When the call came from Christiane Amanpour’s producer in September 2010, a cheer went up at Interfaith Youth Core. Here was a journalist who knew what she was talking about when it came to religion and global affairs. She had reported from all over the world—Bosnia, Afghanistan, Gaza. She had seen religious conflict tear societies apart but had also seen faith-inspired people and organizations do heroic work. She had gotten up close and personal with real Muslim militants, and therefore knew it was laughable that people like Imam Feisal and Daisy Khan were being called radicals. And, especially from her experience in the Balkans, she was acutely aware that Muslims could well be the victims rather than the perpetrators of religiously motivated violence.
Christiane and I had met several times before. In fact, she had interviewed me for a CNN special called Generation Islam, encouraging me to speak of the hope I saw in the growing Muslim youth population around the world. Usually, when journalists asked me about Muslim youth, it was with an air of foreboding. I was struck that Christiane wanted my perspective on the promise rather than the threat of this rising generation.
I’d grown up watching This Week—it was part of the Sunday-morning ritual I had with my dad—so seeing George Will stroll into the green room, bowtie neatly in place, was a bit surreal for me. I caught up with the Reverend Rich Cizik and Irshad Manji, my copanelists for the segment on Islam in America, eavesdropping from time to time on the grilling Arianna Huffington was giving a White House economic adviser in the corner. Broadly speaking, Rich, Irshad, and I had the same view of the Cordoba House situation. Rich had recently made a statement at the National Press Club that Jesus would condemn a Florida pastor’s plan to burn copies of the Qur’an. Irshad had written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal stating that the opposition to Imam Feisal’s interfaith center was misguided and then pivoting to emphasize that Muslims should use the media limelight as an opportunity to make Cordoba House the most progressive Muslim project the world had ever known. I had been opening my speeches with the line “Are we entering a new era of American prejudice?” and following it up with statistics and stories of how scared Muslims felt of their fellow US citizens. The typical format of a Sunday-morning talk show is for hosts to quote earlier statements of panelists and then ask them to expound. I was ready with more stories of Muslims as victims.
At the commercial break, we were hustled from the green room to the set. Christiane shot us a quick smile and then went right back to reading her notes. “Which one of us are you going to start with?” I gingerly asked. She lifted her head and raised her eyebrows at me as if to say, “We don’t tell you those kinds of things ahead of time.”
The first question went to Rich, the second to Irshad, each basically following the expected script. And then Christiane turned to me: “Eboo, you have done a lot in interfaith dialogue, trying to rebuild bridges here since the disaster of 9/11. What does this say to you, this fervor that’s being whipped up, this rising tide of anti-Islamic sentiment in this country?” She ticked off the statistics I was going to use—one-third of Americans say Islam encourages violence; over half say they don’t have a good understanding of the teachings and beliefs of Islam. Waving her hands and raising her voice, she asked point blank, “So, what has all your work done?”1
Thank God I’d gotten media training. The expert who put me through the drills emphasized three rules: Rule number one, don’t listen to the question. If you make the mistake of hearing the question, don’t let it bother you. Rule number two, have a positive message, know it cold, and be prepared to deliver it in twenty seconds or less. Rule number three, SMILE. Many people won’t remember what you say, he told me, but they will remember your smile. If you get interrupted, repeat the cycle. When they ask you another question, repeat the cycle.
And that’s exactly what I did. I beamed broadly for the cameras, talked about how in America the forces of inclusion always defeat the forces of intolerance, and told a story of a sixth-grade girl who donated her allowance to Interfaith Youth Core because she was bothered that too many people were being mean to Muslims. Christiane wasn’t having it. “Well, that’s wonderful,” she said dismissively and went on to cite a recent New York Times article on how scared Muslims were feeling that summer, even more scared than they felt after 9/11.2 And then she gave me a “What are you doing about that?” look. I dutifully put my smile back on and launched into another positive story. I would have kept smiling and pushing sunshine if Irshad had not interrupted.
It wasn’t until I was on the flight back home that I really thought about Christiane’s first question: “What has all your work done?” She wasn’t asking me about how I felt as a Muslim living in America; she was asking about the impact of my work as president of Interfaith Youth Core. She was treating me as an agent, not a victim, effectively saying, ‘Your job is not just to complain about religious prejudice; your job is to do something about it. The task of the organization you started, the claim of the movement you are part of, is to reduce prejudice and increase pluralism. How can you say you are doing your job if we keep seeing prejudice rise?” It was a perfectly reasonable question—an extremely important one, in fact—and I’m kind of glad that I successfully ignored it when she posed it to me on camera in front of 2 million viewers, because the truth is, it did bother me.
