Back on June 8, 2010, I did a blog titled “We’ve Got a Friend: Obama and Interfaith.” It summarized a meeting I attended at the White House, along with about 100 other religious scholars and leaders, organized by the “White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.”  The focus of the meeting was how to advance interfaith and community service on college and university campuses.

Well, Obama has carried through on the commitments he and his Office made back in June.  A few days ago, on March 17, he announced  the “President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge.”   As stated on the website of the Office of Faith-Based Partnerships, it is “an initiative inviting institutions of higher education to commit to a year of interfaith cooperation and community service programming on campus.”

Obama’s challenge lays out concrete steps calling on students and staff, teachers and administration, of higher education to promote specific programs that will enable their learning communities to become interfaith learning-through-serving communities. And there will even be awards for the most creative and effective projects.

Amid the turmoil swirling around the world and in the White House offices – the tragedy in Japan, the violence in the Middle East – clearly this interfaith initiative does not rank anywhere near the top of the list of hot news items.  But it may be one of the most significant in its long-range promise.

Obama is calling for greater religious literacy.  But he is doing so by calling, first, for greater religious cooperation.  The ideals that motivate him are the same that motivate many of us who are trying to promote more effective interreligious dialogue through interreligious cooperation.

Becoming multi-religious friends in mutual efforts to help others is an effective way of deepening not just our tolerance of each other, not just our understanding of each other, but also our ability to learn from each other.   Academics use some fancy, but engaging, language to express this dynamic:  dia-praxis leads to dia-logue. Doing leads to learning.

Religious people who act together stay together in continued learning and respect for each other.

My hopes for universities and colleges across the country reflect my hopes for our community at Union Theological Seminary – that next academic year we will all take up President Obama’s challenge and engage in specific, interfaith collaborative projects in order to meet the needs of our city and country.

By walking and acting together, we will talk and learn together.

Recent policies by President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats have made such opposing without denouncing very difficult.  Simply stated: it seems to me that so many of the policies that the President has been following, or allowing, are undermining the very structures of our democracy.  In a recent article in The Nation, William Grieder offers an analysis of what I, and so many other liberals (yes, I’m not afraid of that word), have been feeling.  So in this blog, I’m going to turn it over to Grieder:

Political events of the past two years have delivered a  profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled and captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of major media.

What the capitalist system wants is more — more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct unless goverment intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of goverment interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections. Many elected representatives are implicitly enlisted in the cause.

The administration of Barack Obama has been a crushing disappointment for those of us who hoped he would be different. It turns out that Obama is a more conventional and limited politician than advertised, more right-of-center than his soaring rhetoric suggested. Most Congressional Democrats, likewise, proved weak and incoherent, unreliable defenders of their supposed values or most loyal constituencies. They call it pragmatism. I call it surrender.

Such policies of surrender are preferring capitalism over democracy.  Capitalism is moral only when it is democratic.  If it’s not democratic, it must be opposed, and maybe  denounced.

I want to say something about Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rauschenbusch (about whom I am in no way specialized, whereas two of my colleagues here at Union, Jim Cone and Gary Dorrien, are) and about Buddha (about whom I know a little more).

What triggered these reflections was an article in today’s New York Times titled “God and Politics Together Again.” The author, Sam Tanenhaus,  notes that President Obama has been influenced not by liberation theology (as Glenn Beck has been proclaiming) but by the Social Gospel of Rauschenbusch, which calls on Christianity “to add its moral force to the social and economic forces making for a nobler organization of society” in which “the burden of poverty” would be lifted from the back of millions.

But Tanenhaus immediately adds that Obama has also been strongly influenced by Niebuhr’s Christian Realism which recognizes “that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things.”

Tanenhaus draws the insightful conclusion that “the tension between these two religious ideas – one wedded to progress, the other mindful of the limits of worldly activism – reflects the broader tension in Mr. Obama’s liberalism, itself divided between an enthusiasm for bold policy initiatives and a pragmatic understanding that some things can’t be fixed or even changed through politics.”

To many of us (yes, especially us liberals), it sure seems that Obama’s tension is tilting toward Niebuhr.  Recently, the President’s words and actions, especially in confronting Republican intransigence, have slipped from “bold policy” to the “pragmatic understanding that some things just can’t be fixed.”

Here’s where I think that Buddha might offer Mr. Obama – and posthumously, Mr. Niebuhr –a helping hand.  Gautama the Buddha also recognized the tension between the “realism” of suffering (dukkha) that is caused by greed (tanha) on the one hand, and the “bold policy” of transformation through enlightenment, on the other.

