Forum; No. 2; Race, Class, and Diversity: Religion and Diversity; Part 1

Hi, this is Forum. Good morning and welcome. As part of our year long diversity series, we are broadcasting today live from the Interfaith Center at the Presidio. I want to welcome our live audience with us here this morning in the chapel. And even though this is a sacred place, I hope that maybe we can raise the rafters a little just to let people out there know that you're here. Could we hear from you out there in the audience? Thank you. Today, we're going to have a special discussion on forum about how religions divide and unite us with a number of clergy representing an array of religious faiths and from a number of different Bay Area locations. I was speaking with one of them just a moment ago, and I said when I ran down the whole list of what we had, it sounded like the way you begin a joke in some instances not to use the word ecumenical, because I've been advised there's a whole ongoing education for me that no longer is the word ecumenical as acceptable in religious parlance. The word is interfaith. And this is indeed an interfaith chapel that we're in. It has had 20 blessings bestowed upon it from all kinds of different faiths. So I feel as we are, as if we are in indeed a hallowed place and a place that has had benediction. And let me tell you who is with us for today's special broadcast

here. I almost said in studio, in chapel, as it were, Abdulkadir Al Amin is an imam. He is with the San Francisco Muslim Community Center in San Francisco. Good morning and thank you for being with us this morning. Let me also welcome this morning Pam Fridmann Ba, who is a rabbi with the Shalom Jewish community here in San Francisco. Good morning, Rabbi. Good morning. Thank you for joining us. And also we have with us Reverend Scott Peterson, who is a bishop with the Church on the Hill in Vallejo. They are Pentecostal. And Reverend Scott Peterson, thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. I also want to welcome Reverend Ronald Nakasone. Professor Nakasone is a visiting professor of Buddhist studies at the Pacific School of Religion and Graduate Theological Union. He is also a Buddhist priest. Thank you for being with us. Good morning to you. Good morning. And we also want to welcome Paul Schultz, executive director of the Bay Area Native American Ministry. They are located in Oakland. Paul, good morning to you. Thank you for being with us. And Reverend Lindy Ramsden is also with us this morning. She is a senior minister with the First Unitarian Church in San Jose. Good morning. Good morning to you and thank you for being here.

Let me begin with the imam, if I may. And let me just say by way of introduction that 100 years ago there were 10000 Muslims here in the Bay Area excuse me, in the whole United States. Now, there that many in the Bay Area, there are one million in the country. Imam Abu Qadir Al-Amin is the leader of a racially mixed congregation. He has been to Mecca. He converted to the Muslim faith when he was 17 years of old, 70 years of age, excuse me, and has now an ongoing Christian ministry, as well as a drug rehabilitation program that he is in charge of in the criminal justice system. And I guess a good place to begin is we were talking about this before we were to begin the program this morning about how Muslims feel separated. I mean, on Sunday mornings, for example, when everybody, not everybody, but when lots of people are going to church from the Christian community and particularly perhaps some of the older members of that faith, do you feel and the people who are in your congregation feel that you are apart from rather than part of? No. First, let me make a point of correction.

In the United States, modest estimates say there are five million Muslims. High estimates say there are approximately eight million Muslims in the United States rather than one million. And regarding how we feel on Sunday morning, because Islam is new to the United States of America, we are in the process of establishing mosques, schools, educational centers. So Sunday mornings for many Muslims is also like the Christians Sunday school. So we have weekend school activities for our children, many of whom do not go to full time Islamic schools. So they get Islamic studies on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday. Schools currently operate throughout the United States. Well, is the worship of Allah and the belief in the Koran something that that separates you from other faiths? In other words, do you feel that those who are here assembled this morning worship the same God that you do and that they are united with you? Or do you feel apart and separate from. Certainly, we we believe that most of the differences are in language and perception and interpretation of the language. We believe that there is one creator. There are many names that described his creator.

The Religion of Islam points out that there is a unity among the prophets and the message that the prophets brought. They all brought a message of unity, belief in one God, the one who created the sun, the moon, the stars and all of us. And we also believe that all of the prophets respected each other. Our book, the Koran, it speaks of the prophets of the of the Christian faith, the Jewish faith. And we respect all of those prophets. We pray that God's peace continually be upon them. And the sense is that we are literally all God's children, that certainly we believe that we have one common ancestor, Adam Lahey's, Salam. We have one common origin. The central idea and the religion of Islam is a concept. All Tawheed, which is the oneness of God and also the oneness of humanity, there's only one human being on the earth. If you made African and Chinese, you get a human being. If you meet a Caucasian and a Hispanic, you get a human being. If you meet an Indian and someone from

