Better Religion: A Primer for Interreligious Peacebuilding

By John D. Barton

In the twenty-first century, humanity faces both unprecedented existential threats and remarkable possibilities for development. While no one knows how things will unfold by century’s end, it is increasingly clear that religion will play a major role in shaping the outcomes, for better or worse. In Better Religion, philosopher and religion scholar John Barton explores how grassroots interreligious peacebuilding can help ensure the "better."

More specifically, the book argues that for religion’s "better" to be realized, interreligious peacebuilding must honor and directly engage religious differences. This challenges a common assumption that religious differences inevitably lead to hostilities and must therefore be minimized or functionally neutralized for collaborative peacebuilding to be possible. Better Religion explains why such assumptions are misguided and charts a more realistic and hopeful way forward. Using a blend of data analysis, theoretical models, and real-life anecdotes, the book makes sense of global religious diversity and projects the possibilities of peacebuilding across even the most irreconcilable of differences.

Written for academic and professional audiences, this "conceptual primer" will equip readers to understand religion in the twenty-first century and pursue constructive collaborations for human flourishing, all for the sake of the world we currently share and the world we want our grandchildren to inherit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Jan 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781481317849

Book preview

front cover image featuring a land bridge over water

"In this readable and wide-ranging book, John Barton makes an important intervention in the debates about effects of religious convictions and differences on our ability to live under the same roof of a common but divided world. Anyone interested in religion and peace should read Better Religion."

—Miroslav Volf, Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale University

In this brilliant and insightful book, John Barton, a serious believer, thinks seriously on how the great religions, which are as vibrant as ever, can work together for a better world. I applaud and join his noble hopes that people who are not exactly on ‘common ground’ can still join forces for ‘common good.’

—Mustafa Akyol, author of Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance

"Better Religion blazes a beautifully winding path with clear conceptual frameworks and compelling imagery, leading to the not-so-simple work of interreligious peacebuilding. In place of a how-to manual, Barton offers an engaging, learned guide to religion in the twenty-first century with a clear sense of why it matters."

—Rachel S. Mikva, author of Dangerous Religious Ideas: The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

John Barton is the ideal guide through the landscape of religious diversity and the field of interfaith peacemaking. Bridges between diverse faiths do not rise from the ground or fall from the sky—people build them. This book will show you how and will tell you why such work is so important.

—Eboo Patel, Founder and President, Interfaith America and author of We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy

Better Religion

A Primer for Interreligious Peacebuilding

John D. Barton

Baylor University Press

© 2022 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Cover and book design by Kasey McBeath

Cover art: Unsplash/Kyler Trautner

The Library of Congress has cataloged this book under hardback ISBN 978-1-4813-1783-2.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940717

978-1-4813-1784-9 (ePub)

This ebook was converted from the original source file. Readers who encounter any issues with formatting, text, linking, or readability are encouraged to notify the publisher at [e-mail]. Some font characters may not display on all ereaders.

To inquire about permission to use selections from this text, please contact Baylor University Press, One Bear Place, #97363, Waco, Texas 76798.

For Saeed Khan and Keith Huey,

in gratitude for twenty years of friendship and interreligious partnership

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

I An Aerial View of Religion

1 Toward Religion’s Better

2 Setting Coordinates for Hope

3 Describing Religion

4 Observing Religions

II The Geography of Dissonance and Peace

5 Silos, Sheilas, and Sets

On Religious Identity

6 Magnets, Markets, and Fields

On Religious Agency

7 Trails, Mountains, and Elephants

On Religious Similarity

8 Bubbles, Bombs, and Bridges

On Dissonance and Peace

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Figures

5-1 Silo Model / World Religions Paradigm

5-2 Sheila Model / A World of Religious Sheilas

5-3 Sets Model / Centers of Religious Gravity

6-1 Iron Filings in a Magnetic Field

6-2 Magnetism, by Ahmed Mater

7-1 Perennialism: Religion as a Single-Centered Set

8-1 Perennial and Diagnostic Models of Religion

8-2 Diagnostic Model (II)

8-3 Diagnostic Model (III)

8-4 Peacebuilding in the Diagnostic Model

Preface

On the surface, this book functions as a general primer, or introduction, for the study of religious diversity and interreligious peacebuilding. Unlike some primers, however, this one does not survey religions one at a time, present a full theory of religion, or offer a how to manual on peacebuilding, all of which has been done quite well by others.¹ Rather, this is a conceptual primer that offers a toolbox of resources for thinking about religion in the twenty-first century and imagining the prospects for peacebuilding across even the most challenging of religious differences.

The primary argument that I will make is that religious dissonance and interreligious collaboration are profoundly compatible. This challenges a common assumption that religious disagreements must be minimized or functionally neutralized for collaborative peacebuilding to be possible. It is my contention, however, that if peacebuilding is to occur on any scale, large or small, it will happen only in the midst of significant and sometimes irreconcilable differences and can even be empowered by those differences. There is much to work out here theoretically, including the need to establish what we mean by religion and peace and other operative terms. There is also an urgency to the issues for human life in the twenty-first century, as I outline in chapter 1. For now, let me just mention two terms I employ that speak specifically to this book’s overall vision for interreligious peacebuilding and then offer a few notes on the book’s title, organization, audience, and posture.

The first term is the neologism justpeace, which is becoming increasingly common in peace studies. By emphasizing the overlaps between peace and justice, the term invites us to imagine the goal of peacebuilding not merely as toleration or the absence of hostility but as a shared quest for mutual flourishing.² The second term is peaceableness, which I use to represent the capacities and resources religions have for peacemaking (their peace-able-ness).³ Here I seek to move past circular arguments about whether religion is essentially violent or peaceful and focus instead on religion’s capacities or abilities for both, and how we can identify and mobilize the peaceable ones.

Introducing things in this way also highlights a double meaning in the book’s title. On the one hand, the better of Better Religion is aspirational in that it refers to the need for people to mobilize the better angels of their respective traditions toward justpeace, or what Susan Thistlethwaite calls interfaith just peacemaking.⁴ On the other hand, the better also represents confessional realities by recognizing that people typically consider their own religious orientations to be uniquely important and compelling, and thus better than the alternatives.⁵ Put together, therefore, the interreligious peacebuilding envisioned in these pages requires the better of our respective traditions, while acknowledging and leveraging the inevitable disagreements over what better even entails. It is within this seeming paradox, I argue, that interreligious peacebuilding becomes imaginable.

The book is divided into two parts, both of which contain four chapters. Part 1 provides an aerial view of religion in the twenty-first century. In doing so I introduce and establish the relevance and urgency of these discussions (chapter 1) and set some coordinates of hope for the work of peacebuilding, emphasizing the role and power of local grassroots efforts (chapter 2). At that point I back up a bit and establish some of the book’s theoretical anchor points and offer working definitions for religion and peace (chapter 3). Part 1 concludes with an analysis of the current religious landscape as observed in various global statistics and trends and offers an assessment of some of the major debates related to secularism and diversification, as well as modest projections about where things seem to be headed (chapter 4). Part 2 provides more of the book’s conceptual material, which I frame in terms of a geography. In particular, I offer a series of conceptual maps that allow us to wrestle with a number of issues related to religious identity (chapter 5), agency (chapter 6), and interreligious similarity (chapter 7). While the whole discussion is intended to offer clarity about religion and religious issues in general, it also brings us back full circle to questions related to religious clashes and interreligious peace in the twenty-first century. The book concludes by bringing many of the pieces together into a proposed framework for interreligious peacebuilding that honors the dignity of religious differences while identifying profound points of overlap that make peacebuilding imaginable (chapter 8).

In terms of intended audience, I write this book with several kinds of readers in mind. First and foremost, I write as an educator for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in religion, philosophy, theology, sociology, international studies, peace and social change, or any class in which topics of religious diversity are relevant. I also include extensive footnotes for those who wish to see my sources or follow the trails of my logic. Having said that, this book is not merely for the classroom or formal academic contexts. I also write for an educated public, including civic and business leaders, those in the helping and teaching professions, journalists, social entrepreneurs, community organizers, mediators, policy makers, and anyone else whose life and vocation finds them at the intersections of religious diversity. With all that in mind, my hope is that the conceptual tools offered will prove useful on the ground for equipping readers from a variety of contexts for constructive and even transformative interreligious interactions.

Finally, there is also a sense in which I write this book for an audience of one: myself. I write to work out certain things I hold to be important based on my own studies and cross-cultural and interreligious experiences. In this way, the book can be understood as an attempt to chronicle my own journey, to make explicit and take responsibility for what I have learned and practiced, and to put it all out there for wider consideration and assessment.⁶ This then requires what sociologists call a reflexive (i.e., self-reflective) posture, and my attempts at practicing that posture should be evident throughout. For this preface, however, reflexivity at least invites an initial acknowledgement of my own religious orientation. While this is not a work of theology, I write this book on religion as a religious person myself. Specifically, I write as a practicing Christian who takes Jesus of Nazareth to be the measure of full humanity and the incarnation of love for God, self, and others.⁷ It is this orientation, in fact, that motivates me to engage each individual and tradition I encounter with the kind of curiosity and respect that I desire in return. It is also what has continued to motivate me throughout my years of cross-cultural and interreligious activism to join friends and colleagues from other religious orientations in pursuit of mutual respect and cooperation, without strings attached or agendas imposed.

