Building Civic Unity In A Religiously Diverse Democracy

- Welcome to Civics in the Academy. This is sponsored by the Alliance for Civics in the academy. I am Josiah Ober. I'm on the Executive Committee of the Alliance. And in my spare time I teach at Stanford University. The alliance was launched just over a year ago as a community of practice for those working in civic education in colleges and universities. So membership in our alliance is open. If you're not yet a member, we urge you to join us. The application link is in the chat. This series features discussions. This webinar series features discussions of the practice and pedagogy of civics in higher education. Our goal is to foster dialogue, to share best practices and to contribute to pluralistic frameworks in the fast changing field of civics in higher education. The alliance also provides seed grants for members to host meetings on topics of importance to civic education, disseminates teaching resources and supports dialogue by publishing members, research and commentary. So if you'd like to submit items for our webpage or have other inquiries about getting involved in the aca, please send us a an email to hoover aca@stanford.edu. We'll put that up in the chat as well. Before we start, let me reiterate our hope that you will want to get involved with our alliance. Our alliance is a shared endeavor. There are many approaches to providing knowledge, skills, dispositions and experiences essential for citizenship in the 21st century. The American ecology is of higher education is diverse, and as civic educators, we need to be making the most of that. Our alliance will be of most value when we share ideas and resources from institutions across our ecology, public and private, red and blue states, big and small, well and poorly resourced. So please do join us, and if you're not yet a member, please become one. Let us know how we might be able to help you. Once again, the relevant websites are in the chat. And finally, do join us for the next episode in our webinar series, which will be announced on the, on the webinar page on historical thinking and democratic citizenship. So religious diversity is a defining feature of contemporary American democracy, and yet it raises questions about how civic unity is cultivated in shared public life. So how can institutions of higher education prepare students to engage across religious difference while sustaining common democratic commitments? So that's the question we explore in our webinar. And we're lucky to have three extraordinary panelists, each one of them, a scholar, a teacher at a public intellectual professor Robert George is the McCormick professor of Jurisprudence and professor of politics at Princeton University and director of the James Madison program at Pre Princeton. His most recent book among many is called Truth Matters, a dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division written with Cornell West. Next, Dr. IBO Patel is founder and president of Interfaith America, a civil society organization that works towards an America that embraces the power of pluralism. He is a prolific public speaker and the author most recently of, we Need to Build Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. Friar Francisco Naja is the chaplain of Thomas Aquinas College, which has campuses in both Southern California and Massachusetts. He is the author of articles on among Other Topics, rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance, A case study, a teaching case study of Bin Kal D for a collection of essays on teaching the global Renaissance across borders. And an article on social cosmology on Rapanui. I hope he'll talk. Talk to us a bit about that. And another related one, Rapanui repatriation, asserting indigenous sovereignty. So I'm gonna ask each of you to take a few moments to share your thoughts about our topic, how we might best go about the work of promoting and sustaining civic unity in religiously pluralistic democracy, a democracy in which religious faith is centrally important in the lives of many citizens, while many also regard the strict separation of church and state as essential. So Robbie George, why don't you kick us off.

- I'd be delighted to do that, Josh, and lemme begin by thanking you for the opportunity to join with my distinguished fellow panelists here and thanking you for your great leadership in the civic education movement. This is a very exciting time for us, for people who believe in the importance of civic education and your leadership. And Stanford's leadership is making a huge positive impact. It's also so great to be on with my old friend Ibu, and with my new friend prior Francisco. I am of the view that the way to deal with the issues that arise pertaining to religion in pluralistic religiously pluralistic societies is by way of engagement. People of different faiths should engage each other in a truth seeking spirit with a desire to learn from each other. I'm not of the school that says the way to deal with the problems raised by religion and pluralistic democracies is to privatize religion, keep our religion to ourselves, keep it in the, in the home or on the table at mealtime or on our knees, at bedtime or in the church or temple or mosque or synagogue. I think that's, there's a, there's a very worthy tradition that defends that point of view, but I'm on the other side. I think that tradition gets, it gets it wrong. I believe in engagement, and part of my belief has been really the result of my own experience. I was born to a Catholic mother and a Eastern Orthodox father. I went off to college where I had the great privilege of studying Buddhism with an eminent teda master, the j Kun Ravar Moon. I married my college sweetheart, a Jewish woman. We raised Jewish Christian children. And then early in my academic career, I began engaging seriously with evangelical Protestants and getting to know people from that tradition. I've served on several commissions, the US Commission on Civil Rights, the President's Council on Bioethics, and most importantly for these purposes as chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. And all of those experiences brought me into contact with people approaching issues from the perspectives of their different faiths. I found myself working with Muslims, with Bahais, with Yazidis, with Hindus, with Buddhists from traditions other than the terra tradition that I had studied and on and on. And what I learned, Josh, is that these great traditions are not only traditions of faith, they are what I would venture to call wisdom traditions. They have been around for a while. They've had many opportunities, very intelligent people within them have had opportunities to think about and to deal with the problems of the human condition. And they have developed insights. And all of us can learn from the wisdom, from the insights of people who come from traditions, very different from our own. So I would like that Josh, to become the norm in our own pluralistic United States of America, where we treat each other not only with respect. That's that's important. And if it was the best we could do, I'd settle for it. But we treat each other not only with respect, but as fellow citizens from whom we can learn learning from their traditions, reflections on human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny.

