Matthew Kaemingk:
Friends, welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a Comment original podcast. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen. Send us an email with feedback, questions at zealots@comment.org, and make sure you tag us on social media. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
And I’m Shadi Hamid. Matt and I are good friends, but maybe you wouldn’t expect that. Matt’s Christian, I’m Muslim. Matt’s conservative, I’m sort of liberal. Matt’s white, I’m brown. Also, Matt’s a theologian, I’m a political scientist.
Matthew Kaemingk:
All right, friends. Well, welcome back. We’re really excited about our episode and discussion today. But first, we are very excited to announce that our book is finally finished. It is completely into the publisher, and it is getting ready for a big fall release.
The title of the book is Can Religion Save Democracy? And we are just absolutely thrilled. This podcast has been the place where Shadi and I have shared notes, have agreed, disagreed, battled, and we’re sorry you didn’t get to see all of the disagreements, but you got to see a few, and we are really excited to share this book with the world.
For those of you who are interested, we want to encourage you to get a special 40% discount on the book. You can preorder it right now. That’s at bakerbookhouse.com. Shadi and I are a fan of unpopular arguments, and this is definitely one of those, an unpopular argument that religion can actually be helpful and is actually quite needed for democratic life.
And the book itself makes a lot of different arguments, but today, we’re going to be focused on one argument that’s particularly unpopular, Shadi, and it is this notion that organized religion is actually particularly important for democratic life, as opposed to individualistic spirituality or New Age forms of spirituality. Now, Shadi, I grew up in Seattle, which is home to many different diverse spiritualities. It is home to the place where it is very popular to say, “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual.”
And there are many sociologists who have studied the areas of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, this sort of cultural environment of the post-religious West where people do not want to be a part of organized religion, but they do seek spiritual meaning, spiritual contact. And these kind of disembedded spiritualities, they manifest themselves in diverse ways.
You’ll find people saying, “Well, I experience God in nature,” or “I experience sort of a spiritual attunement with the world,” or “I want to manifest this divine power within me or the goddess within,” practices like meditation and mindfulness, yoga, all kinds of different spiritual retreats. And the sociologists who study the Pacific Northwest and these new forms of spirituality, one of them argues that the chief marks of this spirituality is, first of all, just a distaste for organized religion with a building, a denomination, a sort of authority structure, a sacred text.
The purpose of spirituality there is really personal empowerment, a sort of experience of the divine. It tends to be very episodic. So you have spiritual experiences and then spiritual dry points for a while, and it’s very elastic. So it kind of means whatever you want it to mean in many ways, but its focus is really on enrichment and personal enrichment and personal empowerment. And really, it focuses on freedom and empowerment. And in many ways, it’s deeply American. Right? Americans love freedom. They love empowerment.
It’s no coincidence that Seattle and San Francisco are the places of technological empowerment and entrepreneurship and freedom. And so, you have this real allergy to organized religion that is sort of seen as old and conservative, and the argument I want to make today is that organized religion, as opposed to personal spirituality, is very important for democratic life.
But before we kind of jump into the politics of it all, I’m wondering if you have had much contact, Shadi, with people who say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual,” who sort of manifest these spiritual techniques for personal empowerment. Have you had much interaction with them when you grew up in Philadelphia, D.C.?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. I think they’re quite common, and I think that’s part of the environment that I sort of grew up in, that people who believe in God in some abstract sense, but don’t really feel comfortable with the structural aspects of organized religion. So they’re kind of like theists or deists but in their own way, and they’re kind of finding their own truth, and God is part of that, but it’s still very personalized.
Yeah. It’s interesting that every morning, I mix some religious recitations or supplications, but I also do secular meditation, and I do them back-to-back. So I have both the religious and a secular practice, and I’m actually going on a meditation retreat that’s secular later this month. So actually, I kind of dabble in that world a little bit, and my philosophy now is that I want to be able to take from different sources.
