If you’re interested in a hopeful vision for healing our racist wounds and moving toward a more perfect union, I highly recommend Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us. If you don’t have time to read the book, try her brief and dynamic TED talk video. McGhee traveled the country for years talking to Americans dealing with some thorny issues: unions, pollution, bankruptcy, health care, dying towns and the loss of vivifying public spaces. She explored the history of these challenges, and discovered some creative practical solutions. She  commits to “the solidarity dividend.”

I’d heard the term “zero sum” for years, but only recently learned what it means. Basically, if I win, you must lose. If I am “plus one,” then you must be “minus one.” Reality sums up as zero. That’s just the way it is in this broken world: winners and losers. But as poet William Stafford knew, every war has two losers. And we know the aphorism: a rising tide lifts all boats. So which is it?

McGhee shows how we found pride in social programs that helped bring poor people into the middle class  during Roosevelt’s New Deal. But by the time of Ronald Reagan, the tide shifted. The only way to lift your boat is to build your own ocean. Government isn’t a solution; it’s the problem. Make sure the rich get richer, and then their wealth will spur new businesses, new jobs, and the money will trickle down. We’re still waiting for the trickle.

McGhee’s research shows how much race played into this equation. We were patriotic about the expanding middle class—until whites faced the threat of a black middle class. A real event inspired McGhee’s overriding metaphor: when the beloved public swimming pool in Montgomery Alabama was about to be integrated, the community decided it was time to close the pool. No one won. Everyone lost, white and black. But at least the closure spared white people the outrage of an integrated pool.

In contrast, McGhee describes what happened in Lewiston, Maine, an old mill town where the economy stagnated. To add insult, Congolese immigrants began to show up. Many locals, including politicians, foresaw a further slide into ruin. But an elderly woman from a French Canadian family wanted to refresh the French she spoke at home as a child. The Muslim immigrants speak French. So she teamed up with them to launch a center where she and her old friends rediscovered their childhood language thanks to their immigrant tutors. Are the refugees an economic drain? They contribute forty million dollars in taxes, earn $130 million in income, and the town built a new school. Not to mention the increased Franco-American heritage pride.

McGhee sums it up: we can keep sabotaging each other through racist policies and attitudes that harm black and white citizens, or we can invest in each other. When we do, we can bank on a solidarity dividend. We are greater than the sum of us.

Racism underlies Jordan Denari Duffner’s Islamophobia: What Christians Should Know (and Do) about Anti-Muslim Discrimination. She makes the point that Islamophobia is racism, and it’s systemic. It cannot be healed by friendship alone. We also need structural changes.

This book is not “Islam 101.” If you’re looking for something like that, go to John Esposito’s Islam: The Straight Path. Instead, Duffner examines all the cagey and lucrative strategies Islamophobes use to scapegoat Muslims. She shows how the stereotypes we use today are recycled from anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Chinese movements in American history. Since the United States required “whiteness” of immigrants until 1944, Italian Catholics and European Jews, for instance, had to fight to be perceived as white.

As they say in cop shows, if you want to find out what drives a crime, follow the money—and the power. Duffner puts it bluntly: fear wins elections, and dehumanization of Islamist terrorists (and portraying them as “radical Muslims” instead of criminals masquerading as Muslims) promotes arms deals. Being “more Muslim” does not mean being more violent. Better to ask a Muslim what it means. We’ll likely hear something like “being surrendered to the mystery of God’s merciful presence and acting justly.” Being “more Muslim” might look like Malala Yousufzai.

There was a time when we Americans were proudly racist. The effects persist in polite, covert ways. We don’t overtly resist the presence of Muslims, we just don’t want a mosque increasing traffic in our neighborhood. And some states pass “anti-foreign laws” bills.

This book is worth reading for anyone who has heard all the reasons we Christians should distrust Muslims and helps us see that the real danger lies in our selves and our distorted versions of “Christianity.” As we’ve seen elsewhere, slaveholder religion sometimes masquerades as Christianity.

Anyone who has engaged in interreligious dialogue learns this: do not assume that the other experiences your religion in its pure form as liberating and loving. And never assume that criminals claiming to uphold a “pure” form of the tradition epitomize the other’s religion.

Many Americans don’t like to look at history. Many American Christians share this resistance. In 1776, leaving behind kings and aristocracies, we entered a new age. We were creating a new world of democratic justice untainted by historical baggage.

