GFCH Blog Flash: Creating a Culture of Unity

[GFCH (India)]

Creating a Culture of Unity Through Interfaith Cooperation
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Courtesy: The Huffington Post, April 27, 2013
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By Rachael McNeal
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There's no question -- our country is divided. Tension hangs in the
air over every conversation about the budget, gay marriage,
immigration, and gun control. Of course, difference of opinion is
nothing new in the U.S. This is a democracy after all. With the
celebrated First Amendment as the cornerstone to our rights as
Americans, we can freely shout our differing views from the rooftops
-- though in this day in age, shouting exists rarely on rooftops, but
on the 24-hour news cycle, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and Twitter. It
seems to me that this pervasive exposure to differing opinions,
partnered with increasingly more polarized party politics, has created
a culture of division in our country.

Many Americans, particularly the younger generations, are disturbed by
this culture of division and desire a more united, less polarized,
America. The question becomes: how do we deconstruct our culture of
division and build a culture of unity? Jim Wallis, in his piece, "On
God's Side: For the Common Good," claims that much of the division
felt in this country is because so many people audaciously claim that
they are on God's side with their politics, actions, and words, and
that those who don't think, act, and vote like them, are disobeying
divine order. In an effort to move the country forward to unity, Rev.
Wallis suggests that instead of making claims about being on God's
side, we should start asking "are we on God's side?"

What would it mean to be on God's side? Rev. Wallis's answer is to
focus on the common good:
Not just in politics, but in all the decisions we make in our
personal, family, vocational, financial, communal, and public lives.
That old but always new ethic simply says we must care for more than
ourselves or our own group. We must care for our neighbor as well, and
for the health of the life we share with one another. It echoes a very
basic tenet of Christianity and other faiths -- love your neighbor as
yourself -- still the most transformational ethic in history.

I agree with Rev. Wallis -- focusing on the common good is a good step
toward answering the question of how to be on God's side, and solving
many of our nation's greatest points of division. In a country as
diverse as ours, however, it can be challenging to know what the
common good actually is. As individual participants in society, we all
come to the table with different ideological structures for framing
our understanding of what is commonly good. Those structures are often
built around religion, philosophy, and our beliefs and understandings
about existence, mortality, and the cosmos. The situation is
exacerbated by the fact that we live in, arguably, the most
religiously diverse nation of all time.

Yes, Jesus has called me to love my neighbor as myself, but what does
that really mean when my neighbor is Mormon, Muslim, Jewish, atheist,
secular humanist, or Hindu?
Religion is often blamed for the world's greatest conflicts, and
rightfully so. One doesn't have to look far to see conflict or
violence that is linked to religious motivations or sentiments in some
way (think the tragedy at the Boston Marathon or the Sikh man that was
murdered shortly after 9/11 because he was wearing a turban). In a
country that becomes more religiously diverse every day, it is easy to
allow conflict to arise between different religious and non-religious
groups. It is true, difference in religious and philosophical ideology
can be a cause of great division. But what if I told you it doesn't
have to be that way?

I believe that amidst all of our nation's diversity, we must be able
to find, or create, common ground among us in order to focus on the
common good. This is exactly what the American interfaith movement
aims to do. According to the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a non-
profit organization whose mission is to make interfaith cooperation a
social norm, the interfaith movement seeks to build religious
pluralism in the U.S. IFYC understands religious pluralism to be
respect for others' religious and non-religious identities, mutually
inspiring relationships between people of different backgrounds, and
common action for the common good.
Religious pluralism, in its most ideal form, not only paves the way to
common ground but also creates action for the common good through
personal relationships. Pluralism is necessarily relational: it only
manifests itself in the give and take of relationships between people
of different religious and non-religious identities.

Interfaith cooperation is the path to religious pluralism and a path
toward ending the hostile ideological environment in which our country
finds itself. It can be scary or intimidating for people of different
religions to meet each other half way and to have a conversation. IFYC
suggests creating interfaith service projects where Atheists,
Christians, and Muslims can work alongside each other in the context
of a service project that benefits their mutual communities (a soup
kitchen, for example). The service becomes the common ground on which
personal relationships across difference are built. In the safety of
their common ground, they can then begin to have dialogue and discover
each other's true selves; thus paving the way to developing mutually
inspiring relationships between people of different backgrounds and
respect for others' religious and non-religious identities,
backgrounds, and beliefs.

Don't be fooled. You don't have to leave your own unique religious (or
non-religious) identity at the door to engage in interfaith
cooperation. In fact, it requires you to be authentically yourself,
religious identity and all. You can fully and genuinely respect
another's identity while simultaneously holding your own differing
religious identity. I, an evangelical Christian, can appreciate, and
even be inspired, by the dedication of my Muslim neighbor to pray five
times a day, while at the same time wanting them to know Jesus. What
interfaith cooperation does require is to listen openly, check
presumption at the door, and suspend pointing fingers and placing
blame on your interfaith cohorts for the ills of the world.

Interfaith cooperation is evolving all the time. With the daily growth
of religious diversity in the country, and the growing awareness
around the interfaith movement, new voices are being added every day
to the conversation about religious pluralism, interfaith cooperation,
and their roles in creating common action for the common good. In
light of this evolution, what remains consistent and clear is that
having personal relationships across religious difference creates
religious literacy and interpersonal understanding; such understanding
fosters compassion while cultivating a more peaceful and united
society. These relationships become our common ground.

I challenge you to help create common ground by building relationships
across religious and ideological difference, and to help lay the
foundation on which we can build our understanding of the common good
and begin to build a stronger more united America.
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"This blog post is part of The Huffington Post's 'Common Good' series
and Sojourners'Common Good Forum, inspired by Jim Wallis' latest book,
"On God's Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn't Learned
about Serving the Common Good."

[GFCH (India)]