What do the phrases “conservative Mormon” and “queer progressive interfaith dialogue” have in common? Me. The former is what I was raised as and the latter has been slowly added along the way. Some of my first interfaith experiences were discussions about faith with my Muslim friends in high school and my first year of college. That spark of curiosity was further ignited by my eighteen-month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka Mormon church) in Sweden. In my role as a missionary, I found and taught others who were interested in learning more about my faith and helped them develop the tools they needed to build their own connection with God. I would spend hours on the street talking to people and inviting them to meet up for a lesson. If the teachings and practices of prayer, scripture study and church attendance resonated with them, we’d continue meeting, and if not, I was back on the street the next hour talking to someone else. Interreligious dialogue was a way to understand the beliefs and practices of others and use that to help them understand what I believed.
For some reason, the conservative Christian beliefs of an American didn’t resonate with many Swedish people who are mostly liberal and secular. As a result most of the people that I ended up teaching and becoming friends with were often immigrants whose beliefs and culture were far from the Swedish mainstream. I remember the hardworking Buddhist couple who had fluffy cats and taught me about the mindfulness that comes when one focuses on the breath. The Sikh couple who invited me into their apartment, carefully washed their hands before handling their holy text and showed me videos about meditation. The kind priest from the Swedish Church who bought me hot chocolate and told me about the writings of Martin Luther. The evangelical minister who gave me a blessing of healing on the street when I said I had a headache. The Armenian family of Syrian refugees who fed me pork tongue for the first time. The hospitality of the many Muslim families of refugees who spoke very little Swedish but welcomed me into their homes, offered me tea and told me about the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.
I came home from my mission with two goals that I had never had before. First, I wanted to make more friends with the wonderfully diverse people at MIT outside of the Mormon community. Second, I started taking history classes on the modern Middle East to better understand the conflict that brought so many of the friends I had made in Sweden to flee their homes. The first goal led me to participate in Addir, MIT’s interfaith dialogue program, and now the Boston Interfaith Leadership Initiative (BILI). The second goal led me to eventually teach coding to Palestinian and Israeli high schoolers in Jerusalem, double major in history and fulfill the requirements for a teaching license.
Participating in Addir allowed me to get together with a small group of peers from different religious and secular backgrounds every week and talk about our spiritual autobiographies and discuss everything about our worldviews, from the afterlife to relationships to gender roles. It was in this intensely vulnerable and incredibly safe space that I started to grapple with the conflict between my faith and sexuality. As I’ve come out, accepted my queerness, and continued to practice my faith, I’ve experienced increasing rejection from my faith community. As I become more progressive, interactions with people in my conservative tradition have increasingly become exercises in interreligious dialogue, love and understanding. At the same time, discussions with my friends in interfaith communities have become a sustaining part of my spiritual home and have allowed me the space to explore, refine and define what it means to be and to have Hope.
Through BILI, I’ve begun to read more about the theory behind interfaith dialogue, listen to discussions between religious leaders about interfaith work and meet other students engaged in interfaith work at other campuses in the Boston area. I’ve begun to see how interfaith work can create systems of cooperation and learning in addition to dialogue.
Looking at the image I drew for this blog, it is clear there is a reason I study computer science and history and not art. But even in a poorly drawn way, the image represents what BILI and interfaith means to me now. Interfaith dialogue is the process of forming cooperative connections between individuals with unique values, experiences and worldviews. Instead of seeking to change the perspectives of others, individuals who participate in inter-ideological dialogue recognize that difference allows their own worldviews to stretch, become more balanced and perhaps even develop new bridges that lead to truth in themselves and others.
Original art by author.