Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:

Welcome to The Unfinished Church. I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling.

Bishop Gregory Palmer:

I’m Gregory Palmer.

Bishop Mike McKee:

And I’m Mike McKee. You’re listening to The Unfinished Church podcast. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.

Bishop Mike McKee:

In our conversation with Eboo Patel, I was struck about how many times a day that we can come in contact with a person of another faith tradition than ours. And I’m not talking about just another Christian tradition, but another faith tradition, and Eboo highlighted this in so many good ways. And in fact, one time I was reminded about something he said that really hit home. And that is about the bias experienced by his sons who are Indian Americans and playing basketball. And what people thought they were capable of or not capable of.

Bishop Gregory Palmer:

I had a similar sense in the conversation with Brother Eboo, and that is, how easily all of us jump to conclusions and work through these lenses and filters that we already have. Some of them we’ve inherited. Other people have talked in our ear through the years, perceptions about groupings of people by race or ethnicity or by national origin, et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes, I find myself seeing someone through the lens of something I heard about my parents, say, about a particular group of people. And to think that we’ve worked to undo all of that and it’s still going on, and the painful thing, and yet the leveling effect, that we all actually still do it.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:

Well, it really resonated with me because it took me right back to a time much earlier in my professional life, when I was working as a prosecuting attorney, and someone made an assumption about who I was because of the color of my skin, thinking that rather than being a member of the bar and a person there working in the court, that I was there because I had a case to be adjudicated.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:

And I can tell you, the sting is real. I can feel it even to this day. And I had to think about how much I wanted to call people on it because I had to continue to work in that system. And I needed that judge to be able to continue to respect me or to gain respect for me. Because again, I had been misperceived. But it is a very daunting experience, and that’s why I think these conversations are so important.

Bishop Mike McKee:

In a conversation I had with Eboo Patel to prepare for this podcast, he mentioned to me a book that he was working on, and it is now in print. And it is called We Need To Build. And we certainly do. So, I want to introduce you to my friend, Eboo Patel. This is The Unfinished Church. Let’s get started.

Eboo Patel:

It’s terrific to be with you. Thank you for having me, Bishop McKee.

Bishop Mike McKee:

Thank you. So, today we are talking about implicit bias, those assumptions, often unexamined or unconscious, that shape how we see and interact with other people. From your perspective, as someone who daily navigates intercultural relationships and promotes interfaith cooperation, in what ways do you see implicit bias rear its head?

Eboo Patel:

I have a friend who was a faculty member at University of Illinois in Chicago, and we were actually undergraduates together at the University of Illinois Champagne, and we had known each other through the years. He is an African American man, and when he was a younger professor, on the first day of class, he would sit amongst the students and five minutes into class having started, 10 minutes into class having started, nobody would know who the professor was, and he would just pretend he was amongst them. And they would kind of look around like, “Is the professor here somewhere?” And nobody would look to him as the possible professor.

Eboo Patel:

And then, of course, he would stand up and introduce himself. “My name is professor David Stoval, et cetera, et cetera.” And it was this incredible exercise in people’s implicit bias, because nobody thought that the young Black guy, who dressed like an urban hipster, was the person with a Ph.D. who was going to be teaching the class and had written the books. And I thought that was such a great way of confronting people with, “Hey, what is your image of what a professor is?”

Eboo Patel:

In my own life, the truth be told, in most of the rooms that I walk into these days, I am a known quantity. I’m the founder of an organization, I write books, I give speeches. And so, people have seen pictures of me on posters before I walk into a room. And so, the implicit bias I experience is minimal compared to what I did experience growing up, and I watch it with my kids.

Eboo Patel:

And my kids are 11 and 14. They’re both basketball players. We’re Indian Americans. And when they bristle, knowing that when they approach a basketball court, nobody thinks that they’re going to be any good, and it’s made them tougher as players. And that’s not a bad thing when it comes to basketball, but boy, can that wear you down in life in general.