I’d gotten quite good at talking about religious prejudice, actually. I always had recent survey numbers on the tip my tongue in order to show just how pervasive the problem is in our society. I’d somberly tick off the percentages of Americans who said that Hinduism and Buddhism are “strange,” who wanted Muslims to go through extra security at airports or don’t believe they should serve on the Supreme Court, who, on account of a Mormon or secular-humanist presidential candidate’s faith or their lack of one, would not vote for them. I’d make comparisons to the multicultural and feminist movements. Progress might not have come fast or gone far enough, but at least these issues were on people’s radar screens. Take the election of 2008 as an illustration. For the most part, mainstream America was proud that we had African American and female candidates running for high office. It was certainly central to the media narrative about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin. When racism and sexism reared their ugly heads, the media cried foul. But the digs against the candidates’ religions—the suggestion that because he is Mormon, Mitt Romney can’t be president, that Sarah Palin is kooky because she attends an Evangelical church, that Barack Obama is a radical because his grandfather was Muslim—these were commonly stated and rarely called out. Part of the work of Interfaith Youth Core is to convince people that religious prejudice is a serious problem, and that it ought to be considered just as un-American as racism or sexism.
I’d also become expert at talking about how fast the interfaith movement is growing. A half-century ago, few cities had any organized interfaith activity. Today, dozens have some sort of initiative, everything from interfaith councils to festivals of faith. Religious denominations have invited leaders from other religions to give keynote addresses at their national gatherings, and local congregations have started interfaith exchange programs. Think tanks have commissioned task forces and issued reports. The United Nations launched a major interfaith initiative called the Alliance of Civilizations. Muslim and Christian theologians unveiled a document called “A Common Word Between Us and You.”3 Scores of scholarly books have been published, including one by Jonathan Sacks, the spiritual leader of the United Kingdom’s largest Jewish synagogue organization.4 Celebrated world-religions author Karen Armstrong used her TED Prize in 2008 to issue a “Charter of Compassion” calling all religions to redefine themselves by the shared, core value of loving others. Princes, prime ministers, and presidents have all, in various ways, lent their support to the interfaith cause. I remember standing in the Oval Office with President Obama at the first meeting of his inaugural Faith Council, when he spoke of the importance of interfaith cooperation as a way to strengthen America’s civic fabric and to show the world that conflict between faiths is far from inevitable. “It’s a rare opportunity,” I would tell audiences at my public lectures, “when a grassroots movement becomes a global priority.”
Every movement has its moment, and, at Interfaith Youth Core, we believed this was ours. We had grown rapidly from our first Ford Foundation grant of $35,000 and a handful of Chicago projects in 2002. Our activities now spanned the globe; our partners included everyone from Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan to the US State Department; our work was getting covered by major newspapers and cited by world leaders. If you opened a book or think tank report about interfaith cooperation written after 2005, there was a pretty good chance you would find a reference to Interfaith Youth Core. If there was an interfaith conference happening anywhere from Louisville to London, an IFYC staff member was very likely on the speakers’ list. We had started the organization with two big ideas: that young people should be a priority, not an afterthought, in interfaith cooperation, and that social action should be central to interfaith efforts—enough already with the documents and ceremonies. Our rationale was simple: if religious extremism is a movement of young people taking action, and interfaith cooperation continues to be defined by senior theologians talking, we lose. In some quarters of the interfaith movement, those ideas were greeted with outward enthusiasm and backroom skepticism. Everybody knew, the whispers went, that young people aren’t interested in religion—or anything else useful, for that matter. And what older people liked doing was having dinners, drafting declarations, and organizing panel discussions.
We had proved the skeptics wrong. A few years after that first Ford Foundation grant, our two basic ideas had become common practice within the interfaith movement and had received attention far beyond. In that Oval Office meeting with President Obama, he had mentioned both the importance of interfaith social action and the leadership of young people. On a visit to Chicago soon after Tony Blair stepped down as prime minister of the United Kingdom, Blair invited me to his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel to discuss plans for his new Faith Foundation. That conversation helped catalyze the foundation’s Faiths Act Fellows program, in which thirty recent college graduates work in interfaith and international teams on social-action projects that have an impact on the United Nations initiative known as the Millennium Development Goals.
