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"Better Together"

One of the best parts of my job as President of the Interfaith Youth Core is meeting inspiring young people who are bringing their peers together across the lines of faith to make their campuses and communities a better place for everyone. Today, I want to share with you a few stories of these young people.

Let me start with a young Christian leader, Greg, from my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Last year, when the tragic earthquake in Haiti affected millions of people, Greg knew that his campus group, Interfaith in Action, had to do more than watch the news. Greg, who had attended Interfaith Youth Core’s previous conference on a special scholarship for outstanding leaders, took everything he’d learned there and proposed a bold goal: he wanted to bring together a religiously diverse group of students and community volunteers to package over a million meals to send to Haiti.

Interfaith in Action partnered with the Salvation Army and got to working. One weekend last April, they gathered over 8,000 religiously diverse volunteers and ended up packing over a million meals to send to earthquake survivors in Haiti. 12,000 more than a million, to be exact.

They did more than package meals, though. Throughout the weekend, they asked one another “Why do you serve?” and explored the inspirations to serve from different traditions. As they were volunteering together, they were building bridges across faiths, showing the world what can be accomplished if we come together to serve the common good.

Nine hundred miles from Chicago at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the friendship of two interfaith leaders has left a lasting impact on their campus.  Rachel is a young Jewish woman who attended Wesleyan University and was an alumna of Interfaith Youth Core's College Fellows Alliance. Her Muslim friend, Nadeem, was also an alumnus of the program.

Now, Jews and Muslims form friendships on college campuses across America all the time. But what makes Rachel and Nadeem's friendship an interfaith friendship is not just that they come from different faith traditions, but also that they took the time to find common values between those traditions. What makes them interfaith leaders is that they took the time to act on those values.

The common value they found was service and the common practice they discovered was fasting. In each of their religious traditions, they realized that by forgoing food, they more closely understood those who live in poverty every day and they felt called to help ease those people’s struggle. Rachel and Nedeem realized that the bridge between service and fasting within their respective traditions also happened to be a bridge between their two different religions.

When he was an IFYC Fellow, Nadeem organized a fast-a-thon on campus during the holy month of Ramadan to promote understanding and service. One year later, when Rachel was an IFYC Fellow, she built off Nadeem's event—and the insight she gained from their friendship—and organized an interfaith fast-a-thon during Ramadan. The event engaged not only a full quarter of the Wesleyan campus—800 students, who fasted for a day and donated their meals to a community soup kitchen and food pantry—but also the event engaged the broader Middleton, Connecticut community. The local Rotary and Kiwanis clubs skipped lunch at their meetings for one week and donated their money to the local shelters. Several members of local churches and faith communities did the same. Through this initiative, Rachel and the campus' interfaith leaders raised over $11,000 for their local pantry.

These students made it clear that this event is about more than being hungry together. It is about appreciating the shared value of service illuminated through their common fasting practices and acting on it together.

Rachel told me, “Fast-a-thons caused me to connect personally with the contribution I'm making and to reflect on the issue of hunger, not just for the five minutes it takes me to make a donation, but for the entire day.” Nadeem agreed, saying: "The fast-a-thon is a perfect demonstration of interfaith in action. I'm not OK that our neighbor is hungry, and neither are you. Let's do something tangible about it together."

The Fast-a-thon at Wesleyan continues even though Rachel and Nadeem have since graduated.  Leadership has transitioned to students of other faith traditions who are trained in interfaith leadership. The event has grown into a successful and sustainable program, from raising $4,000 its first year to raising $17,000 for local causes and mobilizing 1,400 students to participate in its most recent year.

I’ll finish with one last story, the story of a young woman from Maryland who has been an interfaith leader since she was fifteen years old. Aubrey learned about Interfaith Youth Core when she was watching a morning show three years ago. She saw interfaith leaders being interviewed about their work, and realized that what those young people were doing was important to what she’d seen on the news about religions not getting along. Aubrey knew she wanted to be a part of it

She met with a local Imam, who introduced to her to a young Muslim named Ziyad, from her local community. They got together, Ziyad and Aubrey, and organized an interfaith council in their city, calling it Frederick Interfaith Youth. They talked to people at their high school, Aubrey’s Catholic church, Ziyad’s mosque about why it was important to do things together and then made it happen.

Over the next couple years Aubrey and Ziyad organized a series of interfaith service projects.  One year, they staffed a soup kitchen on New Year’s Eve, a notoriously difficult evening to get volunteers. They’ve landscaped houses for a non-profit that services mentally ill in conjunction with dialogue about why it was important for them in that activity. The year President Obama was inaugurated, Aubrey and Ziyad led a service trip to Washington, DC for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, beautifying the Anacostia River.