Eboo Patel:

And I never want to forget the implicit bias that I experienced in all those years where I was not a known quantity; where it wasn’t my face on posters. “Eboo Patel will be speaking at SMU next month,” or something like that. Because it’s daily pin pricks that can collectively draw a quantity of blood.

Bishop Mike McKee:

My fellow bishops and I believe that the theological bedrock for building healthy intercultural relationships is the belief that all are created in the image of God and have sacred worth. So, what are the core convictions that undergird your interfaith work and your relationships?

Eboo Patel:

You know, as you said before, so much of what I do comes out of being a Muslim, and how that tradition intertwines in such a complimentary way to what I understand the ideals that are America, the higher ideals. And so, I’ll put this in Islamic terms for now, but just know that I see a lot of resonances between these deep stories in Islam and, I think, the hopeful version of the deep story of America.

Eboo Patel:

So, in Islam, we believe that everybody’s born with the breath of God. That the way we are created is that God picks up a lump of clay and gives it his breath, and thereby creates Adam, the first human being, the first prophet. And he says to Adam, “You are going to be my Abd and Khalifa, my servant and representative on the planet. You are the steward of my creation.”

Eboo Patel:

And then God sets up a contest between Adam and the angels. And God says to the angels, “I want you to name the different parts of creation. Tell me the names.” And the angels say, “Oh, God, the only knowledge we have is to sing the glories of your name.” And then, God turns to Adam and says, “You tell me the names.” And Adam has the knowledge and the ability to do it.

Eboo Patel:

And for me, that was such a powerful moment, reading that passage of the Quran when I was a graduate student at Oxford, because the term names is not singular. It’s plural. God has made creation diverse. It’s not a monoculture, it’s not one thing over and over again. It is many things. And Adam, our common ancestor, our first guide and profit, created with God’s breath, as we all are, had the ability to name and flow with diversity.

Eboo Patel:

That’s the gift that we human beings have. And so, so much of my work with Interfaith America, formerly IFYC, is about that fundamental equality that human beings have, the diversity in the world and our gift and responsibility to nurture that diversity in positive ways.

Bishop Mike McKee:

So, it’s interesting, just as a comment, that, when you begin to tell a story from your own faith tradition, how it sometimes may intersect with our own stories that we have. That we have some common shared stories among religions, and I think that’s important for all of us to know.

Eboo Patel:

I mean, we Muslims believe, in a very focused way, that there’s one God, and that God sends many revelations. The revelation ends with the Quran, but the previous revelation is the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels. These are all revelations of God, and they’re continuous. And there are common themes. And monotheism and mercy are the most important of those common themes.

Bishop Mike McKee:

In this podcast, we have used, each time, the language of the Beloved Community to cast a vision for the society in which racial prejudice no longer has any power. How do you talk about your vision for society and how does racism interfere with that vision? And I think one of the things I would also ask you to think about, in terms of that is in your book, you have a chapter called “The Service or The Genius of Religious Institution.” And so, I’d like for you to reflect on that for us.

Eboo Patel:

So, I love the Beloved Community, by the way. I love the various ways that religious language has helped us describe our nation. City on a hill, Beloved Community, New Jerusalem, better angels of our nature, almost chosen people. There’s a reason that GK Chesterton said that America is a nation with the soul of a church. And that’s not just because of the religiosity of the people, but because we have imagined our country with religious language, and that religious language is continually expansive.

Eboo Patel:

So, I think of America, now, in Muslim terms, as the New Medina. Medina was the city that the prophet Muhammad moved to when he got harassed out of Mecca, and amongst the first things he did was to build a pact of loyalty between the diverse religious groups and tribes of Medina, something called the Constitution of Medina.

Eboo Patel:

So, the way we talk at Interfaith America about the nation right now is we call it a potluck nation. Of course, the old version of this is melting pot, but what a nightmare, if you were invited to a potluck dinner, and you brought your grandmother’s famous crusty bread recipe, and you were met at the door with this giant melting machine that melted it into some tasteless goo, and you saw somebody bring in their famous dip, and you thought to yourself, “Boy, that would go really great with my grandma’s crusty bread.” And it had to deal with the melting machine, and melted into some tasteless goo.

