Video: Is a Multireligious Democracy Possible? A Conversation with Past Presidents of the AAR

Part of the "Symposium on Religion and American Democracy," held September 27, 2024.

Speakers:

Diana L. Eck, PhD ’76, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Emerita; Fredric Wertham Research Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Amir Hussain, Professor of Theological Studies, Loyola Marymount University

Emilie M. Townes, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Religion and Black Studies, Boston University School of Theology

Moderated by Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies

Full video and transcript below:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Symposium on Religion and American Democracy. Is a Multireligious Democracy Possible? A Conversation with Past Presidents of the American Academy of Religion, September 27, 2024.

MARLA F. FREDERICK: Good morning, everybody. Good morning and welcome. Thank you for joining us today at Harvard Divinity School for the 2024 symposium on religion and American democracy. It truly was wonderful to have you all at convocation on yesterday.

As I said there I am so deeply glad and honored to be here as dean of Harvard Divinity School and to really be a part of this vibrant community. Before we begin, I would like to ask Associate Dean Melissa Wood Bartholomew to offer a land acknowledgment. Melissa?

MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you, Dean Frederick. As we pause to acknowledge and honor our ancestors, those who have gone before us and paved the way, I invite you to focus on your breath and breathe with intention. It is in a spirit of reverence and humility that we acknowledge and honor the Indigenous and African people who were enslaved in this country and enslaved here at Harvard University.

We honor the people who are Indigenous to this land and we share in our Harvard University Native American program's acknowledgments that Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge.

We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people. We know that but for the stolen land and the stolen people and labor this country and this university would not be. Our acknowledgment of the land and people extends beyond our words.

It is expressed through our actions and commitments exemplified by today's symposium. Our actions and commitments are in furtherance of our school's vision of just world, at peace across religious and cultural divides. And this includes our work towards being in the right relationship with the land and the people.

MARLA F. FREDERICK: Thank you, Melissa. Thank you to all of you and everyone here at Harvard Divinity School who worked so hard to make convocation and this symposium an important event for each of us. I hope you feel the care and attention that went into each and every detail.

I also want to thank each of you for making time today to engage in these vital conversations. And I want to acknowledge some special guests. We have several of my fellow past presidents of the American Academy of Religion here with us today.

You will hear from a few of them in just a few moments in a panel moderated by the brilliant woman whom I shared leadership with at the AAR, Professor Mayra Rivera. I also want to appreciate Professor Emeritus Preston Williams, who is with us today.

[LAUGHTER]

He led the AAR as president in 1976, just a few years after he made history as the first African American to be granted tenure at Harvard Divinity School in 1971. He made history here yet again in 1974 when he was appointed as acting dean of the school. And he has continued to shape our understanding of religion and justice with each class taught, each institute launched, and each history lesson shared in conversation. Professor Williams, thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

Our time today will begin with a panel discussing a question that comes up in the work for so many of us who study religion and its intersections with the public life, and that is, what are the possibilities of a multireligious democracy? Professors Mayra Rivera, Diana Eck, Amir Hussain, and Emilie Townes, I so look forward to hearing your thoughts as scholars, teachers, and leaders within the field.

After this panel, we will then hear from colleagues I have worked closely with in my own work around the history and support of historically Black colleges and universities and their importance in the making of American democracy. After lunch, we will have the opportunity to hear from the Honorable Reverend Raphael Warnock.

He is with us today to explore questions regarding the crossroads of religion and democracy, a topic he knows well from his religious leadership and work as a United States senator. Reverend Warnock has also graciously agreed to stay after our discussion for a book signing, and I have more on that a bit later today.

Before I turn the microphone over to Professor Rivera, I want to reiterate my appreciation for each of you. Thank you for being here and for caring about these important issues. I know we are in the midst of yet another unprecedented year, but showing up, asking questions, and imagining a future that is better for all of us is how we tend to our collective hope, and so thank you.

I would now like to invite our panelists for the first session to come up, is a multireligious democracy possible? What are the possibilities of a multireligious democracy?

Whether the murder of seven at a Baptist church in Texas in 1999 or two at a Unitarian Church in Tennessee in 2008, six killed at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012 or nine killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015 or 11 killed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pennsylvania in 2018, our collective conscience has been seared.

