Donna Schaper, Radical Reverend

We I'm just asking. She brings God fearlessly into the public sphere to counter religious conservatives with messengers like them. She says, no wonder nonbelievers are the fastest growing segment of American society. Scopper believes that the Christian God is not punishmentalist. She believes that Christian salvation is a joyous and universal liberation, and she came of age at the height of nineteen sixties radicalism, so she takes that liberation

to the streets. She was trained by Saul Alinsky and has been arrested for civil disobedience, so, of course, her church, Judson Memorial in Greenwich Village welcomes sex workers, militant atheists, LGBT folk, and the undocumented, and not just for worship. It is a church. Plus, it's a church of around three hundred people who worship every Sunday and fairly traditional ways. And it's also a place where about people from the

community come through a week, mostly undocumented people. Right now, a lot of sex workers Extinction Rebellion is meeting in the basement Occupy moved in for a couple of years. Is that kind of place. It's like the wee work of a radical left. Yes, And we try to throw them out as quickly as possible, do you yes, because we want to make room for the new and the next.

That's our job. And one of you of a theory you mean, I wonder if you are the Feds across the park over by the restrooms there in the little building, they were for a while, and we spotted them and they stopped Our executive director and really the founder of the sanctuary movement in this era is a man named Robbie rug Beyer, who has a case in federal court because they've been harassing him forever. And they also picked up another man who was a leader, Jean Montraville, and

deported him. Because they punish you for being an activist today. That's what it's come to under this administration. Well, before we get to the path you were on that led you to this kind of work. When you took over Judson, that was two thousand five. And were you in New York for several years prior to that? Are you arrived in New York right now? I was in Miami before that, in a Judson kind of church in Miami. And how would you describe the people who came to these facilities? Um?

Always the outsiders, Always people who were uncertain about religion, uncertain about God, but had a strong sense of righteousness and spirit and wanted to make something happen. They weren't fooling around, and they knew they needed to be in community to do it. They needed I call it spiritual nurture for public capacity. They're just something that they're seeking. And our congregation is probably a third agnostic, a third atheist,

and a third recovering Baptists. You know, people who know the hymns, know the prayers, love it, you know, need to go to church on Sunday. But really no, they don't really buy it. So I have to be very careful with God talk. Um, it's become dropping the G bomb I call it sometimes because everybody on the left is allergic to religion. Everybody on the left is allergic to God language. Do you think that's sad? I think it's stupid. Um, It's different than sad. It's a m

of ignorance and prejudice. The left is not immune to ignorance and prejudice, unfortunately, if I've experienced that myself, Now, what was your childhood like in that way? My childhood was with the warm fundamentalists, the Missouri sind Lutherans. And I got God. I got God through Pastor Witty. I think I was six. My father was beating up my mother and I called Pastor Witty and he came in his black cassock and he said, Donald, stop that, don't

do it anymore. So when I saw a Pastor Whitty show up, I said, I'm going to dedicate my life to keeping little girls safe. And I started baptizing my dolls. I started giving them communion, and both of my grandmother said, Donna, stop that, you can't be a pastor. It's only for boys. And I said, oh, no, no way, not if it's true, not if it's good. Right, So I fought my way into it. What did your father do for a living? He was a custodian in a garment factory. How many

kids in the family. Three, I'm the oldest, and then my sisters three years younger, and my baby brother wasn't born when this happened. So they stayed together after I had another kid. They stayed together until she finally walked out on him. Um after my begging her to do it. What's the path from baptizing your dolls to becoming you? Go to you? You went to college in get nice

Lutheran College. You know, feminism was just coming on, and I basically it's such a long story, but I got a scholarship to go to the University of Chicago Divinity School because my then husband, Bob Scopper, was avoiding the draft by getting a Rockefeller fellowship to go to seminary. That was one of the ways you could do it. And I called up the school and said, you know, I'm the one who ought to be going here, not him.

