Policy, Persuasion & the PC(USA)

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Good morning everyone. It is, do not be alarmed. We're not starting late. It is officially 9:30, so says Apple. Good morning. I'm Thais Carter. I'm a member of the Adult Ed committee and it is my great joy to welcome you back to adult education on this rainy, crazy morning that doesn't feel like fall or summer. It feels like some weird flash flood first thing in the morning. Morning. But you are here and we here and Isabella Shutt is here. So I'm going to introduce Isabella. And you know, there is a bio that is here and this is not an appropriate bio for Isabella, who is dramatically more impressive than this bio would suggest. One of the things that we're so excited about for the series that is kicking off for Adult Ed this fall, Ways of Seeing is that we are engaging lots of different perspectives that often aren't heard as much in Adult Ed or maybe only heard when we're kind of doing intergenerational Sundays in the later winter. And so we are so excited to kick off with some newer voices, some younger voices who are helping us understand our faith and our faith community ways. And so Isabella, who in addition to being in her final year at Princeton Theological Seminary, is somebody who has really been probably familiar to folks in this church for quite some time. She did her undergraduate work at the university. She was very involved in Princeton Presbyterians, including being one of the student representatives on the board. And Isabella brings that kind of enthusiasm and passion and leadership to everything she does. The seminary is already vastly improved for her participation even in these first couple of years. And I am so excited in all the things that she is going to be up to this coming year. But one of the things that she had the opportunity to do this summer is work in the Office of Public Witness. And that is part of what she is going to be sharing with us today. Today. So a warm welcome for Isabella [00:02:04] Speaker B: and [00:02:04] Speaker A: before we turn things over, join me for a brief word of prayer. Creator God, we are both grateful for the rain and aware of the ways in which this kind of rain speaks to a groaning that is true for this moment in time. And so God, we just pray that your will would be done, God, that you would help us to have peace about what is happening, but also feel deep sense of call towards our ways to help make your kingdom come. God, I pray that you would help our time together in adult education to be a way to hear you in new ways through others around us. That God, the gift of this community would be the opportunity to ask questions together, to learn together and to grow together, and that we have the joy of starting that work anew this season, this morning, in your name we pray. Amen. [00:02:56] Speaker C: Amen. Thank you so much, Thais. It is a pleasure to help you all kick off this season of adult education. I will add to the introduction that I am returning as a pastoral intern here at Nassau Presbyterian Church, so you will see me in Adult Ed almost every Sunday. And additionally, if there are things from this conversation that you would like to talk about, chat one on one or things going on in your own life, please reach out to me. I would love to have a conversation with you. So today our presentation is Policy, Persuasion and the PC usa. We're going to start with a quote, let's see, from a document adopted by the General assembly of the PC USA in 1988. It is a limitation and denial of faith not to seek its expression in both a personal and a public manner in such ways as will not only influence but transform the social order. Faith demands engagement in the secular order and involvement in the political realm. You will see. These are three folks, three summer fellows that I got to work with in 2025. This is the Director of Advocacy and Witness for the PCUSA beside our Senator, Cory Booker. I want to start here because oftentimes conversations around faith and politics get stuck in the question of should faith be involved in politics at all? And we spend so much time arguing why it should that we don't get into how it should be done. So today we're using this as a baseline. I would love to have a discussion with you about whether or not this is appropriate theology. But after today's conversation. But let's take it as given for this morning. I want to start with a bit of reflection from you all. We saw in this call that it is a denial of faith, not to seek its expression in ways that transform the social order. That's a heavy call. So my question is, where and how do you see the church transforming the social order? I put church in quotation marks here because I want you to think broadly. This could be your church, Nassau Presbyterian. This could be the pcusa. This could be Christians and the world generally. Take a little bit of time to think about it to yourself and then turn to your partner and let's see