All Religions Deserving of a Healthy Dose of Respect

I was recently asked, “Does God work through people who aren’t Christian?”There is no older, more fervently believed, or more divisive human assumption than the one that says a particular idea of God is the only true belief.

Christmas is over, Hanukkah is past, soon Ramadan will be over as well. Unfortunately, what we haven’t gotten past are assumptions about God that create divisions between religious groups.

When I was growing up in Mississippi, there weren’t many Catholics around, so naturally Catholics were viewed with great suspicion. I can’t begin to enumerate all the of bizarre things we told each other about Catholics. We Methodists even viewed Baptists with a measure of suspicion and I remember very clearly hearing a man tell my father, who is a United Methodist minister, that he was a fine man but since he wasn’t Baptist, he was damned for eternity.

Religion binds people together. Religion enlightens us spiritually. For many people the world is a very sad and hurting place, and without religion it would be far worse.

Unfortunately, our fears sometimes lead us to distrust and condemn other expressions of faith. We build a very small box of our doctrines and then declare to the world that we have God inside.

Southern California has long been seen as a religious melting pot; and Orange County is increasingly a reflection of that reality. We have Baptists, Bahai and Buddhists, Catholics and Christian Scientists, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Methodists, and Mormons. There are many, many ways we express our human yearning for God. Our religious diversity gives us a wonderful opportunity to discover beauty, truth and insight into one another and into the nature of God. The alternative is to live in suspicion and distrust.

We have recently passed the sixtieth anniversary of “Kristallnacht,” the night when Nazis, who were part of a “civilized” and “Christian” nation, destroyed synagogues across Germany. If we could take only one lesson from the Holocaust it should be that no group of people is immune from participating in the most horrific evil given the right set of circumstances.

When socioeconomic pressures are combined with religious intolerance, the result can be disastrous. History tells us that the seeds of intolerance or tolerance we plant now will surely come to full flower in years to come. People of faith need, right now, to be diligent in tending to our religious gardens in such a way that God is glorified by our diversity rather than having faith stifled by religious prejudice.

There are, throughout Southern California, interfaith councils that seek to promote tolerance, understanding and dialogue among persons of different faiths. Interfaith dialogue is a wonderful way to get to know our neighbors who have a different and frequently insightful way of understanding God. But whether or not we participate in a formal organization, we all have a great opportunity to rejoice in religious diversity instead of being divided by it.

As we approach a new century, a new millennium, it is time to take a long look back at our sometimes glorious, sometimes horrific past and begin to build for a new day. It is time to build a future in which we are not threatened by different religions or different ways of understanding God. God is neither enhanced nor diminished by our religious ideologies. It is time for us to simply let God be God without demanding that all persons ascribe to a particular belief that can only diminish our understanding and increase our divisions.

On Faith is a forum for Orange County clergy and others to offer their views on religious topics of general interest. Submissions, which will be published at the discretion of The Times and are subject to editing, should be delivered to Orange County religion page editor Jack Robinson at 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626. Submissions also may be faxed to (714) 966-7711 or e-mailed to jack.robinson@latimes.com.