This post is in honor of Better Together Day 2018, an initiative started by the Interfaith Youth Core to promote greater inter-religious cooperation. I’m an alum of IFYC’s programs, and believe in the work they do to help heal divisions throughout our nation. For more information about #BetterTogetherDay, click here.
If you had told me, sitting in the sun outside a cafe in Urbana, Illinois in 2012, that in five years’ time Nazis would march through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia chanting “Blood and soil!” I would not have believed you. And if in 2012 you would have told me that the President of the United States would waffle in his condemnation of said march, or that a former Grand Wizard of the KKK would praise the president’s response, I would have believed you still less.
Yet here we are.
We live in a world aflame in political unrest, where ever-growing skepticism of our neighbor has resulted in (or been born by) a life governed by fear. Waves of renewed anti-Semitism and continued persecution of other religious minorities has spiked. Immigrants and folks with brown skin are seen as a threat to our safety and our livelihood, even though—despite the rhetoric of certain politicians and news outlets to the contrary—here in the USA you are far more likely to die at the hands of a neo-Nazi than a member of ISIS, or your job to be taken by a robot than someone from Central America.
Yet here we are.
Back in 2012 at that sunny cafe, I was a student at the University of Illinois. While at U of I, I had become heavily involved in interfaith engagement work through the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) and the campus interfaith organization called Interfaith in Action, where I served as Religious Literacy Chair. I had co-founded an organization devoted to promoting Evangelical Christians’ involvement in interfaith cooperation, and was beginning to grow a platform within certain online circles advocating for Christians’ proactive engagement with other faith groups. Perhaps I was naive, but I thought the need for such work would shrink over time, not grow.
Yet here we are.
My initial draw toward interfaith work came out of my own Christian conviction. I saw in the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount and the Great Commandment to love God and love one’s neighbor an imperative to build bridges across lines of cultural difference. In this particular case, that work focused on one’s faith, but I saw interfaith cooperation as merely one piece of a larger project— that of making our world less divided, not more, and of continuing to see and appreciate the image of God in all persons, especially those who looked and spoke differently than me.
Yet here we are.
I remember one of the first times I heard Eboo Patel, founder of IFYC (and, incidentally, a U of I alum), speak about his vision for interfaith cooperation. His approach to interfaith engagement was compelling to me. It didn’t elide theological difference, but focused instead on shared values— principally the value of service. The idea that folks from different religious traditions could come together around the shared value of service in order to address a community’s needs seemed to me not only sensible, but also indicative of a larger social reality; living in one of the most diverse nations on an ever-shrinking earth requires us to do a better job of learning to live, work, and thrive together.
This notion of interfaith cooperation wasn’t the only thing that Eboo opened my eyes to see. He also told of an aspect of the civil rights movement that I’d not heard before. He told of the way that the civil rights movement— and particularly the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.— was also an interfaith movement. Dr. King’s belief in nonviolence had been inspired by the thought and life of Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu. Dr. King even traveled to India in order to learn from Gandhi’s followers, and he used what he learned there to build a framework for nonviolent action that animated his social activism here in the United States. And of course there’s also Dr. King’s friendship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who famously marched alongside Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery.
Given that we recently commemorated the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, these stories have hung heavy on my mind these past few weeks. As we continue to strive to build a better world, it seems we need engineers and architects for a new era— those willing and able to mend broken bridges and construct new ones. It’s for that reason that I applaud the work of students all across the country participating in IFYC’s Better Together Day. They are those bridge builders, those architects, and I hope they continue to point for us a way in the midst of what can feel like a pretty bleak moment in our nation’s life.
In his sermon “Worship At It’s Best,” Dr. King, pulling from a sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick, speaks of humanity’s seemingly universal impulse to worship. “Whether he is a Buddhist praying in his temple,” writes King in his notes, “a Confucianist bowing in his shrine, a Moslem kneeling in his mosques, a Jew worshiping in his synagogue, or a Christian praising God in his Cathedral, man is a worshiping creature.” King goes on to ask what worship at its best might look like. In his answer, he quotes from the prophet Isaiah: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’” For Dr. King, our faith compels us to social action— this, he says is an aspect of worship at its best.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” (Isaiah 6:8)
Perhaps no one better exemplified the power and possibility of a world that works to build bridges of understanding across lines of difference than Dr. King. Oftentimes it may feel that there is no one to assume his mantle, that we are left wondering who will go for us.
Well, here we are.
CAMERON & SURPLICE 