I am aware that acknowledging my religious orientation right from the start will resonate with some readers and cause ambivalence or even suspicion in others. Nevertheless, one of my fundamental assumptions in this book is that we are all better prepared for mutual understanding and respectful collaboration when we name and claim our particular locations—even if it creates dissonance—than we are when we pretend to operate in religious or philosophical neutral zones. As such, I also hope that my reflexivity will help readers to more effectively and critically assess my arguments for themselves, while also inviting readers to do their own reflexive work on the forces that shape those assessments and their reading.

With all that in mind, this conceptual primer and its toolbox of resources is offered as a modest contribution to our collective pursuits of interreligious literacy and collaborative peacebuilding—and this for the sake of the world we currently share, as well as the one we want our grandchildren to inherit.

Acknowledgments

I have many people to thank for helping make this book a reality. Working with Cade Jarrell and his team at Baylor University Press has been a hugely positive experience. I should especially mention Jenny Hunt, Kasey McBeath, David Aycock, and Harry Hasbrouck, as well as freelance editors Kel Pero and Irina du Quenoy. I also thank the two anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions.

I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Keith Huey at Rochester University and my son Nate Barton. They were my most consistent and committed interlocutors throughout the entire process, and the book is infinitely better because of their help. I also feel a debt of gratitude to Miroslav Volf at Yale, not only for his friendship and our collaborations throughout the years but also for being a primary influence on my thinking in general and on this book in particular, as evidenced in the text and endnotes. Others also gave the book, or specific sections of it, careful attention at different stages and provided invaluable insights, including Matt Sayers, Eboo Patel, Christina Littlefield, Anantanand Rambachan, Karie Riddle, Chris Soper, Gary Selby, Rachel Mikva, Sarah Nissel, Landon Saunders, Jake and Rhonda Jacobsen, Lee Camp, Brent Abney, Diane Samandi, and Brynn Barton. I should also mention my students at Pepperdine who gave helpful feedback on various chapters, including my undergraduate students in Religion 526, the graduate students in the Social Entrepreneurship and Change (SEC) program, and those at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. On the more technical side, my thanks to Jeremy Whitt in Pepperdine’s library, who helped me track down sources; Courtney Wisniewski, who developed most of the book’s charts and visuals (and was very patient with all my requests!); and Liz Brown and Falon Opsahl Barton, who helped with the initial editing of the endnotes and bibliography. I appreciate the support of Stephanie Cupp, my colleague at Pepperdine’s Center for Faith and Learning, and the support and encouragement of Dan Rodriguez, chair of the Religion and Philosophy Division; I also wish to thank (former) provost Rick Marrs for his encouragement at the start of this project. There is also a long list of friends, co-travelers, and teachers who have helped shape both my mind and heart with regard to the religious and cultural diversities of our world. In addition to those already mentioned, I should especially mention Saeed Khan, Michal Meulenberg, Ahmed Taha, Rainn Wilson, Mustafa Akyol, Edina Lekovic, Sarah Bassin, Ezra Plank, Mark Barneche, Rubel Shelly, Greg Daum, Roy Mwesigwa, Ali Ngobi, Jihad Turk, CP and Channi Singh, Sukhsimranjit Singh, Adam Allenberg, Hakan Yildiz, Salih Ozdemir, Atilla Kahveci, Rajinder Mago, Farshid Ahmady, Monte Cox, the late Albert Dalfovo, Prof. Byaruhanga-Akiiki, the community at Bayan Islamic Graduate School, the Jinja Team, and the Kibo family, among many others. While I take responsibility for the final product and any mistakes or inadequacies it contains, I also hope it makes a positive contribution to our ongoing journey and to the wider issues about which we all care so deeply.

Finally, thank you, Sara G., for caring about this project and for being my partner in all our cross-cultural and interreligious ventures. Mostly, thank you for more than three decades of shared life and love, and for being my one through it all.

