This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Every institution gathered in this atlas's interfaith section traces back, in one way or another, to the same nineteenth century starting point: the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, the first attempt to seat representatives of the world's major traditions together as something like equals. Most of that lineage runs through large, one-time or occasional gatherings, a Parliament revived in 1993, a World Assembly convened every several years, a Charter signed once in 2000. The World Congress of Faiths is the exception: founded in 1936 out of the same broad tradition, it has operated continuously as a standing organization for nine decades, longer than every other body in this census, making it less a single historical event than a living institutional bridge between the Parliament's nineteenth century opening and the dense field of interfaith organizations that exists today.
That continuity gives it a distinctive vantage point. Religions for Peace, KAICIID and the United Religions Initiative were all built, decades later, around specific late twentieth century problems, armed conflict, intergovernmental cooperation, grassroots local action, each with an institutional design suited to its founding moment. The World Congress of Faiths predates all of that problem-solving apparatus. It was built simply to instill fellowship among people through religion, a smaller and more personal ambition that, precisely because it asked for less, has proven able to outlast every more elaborately engineered successor founded in its wake.