Why don't you let me come to And they had just hired the first woman professor and her one of the conditions of her employment at this prestigious place was to say, I need three scholarships for three women. There are no women in this class. So they put me through to a woman named Peggy anne Way and I got a scholarship. Bob dropped out in a year, became very depressed by the moral dilemma he had faced because he knew he was it wasn't quite right. But he

also couldn't go to Vietnam. He had a very low number. I don't know if you remember that time before. It's heavy for a lot of men. So I stuck. And then the Lutheran said, we don't know ordaine women. Are you crazy? And I said, well, no, I'm not. And they kept sending me back to seminary to get more courses in luther because they didn't know how to say

the real issue is that we don't ordain women. So there was a big sinid out in Minneapolis, and I and two other women who were the first three prepared to be ordained by the Lutherans, ended up on the front page of the paper um and we were all then banished. They did ordain women, but they weren't going

to ordain us because we were troublemakers. So I just switched to another denomination, the United Church of Christ, where I've been very happy and you were ordained when nineteen seventy three in Tucson, Arizona, and they wouldn't allow the nuns who were parts of my friends. You know, ordination is a ceremony of laying on of hands, and I was appalled at the notion of all those men me

kneeling down and then laying hands on that. I requested that my nuns women's group be allowed to also lay on hands, and the association the denomination said no. So we all bought pink underwear and wore the to the ordination, and when it was time for the laying on of hands, all the nuns came up, moved right to the front and laid on hand. There wasn't anything they can do about it. Judson had a Mass, that's Catholic Mass said by self ordained priests. Correct, Judson, we have we have

five different congregations worshiping in the building. When are they um? There's a thing called lab Shool, which is an experimental Jewish congregation saying praxed Us, which is the Roman Catholic women who self ordained who worship another is a restoration Temple which is a queer people of color congregation which is very evangelical US. And then we had an organization called the Muslim Community Network for a while. What's the

one you have mass for sex workers you tell me about. Yes, we do that, and also for opioid users, but they're episodic, they're not congregational. So the mass for sex workers are the people that what they're seeking as privacy, they want to be able to have COMPETENTI reality when they they wanted probably more space to organize than to pray. But we had Stormy Daniels people in a while back, which was really fun. She didn't come, but she sent things.

We had Pleasure Sunday a while back. You know, we're trying to be on the edge and not be conceited about it and wants to find the people who are outside of religion and have them tell us who God is. We live in a time now. I never hear anybody talk about God. I never hear anybody talk about faith

when you're read a dinner conversation. No, I don't need that to be some you know, obvious thing or very or very uh yeah, I mean, but it's like you never hear politicians talk about peace anymore, and I never hear people talk about God anymore. And yet I talked to God instantly. Most people do constantly. I mean, in my head, I'm saying, there going, but please let me get this right. Please, that wouldn't give me something that I want. Please let me just get through this without

any problems. Call down me down, we will focus me. I would sit there. I wrote this in this book I wrote about my I wrote a book that was basically a screed against the California family law system. When I was going through my custody battle from my older daughter. I remember I would sit on up in a plane and I leaned my head against a window, and I would say, please let this trip with my daughter be pleasant.

I don't want anything. The idea was I would just lean my head on a window of an airplane and say, please just let this weekend go well. Everybody just is happy. I said, let this weekend be normal. I wrote that in the book. Not that we're going to go have like some fizzy entertainment. Let it just be normal. We

all just get along. Everybody's fairly happy. And every time I made that prayer, it happy and nice, I guess, because I was requesting something that was in line with what some other power wanted me to have in my life, but in line with the power's intention right in your lifetime.

What do you attribute the I mean beyond you know, scandals and for the Catholics and stuff forth, and I know that their numbers are going down dramatically, what are you attributed to which have led us to this godless society? So it's a really good question. And the sex scandals do matter tremendously, even though there's an ancient heresy that says the bread is good even if the giver is not. Just because the priest is a bastard doesn't mean religion

is wrong. It's important, very important, and it's been well thought out for centuries. But that being said, I think I think the evangelicals have given God a very bad name, and it's it's the way they are to call it punishmentalism, and it's the punishing God. So they've got God wrong in a very fundamental way. And so people just they're getting blamed and shamed enough and at work, at school, they don't need to God who's like that. So the

good news is God isn't like that. Um I just did a sermon out in Orient last weekend about the difference between sweet braid and sage. So sage is this thing that's lots of people have in their houses, and it's an ancient native custom of dispelling the bad spirits. So people will move into a new house, so they'll go to a a and they'll dispel the bad spirits that are driving them crazy. Sweet braid isn't also an ancient ritual, simple household ritual of bringing in good energy.

