My wife was the head resident of a girls dormitory when I was in Seminary at Campbell University in North Carolina. I would commute every day to Southeastern Baptist Seminary, 100 miles round trip, for the three years as I was getting my Master’s degree. It was a godsend, because we got a one bedroom apartment with a windowless storage room that we converted into a small bedroom for our daughter, and a few years later, our second daughter was born and shared it with her.

I’m sorry we lived there, though. After living with a dorm full of undergraduate girls, we never wanted to send our daughters to college, or at least a Baptist college.

This was in the late 1970s, during President Jimmy Carter’s term, and the school helped supplement its enrollment with a healthy number of students from other countries.. Many of these came from the Middle East. We had two sisters from Iran in our dorm. Their father was a wealthy manufacturer. And two other girls we got to know were from Jordan.

The Muslims were all part of what the Baptist schools called “International students.”  There was an Internationals Club, which provided social connection and support to students that came from Haiti, Africa, India, the Middle East and Latin America. We went to their dinners with our students from the dormitory and always got heartburn, because it was pot luck dinner at the UN. In the South, you always have to be polite and eat a bite from every dish, so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. So, we ended up eating a plateful of good food that ended up in conflict when it tried to get together in the digestive system.  

We got very close to those young women, as they were so far from home, and they usually stayed on campus during summers and holiday breaks. It was a good experience, because we had never met any Muslim people at that time. I didn’t realize the respect they had for Jesus, whom they honored as a great prophet, and many Muslim people say, “May his name be praised,” when they speak of him. They do not believe in Jesus as we Christians do, but they were relieved to discover that we were religious people.

That was back before 9/11 and all the terrible, painful history of this 21^st century, and social media had not yet enabled us to hate nearly everyone we’d never met. The sisters told us their parents were afraid for them to come to America. They had seen the old “Starsky and Hutch” detective shows on television, and their families thought all Americans rode around in their vehicles shooting guns out the windows of their cars. Well, at least back then, we were not doing that so much.

So, they came to Campbell College, as it still was then, in rural Buies Creek, North Carolina, bucolic and dotted with little Baptist and Methodist churches and sleepy villages and farms. They called home and excitedly told their mothers and fathers that we were “people of the book,” and religious, and not so violent as our media portrayed. My wife carried the Jordanian girls home to Savannah one Spring break to stay with her parents, Republican Southern Baptists, and they had a grand time together.

One day, I was sitting in the apartment the college provided, studying, and my wife, rushed in to tell me, “The Iranian sisters are crying hysterically in the parlor. They said their father gave them spending money in an account to live on for the year and they don’t have enough to make it to May.”

That was in November. We both believed then, and still do now, in helping others if they are in need. “What do you think we should do?” My wife received $400 per month and an apartment as compensation. I was working part time leading music and working with the youth group at a small church, and I worked full time as a carpenter for a home builder in the summers. We had a toddler and a newborn baby soon to come. We had everything but money, but a need is a need.

“I have two twenty dollar bills in my drawer. Let’s give that to them., she suggested.” “Okay.” I mean, why even go to seminary to be a pastor if you hate outsiders and don’t help strangers when they’re in trouble? Like I said, it was a different time.

She left for a while. When she came back, she was laughing. “What on earth is so funny,” I asked. She tossed the two rolled up twenties on the couch.

“I asked them to tell me how much they had. They were crying, but they said, ‘Father put $100,000 in the bank for both of us for school and living expenses. It’s only November and we only have $40,000 to live on until May.’” This was 1978. Chat GPT tells me that adjusted for inflation, $100,000 in 1978 would be worth approximately $496,896  and some change now.

I said, “I think they can make it.” We laughed and laughed and rejoiced that we didn’t have to lose those two twenty dollar bills. Typical undergrads who couldn’t handle money. Turned out they’d made a couple shopping trips to London, bought a sports car, and next thing they know, money was tight.

Living together in a dorm, of course, we were all forced to be around differences. People didn’t live in their bunkered houses then with giant screens and computers instead of relationships. You talked to people.

We would have the Muslim girls to our apartment for meals. They were far from home, and talked about their mothers and fathers and what their towns were like. We’d talk about our families, their families, home, and, like all college age girls, classes, boys, makeup, music and fashion.

As I had read a little of some translation of the Quran I said, “I’ve studied Eastern literature and I’m interested. Tell me more about your faith.” And they would tell us what they thought, and I would explain what Christians believed, very relaxed. I said, “Well, I think it’s always important to try to listen and understand someone else’s views.”

And they said, “You know, the Christian students here are very nice. And they try to witness to us and tell us about Jesus. But they never eat lunch with us and they never invite us to go to the movies or go with them anywhere.”

And we talked about that. I tried to make apologies for the rudeness and unkindness of the students. “Well, of course,” I said, “You know, college students are not at the greatest of maturity levels.”

“They tell us God loves us, but then when we don’t accept it, they walk away from us like we are strangers. Some of them tell us we are going to hell and then don’t speak to us again.”

As we talked, one of the Jordanian girls, said, “Maybe if they would get to know us, and care about us we might be more interested in what they say about this love of Jesus.” I had to agree. Because they lived with us, we came to know them, not as “Iranians” or “Jordanians” but as human beings. We were their friends, a husband and wife and a little girl they talked to and played with.

America began as an experiment. Every nation in the world that came to colonize brought an official religion with them—Catholic, Anglican, Separatist, Calvinist. They wanted freedom from the others, freedom to be who they were, without the heavy hand of what James Madison said always ended in persecution. Authoritarianism never wins the soul, even if it jails the body and outlaws thought.