what folks think. I'll tell you when there's like 30, you know, I'll give you a little bit of time to think. Alrighty, have at it. [00:06:05] Speaker B: Never correct. [00:06:41] Speaker C: Alrighty, wrap up your sentence. Alrighty, I'm gonna call us back. I'd like for a few people, if you feel comfortable to share your answers, I have the microphone so that everyone can hear. So please. Anybody want to volunteer observations? [00:07:10] Speaker D: Sure, yeah. I would start with maybe some of the micro points and my partner will give some of the maybe bigger picture ones. But really at the smallest level, I think about the impact on my kids and the social groups they form here in the youth ministry that really carry over into their school relationships, which has meant a lot to my daughter in particular, who has trouble making friends. So having that community that she builds here that kind of carries over into the public school has been great. And then we just started thinking about all the ways that the church, again, on a very micro level, is. We brought a bunch of donations this morning for Arm in ARM that gives food to the community constantly. We've got speakers coming up here talking about all the different ways that we're doing community Reach out. We had a speaker talk about a program where they're making loans to felons to start businesses from the Trenton area, which is an extraordinary thing because again, that really does change the social order. Because if you think about somebody with a criminal record, there's so many strikes against them. And so giving them the tools they need to advance. And then. Do you want to. [00:08:30] Speaker E: So I began at the top of the level. So my first reaction was the fact that we have an office in Washington to focus on public policy is clearly a way of doing that. Well, that actually wasn't the first thing I thought of. The first thing I thought of was if I were answering this question in the 60s, I would have a thousand things to say about the civil rights movement. That's not as clear today as it was in the midst of that. But I think the office in Washington is clearly an established way that the denomination keeps in touch with public policy and ways to influence and change how we live. [00:09:17] Speaker C: What a great segue. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you both worked on these. You both saw the world through these different scales. And I think that's one of the things that is so powerful about church, is that it is forming us in so many ways and then it is also organizing us and activating us to go sort of this distinction between the world and the church doesn't truly exist because we exist in both. Right. And so we're constantly bringing in and out ideas. And so, yes, using this office as a jumping off point. What I am going to share with you all today comes from two different summers, a tale of two summers, if you will. So in the summer of 2025, I worked as a summer fellow at the Office of Public Witness, which is this office that Carol is mentioning. And I worked on domestic policy for the Presbyterian Church. And I'm going to tell you more about what this office does. That's part of the reason I'm here. But I wanted to start by showing you these lovely faces that I'm standing next to. So this is from this past summer, summer of 2026. These are all the summer fellows. We had 15 young adults that chose to spend their summer working at the office for the Presbyterian Church generally in advocacy. And I was the seminarian, which was this in between. A little bit more than a fellow, but not staff. So that's a fun perspective to have. And they are all so wonderful and all brought their own different talents and gifts. This is us in front of the Supreme Court. This QR code goes to a report that one of the fellows wrote up where they asked the summer fellows what they learned. And so you can scan it now, or if you would like the report, I can send it to you via email. Just come see me afterwards. It's a lot of colored copies, so I wasn't sure how many we should print out. Yes. Okay. So what is this office? How does it work? How does the Presbyterian Church speak to the federal government? We first need to start with, how does the Presbyterian Church decide what we believe about politics generally? And so this is Isabella's quickhand of how the Presbyterian Church works. So we have the congregation, that's you all. We have session. We have some session members in here today. These are representatives from the congregation that make decisions such as, you know, should we have adult education? That's a big one. And then sessions send representatives to the presbytery. So this would be. We are in Coastlands Presbytery, which is sort of central New Jersey. Then they send representatives to the Synod. And to be completely honest with you, the Synod does very little but move money. Again, this is my perspective. Okay, I've got to be able to speak bluntly with you all. And then the