I'm on the side of religion that calls up positive energy, not the kind that dispels the bad energy. So no stage all sweet bread for me. Do all the organized religions in the world have something that you admire and respect? Well? When I pray in public, which I often do, I say, God, you whom some call Jesus, another called Christ, you whom some call Allah, and others called breath You beyond the captivity of any human name or force, draw near and bless us on our way to finding some piece of

You today. And I really mean that prayer. Uh. We're struggling for our lives as movements. UM. I have founded this little organization in New York called bricks and mortals, which is about changing up the sacred sites so that they can be more useful. And it means remove the pews from your head, your spiritual head first, and get get over being right about God. So I'm married to a Jew. I have three kids who practice Judayoism. Your children are Jewish? Yes, my son is married to a rabbi.

He walks around Brooklyn wearing a t shirt that he had made and it says, my mother as a minister, My wife's a rabbi. Get over it. There was never any discussion of them coming to your side of the aisle, so to speak. Warren and I decided that the first seven years they'd get immersed in Christianity and the next seven years they get immersed in Judaism. So they were Actually when my mother left my father we were talking

about her before. It was at my twins bar Mitzvahs bar in bat Mitzvah, and my father went into one of his fits and said, I don't want to be around all those rich Jews. And she said I don't want to be married to a bigot anymore, and she walked and she never went back. Now, I said that when I went through the darkest parts of my child custody with my daughter, I said, I'm just gonna go into the woods and message I'm gonna drive up to the Birchers and Mike into the woods and just blow

my brains out. And I said, nobody will find me for at least a couple of weeks. And I wanted to come back from this horrible depression that I had, and um, I will sit with my priest, who is a dear friend of mine, older men. He's ninety three now, and he's one of three or four men over the years who's kept me coming back to pray and to ask for the strength to deal with this. And this because going back to church, going back to sit with these men and talk to them privately, we'd have meals.

I bring food over to the place and we'd sit down and have lunch out here. And all of them don't see the change that I see coming for the church, a dying Catholic church, and I don't want to focus only a Catholicism here. I said to them, you do see married clergy coming, And they said, oh, yes, it's it's it's it's not you know what christ wantity, wanted celibacy, but we're realizing, you know, whatever their words were about

the impracticality of that. Then I said, and if you saw like a gunshot their reaction to this, I said, now what about women? Clear before I even finished the phrase, they went no, no, no, no no no no no no no, and they shot that down so fast. Why

do you think that is why? It's just so? I wrote a book about this called I Heart You Francis Love Letters from a Reluctant Admirer, and I got I got a letter back from him, and in the book, I argued, because I was totally Twitter painted with this guy when he first came in, I just fell in love with him. So I decided to write him love letters, and and I said, your own beautiful internal logic about mother Earth and ecology. I think he's the smartest ecological

environmental thinker we have. And his entire thing is, let's re sacrilize all of the earth, and when we re sacrilize it, we won't be able to pollute it the way we do. And I think that's true, I really do. So I said, your own internal arguments are certainly going to lead you to ordain women have married priests, ordain gay people, and be so much less punishing and rigid in your point of view. And none of that happened. And all my Catholic friends said, Donna, that's the craziest

book you've ever written. It's really really naive. What happened to you? You stupid or something? And I said, no, I actually believe it. And I still believe it. So as long as the Catholics think no, no, no about ordaining women, I think they have missed the Jesus boat so far that they're just not going to make sense to people. And that's a real shame. United Church of Christ Minister Donna Scopper another, here's the thing, guests who

wrestles with questions of faith is Lawrence Right. He writes about the darker side of religion for The New Yorker magazine and in his book Going Clear, in which he documents the Church of Scientology's efforts to convert young actors in Hollywood. Your friends are going off, they're going to get law degrees and stuff like that, and you are out in you know, Hollywood, eating dog food, hoping to

be a movie star. There's a sense of inadequacy alongcome scientologists, which says you will learn the secrets of the universe and you'll acquire superhuman powers. And if you're a young actor standing out in central casting, they'll be passing out brochure saying how to get an agent, how to get ahead in the business, Come to the Celebrity Center. Lawrence Right discusses his other stories in our archive at Here's the Thing dot Org. Donna Scopper returns in a moment.

