Bonding Across Difference (Theory)

Frankly, I was watching the white American dad in front of me as much as the guest speaker. The dad had really short hair, which could’ve just been the family’s way of saving on haircuts, by keeping them less frequent, but had the effect of giving the man a military look. Also, he could’ve been worried about taxes or anything else, but I was struck by how uptight he looked at the beginning of the talk. His preteen daughter looked at his face anxiously from time to time.        

          The speaker was a professor of geography at the local university. His emphasis on his American identity began as he mentioned that before his time here, before his years at other American schools, he was originally from Bangladesh. In fact, although his qualifications to speak about Islam to a group of United Methodist confirmation pupils and their parents spring from his recent tenure as president of the town mosque, he and our pastor both emphasized his connection to her as a baseball parent. She and his wife had worked concessions together, a sure sign of American camaraderie.

          Their social sameness strategy was wise, because this affable religious leader is savvy to how contemporary theory emphasizes difference. After he’d waded into the broad outlines in his Introduction to Islam he announced that he’d be discussing how Islam is different from Christianity, instead of dwelling on their similarities. The father stiffened even more.

          Difference theory erupts all over, unconsciously spreading across fields and originating in post-existential continental postmodernism theories. One version of difference theory would say that there are no ultimate universals, so people and cultures are basically just different, and therefore have different interpretations and perspectives of events. A contrary current of theory was substantiating the interfaith movement’s attempt to build bridges, notably in the British Common Ground (as in finding common ground in scripture and theology) group, but difference theory has won out. Or so it would seem, except that this speaker was framing his acknowledgment of theological difference with lived American similarity.

In fact, by the end of his talk he’d won the father over to a state of relief, by invoking American equal rights empathy by his indignation over his son’s mistreatment. His son’s bus driver had joked about the boy’s carry case having a bomb in it. Hearing that was a valuable wakeup call for those of us like the tense father who are self-censoring the very same impulses. We need to hear it over and over: stereotyping a group based on the behavior of a few of its members is racist, or sexist, or ethnocentrist, but amounts to plain old prejudice and results in discrimination.

Moral of the story aside, my interest lies in the viability of difference theory to undergird a possible interfaith theology. For example, if it is recognized that the seemingly common story of the “akeda,” God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son (Isaac, for Jews and Christians, Ishmael for Muslims) bears actually very different meanings for the three religions, and thus for all their individual adherents, can the story be called common at all? At what point does commonality break down, and can a very thin thread of similarity sustain an interfaith theology at all? Alternately, if an interfaith theology is predicated on absolute difference, with no pretense of commonality except intertwined histories of armed struggles with the other groups, then is there anything to hold such a theology together? Does the interfaith movement require other kinds of similarities to create bonds? In effect, does the recent, local interfaith encounter rest on the members being baseball parents together?