This week, Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson joins Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush for a deep dive into the state of U.S. politics, the role of the rule of law in preserving democracy, and political attacks against institutions of higher education. Together, they explore how faith can play a role in resistance and activism, reflecting on the deep divisions within American society and the responsibility of institutions to defend core values in times of crisis.
Jay speaks about the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism – and how these tactics are being used to attack higher education, ultimately harming the interests of American Jews. He also critiques the rise of the “woke right,” arguing that anti-woke rhetoric has evolved into a new form of censorship, and expresses concerns about the future of LGBTQ+ rights. Above all, he emphasizes the importance of standing in solidarity across lines of difference to protect civil rights in these challenging times.
“[The right isn’t] against censorship. They just wanted to do the censoring. And the same things that people complained about, rightly or wrongly, in the last few years: Oh, you can’t say anything about gender, or you can’t say anything about race, or you have to be careful what you say about this and that, and you have to always be careful because somebody’s going to be offended. That’s exactly the world we’re living in now. It’s just the other side. You can’t say anything that’s too critical of anything that’s on the right…The people who are complaining are now doing the exact same thing that the people who they were complaining about were doing.”
– Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson, visiting professor at Harvard Law School and a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality. He is the author of ten books, and a journalist whose work appears on CNN, in Rolling Stone, and in his weekly substack newsletter, Both/And with Jay Michaelson. For twenty years, Jay’s work has focused on the intersections of politics and religion; he worked as a religious LGBTQ activist for ten years, and earlier this month he convened the first-ever conference on the legal recognition of religious psychedelic use by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. He holds a PhD from Hebrew University, a JD from Yale Law School, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination. Jay’s latest book is The Secret That Is Not a Secret: Ten Heretical Tales.
Please share this episode with one person who would enjoy hearing this conversation, and thank you for listening!
— INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT —
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:
Rabbi Dr. J. Michaelson is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality. He is the author of 10 books, and a journalist whose work appears on CNN, in Rolling Stone, and in his excellent weekly Substack newsletter, “Both/And with Jay Michaelson.”
For 20 years, Jay’s work has focused on the intersection of politics and religion. He has worked as a religious LGBTQ activist for 10 years, and earlier this month, he convened the first-ever conference on the legal recognition of religious psychedelic use by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. He holds a PhD from Hebrew University, a JD from Yale Law School, and non-denominational rabbinic ordination.
With all of that, Jay, welcome back to The State of Belief!
RABBI DR. JAY MICHAELSON, GUEST:
It is good to be here, Paul, although I think it’s time to rename the show “State of Disbelief”, given the times that we’re living in.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Oh, my God. Yes, it is. Every day is another state of disbelief. Well, I’m going to start out just leaning into your expertise, your wisdom, and your generosity as a meditation teacher, because a lot of us are really going through it. And my guess is that you’re going through it. And so I never assume that anybody’s coming in here chipper and happy, given what’s going on in the world. How are you doing? And are there spiritual practices that have been really crucial for you during this time?
JAY MICHAELSON:
Thanks for that question. I’m doing all right, actually. I have a lot of old -fashioned distractions. I have a seven-year-old daughter, and that keeps me really focused. And my work on psychedelics is one of the few areas where the kind of change in Washington is either neutral or possibly even for the better. And so just the amount of work that I’m doing at Harvard – I’m also teaching classes at Harvard Law School – and it is a strange time to be there, in particular, since the institution is under attack as all institutions of higher education are, and also has a lot of the leading constitutional law scholars in the nation. And we’re obviously, now, I would say, in the in the early phases of a full-on constitutional crisis. So all that to say that I’m actually just really busy.
You know, for me, it comes and goes. I do think a lot of my meditation practice and training is kind of built-in at this point, so even when it comes in a bad way, when anxiety or fear comes in a difficult way, there’s some balance around that. It’s less like doing a particular practice at a particular time. There’s a Tibetan Buddhist phrase, “Small moments, many times.” Taking a moment – and we can put in the show notes, I mean, I have recorded some guided meditation specifically for this period. Definitely not to cheer people up, I don’t think, but just to have a break and find the space to do that.
I have an unfortunate tendency to allow a kind of dark overall situation to make me feel like, well, I’m not going to do the things that make me feel better. Like, how can anyone go dancing at a time like this? Or how could I go to a concert at a time like this? And I don’t think that’s really helpful, that tendency. There are populations, I mean, just look at at the Black experience in America. In the midst of slavery, Jim Crow, post-Jim Crow, whatever phase we’re in now, some of the artistic production from this community, inventing entire genres: gospel, jazz, arguably rock and roll, certainly hip hop, you know, R&B. If there were any population in our country who would be justified in saying, it’s not time to dance, it would be this population. And the opposite has been the case. So I just take inspiration from that – just to be clear, not equating my experience or even comparing my experience to the ones I’ve just listed, but just realizing that as Audre Lorde said, in times like this, self-care is a form of resistance.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
I think that’s all really helpful and I do think it’s important to recognize that even small meditations – they’re not meant necessarily to make you feel great, but they are meant to give space, even, sometimes, to recognize what we are feeling and to allow that to be real, and then find ways to move forward.
