At a time when the nation’s political discourse often becomes vitriolic, Tane Danger focuses on bringing Minnesotans together to listen to speakers with diverse perspectives and talk about pressing issues in a civil manner.
How Minnesotans, and all Americans, tackle societal challenges affects how they behave at a city council meeting, in a workplace, or at a pro sports event. Increasingly, business leaders have been asked by their employees to take stands on public issues, which could lead to internal company conflicts.
A key Twin Cities institution that has provided a respectful space for exploring big challenges is the Westminster Town Hall Forum. The august Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis has hosted the forum, which is an integral part of Minnesota’s civic infrastructure.
Danger, 38, recently was named interim moderator of the forum, succeeding the veteran moderator, the Rev. Tim Hart-Andersen, a man with a distinctive, mellifluous voice who retired in October as Westminster’s senior pastor.
Three years ago, Danger was hired to serve as director of the Westminster Town Hall Forum. With the addition of the moderator’s role to his responsibilities, Danger provides a contrast to his moderator predecessors who primarily have been Presbyterian ministers. Danger isn’t ordained, but he’s the son of a Lutheran minister. He’s a young, married gay man who is best known in the Twin Cities for co-founding the Theater of Public Policy, which uses improv to help people understand major issues.
Twin Cities Business recently interviewed Danger to learn more about him and what the forum is striving to accomplish as citizens brace themselves for a divisive presidential campaign in 2024.
This week, Minnesota Public Radio is airing the fall season of Westminster Town Hall Forum events. The broadcasts are scheduled for noon. Emily Hanford opens the speaker series on Monday, followed by Steve Inskeep on Tuesday, Nancy Giles on Wednesday, and Raquel Willis on Thursday.
Listening to voices of conscience
The Westminster Town Hall Forum was founded in 1980 and has brought national figures to Minneapolis to speak about contemporary issues. Citizens have listened in person by filling the pews at the church or by hearing forum broadcasts on MPR. After the pandemic arrived in early 2020, people shifted to watching speakers online.
In the decades since the forum got its start, many people have sorted themselves into political tribes and see little value in talking to people with contrary viewpoints. In recent years, many Minnesotans and Americans have embraced online shopping and remote and hybrid work, so they’ve reduced their interactions with people in public spaces.
Meanwhile, the forum has not deviated from its goals of convening people to listen to a range of viewpoints and to discuss and question ideas in a civilized fashion.
“The Westminster Town Hall Forum has always been intended to be a community program that is not necessarily a faith-based program,” Danger said. “Our mission statement is inviting voices of conscience to address the issues of the day from an ethical perspective, not from a Christian perspective, not from a Presbyterian perspective. It is an ethical perspective, and it is very intentionally meant to be secular in that way.”
The forum is a program of the church, which provides space for events, and Danger has an office at the church. But the forum is led by an advisory board, which works with Danger to choose issue themes and speakers.
A major portion of Danger’s job is raising money to fund the speaker series. In the past three years since Danger became the forum’s director, speakers have been paid between $2,500 and $40,000. Sometimes the compensation involves buying a certain number of books when an author is the speaker.
The public hears from speakers who Danger and the advisory board believe have important messages to deliver and are people the program can afford. Some national figures command six-figure speaking fees for corporate events and conferences. But Danger said he had to say no to a particular speaker who wanted a five-figure fee during the early months of Covid.
“They wanted in that $40,000 to $50,000 to $60,000 range to be on Zoom with us for an hour,” Danger said. “I was just, ‘I can’t stomach this. There is something that is really uncomfortable to me.’ We didn’t end up having that person.” Danger said “income inequality” was one of the main topics the potential speaker planned to address, but he thought it was wrong to pay a speaker what many people earn in a year for a 60-minute virtual appearance.
Key topics that the forum has addressed in recent years are climate change, racial justice, health care access, and rural/urban issues. “On a larger level, another major theme that has been in the talks is connecting across difference,” Danger said. “How do we have a civil, diverse society with people with different points of view, different lived experiences and how do we live together?”
In early 2024, the forum will unveil its list of speakers for the spring series. In May, the forum also will feature an event that focuses on issues of race. After starting his director’s job with the forum in December 2020, Danger knew that the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder would be coming up in May 2021.
