When Sulaiman Salaam Jr. was a teen-ager, he was smitten by a beautiful girl in his school. Well, let him tell the story, as he did one morning last week at an American Public Square event on religious literacy:
"When I was about 16 or 17 years old," said Salaam, whose parents had converted to Islam about the time he was born in the late 1960s and who, thus, grew up Muslim, "there was this girl who went to my school that I was really crazy about. She was absolutely gorgeous and she just blew my mind.
"We would talk on the phone a lot and one day she called me and she was crying. She said, 'Sulaiman, I just came back from Bible study and my pastor said if you don't accept Christ as your savior you're going to hell. And I don't want you to go to hell so please accept Christ as your savior.
"Now, I knew that she was sincere. I knew that she meant it. . .But for someone who grew up as a Muslim -- and this is all I ever knew -- I'm saying (to himself), 'How am I supposed to respond to that?' I didn't know how to respond. So, unfortunately, I responded the way I thought I was supposed to because she was challenging my faith, my beliefs, everything I had been taught. I said, 'You don't need to worry about me, you need to worry about yourself. Now get off the phone.'"
But, he said, "as soon as I hung up the phone, I said to myself, 'Well, what if she's right? How can I say with 100 percent certainty that I'm right and she's wrong, if this is all I ever knew?'. . .So that, for me, began my journey of religious literacy."
Today, Sulaiman is still a Muslim. Indeed, he's imam of Al-Haqq Islamic Center in Kansas City, and last week he joined a rabbi, two Christian pastors and a secularist on a panel to talk about the need for religious literacy. The event was the second presented by the American Public Square in partnership with the Interfaith Religious Literacy Center, a special project of the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council.
Rabbi Mark Levin, founding rabbi of Congregation Beth Torah, has a suggestion -- years too late, of course -- for how Sulaiman might have responded and how others in similar situations might respond today:
"My answer, if I'd been my age, rather than the age you actually were," he said, "would be, 'That's very interesting. Now, why do you think he thinks that?' And it seems to me that the basis of religious literacy in our society is being able to ask good questions and hear the real answers. And we tend not to do that."
Levin said that instead of worrying so much about knowing lots about different religions, "the question we want to ask ourselves is, How do we accept the other as part of our community and a part of our society without feeling threatened?"
It turned out that this conversation was extraordinarily timely, given the much-covered controversy about Donald Trump's ridiculous idea to ban all Muslims from coming to the U.S. now, even though the program was planned months ago.
The truth is that religious literacy is important all the time to help us avoid the kind of ignorance that leads to bigotry and even to violence.
A few other highlights from the morning's conversation, which took place at Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village:
* Secularists tend to be among those who are the most religiously literate, said Helen Stringer, executive director of Kansas City Oasis, which tries to bring together secularists who don't fit into faith communities. But even though they may know more -- or think they know more -- about religion than average Americans, "that doesn't mean it's accurate."
* "A lot of Christians have grown up at least in Kansas City and the Midwest in a culture where Christianity was predominant," said Evan Rosell, pastor of ministry leadership for Redeemer Fellowship. And because of that they weren't forced to learn or have great literacy in other religions. . .One of the questions I've been wrestling with. . .is, 'What's the difference between pluralism and relativism?' What's the difference between understanding and agreeing? Another way of saying that is to ask, 'What's the difference between ideological unity and relational unity?' I think the only way you can move forward in a way that honors each other and honors and honors all of us as human beings is to insist on relational unity without also demanding ideological unity."
* Helen Stringer said secularists are trying to figure out how to rear their children so they are religiously literate in a broad way. After all, she said, religion "is part of the human narrative, part of the human phenomenon."
* Another problem in creating religious literacy, said Levin, is that "the amount of misinformation out there is overwhelming." The way to overcome that is to have calm, appreciate conversations in which you ask what others believe and then ask them to say more and more about that.
The Rev. Brian Ellison, executive director of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, served as moderator of the panel. Two more programs about religious literacy will happen under the American Public Square sponsorship next year.
The hope is that eventually people will be better able to know how to respond when friends tell them they're destined for hell or when many other religious questions arise, including whether the U.S. should think about banning immigration by members of this or that religious group. Lack of religious literacy leads to the kind of foolishness about faith that we've seen in recent weeks on the presidential campaign trail. We can be better than that.
(By the way, the people attending the panel on Thursday morning were asked to fill out this quiz on religious knowledge from the Pew Research Center. Those who did got an average of 12.78 right out of 15, which is considerably better than the national average. Try it yourself. If you're one of my regular readers, you should ace it.)
(In the photo here today, left to right, you see Levin, Stringer, Ellison, Rosell and Salaam.)
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IF YOU ACED THE PEW QUIZ, TRY THIS ONE
Speaking of quizzes about religion, New York Times columnist Nickolas Kristof gave readers this one in a weekend column. And he did it to show that sacred writ can be complicated -- so much so that what we think is true of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an turns out not to be true at all.