We have felt the weight of religious violence in the United States, referendums often on who is perceived as belonging. And at times despite progress that America has made, with the election of John Kennedy as our first Catholic president and Mitt Romney as the first Mormon to lead a major party ticket for president or Bernie Sanders as the first Jewish person to receive an electoral vote for president and numerous state and elected officials representing various religious traditions, our progress towards full inclusion at times feels slow.

With the rise of white Christian nationalism, it feels like the discourse on inclusion is moving backwards as certain pockets of our society work hard to rekindle old hierarchies of religion and race and gender and sexuality and nationality.

Today's panel will help us think about the challenges and possibilities of living into the promise of a multireligious democracy. I am thrilled to introduce to you our moderator for this panel, Professor Mayra Rivera, former president-- each of them former presidents of the American Academy of Religion.

Mayra Rivera is the Andrew W. Mellon professor of Religion and Latinx Studies here at Harvard University. Her work focuses on the intersections of philosophy, religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race, and gender with particular attention to Caribbean postcolonial thought.

Professor Amir Hussain is a professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University, the Jesuit University in Los Angeles. His particular specialization is in the study of Islam, focusing on contemporary Muslim societies in North America.

Professor Diana Eck is a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies emerita, the Frederick Wertham research professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences emerita. Her work has a dual focus on India and America. Her work on India focuses on popular religion, especially temples and places of pilgrimage.

And then finally, Professor Emilie Townes is the Martin Luther King Jr. professor of Religion and Black Studies at Boston University School of Theology. Professor Townes is the recently-- do we call retired-- how do you say that?

EMILIE M. TOWNES: Dean emerita.

[LAUGHTER]

MARLA F. FREDERICK: Dean emerita of the Vanderbilt School of Divinity, where she also served as distinguished professor of Womanist Ethics and Society and university distinguished professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Thank you so much, panelists. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

MAYRA RIVERA: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

I think the way to begin our conversation is to acknowledge how honored I am to be in the company of such wise scholars and leaders and to do so where the words of Dean Frederick still reverberate in this room when we're thinking about and yet we hope as the frame and the challenge for our conversation today.

So I begin with a broad question about what do you see as the greatest strengths and challenges to the making of a multireligious democracy? Any of you.

[LAUGHTER]

DIANA L. ECK: You're just throwing that out there?

MAYRA RIVERA: Uh-huh.

DIANA L. ECK: Well, let's see. I would start with the fact that most complex societies in pre-modern times anyway, were, of course, not democracies. And even more recently, democracy is not something that is easy to pull off when you have multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious societies. And that's why most of those were totalitarian.

It's much easier to have a society that's complex if you are totalitarian. I think of what we now call the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, places like this. But I think the challenge is also how do we deal with the societies we have because nowhere in the world are societies simple these days.

The communications and migration have led to a kind of swirling of traditions and race and cultures in every society. I think that's Emilie.

EMILIE M. TOWNES: Yeah, that's me.

[LAUGHTER]

DIANA L. ECK: All right.

EMILIE M. TOWNES: So sorry, everyone.

DIANA L. ECK: So not only in the United States do we have a multiracial, multireligious, multicultural society, that's true of so many societies in the world today. So how do we take account of where we are? And I think one of the challenges is also a challenge that is posed to us in the academy, which I think of my colleague in India, Ashish Nandy, who is a social scientist in a book called Time Warps.

He says we know so much more about the forces of violence that tear us apart than we do about the networks and communications and practices that bring us together. And why is that? I mean, I guess I would say that's why I started The Pluralism Project because I wanted to know more about those practices and ways of living that bring us together.

So I think that's enough for a launch. Is that OK?

MAYRA RIVERA: Yeah. That sounds great.

AMIR HUSSAIN: Let me start just with a word of thanks to Mayra for inviting me here and for the marvelous convocation yesterday. My only connection to this place is my master was the blessed Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Diana's teacher, after he retired from Harvard, came back to Toronto and that's where I worked with him.

And I think of him when I think of this question because in 1940, as a British Protestant in Toronto, you were part of the majority. He went to India to learn about Islam because at the time there were maybe 5,000 Muslims in all of Canada in 1940. He goes to India, the country in 1940 with the most Muslims. And all of a sudden, he's now in the religious minority. He's now a Christian in India.

