In this episode of The UpWords Podcast, host Jean Geran speaks with Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, Kelly and David Pfeil Fellow at the George W. Bush Institute and former Executive VP at Freedom House. As part of our series on Christian citizenship, Nicole shares her insights on how faith intersects with democracy, the importance of religious freedom, and the role Christians can play in promoting justice and compassion both locally and globally.
Topics Covered:
Why democracy matters for people of faith
The biblical call to seek justice for the vulnerable
How Christians can engage in civic life without placing ultimate hope in politics
The global struggle for freedom and the role of American Christians
Higher education’s role in forming democratic citizens
Guest Bio:
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca is a seasoned advocate for democracy and human rights, with experience at the State Department and Freedom House. She brings a deep understanding of global democratic movements and a strong Christian perspective on civic engagement.
also have the opportunity to engage in our democracy, right? We can support candidates, we can work on campaigns, we can run for office ourselves. We can do a lot of these things because we are called to be in the public square even if we are not putting all of our hope on the public square to solve every single problem that exists.
Jean Geran (:
Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we explore the intersection of Christian faith in the academy, church, and marketplace. My name is Jean Guerin, and today I have a conversation with a good friend and former colleague, Nicole Bibbins-Sadaka. Nicole is currently serving as the Kelly and David File Fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. She also is a former Executive Vice President at Freedom House, an organization that tracks and promotes democracy globally.
This episode is part of our series on Christian citizenship. In it, we discuss how we as Christians can be responsible citizens within our own democratic system. We also reflect on how we can stand with others around the world seeking the protections and freedoms that democracy offers. Now onto the conversation.
Jean Geran (:
Nicole, my friend, Nicole, thank you for joining us on the podcast. So delighted you could be here.
I'm so thrilled to be here with Eugene.
Yeah, well, just to give a little update for our listeners and set the context for our conversation, we've been doing a series on Christian citizenship, which is a hard word to say, I've discovered, but for the last couple months based on some talks we had, events we had here at S.L. Brown Foundation. So as we were discussing this topic, the issue of democracy and different responsibilities of Christians,
in a democracy came up and I knew the perfect person to ask to kind of wrap up our discussion of this topic of Christian citizenship. So also to set the context a little bit, you and I are friends and former colleagues. We worked together at the State Department on issues related to human rights and democracy promotion. I think you went and took that even a step or two further on the democracy front.
We'll talk about some of that going forward, but I wanted folks to know that background that we have together. So I just want to start out with asking, as a person of faith and for other people of faith, why should we care about democracy and having a healthy democracy?
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Absolutely. First, I'm to say it's so great to be with you, Jean. Jean is a person I respect and love very deeply. And so it's just great to be in conversation. And right now is a time where we all should be asking a lot of these hard questions about a lot of parts of what our lives look like. As Christians, our first identity is in our faith. It is, regardless of what our passport looks like, regardless of what country we live in, our first identity is in our following of Christ.
From there, I then have asked myself over the course of many years in this space, what's the governing system that is going to best allow people to exercise their faith, to live and worship freely, to be able to ask the hard questions, and to live in a place that most mirrors or gives us the opportunity to do the things which were called to by our faith? So first,
It really is in democracies that we see the freedom of worship, the freedom of religion best protected. Not perfectly, not perfect everywhere in the world, we're far from that, but it is in democracies where people take seriously the fact that you should be able to worship or choose not to worship how you want. And that is very important to me because I also felt like as a person of faith, that's going to be the environment that I can best live in and
my Christian brothers and sisters around the world can best live and exercise their faith in that. But I'd love to come back to this question of religious freedom, so maybe we can put a pin in that. But then I also think, you know, God calls us to live with compassion, mercy, justice. These are things which are just central to the gospel, to love one another and to help those that are most vulnerable in our society. And I think, where is it?
that that is most possible to happen. And I believe a democracy is the governing system, a secular governing system, but it's the best system where it says everybody is equal before the law. You don't have to belong to this group or that group. You don't have to be in this religion or that religion, but everyone is equal before the law. And your very justice is protected because you live in a democracy. And for me, that is a place where we can most vibrantly live out our faith.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
and seek to live a life that's most consistent with what Christ calls us to.
