Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  Tarek wasn’t. His wife had made him promise the same thing, but he had just gotten the first wave of data back from the McKinsey team working on the Interfaith Youth Core strategic plan, and he was not impressed.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “It’s not working,” he repeated. “At current course and speed, it’s going to take Interfaith Youth Core centuries to make interfaith cooperation a social norm, not decades, and that’s only if you’re lucky.

  “Here are the facts,” Tarek told me. “In any sector you work in—cities, campuses, US embassies abroad—you reach less than 5 percent of the total number of units. Within each city or campus or embassy, your penetration is unimpressive. So it’s great that 150 people came to your lecture at the University of Illinois, but that’s a campus of 35,000 people. And when 150 people come to your lecture in New York City—well, you do the math. Moreover, when we interviewed the people who attend IFYC speeches or trainings, they all say they find them inspiring—which is one of the bright spots in the data we’ve collected—but a year later, the vast majority say they haven’t taken any significant interfaith action steps yet. So here’s the bottom line: your staff is spread too thin across sectors, your programs don’t reach enough people within sectors, and the people you reach don’t take action. You want to know what my hypothesis about this is, Eboo?”

  Actually, I really didn’t, but Tarek kept rolling right along, flipping the steaks as he talked. “My hypothesis is that your organization is spread too thin across sectors because you see yourself as someone who generates cool new opportunities instead of someone who delivers impact. The embassy in Kazakhstan calls and asks for an IFYC staffer to come out, and you think to yourself, ‘How awesome that people in Kazakhstan love Interfaith Youth Core—I must be doing something right,’ and you send someone without any thought about the purpose of the trip. And the reason that people don’t take action after IFYC programs is because you don’t give them a clear road map of what it means to be an interfaith leader and what action to take. You make ten different suggestions, whatever new ideas you’ve been reading about in the New Yorker. When you tell people to do ten things, the chances are they’ll do nothing.

  “And you want to know why I think that’s happening?” I didn’t even try to stop him this time. “It’s because of you. You talk too much and you say too many different things, both within your organization and outside of it. You like to sound interesting, full of new ideas. Well, that’s great for cocktail parties and newspaper columns, but it’s bad if you want to build an organization that leads a social movement. As a leader, you lack focus and discipline. And your organization has taken on that personality. It lacks focus and discipline.”

  This was too much for me. I started to yell. I knew I was going to hear it from my wife afterward, but I just could not sit there and take this anymore. Was he not reading all the glowing press reports on IFYC? Did he not know about all the awards we were winning?

  “Sizzle is good,” Tarek said in a maddeningly slow, patient voice. And then he repeated the same lines: The data showed that we were not on track to achieve our goal—nowhere near, actually. For us to have any hope of making interfaith cooperation a social norm within the space of a generation, we had to stop generating scattered opportunities to do interfaith work and focus on impact. Instead of spreading ourselves thin across sectors, we ought to focus in one area where we could make a measureable change. The sector ought to see interfaith cooperation as a priority and to view itself as playing a vanguard role in American society. As we reached a tipping point within that sector, it would not only serve as a model for the rest of the society but also produce leaders who would directly influence other sectors. With respect to leadership development, IFYC needed to be clear about what we thought people who attended our workshops should do after they left, design the workshop to inspire and equip them to do it, and create a campaign that encouraged lots of people to take that action together.

  “Steaks are done,” he said, and smiled.

  I wanted to throw him into the lake, but he’d already walked inside.

  The hardest thing for a leader to take is criticism in the area he thinks he’s an expert. I complained that Tarek was robbing us of our creativity, that he was too enamored of his own consultant-think. But I couldn’t dispute the facts that he was laying out in front of me. It was true: we had not achieved critical mass in any sector, and people who went through our trainings said they left inspired but didn’t launch projects at the rate we had hoped. It was also true that I had a healthy opinion of my own talent for generating ideas and opportunities. I had been invited to speak at Stanford, Yale, Princeton, the Clinton Global Initiative, TED; I was on an advisory committee for the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; I was writing for the Washington Post and getting quoted in the New York Times. I was the interfaith ideas guy.

  This was something I used to pride myself on. My favorite questions were the ones from left field—the further out the better. I loved it when someone in the audience stood up and talked about a random social problem and asked how interfaith cooperation could help solve it. From deforestation in Brazil to drug addiction in Buffalo, I’ve heard them all, and then some. I remember speaking to the cabinet and board of a small college in Iowa about the power of interfaith work, and being somewhat surprised when the board chair said, “We’ve got a big teen-pregnancy problem in this community. Can your organization help us do something about that?” I’d never thought about teen pregnancy and interfaith cooperation before, but that didn’t prevent me from musing aloud for five minutes on what might be done.

