by Robert P. Sellers
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Winter 2023-24 - Religious Pluralism in the Modern World
Exploring Interreligious Relations and Interfaith Culture
Winter 2023-24
Religious Pluralism in the Modern World
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MAJOR INTERFAITH STAKEHOLDERS
INTERFAITH CENTER AT THE PRESIDIO
ICNY's Interfaith Matters Blog
ICNY's Interfaith Matters Podcast
PARLIAMENT OF THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS
The Next Parliament: August 14-18, 2023 in Chicago, IL
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Our Muslime Neighbor Initiative
Interview with Henry Yampolsky
Practicing Spirituality with Native Americans
Practicing Spirituality at Work
Announcing URI's New Executive Director: Jerry White
Spring 2024 - Adaptive Leadership in Challenging Times
Exploring Interreligious Relations and Interfaith Culture
Spring 2024
Adaptive Leadership in Challenging Times
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Register for Seeking Religious Literacy, an online, self-paced course that seeks religious literacy as an essential good in the world today.
MAJOR INTERFAITH STAKEHOLDERS
INTERFAITH CENTER AT THE PRESIDIO
ICNY's Interfaith Matters Blog
ICNY's Interfaith Matters Podcast
PARLIAMENT OF THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS
The Next Parliament: August 14-18, 2023 in Chicago, IL
A Religious Response to Violence
Our Muslime Neighbor Initiative
Interview with Henry Yampolsky
Practicing Spirituality with Native Americans
Practicing Spirituality at Work
Announcing URI's New Executive Director: Jerry White
How Covenantal Pluralism Can Promote Peace
Biden's Dilemma Over the Israel-Hamas War
TIO Public Square
Biden's Dilemma Over the Israel-Hamas War
by Robert P. Sellers
President Joe Biden faces multiple challenges as he seeks reelection – immigration, the economy, a divided nation, his age, an unconventional opponent – but perhaps his greatest conundrum is how to react to the Israel-Hamas War. For years, he has described himself as “a Zionist in my heart.” He was born in 1942, during World War II and six years before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.
Thus, as a child and adolescent the accounts of German prison camps and the horrific suffering and death of the Jews made a strong impression on his young mind. By his own admission, his father had a “preoccupation with the Holocaust,” often declaring that “the world stood silently by in the 1930s in the face of Hitler.” As an adult, Biden took his children, and later his grandchildren, to the infamous Dachau Concentration Camp, believing it appropriate to teach them about both the terrifying cruelty that occurred there and the silent apathy that allowed it.
Golda Meir — Photo: Wikimedia
During his more than 50 years in government service – as a senator, vice president and now president – he has maintained his “unshakable” commitment to Israel. He has met with every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir in 1973, who told him that Israel’s “secret weapon” was that “we have no other place to go.” Biden has never forgotten that conversation. From time to time, however, while he has expressed public support for Israel, he has privately shared concerns with successive Israeli leaders over their policies and actions.
It is Biden’s prolonged backing of Israel that has gotten him votes from the evangelical Christian voting bloc. Ron Dermer, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, recognizes the political power of religious conservatives. He has urged Israel to put more emphasis on winning the favor of American evangelical Christians than Jews. He argued, “People have to understand that the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians,” noting that evangelicals are about a quarter of America’s citizenry while Jews comprise less than two percent of the population.
An independent news agency, funded in part by the Qatari government, explains that “[al]though President Biden may use less crude rhetoric [than the former president] and [has] reinstated humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, his position does not constitute any real shift from that of Trump and thus [it] similarly gratifies the desires of evangelicals.”
Photo: Facebook
Many of these evangelicals self-identify as Christian Zionists. The leading figure of this political and religious ideology is John Hagee, senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and the founder of Christians United for Israel, the most influential American Christian Zionist organization with some 10 million members. This philosophy espouses “the belief that the modern state of Israel is the result of Biblical prophecy, namely the notion that 4,000 years ago God promised the land to the Jews, who will rule it until Jesus’ return to Jerusalem and the rapture – at which time Jews must convert to Christianity or be sent to hell.”
While President Biden is not a Christian Zionist, he is nonetheless a resolute champion of Israel as America’s greatest ally in the Middle East, one who recognizes that the Jewish State is surrounded by Arab nations that have historically displayed varying degrees of hostility toward Israel. As he has said, “Were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe. It’s the only ultimate guarantee.”
But Biden faces a dilemma as he moves toward the presidential election in November 2024. On the one hand, he experiences opposition from some congressional members of his own party.
Prime Minister Netanyahu — Photo: Chatham House CC BY 4.0 Deed
Progressive Democrats are disappointed in his unquestioned support of the government of Israel and they disapprove of his waiting so long to challenge Prime Minister Netanyahu about the way he is conducting this war. The loss of life in Gaza, more than 35,000 Palestinians – compared to the approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians, including some 120 American, French and Thai citizens, murdered or taken hostage in the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 – is incredibly unbalanced. This tragic one-sidedness breaks a cardinal rule of just war theory which states that “the desired end should be proportional to the means used.”