General assembly is the national church. The General assembly meets every two years. Representatives from all the presbyteries come. They have delegates, and they vote on questions such as, what should the Presbyterian Church say about executive overreach? Should the Presbyterian Church have a position on war in the Middle East? They vote. And then whatever they decide, they send to what is called Presbyterian Life and Witness. If you are used to thinking about the United States government, I think it's helpful to think of the General assembly as the legislative branch, and Presbyterian Life and Witness is the executive. They execute whatever decisions are made at the General Assembly. If you're interested in learning more about the General assembly and how these fun conversations go, Rachel Halbo will be joining us in just a couple weeks, and I hope that you will join us for her adult education. These little dotted lines here are to show that Presbyterian Life and Witness, then this national staff, works with presbyteries, citades and bodies of the General assembly in the execution. So there's constantly this feedback going back and forth. And something you should know about Presbyterian Life and Witness is that that term did not exist except for like a year and a half ago. So there used to be two offices that did this work. Office of General assembly and Presbyterian Mission Agency. And then we went through this big thing called Unification, and Dave got a few more gray hairs because he also worked on that. And so one of the cool things that happened is I existed in one office in summer of 2025, and then in summer of 2026, there was a completely different organizational structure that I was plugged into. So I got to see this really interesting transition. That's part of what I want to talk to you all about today. Are there any questions about this process before we move on? And you can ask questions later, too, obviously. [00:14:35] Speaker A: Nope. [00:14:35] Speaker C: Okay. All righty. [00:14:38] Speaker D: How frequently are these people meeting to make these decisions? [00:14:41] Speaker C: Yes. Okay. So General assembly meets every other year. Every two years. The presbytery meets once a month. Eight times a year. Thank you. Almost once a month. Thank you. And then the session. It depends on the congregation. So some sessions meet like four times a year, some meet once a month. Depends on how much business there is to do. [00:15:04] Speaker F: Thank you. [00:15:05] Speaker C: At Nassau, it's 10 times a year. [00:15:08] Speaker F: Yes. [00:15:08] Speaker D: And then that box all the way to the right. Presbyterian Life and Witness. Is that their certain calendar for when they meet or their. [00:15:14] Speaker C: So that is a standing body of staff. So they're full time employees. [00:15:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:15:20] Speaker C: So they have certain touch points with the different committees on the General assembly, but they. Yeah, they're working all the time. Louisville, Kentucky, but a lot of their work has moved to be hybrid. So they have folks situated all over the country now. Yes. Well, and we still have. So the Office of Public Witness still has an office in D.C. in the United Methodist building, because the United Methodist women were very smart and bought the property, but before anybody else. So we are right next to the Supreme Court. We are the only non, non governmental building on the National Mall. [00:16:03] Speaker F: Yes. [00:16:04] Speaker C: What's happening. I'm sorry, I didn't hear. Okay, next. Let's see. You're good. I thought someone was asking a question. No, you're totally fine. Okay, so now we have advocacy and witness. When I worked in 2025, we had two offices, the office of Public Witness and the Presbyterian Mission at the United States. The Office of Public Witness did domestic policy, international policy, peacemaking, and young adult engagement. Peacemaking used to be its own office. It collapsed into the Office of Public Witness. Each of these dots represents one person. There is one staff member to handle all domestic policy. There's one staff member to do all international policy, one for peacemaking, one for young adult engagement. The Presbyterian Mission at the United nations has an office in New York City and works on maintaining relationships with churches overseas to influence foreign policy, not just in the United States, but also working together across borders. Then in the year 2026, when I worked and it became Presbyterian Life and Witness, Advocacy and Witness expanded. Now the immigration office, which used to exist in a different area, was under this larger umbrella. Faith based investing and shareholder engagement also moved into the umbrella. And gender, racial, and intercultural justice also moved in. Immigration is one staff member. Faith Based investing and shareholder engagement is 2. Gender, racial, and intercultural justice is another one. So it looks like