It was the Muslims who brought the various communities of Christians together. Blacks, whites, and Latinos, some long-time residents and others recent immigrants, groups that had long eyed one another with suspicion on the factory floors and small-town streets of Grand Island, Nebraska, were now lining up shoulder to shoulder together, their collective anger directed at the recent arrivals.
“The Latino is very humble,” said Raul Garcia, a Mexican American who had immigrated in 1994, “but they are arrogant. They act like the United States owes them.” Margaret Hornady, a white woman and Grand Island’s mayor, said she found the sight of Muslim headscarves “startling.” It made her think of Osama bin Laden.
Grand Island is a town of about 50,000 in the southern part of Nebraska, founded in the mid-nineteenth century by German immigrants. It is home to a meat- and poultry-packing plant owned by Swift & Company, the source of much of the employment in the area. To keep up with production demand, the company has recruited recent immigrant groups as labor. Mexicans, Laotians, and Sudanese have all come, worked in the plant, and settled down in the area. Such factories are frequently targeted for immigration raids, and one such raid gutted the labor force of the Grand Island plant. Management decided it no longer paid to recruit workers who were potentially in the United States illegally. They came up with a solution: recruit immigrant workers who have political refugee status, and with it legal papers. Minnesota had a large number of these in the form of Somalis, an immigrant group who also happened to be Muslim.
For the most part, the Somali Muslims were fine with doing their daily prayers during lunch and bathroom breaks. But during the month of Ramadan, they requested a special quitting time so they could properly prepare to perform the more elaborate rituals that surrounded ending the fast. That would disrupt production at the plant, management responded. Many of the Somalis complained bitterly; a few dozen actually quit. Finally, a compromise was reached—everybody would get their dinner break at that time. That meant a shorter workday by fifteen minutes, which meant fifteen minutes less pay. The Muslims were happy with this; it was a sacrifice they were more than willing to make for their faith. But it was too much for the black, white, and Latino workers, many of whom felt the Somali Muslims had been requesting special privileges since they arrived. First, it was about getting Muslim holidays off, then it was about not handling pork products on the production line. Rumors were flying that Somalis had received pay raises while everyone else was getting a pay cut. The frustration boiled over. A thousand workers walked out together.
Here is your assignment, I told my class at Chicago’s McCormick Theological Seminary: Imagine you were serving a church in Grand Island, Nebraska, when these events took place. A New York Times reporter calls you and asks for your comment on the situation as a pastor. What do you say?
One student questioned the relevance: Grand Island had to be an exception. She’d grown up in a small town in Nebraska, and there were no Latino Catholics—forget Somali Muslims—for many miles in any direction. America was changing, I assured her. A version of what played out in Grand Island had also occurred in Shelbyville, Tennessee; Greeley, Colorado; Postville, Iowa; and more than a dozen other such towns across America. Whatever church she served after she graduated from seminary, whether it was located in a small town or a big city, there was a pretty good chance she’d be dealing with religious diversity.
A furious discussion ensued. One person said that because America needs economic growth, it was a bad idea for the Muslims to be given special time off for prayers. The factory would be less productive if it had to close fifteen minutes early. Another was aghast: America was built on religious freedom, she insisted. It’s why the Pilgrims came; it’s what the First Amendment is about. What about the rights of the other workers to make a decent wage? a third student asked. People took sides and argued passionately: capitalism versus the Constitution, economic productivity versus religious freedom, faith identity versus class identity.
I was following each turn of the conversation closely, fascinated by the breadth of issues my students were raising. My IFYC colleague and co-teacher Cassie had a different reaction. She’d earned a master’s degree in divinity at the University of Chicago before joining our staff and viewed the debate through the perspective of a Christian leader herself. What she saw was a room full of future members of the clergy whose assignment was to imagine they were serving in a town experiencing religious tension and to comment on the situation as Christian leaders. In the thirty minutes of debate, nobody had quoted Scripture, nobody had asked what Jesus would do, nobody had referenced the example of Christian leaders in similar situations. As seminary students, they were immersed in learning the religious language of the Christian tradition, but when asked to apply it to a situation of interfaith conflict, they avoided Christian language completely and defaulted to other modes. Finally, Cassie interrupted the discussion and said, “Remember, you are being asked to comment as a pastor, not as an economist or a constitutional-law professor. What do you have to say about this as a pastor?”
There was silence. I could see the wheels turning in people’s heads, and I noticed frustration on some faces. Finally, someone said, “What difference can a pastor make in this situation, anyway?” It was a perfect opportunity to present our next case study.
