Heidi: Hi, this is Heidi Burgess. I'm with Beyond Intractability. And I'm here today with Emma Addams and Jennifer Thomas, who are Co-Executive Directors of the Mormon Women for Ethical Government, or as I gather, it's generally referred to as MWEG. And I've been meeting with Emma and Jennifer for quite a while on Zooms that are run by the Inter-movement Impact Project and have just been really impressed with what they've had to say about what they're doing, and what MWEG is doing. And so I've been really eager to get them to share that story with us for Beyond Intractability. 

Where I want to start is to get each of you to tell me a little bit about your background, what you did before MWEG, how you got involved.

Jennifer: Well, Emma and I are both perfect examples of what you want in a citizen-led democracy. Neither of us came to this work through a professional or necessarily educational track that was dedicated to it. We sort of came to it by accident because we cared about what was happening around us and wanted to figure out how we could participate. So I studied originally art history and Italian in college and did work in fundraising before I ended up staying home with my own kids. And then I did a lot of volunteer work in my community, both as an elected member of the town meeting in my town and PTA and all sorts of other things. And then when MWEG came along, I jumped in with both feet and sort of took baby steps towards leadership. And that is how I ended up where I am today. 

Emma: So I actually have a degree in music. So you've got an art historian and a musician here. I had a piano performance background. But then I needed to pay off loans from said music degree. And so I did work for a few years in law firms and in startups in Silicon Valley, doing everything from negotiating legal contracts to investor relations to stock capitalization and things like that. So I did that for a few years while I was paying off those loans. And then I, for the next couple of decades, mostly ran piano studios and worked as a musician while raising my own children. I then j umped back in a few years ago to do this work and have really, really, really loved to see the ways that the various skills I think that Jen and I have developed and picked up over the past couple of decades from those unique opportunities have really come to play beautifully in this environment where you are doing a lot of work with people who have different opinions. And I think a lot of the organizational work that we had done in our various other various capacities, and certainly, my legal background, writing and reading legal contracts has really, really come into play as well in this role. So it's been a bit of an eclectic background, but here we are today.

Heidi: That's great. I am really impressed. I read the MWEG website a little bit in preparation for this and thought that the story of its founding was really remarkable. I gather from Emma that you weren't around at the founding. I don't know, Jennifer, if you were or not. But the story on the website said that a person whose name I don't know remember dreamed up this idea and created a Facebook group. And within one month, 4,000 people had joined. And I thought, "My gosh, that is just unbelievable." What is it about MWEG that drew you to it and draws so many other people to it so fast? 

Emma: I think the cool thing is you can ask that question of all now 7,000 plus women, and you might get a little different answer from each of them. And I think that's what's so interesting about it. I do think for many of us, there is a foundation of peacemaking that drew us to it. There is this understanding that politics is oftentimes a place of a lot of contention and drama and maybe not the most fun place to spend your time. But MWEG has, from the beginning, been committed to engaging in the political sphere in a way that builds peace, rather than destroys it. And so I know for me, that was a big draw. I also personally had spent a lot of time helping resettle refugee families in Omaha, Nebraska, where I lived. And I had seen the impact that comes on individual lives when policies are directed in a certain way.  And so I was, at that point, really invested in, I think, taking what I hoped would be like a humanitarian heart or a heart that was compassionate, and wanting to help individuals and families. And I recognized that there are systems at work that can hurt or help those who are the most vulnerable and the best way to help impact those systems at the political level is to get involved in the way that we have. So I think it was that combination of wanting to do it in a way that didn't destroy my own soul in the process. So peacemaking was the vehicle for me personally.

Jennifer: Yeah. And I think talking to many of the women who joined early, I think I joined within a couple of days—on Facebook. And I think for a lot of women, there was this kind of inflection point where they had lived their lives and had not really thought, for a lot of them, much about politics. They just sort of trusted that things were going well. They felt like they belonged to political parties that aligned with their beliefs. And then there were events over the last few years that caused an inflection point where they had to stop and say, "Hey, the things that I'm seeing play out politically that I'm making an implicit endorsement of because of my party beliefs, aren't necessarily aligning with my sense of discipleship or my sense of faith. And I think for a lot of women, it just became a little bit of an unbearable tension. They didn't quite know what to do, because the way we engage in our society is through our parties. That's how we have traditionally engaged politically.

