In the first blog in this series, I shared some of my personal experiences as a witness to interfaith meetings across the globe. During this time, I documented a new phenomena in human history: that, for the first time, meaningful relationships were being formed across religious divides.
Human beings have lived side-by-side through the ages, with some notable moments of relative peaceful coexistence between different beliefs. For example, the great Islamic empires often facilitated religious pluralism, from the intellectual exchange of Abbasid Iraq, to the convivencia of Umayyad Al-Andalus, to the organised debates between Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Sikhs and Jains by Emperor Akbar of the Mughal Empire in India.
However, at a leadership level, and beyond day-to-day individual interactions, religion has often been the source of violence, misunderstanding and division. Through history there has been little organised cooperation by religious leaders. It is only really in the last twenty years that leaders have begun to sit down together and consider possibilities for cooperation, dialogue, and friendship, and most importantly, to publicly articulate their respect for other faiths without undermining the truth of their own beliefs. In this blog I’ve laid out a brief history of this recent interfaith movement and the fascinating way in which inter-religious dialogue has come out of and been intertwined with the struggle for racial equality in the 20th century.
The World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago at the 1893 Great Columbian Exposition is often cited as a starting point of the modern interfaith movement. The Great Columbian Exposition celebrated 400 years since Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World, and was designed to demonstrate American progress, the power of imperialism and US exceptionalism, and the success of capitalist industry. Much like London’s Great Exhibition or the Exposition Universelle in Paris, ethnographic displays and human exhibits contributed to the spectacle and construction of racial otherness. It had been just three decades since the abolition of slavery and the World fair Civil rights campaigner Ida B Wells argued for the boycott of the Columbian Exhibition, which she stated purposefully excluded African Americans. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass represented the Haitian government— the de facto centre for the black community— using the Haitian Pavilion as a platform for protest at the fair. Wells, Douglass, I. Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett produced the pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.
Amidst the backdrop of injustice and cruelty, a private group of religious leaders from across the world came together to take part in an unprecedented meeting. For the first time, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain delegates sat alongside representatives from the Abrahamic religions, sharing a public platform and participating in formal dialogue. The Parliament convened in the main hall of the Chicago Art Institute and attracted 150,000 people - according to some reports. Importantly, the Parliament gave each religion their own platform, to represent themselves in their own words. Although sadly, many were still excluded from taking part, notably indigenous Americans, D. Keith Naylor describes how African American Methodists transformed the Parliament into a world court of opinion regarding racial equality, moreover, the Parliament was somewhat revolutionary because it allowed women to participate and even speak publicly in some instances (!). The parliament also encouraged the academic study of comparative religion and theology.
The London Conference on Some Living Religions within the Empire in 1924 was similarly imperialistic, with an ethnographic orientalist gaze on the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Taoist and Zoroastrian “holy men” of the British colonies. And yet, the different faiths were given a platform on which they could dispel many of the misconceptions about their beliefs and traditions and therefore facilitate greater understanding, and the conference also paved the way for the establishment of the World Congress of Faiths in 1936, which is one of the oldest interfaith organisations to still exist today.
In the Twentieth Century interfaith organisations began to develop more widely, often with a focus on social justice and in response to terrible violence unfolding across Europe. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, was founded at the start of the First World War to champion spiritually rooted approaches to nonviolence and the Council of Christians and Jews established in defiance of rising anti-Semitism across Europe.
In the period post-World War II Pope Paul VI convened the Second Vatican Council to reexamine, and in many cases reframe, Roman Catholic practice and doctrine, making progress in ecumenism. In 1965 Vatican II produced a groundbreaking declaration, Nostra Aetate (In our Time), urging Catholics “to enter with prudence and charity into discussion with members of other religions” and opening the door to more positive engagement with non-Christians. I was privileged to attend the fiftieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate in 2015.
Nostra Aetate is seen as a turning point in Catholic-Jewish relations, particularly because it publicly addressed several anti-Semitic misconceptions. Recent scholarship has uncovered the important role played by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel during the Second Vatican Council, who was responsible for articulating the Jewish viewpoint to the Vatican on behalf of the American Jewish Committee. In 1963, at a conference in Chicago, Rabbi Heschel claimed that racism and religion were incompatible. In 1965, during the civil rights movement Rabbi Heschel marched with Dr. King at Selma, Alabama. The two shared in theological study, and in their friendship Rabbi Heschel and Dr King did not merely preach interfaith, they lived it. Rabbi Heschel said that ‘no religion is an island’. In 1965, King publicly declared: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”.
Martin Luther King Jr. saw faith a means of cooperation, not a barrier or division. King was famously inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s use of non-violence. In his 1967 anti-Vietnam War sermon "A Time to Break Silence," King was unequivocal about his Christian commitment and at the same time summarised his view of the powerful commonality across all faiths: "I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish- Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God.”
In 1984 a Multi-Faith Committee was set up at an Inter-Faith Colloquium on Apartheid. The Colloquium was attended by Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs. The group worked to increase awareness of the evils of apartheid among people of faith. As a nonviolent movement, South Africans of various faiths crossed both theological and racial lines to oppose apartheid. On 13 September 1989, Archbishop Desmond Tutu led one of South Africa’s largest mass interfaith and inter-religious processions through the streets of Cape Town that symbolically announced the “reclaiming of the city,” following police brutalities in the city 10 days earlier. After the country’s first multi racial elections in 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed Archbishop Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, investigating the human rights violations of the previous 34 years. Much of Tutu’s work was driven by his belief in the African philosophy of Ubuntu. Ubuntu means “A person is a person through other persons" or is sometimes translated as "I am because we are", it speaks to our interconnectedness as human beings, and has shaped the process of reconciliation.
In 1986 Pope John Paul II gathered leaders of the world’s religions for a World Day of Prayer for Peace in the spirit of Assisi, again I was fortunate to attend the 25th anniversary gathering of different faiths at Assisi in 2011.
There has been a proliferation in interfaith activity in the 21st century, particularly in the post 9/11 era. In 2007 A Common Word between Us and You was a pubic statement endorsed by Islamic leaders and scholars. It highlighted the commonalities between Christianity and Islam and the need for peace and justice between the two communities.
Whilst perhaps the news still feels filled with stories of religious violence, we are living in a truly new moment of interfaith dialogue and coperation, we should take a moment to reflect on the incredible progress that has been made in the last 130 years and the conversations taking place that where once unimaginable. It should be noted that, for the most part, the history of interfaith dialogue has been Western focused, and largely centred on the relationship within the various branches within Christianity, or the relationship between Christianity with Judaism and islam. The terms ‘Religion’ and ‘faith’ are western constructions in and of themselves, and a certain understanding of these terms has been exported round the world as a result of colonialism and globalisation. I am so inspired by the Dalia Lama, I hope to learn more about the history of interfaith dialogue outside of the Western tradition, and that with my work Encounters, in which I portray all the world’s major religions together, without hierarchy, I have documented a truly global era in interfaith dialogue.