This episode is about coalition. Specifically, the coalition I think is necessary to actually meet the moment. And I want to be honest, right at the start, about something difficult. The people whose manufactured certainty has, for the last decade, been weaponized against my son are not, on the whole, people I find easy to approach in a spirit of generosity. I am not writing this episode from a position of serene magnanimity. I am writing it from a position of calculation, honestly earned.

The calculation is this. The coalition that can actually stop what is happening to kids like mine cannot be built on shared anger alone. It has to be built on a shared commitment to evidence, to democratic norms, and to the dignity of every person. And to be wide enough to win, it has to include people of faith. Including people whose faith is not my own. Including, in some cases, people whose politics I do not share.

This episode is about the specific work of building that coalition. What it looks like. What it asks of me. And what — I want to argue — it also asks of people of faith.

The most common objection I hear to the argument I have been making is some version of this. You want to remove religion from public life, and that will never work because people’s religious convictions are the deepest thing about them and you cannot expect them to leave those convictions at the door when they enter the public square.

Let me address this objection directly, because I think it obfuscates what I am arguing. I am not asking religious people to leave their religious convictions at the door. I am not asking them to pretend that their faith does not shape their moral intuitions, their understanding of the good life, or their sense of what their community owes its most vulnerable members. I am asking them to do what the best thinkers in every religious tradition have understood is required. To distinguish between their first-person faith commitments and the public justifications they are willing to offer for the coercive power of the state.

This distinction is not foreign to religious thought. It is at the center of the most sophisticated religious political philosophy in the American tradition. John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit theologian who shaped the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, argued that a pluralistic democracy requires its religious citizens to make a specific distinction. They have to distinguish between their first-person faith commitments and the public justifications they are willing to offer for the coercive power of the state. You can believe, privately, that your tradition is the one true path. That is your right, and I will defend it. But when you walk into a legislature, you have to offer your neighbor reasons your neighbor can, in principle, assess. Not reasons accessible only to fellow members of your tribe.

Reinhold Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian who shaped American public theology for most of the twentieth century, was similarly insistent. The proper role of religion in public life, Niebuhr argued, was to provide the moral seriousness and the critique of power that public life requires. Not to impose particular theological conclusions on people who do not share the theology. Niebuhr was one of the most politically engaged religious figures in American history. He was also one of the most insistent on the limits of what religion could legitimately demand of a pluralistic democracy.

These are not arguments against religion’s public presence. They are arguments about the form that presence should take. They call for the kind of religion that speaks to the conscience of the powerful on behalf of the vulnerable — the prophetic tradition — rather than the kind that speaks on behalf of the powerful to suppress the claims of the vulnerable.

The Black Freedom Movement is, for me, the most powerful demonstration available of what this looks like. Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta Scott King. John Lewis. Bayard Rustin. These were deeply religious people whose faith was the engine of a commitment to human dignity that was, simultaneously, fully compatible with democratic pluralism and the scientific spirit. King’s vision of the Beloved Community — a world in which, as he put it, our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation — is not the vision of a theocrat. It is the vision of someone who had internalized the moral uncertainty that authentic faith demands. The uncertainty that your own tribe is not, in fact, the final measure of moral worth.

Coretta Scott King understood that vision to include the LGBTQ community explicitly. She spoke at the Atlanta Pride Festival and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, standing alongside John Lewis and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond. She saw the connection not as an extension of the civil rights movement but as its natural expression. The same principle that insisted on the dignity of Black Americans logically required the dignity of LGBTQ Americans. She was right.

There is, within Christianity itself, a rich tradition that theologians call apophatic — also known as negative theology — which approaches God not through affirmations about what God is but through acknowledgment of what God exceeds. God cannot be fully described. God cannot be contained by any human formulation. The appropriate response to the divine is not confident assertion but reverent unknowing. Thomas Aquinas drew on it. Meister Eckhart built on it. It runs through Jewish mysticism and Islamic Sufism. Many of the deepest spiritual thinkers in the world’s major religious traditions have understood that authentic faith requires something very close to what I am calling the embrace of uncertainty.

That faith is not what I am arguing against. The faith I am arguing against is the manufactured certainty that has been politically and institutionally engineered in the service of maintaining hierarchies of power. That kind of certainty does not represent the best of religious tradition. It represents its corruption.

I want to tell you about a specific conversation I had in Saline, Michigan. Saline is a small city in Washtenaw County. Predominantly white. Predominantly middle class. With a significant evangelical Christian community. In 2019 and 2020, a series of incidents in the Saline Area Schools — racist language directed at Black students, LGBTQ students reporting hostile environments — produced a community conversation that was contentious and difficult. I participated in some of it.

What I observed in Saline was the full range of responses to the evidence. There were people who denied that the incidents represented a systemic problem. There were people who acknowledged the specific incidents but resisted the conclusions about structural factors. There were people who engaged honestly with the evidence and arrived at conclusions they had not held before. And there were people — some of them among the most committed Christians in the community — who brought their faith explicitly to the question and arrived, through that faith, at a commitment to equity and inclusion that was more robust and more durable than what secular organizing alone could have produced.