MWEG, I think, offered a lot of women a unique opportunity to engage, like Emma said, in politics through both a principled and a peacemaking lens. Women could say, "Hey, these are principles I believe in, and I know that the woman sitting next to me also agrees to those principles."  And whether she's a Republican and I'm a Democrat actually doesn't matter a lot when we're agreeing on the principles and see a problem that we want to solve together. And when we've agreed to do that in a peacemaking way, suddenly that becomes this transformational opportunity for women to participate in a way that builds up their soul and allows them to feel good about the work they're doing, instead of depleting them morally and spiritually.

Heidi: I'm really interested that both of you are using the term "peacemaking" freely without choking on it. We have been doing what we call "peacebuilding" and writing about peacemaking— that's the field that we've been in for 40 years. And we get told all the time, "Don't use the word 'peace'." The word peace is just completely verboten, we are told, among anybody who is not in the peacebuilding field. It's seen as '60s, hippie, namby pamby, dreaming, unrealistic. We got told that if you use that word, that people will expect that you'll be wearing Birkenstocks and long hair. And we haven't known what to do with that statement because it's too much who we are to abandon "peace.". So I'm delighted that you guys are comfortable with it and use it too.

Jennifer: We love it! 

Emma: I think it's one of those things that, when you're doing this work, you kind of have to put a stake in the ground on words sometimes because words change as different people interpret them, or sometimes they become words that you can no longer use. And "peace" is one that we've kind of put a stake in the ground on. But I think at the same time, we've also done the work to rehabilitate the word a bit within our community, within our membership. I think sometimes there's an initial reaction that since we're peacemakers, that must mean that we're all soft and quiet, and that we are  nice, that we just let people do what they want to do, and that's being nice. And so we've really done the hard work of defining what peacemaking is in a much more robust and real way. And then we hold ourselves to those standards as we do our work.

So when I say rehabilitate, it's not just being nice. It's not just being sweet. In fact, it is oftentimes seeing a conflict, whether it be one that you actually see or one that you can see on the Internet, and actually going directly into that conflict and then doing the hard work of helping to resolve it or mitigate harm. That's the opposite of soft. That requires a stiff spine and requires a commitment that once developed and practiced, it becomes a muscle that you can use. I would argue that that's exactly what we need our citizens to be doing right now. So it's much more beyond the soft.

Jennifer: Yeah, I would say we've had to do a lot of rehabilitation work helping women understand that there's a really big difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking. And just keeping things as they are and keeping everyone quiet and happy and cheerful is actually not productive, always, of peace. It resolves tensions in the moment, but it can leave really important structural injustices in place. It can allow people to suffer and not find that anyone's addressing their suffering. And so we've really, like Emma said, tried to reframe peacemaking as something that is proactive, courageous, and moves towards resolving injustice in the world and helping women understand that peace comes when people's needs are being met, when they're doing that work collaboratively, and they're resolving tensions in a way that is nonviolent and not conflict-oriented.

Heidi: So where do you come down on the nonpartisan dimension? And by that, I'm not meaning non-Democratic, non-Republican. But most of the time, peacebuilding or peacemaking is done by somebody who's a neutral, who's trying to help the two sides come to some sort of agreement. Yet I know from hearing Emma recently about the fight that you had in Utah with the Supreme Court, or it was an initiative about the court, I guess? You do take positions. So how do you work that balance between taking positions, advocating for a side, and being a peacemaker?

Emma: You just got right at the heart of the tension that is MWEG. It is tension, so it can be difficult. But it is also our greatest strength as well. Because what we're saying is that we're both peacebuilding and pro-democracy. So I guess I would argue that it doesn't build peace to kind of watch as democratic norms erode. There is actually a short-term peace and a long-term peace. And the long-term peace of our nation is dependent upon checks and balances and the rule of law and the rights of its citizens and our responsibilities towards one another.

