Raising Up Interfaith Leaders

The interfaith and ecumenical movements need to raise up young people who understand how to delve into differences of faith and belief while also focusing on grassroots justice work.

Too often, interfaith dialogue is approached through a single avenue between commonalities or differences. All the while, social activism is seen as a second step made possible only through commonalities between faiths.  In both of these models of dialogue differences are seen as impotent: nothing creative comes out of them.  The real challenge is to see difference in faith as sites of social activism. By seeing differences as sites of social activism (such as the current conversation from various faith communities regarding immigration reform and gay marriage) a deeper relational consciousness can arise. The relational conscious that we need today ought to be robust enough to fight the sense of complacency and nihilism that arises when people become simply “okay” with the way things are.  This is a task for theologians and activists – or theological activists and activist theologians.

The Student Christian Movement USA upholds the ability of individuals and communities to critically reason together and to engage in democratic exchange as important to sustaining a just and loving nation.

Building this “Beloved Community” is the challenge of all interfaith and ecumenical organizations working for peace and justice.  The Student Christian Movement USA (SCM) is a nascent movement of young people across the nation seeking to do both theology and activism – across and within these deep lines of theological and political difference.  Its National Leadership Conference (April 12-14 2013) will train and develop young people to be leaders in this work.  The SCM seeks to build a movement of young people who understand their theological commitments to themselves and more importantly to others. The SCM knows that any sustainable movement has to face these theological and political differences head-on to demonstrate how conflict can be theologically creative and constructive while also being a deep resource for justice. Theological differences can hold and bolster deep friendships between people of differing faiths.  Together, these people can work toward ending poverty while also understanding the religious “other.”

The challenge that faces us is not only increasing fragmentation of people of differing faith, but also declining collaboration.

Two years ago I sat in a small Mexican-American Presbyterian congregation in San Antonio, Texas.  I was meeting with a congregant to talk about her family scholarship fund that helped pay a student’s textbook fees at a local community college.  We had recently met with the local high school counselor and all the logistics were set in place.  As I chatted with the congregant, I could see that she was wary about the amount of work it might take to get this scholarship up and running.  I placed the papers aside and we began to talk about the importance of the scholarship, and what it might mean to a young person to have book fees taken care of.  Yet, in the middle of the conversation the congregant told me that she would rather not do the work necessary to sustain the scholarship, telling me that if other family members didn’t want to help with the work then she was fine with the way things were.

The congregant’s stress on keeping the scholarship up and running seemed to become complacency with the status quo.  The problem of fragmentation and lessening cooperation that justice-oriented people of faith face is in part resulting from the non-profit world being pitted against itself for funding. The hard work of interfaith activism takes place in an arena where we are at times fighting ourselves. This is both a reality of the non-profit world – and yet, is being overcome through collective impact initiatives. We do not have to accept traditional models of non-profit organizing. On the other hand, the difficulty of mobilizing and organizing people into relational models of community is not an easy task. This is a deeper reality about our national sense of community. But our isolation from each other and deeper alienation from our sense of community can be bridged only by opening ourselves again into deep relationships. This vulnerability requires faith differences in politics as part of the conversation.

Two weeks before the 2012 election I sat with an Upper West Side Lutheran congregation and spoke with them about the juncture between faith and politics. I used James Baldwin’s response to William Buckley as a starting point. Baldwin contested the reality of the American dream – primarily because he knew America as a promise un-kept, still waiting to be fulfilled.  This conversation of race and racism in politics is not so far away from the conversation of religious difference and politics.

In other writings, Baldwin speaks of a duty to achieving our country. He talks of those handful of committed folk working for King’s beloved community as “lovers,” but this is not a romantic, easy getaway.[2] It’s messy. At times we are unsure of the future, but we are committed to each other and the vision worked out between us.

Our duty is to name this those obstacles which keep us from accomplishing Baldwin’s call, overturn them, and create something new – a beloved community.  Baldwin’s words resonate with my upbringing – which grew out of Emersonian “Self-Reliance.” Individual self-determination is key in forming a faith identity that can be a bulwark for one’s activist commitments.

