Taking Faith Seriously in Organizing and Advocacy: A Deeper Dive with Becca Leviss

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).

In this segment of their conversation, Leviss discusses why taking faith seriously in organizing and advocacy matters and what that looked like in her work with MWEG.

Natalie Cherie Campbell: Summer 2024 you completed an internship focused on organizing and advocacy work with Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) for your Certificate in Religion and Public Life. Can you briefly tell us about MWEG? 

Becca Leviss: Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) is an advocacy organization that is not officially affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but fully sustains, honors, and upholds the Church’s doctrines and leaders.

Their four core attributes are faithful, nonpartisan, peaceful, and proactive. Their vision is “Women of faith building a more peaceful, just, and ethical world.” They have 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.  They currently have four advocacy areas. 1) Advancing Democracy 2) Compassionate immigration reform and refugee advocacy, 3) Environmental advocacy, and 4) Family health and wellbeing.

NCC: How did you see the RPL Method and the work of just peacebuilding playing out in that space?

BL: The organization's target audience is a particular slice of a particular faith—women members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so the application of what we’d call the RPL Method was obviously narrower. But some key aspects are how they held space for internal diversity and internal validity, and how they explicitly would say that they are faith-affirming but not faith-informing. Their approach, “It is not our job as an institution to teach you what to believe. We will share our own personal experiences and how we relate, but it is not our job to prescribe to you,” was quite intentional. They were also deeply considering the role of faith and how faith showed up in their advocacy work, while leaving a lot of space for what faith actually did when it showed up. That, for me, is my understanding of the RPL Method.

NCC: Would it be fair to say that MWEG is trying to form an approach to how one attends to the “gray areas” of faith and advocacy work? That they're trying to navigate how one balances faith-inspired morality and justice-inspired ethics. It doesn't look like lukewarm, spew-it-out-of-your-mouth behavior. It looks like something else. And they’re trying to discern what that looks like.

BL: Yes. That was beautifully said. Faith does not always show up with a nice suit and tie and sits quietly at the table, only speaking when spoken to. So, then our question becomes, “What do we do when faith walks into the conference room dressed in a trash bag, jumps on the table, and starts knocking papers and coffee mugs around? How do we build a space that can hold that and know that that's a real risk and a real potential of what happens when you invite faith in?”

NCC: That’s a great metaphor for one of the foundational assumptions that frame RPL—religion is a powerful force in human experience. Regardless of whether you let faith in the room or shut it out, it’s powerful. You can't neutralize that power; you can understand it and use that knowledge in the work of just peacebuilding.

You come to this work from a professional background of working in pro-democracy advocacy as a Jewish community organizer. What did your experience this summer working explicitly at the intersection of faith-based organizing and advocacy for ethical government teach you about democracy and activism?

BL: I think if the Left is not careful, they are going to engage in the same sort of moral purity as the Right, which will lead to insurmountable amounts of violence and harm that the Left is desperately trying to fix.  Already, we are seeing this dynamic. With that said, I think organizations like MWEG are a solution in many ways. Maybe not the solution, but a solution. But such organizations are notoriously underestimated and shut out by more progressive democracy spaces because of understandable skittishness and hesitancy around engaging proactively with religious organizations. 

I am more frustrated than ever at how political organizations and democracy organizations don’t take faith advocacy organizations seriously or take them seriously only when they are useful for their political purposes. What groups like MWEG are doing is incredibly powerful and necessary and innovative. They are navigating incredible amounts of nuance while grappling with what it means to transfer religious ideals to political realities. They organize and build in a way that prioritizes relationships and community. And if they're not taken seriously from an organizing perspective, and they're only taken seriously from a policy perspective, then I think we’re missing the whole point.