And they didn’t stop there. Aubrey formalized a partnership between her Catholic church and a local mosque, bringing together the two communities in her town. She never forgot that just as she had heard about the Interfaith Youth Core one morning on TV, others needed to hear about what she and her group were doing as well. Aubrey and Ziyad told the world about their story, reaching out to media to spread the world. When there was an op-ed in the local paper criticizing youth involvement in interfaith work, Aubrey wrote to that paper talking about why she felt it was crucial for youth to be involved in interfaith cooperation and why she was inspired to do exactly that as a Catholic. Aubrey is a freshman in college now and is already becoming an interfaith leader on her campus. 

One of the greatest things about young leaders like Aubrey, Rachel, Nadeem, Greg and others is that they’re always asking Interfaith Youth Core the question, “What more can we do? How can we keep building this movement?” I’m thrilled to share with you the news on our latest campaign. We call it Better Together. We hope it will accomplish just that for the whole country.

The Better Together campaign asks students to do three things. First, speak out about the importance of interfaith cooperation in the world and on your campus. Second, mobilize your peers to participate in interfaith action on a social issue that close to your heart. Third, sustain these efforts on your campus through leadership transition and further interfaith action.

I’m so looking forward to telling you all about the stories that come out of this campaign. I know that students across the country are ready to show that, in America, we don't discriminate against people of any religion. In America, we will not be divided by faith. In America, everyone has a place. And in America, we are better together.

Conversation with Eboo Patel

Daniel Pawlus: Eboo, great to have you here today.

Eboo Patel: Good to be here, Dan. Thank you.

Pawlus: I’m reminded of our first meeting three years ago. You were one of our first Muslim guests on “30 Good Minutes” and I think we’ve come a long way with this program with really consciously addressing interfaith dialogue and interfaith issues. I thought we might start by asking the question: where do you think people are at with interfaith literacy in general?

Sherre Hirsch: And define it, because we need help with that.

Patel: Well, I define interfaith literacy as an appreciative knowledge of people’s different religions, including your own. The purpose of interfaith literacy is to give us the type of knowledge that would help us come together from different religious backgrounds. I think there are three parts to this. Number one, what I call knowing the theology of interfaith cooperation in your own religion. What are the scriptures, the stories, the heroes that would inspire?

Hirsch: That is so needed. So many Jews know more about Buddhism than they know about Judaism.

Patel: And part of, I think, why Jews are attracted to Buddhism is because there are impulses within Judaism, the theology of interfaith cooperation, of reaching out within Judaism. It exists in Islam, in Christianity, in Hinduism. So knowing that theology within our own faith would inspire us to reach out and I think is important. The second thing is there’s a wonderful history of pluralism and tolerance in our nation. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching together in Selma. George Washington having a Jewish clergy person at his inauguration. Thomas Jefferson owning a Koran. This is the history of pluralism in America. We ought to know that. And finally, I would say we ought to know the shared values between different religions. How do our different world faiths—Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism—speak to mercy? How do they speak to compassion? How do they speak to service? Those are the three things that I think make up what I would call interfaith literacy. I’m convinced that if we had widespread interfaith literacy in America we wouldn’t have challenges between different religions.

Hirsch: I want to touch on point two that you made because I think I’m always confused about it and I’m always trying to press it, this difference between tolerance versus pluralism versus respect. What are those lines? I think you have a good sense of that, Eboo.

Patel: I think that these are all good things and I would put all in the same universe of positive interaction and attitudes between different faiths. I think pluralism is what I would call more robust than tolerance. Pluralism, the way I would define it, is building a society where people from different backgrounds live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty. It’s respect for people’s identities. It’s positive relationships between different communities. It’s commitment to the common good.

Hirsch: Sounds like what heaven would look like, by the way!

Patel: It’s certainly what Muslim heaven would look like in my view.

Pawlus: Now, Eboo, at Interfaith Youth Core we have decided that the college vector is the place where we’re focusing most of our efforts. I wonder if you could share with the audience a little bit why that is, why you feel that is a crucial place to reach young people especially.

Patel: I think interfaith work should happen on every inch of American sacred soil: in synagogues, mosques, churches, cities and communities.

Hirsch: Amen!

