# Video: Public Courage and the Academy: Beyond the Binaries: Depolarizing our Politics and Bridging Our World June 20, 2024 ![Beyond Binaries Speakers](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/hds2/files/untitled_600_x_400_px_18.png?itok=0Mi46Q7f) At this event, the Rev. Dr. Deborah Johnson explored the theme of depolarizing our politics and bridging our world. She invited us to move beyond societal binaries and to embrace a more inclusive and compassionate future. Rev. Dr. Deborah Johnson (she/her) is a renowned spiritual leader and social justice activist known for her significant contributions to promoting universal spiritual principles and cultural diversity. As the founding minister of Inner Light Ministries, she has dedicated her life to teaching the practical application of Universal Spiritual Principles to all aspects of life. Additionally, she is the founder and president of The Motivational Institute, a consulting firm specializing in cultural diversity, serving a wide range of clients from Fortune 500 companies to community-based organizations. Dr. Johnson is recognized for her exceptional public speaking skills and her ability to bring clarity to complex and emotionally charged issues. Throughout her career, Dr. Johnson has been a prominent figure in the fight for social justice and equality. She played a pivotal role as a co-litigant in two landmark cases in California that set precedents for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the state’s Civil Rights Bill and defeated the challenge to legalize domestic partnerships. Her focus on coalition building, conflict resolution, public policy development, and cultural sensitivity awareness has made her a powerful voice for compassion, equality, and reconciliation. Dr. Johnson holds a visionary perspective of Oneness, transcending creed and doctrine, and is particularly dedicated to bridging the gap between individuals with conservative and progressive ideologies. Public Courage and the Academy is a speaker series that explores the power religion plays in advancing social change. The series will feature nationally recognized leaders whose creative approaches toward a just world at peace have had national and global impact. This series is hosted by the Office of Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School in collaboration with Just Us, A Unity Campus Justice Ministry for change agents and peacemakers. Facilitated by Rev. Dr. Kevin Ross, MRPL ‘23, Senior Minister and CEO of Unity Sacramento. This event took place on February 29, 2024. SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. SPEAKER 2: Public courage and the academy, beyond the binaries, depolarizing our politics and bridging our world. February 29, 2024. TEDDY HICKMAN MAYNARD: Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Teddy Hickman Maynard. I am associate dean for ministry studies here at Harvard Divinity School. I want to welcome you to the public courage and the academy speaker series on behalf of the Office of Ministry Studies and our partners, The Just Us, a campus justice ministry by Unity Ministries. We are so grateful to have you all with us, those who are in the house, as well as all of our friends online. And we just want to make a few announcements at the top. First, we want to acknowledge the land that we are on. We always acknowledge that we stand, and Harvard is situated on land that traditionally was inhabited by the Massachusett people. We honor them, not only in their ancestry, but in their current formation. And if you want to know more about how Harvard is doing reparative work in our relationship to the land and to the native inhabitants of this land, you can search the Harvard University Native American program. We also acknowledge at this time the learning that has happened as a result of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative. We acknowledge that Harvard was built in large measure due to the involvement of its founders in the slave trade. We acknowledge that Harvard itself owned and used slave labor on this campus. We are horrified by that history. We repent of it. And if you want to know about the reparative work that we are doing at Harvard University as a result of this report, you can see the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative online, as well. We also want to acknowledge that we are recording, that those of you who are in the room, we ask that you acknowledge by your presence that you are giving permission for yourself to be a part of this recording, and we are grateful for that, so that we can share this broadly with our online community. With that, I want to introduce you to our facilitator for the day and the mastermind behind this series, our wonderful friend, the Reverend Kevin Ross, who is the senior minister of Unity Sacramento. He is also a 2023 graduate of the Masters in Religion and Public Life program here at Harvard Divinity School. As a part of his work with us, Rev Kev conceived of a curriculum, whereby he could introduce and guide ministers into a way of demonstrating public courage in the face of the times that we are living in, the demand for working across lines of difference that take an enormous amount of skill, but also an enormous amount of courage. And as a part of that curriculum, he has turned that into the speaker series, where he's invited some wonderful people to come and talk with our Harvard community about what this looks like in practice. And so with no further ado, please help me to welcome to the podium Rev Kev, who will introduce today's guest. KEVIN ROSS: Good afternoon, and thank you, everyone, for participating, both in person and online, to all of our online folks. Shout out where you are joining us from in the chat room so that we can know where you are participating from. And thank you for accepting our invitation to be a part of this important lecture series. And thank you for the Office of Ministry Studies and everyone who is making this possible. We're so grateful. And our friends at Unity Boston, who helped us with this fine speaker that we're going to introduce you to today. I'm so thrilled and delighted to introduce you to a colleague, and a friend, and a mentor, and someone who can be a tormentor when I'm not being a good mentee, but a great mentor and a very important voice that's going to help us take a few more steps forward in our dialogue. Reverend Dr. Deborah L. Johnson is the founding minister and president of Inner Light Ministries and Omnifaith Outreach Ministry, dedicated to teaching the practical application of spiritual principles to all of life's circumstances. She is also the founder of The Motivational Institute, an organizational development consulting firm specializing in cultural diversity, serving the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Her clients range from Fortune 500 companies to community-based organizations. She is a dynamic public speaker known for her ability to bring clarity to complex and emotionally charged issues, and we need that big time nowadays. She's a lifelong social justice activist. Reverend Deborah is the successful co-litigant in two landmark cases in California. One set precedent for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the state's civil rights bill. The other defeated the challenge to legalizing domestic partnerships, a voice for compassion, equality, and reconciliation. Her primary focus has been on coalition building, conflict resolution, public policy development, and cultural sensitivity awareness. She holds a vision of oneness beyond creed and doctrine, and feels particularly called to heal the sense of separation between those adhering to conservative and progressive ideologies. Her ground-breaking work has been featured in numerous magazines, radio, and television programs, including Conversations with God through Neale Donald Walsch radio, the Black Filmmaker showcase production of Jumping the Broom, the film God and the Gays, Bridging the Gap on ABC Nightline. And Reverend Deborah is the author of The Sacred Yes and your deepest intent of letters from The Infinite series, as well as Living the Sacred Yes, Affirmations for Actions. She is co-writer of several songs on Singing the Sacred Yes by Valerie Joi. Wherever she goes, her message is always one of possibility, inclusion, and empowerment. And she is not a stranger to Harvard. She's participated in a think tank before at Harvard Law School in warmer weather. And so she's taken one for the team coming back in the winter. Let's welcome to Harvard Divinity school, Reverend Dr. Deborah Johnson, who's going to help us go beyond the binaries today. Thank you. