DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: Almost 90 percent of the students at Rainbow Elementary School in Berlin are from immigrant families, most of them Muslim. Fitting in can be tough, because a lot of them can’t speak German—even though many of their families have been here for decades.

HEIDRUN BOEHMER (School Principal): When I started being a teacher more than thirty years ago I thought that problem we won’t have in ten years. They all will speak German. But they don’t.

POTTER: Heidrun Boehmer has watched her students struggle to succeed. About 75 percent never finish high school—more than double the national rate. In school and the outside world, their chances are limited by a complicated mix of social and economic issues, religion, and history.

Muslim immigrants, mainly from Turkey, first came here in large numbers in the 1960s, when Germany was facing a severe labor shortage. They were called “guest workers,” but most of them never went home. Instead, they brought their families and settled in neighborhoods like Neukolln in Berlin, where shop signs are in Turkish and Arabic, and satellite dishes bring in programs from back home. Storefront mosques are tucked behind fruit stands. Until ten years ago, immigrants could not become German citizens, and they still don’t have a chance at most government jobs. Integration just hasn’t happened.

RIEM SPIELHAUS (Humboldt University): People who live here since forty, fifty years, were born here in the third generation, are understood as foreigners, are understood as immigrants while they are not. They just have a different faith. So this debate leads to people thinking about their neighbors as problematic because they do have a different faith.

POTTER: Today, Germany has about four million Muslims—five percent of the population, making Islam the second largest religion. Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon and twice as many mosques as the United States. Young Muslims here describe themselves as more religious than their parents, in a country where few Christians go to church. Berlin is sometimes called the atheist capital of Europe. But while religious freedom is enshrined in the German constitution, public schools are required to offer Christian religious instruction. Leaders of Muslim organizations are now demanding Islamic religious instruction as well, and tensions are growing.

SPIELHAUS: The number of people that don’t want to live together with Muslims, that don’t want to have a mosque in their neighborhood—this number is rising.

POTTER: According to public opinion polls, the vast majority of Germans associate Islam with violence and terrorism, and they resent what they see as too many Muslims sponging off the German welfare system. But the country’s strong social safety net may be one reason why Germany has not seen the kind of violence that scorched Muslim neighborhoods in France a few years ago. Young Muslims there took to the streets, angry about unemployment and police brutality. Nothing like that has happened in Germany, even though the jobless rate in some Muslim neighborhoods hovers near 50 percent.

BARBARA JOHN (Office Against Discrimination): If there is no easy opportunity, or if they can’t make as much money as they get from the state as welfare money, they don’t work, of course. It’s not that they don’t want to work, it’s just reasoning, and they are rational people.

POTTER: Barbara John has spent 30 years dealing with integration issues, a task complicated by the fact that Germany has never had a policy of limiting immigration.

JOHN: It’s part of our history of Nazi times. We were guilty, and we still feel guilty, especially when it comes to minorities and to accepting people who are persecuted, and once we were, ourselves, able to give it, we could hardly say no, and now immigrants come, and they want to live in Germany, they want to be proud of this country, and the Germans themselves are not. So integration is difficult for these minorities.

POTTER: The government is now trying to help, offering subsidized language and culture classes for adults at a cost of about $200 million a year. But those who sign up don’t always come.

NADINE HASKE (German Language Teacher): Some of them, they’re not interested. But some of them, also, they have many problems here with immigration, problems that we can’t understand—problems with job, to find a job.

POTTER: The problems are all too apparent to Ender Cetin, who says Muslims want more than equal job opportunities. They want to feel truly accepted.

ENDER CETIN (Turkish-Islamic Union): We feel many, many attacks, not violence but in words, feel many, many kind of discrimination. This makes us also afraid a little bit. There’s a distance. That’s not so good for integration.

POTTER: Cetin was born in Germany but chose to retain his parents’ Turkish citizenship rather than give it up, as required by law, to become a German citizen. As a spokesman for the biggest mosque in Berlin, he now gives tours to school groups, hoping to make Islam seem less threatening.

CETIN: We have many, many questions also in these years and the questions are always the same. The question is—terrorism and Islam, can it be together?

ERDINC SINAC: Not every Muslim are terrorist, something like that, yeah? Sometimes in the TV it looks like that. Every Muslim looks like terrorist. It’s not true.

POTTER: Erdinc Sinac came here from Turkey at age five and recently became a German citizen.

SINAC: I go to school, learn very good German. For me it’s okay, and I have not problems.

POTTER: In the long term, Germany needs immigrants. The country’s birth rate is one of the lowest in Europe, the cost of its social programs among the highest.

JOHN: We have to consider these people as our future, too. They are—their children, the children of the immigrants, are our children, are the children in Germany, they are the children of everybody, and we have to care for them and look after them and give them a better education, give them a good education, so why shouldn’t they be successful? It’s everything in human nature that can make them successful, and we are a country that has money, and we have educators, so we should improve our system.

POTTER: But there’s a long way to go. Other Western democracies have similar problems, but a new study by an international economic group says Germany does about the worst job of providing equal opportunities for immigrants and their children.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Berlin.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Now, a profile of writer, liberal activist, and Harvard University theologian Harvey Cox on the occasion of his remarkable retirement ceremony after 44 years of scholarship and teaching. The celebration had everything—good weather, old friends, short speeches, laughter, and music, all starring the honoree.

That’s Cox, the Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, on the tenor sax with his big swing band the Soft Touch. The chair Cox has held was endowed in colonial times, when some professors got to graze cows in Harvard Yard.

REV. PETER GOMES (Minister in the Memorial Church, Harvard University): Pasturing cows in those days was equivalent to parking privileges today.

ABERNETHY: For this occasion, Cox borrowed a cow whose name turned out to be Pride. Cox pretended that he had been worried that a cow so named might be inappropriate for an event at the divinity school, but then another professor reassured him.

PROFESSOR HARVEY COX: He said, “Harvey, at Harvard we do not consider pride to be a sin.”

ABERNETHY: There was a tuba ensemble, a speech in Latin, and many tributes to Cox’s lifetime of combining the study and teaching of religion with a commitment to liberal activism—and, of course, the more or less contented cow and signed copies of Cox’s latest book, The Future of Faith. We talked with Cox about what he sees as religion’s surprising strength.

COX: The resurgence of religion around the world and the various religious traditions, which is unexpected, global—there were people who were predicting the marginalization and even disappearance of religion in my early years as a teacher. That disappearance, that marginalization did not happen. It’s a basic change in the nature of our civilization. It will continue.

ABERNETHY: Except for fundamentalisms, Cox says, in all religions.

COX: Fundamentalisms—I use the word in the plural. I do not think that they’re going to last out much longer.

ABERNETHY: For Cox, that includes the religious right.

COX: The last couple of elections have exposed the religious right as really kind of being in part a paper tiger. They just didn’t produce the votes. I think they are in considerable disarray and, frankly, I’m not mourning over that.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, especially in Christianity, Cox sees a shift away from beliefs and hierarchies to an emphasis on individual faith.

COX: I call it an age of the spirit, the yearning for some kind of personal experience, even the yearning for some kind of, let’s call it, an ecstatic encounter with God or with the divine.

ABERNETHY: Cox sees this most clearly in Pentecostalism, which he calls the fastest growing branch of Christianity. He also says Pentecostalism is now balancing its well-known exuberance with more and more social service.

COX: This combination of social ministry and experiential worship is a dynamite combination.

ABERNETHY: Within Protestantism, Cox takes some of the blame for the decline of many of the old mainline churches.

COX: The clergy, and I take some responsibility for this, having been involved in it for over 40 years, was trained in Christian thought, Christian philosophy, Christian theology and not enough in how to nurture the experience of God, the experience of the spirit and encounter with Christ.

ABERNETHY: As Cox looks at the US, he sees a huge social problem.

COX: A rampant culture of market-consumer values really has a grip on many people in America. Everybody seems to be driven by, especially, the lure of advertising, which says you ought to have this, you really need this, you owe it to yourself to have this and that. I think the role of religion at this point is to make very clear that this structure of values, of consumer values, is not coherent with Christianity, with the gospel, with the life and example of Jesus. That’s not what he was talking about.

ABERNETHY: Cox condemns the so-called prosperity gospel, preaching that says if people are faithful God will make them rich.

COX: Can you imagine that kind of sermon coming from the mouth of Jesus himself? No. I mean, it’s a rank contradiction. It’s really, let’s call it by its name—it’s a heresy.

ABERNETHY: Cox has been a popular teacher. One year a thousand students signed up for one of his courses. It is the students now who give him a lot of hope.

COX: The change that I’ve seen is the enormous growth in the hunger and interest in religion and spirituality among students at this university. It’s phenomenal. When I first came here we didn’t even have a religious studies program at Harvard College. I notice increasingly among my students, both undergraduates and students in the divinity school, a deep suspicion of this life of accumulating, consuming, to the soul, the dangers to the soul of consumerist values. Let me tell you that the urge to graduate from college, like this one, and immediately go down to a Wall Street investment firm is greatly shrunken this year from what it was last year.

ABERNETHY: At his retirement ceremony, Cox’s wife Nina was beside him. She, too, is a scholar and professor. She is also Jewish. Cox is an American Baptist. They have a college-age son.

COX: We did not want our marriage to be one of these religion-free zones.

ABERNETHY: So out of respect for Jewish law and custom when the mother is Jewish, their son was raised Jewish. Cox became his Judaism teacher.

COX: We have successfully shared in each other’s spiritual traditions, and it can be done, and it’s also very enriching. I really believe that I understand Christianity better having participated in Jewish life—and remember, Jesus was a rabbi—than I would have if I hadn’t done that.

ABERNETHY: Cox also told a bookstore audience this week about religions borrowing from each other.

COX: I’ve been to three or four synagogues recently where they have quite obviously introduced forms of Buddhist meditation within the synagogue service. When we have the opening chant here let’s hold it for a very long time, the way you might hold “Om”—but they say “Shalom.”

ABERNETHY: As Cox studies the variety of religions in the world, he says he has made a big adjustment.

