Bee Moorhead on what called her to advocacy

Bee Moorhead, executive director of Texas Impact, talks about her interfaith-based advocacy work, the moments that led to her calling, and advice on overcoming fears and joining in!

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I am your host, George Mason, and in our continuing series on good politics, we have today Bee Moorhead, who is the executive director of Texas Impact. She is here to talk with us about faith-based advocacy in an interfaith mode and how that's been working for her as she has led Texas Impact for two decades now. That's extraordinary, Bee, but we welcome you to the program, and we look forward to this conversation.

Bee Moorhead:
Well, thank you so much for inviting me. This is a treat.

George Mason:
Well, great. We've gotten to know each other because we've been working together, as Faith Commons is a faith-based organization that works in the advocacy area, as well. And Texas Impact does that work in Austin and around the state in bringing people together, but tell us more about the history and mission of Texas Impact.

Bee Moorhead:
Texas Impact was established in 1973, actually, to be a presence of religious social concern to the Texas legislature, and specifically it was supposed to, and still does, represent what we would describe as the widely-shared and deeply-held beliefs of the various faith communities in the state, around our particular call to care for the poor, people who are victims of discrimination, and people who are otherwise marginalized in our communities.

George Mason:
I think you've made some interesting comments right there about the widely-held shared values that people of faith have around caring for marginalized and poor people. We do find ourselves, though, in an ongoing challenge these days, I think, over whether those are widely-shared values in our state, because it seems that there may have been a time when, whether you were of this party or that, of this church or religion, or that, that the things you just said were things we held in common. Now, the means by which we got there and achieved those ends were different perhaps in terms of whether you believe in big government or regulation or more free enterprise and those sorts of things. Are those values widely held and shared today impacts [inaudible 00:03:01] you think?

Bee Moorhead:
Yes, I do. I do think that they are. And I want to say something about the issue of widely shared and the intersection with your question about interfaith. When Texas Impact started, interfaith in Texas generally meant in the minds of most people, it meant Christian and Jewish. Honestly, as long as we're sort of talking in a community where our language is shared, it really referred to Catholic and Protestant and Jewish. There was kind of a propensity to think of the Catholic church as a different faith than Protestant at that point.

Bee Moorhead:
It's no accident that Texas Impact started in 1973, so did a lot of other interfaith activities around the country. Part of the impetus for that was, in fact, Vatican II, and the idea that the biggest faith community in the world, the Catholic church, wanted to be in relationship with the rest of the faith communities. So I think we often think about interfaith as sort of a lowest common denominator, that whatever we all agree on, the things that are widely shared, the most widely shared, those are the ones that we should focus on.

Bee Moorhead:
I would suggest to you, George, there's a different way to think about it, which has been my privilege in my work at Texas Impact, and that is to go a little bit more in the direction of those deeply-held ideas, to understand that as people of faith, we can benefit not just in making common cause with people who share our beliefs, but in coming to understand what is different about our beliefs, as well. Sometimes it makes us deeper in our own faith, that often happens to me, and also sometimes it gives us new ways to think about those things that we think are important, we think are interesting, but we weren't really sure how to talk about them. And as Texas has become more and more religiously diverse, Houston, Texas, the most religiously diverse large city in the country, and Dallas I'm sure is not far behind, we have more and more opportunity to speak with people who, as you say, we can't tell that we always agree on all the things, but we can really start to get a deeper, shared humanity as we understand where each other is coming from.

George Mason:
Let's talk about your own faith background that drives you into this work and motivates you every day, because I think part of the whole concept of Good God, this podcast, is to keep trying to make that connection between the personal and the public. I'm curious about how you apply your own personal spiritual life and faith.

Bee Moorhead:
I want to tell you about me. I grew up in the 1970s in Kent, Ohio, where Kent State University is. When I was in kindergarten, the National Guard tanks that came to participate in the violence that happened at Kent State, parked on the playground of my elementary school.

George Mason:
Wow.