What would happen as more and more young people got involved in interfaith social-action projects? We believed this surge of interest would shape a society characterized by religious pluralism. In her work on interfaith cooperation, Harvard University scholar Diana Eck had made a crucial distinction between diversity and pluralism: diversity is simply the fact of people from different backgrounds living in close quarters.5 Baghdad is diverse; Belfast is diverse; Bosnia is diverse. Each of those places, in recent memory, had also experienced serious interreligious violence. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Baghdad had effectively become the site of a civil war fought between various groups of Iraqi Muslims wielding weapons and different interpretations of Islam. Where diversity is a fact, pluralism is an achievement—it means deliberate and positive engagement of diversity; it means building strong bonds between people from different backgrounds. IFYC’s definition actually went one step further and laid out a three-part framework for pluralism: a society characterized by respect for people’s religious (and other) identities, positive relationships between people of different religious backgrounds, and common action for the common good.
We set a grand goal for ourselves at IFYC: to make religious pluralism a social norm within the course of a generation. Just as environmentalism, volunteerism, and multiculturalism had permeated our society, altering the notion of what it means to be a good citizen, shifting the images we see in magazines and movies, changing patterns in schools and workplaces, so would the idea that people from different religious backgrounds should come together in ways that built respect, relationships, and common action. Every city would have a Day of Interfaith Youth Service, with thousands of religiously diverse young people cleaning rivers and building houses side by side, all inspired by a keynote address given by their mayor. Congregations that did not participate in interfaith exchanges would be considered out of the mainstream. Ordinary citizens would speak with pride of America’s history of interfaith cooperation, in the same way as they talked about freedom, equality, and justice. Religious prejudice in political races would be considered as beyond the pale as blatant racism had become.
A big dream meant raising big money. I actually enjoyed this part of my job, in no small part because IFYC had experienced great success in fund-raising. My pitch basically revolved around interfaith cooperation being important. It was important because of the pervasiveness of religious prejudice and the destructiveness of religious violence. It was important because it had played an important part in history, from the civil rights movement in the United States to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It was important because lots of important people were talking about it. And IFYC was important because when important people talked about the importance of interfaith cooperation, they frequently talked about us. The State Department was sending our staff on speaking tours, cable news kept calling us for interviews, we ran cool projects all over the world. It was an inspiring narrative, and a remarkable number of the foundation program offices and individual philanthropists I met with found it compelling enough to help IFYC grow from that $35,000 Ford grant into a $4 million entity by 2009. That made us probably the largest interfaith organization in the United States, an impressive achievement for an outfit that opened its first office less than a decade ago and whose founder was neither a bishop nor a billionaire.
There was a certain New York City–based philanthropist I had been trying to get in front of for a year. “He loves programs that develop young people as leaders, especially through social action, and he has been talking more and more about the importance of religious diversity,” IFYC board member Ron Kinnamon told me. “If you can energize him about our work, he’s got the kind of money and clout to take us to the next level.” Finally, I got my chance, a thirty-minute spot on his schedule. This was the big one.
I felt as ready as any organizational president has ever been to make a fund-raising pitch. I knew this man’s favorite authors, I knew his other philanthropic investments, I came highly recommended by his personal friends. There are times when the pitch comes out perfectly and times when it feels a little shaky. On that morning in New York City, I was as on as I’ve ever been. I knew the mentoring programs he supported were domestic, so I talked about our activities in the United States. His work on the Millennium Development Goals was global, so I made sure to mention our partnerships with Tony Blair and Queen Rania. He was involved in American politics, and I managed to sneak in that Bill Clinton liked us. He supported youth programs, so I told stories of impressive projects IFYC student leaders had organized on college campuses. He was nodding and smiling; the moment to make the ask was getting close.
But first, he had a question. “Eboo,” he asked, “how does Interfaith Youth Core measure effectiveness?”
OK, I thought, it looked like this man was listening, but maybe his mind was actually wandering a bit. No problem—he was busy, he had a lot of important things going on. I was happy to repeat. So I ran through the litany again, a little faster this time, lots of grassroots projects, lots of glow from the global stage; everything was growing, growing, growing. He nodded, and then he repeated his question using slightly simpler language: “How does your organization know that what you are doing is working?”