The progressive caucus therefore applauded Biden’s decision to withhold a shipment of weapons contingent upon whether Israel launches a full-scale ground assault on Rafah, the city where as many as a million Palestinians have fled military attacks elsewhere. But the president’s later decision to release the $1.2 billion in tank ammunition, tactical vehicles and mortar rounds angered these Democrats again.
The initial announcement that the administration was pausing the shipment of arms was encouraging, said Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), who explained:
I think this is really speaking to the large swath of the Democratic Caucus that needs to see a change. It has been very satisfying to see [that] the message, I believe, is getting through, it’s getting delivered. “We’re trying to turn the Titanic. Israel is a strong ally of ours. I think most Americans support Israel as a sovereign, secure Jewish state, and they’re also holding this deep despair about the way [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has conducted the offensive in Gaza.
It makes sense, then, that veteran leaders like Nancy Pelosi as well as newcomers like Balint were disturbed when the White House changed its course and announced the weapons would be sent. Senator Bernie Sanders had urged President Biden to withhold the newest shipment of arms to Israel as a way of pressuring Netanyahu to alter his war strategy. Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Sanders and director of More Perfect Union, said in a CNN interview that the foreign aid to Israel “cannot come in and just go right out.” But it seemed like a quick reversal of policy with Biden’s announcement of the change of plans. The disapproval of Sanders and other Democrats was stark, because of the implication that further innocents in Gaza would surely die.
Photo: Wikimedia
This criticism of the current administration has been echoed on numerous college campuses across the country, where supporters of humanitarian efforts to help Palestinians have sometimes been chanting about “Genocide Joe.” The campus demonstrations have forced Biden to walk a tightwire between denouncing antisemitism and sanctioning the students’ right to protest. This balancing act has not been entirely successful, particularly as squads of police have dismantled campus encampments, fought with protesters – sometimes violently – and arrested more than 2,000 since mid-April 2024.
The analysis of the Brookings Institute is that even though the president has pled with Americans to reject anti-Palestinian sentiments, his self-identification with Israel has implicitly legitimized the violence in Gaza which has caused horrific human suffering. Even though unintentionally, “the president’s public support for Israel’s actions that have rendered thousands dead and wounded [plus] hundreds of thousands displaced has served to dehumanize Palestinians in the eyes of the public.”
Progressive Democrats in Congress are also incensed because Biden waited so long to call for a cease-fire despite continuing aggression and mounting civilian deaths. This faction of the Democrats can influence important segments of the population – Arab Americans, Muslims of many nationalities, and younger voters – so many of whom voted for Biden in 2020. Usamah Andrabi, of Justice Democrats, concludes: “President Biden has a made a massive miscalculation to align more closely with Netanyahu’s far-right government than [with] a majority of Democratic voters who support a cease-fire and oppose sending more bombs and weapons to the Israeli military.”
Regrettably for Biden’s efforts to unify his party, progressive Democratic activists are plotting to move the protest over the president’s handling of the war from the halls of Congress and the university campus quads to the Democratic National Convention floor in Chicago. The plan promises to generate a very divisive political battle. On the other hand, Biden faces almost constant opposition from Republicans, and disapproval over his response to this war is especially evident.
Robert Satloff — Photo: Washington Institute
Some Democrats back the government of Israel’s response, but the majority of Republicans are angered that Biden would censure Netanyahu’s war strategy by refusing to transfer to Israel the offensive weapons that had been approved by Congress. Many mainstream Jewish and pro-Israeli organizations across the country mirror this sharp criticism of the president by his Capitol Hill opponents. Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Biden’s decision “runs the risk of lengthening the fighting, causing more civilian casualties, undermining chances for a hostage/ceasefire deal, running out the clock on a Saudi agreement and extending the Gaza fighting so long that it hurts [Biden’s] reelection chances.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) declared: “I support Israel’s desire to destroy Hamas in Gaza. They attacked brutally on 7 October, and Hamas has to be destroyed in Gaza to the best that they can. To stand in front of that, that means President Biden wants Hamas to continue to exist in Gaza, which is a continuous threat to Israel. It’s wrong.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sounded an alarm that delaying the shipment would have negative consequences for the United States. He said: “If we stop weapons necessary to destroy the enemies of the state of Israel at a time of great peril, we will pay a price. This is obscene. It is absurd. Give Israel what they need to fight the war they can’t afford to lose.”
Frustrated, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and other Republicans rebuked President Biden by voting, 224 to 187, to force Biden to transfer the weapons to Israel. This action revealed the deeply divided opinion in Congress about the Israel-Hamas War. The GOP bill was supported by 16 Democrats while only 3 Republicans voted against it. Johnson also sought to court votes for the Republicans at the Israeli Embassy’s 76th anniversary celebration of the founding of Israel when, in his remarks, he delivered a covert critique of the president. He said: “Some leaders who have previously been proud to stand with Israel and even some who have made statements of solidarity following October 7, … suddenly began to backpedal on that support. On one day, they tell us that we can give no safe harbor to hate, but on the next they demand that Israel must give safe harbor to Hamas. They tell us they support Israel but they give cover to antisemitism.”
