How faith can foster belonging across religious lines with Eboo Patel

During the current period of political and religious upheaval, a renowned faith scholar offers keen insights on how to foster belonging even in trying times. Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith cooperation, joins Mary Ann Villarreal, vice president for Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion at the University of Utah, in a passionate discussion on how religious faith can be a bridge to understanding across cultural differences worldwide.

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Transcript

00:00 – 01:27 | Mary Ann Villarreal

Welcome to The Joy of Belonging. I am your host, Mary Ann Villarreal, and our guest today is Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America, and the host of his own popular podcast, Interfaith America with Eboo Patel. Patel is the author of five books, including “We Need To Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy”. He’s a regular contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post, USA Today, the Deseret News, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. He received his PhD in the Sociology of Religion from Oxford University where he studied on a Rhode scholarship that went on to serve on President Obama’s inaugural faith-based council. He’s a sought-after speaker who’s lectured widely from the Clinton Foundation, Ted Talks in the Noble Peace Prize Forum, as well as at more than a 100 colleges and universities, where he’s presented on religious pluralism, interfaith collaboration, and the need for diverse voices and perspectives in a democracy. And finally, Dr. Patel is a current University of Utah Impact Scholar, where he is using his considerable skill and expertise to help the u make faith a bridge of connection, cooperation, and understanding.

Welcome to The Joy of Belonging. It’s always my privilege to be spending time with you and to see you again.

01:27 – 01:28 | Eboo Patel

Nice to see you.

01:29 – 02:58 | Mary Ann Villarreal

Yeah. So I’m gonna just jump right in to questions, you know, around the work that you see we can do together that we should be doing between universities and our communities, and most importantly, relationship of your work as an interfaith, I mean, your work as an Impact Scholar and with Interfaith America. And so let’s start with, for you, Interfaith America, right, faith—and I’ve heard you say it repeatedly, in fact on our campus, right—and secular identities too are a bridge to cooperation rather than a barrier to division. And you’ve written about the ways in which faith has served as this connection point in your life and how you see it works for others in whole communities. So you have a foundation, or you’ve created a foundation that you’re sharing with us where different groups and individuals can come together. And as I’ve read, and I’ve heard you speak, you know, this is a significant part of the story of American democracy, and you refer to the US as the first large scale experiment in religious pluralism. Can you talk more about this and why you think college campuses, despite all the challenges that we’re seeing, might be an ideal space for reinvigorating this sense of faith as a bridge to strengthen our bonds and society?

02:58 – 06:26 | Eboo Patel

Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me on Mary Ann. I wanna be clear about the United States, and it’s the distinctive experiment, it’s the first attempt of religiously diverse democracy. There’s been religious diversity in other societies from time and memorial, but never within a large-scale democracy. And of course, the United States is the first attempt of large-scale democracy, period, right, with the Constitution, et cetera, et cetera. But what was very distinctive about the United States, but I’m speaking of the European founders of the 1776 generation, is the seriousness with which they address themselves to the question of religious diversity, so Thomas Jefferson reverently owned a Quran. George Washington writes a letter to the Touro Synagogue saying, which is first Jewish congregation in America, saying that his government would “give to bigotry no sanction, and to persecution no assistance.” Benjamin Franklin gave a donation to the building fund of every religious community in Philadelphia, various Protestant denominations, Catholic, Jewish, and said that he hoped that they all flourished. Right.

And he hoped that they would all join together and celebrate July 4th together, each to their own faith come together to build the nation, is the message there.

So one thing, first of all, is there’s hypocrisy here, right, George Washington is writing this letter as he is literally a mouthful of his slave’s teeth. Okay. So we need to note the hypocrisy and the sins and the mistakes. And in doing that, I don’t think we should lose the good stuff. I think it is really interesting that amidst the clear racism of the European founders—and it’s okay to say that, I mean, it’s just objective, right—there’s also an openness to religious diversity. And for the late 18th century, that is a remarkable thing, right. And so, to not know that about the American experiment, that the European founders, virtually all of whom were some version of Anglican, right, many of them kind of, not especially practicing Anglicans, they ask really interesting, hard questions about religious diversity and they build a political structure that says people from a range of faiths can be here, can participate in public life, and should build positive bonds together. That it’s just an important thing to know, right.