Yeah, even in the messiness, Democracies are very messy.
Very messy. There's no one who's going to say more than me that democracy is real. It's a messy system because it's made out of demos. It's made out of people. But I also, and you and I have worked in the international space for a lot of years. When you look around the world, it is the best governing system. It's not a perfect governing system, but it is the best because I will say there are far, if you look at where people are living in other countries where they don't have democracy.
where they don't have protection before the law. They are living day to day, hoping that someone doesn't knock on their door and snatch them, or that the fact that they went to church winds them up in jail, or the fact that they voted or didn't even get a chance to vote. All of these things, which we do all day, every day, speak about what we believe, worship the way we want to, criticize or love our government or our school board chairman or whatever.
All of that is only possible in democracies. And we almost forget it because we live this all day every day, but there are people, 80 % of the world's population don't live in a free country. And that is something that should just shake us into understanding and appreciating the role of democracy.
Jean Geran (:
Yeah, it was interesting last night just working here in our student fellows program, I was talking to one of our other instructors and he was talking about being created in the image of God as a democratizing force, right? Because we are all created in the image of God and that was interesting, which makes us all equal, right? Under God and he loves us all. And I think that was an interesting, was like my ears perked up. like, yeah, that kind of does set the
set the bar for equality under the law because we're all created in God's image, right?
Absolutely, absolutely. An equal before God in His eyes, right? And so this is the governing system that's the closest to it, recognizing that it is not God, it is not a Christian system, but it is a system which truly, in that sense, allows us to have that equality. And then the freedom to make choices, sometimes good choices and sometimes bad choices. Right. freedom for us to do that.
and to live in a society where we respect the freedom of others and we then have our freedoms protected as well.
Yeah, and I think one of our previous podcasts, it was looking at dissenter communities in 18th and 19th century Britain. And I think they, because they had been persecuted themselves, they cared deeply about promoting the freedom and the freedom to worship, as you will, as an issue of conscience for everybody. And so I think that was the motivating factor.
Jean Geran (:
for them in promoting equality under law and freedom to worship as our conscience dictates. And part of that was related to kind of the evangelical revival where freedom of conscience and having faith be voluntary, not just something you had to do as living under a state church in that, you know, a state established church in that instance.
I guess given the context that we're in, which is very different than that, right? We don't have a state church or we don't want to have a state church, right? We've seen that churches flourish when they have the freedom to be and people in congregations have the freedom to choose themselves. But in this society that we're in now, in a democracy with some of these protections in place, some fraying on the edges.
You know, how are we called as believers to engage with our democracy and with our government?
I think it's really important that we always anchor on our faith is the first and motivating factor, right? And it's not whether we live in Virginia or in Wisconsin or whether we're a Democrat or a Republican or who we voted for in the last election. We start with our faith as the anchor. And what is central to our faith, obviously, is that we love one another as we have so been loved. And it's most important that we lead with that.
right, is to love our enemies. It's to love, and Christ says, it's not great if you just love the people that you love. It's when you love your enemies. And I think that translated into a democracy then is how do we live in a pluralistic society? How do we live in a society where you know there are going to be people who worship differently, who are in a different party, who have very different views, whose views you totally disagree with? For us as Christians,
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
We are the hands and feet of Christ. We are the fragrance of Christ when we enter into conversations with love, not agreeing with everybody because we have to be true to the gospel, but that we enter in and that we model a love and a civility that is honoring of Christ. And I think right now we're in a very polarized moment in our country. We're at a time where civility is really hard to find. We're seeing really terrible things, rising political violence.