- Terrific. Thank you very much, Ivo. Your initial thoughts.

- Hi everyone, my name is Ibu Patel. I'm founder and president of an organization called Interfaith America. We work on hundreds and hundreds of college campuses on interfaith cooperation through the great American tradition of religious pluralism. And I want to begin with the story. So I will often serve as a, a, a counselor, OO, an advisor to college presidents on how to integrate religious diversity and interfaith cooperation into their diversity paradigm. So a couple of years ago, I'm at a public university in the most religious state in the union, and I'm meeting with a very sensitive group of people. I'm meeting with the counseling staff, and I asked the question that I, I asked at the beginning of almost all of these conversations. I say, tell me a couple of ways that religion shows up positively in your work. Again, this is the counseling staff and the most religious state in the union. I will not use names, but shouldn't take your heart a long time to figure that out. First three stories I hear from the counseling staff are all negative about religion. I'm accustomed to this. And so I take it in stride. I am about a click left of center. And the things that other people a click left of center don't like about religion. I am largely in agreement. And so I kind of nod my head and I'm like, I understand what you're saying, but I'm asking you how does religion show up positively? And I'm looking for obvious things. You have a 19-year-old student who's distraught because their grandmother died or because they got their first F in a test and they grew up in a religious family, and they share with the counselor that their religion's getting 'em through. I wait 15 seconds, silence. I wait 30 seconds, silence. I wait 45 seconds, silence. And I am just letting it sit. I am just letting it sit. 60 seconds, 40 people on the counseling and wellbeing staff at a large public university in the most religious state in the union, could not share a single story of how religion showed up positively in their work. I have been doing this for 25 years. I visit 25 college campuses a year. I do everything from run workshops with students to make presentations to college cabinets and university boards. That is not the exception. That is not the exception. So what if the last 15 to 20 years of diversity work in America were characterized by students reading the flushing rem Mons and the letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island more than Fko and Marcus? What if they read Kwame Anthony Apia cosmopolitanism and the lies that bind where he says at the beginning of those books that the most challenging dimension of his parents' relationship, one black, one white, one from Ghana, one from England, was not the race or the nation. It was that one was Methodist and one was Anglican. And they had to figure that out. What if we, what if there was a deep intellectual reading of the kind of work that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson did in the development of the Virgin Virginia statute for religious freedom and how their creation of the world's first attempt at religiously diverse democracy gets invested into the political architecture and the civic life of the nation. What if we recognize that in other countries it is common to have a Muslim fire department and a Catholic fire department that only responds to fires on the Catholic or the Muslim side of town respectively. What if we got deep into Robert Putnam and asked the question that as religious belonging erodes in America, what will happen to our civic life? What's gonna happen to Southern Baptist Reli disaster relief services? What's gonna happen to Catholic schools that rely on people showing up in church and putting $20 in the basket as it passes by? What would, what would our nation look like if instead of the last 15 to 20 years of diversity work, focusing on dividing people into racists and anti-racists if focused on cooperation across difference, recognizing that the American genius is the ability to disagree on some fundamental things and to work together on other fundamental things and the tradition in which we acquire that genius is working with religious diversity. And we were graduating people from our institutions that can help strengthen our religiously diverse democracy and realize that if you can do this around religious doctrine, you can do this around political ideology. What if this way of thinking and these civic practices became central to the development of civic thought programs? And nobody graduated without reading the letters to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island or the Flusher Mons and asking the question, how does this apply today?

- Thank you. Fire Francisco, the floor is yours.