Australia, you get a human being. So there's only one human species on earth. Is someone, for example, like Louis Farrakhan then who talks about racial separation and perhaps argues for the inhumanity of people who are not black, really preaching the word of God as you see it. I understand that Minister Louis Farrakhan, he uses the name Islam. Much of what he has to say is responding to the hurt and disappointment of an injustice that African-Americans have experienced. But he is not truly a conveyer of the teachings of Islam nor the spirit of Islam. When you talk about the teachings in the spirit of Islam, you're talking about things like work ethic, family values, morality, what certainly all of those things. But more importantly, we're talking about the teachings that are embodied in the revelation that was given to Muhammad, the prophet, fourteen hundred years ago. That book is called the Holy Koran. It is the highest code of ethics for Muslims.

We find our religion is based in the belief in the Koran and the ideas and the laws that we find there in. And what we try to do as Muslims is live up to a measure up to these ideas, family values, the work ethic, morals, respect for humanity. All of these ideas are contained in the Koran, how we conduct our business. All of these ideas are given in the Koran. And again, you feel that these ideas are applicable to all major religions. Certainly you find that there's more commonality in the religious faiths. We believe in having raising our children decently, providing for them, teaching them honesty, respect for property, respect for fellow human beings, striving for excellence, trying to develop their human potential and their intellectual potential. The same thing that other religious communities, the same difficult challenges we all face. So Reverend Scott Peterson is a bishop with the church on the hill in Vallejo. He is of the Pentecostal group and he has been a reverend there for 20 years.

Reverend, the sense of the word of God as you preach it in your ministry, is it something that really can and indeed does apply to people of all faiths? In other words, if someone, for example, of another faith cannot see it to accepting the divinity of Jesus Christ or having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ or doesn't even accept God, can they find their way into the gates of heaven? Bluntly, no. And the way we believe we would welcome them. No. To our our community, to our worship. But in terms of what we believe, we believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and that he is the way one would find salvation. Then where is salvation for those who do not find it through Christ? I guess there wouldn't be. There would not be so right. And that's a hard thing. I mean, people don't like to talk about that. They that's why I brought it up. That's right. But you know what I think we're all talking

about, for example, when the imam talks about that common humanity that connects all of us in that sense of love and loving God and being loved by God, this is really the spiritual essence of so many religions. And I know that you're probably very much in the spirit of that. And yet when salvation becomes something that excludes or that does not include, it's paradoxical to many people it is, but that also loses the spirit of the gospel. The gospel is to welcome everyone. God was the one who who sent his son so that man could find salvation. He was the one Jesus Christ was the one who opened the way for Gentiles, the way for women, the way for those that were previously excluded to find a welcoming in in the religious community to participate on on an equal footing. We believe that everyone is level at the foot of the cross, that there is no, as the scripture, says Junor, Greek male or female, slave nor free, but that we are all one in Christ.

Yet the Pentecostals have had their own internal battles over race, particularly. Let us think about that. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I was raised in the Lutheran Church. I joined the Assemblies of God when I was 19 years of age, and it wasn't until two years ago that I really discovered the racist roots of the Pentecostal denomination. And it's been a learning experience for me. And it's one that our entire movement, not just the Assemblies of God, but all Pentecostal, the nominations have been dealing with. And that is the fact that at the early part of the 20th century, there was a real schism where Caucasian white folk. Made a deliberate move to separate from African-American, from black Pentecostal Christians and really for the last 80 years, that has been an issue that has gone unnoticed and one that it was not really in the forefront, but in recent years through various. Conferences and movements such as the Promise Keepers and others, there's really been a move toward reconciliation and a desire to own what was wrong

and to try to correct the path for the future. Let me introduce you once again to Rabbi Pam Fridmann Barr, who is with us here from the Shalom Jewish community here in San Francisco. Is is Sunday the most segregated day in American life with respect to religion, Rabbi? Not at all. We have Sunday school, just as the imam was speaking about when my congregation or Shalom began, we used to have what we called Shabbat school. And we would gather with the children on the morning of the Sabbath on Saturday morning. But now, as time has gone, we meet on Sundays. The Jewish faith certainly doesn't necessarily talk about redemption, as we heard Reverend Bishop talking about. That is a sense of who can be redeemed and who can't be redeemed. But there's been this there's often a sense in the Christian community that that Jews are tribal, that they identify among themselves, that there's a sense, in other words, of lack of openness in many occasions, in many instances toward other faiths come in.

