Michael Cromartie: Evangelicals’ attitudes toward Islam became a topic of interest to the wider world after press coverage of comments by some prominent evangelical figures. In a front-page New York Times story called "Seeing Islam as an ‘Evil’ Faith, Evangelicals Seek Converts," Laurie Goodstein summed up the controversy:

At the grass roots of evangelical Christianity, many are now absorbing the antipathy for Islam that emerged last year with the incendiary comments of ministers. The sharp language, from religious leaders like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Vines, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has drawn rebukes from Muslims and Christian groups alike. Mr. Graham called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion," and Mr. Vines called Muhammad, Islam’s founder and prophet, a "demon-possessed pedophile." In evangelical churches and seminaries across the country, lectures and books criticizing Islam and promoting strategies for Muslim conversions are gaining currency. . . . Arab International Ministry . . . claims to have trained 4,500 American Christians to proselytize Muslims in the last six years [New York Times, May 27, 2003].

To try to bring some clarity to the question, we’ve asked Lamin Sanneh to say something about theological integrity, cultural sensitivity, and evangelicals’ public engagement with Islam. Dr. Sanneh is the Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School and also a professor of history at Yale University. Educated on four continents, he holds a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the University of London. He is the author of numerous books, including Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa and Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. He’s also an editor at large of The Christian Century.

Few things divide people more than what they have in common. There is a similarity syndrome that says that the more someone is like you, the more likely it is that familiarity will breed contempt. Ogden Nash makes a related point: "One would be in less danger / From the wiles of a stranger / If one’s own kin and kith / Were more fun to be with." One need only reflect for a moment on family feuds or intra-communal strife to realize that similarity or proximity is no guarantor of harmony. People often fight because they want the same thing, or make peace because they embrace difference.

As religions, Christianity and Islam are united, perhaps, less by the things they have in common than by what divides them. The misunderstandings between them arise in matters of similarity, not difference. Christians are likely to charge Islam with falsehood from what is familiar to them about, say, prophecy, while Muslims likewise judge Christianity to be heretical from the monotheistic bond the two religions share. A common faith in God thus aggravates mutual jealousy.

The roots of recrimination go back to medieval times, when our Christian forebears, emboldened by what was familiar to them in Islam from Christianity, were persuaded they had found evidence of forgery, while their Muslim opponents, armed with a single scripture, viewed the Four Gospels, for example, as proof of padding the truth. The "people of the book," as Christians are called, had in Muslim eyes become the people with false books. Some historians have advanced the argument that the idea of Christianity as "Christendom"—that is to say, of faith as territoriality—was copied from the example of the caliphate, where the caliph is "the shadow of God on earth." Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, was the Christian "caliph" for Europeans. At any rate, Christendom became the machinery for armed confrontation with Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. The Crusader campaigns to wrest control of Bethlehem and Jerusalem from the Muslims belonged with the view of faith as territoriality: Islam had its Mecca and Medina, and Christianity should have its Bethlehem and Jerusalem. To become like each other, Christians and Muslims have caused innumerable injuries, and the burden of them is, in the language of the English prayer book, intolerable.

In their missionary expansion, too, Islam and Christianity have a common vocation, with conversion a commonly recognized response of faith. The vitality of Islam as a historical movement and as personal faith is demonstrated by its having inspired hundreds of millions of men and women down the centuries and across the world. Western engagement with Islam is taking place on this missionary frontier, where, as Muslims see it, commitment to truth cannot be postponed indefinitely. In the commandment to submit to and bear witness to the truth, the canon of faith stipulates joining the name of God to that of Muhammad, his superlative messenger. Submission to the truth also taps the world for immediate religious duty, but in the last four or five centuries the world has been controlled by the West to mundane ends. So their common global ambition is another factor complicating relations between Islam and the West.

Muslims recollect in their devotion the successful outcome of the battle of Badr (624 C.E.) as a sign of God’s favor on Mecca and on the Prophet (Qur’an 3:120–24). But today, battles no longer resound with divine approval. Desert Storm of 1991, for instance, left liberated Kuwait a divided camp concerning the West’s standing in the Muslim world. The War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom, whatever their merits, have similarly ignited anger among Muslims, filling them with growing resentment that infidels now call the tune. Important disagreements still divide Muslims among themselves, as, for example, those that led to the Iraq/Iran war; but none is as fateful as the theological divide between the Muslim world and the West. Muslim pride in the Prophet’s accomplishment has been reawakened by the power and success of an assertive, secular West. For Muslims to exempt the Prophet’s accomplishment from criticism, as many are inclined to do, by assigning the blame for their weakness to something other than Islam seems a halfhearted repair job, because exempting religion there necessitates exempting it also as the remedy for weakness. If religion is not responsible for what we have failed to achieve—and no one says it should be—then it cannot be responsible for helping us overcome failure. And that makes religion moot, a scarcely satisfactory outcome.

In mitigation, I turn to a different approach by calling attention to a volume of essays first printed in 1961 in Karachi, Pakistan. The book is called Islam—Our Choice: Impressions of Prominent Converts to Islam, and the converts in question are Western converts to Islam. In the epilogue the editors pause to take stock of the theme of conversion. They clearly had the West in their sights. But what most struck me was the devout sentiment sincerely expressed for the conversion of the West to Islam. The Mongol invaders, the editors said, descended upon Islam in hordes of destruction and rampage, sweeping the caliphate before them, something that even the Crusaders were unable to do. Yet the Mongols’ power and their success in overcoming the Muslims ultimately availed them nothing, because in the end they converted to Islam and went on to produce some of the greatest art and architecture Islam has known. Maybe a similar end is in store for the West, the editors speculated, so that the very might of the West that has been used to defy and humiliate Muslims will be expended through a long and costly confrontation with the Muslim world; and then the West, too, jaded with materialism and success like the Mongols before them, will convert to Islam, a religion that is better placed to use the great gifts of the West for the glory and service of God.

That sentiment, coming four decades before 9/11, struck me as unusual. The idea that others can take everything away from Muslims, including their towns, cities, countries, and political structures, but as long as they have Islam, they will triumph—that confidence I found remarkable. Can it contend against the secular West? Can Western materialism inspire and sustain clarity of faith and vision, strength to endure tribulation? Can it find the largeness of heart required to tolerate disagreement, and the sense of community necessary to nurture the sacred and the holy that Islam represents? The editors of Islam— Our Choice don’t think so. Or, to put it less starkly, the editors don’t think that materialism has the capacity to bear privation and pressure without crumbling into subjective retreat, and they think that a spiritual force like Islam knows how to transform materialism by offering it as a gift to God and thus as fruit for ethical use. The implicit claim is that because the West offers no gratitude to God for what God has given it, its material power will one day choke it.

