On God's Campus, produced by REAP and Axis Mundi Media, is a podcast that uncovers a hidden educational ecosystem in which taxpayer-funded religious schools and colleges fuel racism, queerphobia, misogyny and Christian supremacy—until the ecosystem’s own youth fight back. It debuts October 17, 2023.
In anticipation, Brad speaks with Paul Southwick and Erin Green from the Religious Exemption Accountability Project. They explain REAP's mission: to help queer students on religious campuses and to get tax dollars out of institutions that discriminate against LGBT people. Through civil rights litigation, storytelling, oral history, research and public policy, REAP works toward a world where LGBTQ students on all campuses are treated equally, with safety and respect.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
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What's up, y'all?
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Today we have a special episode.
I'm sharing with you an interview that I conducted with Paul Southwick and Aaron Green, both of whom are part of REAP, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project.
Now, Aaron and Paul are ex-evangelicals who were insiders on religious campuses and as part of many church communities.
They work at REAP because REAP is an organization that works to help Change the landscape of religious-exempt universities that discriminate against queer people.
I'm sharing this interview today because in one week our special limited series from Axis Monday Media and Reap is dropping.
Episode 1 will appear on October 17.
It's called On God's Campus and contains a number of narrative installations, as well as interviews with experts and scholars and journalists, including yours truly.
The series is remarkable because it provides both an insider perspective on how these religious universities discriminate against queer people.
There are personal stories.
There are testimonies.
There are firsthand accounts of how such discrimination traumatizes real human beings.
But it's also a story of policy, of taxes, of the ways that our government and our culture allows these universities to be tax-exempt, to receive taxpayer funding, but to continue to discriminate against people, students on their campuses, based on their sexual and gender identities.
As we will see throughout the series, the story goes all the way up to white supremacy and the foundations of white Christian nationalism.
I hope you enjoy my interview with Paul and Erin because they both share their personal histories and how they came to this project and why it is so important in this moment.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
Here's the interview.
AXIS Mundi Texas Mundy.
Welcome back to Straight White American Jesus.
We are here at the Summit for Religious Freedom once again.
And I get to talk to two people who I've only known a short time, but I think are just really amazing.
And that's Aaron Green and Paul Southwick.
Want to talk about your stories.
Want to talk about your organization.
First, want to say thanks for joining me.
Thanks for being here.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
So y'all are part of REAP, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project.
Paul, you're the founder of the organization, and both of you work there and are advocating tirelessly for basically trying to stop those exemptions and the ways that they hurt people.
These are personal issues for both of you.
So I just want to ask quickly, before we kind of talk about the organization and all of your mission and values, Erin, how does this sort of pertain to your story and your experiences?
Sure.
So I grew up in the evangelical church.
I deconstructed, though, in my 30s, my early 30s.
Left a career, decided to go back to school, and I went to Biola University to major in biblical studies and led their queer underground movement.
While I was there, I just happened to do that as well, and then received some backlash, so I transferred to Azusa Pacific University, still led the Biola queer underground, and helped students out at APU as well, and then went into seminary and started working for REAP.
So I've been doing queer underground activism on campuses for quite a long time and sort of leading the way in the movements and then got connected with Paul and wanted to be a part of what Paul was doing at REAP.
So you went to seminary and so you identify as a Christian to this day, even after your deconstruction in some sense.
Is it it's complicated?
It's, you know, relationship status, it's complicated or?
Yeah, it's complicated.
It's a loose affiliation.
I identify as spiritual, but I do hold to some Christian values.
Yes.
So, Paul, tell us your story.
And I think there's some pretty strong resonances with Aaron's.
Sure, absolutely.
Well, Aaron and I, we ran into each other on the Queer Christian College underground scene several years back.
So I think we've both been in this space for about a decade now.
I went to a Conservative Christian College, was homeschooled, and was a closeted queer person in that space.
Went through conversion therapy for two years, and basically at a certain point reached the conclusion that for my own survival I had to leave.
And so basically I'm a lawyer by profession, so I've been practicing law for about 13 years, and I started doing pro bono representation to queer and trans students that were getting expelled, sent to conversion therapy, harassed, And when I had an opportunity to do it full time about two and a half years ago, I did.
And then Aaron and I connected.
So, Paul, tell us about REAP.
You clearly are invested in this personally.
You're a lawyer.
You could have had a nice fancy life in law.
