What Is Interfaith? Four Doorways into Neighborliness

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, or 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 dialogue, trust, and religious literacy: the patient work of turning strangers into neighbors. At interfaith programs and gatherings, we witness and learn from one another's religious, cultural, and spiritual practices. These relationships also grow at home and at work. Interfaith families, sharing daily life across different commitments, are a microcosm of our pluralistic society. Interfaith networks strengthen all of us, in work and in play, to create 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: 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 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?