Jersey City, New Jersey, has the largest concentration of Egyptian Americans in the country—about 50,000 total, roughly half Christian and half Muslim. Tensions between the two groups are thick in Egypt, but in Jersey City, for the most part, they have gotten along just fine. Kids play football together in neighborhood parks, adults go into business together, twentysomethings share shisha pipes in hip cafés.1
In January 2005, there was a heinous murder of an Egyptian Christian family—four people found bound, gagged, and stabbed to death. It was a crime that tore the Egyptian Christians and Muslims of Jersey City apart. Christian mourners threatened to beat a Muslim sheik who attended the funeral. When Mohsen Elesawi, an Egyptian Muslim limousine driver, walked into his favorite café to share a shisha pipe and a game of chess with his Christian friends, they turned away and gave him the cold shoulder. Teenagers from the two communities no longer sat together for lunch at Dickinson High School. “I’m not going to be friends with Muslims anymore—their parents killed my best friend,” a student at the high school declared, his eyes welling with tears.
As the tensions grew, the rumors spread. The slain father had been known to engage in theological debates with Muslims, so the killing was obviously a religious revenge job. The daughter had a cross tattooed on her wrist, and the murdering Muslim had driven a knife through it. Such details were not confirmed by the police investigating the murder. In the teeth of the bitter divide, the authorities tried to emphasize a simple fact: This was an unsolved crime.
When the culprit was finally found, it turned out that he was neither Egyptian nor Muslim. The murder was not a religious execution, it was part of a robbery attempt. The best name for the killer was simple: killer.
As our seminary students read through the case, one of them spoke up and said he was confused: “I just don’t get it. Here are two communities who get along, who seem to have left old tensions behind and are building a good life together in America. There is no real evidence that this was about religion or that Muslims were involved. It seems to me that this could just as easily have brought Muslims and Christians in Jersey City together instead of driving them apart. So, why didn’t it?”
The answer is buried in the middle of the article. A group of leaders who were part of a religious group, the American Coptic Association, called a press conference on the steps of the slain family’s church shortly after the murder. Their message was simple and clear: This was a religious execution carried out by Muslims. “Wake up, America!” yelled Dr. Monir Dawoud, the president of the group, during his speech. He and other speakers elaborated: the Muslims had killed these Christians, just like they routinely killed people in the Middle East, just like they killed people on 9/11. When would Christians, America, the world get it? Muslims everywhere were crazy fanatics who had to be stopped.
After my students absorbed that paragraph, I pointed to some lines further down the page: “We never talk about religion,” an Egyptian Muslim high school student told Andrea Elliott, the New York Times reporter who wrote the article. An Egyptian Christian student agreed: “We don’t put religion in our friendship at all.”
One of my students raised her hand. “I think I get it now. The faith leaders willing to use religious language were the ones who were framing this situation as Christians versus Muslims. They held their press conference on the steps of a church, and they called this a Muslim execution. The Muslims and Christians who maintained friendships even through the tension, they didn’t seem to have the religious language to convey why this ought to be understood as Jersey City versus murderers instead of Christians versus Muslims. Religious language resonates with a lot of people, and if those of us who have a vision of a diverse community having a common life together don’t articulate that vision using religious language, we simply forfeit the cross, the Bible, even the example of Jesus, to the people who will.”
“I wonder what I would preach in church the Sunday after this happened?” another student wondered out loud.
“That,” said Cassie, “is your next assignment.”
Cassie came to the question of what it means to be a person of strong faith in a situation of diversity in a very personal way. When she was a teenager, she devoted her life to Christ. Her somewhat surprised parents found themselves dropping their daughter off at a conservative Evangelical church on Sunday mornings in the suburbs of Seattle, the only region in the country where more people check “None” than “Christian” on surveys of religiosity. There, Cassie learned Scripture and praise songs, leadership and humility, what it means to be saved and how to spread the Good News to save others.
When she graduated from high school, Cassie went to a liberal arts college in Wisconsin. There were only enough Christians there to form a single student group. It included mainline Protestants as well as Evangelicals, people whose idea of worship was sitting stiffly in church pews and others who spoke in tongues. It also included Catholics. This was something of a challenge for Cassie. In the church where she was baptized, she had been told that Catholics aren’t Christian.
Soon, Catholics became the least of Cassie’s theological worries. During her time as an undergraduate, Cassie became friends with a young Muslim from Bangladesh. She found him to be righteous and pious and kind, many of the qualities that she had at one point associated only with Evangelical Christians. One evening in the library, Ahmed asked Cassie if he could interview her. Cassie said sure, and asked why. It turns out that Ahmed was doing a project for an anthropology class. He had seen Cassie’s Bible and cross, observed her Wednesday-night prayer group, watched her go to church on Sunday mornings, noticed the distinct language with which she talked to her tribe, and had chosen to make an ethnographic inquiry into the exotic life of the American Evangelical Christian.
