The 16 Vermont faith community members signing this open letter, from Vermont Interfaith Action's Clergy and Church Elder Caucus, include Guy Wood (Brattleboro Area Jewish Community), Rev. Telos Whitfield (All Souls U.U. Church, Brattleboro), and Rev. Ralph W. Howe (First United Methodist Church of Brattleboro, Vt./The Beloved Community). The letter comes to us via Mike Mrowicki, an organizer for VIA.
We are writing as leaders of faith communities from across the state of Vermont to express our deep concern that religious freedom is under attack from members of our federal government using the guise of white Christian nationalism as stated in Project 2025.
We call upon all our legislators and community members throughout the state to actively defend the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment supports separation of church and state and prohibits the government from establishing and/or favoring one religion over another. It also protects everyone's right to freely practice their own religion or no religion at all.
Out of our shared values of love, mutual respect, social justice, and collective action for the common good, we as faith leaders denounce the principles and proponents of white Christian nationalism.
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White Christian nationalists seek to erase the separation between church and state and establish a government that promotes and enforces white supremacist, nativist, patriarchal, and heteronormative standards for both public and private life.
By using intimidation and force, the aim is to redefine and restrict liberty and justice in our nation, so it is available to only some people, and not all of us.
Examples of these efforts include:
• Attacks on transgender youth, through a presidential executive order that aims to restrict access to health care for trans people. Such efforts threaten the rights of youth, their parents, and caregivers to make informed, evidence-based, necessary care.
The targeting of trans people includes a lawsuit in Vermont regarding a trans athlete in a suit supported by the Alliance Defending Freedom, whose lawyers include current U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson.
• The Department of Homeland Security has targeted hundreds of international students and scholars who are legally in the United States; doing so violates their First Amendment rights, which extend to noncitizens.
For example, a Tufts University graduate student was abducted by masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in plain clothes on March 25 as she was going to break Ramadan fast with friends.
• Materials highlighting the graves of Black and female service members at the Arlington National Cemetery have been removed from the cemetery's official website. Materials describing the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman have been deleted from the website of the National Park Service. [Editor's note: Tubman's photo was restored after a public outcry, but she remains unmentioned in the edited text as of April 20, as does her connection to the Underground Railroad.]
• The appointment of Russell Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is a core leader of the white Christian nationalism movement and one of the principal authors of Project 2025.
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These few examples, out of many, are part of a systematic effort to erase the diversity inherent in our national story and communities and to impose their religious beliefs using government authority, as articulated in Project 2025.
As faith leaders who value and affirm the diversity of all human life and the various ways in which we love and care for ourselves, each other, the Earth, and the Divine, we refuse to ignore the violent ideology of white Christian nationalism and its effects on our common life together.
We call on all people of Vermont to mobilize our respective thoughts, prayers, and tangible efforts to ensure that the freedoms that have been vital to the growth and development of our American democracy do not become a thing of the past.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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