Why liberals don't make more friends

As an existentialist educated in a Quaker school, I am far more interested in someone's words and actions than in their faith. We come to truth and wisdom in lots of different ways.  In recent years I have found this sets me apart not only from conservatives but increasingly from liberals who define themselves by their beliefs rather than their works. Here is a moving example of the problem.- Sam Smith

Eboo Patel, Harvard Divinity Bulletin  - In the opening session of an interfaith youth core conference a few years ago, a Chicago pastor took the microphone and introduced himself. He spoke about how much he had gained from his Buddhist meditation practice, expressed disdain for Republicans in power, and proclaimed how excited he was to be in a friendly space with people of other faiths. Finally, he noted his frustration that a particular type of Christian was always absent from such gatherings, saying: “There are too many conservative evangelicals who claim the mantle of my faith, who believe that Jesus is the only way, that Christians have the exclusive truth, and who focus their energy on trying to bring others to their view rather than expanding their own spiritual horizons. I find that I have more in common with people like you than with people like them.”

There was nodding around the room. It seemed that some of the people who had come to the gathering had heard this sort of thing before. The pastor passed the microphone off with a flush of pride in his face.

It arrived in the hands of a young man who had recently graduated from the University of Illinois, who was probably two decades the pastor’s junior, and who looked calmly at the pastor and said, “My name is Nicholas Price, and I think you are talking about me.” It could have been an ugly moment, except for how Nick handled it. He simply said that he was an evangelical Christian, had been very active in the large evangelical campus group InterVarsity Christian Fellowship as an undergraduate, and had recently accepted a staff position at the organization. He’d majored in religious studies with a concentration in Islam, and he believed his faith called upon him to seek to convert Muslims and also to cooperate with them. While he was deeply committed to the former, he understood that this space was dedicated to the latter.

I had heard the sentiments expressed by that Chicago pastor in organized interfaith movement events so often that I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about them had it not been for Nick’s presence and response.

In his self-introduction, the pastor had succinctly articulated what I’ve come to call the three main rooms in the house of interfaith cooperation: liberal theology, progressive politics, and spiritual enrichment. Moreover, he proclaimed that those views weren’t just rooms in the house, but the front porch and the foundation as well.

The primary purpose of interfaith work is as a form of bridging social capital—building relationships among religiously diverse people who have different political, theological, and spiritual views.

For the pastor, interfaith cooperation was a logical extension of his theological liberalism, political progressivism, and spiritual sensibilities. More to the point, not only was his engagement in interfaith cooperation predicated on those perspectives, but he believed that they were prerequisites for any engagement with interfaith cooperation. Which is precisely why Nick perplexed him. Here was a theologically and politically conservative young man with clear spiritual limits who was interested in building relationships with people of different faiths.

The moment raised a set of fundamental questions for me about interfaith work, the most obvious being: Who is excluded in a movement that trumpets inclusivity, diversity, and relationship-building? Nick had taken a different route to the house of interfaith cooperation and, when he arrived, was greeted by a guard on the front porch and told in no uncertain terms that there wasn’t a place for him. My experience during fifteen years in interfaith work is that this is pretty common. Evangelicals are on the outside and are frequently invoked as somewhere between the foil and the enemy.

The second issue it raised for me was more fundamental—namely, what is the purpose of interfaith work? Is it to bring together theological liberals and political progressives of various religions to share how their different faiths brought them to similar worldviews? That’s what the pastor wanted, and what he was accustomed to in such settings. He had come to the event hoping to commune with his friends from a range of faiths who felt comfortable in those three rooms, and perhaps to invite a few more folks in. But if this approach excludes, and potentially raises hostility toward, faith groups, then it ought to raise the question of just what it is we think we are doing in a movement called “interfaith.”