Days of Interfaith Youth Service

April 19th and 20th marks the 5th annual Days of Interfaith Youth Service, held in Washington D.C. by the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. Worldwide, these days are led by the Interfaith Youth Core of Chicago. Engage in service, dialog, and have fun making friends with peers of different faiths. Students looking for school community service hours are also welcome to attend. Habitat for Humanity will be there, allowing volunteers to help with a local construction project. Also, there will be a tree planting sponsored by the Earth Conservation corps on Sunday from 2-6. Space is limited for this event, so sign up as soon as possible. Click here for more information.

Yet Another Post About Hate Against Muslims

My apologies to all those readers who waited patiently through our brief hiatus of posts for our return, only to receive two of my posts in one week about hate against Muslims. Unfortunately, there is a lot to post about.

I was particularly bothered today when, upon reading the latest news, I found an article by the Associated Press about a Clinton staffer who resigned her position after forwarding a chain e-mail to friends and colleagues insinuating that Barak Obama is a Muslim who wants to destroy the United States by being elected to the office of the President.

That is not what bothered me, though. What bothered me was the paragraph that immediately followed, consisting of a single sentence:

"Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ and has never been a Muslim."

It seems to me that the author of this article has completely missed the point. The problem with the e-mail was not that Senator Obama is not a Muslim; the problem with the e-mail is that it equated Islam with subversive behavior and treasonous activities.

Whether or not Senator Obama is or has ever been a Muslim is immaterial to his campaign. If religion must play a role in the political discussion, although I often wish it didn't, let it be the path by which candidates discuss their personal stance on controversial issues, their attitudes towards others and goals for the future, their beliefs about themselves and the world in which we live. Religion is not a tool by which we can judge others based on our personal prejudices and mass stereotypes.


Full text of the article is available here.

Breaking the Presidential Mold: A Look at 2008

By Rori Picker, Associate for Interfaith Relations, RFP-USA

There is no place in the Constitution that states that the president of the United States must be male, white, and Protestant, but it is easy to see why one might think it does.

Since this country elected George Washington as its first President, 41 individuals have succeeded him in the role, each one male, each one white, and each, with the exception of one, Protestant.

These numbers are a harsh misrepresentation of our country as a whole. According to a 2003 estimate in the CIA World Factbook, 81.7% of the United States is white; 12.9% is black; 4.2% is Asian; 1% is Amerindian and Alaska native; and 0.2% is native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander. By that count, at least 8 of our presidents should have been of a race other than white by now. Moreover, half of our population is female, meaning that 21 women should have been elected into the Oval Office (or at the very least, 6 out of the 12 presidents who have been elected since women received the right to vote).

The religious statistics are perhaps even more surprising. According to a 2002 estimate, only 52% of Americans are Protestant. 24% are Roman Catholic; 2% are Mormon; 1% are Jewish; 1% are Muslim; 10% are other; and 10% are none. However, we have yet to see 1 atheist president, let alone 4.

Will the election of 2008 be different? It is still early, but already the media has been looking at three formidable candidates for the office, and none of them fit the mold. Barak Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have both been testing the waters for their candidacy while Mitt Romney has already announced his intention to run. Is America ready for a new public face? And in a campaign featuring race, sex and religion, which one will Americans find most objectionable?

It seems the answer might be religion. According to public polls, as many as 37 percent of all voters have said they don’t think they could vote for a Mormon for president — a higher number than you get when you ask the same question about whether people could vote for a woman or a black person.

Is this as far as we have come in the past 217 years? We boast of our freedoms and our progressiveness, but we have created an image of a leader so fundamental as to be incapable of being altered in two centuries.

Perhaps even more frighteningly: have we learned so little of our own past as to only replace one stereotype with the next? Have we fought for centuries to abolish segregation and give women the right to vote only to keep a man out of the White House because of his religious affiliation?

I don’t know who I am going to vote for yet. The election is still about two years away. All I know is that the person for whom I do end up casting my ballot will not receive my vote for being white, male and Protestant, but for being intelligent, insightful, and dedicated to working towards the betterment of this country and those who live within it. Perhaps if more people do the same, we will have taken the first step towards becoming the nation we proudly claim to be.

Government + Religion = Unsure Future?

By Rori Picker, Associate for Interfaith Relations, RFP-USA

Facebook, an online social networking service with a rapidly expanding membership has recently added a new category of groups to which its members may subscribe: campaign issues. Within these categories people have created groups for every conceivable platform addressing issues relating to social welfare, nuclear proliferation, and even religion. In fact, with a membership nearing 40,000 and still growing, one of the most popular groups to date is entitled, “Government + Religion = Disaster.” This Facebook group is only a small representation of what has become a widespread sentiment among the American public. Millions of people view religion as a source, if not the source, of conflict in the modern world and demand the removal of religion from the political process in order to pave the way for sustainable peace.

If religion is to remove itself as the source of conflict, it must become part of the solution. At the VIII World Assembly of Religions for Peace in Kyoto, Japan, over 800 senior religious leaders from across the world spoke in one voice and declared:

As people of religious conviction, we hold the responsibility to effectively confront violence within our own communities whenever religion is misused as a justification or excuse for violence. Religious communities need to express their opposition whenever religion and its sacred principles are distorted in the service of violence. They should take appropriate steps to exercise their moral authority to oppose attempts to misuse religion. What can we do as individuals? - Resist and confront any misuse of religion for violent purposes, including the promotion of religious stereotypes in sermons and in the media; - Become effective educators, advocates and actors for conflict transformation, fostering justice, peacebuilding, and sustainable development; - Draw upon our individual spiritual traditions to educate our members on our shared responsibilities to advance shared security; - Strengthen peace education on all levels.

To help accomplish these tasks, Religions for Peace - USA has made available themed papers on Confronting Violence and Advancing Shared Security, Conflict Transformation, Peacebuilding, and Sustainable Development, along with a toolkit on the Millenium Development Goals, and new resources will constantly be added.

Together we can ensure that Government + Religion = Peaceful Future.