I’m a visiting scholar at Yale Divinity School, not a student, and as a Quaker I can’t be ordained, so I delete most of the institutional email notices unread. Vestments and books on preaching and counseling can change hands at astonishingly low prices, the Reverend Mister Manners can strike again and again with sessions to prepare for interviews with parishes, and the Thou Shalt Kill volleyball team can massacre its rivals from other Yale professional schools, all without concerning me. But I eagerly read the announcement that came in July of this year about the first conference to follow from the document called “A Common Word Between Us and You.” That public expression by Muslim leaders of their solidarity with Christians had received a warm response from Western churches and universities, and now the conference was warmly entitled “Loving God and Neighbor in Word and Deed: Implications for Christians and Muslims.”
I recalled my excitement about the many luminaries’ denial that there was any need for Christians and Muslims to be at each other’s throats; I had been proud of the role played by Yale religious scholars. I now wanted to attend the conference and help to assure the guests of Christian goodwill, but also ask some of the hard questions that Quakers in South Africa, my second home, had been asking for decades, especially since the failures of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After a long history of violence and mutual ill-will, how can lasting peace and goodwill come about? The catastrophically growing South African income divide; the unbelievable amount of crime; the government’s assertions—at the probable cost of several million lives—that AIDS is a Western conspiracy; the stubborn and worsening racism in a country that is most people’s favorite example of “reconciliation"; and the alliance with ravaging tyranny in neighboring Zimbabwe show that the formulas for mediation that are now most admired have proven, at best, incomplete.
But as I learned to my anger, neither I nor any other ordinary members of the Divinity School community could attend any panels of “Loving God and Neighbor.” All of them were closed—extremely unusual for this institution. The purpose of Dean Harold Attridge’s email was not invitation but warning: “I am writing today to let you know how these events might impact life on the [Yale Divinity School] Quad” (his emphasis).
He continued in normal font. “Firstly, some of you have been asking about any adjustments regarding dress or behavior that might make both you and our guests feel more comfortable during their visit here. I have attached for your information a document prepared by the Reconciliation Program at YCFC [Yale Center for Faith and Culture] to guide all staff directly associated with the upcoming workshop and conference in regard to dress and behavior.”
My anger grew as I read the attachment, with its tips that would make me almost legal on the streets of Tehran, but quite uncomfortable running errands in the Quad, among my friends and in the middle of the summer:
When last I checked, the world-wide norm of hospitality was that the guest accepts the way things are done where he is visiting (not that he himself should have to do anything forbidden to him at home) or stays away. But here we were being asked to “defer” in all “definitions"—not just in our actions, that is, but in our thoughts. (This, I guess, would make Yemeni “honor killings” of young women, on the suspicion of sexual impropriety or merely to cover up their rape by their brothers, honorable in our minds.) We were to do this merely to allow meetings between some of our associates and people who would not, for fear of defilement, enter the same building we entered in our usual clothes and with our usual manners.
“Guidance” from an authoritative institution is really precept and command. “Please be courteous toward others and refrain from walking on the grass” is not a request; nor was this a case of “Employees must wash hands": the email went to everyone.
When I had to go to the Divinity School during the week the conference was there (it moved to the Law School for the second week), I steadfastly—OK, provocatively— wore what I normally would have and behaved as I normally do. (Friends reading this are snorting, but they need to admit that dowdiness, frankness, and a crude sense of humor don’t exactly make me a spawn of Satan.) On my second set of errands, I had on sandals and an unbecoming, loose, short-sleeved, ankle-length dress with a medium neckline, and I asked at reception about parking for a visit a male friend was planning to make over the weekend. (I have a Divinity School apartment across from the Quad, because I use the library in the Quad to do research on the Bible.) One of the many extra security guards hovered, visibly unhappy, between me and a woman in a high-security outfit who was seated at a table covered with folders—but she disappeared within seconds anyway.