The SCM’s National Leadership Conference is a time when young people can begin to develop these faith sentiments and explore what it means to have such a democratic sensibility. It is a place where we foster democratic exchange, love justice and deepen our faiths.

[1] http://scmusa.org/2013leadershipconference

We’ve Got A Brand Problem

If I ask you what the human rights, civil rights or environmental movements are about, you likely can give a semi-   coherent description that sounds something like what your neighbor might say if we asked her as well. The interfaith relations movement, on the other hand, has no defined brand. (Some people working squarely within the movement actually even giggle a bit when I try to even use the term “interfaith movement.”)

It’s a fluid network of people and organizations working to advance tolerance, understanding and genuine respect for the religious “other” (plural) and the positive appropriation of religious diversity. It has emerging centers and hubs in NGOs, academia and the foundation world. In the U.S., it has some leading luminaries like Eboo Patel, Diana Eck, Welton Gaddy and Bill Vendley, to name just a few that I have learned from. It has also has less visible architects like Lynn Szwaja, Philip Clayton, Jennifer Peace and Heidi Hadsell. But overall it lacks definition and gravity and falls short of being a “movement.”

So what is wrong? Because the need for a movement for religious cooperation has never been greater. It appears we’ve got a brand problem. It’s the name, stupid.

What Do You Call It?

Speaking about social change, Cheryl Heller recently said, “If it is true, as has been said, that all change begins with language, then it is equally true that the inability to change begins with language as well.”

If the movement for religious cooperation, as we might call it, wants to get out of the mud, it has to address its serious name problem. “Interfaith” is such a plastic word that it doesn’t mean much of anything. The word is used by people with distinct faiths engaging with others of distinct faiths (what we more technically call “interreligious” in the field). The word is also used by the “spiritual but not religious” set and those with “multi-spiritual” or “multi-religious” identities. Few understand this fact yet, but for the latter there are even “interfaith” ministers and interfaith “churches” where people who concurrently hold multiple affiliations can find community with the same. (I say “concurrently” so as not to confuse, because according to Pew Forum approaching one half of all people in the US change their religious affiliation during at least one point in their life).

The problem is that some of the folks — all using the same word, “interfaith,” mind you — don’t want to be caught dead with the others. Not a very nice thing for a bunch of folks who are supposed to be spiritual or religious, is it? Most often it is the single faith/institution folks not wishing to congregate with the multiple-affiliation folks, because it challenges the integrity of the boundaries, authority, and truth claims that they hold dear.

In short, some folks think we are all following different paths up the same mountain to essentially the same peak. Others think that, while we might all be on paths, those paths are certainly not the same and the mountains are quite distinct.

This tension is situated in the competing assumptions about the meaning and place of sacred texts, traditions, and histories of traditions and their relationships with that of others. Not everybody can bracket (or not, as it may be) the truth claims of their own tradition(s) in the same way as others. And these truth claims in religious talk are about the very core of the meaning and purpose of life. The labels we choose, therefore, carry more gravity, more hidden assumptions than what appears on the surface.

Add to this the whopping 20 percent of the American population that is now categorized as “nones and nons” — folks who are religiously very independent (even to the point of not having any faith) or who aren’t “faithed” but are somewhere in the blender of things that is labeled “interfaith.” Or, in contrast, add the wide swath of Christian Evangelicals for whom “interfaith” is the simply the shorthand way that you talk about positioning your Christian faith for marketing to those of other faiths, and, well, you’ve got some serious confusion as to what we are talking about when we say “interfaith.”

Something Has To Give

Terms like multifaith, multireligious, intrafaith, interfaith and inter-religious each have nuanced technical meanings in the field (that is, if you believe there is one). But that is a useless fact to the average ear. Those words too often appear everyday in print as though they were synonyms. They are not. We need a way out.

