"Blessed are the peacemakers," and that includes you, Mr. President

President Obama's 10-day Asia trip includes visits to India and Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country.

The president chose not to visit the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar during his time in India because it required a head covering that his advisers feared would fuel speculation about his faith. A Pew study showed that nearly 20% of Americans believe falsely that the president is a Muslim.

The more Obama reaches out to Muslims, the more his critics are likely to slander him, implying that he is not a Christian.

An example is his April 2009 speech in Turkey, in which he said, "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation, we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values." The president's critics have seized on that statement, insisting that he rejects the Christian foundations of America.

Is Obama stuck between a rock and a hard place? If you were the president, how would you handle this dilemma?

Let's be honest here. President Obama's most severe critics have shown they will criticize him just because he's actually president, let alone for any international or domestic policy initiatives he pursues. Those who are persuaded he is a Muslim, in the complete absence of any facts, will not give up their views even if the president never talks to another Muslim again. The president has no choice here but to cast his lot with the peacemakers and reach out to other peoples and nations around the world in all their cultural and religious diversity, and do so with mutual respect and confidence (not arrogance) in the strength and diversity of the American people in our own religious and cultural pluralism. The future stability of the world, and the security of the United States, depends on his doing just that.

Jesus says, in Matthew 5:9, "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God." This verse sounds easy, but it's one of the hardest things in the world to do.

Peacemaking is uphill work, especially because there are those who want to sow fear and hatred often to gain political and even religious power. Fear sells. Fear is powerful. Hollywood knows that. But peace? Not so much. It's a lot harder slog to make peace. That's why Jesus says you are blessed when you pursue peace. And today, the route to world peace, as well as to domestic peace, is through building religious pluralism, tolerance and cooperation among peoples of different faiths and humanist values.

Being a peacemaker is not a passive thing. You need to actively seek out the other, and get to know him or her. You must, as the president is doing, "put in some face time" with people of other nations, come to know their cultures, their varied religious practices and beliefs, and above all, be present as a human being one to another. This is the way you start to break the cycle of fear; we cannot make peace among nations and within nations today without breaking the cycle of fear of each other, and especially each other's religions.

This requires insight into your own religion, not only the religion of other people. It also requires that you know what time it is in the world. And now is the time, indeed it is well past the time, where one religion can claim it owns all the truth in the world and all the others are false. Gandhi declared (in 1905!),"the time had passed when the followers of one religion could stand and say, 'ours is the only true religion and all others are false.'" The kind of spiritual arrogance that claims it is the "only true religion" and that "God is on our side" does not break the cycle of fear, it intensifies it.

There are those in the United States today, many of them President Obama's political critics, who are using Christianity and the idea that we are a "Christian Nation" to stoke the cycle of fear in order to gain and hold political power. They use this claim that the U.S. is a "Christian nation" to feed a strong myth of American exceptionalism. They want Americans to believe their country is, in the strong, ironic words of one of the twentieth century's greatest Christian theologians, Reinhold Niebhur, "the darling of Divine Providence."

But Niebhur knew that this conviction of God's exceptional blessing upon the nation above all nations leads to an almost impenetrable conviction of national innocence. This is not, and never has been, good for the national soul, nor for the national practice. Niebhur concluded, "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem, are insufferable in their human contacts." (The Irony of American History, p. 42) Indeed, the United States' international reputation, and ability to broker resolutions to international conflicts without resorting to war, has been damaged, and is not yet fully repaired, in large part due to the fact that other nations have considered us insufferable in recent years.

Peacemaking, on the other hand, is the respectful and self-respecting engagement of other people and nations in all their religious and cultural diversity, and working together to reduce fear, ignorance and misunderstanding and create the conditions that make for a sustainable and just peace throughout the world.

Time to start earning that Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. President. Just go for it.

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  |  November 8, 2010; 3:52 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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