And even as that happens, there is a deep anti-Catholicism in America, right. Anti-Catholicism is one of the oldest bigotries of the United States. And people from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln stood up against it. And interestingly, over the quarter century or so of the American experiment, we have largely metabolized our anti-Catholicism. I think that’s an inspiring story. We should ask the question, what’s the history of this? Can we learn from it? And even as other prejudices last for a long time, anti-Blackness for example, is there something we can learn from the American experience of anti-Catholicism and the ability to rid ourselves of that, that can be applied elsewhere? In other words, knowing things about the way that the formal political structure engages religious diversity and the way American civil society either does or does not live up to that over the course of American history, it opens up other interesting questions about our nation.

06:27 – 07:14 | Mary Ann Villarreal

Well, and one of those questions, and I wanna say both about our nation, but our current moment, and you ask what are the important bonds, right? Every time I hear you speak, you invite the people in, you invite audiences in to find those bonds. And when we first met, and I talked to you about joining the University of Utah as an Impact Scholar, working closely with us as a division, there was a moment in which you said, “You know what I do is not EDI.” And I jokingly said to you, “I’m not asking you to save EDI”, but what I was really interested in is that what were those bonds? What are the bonds that are very real in the State of Utah that the University of Utah should pay attention to, right, around interfaith and cooperation in particular?

07:15 – 08:37 | Eboo Patel

A couple things strike me. One is, so clearly The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a dominant force here, right? And as I’m driving through Salt Lake yesterday, I passed both the synagogue and I think Catholic charities offices, one of the things that strikes me is this is a state in which you have Republican governors who say, “Refugees are welcome here” at a time when many Republican governors are saying refugees are unwelcome. Okay. Democratic governors and mayors, including in my state, have said refugees are welcome, but have done a very poor job in helping resettle them. And part of this is about federal law. You guys have done a pretty good job of resettling refugees in the state of Utah. Why? Largely because your faith-based agencies, Catholics and Mormons have worked well together in the resettlement process. That is a stunningly inspiring story. We should learn more about it. We should ask ourselves, how did that happen? A university might want to ask itself, how would we prepare graduates to be effective employees of agencies doing important work like that, recognizing that those agencies are started by a faith base?

08:38 – 09:34 | Mary Ann Villarreal

It also strikes me in that how do we graduate students who can participate in those agencies to also expand the question of who we serve, and beyond refugees, that there are important moments right now nationally around populations that are, as you noted, partly federal regulation around resettling the church’s involvement in resettling migrants. But what you raised for me is how do our students also not come in as an attack, but rather to widen the conversation in the bridge of how faith-based organizations might think about serving? And I think most recently, we talk about the Texas border, and what we’re seeing in terms of displacement for so many people. So you just struck me that our responsibilities are deep and great for the University of Utah.

09:34 – 09:35 | Eboo Patel

Right. Absolutely.

09:36 – 10:07 | Mary Ann Villarreal

Yeah. And so we’ve asked, your Interfaith America, you’re with us for another year and a half and growing. What was your hope or ideal in engaging the organization as well? Our ideal is that you have a, the practice expertise models, your incredible partners and collaborators. But as your team has been with us for six months, what now do you think are some opportunities that we need to explore?

10:08 – 12:29 | Eboo Patel

Well, I came in here very interested in, anytime a public university is interested in interfaith work, I’m interested, right? Because it is a territory that outside of religious studies departments, public universities are often allergic to. So I’m interested in a public university that recognizes the importance of a positive and proactive engagement of religious diversity. Not all, maybe for the spiritual development of its students, but also because it’s part of graduating people who are considered educated, effective citizens, excellent professionals, right, so I’m interested in that.

Second thing is, I think this state is particularly fascinating because of the presence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its premier university being Brigham Young and the University of Utah, having a significant Latter-day Saint population. And something historically a kind of an ambivalent attitude towards the relationship of the Church. So I’m interested in that, right. And I think that those retentions you should expect, right. Like diversity is not always, diversity means dissension, intention and disagreement. And it’s how we work through those things that are fascinating. So, you know, and I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t think that there were excellent people here, right, and who were interested in leaning into that in positive, proactive layers. And you also have a governor, I don’t know anybody else in Utah politics really except for the governor who I only know a little bit. You have a governor who is interested in a range of populations succeeding and recognizes the benefit of diversity, right. So that doesn’t mean everybody has the same definition of that, right. The question is, are there overlaps between people’s views of how diversity work happens well, and the role of religion within it, and if myself and the organizations I lead can be a value add to that, then we’d like to be.

