Certainly, I agree with the Dalai Lama’s statement that “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message: That is love, compassion and forgiveness.” But I trust also that he would agree that religions are not essentially the same, as some people like to say.
Most religious traditions hold many values in common and those values help us connect and work together. But each religion or set of beliefs expresses “love, compassion, and forgiveness” in very different ways.
Rather than trying to ignore or blur those differences, we must respect and honor the differences, using them to build a better community and nation.
We live in the most religiously pluralistic nation in the world, and that is our strength. The challenge is to learn not just to find that small area of common ground, common belief, common values, but to learn to live with each other in the breadth of our identity, affirming our diversity, respecting our differences.
When I read the First Amendment, I see a brilliant formula for facilitating that kind of life together. No religion is established as official, no specific religion is favored over any other religion, and religion is not favored over nonreligious beliefs. Yet everyone is free to enjoy the religion they choose or free to choose no religion.
During the past two summers I have participated in a week-long camp for high school students from many religious traditions. Created and sponsored by The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, the camp is called Leadership Education Advancing Democracy and Diversity or LEADD. Our goal is to teach the students about our nation’s historic commitment to religious freedom and how to counter the threats to that vision today. But while we hope that the students learn from the workshops and classes we teach, we know that they learn much more from each other.
One by one, around a campfire, on the volleyball court, or over dinner, the students came to know each other. They told their stories. Mary Elizabeth, a Baptist from Louisiana, admitted that she had never heard of some of the religions of her fellow campers. A Sikh from Maryland, Dilbagh, told of the harassment he and his father and other Sikhs had faced after 9/11 because they wear turbans as part of their religious commitment. Sarah, a Muslim, and Darrow, a Jew, became close friends and returned to their hometown in California where they started an interfaith group at their high school.
But while the students, or LEADDers as we call them, learned about other religions, each of them went home even more committed to their own religion. In that setting and when they returned home, they realized that they can be 100 percent American and 100 percent Roman Catholic, or Jewish, or Sikh, or United Methodist, or atheist, or Muslim, or Baptist. That is the model of religious pluralism that we at The Interfaith Alliance affirm as the backbone of our democracy and the highest of our civic values as Americans.
As the framers of the Constitution and the First Amendment envisioned, the future of America will be interfaith and pluralistic, or there will be no meaningful future at all.
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