But it's our chance as Christians to really model, we worship a God who is a God of love. And we will step into conversations and not worry that we disagree with people because we are very firm and anchored in what we believe, and that we will even draw people to what we believe by being people of love, of compassion, of mercy, of justice. So one is just that posture of how do we enter into a diverse society of people, but then is also thinking
How do we ensure that the compassion and the mercy and the justice, which we are called to by Christ, is modeled in our society? We don't use all of the levers of power as part of our faith. That's not, they are separate and apart. But how do we engage with the laws and with the policies and what's going on in government in a way where we say we want to see it reflective?
of the compassion, the mercy, and the justice that we are called to. And that's where we have an opportunity to be in, but apart from, but in a society and being a responsible Christian citizen of a democracy.
Yeah, well, and I think in the last few podcasts, we keep coming back to living well and loving your neighbors well in the proximate, in the relational environments that God has placed us and who we know and who we love and who we are challenged by, right? Face to face. Like, we had a discussion of even in families, right? If you start by just loving your family well when they're not easy.
Jean Geran (:
always easy to love, right? That's step one. But I guess for our conversation, we get a little bit into the murkier waters, right? And one of my own strategies, for better or for worse, in the midst of so much disruption and conflict and political violence at the national level and internationally, where you and I used to, well, you still do, but I used to...
also be there at working at that level, trying to use those levers to reflect God's love as much as possible, exactly what you just described. My strategy, because I don't feel like I can impact that level anymore, is to focus on the proximate, know, work with a refugee family in Oshkosh and love them and help them. And I'm struggling personally with then what is that step to engage
the systems that seem both broken and more difficult to engage. I mean, know we need to do start with the first one. And that's the most important one, loving our neighbors approximately. How do we do that? How do we translate that into those more structural policy levels? What are your thoughts?
It's a great question. And I think first off, it's really important that we remember we are not, even though our hearts are burdened with many of the things that we see in the news all day, every day, we're also not burdened to solve every single one of them. We have the opportunity to lift those up in prayer and to say to God, hey, God, this is a grieving my heart. I'm sure it's a grieving your heart. Be in this moment, whatever the situation is. We see a lot internationally and domestically.
But I'd say for individual Christians, obviously prayer is always the first step, right? And have the ability to pray whatever it is and to pray, God bring your mercy and your justice to this situation. All of us are in communities where there are people who can be served. You've done phenomenal work on serving people who are victims of human trafficking, working in the refugee community. We all are very proximate to people who are the least of our communities.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
not because they are seen differently in the eyes of God, but because in that moment they have been the victim of something which is difficult or they are suffering in some way. And we have a responsibility to respond with the compassion and mercy that God calls us to in those situations. So looking in our communities, how do we help? How do we protect? How do we ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable in our communities are? We also, because we live in a democracy, we have powers within a democracy, right? We have elected officials.
and we need to make our voices heard. And sometimes people think, oh my gosh, it's real. don't understand everything in Ukraine or I don't understand everything about our immigration policy or our healthcare policy. You don't have to understand everything. I think particularly as Christians articulating what we do know. We want to have a compassionate policy towards the people of Ukraine that they may not be suffering from the Russian bombs that are unprovoked that are dropping on their head every day.
Dear member of Congress, please help us be compassionate towards those people and protect them from that violence. That is fine. You don't have to understand all the history of Ukraine and everything like that. But I do think we have a really great opportunity to write to, to call into our members of Congress and to the administration and to say, this is what I, as a believer, think is important. And I want to see this in our policies.
It's not a guarantee that everything will turn around exactly as you want, but what it will guarantee is that your voice is heard and that our elected officials hear, this is a person of faith in my district, in my country, in my community, who is saying, I want to see the compassion or the mercy that we are called to reflected in our policies, reflected in our laws or whatever it is. And so I do think we have like that, the proximate care and the engagement, the political, all of us also have the opportunity to
engage a political in our our democracy, right? We can support candidates, we can work on campaigns, we can run for office ourselves. We can do a lot of these things because we are called to be in in the public square even if we are not putting all of our hope on the public square to solve every single problem that exists.
