DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
19 August 2008
The Interfaith Movement
By Gustav Niebuhr
For more than a century, some groups of Americans have been attempting to reach out to other religious groups, in hopes of gaining greater understanding and cooperation in their communities.
Gustav Niebuhr is the author of Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America. He is also an associate professor of religion at Syracuse University in New York.
Back in 1991, the rabbi at a suburban New York synagogue on Long Island posed a searching question to one of his lay leaders. Was there a group of Muslims nearby who might want to become acquainted with the synagogue’s members to gain some mutual knowledge across faith lines? For Rabbi Jerome Davidson, spiritual leader at Temple Beth-El in Nassau County, New York, it was not a totally unusual idea. For years he had been in charge of inviting well-known non-Jews — Protestants, Roman Catholics, occasionally American Muslims — to speak at his national rabbinic organization. But no such thing, he said, had been attempted on the local level. “It felt important to try that.”
It took time, but within a year some of Beth-El’s leading members had agreed to begin conversations with counterparts at the Islamic Society of Long Island, a mosque several miles away. They started off modestly, sharing information about the way their different faiths marked life’s great moments (What do you do at a baby’s birth? How do you celebrate a wedding?), then moved on to discuss theological principles in their sacred texts. Once they had really gotten to know one another, the Jews and the Muslims compared their differences over the Middle East — “the sophisticated stuff,” as Davidson described those discussions. By the time I interviewed him, for research for a book on interreligious relations, the dialogue was in its 15th year. “Does it make a difference?” asked Faroque Khan, the physician who served as the mosque’s president. Not globally, he said, but he added, “If I can help two communities understand each other better, that to me is an accomplishment.”
If this story seems unusual, it is because such encounters rarely make the headlines, which often seem reserved for stories of conflict, not cooperation, between religious groups. But the Long Island meetings fit within a pattern emerging in the United States. Even as religious differences are often associated with tension and violence in the news, collaboration among Americans of different traditions has been on the rise. The trend typically takes the form of regular meetings between members of different congregations, for formal conversations or shared work on social projects, such as running a soup kitchen or a literacy program for children. One study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Connecticut reported that among the congregations it surveyed — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and others — collaborative, social efforts had increased more than four-fold, to 38 percent of all congregations, between 2000 and 2005.
A Nation of Faith
Two facts help explain the trend. First and foremost, the United States is a religious nation, as measured by national polls. Americans value basic religious beliefs and practices, a feature of the nation’s life, past and present. In June 2008, the nonprofit Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released a massive survey of more than 35,000 people, reporting that 92 percent of Americans said they believed in God; 75 percent said they prayed at least weekly, many of them daily. The findings were consistent with previously reported surveys that upward of 7 in 10 Americans declared religion to be either “important” or “very important” in their lives. The widespread belief that faith in itself is valuable can be traced back into the American past. President George Washington declared in his Farewell Address in 1796 that citizens in a republic could not govern themselves and exercise their full liberties unless they possessed virtue. And civic virtue, Washington said, stood on religion and morality. (Notably, he did not specify which religion.)
Secondly, the trend toward interreligious cooperation is linked to the demographic shift the United States has been undergoing since the last few decades of the 20th century. In October 1965, after weeks of congressional debate, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation enacting a sweeping reform of immigration laws. The new law opened the doors to new immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America — an influx that diversified the nation’s religious landscape. The new Americans included not just Christians and Jews, both present on the continent since at least the 17th century, but also communities of Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, and others.
On a practical level, this immigration has meant that in large cities and their suburbs, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists find themselves rubbing shoulders in the same workplaces, college campuses, and neighborhoods. There are a growing number of individuals who want to bring these diverse groups even closer. Eboo Patel, an Indian-born Muslim whose family immigrated to the Midwest in the 1970s, wants to help break down stereotypes with conversation and activities in which these groups might intermingle. After college in Illinois and graduate school at Oxford, Patel founded the Interfaith Youth Core, based in Chicago. The organization works primarily on college campuses, signing up students to meet across religious lines, discuss core beliefs, and volunteer together on projects, such as repairing housing for the poor and cleaning up city parks. Patel, now executive director, says the idea is not to convert anyone to another religion, but rather to reinforce students’ religious identities while allowing them to discover ethical traditions that their faiths share.
The History of the Interfaith Movement
The essential idea of thoughtful dialogue among religious minorities in Chicago can be traced back to a singular, historic event on September 11, 1893. A special conference convened on that date as Chicago hosted the World’s Fair. Called the World’s Parliament of Religions, local Protestants convened the gathering to invite representatives of 10 different faith groups worldwide to Chicago to speak about their specific religious beliefs and practices. The event, which ran for about two weeks, became a national sensation as a public course in comparative religions. Thousands of people attended, including newspaper reporters who carried word of the sessions coast to coast. What particularly mattered was the attention accorded non-Christian speakers, especially two, a Hindu teacher named Swami Vivekananda, and a Buddhist monk, Anagarika Dharmapala. Each represented a religion Americans barely knew or understood. Both men impressed the crowds who heard them and readers who pored over regular newspaper accounts. Each of these South Asian religious figures called for dialogue and respect among the world’s faiths. Vivekananda, speaking on the parliament’s first day, declared the bell that rang in the opening session had sounded “the death-knell of all fanaticism.” We know, of course, that he voiced hope unrealized more than a century later, but for some his words retain an ability to inspire.
The parliament closed without a successor to carry forward its ideas. A broad interest in dialogue did not really begin to develop, either in the United States or Great Britain, until the mid-1990s. A centennial celebration of the parliament itself drew thousands of people to Chicago in 1993, a crowd sufficient to encourage establishment of a permanent organization to continue such international gatherings. The Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions (CPWR) has organized meetings in 1999 in Cape Town, South Africa; in 2004 in Barcelona, Spain; and the next is set for 2009 in Australia.
For many Americans, the important work in interfaith relations takes place at the local level, as in the Long Island example. Much has occurred in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Although the destruction wrought that day increased tensions between non-Muslims and Muslims in some places, that response was far from universal. In a number of cities immediately after the attacks — Seattle, Denver, and Washington, D.C., for example — Christians and Jews rallied to protect mosques from vandalism and reassure Muslim neighbors and coworkers. Longer term, the attacks prompted congregations to engage in dialogue with one another. Acting on their own, many American Muslims launched a series of open houses — “open mosque days” — to introduce curious neighbors to Islam’s basics.
To be sure, the trend described here is not universal. Many religious Americans, of all persuasions, do not participate in such events. Some are deeply skeptical, even hostile, about this dialogue, believing that their faiths alone subscribe to absolute truth. Opening religious conversations with other people, in this view, is a waste of time or worse. Under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which guarantees religious liberty to all citizens, such people are entitled to full protection of their beliefs and attitudes.
But as the Pew report cited above found, a majority of Americans are not so dogmatic when it comes to their faiths. And as I discovered in my research, a good many do want to know more about their neighbors’ beliefs and practices, and are willing to invest the time to find out. Many find inspiration within their own curiosity. But perhaps the best grounds lie in a statement written 41 years ago by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. An African-American Baptist minister, he is best remembered for leading the U.S. civil rights movement. But near his life’s end, he befriended an exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, then traveling in the United States on a peace mission. Nhat Hanh's plea for peace and reconciliation in Vietnam inspired King, who later nominated the monk for a Nobel Peace Prize. Around that time, King wrote an essay in which he asked readers to imagine humankind as having inherited “a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together.” King listed its inhabitants as Jewish and gentile, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu, calling them a family diverse in ideas and culture but one that “because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
