Waco native, Baylor University class of ’03 alumna and
Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman, highlighted in Time magazine’s
“100 Most Influential People of 2025,” was back in her hometown on Feb. 28 to
accept the Baylor Line Foundation’s “Distinguished Alumni Award” for her
leadership in “confronting extremism, challenging anti-democratic movements and
building a vibrant democracy for all people.” Other Baylor alumni receiving
honors included Chris Seay, pastor of Ecclesia, a holistic missional Christian
community in Houston, and Daniel Vestal, director of the Eula Mae and John
Baugh Center for Baptist Leadership at Mercer University and long engaged in Christian
ministry. Democracy Forward’s forays in recent months offer sterling examples
of both its work and vigilance: legal inquiry into the $230 million in
compensation sought by President Trump from his own Department of Justice for federal
charges brought against him and dropped only because he was reelected president
in 2024; a lawsuit challenging unlawful immigration detention practices that
blocked the detained (some of them U.S. citizens) from accessing legal counsel;
and challenging the Trump administration’s unlawfully freezing Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, threatening food access for more
than 42 million people during the autumn 2025 government shutdown.
Upon receiving her law degree with honors from Georgetown
University Law Center, Perryman began her career at WilmerHale and Covington
& Burling, high-profile law firms in Washington, D.C., that, notably,
refused to buckle under punitive actions by President Trump in targeting law firms
that displeased him. She focused her work on health care, financial services,
education and consumer products while maintaining an active pro bono practice.
Before assuming the top post at Democracy Forward in summer 2021, she worked
with its founding legal team. The nonpartisan, national legal organization, “committed
to achieving a nation and a democracy that enables all people living in America
to thrive,” formed in the wake of the 2016 election once it became clear “the
number and severity of threats to democracy, social progress and the rule of
law would be unprecedented.” Married to high school sweetheart and fellow
Baylor alumnus James Cole Bucy (with whom she has a son), Perryman lists as strong
influences on her outlook and work former Congressman Chet Edwards of Waco (who influenced
her on the importance of the First Amendment and church-state separation),
Baylor philosophy professor emeritus Robert Baird (the relevance of knowledge
and humility) and her parents, including economist and Waco Tribune-Herald
columnist Ray Perryman (the benefit in seeking solutions of reducing complicated problems to their
fundamental components).
In a Feb. 27 Q&A with the Tribune-Herald, Perryman, 43,
discussed Democracy Forward’s anticipation, as far back as 2023, of another
Trump victory in 2024 and the constitutional challenges it might pose; the
Supreme Court’s failures in reining in Trump administration excesses; the
necessity of citizens to not only battle destructive indifference but better
inform themselves amid a torrent of conspiracy theories and deceit coming daily
from the White House and its media allies; and the deep influences Baylor
University scholars have had on her. Her book, “Ordinary People, Extraordinary
Times: How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom and Reimagine Democracy,” is
due for release in August.
 |
| Skye Perryman |
Q The Atlantic describes Democracy Forward as “the single largest source of Trump’s legal problems.” In surveying the breadth of cases filed, I can believe it. I understand Democracy Forward formed after the 2016 presidential election. Many mistakenly assumed that while Trump was certainly an off-the-rails presidential candidate, he would settle down to some conventionality and be guided by wise counsel from Cabinet secretaries and astute legal advisors and congressional wisdom. The folks at Democracy Forward knew better. You were a litigator with Democracy Forward in those early days.
A In the
presidential election of 2016, the majority of Americans who were voting voted
for Secretary Hillary Clinton. The incoming president wasn’t happy he won the
Electoral College but lost the popular vote [by nearly 3 million votes], so he
immediately – right after the election – began casting doubt on the vote count
and started suggesting there was fraud, and that it wasn’t fraud by people who
looked like him, it was fraud he alleged was committed by people of color,
people in communities he didn’t like. And then, in the early days after the
inauguration, he didn’t like the crowd estimates. Simply put, he gets into
disputes with journalists – at the time the press pool was more diverse than it
is now – over things that are verifiable. And what we know about unbridled
power is it doesn’t like a check, and the checks in our system of government
include Congress, the courts and public opinion. But another of those checks in
America is reality – facts and science and evidence, things that can be
verified. There’s a lot of subjectivity in many of the things people purport,
but not in a popular vote count that he didn’t like.