Eboo Patel:

And so, we would much rather have a flavorful feast together in this notion that America, at its best, welcomes the distinctive contributions of diverse people. It creates really tasty combinations between them, and then it serves it to the community, so that the community, the nation, can feast. And religions actually do this, right? So, religious communities have potlucks.

Eboo Patel:

Fannie Lou Hamer would talk about America as the welcome table beside a Baptist church in the rural South. And one of the things I love about religious traditions is they articulate a vision of the good. In fact, it’s often articulated in scripture. And the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita or the Gospels or the Hebrew Bible. You have this cosmic vision of the good, and then you approximate it as closely as you can on Earth. And you build institutions, which are some approximation of what you believe the cosmic vision of goodness to be.

Eboo Patel:

And we do that really well in religious communities, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit for it, and we don’t get enough credit for it. And I’ll give you an obvious example, and that’s Methodist

Hospital in Dallas. Or all of the Methodist and Catholic and Lutheran and Jewish hospitals and Muslim health clinics around the country and the world. Why do we do this? Because we believe that physical health and spiritual health are connected. We feel like those are joined in a version of the cosmic good. And we attempt to approximate it on Earth, and we never do it only for ourselves. Methodist Hospital has Hindu physicians. It has Muslim patients. It has atheist administrators. I just think that’s a remarkable fact of religious life in America and the world. And we ought to recognize that that is what we are doing. And just take a moment to feel some pride that we are attempting to live up to the highest ideals of our tradition. And then we should get back to work.

Bishop Mike McKee:

As a response to that, I think you call that something that I’ve been noticing that perhaps one of the most diverse communities I’m around is the medical community. You walk into the hospital, and you see people from everywhere, who literally are working in the hospital. They’re physicians. They’re administration. You said that perfectly. And so, I think about Methodist hospitals, which are everywhere, and how it is that they really exemplify what we’re talking about, in terms of that diversity and this larger, significant community.

Eboo Patel:

I run into people all the time who are like, “Is interfaith cooperation even possible?” And I’m like, “It was the story of your birth. You were born in an interfaith situation. You were born at a Catholic hospital and a Hindu doctor delivered you, and she was supported by a nurse who was a Jehovah’s Witness, and the room was sanitized by a Muslim, and the CEO was an atheist who grew up Jain. And the pediatrician is Jewish.” And that’s everywhere, all the time. By the way, those people voted differently. They have different views on important matters, and that did not stop them from making sure you were delivered as a happy, healthy baby. And that’s what interfaith cooperation is all about.

Bishop Gregory Palmer:

This is really exciting to be reminded of the institutions that faith communities inaugurated or birthed. And so, healthcare, childcare, elder care and higher education. And initially, a lot of the religiously birthed institutions were about access for those that maybe didn’t have access. But as you think forward with us and with the audience, what’s the next horizon of institution creation that religious organizations or faith-based communities should be paying attention to?

Eboo Patel:

Thank you for that question, Bishop Gregory, and you and I have a long history, and I owe you a lot. I owe you a lot for our moments together when I was a graduate student. I just want to let you and the audience know how grateful I am for your taking time with me when I was a graduate student trying to figure out my path and my soul. And there you were, and you took that time, and I’m grateful.

Eboo Patel:

So, one of the exercises that I open my speeches with when I speak to audiences is, imagine all the faith-based institutions in your city disappearing overnight. Let’s take a walk in the morning. Let’s see what’s gone. Let’s begin with the churches and synagogues and mosques. And maybe you shed a single tear that people will not have a place to worship. But there’s actually more than that. Where’s the AA group going to meet? Who’s going to make sure that kids’ backpacks are filled with food on Friday afternoons, the way that the synagogue, Temple Sinai in Chicago, does for a local elementary school, and synagogues and churches all over the country do?

