By John W. Morehead
The title of this post might be an interesting one for evangelical readers. We are used to discussing what we believe about other religions as we compare their doctrine and teachings in relation to our own. Usually, we don’t recognize that how we feel about other religions, the emotional component, is intimately bound up with the more analytical facet of our analysis. This is understandable. American evangelicals are a part of Western Christendom, and especially as Protestants within this historical context there is an emphasis that privileges the rational component. But in doing this we fail to understand an important part of how we view the world, and in turn, how we view those in other religions.
My research in social psychology has been helpful in shaping my views in this regard, and in giving me a more holistic understanding of the human mind. We tend to think of ourselves as objective, rational agents who carefully consider arguments and evidence as part of a deliberate cognitive process in making decisions. This rational deliberation is in sharp contrast with our emotions. However, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, has argued that this is “a prevalent but useless dichotomy between cognition and emotion.” Instead it’s better to see them as different facets of how we use our brains. Haidt says, “…emotions are a kind of information processing,” and further, that, “…moral judgment is a cognitive process” where there are really “…two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning.” To understand the relationship between the two, Haidt uses a metaphor of the elephant and its rider. The elephant is our emotions, and the rider is reason. The elephant really leads the way, and the rider rationalizes why the elephant is going in the right direction. As Haidt puts it, the first rule of moral psychology is “…intuitions come first; strategic reasoning second.”
This view of cognition as a synthesis of emotion and reasoning has implications for how we understand and relate to those in other religions. In a poll from July 16, 2014, the Pew Research Center looked at “How Americans Feel About Religious Groups.” The survey asked people to rate various groups on a “feeling thermometer” with 0 being the coldest and most negative and 100 the warmest and most positive. The range of 0 to 33 was categorized as “most negative.” The poll revealed that evangelicals felt warmly about Jews but gave average ratings of 39 to Buddhists, 38 to Hindus, and 30 to Muslims. In other words, evangelicals don’t feel good about the people in other religions.
Studies like these present us with two emotional impediments: those that keep others from hearing us, and those that keep us from hearing others. If we’re honest with ourselves, we must come to grips with this and recognize that for many evangelicals fear, anger, and suspicion drive our perspective on multifaith engagement. This is a vitally important but often neglected topic. We tend to focus on developing a good theology of the religions (orthodoxy) and also work to identify the best practices for engagement (orthopraxy). At the same time, we largely fail to consider the significance of our emotions. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are important, but unless we grapple with our emotions in multifaith contexts we will continue to view those in other religions negatively, have a skewed understanding of what they’re about, and pursue encounters that are needlessly combative. Examples of this include evangelicals shouting messages at Latter-day Saints critical of their founder Joseph Smith while at outdoor LDS pageants, preaching loud apologetic sermons outside Pagan bookstores, and holding up confrontational signs attacking the Prophet Muhammad and a pig’s head on a stake at the Arab International Festival in Dearborn, Michigan.
What can be done to change things among evangelicals? Two items are very important as I see it.The first is, since evangelicals place so much emphasis in our spiritual lives on Scripture, we should strive to see the biblical text in new ways. This is not easy because we bring our presuppositions to our interpretation, and we often allow our post hoc assumptions about what the text means to influence what texts we emphasize. So, in the case of biblical texts informing the multifaith encounter, our negative emotions about religious others influence our selection in more combative and apologetic texts like those about false teachers and prophets. But if we can be self-critical in our reading of the Bible and realize the emotional dynamics involved, we can open ourselves to other texts and applications. In a previous post in this series I described how this might be done with a consideration of the work of Bob Robinson, author of Jesus and the Religions. He acknowledges that we must go beyond the biblical text to see the importance of the affective dimension, but given that evangelicals are “people of the book,” the biblical text is an important starting place. Robinson suggests we must look at Jesus in the gospels and the emotions behind his healing encounters. With fresh appreciation for Jesus’ example, Christians can then practice the imitation of Christ in his emotional reaction to others and thereby become more Christlike in our emotional embrace (rather than repulsion) of others.
The second thing we can do is to deepen our emotional lives in relation to others. This can happen as we develop relationships with those in other religions, thereby humanizing those whose religious traditions we find frightening and distasteful. We can also shape our emotional perspective of others by studying how the emotions are formed and impact our thought life and practices. Readings in areas like social psychology and neuroscience can thus become useful perspectives that help deepen and broaden our emotional lives, as well as our theology and praxis toward others. I’ve explored some of this in greater detail through an anthology volume exploring different facets of our emotions towards those in other religions. If you’re interested, track down a copy of A Charitable Orthopathy: Christian Perspectives on Emotions in Multifaith Engagement (Wipf and Stock, 2020).
John W. Morehead is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, and the Director of its Evangelical Chapter (Multifaith Matters). You may contact him at johnwmorehead@msn.com .