I don’t know if people have been following this story, but Swiss voters recently approved a constitutional amendment that would ban the construction of further minarets in their nation. The whole measure and campaign seems rooted in fear. Not reasonable concern, but out and out xenophobia. According to an Associated Press story, “Backers said the growing Muslim population was straining the country ‘because Muslims don’t just practice religion.’” Yet, those backers seem to have neglected the facts. “Muslims comprise about 6 percent of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people. Many are refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and about 1 in 10 actively practices their religion, the government says.” Based on the campaign and the legislation, one would think there is a spate of minaret construction in Switzerland. How many minarets currently exist in that Alpine nation? Four. And they don’t even sound out the calls to prayer.

Just take a look at the campaign poster, which it should be noted, has more minarets than Switzerland currently does.

The expert propagandists of the early 20th century would be proud to make a poster so full of insinuation, fear, and hate.

I am disturbed by these events. Thankfully there has been much international condemnation. I think this is bigotry and utterly discriminatory. It also says a lot on what people think religion should be. Religion should be toothless. It should have no real affect on our lives except that we give some money away and go an hour or so a week to a worship service. Religion should never change the way we live. The practice of religion is purely ceremonial. If Switzerland is so concerned with radical Islam infiltrating its way into the overall society—a dubious claim given the size of the Muslim population there—I would argue that marginalization is a backwards strategy at best. My sympathies go out to the Swiss Muslims, many of whom, as the story reported, are refugees from the Yugoslav wars. They were already forced out of their homeland only to be ostracized, feared, and hated in another nation.

I wonder, if Christians start practicing their religion outside the church walls, is Switzerland going to next outlaw church steeples and bell-towers?

In my previous post, Tom recommended a book by Krister Stendahl. I looked on the Wikipedia entry on Stendahl and found his wonderful “Three Rules for Religious Understanding.”

1. When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
2. Don’t compare your best to their worst.
3. Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this Stendahl meant that you should be willing to find elements in the other religious tradition and faith that you admire and wish could, in some way, be reflected in your own religious tradition or faith.)

The first rule hits home. I remember when I was younger and I would seek to learn about other faiths, I would read what Christians had to say about those religions rather than what the adherents of those religions would say about their beliefs. I wish we all would offer more charitable reads of ideologies different than our own by listening to those ideologies directly. I’m not saying those Christian voices were wrong in their critiques, but there is a difference of learning a position from someone trying to edify it from within and from someone trying to debunk it from without. It happened in seminary as well. I read enough works criticizing Martin Luther that by the time I picked up his writings, I was ready to disagree with him. By reading his own words, I can say both that I actually like Luther quite a bit and I agree with many of those criticisms of him, but not all of them. Stendahl’s rules offer a good analytical matrix for nearly any area of life, be it religious, political, economic, scientific, etc.

In yesterday’s edition of Sightings, Martin Marty writes about interfaith relationships and praying for the conversion of others.

A week from Friday is Good Friday, a most solemn day for Christians. It is also a problem day for Jews, and for the evident Christian majority which is (or wants to be) sensitive to the sensibilities of Jews….

Then I chanced on this headline in the Jewish weekly Forward (February 29-March 7): CATHOLICS HAVE A RIGHT TO PRAY FOR US, above an op-ed by veteran Professor Jacob Neusner, a scholar of Judaism uncommonly informed about such matters. His main point will surprise many non-Jews and many Jews as well: “Israel prays for gentiles, so the other monotheists, the Catholic Church included, have the same right to do the same—and no one should be offended, as many have[.]”

Rabbi Neusner notes that a prayer “for the conversion of ‘all the wicked of the earth,’ who are ‘all the inhabitants of the world,’ is recited in normative Judaism not once a year, but every day.” He quotes several passages from standard Jewish liturgies, which “leave no doubt that when holy Israel assembles for worship it asks God to illuminate gentiles’ hearts.” Prayers of both covenanted sets of people have “an eschatological focus and mean to keep the door to salvation open for all peoples. Holy Israel should object to the Catholic prayer no more than Christianity and Islam should take umbrage at the Israelite one.”

I agree with Rabbi Neusner. Speaking as a Christian, I know that at their best, our prayers for the conversion of others are rooted not in judgment, but in love. When other faiths pray for my conversion, I know that at their best, they want me to participate in what they see as the good life in closest proximity with the divine. Proselytizing certainly can become oppressive as we have seen in history. Prayers for the conversion “the wicked” can take on the air of exclusionary superiority. It is strange to me, however, that we live in an age where any assumption that one’s faith is closer to the divine reality than other religions is tantamount to a hate crime. Evangelizing others is not an affront to people as human beings or an impingement on their functions as agents. As agents, they have the rationality to accept or reject the evangelist’s claims. Prayer for the conversion of others in and of itself is not an attack, nor should it ever be. Let us not be historically ignorant, however, of how prayers and proselytization have been used at times for domination, oppression, and vengeance. As we pray for others, may we seek their welfare and love them as children of God.

Marty’s column is well worth the read and an interesting companion to my earlier post about the Abrahamic religions finding common ground in loving God and neighbor.

I’m not sure if people saw “Loving God and Neighbor Together,” but I just came across it. It is an open letter from many Christian theologians to Muslims, published in the New York Times in response to the Muslim letter to Christians, “A Common Word Between You and Us.” The Muslim clerics, scholars, and intellectuals from every branch of the faith write:

Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbour. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.

The Christians write back:

We find deep affinities with our own Christian faith when A Common Word Between Us and You insists that love is the pinnacle of our duties toward our neighbors. “None of you has faith until you love for your neighbor what you love for yourself,” the Prophet Muhammad said. In the New Testament we similarly read, “whoever does not love [the neighbor] does not know God” (1 John 4:8) and “whoever does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). God is love, and our highest calling as human beings is to imitate the One whom we worship.

I find this dialogue extremely hopeful. I pray deeply that Christians and Muslims would be able to find common ground to live with one another. I am reminded of Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that seeks to engender deep religious convictions and cooperation across faiths. His vision isn’t that we all believe the same things, but that in embracing our traditions strongly and in learning from others’ traditions, we can find common ground. He wants the students who participate in his program to see that among many religions, and especially among the three Abrahamic faiths, that service of others is a core value. In a wonderful interview with the radio show Speaking of Faith, Patel says:

You have a gut-level respect for people’s identity when it comes to ethnicity, gender, class, race. Why not religion? And the second thing is religious people are changing our world. You can sit in a corner and whine about it, or you can be on the bus and figure out how we can all work together to build a world where people cooperate and live together in some sort of mutual loyalty. I’ll tell you something: Muslims are not going to stop being Muslim….

Christians are not going to stop being Christian. The question is, the challenge is, how do we promote a way of being Christian and Muslim and Jewish and Buddhist and Hindu that lives in cooperation with other people?