Bee Moorhead:
I, and other friends of mine were hustled home through the woods to our parents' houses as the city went into martial law. Some of my earliest memories are of a very public instance when public policy and politics and government went wrong. And my parents were, they were not activists so much, but my dad taught at Kent State, he was a music professor. My mom was a member of the city council in that small town and then went on to become a lawyer and a judge later.

George Mason:
You [inaudible 00:07:32].

Bee Moorhead:
And so I had an example of life lived publicly in a period of turmoil. At the same time, my mother also was a volunteer with FISH, who you maybe will remember was a kind of a church women, united ancillary [inaudible 00:07:52] direct service ministry. My dad was part of the Salvation Army apparatus in that county. At that time, I belonged to the Episcopal church. I was raised in that church. So I saw direct service all the time. And as I grew up, I came to the University of Texas, I made a huge rebellious move and switched from being Episcopalian to Presbyterian. I think my parents were like, "Wow, okay. I guess we lucked out on the rebellion on that one." But I participated in direct service ministries. I went on mission trips. Then as a young mother, I had the opportunity to be a volunteer in the public hospital in Austin, where uninsured people went and had babies, so I saw a very different part of the world than I had been used to seeing.

Bee Moorhead:
All of those experiences together are what prepared me to, one, work in state government. Many people don't know this, but my undergraduate degree is in costume design. I intended to work on Broadway. Instead, I will tell you, I understand the language of call very much, because I felt it deep in my heart. I had a moment where, as I was with a mother who was having a baby and she didn't speak any English and she was alone, and I thought, I think something is wrong, and I think God is calling me to something more than making costumes for plays. I think I have a job here.

Bee Moorhead:
I left and applied to the LBJ school and went to the LBJ school and went to work in state government. Because of all my prior experiences as I was in state government, I was very attuned to how different people saw the problems of government and where people's faith seemed to intersect with their work. So when Texas Impact called me, I was able to bring all of that into the work that I do with our members. When I tell people the most important advocacy you can do is not because you learned some fact off a piece of paper, it's because you have a story of yourself in your community, the way you interact with other people, the direct services that you do, the neighbors that you have, all of those things, that's where your advocacy comes from, your unique understanding of your community.

George Mason:
I think for a lot of people of faith, their story is similar enough to yours at the front end, but it never gets to the backend. That is to say they participate in mission trips; they get involved in direct service, charity work, through their church or synagogue or mosque; they're in their community, and they see that here are some women who are fleeing a domestic violence situation, we need to help them. Here are the homeless that we should feed. Here are children that need tutoring, but that's the end of that work. I think the important link that you're talking about is that at some point, some of us get to the point where we say, it's not that that's wrong or wicked or should stop, but maybe we should go a bit deeper to the cause and say, what's the link between public policy and the things we do politically, and the outcome in people's lives that keeps producing the need for all this charity.

Bee Moorhead:
So we have this story about the children in the river. You and I are both very familiar with this. Two women are walking along the river, and they see the baby floating downstream. And one of them says, "We need to save that baby." And so they fish the baby out of the river, more babies come. And finally, one of them says, "I think I'd better go upstream and see who keeps throwing all those babies in the river." Well, we would say is, there is... And if you will indulge me, that maybe she needs to cross the stream to go find the source. It's not just a question of going upstream. That bridge that she has to cross, that is the bridge that, in the Wesleyan tradition, they would describe as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, the part where...

George Mason:
Ooh.

Bee Moorhead:
Yes, there's always a name for it, right? John Wesley did not make up the term quadrilateral, I do not think, but he described that what happens is, in the life of faith, we have the tradition that we come from, the scripture that we live by, our lived experience, and then we have something called reason. And reason is the part that applies all that other information and helps us to see what the policy, what the system's issues are that are contributing to the lived experience that we have.

