Brookings has been home to an interfaith dialogue group for more than a decade. Participants gather monthly during the school year to meet, greet, eat and discuss topics of mutual concern. The first few times the group gathered, people were on their best behavior, avoiding any hint of provocation and being unusually polite. But as people got to know each other better, as ignorance and misunderstandings disappeared, serious dialogue and deeper relationships developed. No question or topic was off the table.

Known now as the Brookings Interfaith Council, one can access their information and schedule on their web-site. Like many similar community groups, the pandemic has curtailed activities. But when they resume, the group will continue to be an asset to students of world religions at the university and in the larger community.

It’s always a delicious meal. Eating together is a time-tried way of bringing disparate peoples together in a welcoming atmosphere. And where else can one find in South Dakota a room where there may be Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha’i, Unitarians, Atheists; all interested in learning from the other?

One of the tragedies of our time is the exclusivist mentality of some religionists. They appear to be so insecure about the veracity of their own faith that they have to rule out any truth in all the others. We see the results on the news nightly, where religious motivation often lies behind the conflicts and wars of our time.

This is an especially tragic consequence for those who call themselves Christians. Often they will take one special Biblical passage out of context as a justification for Christian imperialism. The passage often used is in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is talking with his disciples, telling them with some foresight what will be happening to him and how he will be preparing the way for them. When they don’t understand the “way” he will be going, he says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.”

Jesus was not standing on Mt. Horeb, making an announcement for all-time for all people or thundering his kingship from the heavens. He was speaking to some confused disciples, who even after having lived with him, followed him, watched him, still did not understand him. Surely they should have understood his “way” of compassionate and self-sacrificing love by now!

For Christians to tell everyone on the planet the only way to salvation is through Jesus is like me telling my students the only way to success in life is through my class. I can’t imagine an inclusive Jesus excluding anyone, not based on the life and witness described in the Synoptic Gospels.

Frankly speaking, some of these imperialistic ideas spread in the Christian community have become enormous stumbling blocks for the future of the faith. That is also true of many of the passages from Scripture that are taken out of context or interpreted literally and mistakenly, all in service to a system intent on confining its adherents rather than freeing them for Christian service.

Diana Butler-Bass is an American historian of Christianity, author of several books. She travels extensively on the lecture circuit. 

She describes how in many of her lectures she will ask her audience to identify themselves as “spiritual” and/or “religious.” Then they spend some time identifying what those two words signify. What makes one spiritual or religious or both? 

What she has discovered in her travels is that increasingly people prefer the designation spiritual. By definition, people find spiritual freeing, whereas religious is more confining, even narrow and dogmatic.

In incorporating the spiritual/religious question in my religion classes, I have found the same result as Butler-Bass. The younger generation prefers spiritual. This can be troubling, if one believes in the idea of the church, the community of faith, in and through which one grows and impacts the world together.

Perhaps the reason more and more people choose spiritual rather than religious is because religion so often means required beliefs. If I don’t believe this, I won’t gain salvation. If I don’t believe that, I’m not a good person. Religion means boxes.

People get boxed in by beliefs.There’s the crux. Belief trumps behavior. Belief trumps values. Belief trumps service. Belief trumps being who I am born to be. But in the end, beliefs are mental constructs. They can fade to the background in the presence of lived experience.

Beliefs can be a stumbling block to interfaith harmony. But as people of all faiths sit together in mutuality; similar behaviors, values, rituals, ceremonies, prayers, Scriptures emerge. One doesn’t surrender their own tradition nor feel the need to impose it on another. One can recognize the similarities in other traditions and deepen one’s own. Perhaps the new community of faith will be interfaith.