The Power of Faith (Davos - World Economic Forum 2018)

The Power of Faith - World Economic Forum 2018

Introduction: Healing a Fractured World

Welcome to our session today. I must admit feeling tremendously excited both on a personal level and a spiritual level, and I'm looking to discover some wonderful answers to all of the wrestlings of my soul today.

Our world right now feels fractured. We're seeing a rise in nationalism, we're seeing divisiveness around political discourse at the societal levels, we're seeing difficult conversations, a sense of tribalism emerging in many parts of the world. The question of today: What is the role of faith in helping us heal those wounds, heal the fractures that many societies are experiencing right now? And we have the wonderful opportunity today to hear from really some of the world's leading experts and faith leaders who are going to hopefully share some insights into that domain.

Panel Introduction

So let me start by just introducing in alphabetical order our distinguished discussants for today. First we have Miss Bonnie Dougall of the Baha'i International Community, and she's the principal representative to the UN. Second we have Miss Christiana Figueres who is convener of Mission 2020 and former executive secretary of the UN Convention on Climate Change. We also have Dr. Brian Grimm who is president of the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf Hansen who's president of Zaytuna College and vice president of the Forum for Promoting Peace. And we also have with us His Eminence Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson who leads the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development at the Vatican.

So we have an extremely distinguished and thoughtful group of leaders with us today. So let's jump right into the conversation.

The Role of Faith in Healing Societal Fractures

How can faith guide us in dealing with and healing the societal fractures that we're experiencing in many parts of the world? And Your Eminence, might we start with you to hear some thoughts on that?

Cardinal Turkson: The Foundation of Human Brotherhood

Thank you and welcome all of you. I think faith helps us navigate and helps us mend all of these by providing us with basic underlying principles: the basic underlying principles of human life and basic underlying principles of societal living. I mean, being a Christian and therefore making the Bible and its account of creation as a point of departure, creation basically establishes the fact that humanity is a family. It belongs to a family and its very gated forms are based on a principle of brotherhood. Fraternity is the one thing that was created by God on the basis of which humanity spread. So belonging and therefore guided by brotherhood, humanity belongs together.

And belonging together, the first offense against humanity was a fratricide, a brother killing a brother. That can happen, but it's a fratricide. It's a brother diminishing his life as a brother by eliminating a brother. So the principles which bind us together is just this: having a common father, we are one of a family, one of a family meant to live together, called to co-exist in the pursuit of a common good as brothers.

Having this as basic principles, we can go and evolve other principles. Whenever there are challenges, the principle of solidarity would want to bring us all back together, the principle of appeal for a common good, and the fact that everything that God has created was meant to make us all happy, universal destination of the goods of the earth. All of this become principles that help us mend whatever fracture relationship can result in our various experiences in life. But essentially the role of religion is to provide this basic background of principles that describe what we are as a family and as people living together, called to live together in pursuit of our common good.

Yes, so the family is the basic fabric holding us together. If devices should erupt, wait a minute, we're family, and you start with that as the basic principle. That's what we are. Thank you.

Bonnie Dougall: Unity and the Purpose of Religion

What's your perspective on this?

The purpose of religion is to unite people, and we from the Baha'i perspective believe that all the manifestations of God were sent to earth to bring unity, to build upon each other's previous messages, and to bring new truth to mankind as mankind matures to receive it. And we are possibly in an age where humankind is at its stage of adolescence, and we are seeing those tendencies playing out, the tendencies that are associated with adolescence and the uncertainties and others.

Unfortunately, the narrative that is playing out is that there are these corrosive narratives about the world falling apart and that there's very little that can be done and mankind cannot live in peace and conflict is going to be the nature of things. And I think as the different religions and the faith groups and those that believe are really the ones that can bring about this sense of unity and a better understanding of what is the purpose of faith, what is the purpose of religion. The true nature of religion is to unite and to inspire their congregants, the individuals they work with, to rise to that higher level and to build communities, strong communities at the grassroots levels, communities that are resilient that can withstand these fractures and the forces that are impacting societies that are causing those fractures.

