A model for world peace at Princeton

Religious exchange is the key to world peace. This is my conclusion after spending a week with the Religious Life Council in D.C. during Intersession.

To be honest, I did not expect anything from this trip, let alone an insight into the solution to world peace. This was my first year on the council, a group that fosters inter-religious discussion on campus. Having never been on an organized collegiate trip before, I decided that this was one on which I needed to go. As a senior, I felt that I lacked the inter-religio-cultural experiences that serve as the hallmark of a complete liberal arts education.

The trip began, and with it, the assembly of the first fragments of what I would deem the rough model for world peace. The car ride in the van was the first time I befriended someone of the Muslim faith since being at Princeton. It was also the first time I had an honest discussion about my own religion with someone of a different sect of my tradition.

These were just the hors d'oeuvres of the spiritual feast that was to come. During the first two nights we spent hours presenting to each other our spiritual autobiographies — stories about our unique spiritual journeys, traditions, and confusions. They were the most honest self-revelations I have ever witnessed. The uniqueness of these stories was perhaps matched only by their physical corollaries: the holy sites of each of the respective religions we spent our days visiting — each with its defining garbs, rituals, and auras.

The list of religions on the trip was vast. It ranged from Judaism to Buddhism, Catholicism to Hinduism. Even the faiths of smaller denominations were among us — a Mormon, a Zoroastrian, a person of the Baha'i faith.

Admittedly, there were moments where I questioned the authenticity of certain religions. How could they believe so strongly in a God who was so different from my God, I would ask. Could the universe harbor such seemingly mutually exclusive ideologies?

But after each day of eating, sleeping and conversing with these people, I realized that we were growing more similar than I could ever imagine. People empathized with each other about embarrassing moments with which their religious garb would often present them. Mysteries about various religions, often created by prejudiced myths, were openly discussed and carefully demystified. The Hindu aversion toward eating cow was told to be more cultural than religious in origin. Furthermore, the common conception of Mormonism as a polygamous faith was debunked and then explained in historical context: The Mormons were a persecuted people and when battles increased the female-male ratio, men took on the duty of supporting multiple widows.

Most importantly, though, I found that we were all asking the same questions. Through our discussions that would sometimes last five hours into the middle of the night, I realized that each of us wondered about the problems of free will and evil and the compatibility of our own religion with those of our peers.

Through the dialectic method, I think we absorbed more about each other's faiths in a fuller sense than we could have done on our own through countless hours of reading text. After all, we could trust our sources, as we were all in the same boat engaging in the same experiment. Most importantly, we were all good friends at this point and needed not worry about things such as proselytism or biased pedagogy.

And so in our one week a model for world peace was formed. The major tenet of the model is as simple as to have people of differing, even antagonistic, religions, live together in a communal manner for just a small period of time — perhaps two weeks. Of course, a common language and a decent education are prerequisites that we Princetonians already possessed going into the trip.

The advantage of such a model over current world government/world law solutions is that it has the potential to create voluntary tolerance, which is more effective and lasting than forced tolerance. If this model, based on our small college trip, can ever offer even the slightest guidance to a world peace solution, then Princeton truly will have led "in the service of all nations." Steven Kamara is a politics major and a member of the Religious Life Council from Manhasset Hills, N.Y. He can be reached at skamara@princeton.edu.