JAY MICHAELSON:
And I have to say, you know, I literally wrote a book on this, about how the energy of resisting sadness is actually more tiring than just feeling the sadness. And so I remember, on Inauguration Day, for some reason, sadness was my predominant emotion. It wasn’t anxiety – that’s no longer true – but it wasn’t on that day. Not anxiety or anger and fear. It was just sadness over what this country has become. And I definitely think that’s true.
I also think I just want to say, and I think probably anyone listening to you and us right now, is not in the group of tuning out politics – yet; but there are a lot of people who are. And I’m kind of fine with that. And I was just thinking this morning, when is the day when we need to wake up our friends and say, “Actually, now we really need you”? I think for me, one of those days would be if the Supreme Court makes a ruling, and Trump tells them to go to hell. At that point – arguably, we’re already not in a democracy – but we’re really not in a constitutional democracy when that happens.
We’ve seen all of the warnings that that would happen. JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Trump himself, saying these judges are acting … Stephen Miller just did an asinine post that these judges are now acting like they’re Secretary of Defense. No, that’s not true. They’re acting like the interpreters of the Constitution that constrains the Secretary of Defense. That’s the whole point. So I think there’s some point at which we wake up our friends out of their self-care. Right now though, who am I to judge?
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
I think the time is coming. And I think a lot more people are no longer tuning out the news. They’re aware. They’re trying to figure out where to plug in. We’re taking part in just bringing religious leadership to the Move On Mobilization that’s happening on April 5th. And so I encourage people, if there is something that you want to show up with other people, I think showing our faces in the street and showing up and speaking out, even in small ways, is really helpful, and also I think can be beneficial to our mental state.
But you already went down the road that I just wanted to start with, which is the law and this lawless administration. And it’s very interesting to me that you’re located at Harvard Law right now, and I am curious, how do you understand where we are as the Constitution gets flouted, as there’s a constant push, push, push? There’s been great efforts at pushing back using the courts. And I think the courts have done a good job, and lawyers have done a good job. Where do you see the law and the role it’s playing in this moment in our democracy?
JAY MICHAELSON:
So I think the sobering thing I would start with is just remembering how early this is, right? I mean, if this presidential administration goes the distance, that’s 48 months – and we’ve gone two months. So it’s just worth remembering, noting, dreading the fact that this is all just the opening moves.
There is one consoling version of that that I’ve heard some of my colleagues at the law school talk about, which is that a lot of what’s happening now is like getting an opening position. And if we take the DOGE stuff as an example, the way that Elon Musk has worked in any of these situations is kind of over-fire first and then hire back. I’m not saying this is good, obviously, but that’s what he does. And there is a certain logic to that, right? If you proceed carefully and incrementally, you’ll probably under-fire, from his perspective.
So, if you look at, for example, shutting down the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, that is unconstitutional, right? That was created by an act of Congress. There’s a view that I think is probably right, that that’s the opening bargaining position. Imagine yourself haggling over something in a shop somewhere. So first, we’re going to close the doors. Then we’ll invite back in 50 or 60 people. There had been, I think, 900 or even 1,000 employees. We’re not coming back to that in the next four years, but invite back some group that does do what’s statutorily required. Which, footnote, not to get down this rabbit hole, but the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau actually has very few statutory requirements, things they have to do. They have to file a report. I mean, Chat-GPT can write their report, right? So that’s not hard to do.
From a constitutional, from a policy point of view, that’s terrible, right? The CFPB was doing great work and returning billions of dollars. They were more than paying for themselves, returning tons of money to people who were swindled by banks and other institutions. So it’s terrible. From a constitutional point of view, that’s actually better – and it’s funny, it’s reminding me in this moment of kind of – in the Jewish tradition, there’s all kinds of workarounds to the law that people look at. It’s like, well, why don’t you just break the law? It’s like, well, no, no, no. We want to keep the law, but we don’t want to keep the law. And that, from a constitutional perspective, is preferable.
Same with USAID. Some of USAID’s funds are being restored by court order. The doors are being reopened in a limited way. From a global health perspective, this is a gigantic catastrophe. And the worst thing I read this week, which I recommend for everyone to read, David Remnick’s interview with Atul Gawande in The New Yorker. Atul worked at USAID for a while, and just looking at the human toll of this cruelty, probably hundreds of thousands of people will die in 2025 alone, just because of the malaria program, the HIV program, and others that were literally saving lives around the world.