As she answered the questions, talking about the meaning of the cross and reading aloud passages from the Bible, Cassie had the sudden realization that this anthropology exercise presented her with the opportunity she had been hoping for. She took a deep breath and prepared to make her move. Ahmed beat her to it. Looking Cassie deep in the eyes, he said, “You are such a wonderful person, exactly the person I have been looking to share something with. I would like to tell you about my religion—Islam.” And with words eerily similar to the ones Cassie was about to say—truth, love, faith, God—Ahmed tried to convert her.
For a second there, Cassie was stunned. She had spent years in church learning the script to convert others, and she now found herself on the receiving end of that process. She wasn’t really offended, just surprised. Finally, not really knowing what else to do, she began to blurt out the words that had been gathering in her head since she first met Ahmed: “Has anybody ever told you what it means to have a personal relationship with a man named Jesus?” Now it was Ahmed’s turn to be surprised. His eyes got wide, and he started to say something. And then the corners of his mouth started to turn up, and pretty soon they were both laughing.
It is a story that reminds me of the dynamic that the great religious studies scholar and Christian theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith describes in the introduction to his book The Faith of Other Men. As the gender-loaded title suggests, the events the book is based on took place before the midpoint of the twentieth century, when the city of Lahore, where Cantwell Smith was a young professor at a Christian missionary college, was still part of an undivided India under British rule. One day, while going about his normal routine, he had a startling realization about the obvious: most of his colleagues and students at the missionary college were not Christian; they were Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus. “The Christians among us,” he writes, “were attempting to illustrate and practice our faith; our colleagues of other communities, often reverent men, were willing to work with us toward constructing and maintaining a community—a community religiously diverse.”2
Had he been asked before he arrived what a Christian should do when put in the same room as someone of a different religion, he might well have answered, “Try to convert them.” It is, after all, the command of the Great Commission, a central part of the Christian tradition. That desire was no doubt present in him, but when put in a situation where he grew to respect people of other faiths as colleagues and, especially living in an unfamiliar country, rely on them as friends, he found other thoughts arising as well. How were they, together, to most effectively teach their students? What could they do, together, about the increasing religious violence in the subcontinent? What did their religiously diverse community have to say about the colonial regime in place at the time? All these questions, in a community of believers, inevitably became intertwined with faith. For a Christian to think only of converting others in this situation seemed to Cantwell Smith not so much to miss the point as to miss too many other dimensions of life.
Cantwell Smith had no interest in converting to another faith himself, and in a community that worked together and even worshipped with one another, it was facile to believe that all faiths were going to fold into one, or that religion was going to melt away entirely. Ultimately, Cantwell Smith came to this: “The problem is for us all to learn to live together with our seriously different traditions not only in peace but in some sort of mutual trust and mutual loyalty.” The question was how to have a vertical relationship with one’s own understanding of the divine, and a horizontal relationship with the diversity of the world—in Cantwell Smith’s words, to arrive at a point where one “can appreciate other men’s values without losing allegiance to our own.”
The Faith of Other Men was actually written in the early 1960s, some twenty years after Cantwell Smith’s experiences in Lahore. By then, he was director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and had enough perspective to make some comparative observations. The first was about religious diversity. The United States at that time had just recently started understanding itself as a Judeo-Christian country. It had nowhere near the range of religious diversity that Cantwell Smith had experienced while in Lahore. That would change, he predicted. The diversity of Lahore was on its way to Louisville—air travel, communications technology, and the early emergence of globalization made it inevitable. The kinds of questions he found himself asking at the Christian missionary college in Lahore were the type of questions all believers would soon have to face. As he wrote, “The religious life of mankind from now on, if it is to be lived at all, will be lived in a context of religious pluralism.”
Cantwell Smith’s second observation had to do with the field of religious studies. Traditionally, comparative religion focused on religious systems—the beliefs, rituals, sacred texts, and so on, of the various world religions. Understanding religious systems, however, gives you limited insight at best into the perspectives and practices of religious believers. Islam is, after all, not the same thing as Muslims. The best way to apprehend religious communities instead of religious systems is to pay close attention to how various groups of believers orient around the central symbols of their religious traditions, to study what the creed “There is no god but God” means in the life and practice of a Muslim, or how the Cross guides believing, behaving, and belonging for Christians. This relationship between believer and tradition is what Cantwell Smith called faith. It was, for him, the most important way to understand how religion is actually lived, and one that religious studies scholars had too often ignored.
