Can Interfaith Dialogue Cure Religious Violence?

In the wake of the Boston Bombings, Eboo Patel, public intellectual and director of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), has proposed, in a recent article on HuffPo, that this explosive violence resulted partly from a failure of interfaith dialogue.

With the caveat that “interfaith programs are not a miracle solution,” he offers three ways that this work can help:

First, “interfaith helps harmonize people’s identities.” Patel goes on:

“In America, just about everyone is some sort of hyphenated hybrid of race, religion and ethnicity/nationality… Religious extremists try to separate people’s various identities and pit them against each other.”

Patel suggests that the Tsarnaev brothers might have been less vulnerable to extremism if they “had been involved in discussions with people from other backgrounds about how their faith identity was mutually enriching with their nationality and citizenship.”

Second, Patel notes that “interfaith efforts” will discourage Americans from casting blanket suspicions on Muslims. “Interfaith efforts,” he writes, “help us to separate the worst elements of communities from the rest.”

Third, in general, “interfaith efforts remind us America is about welcoming the contributions of all communities and nurturing cooperation between them.”

Such assertions make sense. For many people—especially those who are not white Christians—joining a liberal interfaith organization might be a matter of survival in light of a “War on Terror” that has made primary targets out of black and brown bodies. This is especially true when we consider widespread abuse directed at people profiled as Muslim or Arab—a response that began before the second bomb had even exploded.

But I think we should be cautious about attempts to frame the Boston bombings, or for that matter any profound act of violence, mainly as a failure of (or an injunction toward) “interfaith cooperation.” There are four questions worth raising:

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