So this is horrifying from a policy perspective, from a human health, human rights, and religious perspective, and – we can talk about this in a minute – I have no idea how it squares with any notion of Christian ethics. From a constitutional perspective, again, I’d rather they do that. At least they’re complying with court orders, reopening the agency, fulfilling what Congress has mandated the agency to do. And so we’ve preserved something around the constitutional democracy.
At some point, it does seem very likely that that won’t be what happens anymore, and then we are in the next phase. I wrote about this in one of my Substack pieces. You know, now we’re in the next phase of the crisis. So, for example, the Supreme Court is now going to look at birthright citizenship. And I know we’re kind of all over the map policy-wise, but this is clear from the 14th Amendment, that people born in the United States are citizens. The Supreme Court – even this very conservative Supreme Court – I would be very, very surprised if the Supreme Court found that that’s not required by the Constitution. That will be a square, frontal… There’s no gray area there. You’re either a citizen or you’re not, if you’re born here. And if the court says that you are and Trump says that you’re not, that might be the moment when we wake up our friends.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Well, we are seeing something like that. I mean, we’re taking steps with the deportation question, and it hasn’t reached the Supreme Court yet, but it certainly has a court order that is being flouted, we’ll see what actually happens with that.
JAY MICHAELSON:
And there again, just on that, I’d love for listeners to hold a certain kind of tension in our minds about that, where there are different degrees of injustice, right? So just what’s happened to the people who were just deported to El Salvador, at least one of whom is now proven to have been completely innocent. And what’s happened? There’s the terrible thing that’s happening. There’s also a second terrible, horrible thing, which is the flouting of judicial review and the constitutional order. And so far, we’ve only seen a little of the latter. We haven’t seen none, but we haven’t seen a huge amount.
There is a legal theory about what the rights are of PLRs, permanent legal residents – these are people with green cards – what their rights are and aren’t. If we separate out – and I want to hold both, because both are true – first, I want to recognize that this is an absolute human rights disgrace and abhorrence, and I don’t want to minimize it. I also want to recognize that there are legal questions actually in play about what rights green card holders have – and those have not been resolved, and they will be in time.
I think I’ve been clear, but I’m not saying, oh, it’s okay that they’re just deporting people without due process. It’s definitely no way okay. However, there are different kinds of not okay. And hopefully – I don’t know if that provides any comfort – but just understanding that there are some legal questions that are being worked out, while at the same time, anyone of conscience, I think, should be horrified at what’s happening to people without due process.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Yeah, I think I’d question you saying “worked out”, given that one of the things that is being worked out is the judge is being threatened – so much so that Roberts had to actually make a public statement that seemed to somehow go against his friend who said, after the State of the Union, “Thanks for everything you did for me.” I mean, if there was ever an embarrassing moment for a chief justice, that was it.
I understand what you’re saying. There’s degrees, there’s ways that things are in process and still being discussed that don’t reach the magnitude of a Supreme Court decision being thwarted. But it’s a very hard moment for those of us who have felt like there was a role for judges and the law that of course they’re getting attacked, and impeachment happening. And all of that is, I would say, all of that is within a framework of understandable, but it doesn’t mean that it’s good.
JAY MICHAELSON:
No, no, and that’s why I want to hold both of those. I want to hold that it’s not good and that it’s different from… I think it’s helpful, again, we’re, two months into a 48-month marathon – at least, assuming there’s an election in 2028, which I don’t assume, a fair election. It’s just helpful, I think, to just see where we are and where we aren’t.
A lot of this we saw really early, just in the first two weeks of the administration when all the Elon Musk craziness was going. They were very good with photo ops, like taking down the letters from the USAID building. That’s a pretty good photo op, but that’s also bull***t. The courts called them on the bull***t. And a lot of jobs are being restored. And so again, I’m not papering over anything. I’m just trying to put us in perspective about which kinds of harms are happening now, and which are still in the future. And I’m not saying they won’t happen in the future. I’m just saying they’re in the future and not yet in the present.
And I don’t know, both for our own mental health, but also we don’t want to be, you know, it’s not like we’re crying wolf, but we want to just call things as we see them. We want to try to call balls and strikes and not let… There is a sort of righteous anger among progressives that I’ve seen directed at me, being like, “Come on, you stupid, naive idiot. Wake up and smell the coffee. It’s time to hit the streets!” We don’t have the numbers to hit the streets. So I don’t think I’m the one being naive. I think the person calling for a general strike when we don’t have the numbers to do that is the one being naive.
You know, we saw the same anger at Democrats. I’m not defending Schumer’s recent decision to keep funding the government. But if you follow the logic, if we allow the shutdown to happen, the GOP would open up only the parts of government that they want to open up. I have yet to see any coherent response to that reality. So it’s fine to throw a hissy fit as a progressive and say that we should just be angrier, but I don’t think that’s responsible. And it’s certainly not my role in the situation I currently find myself in to kind of egg that kind of thing on. I think we need as much critical thinking and reflection as possible precisely because they’re under attack.
