I was asked in a radio interview last week the biggest challenge confronting college campuses today.  I said “isms,” with pluralism and relativism topping the list.  Imagine if your campus was restructured such that all faiths were combined under the same umbrella (I can’t not mention that “ella, ella, ella” is running through my head right now).  Imagine that your “staff position” was mixed with that of the Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Athiest staffers, too?  "You’re all aiming for the same thing right?!  Trying to help students explore their “god-concepts”? Ummmm, sort, but no, not really…  The LA Times ran an article Sunday that doesn’t fall too far off this paradigm shift. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-alameddine6apr06,0,2743519.story

It’s eerie how much this article took me back lawn conversations and lectures during my undergrad days at Emory.  In short, the writer takes about 80% of the article to build a point regarding “Allah” as synonymous with “God,” and thus rightfully needing to be used as such in the English vocabulary.  The point is padded by remarking that so many religious faces are acceptingly worn by “God,” and yet Allah remains separate—dangerously separate.

I’ll agree to the extent that openness to the term and context of “Allah” would do our linguistic and existential vocabularies well.  But on almost every other front, I have to disagree.  Compartmentalizing all gods into one “God” ends up minimizing all the gods.  Every “god” of every religion is unique and uniquely named into its given culture, history, cult and/or custom.  And although most may assume similar characteristics, they mean different things, to the degree that that have been differentiated at some point in history in order to designate a given faith, or spirituality.

Presuming that “all gods are the same” and should be titled under the same heading (“God”) feels to me like saying “all people are the same,” so let’s ditch specific “names” and just refer to each other as “people.”  Furthermore, consider my current writing environment: a family of bluebirds is singing into my window, and the Berlin Philharmonic is wafting spectacular notes from my living room below.  But what if I were to say, “There are animals making noise outside my window and sounds coming from downstairs.”  Oh how this minimizes the grandiosity of precise sound enriching my ears!

Finally, and I feel like I’m just getting started, but the writer of the article ended with: “One nation under Allah?,” as if to say this is where our country needs to head.  What a scary thought, I think—not because Allah is scary, but because trying to “refound” the history of a given country, let alone faith, is manipulative, dangerous and dishonest.  America wasn’t founded as a nation under Allah, or else old Christopher would’ve said so.  Furthermore, Islam wasn’t founded under “God,” or else I’m quite sure their Christopher would’ve said so, too, for Allah’s sake.