Table of Contents
On faith, freedom of conscience, mutual respect, and the difference between acknowledging someone’s existence and being required to share their beliefs.
I am a Christian woman. Baptist raised in the South. I attended schools named after civil war fighters who would not have believed in my right to read or attend school. Our parks and neighborhood communities were named after people and events of the Civil War who believed in Black enslavement to build up the lives of white Southerners. Seeing the “rebel flag” on cars and t-shirts is still commonplace. 
My faith is not something I picked up because it was fashionable, convenient, or socially acceptable. It is a deep and abiding faith that has carried me through some hard and treacherous places. There have been times when I didn’t know how I was going to get through what was in front of me. But I believed God would see me through. I knew that I knew that I knew. Sometimes all I had was faith the size of a mustard seed, but that was enough.
And here I am.
I exist. Women like me exist. Millions of us exist.
But here is something else I believe, just as firmly.
I do not have the right to require another person to make declarations that I hold sacred.
I don’t need a Muslim to profess my Christian faith. I don’t need a Jewish person to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. I don’t need a Buddhist to pray the way I pray, or an atheist to pray at all.
And I don’t consider their refusal to do those things an attack on me.
That understanding did not weaken my faith. Life has given me plenty of opportunities to see why it matters.
1. We Didn’t Have to Believe the Same Things to Do Good Work Together
Over the years, I have served on many multifaith task forces addressing violence against women. And I mean it when I say those experiences were blessed.
We came from different faith traditions. We brought different teachings, histories, practices, and ways of understanding the world. Sometimes our beliefs overlapped. Sometimes they did not.
But we had women and families to help.
We had violence to prevent. We had institutions to challenge. We had people who needed safety, compassion, and practical assistance.
And when somebody shared something from their religious tradition that I had never considered before, I listened. I learned. In some ways, it changed me.
Sometimes what they shared changed how I thought about violence, harm, abuse, and our responsibilities to one another.We exchanged knowledge. We learned from one another. We grew. Every time.
I have also worked alongside people who do not profess religious faith. They have knowledge and experience worth hearing, too. Multifaith coalitions are generally organized around religious traditions, but the work of protecting women has never belonged exclusively to religious people.
Nobody had to convert anybody.
Nobody had to pretend our differences didn’t exist.
And nobody had to abandon what they believed before we could get something worthwhile accomplished.
We respected one another enough to work together without requiring one another to become alike. Mission centered. Mission first.
2. You Don’t Have to Call Me Sister Tonya
Among fellow Christians, particularly in the Black church tradition, I am accustomed to forms of address that carry religious and cultural meaning.
“Sister Tonya.” You can call me Tonya. My sisters and brothers in Christ may call me Sister Tonya. Neither form of address diminishes who I am.
I understand that language. I appreciate the fellowship behind it. But why would I expect a Jewish colleague, a Muslim colleague, or an atheist to address me the way members of my church and faith community might?
They can call me Tonya. That’s my name.
We don’t all have to pray together. We don’t have to pray the same way. Some people don’t pray at all.
If I am participating in a Christian worship service, of course my faith will shape how I worship. But if I am working with people from different backgrounds on a shared public mission, I understand that I am not standing in my own church.
There is room for everyone to bring what they know without being required to profess what someone else believes.
That is not disrespect.
That is how mutual respect works.
3. I Knew Jill Before I Knew She Was Jewish
I grew up in a mostly Black Southern city in the years after legal segregation.
Proud people. Resilient people. Battle-tested people.
And yes, there was a church on many a street corner.
Where I grew up, the question was not always whether your family went to church.
It was, “What church does your family go to?”
Even if somebody didn’t attend regularly, there was usually a church connected to family holidays, funerals, or some part of their upbringing.
Church was woven into the culture.
Now, let me tell you about Jill.
Jill and I had been classmates since elementary school, back when we were still wearing ponytails and knee socks with our skirts.
She was smart. Everybody knew that. She was always winning the spelling bee. I tried to win, but everybody knew that Jill was going to win.