A few years after Cantwell Smith published The Faith of Other Men, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1965, legislation that opened America’s borders to people from Asia, Africa, and South America, new citizens who brought not just their professional talents and dreams of economic success but their religious practices as well. The mosques of Lahore started to spring up in Louisville; the Buddhist prayers of Colombo were now chanted in Cambridge. What was once an over-there issue for scholars, missionaries and travelers was now an over-here issue for everyday citizens: Can Hindu teenagers eat the food served in the hot lunch served at high schools in Rochester? Will Buddhist women refuse to be examined by male doctors at hospitals in Denver? When anger rises in Kashmir, a territory subject to a violent religious and national dispute between majority-Hindu India and majority-Muslim Pakistan, will anger rise between Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims in Chicago? And when an Evangelical Christian goes to college and meets a Bangladeshi Muslim, each serious about their own faith, which turns will the conversation take? These are not ultimately questions about religious systems, they are questions about religious communities. More specifically, they are questions about how people of different religious communities will interact with each other. They are interfaith questions. Inter—how we relate to the diversity around us. Faith—how we orient around the key symbols of our religious traditions. Interfaith—how our orientation around our religious traditions impacts the relationship we have with the diversity around us, and how our relationships with the diversity around us shape the way we orient around our religious traditions.
One day, as we were preparing for class, Cassie noted that not only had Cantwell Smith predicted her situation with Ahmed, he had also pinpointed the particular struggle she had experienced—namely, how to be a faithful Christian while being friends with a righteous Muslim. “I wish I had a pastor at the time who understood what I was going through,” she said. It sounded like the perfect assignment for our class on youth ministry at the Princeton Theological Seminary.
After Cassie told her story, we split the students up into pairs and asked one to play the role of the campus pastor and one to play the role of Cassie, the Christian student who has recently become friends with a Muslim and is asking a set of questions about her faith, in light of this friendship. As we went around listening in to the conversations, I was struck by how easily the seminary students slipped into the Cassie role. They asked pointed, specific questions:
“Are his beliefs wrong, or are my beliefs wrong?”
“If Islam is evil, like my preacher back home said, how come Ahmed is so nice?”
“I’m friends with this guy—genuinely friends with him. And I want to convert him—really, I do. But it feels manipulative to continue a friendship if the only intention I have is to convert someone; it’s like a bait and switch. On the other hand, if I continue to be friends with him without telling him about Jesus, I feel like I’m failing my faith.”
“Those are precisely the questions I was asking myself at that time,” Cassie told me later. The reason, Cassie believed, that they could formulate the questions so clearly was because every student had gone through the experience of being friends with someone from a different faith and through the process asking questions of their own.
The students playing the role of pastor were a different story. Their pastoral skills were impeccable. They listened with soft eyes and offered frequent sympathetic nods. They held the hand of the Cassie character when she grew emotional. But when the faith question was asked, the answer was saccharine. “This is all part of your journey,” one said. “Faith and friendship is a mystery,” another counseled. Just like the seminary students who had discussed the Grand Island and Jersey City case studies, these students seemed to shy away from Christian language even when presented with a Christian student seeking clarity and confidence from her faith.
Over lunch, the founding director of the seminary’s Institute for Youth Ministry, Professor Kenda Dean, shook her head and said, “The church has simply not taught our future leaders a way to articulate Christian identity in a religiously diverse world. We need a language that maintains our own distinctiveness and truth claims while respecting the goodness in others and, above all, affirming the holiness of relationships. The most prevalent Christian language in the public square is the language of domination. Because that language is so ugly and destructive, we race away from it, but we run so far we find ourselves in a land devoid of Christian symbolism entirely.”
This was one of the reasons, she believed, for what scholars of the church are calling the trend toward moralistic therapeutic deism, the notion that God exists and is generally good and wants people to be good, but that particular symbols or prayers or practices don’t really matter. Carrying the cross gets cumbersome when your friends are Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and humanists. It’s easier just to be nice than to talk about being Christian. The phrase “moralistic therapeutic deism,” coined by sociologist of religion Christian Smith in a book called Soul Searching,3 was the best way to describe how the majority of young Christians viewed their faith. It was an insight that sent shockwaves through church circles. Christian leaders used to spending a lot of time worrying about the faith of “the unchurched” were stunned to learn that the kids who showed up every week in the pews—“the churched”—didn’t know much more than those who didn’t come at all. Dean was at the vanguard of addressing the problem, and she was convinced that youth ministry could play a major part. Youth ministry is about engaging young people where they are, swirling about in the carnival of contemporary American cultural diversity, with the fullness of the Gospel. Otherwise, Dean, never one to mince words, believed that youth ministry, like the churches it reflects, would be guilty of promoting the hopelessly benign and acculturated religious outlook suggested by the title of her recent book, Almost Christian.4
“So, what’s wrong with that?” asked Aaron, my friend from graduate school who served as chair of the board of Interfaith Youth Core in the very early days of the organization. He’s a nominal Catholic with a big humanist heart, aware of how faith has inspired service but not willing to overlook the violence that religion caused. To him, moralistic therapeutic deism sounds pretty good. It felt like religion minus the dogma.
