The hearings Representative Peter King recently held on the supposed “radicalization” of American Muslims are widely considered to be the most counterproductive in recent history. They single out the American Muslim community and misuse one of the highest offices in the land to bolster Islamophobia — or at the very least inaccurate generalizations about Islam — under the guise of protecting Homeland Security. Some pundits have gone so far as to compare them to the McCarthy Hearings, and those comparisons are becoming more persuasive.

Yet a remarkable and increasingly salient byproduct of the Peter King hearings is the crystallization of the Interfaith Movement. As the embodiment of what its members feared — the singling out of one religious community to the detriment of them all — the hearings have become a rallying cry for those who see the hope that the Interfaith Movement can bring: the end to inter-communal strife and collaboration across religious lines for the common good.

First, it is hard to overlook the success of the interfaith movement in speaking out against the Peter King hearings. With a remarkable diversity of voices, members of all different religious communities are working to put an end to the hearings — or counter their claims, should they persist.

To take but a handful of recent examples of religious communities and interfaith leaders speaking out against the Peter King hearings, Religious Freedom USA recently gathered over 800 signatures from people of all traditions who found that it is “inappropriate and unfair to single out one group of Americans” in this way; Rabbis for Human Rights, replete with members from different branches of Judaism and some of the most noted Jewish scholars and leaders in the country, issued a statement against the hearings: “….Today’s world is fraught with a danger. We understand that we have to challenge fundamentalism, but in the pursuit of that goal, we must not fragment the family of humankind….”; and Professor J. Brent Walker, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee, shared in emphatic terms why “Singling out one faith affects them all.”

Voices within numerous denominations, from Secular Humanists to Catholics, Jews to Sikhs have come out in protest of the hearings. Ingrid Mattson, Immediate Past President of the Islamic Society of North America was correct when she told a group of coreligionists, “‘We are not alone — our interfaith family has our back.'” Her interfaith family — Americans of all religious traditions — have helped shroud the hearings in doubt, in a remarkable showing of support for the American Muslim community. But undermining a wrongdoing must only be the start.

Now that we know what one of the “worst case scenarios” looks and feels like — the targeting of a religious community by an office of our government — it is important to work towards best case scenarios: cities filled with interfaith community service efforts, dialogue taking place within and across the schools that train our religious leaders, American religious communities leveraging their social capital at home to resolve religious conflicts abroad.

The fundamentally unjust nature of the Peter King Hearings is galvanizing an unprecedented response. But is up to us, as members of the Interfaith Movement, to translate that response against injustice into a proactive effort to build enduring collaboration and partnerships across religious lines.

This blog post was re-featured with permission from Odyssey Networks.