But he placed his money (so to speak) and devoted his full energies to the transformation of individuals and of society that can come through awakening to our true nature, our Buddha-nature.

For Buddha, the reality of evil and the promise of awakening did not have a 50-50 chance.  Albert Nolan has said somewhere in his Jesus before Christianity, that anyone who believes that good and evil have a 50-50 chance is an atheist.  In this sense, Buddha was no atheist.

So I think Buddha would walk a middle path between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr. (Okay, with a tilt toward Rauschenbusch.)  He would hold up the promise, calling for our full commitment, that the individual and society do not have to stay the way they are; they do not have to be caught in the “poisons” of ignorance, greed, and hatred.  But at the same time, he would tip his hat to Niebuhr in recognizing that we have to be mindful of the realities of ignorance and greed and hated.  “Being mindful” means we have to be fully aware of them, analyze them carefully, engage them through “skillful means” (upaya) – in the assurance that they can be – yes, they can be – changed.

Why would Buddha be so sure that things can be different than what they are now?  I think for two reasons:

1)    Because of impermanence (annica): everything changes, nothing – neither the human heart nor the capitalist system – has to stay the way it is.  As one Buddhist saying has it: “Impermanence makes everything possible.”

2)    Because of our inherent Buddha-nature:  In our deepest reality —  even though that reality is covered over by ignorance and all kinds of “causes and conditions” – we are Buddhas, inherently connected with all beings in mutual goodness and mutual compassion.

What Buddha discovered is in no way contradictory to what Jesus discovered.   For me, it offers the possibility of a deeper grasp of St. Paul’s announcement that “where sin abounds, grace does more abound” (Rom. 5:20) – that is, sin and grace do not have a 50-50 chance. And when Buddhists affirm that we are all called to be Buddhas, Christians affirm that we are all called “to put on Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:27)

Rather than Christian “realism,” maybe we are closer to Jesus and to Buddha if we talk about a Buddhist-Christian “mindful optimism.”

It turns out that I was too quick to criticize and challenge him in my last blog about not really “speaking his mind” concerning the Muslim Center in lower Manhattan. Two days after I posted the blog, in which I quoted from his speech in Cairo and implored him to, more or less, give the same speech here in the States, the New York Times, in today’s edition, announced that the President, at an Iftar dinner at the White House, came out clearly, strongly, courageously in support of the Muslim Center.

Obama explained that he didn’t speak up earlier because he “did not want to weigh in until local authorities made a decision on the proposal.”   I should have thought of that.

In my previous blog, I urged Obama to provide the presidential leadership he promised in his Cairo speech “ to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

He has provided such leadership.  And we are all grateful.

On Aug 3, your press secretary, Robert Gibbs, speaking for your administration, said that you did not want to take a position on the controversy surrounding plans to build a Muslim Center near Ground Zero.   When asked what was the opinion of your administration, Mr. Gibbs replied that it was “a matter for New York” and that you did not want “to get involved in local decision-making.”

That’s hard to believe.  I suspect – no, I’m quite certain – that you do want to get involved,  but that you, or your advisers, are afraid of the political repercussions from the growing anti-Muslim movement on the right. (It was a Tea-Party group that first sounded the conservative attack on the Manhattan Muslim Center.)

I am convinced that you really do want to come out publicly and defend the rights of our Muslim fellow-citizens to establish a center close to Ground Zero  – a center that is intended to provide space for dialogue between Christian Americans and Muslim Americans and that will show a different and more authentic face of Islam rather than the one embodied in the actions of extremists.

Why am I so certain that you want to so speak publicly on such an issue?  Because you said so!

May I quote for you what you said in your speech in Cairo on June 4, 2009?  And allow me to nudge your conscience on each of these statements:

• “The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.” –  (Such fear and mistrust are being fostered by the ugly rhetoric of the opponents of the Center.)

• “So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.” –  (You have an opportunity to help end this suspicion and discord by taking a clear and strong stand for the rights of our Muslim fellow-citizens.)

• “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” –  (You said this in Cairo to Egyptians.  I beg you to now say it now in Washington, D.C. to Americans.)

• “I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.” –  (Please, say openly these things that you hold in your heart. Call all sides involved in this controversy to listen, learn, respect, and seek common ground.  It is so important, it would be so helpful, for you to pronounce just these words in the midst of this controversy.)

• “ It is my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” — (Such negative stereotypes of Islam are rampant in most of the public statements of those opposed to the Muslim Center.   Please, carry out your “responsibility as President of the United States.” )

Mr. President, we need your leadership.  Please, speak your mind!

