by Eboo Patel
I felt as ready as any organizational president has ever been to make a fund-raising pitch. I knew this man’s favorite authors, I knew his other philanthropic investments, I came highly recommended by his personal friends. There are times when the pitch comes out perfectly and times when it feels a little shaky. On that morning in New York City, I was as on as I’ve ever been. I knew the mentoring programs he supported were domestic, so I talked about our activities in the United States. His work on the Millennium Development Goals was global, so I made sure to mention our partnerships with Tony Blair and Queen Rania. He was involved in American politics, and I managed to sneak in that Bill Clinton liked us. He supported youth programs, so I told stories of impressive projects IFYC student leaders had organized on college campuses. He was nodding and smiling; the moment to make the ask was getting close.
But first, he had a question. “Eboo,” he asked, “how does Interfaith Youth Core measure effectiveness?”
OK, I thought, it looked like this man was listening, but maybe his mind was actually wandering a bit. No problem—he was busy, he had a lot of important things going on. I was happy to repeat. So I ran through the litany again, a little faster this time, lots of grassroots projects, lots of glow from the global stage; everything was growing, growing, growing. He nodded, and then he repeated his question using slightly simpler language: “How does your organization know that what you are doing is working?”
I tried a different tack this time. Religious prejudice was getting worse. Religious violence was getting worse. The institutions that were making religion a barrier of division or a bomb of destruction were getting lots of money. If the world wanted religion to be a bridge of cooperation, it had to invest more money in interfaith cooperation.
He leaned back in his chair. He was not nodding anymore, and he was not smiling. I realized that he had actually been paying very close attention the whole time, listening for a direct answer to his question about effectiveness. He wasn’t hearing what he needed to hear. “You just used the word investment,” he said. “Investments are what I do. The return on an investment in the business world is money. The return on an investment in the social world is impact. I invest in fields and organizations where I see effective work being done. The data in mentoring shows us that if an at-risk young person has a mentor, his or her chance of leading a successful life goes up significantly. The data in malaria shows us that bed nets, which, properly used, prevent people from getting bitten by malaria-carrying mosquitos, cost ten dollars each.6 In each of those cases, I know precisely what impact my investment buys. I love the idea of interfaith cooperation, and I’m impressed by the sheer energy your organization brings to this issue. But I don’t know the specific objectives of your activities, I don’t know your definition of success, I don’t understand how you’ve chosen your strategy, and I don’t know the metrics you use to track progress. Bottom line: I can’t measure the impact of my investment, and when that’s the case, I don’t invest.”
He had caught me in a contradiction: if your organization is growing but the problem your organization claims to solve is growing faster, then maybe something you’re doing is wrong.
How do we measure effectiveness in interfaith work? How do we track progress? What outcomes are we after, and how do we know we are reaching them? Frankly, I hadn’t thought much about any of those things. When I thought about Interfaith Youth Core, words like dream, passion, and vision came to mind. Metrics were for the corporate guys who worked in cubicles, not the leaders of social movements. Actually, they were also for some of America’s most perceptive observers of religion in public life.
The reason I could easily rattle off statistics on religious prejudice in America is because social scientists at universities like Harvard and Princeton and at organizations like Gallup and Pew had been gathering quantitative data about religious diversity for years. The most influential was Harvard University’s Robert Putnam. In 1995, his book Bowling Alone introduced the term “social capital” into our nation’s vocabulary.7 The idea is simple: the activities that strengthen our civil society, from volunteering and voting to giving money to charity, are based on social networks and civic organizations. Such groups play a crucial role in any society, but America especially relies on the energies and involvement of its citizens in the civic sphere. As he later put it in a lecture, “Where levels of social capital are higher, children grow up healthier, safer, and better educated, people live longer, happier lives, and democracy and the economy work better.”8
Probably the most important source of social capital in America is religious communities. Putnam says that basically half of America’s volunteerism, philanthropy, and associational membership is religiously based. This was especially dramatic during the abolition and civil rights movements, when large groups of religious people risked their lives to fight for things that they considered fundamentally religious values. But it goes on in less dramatic ways all the time, in the schools, hospitals, social-service agencies, and volunteer programs that religious communities run. Putnam writes, “[Faith communities] provide an important incubator for civic skills, civic norms, community interests, and civic recruitment. Religiously active men and women learn to give speeches, run meetings, manage disagreements, and bear administrative responsibility.”9 This is the good news. But there is bad news as well.
In his research, Putnam discovered something that he found extremely disturbing: diversity actually reduces social capital. In highly diverse areas in the United States, people report lower levels of confidence in local leaders, lower levels of confidence in their own influence, lower voting rates, fewer close friends and confidants, less likelihood of working on a community project, and lower expectations that other people in the area will cooperate together on community projects. About the only thing that people in highly diverse areas did more of was sit at home and watch television. Putnam concludes, “In more diverse communities, people trust their neighbors less . . . [and] appear to ‘hunker down.’ ”10 For a generation raised both to value civic engagement and celebrate diversity, it is more than a little sobering to learn that the data shows that the two are inversely correlated.