Q Yes, President Trump in 2017 formed a commission
under Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to find this widespread voter fraud
in the 2016 popular vote count. In closing down a year later, it acknowledged
finding no evidence of such fraud.
A Yes, they were
disbanded in the wake of our litigation. That was my first case. But we began
to see this kind of thing very early on. Part of the formation of Democracy
Forward was the understanding these sorts of things were not normal. There were
concerns, for instance, that ended up being verified by Senate reports – put
out by a Senate controlled by Republicans – about foreign interference in
elections.
Q I
believe there were several sets of reports by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence
Committee highlighting Russian interference in the 2016 election. I read some of
it.
A Exactly. So
what is going on is, all of a sudden, you have a president challenging reality
on his first day [regarding his inauguration crowd size], wanting to test the
loyalty of those around him. That’s classic anti-democratic autocratic
behavior. It’s something we know from governments that have been under that
type of leadership. We know it can break down the safeguards of a country. Now,
traditionally, a lot of public-interest organizations focus on constitutional
law, they focus on things like our friends at the American Civil Liberties
Union and that is a whole body of law our own lawyers are very good at. It’s a
body of law well covered by legacy and traditional organizations that have made
this country safe and free every day. But what Trump was also seeking to do was
work within the federal government to weaponize the power of government against
people, which is different than doing something that simply violates the U.S. Constitution.
It would involve these small, very technical things – passing regulations
without public comment, for instance. They’re things that seem very nuanced and
even sort of wonky. And Democracy Forward saw this back in 2017, even while
others might have been more hopeful.
So Democracy Forward came on the scene to bring the
expertise of litigators who had either been in positions of government and knew
those mechanics, which is not what you often get with a more traditional
public-interest organization, and people who had been in corporate practice and
knew the ins and outs of government because they represented clients who had
sued the government. This is the particular gap Democracy Forward filled. It came
into the fray to fill those gaps, without, I think, understanding where all this
might lead. But then this was what we saw as a democracy emergency and lawyers
are the emergency physicians in that unique realm. And then various
developments in the country suggested the organization should stick around and
become an institution. And I came back to run it. I came back in summer 2021
after January 6.
Q I understand
the January 6 violence at the U.S. Capitol was particularly formative on you.
A I think it
was a formative event for many people in our country. It certainly didn’t seem
as formative for the balance of Congress, which never passed comprehensive
legislation to prevent something like that from happening again. But for me, it
was. It showed what we know from people who study history. We know that attacks
on democracy aren’t about one election cycle. They’ve been here since the
founding. This has always been a country that’s been working toward achieving
true democracy, which we’ve never had. But there has been over the course of
decades a real backlash against the progress we saw in the civil rights era.
We’ve seen that here in Central Texas, of course, and that piece in my
background places me on high alert. So when you see something like January 6 – disruption
of the peaceful transition of presidential power – that’s really a five-alarm
fire for our democracy and an indication that this problem was not going to be
solved quickly.
Q I’ve had
Republican block walkers at my front door insist the January 6 violence was all
a false-flag operation or provoked by the cops. I spent eight solid hours
talking to these people during the March 25, 2023, Trump campaign rally in
Waco. Is there any hope for these people? I mean, right now some of them argue that,
because Trump got 77 million votes in the 2024 election, he should be able to
supersede the will of Congress whose members garner but a fraction of that, or
the federal courts, whose jurists are appointed, not elected.
A One good
question for us to ask: Is there hope for the majority of Americans who in the
last election didn’t vote for any candidate? I mean, there’s more people
who didn’t vote at all [87 million] than voted for either Donald Trump or Kamala
Harris. I think that is a relevant question that we need to wrestle with: What
is it about democracy that existed prior to this election – what is it about
democracy that makes it such that people won’t invest in it or participate in
it? The answer may well be that it wasn’t delivering for people. We have a minimum
wage in Texas of $7.25 an hour. We have to be realistic about the world we live
in and the failures of the system we’ve had, the failures of the leadership –
even well-intended leadership.