Alfred Guillaume, a scholar of Islam and the translator of the earliest biography of the Prophet, describes how much of the Lord’s Prayer Muslims share with Christians— a great deal, it turns out. Yet there is a crucial difference. "Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven," with its hints of a redeemed future, becomes for Islam "as on earth so in heaven," with strains of theocratic vindication here and now, as Isma‘il Faruqi has argued. The City of the Prophet, Medina, with Mecca astride it, is a norm in heaven. Religion as realized truth, however, conflicts with Western secular thought that has twice dethroned God: once in the primacy of the people, the sovereignty of the ballot box; and again in the veneration of the national state. That is why political parties as free associations and nationalism as popular or territorial dogma continue to be problematic in the Muslim world. The problem really is this: The West cannot, either on those two grounds of peoplehood and nationhood or on others, be entirely ignored, nor can it be allowed to succeed unchallenged. How then do Muslims deal with the West?

There are many issues on which the West will not yield, but the notion of religion as dispensable, or as a private option, is one of the most stubborn. Churches still exist, but their meaning has changed drastically. We do not go to church because of a summons from inside the church; we go to church for reasons of our own. By contrast, the mosque is instituted by divine mandate; you go there, alone or with others, to worship and to reclaim the world rather than, as in a church, to celebrate community. You go to the mosque because you are summoned, to the church because you are motivated. In Islam, the mosque is something God demands of you; in Christianity, church is something you ask of yourself. Hence the multiplicity of churches to cater to differing appetites. Similarly, we speak of rights—human rights, minority rights, rights of children, of women, of the disabled, of the sick and elderly—and radical Islamists rub their eyes in disbelief. Rights against one another, maybe, but against God? Impossible. If "right" is a legal cause with claim or restitution as remedy, then it is inapplicable to God. God is not a defendant. Similarly, freedom of expression, even when it insults God and his messenger? Over our dead bodies, says a rising chorus of outraged Muslims.

Why don’t they go back where they came from? asks an impatient West. If they don’t like our ways, they don’t have to stay here. But geography cannot solve the dilemmas of theology. And we make comparisons between the Muslim world and ourselves. Our values are superior to their dogmas. We tolerate, they exclude; we give, they take; we discuss, they impose; we persuade, they threaten; we help, they harm; we affirm, they reject; we include, they exclude; and so on. In several public statements since 9/11, for example, former President Clinton has expressed himself in those terms. We claim a human source for our values; they claim a divine source. Can the creature defy the Creator?

Yet the two societies are now inextricably intertwined. The West is a living reality in Muslim lands, and Muslims are a growing presence in the West. Placed in each other’s way at that practical level, they have not avoided being entangled also at the intellectual and spiritual level. But beyond the obligatory cultural politeness, the West’s images of Islam and Muslims are not flattering, perhaps understandably, while the Muslim world produces for popular consumption its own often garbled stereotypes of the West. The political cartoon becomes effigy in an adversarial milieu, with Muslim youths burning images of Western leaders and Western tabloids parading caricatures of bearded Muslim fanatics.

What confuses Muslims, nevertheless, is how Christians as religious people seem content to maintain churches but to defer to cultural arbitration for how to bear witness to God, or perhaps, more accurately, how religion might vindicate cultural choices we make. In that situation, it is much simpler for Muslims to assume that Christian truth-claims are a cultural truce than for them to enter into a complicated debate about how Christianity has modernized its theology to become acceptable to the world. Many Christian theologians, Muslims observe, speak lucidly of a transcendent God while at the same time they urge that religion be made to fit within the bounds of reason. Theology, as the tenth-century Muslim philosopher al-Farabi pointed out, originally meant just that for the Greeks: making God accountable to reason. Muslims, however, remain unpersuaded of the worth of religion once it becomes enslaved to the world.

In the deep gulf between the Muslim world and the secular West, Muslims have not been reassured even by professed Western interest in the Sufi Muslim tradition, since the West takes the Sufis as conceding a distinction between spirituality and worldly concerns. In its search for a mystical kind of religion, the West recruits the Sufi in the cause of isolating religion and removing it from public life. Muslims suspect the West of masking its dislike of Islam’s position on the assertion of faith in the public order by professing an interest in Sufism. In the way the West has set up a solid wall of separation between church and state, Sufism belongs on the private side of the wall, which allows the West to evade the public claims of Islam. Sufism as religion without creed and sacrament, as spirituality without obligation, appeals to the West’s notion of religion as private piety. Hence the draw of figures like, for instance, Rumi and Omar Khayyam in the Muslim tradition and, in Christianity, Albert Schweitzer and Dag Hammarskjold.

This attitude to Sufism extends to other religious traditions whose truth-claims are reduced to their essence in the search for a common, overarching theme. In the hands of accomplished writers such as Joseph Campbell and Matthew Fox, these forays into spirituality can indeed look like a much overdue cutting down of dead wood. Spirituality, defensible on the theory that man does not live by bread alone, seems like an innocuous way of filling the gap that has opened up in the process of separating church from state, a theme Robert Bellah and his colleagues have expounded in Habits of the Heart. Not infrequently, however, spirituality takes a downturn to become a device for stripping or suspending difference. Popular mysticism often is a strategem of mass distraction, say the religious masters. Muslims in the main do not accept the view that religion as creed is secondary or derivative, and so they have reined in Sufi mystics, however useful mystics may be for getting the West’s attention.

When Bernard Lewis first propounded the thesis of a "clash of civilizations" in an Atlantic Monthly article ("The Roots of Muslim Rage," September 1990), he was giving voice to a reality implicit in the order of things. As a lifelong student of Islam and the Muslim world, Lewis was keenly aware that the logic of the secular imperative confronted with the logic of Muslim truth-claims makes a clash all too likely, if not inevitable—unless, that is, there is compromise.

One response to this unhopeful account of interfaith relations is containment, but that cannot be a long-term solution. Spatial separation is impractical as well as undesirable. Although Lewis did not say so, dialogue is the alternative to the civilizational clash he describes; yet for dialogue to work there has to be agreement about the terms and goals, so that we can have dialogue not, for example, between public reason and subjective truth, but between contrasting views of revelation and the public good. Dialogue cannot go back to assumptions in the medieval age about common ground as the answer to difference, or to modern ideas of universal values of which Sufism is an example.

That medieval view proved a failure. When in 1302 Pope Boniface issued the bull Unam Sanctam, declaring the church the only institution with authority to grant salvation, he was giving voice to the culmination of what started with Emperor Theodosius’s decrees of 380 and 391, the first requiring all citizens of the empire to become Christians, and the second proscribing all non-Christian religions. The Council of Florence in 1442 and the Roman Catechism of 1566 pushed the process further by condemning nonbelievers and, with the Catechism, by declaring the infallibility of the church. All these actions had in common the idea of territoriality as a sacrament of faith, with the church complementing in the religious sphere what the state had become in the political sphere. Uniformity of rule and doctrine had its validation in state and church autonomy in their respective domains. A common rule of church and state, however, sowed the seeds of future conflict.