there's a lot of people, but when you count it up, it's kind of a lot to handle. So one of the challenges that we are currently seeing, one of the opportunities as well, is how do these folks who used to engage in an organization that was built very differently work together? So, for example, we have one person who's used to handling all of domestic policy. Immigration, a domestic policy. Those two folks have worked very closely together. Now, peacemaking, okay, Gun violence prevention is under the peacemaking. That's a domestic policy. Also, the end of wars generally is under peacemaking. That would be international, also relevant to the United Nations. One of the reasons that this looks very piecemeal is because that's how it originated. So what happens is someone has a really great idea at a presbytery level and says, immigration is the policy issue of today. We need to hire a staff person or create an office to do immigration advocacy. It gets sent up the chain. Most people at General assembly say, absolutely, yes, that is so smart. We should do that. So now there is a mandate from the General assembly that we have this separate office. When the restructuring happened, they had to take into account all of those mandates. So they can't just say, well, that's silly. Let's just take the staff member who's doing immigration put them in office of Public Witness. Right. So all of these, this is their way of trying to collapse and make things more fluid. But there's a question that remains. What happens when you build an organization by changing something every two years and not necessarily going to the back, going back to the beginning and figuring out how it all fits together. Unification was an opportunity to consider that. And it's, I think one of the. A good step to demonstrate that it is at least somewhat bit effective is that these folks are now operating under one director, have weekly conversations with one another. Any questions about this? [00:20:02] Speaker B: Yes, I don't hear anything about ecumenicism. [00:20:07] Speaker C: Ecumenicism, yes. [00:20:11] Speaker B: In particular amongst the Reformed and other Presbyterian congregations because one would think that they would have similar theological perspectives, yet in reality they're very different. And it would seem to me that trying to at least unite that part of Christianity together would be useful, if not including other denominations as well. [00:20:33] Speaker C: Yes, thank you so much for that question. So the question of ecumenical engagement. So the honest answer is that all of these folks, but especially OPW and pmun, all of their work happens in partnership with other denominations. They tend to be the other mainline denominations. So that's represented in part by the fact that OPW is situated within the United Methodist Building. But so think about umc, elca. We have Catholic siblings that we work with as well. I'm just naming a few. I'm not naming all of them. But yes, that is going to come up later. However, the structural question that remains is we have a new category of worker at the Presbyterian Life of Witness, Life and Witness, which is called a gel, and it's an ecumenical liaison. And this took the place of. Oh, I'm going to need help with a name here, Lynn. Mission co workers. This took the place of mission coworkers. So you all might be aware that they shut down the Mission Co Working program or reimagined it. There was a big. A lot of people are very worried about that. It happened to coincide with the shutdown of usaid. So the United States was withdrawing as a government and the PCUSA was withdrawing as a church. So that was very harmful for our relationships. What is taking the place of that are these ecumenical liaisons. And we have domestic ecumenical liaisons. And so their responsibility is to build these relationships between presbyteries and say a district for the umc. And one of the things that they really want to engage in is advocacy. So now we have this question. We have a whole advocacy and Witness office and no structure to connect them to the jails. So the question is, what will that look like? Did that answer your question? A little bit. I'm going to get more into like what ecumenicism looks like in the day to day work. Yeah. Okay. In terms of the Reformed tradition, that's a great question. I don't know of us working with the PCA for example, or eco. Those are the two Presbyterian churches that [00:22:51] Speaker B: reform and Christian Reform. [00:22:54] Speaker C: Yeah, they're not one of our major partners. Also, much smaller churches is another thing to consider. Like their apparatus is really just much smaller because they have way fewer members than we do. Alrighty, next. Okay, so what does the day to day work actually look like? One of the major pieces of the work of the advocacy and witness offices is education and mobilization. So we create a lot of resources. We have, for example, the Holy Discontentment Guide which goes through why and