And forget about 1940, now, Christians are what? 2%? of the population. And so having that experience of being in a minority setting, I think tells you things because in the minority, you have to know the majority. The majority doesn't have to know about you. And so I think those are the kinds of issues that come up here when we're talking about a multireligious democracy.

What do you do with the rise of Muslims as Muslims working in the system? I'll talk a little bit later about Keith Ellison and use him as an example of things there. But I think that's really important. But it goes back again to Wilfred because of course, he's in India from 1940 to '46, comes back in '48 after the horrors of partition and independence and sees the violence.

And so he sees exactly what happens when religious folks don't get along. And that's always been that danger. What do you do when you have this horrific, horrific violence? In that case, between Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims. What do you do with all the kinds of things that you had talked about with respect to the history of this country? And so I think that becomes really important, minority/majority kinds of settings.

EMILIE M. TOWNES: One of the things and just pick up on something that Diana said, I know we're supposed to be a democracy in this country. I haven't seen it happen yet. And I don't say that to be cute, I say it to be accurate because we have not simply pulled it off as a nation.

And so we don't have a clue in some ways of the sorts of hard work that are very much a part of any democracy. First of all, you have to be educated about who's around you. And we don't do that well. We don't do that well in terms of gender or race or class or sexuality or sexual orientation, and we certainly don't do that around religion.

We create caricatures of folks sometimes within our own religious traditions. So it's one of those things that when I think-- I mean, I went into a sort of brain freeze when I saw this question just in the words, multireligious democracy. It's like, oh my God, how do we do that?

And I think rather than slip into despair and since I try to be a good Baptist girl, we don't do despair, we do hope, we do hope. I think it's really digging in, the challenge is really digging in and opening ourselves up. We have to learn how to listen. And then also here, we have to expose ourselves to more than what we have immediately around us in terms of all the ways that humans and creation show up.

And we have to have I think a huge dose of humility and curiosity, wanting to know what it is that we have been given that I think in some ways we've been squandering. So that's my hope is we can do that. I don't know that we will do it in my lifetime. And that saddens me.

MAYRA RIVERA: And it gives you-- partly from where I work, gives you a very different sense of this democracy to be when you look at it from the perspective of territories, from the perspective of communities that have to struggle to become part of a democratic future, whether they are religious communities or ethnic racial communities many, many times those cross or coincide with each other.

And thinking from our context today, we wrestle with this question of Christian nationalism and the ways in which it shapes how we imagine the United States in the past and in the future, what is the ideal, how does that shape, how we think about the broader global community. So I want to hear from you some of your thoughts about this.

AMIR HUSSAIN: Let me start there because Mayra and I were talking beforehand. I teach in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit university, LA is the largest Catholic archdiocese in America. And my students were all brilliant and also very young and have no sense of history. And so when Mitt Romney--

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah, it's not OK. 9/11 was before they were born, so it's a weird moment there. But when Mitt Romney was running as the first Mormon and the question comes up, can a Mormon be president of the United States? And I just innocently said, well, it wasn't that long ago that the question was, can a Catholic be president? And they had no idea what I was talking about because of course, the mayor at the time, the governor at the time were both Catholic.

And so you have to tell them these stories. And so you look in the work that I do on Islam in America, the rhetoric of the Know Nothing party talking about Catholics could be replaced. Just swap out the word Catholic for Muslim, it's the same, these foreigners who are brown, who don't speak our language, not just a different religion, but false teachers overseas and they're bringing their violence to our shores.

All that kind of stuff is said today about Muslims in the same way it was said about Catholics 200 years ago and not knowing that history. And so I mentioned Keith Ellison. When Keith was elected to Congress, the first Muslim to Congress in Minnesota in 2006 and wants to get sworn in on a Qur'an as the first Muslim, people in this country went mad.

You have to be sworn in on the Bible. And then people have to point out, no, in fact, don't have to be sworn in on the Bible. That would be a religious test in this country. It doesn't have a religious test. You don't have to belong to a religion to hold office.

And then Keith did one of the smartest things I've ever seen politicians do, walks across the Hall of the Library of Congress and checks out Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an and said, OK, what about this Qur'an? And so Denise Spellberg, a decade ago, Denise wrote a great book called Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an that talks about the fact that in 1765, Jefferson has a Qur'an.

