Why Talk: On the Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue
Keynote Address for Week of Interfaith Understanding: October 21, 2002
Allen Hertzke
Peace be with you, Shalom, Salaam Alaikem, Namaste.
Before I offer reasons why we should talk, I’d like to say a few words about what
interfaith dialogue is, or should be, and what it entails.
First, true interfaith dialogue does not have an ideological agenda. It is not, as
some fear, a politically correct plot to force you to think a particular way. I admit that
sometimes it can be used this way. Some advocates of dialogue, for example, see as their
purpose attacking the supposed narrow mindedness of those they pejoratively label
“fundamentalists.” And some initiatives for Christian-Muslim dialogue have been
organized for political purposes, such as to oppose Israel’s policies or criticize President
Bush’s campaign against Iraq.
I’d like to place interfaith dialogue in an entirely different context. For example, it
is because I am hawkish on Iraq that I need to be in dialogue with Muslim persons. And
that’s true of our leaders. While people of good will differ on the wisdom of going to war
in Iraq, how could a wise decision be made without intense dialogue between American
policy makers and Muslim leaders and representatives? Talk about the necessity of
dialogue.
This brings me to another point: you don’t have to abandon your faith convictions
to engage in dialogue. Indeed, the most important and fruitful dialogue is core to core,
conviction to conviction. To illustrate what I mean, let me contrast it with the most
common form of dialogue. Often the people most inclined to engage in dialogue are
those who are questioning their own faith, who are open to new ideas, who are searchers,
who are, in other words, somewhat on the periphery of their own religion. Now, as one
who spent a good deal of early adult life as a searcher, I can attest to the value of this kind
of dialogue. For an American searcher of rather conventional Protestant background,
there is an excitement and mystery in talking with, and learning from, a Buddhist, a
Hindu, an Jew, a Moslem.
But the harder kind of dialogue is between individuals deeply embedded in their
own faith, and its truths. What I call core to core. Imagine a dialogue between the devout
Christian and the faithful Muslim -- both see their faith as the ultimate truth about human
salvation; each believes the other ought to join their true faith. I believe each can learn
from the other without abandoning core convictions. Equally important, imagine what
others could learn by observing such a dialogue.
Now, an absolutely essential feature of dialogue is the ability to listen. This may
seem simple, but real listening is one of the hardest things for us human beings to do.
Management training seminars contain entire sections devoted to active listening. Premarital counseling teaches couples techniques of listening.
Listening is hard in part because of the way our minds work. We organize the
world into simplifying categories; we must or our circuits would overload on information.
And because cognitive dissonance is painful, we screen out information contrary to our
world view. Thus, our categories about people easily turn into stereotypes. So we don’t
listen because we assume that we have the other person figured out. And if they have
things to say that challenge our beliefs, dialogue easily becomes debate, and while they
are speaking we are mentally preparing our response, rather than really listening.
If you have ever been really listened to, you know how gratifying it is, how
potentially transforming. Talk about Maslow’s hierarchy all you want, I think one of the
most fundamental motivations is to be understood.
A couple of tips on active listening. Respond by re-phrasing what the person said
-- “what you’re saying is” -- then allowing them to refine. Allow the person time to say
what they mean. Core to core dialogue probably requires people to exchange roles as
active listeners.
This brings up another point about dialogue. The act of listening implies
something quite profound: that other persons, no matter how different their faith, deserve
RESPECT. Respecting other persons means acknowledging that they have something to
teach us. That is the gist of criteria that theologian Paul Tillich laid out in his book on
interfaith dialogue. To engage in real dialogue presupposes a genuine respect for our
common humanity -- which springs, many of us believe, from the fact that we are all
made in the image and likeness of God. Those of us who take seriously this Biblical
insight are therefore obligated to be enter into dialogue with the utmost respect.
I began this talk by offering religious greetings. The first three were offerings of
peace shared by Christians, Jews, and Muslims (Kiss of peace, Shalom, Salaam...).
Notice the similarity, notice the sacred impulse. It is the last one I’d like to highlight.
Namaste is a traditional Hindu greeting, which migrated to some Buddhist meditation
rites. If you travel through India, as I did many years ago, you will find yourself saying
Namaste as naturally as hello. But I just learned from a graduate student that the Sanskrit
translation of Namaste means “I bow to the divine in you.” I can hardly think of a better
spirit in which to enter interfaith dialogue.
But Why Talk? Why can’t we just read about other faiths? We can, and should,
read about other faiths. But as I will argue, there is an additional value, even necessity, to
interfaith dialogue. Let me offer some reasons.
