Jesus may not have been a Christian, but Christians do not like anyone else claiming to know him as well as we do. When the Muslim scholar Reza Aslan wrote Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth in 2013, Christian backlash was swift and heated. Since I have not read the book, I cannot comment, except to say that it is interesting how many of the Christians who objected to Aslan’s speaking of Jesus believe they are competent to speak of Muhammad. What happened to the Golden Rule?
In recent years I have begun taking students on a weekday tour of a large downtown masjid instead of to Friday prayers. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I find it increasingly awkward to bring spectators to other people’s worship. The second is that I read about a teacher who got in big trouble when he took his class on a field trip to a mosque and someone made a video of several of his students taking part in the prayers. The video became part of a larger attack on the mosque, which boomeranged back on the school.6 It was a public middle school, not a private college, but why tempt fate? By taking students for a Wednesday tour instead of Friday prayers, I can handle both of my concerns.
On the day I am remembering, the students and I arrive a little early in spite of the fact that the women have spent a lot of time looking in the rearview mirrors of the school van to make sure their borrowed scarves cover their hair. Some like wearing the scarves so much that they do not want to give them back at the end. Others never stop fuming about how the scarves make them feel silenced, sidelined, and oppressed. In this way, they are not so different from young women who happen to be Muslim. Some fight to wear the hijab; others fight not to wear it. Since my job is to be a perfect stranger, I knot the ends of my scarf behind my neck and lead the way to the front door of the masjid.
It is a magnificent building in midtown Atlanta with two schools on its campus, which helps explain why we run into a crowd of young boys in ankle-length white robes coming out of the masjid as we are going in. A few of them turn smiling faces toward us while the rest flow between us engrossed in their own conversations. Once inside, we take off our shoes and place them in cubbyholes, feeling the coolness of the marble floor under our feet. Then we wait for our host to appear.
I have met a variety of guides over the years—all men—who have graciously agreed to meet my group at the masjid. One was so white that he looked like my Uncle Howard. Another was a Pan-Africanist who converted to Islam during the Vietnam War. One was a Pakistani physician, and another was a retired real-estate agent from I don’t remember where. Since they were all citizens of the United States, I have to wonder why I remain so curious about their origins. Edward Said, a groundbreaking scholar and cultural critic of the last century, called it “Orientalism”—the way Westerners like myself persist in thinking of Near Eastern cultures as exotically “other.”
Today’s host greets us a few moments later, introducing himself by name and asking us ours. He is a doctor who has taken time out of his practice to fulfill one of the missions of the masjid: “Presenting Islam to the followers of other faiths and promoting goodwill between Muslims and non-Muslims,” as the website says.7 I have met him before. Years earlier, when the pastor of a fifty-member church in Florida made national news by threatening to burn a Qur’an (which he later did), a student asked the doctor how he felt about that.
“Well,” he said, “of course I was dismayed at first, since I knew how much trouble it would cause.” Then, improbably, he smiled. “But then I thought I might write Pastor Jones and ask if he planned to burn old Qur’ans or new ones—because we have some very old ones here, and if he would be willing to send us some new ones then perhaps we could work out a mutually beneficial exchange.” He was not serious, of course, but his ability to turn a hostile threat into a joke impressed the students as much as anything else he said.
Now he leads us through a pair of very tall doors into the main prayer hall of the masjid. This surprises me since the women’s prayer room is upstairs behind glass panels, and there are men praying in this hall, but he points to some folding chairs leaning against the wall and invites us to set them up in a circle. We do, with as little clanking as possible. Then we all sit down, the women tugging at their scarves and the men tilting their heads to look at the elaborate patterns inside the great dome of the roof.
The doctor speaks for about thirty minutes about the central teachings of Islam. Then he takes questions from the students, most of which he has answered a hundred times before.
“Why do the women have to sit up there?”
“Why did we have to take our shoes off?”
“Why don’t Muslims believe in Jesus?”
“Is it true you can have four wives?”
When a student asks our host what it is like to be Muslim in the United States today, he pauses. “It is more difficult now,” he says, knowing that we have no way of measuring the distance between his “then” and his “now.” “Let us say that when I travel overseas, I always leave several hours early for the airport, so that when I am detained I will not miss my flight.” He does not say “if” he is detained. He says “when.”
After a few more questions, a student asks whether it is possible to purchase a Qur’an. The doctor gets up, goes over to a bookcase against the wall, picks up a cardboard box, and sets it down on an empty chair in the circle.
“Please, help yourselves,” he says. “Since there is no compulsion in religion for Muslims, I will not hand you a copy, but you are free to pick one up if you like.” Almost all of the students take him up on the offer, weighing the books in their hands like contraband as they make their way back to the college van. Remembering the uproar at the University of North Carolina a few years back when incoming students were assigned to read a book on the Qur’an, I am glad that I work at Piedmont.8
On the last day of the unit on Islam, I turn on the overhead projector and let students watch Nina Davuluri perform the Bollywood dance routine that helped her become Miss America 2014. Born in Syracuse, New York, to Hindu parents from southeast India, Davuluri was the first American of Indian descent to win the Miss America competition. Within moments of the announcement, Twitter erupted.
