Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  Looking back, the headlines of the 1990s read like a narrative of religious conflict: There was the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, announcing the global ambitions of Muslim extremism. There was the war in the Balkans, where Slobodan Milosevic’s soldiers held up three fingers for the Trinity as they launched their mortars into the majority-Muslim and nearly defenseless city of Sarajevo. A half century earlier, a Hindu nationalist in India had assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1990s, political parties affiliated with the group the assassin belonged to roared back to power in India, winning the election in 1998 and promptly testing a nuclear weapon, which they called “the Hindu bomb.” An explosion went off at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and Eric Rudolph held up the Bible as his inspiration. A few years later, Benjamin Smith chose the Fourth of July weekend to go on a shooting spree across Illinois and Indiana, targeting Jews, blacks, and Asians, motivated by the racist theology of the World Church of the Creator. When Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin appeared in an Israeli court, he proudly stated that the murder was rooted in Jewish scripture and law. When asked if he acted alone, he replied, “It was God.”1

  We were too busy reading critical race theory to pay attention to any of this. The problem of the color line blinded us to the coming challenge of the faith line. We even ignored the religious dimensions of obvious issues. We talked a lot about Cornel West the Black Panther, and not at all about Cornel West the black Baptist. We viewed the university’s mascot, Chief Illiniwek, as a racist symbol but knew almost nothing about the spiritual role that chiefs played in Native American religious culture. And for all our talk about the importance of identity, of the personal being political, of knowing one another’s stories, we knew almost nothing about each other’s religious lives.

  Every other Monday night, we resident advisers would gather for additional training. Diversity was again a centerpiece, but because time was shorter, these were generally more straightforward discussions with fewer crossing-the-line-type exercises. One Monday night, the question we were told to answer was “Tell us about a time when you felt marginalized based on your identity.” The white kids knew their part: “I’ll pass. I just want to listen and learn from the experience of those who are oppressed.”

  My friend Hussein’s turn came up. He started slowly: “So, last week, in the dining hall, a group of older students, including some resident advisers, were part of something they called a Viking Dinner. They got mashed potatoes, peas, and chicken from the food line, came back to their table, and basically smooshed their food on each other’s heads and bodies and made loud grunting sounds.”

  The other resident advisers started to smirk, me with them. We’d all seen this, and as Hussein said, some of us had participated. It was messy, it was funny, it was a break from the normal routine. Hussein waited for the chortling to die down. He had no look of defiance on his face, but he wanted to get through his story: “I couldn’t sit there and watch it,” he said. “I packed my food up and left and finished my dinner in my room alone. The whole thing just made me really uncomfortable. Actually, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the more I did, the more I realized that I was more than uncomfortable, I was offended.”

  The smirks were slowly evaporating now. People were looking at Hussein with some concern. We were remembering we were resident advisers, not Vikings. We did not want one of our own—a brown fellow, no less—to feel offended. We leaned in; we wanted to know more. Hussein continued. “Where I come from, food is life, and life is precious—it’s from God. That’s what we are taught in Islam.”

  The facial expressions started to change. They weren’t looks of concern anymore; they were more like those of confusion. If Hussein had said he was offended because he was Indian, he would have gotten sympathetic head nods. Nationality and ethnicity were part of our diversity radar. If Hussein said he didn’t like the Viking dinner because Vikings oppressed gay people, he might have gotten a hug. Every year I had been in college, sexual orientation had become a larger part of diversity training. But hearing that he was offended because of a religious sensibility was confusing. People weren’t hostile to it; they just didn’t know what to do with it. They had no framework. It simply didn’t register.

  A few nights later, as I was walking through the third floor of my dorm, I heard the sound of an acoustic guitar and a chorus of sweet-sounding voices. The door was ajar, and I peeked inside. It was Allen Hall’s InterVarsity Christian Fellowship group, holding a prayer circle. I saw a friend from class in the room, met her eyes, and exchanged a smile. I stood at the door and listened for a moment as they sang, “Lord, I Lift Your Name on High.” As I walked to the stairs, I realized that this was a regular occurrence. I had passed that room dozens of times before, seen people slip inside and take a seat in the circle, heard the faint echoes of soft songs coming through the door. Half the time, I was off to some meeting or lecture about identity. The Latino students were preparing to meet a senior university administrator to insist that, as their cultural center got remodeled, the mural be saved. Asian American students were agitating for their own cultural center, African American students wanted more black faculty hires, women were discussing whether men could be part of the Take Back the Night march. I was immersed in several such discourses and had become a strong advocate for many of those causes. I believed that identity matters.

  But what of this other identity that we activist types talked so little about? This identity that my friend Hussein spoke of, the one that drew thousands of students at the University of Illinois into prayer circles on a regular basis, the dimension of people’s lives that—my father had it right—was driving world affairs?

