In an effort to better understand the current tensions which are now so clearly on display between some Christian and Muslim communities, I have come to appreciate the dynamic that Eboo Patel, the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, brings into focus through his description of what he calls, “The Faith Line.” Put simply, Patel divides the global religious community into three ideological camps: pluralists, totalitarians, and those who straddle “The Faith Line” between these two poles. To begin, Patel rightly contends that one must go beyond establishing that interfaith dialogue is an important practice worthy of one’s time and effort—which of course assumes that a religious community has even been willing to go so far. Indeed, he says, “One's own identity and the identities of the other participants may form the fabric of an interfaith dialogue, but the ultimate goal of interfaith work is the creation of a larger identity that makes room for the distinctiveness of different traditions,”[1] while at the same time being open to the possibility of being transformed as a result of encounter. Patel defines “This larger identity,” as “pluralism: the conviction that people believing in different creeds and belonging to different communities need to learn to live together,”[2] and I would add, learn to learn together. Consequently, pluralists are individuals who hold to this “conviction,” and as Patel reports, “they come from every religious and political creed on the planet, for pluralism is neither syncretism nor relativism.”[3]
In contrast to pluralists, Patel asserts that, “totalitarians seek to blot out any identity but their own.” As the picture of the totalitarian agenda takes shape it becomes ever more pertinent to my understanding of the tensions that exist between some in the Christian and Muslim traditions. For example Patel reports that,
Where pluralists seek relationships across religious divides that provide for mutual inspiration and growth, totalitarians seek to cow, condemn, or—at the extreme—kill anyone not like themselves. Where pluralists seek to work with others for the common good, totalitarians seek to destroy the dream of a common life together. The one characteristic they do have in common is that either one can come from any religious and political creed. Rabbi Abraham Joehua Heechel was a Jewish pluralist; Rabbi Meir Kahane was a Jewish totalitarian. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Christian pluralist; Eric Rudolph is a Christian totalitarian. Imam Feieal Abdul Rauf is a Muslim pluralist; Osama bin Laden is a Muslim totalitarian. Thus the central challenge of our time is indeed the faith line, but it does not exist, as some have argued, where religious civilizations bump up against each other but, rather, within and across all of them. As Martha Nuesbaum writes, "The real clash is not a civilizational one between 'Islam' and 'the West,' but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations—between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious or ethnic tradition." What is perhaps most intriguing about the faith line—in the struggle between pluralists and totalitarians—is that the majority of people in the world are standing right on it, uncertain and undecided about their allegiance.[4]
Pluralism, as Patel has defined it, challenges individuals and communities to move beyond simply coexisting with the religious other. What is more, in my estimation, the call for individuals from different faiths to “coexist” is simply the latest way of advocating for religious tolerance, which in itself is certainly better than intolerance or worse, religiously sanctioned violence. However, as Diane Eck rightly asserts, the mere establishment of tolerance “is too thin a foundation for a world of religious difference and proximity;”[5] for, as she is want to argue, “It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotype, the half-truth, the fears that underlie old patterns of division and violence.” Furthermore, and this gets to the heart of where I believe the problems between totalitarian Christians and Muslims lies, Eck maintains that, “Tolerance is a necessary public virtue, but it does not require Christians and Muslims…to know anything about one another.”[6]
[1] Eboo Patel, April Kunze, and Noah Silverman, Interfaith Dialogue at the Grass Roots, “Storytelling as a Key Methodology for Interfaith Youth Work”, (Philadelphia: Ecumenical Press, 2008), 38.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] IIbid.
[5] Diana Eck, Director of the Pluralism Project, Harvard University, http://pluralism.org/pages/pluralism/what_is_pluralism.
[6] Ibid.
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