“It’s religion minus the religion,” I told him. He looked skeptical. “Listen, maybe this will convince you.”
“There is a story of an American Christian pastor who was serving a church in Europe during World War II,” I said. “His congregation sent him money so that he could come back and celebrate Christmas with his home church. He used the money to help a group of Jews who would have otherwise burned in Hitler’s hellfires flee to safety. One of his congregants got angry when she heard about this and fired off a letter, basically saying, ‘How dare you use that money for a different purpose. And those people you helped, they weren’t even Christian.’ The pastor sent a letter back with these words: ‘Yes, but I am.’ ”
“Faith causes people to do that?” Aaron asked.
“Faith causes people to do that,” I said.
“So, how are we going to solve the problem of moralistic therapeutic deism?” he asked.
“Working on it,” I told him.
The heart of the matter is how to articulate religious identity in a world of diversity in a way that affirms particularity and builds pluralism. Here is another way of saying that: How can Cassie be a righteous Christian while remaining friends with a good Muslim? Too often, people in that dynamic understand their situation this way: “I’m friends with a Muslim even though I’m Christian.” That’s not a formulation that says much about either faith or friendship. I think the place we want to get to is this: “Because I am a Christian, I have formed a friendship with a Muslim.” In other words, “It is precisely the values that I derive from Christianity that attract me to a person as righteous as you.” Here, faith and friendship are connected, mutually enriching instead of mutually exclusive.
When looked at across a religious tradition and a religious population, we recognize that this is a problem whose solution begins with theology and continues into faith formation. Just as the abolition and civil rights movements caused faith communities to articulate a theology of race relations, just as globalization spurred faith communities to articulate a theology of the world church or the global ummah, just as climate change has catalyzed articulation of theologies of environmentalism and creation care, the dynamic of increased interaction between people of different faith backgrounds should encourage religious communities to articulate theologies of interfaith cooperation. And just as all of these things were first articulated in books and then worked their way into Sunday school, so must it be with the theology of interfaith cooperation. The most important institution on that road is the seminary, the space within a religious tradition where future religious leaders grapple with questions at the intersection of faith and culture, of history and theology, all with the hope of applying the solutions in the world.
By theology, I mean a coherent narrative that references key Scripture, stories, history, heroes, poetry, and so on, from the cumulative historical tradition of the faith community. By articulate, I mean to highlight that all our faith traditions already contain resources that speak to positive relations with the religious other. Our challenge is to make those pieces salient, interpret and apply them to the contemporary dynamic of religious diversity, and string them together in a coherent narrative. It is this interpretive process that keeps traditions founded thousands of years ago relevant to the contemporary age. It is what Harvard scholar Diana Eck means when she says that “our religions are more like rivers than monuments, changing.”5
The seeds of this theology are not in the esoteric or ethereal dimensions of our religions; they are right there at the center, located in what Wilfred Cantwell Smith might call our key symbols. We need to give those key symbols a fresh look, seeing them from the angle of a world defined by interfaith interaction.
In the ten years I have been teaching in seminaries, the Bible story that I have heard most often is the story of the Good Samaritan. It is a story familiar to nearly every Christian, and most non-Christians as well. A lawyer asks Jesus the question “Teacher, how shall I gain eternal life?” Jesus suggests the man answer his own question, based on his knowledge of the holy law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind—and your neighbor as yourself,”6 the lawyer dutifully replies.
But then—“desiring to justify himself,” the Scripture says—the lawyer presents Jesus with a more complex matter: “Who is my neighbor?” In response, Jesus tells a story:
A man traveling the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is set on by robbers and left for dead. A priest walks the road, sees the man, and passes to the other side, willfully ignoring him. A Levite does the same. Along comes a traveler, a certain Samaritan, who Jesus says is moved by compassion. He approaches the man, dresses his wounds with oil and wine, places him on his animal, brings him to an inn, and spends the evening caring for him. The next morning, he gives the innkeeper two coins and clear instructions that this man is to be nursed back to full health and that he will pay the additional cost, whatever it may be.
“Now, which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?” Jesus asks the lawyer.
“He who showed mercy on him,” the lawyer responds.
“Go and do likewise,” says Jesus.