And so in order to hold that tension, it basically means that every minute of every day, we are having difficult conversations, even within our own leadership team, even between Jen and I, about how to go forward and take the positions we take. So the positions we take aren't taken lightly. They are really batted around quite a bit, discussed, researched, and that's why we're a little bit slower, you might notice, than some groups to respond to things, or we choose not to respond to a lot. We try to really focus in and respond to the things that are the most meaningful to those concepts that I laid out.

And then we go about responding in a way that doesn't dehumanize anyone in the process. And I think that also is what brings peace. By demonstrating how you can disagree and how you can take hard positions and make tough calls, but always do it in a way that honors the humanity of everyone involved. And that's hard work, and there's no easy formula other than trying to bring good people into it and give them the tools they need and the spaces and places to do that work.

 Jennifer: And I'll add to that that I think sometimes people, particularly people who are hyper-partisan, try to neuter anyone who's nonpartisan by saying, "Well, you violate nonpartisanship anytime you disagree with me." Anytime you take a position that is not my position, you are therefore, by definition, partisan, right? And that basically means that absolutely no one can operate in the political sphere by that definition unless you are X or Y.

We would argue that, for us, "nonpartisanship" means a very specific set of things. It means that we do not endorse candidates. We don't work to support and advance political parties or their agendas. But that doesn't mean that we're viewpoint neutral at all. We have as much of a stake in this society as anyone else, and we've actually found that being nonpartisan, and just saying very freely and clearly, "We are not here to advance anyone's party politics.  We are here to advance principles and policies that we see are productive of common good and on which we can get buy-in from our members of our organization from both sides of the political spectrum." That allows us to take very strong, like Emma said, robust positions that are really vetted from women in our organization who lean right and also who lean left. And it's a strong position. And it's stronger for having input from both sides of the aisle. But it doesn't mean that we're just going to abdicate any space where someone from the right or the left has claimed that space. In fact, quite the opposite. We're going to move into those spaces and say, "You don't own that problem. People should have a say in that, whether or not they're interested in advancing your party politics."

Heidi: Wonderful. I realized that I kind of jumped right into it without doing some of the background stuff that I had meant to do. So I want to back up and get you to just tell me and our audience what MWEG is and what it does, because I kind of know that, and we jumped in, and I assumed everybody else knew it. And of course, they don't. So let's back up and do that.

Emma: I think one of the most important things to realize has already come out in this conversation, and that is the grassroots nature of MWEG.  A lot of groups talk about being grassroots. We are about as grassroots as you can get when you look at our start. We had thousands of women who gathered together in a Facebook group over the course of a month and we have grown since then. And our membership is truly a cross-partisan. As of earlier this year, we have around 40% Republican and 34% Democrat and then that 26% category of other — unaffiliated or independent. So our membership forms the basis of who we are as an organization. And everything we do as an organization is truly focused on building our membership.

And when I say "building," I don't just mean numbers, though that's certainly important to us. It means every single one of those women, we hope, come to MWEG and that they become better people. They become better advocates. They become truly empowered. And if we are living out the two parts of our mission, one being to do what's obvious in our name and advocate for ethical government, and the other one being to empower women to become independent civic actors or actresses. If we're living out our mission, then our women are learning and growing with us. They are oftentimes going and creating new things or doing things beyond MWEG. We hope they continue with us and they almost always do continue to be with us as well. But we're really empowering them to start new projects or go run for office or do this whole long list of things that you could do to be what we call a "principled citizen." So that's a little bit of an overview. There's a lot more details. I don't know, Jen, if you want to get into or add to that.

Jennifer:  So the nitty-gritty of that is that basically we have, like Emma said, two parts to our mission—to advocate for ethical governance and to empower women, as she said. And we advocate for ethical governance in five advocacy areas. Our core value is protecting democracy. Then we do environmental work. We do work around immigration and refugees, and work that  we call "rooting out racism," working to eliminate racism. And then finally, work around the economic and social well-being of children and families. We take on advocacy efforts at mostly the federal and state levels, where we feel like MWEG and its members, most specifically its members, have the opportunity to move the needle. Sometimes that means we think we can get a piece of legislation passed. Sometimes it means that we think we can change discourse and dialogue. It can really be as nitty-gritty as working to fight off bad environmental efforts or as vast as doing federal legislation.

