Songs of Worship – Why We Sing To The Lord

By David W. Stowe
Michigan State University
February 11, 2017

This Saturday, Feb. 11, many Jews will celebrate Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Singing, which commemorates one of the most vivid musical performances in the Hebrew Bible: the songs sung by Moses and his sister Miriam to celebrate the Israelite crossing of the Sea of Reeds (Red Sea) in their dramatic escape from bondage in Egypt.

This Song of Miriam exemplifies one dominant motivation for sacred music: collective celebration.

“Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them:
‘Sing to the Lord,
for he is highly exalted.
Both horse and driver
he has hurled into the sea.’”

As a cultural historian, I have been studying the relationship between music and religious experience for two decades. Music has been crucial to religious experience across history and region.

Sacred music has a unique ability to engage both body and mind. It brings people together in expressing gratitude, praise, sorrow and even protest against injustice.

Why religion needs sacred song

More than three millennia after Miriam, singing continues to be a widely observed expression of thanksgiving and gratitude, whether or not couched in religious language or occurring in a sacred space.

Singing bhajans.
Vrindavan Lila, CC BY-ND

Jews and Christian sing psalms that celebrate the glory of creation and the god who created it; Muslims offer “na’t” in honor of the Prophet Muhammad; and Hindus chant “bhajans” to express their devotion to Shiva or Krishna. In many American evangelical churches, pop-influenced congregational singing, generally referred to as “praise music,” has replaced old-school hymns.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, sacred music is the preferred medium for expressing mourning and lament. African-American churches commonly referred to such songs of trouble and grief as “sorrow songs,” in contrast to the more upbeat celebratory “jubilee songs.”

Indeed, the climactic final chapter of historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois’ classic collection, The Souls of Black Folk, is titled “Of the Sorrow Songs.” He offers an eloquent tribute to the power of the spiritual, when he says,

“And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song – the rhythmic cry of the slave – stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.”

Many Hebrew psalms are classified as laments and have been sung by monastics and lay worshipers, Jewish and Christian, for 2,000 years. Islam has its own tradition of lamentation dirges, called “nauha,” typically sung by Shiite Muslims in mourning for the martyrs of the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, which initiated a bitter succession struggle that still resounds through the Muslim world.

The blues, which have so profoundly shaped American popular music – from jazz and rhythm & blues to soul – are regarded as a secular counterpart to the songs that arose out of conditions of chattel slavery, as the theologian James Cone memorably explores in his seminal study, “The Spiritual and the Blues.”

Just as the experiences of ecstasy and gratitude are heightened by giving vocal expression in collective singing, so the pain of injustice and uncertainty are relieved by vocal release through music.

Former President Barack Obama too broke into what seemed like a spontaneous rendition of “Amazing Grace” at the eulogy he delivered at the historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, following the mass murder of nine church members by a white supremacist in 2015.

Why should this be?

Sacred song is one of the most social aspects of religious practice. But it is also an intimate embodied experience. The singer draws meaning from her or his core being: She feels the sound being produced as she hears it.

Creating musical tone in one’s chest and throat provides sensuous pleasure, amplified by what sociologist Emile Durkheim referred to as “collective effervescence” – the collective energy generated when groups come together in a shared purpose. This concept has been explored extensively by sociologist Randall Collins in his work on interaction ritual chains.

Personally, I have experienced this most intensely while singing shape-note music, which might be described as the heavy metal of American roots music (with a Calvinist twist).

Why communal singing is joyous

Worth noting in the Miriam singing we began with is the way in which singing and dancing are conjoined.

Disembodied music of the sort we take for granted through MP3s and earbuds, or even sitting passively in a concert hall, is a recent historical development. The most intense experience of unity between body and music is called trance. “[Trancing]
is a profound mystery,” writes ethnomusicologist Judith Becker.

“You lose your strong sense of self, you lose the sense of time passing, and may feel transported out of quotidian space.”

Communal singing is more joyous.
cristian, CC BY-NC-ND

Ordinary worshipers often get at least a taste of this when they sing in community. Communal singing plays a role in the release of oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone” instrumental in the pleasures of social bonding.

Music, religion and political protest

The Abrahamic faiths that trace their origins to the Hebrew Bible have a long history of linking sacred song to the struggle against injustice and oppression. This tradition comes out of the Hebrew prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Amos. Social protest is a strong thread in the psalms, which provided the central worship songs for Jews and Christians.

