BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -Brian McLaren, the minister known as a major spokesman of the Emerging Church movement for more than two decades, will return to Birmingham next month to speak to the Southern Progressive Alliance for Exploring Religion.
McLaren, author of "A New Kind of Christianity," "Naked Spirituality," and "Everything Must Change," will be speaking at the SPAFER lecture series on Sept. 19-20 at Canterbury United Methodist Church in Mountain Brook.
In an interview with AL.com in 2012 when he last spoke in Birmingham at Trinity United Methodist Church, McLaren said conflict often becomes a rallying cry in religion.
"Our biggest tensions between religions don't actually come from our differences," McLaren said. "It comes from what we have in common: building identity in opposition to other identities."
All faiths need to find common ground, he said.
"If there's a nuclear bomb, radiation doesn't distinguish between Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus," McLaren said. "We have to find a way of treating each other as neighbors. That was pretty essential to Jesus' teaching."
Nativism has become especially evident in U.S. debates over immigration, he said.
"A lot of people don't realize the Bible is a book about immigration," McLaren said. "Abraham was an immigrant. Moses was a refugee. The Hebrew scriptures have so much to say about how how we should treat the immigrant and the alien. So much of Jesus' ministry is defined by his reluctance to play along with the nativist urges of his day."
The descendants of Europeans who settled America, displacing Native Americans, overlook that, he said.
"All white people are immigrants," McLaren said. "This would be a good time to remember that. One of the really hard things in building Christian community is getting people to give things a second thought, to go against the flow. When we see these scapegoating attitudes toward immigrants, if pastors don't create a process where those can be challenged, we can become an uglier nation. We can even look at our own history; segregation was the order of the day when I was a little kid and it was defended by thousands of clergy and tacitly accepted by thousands of others."
During debates over slavery and segregation, scripture was used and abused, he said. "Both sides quoted the Bible to support their arguments," McLaren said. "It's a reminder to us that faith is going to be on one side or the other of history. This is what is insidious about religion, when it's used to defend the indefensible."
Time magazine named McLaren, founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Md., one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America in 2005. McLaren was working as a college English teacher when he founded the church in 1982. He became a full-time pastor in 1986, and stepped down as senior pastor of the 500-member Cedar Ridge in 2006 to devote full-time to speaking and writing.
McLaren shrugs off critics who question his evangelical orthodoxy. He notes that Christian theology in America has been rife with failures.
"I do think theology is one of our core areas of struggle," McLaren said in an interview in 2012 when he came to speak at Trinity United Methodist Church in Homewood. "We had a theology that allowed terrible injustice to Native Americans, that defended slavery, that said women are not allowed to have the same rights in religion as men."
Adapting to change is necessary, he said.
"Theology has always been an emergent process," McLaren said. "Christian communities can make two mistakes: one is the refusal to keep learning and growing and admitting the need for change; the other is throwing out the past and forgetting the past."
McLaren has written a dozen books and makes about 80 speaking appearances a year. His latest book is "Why did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Muhammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multifaith world."
"The simple idea is we know how to do two things well," McLaren said. "We know how to have a strong Christian identity that is hostile to other faiths; and we know how to have a weak Christian identity that is friendly to other faiths."
War-mongers don't belong to one religion, he said.
"The real conflict isn't between Muslims, Jews and Christians," McLaren said. "It's between peace-loving people and people who want to stir up conflict. There is a dividing line in faiths. There are Christians who'd be happy with a war against Muslims and there are Muslims who'd be happy with a war against Christians. You also have Christians and Muslims who would like us to find ways to be good neighbors to each other."
Pastors bear a responsibility to be moral beacons, he said.
"The sad thing about religion is that it can be used to bolster some pretty ungodly attitudes," McLaren said. "If our leaders don't direct faith communities in healing directions it can quickly become toxic. People think of being a pastor as a quiet desk job, but when you think about the huge crises we face in the world, it's a lot of responsibility. The public opinion of a nation is built through tens of thousands of small communities."