Then the second part of that mission is developing the women and the skills in women to do that advocacy work. So we develop them in four ways. The first is in media literacy and truth. We believe that a democracy can't exist if we aren't grounded in a basic common shared truth. So helping women to understand how to filter truth in a very complex media environment, helping them to become principled citizens, which we talked about earlier, having a political identity that is independent of party, even if they do participate in party politics, and peacemaking. And then the fourth is just civic engagement, teaching them and giving them the skills to be engaged in the civic sphere, building up and sustaining our democratic systems of government. That would be like being a poll worker or a poll watcher.

And those two things work really well together because our goal is to develop women so that they are prepared, educated, and have the sophisticated ability to engage in this advocacy. And then we make sure that our advocacy efforts don't ever tip over into hyper-partisanship and that are always peacefully oriented. So we hope that by helping women become really peaceful and powerful political actors, we achieve advocacy in a different way, and we achieve advocacy in a way that always is building up our women and making them better prepared for their next political and social engagements. We try to do those two things really hand in hand. Other advocacy organizations often treat their grassroots members as the point of the spear. We try never to do that, to make sure that we are being very protective of our women and training them and helping them so that any work they do in conjunction with MWEG leaves them stronger, better, and part of a more robust community, rather than depleted.

Heidi: That sounds really good. I have two questions. One is, do you have to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be a member or not?

Jennifer: No, not at all. This is principal-driven work. We put our principals out on our website for everyone to see. We have quite a few members who are not  members of our church. All are welcome. All we tell people is that a lot of what motivates a lot of the women to do this work is their faith, but we are not here to promote our faith or to advance it. Our job is to advance ethical governance.

Heidi: Thanks!  My second question is, how do you do this training?  If you've got 7,000 members, you can't be all over the world. You can't be running little trainings for 20 people here and 20 people there. How do you do it?

Emma:  Well, we actually kind of do, do it that way, to be honest. So our members are all over the United States. We do have some international, but we mostly are focused on the US right now. And we are in 49 states. We have a higher concentration in the Intermountain West, just because there is a higher concentration of members of our church there.  So like Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, those states. So a lot of our in-person events tend to be in the states with a higher concentration of Church members.. And so we do do that. We also leverage the power of social media and the Internet. We now have our own app and our own kind of gathering space outside of social media. And so we use all these different spaces and strategies to help women gather, really, in small groups.

One example of something that we've done over the past couple of years is we will stream out an event to our membership.  In this case, it was the movie now called The Basement Talks—I'm sure you're familiar with that —it used to be called The Abortion Talks. And so we created a whole peacemaking program around that, and we streamed it out to our membership. But everyone who signed up to watch it invited a group of people to their home. So I think we had, when all was said and done, 30 to 40 states represented, each with multiple homes gathered, each with anywhere from 5 to 20 women.

And so that model of kind of creating content and programs and trainings and information from our leadership team and from our huge volunteer team,. By the way, we have our leadership team, but then a lot of our content bubbles up and is created through this enormous volunteer team. And then when I say "volunteer," I don't mean in the traditional sense that all of our MWEG members are volunteers in some ways. These are women who actually have a distinct role within the organization, have a title, and have ongoing responsibilities working to create content. So when that kind of content is pushed out to all these other women, you do have this wonderful kind of kind of small-scale interaction happening, nestled all over the US, building into this kind of larger movement. So that's part of how we do things. And we do also do a lot of delivery on social media as well.

Jennifer: Another good example of how we train women very intimately is our op-ed lab. So we've got this fantastic lab internally that is run by a group of women who work for MWEG and then a lot of volunteers. So any woman across the United States who is a member of MWEG can say, "I feel strongly about something—It doesn't have to be something that MWEG is even working on— and I would like to write an opinion piece for my paper."" . But that might be scary. So we will put her in contact with a support team of editors who will help her flesh it out, who will review it, edit it, and then teach her and help her to get that published locally or sometimes even nationally. So that's a great example of, how, as just being a member of MWEG, someone can take initiative and say, "Hey, this matters to me." But in my normal life, I don't really know how I would express myself. And MWEG can scaffold that and help a woman get her voice out there.

Heidi: Great! Another question I've been thinking of as you're talking, your name is "Mormon Woman for Ethical Government." What's ethical government?

