If you want to strengthen America, consider funding religious pluralism

As we look retrospectively at 2020, one of the year’s clear storylines is that faith communities across this country played a critical role in providing support, leadership, and care for every challenge we faced. In response to the coronavirus pandemic, houses of worship provided food, attended to the elderly, and gave solace in a time of grief, anxiety, and isolation. During the 2020 election season, faith leaders demonstrated moral leadership, shared critical information, and worked to ensure a free and fair election. The massive mobilization for racial equity in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and so many others was not only multi-racial, but also multi-faith. With a vaccine on the horizon, we hope that 2021 will be better than this year. Yet, we also know that in order to address the enormous structural inequities that were laid bare in 2020, our efforts must include every social asset that is available to us.

America’s communities of faith are among its strongest sources of social capital. Across the United States, there are 384,000 congregations and 228,000 faith-based non-nonprofits with secular causes — more than the number of schools, colleges, and universities combined. These organizations and communities play a critical role in the spiritual, physical, and mental health of their members and of the surrounding community, and they represent every type of American ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. For many Americans, their faith is also what informs their moral framework, what motivates them to do good in the world.

Religious groups are often working on issues and influencing environments in which philanthropy is also seeking impact. A deeper understanding of — and engagement with — faith communities can promote more effective grantmaking. As one nonprofit leader we work with put it: “Foundations and funders miss an opportunity when they don’t work with the faith communities — we are accountable, we can deliver, we aren’t going anywhere, and we are loyal to our causes.”

My work at the Aspen Institute’s Inclusive America Project (IAP) focuses on building the field of religious pluralism. Religious pluralism starts with individuals forming meaningful connections around lines of faith difference. When this connection happens, it can build bridges, deepen our understanding of the ‘other,’ and develop the skills needed for engagement in our religiously, ideologically, and demographically diverse society. At IAP, we define religious pluralism as a vision of the world in which diverse religious communities and non-believers engage each other in beneficial ways, maintain their distinct identities, and thrive and defend each others’ right to thrive.

Our hypothesis is that religious pluralism is a complex system of subfields which include religious literacy, religious freedom, interfaith/multifaith engagement, and others. These fields are adjacent to one another and the success in one impacts the successes in another. Our report, The Multiplier Effect, highlights these connections by examining faith-based nonprofits in Chicago, IL. For example, the Syrian Community Network works to serve, connect, and empower Syrian refugees and Muslims, and it depends heavily on the field of hate crime prevention and diversity in media in order to do their work. Too few individuals and organizations see how these fields are connected, but that interdependency and cross-connection is essential to the work having impact. Instead of collaborating, there is often an unhealthy competition among communities and nonprofits for scarce resources; the result is inefficiency in the field that is limiting the success of the work.

Philanthropy can play a critical role in addressing this issue by advancing the relationships and understanding between those working in these various subfields of religious pluralism. PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy initiative is a great example of how we can strengthen the system of religious pluralism by funding grantees and simultaneously creating a learning community that supports funders and faith leaders alike. Similarly, at IAP we have a program called the Powering Pluralism Network, which is a multi-sectoral leadership network focused on building the capacity of those working in religious pluralism. Through our network, it was possible for an interfaith nonprofit leader in Los Angeles to connect with a professor in Chicago, for a rabbi in Chicago to work with a consultant specializing in racial equity and institutional change, for the president of a Catholic school in Alabama to learn from experts in fundraising and philanthropy from California and Indiana, and so much more.

Another aspect of our field-building work is researching how philanthropy supports religious pluralism. When conducting an initial survey of the field, we concluded that there was a general lack of information on the extent and types of funding available in the area of religious pluralism. To address this need, we partnered with the Lake Institute on Faith & Giving at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and Public Religion Research Institute to survey funders and release a report on philanthropic giving to faith-based institutions by foundations. In our report, Powering Pluralism: Analyzing the Current Philanthropic Landscape, we found that only around $30 million is invested into the field annually, and the greatest giving is in mono-faith action, followed by inter/multi-faith engagement and inter/multi-faith action.

While this $30 million invested in the field does much good, we have seen this year that the work of faith communities is essential and that increasing support to faith communities can benefit us all. There is an important leadership role for philanthropy to play in advancing the scope, structure, and system of religious pluralism.

Funders who are seeking deeper engagement in this field can take action in the following ways:

· Increase their understanding of religious diversity and religious pluralism. Developing an understanding of religious pluralism, and its importance to philanthropy is crucial for funders to better achieve their prosocial goals. Many grantmakers don’t recognize the work they are already doing in religious pluralism and with faith-based communities, and many others don’t recognize how the organizations they already support rely on a thriving religious pluralism. This is a loss for both grantees and foundations. By not understanding religious diversity and religious pluralism, grantees may lose out on funding and foundations may miss supporting organizations that are uniquely positioned to achieve shared goals.

· Explore opportunities in the field and seek collaboration. When funders connect with other funders, grantees, and nonprofit associations on issues of shared concern in religious pluralism, impact and reach can grow. It is especially critical to seek opportunities for collaboration as religious pluralism operates in a virtuous feedback loop, with its component pieces relying and impacting each other. Investing in Faith in/and Democracy is an excellent starting point for funders who would like to make experimental investments.

While many in philanthropy and the public sector may be wary of religion’s role in public life, if they seek to do prosocial work, faith communities are a critical asset that they need to better understand. Chris Crawford, a program officer at the Democracy Fund said at a recent Aspen meeting, “Religious pluralism work cannot be about watering down faith engagement. The strategy for an authentic, durable movement toward religious pluralism will not be created by one of our foundations. It will be created by engaging deeply with faith communities in our country, listening to them, and giving them the tools that they need to engage across differences and to promote pluralism within their communities…Religious pluralism funding should be a tool in the toolbox of every funder.”