Visit us at: 30 Good Minutes.org

         

Conversation with Eboo Patel and Skye Jethani

Daniel Pawlus: Let’s turn now to Eboo Patel and Skye Jethani. Gentlemen, thanks again for being with us here today. I know we’ve got a lot to talk about, but let’s start with this interesting fact that both of you grew up together. Skye, tell us a little bit about that. The suburb of Glen Ellyn, I believe, right?

Skye Jethani: Yeah.

Daniel Pawlus: You guys have known each other for a while.

Skye Jethani: Right here in the western burbs of Chicago. We grew up in the same town, same elementary school, all the way through high school. Eboo’s parents immigrated from India. My father came from India. So we were two brown kids in a predominately white environment! So I think we had different experiences even within that but it was a fascinating time. It’s amazing how much the suburbs have changed. I’m still there. My kids are in the public school and I think about half of the students in one of my daughter’s classes are minority students. So it has changed significantly just in that short time.

Daniel Pawlus: Interesting.

Eboo Patel: And you know, it’s interesting. Skye and I probably talked about a lot of  different things back then—sports, math class, whatever it might have been—but we probably never talked about religion. And we’re both religion professionals now and religion has played an important part role in our lives for some time. In the most religiously diverse country maybe in human history, in the most religiously devout nation in the West at a time of religious conflict, what should we be teaching people about how to talk about religion with people who are of different religions?

Skye Jethani: Well, I think we’ve been under the illusion for a long time that we can get by just fine in the secular West without having to think about religion as part of our identity or our politics or our international relations. All of that radically changed on September 11, 2001. One of the positive things that came out of that tragic event was this realization that religion is a critical part of who we are, of our identity, and how we engage the world. So I think it’s a lot easier now to convince young people or educators that if people grow up in the current 21st century environment without a knowledge of their own religious tradition and that of others, this is a massive hole that they need to fill because they just can’t function well in the modern world without having that. So that’s a big piece of it. It’s a simple education of your own traditional background and then understanding the basic ideas of those who live around you who are your neighbors so that we can begin to weave together a more peaceful community.

Daniel Pawlus: A perfect transition for me to build off of that. The two of you did a program together at Wheaton College not too long ago about Christian and Muslim relations. Why don’t you unpack that a little bit for us. Tell us what you talked about with that audience for our folks.

Eboo Patel: Sure. One of the themes that I like to talk about a lot now as founder and president of the Interfaith Youth Core is something we call “interfaith literacy.” Religious literacy is knowing something about somebody else’s religion. But there are plenty of people out there who are quite happy to tell you only the worst things about other people’s religions. So there is that sign that we’ve seen on television quite a bit in the last year or so: All I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11. And I want to say, if all you know about Islam is what you learned on 9/11, then you’re just ignorant. It’s like if the only thing you knew about America was slavery, right?

So I think what Skye and I were doing at Wheaton College was advancing an appreciative understanding of different religions. A lot of the stories I told were my positive relationships and dimensions of evangelical Christianity that I admired, which is the tradition that Skye is a part of. He reflected back to the audience that the positive relationships he had with Muslims and the dimensions of Islam that he admired. I think we were doing something more than religious literacy. It was interfaith literacy and it was modeling it. As part of that, Skye, you told this beautiful story about St. Francis and the sultan. I’m wondering if you would share that story and what it means for us a thousand years after it actually occurred.

Skye Jethani: Right. It’s a great story that shows that interfaith cooperation is not a new idea. It’s been around for a long time and there have been other scenes in history where it’s been really, really important. So in the 13th century, the Crusades were occurring between Christian Europe and the Muslim North Africa and Middle East. The wars were getting more and more violent. Francis of Assisi went to minister to the European troops on one of these Crusades and decided one day that we was going to cross the battle line and go approach the sultan who, obviously, was leading the armies on the other side. So he and his friend approached the Muslim line and they were unarmed. The Muslims thought he was crazy but they let him in. He asked to speak to the sultan. He went before the sultan and simply spent a couple of days with the man talking about their faiths. Francis’ agenda was to communicate his Christian identity and values and beliefs to the sultan and to hear from the sultan. They ended up playing chess and other games together. At the end, the sultan was not converted to Christianity. Obviously, Francis was not converted to Islam. But he modeled a different way of relating and what motivated him was Jesus’ command to love our enemies. He realized this conflict between these two civilizations would end in just destruction if there wasn’t another way modeled. So Francis, showing enormous courage, defied the expectations of the day and rather than approaching the enemy as an enemy, approached them as a neighbor. I think that’s a great model for where we find ourselves today.