The Founders trusted in what Jon Meacham called in his book American Gospel a delicate balance of Enlightenment reason, unhindered moral and religious faith, and a free conscience. What you believed could no more be coerced than you could make grass grow by yelling at it.

So, I fast forward to now, where scared people pop out of rabbit holes of stupid notions and fear and clamor for absolute certainty and control. And the quickest way to have absolute certainty is to get rid of differences. Not by persuading, or living a convincing life, but by laws and punishments and deportations and cruelty. I live in a state that constantly tries to legislate prayer back into schools, not because it will make students love God more, but to reassure the voters back home. They forget that the embodied witness of a real Christian teacher who loves them might do that. But all state sponsored religion seems to do is make a mountain into a mudhole.

James Madison got lit up for religious liberty after hearing the voice of a Baptist preacher in Virginia preaching from a jail cell. He’d been locked up for not having a state license to preach, which was another way to say, he wasn’t an Anglican. The problem of a Christian nation was always, “Which Christians?” And that’s what all nationalist movements eventually run aground on.

Christian nationalism is a thinly veiled version of theocracy, masking anxiety and fear of the other with arrogance. It is led by pseudo intellectual influencers, blathering theories of predestination, neo-Puritanism, and theocracy while they drink crafted beers. But inevitably, they sound a lot like those immature kids witnessing to our Iranian girls. Or worse.

If we become that kind of country, we will never again know the beauty of sitting around a small dining table, two Baptists and their Muslim girls, and talking about God. Not if we have to work all this out with yelling and violence and disinformation. There’s no room for reason and patience with each other. Instead of trying to find practical solutions and understanding, we have regressed into that terrible adolescence of winning and losing as the only mark of our life together. Or worse, potentially with a christian ayatollah from the New Apostolic Reformation.

During that time, about the fall of 1978, when our second child came, the clouds of fundamentalist theocracy were gathering in Iran. The Shah, who was put in power by Winston Churchill, President Eisenhauer, and the oil companies, had westernized the country fast, but also brutally. Our girls were afraid of SAVAK, the secret police, who they said even spied on them in the U.S. You could disappear suddenly, even before the Ayatollah came along and made it worse.

And then came the hostage crisis, and they watched their world crumble into a religious theocracy. The Ayatollah and the militant theocrats overthrew the Shah and began a war on the rest of the world, and their backward extremism as the only option. One, ironically, not all that different that we would probably be if certain misguided Christians had their way, with Christians running and ruining everyone else’s lives.

I hope we can find that original, beautiful, fragile balance again, that navigates around common respect, decency, and a sense of universal rights for all, and how we behave to one another, not what we think differently than the next fellow. I hope Separation of Church and State survives all the scaredy cats and would-be theocrats. We tried that with the Puritans in Massachusetts, and the same thing happened that always happens: people get jailed, people get beaten, people get hanged on the square. The only way to stay out of that bloody inevitability, the Founders decided, was to live with the differences. They constructed a country where conscience is left alone and we figure out common public virtue based on common ethics, a respect for one another, and leave religion alone to morally shape us to do right by one another.

They put it in the Bill of Rights because they were afraid, well, afraid of what we seem to have become right at this moment: rude, scared, stampeding cattle, stepping all over one another without any manners or respect.  That Bill of Rights, that First Amendment, is the way back. Thomas Jefferson, who was as clear as a bell on religious liberty, put it succinctly:

The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subjects to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  [Query XVII, “Religion”]

Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to gather peacefully and ask for change. Maybe, on the other side of this insanity of right now, we might learn how to sacrifice for each other, find common ground as much as we can, and sit around a table together again and speak of deep truths. Leave the eternal sorting out to God and leave one another alone. I know we can’t bomb it into submission. And you can’t finally pass enough laws to force one another on the finer points of doctrine. Look at Iran. In fact, look at most of the countries of the world. Look at European Christian history. 1500 years of official state Christianity should have taught us something about hangings, Inquisitions, and trying to force people into trusting belief.

Not long ago, before the bombing in Iran began, I had already been thinking about those sisters, and the other girls we got to know. I have wondered what happened to them since then, our Muslim girls?

Where are you, girls?  I judge they’d be in their sixties now, probably mothers, grandmothers even. They were cut off from home in 1978, and a year later we left for doctoral studies and Texas. We lost track of them. Their worlds flipped on their heads, from one reality to another one, both authoritarian worlds, but a different one now, worse. Those with all the advantages before, gone , but now what?

I thought about that tragic, terrible bombing of a girls school. Maybe once, long ago, some of those little girls might have eventually come here, and would have been in a Baptist college with a couple of dorm parents, eating supper and talking about home, telling us about their mothers and fathers and their hopes and dreams for a good life. And hearing about Jesus, uncoerced, but free to decide for themselves. And if they stayed, we’d find a way to live without the insecurity of trying to bring everyone around by laws and cultural coercion.

Did our girls stay or go home? Are they still alive? I’ve tried to find them but have been unsuccessful. I’d love to have them over again, just to eat, and talk, and hear how it has been since that time, so long ago, when we gathered in that tiny apartment in Hedgpeth Women’s Dormitory, unafraid of one another, safe, and loved. We spoke unhurriedly, unhindered, but in the safety of an apartment where they knew we cared about them and nothing bad would happen. And here, where religion was very important to most of us, but never allowed to punish people for having different views, they could speak freely. And in the mystery of freedom, we could try to get at the truth of all things.

But like I say, that was a different time.