Now, he's no lover of Islam. Probably he's not a great lover of Christianity, or at least in his own understanding there. But just the sense when you're about to do the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, when you're about to work on Declaration of Independence, having a comparative perspective helps.

And so for Mr. Jefferson, it really was, oh, let me learn about the others, the Turks and do this kind of thing, including trying to teach himself Arabic, which he did with a bilingual translation of Galen. And I'm like, OK, how many presidents could try to learn the Arabic from the Greek text of Galen?

But all that to say that we have this history but it's being suppressed in some ways. This idea that, oh no, when they were talking about religious freedom, they were really talking about the Baptists and Methodists have the same as the-- no, that's not what Jefferson meant. But I think that's part of the issue is we don't know that history, our own history.

DIANA L. ECK: Well, in the Constitution itself has no mention of God. That surprises our Christian nationalist friends. And that was not simply a lapse. That was deliberate. Actually, the government is not a good arbiter of religion. And more than that, the free exercise and non-establishment of religion, which needs to be underlined again and again and again.

And so it's not surprising that Christians against Christian nationalism, which is a fairly substantial movement, has a lot of allies as well. But I think one needs to also make some distinction between who we are as citizens of a multireligious, multiethnic nation, and who we are as people of faith, if we are people of faith.

So there are plenty of Christians who have attitudes toward Muslims or Hindus or atheists or whatnot that really consign them to the lower levels of. hell, et cetera. And we have to respect that. I mean, we can argue with that as people of faith, but that is part of what they believe.

And so when the Hindus in Houston were outraged that the Southern Baptists had produced a prayer guide to enable Southern Baptists to pray for their Hindu relatives or friends who were lost in the hopeless darkness of Hinduism, Hindus were outraged at that. And they said, somebody should deal with this. How about the attorney general?

And so the Hindus had to be informed that the attorney general had no business dealing with religious attitudes and that if they wanted to deal with that, they were going to have to enter into dialogue with their Southern Baptist friends and explain to them what was a more accurate understanding of their faith, or we as interlocutors could do that as well.

But to make that distinction between who we are as people of faith and how as Christians or Muslims we regard the religious other, that is not the same as how we regard the religious other as citizens of the United States. And that distinction is something that people have trouble with, I would say.

EMILIE M. TOWNES: I think one of the things that troubles me so much about Christian nationalism is that I believe it's a form of blasphemy. To think that you are superior to someone else is not within my understanding of the Christian tradition. We are supposed to all be-- as the language goes, brothers and sisters, and depending on where your Christology is of Christ, but at least of God.

And so one of the things that Christian nationalisms-- and there are varieties of them, do is they claim that they are superior, they are the ones and only they know how to do the Christian thing and everybody else needs to follow them. That doesn't work in a democracy.

And so part of my trouble with them is that they are so certain. I find it a kind of arrogance, actually. That is deadly because there are just enough folks out there who believe this way that we could end up in a terrible place in this country not that long from now, like November 5th.

So I think that we have to be really clear that Christian nationalism is-- and it's not going to go away, it's been loosed, so it's not going to go away. But here's where education and actually learning about your faith, being aware of the different ways that faith traditions operate, even internal to themselves becomes very, very important for me.

MAYRA RIVERA: And you all have touched on these elements of the necessity of deeper education, both in one's own tradition and other traditions and also in the United States history of what are the precedents that exist and how those have been threatened at different moments.

And with that, I'm wondering if you want to talk about how these questions, either the question of a multireligious democracy or the question of Christian nationalism have inflected your own work as scholars.

EMILIE M. TOWNES: Well, as an ethicist, it's just grist for my mill and a Christian social ethicist, which means I'm looking at movements and large questions and how people fit in them and how they create them and how they try to eradicate them.

And so the ways in which this emerges is it expands and forces me to expand my vision of what I need to be worried about if I say also in top of being a Christian social ethicist, I'm a womanist, which means I'm looking at race, gender, class, sexuality, sexual orientation, militarism, ageism, and a whole bunch of other things in my work.

But it's not enough. It's not enough anymore. And so I think it encourages me to do crazy things like accept a King chair. I don't know how many women are there in a King chair in the country, but I would wager I might be the only one. But for me, it became a place or a chance to really not be so comfortable in my scholarship anymore and to continue to grow and push myself.

