Interfaith Strategies
Starting with Kids
by Vicki Garlock
Our children are growing up in the most globalized world humans have ever known. While a globalized society might feel new to many of us, it’s important to remember that globalization is totally normal for kids. We also need to accept the fact that it’s often the loudest voice, the most viral post, the funniest meme, or the You-Tuber with the largest following that absorbs much of their mental capacity. Even when kids notice someone different or something unfamiliar in their immediate environment, they are often inclined to ignore or simply tolerate.
The upshot is, when it comes to religious literacy, our biggest challenge in the 21st century has shifted. It’s no longer about information availability or ease-of-access. It’s about actual exposure and explicit engagement. It’s about getting kids to pay attention and learn about the faith-based practices happening all around them. There is no justification for raising another generation of fearful, ignorant, or apathetic adults. And the best way to avoid that is to start now, with this generation of children.
Broad-Based Tactics
This image of a woman in a niqab sitting next to a drag queen on the New York subway went viral in early 2017. Some saw it as an image of a dystopian future. Others saw it as an image of diversity at its best.
A great first step involves raising awareness about diversity. People who represent all sorts of racial, cultural, and linguistic identities mill about in cities and towns around the globe. Indigenous and other minority voices are finally being heard as we work to decolonize everything from art to yoga. And the UN recently reported that there are now well over 250 million international migrants on the move from one country to another in any given year.
This naturally results in a beautiful assortment of faith-based practices. As Rita Gross1, professor of Comparative Studies in Religion, once said, “religious diversity is a fact, and it is also a fact that religious diversity is here to stay. … we need to find the resources and means to become comfortable with and untroubled by the fact of that diversity.”
Another excellent step is to start taking advantage of technology. The International Data Corporation (IDC) calculated that in 2018 the “global datasphere” was 33 zettabytes. (If you’re rusty on your middle school math, that’s 33 x 1021 bytes, and, yes, that’s a 1 with 21 zeros after it.) It’s difficult even to imagine a number that large. What’s more incredible is that the datasphere is expected to grow exponentially, possibly reaching 175 zettabytes, by 2025. Put plainly, the world now offers, via phones kept in our back pockets, more information than we could process in several lifetimes. For interfaith educators, that means learning to utilize this treasure trove of books, videos, and blog posts to help kids explore faith-based beliefs and practices in age-appropriate ways.
Moving Forward
Although the task of religious education for kids can seem daunting, there is help for parents and teachers. Communities of like-minded folks are starting to create resources for those interested in interfaith education, and there are several avenues for increasing your children’s level of interreligious awareness. This is especially true if you’re willing to learn along with your kids.
Consider the Schools
Educators from around the world and a variety of faith traditions have issued a clarion call for religious education in schools. As Abdullah Sahin2, an educator in the UK put it, “… reflective religious literacy and interfaith understanding remain essential to nurture ‘critical-openness’ among children and young people.” Simply put, schools are in the business of ensuring that the next generation have the skillsets necessary for success. Understanding “the other” is sure to be one of the skills that’s desperately needed.
Photo: Pixabay
Schools also provide one of the most effective and efficient means for reaching a large percentage of children. In the US, however, school-based religious literacy efforts are hampered by a poor understanding of “the separation of church and state” (a colloquial paraphrasing of the first part of the Constitution’s First Amendment).
Even in countries with relatively strong religious education traditions (like the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, and Malaysia), globalization has complicated the situation. Should all religions be included? Do all kids need to learn about all the major faith traditions? Should special preference be given to a country’s dominant religion? Can kids/families opt out of all, or part, of the curriculum?
While a complete exploration of this topic is beyond the scope of this post, positive change will almost certainly rely on parents and other caregivers paying particular attention to what kids are (or aren’t) learning about religion in school. Adults can also stay abreast of local controversies related to the presence of religion in schools (and at sporting events), and they can actively support educators trying to address these topics in the classroom. In the US, religious education is generally handled by Social Studies teachers. And some of the best materials, including position papers and resources, come from the National Council for the Social Studies.
Attend Interfaith Events
Outside of schools, events where people from more than one faith tradition come together are becoming increasingly widespread and popular. Some of these events are focused on specific holidays. Jewish communities host public Passover seders in the spring and Sukkot fairs in the fall. Muslim communities host interfaith iftars during Ramadan. And Hindus regularly invite the public to celebrate Diwali or Holi with them. Kids are often welcome, and they are great places to meet members of your own community as you put real faces with religious identities. And since these types of events are often hosted by the individual faith communities, themselves, you might be able to visit a synagogue, mosque, gurdwara, or temple in the process.
If that approach seems a bit too immersive for you, many communities now host interfaith events where several faith traditions are represented at one time. Interfaith Thanksgiving Services and Interfaith Fairs are two common examples. Search the internet – or even just Facebook – to find events in your area. My recent internet search showed Interfaith Thanksgiving Services in Las Vegas, NV, Charlotte, NC, Austin, TX, Rochester, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, and Grand Rapids, MI. And that was just the first page of results!
Interfaith Fairs popped up in Edmond, OK, Monterey Bay, CA, Boston, MA, and Salt Lake City, UT. Sometimes program participants are asked to share information about their traditions. Sometimes they’re asked to share something more related to their faith practice (like a reading, dance, song, or chant). Either way, these events are frequently hosted by college/university campuses or local interfaith groups, and families are almost always welcome. Frequently they also include experiential, hands-on activities for the kids.
Emulate Interfaith Families/Communities
Another way to offer interreligious education to your kids is to emulate families already doing it! By most measures, interfaith marriages are on the rise. They are happening in varying degrees across all major religious traditions, and they represent a certain contempt for more conservative belief systems which tend to prohibit them. This increase in interfaith marriage is particularly true in the US, where 40% of couples married between 2010 and 2015 were in an interfaith union (compared to about 20% of US couples married before 1960).
The more interfaith marriages, the more likely it is that kids will grow up in an interfaith household. In general, traditional religious communities find little reason to develop resources for interfaith families, but the growing market has not gone unnoticed. The InterfaithFamilyProject in Washington D.C., the Union School for Interfaith Families in Chicago, and InterfaithFamily, which has hubs in Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago, are good examples of communities that have been explicitly created for Jewish-Christian families.
A few resources move beyond the Jewish-Christian combo. The first unit of our interfaith curriculum for kids, Interfaith Made Easy: Peace, has recently been published. It offers peace-related stories from a variety of faith traditions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hasidic Judaism, Native American, Sanatana Dharma – aka Hinduism, Sikhism, Sub-Saharan African, and Sufism). Our children’s book, We All Have Sacred Spaces, highlighting Indigenous sites, Hindu temples, Christian churches, Muslim mosques, and Sikh gurdwaras, will be out in 2020.
You can also find several first-person accounts about raising kids in an interfaith family. These show up in blog posts and newspaper articles from around the globe and involve any number of different faith combinations. Here are a couple of examples to get you started.
Want to Share Faith Traditions with Your Kids?
Four Tips for Raising Interfaith Kids
Four Simple Interfaith Tips for Parents
One of your best resources might be The Interfaith Family Journal (Skinner House Books, 2019) by Susan Katz-Miller, a pioneer in the interfaith family movement. Her workbook provides prompts, creative activities, and lots of writing space to help interfaith families develop specific strategies and practices for honoring a faith tradition. Since the workbook is not geared to any particular belief system (or combination of belief systems), it can easily be used to create your own version of interfaith education.
Conclusion
We teach kids how to do all sorts of things as we prepare them to enter the world of adulthood – how to dress themselves, how to read, how to ride a bike, how to perform basic math, how to drive, and how to vote. So why aren’t we actively teaching them to live in a religiously diverse world? I tell anyone who will listen that I have the easiest interfaith job on the planet because I work with kids. And while we still have a long way to go, tools and resources are slowly becoming available to help parents and educators prepare our next generation for the world in which they already live.
Resources
1 Gross, R. M. (2014). Religious Diversity What’s the Problem: Buddhist Advice for Flourishing with Religious Diversity. Cascade Books.
2 Sahin, A. (2017). “Religious Literacy, Interfaith Learning and Civic Education in Pluralistic Societies: An Islamic Educational Perspective,” in D. Wielzen and I. Ter Avest (Eds.) Interfaith Education for All: Theoretical and Best Practices for Transformative Action (pp. 45-53). Sense Publishers.
Header Photo: Unsplash