Jean Geran (:
Yeah, and in the original or the first of this series in the podcast with Chris Ipel, mutual friend of ours, he inserted the term responsible Christian citizenship. And I thought, yep, that's an important one because we do often think about, you what do we get from our government? they're not doing what we want it to do. It's not serving my interests.
And that's demanding rights. And we worked on rights. And sometimes that is a strategy to say, this is what the law says I should have access to. And I don't. So, right. But then with the rights comes the duties and the responsibilities as well. And so it's figuring out what those are. As you were talking, I remembered something that you said to me when I had first started working at the State Department in the international realm.
on refugee issues, refugees whose rights were not being protected in a particular country. And it just seemed so overwhelming, you know, the amount of work and what we were doing wasn't helping a very closed country. And I was very discouraged. And you said, Jean, you know, I worked on a different refugee issue and there were refugees then and maybe someone had told you back then.
There were refugees before you started working with them and there will be refugees after. And similar to how Christ said, right, the poor you will always have with you, right? So we're never going to solve all these problems. But then, and then that helped, that took the burden off of me and put it back on the Lord for these very large systemic structural issues. But that doesn't mean we don't have a role to play.
And I think discerning what that role is though is the challenge, right? And as we, I think when we are working at those more macro levels, the temptation is to think that we can actually solve these things, right? And that's a pride, that pride sneaks in. So humility is an important concept too, right?
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Absolutely. And I think that's the challenge that Christians face. You can neither just tap out and be like, well, so big, can't do it. God's got it. We're totally done. I'm out. I'm going to go play golf. Right? Like you can't just totally tap out, nor can you take all the burdens of the entire world and believe and have the hubris to say, but I'll be the one to fix it. Right? Dr. King, major democracy activist and a Christian leader said, you don't have to understand, you don't have to see the whole staircase. You just have to take one step.
Right? And that sits with me, which is we are all as Christians in lots of different places, right? Whether we are in Wisconsin or in Washington, D.C. or in Dallas, and whether we are in government, in the home, in the state hall, wherever we are called to in this moment, we can take a step. And we don't bear the burden of solving all of the problems, but we absolutely can take some step. And I think that's the important thing, particularly as the Christian community is just thinking, what do we do in our nation and our world?
We have to be part of ensuring that, again, that compassion and the mercy and the justice that we're called to by Christ is reflected in our communities around us, and we have that ability.
we look to the relationships that we do have, like you said, some are linked globally to the rest of the world, and some are more local. it's where we are that we need to pray and think, OK, what can I do now? What is within my power to act on behalf of someone else or speak on behalf of someone else? But not feeling like you always had to do that, right? Right.
I was listening to a sermon recently and they were talking about how frequently in the Bible the admonitions of prophets is not always against something that's happening, but it is also about the admonition to ourselves and to our community, to Israel, to the people that we are a part of. That's where we also have a tremendous amount of power. And I think that's what we're also called to look inside our own tribe. Who is our tribe? It might be our church community, might be our small group.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
might be my office, it might be my family, it might be my soccer team, whatever your tribe is, the question is, how are you showing up with godly principles to that group and calling that group to be the best of who they should be, right? So if I see something in my church, I have a responsibility to call that out if I think it is ungodly before I'm calling out what the other churches down the street are doing or what somebody else is doing.
I have to within and say, is my community, own my responsibility as a responsible Christian citizen is to say, is the action that I'm seeing in my own group reflective of Christ's calling? Is it reflective of the best of what Christ has called us to do? And if it's not, we have a responsibility, a burden to say to people with whom we have a relationship, hey, I understand why you're doing this, but that behavior is not godly.
And that we have an opportunity to do because we are closest to those people, right? Before we start criticizing that person who you don't even know down the street, think about how do I get myself, my family, my community, my circles aligned with what we're called to do?