And that if you would, you know, I think partly it has to do with the fact that Jews are a minority in our country. The number of Muslims and the number of Jews in our country is probably fairly similar. And I mean, for example, yesterday I was shopping in Walgreens and there was so much Christmas stuff around and I was looking for something that was Hanukkah ish to bring home to my children and there was nothing. So in that sense, it's like anyone whose ethnicity is is absent from certain spheres. People might experience our reactions as tribal, but I don't consider Jewish people to be close to others. I would agree with everything, really, that the demon said about Islam. And I would say that the same kinds of things with respect to what you want to teach your children. And what about the nature of understanding your upbringing? God is absolutely, absolutely. And from my point of view, the differences are partly a linguistic difference and partly a cultural difference, depending upon

the language of the prophet that brought the message to a particular faith that can only bring this to the Middle East in some fashion. Right. I mean, the sense of what both of you were communicating, if there's common connectedness, I think that this idea, though it started in the Middle East, the idea in Islam has always been towards inclusion. And it wasn't just for the Arabs, though. It started with Muhammad, the prophet, peace be upon on him, who is an Arab. But at its very beginnings, Bilal al Habashi was given high position in Islam. The first call to prayer, Salman Farsi, who was a Persian, was given prominent responsibility as an envoy ambassador for Islam Suhail al Rumi, Suhail to Rome and also was given high position and responsibility. So Islam from the very beginning was much broader than the tribe or the the local group. It always had a universal appeal, and that's one of the reasons scholars have said that it has grown so much when it goes to various lands and cultures.

It doesn't wipe out the culture of the people. If you go to Africa, where Islam is, over 50 percent of the people of Africa are Muslims. You find they still have their African identity and culture. As long as it doesn't conflict with the spirit and the letter of Islam, then your culture still remains the same. You find exactly the same thing in Judaism if you go to different parts of the world. And when you're mentioning Africa, I mean, if you look at the as the Jews of Ethiopia, their culture is very much part of African culture, that it was not necessarily a word that they welcome being called philosophize, which suggests sort of a peasant class or something. I just learned that recently myself. But I know it's a common, common word that we use to describe Ethiopian Jews. You may have more information on that than I do. I don't mean to be pedantic, but I am. But I want to get back to this notion, though, of when we'll talk about proselytizing and all of that and trying to spread the faith and how that works, but of Jews having

become in this culture, as assimilated as they have, which suggests to some extent that maybe instead of the separation in the marginal identity that has always given strength to those people, that's become diluted because now they are, at least in the United States, are very much accepted into the mainstream more than they are people of color, for example. I'm sure that that's true. Are you losing your identity, I guess, is what I mean by assimilating and being absorbed into the main cultures? I'm not. I think that assimilation is both a positive and a negative for those whose ancestors lived in places where they were persecuted because of their faith. Assimilation is a welcome breath of fresh air. We have a family in our congregation in which the grandmother was raised and start, which is a concentration camp, actually a model concentration camp. And her reaction after the war was to marry her husband, to have children and to baptize them in the Church of England because her feeling was, if this is what being a Jew leads to, I don't want it and I don't want it for my children.

And yet, after many years, maybe 40 years, her son, one of her sons, found his way to our community and now is deeply involved in Judaism. And it doesn't mean that he's leaving his American what you would call assimilationists nature. He's simply bringing faith and religious practice in to who he is. Couple of questions specifically to you as a woman. Is it been difficult for you as a woman, rabbi? Not particularly. I've been very lucky because there were pioneers who went before me and I have been ordained in the Jewish renewal movement. And that's a fairly new movement. There have been many questions among the various denominations of Judaism about Jewish renewal. Is it an acceptable movement? At this point? We're still in our infancy in many ways, and so people are still exploring the impact of our movement on the Jewish community. But as far as being a woman, I've been very accepted both in the Jewish community and in

the interfaith community. Difficult to get young people excited about Judaism in a general way, because I know that there have been and this is true about every religion, really more falling away from the faith and more of a sense of fact. I think other than Catholics, Jews are highest in number and even more than Catholics proportionately, of those who, for example, find their way to Eastern religions and leave the faith for other kinds of faith. I think that that's certainly true in general. In our community, we have a religious school that has a very unique precept, and that is that children can only attend if they want to. Parents are not allowed to force their children to go to religious school. And I want to tell you that we have 76 kids in our school and it's really wonderful. It's really wonderful to see the interest, the enthusiasm, the questions that come up. I mean, I am constantly challenged and constantly sent back into meditation and into my books to find answers to questions that I had never considered before, because there's such an atmosphere of