Daniel Pawlus: It is a great story. And what’s also interesting about that particular event was that it was happening at Wheaton College, right? A traditionally very strong Evangelical community, Billy Graham’s alma mater. Skye, what do you think needs to happen for more of those conversations to potentially happen at other evangelical colleges and communities around the country? It’s a big part of the demographic of America, Evangelical Christians. If our work around interfaith cooperation is going to be a broader exercise, it has to involve that conversation.

Skye Jethani: Yeah. I think it’s going to take Evangelical leaders modeling it for their followers, for their congregations and for their schools. So if all Evangelicals hear about Muslims is what they get on the news or the stereotypes they hear in various media outlets, it’s going to go nowhere. It’s going to take church leaders, professors, Evangelical leaders who have friends, like I have a friend in Eboo, to show them a different way. Not only different Muslims than the stereotype they see on TV but then a different way of relating to other faiths. So it really begins with the leaders and has to work its way down.

Now the challenge is because Evangelicals have been a large community in the United States for a long time, they can isolate and do pretty well all by themselves. They don’t have to relate outside their faith.

Daniel Pawlus: Right. That’s a fantastic point.

Skye Jethani: So it’s really going to take the initiative and the conviction of leaders to say we don’t have to do this but it’s in everyone’s best interests that we do it and model it for everyone else.

Daniel Pawlus: We’ve got about a minute let. Do you want to build on that before we go on to the next segment?

Eboo Patel: I don’t know if anybody can isolate anymore. I’d actually love to come back to this. I think to myself…my wife and I have two beautiful, blessed children and one day we came home and it turns out that our son is saying the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish and that’s because my son has a Spanish babysitter who’s a deeply devout Catholic. As a Muslim I have to wonder how I felt about that. But then I thought to myself, this is the real world. This is the beautiful real world where people are sharing their faith with my son. And the kind of Muslim that I want my son to be is a Muslim who knows how to articulate his identity amidst a world of diversity and do it in a way that builds bridges instead of barriers or bubbles. So that was a challenge for me when my son was three, but it’s a challenge that we all face.

Eboo Patel: Skye, I remember you posed a very challenging question to the group of student leaders that we met with before we actually did our larger, public presentation at Wheaton College. You said that if the Evangelical community in the next generation doesn’t have an appreciative understanding of religious diversity, they’re going to have serious problems with their own religious identity. Unpack that a little bit.

Skye Jethani: Yeah. You made the point earlier that your son was saying the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish, a reflection on the diversity of our culture. That’s happening everywhere. My kids are in public school. They have a very diverse environment in which they are growing up. If you’re in the work place in this country you’re going to have a diverse environment. If everyone in our culture is diverse religiously and culturally but the church isn’t talking about that and isn’t expressing what does it mean to exist as a Christian within this environment, then they’re sending their people out into this culture completely ignorant. Eventually what they are creating is a false choice. At least I’ve seen this in some young people where you are either a Christian or you’re engaged with people of other faiths and that’s a false dichotomy. So what we need to begin doing in the church is modeling what does it mean to be a Christian in this diverse environment so that when people engage it, whether as students or after college, it’s just natural. It makes sense for me to be a Christian, to hang on to my identity in the midst of this diversity so that people aren’t completely walking away from their Christian faith for the sake of acceptance within this diverse community we’re a part of now. The church needs to be talking about this, otherwise I fear more and more young people—and we’re seeing the statistics already—may be leaving the church because they feel like it’s all or nothing.

