Father Abraham's Many Children

The Bible in a World of Religious Difference

Tyler D. Mayfield

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467463041
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religiöse Ökumene & Interreligiösität

Reframing religious diversity through the stories of Cain, Ishmael, and Esau

The way we read the Bible matters for the way we engage the pluralistic world around us. For instance, if we understand the book of Genesis as narrowly focused on primary characters like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, we'll miss the larger story and end up with the impression that God only cares about those who are "chosen." In fact, the narratives of marginalized biblical characters reveal that God protects and provides for them also. What might this mean for Christians living in a world of religious difference today?

In Father Abraham's Many Children, Tyler Mayfield reflects on the stories of three of the most significant "other brothers" in the Bible—namely, on God's continued engagement with Cain after he murders Abel, Ishmael's circumcision as a sign of God's covenant, and Esau's reconciliation with Jacob. From these stories, Mayfield draws out a more generous theology of religious diversity, so that Christians might be better equipped to authentically love their neighbors of multiple faith traditions—as God loves, and has always loved, all humanity.

CHAPTER ONE

Religious Diversity and Our Bibles:

Retelling the Ancient Stories

How does one account, theologically, for the fact of humanity’s religious diversity? … From now on any serious intellectual statement of the Christian faith must include, if it is to serve its purpose …, some sort of doctrine of other religions. We explain the fact that the Milky Way is there by the doctrine of creation, but how do we explain the fact that the Bhagavad Gita is there?

—Wilfred Cantwell Smith,

The Faith of Other Men

A World of Religious Difference

Prestonsburg, Kentucky, is a small Appalachian town in eastern Kentucky with a population of about 3,500. There are a few fast-food restaurants and many more small churches of various Christian varieties. And off one country road outside town sits the Islamic Center of Eastern Kentucky. It is a nondescript building, but its presence in Prestonsburg testifies to America’s growing religious diversity. You would not be surprised to learn that the much larger city of Louisville has a dozen mosques and a vibrant Muslim population. But Prestonsburg? Muslims living in Appalachia? Religious diversity has arrived not only in our major cities but across America’s smaller cities and towns. I’m thinking here about the Hindu temples in Spanish Fork, Utah, and Panama City, Florida; the large Buddhist temple in Hampton, Minnesota; and the mosque in Princeton, West Virginia. We can observe the growing number of sacred spaces such as mosques and temples in our neighborhoods.

In recent years, religious diversity has shifted from discussing the differences in worship styles between Presbyterians and Pentecostals to talking about Hindu holidays and Buddhist temples. Talk of ecumenical partnerships between Baptists and Methodists has expanded to include interfaith relationships with Jews and Hindus. The modern Christian ecumenical movement of the early twentieth century is waning as more interfaith organizations such as Interfaith Youth Core are created. Society now sees a need for people across all religions and no religion to work together with respect for the common good. For example, as I was writing this paragraph, I received an invitation to a local interfaith music concert.

Recently in Louisville, a seventeen-year-old broke into our local Hindu temple and spray-painted messages of hate on the temple walls. The supportive community response was overwhelming and immediate. Over five hundred folks from across the religious spectrum, including Christians, Jews, and Muslims, showed up on a Saturday morning to help paint over these offensive words and denounce the action. I attended the event to help but did not expect to arrive at a Hindu temple that looked like my childhood church. Redbrick. Tall steeple with a cross. Stained glass. Stone columns. A sanctuary with a basement. An educational facility with a gym/fellowship hall and kitchen. And a vibrant Hindu community with a message of peace and forgiveness for their community. I later discovered that the building belonged initially to a Presbyterian church, which sold it as the congregation aged and downsized. The Presbyterians—a model Mainline Protestant denomination—moved out and the Hindus moved in. A world religion with over a billion adherents found a home under a lofty white steeple. This is our new religious reality. But how did our nation and communities get to this place?

Religious diversity has been present throughout our country’s history. We need only to think of the faith traditions of Indigenous peoples, the colonial roots of Jews, and the waves of Irish, German, and Chinese immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. Our religious history as a nation has always been more diverse than we typically allow. For example, Thomas Jefferson owned a translation of the Qur’an. And it is estimated that 14–20 percent of African slaves brought to America were Muslim.¹ Yet our nation diversified religiously primarily because of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed for even more ethnic—and therefore religious—diversity on our shores. The result of this legislation is captivating. There are, for example, about 3.3 million Muslims in America today. That’s 1 percent of our country’s population. That share of the US population will double to 2 percent by 2050, at the end of my lifetime.² (Only around half of this increase, it should be noted, is due to immigration since many Muslims are native-born.) The Hindu population in the United States nearly doubled between 2007 and 2014.³ We could also mention the rise in Buddhists and Hindus and the Nones, who do not desire to affiliate with any particular religious group. Non-Christian religious identities are increasing every year. In 2017 the United States Department of Defense listed 221 options for religious belief for their armed forces.⁴ The list includes dozens of varieties of Christianity, all major world religions such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism, and also Wicca, Paganism, Humanism, Agnosticism, Atheism, and Heathenism. The United States contains astounding religious diversity.

How are we to feel about this diversity? Religious differences may be easier to tolerate than to embrace. To accept differences in our lives is a positive virtue, but our acceptance can frequently be passive. We accept without much intention or thought. We read the statistics and examples above with little thought of how these changes affect our Christian communities. Christians, however, are called to act faithfully in a world of religious difference. We worship and work, pray and serve in such a society. We can no longer assume our neighbors are people of faith in the same way we are. We can no longer merely tolerate our religious neighbors who worship in different sacred spaces. As Diana Eck notes, “It’s one thing to be unconcerned about or ignorant of Muslim or Buddhist neighbors on the other side of the world, but when Buddhists are our next-door neighbors, when our children are best friends with Muslim classmates, when a Hindu is running for a seat on the school committee, all of us have a new vested interest in our neighbors, both as citizens and as people of faith.”⁵ A world of religious diversity is now on our street and in our community.