And here you are running this nonprofit that's really in the trenches fighting for the rights of queer students and especially those who are at religious institutions.
What's the mission of REAP?
Tell us about it.
Absolutely.
So the mission of REAP is really to create safe and affirming educational environments for queer, trans, and other marginalized communities in these evangelical, LDS, and other conservative religious spaces.
So that's what we do.
You know, I think it's similar for Aaron, but for me, I really want to make sure that nobody goes through what I went through.
And so I think that there is a deep sense of trauma that has motivated this call to accountability.
And so we chose the name Religious Exemption Accountability Project because we do think that sharing stories and exposing abuse, mistreatment, trauma, That is what's going to cause change.
That's what's going to make people upset and angry and want there to be safer spaces.
One of the things that I've been thinking about lately is that we have Title IX in this country.
And so I think from an outside perspective, a casual observer would say, okay, so we have Title IX.
So if you wanted to be, we can talk about taking money from the federal government and that, but if you just want to be accredited, don't you have to sort of like agree that you won't discriminate against people?
And yet it seems as if, and I know firsthand, I went to the Pacific, my brother went to Biola, so I know those institutions very well.
It seems that somehow even institutions that actively discriminate and are marginalizing queer folks, in some cases people of color, openly, how do they slip by?
How do they somehow become exempt from those accreditation standards?
You would think that they should, but they absolutely don't.
Not even for accreditation.
So we only work in the taxpayer funded space.
So that is our connection to Title IX.
But there's a giant religious exemption to Title IX.
It's the broadest religious exemption in pretty much any civil rights statute in this country.
And it essentially says, well, Christian colleges and schools, you have to pay, you have to follow Title IX, except whenever you don't want to.
And that could be even in cases of sexual abuse, even in cases of bullying, harassment.
If you don't want to, you don't have to.
And guess what?
You don't even need to tell anyone that you're not going to be following Title IX.
You can keep it a secret.
And that's very damaging.
And that's a really scary place to be in when you're a queer person and you think, oh, this Christian college seems kind of cool.
Like it's got the cool youth pastor vibe, you know?
I'll probably be OK.
And then you're okay until you come out.
And then the whole administration can be turned against you.
So, Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump did a whole bunch of harmful things to this country, but especially for Christian colleges in the realm of accreditation.
And in Title IX, they essentially made Christian colleges immune from any requirements they don't want to follow.
That's like a three hour conversation.
I mean, I'm blown away and there's so much to say.
What I do, though, want to make sure we get to just in the context of all that, Aaron, is that something I've heard you say numerous times, which is that we pay a lot of attention to churches.
You know, on this show, we talk about mega churches and the influence that they have, the pastors, the celebrity, influencers, all that business.
But I think one of the things that REAP does well and that is really important to you, Aaron, is that these religious educational institutions are an essential part of the ecosystem of the religious right, of Christian nationalism.
Can you talk about that and why it's so important to make sure not to miss that?
Sure.
Yes, absolutely.
I think that it's easy to point our fingers at the church, right?
It's for so many reasons.
But I think what we often or what gets missed or overlooked is that Religious leaders, clergy, politicians, judges, doctors, come out of these religious educational institutions and they disseminate the very things that they've been programmed with.
In white Christian nationalism.
So it's not getting disseminated only in the church.
It's getting disseminated in the public sphere, too.
Not just in that little private area, which is really frightening.
So I think that, yeah, our focus at REAP is to call that out and to say, you know, we need to look at both spaces as part of the problem.
And start thinking about, well, what kinds of solutions we can come up for with that.
Because that almost seems a little bit, not more dangerous, but it's dangerous.
One of the things that I saw firsthand and I continue to see first happen is that I don't think people realize that, okay, so if you're a 20-year-old kid and you're committed to your Christian faith, you came from an evangelical background, a fundamentalist background, and yeah, you're at Wheaton College, you're at Biola University, you're at Patrick Henry, whatever it may be,
What you start to realize is, hey, if I have doubts about my path, one of the things that's a huge benefit is that there's a direct pipeline, as you just talked about.
Like, so if I want to go into law, and I'll say even journalism, if I want to go into politics, if I just take on this identity and I stay in this sort of pipeline, I'll get shot right to the top way more quickly than somebody who's on the other side or who's out on their own.
And I'm just wondering if that makes sense to you all in terms of some of the influence that these institutions have and if you've seen that as well.
Absolutely.
And we're not talking just about small little Bible colleges.
