c. 1998 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Co-workers read the Islamic holy book, the Koran, on break. Wiccans celebrate the summer solstice in a public park. Zen masters lead stressed-out lawyers in weekend retreats.

It’s all becoming increasingly common in the United States, where America’s historic Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities are learning to make room for”new”spiritual traditions ranging from animists to Zoroastrians.

In a country where Buddhists may soon draw even with 2.5 million Episcopalians, the question before a White House-sponsored gathering of some 200 clergy and academics at Tulane University Thursday (May 21) was whether America’s diverse religious communities can help heal its racial divide.”What does it mean to be an American?”asked Maria Echaveste, the White House aide who chaired the eighth meeting of its kind in President Clinton’s year-long Initiative on Race.

It wasn’t a question to which White House organizers expected a simple answer.

But a day of talk on what faith has to say about racial reconciliation provoked a series of sometimes blunt observations from participants suggesting why, as many said, 11 a.m. Sunday is still the most segregated hour in America.

Themes developed during this and similar meetings were to go into a year-end report to the White House that would also contain local churches’ best racial reconciliation projects, organizers said.”We know that churches are deeply involved in the social needs of their communities,”said Lydia Sermons, a spokeswoman for the initiative.”We’re looking for an exchange of ideas _ some that the participants can take back to their communities and some that we can take back to the president”for a report the project hopes to turn in at the end of the year.

Indeed the cliche about segregated Sunday morning worship rests on a dated stereotype, said Diane Winston, a Princeton University specialist on America’s religious diversity.

That observation might be true for Christians, she said, but among Muslims _ who may soon outnumber Jews in the United States _ weekly worship at a mosque is often an amalgam of rich and poor believers from many Islamic countries united only by their faith.

Black and white Christians, however, still separate themselves to be nourished by very different and equally valid theologies, said Tenolian Bell, a Baptist preacher on the faculty of Tulane’s school of social work.

White Christians, he said, hear lessons on duty and compassion that flow from their position of prosperity; black Christians hear lessons of solace and deliverance to comfort them in the midst of oppression.

The result, he said, is that when a few white congregants joined his predominantly black church some years ago, he emphasized to them they were joining a distinctly black church that would remain so.

Some, like Jyaphia Christos-Rodgers, a white member of the Unitarian-Universalist Association, said racial reconciliation could not begin until whites recognized the continuing privileges they enjoy as the result of slavery.

And Carl Galmon, a New Orleans civil rights activist, asked when churches would”leave their comfort zones”to take up the question of making reparations to descendants of slaves.”I have forgiven the past,”countered Glen Abdullah, a New Orleans Muslim.”I think it’s enough that Christians ask themselves, am I really following what Jesus Christ taught? And Muslims ask whether we’re really following what the prophet taught.”This is a country where the good far outweighs the bad. Go to another country and see that for yourselves,”Abdullah said.

Still, the times call for a new”storyteller”to help Americans heal their divisions, said Robert Franklin, head of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

In part, this leader would help Americans see new possibilities, as both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. did, Franklin said. Partly, he would see the present more moderately than either radio conservative Rush Limbaugh or the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, and have a vision for getting to the future.

But absent that leader,”the question is, can our religious traditions craft a common story that moves us forward?”Franklin asked.

MJP END NOLAN