  In the early 2000s, a family friend who was a student at the University of Illinois visited me at Interfaith Youth Core’s offices on the near North Side of Chicago. I got the scoop on my old coffee and pizza haunts down in Champaign-Urbana, and then I asked about the campus activist scene. “It’s all about identity,” she told me. “Same as when I was in college,” I retorted. “What’s the latest?”

  She told me about how different student groups were bringing in fiery speakers they knew would make inflammatory statements and offend other groups. Those groups would respond by bringing in their own fiery and offensive speakers, continuing the cycle. There were demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, ugly and accusatory op-eds and letters were flying back and forth in the Daily Illini, students from different groups were chalking the quad with demeaning slurs directed at one another. It had gotten so heated that worried parents were calling university administrators, who, frankly, didn’t know what to do. It sounded uglier than any of the ethnic or racial tensions I witnessed when I was a student. I wondered if something had gone awry with the Asian American activist movement that had started in the 1990s. “Who are the groups involved?” I asked, a little nervous to hear the response. The answer could not have surprised me more: “Mostly Jews and Muslims,” she said. “It’s stuff related to the Middle East.” The headlines in world affairs were starting to draw the fault lines on college campuses.2

  As I talked with my contacts down in Champaign, I realized that campus politics related to the Middle East was just one religious tension point among many. After George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore in the 2000 election, which the dominant media narrative credited to the resurgent power of Evangelicals in America, Christians on campus felt harassed in classrooms and residence halls. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ had deeply offended Jewish groups, who pointed out that the characters who sent Jesus to the cross looked like Jews out of some early-twentieth-century anti-Semite’s imagination. And, of course, the shadow of 9/11 loomed over everything. A decade earlier, my resident adviser friend Hussein’s religious identity had been somewhere between invisible and a mystery to most people. In the early 2000s, Muslim students felt anything but invisible or mysterious. They felt immediately marked and explicitly labeled, like they wore a scarlet letter E, for enemy.

  I remember sit
ting in the student center of a midsize college in a midsize Midwestern city, making final preparations for a talk I was giving there and looking up to see a woman wearing a headscarf walk by a flat-screen TV playing cable news. I saw a couple of students sitting at a table, finishing dinner, watching a story about Muslim terrorism. There were the stock images of angry Muslims with beards pumping their fists and burning American flags, and the newscaster said something about a spike in the number of suicide bombings. One of the students nodded in the direction of the unsuspecting Muslim woman, pointed to the television, and said to his friend, “Maybe they’re related.” They both laughed and went back to their dinner.

  I was furious. I got up, all ready to give them a piece of my mind on discrimination. And then I caught myself. That was me, in high school, when it came to race. What set me straight was college.

  What did those students at that Midwestern college see when they looked at that Muslim woman? What do many people see when they look at Evangelicals or Mormons or Buddhists or Catholics or Jews—or atheists, for that matter? Where do they get that information? Do they have knowledge or relationships that challenge the stereotypes presented by Hollywood or the evening news? And what is their campus doing to advance an alternative narrative, teach an appreciative knowledge base, create spaces for meaningful relationships, offer opportunities for leadership, provide a model for the rest of the society on interfaith issues?

  Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of college professors and campus chaplains started to give voice to this agenda. Harvard professor Diana Eck wrote in Encountering God that religion was the missing word in the diversity discussion.3 Sandy and Helen Astin, at the University of California at Los Angeles, published research suggesting that undergrads came to college seeking conversations about religion and spirituality but were frequently disappointed at the lack of them.4 Chaplains like Janet Cooper Nelson, Sharon Kugler, and Scotty McLennan started cocurricular programs that filled this gap. These multifaith councils and interfaith discussion dinners became the place that interested undergrads came to talk about their religious identities and spiritual journeys. Victor Kazanjian, the chaplain at Wellesley College, not only started programs on his own campus but also a national network called Education as Transformation, which publishes resources and organizes conferences on religious diversity and spirituality.

  Important as these programs are, they tend to be at private schools on the East Coast, the type of college that can afford to hire part-time Hindu and Buddhist leaders to minister to a few dozen religious-minority students. The programs occupy an important niche—interested students at elite schools. The big question for interfaith cooperation in higher ed, however, is how to go from niche to norm, just like the multicultural movement did. From private institutions on the coasts to public universities in the Midwest, from the small group of students who actively seek out such programs to part of the orientation for incoming freshmen and the required training for resident advisers. To go from niche to norm, you’d need everyone from presidents to professors to chaplains to students to view this work as a high priority, something to be not just talked about but also acted on, and to be not just done but also done well.

  One of the victories of the multicultural movement was to make it standard practice for campuses to survey their students on attitudes, knowledge, and relationships related to race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Why not administer a religious-diversity survey asking the same questions about Muslims, Mormons, Evangelicals, and atheists? Today, a student can major in sociology and get a concentration in race, class, and gender. Why not have the possibility of majoring in religion and taking a sequence of courses that would qualify for a concentration in interfaith leadership? Without a doubt, the external impetus exists. If the Rodney King incident and its aftermath raised the volume on race relations in our society, prompting campuses to take on the challenge, certainly 9/11 and its various effects have had a similar impact when it comes to interfaith issues.