While it is true that the church at that time sought and used temporal power, that was not because the church was blind and bigoted. Given the relative social immobility of the time, successive developments in church doctrine reflected evolving differentiation in the role and function of the state vis-à-vis the church. When the notion of sovereignty underwent structural shifts through changes in the idea of political obligation (as described, for example, in Thomas More’s Utopia), the problem of religious plurality asserted itself with new force. Nicholas of Cusa, a fifteenth-century German cardinal, recognizing that the destructive wars between Christians and Muslims were a challenge theology could not ignore, proposed "one religion in a plurality of religious rites." Nicholas was astute in his view that it was similarity and common ground, rather than difference and variety, that explained why Muslims and Christians felt so intolerant of each other. His novel approach drew attention to the issue of the one and the many, of one God and the many practices by which religious people seek a path to God. Truth is one, and Muslims and Christians demonstrate that by the practices they observe separately. Acknowledgment of difference, in Nicholas’s formulation, should be by virtue of the truth that God is one, not by evading that truth or denying that we have diverse practices. To put it in our language, difference should be not a denial of our oneness but an asset in our diversity. This position affirms Christian truthclaims and their heritage in the West without denying other religions and cultures. Charity begins at home.

Many people feel the need to repudiate Christian or Western particularity as a condition of diversity and tolerance in the world. They believe that by forgoing the option of privileging their own culture, they will advance the goals of pluralism and tolerance among all cultures. But others are not so sure that rejection of the West will beget global cultural tolerance. On the contrary, that might only encourage fanaticism and blackmail, like dousing the flames with oil. The contest between the right and the left in the West has often followed two schools of thought: the internationalist and the nationalist. The left offers religion as international common property, as an equal-opportunity and affirmative-action norm, while the right offers religion as a patriotic entitlement, with a jingoistic edge. And so dissidents on the left, for example, accuse the United States of promoting a Pax Americana that is an arrogant violation of other cultures, while their counterparts on the right salute the flag as a sign of God’s favor.

Underlying much of what I have said here is an implicit claim that I should now make explicit. Contrary to claims by its radical opponents, America is not hostile to religion but in fact is very hospitable to it—witness the proliferation not only of churches but of mosques, temples, synagogues, pagodas, shrines, meeting houses, chapels, and halls of prayer and meditation, often in proximity to one another. This hospitality to religion did not just happen; it was conceived as such by the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson is usually considered the champion of freedom of religion, being responsible for, among other things, the Virginia Act Establishing Religious Freedom (1786). Equally important in this sphere was Jefferson’s successor as president, James Madison, who had affirmed in 1785 that the establishment of religion as an engine of civil policy would destroy the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience. Madison added that infringing religious freedom is an offense, not against the state, but against God:

All men are . . . to be considered as retaining an "equal title to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience." While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace . . . the religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man. . . . The Christian religion . . . both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them ["Memorial and Remonstrance," para. 4 and 6].

Religion is not invented by human policy, so it cannot depend for its truth-claims on human enforcement. This is a principle of enormous importance for us. The imposition of religion is really as bad as the suppression of it. The result, in both cases, is a violation of conscience.

We should take seriously the moral insight that the things of God and those of Caesar belong to distinct domains. The bidding of Caesar holds us to temporal obligations for our mutual safety and security, while the injunction of God calls us to the holy and transcendent for our eternal good. Obedience to Caesar draws on obedience to God like the shadow on the sunlight: the connection between the two is one of outward temporal necessity, not intrinsic moral equivalence. Faith has fruits for the public good, but its roots lie in another realm. That means the fruits of religion have untainted public use while the roots of religion have unreserved divine safeguard. Usefulness, accordingly, is not a truth-claim, just as faith is not just a public convenience.

The costs of postponing open public discussion of how, in that light, religion may impinge on politics to tame an aggressive secularism, and to avert its radical religious nemesis, are high. We need to engage our Muslim friends on the perils of joining church and state, but also on the perils of separating faith and the public order.

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Dr. Sanneh. Now we invite everyone else to join in a conversation with our speaker. [All participants will be identified at the end.]

Michael Woodruff: Professor Sanneh, I’d be interested in your views on the notion of reciprocity as that value is carried as a political policy on religious freedom. We look at Saudi Arabia and other countries and see them as closed societies because of their political and religious history and practices. We say they’re not treating women and children as they should. Yet Western women journalists who go to those countries will cover their heads out of respect for the culture. Why must the West accommodate their values in their countries while they do not accept similar restrictions in the West? It’s a double standard.

Lamin Sanneh: The problem of cultural relativism is that any attempt to show interest in a culture other than your own can be construed as unwarranted interference. I read in the New York Times several years ago a little piece tucked away in an obscure place that said four homosexuals had been executed in a public square in Saudi Arabia. That was it. No comment at all. This was long before 9/11. I teach a course on dialogue, and for about fifteen years I used to collect stories like this from the papers and give them to my students to read. The students don’t know what to think. They would like to believe that we have no business criticizing other people’s cultures. But in cases like this, that principle is not very comfortable for them.

Paul Marshall: In regard to Iraq, many Americans have said that it’s important to have a separation of mosque and state. It is important that clergy (by which they mean Shiite law professors) don’t rule the state. But for me, that’s not the really important question. I don’t care so much who the officers of the state are; I care what laws the state passes and which ones it enforces.

Now, I don’t think one could argue that our understanding of politics and the state and law can be separated from our religious beliefs. I know of no society where such a separation exists. The important question, I think, is: In what ways is it legitimate to have religious influences on a state structure? And in what ways is it illegitimate?

Lamin Sanneh: I agree that functional separation is very important, but for religious reasons. Enforcement of laws is not a sacrament of faith. One Muslim scholar in Nigeria said, "The functions of sharia are so horrendous that an awareness of them would deter people from the beginning." That’s a theological argument: that God is our enemy, not our friend; God cannot trust human beings; the only way human beings can be kept in line is with the threat that God might crack the whip at any time. Now, I disagree with that idea of a vindictive God. I would say that’s a terrible way of looking at divine mercy and divine compassion, about which the Qur’an speaks so eloquently. Obedience is a function not of coercion but of a free conscience.

Os Guinness: I thoroughly agree with you, but I’d like to broaden the discussion a bit. Jerry Falwell’s remarks in Lynchburg causing riots in Pakistan— it’s very much a result of globalization. But it’s equally true that the cultural warring over religion and public life we’ve had here over the last thirty years is now being played out round the world. We’re torn ourselves between the concepts of the sacred public square and the naked public square, as Richard Neuhaus has put it. Now this conflict is being played out globally, and the same people who did not give us a good answer here are now giving us a very bad answer around the world.

The impulse is both toward universalism and toward radical relativism. And the universalism is not only Christian and Muslim; it’s also a tendency among some feminists who want to impose women’s rights as a universal thing, and among some democrats who want to impose democracy as a universal thing. So there are powerful impulses toward universals in the world—both secular and religious— and there are powerful impulses toward relativism, especially in academic areas like anthropology. But in America we can live with our deep differences, and we can debate them. We need the global equivalent of a civil public square, which is totally lacking. In the absence of a global civil public square, we’re likely to move towards a two-tiered universe. The top tier will be cosmopolitan liberals, mostly secularists. And the bottom tier will be local non-liberals, mostly religious people.

Actually I would agree with Muslims that much Western religion isn’t serious. "Privatized religion" is a grotesque expression of, say, orthodox Judaism or classical Christian faith.

