by Eboo Patel
This story is a perfect illustration of why college campuses are an ideal civic laboratory for interfaith cooperation. All the positive social capital in our broader society—faith-based groups, volunteer programs, educational opportunities, forums for discussion and exchange—exist on campuses in concentrated form. Students like Greg can go to a gathering of their Evangelical Christian group at 6 p.m., walk across the hall to a session of their interfaith club at 7:30 p.m., notice that that the theme of both meetings is faith and service, and drop by the room of their resident adviser at 9 p.m. to ask for help in planning a panel discussion on the subject. The key leaders can meet the next morning for breakfast and start to put the program together. A professor of Islamic studies, a Jewish faculty member from the theater department, and an Evangelical Christian who teaches chemistry might be the invited panelists for a discussion on how faith inspires service across traditions. Perhaps the college’s secular-humanist volunteer coordinator attends the program and says that she knows a Catholic church in the community that has just opened up a homeless shelter and is looking for volunteers.
If the audience assembled here wanted to apply the value of service in a real-world interfaith project, this is an ideal opportunity. All of this can happen relatively quickly and easily on a campus, all stemming from the flash insight of a student and encouraged along by the professionals on a campus whose job it is to nurture student leadership. The most critical factor in nurturing young leaders is giving them a place to apply their leadership skills, to form an idea, and to make it a reality. Campuses pride themselves in being that space. If Greg and his group hadn’t run several interfaith service projects with a hundred students, there is no way they could have run a program with five thousand.
I excitedly told Greg that he was putting all the theories into practice—bringing people from a range of backgrounds together in common projects, bridging social capital, turning diversity into pluralism, creating networks of engagement, working the interfaith triangle. Greg stopped me. He was happy about all that, but he had done this in the name of a different philosopher. Greg quoted him: “I was hungry, and you brought me something to eat.”
This issue is personal for students, part of their core. And when something becomes personal for students, it quickly becomes personal for faculty, staff, and administrators across college campuses.
Per Tarek Elmasry’s advice, Interfaith Youth Core had narrowed its focus to higher education. No more traipsing off to Kazakhstan when the State Department called; our staff now spent most of its time on college campuses. I personally visit about twenty-five campuses per year, giving keynote talks on interfaith cooperation and speaking with faculty, administrators, and students about making interfaith a priority. The range of responses I’ve gotten is an interesting illustration of where the movement is at.
When I suggested to a group of graduate students in higher education at a public university in the Deep South (people who would one day be vice chancellors of student affairs) that they become literate in religious diversity, one raised his hand and said to me point blank, “We don’t talk about religion here.” At a conference of student-affairs administrators, someone stood up and said she was a lesbian and that religion had been nothing but a force of oppression in her life. At Chicago’s DePaul University, the nation’s largest Catholic higher-ed institution and among the most diverse, a staff member mentioned to me off-handedly, “We love religious diversity, even though we are Catholic.” At Berea College, a Christian liberal arts school in Kentucky, a minister at the chapel where I was to give my keynote address asked if I would be more comfortable if he put a blanket over the large cross that hung behind the podium.
Frankly, I expected to encounter more hostility when I started talking about higher education making interfaith cooperation a priority. After all, high-profile aggressive atheists like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, who call universities home, delight in wielding traditional academic values (reason, science) like a bludgeon against religion. I would characterize the sentiment that I’ve come across as discomfort rather than hostility, a discomfort largely borne from a lack of knowledge. If you work in student affairs and part of your role is to create a welcoming environment for gay students and your formative experiences with religion are Christians from the small town where you grew up speaking negatively about gay people, then it makes sense that you see faith as a problem. “Does it ever happen,” I asked the student-affairs administrator who told me religion is hostile to homosexuality, “that you have a student from another country or from a minority community—say, black or Latino—who says that being gay is against their culture?”
“Sure,” she responded. “My job is to talk with them. I tell them about the heroes of their culture who were gay that they might not know about. I point them to writers from their own backgrounds who have a more progressive perspective than the ones they have been exposed to. The goal is to show them that welcoming people who are different is actually a part of their culture.”
“So why not use the same approach when it comes to religion and homosexuality?” I asked. “Why not point Christians who might have qualms with homosexuality to gay faith heroes in their own tradition, or to Christian theologies of welcoming?”
“I guess I just don’t know that territory very well,” she responded.
“You could start with Peter Gomes,” I suggested. Gomes, who died a few years ago, was the minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, an openly gay African American clergyman who preached around the world, offered prayers at the inaugurations of two Republican presidents, and wrote a stack of widely respected books on Christianity.
Higher-education officials have spent years reading widely and deeply in the literature of multiculturalism, and so feel equipped to deal with the normal culture conflicts that emerge during those conversations. They have little or no fluency in interfaith matters. This is a solvable problem. Consider the fact that race, gender, class, and sexuality are equally complex issues. The reason we have a robust movement devoted to these issues is because people within the academy decided they were important enough to soldier through all the challenges and address. Religious diversity requires the same time, effort, and purpose.