So if non-Islamic sources have something useful to say, I don’t want to close myself off to that. Yeah. I think maybe I have a little bit more sympathy to that kind of world, but I agree with you that having an organized approach is probably going to be the best way for a lot of people. But, I mean, part of the problem with secular meditation and going to retreats like that, there isn’t a strong foundation.
It’s sort of like they try to avoid getting too much into the Buddhist or dharmic origins of meditation practices, because they don’t want to alienate anyone. So it becomes very much lowest common denominator, and I feel in the end that people have to be bound to something. There has to be a stronger commitment, and there has to be a metaphysics behind it. If you’re just doing meditation but you don’t really have a way of looking at the world that grounds the meditation, I wonder how sustainable that is.
And we can also extend that to yoga… I mean, it’s interesting that it’s called SoulCycle. I think we’ve probably mentioned this on the podcast before that you have things like SoulCycle that are physical in nature, but they’re supposed to be more than that. They kind of aspire to something that is spiritual, and you see that just by the name of SoulCycle. Right? Soul is right there in the name of the company. And yoga, I think, again, it’s oftentimes detached from its Eastern origin. So people get something that is diluted and doesn’t have a strong foundation or worldview that undergirds it.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I have many similar experiences. Let’s dive into the politics of this. What does this have to do with democracy and political life? I think for many people, they would say, “Look, yoga helps me relax. Meditation helps me sort of calm my mind. What on earth does this have to do with politics and democracy?” This is just personal spiritual enrichment or just a way to stave off burnout or something like that. So here we go.
So famous old sociologist named Émile Durkheim. He emphasized the importance of organized religion and shared rituals, which strengthen collective identity and cohesion, whereas individual spiritual practices rarely provide that same frequency and consistency of group contact. So what an organized church or mosque or synagogue provides is this sort of constant, repeated interaction where you are bumping into other individuals, many individuals who you might not necessarily like, but organized religion sort of forces you to socialize, to interact.
We use language of this with preschool or kindergarten. You socialize the child. You teach them to share. For Émile Durkheim, that’s very much the same for adults, is adults need to be interacting and learning to share. Synagogues, mosques, churches provide a clear set of ethical norms, a sort of moral framework, whereas for the yoga studio, as you said, the concern is not to alienate anyone. So there’s not this clarity of, “Here’s what it means to be a part of this group.”
On top of that, there’s an intergenerational piece of this. So when you come to my local church, you are going to interact with 80-year-olds. And just this last Sunday, I was holding a baby while we were worshiping. One of my favorite parts of church is that there’s just cute babies everywhere. Shadi, I don’t know how often you get to hold babies, but it’s a-
Shadi Hamid:
Nope.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Nope. So there’s sort of an intergenerational element here where a church is a place where you’re really interacting with different generations, where a yoga studio, you’re typically with one specific generation of people, often with one specific economic class as well. In a church, there are structured roles and even hierarchies and opportunities to become a leader, and there’s also opportunities to learn how to be led, and those roles shift and change, and you can develop your own voice in a variety of ways, whereas in these mindfulness areas, there’s one leader, and that leader is paid for those specific services.
These rituals, according to Émile Durkheim, develop a sense of bonding between the people, a sense of shared belonging and meaning. And all of these things are really important for democratic life, because democratic life requires citizens who are used to interacting, used to sharing power, used to being leaders sometimes and followers other times, and people who have a strong sense of meaning and purpose, because if you don’t have a strong sense of meaning and purpose, you are vulnerable to politicians who might offer you a strong sense of meaning and purpose for political ends.
You’re more vulnerable. I have many more arguments around these, but let me pause there, Shadi. And I am curious about your own experience in Muslim communities and mosques and how those things have developed, or you’ve watched leadership development work and social bonding work within those communities.
Shadi Hamid:
So I think that one major difference between secular spaces and religious spaces is, as we sort of touched on, is that secular spaces focus on self-improvement, where religious spaces that are organized focus on submission, and it’s one of the ways to… Islam means submission in some sense, and that’s a big part of how we view our religion, that at the end of the day, you’re submitting to a higher authority, and your own whims and desires are not central. They have to be kind of pushed down and regulated in some way, where secular spaces encourage you to… You are your own guide. You are your own-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Your own priest.
