Nara Schoenberg, Chicago Tribune
May 10, 2022·7 min read
Eboo Patel began his efforts to bring people of different faiths together for dialogue and service projects in a basement office on the Northwest Side.
He kept his day job and piloted a practical Chrysler Cirrus sedan through the streets of Chicago, delivering high school kids to meetings where they engaged in spirited discussions and packed meals for homeless people.
“I was like a Cub Scout leader,” Patel said with a chuckle.
What a difference 20 years makes. Today Patel, who comes to interfaith work from a Muslim perspective, helms a nonprofit with a staff of 54, a budget of $14 million and programs on hundreds of college campuses. Interfaith America has advised presidents and helped Starbucks develop religious diversity education for employees.
And Patel, whose organization — formerly known as Interfaith Youth Core and is being renamed Interfaith America on Tuesday to reflect its broader goals, is still innovating.
In his new book, “We Need To Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy,” Patel pushes for a broader vision of American religious values that acknowledges not only Christians and Jews, but also Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians and nonbelievers, among others.
“We are an organization that builds bridges and says, ‘Diversity is not just the differences that you like,’ ” said Patel, 46.
“The only way to have a healthy, religiously diverse democracy is for people who disagree on some fundamental things to work together on other fundamental things, right? It’s a remarkable achievement in human history for people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies to build a nation together, and we think religion has an awful lot to do with that,” he said.
Patel acknowledged that religion can be weaponized but noted that his Muslim parents obtained degrees from the University of Notre Dame and DePaul University, both Catholic institutions. His kids went to Catholic preschools. His sister-in-law’s children went to a Jewish preschool.
“We in America have this remarkable civic genius where communities of a particular faith build institutions as an expression of their particular faith identity, (and those institutions) serve everybody. I think it is one of the great, never-celebrated geniuses of America,”Patel said.
In recognition of his organization’s expanded mission, which has included training 2,000 people to work within their diverse faith communities to advocate for the COVID-19 vaccine, the group is formally announcing the name change Tuesday at Georgetown University.
“As my Buddhist friends say, ‘Chop wood, carry water,’ right? There are no shortcuts,” Patel said of his organization’s rise. “I’m really proud of how hard we have worked, program by program, staff person by staff person, student by student, faculty member by faculty member.”
Patel began his career in the shadow of Sept. 11, 2001, and became a media darling at a time when news organizations were seeking out moderate Muslim voices to combat a wave of bias and misunderstanding.
“CNN would be calling us all the time,” said Zeenat Rahman, the executive director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, who worked for Interfaith America from 2006 to 2011.
Patel, a Rhodes scholar with a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, was named one of “America’s Best Leaders” by US News & World Report in 2009. He served on President Barack Obama’s inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships, and has published five books, including the award-winning autobiography, “Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, in the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation.”
His greatest strength is his ability to convey an inspiring vision of what is possible, Rahman said, but he’s also a strategic thinker who can convince foundations that say, “We don’t do religion,” to get on board and invest in his programs.
“He could have done and been anything he wanted and he chose to do this,” Rahman said of interfaith work.
“He could have run for Senate,” Rahman said. “He could have run for presidential office, and I think we would have been really successful because he has that intangible ‘I don’t know what it is, but you know it when you see it in a leader.’ Obama has it. Bill Clinton has it.”
Wheaton College President Philip Ryken said that he’s known Patel for about 10 years and they see each other regularly at higher education events. A few years ago, Ryken invited Patel
to his evangelical Christian college campus and interviewed him publicly about interfaith issues, Christianity and Islam.
“Eboo has a strong capacity for friendship — not just networking, but also friendship, and I think that enables him to build coalitions more strongly,” Ryken said.
Ryken said that Patel’s message appeals to communities of faith that hold strongly to their religious convictions, a category that includes evangelicals as well as many Muslims and Jews.
“Interfaith Youth Core does not require people of faith to check their religious convictions at the door, but actually to bring them to the conversation so that they can be the fullness of who they are in those relationships and not have to pretend to agree about things that they don’t agree about,” he said.
Ryken disagrees with Patel on big issues such as the nature of God and the path to salvation, he said, but he agrees that there are still areas where they can cooperate for the common good, and that it’s important to seek out such cooperation.
Patel lives in Chicago with his wife, Shehnaz Mansuri, a lawyer, and their two sons, the older of whom is a student at Lane Tech College Prep High school.
Patel was full of his usual enthusiasm during a recent interview, and, true to form, was still setting new goals. He wants the United States to fully embrace the contributions of all religions to the cultural fabric of the country, he said, a paradigm leap that would build on the advances made in the 20th century, when a nation that had viewed itself as Protestant began to see itself as Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.
“My vision is that we start calling the United States ‘Interfaith America,’ and not Judeo-Christian, and that becomes just commonplace in five or six years,” he said. “‘Judeo-Christianz did great work, but it doesn’t include atheists or Zoroastrians, it doesn’t include Muslims or Jains, it doesn’t include B’hais or Buddhists. And we have to. We have to. So a big part of the vision is a shift in paradigm. And then I want our civic American institutions to follow that shift in paradigm with actual activities.”
Patel wants a national day of interfaith service, an interfaith student council on every college campus and training for nurses and doctors in how to engage the diverse religious identities of their patients.
He wants companies to follow Starbucks’ lead and have religious diversity education that encourages interfaith cooperation.
This isn’t the first time that interfaith leaders have tried to broaden the nation’s understanding of its religious identity, according to Kevin M. Schultz, chair of the history department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the book “Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise.”
In the 1920s and ‘30s, people of different faiths worked together to combat a wave of Ku Klux Klan activity and anti-immigrant sentiment aimed at Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe.
“It was a big deal to get Protestants, Catholics and Jews to work together,” said Schultz, and the effort, which included the formation of the National Conference for Christians and Jews, had broad impact. Presidents joined the board of the organization, the group’s National Brotherhood Week was widely celebrated and members helped organize the national March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Broadening the idea of whose religion is fundamentally American was a big lift, and remains so today, Schultz said. Still, he said, Patel is suited to the task: He is well-connected, having worked on Obama’s interfaith efforts. He comes from a minority faith, but he’s very good at speaking to majority faiths. And he has a vision and optimism that Schultz finds “totally compelling.”
“If anyone’s well-positioned to make it happen again, it’s Eboo Patel,” Schultz said.
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