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"Why Religious Diversity is a Bad Idea"
I know we’re not supposed to dump on tolerance and part of what it means to be a Christian today is try to understand people of other faiths. But I have severe reservations about Christians suddenly becoming tolerant. How would you like to be the one tolerated? Tolerance is always a position for those that are in power and Christianity is in the process of losing its power. So one of the things that Christians have to do is not ask, how are we going to understand other faiths, but how are other faiths going to understand us?

I was at a small school called Hendricks in Conway, Arkansas once. I gave a lecture that one of the faculty members disliked intensely. When I finished, he said, “Hauerwas, your problem is you give us no theory that will enable us to talk with Buddhists.” And I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. How many do you have here in Conway? And what good would a theory do you if you wanted to talk to them? I would just think you’d go out and say, ‘What in the world are you doing here in Conway?’ and then you might strike up an interesting conversation.” The idea that we need some policy toward other faiths indicated that you probably are thinking more like an American. How do you deal with religious diversity in America, rather than thinking like a Christian?

How a Christian thinks isn’t about how do we make America work, but how a Christian thinks is how do we witness to people our love of God in a way that they will want, as a matter of fact, to talk to us because we have something interesting to say. This is extremely important because I fear that in the name of religious diversity, Christians increasingly are learning to say things like: “Well, I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.” What an odd grammar of speech that is that would derive from the presumption that I need to be tolerant!

Christians don’t need to be tolerant. We need to be humble. And we need to be humble, that is, to have the virtue of humility, because we worship a crucified Savior. How can anyone that worships a crucified Savior have the presumption that when we talk to people who are not of our faith, that somehow we have some presumptive superiority to them? Of course, all of this is being occasioned, I think, in the current enthusiasm for religious diversity, for religious pluralism is being shaped by what people feel is the threat of Islam. That is, I think, a very bad reason for Christians to suddenly get interested in religious diversity. We’ve got, as a matter of fact as Christians, to always want to be able to be challenged by people who do not believe as we believe, in order to better understand what we believe.

One of my close friends is a man named David Burrell, who is a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross from the University of Notre Dame. When David was in his 50s, he got a sense that he needed to renew his vocation, so he asked to be sent to teach in the seminary in Bangladesh. There he discovered that he was training young men to serve basically an Islamic country. But he didn’t know anything about Islam. So David, being David, learned Arabic and in so learning Arabic he read the Koran. He became one of the really skillful interpreters of Islam, submitting to study in Cairo and now has gone to great lengths translating, for example, the 99 names for God. He speaks all over the world in Islamic countries. He has a background also in the study of Judaism, being a medievalist looking at the relationship between Maimonides, Ibn Sina, and Aquinas.

Now, if we’re really going to be serious about religious dialogue, we’re going to have to really do that kind of close, hard work. The idea that we get together because we’re all representatives of a religion is a deep mistake, because the very idea of religion tends to make religions part of the privacy of life that the modern state wants to use to domesticate serious religious convictions. That’s the reason why Islam isn’t happy about the privatization of Christianity or Judaism in societies like America because they don’t understand that their faith is anything but a strong political expression. It requires a strong political expression.

Christians also think that. We just got domesticated in the interest of peace in the modernity that allegedly was being supplied by the modern nation state. So what I think we’re confronting is a really quite extraordinary historical challenge in which Christians learn to reclaim their faith exactly because we’re losing our political power in the kind of societies in which we find ourselves. As a result, we will be able to enter into more intense dialogue with other faiths exactly because we’re not in control.

 

Conversation with Stanley Hauerwas

Lydia Talbot: You are provocative, Dr. Hauerwas! You just lived up to your reputation. How did you feel about the Parliament of the World’s Religions when it convened in 1993 in Chicago on it’s centennial celebration?

Stanley Hauerwas: I had deep ambiguity about it. I think it’s a kind of false atmosphere where people get to feel good about the fact that they’re getting together in a way that doesn’t expose deep difference.

Talbot: Now, there are about six thousand people from around the globe and 125 religions who might disagree with you on that, as well as your interpretation of the word tolerance. Can you unpack that a bit because instead of our understanding other faiths, you’re advising us to have other faiths understand Christians?

Hauerwas: Well, that’s a good place to start. What I suggested was that it’s not a question of...I mean, when you’re tolerant you’re in power so you’re tolerating someone. Do you want to be tolerated? No, you don’t want to be tolerated, you want to talk to someone back in a way that you have something to say. So what tolerance does is evacuate difference, exactly what we’re going to have to start looking for is difference. To see where it is, we really come to disagreements. What I fear in America is that Christians continue to presume that they understand you, but you don’t understand us and so tolerance is always a kind of way of reinforcing my presumption that I’m in control but you’re not.