12:30 – 13:08 | Mary Ann Villarreal

So part of that value add is how do we be together, right? How do we together form, create, shape, influence interfaith cooperation on a secular campus and a large one, right? So to your point about a large public. So as we witness right now in this moment, so many divisions, and we could name them across particular communities, what is your guiding thought and what is your guiding advice for those of us at a large public around how we do bring people together, and what does it mean for us to bring people together?

13:09 – 15:11 | Eboo Patel

So I think an interesting way to go about this, and this is similar to the address that I gave at AAC&U, which I think you’re kind of intimating, right, is to ask the research question, what are the diversity needs of the state? That’s a research question. Who’s showing up at our hospitals these days? I bet you it’s a very different demographic than 30 years ago. Right.

Who is in our elementary schools? Who’s in our athletic leagues, right? Who’s in our businesses and companies? What does it look like to be able to serve our patients while in our hospitals? Diversity and medicine is a profound intersection, right. And so if you don’t know anything about, say what Muslims eat or Hindus eat, or how Jews understand the moment of creation and the moment of death, or what happens after a baby is born, you’re not gonna be serving patients well, right? If you have never heard of Ramadan and you have Muslim students at your school—and there’s a good chance you do—like, you are just, you’re not being a good educator, right? Like you need to be able to provide for that. There are a 1000 examples of this.

So I think a really interesting process to go to is to ask the research question, a research question which intersects deeply with the good of the state, which I think is one of the roles of a state university. How do we serve the good of the state? Ask the question, as the demographics of Utah change and they’ve changed rapidly and they’ll change in the future, what kind of teachers, nurses, doctors, business people, coaches, et cetera, et cetera, do we need to help better serve the changing demographics of our state, and can we count on our universities to help prepare those people in those ways?

15:12 – 15:53 | Mary Ann Villarreal

So how might we untangle what you’re saying? And I absolutely agree, and we have been on that, moving in that direction, but how do we untangle that ideal from the current discourse that we are making people feel excluded at the same time—at the universities, I mean, we’re seeing it headline after headline? So what is the pause button there for us to move in a direction of common good and recognizing this is really what we’re both aiming for?

15:54 – 16:04 | Eboo Patel

Yes. So look, if, this is not a comment that what’s happening at the University of Utah, right, Let me be clear.

16:05 – 16:06 | Mary Ann Villarreal

Right.

16:06 – 19:52 | Eboo Patel

I spend a lot of time on campuses, I spend a lot of time in higher ed discourse. If it is customary to refer to a certain group of people as oppressors consistently, expect them to not like it. I mean, you just keep, right, like based on their skin color or their religion or their gender, if they enter into a room and they have a bunch of fingers pointed at them that says you’re an oppressor, don’t expect large quantities of those groups to embrace that. Right. And incidentally, many of the diversity paradigms we’ve had over the years don’t flatten people into the categories of oppressed and oppressors.

So if you read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Cosmopolitanism” or Danielle Allen’s “Talking to Strangers,” they’re interested in particularity. They’re not interested in flat two-dimensional categories, right. So again, this is not an accusation of the University of Utah at all, it’s simply an articulation of a predominant diversity paradigm in our era divides people into oppressed and oppressor. I think that neither category is something that somebody would want to be in.

I know this intimately, I have teenage kids who are in diversity programs and there’s like two different circles, are you the “privileged” or the “marginalized.” And I’m like, that is worse, and that’s, if I can use an academic term, that’s a “worse” and “worser.” Because honestly, it is deeply demeaning to be put in the category of the marginalized. I find it deeply demeaning. One, objectively speaking, there’s eight billion people in the world, four billion living under $7 a day, one and a half billion have worms in their system. I was born in a country in which there are 10s of millions of leprous beggar children, leprous beggar children. I was raised in a family that basically said, “If you open the tap and clean water comes out, Alhamdulillah.” Praise be to God, because you were born in a country where that doesn’t happen. So that is my view on what it, like if you can breathe the air and drink the water, you are one of the 8 billion people on the planet that has things that most other people don’t. Right. And on top of that kind of material privilege, I’ve always thought that people’s identities are principally a source of inspiration, not a status of victimization. Right.