The Reverend Donna Scopper of Judson Memorial Church in New York comes by her radical activism. Honestly, she studied with the great rabble rouser Saul Alinsky, who got wind of Scopper while she was sort of attending the University of Chicago Divinity School. The first day we went to class, we all just said it was bs and went on strike. So we came up with this song that to Alice's restaurant and camped out in the chapel and that you can bullshit any time you feel. Let the smell don't

make you reel. And Saul was right around the corner, came and helped us organize it, and there was a mass graduate student sort of walk out. It was really really interesting and kind of adolescence and embarrassing. UM and Saul started teaching us, and I was really excited about organizing and really cut my teeth on the South side of Chicago with him for about a year, and then I realized that he was really sexist in his understanding of power. Today we would call it instrumental. You know,

hurt those guys, make an enemy, kill them. How do you get power? You you wait for the people in power, all of whom are bad and evil, to make a mistake, and then you, JOm, I got them. And so it's just masculine. So I wrote this paper in which I pointed out that I don't think women would organize that way. H nor did I think Christians would organize that way. Jesus is the one who he refused to have an enemy,

even though he called out power all the time. I mean, it's a beautifully hard dance, you know, because you can make more change if you can declare an enemy, you can really get very far. But when you're there and you're ministering, how do you get them to refuse to make an enemy? Because when you drop your guard, you feel like a chump. I'm in a lot of trouble right now for saying to the Me Too movement that

I just don't think we can demonize people. People just get angry about it and will tell you the victim regardless. Just believe the victims. Start with that, and I can even believe the victim. But I still want to know what's going to happen to the person over there, you know what happens to the rest of your life. You can't say that you're for decarceration and then throw the book at other people. You just can't do it that way. And I'm totally opposed to decarceration except for that group

of It just drives me crazy. But the larger way I do it in Greenwich Village is so we got a lot of funerals and a lot of weddings. Fewer baptisms these days, but a lot of funerals. In some stranger will walk in the door of Judson twice a week and say, my downstairs neighbor died. I called everybody

in her address book. I don't know nobody's answering. There are a lot of people like that still in the village, and we say, of course, we'll do a service and then ten people from the buildings show up, and the doorman and the housekeeper, you know. But usually the person who is the chief owner will say, by the way, no mention of God. And I'll get a big fat smile on my face and say I'll try, right, and because I have to agree to the terms, you know.

But then when we get into the service, I'll say, now, I've been asked not to mention God, so I'm not going to overdo it. But um, Suzanne is in the hands of whatever is almighty, whatever is good, whatever is beautiful, whatever is true, and her life mattered. In other words, try to reinsert God language or Jesus has been so polluted by the evangelicals that it's hard to go Christ.

I'll say Jesus all the time, but I probably won't say Christ because Christ has a kind of imperial feel to people, and in fact, that's what it means biblically. It's a way to be invitational. I want to be as invitational as possible, and I want to make people as spiritually comfortable as possible so that they don't have to be apologetic about being a Christian. So I'm so tired of people at Judson and elsewhere saying well, you know, I'm a Christian, but I'm not that kind of Christian.

