Navigating Difference and Discomfort in Organizing: A Critical Conversation with Becca Leviss and Natalie Cherie Campbell

Natalie Cherie Campbell, MTS ‘18, sat down to talk with Becca Leviss, MTS '25, and CRPL in Organizing about her CRPL internship with Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG). MWEG is a cross-partisan, grassroots advocacy organization begun by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Leviss is a member of the Reform Jewish community, and Campbell is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In this segment of their conversation, they discusses what navigating gray space and discomfort in coalition-building means to them.

Becca Leviss: I think institutions are inherently imperfect. Whether they are faith institutions, whether they are democratic institutions, they are not perfect because we are not God. I do not believe God built the American government. I do not believe that God built our current iteration of religious institutions, which reflect our human interpretation of divine mandates, meaning there are going to be errors in translation, both literally and figuratively. This is a very Jewish idea: that the world is inherently broken. I believe that because we are inherently broken, we are inherently building and constantly trying to repair and hold the breakage together. That can be painful to live in. I’m not going to pretend it’s always comfortable. I’m not going to pretend it’s always pleasant. I deeply understand more than ever why people gravitate toward fundamentalism and extremism; it’s so easy. It’s so easy and black and white, and purist and seemingly perfect in ways I don’t think the world is.

Natalie Cherie Campbell: Absolutely. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we frame our mortal state as “fallen,” in that we have both an inherent divinity within us as children of God but also a kind of brokenness, to share your word, from being cut off from the presence of God. Our life or “mortal probation,” is a time for us each to prepare to meet God. We must each wrestle with the difficulty of becoming more like God—turning away from our “natural man” or base tendencies that harm us and others and turning toward our divine nature that blesses us and others. We’re told to be peacemakers and merciful even in the face of persecution and within the context of a complicated, gray, difficult, broken world. It is incredibly demanding and uncomfortable but immeasurably important.

BL: Yes. In some ways, what I saw as the LDS community’s desire to avoid discomfort can be beautiful. Of course, we want to be in relationship with those we disagree with. I want to go to Thanksgiving dinner and feel comfortable and loved together with my family members who might disagree with me politically or religiously. I get the need for comfort. I think in many ways it prioritizes safety, security, familiarity, love, and belonging.

However, I also believe that to be in an actual relationship with each other is also to be a little uncomfortable. To be in a relationship we must step outside of ourselves into this liminal third space, in between each other. What I saw MWEG ultimately doing in teaching their peacemaking methodology and empowering women to be involved in inherently imperfect political systems is teaching them to exist in this ambiguity and in this nuance. It's not neat, it's not pretty, but it's incredibly important. And that, in my mind, is the best type of organizing and the most effective type of organizing and community-building.

While working with MWEG, I found similarities between The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and my own Jewish community. Finding similarities is incredibly helpful for community building. If you want to organize people, you have to connect them in some way. However, I don’t believe that a just world, a peaceful world, or a ‘beloved community,’ to use MWEG’s phrase, means that everyone is exactly the same. Our relationships and position in the world are not black and white, yes or no. Such binaries are where harm happens. As necessary as connection is existing in nuance. Doing so makes better advocates and community members because it is how we hold complexity and each other.

NCC: It has been my experience that binaries and litmus tests are really damaging to prospective allyship. If I can't quite say everything that someone wants me to say, or espouse identical beliefs, I won’t be accepted as an ally. The discomfort of not being completely aligned can cause rifts where solidarity could instead exist. It’s important to navigate faith-informed codes of morality and justice-informed codes of ethics, and respect others trying to do so as well. 

BL: Absolutely. I think about this all the time. We all need to navigate gray space and discomfort in coalition-building. And if faith organizations can do that when they engage with politics, then politics needs to do that when they engage with faith. It needs to go both directions. It can't just be that faith leaders and organizations can only be allowed in the room when they look a certain way, talk a certain way, act a certain way. We must take seriously the work they're doing, even if you don't believe their theology.

NCC: Some ideas and phrases that are frequently used in The Church of Jesus Christ include, “going forth to serve,” “the joy in service,” “lifting where you stand,” “having our efforts magnified as we fulfill our callings”—and I’ll extend that to the universal calling to minister to each other, love God, and love our neighbor. I think these are all important ideas in the work of peacebuilding. I appreciate, however, that the ideas and phrases I’ve found through RPL like courageous hope and “moral imagination” make explicit the fact that this work of peacebuilding takes unyielding courage, creativity, and vulnerability. We must see the plausible and believe in the possible even so; and we must do so together.

BL: Precisely. Thinking toward such a future, makes me think of my own research at the intersection of Black organizing and Jewish organizing. I studied that historically. Now, I look at W.E.B Du Bois and proto-Afrofuturism, and how his writing gives us insight into how he understands antisemitism and anti-Black racism. I also work on Judeo-futurism, which is how we can take frameworks of Afrofuturism and other futurisms and cultivate a Jewish moral imagination and Jewish community. On the surface, these topics don't feel related. But the more I dig into it, the more I think it is all deeply, deeply related to the same questions, “How do we exist in loving relationship with each other? How do we continue to build a just world at peace?” 

Part of the work of futurism, and to have a future orientation and a moral imagination in general, is a vision of what you want to come and a belief that you can build towards it. We need to have the community infrastructure to support that mentality. We need to know that even as we are inching towards some far-off future our community is going to hold, our relationships are going to hold. And that requires the work of just peace, or peacemaking.