1) You will learn a lot
I am example of this. After I rashly agreed to give this speech, I realized in a bit of
a panic that I hadn’t thought much about this topic, that I had no special expertise. What
did I know? So what did I do? Talk to people, such as Barbara Boyd, Susan Laird, Joe
Meinhart, Tom Boyd, and several students. Thank you all for allowing me to plagiarize
your ideas.
As I was sweating this talk, it also dawned on me that I’ve built an entire scholarly
career mostly on talk, listening to diverse religious activists. Over the years I’ve been
fortunate to interview a number of national religious leaders -- Catholics, Jews,
evangelicals, mainline Protestants, African American and Hispanic church
representatives, Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Mennonites, Quakers, Mormons. We call
the kind of research I do ethnographic. I other words, I talk with people, hang around
them, visit their meetings, observe their activities. I am far richer because of what I have
learned from the many thoughtful and committed activists who work in the public square.
And you will be richer if you engage in real dialogue with people from other faiths.
Insights gained from human interaction will stay with you, will fortify what you gain
through reading.
For example, I have been reading a lot about Islam lately and learning a lot. But I
have learned special things from talking with my Muslim students, particularly about their
strong sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, which I find tremendously appealing and a
challenge to my own religious practice. And while I have read various depictions of the
meaning of the female head cover, it was one student’s explanation of what it meant to
her that stayed with me.
2) Interfaith dialogue will dash stereotypes. Unfortunately, stereotypes abound in the
world, a product of socialization and media distortions.
When we really listen and share with others, we dissolve stereotypes. We discover
many common aspirations as fellow students, or sons and daughters, or parents. We see
people in personal terms rather than simply categories.
Sometimes it is the little things that reveal a lot. I was once interviewing the head
of the American Muslim Council in Washington DC. And the man had a slight accent
and Middle Eastern features, so at one point I asked, Where are you from? Detroit, he
answered, and with an impish grin signaled both his delight at catching me in
stereotypical thinking and his willingness to let it go.
The value of dissolving stereotypes extends beyond obvious cases, such as the
negative typification of Muslims one finds in certain Christian circles. One of the
greatest gulfs of suspicion and stereotyping you could find is between the two branches of
Protestantism. As Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow observes:
“People who identified themselves as religious liberals were prone to stereotype their
conservative brethren as intolerant, morally rigid, fanatical, unsophisticated, closed
minded, and simplistic. The animosity recorded from the other side was equally blatant.
Self identified religious conservatives thought religious liberals were morally loose, were
too hung up on social concerns rather than truly knowing what Christianity was all about,
had only a shallow knowledge of the Bible, and were deeply compromised by secular
humanism.”
My encounters with figures from both camps gives the lie to these stereotypes. I
don’t think one could hold the above view of evangelicals after meeting Charles Colson
or Gary Haugen, who take their ministries into some of the dark corners of the world, or
Amy Sherman, who works among the poor here at home. And I don’t think one could
read Nora Gallagher’s moving account of life in an Episcopal church to see her as
compromised by secularism, or get to know some of the committed liberal church
activists and see them as biblically shallow.
It’s not just religious people who hold stereotyped pictures in their heads. Within
the secular class in America -- that highly educated and heavily bi-costal elite -- one
sometimes finds prejudice bordering on bigotry against theologically traditional belief.
People who have the most sophisticated understanding of art or music can hold the most
crude and reductionist stereotypes of the evangelical world, of born-again Christians, of
Southern Baptists, or traditional Catholics for that matter. So I call upon avowed
secularists to join the dialogue. You can challenge the believer, but the believer has
something to teach you.
3) Interfaith dialogue will help you develop a livelier sense of your own faith. Here I
am borrowing from John Stewart Mill, who suggested that challenges to our beliefs are
like a crucible that refines our convictions. By articulating your own beliefs, and hearing
them reflected back, you discover unspoken assumptions and dimensions. In dialogue
with others your faith can be enlarged, become more encompassing. You also discover
what’s essential, what’s at the core of your faith, versus cultural accretions. In a way the
early history of Christianity illustrates this. If you read accounts of the Apostle Paul you
notice that he was constantly in the process of refining the core message and
distinguishing it from cultural norms from place to place. And you notice how frequently
he engaged in dialogue -- with Jews, Greeks, and Romans, emphasizing areas of
commonality, as he vividly did at Mars Hill in Athens.
