Chris Stedman is an Interfaith and Community Service Fellow, Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and Managing Director, State of Formation at Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue. He is also a columnist for Huffington Post Religion and blogs at NonProphet Status. He tweets from@ChrisDStedman. The following has been reprinted by permission:

This year, two notable controversies have been brewing in Tennessee: a proposed bill that would forbid educators from using the word “gay” in the classroom, and a court battle to determine whether or not Islam is a religion. (The verdict? Islam is in fact a religion – for now, anyway.)

These two issues may seem unrelated, but I believe they’re actually symptoms of the same problem – our nation’s historical difficulty with those who are seen as disrupting the status quo. Intolerance against Muslims and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) individuals isn’t exclusive to Tennessee; with a fever-pitched debate over Park51 (or the “Ground Zero Mosque”) and headline-grabbing concerns about anti-LGBTQ bullying, these issues are a national concern.

Last month, I went to Tennessee for the first time. I spoke at Vanderbilt about the need for the religious and the nonreligious to find better ways of engaging with one another and identifying action-oriented shared values, sharing some of the experiences I write about in my forthcoming memoir, (F)a(i)theist: How One Atheist Learned to Challenge the Religious-Secular Divide, and Why Atheists and the Religious Must Work Together (working title, Beacon Press 2012).

AAIM Meeting

As I discussed in a previous post, I recently moved to Austin Texas and started sampling some of the local community events here. This past week I attended my second meeting of the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries (AAIM). The meeting was organized as a collection of small table discussion groups. The topics for the evening were the Cordoba Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero in NY City, and how to respond to the fear of Islam surfacing in our society.

First, some general observations about the people I talked to there. Many of them were not presently part of any religious church or organization. They attended this interfaith dialogue because they felt a longing for the warmth and sharing that took place at an event like this. Several people mentioned that they viewed participating in this type of respectful interfaith dialogue as a very meaningful spiritual practice for them.

Many people felt that the emotional controversy over the Islamic Cultural Center is starting to wane. Any news story has a natural lifetime for remaining on the front pages before starting to fade from the public interest. This story, however, seemed fade away faster than one would expect given the strong emotions surrounding it. Why might that be happening?

Rabbi Michael Lerner has helped lead a growing chorus of American rabbis who are voicing their support for the Park51 Islamic community center (often mislabeled the “Ground Zero Mosque”) in Lower Manhattan. His video of support, featured here, is a call for people of all traditions to recognize the holiness in each other. It also touches on the singular hope that Americans have of honoring each other’s freedoms and affirming each other’s beliefs.

Please join Rabbi Lerner in doing the same! Whether you are a rabbi or a nun, a lay leader or proud humanist, the need to protect religious freedom in America has never been more important. Religious Freedom USA, the organization that first featured Rabbi Lerner’s video, is quickly becoming an interfaith movement to support of Park51 as a praiseworthy center that must be protected as an expression of religious freedom.

Religious Freedom USA, of which I am proud to be a founding member, has started a petition in support of Park51. It affirms,

Since the first pilgrims reached the shores of Plymouth, America has shone as a beacon of religious freedom, illuminating the path to liberty for the oppressed from every land, in every generation. Extreme criticism of the proposed Muslim community center in lower Manhattan is an affront to the religious freedom that our Founding Fathers fought to secure. We stand by our belief in freedom of worship and freedom of expression and consider the Park51 community center to be an expression of both. We are proud to unite behind it as a symbol of religious freedom.

Join the movement. Religious freedom is either guaranteed to all or safe for none. It is a cause vital to the entire Tikkun community, as Rabbi Lerner has made so tremendously clear.

[To learn more about this topic, check out Rabbi Lerner's post on the ADL's opposition to the mosque and Josh Stanton's previous post on the controversy.]