Shadi Hamid:
… your own priest, and you make determinations about what is right and wrong, oftentimes based on feelings and emotions that are not grounded in something. So I think that just in the local Muslim community center that I go to here in D.C., first of all, you see a lot of volunteering. You see a lot of selflessness. There’s only two full-time paid staff. So all the other activities, most of the activities have a strong volunteer component. Otherwise, the whole thing would fall apart, and the reason that people are willing to volunteer and do things without being paid is because they’re doing it in the service of God.
So in Islam, we very much have this idea that actions are judged by their intentions. So everything that we do, we’re supposed to either silently or even vocally express our intention to God, so that way, we ground whatever activity we’re doing as something that is explicitly religious, and that way, you also… And you can really do that for anything.
If you’re giving some money to a homeless person on the street, before you do that, you think, “Oh, my intention here is that I’m serving a higher purpose,” then you do it. So it’s a way of being very conscious about the things that you do, and to always remember that God is the reason, and that you’re not just doing it because it’s good in some generic sense.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I want to come back to that sort of spirituality is about personal empowerment, whereas religion is about submission. I think that’s a really important distinction, where organized religion actually organizes humans around something beyond themselves and chastens their own desires and longings, whereas spirituality does not in that kind of way.
We live in a culture that is very consumeristic, and it’s a question of, “How does this help me? How does this optimize my life? How does this empower me?” And in many ways, personal forms of spirituality are much more conducive to capitalism in that you have different spiritual leaders and gurus offering goods and services, spiritual goods and services to consumers, spiritual consumers.
And so, you get a sort of spirituality consumerism, a sort of competition of the market, and I see this in political life as well where citizens increasingly think about the government as a service provider that either does a good job providing goods and services or does a poor job. It’s either efficient and wise or it’s not.
And I worry about the sustainability of a democratic society where everyone has this posture of consumerism for its religion and for its politics, that both politics and faith are supposed to be spaces in which we serve one another. They are not supposed to be spaces in which we get things from. And so, I see a sort of parallel going on in American society that is not healthy.
You listen to speeches from politicians, and it’s all about, “What I will do for you and the services and goods that I will provide for you.” And I don’t actually think that is the final purpose of the state to provide goods and services, like a massive corporation, and people are running for CEO of the country.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And maybe similar to this is a sense that we’ve often talked about on this podcast that religion is supposed to be strange, but also hard. It’s not supposed to be easy, where in a consumerist, capitalistic society, the ease of getting things is the priority. We’re not supposed to experience that much friction. Anything that we can do to reduce friction is positive, where I think organized religion introduces places and experiences where we actually feel friction. And instead of just putting it to the side, we have to find ways to live with it and be resilient.
Yeah. I mean, religion hasn’t always come easy to me, and I’ve been honest about that at different points in this podcast that I’ve really had to work at it. I think that the kind of… That deeper relationship with God, the heart. Islam, to me, is very compelling intellectually, and it makes a lot of sense to me logically.
I love it as a kind of intellectual thing, but where I struggle more is developing the heart and the kind of close relationship with God that is more personal, and that requires work. It requires discomfort. It requires me extending myself beyond what my normal activities would be. I just recently went on a Sufi retreat for about five days in Jamaica, of all places, but there is this very small Jamaican Muslim-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Suffering for God. I see, Shadi.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. No. Just occasionally, these retreats are in places where Islam is just starting to gain traction, and it’s a way of interacting with local Muslim communities that aren’t used to seeing people come and visit them. So that’s part of the idea. But anyway, maybe I was just being hard on myself, but I felt that I was probably the least religious person there. Everyone else seemed so serious and so committed and so on the straight path, and you never know what’s going on in people’s hearts and minds beyond the surface.