how you can do advocacy as a member of the pcusa, as a leader, as a congregation. This guide was redesigned by members of the Summer Fellowship in 2025. So it is brand new, looks fresh, has, for example, doesn't call X, Twitter, you know, some, some of those little updates that needed to happen. These are some things that I worked on this summer. So we have, for example, I created a guide on how to do August recess advocacy and why it's important to take advantage of August in particular because your members are returning back to their home district. We have the Presbyterian Voter Issues Guide which outlines six priorities that the PCUSA would recommend you consider as you are weighing your candidates. Another fellow worked on an info sheet on the farm bill. So what I'm trying to show you with this is that there's sort of three things that we need to teach people if this is one of our major priorities. One is why we do advocacy at all. That's partially in Holy Discontentment. Another is what policies require advocacy, what's happening at the national level, trying to cut through the information echo chambers. And the third is how so this goes to our August recess advocacy. Now I have a question to ask you. How many of you had heard of any of these resources before this morning? Andrew. Great. And I point this out because I don't know if any of you wrote senior theses in undergrad, but there's this feeling when you write a senior thesis of like, I've poured all my heart and soul into this and now it's going to sit on a shelf forever and nobody's going to read it. And sometimes doing work at the PCUSA can feel a lot like that. Of like. I did a lot of hard work. I spent a lot of time trying to make sure people could understand this stuff. The question is, how are they ever going to know that it exists? [00:25:35] Speaker D: I read your thesis, [00:25:39] Speaker C: so what you should know is one person will read your thesis and another and one person will read this work that you've done. So one of my goals today is to show you all how to find these resources, but also to sit with the reality that communications is a major part of advocacy and organizing. If a tree falls in the forest but nobody hears a sound, did the tree really fall? If a young adult yells into the void that we should be advocating on something but nobody hears it, does it make a difference? Yes. [00:26:15] Speaker G: I'm sorry, the name of this office is again? The office we're talking about? [00:26:20] Speaker C: Yes. [00:26:20] Speaker G: So the name of it is. I just need the name. [00:26:24] Speaker C: That's a complicated question. [00:26:27] Speaker G: You said it five times. What did you. [00:26:29] Speaker C: Office of Public Witness. Office of Public Witness. [00:26:32] Speaker G: Office of Public Witness. So in conjunction with this question, so does the Office of Public Witness have an Instagram feed? [00:26:41] Speaker C: We do. [00:26:42] Speaker G: Do you have a TikTok feed? [00:26:44] Speaker C: I don't know. [00:26:45] Speaker G: But are you present on Tumblr? [00:26:47] Speaker C: No. [00:26:49] Speaker G: Are you present on Facebook? [00:26:50] Speaker C: Yes. Though I will say one thing to consider is that the average age of this room would indicate that we should not have a TikTok feed because we would be wasting our time making content that the older members of our congregation would not see. [00:27:04] Speaker G: C. But that's crazy. [00:27:06] Speaker C: That's fine. [00:27:08] Speaker A: Ned is very active on TikTok, [00:27:14] Speaker C: But let me show you. Yes, I'm going to show you all how to find all of these things. That's part of the presentation. Actually, it's my next slide, so. Thank you, Ned. Maybe if I can find my cursor. Ok, so, so how do you find these resources? Three major ways you can engage with the Office of public witness. 1. Follow us on Instagram. It's not going to be the most engaging content you've ever seen. It's just informational. You can also sign up to receive action alerts. So these are emails every time. We're like, oh my gosh. We need Presbyterians to mobilize around this issue. We need you to call your senators. We. We send you an email that says, please call your senators. We also have Presbyterian Advocacy Hour, which is a monthly conversation with folks, policy experts essentially. So again, you could scan the QR code or I'll show you how to find it. Bloop. Maybe maybe. See what we're doing here is we're proving that generational stereotypes are not always accurate. Ned uses TikTok and I can't use technology. Okay. So if you go to pcusa.org and the best way to find anything on this website is to just click this search bar and search what you need. So search up. Office of Public Witness. This is our page. You will see if you click here. Presbyterian Advocacy Hour. This is the advocacy report that I shared with you all at the other QR code. There's a conference coming up. Then we have connect with your lawmakers and advocates. This