The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Polite society counsels us to keep the peace by “not discussing religion or politics.” When I ask my students to explain this folk wisdom, they get it right every time. “Somebody will get their feelings hurt.” Religion and politics are volatile subjects when talked about separately, because they touch on what psychologist Abraham Maslow calls “core values.” But when they are put together, especially as a political tool to divide and conquer, the situation can be explosive.
The problem, however, isn’t that religion and politics are part of the lively dialogue of democracy, but how one-sided that conversation has sounded since the rise of the Christian Right. No so long ago, many evangelical Christians lobbied on behalf of public, or “common,” education, worked to eliminate slavery, and then helped to expand women’s rights—and they did this from religious conviction. Most took the separation of church and state for granted, believing that it was the best bargain for both entities. But they also participated in the covenant that is required of all citizens in a free society, pushing not for government endorsement of sectarian religious issues but for laws that would make the nation more compassionate and all its citizens more equal.
Prior to the establishment of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and 1980s, most evangelicals believed that partisan political involvement would compromise the gospel, and they knew that joining the gospel to any political party would hamper the freedom of that gospel to speak to all people. Deep religious conviction was an affair of the heart and not for show. As for seeking power, Christianity is a faith that was born at the margins of society, and it has always been most effective when it speaks from the margins.
What this generation has forgotten is that some religious communities used their faith as the basis for social transformation in the face of injustice. Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, and others petitioned their governments for “redress of [moral] grievances.” They shared a fundamental conviction that God cares about the suffering of all people, and this led them to propose alternative social structures. Many of them gave their lives for that vision. Base communities and liberation theology movements sought to dismantle oppressive systems and were thus inescapably political. Roman Catholic priests have been warned (and continue to be warned) that their work is to save poor souls, not to protest the domination systems of the Third World. Such an impossible dichotomy led Archbishop Dom Helder Camara to pen his famous complaint: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
But all this changed in the late twentieth century. On the Catholic side, bishops went from issuing calls for a nuclear freeze and an end to poverty to debating whether pro-choice Catholic candidates should be offered Communion. On the Protestant side, high-profile public voices of the church became narrow, ugly, and retributive. One could be either a Christian or a Democrat, but not both. Judges were demonized for rulings that protected the separation of church and state or hindered attempts to impose sectarian beliefs through the force of law or in the public schools. A handful of emotionally volatile issues, especially abortion and gay marriage, dominated the public discourse to the exclusion of issues like poverty, war, and the destruction of the environment. Only recently has this begun to change, as thoughtful evangelicals like those in the Sojourners community have worked to reintroduce their members to their own history. This is both hopeful and exciting.
It also comes at a crucial moment in the history of the church. For a number of reasons, the church has become widely viewed as either irrelevant, the object of contempt, or both. The situation is complex, but two factors stand out. First, a narrow approach to the idea of salvation, as expressed in the blood atonement and with Jesus as the exclusive divine Savior, has played into the hands of a church seeking political power at the expense of the inclusive wisdom of its own gospel. “Getting saved” not only is a static and highly individualistic phenomenon but narrows and domesticates the redemptive activity of God in ways that conform all too conveniently to the worldview of the new American empire. In a land of entitled bargain hunters, salvation becomes the ultimate bargain.
Second, the notion of covenant as a collective expression of gratitude and mutuality has been trampled beneath a culture whose real devotion is to private ambition. The religious impulse, born in epiphanies that awaken us to our responsibilities to and for one another, is fundamentally corrupted when it is reduced to an individual balm. Faith is always supposed to make it harder, not easier, to ignore the plight of our sisters and brothers. In short, the church must make a crucial choice now between wisdom theology and salvation theology—between the Jesus who transforms and the Christ who saves. One is the biblical ethic of justice; the other is a postbiblical invention that came to fullness only after the Protestant Reformation.
Salvation theology reinforces the notion that religion is a transaction, rather than a covenant of compassion. God has done something for me, and the rewards belong to me. For others to reap the same eternal rewards, they must convert to my way of thinking in order to be similarly rewarded by my God.