COX: I have learned how to think about Christianity as one of the possible religious and symbolic ways to approach reality, among others. The plurality of religions in the world is a check on any one of them, including ours, not to get too pretentious and think that we have the whole truth. One of the most dangerous things in any religion is to identify my understanding of the truth, my take on it, with the truth itself. The truth itself is something out there, it’s absolute, but my take on it is relative. God is larger than this. God is much larger than any particular understanding of God.

Q: Let me begin by inviting you to sum up, if you would, the central idea of The Future of Faith.

A: Let’s say it’s a tripartite thesis in this book. One is that the resurgence of religion around the world and the various religious traditions, which is unexpected, global—there were people who were predicting the marginalization and even disappearance of religion in my early years as a teacher. That disappearance, marginalization, didn’t happen, and in various religious traditions, almost all of them, there’s been a resurgence for complicated reasons. I do not think that is a mere transient phenomenon.  I think it’s a basic change in the nature of our civilization, that it will continue, and so, therefore, programs like this one probably have a future. You deal with religion and ethics. The second part of the thesis, however, is that fundamentalisms, I use the word in the plural, which have often been associated with this resurgence of religion, at least in the popular mind, are on the decline. I do not think that they’re going to last out much longer. It’s a recent phenomenon, began in the early 20th century and has appeared in various different religious traditions, always as a kind of a reaction against something that’s going on in that tradition. They claim to be very traditional, but they’re not. It’s really a modern movement, and I think there’s evidence that, in every one of the religions, they are on the decline. The third part of the thesis, and I think it’s one of the most important, not the central part, is that we’re seeing a change in what I call the nature of religiousness, that what it means to be a religious person, or frequently now people will say a spiritual person, they have some questions, occasionally, or often, about the word “religion.” We’re seeing a fundamental change there so that it means something now different than it did 50 or 100 years ago, to say nothing of 500 years ago. And that’s the main thesis of the book. It’s a a mixture of some of the things we’re talking about here as well as some autobiographical illustrations—my experience with liberation theologians, my experience with Pentecostals, with the Catholic Church, in fact with the present pope, and also my early years of formation in a Baptist evangelical congregation. I think it’s important when people are reading about issues as important as this that they know something about where I’m coming from when I’m saying these things and what life experiences have led me to make the kind of statements that I have here.

Q: So how is it changing? Tell me what the elements are of this new thing that you see.

A: For Christianity, in particular, to single it out among the various world religions, there’s a movement away from a more belief-and-doctrinal formulation of religion into a more experiential, practical, you might even say pragmatic understanding: How do I get through the day? How do I get through my life? What resources do I have—spiritual resources? There’s a very distinct move in that direction away, from hierarchical kinds of structures in religion toward a more egalitarian form of religious organization. I think the major evidence for that is the enormously new and important role that women are playing which they didn’t play 50 years ago, and there are other evidences for this egalitarian tendency.

Q: Let me take you back to the emphasis on faith and the movement of the spirit and the presence of the spirit in people’s lives, or the hope for it, and contrast that to 1,500 years in which beliefs and doctrines were primary.

A: I contend in this book that for roughly the first 300 years, early Christianity was a faith movement. They didn’t have creeds until the early fourth century, until Constantine. They didn’t have hierarchies. There was enormous variety of different expressions of Christianity which we’re now uncovering, with the different scrolls that are found, have been there all that time. Then, around the early fourth century, with Constantine in particular, there was a massive movement toward hierarchy, a clerical elite, and a creed. Now remember that the creed was insisted upon by the emperor. Not by the bishops, not by the pope. He wanted a creed so he had a uniform expression of Christianity as an imperial project. He wanted something that would bring the empire together. Now it didn’t work that well for him. Nonetheless, I think the creedal understanding, that is, the rather doctrinal and hierarchical understanding, goes back to that very, very unfortunate term under Constantine, which then set the pattern for the next centuries. Now we’re in a new phase in which that is no longer the case, a third phase.

Q: Define for me, if you would, just what are the principle components of this turn toward emphasis on faith?

A: I call it an age of the spirit, with the age of faith in those early years, and then the age of belief, and now this movement toward an age of the spirit, because the spirit indicates, at least in Christian history, the personal, communal, even subjective element as opposed to the hierarchical and doctrinal element in Christianity, and that’s where everything is moving, I think, clearly. The fastest growing movement in Christianity today is the Pentecostal charismatic expression of Christianity—vast variety of them. Nonetheless, what they have in common is an enormous emphasis on community and spirit and experience, and that’s drawing a lot of people away from these previous forms.

Q: Why do you think that is? I mean, why is there this emphasis on the spirit now, as opposed to creeds and beliefs?

A: Well, I think that, given the fact that we are often deprived, in modern technical society, of very much chance for deep, personal experience—we pass each other by in elevators—the yearning for some kind of personal experience, even the yearning for some kind of let’s call it an ecstatic encounter with God or with the divine is there, and the Pentecostals offer this, and they offer it in a community where people support and take care of each other, where there’s also healing. A lot of people are drawn in by the healing. So I think it combines elements that have an enormous appeal. It has no hierarchies. That’s why it branches out in so many different directions.

Q: But you have said that this is not just among Pentecostals, that this movement of the spirit, this emphasis on the spirit, is very broad.

A: It is very broad. I think in the mainline Protestant churches and the Catholic Church the emphasis on community and experience, and also the language of the spirit—and one of the favorite ways for women theologians and ministers now to refer to God is using the language of spirit, because the traditional language of the sovereign God and so on seems, and is, rather hierarchical and masculine.

Q: People have said when they’re referring to this experiential part of the heart it is often described as the heart versus the head—that for a religion to be healthy, it has to have both the spirit and some kind of structure, creeds, or beliefs, to hang all the rest of the feelings on.

A: I agree with that completely, and I think what we’re seeing now is a compensation for centuries in which the main emphasis was on doctrinal assent, hierarchical control suspicious of laity and lay movements, and now we’re seeing a kind of reaction to that, if you will, which inevitably is going to have to find some balance. I study the Pentecostal movement pretty carefully. The younger Pentecostals now are saying, “Hey, we ought to deal with the head a little bit here, too, you know,” some doctrinal or philosophical basis. So you’re noticing that, and they’ll work on that, as well. But what it is is really a complementary movement.

Q: I was particularly interested in your idea that the so-called apostolic succession after Jesus  wasn’t something that right back to his giving the keys of the kingdom to St. Peter, but it was something that was created by human beings some centuries later, and I’m wondering if you could describe how that happened and then tell me, particularly, how you think that affects the authority of the Catholic Church.

A: Well, I think the evidence is now in that the whole idea of apostolic authority, apostolic succession, came in much later, let’s say in the 200s and 300s, when Christianity was growing and people were looking around for some way to assert, especially the early bishops, their own authority, and you can see this emerging. The bishops would say, “Well, I go back to Matthew” or “I go back to Peter,” and they would even construct or write gospels and statements that were really—we would call them forgeries. They didn’t have that term in those days. And the interesting thing now is we’re beginning to find these things. You know, that whole stash of documents in Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Peter, and all those things, which are late. They’re not early. They’re not the apostles doing that. But it was an invention. It was an invention to secure the authority of the church leaders who needed to have some kind of historical backing. I think it means a rather serious rethinking of the basis on which churches that claim the apostolic authority continue to assert their authority. Now, whether they are going to do that or not is another whole question. But when you find out that the historical basis for this is a little shaky, does that affect the way you exercise authority today? I think it should.

Q: Not only how you exercise it, but how the rest of us look at it. Does the scholarship you refer to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church?

A: Well, yes. I think it does. You know, there was a document around just about the time of the Renaissance called the Donation of Constantine. You may have heard of it, and it was supposed to be a document by which Constantine gave a lot of the property in central Italy to the church, and they used that to claim the church’s sovereignty over that. It was proven to be a forgery, and the Catholic Church made the adjustment, and eventually they gave up, many years later, secular sovereignty over central Italy and in some ways the moral authority of the pope became greater after he didn’t also have to be a secular sovereign. I think the Catholic Church can adjust to this quite well, and maybe it’s a very good thing that they have this coming. Now, I don’t know. I’ll be interested to watch, but they have to deal with the fact that the early historical grounding for apostolic succession is really no longer held by most scholars.

Q: In 1965, you published a book called The Secular City in which you thought that the role of religion in modern city life was becoming pretty less important than it had been, and some people said you were wrong about that assertion.

A: The original title of that book was God in the Secular City. Most people don’t know that, and the thesis of the book was the decline of institutional religion should not be viewed as a catastrophe, because God is not just present in religious institutions. God is present in all of creation, in other kinds of movements and institutions and to be discerned, presence of God to be discerned there and responded to.  The publisher said no “God in the Secular.” It’s too complicated. Let’s just call it The Secular City. So I’ve lived with that title now for—that was 44 years ago, and I have learned a few things since then. I wouldn’t swear by every sentence in that book. Nonetheless, the central thesis of the presence of God in all of creation and historical institutions, culture, and politics and family I would certainly hold to enthusiastically and say that what I say in this book is the decline of creedal Christianity and hierarchical Christianity is also not a catastrophe. Maybe it points to a really important renewal of facets of Christianity that have been repressed over many, many years. I think it does.

Q: What are the implications of an age of the spirit for everybody who’s religious?

A: Well, I think it means, among other things, that we’ll be seeing, and should be welcoming and affirming, a much wider range of expressions of Christianity. I’ve often been thought of as normative over these 1,500 years of what I call Constantinian Christianity. We see it happening frequently, now, all around the world, especially since Christianity is no longer a western religion. That’s a central and important change in the composition of the Christian world—dates back to only about 20, 25 years. The majority of Christians in the world are no longer in the old steer of Christendom in which Constantinianism was the rule. So we see all kinds of very interesting new theological and liturgical and ethical movements emerging, often around what we used to think of as the periphery. But it’s not the periphery anymore.

Q: And what are the implications of that for the influence of religious life?

A: Oh, I think the influence of religious life is continuing. Not necessarily institutional, hierarchical religious life, but the influence of people who are religiously informed and inspired and supported in communities, working in various kinds of even nonreligious structures and movements. I think that’s on the increase and will continue to be.