“I am literarily soo mad right now a ARAB won Miss America,” reads one.
“So miss america is a terrorist,” reads another.
“Miss America? You mean Miss 7–11,” reads a third, a reference to how many 7-Eleven stores are owned or staffed by Indian Americans.
By now the anti-Muslim comments have given way to antibrown sentiments, as in a final tweet that says, “Asian or indian are you kiddin this is america omg.”9
I do not have to say much after that. Students shift uncomfortably in their seats, recognizing things that have shown up on their own Twitter feeds. They may not remember everything they have learned about mainstream Islam, but they know how race, religion, and social class get all mixed up in people’s minds. Now that they have seen how ugly it can get, they do not want to be the kind of people who take part in it any more. Though the self-protective benefits of “groupishness” may never go away, they have gained a glimpse of the world through other eyes that they will have a hard time forgetting.
It will still take enormous energy for them to keep this glimpse from sinking under the weight of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. If they stay tuned for even an hour of it, the media will download image upon image to their heads: Muslim faces misshapen with rage, running from something in the background from which smoke is spiraling up, or carrying a homemade coffin surrounded by veiled women who are beating their breasts with fists. In the face of such a tragic picture gallery it is hard to mount an argument that this is a curated fraction of the truth. Where can I get photos to back up my claim that most people of every faith wish to live in peace? What are my sources for believing that I have nothing to fear from the vast majority of people who do not share my faith? My only hope—the small hope embedded in this book—is that the students in Religion 101 will be able to maintain possession of their
own imaginations, declining to surrender them to people who know nothing about their life, their school, their faith, or their friends of many faiths.
The faces on the news are real and important. I want never to forget how much other people in other parts of the world are suffering from groupishness in all its deadly forms. At the same time, I want never to let those faces obscure the faces of the people in my near world who have kissed me on both cheeks, preached peace to me from an Arabic text, been students in my classes, welcomed me into their sacred spaces, invited me to break their fast with them, smiled up at me in their long white robes, showed me how to tie a head scarf so it would stay put, and reminded me that the neighbors God has given me to love do not all call God by the same name.
It is possible that my attitude is naive. I have been told that. I have also been told that I am going to hell for it. Since it is Jesus’s turn in the classroom next, I will wait and see what he says this time. The only religion left on the course plan is my own, which will give me one more chance to figure out just how Christian I really am.
8
Failing Christianity
This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine;
this is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine:
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
CHRISTIAN HYMN BY LLOYD STONE
Time has just run out for the ten-point quiz on Christianity. Students who finished quizzes on other religions in record time are still sitting in their seats, staring at the multiple-choice questions on Christian origins, sacred texts, and central beliefs and practices. Since the same thing happened to me in college, I know what they are doing. They are making bargains with the God of Tests. They are promising that they will study harder next time in return for any kind of rescue right now. They are convincing themselves that if they do not blink, the correct answer will begin to glow on the paper in front of them, making it impossible to ignore.
“Time’s up,” I say. When no one moves, I try again.
“Really,” I say, pointing to the clock on the wall. “It’s time to go. Make sure your name is on your quiz, and I’ll see you Thursday.”
“I think I just did the worst on my own religion,” one student says as she drops her paper on the pile. A young man behind her asks me if Constantine was the main figure in the Protestant Reformation and slaps his forehead when I break the bad news. The only student who makes an A+ on the Christianity quiz is Shlomo, the orthodox Jew, perhaps because he is the only one who knew he had to study for it.
The first time this happened, I did not see it coming. I knew that the unit on Christianity would be different for students, since it was the religion they knew the most about. I just did not think it would be so difficult for them to approach a familiar faith the same way they had approached the others: from the outside, not the inside.
“I couldn’t hold on to what I was learning in class,” one student says when she gets her quiz back. “I found it incredibly interesting, but I couldn’t make it stay in my head. It was so different from what I had already learned that my brain just kept switching back.” As she speaks, I imagine her in front of her mental file cabinet with her class notes in her hand. The labels on the drawers say, “Sunday School,” “Bible Study,” “Youth Group,” and “Personal Relationship with Christ.” Those drawers hold important, life-giving things, but where is she supposed to put her new insight about the role of the early churches in the formation of the New Testament? Where does she put her new awareness of the Eastern Orthodox Church? The problem is not that her drawers are full. The problem is that none of the labels on them match what is in her hand.
Over the years I have met students who could recite the sixty-six names of the books of the Bible in order, but had no idea how or when those books were assembled into a sacred library. Some grew up with parents and grandparents who were Baptist ministers, but they never knew that made them Protestants until they learned it in class. Fewer and fewer have heard of the Nicene Creed. Most are surprised to learn that early Christians believed baptism was supposed to be a one-time thing or that sprinkling was an acceptable method.