I don't want to have to say that anymore. I want to create a world in which people who are full of hate and bile are not Christians period. They have nothing to do with Jesus. So let's say the sex workers come and have their service. Do you find that people who are going to these whatever, the congregants, whatever their d NA, do they have that kind of self examination? Is that a part of what they're doing. Yes, they do for the most part, and that's because they're

really human. And the safer the human is, the more likely the human is to confess his or her sin. And sin is miss the mark of our true humanity. It's missing, it's not being close to the ultimate to God. Um, it's distance from God. Sin is not specific things so much as your whole attitude, in your whole way of being, and whether you're making yourself stronger to be more loving because love is very hard. Is it becoming harder to love in the world we live in? Well, of course

it is because we've banned God. Is this great article not to get off the sex workers? I think they are as accountable as any other group of human being. I really do on us. They get what they're doing. I mean, some people who work at Walmart are really worried about selling guns. Some people who work in a fast food place, Thank my god. I'm a great singer and I'm working in a fast food place. What is

it with me? A lot of my preaching friends. So I gave another crappy sermon on Sunday, what's with me? You know why? I am? Why not doing my best? But it's not It's not the act, the habitual act of this or that, or the crummy job. There are a lot of people with crummy jobs. And there's a Korean notion of sin, which is the word is han h a and and it actually comes through Reinhold neighbor to who thought the big sin was pride. Mm hmm. The big sin is what he calls um indifference. I

can't believe you just said that. I said to my priest, my former priest who died from the bell Rose Queen's School, the old Catholic boys from Queens. You know, we had this a very heavy New York accent like this, And I said, I want to sit down with you and do reconciliation. I'm wanna do the modern Catholic confession. He goes, what I said, Yeah, I want to sit down with you. I got a lot of things I want to talk

about that are really eating at me. And I feel bad because you want to sit down and do all of that in the room and tell me every horrible thing you've been doing. Well, please, because are you sorry? Are you sorry for what you did? Alright, the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, You're absolved, Okay, Please go. I can't stand that listening to those stories. And then we had lunch and I said to him, people come to He goes, well, he is.

Everything is about sex. The man is having an affair with his secretary and it's just sex. He's just fooling around. And the woman is having sex with a tennis pro or her trainer. But she's fallen in love. She's in love. And he says, and I don't care about that. He goes, I'm from the Thomas Aquinas school, the sins of the Flesh, of the least of our concerns. He said, I want someone to come into this room and say, bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have an abundance of pride indifference.

People have been told stop caring carrying his old care. It's too expensive. And this is why we get climate deniers, school shooters, ridiculous forms of government. I mean, I can't believe the Congress sits around every day all day long and does nothing about people whose medical bills are skyrocketing, and they're going, I mean, it's just insane. So it's what you don't do. St. Paul said, um uh, the good that I do not and the evil that I would not do, I do. And it's in that place

the Korean word han. It's not just indifference, it's also folly lust and they apply it to people who died in the Holocaust. This is very uncomfortable, but they'll say, why did the Jews who outnumbered the guards not rise up and die fighting and die fighting as opposed to the way they died. Now, I don't know how I really think about that, because, okay, because I have a mother. I have a mother who stayed with an abusive man for thirty years and when I finally got said to her,

why why why why why why? She said, Donna, because we would have been in the poorhouse. I did it for you, Now shut up and get it. I get it. So it's not like we have all these choices to rebel or to foment revolution on a daily basis, But we do have responsibility when we don't, when we settle, and that I think is a form of sin too. And you know, one of the things that's going on

with clergy right now. We used to call it rent a caller, and now with all these mass shootings, it's like rent a caller at the vigil getting really hard these Saturday events. You have to change up everything you're gonna do, and then the mayor, of course us wants you to stand there and look like you're praying. And these are all people who haven't been religiously prepared. I think it takes a whole life to become a Christian, and I hope I get there before I go. You

don't just do it a little bit. You guide a lot of people through their final moments. Correct. Yes, mostly I do old fashioned ministry, hatching, matching and dispatching weddings, funerals, baptisms, despatching exactly. You have never heard that, Well, always said that to me. That was my prec said, oh, he goes. I love it you come here, he said, I thought you'd be one of those A and P Catholics. I said, what they say as ashes and palms hatching, matching, dispatching.

But when's when a congregant you're told is gonna is gonna cross over and you go there. I'm assuming that many times they're not lucid, they're not conscious, know, but the people around them are. What do you want them to know that they're going to be okay, that the survivors are going to be okay. Even if it's a husband or a wife or a partner, they're going to be okay. Even without the role of the church over throughout time to let people have a place to go,

it still matters a lot, you know. I mean, I have a beautiful woman in my congregation. Um. She was the first chair of the board when I got to Judson, and she and her husband were so close, just the two of them. They were just happy together, didn't have children. She has a beautiful garden in Brooklyn. They were redoing this brown stone, these great New Yorkers. Anyway, he died, and his whole dying was Mary going to be okay, what is what's going to happen to Mary? What's gonna

happen to Mary? And she was just lost without him. It's like this guy that was killed in the shooting who held his father in his arms, and the father right it was kept asking if he was okay. That last impulse, that last breath of life is an outwardly directed breath and then a miracle it is, And it is a miracle because you really are less self obsessed than than ever people know they're dying. You know, my mom just died this year and she were you there

for her to minister to her. No, my sister was, and I wasn't. She died in her sleep at peacefully. But she's been saying for two years you know I'm ready, Donna, don't get all uptight, you know. I said, well, you can be ready, but maybe I'm not ready, you know, So that's the difference. What do you think happens to us when we die? Oh? I think we all go to heaven. I think that's fantastic. What do you think

happens when you die? Oh? I got it down, fascinating. Yes, Um, the my last question for you, you've been a minister in several different congregations. Seven. If I'm mistaken, give me one or two of the most fundamental changes for you over time. Boy, I wish I could say I had changed more. I it's all pretty basic. Um. I think probably social media and the internet has changed some of

the way we do pastoral care. I used to always visit in people's homes and uh, you know, and kind of a circuit, you know, you go this and you do that, you go there and you and so I got to know lots and lots of old ladies, uh really well, which was wonderful, Um, people who are not afraid of dying. And then now we just had a baby born at Judson and I said, emailed, said, I'm gonna come over, you know, say hi and see how

you're doing, because I'm concerned about the mother. And the baby will be fine, but I know what happens to mothers. And she said, oh my god, couldn't we just talk on the phone. And I thought, hmm, okay, you know, so I missed the face to face. And you know, I think that the world is more dangerous right now, and people are experiencing it as very dangerous. And I attribute that to the lack of acculturation of meaning religion

in the best sense of the word. You know, not crappy religion, but being raised with a common set of values that are broad enough to include people and narrow enough to say this matters. You know, you just don't. You don't go shooting people, you know, you don't. My rabbi friend in Miami, uh, we did a Good Friday and pass Over together once when that guy came out with the Jesus Blood movie. What's his name, Mel Gibson,

Mel Gibson. When Mel Gibson did his movie, I called Rabbi Mitch Cheffer's my dear friend now and he said, we have to do something about this movie together. Coral Gables Congregational Church and temple is real. He said no. He was like, well, thanks Mitch, you know. And then a week later he called me back and he said, we have to do something. So let's worship together on

opening night of Passover and on Good Friday. You bring your cross into the temple, take it out, do exactly your service, and then we'll do exactly our service and we'll show what religions mean. And it was beautiful because we were able to not turn Mel Gibson into uh, you know, a demon, but to do what we do and and respect it. It's certainly there are fewer people coming to church or synagogue, but those who do are getting a really interesting experience. That's what I would say.

It's not automatic. You choose it. Because So there was this guy on the subway two days ago, and it's eight o'clock in the morning and he walks in with a giant Carvel ice cream cake you know what they are, and it's melting, and he's got spin asked me what carvel cake is. Come on, he's got tats all over, he's got a backpack. He looks like a strange hipster.

It's at Fort Street. He gets on with the cake and he yells out to the whole car it's my birthday and does anybody want to have some cake with me? And everybody looks like no. Then all of a sudden, a couple of people say what the hell start eating. So then people all gathered around the cake, eating this cake, and he's laughing his head off and he says, this is how I wanted to celebrate my birthday. I wanted to have a Eucharist with you, and this is my body.

This is my body, Fugie Whale, It's my body, Fuggie the Whale. Donna's scopper on social justice, salvation and carvel. You can find her delivering the good news at eleven every Sunday morning at Judson Memorial Church in New York City or at a protest near you. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Two two