I imagine Jesus telling this parable about a man from the other community, the despised community, to a large gathering of his main audience—Jews. As Jesus proceeds, describing the brutal robbery, the two men who see and ignore the traveler, and finally the Samaritan who nurses him back to health, I imagine the series of realizations, the layers of understanding, occurring in the minds of this audience.
Clearly, helping those in need is an important part of this story. Well, why don’t the priest and the Levite—both representing important positions in the community of Jews—stop to help? They were both aware of the law. In fact, they were expert in the law, and had responsibility for interpreting and implementing it. Perhaps it was their very expertise that prevented them from helping. One of the laws forbade the touching of the dead; another forbade them from touching Gentiles. Perhaps the priest and the Levite feared that the man was dead, or thought he was a Gentile, and chose to follow the letter of the law so that they would not become unclean. Clearly, Jesus is saying there is a good higher than following the letter of the law—the ethic of helping one in need.
But if that were indeed the main point of the story, why not have the priest or the Levite choose to override the letter of the law in the spirit of the higher good? Certainly, that would have brought home the holiness of helping. Something else is happening here.
The priest and the Levite get only three short sentences in the story. The Scripture is not about them. The man who is hurt is also barely described at all. It is the Samaritan who gets all the attention. His actions are described in rich detail—using oil and wine (valuable resources) to dress the wounds, using his own animal to transport the man, spending his own time caring for him, offering the innkeeper whatever money is necessary to nurse him back to health.
Jesus is telling a story about people who were not part of his audience. In fact, he is making one the hero of his story. The Samaritans who were not just “other,” and not just despised; they were heretics, people of a different faith.
When Jesus finishes, he turns to the man who asked, “Who is my neighbor?” and gently suggests he answer the question based on the story he just heard. The lawyer is unable to bring himself to speak of the man the way Jesus does, to say the word Samaritan. But he gets the point of the story: “He who showed mercy on him,” he tells the teacher. Jesus doesn’t force him further. He trusts the moral will work its way through the man’s prejudices. The story ends with Jesus telling the lawyer, and the crowd that has gathered, “Go and do likewise.”
I imagine the question lingering, the stillness in the air, the sense of joy and fear and desire that this story has provoked in the audience. I imagine them nervously looking around at one another. No heretics here. No despised ones around. No “others” present. The Samaritans are safely elsewhere. I imagine the comfort this community felt being amid their own as the story opened. And then slowly, as the story develops, as the characters are introduced and the action unfolds, a nagging feeling starts to set in. The respected leaders among them—the priest and the Levite—are not the heroes of this story. Elsewhere in the Bible, Jesus makes it clear that he disagrees with the theology of the Samaritans.7 Still, it is the Samaritan, the heretic, Jesus tells them to emulate. Jesus seems to be saying it is not enough to stay within the fold of the faithful, not enough even to follow the way, the truth, and the life. To attain the eternal, the story suggests, you have to engage with people who believe differently than you.
“How many times did you hear the Good Samaritan story when you were growing up?” I asked my friend April.
“About a thousand,” she said.
I wrote about April in my book Acts of Faith—she was the first person hired at Interfaith Youth Core with our initial grant of $35,000. Since then she has helped build IFYC into a $4 million organization, running just about every one of our programs along the way, and launching half of them. She was raised a devout Evangelical Christian in rural Minnesota by a family who believe that faith is about action. Her mother, out of Christian conviction, adopted children. April led not only Bible studies at church but also service and mission trips abroad throughout her high school years. “Jesus taught that you helped people, especially people different from you,” she told me. “That’s what the Good Samaritan story is all about.”
The turning point in April’s faith life came when she was president of the Christian Students Group at Carleton College. A mosque in nearby Minneapolis suffered an arson attack, and April received an e-mail requesting that the religious leaders in the area support the Muslim community in its time of need. April immediately shot back a yes. When she brought the idea to the next meeting of the Carleton Christian group, some members had different instincts. A few suggested that this was a good time to proselytize to the Muslims whose prayer space had been destroyed. When April said she had already sent back an e-mail saying she would help, and thought that turning service into evangelism was disingenuous, one person spoke up with indignity, saying, “Those people aren’t Christian. They do not believe in Jesus Christ. They pray to a false God. If you help them, you are supporting devil worship.” The problem is, those people had not just their instincts, they also had a very clear interpretation of Christian texts. Out came the fangs and the Scripture, and April found herself subject to a session of religious bigotry decorated with Biblical proof texts.
“While you were being barraged with all these verses claiming you should hate people from other religions, why didn’t you just tell the story of the Good Samaritan?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just stayed silent. I let them out-Scripture me, even though I knew the Bible as well or better than any of them. I guess I just never thought about how those stories applied to people from different religions.”
