Religions for Peace Case Statement

Introduction

Peace is not the absence of war. It is the stability that enables people to work together to advance human dignity and create shared well-being in harmony with the earth. Today there is barely a corner of the world that is at peace. “Developing” countries regularly face crises of conflict, disease, natural disasters, and human rights abuses. Even countries with the most established economies and democracies experience rising division and authoritarianism, making it more difficult to confront shared perils such as Covid-19 and the extreme weather resulting from climate change.

Throughout the globe, religion—or more accurately, the rigid practice and narrow understanding of particular religions imposed by people with power—has been misused to support violent conflict, extremism, and hostility among social groups. Yet nothing is more fundamental than the shared human values of care and compassion that undergird all religions. When religious leaders and people of faith from diverse traditions are able to reach across lines of difference and work together to resolve conflict, respond to crises, and restore the bonds of community, only then can the promise of peace emerge. And at that intersection of faith and fracture is where Religions for Peace does its work. We hope you will join us as a supporter and partner.

Who We Are

Religions for Peace, founded in 1970, is the largest worldwide alliance of religious communities devoted to advancing common action for peace. Many humanitarian agencies and organizations provide services to vulnerable populations. Religions for Peace is distinctive because we go beyond that: We bring different ethnic and religious communities together to deliver needed services, and through those concrete efforts, build trust and cultivate the enduring habit of collaboration. In this way, we not only respond to immediate crises and build the groundwork for collaborative responses to future emergencies, we also help dismantle the distrust and factionalism that are the root causes of crisis and conflict.

Our unique approach is to build, equip, and facilitate Interreligious Councils (IRCs) that provide a platform for dialogue and trust-building for common action. Composed of both clergy and lay leaders from the diverse religious communities in a particular area, the IRCs function as sustainable, civil society cooperatives that can work together in times of peace, conflict, natural disaster, or public health emergency. While the Interreligious Councils are members of the Religions for Peace network, each IRC is a locally owned and led endeavor.

Today Religions for Peace has IRCs in 90 countries and six regions. Together with our Global Women of Faith Network and our Global Interfaith Youth Network, they enable us to span the world and engage religious communities at all levels, from the local to the international. Religions for Peace is led by a World Council composed of senior religious leaders from 60 countries. The main religious communities represented in Religions for Peace, including many different denominations and Indigenous leaders, are (in alphabetical order): Bahá’í, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Indigenous, Islam, Jain, Judaism, Sikh, Taoism, and Zoroastrian.

In virtually every political or humanitarian crisis, there comes a moment when the multi-religious voice has a powerful role to play. We saw that in the United States when religious leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Heschel joined with many others to galvanize the civil rights movement and highlight the moral roots of their call for justice. Similarly, Religions for Peace works to position multi-religious voices so participants can speak out and take action collaboratively.

We are the only organization that brings together religious leaders and enables them to speak as one at the national, regional, and global levels. During our more than 50 years of experience, this approach has proven more powerful than the efforts of individual religions acting alone, more inclusive than endeavors solely within religious communities, and more efficient and sustainable than ad hoc interfaith initiatives.

What We Do and Why It Matters

Religions for Peace advances common action for peace among the world’s religious communities, primarily through creating and supporting Interreligious Councils that serve as mechanisms for collective action. We build IRCs by bringing together religious institutions and communities to help them define local problems, identify effective interventions, and leverage their varied religious assets to address common concerns. We help them establish the IRC as an organization, assisting them with governance, management, finance, and fundraising. When possible, we provide financial support.

Religions for Peace equips IRCs by training their staff members, providing technical support in areas such as peace-building and humanitarian assistance, and furnishing them with examples and best practices derived from experience in other countries, as well as a wealth of tools, manuals, resources guides, and training modules. We organize global capacity-building workshops for IRCs and create regular opportunities for them to connect with and learn from one another, sharing experiences, strategies, and support.

We facilitate IRCs by brokering relationships and partnerships for them with governments, NGOs, and others in the international community. Religions for Peace facilitates platforms where our IRCs can interact and partner with entities like UNICEF, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and the World Health Organization. We train and cultivate religious leaders that are part of our network to become advisors to organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the United Nations in order to bring multi-religious perspectives and policy advice to global initiatives.

These efforts have resulted in concrete gains for local and national populations facing the threat of war or humanitarian crises. Here are some recent examples.

