The Future of Faith

by Harvey Cox

  It is touching to have been reminded recently—in Peter Hebblethwaite’s biography of Angelo Roncalli3—of something I had read but nearly forgotten: that virtually the last words he uttered on his death bed were ut omnes unum sint (“that all may be one,” Jesus’s prayer in John 17:21). I think it is safe to say that, given Roncalli’s short but spectacular papacy, the name John has now been fully restored and vindicated. The Catholic Church, it seems, is not in any particular hurry about these things.

  John XXIII did far more than reclaim a papal name. He demonstrated, in a thrilling and imaginative way, the kind of freedom a pope has if he is willing to exercise it. John XXIII not only issued encyclicals, like Pacem in Terris, that still reverberate and not only assembled a council that changed the church forever; he also redefined the religious, cultural, and moral meaning of the papacy itself. He did this, moreover, not through any sweeping juridical reforms, but simply by the way he lived. I continue to be astonished when I remember how not only Protestants, Jews, and members of other religions, but also atheists, skeptics, and agnostics seemed to admire and even love him and how genuinely sad hundreds of millions of people were when he died.

  I am also somewhat baffled by it. Why should so many people who, like my parents, think of this pope business as an odd but harmless Catholic thing have any interest in whether a pope is generous, expansive, and humble or not? It almost suggests that there was, and is, something deep in even the most unpapal (as opposed to antipapal) soul that hopes for a pope we can all feel fond of. It is the evolution of this cultural, spiritual, and moral dimension of the papacy that is left out of most of the suggestions I see about the future of the papacy. Maybe the omission occurs because most of those who engage in the discussion are Catholics, and since they tend to be preoccupied with other aspects of the papal office, they miss this one. Perhaps one almost has to be something of an outsider, and therefore not so wrapped up with issues of collegiality, infallibility, and curial power, to appreciate it.

  The first pope I met personally was Paul VI. It happened at a consultation in Rome sponsored by the Vatican’s then newly established Secretariat for Nonbelievers, whose president was Cardinal Koenig of Vienna. It was a meeting that altered forever my ideas about the papacy and what its future course might be. I was not, however, invited to the conference as a nonbeliever. Vatican II had made it clear that Protestants were now to be viewed in a much more favorable light, and a Secretariat for Christian Unity had just been established. I was invited because it was shortly after the appearance of my book The Secular City, and someone at the Vatican, possibly even prompted by the pope, thought I knew something about secularization and modern unbelief. When at the conclusion of our talks Pope Paul VI received the scholars who attended, he took my hand and, with gentle eyes looking over his hawklike nose, told me that he had been reading my book and that, although he disagreed with some of it, he had read it “with great interest.” I was immensely pleased, but also sorry the next day that I had not asked him to put it in writing. It would have made a marvelous blurb for future editions.

  What was important about that consultation, however, was not meeting the pope. (“It’s like visiting the Statue of Liberty when you go to New York,” the monsignor who administered the Secretariat told us before the audience.) The important thing was that this was a meeting sponsored by an official organ of the Vatican Curia to which not only Protestants and Jews but nonbelievers and even Marxists were invited. It suggested a boundless new arena for papal leadership, a transformation of the Vatican itself into an open meeting ground where representatives of various contending worldviews could come together for uncoerced and honest conversation. This hope is voiced by historian and Vatican watcher Giancarlo Zizola when he suggests the possibility of the Vatican becoming “such a point of concentration of spiritual authority in the eyes of all Christians and of all peoples as to become a kind of agent of unification of all forces that tend toward the good, without losing at the same time continuity with what had previously been considered good.”4 This represents a truly catholic vision of what Christ’s prayer ut omnes unum sint could mean.