The thing I focus on in part: Is there hope for those people
who didn’t vote? How do we instill hope? Because democracies can’t sustain if
people aren’t willing to defend them. It’s advanced citizenship. We have right
now people who, perhaps for very good reasons, do not believe that one of the
top things to do is become engaged. On the point of our fellow people who are
very deep into the MAGA movement, I testified on the fifth anniversary of
January 6 alongside Pamela Hemphill who was a MAGA rioter, was convicted [and
spent two months in prison] and later refused the president’s Jan. 20, 2025, pardon
[because she didn’t want to, in her words, “become a part of their narrative”].
Q She was
a grandmother, wasn’t she?
A Yeah, they
called her the “MAGA Granny.” It’s unclear when you read the public reporting on
all the things that led [to her involvement in Make America Great Again and the
J6 riot], but she came to the conclusion this was really kind of a cult. That’s
her word, not mine. But she came to that conclusion. Part of the reason was the
people around her were seeking to somehow be represented and started believing
in the movement and it all eventually comes to just surround you. [NOTE: In her Jan.
6, 2026, testimony, Hemphill told lawmakers: “Five years ago, I traveled from
Idaho to D.C. to see Donald Trump speak. I had fallen for the president’s lies,
just like many of his supporters. Local people had welcomed me into their
circle, and when I was around them, I heard them say things like ‘the Democrats
are trying to turn this into a Communist country’ or ‘the Radical Left wants to
do away with the Constitution.’ That gaslighting caused a lot of fear and I was
scared.”] Is there hope for people who seem to be parting with reality? I will
always have hope. There’s a chapter in my book dealing with this. You
can set some boundaries. You don’t have to spend time with people who want to
deny your very existence or your loved ones’ existence and just aren’t going to
be reasoned with. But we can soften our hearts and at least try to understand
or ask the question as to what happened here. To me, the much more important
question is: What do we do with the people who in some way opted out of the
system because it wasn’t delivering for them? What is a democracy if it’s not
serving people? We don’t need to be sanctimonious about the word. What is it?
What can we do in this moment to try to bring people in? That is the larger
thing that keeps me up at night. [NOTE: Excerpt from Perryman’s Jan. 6, 2026,
congressional testimony: “Congress must do its part – to assert its check on
the president’s excesses, to defend the American people from the autocratic
steps we are seeing and to protect the right of the people to vote. The people
must keep showing up too, as we will in courts and communities across the
nation. We must fight and overcome those threats to our democracy that we saw
in all their ugliness five years ago today in this very building.”]
Q The MAGA
movement seems fueled primarily by resentment and grievance more than optimism
and constructive dialogue. I’m not talking about the politicians subscribing to
MAGA but the people themselves. Your organization came out with its State of
Democracy report the same day the president gave his polarizing State of the
Union address. It’s a great chronology of everything we’ve witnessed in the
first year of Trump 2.0. But what impressed me is that, under each category, it
showed ways the public could resist, either through tapping remaining institutions
of democracy or the actions of everyday, ordinary Americans. We’re only a year
into this administration. Are you confident these levers of democracy are
sufficient to prevent the United States from ending up like, say, Victor
Orban’s Hungary?
A I think
this is the most significant year since 1863 and the Battle of Gettysburg. The
answer to that question: It’s entirely up to us as people – not just the
lawyers or politicians or media consultants or direct-mail messaging campaigns.
It’s going to rely on ordinary people. And it’s going to rely on ordinary
people who look at what is happening and say, “This is not where I want to be,
this is not what I want my future to be,” and find a way to do what they can in
this moment. I do have ultimate faith that people using the levers in our
system can make a big dent against this accelerating democratic backsliding and
can turn this around. That’s a piece of it. But it is not going to be about the
strength of one lever or one institution. It’s going to be about people who
become willing to use the things that are available to them.
