How To Find Common Ground When You Disagree About the Common Good
This essay is the first installment of a new weekly series by Christianity Today.
How do Christians live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control?
In 2020, Tim Keller and I coedited a book titled Uncommon Ground. Our project convened a group of evangelical and evangelical-adjacent friends to reflect—as the subtitle said—on how Christians can live faithfully in a world of difference. Since then, however, I’ve rephrased the question for my own work. We should be faithful, yes, but also neighborly. And our world is not just host to real difference of belief; it’s also a world we don’t control.
I owe this subtle but important reframing to my friendship and work with Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America. The most important interfaith organization in the country, Interfaith America does not advance a soupy multiculturalism that pretends that all roads lead to heaven or that our differences don’t matter. It takes religious particularity seriously, identifies conflicts and tensions created by that particularity, and works to find common ground across religious differences.
Interfaith engagement that doesn’t devolve into a soupy multiculturalism is difficult—and necessary in our diverse democracy.
I met Eboo nearly a decade ago. On that first meeting, we talked about the challenges of having young kids, busy travel schedules, and public writing commitments, as well as the importance of interfaith cooperation. Since then, we’ve spoken, taught, written, and built together.
As a Muslim, Eboo does not believe in the saving work of Jesus Christ—and that difference between us is no small thing. We have other differences too: Eboo tells more stories than I do. I drink alcohol, and he doesn’t. His language is usually more colorful than mine. We are friends in spite of our differences.
What does this kind of friendship have to do with Christian engagement in the world? Almost everything.
About John Inazu
John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University. His latest book, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect, was published by Zondervan in 2024. Other books include Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (2012) and Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (2016). Inazu is the editor of a volume on law and theology published in Law and Contemporary Problems and co-editor (with Tim Keller) of Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference (2020). Prior to law teaching, Inazu clerked for Judge Roger L. Wollman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and served as an associate general counsel with the Department of the Air Force at the Pentagon. He publishes a weekly Substack, *Some Assembly Required.