People should have a right to identify themselves as they wish, as long as it is not offensive. Self description is a matter of justice. Since we can’t ask one group to start using a new term — like “intra-spiritual,” “multi-spiritual,” or the like — I think we may need to cede the term “interfaith” to the small but growing number of people who see faith, religion and spirituality as boundary-less enterprises of exploration and who allow for multiple affiliations. And the more narrow technical term “interreligious” needs to be co-opted to cover the broad arc of things that are multi-, inter- and intra- for -faith, -religious and – spiritual. I wish there was a more satisfactory solution, and perhaps there will be soon with some new things on the horizon.

A Turning Point

We are at a turning point in the “interfaith movement.” Focused non-profit organizations, contributing foundations and academic centers are well formed enough now that they are going to give shape to the movement and its public nomenclature going forward.

Eck famously demarcated “religious pluralism” as the positive appropriation of the fact of religious diversity and championed it in the academy and in public fora. Today, finally, the American Academy of Religion has formally recognized what has become increasingly unavoidable: the legitimacy of interfaith and interreligious studies as a work area, an idea Eck championed as its president several years ago. Rather interestingly, this year the AAR will focus on religious pluralism and include a new group, the Interreligious and Interfaith Studies Group. Another such sign is the fact that that the Association of Theological Schools passed in the last year an accreditation requirement that seminaries and theological schools, in effect, need to account for how they are preparing their leaders to deal with the religious “other.”

Some of the conversations in November in Baltimore at the AAR will begin to answer the many questions about “what do you call it?” Though the term coining is likely to come from the field itself, the massaging and refining may happen in the academy. And the job of branding and positioning is one for all of us.

Religion, faith and spirituality are sensitive conversational material. In America, we privatize our religious experience and hold as sacrosanct our rights to have whatever belief we wish, in interest of protecting everyone’s beliefs. The subject matter — like politics — is even seen by many as taboo in polite conversation. But at the same time, we need to have tools to speak publicly about our religion, faith and spirituality in constructive ways that reduce tensions and build social cohesion. This will require getting us beyond our silos and language fumbling.

It starts with exposures and experiences with and education about the religious “other.” It is advanced by some generally common understandings about what is labeled what. Language is integral to social change. And religious cooperation or interfaith relations will not advance as a field without dissipating some of the current linguistic beclouding.

So what do we call it when two people constructively engage with one another about religion, faith or spirituality? As for me, for now, I will just call it “progress.”

Some further treatment on meaning of the words in this essay is found in opening chapter of ‘InterActive Faith: The Essential Interreligious Community-Building Handbook‘ (Skylight Paths, 2008).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-donald-heckman/why-the-interfaith-movement-must-rebrand_b_2849432.html

 Rev. Donald Heckman

The Potential Impact of the New Saudi-Sponsored Interfaith Center in Vienna

The question is no longer, “Should governments foster interreligious action?” but instead, “How should they do it?” And  then, “What happens when they do?”

Governments have been helping to advance interreligious dialogue for many years, particularly since 9/11. They have an    increasing interest in the enterprise, especially given the way religions are manipulated in global conflicts. Qatar, Norway, Kazakhstan, Jordan, United States, Indonesia, Denmark are but a few of the countries with interreligious initiatives.

The interfaith field is fledgling. Though the modern interfaith movement had its harbinger in the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, interfaith work and organizations only began to come to life in the 1960s with organizations like Religions for Peace. Despite some shining examples to the contrary, the field today is under-funded, ill-coordinated and un-strategic. In contrast, the movements for civil rights, human rights and environmental justice each emerged in roughly the same time frame and became widely publicly recognized and defined fields. Why? They came to be anchored by a plethora of well-developed non-profits, academic centers, donor bases and even, finally, enjoyed government support.

For interfaith work, government involvement has often began and ended with the hosting of conferences and exchange visits, halting at the level of restrained observation and conversation. That is a necessary early step and valuable for advancing understanding and education, but the real promise for the field to become a field is in bringing government-scale funding and gravitas to fostering interreligious action. The involvement of multiple governments — with resources, not just platitudes — will create a global political climate of expectation for religious tolerance.

The stakes just changed in that regard. The world’s newest and perhaps boldest center for interreligious engagement formally opened on Nov. 26 in Vienna, Austria in an elaborate inauguration ceremony featuring high-level religious and political leaders at the Hofburg Palace. Backed by Saudi Arabia with the support of Spain and Austria, the King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue fulfills a vision of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, for fostering “religion as enabler of respect and reconciliation.”