So for all I know, other people were feeling insecure about their own religious station as well, but I felt a little bit uncomfortable, because I felt like I wasn’t where I should be, and I was trying to push myself and put myself in a new experience where I had to engage on a deeper spiritual level, and I think that being open to that kind of discomfort is part of what it means to grow as a religious person, if that makes sense.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. The value of organized religion is that it’s a bit like going to the gym. Right?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It’s a hard work, and you’re looking around, and you’re like, “Man, that guy’s body looks a lot better than mine. I got some work to do.” I do want to anticipate an objection here to this argument which you and I are quite familiar with, which is, how can you possibly say that religion is good for democracy when evangelicals and Muslims are causing so much trouble in democratic life? How can you possibly make these kinds of arguments? And I’ll speak for my own-
Shadi Hamid:
I mean, I don’t know if we’re causing a lot of trouble, but you guys certainly are.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Oh, come on. Yeah. Muslims are just awesome at democracy. What are you talking about? Yeah. Sure, buddy. Sure. Well, I’ll talk about my crew, and you can talk about your crew if you like, but evangelicals have been very… I think there’s no contest. Evangelicals in America have been very disruptive to democratic life, disrespectful of democratic norms, like elections and term limits and all these sorts of things.
So how is it that I can make this argument that organized religion on the whole is really important for democratic life? I think what I would say first of all is, when American evangelicalism is misbehaving democratically, it is behaving more like a spirituality than like an organized religion. The more detached evangelicalism becomes from institutions, denominations, Christian universities, Christian magazines, these sorts of things, its own history, its own traditions, as evangelicalism becomes a sort of disembedded cultural movement and moves away from institutional religion, it becomes more deformed.
So it’s increasingly organizing itself around charismatic individuals online and in politics, and disembedding itself from local congregations and local systems of power and formation. American evangelicalism is less communal and less institutional, and it’s increasingly digital, disembodied, and focused around charismatic movements and fears. And so, my argument is essentially that what we want is for evangelicalism to become more institutional and less digital, more communal rather than organizing itself around charismatic leaders.
Shadi Hamid:
Can you say a little bit more about why it’s been so deinstitutionalized?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, sure. Well, I think that it is because American evangelicalism is very much influenced by American individualism, American pragmatism, American anti-institutionalism. Anti-elitism is a big part of that. So I would just say American evangelicalism is just very, very American, and it needs to be more evangelical than American. And so, yeah, you have a lot of anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism active within American evangelicalism. And so, that just makes it very politically and spiritually erratic. And so, you get just some wild characters who are given a platform within American evangelicalism.
Shadi Hamid:
Interesting. So I actually think that maybe something quite different is happening in the American Muslim community. I mean, the whole question of Muslims and democracy in the Middle East is a whole different one, but if we’re focusing on America for a moment, I think that we’re becoming better institutionalized as a community. And I think that the first Trump term and thereafter, we had a real sense of being under attack, and that forced us to think a little bit more carefully about how we want our community to respond and how we want to build new leaders.
And it’s no surprise that in the past couple years, we’ve seen really an explosion of usually young Muslims running for office in different parts of the country. I mean, the two most well-known examples are Zohran Mamdani and then Abdul El-Sayed, who’s rising in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, and might actually have a chance of getting the nomination and facing Mike Rogers in the general.
But both of them, I think, are products of a new institutional awareness that Muslims have to be engaged, and mosques and local community centers are encouraging people to get more political, where there used to be a sense of, “Let’s not talk about politics too much. Let’s kind of leave that to the side.” I think that people who are growing up in these Muslim communities are learning something important, and then they’re becoming inspired to serve their communities politically.
Obviously, you don’t want it to be like everything is about going into politics and everything is politicized, but I think there is something positive that I’ve seen more recently. If we contrast that to the Middle East, part of the problem in Middle Eastern countries is, because they’re so autocratic, it’s hard to set up independent religious institutions. Everything is regulated by the state. The state is monitoring all religious activity. And when you have a situation like that, people can’t actually grow in religious communities.