I tried a different tack this time. Religious prejudice was getting worse. Religious violence was getting worse. The institutions that were making religion a barrier of division or a bomb of destruction were getting lots of money. If the world wanted religion to be a bridge of cooperation, it had to invest more money in interfaith cooperation.
He leaned back in his chair. He was not nodding anymore, and he was not smiling. I realized that he had actually been paying very close attention the whole time, listening for a direct answer to his question about effectiveness. He wasn’t hearing what he needed to hear. “You just used the word investment,” he said. “Investments are what I do. The return on an investment in the business world is money. The return on an investment in the social world is impact. I invest in fields and organizations where I see effective work being done. The data in mentoring shows us that if an at-risk young person has a mentor, his or her chance of leading a successful life goes up significantly. The data in malaria shows us that bed nets, which, properly used, prevent people from getting bitten by malaria-carrying mosquitos, cost ten dollars each.6 In each of those cases, I know precisely what impact my investment buys. I love the idea of interfaith cooperation, and I’m impressed by the sheer energy your organization brings to this issue. But I don’t know the specific objectives of your activities, I don’t know your definition of success, I don’t understand how you’ve chosen your strategy, and I don’t know the metrics you use to track progress. Bottom line: I can’t measure the impact of my investment, and when that’s the case, I don’t invest.”
He had caught me in a contradiction: if your organization is growing but the problem your organization claims to solve is growing faster, then maybe something you’re doing is wrong.
How do we measure effectiveness in interfaith work? How do we track progress? What outcomes are we after, and how do we know we are reaching them? Frankly, I hadn’t thought much about any of those things. When I thought about Interfaith Youth Core, words like dream, passion, and vision came to mind. Metrics were for the corporate guys who worked in cubicles, not the leaders of social movements. Actually, they were also for some of America’s most perceptive observers of religion in public life.
The reason I could easily rattle off statistics on religious prejudice in America is because social scientists at universities like Harvard and Princeton and at organizations like Gallup and Pew had been gathering quantitative data about religious diversity for years. The most influential was Harvard University’s Robert Putnam. In 1995, his book Bowling Alone introduced the term “social capital” into our nation’s vocabulary.7 The idea is simple: the activities that strengthen our civil society, from volunteering and voting to giving money to charity, are based on social networks and civic organizations. Such groups play a crucial role in any society, but America especially relies on the energies and involvement of its citizens in the civic sphere. As he later put it in a lecture, “Where levels of social capital are higher, children grow up healthier, safer, and better educated, people live longer, happier lives, and democracy and the economy work better.”8
Probably the most important source of social capital in America is religious communities. Putnam says that basically half of America’s volunteerism, philanthropy, and associational membership is religiously based. This was especially dramatic during the abolition and civil rights movements, when large groups of religious people risked their lives to fight for things that they considered fundamentally religious values. But it goes on in less dramatic ways all the time, in the schools, hospitals, social-service agencies, and volunteer programs that religious communities run. Putnam writes, “[Faith communities] provide an important incubator for civic skills, civic norms, community interests, and civic recruitment. Religiously active men and women learn to give speeches, run meetings, manage disagreements, and bear administrative responsibility.”9 This is the good news. But there is bad news as well.
In his research, Putnam discovered something that he found extremely disturbing: diversity actually reduces social capital. In highly diverse areas in the United States, people report lower levels of confidence in local leaders, lower levels of confidence in their own influence, lower voting rates, fewer close friends and confidants, less likelihood of working on a community project, and lower expectations that other people in the area will cooperate together on community projects. About the only thing that people in highly diverse areas did more of was sit at home and watch television. Putnam concludes, “In more diverse communities, people trust their neighbors less . . . [and] appear to ‘hunker down.’ ”10 For a generation raised both to value civic engagement and celebrate diversity, it is more than a little sobering to learn that the data shows that the two are inversely correlated.
One problem is that America’s social capital tends to be, in Putnam’s term, bonded. Within religion, that means Catholics do things with other Catholics, Muslims with Muslims, Jews with Jews, and so on. Even when institutions founded by one community serve the broader public, they are typically run by that one community. In America’s highly diverse society, Putnam much prefers what he calls bridged social capital—different religious groups that work together by, say, co-organizing volunteer programs. Not only does this bridging increase the good work being done for the broader society (the volunteering), it has the highly important effect of encouraging people from different backgrounds to work well together. In other words, bridging, or working together, both increases social capital and strengthens social cohesion.11
Diverse civil societies with high amounts of bonded social capital and deep distrust between different communities are in danger of everything from being silos to suffering civil wars. Effectively, you’ve got communities that encourage high participation within the group but little involvement with other groups or the broader society. What happens when those different groups decide they don’t like one another? What happens when you take all that bonded social capital, all that powerful sense of in-group identity and those high levels of internal community participation, and release it in aggression toward other groups? That’s when you get the religious violence of a Baghdad or a Belfast.