My most recent book studies just one text, Psalm 137, which includes the famous line,

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

This is a psalm that mourns the plight of Judeans held captive in Babylon after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 587 B.C. This has been used as a rallying cry for religious and political movements for many centuries.

And indeed it seems that music may play a part in the mass protests of the Trump era. Secular spirituals like “We Shall Overcome,” with its roots in the black church, are always ready to be dusted off. But this time, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” has already been promoted by the political resistance as a reminder of the earlier, more inclusive vision of American nationhood. Lady Gaga even managed to take it into her Super Bowl halftime show without raising alarms. New versions of the Song of Miriam continue to be rewritten and sung, as songs that celebrate triumph over oppression or injustice.

As Becker says,

“You cannot argue with a song sung in soaring phrases, with drum rhythms you are feeling in your bones, surrounded by friends and family who are all, like you, structurally coupled, rhythmically entrained.”

Editor’s note: the original version of this story inadvertently identified the Battle of Karbala as having taken place in 680 BC instead of 680 AD.

David W. Stowe, Professor of English and Religious Studies, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

There is More Than One Story To Be Told About Muslims in Trump’s America

By Maha Bali
January 31, 2017

Let me tell you two stories that happened to two different people. Both concern religion in North America.

Register how you feel about each of them.

Story one: “Why are you not Christian?” a man asks you.

Story two: You wake up to find someone has left a Bible on your doorstep.

Which of these sounds more violent, more threatening to you? Or neither?

Now, imagine yourself a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in a Western country and repeat the two stories to yourself again. How would you feel?

Now let me complete each story and give you some context.

Story one

“Why are you not Christian?” the man asked, kindly, in broken English.

“We believe in Jesus and the Bible,” I said, wanting to comfort him, “and we have a lot of Christians in Egypt where I come from.”

This happened to me in Houston, Texas around 2007 or 2008. The man was a plumber coming in to fix my sink. He found it difficult to express himself in English but seemed to care about saving my soul, however misguided that was.

It didn’t occur to me to be offended or afraid. This was a time when America was on the cusp of electing either a black president, a female president or at least a female vice president. Houston, despite what all my American friends had told me before I left Egypt, was not a generally racist place to live.

Half of the surgery fellows working with my husband at the Texas Heart Institute were Muslim. Some strangers said “Assalamu Alaikum” (peace be upon you) to me on the streets, or stopped me and my friends to comment on the beauty of our colourful headscarves.

Story two

You wake up to find someone has left a Bible on your doorstep. This happened to a friend in North America, soon after Donald Trump was elected president. She felt it was a threat or a subtle act of violence. She wondered how her neighbours would feel if she placed a Qur’an on their doorsteps.

When I heard my friend’s story, it got me thinking about the possible intentions of the person who placed that Bible on her doorstep.

I trust that my friend’s feeling of being threatened was real in that context. But I wondered if the story might have been different. What if the story had included a note inside the Bible, showing who had left it, or giving an invitation to exchange holy books?

What if the Bible on the doorstep had been the beginning of a dialogue rather than a way to scare someone away? And if the person who left the Bible on my friend’s doorstep didn’t have bad intentions, why didn’t they do it in person and look her in the eye?

What does a Bible on a doorstep mean?

Context and power

There are differences between story one and two, chief among them are context and power. The political context and who the actors are make a difference to the story. An elderly, Hispanic plumber fixing my sink? Not a threat to my 20-something self in Houston, accompanying my surgeon husband doing a fellowship at a prestigious nearby hospital.

Had I been asked the same question by a white man, in an angry voice, in another context, my reaction would probably have been very different.

I am telling this story in the era where we are lamenting the rise of fake news and exploring our roles as educators to respond to it, as if a technical solution to figuring out if something is a lie will fix our problems. It won’t. Because it’s not a technical problem.

Education and understanding

Donald Trump’s executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US is not fake news. It’s real news. And as a community, we have to deal with it.

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said:

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, ‘secondly’. Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story”.

The media does this all the time. So do politicians – we see Donald Trump right now, talking about banning Iraqi refugees and immigrants from entering the US, without mentioning the role of his country in causing the instability that motivated the immigration in the first place.

Adichie also says:

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story”.

In my view, the best way to ensure that we and our children see more than the stereotypical story about people who are different from us is to expose them and ourselves to multiple stories. The bare minimum is to expose ourselves to other cultures on their own terms.