Patel: Amen. In the Interfaith Youth Core our best work is on college campuses. Here’s what I imagine there: I think that when college presidents are handing diplomas to their graduates, from Tufts University to the University of Washington, they should be able to look that graduate in the eye and say, “I trust that you have a basic fluency in interfaith literacy.” Every graduate of every university in America should have a basic interfaith literacy. The second thing is, I think college presidents should expect that students of their campuses have multiple, meaningful encounters with people from different religions. These two things. The data shows us—from Robert Putnam’s recent work, from Pew surveys and Gallup surveys—that interfaith literacy and meaning, positive encounters with people from different religions, and things like interfaith service projects dramatically improve attitudes between people of different faiths. And that’s what we’re going for.

Hirsch: It’s so simple! If they’d just interact with each other.

Patel: It is simple. We know it works. These are the two things that work. If you have positive knowledge about other religions and how your own religion connects with that, and if you have positive, meaningful encounters with people from different religions, you dramatically improve your attitude towards different faiths. This is the story of America when it comes to Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, which is why the levels of attitudes between these groups are so high. It’s got to become the story, which includes Buddhists, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims and Humanists.

Hirsch: I want to stay on point with that particular population. I’m in my early 40s and the interesting thing is that population has a whole new language, this social media, social network. I don’t have a twenty-year-old that uses a phone anymore. It’s like, oh, you use one of those? So how is the interfaith dialogue changing with this new social media? And how is it helping and maybe also hurting?

Patel: I think that’s a great question. One of the things that we’re finding at the Interfaith Youth Core is there are multiple ways to first engage an audience, kind of traditional ways. Public speeches are one. Last night I talked to about 300 hundred people at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. A fabulous crowd. Of course, traditional media like this, like Good Morning America, the kind of shows you’re on frequently. But the wonderful thing about social media is it allows us, through Twitter and Facebook, to keep on bringing our message to those folks, to send them the articles we’re writing or the articles we think are important, to send them a daily inspiration on interfaith cooperation or pluralism. It allows those people to connect to each other. So people at Brown University, where I was earlier this fall, to people at the University of South Carolina, where I was last night, they get to talk to each other and they might not have previously met. I think this is a dramatic opportunity for interfaith cooperation. But I have to say that, Sherre and Daniel, the forces of intolerance, the people who want to dehumanize folks, people who want to build barriers instead of bridges, they use it, too. So we just have to use it better.

Hirsch: Right. We just need an edit function. If you’re intolerant, you don’t get to use it!

Pawlus: Eboo, I know you speak to a lot of different audiences, not only colleges, and you often paint a broader picture of what good looks like. So we talked about colleges a little bit, but what about other sectors in the larger community, in religious communities? You’ve got specific ideas of what you think could happen.

Patel: I think everybody can be an interfaith leader. Everybody can be an interfaith leader! One of the ways you’re an interfaith leader is if you spread a message of interfaith cooperation. I have to tell you, this past summer was a real challenge for a lot of Americans, but especially Muslim Americans, right? I mean, I’m sitting on the couch watching television with my young child and there are shows on titled things like “Should Americans Be Afraid of Islam?” And my three-and-a-half-year-old is looking at me saying, “That’s us, right, Dad?” I’m thinking this is not the Islam that I teach my child. Why do I feel like my child is being subjected to images of his faith, many of which are, unfortunately, produced by Muslims with a very twisted idea of their religion, but then repeated by mainstream media outlets in this country that are really negative, that are really ugly? So the ability to spread a message of what’s positive about religions, about what it is in our own religion that inspires us to connect to people from other religions, everybody can do that and I hope they do.

Hirsch: So, Eboo. You’re Eboo Patel: Rhodes scholar, you’ve been to Oxford, you’re on the President’s council. What locally can a regular person like me do to begin the conversation, to do something on the very local level? I don’t have to send a million meals to Haiti because that to me, just hearing about it, is incredible. What can I do?

Patel: Preach to your choir. And if your choir is kids, if your choir is friends, if you choir is your choir at church, tell your choir what it is that inspires you to build bridges of interfaith cooperation. Maybe it’s the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. learning from Gandhi, and that as a Protestant Christian is an inspiration to you. Maybe it’s the story of Rabbi Hillel saying, “If I’m not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” There are these wonderful nuggets in all of our religions. Share that with people. Because I’ll tell you, one of the things that scares me is that the people who are sharing the stories of hatred between faiths, they’re not shy. So we can’t be shy either.

Hirsh: So true.

Pawlus: Eboo, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today.

Patel: Thanks, Daniel. Thank you, Sherre.

Hirsh: Thank you.

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