So there’s a great book by Michael Walzer
called What It Means to Be an American.
And one of the things that he says is that
for centuries, really from the time of the
Greeks, political philosophers believed that
the only way to have diversity in a society
was for it to be an empire or a dictatorship.
If you wanted a democracy it had to be homogenous—one
ethnic group, one racial group, and especially
one religion.
And then he ends that section and he begins
the next section with the line: “…Until
the United States of America.“
We are the first mass-scale religiously diverse
democracy, and I think that’s a remarkable
thing.
And when a religiously diverse democracy works
well it’s a sight to behold.
You have low levels of prejudice, you have
strong social cohesion, you have high levels
of social capital, you have respect for different
identity communities, you have the narrative
of a diverse society that binds that society
with a sense of unity.
And a lot of what Interfaith Youth Core is
about is helping America continue to be a
religiously diverse democracy that we all
ought to be proud of.
So, what strikes me most about the founding
fathers (and a set of important figures before
the founding fathers, people like Roger Williams
and the people who drafted the Flushing Remonstrance,
that’s 140 years before the founding fathers),
was that this set of characters imagined a
religiously diverse democracy.
And a big part of that is the separation of
church and state, and a part of that, of course,
is to protect the state from the church and
to protect religious communities from undue
interference by the state.
And it is also, significantly, about the welcoming
of contributions from diverse religious communities.
And so it’s not like the founding fathers
were principally very devout people, but they
recognized the importance of the civic contributions
of religious communities and they certainly
wanted those communities to flourish.
Let me give you a couple of examples of this.
So Benjamin Franklin when he lived in Philadelphia
made proactive donations to the building funds
of every religious community that he could
find in Philadelphia, different communities
of Christians, a Jewish community, and he
built a hall so at the pulpit of this hall
would be open to the preaching of anybody.
If the Grand Mufti of Constantinople wants
to send somebody preaching about Islam this
pulpit is here for his service.
That’s not just freedom of religion, that’s
welcoming the contributions of diverse religious
communities.
George Washington, when a Jewish leader in
the late 18th century says to him, “What’s
going to happen to my community, to us Jews
now that we have a new nation, a constitution,
and you are the president?”
And George Washington writes, in a famous
document in American history called the Letter
to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport Rhode
Island, he writes, “This government will
give to bigotry no sanction and to persecution
no assistance.
May the children of the stock of Abraham sit
in safety under their own vine and fig, and
let there be none to make them afraid.”
So where is the sense that these different
religious communities are going to help make
up the civil society that is the United States
of America.
I think about it as a potluck nation, and
of course, that’s a play on the term “melting
pot.”
And what I don’t like about “the melting
pot” is obviously this notion that you have
to kind of melt away your identity or your
distinctiveness.
I think what makes America strong is not that
different communities melt away their identities,
it’s that they bring their identities to
the common table in the way we think about
a potluck.
And a potluck is boring if everybody brings
Wonder Bread and peanut butter.
A potluck is wonderful and nutritious and
festive when people bring the various dishes
that are distinctive to their identity.
That’s how I think about interfaith: America
is a variety of communities, a variety of
orientations around religion, as I said it
from Atheists to Zoroastrian, are contributing
the best of who they are for the commons.
If different communities don’t contribute,
the nation doesn’t feast.
