Faith in Our Neighbors: Healing Social Divides in the U.S.

Dear Friends,

“They’re not out there. They’re too afraid.” This was the disheartening response from a well-respected Evangelical pastor, who is working on Abrahamic interfaith initiatives, when asked where Christian voices were being raised to advocate for dialogue across differences in polarized communities in the United States.

Perhaps his assessment was a bit stark, and many, including myself, instinctively assume he must be mistaken. The prophetic voice seeking healing over harm, empathy over vilification, rehumanization over dehumanization is surely coursing through the narratives of those committed to the Biblical beatitudes. Humility, mourning, fairness, mercy, kindness, peacemaking…perhaps more than in any other passage of that sacred text, these are the virtues that Jesus elevated as opening the way for divine irruption into the world.

And that powerful list, a plea of sorts, ends with a warning: those who stand for these principles may well be persecuted. Were not the prophets of old often rejected, ridiculed, and even destroyed? When you challenge those who are radicalizing under a banner of self-righteousness and twisting their interpretation of divine exhortations to seek power over others, you should watch your back. Yet, that would seem to be the very spiritual obligation of faith leadership.

At least five pastors in the greater Portland, OR area were forced from the pulpit within a few months, earlier this year. Was it for financial malfeasance? Inappropriate behavior in their personal lives? Inability to perform their duties? No. Five pastors, perhaps more who were unknown to the faith leader who was interviewed by ICRD’s team, were chased from leadership for the sin of calling on their faith communities to embrace dialogue and empathy over political polarization and hatred. Race and justice, the authenticity of the pandemic, the sanctity of democratic governance – these were the issues they addressed. These pastors did not challenge their communities’ beliefs, only their reactions. They encouraged their flock to seek what the Quakers call “the light of the divine in the other”.

All of these issues are visibly tearing at the fabric of American society, fueled by media divisiveness, misinformation, and political posturing. Who better to stand in that breach and evoke the spirit of love and reconciliation that is the firmament of the Christian faith than those church leaders? But in Portland, a pattern most likely repeated across the country, those prophetic voices are being silenced in favor of the narrative that God is political, and that the divine hates the same people we do. There seems to be one unifying trend in American Christianity, whether conservative or liberal, and it is deeply troubling: the faithful increasingly doubt the legitimacy of the religious beliefs of the “other side”.

However, it remains ICRD’s steadfast conviction that the best of our faith traditions should be the very solution to seemingly insurmountable problems. Common religious values, which illuminate and amplify that “small still voice” of the divine, echoing in the human heart, are precisely designed to raise us above our basest instincts of prejudice, fear, and hatred, and shine a guiding light into the darkness, around which we might all gather.