We also believe in the equality, and I think all religions speak of equality, but I think that equality has to be at all levels. The equality of women and men is a very important principle for us, and until we can realize that and advance the role of girls alongside that of boys, we will not have the united, the strong community that's required to mend those fractures. And the same thing goes for economic security as well.

So this magic doesn't happen just automatically just by saying that there's religion or faith in a community. We have to work and we have to think very critically as to what are the structures that need to be reexamined, because often we hear people say, oh, if only we were to educate the people. But I think some of the educational systems themselves are flawed and need reexamination. And again, we've heard it from world leaders just a little while ago, but others as well throughout the forum: the role of the media is one that we need to examine, and I think the media itself needs to do an examination as to the role it can provide alongside religious actors, because often it is religious media too that can sometimes perpetuate these narratives that I think we can overturn.

Gotcha. So ultimately it's once again looking at a set of values: unity, resilience and community, equality, and then looking at how those can be applied both at the personal level and at the structural level. Thank you.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf: Reasonable Faith and Human Humility

Then let's turn next to you. Well, the first thing I think it's important is we talk about terms like faith and often don't define them, and faith obviously has dictionary meanings. One of them is just belief without any proof, and there's a lot of people that that's how they view faith. In fact, a lot of skeptics and secularists think the people of faith are simply, they just have no proof and they're believing and it's irrational. But there's also reasonable faith, and I think most of our traditions actually are founded in reasonable faith.

Everybody this morning got up with reasonable faith that they were gonna make it to the Congress Center. We got on airplanes with reasonable faith that that pilot knew what he was doing, that Boeing knew what they were doing when they put it together. Basically everything we're doing is faithful. I mean, we have immense faith. We had faith in our teachers when they told us that 5 times 5 is 25. We have faith in Klaus Schwab that he's a good organizer and this thing's all gonna work out. So faith is just part of life, reasonable faith. You know, there's a lot of unreasonable people. It's probably wise maybe to ask your spouse where you fare on that, but faith is just part of life and how we bring faith into a type of reasonableness.

In terms of healing the world, the world has always been fractured. The Jewish tradition has tikkun olam, which is the idea of healing a fractured world. In the Islamic tradition, there's a verse in the Quran that says:

"Do not corrupt the earth after it has been set in order." (Quran 7:56)

So humans have the capacity to actually create an immense amount of fracture. Now fracture is interesting because we have a mathematical term, fraction. And if we want to add fractions, we have to find common denominators and bring those together. That's the way we bring things together. And also to reduce, to get things down, a kind of Occam's Razor, down to what are the fundamental problems on the planet. And if I was going to identify the fundamental problem, I would say it's arrogance. Human beings need to learn humility towards one another.

And then I totally agree with His Eminence the Cardinal that family is at the root of it. And families are dysfunctional part of the reason why we have dysfunctional families is to learn how to live with people we don't agree with, right? I mean, everybody has the uncle that nobody wants to come to the holiday, but he still comes and we kind of deal with it. And so that's part of just learning to live together. We are a human family and having contempt for others is a major problem.

And just in conclusion, our Prophet said: "None of you will enter paradise until you have faith." And he said: "But you will not have faith until you love one another." He said: "Can I tell you something that if you practice it you will come to love one another?" And then he said: "Spread peace."

Faith and Climate Action: The Paris Agreement

Let's turn to you, Christiana. You have led tremendously complicated negotiations over incredibly important issues in our world and the sustainability of our world. How does faith fit into the work you do?

Christiana Figueres: Rising and Converging Through Solidarity

Well, you know, I come at this from the realization that we have not just reached planetary boundaries, we have overstepped them. And once you realize that, you begin to say, so what is the consequence of that? And you begin to understand that what I was taught as a young child, as a young woman, as the definition of the zero-sum game, in which what you win is my loss and what I win is your loss, frankly doesn't have a place anymore. Because if you have reached and overstepped planetary boundaries, the fact is either we all win or we all lose together. That's the new interpretation of zero-sum.