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
podcast notes for today's conversation include a link to view this episode on YouTube. Remember to follow or subscribe to stay updated with our latest episodes in your podcast app.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Great. We saw since the Second World War, super quick history lesson, since the Second World War, a massive growth of democracy around the world in chunks along the way. And what that means is that more and more people began to rise up or they began to push in their own society for a transition to say, no, no, no, I want a government that doesn't just take from me and demand of me all that it wants. I want a government that's accountable.
I want a government that is responsive to my needs and is serving our entire nation. And we saw a huge growth in democracy since the Second World War. For the last 19 years, we've actually seen a regression. And it's a challenge that we're seeing this system, which has provided freedom and has provided protection for a lot of people around the world, starting to hit some pretty rough years. So a lot of reasons for that.
One, I think that there are some forces in the world, the Chinese Communist Party, the government in Russia, in Iran, others that are really, they don't want democracy to win. And the reason is if they actually had to be accountable to their people, they probably wouldn't still be in power. So what we've seen is they ramped up their efforts and they're saying like, it could be the United States and other democracies that are leading, or it could be us. So we're taking it and we're ramping up our fight. And we're seeing that increasing.
both through violence in Ukraine. We're seeing that through cyber attacks, through undermining elections. We're seeing it across the board. So it is a real struggle right now about whether we're gonna see free democratic systems went out or we're gonna see what they're putting forward as an alternative, which is a strong man, closed societies. So what we've seen is the last 19 years,
There are more people who are having freedoms taken away from them around the world or are never even experiencing freedom than we are seeing people who are getting more and more freedom. I think it's a huge call to all of us who live in a democracy to push back. And it's not just because we want to see more people living with freedom and free of the abuse that we see in some of these dictator societies.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
It's also, it's in our interest. We want to live in a world that we know that freedom and that prosperity is open to more people. And it also benefits us. We're, we're doing a lot of work right now on democracy is really great for our security. We don't go to war with democracies. We go to war with countries that are aggressive autocracies, right? It is better for our economic development.
Well, and it's linked to the foundational creation principle of God choosing to give us free will in the first place, right? I mean, he could have just, okay, you're gonna be like this and here are the rules. But he created us in his image, which meant we had to have the freedom to choose to love him, to choose to love others or not, right? And so,
So we're seeing tangible benefits of democracy, but we're also seeing, and this is where I think for Christians, we're seeing, do we wanna see people around the world suffering under violence? Do we wanna see people trafficked around the world? Do we wanna see people suffering from genocide around the world? We see much of that violence and abuse and exploitation happening in societies where there is no democracy, where there is no rule of law. And if we have a heart,
Obviously, God cares about the freedom to choose or the freedom to choose love and Him over our own tendency toward sin and destruction, right? So we have to give everybody that same freedom so that they have an opportunity to choose Him.
for those who are in poverty, if we have a heart for those who have been trafficked, or if we have a heart for those who are suffering exploitation, we have to also say, how do we not only lift those people out of those problems today, but how do we create a system so that they don't have those problems tomorrow? And democratic societies that protect the rights of people is actually how we see that justice experienced for more people.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Let me just share one thing also. If you read through, many of us have read through scripture and where it talks about widows and orphans. A striking thing I was giving a talk the other day, a striking thing is if you go back and look at those passages, yes, the Bible is replete, I think more than 80 references of talking about caring for the widow, caring for the orphan. It doesn't just say care for them. This is super interesting. It doesn't just say, give them a sandwich, give them some food, give them a bed.
It says seek justice for. It says plead the case of. And what that does is it tells me that our calling as Christians, if we feel a passion to reach out to the most vulnerable, it is not sufficient. It's the starting point to give them the physical needs that they need, a bed, a food, shelter. And we absolutely, absolutely should be in that game.