KAICIID, as it is called, is not just another NGO in the emerging field of interfaith relations. First, it is the most well funded enterprise of its kind, with tens of millions of Euros in support from the Saudi government alone for first three years of outfitting.

Second, KAICIID (pronounced “ky-sid”) will be integrated with the United Nations in its activities and promises to move beyond just “head-talk” dialogues toward fostering action-oriented projects in education, health and other areas. It showcased many of the kinds of organizations that it might partner with in the future in best practices workshops on its inauguration day.

Just how its relationship with the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations – now interestingly with Abdulaziz Al-Nasser of neighboring Qatar at the helm as the High Representative — will play out will remain to be seen. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon was clear in his opening remarks at KAICIID’s opening that the two entities would have to work together. The UNAoC has leaned heavily toward the cultural pole on the continuum of religion and cultural, perhaps because it is more beholden to a wider array of member states’ interests, many of which find culture conceptually safer ground for engagement. KAICIID looks better equipped and ready to tackle the role of religion.

The Saudi generosity should not be looked at like a gift horse in the mouth, as it too often has been. The Saudis have a number of leading philanthropists like Mohamed Abdul Latif Jameel and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal who have been exemplary in giving away millions in private support to interfaith initiatives without an inkling of promoting any brand of Islam or Saudi political view being advanced in the process.

Unfortunately, much of the initial reporting on KAICIID has fixated on the conditions for religious freedom and gender parity in the major sponsoring country. Such challenges give little or no appreciation for the complexity of political conditions in Saudi Arabia and what would be necessary to transform and mitigate those concerns, nor respect for the brave diplomacy of His Majesty King Abdullah’s reform efforts to date. With a small and religiously diverse board, there is enough DNA in the governance design of KAICIID that the good intentions of the Centre should be received for what it is that they are on their own terms. Besides, none of the countries fostering interreligious dialogue today has completely clean hands when you consider the interreligious tensions found on their own soil.

For example, even with the respected model of religious freedom in the U.S., the wheels of justice and fairness sometimes take time in helping people to live up to their highest ideals. The much challenged Islamic Center in central Tennessee — subject of a recent CNN special “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door” — just publicly opened last weekend after more than a few challenges over several years. And former periods of religious phobias and discrimination — against Jews, Catholics and Mormons — are not so far back in history. Religious tolerance and freedom is a struggle everywhere. It is a matter of degree, discovery and complexity. It takes time and effort to make changes.

For evidence of KAICIID’s sincerity in making space for difficult questions, one needs look no further than Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran’s inauguration ceremony remarks. He openly reminded his esteemed colleagues that the Holy See, a Founding Observer, is very “concerned about the fate of Christian communities where their freedom is restricted.” The Vatican is concerned about the welfare of Christians and reciprocity, and they did not feel inhibited from saying so, even with glasses still clinking in the opening festival.

The measure of success for KAICIID will be not only in creating a space where difficult concerns can be aired with integrity, but also in its programmatic outputs and outcomes. The first major project of KAICIID — a joint effort with UNICEF and Religions for Peace — to advance child survival rates through multi-religious efforts at nutrition delivery in Africa is a hopeful sign of its potential. What unfolds in the coming months and years will ultimately show the value of government involvement in the emerging field. Cardinal Tauran said it bluntly and with knowing humor at the beginning of his remarks, saying slowly and with emphasis “we are being watched!” Indeed, you are KAICIID.

with Rev. Dr. Karen Hamilton, General Secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches in G8: The Camp David Summit, May 2012.  See p. 220-221

http://www.who.int/pmnch/media/news/2012/20120518_G8_newsdesk_frenk.pdf

(World leaders pose for a group photo at the G8 summit in Deauville May 27, 2011. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer)

By Aaron Stauffer and Rev Bud Heckman, May 17, 2012

Vladimir Putin is sitting out this year’s G8.  Why is it easy to skip all of a sudden?  Is the sizzle gone from these meetings?  The US suspiciously moved from a high fanfare and public Chicago doubleheader with NATO to the quiet retreat at Camp David.  Is there not anything meaningful and constructive left to talk about at these meetings?