Haiti

In July 2021, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, unleashing political turmoil, violence, and a humanitarian crisis. Within days, representatives from Haiti’s Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical churches asked Religions for Peace to help them conduct multi-religious advocacy. We assisted them to raise a united voice calling for the Haitian people to reclaim their fundamental values of respect, resiliency, and reconciliation. The fact that we were so quickly called upon in a time of upheaval reflects the credibility Religions for Peace has earned over years of work in Haiti. Our Interreligious Council in Haiti has established a strong track record of facilitating dialogue between opposing political parties and civil society groups and channeling humanitarian aid. The IRC has been called upon over the years by conflicting parties, as well as by the UN and the Organization of American States, to mediate conflicts and enable respectful and inclusive discussions.

Mozambique

In Mozambique, a far-reaching public messaging campaign was urgently needed to combat the spread of Covid-19. People had to adopt health-conscious changes to burial customs, holiday traditions, and everyday life habits. Only Religions for Peace had both the credibility and the network of religious leaders on the ground to accomplish this work swiftly. Our Interreligious Council in Mozambique reached out to 250 leaders from a diverse range of religions across the country and engaged them in Covid-19 prevention training. While those 250 leaders made up a minuscule percentage of the country’s 30 million inhabitants, together they had the ear of the millions of Catholics, Muslims, Christians, Anglicans, Pentecostals, Jews, and Bahá’í in every corner of the country. The religious leaders, along with women and young people of faith, took to the airwaves and pulpits to spread health and safety guidelines, reaching an estimated 25 million people. This work by Religions for Peace and its partners has kept the kind of tragedy we witnessed in India at bay in Mozambique. Moreover, through this effort the IRC forged working relationships with a broad spectrum of government and non-governmental organizations, laying the groundwork for collaborative efforts to fight vaccine misinformation and address future crises in Mozambique.

Our previous work continues to produce vital benefits today. For example, in 1996 Religions for Peace organized the first meeting since the outbreak of the Balkans war among the four most important religious leaders of Bosnia. Six months later, this dialogue culminated in a declaration in which Roman Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, Islamic, and Jewish officials agreed upon a joint moral commitment and established an Interreligious Council. Religions for Peace has received international recognition for our mediation between the conflicting parties in that war. Thanks to the respect and relationships we built then, today Muslim and Christian members of the IRC work side-by-side to deliver humanitarian aid, supplies, and services to address the Covid-19 crisis. A similar dynamic is at work in Sierra Leone where, building on the IRC’s successful efforts to mediate peace negotiations, secure the release of child hostages, and provide care for people affected by HIV/AIDS and Ebola, today we have been able to send trained volunteers from diverse religious communities to villages across the country with messages of safe practices and solidarity for addressing Covid.

Religions for Peace Has Never Been Needed More

Meeting the challenges of peace, sustainable development, and the protection of the earth will require unprecedented collaboration across cultures, societies, and peoples. But this urgent need for collaboration is thwarted by a global erosion of trust and rise of social hostility. Many nations—“developed” and “developing”—are experiencing decreasing social cohesion, leading to increased violence and weakened abilities to achieve moral and political consensus. Religion- and race-related hostilities proliferate. Every attack, every hate crime, every insult, every humiliation is amplified in the media and sends out a polarizing wave, fueling the hostility.

If the efforts of governments, civil society organizations, and individuals remain essential to meeting today’s concrete challenges, it is also clear that the social cohesion built on shared care and trust is both a prerequisite for effective action and a social good. Eighty percent of the world’s population expresses some form of affiliation to a religious community.  Religions for Peace’s aim is to help those 80 percent—through their own local institutions and leaders, including women and youth—to build the shared values and trust that can trigger action for peace by governments, civil society organizations, individuals, and by the religious communities themselves. Our mission—to find common cause despite differences, to achieve action through empathy and shared values—is a vital key to unlocking the pressing dilemmas of our time.

 

What We Can Do With Your Support

Religions for Peace seeks to raise $25 million for use over the next five years. We will apply these resources to create a rapid response fund that will enable us to act swiftly when crises emerge; to help support our Interreligious Councils across the world; to advance the aspirational goals shared by the UN and hundreds of national and international bodies; and to strengthen our own organization for the future.

 

Rapid Response Fund – $7 million

Over the years, Religions for Peace has successfully mediated peace negotiations and facilitated solutions to regional conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Asia, and elsewhere. Typically, we must dig into our limited core support to fund the rapid response that is crucial to address immediate crises, essentially borrowing from ourselves and imperiling our financial ability to carry out future activities. We seek to build a rapid response fund that will enable Religions for Peace and our IRCs worldwide to swiftly ramp up operations, purchase and deliver vital supplies, and bring needed expertise to regions that face crises that might range from political conflict to natural disasters to public health emergencies.

