Miller Center Minneapolis and the Beloved Community
Todd Green is a scholar of religion and Senior Director of Campus Partnerships at Interfaith America, where he works closely with Miller Center Director Or Rose, a senior consultant to the national organization.
I am a Christian agnostic. For most of my life, I have doubted that there is an intervening God, a God who enters into history and tinkers with things, or who intervenes once we pray hard enough for divine intervention on our behalf. But I am also a Christian, someone who believes that what we call “God” is the Ground of Our Being, and in the person of Jesus, God shows us how to live sacred, authentically human lives.
It is the Christian tradition that shapes many of my moral commitments, including my commitment to pluralism. And it shapes my response to what is happening in Minneapolis.
The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez once defined sin as a “multifaceted withdrawal from others,” the process by which human beings selfishly turn away from others and turn inward on ourselves. In this withdrawal, we refuse to love our neighbor, and in that refusal, we pull away not only from our fellow human beings but from God.
If sin is a collective, structural reality characterized by our withdrawal from our fellow human being, then we live in a nation steeped in sin. Sin manifests itself in the deep polarization that is tearing the body politic apart. It manifests itself in government policies and political rhetoric that severs us from one another, that forces us into in-groups from which we then define our humanity and worth over against a whole host of “others.”
The targeting of immigrants and refugees is a manifestation of this collective, national sin, a sin that is prompting some agents and representatives of the U.S. government to act upon their worst, most violent impulses. All of this reflects the forces of anti-pluralism – pitting people against one another, manufacturing conflict, and framing difference as an existential threat to be eliminated.
The church has an essential role to play in all of this. The church’s responsibility is to embody salvation. By salvation, I’m not primarily referring to an otherworldly escape but to the manifestation of a beloved community. At its best, the church breaks down the whole host of barriers that separate Republicans from Democrats, Christians from religious “others,” in-groups from out-groups, “us” from “them.” The work of the church is to model and embody the communion between people that powerful political actors have intentionally sought to disrupt and dismantle, all as part of a self-serving, violent, divide-and-conquer strategy.
When I watch what is going in Minneapolis, I ask myself the question once asked of Jesus: “Who is my neighbor?” So who is my neighbor? Mayor Frey? Governor Walz? Renee Good? Alex Pretti? Those protesting the occupation of Minneapolis by ICE agents?” It’s easy for me to answer “yes” to all of the above.
But my neighbors are also DHS agents and would-be authoritarians. The Christian tradition that formed me compels me to find a way to reestablish communion with the very people I hold directly responsible for the chaos and violence in Minneapolis, to see in them an untapped potential to rediscover who they really are and who they are meant to be. I know in my bones that my humanity is tied to theirs, that my need for redemption is as great as theirs, and that the world that I endeavor to build is one in which they as much as I must be allowed to flourish.
The task of the church, I believe, is to build this beloved community, to model restoration and reconciliation even with people whom I’m tempted to label as my enemies, and even as the forces of anti-pluralism and violence threat to undo us. But I also wonder if this is also the work set before all religious communities. And I wonder if this is the work of the university. Does the university have the sacred task of creating and modeling the beloved community, of bridging differences so that we help one another discover our authentic humanity in the face of that difference? I think so.
For now, I will simply say I see a lot of committed people of faith in Minneapolis – rabbis, monks, imams, priests, ministers, activists, laypeople – laboring to insert human dignity into a context in which so much of that dignity has been broken down in some of the most horrifying, dehumanizing of ways. I am grateful for these laborers. I am grateful for their courage and resolve. And I remain hopeful that their work will contribute to the very salvation and restoration of communion that our nation so desperately needs here in some of its darkest hours.
Todd Green, Senior Director of Campus Partnerships, oversees Interfaith America’s efforts to promote religious and civic pluralism across all aspects of university life. Prior to joining Interfaith America, he served as a professor of religion at Luther College in Iowa and as the Executive Director of America Indivisible in Washington, DC. A prominent scholar of Islamophobia and interfaith relations, his perspectives have been featured in a variety of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR. He has consulted with federal government agencies on Islamophobia and interfaith engagement – including the White House, the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice – and in 2016-17, he served as a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department, where he advised on Islamophobia in Europe. He is the author of multiple books, including Presumed Guilty: Why We Shouldn’t Ask Muslims to Condemn Terrorism.