If a high amount of bonded social capital combined with tension between different groups in a diverse society is a recipe for a civil war, it is also true that bridged social capital can prevent such violence. In a study on India, Brown University social scientist Ashutosh Varshney asked the question “Why do some cities in India explode in inter-religious violence and others remain calm in similar circumstances?”12 The answer, he discovered, is stunningly simple: cities that have what he calls networks of engagement—in Putnam’s terms, civic associations that bridge social capital—remain peaceful. In cities that do not have organizations or activities in which people from different religious backgrounds regularly gather for good works, in times of interreligious tension, civil wars erupt.
America is among the most religiously diverse countries in human history and by far the most religiously devout nation in the West. How are we doing when it comes to bridging our religiously diverse social capital?
Social scientists measure America’s religious diversity in three basic ways. The first and most common category is attitudes. This is a broad category, and there are many ways to ask questions about attitudes, but it generally comes down to a pretty basic sentiment: “Do you like Muslims/Jews/evangelicals/humanists?” The second category—relationships—is illustrated by questions like, “Do you know/work with/have a friend of a different religion?” The final category is knowledge, exemplified by questions such as, “What religion is Shabbat associated with? In what faith do adherents fast from dawn to dusk for one month of the year?”
I knew this data well. I used it in my speeches and writings, and it helped me paint a picture of how bad the problem of religious prejudice is in our society. What I had failed to notice was that the data isn’t just useful in presenting the problem; it actually shapes up to suggest a solution. The three measures—attitudes, relationships, knowledge—are actually deeply related. A 2007 Pew study found that 44 percent of people who did not know a Mormon had a positive attitude toward the Mormon community. Of people who did know a Mormon personally, 60 percent had favorable views. That’s a 16-point difference. When the same question was asked regarding Muslims, the difference was even starker: only 32 percent of people who did not know a Muslim expressed favorable views toward the community, but of those who did know a Muslim, 56 percent had positive attitudes. That’s nearly a 25-point difference—huge, really.13
In his most recent book, American Grace, written with David Campbell, Putnam calls this the My Friend Al Principle, which he explains like this: Say you are a beekeeper and your friend Al is a bee-keeper. Apiculture brings you together, and through this shared activity, you learn that Al is an Evangelical Christian. Prior to meeting Al, you harbored a host of prejudices about Evangelicals, but if Al is a bee-keeper and a good guy and an Evangelical, then maybe other Evangelicals aren’t so bad. Putnam and Campbell actually show strong statistical evidence for this principle—that people’s regard for entire religious groups improves through a positive, meaningful relationship with even one member of that group, often formed through a common activity. Putnam and Campbell discovered that their data suggested something else: by becoming friends with Al the beekeeping Evangelical, not only did your attitude toward Evangelicals improve, so did your attitude toward Mormons and Muslims. They conclude, “We have reasonably firm evidence that as people build more religious bridges they become warmer toward people of many different religions, not just those religions represented within their social network.”14
Clearly, relationships between people of different faiths have a profound impact on attitudes toward other faith communities. But that’s not the only variable that makes a difference. There is also good evidence that knowledge of other traditions correlates strongly with positive attitudes. A 2009 Pew study found that those who reported a high familiarity with Islam—for example, knowing that Muslims call God Allah and that their holy book is called the Qur’an—are three times more likely to have favorable views of Muslims than those who report low familiarity.15 A Gallup survey released the same year found a similarly strong correlation between knowledge of Islam and attitudes toward Muslims.16
But it’s not just knowledge that matters; it’s what you know—the type of knowledge—that counts the most. According to a recent Gallup Poll, only 2 percent of Americans say they have a great deal of knowledge about Buddhism, and 14 percent report feeling some prejudice towards Buddhists. Meanwhile, only 3 percent of Americans claim they have a great deal of knowledge about Islam, and yet 43 percent claim some prejudice towards Muslims.17
How is it that a little knowledge about Buddhism correlates with broadly positive feelings towards Buddhists, but a little knowledge about Islam is linked to frighteningly negative views of Muslims?
