Faith In/And Democracy Grantee Profile: Evangelical-Muslim Friendship Mobilization
A Conversation with Neighborly Faith Inc.
Faith In/And Democracy is a pilot funding and learning initiative led by PACE to explore the ways faith and faith communities can support democracy and civic life. PACE caught up with all five of the cohort participants to get a status update on their projects thus far, and we are releasing a series of interviews over the next month to highlight their leadership and share more about their early learnings.
Neighborly Faith (NF) is launching a new program that mobilizes emerging Evangelical leaders on college campuses to address systemic fear and bigotry toward Muslims and to introduce inclusive democratic values. Here’s more from our conversation:
Q: Tell us more about your project. What are the tangible action impacts you are pursuing?
A: Our project works with young Evangelical and Muslim leaders by equipping them to lead change in their communities and institutions to introduce inclusive democratic values. Specifically, we are training ten college students to become ambassadors for principled civic pluralism and Muslim friendship at ten select Evangelical colleges. Most of these campuses have not grappled with the impact of explicit or implicit Islamophobia in their curriculum, and most have not considered how their faith connects to their participation in American democracy. This is what our project aims to address by empowering student leaders to be catalytic ambassadors for pluralism-friendly democracy and interfaith bridge-building.
We are pursuing three action impacts:
- Ten Evangelical campuses launch inititives that foster Christian-Muslim friendship and civic cooperation in the campus community.
- Groups from ten Evangelical campuses team with local Muslims for on-the-ground service projects and/or democratic lobbying efforts for the common good.
- Evangelical campuses implement curricular or extracurricular programs for promoting diverse democratic values.
Q: Why did you take this on and what do you hope it achieves?
A: White Evangelicals are the most Islamophobic segment of American society (Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, 2019). Tragically, many Evangelicals perpetrate Muslim bullying, marginalization, and misguided media tropes. NF was formed to address this, and we believe that the future is bright for Muslim-Evangelical friendship and cooperation. Since 2015, NF has been scaling up its programs in response to unprecedented opportunities in the Evangelical community to generate empathy and goodwill toward Muslims. In 2019, NF has been invited to run programs to bring Muslims and Evangelicals together at surprising scale — more than our resources can meet. Given this demand, we’re seeking to intelligently grow our existing programs and launch innovative new programs to truly do justice for our Muslim neighbors as we seek their well being in coming years.
Q: What are you learning so far?
A: The biggest lesson we have learned is that young students are increasingly interested in direct conversations about diversity, citizenship, and democracy and that these should be foregrounded in activities that NF runs on campus. Our initial programs focused narrowly on articulating the biblical basis for diverse friendships. Yet, in the process we learned that students are energetic about connecting these new relationships with conversations about citizenship, democracy, and diversity. We have come to realize that Evangelicals need a vision for our country that breaks through the tired trope that American is a “Christian nation” and that we must bully others in order to maintain it. Fortunately, young Evangelicals are ready to write a new story about their posture in public life, and we want to harness their enthusiasm.
Our project is organized around three learning impacts we hope to achieve:
- Thousands of Evangelicals learn about Muslim friendship and the American Muslim experience
- Ten emerging evangelical leaders are equipped with life-long leadership and mobilization skills
- Evangelical campuses learn how to better equip students for faithful service and leadership in a diverse democracy.
After a few months working on this project, honestly, we are more positive than ever before that these are achievable. Forty-two Evangelical college students applied for our fellows program. These students are eager to bring these important conversations about democracy and diversity to their campuses, often for the first time.
Q: What success have you seen so far in your project? Any stories to share?
A: I’ll share two recent stories.
NF is about to make a huge leap toward normalizing Christian-Muslim relationships for people in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Our friends at the Southern Baptist Convention have agreed to partner on a public event that brings Christians and Muslims together for the first time. In February, the SBC’s president and a nationally renowned pastor, JD Greear will dialogue with Omar Suileman (a celebrity Imam) on the topic of “Hope in the Current Age.” The dialogue is expected to focus on the distinctive faiths of the speakers — and how, despite their many differences of belief, they can be friends and fellow citizens. The event in Raleigh is expecting over 1,000 Evangelicals and Muslims in attendance. This will be the first time an SBC president has shared a stage with an Imam and is a significant step toward normalizing these engagements among baptists.
At the grassroots level, one of our 2019 fellows has begun a project that has the potential to change how one of the world’s largest missionary organization engages with people of other faiths. This fellow is a staff member at an Evangelical missions organization which has 25,000 missionaries in over 150 countries, and large chapters on every college campus in America. After he successfully launched Christian-Muslim friendship & dialogue events on his campus with NF, he is beginning to train his fellow missionaries to do the same. While talking with his staff peers, he found that few had considered getting together with other faiths to talk about areas of common cause: democracy, active citizenship, religious freedom, justice, etc. He will begin by prototyping events like this on 3 new campuses this Fall. We are excited to see the results and are pleased that our efforts are multiplying through our leaders.
Q: What are your biggest challenges as you look ahead?
Our largest challenge is and has always been not getting ahead of ourselves in our excitement about our work, but instead to focus on perfecting our programs and readying our team for the next stages of growth and impact. Like many young orgs, when early results come in we are tempted to immediately plan bigger and better programs. We are learning the importance of measuring our results in detail, talking to experts, training our volunteers, and reflecting on what worked and what did not before we jump back into multiplying the impact.
