Who owns God?

All the world loves a lover, right? Perhaps in purely human terms that cliché is true, but plenty of people who profess to love God rely on their devotion to justify rejecting believers of other faiths.

Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service has produced generations of American diplomats. At the university's branch in Qatar, Jesuit Ryan Maher recently spent two years teaching theology to young Muslims, many of whom will become diplomats for their own countries. He trusted that interfaith dialogue would defuse the misunderstandings between Muslims and Christians, and aid diplomacy.

He explained his disappointment in The Washington Post. Maher quickly learned that our American custom of religious tolerance was anathema to devout Muslim students.

"Many of my students approached discussions of faith and religion with an intensity and passion that differed in kind, not just in degree, from what I had grown accustomed to in the United States," he writes. Their faith was "the outward manifestation of an inner relationship with the divine" -- something intensely personal and compelling.

Most Americans, he believes, "presume that different groups of faithful people approach their religions in the same way football fans approach their favorite teams: I cheer passionately for mine, you cheer passionately for yours, and we all agree to play by the rules and exhibit good sportsmanship."

Instead, "A person of Muslim faith and a person of Christian faith ... are more like two men in love with the same woman, each trying to express, safeguard and be faithful to his relationship with his beloved."

In the Judeo-Christian world, we tend to differentiate the kind of emotion we feel for God and the passion we express for another human.

Or do we? Love can be possessive and exclusive. A man in love desires his beloved for himself. Women have increasingly fought the notion of the wife as property "owned" by her husband. By extension, the commandment against coveting thy neighbor's wife condemns treating one's own spouse as a personal possession.

It is not uncommon for devout believers to claim God exclusively, as a personal possession: my God, my Lord, my Redeemer. The competition among religious faiths can have a hidden agenda: that God belongs more to my faith than to yours.

Religious conflict stems from the human habit of viewing God from the wrong end of the telescope -- as the object of our faith.

Restoring the true relationship of God and humankind requires us to acknowledge that we do not own God and that our faith in him is his gift; it is God who owns us and gives us our faith as a gift.

When all believers acknowledge that they do not own God, we will have leveled the playing field for effective diplomacy.