In our interfaith group, we want to make it clear that we want to include everybody, and from the beginning we never considered leaving out atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious people; however, one of the first challenges we stumbled upon was whether the term 'interfaith' by definition excludes nonreligious people. That's not at all what we want; we want to promote the education and tolerance of
all belief systems, but atheism/agnosticism (at least according to some) is not a faith.
In order to solve this problem, I've been doing some research and came across
this article by Chris Stedman. I highly recommend you read the whole thing, but here is a select bit:
The fundamental misunderstanding that many atheists have is that they
imagine the interfaith movement as uninterested in combating religious
totalitarianism and solely existing to maintain religious privilege—as
an excuse to show that religion, in its many diverse forms, has a
monopoly on morality—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
As Stedman goes on to point out, the true goal of interfaith work should be to bring together people of diverse backgrounds and to converse, question and challenge. This is what we are trying to achieve in our club.
Stedman also linked to
this article by Jesse Galef (warning: there is some cursing). Though I do not agree with everything he says, he makes some important points, including that the term interfaith means what you want it to mean. It only becomes an exclusionary "Kumbaya club" if you make it that.
At the same time, we want to use language that is clearly and openly tolerant and all-encompassing; to paraphrase John Green, the words we use to describe the things we think matter, and I think it is worthwhile to consider whether 'interfaith' really can include everyone.
Galef also notes that associating community service with interfaith work "strengthens the impression that religion is the source of charity." There is a conflict between an interfaith group being about the faiths themselves (think about the interfaith events, interfaith prayer sessions...things that could clearly exclude atheists) and them being about the
people of those faiths coming together for a common good, and that is something with which we as an interfaith club will have to grapple. I think it's also important to note here that we're going to have to forge our own goals and missions here; we can't rely on what the word interfaith has meant in the past. It's up to us to make it mean something worth doing.
Last, I'd like to include one more quote from Stedman.
If the only thing keeping some atheists from participating is a semantic
disagreement with the word “faith,” I think that is a missed
opportunity.
If you're atheist or agnostic, please feel welcome to join our group! If you don't think the semantic disagreement is trivial, we can work together to fix this issue--along with any other problems that might make our club less inclusive and appealing to everyone.
Please let us know what you think in the comments below, and/or join us on Thursdays in Room 157 to have a discussion about it! This is important, and so is what you think!