And I think it was that understanding that we frankly all have to win together which was at the basis of the development and the delivery of the Paris Agreement, where 195 nations came together, not just the governments but all of the sectors. The spiritual leaders were there all the time, the scientists. There was not a fraction between science and religion. The business people were there, the NGOs were there, because we came to understand through a very difficult and complex dialogue that we're all in this one planet together and that if there's anything that is going to move us forward, it's solidarity.

So the main lesson, I think, that I had from that is: as we rise, we converge. Because as we rise in our awareness of our deep humanity, of the divine in us, of the spiritual in us, of the best of the human in us, that's where we converge. That is what we have in common. And as much as we reflect that and live with that, then solidarity comes as a natural next step, and then agreements are also a natural next step.

The Role of Faith Communities in Global Agreements

And agreements can stick, Paris Agreement, or they can start to... or some countries can drop out of these agreements. How did you engage faith communities in dealing with some of these kinds of complications?

The faith communities were there actually and were, you know, I am truly grateful. Laudato Si of course is the most famous but is not the only one. The Baha'i community, the Muslim community, everybody was there, the Buddhist community, and truly supporting this process very, very deeply in addition to all of the other communities and the other sectors. And that is why the Paris Agreement is a strong agreement. It cannot be fractured, to use your word, which I actually don't mind. It cannot be questioned by one person sitting in any particular house because it came, it rose out of a higher consciousness of humanity, and therefore it is not prone to electoral cycles. It will be with us for a much longer time.

And it is in fact, without wanting to minimize the difficulty of the Paris Agreement and of the world coming together on climate change, a job which we have not finished by the way, and we must finish. But I very fundamentally believe that it was the first very successful effort that humanity made to truly address a global issue that needs a global solution. It is definitely not the last, and we know that we have biodiversity to deal with, we have poverty, we have water, we have migration, we have food security. The list goes on and on about global issues that we will all face in the 21st century.

So the fact that we came to an agreement on climate, which we're still implementing, is I think humanity's gym. We're just at the gym of strengthening our muscle of rising and converging with each other.

Faith and Economic Development

And Brian, so we are here at the World Economic Forum. In other words, there is a business perspective to faith as well, or there's at least some relationship between the two. Can you help us understand more about that?

Dr. Brian Grimm: Religious Freedom and Economic Prosperity

Yeah, so the connection between faith and the economy is that when people give each other freedom, religious freedom to be who they are, and you respect the other person to be who they are, that creates a society that's good for sustainable business. And when you don't have that condition, you have a conflict economy. So it's a very clear connection. And so there's a connection between religious freedom in society and business.

I'll give one example. A president of Rajawali Corporation in Indonesia had his employees come to him and say we can't get our children into school or get health care and they were missing work. And so the large corporation, and he's a... a lot of people were having this problem. So why not? They said, well, we don't have a birth certificate for our children. Why not? We're not married. I thought, well, in Indonesia, you have to be married in a religious ceremony and get a government certificate. The religious ceremony requires a dowry and a large party. It's too expensive for them, and the government bureaucracy just doesn't have the forms on hand to give the wedding, so people just don't do it.

But they can't get the birth certificate. Their children can't get schooling or health care. So he said, let's do something about it. And he's a Catholic in a Muslim majority country, and he had the freedom to contact the Muslim leaders, the Buddhist leaders, the Hindu leaders, Christian leaders, bring them all together and have a

Dealing with Institutional Conflict and Division

Great. Let's go a step deeper. Individuals have divisions within us, as the Sheikh pointed out a bit earlier before we came on stage, but institutions do as well. And each of the institutions represented here in this room, as with any religious institution, can have points of division. And these institutions have indeed withstood the test of time. How do your institutions understand conflict and division? How do they deal with it in ways that really get to the heart of it, keeping consistent perhaps with the kinds of ideas we've been talking about: unity, walking the faith consistently, family? How does the family deal with conflict? Might we start with you once again, Your Eminence?

Cardinal Turkson: Dialogue, Recognition, and Reconciliation

Yes. The beginning statement I made seeking the basis, kind of the basis of foundations, incidentally also becomes the appeal for motivation. Because of what we are, when we get into situation, we want to settle this, we appeal to that. That's what we did in Davos. The nations got it together. We needed to come to an agreement. And what is that? And that drives us to want to come to an agreement because essentially we belong to the one family and the earth is our common home. This becomes a motivation.

