Introduction

Symposium and Report Credits

In his lunch-hour keynote address, Marty talked about the use of shadows and light in impressionistic paintings. Some parts of the paintings are clearly hidden in shadows, others are in that space where shadow and light blend together, and still other areas are clearly in the full light of day. Similarly, religion at times is cast in the blinding light of public life; at other times it is deeply hidden and private. And, there is not always a clear boundary between the public and private. Marty openly acknowledged the dark side of religion. He quoted a colleague who once compared religion to sex: "If you get it a little bit wrong," the colleague told him, "it's dangerous." In places like Afghanistan and Northern Ireland, Marty added, people are "getting it wrong - believing things passionately, and then fighting for turf and invoking their gods. . . . [Religious] institutions do enough wrong, enough self-seeking, that they're often perceived by people as part of the problem."

But that does not mean, Dr. Marty argued, that we should abandon religion, or that we should attempt to confine religion to a strictly personal realm. "Is religion in the public good or bad?" he asked. "The answer is yes."

Indeed in Dr. Marty's view, getting rid of religion is not really an option. Mao Tse-Tung and the leaders of the Soviet Union tried that - and produced what Marty called "quasi-religions," full of myth and ritual, ceremonies and symbols. They asked for ultimate sacrifice and total commitment. They offered a philosophy that claimed to answer larger questions. "The human impulse to make sense of life is going to be drawn, on the large scale of people, around such [religious] themes," Dr. Marty added.

The mission of The Public Religion Project is "to promote efforts to bring to light and interpret the forces of faith within a pluralistic society."

Among the benefits of "bringing to light" and understanding the role of faith in American society, Dr. Marty said, we will better understand our resources for addressing social problems. As an example, he cited research which shows that more than half of Americans volunteer their time in some capacity or other. Of that enormous number, 70 percent to 80 percent say they are either motivated by religious faith or they are working through religious institutions. Dr. Marty called this "one of the great untold stories of American life."

The Pew Charitable Trusts, as project sponsors, asked the project leaders to (in Dr. Marty's words) "put as much energy into studying its [religion's] healing role as its conflictual role." Working with the poor or the homeless, with prisoners, can be a devotion to God, a form of prayer. In Dr. Marty's view, the process begins with a sincere (and civil) dialogue - with respectful discussions between those of different and sometimes competing faiths, between the religious and the non-religious, between those who believe fervently and those who oppose all faith. The dialogue itself, Dr. Marty said, enriches us.

To illustrate this notion, Dr. Marty described a fifteenth century map that showed monsters lurking at the borders of the known world. "I think very often the unknown is the monstrous to us," Dr. Marty added. "To bring people into open confrontation, across the boundaries of their faiths and nonfaiths, their philosophies and so on, is good for the society."

The challenge, then, Dr. Marty said, is to bring forth those religious forces that contribute to the public good and to call forth what Abraham Lincoln described as "the better angels of our nature."

"We believe," Dr. Marty added, "the best odds for that are if believer and nonbeliever, believer and other-believer, confront each other from the depths of their own convictions in the public sphere. They learn the limits of what the other is after. They learn empathy for why the other is after it, the way the other person is . . .

"You cannot have justice without argument - in politics, in commerce, or anywhere. So the issue is to make it civil."

Some of the influential figures of the twentieth century, Dr. Marty noted -Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Pope John XXIII, and Thomas Merton - were profoundly religious and deeply connected to their own religious tradition and scripture, yet they reached out to and learned from people of other faiths.

"Martin Luther King is inexplicable apart from his Baptist roots, but he needed Gandhi's satyagraha, and Gandhi was Hindu to the core, but he welcomed the role of Jesus," Dr. Marty explained. "You don't become less Baptist, Hindu, Catholic along the way for doing this. You might even become richer."

Dr. Marty compared The Public Religion Project to a particle accelerator, "which picks up things that are already going - atomic and subatomic particles - and accelerates them."

Religion is already a part of American public and private life. What Dr. Marty hopes is that The Public Religion Project will move it more quickly in the right direction.