I am infatuated with Yale Divinity School. No institution has ever treated me better. But it isn’t simply that I was ticked off (though I was) at being asked not to wear sandals or speak at any length to any male or even smile at one or shake one’s hand, in order to accommodate a gathering I was excluded from, though it was held in my workplace. It’s that the Western leaders of what may be the major push for Christian-Muslim reconciliation appear to be so single-mindedly zealous, so prone to create impressions in conflict with reality, and so oblivious of what this could lead to, that a mere waste of time and money might be the best outcome.
The first person to bring together the African National Congress and the white apartheid government for talks was H.W. van der Merwe, whom I knew only after the first multiracial elections, when he was a rejected candidate for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and dying of cancer. In decades of quiet activism (he raised money to educate Nelson Mandela’s daughters, for example), he had always been concerned that reconciliation be solid, because eventually more people can die from the results of a false peace than from the original violent conflict. The reconciliation of groups is not a magical process that needs only to get started, as if “you just talk to people and meet them face to face, and you see how much like you they are.” They’re probably not much at all like you, and if you pretend otherwise to move things along, you dribble a poison into the water that everyone will be drinking.
Americans are offended at intimations of impossibility, that enemy of inspiration and freedom. Don’t tell Americans that they can’t do certain things, or shouldn’t even try certain things, because the nature of things is against it. The only way you can get away with such statements is by discussing rights, because these are the guardians of inspiration and freedom. This is how I intend to get away with discussing the necessary limits of reconciliation between Christians and Muslims.
I would be thrown out of the Religious Society of Friends (well, “eldered,” anyway) for suggesting that any two groups are beyond the hope of reconciliation, but few in the West could object to the statement that we have to approach others sincerely, as the human-rights cultures we are. That doesn’t mean accepting nothing about others, demanding that they become like us before we even talk to them, but it does mean refusing the same kind of demand from them. If in any instance this principle results in not being able to talk right now or in not being able to talk about a given topic, it isn’t a defeat but a mere acknowledgement of facts, the first step in any mediation that has a chance.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission didn’t achieve real reconciliation because it neglected the truth. This was, on the one side, that Europeans are very attached to their justice system and were appalled to see its essentials rushed offstage, in however worthy a cause—in fact, they couldn’t imagine a cause that wouldn’t be perverted by this expediency: they thought that sharing the human rights they had enjoyed as a minority should come before anything else. On the other side, the truth was that poverty had led Africans to conceive human rights in starkly material terms: the long delay in reparations and the paltry amounts paid made the chance the victims had to tell their stories seem trivial. It was as if the two sides themselves weren’t meeting, but that instead there was a hasty mock-up of either, draped over representatives neither chose.
Many of these were activist scholars and clergy, impossible to badmouth without seeming to be against peace, love and understanding. But it quickly became evident that their interests were far from identical with those of the people they claimed to speak for. They were “religious and moral leaders” of—at most—divided and very restless constituencies. Even Desmond Tutu’s fan base was largely foreign, and the dedication of the whole of it was nothing in comparison to what Winnie Madikezela-Mandela could command from a single crowd while she was questioned by the commission about her role in the death of a young boy. The commissioners were like parents who demand handshakes and apologies from children who are still yelling, “But what about . . .?,” parents much more interested in a quiet life and the credit for a well-disciplined household than whether or not Billy is raising a possum under his bed or Uncle Bert is touching Susie. And no commissioner was without powerful political ties. If embarrassment for the ruling African National Congress or its current allies from the old regime ever emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it was not the commissioners’ fault.
It is natural to suspect (especially because of the much greater secrecy) that both sides of the “Common Word” project have motivations—if only careerism—beyond the desire to see Christians and Muslims kill each other less often. And it somehow makes sense that ordinary people world-wide are not gushing in letters to the editor and in coffee houses, “Thank goodness that they’re talking to each other! Now everything will be OK.” (The New Haven Register ran a different kind of outburst from a local—which reminds me that I want some credit here: At least I didn’t call the organizers “pathetic weenies.”) “A Common Word” emerged from Jordan, whose monarchy shamelessly sucks up to Western elites (even to the extent of donating much cash to the good cause of New England prep school education) to protect itself against its own citizens’ demands for democracy; Jordan’s Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad was one of the “notable leaders” at the conference. John Kerry, not noted for religious activism but for other aspirations, gave the opening address at the conference.