But when the Bible says to us, seek justice for the widow, seek justice for the orphan, plead the case of, then I have to say, but what are they talking about? They're talking about protecting those most vulnerable from repressive forces that are seeking to exploit the most vulnerable. And to me, a democratic society that functions as well as it should,
is the best protection against the vulnerable. It's not perfect. It's not going to win all the time, but it will be better 10 out of 10 times than the autocratic systems we see where those people are vulnerable to state forces that exploit people that target the most vulnerable and take advantage of them. And that's why for me, democracy is not just this nice academic thing that we're undertaking. It is a system
that truly I believe can help us get to a place where we are protecting more of the vulnerable around the world.
Jean Geran (:
Yeah. And I think that it reminds me of, I used to get pushback, well, you know, you're promoting democracy or they would say, you're trying to impose, when we work together, trying to impose democracy on these other countries. And I said, well, no, can't be further from the truth because basically it's impossible to impose freedom on people. I mean, you know, that's, that's what we're looking to do. Exactly. What you described was to identify people in those countries that
wanted those freedoms and then supporting them. That's not imposing. That's supporting them in their search or their desire for freedom. And certainly President Bush wanted to do that, right? Like that was his thing, right?
Absolutely.
Absolutely. We have to think, do we believe, when we say we have brothers and sisters, do we believe that is people in every country, in every passport, they look different, they have different histories? That is the body of Christ, right? It is not people share our land mass or it is truly there are a billion Christians around the world. And I think we have to think, are we concerned about their ability to worship every single day the way we are able to do? Pray freely, go to church on Sunday.
be in a small group, study the Bible, are we as concerned for them, right? And many places around the world, Christian believers are suffering tremendously. Simply to go to church or to have a Bible will end you up in jail, will end you up disenfranchised, have your job taken away from you. And we have to realize that is a very real persecution that Christians are facing all around the world. And it is our responsibility to speak up for them.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
But part of what our responsibility is, is not just to speak up for the Christians. It really is to speak up for this idea that everyone should have the ability, the freedom to worship or not worship as they would like to. And sometimes I've been in conversations where Christians are like, I don't get that. Why are we fighting for the right for someone to worship something that we really don't believe is true? To worship a freedom to worship a God that we actually don't think exists.
And even just standing with them symbolically or rhetorically seems so like not a big deal. And yet to them when they're fighting that fight, it is a big deal to have brothers and sisters or others, just friends standing like I stand with you. That's a meaningful statement in and of itself. And then maybe one other thing I was just thinking of as you were speaking earlier about prayer being something we always have access to.
I know that our right to be a Christian citizen will only be protected. There's only two ways. We either say it's just for us and we will force this on everyone and then you've got to have an iron fist where you force your faith on every single person. Or you say everyone has the right. Everyone has the right, Christians, Muslims, atheists, Jews, everyone has the right to believe what they want.
And some friends of mine are part of a prayer network called the Ask Network, and they pray through scripture for the nations. And we are called to pray for the nations, right? And we are called to be a house of prayer for all nations, right? So I think we often in our churches and in our local context, we forget about that exhortation as well. From scripture, from the Lord, to pray for...
And that provides a freedom for me to worship as I would like to. And then for others to also worship, it gives us an opportunity to be in conversation about our faith. religious freedom really is not a struggle just for the people that we agree with. It is a struggle to say there has to be a protection for people to be able to be true to what they believe and to be able to worship and to not worship as they would choose to.
Jean Geran (:
the world and our brothers and sisters around the world and for God's kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven, right? And that's global. That's not just local. So that's where we make a little bit of the link, right?
And I think also as we look back, Jesus did not go just to those who were his followers. Absolutely. You see him throughout the Bible go to people from different groups, groups where it was not even politically correct to talk to. And he went to so many different groups and he was in conversations with them, which meant he created the freedom for them to be without a heavy handed, know, as the son of God, he was able to do that. We also can
Create the space for people who are different, create and protect the space for people who don't believe what we believe. And I also think that is one of the best Christian witnesses we can do is to say, we love and protect your space, even if we don't agree with what you're saying, because we believe you are created in the image of God and it is God's will for there to be that freedom. And through that, they will see the best of who we are as Christians.