Religious leaders think so.  Critical human development issues matter to billions of believers, and these summits are a way to hold governments accountable for their role and remind the faithful of the necessity of their own moral commitments.

With the deadline of the Millennium Development Goals drawing itself nearer each year, and the likelihood of unfortunate shortcomings in reaching them, the leaders of the G8 and G20 Summits hold an even more important role to play.

Religious and interreligious leaders from across the world are gathering today to urge and challenge these leaders to consider prioritizing the voiceless and marginalized – the poor, women, and children.  On the eve of the 38^th G8 Summit in Camp David, Maryland, the leaders of diverse religious traditions – ranging from Buddhist, Baha’i, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Zoroastrian, and others – are gathering today to speak with a moral voice and refresh their own commitments to the solutions.

This gathering demonstrates the potential of religious institutions and people of faith and goodwill to be a voice for justice and advocacy movements.  In the face of economic, food, and human security crises, leaders of religious communities hold a unique responsibility to turn their ear toward the downtrodden and their voice toward pinnacles of power.  They must focus on changing the macro systems that structure and guide our communal and individual lives.

This gathering is not only a moment to hold publicly accountable these leaders of the world’s eight largest economies, but also a moment to affirm what all religious traditions might deem as the common good. Where they have deeply held and widely shared values, they can speak with a strong moral voice and reaffirm their own communities’ commitments to work for peace with justice.

Soberly, it is important to begin by acknowledging the all too frequent misuse of religion for ill in this world as one of the mitigating factors.  This interfaith leaders’ summit marks a coming together that both urges and challenges the G8 and G20 leaders to uphold the political claims affirmed in past “G” meetings and offers guidance to them from theological and religious traditions that proclaim the hope-filled possibility of a better world.

Religious communities must speak to the pain that the current crises have waged upon individuals and their communities. This necessitates challenging the “G” leaders to focus on economic reform, regulation, and stability and on food and human security and poverty alleviation.  At the same time, the religious leaders are challenging themselves and their communities to own and locally live out the values of uplifting and transforming the lives of those who are the least and the last.

Religious leaders believe we are at a critical juncture where political, humanitarian, and economic decisions of the “G” summits hold powerful influence over billions of lives and the well-being of, most especially, the poor, women, and children.  Maybe retreating to a cabin in the woods is just the place where President Obama and his guests can “get real” about what really matters.

by Bud Heckman

How do we know when we havearrived in the interfaith movement?  When religious pluralism is normative?  When religious differences don’t cause conflict or even concern?

Bud Heckman and Stein Villumstad

New Routes. Peaceful co-existence: a faith issue, January, 2011. Volume 16. Uppsala, Sweden.

http://www.life-peace.org/resources/publications/new-routes/2011.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/11/a-new-era-partnerships-advisory-council-faith-based-and-neighborhood-partnerships-pr.

Mary Rosenblatt grew up Jewish, she married a Catholic and her children are “exposed to both faiths.” In her adult life, she has become particularly drawn to meditation as practiced by a local Buddhist circle. If she participated in a survey about religious identity, how might she be portrayed?  And what about her kids?

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has just released a survey entitled “Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.” that attempts to map changes in religious affiliation in the U.S.  It follows on the coattails of the important “U.S Religious Landscape Survey” conducted by the Pew Forum in 2007.  If read in cross-tension with the “American Religious Identification Survey 2008″ released by Trinity College in Hartford, one can begin to see a complex and diverse picture of faith affiliation for Americans, as well as some patterns of change.

One key result is that perhaps as many as six in ten American adults have changed their faith tradition. Nationwide surveys are certainly important, and getting statistics about changing religion is also important. But thinking about the problems with this survey is perhaps as important as the information that it provides.