She was Jill.
By senior year, a group of us were sitting together at lunch when somebody mentioned that something needed to be handled differently because Jill was Jewish.
I stopped.
“Jill is Jewish?!”
They looked at me like I had lost my mind.
Somebody repeated her last name, which was recognizably Jewish.
And I said, “Ohhhhh.”
I had known that girl practically my whole school life. I knew she was brilliant. I knew she was a classmate. A fellow senior. Danced with our class section at the pep rallies. School pride. Class pride. I knew her as Jill.
Her religion simply had never changed anything about how I saw her.
But as I grew older, I began to wonder about something. (You’re about to learn why.)
Just because her being Jewish had not changed how I saw her, did that mean growing up where we did had always been easy for her?
I couldn’t answer that question for Jill.
And that is part of the lesson.
4. Then Came Our Class Reunion
I was not the only one who didn’t consider that Jill was Jewish.
Years passed.
We grew up, built lives, pursued careers, raised families, and found our different places in the world.
Eventually, we came together for a class reunion.
And because of the community we came from, part of our reunion involved going to church together.
Some of our former classmates had become evangelists, ministers, and pastors. They led the worship.
For many of us, it was familiar.
It sounded like home. It reflected the community that had raised us.
I understood why people wanted to do it. It seemed natural to me and a way to honor where our home that nourished us, loved us and gave us wings. What all the good fighting people gave us that had brought us this far.
But afterward, a conversation began on Facebook.
April, our Black religious undeclared classmate and salutatorian, raised a question about the fairness of organizing a class reunion around Christian worship when not everyone in our class was Christian.
Jill, our valedictorian, was Jewish.
And April was asking us to think about that.
The discussion became deep, tense, and necessary.
Because we were confronting something that is easy to overlook when your own customs are the dominant ones.
The service reflected the identity of the place where we grew up. But Jill grew up there, too.
Jill had attended those schools.
Jill had shared those classrooms.
Jill had been part of our childhood, our education, and our community.
Jill was us too. Jill is us too.
She was our valedictorian.
She was still engaging with former classmates on Facebook all those years later.
And she was Jewish. I am Christian.
One truth did not cancel out the other.
Jill is us, too. And I belong, too.
5. Sometimes We Mistake What Is Familiar for What Belongs to Everybody
I don’t think there is anything wrong with Christians gathering for worship. For me, it is amazing and transformative.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with former classmates who share a faith wanting to attend church together.
But a class reunion is not the same thing as a church gathering.
It belongs to the class.
And our class included Jill.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Christian classmates could not have a worship service. It does mean we needed to consider whether it should be an optional gathering alongside reunion activities that welcomed everyone equally.
There is a difference.
A person should not have to participate in somebody else’s religious observance to feel fully included in a reunion celebrating a community they helped make.
And I appreciated that April raised the question. It was NOT an easy conversation. It was tense.
She challenged us to consider something beyond our own experience.
We did not have to stop being Christian to hear her.
We simply had to remember that we were not the only people who belonged.
6. This Is Also How I Think About Trans-Identified People
I believe trans-identified people exist. I know that they do. I have collaborated with them in my work.
They are human beings. They live in our communities, work, raise families, experience joy, suffer hardship, and deserve the same basic human dignity and protection against violence that everyone else deserves.
But I also do not believe that recognizing another person’s humanity automatically obligates me to adopt every belief that person holds about identity.
I don’t require a Muslim to affirm Christianity.
I don’t require a Jewish person to participate in Christian worship.
And I don’t believe that I should be required to make personal declarations about sex and identity that conflict with my sincerely held convictions, truth, and provable facts.
That does not give any of us permission to harass, threaten, mistreat, or humiliate another person.
Nor should disagreement automatically be treated as proof that someone wishes another person harm.
We can discuss reasonable expectations of courtesy, professional conduct, and equal treatment without pretending that every disagreement is the same as “cruelty.”