Bee Moorhead:
I think in our local communities, the place where local congregations, let's say, most often fail to make that transition is not that they don't believe that there are systems problems. They do. They believe that there are issues. It's that they don't have an understanding of their current involvement in implementing policy. If you run a food pantry, let's say, it is easy to say, "Well, that's just a charity ministry. That's just something we do in our congregation." The congregations, the local churches that are able to make the leap, start by saying, "We have this feeding program, and it has nexus with public policy that already exists," not just about there's poor people and we need policy that makes that better. But somebody is giving us a certificate that says we're allowed to serve food. That state government, or city government, somebody is in charge of making sure that we have streets where the people can get to us.

Bee Moorhead:
When you start to see yourself as a co-implementer, then you have made a move that the Lutheran church has made a big statement about in the past year-and-a-half about government, where you say, God gives us government so that we can live together in love, and we are charged with participating in it. So government is not over there, government is something that we are part of, you and I are participating in implementing systems just by being on this Zoom together. That's the move.

Bee Moorhead:
What we ask people to do is don't start with signing up for some national thing and signing on the line, start by talking to local government people and understanding where you fit in, and then you'll have a better idea of what your particular story, your particular advocacy, might have to offer into the public square.

George Mason:
It reminds me of Cornel West's statement about how love is different in private and public. That intimacy is what love looks like in private, but justice is what love looks like in public. I like that. So if you're going to talk about love, well, there is a public aspect of it, and that is to create a just society. I think about, for instance, to make your point, in this very Texas legislature, there was a bill that was termed the Bonton Farms Bill, which is a community-based farm and employment neighborhood project of Daron Babcock and the Bonton community here in Dallas. What Daron Babcock learned in his work in Bonton, which it's a community that was named Bonton because it was, Boom Town is what it really was, because of the Klan exploding bombs in the neighborhood. And so it came to be known as Bonton.

George Mason:
Well, it's been a very disinvested community and shut off by roads of highways and levies and all of that. And the people in that community have experienced tremendous health problems for a lack of fresh food, and then also they have criminal records and legal problems. And so part of what Daron Badcock did with the Bonton community is to say, "When people get out of jail in our community and come back and try to rebuild their lives, they have felon records that make it impossible for them to transcend their past transgressions." So the law being proposed was that they'd be able to have their record expunged if they've done their time, that they have an opportunity to rebuild their lives without the liability of all of that hanging over them. And this is that link between the charitable work that we're talking about and the public policy that allows people to have a second chance to flourish, to contribute to the economy, and not to live in despair, but to live in hope.

Bee Moorhead:
It's such a perfect example. One of the things that we saw in the legislature was that legislators didn't necessarily have a hard time understanding that. Across the political spectrum, there was general, what do I want to say, affirmation that that's a good idea. And one of the things that's been interesting to me... I'm real excited that you would use that Cornel West language about love. I teach a class at Austin Seminary, and what I always start by saying is, as the faith community, we want to say there are two reasons to have public policy. One is because we hate and fear each other. It's to build walls that protect me from you and you from me. The other is because we love each other. And we, in any given day, you and I, and everyone else gets up in the morning, and it is true that we love each other, but we had a bad day yesterday, or something is getting to us, and we are not able under our own steam to live in the loving way that we know we want to, in every case.

Bee Moorhead:
When I see that person at the stop sign, I am not feeling charitable to them. Policy is what builds the framework so that we can live into the loving ideal of community that we all share. And I believe we all share it. And I think when you see that Bonton Farms Bill, I also think when you see a very conservative legislator, Matt Krause, who had a bill that had to do with medically fragile children. When you see that, or you see Jeff Leach, another very conservative member who has had a big experience that has made him understand that there are some parts of death penalty that he can't affirm, what we want to do as much as possible is to say, that is a loving instinct, and we want to affirm that loving instinct.

Bee Moorhead:
I think, and I know you want to talk about challenges, sometimes we have to say the instinct that is motivating a legislator is not loving. We have to have a strategy for how in love we approach someone to say, "We can't affirm that you are acting out of love in this moment. You're acting out of fear, and that's not what God wants for us."

