From dialogue to activism: How to get Generation Z and Millennials to participate in the multifaith movement in Australia

Abstract

This article examines why young people rarely participate in the activities, initiatives, and organisations of the multifaith movement in Australia. It will discuss five issues which impede Generation Z and Millennials from engaging in the multifaith movement by drawing on previous studies on these generations and interview data with multifaith activists in Australia. There is a significant portion of Generation Z and Millennials who have hybrid religious identities, identify as nonreligious, and/or stand at the margins of religious institutions. Yet, this is incompatible with the dialogue model which assumes that its participants are unambiguous full members of their religious tradition who are imbued with the legitimacy of their institution and endowed with the role of a representative. If multifaith activists shifted the focus from dialogue to activist, relational, and humanitarian aspects of the multifaith movement, it may empower young people to participate in a way that reflects their experiences, concerns, and goals.

Introduction

The multifaith movement faces the challenge of meaningfully including young adults in multifaith activities, initiatives, and leadership (Fahy and Bock, 2018: 18; Orton, 2016: 354; World Faiths Development Dialogue, 2017: 51). In the late 2000s and early 2010s, youth participation in multifaith organisations and initiatives rose in Australia. Young people were involved in the 2009 Melbourne Parliament of the World’s Religions, and Australia had its own youth-led multifaith organisation InterAction, which was influenced by the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) established by Eboo Patel in the United States (Halafoff, 2013: 104). However, InterAction has since become dormant, and as the data collected for this research revealed, Millennials (1982–1996) and Generation Z (1997–2016) are largely absent from the multifaith movement in Australia. The multifaith activists interviewed for this study emphasised that increasing youth involvement was an urgent issue. Those who have held leadership positions in multifaith organisations in Australia are ageing and are looking to mentor the next generation of multifaith activists. They made it clear that without young people taking up leadership, the multifaith movement will suffer a crisis of succession. The multifaith movement needs to figure out how to entice Millennials and Gen Z to take on leadership roles, if they are to ensure that multifaith work continues and that it adapts to the evolving challenges and opportunities of religious diversity.

The Worldviews of Australia’s Generation Z (AGZ) study (Singleton et al., 2019), the Australian Interaction multifaith youth movement project (Halafoff and Gobey, 2018), and the Religion, Gender and Sexuality among Youth in Canada (RGSY) study (shipley et al., 2016) shed light on why young people are absent from multifaith initiatives and organisations in Australia. They highlight that Millennials and Gen Z have significantly different ways of identifying with and relating to religion that has been overlooked by traditional data-gathering methods and limited categories of religiosity. The AGZ, Interaction, and RGSY studies suggest that a significant portion of Millennials and Gen Z have hybrid religious identities and are influenced by a range of religious and nonreligious sources. They have also grown up in a context where religion is under critique, and they are questioning the role of religion within a larger range of other diverse identities (Halafoff et al., 2020a; Halafoff and Gobey, 2018; Singleton et al., 2019; Shipley et al., 2016).

The equivocal ways that young people engage with religion is incompatible with the dominant practises of the multifaith movement which privileges dialogue. Many multifaith scholars promulgate a logocentric bias by examining all multifaith practices through the lens of interreligious dialogue. While it is merited, it leaves little room for young people to play a role. It posits individuals as unambiguous representatives of their religious tradition, privileges the voice of an elite, essentialises the diversity of religious traditions, and tends to overlook the complexities of lived religion. The multifaith movement has also traditionally excluded women, LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex) individuals, and non-Abrahamic faiths, and privileged the voices of male religious leaders who occupy elite positions within their traditions. This article seeks to join the response of scholars of material religion, and more specifically material religion in the context of multifaith, to challenge the logocentric emphasis of religious life, and call attention to the embodied and lived modes of religion. Doing so allows greater breadth for understanding the role that young people can play in the multifaith movement.

25 multifaith activists were interviewed for this study and the author did fieldwork at 8 multifaith events. Two multifaith activists that stood out included Niveditha (Nivy) Balachandran, who co-founded InterAction and has been active in other multifaith organisations for many years, and Ryan Epondulan, who is the Youth and Networking Coordinator for the Columban Centre for Christian–Muslim Relations, which runs a youth-led initiative called Youth PoWR. Some of the observations they made were echoed in other interviews and fieldwork. However, they also provided a unique perspective due to their position as youth representatives. Their stories intend to highlight five key challenges to the inclusion of young people in multifaith initiatives. Young people are limited by external pressures from work and family; a lack of accommodation by multifaith organisations; the contentious position of religion in Australia; the perceived absence of social action; and the lack of engagement with their concerns, goals, and values. Nivy’s and Ryan’s stories also emphasise the challenges they face as youth leaders. These organisations are anomalies in the multifaith movement in Australia, and count among the few youth-based multifaith organisations in Australia. In fact, InterAction is no longer active. Their stories have been chosen to demonstrate that there has been success in this area. Therefore, a focus on these two youth representatives provides an instructive angle for how multifaith organisations can be successful in navigating these challenges and empowering young people.

This article focuses upon the multifaith movement, rather than religious institutions more broadly, because of the unique role it plays in peacebuilding in diverse societies. Anna Halafoff (2013) argues that religions are predisposed to a peacebuilding role because they possess ‘extensive networks of communication and action’ (Halafoff, 2013: 59), engage with grassroots communities, possess moral authority and the trust of the people, often promote nonviolent responses to injustice, and because ‘faith-based peacemaking draws on religious texts and narratives of peace, justice, repentance and forgiveness to aid the peacebuilding process’ (Halafoff, 2013: 59). This is particularly important among young people because they have grown up in a diverse world and have a unique part to play in ‘normalising pluralism and in spreading awareness of interdependence and global responsibility in ultramodern societies’ (Halafoff, 2013: 104).

Halafoff (2013) explains that multifaith empowers young people to engage critically with their society and participate in social change and can be a powerful counterbalance against extremist movements which prey upon disenfranchised youths (2013: 104). This article will conclude with two recommendations that seek to remedy many of the issues presented. Multifaith organisations will attract more young people that have been previously excluded by a dialogue-centred model by emphasising the activist, relational, and humanitarian aspects of the multifaith movement. Multifaith organisations need to provide young people meaningful leadership roles to encourage a new generation of multifaith activism which reflects their diverse experiences, concerns, and goals.

Methodology

The conclusions made in this study emerged from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork which was conducted in 2019–2020. I conducted 25 long semi-structured interviews with multifaith activists and performed fieldwork at 8 multifaith events, which also involved 8 short semi-structured interviews with people who attended some of the events. The long interview participants were in leadership positions in multifaith organisations in Sydney, Melbourne, and Hobart, Australia. These organisations included Religions for Peace (RfP), Faith Communities Council of Victoria (FCCV), the Columban Centre for Christian–Muslim Relations, Sacred Conversations, the Interfaith Network of the Greater City of Dandenong, Together for Humanity, the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), InterAction, Affinity Intercultural Foundation, Wyndham Interfaith Network, Geelong Interfaith Network, and the Whitehorse Interfaith Network. The interviews and fieldnotes were coded on NVivo and common themes were identified, and an interpretive analysis formed out of the collection of these data.

The most salient observation made in doing fieldwork and conducting interviews was the lack of young people participating in multifaith initiatives in Australia. Most of the multifaith events included in the fieldwork were absent of Millennials or Generation Z, or they were a small minority. This included myself as I was born in 1995. One attendee who was interviewed at the 2019 Victorian Interfaith Networks Conference remarked, ‘people are ageing with it’. This was flagged in interviews as an urgent challenge, and that is why generational differences were chosen as the focus for this article. For example, Terry Sussmilch, the Branch Convenor for RfP Tasmania, noted that

the main difficulties are that young people aren’t volunteering for this kind of action. Those of us who are getting old and sick [are] running out of oomph. It takes particular dedication to volunteer in this area, that young people may not necessarily have.

The interviews with Nivy Balachandran and Ryan Epondulan stood out because of the unique position they occupied as youth representatives in multifaith organisations. They were the only youth representatives in multifaith organisations that were interviewed. Some of the observations they made were reflected in what was said by other interview participants and in what was observed during fieldwork. However, Nivy’s and Ryan’s stories offered some unique observations about the challenges experienced by young people who participate in the multifaith movement. Their stories take centre stage in this article because it highlights a key point being made in this article, which is that to solve the issues around a lack of youth engagement, multifaith activists need to listen to what young people are saying about their experiences with religion and multifaith.

This research is part of a PhD undertaken at the University of Tasmania on multifaith encounters and negotiations in Australia. It is a branch of a larger Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Discovery project on the dynamics of religious and cultural diversity in Australia. Anna Halafoff, who is a key investigator in the AGZ and Interaction studies and a Chief Investigator of the ARC project on religious diversity, and Douglas Ezzy, who is also a Chief Investigator of the same ARC project, are the supervisors of this PhD. They helped to develop the ideas of this article through an ongoing discussion about the intersections between religion, youth, diversity, and multifaith.

Australian and Canadian studies of young people and religion

Each generation has different ways of understanding religious and nonreligious worldviews, religion’s place within society, and how one participates in it, and as a result, there is a generational divide with the multifaith movement in Australia. Halafoff et al. (2020a) collate the findings of the AGZ, RGSY, and Interaction studies to draw conclusions about the ways in which younger generations navigate and relate to religious and nonreligious worldviews and identities in the contexts of Australia and Canada. These three studies from Australia and Canada were chosen, despite the focus of this article being on Australia, because the authors of these studies collaborated and published a collated analysis of their findings which combined data about Millennials and Gen Z. However, there is potential for broader exploration into how other identity markers, such as class, gender, sexuality, geography, language, and cultural background, affect religious belonging and engagement in the multifaith movement among young people that would likely demonstrate greater and more nuanced diversities.

The AGZ, RGSY, and Interaction studies argue that different generations have had diverse experiences regarding religion. The Silent (to 1945) and Baby Boomer (1946–1965) generations were raised imagining Australia as European and Christian and belonged to a single religious affiliation. However, Baby Boomers also experienced the influx of migration in the 1970s and the rise of new religious movements, and ‘the beginning of “new style religion” and spirituality that is characterised by diversity, fluidity, individual choice, and hybridity’ (Halafoff et al., 2020b: 199). Gen X (1966–1981), Millennials, and Gen Z were raised in a time where multiculturalism and religious diversity was normalised and were influenced by ‘old’ and ‘new’ styles of religion. Halafoff et al. (2020b) observe that Gen X and Millennials are characteristically ‘less Christian [and] more religiously diverse’ and Millennials are ‘the least religious Australian generation’ (Halafoff et al., 2020b: 200).

Gen Z and Millennials are also witnessing the critique of religion, and the shifting relations between religion and the state. For example, they have witnessed the debates around same-sex marriage, and the Religious Freedom Bill, ¹ and through the media are exposed to the findings of The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ² and news of religiously motivated conflict and terrorism. Gen Z are also growing up in a world dominated with social media and are immured in navigating what Steven Vertovec (2007) describes as a ‘superdiversity’. They also must contend with questions over gender, sexuality, religious, cultural, and multispecies diversity (Halafoff et al., 2020b: 200). The AGZ study highlights that despite this, most government schools receive no education in religious diversity, or ‘the types of education programs that are currently being delivered do not adequately match their lived experiences and appreciation of superdiversity’ (Halafoff et al., 2020b: 200). Multifaith activists have lobbied the federal education department to include General Religious Education (GRE) in the national Australian Curriculum, yet it remains largely absent (Halafoff et al., 2020b: 201).

The AGZ study presents a complex picture of how Gen Z belong to and participate in religious, spiritual, and nonreligious worldviews. In all, 52% of responders identified with ‘no religion’, yet 67% possessed belief in God or a higher being, and a large portion had beliefs influenced by Asian religions. For example, 50% of teens believed in Karma (Singleton et al., 2019: 6–7). Halafoff et al. (2020a) point out that these data reveal that young people are engaged with religious and spiritual worldviews but in nuanced ways not quantified by previous data collection methods. They challenge the conception that young people possess an ambivalent or ‘whatever’ attitude towards religion, which dictates that the currents of individualism, consumerism, and secularism have led young people to have either a shallow and consumerist interest in religion or very little interest at all (Halafoff et al., 2020a: 4). Furthermore, the Interaction study by Halafoff and Gobey (2018) demonstrated that at least a portion of young people are still deeply interested in discussing, being involved with, and exploring religion and spirituality, and that the multifaith movement offers a unique space for young people to connect across religious boundaries.

Many respondents in the RGSY and AGZ study demonstrated a hybridity of religious belief and practise and claimed several religious identities (Halafoff et al., 2020a: 5–6). The Interaction study revealed that participants were influenced by their family, as well as a diversity of religious teachings, spiritualities, and practices which was accessed through their physical and online mobility (Halafoff et al., 2020a: 5; Halafoff and Gobey, 2018: 273). In this context of diverse influences, Gen Z and Millennials exhibit a degree of agency as they are engaging in ‘reflexively, constructing, re-evaluating, and reconstructing their own religious, spiritual, and nonreligious identities themselves’ (Halafoff and Gobey, 2018: 274). According to Heather Shipley (2018), the RGSY study also revealed an openness to other religious and nonreligious worldviews. Shipley states that even those participants who identified with a single affiliation were open to other religious and nonreligious worldviews and were not ‘rigidly self-defining’ (Shipley, 2018: 197). Many respondents included philosophical and ethical values, spirituality, and social justice into the make-up of their worldviews (Shipley, 2018: 196–197). However, this religious self-styling may suggest that many of the participants in these studies come from privileged backgrounds, whereby they have access to resources to participate in the religious marketplace.

Halafoff et al. (2020a) identify that young people are strongly engaged in questioning religion, learning about diverse religions, and critically thinking about how religious rights and freedoms sit alongside the rights and freedoms of others (Halafoff et al., 2020a: 8–9). These studies demonstrated that young people are conflicted about religion, specifically regarding the attitudes of some religions regarding gender and sexuality (Halafoff et al., 2020a: 7). Halafoff et al. (2020a) note that ‘clashes between religious freedom and sexuality rights appeared to be a highly charged issue for participants’ (Halafoff et al., 2020a: 9). For respondents in the RGSY study, it was clear that while they saw value in many aspects of religion, the contentious beliefs regarding gender and sexuality was a barrier to identifying with being religious or with a religious institution (Shipley, 2018: 197–198). Participants in the AGZ focus groups were deeply concerned with how religious freedom would result in the discrimination towards LGBTQI+ people (Halafoff et al., 2020a: 9). Young people supported religious diversity and religious freedom but, their support was challenged when religion was perceived to impinge upon the rights of others or seen as the cause of violence, intolerance, or discrimination (Halafoff et al., 2020b: 207).

The dialogue model

These studies highlight some themes that help explain why young people might avoid engagement in the multifaith movement. This section will describe how young people’s engagement with religion is incompatible with the dominant model of multifaith which frames all multifaith activity as a form of dialogue. The dialogue model necessitates a logocentric bias in the multifaith movement which privileges belief, texts, and doctrine above ritual, practise, and embodiment. Scholars exemplify this when they describe all manner of multifaith activities, practices, or relationships as ‘dialogue’. Sallie B. King (2010) refers to 7 types of dialogue, including official dialogue between religious leaders, religious leaders speaking to an open forum, verbal dialogue (intellectual discussions), intervisitation (visiting the places of worship of other religions), spiritual dialogue (participating in the rituals of another religion), practical dialogue (communities working together on an outward issue), and internal dialogue (discussions within oneself) (King, 2010: 2). Similarly, Leonard Swidler (2014) says there are three kinds of dialogue: Dialogue of the Head (intellectual verbal discussion), Dialogue of the Hands (social activism and humanitarian work), and Dialogue of the Heart (sharing religious and spiritual experiences) (Swidler, 2014: 25).

Christian theologians who participated in the emergence of the multifaith movement in the late 1800s and the early scholars of the academic discipline of religious studies set this precedent (Moyaert, 2019a: 9). Cotter and Robertson (2016) note that early scholars of religion modelled ‘religion’ on Protestant Christianity, ‘which prioritised “belief” and “doctrine” as preserved in texts as the sine qua non of “religion”’(Cotter and Robertson, 2016: 6). Those traditions which resembled Christianity were included into the Big Five – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism – or what is known as the World Religions Paradigm (WRP) (Cotter and Robertson, 2016: 7–8). Religious traditions which failed to fit this model were either classified as ‘primitive’ iterations or were re-imagined to fit the model by emphasising textual aspects of the tradition (Cotter and Robertson, 2016: 6). Religion was thus ‘distinguished (often implicitly) by textual traditions, [and] a stress on orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy’(Cotter and Robertson, 2016: 6). This classification of religion, which is also inherent in the early multifaith movement, benefitted the colonial project because it affirmed the perfection of Christianity (Cotter and Robertson, 2016: 8; Swamy, 2019: 726–727).

Although largely discredited today, the WRP continues to command the multifaith milieu, both in scholarship and practise. It does this in two ways. First, by essentialising highly internally diverse religions traditions. Second, by enforcing a power structure of legitimacy regarding which traditions possess ‘the Truth’ and who is eligible to share it. In Catherine Cornille’s (2008, 2013) scheme on conditions of interreligious dialogue, she argues that dialoguers must have an identification with a single religious tradition and act as representatives of their tradition in dialogue – she calls this Commitment. According to Cornille, dialogue is a conversation between institutions, traditions, and belief systems; it excludes individual spirituality and nonreligious worldviews. This is important because without it, interreligious dialogue will begin to resemble the ‘New Age’, which she defines as the selection of various religious beliefs and practices for ‘indulgence of one’s own personal desires and needs’ (Cornille, 2008: 64).

Cornille demonstrates a Protestant bias in claiming that those outside of the WRP are somehow illegitimate and disconnected from the Truth. Swidler (2014: 23) draws a similar boundary, and says that humanistic, atheistic, or ideologically based individuals, those who do not belong to a religious community, may engage in dialogue but it would not be interreligious dialogue. The privilege of ‘Truth’ as the main goal of multifaith is the second limitation that the dialogue model enforces. An earlier work of Moyaert states that ‘dialogue is connected deep down with the search for truth’(Moyaert, 2013: 206), and without this pursuit, dialogue is baseless (Moyaert, 2013: 206). Swidler states that truth is found through the engagement by individuals who possess different fields of religious knowledge, or partial grasp of the Truth, that through dialogue may come to a more whole grasp of the Truth (Swidler, 2014: 19–20).

Cornille problematically attaches this search for Truth with the implicit assumption that long-standing traditions (those within the WRP) are the only legitimate sources of Truth. Cornille states that dialoguers ‘bring to the discussion an entire storehouse of religious teachings and practices that have been tried and transmitted, purified and enriched through the ages’ that within these ‘[traditions] contains the history of struggle to maintain and indeed improve the purity of those teachings, and to transmit them in new forms, intelligible in different cultures and epochs’ (Cornille, 2008: 66). Cornille is explicit about which groups are ‘pure’ holders of Truth and who are not. She argues that New Age beliefs are often incoherent and inconsistent, and those who participate in it are ‘caught up in the restless pursuit of new experiences in one religion after the other’ and that dialoguing in this way leads to ‘endless wandering’ (Cornille, 2008: 64). Admittedly, Cornille may not be representative in this view, but the consequences of this idea have been documented in how multifaith initiatives are played out on the ground.

In Muthuraj Swamy’s (2016) postcolonial critique of multifaith work within the context of India, he argues that it is an elitist position to infer that formal dialogue ought to be ‘passed down’ from religious leaders to those on the grassroots level to urgently prevent religious violence. It assumes that the absence of dialogue is the cause of religious violence among ordinary people and downplays the effectiveness of multifaith activities outside of dialogue, which he found was already occurring between religious communities living together (Swamy, 2016: 146). In their review of multifaith work in Delhi, Doha, and London, Fahy and Bock (2018) observe how dialogue transmutes ‘shared values’ and ‘religion’ into abstract essentialised categories (Fahy and Bock, 2018: 69). Meanwhile, engagement with ‘lived religion’ – the often messy, conflicted and unpredictable ways in which religion manifests in the world – is sidelined (Fahy and Bock, 2018: 68). Baumann and Tunger-Zanetti (2018) observe in Switzerland that the WRP continues to promulgate the division between ‘religions proper’ – those part of the WRP – and ‘religions improper’ – groups considered to be ‘cults’, ‘sects’, or ‘heretics’ (Baumann and Tunger-Zanetti, 2018: 200–201).

Interreligious dialogue is a highly important pursuit, but what needs to be critiqued is how allocating the framework of dialogue to refer to all multifaith practice reinforces power structures over what counts as legitimate multifaith practice and who is eligible to participate. Without critique, it threatens to exclude those who possess multiple religious belongings, those who identify as spiritual but not religious (SBNR), and religious nones, which is a significant portion of young people. Moyaert (2019b) argues that a focus on theological dialogue also presents religious identities as clear and fixed, rather than multilayered, fluid, and complex. It fails to notice that religious traditions may borrow ideas and practices from one another, and that many adherents may engage in multiple beliefs and practices. Focusing upon religious identity obscures other identities such as race, class, gender, or sexuality, and the power imbalances and politics connected to those identities are overlooked (Moyaert, 2019a: 4). Focusing on dialogue limits multifaith relations to an educated elite (Scheffler, 2007: 175), and as Fahy and Bock highlight, it ‘uncritically accepts religious leaders and scholars as representatives of complex and heterogenous traditions’ (Fahy and Bock, 2018: 69). Thus, it limits access to those who are commonly left out of the hegemonic power centres of religious institutions, such as people from a low socio-economic class, women, LGBTQI+ people, and youth.

An activist model

When comparing the dialogue model to the AGZ, RGSY, and Interaction studies, several incompatibilities can be noted. Young people are critical of religious institutions and form their worldview from a range of religious and nonreligious sources. This means that the educated elite performing dialogue no longer possess exclusive access to the young people in their religious communities. A significant portion of young people sit at the margins of their faith or have multiple belongings. They are unlikely to embody the unadulterated essentialised teachings of their tradition. Therefore, they are unable to dialogue as delegates of their religion, they can only speak from an individual perspective. Many young people subscribe to nonreligious worldviews, and this position already excludes them from dialogue. In some cases, a young person who identifies with beliefs or practices that sit outside of the WRP may also be excluded. Instead, what is needed is a model of multifaith practice which allows space for the experiences of young people and their ways of doing religion. Models based in embodiment, materiality, and rituality, and emphasise practise, social activism, and relationships, are best suited to do this.

The material turn of the late-twentieth century saw the rise of scholarship interested the lived experience of religion, material culture, and visual religious culture (Moberg, 2016: 1–2), with the likes of David D. Hall (1997), who addressed the diversity of Christian expression in everyday life, and Collen McDannell (1995), who critiqued the dichotomy of the sacred and profane in the study of Christianity. In the early 2000s, Robert Orsi (2003) reflected upon the usefulness of this approach and argued that the strength of a lived religion approach was its ‘radical empiricism’(Orsi, 2003: 174), as it works in ‘disentangling us from our normative agendas and defamiliarising us in relation to our own cultures’(Orsi, 2003: 174). It can work as a way to study religion and to critique the assumptions, normative values, boundaries, and ‘deeply encoded fears and values’ of religious studies itself, and challenge them (Orsi, 2003: 174). Meredith McGuire (2008) questioned the division between the elite class of leadership and orthodoxy to the social realities of those living out their religion in the everyday and highlighted the importance of bodies in reifying the religious worlds of adherents. Similarly, Meyer (2012), Dick Houtman and Meyer (2012), and Cristina Rocha (2020) called for more attention to be placed on the embodied and material dimensions of religion.

Halafoff (2013, 2019; Hedges and Halafoff, 2015) has moved multifaith movement into framework which highlights its embodied, relational, and activist grounding as a cosmopolitan social movement that developed alongside nonviolent environmental, women’s, anti-nuclear, and peace movements (Halafoff, 2013: 12). Similarly, Fahy and Bock (2019) are critical of the dialogue model and have sought to broaden the frame of multifaith into the realm of social sciences by inviting scholarship on the socio-political contexts in which multifaith initiatives have developed and to expand upon multifaith as a social movement (Fahy and Bock, 2019: 10). Conjunctively, Indigenous, postcolonial, and feminist critiques have been crucial to challenging the logocentric bias in the multifaith movement (Kwok, 2005; Moyaert, 2019a: 9; Swamy, 2016), and a field that emphasises multifaith practise, embodiment, and materiality is expanding (see Giordan and Lynch, 2020; Griera, 2019; King, 2016; Moyaert, 2019b; Smith and Halafoff, 2020).

Among those drawing more attention to the embodied and material aspects of multifaith, Moyaert’s most recent work offers a blueprint for the suggestions made in this article. Moyaert (2019a) argues for greater focus to be placed on ritual in interreligious relations, and the fluid and multifaceted nature of religious identity (Moyaert, 2019a: 5). Ritual is a powerful medium which can bond people together, educate them, or form boundaries between them. Moyaert uses ‘interrituality’ to ‘refer to the way that interreligious encounters are concretized in the performance of embodied ritualized practices’ (Moyaert, 2019a: 6). Interrituality also refers to the complexities of identity, intentions, and interpretations. She writes that ‘the spaces that the “inter” bridges are manifold’ (Moyaert, 2019a: 6). Religious identity is blurred when individuals enter the realm of interrituality, as other identities, such as gender, class, ethnicity, and so on, come into play, as do the social dynamics of secularism and pluralism (Moyaert, 2019a: 6). Moyaert’s approach is applicable to a range of multifaith practices, including activism, humanitarian work, and relationship-building activities. It allows for participation by those who may have previously been excluded by the rigid criteria of the dialogue model and contextualises multifaith practice within the social dynamics of multiple diversities, pluralism, and secularism.

Generation Z and Millennials in the multifaith movement

The multifaith movement plays a unique role for young people. Multifaith activists in Australia have long worked with young people in areas such as education, in lobbying for greater and consistent GRE in schools, through humanitarian initiatives, by providing support for vulnerable youths, and in providing a unique space where young people can explore their own and others’ religions. The interview participants in the Interaction study said that multifaith initiatives offered them a rare opportunity to discuss religion and spirituality (Halafoff and Gobey, 2018: 265 and 273), and challenge barriers that confine an individual to a single religious identity by allowing discussions around commonality (Halafoff and Gobey, 2018: 269). Patrick McInerney, the director for the Columban Centre for Christian–Muslim Relations, put it succinctly when he said that young people may be ‘mixing in a multi-faith world more so than people of my generation ever did but their mixing tends to be social or secular . . . They’re not actually meeting as people of faith’. He said that Youth PoWR is unique because it is ‘one of the rare opportunities when young adults from different faiths actually come together as people of faith and meet each other’.

Nivy founded InterAction with two others in Melbourne in 2008. InterAction was rooted in activism from the beginning as it was modelled on the IFYC based in the United States and pioneered by Eboo Patel. However, InterAction went beyond purview of the IFYC by forming partnerships with The FCCV and the United Religions Initiative (URI) (Halafoff and Gobey, 2018: 257). They went beyond university campuses to engage in schools, local councils, and non-for-profit organisations. They also delivered educational modules, attended international multifaith gatherings as representatives, participated in panels, and sat on multifaith boards. Notably, they partnered with Australian activist and Catholic priest, Father Bob Maguire, and borrowed his food van to supply meals and reclaimed groceries to public housing in Melbourne. InterAction is now dormant, but Nivy continues her multifaith work with the URI and RfP, in Australia and internationally.

Youth PoWR is an emerging initiative of the Columban Centre for Christian–Muslim Relations based in Sydney. Ryan Epondulan is the Youth and Networking Coordinator of the Colombian Centre for Christian–Muslim Relations. When the interview took place, he was amid running the Sydney Statement project. Youth PoWR ran four open forums in 2019 to draft a co-written statement articulating the multifaith goals of the young people of Sydney. These events involved sitting around tables with young adults aged 18–30 and discussing their experiences of being a person of faith in Sydney, visions for the future, and strategies to bring it about. These events were led by an organising committee of youth leaders and successfully launched the Sydney Statement in 2021. Youth PoWR is in early stages of developing a sustainable organisational structure and building a social network. Ryan expressed eagerness for Youth PoWR to branch out and become involved in ecological and social justice.

Despite working in different cities and in operating in different multifaith networks, Nivy and Ryan spoke of several similar challenges. First, the widespread critique of religion is discouraging trust and participation in religious institutions, and by extension, multifaith organisations and initiatives. Ryan and Nivy both observed that people are happy to engage in cultural exchange, and funding is more easily obtained in the multicultural sector. However, multifaith is excluded from multiculturalism because, according to Nivy, multifaith is in the ‘too hard basket as it goes beyond food and festival multiculturalism, and asks us to engage with what lies beneath, such as our values’. Ryan observed that many people think that talking about religion is taboo. He also noted that ‘some people might think that religion is just bad, and it’s got a bad reputation currently’. He observed that different religious groups experienced different prejudices. Muslims experienced Islamophobia and were connected to a stereotype of being terrorists, Jewish people experienced anti-Semitism, and Christians faced denunciation over child sex abuse. Ryan identified one of the challenges for the future of the multifaith movement was the large portion of those identifying as nonreligious. He acknowledged that people identifying as nonreligious, ‘doesn’t mean they have no spirituality; they may follow a different form of spirituality or faith’. He understood this trend as a consequence of the loss of trust in religious institutions. Nivy also observed that previously there was a minority of people who chose multifaith as their spirituality, but now there was a growing portion of ‘people who are at the margins of their faith’.

Second, multifaith needs to be mainstreamed into the lives of young people if they are to take it up as a worthy cause. Ryan noted that multifaith ‘is not the flavour of the year, it’s not the trending topic of today. What is the trend? The multicultural aspect, food’. Ryan said that for older generations, ‘interfaith dialogue was the thing of their time’, yet for young generations, it is no longer the trending topic. He pointed out the window at school children playing in the yard and said,

I guarantee if you ask one of those students out there what was interfaith dialogue many of them would be struggling to explain it. If you ask them what can we do? they’d be like ‘oh I don’t know. Are we even allowed to engage with people of different religious traditions?’

Nivy also noted that the multifaith movement struggles to be relevant in the lives of young people. She argued that ‘interfaith in its current model has reached an impasse where if it’s not being mainstreamed, we’re not reaching enough people, and given other issues in society, it’s not worth the money’. By mainstreaming, she meant that it needs to become incorporated into all areas of life; in work, family, culture, friends, hobbies, and school. She said that multifaith initiatives are unable to compete in a world where the individual is balancing all these other aspects.

Third, the lack of stability in young people’s lives is a barrier to multifaith involvement, but the structures of multifaith organisations also do not accommodate this instability. Nivy argued that in practical terms, ‘when you’re trying to create permanent structures in youth spaces it’s always going to be a challenge because youth is a stage of life so they are going to grow up and move on’. Young people may also lack the time or resources to participate for long periods. She explained that

Technically youth is that transitory period . . . there’s going to be so much change in their lives and they’re going to have so many time constraints where they might be juggling education or work or family just a whole bunch of different considerations, like resources as well – which they have to consider because participation in multifaith dialogue is voluntary.

This is exemplified by InterAction’s discontinuation, which became dormant when the leaders of the organisations moved onto new projects. Nivy suggested that one reason for a lack of involvement lay in the structure of peak multifaith bodies which she said rarely included youth representatives. The kind of rigid structure of dedication required for long-term participation was difficult for a young person to do. She suggested to remedy this by placing the responsibility of managing the ‘revolving door’ of young leaders with the religious institutions themselves who could provide several youth representatives who can share representative roles. However, she also noted that this was difficult because ‘many religious institutions do not have many young people coming to their churches, mosques or temples’.

Fourth, the older generation of multifaith activists are instrumental in elevating youth voices but can also fail to engage meaningfully with them. Ryan argued that the Sydney Statement is unique because of the central role that youth leadership played in its creation. Ryan explained that young people ‘provide the core content to understanding what young people want to do to get involved in interfaith dialogue’ and this made the Sydney Statement unlike any other multifaith statements. Youth PoWR is led by a committee of young people and Ryan was optimistic that this would place young voices at the forefront of multifaith in Australia. Nivy saw room for improvement. She said that InterAction wanted to ‘elevate the voice of young people in mainstream interfaith because it was very much a voice that was – I don’t want to say marginalised but it was considered secondary’. She felt that sometimes engagement by religious bodies with youth representatives was tokenistic and often failed to take their opinions seriously, because although young people were encouraged to attend, it was apparent that they were not seen as equal stakeholders with equal ability to shape the agenda or influence outcomes. She suggested that in some instances, young people are invited to the table to give the appearance that young voices are being heeded but, meaningful engagement fails to take place.