But Biden’s guidance of the U.S. response to the Israel-Hamas War is not a problem only in Congress. It also has greatly damaged his support across the nation among young voters. For example, Hayden Camarena, in Northern California, may skip voting in the 2024 presidential election altogether. Evan McKenzie, in battleground Wisconsin, wanted any candidate for president other than the two who are running again. In Philadelphia, Pru Carmichael is not even sure the election matters. According to an NBC News report, while these young voters live in different cities, pursue diverse careers and have varying political beliefs, they have one thing in common: they voted for Biden in 2020 and say they may not again in 2024.
While a number of policy misfires have disappointed young voters – in their view Biden’s insufficient response to climate change, his inability to cancel all student loan debt and the administration’s failure to codify Roe v. Wade – the White House response to the Israel-Hamas War has caused the greatest slippage with this voter bloc.
Photo: DeviantArt
Yet, if it were not enough that Biden’s decisions regarding Israel have alienated progressive Democrats and young voters, as well as justified the suspicions of Republicans that his administration is dangerously left-leaning, it is an even greater risk for his reelection chances that white evangelicals are a significant part of Donald Trump’s base. Mimi Kirk, editorial consultant at The Palestinian Policy Network, notes that with 81% of this Christian voting bloc supporting Trump in 2016, “he catered to them through such Israel-friendly moves as the transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and support for settlements and Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights.”
In summary, President Biden faces a tremendous problem as he tries to traverse the politically dangerous territory of an American response to the Israel-Hamas War. His difficulties bring into sharp relief the tensions between political and religious interpretations of current events, the obligations both to military alliances and humanitarian justice, the right of security for every American versus the right to public protest and freedom of speech, the contrast of defensive and offensive weapons and, finally, the different loyalties of older and younger voters.
Intriguingly, Biden’s reelection to a second term as President of the United States may not rely upon his domestic successes – such as getting control over the coronavirus pandemic, lowering job unemployment for Blacks, Hispanics and persons with disabilities, rebuilding our infrastructure, expanding benefits to toxic-exposed veterans, passing the first gun violence legislation in 30 years, providing student debt relief for middle- and working-class families and restoring an atmosphere of gravitas and integrity to the presidency. Instead, a war fought far from U.S. shores, and the complex situation of growing disapproval of the way this administration has responded to it, may cause Biden to lose the election in November.
Header Photo: The Spartan Shield
The Meaning of Truth has Changed…And that’s No Lie
TIO Public Square
The Meaning of Truth has Changed…And that’s No Lie
by Robert P. Sellers
I am old enough to have heard the story in elementary school about young George Washington cutting down his father’s cherry tree, and then declaring he could not tell a lie, so his father – celebrating his son’s honesty – did not punish him. A video on the History Channel, commenting on this story, explains that little is known about Washington’s childhood, except for this one beloved incident. According to the narrative, George received a hatchet as a gift when he was perhaps six years old, and his favorite pastime became chopping everything in sight, including his father’s favorite cherry tree.
Because the elder Washington had taught his son the value of truth-telling, he embraced and forgave the boy when George admitted his wrongdoing. The story, however, is legend and was invented by Parson Weems, an itinerant preacher. In 1809, a decade after President Washington’s death, Weems published this tale in a new edition of his book, Life of George Washington the Great. While there is no evidence that this account is true, parents and teachers have retold it for generations, wanting to inspire children to develop honesty as a virtue, modeled after the character of our country’s founding leader.
We have traveled a very long way from 1809 to 2024, from the first president fictitiously commemorated for his honesty to the 45th president notoriously documented as blatantly and excessively dishonest.
Donald Trump is infamously known as a liar. His “false or misleading claims total 30,507” during the four years of his presidency, says the fact checker team of The Washington Post, “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30507 over 4 years.” In 2017, barely a year into Trump’s term in office, the social justice Christian Jim Wallis, president and founder of Sojourners, wrote about Trump’s lies in Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump: “[C]onfronting falsehoods with the truth is absolutely crucial, and will have to be done by all of us…. So it’s time for us all to stop calling the presidency of Donald Trump “unprecedented.” Dangerous is the proper word.”
Kelly Brown Douglas, Distinguished Professor of Religion at Goucher College and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral, asks in her article for Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump:
How did it happen? How has a man whose campaign was filled with racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic vitriol and who mounted a racialized ‘birther’ campaign against the nation’s first African American president, while promising ‘Law and Order’/ Wall Building protectionist policies – how has this man been elected president in a country that proclaims ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ for all?
Granted, politicians will stretch the truth to gain favor and votes. Newswriter Jude Sherrin explains that, without contradiction, recent presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been guilty of this practice – and Joe Biden can be added to the list. But Trump’s massive catalog of lies stands alone in American history. Moreover, his three-year repeated recitation of the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election has duped millions of American voters.
Joseph Heller, in his 1961 novel Catch 22, was more prescient than he realized when he wrote:
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Retired U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly, after serving our country more than four decades in the military, served as White House Chief of Staff for President Trump from 2017 to 2019. During those years, he became increasingly disillusioned with Trump’s character and leadership. For a 2020 CNN television special titled “The Insiders: A Warning from former Trump Officials,” Kelly said: “The [depth] of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, [is] more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed and Wikipedia
It is fair to say that our ancestors who talked about George Washington’s unwavering commitment to the truth and our children today who recognize Donald Trump’s cavalier disregard for the truth reveal differences other than the passage of time. Even though a side-by-side comparison of these two presidents is a fiction that may only have occurred in the 45th President’s mind, it is ironic, for me, to imagine Washington saying “I cannot tell a lie” and Trump admitting “I cannot tell the truth.”
Yet, does Donald Trump stand alone in his denial and distortion of the truth in the public square? Not at all. A NY Times best-selling author, Robert Draper, published an article for The Atlantic titled “A political party unhinged from the truth.” The piece, adapted from Draper’s 2022 book, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost its Mind, tells of his repeated encounters with supporters of the new GOP. Draper reports: They “could not conceive of Trump’s adversaries possessing human attributes. Instead, they viewed Democrats, government bureaucrats, and members of the media … as any combination of Communists, traitors, swamp creatures, and human scum.” Convinced and compelled by Trump’s litany of lies, they believed that
the hallucinatory claim that a grand if largely unnamed conspiracy managed to snatch victory away from Trump and hand it to Joe Biden is not a trivial, stand-alone falsehood. Instead, it has become as central to the MAGA belief system as the crucifixion of Jesus is to Christianity. It affirms the martyrdom of their revered leader as well as the incorrigibility of his persecutors. Furthermore, it encourages the belief that the former president’s imagined adversaries across the globe have colluded with domestic malefactors to undermine all manner of American liberties. In these fevered scenarios, Venezuela and South Korea have corrupted our electoral ballots, China has implanted COVID vaccines with mind-control devices, and liberal Jewish billionaires like George Soros have underwritten acts of domestic terrorism.
The lies Trump has so continuously told have given his admirers and followers permission to lie. People who likely grew up valuing truth-telling have relished the freedom they now feel to say anything and everything that comes to mind, believing that by repeatedly uttering falsehoods, no matter how outrageous, their lies somehow become the truth.
Again, I am not suggesting that there are no Democrats or Independents who have believed and spread lies or unjustly denigrated their political opponents. Instead, the point is the obvious fact that in our rancorously divided nation, veracity has been a frequent victim.
Have Americans simply lost their respect for the truth? Or, has the meaning of truth changed, as it has morphed into “alternative facts,” as designated by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway?
Photo: Digital Notebook
In 2005, comedian, writer and political satirist Stephen Colbert hosted a new television show, “The Colbert Report.” In the first episode of that award-winning, 11 season entertainment phenomenon, Colbert introduced a word he had made up, “truthiness.” He explained: “Truthiness is ‘what I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.” Truthiness, then, has no reliance upon what the facts can support.
In today’s America, lies, conspiracy theories, alternative facts, and truthiness often dominate the media. These duplicitous attacks on the truth can be further enhanced now by artificial intelligence. It is sometimes difficult, therefore, to discern what is actually true but that is what we must do. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham – in The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels – challenges his readers to learn from the lessons of the past and lean into the future with hope and conviction. He writes:
History – and that is all we have to go on – suggests that a president’s vices and his virtues matter enormously, for politics is a human, not a clinical, undertaking. So, too, do the vices and virtues of the people at large, for leadership in the art of the possible, and possibility is determined by whether generosity can triumph over selfishness in the American soul.
If history has taught us anything – not only in fables like the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, but also through the failures and victories of our nation, its leaders and people – it is that truth is a virtue that cannot, should not, must not, be sacrificed on the altar of expediency and success. The meaning of truth in the public square has radically changed, and if the soul of America is to be saved, we must identify and reject lies and work together to reclaim the best angels of our beloved nation.
An ancient prayer by an unknown writer expresses our collective need so well:
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth.
From the laziness that is content with half-truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
O God of Truth, deliver us.
Header Photo: Unsplash
Swami Vivekananda and Interreligious Harmony
TIO Public Square
The Meaning of Truth has Changed…And that’s No Lie
by Robert P. Sellers
Diana Eck, professor of comparative religions and Indian studies at Harvard University and Director of its Pluralism Project, published an award-winning book in 2001 titled A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” has become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. In that volume, Eck claims and then demonstrates that the United States is now the most pluralistic nation on the globe. No matter where one lives in America, it is typical to encounter people who follow other traditions, or no religious path at all.
