Capital Jewish Museum
Washington DC
April 24, 2025
Dr. Sousan Abadian
(Event was funded by
The Greater Washington Community Foundation &
the Jewish Community Foundation)
Q1: Tell us about your journey toward interfaith work. Why is that your calling?
My path into interfaith work was born at the crossroads of love, identity, and witnessing harm.
My father had a great influence on me and he, himself, was profoundly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and was devoted to the Gandhian principles of interfaith respect. So, I grew up in a household where my father, though he wasn’t Muslim, fasted during Ramadan, and crossed himself when he passed a Church… and celebrated when I married a Jewish man. So, interfaith respect was all that I knew growing up.
As an Iranian, the consequences of the Iranian Revolution were devastating: the damaging impact of religious intolerance and fundamentalism on an entire nation. The reality is that the Zoroastrian community that I was born into had endured nearly 1,400 years of marginalization, religious persecution, and the slow violence of erasure. Add to that my marriage to an American Ashkenazi Jew, whose mother fled Nazi Germany and whose entire extended family was murdered as a result of antisemitism and the Holocaust. You begin to see how religious arrogance and supremacist ideologies have touched nearly every corner of my life.
Professionally, I’ve also worked closely with First Nations and Indigenous communities and have seen up close how the misuse of religious conviction can devastate entire peoples. For a time, I also worked at the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, where I encountered, on a global scale, the consequences of weaponized belief systems—where faith is used not to liberate, but to control, exclude, and harm.
And yet, I’m someone for whom spirituality is important. My connection to the sacred is central to how I live. And I love Humanity. So, the dissonance—the pain of watching religion be used as a tool of violence, rather than a path to deeper humanity—was unbearable. All of this has led me to interfaith work.
Because the way through isn’t more dogma. It’s humility. It’s relationship. It’s the practice of sacred curiosity. That’s what interfaith work and our work at the Interfaith Council of Metropolitan Washington is all about: we offer a space where understanding replaces judgment, and where faith is not flattened, but deepened through encounter with difference.
For me, interfaith work isn’t just professional. It’s personal. It’s redemptive. It’s the slow, essential work of repairing what has been torn.
Q2: What about interfaith work can help guide us in this moment?
We are living in a time of profound division—across politics, theologies, and more. And in such a time, bridging divides isn’t just a nice idea—it’s the prime directive of our age. That’s what interfaith work is all about.
Interfaith work calls us to resist the impulse to dominate, convert, or convince. We need to develop the skills and capacities to “call people in,” in the words of Loretta Ross, not just “call them out.” That calling-in—the invitation to relate across difference without erasing it—is sacred work. It’s not glamorous. It’s not always headline-worthy. But it is happening. And it’s transformative.
I also believe polarization is not just a political problem—it’s a spiritual crisis. When we lose the ability to see the humanity in someone who disagrees with us, we’ve lost something essential. Interfaith work teaches us that we don’t need full agreement to build meaningful relationships. We can hold difference without being divided by it. We can even disagree—sometimes vehemently—without dehumanizing one another.
This work cultivates vital capacities: listening deeply, practicing empathy, embracing humility, and honoring imperfection. It invites us to prioritize relationships over being right, to value common humanity over uniformity.
And it’s not just about individual virtues—it’s about social structures too. Interfaith engagement builds, what the Harvard scholar Robert Putnam terms cross-cutting social capital that strengthens our communities by connecting people across the lines that can divide them. And according to Putnam and others, this is essential for healthy democracies to thrive.
At the heart of it all is this truth: we don’t have to be the same to be united. Our shared humanity is greater than our differences. And that simple, profound truth can guide us through the complexities of this moment.
Q3: What do you see as the biggest barriers to true solidarity between faith communities?
There are two that rise to the surface for me:
First, triumphalism and particularism—the belief that our faith is the one and only true path –that we have the one true way to God, the best way, the last word on God – and that in the end, everyone else will either convert or be proven wrong. The idea that the people of our faith have a special and exclusive relationship with the Divine sounds a lot to me like the roots of supremacy. It makes genuine partnership nearly impossible, because it subtly (or not so subtly) undermines the dignity and truth of others’ paths.
Second barrier to solidarity between faith traditions is trauma—both individual and collective. Many of our communities carry unprocessed ancestral pain. And pain that hasn’t been metabolized often becomes narrative—turned into stories we pass down about who we can trust, who we must fear, and what we must defend. These stories, when left unexamined, can block solidarity. They keep us in survival mode, reacting to ghosts rather than relating to the living.
To build any kind of solidarity, we have to be willing to look at the pain we carry—and the pain we may have caused. That takes courage, compassion, humility, and a willingness to be transformed.
This brings me to a distinction I think of in doing interfaith work: turning interfaith from an adjective to a verb: interfaithing.
Most interfaith work is what we might consider to be interfaithing light – sharing our traditions, with the intent of broadcasting what we’re most proud of and redemptive about our faiths, and seeking commonalities between our and other faiths.
This is good and necessary work, perhaps a needed first step in building relationship of trust and engaging across religions. But there is also interfaithing deep – recognizing differences, discussing them and their implications. And even further, acknowledging ways in which our faith traditions may have caused or are causing harm to others, seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with those others. And perhaps, even, an acknowledgement of some need for reform. Up until now, interfaithing deep rarely happens.
There are various levels of solidarity and all of them are valuable, but perhaps, the “truest” form of solidarity, in my estimation, comes from interfaithing deep. It’s an outgrowth of developing the kind of intimacy and vulnerability that goes beyond trying to look good in front of each another, but the safety and willingness to air our dirty laundry with one another, and doggedly commit to staying in relationship.
Q4: What gives you hope right now?
What gives me hope is the everyday kindness I see in people.
I’m continually moved by the quiet acts of decency and care that don’t make the news—people checking in on a neighbor, showing up for a stranger, staying in hard conversations. Gathering on a predawn Sunday morning, like the Sikh community at the gurdwara in Rockville, to distribute food to those in need from any faith and ethnicity. These moments remind me that goodness isn’t gone. It’s just quiet. And sometimes, we have to slow down enough to notice it.
Interfaith work helps us do that. It reminds us that hope isn’t found in abstract ideals—but in real relationships, and in the sacred practice of showing up for one another again and again.
Also, in my other role as a counselor and leadership coach, I often work with individuals navigating various personal challenges including grief and trauma. I witness—over and over—that healing is possible. People can change. Lives can improve. And that the human spirit has such remarkable resilience.