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Brad speaks with the Rev. Angela Tyler-Williams a queer pastor in the Presbyterian USA Church and co-director for movement building at SACReD (Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity). They discuss the interreligious movement led by clergy and religious leaders to bring reproductive justice to the USA.
They also discuss:
What the Bible really says about abortion
Why the Dobbs decision rests on bad theology
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And today I have a great guest who is joining us for the first time and is here to talk about something that's overwhelmingly important and is on the, I think, forefront of many of our minds.
And so I want to welcome Reverend Angela Tyler Williams to Straight White American Jesus.
Thanks for being here.
I'm going to tell people about you in a second, but let me just first say thanks for taking the time to be here.
Thank you.
I am so excited for this conversation and to get to talk about the work of sacred and be with some folks about straight white American Jesus.
There you go.
So you are a PCUSA pastor.
Got to get the USA right there because there's some of you who know, you know that.
We've got to get that right.
So, Presbyterian Church of the USA pastor, queer pastor, and somebody who is the co-director of Sacred, which we're going to talk about here in a minute.
But Sacred is a spiritual alliance of communities working for reproductive dignity and does that through various congregations and in conjunction with various religious leaders and academics and organizers and so many folks.
Let me start here and Just sort of kind of jump into talking about reproductive rights and what it means to be a religious person, a religious leader who is kind of working towards reproductive justice.
What is Sacred, first of all, and what is its mission?
What is it that you all do?
Yeah, thank you, Brad.
Sacred is the Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity.
You covered it mostly already.
We are an alliance of organizers, religious leaders, academics, and congregations working together to advance the cause of reproductive justice through a congregational designation and community building programs.
And so we work with faith communities across the country to bust the stigma around abortion, to start to weave together our faith stories and our reproductive stories.
Everyone has a faith story, even if they don't belong to a particular religious tradition, because we exist in the United States.
That is Christian hegemony is all around us and everyone has a reproductive story even if you've never been pregnant or you haven't had children.
We all have stories of our bodies and our partners and decisions we make about relationships and how we create family and for so long Folks have been told these things are very separate from each other and they cannot come together.
And you know, God is not in your body, God is not in sex, God is not in your reproductive decisions.
And we say no, God is in every single one of those moments and through all of your decisions across the lifetime, God is there.
And so we've got to bring our stories together out of the shadows and free from shame, judgment, and stigma.
And that's how we're really gonna change the culture around both religion and abortion and reproductive justice in this country.
I really love how you put it, to bring the faith story and the reproductive story together.
That's just an amazing way to articulate that.
Just kind of jumping off from what you said about the work of sacred, what is it that people don't understand about the religious leaders and communities?
Working for reproductive justice.
I think we hear all the time about those working against it and those working to, in many ways, halt it.
And so I'm wondering what folks need to understand about those who those religious leaders and communities who are working for reproductive justice.
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