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Thank you, Rev Kev. And I'm so pleased and honored to be here, and I say thank you to Harvard for having the courage and the fortitude to do the very impressive work that you're doing, including this particular series. And shout out to all of you who are listening online right now. I'm going to be talking about beyond the binaries and the depolarizing of our politics and bridging our world. I'm going to be coming at this, primarily from this place of, how do we use spiritual principles to inform our political work, our social justice work? But I want to remind you that the same principles work in absolutely every arena. So anything that you hear me say now, I may be giving it within the context of politics, but what does this mean for your home? What does this mean for your profession? What does this mean for your community? Really take it to heart. The other thing that I want to say is in the inner, so in the outer, the macro, the micro, they are the same. So it's just a matter of degree. So I might be talking about something on a macro sense and then go to a micro sense, but it's all connected. It's all connected. So I want to start off by first off, this quote that comes from one of my books. Get these, literally these spiritual downloads that are in series called Letters from the Infinite. And I want to really anchor our discussion today in this particular observation that it's not differences that cause conflict. It's the polarization around the differences. That polarization itself is the conflict, not the differences. I cannot say that enough. We spend so much time trying to work through each other's differences. However, if the state of awareness that we're in, if the construct that we're using is still one of polarity, it's not going to make any difference. We're going to get through that particular set of quote-unquote diverse issues, but because we have this construct of othering either, or, we're going to wind up in the same situation again. Just think about this for a moment. Just think about it, even in your home life. Let's just say you're in couples counseling or something like that. Before you can actually iron out the differences, something within your heart has to settle a little bit to be open to hearing the other person. You have to de-escalate the polarization to even be willing to deal with the differences. And as long as we are polarized, there's no amount of discussion about the differences that's going to make any difference. What happens to us in life, our experience of life, is not actually the facts. Our experience of life is the narrative. It's how we define the facts. It's what it is that we say that it is. Polarity is a construct, and like any construct, it's a narrative. It's a story. And behind all of these stories are underlying assumptions, quite often assumptions that have never been truly examined. And that's what we're going to be doing here today. I'm not going to be spending a whole lot of time talking about specific differences and how do we get over these specific differences. I want to focus on, what is that underlying narrative that keeps us polarized to begin with? And to put forth an alternative narrative, an alternative one, one that I contend actually gives you not only as good a results, but in my estimation, even more effective results. And to talk a little bit about, what is it that we need to do, what do we need to become in order to actually actualize a new construct, a construct of oneness that goes beyond the polarities? So there's two framings that I want to introduce to you to give us a container in which to have this discussion. One we're going to be starting off with is, how do things actually show up in the manifest world? And then we're going to be talking about how when things do express, they actually don't express so much as polar opposites, but more on a continuum. And what does that mean for how it is that we organize? So there are three layers of manifestation, and I want you to really lock in with me here because I'm going to be going back and forth using this particular model throughout this entire presentation. There are three layers, OK? There is a way in which each is like, one, all others, two, like some others, and three, like none. It is always that way. There's three levels. One, like all others, two, like some others, three, like no other. Let me give you an example. You have music, OK? Music is, say, a generic song, OK? Then there are particular genres. Then there's the individual song. Notice that I've put them here as concentric circles because that's what they are. They are literally subsets of one another. So every individual is going to be within some kind of a genre and then that is going to be in the universal. So this way in which everything is like everything else, I'm going to be referring to as universal. The ways in which everything is like some things, I'm going to be referring to it as diverse, OK? This is the level where we get identities, where we get affiliations, where we get things like culture. At that universal level, that's where we get the wholeness. That's where we get the oneness. At the individual level, that's we have the personal. And that's where we have the unique. They're all playing together. They're all playing together. So throughout this presentation, when you hear me talk about layer one, I'm talking about the universal. When I refer to layer two, I'm talking about that diverse. When we talk about layer three, I'm talking about the individual. Now, there are ways in which we have been going about this thing called intersectionality. And the way that we most often have been looking at intersectionality is we've been looking at layer two. We have been looking at various affiliations, identities, cultures, and we're looking for ways in which those things overlap, where they might have some common ground, they might have some similarities. And I'm not saying don't do this. What I'm saying is that it can't be the end of the story. That we have to expand beyond just intersectionality being looking at level two overlapping diversities, overlapping ways in which our otherness has common ground, and go to yet another way of looking at intersectionality, which is looking at intersectionality from a oneness approach. OK? When we're looking at intersectionality from a oneness approach, what we are doing is we're working at the intersections and the integration of those three layers of manifestation, where we're taking into consideration the universal, we're taking into consideration the diverse, and we're also taking into consideration the universal. That's what we're doing when we're working at this place of the intersectionality. And my contention here is that the only way we will ever truly have any depolarization is if we are working at this intersection, not just the intersection of our differences, but the intersection of our wholeness, our commonality, coupled with our differences and our own individual unique expressions. So let's have some examples of this, how this kind of plays into what it is that we're doing. There are a few things that come to mind. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I'm sure you've probably heard that before. Now, regardless of the fact of we haven't quite lived that out yet, the idea of that is at the universal, OK? It starts off at the universal, that there is something, and an endowment is something that is just given to you. I want you to catch this. This is a spiritual declaration. This is going to be very important as we're talking. It's supersedes civil law. It supersedes legislation. It's saying that there is something that is so inherently fundamental that it just is, and that everything needs to organize around that. Everything needs to organize around that. So it really sets this spiritual declaration, and I contend behind every politic is a spiritual narrative because every politic is dealing with what it considers to be the natural order of things. So what we've done here with this declaration of independence is that we have here, where there's this universal assertion that's taking place, and then it jumps from one right down to level one, to this individual right that each in person has based upon this universal thing that's supposed to be in existence. And we have spent the last 200 and something years debating about level two. We have spent the last couple of hundred years trying to expand what is in that level two. Now, when they first put it out there, it was white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, English-speaking, able-bodied, heterosexual, educated, adult males with property, OK? You had to have all of that to even begin to qualify for equality. Each of those things is a social demographic profile. And we've been one-- and the further away you were from that particular profile, the fewer of those individual rights you were able to express. And most of our approach to civil rights has been trying to eke in, eke in. How can we expand that on race, on gender, on education, on all these different things, so that it wasn't just that particular profile? That is important work that we have to do. But I find that too often, we get stuck in that. We get stuck in the identity politics, and we get all of our attention focused on just trying to expand that. Rev Kev mentioned in my introduction that there are two civil rights cases that I had the privilege of being a co-litigant in that are landmark cases in the state of California. So the first one was back in 1984, which set precedent for the inclusion of sexual orientation into the state's civil rights bill. But the reason why I want to focus on that one first is that that's the way that I often refer to it. But what happened there was much bigger and much greater. We wanted the appellate level, unanimous decision, and it's certified for publication, so it's in the law books. But what the courts ruled, the California Supreme Court refused to hear the case. They let the unanimous appellate court decision stand. But what the writer of the unanimous opinion said was that that list that was in California's civil rights bill, don't discriminate against race, don't discriminate against religion, don't discriminate against sex, that those things, listen, were meant to be illustrative and not exhausted. It was a right to oneness. Some say it was a right to oneness. What they were saying is that, we don't want to keep setting up protected classes. We don't want to have to keep saying, don't discriminate against this and don't discriminate against that. And if it's arbitrary, don't do it. Don't do it because there is something that is bigger than that. There is something, in fact, that is greater than that. I find that so much of the polarization is really oftentimes around this tension, particularly between the level 2 and the level 3. And my contention is that you don't really get to the point of success until your level 2 is also perceived as a level 1. Excuse me, I didn't say that correctly. That most of the tension is between level 1 and level 2. It's between the universal and it's between the diverse. And you don't really get to the point of any kind of lasting progress until your level 2 issue makes it up to the level 1. Black Lives Matter. There are people who are anti Black Lives Matter because what they hear is black lives matter. That's what they hear. They see it as a level 2 diversity issue, where you are affirming that some people matter and maybe nobody else. I think the phrase was written Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. So within the scheme of all of the lives that matter, that includes the black ones, as well. It would be as if the name of the organization was Black Lives Matter and the letter-- and the number 2, like Black Lives matter 2. And it is this tension here between, which of these are we talking about? And as long as you can let anybody polarize and relegate it to just the level 2, you're going to always be up against these stumbling blocks. I remember during the whole marriage equality movement, where it was first being characterized as gay marriage by some people. And then it became characterized as same sex marriage. And there was something about that word sex that was just kind of like sending people over the top. But it was still keeping it in the level 2. And it wasn't until we started to adopt the phrase marriage equality that it opted up to the universal. I can't begin to tell you how important this is. Sometimes, I wish they hadn't called it a civil rights movement because it misses the point, OK? It was a spiritual rights movement because at the universal, it shifts the relationship that we have with each other. The civil rights don't make you equal. The civil rights confirm a pre-existing equality. I want to say that again. The civil rights, affirm, and they take away all of the impediments to the preexisting right. So even with marriage equality, people were thinking, well, they were suddenly given the right to marry. That's not true. What the cases said is that fundamental right to marry was in level 1, and it had been denied them because of their level 2. Even in the court case that I was in, it was very interesting, where the courts actually agreed it was a public accommodations discrimination suit, where we were not seated because-- or served. We were seated. They wouldn't serve us because we were both women. And it was very interesting because we were losing at the lower court. And what they said was clearly, that was discrimination. But if it had anything to do with the fact that we were a lesbian couple, they weren't sure if we had any rights anymore. And this is what happens is that there are certain things that should be or that we even understand as being a universal right, but because you fit in this certain diversity category at the level 2, we're going to take that away from you. Or you don't deserve to have that. This interesting way that this polarization happens. And once again, I contend it isn't until you do all three. Nelson Mandela did a beautiful job of all three with the Truth and Reconciliation process. It said, OK, we're going to come here together as a common humanity. We're not going to look over the differences that we have here on race, but what's more, we're going to deal with the individual hurt and pain, too. We're going to unmask it. We're going to take a look at it. And I contend that any great civil rights leader, from Martin Luther King Jr., to Malala, to Elie Wiesel, that they were all coming from this same place of this integration of the three, which also means the inclusion of the so-called