So, for example, we don’t learn about Native Americans from Pocahontas or from Western films. We learn from Native Americans themselves. If we don’t have direct access to them (I live a long way away in Egypt), find them online. Read or listen or even, if you’re lucky, converse.

I know what you’re thinking. I’m Muslim, talking about Muslims in America. What brought this on? But in the midst of my concern over Muslims in America, I also noticed Trump’s presidential memo to advance approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline, I can see the injustice in this, and the irony: on the one hand, a “nation of immigrants” that is neither honouring immigrants, nor honouring the original residents of this land.

We will always have blind spots towards cultures that are unfamiliar to us. But the more deeply we establish understanding of the “other”, the more we try to empathise, with social justice as our underlying value, the more likely we are to become empathetic, critical, global citizens. As educators, we must expand and diversify the people in our in-groups, and help students do this too.

Education expert Sean Michael Morris, on the day of Trump’s inauguration, urged us to change the way we teach. He wrote:

“An education that convinces us of what needs to be known, what is important versus what is frivolous, is not an education. It’s training at best, conscription at worst. And all it prepares us to do is to believe what we’re told”.

This goes for parents and mentors as well as those of us in more formal teaching roles.

Building empathy

The best way not to believe what we’re told is not to go fact-checking each and every thing we hear. Instead, I propose we start building our ability to understand people who are different from us, in context, rather than relying on harmful stereotypes. To know them as individuals, as they would like to be known, not as some dominant power (or US president) has decided we shall know them.

This is not quick or simple. But it can allow us to form a view of the world that rises above deception and to see what’s important in our humanity. And it will change the way we vote. When we empathise with others, we imagine how our decisions can impact them.

Remember those two stories I mentioned earlier? Back in 2007 and 2008, I felt comfortable and safe praying in a mosque in Houston. Now, I would not, given the latest news of Islamophobic violence in mosques coming from North America, most recently the terrorist attack on a mosque in Quebec City that left six people dead.

My friend with the Bible on her doorstep, a dual citizen, was unable to attend a conference in the US a few days ago.

But that isn’t the biggest tragedy. The tragic stories are those of families torn apart by this executive order. Parents who cannot reach their children. What we need now, more than ever, is empathy.

Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice, Center for Learning and Teaching, American University in Cairo

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article

The Plight of Christians in Pakistan

Breathing Without living: the plight of Christians in Pakistan

The nativity scene, organised and prepared by Christians in Peshawar just before Christmas. Photo: A. Khan

 

Altaf Khan, University of Peshawar

“The year 2017 will be one of peace and love,” Naheed Naz told me. “There is nothing in the scriptures about it, but Jesus puts feelings in your heart about what is going to happen. It is a matter of faith and we believe in it.”

I met Naz, in her 40s, and a nursing teacher with a Masters degree in Public Health, at the All Saints Church in the heart of Peshawar’s old city. She sounded optimistic despite the last days of 2016 bringing more turmoil in Pakistan for Christians.

Christmas messages were received with death threats and a Christian man was arrested on December 30 for allegedly desecrating the Koran. He currently faces the death penalty.

I could feel this tense atmosphere as I approached the All Saints Church on Christmas Day. The 19th-century building of Islamic Saracenic style reflecting in the brilliantly sunny day outside.

As I entered the church’s hall, the faithful were taking seats in anticipation of the Christmas mass. I had to come in through heavy security. The street where the church stands was blocked at both ends by sand barriers and guarded by security personal. On 22 September 2013, a twin suicide bomb attack during a Sunday mass at the church killed 127 people.

I asked Naz how the Christmas of her childhood differed from now. She recounted memories of her childhood and her sister’s: the letter to Santa, her mother and father who used to make their life loving and rich, and the moral values of love and peace Christmas used to bring. Naz lost her mother in the 2013 bombing.

A little later, as I sat in the church, I met Shafi Maseeh, 75, who also lost his son in the same terror attack. He had little to say. Shafi is the real prototype of a Christian in Pakistan. A janitor by trade, he had no good memories to share of anything.

Most Christians I talked to felt a loss of identity, isolation and a deep sense of alienation. There was no nostalgia for the past, nor any enthusiasm for the present.

In the All Saints Church, I was not alone at the Christmas ceremony. The local media had come too. Father Patrick Naeem was happy to see them and thanked the government, the media and the chief of the Pakistani army, while also asking journalists to respect the parishioners as they took photos of the ceremony.

