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Multifaith Continuing Education: Leading Faithfully in a Religiously Diverse World

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Multifaith Continuing Education: Leading Faithfully in a Religiously Diverse World Justus Baird: Multifaith Ed for “Lifelong Call to Learn” 9/17/08 1 Multifaith Continuing Education: Leading Faithfully in a Religiously Diverse World Justus N. Baird As a rabbi who directs a multifaith center in a Christian seminary, I often get asked about multifaith education. People ask me, “What curriculum should I use?” or “How can we teach our students about other religions?” Even more often I get asked, “Do you know a Muslim I can invite to speak at our program?” But rarely do I get asked, “Why should we be doing interfaith education at all?” A rabbinic colleague of mine put it to me this way: “I just can’t articulate why interfaith is important to focus on,” he said. What worries him most about serving his congregation is not how much his congregants know about other faiths. “Other than making sure we can all just get along, why does this matter?” he asked. Let’s be honest: most of us know precious little about our own religious traditions, so why should we spend our valuable time learning about other faiths? The aim of this chapter is to articulate what multifaith education is, why it should be part of any continuing education program, and address some of the challenges that confront multifaith education. Part one answers the ‘why do interfaith?’ question articulated by my colleague and makes the case for including multifaith learning in any continuing education program. Part two defines multifaith education and describes various approaches to multifaith education. Part three articulates the challenges and barriers to multifaith education. Because of the wide variety of approaches to and motivations for interfaith work in the world, it is worth disclosing my personal and theological perspective. I am a rabbi, trained at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion. I proudly identify as a Reform rabbi. I am married to a Conservative rabbi, and most of my in-laws are Orthodox. My extended family, like most American Jewish families, also includes non- Jews. I work in a Christian seminary: Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, which was founded in 1818 and is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA. I get paid to direct the Center for Multifaith Education at Auburn. In my spare time, I serve as the part-time rabbi for a small synagogue on the New Jersey shore. I do not embrace a “why don’t we all just get along” attitude toward interfaith work, and I do not believe that the world would be a better place if people of faith would just focus on a few so-called universal teachings from their religious traditions. I do not want there to be one religion in the world; in fact, I think that would be a disaster, and my own understanding of God’s will, which is rooted in Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Bible, is that God doesn’t want there to be one religion either. Articulating a personal theology of difference, or a theology of religious pluralism, is an important task for anyone who engages in multifaith work. It’s impossible to work closely and deeply with people of different faiths without doing some serious thinking about how those faiths and their adherents fit into our religious worldviews. For me, the narrative of the Tower of Babel is the cornerstone of my own theology of difference. Here is the short version of an already short nine verse story (Genesis 11). Once upon a time all humanity spoke the same language. “Come, let us build a city and tower into the sky and make a name for ourselves,” they conspire. God notices the skyscraper and proclaims, “If this is how those humans are going to act when Justus Baird: Multifaith Ed for “Lifelong Call to Learn” 9/17/08 2 they speak the same language, then we must confound their speech so they won’t understand each other and then scatter them around the earth.” One important message of the Tower of Babel is that when humans all work together as one, with the same language (or culture or religion), bad things happen. Our desire to control and our ambition for power take over, and we try to compete with God. Like my colleague above, who hasn’t asked the question, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Maybe we should be asking, what terrible things might happen if we did all get along? This is paradoxical thinking, so let me offer a couple analogies. Ecologically, habitats are healthy when they are biologically diverse and unhealthy when a single species dominates (think kudzu). Can you imagine a world where there is only one kind of tree? Or think politically: what happens when power is concentrated in a single party? God knows that unchecked human power is a bad idea. By confounding our language and scattering us around the world, God sets up a divinely inspired system of checks and balances. This is a theology of difference: that the reason we humans are so different from each other – linguistically, religiously, culturally – is to protect us from trying to become God. God wants multiple and different faiths to thrive, just as God wanted humans to have different languages – because God is just too great for any one faith to capture God completely. Having disclosed my own perspective on multifaith work and a theology of difference that informs that work, let me now make the case for multifaith education. I. THE CASE FOR MULTIFAITH EDUCATION The case for multifaith education stands on three things: the news, the pews, and religious views. First, the news. News headlines are dominated by events that are, at least in part, the result of religious ignorance or misunderstanding. Consider the following news cycles making headlines as I prepared this chapter, each of which has a significant interfaith component: the 2008 presidential race, including confusion over the religious background of presidential candidates Obama and Romney and the way both McCain’s and Obama’s pastors have been part of the news coverage; international conflicts including the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, saber-rattling with Iran, and the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, each conflict colored by so-called fundamentalist Muslims; and a federal raid of a large compound in Texas run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, followed by an embarrassing reversal of many of the charges by the Texas Supreme Court. None of these stories is exclusively about religion, but each one has a religious component. Because news stories like these are the primary source of information about other religious traditions for most Americans, it’s not surprising that so many of us are misinformed or have biased opinions about people of different faiths. Is Judaism well- represented by the news of a federal raid on the kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa or by stories about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Is Christianity well-represented by headlines about Ted Haggard, Jeremiah Wright, or pedophile priests? Religion’s high profile in the media puts the responsibility on religious leaders to offer quality instruction about other religious traditions to their flocks. If we don’t answer this call for multifaith learning, we will raise another generation of people of faith schooled in misunderstanding, stereotypes, and bias. Justus Baird: Multifaith Ed for “Lifelong Call to Learn” 9/17/08 3 But news headlines make the case for multifaith education in other ways as well. News stories are a constant reminder that religion and misunderstanding about religion play a role in conflict around the world. In places like the former Yugoslavia, India, Israel, Iraq, Iran, the Sudan, Myanmar, and Northern Ireland, conflict is fueled by the relations between faith communities. On 9/11 Americans learned that such conflict is not confined to foreign shores. Our ability to resolve conflict is in part predicated on our ability to create better understanding between peoples of faith; our own security – our physical safety – is directly related to building relations across religious divides. Even news stories that appear to have nothing to do with religion are an impetus for multifaith education. Global warming, torture at Abu Ghraib, and poverty: injustices like these are opportunities for people of different faiths to engage in cooperative action to promote justice. The news is a daily reminder that the world remains a broken place. People of faith have a responsibility to take part in repairing the world by reaching across religious divides and working together on issues of shared concern. For all these reasons – the misunderstanding and bias created by learning about other faiths from the news, the role of religion in conflict that affects our security, and the reminder of injustices that demand cooperative action – the “news” is a major part of the case for multifaith education. The second reason to engage in multifaith education is the pews. ‘Pews’ refers to the religious diversity in our neighborhoods and in our congregations. Although reliable figures are hard to come by, many have claimed that the United States is the most religiously diverse country in the world.1 What is not disputed is the incredible growth of religious diversity in America since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In 2008, researchers at Harvard University’s Pluralism Project listed more than 1,600 mosques, 2,200 Buddhist sanghas, 700 Hindu temples, and 250 Sikh gurdwaras in the United States. How many times have we driven by these structures in our own neighborhood without ever bothering to stop in? 2 The religious diversity in our neighborhoods spills over into the pews of our congregations. Each time I lead prayers or give a sermon in my own synagogue on the Jersey shore, I have to think about how the prayers or the sermon will be understood not only by my Jewish congregants, but also by the many non-Jewish people in the room.
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