Q But how
do you do that? I run into a lot of people and talk to a lot of people about
these things. I mean, they don’t read newspapers, they don’t watch the TV news.
And, frankly, a lot of the news media now are no longer what they used to be in
terms of watchdog reporting and robust editorial perspective. Consider the
Washington Post and CBS News. Edward R. Murrow must be spinning in his grave
right now. I mean, some people believe President Trump the other day sent a U.S.
hospital ship to Greenland to rescue medically ailing individuals when in fact
only one U.S. serviceman required any medical attention, which he received
promptly through Greenland medical facilities. Meanwhile, both U.S. hospital
ships were actually still docked off the coast of Alabama. [NOTE: The president’s
Feb. 21 social-media post informed Americans that “we are going to send a great
hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick and not
being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!” The crisis never happened.]
A A lot of
people believed, as late as the 1920s and ’30s, that black people were not
human. So this is not the first time people have dealt with huge systemic,
almost insurmountable obstacles. I think the solution is a combination of the
humanity that people can find in each other when they are approximate to one
another plus a commitment to what this country says its values are – those do
mean something. Promises were hollow when they were first made [in America’s Declaration
of Independence, including Jefferson’s passage “that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”]. But we were the
first country in the world to be founded on ideas. And, yes, there were
enslaved people who were disappointed and even terrorized by the fact that
after independence was declared, they didn’t get their freedom. Yet they
continued to buy into those ideas in order to one day win their freedom. So I
understand that the odds are very long, but to think that in this moment we are
confronting insurmountable odds that people in this country haven’t confronted
before and that people across the globe haven’t had to confront – I just refuse
to believe that this moment isn’t an extraordinary time. There have been many
of them and it has been ordinary people who have been a key to that.
Q I came
up to you at the 2025 Baylor Line Foundation dinner and congratulated you on
the work that Democracy Forward was doing. I said I hoped your organization could
sustain it. And you said, “I think the federal judiciary will rise to the
challenge, but they’re going to need help and that at least one of the two
chambers of the legislative branch must change hands in 2026.” Do you still
feel this way?
A The federal
judiciary, which is very different from the U.S. Supreme Court, has reminded
people what it means to have courts that aren’t perfect but will try, as humans
can, to reach some reasoned conclusions which they can then explain to the
people. We have won a number of court orders in cases where we were opposing
the Trump administration – and with Trump-appointed judges sometimes deciding
those cases. We have won with Democratic-appointed judges and
Republican-appointed judges. We have seen the judiciary step in, even in the
midst of great threats to their persons, to their families. They are not
intimidated by those threats and continue to do the work they need to do. I
always firmly believed that if people could get access to the courts – and we
represent all of our clients on a pro bono basis – then you could meet the
shock and awe with the people’s response, which is what we’ve done. We have
filed hundreds of cases in coordination with an initiative called Democracy
2025. [NOTE: The initiative, involving multiple organizations, is “committed to
defending our freedoms and our democracy in the face of the profound threat
that is the Trump administration.”]
If you’re operating, say, Meals on Wheels and you don’t know
if you’re going to get the grant you rely on to deliver food in the community
because the White House came out and said they were going to freeze funding, all
of a sudden you start caring about who out there is going to stop it. To me, the
power of the courts is the power of people because in this country we do have
the ability, at this point, to initiate litigation against our government to
say, “We have a constitution, we have laws designed to protect us and, if you
violate them, we do have a remedy.” And so, from what I said last year,
I stand by that. I think you’ve seen the federal judiciary stand up. There have
been many more grave threats since we saw each other because I believe, if I’m
not mistaken, that Baylor Line Foundation event was before J.G.G. v. Donald
J. Trump [NOTE: This explosive March 15, 2025, habeas corpus lawsuit, filed
by the ACLU and Democracy Forward, involved Venezuelan immigrants and the
legality of President Trump’s invocation of a centuries-old wartime act in peacetime
to spur mass deportations]. There have been a lot of sustained threats and the
federal judges are doing what we need them to do.
