Faith, Conscience,
and the Common Good
On why the founders were right about the wall between church and state— and why that wall protects every American's conscience, including yours.
“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”
I Have Sat at Many Tables
I hold a BA in Religious History from UC Santa Cruz—a degree I chose not to find which tradition was right, but to understand what each one was reaching toward. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the indigenous traditions of the Pacific and the Americas. Every one of them, at their deepest, is trying to answer the same question: How do we live together well?
That question has never left me. It shaped thirty years of behavioral health counseling—sitting with people in their most difficult moments, regardless of the faith they carried or didn't carry. It informed my work as a CDC Quarantine Public Health Officer, where the communities I served came from every tradition on earth. It grounds my belief that public policy must serve all of us equally—not the followers of any one creed.
I spent a year in Indonesia as a volunteer English teacher, living with a Muslim family in a small city on Java. I observed Ramadan with them. I sat for prayers I did not speak. I ate from their table, helped with their children, and was welcomed without condition. It was an education no classroom could have provided.
When my mother flew out to visit me, I went to meet her at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta. The arrivals hall was chaos—thousands of people pressing in every direction. I could not find her. A Muslim gentleman, a stranger who owed me nothing, who had no connection to me, no obligation, no incentive, found my mother in that chaos. He arranged shelter for her through the night. He personally brought her to me the following morning. He asked for nothing in return. He offered no explanation beyond the simplest: it was what a person does.
He was not performing Islam for a Western observer. He was living it. His hospitality was the living tradition of the Prophet Muhammad, who said: “He who believes in God and the Last Day should be hospitable to his guest.” I carry that man's face with me whenever I hear that Islam is a religion of violence. He is my evidence against the caricature. He is one of many.
I came home from Indonesia with a question that I still carry: What would American public life look like if we led with that kind of welcome?
That commitment to human dignity is not selective. Approximately half of my closest friends and family are Jewish. My nephew lost three friends from Camp Ramah in the October 7 massacre—people he had grown up with, whose absence he will carry for the rest of his life. My concern for Israeli security and Palestinian dignity are both real, both personal, and I refuse to choose between them.
If our standard is not universal, it is not a moral standard. It is a tribal one.
CA-2 is home to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, indigenous communities, and people of no formal faith at all. Each of them pays taxes. Each of them deserves a representative who does not treat their tradition as the problem—and who does not look away when people from any tradition are suffering.
The Founders Were Right
Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Washington lived in a world of violent religious conflict. They had watched Europe bleed for centuries over theological disputes. They designed the First Amendment not because they were hostile to religion—most of them held deep personal convictions— but because they understood that the moment a government endorses one faith over others, it begins to coerce the conscience of everyone else.
The wall of separation between church and state is not an attack on believers. It is the protection of believers. It is what guarantees that a Muslim family in Marin County, a Baptist congregation in Shasta County, a Jewish community in Sonoma, and a secular household in Humboldt all stand equally before their government. No favored creed. No established orthodoxy. No litmus test.
I believe that wall needs defending today with the same urgency the founders brought to building it. When elected officials legislate theology—when they use governmental power to impose one tradition's moral code on people of other traditions or no tradition—they betray the deepest insight of the American founding.
“Religion flourishes in greater purity without than with the aid of government.”James Madison — Letter to Edward Livingston • 1822
Five Principles That Guide Me
These are not campaign positions. They are the convictions I have carried across every role I have held and every community I have served.
Conscience Is Sacred and Cannot Be Legislated
Every person carries an inner life that government has no authority to reach. How you worship, what you believe, how you pray— these belong to you. My job as your representative is to protect that space, not fill it.
Every Tradition Deserves Respect in the Public Square
CA-2 is home to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, indigenous communities, and people of no formal faith at all. Each of them pays taxes. Each of them deserves a representative who does not treat their tradition as the problem.
Personal Belief Should Deepen, Not Replace, Evidence-Based Policy
My thirty years in public health taught me that moral conviction without data can cause enormous harm, even when the intention is good. I will always ask: what does the evidence say? And I will always show my work.
Compassion Is a Policy Argument, Not Just a Value
Every faith tradition I have studied—and I have studied many— places the care of the poor, the stranger, and the vulnerable at the center of moral life. That is not a left-wing or right-wing position. It is the oldest consensus in human civilization.
Humility Is Required in All Things
I do not hold my beliefs with certainty, and I am suspicious of those who hold theirs with absolute certainty in matters of conscience. The founders designed a republic, not a theocracy, precisely because they understood that human institutions are fallible—including their own.
What I Bring to Washington
I am running for Congress not as a representative of any faith community, but as someone who has been genuinely shaped by many of them. The year I spent in Indonesia. The decades of behavioral health work. The childhood field trips to Point Reyes with naturalist Elizabeth Terwilliger, who taught me that the natural world demands reverence whether or not you put a theological name on it.
My mother, Wanda Lee Ballentine—now eighty-seven, living with dementia in a memory care home in Petaluma—taught me the ethic that runs through everything I have drafted. She was sorting recycling and composting food scraps in our Mill Valley backyard in the 1960s before either practice had a name or a government program behind it. In 1972 she published alongside Dr. Benjamin Spock and Gail Sheehy, arguing that the isolated suburban household was both ecologically wasteful and socially destructive. ABC7 News featured her in 1977 demonstrating how to recycle laundry water during the drought. She fought the ozone crisis in 1992, opposed industrial wastewater discharge near the Willamette River in 1996, and organized climate activists across six continents in 2003—years before climate change was front-page news.
She never stopped. Now, at eighty-seven, with dementia, she is still organizing her fellow residents and inviting them to church services. Not for recognition. Not because she remembers the full arc of her own life. Because it is what a person does. That is the only definition of faith that has ever made complete sense to me.
That conviction shapes how I spend my time when there is no camera. I volunteer as a driver for A Simple Gesture, collecting food for the Marin Food Bank. I support the World Food Program USA Zero Hunger initiative—because food security is not charity. It is the oldest moral obligation in any tradition I have ever studied, and when the federal government stepped back from that obligation, someone had to step forward.
That is what “Show Your Work” means to me. Not just transparency in legislation—though it means that too— but a commitment to reasoning honestly in public, to showing the values behind the votes, and to trusting that voters are capable of evaluating the argument and deciding for themselves.
I will not tell you what to believe. I will tell you what I believe, and why, and let you judge whether it is worthy of your trust. That is the only honest offer any candidate can make.
For a fuller account of how I understand the relationship between the Abrahamic traditions—and what it means for how America conducts itself in the world— I have written a long-form essay available on this site.
Read “One Family at War With Itself” →Read the Platform Behind These Values
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