oppressor. Just saying that when it finally turns, when it finally turns, it is going to have to take those people who were in the positions of power to be part of the solution. So in your organizing work, do you have a vision that does that? Does your vision include everybody in it? That was the brilliance of King's I Have a Dream speech because he was painting the picture of, this is what it's going to look like when we get ahead. This is what it's going to look like. Just soak that in for a second because if the only picture that you're painting is what it's going to look like when your level group gets everything that it needs, and you're not positioning it within the whole context, then you're probably going to wind up with a lot of struggle. Before I go on to the continuum, I want to just briefly say that our whole governmental system is designed around this same idea of these three layers, where the executive branch represents the universal. There's one army. There's one postal service. It's the whole. The Legislative branch is the diversity. And what the judicial system does is it takes a look at the application at every specific individual level of whatever these laws is that have been put into place. The point that I want to make to you here is that the intersection of those three is your vote. We tend to think that we vote for personalities, but that's not what you're really voting for. What you're voting for is the intersection. What you're voting for is the way in which those three pieces integrate and work together effectively, and that's what your vote does. The same thing is replicated at the federal level, at the state level, and at the local level, as well. So if anybody is thinking about not voting, and you're committing to doing intersectional work, you might want to think again because your vote impacts all of that. You're not voting for personalities. You're voting for policies that are moving in a certain kind of a direction. So I want to go briefly now into this idea of manifestation as a continuum. When things come into being, it's more like a yin and a yang. They're not so much polar opposites as they are places on a continuum, OK? There's a lower vibration and there's a higher vibration. I want to just give you a couple of examples. Darkness, light, they are not opposites. They are different places along a continuum. You can't make darkness. The only way you can make a room dark is to retract the light. The only way you can make the room not be dark is to add in the light. You can fight darkness from here to doomsday, and it won't bring light, OK? Health, illness, they are not opposites. Illness is just when that life force, that chi vibration, is too low. And health is when it increases. It's not a question of just getting rid of illness. It's how, do we pump up the health? It's the same thing, freedom. It's not a question of this either/or. And here's the point that I really want you to catch into. It's that we have to embody it, like King said. He says that love and hate-- it keeps jumping on me here. Sorry. OK. Put it down. Don't touch it. Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that. So what does this mean for our organizing? What does it mean? What it means is that we have to become the thing. If we want to get away from hate, we can't just fight hate. We have to embody more love. You hear that phrase, you have to be the change, it's true. You have to be it first. I say all the time, no slave got on the freedom train. Not a slave. The people who got on the freedom train were people who already knew they were free. What's a free person like me doing up in here enslaved? I'm up here. I'm not even going to get somebody to free me. I'm going to where people can see me and know I am free because they're up in that level 1. They're not just fighting at the layer 2 break out of that. They're saying, I'm up there in the universal. The couples that first got married, and I was amongst them. My former wife and I were one of the first ones, married back in 2008. These couples weren't asking to be married. They showed up saying, our relationships are just as equal. They're just as equal. So can you see the difference in your intersectionality when you bring in that top level that says, we're already there? And it's interesting. I'm watching what's happening in the whole abortion issue. As long as we were doing abortion at level 2, this idea that women have rights and control over their own bodies, even though people were agreeing, I'm watching the conversation shift as we start getting into the fertilization, the IVF. Thank you. That as we're getting into that, that suddenly, this discussion is starting to shift because whereas people may not think that they have the right-- that women have the right to end a pregnancy, there's this collective agreement that everybody has a right to procreate, like everybody has a right to marry. So when you lift it and you elevate it up to that level, the depolarization goes down because you find that you are actually in some kind of a place of agreement that's harder to deny. You get out the other end. We don't decrease the supply of hate. We introduce the demand for love, OK? That's what we do. In the interest of time, I'm going to go to the last slide that we have this choice. We can do the traditional approach, which is this sort of good versus evil. We have these mutually exclusive sides that are polarized, each claiming to be the good. And their sense of victory is in defeating the evil one. It's his perpetual battle. Or we can do a oneness approach, which is we are one as opposed to just we won. And instead of it being mutually exclusive, it's radically inclusive, radically inclusive interdependence. There is no othering. The victory is in getting into right relationship, getting into right relationship with each other, which is what I contend all of the big social justice people are trying to do, to get us into right relationship for a peaceful coexistence. So the continuous work here is not perpetually battling but perpetually healing the polarization because it's the polarization that has us in conflict, not the particular differences. We have to be it. Be it. Don't chase after it. It's not outside of you. What you're looking for, you're looking with. Stand in it. Stand in it, and then let all of the laws change to bring this pre-existing right relationship into its fullest fruition. And on that, I'm going to conclude, and we're going to open it up to questions and answers. KEVIN ROSS: Only over here. Thank you so much, Dr. Deborah. In the chat room, I invite you-- if you have a seat over there. In the chat room, I invite you to start formulating your questions. You are probably super excited. If you're at home, you have shouted amen a couple of times, probably, and gotten excited because she is such an energizing speaker. So what I'm going to do is we're going to transition over. We got a little different setup here today. I'm going to transition over where we'll get a chance to sit and talk just briefly, and then we want to hear from you, your questions and your direct engagement with Dr. Johnson, OK? Test 1, 2. We can hear us perfectly there? OK. Well, Dr. Deborah, that was phenomenal. I'm so grateful that you took the time to visit us here in the snow and the cold at this time. Before we dive in, we've been asking all the speakers to just kind of reveal themselves a little bit, give a little bit of the backstory of who you are and how you came to get on this powerful journey that you're on. So I've asked every speaker to, using the sights and sounds and smells and scenes from the places and spaces that made you you, and not necessarily the words from your bio, describe yourself. Sights, sounds, scenes. DEBORAH JOHNSON: So I would say I come to a lot of these conclusions based upon my age and the time frame in which I came of age. So I came of age in the '60s and the '70s in Los Angeles, which is obviously one of the most culturally diverse places on the planet. And a time of a lot of contentiousness. KEVIN ROSS: Paint the scene. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Yeah. So you have the streets on fire, the cities ablaze, particularly over black empowerment and protesting police brutality. Similar protest of police brutality, you have the Stonewall riots and the whole birth of the gay pride movement, as it was called then. You have Vietnam and all of the violence that's going on in protest of Vietnam. You have the feminist movement that's just starting to really get some traction in terms of women's equality. I mean-- KEVIN ROSS: This was all in the-- DEBORAH JOHNSON: The assassinations. KEVIN ROSS: So what assassinations did you live through? DEBORAH JOHNSON: Well, the first one that really hit was JFK, president. I happened to be actually doing a paper on his brother, Bobby Kennedy, when he was assassinated just a few blocks from where I was. About less than 90 days before that, King Jr. was assassinated. He had Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, and these are just the US folks. This wasn't even including the people around the world. KEVIN ROSS: And you're in California at that time? DEBORAH JOHNSON: I'm in Los Angeles. KEVIN ROSS: Los Angeles. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Yes. KEVIN ROSS: What's it like at your house? What kind of conversations are happening? How is this shaping the person you're becoming? DEBORAH JOHNSON: So it's shaping the person I'm becoming because, one, I'm questioning, and, two, my existence was tied up in these struggles, particularly as a young, black, female, gay Pentecostal, deeply Pentecostal. I was in Bishop Samuel Crouch's church, and he was vice president of the World Pentecostal Movement. So it felt like I couldn't believe the messages of inferiority. So King said that God would never place a permanent yoke of inferiority on any group of people. I knew he wasn't just talking about black people. I knew he was talking about me as female. I knew he was talking about me as gay. I knew that. So we had all of these systems that we're putting impediments in the way of being fully actualized and being expressed. And it felt like it was just wrong. It was wrong. And I made a commitment early, early on that the world had to change. That we had to live up to a higher potential. But that couldn't be just me. It meant all of us. KEVIN ROSS: What age were you when you made that decision? DEBORAH JOHNSON: About 11. KEVIN ROSS: 11. So you mentioned-- DEBORAH JOHNSON: Starting junior high. KEVIN ROSS: You were in the Pentecostal church. You just kind of named all the ways you're situated. Did you find, in the Pentecostal church, an onramp for the kind of conversation that you're leading today, an affirmation for where you are, who you are, and where you are? DEBORAH JOHNSON: I would say yes and no, to be honest about it. KEVIN ROSS: Yeah. We welcome honesty here. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Yeah. I would say the yes part was that spirituality, religion, it was very real. It was an everyday discussion, and I developed at an early age a profound sense of connection to the divine. This was not like some theoretical discussion. KEVIN ROSS: This is in the Pentecostal church? DEBORAH JOHNSON: No. I find a connection with the divine that I could not always reconcile with the tenants and things that I was hearing from the Pentecostal church. KEVIN ROSS: Got it. DEBORAH JOHNSON: But the depth and the intensity of which the presence of the divine was the topic and the thing, I'm not sure without it, I would have gotten there. Miracles. I saw the miracles. I saw them. I saw the people get up and walk who had been crippled with my own eyes. I saw the blind. I mean, I watched these faith healers. So that idea that the impossible is possible with enough faith, that was down in the bones. I didn't believe the-- KEVIN ROSS: Some of the tenants? DEBORAH JOHNSON: Yeah, some of the tenants, particularly the exclusionary and the supremacy and-- KEVIN ROSS: But even as I hear you talking about it, even as I hear you describing your own experience of it right now, you are integrating. You're being integrated. You're modeling what-- so you're not casting out your former pathway and your faith tradition. I think you found-- you're taking the best of it that has helped to form who you are today, and you're holding to that, bringing it forward into your own spiritual awakening. DEBORAH JOHNSON: What I had to learn to do is that I had to learn to forgive because what ends up happening is that in our protest-- I see this happen all the time, as a minister. That in protest of the dastardly things that religion has done, so often, people acquiesce their spirituality as a protest. So as a protest to what people have done with power or money or whatever, we denounce that. So I had to heal, and I had to get over it. And interestingly enough, as you well know, that that very Bible that I was beaten up with, I'm a metaphysical Bible teacher. KEVIN ROSS: Yes, you are. DEBORAH JOHNSON: But I can be it because I knew it. I just didn't believe in the interpretations of it or the way in which it was done. But that forgiveness piece is really, really important. And I want everybody to hear what I'm saying. Forgiveness doesn't wipe it away. Forgiveness doesn't make it clean, once again, the right relationship. Forgiveness gets you back in your power so that you're no longer under the karmic effects of whatever else has happened with it. So I had to get free. KEVIN ROSS: Got it. DEBORAH JOHNSON: And once I got free, then I could quit denouncing and being at such cross purposes. And sure enough, the fire and the sort of-- I'm not any proselytizing person, but that evangelistic fervor of possibility, and you don't have to stay down there because there's something better for you, it's in the bones. KEVIN ROSS: Came alive. DEBORAH JOHNSON: I had to let it be there to find it. KEVIN ROSS: Got it. So I have two other questions, and then we want to open up to our viewers. Are we seeing questions in the chat room? We got four? Great. You are a new thought spiritual practitioner. Tell us what that is. And really give some context to it because that's a journey from where you started. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Yes. So new thought is a spiritual tradition that actually is born out of Christian mysticism that embraces the universal spiritual principles that we find in the far East, the middle East, native traditions. There's a phrase that I liked that one of the founders of one of the branches of New Thought, Ernest Holmes, did, where he said that it was the religion of Jesus, not about Jesus. That what was that allows you to do the miracles? What was that allowed you to see yourself in this direct relationship with the divine? So with the new thought movement is it's literally a movement that's beyond religion. It brings in science, it brings in social justice. And it points us to actually a lot of the things that I was just talking about, where oneness is the paradigm for living. KEVIN ROSS: Awesome. And then my last question for now, define courage and tell us how you know when you're using it. DEBORAH JOHNSON: So I told you to get these downloads. And courage is defined in one of those spirit letters is courage is the willingness to keep walking in the direction of your surrender. The willingness to keep walking in the direction of your surrender. A lot of times what the world thinks of is courage, and you ask the people who did it, it didn't feel like courage to them because, you