Interview with Reza Aslan about his TV Show "Believer"

Interview with Reza Aslan

On your new show, “Believer,” you examine niche, sometimes extreme, global religious traditions. Do you think this is the best time for a show like this? It is the most perfect time possible. There is no medium on this earth that has more power to transform the way that people think about others than television.

You received some backlash after the first episode, in which you featured a Hindu sect that engaged in cannibalism, and critics called it sensationalist. You have to admit you couldn’t have filmed that without thinking, This is going to make good television. Of course.

It is actually a relatively brief part of the episode, and you come to a fairly profound conclusion about Hinduism, but people didn’t really talk about that. Do you think TV is an ideal place to educate people about different religions? Can it accommodate nuance? Look at what’s happening with Islamophobia or anti-Semitism: 1 percent of the population of America is Muslim. Two percent is Jewish. You could very likely be born, raised, grow old and die in America without ever once setting eyes upon a Muslim or a Jew. And so the only Muslims or Jews that you will ever be exposed to are the ones on television. If bigotry is a result of fear and not ignorance, then to me that becomes the medium through which to dispel fear of the other.

You were raised Muslim, but you briefly departed from the faith in your youth and ended up having an “intellectual conversion” back to Islam as an adult. What did that look like? I grew up in Iran in a fairly secularized Muslim family. We came to the United States, and for the first time I realized that my religious faith was an issue. This was a time of tremendous anti-Muslim and anti-Iranian sentiment in the U.S. because of the Iran hostage crisis. I separated myself as much as possible from my culture and religion and converted to Christianity in high school. Once you’re a Christian, that’s your “you belong here” card.

Apparently because you didn’t want people to know that you were from Iran, you used to tell people you were Mexican. Yeah, that tells you how little I knew about America. I didn’t realize you guys don’t like Mexicans either.

What brought you back to Islam? I started studying religion, and I quickly discovered what everyone who studies religion discovers: Underneath the externalities of these religious traditions, they’re all saying the same thing. The principal metaphors of Christianity no longer worked for me as I got older, so I started looking for other metaphors. I went back and studied Islam again, and I found the language that I was looking for.

What does your religious practice look like now? I have a Christian wife; I have twin sons, one of whom is convinced he’s Jewish, and one of whom, after he read the Ramayana, was like, “That’s it, I’m Hindu.” I have a 2-year-old boy that we just assume is a reincarnation of the Buddha in some way. So every Sunday, we get together and share one particular religious story, whether it’s of the Buddha or Ganesha or from the Gospel, and then we pick some value to learn from it, and then we, as a family, put that value into practice in our home and in our lives.

Because of your conversion to and departure from evangelical Christianity, do you have any insight into why so many evangelicals voted for Trump? The generous way of putting it is that Trump basically said to this group, “Vote for me, and I’ll get rid of abortion,” and so they did. A lot of those evangelical voters are one-issue voters. But let’s be clear: It’s not the case that 81 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump; it’s 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted for Trump. A recent poll just came out that showed that while support for a Muslim travel ban diminished in almost every single group in America since 2016, it has actually risen among white evangelicals. So let’s just call a spade a spade: You can love Jesus and still be a racist.

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 Interview has been condensed and edited.