So what was a principle of our origins, in difficult times or in terms of need, also becomes a motivating factor that drives us to a solution. That never... division again, in the light of the principles that I was talking about, foundations. The story about creation that we read in Genesis very soon talks about sin entering the situation which ruptures relationship: first between man and God, between man and man, Adam and Eve, the man and the woman, and then between even humanity and the earth which is supposed to sustain his life.

So this reality we call sin is the source of fracturing. This manifests itself in the lives of individuals. He talked about arrogance, but that's not the only manifestation of the sinfulness in the lives of the human person. So sinfulness becomes a big factor and leads to ruptures and ruptures and ruptures. And if we're going to stay beyond this, we will call our traditional call for a conversion. They need to recognize what this does to our lives and they need to want to repair this and step beyond this.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf: The Triune Nature of Humanity

Well, I would agree. Superbia, pride, Dante put it at the top though, in Purgatorio. I would say that the human being, we're a triune creature. We have a reptilian stem, in evolutionary psychology it's at the base. It's survival, fear, instincts. And then we have this midbrain which we share with dogs. We have emotions. We've got dogs in America on Prozac because they get depressed in families that are kind of depressing. And then we have this neocortex which is riding over these two.

Now in a traditional scheme, like Plato would have said, the whole purpose is for that rational brain to control the irascible, the concupiscent, these lower selves. And if we look at this triune self, human beings do basically three things: we know things, we do things, and we make things. And this was the understanding. One of the things C.S. Lewis said that he lamented the loss of a holistic view of the world that the ancients had. The moderns have become fragmented because we fragmented knowing, doing, and making. And we were meant to know the truth, we were meant to do the good, and we were meant to make the beautiful. And this is a holistic way of viewing the world.

I don't think you can get a better definition for happiness, which is what ultimately people apparently are all looking for. Happiness is the soul's conformity. It's the soul's activity in conformity with virtue. So all of our religious traditions are calling us to be virtuous.

Last night we had an exercise where everybody was told to imagine the person most influencing in their lives and then imagine a quality that defined that person. There were probably about a hundred people in the room, maybe 150. Every single one of them gave a virtue, right? That was what they saw. They didn't say, oh, he went to Harvard and had a 4.0 degree, or he made a billion dollars, or he invented a rocket that got us to Mars. It was compassion, humility, equanimity, love, wisdom. These are the things that really all of our societies have cultivated.

Institutional Reconciliation in Islam

Within the institutions, and there are many, many institutions within Islam, but from your own perspective, how is conflict dealt with?

Well, in the institution, I mean, obviously not very well right now, right? But conflict, the Quran talks constantly about reconciliation. I mean, Mandela was successful because of the truth and reconciliation, the idea of bringing people together. And that is something I think that the Muslim world is grappling with. But when you look at the Muslim world today, what you're seeing is the absence of the practice of the principles of the Prophet. You're not seeing the practices.

The Quran constantly says do not go into sects, to love one another, to treat people, and all of humanity. We have a famous tradition. I've got two ayatollahs in the room. But we have a famous tradition from Ali that said that all of humanity can be divided into two types: either you're your fellow in religion or your peer in humanity. And the great poet Hafiz said: How would you treat others if you realized that you were all invited by the Creator to a banquet and each one was a guest? How would you treat them? What right do we have to oppress other people or to denigrate or look down on other people?

So institutions, we need to learn from our religions. The Catholic institution has been incredible in navigating modernity in many ways. It's survived intact for centuries. Pascal reminded us that governments don't last, and history proves that. We don't know how long these governments are going to last, but if history is any indication, they won't last forever. But he said the reason religions do last, the institution of religion lasts, and he said the reason for that is that the ground of politics is compromising principles, but the ground of religion is principle. So I think we really need to examine the role of the institution, what do we mean by that. And I think that's what the people of the world are also looking at: what is it to be a leader? And what does that comprise?