That’s what I felt as I rode the train back from Washington, D.C. the night of June 7, after attending a meeting at the White House on “Advancing Interfaith and Community Service on College and University Campuses.”  It was organized by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

It made clear to me, and I dare say to all of the 110 invitees, that those of us who are committed to promoting better relations and more effective cooperation between the religious communities of this country (and the world) have a friend in the President who now lives in the White House.

That’s a statement I don’t make easily.  I travelled to this meeting with my left-leaning guard up:  politicians are keen, and experienced, at using religion and religious leaders for their own political purposes.  If religion is supposed to be one of those sources of truth spoken to power, it suits “power” to befriend, and soften, “religion.”

I soon lowered my guard and opened my mind and heart.  Joshua DuBois, former Pentecostal minister, and presently Executive Director of the Office on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, together with his energetic and articulate Deputy Director, Mara Vanderslice, made it clear to us, in both the content of what they said and the way they said it, that they were genuinely interested, as Vanderslice put it, “to increase collaboration between universities, colleges, and seminaries in their interfaith activities and White House efforts to call religious communities to cooperate for the greater good of our society and the world.”

Mara Vanderslice, Deputy Director, White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships; Joshua DuBois, Executive Director of same, Rev. E. Terri LaVelle, Director of Veteran Affairs.

DuBois made it clear, especially for secular critics who fear transgressions of church-state borders, that this effort of the Obama Administration places its focus on bringing religions together not on the basis of shared beliefs but on the basis of shared action. This reflects what President Obama said in his first talk at a National Prayer Breakfast: he clearly recognizes the enduring differences between religions; he’s not out to boil those differences down to one common religious soup.  But Obama, and his administration, believe that the religions do have one thing in common: the desire to serve – the desire to respond to human needs and problems and do something.

This is where, the White House believes, religious believers, despite their real differences, can come together – and even be joined by secular humanists who also want to serve: they all can stand and act shoulder to shoulder in imaging and achieving “what good might look like.”

That last phrase came from Eboo Patel, the young, dynamic Muslim founder of the Interfaith Youth Core and one of the 25 members of Obama’s “Council of Advisors” for the White House Office on Interfaith. Patel delivered a short keynote address to launch the meeting and further conversations.

His main point was that “Interfaith, ” – the one-word designation for the dialogue and collaboration of religions that must replace the competition and clash of religions – is at what Malcolm Gladwell would call “a tipping point.”  Our society is coming to the realization (but is not quite there) that if our nation, as well as the community of nations, is going to effectively deal with the problems confronting us, religions are going to have to get along with each other and make their contribution.  That means that whether you’re a religious believer yourself or not, you’re going to have to deal with religion – with religions in the plural.

This is where Steven Prothero, Professor of Religion at Boston University and well known author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t, offered his input. He highlighted both the growing awareness that “religious literacy” is today becoming an essential part of being educated.  When one goes to college one should expect just as much to learn about religious diversity as one expects to learn how to dissect a frog.  The term “interfaith” must become as much a part of our general knowledge and concerns as “ecology” and “human rights.”

And for religious believers themselves, Patel pointed out to the affirming nods of all participants, this presents a challenge.  Religions today stand before four possible paths: 1) religious communities can become bubbles, and try to shut off the rest of the world; 2) they can become barriers and by insisting that “my God is better than your God” increase the tensions among nations; 3) they can become bombs, and actively call their followers to resort to violence to defend their identities or supremacy; 4) or, they can become bridges of mutual respect and collaboration.

Clearly, the reason why the White House called us religious types together, and the reason why we all responded eagerly and hopefully, is that we share the conviction that now more than ever we can, and we must, make sure that at this “tipping point,” religious believers and religious leaders become bridges – or in the terms of the White House, partners in service.

The religious experts, leaders, scholars and organizers who attended this meeting felt that what they were trying to do was confirmed and affirmed.  It was a relief and a reassurance to know that this President understands “faith-based initiatives” to mean “multi-faith based initiatives”  — with the emphasis on service.

Personally, I found this meeting to be a confirmation both of what I have been trying to do as a scholar over the past 40 years and of what we are trying to do here at Union with the redefined Paul Tillich Chair.   As I tried to lay out in my 1995 book, One Earth Many Religions, the most promising and the most urgent kind of interreligious dialogue doesn’t begin with interreligious conversations about what we believe; it begins with interreligious collaboration about issues that concern us all.  If we start there, if we can become friends in such solidarity of action, we will create the spaces of trust and respect in which we can, and will want to, talk about the beliefs that ground us and animate us in our efforts to serve.

When I summarized this at the end of the meeting, Mr. DuBois pronounced a Pentecostal “Amen.”

I rode the train back to New York with a palpitating sense of gratitude – and hope.