DIANA L. ECK: I would say, for me, the field that I am in you might say was at one time called The History of Religions. Well, at least one of the things that Wilfred Cantwell Smith and others have taught me is that history of religions isn't over, it's still happening and it has been.

It has been changing. It has been more like the history of a river or something like that. You can't actually fix it. It's not like a box of doctrines that you pass from hand to hand down through the ages. And it's changed in particular ways.

In our own times, I might say the last few centuries, religious traditions have changed as they have encountered-- I think of my own tradition Christianity is the rise of the social sciences, psychology, political science, a clearer understanding of ourselves and of others as nations and peoples.

And certainly history of religions has changed through the women's voices that have now become-- maybe not enough, but very much part of the history and interpretation of religion, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual people also. And so this is something very dynamic.

And they also changed in encounter with one another. So part of the dynamism of the historical study of religion is to recognize that no tradition has been fixed somewhere. And when they end up not changing, they pretty much die. They run off into little tributaries in the desert and that's it.

And we've seen through the history of traditions that that happens. I think, here, David Hempton sitting out there, our scholar of Methodism. And Methodism was itself a kind of dynamic movement and continues to be.

I mean, it's just like practically the day before yesterday that the Methodist general conference decided that they were not going to put on trial gay and lesbian people who wanted to be in the ministry that that was an argument that was over for them. And yes, indeed, this was an important change. It meant that some others went off in their direction, but, yeah, it happens. It goes on happening.

AMIR HUSSAIN: For me, again, it's that historical moment. So when President Obama in 2009 went to Cairo and gave an address at Cairo University talking about the history of America and Islam and talked about that history, I thought, oh, I bet most Americans don't know this history. And you wanted to think, OK, well, I should write something about this and then you get pulled off in other directions.

2016 when then candidate Donald Trump says Islam hates us and Muslims haven't contributed anything to America. I'm like, OK, I got to do that book about what are the contributions, what are the things here. And again, it goes back to that history.

I was a kid watching television when I learned that some of the African slaves that were brought over to America were Muslim. That's LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte. And I was like, wait, Kunta Kinte was a Muslim, that there were Muslim slaves? Well, of course, there were Muslim slaves because Islam has been in West Africa for centuries before the slave trade.

But you don't think about that kind of history and the kind of work there and I think that undercurrent of what has been the kinds of contributions. And it's no surprise that the first two Muslims in Congress, Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, both African American Muslims, at least a quarter of us, and I say that as someone who also is an American Muslim, are African American. And you look at that kind of-- I'm looking at Emilie, that complicated history of what it means to be an American when you're an African American.

DIANA L. ECK: Well, and the other thing I think in terms of this kind of dynamism is that as people we are more complex. I mean, think of Kamala Harris, for example. I mean, people now they're, oh, yes I mean, Jamaican father and a South Asian Hindu mother. That's not so unusual when you look at the number of multiracial, multireligious people and families in the United States.

We are gradually becoming a mixed people. I think it was somewhere in the '90s I saved it. I think in one of my endless paper files, having lived in the age of paper far too much. But it was a cover of Time magazine that tried to project what a sort of average American might look like 100 years hence. And it was this attempt to see how our mixed race backgrounds might actually just look like if we project that into the future.

MAYRA RIVERA: And yet we see also this attempt to mobilize negative categories to name people. So there's also a dynamism in the ways in which people are characterized. We see it in the political discourses.

DIANA L. ECK: And easier to mobilize people if one can see them as a block. And of course, that is true.

MAYRA RIVERA: And use even discourses, scripts that have been used for one group mobilize it for a different group at different points in history, which leads me to the question of as scholars we often say religion and race constitute each other. And I wonder how you understand that? Why is that important for us? And how does it inflect the ways to think about democracy in the United States?

AMIR HUSSAIN: For the Muslim community-- let me start right there, it's really interesting because you have this multiethnic community. A quarter of us American Muslims are African American, a third of us are South Asian people like me, from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. A third are Middle Eastern. But where I live in Los Angeles, Middle Eastern could mean Iranian more than it means Arab or Turkish where that comes in.

