Interfaith dialogue is the answer to polarisation, say scholars

‘Authoritarians seek to weaponise religion, and dictators try to divide and rule through religion,’ said Oxford professor of international human rights law, Dr Nazila Ghanea. ‘Recognising that religion has been and continues to be abused is not an assault on our shared sacred reality, but a reason for its preservation.’

Theos Think Tank and the Fetzer Institute held a series of events exploring interfaith dialogue and the place of the sacred in a polarised world from 2-5 June in London, Cambridge and Oxford, marking the publication of a new book Retelling Sacred Stories, described as “one of the most ambitious interfaith collaborations of our time”.

In the panel held in Oxford on 5 June, writer and former Anglican priest Mark Vernon explained, “The book captures many different traditions journeying within their tradition towards a shared sense of the sacred.

“The distinctiveness of each faith tradition leads to a recognition of what’s in all traditions, and of how world traditions can come together in times of change and times of crisis.”

American philosopher and Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart said the world is currently “in a peculiar moment of crisis”.

“Wars are always with us, but the magnitude of the capacity for destruction has never been greater, along with the destruction of nature and transformation of the world into a relentless machine of consumption.

“Religion is becoming a subset of nation, race, ethnicity in the mind of many. The virtual world is acting as a vehicle of fragmentation, atomism, suspicion and antagonism.

“Western history has brought us and the whole world to this point. We are spiritual beings, not just malleable figments of economics and material conditions.

“The ideological project of conquest over nature started with the separation of the natural and the supernatural, which enabled nature to be exploited for profit and power.

“Religion has now been conscripted into economics, nation states, tribal and ethnic identity, but the potential for communication between spiritual traditions is greater than ever before, despite the ideological hostility.”

Hart said interfaith dialogue should not “impoverish traditions by trying to reduce them to commonalities”, in such a way that they “can’t bring anything new to one another or themselves”.

Instead, interfaith dialogue should highlight the “polyphony” of diverse traditions, exploring their “mutualities and enrichments but not uniformity”.

Imam Monawar Hussein related his experience of founding “United for Peace: Communities united against Extremism” to protect community relations in the UK in the face of growing polarisation.

“Its purpose was to create mutual spaces where people of faith could share something meaningful from their tradition,” he said.

“Something moving happened: not sameness or uniformity, but an experience of harmony. Communities come together with integrity, bringing what is of value to them.

“Even at a time when relationships have fractured, every tradition can bring something beautiful and generous. We’ve now established leadership groups that bring together civic leaders and faith leaders, creating spaces of trust for continued collaboration for the common good.”

Imam Hussein said there was a “yearning for a whole sense of the wholeness of the human family amid polarisation”, and “a need for a fuller sense of meaning, connection and responsibility”.

Secretary general emeritus of Religions for Peace International William Vendley spoke to The Tablet about the rise in community tensions and prejudice against religious minorities in the UK.

“The lesson we’ve learnt in 27 years working in some of the most painful and difficult circumstances on earth is that the fastest way to help different religious communities overcome their fear of each other is to find the easiest and simplest thing they are willing to work together on,” he said.

“The very experience of standing shoulder-to-shoulder – not talking about doctrines or grievances yet – collaborating on something that is a good in itself establishes a degree of solidarity and mutuality in a non-threatening way.

“That begins a virtuous cycle of ever-expanding shared care that brings us together. You always have to ask: what is the least threatening thing that each of these communities could bear to try to do together?

“Words come second, connection comes first. Then space is made between the injured parties to experience grace.”

Vendley also told The Tablet: “The Second Vatican Council document Nostra aetate underlined that it is a solemn obligation of the Catholic faith to work to preserve all that is good and true among the world’s religions. There’s an awful lot that is good and true in all the world’s religions.

“This is a central teaching of the Church; so, as a Catholic, you are not following your own Church if you do not acknowledge this commitment to both honour and work to preserve all that is good and true in other religions.

“That leaves the question of discerning what’s good and true, which is discerned in context, in encounter itself. That process is going on at such a scale around the world that the newspapers that report on conflict, controversy and contradiction, don’t find that it’s easy to report on this.

“It’s taking place at the village level, at the national level, at regional levels: pan-Africa, Latin America, and so on. Do we want to seek out what’s worst in other traditions while romanticising our own and pretending that it doesn’t have its own failures according to its own deeper standards, or shall we look for the beauty and goodness and source of solidarity?”

Professor Diwakar Acharya, scholar of the Indic religions at All Souls’ College, Oxford, said, “Every religious text has eternal and time- and space- specific elements, but these texts also enable us to encounter a reality that it greater than our divisions, to see one another not as strangers or categories.

“Sacred stories teach us to live in communion,” he said, and quoted a Buddhist proverb from the Dhammapada: “Hatred cannot end hatred, only compassion can do that.”

Dr Nazila Ghanea, professor of international human rights law at the University of Oxford, said, “Freedom of religion or belief as part of international human rights law offers a path for interfaith encounter.

“Religions have helped the League of Nations and the United Nations come into being, encouraging multilateralism and peacebuilding.

“Religious influences have gone into various treaties like child rights, education, freedom from torture,” she said, referencing the book Faith in United Nations Human Rights Treaties, which explores the religious convictions of those who drafted key UN documents.

“Human rights law is there to offer a minimum safety net of protection for all humanity on the basis of their humanity. It needs to be applicable to everyone to enable human flourishing, so we need to reinvigorate it with the enriched sense of the human and human dignity which derives from religious traditions and underscores the whole project. 

“As a result of human rights, religions are free to encounter one another. On a level deeper than all the identity claims and culture wars, there are profound virtues that all traditions share. Human rights need to reconnect with these shared stories.”

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