A Deeper Interfaith Dialogue among Students
By Kevin Singer
Preparing our best and brightest for a religiously diverse world
The next generation is charting its course on college and university campuses across America. And during such formative years, these young adults are learning what to expect after they walk off the commencement stage and into the big brash world beyond.
But too often these students do not engage the religious, spiritual, and secular beliefs around them. Then later they encounter a diversity for which they are unprepared. A recent study found that only 14% of students participated in an interfaith dialogue on campus, 11% in an interfaith service project, and 9% in an interfaith or religious diversity training.
The result? Students leave ill-equipped to live with, work with, and build relationships with people who believe very differently than they do. Perhaps this is why a third of Gen Z — including college students and recent college grads — recently told Springtide Research Institute that they don’t trust people of other religions “very much” or “at all.”
This need to increase religious literacy and interact with people who practice a different religion and see the world differently applies to all religions and all people, both the more conservative and progressive types. But our organization Neighborly Faith is working to introduce the norm of religious diversity particularly to evangelicals on Christian college campuses and with evangelical student groups at public universities (e.g., CRU, InterVarsity). Why are we focusing on evangelicals? Because we are evangelicals ourselves, and because students at evangelical colleges are typically not afforded the same opportunities to encounter people of other faiths nor prepare for a society of many faiths.
At the same time, evangelicals are arguably the loudest religious group in America — they energetically and sincerely want to share their beliefs. When people think about religion in public life, they see evangelicals as a big part of that lively mosaic, for better or for worse. A community who speaks confidently but respectfully is more likely to win the hearts of the people it is trying to reach.
For our faith to maintain credibility in the public square — the “marketplace,” as the Apostle Paul called it — new generations of evangelicals must grapple with the fact that Christianity is one of many faiths and worldviews in America. In fact, Gallup recently reported that U.S. general church membership has fallen below the majority for the first time. Other studies show the proportion of religious “nones” (i.e. non-affiliated) growing year after year. And Pew projected that Muslims could become the second largest religion in America by 2040.
In the early years of Neighborly Faith, Chris Stackaruk (Co-Director) and I examined numerous models that strive to train and equip young people for interfaith encounters. While it was obvious that these models resonated with religious and political progressives in the room, it also became clear that evangelicals and their conservative religious or political counterparts — whether Muslims, Orthodox Jews, Latter-Day Saints, or conservative Catholics — felt the curriculum just wasn’t made for them.
Unfortunately, a familiar refrain we’ve heard time and time again from students is: “I’m not finding what I need in this progressive interfaith space, but I’m not sure I can find the clarity I’m looking for within my conservative community, either.”
This is precisely the gap Neighborly Faith is trying to fill for young people in the evangelical Christian community, especially as it pertains to Evangelical-Muslim dialogue. Fortunately, we’re tilling ground that is more fertile than previous generations. Public Religion Research Institute recently discovered that younger white evangelicals (ages 18-39) are far more likely to say that American Muslims are an important part of the religious community in the U.S., and they are more comfortable with public displays of Muslim culture and religious expression, than those white evangelicals ages 40 and up.
Here are three principles that resonate with young evangelicals:
(1) Honesty and transparency create trust
The subtle message of both progressive and missionary-based approaches is that we’re not totally honest about our intentions. Progressives might say, “Don’t try to persuade others in this space to believe as you do.” Whereas a conservative approach might say, “Keep this missionary motivation in your back pocket until the time is right.” On the contrary, Neighborly Faith encourages dialogue participants to be honest and upfront from the very start of the relationship.
We’ve seen an entire room of Muslim and Christian students affirm, just before an event started, that they hoped the other group would come over to their side — at least eventually. Smiles and even some chuckles could be heard around the room. The result was that there were no secrets, and trust-building happened a lot quicker that way. These two groups have been meeting, at least once a semester, ever since. Persuasion about ultimate things is simply human nature. Why do we pretend that people can somehow turn that instinct off, yet expect them to feel totally genuine in these spaces?
(2) Don’t over-program
When we approach interfaith encounters in terms of risk rather than the possibility of relationship, we overburden the experience with curriculum, ground rules, activities, and the expectation of specific outcomes. We’ve seen this approach suck the possibility for relationship right out of the room, as everyone is hearing subtle cues that “this is actually a very risky endeavor that I might fail miserably at.” Participants then just try to get through the experience without offending anyone.
We must consider the possibility that our intentions to create safety in interfaith exchanges might actually be engendering a faux authenticity that does nothing to build real bridges.
To be sure, we are clear with participants that they shouldn’t be jerks. We encourage them to listen well, ask genuine questions, and seek to understand just as they seek to be understood. We’ve yet to see a student at one of our programs fail to get this message. We give young people a lot of credit: Most are genuinely curious about their neighbors of other faiths and grateful for the opportunity.
(3) Encourage students to remain tethered to their community
One of the blind spots of mainstream interfaith work is that it creates a third space — an interfaith “religion” of sorts — that can take the place of the religious, spiritual, or nonreligious communities that participants represent. I encountered a recent evangelical grad heavily invested in their college’s interfaith center. When I asked them to help us plan a program that introduced evangelicals to Ramadan, they said, “I am quickly realizing that it will take some reprogramming for me to think about including evangelical Christian students.”
When students lapse in their own faith community and replace it with a blended interfaith community, they are unable to encourage others to follow their lead. They’ve lost the ability to be persuasive about the importance of engaging their neighbors of other faiths.
Rather than imagining students as future “interfaith leaders,” a concept foreign to the New Testament, we strongly encourage evangelical students to remain anchored to the churches and campus ministries they belong to as they engage with people of other faiths. We see our work of pitching faithful engagement with religious diversity as an important component of Christian witness and discipleship.
In conclusion, I propose a new starting point for healthy, thriving relationships between students of different faiths: Rather than trying to plan an initiative bringing together as much religious diversity as possible, start with two committed faith groups who have participants with varying levels of experience and confidence engaging with people of other faiths. Encourage honesty and transparency. Don’t over-program. Encourage them to grow deeper with each other as they grow deeper in their own tradition and community. I believe with this approach, we’re more likely to scale our efforts to bridge disparate communities of faith in America.
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Kevin Singer (@kevinsinger0) is Co-Founder and Director of Neighborly Faith, an initiative promoting genuine friendship and constructive exchanges between evangelical Christians and Muslims. He can be contacted at Kevin@neighborlyfaith.org.
[This essay is part of a series called Positive Faith in Public Life]
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