What Is Interfaith? Four Doorways into Neighborliness

Oct 15, 2026 · Reuben Shank

When I tell people what I do, the next question is often the same: "What is interfaith?" Sometimes it comes with a spark of recognition. Sometimes it comes with a polite, blank look. Here in the Bay Area, one of the most religiously diverse and least religiously affiliated regions of the country, the question comes up often, and it is worth asking. Exploring its different meanings helps us see what interfaith makes possible in practice. At Marin Interfaith Council, I am coming to see at least four doorways into this work.

Acting together for the common good. From its beginnings, MIC has brought diverse religious communities together in response to pressing challenges: fires, floods, and landslides, many shaped as much by human systems as by nature, by tragedies of hate and harm that our human choices and cultures have caused. This is interfaith as solidarity in action. It is also where the work of justice and advocacy can be most visible.

Relationships across difference. Interfaith also means relationships grounded in awe and joy, authenticity and learning. Unexpected partnerships emerge, and new connections call for the courage and care to stay present through difficult conversations and real hardships. Through interfaith programs, we deepen our connection to our own traditions even as we learn from one another’s religious and cultural histories and practices. Over time, collective wisdom and trust grow. At home and at work, interfaith families and friendships are a microcosm of our pluralistic society, creating spaces of belonging, support, and creative understanding.

A spiritual path. For many people, interfaith is a spiritual identity of its own. Some are drawn to insight wherever it is found. Some grew up without a religious community. Others stepped away, at times because of real harm. Many cultivate deep values and spiritual practice by encountering wisdom beyond any single community and drawing creatively on the many traditions of our shared human story. Increasingly, they are finding one another in new forms of community.

A connective hub. Interfaith work can also be a shared space where congregations, nonprofits, public agencies, and grassroots groups share what they are doing, what they have to offer, and what they need. MIC's newsletter is one expression of this. When we know what is moving across the county, we can find one another, and meet one another's needs, more readily.

Justice runs through all four doorways. Our society favors some religious, spiritual, and ethical traditions over others. Indigenous traditions, along with many minority traditions, still struggle to be seen and respected. Inequities of race, class, and gender run within religious communities as well as between them, as our still largely separate Black and white churches remind us. At its best, interfaith work names these realities and, drawing on the commitments to love and justice found across our traditions, works to repair them.

What the four doorways share is neighborliness as a practice. Across many traditions, the neighbor includes the stranger, the migrant, the other—even the one we have been taught to fear. Being neighbors means connecting across our differences to safeguard what is precious, repair what is broken, and meet one another's needs, so that all belong. This work reaches inward and outward at once, shaping our own spirits, our relationships, the structures we share, and the culture that holds them all. Religious, spiritual, and wisdom traditions offer deep resources here: long practice in welcoming the stranger, in lament and repair, and in sustaining hope through hardship. They help ground resilient communities. Resilient communities, in turn, form resilient leaders, rooted deeply enough to stay present when things are hard.

We saw this recently after hateful graffiti appeared at a Marin elementary school. Neighbors gathered to face the harm honestly, interrupt it, and begin repair. Together, they recommitted to a community where every child and every family belongs.

Courage like this grows both in the face of unexpected encounters and over decades of relationship and shared learning, and it shows up in caring responses to crisis and tragedy. It is the theme of this year's Emerging Visionaries gathering, The Courage to Be Neighbors, on Sunday, November 15, at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tiburon. Until then, I would love to hear from you. What does "interfaith" mean to you, and which doorways brought you here?