Real life faith heroes from 2010

As voted by the Religion Newswriters Association's members, among the year's most consequential religion newsmakers were Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Pope Benedict XVI, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, and the U.S. bishops.

How would you have ranked them? Has their influence been harmful or constructive? What issue or person do you expect to have the biggest impact in the year to come?

I am going to exercise a typical Quaker idiosyncrasy and pose a query of my own in place of the one posed by the fine folks who come up with the weekly questions for the "On Faith" panel: Why is it that we look to the "high and mighty" as the "newsmakers," as the ones who have had the most impact on the world? Isn't the lesson of this season one of the weak overcoming the strong? Of the mighty being flummoxed by the lowly?

Certainly the New York Imam, the Pope, and media darlings such as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin garnered a great deal of attention, and gallons of ink were spilled describing their moments in the spotlight, but they wouldn't have been on my list of most significant religious influences on the world this year. Instead, I'm going with three acquaintances of mine who passed away in 2010 and who represent for me the best qualities of influencing the world.

The first would be Elise Boulding, a Quaker sociologist whose 1976 book "The Underside of History" first introduced me to our habit of writing history from the perspective of powerful men rather than through the lenses of those who create a life through the daily heroic work of making a home, raising children, addressing the cares and concerns of ordinary living, yet who, for the most part, live unremarkable lives outside of the limelight. How about including on the list of the "most influential" those countless billions of women of many faiths who apply the simple credo of their religious traditions to creating a future for the next generation through love, nurture, guidance, support, and encouragement?

The next would be Art Gish, an intrepid Brethren peacemaker who eschewed a life of material comfort in favor of a simplicity that freed him (along with his wife, Peggy) to seek a world of peace with justice. A brilliant scholar and author of numerous books, he could have lived in ease as a settled pastoral minister, university or seminary professor, or mainstream farmer. However, he chose to live below the poverty line as an organic farmer in intentional community and spend much of his life laboring alongside those working against war and injustice. For much of the last fifteen years of his life, Art worked with Christian Peacemaker Teams, living with peasants in very trying conditions in the Middle East, providing by his very presence a shield against the power of those who would use terror to seek the advantage only of their own narrow slice of humankind.

While Elise Boulding and Art Gish were not unknown and could, in fact, be included in some lists of fairly recognizable public religious figures, my third choice is a woman who is representative of the very unheralded people described in Boulding's book. Mary Minor was an African-American housekeeper at Guilford College. Quiet, unassuming, and unremarkable by the world's standards of notoriety, she endured a childhood in the Jim Crow South to raise a fine family, work with honor, and mentor several generations of college students through her deep faith and life of grace. At her passing, students and the former presidential family whose home she cared for poured out testimony about the impact she had on them.

These are the kinds of people I believe will truly have a lasting impact on the world - and whose lives are truly newsworthy. And who do I see as being the "poster folks of religious influence" for 2011?

I'm going to go with a whole community: the Amish. And not because their handmade mantlepieces for Heat Surges are all the rage these days (Does anybody really believe there are Amish who would appear on camera, laboring in a haymow cranking out overpriced wooden frames?!)

We all should still be drawing lessons from the incredible response of the Amish community to the murder of several schoolgirls in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania a few years ago. But beyond their example of offering forgiveness instead of revenge and reconciliation instead of enmity, I believe their way of living offers us one of the best examples of addressing the challenges we are facing today - and whose continuing ability to "negotiate with modernity" will be newsworthy in more and more significant ways. The Amish demonstrate with their faith and community-based way of life an important example for providing full employment, a way beyond our health care crisis, an approach to avoiding the excesses of materialism and the incursion of social media, and a model of living deeply meaningful lives in the midst of a world gone mad.

I don't realistically expect the Amish to appear on the end-of-2011 list of most influential religious figures, though! We are still enamored of the mighty, the powerful, and the headline-grabbers. But until we figure out what really makes this world a sustainable place in which to live, the issues that this year's religious hot shots have failed to solve will continue to drive us buggy, while the Amish continue to offer an alternative way of life - and calmly and peacefully drive their own buggy.

By Max Carter  |  December 27, 2010; 1:29 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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