  That meeting in Rome was a genuinely remarkable gathering, but I regret to say that the Secretariat for Nonbelievers soon fell upon hard days. Perhaps it was just a little too daring, a bit in advance of its time. Still, I like to think of its courageous work almost as an eschatological sign, a token of future possibilities. After all, the authority of the bishop of Rome in the early years of Christian history arose when he was looked to as the one to hear out and settle otherwise intransigent disputes between contending parties within the church, so the kind of meeting I attended would represent a logical extension of that practice. Someone reported a few years ago that the reason the Secretariat for Nonbelievers eventually declined into insignificance was because neither Cardinal Koenig, who died in 2004 at the age of ninety-eight, nor the clergy who administered it in Rome were cagey enough to deal with the hardball of internal curial politics. This may well be the case, but again, maybe one has to be a non-Catholic, or at least blissfully uninvolved in the internecine power struggles of Rome, to appreciate just how powerful and promising that historic gathering was. I still believe, despite more recent reverses, that it presages a role the papacy—and quite possibly only the papacy—could play as we open the next chapter of Christian history.

  Meanwhile the Protestant struggle to move beyond fundamentalism is also under way, as we are about to see in the next chapters.

  CHAPTER 9

  Living in Haunted Houses

  Beyond the Interfaith Dialogue

  One rainy winter day when I was a boy of eight or nine and feeling unusually restless, I decided to rummage through the attic. There, tucked behind some dusty suitcases and chipped blue French provincial bedroom furniture, I uncovered a stack of old encyclopedias. I thumbed through them distractedly until suddenly coming upon a foldout map, “The Religions of the World.” I stared at it with mounting curiosity. It was color-coded. It showed “Hinduism” in red occupying the Indian subcontinent. “Buddhism,” appropriately orange, was spread across Southeast Asia from Thailand and Cambodia up to Japan. Since the map was an artifact from before the Maoist revolution, China was designated “Confucianist” and tinted in light gray. What the editors called “Mohammedanism” constituted a long yellow splash across North Africa, through the Middle East, and into Indonesia. Christianity sprawled comfortably across both Americas and Europe. I was amazed. In our small town we had Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and Catholics. But, I wondered, who were all these other people, and what were their religions like? I date my lifelong interest in theology and comparative religion to that drizzly afternoon.

  The multihued map, however, is now totally outdated. Today all these religions are everywhere. Just as Christians are rediscovering their genuine origins, they also find themselves bumper to bumper with other traditions in areas where Christianity is a small minority. The other religions are here, not just there. All are now crammed into a shrinking world as well. Immigration patterns have transported large Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim populations to Europe and America. Pagodas and mosques nestle among churches and synagogues. Adherents of the different world religions can no longer avoid each other, so understanding each other is no longer merely an option, but a necessity. The sobering truth, however, is that proximity has not always bred respect. In many places it has spawned suspicion and contempt, and just as religion has become more rather than less of a force in our time, the relationships among the different traditions have reached a new moment of crisis.

  As human beings we live in both nature and history. We fuse two modes of existence. We all inhabit bodies, but we clothe them with everything from loincloths to Prada. We all speak, but in hundreds of different languages from Bengali to Serbo-Croatian. Likewise, we are all “faith-ing” animals. We cannot live without some degree of confidence in whatever lends coherence and purpose to our lives. It can be good luc
k, our ancestors, our money, brains, or contacts. It can even be a confidence that none of the above can be trusted, and it can change from year to year or from one hour to the next. Still, it has to be something. We are all “faithers,” but we direct our faithing toward a myriad of different entities.