Gerald McDermott: Sura 9:5 of the Qur’an says, I believe, "Slay the unbeliever wherever you find him." And in the book of Joshua, we read that Joshua is to exterminate all sorts of folks—men, women, and children. Now, Christians and Jews, historically, have developed a mechanism for reading the book of Joshua in a historical context. They don’t regard God’s commands to Joshua in regard to the Amalekites or other "-ites" as normative for believers today. But most Muslims have not developed that mechanism. Instead, the vast majority read these Qur’anic passages where Muhammad was dealing with his enemies normatively.

So, Dr. Sanneh, I have two questions. One, what do you think is the percentage of worldwide Muslims who do not see lesser jihad—that is, the forcible imposition of Islam upon the rest of the world—as normative today? There’s been a big debate since 9/11 about the percentage of Muslims today who are sympathetic to militant radical Islam. Do you think that Muslims who are really peaceful and think 9/11 was terrible are in the majority or not? Two, many people have said worldwide Islam is at a crossroads today. It can go in a militant, radical direction in which it always interprets the Qur’an normatively and not historically, or it can go in the other direction and recognize the value of pluralism, for instance. Which way do you think Islam is going to go?

Lamin Sanneh: If I had a good answer to that, I would become the pope or the president or at least the chief oracle. Thomas Friedman, in a New York Times article entitled "Run, Osama, Run" (January 23, 2002), reports that he had traveled through the Muslim world, then to Belgium, Germany, and England, and had spoken to business, political, and community leaders "all of them educated, intelligent, and thoughtful—and virtually none of them believed that Osama bin Laden was guilty." He couldn’t find one person who would condemn Bin Laden either publicly or privately. Friedman said he was disconcerted by that discovery, for he had "somehow hoped that after the fall of the Taliban, or bin Laden’s confessional tapes, [those views about his innocence] would have melted away. But they have not. Indeed, they have congealed into an iron curtain of misunderstanding separating America and the Arab-Muslim world, and are now as deeply held as they were on September 11."

Another point on jihad: I think it is fair to say that in medieval Arabic sources, whenever jihad is used without qualifications it means our sense of holy war, "war against the infidel." Only when it’s qualified does it refer to the greater jihad against complacency and personal corruption. So that interpretation of jihad unqualified is a new thing.

Michael Cromartie: Let me throw out a question: Might the response to Bin Laden reported in Tom Friedman’s piece help to explain—not excuse but explain—some of the public rhetoric by evangelicals? Paul Marshall, what do you think?

Paul Marshall: It was a very widespread belief throughout the Muslim world that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were not responsible for September 11. Stories began circulating—I think they started in Jordan—that Jews were told not to go to the World Trade Center on that day, and didn’t. In many places this was accepted as truth: that was what people read in the newspapers, what they heard on the radio and perhaps on television, and what they heard at the mosque. It is not that all these ordinary Muslims are extremists, but everything in their environment tells them things like, "No, of course our people didn’t do this; the Americans have blamed them in order to protect the Jews." So a judgment about whether the person who believes this is an extremist is decontextualized. My guess would be that between 20 and 40 percent of Muslims would want an Islamic state, and a small percentage of Muslims—maybe 1, 2, or 5 percent— would fight to establish that. But of course even with a very small percentage, you may be dealing with a million people.

Ron Sider: Dr. Sanneh, I would like you to comment on this big problem we have. Some evangelicals have made some very strong statements about Muslims and have caused riots in other parts of the world. I think a lot of other evangelicals feel that those statements were misguided. Help us out here: What things do you think would be the most truthful and right and helpful—I trust that those qualities are not contradictory—for the evangelical leadership in the United States to do and say at this point?

Lamin Sanneh: Let me speak out of my own experience within Islam. Before I became a Christian, I read only the Qur’an. What really grabbed my attention was the life of Jesus. But Jesus is a figure of controversy in the Qur’an, in chapters 3, 4, 5, 9, 23, 33, 43, 61, and especially in the chapter called the Mariam (chapter 19). What attracted me, then, to Jesus was this kind of controversy. He wasn’t an innocuous prophet who came, did God’s work, and then went away quietly. He was covered in a cloud of controversy, and that controversy became for me a deeply personal issue. It screamed at me for resolution by day and by night and from every corner of my life, whether alone or with others. I felt I could find no sanctuary from Jesus, alas. Because of his work as a prophet of God, Jesus was hated. My puzzlement and pain over that tragic turn of events grew into a secret moral crisis. I asked myself, What hope was there for the likes of me when even a prophet of God was not spared?

As a young Muslim who was a descendant of chiefs, I was entitled to go to a boarding school supported by public funds. (Here was a colonial government supporting Islam!) Reading the Qur’an controlled much of my life. I wanted to find a connection between the life I saw around me—children suffering, for example—and the divine. The image of God in human beings, the idea that the divine enterprise was connected with human struggle and suffering, was particularly telling for me. And this amazing picture of love expressed and dramatized in the life of Jesus, who in the face of evil and suffering didn’t flinch or recoil—this really upset my world and left me reeling. This was not the value system I was used to, and so I felt an attraction to Christianity that eventually led to conversion.

I feel there are evangelical themes that can be invoked to really appeal to the conscience of Muslims.

Ron Sider: It seems to me that you are saying, gently, Don’t back off from evangelism and from sharing your faith. I think American evangelicals agree with that. The disagreement comes with the other part. As we insist on the truth of Christianity and Jesus Christ and clear recognition of fundamental differences, we also have responsibilities as citizens of the world. And some of our fellow evangelicals are saying that Islam is evil, or that Muhammad is a demonic pedophile, or whatever. What we aren’t in agreement about is how we get the citizens-of-the-world part right as we continue—passionately but wisely, I hope—with evangelism.

Lanin Sanneh: When I as a Muslim teenager went to the Protestant church and told the minister that I wanted to love the Christian God, he said, "That’s a wonderful idea. But you know, there is a Catholic church across the road; you can go there." I spent a year at the Catholic church, but they wouldn’t baptize me. So I went back to the Protestant church and said, "The Catholics won’t baptize me. Will you?" The minister said, "Well, did you know that our baptism is recognized by the Catholic Church?" For my catechism I read New Testament form criticism—heavy going for a 17-year-old raised as a Qur’an-memorizing Muslim.

Michael Cromartie: What really is creating the controversy is not so much that Franklin Graham made some unwise comments but that he actually might share more than medical supplies and food with Muslims: he might share his message as well.

Uwe Siemon-Netto: Since September 11, I have been looking into the matter of conversion and mission. In Barcelona at a conference for journalists and theologians, I ran into a Lutheran theologian from Cairo who told me that there were, in and around Cairo, at least six Muslim congregations that were actually secretly Christian. Their imam would sneak out his back door to do catechism in the middle of the night. Then I heard the same thing from the moderator of one of the Presbyterian churches in Pakistan, that in the countryside there were Muslim congregations that were de facto Christian, and whose imams were trained at Bible schools along the border. Next I ran into a Lutheran pastor friend of mine in Germany who has been baptizing Muslim women from Iran. And I talked to a missionary who said that even in Saudi Arabia there were Muslim congregations that were secretly Christian.