And so according to the Pew forum, the two most ethnically diverse religious communities in America are Seventh-Day Adventists and Muslims. And so that sense of, what do you do? Then you couple that. And I come from a long line of poor people. So my default value is always class. And that's a problem.

Well, in America, I don't think we talk enough about class, but sometimes it's more than class. It's race, it's gender, sexuality, whatever. And American Muslims have this really interesting distribution. 40% of us live below the poverty level, make less than $30,000 a year. 25% of us make more than $150,000 a year. You've got Muslims in the 1% is engineers and doctors.

There's a Muslim guy, Shahid Khan, who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars. And when you're an NFL owner, you're the quaint 0.1%. And so the Muslim could be the billionaire owner of a football team or an unhoused woman in Los Angeles. And so you get all these complications. I think Diana's work is so beautiful on that is of the internal diversity within a community.

And Muslims don't vote as a block or do that. I mean, it surprises people when you tell them that up until the 2000 election, American Muslims voted Republican more than they voted Democrat. After the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, they switched over. But you've got all these interesting things happening now, people trying to engage their political power and say, no, we're here and we matter, too. But who we are is very, very diverse.

EMILIE M. TOWNES: There's a stereotype that has a little bit of truth to it that most Black folks are Baptists, followed closely by the Methodists. And saying that means almost nothing because of the different forms of those two denominations. And it leaves out the folks who are increasingly turning to what we call Indigenous religions like Santeria, Macumba, and a few others.

And it also doesn't play well with the folks who have abandoned the formal church or the organized church because of all the ways that we seem to shoot ourselves in the foot around diversity and actually living the faith we say we believe in. And so there's a lot of shifting and movement going on and also the rise of what I sometimes call Earth religions that are now getting somewhat of a Black twist to them.

And it's not an easy thing to talk about Black religion anymore because it's better to say Black religions. And then there's the folks who are Muslim, as Amir is pointing out. And that number is not just the nation. In fact, it's not the Nation of Islam, it's Sunni Muslims. So those things, those fine line distinctions have us living a comfortable picture of who we are not. And I don't think it's serving us well.

MAYRA RIVERA: And we can even notice the ways in which particular groups have been racialized and that affects relationships with the religions that we associate with particular groups. And that goes back to Christians' relation to Muslims and to Jews and how that framed some of the ways in which Indigenous peoples in the Americas were characterized.

And we can think about the ways in which discourses about Catholics have been instrumental in immigration discussions, particularly in relation to Latinos. The fact that they are Catholic becomes the element that is mobilized to exclude them.

DIANA L. ECK: Could I just say a little bit about the people who are described as Asian American?

MAYRA RIVERA: Yes.

DIANA L. ECK: Because I did for a few years teach a seminar on Asian American religion, specifically using that term. And of course, I had lots of students, some of whom were from a Chinese background, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and others as well.

And of course, the religious-- I mean, the very term, Asian, covers many, many things. And many of these people don't want to be all lumped in together and certainly covers a lot of religious traditions. And what we know from the history that's been written by one of our own graduates, Duncan Williams, about the internment, is that the internment of Japanese Americans during what became the Asian front of World War II was particularly oriented toward the Buddhists.

And they didn't round up the Christian Japanese who had their own churches and that sort of thing. To that extent, there was sort of a trust in these Christian Japanese that they weren't going to be spies, whereas the Buddhists, who were also internally diverse, were put in America's version of concentration camps. And we haven't really adequately faced that chapter of American history.

And when the so-called Muslim ban was announced by President Trump, it was Japanese Americans, many of whom the Japanese Americans Citizens League who stepped up and said, no way. This is what we have seen in the past and you don't categorize people and decide you're going to round them up according to their race.

MAYRA RIVERA: Yes, absolutely. We are gathering on this really historic occasion celebrating that Harvard Divinity School has appointed the first woman in 207 years. Sit with that. Two centuries. And we are honored to have in our panel Dr. Townes, who was the second woman dean of Vanderbilt University.

And so it is an important occasion to think about how both academic institutions and religious institutions promote or present obstacles to women leadership and what that teaches us also about the broader political landscapes that we are seeing.

[LAUGHTER]

EMILIE M. TOWNES: Well, thank you for that small question.