takes you to our system where you can sign up for the alerts and see what it is that we're currently, currently advocating for. Yes. Questions around this. Yes. [00:29:29] Speaker A: I just wonder if you have a list of the members of Congress who are Presbyterians. [00:29:34] Speaker C: Yes, it's on one of my next slides. You guys are so good at predicting where we're going. [00:29:41] Speaker A: Let me. [00:29:43] Speaker C: So first of all, it's on this page. You can search down, but I'm just gonna. I'm actually gonna go out of order to get to Virginia's question. So one of the other things that we do is direct lobbying. So this is meeting with Congress members and explaining this is where the people in our church are. This is why we believe what we believe. Please vote yes, no, please sponsor this bill, etc. Etc. And one of the ways that we find commonality with these folks is by looking at who the Presbyterian members of Congress are. So in the U.S. house of Representatives, there are 14 Presbyterians. In the U.S. senate, there are 11. Eleven. That is a massive overrepresentation of Presbyterians. Eleven out of a hundred, that's 11%. There's. I'm about to show you. One percent of the U.S. population is Presbyterian. I don't know how this happened. Actually, I have a lot of theories on how it happened, but we don't need to get into that. One of those 11 is our senator Andy Kim. This is Senator Andy Kim giving a statement on the conditions in one of the ICE detention facilities in New Jersey and calling for the humane treatment of our neighbors. That's where that screen grab is from. I create little leave behinds like this. Presbyterians believe in true reconciliation, not sinful spending. So I turn on the phrase of a reconciliation package and I leave it with their office and then their staff have a really fun time reading it and going, wow, these Christians are a little wild. And I only know this because my friends are staff in the offices. But often this direct Lobbying happens in ecumenical interfaith conversation. So every Wednesday, all of the staff of all of these different interfaith offices that all exist in Washington, D.C. to do the same thing, meet over zoom. To talk strategy, to focus on various. Yeah, to talk strategy, to organize things like walking through the capital. We did a vigil for those lives that would be lost due to SNAP funding and Medicare and, sorry, ACA subsidy cuts. And that is only possible because we have those relationships maintained. This is actually a very small portion of the time that is spent of the staff, and that is because it takes a long time to generate the resources that nobody really reads. Also, there's just very few staff. Okay, now let's see. We're going to go backwards. The other thing that takes a long time. Oopsie daisy. Are writing the statements. So the Presbyterian Church comes out against blank. Oftentimes our stated clerk will make a statement saying, the church has already taken a position on this and we need you to listen right now. And maybe it gets news coverage in Christianity Today or Religious News Service, if it's really big, you know, the New York Times, but that doesn't happen anymore. But I think this image of Marianne Budd, who gave the memorable sermon after Donald Trump's inauguration, is a good example of what is considered when we think about prophetic witness. It's speaking directly to power and saying, no, we stand opposite to what you are doing. We stand opposed. Sometimes it's, this is good, we should be doing this. That is a lot less of what is done by prophets. That's true in the Bible as well. Very few prophets are like, great job, Israel. Keep it going. So, yes. Any questions about these three arms? So we have education and mobilization, prophetic witness, direct lobbying. No. Okay, great. Now, I've already previewed a lot of this for you all and I really want to make sure there's time for questions and conversation. So I'm going to try to speed run this part. Can't hear me, sorry. Yes, [00:34:13] Speaker F: Yes, I can. [00:34:14] Speaker C: Wait for the mic. Thank you. [00:34:18] Speaker F: Here we go. So you mentioned earlier that at the time the US Aid shut down, we also pulled out of active aid. What was that about? And why did we do that? Because it feels like advocacy versus action is a weaker position. [00:34:38] Speaker C: Yes, great question. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Part of me worries that somebody from the PCUSA office is gonna be like, we're never hiring Isabella for anything. To be so blunt with you right now. Okay, so this restructuring of mission co workers was in the process for a long time. There was an understanding that the amount of money that we are spending sending mission co workers is unsustainable for the future of the church because of dropping attendance and giving. Additionally, it wasn't just money. There was also conversations around what is the ethical way to engage in missions. Should we as the American church be going overseas and trying to convince, trying to convert people essentially, especially when former like the American empire has already handled a lot of that. And most of the time the places we're going to have a lot of Christians in them already. And so all of this came to a head when mission co workers were sent a letter that said, you have X number of months to pack up and come back to the United States because you will have to reapply if you want to maintain your position. And your position will no longer be rooted in place place, but you will be a liaison that travels sort of around different parts of the world. A lot of people have been very angry about this decision. I this was the discussion at General assembly and I hope you will ask Rachel about it if you are here because she will have a lot of interesting insight. I think that being said, individual churches have maintained their relationship with some of these folks. So I'll give you an example. Carla Cole worked in Costa Rica at a center for theological education. That's one of the only queer, affirming, educational like Spanish speaking, theological education places in the world. She was a mission co worker. She was one of the individuals that was told wrap up. She decided, okay, I think I'm kind of coming to the end anyway. Before she came to the end though, Nassau as well as UN Covenant Presbyterian Church, which is down the street, continue to support her. And now at least UN Covenant gives money to the institution and Nassau does as well. So there's this continued relationship. Churches have really stepped in like individual churches and said, we know that there's a lot of rigmarole going on at the national level. Maybe missions need to be rooted in direct relationship locally. And I think that's an interesting model to look at and I think it seems to be working in some places. But there was a lot of. Because it coincided with Doge and everything else being cut. It felt like for a lot of people that the Presbyterian Church was also choosing efficiency over equity and care, which is a hard pill to swallow. Okay, we're just going to keep getting dark on you. Okay, I'm so sorry. Is it working? So I've showed you all this work that I've been doing that other people have been doing. You didn't know about it before. Now you're like, oh, my gosh, look at how great my church is for doing such good work. But is it working? This series is called Ways of Seeing. So one of the things we're asking you to do is look again. So oftentimes when you have these presentations about advocacy in the Presbyterian Church, you get, here's all the great things we're doing. See you. Bye. My hope is that I will say, here's all the great things we're doing. Look again. What are the barriers that exist? What are the possibilities for new ways of doing things? One thing you need to realize is that among Presbyterians, 49% identify as Republican and 46% identify as Democrats. You also should know that 1% of the U.S. population is Presbyterian. When you try to think about building a social movement and your group is split across ideological lines, I'm using parties here as a proxy for ideology, not because that should always be done, but because of the current moment to have the conversation. You have a split population that disagrees amongst itself and then that population is very tiny. How do you convince a senator that your opinion matters when you can say, I represent 0.5% of the population and actually maybe none in your state? That's a big question. What does this look like? What does effective advocacy look like? Yes, question. [00:39:47] Speaker F: So the 1%. Can you give some sense of the relativity of that to some other denominations and say the Catholic Church or whatever? [00:39:56] Speaker C: Yeah. So here we have the Lutherans are at 2%, the Methodists are at 3, but again, these are the whole family. So even within that 1%, we're counting PCUSA and PCA, those are really the two that they're counting here. Non denominational, within the mainline. Very interesting. 1%, evangelical Protestant, 23%. So especially if you're trying to make an argument, hey, Christians believe X. And it stands in complete opposite to what the 23% of evangelical Christians are saying. It's a hard argument to make. Yes. [00:40:34] Speaker B: So I see that 49 and 48%, if I'm reading that correctly. [00:40:38] Speaker C: Yeah, 49, 46. [00:40:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:40] Speaker B: As a fantastic advantage. Because one of the problems that I see within this country in many different areas, because even in medicine where I work, we don't know how to communicate with one another and we're getting less and less. Well, if these are all Christians, I think there's some commonality amongst them and you have the potential. It's not as if one side or the other holds all the truth, but maybe each side holds part of the truth. And we can begin to work together and communicate together and build around a