Wonderful. I wanted to bring us back because we've touched on education and specifically higher education and its role in both creating or nurturing good citizens, Christian and otherwise, and also building character. So maybe, you know, what do you think is the role of higher education, specifically in a democracy, to promote good citizenship?
You know, I reflect back on the religious freedom summit that I was at not too long ago. And I walked in and I saw there was an evangelical pastor from Dallas. There was an imam and a rabbi. It almost sounds like a bad joke, but they are all sitting in, they are all sitting just talking at this summit. I thought to them, there are not three people who disagree more on the most foundational issues like.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
salvation and what's going to happen to us? Why do we live? Right? They fundamentally disagree. And they are the most fervent advocates for each of their faiths and other people's faith and no faith at all to have the space to worship. And I thought that is the most beautiful representation of their faiths. It's the most beautiful representation of American democracy, truthfully, to open up the space for people who you radically disagree with.
to protect their space, to be able to talk about what you don't agree with, and then to be able to walk away as friends. And that really was, for me, a real model of where we as Christians can be witnesses, that pastor and his colleagues, and where we also as Americans and people in a democratic society can learn from that. We can radically disagree with people, radically disagree, and never come to agreement.
but we can hold the space for people to believe something different and be an active witness in that relationship day in and day out.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Yeah, and let me, if I can just make two other points. One, if you look back, how did Jesus engage people? He didn't engage people screaming and yelling. I mean, if anyone had the right to, it was Jesus. He was the son of God. He could have just come in like fire and brimstone just telling people this is the only, what he, he sat with people patiently. He sat with sinners. He sat with prostitutes and tax collectors, patiently speaking from love as the best reflection of what a God of love looks like.
And if we cannot do even in our smallest, most incomplete way, that is to sit with people who are different, sit with people who we believe may be sitting in a place of sin, as we all are. If we can't do that and just reflect love, then we are not continuing on in the tradition that Jesus modeled for us. Let me also just say one other thing, come back to this point about, you know, international religious freedom.
And it is the encouraging piece there. Sometimes it's hard to have hope, even though our faith is rooted in hope, and that is where we must stay. But I get the most hopeful when I think about and I interact with some of our student fellows and younger people who really want, you know, they want a different world and a different system. And often it is actually one that is more just. So I follow...
where we are seeing how important it is to have a system that protects everyone's right to worship for our one billion Christian brothers and sisters, but truthfully for people of all faiths and of no faiths, that is only happening in democratic societies. And so if we really are asking ourselves, how is it that we can help those Christians around the world not face that persecution?
into the temptation of despair, but it is those younger people with, I think in this generation, there's almost more of a desire with all the new problems that they're facing and they have to face and I will pray for them, right? Because it's a challenge, but the passion is still there. I think that the God-given passion to make it a better world for all, right?
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
How can we help our brothers and sisters of other faiths not face that persecution? Help them to live in a society where they are not subject to the whims of a leader that has no accountability to their citizens, where the rights of people are protected on a daily basis. And that's not something we can do from the United States, but I do know that people in every single country are fighting for democracy.
Absolutely.
And our job is to come alongside and support them in what they are struggling for. It's not ours to stay or it's not ours to push for, but it is ours to say people are asking around the world for the freedoms that we enjoy. They're asking to have a government that's reflective of their interests. And our job is really to be able to support them in that struggle so that they have the opportunity to go to church or to go to a mosque or to choose not to worship.
in freedom so that they can exercise that free will and they can encounter, they can live into their fullest and then they can encounter their own journey of their own faith as they would.
Jean Geran (:
Yeah, lovely. Well, thank you, Nicole. This was fun. Likewise. A joy to be with you and really appreciate it.