Bonnie Dougall: Service and Democratic Leadership in the Baha'i Faith

In the Baha'i conception, a leader is really a servant. You're serving the community. It's not a top-down approach that we have. We don't have clergy in the Baha'i faith. And so if the Baha'is are dissatisfied with the way things are being handled, well, there'll be an election in a year and those that are serving the community will be replaced by somebody else. By election we are not permitted to electioneer and stand for elections. There's none of that. It's just a very prayerful process where the members of the community come together and write down nine names of individuals, men and women in their community that they think are capable of serving the needs of the community, and then the ones that receive the most votes are the ones that are elected. And every five years we have an international body that's elected too.

Dealing with Internal Pain and Personal Struggles

And our time is ticking. You were right about 10 minutes left, and I really want to learn more. I could have got... I could get lost in this conversation. We could go for hours, except everybody would have to leave. No, I think we all struggle in our own personal lives. This is being videocast as well. Every person watching this, we know, is a human being who has some pain, who has some suffering.

So the divisiveness is very internal as much as it might be global as well. What's your advice in a minute or two's worth of thinking? What is your advice to all of us on how we might deal with that internal pain, that suffering, whether it's family fracture... I won't use that word... family division, whether it is a conflict you've gotten in with a friend on a political issue. How do we personally deal with these things? What's your advice or your guidance to all of us? And I open it up to any of you. Please jump in, please.

Dr. Brian Grimm: The Spiritual Foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous

So something that's not well known, the organization is but its principles aren't, is Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States and worldwide. So it's recommended by health providers as one of the best hopes for people who are addicted to not only alcohol but other addictions to have recovery. What's not well known is that of their 12-step principles, about eight of them involve God. It's not a religious organization. I mean, it comes out of people with Christian experience, but they bring people in, and the first three steps are: recognizing you have a problem, and then recognizing there's somebody above who cares, God, whatever that is. And they don't let people go past those three steps. Later on it's reconciliation and getting your life back in order.

But the very first step is: "Hi, I'm Jim, I'm an alcoholic." You probably have seen that in TV shows or maybe some of you have been to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. So that is the beginning stage, is recognizing we've got a problem, and then faith has solutions that are missing from many other things. And people lose that. People often drop out of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I know some about this because my next quantitative study is studying the value of faith communities to addressing addiction and mental health issues. So I'm looking into this.

And what they do is that they really understand that if you don't reconnect with each other and reconnect with God as you see Him, and it might not even just be a spiritual force, like you were saying, it might not be an

organized faith, but they begin there. So I think that there's... faith is addressing a lot of problems and many of us aren't aware of it. And I have to admit, till I started this study, I wasn't aware of how faith imbued Alcoholics Anonymous.

So when we are struggling, when we feel lost, remember faith as a potential guiding source. Yes.

That was bad facilitation on my part. Yes, maybe go this direction.

Christiana Figueres: No Mud, No Lotus

I must say I have been struggling with a deep personal pain for quite a few years, and I don't... I'm sure I'm not the only human being who is in that situation, and so your question is quite pertinent. And for me, in my spiritual growth which follows the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist master, what I have learned, or what I'm still trying to learn, because I have to relearn it about every minute of my life, is that those situations of pain that are present in our life are very fertile ground for learning, and that there never is a pain, there never is a difficulty that is present for us from which we cannot learn if we choose to do so.

But it's a choice. We can either decide that we're victims of it and the world is unfair, he, she, it, whatever is unfair to me, and poor little me, I'm never gonna get out of this hole. Or we can decide to look at this and say, what is the lesson that is trying to emerge out of that for me? And learning that lesson, you enrich yourself and are better equipped to understand others who are in very similar situations.

Thich Nhat Hanh has a beautiful way of saying that, and he says: "No mud, no lotus." Because the lotus flowers grow in the mud. And if you don't have any mud, if you don't have anything to struggle with, you will never be able to bloom a lotus. So be grateful for the mud because we can all harvest a lotus, right? So suffer more today.