George Mason:
I think you're actually putting your finger on one of the challenges that faith-based advocacy wrestles with, and that is how to deal with people who are operating out of fear and not love, whose orientation toward government is about only restraining bad behavior and not promoting good behavior. Some of that is, I think from the faith community, maybe about monitoring our own language and our own approach to people so that we don't simply become partisans ourselves and say, "We're really carrying water here for this party or that party, and part of the problem is we've got to defeat the other." Instead, we've got to figure out how to bring a different tone with our passion so that we can teach people that kind of mutual respect, even in the midst of our differences.

Bee Moorhead:
Well, that's right. And what I am coming to believe, as we move to the end of this legislative session, and it really has been very rocky, and there's been a lot of stuff that I believe could have passed and should have passed, that is likely to not pass. It is fashionable to say that legislator is not representing their district. If they do something we don't want, they say they're not representing their district. But they are. They're representing someone in their district. If they weren't, they wouldn't be elected.

Bee Moorhead:
So when we, the church, find ourselves saying that legislator's not representing their district, I think it signals two things: one, we better learn more about that legislator. And the only way to do that is by talking with them directly. The other is we better learn more about this district, because there is somebody here who doesn't share... I don't think it's fair to say they don't share our values. Maybe, maybe they don't, but it is definitely true that they don't share our worldview, and the way to overcome the kind of political strife that we're in right now is to learn what their worldview is.

George Mason:
With that, you're urging us all to become more personally engaged in knowing our legislators, and contacting them, and being engaged. And this our sort of final part of this conversation, Bee. I think Texas Impact facilitates that work, helps people, ordinary people in the pew of church, synagogue, mosque, whatever your religious tradition, to learn how to do that work. I think one of the biggest hurdles for ordinary people is they don't actually know how to get into that. I have a friend who's very passionate, for instance. And she said, "Okay, I've emailed things and all of that, but for the first time I got up the nerve to pick up the phone and call my senator," or my legislator. And she said, "Oh, it was so much work to get myself to that point, but I feel proud of myself that I did it," but I think that's one of the big hurdles, isn't it? How do you facilitate that, and what do you want to say to people about getting involved?

Bee Moorhead:
What I want to say to people about getting involved is, come on in, the water's fine. It is not any harder than calling somebody to be on your committee at PTA. When I learned how to change a gasket in my faucet at my house, I did it the way anybody would do these days. I thought, well, I'll just look on YouTube. There's bound to be a video. Video is how people are learning a lot of stuff. And that is true for advocacy, too. Texas Impact has a weekly program called Weekly Witness. It's on Facebook at noon on Mondays, and then it's a podcast just like this one. You can learn little by little through Weekly Witness all the ways to be engaged and all the tools, all the tips and tricks to make it effective and fun.

George Mason:
It actually works, doesn't it? There is an impact in Texas, Texas Impact, of people calling their legislators, writing, doing the things that you sometimes think, oh, it doesn't matter.

Bee Moorhead:
We've generated, I think, 6,000 phone calls to legislators this session just from ordinary people who figured out that they can make that call, so they decided to do it, and they did. And invariably, what they say is, it was easier, faster, and more rewarding than I could have imagined.

George Mason:
And what the legislators will tell you in return is, when they thought about their vote, they thought about the fact that they had these hundreds of constituents who called to say, I want you to do this. Even if they didn't, they knew that they had to reckon with that.

Bee Moorhead:
Exactly so. Just because they don't do everything you ask them to do, doesn't mean that you're not building that relationship over time. It's not transactional, it's relational.

George Mason:
Bee, thank you for all the work you do for the common good. Thank you for Texas Impact and its partnership with the faith community. We look forward to continuing to work together.

Bee Moorhead:
Absolutely. Thank you so much. This was wonderful.

George Mason:
All right, have a good day.

Bee Moorhead:
Thanks, bye.

Speaker 3:
Good God is created by Dr. George Mason. Produced and directed by Jim White. Social media coordination by Cameron Vickrey. Good God, conversations with George Mason, is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2021 by Faith Commons.