Religions for Peace

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.

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 was never built to settle what its member traditions believe about God, salvation or the nature of reality, and it does not try. Its working method is deliberately narrower and, its founders believed, more achievable: bring senior leaders from traditions that disagree about almost everything theological into the same room, and ask them to discern what they already, separately, hold in common on questions that are not doctrinal at all. Transforming violent conflict. Building just and harmonious societies. Advancing human development. Protecting the earth. On those grounds, a Buddhist monk, an Anglican bishop, a Sunni scholar and a Hindu swami can often find more agreement than four theologians from within a single tradition arguing over a contested text.

That design is also the coalition's limit. Religions for Peace has no authority to bind any member community to a position, doctrinal or otherwise; it can only convene, discern and act, relying on the standing of the leaders who show up rather than on any institutional power over them. What it offers instead is scale and legitimacy that a single-tradition body cannot claim: when its World Council speaks, it speaks for a coalition spanning nearly every major living religion, which is precisely what lets it hold consultative status at the United Nations and be heard as something other than one more sectarian voice among many.