Q: The spread of this kind of emotional Christianity throughout the southern part of the world—what do you think that implies for the future of Christian practice in the United States?

A: You know, the term “emotional” doesn’t quite do it.  I would prefer personal, experiential. Emotion is part of that, but the experience of community and hope and of affirmation is part of it, too, but they are experiences. I think it’s already having its impact. Somebody has talked recently about the reverse missionary movement of Christians coming from South America, or especially Korea, into the United States and influencing American—or Africa, most recently, African religious movements coming in and influencing American Christianity. I think that’s really going to be a big development in the future.

Q: Influencing it in what ways?

A: Well, toward a more communal and more experiential direction, largely. There may be other influences as well, but I think that’s mainly the way it will influence.

Q: In your teaching and writing career, you’ve been well known as someone wit an uncanny ability to spot new developments in religious life. One of them, certainly, was liberation theology.

A: Liberation theology emerged in Latin America as a way of understanding Christianity, a new way of understanding it from the perspective of those who had been excluded and not part of the clerical elite or the theological elite. They talked about the preferential option for the poor—not just doing something for the poor, but helping the poor to understand the claims they can make on the basis of the gospel. I have a chapter in the book on that as illustrative, precisely of this movement away from the control of hierarchies and creeds, because the basic structure of liberation theology, or what they call the ecclesial base communities, small groups of people, tens of thousands of them, all over Latin America and in other places, getting together, sharing, reading, sharing food, singing, studying biblical texts and thinking about how that would apply in their own lives, and it made, and continues to make, a very significant impact not just on that continent and not just among Catholics. It’s going strong, especially among people who had their first experience within these base communities and are now in other kinds of institutions, especially political, and journalism and education and things like that. That’s where its impact is being felt at this point.

Q: We talked about Pentecostalism a little bit. What are the real implications of that for us?

A: The most important development in the world Pentecostal movement is a movement toward social ministries. They didn’t used to be interested in that in their early years. They were really very much fixed on “my own experience” and, really, getting to heaven. There’s a recent book on Pentecostalism in which the author has coined the term progressive Pentecostalism. They went around and studied congregations all over the world, especially in the nonwestern world, and found that the ones that were involved in community service, in clinics, in hospitals and schools and all of that mainly were Pentecostal and charismatic churches. And they said this is the major trend now. This is what’s happening. So this combination of social ministry and experiential worship is a dynamite combination, and I think that is really going to be influential on North American and, eventually, even European Christianity, which, we all know, needs kind of an injection of life at this point, and it could happen there as well.

Q: Why did the mainline Protestants suffer such a decline over the last 20, 30 years?

A: Well, I think one of the reasons is the mainline churches did allow themselves to drift toward a more hierarchical, less communitarian structure—away from where they were, let’s say, 50 years ago. People need to have a sense of belonging, and that wasn’t there. It was a little bit too audience-oriented: There’s the pulpit there, and here’s the congregation and a choir performing for—now the Pentecostals: everybody sings. Everybody testifies. Jimmy Durante used to say, “Everybody gets into the act,” and it’s richly participatory—if you want to be a participant.

Q: I’ve heard it argued that they became too intellectual and not enough spirit.

A: I think that’s another way of saying the same thing. The clergy—and I take some responsibility for this, having been involved in it for over 40 years—was trained in Christian thought, Christian philosophy, Christian theology, how you deal with the problem of the modern world and all of this, you know, and not enough in how to nurture the experience of God, the experience of the spirit and encounter with Christ, and so the churches which have brought that back in, I think, are finding that it appeals to people.

Q: And what about the place today of what we call the religious right?

A: By religious right I think of a particular political expression of conservative evangelical Christianity, and I think that movement, if it indeed ever was a movement, is now divided and declining in many ways. The agenda used to be driven by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and a couple other people. That whole generation is now either dead or really gone, in one way or another, and you have a whole variety of people now in the evangelical community, and they have a political agenda which is far more diverse. I mean, you think of the evangelicals for ecological causes, or the ones who got together to sign the petition against torture, and the opposition to the war in Iraq, where a lot of evangelicals became involved. I don’t consider that a religious right. I consider that religious involvement in the public sphere, which they ought to be doing. I mean, as Christians and as citizens, you ought to be involved.  But I think the last couple of presidential elections and by-elections have exposed the religious right as really kind of being, in part, a paper tiger. They just didn’t produce the votes. They were really kind of angry—the fact that they didn’t get a Republican nominee that suited their profile. And I think they’re in considerable disarray, and frankly I’m not mourning over that.

Q: Let me ask you to look around the country and size up what you see going on there. A lot of people think that there’s been a rise of selfishness that perhaps was of basic reason for what happened to Wall Street, what happened with sub-prime mortgages and in other parts of life. What do you see as the problems in this society right now? We’ll get to religion’s role. What’s wrong?

A: It’s the best of times and the worst of times, I think, and I’ll explain that in a minute. But there is no doubt that a rampant culture of market and consumer values really has a grip on many people in America, and therefore accumulating, getting things, getting ahead is for many kind of a principle life goal. I’m told we work harder in America than any country in the world. Productivity is up. But everybody seems to be driven by, especially, the lure of advertising, which says, “You ought to have this. You really need this. You owe it to yourself to have this and that,” and therefore mounting credit card debt, and these people who buy houses on mortgages that they’re not going to be able to afford. I think the role of religion at this point is to make very clear that this structure of values, of consumer values is not coherent with Christianity, with the gospel, with the life and example of Jesus. That’s not what he was talking about at all, so we in the religious community need to take a much more critical, even confrontational, role about this, I think, than we have in the past. There have been moments in the history of American Christianity in which there has been a more confrontational role between Christian values and the values of consumer society. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of my great teachers, was really a great spokesman for that, But that seems to have faded out as the churches have largely simply adjusted to this, even taken over some of those kinds of advertising techniques and consumerist values. But I think we have to get tougher about that and really remind people that this is not what we mean by a Christian way of living.

Q: There is what’s called a prosperity gospel, and lots of ministers preach that God will reward you with everything you want.

A: Yeah. Can you imagine that kind of sermon coming from the mouth of Jesus himself? No. I mean, it’s a rank contradiction, the prosperity gospel. When Jesus says blessed are those who serve and have compassion on the poor, beware of riches, it’s very hard to get into the kingdom of God—passage after passage. It’s right there. You don’t have to look very far for it. The contrast is quite stark, and yet you’re right. There are ministers and preachers who pick up on this prosperity gospel, promise this to people, and I think it’s really, let’s call it by its name, it’s a heresy and needs to be pointed out as such.

Q: You spoke about religious leaders needing to stand up to consumerism. What do you want the churches to do?

A: Well, I think it does start with the ministers and priests in the pulpit, with the congregations, and then I think churches have to speak publicly, and some of them have, about the dangers to the soul of consumerist values, the lethal danger that the accumulationist light poses for you spiritually. There has to be more of that, which is really quite the opposite of the prosperity gospel. I said this is the best of times and the worst of times. I notice increasingly among my students, both undergraduates and students in the divinity school, a deep suspicion of this life of accumulating, consuming, and a realization that a truly spiritual life is going to be more simple and more oriented toward building community rather than competition with the other guy to see who gets ahead. It’s a canard about all young people, that they’re all “me first,” “I first” oriented. I don’t think that’s true. There are many who are. But let me tell you that the urge to graduate from college, like this one, and immediately go down to a Wall Street investment firm is greatly shrunken this year from what it was last year. We’re learning something from this—that this is not only economically, but spiritually a dangerous way to think of your life. I think there’s real hope in a younger generation coming along with that viewpoint.

Q: You’ve been teaching here for 44 years, since ‘65. You’ve seen a lot, you’ve written a lot, you’ve studied a lot, you’ve taught a lot. What are the most important things you’ve learned?

A: I have learned how to think about Christianity as one of the possible symbolic ways to approach reality, among others. I used to think of other world religions as kind of exotic, and they’re out there, and they’re kind of curiosities. Now I have made a big adjustment, I think, in my life, and many people are, to say this is the way we see it. Other people see it other ways. This doesn’t invalidate, at all, our way of understanding reality. Rather, we have to look for the common threads, common values, and with these other folks, with Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims, even secular people. That is how to live with radical pluralism. The other big change that I’ve seen is the enormous growth in the hunger and interest in religion and spirituality among students at this university. It’s phenomenal. When I first came here, we didn’t even have a religious studies program at Harvard College. Didn’t exist. We had a very small divinity school. Since then, we have a religious studies program. We can’t add enough courses to respond to all the interest. Furthermore, if you clocked how many students here, on any given weekend, are worshipping, one way or another either at a church or a synagogue or a mosque or Memorial Church, there are more now than probably in the history of the college—a vast variety of ways of worshipping, and being spiritual, religious. It’s not singular. But—there it is. And I think they’re very interested. It’s intellectual curiosity. It’s also personal quest. And we have a responsibility, I think, to help them with that. I’m talking about the students now. But I think it’s also true in the public at large, maybe especially in the younger cohorts of the public at large.

Q: On this question of being open to the wisdom in lots of other religious traditions: If a Christian says, well, I’m a Christian, but of course that’s just one way among many others, what does that do to that person’s confidence and passion about his own faith?

A: Well, it requires a transitioning. It requires a maturation. I think we all grow up with serving ourselves, the center of the world. Then we learn that there are other centers gradually. Not only do I not think it diminishes the validity or power of the faith, in some ways I think it enriches it. I wrote a book about this some years ago called Many Mansions. You know, Jesus says at one point, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” I would even argue that the plurality of religions in the world is a check on any one of them, including ours, not to get too pretentious and think that we have the whole truth. One of the most dangerous things in any religion is to identify my understanding of the truth, my take on it, with the truth itself. The truth itself is something out there, it’s absolute, but my take on it is relative. Otherwise, I’m guilty of the sin of pride. I mean, I identify my view with God’s view. God is larger than this. God is much larger than any particular understanding of God.

Q: So I can be just as faithful, I can be just as active.  I can be just as convinced of the importance of what I’m doing with my life if I say mine is just one tradition among many others?

