After Haiti’s August earthquake, as relief organizations rushed in, Eboo Patel pointed to a lesson for equity advocates in the United States. Many groups putting boots on the ground in the Caribbean country were anchored in a religious faith, with aid workers who were Catholic and Jewish, Islamic and evangelical Christianity, Lutheran and Episcopalian. Patel’s rhetorical question: If people who embrace different ideas of creation and salvation find common ground in a mission of mercy, couldn’t those who fight for justice do the same?

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You might expect such an argument from Patel, who founded the Interfaith Youth Core some 20 years ago to make interfaith coalitions the norm, particularly in efforts for social good. But the message takes on even more importance today, he says, because religion is largely absent from equity campaigns. The movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela all drew strength from interfaith coalitions built on a shared belief in love, equity, and the dignity of every human being. “We need to bring that to the fore, we need to learn from that, and we need to do the 21st-century expression of it,” he says.

Patel has not always espoused what he calls “love-based activism.” In the 1990s, while a student at the University of Illinois, he was a racial-justice warrior fueled by anger. “I just would breathe fire wherever I went,” he says. His intensity was such that his roommate took to sleeping on a friend’s couch to escape his rage and his rants.

But in 1999, Patel, an American Muslim, heard Mandela speak at the Parliament of the World’s Religions. The South African anti-apartheid revolutionary talked about how people of all faiths — Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians, and more — inspired him during his 27 years in prison and ultimately helped secure his release. In the coming century, Mandela said, religion would have to play a bigger role than at any time in history to answer poverty, racial strife, and other challenges.

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“Here was perhaps the greatest figure of the second half of the 20th century talking about the crucial role of religion,” Patel remembers.

Today, religion’s potential power for racial equity can be seen in Covid-19 vaccine drives, Patel says. Interfaith Youth Core has conducted polling with the Public Religion Research Institute that suggests that faith-based strategies — such as clinics in worship centers and messages from faith leaders — are among the most effective at inspiring vaccine confidence in the nervous and reluctant. Interfaith Youth Core has trained 1,600 people — college students, campus staff, religious leaders, and community organizers — from diverse faith backgrounds to do vaccine outreach in their religious communities.

“If you are not engaging the religious dimensions of people, you are missing out on a huge part of who they are, what motivates them, what makes them feel comfortable,” Patel says. “Just like it marginalizes people not to consider their racial identity, it marginalizes them not to consider their religious identity.”