Neighbors

Christians and Muslims Building Community

Deanna Ferree Womack

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780664266172
• eBook ISBN: 9781611649918
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Ecumenism & Interfaith

For a long time, American Christians have been hearing a story about Islam. It's a story about conflict and hostility, about foreigners and strangers. At the heart of this story is a fundamental incompatibility between the two religions going all the way back to their original encounters. According to that story, the only valid Christian response to Islam is resistance.

But it's time to tell a different—and truer—story. Christians and Muslims have not always fought or lived in fear of each other. Christian communities in majority-Muslim countries have coexisted with their Muslim neighbors for centuries. More importantly, Muslims have been part of the American story from its beginning. And like their Christian neighbors, Muslims want to make the community in which they live a better place for all citizens. In Neighbors, Deanna Ferree Womack lays the groundwork for members of the two religions to understand, converse, and cooperate with each another. With models for cultivating empathy and interfaith awareness, Christians can move from neighborly intention to real dialogue and common action with Muslims in the United States.

Ideal for individual or group study, the book includes discussion guide for group study with links to video clips, a timeline of the first Muslim communities, and a glossary of Arabic terms related to Islam.

PART 1

When Our Neighbors Have
a Different Religion

Learning about another religious tradition must start close to home, with our own sense of identity as Christians and as Americans. This means reflecting on our faith and also reflecting on the churches, American values, and western cultural contexts that shape us. This is especially important if we want better Christian-Muslim relationships. Real friendships require us to understand ourselves and the other person. We Christians need to consider

• how we feel about interreligious dialogue,

• how much we really know about Islam—or other non-Christian traditions, and

• our gut reactions when we see Muslims in the grocery store or hear about them on the news.

It is also important to understand the ways that other Christians in America and in the western world tend to approach people of other faiths. Those approaches influence us too.

Our focus in this first part of the book is the United States and the western Christian culture we have inherited. I don’t like the language of “East and West” because it suggests that European heritage is completely different from and superior to the cultures of the Middle East and Asia. Our world is much too interconnected for us to believe in such a split. To challenge such assumed divisions, this book does not capitalize east or west when referring, for example, to western Europe or eastern Christianity. I hope this will diminish the lingering power of such terms. When I speak of western Christianity, I mean Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Protestant and Catholic traditions and western European cultural thought patterns influence how most Christians in the United States approach Islam, even if our family origins are not western European.

1

Religious Diversity Starts at Home

Readers are invited to consider each question before reading the chapter and write their initial responses in the space provided.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. How much do you know about religions other than Christianity?

2. Where does this knowledge come from? Does it come from

– academic study, books, or other scholarly material?

– news, social media, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, or online searches?

– personal encounters, including relationships, travel, and interfaith events?

3. Now or in the past, have you interacted regularly with people of other faiths?

4. How do you feel about religious diversity in the United States? Perhaps you grew up in a place where religious differences were common, or maybe you’ve never known a Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or Hindu. Or perhaps you feel uncertain about the growing diversity in your community. What word or phrase would you use to describe your views about religious diversity?

A growing number of people in the United States identify with religions other than Christianity, including Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In a 2015 attention-grabbing study, the Pew Research Center projected that this multireligious growth would continue in the coming decades. Over the same period, the report said, the Christian percentage of the US population would steadily decline. In 2017, Public Religion Research International (PRRI) reported similar findings and emphasized the ethnic dimensions of such religious changes. Only 43 percent of Americans identified as white Christians and only 30 percent were white and Protestant. The title of PRRI founder Robert P. Jones’s book aptly summed up this reality: The End of White Christian America.¹ What should American Christians think about these shifting religious and racial demographics? How should we respond to diversity, to religious differences, and especially to the growth of Islam in America? The first question is the focus of this chapter, and we address the second in the next chapter.

Such statistics can unsettle Americans who think of the United States as a Protestant nation or as a Christian nation. These statistics can also be jarring for white Americans who take for granted their majority status. For most US Christians, and not just those who are white, interfaith engagement involves encounters across ethnic and cultural differences. And Americans of all backgrounds have often characterized Islam as a “nonwhite” religion. When applied negatively, this view has made immigration and citizenship more difficult for Muslims. It has also contributed to the recent rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States.

We see presumptions about race and religion also in anti-Semitic acts, which constitute the majority of religiously-targeted hate crimes reported to American law enforcement today. Whether against Jews, Muslims, or others, many acts of religious bias combine racist rhetoric with Christian symbolism. For example, vandals desecrated a synagogue in Carmel, Indiana, in 2018 with Nazi flags and iron crosses. The iron cross was a Third Reich military medal modeled after the crosses of a German religious order of Crusaders.² Recall also the hate group (mentioned in the introduction) that called itself “The Crusaders” and planned to attack Somali Muslims in Kansas.