One reporter asked me what I was doing there. When I told her I was going to do a story on Christmas and would like to interview her too she angrily replied, “I am not a Christian, do I look like one?” I was shocked for a moment. “There is nothing wrong with being a Christian,” I said.

Another reporter warned me as I was leaving the place: “Be careful, liberals are on the hitlist.” I just kept quiet.

Pakistan’s Christian minority

There is no definitive figure, but Christians make up roughly 1.6% of the population of Pakistan, as many as Hindus, according to the latest official statistics.

Christians mostly converted from Hinduism to escape the caste-dominated Indian society before the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. But changing religion didn’t help: the roots of discrimination based on caste run deep in both Indian and Pakistani society.

The Christmas ceremony is an event on its own as media gathered to film.
A. Khan

The plight of Christians has persisted for decades, but there has also been a rise of hatred against Christians since the late 1980s, when the dictator Zia ul Haq introduced Pakistan’s blasphemy law, particularly used to persecute Christians.

A double oppression

Pakistani society is still marred by racism and questions of caste, even among Muslims, despite the Qur’an setting out radical equality for all.

Across South Asia, Muslims remain divided up by various hierarchical systems. This long trail of caste-related injustice goes back to the beginnings of subcontinental societies and seems impervious to the intrusion of other sources of identity such as the nation state or religion.

So the Christian community reels under a double oppression of racism, based on the low castes many Christians come from, and religious intolerance towards their belief system.

But even among minorities, Christians are particularly singled out, for a number of reasons. They are visible: they live mostly in urban areas and are often employed in low-wage jobs. They are also the poorest of the community.

In December 2015, the Capital Development Authority of Islamabad submitted a report suggesting that the Christian “ugly slums” of the capital be destroyed to keep the city clean. The CDA, in this unprecedentedly stupid move (“their Trump Moment” as the English daily Dawn put it), argued that the campaign of destruction would preserve Islamabad’s aesthetics and maintain its Muslim-majority demographic balance.

The proposal was rightly contested by political parties, activists, and NGOs and thwarted by the Supreme Court, but it was a worrying sign of just how poorly Christians are thought of by the Pakistani elite.

Adding insult to injury, Christians in Pakistan are also seen as representatives of the US and other Western powers who are often held to be responsible for the plight of Muslims around the globe.

Christianity in politics

The plight of Christians is linked to the political foundation of Pakistan and the much criticised Two Nation Theory which became the basis of Partition in 1947. Partition aimed to create a state for Hindus (India) and one for Muslims (Pakistan).

Christians are historically considered to have positively contributed to Pakistani statehood, thus helping the development of the Pakistani society, but today they, along with other non-Muslims, are forbidden from holding high office.

The Christian vote in Pakistan is around 1.3 million, second to the Hindu vote, which is around 1.5 million. While the Hindu vote is mostly concentrated in the Sindh and Punjab regions, Christian voters are more scattered. Since the minority vote is restricted to a few electorates, political parties are not generally interested in serving them, though there is a lot of lip service to minority issues.

Minority representatives protest the problem of segregation from mainstream politics. There is no doubt that the electoral system adds to the problems of already frustrated minority communities in Pakistan. Minorities don’t have the right to place their own candidates in elections. They can vote for any Muslim candidate in their constituency from within the general seats, and they also have the right to vote for a minority candidate, but they don’t have the right to choose these. They are instead given minority seats for which tickets are allotted by mainstream political parties.

Fractured communities

While talking to various Christians, I observed very little sense of community. All identity revolves around the personal and in Pakistan, that is steeped into the psychology of status.

Christians in Pakistan are faced with both victim-blaming from without and the self-loathing it generates within the individual.

Continuous repression as a community within social and political life in Pakistan has led some to blame themselves for their problems. Self-incrimination, a shallow sense of belonging to the mainstream and the loss of the social self were often apparent in my conversations for this article.

“Our people are not serious about their studies; they don’t save money,” a priest who works as a waiter at my university’s student accommodation told me. “I do save, though I am usually in debt, while keeping my needs to the minimum.” When I asked if it is because of the loss of hope that some Christians struggle in school and work, he replied, “No, I have made it from a janitor to a waiter. My boys are going to school. Isn’t it an environment conducive to success?”