And we should be able to distinguish those questions from demands that people personally affirm a particular understanding of identity.
Respectful conduct and personal conviction are not identical things.
I have spent too much of my life working against violence and abuse to believe that human dignity should depend on everyone agreeing about everything.
7. Acknowledgment Is Not the Same as Agreement
We make this distinction in ordinary life all the time.
I can acknowledge that my neighbor is Muslim without becoming Muslim.
I can recognize that a colleague is Jewish without participating in Jewish religious observances.
I can defend an atheist’s freedom not to believe in God without surrendering my own faith.
And they can defend my freedom to worship without accepting Christian theology.
I see and hear the jokes about Christians. I’m still going to do me. Sometimes we ought to be thankful that people choose what they choose and not the other options of this world.
Nobody disappears because somebody else disagrees.
Nobody’s humanity becomes conditional upon winning an argument.
We can recognize one another’s humanity without requiring one another’s declarations of belief.
8. April Asked Us to Remember Who Else Was in the Room
When I think about that reunion conversation now, I think about how easy it would have been to dismiss April.
After all, we were raised in a community where church was deeply woven into everyday life.
What was the big deal?
Everybody knew what kind of place we came from.
But that was precisely the point.
We were remembering the place through the experiences of those of us for whom Christian worship was familiar.
April was reminding us that somebody else’s experience deserved consideration, too.
And Jill wasn’t some stranger arriving in our community and asking us to erase our history.
She was part of that history.
She had been there since we were children.
She had helped make our class what it was.
I cannot tell you what Jill thought about that particular reunion service. Her own perspective belongs to her.
But I can tell you what the conversation taught me.
Sometimes inclusion begins when somebody who belongs to the majority stops long enough to ask whether the traditions they enjoy have left somebody else standing at the edge.
That question is not an attack on tradition.
It is an opportunity to practice the respect we say we believe in.
9. My Faith Has Never Needed Everybody Else to Be Christian
I am still a Christian woman. All by myself. I don’t require anyone else’s approval, validation, or acknowledgement to be that.
Still Baptist raised in the post Civil War, post Jim Crow south.
Still grateful for the faith that has carried me through this life. (And sometimes I know that others ought to be too. Some people who have survived what I have choose violence. This world ain’t nothing nice and easy.)
I have not abandoned my convictions because I have learned from Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, or people who do not believe in God.
Quite the opposite.
My experiences working alongside people of different faiths have deepened my appreciation for what people can accomplish when they bring their knowledge to the table without demanding ownership of everyone else’s conscience.
I can remain faithful to what I believe.
You can remain faithful to what you believe.
We can disagree about important things and still work together where we share a purpose.
And when disagreement raises genuine questions about rights, safety, fairness, or institutional responsibilities, we can address those questions directly-with truth, integrity, and MUTUAL respect.
We do not have to pretend they are simple.
We do not have to make every difference a personal insult.
And we do not have to demand professions of belief as the price of belonging.
10. Jill Is Us Too
I keep coming back to that little girl with the spelling bee trophies.
The girl I knew before I understood much about religious differences.
The girl who grew up in the same city, attended the same schools, and became our valedictorian.
Jill was Jewish all along.
And she was Jill all along.
Those things were never in conflict.
What changed as I grew older was my understanding of how easily a majority can confuse its own customs with everybody’s obligations.
I am grateful for the people who have challenged me to think beyond what was familiar.
I am grateful for the multifaith colleagues who shared their wisdom about preventing violence against women.
And I am grateful for April, who asked our class to think about fairness when it might have been easier to remain silent.
Because the goal was never to make everybody the same.
It was to remember that everybody belonged.
My Christian faith is sacred to me. Your freedom of conscience should be sacred to you. And neither of us should have to surrender that freedom to recognize the humanity of the other.
We can share a community without sharing a creed.
We can share a mission without sharing a prayer.
And we can make room for one another without pretending our differences do not exist.
Jill is us, too.
She always was. She always will be.
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