They can’t actually have this kind of organic development, and then you have people falling back on charismatic and sometimes extremist voices. They go online, because they don’t actually have a real home, and they don’t have a real place to go physically, because everything is so monitored and surveilled. And I think that that is a reminder that in democracies, democracies are good for many reasons, but one reason is they allow independent, autonomous religious institutions to develop organically without fear of persecution, without fear that the state is going to come in and clamp down on them.
So the fact that we have American Muslims setting up institutions throughout the country, the expansion in mosques that we’ve seen. Growing up, there was only one or two mosques that were in maybe a 10-mile radius in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Now, in a 10-mile radius, you’ll find five or six mosques. I mean, there is that kind of natural growth that happens.
Of course, part of that has to do with population growth and the fact that the Muslim community is expanding, but we are getting better at building institutions, and that’s something we wouldn’t be able to do as much in our countries of origin. And that’s one of the reasons that America is such a great place to be a Muslim, is because we can make choices about the kind of communities we want to build.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So that gets me thinking, maybe I’ve been going about this wrong, Shadi. I think maybe one way to make this argument is in the reversal, which is, let’s say that you are a charismatic politician, and you want to be an autocrat. You want to rule over a country in a sort of unquestioned way. Think backwards as to what kind of a population you would want. Right? You would want people who have very shallow roots. And by that, I mean people who do not have a thick sense of identity in any institution or clan or whatever else it is.
You would want people who are relatively shallow, who don’t have formative rituals or loyalties that you can gather around yourself. You want a sort of amorphous mob of people who you can represent and who look to you for political leadership, cultural leadership, spiritual leadership. So you don’t want them bound up by any other community that would question the sort of meaning and purpose that you provide.
And so, the argument for religious institutions here is that they actually make charismatic, autocratic leadership difficult, because, first of all, they cultivate citizens with deeper roots that are not so easily swayed, but they also cultivate citizens who have alternative forms of meaning and purpose and moral direction. So they’re not so easily gathered around an autocratic leader. It develops a stubborn culture that will not be so easily swayed by an autocratic leadership.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Religion is supposed to immunize you from personalistic, autocratic leaders, who oftentimes are trying to play God themselves, and this is why it’s no mistake that Trump sort of acts almost as if he’s a savior-like figure. It’s something similar with autocrats in the Middle East. They become the arbiters of truth. They become the arbiters of what is right and wrong, and what they say is ultimately the only thing that matters if you want to survive in that society.
And that’s one of the reasons that I often argue that dictatorship is such a great sin in Islam, but also more broadly in religion, because God doesn’t want you to elevate mere mortals as your guide. Only God should play that role in your life, not an autocrat or not a charismatic leader. And when you start worshiping Donald Trump more than you’re worshiping Jesus, or you follow Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt more than you’re focusing on God, then you have a big problem.
So religion, in theory, is supposed to help with that. And it’s also no mistake that in countries like Egypt, Jordan, actually probably most Arab countries, the most well-organized religious movement is the Muslim Brotherhood. And whatever you think about the Muslim Brotherhood, whether they’re bad or good or something in between, that’s not the point. The point is that they are an institution, and that’s one of the reasons that regimes in the region feel a need to repress them, because they sort of represent an alternative center of power.
People are organizing around an idea, and dictators don’t want people to be organized in that way. They want individuals to be atomized. They want it to be every man for themselves, because when you feel like you’re not united with your fellow citizens, when it’s just you and you have to find a way to make ends meet, you’re struggling to put food on the table, then you’re going to be more susceptible to an autocrat.
If you’re well-grounded in an institution, if you’re well-grounded as part of a community, then you’ll be able to resist what the autocrat is doing. So I think that’s one reason that autocrats in general, they want weak societies, where democracies ideally should have strong societies and weaker states, where in autocracies, it’s the reverse.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So this draws me back to a sickness within American evangelicalism, which is we have our own charismatic leaders within evangelicalism who are abusing their power and getting found out in terms of money, sex, abuse of power within these megachurches and these mega-ministries. And once again, if evangelicalism had healthy institutions, they would hold their leaders accountable.