  The religious and cultural patterns we live in shape our languages and our thought forms in ways that are almost impossible to escape. Jews and Christians who come to deny the existence of “God” inevitably deny the God they learned about through the Jewish or Christian tradition. Even conversion to another religion does not solve this problem. Christians who embrace Buddhism cannot help but understand the dharma in part through the lens of the faith they are leaving. I have met a number of people from other faith traditions who have become Buddhists. But without exception they either extol the virtues of their new faith at the expense of the one they have left, usually Christianity or Judaism, or suffuse their Buddhism with Christian or Jewish overtones. Our traditions, whether we like it or not, permeate the language, thought forms, institutions, and values of our societies. They seep into the marrow of our bones and the synapses of our brains. They lodge not just in our conscious thinking, but also in our instinctive responses. I once heard Professor Arvind Sharma, the noted scholar of Indian religion, parse this unavoidable element of human existence in a whimsical reply to a reporter’s question. Asked if he was a “believing” or a “practicing” Hindu, Professor Sharma smiled and responded, “Well, if you live in a haunted house, does that mean you believe in ghosts?”1

  To some extent we all live in haunted houses. But although the houses may be in one shrinking global village, they remain separate houses. We all share a common need for a faith, whether it is a religious one or not, but we find ourselves amid a bewildering array of different ways of symbolizing both faith and its object. The chart of world religions still has many different colors, even though they are now striated and marbled. The map now looks less like a Joan Miró painting, with the colors clearly delineated, and more like a Jackson Pollock, with large swatches here and there, but spots and driblets splattered all over the canvas.

  More than that, historically the contrasting tints have fueled an endless succession of crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and persecutions. It has been said that people are willing not only to “die for the faith,” but also to kill for it. After the twentieth century, however, we have to add that not only have religious people killed atheists and heretics; atheists have been willing to kill religious people because of their religion. It is an ugly history, and among the various religious traditions Christianity has amassed one of the goriest records. But there is some evidence that Christianity’s current retrieval of its core faith, especially in parts of the world where Christians live as minorities among those of other religions, could generate a more respectful, cooperative, and compassionate attitude.

  Christianity began as a loose gaggle of Jews, soon joined by Gentiles, who were trying to follow Jesus by continuing his life work, best stated in the prayer he taught his friends, that God’s reign of peace and justice, his “Kingdom,” should “come on earth as it is in heaven.” But Jesus never met a Hindu, a Buddhist, or a Muslim. He left no clear precedent for how to live with people of other religions. Consequently, the question of what the current rebirth of faith means for relations among these different pathways requires some original thinking. But as the new century begins we face a curious paradox. It is the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, there are more organizations, conferences, and seminars devoted to interreligious dialogue than at any time in previous history. However, we also live with terrifying animosity between—and within—religions. Hindus and Muslims slaughter each other on the Indian subcontinent. Ultra-Orthodox Jews and radical Muslims aggravate rivalries in Israel and Palestine with claims that Yahweh or Allah has given them the land. Meanwhile, Jews kill Jews and Muslims kill Muslims.

  Maybe these two contradictory trends have a common explanation: we can no longer avoid each other. There was a time when most of the adherents of any religion (with the exception of Jews) could live their whole lives in blissful ignorance even of the existence of any other one. Now all that is changed. Due not only to tides of immigration, but also to jet travel, the Internet, and films, the dispersion of religions all over the globe now makes us all each other’s neighbors, whether we like it or not. In this testy new planetary neighborhood, an honest assessment of relations we can no longer avoid dealing with the “religious other.”

  I became increasingly aware of the urgency of “interfaith dialogue” when I was in college, where I met Hindus and Muslims at a club for international students. Then as soon as I began my teaching career, I became an enthusiastic participant in dialogues in several different venues, some of them deliciously exotic. I lived for a week in a Vaishnavite Hindu compound in Vrindavan, India, and sat on the floor in bare feet exchanging ideas for hours with sadhus from the adjoining region. I attended a conference in the temple city of Kyoto, Japan, sponsored by a Buddhist organization. Later I hunched over old texts in three-way study with Muslims and Jews at the Shalom Hartman Center in Jerusalem. I taught a course on Jesus for two summer terms at the Naropa Institute, which was founded by the Tibetan Buddhist lama Chogyam Trungpa, in Boulder, Colorado. At home in Cambridge, I often visited the local Zen center and ate lunch with numerous visiting scholars who lived at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions.