Many Americans celebrate this religious and philosophical diversity, realizing that multiple worldviews, values, beliefs and experiences can create a more productive and interesting society. Others, however, fear what differs from the way things used to be, and they long for a return to that time when life was more familiar and comfortable, when America was “great.”
Religious Pluralism Defined
One of the most helpful contributions of Eck’s award-winning book is the way she explains and demystifies the concept of “pluralism.” She writes:
The language of pluralism is the language not just of difference but of engagement, involvement, and participation. It is the language of traffic, exchange, dialogue, and debate. [For some people, ‘pluralism’] has a bad name…. [It means] the chaos of ‘anything goes.’ It means unprincipled relativism and therefore moral decay. It means giving up on one’s own, usually Christian, truth claims in favor of an unconvincing ‘religious correctness.’
However, she explains:
Pluralism is not an ideology, not a leftist scheme, and not a free-form relativism. Rather, pluralism is the dynamic process through which we engage with one another in and through our very deepest differences.
First, pluralism is not just another word for diversity. It goes beyond mere plurality or diversity to active engagement with that plurality….
Second, pluralism goes beyond mere tolerance to the active attempt to understand the other…. Tolerance alone does little to bridge the chasms of stereotypes and fear that may, in fact, dominate the mutual image of the other.
Third, pluralism is not simply watering down differently-held beliefs to the lowest common denominator. It does not displace or eliminate deep religious commitment or secular commitments, for that matter. It is, rather, the encounter of commitments.
When I call myself a pluralist, I am not saying that I endorse a scary relativism, or am merely tolerant of people who are different from me, or water down my beliefs so that somehow they agree with the views of people who follow other spiritual or philosophical paths than I. Rather, I mean I am determined to befriend those who believe differently, so that we can understand each other better and together might work to make the world more just, peaceful and sustainable. This cooperative work will be more effective when we see and address shared problems through our own distinctive religious and ideological commitments.
An Unusual Breakfast
The table was appropriately prepared as we sat down to a meal both kosher and halal. I was meeting the guests seated on either side of me for the first time. To my left was Rabbi David Saperstein, United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom under President Obama, and to my right was Sheikh Saleh Abdullah bin Humaid, President of the Consultative Assembly of Saudi Arabia and Imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca. As a Christian minister and Baptist professor from Texas, and Chair Elect of the convening organization hosting the meal, I sat between them. There we were: a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim, representing the three great Abrahamic religions – siblings descended from the same Semitic ancestor and each committed to belief in and submission to the One God.
Where did this unusual shared meal occur? It happened during the sixth convening of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City, Utah, in October 2015.
The Parliament is arguably the oldest, most documented, and largest convener of religious followers on earth. Sometimes credited with originating the term “interreligious dialogue,” it provides opportunities to experience similarly significant conversations with the Religious Other which are limited only by one’s personal inclinations and her or his willingness to engage those who are different. My breakfast companions and I were not only civil to one another, but engaged genuinely, desiring, and expressing harmony despite our religious, cultural, ethnic and political differences.
The First Parliament
The original gathering in 1893 has been termed “the dawn of religious pluralism” by Richard Hughes Seager (I recommend reading his book The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893). The World’s Parliament of Religions, the precursor and model for the contemporary Parliament of the World’s Religions, was conceived to be a vital part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair crafted to celebrate the “discovery” of the New World by Christopher Columbus and organized to rejuvenate the city of Chicago after the devastating fire of 1871.
1893 Parliament Gathering — Photo: Wikipedia
According to religious studies scholar Richard Hughes Seager:
In September of 1889, when plans for the fair were just getting under way, Charles Carroll Bonney, a Chicago lawyer and a layman in the Swedenborgian church, proposed that the Exposition Corporation sponsor a series of international congresses to complement the material triumphs and technological marvels that formed the substance of the Exposition’s displays. ‘Something higher and nobler,’ he wrote, ‘is demanded by the enlightened and progressive spirit of the age.’
Of the two hundred such congresses convened during the Exposition – focused on themes as diverse as “women’s progress, the press, history, fine arts, public health, medicine and surgery, engineering, temperance, government, social reform, and religion,” which collectively drew “an estimated seven hundred thousand people in the course of the Columbian summer of 1893” – the World’s Parliament of Religions garnered “the most attention, the most applause, and the best press according to David Burg in his book Chicago’s White City of 1893.
The Goal of the First Parliament
As Marcus Braybook recounts in his book Widening Vision: The World Congress of Faiths and the Growing Interfaith Movement, Charles Bonney’s desire was that the World’s Parliament of Religions would “unite all religion against irreligion,” and that the Golden Rule would be “the basis of this union.” His hope was that “when the religious faiths of the world recognize each other as brothers, children of one Father, whom all profess to love and serve, then and not till then, will the nations of the earth yield to the Spirit of concord and learn war no more.”