Living with contradiction

Christians are often the recipient of local charities. “Yes, we like them, because they grew up with us,” a high-level political activist in Peshawar told me. “They clean our homes and we give them our used clothes, and also food. They are good people. We also offer them gifts on Christmas. We just did this year, too.” The activist was also a trader in the market in front of the All Saints Church.

Christians often feel the same way. “The political parties don’t care for us,” the priest at Peshawar University said. “Some politicians do, though. They offer us gifts on Christmas. I also got my package. They change the carpets of our church every now and then. This is good.”

In the present environment of hopelessness and fear, the only option left for Christians is to learn to live with Pakistan’s deep contradictions – discrimination from the state, but charity from politicians.

Centuries of continuous repression have left many without any sense of identity within their home country. Many Christians here just want to breathe – being able to truly live is a distant dream.

Altaf Khan, Professor, University of Peshawar

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

What’s Missing in The Teaching of Islam

 

Kishwar Rizvi, Yale University

There has been much misinformation about Islam. Reports in Western media tend to perpetuate stereotypes that Islam is a violent religion and Muslim women are oppressed. Popular films like “American Sniper” reduce places like Iraq to dusty war zones, devoid of any culture or history. Fears and anxiety manifest themselves in Islamophobic actions such as burning mosques or even attacking people physically.

At the heart of such fear is ignorance. A December 2015 poll found that a majority of Americans (52 percent) do not understand Islam. In this same poll, 36 percent also said that they wanted to know more about the religion. Interestingly, those under 30 years were 46 percent more likely to have a favorable view of Islam.

These statistics highlight an opportunity for educators. As a scholar of Islamic art and architecture, I am aware that for the past 20 years, educators have been trying to improve the teaching of Islam – both in high school and college history courses.

The problem, however, is that the teaching of Islam has been limited to its religious practice. Its impact on the arts and culture, particularly in the United States, is seldom discussed.

What teaching of Islam misses

In high school history books, there is little mention of the intertwined histories of Europe, Asia and Africa in the middle ages and the Renaissance. There is even less mention of the flowering of art, literature and architecture during this time.

In a world history textbook for New York public high schools, for example, the “Muslim World,” appears in the 10th chapter. In condensing a thousand years of history – from the seventh to the 17th century – it focuses only on “Arab armies” and the rise of early modern Muslim empires.

Palatine Chapel borrowed from the art of the Fatimids.
Al-dabra, CC BY-NC-ND

Such narrow focus misses out on the cultural exchanges during this period. For example, in medieval Spain, the Troubadour poets borrowed their lyrical beauty from Arabic. Arabic was the courtly language of southern Spain until the 15th century. Similarly, the 12th-century Palatine Chapel in Sicily was painted and gilded in the imperial style of the Fatimids, the rulers of Egypt between the 10th and 12th centuries.

Such exchanges were common, thanks to the mobility of people as well as ideas.

The point is that the story of Islam cannot be told without a deeper understanding of its cultural history: Even for early Muslim rulers, it was the Byzantine empire, the Roman empire and the Sassanian empire (the pre-Islamic Persian empire) that provided models. Such overlaps continued over the centuries, resulting in heterodox and cosmopolitan societies.

The term “Middle East” – coined in the 19th century – fails to describe the complex social and cultural mosaic or religions that have existed in the region most closely associated with Islam – and continue to do so today.

How the arts can explain important connections

So, what should educators do to improve this literacy?

From my perspective, a fuller picture could be painted if identities were not to be solely defined through religion. That is, educators could focus on the cross-cultural exchanges that occurred across boundaries through poets and artists, musicians and architects. Both in high school and university, the arts – visual, musical and literary – could illustrate the important connections between Islam and other world histories.

For example, a class on the Renaissance could explain how the 15th-century Italian painter Gentile Bellini gained famed at the court of Mehmet II, the conqueror of Istanbul. Mehmet II commissioned Bellini to design an imperial portrait that was sent to rulers throughout Europe. His art presents a wonderful example of the artistic exchanges that took place between early modern cities such as Delhi, Istanbul, Venice and Amsterdam.

It might also help students to know that the Dutch painter Rembrandt collected Mughal miniature paintings. Silks from the Safavid empire (the Iranian dynasty from the 16th to 18th century) were so popular that Polish kings had their coat of arms woven in Isfahan.

This exchange of art continued into the Age of Enlightenment, a time when ideas around politics, philosophy, science and communications were rapidly being reoriented in Europe. A class on the Enlightenment may highlight the fact that writers like Montesquieu turned to the Middle East to structure a critique of their own religious institutions.

