The media runs on a conflict narrative, which means the extremes get to control our public discourse from the caves in Afghanistan to the fundamentalist backwaters of Florida, where we recently saw a pastor nobody had ever heard of threaten to burn Korans on September 11. This took place when we were already in the middle of a controversy where my friend Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Kahn, his wife, and their plans to open a peace center—a healing center, an intercultural center—in New York City, in lower Manhattan, had run into protest. Daisy told me a few months before that her biggest concern until the controversy was whether there would be enough stroller space in the interfaith cultural center!

Well, that got very complicated. They called me and said, “What do we do with all this hostility being directed towards us, when we wanted here to make a bridge, make a way to peace?” In the middle of this, this pastor, Terry Jones, said he was going to burn Korans. So right away what I learned was the relationships between us across these faith lines quickly came into play and so I want to tell a very hopeful story.

I think, since 9/11, our relationships have deepened and strengthened, and those relationships helped to avert a tragedy on that day of 9/11. First of all, evangelical Christians, a tradition that Terry Jones claimed, wanted to surround Jones, first with condemnation for his hateful rants and threatened actions, saying this was really a slap in the face of Jesus. Second, we wanted to support our friends, Feisal Rauf and Daisy Kahn. So, I remember when Terry Jones said he was going to go to New York City and confront the Imam and negotiate: I won’t burn Korans if you don’t build your interfaith cultural center, which was an offensive moral equivalence. Here is an obscure pastor going to burn the holy book of a billion people and a respected, courageous—heroic, in my mind—moderate Muslim leader trying to find a way to peace right there in lower Manhattan. So Daisy and Feisal called and said what do we do? He’s coming to town and going to confront us, what do we do?

I remember it was a Friday, September 10th, and I was wondering what we could do as Evangelicals to run interference for our friends and really head him off. He shouldn’t be talking to Feisal Rauf. He should be talking to us and be accountable for his activity. So right at that moment, sometimes the Lord provides. I get a call from Geoff Tunnicliffe. Geoff is the leader of the World Evangelical Alliance. He told me that he was in lower Manhattan and he wanted to help, and he’d gotten the cell phone number for Terry Jones. As I say, the Lord provides. He was there and he wanted to be of assistance. So I called Feisal and Daisy and said trust him, he’s a good man and we’ll head off Terry Jones. Sure enough we put together a team of Evangelicals to talk to Jones, who arrived, got to a hotel in Queens, and was going to walk to the mosque. The police said, “You’re a threat to the city. We can’t protect your security. You better hide under your bed and go back to Florida.” Well, he was terrified and our team actually became supportive to him when he began to talk on a conference call because he wouldn’t leave the hotel. They said he was lost. He was way over his head. In the conversation he agreed that he wouldn’t burn the Koran and went back to Florida.

I was on TV most every night—CNN, MSNBC, all the cables—trying to interpret this and say their conflict narrative wasn’t working. So I challenged CNN to tell a different kind of story, all these stories across the country of Christians and Muslims and Jews finding collaboration. Finally on Sunday morning they went and got one of those stories. It was in Tennessee a year and a half earlier. The Heartsong Church heard that an Islamic cultural center was coming to their neighborhood. So Pastor Steve Stone thought he would welcome them because, as he told me, Jesus tells us to love our neighbors. Heartsong put a sign on the front lawn: Heartsong Church welcomes the Islamic Cultural Center. The Muslims were floored. They didn’t expect that kind of greeting. They walked to the door of the church two days later and said, “We were kind of hoping just to be ignored and you’re welcoming us. Why?”

“Because,” Steve Stone said, “Jesus tells us to love our neighbors and you’re neighbors! Welcome to the neighborhood.”

They began to talk. Leaders and leaders, kids and kids. Nothing like play dates to get your kids to know each other. The pork barbeque began to include halal meat, so barbeques took place. Ministry took place to homeless people and tutoring kids. Steve told me he didn’t know much about Islam before this, but he was learning now and he found it exciting.

