NEWS FEATURE: Theologian: `Cheek-by-jowl’ society requires interfaith acceptance

c. 1998 Religion News Service HIRAM, Ohio _ In Los Angeles, there are 241 Buddhist temples. In Boston, the most recent valedictorian and salutatorian at Harvard University were Hindu and Buddhist _ both born in the United States. In Hiram, Muslim students invited their entire college to mark Ramadan with them for the first time […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

HIRAM, Ohio _ In Los Angeles, there are 241 Buddhist temples.

In Boston, the most recent valedictorian and salutatorian at Harvard University were Hindu and Buddhist _ both born in the United States.


In Hiram, Muslim students invited their entire college to mark Ramadan with them for the first time this year.

“It is no longer possible to avoid contact with other religions,” said Harvard theologian Harvey Cox. “Everybody is everywhere. There are pagodas and mosques all over North America. There are more Muslims in the United States than there are Episcopalians.”

Cox called this the “cheek-by-jowl” phenomenon. He gave two pieces of advice to the mostly Christian audience he attracted recently for three lectures at Hiram College: See Robert Duvall’s movie about a Pentecostal preacher called “The Apostle.” And read the Koran.

“I never get into a taxi in New York without getting into an interfaith discussion,” Cox said, “usually with a Muslim driver who is delighted to find an American who has read the Koran.

“One of the things Christians have to learn from Muslims is how to live with others outside one’s own tradition. By and large, Muslims have done a much better job than Christians. Islam has a very high respect for Jesus, and for Christians and Jews as people of the book.”

Cox, 67, who has taught and worshipped in cities as far-flung as Madrid, Spain; Tokyo; Berlin; Lima, Peru; and Oberlin, Ohio, often weaves his travel experience into his lectures.

“As of 1978,” he said, “it is no longer factually accurate to describe Christianity as a Western religion. Most Christians are nonwhites living in Asia, Africa and South America.”

The Christian sect growing most robustly is Pentecostalism, which appeals to the world’s poor and dislocated, said Cox. He documented Pentecostalism’s worldwide rise in his 1995 book, “Fire From Heaven.”


The best estimates are that 450 million people now worship Jesus as Pentecostals, a style that emphasizes direct experience of the Holy Spirit. Once disparaged in America as “Holy Rollers,” Pentecostals are being joined by hundreds of thousands in China, including many in the educated classes, Cox said.

In Brazil, Pentecostals already attract more worshippers on any given Sunday than the Roman Catholics. And in Seoul, South Korea, the Pentecostal Yoido Full Gospel Church has grown to a mind-boggling 800,000 members.

“I’ve noticed the religion of choice among the poorest of the poor, the people living in corrugated shacks, is Pentecostalism,” Cox said. “In Seoul, Jakarta, Lima and Nairobi, those drawn to the Pentecostal Church are the very people Jesus spent most of his time with.”

Cox tried to explain the attraction: Pentecostalism is steeped in an experience-filled accessibility, has a nonhierarchical structure and offers ample space for women.

“A Pentecostal believes the Holy Spirit can and does speak through very unlikely vehicles, like women,” Cox said to nervous laughter among the mostly Protestant and Catholic audience members.

Although Cox made his reputation as a precocious 34-year-old scholar with the publication of “The Secular City” in 1965, he is the first to acknowledge his missteps on the contemporary religious scene.


Now, despite trendy expectations that religions would gradually wither away, Cox said: “They will never disappear because we are questioning, mortal beings. But that was the prediction serenely made in the mid-’60s by large numbers of well-educated people.”

As world religions have flourished in ways undreamed of 40 years ago, other players are also in the game, Cox said.

“The major challenge to all the religions today is `mammon-idolatry,’ the elevation of profit and wealth to the status of God,” Cox said. “The culture of the market is a complete religious system, with its advertising, acquisitiveness and competitiveness. What happens to tenderness, compassion and community? Those are not market values, but they are values for which the religious traditions have spoken.”

Cox doesn’t advocate mere tolerance among world religions; he wants active networks building trust and reconciliation.

In his lecture series, titled “Abraham’s Children: Jews, Christians and Muslims in the United States,” Cox argued that the three traditions had reached a historic opportunity in America, a land that cherishes freedom of religion, to figure out how to live as literal neighbors.

“Maybe God has pushed us together,” Cox said, “cheek by jowl, to learn from each other as our last, best chance to get it right.”


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