William Greider

I’ve just returned from a wonderful, nostalgic visit to my favorite city in the whole world: Rome. And I’ve been trying to catch up with national news.

The latest issue of THE NATION has left me stunned, bewildered, unable to be incredulous. A column by William Greider, whose books, columns, and appearances on the Bill Moyers show have elicited my trust and respect, lays out the case that President Obama is, indeed, “whacking the old folks.” (I guess I should make that “us old folks.”)

This is his main contention: “The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan compromise in which Democrats agree to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees while Republicans accede to significant tax increases to reduce government red ink.”

Greider offer particulars: “Obama is arm in arm with GOP conservatives like Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, who for decades has demonized Social Security as a grave threat to the Republic and has spread some $12 million among economists, think tanks, foundations, and assorted front groups to sell his case.”

But the facts contradict such claims. “Social Security has accumulated a massive surplus — $2.5 trillion now, rising to $4.3 trillion by 2023.”

Therefore: “Despite conservative propaganda, cutting Social Security will have no impact on the deficit problem that so stirs public anxiety. The While House knows this. So why is the president targeting Social Security?”

Greider’s answer to this question sends shivers up the spine of many an Obama supporter, especially those who are moving close to retirement: “Targeting Social Security is a smokescreen designed to reassure foreign creditors and avoid confronting the true sources of US indebtedness.” Those true sources of our gigantic deficit are the two wars we are now fighting on borrowed money, tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, and the deregulation that was a major cause of the recent financial crisis.

So why doesn’t Obama address the real causes of our deficit? Greider’s answer to that question is both sobering and shivering: “Those and other sources of deficits involve very powerful interests. Instead of taking them on, the thinking in Washington goes, let’s whack the old folks while they’re not watching.”

If this is the thinking in Washington, as it seems to be, both young and old folk better speak up before they get whacked.

Check out Greider’s full case.

I’m sure many of us resonate with what Pollitt is urging:  Get tough, Mr. Obama!  All your reconciliation stuff and your efforts to build consensus have hit the brick wall of Republican obstinacy and downright meanness.  So hit back!   Respond to their recklessness and refusal to cooperate with your own.

But my “better angels” — who include Jesus and Buddha — come fluttering in to hold me back from joining in Pollitt’s calls for responding to recklessness  with recklessness.   The same principle that warns against violence applies here: meanness, nastiness, refusal to cooperate, putting your enemies in their place — it will all only bred more of the same.  The law of karma:  hate begets hate.

And yet, yes, Obama has to change course. He has to get tough.  But how?

Buddha’s “Middle Way” might apply here.  After a life of luxury, he decided to seek enlightenment through six years of rigorous self-denial and asceticism. That didn’t work either.  So he set off on the Middle Way between luxury and self-denial — and that led him to the experience of awakening under the Wisdom Tree.

There is, there has to be, a middle way between Pollitt’s being “careful” and being “reckless” — between being conciliatory and being mean. Again, Jesus and Buddha offer some examples.  Jesus could get tough with the powers that be and endorse language like “brood of vipers,” but at the same time he could forgive them “for they know not what they do.”

To be firm but at the same time open to other ideas.  To resist one’s opponents but never write them off.  To try to get around their filibusters but to assure them that you still seek for cooperation.

I think it all boils down to getting tough without hating.   To resist and insist without hating and demeaning.  That’s the Middle Way.

President Obama’s political predicament is
perhaps more serious than he understands or
appreciates. He appears to see opponents as
rivals to be charmed. What he should see are
enemies determined to destroy his presidency. To
save the agenda for which he was elected, he must
give up the pretense of being a postpartisan
professorial president and start acting like an Oval Office tiger.

Can Obama be a tiger?  Should he?  I basically agree with Rogers, but with a kind of Buddhist caveat.  What I’ve always liked about Obama, from the start of his campaign, was his Buddhist quality of not demonizing his opponents, of trying to stay connected with them even when he has to stand in opposition to them.   But that does not seem to be working, at least with the Republican opponents whom he has been facing over his health care reform.  So he needs to be a tiger and get tough.

But does that mean that he has to get nasty?  Usually, we associate, even identify, toughness with nastiness.   Buddhism suggests, even warns, that we don’t have to.   Obama can get tough and really face off with his opponents, pointing out their inconsistencies and lack of honesty.  But he can do that without being nasty toward them — without putting them down or ridiculing them.  Or more positively, one can get tough and at the same time show respect and openness towards those we are opposing.

Will that work?  I think Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr have shown that it can.   They were tough. But they never showed hatred toward their enemies; more importantly, they never acted out of hatred.

So Obama can be a tiger who growls loudly and can induce tremors of fear — but who never eats his prey.