So I am an Ismaili Muslim. We are an objectively marginalized religious community. And our religious leader, in 60 years of being the leader has never referred to us as victims or marginal or oppressed, only as blessed, only as lucky, only as people who are meant to be a blessing unto others. My wild guess is that many, many people think of their identity, religious, racial, ethnic, geographic, whatever, principally as a source of inspiration. So to require them to read from a script of marginalization is a super imposition of a paradigm onto their identity that it is likely they don’t hold, and that their family probably did not teach them. I have seen enough of it in higher ed to think to myself, either circle you’re put in, “marginalized” or “privileged” is not a circle you might want to be in.

19:53 – 20:37 | Mary Ann Villarreal

So I’m gonna reframe my previous question on that because we keep … I’m gonna circle back because I’m really trying to come underneath to say, how do we uproot what your frame around the circle of marginalization or privilege to say we’re actually carving out a new path, right. And I’ll say for this institution in particular, we’re gonna carve out this path that is built in, the ideas and ideals of religious diversity, of recognizing, we have opportunity to build bridges. Is there a roadmap for this?

20:38 – 22:11 | Eboo Patel

So that’s an excellent question. So one is, other paradigms of diversity, I talk about a lot, I wrote a Chronicle of Higher Ed piece on him, “Cosmopolitanism,” and “The Lies That Bind” are intellectual roadmaps to this, right? The whole history of American pluralism, you can date it back to James Madison’s writing about factionalism, you can go through Jane Adams and Martin Luther King Jr, and John Courtney Murray and Michael Walser and Danielle Allen and Kwame Anthony Appiah and John Inazu. There is a whole intellectual tradition of pluralism, which is principally—Diana Eck would be a part of that, Laurie Patton would be a part of that. What is interesting to me is in the current diversity paradigm, oppressed versus oppressive, which by the way, I think has intellectual value, right. I don’t think it should be the reigning paradigm, but I’m perfectly happy for it to be a voice in the room. Okay. What is interesting to me is how rarely I hear these other scholars referenced, these are the giants of a long American tradition, right. And I think in the last eight years of being around diversity work, I’ve heard Kwame Anthony Appiah referenced, I don’t know, three times, that’s like doing physics and not recognizing Einstein, right. He writes The Ethicist column in New York Times Magazine every week.

22:12 – 22:16 | Mary Ann Villarreal

And I wanna thank you for that recommendation because it gives my 15-year-old and I something to connect over.

22:17 – 23:44 | Eboo Patel

Yeah. So, the point is, I think that there is absolutely an intellectual tradition in this. It is not a hidden tradition, it is the predominant tradition in kind of how to think about pluralism issues in American life. I think there should be other perspectives also, I think of critical theory as another useful perspective, right. I do not think it should be the reigning paradigm. I think the “how to” at a university is it should begin with two questions. What do we promise the public? What do we promise our students?

What do we promise the public? What can you count on our graduates to do? Right. A flight school promises the public: our graduates can fly planes. What do you promise the public? Right.

And then what do you promise your students? And I think part of the promise of a university to a student should be, we gather a diverse group of people into an environment that we curate for the purpose of learning. There’s lots of places where there are diverse groups of people. You go to a public park. There’s a diverse group of people, right? You pay us 10, 15, 20, $25,000 a year because you trust us to curate a diverse group of people, scholars, and students into a learning community.

23:25 – 24:44 | Mary Ann Villarreal

The question based on this design of what are we promising our publics, right, what are we promising our families? What are we promising our students? What is the responsibility then of leaders to … and I talk a lot about pausing because it feels like we continue to move and dodge, right, that we’re dodging political waves coming at us. But really as I, you know, so as I think about all of these pieces, I wonder what is the responsibility of university leaders to be the ones to say out loud, “We will, right, carve out these spaces, we will bring out our better selves in spite of, right, the strong currents that move us and sway us.” What is our responsibility to diverse democracy?

24:25 – 27:15 | Eboo Patel

So I’ve underscored a couple of things that I said, one is, I think that there, that to be led by two questions, what do we promise the public? What do we promise our students? And the inquiry and the conversation around those questions, I think then lead to a path to what you actually do and what good looks like. And here’s the beautiful thing, the intellectual tradition is there. It just hasn’t been read for a while, but I will say it again, it is the central intellectual tradition of how we think about diversity of American life. It’s not complete. And I think critiques of it are very useful. And to not know that tradition is … it’s to not be fully enriched about how very smart people have addressed themselves to the question of how do you have a democracy with people of diverse identities and diverse ideologies? Right.