Eboo Patel:

Who does employment training? Who does AIDS? All those congregations, that’s what they’re involved in. And then let’s look at the hospitals, and let’s look at the universities, and let’s look at the social service agencies. It’s precisely what you said, Bishop Greg. And to just do that visual exercise, I just think it gives people pause. Nobody knows that Methodists started 120 colleges and universities. Y’all are not very good at telling your own story in that regard. But USC, Syracuse, Emory, Duke, bunch of smaller places, SMU, they wouldn’t exist if the Methodist community had not founded them. I think that’s a big deal.

Eboo Patel:

So, what’s the future? I think the future is interfaith efforts to doing this together. And I think we ought to be proud that virtually all of the institutions that faith communities built, all the civic institutions, right? Sunday school is a little bit different. How we do funerals and burials are a little bit different. But the hospitals, the schools, the social service agencies, they almost all serve everybody. I think the future is going to be the Muslim Methodist disaster relief services, the Jewish Jain Hospital. I would like to think that’s the future.

Bishop Gregory Palmer:

Wow. Thank you.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:

Eboo, I love that future. That’s so positive and forward thinking. And we’ve been talking about the institutions, the aspects of our religious lives and even our secular lives, that have been living into their better angels. And yet we know that we’re mired in a milieu that still has, as Isabelle Wilkerson called it, our American caste system. And so, to get to this new horizon, this better future that you and Bishop Palmer were just talking about, how do we rest ourselves from where we are if we are not even to admit who we are?

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:

There are so many that deny that we do have something akin to a caste system, especially when those that are not in the dominant culture are still yearning for proximity to what America deems the dominant culture. And those in that culture are accustomed to having themselves and their culture be the measuring stick with which everyone else is judged or aspiring to. How do we disabuse ourselves of all of that, so that we can get to this better future that you’re talking about?

Eboo Patel:

Thank you for that question, Bishop Easterling. So, I just want to say in the podcast, all of these good, good people told me to call them by their first name, and I was just raised, you called religious leaders by their titles. And so, I’ve tried. Every once in a while, I slip and say Mike, because I’ve known Mike McKee, we’ve had back and forth several times a year for the last five or eight years or so. But anyway, just to let folks in the podcast know, one cannot outgrow one’s upbringing too far.

Eboo Patel:

So, Bishop Easterling, I love the Baldwin line. I imagine you love it, too. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced. And so, I go see every August Wilson production that comes through Chicago, because that’s, you’re facing American racism, every decade of the 20th century. I have a friend, Brad Braxton, familiar to some of you, he told me this line, which sent chills up my spine. He said, “There are places in the Atlantic Ocean where the sharks still circle because they are accustomed to being fed.”

Eboo Patel:

I mean, we have to face this and we do not have to stay there. We have to face this and we do not have to stay there. So, to tell the story of America only from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Barack Obama is a lie. And it’s also a lie to tell the story that the oppressions of 350 years ago are exactly the same. So, how do we face the past in a raw and brutal way? How do we tell the stories of overcoming and achievement, and how do we help more people on the path in overcoming and achievement?

Eboo Patel:

It is simpler to say it than to do it. But here’s the thing. We can do it. Every kid who wants to join a basketball team should be able to join a basketball team. Every kid that wants to play an instrument should be able to play an instrument. Every kid that wants to have an arts educator should have an arts educator. There are things that we can do.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: Thank you.

Bishop Mike McKee:

So, a couple of questions, as we begin to wrap up, Eboo. The first one is, before I say it, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. But we’re asking each of our guests, all of them, the same two questions. How do you talk with people about racial justice who do not think, act, or look like you?

Eboo Patel:

Through stories. The Jesus way. And I think, to tell Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is such a great path on that. I mean, I watched this with my kids. I’ll tell you a story right now. I’m sharing a lot of the stories from my new book, We Need To Build, but here’s one of them. I live near this great concert venue called the Old Town School Of Folk Music. And I’m walking by the venue with my son, Zade. This is three, four years ago. And there’s a poster of a band that my wife and I really like called Tinariwen. They’re this roots music, West African band, many of them are Muslim.