When they discover that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell significantly different stories of Jesus’s birth, this astonishes them only slightly less than discovering that the Gospels of Mark and John tell no such stories at all. When they find out that Paul was not one of the original twelve disciples, they cannot remember why they thought he was. No one ever told them about Constantine, Augustine, Charlemagne, Pope Leo IX, or Martin Luther, and some are not persuaded that they need to know about them now. What happened in the centuries between Jesus’s resurrection and their own profession of faith is of little relevance in the churches where most of them grew up. They were raised to take their places in line directly behind the disciples, picking up the proclamation of the gospel where those simple fishermen left off.
So it is no wonder they do not know where to file what they learn in class, especially since many find the new information unsettling. If the contents of the New Testament were not set in stone until the fourth century, what did early Christians read? Why do some Bibles have a section between the Old and New Testaments called the Apocrypha, and others do not? If the most ancient copies of Mark’s Gospel end halfway through the last chapter—before anyone has seen the risen Christ—then who wrote the longer ending in their Bibles? That is the part with snake handling in it, which increases their investment in the answer.
There is little time to linger over discussions like these, since we only have four class sessions for Christianity. It is one of the things that gives me a pain in the side: in a survey course like this one, the easy questions are the ones that get answered. The hard ones—the important ones—are too often deferred. I find them written on the index cards I leave strewn around the room for questions the students have not had time to ask in class (or do not want to ask out loud).
“Is the God of the New Testament a different God from the God of the Old Testament? If so, why do Christians say they believe in one God?”
“Who decided what books would be in the New Testament? Was that a decision made by God or men?”
“My boyfriend is Mormon, and he says he is Christian. Some of my Christian friends say he’s not. Who is right?”
Since my first college religion class took place in the last millennium, my questions were different, but I still remember the almost physical rush of being denied easy answers. My religion professor was not interested in teaching me what to think. He wanted to teach me how to think, which was so different from what I expected that I kept signing up for religion courses until I had enough to declare a major.
Part of my good fortune was the emptiness of my religious file cabinet. When I arrived at college I had attended various churches with friends. I had been baptized by immersion when I was sixteen, but that had more to do with my boyfriend than with God. I did not grow up with Christian teachings. I cannot remember ever saying a prayer with my family around the dinner table. There were no Bibles in my house except the pocket New Testament with the white leatherette cover that my grandmother gave me when I was ten.
By the time I got to college, I had devotion but very few beliefs. I had not stayed long enough in any of the churches I visited to receive full indoctrination. Even the preacher who baptized me did not ask for a meeting ahead of time to make sure I understood what I was doing. He just put on his hip waders and met me in the baptismal pool, where I was so tall that he almost toppled over when he bent me backward into the water. That was the last I saw of him, at least at eye level. I gathered from his sermons that Jesus had forgiven us for our sins, though he continued to berate us for them. When my boyfriend joined the army, I moved on.
In a reversal of the usual pattern, my real conversion to Christianity star
ted in the classroom—in my college textbooks, in the things my professors asked me to think about, in the papers I wrote for them. That was how I learned my way around the Trinity, the social gospel, the Christian mystics, and the Hebrew prophets. Though it may be unkind to say so, I had never thought of Christians as particularly bright people. In college I learned how smart they could be, which made me want to be one of them more than anything else.
I started attending university worship. I became a religion major. I applied to seminary and was accepted, though I did not belong to a church and had heard no call from God. It was not until I decided to become an Episcopalian at the age of twenty-five that I became fully and willingly indoctrinated into Christian belief. I accepted the doctrines of original sin, the incarnation of God in Christ, his divine partnership with the Father and the Holy Spirit, his redemptive death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, his second coming, and the unity of his church. When ordination followed several years later, I accepted the responsibility of communicating those same truths to the congregations I served with as much confidence and intelligence as I could.
Then I left parish ministry for teaching religion at the college level. As unexpected as this turn of events was, it proved the truth of a frequently quoted line from T. S. Eliot’s poetry. I arrived where I had started and knew the place for the first time. I was back in a college classroom much like the one where I had learned to love Christianity. Now it was my turn to deny students easy answers. It was my chance to see if I could ignite their minds and quicken their spirits at the same time. When it came to the unit on Christianity, my dilemma was much the same as theirs. I too had to look at my religion from the outside as well as the inside and be prepared to lose my balance during the spin.
My belief in the unity of the church was the first thing to go. Like most Christians I had long spoken of “the Church”—capital C—as if it were one instead of many. I warmed to the biblical image of the Church as Christ’s body—one being with many members, dependent on one another for fullness of life. When I was a pastor, my favorite service in The Book of Common Prayer was Holy Baptism, which begins like this:
Holy Envy Page 13