Eboo Patel wants to tell a better story about religion in America.
Patel, an American Muslim and founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based nonprofit that aims to promote cooperation across religious differences, served on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships and has written five books, including his latest, “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.” I met Patel at an Interfaith America gathering last year and was struck by his buoyant enthusiasm for religious groups in America and his comfort with diversity and disagreement. I asked him to speak with me about religious identity, diversity and institutions in America….
Eboo Patel: It is considered sophisticated and educated to know only the bad stuff about religion. Of course, that’s ironic because to only know the bad stuff is to not actually be educated. So that is discouraging.
I’ll tell you what I find encouraging. Catholic sisters just keep on doing what Catholic sisters do, which is taking care of poor people. There are 10,000 migrants in Chicago that leadership recently welcomed into the city. But they had not adequately prepared for where those people would sleep. Well, guess who’s taking care of them? Largely, Catholic Charities and other faith-based organizations.
Our society relies on religious communities to take care of people, to do addiction counseling, to do job training, to do hunger and homelessness work, to do refugee resettlement. We just don’t often tell the story of them doing that work. And I think that that’s a big problem….
People from diverse religious backgrounds — who may disagree on some fundamental things about abortion or where to draw the line in Jerusalem or doctrinal matters like the nature of Jesus — who are working together on other fundamental things. That is the genius of American society. We call that civic cooperation. It takes place everywhere all the time….
Stephen Prothero wrote the book “Religious Literacy,” about the absence of religious literacy in American civic life. We know less about our country, less history, less about the world civilizations, less about our neighbors, if we don’t engage in positive, productive conversations about religion. Few people truly recognize the role that religious communities play in America’s civic infrastructure — hospitals, social service agencies, our colleges, our K-through-12 schools….
Our framework for healthy pluralism is: respect, relate, cooperate. Respect for people, for diverse identities, even if you disagree with them. Relate positively across communities. Cooperate on common projects that serve the common good. And the truth is, in America, we do this all the time. We do this in our refugee resettlement. We do this in disaster relief. We do this with social services. We do this in athletics. It is actually the central dynamic of our civic culture. But we do not talk about it as building pluralism.
Millennial 