What's inter-faith for?

I have always been, without thinking about it too hard, a supporter of inter-faith institutions and proposals. I believe in the value and interest of every religion and the importance of sharing that wisdom between all believers, particularly when it can promote peace, cooperation and friendship. At its root I hope it would reflect at a more widespread level my own experience of friendship with Muslims, Jews and Sikhs, something which has stimulated my own faith, and my fascination with other religions, more than any other encounters.

However, attending a presentation at the Cambridge University Divinity Faculty on 25 July 2011 was my first real engagement with an institutional inter-faith event. It was an odd evening, the talks, given by Jewish and Christian academics, and a Muslim student, were more negative than I had expected, focusing on necessity, pragmatism and conflict as much as on theology. The talk was intended not to find common ground between faiths but to find independent reasons within each religion for engaging in interfaith, a sensible approach surely but one which seeks to remind us how far some religions are from one another. Occasionally the talks were provocative, especially when considering the most grievous points of conflict, serving to make me wonder whether the Israel/Palestine issue, for example, is essentially impossible to overcome. One questioner at the end of the talks proposed one Islamic view on Judaism which he claimed was too fundamental to ignore, the Muslim student handled this aggressive point brilliantly but it left a sour taste in the mouth. Does inter-faith, speaking pragmatically, require some taboos in order to work? Marriage counselling presumably only works because the two sides have, at some point, been in love, they just need to recapture a sense of this original emotion, which is why discussion works; the same is not obviously true of religion. The study of comparative religion, in my opinion the most fascinating subject of them all, perhaps requires independence from engagement between individuals with chips on their shoulders.

My final surprise was that the discussion left relatively little room for individuals or friendship - there was some talk of love, agape, courage, 'eye to eye' and so on, but it was communities, religious texts, doctrine, prophesy and politics that absorbed the speakers' attention. After the talk I spoke to a priest from Leicester who told me that 'all you need for inter-faith work to happen is a few key players from either side to lead it'. When I suggested it was friendships between individual members of each group which really counted, his friend, also a priest, told me this was inter-faith too, as if a natural relationship between a Jew and a Christian could never be other than the meeting of religious representatives across a great religious divide. Maybe 'inter-faith' benefits from a fuzzy definition that allows academics and leaders to compare different scriptures in university settings while grouping this activity with hypothetical relationships between real religious believers, but I worry that it emphasises difference by its very name, excludes normal social activity and threatens to descend into an activity carried out by and for academics, priests and religious leaders. To use a cliche - can a top down structure deliver bottom up results?