Emma: I love this question! Here's the way I describe it. Philosophers have been arguing about the definition of ethics for how many thousands of years. So we never claim to have come to this with the definitive definition of ethics. And there was a lot of conversation about that early on and lots of definitions turned around and lots of trying things out. Ultimately, what we decided to do, and I think has been very effective, is define what ethical government means for MWEG and its members. And we did do that over many years of back and forth.

We produced what's called our Principles of Ethical Government. And those are on our website. There's three pages, multiple principles, all based on what we call a "triangle of ethical government," which is the rule of law, the rights of citizens, and then our responsibility towards one another. And so once we've defined that, and we're transparent about what it means to us, then anyone can know if they want to support us, how we define ethical government.

And then over the past five years we have written a series of papers that we've slowly been releasing that go into greater detail about the principles of ethical government in various areas. So we're working on one right now on immigration. These aren't policy papers. We spend quite a bit of time and invest a lot of effort and discussion and review and research into defining principles. And then we put those principles out there so that our members and the public can trust that we will always adhere to those principles. And then the process of having policy or programs come out of that is also robust. But again, we're always tracking everything back to our principles.

Heidi: So what I heard, tell me if I'm hearing right, that a paper on immigration, say, could either take a substantive position that says that we think the United States should allow X number of people a year and no more. Or if you might want to get detailed, like you might say we should allow in so many people from here and so many people from there and so on. Or it can say, "This is the process through which we think those decisions should be made." So it either can be procedural or substantive. And I heard you, I think, saying that you're primarily working on the procedural side rather than the substantive side. Is that correct?

Jennifer: Procedural and the underlying values that we've traditionally agreed on in our society that should guide that work. And you can really be committed to the common values that unite us, or have in the past united us, in our nation without agreeing on policy. And we've forgotten that. America at its absolute best is a group of people committed to a set of ideas and a set of principles, governing principles. And then policy can flow from that in different directions. And one of the things that's most protective is when we are grounded in those principles: freedom, equality,  unity, things that have mattered to us throughout time.

 And we found that policy is least effective the more it strays from those principles, and it gets harder and harder to agree on. And so for us, we've started with those principles, and having those principles as a baseline has helped our membership to have really hard conversations successfully. Emma and I have been in rooms as they've happened, really hard conversations where they will take, for example, two women, with very radically different views about how policy should look in terms of immigration. But as they talk about these principles together, it's much easier for them to hear one another, to trust one another when they disagree, and to find common ground to build on. Because you really do sense that this person has a foundation that you agree with, that we're building on a similar foundation. And it has been very productive of some great ideas that women admit they never would have had on their own without that robust dialogue.

Heidi: So what are these principles?

Emma: So we've kept it both very simple and very complex.  So those three principles I had mentioned upfront really form the basis of everything. So one is the rule of law. We all need to follow the rule of law from citizens through the highest elected office and we hold each other accountable for that.

Heidi: Let me stop you right there for a second. What if you disagree with the law?

Emma: We actually have a paper about that that we're going to be releasing in this next month where it talks about the beautiful history that we have in this country on both peaceful protests and also working to change the law through accepted vehicles that we have in place through advocacy and things like that. So like I said, it's both simple and it's complex. Because you can say you've lived the rule of law, but what does that look like when it comes down to it? So that's the first one.

Jennifer:  I just want to add that this is exactly what you referenced happened in Utah. You know the citizens in Utah passed a ballot initiative. The legislature argued that they had the right to eliminate that ballot initiative. And we sued them based on an argument that in Utah, power should flow from the people and that they have a constitutional right to reform their government. And so that was a case that went to the Supreme Court of Utah and was ultimately decided in our favor. But that is a process by which two groups of people, a legislature and some citizens disagreed on the law. They disagreed on the interpretation of the Constitution. And there was a peaceful process that we could follow, to push back against one another and refine arguments and have a dialogue in the public square about who was right and who was wrong. And I think this is exactly what's important that we retain in our society. It is not an absence of disagreement, but an agreement that there are processes that we use when we do disagree and patterns that we use and ways we behave when we disagree.

We observe the results of elections. We observe the law, whether or not we like what courts have decided, we agree to abide by those laws and then work to reform them through peaceful channels.