A: Some of the most faithful and zealous Christians I’ve run into in the last 20 years traveling around the world are precisely those Christians who are living in India, Korea, China, Indonesia, Africa where they are surrounded by people of other religions. It has not in any way diminished how they feel, or their faith. They believe that they have unique contribution to make. It’s different from these other. But it hasn’t diminished it at all. In fact, in many ways it’s enhanced it. And I have a feeling that’s the way it’s going to go.

Q: You are an American Baptist married to a Jewish woman. You have one son by that marriage, and I think a lot of people would be interested in how you accomplish the religious education of your son when the mother is Jewish and you are Protestant?

A: Well, as you can imagine, my wife, Nina, and I talked about this a lot before we were married. We did not want our marriage to be one of these religion-free zones. She’s a serious, practicing Jewish woman. I’m a serious Christian. And we decided that what we would do was to try to learn about and participate in each other’s traditions to the extent that conscience permits. And so that’s what we’ve done. And we also decided before that I would respect the Jewish custom, and indeed Jewish law, that the child of a Jewish woman is Jewish and should be raised with that understanding of himself or herself.  And I said, “Look, I agree with this. I endorse it—on one condition: that I also, maybe mainly me, will be responsible for his religious education and formation.” And I was. When he had his bar mitzvah, she’s the one who sent out the invitations and prepared the reception. I was the one who prepared him in studying his Torah passage, and he gave a wonderful exposition of his Torah passage at the bar mitzvah. Now I have to say that, of course, as the son of a Protestant Christian theologian, he got very interested in Christianity and is, I would say, very sympathetic to it and has studied, at Princeton, early Christianity and some recent thought. He’s interested in the phenomenon of religion at large. But he considers himself Jewish, with this interest in religion in general and Christianity, of course, as his father’s particular way of life. So we think it worked out very satisfactorily. Both of us are quite pleased with the way it’s gone. And when I am asked by people about this, “What would you have done if you were Jewish and you’re marrying a non-Jewish woman?” I don’t know. That’s a theoretical question, because the child would not then, by Jewish custom and law, have been Jewish. That would have to be negotiated otherwise. But that’s the way we did it and are continuing to do it. We mark the Sabbath every week, with the lighting of candles and prayers. I go to the Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. She comes with me to various Christian festivals, as does Nicholas. We have successfully shared in each other’s spiritual traditions, I think, and it can be done, and it’s also very enriching. I mean, I really believe that I understand Christianity better for having participated in Jewish life—and remember, Jesus was a rabbi—than I would have if I hadn’t done that.

Q: How do you pray? What are your practices? How do you attend to these things through the day?

A: I start the day with a prayer, just turning the day over to God, thanking God for this day. We have prayers at all of our meals, a mixture of Jewish prayers and Christian prayers, depending on how we feel. We mark the Sabbath. I have told my friends I’m in search of the perfect congregation. I haven’t found it yet. So I’m one of those people who bounces from one congregation to—I’m somewhere every week, but I go back and forth between the Baptist church which I belong to here, and an Episcopal church in our neighborhood, a black Pentecostal church, and sometimes Memorial Church, the university church here, and I get something from all of them. I feel a little guilty that I’m not sort of committing completely to one of them. But that’s how I do it.

Q: You have the reputation of being a pretty staunch liberal theologically and in every way.  Is that fair, or has it changed at all over the years?

A: I’m a chastened liberal, as they say, both theologically and politically. I have been greatly enriched in my fairly liberal understanding of Christianity by my evangelical boyhood, by very significant experiences among Catholics, especially liberation theologians, and others, by my experience with Pentecostals. So I’m an unusual kind of liberal in that—maybe that’s what a liberal should be, one who can affirm and learn from a lot of different sources. But I suppose the label is still a useful one, yeah, and not one to be shied away from.

Q: Have you become more committed to that position as the years have gone by?

A: More committed to the position of being open to learning from various sources? Yes, yes, I have. I started early with that, and it’s really kind of a hallmark of who I am. I think you have to be anchored, though, and I’m really pretty anchored in a form of Protestant Free Church Christianity. That’s pretty secure. That allows me, then, to be open to think other things that I can participate in without feeling that I’m floating away. I have something secure as an anchor.

BOB FAW, correspondent: For people of faith, services which acknowledge, indeed commemorate, death can bring comfort or anguish. Thomas Beveridge’s Yizkor Requiem recognizes both. Performed here by the orchestra and chorus of London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the music is emotional and cerebral—suggestive, even, at times, haunting. Conducted by Sir Neville Marriner and recorded for the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, the Yizkor Requiem was composed by Beveridge not just to remind listeners of what Beveridge says “really matters,” but also to combine, musically, two faiths.

THOMAS BEVERIDGE (Composer and Conductor): I realized that I could put together a piece that kind of stands on the bridge between the two religions, the Christian religion and the Jewish religion, and takes a look at, simultaneously, at the ritual for the dead.

FAW: Beveridge says he was inspired to compose this piece after the 1991 death of his father, an Episcopal priest and scholar who immersed himself in both faiths. It was, says Beveridge, “a quest for spiritual roots.”

BEVERIDGE: My quest and my father’s quest. My father inspired me to look at the origins of Christian liturgy in the synagogue. I mean, that’s basically what we’re talking about here.

FAW: Was it an attempt to come to terms with his death, or to memorialize him, or both?

BEVERIDGE: I think both. I find it a very cathartic experience to make this effort in his memory, and in the process I learned a lot.

FAW: What Beveridge, a church organist, choir director, and composer of more than 600 works, learned over the two years he spent writing the Yizkor Requiem is that despite profound differences in theology, the two faiths share enormous common ground.

BEVERIDGE: I went through the Requiem Mass and found passages that were almost exactly the same as passages in the Yizkor service or in similar synagogue ritual, and that’s where the Mass came from. It came directly out of the synagogue.

FAW: “Yizkor,” Hebrew for “may he remember,” is a memorial service for the deceased. The Requiem is the music for a Catholic funeral service, seeking eternal rest for the departed. While a Requiem emphasizes comfort, and the Yizkor can be sad, musically they reinforce one another.

Here, for example, as the cantor sings the Kaddish in Hebrew, the chorus underneath sings the Lord’s Prayer in English—each of them a doxology, a hymn praising God.

BEVERIDGE: The Kaddish is a doxology. The Lord’s Prayer is a doxology, though the Yizkor Requiem begins with the Kaddish prayer, which is what every Jew says at the Yahrzeit, the annual remembrance of anyone in his family who has died.

FAW: Another similarity which Beveridge accents musically: the word “holy,” repeated here three times in Hebrew—kadosh, then three times in Latin—sanctus.

But make no mistake: while much of this composition is solemn, parts are also light-hearted, or what Beveridge calls “lickety-split.” “I wanted,” says Beveridge, “to give the impression of a train that gets going and keeps going, going along.”

BEVERIDGE: It’s not all very ponderous stuff. There’s a lot of joy in it—the joy of recognizing that a departed soul may be resting in Eden, in the Garden of Eden.

FAW: Perhaps the most dramatic moment of all in the Yizkor Requiem comes at the end, when a single flute plays a plaintive theme. Finally, with the soft refrain of “Amen” by the chorus, the flute slowly fades away.

BEVERIDGE: The flute player turns around and walks out of the building and disappears, and the last phrase is played over and over and over again until the player can hardly be heard any more. I wanted to depict the departing soul somehow, and the flute playing the melody of the ninth movement, the words of which are “the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.”

FAW: What Beveridge has done, says one reviewer, is “bring us back to our beginnings—and our endings” in a work which Beveridge says is meant to be reassuring, a peaceful work about the experience of death.

BEVERIDGE: I mean we are the ones who are left. We’re the ones who have to deal with this event in our lives and to try to understand it, try to find a way, through ritual or through musical experience, of coming to terms with it.

FAW: A spiritual lesson in music—bridging traditions which differ, but which also experience the same thing and which here come together as one.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Washington.

Joel Hunter

Q: Tell me about Northland Church. Obviously, it’s grown so quickly. It’s so large. What need do you think the church is meeting? What is the niche that is really filled here?

A: This sounds awful, but I think we’re just a generic church. I think we care about people, we love people, we try to help them in their spiritual life, try to help them in their practical relationships. The thing that’s probably a little bit different is that we’re a distributed church in that we emphasize what goes on outside the building rather than what goes on inside the building, and we want to equip people for living great lives where they are. So we’re constantly trying to get the resources to them in their everyday lives rather than making them come to a building. But we are just one of 300,000 churches in the US and we don’t count ourselves any better or worse. We’re bigger and we’ve really never been able to figure out why. I got the statistics just for this month, and there is 1200 more attending this month this year than there were this month last year. Nobody can figure out why. We are not a “church growth” church. We just try to preach the best we can from Scripture, try to help people where they are in their lives and love them and encourage them—people are desperate for encouragement—and try to help the world get better. And whether that is about community service or it’s about shaping social policy, whatever that’s about, we are trying to make this world more like heaven. Jesus taught us to pray that “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” So that’s what we’re trying to do.

Q: You have also used technology, especially online. Why did you choose to use that route to help minister to more people?

A: Most people don’t really want to go into a church building. They have a very personal relationship with God, and they would rather be in a familiar territory when they worship. This goes a lot for the younger generation. My generation is kind of used to church, doing the “church” thing, but a lot of people aren’t. So when we built this building we built it as a communications device, and the selling point to the congregation was you are not building a building that can just seat 3000 people at a time. We can seat three million people at a time if we have enough broadband, and we have enough people who can gather around a computer screen, worship with others, and so we have people worshipping in Starbucks. We’ve had a person, when it came time to take membership vows, and he had to catch a plane, he was in the airport, he stood up in the airport and took his membership vows because he was online with us and he was going through the worship service with us. So we just wanted to not be geographically limited, and we have partners all over the world, and we don’t want to be culturally limited either, so we will worship with them periodically. We worship with our partners in Egypt or Ukraine or other places, and they do the same. There’s just a lot more of the church now that is using technology to build relationships, because people of my generation—it was important to be in a building together. For people who are 30 years old, that screen is intimacy to them. I mean, that’s a window to them, and there’s nothing artificial to them about that, and so we just wanted to connect with as many people as we could.