And just to say one other thing on the question of impeaching the judges: Democrats have very few arrows in their quiver right now, but they do have the power to stop the impeachment of any judge. And so I would be shocked if a single federal judge is impeached in the current year.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Yeah, I don’t expect it to happen. I think it’s more just the piling on and especially in social media and how judges — I would not want to be a judge that is in any of these locations.
JAY MICHAELSON:
No, I’m acquaintances with one of the judges who I won’t name, and he’s had to do all the things which we all have to do when we get attacked: moving the family and doing all that security, and that’s very real.
I do also think, look: the American Bar Association is not a liberal organization by any stretch. They sent out a public letter a couple of days ago that really put it all on the line. And that was, I think, in partial response – there were nine senators, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and some others – who sent a letter to the ABA filled with lies and insane rhetoric and saying, we’re not going to listen to you, the American Bar Association, anymore. And then these attacks on judges.
I think a lot of folks are being careful to not fire all our guns too soon. That’s a metaphor. If we look at where past Democratic presidents have been for the last couple of months, they’ve been stepping back, right? And I don’t think that’s out of cowardice. I could be wrong, but I don’t think it’s out of cowardice. I think it’s out of trying to see where we are and where we’re headed, and waiting for the time where there’s something that clearly offends a large majority of Americans. An attack on a judge, God forbid, would be one of those things. And I think the time will come quite soon when a lot of the voices who have been relatively quiet will not be quiet. And I think they’re waiting for the right moment to come.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Talk to me a little bit about how you understand being at Harvard and being someone who has had your own experience in the academy, how you understand some of the way that the administration is leveraging accusations of antisemitism, accusations of favoring trans people, DEI in general. How does that feel at Harvard? How does it feel overall as a leverage tool used by the administration?
JAY MICHAELSON:
I’ll get to that. You know, my partner’s had to hire and let go of many employees in his career, folks he’s managed. And when you get somebody with a resume that they have like seven companies they worked at, and they had to leave each company, and they say, well, those people were a**holes. Well, those people were a**holes. Those people were a**holes. You start to think, probably this guy is the a**hole. And that’s how I see these multiple attacks on universities. So if anyone who thinks this was actually about antisemitism, which I never thought for a second, that is clearly false, because they are now using any pretext that they can find.
A single swimmer from Penn is a pretext. These are all pretexts. Not only are they pretexts, just open up Project 2025. I feel like we’re all quite Cassandras on that document. We told you so, America. It’s right there. The attacks on higher education are right there. Read any interview with Chris Ruffo, the guy who coined the term “groomers” to describe gay people, who is one of the masterminds behind this attack on higher education. There is a belief in the regime, and it’s probably accurate in a certain way, that higher education is going to be one place where their nationalist patriotism is resisted. And so they are, just like Viktor Orban did in Hungary, and yes, just like fascists have done in other countries across historical time, they have attacked universities. If you look at Orban’s Hungary, the attacks on the media, the independent media and universities, are straight out of his playbook. And you don’t have to play some kind of conspiratorial connect-the-dots to get from Orban to Seb Gorka to Steve Bannon to Chris Ruffo, to this whole wing. It’s not a complicated chart, right?
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Or clandestine.
JAY MICHAELSON:
It’s not clandestine. It’s not secret. It’s right there out in the open. They go to conferences. They praise Orban. They say, “We want to do what you just did.” It can’t be more plain than that. So that is obviously what’s happening. And so that’s my first piece. When you see them reaching for any excuse, you should realize that these are excuses, not actual reasons.
It is particularly, as a rabbi and as someone who’s been working on the antisemitism issue for decades, it is particularly loathsome to see, first of all, how it is being weaponized, and second, that there are many in my own community who actually are on board with it.
I had a friend, a close friend, say, well, if it takes $400 million for Columbia to act against antisemitism, so be it. And, you know, analytically, it’s hard to see how that misinformation got absorbed so readily. I mean, it goes to me, the issues of Jewish trauma and exclusion from – whether it’s the Holocaust or October 7th – which are really almost two sides of the same coin in the trauma activated in my community. And it’s sad. It’s really sad. And it’s sad that any American Jew should think that attacking higher education won’t end up hurting American Jews.
Higher education was the ticket to American Jewish success in this country, as it is now for people of other ethnicities and other backgrounds, as well as Jews, continuing, Jews. This is how we became successful Americans in the first place. And it’s certainly true in my particular family as well. And so it’s tragic to see people fall for this con. And it’s disgusting to see people play this con, because what it is is playing on people who are still wounded and who are aching over the heartaches of the last few years. And using that to put this over on us is truly, to coin the phrase, deplorable. So it hurts.
