Clark Lobenstine has been the executive director of the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington since 1979, shortly after it formed as the first staffed interfaith group in the United States to work with Jews, Christians and Muslims. Lobenstine holds a doctorate in Christian-Muslim relations and is a volunteer assistant minister at Silver Spring Presbyterian Church, a diverse congregation with a large number of Cameroonian members. He lives in Northwest D.C. with his wife, who is also a minister; they have adult twin sons and three grandchildren. He spoke with The Examiner about the challenges and rewards of interfaith partnership. You’ve worked with the InterFaith Conference for more than three decades. What changes have you seen in the religious community over that time?
A lot more faith communities are members of the InterFaith Conference. When we started it was the first conference to get Muslims to work with the Jewish, Protestant and Roman Catholic communities. … Our experience is that as we deepened our understanding of each other, we also built a trust that allows us to work on issues. So one change is we’re now 11 faith communities instead of four.
A second change is that Sept. 11, 2001, has substantially increased the readiness of people to be engaged in interfaith work. Whether they’re in the PTA or they’re shopping or going to school, people are with people from other cultures who often come from other faiths. That cultural dialogue, which is certainly important, often leaves out religious similarities and differences. So we help by focusing on that.
So you think 9/11 made people more open to Muslims, rather than wary of them?
There’s plenty of wariness. I would say that has increased in the last few years — Islamophobia. But as Muslims and others in the faith community have discovered over the last few years, whenever one of us is targeted, the fact that we can stand up and say, “They’re legitimately a part of us,” that really makes a difference when it comes from the 11 faith communities in the InterFaith Conference.
You are an expert in Muslim-Christian relations. Are there any attitudes or assumptions you think need to be eliminated on either side?
I think many Christians have an understanding of their faith that they’re the last revelation, the best revelation, that everybody who comes afterwards is not worth paying attention to or got the wrong idea or something. And I think that Muslims think that because they believe they have the final revelation, they’ve got the final understanding. And I think both groups are caught up in this to some extent. And both groups have leaders and followers who don’t agree with that. And it’s an issue that gets raised in various settings and gets expressed in the Islamophobia we are experiencing today.
Does interfaith dialogue hold the danger that participants might water down their own faith? Doesn’t it presume that each religion’s claim to exclusivity is false — that there is no one true faith?
We do agree that the InterFaith Conference meetings are not times for proselytizing. We’re not trying to convert each other, but we are clear about our similarities and differences. And fairly early on we adopted a statement about proselytism. That was something that we definitely don’t approve of or support. Though I would say that the Holy Spirit works in ways we don’t understand, and sometimes people do convert, but the overwhelming experience we have is that by engaging with people of different faiths we strengthen our faith traditions; we don’t water our faith down or weaken it. As a Muslim faith leader says, “We dilate our faith. We don’t dilute our faith.”
Washington can feel like a very secular place. Do you ever sense a hostility to faith in D.C.?
I don’t like to generalize. Some people are; some people aren’t. I would say there’s not many people like Christopher Hitchens, but there’s some people for whom the religious community does not have a significant role to play or is not held up as an important partner or whatever. And I would say there’s been a diminishing of the way the religious community is held especially over the last 30 or 40 years. Ministers in town comment on that. But there’s also an appreciation on many people’s parts for the roles that the religious community can play and often a turning to the religious community. So it’s a mix.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
One of my defining beliefs is that God is incredibly loving, much bigger than any of the boxes we want to put him in.
– Liz Essley