The graduate student at the public university in the Deep South seemed to think that faith doesn’t belong in public life at all, and definitely not in higher education. “Really?” I responded. “I’ve been flipping channels in my hotel room and it seems like every other person on your local television station wants to talk about religion, and much of what they have to say belittles much of what you value. Let’s get something straight: just because you are not talking about religion in graduate school does not mean that religion is not getting talked about. It just means you are forfeiting the conversation to someone else.” Part of the responsibility of public universities is to prepare citizens for engaged life in America, an America that is now among the most religiously diverse nations in human history. As the Truman Commission on Higher Education wrote in 1947, “The first and most essential charge of higher education is that at all levels and in all its fields of specialization, it shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals, and process.”5
When I shared with the president of DePaul University his staffer’s comment that they love people of other religions even though they are Catholic, he laughed and said, “My goal is to help build a campus culture where people say, ‘We love religious diversity because we’re Catholic.” This highlights the interesting challenge that religious colleges face. There are many such institutions, obvious ones like the Evangelical Wheaton College and less obvious ones like the University of Chicago (started by Baptists) and most of the Ivy League schools. In fact, two-thirds of the colleges that are part of the Council of Independent Colleges, one of the larger higher-education networks in the country, have some sort of religious affiliation. In many cases, as with Ivy League schools, it means that religious communities played some role in the founding of the
institution. In other cases, as with Catholic, Lutheran, and Evangelical schools, those colleges view part of their mission as advancing a religious influence. These schools almost always have strong religion departments and some type of religion requirement.
So, how does a religiously affiliated college live out its heritage and identity in a world characterized by religious diversity, when even its student body comes from many different backgrounds? That’s what the staff person at Berea’s chapel was struggling with. His offer to cover the cross was a gesture of hospitality, an attempt to make a Muslim guest comfortable at the Christian college.
Berea is a special place. Located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, it was founded by an abolitionist named John G. Fee who was committed to building an institution that lived out the biblical line “God has made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.”6 In that vein, Berea started as a school where blacks and whites, men and women, studied together. That was nothing short of radical for Kentucky in the 1850s. Today, that vision expresses itself in an institution where there are basically two requirements for entry: you have to be academically promising and you have to be poor. Berea charges no tuition. Every student works on campus at least ten hours a week so that the college can simply function. And in addition to being racially diverse, Berea is becoming increasingly religiously diverse as well, a fact that led them to bring me, a Muslim speaker, to campus.
I considered that history as I looked at the cross and I thought to myself, “That cross is why this college exists. John Fee risked his life to build an institution that brought people from different backgrounds together.7 I’m standing here, a Muslim interfaith leader, because Berea believes that cross signifies an inclusive and relational Christian identity. I don’t want them to cover the cross. I don’t want them to hide their Christian faith. I want them to tell the story of how that cross inspired them to build an interracial college in pre–Civil War Kentucky. I want them to share how that cross moves them to admit Buddhists from Sri Lanka and Hindus from India and have them in classes and volunteer activities with Christians from Appalachia. I want them to tell the world, ‘This is what it means to be Christian.’ ”
What does it mean to be Christian in a world of people of different faith backgrounds? It’s a question that seminaries and divinity schools wrestle with just as much as religious colleges do. These institutions, though smaller in number and size than undergraduate campuses, will play an out-size role in America’s interfaith future. They train religious leaders, they advance new theological understandings, and they send signals that point the way for denominations and congregations. We have partnered with seminaries from the beginning at IFYC, teaching classes, designing youth theology programs, and being part of continuing education for ministers. The issues being discussed in seminaries today will shape the identities of people of faith for generations to come.
SEMINARIES
It was the Muslims who brought the various communities of Christians together. Blacks, whites, and Latinos, some long-time residents and others recent immigrants, groups that had long eyed one another with suspicion on the factory floors and small-town streets of Grand Island, Nebraska, were now lining up shoulder to shoulder together, their collective anger directed at the recent arrivals.
“The Latino is very humble,” said Raul Garcia, a Mexican American who had immigrated in 1994, “but they are arrogant. They act like the United States owes them.” Margaret Hornady, a white woman and Grand Island’s mayor, said she found the sight of Muslim headscarves “startling.” It made her think of Osama bin Laden.
Grand Island is a town of about 50,000 in the southern part of Nebraska, founded in the mid-nineteenth century by German immigrants. It is home to a meat- and poultry-packing plant owned by Swift & Company, the source of much of the employment in the area. To keep up with production demand, the company has recruited recent immigrant groups as labor. Mexicans, Laotians, and Sudanese have all come, worked in the plant, and settled down in the area. Such factories are frequently targeted for immigration raids, and one such raid gutted the labor force of the Grand Island plant. Management decided it no longer paid to recruit workers who were potentially in the United States illegally. They came up with a solution: recruit immigrant workers who have political refugee status, and with it legal papers. Minnesota had a large number of these in the form of Somalis, an immigrant group who also happened to be Muslim.