As for suffering, it is commonly considered to be a form of divine punishment, not part of the journey toward wisdom. God’s “justice” is often seen as the opposite of God’s “mercy.” Marcus Borg comments: “Given the choice, we would all prefer God’s mercy and hope to escape God’s justice. But seeing the opposite of justice as mercy distorts what the Bible means by justice. Most often, in the Bible, the opposite of God’s justice is not God’s mercy, but human injustice.”1
Wisdom theology, on the other hand, is not to be confused with what is commonly called “enlightenment.” Wisdom is not about crystals, channeling, or thinly disguised self-absorption. Wisdom is the unifying object of all religious faith, and suffering as part of the process of transformation is present in every faith tradition. The biblical story is the story of light overcoming darkness, scales falling from the eyes of those who could not (or would not) see. It’s the story of the journey from a narcissistic and tribal understanding of faith to a death-defying embrace of the universal worth and dignity of all life—including creation itself.
Salvation theology, however, cannot be collectively understood by definition. It is a zero-sum game that cuts us off from the unsaved and often causes us to be arrogant and judgmental. The religious “loop” closes down upon itself; by making an exclusive claim, it becomes essentially irreligious. Human beings draw circles because we want to be inside them. Jesus kept expanding the circle to include more and more of us. A Christian covenant is therefore, by definition, a covenant of inclusiveness—or it is not Christian.
This idea, that we are to bear one another’s burdens and sacrifice something in order to contribute to individual wisdom and collective transformation, is now so foreign to the American mind that, for example, no modern politician can even suggest that taxes might need to be raised without committing political suicide. The appeal is always to selfishness and greed, reminding us that it’s “our money” and that the government (the enemy) is really stealing it from us. The result is the society we now inhabit, in which we worship at the altar of “whatever the market will bear.” The government serves private interests at the expense of public assistance, and life is reduced to a game. A recent sermon title said it simply, but well: “I Win, We Lose.”
The reason we should never stop talking about religion and politics is that our view of God shapes our view of how society ought to be ordered and what constitutes that vague but powerful concept known as justice. Christianity may be the dominant belief system in America, but there is hardly anything “biblical” about our understanding of justice. Today, the concept of covenant is legalistic, spelling out the consequences of breaking the covenant. Sin is entirely the fault of the sinner, not the consequence of a series of collective social failures. As for rehabilitation, how nineteenth century!
Today we see our religious and governmental relationships (as well as our interpersonal ones) in largely contractual terms. Mutuality and shared sacrifice are out; individual rights and unrestrained freedom are in. America has no controlling metaphor now, except the unholy trinity of Me, Myself, and I. “Every man for himself” may be a good theme for a western movie, but for the future of civilization, it’s a recipe for disaster.
WHAT IS BIBLICAL JUSTICE?
“Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29:18, AMP). Without a unifying metaphor, a grand plan, a model for the shape of the future, human beings begin to atrophy in a self-absorbed soup of gamesmanship and greed. In America’s brief history, we have had a number of visions that unified the nation, from the convulsions of our own independence, to the abolition of slavery at great price, to fighting militant fascism abroad, to social movements that sought to end discrimination and injustice against our own citizens. The question is, What is our unifying vision now? Is it to defeat terrorism? Is it to get rich? Is it to maintain a lifestyle, regardless of the cost, to which we believe we are entitled?
The biblical vision, though tainted with human folly, violence, and sin, is a vision of shalom. When this Hebrew word is translated as “peace,” something of its richness and complexity is lost. More than just the absence of war, shalom is a pervasive well-being that reflects the absence of oppression, anxiety, and fear and is characterized by health, wholeness, prosperity, and security. It is God’s dream made manifest “on earth as it is in heaven.” But it belongs to everyone, just as it is everyone’s responsibility.
Despite the Bible’s variety and breath, not to mention its tribal violence and chauvinism, there is a unifying vision in scripture—a “plot,” if you will. Expressed in metaphor and myth, it begins with paradise for two people who destroy what was given to them and ends with a new paradise—the city of God, as all the nations are healed in the vision of Revelation. In between there are nightmares, of course, but the dream recurs again and again, on the lips of prophets and in the radical wisdom of Jesus:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more. (Isa. 2:4)
This dream of God is constantly set before the people of God, and they find ways to ignore it, pervert it, or simply forget it altogether. It is truly a “tale of two kingdoms,” and the tension between the two animates scripture from start to finish. But it is never merely an individual or private vision. It is never about just “getting right with God” and then resting in the assurance of personal salvation. It is a collective vision, lived out in covenant with a God who is depicted as an Aggravator, not just a Comforter. Israel’s very identity is bound up in the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel in the middle of the night on the banks of the Jabbok River (Gen. 32:22–32). Faith is a mortal struggle, and God is a divine Adversary.