Heidi.  Good. So one of your principles is the "rule of law."

Emma: (33:30) Yes. But I misspoke a little bit. We define it as the government's duty to adhere to the rule of law. All of our rule of law sub principles are around the government's duty. So one is that the government should follow accepted processes for how the law is to be established. We talk about people in positions of power should not violate or discard long-standing political norms. Elected and appointed officials must eschew conflicts of interest and avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. We've got seven sub principles relating to corruption.

The next principle is rights, as we talked about a minute ago. And in that, we say that every human being is endowed with rights that governments are obligated to protect and not violate. And that includes universal human rights, liberty and life, as well as civil rights, and then also equitable political representation and equal protection under the law. And then for each of those, we have a set of sub-principles that we've laid out.

And then the last point on the triangle is responsibilities. And this is a really interesting and fun one to work on and we think about it quite a bit. With this one, what we argue is that all human beings are mutually accountable to our fellow human beings in our local communities, our countries, and in the world. So, within that would fall our responsibility to be educated voters and to have good media literacy skills and to follow truth and things like that.

But it kind of is like the rule of law is the floor in many ways, and our responsibility to one another is the ceiling. It's elevating how we engage in politics, because we're saying that we have a responsibility to engage in a way that really considers all the other humans in our spaces as part of it. And not just our own self-interest we are advocating for and as we are voting and as we are engaging with one another.

Jennifer: It's a really important balance to us, because rights are so important in our nation, in its history. They're one of the foundational elements of freedom and people's ability to construct a life as they see fit. But if rights become overbalanced without people recognizing their responsibility to one another, we get out of step with each other. And so every time I assert my right, I also am required morally, we would argue, to do that in a way that recognizes my responsibility to others around me. I don't just get to move through the world freely saying, "This is Jen's right. This is Jen's right," regardless of whether that causes significant pain and harm to Emma.

So one of the things that we ask our women to do, particularly in an election season, is part of what we call our "Principled Voter Campaign", which is asking women to go through serious steps to have them individually interrogate what they're voting for and why and think about that. At the end of every one of those series of questions is a final question, which basically says that I have an obligation to vote in a way that does not do overt harm to other people or leave them behind. I need to always be voting as what we call a "golden rule voter."  And so I certainly should use my vote to assert what I think is right and to create the society that I want.  But I also have to be very aware, am I voting for someone who's going to absolutely trample and hurt others? And then I probably need to question whether that's a good choice.

Heidi: Have you gotten at all involved in the dispute that happened after 2020 and may well happen after 2024 of people not believing the results of the elections?

Emma: Yes. That is absolutely one of our core values as an organization that we are going to put forward: the peaceful transfer of power is everything to this nation. And I think we have focused on creating trust, building trust in elections and trust in the process amongst our fellow humans.  So we've done the work of putting out lots of good content on social media for our own members and followers to share with their friends and family to start good conversations. But at the same time, we've really taken some very strong positions on elected officials and how they react to political violence in those situations and whether they are willing to unambiguously state commitment to accepting election results and a peaceful transfer of power. This is one of those lines in the sand, stakes in the ground, for us. So we are committed to it, and we will speak out on that over and over and over again and have in the past.

Jennifer: And immediately following that, we worked really robustly as an organization with some national partners, including Protect Democracy to get the Electoral Count Reform Act passed. So for us, it was very important to speak out. We're going to use our voice. We're going to encourage women and speak to elected officials to ask them to respect the outcomes of elections and abide by them.

But we also started immediately working on making sure that there were structural foundations to support the rule of law and to not allow bad actors to manipulate our society. So we took that on both tracks, both trying to undergird the foundations of our society, while also working with citizens to encourage them to speak up for this value, this sincere belief that a peaceful transfer of power has been one of the hallmarks of our nation. And without it, we won't long continue.

Heidi: Were you guys at all involved with Spencer Cox's fairly remarkable campaign when he came up with the ad with his opponent that they were going to follow the rule of law like the ones that you talked about? And after he got elected, he started the Disagree Better Campaign.  Were you involved in that?

