by Eboo Patel
In my first year as a teacher, I had a school director who had barely any experience in inner-city classrooms. Whenever she made a suggestion to the faculty about how to teach, we would roll our eyes and whisper, “If she had any ground-level experience in teaching, she wouldn’t make so many stupid suggestions.”
I realized how easily I could fall into that trap. I could spend all my time meeting with program officers and speaking on panels and never actually run any interfaith youth programs. I wouldn’t get any personal experience of how the theories I was spouting worked in practice. I would make unreasonable demands on staff members who actually ran programs and give them advice that sounded good but had no traction. And sooner or later, people would say, “That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s never spent any real time actually doing the work.” And they would be right. The principals that teachers respect the most are the ones who have been effective in the classroom and have an appreciation for what teaching really takes. Following that model, I decided I was going to be deeply involved with every one of the IFYC programs in the early stages of their development.
The first challenge was to get religious leaders on board. I met with people at the American Jewish Committee, the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, and several other religious institutions. All of them were supportive of interfaith work in theory, and many had actually played a leadership role in adult interfaith programs, but they were universally apprehensive about involving their young people. “We barely have enough time to teach our kids about their own religion,” they would say. “It’s just not a high enough priority to spend that precious time exposing them to others.” Underlying all of this seemed to be a suspicion that interfaith programs would somehow make other religions so alluring that there would be mass conversions, that hordes of young Jews would trade the message of Sinai for the lotus position and the Bodhi tree. After hearing this concern over and over again, I realized why most interfaith organizations could gather religious leaders but could not convince them to bring their youth groups: there is such a strong emphasis in most interfaith programs on collectively increasing spiritual peace and social justice that the importance of strengthening religious identity gets drowned out. Religious leaders are not particularly concerned about losing their own identities, so they do not consider involvement in interfaith work a threat to them. But they have a whole different set of concerns when it comes to their youth.
A senior person at the Archdiocese of Chicago put it like this: “I love the idea of interfaith cooperation. We certainly need more of that in this world. But my primary concern is that Catholic kids become better Catholics. I want them to know more about the Catholic tradition and to be more active in Catholic practices and institutions. Look, I think my religion has the banquet. I agree that all religions are holy and have something to offer, but I think Catholicism has the feast.”
“I totally understand your position,” I told him. “The truth is, most religious people feel that way. I certainly believe that Islam has something unique and powerful that holds my allegiance, and I believe one of my most important responsibilities as a Muslim is passing down my tradition to the next generation.” I saw him easing a little bit in his chair. By proclaiming our strong commitment to our respective faiths, even intimating that we believed what we each had was superior, we had cleared the way for an honest conversation. Neither of us was offended by the other’s faith commitment. To the contrary, it had created a common bond—two men of deep but different faiths talking about religious cooperation.
“The problem is that today’s youths—Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever—no longer live in the so-called ‘banquet hall’ of their faith communities,” I said. “They are coming into contact with kids from different backgrounds all the time. If they don’t have a way of understanding how their faith relates to the Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Evangelicals, and others that they spend most of their lives around, then there’s a good chance that their religious identities will atrophy.”
He grew very attentive. I think he felt that I had put my finger on something important: how to maintain faith identity in a religiously plural world. I explained to him that one of the top priorities of the Interfaith Youth Core was to help young people strengthen their religious identities by creating a safe space where they could talk about faith.
“How do you make sure that they don’t just argue about who is going to get into heaven?” he asked me.
“At the IFYC, we call those the ‘mutually exclusive’ discussions,” I responded. “The truth is, our religious traditions have competing theological claims, and we simply have to accept those. There is little point in arguing about whether Hagar was Abraham’s legitimate wife or his concubine, or whether it was Isaac or Ishmael on the rock. Even when we feel like we have found theological common ground—like Abraham as the patriarch of Jews, Christians, and Muslims—we quickly discover that even those paradigms have their limits. There are a million Hindus in this country, and over three million Buddhists, and neither of those communities would be called Abrahamic. But they live in America, too, and we have to have a paradigm that includes them.”
“So what’s the IFYC approach?”
“We call it shared values—service learning,” I said. “We begin by identifying the values that different religious communities hold in common—hospitality, cooperation, compassion, mercy. We bring a group of religiously diverse young people together and ask them, ‘How does your religion speak to this value?’ One kid will say, ‘Well, I really admire how the pope embodied mercy when he forgave the man who tried to assassinate him.’ A kid from a different religion will say, ‘There is a story like that in my religion: when the Prophet Muhammad returned to Mecca, he extended mercy by forgiving many of the people who had waged war against him.’”
“Are you trying to teach the kids that all religions are the same?” he asked, again growing suspicious.