The first important problem with both surveys is that they do not allow for the likes of Mary Rosenblatt. Is she Jewish, Buddhist, Unaffiliated or Other?  The survey questions assume that she is only one of these, and so asks “What is your religion?” in the singular. Of course, Buddhists, Baha’is, Sikhs and others who think of their “religion” as a faith or those who view themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” might not make it through the early stages of the questions gauntlet either.

(Photo: A Tibetan Buddhist monk at Washington’s National Cathedral, 19 Oct 2007/Jim Young)

Others who because of life circumstance, e.g. inter-marriage, geographic transplantation, or cultural expectations, may think of themselves as being multireligious or somewhere in-between, are equally off the grid. In the ARIS study an unusually high number of Asians were unwilling to identify their religious identification, perhaps because of the imposition of Western presuppositions and categories.

If the first problem is a misunderstanding about how religion is lived out by many Americans, the second problem is that not all religious Americans speak sophisticated English.  In fact, many of those attempted to be questioned for the Pew study were dropped out of the interviewing because there was a language barrier or they “did not confirm their religion.” Scholars of religion and immigration have detected the increase of religiosity amongst new immigrant groups in America: religion serves as an organizing force, houses of worship as community centers, often across religious lines. Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim newcomers, not to mention Latino Christians and Russian Jews, find themselves increasingly identified with their faith tradition when they come here. Yet this segment of the population is largely left out of the Pew survey because of language.

Mentioning these other faiths leads to the third major problem. The survey claims to speak for American religious trends, but focuses on Christians. Researchers set aside another 4% before the survey started because they belonged to small groups, other world religions, other faiths, or because they merely moved around within the broad stroke of the unaffiliated.  What would happen if Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Hindus were included in this survey with equal numbers?

(Photo: Mosque in Atlanta, 25 Feb 2007/Tami Chappell)

As the ARIS study is more apt to lead one to discover, after sifting through the weight of the data, there may be more yet hidden from our maps of knowing than heretofore realized.  It shows that the number of people refusing to answer the survey or declaring no religion (atheist, agnostic, or searching) has more than doubled since the 1990′s.  These two categories of people now account for one in five Americans.  And the geographic breakdown shows that this phenomenon, while concentrated in the West and Northeast, is widespread and now is evident even in the deep South.

With President Obama recently joining an interfaith prayer service the morning after his inauguration, and with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships claiming that they will work with all faiths, national surveys conducted by organizations like the Pew Forum must at least acknowledge that their surveys are about Christian Americans, or reconfigure how they approach their sample audience.

(Photo: Woman attends Mass by Pope Benedict in Washington, 17 April 2008/Jason Reed)

What else can we see in these set of surveys? The growth in unaffiliated respondents is the overriding story.  According to Pew, four of every five becoming unaffiliated reported that they were raised in a religion as a child. But of the former Catholics and former Protestants – where Pew concentrated its analysis of research – few of those who became unaffiliated reported a strong faith as a child.  Further, three-fourths of them cite both the view that “religious people asbeing hypocritical, judgmental, and insincere” and the view that“many religions as being partly true, but none completely true” as factors at play.  And half of them give this outlook as an important reason for having become unaffiliated.

But much remains unknown. Perhaps the most important missing factors are the changes one makes within a faith -say from Jewish Reform to Orthodoxy. These changes are substantial, in terms of how one dresses, who one lives and communicates with and how one lives ones life in both public and private. While the change between a liberal Christian and a liberal Buddhist may go unseen by anyone, the move from Jewish Reform to Jewish Orthodoxy could not be missed by anyone.

Likewise, a person changing from being a Methodist to a Presbyterian because they have moved or married may be captured by the way these surveys are structured, but these moves are often uneventful and give false impressions of the “churn.”

(Phoito: Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis meeting in New York, 21 Nov 2008/Chip East)

In fact, allowing for a picture of the pluralism that may be within the individual and, in some ways, within a tradition is not in the cards yet for the designs of these surveys.  It is a little like looking at a puzzle table in its very early stages.  The pieces are there, and perhaps there are some connections, but it is not clear that they will fit together.  Worse yet, the box cover is not to be found, and whether it provides a picture worth looking at once it is put together is still unclear.