Interfaith Dialogue: Metaphysical Not Political?
by Samuel Hayim Brody
Interfaith dialogue has an ambivalent relationship to politics. Founded upon a metaphor of international relations, it imagines religious traditions as states entering negotiations. Diplomats trained to observe proper protocol carefully parse grievances, borders, property claims, and the balance of trade. Grand statements such as Nostra Aetate produced by actual state and quasi-state entities like the Vatican make this clear. Statements produced by independent, decentralized groups of religious leaders, such as the Jewish Dabru Emet and Islamic A Common Word Between Us and You, follow the same pattern.
The grievances, property claims, and trade balances in question, however, seem “unpolitical” to many. Let us agree with Dabru Emet that “Jews and Christians worship the same God,” noting the careful negotiation that allows it to speak of the Giver of the Oral Torah and the Triune God as “the same.” A conversation starting here seems removed from the passions driving contemporary political partisanship. Indeed, today, it often feels easier to maintain relationships across theological chasms than political ones. You disagree with me about who God is, or whether God exists? Fine. You disagree with me about Trump? Forget it.
This lived priority of the political over the metaphysical may vindicate a classically liberal separation of these realms. The legal wall between church and state matches a similar divide in what John Rawls called the public political culture: reasonable adherents to Catholicism or Islam can recognize that even if they draw support for their preferred policies from religious traditions, they cannot expect others to do the same. So, they make their public arguments in a shared, common language. Rawls describes this concession to reasonable pluralism as a recognition of the pragmatic demands of the moment, not a draconian imposition of liberal agnostic ontology.
Academic religion scholars and theologians have vilified Rawls in their projects, rejecting him through communitarian, natural-law, and “religionist” arguments. On the ground, however, interfaith alliance in the world of real politics more likely takes a Rawlsian form than a theological-dialogical one. On the Right, the Jewish–Christian alliance has solidified into a truly formidable political force, yet I would hardly trace this to the theological rapprochement represented by Dabru Emet or any other statement. Instead, it is a marriage of convenience, where each partner benefits. The Jewish Right gains rhetorical, economic, and military support for the State of Israel from the most powerful faction in the American empire. The Christian Right gains insulation against the charge that its project brutely imposes hegemony, and instead becomes the defender of the “Judeo-Christian West.” This incoherent but powerful category does not depend upon agreeing with Dabru Emet’s claim that “the humanly irreconcilable difference between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the entire world.” Both Jewish and Christian right-wingers regularly make chauvinistic, self-aggrandizing claims in clear violation of this spirit. At the same time, they draw upon widespread consensus on Dabru Emet’s other “political” statements—“Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the Land of Israel” and “Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon.” Neither claim was unique to Dabru Emet nor dependent upon it. The alliance thus survives each side’s awareness of the other’s triumphalism.
On the Left, common practice reveals implicit commitment to two other theses of Dabru Emet: “A new relationship between Jews and Christians will not weaken Jewish practice” and “Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace.” Yet this practical commitment is challenged from two directions. First, religion per se has an uncertain position on the Left. Although resurgence of a “Religious Left” that would resemble the glory days of the U.S. civil rights movement seems possible, such a force never quite materializes. Second, younger Jews seem far less interested in rapprochement with Christianity and far more interested in critiquing Christian hegemony, a task they regard previous generations as having left incomplete. The renewed appearance of “classical” antisemitism on the Right, combined with the prevalence of Islamophobia, strengthens this tendency. The oft-discussed rise of intersectionality discourse on the Left and increased awareness of postcolonial and decolonial thought similarly renders theological “dialogue” a quaint relic. Not only is such dialogue unnecessary for multicultural intersectional organizing, it may actively harm progress as it solidifies reigning orthodoxies within the more conservative sectors of each community. Here too, alliance becomes possible through Rawlsian modus vivendi rather than theological dialogue.
That coalitions on both the Right and Left see no need for discussion of metaphysical premises or theology raises the question of whether such discourse is politically useful at all. I would make a case from the Left that it is. Clarifying and emphasizing the theological premises of the parties would hinder cooperation on the Right. Against the Right’s self-impression, they suppress such discussion in a classically liberal attempt to avoid conflict over their deepest convictions, focusing instead on common enemies: Islam, secularism, and socialism. On the Left, however, honest theological discourse in keeping with the Dabru Emet model holds the potential to add a powerful new dimension to the intersectional conversations that fuel popular leftist activism on economic, racial, gender, and sexuality issues. It could enable a positive vision of religious difference that is impossible on either conservative–chauvinist or classically liberal premises.
How so? The Left must recognize that, through a theological lens, the ally/enemy line does not run neatly along a left/right axis. On the issue at the core of Dabru Emet—Christian supersessionism and the “teaching of contempt” for Jews—there are leftist Christians who do not understand how their “revolutionary love” isn’t revolutionary enough to overcome Christian hegemony. And there are Christians whose theology we might call conservative who might not be allies on other issues (especially social issues) who have confronted the question of supersessionism and proven possible a nonsupersessionist Christianity. Failing to recognize this risks leaving the Left with an eliminationist imaginary: a coalition without (nonsupersessionist) Christians building toward a world without them. Such a coalition, even if it declares itself socialist, relies on the liberal assumption that metaphysics means war.
Samuel Hayim Brody, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. Twitter: @HayimBrody.