There is a common thread to all these stories, and that is apparitions, which we Lutherans do not stress very much. In every one of these cases, there were apparitions of Jesus. Always Jesus.

This brings me to some questions: Who is actually there as a partner within Islam to discuss these things? How many are actually prepared to discuss reforming Islam? What leverage is there to reform Islam? My contacts in Europe tell me that maybe 1 or 2 percent of the Islamic scholars would be persuaded to discuss this from the angle that every hundred years or so God sends a reformer who will refocus, not the Qur’an itself, which would be considered heresy, but the perspective on the Qur’an, from the angle of the era we are living in.

Michael Cromartie: Before we take on the question of reforming Islam, I think we need to stay on the point that Ron put on the table about evangelism. David, is your question related to this?

David Van Biema: Yes, although it debases the discourse a little bit. I’ll put it in terms of the New York Times article [May 27, 2003], since you mentioned that. Laurie Goodstein seemed to suggest that, far from being an outlying sort of notion, the opinions expressed by Franklin Graham about Islam being an evil religion were fairly normative for the evangelical community. Ron Sider said that some evangelicals would disagree with Franklin Graham’s statements. I’m wondering whether they would actually disagree or would just feel such statements are impolitic, or not useful for sharing the Gospel. Is there a baseline agreement in the evangelical community that Islam is at best misleading, and probably quite a bit worse than that? My assumption has been yes, but now I’m sensing that no, that is not the case.

Ron Sider: I think that almost universally evangelicals recognize that there are fundamental conceptual, theoretical, and theological differences between Islam and Christianity, and we don’t intend to pretend otherwise. We deeply believe that the Christian faith is true, and that Jesus is the way of salvation. However, while we are eager to share that truth, the wholesale condemnation of what others believe to be truth is unacceptable. It is not just impolitic; it is wrong to say that a whole religion, with its mixture of good and bad, is "evil." I think a large number of evangelicals would say it is wrong to make that kind of sweeping statement. But that is not backing off from the fact that we recognize fundamental differences, and we want to make truth-claims.

Os Guinness: Franklin Graham’s remarks were about Muslim actions. I would say as an evangelical that what Richard Coeur de Lion did in Jerusalem as a Christian crusader was evil. And I would also say that what the Muslim radicals have done in slaughtering nearly two million people in the south of Sudan is absolutely evil. Now, that does not mean that Islam is evil.

Gerald McDermott: There are probably 40 million evangelicals, so this is a huge community with a vast range of opinion. Theologically, I would say that many evangelicals use the doctrine of common grace. God gives his grace to all human beings, particularly to all religions, or at least many religions. You can go back as far as Jonathan Edwards, who is recognized by many evangelicals as a theological father, so to speak. While Edwards did say that Islam as a whole is demonic, he nevertheless recognized that the Qur’an, which we think he had a copy of, had much truth in it. For instance, he said the Qur’an says that Jesus was the Messiah. Now, of course, the Qur’an uses the word "messiah" differently, but Edwards said, Hey, there is truth here.

Paul Marshall: Two things. One, I would suggest that evangelical attitudes towards Islam are basically part and parcel of American attitudes toward Islam. I get the same attitudes from the usual journalistic sources like cab drivers and the guy on the next stool at the bar, comments like, "Well, I think we should say it is peaceful, but I think there is really a militant streak there." These attitudes are not just "evangelical."

For my second point I want to go back to Lamin Sanneh. You mentioned that it was difficult to get catechized and baptized when you converted from Islam, but you didn’t say why. Were church leaders worried that if they did this, you might be killed and the church itself might be attacked?

I have found that the issue of converting from Islam is a sticking point even for more liberal Muslims. For many churches in the Muslim world, especially the Arab Muslim world, it is a matter of protocol that you will not baptize a Muslim who has become a Christian unless that person leaves the country first, because the convert’s chances of getting killed or imprisoned are very high, and the church’s chances of being attacked are also very high. I have interviewed Muslim converts in probably a dozen countries who have lived their entire post-conversion lives in hiding. I think this is important to keep in mind in dealing with the question of evangelism in Muslim countries. Often, converts are killed or imprisoned.

Lamin Sanneh: I don’t think the concern was ever for my safety or well-being. But it seems to me that what-ever the reason for the church leaders’ reluctance, it raises the question whether they should be in that game of mission at all. What’s the point of being a missionary church in an over-whelmingly Muslim society if you don’t function as a missionary church and indeed are averse to it? Why are you there?

I think the reason for their reluctance was that liberal Protestantism believes that all religions are moving towards a convergence, and in that convergence, the distinctions of religion will fall away; what remains will be a common denominator in which religions will be united as one. Conversion makes that belief awkward.

Os Guinness: This matter is controversial because the Muslim hatred of conversion, which as Paul Marshall said often leads to the death penalty, coincides with the secular aversion to conversion. And I want to make a very simple point: I’ve never heard a secularist argue against conversion in a way that didn’t undermine the liberal commitment to persuasion. Because as long as there is not coercion, only persuasion—which of course is at the heart of the message of Jesus—conversion is the fruit of the highly liberal principle of changing people’s hearts and minds. Anyone who argues against attempts to convert through persuasion, whether the Baptists praying for Hindus a couple of years ago or the current Muslim thing, is actually being not liberal but illiberal.

Lamin Sanneh: Islam isn’t opposed to conversion; it seeks conversion into Islam.

Os Guinness: That’s right, people converting out of other religions.

Deborah Caldwell: I want to think out loud a bit as a Christian and as a journalist. One of the many things said here that I have resonated with is that, in a way, Christianity has won. In my job I spend a lot of time talking to both Christians and Muslims. I think it is true that the Jesus story is what is so interesting to people and the reason why there are conversions. But I also recognize that I am located within Christianity and so I view it through that lens. I struggle with that a lot when I am writing about these matters, because I don’t want to portray Christianity as the winner.

We’ve been talking about Muslims as this big group of people and asking, Is there a possibility of reform? Well, there is. Quite often I talk to Muslims who are just as angry and just as worried as evangelicals are, and there are just as many differences among them. They have their liberals and they have their conservatives. There are some who would really understand a conversion story. I feel as if we are viewing Islam as a monolith, which it is not, and neither is Christianity.

Lamin Sanneh: The question often comes down to, How do you compare Islam and Christianity? I think it is correct to say, first, that Christianity is the only world religion that is propagated without the language of the founder of the religion. Christians do not pray and worship and sing in the language of their founder. That is not true for Islam.

Christianity is also the only major world religion that is marginal and peripheral in the land of its origin. Islam is of course preponderant in Mecca and Medina, whereas Christianity almost from the beginning has been in exile from the birthplace of Jesus, except in the witness of a precarious minority there. So the development of Islam is progressive, expanding like the circles from a pebble thrown into a pond. The circles go on expanding while the point of initial impact isn’t lost. Christianity, by contrast, expands in a series of attrition and fresh growth—here today, there tomorrow.

