I want to share a few thoughts on why I find the whole “interfaith” project to be so problematic, since I find myself occasionally saying stuff about it on here. So, a thread. 1/

First, I obviously have no objection to folks from one religious group learning about and experiencing the traditions and practices of another. That’s obviously a fine thing. I do have a problem with the way this is sometimes done. 2/

I have been to blended “unity” services - a little Judaism, a little Christianity, a little Islam - and they’re uniformly terrible. No one actually experiences the other, not in their wholeness. It’s performative, but acts like it isn’t. 3/

I’ve also been asked, at my current institution, to do a little “Jewish stuff” during the daily chapel service, or to say a Jewish prayer here or there. Again, that sort of thing is mostly to make the Christians feel righteous in their worldliness. 4/

I think - though that’s a very minor example - that a lot of interfaith falls under that category, of Christian self-righteousness. Is it really about the other, or is it about making Christians feel good about themselves for being open-minded for a few minutes? 5/

That’s interfaith at its worst. But the core idea behind interfaith, at its best, is, I think, to de-center Christianity in a broader religious landscape. The notion that it’s actually a totally even-handed mutual effort is, I think, rather naive. 6/

Religions exist in a social hierarchy, and almost nowhere is one not dominant over the others. (Everything I say here is for the American context; in Israel, replace Christianity with Judaism and Judaism with Islam.) 7/

Interfaith efforts are undertaken by Christians who actively want to engage a religiously pluralistic society, and by Jews who want to be taken seriously and treated respectfully by Christians in that society. It’s never Christians looking for respect from Jews. 8/

The first big issue there, of course, is that the effort to de-center Christianity still centers Christianity. (This is a familiar problem from other spheres, of course.) But I think people are so used to Christianity being centered that it never occurs to them. 9/

A second issue is that it feels almost like charity - like interfaith work is something we should to do help and to better understand those poor other folks who aren’t us. But that simply reaffirms the relative status of the two groups. 10/

Third, and I think most bothersome to me: in attempting to de-center Christianity, a new center is created, around those faiths - usually the “Abrahamic” ones - vis-a-vis other religious traditions, or lack thereof. And here we need to ask why. 11/

So much of interfaith stems from or rotates around a sense of similarity: common origins, shared monotheism, “the same god,” etc. It seems pretty clear to me that what’s being said is “we can engage these people because, though different in some ways, they’re like us.” 12/

The interfaith project, if it is fundamentally an attempt to recognize the humanity of the other, defines that humanity by the existence and comprehensibility of the other’s faith. It is as if to say, “We can accept you because your beliefs are within the right range.” 13/

In making faith the grounds in which acceptance and understanding are based, interfaith continues to prioritize certain peoples over others, and centers the faith community as somehow more deserving. This strikes me as deeply anti-humanistic. 14/

If we require someone to be of a particular faith tradition in order to make the effort to understand or accept them, then we’re just extending the umbrella of our current closed-minded perspective a tiny bit further. We’re not actually getting rid of it. 15/

We should care about other people because they’re...people. Humans. Not because they participate in any faith tradition, especially those most recognizable to us. Members of the Abrahamic faiths aren’t more worthy or deserving of understanding than anyone else. 16/

Interfaith, while it purports to be about understanding the other, is really about understanding only some others. It lifts up some “acceptable” groups as worthy of care, and by definition thus only draws a wider circle around Christianity. It doesn’t eliminate the circle. 17/

What do interfaith projects teach their participants? That these other people are okay, we should see them as fully human, just like us. If you have to teach that, your religion has some problems to begin with. But interfaith reinforces those problems. 18/

Interfaith works within a system that prioritizes human lives differently depending on their religious affiliation. It may be an attempt to improve things, but it accepts the basic structures within which improvement can happen. It’s still playing the same basic game. 19/

Interfaith needs to be at most a subset of interhuman. We should be caring for and understanding every person as an human life first and foremost. Interfaith privileges group identity over the individual. That’s what gets us in trouble to begin with. 20/

I’m not talking about projects that bring multiple faith groups together to do social justice type work. Everything that tries to make the world a better place is good. And we should absolutely be attending to the dangers specific to Judaism and Islam in today’s society. 22/

But when we engage in interfaith efforts, usually from some institutional standpoint, we should be asking what values those efforts are based on, and what they say about how we categorize people and what we think makes them worthy of our outreach efforts. 23/

If the impetus is “Can’t we all just get along,” then the answer is yes - we can all just get along. If you have to do programming to teach your people how to just get along with others, I think you’ve screwed up along the way somewhere. 24/

And if your programming is “can’t we just get along with these particular folks who belong to this one religious tradition,” then you’re already saying that we can get along with some people better than others. And that’s bad too. /fin

PS - I’m sure I expressed some things poorly, or incompletely, along the way here. Please excuse such failings. This may all just be one big subtweet of my own institution, in the end. (Don’t tell them that.)