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The InterVIEW

Giving young adults the words to speak of faith

A regular feature of The Catholic New World, The InterVIEW is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today's Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith cooperation. He is the author of “Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation.” An American Muslim of Indian heritage, Patel has a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship.

He recently spoke by e-mail with editor Joyce Duriga about the need to promote positive religious discussions among young people as a way to prevent religious extremism.

Catholic New World: You talk about there being an absence of language around the topic of religious diversity and there being a vacuum as a result. Where does this absence come from and how can we fill the vacuum?

Eboo Patel: I once taught a student from a liberal arts college in Colorado named Kristin. She had grown up in a strong Christian family but told me she stopped going to church in college and no longer calls herself a Christian. I asked her if she still found solace in the Bible or inspiration in the words of her pastor. When she answered “Yes,” I told her that I didn’t understand.

“If that’s true,” I said, “why do you not call yourself a Christian now?”

Kristin told me that an official from an organization in Colorado Springs came to speak at her college on Christianity when she was a first-year student. He said that Christians believe women should be subservient; that people of other faiths, especially Muslims, are wicked; and that professors who teach courses applying philosophical and intellectual frameworks to Christianity should be avoided.

One group of students, who wore the label “Christian” on campus, excitedly gathered around this man. The other group slunk away. Kristin told me, “I don’t want to be subservient because of my gender, to hate anybody because of their faith, to put my mind on hold because of my beliefs. If that’s what Christianity is about, count me out.”

Everything Kristin learned about Christianity focused on how to speak and act in church. Her education about religion never related her faith to the world. She had only a private language of faith. When Kristin went off to college, she experienced one particular public language of faith, and she had no knowledge to challenge it, no means for discerning how her faith related to the broader issues in the world — among them gender, interfaith issues and reason.

Perhaps the leaders of Kristin’s church intentionally offered an education that was relevant only within the walls of the faith community. Perhaps they did this out of some sort of sense that faith is only private, a connection between the believer, the church and the Creator. If so, they made a terrible mistake.

By not addressing the public dimensions of faith, they effectively forfeited that dimension and that discourse to a group of people who were willing to talk about it — a group that had an extremely narrow view. In the absence of alternatives, Kristin was presented with a false choice: Christianity on the one hand, or progressive ideas and intellectual growth on the other.

Even though she felt spiritually connected to Christianity, she had given up on it as a tradition that could guide her as she made her way in the world. Kristin’s church leaders failed Kristin, their religion and their democracy. In giving her a language that addressed the public dimensions of her faith, they would have succeeded in all three.

CNW: In your talks, you mention how notable religious figures such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr started their work as young adults and you note how the young are susceptible to negative religious extremism. What makes this age group unique?

Patel: Religious extremism is a movement of young people taking action. Hindu nationalists, hate-filled rabbis, Christian Identity preachers and Muslim totalitarians prey on young people’s desire to have an identity and make an impact, while religious pluralism too often takes the shape of religious leaders issuing declarations.

These leaders certainly play a crucial role in breaking important theological ground, but while debating, young people are at home posting blogs and spending time in chat rooms. Religious totalitarians are meeting them there.

Young people want to be engaged, to hold some sort of transcendent purpose. If nine times out of ten they’re told they’re too young to participate in the world, they’ll devote themselves to the first person who opens a door. Unfortunately, that door often leads to destruction.

So when people say to me, “Oh, Eboo, you do such nice work by bringing kids together through Interfaith Youth Core,” I think of another organization that’s exceptional at recruiting young people for their cause. I think of al-Qaida. I think of an ideology that is deeply participatory, that recognizes young peoples’ desire to be authentic and contribute, that takes young peoples’ potential and shapes it into something destructive.

Young people are standing on the faith line between religious totalitarianism and religious pluralism. Who’s asking them to contribute? Who’s teaching them what it means to be religious in the modern world? If we do not help our young people to develop a positive religious identity relevant for their time and place, we may forfeit them to extremism.

CNW: You’ve also mentioned how Pope John Paul II was effective in leading young people in discussions of interfaith. What made his efforts successful?

Patel: As a mainline religious leader, Pope John Paul II was extremely effective at engaging youth. Young people have little patience for leaders who lecture the public on private morality, who set the bar high and do not live above it.

But Pope John Paul II preached a conservative code and practiced celibacy. In matters of Vatican policy, he declared the Catholic Church opposed to violence and denounced force at every turn.

The pope always invested in young people. He ended every visit to a church in Rome by meeting with the parish’s youth group. He addressed young people directly in his sermons and devoted chapters to them in his books.

He created programs like World Youth Day that actively engage young people in the life of the church and its work in the world. The first World Youth Day, held in Rome in the mid-1980s, drew a few hundred thousand young Catholics. A decade later, when the event was held in the Philippines, it drew more than 4 million.

For more information about Interfaith Youth Core, visit www.ifyc.org.