An interview with Bishop William Swing,
by Coleen O'Connor

The United Religions Initiative started in 1993 after you received a call from the United Nations about hosting their 50th anniversary celebration.

They said they would bring all the nations of the world and they wanted us to bring representatives of all the religions of the world, and we agreed. The moment I went home that night, I began to think about the religions of the world as opposed to the nations of the world over a 50-year period. The nations of the world have been meeting everyday for 50 years, and I thought, 'Well, what about the religions?' Most of the wars of the world are fueled by great religions of the world. They don't have a sense of patience, a sense of accountability with each other for what they do to each other and to the world. Fifty years of religions have refused to speak to each other, they have taught their children to hate each other, to torture each other, to bring economic sanctions against each other, to compete against each other, to try to destroy each other and to kill each other. The next morning I thought, 'I hope that there are people out there in the world who are working everyday to create a United Religions that will parallel the United Nations, and that whoever they are, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to be a catalyst.' So the first thing I did was to figure out which international interfaith groups were working everyday for something. I called them all up and asked if the general secretary of every one of them would meet me in New York on June 21, 1993. They all said, 'Yes.' We met at the United Nations. I said, 'This is my vision, that there needs to be a United Religions. I don't know what it would look like, I don't know how to do it. I don't know interfaith work. But you all are doing it all over the world. What would you suggest?' And they all said, 'Well, we all entertained the idea of a United Religions years ago and it's impossible to get the religious leaders together because they don't want to get together. It's impossible to fund it. It's impossible how to figure out how to get representation.' It's one thing if every nation can come to the table and have one vote. But you look at Christianity--you're talking about Protestant or Catholic. You're talking about Protestants, about Methodists or Baptists or Lutherans, about many different groups. So all of a sudden, it opens up on so many possibilities of representivity. It's unsolvable.

How did you get around that obstacle?

I thought, 'Give me a break. If we can go to the moon, we can solve representivity.' So I said to them, 'What good advice can you give me?' One guy said, 'Why don't you go home and have a youth conference?' And I thought, 'Okay, you've got to start someplace.' So I went home and I got the University of San Francisco campus. I got 200 young people from 46 religions, and Reverend Tutu and Betty Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Price.

How did that affect your vision for a United Religions?

I saw 200 young people stand in an open field, hold hands and pray together. Some were Jews, some were Hindus, some were Buddhists and some were Christians. Whether they were praying in the name of Jesus Christ or Allah or whatever, they just did it. I saw that something is standard in the hearts of young people that maybe goes beyond what we adults are really capable of in terms of the lack of interfaith cooperation. I think young people see that there are possibilities that older people don't even imagine.

Why is a United Religions so urgent in the current world situation?

Today when you open up the paper it's government versus religion, or religion versus religion, or ethnic group versus ethnic group. What is a bigger terrorist threat than religion in the world today? There is none. The extreme Hindu parties before the last election ran on the platform that 'If we are elected, atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs will be exploded.' They were elected, and right away atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs were exploded. Across the border, the Pakistani president said 'What we need is an Islamic bomb.' We now have a Hindu bomb, and an Islamic bomb. So now we translate atomic weapons into religion. And if that happens, then there's a proliferation of religious fundamentalists who get their hands on the atomic weapon. What we're looking at is religion is taking over the atomic bomb. This is the beginning, the first page of the first chapter. What happens when you get to the third or fourth chapter? The newspapers are sending us lots of messages now that religion has come of age to be a terrorist threat and a nuclear threat. Nations of the world can appeal to the United Nations and say, 'We've got to do something.' But the religions of the world can't appeal to anything to say, 'We've got to sit down and talk about this among each other to figure out what is at least sensible. What's doable? What's negotiable? There's no arena to do that.

How would URI address a problem of this magnitude?