There is a chilling effect. I haven’t received any orders about what I can and can’t say, but I’m absolutely not writing and speaking on certain issues because of my institutional affiliation. I’m a visiting professor. I’m very low on the totem pole. It’s not a self-deprecating comment, that’s just reality. And I’m the easiest kind of person to let go because I certainly don’t have tenure. I don’t even have a faculty appointment. And I’m very aware of that. And again, I haven’t received anything from my superiors on that. But you don’t need a weather vane to know which way the wind blows.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
I really appreciate your being forthright about all of that. It’s a very nefarious and clever way to go about things because of course, you – and I put myself in that camp, too – care deeply about antisemitism and want to combat it in every form. And yet when it’s wielded like this, you’re kind of like, okay, so if I say something, then I’m just automatically, I don’t care about the Jews. And then you have people in positions like yours who are kind of like, how do I respond in a way that shows my deep commitment to this struggle, and yet doesn’t want this to be weaponized in such a way that literally higher education is being targeted?
It’s hard to see how, if this continues, how higher education as it has been envisioned can stand. And they’re forcing certain kinds of curriculum changes and all this kind of stuff. I just find it one of the most distressing parts of this moment. It may not be frontline for some people, but this is just really, really nefarious – and the long-term damage is going to be severe.
JAY MICHAELSON:
This is just the new woke right. This is wokeness, but on the right. People voted for Trump because they thought he was anti-woke, but I was just reading an actual anti-woke centrist who I often disagree with, and I wrote about this in my new Substack article, who was saying, you know, actually, anti-woke, we were never unified. And again, this is not someone I agree with. She has a lot of views I really dislike. But she was like, you know, there were some of us who were anti-woke because wokeness is bad. And there were other of us who were anti-woke because it was just the wrong side doing it. And that is the side that’s ascendant.
That second group is the one that it’s in power now. They weren’t against censorship. They just wanted to do the censoring. And literally the same things that people complained about, rightly or wrongly, in the last few years: Oh, you can’t say anything about gender, or you can’t say anything about race, or you have to be careful what you say about this and that, and you have to always be careful because somebody’s going to be offended. That’s exactly the world we’re living in now. It’s just the other side!
You can’t say anything that’s too critical of anything that’s on the right. You can’t say anything that is pro-DEI. Before you couldn’t say anything, supposedly, that was anti-DEI. Now you can’t say anything that’s pro-DEI. It is exactly animal farm, right? The people who are complaining are now doing the exact same thing that the people who they were complaining about were doing. And I think this writer, whose name I’m forgetting, which is fine, I think she had it exactly right. They never were on the civil libertarian team. They were just on the right wing team. So we now have a woke right that is no longer an oxymoron. That’s what it is. We should start calling it what it is.
And unfortunately, the word “woke”, as you know and I’m sure many listeners know, actually did have a really worthwhile meaning a long time ago, when it was created in the Black community to talk about waking up to the reality of systemic racism and like, wow, this country isn’t what it says it is. Unfortunately, that’s gone. That usage is finished. So we should just start calling the woke right what it is, because that is what it is. I was thinking about some of my friends in the tech space and others who were like, well, I know Trump isn’t great, but at least he’s going to relieve us of wokeness. Guess what? It’s just the new wokeness. We have not been relieved.
The other thing I just want to say, I do have a little bit of optimism – or perhaps maybe I’m too optimistic in the long term – around universities. The American university will decline. This happened in Europe after World War II due to a lot of different factors. A lot of the great European universities are, really, just shadows of what they used to be. And that will be true in America, as well. I do think that some will survive, and I do think that others will simply just be shadows of what they used to be.
In the long term we are correct. We are right, that just from – even setting aside the moral side – we are correct that these universities are engines of success, of innovation. Everything that really made America great came, in large part – think about the GI Bill, for example, and how that created the American middle class. It’s not just the elite professors like me who benefited from the university structure, it’s the great middle class of America. And certainly in some post-AI future, in which a lot of what people now do for their work will no longer be compensated. There won’t be paying jobs. The idea that we should eviscerate the institutions that create, you know, the real innovation at the at the kind of top of American business – I mean, that’s ridiculous. So we will eventually be proven correct. And I do think we’re entering a period where a lot of America is going to look like Hungary.
But remember, most students don’t go to these elite universities. They go to state universities that are being targeted in different ways, but are not being targeted in the way that the Ivy League is. And I do not believe that civilization itself is going to end. And I believe that – I don’t know if this recording will last 50 years, but whenever it is listened to, 50, 20, 30 years from now, we told them so. And we know that that’s true. And we have our moral convictions, and we have our ethical convictions. And we should just think about how to make sure we keep our families safe.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Well, speaking of family…
JAY MICHAELSON:
That’s my speech. I’m done.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
That’s a good speech. You know, I mean, I won’t say that I gathered much hope from that, as you promised at the outset…
JAY MICHAELSON:
No, I’m not good on hope.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
…But I do think recognizing the values of universities, that’s a big part of my world and my family’s world.
