Duke Chapel, Islam & Religious Liberty

Protesters claim that Duke University’s revoking its brief plans for Duke Chapel’s bell tower to become a minaret for Islamic prayer calls every Friday violated religious liberty and hospitality.

The current multiculturalist zeitgeist has apparently reinterpreted religious freedom and Christian hospitality to mean a church may not remain exclusively a church but must morph into an interfaith clearinghouse for all religions, or at least politically correct forms of religion.

Fascinating. And troubling.

For many years I lived close to a large mosque, and subsequently rented my home to regular worshippers at that mosque. It never occurred to me that this mosque, which was closer to me than almost all churches, should have broadcast Christian prayers or otherwise be denounced for being unneighborly. It was, after all, built by Muslims and for Muslims exclusively for Muslim worship. The mosque was under no obligation to compromise its message to cater to its community, whose residents of course could attend their favored forms of worship at countless other places down the road.

Religious liberty and freedom of speech are not about coercing religions and different perspectives into a common cultural stew contrived by multiculturalist cooks. Instead, religious and other groups ideally are free to vigorously create their own believing communities and extol their own exclusive beliefs without outside pressures to conform or dilute.

Duke University is a private institution. It has no obligation to accommodate any religious or ideological perspective. It could become an exclusively Christian school without welcoming other religions. It could theoretically become Islamic and remove any Christian presence from its campus life. People disliking either option have many other schools from which to choose.

Of course, Duke, despite its Methodist heritage, is a largely secular school that boasts its accommodation of all major religions represented among its students and faculty. Reportedly about five percent of the student body come from Muslim backgrounds, and about fifteen percent of them, or less than one percent of students, attend regular Islamic worship in the chapel’s basement lounge. Duke has a paid Muslim chaplain and a Center for Muslim Life, plus a Muslim Appreciation Month. It’s unclear how Muslims at Duke face anything less than affirmation.

And it’s unclear why the apparently vibrant but still small Muslim group at Duke should uniquely merit prayer calls from Duke Chapel’s soaring bell tower. One Duke official had explained that the Muslim prayer calls would illustrate Duke’s opposition to Islamophobia. So the bell tower as minaret idea was at least partly if not primarily a political statement, without evidently much theological consideration.

Renowned theologian Richard Hays, the dean of Duke Divinity School, a United Methodist seminary on campus, noted he was not consulted about the Muslim prayer call idea at the chapel, which has an “explicit Christian identity and mission.” He also wrote, “Any decision to permit the use of a prominent Christian place of worship as a minaret for Muslim proclamation will, in our time, have immediate global repercussions. Any discussion about such a proposal should take into careful account the perspective of millions of Christians living in Islamic societies where their faith is prohibited or persecuted.”

The protesters who fancy Duke Chapel’s failure to broadcast Islamic prayer calls as discrimination and inhospitality seem to have little interest in genuine religious persecution. Instead, they seem to confuse religious persecution with any boundaries on the postmodern assumption that all religions and belief systems are just pieces in a wider cosmic mosaic subordinate to their vision.

Of course, according to this postmodern, multiculturalist vision, some religions are less equal than others. What if a conservative Pentecostal sect, with social views on sex and gender similar to Islam, had wanted to broadcast evangelistic calls from Duke Chapel’s similar to the language of the traditional Muslim call? How would the university have responded?

Maybe some day in the future there will be large demonstrations and social media campaigns at Duke against real religious discrimination, including solidarity with besieged Christians around the world, some of whose churches have been coerced into becoming mosques, under circumstances that were less than interfaith.