He was convinced that persons of multiple faith traditions who choose to live as neighbors could ultimately effect change and inspire good in the world. Bonney’s belief was echoed, more than a century later, in the assertion of Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Küng, who famously said that “There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions.”
Parliament of Religions September 1893. On the platform (left to right) Virchand Gandhi, Anagarika Dharmapala, Swami Vivekananda, G. Bonet Maury — Photo - Wikipedia
The opening day for the highly anticipated 17-day festival was September 11, 1893. The Columbian Liberty Bell tolled ten times for the great religions of the world, as they were identified at the end of the nineteenth century: three Indic Religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism); three Eastern Religions (Taoism, Confucianism, and Shintoism); and four Mediterranean Religions (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). At that same moment, a joyous procession into the Hall of Columbus and onto the decorated stage began, creating a colorful display of distinguished spiritual figures from many diverse faiths.
As Seager poetically recreates the scene in his book The Dawn of Religious Pluralism, there were the ocher robes of Buddhist ascetics; the vermilion cloaks and turbans of Hindu swamis; the silk vestments of the Confucians, Taoists, and Shinto priests; and the somber raiment of Protestant ministers, all gathered together on the platform around a Catholic cardinal dressed in scarlet and seated upon a high chair of state.
This initial excitement did not wane over the two and a half weeks of meetings. Inspired by stirring public speeches and stimulating personal encounters, attendees went home flush with idealism and zeal. Bonney optimistically predicted, “Henceforth the religions of the world will make war, not on each other, but on the giant evils that afflict mankind.”
One reason for the high esteem with which that original meeting is held was the presence in 1893 of Swami Vivekananda, “a captivating Hindu monk [who] addressed 5,000 assembled delegates, greeting them with the words, ‘Sisters and brothers of America!’” His speech, which introduced Hinduism to America, is memorized by school children in India to this day. Swami Vivekananda became one of the most forceful and popular speakers at the first Parliament.
Swami Vivekananda and His Legacy
Swami Vivekananda — Photo: Wikimedia
From this impressive spokesperson for Asian inclusivity has come a legacy of accepting religious diversity and recognizing that multiple spiritual paths offer valid avenues for improving the world. Vivekananda made this point 125 years ago when he stood before the assembly to declare:
Much has been said of the common ground of religious unity…. But if anyone here hopes that this unity would come by the triumph of any one of these religions and the destruction of the others, to him I say, ‘Brother, yours is an impossible hope.’ Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian? God fobid…
If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: it has proved to the world that holiness, purity, and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character.
The impact of this Hindu monk upon the progressive spirit of religious leaders who attended the 1893 assembly was remarkable. Merwin-Marie Shell, the secretary to Bishop John Keane of the Catholic University of America, commented that Vivekananda was “beyond question the most popular and influential man in the Parliament.…[who] on all occasions…was received with greater enthusiasm than any other speaker, Christian or ‘Pagan.’”
The Modern Parliaments
In 1987, an idea began to be discussed around another breakfast table – the one in the monastery at the Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Hyde Park in Chicago. Swami Varadananda, a former trustee of the modern Parliament’s board of directors, recalls that he and other devotees of the order founded by Swami Vivekananda were interested in celebrating the centenary of that first international convening.
2018 Parliament Justice Plenary (Left to right: James Lawson, Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan, Kasha Nabagesera — Photo: Institute for Ecological Civilization
To help bring this dream into being, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions was incorporated as a non-profit organization dedicated to extending the spirit and legacy of the 1893 event through subsequent global gatherings. Since that dreaming session by a group of contemporary Hindu monks in Chicago, there have been eight modern international Parliament convenings: Chicago, 1993; Cape Town, 1999; Barcelona, 2004; Melbourne, 2009; Salt Lake City, 2015; Toronto, 2018; a virtual gathering during Covid, 2021; and Chicago, 2023.
The convenings have drawn between 6,000 and 10,000 persons from more than 70 countries and 50 religions and spiritualities for days of personal encounters and interreligious dialogue, plenary speeches from world spiritual leaders, hundreds of breakout sessions, musical concerts, art exhibits, and educational and craft concessions from around the world.
What is the visionary legacy of Vivekananda, now 131 years after his appearance at the first Parliament? One only must consider the vision statement of the Parliament today, which states:
The vision of the Parliament of the World’s Religions is of a just, peaceful, and sustainable world in which:
Religious and spiritual communities live in harmony and contribute to a better world from their riches of wisdom and compassion.
Religious and cultural fears and hatreds are replaced with understanding and respect. People everywhere come to know and care for their neighbors.
The richness of human and religious diversity is woven into the fabric of communal, civil, societal, and global life.
The world’s most powerful and influential institutions move beyond narrow self-interest to realize common good.