  I was getting to be a real jet-setting interfaith adept with shelves of exotic souvenirs. But I was also becoming increasingly aware that the people I met were much like me. They belonged to the “dialogue wing” of their traditions. The other wing was always missing. It was evident that continuing in this direction would inevitably lead to a cul-de-sac. We also needed to talk with the “fundamentalist wings” in our own and other traditions, especially since a lot of the religious animosity that sometimes flares into violence today occurs within religious groups, not between them. Although spokespersons for the American religious Right attack what they call the “liberal media,” Hollywood, “activist judges,” and stem-cell research, they reserve their most potent fusillades for other Christians who disagree with them on these and a host of other issues. The questions that concern the religious Right most are not now—as they once were—biblical inerrancy or the doctrine of the atonement, but rather what they call “social issues,” matters of politics and culture. The proper place of gays and lesbians in the church is one of the most divisive issues currently tearing some denominations apart.

  The passions enflamed by these internal struggles within particular traditions can lead to mayhem and death. The American Christian convicted of killing staff members at a clinic that provided abortions never repented, because he believed he was obeying God’s Word and saving the innocent lives of unborn children. Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated not by a Palestinian, but by a devoted Jew acting on what he believed the Torah instructed him to do to both save Jewish lives and prevent the surrender of land God had given to his people. It was not a Muslim who killed Gandhi, but a fellow Hindu. Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto was murdered by a fellow Muslim. Everywhere in the world, a “circle-the-wagons” wing has materialized within each religion that defines itself at least as much against its coreligionists as against outsiders.

  The eruption of these “fundamentalist” movements puts the interfaith conversation in a difficult bind. Whatever else they may disagree on, fundamentalists in every tradition concur on one thing: they vociferously oppose interfaith dialogue. They see it as a clear evidence of selling out. Their refusal to come to the table is aggravating to anyone trying to build peace among the religions. But the response to their refusal is also disappointing. Most of those participating in interfaith dialogues—although there are a few exceptions—are content to stay with the easiest elements of the conversations. Christians who take part in dialogue strongly prefer to converse with sympathetic Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. T
hey rarely try to communicate with the most refractory wing within their own camp. This is understandable. What dialogically oriented Christian would not rather spend an afternoon with the Dalai Lama than with Pat Robertson?

  Of course in conversations between people from differing traditions, for example, between Christians and Buddhists, differences always come up. Indeed, that is one purpose of the conversation. But the differences seem to be at a safe remove, since the participants are not a part of the “family.” They can be registered and dismissed as “interesting.” This is not the case, however, with the discrepancies that inevitably arise when those in the interfaith wing of a religion try to converse on a serious level with those from the circle-the-wagons wing of the same affiliation. In these encounters, things get tense, tempers often flare, and people sometimes stomp out of the room. More seems to be at stake. Many people try and then just give up. But quitting merely propels the whole interfaith enterprise toward a dead end. It creates the unpleasant prospect of a future in which, while open-minded members in each religion enjoy cozy colloquies with each other, the ultraconservative wing in each becomes more isolated and truculent.

  As I became convinced that something had to be done about this stalemate, a drastic idea came to me. I suggested to my colleagues in 1983 that we invite Reverend Jerry Falwell and some representatives of Liberty University, the institution he founded and headed in Lynchburg, Virginia, to visit us at Harvard. Falwell, who died in 2007, enthusiastically styled himself a “fundamentalist” and boasted that his theology and political stance were “as conservative as you can get.” Some faculty and students were aghast at my idea. They strenuously opposed inviting him to the campus and warned me against the danger of “giving him a platform.” But I persisted, and even enlisted the support of colleagues from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, who were accustomed to entertaining controversial guests. After considerable negotiation, we eventually agreed on a jointly sponsored event at which I would introduce Falwell and two graduate students in religion would respond to him briefly, followed by a question-and-answer period and then a dinner in the splendid penthouse of the JFK School, overlooking the Charles River.