For the most part, the Somali Muslims were fine with doing their daily prayers during lunch and bathroom breaks. But during the month of Ramadan, they requested a special quitting time so they could properly prepare to perform the more elaborate rituals that surrounded ending the fast. That would disrupt production at the plant, management responded. Many of the Somalis complained bitterly; a few dozen actually quit. Finally, a compromise was reached—everybody would get their dinner break at that time. That meant a shorter workday by fifteen minutes, which meant fifteen minutes less pay. The Muslims were happy with this; it was a sacrifice they were more than willing to make for their faith. But it was too much for the black, white, and Latino workers, many of whom felt the Somali Muslims had been requesting special privileges since they arrived. First, it was about getting Muslim holidays off, then it was about not handling pork products on the production line. Rumors were flying that Somalis had received pay raises while everyone else was getting a pay cut. The frustration boiled over. A thousand workers walked out together.
Here is your assignment, I told my class at Chicago’s McCormick Theological Seminary: Imagine you were serving a church in Grand Island, Nebraska, when these events took place. A New York Times reporter calls you and asks for your comment on the situation as a pastor. What do you say?
One student questioned the relevance: Grand Island had to be an exception. She’d grown up in a small town in Nebraska, and there were no Latino Catholics—forget Somali Muslims—for many miles in any direction. America was changing, I assured her. A version of what played out in Grand Island had also occurred in Shelbyville, Tennessee; Greeley, Colorado; Postville, Iowa; and more than a dozen other such towns across America. Whatever church she served after she graduated from seminary, whether it was located in a small town or a big city, there was a pretty good chance she’d be dealing with religious diversity.
A furious discussion ensued. One person said that because America needs economic growth, it was a bad idea for the Muslims to be given special time off for prayers. The factory would be less productive if it had to close fifteen minutes early. Another was aghast: America was built on religious freedom, she insisted. It’s why the Pilgrims came; it’s what the First Amendment is about. What about the rights of the other workers to make a decent wage? a third student asked. People took sides and argued passionately: capitalism versus the Constitution, economic productivity versus religious freedom, faith identity versus class identity.
I was following each turn of the conversation closely, fascinated by the breadth of issues my students were raising. My IFYC colleague and co-teacher Cassie had a different reaction. She’d earned a master’s degree in divinity at the University of Chicago before joining our staff and viewed the debate through the perspective of a Christian leader herself. What she saw was a room full of future members of the clergy whose assignment was to imagine they were serving in a town experiencing religious tension and to comment on the situation as Christian leaders. In the thirty minutes of debate, nobody had quoted Scripture, nobody had asked what Jesus would do, nobody had referenced the example of Christian leaders in similar situations. As seminary students, they were immersed in learning the religious language of the Christian tradition, but when asked to apply it to a situation of interfaith conflict, they avoided Christian language completely and defaulted to other modes. Finally, Cassie interrupted the discussion and said, “Remember, you are being asked to comment as a pastor, not as an economist or a constitutional-law professor. What do you have to say about this as a pastor?”
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nbsp; There was silence. I could see the wheels turning in people’s heads, and I noticed frustration on some faces. Finally, someone said, “What difference can a pastor make in this situation, anyway?” It was a perfect opportunity to present our next case study.
Jersey City, New Jersey, has the largest concentration of Egyptian Americans in the country—about 50,000 total, roughly half Christian and half Muslim. Tensions between the two groups are thick in Egypt, but in Jersey City, for the most part, they have gotten along just fine. Kids play football together in neighborhood parks, adults go into business together, twentysomethings share shisha pipes in hip cafés.1
In January 2005, there was a heinous murder of an Egyptian Christian family—four people found bound, gagged, and stabbed to death. It was a crime that tore the Egyptian Christians and Muslims of Jersey City apart. Christian mourners threatened to beat a Muslim sheik who attended the funeral. When Mohsen Elesawi, an Egyptian Muslim limousine driver, walked into his favorite café to share a shisha pipe and a game of chess with his Christian friends, they turned away and gave him the cold shoulder. Teenagers from the two communities no longer sat together for lunch at Dickinson High School. “I’m not going to be friends with Muslims anymore—their parents killed my best friend,” a student at the high school declared, his eyes welling with tears.
As the tensions grew, the rumors spread. The slain father had been known to engage in theological debates with Muslims, so the killing was obviously a religious revenge job. The daughter had a cross tattooed on her wrist, and the murdering Muslim had driven a knife through it. Such details were not confirmed by the police investigating the murder. In the teeth of the bitter divide, the authorities tried to emphasize a simple fact: This was an unsolved crime.