Q I tell folks if
they really want to know constitutional law, don’t look to the Supreme Court of
the United States, look to federal district judges laboring away, unknown to
the masses. I mean, the Supreme Court won plaudits on Feb. 20 for striking down
President Trump’s imposition of global tariffs without proper congressional
authorization. Justice Gorsuch gave the president and Republicans a grand Civics
101 lesson on the Declaration of Independence and kings. Yet a few days later,
the same court wildly misinterpreted a federal law protecting the U.S. Postal
Service from lawsuits over accidentally lost or miscarried mail. It contorted that
law to bar lawsuits over mail that is intentionally misdelivered!
A When we
think about the Supreme Court, we need to remember our history. The Supreme
Court, certainly for a few decades, say, beginning with Brown v. Board of
Education [a famous 1954 ruling that racial segregation in public schools was
unconstitutional] and continuing with Miranda v. Arizona, Griswold v.
Connecticut, Loving v. Virginia, Roe v. Wade – was an
institution interpreting the Constitution in a way to affirm the rights of the people,
to expand rights recognized by courts of the past. But for those two decades –
maybe it’s even four decades, you’re looking at the 1950s up through the ’70s,
maybe into the early ’80s – but after that, into the 21st century, we
see only a smattering of such wins, maybe Obergefell v. Hodges. [NOTE: In
this 2015 case, the Supreme Court ruled the fundamental right to marry was
guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Due Process Clause and the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. McLennan County Justice of the
Peace Dianne Hensley has since pressed the federal courts to overturn Obergefell
v. Hodges on the grounds the high court subordinated state law “to the
policy preferences of unelected judges.”] There was a Fourth Amendment case also
[NOTE: Barnes v. Felix, a check by the unanimous court on “excessive
force” by peace officers] last term. My point: This is why the Supreme
Court has not, if you look throughout our history, been a consistent
arbiter of constitutional projection – Dred Scott v. Sandford. You don’t
even have to go that far back. You can go to Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu
v. United States, you can go to Lochner v. New York. The state of New
York had the “audacity” to pass a law that you have the limit of a 60-hour work
week – I mean, c’mon! – and the Supreme Court says, “No, due process prevents
that.” [NOTE: The high court majority in that 1905 decision sided with a baker in
demanding longer on-site hours than the 60-hour work week for employees
set by New York.]
Q That’s
why I find more constitutional gravity and fidelity in the district courts.
After the Supreme Court gets done with the law, it can be a pretty misshapen thing.
A In looking
at district courts, you’re looking at the people’s beliefs. You can find this
in Pew Research surveys. Typically the courts are the most trusted branch of
government. And what we’ve seen in the last few years is that the Supreme
Court’s rating is at a historic low. [NOTE: A Pew Research Center survey found the
high court’s favorable rating in 2025 was 22 percentage points lower than in
August 2020.] Now people still actually hold their local courts in relative
trustworthy regard. The courts are still the most trusted branch of government.
But there’s been a nosedive of support. The Supreme Court itself, it is an
institution that has to be pushed back.
Q Are you
talking about reforms?
A I certainly
believe the Constitution permits a range of reforms. Courts are legitimate in a
democracy, even if courts are going to seem more anti-democratic. You look at
the Supreme Court: It is an institution that is not elected by the people. But
the courts face a legitimacy crisis in a democracy when they are not protecting
our democratic institutions or people and people get left out. When they do
protect those institutions and people – say, Brown v. Board of Education
– they are operating to help expand and achieve a democracy for people, to make
sure those guardrails are there, that we’re not just going to have a tyranny of
the majority because some things aren’t popular. That is when they’re at their
best and we’ve seen this court at its best in the past. One reason we have such
high expectations for this court is because of the generations we grew up in when
in fact that is what the high court was doing. It’s what we saw of the court in
what we learned in school, what the court was doing in prior generations. But
when the court is not protecting democratic institutions or protecting people
who get left out of the political process because of systemic barriers to that
process, it faces a massive legitimacy crisis.