[LAUGHTER]

DIANA L. ECK: Well, there weren't even women students at Harvard Divinity School until Connie Parvey and a few others. And it wasn't that long ago. I don't have the exact date here, but a few decades ago, the first women students here. And as for professors, well, that wasn't until Margaret Miles in theology was appointed as a professor.

Since by that time, I had been tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. At that time, I was the 20th woman ever to be on that faculty as a full professor. And so taking advantage of this, the Divinity School would waited for quite a long time to appoint its first woman professor, and within about 20 minutes voted me a member of the faculty as well. So now they had two. And I was privileged to be a full professor on two faculties.

But this is the sort of issue, I mean, women's leadership, women's participation. We can all remember the first woman who was elected as a bishop, maybe not in the Episcopal Church. I went to her ordination that was in the Hynes Convention Center downtown. And she had to wear a bulletproof vest-- maybe she didn't, but she was encouraged by security to do that. I mean, we're still in that era.

EMILIE M. TOWNES: Yes.

AMIR HUSSAIN: No. And that history is fascinating. I have many, many sins and many, many vices, but gambling is not one of them mostly because I suck at it.

[LAUGHTER]

I would have lost a lot of money in 2008 betting on who the Democratic candidate would have been because for me it was simple. This is America. It's a racialized country. The Black man, the white woman. Of course, they're going to go with the white lady, forgetting, of course, that she's a lady, and what do you do with that kind of intersection.

And you look at-- in 2016, just after the election, Dave Chappelle, an American Muslim, hosted Saturday Night Live, and he and Chris Rock did a great skit about watching the election and some of the things going on. And what they said was look, over half the electorate is women. If over half the electorate was Black folks, how many Black presidents there'd be? Flavor Flav would be president. It was like a--

[LAUGHTER]

And so you're not blaming folks, but you're saying, yeah, what do we do here given this history, given that Diana, what you're talking about, that being the 20th full professor on that faculty that's in our lifetime. You look at the marvelous achievements and then wonder like, why haven't we kept going? Why aren't we doing those kinds of things?

And I was so fortunate to have Wilfred as a mentor, but on my committee, Jane McAuliffe, and Jane was just extraordinary in terms of the work she did on the Qur'an. I remember once-- it's more for the grad students in the crowd, back in the day before the phones and things. I mean, the cell phones, we had this thing called answering machines.

[LAUGHTER]

As a good grad student on a Friday night about 8 o'clock, I'm doing my work and I'm coming up with something and I figured, oh, I'll leave a message on Jane's answering machine so when she gets into the office on Monday she'll pick it up. And she picks up the phone at 8 o'clock on a Friday in the evening in her office.

And I'm so surprised that she picks up the phone. I said I didn't expect you to pick up the phone. And she said-- I hope she'll forgive me for saying this. I have a husband and three kids, how do you think I get any work done? What do you want? And it was this great kind of moment of all right, that's what it takes. That's the work that needs to be done.

EMILIE M. TOWNES: A pattern that is completely anecdotal, but it seems that it might hold up is that so often women come into leadership when the institution is in trouble, if not dying. And often in the life of churches, particularly in Black churches, many of these women go in and find some sort of reviving of the church. And when it gets to a place of near sustainability, they are no longer the pastor. A man comes in and takes the church on.

That's not an always the thing, but it happens too many times for me to ignore it. And I think the same is true for our academic institutions. This is the first time that I've seen a woman become the dean of a divinity school that's not in some sort of financial trouble. I'm assuming.

[LAUGHTER]

That's my assumption.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm not asking about your budget. But it is maddening because it affects our health, it affects our effectiveness. And often if you're in an academic environment, the faculty don't know what's going on. And so they can't be nearly as supportive as they might be in those cases.

So it takes a toll. It takes a toll. And I say that having loved my 10 years as dean at Vanderbilt. I absolutely loved it. And at 10 years it was enough. I had to stop. But it delights me.

Frankly, I'm tickled purple that Carlos is here. There's so many good things that says for the younger generation of Black women coming through the academy who just might want to do administration. That is possible.

MAYRA RIVERA: And the things we are able to learn about leadership and expand what our images of leadership that we have learned through the years. But also I think some of your comments make me speak to the responsibility of the broader faculty of the school to be attentive to that kind of dynamic and to engage in that responsibility of supporting our amazing leaders.

We're out of time, but please join me in thanking this wonderful panel.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.