- Thank you very, thank you very much. I'm delighted to be part of this panel and, and learn from my fellow panelists. I don't think we've ever met before, but I'm aware that Dr. George has worked extensively with my former employer, Hamza Yusuf, who's the president of Tuna College. I spent eight and a half years on the faculty there before coming now to Thomas Aquinas College. So from a Muslim Great Books College to now a Catholic Great Books college, I think I'd, I'd start by saying that my earliest remembrance of what today we would call engagement with America's religious pluralism came on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse in the late 1960s when my dad became a citizen of the United States. I remember vividly that after the ceremony, we all adjourned to the lawn in front of the courthouse. And everybody who became a citizen that day brought food picnic basically from their respective countries and traditions. And I took it upon myself to visit every single one of. Now my motivation, of course, was purely hedonistic, but the experience that I had as a small child was one of bulent interaction with men and women with families and consequently with religious perspectives from all over the world. And I think it's really, it, it re redos to my parents' credit that though I grew up in a Catholic household, it was one that was very outward looking in that respect and one that modeled engagement not only with persons, but with the religious traditions to which the persons belonged Later, a as a a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, my my headmaster was the late Dr. Theodore Sizer, who's genius really not only oversaw co-education when Abbott and Philips academies were merged there in Andover, but also the creation of a tripartite at the time school chaplaincy. So our chaplains were a rabbi of the reform tradition, a United Methodist minister and an Augustinian friar who was the Catholic chaplain. So in that environment, I think it's not an exaggeration to say that in consequence of the religious pluralism, and over in the late 1970s when I was a student there, I became a better Catholic. And I wanna underscore that this is something that at least in my interaction with people of specific religious backgrounds, something they often worry about in connection with American pluralism, namely that our inter action with communities of faith in other traditions is at least has the potential to water down our own commitment. And all I can say is that hasn't been my experience so far. Later, as I just mentioned, I went to work for a Muslim institution where I bought both philosophy and rhetoric on the one hand, but specifically principles of democracy on the other. And I found myself again and a reading classical texts, take for example, through an entirely new lens that is to say a, a lens informed by the explicit Muslim content, the, the, the Islamic content of the curriculum at Una College, which is attempting to teach side by side both western and Islamic traditions. So I've had a number of wonderful experiences in the course of my lifetime, not only of American pluralism, but specifically religious pluralism and in ways that I found have not only improved my experience as a citizen of these United States, but also as a Catholic and one who is engaging both his own faith and his faith in the context of American civic pluralism.

- Thank you very much, Robbie George. I've often told the story about how the Stanford Civics initiative had its origins in some ways in a talk that you gave here at Stanford on free speech. So I, I'd like you to talk a little bit about your own work. I know you've been dedicated to free speech, academic freedom for your whole career. How do we think about free speech in the face of the demands of some sincerely religious persons, whether they're in state legislatures or otherwise for censorship of materials that they see as promoting lifestyles that they regard as just fundamentally wrong or, or, or even even sinful. How do you respond to that kind of challenge? And once again, imagining that the challenge you're responding to is a sincere one. These people are, are genuinely concerned. How do you, how do you talk with them?

- I believe they are genuinely concerned. I don't think that's a pretext at all. I mean, I've talked with many people, debated many people who, who think that we've gone too far with free speech or who believe I go too far in defending free speech. I'm often accused of being and not with, not without justice being a free speech fundamentalist as you as you know. But let me just toss a couple of considerations in here, Josh. First, especially if we're talking about education and most especially if we're talking about higher education colleges and universities, I think we have to be clear about what our mission is. And our mission is truth seeking. That's it. It's the pursuit of knowledge, knowledge of truth, advancing understanding, deepening understanding, it's the preservation of truth once it's been securely attained to the extent that we can ever securely attain truth. And then the transmission of knowledge, the teaching, the, the teaching mission, which to me fundamentally is a matter of helping the young men and women entrusted to our carers, our students, to form themselves to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. So I think that mission is important for, to understand the role of, of free speech. Now the second thing I want to toss in is this, as you know, Josh, because we work in broadly the same field, I've kind of made my career in no small part by being a, a critic of the kind of liberalism or political liberalism that is associated not only with figures like the late and very great John Rawls, but also John Stewart Mill. I've been critical of mill's utilitarianism. I've been critical of some aspects of Mills libertarianism as general libertarianism. But in that second chapter of Mill's, great work on liberty, that great essay on liberty, where he takes up the question of what he calls liberty of thought and discussion, what we would call free speech. He identifies the importance of free speech as fundamentally instrumental to the project that all of us, whether we're in educational institutions or not, should be about the business of pursuing. And that is truth. And I think he's a hundred percent right about that. That if we are to be truth seekers, if we're to be determined truth seekers, then we're gonna need the freedom to ask any question, to question any orthodoxy, any dogma, political, religious, ideological, whatever it is, we're going to need the freedom to object, to inquire, to challenge, to criticize because it's the only way we're gonna get to the truth or at least nearer to the truth or deepen our understanding of the truth. We're never gonna get there perfectly. We all know this. Whatever truth we attain, it will always be aix with some measure of error, error. But we also know right now that each and every one of us, everybody on the planet has some false beliefs in his or her head. We all do. We all know we do. The trouble is we just don't know which ones the false ones are. We believe what we believe because we believe it to be true. But we know not everything we believe is true. So if we're gonna make any progress towards swapping out at least some of those false beliefs and swapping in true beliefs, we're gonna have to be willing to allow people to challenge our beliefs. And this pertains not only to the trivial, minor superficial things in life, things we don't care that much about, where it's easy to admit not just notionally, but deeply existentially, easily admit, easy to admit we could be wrong, but it pertains, let's be honest with ourselves to the deep important, profound questions, the things we really care about. We could be wrong about those too. Those deep questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, human rights, human destiny. So again, that means we need the freedom to challenge and we need to be willing to be challenged. The other side of the freedom is the virtues that we need to be truth seekers. If we're to be truth seekers, we need conditions. Those conditions have to be marked by freedom. But we also need virtues. We need the virtue of intellectual humility. That is the willingness that to acknowledge that we could be wrong and very well might be wrong. Not only about the minor things, but also about the big important things, not only about things we don't care that much about, we're not deeply emotionally invested in, but the stuff we're really deeply emotionally invested in. And we need the courage to be willing to detach ourselves enough from our emotions to consider whether in fact we might be wrong about this thing or that thing that we really deeply care about. So there are two sides here. Conditions and virtues on the condition side, centrally freedom of speech. It's all about, as Mill w rightly said, truth seeking

