Chapter 17
Cultivating Champions of Interfaith Action—United States
Who did you feed in Ramallah by not talking to Hillel? Who did you keep safe in the south of Israel by not talking to the Muslim Students' Association?
—Eboo Patel
RELIGION IS A POWERFUL FORCE IN THE WORLD. IT CAN DIVIDE US, causing painful and long-lasting conflicts, or it can help unite us. No surprise here. Too often, we hear the noise made by religious extremists and not the voices of the people who are united against them. Prejudice, ignorance, and violence among people of different religions feel widespread. Eboo Patel believes the solution is building sustainable understanding and cooperation between diverse religious populations.
Building a Core of Campus Champions
Eboo is passionately certain that the solution is not a program that will fall from Heaven, nor a methodology written in a book. It's about having enough interfaith leaders and champions of interfaith action who have learned the methodology of building and strengthening ties across religions and who can attract a large number of committed people to that cause. For Eboo, it's always about people. And not just about a few people here and there, running a program with a few like-minded individuals. It's got to be about involving enough people to form a tipping point. Enough people who, when connected together, become a movement.
Martin Luther King Jr. was twenty-six when he organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Gandhi was in his twenties when he began his peace-building work in South Africa. Jane Addams, the woman Eboo feels exemplifies citizens who build institutions to meet the challenge of their era, started Hull House (America's first homeless shelter) when she was in her late twenties. As we have seen in the past and again through the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings across North Africa, it is often the shoes of young people that leave the largest transformational footprints.
Eboo Patel was twenty-two when he created the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), and his trajectory is following a similar path to those mentioned above. Growing up as an Indian-born Muslim in Chicago, his early life was rife with racism, religious prejudice, and rejection. Having been a victim of religious intolerance, it would have been natural for Eboo to take one of two paths in life: to question why religion causes such viciousness and violence around the world, or to become an intolerant bully himself. He asked himself what would set him apart.
Eboo's core belief is that religion can and should be a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division. His Muslim faith, his Indian heritage, and his American upbringing have given rise to his bridge-building mission. So it often pained him to read or listen to the daily news because it seemed as if religious bigotry and the resulting conflicts were the main headline. Where was the other side of the story? Where were the people of different faiths and traditions who were working together to promote the common good? They must be somewhere—but there didn't seem to be enough of them to really make a difference. These questions inspired the creation of the Interfaith Youth Core and led to two solution-oriented thoughts: what if people of all faiths and no faith worked together to change the world, and what if students led this charge and campuses became the ground for a global movement of interfaith cooperation? What if we could prove that the twenty-first century can be defined by cooperation between diverse communities instead of conflict?
Eboo's defining moment came in college in 1995. A professor handed him a copy of an article by David Bornstein about Mohammed Yunus, who created the microfinance movement.1
I became fully interested in this guy who was at the center of a terrible system of poverty surrounding the worth of labor in Bangladesh and managed to see that the inherent social problem was access to capital. Instead of writing a book about it or starting a charity, he started a whole new system of finance to get capital to women in villages. He was a social entrepreneur. Well, I'd sit around dreaming of new solutions to social problems, but I thought the only career path open to me was being a professor, and all I'd ever be able to do was write about those ideas. But here was a person who was making a career out of solving problems in a pattern-changing way. That changed my life. I realized that is who I could be—not a professor but a social entrepreneur. I called that my moment of having an identity of a social entrepreneur. Consequently what we try to do at the Interfaith Youth Core is articulate the identity of an interfaith leader and then—following the path of Yunus—we say, “Listen, there's a problem in the world that we have to solve.”
Enhancing Your Religion Through Exposure to Others
IFYC was created to implement answers to Eboo's questions. Started in 1998 and incorporated in 2002, it began with the help of a Jewish friend of Eboo's and an Evangelical Christian employee. By late 2011, it had grown into a staff of thirty-five with a $4 million budget. It's always been centered around one crucial idea: Have students of different backgrounds, from different walks of life and religions, bridge the divide by working together in the service of others, learning about themselves through feeding the poor, working in a homeless shelter, or painting schools. From the beginning, service learning was to be the bridge that would lead to the creation of interfaith dialogue on a grand scale, eventually feeding a movement. Service learning and a focus on shared values continue as core methodologies for IFYC programs today.
One of the other methodologies that has since become core is bridging off current events, which have given the idea of IFYC a real boost that could not have been anticipated. Consider the election of U.S. President Barack Obama. IFYC used the president's history as a community organizer in Chicago working with Protestant churches, Catholic churches, and Muslim communities under the tutelage of a Jewish mentor to relate to the model that IFYC wants to spread. The story of the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York City, and the ugly discourse that surrounded it, provided a real lesson around the role of religious prejudice in our society and helped articulate the Interfaith Youth Core as an alternative and a solution. For Eboo, current events are opportunities to continually highlight the relevance of the IFYC message and to grow its existing programs. He sees them as just another way to build a society characterized by understanding and cooperation between people from different religious communities.
At the beginning, it was current events that had led Eboo to reason that “if Muslim radicals and extremists of other religions were recruiting young people, then those who believe in religious tolerance should also enlist the youth.”2 So he started to focus on college campuses where interfaith advocacy could take the form of activism. He figured that it could become a norm, much as women's rights now were in some parts of the world, and it could be as ambitious as Teach for America (a U.S. program committed to educational equity and excellence that has become one of the nation's largest providers of teachers for low-income communities).
In Eboo's mind, the only way to overcome destructive religious fanaticism is to create communities where human connection transcends differences of race, religion, and culture. He once told National Public Radio, “I recognize now that believing in pluralism means having the courage to act on it. In other words, action is what separates belief from merely an opinion.”3
Eboo defines IFYC's product as threefold. First is the message of interfaith cooperation. Second are the college campuses that articulate interfaith cooperation as a high priority. And third are the young people who see themselves as interfaith leaders and want to start interfaith cooperation projects. Cultivating these future interfaith leaders is one of Eboo's top priorities as they will be the backbone of the movement, the changemakers of tomorrow.
The hurdle is, it's not easy to find those young people. As Eboo explains it, part of the difficulty relates to the way that our education system trains people for certain professions; if you want to hire them you go to the specific type of school that trains them. If you go to medical school to become a doctor, obviously hospitals will go to medical schools to hire doctors. If you go to law school to become a lawyer, obviously law firms will go to law schools for new hires. If you are recruiting for McKinsey, you can go practically anywhere—every business school in America is training people to become McKinsey consultants.
The point is, there is a pipeline of talent coming into these institutions. But there is no pipeline of trained talent for interfaith leadership. People may have content knowledge from seminaries or from masters' programs in religion, but in the end, interfaith leadership is not just a matter of having the right content knowledge; it also requires demonstrating the ability to mobilize, organize, and inspire others and make a difference on a large scale. If new voices and visions are the products of IFYC, it is producing them by pioneering a market for interfaith action.
“Better Together” is a good example of such pioneering. It's a year-long campaign led by college students who want to take a stand for interfaith cooperation. The campaign has three goals: to empower students to lead activities that build interfaith cooperation on campus; to equip campuses to become places where a critical mass of students participate in interfaith action and conversation; and to spark a global movement of interfaith cooperation with college and university campuses at the center.
The campaign is also a way of training interfaith leaders who can mobilize, organize, and be the leaders of tomorrow. Joshua Stanton, who was an undergraduate at Amherst when he spent a year in formal training with IFYC, writes:4
I went from seeing interfaith work as a hobby to realizing it as a calling. I was a committed Jew, pursuing the possibility of ordination as a rabbi after college. In the year I spent working intensively with the Interfaith Youth Core, I realized that I couldn't be an effective religious leader in a religiously diverse country unless I robustly engaged with leaders—and congregants—of other traditions. I also realized that seminary education did not always provide a space for students and professors to study the differences between religious traditions in a way that led to productive strategies for interfaith engagement, or even clarity about the nature of the differences themselves. So, when I was a first-year rabbinical student, I founded a peer-reviewed academic journal and online forum, the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, to bring tough issues into the open and enable scholars, clergy, students, and non-profit leaders to engage with each other. The Interfaith Youth Core taught me how to transform an environment, such that our over 120,000 yearly readers and contributors from across traditions and institutions now have a space in which to guide their interfaith work with rigorous thought, dialogue, and personal discernment.
Seeing Similarities, Not Differences
Eboo would love to see interfaith cooperation become a social norm, just the way sustainability has become.
Thirty years ago protecting the environment wasn't a social norm, but right now, when we are done with our coffee, we will look for a recycling container. We have an internal social-cultural expectation of what we should do with a plastic or paper cup and we expect the business that we are buying it from to meet that expectation. That is what a social norm is. The same with social entrepreneurship—it too is on its way to becoming a social norm. People know what it means, they talk about it, people aspire to work in that field, it carries a sense of value. That is where I want to see the interfaith movement in ten years. In ten years, I want every college campus to have an interfaith program, just like you'd have a multicultural program, just like you'd have service days.
The future Eboo envisions doesn't stop there. His concept is huge and inspirational, but amazingly practicable at the same time:
I'd like those programs to be consistent with what we think of as the excellence of the Interfaith Youth Core: programs that are capable of turning our civil society around. College interfaith programs that have a chance to make a difference are ones that are led by small groups of students and involve large groups of students, where the college president should be able to shake the hand of his or her graduates and have a reasonable degree of confidence that those graduates have acquired interfaith literacy, have engaged in interfaith service, and have acquired interfaith leadership over their four years at that institution of higher education.
A population disconnected from parts of itself will not fight to protect the freedoms of all. It seems like a logical imperative to increase understanding between religions and nonreligious people to bridge the divide between people with different worldviews. In the face of national and global religious strife, it's time to take a stand for cooperation and prove that we are better together. Eboo believes that faith in the twenty-first century can build bridges of cooperation that are stronger than barriers of division. Once he gets the United States in shape, he will turn to the rest of the world.
Amen. Sign me up.