Most Christians cannot locate the birthplace of the founder of their religion. They can’t point to it on a map. Muslims can. They pray towards Mecca five times a day around the clock, every day, around the world. Whether you are a liberal Muslim or a conservative Muslim, you know that and you do that.

Another significant difference has to do with language. Christians believe that the revelation of God is compatible with everyday human language; the Gospel can be expressed in the language of the street, the language of the marketplace. This is a pretty revolutionary idea for religion. Muslims want to privilege a special discourse that is fit only for religion, without a substitute in the other languages of the world. It is fundamental in Christianity that God makes available for the use of faith such things as language and culture that exist for other purposes. In that sense, Christianity is always anticipated in the languages and cultures of the world; Christianity is a "world" religion in the sense that it is at home in the world’s cultures, whose unity Christianity affirms by the attention it gives to the diversity and variety of tongues and races. Also, Christianity adopts the names of God in various languages in a way that Islam does not. A Muslim could not enter a mosque and pray to a God named other than "Allah"; his or her prayer would not be valid. Christians across the world name God in their own language.

Islam is united without a Vatican by prayer and practice, by Mecca and Medina. Catholics are divided by the Vatican. An article in the New York Times asked, "American Catholics: Are They Roman?" You couldn’t ask a similar question of Muslims: "American Muslims: Are They Meccan in Their Orientation [qiblah]?"—it would be meaningless. We talk about liberal and conservative Muslims, but they all accept this authority of the Qur’an in the language of the Prophet.

Marc Erickson: I was a missionary doctor in Somalia, and I have many friends in the Muslim world. Now I am the pastor of a church in Milwaukee. (Incidentally, when I was a pastor in Baghdad I did speak the language of Jesus—Aramaic.) I think Islam from the very beginning has been a tremendous test for Christianity. It challenges us in three areas. First, we believe in original sin, which means we should spend some time talking about what we have done wrong before we ask what is wrong with Islam. We need to ask ourselves why Islam is so resistant to the Gospel; it may be because of something we are doing wrong. Second, in the Dome of the Rock it says that God has no son. The challenge of Islam to us is this: we make this outrageous claim of the Trinity, and it should show up in the way we treat each other. But it doesn’t, and so they say we don’t believe it.

The third thing is the Cross. Muslims say it didn’t happen. I think the problem is not that they couldn’t be persuaded but that they don’t see self-sacrificing love showing up among the followers of Christ. It’s not only evangelicals; it’s Catholics, Orthodox, and liberal Protestants. We have to model the Trinity. We have to start loving the Muslims self-sacrificially, even if they kill us.

Joe Loconte: I think it is right at the beginning of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity that he says, in his classic defense of Christianity, that faithful Christians are not required to believe that all other religions are wrong all the way through. It seems to me that some of this discussion about the nature of Islam is a little bit misguided. Think about the 1930s, for example: there were no peace-loving fascists in Germany. There were no lovers of liberal democracy or lovers of Jews who considered themselves German fascists. We can say that the fascist ideology through and through was evil. But we have peace-loving Muslims in America, and plenty of peace-loving Muslims outside America. I think [Ethics and Public Policy Center president] Hillel Fradkin’s strategy is exactly right, to identify the Muslims who believe in liberal democracy, in pluralism. What is the possibility of finding and promoting faithful Muslims who in concert with religious leaders of other faiths will say, "Look, we believe in the principle of religious freedom. We believe in freedom of conscience. We think evangelism, whoever is doing it, is an okay thing"?

Serge Duss: One of the reasons why we are having these discussions is because of comments made by publicly visible evangelical leaders who also happen to be closely associated with humanitarian organizations. I would like to make two points, one from a short-term perspective and one taking a much longer view.

Has this been a controversy in Muslim countries that are receiving humanitarian aid? I hadn’t heard of any Muslims in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere saying, "No, we will refuse humanitarian aid from a Christian organization." I think a mountain has been made out of a molehill because Franklin Graham is the head of a humanitarian organization. If another well-known evangelical who was not associated with an organization said this, I think it would just be regarded as an unfortunate statement about another religion.

Looking at the long term: evangelical organizations over the past fifty years have been working in many countries that are predominantly non-Christian. My organization, World Vision, began in Korea and spread throughout Asia, in countries where Hinduism and Buddhism are the main religions. Even in Gujarat, India, the scene of a terrible Hindu massacre of Muslims in 2002, no Christian organizations were kept out, and none had their aid refused. When people are suffering, they do not ask where the help they get is coming from. Evangelical organizations have been in the forefront of providing humanitarian aid in many parts of the world. We continually discuss how we can be relevant, how we can be sensitive to culture, but also how we can be true to the driving factor of why we exist—because we love God and because we love our neighbor. This along with a sense of justice is what drives us. Why is there so much need for humanitarian aid in the world? Because there is such a poor level of justice in the world.

The current controversy is just a blip on the screen when seen against the last fifty years of Christian organizations’ achievement, not only in meeting immediate physical needs but also in job creation, in education, in raising levels of health, in improving sanitation, and in many other areas. At times we can be open about our Christian faith, and at times we cannot.

Alan Cooperman: As I visit mosques around the country, I am often introduced to former Christians who have converted to Islam. Does anybody know whether in the United States you—"you" being evangelical Christians— are winning more souls or losing more souls? Are you converting more Muslims than they are converting Christians?

Marc Erickson: We were told unequivocally in the 1980s that Islam would take over our cities. It didn’t, and the reason is that the storefront churches fought it, all by themselves.

Alan Cooperman: You didn’t really answer the question. Are you confident that more Muslims today are being converted to Christianity in the United States than Christians to Islam?

Marc Erickson: Yes, in my experience. A lot of Muslims are coming to Christ. We have quite a few in my church alone.

Alan Cooperman: Do you have any basis for saying that other than anecdotal evidence and what you see in your own church?

Marc Erickson: No, it’s anecdotal.

Os Guinness: I want to make a point about the statistical stuff: most of the Muslim growth is through birth rate, while a significantly higher percentage of Christian growth is by conversion. That is significant.

Gerald McDermott: There’s a notable growth in the number of African Americans who convert to Islam, particularly in prisons. There is a very strong Muslim presence in American prisons.

Lamin Sanneh: Islam is an evangelistic faith. When you visit a mosque as a non-Muslim, you are seen not just as a visitor but as a potential convert; otherwise why would you be there? Curiosity alone is insulting, for it suggests being drawn by exotic appeal rather than by the gravitas of truth. So you would be put in touch with American Christians who have converted to Islam as a gentle message that it shouldn’t be out of the question for you, too. The Arab embassies here in Washington, D.C., are also missionary centers that disseminate literature and information about Islam, and for a very good reason: carrying on trade in the Muslim world, for example, would require that you conform to Islamic laws on trade, banking, and exchange. Islam views the West as a kind of missionary frontier. It’s not just a cultural relationship—there is a faith dimension of which we should be aware.