Q Many of
us who follow the courts are astonished at the flagrant lawlessness manifesting
itself in the Trump administration. We see this in everything from the
president’s willy-nilly imposing global tariffs without congressional approval,
to the employment of “administrative warrants” rather than legitimate judicial
warrants to arrest and detain immigrants legal and illegal as well as U.S.
citizens, to federal judges expressing anger nationwide that their orders are
ignored or defied by the Trump administration, to the president and his
attorney general ignoring a vote by Congress for prompt and proper release of
the so-called “Epstein files.” Is what we now behold just over a year from Inauguration
Day 2025 worse than you imagined or about where you and Democracy Forward colleagues
figured we would be?
A Just about
where we figured we would be. The main reason we’ve been able to get into court
so quickly is we started working in late 2023 to understand what would happen
if the federal landscape regressed and to be able to make sure people could
respond. In 2021, the United States was added to a list of global backsliding
democracies [by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral
Assistance, partially due to “the inability of the U.S. Congress to check the
executive or investigate the actions” of then-former President Trump]. It’s
remained on that list every year since. The crisis in our democracy did not
start on Election Day 2024 but the backsliding started rapidly accelerating.
And what I know, from growing up in a place that became very influenced by
far-right movements, is that when these movements tell you what they are going
to do, you need to believe them. And while we hoped the preparations we
made then would be unnecessary because the country wouldn’t have actually faced
this crisis, there was no other option because, without the cases we prepared
and the groups with which we coordinated and organized, there wouldn’t have
been pushback in the early days [of the second Trump presidency]. They were
shocked when we got into court so quickly, they were shocked when their efforts
got blocked.
The first White House press conference, you’ll remember, was
a complete disaster because they were forced to stand up to the American people
and explain why [the Trump White House Office of Management and Budget] would
be cutting off essential services across the country, including rural and red
communities which use those services more – everything from Meals on Wheels to
Head Start to small-business credits, all of it. And so that case and other
cases like it demonstrated to people, when they started wondering what was
happening – this was really shock and awe – that the people still had some
power. The same thing happened with the state AGs and the ACLU on birthright
citizenship [in the Fourteenth Amendment, struck down by executive order by
President Trump on his first day in office]. Immediately out of the gate, a
Reagan-appointed judge [U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour] in effect said:
“This is the most unlawful thing I’ve ever seen!” [NOTE: Judge Coughenour’s
observation in court: “It has become ever more apparent that, to our president,
the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is,
according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that
be for political or personal gain. Nevertheless, in this courtroom and under my
watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”]
Q I
remember President Trump issued his executive order striking birthright
citizenship from the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution on his first
day back in office. [NOTE: Famed Yale-based legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar, arguably the nation's foremost expert on the U.S. Constitution and an occasional guest lecturer at Baylor Law School, argues in a Feb. 23 amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court that Trump's Jan. 20, 2025, executive order "
A And at a
time when people are scared and you have a person in the White House and a
movement behind him that does not want people to believe that the rest of the
people have power. It’s like some of the people you’ve talked with – that because
the president won the election, that president then gets to run roughshod over
your constitutional rights. We had to be ready and we had to be able to meet
the speed at which these things might occur, and we did. But it took over a
year of preparation. I mean, we were very clear-eyed about what we would see
and we’re still working now on things the president hasn’t done yet but said he
was going to do. We’re also watching how the president evolves in his long-term
strategy and we’re not seeing him evolve to move more in line with the people
and the law unfortunately. And that could have been a response after this first
year. He could’ve paused to think, “Gosh, I’ve got to start getting back to
work to try to make people’s lives a little better.”
Q During a
Baylor Homecoming address you gave to Baylor Interdisciplinary Core students on
Oct. 31, 2025, you stressed the importance of embracing Socrates’ much-vaunted
“examined life.” Yet today in higher education, we witness rancor even over
Plato. I guess you’ve heard about the flap at Texas A&M, which admittedly
is more nuanced than some people grasp. You talked to Baylor students about the
importance of critical thinking. What did you personally get out of the celebrated
Baylor Interdisciplinary Core program?