“I pitched to my advisory board a new annual program called the Arc Toward Justice,” Danger said. “We would invite national racial justice leaders to Minneapolis to speak on and around this anniversary, what has happened since George Floyd’s death, where they feel we’ve made progress or where we haven’t, and where they think we need to go.”
The Minneapolis Foundation signed on as a co-sponsor and continues to financially support the racial justice program.
Intersection of faith, ethics, policy
Danger said he doesn’t attend church services on a weekly basis. But he had regular contact with Pastor Hart-Andersen until his retirement and Danger spent considerable time within the mainstream Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
His parents, both Minnesota natives, graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, which is affiliated with ELCA. After his father, Terry, graduated from Gustavus in 1969, he earned a divinity degree at Luther Seminary in St. Paul.
Terry Danger is a veteran pastor in Hollywood, Florida, where Tane Danger was raised. “My dad’s church is an ELCA Lutheran church,” Danger said. “I really believe that the work that the church does that is most important is that it brings a community of people together to believe in something that’s bigger than themselves and to serve their neighbors and their community.”
Danger, who also has studied Buddhism, said he admires his father’s commitment to welcome everybody to his church, regardless of their religious history.
“There is a very valuable and important role for faith in people’s lives,” Danger said. In his work with the Westminster Town Hall Forum, Danger doesn’t dwell on faith. Instead, he said, he emphasizes an ethical framework to produce “an intellectually nourishing program that people will learn something from.”
Both of Danger’s parents have shown commitments to intellectual inquiry, a search for facts and the truth, and a willingness to take public stances on important issues.
Tane Danger followed his parents lead and went to Gustavus, graduating in 2007 with a degree in communication studies and English. Since 2022, Tane Danger has served on the Gustavus Board of Trustees.
“My dad was very big in the anti-war movement when he was in college,” Danger said. “My parents were hippies up until the point they named me and my sister and then they quit being hippies.”
The name Tane emerged from a book his parents read that included the name with a Polynesian origin. Danger’s younger sister was named Tyger, which came from a William Blake poem.
Danger’s mother, Jana Soeldner Danger, has worked as a journalist during her entire career. Tane Danger was editor of the Gustavian Weekly newspaper when he was a student.
On a day when he was going through some archival issues, he was surprised by what he found. “There was this fiery letter to the editor, complaining about how the Gustavus Health Services made you go through all of these hoops to get birth control,” he said. “[It argued] how ridiculous it was in this age of women’s liberation. I discovered when I got to the tagline that my mother wrote the letter to the editor.”
In early 2021, the Gustavus news office published a feature story about Tane Danger to report on his new job with the Westminster Town Hall Forum. Danger’s mother posted a comment on the story that drew a direct line from the Danger family educations at the liberal arts school to Tane’s job.
“How did we manage to produce him? Because Gustavus taught us to think, explore all viewpoints, and listen,” Soeldner Danger wrote.
A passion for improv
For those who know Tane Danger, he enjoys being in front of an audience—doing improv, serving as an emcee, or moderating a discussion.
He attended a theater summer camp in elementary school and acted in plays in middle school, but he said that being a “drama kid” was not his whole persona when he was growing up.
“I was the editor of the high school newspaper. I was the captain of the swim team and the tennis team. I was vice president of the National Honor Society. I was class president one year,” he said. Then joked, “I was really trying to get attention somehow.”
While still in high school, he also found time to be a teen theater critic for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and that experience set him on a trajectory that ultimately led to the Westminster Town Hall Forum and Danger’s role as the new interim moderator.
“I went to the Hollywood (Florida) Playhouse. They had improv shows,” he said. Adults in their 30s and 40s were doing improvisational acting and it was Danger’s first exposure to the craft.
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“I really loved it, and then just started going back,” he said. “It became a thing that I would go to with friends on a pretty regular basis.”
Not long after he arrived at Gustavus as a college freshman, Danger had the moxie to start an improv troupe on the campus. It wasn’t sanctioned by the theater department, but several other first-year students agreed with Danger that improv would be fun.
“We started just practicing doing improv games and exercises in our dormitory common room,” he recalled. “We practiced together twice a week for a couple of months.” Danger invited a theater professor to see what they were doing, and he said she told them everything that they were “doing wrong.”
Undeterred, the freshmen in the improv group kept practicing and then decided to spotlight their talent in a show at the Gustavus coffee shop. “It was hilarious and delightful, and people were rolling in the aisles laughing,” he said.