Support to IRCs 

We provide our Interreligious Councils with a varied menu of assistance, from issue expertise to leadership development. When IRCs also need financial support, Religions for Peace responds whenever we can, but our ability to do so is limited and inconsistent. The needs and capacities of IRCs differ from country to country and from year to year. Some IRCs quickly establish themselves and grow beyond the need for our help; for example, we created an IRC in Uganda in 2002 that within five years had a $50 million budget, more than 50 staff members, and active programs on the ground in partnership with USAID, the world’s leading international development agency.

Uganda’s experience is a model to strive for, but by no means the norm. Some IRCs may require significant investments of funds and technical assistance to become fully operational. Others may be working effectively and autonomously with no ongoing need for our support, but then confront a conflict or humanitarian crisis that requires different kinds of assistance and equipment. Our aim is to be able to provide financial and other kinds of support reliably and as needed.

UN Partnership and Collaboration 

As the largest non-sectarian, non-political coalition of representatives of the world’s religions dedicated to building peace, Religions for Peace is a key partner of the United Nations. We have achieved Special Consultative status with the UN and created a respected 40-year history of engagement and alliance with UN agencies such as UNICEF and the UN High Commission on Refugees.

Today we are committed to advance the 2030 Agenda and Goals for Sustainable Development that have been adopted by 197 member states of the UN. The goals are to promote peaceful, just, and inclusive societies; advance gender equality; nurture a sustainable environment; champion freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; strengthen interreligious education; and foster multi-religious collaboration and global partnerships. We have developed a set of strategies, ranging from education to advocacy to alliance-building, that we will conduct in order to elevate and advance these goals—efforts that we will undertake alongside and simultaneous to our work of addressing emerging crises and conflicts. Although we are a key partner of the UN, Religions for Peace receives no UN funding. Our work is financed entirely by support from foundations and individual donors.

 

Stabilize and Strengthen Religions for Peace 

Religions for Peace currently operates with an annual budget of $4 million and a hard-pressed staff of 11. That is not enough for an organization that coordinates crisis response and peace-building efforts around the globe, particularly in an era when internecine hostility is on the rise and climate change has turned unthinkable natural disasters into routine events. We intend to gradually increase our budget and staff size, stabilize the organization for long-term strategies, and scale up our work in the field of interreligious action for peace. Our plan includes strengthening Religions for Peace’s ability to:

• Educate by developing multi-religious resource guides, toolkits, and manuals to equip our partners to take collaborative action;
• Advocate by raising awareness, encouraging policy formation, influencing beliefs and behaviors, and mobilizing specific communities;
• Build capacity by offering safe spaces for multi-stakeholder dialogue and action, providing training to religious and community actors, and brokering relationships between faith-based organizations and leading NGOs in the fields of international development and humanitarian aid.

In these efforts we will focus on developing the leadership not only of ordained clergy, but also of the lay women of faith who are the backbone of religious communities, and the youth who are their future.

Religions for Peace will also increase our investment in the capacity and leadership development of our own staff members. When people join our organization, they are not meant to become nine-to-five technocrats, although of course they gain technical skills and are mentored by some of the leading experts and practitioners in the field. We cultivate our staff members so that when they eventually leave Religions for Peace, they do so to become mediators in conflict situations, or communications experts about multi-religious engagement, or to focus their PhDs on interreligious collaboration. We would like to be able to invest even more robustly in our staff just as academic institutions invest in their students—as a way to secure the future by seeding the field of peace-building.

Conclusion

Religions for Peace is not an organization that slaps our brand on projects or programs. Our signature is the consensus of care across the world’s diverse religious communities in relationship to some of the most pressing challenges confronting the human family:  war, poverty, disease, and the protection of the earth. It requires skilled, persistent effort to slice through the fear and hostility people can feel in the face of difference, in order to reveal the powerful human commonality that people of all religions share.

Those who experience humanitarian crises are all in it together, yet most human institutions, from political parties to nation-states, seek to pull us apart. When misused and exploited, as it often is, religion too can be a force for division. But when recognized as a bridge rather than a border, religion can be a powerful source of progress as long as people of faith have the skills and strength to work together to build a better future for us all. Religions for Peace asks you to invest in this future, and in our unique approach to peace-building that has proven effective across the world.