Assessing the Impact of Interfaith Initiatives

Abstract

In 2011, I began working at the Woolf Institute, which focuses on interfaith relations in the United Kingdom and is based in Cambridge. Shortly after starting the job, the Director of the Institute and I sat down with a professor at Cambridge to ask about pursuing a research project on inter faith dialogue. “Interfaith dialogue is not a field of study,” the professor retorted, “it’s a practice.” Perhaps a year later, I attended a lecture by one of the most well-known scholars of faith and social action in the UK, Adam Dinham. Professor Dinham labelled interfaith dialogue “A pragmatic cobbling together of people who already want to work together”. Referring to the 2007 Labour government initiative Face to Face/ Side by Side, he commented that it had disappeared under the Coalition government “entirely without comment.” This initiative, launched by the then Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Hazel Blears, was intended to provide an “opportunity to reflect on how Government should support this [interfaith relations], where and in what circumstances interfaith works best and how we can work in partnerships with faith and non-faith-based communities and organizations” (Blears 2007). For Dinham, government consultations like this reflected the interests of “policymakers more than lived reality.”1 In practice, without committed leadership, buildings, and basic tenets, forums could only attract those already deeply motivated on a personal level. They offered little for those individuals who rejected communication with other faiths. I often thought about Professor Dinham’s comment when listening to the anxiety and discomfort of interfaith activists in the years following the meeting. These activists frequently repeated an observation that dialogue had become about ‘Bagels and Samosas’, or food and entertainment, rather than more profound efforts to improve understanding. This disillusionment was echoed amongst policymakers and in policy documents, which cited slow integration of migrant communities and patterns of segregation between minority and majority communities as evidence of the failure of interfaith dialogue. The 2016 Casey Review, a report on ethnic and religious diversity in the UK commissioned