The below was written for the 2017-2018 cohort of the Boston Interfaith Leadership Initiative (BILI), in which Ann-Marie was a fellow. For more information about the program, please see the BILI website.

The greatest opportunity BILI afforded me was the ability to connect with our cohort of young, humble, capable leaders. I often think that resources are plentiful in Boston when it comes to interfaith and multireligious work—it’s a growing field, there are many social justice-oriented religious communities in the area, and there’s a ton of energy and momentum—but the connections too often are scattered and siloed. Bringing together the next generation of interfaith, multireligious leaders has already helped plant many seeds to forge ahead with the burgeoning network of cross-spiritual change-makers.

What most stuck with me during the retreat BILI held was the ease with which everyone slipped into intimate and engaging discussion. The retreat attendees were largely strangers to one another, and yet our thoughtful collective seemed to know instinctively just how genuinely, curiously, and wholeheartedly to embrace difficult questions about crossing cultural and religious boundaries. I remember most vividly talking about hospitality with a fellow cohort member and a new friend we met minutes earlier; we delved into lived experiences with Eastern and Western versions of hospitality and how they informed our etiquette. I truly think our recipe for the day was as simple as it was great: coalesce a group of like-minded and earnest peers, then add a mission.

What’s the mission now that BILI is over for me?

I encourage people not just to have dialogue surrounding religion and faith—however those terms may be loosely constructed, interpreted, and defined—but also to have discussions surrounding secularism, agnosticism, atheism, and other marginalized topics. I encourage people to think about Christian hegemony and Christian privilege in interfaith spaces. I encourage them to think about how the term “interfaith” can obscure power differences and structural violence against more minoritized faiths in the United States. Think about Orientalism and appropriation, as well as decentralized and noninstitutionalized folk traditions and paganism. Think about how religious self-education can be conducted to take the burden of explaining minoritized spiritual or religious paths off of marginalized religious practitioners. Think about how “faith” is a problematic word that doesn’t apply to every religious path. Think about how philosophical, ethical, and moral systems are dependent upon who had the privilege and opportunity to be in the room. Think about how “theology” is a Western term. Think about how the divide between the secular public sphere and the private religious sphere is an Enlightenment construct that is false and obscures the hybridity of non-Western lifespheres and worldviews. Think about how not every religion has a God. Think about how religion is not just the rote formula of canonized texts, leaders, place of worship, and congregation. Think about how religions are not exclusive (thereby making the term “interfaith” defunct). Think about how the word “religion” is Western and does not exist in other languages.

Until contemporary interfaith, multireligious spaces address the power dynamics within them, the very oppressions they claim to fight in social justice struggles will be perpetuated. You cannot organize for racial justice, gender equality, or the self-determination of queer folx unless you think about the racial makeup of religious communities, patriarchal religious leadership, or structural homophobia. If class struggles aren’t recognized and actively combatted, and accessibility isn’t prioritized, then only middle- to upper-class, able-bodied, neurotypical, well-educated people will be in interfaith spaces. How can we make interfaith and multireligious work more self- critical? How can we be intentional about pluralism?

I additionally hope to motivate people to consider the impact that capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism have had and continue to have on interfaith and multireligious work. As I write this blogpost, I am working on the stolen, unceded land of the Massachusett, the Pequot, and the Wampanoag peoples. Arguably, you cannot come together and organize for justice without reparations. If interfaith and multireligious leaders continue to tokenize indigenous peoples and those with other minoritized faith backgrounds, nationalities, and experiences, then we will never achieve the goals we set out for ourselves.

We must build a sustainable movement, and that sustainability must be grounded in community, criticism, and a willingness to learn and grow. Calling people in—not out—needs to be the first step to not just opening the door, but helping up the stairs, the future leaders of spiritual engagement. We need to be radically hospitable. We have to care for each other’s holistic health—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, both individually and as a collective. Every prayer, mantra, chant, intention is a call to action.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash