Case Study 4: Community Action Projects

Abstract

Community action interreligious projects conform to Jonathan Sacks ‘side-by-side’ model of interreligious engagement. The projects investigated for this research, in particular those London projects in the Near Neighbours programme, were set up to bring neighbours of different faiths together and to collaborate with these neighbours in social action. This chapter considers the way religious thinking features and operates in a context where social, rather than theological factors play a prominent role. It explores this on three planes: private reasoning; public expression; social encounter. There is little tension between religious and secular thinking in the process. Religion is a powerful motivator to involvement, but non-religious humanitarian impulses work in the same direction. The expression of religious reasons in a public context faces different constraints, real or imagined. The social orientation of the projects supports secular framing; the overriding interests are human and humanitarian. Where the interreligious interactions enabled by the community action projects are concerned, religious thinking is incidental rather than necessary to the social processes of building relations, developing working partnerships and friendships. When religious discussion does happen, the form it takes tends to be sharing information about one another’s religious traditions, practices and beliefs in a comparative religion fashion.