That's much more appropriate. Yes, please.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf: Identifying the Source of Pain and Finding Purpose

The Persians have a teaching story about a man who went to a doctor and he said, "Doctor, I touch here and I have all this pain. I touch here, I have all this pain. Here, I have all this pain. Everywhere there's pain. What's wrong with me?" He examined him and said, "Your finger's broken."

And the meaning behind that obviously is we need to identify the source of the pain and the suffering, where it comes from. And a lot of people don't know where their pain comes from. Melancholy can be intrinsic. There's exogenous where your father dies and you have pain, but there's also a type of inward pain and suffering. And in our tradition, we actually believe that that's part of the design and that pain is to drive you to seek solace. And the only solace that you will find is in truth.

And so, one of the verses... well, the relationship of pain and knowledge is in the Arabic word: 'ilm )علم( and alam )لم(. They're actually cognates. So they're related to each other. Immense learning comes out of suffering, and we believe in redemptive suffering, the idea...

There's two ways to look at the world and both have a lot of evidence. One is that this is meaningless randomness, madness, and we'll all just... John Lennon said, "Whatever gets you through the night." And then the other is that it's meaningful and it's purposeful, and I have meaning and I as an individual have purpose, and I'm in a universe of purpose, that each individual that comes into my life has a purpose and meaning.

Those are two choices, and there's not enough time to sit around and debate about it. For me personally, I made my choice. But like I said, they both have arguments.

So once again, choice and the value of choosing.

Cardinal Turkson: Faith as the Keel of Life

I think, like a ship or a boat on a stormy sea, you always need a keel. That's tears that keeps a ship balanced on the stormy waters and keeps going. And I think that's the role of faith in the lives of human beings. We all need to be keeled into something that stabilizes us, that drives us, and that gives us an orientation in everything that we do. And that kind of faith again... you're talking about... it's a fundamental option. He said he's made a choice. That's a fundamental option.

In our tradition, it's a fundamental option to commit oneself in relationship to a personal God, a personal God who is good and loving. It's not committing oneself to anything, but to a personal entity who is good and loving and who is displayed or manifest in this. So the faith is very fundamental.

I recognized what Sheikh said at the use... if I said at the beginning, manifest different forms of it, like we all come here to Davos trusting that we're going to be... and that's an act of faith. We eat... it's a lot of... those are acts of faith, manifestations of faith. But they all rooted in a more fundamental faith which orients our being to, in this case as a Christian, to a personal God who is loving and all. And it is this relationship which inspires other types of relationship and other activities and functions of my life.

So if I should get into a difficult situation or whatever time, whatever, I know how to orient that. I know how to orient that. And so it's not a ship tossed on the sea not knowing where to go. However, there is a keel to my life, and that keel to my life, and that can be a keel to anybody's life, is this faith commitment in a personal being who's good and who's loving and who's interested in me, basically. That's... it's not about... Alcoholics Anonymous type often, this is the presentation. This is what faith actually in this type often does mean radically. And to bring us again in one slide, yes.

Closing Reflections: Love as the Unifying Principle

And our time is just about up. Is there any final thought that's been burning on your mind that you'd like to share before we close? We have about three minutes.

Bonnie Dougall: Love and the Great Equalizer

The underlying concept is love and not treating the other as the other. And I think we are living in a world where there's this tendency to get nervous when we're living at a time when there are other communities, the world is getting smaller and people are coming in, etc., and there's this tendency to close in.

And as Brian mentioned, the Alcoholics Anonymous program is one of those great equalizers where you could be the wealthiest man or the person really from skid row, and you're there together and there's one common fraternity which gets you through this illness, whatever it might be. And but at the core of that is the concept of love. And we have to love each other and love mankind, and that is the only thing that's going to unite us.

Moderator's Closing Remarks

I think that is a beautiful place to close for the moment. Just in reflection upon hearing and learning from your perspectives, there's so much noise in our world. There's so much noise that we are facing every day. How do we find that guidance on this boat of life? And you've more than reminded us, I think you've deepened our understanding. For me, you've given me a lot to think about as I go to sleep tonight and call my family and say I love you, kids, I miss you.