And on top of that, they would humble their leaders and have institutional systems and rules and forms of accountability that would cultivate a healthier sense of religious community. And yet, once again, evangelicalism in America getting drawn into a sort of celebrity spiritual movement culture as opposed to historic institutions that shape and form and humble their leaders.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, one question I have for you, Matt, is, how much does the so-called prosperity gospel play into this individualistic approach to evangelicalism, the sense that God wants us to be productive and entrepreneurs and consumers, that it becomes a very capitalistic approach that is less about the community and more about an individual supposedly becoming closer to God by being more prosperous, that by being more prosperous and more successful financially, it means that almost it’s evidence that God is looking down on you positively and you’re one of the elect?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s a fantastic question. I think that a prosperity gospel preacher has much more in common with a sort of spiritual guru than they do with a traditional Christian pastor, because remember again, these new forms of spirituality are all about personal empowerment, personal enrichment, spiritual tools and tricks to optimize your life here and now. That is what it is.
And so, the prosperity gospel is that. It is a spiritual trick or technique to enrich you. And so, there’s no form of communal discipline. Right? You’re watching a prosperity gospel preacher on television. Right? He can’t ask you hard questions about your drinking. He can’t ask you hard questions about your marriage. He can’t really know you in any meaningful way. He can’t offer you a community of discipline or formation.
He’s selling you a spiritual technique for personal enrichment and empowerment. So in this way, the prosperity gospel is a unique and disgusting marriage between Christianity and American consumerism and the love child between those two.
Shadi Hamid:
Yup.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Do Muslims have a prosperity gospel in some kind of way? Have you ever seen anything like that, like you do these things and Allah will bless you, or you buy my product and-
Shadi Hamid:
We don’t have something quite like that. I mean, there are religious movements, and even I would say the Muslim Brotherhood, to some extent, is more capitalist-oriented, this idea of setting up businesses and neoliberal economics, not in the way that I think… When I think about the prosperity gospel, I think of it as, if you’re rich, it means that God’s favor is upon you.
There seems to be almost a connection, which seems to be an inversion of what Christianity is about, because as I understand it, the first shall be last and the last shall be first. I mean, Christianity is a religion that sees the poor as elevated in some sense, and the prosperity gospel almost inverts that. I don’t want to speculate on how it’s possible that evangelicals can invert one of the basic doctrines of Christianity and people are okay with that.
But I think that you can find this in any religious movement or any religious group where people kind of idolize capitalism. Capitalism becomes a kind of idol, because God is encouraging you to succeed. And there is a sense that if you’re successful, that means God is rewarding you in some way. I think it’s very easy to get into that kind of thinking.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I mean, traditionally speaking, being wealthy is not something a Christian should want, because it’s harder actually to get into heaven if you’re rich. And, of course, there’s debates about all this, but that much is quite clear that being wealthy makes it difficult to get to heaven. So one other side of this I wanted to talk about was this concept of table manners.
My wife and I, we’ve got three boys, and we’re trying to teach them table manners. And some days, I feel successful, and some days, I don’t. But basic table manners, of course, of saying please and thank you and sharing and learning to tell your story and to talk about yourself, but also learning to ask other people questions and show genuine interest.
These are things that we’re trying to teach our boys right now, and much has been written about the death of the family dinner, that families aren’t eating together, and how that’s sad for a variety of reasons. But I think that, democratically, that is sad, because democracy depends upon citizens who are capable of having good conversations, even debates and disagreements, and learning those basic table manners. And one of the things that I’d like to argue is that the church, the mosque, the synagogue is a place where citizens learn the basic table manners of democratic life.
