This post was submitted by Chris

This post was submitted by Chris Stedman, a secular queer finishing a Master of Arts in Religion who runs the website NonProphet Status, a blog for non-religious news that is not rooted in anti-religious sentiment.

“Theologians / They don’t know nothing / About my soul,” sings Jeff Tweedy on Wilco’s “Theologians,” a track off their 2004 release “A Ghost is Born.”

Last year I started doing work for Chicago-based NGO the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC). IFYC is an advocacy organization that is working to make interfaith cooperation a social norm. It was started by Eboo Patel, a deeply religious Muslim who is now one of Obama’s advisors on religion and one of America’s Best Leaders according to U.S. News & World Report. He may be all of these things, but the first thing I noticed upon walking into his office for a meeting last June was the colossal Wilco poster on his wall.

There are no Wilco posters on my wall – personally, I prefer Okkervil River when it comes to literate middle-American folk rock. And I’m not a Muslim; I call myself a secular humanist. That means that I don’t believe in god, I don’t go to church, and I use my best sense of reason to decipher what’s “right” and what’s “wrong.”

A good number of my fellow secular friends don’t understand what draws me to religion, and I can’t say I blame them. I always get the same Jeff Tweedy-esque comment when my work comes up: “You know, I just don’t get religious people. And they, certainly, don’t get me.”

Maybe the reason we secular folks feel like religious people don’t get us is that we’ve never bothered to let them. And that, I think, is “wrong.”

Last year I gathered together a bunch of people to celebrate my twenty-second birthday, and I have to say it was an awkward affair. Half of my friends were standing on one side of the bar and half on the other. You could practically draw a chalk line down the middle of the room, and if that line had a name, it would be what Eboo calls “the faith divide.” Anyone who looked remotely religious was given the suspicious side eye by my secular friends as they went outside for another cigarette. From inside, I heard them say: “What are they doing here? Did he really have to invite his Jesus-y friends? Some of them aren’t even drinking!”

It’s not like I don’t understand the secular hesitancy toward religious people. Once you’ve been burned, you’re less likely to step foot in the kitchen. But I believe the only way we’re going to fully engage in a religiously diverse world is if we engage with the world’s religious diversity.

I think Mr. Tweedy’s got a point. As a pragmatist, I believe theology and philosophy are worthless if there’s no practical application for them. The best theologies and philosophies are based in real experience, and experience is translated through stories. I’ve heard an awful lot of stories since I started doing interfaith work.

One day at IFYC a coworker and I were working on promotion for an interfaith conference we had planned and, to break from repetitive emailing, got to talking. My coworker, a hijabi Muslim, started to tell me about the man she was seeing. After we had swapped several dating stories she confessed that’d she never really met a queer person before – besides the ones she “kicked and punched” at her karate dojo – and wanted to know what I looked for in men as a secular humanist.

To her, faith was a priority when seeking a suitor. Her boyfriend was a Christian, so though it was not her religion, she was relieved that he believed. I informed her that there are a lot of things that attract me to a person, but that I’m often drawn to compassion, empathy, and a desire to build a better world. She replied that what appealed to her about her boyfriend’s religiosity was that he had a value system, and I agreed that values are critical. Before that afternoon we’d never really thought we had much in common, but by engaging our experiences, an unlikely duo – a secular queer and a hijabi Muslim – uncovered a shared respect for ethics. That day we discovered ourselves in the others’ story, and we were both transformed.

I’ll admit I get some strange looks when I walk into a room to lead an interfaith dialogue training at a high school, college or conference. Those looks say: “well, you aren’t exactly what I was expecting.” Maybe it’s my visible tattoos, my stretched earlobes, or the fact that I’m wearing lime green skinny jeans. But as soon as I tell my story, there’s a change in the room. People “get it.”

Eboo writes in his book Acts of Faith that “when thousands of people discover that their story is also someone else’s story, they have the chance to write a new story together.” The moment I share my story as a secular humanist, others feel more comfortable sharing their own story of religion. Or, as Christian author William White writes, “the most natural response to one story is another story.”

In a world dominated by religious politics and conflict, it is so important that we share stories of cooperation across lines of difference. If Sufjan Stevens can sing about his love for Jesus and Lupe Fiasco can declare himself a devout Muslim, certainly we secular folks have our own stories to share – if only we will. I know one religious man with a Wilco poster on his office wall who is more than happy to listen.

My twenty-third birthday is coming up. Maybe if we all talked a bit more, all of my friends could celebrate it together, crossing the bar to share their stories of religious and secular identity.

I don’t know about you, but I’d drink to that.

Chris Stedman is a secular queer finishing a Master of Arts in Religion who runs the website NonProphet Status, a blog for non-religious news that is not rooted in anti-religious sentiment. Chris is an Adjunct Trainer for the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based NGO that works to change the public narrative on religion from one of conflict to one of cooperation. He is a member of the American Humanist Association and voting member of the Secular Student Alliance, coordinates religious roundtables for Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo.org, is the Religion Staff Writer for arts and culture magazine Jettison Quarterly, and is working on a post-graduate certificate in Spiritual Direction, making him the first self-identified non-religious individual to do so. You can often overhear Chris lamenting that activism won’t make you rich and subsequently catch him trying to charm his way into concert tickets from cute strangers at the bar. Don’t ask him about his success rate; he’s only been to two concerts in the past year.

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