Interfaith Youth Core founder discusses religious pluralism during Martin Luther King lecture at PC

Jan. 17, 2007

A man devoted to bringing together different faiths to work for peace discussed the inspiration of one of his heroes during Presbyterian College's annual Martin Luther King Jr. lecture on Tuesday.

In contrast to being inspired by King's example, though, Dr. Eboo Patel, founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, said he remembers growing up in the middle class suburbs of Chicago envisioning a future of "fat paychecks." Later, as a college student at the University of Illinois, he said he encountered the "other" America that was home to poverty, racism, and social injustice.

In his sociology classes, Patel said he read books about theories and heard eloquent explanations by professors about the social ills still rampant in the United States - and grew tired of both.

"But I wasn't interested in an autopsy," he said. "I didn't think the world was quite dead yet."

Following his sophomore year at the university, Patel said his frustration with books and theories made him restless - and so he toured the country looking for some new answers.

"I wanted to get at the clay of this earth," he said.

His first stop was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., the site where King was assassinated and which is now the National Civil Rights Center. There, Patel walked the galleries, watched the footage, heard the speeches, and stood in the room where King breathed his last breath. Patel said he remembered a poem by William Carlos Williams - "Dedication for a Plot of Land" - that was a tribute to a woman who achieved dignity by owning her own humble home and declared to potential new habitants "If you can bring nothing to this place/but your carcass, keep out."

Patel said King, too, built a house called America by strengthening the foundation that all people are created equal, expanding the walls by promoting the most important civil rights legislation in U.S. history, and widening the door by paving the way for the Immigration Act of 1965.

"I was standing in King's house," he said. "He had given me the key. What was I bringing to the table?"

Patel said every young person has a moment in their life when they realize that the earth was handed down to them and they hold in their hands they are asked a question that will gnaw at them until it is answered - "What is the shape of the world that I will hand down to my children?"

Patel said he left the Lorraine Motel with a commitment to answering that question with actions and not words and he saw King as his model.

"In a way, I guess, we all make of Martin Luther King Jr. what we want to," he said. "Some see him as a national hero - an American redeemer. Somebody who demanded that the check that Jefferson and Lincoln wrote would be cashed in the hard currency of equal rights. Some see him as a race hero - a man who embodied the African-American blues spirit of hope in the face of despair. Of visionary idealism combined with hard-headed pragmatism. Of living with one foot in heaven and one foot in Harlem.

"If King was only those two things, he might still be the greatest American of the 20^th century. But I actually think that King was more than that. I think in the final analysis, King's vision was not just about America; it was not just about race. It was about new relationships - new relationships between people of different colors and classes and religions and new relationships between America and the world. A new relationship between humanity and God."

In one of King's most famous speeches, said Patel, he spoke of the "World House" where all people must live together in peace because they can never live together apart.

"King understood that bridging relationships required the unique ability to be rooted in one's own particularity but open to the universal," he said.

Patel said King demonstrated his own interfaith commitments by learning more about active passivism from Mahatma Ghandi, an Indian Hindu, and forging friendships and finding common cause with an Orthodox Jewish rabbi.

In his sermon "A Time to Break Silence," King stated that the world's major religions - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism - are rooted in the principle that love is the unifying force, said Patel.

"My question is how are we in this generation - my generation - apply that principle to our century?" he said.

While W.E.B. Du Bois warned of the "color line," Patel said he also is concerned about the "faith line" - particularly over people who kill in the name of God. It is, he said, a question of pitting totalitarianism versus pluralism in the hope that religious pluralism based on the common cause of serving others will prevail.

"Religious pluralism is not mere co-existence nor forced consensus," he said. "It is a form of proactive cooperation that affirms the identity of the constituent communities while emphasizing that the well-being of each and all depends on the health of the whole. It is the belief that the common good is best served when each community has a chance to make a unique contribution."

Imagine, he said, a world where Shi'ites and Sunnis rebuild Baghdad or Protestants and Catholics commit to reshaping Northern Ireland.

"That is precisely why I started the Interfaith Youth Core," he said, "because I believe that the Creator wished for humanity to be diverse - but not divided - and that the best way for us to move creation in line with the intention of the Creator is to make common cause by serving others."