Well, this year the Muslim neighbors went to the Christian neighbors and said, “Our place, our center isn’t finished yet. Could we celebrate Ramadan in your church? At least the first couple of nights?” A year-and-a-half before I’m sure the Christians would have said, what is Ramadan? But now they knew and they welcomed them in. So here are church members, Evangelicals, welcoming their Muslim neighbors, saying welcome, we’re glad you’re here, here’s the place, here’s the bathrooms, here’s the coffee—is coffee okay? They’re all learning together.

CNN told their story and showed Steve and the leader of that community together as friends and really showing their respect and love for each other. Then Steve called me and said he needed to tell me a story. Three days later, he got a call from Pakistan, from Kashmir in Pakistan, where a room full of Muslim men had gathered at 1:30 a.m. to call this pastor. They said, “Is this Pastor Stone?”

He said, “Yes, it is.”

“We’re calling from Pakistan. We’re all in a room together. We want to tell you how we felt about that story we saw on CNN. We were watching it together and when it was finished we were all silent because we were stunned. And then one of us said, ‘I think God may be speaking to us through this man.’ Another one said, ‘How can we kill these people?’ Then one of us—he doesn’t speak English or he would tell you—went out and with his own hands he cleaned inside and outside the little church close to where we live. And now we’re all gathered here just to call you and to tell you that we don’t hate you, but we love you and we’re going to try and be good neighbors now, too, like you have been. So we’re going to promise you that we’re going to look after that little church near us for the rest of our lives.”

That story is our future and we have to pay attention.

Conversation with Jim Wallis

Daniel Pawlus: Jim, thank you so much for making time in your very busy schedule to with us today. We really appreciate it.

Jim Wallis: It’s a great show. I love coming here.

Pawlus: I know Eboo and I are looking forward to our conversation with you. I thought we’d start by asking you about your work with pastors. You deal with a lot of pastors around the country. You mentioned it. What are you telling them now in terms of how to talk to their congregations about interfaith dialogue?

Wallis: I think there is a principle here that Eboo and I have talked about many times. How do you confront religious extremism? The conventional wisdom is that you smash it from without. It’s not working. It’s simply not working. You’ve got to defeat it from within, from inside, which means those who are in the more moderate and prophetic traditions in all of our faith communities have to make new and powerful alliances with each other. The seeds of defeating Islamic extremism are in Islam. The seeds of defeating Christian fundamentalism are in the Gospel. So this is where those of us who are called moderates, or from the prophetic stream I would say of our traditions, have to find each other and help each other do this job. That’s what Eboo and I have begun to do and lots of people like us. I think there’s a real answer here but not the smashing from without. It’s simply never going to work.

Eboo Patel: Jim, one of the things you said in your message was that interfaith cooperation has actually accelerated after 9/11, regardless of what the media narrative is telling us. It use to be that interfaith cooperation was people gathering at conferences to hear speeches. My experience of interfaith is young people from different religions working together in communities. How have you seen the changing, accelerating, becoming more robust?

Wallis: I had such a great time talking to your young staff recently here in Chicago and I was really impressed. There is an Evangelical, young Christian girl next to this young Muslim man, there’s this young Jewish guy and they’re talking about how they can contribute to the common good because of their faith and they’re leaning from each other in the process. I point to things like the big gathering for peace right outside that pastor’s church in Florida, which the media never covered. Two thousand people came out! But more important than conferences, as you say, and dialogue and vigils is people working, getting their hands dirty in serving the common good. In fact, a new generation cares more about mission than dogma. They want to know what a religion does more than just what it believes. So many pastors I know are starting with mission. They’re saying come join us in our mission and then along the way they ask, why do you do these things? What motivates you? Why are you building all these schools or doing this or that? Then they say it’s because of my faith. That’s what leads people to faith rather than saying, here is what we believe different from what they believe and so we’re in conflict with them.