Other books deal more comprehensively with issues of American Christianity and racism, and I shall return to the topic of race in American Christian-Muslim relations in part 2.³ For now, I simply note that anxieties about changing religious demographics in this country are often racially charged. In light of violent reactions to religious diversity, as well as passive feelings of unease, it may be helpful for Christians to consider three things:

1. the proper interpretation of demographic statistics,

2. the long-standing multifaith character of the United States, and

3. the affirmation of pluralism that drives the American promise of “liberty and justice for all.”

I address these points in the section below. Then in the final section I consider why American Christians are not more deeply involved in interreligious dialogue.

WHAT MORE SHOULD WE KNOW?

First, some media outlets mistakenly suggest that immigration and rising diversity threaten America’s Christian majority. In reality, Christians will make up the majority of the US population for the foreseeable future. Moreover, the shift in the United States religious composition will be due mainly to the large number of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated. These so-called nones made up 22.8 percent of the US population in 2014. Nones include atheists, agnostics, and others who select the category “none” on surveys about religious identity. Their numbers may rise to 25.6 percent by the year 2050. The expected drop in the Christian population over the same period (from 70.6 percent to 66.4 percent) correlates in large part with the rise in this unaffiliated category (see figures 1.1 and 1.2). Nones will continue to outnumber the combined population of American Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus (which are, in descending order, the four largest non-Christian traditions in the United States). According to the most recent Pew Research Center studies, one out of every sixteen Americans practices a religion other than Christianity, and 1.1 percent of all Americans are Muslim (around 3.45 million). By 2050 the number of Americans who identify with a religion other than Christianity should increase slightly to one out of every twelve, and Muslims will make up 2.1 percent of the total US population.⁴

Figure 1.1: US Religious Affiliations in 2014

Figure 1.2: US Religious Affiliations in 2050

These numbers indicate that American Christians should expect more opportunities to meet people of other faiths in the coming years. Yet the challenge of the shifting US religious landscape is not, as some suggest, to stop another faith from triumphing over Christianity. Rather, the challenge is for the American Christian majority to learn how to live well alongside neighbors of other faiths or of no religious tradition at all. Indeed this would be our calling even if American Muslims or Hindus or Jews outnumbered American Christians! If we are going to be the neighbors God calls us to be, we will have to learn compassion and empathy for people of other faiths.

This leads to my second point, that the religious diversity that has caught some Americans by surprise actually has very deep roots. As Diana Eck reminds us, we should not overlook the “textured pluralism … present in the lifeways of the Native peoples” in America before European migrants came to these shores. Those settlers who brought their own diverse traditions to North America included Sephardic Jews, Quakers and Puritans from Great Britain, Reform Christians from the Netherlands, and Catholics from France, Spain, and England.⁵ Even in the colonial period, before any of our ancestors would lay claim to United States citizenship, interreligious engagement was already part of the North American reality.

Along with Protestant churches of multiple denominations, the first Jewish synagogues were founded in the American colonies in the eighteenth century. The late nineteenth century brought larger waves of non-Christian communities to the United States, as well as Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and other non-Protestant Christians. Chinese Buddhists settled in the western United States in the 1840s and soon afterwards established the first American Buddhist temple. The Muslim presence in America dates to the colonial period, and in part to the slave trade. The first evidence of regular, communal Muslim prayer in the United States comes from early twentieth-century North Dakota, a gathering point for Syrian peddlers.⁶ Despite persistent Eurocentric imaginings of US history as a western Christian story, Americans have long had a multifaith heritage.

Third, and finally, although progress has not come without struggle, to be an American is to value diversity of belief and culture. Pluralism has long defined American political and social structures. Take, for example, the Immigration and Nationalization Act of 1965. It opened US borders to individuals of non-European descent and spurred further religious pluralization. Because of this change during the civil rights era, Eck noted that our so-called Christian country had become “the world’s most religiously diverse nation” by the 1990s.⁷

For Eck, as a committed Christian, this long-stand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: When Our Neighbors Have a Different Religion
• Part 2: Christian-Muslim Encounters
• Part 3: From Neighborly Commitment to Working Together
• Afterword by Roshan Iqbal
• Glossary of Arabic Terms
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Index
• Excerpt from Neighborhood Church: Transforming Your Congregation into a Powerhouse for Mission, by Krin Van Tatenhove and Rob Mueller