What’s more, because this biblical tale of two kingdoms was lived out in the midst of a world of wrenching rural poverty and oppression by urban elites, it was a dream that was continuously dashed by the realities of everyday life. The well-known beatitude “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh” (Luke 6:21) is most often heard today in the context of a funeral. But it was originally a word spoken to peasants living with daily grief as constant and dark as any vision of hell on earth—dying children, life on the edge of starvation, death from common diseases, and hopelessness.
What’s more, then as now, religion functioned to legitimize the social order. Its practitioners, the scribes and priests, maintained the system on behalf of the elites and thus gave divine sanction to social structures that were exploitative and politically oppressive. The message was: “This is how God wants it to be.” Then against this deadly fiction came Jesus preaching: “This is not how God wants it to be.”
Getting this message across might have been an impossible task except for one thing—Israel’s memory of its own deliverance. This defining story, of what it believed to be a God-assisted exodus from the bondage of slavery in Egypt, was kept alive in song and story. Granted, one can argue that this is “tribal religion,” and that the story would have been written differently if told by the Egyptians, but this important fact remains: Israel’s foundational narrative was a story of liberation from the domination system operating in a peasant society.
At the heart of this story is a message about the nature of God. Unimpressed by the trappings of the royal court and the rituals that sought to appease and sanctify inequity, God is portrayed as being moved by compassion for the Israelites’ misery and suffering and is believed to have liberated them from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. But this liberation was not without obligation. It was followed by a covenant delivered at Sinai that spelled out their responsibilities to God and to one another. Just as the original oppression was political, the liberation was also political, because it ended in a new kind of “bondage”—a religious covenant.
For several hundred years, the Israelites sought to live out this covenant in a way that reversed their experience in Egypt. There was no central government, no monarchy, and no elites. Instead, God was king. As a way to prevent power from accumulating in a few hands, each family was given a portion of land that belonged to them forever, according to the accounts in Joshua and Judges. Just imagine such a plan today as part of a political campaign: free land in perpetuity! Is this not socialism?
The experiment did not last, of course, and Israel soon established its own domination system through kings and their subsequent elites. But the model of joining religious ideas with political structures under the dictates of a covenant endured. Eventually the prophets and the peasant class would see themselves as being in bondage once more—not to Pharaoh, but to a new domination system. The classical prophets of ancient Israel—Amos, Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah—raised their “God-intoxicated voices of protest”2 against the human suffering caused by unjust social systems. God’s covenant with Israel had been broken, and one form of domination had been traded in for another. Then the three-step process of liberation, covenant, and alternative social structure would repeat itself. Over time, that structure would break apart, giving way to the reestablishment of power, the loss of covenant, and the return of yet another domination system.
It is no accident that the passion and preoccupation of Jesus should be something called the “kingdom” of God—an inherently political term. We tend to attach a fantastic quality to the word “kingdom” (as in Disney’s magic kingdom), but for those who heard the words of the Galilean sage, a kingdom was their everyday reality—it meant living under a system of ruling elites. There was Herod’s kingdom and Caesar’s kingdom. So when Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, the meaning would have been immediate and unmistakable. The kingdom of God is what life would be like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar.
COVENANTS MADE AND BROKEN
It is deeply ironic that every Sunday millions of Christians say in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” The implied covenant here is that the two kingdoms should be reconciled by our faithful effort to make it happen. As one scholar put it, “Heaven’s in great shape; earth is where the problems are.”3 Unfortunately, Matthew changed “kingdom of God” to “kingdom of heaven”—probably in reverential deference to the Jewish belief that one should avoid writing or speaking the name of God. The effect over the centuries, however, has been to spiritualize the notion of justice and make countless Christians think of the kingdom only in heavenly terms, or concerning just the afterlife.
This suits today’s ruling elite just fine, for they fear one thing from religion above all else: that it will disturb the commercial status quo. Charity they love, because it fills bellies without changing public policy. Pastors are shamed into thinking that political action means “taking sides” and that this somehow compromises the purity of faith. But as William Sloane Coffin Jr. reminds us, “Not to take sides is effectively to weigh in on the side of the stronger… Compassion and justice are companions, not choices.”4
What is wrong with America is identical to what is wrong with the church, and the two are feeding off each other in a demonic way. If the gospel cannot compel us to recover the meaning of covenant and the political consequences of being responsible to and for one another, then perhaps Karl Marx was right when he said religion is “the opiate of the masses.” Though this saying has been misunderstood as a call to abolish religion, Marx did believe that religion was illusory and played a role in the oppression of the working classes. If Jesus is now a free-market capitalist who worships private property and favors fair skin over fair trade, then we should drive whatever we want, live wherever we want, and let the last woolly-headed liberal turn out the lights.
