A month before the 2020 election, Auburn Seminary Senior Fellows were featured in a “May You Vote” video. The fellows did not name candidates or political parties, but their social and racial justice message was clear.
Indeed, not only their words but their faces were part of that message: They are a multi-racial multi-denominational group who do more than pay lip service to working together. They live it each day.
For example, in 2017, when Muslim Palestinian rights activist Linda Sarsour was harassed and threatened by far-right activists and some members of the Jewish community, Stosh Cotler, CEO of Bend the Arc Jewish Action, raised more than $10,000 to pay for extra security to protect her. “For years Linda has been a leading voice in our shared interfaith work of building a more just society,” Cotler said. “During this unprecedented time of rising white nationalism,” Cotler added, religious communities should not “be pitted against one another.”
A few months earlier, Sarsour helped organize a crowdfunding campaign to restore two Jewish cemeteries that had been vandalized. Both women are among Auburn’s 24 senior fellows.
The fellowship was created in 2015 by Auburn Seminary. “Auburn was one of the first institutions to really grapple with religious pluralism in the 1990s,” says Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, its president. But by 2010, the discussion was leading progressive people of faith to think about the ultimate goal of multifaith work.
“It’s not primarily to learn about each other’s religious traditions or see how similar we are. But it’s through our differences, and with our differences, to do the work of justice together,” she says.
It is not the first time that Auburn has evolved in its approach to problems of the day. Founded in Auburn, New York as a Presbyterian seminary 200 years ago, Auburn moved to New York City in 1939, after the depression depleted its resources and students. At that point, it changed its focus, ending its training of ministers and switching its mission to continuing education and research. Auburn programs include individuals who are not aligned with any one church, but have “moral courage” and are “spiritually grounded,” Henderson says. Its media training alone has reached thousands of activists, she adds.
The Auburn Senior Fellows Program marks another pivot for the seminary. In 2015, Auburn created a program to recruit the best and brightest of progressive faith leaders whose race, gender, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation were a microcosm of “a multifaith multiracial democracy, that’s never been, but yet could be,” Henderson says.
The program typically includes both in-person three-day retreats, now held virtually due to the pandemic, and a commitment to nearly constant online engagement with one another and Auburn.
The annual cost of the program is between $300,000 and $400,000, Henderson says. Major funders have included the Henry Luce Foundation and the Righteous Persons Foundation.
Auburn looked for very specific criteria when recruiting its fellows. The program wanted faith leaders, with some media visibility, and “ambitions to have a larger public voice, beyond the walls of a congregation or an organization and that they had the ability to achieve that,” Henderson says.
Since the fellowship was founded, the program has developed deep relationships among people of diverse races, religious affiliations, and lifestyles. They include nine ministers, a Zen priest, a Jesuit priest, an imam, two bishops, three female rabbis, and even one journalist.
They’ve written books, recorded Gospel albums, given TED talks, made films, and are active on social media. They’ve marched in demonstrations, written joint op-eds, and made “good trouble,” says Henderson, quoting the late Rep. John Lewis.
In the progressive nonprofit world, several of them are well-known: Rev. William Barber, whose Moral Monday movement and protests at the North Carolina General Assembly in 2013 called attention to the needs of the poor and helped bring about change in his state; Sister Simone Campbell, the Catholic leader of NETWORK, the social justice lobby whose efforts on Capitol Hill ensured the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop.
Others may not be as well-known outside the religious left but are prolific writers, activists for immigration reform, racial justice, and criminal justice reform. Some have also worked internationally.
The goal of the fellowship is not only to foster inter-faith tolerance and understanding but also to create a closely-knit community of people who both share a passion for social justice and can work together to essentially change the world.
Creating that community takes both work and planning and the ability to “fast-fail,” Henderson says with a laugh. Auburn has a long history of developing processes for bringing people together and facilitating substantive discussions. But those approaches have to be continually refined and honed, she says.
Fellows commit to attend retreats and then stay in touch with other fellows virtually. That online exchange of thoughts and ideas is nearly continuous. “It takes time to be a fellow,” Henderson says, adding that fellows must “prioritize” their commitment to building relationships that extend to their daily lives.
Fellows do not always agree with one another on all the issues. But, Henderson says, the point of the fellowship is not to necessarily resolve those differences but to help fellows understand them—and to also understand each faith leader’s obligations to their respective constituencies.
And fellows can offer each other something else—support. “Seasoned leaders can be isolated, and carry unusual responsibilities,” Henderson says, adding that “public faith leaders often receive a lot of resistance, opposition, sometimes death threats. They need support and encouragement.”
Henderson acknowledges that “accessing organized religion” may be more difficult for people, especially for younger generations. But she adds, “that doesn’t mean people don’t have spiritual needs.
“Going at social change through only a political lens, often tied to election cycles, is very thin,” she contends. “It lacks depth and meaning and resilience that can last as long as justice issues need them to last.” Faith leaders will be needed to help the country and the world address “hundreds of years of racism,” and economic inequality and to rebuild the structures that foster it, Henderson says.
Faith, she says, contributes, “moral imagination…the vision of a world that’s possible, a world that we’re working for and building.” Politicians talk through policy, she says. “They don’t necessarily have the moral imagination or vision or the language that can move people from where they are to where they long to be…Faith provides that.” (On November 16, Henderson announced that she was stepping down from her position in 2021, declaring herself “committed to Auburn and to the broader movements to build a multifaith, multiracial democracy.”)