  In addition to telling the leaders of nonprofit organizations what new social problems they should take on, people also love telling us all the new places we ought to be working. You should be writing curriculum for preschools, people have told me, more scolding than suggesting. You should be running workshops in prisons, holding interfaith rallies in Portland, opening an office in Portugal. There seems to be no place on the planet that does not desperately need some version of an Interfaith Youth Core program. Of course, these statements spoke directly to my ego. See how valuable and necessary people think your work is! My typical reaction was to go with the flow: “Let me think about how we might do that.” And when I came up with a brilliant plan, I called my staff together and started outlining it on the whiteboard. These used to be known as the Eboo-chasing-another-uni-corn-down-a-dark-path sessions. “Ah, yes, but isn’t she beautiful?” I would respond.

  For Tarek, this was precisely the problem. If interfaith cooperation could be morphed into anything, then it was really about nothing. If interfaith cooperation went easily everywhere, then its impact was really nowhere. The goal of Interfaith Youth Core wasn’t to be an organization that proposed an interfaith solution to every conceivable social problem in every possible geography; it was to build understanding and cooperation between people from different faith backgrounds where it worked. For Tarek, responding to left-field questions and riding out random opportunities wasn’t an interesting quirk of Interfaith Youth Core. It revealed an organization that either didn’t know what it was doing or didn’t have the integrity to do what it was saying. These practices were not just for corporate consultants; they were also followed by some of the nonprofit leaders I respected most.

  When I was in college, one of my professors handed me a book titled Who Will Teach for America?18 “It’s about a young social entrepreneur named Wendy Kopp who had an idea for a domestic teaching corps when she was in college,” he told me. I devoured the book, and I became a devotee of Wendy’s. When her memoir One Day, All Children . . . : The Unlikely Triumph of Teach Across America and What I Learned Along the Way came out a few years later, I read it three times and underlined about half the book.19 She had done what I wanted to do: have a big idea and make it reality. When I met her some years later, I asked her to recount the story of the moment the ide
a had hit her, how she had convinced her parents that she was going to chase her dream instead of a corporate job, what those first staff meetings and fund-raising conversations had been like. I told her that I was trying to follow in her footsteps with Interfaith Youth Core.

  “I’ll tell you a little secret,” she said. “Everybody wants to hear the story of the idea, but having the idea is actually the easy part. The hard work is setting goals and building an organization that accomplishes those goals. Your organization exists to get results. Define those results clearly and pursue them relentlessly.”

  Part of the promise of the growing science in religious diversity is that it provides a plan for making interfaith cooperation a social norm. If we train a critical mass of leaders to create enough spaces that expand the number of positive, meaningful encounters between people from different religions and programs that increase people’s appreciative knowledge of other religious traditions, the studies tell us that people’s attitudes toward other faith communities will improve. As people’s attitudes improve, they will seek more interfaith friendships and interfaith literacy. When we work the attitudes-relationships-knowledge interfaith triangle, we build connections between people from different backgrounds. These connections become the networks of engagement that prevent social conflict and create the bridging social capital that address social problems.

  This all looks very logical as a flowchart on a whiteboard. My wife was not so impressed. “Every time you say ‘interfaith cooperation as a social norm’ or ‘the science of the interfaith triangle,’ you have to buy me something—something nice,” she told me. She was being cute, but she was also signaling something more serious. I was once an organizational president who told majestic stories of how interfaith leaders in the past had shaped some of history’s most inspiring moments—Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan in India, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel in Selma, Farid Esack and Desmond Tutu in South Africa—and told young people today that the next chapter in the narrative of religious pluralism was theirs to write. I had become someone who kept repeating the terms science, strategy, and social norm. It wasn’t just my wife who had a problem with it. I could see eyes glaze over in my public talks when I started explaining the science of interfaith cooperation. Even some IFYC staff complained about the work not being inspiring anymore.

  I started to get frustrated. “People,” I wanted to yell (and probably did, at some points), “do you not realize that if we fail to create rigorous systems for applying this science and evaluating our programs, our movement will deserve the most common insults of the skeptics: that we are well-meaning and ineffective.” But I knew in my heart that they were right. This work is either inspiring, or it doesn’t exist.

  If interfaith cooperation becomes about applying a science, does it lose the beauty of its craft? If interfaith cooperation becomes about executing a strategy, does it ignore the power of people’s stories? It was a day spent with one of the world’s most celebrated interfaith leaders that reinforced for me how much of an art it is to apply a science well.

  THE ART OF INTERFAITH LEADERSHIP

  “I’m inspired,” I heard the man say. “But I wonder if he’s just preaching to the choir?” We were walking out of an arena in Chicago where His Holiness the Dalai Lama had just done a teaching on interfaith cooperation in front of about eight thousand people. “Pretty big choir,” I thought to myself. “A choir that size, it could do a lot in this world.”

  About every other speech I give, somebody stands up and says, “Thanks for your talk, but didn’t you just preach to the choir?” They mean it as a mild rebuke, but increasingly I’m not so sure I see the metaphor the same way.