Q: Does that change the nature of what happens on Sunday morning, what happens inside the worship service?

A: It does. We are very aware of the congregation that is not in this building. We have several different congregations in buildings around central Florida. We have probably 1200 or 1500 sites around the nation and the world at any given time worshipping with us in the worship service. So when we take Communion we say at the beginning, “Get your Communion elements because we will be taking Communion together.” When we ask for people to contribute, for example, their favorite Scripture on hope, we will have some people in the main headquarters sanctuary, so to speak, but we will have somebody from Germany: “This just in from Christina in Germany, this in from Suzie in South Dakota., this is from…,” and so all of them can participate whether or not they are onsite.

Q: Shifting beyond here and looking at the evangelical world a little more broadly, I’ve heard some people suggest that perhaps evangelicalism is in a bit of identity crisis right now, trying to figure out who they are, where they are going. Do you agree with that characterization?

A: Well, we like to call it growing up. I think there is an ever-maturing identity for evangelicals. I think especially in the political realm we went through a phase more recently when we were known for what we were against rather than what we were for. We were pretty narrow in what we were paying attention to rather than very broad. Now that wasn’t true in Jesus’ time, because Jesus was very broad in what he did, very positive, very loving. And so I think the church in different cultures goes through different phases according to what is happening in that culture. But I do think that evangelicalism is changing, and you will always have people who are just kind of staunch and, you know, mad: “I want to talk about these, and anybody who doesn’t agree with me probably isn’t really, you know, on the mark.” But I think much more of evangelicalism now, especially when you talk about the next generation, really isn’t so bound up with some of the more institutional concerns. They really are saying, “Church? Fine. All the traditional things? Great. But just tell me how I can help. Tell me what I can do to be more like Jesus in world, to love people like he loved them, to serve people like he served them. It’s much more important to me than knowing theological intricacies to be practically of use and of good.” And so I think you’re seeing a maturing of the movement right now.

Q: I want to talk about politics in a minute, but what are the spiritual implications or challenges that go along with that kind of a shift?

A: The spiritual challenge here is that you have to know Scripture well enough to go back to the source and to be able to focus on God instead of an institutional church. Not in lieu of, you know, the institutional church is still valuable. It’s a place of belonging, it’s a place of help, it’s a place of teaching, but having said all that, if your emphasis is following God in your everyday life for the people who are right in front of you, then you’re going to have to have the kind of relationship with God, a personal relationship with God, that doesn’t require a church program in order for you to act. And so along with this maturing of evangelical Christianity, there has to be a more practical kind of education religiously. In other words, it can’t be just “I’ve got to memorize the Apostle’s Creed.” It is, “I’ve got to know in this situation what would Jesus do and I’ve got to take responsibility for doing it.” And so that’s kind of where things are going right now.

Q: Some people are suggesting there is a leadership void compared to previous generations. Do you see that?

A: It’s always tricky when you talk about Protestantism, because we don’t have a pope, you know? And with some of the passing of the old lions—you know, the Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and some these old folks that everybody kind of looked to because they were world-famous leaders—you do have another generation. And, again, with these past few decades people looked at some of the more public faces, the more mobilizing voices, the [Rev. D. James] Kennedys and the Falwells and all of the rest of the folks that really got a lot of media time. What you’re seeing is a very solid group of evangelical leaders developing and kind of a new constituency growing up with a broader agenda. You will never see just one person leading the way, because evangelicals don’t do that. We are much more collaborative in our leadership, much more appreciative of the differences, and we operate well in ambivalence. But what you will see is a new generation of leaders, some of them my age, some of the younger, because they’re gifted, they have great visions, they mobilize great organizations. So that’s what you’re going to see in the years to come.

Q: What are your hopes for Obama’s faith advisory council that you’re a part of?

A: The hopes are very new, because this has just started, just started, so I’m not sure of all of their hopes for this advisory council. I know we have been given four priorities, but there is a larger development here. First of all, I have great respect for the president, and I respect his personal belief in God and his desire to want to do the right thing as far as God is concerned, and I so respect his observation and respect for the largely religious character of this nation and his acknowledgment that you can’t separate that religious character from political life, and so why not try to incorporate it in its breadth, in a broad spectrum, and use the mobilization possibilities to really get people of faith to serve and improve the nation? So I love that. That’s what I would hope for this particular advisory council—that we could work on a broad policy agenda that would mobilize people to actualize their faith. Now as a pastor, see, I always want to be of spiritual encouragement to someone, so I hope that along the way I could be of encouragement to the president’s spiritual life, because that’s what a pastor does. That’s what we care about. But beyond that I’m very excited about working with a very broad spectrum of people to see how our faith communities can really solve the problems, or help solve the problems of this country. The problems of this country and of the world are way too big for a government to solve, and way too big for faith communities to solve. We have to partner together, and if we can do it in ways that don’t blur the lines between the institutions of religion and government, and that’s very important, the institutions, I say, you know, not the individuals, because those lines are already blurred, but we’ve got to watch the boundaries of church and state. Those are very important. But there is so much that can be done. I mean, 99 percent of the stuff that we do can be done without even going near the boundaries of church and state, because they can be personal, they can be community-based, they can be faith-based individually, and for us to feel like we’re a part of solving the countries problems when we are in such deep weeds right now as a country, I mean economically, there’s so many people hurting economically, there’s so many people who are confused about the kind of lifestyle questions and the kind of cultural wars going on. If we can be called into service, then we cannot only help the country, we can help the church mature. This isn’t just about helping the country. The church needs to mature itself. Sometimes I think people think the church can save the country, when really some types of political responsibility can help save the church from just dabbling in religious intricacies.

Q: Is there a danger, though, that being in an official capacity, even though I understand it’s not government employment, could in some way blunt or make one reluctant to perhaps be prophetic or to, as people say, speak truth to power? I’ve had a conversation with someone who says no pastor or priest should be a part of something like that because then he or she can’t really speak the truth to these people.

A: Well, I agree that no coward should ever be part of something like this, but the president has made it very clear—and this is another thing I like about him—he is not looking for “yes” people here. He’s looking for people on this council that will have a prophetic voice, and all of us made the agreement that we would not be on the council unless we could be blunt-honest about the dangers we saw, about what was not going right, and what we had real problems with, and probably what we couldn’t participate in. And so there’s not only a permission to be prophetic, there’s a desire to hear that voice, because when that voice gets raised it’s not just your voice; it’s the constituency you come from, and any political leader, if he’s honest, and if he wants what he’s going to do to last, is going to have to hear what constituencies have to say, not just what people in his office will say in order to get into his good graces. So that is a danger, absolutely. But we’ve addressed that, and we will continue to address that.

Q: I interviewed some years ago a clergy member who was close to the Clintons. During a difficult time he was brought in as a spiritual advisor, and he was candid about sitting in the Oval Office and having the leader of the free world talk to him, and it’s pretty heady stuff, and I’m wondering if you’re at all concerned about being pulled into that in a way that might change you in some way or have an effect on you.

A: Yeah, you’re always concerned about that. I mean, if you are human and you realize the position of power that this person has, then you are aware that this is an honor, this is a privilege, I mean, to be in the Oval Office, to walk in there and to look at that desk where the presidents have just signed these tremendous bills and have changed—and all the people that have been in that Oval Office. There’s a sense of history, and I was a history and government major, and so there’s a real sense of privilege. However, you say all that, you can say all that, and you’ve got to realize what happens with me personally, I just don’t take myself that seriously. I mean, I don’t feel like I’m somebody that’s got that much power, or there’s nothing else I want to get to, you know, I’m going to be a pastor for the rest of my life. There’s nothing I have to lose. Here’s a guy that’s going to be there eight years at the longest, you know? And so the idea here that goes through my mind is this is not the person that I’m going to be answering to. That’s a way higher thing, and on Judgment Day when I stand before God I’m going to have to answer to what I’ve said. If I didn’t do things according to how I read them in Scripture, if I didn’t voice the truth in love as I saw it in Scripture, then I’m in judgment, I’m in trouble on Judgment Day for my works, not for my sins those have been paid for by Christ, but for my works, so that’s the accountability that I have, and for those of us that—you know, most of the people in that room have been in positions of authority for a long time. That’s why we’re in that room, and so we’re not quite as intimidated as—I mean, we’re used to talking with people in authority, we’re used to having phone conversations where you get off the phone and you go, how did I get to be in this place that I just had that conversation? So it’s not quite as intimidating as it might be, as it might seem, but yet you’ve got to watch yourself, and I have to keep saying, “Lord, this is for you. I’m here to do your work. I’m here to be a voice for the gospel as well as I can,” and if that gets me off the council in a record time, then I’m off the council in a record time.

Q: How do you stay spiritually grounded to have that kind of strength or fortitude?

A: Well, first of all it’s important for me every day to spend a good deal of time in Scripture and in prayer. That’s kind of like the, you know, I do the—physically I work out every day, you know, so I can stay healthy. Spiritually that keeps me healthy; it keeps me oriented in the right direction. Secondly, I’m surrounded by people who tell me the truth. My wife tells me the truth, but my wife is my biggest fan. She doesn’t tell me the truth to take me down a peg or two. She just thinks I hung the moon. I have no idea why she thinks that. She’s fooled herself all of these years, and I’m not telling her anything different. But the point is that I don’t have to seek approval of other people. I’ve got a wonderful family, my wife and my kids and our grandkids, so it’s not that I’m looking for something else, and when you are satisfied with the love that you have, when you realize that you walk in the grace of God, when you realize that your family is just as crazy about you and you’re crazy about your family, then it’s fairly simple not to take yourself so seriously and have to be a world-changer and get all distracted with all of these grandiose ideals and ideas. You can just get up every day and do what’s right with what’s right in front of you, help out whoever you can, and go to bed every night and sleep like a baby, and so that’s just—I think I’ve got a life like anybody else. I think what I do is not so different than anybody else, except maybe in different circles, but I just live my life as best I can, and I just pray that I’ll do God some good.