But speaking of family, you and I both have gay families with children. And there was a lot of effort to say, oh, well, you know, the regular gay guys – which if we’re anything, we’re the regular gay guys – probably love Trump. And I feel like that, first of all, it’s immoral and reprehensible, and I kind of loathe all of that.
But I do think that we have to recognize that what’s happening to the trans community is – it’s unbelievable. Just total erasure, total targeting, total attack on every level. It feels absolutely existential. I don’t take any solace that our families will be protected by MAGA or any of what is being proposed in Washington. And, already there are bills in state legislatures around the country to negate gay marriage and all of that. And I’m just curious: as someone who’s been part of the movement around LGBTQ equality, how you’re understanding this moment for our community.
JAY MICHAELSON:
Yeah, I again have 2 responses for some reason. That’s a pattern. I’ve gone through that process and I’m now in the place where there’s a Buddhist teaching that’s recounted in a book by Mark Epstein that when you see a beautiful vase or something sitting on a shelf, you see it and you’d be sad if it breaks. But the Buddhist master says, for me, it’s already broken. Because of impermanence, we know that it’s already broken. I’ve already assumed that my family will lose the legal recognition that it currently enjoys in this country.
I think the MAGA gays are naive and are stupid. There are a million ways for this to happen that aren’t going to be a frontal assault. So as you’ve noted, so state-by-state legislation, litigation, that sort of chips away at what a marriage means. And I think it’s better just to already assume that the worst will happen and stop worrying that it will happen, and take the legal steps. We’re both pretty privileged people. We have the money and the lawyers to do what we need to do to protect our family arrangements, because the government is not going to do so. And I find that helpful from a coping point of view. Rather than worrying about losing it, we’ve already lost it. It will not happen this year. It might happen next year. It will happen soon.
We will lose most of the rights which we worked hard to get, even if we retain marriage in some form or fashion. And then they’ll come after any state that recognizes same-sex marriage and penalize it by withholding federal funds or whatever. So, we will lose these protections that we have. So, that’s the first piece. I do think that there is… The gay men who are Trump supporters share the privilege that we, you and I, have. And they know that they will basically be fine. We existed before this legal recognition and will exist after this legal recognition. So it really just boils down to the simple kind of selfishness that underlies any Trump supporter. That the lack of empathy for the people who don’t have the kind of protections that you and I have, whether they’re green card holders or whether they’re trans or whether they’re gays and lesbians who don’t have the money and the access to legal services that we have. So, in a way, they’re no different from anyone else. They’re particularly naive, but they’re not that different.
I do think we could do a better job in our community of calling out some of the, quote, LGBT people. I’ve been told that some recent Andrew Sullivan pieces have signed on to the erasure of trans identity. I don’t think we should be tolerating these people. And it’s funny that I had a pretty rough moment on my CNN gig back in November, which went viral – and not in a good way for me – where I kind of lost my composure when there was somebody on the panel who referred to trans girls as boys, boys playing girls sports.
And as I said at the time, I’m fine to have some conversation about trans sports, but that conversation is bull***t. It’s about 900 people in the entire country, at least on the collegiate level. And so what we’re really talking about is: do trans people exist? And when my fellow panelists called trans girls boys… So I’m not surprised.
You know, you said it was unbelievable. I mean, I wrote about this five years ago, six years ago, when there were the first sort of documentaries, that hideous documentary. What is a woman? And others like that, that just say that trans doesn’t exist. And where I have a little bit of optimism, if it is optimism, is just that trans people do exist. And so that’s reality. Trans people have always existed. They haven’t been called trans, but there’s always been a spectrum of gender across every society in every culture in the world, including Jewish and Christian european ones, there have always been gender non-conforming people. That’s just part of the diversity of nature. They have always existed. Obviously, the medical treatments that we have for people in that condition are very new, and there’s been a medicalization of that identity. But that phenomenon is real, and no bigot wishing it were otherwise is going to make it disappear.
Any other marginalized group, they are who they are. And you can lie about different racial groups or religious groups as long as you want, but they’re going to persist because they still f***ing exist. That’s the reality. I have several trans friends. They’re not going away. They’re taking steps to protect themselves. And I’m on a panel, actually, in the next week about how to do that legally. But at the end of the day, trans kids are still going to be trans kids. And these people are going to look just as bigoted as Anita Bryant looks now. Anita Bryant, you know, we’re old enough to remember who this person is. Young people don’t even know what she is. She just finally dropped dead. But that’s what these people are going to look like, because, again, you can’t wish away these people’s existence. And the middle is going to move. Right now, the middle believes that this is boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, because of tens of millions of dollars that was spent to spread that lines of dollars.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Hundreds of millions of dollars.
