The G20 Interfaith Forum held in Cape Town last week must be one of the most impressive spectacles in world religion.
Every conceivable religious group was represented in colourful costumes, elaborate head wear, and a display of religious comity that would have impressed even the most hardened cynic.
Sitting there and waiting my turn it was easy to forget that murderous wars were fought among some of these groups, then and now.
After an annoyingly long delay (for these people, time is eternity as an Anglican archbishop once said), our panel was finally called to the stage to discuss the teaching of values in education.
I was the last of about nine speakers (nine men and one woman) but listened patiently to some dreary homilies and pretentious academic types.
By the time the mic reached me, I realised there was something terribly wrong and that these amply adorned believers had talked about education and values without almost any reference to the most tragic destruction of humans and humane values of our times, the genocide in Gaza.
The most televised war in history, some say, so nobody could claim ignorance.
I spoke as a Christian. Jesus was a pacifist, I told the audience, but he reserved particularly harsh judgment for those who hurt children.
If you offend one of these children, said the Prince of Peace, it would be better that a block of cement be put around your neck and you be dropped to the ocean floor. Haibo!
Now, with more than 50,000 Palestinian children murdered or maimed (and about one killed every 45 minutes), I wanted to know from the audience about their silence if not complicity on the matter.
How, I asked, do you teach values in the shadow of a genocide?
By now there was a rumbling in the audience, almost a sense of relief, as the elephant in the room went hurtling across the expansive hall of the international convention centre.
From my fundamentalist, evangelical upbringing, I long ago realised that conservative Christians can use the Bible to justify any preferred ideological position, and so it is with Israel.
“He who curses Israel”, I was taught since Sunday school, “will be cursed”.
In this twisted interpretation, the warning even applies to those criticising (cursing?) the Benjamin Netanyahu government whose leader faces warrants of arrest by an international war crimes court.
It is the same government accused of intentionally denying food to Gazans including the most vulnerable among them, children.
What an utterly disgraceful thing to believe and have the temerity to call oneself a Christian.
Unless, I suggested to the audience, the words of Jesus do not apply to Palestinian children or to Muslim children (not all Gazans follow Islam, though) or to those Israel is intent on exterminating from the region and from life itself.
Yet here sat the G20 Interfaith Forum without a squeak on this televised genocide.
You cannot effectively teach values through an official curriculum, I offered. That often goes by another name, indoctrination.
You teach values by what you stand up for, by the choices you make, and how you constitute your panels.
Whether you intend it or not, I told the audience, when you have a panel of nine men and one woman on display here, you are teaching values!
Now the rumbles of agreement got louder in the audience only to be met by some of the most patronising comments by the men on the stage.
You did not say anything about Israel, said a young Jewish man after the session.
I do that all the time, I told him, but that this talk was about the children of Gaza given the sheer scale of this human atrocity inside an asymmetrical war.
As one who served as patron of both Jewish organisations and Muslim schools, I regard all of these as my people.
The pain of a Jewish mother who lost a child on October 7 2023 is the same to me as that of a Palestinian parent whose child was bombed into eternity while waiting in a food queue. I cried twice. It was clear that I was not getting through to the Jewish man.
Perhaps that is the point of this glamorous parade of world religions, I thought.
The best way to stay together is to take off the table any issue that could split them apart.
And yet I heard value-laden words such as solidarity, for example, from an impressive speech by a leader from the Orthodox churches.
“Jesus went about doing good,” a church elder half-jokingly told two of us young high school souls. “You chaps just go about.”
Perhaps like the Interfaith Forum with its stunningly loud silence on the genocide in Gaza even as the group jets off to its next international venue.
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