By Eboo Patel and Samantha Kirby
CHICAGO, Illinois: Last month, Zach Jordan, a senior at Elon University in North Carolina, found himself aghast at what he was hearing in the media about Muslims. But instead of just turning off the television or even yelling at it, Zach took what sociologists Bob Putnam and David Campbell tell us is amongst the most effective steps at increasing religious tolerance: he created a space for people from different religious backgrounds to have a positive, meaningful encounter with each other.
Zach organized an event on his campus, attended by 150 students and staff from different faith backgrounds, on religious diversity in America. The event was so thought-provoking — and there was such a high demand for this type of discourse — that most of the students stayed for hours after it ended, working through the ideas presented with each other. They engaged in a civil discussion through a common activity.
In their recent landmark book American Grace, Putnam and Campbell refer to this casually as the “your Pal Al syndrome”. They explain that if you come together with somebody else in a common activity — even if you enter into that relationship with negative attitudes or even suspicion about their religion — your attitude improves throughout the course of participating in that common activity.
If we prize religious tolerance and interfaith cooperation, and if we know those things are increased by meaningful, positive encounters from people with different religions, we ought to expand the opportunities for these encounters.
At Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), we think the Zach Jordans of this world are our best hope at expanding such opportunities. We believe that college students can — first on their campuses and then in their civic, professional and personal lives — create common activities for people from different religions to come to know one another.
Zach was trained as what we call an “interfaith leader”, somebody with the framework, knowledge-base and skill set to create such meaningful positive encounters. Last week, we trained 200 more Zach Jordans, as well as 100 campus staff who can support them, from 136 different campuses in Washington, DC at our inaugural Interfaith Leadership Institute.
When we first organized the Institute, hosted by Georgetown University with a kick-off session at the White House, even we had no idea how much demand there would be. In just two weeks, we received over 500 applications for 150 spots from students and campus staff across the country, and had to add a second session to accommodate this demand.
In the two intensive sessions, we trained these campus leaders to speak out about the importance of interfaith cooperation in the world and on campus, mobilize their peers to participate in interfaith action on a chosen social issue and sustain these efforts on campuses across the country through IFYC’s “Better Together” interfaith action campaign.
The bottom line here is that we’ve learned from sociology that positive, meaningful encounters can change people’s attitudes about people from different religious backgrounds. And we know that we don’t have to wait for it to randomly happen. There are tens of thousands of Zach Jordans out there, hungry to create these opportunities and eager to learn how. We just have train and mobilise them to do it.
Eboo Patel is Founder and President of the Interfaith Youth Core. Samantha Kirby is IFYC’s Communications and Policy Specialist. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from the authors. It was first published by On Faith, newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith.