Emma: That was independent.  We weren't involved in it in any way. We'd like to think that we've contributed to the atmosphere in Utah and other places that made the ground fertile for those sorts of things. Our women are very supportive of this kind of action. When I go onto social media and I see some articles from the Deseret News or from other places that talk about these efforts, I see our women's names all in the comments saying things that are supporting, both on the one hand, the peacemaking approach and the Disagree Better Campaign and also supporting those who make those commitments early on. So for sure, we are there in those conversations, but we can't take credit for that. I'm so appreciative of the way that that has taken bridge building and peacebuilding and raised its profile so it has really played out on the national stage over the past year, so.

Heidi: Yes. I don't know how much it's caught on, nationally.. It caught on in Colorado, I'm glad to say. But you know when I learned about Governor Cox and I'd met you guys, my reaction was, "Well, yeah, that makes sense. He's from Utah."  If anybody who is watching this doesn't know, check out the Disagree Better Campaign. It was started by Governor Spencer Cox from Utah. I think it's now being run by Governor Jared Polis from my state, Colorado. And it's trying to get governors all over the country to disagree better, more constructively, following MWAG's principles, basically. And it's not caught on like wildfire, I don't think, but people are talking about it at least. So that's really good.

So are there other things that MWIG does that we haven't talked about?

Jennifer: MWEG does too much. I think we probably pretty much covered it. I think some of the things that we are most proud of are the ways that we have helped women develop peacemaking skills, the ways that we have helped women develop the political skills that allow them to be really vocal in defense of what they think is right, but in a way that brings other people along and is really well-sourced and true. So that's the hallmark of what is coming to be known as the "MWEG Super Citizen." These are women who are committed to building something beyond themselves that doesn't always perfectly suit their needs, but does meet the needs of the common good and allows us all to live in harmony together. So we're really proud of the women that are doing this work. They just are exceptional.

Emma: And maybe I would add to that, Heidi.  I think as we have gone deeper within the communities, the peacebuilding communities and the pro-democracy communities within the United States, we really recognize that the work that we're doing is building on the work that's the foundation that so many of you have laid over decades in really unsung and unseen ways until now where it's like, "Oh, wait a minute. We actually need these things!"  We have benefited from guidance, from introductions, from really interesting conversations. Anytime I engage with the Inter-movement Impact Project or anytime we engage in any of those spaces where peacebuilders and electoral reform specialists and community organizers are coming together, there's just this beautiful synergy amongst all of these humans from across the US, at different stages in life, different career points, different political beliefs, different expertise, different faith from us in most cases. It's been one of the highlights, I think, for me personally, and I think for Jen would agree. We love working with our women, of course, and we certainly love doing all the work we do to build our particular movement. But we see ourselves as one piece of this larger community of peacebuilders.  I'm just going to keep using that word "peacebuilders." I refuse to let that one go, because I think it is the most robust way to explain the work we're collectively doing together. So we're so grateful for the kindness and the generosity and the ways that you, Heidi, and so many others within this space have just welcomed us in and been so affirming. And we want to play our part and play our part well. We want to do the role that we're here to do, but recognize that it's fitting into this larger space. And that's the beautiful thing of a democratic republic, right? This is how things are done. It's not one person or one figure or one group coming in and solving all the problems. It's us collectively doing the kind of messy hard work of fixing it together.

Heidi:  I think your model is so powerful. I'm wondering if it can be cloned and whether other people could start organizations that are modeled after yours but don't have the word "Morman" in the name, which might conceivably be off-putting, especially if people haven't met you and heard how open and wonderful you are. And it goes back to the notion that you had 4,000 people signing up within a month. Is that because there is such a strong network among followers of your church that sort of had everybody just coming in fast and other people don't have that network? But is that faith network really necessary? Or do you think it's possible to clone what you're doing without that?

Jennifer: I think that word you talked about at the beginning that might be off-putting to other people was what unified us. And I think that what you've kind of landed on, which is absolutely correct, is that if you can find people that share an affinity for something or share a commonality or share a common goal or a common community, I think something like this is buildable around that. Because even though all of the women of our organization, we've talked about this, share this common faith, at least at the beginning, what kept them together wasn't that.  What kept them together was this desire to do something good based on principles.

