think, compared to a lot of folks that I've met and how they came to their activism.
I'm the daughter of Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union, who are very strongly culturally Jewish, but also very strongly atheist.
So I was actually raised by two atheists, which is now becoming increasingly more common these days.
But a lot of folks I know don't have that experience.
And so I think that definitely impacted my being drawn to activism, rather than kind of just being drawn to the general idea of kind of thinking about and discussing religion, all of which is very interesting.
But I kind of did that at my kitchen table.
As I grew up, talking about it with my parents, so when I got to college, I did seek out a like-minded group of people.
There was a Secular Student Alliance affiliate there, and so I got involved, became a part of the leadership, and I really enjoyed having a community to go to at the end of the week, where I would just, you know, have friends to talk to who are like-minded.
But ultimately, you know, going to college in DC and being really interested in politics, More and more what I was more concerned with is was the incursion of the entanglement of religion and government and how that entanglement was impacting all these issues that I cared about.
And in, while in college, I actually started interning for the Secular Coalition for America, and then, you know, ended up working there for years.
And when I, when I came in, there were already a few issues that I saw as connected to secularism, separation of church and state, mainly LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights.
But then I learned so much more about how A very narrow set of beliefs is being imposed in policy, in nearly every area of policy.
Someone's learning about how that was manifesting in the military, in tax policy, in healthcare, even beyond reproductive rights.
It made me realize, if I could work in This world of secularism, of protecting the secular character of our government, then I can impact all these civil rights and civil liberties issues that I care about across the board because it impacts so many.
I see it as sort of a root cause issue.
And so that's what drew me to activism and particularly the political side of it because I wanted to see, I wanted to be able to make an impact on the laws that impact all of us.
That's fantastic.
And you know, we've on our show, we've outlined some of the details of Christian nationalism at every level of government.
So from the local, To the school board, to the PTA meeting, to the mayor, all the way to, you know, the national scene.
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