Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  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 no
t 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.