Jean Geran (:
Thank you.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
It is still so deeply on his heart that people live with freedom and that he believes that we should have compassion towards people who are living without freedom. And you and I have met with so many activists around the world, just too many to count, from every single continent and every imaginable society. And the interesting thing, and I wish that people could all be in those conversations, they come to people in the United States, in the nonprofit world where I used to work and in government where we used to work, and said,
Please stand with us. We are fighting every day. giving our lives. We've given up our livelihoods. Please stand with us. They are coming and asking for the United States, for other democracies, to stand with them. The question is, how do we respond to that request? That is where it is. It's not an imposition. It's not us telling or lecturing people how to do it because we're imperfect in our own way. It is us responding if someone is saying,
I am not living under justice. I am not living freely. Stand with me. We have a very clear opportunity to say we believe that you should live with the freedoms that you are asking.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
And I will say, I am a very, very proud American and I am a flag-waving American. And I know when you look through the Bible, the countries and the territories and the kingdoms that were in the Bible do not represent the borders that we see today, right? And so what we know is nations come and they will come and go and they will pass away and the map will look different. And yet God is the same God before and after every one of those countries.
And so in that sense, we are praying for all of the people, all that are created in his image. And we happen to be in these territories by these names, with these passports and these laws today, but we are praying for all that are created in his image all the time and what he is doing that they may also live with the human dignity that he's created and with the freedom that he has created for people.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Absolutely. It's a great question and you and I have spent a lot of time in the classroom. Higher education is absolutely a vehicle for conveying knowledge and facts and figures. But more importantly, I would argue, more importantly, you have young people in a country from 18 to 22 or 25 or whatever the case may be. We are creating citizens. And that to me is the role of higher education.
is to convey the facts and figures and all of the learning in the various disciplines in a way that reinforces democratic citizens. Democratic like in a democracy, not the party. Democratic citizens, which means higher education bears the responsibility of teaching what does it look like to be in a pluralistic society, to be engaging in civil discourse with people that you don't agree with, to be respecting people who have different
faiths and different views and different understandings and to create that space. We are training people for how they will go on to lead. And to the extent that the higher education is not taking that role as seriously as the research about biology or literature or whatever, that is something that higher education has to embrace. If we are not during those pivotal years, and I've got one kid in college and one on his way.
If we're not embracing in those years the formation of democratic citizens, of democratic character, we are missing an opportunity and we are not sending out into the future leadership of our own country the people who are equipped with the skills, the capacity, the posture to be able to lead a democracy. And if I had to say what those skills are, it is civil discourse.
It is recognizing, appreciating, and making space for diverse views with whom you totally disagree with. It's understanding that the diversity of our society, where we have different ways that we worship, we have different ways that we think about things, we have different approaches, we have different histories that we're bringing to the table, that those have to be respected and understood. And that's across the spectrum. That is across the spectrum, Political spectrum, ideological spectrum, all of the spectrums.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
We have to be able to create that space so that people are equipped to go out and to be great leaders in their communities, in their civic organizations, and in our government so that the government that we see 15 years from now, 20 years from now, is so deeply rooted and anchored in democratic principles and high character that they are able to lead us through whatever comes for our nation in the next decades to come.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Absolutely. I'm the hope. We have a God who is bigger than any moment here or any country or any global system or any anything. He has been the God with no beginning and no end. And He has been the God over so many things that have happened. So I take that as a moment of hope and as an opportunity to be hopeful in a God who already has this figured out. And I take serious my responsibility as a Christian.
to live a life of love and of compassion and mercy and civility towards all of the people around me. I take serious my job as a democratic citizen to live according to the laws of my nation, but also to live and show up civilly and respecting the people around me, not because I agree with them, but because that's my responsibility in a democracy that we want to live in peaceably. And we just have the opportunity to cover all of that in prayer as we go forward.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Wonderful to be with you, Jean. I'm so thankful for the work that you're doing and I just look forward to being in touch and continuing conversations.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (:
Thank you for tuning into the Upwards Podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. For more information about the S.L. Brown Foundation and Upper House, please visit slbf.org. Go in peace to be a light on our campuses, in our churches, and in our businesses so that all may flourish.