openness. Now, our community has a very high interfaith population as well. In the school, I would guess about 60 percent of the kids are from interfaith homes. And in fact, next Wednesday, which will be the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, we will share with them a special ritual in the Hebrew school. And this is for kids who are fourth through eighth grade. We'll have a candle lighting ceremony and each child will have an opportunity to light a candle in honor of the faith or faiths in their home. And so we light for a variety of faiths, as you can imagine, particularly Christian faiths. And then after we've lit for all those faiths represented in our community, we like for all the other faiths and paths that we can think of. And as we light each one, we say a little word of thanks is. So, for example, if I was going to light a candle for the Jewish religion, I'd say we give thanks for the light of Judaism or if we were going to light for the Lutheran faith, which is one we will certainly like for we give thanks for the light of the Lutheran faith. And so this is one way that we are instilling faith

that is universal and reminding our children that God is one and that we are all part of one humanity. Rydal Nakasone is visiting professor Buddhist Studies at the Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union. He's been involved in Pacific Interfaith Network. He is also a Buddhist priest. Thank you again for being with us here. Reverend Nakasone, the rabbi talks about openness and she talks about the sense of unity of all religions. There has been certainly, particularly with respect to your faith, a feeling that Christianity, particularly about other religions as well, has worked against has has historically been in opposition to your faith. And I wonder how you managed to set that, for example, when the rabbi talks about. The light of Lutheran Martin Luther himself was a great enemy of the Jews and inveighed against the Jews there, but how do you work against that sense of history when you try to move toward an interfaith feeling, come closer to the mike if you could? Well, as you know, in any religion,

the real and the ideal almost never meet. And same with any kind of religious and human organization historically here in the United States. You know, I belong to a Japanese Buddhist congregation or my tradition. And at the early part of this century, when the great numbers of Japanese came to the United States, there was great discrimination against them to the fact, even to the point they were they were not able to go out and lead their own congregation. And because of that, they modified many of their rituals, for example, to have it on Sunday. The holy book, which I have, is almost like a Bible, look like a Bible. So I guess when they walked out, they couldn't tell us the Buddhist book we adopted Sunday school and things of all many of those rituals listed on people's interest on that. So these are some of the things that adaptational that have been made, Americanization in effect and modernization Americanize.

Yes, but when I raise the question about history, I guess you talked about. The sense of Christians coming in, for example, just to use a specific example, destroying ancestral tablets and trying to proselytize Buddhists and so forth, I mean, there's there's a good deal of baggage when we think about history. And what we're talking about is how we overcome that and how we connect with one. Well, are you asking me to speak a little bit about what Buddhism is? Indirectly, but directly, but really, the direct question has to do with how how do you move toward that sense? Because you've worked with interfaith, how do you move toward interfaith when when people look at history and they see things that they don't like? Does it make them unhappy with respect to other religions to respect other faiths in light of that history? Well, I suppose the Buddhist view on this would be that I'll have to regress a little bit here. You on this would probably be something like this for Buddhists. We have three things that I think are very important.

And Buddhism is nothing more than a expression of humanity's deepest yearnings. The highest aspirations and our belief systems is one we cherish very much. And in this regard, the highest yearnings of human beings, and we speak of this universally, is that all beings want to be freed from suffering whatever that kind of suffering may be. On the flipside to healing is our highest aspiration and the highest aspiration is something to the effect that all beings, not only myself, want to be free from suffering. Now, how the Buddhists reconcile this is very simple. And our most cherished belief is that all things and all beings are interdependent. Interdependent entails two things. One is great responsibility. We rise and we fall together as one human body. And the other flipside to that is great gratitude. Having said that, there is a predominant belief in Buddhism that all beings possess a absolute sense of absolute essence.

We call that Buddha nature. Other names for that and those that have persecute others and ostracize others. We would say something to the effect that those beings have still yet to realize their true nature. Does this work in a similar way for you? Paul Schultz, that is. Paul Schultz is executive director of Berry Native American Ministry in Oakland and probably Ojibwe tribe that again, we are all God's creatures and that allows for forgiveness or an acceptance of those who I mean, let's face it, we have in this country been in many ways very cruel to your people in terms of our history. So reconciling history with a sense of interfaith compassion and universality, brotherhood, whatever transcends history, forgives it. What? Well, I think what it what it calls us to, particularly those who come from a variety of different spiritual communities, is an opportunity to set things right by considering and then becoming fully participant