4) Inter-religious dialogue can help bridge racial division, the great unfinished
business of this nation. The legacies of slavery, racism, and discrimination have
produced a continuing racial divide in this country – a divide we social scientists actually
measure in surveys. Social segregation, suspicion, and insensitivity still afflict race
relations, as we learned a few weeks ago on this campus. But how do we bridge this
racial divide? How can whites, especially, come to appreciate and understand the African
American community and its story?
Secular society does not have much of an answer, in my judgment. But religion
does. In spite of the fact that the Christian church continues to be heavily segregated,
there are common bonds that can be explored. In America the majority of whites and
blacks are church rooted Christians. We can start asking each other what church meant to
us as kids, to our sense of community? What scriptures were sealed in our memory?
What hymns did we sing? How do we see ourselves in the gospel narrative?
Ironically, while it is often believed one should avoid religion in polite
conversation, here we are on safer ground than in the highly charged racial dialectic. It is
such a tragedy that so many whites do not appreciate how much the African American
religious experience is central to our nations story, and to our cultural life. I look at
myself, growing up in a Colorado farming town that was absent black faces, yet what
songs do I remember singing in Lutheran choir? Negro spirituals, the saddest, sweetest
hymns of American creation. By talking with each other about church and faith, we will
also start shattering the categorical prisons of race. We will begin to see the other person
not as a white person or a black person, but perhaps as a fellow Baptist, a brother or sister
in Christ. Its about time that the Christian community in America responded to the
challenge from Malcolm X, who was dazzled by the colorblind brotherhood he
experienced in his pilgrimage to Mecca.
In the same way that faith is central to the black experience in America, it is a
window into the richness of ethnic groups. For most Hispanics church is central to
cultural expression and sense of identity. Dialogue with Hispanics, therefore, allows
others to understand how unique forms of Catholicism and Pentecostalism infuse Latino
culture. This growing culture, moreover, is a harbinger of the changing face of American
Christianity. Given demographic trends of a dramatic growth of the Hispanic population
in the United States, we can learn a lot about the future of our collective religious life by
talking with Latinos, attending their churches and festivals.
5) This discussion of race and ethnicity leads me to another reason why interfaith
dialogue is essential. In such dialogue you will discover America. America is a great
experiment in religious freedom and pluralism, and a work in progress. From the
beginning the diversity of religious sects meant that people had to work out
accommodations with each other. To be sure, there has been discrimination, even tragic
persecution along the way. And not just the obvious case of genocide against Native
American tribes, whose spiritual life was viewed as heathen. In the 19th Century an
extermination order was given by the governor of Missouri against Mormons. Catholics
were hated and feared by the dominant Protestant majority, Jews were seen as alien. But
religious dissenters, minorities, immigrants continue to add to the pluralist pastiche that
makes up this country.
You may have grown up in a town, for example, where most people belonged to
the Baptist church or the Church of Christ. There are other people on this campus who
grew up in communities that were majority Jewish, or Catholic, or Greek Orthodox, or
Muslim. I grew up in a community of farmers who were all German Lutheran. In a
sense, we discover the real America when we come into contact with each other, come to
accept each other as citizens. You cannot understand America without appreciating
our religious diversity. And you will never fully appreciate that diversity without human
contact and dialogue.
6) You will discover a deeper side of people, of life itself. Modern life can mire us
superficiality, details that consume our time, entertainment that dulls us, small talk that
never goes beneath the surface. Sometimes it seems as if our society is racing headlong
to confirm the common view in the Muslim world that we are hopelessly materialistic.
Unfortunately, if you don’t talk to other people about things that matter, about First
Things, then its easy to succumb to cynicism, which is an acid that eats away at healthy
civic life. Why get involved in my community when people are so self-absorbed and
shallow? We are, thankfully, a better people than that, certainly a better people than you
would think by watching sitcoms and soaps. To discover a deeper side of people, talk to
them about their religious faith. Discovering common concerns about the drift of the
culture may be a way out of the cul-de-sac of materialistic assumptions.
7) Finally, through interfaith dialogue you will model your future, the future of
America, and the future of the world.
Let me start with a bold assertion: Interfaith understanding will be central to your
career success. No matter what your chosen profession, you will inhabit a complex and
diverse religious world. You had better get ready. And the way to get ready is to start
talking with people from other faiths. As a future teacher, are you ready to deal with
Muslim students? As you accommodate their unique needs, are you prepared to respond
to other students’ desire for recognition of their traditions? As a journalist do you know
the difference between an evangelical Baptist and a Pentecostal believer, between
Orthodox and Reform Judaism, between Sunni and Shia Islam? If not, you may not be
able to do you job. I could go on and on. Your success as a teacher, a journalist, a
lawyer, a doctor, a minister, or a business person, may hinge on how well you are able to
relate to those of other faiths.
