The heartfelt plea – “why can’t we all just get along?” – finds no warrant anywhere in either the Bible or Quran, and no amount of cooperation, social activism, community cohesion, missionary outreach, collaborative partnerships, constructive dialogue, platform-sharing, bridge-building, face-painting, placard-waving, prayer meetings, pluralism, performative gestures, multifaith initiatives or hands-across-the-sea internationalism can alter that.
There is a call, in Isaiah 2:4, for an end to war – and for swords to be beaten into ploughshares – though the message fails to land with the thunderous authority of God’s first commandment. The only multifaith initiative worth a damn would be for the leaders of all the world’s faith traditions to abandon their tiresome insistence that they – and they alone – have access to absolute truth (and hell will have frozen over before they agree to that). Religious tolerance – at best a ‘gritted teeth’ kind of getting along – is about the limit of our ambitions. This too is better than nothing, though I’m yet to be convinced that monotheistic religions with supernaturally revealed ‘knowledge’ can ever truly be at peace with one another. Despite the performative gestures of goodwill, do believers really respect the doctrines of any faith other than their own?
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