This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Religions for Peace began not as an organization but as a question. In 1961 a small group of senior religious leaders in the United States, Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath among them, started asking whether the world's faiths could hold a summit of their own, matched in seriousness to any political one, aimed squarely at peace. It took three more years before that question became a room: a conference in New York in January 1964, followed in March 1966 by a much larger National Inter-Religious Conference on Peace in Washington. Both were American gatherings, but the ambition behind them was never national. By the end of the decade the organizers had built toward something worldwide, and in October 1970 the first World Assembly of what was then called the World Conference of Religions for Peace convened in Kyoto, Japan, drawing senior figures from traditions that had rarely, if ever, shared a stage as equals rather than as guests.
What Kyoto started has not stopped growing. Religions for Peace now works through a World Council of senior leaders and a network of regional and national Interreligious Councils active in more than ninety countries, coordinated from an International Secretariat in New York that holds consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, UNESCO and UNICEF. Six decades after a handful of leaders first wondered whether such a thing was possible, it is the largest and most representative multi-religious coalition in the world.