Robin Wainwright: On the question of what would be the most helpful thing for evangelicals to do and say regarding Islam, my response is: Be evangelical. We are to be a living, breathing representative of the body of Christ. Having embraced the good news of what God has done in Christ, causing the Word to become flesh, we are to be the latest, newest expression of that. Embrace the world. Get to know Muslim people as individuals, rather than simply dealing with Islam as a doctrine. Get to know Muslim people, whatever country they are from, whatever their particular beliefs. Embrace them and love them.

I will use an example from my own experience. As the turn of the millennium approached, my wife and I had a simple idea: to honor Jesus on the two-thousandth anniversary of his birth by repeating the journey of the three wise men. We would travel through these Islamic countries where the Magi traveled, such as Iraq and Syria, and arrive in Bethlehem. We would invite some Muslim people to do this with us. In a true pilgrimage spirit, we would want to express some degree of repentance for the failings of Christians to embrace these Muslims and show them God’s love. We would also ask permission to ask a blessing upon their communities for their needs.

Muslims understood this quite well. However, when I approached evangelical leaders around this country and asked them to join us, by and large they said no. When I asked why, they said, "Because the Muslims are the devil’s people, and you can’t pray with the devil’s people." I found this an astonishing answer for evangelicals.

In fact, we did make this pilgrimage, and Muslims gladly joined us. Hundreds, even thousands of people lined the road, waiting hours in the hot sun or cold rain for us to come by and honor Jesus. Elderly women in their veils would call out, "Blessed be the woman who bore you" and shower honors upon Jesus. So that’s my response about what we should do as evangelicals: Be truly evangelical. Get to know and love Muslims. Before we get to evangelism, we should exemplify God’s purposes and God’s intentions.

Mindy Belz: I fear I’m going to take this in a different direction. I would like to hear some practical comments from some of the relief groups represented here. A lot of what we’ve been talking about kind of intersects in Baghdad right now. A reporter who wrote a story about churches in Baghdad found a surprisingly consistent sense among them that there was considerable religious tolerance under Saddam Hussein, and now they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to keep it once democracy, if dominated by hardline Muslims, came. Humanitarian groups coming in are, I think, working with the churches in Baghdad. What are some practical things we can do to reassure the people?

Jaisankar Sarma: Speaking out of my experience as a development worker: If I were responsible for relief operations in Iraq, I would establish a relationship with churches, but not for administering aid to the Iraqi people. For that task I would turn to Iraqi civil institutions, or even to the Muslim faith communities. I would work with them in administering aid and establish a minimal relationship with the churches. If people in the churches needed assistance, I would give it. But I would not use the churches as the link for reaching out to the ordinary Iraqi people, lest the aid be seen as the product of the church and its people.

If Saddam has been brutal against the Iraqi people but has protected the church, why is that? Has the church stood by in silence while many Iraqi Muslims were being abused? Maybe the church has to repent of sin.

Serge Duss: I will add that in other Muslim countries where we worked, Bosnia and Kosovo, we did not align ourselves just with the Christian churches, because then it becomes them and us. We are there to provide aid to all who need it, and to contribute to an emerging civil society where people and communities will be able to take the responsibility of helping themselves. One of the ways we promote that is by structuring projects to bring together leaders from opposing ethnic or religious communities. It takes time, but there are results. People see that this foreign group is there to help all people, not just some. That gives us credibility and builds trust.

Galen Carey: I think there’s an important need and opportunity domestically in terms of how Muslim Americans, especially those from the Middle East, are treated here. It’s more a policy issue than a personal one. My sense is that on a personal level, in general, Americans are even-handed about things; but on a policy level, Muslim Americans from the Middle East have been treated quite badly in the post–September 11 period, and the evangelical voice of protest is virtually nonexistent. I think most Muslim Americans assume that the policies of our government reflect the wishes of the Christian community, and particularly the evangelical community. Things like the detentions and the special registrations for Pakistanis and others are quite troublesome in terms of our own values. Yet we almost never hear Christians speaking up about that.

People from evangelical traditions are in places of responsibility throughout the government, and the extent to which they represent policies antithetical to this self-sacrificial love that we say we’re all about does the cause of the Gospel no good.

Paul Marshall: But maybe they don’t speak out because they disagree with your opinion of what’s happening. I have not closely followed detentions or immigration violations and the like, and I could be persuaded either way. But the analysis you offered— right or wrong—is not shared by most evangelicals or by most Americans. You say that these government actions created problems in terms of our values. It is not a moral failing if people do not do something you think they should do when they disagree with you about whether it should be done. If they feel that the current security policies of the U.S. administration are okay—bad sides, good sides, but generally okay— you’d need to persuade them otherwise rather than saying that they’re doing something unbecoming to their faith by not complaining about these government actions.

Os Guinness: Well, I’ll go on record as saying that when we look back in ten years, I think evangelicals will seem far too much in the "amen corner" regarding what’s been going on. In the last few weeks, some of my good friends in the Administration have sounded like cheerleaders. And I’ve sort of groaned at the e-mails that have come across my desk. Are they thinking in the light of wider theology or deeper history?

Serge Duss: The survival of the West has nothing to do with the job of the church.

Steve McFarland: Professor Sanneh, what can evangelicals, particularly evangelicals in relief and development agencies, start doing or stop doing in our approach to Muslims? What are things that don’t compromise the Great Commission and our truth-claims? What can we stop doing so we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot?

Lamin Sanneh: I think we should bear down on one thing that no one can dispute, which is that the Muslim world is religious. The president of Senegal—a Muslim—has available to him government schools that he supports himself, Muslim schools, and Christian schools. He decided he wants to send his kids to the Christian schools. When asked why, he answer was something like this: "Because they teach values. In secular government schools our children can learn how to become doctors and lawyers and so on. They can also learn that at the Christian schools, but in addition the Christian schools teach values." When I visit the Muslim world, I disappear into the villages to speak with the elders. One elder who lives in a hut in a rural village in eastern Senegal is writing a 400-page book of spiritual meditations. The power of faith is very important to Muslims. For evangelicals, this should be their niche. They should be pleased at the presence of faith, and the opportunity to redirect it. I think the Muslim world hasn’t become jaded about faith the way we in the United States have. Also, in the Muslim world community is very important. Evangelicals should pay attention to group meetings, devotions, public practices. Muslims would take note of that, in a gracious way.

Gerald McDermott: Under the surface of much of our discussion I see the need for a theological understanding of what God might be doing through other religions, particularly Islam. It is a common notion among evangelicals that all of Islam is demonic, that God is not at all involved. I would suggest three points that we as evangelicals should rethink or consider theologically: First, while Islam contains the demonic, particularly in matters like religious freedom, women, and pluralism, the history of Christianity also contains the demonic. Second, without sacrificing the finality of Christ, evangelicals can still say that God’s truth and beauty can be seen in certain aspects of Islam, not just in the lives of particular Muslims. And third, as Dr. Sanneh has suggested, we Christians can learn some things from the religion of Islam—but without denying that there is the demonic within Islam as well as in the history of Christianity.