I think a lot of people think, oh, a harmless little Bible college.
We're talking about Liberty University having over 100,000 students and multiple graduate programs.
We're talking about places like Regent that are pumping out lawyers who are going into clerkships with federal judges, becoming federal judges.
And they are trained in these environments in which They not only have rules saying that you can't be gay, but they create these ecosystems where queer people are literally erased and then they are prepared to become teachers in public schools with that mindset that it is okay to erase queer people.
So it must be okay to not use pronouns even as a public school teacher and I have a religious right not to do that.
And then I have an entire team of lawyers who will back me up at Alliance Defending Freedom and Beckett Fund.
So yes, they are funneled into professions and they are also, there's a lot of gatekeepers.
I saw this in my own life.
There'll be mentors, often white older men, and they'll say, this kid, you need to bring him in.
This one, you need to bring her in.
And then once you're in, you're part of a very large system that we're now seeing threatening the country.
So, what are the goals?
If I say, hey, you two are very well positioned first-hand.
The problem, you know what effect it is having on the individual lives of queer students at these universities.
You know what it is having systemically on our courts, in our law space, in our electoral politics, in other places.
So, you know, if we talk about the goals of your organization, what is it you want to accomplish?
I can talk about some of those things.
I can talk about the piece where I think public education is so important.
And I do the campus organizing for REAP.
So a combination of things like organizing and public educating or publicly educating folks.
One of the big hurdles that I've noticed to get people to care about this is helping them understand why queer, trans, and non-binary people are at religious educational institutions.
That seems to be the number one question that we get asked.
Why are they there?
If it's so bad, why don't they just leave?
And it's not that simple.
I think all of us in this room know that.
But I think the simplest answer is that students between the ages of like 17 and 24 years old When they go into college, it's a big exploratory time.
They don't even discover that they're queer until they're in that space.
And oftentimes parents have already paid for them to go there.
So there's a lot of things kind of aligned for that person to be there.
Things that we could go into some other time.
Well, and sometimes parents will say, I'm only paying for Christian college.
So if you transfer to Cal State or blah, blah, blah, you're out of luck.
Absolutely.
And don't come home this summer.
Exactly.
So it's it's first, I think, helping people understand why they should care about the queer, trans or non-binary student in the space.
And then the other part is is protecting and empowering these students in those spaces to build coalitions, to build communities locally on campus, things like that.
And that's what I do.
I help them do.
But I think we have other Like strategic methods that we use as well that Paul can go into.
Yes, we also use litigation as a storytelling device.
So we have a large class action lawsuit against the U.S.
Department of Education.
It's currently on appeal at the Ninth Circuit.
We have over 40 students from 25 plus Christian colleges across the country.
And we sued the government, not the schools, because we want to show the government is funding.
This is something that at this conference I've thought about a lot.
We're talking about white Christian nationalism and the problem.
Our government is funding explicitly white Christian nationalist schools and colleges to the tune of billions at the federal level and at the state level.
And you know what?
They're very mission driven.
So if you're going to give them almost unlimited access to money, to these mission driven organizations, you are going to have a giant problem on your hands.
So that faucet needs to be turned off.
And at that point, the power and influence of fundamentalism in our society would hopefully go back to The smaller level at which it really should exist rather than this expanded version.
So we fight back with a lawsuit to shine a light on this.
A lot of people don't know the tax dollars are going to these kinds of schools.
We also filed Title IX complaints and we've had 11 federal investigations opened, including against Westmont College, against a whole bunch of educational institutions, Azusa Pacific.
And these just shine a light on some of the incidences of abuse.
So we use those tools as well.
I mean, yeah, I really, one thing I appreciate about what y'all just said is, Aaron, you talked about something that's really on the ground and focused on campuses.
And then Paul, you talked about something that's just class action, right?
It's sweeping, it has a wide range, and really is aiming at the systemic.
So there's a systemic focus, there's an individual focus, and those are working together.
A lot of this comes out, and we've talked a lot about this on the show, I talk about it in my book, but it's always worth talking about.
The idea that the federal government would fund institutions that, as you said earlier, Paul, can basically ignore Title IX if they want.
It's as if they're a church or something that has the ability to kind of play by its own rules.
And there's government funding.
A lot of it traces back to 1954, Brown v. Board, and then we get into the court cases about tax-exempt status.
Would you mind just briefly linking those dots for us?