Additionally, we read our Bibles in such a world of religious difference. We open our book of sacred stories in places such as Prestonsburg, Kentucky, where we know that Muslims are turning to their Qur’ans for guidance right down the road. We read Exodus and Ruth in our churches while our Jewish friends hear those same stories in their synagogues. We listen to Jesus’s words about our neighbor and think of our Buddhist friends next door. One part of acting faithfully in a world of religious difference is reading our sacred literature anew, understanding that religious diversity will challenge our readings of our Bibles. And our Bibles will inspire us on our journey.

But is an awareness of religious diversity as a present reality enough for a thoroughly faithful Christian response? God calls us as Christians beyond acceptance and tolerance, beyond a cognitive assent to the issue. We need to heed a call to engagement.

Religious Pluralism as Engagement of Commitments

What if Christians move from merely accepting the reality of religious diversity to engaging the diversity around us? Of course, we can realize that our country is religiously diverse, even without the element of engagement. We read the examples given earlier and nod in mental acceptance of such a changing world. We may have heard in our jobs and schools about the need for diversity. We may have participated in workplace diversity training. But how do we respond?

We need to move beyond diversity talk alone as if the goal is simply to collect different perspectives, experiences, and values. This approach may be a helpful or necessary first step since a diversity of views is a valuable and essential tool for learning and working together. We may need to think about the extent of diversity we encounter in our circles of influence. Some of us live in homogeneous work, church, and residential communities; others of us participate in more diverse environments. No matter our level of diverse surroundings, we need to take an additional step beyond creating diverse religious environments. We need to learn to participate in the diversity from our unique perspective and listen deeply to all views. We need religious pluralism.

Diana Eck, director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, distinguishes helpfully between diversity and pluralism and explains that religious pluralism goes beyond recognizing diversity. It engages the difference. Religious pluralism is not merely “accepting” and “allowing” various religious traditions to exist. We move from allowing Hindus and Muslims to construct their temples and mosques in our neighborhoods to engaging these faithful folks in constructive dialogue, compassionate listening, and critical thought. We move from simply noting the construction of new mosques in our neighborhoods to reaching out to our Muslim neighbors for understanding. We speak to these communities out of our deep religious commitments and listen sincerely to their commitments. We create ways to have conversations as neighbors.

Eck defines pluralism with a four-part description:

• “Pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity.”
• “Pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference.”
• “Pluralism is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments.”
• “Pluralism is based on dialogue.”⁶

This definition emphasizes the meeting of diverse peoples to comprehend their commitments better. It’s an active posture, one that cannot be accomplished through monologue or mere philosophical assertion. It is not a “pretend pluralism” that assumes all religions are alike.⁷ It is a posture of curiosity and passion, a stance that demands open hearts and lively minds. Passivity plays no role in this type of religious pluralism. The posture of religious pluralism does not ask us to give up our faith commitments and ideas about God and the world. It asks us to articulate with vulnerability and courage those faith commitments and listen humbly and gently to our fellow human beings as they express their beliefs and values. It leads us to curious questions about others’ beliefs, trusting that just as we do not have all the answers within our own faith tradition, neither do they.

Eboo Patel recently summarized the difference between diversity and pluralism as follows: “Diversity … is simply a demographic fact; pluralism is a hard-won achievement.”⁸ The language of diversity can often reduce analysis to the quantitative. We count. We demonstrate diversity by noting the number of aspects we see around us. For example, we might note the number of people of color in our church as a sign of diversity. Or we might cite the number of female clergy in our denomination as an indication of diversity. We might note that there are over 450 Hindu temples in the United States today.⁹ But pluralism demands more than counting. It does not value only the presence of diversity, although, again, this may be a needed first step.

Patel defines pluralism in a tripartite way:

• “respect for different identities”
• “relationships between diverse communities”
• “a commitment to the common good”¹⁰

First, respecting someone’s identity means allowing them to be who they are without necessarily agreeing with or trying to change their values or commitments. They can express their religious identities, and we have some responsibility to accommodate these expressions. Respect involves deep listening and valuing people as children of God. For some of us, it may mean becoming more comfortable with differences in general and conflict in particular. Our society has not always helped us learn these crucial skills and this type of emotional awareness. Furthermore, our Christian faith tradition has not prioritized differences as essential to spiritual growth. Many of us are not adept at handling conflict. Our anxiety around differences may lead us to minimize or dismiss those differences. When we confront our embedded prejudices, we often feel bad and have to deal with our inner conflict. Respect does not necessarily lead to agreement but certainly involves understanding.

Second, Patel encourages us to move beyond respect to relationship, which he defines as “positive, constructive, warm, caring, cooperative engagement.”¹¹ We have to get to know each other across differences; this action requires a certain sense of connection and dependence. This connection requires actual human contact, not merely knowledge acquired from a book. It requires openness and the cultivation of brave spaces. A healthy relationship weaves together our previous discussion of respect with notions of intimacy and affection. Relationships require empathy, compromise, and a commitment to something beyond ourselves.

Third, despite our differences, we share a commitment to the good of the whole community. Patel notes that a shared interest is at play no matter how different individual communities are; they each want the best for society. This common good may look slightly different to each community. Nevertheless, each community can articulate how it chooses to contribute to the overall thriving of the neighborhood and world.

Eck’s and Patel’s calls to engagement take seriously social-scientific research’s claim that the mere presence of a diverse environment is not enough to forge produc...