But four hundred years after colonizers brought enslaved people here, we have baggage. Many of us just want to leave it behind. We have a democracy, a meritocracy. We’re making progress. Those are nice ideas, but when we ask our black or Muslim neighbors about the meritocracy or voting rights, they describe a different experience.

American Christians may not know much about Srebrenica, for example. But Bosnian Muslims cannot forget. I am a well-educated Catholic, but I did not know that the Catholic Church never used the word “Muslim” in her teachings until Vatican II, in the twentieth century. Long before that, Pope Urban II encouraged Crusaders to “destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends…God wills it!”

The Roman Catholic Church now teaches that mutual respect between religious traditions is not an option; it is essential. Love moves us to stand up for Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or Sikh brothers and sisters. And if someone finds my perspective ludicrous and my words fall on deaf ears, it’s not a time for debate.

“Debate” shares its root with “battle,” “batter,” “beat.” As Duffner notes, “When people are in a defensive state, they cannot have a change of heart or be argued with rationally.” So, like gardeners, we just try to till the soil with respect, plant a seed, and move on with a long-haul hope.

So now that we’ve been immersed in the world of gut-wrenching Islamophobia for a while, you may want a break.

Or we may stretch our theological boundaries and exercise our intellectual muscles. That’s what happened when I read Divine Hospitality by two Lebanese theologians: Christian Fadi Daou and Muslim Nayla Tabbara. This is not an easy read, but it’s short and demonstrates how a devout Christian and a devout Muslim can share the beauty of their traditions without attacking the other. In fact, many Christians are surprised that Muslims acknowledge that God affirms diversity: “O People! We have created you of a male and of a female. We have formed you into peoples and tribes so that you might have knowledge one of another (Al Hujurat, 49.13).”

Just as Duffner warns against claiming that “Islam says” this or that, Daou and Tabbara remind us that each religion includes various paths. We cannot claim that either religion has a monolithic self-understanding. But each writer emphasizes self-understandings that, relying on scripture and tradition, open out in hospitality.

Daou and Tabbbara focus on a crucial theme for any real dialogue: the gap between the Mystery of God and our human reception of revelation. Here’s how Daou puts it:

These two religions are sometimes among the most insensitive so far as religious absolutism is concerned, as well as imperialism. If one does not keep a space between God, as absolute truth, and each of the religions claiming to be recipients of his revelation, one falls into a pernicious form of self-assertive group identity and spiritual pride, which transforms religion from a path of sanctity into a form of segregation and a force for coercion in the hands of the most powerful. (57)

Later, Tabbara reflects on the last surah to be revealed in the Qur’an, Al Ma’ida (the Feast), and observes,” God is not the monopoly of anyone and He is at equal distance from the whole world“ (97).

Can we learn to respect this space or distance, and admit our limited, but saving reception of the Mystery? Yes, and then we may travel together in Hope and humility. Daou reminds us that a religion is not its own reference. That would be idolatry. A wisdom tradition’s “existence and its mission find their meaning in God and his universal plan for the whole of humanity and the totality of creation.” The Church’s vocation “is to be in the service of the unity of human beings and their communion with God” (117). We are not called to herd everyone into a single institution.

Daou cites one of my own heroes, Paolo Dall’Oglio, founder of the ecumenical community of Dar Mar Musa in Syria and now presumed dead after his disappearance during the recent uprisings in Syria:

If only we were to admire the enormous work of God in every soul, in every tradition, in every human family, then our soul would enlarge, our heart open, our eyes shed forth tears, and our intelligence would be caught up in a vertigo of amazement at the presence of truth! (118)

Truth is not monotone. It is symphonic. The Trappist martyr Christian de Chergé called for “an authentic communion in the differences which are combined, a polyphonic celebration of the innumerable wonders and mercies where the One has imparted his inimitable signs across all our resemblances.” This communion would be, he wrote, “pure joy.” A solidarity dividend.

The Arabic word Al-Wāsi’, meaning “the Vast” or “Spacious.”

Tabbara reflects on one of the Ninety-Nine Names of God: al-Wāsi’, “the Vast” or “the Spacious.” She interprets this vastness as divine hospitality: room for everyone. We make space and welcome God within ourselves, and we include others in our hearts. Divine love “creates a space large enough for the love and the knowledge of others to come to be contained there (147).”

Tabbara concludes with wise words from our friend Jamal Rahman: “Harmony between religions is not possible without doing the inner work that creates the spaciousness required to embrace differences” (148).