They learn to disagree with one another. They learn to organize themselves, to argue about, “Hey, what should the mosque be doing in the community this year? What should the synagogue be doing for the kids? What new programs should the church start?” You do learn to become an advocate for whatever it is in this small space. And if you don’t have that space, if you don’t have that dinner table, that elders’ meeting at the church, where are you learning to interact with other human beings?
And the new social alternative to these embodied spaces is social media, and I think it is a profound mistake to believe that social media teaches us table manners. In fact, I would argue it teaches us the opposite of table manners. And so, the need for institutional forms of religion where we learn these democratic habits is incredibly, incredibly important. Yeah. I worry about what happens when that’s gone.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. We don’t have third spaces anymore. I mean, we’re all bowling alone, as Robert Putnam put it, and that’s one of the reasons that Robert Putnam has been a very prominent advocate for religious life in America, because if you no longer have people bowling together or you don’t have those old-school clubs… Social clubs were kind of… I guess old people still have them, but whether it’s the Rotary Club or Lions Club, that sort of thing has completely dissipated from American public life.
So you have to look for alternatives, and religion is still the best candidate for bringing people together who otherwise wouldn’t be brought together. And I’m just thinking about the retreat that I was just on with this group of Muslims. We came from different walks of life. I met people who I would otherwise not meet, people who I probably wouldn’t normally be friends with, but because we have something in common, the fact that we’re Muslim and that we’re part of this kind of Sufi group, that that brings us into conversation with each other.
I had one really interesting conversation on the bus with a fellow participant, and he was trying to persuade me that Trump was better for Muslims. I don’t really know. I wouldn’t have talked to someone like that or been open to hearing that unless he got… But he was just lodged next to me on the bus ride. So I had to listen to-
Matthew Kaemingk:
You were stuck.
Shadi Hamid:
I was stuck. So I had to listen to a very different perspective. And at first, I was a little bit annoyed that I had to engage in this conversation, but then I tried to open myself up to it. Does he have legitimate reasons for thinking this? Let me try to understand things from his perspective, and that was just one example. I had a number of fascinating conversations with new people.
And when you think about it, we don’t usually make a lot of new friends as we get older in life. We have our same social group that we see regularly. We’re kind of in a particular mode, and going into religious spaces actually, I think, is one way to get out of our comfort zone and to be with people, and to practice those basic skills of how do you engage with someone who you wouldn’t normally be friends with.
Matthew Kaemingk:
My boys and I are going to a baseball game today. My son is singing Take Me Out to the Ball Game at the stadium today.
Shadi Hamid:
Wait. He’s singing it?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, yeah, with his school choir.
Shadi Hamid:
Oh, cool. Okay.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So St. Louis Cardinals are playing today, and they’re going to go out on the field. He’s very excited. He’s singing Take Me Out to the Ball Game. And during the seventh-inning stretch, we’re going to sing God Bless America, and everybody is going to stand up, and the whole crowd will do that, and I’m just thinking to myself about how…
Well, first of all, it is, in many ways, a very religious ceremony there in the baseball stadium where everyone stands and everyone faces the flag, which I have mixed feelings about as a Christian. I’ll just say I have mixed feelings about it. There’s part of it where I’m very proud to be an American, and I very much want God to bless America. But yeah, there’s other parts of that ritual that I think are a bit silly and sometimes even a little bit dangerous.
But as I think about all of the bodies in that baseball stadium being oriented towards the flag, everyone faces the flag, and then I think about Muslims being oriented towards Mecca, and I think about in my church, the center of my church is the Cross, and we all are always oriented towards the Cross, and that’s the one thing that we have to look towards.
And so, the architecture of the church orients our bodies towards the Cross, and the architecture of the mosque orients your body right towards Mecca. How do you think about that in terms of politics and the ways that the state tries to orient our bodies and our hearts towards itself? I mean, do you think that’s… Am I reaching here, or is that something-
Shadi Hamid:
No, I think you’re right. I think there’s something really important about prayer and the role that it can play in democratic politics. And as it turns out, our book has a chapter that explores some of this more in depth.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Hey, good plug there, buddy. Sell that book.