Goethe found inspiration in Persian poetry.
kaythaney, CC BY-NC

A poetry class could similarly show connections between the German author Wolfgang von Goethe’s writings and Islam, as exemplified in his “West-Eastern Diwaan,” a collection of poems. This epitome of world literature was modeled after classical Persian poetry in its style, and inspired by Sufism, the mystical tradition in Islam.

Most students are open to seeing these connections, even if it might require overcoming their own preconceptions about Islam. For example, when I teach my class on medieval architecture, students are surprised to learn that the two oldest continuously run universities in the world are in North Africa (in Fez – a city in Morocco – and Cairo).

Indeed, it is not easy to disentangle contemporary politics from historical fact, to teach more fully the culture and diversity of a religion that is almost 2,000 years old.

Perhaps educators could learn from a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York titled “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven.” The show illustrates how Abrahamic religions – that is, Christianity, Judaism and Islam – borrowed freely from each other in the realm of art, music and literature. Jerusalem was home to diverse populations and the arts played an important role within its religious and political life.

Muslims in America

It’s not in the past alone. We see these connections continue today – here in America, where Islam is an intrinsic part of the culture and has been for centuries.

From the Mississippi delta to the Chicago skyline, Muslims have made contributions, which might not be so obvious: West African slaves in the South were central to the development of the blues. Its complex vocalization and rhythms incorporated the rituals of Islamic devotion many of them had to leave behind.

The same is true of architecture. A quintessential example of modern American architecture is the Sears Tower in Chicago, which was designed by the Bangladeshi-American structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan.

Muslim contributions to art and architecture don’t just reflect the diversity of America, but the diversity of Islam in this country. Muslims in America comprise a rich tapestry of ethnicities, languages and cultures. This knowledge is particularly meaningful for young Muslim Americans, who struggle to claim their place in a country in which they are sometimes made to feel like outsiders.

Educators, especially within the arts and humanities, have an important role to play in this religious literacy, that helps students understand the unity in the diversity. After all, as the most popular poet in America, the 13th-century Muslim mystic Rumi wrote:

All religions, all this singing, one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity.

Kishwar Rizvi, Associate Professor in the History of Art Islamic Art and Architecture, Yale University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original articl

Religious Liberty by Rev. Dustin Bartlett

Religious Liberty
by Rev. Dustin Bartlett
November 18, 2016

“ You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” – Exodus 22:21

When I was first approached about writing a weekly article for the Custer Free Press, I was specifically asked to write about religion.  Not about Christianity in particular, but about religion in general.  Of course, I am a Christian pastor.  I approach the subject of religion from the perspective of my own religion, and most of my articles reflect that perspective.

This article is different.  That’s because this is an article about religious liberty, and for religious liberty to mean anything it must be extended to all religions.

During the campaign, Donald Trump said a number of things that should deeply concern people who believe in religious liberty.  He called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country, and suggested that all Muslims already in the country – including U.S. citizens – should be required to register and be tracked in a government database.  Now that he is the president-elect, there is evidence he may be planning to follow through on his campaign rhetoric.  One of his advisors has said that they are discussing plans for a registry of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.

This should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t, so I’m going to say it clearly: Religious liberty cannot exist where the government is directing suspicion at people simply because of their religion.  And religious liberty – like all freedom – only truly exists where it protects those in the minority.

I am not a Muslim.  I am a Christian in a country that is still majority-Christian.  These policies, should they be enacted, are unlikely to affect me directly.  But if people in the majority religious group don’t stand up for religious liberty when it is threatened for others, then there is no guarantee that it will exist should we ever become the members of the minority.  That’s how freedom works – it exists for all of us, or for none of us.

So, for all people of faith, this is a time to take a stand.  The government should not have programs or policies that apply to members of one religion but not another, and in our democratic system that means that the government needs to hear from you.  Call or write the members of your local, state, and federal government and make clear that the government should treat all religious people the same.  And speak to your Muslim neighbors, and let them know that they are not alone.

I know that you’re probably tired of hearing about the election, but this matters.  Religious liberty matters.  It is foundational to the success of American democracy.

And although this is an article about religious liberty in general, I’ll remind my Christian sisters and brothers that Jesus once said that treating others as you would have them treat you is a pretty good summary of the of what the Bible has to say, and I’m guessing you, like me, don’t want the government forcing all Christians to register in a database.