Don't go too far yet. Let me just say that we are the United Religions Initiative. We are not the United Religions. We're trying to mobilize people to create the United Religions...Everything hinges on having a design that would be so different than anything else that's ever existed in a religious sense, something that would be adequate for starting the next century, in the next millennium, for bringing people together, globally. When they created the United Nations, the only model they had to work with was, 'Let's go out and buy and big piece of land in New York. Let's put up a great, big building. Let's have a great, big bureaucracy. Let's sit an assembly and a jury council, and everybody has one vote and everybody comes to one table.' But with the United Religion Initiative, given all the problems that we've been talking about, you're going to have to create something that's decentralized and non-hierarchical. It's going to have to have not one place, but multiple places all over the world where people can engage, and it's going to have to have an electronic satellite possibility of collecting people on an instantaneous daily basis. We would create multiple local units, and the greatest amount of authority would be vested in the smallest local unit. And the only thing that would be handled by anybody else would be if they come up against something the local units can't handle, then they give it to the next regional group. And if they can't handle it, they give it to a global group.

What would its global problem-solving look like?

I think the best example of United Religions would be Northern Ireland, where the people have two religions, have been negotiating and negotiating, and bombs have been blowing up in their face and they haven't quit. They've stuck with it, and they're closer now than they ever got. Making peace among religions is hard arduous work over a long period of time. And United Religions would be moving in that direction. So there would be a lot of spin-offs around it. People of other religions would get to know each other and learn a lot about each other--they'll learn music, cooking, and how to raise children together. People will realize it will be okay not to hate those people, it will be okay to speak to those people, and even to live with those people in the same community. When we were at Stanford University this summer working on the draft of the first charter, there were people there from Pakistan and India. Back home in their own countries, the religious people from India were not allowed to speak to the religious people from Pakistan. But because they came out here with the United Religions, they could speak each other. So they said with they would form a committee that would go back to the sub-continent and figure out a way that they could deal with each other on a permanent daily basis to see peace among religions in Pakistan and India. So do we have the answers? No, we don't have the answers. But we have an invitation. I can see from being with each other in the United Religion initiative, all of us working together and forming a very strong bond because we learned about each others lives and then fell in love with each other. We've learned a lot about each other's faith, and we still are believers in our own faith. All of us are deeper believers in our own faith because we've known the other side. That's the mystery and the contradiction. People think that if you get into the United Religion Initiative you're going to lose our faith. But you find your faith.

How can the average person help?

There's only one issue, and that is do you have the courage to commit yourself, or do you say, 'This is too big, I'm too small, it's too impossible' and walk away? It would be so cheap and easy to send money. And so I'll say it: send money. But the biggest thing is to just take one action of putting your name behind it. Because very soon it's going to be the main task. We're never going to change the world unless we've got enough names who say, 'We believe this.' And, you know, once you give your name, we're off and running. You can find us on the Web page (www.united-religions.org), you can read the literature, you tell the people in your spiritual group, or the people in your office, or the people in your synagogue or mosque, or your religious leader. You can move it along. But it all comes down to courage. The only issue is if you're going to have courage or you're not going to have courage.

You would like to see feminism think of itself as a "resistance movement based in spirituality." What does this mean?

The Civil Rights movement in the American South, Gandhi's Free India campaign, Lech Walesa's Soldarity Movement, the resistance movement taking place in Burma today under the inspiration of Aung San Suu Kyi, all of these are political movements, but they spring directly from the deep intuition -- cherished so much that their supporters are willing to die in its defense -- that all of life is one. That when I hurt you I hurt myself. That no-one has the right to demean or oppress another, and that when he or she does, they demean and oppress themselves as well. Those movements succeeded, or are succeeding, because deeper resources have come into play than can ever be released when a narrowly political or economic paradigm shapes the work.

The Rt. Rev. William Swing, the Episcopal Bishop of California since 1980, is devoted to bringing religions and spiritual traditions to a common table in a daily global assembly. In his vision, they will seek to make peace among religions, working together for the good of all life and the healing of the earth. You can find out more about the United Religions Initiative at http://www.united-religions.org.

Related Links

Building Wisdom's House
The Right Rev. William E. Swing and co-authors from multiple faiths discuss values for our times. Excerpt.

State of the Diocese/State of the World
Join Bishop of California the Rt. Rev. William Swing in a discussion of California history, Episcopal politics and world peace. Forum.