And then she turned the tables on me. “If you were in Morocco or Pakistan, and a group of fanatical Muslims burned down a church, how would you convince the local community that it was part of being Muslim to help the Christians rebuild?” She wanted to know if there was a theology of interfaith cooperation within Islam. I would be lying if I said I had the answer at the tip of my tongue.
One of the hidden dimensions of interfaith cooperation is how it strengthens your own tradition, precisely because when other people ask searching questions like the one April posed to me, you go back in the sources of your faith to find the answer. And who knew that at the source of Islam, contained in the Prophethood and practice of a respected merchant in Mecca named Muhammad, lay a theology of interfaith cooperation?
Every year during the month of Ramadan, Muhammad would make a spiritual pilgrimage to a cave near Mt. Hira, outside of the city of Mecca. On one of the odd nights of the last ten days of that month in 610, while Muhammad was praying on the mountain, he felt a powerful force enveloping his whole body and heard a voice say “Iqra,” Arabic for read or recite. At first, Muhammad was terrified. Trembling, he said to the force, “I am not a reciter,” meaning that he was not one of the poets of the Arabian desert, figures whose verse was said to be inspired by demonlike creatures called jinns. Again the force enveloped him, again came the command to recite, and again Muhammad said, “I am not a reciter.” It happened a third time—the grip, the command, the shock of fear—but during this cycle, Muhammad felt the following words come forth:
“Recite in the name of thy Lord who created!
He createth man from a clot of blood.
Recite: and thy Lord is the Most Bountiful
He who hath taught by the pen,
taught man what he knew not.”8
It was the first verse of the Qur’an pouring from his lips. Muhammad returned to his wife, Khadija, crawling on his hands and knees, shaking with fear. There are traditions that say that the event of this first revelation so frightened the Prophet that he considered flinging himself off the mountain, disgusted that he had allowed himself to become possessed. Khadija calmed her husband, assuring him that Allah would not let a demon enter a servant as righteous as he. She had a cousin, a man named Waraqa, a man learned in the Scriptures, and she would go to him and ask his counsel as to what they should make of these events.
When Waraqa heard the story he exclaimed, “Holy! Holy! . . . There has come to him the great namus that came to Moses aforetime, and lo, he is the prophet of his people.” When Waraqa next saw Muhammad in Mecca, he ran to kiss the Prophet on the forehead.
Who was Waraqa, I wondered? What did it mean to be “learned in the Scriptures”? It turns out that the first person to recognize the Qur’annic revelation was a Christian, an Arab Christian who never converted to Islam.
The revelations continued, and Muhammad started preaching the message of Islam—mercy and monotheism—in Mecca. As the number of converts grew, so did the anger of the powerful Quraysh tribe. They viewed Muhammad’s mission as an insult to their faith and as a threat to their way of life. Attacks on Muhammad and the early Muslims became more brazen, and his companions became afraid for the Prophet’s life.
For the Quraysh to rid themselves of Muhammad entirely, they would have to ask the clan leader Abu Talib to lift his protection of the Prophet. The anti-Muhammad forces did not want to risk an internecine war by attacking a man who had the protection of a respected clan leader. Abu Talib was Muhammad’s uncle; he had taken Muhammad in after he was orphaned at five years of age. He was also a man fully committed to the pagan gods of Arabia. Muhammad had asked him to convert many times, but Abu Talib had refused. This was one of the points the Quraysh leaders made to him: they collectively belonged to a tradition that Muhammad was effectively saying was wrong. But Abu Talib rebuffed them and refused to lift his protection. “Go and say what you please,” he told his nephew, “for by God I will never give you up on any account.”
And so it was that the first person to recognize the Prophethood of Muhammad was a Christian and the primary protector of Muhammad during those brutal early years in Mecca was a pagan. Interfaith cooperation was written into the very founding of my faith tradition, and an ethic that continued throughout Muhammad’s life. There is a story of the Prophet hosting a Christian delegation in Medina. The Muslims and Christians had a heated debate on the differences between their respective traditions. At one point, the Christians asked for the Prophet’s protection so they could leave the city and perform their prayers. The Prophet surprised them by inviting them into his mosque to pray, saying that just because their traditions had differences did not mean that they should not respect and show hospitality to the others’ practices.9
This story of the Prophet highlights an important distinction—namely, a theology of interfaith cooperation is not about religions being the same, or even an agreement that everyone is going to heaven. A theology of interfaith cooperation does not state that we should not argue about deep cosmic differences. After all, in the story above, the Muslim hosts led by the Prophet were arguing with the Christian delegation about the different Muslim and Christian views of Jesus. Theirs was not a facile exchange along the lines of “You wash your hands before you pray, and I wash mine—we’re all the same.” Instead, the story shows that, in the midst of an argument about important theological differences, the Muslims and Christians showed each other kindness, respect, and hospitality. It was a theology of interfaith cooperation that focused on building bridges between people of different faiths, not about which religious bridge leads to heaven.