I’m sure you saw that moment where the member of the House addressed Rep. McBride and misgendered her twice. And I admired Rep. McBride coming right back at him. And then the colleague just saying, we’re not going to do this. And I think we need a lot more of that. But I would say Rep. McBride has been extraordinary.
JAY MICHAELSON:
Well, she really is incredibly courageous and even, just, more patient than I was personally able to be.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
And she’s always just like, “I would love to turn this back to the way our economy can work for everybody.” You know, she’s really trying to actually represent her people in her district rather than… I think she’s just right. And she’s also from a faith background. It’s interesting. She has her own deep faith, as of course many people do.
This is where religion and democracy meet. So what does religion have to do with any of this? I mean, we’ve talked about the weaponization of antisemitism. We’ve talked about the way the law is being undermined. All sorts of things. But how do you understand the machinations of religion in this kind of moment of crisis for our democracy?
JAY MICHAELSON:
Well, it’s hard because you and I sit on the religious left. And so I feel like there’s a sense that obviously religion needs to step up. You know, numerically, we’re pretty small compared to the religious right in this country. And so I do think if I look at the gay marriage battles of the 2000s, 2010s, there was a lot of money spent on smart market research and who are the movable middle, and targeting the movable middle with faith-based messages that they could see, and that required some compromising on our side. I think there were a lot in our community – and I, certainly, was ambivalent about it – there were a lot who felt like we were playing respectability politics and kind of tamping down or repressing or closeting some of the expressions of queerness that we thought wouldn’t work. And I’m sensitive to that critique, but I’m also mindful that that really did move public opinion in a significant way.
And I think something similar needs to happen for trans folks, and I think it will happen. Because again, it’s hard because there just aren’t that many trans people. It’s a really good minority to demonize, because there just aren’t that many. And so the odds of somebody having someone gay in their extended family could be pretty high, but the odds of having someone trans in their family is probably a lot lower. And obviously the stigma is much higher still. So there are fewer trans people who are willing to be out.
But one thing about Sarah McBride, this is somebody who quote-unquote “passes as female”, right? She reads as female. And so she, her very existence, kind of really calls the lie on the Nancy Maces of the world who want to call her “Mr. McBride.” I mean, just look at her. And it’s just like, that’s ridiculous, right? It’s also ridiculous to look at her and see a predator who’s trying to use the wrong bathroom, all these preposterous, ridiculous lies.
And I do think sports is tough. Because there are a handful of trans women who have been athletes, who do seem to have an anatomical advantage. The statistics show that that’s not the case. There’s much wider variation just within cisgender women than between men. But the visuals are the visuals. But the visuals on trans people just living their lives and just being people, those really are very compelling. So not all visuals are easy for our side, but some really are. And I think it’s coming back to the very basics of loving your neighbor and at least not doing to your neighbor what you don’t want done to yourselves.
And I think there was some perception that a lot of the trans community was trying to change everybody and everything. And there was some association of that was true the last five years. But most trans people want to live their lives and be left alone. That’s what they want. And that’s a very basic live and let live message that I think Americans will be receptive to.
You know, I think from a funding perspective, my sense is that a lot of the big funding foundations are trying to figure out where they can have the most impact. I hope that there’ll be significant money put behind the kinds of faith-based messages that worked for gays and lesbians 15, 20 years ago, and I think are incredibly necessary for trans people now. Trans people are going to exist even if we do none of that. They are going to live their lives. They’re going to thrive. They’re going to be who they are. And yet, I think those of us in the faith community and those of us in the gay and lesbian community need to step the hell up and take the risk and do what we need to do.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
We’ve talked about this before in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. I am curious how you’re seeing the ongoing impact of October 7th. As we speak, Netanyahu has reactivated the war. I mean, maybe that framing is unfair, but it feels like entering into a perpetual state of war. And I’m just curious how you understand that conflict in light of what is happening in the United States and how it continues to impact a lot of the way we’re talking about interfaith advocacy and coming together.
JAY MICHAELSON:
It’s a tough moment. I think, yeah, the Jewish community, I don’t know, I haven’t looked at numbers, but the affiliated institutional Jewish community is split – not quite down the middle, but maybe something around down the middle. Something like 90% of Orthodox Jews support the Netanyahu policies, including the latest of restarting, as you said, restarting the war. A bare majority of non-Orthodox Jews don’t, but it’s not – from what I’m seeing, it’s not top of the agenda right now in a way, and it’s – maybe it’s just not at the top of my agenda because I don’t feel safe to write about it, so I just haven’t been involved in my own journalistic work on that subject. And that’s been a choice, again, that I made on my own after receiving some threats. And I felt like I can still do my work in a lot of other areas. And my position at Harvard is a temporary one. So I’m not going anywhere in the long term.