Eboo Patel:

And the poster has them dressed in robes and in head wraps. And they’re set against the desert in West Africa. And I pointed the poster out to my son, Zade. And I said, “Zade, Mom and I are going to take you to see Tinariwen. We love this band. The music is terrific.” And my son looks at me and he says, “Dad, that’s ISIS.” We’re a Muslim family, like Muslim prayer every night, and really positive stories about Islam. And this is a poster at a concert venue of a band. And my son’s instinct when he sees dark men in robes and head wraps is, “Those must be Muslim terrorists.”

Eboo Patel:

Because there’s poison in the culture. Right? There’s poison in the culture. The culture is telling you that you are violent. That people who look like this are violent. Even if they have instruments in their hands. Look, I am 46. I’m 22, 23 years into building an organization. This happens to me very infrequently now, but it happened all the time growing up. And I watch it happening. I just watch the invisible poison in the culture seep in, even in Whole Foods, liberal, multicultural embracing America, which is where we live. And not every place is like that. That’s where we live. And it still has an effect.

Bishop Mike McKee:

So, as a follow up, a question we ask everyone is this. In the midst of all of that, how do you care for your own soul or your own spirit?

Eboo Patel:

Thank you for that. So, I’m actually good at that. And I’m lucky. I run an organization. I get to set my own schedule, largely. I have an unbelievable set of staff and colleagues. I have the unbelievable good fortune and grace of God to have basically invented a path and to walk the path that I’ve invented.

Eboo Patel:

That doesn’t mean that things aren’t hard sometimes and I don’t work too hard sometimes, or whatever, but I was raised thinking I was the luckiest person on Earth. I now think I’m probably the luckiest person for several planets around me, and I just walk that path. I get to live that way. I don’t think that’s a very good answer to your question. I totally don’t think it’s going to help anybody on this podcast, but let me put it this way.

Eboo Patel:

When something internal says, “It’s time to back off a little bit,” I try to get some time to back off. When I think to myself, “Boy, I really need to write down these thoughts.” I try to get some time to write down those thoughts. And when I find myself in a situation, going back to a high school reunion, thinking to myself, “I cannot believe that I was subject to conversations about popularity and clothes for however many years between middle school and high school, and I’m surrounded now by conversations about God and ideas.” I remember how lucky I am, and I’m unbelievably lucky.

Bishop Mike McKee:

Thank you. So, we really appreciate you being with us and sharing your thoughts, and as always, in any conversation with you, Eboo, always learn something and I’m always inspired. And I want to thank you for being with us. And I know that Bishop Easterling and Bishop Palmer may have something else to say, too. And I encourage them to do that as we begin to wrap up.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:

Well, thank you, Bishop McKee. I appreciate that. And two things that struck me, Eboo, as you’ve been talking to us, and I am very grateful for this conversation, and the ways that you have just inspired me. I look forward to that book, We Need To Build. Do I have that right?

Bishop Mike McKee:

Yes.

Eboo Patel:

You have that right. And thank you for saying that. I’m looking forward to talking to Methodists about that book.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:

Amen. Amen. We will give you that opportunity. But two things stick out for me. I think about the story that you opened us with. A professor sitting in the classroom amongst the students and wondering if anyone will notice. As a former prosecutor, I remember walking into a courtroom and having a judge bark at me to go back out and wait until my attorney showed up, and I was the prosecuting attorney. And I’ll never forget how that made me feel. So, we need to be able to tell our own stories of how we’ve been abused through bias. But then, I also hear you say we need to confront stories that continue to perpetuate bias. So, that’s what resonates for me and what I will continue to think about as I allow what you’ve taught us today to percolate within my own spirit. Thank you.

Bishop Gregory Palmer:

It’s great to be with you. It was a grace to meet you the first time and to occasionally run into you around the country. And thank you for today. I have never been in your presence, even if I was in the audience just listening, that I have not learned and grown and walked away with at least one provocative question. Thank you.

Eboo Patel:

Appreciate it.

Bishop Mike McKee:

Friends, please join us next time as we talk about choosing a path forward with Opal Lee.

Bishop Gregory Palmer:

Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling:

Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church: Conversations That Transform.