“Not at all,” I responded. “We are showing young people that religions have powerful things in common, but they come to those shared values through their own paths. Each religion has something unique to say about universal values through its particular set of scriptures, rituals, and heroes. This is a methodology that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of interfaith work. The Scylla is the notion that we’re all the same: I wash my hands before I pray; you wash your hands before you pray; everything else is details. We don’t believe that’s true. We believe the differences between religions are extremely important. As a devout Muslim, I certainly want to preserve the uniqueness of my religion. But you can go too far in that direction, right into the jaws of Charybdis, which is the thinking that religious differences are so great that we can’t even talk. The middle path, the only route to collective survival really, is to identify what is common between religions but to create the space where each can articulate its distinct path to that place. I think of it as affirming particularity and achieving pluralism.”
The Catholic leader sighed. “I’ve got to admit, it sounds great in theory,” he told me. “I’m just afraid kids today don’t know enough about their own religions to be able to tell the stories that you expect from them.”
“I did my doctorate on religious education programs. One of my biggest discoveries was that kids know a lot more about their religions than their teachers think. It’s a matter of what kind of space you create and how you ask the questions. That’s why the IFYC always gives young people the chance to actually act on the religious value they are talking about through a service project. It’s amazing how many faith stories of compassion kids remember when they are building a house together for a poor family, or what their insights into hospitality are when they are tutoring refugee children.”
I had much the same conversation at the American Jewish Committee, Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, Catholic Theological Union, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago Theological Seminary, and Council o
f Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. Once these various religious leaders felt assured that the IFYC had a sense of how precious religious identity is and had a methodology that both preserved their own religion’s particularity while building interfaith understanding, they were happy to give me the names of contacts in their communities who worked with teenagers. These leads were generally my peers—well-educated professionals in their twenties who volunteered as religious education teachers and youth advisers. I would explain that Emily Soloff at the American Jewish Committee or Father Demetri at the Greek Orthodox Metropolis had suggested I call about getting their youth involved in a new interfaith service program. I would give them the background and methodology of the Interfaith Youth Core and ask them whether they had young people who wanted to participate in our Chicago Youth Council. Inevitably, they would say, “Why don’t you come to one of my youth meetings and ask them yourself.”
And so I spent a lot of time in the basements of synagogues, churches, and mosques, telling teenagers about the Interfaith Youth Core. I was prepared for reactions ranging from skepticism to teenage boredom. Instead, I received almost unanimous enthusiasm. “You mean, we do projects together with kids from different religions and talk about our own faith and listen to them talk about theirs?” a high schooler at the Muslim Education Center asked me.
“That’s basically it,” I said.
“Man, what a cool idea,” she said with a smile.
I thought back to my own high school experience, and how faith was the one topic that we didn’t talk about at the lunch table because none of us knew how. I realized that these kids were excited about the Interfaith Youth Core because it was giving them a space and a language to talk openly about something that was such a big part of their lives but was too often hidden from others.
It did not take long to find eight young people to become the 2002–2003 Interfaith Youth Core Chicago Youth Council.
The CYC met on Monday afternoons at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Rogers Park. I bought kosher snacks on the way to meetings, drove kids home afterward, and prepared interfaith homework assignments such as “Find a faith hero in your tradition who exemplifies the shared value of hospitality and make a five-minute presentation on him or her next week.” Each year the CYC chose a service project where the members could put their shared values into action. One year it was working with homeless people; another year it was tutoring refugee children. The students would do the service project one week, then go through a guided interfaith dialogue the following week. When Mariah Neuroth took over the CYC in 2003–2004, she added a new dimension: at the end of every year, the CYC created an art project that embodied the group’s interfaith service learning experience. The year they worked with homeless people, they made a video scrapbook on different religious ideas of home. The year they worked with refugee kids, they wrote a children’s book that wove religious motifs through a refugee’s story.
The CYC was where I saw the IFYC theory come to life. I watched devout kids from different religions deepen both their own faith and their relationships with others. I was astounded by how theologically insightful young people could be during interfaith discussions. A Muslim participant asked a Christian why his church collected gifts for needy families at Christmas. “Well,” the Christian responded, “Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus, who was a gift to us, a people who needed spiritual guidance. The best way for us to celebrate Christmas is to follow the example of Jesus and try to provide gifts for the people around us.”
I watched the CYC members become interfaith youth leaders. They were interviewed about interfaith youth work on television and radio programs. They made speeches to gatherings of hundreds of other teenagers about the importance of building religious pluralism. And on more than one occasion, I watched them intervene when adult interfaith groups began drifting into useless theological and political disagreement, bringing them back to constructive discussions based on shared values.