Talbot: Well, the language of faith is a semantically bumpy road. Daniel?

Daniel Pawlus: I was going to say, you’re trying to sweep away this superiority and get us more to the humility that you were talking about, to even the table or even the score, so to speak. Is that what you were alluding to?

Hauerwas: Certainly. I certainly think that Christians have an obligation to embody the virtue of humility, which means that our first task is not to tell others how we can get along. Our first task is to listen. Just think how hard it is for Christians to listen!

Pawlus: Then how do we do that as a community, as a church community? How do we do that better? We’re not doing it now very well, obviously, and we need to get to that place.

Hauerwas: How we do it is, I hope, through the establishment of friendships. I think friendships are absolutely crucial if we are to discover how it is we need to tell one another what we know is true, because you have to be willing to have your most essential convictions challenged. Now, I am a representative of Christian non-violence and I don’t think this is possible, the kinds of friendships I’m talking about, until Christians again learn what it means to be non-violent.

Pawlus: Does that go to your ideas about true discipleship?

Hauerwas: Absolutely. For Christians, the kind of robust understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Christ with no apologies that I represent could be quite arrogant, it could be quite violent if Jesus didn’t demand that we are non-violent.

Talbot: So discipleship in the context of Bonhoeffer, the German Christian. The Cost of Discipleship. It’s costly, very costly.

Hauerwas: Of course. Very costly. And it means that you’re going to have to learn things about yourself you probably didn’t want to learn.

Talbot: Now where did you learn that kind of discipleship growing up in Texas?

Hauerwas: I’m not sure I did in Texas. We Texans are natural born killers, you know! I often times tell people that I’m a pacifist and I don’t like the language of pacifism at all because it’s so passive. But by creating expectations in other people, no matter what they think pacifism is, I hope that they will keep me true to a way of life I know I should live even though I have no faith in my own ability to live it at all. So I learned it fundamentally through reading the works of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as a great theologian named John Howard Yoder who came from the Mennonite background.

Talbot: You have said that religious diversity is the churches attempt to own pluralism. Can you unpack that for us?

Hauerwas: Well, I don’t believe in pluralism. Where are you standing when you say we live in a pluralist world? You’re standing in a place that you think you can look over the variety and call it pluralism. But, in fact, the place where you’re standing isn’t pluralistic.

Talbot: What do you mean?

Hauerwas: I mean that it presupposes a standpoint that isn’t subject to the description that you’re making because it assumes that you’re standing in a place that allows you an overview. Where the place itself is isn’t part of the overview. So it involves some deep philosophical issues, as a matter of fact, that’s part of a change in modernity that challenges the presumption that you can have an account of what you know before you know anything. It’s called foundationalism and I’m an anti-foundationalist.

Talbot: Is there some Constintinian component in it?

Hauerwas: Yes. Foundationalism goes hand-in-hand with a sense of a kind of Constintinian church that presupposes that it must make the world come out all right because we can’t trust God to do that.

Talbot: Now you want us to delete the word “pluralism” from our vocabulary?

Hauerwas: I do. I don’t think you ought to talk about pluralism. I don’t think you ought to use the word tolerance. I think we need to have a much more determinative Christian vocabulary than either of those words and those words are not Christian.

Pawlus: One of the other provocative statements I think you made was your idea about Islam and how that’s catapulted us into this framework of tolerance. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Hauerwas: Well, we simply don’t know anything about Islam and I use the example of David Burrell because we just have to produce people who are willing to subject their life to undergoing the kind of training a Muslim undergoes to be faithful to Allah. I mean David can do that because he’s so completely a Christian.

Pawlus: It’s his confidence in his own beliefs.

Hauerwas: So he doesn’t have to be guarded about it. And, of course, I mean he’s a great scholar so that allows him to have a sense of the diversity both of Christianity and of Islam. For example, the idea that you could have a separation of church and state in Iraq. There’s no church! I mean, the Sunnah has no separation between what it means to faithfully worship Allah and what it means to rule in the kind of society they want Iraq to be. So the very idea that you could translate American political practices into an Islamic society is absolutely arrogance to the nth degree! Now Christians, of all people, should understand that and they should say, hold it. I say I represent the “Tonto Principle of Christian Ethics,” namely that when Tonto and the Lone Ranger were surrounded by 20,000 Sioux, the Lone Ranger looked over at Tonto and said, “What do you think we ought to do?” And he said, “What do you mean “we,” white man?” Now we Christians have to learn we are not Americans, we’re Christians.

Pawlus: I think we’re going to have to leave it there. Very provocative stuff. Thank you for joining us today, Stanley. We appreciate it.

Hauerwas: A pleasure to be here. Thank you.    

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