Example. I got an e-mail a few weeks ago from a former student of many years
ago. He is now vice-president of a major international brokerage firm in New York City.
He wanted to share that of all the classes he took at OU, one stood out in helping him do
his current corporate job. What was the class? Finance? Accounting? No, Religion
and politics. He explained that in his unit there are people from 8 countries representing
5 major religious faiths, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity. Because
the class exposed him to the diversity of religious world views, he was better equipped to
operate in such an environment. That’s the practical necessity of interfaith dialogue.
Interfaith dialogue will also model the best future of our nation. America of
tomorrow will be a place of enormous religious pluralism. The only question is whether
or not we can construct a civic community in which that pluralism is manifested in
dialogue, debate, and common enterprise, or in suspicion and strife. By engaging in
interfaith dialogue you can literally model a vibrant and healthy future for our nation.
Finally, by engaging in interfaith dialogue you will model the world.
Globalization has not, contrary to some predictions, brought homogenization or universal
civilization. Rather, it has brought people of different faiths and world views into closer
proximity, competition, and sometimes bitter conflict. In light of this, we Americans
have a unique responsibility as citizens of the globe’s lone superpower. How will we
carry out this awesome stewardship role? One of the best things we can do is provide a
model of how people of diverse faiths can work together to achieve common democratic
purposes. It was the American model, in part, which inspired the Catholic Church to
embrace democratic pluralism at Vatican II. Perhaps the American model of religious
freedom and tolerance can do the same in other parts of the world.
There is a special way in which modeling dialogue can serve the future. In many
parts of the world women especially suffer under yokes of oppression, their lives
delimited, their voices muted. By promoting vigorous dialogue here, we will show how
women of all faiths can be full participants, not only in civic affairs, but in religious
discourse as well. The emancipation of women around the world hinges, in some sense,
on the evolution of religious institutions, on their ability to listen to the religious
experiences and yearnings of women.
Now, in discussing the global role of interfaith dialogue, I must say a special word
about discussion between Muslims and Christians -- clearly the most important interfaith
dialogue that can occur today. Islam and Christianity are the two largest religions on the
globe; both are proselytizing faiths, both are growing, both are widely dispersed across
the continents. They share a long history of competition and war. In a profound sense,
for much of the past thousand years these two monotheistic religions saw each other as
mortal enemies. Some scholars, therefore, predict that a renewed clash of these two great
civilizations is replacing the old cold war. As evidence they point out how strife between
Christians and Muslims – from Nigeria to Indonesia – has erupted into violence. They
point how Osama bin Laden declared war on Christians in his 1998 fatwa and organized
his terror network explicitly in the name of Allah against the “crusaders.” This led some
Christian leaders to respond by publicly castigating Islam itself.
Interfaith dialogue provides a crucial model of an alternative to this bleak picture.
But I caution that Muslim-Christian dialogue will be hard. It will require real
two- way sharing, not only of faith and common concerns, but of complaints and
grievances, which are legion on both sides.
Now that I have given reasons for the value and necessity of interfaith dialogue, let
me conclude by challenging you to take the initiative.
Start talking with each other.
Begin with basic questions. What is your religious background? What do you believe?
How do practice that belief? What are the key ceremonies? How does this animate
family life? Share stories about childhood, about those magical moments that punctuate
our lives. The Christmas traditions, The Hindu prayer nook, the family trip to the
Buddhist temple, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, Rosh Hashana and Passover.
The kind of interfaith dialogue I am urging here is more phenomenological than
theological. Theological dialogues are taking place between various religious
communities and their leaders, and they are valuable. But what I seek is something
broader. We should visit each other’s churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques.
Participate, to extent appropriate, in each others ceremonies. Religious communities
welcome visitors, and there is a world of knowledge and experience right here in Norman
and the metro area. You don’t have to travel far to experience an Eastern Orthodox
church, a Buddhist temple, a Moslem service, a Pentecostal congregation, a Catholic mass
– or talk to a rabbi, or interview an African American preacher. Similarly, if you are an
international student, visit our houses of worship. You will find, I think, a better
representation of what America really is than by imbibing what the entertainment industry
churns out.
We should all do this because it demonstrates the kind of respect essential to the
civic community of tomorrow. But we should also do it because it is a way to
acknowledge the divine in the other person. Namaste.