Meghan Hussey: What's Faith got to do with it? : Reflections on a Semester of Interfaith Action

Religion was something that I knew deep down was an element of my identity that shaped and molded my worldview and my values. It was in college that I really began to own my faith for myself. Church was not something I just did on Sundays because I had to go with my family. Going to Mass and receiving the sacraments was a choice I made because I found that in growing closer to God I could find peace despite the intense pressure of being at an Ivy League school, find direction in my life in times of uncertainty as I have gone through immense changes over the past four years. Though I have not been very involved in explicitly Catholic activities or ministry, I know that many of the choices I have made in my life to be involved with service and social justice work on the local and international levels have been heavily motivated by my faith.

Knowing how important religion has been to me in my own personal journey, I have always been interested in discussing it with my peers. Up until this point, this mostly only consisted of informal conversations with friends, the majority of whom were Christian. After building strong interfaith friendships during my study abroad experience last year, I was eager to find more ways to discuss my faith and to learn about others. Yet I did not know of a forum on campus where that could take place. As an international relations major, the few times religion had been brought up in the classroom had typically been to discuss religious violence and how dangerous it was as a justification for war and terror. I had been involved with intercultural dialogue and diversity activities throughout high school and my passion of that continued when I was at Penn. It was while I was a facilitator for Penn’s Intercultural Leadership Program that I first heard about iBelieve, and I knew that it was a program I had to be a part of.

Although I was really looking forward to the discussions and I was confident that as a group we would learn a lot from one another, I never could have imagined how wonderful of an experience the class would be. The biggest take away for me was being able to engage in deep personal and intellectual conversations about religion with a group of students that I know I may very well have never met were it not for this class. I came to Penn from a very small high school and one of the things that I fear about going to a medium sized university such as Penn is that there are so many people who I never have a chance to meet. iBelieve gave us the opportunity to cross not only religious boundaries, but also class years, socioeconomic backgrounds, academic field, and race.

After the retreat I can say that I truly appreciated this diversity not only because it enabled me to have great classmates to engage with; it had also given me a wonderful set of new friends. We came away from the retreat not only having had extremely deep and personal conversations about religion, we found that interfaith could be a gateway for us to enter into conversations about a range of topics. I remember the last night of the trip some of us stayed up until almost five in the morning in a discussion that went from religion, to American identity, to the state of the education systems, to relationships. Interspersed among those topics was laughter and what would become inside jokes we still bring up as memories.

This was, for me, the biggest testament to the success of iBelieve. It demonstrated that bringing students together to talk about religion would not inevitably end in the awkwardness and anger that many fear. We did so much more than just direct service both on the trip and during the semester. We served the community by building our own community, thus demonstrating for the school and the city how lines of religion and culture and be transcended.  However, there were times at Penn when I came face to face with the fact
that there is a real and often unspoken religious divide on campus between those who find faith to be important and those who do not. These have ranged from having a professor rant about the Catholic Church’s “oppressive” practices of not ordaining women, to having colleagues uncomfortably look at my forehead on Ash Wednesday, to having to awkwardly answer the question “so are you religious then?” while on a first date. When I talk to some people on campus about religion, it seems as if they have become disillusioned and only associate religion with the negative. They see it as the source of divisive politics, impediments to scientific progress, and the justification for terrorism and hatred. This creates a large divide
that is difficult to cross.

I feel as though iBelieve could be a direct refutation of that way of thinking. We demonstrate that students of faith on campus are not closed minded, but rather open to dialogue and able to learn from one another and hear other points of view and experiences. We also had the opportunity to live out what many of our religions say about service, charity, and social justice in a way that was beneficial to our community. Moreover, as an academic class we show that faith and reason are not analogous to oil and water, as some at this secular school believe. One can analyze problems with reason without checking one’s faith at the door. This, to me, is the next challenge for the interfaith movement. It is not just people of different religious traditions coming together, but also including those of no faith background at all. How to we have a civil and productive dialogue among those with strong religious beliefs and those who have none? This I think is the question to be answered moving forward. Can having iBelieve as a model of interfaith reach out to students who aren’t particularly religious themselves, not to convert them, but to create a climate that is more understanding of different religions and more acceptance of peoples’ beliefs or lack thereof?

iBelieve was the first opportunity for me to really explore my own religious identity and I found a group of friends at Penn who, like me, found that their religion was a driving factor in their life. I feel incredibly blessed to have had this opportunity to be part of the first class during my final semester at Penn. I look forward to hearing updates about how the program is growing and progressing, and how it continues to bring together Penn students of different backgrounds to form friendships that will change this campus and, in a small but important way, change the world.