But if we want to survive, if we want peace, and if we still believe in justice, then we must change more than administrations. We must recover a theology of conscience and reject the dominant and heretical theologies of personal “victory.” This cannot occur in our time without a renewed understanding of the meaning of covenant, and it cannot occur entirely outside of political action. Covenants are freely made agreements between persons. They function as residuals of trust, not as instruments of fear.
We enter into such agreements all the time in daily life, every time we hand over money as a “promissory note,” stop on red, or go on green—we do so assuming that this covenant will be kept by others as well. There are legal consequences, to be sure, but we often feel bound by more than mere compliance. Consider, for example, sitting at a red light in the wee hours of the morning with no one around. Why not go? Because we live by the ethical force of our mutual covenants, and society itself is made possible by voluntary compliance with the unenforceable.
We drop our kids at school and thus participate in a covenant of trust with teachers, administrators, and other students. We come home each day to partners whom we love in a different way by virtue of our vows and promises. We are, as philosopher Martin Buber put it, promise-making, promise-breaking, and promise-remaking creatures. We are defined by how we relate, one to another, and how well we keep our promises.
When a covenant is a religious one, another dimension is added to the idea of an agreement, even one that is freely entered into. That dimension is a transcendent quality based on religious values. A religious covenant is not a contract, which we enter into and follow mostly for self-protection or to force compliance. In contracts, if one party fails to live up to the agreement, the agreement is voided. Not so with religious covenants. They are bound by the parameters of forgiveness and patience and characterized by a kind of transrational tenacity.
The covenant itself and what it makes possible are considered larger and more important than the benefit to either party. What’s more, religious covenants are future-oriented; they are grounded in faith and are entered into in the belief that reciprocity and mutuality are transformational. Religious covenants are long-term voluntary commitments in which some of the individual’s autonomy is lost—surrendered on behalf of the covenant itself. Ask any married couple who have worked through a crisis and saved a marriage to explain religious covenant, and the words will come easily.
Covenants by nature restrict freedom and lift up the notion of “duty”—which is precisely why they aren’t very popular today. Freedom is widely misconstrued in Western culture as the freedom to do as we please unencumbered by a concern for the consequences of our actions. We assume that we are not our brother’s or sister’s keeper, and we like it that way. The good life is thereby widely confused with unrestrained indulgence made possible by nonempathetic self-absorption.
To the contrary, the biblical covenant we claim to honor is, in fact, social, communal, and egalitarian. Our dream, however—indeed, the American dream—is individualistic. In fact, we live in probably the most individualistic culture in human history.5 We are told in a thousand ways that it’s “all about me.” It’s about how I look, how much I own, how much power and status I have attained compared with others. We live under an astonishing barrage of mass-media messages that target individual insecurities in order to sell products. Our real national motto belongs to the maker of York peppermint patties: “You can’t be too rich or too thin.”
TOWARD A COVENANT OF TRUST, NOT TREPIDATION
Sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues have been telling us for years that every “good” society needs two things: opportunity and community.6 Although we hear a great deal about opportunity in America, especially from politicians, we hear very little about community, except in very nostalgic ways. We hear stories of remarkable individual successes, like Horatio Alger, but a cruel fiction is thus perpetrated—that we are all “self-made” human beings. Not only is this patent nonsense, but it also constitutes a pernicious lie. It allows us to ignore the fact that without vital communities and institutions, like decent public schools, for example, many people are not even equipped to take advantage of the opportunities. The most twisted but perennial of American myths is that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.
Now we have come to the end of three decades of stressing opportunity and free markets as the magic bullet in a capitalistic society, while paying only lip service to communities and the sacrifices that they require. But without a balance between opportunity and collective social obligation the country is spinning out of control. A politics of individualism with no community counterbalance and no collective covenant will produce wave after wave of ethics scandals, a tsunami of disposable interpersonal relationships, and the preposterous theater of the rich claiming to be the overtaxed, overregulated victims of society. Sound familiar?
What has all this got to do with Jesus, and Christianity as wisdom, not salvation? The death-dealing politics of individualism is being facilitated, rather than corrected, by a church that caters to the individual soul and individual success, rather than to building the beloved community and practicing the politics of compassion. Popular salvation theology saves the individual (“without one plea, but that my savior died for me”). Saved individuals then join communities of other saved individuals, where they remain, as individuals, imperfect but forgiven. There they celebrate their salvation and look after largely individual spiritual matters—especially how to claim what God wants them to have (riches) and how to overcome bad habits and negative thoughts.