Q: You’ve been active in some interfaith circles. I know you’ve worked on Islamic-US issues and other interfaith things. How do you relate across religious lines, offering respect to people you differ with theologically without in some way compromising your own faith or what you believe to be truth? How do you walk that line? A lot of people have a hard time figuring out how to do that.

A: First of all, it’s fairly simple to maintain respect and even admiration when you get to know people. I love these guys, I really do. I mean these other faith leaders, as I listen to them I’m much more fascinated in listening to their stories and their perspectives. I need their perspectives to get a fuller picture of who God is as a Christian, I mean, because it’s not like God is absent or God has somehow avoided Muslims or Jews or all the rest of these folks. They have a faith that I think appreciates a side of God that I could find in Christianity, but I see it more readily when I’m with them. So in a way they are a spiritual mentor to me. Having said that, though, Christianity is a faith of relationships, of a personal relationship with God made possible through Jesus Christ and his sacrifice, so therefore, as I have these relationships with other faith leaders, as they get closer, we are very free in talking about what we believe and about—I am more free many times in talking in about what Christ has done for me and about what price he paid on the cross for all people with another religious leader who wants to hear what I want to say. He doesn’t want me to tip-toe around it; he wants me to be honest. I’m sometimes more free with a person like that than I am with a person in an elevator where he may have been a Christian a long time ago, and my eye starts twitching when I start talking about it. So the point here is that the better relationship you build, the more free you are to share with people what you really believe, and then you let God take care of the rest. It’s not my job to convert people, you know? Only God can move in the spirit to change somebody’s heart and establish a relationship. I can’t do that, so I don’t have to worry about it. I just love them and serve them as best I can, and we swap stories, and I leave the rest to God.

Q: How serious do you think the issues of these interfaith relations are in our world today?

A: I think they are absolutely critical for the future. I cannot picture a long-lasting peace without religious leaders having actual relationship together and caring about one another, because if all you have are these tender and vulnerable treaties, you know, these diplomatic papers, and you still have a bunch of people at these grass roots or a bunch of religious leaders that not only distrust people who are different but that are angry at people who are different, then that peace isn’t going to last very long at all, and we’ll never be able to cooperate in solving some of the larger problems of the world. However, if faith leaders and ultimately people of different faiths can serve together, can get to know each other on a personal basis, can appreciate each other as a person and as a person of faith, I’m telling you, that will move the ball down the field when it comes to world peace. So I just don’t see long-lasting peace in any section of the world happening without faith-based community relationships, interfaith relationships.

Q: What have you learned from your relationships, especially with Muslims, which has been a particularly tense one in our country?

A: Yeah, it has, and I have such a deep appreciation for my relationships with Muslim leaders. First of all, they are very honest about what they think and about—Christians by and large are scared to death of Muslims. But Muslims have at least been trained as to respect Jesus. They believe Jesus was a prophet. They believe in the virgin birth. They believe in many of the issues, and so for many Muslims it’s good to talk with a Christian. What are we scared about here? In this culture, we have been so slanted by the association of Islam with terrorism that we’re very reluctant to have that conversation. So every conversation I get in, it’s really one of respect. Muslims have a tremendous reverence for God, tremendous reverence for God, and I love that, and they have—they really want to know what you think, and how we can work together, and what are we afraid of here? So I have built several very close relationships in the Muslim world, a very close relationship with an imam here in town. He’s one of my very good friends. We do a lot together. I love him, and I love his family. The same ob-gyn delivers his babies that deliver my grandbabies. We’ve just got this relationship. So basically what I’ve learned is we’re trying to love God as best we can, and we’re trying to work together to love other people.

Q: We have footage of a recycling event your church has done, and I know this has been an issue for you quite some time—creation care. I am wondering if you are seeing with the evangelical world a greater embrace of this issue. For a long time there just seemed to be a real reluctance to get involved. Are you seeing that change, and have you felt that impact?

A: There is a change. Again, this may have to be a generational change, but we’re talking more and more with leaders. We just hosted an event last week of evangelical leaders here addressing just exactly that challenge. There’s two problems here. First of all, people are generally ignorant about the science. All they hear are the sound bites on the radio and the sound bites on the television, and they have been linking this issue with a political agenda rather than an actual consensus of science, and so many evangelical Christians are reluctant to see this as a consensus, so there’s a lot of teaching that needs to be done. The second problem is people really don’t address a problem until it’s an emergency, and so they’ll look out the window and say, “Man, it really looks cold out there. Must not be global warming, you know?” And they’ll read this stuff that says coldest January on record and say pshaw, and so instead of understanding this is not about global warming, it’s about global weirding, about the nonlinear effects of climate change, and there are very many new nuances of climate change and understanding the interaction of a very complex system, but yet the ultimate and undeniable effect that this is going to have on the poor—they just kind of brush it off, so we have our work laid out for us. But I do believe that, again, this administration is going to be helpful because they take the problem seriously, and maybe as more and more leaders acknowledge the problem the general population will, too, but in the evangelical world we’re still having a push back.

Q: Our show did a survey which found that larger numbers of younger evangelicals do see things like the environment and poverty as pro-life issues.

A: Exactly. Again, this goes along with expanding the issue, not in lieu of, not denying the others. Pro-life is very important and will always remain in the foreseeable future a central issue for me and other evangelical leaders. But to expand the pro-life movement to the life outside the womb, to understand that 5,000 children under five die every day from poverty-related causes, directly related to poverty, that’s a pro-life issue; to understand that AIDS is a pro-life issue; to understand that climate change, to understand that even in some instances our issues with immigration, all these other issues, certainly peace, world peace—pro-life issues. These should be just as important to us, those lives should be just as important to us as the baby in the womb, and so we just have to expand that picture.

Q: I want to ask you about your prayer at the Democratic Convention. The issue is always whether or not to pray in Jesus’ name, and you chose to work around that. What kind of reaction did you get?

A: Oh, on the one side I had a wonderful encouragement, especially from non-Christians and from many Christians who understood what I was doing. I got raked over the coals with a lot of Christians because I didn’t hijack the prayer and only pray it for Christians. But as I explained, several things: first of all, we did get, the Christians got to say “in Jesus’ name,” so we didn’t deny anybody that, and if you were there the stadium was booming with that. By the same token, to make somebody or to cow somebody to silence as you pray in Jesus’ name, or to somehow make them seem like they’re praying in Jesus’ name, is really a sacrilege because only Christians can pray in Jesus’ name. It’s in the power of Jesus, so it’s the wrong way to use that ending. If you’re serious about it you can’t use it asking people who don’t believe it to say it. Ultimately, the greatest thing about this was that not only was it a prayer appropriate for a public venue where people had different faith traditions, but my wife sat beside a lady on a plane on the way back, and she said, “Your husband was the one who said that prayer?” and she said “Yeah.” She said, “I was so shocked that an evangelical would respect those of us, I’m an atheist, but I was so shocked that an evangelical would actually respect me enough not to make me go there and not hijack that prayer.” And Becky said, because she’s just really interested in people, “Tell me about what you believe, tell me why you’re an atheist.” Well, they talked for the whole plane ride, and by the time the plane landed the lady goes, “I live 30 minutes from your church. Give me your address, and I’m going to show up just to check it out.” Well, I mean, just the—this isn’t about who gets converted, this is about someone feeling respected enough that they would give a window in their life, as it was very apparent from the beginning of that conversation that she wanted nothing to do with the evangelicals, but because I had respected her then there’s some openness to say, well, maybe we can have a relationship. That was wonderful.

Q: As you’ve done interviews and gotten more attention, people around the country are getting to know you. I’m wondering what you feel people don’t know about you that you wish they did, as they’re making judgments and assumptions?

A: You know, I don’t—I have no desire for people to really know who I am. I’m an—you wouldn’t believe this, but I’m an introvert. I could spend all day in a library and just be perfectly content, as long as my wife was one stack over. These things really stretch me, you know. I feel like I’m put here for a reason, but I’m not a very self-revealing person. I just do what I can, and there’s really not much there to know, honestly. I’m just real simple. I get up every day and I eat and I study and I talk to people and I try to help where I can, so there’s not much to find out.

KIM LAWTON, anchor: Interfaith marriage has become commonplace in this country. But, for a long time, when it came to the wedding ceremony, many couples felt they had to pick just one religious tradition, the bride’s or the groom’s — or none at all.  Today, brides and grooms are finding new ways to incorporate both their religions. Betty Rollin has our story.

BETTY ROLLIN: Sunitha Mani is an Indian Hindu, born in America. Her mother calls her a modern girl. Even so, as she prepares for her marriage, she is going the traditional route, and then some. It begins with her getting painted with henna, a process called “mehndi.” Sanjana, the marital makeup chief, explains:

SANJANA PURSNANI (Makeup Director, Sona Salon): When it dries up and it starts flaking it gives you that mahogany, like a red burgundy color. So in India the bridal colors are red. We usually wear red, maroon, burgundy, so they say that the bride’s hand shouldn’t show color of her skin.

ROLLIN: Sunitha met her husband-to-be, Ronjit Sandhu, who is a Sikh, at college eight years ago.

SUNITHA MANI (Bride): The henna artists told me yesterday the darker the henna the more your husband and your in-laws love you, so my hands are dark, but not down here so much.

ROLLIN: The groom’s mandate on the wedding night is to find his name hidden in the design.

RONJIT SANDHU (Groom): The night of the wedding, I’m supposed to find — I’m supposed to search for my name in the henna, and then if I can’t find it, basically I’m not allowed to consummate our marriage.

Bride and groom

ROLLIN: The next pre-marriage ritual performed is the puja, where the bride’s family’s Hindu pandit prays before a sacred fire.

Pandit BALU DIXIT (Hindu Temple, Albany, NY): We pray to Lord Ganesha asking for his blessings, so that everything goes very smoothly without any obstacles.

ROLLIN: When Sunitha’s parents married, not only were they required to be of the same faith, but they were expected to marry the person their parents chose.

