The Relationship Between Faith, Advocacy, and Peacemaking

Becca Leviss, MTS '25, studies religion, ethics, and politics, with a focus on organizing as part of her Certificate in Religion and Public Life. She completed her CRPL internship with Mormon Women for Ethical Government over summer 2024.

I grew up with the idea that being an activist and an organizer, a community person, is deeply tied to what it means to be Jewish. For me, I could never really separate the two.

It felt like RPL was naming the thing that I have lived and what I've wanted to devote my time here to studying. I came to Divinity School explicitly because I believed that understanding the role of religion would help me build more effective relational infrastructures. “Relational infrastructures” is a fancy way to describe how we exist in relationship to each other, whether that is individual relationships, organizational relationships, community relationships, or movement relationships. Faith and religion have an important role in the brick making and laying of relational infrastructure.

My track within the Certificate in Religion and Public Life is Organizing. Before coming to HDS, I spent four years working at Protect Democracy, an advocacy organization committed holistically to preventing American democracy from authoritarian decline. I started there, fresh out of undergrad, and helped build that organization for over four years. So, when it was time to complete a CRPL internship, I wanted to find a placement at the intersection of faith, advocacy, and organizing.

I don’t think that faith advocacy and faith-based organizing is slapping a Bible quote on something and pretending that it is a policy stance. I think that if you want to make any position valid and legitimate by liturgical standards, you can, if you try hard enough. So, I was not interested in an organization that was saying, “This Bible quote says that there’s a right to life.” Because you can just keep reading and say, “This Bible quote says, there’s a right to choose.” As well as being a false binary, I think this approach cheapens and flattens the role of faith in advocacy work and instrumentalizes it for secular political organizations and secular policies. I didn't want that.

I called up one of my old coworkers, and I said, “I really want to work for an organization that is not weaponizing faith but really gets its power in organizing and advocacy work. Which of these organizations are really thinking about this relationship well?" At the top of his list was Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG). I was incredibly impressed after having several conversations with the executive director. I also recognize that I am not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so when else am I going to get this awesome opportunity to really get to learn, listen, and be curious about not just Latter-day Saint (LDS) culture, but this unique subset of the community. So, my choice was “absolutely.”

Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) is a cross-partisan, grassroots advocacy organization. MWEG’s vision is “Women of faith building a more peaceful, just, and ethical world.” They have a two-part mission: empower women to eschew partisanship and act as well-informed, effective “principled citizens” and come together to collectively advocate for ethical governance. Their four core values are faithful, nonpartisan, peaceful, and proactive. They are very clear that peacemaking is not the same as peacekeeping. MWEG’s peacemaking methodology is very focused on cultivating a community of practice that is courageous and hopeful. I find it to be very similar to RPL’s mission of a ‘just world at peace: language that I think would ring true for a lot of the women at MWEG.

MWEG has four advocacy areas around advancing democracy, immigration and refugees, environment, and family health and wellbeing. Members spoke frankly to me about these issues, on many sides of those issues. I think they're asking important questions, which I found really useful to my own work, research, and advocacy. Primarily, how does a faith-based advocacy organization transfer lofty, beautiful religious ideals into a political reality that is anything but ideal, and is instead pragmatic, complicated, and often morally gray.

Members were talking about this in very amorphous words. My job, as someone who is a little more outside of their community and coming from an academic perspective, was to help them more concretely understand and articulate their ideas by rigorously reflecting upon the relationship between faith, advocacy, and peacemaking. “What does that actually look like? How are you talking about it? Is there more or less consistent understanding across different sectors of the organization? And if there is less consistency, what changes could be made? If there is more consistency, what are some formal structures and tools that we can develop to help create intentional training?”

I spent the better part of six weeks immersing myself in the organization and talking to people, including spending time out in Utah with MWEG members in person. Between Salt Lake City and Provo, I spoke to around 35 members of leadership, volunteers, contractors, folks within MWEG, MWEG-adjacent people through long-form, semi-structured, in-depth interviews. It came out to over 35 hours of transcripts that I then distilled into some key takeaways.

It was so much fun. I love qualitative research because I love talking and listening to people. Inductive research, especially, is interesting because you don't know what you're going to find out. You're not coming in with any hypothesis. You're just letting the people share their stories. I think a lot about the power imbalances between researcher and research subject; oftentimes, the more inductive you can make your research, the more power and agency are given to the participant.

The only hypothesis I went in with was, “there is some connection between your faith, your advocacy, and your peacemaking.” The rest of my approach was, “you all tell me what you're doing, and what it means to you and why.”

I brought three main things to the table at MWEG. I came in with my background in democracy and ethical government. I already knew the language of that work. I had already bought into the idea that you can do highly effective and powerful faith-based advocacy work. No one needed to convince me of that.

I was also comfortable with continually not knowing things and learning. I started working at Protect Democracy when I was 22. There were a lot of incredibly talented, brilliant, experienced people there, so I was constantly in rooms where I knew the least.

I was also coming in very much as an outsider to MWEG. My job was to be as curious and transparent as possible about my situatedness. My job was also genuinely to be as unbiased as possible. People would tell me their stories, and I would trust their words to be valid because it’s their experience. I was blown away by the generosity of these women in giving their time and vulnerable, raw stories of their experiences and their opinions. I was genuinely honored, for lack of a better word, by the grace that they gave me in letting me into small windows of their experience.

I had one person say to me something along the lines of “You're not here automatically hostile to us. You’re not here on a gotcha mission.” And they were right. I wasn't. I was there to ask questions and learn. And my sense is that that is not often how people outside of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints engage with the LDS community. I think that was, for them, really refreshing. I hope I brought some helpful validation from someone who both knows them and doesn't know them. I believe wholeheartedly that what they are doing is something incredibly rare, powerful, and necessary, both in movement building, but also in having a robust, engaged electorate, democratic system, and community.

The internship was an incredible learning opportunity for me because MWEG is grappling with questions that I continue to grapple with in the Jewish community. “Where does politics end and faith begin, and vice versa? How do you maintain the sanctity and importance of tradition and community, and in-group, while at the same time, caring for out-group? When do you prioritize the in-group over the whole? All while considering theological differences. I find it both difficult and reassuring to know, “Oh, it's not just us.”