Shadi Hamid:
But I do think that even when you prostrate your head… So as Muslims, we prostrate our head on the ground several times in each prayer. So we probably do it, I don’t know, more than 20 times or about 20 times in a day or something like that. The fact that everyone does that, no matter how rich or how powerful or how successful, it’s a reminder that you don’t have all the answers, that you are not the center of the world, that you are orienting yourself to something that is larger than you, and that, in theory, should instill some kind of humility and some sense that the self is not everything.
Now, that doesn’t always work like that. There are obviously people who pray and prostrate, who are terrible people, but I think if you’re praying the right way, it is that kind of daily reminder that you are mortal, that you are small in the larger scheme of things, and that God is greater. You don’t compare to God. And I think the physical movement of being in that kind of bowing position is something that’s very appealing about Islam, that you actually have structured movements that remind you of that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Another piece of this is when my son goes down there to sing. God Bless America as a ritual, it orients us towards our specific nation. Right? And that’s a good thing. I’m glad to be oriented towards my nation, love my country, and serve my country, but both Islam and Christianity offer a ritual that is also very international, that actually orients us beyond our specific nation.
So when I take Communion on Sunday morning, when I take the bread and wine, I am being united to Christians in Kenya and Indonesia and China and Argentina. I’m being connected to them, and I’m being connected to Christians in Iran right now, who my country is bombing, and singing God Bless America does not connect me to the Iranian citizens.
Similarly, when you pray towards Mecca, you’re not just being connected to other Muslim Americans. You’re being connected to Muslims all over the world, including those in Iran right now. And maybe this is a good place to sort of close up our conversation of what religion can offer to democracy, is that, here, we see religion can offer to democracy a sense of international citizenship that goes beyond national identity.
And as good as national identity is and as good as patriotism is and as much as I love my country, there are dangers to patriotism. There are dangers to nationalism, and the primary one is the narrowness of vision that we think we are human and others are not. But when I take Communion, I am taking it with Palestinian Christians. I’m taking it with Iranian Christians. I’m connected to Christians in China and Russia, and I’m bound to them in one body. And I think that’s actually really important for democratic life, that democratic citizens see themselves as more than just the citizens of one nation.
Shadi Hamid:
And that’s why nationalism and the nation-state have always had an uneasy relationship with religion, because if Christians see Christ as sovereign, and if we see God, if we see Allah as sovereign, that to elevate the state or the nation and to make an idol of it where everything is about America to the exclusion of people elsewhere, then you’re falling into something that I think is not really in the spirit of our respective religions, that we have a sense that we are part of a greater body of believers.
In Arabic, the word for that is ummah. We’re part of that broader ummah, and we have something in common with Muslims in all these different countries that binds us in ways that are important. And that’s one reason why I would argue the nation-state hasn’t really taken hold in the Middle East the way it has in, let’s say, the Western world.
It’s sort of an unnatural fit, and Muslims have been forced into dividing themselves based on these arbitrary borders and arbitrary identities, where in the pre-modern era, your fundamental affiliation and loyalty was religious in nature, not to the state, and that runs the risk of sacralizing the state. The state almost becomes an object of religious devotion, and that’s why nationalism can be scary and dangerous, and also fundamentally anti-religious.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, friends, I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation. In defense of spirituality, yoga can do some really lovely things for your back. We really do appreciate you hanging with us in this conversation, and we encourage you to check out this brand-new book. As we said, it’s there, available for preorder now. Shadi and I worked very hard on years we invested in this project, and we’re so excited to share it with the world. So you can-
Shadi Hamid:
And we’ll include the link in the show notes where you can get that 40% discount. So make sure you look for that if you’re interested.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s right. Yeah. You don’t want to miss the 40%. So bakerbookhouse.com. Friends, thank you very much for engaging with us. Remember to send us the feedback and emails and all that good stuff. We’ll see you next time.
Shadi Hamid:
See you, guys.