I

An Aerial View of Religion

In August 2018, I was given the opportunity to participate in a NASA-sponsored video call with Ricky Arnold, an American astronaut who was working on the International Space Station (ISS). The call happened because of a convergence of several factors: Arnold’s daughter Jessica was, at the time, a student at the university where I teach; Arnold is a fan of the television show The Office; and I am friends with the comedic actor Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute on that show. (It is also noteworthy that Rainn shares my passion for interreligious literacy and peace.) It was a strange confluence of factors, to be sure, but it led to a memorable experience that August afternoon when Jessica, Rainn, and I visited Arnold on the ISS. That experience also now serves as a metaphor for what this book seeks to do.

During the call, Arnold gave us a virtual tour of the space station, introduced us to other astronauts there with him, and explained some of the research they were conducting. One of the most remarkable moments, however, came when he turned his camera around and showed us the view out of one of the windows. Although the image was being channeled through a thick window, a small camera, and thousands of miles of bouncing radio waves, the Earth came into clear and beautiful focus on our computer screen. Its smooth curve stretched before our eyes, and, for several magical minutes, we took in the outline of continents, the deep blue of oceans, and the white wisp of clouds, all set against the stark darkness of surrounding space. Arnold then pointed out that, at that particular moment, we were passing over the eastern edge of South America and were looking down on Lake Titicaca on the border of Peru and Bolivia. The view was stunning.

Throughout the centuries, humans have expressed their understandings of the scope, shape, and status of our planet through maps, literature, and theories. Modern space exploration has, of course, expanded our global imagination and made the world’s features, like Lake Titicaca, more comprehensible in important ways.¹ But our experience that August afternoon was also a reminder that, no matter how elevated and remarkable a view may be, it still originates from a particular location (in this case, from the ISS window) and at specific times and angles (at this moment, looking down at South America). In one sense, our view on that August afternoon allowed us to see more of Lake Titicaca than a Peruvian who might have been standing on one of its shores at that same moment. On the other hand, unlike that Peruvian, we could not smell the lake air wafting over the surf, feel the waters rippling at our feet, glimpse a famous Chilean flamingo, or sense the roll and rumble of approaching storm clouds. While our aerial view was remarkable, it was also a reminder that there are different kinds of vantage points.

In this book, I attempt an aerial view of human religion. Employing the various academic resources available to me, I turn the camera around from the window where I sit and try to capture something of religion’s broad outlines and global features. Admittedly, this means that the picture I provide is more impressionistic than precise. It necessarily glosses over many of the details on the ground that give religions texture and make them compelling and sometimes stormy. I should also acknowledge that a big-picture approach like this diverges from current trends in religious studies that privilege specialized shoreline analyses of particular traditions and practices more than generalized birds-eye views of religion per se. Nevertheless, while the work of generalizing is always at risk of slipping into over-generalizations and stereotypes (what scholars call essentialism), the fact is that big-picture approaches are both unavoidable and indispensable. Not only do they help us identify broad patterns and make better sense of the wild flux of the human experience, but they also provide reference points that help us navigate the diverse conditions on the ground. Moreover, while specialists keep generalists grounded and accountable, generalizations are required for meaningful specialization to be possible. Stephen Prothero captures this point for religious studies:

As we move into greater and greater specificity when it comes to religion—from religion to Buddhism to Zen Buddhism to the San Francisco Zen Center—the problem of generalization does not go away. Every discussion of any of these topics requires massive generalizations simply to get off the ground. But there are things we can do to minimize the tendency toward essentialism.²

With all this in mind, it is one of my primary challenges in this book to generalize responsibly and thus minimize the tendency toward essentialism. It is also my deeper hope that, if I can do that adequately, then this aerial view of religion will prove useful for increasing religious literacy and mobilizing interreligious peacebuilding.

1

Toward Religion’s Better

This book builds on two broad premises. First, life on planet Earth is in a time of significant transition. Second, religion will play a major role in shaping the outcomes, for better or worse. With these as a backdrop, I explore in the pages that follow the possibilities of religion’s better.

At the core of my argument is the following claim: for religion’s better to be possible, it requires a kind of interreligious peacebuilding that honors and directly engages the unresolved (and often unresolvable) religious differences among us. This will immediately strike some as counterintuitive. After all, it is common to assume that highlighting religious differences will only stir tensions and potentially invite hostilities. In that case, if peacebuilding is to have any hope of success, it requires us to ignore our differences or even seek to actively neutralize them conceptually (with theories) or politically (with policies). This book will explain why such assumptions and practices are wrong and why that matters so much.