- Fair. Francisco, you teach in a a Catholic college that was established specifically to be a Catholic institution. How do you respond to this? Do you think it is a part of your mission as chaplain, as as teacher, to expose your students to this possibility of error, which you know, might be seen as challenging to the tradition in which the, your college was established?

- It depends on what you understand the tradition to be. For example, the, the tendency in contemporary American discourse is to regard religion as synonymous with dogmatism. And at least this has not been the, the, the Catholic understanding, which is I think probably best summarized by say a figure like Anselm who refers to our project. That is to say the, the, the project of, of this college as faith seeking understanding, we understand ourselves to be motivated both by faith and by reason. And the curriculum is designed in such a way as to sharpen the capacity to recognize what is reason and reasonable as much as it is to deepen the faith of those who elect to come here. So I don't, I don't experience myself. I'm, I, I'd be surprised if, if the, the founders of this college understood themselves as carving out a, a protected space for Catholics to develop as Catholics. That is to say protection understood as insulation. I mean our, our students are reading mill and engaging Hume and, and, and dealing with the issues that are raised in the intellectual tradition. Of course, they're also going to mass, they're going to confession every day or, well, not every one of them every day, but every day we have confessions, right? And so, so they are practicing their Catholic faith as well. I think they'd be very surprised to discover that that's regarded as sort of two, if not completely incompatible things, difficult things that somehow have to be juggled in a particularly dexterous way. It is in fact our tradition, faith and reason.

- Thank you Evo. You describe in your most recent book, your own development from a, a social critic, quick to, shall we say, shoot from the hip and a call out hypocrisy of some of the institutions of America, including ones by which you were employed. So you move from that position to being a builder, to building an institution, to trying to, as you say, make things. Does it still feel like a tension that you need to resolve for yourself in your, in your work or in your, in your personal life? I mean, once again, we're sort of talking about the ways in which criticism challenging and yet trying to build something to establish something is, is, is compatible or, or, or attention that needs to be resolved

