Passion & Policy: Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, one of the country’s top advocates and experts working at the intersection of religion, politics and policy, has just this week joined Interfaith Alliance as the organization’s new Senior Director of Policy and Advocacy.

To start off his tenure, he joined host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush on The State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio program and podcast, to discuss the threat of the Christian nationalist right’s vision for America’s future – and how so many Christians and other Americans of diverse faiths and beliefs are collaborating to advance a compelling, competing vision of true religious freedom and mutual respect.

“If authoritarianism comes to the United States, it will be done in the name of Christianity and restoring God to the public and putting God back in our schools. And it will be a Christian theocracy that is advanced. And you see that in Project 2025. A year ago, I was the first person to go through this 900-page document and identify the different theocratic elements of it. They talk about how they are going to put forth a religious definition of marriage… They talk about portraying the left as trying to advance a religion that would attack Christianity. And so throughout Project 2025, you see explicit and implicit appeals to Christian nationalism.”

– Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, who joins Interfaith Alliance with more than a decade of experience working with faith communities on some of the most important social justice issues of our time: religious freedom, democracy, LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom, immigration, anti-Muslim bigotry, and more. He most recently worked at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, with an emphasis on its Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. Prior to BJC, he held positions at the Center for American Progress, ReThink Media, and the National Immigration Forum. An ordained Baptist deacon, he is the author of Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity (Broadleaf Books, 2020). In 2019, the Center for American Progress (CAP) named him one of its annual list of Faith Leaders to Watch.