  Every year, colleges inject a stream of impassioned, idealistic new leaders into our nation who are itching to take on our toughest challenges. They bring with them the knowledge and relationships, the attitudes and skills, they learned on campus. Those of us who went to college in the 1990s could easily be called the Multicultural Leadership Generation. After we graduated, we started diversity groups in our cities and our companies and pushed Hollywood and major retailers to diversify representation. We wanted to bring our values to the highest stage possible, so when Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States of America, we worked day and night to help elect a man who combined genes from Kenya and Kansas, who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, who worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

  What if colleges took religious diversity as seriously as they took other identity issues? What if recruiting a religiously diverse student body, creating a welcoming environment for people of different faiths and philosophical perspectives, and offering classes in interfaith studies and co-curricular opportunities for interfaith community and leadership became the norm? What if university presidents expected their graduates to acquire interfaith literacy, experience interfaith community, and have opportunities to run interfaith programs during their four years on campus? What impact might a critical mass of interfaith leaders have on America over the course of the next generation?

  There is certainly no lack of interest among students. Every year at Interfaith Youth Core we raise the number of students we expect at our Interfaith Leadership Institutes, and every year we still find ourselves scrambling at the last minute to accommodate all the interest. For all the mistakes we’ve made at Interfaith Youth Core, our basic instinct was right on. Young people don’t like to have their own faiths or the faiths of their friends maligned. They don’t view people from different faiths in an inevitable clash of civilizations. They desperately want a vocabulary that helps them stay grounded in their own tradition and relate positively to those from other traditions. The more they see religious bomb throwers, the more committed they are to being interfaith bridge builders.

  Greg Damhorst is a prime example. Greg grew up in Elgin, a middle-class suburb about forty miles northwest of Chicago. The Evangelical church he attended was right next to his diverse high school, and because of the way the roads were configured, parking at the church was easier than parking at the school. This concerned some church members, who felt that the church parking lot was private property that should be used only by church members. A group showed up one morning and strung a rope across the entrance. If you were a member of the church, they lowered the rope and let you in. If you weren’t, well, then you had to turn around and find a different place to park.

  Greg is the type of guy for whom ropes across his church parking lot raise deep theological questions. One of Greg’s high school friends was a young man from a Hindu background, and Greg couldn’t help but think about him every time he parked at church and walked across the lot to school. Was this how Christians were supposed to invite people to Jesus? It felt a little like a Jesus tollbooth: put the right coins in and the gate would lift. What if someone said yes, he was interested in the church but only because he wanted to park in the lot? What if someone else who truly could be seeking Jesus was turned off by the rope?

  Greg brought these questions with him to the University of Illinois. He believed deeply in his faith—indeed, believed it was the only way to God. He also believed that the best way to express his faith, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, was to be in right relationship with the world, including people of other faiths. Right relationship means respect, understanding, and cooperation. So, in addition to being part of an Evangelical Christian association, Greg joined the Interfaith in Action student group (set up by a group of Illinois students who spent a summer interning at Interfaith Youth Core) and quickly became a leader in its weekly shared-values discussion and annual
Day of Interfaith Service. On a good day, twenty students came to the discussion. Interfaith in Action could expect 120 or so for the annual service day, when Interfaith in Action leaders organized students into religiously diverse groups for a day of volunteering and then facilitated small-group discussions about the shared value of service across faiths.

  The numbers remained modest for several years, but the network of relationships that Interfaith in Action cultivated were increasingly impressive. Directors of local social-service agencies came to respect Greg and his colleagues and to rely on the annual volunteer day. Campus officials, including the vice chancellor, learned about their work. The leaders of various religious student organizations encouraged their members to participate in the discussions and the days of service, resulting in markedly lower tension between religious communities across the campus. Personally, Greg felt fulfilled. The model of discussing shared values like mercy and compassion with people of different traditions and applying those values in interfaith service projects allowed him to speak openly about his Christian inspiration while also listening respectfully to others.

  In January 2010, a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving a million homeless. Greg and the Interfaith in Action’s executive committee started to organize. They found the most practical way they could help: packing nutritious dry-goods meals. And they set a goal: the University of Illinois and the Champaign-Urbana community would pack a million meals for Haiti in a weekend. Directors of local social-service agencies helped them find a space large enough for the event. One helped them get a federal grant to pay for the food and materials. They mobilized their network among student and community religious communities. They pasted butcher paper on a wall so that people could write what inspired them to serve. In a twelve-hour period, over five thousand people packaged over a million meals for Haiti. Hundreds took the time to leave a quote about service from their tradition on the wall.