- Is, it's such an interesting question because because right. I, I am known right now as a, as a pretty fierce critic of DEI, although I, I think of it as a tragedy, which is to say, I think of what DEI could have been instead of what it became. And so in some ways, but I, I feel like at I am doing it for a very different reason than I did in my early twenties. So maybe I'll just tell a little bit of the story in part because your institution is where the story took place. So I kind of come out of, if you will, in political correctness in the mid 1990s when I was a a college student, you kind of the nineties version of wokeness or anti-racism, if you will. And I, I start getting interested in religious diversity and interfaith work in, in some similar ways as, as as Ravi's stories, Ravi's story. I'm particularly drawn to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. I start looking at theologies of social action across religious traditions, and I start going to interfaith conferences and I'm looking for the, the new Dorothy days and Nu Hans and Malcolm X's of the world, and I'm finding senior theologians on panels. And while I was 22 years old, my hair was on fire. And at one of these interfaith conferences at Stanford, I stood up in the middle of, of a plenary session, I threw my fist in the air and I denounced the whole thing as useless and boring. And I said, where's the, where are the young people? Where's the sense of energy? Where's the, where's the vitality? Where's the social action? And you know, there was some shocked faces, there was a smattering of applause because everybody likes a young activists in those, or a set of people like a young activist in, in those settings. But the real gift was this woman comes up to me, her name is Jolan Trevino, she comes up to me as people start going to the next session. And she says, you know, that's a really interesting idea you have in, in interfaith organization that would be based around young people and social action and religious diversity that would take very seriously the theologies of social action across religious traditions. You should build that, you should build that. And I kind of receive that as a profound challenge, although she didn't mean it as such. And the reason for that is because she was basically saying, if you're smart enough to tell other people what they're doing wrong, well certainly you're smart enough to build a thing that, that you think is right. And 30 years later, here I am, and you know what is now a $22 million 85 person organization that you know is by orders of magnitude, the the largest interfaith organization in the country. And I, I think that the great gift of our religious traditions and of the American tradition is you build better things. It's the toque villian tradition. It's the tradition of the prophet Muhammad made the peace and blessings of God be upon him the way that he built civic institutions in Medina. That created a sense of pluralism. But I wanna move to this kind of critic notion for, for right now, because if you read what I write in inside Higher ed or the Chronicle of Higher Education or the New York Times or persuasion, you'll see me pointing out a lot of things that I think are wrong about the current diversity model. And and the reason for that, I think is because it took a sharp turn into dividing into us versus them and into encouraging people to tell victim stories rather than agent stories. And I, I think that that is a sacred violation. I think that is a, it is a sacred violation to ask people to tell the stories of all of the things they can't do in the world than to all of the stories they can do in the world, particularly when those people are on college campuses in America, which is the probably the greatest social mobility elevator ever invented in human history is the American college campus. And so my purpose in this is to encourage people towards something that is better. But I just think if the analogy that I've been using is, is you can't turn linebackers into shortstops. So if somebody is, and this is a, it's a prosaic metaphor, but it's actually a pretty profound thought. If you have a diversity infrastructure that for 25 years has been committed to dividing people into oppressed and oppressor, into encouraging people to tell victim stories, into, into training people to be critics and not builders, you cannot all of a sudden turn around and expect it to be a pluralism infrastructure. You are aligned to yourself, you are aligned to yourself. There are not that many BoJack's in the world. And if we really believe in the American project, which is people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies build a nation together and they cooperate across their differences. If we really believe in that, we demand excellence around it. And excellence takes discipline and practice.

- Josh, may I offer a comment? Please, please. Yeah. So I travel around the country speaking at universities, colleges and universities, public, private, non-sectarian, religiously affiliated. And I must say that in the past half decade to a decade, as I tore around the country lecturing, I've found greater openness to challenge, to dominant opinions on campus or to orthodoxies a greater openness to challenge among the more deeply religiously affiliated institutions than among the only loosely affiliated religious institutions or the non-sectarian institutions. Again, be they public or or private. And I think that tells us something. I find more openness, for example, at Brigham Young University, Latterday Saints University or at the University of Dallas at Catholic University, or at where fire Francisco used to teach at Zaytuna College, the new Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, California than I do at Yale or at Williams or at the University of of Illinois. Now, when I visit religiously affiliated colleges because of my work on free speech and academic freedom, I'm often asked, well, how does that apply to us at Yeshiva, let's say, or at Notre Dame or at at Baylor, a Baptist institution or at BYU or at za, how does it apply to us? And my answer to that question is, you're a university, you're not catechism class, you know, you're, you're, you're, you, you, you're not just trying to get doctrine into people's heads. You're committed to a certain doctrine that that's, that's your faith-based commitment, but you're a university, which means that the norms that should govern you as a truth seeking institution are gonna be much more like than unlike the norms that should govern at a non-sectarian institution. Now, it doesn't mean that they're identical, but it does mean that they're pretty darn close. It does mean that if you're at Notre Dame or Yeshiva or BYU or Baylor or say tuna, you should know about, you should read, you should confront Nietzsche or Hume or Marx or any of the other great figures of history who've, who've challenged theism or challenged your, your, your Jewish or Christian or Muslim tradition of faith. You would not be educating your students properly at Notre Dame or BYU or Zaytuna if they came out not having had a genuine con confrontation with Nietzche or with Marx or with Hume. And, and i, I mean here, not just setting up a straw man and knocking him down. I mean, they're really engaging the best arguments that those figures, those critics of religion have to have to make. That's what it means to be a university, not a catechism class. If you're a university, your job, and I don't care what you're Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Baptist, your job is to ensure that your students engage with the best that has been thought and said across the range of perspectives by people living in the best minds, living in, living in dead, on these perennial disputed questions, these questions on which reasonable people of goodwill we all must acknowledge, have and continue to, and, and will continue to disagree.