The gathering included operatives from theocracies and Islamicist movements, whose backgrounds showed no striking interest in coexistence with Christianity, but rather in proselytizing, banning all media that “expose the movement of certain body parts which are sensual,” and advising the state on the enforcement of such laws. Christian participants, in their public statements, apologized for the Crusades but shied away from the human rights issues the people they purport to speak for consider crucial. The questions are unanswerable. If what’s going on is politics, and we’re all going to be subject to the results, then why can’t we select the participants or even listen in? If it’s theology, then what could the secrecy possibly be for?
I would have no way of knowing whether the actual followers, spiritual and political, of the Muslim leaders invited to “Loving God and Neighbor in Word and Deed” are satisfied. The Muslim guests’ presentation of themselves, however, was downright commendable in its forthrightness. Muslims never seem to fudge their identity; a devout Muslim wouldn’t take off her veil in public for any reason, and blood might spill if a Muslim pundit asked her to do so in order to make Westerners more “comfortable.” How else could I make them “comfortable,” she might ask—with sex or alcohol?
But the Western organizers of the conference have not been honest about me or the majority of Christians. Admittedly, an explanation is challenging. Among the most passionate beliefs Western Christians tend to have is in the right to believe in anything or nothing and to do as they please in all matters related to religion. U.S. News & World Report casually cites a Quinnipiac University poll that would baffle any Muslim who has not been raised in the West: 55% of U.S. voters oppose same-sex marriage, but most of these don’t want the government banning it. Disapproval, in the West, does not equal a desire to suppress.
This kind of superficially divided thinking is not religion hacked up by secularism but is deeply theological in its origins and growth. One of the speeches opening the Law School part of the conference did touch on two basic anomalies often cited in Christian doctrine: the Incarnation and the Trinity. After a year of hanging around a divinity school, it has become part of my own credo that, during the past 500 years at least, Christians have not cared all that much about the Trinity. Muslims are alarmed at its potential suggestion of polytheism, but Christians have merely settled with joy into what it used to help explain, the Incarnation. Here, while Muslims quail at the idea of the God becoming human and dying in pain and humiliation, Christians embrace the personal love of God the story invites them to, without being bothered by the apparent paradoxes. In fact, that God made his Son human and let him die on behalf of degraded humanity is the dearest to us of all Christian beliefs. But I will stand on my head (exposing my demonic—though not very attractive—ankles and knees) if any Christian speaker at the conference insisted on the social and political implications of this, in spite of the huge costs the Christian world has paid to vindicate them: Christianity, as a personal relationship with God, must be chosen and practiced in freedom, without human authority getting in the way. To admit this would be to discredit Christian participation in the conference. How many Christians believe their religious leaders—"religious leaders” carrying a very different meaning in the West—have the authority even to talk about them beyond their backs to outsiders, let alone to negotiate on their behalf?
A point on which Muslims are very persuasive is that how we behave in public is not a trivial matter. It symbolizes our basic beliefs. In 1660, Puritan officials marched the Quaker Mary Dyer to the center of Boston and hanged her for preaching. She had defied several warnings and would have been allowed to leave town unmolested, but she believed that telling her version of the truth—that God spoke without clerical mediation to the individual—in public was worth her life. The Puritans had persecuted her as a woman, exhuming her deformed, stillborn baby and displaying it as evidence of her “monstrous” heresy, but she had persisted in her ministry. For a woman not to accept a restricted role, for her to develop her gifts to their fullest and share them as widely as possible for the glory of God their Creator, has always been in the eyes of Quakers a form of worship, and to die for this is martyrdom. It’s not from fashionable gender touchiness that I don’t refrain from saying in public what I think, and that I don’t dress in public as if I serve different functions there than men. It’s my religion. If other women do the same for irreligious or even antireligious reasons, I don’t mind. Quakers were prominent in the fight for women’s rights, and it would be against our religion to consider that a gift with strings attached.
