Due to the heightened visibility of interfaith work after 2001, many people assume that much of Boston's interfaith work began only after--and as a result of--the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Boston, however, has long been a place where faiths come together and learn to live together. At one time, "interfaith" meant Protestant-Catholic-Jewish relations; today, Boston has become a thriving center for interfaith work and is considered a model for other US communities.
Protestants, Catholics, and Jews: Boston in the Seventeenth - Nineteenth Centuries
In elementary school classrooms across America, schoolchildren are often taught that the Puritans came to these shores for freedom of religion. However, this actually meant freedom for one religion, the Protestant Christianity of the Puritans. At various times, Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and others were banned from Massachusetts, and it was not until 1789 that the Massachusetts Constitution finally implemented freedom of religion.
With large-scale immigration bringing diverse communities to Boston, primarily from Europe, the 1800s were a time of great transition. Although the Jewish community had a small presence in the city since the late 1600s, their numbers began to grow and by the 1840s, they had sufficient numbers to establish their first synagogue, Congregation Ohabei Shalom. At the same time, the Great Hunger caused by the potato famine in Ireland was bringing waves of Irish immigrants to America's shores, resulting in such a boom in the city's Catholic population that by 1875 Boston had been named an Archdiocese by Pope Pius IX. By the end of the century, there existed a large Jewish community that would soon be followed by a variety of other religious traditions.
1893 saw the first wide-scale collaborative attempt at interfaith understanding with the World's Parliament of Religions held in Chicago: the Parliament included Unitarians, Universalists, Buddhists, members of the Bahá'í faith, Jews, Christian Scientists, and Hindus, among others, and influenced several well-known Boston clergy who were in attendance. Swami Vivekananda, one of the most influential speakers at the Parliament, brought his teachings to Boston as well; the Ramakrishna Vedanta society, named for Vivekananda's spiritual teacher, was founded in Boston in 1910. The first Bahá'í community was established in the city in 1899, and thirteen years later the son of the faith's founder, Abdu'l-Baha, visited the city. Yet non-Christian religions still faced difficulties. Just as the Jewish community in Greater Boston was becoming more influential in the 1920s--in 1921 Hebrew College was founded in Brookline, and in 1929 a bill passed in the Massachusetts State Legislature to allow the sale of food on Sunday when High Holy Days for Judaism fell on a Monday—the United States government passed the Johnson-Reed Act. This established a national-origins quota system to limit the influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans--groups that included large numbers of Jews--and it altogether prohibited Asian immigration.
Non-Christian Immigration in Greater Boston: Engaging Difference
Nevertheless, the non-Christian population of Greater Boston continued to grow, with a sizeable Muslim community from Lebanon establishing the Arab American Banner Society in Quincy to preserve their Islamic heritage. Finally, in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson abolished the immigration quota system with the Immigration and Nationality Act, and numbers of Asian immigrants to the United States began to soar, bringing with them various cultures, religions, and traditions.
This sudden increase in diversity in Boston's communities coincided with the racial tensions of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and led to growing awareness of the need for cooperation across religious, cultural, and racial boundaries. Religious communities reached out to one another to build these bridges. In 1966, inspired by the nonviolent methods used by Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of Boston-based Jewish and Christian clergy and activists who had marched with King in Washington, DC, established Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries (CMM), which brought congregations together to combat social and economic injustice across ethnic and religious lines. The annual Black-Jewish Seder created by Lenny Zakim and Reverend Charles Stith in 1980 was another example of this cooperation. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, interfaith work was based mainly on community building and helping people to address social injustices and poverty. The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), launched in 1996, brought faith communities together to organize for social justice, achieving successes on issues of affordable housing and healthcare. A few years later, the City of Boston established the Mayor's Office of New Bostonians to help immigrants utilize public resources in order to participate more in the life of the city.
"Hyphenated-Americans": Second-Generation Immigrants and US Society
This increasing engagement with race and ethnicity became more evident in the mid-1980s and 1990s as the second generation, the children of immigrant parents, became young adults. "Americanized" and English-speaking, they no longer faced the kind of isolation due to cultural and language barriers that their parents had, and they began to engage with their religious and cultural backgrounds. Colleges and universities in Greater Boston began to create interfaith student groups to connect on these types of issues. One example is Wellesley College's Multi-faith Student Council, which has an "equity of voice" requirement that gives each religious group, no matter how proportionally small in the campus community, equal representation in a Christian-dominated environment. The Pluralism Project, too, was founded in response to new questions being raised by the sons and daughters of immigrants about what their various religious traditions and cultures meant for American society and for Greater Boston in particular.
Interfaith dialogue groups were also established to foster collaboration and understanding among various religious communities. The Weston-Wayland Interfaith Action Group, for example, was established in response to an act of discrimination and used a "Facing History and Ourselves" curriculum to bring area communities together for dialogue. Also notable was a dialogue co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the Archdiocese of Boston, and the Massachusetts Council of Churches, followed by a new dialogue between the Massachusetts Council of Churches and the Islamic Council of New England.
Challenges, Triumphs, and the Future: Interfaith after September 11, 2001
The events of September 11, 2001, and the rash of xenophobic, racist, and religious-bias incidents in local communities that followed, resulted in a surge of interfaith activity. For example, Camp IF, or Interfaith, was established to offer a summer opportunity for young people from the Abrahamic faiths to learn about one another on neutral ground. In Sharon, a multicultural suburb, Interfaith Action, Inc. started training youth to become effective interfaith leaders in their communities. Daughters of Abraham, a women's book group, continues to bring Muslim, Christian, and Jewish women together to learn about their respective traditions through visiting local religious communities and reading about one another's respective religion.
Despite Boston's wide range of interfaith initiatives, challenges still remain--the contestation around the building of the Islamic Society of Boston's Cultural Center in Roxbury is a prime example. In a Pluralism Project interview, Charles Harper, the founder of Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries, was asked what types of issues the organization had faced once interfaith in Boston had expanded beyond its traditional American definition of Christians and Jews. Harper answered that "it was just like the first time that everyone--Protestant, Catholic, and Jew--had to learn to live together." Indeed, much of the region's interfaith work has been done with the ultimate goal of living as neighbors and creating a better, stronger community. Greater Boston, with its incredible diversity of religions, nationalities, and perspectives, is an ideal place to watch the future of interfaith work unfold.