In what is perhaps the ultimate irony, the Christian Right professes to yearn for a return to America as a “Christian nation,” without stopping to consider that the original covenants, like a “city set upon a hill,” to quote the stirring religious language of Puritan colonist John Winthrop, were not “contracts on America,” threatening divine punishments for specific moral sins. They were collective social visions of a more just society in the New World. Although far from perfect (they embraced slavery and second-class citizenship for women, among other things), these early American covenants were never about the individual, nor were they sectarian in nature. They “bound” people together, rich and poor, in order to pursue justice for the religious and nonreligious alike. This collective commitment was ultimately reflected in early American architecture (the grandeur of schools and libraries), the criminal justice system (a model for the world by the nineteenth century), even gathering places (the commons). It was all about what citizens of a young nation could do together, as long as they never forgot that beautiful, but now forgotten, concept: the common good.
Contemporary Christians have declared war on individual immorality but seem remarkably silent about the evil of systems, especially corporate greed and malfeasance. Sermons on greed have all but disappeared from today’s pulpits, when only a hundred years ago congregations could expect to hear thundering judgments against the robber barons. How often in our wealthiest churches does anyone hear a sermon from Luke 12:48, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded”?
In late-twentieth-century America, the cult of the individual reached its zenith. With the help of willing corporate media, citizens became consumers. The news of every systemic failure, whether by government, industry, the schools, or the churches, was distilled down to the level of an individual failure—like a welfare mom or a clueless bureaucrat. It is always someone else’s fault, and if you want further comment, you can speak to my attorney. In fact, we know so little about collective responsibility that we often hear: “Don’t talk to me about racism—I never owned any slaves.”
By directing all our anger at individual failures or scandals, we gradually forget that we are not called to shop and gossip, but to make, keep, and renew collective covenants in the quest for social, political, and economic justice. As the gospel got narrowed down to fervently held positions on a handful of culture-war issues, Christians who claimed to hear fetal screams turned a deaf ear to the postfetal screams of “enemy combatants” (most of whom were innocent) whom a reputedly Christian nation was torturing. Then they lied about it. Most pro-life Protestants did not lobby to end the death penalty, and divorce as a sin was out, while homosexuality as a sin was in. Where Jesus spoke, they were silent; where he was silent, they condemned.
While pushing endlessly, and by stealth, the teaching of “intelligent design” as a tribute to the Creator, these same Christians have been slow to join the environmental movement, which seeks to save that very handiwork—not to mention all of us, conservatives and liberals alike. All of this has been a calculated attempt to secure political power not for the sake of the poor, but to establish “biblical law” in a theocracy. These are covenants not on behalf of the poor but on behalf of power. That power is secured, now and always, through appeals to fear, even though a central tenet of the gospel is “Fear not.”
We are all in competition with one another now and dedicated to that vacuous ideal “the pursuit of happiness.” Would that the founding fathers had called it “the pursuit of contentment,” because we have traded collective security for hyperindividualistic insecurity. We are not our brother’s or sister’s keeper. We are 300 million self-help projects warned by investment firms not to “outlive our money” (before they can gamble it away). A recent TV ad showed people walking around in public, at work, at the store, in the park, and so on, with giant numbers attached to their backs, revealing to the world exactly how much they had saved for retirement. As Social Security faces insolvency and Wall Street reels under the weight of its own greed and corruption, we have become little more than account balances competing with other account balances. Show me your number.
Once, early in my ministry, a young woman said in the midst of premarital counseling that she had taken advantage of her position in a local bank to hack into her fiancé’s financial records. “Before I married him,” she confessed, “I needed to know what he was worth.”
The problem with most of our contemporary covenants is that they are not biblical—that is, they are not about the strong helping the weak, which is the central ethic of scripture. Instead, they protect the strong from the weak and comprise rules meant to reward and punish—hence they are instruments of control. Truth be known, a great deal of religious doctrine is born of a desire to control those around us (especially women). God’s edicts must be simple, direct, and unequivocal—like those of a strict father. It’s almost as if all that stands between us and moral chaos is too much love and forgiveness!
In everything we do these days, there is a certain frantic quality. In the way we shop, the way we travel, even the way we worship. Compulsiveness is always a sign that human beings are compensating for something and not living what Parker Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness calls the “undivided life.”7 At the heart of this social dis-ease is a basic lack of trust. We don’t trust others; we don’t trust God; we don’t even trust ourselves. To secure ourselves against our own insecurity, as Kierkegaard put it, we set out to become masters of the universe and to hold chaos at bay for one more day.
