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Q & A
Q&A: Finding God outside our faith tradition Robin Russell, Jan 15, 2010
Samir Selmanovic, whose efforts have been praised by key voices in the emerging church movement, is passionate about his Christian faith but believes that Christians must learn to respect other religions and even find God outside their own religion’s boundaries.
Raised culturally Muslim (but practically atheist) in Croatia, Mr. Selmanovic converted to Christianity while a soldier in the Yugoslavian army. He went on to become a pastor in the U.S. and now is co-leader of Faith House Manhattan, which brings together people of faith—as well as atheists and humanists—to explore ways of living interdependently.
In his new book, It’s Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian (Jossey-Bass), he proposes a different way to practice one’s religion. He spoke recently with managing editor Robin Russell.
What’s wrong with just enjoying God within our own religion’s framework? There’s nothing wrong with it. I think in fact it’s necessary to enjoy your own religion before you can respect the other. It’s a prerequisite—to be rooted in a certain place, so you really have something to offer others. None of us owns our stories; we have a responsibility to share it. And sharing presumes there is somebody to hear it, therefore we need to be hearers of other stories, too. If all of our stories are revelatory about God, then we owe those stories to others.
I often say to Jews, “When are you going to start doing evangelism?” They say, “Well, no, we don’t do evangelism.” And I say, “Look, Judaism doesn’t belong to you—it’s a world heritage.” So many of us can benefit from it and then dig into our stories and traditions and find things about social justice. We give and receive our stories so that we know one another and we enrich the world.
Why has religion lost credibility and relevancy for so many people? Religion is something that helps us to live with uncertainty. A faith is a working relationship with a mystery. Religions start by saying, “Isn’t this life experience amazing—and isn’t it awful?” And what do you do with that? People start sharing with one another their insights to help them live with this unknown. I think that we have in this age of reason started to systematize this, to break down into propositions and certain statements of belief that we have to give assent to.
Author Karen Armstrong talks about how religion in modernity has been shrunk, taking away from mythos and being explained in terms of logos. But people feel that life is larger than religious institutions, theologies, principles, steps—all of these things. In the last 50 or 100 years, religion has become more and more of a compartment of life. I think that’s the reason: People sense that life is bigger.
So they opt for “spiritual but not religious.” But religion at its best is a resource, a treasure—a community of support. So what they’re saying is, “I want to be spiritual alone.” That’s like saying, “I like knowledge but not education.”
In the book’s subtitle, you call yourself a “Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian.” I use those words as adjectives simply to say that without Islam, Judaism and Christianity, I don’t know if I would still be a Christian. Those traditions and stories and people helped me on my Christian journey when I came to an impasse, or when it’s difficult or I’m disoriented or I can’t get it, or I’m frightened or bored. I turn to these others and say, “How are you doing this on your path?” And they give me a bigger picture, and ask questions I have never been asking and name things I’m afraid to name. They look into the blind spots and say, “Hmmmm. Why don’t you move your head a little bit this way and then maybe you can see this in your tradition?”
In the Bible, strangers were those who helped us come to a place we have never been before, and to see things we cannot see on our own—like heavenly consultants. There are lots of examples in the Bible.
Give me one. Why did we need Persian astrologers to name the Messiah? Why didn’t we just tell ourselves who the Messiah is? Why was the outsider needed? And Jesus was a stranger all the time. In Matthew 25, it says, “I was a stranger and you helped me.” The Bible is so obsessed with strangers because God is afraid—if I can use that word—that his otherness would be lost on us if we did not accept that those who are not in our image are nevertheless in the image of God. So God comes to us as friend and neighbor, but also as stranger who brings a new thing: Good News. Jesus was a stranger, it says in John 1, and they didn’t recognize him.
In the Old Testament, we can see that Melchizedek the high priest shows up out of nowhere to bless Abraham, the first believer. And the Samaritan was a person of a different religion, and Jesus used a person who was wrong to teach the truth. I think God’s preference is for the poor, but also for the stranger.
Tell me what you found in Christianity that was so compelling to you. What Christianity enlightens and offers to the world is God’s presence in human suffering. It accounts for the dark side in a way that I don’t see anyone else doing. And it’s full of compassion—that all suffering is redemptive because God has suffered. It keeps the tension between good and evil, but also brings the evil and suffering within God’s kingdom. If there’s no Jesus, then evil is an inexplicable malfunction. And this personal embodiment in Jesus of what is divine—I like that part.
Writing about religious extremists, you say that they are not really religious at all. Explain. We call people who use religion for their own goals “religious extremists.” But I think the deeper you go into your religion, the more compassionate you will be. If you are extremely religious, you will be extremely compassionate. Mother Teresa or Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr., they were extremists; they were pushing it far enough. I think people who are extremists are not pushing their faith far enough: It has not informed them. They have not taken their religion deeply enough and broadly enough to help them live with uncertainty and help them live with unanswered questions and tensions and with imperfections of this world and of other human beings.
Real relationship with humanity and with God is unbearable to them. Instead of living with uncertainties and difficulties and beauty and challenges of life, they would rather shortcut that into certainty. You also write that Christians should engage in dialogue with atheists. Why? There are two kinds of atheism. One simply resembles religious fundamentalism. It denies any self-doubt. It’s obsessed with having answers and it mocks to discredit others. It wants human community to change in its own image. It says, “In order for the world to really work, we need to get people off religion.” So we need to get 3.3 billion people to stop being religious before world will improve. It’s just naïve—it’s a dead-end kind of thing—in the same way fundamentalist Muslims want to make everyone Muslim before the world will get better.
But there are atheists who are introducing new questions. They are like God’s whistle-blower as far as ethics are concerned, saying, “Look, if you say these things, you’d better live this way.” Some of the critics of our faith have been our best allies, like prophets. Because without Marx and Freud and Nietzsche, we wouldn’t be able to see a lot of the things we needed to see. They have been very helpful to us in making us better, in naming some of the idols we have.
There are atheists who participate in your Faith House Manhattan. What do you hope it will accomplish? When religious people get together, we objectify the other. But all of us have this process of doubt in ourselves. We question the existence of God every couple of weeks because of what we encounter. We have to be honest about that. And atheists help us not to live in God’s echo chamber. They bring different voices. They’re asking clarifying questions. They’re asking us to function for the common good. And atheists are as diverse as Christianity is diverse.
Are you optimistic about the future of religion? I am, very much. We are going through a period where what it means to be religious is changing. Religion has to adjust to an interdependent world. In the past, the strong city was a city with big walls. But today, the strong city is the city that has more bridges and airports and links. Links make you strong, and links are also boundaries, so we can have our identity. If our roots go deeper, we can afford to take off some walls.
When religion is able to adjust to the world as is—kind of live in reality—I think it has a lot to offer, as long as it is dethroned from being a manager of all the mystery. Our stories are interdependent; our mysteries need one another.
Religion is a way we give voice and structure and narrative and story to what really matters to us. That’s why religions are in conflict, because religions simply express what’s important to us. And as such, there is a future to it, because our lives are made of stories. And religions preserve those stories and connect them and help us live with unanswered questions. We borrow faith and optimism and strength from each other. Religion is story plus community plus impact, and it will be there.
In the book’s subtitle, you call yourself a “Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian.” 
