Interfaith tension: elephant in the room

Allow me to begin with a provocative quote I found while procrastinating on Facebook by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: “There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church—which is, of course, quite a different thing.” ­

How does this quote strike you? Do you put yourself in the category of the hundred “who hate the Catholic Church”? Do you scratch your head, wondering if your perception of the Catholic Church is the correct one? I think the quote highlights a major issue that ought to be more widely addressed.

I am in the rare position of being an active member in both the Columbia Catholic Undergraduates group and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which is one of the many Christian groups on campus whose members have mostly Protestant convictions. Thus, I cannot help but feel the tension in considering the contradicting convictions Catholics and Protestants have. Given the plethora of religious organizations at Columbia, this tension only builds. How does one weigh the claims of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists, among others?

There are three main ways you may respond to this tension (I know because I’ve responded in all these ways). You may hope it never comes up in conversation, you may seek to discover what is common among all religious traditions (an admirable pursuit), or you may jump to conclusions and strike down the strawman that you raised. All of these ways, however, run the high risk of ignoring or underestimating the real differences that exist among perspectives.

Much work has already been done to try and face these differences head-on rather than ignoring them. The Interfaith Collective hosts events geared toward understanding different religions as applied to questions such as social justice, suffering, and the afterlife. ROOTEd is a group that promotes honest and open discussion of controversial issues (a recent topic was abortion). The Veritas Forum is a group dedicated to addressing “life’s hardest questions” in religion, politics, and philosophy, inviting all opinions and perspectives to the table with the understanding that those opinions will be respectfully challenged in the search for the truth.

However, these organizations serve small groups of students, and the fruits of their labor haven’t impacted the student body as a whole. Why is that? Is it a lack of interest among most students about this issue? If so, why don’t many people feel the tension that I do surrounding these differences? Is it that our overwhelming workload doesn’t give us the time to step back and consider the question of which faith, if any, has it right?

Why is this a big deal? Because what we believe has profound implications for our decisions, our identities, and our lives. If the pro-life crowd is correct, we are condoning the mass murder of thousands of human lives every day. If the LGBT community is correct, a huge number of people are being discriminated against. If Jesus actually physically rose from the dead, the eternal state of our souls hangs in the balance. If the atheist is correct in asserting that none of the claims about transcendental entities are true, there are billions of people who are deluded and wasting their time. There is no room for “agree to disagree” because the stakes are too high. Thousands of lives, the civil rights of others, and the eternal states of our souls are all issues of such gravity that it would be unwise to ignore the competing claims that impact them.

Many Christians on campus, myself included until recently, have ignored the tension between Catholicism and Protestantism. That is why I am trying to form a niche within the Catholic leadership to be a sort of “interfellowship liaison” wherein I would promote informal and formal dialogue between my peers in each group to truly weigh the differences of our faith traditions (Christians, consider this an open invitation).

My claim here, though, is that most Columbia students are ignoring the tension inherent in these questions, whether such tension arises among Christian sects or among perspectives as different as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, atheism, etc. If you don’t feel the tension, I challenge you to seriously reflect on this now that there’s a post-midterms lull. College, especially Columbia, is a great place to acknowledge and attempt to resolve the tension, and I wouldn’t want anybody to miss out on this opportunity. Ask your friends about their beliefs. Carefully consider yours and why you believe them. Be open to challenges, and be respectful when you challenge others. Face the tension rather than ignoring it. It isn’t a comfortable place to be, but since when has comfort trumped lives, civil rights, our souls’ eternal states—in a word, truth?

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in biochemistry.