The lesson I took from Saline is not that religion is the answer or that secular organizing is insufficient. It is that the coalition capable of addressing manufactured certainty has to be broad enough to include people who arrive at the same commitments through different routes. And dismissing the religious routes is both theologically arrogant and politically self-defeating.

Let me be concrete about what finding common ground actually looks like, because I have spent years trying to do it, and I have learned some things about what works and what doesn’t. What doesn’t work — leading with the argument. When you approach someone whose political and religious identity is organized around manufactured certainty with a stack of evidence that contradicts their certainties, you are not having a conversation. You are triggering a threat response. The person does not hear your evidence. They hear an attack on their identity. They respond accordingly. With defensiveness, dismissiveness, or anger. The evidence, no matter how compelling, has not been processed. It has been rejected at the gate.

What works — leading with the relationship. The most consequential conversations I have had about my son’s existence have not been with strangers at political rallies. They have been with people I already had some relationship with. Neighbors. Colleagues. Relatives. Members of our community. Who were given the opportunity to encounter my son not as a political symbol but as a person they already, to some degree, cared about. When someone already cares about you, the evidence of your humanity arrives differently. It doesn’t need to argue its way past the amygdala. It is already in.

This is why visibility matters. It is why pride parades and public testimony and books like this one matter. Not because they change everyone’s mind. They don’t. But they make it possible for people who are already in relationship with LGBTQ people — who already love a gay friend, a transgender relative, a bisexual coworker — to integrate that knowledge with their political choices. The research on this is consistent. Knowing an LGBTQ person personally is among the most reliable predictors of support for LGBTQ rights.

The same principle applies to race and to every other form of dehumanization. The civil rights movement’s most powerful strategic insight was not the legal briefs, though those were essential. It was the decision to make the suffering of Black Americans visible to white Americans in ways that could not be dismissed. To put the bodies, the dignity, the full humanity of particular people onto national television and into national newspapers. It worked because it made the evidence of shared humanity impossible to ignore for people who were already, at some level, capable of recognizing it.

The people who are not capable of recognizing it will not be reached by visibility or by evidence or by relationship. They are anchored in a certainty that the recognition of that shared humanity would destroy. They are a minority. The strategy of Scientific Rebellion cannot be primarily aimed at persuading them. It has to be aimed at activating the much larger number of people who are already, somewhere, capable of recognizing the shared humanity they are being asked to deny.

Those people exist. They are, in most polls, a majority. They oppose book bans. They support access to medical care. They believe people should be treated with dignity regardless of gender identity or race. But they are not, for the most part, activated. They are not showing up to school board meetings. They are not running for local office. They are not organized in the way the manufactured certainty movement is organized. This is the gap that Scientific Rebellion exists to close.

Reverend William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign, which he relaunched with Reverend Liz Theoharis in 2018, is one of the most significant attempts to build exactly the kind of coalition I am describing. Broad-based. Explicitly connecting racial justice, economic justice, LGBTQ equality, immigrant rights, and environmental justice as components of a single moral and political project. Grounded in both prophetic faith and empirical evidence about the consequences of the policies it opposes. Its analysis is that these are manifestations of the same underlying structure. The use of manufactured certainty about who deserves rights and protection to maintain hierarchies that benefit the few at the expense of the many. That is the argument of this book, stated in the language of the prophetic tradition rather than the language of engineering epistemology. The language is different. The structure is the same.

I want to close with a story about what common ground actually looks like in practice. In 2017, the Dexter Community Schools district in my hometown was navigating the *I Am Jazz* controversy and the broader question of how to support LGBTQ students. The administration did not retreat from the commitment it had made. But it also understood that the community contained people with deeply different views, and that the path forward required finding language that could hold more of the community than the language of culture war could.

What eventually emerged — through many meetings, much difficulty — was a framework organized not around ideology but around two principles that almost no parent, whatever their theological convictions, could reject. The safety of every child. And the dignity of every student. Not the approval of every identity. Not the celebration of every family configuration. Simply the commitment that every child in the district would be safe at school, and that no child would be subjected to humiliation, harassment, or exclusion based on who they are.

This is common ground. And it is not nothing. It does not resolve the theological disagreements. It does not ask people to abandon their certainty about what God designs. It asks them to agree that whatever their certainty, it does not authorize the harm of children in their community. And it asks the school to be the institution that protects children from that harm. Not by deciding theological questions. By maintaining the basic conditions under which all children can learn.

This is a limited victory. It does not protect transgender children in states where the law has been weaponized against them. It does not change the minds of people who still believe my son’s identity is disordered. But it protected my son, in his school, during the years when he most needed protection. And it did so by finding language that spoke to the values of people who did not share my theological convictions or my politics. That is what common ground looks like. It is not agreement. It is coexistence under shared principles that are not derived from any particular theology. It is, in the oldest sense, democracy.

The challenge of Scientific Rebellion is to extend that coexistence — that shared commitment to evidence, to safety, to the dignity of every human being — from the school district level to the state level to the national level. It is the challenge of making the limited local victories into the framework for the next period of American democracy.

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