But Quakers no longer lead the pack in Christian tolerance. Many denominations now embrace gay and lesbian believers, of which there is a large community at Yale Divinity School. In this connection, the attitude of the YDS-affiliated conference organizers teeters on the edge of a full denial of who they themselves are. They have taught and ministered to and socialized with openly homosexual students, treating them just the same as others and helping them in their careers wherever possible. They would be in serious legal trouble if they didn’t. But it wasn’t merely the dress or behavior of certain students that would have been the problem in the Quad during the conference, but their existence, their nature (which—believe me—nothing could have hidden). It may not have been a coincidence that the conference was in the summer, when fewer students were around and the most obviously gay men were either overseas or at the other end of the continent. A few weeks later, and the Christian organizers would have had to explain to some of their guests how it was that the youth who had just swished by was not going to be executed but ordained.
The conference discussion panels, to judge from their titles, were whitewashes of these awkward but useful facts about Christianity. “God is Loving,” “Loving God,” “Loving Neighbor"—why not “Love and 10 Cents Will Get You a Cup of Coffee”? The Christian version of love could not have been presented in full, because it would have caused at least the Saudi and Iranian delegates to walk out. For Christians, conforming or enforcing love is not the prize, but rather the booby prize, for those who cannot give up the self and all of its petty customs. The kind of love that counts is love for a gay man whom the believer is afraid will burn in hell if he doesn’t change. The Christian way is, above all, to keep loving him, which can hardly include any coercion of his sexuality. (When that is tried, the great majority of Christians approve of the law intervening).
The Christian God gave up all of his power out of love, gave up even human dignity and human life. An image offensive to Muslims but indispensable to Christians was apparently kept out of the conference: the crucifix. Often worn over a woman’s breasts or on a man’s chest, it is an image not only of God, but also of God dying nearly naked and in agony. To Muslims, it is blasphemy broadcast through lewd idolatry. No explanation is likely to change their minds, but we should at least try to get across our commitment. We should state plainly that not only are we inspired by this image, but that we shaped our societies around it. It led us to express love not through power but through its sacrifice, so that, over time, we came to see defending the weak as the only legitimate use of force, limited our governments accordingly, and emerged looking—to Muslims—thoroughly godless. We’re not: we’ve merely got the societies our God demanded, and most of us are happy to serve our God within them.
The cost of a phony love-fest between Christian and Muslim leaders could be high. There is already a great imbalance in knowledge or respect, if not both. As part of our confirmation course, when I was a teenage Methodist in rural Ohio in the 1970s, we were taken not only to a synagogue but to a mosque and learned the basics of both faiths. But the Muslim cleric who lectured to us clearly disapproved of Christianity, and the minister misled him to keep the peace. We don’t want to be called Mohammedans, the Muslim huffed; we don’t worship Mohammed, who was a man. The minister jumped in to assure him that we were just the same—we didn’t call ourselves Jesus-ans or anything like that. I nearly gasped at the lie, but I wasn’t bold enough to challenge it.
I’m bolder now. (It’s amazing what a decade in Africa will do to you.) And truth in theology while theology approaches politics is worth a bold defense. Essential to Muslim extremism is the notion that the West is decadent and not attached to its professed values. “Violence will weaken political support for Israel” has a religious parallel: “The West resists adopting Islam only because Muslims do not push hard enough against Christianity.” Not to speak up for Christianity with complete honesty sends our Muslim interlocutors home with a time-bomb version of us: either that we have no objection to being like them, or that we are in essence like them already. America has made the mistake of assuming our values are universal, and we may be encouraging the same kind of assumption about ourselves.