If the Good Samaritan is the most common Christian story cited by my seminary students, Martin Luther King Jr. is the most quoted Christian hero. My students like to point out to me that King’s commitment to nonviolence was deeply influenced by the work of Mahatma Gandhi. It is one of the most inspiring examples of religious influence in modern history. Gandhi’s idea of satyagraha—literally “love force”—provided King a new instrument for combating social problems. King had long believed in Jesus’ exhortations to “Turn the other cheek” and “Love your enemies,” but he understood them as applying to individual relationships. Gandhi’s successful campaign of active pacifism against British rule in India convinced King that nonviolence could be employed as a method of broad social reform. It was an ethic that King had the opportunity to put into practice in 1955, during the Montgomery bus boycott, when King was just twenty-six years old. “Christ furnished the inspiration,” King wrote, “and Gandhi gave us the method.”10
It is commonplace to trace King’s journey down the path of Gandhian nonviolence, but King followed Gandhi down another path as well, one that my seminary students are surprised to hear about: the path of interfaith cooperation. Gandhi, of course, was not a Christian. And although he had great respect for the Christian Scriptures, the book that Gandhi drew his deepest inspiration from was not the Bible, it was the Bhagavad Gita.
In 1959, King traveled to India to learn more about Gandhi’s life and work, and was struck that Gandhi’s movement involved people of all religious backgrounds and that the Mahatma had ranked interfaith cooperation as one of his chief goals. Two months after his return from India, in his Palm Sunday sermon at Montgomery’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, King referred to Gandhi as one of the “other sheep” of Jesus and said, “It is one of the strange ironies of the modern world that the greatest Christian of the twentieth century was not a member of the Christian church.” He ended his sermon with the following prayer: “O God, our gracious Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the fact that you have inspired men and women in all nations and in all cultures. We call you different names: some call Thee Allah; some call you Elohim; some call you Jehovah; some call you Brahma; and some call you the unmoved Mover.”11
King’s interfaith path involved far more than the study of different religious systems. The man with the bushy beard marching next to King in the famous picture from Selma is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a descendant of Eastern European Hasidic rabbis who had escaped the trains running from Warsaw to Auschwitz by six weeks. Instead of secluding himself into a religious bubble in America, Heschel threw himself into the work of the civil rights movement. About walking with King in Selma, Heschel wrote, “Our march was worship. I felt like my legs were praying.”12
As King connected the civil rights movement to struggles around the world, from hunger in India to war in Vietnam, no contemporary figure influenced him more than the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In his letter nominating Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize, King wrote, “He is a holy man. . . . His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to a world brotherhood, to humanity.” In his first major sermon against the Vietnam War, King connected the Christian ethic that brought him to his antiwar conviction with the core lesson he had learned from the faith of other men: “The Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality . . . is that the force of love is the supreme unifying principle of life.”13
What surprises my seminary students most of all is the place where King began to take Gandhi’s work seriously, the site where a theology of interfaith cooperation that shaped the second half of the twentieth century first began: in seminary. As a student at the Crozer Theological Seminary, King came under the spell of Professor George Davis, the son of a union activist, a committed pacifist, and a deep admirer of Gandhi. King took a third of his Crozer courses with Davis, and it was Davis’s copy of Frederick Bonn Fisher’s That Strange Little Brown Man of India, Gandhi that King borrowed and pored over in the library. The message was reinforced by a lecture that King attended in the spring of 1950 at Philadelphia’s Fellowship House, where the president of Howard University, Mordecai Johnson, spoke on Gandhi as an embodiment of Christian love. It moved King to buy a stack of books on the Mahatma and his movement.14 I imagine King marveling at what Gandhi accomplished in the Great Salt March, his mind swirling with Bible verses and Walter Raushenbush quotes, wondering what it meant to admire the inspiration that Gandhi got from Hinduism while staying committed to his own Christian tradition. It occurs to me that the conversations that King must have had at Crozer sixty-five years ago about faith having both roots and wings is very similar to the ones that seminary students are having today.
One of my favorite lines from King is about the origins of his faith commitment: “I am many things to many people, but in the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. That is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.” I thought about those lines when I visited the home where King grew up, in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn district. For all that King learned about faith and leadership at Morehouse College and at Crozer, it’s that home where the first and most important formation took place. It is the home where the pressures and wonders of religious diversity are first felt, and these days, felt more intensely than ever before. As the founder of an interfaith organization, I thought I knew something about this. And then I had children—and that, as they say, changes everything.