Face to face
Religion as leaders understand it is frequently very different than religion as followers appreciate it. Religions differ greatly. People themselves do not differ that much.
REAL POSSIBILITIES EXIST for mutual understanding between religions -- so long as religious leaders stay on the sidelines. All too often, when interreligious conflict takes place, it is not because masses of people hate other masses of people but because elites fuel religious antagonism for their own purposes.
Iran is the most obvious example of this phenomenon. It was not popular demonstrations that led Iran to hold its faux academic conference on the Holocaust earlier this month; if anything, the regime of the mullahs lacks popularity, as recent election results show. Rather, it was a decision by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This is not to say that the Iranian masses love Israel; obviously they do not. But ordinary people do not generally engage in the kinds of gratuitous insults to Jewry engineered by the recent visitors to Iran.
When it comes to less dramatic cases, religion as leaders understand it is frequently very different than religion as followers appreciate it. The Catholic church is preoccupied with issues such as abortion and homosexuality; most ordinary Catholics are not. It can hardly be surprising, therefore, that when the Pope said less than positive things about Islam in his Regensburg speech, many Catholics found his comments too harsh, just as they were pleased by the less harsh tone he displayed on his recent visit to Turkey.
Religious tolerance is frequently found among ordinary people because, at least in the United States, religious pluralism is a fact of life. If you run a business, you do not want to lose customers by alienating people whose faith may be different from yours. If your children bring all kinds of friends home to visit, you do not want to develop the reputation of being a bigot. Politicians -- and then again, only some of them -- like to draw lines in the sand. Most people cannot.
Religious leaders, by contrast, have to worry about maintaining the traditions and beliefs of the religions they lead. If they are evangelical in outlook, they insist that salvation can be achieved only through a born-again experience with Jesus, not something likely to be appreciated by Jews or Muslims. If, instead, they try to keep their tradition pure by discouraging converts, they may ignore others rather than offend them, but they may also wind up less tolerant.
More efforts should be made to bring people from different religious traditions together and less attention should be paid to summits among church leaders. Find yourself face to face with a person from a different faith than your own, and it is hard to conclude that your truths are infallible and those of others heretical. Get a Muslim and a Jew talking in the course of daily life, and they may talk about how to substitute kosher for halal or vice versa.
Religions differ greatly. People themselves do not differ that much. The more the conversation gets broadened, the more tolerance will be deepened.
Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College and the author of several books, including "The Transformation of American Religion" (2003). 