But after hundreds and hundreds of years, our practice of faith is not pure. It’s mixed with cultures, nationalities and ethnicities. That’s why it’s hard to hear the Pope’s Regensburg lecture as he apparently wanted it to be heard—as a dispassionate raising of issues in academic and theological setting.

Even if his quote from the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus had been clearly used (I thought it was confusing at best), it’s now become a media phenomenon with a life of its own. Anyone who has tried to speak publicly today from a religious perspective knows how hard it is not be misunderstood. Religion is hot. And we all project our hopes, fears and prejudices on those who speak for religion.

If you really read the Regensburg text (it’s here in English), you might be surprised by how reasonable its argument is about human reason. Mostly what Benedict argues is that Christianity is shaped, and is better for, the tension between revelation and reason, between “Athens and Jerusalem.” If we think reason is a selling point, we need to submit to it ourselves.

Every religious tradition or denomination is troubled from within by those who assert a kind absolutism (some say fundamentalism) about sacred texts or original intent. Conservative Evangelical Christians assert it. So do American religious liberals, including my own Episcopalians, when it suits their agenda. So do many of the Pope’s fellow Catholics. And, yes, so do many Muslims and others.

If you’re going to get a hearing in the marketplace of ideas, you have to live by the rules of the market. Reason is a market force, but it’s more than that. Reason is a gift from God. A faith whose actions are tempered by reason is an antidote to violence and extremism.

As I read history, many Muslim cultures in history engaged with reason, science, and mathematics, and made room for peaceable coexistence with others and their traditions, arts and cultures. It would be in our common interest for them to do that again.

But before I tell others to invite reason into their lives of faith, I need to remember what Jesus said best: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? . . . You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” (Luke 6:41-42)

We have to work first within our own faith communities, contending with those whose absolutism can give us and our faith a bad name. We persuade by example or not at all.