Finally, Nivy and Ryan observed that young people want their multifaith engagement to be rooted in social activism and humanitarian work. Nivy said ‘our [InterAction’s] goal was “common action for the common good” so the goal was to bring together young people of different cultures and faiths not just to talk about a better world but act to create it’. She framed this as a contrast to multifaith initiatives they had seen previously:

It’s not meant to sound harsh, but we had seen interfaith done by older people, what I call tea and biscuit interfaith where people sit around a table and talk, which is important work, but we had a sense of urgency that comes with being a young person. We recognised that there was so much need in the community, we didn’t feel as though we could create a better world through just talking but that we needed to address those broader social needs too.

When I asked Ryan how to get young people involved in the multifaith movement, he said that ‘young people in general are wanting to engage in social action, they want to do something tangible’. Ryan believed that social justice is central to multifaith. He said that there is an erroneous perception that multifaith is all about dialogue or ‘just talk’. The consequence is that young people are deterred because they think that their lack knowledge of their own faith may lead them to be discouraged and even converted. There is a misconception that interreligious dialogue is about

‘defending your own beliefs and to answer the challenging questions of your own faith, [which] may deter people from engaging in multifaith activities.’

Also, without knowledge of other religions, they are also fearful of offending others. This final point is exemplary of the limitations of the dialogue model, in which young people who sit at the margins of their religion feel that they are not eligible to participate in multifaith activities without possessing extensive knowledge of their tradition. Emphasising social activism and humanitarian work may widen the invitation to a more diverse range of religious belonging.

Conclusion

This article sought to answer the question of why there is a lack of meaningful youth participation in the multifaith movement in Australia. The AGZ, RGSY, and Interaction studies identified that many Millennials and Gen Z are critical of religious institutions, less likely to consider themselves with a single affiliation, draw their influences from multiple sources, and fashion hybrid identities. A review of the literature showed that, there are some incompatibilities between the ways of doing religion identified in these studies and the dialogue model of multifaith which privileges unambiguous religious belonging to a single tradition. This model can limit participation to those who are entrusted to be representatives of their religious tradition and not those who hold marginal positions, such as young people, LGBTQI+ identifying, or women. Nivy’s and Ryan’s stories suggested that this limiting can be expressed through the ways that youth leadership is structured within a multifaith organisation, whereby a youth representative is given a seat on the council. This is not only problematic considering the turbulent transience of young people’s lives but also because it requires a single young person to hold enough capital within a single religious tradition to be entrusted with this representative role.

Nivy and Ryan, similarly, highlighted that a significant portion of young people have lost trust in religious institutions and see them as incompatible with the make-up of their lives, and to an extent, their values. They suggested that religion is somewhat unpopular among young people due to the belief that religion is a source of intolerance, prejudice, and discrimination. They also said that the multifaith movement exists in a realm separate to the experiences and concerns of young people, and that it needed to ‘mainstream’ to become relevant. The AGZ, RGSY, and Interaction studies reinforce this by noting that young people are hesitant to identify with religious institutions because they hold competing values. This is particularly the case with differing views on gender and sexual diversity, which causes feelings of conflict. This suggests that the cultural conflict over gender and sexuality diversity (and other related issues) is a key barrier to youth participation in multifaith initiatives. The issue is so highly charged and divisive that many multifaith organisations refrain from discussing or engaging in anything to do with gender and sexuality diversity. An area where young people may be able to take up leadership in a way that long-established leadership-based multifaith organisations may not, is in the reconciliation of these contentious issues.

As noted by Ryan and Nivy, there is a perception among young people that multifaith is all about dialogue, or ‘just talk’, and young people want to participate in multifaith initiatives through social action. This meant that many young people felt unqualified to participate at multifaith events as the dominating mode of participation was through dialogue. This article seeks to contribute to the growing critique that the multifaith movement problematically maintains a WRP bias, puts too much emphasis on dialogue without turning it into action, excludes those not part of the elite, and uncritically accepts religious leaders as representatives of diverse traditions. These critiques also amount to the exclusion of young people. This research also seeks to contribute to the growing responses to these critiques which place more emphasis on material religion, namely, how multifaith is expressed in embodied, ritualistic, and relational ways, such as through inter-ritual participation, music, retreats, workshops, friendship, and activism.

However, as Ryan pointed out, Youth PoWR is exemplary of how established organisations, namely, the Columban Centre for Christian–Muslim Relations, can encourage young people to take up leadership. In addition, InterAction also received support from multifaith peak bodies in Victoria, Australia, such as RfP, the FCCV, and help from other organisations such as the Father Bob Foundation. What made them successful was that they were provided with not only support but also autonomy. By championing practice-based multifaith that emphasises activism, humanitarian work, forming friendships, and participating in one another’s spiritual lives, the door opens to a wider range of young people regardless of their religious, spiritual, or nonreligious identity. It also invites multifaith engagement into the mainstream of young people’s lives by placing focus on shared concerns regarding social or ecological justice. By allowing young people to be leaders, they empower young people to decide how they will participate in the multifaith movement, how they will organise themselves, what concerns they will focus upon, and how they will navigate the world of identity, social justice, and diversity.