So I think any group that wanted to come together and say, "Hey, we're all people who do rock climbing, but here are a set of principles that we really agree on that we want to use to transform our government in a way that transcends party." I actually think that's doable. They all don't need to be big. Some of those groups can be small.  That's how democracy works is people gather together in affinity groups, whether it's a rotary club or a church or, in years gone by, a sewing circle, whatever it was that brought people together, they then used that commonality and that sense of community to say, "What is the project that we're going to work on together to make our society and our democracy better?" And they did that. I think we can absolutely get back to that.  It's just going to take us having the courage to say, "Okay, who are the people that are with me and how can I build a space that isn't neutral, but is also not partisan so that we can kind of build together."

Heidi: And what I see is really necessary that you guys have done so well, and it's unfortunately so rare, is being very clear that you're not going to get on this us versus them bandwagon. You're not going to say "it's their fault. And what we have to do is defeat them in order to make everything right." And I think that's so important. And you guys have done that just so beautifully, while at the same time taking on these issues and doing so in a principled way. The fact that you have so many Democrats and Republicans working together —how many other organizations beside Braver Angels has that? And Braver Angels does it for one-off things. And then it's over, by and large. And you guys are continuing. And it's just really remarkable.

Jennifer: We say all the time that we refuse to buy into this argument that just because we have different political views, that of a necessity means we have to be at war with one another.  It just means we need to be in dialogue with one another. And that we need to find common goals based on common principles. MWEG can show you that people can retain very distinct political ideologies and still come together in a space to work, as long as the foundations are principles and peacemaking.

Heidi: And do you see people who do that changing their views, or do they stay pretty far apart?

Emma: it's interesting. I would say, if you have a one-on-one conversation with various MWEG members, I think you would find some who shifted their political views one way or another after the interaction. I think you would find some who've become more solidified in who they are, whether it be conservative or liberal. But in that process of understanding their own political identity, they've been open to kind of adding this additional layer of nuance to their political identity.

And if we're doing our job well, and we're doing what we're trying to do, our women are maintaining some sort of a political identity or party that is true to their values and who they are. But they're actually almost subsuming that to a higher political identity, which is that of a principled voter or a principled citizen. So being a Republican or Democrat matters on some level, or being a liberal or a conservative still matters to them. It's part of  their personality.

But what matters even more is this principled identity. And that is their primary one. That is the one that allows them to do the hard work of listening to others and perhaps voting across the ticket on their ballot. We're not asking women to become clones. We're not trying to make them all centrists or all moderates. In fact, I would argue that that would make for a very boring society.  You need those tensions. 

But what happens is as they allow that primary identity to kind of settle in and allow their principled identity to become their primary identity, they come to us and they say, "I feel more free." I feel less like I'm in shackles to a party or a group of people who are telling me I need to believe a certain way or I need to act a certain way. And it just allows them to become more fully themselves. So coming back to what Jen said at the beginning, hopefully in that process, we are  helping women to just be more powerful, be more influential, but also be kinder and better. And I'm not interested in any endeavor that doesn't work to help people be kinder and better. I don't care what the ends are to it. If the process of it turns people against one another and turns them to be more hostile, then I don't want any part of that. I only want to be a part of something that is making people better.

Heidi: I hope you guys are prepared for 100,000 new members come December!

Jennifer:  Anyone at all are welcome.

Heidi: This is so needed. I really hope that this takes off in a big way because it's wonderful that you went from 400 to 7,000 in how long? I didn't ask how long ago how long MEG's been in existence.

Jennifer: Well, we did a very conscious thing where very early on, a decision was made that we didn't want to just be a Facebook group, and we knew we had to build something and we did all of the thinking that we've shared with you. What are our principles of nonpartisanship? What are our principles of peacemaking? What are our principles of ethical government? And we built a structure that could support and educate and train these women. And so we really put a hold on membership for a while while we tried to build a machine that could support them in becoming their best selves. And over the last year and a half, we really feel like we've gotten there and we've opened the doors again and are welcoming members in.

Heidi: All right. Well, I very much hope it takes off. It's just wonderful. All of my suspicions were correct. You guys are brilliant. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate it. And when we put this out, I'll put a link to your webpage and the principals and all that because they're great.

Jennifer: Well, thank you, Heidi. It was really lovely talking to you.