- Terrific. Thank you for our Francisco. I think you, you started us off on, in on, on a on an interesting discussion. I'd like to, to shift a little bit, I I imagine that each of you believes that there are some behaviors, some attitudes in which democratic citizens, perhaps anyone ought to be intolerant, and yet religious intolerance has historically been a real threat to civic unity, our, our topic. So just, I'm gonna invite each of you to give me a personal experience that you've had. I'm guessing that each of you, one in one way in another has had an experience with intolerance and how that's figured if, if it has in your, in your own teaching and practice. So anyone of you would like to jump in? Go ahead.

- When you say intolerance, I, I just wanna make sure I've understood. Are you asking for examples of an explicitly religious kind of intolerance or is any kind of intolerance on the table here?

- Yes, I think any time is, I mean, our topic is reli, you know, religion and civic unity. But it seems to me that, you know, as we've been talking about things, we've been talking about engagement, needing to get people to understand and think seriously about other traditions or other ways of thinking, other ways of living their life. And intolerance seems to be, at least at its core to be a structured refusal to engage in that way. And to say that, I'm going to shut that down because I cannot tolerate it. Now, as I say, I started out saying some things I, I accept as being intolerable, but I think for many, I think all of us would agree that some degree of tolerance for that which people find uncomfortable is, is, is important. So it's just a just throwing it out. Maybe it's a,

- I had an interesting experience a a few years ago I was in Dublin, Ireland presenting at an academic conference. And the, the conference was organized in such a way that we were using facilities on both sides of the LiFi. So we frequently had to cross the various bridges to get to our respective venues. And on of all places, the Beckett Bridge, a woman stopped in front of me and said, I despise public displays of religiosity apparently, because I'm wearing a Franciscan habit, you know, and just walking around the streets of Dublin, like that's not a problem. My immediate thought was, I feel rather the same way about public displays of bigotry.

- I wonder father fire Francisco, whether say a Buddhist monk and the saffron robes would have elicited the same response from this woman. I suspect not,

- I mean, I, I often, you know, coincide with Buddhist monks or sometimes with orthodox clergy, sometimes with Hasidim, yeah. Very frequently in part because of my, my eight and a half years at tuna college with, you know, someone wearing a Kofi, for example. So there's, there's a sense in which such persons seeing me will come right at me.

- Yeah,

- Stand, stand there with me as if to say, here we are. Isn't this a wonderful thing? And I, so I just, I just am challenging the notion that intolerance is the kind of thing that the religious have any monopoly upon. Of

- Course, it's, oh, I, I was, part of my thought was that the religious suffer intolerance from the determinately anti-religious. So it's not a, it, it doesn't have to go any one way.

- Well, human nature being what it is, the temptation to be dogmatic and ideological and bullheaded and mean crosses, religious lines, crosses ethnic lines, crosses ideological lines. But maybe Josh, we could begin by talking a little bit about the things we should be intolerant of because they really are intolerable. I would start that list in the university world with intellectual dishonesty. We cannot tolerate that. We cannot tolerate that among our students. We cannot tolerate that with our faculty. It is simply incompatible with the truth seeking mission of the institution, with the vocation of the institution, with our own vocation as, as scholars. And of course the same when it comes to things like incitement to violence, harassment, defamation. There are some categories of speech that even a fundamentalist free speech advocate like myself realizes. You know, those are, those are not what in, in first amendment law we call the not protected speech. Those are not protected categories of, of speech we have to be intolerant of, of of those things. We also, I think, need to be intolerant of closed-mindedness. I mean, if you're not open to being challenged, then you just don't belong at Princeton or Stanford or the University of Illinois or Gettysburg College or wherever it is. If the institution is really dedicated to truth seeking, you know, if, if you're not willing to acknowledge your own fallibility that you might be wrong about things, then you're just not gonna benefit from the place and you're certainly not gonna confer any benefit on the place. So I take a pretty strictly intolerant line toward those sorts of things. But I do think we have to be tolerant in the words of the principles abra at the University of Chicago, which we've now adopted at Princeton, the University of Chicago free speech principles need to be willing to consider, willing to engage any idea, maybe a very bad idea, maybe a very corrupt idea. But, you know, if there's somebody who's willing to defend that idea in the proper currency of intellectual discourse, using reasons, argument evidence, then we owe it to them. We owe it to our own mission as truth seekers to be willing to engage in. It might strike us at least initially, and maybe all the way down to the end as an outrageous idea, corrupt idea, an evil idea. But if so, we should be able to pinpoint what, what's wrong with it. You know, we don't have to just exclude it. We should be able to figure out and to articulate what's wrong with it. So I, I want everything on the table. My, you kindly mentioned the new book Cornell West and I have out in, in our teaching together, Cornell always begins our seminars together by telling the students the whole purpose of this course is to unsettle you no matter where you are, whether you're on the left or on the right, whether you're religious, whether you're secular, no matter where you come from, if we're not unsettling, you we're not doing our jobs as professors.