The IFYC also continued to run the Day of Interfaith Youth Service program, bringing hundreds of religiously diverse young people from across the Chicago area together for a day of volunteering and interfaith dialogue. A group of curious religious leaders and parents always tagged along. “I wanted to come see why my child has been so interested in religion lately,” one said. “A year ago, I couldn’t force her to go to Hebrew school. Now she can’t wait to go. She keeps telling me that she has to learn more about Judaism so she can have more to say at the Day of Interfaith Youth Service.”
I could not help but think back to all the adult interfaith programs I had been to, which always promised that the youth program would follow once the adults built trusting relationships. “When are the kids coming?” I would ask.
“Next week,” they would tell me.
It turns out that the opposite logic was true. If you center the interfaith program around young people, the adults and religious leaders inevitably show up.
Even though the Day of Interfaith Youth Service was a one-time, short-term event, it had a catalytic effect because entire youth groups would participate and return to their community with a whole set of questions about their own religion and how it relates to the faith of others. Watching eighty Muslims perform the late-afternoon salat caused a group of Jews to wonder whether their religion had an afternoon prayer practice. They discovered that Judaism did have such a ritual, called Mincha.
After the 2004 Day of Interfaith Youth Service, the students at the Universal Muslim School, a largely Arab American institution located in a suburb just south of Chicago, started an afterschool group to study Muslim texts that speak to religious pluralism. They also tripled their participation in the school’s volunteer program. “The Day of Service changed their whole lives,” one of their teachers told me. “So many parts of it were new to them: that there were other Americans who were religious, too; that Islam has such a strong tradition of pluralism and service; that they had so much in common with Jews and Christians. They were truly never the same again.”
The first National Conference on Interfaith Youth Work was held at the University of Chicago in 2003 and attended by some forty people, including college professors and chaplains, student interfaith activists, and Chicago-area religious leaders. Each participant presented a paper on his or her own interfaith youth program: the research-based Pluralism Project at Harvard University led by Grove Harris and Diana Eck; the interfaith student council that Victor Kazanjian had established at Wellesley College; Joe Hall’s program in the South Bronx that brought Catholic and Pentecostal kids together to make films on sacred journeys; the E Pluribus Unum interfaith summer camp created by Sid Schwarz. By the end of the conference, we discovered that nearly twenty different projects were represented in the room. “All this time, I thought that I was the only person doing this work,” one person said, a hint of shock in her voice. Anastasia White had been right. There was something so resonant in the idea of interfaith youth cooperation that it had emerged independently in many places at once and was beginning to take a variety of expressions. We had the chance to turn this into a movement. The challenge was to create a spread strategy and a strong network.
We decided that the papers needed to be collected into a book, which we called Building the Interfaith Youth Movement (published in 2006). Melodye Feldman of the Denver-based organization Building Bridges for Peace suggested that the growing interfaith youth movement needed an annual conference. Others agreed. Somebody else pointed out that we needed one common program that everyone did together. I talked about our Day of Interfaith Youth Service in Chicago. Julie Eberly said she ran a similar project at Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston. “That’s the one,” said Patrice Brodeur, a longtime supporter of interfaith youth programs. And so the Day of Interfaith Youth Service was born, first as a national program and now as a global one.
A book, an annual conference, a national program: “Who is going to coordinate all of these things?” I asked. All eyes tur
ned to me. “Does that answer your question?” Patrice said.
Overnight, the IFYC had picked up a national brief. The pebble had been kicked off the mountain, and it was beginning to gather speed.
Shehnaz’s mother swears that she knew we were going to get married the first time she saw us together. Her family is from the same part of India as mine, Gujarat, land of merchants and mustaches. They practice the Sufi-tinged interpretation of Islam common to Gujarat: put a black dot on the lucky person to ward off the evil eye, visit the graves of Muslim saints for blessings, chant the shahada when the moon comes out. It has strong similarities to the Ismaili understanding of Islam. From the start, Shehnaz was very comfortable around Ismailis. She liked that the community was both unabashedly modern and devoutly Muslim; that so many of the women were professionals and in positions of community leadership; that we were putting so many resources into nurturing Islam’s cultural and intellectual heritage, from Middle Eastern architecture to Central Asian music. She sat with me while I prayed the Ismaili Du’a and always expressed great admiration for the work of the Imam.
One night, at dinner, I asked whether Shehnaz was interested in taking the next step. “I mean, your practice of Islam is so similar to the Ismaili understanding. Plus, don’t you think it would make things easier, in the future and all?”
She gave me a look that said I had made two missteps. The lesser crime was suggesting we were going to get married without properly asking. “There’s no romance in insinuations. When you’re ready to do it, do it right, and pray that the answer is yes,” she told me flatly.