Today, faith divides. Never in our history has the nation been so awash in—and so torn by—discussions and debates about faith. Civil libertarians decry the blurring of the line between church and state. Judges attempt to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses. Schools petition for the right to pray while others fight to remove “under God” from our Pledge of Allegiance. The issues of abortion, homosexuality, and gay marriage trigger huge fights about the sacredness of life, the nature of marriage, and what is acceptable in the sight of God. A church group from Topeka, Kansas, even pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, “thanking God for dead soldiers.” Why? They want to drive home their belief that God is killing soldiers to punish Americans for condoning homosexuality.
That’s all we seem to hear about. We don’t hear about the ordinary people whose faith inspires them to do the extraordinary: cops, teachers, social workers, district attorneys, directors of non-profit organizations, state officials, youth workers, and so many others. They are Christians and Jews, Muslims and Baha’is, Hindus and American Indians. They are real people doing real work, people who don’t beat others up with their faith or “lord” it over nonbelievers. They are doing some of the toughest work in the country.
And they keep their faith hidden, quiet, even silent. Their amazing stories don’t get told, and we don’t hear about a faith that spurns blame, a faith that serves.
Yes, religion can kill. Catholics and Protestants have fought for centuries in Ireland. Europe witnessed millions of deaths during the Reformation and Counter Reformation. America has recorded its own sad chapters of persecution of blacks, of Native Americans, of Mormons, often in the name of religion. The West is under attack by Islamic extremists who claim to be “people of faith.” And many in the West label Islam as a violent religion or a religion of the violent: “I think Muhammad was a terrorist,” stated the Reverend Jerry Falwell on “60 Minutes” in October 2002. He said we should “blow them all away in the name of the Lord.”
Sam Harris, in his best selling book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, lays intolerance and killing at religion’s door: “A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion… It is what we do with words like ‘God’ and ‘paradise’ and ‘sin’ in the present that will determine our future.” Will that future be more of what Harris documents, like “the one million people dying in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan”? Will it be the dark, extremist side of faith?
Harris and others miss the untold story of a faith that bridges, not divides, that accepts, not judges, that nourishes, not crushes.
Indeed, the international conversation about faith and public life is far from complete. Implacable hostility and division are not the last words. Millions of good people are anchored in and guided by faith, people who feed the hungry, shelter the poor and homeless, visit prisoners, work with the wounded, protect abused and neglected children, and house victims of domestic violence. They work with the crime victims, those who have been sexually assaulted, with communities that gangs have terrorized, with children whose parents are in jail, and with the legions of teenagers who have no positive adult role models in their lives.
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