The Earth and all life are cherished, protected, healed, and restored. All people commit to living out their highest values and aspirations
The Parliament is just one of thousands of grassroots interreligious organizations worldwide. The hope for peace in our country and the world depends in part on our ability to seek and maintain harmony, mutual respect, understanding, kindness and neighborliness among people who differ religiously and philosophically. When these positive behaviors cannot be achieved, a violent attack on a Sikh gurdwara, Jewish synagogue, or Islamic mosque might tragically result – or, more horrifying, may lead to war and ethnic cleansing such as in Kosovo, Nigeria, Myanmar, or Gaza.
May we confront this potential evil by committing ourselves to “living out [our] highest values and aspirations.” May harmony and not animosity, appreciation instead of fear and cooperation rather than competition characterize our relationships with persons whose spiritual or philosophical loyalties differ from our own. Even if we have never heard of him, may the story of the young Hindu monk Vivekananda inspire us to acts of kindness and generosity of spirit.
Header Photo: Parliament of the World’s Religions Facebook
‘On The Border’ — Franklin Graham’s Religious-Political Scramble
TIO Public Square
‘On The Border’ — Franklin Graham’s Religious-Political Scramble
by Robert P. Sellers
My son-in-law enjoys Tex-Mex food, and there is plenty of it in Texas, where he lives. One of his favorites is a Southwest Scramble – a spicy mixture of sausage, onions, green and red peppers, eggs, milk, Colby Monterey jack cheese, tortilla chips and salsa. This menu item is usually what he orders when we go to one of our favorite breakfast spots.
Photo: Unsplash
But “On the Border” does not always refer to tasty Tex-Mex food, as anyone who lives in the American Southwest knows well. For months, national attention has been drawn to the challenges which thousands of immigrants face at the U.S. southern border, now accentuated by Governor Greg Abbott’s signing into law a bill making illegal immigration a Texas state law – dedicating more than $1.5 billion to his war on the border – and launching a political showdown with the Biden administration. It is precisely in the midst of this volatile situation, only a few months before the election of the next president, that Franklin Graham has planned an evangelistic campaign, a God Loves You Frontera (‘Border’) Tour, to Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, Presidio and El Paso, Texas; Tucson and Yuma, Arizona; and Chula Vista, California.
Graham, son of the late international Christian evangelist Billy Graham, is the CEO of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse. Both organizations are massively influential among Christians, especially evangelicals, and not surprisingly they are also very wealthy religious enterprises. The Evangelistic Association reported a recent annual income of $168 million, while Samaritan’s Purse has net assets of over $1.2 billion.
Franklin Graham is also an unabashed, faithful supporter and promoter of Donald Trump. In many ways, he has been one of the most vociferous cheerleaders for the former president, one whom he said has “defended the Christian faith, although he was not the best example of it.” Perhaps that is the reason he has finally admitted that Trump lost the 2020 election, and has pledged he will stay out of politics until after the GOP primary is finished.
But the God Loves You Frontera Tour is a subtle move to support his friend, President Trump. Actually, it’s quite devious. It is political persuasion masquerading as religious revival.
Any good GOP aficionado knows that Republicans are screaming about the problems “on the border” and blaming President Biden for every manner of shortcoming, from having an “open border policy” to allowing our national security and public safety to be at risk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is committing hundreds of millions of dollars to stop the flow of immigrants across the border and is threatening to lead Texas to secede from the Union. Recently, Donald Trump single-handedly stopped the passage of a bi-partisan immigration bill in the House – a bill whose development had been in process for months – by convincing his Republican congressional followers to vote against it so that blaming Democrats and Biden for problems on the border can be a major part of his presidential campaign.
During his God Loves You Tour, Graham will visit ten border towns, to which he insists his only wish is to bring a message of personal salvation that he believes is found in their becoming Christians. The Evangelistic Association’s marketing plan seeks to engage evangelicals who support Graham to join the effort on the border through their prayers (and, by implication, financial gifts): “As we prepare for this 10-city tour from Texas to California, will you pray for God to open hearts on both sides of the border – and transform entire communities with the Gospel?” This call for the prayers from Christians is the first way that Graham’s God Loves You Tour can be termed a “religious-political scramble.” Graham wants Christians to pray for the conversion of persons on both sides of the border – and, he wants them to believe the border is in a horrible mess because of the Democrats and Joe Biden.
A second incongruent element of the evangelist’s effort is the contradictory flavors of what Graham has previously said about immigration and what he is claiming now about God’s love (and his concern) for the people on both sides of the border. Startlingly, attempting to justify Trump’s presidential comments about immigrants, he publicly asserted that immigration is not an issue in the Bible! One would think that any Christian, especially an experienced preacher, would know that how the outsider in our midst is treated is indeed a Bible issue. Joel Baden, professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School, points out the absurdity of this assertion by Graham, stating that “[a]cross the books of both testaments, in narrative, law, prophecy, poetry and parable, the Bible consistently spells out that it is the responsibility of the citizen to ensure that the immigrant, the stranger, the refugee, is respected, welcomed and cared for.”