- Evo, you're interfaith America is really about pluralism, and yet intolerance is potentially a threat to pluralism. Do you have experiences or more thoughts about this?

- Well, you know, I was named with an, I was raised with the name IBU in the western suburbs of Chicago, the 1980s. So I've, I've been there, but I actually wanna tell a story about, about a, a a Jewish friend of mine that shaped my founding of this organization and also an extremely important dimension of all religious traditions. So when I was in high school, my, my friend group included a South Indian Hindu, a Nigerian evangelical, a Cuban Jew, a Mormon. And back in the early 1990s, this, this was probably the exception. And today it's the rule today, the, the rule is in so many places, people have a, a, a diversity of friends from religious and racial backgrounds. And I think that's wonderful. And over the course of, of a few weeks in, in our third year in high school, a a group of the thugs in my school started going after my Jewish friend, and they would say really ugly antisemite things to him in the hallways, and they would scrawl ugly things on desks. And I watched this happen and I did nothing. And, you know, my friend like kind of shrank into to the shadows. I, like, I watched that happen and you know, again, I did nothing. A couple years later we're all back from college and we're hanging out one night and he brings this up with me and he says, you know, those were the worst, like six or eight weeks of my life, and I watched you watch me suffer and do nothing. Why did you do nothing? And it was a, it was like a shake me up experience because, because I intentionally, I I I knew I was doing nothing. I knew I was doing nothing and I knew what was wrong. And I shared it with my dad that night, and my dad was so angry at me and he said something that is stuck with me deeply. He said, you failed your friend and you failed your faith. What's interesting is that my dad is not a ritualistic Muslim at all, but he is deeply shaped by the ethics of the tradition. And for him, the ethics of the tradition mean that part of what we are called to as Muslims is we stand up for people of other fates when they are suffering. And he named the story of the prophet Muhammad standing up when, when the, the funeral of a Jew went by, told a story of the prophet arguing with the Christians of nudge, run over theology over the na the, the nature of Jesus. And when this group called the, the Christians of nudge run said that they needed leave of the, they needed his safe leave to go out of the city and do their prayers and return and continue the theological argument, he invited them to pray in the Majid that he had built in Medina. And so this is, you know, when I was 17 and, and, and this happened to me, or I was, you know, 17 when I failed my friend 19, when, when, when he challenged me on it, I thought of it as, as just the kind of failure of a friend. But the more I get into this notion of what do our religions call upon us that we owe other people, I started to call this a theology of interfaith cooperation, theology of interfaith cooperation that in every religion there is some version of the great Commission, right? And in some religions it's more explicit than others and Christianity and, and in Islam, the great commission is pretty explicit, convert others. And there is also the great cooperation, which is, you know, in Christianity to be the Good Samaritan story, you are meant to f follow the ethic, follow the behavior of the person with superior ethics, even if the belief is different. And it is not a small matter, that story begins with the question, how do I attain eternal life? And this notion, this, this, this, this idea of how do we strengthen the knowledge of our own theology, of interfaith cooperation and practice it in the world? I actually think this is hugely, hugely practical. So give you just a quick kind of example of of, I I often say, you know, if, if, if you graduate from flight flight school, you have to know how to fly a plane. You have to know how to fly a plane. So what is our version of that in the humanities or social sciences? If you graduate from, if you, if you come through an Interfaith America intensive fellowship or if you graduate from Princeton, what should the public be able to trust you to do? So here's something, here's one way to think about this, which is if there is a disaster in your city and the diverse faith-based organizations have come in to help with that disaster, which happens everywhere, you know, God bless, we live in a great country in that regard. And here's Mormon Reli, Mormon Disaster Relief Services and Southern Ba Baptist Disaster Relief Services and Jewish and Catholic and the like. Will your graduate know enough about the different traditions to be able to speak of them appreciatively? Well, they know enough about the sociology of their communities to effectively coordinate those disaster relief services. That's the kind of, you know, David Brooks likes the line, what the graduate of, of elite education should be able to do is be acceptable at a dance and indispensable in a shipwreck. That's a shipwreck, that's a shipwreck. And diverse faith communities show up in a shipwreck and can our graduates coordinate them effectively for the benefit of the common good.