KANTHI MANI (Mother of Bride): We got married, what, 36 years ago. I think it was through communication between my parents and his parents, and they looked at the horoscope, and once it was agreed, he came to visit me, and that’s it. I hardly knew him until I got married.

ROLLIN: And how do the Manis feel about their daughter marrying outside their faith?

Dr. SRINIVASAN MANI (Father of Bride): Whatever makes our daughter happy and secure in the future, that’s what matters, rather than our discomfort.

ROLLIN: The groom’s father, now a widower, and his aunt also have had some concerns.

Satwant Kaur Banga

SURJIT SINGH SANDHU (Father of Groom): Not having the same culture and the language, sometimes it’s hard to interact.

SATWANT KAUR BANGA (Aunt of Groom): I think that as soon as you hear of a child marrying into a different religion, even though Sikhism absolutely tells there’s only one God and all people are equal, the cultural differences — they creep in after the children come in.

Mr. S. SANDHU: Ideally, you know, you want your kids to be raised as Sikhs, but then again once you are out of India, you know, our kids now are raised in this culture. So in this culture, their culture is the same.

ROLLIN: Ronjit has his own ideas about what his childrens’ religion will be.

Mr. R. SANDHU: I think they’ll definitely be raised under both religions. You know, they are going to go to temple, they are going to go to gurdwara, the Sikh version of a temple. They will essentially learn, you know, about the histories behind both of the religions. Her parents are very religious, so whether we wanted them or not, they will probably share everything they know. They share it with me openly, so I’m sure they will definitely do it with our grandkids.

ROLLIN: The couple decided there was one obvious way to smooth over the religious differences: two weddings — one Sikh, one Hindu.

The Sikh wedding came first, with the groom making his entrance on a white horse named Max. The procession is called a “baraat.” The bride’s extended Hindu family awaits his arrival.

The families greet each other with an elaborate garland exchange. And here comes the bride.

Wedding elephant

And three hours later, here comes the bride again.

Two weddings — one in Sanskrit, one in Punjabi. Countless rituals; two receptions; decorations involving hundreds of yards of fabric; banquets; music of two cultures; 400 guests and a costumed horse.

Putting this together takes a commander-in-chief, otherwise known as a wedding planner. That would be Sonal Shah and her small army of lieutenants.

SONAL SHAH (Interfaith Wedding Planner, Save the Date Event Consultants): Don’t forget to tell everyone to take their shoes off, cover their head.

When she began her profession one religion was the norm. Not anymore.

Ms. SHAH: In the last five years since I started doing wedding planning, interfaith marriages have just skyrocketed. Out of the 25 or 30 weddings we do in a year, right now about half of them, if not more than half, are interfaith marriages. One of the biggest problems that we face is the whole meat/non-meat issue. So, you know, we did a wedding last year where the groom was Irish and the bride was Gradrati Indian, and her family, you know, strict Jains — no meat, no potatoes. And his side of the family is Irish, so obviously they want those things. We really just try to come to a consensus.

(to Ms. Shah): What did you do?

Ms. SHAH: We ended up going with the non-meat. But obviously they weren’t happy about it because their guest list consisted of everybody that, you know, ate meat and potatoes!

ROLLIN: At the Mani-Sandhu wedding there was also a meat issue, since Hindus are vegetarians, but meat won out.

And then there is the animal issue. At a recent wedding Sonal supervised in Washington, D.C., a Hindu groom wanted to make his entrance on an elephant.

Wedding guest

Ms. SHAH: It definitely posed a lot of challenges. But, yes, we found an elephant. We had the elephant brought over on a semi to downtown Washington, D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue. So it was very exciting. But it was, literally — the last six months of the wedding all we were worried about was this elephant.

ROLLIN: Back at the Mani-Sandhu wedding, Sonal has made sure that the two weddings faithfully represent the two religions.

At the Sikh wedding, men and women sit separately on the floor — shoes off, heads covered. The service centers around the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Ms. BANGA: The bride and the groom, they go around the guru, keeping in mind that the guru or God is the center. All their life, because of this way, they will be very easily able to mend their differences if that’s what they keep in mind.

ROLLIN: At the Hindu wedding the bride groom also do a walk-around.

Pandit DIXIT: So that completion of the seven rounds around the fire signifies that they are married, and that concludes with the ceremony where the groom offers a necklace, ties a necklace to the bride and usually they put a little dot, like a kumkum, a sindur of the forehead of the bride, and that means she’s a married woman from then on.

ROLLIN: At the end of the Hindu service, the Sikh elders were invited to join in blessing the bride and groom, showering them with rice, flowers, and spices for fertility, happiness, and peace.

The bride’s hands are painted with henna.

Mr. S. SANDHU: As long as, you know, they will respect each other, not only as an individual but also respect each other’s customs and religion, you know — let the kids learn the better of both sides, and I think they will be stronger.

ROLLIN (to Mr. S. Sandhu): Did it take you awhile to come to this?

Mr. S. SANDHU: Yes. You know, your initial reaction is, you know, you would rather have things, you know, go your way, let it be simple. But reality is not always simple.

ROLLIN: This three-day celebration does come to an end, and Ronjit and Sunitha will be off to Hawaii for their honeymoon, knowing that they have the blessings and acceptance of both families.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Utica, New York.

Sarah Sayeed, Moderator (Interfaith Center of New York): The first question that’s going to guide us right now is: What is your role within your respective faith tradition?

Fatima Zahra Salhi (Mourchidate from Morocco): My name is Fatima, and I am also mourchidate working with the ministry in charge of religious affairs in Morocco, and I am extremely happy to be here among you because I believe that what gathers us together is more than what separates us.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz (Rabbinic Staff, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, New York): Right before I was going to college, my parents insisted that I take a vocational test to see where my strengths lie. So after this two-day intensive testing, the results showed that I would be best suited for clergy. At the time I laughed, because as a female Orthodox woman there was no opportunity for women to be rabbis.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey (Associate Rector, Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York City): I just have an example of a young girl who is eight in my congregation, who grew up in the Episcopal Church. Her grandmother took her on a trip to Virginia to visit the relatives who were of another denomination. In that church there were all male clergy. The little girl said to her grandmother, “Grandma, there’s something wrong with this church. There are no women up there.” She is used to seeing women at the altar. The Episcopal Church just elected, two years ago, as Presiding Bishop, a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is a former oceanographer, a very brilliant woman and very articulate. She’s the first woman to reach that level of leadership in our church since Elizabeth I in 1500, so it’s a big deal. Among all the provinces in the Anglican Communion she’s the only woman at that level. So at the other end of this spectrum of perception and welcome, her bishop colleagues from certain places of the world will not receive communion if she’s present.

Nezha Nassi (Mourchidate from Morocco): When I counsel women prisoners, they feel more at ease talking to me and opening up to me, and I have the tools actually to talk to them and try to orient them in the right way. Of course, this opportunity was not available to us until the creation of this program, imams and mourchidates. I really don’t feel any difference between the work I do and what the imam does. In fact, I do chair a committee that is composed of imams and mourchidates.

Sarah Sayeed: Is it important to have women doing the kinds of things you’re doing, and is there something new or different that you are bringing as women to this role that your male counterparts cannot do?

Rabbi Stephanie Dickstein (Spiritual Care Coordinator, Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, New York City): I would say that one thing that is probably different about my rabbinate is that I have never given a sermon using a baseball or other sports metaphor. Another difference I think—and certainly we saw this in chaplaincy work and I see it in my counseling now—is that being a woman makes me more available to people. And so when I walk in the door of someone who has been estranged from Judaism, or never really involved at all—they weren’t rejecting anything; they just never had it—when I walked in the door as a woman rabbi, there was an immediate message, which was: Hey, there’s possibilities for me, even though I don’t fit a certain…I don’t come from a certain background, or I may be angry. If you can be there as a rabbi, maybe there’s possibilities for me within Judaism as well.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey: I don’t feel like I’m really on the cutting edge. I feel I’ve inherited the fruits of the hard work of the pioneers in my church and that my responsibility is to take my place as an equal among my colleagues. That’s its own project day to day, and I have to contend with the prejudices of others and assume my role and realize that others can also do the work to learn how to accept and treat females in positions of leadership, just as it happens in the outside world.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: In the Orthodox community it is still revolutionary. Seeing a woman in the forefront of the clergy is revolutionary, however the day-to-day job that I perform is entirely unrevolutionary, entirely normal. A rabbi is a teacher, a role model, a pastoral counselor, somebody who gives guidance in Jewish law as well as life, somebody who facilitates life cycle events. All these roles are functions that a woman can and should and do perform. There are a few things that women in the Orthodox world still do not do. Sometimes these roles are seen as very public. For example—I saw this in some of the restrictions that you have, so I relate—that although on a Shabbat morning, a Sabbath morning, I can address the entire congregation and give a sermon, what I don’t do is lead services.

Nezha Nassi: Concerning leading prayer, we are Malakites. Our doctrine is the Malakites, where woman is not allowed to direct prayer. This is the reason why there was no debate on whether the woman should lead prayer or not, and there was no conflict.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: There are certain areas, of course, that women feel more comfortable coming to me specifically as a woman when it has to do with areas relating to sexuality and other topics that are more sensitive. I’ve found that, whereas women were not coming to rabbis to ask these sensitive questions and they were kind of just suffering themselves, now women have a spiritual leader to turn to.

Ilham Chafik (Mourchidate from Morocco): Concerning the relationship, or what we bring to women, we do feel like we are making a big difference in women’s lives because of sometimes the questions that women cannot ask the imams, and they feel very comfortable asking the mourchidate.

Fatima Zahra Salhi: Just as an example, if there is a conflict in a couple’s life the man actually, given the fact that he trusts the mourchidate, he asks his wife to go and ask advice and counseling from the mourchidate. Whatever decision she takes, or whatever view she gives him, he trusts it.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: I think women bring a unique voice to the table, but I think being in a position of spiritual leadership is about creating relationships and establishing a connection with people.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey: I also see my role as bringing along women in the church to assert themselves and to speak up and to have their own voice in the church. The church has long been so male-dominated. There are so many wonderful, fantastic male voices, but there are many lurking in the shadows that are female that need to be brought out, too.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: As President Obama pushed health care reform a coalition of religious leaders joined the effort with a rally and interfaith prayer service in Washington. The event brought together Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and others who called for universal and affordable health care. The group said health care is a moral issue and called the nation’s current situation too immoral to tolerate. One of the participants in that interfaith coalition is Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby. Her order is the Sisters of Social Service. She is also a lawyer. Sister, welcome.

