Peace bridge gains strength through the faiths it supports

By Dan Edwards

Friday, Dec. 25, 2015 | 2 a.m.

As Christians prepare to welcome the Prince of Peace, our minds are filled with fresh memories of San Bernardino, Colorado Springs, Paris and Charleston. Random violence stirs our fear so we race into violent racism, xenophobia and religious prejudice. We can blame it on Islamic fundamentalists. But what about the Planned Parenthood attack in Colorado Springs, the racist shootings at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, or the mass shootings at Umpqua Community College, Sandy Hook or the Amish school? The perpetrators are Muslims, Christians, white racists and nihilistic youth. If these episodes are completely different, how come they look so much alike?

Here are five observations and a proposal.

• The vast majority of conflict in the world has been about power and wealth, not religion. But religion has often been enlisted in the fights, and religious folks have all too often joined right in to drum up support for the powers that be.

• Survival depends on cooperation. Humans are biologically wired to support people inside our group but fear and loathe people outside our group. The rise of cities and trade led to broadening the definition of the in-group to include more people. Religion was the social mechanism that extended trust and caring farther out into the human species. Religion’s social function is not war mongering, but to be the basis for trust and cooperation.

• When we suffer, we blame and demonize some “other,” regarding ourselves as victims entitled to revenge. Biblical scholar Walter Wink said “the myth of redemptive violence,” though contrary to all the world religions, is the prevailing moral assumption of our world, drummed into us through movies, TV and Internet. The symbol of the myth of redemptive violence is the good guy with a gun shooting down the bad guy with a gun. It says the evil people oppress the good people until a good hero slays them — so we all rejoice because we love aggression and just need a moral pretext of victimhood to set free our baser nature.

• Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says we overcome hatred by seeing ourselves in the other’s shoes. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum says fear blocks our capacity for “participatory imagination,” the ability to see the world through another’s eyes. This loss makes our world smaller as we turn “others” into something less than human.

• Rabbi Sacks says no society has ever lasted without a religion or some substitute ideology that took on ultimate significance (fascism, communism, etc.). Religion makes meaning out of life. We find our identity through belonging to a community. Sacks and psychologist Jonathan Haidt agree that our Western culture, which is spreading through globalization, is devoid of meaning and identity. Terrorism, by jihadist and nihilistic teenager alike, is a cry of protest against that vapid shallow imitation of life.

Proposal: Our best hope is not in carpet bombings and boots on ground. It is in the world religions joining hands to give society a meaning transfusion. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others can commit to non-coercive, tolerant, relational sharing of our ways of making meaning out of life’s chaos and suffering. We are not in competition. For example, ISIS recruits lonely youth alienated from orthodox Islam. If we want to prevent American teens from becoming jihadists, the best thing we can do is support our local mosque.

At the Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada and at Nevadans for the Common Good, we treat our co-religionists with respect and partner with them in charity and the quest for social justice.

A society in which the religions flourish and faith communities treat one another as friends is a better place to live than the lonely atomistic individualistic cynical world we Westerners inhabit today.

But not just any kind of religion will do. The myth of redemptive violence is at the root of religious intolerance and terrorism. What the world needs now is a story of peace practiced in the face of violence, of love overcoming hatred. We need religions true to their original social function to extend trust beyond the confines of our group out into the wider world.

In all of our religions, we need the spiritual discipline of participatory imagination, imagining our way inside someone else’s skin. This discipline would not make us suddenly fall into each other’s arms in a love fest. But the society would not be nearly so highly conductive of the energies of fear and hatred.

So friends and neighbors, whatever this season is for you, even if it’s only the end of the calendar year, now is the time to reconnect or deepen your connection with your faith tradition. If you don’t have a faith tradition, go find one that speaks for peace and reconciliation. We have enough voices of fear, hatred and vengeance already. Go find yourself some meaning, make some friends in a faith community, and then get them connected with people from a different brand of faith to do some good in the world. The Interfaith Council and Nevadans for the Common Good are the best places I know to make those connections. But wherever you do it, however you do it, build a bridge of peace. Build it strong and build it now.

Dan Edwards is the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada.