🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Hate crimes have reached epidemic proportions—rising again in major U.S. cities during the first half of 2022 after double-digit percentage increases over the past two years. We stand together as religious leaders to urge anti-hate training from an early age to end this dangerous trend and to implore our fellow clergy to preach from their pulpits what extremists have tried to hide: All major religions abhor violence and reject militancy in their names.
We should start by recognizing that misguided religious devotion is a significant cause of hate crimes. Religious discrimination has spurred a string of mass shootings—from the 51 people killed at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 to the deaths of 10 people in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket last May. The attackers in those incidents were inspired by the heinous Great Replacement Theory, which imagines that migrants from places like the Middle East and Africa—often Muslims—are determined to overwhelm the inhabitants of Western countries.
Christians and Jews also have been regularly targeted. On June 5, 2022, Pentecost Sunday, gunmen associated with the Islamic State West Africa Province entered St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in southwestern Nigeria and killed at least 40 people. In Egypt, the attacks during Palm Sunday services six years ago were the worst day of violence targeting Christians in Egypt's modern history. On Palm Sunday in 2021, suicide bombers injured 20 people in an Indonesian Roman Catholic church. And who can forget the 11 Jews shot to death in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018?
Faith leaders have responded by explaining that people of faith who follow religions' teachings love all people no matter their beliefs or backgrounds. In May, a Muslim World League conference of Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish leaders met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for a Forum on Common Values Among Religious Followers. They declared: "We call on religious institutions around the world to advance values that highlight forgiveness and religious tolerance and ... reject extremism that incites hatred and takes advantage of religion to create crises and fuel conflicts."
Similar statements have been issued by the Interfaith Appeal of Conscience Foundation, by Pope John Paul II in his landmark rejection of intolerance in 1990, and by Pope Francis' signing of the Document of Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together in 2019.
But more than words are needed. Education about respect for others needs to be provided from pre-school onward. That's why all three of us shared a stage recently at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York to inaugurate the International Interfaith Research Lab. The program will develop and disseminate training methods to educators that will encourage inclusiveness and reject divisiveness especially among young students.
Research funded by the U.S. government has shown that children who are subjected to biased behavior by their teachers or peers learn from an early age that they don't "belong." This concept of the "other" can metastasize into religious, ethnic, and racial discrimination, radicalization, and eventually, violence. Students need to feel accepted and part of a community, not alienated from those who look or worship differently than themselves. This will reduce hate crimes from the start.
Without this kind of education, research shows that young people searching for a sense of belonging frequently turn to radical groups that offer empowerment along with messages of hate and violence.
One initiative to counter this by the Lab features the story of how Muslims in Bosnia saved an ancient book treasured by the Jewish people—the Sarajevo Haggadah—even during the genocide against Muslims there three decades ago. The Lab also will produce an Encyclopedia of Common Human Values and convene conferences of religious leaders.
The objective is to welcome racial diversity, social justice, and interfaith understanding. These kinds of activities are needed more than ever to transform the ways we think about each other, not as enemies but as diverse members of the same, human race.
Sheikh Dr. Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa is secretary general of the Muslim World League, the world's largest Muslim nongovernmental organization.
Timothy Cardinal Dolan is the archbishop of New York.
Rabbi Arthur Schneier is senior rabbi of New York's Park East Synagogue and founder and president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