Because we are dying, we find the idea of eternal life irresistible. Because we fear losing someone we love, we find the restrictive covenants of marriage very comforting. Because we are weak and vulnerable, we like to surround ourselves with symbols of strength and protection—walls, guards, guns, and very large vehicles. But most of all, because we fear utter insignificance, we attach ourselves to institutions or to human beings that flatter us and tell us we are indispensable, noteworthy, irreplaceable. The doctrinal manifestation of this need to be singled out, recognized, and loved beyond measure is not a two-way covenant at all, but a one-way transaction—the belief that God sent his only son to die for my sin and purchase my salvation. I followed the formula, and I’ve got mine. I pray that you will get yours.
That such a deity would devise and execute such a plan is, at its heart, an example of cosmic mistrust. On the other hand, to follow a teacher of wisdom named Jesus means submitting to an entirely different ethic—that we must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves. But in our culture, we are always urged to do exactly the opposite—to “find ourselves.” We all want our fifteen minutes of fame. What’s more, the religious covenant that we are invited to make by prophets and wise ones requires not knowing but trusting in some distant, unnamed, mysterious equilibrium we call God.
Faith itself is better understood as trust, a trust so deep as to baffle those who count only what can be weighed and measured. In the future liturgies of the church, the word “trust” should replace the word “faith” as often as possible. The word “wisdom” should replace the word “salvation.” “Blood” should disappear altogether—along with all military metaphors and images. Bloody liturgies in church only encourage and sanctify the bloodletting of the battlefield. Please, for God’s sake—no more “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
The church must now make a pledge to correct its most recent heresy: teaching faith as a belief system characterized by certainty. Instead, we must recover faith’s original impulse. It was never an intellectual assent to implausible assertions that could be traded in for improbable favors. It was a deep and abiding trust in the “arc of the moral universe” and the redemptive power of the beloved community. Ministry to mistrustful human beings can therefore never be a matter of substituting one illusion for another. Offering guarantees, for example, about the survival of personal identity after death is not about trust, but just the opposite. The church should tell the truth, which is that no one knows what happens to us after we die, and thus invite us all into a mystery requiring more trust, not less. Hate-filled preaching that instills in human hearts the fear of the “other” may be an effective way to seize and hold power, but in the end it’s a covenant of mistrust. It’s the antigospel.
When politicians and presidents refuse to talk to the enemy or consider apologies to be a sign of weakness, it is not a sign of principled leadership, but mistrust masquerading as resolute faith. When the world is divided up into the good guys and the evildoers, it is not Realpolitik in action, but a failure to trust that there is any goodness in others, just as it reveals a crippling blindness on our part to the evil in which we are complicit.
When Christians make the claim that only through Christ can one be saved, they display a fatal lack of trust in the power of other religious traditions to enlighten, edify, redeem, and transform. They mistrust ultimately the power of God to gather followers into the ways of wisdom and to reveal multiple levels of reality and consciousness. In the end, fundamentalists of any religious persuasion mistrust the very premise underlying the title of William James’s classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience. To admit to “varieties” is to lose the monopoly of one’s own experience.
But the truth is, one can embrace one’s own tradition, deeply and unapologetically, without invalidating the religious tradition of another. Until we correct this most pervasive of illusions, we have no hope for peace. Fundamentalism of all kinds is the enemy of peace.
A Christian asked the Dalai Lama once whether she should become a Buddhist. His response was to tell the woman to become more deeply Christian and live more deeply in her own tradition. Huston Smith makes the same point by using the metaphor of digging a well. It is better to dig one well sixty feet deep than to dig six wells ten feet deep.8 This is an act of trust and represents a covenant of trust. Come to think of it, marriage is only possible as an act of trust. Parenthood is a covenant of trust, and an achingly irrational one at that!
Years ago, I listened to Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel speak to a group of Protestant ministers in Detroit. He had come to teach us the book of Job, and before he began his lecture he said something that I have never forgotten. He sat down, this small man with thinning hair, and opened up his Bible to one of the most enigmatic and fascinating of all biblical stories. Then with a sigh he paused, looked up, and said, “Let me be clear about something. I’m not going to try to convert anyone here to Judaism, and I would appreciate it very much if you didn’t try to convert me to Christianity. What I am trying to do is to be the best Jew that I can be, so that you can be the best Christian that you can be. Let’s study together.”