LAUREN GILGER: Yesterday on The Show, we introduced a new series we’re diving into about religion at the state Legislature. We’re calling it Ditat Deus, which is Arizona’s state motto. It means “God Enriches,” and it’s where we begin our next conversation in this series today with professor Evan Berry.
Berry is a religious studies professor at Arizona State University, and he came into our studios recently to talk about where that motto comes from and how baked in religion is to our way of government — not just here in Arizona, but in the country. And professor Berry, I don’t think we’re the only state in the country with a religious or God-referencing motto, right? ... How connected from the very beginning has religion been to our system of government?
EVAN BERRY: One of the interesting things about Arizona is its roots in mining have a lot to do with this. The fact that you get rich with mines based on God’s providence, I think, is is is the basis for why that motto is so central for the organization of state politics.
LAUREN GILGER: God enriches refers to like riches in the earth.
EVAN BERRY: God’s bounty in from waters, from rains, from mining. We’re really dependent on those things here in the desert Southwest.
LAUREN GILGER: No way. That’s fascinating. So, one of the things that strikes me and that we’ve been thinking about and talking about as we’ve done this series is that each session at the state Legislature — and I don’t think most people realize this — begins with a prayer, right? Like, you will have a lawmaker up there reading sometimes a very in-depth and sometimes very personal prayer. Is that common?
EVAN BERRY: Yeah, I think more than half of state legislatures open both chambers of their state legislatures with a prayer for every session. Some of those states have guidance about whether or not certain kinds of language is allowed. Some of those states have criteria about who can and can’t speak. Arizona’s pretty laissez-faire in terms of who is allowed to present. It can be a guest, it can be a visiting chaplain. So, Arizona’s a little bit more open about prayer at state legislative gatherings.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, but it does seem as if religion and Christianity in particular seems to be kind of — maybe not baked in, but assumed in a lot of the the rituals around our state government. Would that be a fair statement?
EVAN BERRY: Yeah, that’s fair. So, prayer before legislative sessions has been practiced in most states since the beginning of the republic. And I think by today’s standards, that would strike many people as like an establishment clause issue. But courts have consistently found that because that practice predates even the First Amendment, right, it just it dates back to the to the colonial period, that it’s sort of grandfathered in as a tradition more than an establishment.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting. So, you teach a religious freedom class at ASU. And I wonder in today’s world in which, I don’t know, politics are very divisive and heated often, and they often go very hand in hand with religion, what’s that like? What do students think about religious freedom in this country today?
EVAN BERRY: You know, most students who take religious studies classes, it’s going to be the only class that they get the opportunity to really think and talk about religion in their college experience. And they’re mostly really excited to get a chance to do that.
The students really engage that as an opportunity to think through what it means to be a citizen, what it means to connect their personal identity with the cultures and spiritual traditions of their neighbors, and to think about those questions together in sort of a collegial debate environment.
Yeah, students, I think, have responded really well to that. We do talk in that class about charged issues, animal sacrifice, Christian nationalism, climate change, oil and gas exploration — all sorts of things that are contested areas in American politics where religion is sort of hiding in the background of what — how our debates are shaped.
LAUREN GILGER: Where does Christian nationalism come into this conversation today, Evan?
EVAN BERRY: Well, that’s that’s the million-dollar question. I think that Christian nationalism, with its assertion that America is and should remain a Christian nation, crowds out the space for other kinds of religious claims in our public policymaking. So, if you have Native American plaintiffs, citizens arguing that their rights should be respected by the courts, Christian nationalist perspectives don’t want to make room for that. If you go back to the case about animal sacrifice in Hialeah, it’s the same thing, that the Christian ideas and norms should be reflected in the law and that other kinds of religions shouldn’t deserve the same protections as as Christianity.
LAUREN GILGER: How much has that conversation and sort of the idea that that we are a Christian nation changed or become more prevalent, you think, in recent years?
EVAN BERRY: I think it’s become substantially more prevalent over the past, say, 50 or 60 years. I think to some degree, this is a growing movement that dates back to the reactions against the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. So, you have groups rallying around segregation academies, you have groups petitioning not to have to follow the government’s mandates not to discriminate, and so separating out that on the basis of their religious freedom to do so.
You know, the original idea of separation of church and state, which is not actually named in our founding documents, but, you know, it’s comes from the writings of people like Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson. So in their in their private papers, which were inspirations for the the Constitution. They use this language of separation of church and state both to talk about protecting the state from the church, but also protecting churches from government interference. And Christian nationalism essentially rejects that idea that there should be a protection of both of those things from one another.
LAUREN GILGER: What do you think this means, or how do you think this looks when it comes to lawmaking? Like, we for this series interviewed a series of lawmakers about their own religious experiences and sort of inspirations, the reasons why they’re driven to do the things they do, vote the way they vote. And sometimes that’s based on their religion, sometimes that’s not. When it comes to lawmaking at a national level or a local level, do you think the sort of forthright conversation about religious motivations has changed?
EVAN BERRY: Yeah, it’s hard to track that over time. I do think that in a representative democracy, it’s really important that private citizens and elected officials are both free to speak about their private religious convictions and to talk about the relationship between what they think is important in policy and how that stems from their moral and spiritual and religious commitments.
That said, sometimes those commitments might be religiously particular in ways that step on other people’s religious commitments. And that’s where the trick is. So, this idea that legislators here in Arizona or anywhere in the nation draw on their religious and and faith lives to shape what they think is important is a long part of American tradition. What’s what’s changing is our willingness to give space for people whose religious differences might be impacted by that.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. Evan Berry, religious studies professor at Arizona State University joining us. Evan, thank you very much for coming in. Appreciate it.
EVAN BERRY: Yeah, thanks for inviting me.
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