And then the second question is, how do you curate a learning environment where people from different identities and divergent ideologies are principally learning from one another? So when it comes to free speech, you have it within certain reasonable limits. But honestly, if what you mostly want to do is shout at people who are different from you and that you disagree with, you can do it for free in the park. You pay us 20 grand a year to create for you a place where you learn with people who are different than you and who you may disagree with, and who may in the course of leaning into that disagreement, you will maybe sharpen your arguments or maybe you’ll change. You are probably 19. If you don’t change between 19 and the rest of your life, why are you paying to go to college? If you do not prepare to—and by the way, there’s an intellectual paradigm underneath this, it’s Karl Popper’s Falsification Theory, which is part of what the intellectual life is to try to falsify your own theories. Right. So an awful lot of what I’m talking about is based on pretty standard academic scholarly paradigms.

27:16 – 27:35 | Mary Ann Villarreal

Right. And I asked the question and a reframe because as we watch what happens nationally around diversity or equity and inclusion, we’re still gonna have to solve for growing diversities. The question is, how will we do that?

27:36 – 29:50 | Eboo Patel

Right. Yeah. And I think, so I don’t know this, right, but I think it is an interesting question to ask, has this university or could this—because I don’t mean this as a challenge, I mean this as an invitation, right. What if any university, but I think the University of Utah is especially well situated, because my guess is the demographics of Utah are changing as fast as the demographics of any state in the union. Okay, this state is changing as fast. And there are very few states with the distinctive community like the LDS community, right? That is the combination of a historic predominant community and its various civic agencies and a changing population and a preeminent public university. That’s a really interesting combination.

So for a university to say, we are going to engage in a research-based inquiry, what kind of teachers, nurses, coaches, business people, is our state gonna need to, over the next 25 years? Who’s gonna be in our schools? Who’s gonna be in our hospitals? Who’s gonna be in our YMCAs? Okay. What kind of knowledge and skills will our civic and business and political leaders need to effectively engage those populations? Okay. And then you’re doing a reverse engineering bit, and then you’re saying, how do we prepare people? And it’s a quintessentially liberal arts approach, right. It’s not a technical approach, right. Because being Muslim means a 100 different things for people, right? So there are many Muslims who would not depict the prophet Muhammad. There are some Muslims who would, right? So what do you do in an art history class? That is not an easy answer. That’s a liberal arts question. It’s precisely why we have liberal arts programs at universities.

29:51 – 30:20 | Mary Ann Villarreal

Eboo, thank you for taking on this question of our, how do we continue to carve out the spaces that are so needed, and how do we bring that intellectual engagement back into, into the divisiveness of what we’ve become. So I’m gonna just wrap this up with this last question, the podcast is The Joy of Belonging. How do you think about joy? Largely? On the daily? And where do you find it most in your life?

30:21 – 31:46 | Eboo Patel

Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of joy in my life, right? Like you don’t get paid anymore to be sad, so you might as well, you know. And honestly, like I’ve been, you know, like I have a positive disposition and Alhamdulillah. Praise be to God. Like, I understand some people don’t, I just do. Right, like I laugh, I love things, I think things are hilarious. I listen to the Grateful Dead a lot. You know, like I am joyous that the sun is out. I have great friends, this super dorky group of high school friends that like passes out math puzzles by text every day, and I just laugh at, I’m like, “I can barely add three plus three, you guys are doing like calculus,” right? But like, I just find like joy in little things and I look for it, you know? Like I go to concerts. I’m part of, you know, I go to plays. I like take walks with my wife, and we hold hands. I laugh at my kids. You know what I mean? Might as well, right?

And honestly like, you know, like I’ve seen rag pickers on the trash mountains of Nairobi. I’ve seen people living in asbestos filled shacks in outside of Johannesburg. I’ve seen leprous beggar children in India. Like, there’s so many people who have it so much worse, right. Why wouldn’t I wake up every morning and just think to myself like, Alhamdulillah. I’m the most privileged person in the world. Go out and have fun and see how you can make things better. Why wouldn’t you do that? You know?

31:47 – 31:56 | Mary Ann Villarreal

Well, thank you for helping us make things better at the University of Utah and spending your time with us. We always have wonderful engagement across the campus when you’re here. So we look forward to more.

31: 57 – 31:58 | Eboo Patel

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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