fundamental common, to my mind, philosophy, theology that actually transcends those differences. [00:41:25] Speaker C: I think that's a great point, and it's one of the places I was hoping we would get to. I will point out, however, one potential issue here is that just as the American public is becoming geographically polarized, our churches are becoming polarized. So it's not that within every Presbyterian church, 49% are Republican, 46 are Democrat. It's that there are 46% of churches where 90% of the people are Democrat, and there are 49% of churches where 90% of THE PEOPLE are Republicans. So the question is, how do you get the people within the different congregations to talk to each other? Which is where I think some really interesting things can happen at, like, the presbytery level, for example, we have these regional structures that are built in to try to get people to talk and work together. But oftentimes we're not seeing advocacy as something that lands there. But that's a great point, and it gets me to, we're coming up on time, so I want to make sure you guys have time to ask questions and say other things. I've kind of pointed these out as we went. So I don't want to just say it's really hard to do advocacy in this environment. I'm sorry, we're not like, it's. I also want you to know that internally, there's a lot of things that are going on that are making it harder. One, the Presbyterian Church has a policy statement on almost everything you could imagine. And it is the responsibility of Presbyterian life and witness to stand for all of them simultaneously at once. General assembly never says you should prioritize this right now. They just say we really care about executive overreach. So can you add on to the environmental policy that you're doing alongside trans healthcare, alongside the war in Gaza, all of this. Can you please talk about executive overreach as well? So this is just a typical interest group problem of the interests of the group are too wide. And so a question is, how do we as a church prioritize? Or do we share the load with other churches? Do we say, okay, pcusa, we're making the environment our thing? Ucc, you've got the gender wealth gap. How do we think about new ways of doing this instead of all of us replicating the effort over and over again? The other problem that exists, and these are not all the problems, obviously, responsibility dispersed. So this is the gel point that I was making. There's also something called the Self Development of People, which is a really wonderful program that gives out grants to organizations that empower folks to improve their own social position. They also want to do advocacy. So there is this question of, like, we all are doing this different programming, everybody's using the same communications team. How do we collaborate together? And then there's just statement fatigue. We make a lot of statements. Eventually, the more statements you make, the less they mean is an unfortunate reality. But we're moving into this. Can we transform these challenges into possibilities? So this question of can we actually take the fact that we have a divided denomination and make that a possibility for making us more effective advocates? This is the question I leave you with. I'm sorry. We went longer than I thought. I will say, because we end at 10:15, right? Yes. Okay. I'm going to show you this one last slide just because I think I want to end on an uplifting note. So this picture are folks who were brought into a Presbyterian church in Minnesota to train on how to resist ICE enforcement in their communities. The church really activated around the explosion of ICE activity in Minnesota. And the church has not stopped that work. It is more dispersed because ICE has not stopped what they're doing. But it is still happening. Another point, this is our former Governor Murphy. This is him after signing a executive order that essentially said he is going to do the most clemencies and pardons that any governor in New Jersey history has done. That was pushed by the faith community. He's in a church when he makes the announcement. That was pushed by folks like those in the Mass Incarceration Task Force at Nassau Presbyterian Church. When we talk about transforming the social order, think about the lives that are changed by no longer being in prison for decades upon decades, but getting brought back into the community. That's transforming one person's social order in a massive way. So there are wins happening. We have to look for them. And we also should look at ways that we can get better. That's my conclusion. Please talk to me over coffee hour. I can tell you all have many thoughts, but they're gonna bust down the door trying to get to the coffee. Thank you all. [00:46:37] Speaker A: Thank you, Isabella. And she's here all year, everybody. I hope that you join us the next two weeks. Elizabeth Steele is going to be talking about learning how to imagine the world, as if. Thanks so much for being here.