run into a burning building because your daughter's in there, that's not courage. It's that boom. It's like, I got to do this. Courage, for me, and it comes from the root word heart, that it's when you keep taking those brave steps in the midst of the fear, in the midst of the trepidation, where you're guided by an internal compass that says, I must keep walking in this direction. KEVIN ROSS: Give me an example where you knew-- and remember, we're talking about the intersection of religion and public life. So maybe a public-facing way when you knew that you were-- this must be courage, like you were acting in it, because part of the whole purpose of this series is to support people in moving past a kind of neutrality and past a type of passivity or being a spectator and becoming more engaged in these times. And so having you here gives us a chance to tease out an example. DEBORAH JOHNSON: I contend that the most courageous act that any of us will ever do. Is giving ourselves permission to be ourselves. And I mean that. Like to bring the whole of you to the table. And I mean, I've faced a lot of things, the death threats and all the rest of that. But I think the most courageous thing that I've ever done is allowed myself to integrate because talk about those polarities, where the gay community, oh, you're being a sellout and you're being a traitor. You're being a minister. And the religious community, oh, you're the demon and the devil because you're gay, and you're leading people astray. And oh, what's this prophetic voice? And you get these messages and these letters. It's like, how does that fit with your MBA in urban land economics exactly? I mean, there's all these different facets and assets. And what we tend to do is we tend to be closeted. We tend to play small. We tend to want to relegate ourselves down to areas where we think that we're going to be safe or we think we're going to get the approval. And the reason why that's so important is that even if we look at the political landscape that we can see today, we can see that there are so many people who are saying things that are misinformation. They're doing things that you know that they don't even agree with, but they're doing it because they're afraid. They are afraid. They are afraid of the backlash. They are afraid of what their own kind-- I really want to make an emphasis on that is that a lot of times when we talk about polarization, we're afraid of what the other people are going to do. But the way that you really keep oppression going is that the oppressor has got to oppress their own kind. They got to keep you in line. It wasn't just-- it's like the only way that a black person can get a job is if you burn all the white people's homes down for giving them one. It's not just, we're controlling you. We're having to control everybody else with our agenda to make sure that they keep this particular ism or oppression in alignment. So that willingness to face the backlash. And it could just be your mama. It could be your church. It could be your partner. I'm just saying. But that's the biggest act of courage is to just come into the, this is who I am and breathe through it. You might lose some folks along the way, but what I've learned is that if I've lost them, they weren't really mine. KEVIN ROSS: So what I hear you saying is the integration of all the components of yourself and then walking toward up this path of surrender, bringing your-- we say around here at Harvard, bringing your full self. DEBORAH JOHNSON: And I said that in the beginning, that everything on the personal is also on the collective. I'm mentioning it in here because we'll never get to that place politically if we can't do it internally. See, if I can't live through the contradictions in myself, then I can't live it out there. I'm all of it. KEVIN ROSS: Got it. DEBORAH JOHNSON: I'm the slave. I'm the slave master. KEVIN ROSS: So it's this reconciliation. within the self. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Exactly. Because if we can't do it here, we can't do it out there. The polarization, honestly isn't true. The mutual exclusive, it really is and we're all of these combinations of different things. So we're denying to keep the polarization going. But if we pull all that down, we're a lot more complex than these simplistic boxes that we put ourselves in. KEVIN ROSS: I want to keep cooking on this, but we've got questions, and I'm going to come back. Let's take a question from our chat. Thank you for tuning in and for being a part. We have a question. SPEAKER 3: Catherine asks, I find everything you've said deeply true. My challenge is that I get so upset by the dire outcomes for human beings inherent in the far right positions and policies that I can hardly remain civil in the presence of those articulating them. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Take a breath, Catherine. No, I'm really serious. And I don't mean just now. But take the breath. What I want to remind you of here. Is that despair is a weapon. It is a weapon of oppression to wear you down, to keep you in fear, to keep you so disillusioned as to feel powerless, to keep you so enraged as to be blind. We know scientifically that when we're working back here with the little mammalian brain, we can't even reach in the frontal cortex, where the reasoning and the logic and all of that takes place. If you really are that outraged, don't let them win. Don't let them win. I say all the time, you may try to take me out, but ain't going to take my own self out. I'm not going to do your work for you. KEVIN ROSS: That's good. DEBORAH JOHNSON: And this is what happens, is that when we allow all of that to eclipse our sense that there's something bigger, there's something greater than this, we make a god out of anything that we let define our possibilities. Don't make a god out of people or politics. They're not. There is something that is bigger and greater than that. And I don't know your particular racial ethnic background, but what I always do is I go back to my ancestors. I go back to my ancestors in the field and say, talk to me. How did you do it? How did you do it? Because they knew that rage and anger and lack of forgiveness was going to eat them up alive. And with their music and their prayers and everything else, coming up to a transcendent place to keep their humanity, to keep their humanity. Don't let anybody rob you of your humanity. KEVIN ROSS: Thank you. Let's take another question. SPEAKER 3: Reverend Carolyn asks, every night, the news creates a sense of polarization around black and brown issues and immigration. What's a good conversation starter with people who focus on hard work as their way of \[INAUDIBLE\]? DEBORAH JOHNSON: Everything is always going on simultaneously. That's why it's a continuum. There's always greater, and there's always lesser. We have to be leery of letting the popular news be the narrative of our life. There's always other news that's going on. For one, you may have to search for it a little bit more. And two, what's the narrative that's coming out of our mouth? Pain pushes until vision pulls. Can people tell what you stand for and not just what you stand against? What I want to encourage everybody to do is whatever that is that you think should be the outcome, start there, kind of like the marriage equality. You call the relationships marriage. What I do, the phrase that I use is undocumented citizen, undocumented citizen. But it's like squarely, as far as I'm concerned, particularly these people who have been here for decades, they're already citizens. They're already doing everything that they should be doing. They just don't have their papers. They just don't have their papers. There's ways in which we frame things where we control the discussion. Be careful of the labels, immigrant, homeless. It dehumanizes. If we were to shift it from-- well, the homeless, OK? People who don't have homes. KEVIN ROSS: Yes. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Just hearing that, the people who don't have homes, it makes you have to think for a moment, what is that about? Well, how did that happen? They're not like an amorphous problem to have to do something about. They become people, which puts them in level 1 with the rest of us, having a certain circumstance, but they're still up there in level 1. When you just talk about the homeless, you just talk about immigrants, illegal aliens, you've got them down at that level 2. Got to bring them up to 1, to the universal. KEVIN ROSS: It's really good. Another question. SPEAKER 3: Diana asks-- KEVIN ROSS: Hi, Diana. SPEAKER 3: First, got my shout on. In thinking about religious plurality, I heard earlier this week in a podcast getting off the eternal multiplicity that within one's own tradition shut down these moments of proximity and recognition. If all the religions would even work with three levels, you just-- wouldn't that be a great improvement? There seems to be a lot of othering in religions, some of which call themselves \[INAUDIBLE\] and then I think these are the level 2 organizations, evangelical, mainline Protestants, Hindu Buddhists. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Well, thank you, Diane, for that question. KEVIN ROSS: Diana. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Oh, Diana, for that question. There's a lot of othering going on everywhere, OK? I can't think of any group, religious, educational, in any realm that would not somehow benefit from working at that intersection of the three, of the universal, and the diverse, and the personal. But what I would caution us against is discarding some of the tenants or information that's coming out from these groups because they're not emulating it. Don't miss the truth just because the messenger can't live up to it, OK? The old folks used to say, the truth will be told even if it takes a liar to tell it. So the person that wrote Everybody's Created Equal had slaves, hundreds of slaves. He couldn't even live up to the truth of what he wrote. But it was still a truth. It was still a truth. And we're constantly trying to live up to the promise of that truth. But so often, because the messenger isn't living up to it, we doubt its truth. KEVIN ROSS: All right. Let's just hold that for a moment because this is the moment we're in right now. We're absolutely in this moment nationally, where we're all in agreement in the ideal sense that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Yet the representatives for our political parties seem to be messengers for whom hold such little credibility on either side. So when we're talking about bridging our politics, depolarizing our politics and bridging our world, in a moment like the one we're in now, how do we help folk-- and maybe you're going to be redundant about this, but how do we help folks get beyond the candidates? To continue to see a possibility for the whole? So I think this is where we get stuck. I know folks who are not voting, who are not voting this time. I can't vote for Biden. I can't vote for Trump. This is the conversation. So help us. And no pressure. DEBORAH JOHNSON: I got to go back to my ancestors, the slaves. KEVIN ROSS: OK. DEBORAH JOHNSON: So I imagine the first slaves that got a chance to vote, who was on the ticket? I can't imagine that they had a whole bunch of people that looked like them or that represented them. But they knew that the voting was the registration of their personhood. It was the affirmation of their belonging. And they knew that if we just kept doing this, if we just keep going in this direction, eventually, we will, in fact, be able to influence what's going on. KEVIN ROSS: And who the messengers are. DEBORAH JOHNSON: And who the messengers are. And quite frankly, and I don't mean to sound judgmental when I say this. It's really an internal question. I don't when we got so entitled with this thing called voting that we could treat it so nonchalantly, of what it actually means. I look at it like this. It's like if you're going from California to New York, OK? You're going East. Now, you can get there by jet. You can get there by Harley Davidson. You can take a train. You can road trip. You can walk, OK? But you're all going to New York. And that's kind of how it is in this political landscape. Who's going to New York? Hook up with the people that are going to New York. Now, you can duke it out about whether we're going to take the plane or whether we're going to walk part of the way and who gets there fastest and what's to slow or-- but you're going to New York. And more so than any other time in history, we don't have the luxury to sit it out because the cost is so great. KEVIN ROSS: What's at stake? DEBORAH JOHNSON: What is at stake is the democracy as we know it. That depending upon who's in power, the safety rails, the way in which the branches have checks and balances upon each other, which makes them legitimate, that there's a party that's already declaring they're going to tear all of that down. And you don't recover this. This isn't like, OK, we'll sit this out and then we'll get it back. It doesn't work that way. And the kind of vitriol and this isolationist that we can just sit here, no, we are part of a global order. The whole world is counting on us. We have friends. We have allies. The only way that we can sit here safe and never have war on our soil, OK, is because there's a whole lot of people out there who are helping to keep us safe. And what is at stake here is so beyond monumental. Now is not the time to sit it out. There's no such thing as not voting. There's no such thing. If you don't vote, you give your proxy. You give your proxy to everybody else who is voting. But there's no such thing as like-- KEVIN ROSS: Your non-vote is a vote. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Your non-vote-- KEVIN ROSS: Is a vote. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Is a vote. You're not working just for a personality. Specifically, what is at stake right now? What is at stake right now is the environment, global warming, how much we participate in that or not. What is at stake is human rights in the United States and all over the world. What is at stake right now is freedom over your own bodily autonomy. And sure as I'm sitting here, marriage equality is the next on the chopping block. You can rest assured on that. What is at stake is censorship, and to what extent is their ability to be able to have the government control what books are read or not read. What is at stake here is a free press that is not put in jail and prosecuted and whatnot, for, in fact-- KEVIN ROSS: So freedom of speech. DEBORAH JOHNSON: --telling the truth. Not just freedom of speech. I want to say specifically, freedom of the press because in authoritarian states, one of the first things that you do is you shut down the press that holds you accountable. What is at stake here are who's in the judgeship positions. We've already seen what's happened with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, with the decks being stacked with these judges who will not uphold the precedents. This wanting to roll things back. I mean, I could just go on and on and on, but there's all of these things are at stake. KEVIN ROSS: Got it. Do we have another question? DEBORAH JOHNSON: There's two. KEVIN ROSS: Yeah. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Can I say one more thing about this? Just very quickly. And if you're thinking about voting for a third candidate because you don't like all of this polarization that's happening in just the two-party system, Google, what happens if no one wins the electoral college vote? Just Google that, and it'll make that hair stand up on the back of your neck how it takes the vote from the people and puts it squarely in the hands of Congress in ways that are absolutely unbelievable. Look it up. KEVIN ROSS: All right. SPEAKER 3: Hunter asks, thank you for the very thoughtful, loving talk. I greatly appreciate hearing the creative but quite rational approach to our relationships with each other, broadly and narrowly understood. Do you agree that it works equally well for those of us who agree that there is a universalism to our humanity but do not situate it in a divinity? DEBORAH JOHNSON: Yes. A Divinity is not a necessity. Everybody believes in something. I don't care what you call it. What I'm talking about is transcendent of any particular theology. But it is this notion of us being in a sacred relationship with each other. And that includes the planet. That includes all sentient beings. That whatever that is that makes us understand that we are in a world of mutual interdependence, how you think we got there is less important to me than the fact that you grasped that that's what we live in. KEVIN ROSS: You said we had one more? SPEAKER 3: We actually have two more. There's another one that came in. But I want to get this one in because this is for me. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Go for it. SPEAKER 3: You mentioned Stonewall, and I think a lot of people know about Stonewall in New York. What we're experiencing around \[INAUDIBLE\] and how did those early experiences influence your idea of \[INAUDIBLE\]? KEVIN ROSS: Thank you, Dawn. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Thank you. So Stonewall happened right at the time I was coming out. Stonewall was a riot in a bar called Stonewall, basically a drag bar on Christopher street, West in Greenwich Village. And it was a time when those clubs were being raided and a lot of police brutality and people fought back. This was the end of June in 1969, which is why June is Pride Month. And at first, it was just the weekend, and it kind of became the whole month. So for me personally, I was paying attention to this as much as I could possibly pay attention to it. And I got involved very, very early, very early. I was in college at 16, and I started then going to the different organizations and the different groups. I had the same girlfriend all through high school up through my senior year in college. We're actually still good friends. And I got very politically involved. And because I started so young, I had a chance to be there in the early parts of the movement. So I was on the board of directors of the gay and lesbian community service, actually, it was just the gay community services center then at 23 years old. And that's still the biggest and the largest of its kind in the world. | had a chance to be there in those early baby stages. The people on that board started the first AIDS organizations. I was there at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. And so many really big milestones, I had a chance to be a part of either as an activist or as a consultant. It was a hotbed for people thinking and challenging and the willingness to go up against all the odds because historically speaking, we still had the sodomy laws, which meant we were felons. You could get up to 20 years. The American Psychiatric Association hadn't changed its mind, so we were sick. We were depraved. You could lose your own kids. You couldn't get security clearances. The church is saying that you're satanic. And the sodomy laws and the psychiatric didn't change until I was halfway through college. So it was real acts of courage to stand out and to be visible, and I'm one of those that's been visible on television and all the rest of that. But it really got me to say, once again, but it was also in the context of the black movement, also in the context of the feminist movement. But those movements were working very separately, OK? So you couldn't bring it all together just in one place or just in one activism. But I am so glad that I had a chance to be in Los Angeles because it was in the forefront. KEVIN ROSS: Wow. We are just about out of time. This has been so, so, so rich. You said there's one other question. SPEAKER 3: They keep coming in. KEVIN ROSS: So can we-- let's get an email address and maybe we can follow up. Tell us an email address for you that folks can continue to get their questions to you. What is it? DEBORAH JOHNSON: Yeah, RevD-- @RevDNow.com. KEVIN ROSS: RevD, as in David or Deborah, RevD-- Look, @RevD.com. So you can continue-- we'll get it in the chat room for you so that you can get more questions. So we have that one-- or no, you said you have multiple. Let's try one. We'll try one. The dean says we can try one. I want to make that clear to all the AV folks, it was not my call. SPEAKER 3: Tracy says, thank you, Dr. Johnson and Rev Kev for the conversation today. My vocation is focused on the arts in creating space and resources \[INAUDIBLE\] for Black creatives to transcend and challenge others. I see you referenced-- I can't see it, the Ntozake Shange play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf, as a spiritual turning point for you \[INAUDIBLE\] are some of the current artists or movements or experiences that you find as spiritually impactful for you and \[INAUDIBLE\] KEVIN ROSS: Got it. Laser answer. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Yeah. I find myself extremely inspired these days by actually the way that technology has allowed people to express themselves creatively. So I am particularly inspired by the way in which people are not always turning to authority to articulate. And they are, through their own art and poetry, visuals, videos, putting it out there what they're learning and what they are grasping, or grasping with. So in addition to authors and whatnot, just particularly the young people, their takes and their courage and their inspiration is really very moving to me. KEVIN ROSS: We've got one minute. DEBORAH JOHNSON: One minute, OK. KEVIN ROSS: I'm going to take that one minute. DEBORAH JOHNSON: All right. KEVIN ROSS: Speak directly to new thought religious actors who might want to take a step and who might be tuning in right now and who know you and respect you. How can we encourage them to take a step in acts of public courage with an interest to this co-creating a world that works for all? You have the final word. DEBORAH JOHNSON: There's a phrase that we use in new thought, treat and move your feet. That faith without works is dead. That if you have a vision of anything, we know that. We know that you have to become it. You have to embody it. You have to do it. And I would dare say I think we're being hypocritical to say that we want a world that works for everyone, but we're not willing to do the work so that it can work for everyone. KEVIN ROSS: You heard it from Reverend Dr. Deborah Johnson here at Harvard Divinity School in our public courage and the academy series. Continue to follow us each week as we bring you some new and exciting content. And in the meanwhile, go forth and exercise public courage. Thank you, Dr. Deborah. DEBORAH JOHNSON: Thank you. KEVIN ROSS: Awesome. DEBORAH JOHNSON: All right. KEVIN ROSS: Awesome. Thanks for being here, guys. SPEAKER 4: Sponsor, HDS Office of Ministry Studies. SPEAKER 5: Copyright 2024, The President and Fellows of Harvard College. See also:- [ Ministry ](/discover-stories-about/ministry) - [ Politics and Religion ](/discover-stories-about/politics-and-religion) - [ Community ](/topic-tags/community) - [ Ministry ](/topic-tags/ministry) - [ Politics ](/topic-tags/politics) - [ Politics and Religion ](/topic-tags/politics-and-religion)