If a stranger called you and said she needed baby formula for her starving infant, would you go to a store and buy her some? That’s not a hypothetical. It’s a real question that a real woman posed to American churches in recent weeks, while the longest U.S. government shutdown in history cut food assistance for millions.

It was a real question, but the woman who made the calls does not have a real baby. What she has is a TikTok account, where her videos showing the responses got millions of views.

What would you do?

The woman goes by the name Nikalie Monroe.

She announced on TikTok a few weeks ago that she was conducting an experiment to see whether religious people really loved their neighbors. She looked up houses of worship on Google Maps and called more than 40 of them — mostly churches, but also a mosque and a Buddhist temple. In some calls, she played a recording of a crying baby in the background. She wanted to see if the people who answered would help someone outside their community. Her guess was no.

“I want to be proven wrong,” Monroe said in one of her first videos.

Most of those who picked up did not rush to help, according to a Washington Post article about the whole saga. At the Houston megachurch run by Joel Osteen, the person who answered the phone said Monroe could submit a request but it could take weeks to process.

Some did offer support, though. The folks at a mosque in Charlotte, N.C., a Buddhist temple in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a few Protestant churches across the South and Midwest all said they would help. One was Johnny Dunbar, 69, pastor of a small congregation in Kentucky. He got a pen and paper to write down what brand of formula Monroe preferred and said he’d get it himself if necessary.

The experiment not only went viral on TikTok, it became the subject of sermons and conversations in churches across the country. Some people criticized Monroe’s approach as duplicitous, and one Louisiana pastor called her a “witch” from the pulpit. (Monroe did not reply to a request for comment.)

The whole episode was a new twist on some very old questions: How do we live well together? What do we owe one another? And, in this divisive moment, how can we collectively mete out a better future?

Practicing pluralism

I spent last week discussing these ideas at a conference in France.

The Aspen Institute had convened a group of about 25 theologians and journalists to talk about religion’s role in public life. We didn’t cover the TikTok experiment, but as I returned home and discussed it with another journalist, I realized it was like a petri dish for our largely theoretical conversations.

One of our main topics was pluralism, or the coexistence of different convictions, ideologies and lifestyles. We considered whether religion enabled pluralism by calling people toward better, more generous versions of themselves — or heightened polarization by making people more insular, more tribal. It seemed to me that’s what Monroe had been trying to find out, too.

In a moment when America’s divisions seem to be growing ever more intractable, the theologians at the conference argued that faith could be a bridge.

“The central dilemma of our time,” said Tomas Halik, a Czech priest and philosopher, “is not between the left and the right, but between the surface and the depth.” Religion, Father Halik added, “can be a solution to the destructive culture wars,” if it can become “a school for a deep engagement with contemporary reality.”

Others acknowledged that pluralism was aspirational, something that requires work. “Tolerance is about exposure,” said Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, the president of Zaytuna College in California, the first accredited Muslim undergraduate school in the U.S. In an era of addictive algorithms and atrophying attention spans, he wondered whether we have enough exposure to those who think differently.

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love,” said Joel Halldorf, a Swedish theologian, quoting Jonathan Swift. In a lecture to the group, Halldorf also cited the parable of the good Samaritan, a biblical story in which two people, including a priest, ignore a person in need of help on the side of a road. Finally, someone from a sect known as the Samaritans, considered heretical to many in ancient Jerusalem, stops to help. It’s also a story that was invoked often in response to the TikTok experiment.

“Jews and Samaritans were divided by deep religious and ethnic hostilities, but Jesus casts the outsider — the Samaritan — as the moral hero of the story,” Halldorf said. “True neighborly love, Jesus suggests, ignores boundaries of belief and blood.” I asked him to send me a copy of his talk. Here’s an excerpt:

The theologian Luke Bretherton reads this story as a model for the church’s political life. When we meet the stranger, he writes, we can chose to kill, control or exclude him or her — but the gospel offers another way: to turn a stranger into a friend, and build a good life together with him or her … to live well with others is a practice that demands love.

… To meet the challenges of our time, people of faith must think theologically about religious pluralism — but we must also grow in love. This means going deeper, not just intellectually, but also in the wellsprings of spirituality that nourish the fruits of the spirit in our lives and communities. These fruits stand in stark contrast to the fear, narrow-mindedness and hostility that dominate so much of public life today.

I remember the first time I heard of pluralism. I was in my first year of college and reading Isaiah Berlin for a political science class. It cracked my world open. It’s hard to overstate how radical the idea was to me, a young religious girl, that many truths were possible, all deserving of attention and consideration and respect.

I’d lived my life thinking that the world was us — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and them. I remember once, at a strip mall in Arkansas, scanning shoppers for clues: “Are they like me? Or are they not?”

The antidote to that particularly binary way of thinking, I found, was exposure to people and places foreign to me. But I still find myself reflexively sorting people into categories, as most of us do, all the time. It’s something that implicitly biases me toward generosity and care for some, and less sympathy and more wariness for others. It’s something I’ve examined in response to this conference, and in response to the TikTok experiment.

It’s something I’m working on.

This article was written by Lauren Jackson and appeared first on The New York Times.