Because I always think this story is worth telling, and I think it's worth telling because it links up to what you just said, Paul, about the class action lawsuit and the billions of dollars getting thrown to these institutions.
Absolutely.
And I'm so glad that your recent book has focused on this.
So what a lot of people don't realize is that the religious exemptions and the sort of religious supremacy claims that were above the law that are going on right now, they are not new.
This is part of a playbook going back to the 1950s and 60s.
And so after Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, somewhat shortly thereafter, The white religious conservatives of the South said, oh my God, we do not want our daughters going to schools with black boys is really what it came down to.
And so they opened what were called segregation academies.
They didn't call them that, but that's what they're called now.
And they were whites only religious schools.
And what I want people to realize is they were thoroughly Christian.
We're not just sometimes they want to think like, oh, that was just cultural racism.
No, they were thoroughly religiously racist.
God separated the races.
Interracial dating and marriage is prohibited by divine order.
They had a whole exegesis on all of this preaching and everything.
And so, for a little while, that worked.
And they were able to maintain a separate white-only religious educational system.
Very similar to the queer erasure, you know, erasing an entire community from that educational ecosystem.
Well, after a while, black parents of black children said, what the hell?
Why does my kid not get to go to that really fancy, taxpayer-funded school with a great gym and art classes and stuff?
Why don't my black kid doesn't get to go there?
And they started suing.
And the parents brought the cases and they lost a lot of them.
And we'll probably lose a lot of ours.
But eventually they won and they won big at the Supreme Court.
And then it went all the way.
And that was a case called Norwood in the 1970s.
And then we have Bob Jones University in the 1980s.
And that was sort of the big win where the government pulled
And so our case in the context of queer and trans rights is very much linked to that history of saying there are certain things that are so harmful to society, racism and education among them, queerphobia, transphobia and education among them, that the government is constitutionally prohibited
from funding them because of equal protection and First Amendment concerns.
That's the argument we're making, whether it will be adopted now or 10, 20 years from now.
TBD.
One of the things I love about what you just said, and it's something that's almost been a constant theme at the summit this weekend has been that there's it's easy to think, well, yeah, it would be good to do this.
It'd be good to do that.
It'd be good to run for office.
I probably won't win, so I'm not going to do it.
It's too hard.
They have too much money.
They're too organized.
Why even try?
And what you just said, Paul, is we may not win this time back in the 70s.
It took dozens of tries to get to where we eventually got.
Aaron, as somebody who's really experienced in just on the ground, on campus, queer resistance and organizing, would you mind just talking about how that mindset is essential to have if you're going to do this work?
Because I just want people to hear that.
Oh, I don't want to run for office.
I'll lose.
Oh, I don't want to try.
Who could even make a difference?
And yet that's exactly, I think, the wrong way to think about it.
So how does that play into your story?
So the first time that I organized a protest at Biola, it was against their Title IX religious exemption.
We were standing waiting for chapel to get out in a big line and we had our banners and our queer stuff and all the cool things.
And I remember the director of communications coming out of the tower to find me, the organizer, and ask, you know, why are you doing this?
And I remember watching her ask me this, and she was visibly shaking.
She was so scared.
And in that moment, I realized how much power we had, and how much power these students have, and how afraid these schools are of us, and how afraid of our messaging, and our power, and our action, and our momentum that they are.
And that's what I reiterate over and over again to these students, that If they only knew how scared these schools are of what we're doing and the collective organization and power behind what we're doing, we could make huge moves.
And we are.
But it's hard for the general public.
To hear these kinds of stories, unless it's coming from REAP or it's coming from other news sources.
Again, we are trying to promote this topic of queer liberation in religious spaces.
But there's power in the organization at these schools with these queer and trans and non-binary students.
But in addition to the litigation, in addition to all the other moves that we're making, I think that that's one of the most powerful pieces is student organizing on these campuses.
I love that story.
And you brought us right into the scene and it really just hits home.
We are out of time.
We could probably talk for the next three days, but we'll stop it here.
Tell us where to find you all online so we can link up with your work.
We're at www.thereap.org.
We're on all the socials at reap underscore LGBTQ.
You can find us there.
I also just appreciate that the Reap as a website is pretty badass.
I'm just, you know, that's just, it's just really, you know.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I might get a tattoo or something.
Okay.
Appreciate you all.
I'm going to hold you to that.
Yes.
Thank you so much for being here.
Let's talk again soon and just appreciate all you do.
