Chicago has become the center of the interfaith movement.  It’s a not-so-micro microcosm of religious diversity.  It’s a place where Catholics, Jews, Jains, Muslims, Atheists, Evangelicals and others live alongside each other in “a city of neighborhoods,” as we like to say.  

These religious groups find common ground through organizations like the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), founded more than a decade ago by Chicagoan Eboo Patel. 

The 33-year-old Indian-American is ready to turn religious pluralism into a new norm, a societal standard. Like multiculturalism.  Like environmentalism.  Like equal rights.

The voices of hate and religious discrimination have gotten too loud in Chicago and all over the world, Patel says.  We can’t let it continue any longer.  We have speak out and make change.

The “we” Patel refers to is a pretty powerful “we.”  On Sunday, he addressed 500 teens, young adults, clergy members and interfaith advisers rallying together at the Interfaith Youth Core’s annual conference, held at Northwestern University in Evanston.  Over the course of the three-day event, more than 1,000 people from 90 schools, scattered all over the world, were said to participate.

Patel, in some ways, is like their superstar.  He’s become the guy for all things interfaith, serving as an adviser on faith issues to President Barack Obama and gaining recognition this week from the U.S. News and World Report as one of the Best Leaders in America.

The crowd at the conference applauds wildly when Patel takes the stage, snapping photos with digital cameras and iPhones.  As Patel speaks, his eyes sweep the room and never once look down at the small black notebook in front of him.  He talks about a vision for an interfaith future, and I’ll admit: I got goosebumps.

But what will the future of Chicago’s religious communities be?  How will the interfaith movement play out here?

Patel and IFYC have formed a million-dollar partnership with the Chicago Community Trust to address interfaith issues.

“The issue of the 21st century is religious diversity and pluralism,” said Terry Mazany, the president and CEO of the trust.  “This (partnership) has emerged to address that top-level need, not only preventing a horrendous action, but in fact tapping into the wellspring of goodwill and creativity” among the city’s religious groups, who are its largest recipients of philanthropic giving.

On local college campuses, the interfaith movement may seem to be well on its way:

-        Loyola University regularly sponsors conferences and academic discussions, includingGlobalization and the Common Good—An Interfaith Perspective held last spring.

-        DePaul University has two designated interfaith pastors and a group, Interfaith@DePaul, that sponsors 3-4 events each month.

-        Northwestern has an interfaith dorm, a “living and learning community,” where students can choose to intentionally interact with people of other religious traditions on a day-to-day basis.

Still, these efforts represent a small proportion of the student population, maybe 50 to 80 students each, Patel estimates.  “We want it to be the status quo on college campuses,” he says.

“And for those who don’t participate to feel guilty about it,” added Mazany.

IFYC, even with its intern program alone, has begun to shape young leaders, people who won’t accept religiously discriminatory language, close-mindedness or exaggerated stereotypes. These 20-somethings will be the civic leaders of the next generation.  At least that’s the hope.

And speaking of hope…

“The guy in the Oval Office was an interfaith leader in Chicago 30 years ago,” Patel tells the conference crowd, giving one example of the city’s long interfaith history, highlighted with revolutionary leaders like Jane Addams, the founder of the Hull House.

“Back then the common good for him was Altgeld Gardens,” he continues.  “Now the common good for him is planet earth.”

Faith communities, from non-believers to Muslims, have applauded Obama’s attention to religion and religious diversity in his inaugural address (my see previous blog entry here) as well as his speech from Cairo to Muslim countries (blogged about here).  But perhaps our president, with his roots in interfaith community-building, could be doing more and saying more to address religious plurality in America.

“I’d love for him to say more,” says Patel, who is a Muslim.  “It has to be the spirit of our time.”

No one really cares about the atheist billboard that made its debut downtown today.

On the corner of North LaSalle Drive and West Grand Avenue, Chicagoans pass by silently, smoking cigarettes, chatting on cell phones and barely glancing up at the sign, which says: “Are you good without God? Millions are.”

Like the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign ads on the CTA back in May, it seems the latest effort to publicize non-belief is a non-issue in the city of Chicago.  No protesters.  No angry glares.  No immediate public response from the religious community.

Hemant Mehta, the coordinator of Chicago Coalition of Reason, the group that sponsored the billboard, thinks no reaction might be a good reaction. 