One problem is that America’s social capital tends to be, in Putnam’s term, bonded. Within religion, that means Catholics do things with other Catholics, Muslims with Muslims, Jews with Jews, and so on. Even when institutions founded by one community serve the broader public, they are typically run by that one community. In America’s highly diverse society, Putnam much prefers what he calls bridged social capital—different religious groups that work together by, say, co-organizing volunteer programs. Not only does this bridging increase the good work being done for the broader society (the volunteering), it has the highly important effect of encouraging people from different backgrounds to work well together. In other words, bridging, or working together, both increases social capital and strengthens social cohesion.11
Diverse civil societies with high amounts of bonded social capital and deep distrust between different communities are in danger of everything from being silos to suffering civil wars. Effectively, you’ve got communities that encourage high participation within the group but little involvement with other groups or the broader society. What happens when those different groups decide they don’t like one another? What happens when you take all that bonded social capital, all that powerful sense of in-group identity and those high levels of internal community participation, and release it in aggression toward other groups? That’s when you get the religious violence of a Baghdad or a Belfast.
If a high amount of bonded social capital combined with tension between different groups in a diverse society is a recipe for a civil war, it is also true that bridged social capital can prevent such violence. In a study on India, Brown University social scientist Ashutosh Varshney asked the question “Why do some cities in India explode in inter-religious violence and others remain calm in similar circumstances?”12 The answer, he discove
red, is stunningly simple: cities that have what he calls networks of engagement—in Putnam’s terms, civic associations that bridge social capital—remain peaceful. In cities that do not have organizations or activities in which people from different religious backgrounds regularly gather for good works, in times of interreligious tension, civil wars erupt.
America is among the most religiously diverse countries in human history and by far the most religiously devout nation in the West. How are we doing when it comes to bridging our religiously diverse social capital?
Social scientists measure America’s religious diversity in three basic ways. The first and most common category is attitudes. This is a broad category, and there are many ways to ask questions about attitudes, but it generally comes down to a pretty basic sentiment: “Do you like Muslims/Jews/evangelicals/humanists?” The second category—relationships—is illustrated by questions like, “Do you know/work with/have a friend of a different religion?” The final category is knowledge, exemplified by questions such as, “What religion is Shabbat associated with? In what faith do adherents fast from dawn to dusk for one month of the year?”
I knew this data well. I used it in my speeches and writings, and it helped me paint a picture of how bad the problem of religious prejudice is in our society. What I had failed to notice was that the data isn’t just useful in presenting the problem; it actually shapes up to suggest a solution. The three measures—attitudes, relationships, knowledge—are actually deeply related. A 2007 Pew study found that 44 percent of people who did not know a Mormon had a positive attitude toward the Mormon community. Of people who did know a Mormon personally, 60 percent had favorable views. That’s a 16-point difference. When the same question was asked regarding Muslims, the difference was even starker: only 32 percent of people who did not know a Muslim expressed favorable views toward the community, but of those who did know a Muslim, 56 percent had positive attitudes. That’s nearly a 25-point difference—huge, really.13
In his most recent book, American Grace, written with David Campbell, Putnam calls this the My Friend Al Principle, which he explains like this: Say you are a beekeeper and your friend Al is a bee-keeper. Apiculture brings you together, and through this shared activity, you learn that Al is an Evangelical Christian. Prior to meeting Al, you harbored a host of prejudices about Evangelicals, but if Al is a bee-keeper and a good guy and an Evangelical, then maybe other Evangelicals aren’t so bad. Putnam and Campbell actually show strong statistical evidence for this principle—that people’s regard for entire religious groups improves through a positive, meaningful relationship with even one member of that group, often formed through a common activity. Putnam and Campbell discovered that their data suggested something else: by becoming friends with Al the beekeeping Evangelical, not only did your attitude toward Evangelicals improve, so did your attitude toward Mormons and Muslims. They conclude, “We have reasonably firm evidence that as people build more religious bridges they become warmer toward people of many different religions, not just those religions represented within their social network.”14
Clearly, relationships between people of different faiths have a profound impact on attitudes toward other faith communities. But that’s not the only variable that makes a difference. There is also good evidence that knowledge of other traditions correlates strongly with positive attitudes. A 2009 Pew study found that those who reported a high familiarity with Islam—for example, knowing that Muslims call God Allah and that their holy book is called the Qur’an—are three times more likely to have favorable views of Muslims than those who report low familiarity.15 A Gallup survey released the same year found a similarly strong correlation between knowledge of Islam and attitudes toward Muslims.16
But it’s not just knowledge that matters; it’s what you know—the type of knowledge—that counts the most. According to a recent Gallup Poll, only 2 percent of Americans say they have a great deal of knowledge about Buddhism, and 14 percent report feeling some prejudice towards Buddhists. Meanwhile, only 3 percent of Americans claim they have a great deal of knowledge about Islam, and yet 43 percent claim some prejudice towards Muslims.17
How is it that a little knowledge about Buddhism correlates with broadly positive feelings towards Buddhists, but a little knowledge about Islam is linked to frighteningly negative views of Muslims?
Here’s my theory: In the minds of most people, entities as abstract and amorphous as religions are represented by the small piece of knowledge we have about that tradition. What people likely know about Buddhism is the figure of the Dalai Lama, and so it’s hard for them to associate Buddhism with something terribly negative. When it comes to Islam, the images of terrorism come immediately to mind, and so people’s view of an entire tradition is colored by an infinitesimally small but shockingly violent fringe.
That data point made me think about the man at the anti–Cordoba House rally carrying the sign that said, “All I Need to Know about Islam I Learned on 9/11.” He didn’t know much about a 1,400-year-old tradition with 1.5 billion believers, and the thing he did know was an act of horror.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in data about religious diversity. The more I studied this area, the more I started to see attitudes, knowledge, and relationships as three sides of a triangle. If you know some (accurate and positive) things about a religion, and you know some people from that religion, you are far more likely to have positive attitudes toward that tradition and that community. The more favorable your attitude, the more open you will be to new relationships and additional appreciative knowledge. A couple of cycles around this triangle, and people from different faiths are starting to smile at each other on the streets instead of looking away or crossing to the other side. A few more cycles—more knowledge, more friends, more favorable attitudes—and people are starting to say, “We ought to do something with those people who worship in that place called a mosque or a gurdwara down the street.” To go back to the social science jargon, that’s when bridging starts to happen, that’s when social capital starts to grow, that’s when social cohesion gets stronger.
But the triangle works the other way as well. You can run reverse cycles on it. People without much knowledge about other religions and with little contact with people from those communities are far more likely to harbor negative attitudes toward those traditions and communities. If movements emerge to fill those gaps in knowledge and relationships with negative information and ugly representations, people’s attitudes go from negative to vociferously opposed. This is precisely what happened during the Cordoba House controversy. And that leads to community action as well—like arson attacks on mosque construction sites.
The joke about social scientists is that they run expensive research projects that generally end up proving common sense. In this case, it’s true. You don’t need to be a professor at Harvard or Princeton to know in your gut that positive relationships with people of other faiths and appreciative knowledge of their traditions will improve people’s attitudes toward religious diversity. But it’s one thing to feel something in your bones and another thing to have the data that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is true. The data helps convince skeptics, but perhaps even more important, it focuses the efforts of activists. Now that we know that the key leverage points in building religious pluralism are appreciative knowledge and meaningful relationships, interfaith organizations can design their programs to increase these two factors.
This sounds innocent. All interfaith programs, at some level, seek to increase appreciative knowledge and facilitate positive, meaningful relationships, right? Sure, but once you have the science that shows what works and you make the decision to craft your programs to apply this science, you find yourself asking a whole different set of questions: How can we shape our program design so that we maximize for knowledge and relationships? What do we need to leave out of our programs, even if we loved doing some of those things, because they distract from our goal? Do we have instruments th
at can measure our progress? If we follow this science, we know that an interfaith panel that argues about the Middle East is not the most effective step to building positive relationships and spreading appreciative knowledge. Instead, a program that brings people from different religions together to discuss how their various faiths speak to the shared value of mercy is a more effective approach because it builds appreciative knowledge. Following it up by an opportunity where the audience can plan a concrete project applying mercy in small, religiously diverse groups where they can begin to form meaningful interfaith relationships is even better.
These were the conversations I started having with IFYC board members, especially one Tarek Elmasry, a director in the Chicago office of McKinsey and Company. (He’s now running the Middle East region for McKinsey.) He liked nothing better than to talk about defining goals and measuring results. When he was convinced that I was serious about the science of interfaith cooperation, he committed to helping me design a strategy for implementing that science. He got us a McKinsey engagement team, pro bono. The team would spend its first weeks gathering data about the effectiveness of IFYC programs over the past five years, and then help us shape a plan for the next five years. Tarek himself would supervise the team. He promised to be personally involved. I had no idea how personal it would get.
“It’s not working,” Tarek told me. We were standing at the grill looking out over Lake Michigan in the backyard of his beautiful home on Chicago’s North Shore. It was the middle of the summer, a perfect night to get the families together for a barbecue. “No shop talk,” my wife had made me promise on the drive over. “Yep, of course,” I said. What was there to talk about? Things were going great. I was in a celebratory mood.