in an act of apologizing to Indian people and making more of a commitment in this country ever has to set the record straight. And just as we sit here in the land of the Presidio, we sit here in the land of the Aloni, people of the promo, people of the Miwok people. Yet there's been just sort of a categorical effort to deny that presence. And today, the tribes in California and their friends from other states of which I count myself one, are here to make sure that that their participation here is certainly something that's honored and acknowledged in a more forthright manner today. How have you been denied how tribal people's been denied specifically? Well, in terms of if we talk generally about Indian people, a little known fact among the American public is that American Indian people did not even enjoy basic religious freedom in this country until 1978. That is inconceivable to many people who have taken pride in living

in a country that espouses religious freedom for all. But American Indian tribes were categorically denied the right to practice their religion and were subject to summary arrest and conviction for the practice of their own tribal faith. And this did not officially go off the books until 1970. That is correct. It was in 1978. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act was finally passed, which took away at least it begin to take away the fear of arrest that many of our people had for practicing their own tribal faith. The faith had had to go underground. In many tribes, it was kept alive. But in many others, churches became core participant with government in a way to make sure that Indian people were forced away from their culture. We're taught to believe that that they had no relevance spiritually, and that was certainly a kinder of the notions. Others were too willing to simply call us pagans and to essentially come to us and try to force us to believe that somehow God in infinite

wisdom had decided that we were to continue to be outcasts and to not be beneficiaries of anything spiritual, even from a Christian perspective, until such time that that we shut ourselves the. Respecting ourselves as American Indians turned away from our culture and became something which we've never truly been invited to be, and that is a part of white America, that sense of being seen as pagans or being excluded because of your beliefs. There are certain parts of the country, for example, when North Dakota comes to mind and other places where Native Americans still feel an acute kind of exclusion along those lines religiously. And in terms of just the society in general, is it better in the Bay Area? One would think the liberal, tolerant Bay Area would be more open, for example, is it? Well, I think in terms of the Bay Area being a place where American Indian tribes from across the nation have come together in an urban community. And incidentally, it is important to know that urban Indians now constitute between two thirds to three quarters of the Indian population.

I think you will certainly find a more tolerant attitude among many of the tribes who were brought here. But you have to understand how they were brought here. The coming to the Bay Area was not a choice and the fulfillment of a dream for many people. It was an act, again, of the government forcing Indian people to leave the reservation to come into urban areas. And again, the hope was that we would lose our culture, lose our language, lose everything that was Indian and again become part of this American dream and have no identity. And the feeling was by government and by a number of churches that that was our best hope. And there was there was never any thought given to consulting with the people to see what it is that we might have preferred. Let me Ramzan is also with us. She is reverend and senior minister of the First Unitarian Church in San Jose. Your church certainly has a history of being on the outside to some extent. I remember going to Calvin College and seeing someone rebelliously wearing a Michael

Servatius T-shirt, which sort of stays in my mind. Michael Sebaceous was a great Unitarian heretic, at least to the Calvinist. Is there still a kind of outsider role for Unitarians? Because they're really not so much, in a sense, identified with traditional Christianity by any means? I don't think exactly it's an outsider role as perhaps a place where people who have felt hurt in other traditions have had a place where they could come and have a more open opportunity to explore their own spirituality. So there are some people who come in who probably feel like they have felt outside in the tradition that they were raised in and perhaps bring that sense of outsiderness with them. But my own sense is that as people's personal spirituality starts to mature, that people become less of an outsider and more of a sense of claiming their own spirituality in a positive way. Unitarian Universalist certainly are not a large movement in

the United States, but have had a fair amount of influence for our for our small numbers in terms of people within the community that have had influence in the nature of political decision making and social movements in the United States and often identified with a kind of progressive or liberal political stance with respect to many issues. You've also been a church very open to gays and lesbians and have been in fact, you yourself are lesbian. Yes. What what has this meant in terms of, say, the relationship of those who have come to you seeking refuge? It's meant, in effect, that this is a place where they can worship and not feel hindered by dint of their sexual identity. Well, the first principle of Unitarian Universalism is a respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. And so that has challenged the Unitarian Universalist to take that seriously, both in terms of issues of race, you know, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation. And so Unitarian Universalist were indeed among the first

in terms of religious communities to to welcome gay and lesbian people as full participants and members of our communities to ordained ministers and our own congregation in San Jose. I'd say probably about 15 percent of the people in the congregation are openly gay or lesbian. Have a lot of Hispanics in your congregation, too, which is not usually what one finds in Unitarian congregations. Well, I wouldn't say that there are a lot of Latinos in our congregation, but there are more than you would find in most Unitarian Universalist churches. We are downtown urban core where there's a large Latino community. I've always described our churches at the intersection of the shopping carts and the and the BMW is because we're right across the street from a park where a lot of homeless people.