- Great. We, I'm gonna take a few questions. We have just a, a few minutes left. Roberta Katz asks, in the context of interfaith conversations, how does one bridge religious ideologies that demean even condemned to hell, those who are not co co-religionists or are nonbelievers, and I think Friar Francisco, you offered to pick up on that question

- Or at least to start one level of response, but I'd be surprised if if others don't have things to say as well. First of all, at least in the Christian tradition, it is not the one arguing who condemns others to hell if there's any condemnation. And this is, this is a shocking thing, really. It's not even God who condemns in the end, hell is chosen by those who prefer it to the alternative of the searing truth that is God. So if I can transfer something that Dr. Georgia said about the one intolerable thing being intellectual dishonesty, there is a, a deeper species of that that threatens every human being and that is resistance in knowing the truth about ourselves, right? This is not just the Delphi paradigm, this is what stood between, for example, Simon Peter and the fulfillment of his very lofty ideal Lord, I would die for you to which the Lord Jesus responds you, you would die for me. I tell you this day, this night, you'll betray me three times. It's not Peter's sincerity that anyone doubts, it's his self-knowledge. So the the idea that the religious ipso facto that's to say because they are religious are sooner or later in the position of the dogmatic condemnation of others, I think is, it's not actually correct. If we look carefully at, for example, the, the great commission to which Dr. Patel just alluded, if, if this is not first and foremost an expression of love, it is best that we let others undertake it. We are meant to love one another as the Lord has loved himself, and that includes our neighbor as ourself as well. So I I want to say that if we do encounter this kind of quote unquote religious intolerance or, or demeaning of others, we really need to look carefully at the whole tradition because I'd be surprised to encounter a religious tradition that does not already have its own correctives in place for the kind of demeaning attitude that Roberta Katz has, has alerted us to, in my experience, not only Catholicism, but Judaism and Islam are replete with instances that would challenge precisely the demeaning of others because of their religious convictions. And the example that Dr. Patel gives of the Good Samaritan stands foremost in our minds. So I I just as a, a way of sort of beginning to address it, I'm sure the other panelists have things to say as

- Well. Good. We, we, we, we only have about four minutes, three minutes left. So want me to go to one more question and sort of lightning round on this. We have a, a question that says, I have been struck by a dynamic that might be called creeping politicization through which religious identities are increasingly shaped by forms of political partisanship. How can religious communities guard against this powerful divisive trend? So it's gotta be quick. We've only got I think, three minutes.

- There's a fine line here too. It's a great question. There's a fine line here to walk because traditions of faith are prophetic, generally speaking prophetic traditions, they have something to say by way of social criticism. We would not want to silence Martin Luther King or the Prophet Amos or any of the great prophets of any of the, of the, of the great traditions of, of faith. But of course, we also don't want these faiths to be politicized. The the faith should be shaping our political views. It shouldn't be the other way around where political views are, are shaping our faith. You shouldn't choose a faith because it lines up with the political view that you have. It seems to me that that gets things exactly, exactly backwards. So, you know, if we're, if we're criticizing the politicization of religion and there's plenty of grounds for criticizing that today, let's do it very carefully and self critically so that we don't end up condemning figures that, that we rather like the prophetic witness of in the public square, even though they're gonna be talking about political things like, like Martin Luther King.

- I think that, I think the, the hidden genius of American life is, is our civic institutions. And, and here's what I mean by this, is it's the institutions and spaces, I'm gonna be precise in my definition here as an academic would be that bring pe that bring people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies together in non-controversial concrete activities that guide cooperative relationships. So perfect. I'll give you a very prosaic example. There was an on my son's little league team a few years ago, there was a guy known to be pretty pro-Palestinian and a guy known to be pretty pro Israeli who were the assistant coaches on the team. And I thought, is this gonna blow up this Midwestern baseball league? And it didn't because the kids referred to them as first base coach and third base coach, not pro-Palestinian dad and pro-Israeli dad. And it is our religious institutions. It is institutions founded by particular religions that build civic life in America. Catholic universities are a great example of this. Jewish refugee resettlement organizations are a great example of this. Muslim social service organizations, particular communities have built civic institutions that serve everybody in a by bringing them together in these concrete, non-controversial activities that guide cooperative relationships, that is the hidden genius of American life, that that is the most remarkable fact and is the least and it's the least remarked upon. And the question is, how do we strengthen it into the next generation?

- Well, we have come to the end of our time. Thank each of you, Robert George Ivu Patel Fire Francisco. Once again to the audience, please do consider joining our alliance for civics in the academy if you haven't already. And this conversation will be up on our YouTube channel within about three or four days. Gentlemen, thank you again, really productive conversation. I wish we had another three hours to continue it.

- Thank you, Josh.