Transcript of Talk by Professor Charles L. Cohen
(The following is a transcript of a talk delivered by Charles L. Cohen—professor of history and director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions—at the Campus Climate and Diversity Forum, Sept. 20, 2006.)
I have been asked to say something significant about religious diversity and its role in building community on campus in 2-4 minutes. It would be easier to cast Paris Hilton as a figure of gravity, but here goes:
UW-Madison is a city of 60,000. Unsurprisingly, its denizens display a variety of religious opinion. Discord over religion falls into two categories: controversies between adherents of different faiths, and an epistemological cold war between adherents and nonadherents. Enmity between believers receives more attention, but friction between adherents and non-adherents is equally destructive. I am less aware of wounds in Madison opened by hostility between members of different traditions than of those salted by believers’ and non-believers’ reciprocal sneers. In neither case do partisans recognize their common frailty as human beings.
There is something to be said for indifference to religion as a way of promoting toleration. Apathy sits on its haunches, too listless to disparage any creed. But indifference does not build community; instead, it shuts people from each other, substituting a stagnant calm induced by mutual isolation for the respect engendered by critical engagement.
Nor does celebrating diversity as an end in itself take us very far. Diversity is at most a precondition for building a tolerant community. The same goes for invoking multi-culturalism as an ideal: in the United States (and the Anglo-American colonies that preceded it), cultural and religious pluralism have, rather, increasingly since the seventeenth century been facts on the ground. Well-meaning calls to accept difference merely for its own sake minimize the real difficulties of meeting others on shared ground, even in a society as accustomed and, in its best moments, friendly to religious diversity as ours. A strong pluralist community ought to be able to tolerate disagreement among its members. The respect for other religions (or religion, or noreligion) that can build greater comity at UW-Madison flourishes in the noonday sun that exposes what different traditions do — and do not — share, not in the false dawn which tidies up inconvenient incongruities by cloaking them in uniform grey. It comes from enjoying the freedom to reject as well as endorse another person’s position. An individual’s capacity to make such decisions intelligently involves taking the risk of giving offense and marshaling the courage to surmount rather than retaliate against someone else’s offensiveness.
To build genuine respect for religious difference, individuals need a working knowledge of other traditions coupled with a willingness to recognize commonalities, acknowledge dissimilarities, and maintain an open-minded but critical perspective on both other people’s traditions and one’s own (or lack of one). It also requires one to recognize that though God, the gods, or (if one prefers) no-god may be perfect, their followers never are: the basis for constructing such a community requires that all sides acknowledge, without defensiveness, the sins their own adherents may have perpetrated on others and reject casting themselves first and foremost as victims. We all have blood on our hands.
I delight that the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions is inviting Muslim, Christian and Jewish students to participate in the first annual LISAR Undergraduate Forum, a project encouraging just such sympathetic candor by involving them in a year-long discussion of “What My Religion Means to Me and You.” Students to whom I have spoken about the Institute’s mission, including its own Undergraduate Fellows, express with virtual unanimity the wish to engage each other seriously, i.e., on the messy ground where they can explore what they share, and what they do not. They are saying, I think, that respect for religious difference does not come about in response to pious exhortations to accept others uncritically but from having wrestled openly with their peers’ commitments and their own.