Marc Erickson: On the positive side: I can’t recall in the last ten, twenty, thirty years a Western missionary being put on a plane and deported from a country that’s not engaged in conflict. The reason, I think, is that those involved in missionary work, or evangelism, have done a rather good job in contextualizing the message.

I grew up in a missionary denomination, and I’ve seen it happen numerous times: friends who were gung-ho about going overseas, when they came back, had had a transformation. They had realized that their methods of communicating here in the United States could not survive overseas, and they had first sought to understand the people. We Christians do not win souls. We do not make converts. We are tools of the Holy Spirit. Once missionaries realize that, they take another approach to communication in the relationships they build. They may invest twenty or thirty years in a country and bring only six or eight people into the church. But that’s not the point. The point is living the Gospel in that context, and I would say that overall, that job has been done well.

Os Guinness: My quick take-away on what evangelicals should do has four points. One, we must examine our own faith. To me Islam is a living challenge above all to the integration of faith and life. We’ve lost it in the West; they’ve kept it alive, in disastrous ways. Two, love our Muslim neighbors. Three, wise up our public leaders; they sometimes make asinine public pronouncements. And four— this is probably the most overlooked one: as evangelicals we should be in the forefront of articulating a global public philosophy. Be ahead of the game and not always reactive.

Ron Sider: I agree with that, Os. I think we will look back in ten years and recognize that we have not been sufficiently critical of foreign policy. I think we urgently need a broadly based sign-on statement on how evangelicals relate to Islam. This cluster of issues is so important, in terms of both long-range missionary goals and just being wise citizens. I hope and pray that we will get that kind of statement soon. The main way the much-divided evangelical community can reach some consensus is to get a bunch of key stakeholders signing on to a statement.

A question in regard to Islam and religious freedom: It was after all in this country that Catholics reversed a very long-standing policy with regard to church and state, and, thanks to the work of the American Roman Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray, Vatican II fully embraced religious freedom. My question to Dr. Sanneh is: Do you think that something similar to this development in Catholicism could happen with Islam? Could it be that American Muslims could help the global Muslim world embrace religious freedom? And if there’s a possibility there, then what kinds of things could we put in place to maximize that possibility?

Lamin Sanneh: Historians have established that the evangelical movement helped to emancipate the church from subservience to the state. Evangelicals have a track record on this that maybe they should reinvigorate in light of the encounter with the Muslim world.

And there are also very good Islamic, theological, Qur’anic reasons for qualified separation of church and state. The Qur’an says there is no compulsion in religion. Evangelicals and strong Muslims would agree that the absolute, the divine, should not be subservient to the relative, to the state. The state is not an organ of faith; it’s a contrivance of human wisdom that exists for our good, as Edmund Burke put it. We change it and adapt it to make it to do what we want it to do. Muslims should be able to respond to this. This, by the way, is what I’ve been trying to say for the past thirty years in dialogue meetings with the World Council and Muslim groups around the world. Believe me, I have found many Muslims who would say, "Yeah, when I pray, I don’t think Islam. I begin the prayer with Allah u akbar, God than whom nothing is greater." Not the religion, but God. I think evangelicals should resonate with this very well.

Mark O’Keefe: I’d like to make a brief comment as a reporter who broke the initial story on Franklin Graham and the Southern Baptist Convention being ready to go into Iraq and proselytize. Someone tipped me off that Graham’s organization, Samaritan’s Purse, was poised to enter Iraq. Knowing Samaritan’s Purse, knowing that its mission statement is essentially the Great Commission, I thought it was likely that they were going to evangelize, and their website made that clear. Deborah Caldwell and others followed up with interviews with Franklin Graham to confirm this.

As a Christian journalist who has written about evangelicals for many years and understands the culture, I realized that this is normative for evangelicals; spreading their faith is what they do. However, I also pretty quickly realized that this was news. Whether we like it or not, conflict and controversy are newsworthy. The reason this was news is that many people in our culture would be offended by this. Why? Because Christianity is interpreted as exclusivist. It’s not that all paths lead to the mountain top; one path leads to the mountain top, and it’s our path. I don’t think evangelicals should be surprised when their evangelizing makes news. Jesus himself said the Gospel would be divisive.

Os Guinness: This is a point for a much longer discussion, but just briefly: The exclusiveness of religion isn’t just an evangelical point. And I don’t know an atheist who’s not exclusive about his atheism. This anti-exclusivism is one of the intellectual fallacies that are sweeping through the Western world. All Christians in the classical sense (evangelicals, Orthodox, Catholics) are committed to certain exclusive truth-claims. The confusion surrounding this is absolutely appalling.

Mark O’Keefe: The big controversies are generally about conversion.

Os Guinness: Well, as I said, I don’t know a single liberal argument against conversion that doesn’t end up as illiberal, because what they’re attacking fundamentally is persuasion. Conversion, put in a proper context, is actually the heart of liberal persuasion. And again, there’s an enormous amount of confusion about this. The secular intellectuals need to be taught.

Serge Duss: Do you think it would have been such a story that Samaritan’s Purse was going to provide humanitarian aid to Iraq if two years earlier Franklin Graham had not been quoted as saying that Islam is a wicked religion?

Mark O’Keefe: I don’t think it would have been nearly so newsworthy. A lot of what makes news is the time, the place, the context. Here was someone who had been quoted as saying that Islam was evil and who was quite close to the Bush administration, and it was at a particularly sensitive time when many Muslims, rightly or wrongly, perceived the Bush agenda as partially "here come the Crusaders." At this time of heightened sensitivity, this particular person was willing and ready to go in there and continue doing what he has always done. I think you’re right, that made it news.

Michael Cromartie: Dr. Sanneh, do you have any closing comments?

Lamin Sanneh: I believe God made the world, and God anticipated our being in the world. We do not enter the world as strangers; God has been here before us. Christians should be at home with different and diverse voices in the world, because through them we hear certain things that God is saying to us. That’s why it was so important for missionaries to adopt the names that people give to God. Our differences, rather than being suppressed, can be affirmed and celebrated in the light of God. It is only God who makes difference an asset. Without God, ethnographic difference can turn into ethnic cleansing.

So as a person of faith, I want to see the twenty-first century as one in which God is saying to us, You haven’t seen anything yet. The best is still to come.

• Lamin Sanneh, Yale Divinity School
• Michael Cromartie, Ethics and Public Policy Center
• Mindy Belz, World magazine
• Deborah Caldwell, Beliefnet.com
• Galen Carey, World Relief
• Alan Cooperman, Washington Post
• Serge Duss, World Vision
• Marc Ericson, Eastbrook Church, Milwaukee
• Os Guinness, Trinity Forum
• Joe Loconte, Heritage Foundation
• Paul Marshall, Freedom House
• Gerald McDermott, Roanoke College
• Steve McFarland, Prison Fellowship International
• Mark O’Keefe, Newhouse News Service
• Jaisankar Sarma, World Vision
• Ron Sider, Evangelicals for Social Action
• Uwe Siemon-Netto, United Press International
• David Van Biema, Time
• Robin Wainwright, Holy Land Trust
• Michael Woodruff, Charles Malik Foundation