Danger took part in improv all four years at Gustavus. An improv troupe still exists on campus.
After graduating from Gustavus in 2007, Danger worked in a variety of jobs in which he did communications and fundraising work. But he didn’t abandon improv.
“I had an improv troupe in the Twin Cities called Walrus,” Danger said, which he launched with other Gustavus graduates. Danger and his friends did shows monthly at an Ethiopian restaurant on Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis that had a stage.
By 2011, Danger and Brandon Boat, a friend from Gustavus, founded what they called the Theater of Public Policy. The concept was to use the fun of improv to get an audience engaged on a serious public policy issue.
Danger would interview a politician, subject matter expert, or somebody else involved in public policy for 15 to 20 minutes. “The [improv] cast would take over and they would do improv based on whatever we talked about,” Danger said. “Then we opened it up for audience questions. And we would do one last round of improv. So you got multiple bites at the apple.”
The Theater of Public Policy got plenty of bookings to perform at conferences and on college campuses.
At one show, staff from the Minneapolis Institute of Art were in attendance and they were impressed that Danger and his cohorts could hold an audience’s attention for 90 minutes on water quality issues.
That performance led to an offer that Danger and Boat could not refuse. “Brandon and I were hired on as artists-in-residence for six months at the Minneapolis Institute of Art to infuse improv into the museum,” Danger said.
As he developed the Theater of Public Policy, Danger was chosen for a Bush Fellowship, and he earned a master’s in public policy from the University of Minnesota from 2014 to 2016.
The pandemic wasn’t kind to the business model of the Theater of Public Policy, so Danger decided to look for a job. He found a strong match with the Westminster Town Hall Forum.
Moderating with humanity, humor
This month, Danger is celebrating his third work anniversary as director of the forum. He’s only been the forum’s moderator for a few weeks. But his many years of improv training have prepared him for that pivotal role.
“Improv is absolutely my unique secret sauce to how I do interviews and why they feel and sound different than a lot of other people who do them,” Danger said. “Improv teaches you that you are going to be OK with whatever comes your way. You can not only just deal with it, but you can make something wonderful with it.”
Danger and his forum guests open themselves up to the benefits of spontaneity in conversation.
“Improv teaches you to be present and connected in the moment to actually listen to what somebody else is saying,” he said. He isn’t nervous about what direction an interview might take based on an unexpected comment. Danger doesn’t simply look down at notes and move to a prepared question. He’s ready to ask an important follow-up question based on what the speaker has just said.
“Improv is about yes—and,” Danger said. “It is about taking what somebody offers you and saying, ‘Yes, I hear that, and let’s go further with that.’ That is my philosophy towards interviewing or hosting a conversation in pretty much everything I do.”
In early November, Danger got his first opportunity to moderate a big event at Westminster. The speaker guest was Nancy Giles, who came to talk about “Humor and Storytelling in the American Experience.” Giles is a comedian, actress, and social commentator.
“When I’m moderating the forum, I think about my job more so as facilitating a thoughtful dialogue that is primarily driven by the audience,” Danger said. At the Giles’ event, audience members asked questions at microphones and Danger posed some audience questions that were submitted in writing.
But the audience also provided a situation that might have rattled some moderators. Before the event had concluded, Giles noticed that two men stood up and were preparing to exit the forum. She asked them why they were leaving, and they responded they were from St. Paul. Danger, with his improv training, immediately said: “St. Paul closes at 8 o’clock.”
So humor remains part of Danger’s public profile, even though he frequently is talking about weighty issues.
He also has preserved two sartorial trademarks, wearing bow ties and tennis shoes.
In October, he moderated a discussion at the University of Minnesota with former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney.
Cheney was invited to deliver the Distinguished Carlson Lecture at Northrop Auditorium, and Cheney’s message focused on preserving democracy and upholding the Constitution.
Sitting alongside Cheney, Danger was wearing red tennis shoes with University of Minnesota socks.
Asked whether he had given a second thought about wearing the tennis shoes, Danger said: “Not only did I have a second thought about it, I think I did bring a backup pair of shoes with me.”
But nobody expressed an objection to his tennis shoes. Danger said that Cheney told him backstage that she was wearing “No. 1 Mom socks” under her black boots.