A Well,
there’s so much, especially given the people who have taught there such as philosophy
professors Bob Baird and Lenore Wright. The curriculum tries to take
disciplines and lessons we can learn in context: How do you understand
something like Picasso’s “Guernica” if you don’t understand what was happening
in the Spanish Civil War? How do you understand and read a text like the
Declaration of Independence without fully understanding its history? What was
going on in real life looks a lot different than the story and rhetoric
Jefferson puts there, but how do you read that and understand what it is in all
of the context? So, for me, it was very helpful to get a broader view. It’s a
view that reinforces our humility as people. All of the things that we deal
with are things that people in the past have also dealt with and they’re trying
to make sense of it with the tools they have. People here who believe
misinformation and disinformation – say, our MAGA fellow citizens – what is it
that’s going on there? So there’s the curiosity and humility you get when you
learn about things in context.
An incredible part is the professors who teach in the Baylor
Interdisciplinary Core. They actually sign up to teach things they have some
expertise in but it’s not their supreme expertise. They’re also opening up a
vulnerability in themselves to say, “I can learn something, too. I can teach
alongside another professor who might have a completely different expertise
than me and we can be on this journey together.” So the method was important
and, of course, the ideas and the text. I talked in that speech about Socrates
but also Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement and what that
meant. What did King mean in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" [about
what citizens can do to test unjust laws] and what are those references that
he’s drawing upon as he tries to describe not just the fight for freedom –
that’s how people like to view it – but also the apathy of white Christian
people who said they knew and in theory affirmed the value of all people but
thought he was a little extreme for his marches and his demands. So those types
of pieces have really shown how people have persisted and overcome. Many of
these were core texts in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core.
Q I was
impressed but challenged by Lenore Wright’s introduction before your address on
how students in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core “would struggle with Aeneas
on his journey, weep with Rama in exile, laugh with the irrepressible Monkey
King as he marked the farthest Column of the Universe and learn to embrace ‘the
other’ across the boundaries of time and culture.” OK. Just how do these particular
works help you understand what we face at this perilous moment in America?
A Well, those
works – I’ll just talk about Aeneas and the story of the founding of Rome with
its references to the democratic tradition while also not living up to the way
we view it – but we could put it alongside Dr. King’s Birmingham letter and
Plato’s “Apology” about Socrates [and the latter’s dialogue with his accusers
in an Athenian court]. They’re about insurmountable barriers that people or
gods or whoever is in the telling – and in “The Aeneid,” it’s humans and
gods, Juno in that work famously says, “If I cannot move heaven, I will raise
hell” – a lot of it is about what you do when things seem insurmountable. And,
of course, you have the gods at play. One of the lessons in the story is you
don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but the way you achieve the work you’re
to do as a human and in a way achieve immortality is to strive and have courage
and look at those odds. There are two passages from a list of reflections I
generally review each day. One: “But to lengthen out one's fame with action, that's
the work of courage." Note the word "fame" in the translation
means immortality, not fame as we know it. The other: “Blessings on your young
courage, boy; that's the way to the stars."
I gave a speech [Feb. 26 in Arlington, Texas] to a group of
Baptists at the T.B. Maston Foundation where they gave me a Christian ethics
award, which was very kind and unexpected. They asked me to speak about my
faith journey and how it effects my work. And one of the things that has
recently occurred to me is what courage means. I mean, David and Goliath, we
read that in the Baylor program as well. We’re reminded that when God wants to
make David a king, he doesn’t send him a crown, he instead sends a challenge in
the form of Goliath, demonstrating that when we face our threats head-on with
what we have – in David’s case, a sling shot – and stare it in the face without
blinking, we can prevail, no matter the odds. Wherever these stories appear,
whether in the Hebrew text, whether in Greek and Roman text, whether in Western
text, you see that struggle. The Baylor Interdisciplinary Core does a good job
of linking these. What does Aeneas’ journey have to do with Dr. King in the
basement of the Birmingham city jail? They face seemingly insurmountable obstacles
and don’t know how matters are going to turn out. The outcome wasn’t necessarily
going to be controlled by them but they still found some way to persist.
Interview
conducted, condensed and edited by retired Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor Bill
Whitaker for clarity and conciseness.
