Three lessons for interfaith engagement on campus

Ten years ago, I led my first educational visit for LSE students to Israel and Palestine. Coinciding with the opening of the LSE Faith Centre, the programme was targeted at active members of student faith societies, with the intention of generating a more informed, more respectful conversation on campus around this most divisive of conflicts. 

This trip (and the five that followed) had many memorable moments. But one of the more heartening occurred as we queued up to ascend the highly contested Temple Mount in Jerusalem. A security guard looked in bewilderment at our multifaith group – young women in hijabs, young men in kippot (skull caps) and me in a clerical shirt – and asked, “Where are you from, and can I come back with you?”

The answer is that we were from a diverse university campus where, in the most part, staff and students of all faiths (and none) get along incredibly well. This is true of most British universities now. It is 14 years since the Equality Act required all public institutions to think more seriously about how they can incorporate the beliefs and customs of different religious groups into the ecosystem of a plural community. New facilities (like the LSE Faith Centre) have been built, canteens are catering for religious dietary requirements and religious holidays are taken into account when timetabling.

• To combat antisemitism in HE, teach students about Jewish history
• Challenging Islamophobia across higher education
• Pluralistic campuses will foster the bridge-builders our divided nations need

But to think of religion simply in terms of a “protected characteristic” can leave us a little naïve about the task of building a religiously plural community in times when religion is increasingly entangled with political divisions around the world. As many pointed out when the Equality Act was passed, faith identities are rather more complex than other categories of identity. They can be personal and spiritual, cultural and political, metaphysical and all-encompassing. As such, they require not merely practical accommodations but a sustained process of engagement and relationship-building.

This has been the LSE Faith Centre’s mission for the past decade, pursued through a range of programmes, events and research supported by the Templeton Religion Trust. Sadly, the interfaith trips to the Holy Land have been paused since 2019, but every year roughly 80 students take part in our extracurricular programme, Beecken Faith and Leadership, which builds students’ religious literacy and develops their skills for dialogue and leadership across difference. While this is a small proportion of the whole student body, engaging key figures within religious groups and establishing a good reputation for this work can impact campus culture significantly. 

In the course of this work, we have learnt=ed three important lessons.

First, interfaith work can’t just be a crisis response. It needs to be sustained, building up credibility and capacity in the good times that can be drawn upon in the bad. Too many institutions have only recently been prompted to pay attention to their community’s inter-religious dynamics. But the current conflict in the Middle East creates a difficult backdrop for new initiatives that do the slow and patient work of building trust. LSE has certainly had its own challenges in the past 12 months, but the Faith Centre has been able to sustain its work and has acted as a trusted broker in efforts to bring communities together.

Chaplaincies can be good vehicles for ongoing interfaith work. But too often they are underfunded (sometimes even dependent on volunteers), lacking in interfaith competences and attempting to deliver on a range of different agendas. While religious expertise is needed for interfaith work, there is no reason why institutions cannot recruit interfaith practitioners and invest in this work themselves.

Second, we have learned that effective interfaith engagement will not shy away from intractable disagreement. Considering religion purely through the lens of diversity and inclusion can lead to an implicit relativism that most religious people reject. Religious differences matter. They matter to religious believers for ultimate reasons of truth, meaning and salvation. But they matter for more immediate practical reasons because they lead people to see the world differently, from the politics of the Middle East to the meaning of the human person.

The task of interfaith relations is to create spaces where these differences can be explored respectfully but robustly. Differences need to be confronted. This is not in some naïve attempt to eradicate them but so that through better understanding in the context of interpersonal encounter, they can be held peacefully and without prejudice. We are seeing more and more that this doesn’t just apply to religious differences. Engaging critical thinking with civility is the core task of the university in a polarising world.  

Third, there is wisdom in linking interfaith engagement with common cause. Our leadership programme has a focus on climate change and the contribution that religious narratives and communities can make to ecological repair. In the face of intractable differences, a reminder of shared concerns and common humanity give renewed impetus to dialogue. While religio-political conflicts may divide us, the ever more serious climate emergency demands unified action. Closer to home, during last year’s Interfaith Week, with intercommunal tensions heightened, our Muslim and Jewish students were still able to cooperate on an interfaith soup kitchen for homeless people near the LSE campus.

The violence in the Middle East will die down but this endlessly tragic conflict will not be resolved any time soon. All the while, we see rising inter-religious tensions in other parts of the world where many UK universities draw their students from, such as the Indian subcontinent. Interfaith work can no longer be seen as tangential to campus relations; it is central. And if we do it well, we will indeed model – and, may we hope, export – the cohesive religious pluralism needed in so many societies around the world.

James Walters is director of the LSE Faith Centre.

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