A remarkable event took place in Washington this week. The National Association of Evangelicals hosted a delegation of six Moroccans—including this writer, who is Moroccan-American—to discuss the pressing problem of the environment and the “future of our planet.” In the language of faith, Christians and Muslims alike are called upon to care for God’s creation. The message that came across from the very start is that if Christians and Muslims cannot come together to do something about environmental degradation, both communities will have, in essence, forfeited their missions, if not abdicated their faiths altogether.
This is quite a twist in Christian-Muslim dialogue, one that should be broadened not only to include Muslims and Christians from other nations but also representatives of every possible faith, including atheists. I could well imagine a United Nations-like assembly meeting for two days or so and issuing an interfaith proclamation on the sacredness of the creation and our God-mandated duty to protect it. Such a measure, however, may not be enough. It is our faiths, as Rev. Richard Cizik, the co-convener of the event, suggested, that need to be rethought. But how does one begin to do so in a hyper-consumer global society, one in which people are divided into the super-fed and super-entertained few and huge masses living on the edge of starvation? We may ache for our embattled planet and the losers among us, but we are way too embedded in our long-dysfunctional economic and political structures to see our way out to natural safety.
This is what I thought, at any rate, as I listened and talked to various participants. I imagined Christianity and Islam as cities upon crumbling hills and having only themselves to blame for their obsolescence. Obviously, the meeting brought to mind John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, one that is often invoked by politicians in Capitol Hill. For more than any other Christian in American history, it is Winthrop’s vision that has issued a warning to the ages, one that Christians (and Muslims) would ignore at their own peril. Faith, I remembered Winthrop saying, is sharing and forgiveness. It is unconditional love. Faith is community, above all, not the maniacal pursuit of private wealth, redeemed by charitable donations to worthy but, ultimately, futile causes. The first governor of Massachusetts failed to keep his comrades in the fold of Christian love, and so we today stand on the hill of perdition. We stand as helpless sinners, as the fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards would say more than two centuries later, “in the Hands of an angry God.”
If nothing else comes out of this historic encounter, then the least it could do is, in fact, broaden the reach of our faiths. Creation care requires unconditional love for God’s whole creation, including our fellow humans, without regard to their religions. One could imagine this approach leading to more trust and, even, love, thereby tempering the destructive (but equally human) drive for accumulation and conquests. Families tend to fight strangers more than they do themselves. And so this inauspicious Christian-Muslim encounter could very well lay the foundations of a world closer to divine intent than all our traditional expressions of faith have so far been able to do.
Anouar Majid is author, most recently, of "A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America." He is Chair and Professor of English at the University of New England.
