Interfaith Initiatives as Catalysts for Social Change: Aspects of Critical Interfaith Activism

This contribution illustrates how organizers of interfaith initiatives increasingly centralize activism and social change in their programs. These initiatives address various global challenges, such as protecting nature and fighting climate change or rising up against injustice or oppression. How can and do interfaith initiatives contribute to social change? What skills and consciousness are needed for interfaith activism? Based on the analysis of specific interfaith initiatives as well as more theoretical perspectives on interfaith learning and leadership, this contribution discusses how interfaith initiatives stimulate participants’ skills to mobilize a network to take action, adjust their behavior, and communicate across differences in order to contribute to social change. In addition to these essential aspects of interfaith activism, another dimension of interfaith activism is discussed that is often absent in how interfaith initiatives are organized, namely, awareness of social injustice, power and privilege, and critical and reflexive consciousness of one’s own positionality. The chapter thus offers pedagogical directions for interfaith critical activism.