There’s a kind of stasis I’m seeing in the American Jewish community, and it’s hard. In the psychedelic symposium I did a few weeks ago, we had Jews, Christians, and Muslims. We went through it together in a space. We had pretty right-wing Jews as well as left-wing ones. And, you know, we worked through with our Muslim invitees figuring out how to just honor the reality of the moment. We did find our way through. There were some on the right who weren’t happy about things that some of the Muslim attendees had said in the past. We dealt with that, I hope. We had a moment of silence where a Jewish, Christian, and Muslim representative who were at the symposium just lit a candle in silence. We didn’t make statements, we didn’t adopt any positions, and we were able to navigate that.
From working closely with the Muslim scholars and practitioners who came, having the psychedelics piece in common and some of the insights that arise in some psychedelic experiences was really helpful, but that was one little tiny bubble. Having said that, we did have 700 people at that conference, and many people said it was the most healing experience that they’d had just on the Jewish-Muslim side in recent memory, just being able to share space. But it’s hard not to see a lot of what Netanyahu is doing has to do with his own political and legal survival. But it’s so hard to penetrate the kind of Foxwashing of right-wing America that that’s what’s really happening, that it’s still seen as you’re on one team or the other.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Why don’t we close on something that seems a little bit more positive? Psychedelics. Let’s talk psychedelics. Psychedelics. I’ve been hearing about a lot of this work. It’s not new, but it does seem like it’s getting a new life in the academy, religion and psychedelics, I think. Elaine Pagels, does she do any of this with you?
JAY MICHAELSON:
No, not with me. I didn’t know she’s written on psychedelics. I hope you didn’t just out her on your podcast.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
No, the Parliament of the World’s Religions, she did a panel. There’s lots of people interested in this, and I think it’s interesting. Back when I did all kinds of things, I did psychedelics, and I view it as an interesting element. I’m curious if you could just give us a short preview of the next time I talk to you, we’re going to get really into psychedelics. But what’s inspiring this for you, and why does it feel important to your broad trajectory of work?
JAY MICHAELSON:
Like a lot of people, I’ve been an underground practitioner since, let’s see, 1991. So that’s a long time. There’s a funny thing that’s happened a few times in my life. I came out late in my life as gay, and I came out around like 2000. And then right after that, the country seemed to shift on gay issues. Clearly a direct causal relationship there. And then likewise, I sort of reconnected with psychedelic spiritual practice after becoming a parent, which I realize is maybe an unusual story, but that’s because I used to go on meditation retreats, and going on a 10-day or 21-day meditation retreat is just not in the cards right now.
And I knew from my past experience that psychedelics is not quite exactly the same experience, it’s a very concentrated mind, but it’s similar. And so I returned to that, and then just as that happened, the world seemed to change. Again, correlation, not causation. But certainly what’s been called the psychedelic renaissance is real. The mental health data is very real. And this really is a bipartisan thing. I mean, Dan Crenshaw, who’s way on the right in terms of MAGA, has been, actually, a real spokesman for MDMA and other treatments for veterans with PTSD. He’s obviously a veteran himself.
And the data of MDMA and PTSD is really quite compelling and breathtaking when you read people’s accounts. People with treatment-resistant depression who had either attempted suicide or were right on the edge of suicidality reporting, really, breakthroughs. So there’s the mental health side. I’m not a scientist, I’m not a psychologist, I’m a religion person. And so for me, where I’m working is on the religious and spiritual uses of psychedelics. And here, too, there’s been a real – I don’t know if “renaissance” is my favorite word, but there’s certainly been an increase in the usage of these compounds, both in novel psychedelic spiritual communities and in traditional religious communities.
So this symposium and the work that I’ve been doing is on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam primarily, just looking at the Abrahamic traditions and people who see their psychedelic practice as part of their religious practice. So don’t just happen to be of one faith tradition or another, but see what they’re doing as part of their religious practice. And here again, it’s easy to get jaded. I’ve read so many testimonies of: this is the most spiritual, powerful thing that’s ever happened to me, that you kind of become inured to that. But it is that for many, many people, and it’s quite transformative. I don’t think psychedelics will save the world, but I do think that they can be one arrow in the quiver in working on the meaning crisis, which could also be the loneliness crisis, which could also be the spiritual crisis, but this profound crisis that America is in, and which has generated a lot of the Trump phenomenon and its appeal.
I think there are many ways to approach that. There’s no one way. Obviously, I think meditation is one of those two. I’m persuaded and committed to the fact that psychedelics can be one pathway toward opening the mind and opening the heart for some people.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is a writer, journalist, and meditation teacher. Jay is visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is the author of 10 books, including his newest, The Secret That Is Not a Secret, 10 Heretical Tales. His Substack newsletter is “Both/And with Jay Michaelson.” Heavy endorse there. Jay, I always appreciate having you on The State of Belief. Thank you for being with us.
JAY MICHAELSON:
My pleasure. Take care of yourself, my friend. Don’t work too hard.
