This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The United Religions Initiative traces its origin to a single request. In 1995, as the United Nations approached the fiftieth anniversary of its founding Charter, it asked William Swing, then the Episcopal Bishop of California, to host an interfaith service marking the occasion. Organizing that service left Swing with a larger question he could not put down: if the nations of the world had built a permanent institution to manage their conflicts and cooperation, why did the world's religions, which had inspired at least as much conflict and cooperation across history, have no comparable standing body of their own. The idea of a United Religions, deliberately modeled on and named after the United Nations, grew out of that question.
It took five years of consultation across traditions and continents to turn the idea into an institution. On June 26, 2000, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, more than two hundred people gathered in person, with hundreds more joining over the internet, to sign the founding Charter of the United Religions Initiative. What they signed was not a doctrine or a creed but a structure, one built to let local groups organize themselves into what the Charter calls Cooperation Circles, a design that would go on to define how the organization actually works.