  One of the striking things about the furor around Cordoba House was the consistency and pattern of language used by a wide group of people:

  Radical Imam

  Terrorist Command Center

  Oppress women

  Sharia sharia sharia

  Stealth jihad

  Taqiyya

  Replace Constitution

  Sharia sharia sharia

  Verse, chorus, verse, chorus. It was a large choir singing a song loudly. They knew every word and every note, and every day they grew in size and increased in volume. How did they learn that song? Well, there was Newt Gingrich on television using and twisting terms like sharia and “stealth jihad.” Robert Spencer was doing it in books, Brigitte Gabriel in her public speeches, Franklin Graham in his television appearances, Pamela Geller on her blog, David Yerushalmi in his anti-sharia legislation. These were the preachers. Some even wore collars.

  The people who logged on to their websites, read their books, listened to their sermons, sent checks to their organizations—they were the choir. Why were they so effective in creating a climate of fear around Muslims? Simple. They sang the song the preachers taught them. Some people who heard the song found the music compelling and joined the choir, so the choir got larger and the song of religious prejudice got louder. The choir members with the most dedication and the best voices were picked out and given special training—preacher training. They were sent on the road to start new choirs. More preachers, new choirs, louder song, repeat cycle. Pretty good way to build a movement, actually.

  The follow-up to asking, “Aren’t you just preaching to the choir?” is stating that the people who really need to hear the message didn’t come to this presentation. The assumption is that social change happens when you go find the toughest problems, and that the people who come to the talk or show up at the activist meeting should somehow be disqualified precisely because they are interested in the issue. Increasingly, social-change theory is saying the opposite: the trick is not in finding the toughest problem, it’s identifying the people who embody the solution and helping them spread it. Preaching, if you will, to the choir.

  In their book Switch, social-change scholars Chip and Dan Heath illustrate this principle with the story of Jerry Sternin’s work for Save the Children in Vietnam in the early 1990s. Sternin’s objective was to improve nutrition in the country. He didn’t speak the language, he wasn’t given a plan, and he wasn’t particularly welcomed by the government, which gave him six months to make a difference and stern warnings not to rock any boats. The analysis papers Sternin read on Vietnam and malnutrition were uniformly pessimistic: malnutrition couldn’t be solved unless sanitation was improved, poverty was alleviated, education became universal. Sternin labeled this information TBU—True But Useless. His job was not to add to the literature of why malnutrition was such a big problem, it was to find a solution.

  Sternin started going to poor rural villages and asking a simple question: Were there examples of typical families whose children were healthier than the rest? Once he found those families, he went about figuring out what they were doing differently than others. It turns out that the mothers of the healthier kids were doing a few simple extra things—mixing greens and tiny shrimp in with the basic rice, and providing four smaller meals a day rather than two larger ones.

  Now that he knew what worked, Sternin’s challenge was to figure out how to spread it. Creating a big conference and doing a PowerPoint presentation on strategies for nutritional success would have looked good in memos back home but would have done little to improve nutrition in Vietnam. Instead, Sternin devised a model in which the mothers of healthy children shared their methods with the others. It was simple, and it fit right into the fabric of village life. He suggested that the village mothers cook together, with the mothers of healthy children showing the others how to mix in the greens and shrimp, and how to prepare smaller portions that their children would eat more often. The strategy was highly successful. Six months after Sternin arrived in the village, 65 percent of the kids were better nourished. The program spread to 265 villages, impacting 2.2 million people.

  Jerry Sternin found people who already knew the song of good nutrition in Vietnam. He helped them sing it louder and to teach it to larger choirs.1

  _____
__

  Where was the song of interfaith cooperation during the Ground Zero Mosque crisis? I know it existed, but it was hard to hear. That’s because most interfaith work isn’t actually a large choir singing the same song; most interfaith work is more like a chamber ensemble. Chamber music is a classical form meant for the intimate quarters of a palace chamber—basically, a handful of highly trained musicians playing for a small group of their friends. It is beautiful, it is deep, it is intimate, and it is very, very soft. It is the type of interfaith work described in The Faith Club, a popular book written by a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew about the group the authors formed to discuss their spiritual journeys with one another after 9/11.2 It inspired many more faith clubs around the country, small groups of people sharing the rich details of their personal spiritual journeys in intimate settings. It is one of the most common formats for interfaith work.

  The vast majority of people I know who get involved in interfaith work do so because of their personal spiritual journeys: their best friend or their boyfriend is of another religion, a teacher they admire or an aunt they love calls God something else, they read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and want to know more about Islam—or, like me, they read Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, and are inspired by how her Catholic faith motivated a life of justice. There are few things more personal than the question of how we view the divine and how we relate to those who understand the divine differently. What happens when we find beauty in faiths we were raised to think were wrong, even evil? What happens when we discover that someone else lives the values of our faith better than we do, and they are of a different faith? What happens when we rely on our faith to help us through a catastrophe and find people from other faiths doing the same thing, finding a similar solace in different prayers? This is what The Faith Club is about. It’s an eloquent book that touched a lot of people and inspired a lot of important conversations.