Dr. Eboo Patel talks about Islam, pluralism, and building the interfaith youth movement.

In this third episode of Progressive Religious Voices, Dr. Eboo Patel talks about how his Muslim faith grounds his deep commitment to pluralism and his work with youth around the world at Interfaith Youth Core.

Eboo compellingly describes what he calls the significance of the emerging “Faith Line.” The Faith Line, as Eboo describes it, does not separate people of different religions but separates religious pluralists on the one hand and religious totalitarians on the other. Eboo’s work is focused on broadening the space for religious pluralism. Drawing on his Islamic faith, he summarizes it as follows: “My hope is to articulate what I love about your tradition, and to teach you what you might love about mine, and to point to a space where we might work together to serve others. And in my mind, that’s the example of the Prophet Muhammad.”

Eboo is an important emerging progressive religious leader, and articulates eloquently the way his Muslim faith interfaces with the best of the American ideals of democracy and pluralism:

In my mind, I’m part of the story of America, I’m part of the story of India, and I’m part of the story of Islam. It was in the Holy Qur’an, which is the book that animated my ancestors, that I found the fullest description of that and that I found language that I considered home…. I love America because it gives me, the child of immigrant Muslim parents from India, the chance to participate in its progress and to carve a place in its promise. And I believe that this country was founded in large part on the idea of religious freedom and its relationship with religious pluralism…. We have managed to have a relatively thick religious pluralism in this country that has respect for identity, that nurtures community, that focuses people on the common good. What I think we need to do in America is realize that this in the early twenty-first century, in the century of the faith line, is in fact, our most precious internal resource and our most important gift to the rest of the world.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

About Eboo Patel
Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that is building the interfaith movement through service and dialogue. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths apart and what brings them together. Eboo is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the soul of a Generation.

About the Podcasts
This podcast is the third episode of Progressive Religious Voices, a bi-monthly podcast of interviews gleaned from nearly 100 interviews with progressive religious leaders. You can subscribe to the podcast feed directly or on iTunes to get all 24 exciting interviews that we will feature throughout 2008.

You can also read more about the growing progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

Labels: islam, muslim, pluralism, podcast, progressive religious voices, youth

Note: The full text of this blog can be read in my regular "Dispatches from the Beltway" column on Religion Dispatches.

E.J. Dionne’s bold pronouncement that “the era of the Religious Right is over” has been the subject of much discussion and debate. Those who agree cite the growing support for broadening the evangelical agenda to include issues like the environment (a.k.a. “creation care”), poverty, and HIV/AIDS. They also point to the graying of the Religious Right, most prominently the deaths of Jerry Falwell and James Kennedy, and the virtual collapse of the Christian Coalition. Moreover, prominent old guard leaders like James Dobson and Pat Robertson have seriously damaged their credibility with many evangelicals by endorsing Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and Rudy Guiliani, a thrice-married, pro-choice New York governor, while passing over fellow-evangelical candidate Mick Huckabee. No one need ask for a more bald demonstration of prioritizing power over principle from the self-proclaimed leaders of “values voters.”

Skeptics of the decline of the Religious Right, on the other hand, cite the huge infrastructure, resources, and reach the Religious Right has built over the last few decades (to take just one example, James Dobson’s sprawling conglomerate has its own zip code in Colorado Springs and a larger monthly print circulation than the New York Times) and argue that it will not so easily wither on the vine. The most jaded on the left simply assert that the Religious Right is the truest expression of the heart of the evangelical community and is thus here to stay.

If the argument that “the era of the Religious Right is over” depended solely on what one might call the “graying and greening” argument—that the leadership is aging and out of touch and that a few issues like the environment have simply been attached to a persistent static core—I too would be skeptical. I want to argue, however, that the reason I believe Dionne is right is that a more thoroughgoing and measurable shift is happening within the evangelical community, one that represents not simply a broader agenda but also a significantly different spirit and worldview.

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Read the rest of the article at Religion Dispatches.

Labels: culture wars, dispatches from the beltway, environment, evangelicals, religious right