How a Pluralist Views Democracy’s Beautiful, Messy Tensions

How do religions change and make change in the world? For Brie Loskota, these are more than questions to ponder in a classroom. Loskota, born in the Philippines and raised in a Pentecostal Christian family, has built a career devoted to religious pluralism and civic engagement. Among her many projects, she’s built a leadership training program for young Muslim civic leaders, an app to help first responders navigate the needs of religious communities during disasters, a public radio series of COVID sermons, and more.  

Loskota is now the Executive Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago School of Divinity, a role she took on last year after leading the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. 

As part of Interfaith America Magazine’s “Vote is Sacred” series, Loskota sat down with managing editor Monique Parsons to talk about voting, Election Day, and the ways religious communities can serve as bridges during polarized times. 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Monique Parsons: When you think about voting and civic engagement, do you make a connection to your own worldview or religious leaning? 

Brie Loskota: I was born in the southern Philippines, in Cebu. My parents were there because they were pursuing something that I call the reverse American dream —  they left the U.S. for economic opportunity and upward mobility. My dad went to medical school in the Philippines in the ‘70s. When we returned to the United States, they raised us in this very strongly Pentecostal environment. And to me, Pentecostalism meant sort of global engagement. We went to a big Pentecostal megachurch, and then some offshoot churches growing up, and I went to a big evangelical Christian high school, which I hated. I’m American, but I wasn’t born here, so (I’m sensitive to) that concept of who belongs and who’s foreign. And my mom would always pick up anybody who was in my dad’s department who was an immigrant, who was visiting, who was kind of displaced in some way, (and) they would always be at our house for dinner. She would always try to make them feel welcome. And she would always just repeat, “You were strangers in a strange land,” and “Be kind to the stranger.” And that was very much the rhythm of how she talked, in the cadence of her thought about how you engage the world.  

So, (for me) there was a little bit of this disjuncture between this, like white conservative evangelicalism of the suburban high school that I went to, and this kind of engaged notion of what it meant to be a stranger in a strange land and how you’re supposed to behave. And I was also a rebellious teenager. So I went to college, and I wanted to build race cars. I wanted to be a petroleum engineer with a race car business on the side or something like that. And I took some history classes I really liked, so I declared a history major. And then I took a religion class I really liked, and I declared that as well. So, when I was thinking about going to graduate school, I had to take his Jewish study classes to finish my major, and one of my professors said I should apply to Hebrew Union College. I was the only non-Jew (there) and I ended up writing about Muslim and Jewish relations. 

It was really my first time being on the inside of an institution that I wasn’t a part of and wasn’t built for me. I had to learn a really fantastic set of skills that people who are “other” have to learn really instinctively. And I thought that was powerful and magical and wonderful. I ended up doing a bunch of stuff with people who weren’t like me in many ways, but I learned how to like and love them. It was really a profound experience, and that’s been the kind of trajectory of my life.