So really, thank you all so very much. It's a true honor to be here today with you. Would you join me in a show of gratitude to our distinguished panel.'s a great deal of importance on the role of institutions that Baha'is place, but we also believe that if religion in itself becomes the cause of disunity, it's better not to have that religion, disunity, dissension, whatever. Because again, as I'd mentioned earlier, the purpose of religion and the purpose of religious institutions is to help mankind, humankind advance, and that is what we should all be aspiring to do rather than moving backwards. We are moving forward and trying to bring about a better world, a better... and as we have a better understanding, I mean, we are advancing in science. So too, why not in our conceptions of how to promote well-being for our communities?

Faith in Practice: Navigating Difficult Situations

And Christiana, could you share with us any examples that come to mind of specific situations where you felt stuck or you were dealing with the situation that was just, it felt somewhat intractable, and faith of some kind, whether the kind we were talking about that we're with every day or faith of a deeper kind, helped to move that situation forward?

Christiana Figueres: Choosing to See Differences as Enrichment

Well, unfortunately or fortunately there were many of them. But you see, I'm a trained anthropologist, and so for me, differences, I just thrive on differences. That is the beauty of this fantastic planet. And I think every time that I saw myself in a very difficult situation, I always reminded myself: I have a choice. And it's about making a choice.

I can choose to see difficulties, whether it is the difference between me and someone else that I have in front of me, or whether I am witnessing and trying to bring two people together. There is always a choice about whether you see that difference of position, of economic interest, or anything else, whether you see that as leading to conflict or whether you see that difference as actually leading to a fascinating exploration of the differences. And that's a choice. That is the attitude that you bring toward what you are witnessing or what you are in the middle of. And frankly, it's a choice that we make almost every minute of the day, sometimes with huge consequences and sometimes with smaller consequences, but it is a constant choice.

It is the attitude with which you see everything that is out there. If you see it as, is life happening for me to teach me something new that I didn't know, or is life happening against me? It is very much of a choice. And once you make the choice to be enriched by differences, to be enriched by challenges, then there is an unlimited number of lessons that can be learned and your life is all the richer for it, not diminished by it in any case.

Yes, so you have faith in humanity and a deep curiosity that helps to move you forward in certain kinds of ways.

Dr. Brian Grimm: Quantifying Faith's Economic Impact

Brian, what's your take? How does faith play more specifically into the work you do, your own life? Talk personal.

Well, I'm a quantitative sociologist. It's perfect. You just want to interrogate. Yeah, I study religion as an economist would study society. Yeah. Now I do that because I care about faith deeply and I'm a Catholic and used to be a Baptist, and that's sort of what gets me interested in religious freedom. Yeah, I've exercised it in my own life.

And so taking those skills and looking at religion, I did a study that looked at the socioeconomic contribution of faith in American society. This could be done in any country. And at the very basic level, we begin, you know, not at the Vatican, which is a very meaningful, important institution, but at the local congregation. And there across the United States there are nearly four hundred thousand local congregations of all faiths: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, all different faiths. And the study looked at what they do and what it's worth.

So, how can you put an economic value in faith? Well, my daughter recently got married in the Center City Church in Baltimore, and that started off with love, resulted in marriage. I can tell you exactly how much money that cost and how much money went into Center City, Baltimore to a Catholic Church there that wouldn't have gone in if they had gotten married in the country club outside, right?

So what the study found is that faith groups across the United States, across the world, are engaged in mental health programs at the local congregation. They're engaged in jobs programs, are engaged in programs that help the mentally ill, that help people with HIV AIDS. In the United States, across congregations of all sorts, there's one HIV AIDS ministry for every 46 people infected with HIV AIDS. Can you imagine a government trying to put that in place?

So all of that has a value, and I won't go into the details, but we estimate that the economic contribution of the faith sphere to American society is 1.2 trillion dollars with a T every year. Now that comes as a surprise to many people. And it was covered by the Guardian newspaper when the study came out, and in that study 18,000 people shared it, not just viewed it. Many more viewed it.