To begin, however, I need to step back and parse things out a bit with regard to our current global context and the place of religion within it. That will also allow me to establish more fully the relevance and even urgency of these kinds of discussions.

As Goes Religion, So Goes the World

The twenty-first century features tectonic shifts and global convulsions that rival or even surpass those of the Industrial Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹ For the sake of the analogy, it is often noted that as late as 1850, more than 90 percent of humans were still rural peasant farmers but that, within a few turbulent decades, those realities had irreversibly shifted. Technological developments such as machine tools, the steam engine, railroads, and the telegraph (and the factories, sociopolitical systems, and capitalist financiers who empowered it all) thrust our traditional agricultural world toward industrial urbanized modernity. Today, more than half of the planet’s population lives in cities, and we all experience global conditions that would have been utterly unimaginable in 1850. Moreover, all this has dramatically affected how we understand ourselves as humans and how we think about our place in the cosmos. More practically, it has also affected where we live, what we do, how we interact, and how we educate our children.

As dramatic as those earlier transitions were, however, the tectonic shifts of the twenty-first century may have even more dramatic implications for human societies going forward.

Evidence of the current shifts are all around us and can be both alarming and, in some cases, promising. Across the world we are witnessing vast and unprecedented migration patterns, surprising changes in fertility and global demography, extreme weather patterns and looming ecological crises, threats of nuclear war, cyber attacks and bio-pandemics, a resurgence of illiberal authoritarian regimes, and an ever-widening wealth gap. If that were not enough, technological revolutions continue to upend job markets, raise new kinds of ethical questions, and push us toward a future that looks more and more like science fiction.²

And yet, the twenty-first century also boasts unrivaled advances in travel, communication, information access, and biomedicine. Historian Yuval Harari states that while humans have always faced the perennial challenges of famine, plague, and war, those have now been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges.³ Admittedly, it is an open question whether these challenges will remain manageable. For now, however, we cannot ignore the remarkable achievements of the modern era, such as the fact that life expectancy across the globe is at an all-time high, child mortality and the percentage of humans living below the poverty line are at an all-time low, and human violence is, at least in some ways, less deadly than ever before. Harari summarizes the situation memorably: For the first time in history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, famine kills fewer people than obesity, and violence kills fewer people than accidents.⁴

How should we take inventory of all the feats and convulsions of our current century? Are we experiencing the jolts of progress as we climb toward a brighter collective future? Are we rushing toward apocalyptic upheavals? Or, in Thoreau’s memorable description, is all our progress merely improved means to an unimproved end?⁵ There are now multiple and often competing metrics that seek to analyze and measure human development and progress, and prophets can be found for every scenario. For every Don Quixote who doles out futurist optimism, there is a Chicken Little who cries the sky is falling. Regardless of one’s take on the issues, these global crosscurrents at least highlight the urgency of the moment. It is in this sense that philosopher Toby Ord describes humanity as having reached a precipice in which our collective future is suspended between, on the one hand, immense human potential and, on the other, a series of existential threats that include our own capacities for self-destruction. As Ord puts it, we stand at a crucial moment in the history of our species.⁶

Here is where we come back to a consideration of religion. While no one has a crystal ball by which to see how all this will play out by century’s end—or, for that matter, in the next few decades—there are several things we can mention.

First, the twenty-first century is an age of religious energy and even revival, as I will present in chapters 3 and 4. While some secularists still insist that religion is decreasing in the modern world, we will see that religion’s relevance actually seems to be increasing, not despite modern forces and experiences but in alliance with them. But whichever way you look at the data, it is at least relevant to acknowledge that the unrivaled accomplishments of the modern world have not translated into unrivaled levels of human satisfaction or flourishing. This is put into tragic focus by a global mental health crisis and the fact that more humans died in recent years from suicide than in all wars, violent crimes, and terrorist acts combined.⁷ This also suggests that the heightened anxieties of the twenty-first century will only create greater demand for the kinds of comforts and certainties that religion promises.

Second, as the relevance and demand for religion increase, so does its inevitable impact. There are, of course, a number of factors affecting the century’s tectonic shifts, including geopolitical maneuvering, market forces, and environmental and technological disruptions. But another factor arguably tops the list: our collective future will largely be shaped by the cumulative effect of human behavior, which is, in turn, shaped by the narratives of meaning and moral imaginations that inspire large groups of people.

And that is the stuff of religion.

This brings us back to the title of this section: As goes religion, so goes the world. This claim directly challenges secular myopia, which assumes that global problems can be diagnosed and addressed with little or no reference to religion (except possibly to blame religion for its role in