Pawlus: I think you’re answering the next question I was going to ask, which is how are young people, specifically, connecting to the prophetic tradition of their faith tradition that they’re speaking to? I know you are in front of college audiences and young people quite often talking about this. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, as well.

Wallis: One of the best things now for me, as no longer just a seminary student, is our audiences are half under 30 all the time and sometimes half of them under 25. What I hear from them is that they want their lives and their faith to make a difference in the world. That’s what they want. They want give to something larger than themselves and they want to count. They want their faith to count. So they’re new abolitionists fighting trafficking. They’re doing water projects in Africa. They’re working to allow their undocumented friends a path to citizenship in this country. They care about justice and they think faith is, in fact, deeply connected to social justice. So I am really hopeful by this new generation’s passion and the way they’re not afraid of each other. They are not afraid. They want to learn from each other. They don’t compromise their own faith when they have an interfaith dialogue, but they want to learn and they want to find allies. We have so much work to do and they want to find allies.

Patel: You know, Jim, there are folks at your level who would spend all of their time writing books and giving speeches and kind of in a way growing their own message. You are one of those people who can write books and give speeches in your sleep at night, you’ve done so much of it. But you spend a lot of your time also nurturing young people, developing exceptional young talent. I know some of these people on your staff: Tim King and Adam Taylor and others. Tell us why you do that and tell us what some of the best strategies you’ve found are.

Wallis: I believe in social movements. That’s what changes the world, ordinary people becoming part of something larger than they are. So Wilberforce and slavery, and King and Gandhi. These are my heroes. Their pictures are up in my room where I write every night. If you believe in movements, you’ve got to care about leadership. The leadership of the next generation is the most important thing to a movement. So I have really two main commitments now. One is to get a larger voice for the message of prophetic faith in the media, in the popular culture. The extremes are dominant and they have to be challenged. I think a moral, civil tone is what the country is hungry for. I think the politics of fear and the politics of hope are always in conflict. Right now the politics of fear are winning. How do we articulate the politics of hope? How do we provide a much larger platform for that voice?

Secondly, to mentor and nurture a new generation of leaders. And they are everywhere. I mean, when I talk to these young leaders—they’re Christian, Muslim, Jewish; they’re all over the country in grass-roots work; they’re in academia, they’re teachers, they’re organizers, they’re theologians and pastors—they are the future. I tell them, forget your career, your vocation is to find where your gift meets the crushing needs of the world and right there is your vocation. I talked to a thousand high school kids yesterday and I said, don’t start thinking about what you’re going to do when you’re a leader, start living by those values and choices now. Develop moral habits that will help you when you become a leader to live those values. So to me, a larger platform for this voice for this movement and a new generation of leaders. Those to me are the two most important things.

Pawlus: Eboo mentioned your book writing. God’s Politics was a wild success, obviously. How have you found things with Rediscovering Values now? It’s opened up another set of conversations for you I imagine.

Wallis: There’s a new audience of business people which I’ve never had before: business folk, Wall Street CEOs. They come and talk like Nicodemus at night about something they’ve lost. They’ve lost their balance they feel or they’ve lost values or they’ve lost their faith or the things that their mom told them at bedtime at night. Even Davos, the World Economic Forum has asked us to convene a moral economy dialogue. This is Davos of all places! I think we won’t get an economic recovery without a moral recovery, without spiritual recovery. What a moral compass for the new economy looks like is something we’re finding an audience for at business schools and corporations. On the streets of Detroit, where I’m from, if we don’t find our way back to new normal and not business as usual, then all the pain and suffering of places like my hometown will have been in vain.

Pawlus: Jim, we’re so grateful for you to be here and spending time with us today. I love watching your mentorship with Eboo and the work that both of you are doing is inspiring to me. Thank you so much.

Wallis: He makes me hopeful, this guy does!