Now that's a statistic. When Donald Trump was elected, we just came from hearing him speak, when he was elected that was big news and surprising to many people, maybe shocking to some. Their story was shared only 17,000 times. So that faith has a socio-economic benefit to society was more shocking to Guardian readers. Yes, then it was that Donald Trump was elected. So faith is more popular than Donald Trump. I have some numbers to prove it.

Additional Examples of Faith's Practical Impact

Well, first, any thoughts so far?

You're familiar with cereals? Yes. Stuff you take for breakfast. Cereals is related to faith and its practice. The Quakers and those who invented and came up with cereals, well, because of... that was their religion that led to that invention and the development of that.

Secondly, lately, South Africa didn't used to have an embassy to the Vatican. So one gentleman who is now the ambassador brought this to the government and they thought, you know, what do you... what is this? So he went back and did just what he talked about. He studied with... the contribution of the church to the South African society. And when he came to Parliament and showed them the figures, they said go. So that's how now there is a South African ambassador. This on a lighter note, South African ambassador in the Vatican. Their contribution, I mean, faith inspiring people to do things even with economic effect and implications. So very many.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf: Modernity's Debt to Religious Tradition

A lot of what we cherish about modernity, about individual rights, inalienable rights, human dignity, all these things, these come out of Christian Western civilization. I mean, this idea in many ways, modernity is a Christian heresy, just simply because it removed God but it retained a lot of the principles. And I think that's something modern Westerners tend to really forget, how much religion informed that.

And then also the participation of religion in... credit unions were faith-based. They came out of a faith-based tradition in Germany and then in America and Canada. Life insurance was a Catholic initiative to protect families that suddenly lost a provider. The Evangelicals were the ones that eliminated the Atlantic slave trade. William Wilberforce in Parliament was entirely informed by his faith.

So we forget all of these things. But I would say one of the most important things about faith, I mean, as somebody who studied theology, I'm very committed to reasonable faith, but there's also satisfactory dogma. There's this idea that people get a great deal out of faith.

Marx is often quoted saying religion is the opiate of the masses, but he didn't actually say that. It's a completely misinterpretation of what he said. What he said was is that religion is a protest against an unjust world, that religion is the sigh of the oppressed, it's the heart of a heartless world, it's the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate, it's the opium of the people. In other words, it numbs the pain of living in the world.

Now, we have replaced religion with real opium. We have an opium crisis in America because people have such a hard time dealing with... now, I think if Marx was writing today, he probably would not have said religion is the opiate of the masses. He would have said something like Facebook is the heart of a heartless world, that Netflix is the opium of the people, right? Because we're in a different type of world.

But I think faith, we forget how much faith enables people to navigate. I mean, Buddhism, the first truth of Buddhism is the world is suffering, right? And people forget that, that there is great suffering in the world, and religion has always been a source of solace for people. So Marx's idea was look, instead of having religion, let's just get rid of the suffering in the world, which is a utopian idea that ended up killing millions of people.

So faith has a practical component to it, and that may in fact be measurable. Yes.

Christiana Figueres: The Broad Spectrum of Faith

Christiana, I just wanted to add, if I'm assuming that we have to close very soon, that when we talk about faith in the fractured world, I think it's important to remember, although we have these three fantastically distinguished leaders of institutionalized religions, that when most people think about faith, the gamut is much broader. It is either those who are part of these institutionalized religions and it goes all the way to people who feel that they are on a spiritual path of self-discovery that not necessarily is in any of the traditional religions.

And I think that is equally as important. So I think we should keep in mind that this is fortunately for all of us a very, very wide gamut, and the wider we make it, the more inclusive it can be and the more healing it can bring.

And I hear you saying unity. How's this connect?

Bonnie Dougall: Youth, Purpose, and Unity

Bonnie, what's your take? How does that resonate with you?

Very well, and that's something that we believe that, you know, young people are being... again, we hear that young people are being alienated and they're turning away from organized religion, etc. However, I think what young people are yearning is a sense of purpose in life. And where there is... I think Islamic Relief Worldwide, I've heard them talk about how their young people are doing a lot more in the field and going out and serving, and there's a lot of energy there. They may not be sitting in the mosques, and likewise with the churches and other communities as well.

So I think there