“If Christians (or whomever) don't react, that means atheism is becoming more acceptable in society.  Which is great.  If they do react, then what exactly are they opposed to?” said Mehta, also known as the “Friendly Atheist, in an email.

More and more Americans are falling into the “good without God” camp—16 percent of adults don’t identify with a religious tradition and 4 percent call themselves atheists or agnostics, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Sam Younan, an Iranian-American Catholic who passed by the billboard on his way to church on Tuesday, said just because there are millions of people who don’t believe doesn’t mean they’re all right.

“I’m good, and I believe in God,” the 56-year-old said.

The second annual Art on Track event —where an eight-car CTA train turns into a mobile art gallery for a day—offered Chicago’s visual artists a nontraditional space to display their work and passengers a pretty unusual, and perhaps slightly spiritual, el ride. 

On Saturday, large ham bones made of pink and red felt swung from the ceiling of one car; the fluorescent lights shone through blue cellophane; and excerpts from Craigslist “missed encounters” that took place on the CTA were posted on the walls.

“I want them to feel kind of transformed,” said 27-year-old Allison Glenn, who curated the “Meet Meat Train” installation, created students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, or SAIC. 

Works of art and religious rituals both offer people the chance to be transformed, one professor told me.  In each experience, the ultimate impact comes from the return to normalcy and what lasting effect the work or the ritual has on someone once it’s over.

In the case of the Art on Track, the nearly 70 artists showcasing their work in the train looping around the Loop wanted to change the way CTA passengers think of public transit and public space.

Being involved in the event made Allison approach the el’s “awkward social setting” with a renewed awareness to notions of inclusion, irritation, reaction and acceptance.

The mobile exhibit, the largest of its kind, also can transform the way people experience art.  Tristan Hummel, one of the founders of Art on Track, designed the event to show the public art outside of a standard museum setting.

“Maybe they want to get excited in the way a sports fan does when they see a homerun,” said Tristan, a 23-year-old SAIC alumni.  “Maybe they want to scream.”

Rob Sherman, an atheist activist based in Chicago, reported yesterday that the government terminated a $1 million grant to help rebuild a historic South Side church.

Sherman had filed a lawsuit against the state officials, including former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who authorized funding Pilgrim Baptist Church.  But now, there’s no plan in place for what should be done with the ruins of the 115-year-old building.

When the church was all but destroyed by fire more than three years ago, Chicagoans mourned the loss of the building where gospel was born.  It had garnered national attention in the 1930s for its music director Thomas Dorsey and later for gospel singers like Aretha Franklin.

The building, designed by Chicago architects Adler & Sullivan, was an official city landmark, so then-Governor Rod Blagojevich pledged $1 million to help rebuild the non-church part of the building, administrative offices that housed the church’s school and historic documents.

Even before Sherman, the “Godless in Chicago” blogger, filed a legal complaint two years after the fire, people were questioning the constitutionality of the grant, citing that the state’s constitution does not permit publicly funding church-run schools.  Sherman, in 2008, alleged that it was impossible to limit the funding to the church’s “secular” functions and the grant was unconstitutional.

I agree with the legal arguments in Sherman’s filing (text here); the government directly handing money to religious institutions, for both religious ends as well as historical/cultural ones, seems to violate the most general notions we have for the separation of church and state.

The statements he makes on his blog, though, go beyond anti-church-and-state, towards-anti-church-itself. 

“Pilgrim Baptist Church remains a decrepit blight on the community, with no prospect of it being rebuilt in the foreseeable future.  Indeed, it is a perfect metaphor for what heaven is:  Once you look past the phony fancy facade of pearly gates, you realize that there's nothing there.  No god, no people -- nothing.  It's completely empty, just like the above picture of Pilgrim Baptist,” Sherman writes. “They ought to tear down the remains of that building and let the community move on.”

I can see why Sherman and area atheists are celebrating the victory of constitutional law over misappropriation of taxpayers’ dollars.  In some ways, I guess that’s something every American should celebrate, first-amendment-style.

But given the history of this specific building, of the now-crummy-looking Pilgrim Baptist Church, I’m still holding out hope that the funding will come. Already a handful of Adler & Sullivan’s buildings have been demolished (the Schiller Theater, the Stock Exchange and earlier buildings such as the Troescher and Ryerson, according to the city’s Landmark Division).  For the sake of the Bronzeville neighborhood and in honor of Chicago’s architectural history, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Sherman’s ought-to doesn’t come true.

 Photo by bluebike, Flickr Creative Commons.