Here’s my theory: In the minds of most people, entities as abstract and amorphous as religions are represented by the small piece of knowledge we have about that tradition. What people likely know about Buddhism is the figure of the Dalai Lama, and so it’s hard for them to associate Buddhism with something terribly negative. When it comes to Islam, the images of terrorism come immediately to mind, and so people’s view of an entire tradition is colored by an infinitesimally small but shockingly violent fringe.
That data point made me think about the man at the anti–Cordoba House rally carrying the sign that said, “All I Need to Know about Islam I Learned on 9/11.” He didn’t know much about a 1,400-year-old tradition with 1.5 billion believers, and the thing he did know was an act of horror.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in data about religious diversity. The more I studied this area, the more I started to see attitudes, knowledge, and relationships as three sides of a triangle. If you know some (accurate and positive) things about a religion, and you know some people from that religion, you are far more likely to have positive attitudes toward that tradition and that community. The more favorable your attitude, the more open you will be to new relationships and additional appreciative knowledge. A couple of cycles around this triangle, and people from different faiths are starting to smile at each other on the streets instead of looking away or crossing to the other side. A few more cycles—more knowledge, more friends, more favorable attitudes—and people are starting to say, “We ought to do something with those people who worship in that place called a mosque or a gurdwara down the street.” To go back to the social science jargon, that’s when bridging starts to happen, that’s when social capital starts to grow, that’s when social cohesion gets stronger.
But the triangle works the other way as well. You can run reverse cycles on it. People without much knowledge about other religions and with little contact with people from those communities are far more likely to harbor negative attitudes toward those traditions and communities. If movements emerge to fill those gaps in knowledge and relationships with negative information and ugly representations, people’s attitudes go from negative to vociferously opposed. This is precisely what happened during the Cordoba House controversy. And that leads to community action as well—like arson attacks on mosque construction sites.
The joke about social scientists is that they run expensive research projects that generally end up proving common sense. In this case, it’s true. You don’t need to be a professor at Harvard or Princeton to know in your gut that positive relationships with people of other faiths and appreciative knowledge of their traditions will improve people’s attitudes toward religious diversity. But it’s one thing to feel something in your bones and another thing to have the data that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is true. The data helps convince skeptics, but perhaps even more important, it focuses the efforts of activists. Now that we know that the key leverage points in building religious pluralism are appreciative knowledge and meaningful relationships, interfaith organizations can design their programs to increase these two factors.
This sounds innocent. All interfaith programs, at some level, seek to increase appreciative knowledge and facilitate positive, meaningful relationships, right? Sure, but once you have the science that shows what works and you make the decision to craft your programs to apply this science, you find yourself asking a whole different set of questions: How can we shape our program design so that we maximize for knowledge and relationships? What do we need to leave out of our programs, even if we loved doing some of those things, because they distract from our goal? Do we have instruments that can measure our progress? If we follow this science, we know that an interfaith panel that argues about the Middle East is not the most effective step to building positive relationships and spreading appreciative knowledge. Instead, a program that brings people from different religions together to discuss how their various faiths speak to the shared value of mercy is a more effective approach because it builds appreciative knowledge. Following it up by an opportunity where the audience can plan a concrete project applying mercy in small, religiously diverse groups where they can begin to form meaningful interfaith relationships is even better.
These were the conversations I started having with IFYC board members, especially one Tarek Elmasry, a director in the Chicago office of McKinsey and Company. (He’s now running the Middle East region for McKinsey.) He liked nothing better than to talk about defining goals and measuring results. When he was convinced that I was serious about the science of interfaith cooperation, he committed to helping me design a strategy for implementing that science. He got us a McKinsey engagement team, pro bono. The team would spend its first weeks gathering data about the effectiveness of IFYC programs over the past five years, and then help us shape a plan for the next five years. Tarek himself would supervise the team. He promised to be personally involved. I had no idea how personal it would get.
“It’s not working,” Tarek told me. We were standing at the grill looking out over Lake Michigan in the backyard of his beautiful home on Chicago’s North Shore. It was the middle of the summer, a perfect night to get the families together for a barbecue. “No shop talk,” my wife had made me promise on the drive over. “Yep, of course,” I said. What was there to talk about? Things were going great. I was in a celebratory mood.
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 idea 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.