Photo: Bible Hub
For example, in the Hebrew Scriptures (Leviticus 19:34) one reads the command: “Don't mistreat any foreigners who live in your land. Instead, treat them as well as you treat citizens and love them as much as you love yourself. Remember, you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” According to Mark Wingfield, there are 92 times the Hebrew word translated “immigrant” in English is used in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and “in every case, the admonition is for acceptance and welcome and kindness.”
Quickly noting the incompatible ingredients of Graham’s planned tour, the social justice organization, Faithful America, has written and circulated a petition objecting to the Frontera Tour. While the 71-year-old Graham has said, “We are taking the God Loves You Tour to the southern border this year because it is one of the neediest areas of our country at this time, and people need to hear a message of hope from God’s Word,” the petition claims: “The upcoming ‘frontera’ iteration of Graham’s tour feels especially distasteful and hypocritical given that . . . Graham once falsely claimed that immigration is ‘not a Bible issue.’” Almost 21,000 have signed this petition imploring Graham not to go to the border.
Immigration and border security are a major part of Trump’s campaign against President Biden. Thus, although Graham defends his string of rallies with “evangelism-speak,” his ulterior motive of calling attention to the problems on the border and attributing them to Biden seems clear.
This religious-political scrambling of motivations behind the tour – one overt and perhaps the more important one covert – underscores the last characteristic of this odd mixture, which is the inappropriate marriage of religion and politics in a multi-city event devised to gain maximum news coverage. For all who care about the intersection of freedom of religious expression and the role of government, this is an attack on the separation of church and state, which is protected in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The problem here is the pretense of conducting religious meetings that really have clear political overtones. In 1954, an amendment to the tax code was introduced by then Senator and Democratic Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. This legislation prohibited organizations from involvement in partisan politics at the risk of losing their tax-exempt status. For decades this “Johnson Amendment” has been followed, but more recently it has been challenged by those who want to allow religious organizations to promote political candidates. Strictly speaking, by utilizing his evangelistic tour to call attention to political issues on the U.S. southern border, Graham is putting at risk the tax-free status of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse.
At one of Graham’s previous God Loves You tours, held in Spokane, Washington, in 2018, he told a reporter multiple times that salvation was his main message, that he only spoke of politics “for five minutes, maybe four.” Yet, after attending the rally, she wrote that while Graham “casts the events as ‘prayer and evangelism,’ . . . the tour is, in fact, much more akin to a political rally than a religious revival, and Graham benefits from blending the two in order to turn out like-minded crowds of hardline, [Christian] conservatives.”
To those familiar with the Christian neo-conservative terminology, the word “decision” has two meanings: it is the familiar Christian evangelism message of choosing to trust in Jesus, but also a political suggestion to vote a certain way in a coming election. As the reporter notes, “Graham is careful to stress that he tells people only to ‘vote Biblically,’ but this is a code his followers understand.”
There is a humanitarian crisis on the southern border. Thousands of poor and desperate people are crossing over the border into the United States, hoping to escape persecution or physical harm in their own countries, only to encounter barbed wire barriers, border guards, holding cells, or thoughtless shuttling to unprepared northern cities as political fodder in a presidential battle. Many of these people have walked for hundreds of miles. They may have paid enormous fees to criminal “coyotes” who have duped them, emptying their savings trying to buy freedom and opportunity. Some of them have lost loved ones on their difficult and dangerous journey.
What is needed most on the border is humanitarian aid along with policies that will make it easier for refugees to seek asylum and immigrants to start the process of seeking citizenship. Samaritan’s Purse reports that it is working along the southern border to bring relief to the people crossing the border. Working in “Del Rio, Laredo, McAllen, and other communities to provide water, food, and other emergency supplies, including hygiene kits and diapers” is commendable. It is absolutely appropriate for volunteers working with Samaritan’s Purse to identify themselves as Christians, as “people who care," as long as they don't imply that Christians are the only people who care.
But for there to be a 10-city God Loves You Tour at this precise moment – highlighting the political ramifications on the southern border under the guise of addressing the spiritual needs of persons on both sides of the border – is a tasteless and contrived scheme. It suggests that the answer to the existential human problems of exhaustion, hopelessness, illness, sorrow, poverty, threats of violence and overwhelming discouragement can be found in conversion to one particular religious path.
A Southwest Scramble” is a delightful breakfast entrée. The opposing ingredients – like milk and salsa, or onions and cheese – make an interesting and tasty meal. But Franklin Graham’s religious-political scramble” on the border is anything but interesting or tasty. The incongruent ingredients of this tour give religious freedom severe indigestion! His couching of this only slightly disguised tour as evangelism while seeking the support of his millions of Twitter and Facebook followers is problematic. His odd claim to be concerned about the eternal welfare of those on both sides of the border when he has infamously said that immigration is not a Bible issue is hypocritical. Most troublesome, his mixing of religion and politics – and thereby his attack on the separation of church and state and his disregard of the Johnson Amendment – is a strategy that Trump and thousands of Christian Nationalists no doubt applaud.
Header Photo: Rawpixel
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