Sister SIMONE CAMPBELL (Executive Director, NETWORK): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: In that coalition, your number one priority is expanding health care for everyone. Talk about that.

Sr. CAMPBELL: It’s a shocking outrage in our country. It’s a moral outrage that we have almost 50 million people without coverage, without access to a doctor, and we have even hundreds of thousands more that can’t even use the coverage that they have. That’s wrong. We have to change it.

Sister Simone Campbell

ABERNETHY: Hard as that is, perhaps, to change, even harder is trying to figure out how to pay for what we’re doing.

Sr. CAMPBELL: Well, we have to be responsible and pay for it, but there’s lots of savings in the system. There’s administrative savings, streamlining processes, electronic filing. There are controls of costly expenditures, planning for where high capital equipment gets installed, and there’s ways of saving on expenditures for services, also.

ABERNETHY: Let’s talk about that — especially for older people. We read that there is just a whole lot of stuff that is prescribed and ordered that, at least in retrospect, looks as if it wasn’t really necessary and that the biggest savings are in what’s done for people in the last part of their lives.

Sr. CAMPBELL: Well, that is a significant area of savings. There’s a lot of evidence that the fear of dying keeps us holding on to life in such ways that extraordinary means get used on a regular basis, and that makes it really challenging for limiting costs. There are other places where cost savings can be obtained, too, but that’s a big one.

ABERNETHY: You have said that we need to “get real” about dying. Is that what you’re talking about — accepting it?

Sr. CAMPBELL: Yes.

ABERNETHY: Now how can you expect somebody to do that? You know, maybe another procedure will help.

Sr.  CAMPBELL: And maybe it will, and that’s the hard part, but culturally as a nation we do not see death as integrated with living. We see it as something that’s to be feared. We’re getting better at it, but—with the hospice programs and other programs—but we as a culture need to accept dying is part of living, and it’s integrated. It’s one piece. And I as a person of faith know it’s not the worst thing that can happen to you.

ABERNETHY: It’s pretty hard to convince the family of somebody who’s very sick that you shouldn’t do everything possible to help them.

Sr. CAMPBELL: I think there’s a question between quality of life and what does it mean to do everything possible. When you see your loved one in pain — yes, it’s hard, but what are the choices? I think we have to be responsible in making those choices and that just because it can be done doesn’t mean it must be done.

ABERNETHY: And do you think it would be better off if doctors were on salary rather than fee for service?

Sr. CAMPBELL: There’s a lot of evidence that there are better health outcomes, that patients are happier when doctors get a salary and don’t have the incentive to prescribe additional treatment or to do just one more test. The real issue — health care is about nurturing the whole person, making the whole person well, and doctors need to take that into consideration, not just the money they make.

ABERNETHY: And, very quickly, are we going to get a bill this year? Are we going to get a law change this year?

Sr. CAMPBELL: I think we’ve got a great chance. It’s moving, but it’s going to be up to us, we the people, to insist that it happen. We’ve gone too long without it. We need to make it happen now.

ABERNETHY: Sister Simone Campbell, many thanks.

Sr. CAMPBELL: Thank you.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: It’s a common observation that one of the most important paths to peace between enemies is to learn to see others not as demonized stereotypes, but as unique human beings. When she was in the Middle East last month, Kim Lawton learned about the Parents Circle-Families Forum — Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims who have lost loved ones in their long conflict but have learned to replace hate with reconciliation, even friendship. Here is Kim’s special report.

KIM LAWTON: Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank have been hotbeds of unrest and often scenes of angry confrontation between displaced Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. Because of the continuing military and political conflict, few Israeli civilians ever venture in. But don’t tell that to Rami Elhanan. On this day, he and his wife Nurit have come to the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem to visit their friend, Mazen Faraj. It’s is an unexpected friendship. Both have lost family members in the conflict. Yet their grief has brought them together.

MAZEN FARAJ: Today it’s our responsibility for our children and for our families to build something new.

RAMI ELHANAN: We put a crack in this wall of hatred and fear that divide these two nations, and we show another way. We show another possibility. We show the ability to listen to each other’s pain, which is essential if you want to get to any kind of reconciliation.

Mr. FARAJ: This was the first room for our house.

LAWTON: Faraj has lived in Dheisheh his entire life. During the early part of his childhood, fifteen people in his family lived in this one crowded room.

Mr. ELHANAN: This is the place he’s always talking about—that you don’t need someone to hate you to teach you how to hate when you grow up in a room like this.

LAWTON: In April of 2002, there was a violent confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians fighters outside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, the site where Christian tradition holds that Jesus was born. Palestinian fighters holed up in the church, and Israeli soldiers laid siege. During a lull in the fighting, Faraj’s 62-year-old father went out to Jerusalem to get groceries. He was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.

Mr. FARAJ: He got killed in April 2002 when he was coming back from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The Israeli soldiers, they started shooting him and without any reason. No one can kill his soul. They succeeded to kill his body, but without his soul. His soul’s still around us and give us like the power every day, how to keep going in our lives.

LAWTON: But there is great pain on the Israeli side as well. Elhanan had 14-year-old daughter, Smadar. Of four children, she was the only daughter, and the family had called her “the princess.” On September 4, 1997, the first day of school, Smadar went to a popular shopping area in Jerusalem.

Mr. ELHANAN: And she went down the street with her girlfriends to buy new books for the new year. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up, killing five people that day, including three little girls. One of them was my 14-year-old Smadar.

LAWTON: Elhanan says he was overwhelmed by anger and despair.

Mr. ELHANAN: It took me almost a year to understand who I am, to try to recover, and to understand that I have to choose a way for myself and translate these feelings of anger and despair into something constructive and create some hope out of it. And I joined the Parents Circle and I found a meaning for my life.

LAWTON: The Parents Circle-Families Forum was launched in 1995 as a way to bring bereaved Israelis and Palestinians together. The group now has several hundred participants who’ve lost immediate family members because of the violence in this region. Organizers believe it’s the only project of its kind in an area where conflict is still ongoing. The nonprofit group sponsors face-to-face dialogue meetings for bereaved family members and public lectures about reconciliation.

Mr. ELHANAN: The minute I saw in that meeting the first bereaved Palestinian families as human beings I was completely shocked. It was the first time ever in my life that I meet Palestinians as human beings after so many years of demonizing each other. So this was the turning point.

LAWTON: Faraj, who was dealing with his own feelings of anger and revenge, went to one Parents Circle meeting where Elhanan spoke.

Mr. FARAJ: And it was this man talking about his suffering and his pain, too. But I told him, “What do you know about suffering and pain? You just live in Jerusalem. ou are Israeli, you are the occupier, you are everything.” And then he starts to talk about his daughter, and then really I found out that, whoa, it’s the same pain.

LAWTON: The two men became close friends. Elhanan was drawn by Faraj’s humor.

Mr. ELHANAN: He’s the only guy in the world that makes me laugh.

LAWTON: Faraj couldn’t believe that Elhanan was willing to visit him in the refugee camp. They built a deep mutual respect.

Mr. FARAJ: He’s just a human being, and you can deal with him in an easy way, and you can build a discussion with him with easy way, and you can build the fight also in easy way, too. But the most important thing’s that he’ll respect the other.

Mr. ELHANAN: What he’s doing needs a lot of guts, and his ability to face the world, tell his truths after all the things that he’s been through, I think it’s admirable, and I really respect him for it.

LAWTON: Faraj and Elhanan started doing joint lectures for the Parents Circle.

Mr. ELHANAN: We use this enormous respect that the two societies have for people who paid the highest price possible to convey this message, to convey the message of dialogue, of reconciliation, of peace.

LAWTON: Elhanan and Faraj have given more than 1,000 joint lectures in Palestinian and Israeli schools. They say most of the kids have no idea that Palestinians and Israelis can be friends.

Mr. ELHANAN: If there is only one kid at the end of the class who nods his head with acceptance to this message, we saved one drop of blood. According to Judaism, this is the whole world.

LAWTON: The Parents Circle is nonsectarian, but is supported by several Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups. In 2008, Catholic Relief Services brought Faraj and Elhanan on a speaking tour across the United States.

BURCU MUNYAS (Program Manager, Catholic Relief Services): They are giving a message of hope in the midst of hopelessness in the Holy Land. So we thought that this would be a strong message to bring to our US Catholic audiences.

LAWTON: For their part, Elhanan and Faraj try to keep the focus on relationship, not religion.

Mr. FARAJ: It’s the important things that we don’t want to make this conflict like a religion conflict.

LAWTON: Their work isn’t always easy. Both men have received sometimes strong criticism from within their respective communities.

Mr. ELHANAN: People tell me that I’m a traitor or a — but I think more people are impressed by my ability to translate the pain into hope.

Mr. FARAJ: I really believe in what I’m doing and — but not all the people they really accept that, but anyway, if you believe in something you have to continue.

LAWTON: Parents Circle supporters hope these relationships can be a model for others, which they believe will help further the political peace process.

Ms MUNYAS: By building trust with each other they become more and more ready to trust the other side, to compromise, and to tell their leaders that they are ready, that they can move ahead, they can compromise, and they can sign the peace agreements.

LAWTON: Faraj and Elhanan agree.

Mr. FARAJ: We have a different culture, a different religion, and different, also, conditions on the ground, too. So how we can find a way? This the problem. It’s not about that’s it, I found the solution for the conflict. No. But the first step, we have to know each other.

Mr. ELHANAN: I devote my life to go everywhere possible to tell the very simple truth that we are not doomed. It’s not our destiny to keep on killing each other, and we can stop it by talking to one another — that simple.

LAWTON: Simple in theory, much more elusive to work out. But they hope their relationship proves it is possible. I’m Kim Lawton in the West Bank.