Eboo Patel: So I actually want to follow-up on that. The church needs to be talking about it, right? What’s the language for it? I want to give you a personal situation, which is our friendship, right? As some of my secular friends like to say, “Evangelical Christianity is about evangelizing. So how is it, Eboo, that you as a Muslim are friends with Evangelical Christians? Isn’t it the case that all they ever do is evangelize to you?” And I say, no. I am under no illusion about what they might want me to become, which is a Christian, an Evangelical Christian, but the entire conversation isn’t haranguing me to convert. Give us the language for how it is that you as an Evangelical Christian are able to hope for conversion at appropriate moments, invite conversion, but also have other types of conversations with people from other faiths.

Daniel Pawlus: It’s a tall order, Skye!

Skye Jethani: It is a big one! The simplest way we can get back to it is just look at that word “evangelical” again. It comes from the Greek word, euangelion, which is the word for “good news” or Gospel. Gospel can be either a noun or a verb. It can be the noun, the Gospel, the good news, Jesus Christ is Lord. He came, died, rose again, and reigns in this reality. Or it can be a verb meaning to proclaim the Gospel, to spread that good news. And both of them are critical to Evangelicalism. So yes, the proclamation of the Gospel is good and we certainly want to see more people embrace who Christ is. But there is also the noun of Gospel, which is to live in the reality of Jesus as Lord and that’s a big part that a lot of Evangelicals need to embrace again. So it doesn mean caring for the poor and bringing social justice and loving our neighbors and loving our enemires as Francis did and showing kindness and goodness and gentleness and healing and all the other things that Christ brought. All of that should be part of my relationship with you. And when you ask why am I doing this, it is because of this good news and certainly there is an opportunity to share that as well. So I think, frankly, if Evangelicals were truly evangelical of the Gospel everyone would want them as their neighbors and as their co-workers and as their colleagues because they would be good people revealing the goodness of God in every environment in which they find themselves. So it’s not just about proclaiming and converting, it’s about living and being and showing the goodness of God in his reign in our world.

Daniel Pawlus: Great answer, Skye, and a great transition for us to spend some time talking about your book. The first book you wrote, The Divine Commodity, I thought was fascinating. If you want to speak really quickly about what that was about feel free, but also lets’s talk about With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God. If you want to lay out what you’re trying to accomplish in that book, we’d love to hear that.

Skye Jethani: Well, since we don’t have a ton of time let’s just focus on the second book. With looks at five postures that people have in the way they relate to God. I articulate them as life under God, life over God, life from God, and life for God. And then the last one, life with God, where the title of the book comes from. So the first four—I probably don’t have time to unpack—I show how they are rooted in some level of truth and why we’re so motivated by them, but how they ultimately leave us dissatisfied. They don’t end up producing genuine faith, hope, love. And, in fact, some cases can lead to a great deal of pain and disunity and hatred and strife in our world. The message the Jesus really brought was one of life with God, to be in constant communion with him and how from that posture we are set free to live lives of faith, hope and love.

Eboo Patel: Tell us about how your model of life with God helps people live life with other people.

Skye Jethani: Okay. Well, the biggest one is when we have a clear vision of who God is—his goodness, his love, his power—we want to be with him and when we are with him it sets us free from fear. And if we are not afraid, then I can walk across the battle line to the person the world calls my enemy and love him, even at the risk of my own life. When I’m not afraid I can show kindness and compassion. When I’m not afraid I can reach out to a Muslim friend and make him my friend and introduce him to others. Fear is what keeps us constantly at war with one another. It’s what keeps us self-centered. And it’s the role of Christ in the true Gospel is to set us free from that fear so that we can truly love, which is exactly what he modeled for us. So set free from feat he could willingly go to the cross and model the ultimate love of giving himself up for the world. That’s what it ultimately leads to. So once that fear is gone, once we are with God, love becomes possible.

Daniel Pawlus: Guys, great to have both of you together. Long time friends. It’s been a pleasure spending time with you.

Skye Jethani: Thank you.

Eboo Patel: Thank you.

Home | Schedule |This Week |PG Archives| Interfaith Resources | Short Video | About| Links|Donation